User Reviews

Throughout his entire career, Georges Méliès was mostly known for (besides "A Trip to the Moon") his magic movies. Since he was a stage magician in real life, Méliès enjoyed playing with the technology of the day to create things that no magician could really do--and many of these illusion pieces often featured a magician (Méliès himself, often times) performing these impossible feats. Nowadays, we often refer to films such as these as 'trick films' or 'gimmick films', because the camera trickery was meant to entertain and astound audiences. Of course, nowadays they seem very primitive-looking, but were in truth the peak of filmmaking all those years ago.

There's a reason why I did not refer to this movie as a 'trick film'. It's because, unlike later ones, the tricks shown here are authentic--no camera tricks, no editing, nothing. Instead, Méliès films himself performing a basic conjuring trick that was part of his act at the Théâtre Robert-Houdin. He has a setup of two stools, one of which has an Indian mask on it. He sets down two tubes on the stools, covers his eyes, lifts them up, and presto, the mask has changed places from the one stool to the other.

There's a good reason why Méliès used no camera tricks in recreating this act on film. For one thing, he had yet to discover them in the first place. Even though Edison had indeed used an edit for "The Execution of Mary Stuart" the year before, that doesn't mean Méliès knew it could be done. After all, this was only his second film, and he was merely just fooling around with the movie camera to see what audiences would like. How could he have known so early on about such trickery? You have to start somewhere, and movies such as these showing a promising beginning to the auteur's career.

Until the 'discovery' of camera tricks, all of his gimmick films had to be like this. Two other shorts I can think of off the top of my head that are performed live for camera are "Conjurer Making Ten Hats in Sixty Seconds" (1896, surviving in fragmentary form as a flipbook and one I presume starred Méliès himself also) and "D. Devant, Conjurer" (1897, surviving as a fragment in flipbook form as well and starring the magician David Devant). It's obvious there weren't very many of them since Méliès discovered special effects so quickly, later the same year.

Unfortunately, this film was also considered lost until just four years earlier (as of the time of this review). In 2014, it was found to be in the form of a colorized chromolithographed film fragment given to the Cinémathèque francaise, rotoscoped from a Méliès short of 1896. Chromolithographic film was used around the turn of the century for home use in toy projectors, as a sort of cartoon-like, animated form of the original work. Apparently, the print was missing some frames to boot, so now the entire run-time is a matter of about five or six seconds when viewed on YouTube (and eleven seconds when put in a loop). Of course, film like this isn't exactly the most easy kind to view, so thankfully they were able to uncover the same work in original black-and-white form. I hope to see the day when it too is available online...but until then, the chromolithographic version will have to do.

Having any of Méliès's earliest films is a miracle in itself, considering almost all of his 1896 shorts ones are lost. Many of them were simply like Lumière productions--children playing in the sea, gardeners getting sprayed by hoses, etc.--but every little bit counts. That's why I'm thankful we have two different versions of "Conjuring" at all, rotoscoped or not. As the years pass, hopefully we will see more resurface--in the meantime, let's enjoy these newfound treasures of cinema's first years.