Une
Nuit Terrible
A man in bed,
besieged by bugs.
Combat Naval en Grèce
Officer and gun
crew on the rolling deck of a modern warship, firing and fired upon, toward and
by the audience (cf. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery).
Un Homme de Tête
Méliès removes
his head and places it on a table, another appears, thereby he arranges to sing
a quartet with three heads on two tables to right and left of him, sitting
between them playing a banjo.
The two on his right sing
unpleasantly, struck with the banjo they vanish in a puff of smoke, he tosses
his head away and nimbly places the head on his left on his shoulders, exit
with a flourish.
Le Magicien
Oh the vicissitudes.
The magician
leaps into his magic box and appears an auguste, forlorn.
There is a feast prepared for him,
it vanishes with the stool he sat on.
A courtier knocks him into an
artist, his sculptures are alive but unembraceable. The benefactor knocks him
once again in The End.
La Lune à une Mètre
“She comes
more nearer earth than she was wont,” Selene and the devil contend for
the mind of Méliès’ astronomer.
Illusions Fantasmagoriques
The magician and
his magic box, dove and duds in, boy out, axe splits him in two, two boys, two
flags waved by the magician, who disappears.
Le Voyage dans la Lune
The celebrated
expedition mounted by the Institute of Incoherent Astronomy, in a large
cannon-shell.
The Septentrion observes, stars and
planets, snow falls on the explorers.
Within the Moon, they are captured
by Selenites, who explode when struck.
They return to Earth, one Selenite
in tow, and are feted in the name of Science.
La Lanterne Magique
Commedia
dell’Arte figures assemble it and project one of their plays, dancing
girls emerge from it, there is a fight among the players, policemen are
rebuffed by the elongating carnival figure revealed inside, the dance
continues.
Le Cake-Walk Infernal
Darktown
strutters in hell, where Satan has the physiognomy of a man so crooked that
when he dies he has to be screwed into his grave, according to the proverb.
La Flamme Merveilleuse
Inventor of the
footman and the flame, out of a skull magically converted into an extendable
handkerchief.
Le Monstre
One of
Méliès’ scenic masterpieces. At the feet of the Great Sphinx a fakir
laboriously brings a skeleton to life, it is a nautch girl who, tossed to an
onlooker, is only a skeleton.
Cendrillon
Cinderella, by Méliès.
The critical
point is the hands of midnight, her rags, the slipper.
Wedding dance,
apotheosis.
A very beautiful,
majestically analyzed understanding of the tale.
L’Affaire Dreyfus
Scenes of the
participants, arranged with positive inspiration throughout, a great and noble
film.
Le Sorcier, le Prince et le Bon
Génie
A
chef-d’œuvre in no time at
all, an intensely concentrated work.
You can’t
fight a wizard, the good fairy chastises the prince as
well, bestowing the princess.
Infortunes d’un Explorateur
Only a matter of
seconds remaining in this piece of film set in Egypt, he finds a sarcophagus
and unwarily steps inside...
Déshabillage Impossible
The man in the
Dalian bedchamber, the more he takes off, the more he has on.
Jeanne d’Arc
The whole story
in ten minutes.
Hand-colored, lap
dissolves, pageants and processions.
DeMille has the superimpositions in Joan
the Woman. Until he and Fleming and Preminger are recognized, it means
nothing to say that Méliès has the pre-eminence.
L’Homme à la Tête en
Caoutchouc
The rubber head,
a living likeness of his own, is easily inflated and deflated by Méliès, a
neighbor brought in to marvel can’t get enough of the sight and
overinflates it until it bursts, he is then ejected.
Rêve de Noël
The happiest of
Christmases, simply arranged as the ideal form of the French holiday, following
on a bedtime story.
La Douche du Colonel
A case of
carelessly applied whitewash.
L’Omnibus des Toqués ou
Blancs et Noirs
The farting
horse-drawn carriage unloads interchangeable augustes and golliwogs
rolled into one, finally, who is exploded.
Le Diable Géant, ou Le Miracle
de la Madone
An
Italian palazzo.
The lover
departs, she is imprisoned there by the devil, leering and mocking and growing
in size, a giant.
The statue of the
Madonna extends its palm branch to diminish and disperse him, the figure
descends into the room and in the same way causes the iron bars to disappear
from the window, admitting the lover.
Le Mélomane
Méliès’
greatest trick, casting aside his clown makeup he flings his head up six times
to make musical notes on telegraph wires, girls with cards bearing the solfège
spell out the tune as well, “God Save the King (or Queen)” and
“My Country ‘Tis of Thee”.
The Man, in other words, Who Loses His Head Over Music.
Les Cartes Vivantes
A magician (Méliès)
appears on stage holding up a card to the audience. Can’t you see it? He
enlarges it for you, then throws it upon a portable screen—the eleven of
spades. He does the same thing with the queen of hearts, she takes his hand and
descends from the screen. Finally it’s the king of clubs, who descends,
throws off his beard and robe to reveal the magician Méliès.
Le Juif Errant
A vivid, edifying
and impressive dramatic spectacle with its beautiful painted backdrops and
superimpositions and scenic effects.
He who hastened
Christ on his way to Golgotha likewise has no rest from devil nor angel nor
heaven itself, by thunder.
La Sirène
To go fishing in
your hat for an aquarium full is one thing, Méliès pulls rabbits out to prove
the point, the old man’s hammock disappears, he creates a grotto and the
mermaid, royally ensconced in a seashell divan with Nereids and King Neptune.
Les Apparitions Fugitives
Méliès the
magician causes a boy to appear and disappear, changes places with him, leaps
into the air and vanishes, entering from the side of the frame to take a bow.
The Untamable Whiskers
Le Roi du
Maquillage, that is to say, The
Makeup King.
He draws a thing
and becomes it.
Hirsute
characters, young, old, monocled.
He writes in
English
|
comic eccentric |
and becomes a
circus clown then an old stock figure in a farce.
Lastly he’s
a devil and disappears.
Le Thaumaturge Chinois
Out of his
parasol come paper lanterns transformed into dog and then lady, magically
transported and converted into chickens and a Chinaman, she reappears to tie
his pigtail to the thaumaturge’s.
Le Voyage à travers l’Impossible
A film of
marvels, utter marvels, the exact counterpart of Le Voyage dans la Lune.
A leap from the
Jungfrau into outer space and the maw of the Sun, landing God knows where in
three thousand degrees of heat, ice box unavailing, return by submarine, a
heroic return.
And thus the
Institute of Incoherent Geography’s trip around the world.
Hand-colored,
with a bonimenteur.
Le Baquet de Mesmer
The statuary
fountain group comes to life with the aid of dresses pulled from Mesmer’s
Tub, dancing girls and a prima ballerina appear, the dresses go back in the tub
and are spilled out as chickens and ducks.
The Tub is
prepared at the outset with water and fire, like one of Elijah’s feats.
A hand-colored
prestidigitation.
Détresse et Charité
Détresse means
poverty, misery and ineffectual begging to the point of death in the Christmas
season, Charité is the good angel who puts all to rights (cf.
Russell’s Amelia and the Angel).
La Chaise à Porteurs Enchantée
A fantastic magic
show, clothes make the man and his lady, the proper reverence is due a woman,
this is all explained by prestidigitation.
Le Palais des Mille et une Nuits
The grand
masterwork of Méliès is an exploit of Prince Sourire, whose suit for the hand
of Princess Indigo is refused by the Rajah, her father. Indigo is promised to a
usurer, Sourire is very poor.
Kalafar appears
from a bottle and leads the Prince through many ordeals to the Palace, first
obtaining the consent of the goddess by epiphany in a “cérémonie
bouddhique”. The boatmen of the sacred river and the Blue Dwarf
conduct them to the magic forest, it opens to reveal the Golden Fairy standing
before the Marvelous Caverns. Genies of fire in the Crystal Grotto, will
o’ the wisps and specters guard the treasure. In the wonderful caves a
dragon and magic frogs turn into stone gargoyles that become the leaves of
beautiful lotus flowers, the goddesses of the subterranean world, a fountain of
fire, the Golden Temple, finally the Palace of a Thousand and One Nights is
made manifest. The Golden Fairy dispenses its treasure, Prince Sourire returns
to the Rajah’s palace and weds Princess Indigo.
Two reels,
hand-colored. Bergman remembers the guardians of the forest and much else in The
Magic Flute.
Les Affiches en Goguette
The sort of
stacked posters you see in tiers come to life within their individual panels,
creating a great disturbance among the passersby. The police are called, so
Méliès drops the screen to show the advertised personages separated from the
real world not by the two-dimensional plane but by iron bars. It’s a magic trick, like
Magritte’s pipe.
Alchimiste Parafaragaramus ou La Cornue Infernale
The sleeping
alchemist is possessed of a wonderful dream familiar to those who keep long
vigil, a snake from his stove, a weaving spider in the retort and then (it has
enlarged) a beautiful woman, a shower of sparks and “the expense of
spirit”, the infernal retort explodes, knocking down Parafaragaramus in a
beautiful hand-colored film.
Robert
Macaire et Bertrand, les Rois des Cambrioleurs
They bum at an
outdoor café, burgle the International Bank, steal disguises and make off by
train, survive an earthquake, are flung through the air pursued by gendarmes,
who kill them and shed tears, after which the two kings among thieves make
their getaway in a balloon.
A goddamn funny
extravaganza in pure Méliès style.
20 000 Lieues
sous les Mers
The
catastrophic futility of life under the seas, with mermaids even, not Jules
Verne but a tale of a tub.
Photographie Électrique à Distance
The inventor
gives four demonstrations to a couple of visitors in the workshop.
The Three Graces
languidly pose from a still photograph.
A motionless
model flirts with the man.
The wife, a
disembodied head, giggles and grimaces.
The man is a
mechanical monkey-face in clown makeup, winking and chattering.
He knocks down
the apparatus and receives a hair-flying shock from a dynamo while the inventor
and his assistants laugh helplessly.
Le Papillon Fantastique
The butterfly and
the spider, by the magician’s art one and the same, victim and target.
Hydrothérapie Fantastique
The Before and After
of very fast weight loss have a middle term of steam heat that brings to mind
Hitchcock’s joke, “two men are walking along the street when they
spy an arm lying in the gutter. ‘It’s Muriel,’ says the
first. The other one shrugs his shoulders, ‘how can you tell?’
Farther on, there’s a leg, again the first man recognizes Muriel, again
the other one is skeptical. A second leg does not convince him. Round the
corner there’s a head lying in the gutter. ‘You see,’ cries
the first man, ‘I told you it was Muriel!’ The other one, taking it
all in, picks up the head, embraces it tenderly and cries in turn,
‘Muriel, what’s the matter?’”
Méliès’
hydrotherapist glues the client back together.
Die Endeckung des “Nordpols”
Eine aviatische fantasie Reise über das nördliche Eismeer zum Nordpol.
Colorirtes
Fantasie Filmwerk in 2 Teilen.
By
land, or sea, or air? Balloon,
no, aeroplane.
Maboul of France, Run-Ever of England, Bluff-Allo-Bill of America, Choukroutman
of Germany, Cerveza of Spain, Tching-Tchun
of China, Ko-Ka-Ku of Japan, sont nommés délégués.
The suffragettes
(“Aux Femmes le Pôle”)
go into Blake Edwards’ The Great
Race.
At “die elektrische Fabrik”, Méliès’ characteristic power to
build a scene with a static camera, here gradually conveying furious preparations.
À la Conquête du Pôle. Méliès, father of Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines.
Beyond the
Zodiac, Saturn, comets and the Pleiades, through electrical storms to the polar regions. The devouring Snow Giant. Magnetic
North, truly. Providential rescue.
Heroic
return to the Aero Club.