It's tempting to see the two great French pioneer film makers, the Lumière brothers and Georges Méliès, as two opposing poles of the cinema — the documentary depiction of reality set against the drive to enhance reality, and show things that previously couldn't be shown. But this is over-simplistic. First it underestimates the extent to which, even in their earliest films, the Lumières were taking aesthetic decisions about exactly which slices of reality to depict, and how — consider the camera placement and timing, for example, in L'arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat. Not long afterwards, they took to re-enacting events they weren't able to film for real.
Meanwhile Méliès, for all that he seemed to take a more forward looking and adventurous approach to the possibilities of cinema, was deeply rooted in a much older tradition. He was a stage magician and illusionist, owner of Paris's Théâtre Robert-Houdin, an heir to the staged spectacle, the Fantasmagorie and the magic lantern show. Attending the Lumières' first Paris exhibition in 1895, he immediately saw the potential of this technology in achieving illusions he'd already been pursuing by other means. The brothers refused his offer to buy one of their machines, but within a year he bought a projector from Robert Paul in London and built a camera himself.
Méliès' tradition is explicit in this film, which is staged as if in a theatre, with the man himself as the magician performing to an imaginary audience, and even taking a bow at the end. But the illusion presented would be impossible to achieve so convincingly without film. Méliès several times removes his own head and places it on a table, then regrows a new one, until he's surrounded by three detached heads, all jabbering away animatedly at each other to prove how alive they are. He attempts to wrangle them into singing together, but soon gives up in frustration and extinguishes two of them with a blow from his banjo.
It's funny and visually striking but also poignant — the film externalises our experience of conflicting inner dialogues. How much we've sometimes wished to shut up some of our own jabbering heads with the swat of a banjo.
A wiry, balding man with a naturally comical appearance, Méliès regularly performed in his own films, often decomposing and distorting the image of his own body, and particularly his head. He's always worth watching and this is a particularly fine example of his eccentric, athletic and manically energetic style — you can believe he's capable of bullying reality into new shapes by force of gesticulation. Like many of the pioneers, he never reaped the just rewards of his foresight, and it's rather saddening to see his energy here and then remember that he ended his career scraping a living selling sweets and toys from a kiosk at Gare Montparnasse.
Meanwhile Méliès, for all that he seemed to take a more forward looking and adventurous approach to the possibilities of cinema, was deeply rooted in a much older tradition. He was a stage magician and illusionist, owner of Paris's Théâtre Robert-Houdin, an heir to the staged spectacle, the Fantasmagorie and the magic lantern show. Attending the Lumières' first Paris exhibition in 1895, he immediately saw the potential of this technology in achieving illusions he'd already been pursuing by other means. The brothers refused his offer to buy one of their machines, but within a year he bought a projector from Robert Paul in London and built a camera himself.
Méliès' tradition is explicit in this film, which is staged as if in a theatre, with the man himself as the magician performing to an imaginary audience, and even taking a bow at the end. But the illusion presented would be impossible to achieve so convincingly without film. Méliès several times removes his own head and places it on a table, then regrows a new one, until he's surrounded by three detached heads, all jabbering away animatedly at each other to prove how alive they are. He attempts to wrangle them into singing together, but soon gives up in frustration and extinguishes two of them with a blow from his banjo.
It's funny and visually striking but also poignant — the film externalises our experience of conflicting inner dialogues. How much we've sometimes wished to shut up some of our own jabbering heads with the swat of a banjo.
A wiry, balding man with a naturally comical appearance, Méliès regularly performed in his own films, often decomposing and distorting the image of his own body, and particularly his head. He's always worth watching and this is a particularly fine example of his eccentric, athletic and manically energetic style — you can believe he's capable of bullying reality into new shapes by force of gesticulation. Like many of the pioneers, he never reaped the just rewards of his foresight, and it's rather saddening to see his energy here and then remember that he ended his career scraping a living selling sweets and toys from a kiosk at Gare Montparnasse.