Oh good! You found us.
We’re an on-demand movie theater where you can discover hand-picked films from festivals and collections around
the world. We make it easy for you to find films you’ll love, no matter what your interests are.
Georges Méliès often said that he discovered his first signature technique, the substitution splice, as an accident. While filming a horse-drawn omnibus, his camera malfunctioned in the midst of shooting. When the mechanism started up again, a hearse had moved into the frame in the former vehicle's place. Voila! One object becomes another! John Frazer casts doubt on this tale as more than merely apocryphal, suggesting that Méliès must have seen the substitution splice in Thomas Edison's EXECUTION OF MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS prior to his own filmmaking endeavors. Regardless, THE VANISHING LADY (also known as THE CONJURING OF A WOMAN AT THE THÉÂTRE ROBERT HOUDIN) is the earliest surviving example of Méliès's use of the effect in one of his films. No longer operating the camera as he did for some earlier films, Méliès appears as a magician who places a cloth over the body of a seated woman (his wife Jeanne D'Alcy). After a fairly obvious cut (D'Alcy's dress is a dead giveaway), the cloth is removed and the chair is shown empty. When the magician attempts to bring back his wife without the use of the cloth, he's in for a ghastly surprise. But he has the powers to amend before the end of the film. Finally, both actors exit the set through a doorway and then return as if called back by applause. This last disappearance and reappearance puts into relief the fundamentally but seemingly more "magical" intermittence we've already seen. - Brian Darr
GENRES
- International / European / French
- Short / Trick
- Fantasy / Magic
- Short / Performance
- Silent / Silent Fantasy
Festivals
Related Films
-
Excelsior! Prince of Magicians
French stage magician and illusionist Georges Méliès began filmmaking in 1896. He worked in many genres but is especially remembered for short trick films such as this one from 1901, EXCELSIOR! PRINCE OF MAGICIANS. Melies wrote, designed and directed his films and often (as here) performed the principal...Start your free trial to watch
-
Delirium in a Studio
Only a small portion of this film survives but the extant fragment proves a strong dose of Georges Méliès-style imaginative slapstick. We enter mid-hallucination, as a painter's assistant chases a live concubine back into her portrait. When the artist wakes up and sees his hired hand bashing the canvas, he...Start your free trial to watch
-
The Good Sheperdess and the Evil Princess
The Cinderella story gets a fresh spin in this enchanting fantasy from pioneering French director Georges Méliès. A nimble fairy whisks the kind shepherdess (spelled "sheperdess" in the English title) into a charmed realm of beauty and dance, while the noisome princess is brought down a few pegs in life,...Start your free trial to watch
