Der Mann mit dem Gummikopf

The very early French film director Méliès was super-famous for his trick cinematography. He deserved this fame for such standout films as Le Voyage Dans le Lune and I personally think he was the greatest movie maker of his age. Compared to Edison and Lumiere's films, his movies were always superior--featuring great sets, stories and camera-work. And, compared to later luminaries such as D. W. Griffith, I think Méliès' films are much more watchable today.

This film features the director's disembodied head as the star. Believe it or not, this was not very unusual for Méliès, as I have seen several films where his disembodied head performs! This is very clever and funny and it differs in this case because the head it enlarged again and again using a pump until it ultimately explodes! And, for the year it was made, it looked amazingly real! Funny stuff indeed.

If you want to see this film online, go to Google and type in "Méliès" and then click the video button for a long list of his films that are viewable without special software.

In Georges Melies film 'The Man With the Rubber Head', what is it that is suspended? Our belief or our disbelief? The modern audience is desensitised to what is witnessed, which to the films modern audience would have seemed particularly, lets say 'futuristic'. If technological advancements have affected the way in which we apprehend phenomena on-screen, does it affect the way in which we apprehend further life? Is it possible that life in a technological advanced society is less real than before? However, will the 'real' and the 'possible' be "more" as technology advances?

What this film does more than any other in the digital age is demonstrate artistic creativity. The illusion which (really) exists before us was not borne by the touch of a button, but crafted with a patience, that is rare in our postmodern dullness.

A chemist is hard at work in his laboratory creating a copy of his own head. When he succeeds he places it on a table and watches it animatedly respond to him. However, then he gets a pair of bellows and decides to see ho big he can make this rubber head by inflating it himself – with awful results.

Back when many films were very descriptive and very 'real' in their subjects, Méliès must have been a bewildering influence. Films called 'man riding a horse' were wowing them in the moving pictures (or movies as they are still called) by doing exactly what they said on the tin, or in other words, such a film would feature a man on a horse, a training coming into a station and so on. Méliès created short films that contain visual images that still retain their appeal today and will be known to many people (even if they don't know that they are his images!) and this is the modern appeal of his films to me. Sure they are simple in terms of substance and are more style over content but remember these are a century old – think of how they must have been viewed then!

This is one example but it is not one of his best for my money. The film is weird even watching it now and it is far more about visual impact than about its narrative foundation or substance. It looks great and some of the effects show him to have been years ahead of his time – anyone looking for meaning or plot will be annoyed but the focus is visuals and, in this regard, it still works and is very imaginative and funny. True, it is obvious now and we all know how the effects were done and what the joke is going to be, but it is impossible to watch this without being impressed by how visionary Méliès was and what an impact the sheer originality and imagination of this film must have made back then.

I have watched many rubbish films and many good films that have lasted two hours; this film lasts only a very minutes and is well worth the amount of time it took for me to watch it. Méliès' images are still in the public psyche today and this film, while not his most famous, is another good example of why that is the case.

Man With The Rubber Head, The (1901)

*** 1/2 (out of 4)

aka L'Homme à la tête en caoutchouc

This here is one of the director's best known and most loved films and that's understandable due to the wonderful magic created here. Meiles once again plays the magician who puts a head (again Meiles') on a table and blows it up to a large side, lets the air out and then blows it back up again. This is certainly one of the director's best films as it's guaranteed to keep a smile on your face the entire time. The special effects are very well done and hold up quite well today but the highlight is certainly the ending but I won't ruin that for you. If you're new to the director's work then this here would be a great place to start.

In less than 5 years, the cinema had made a gigantic jump from the short "documentaries" of the early pioneers (Le Prince, Dickson and the Lumière brothers) to the amazing Cinemagic of french director Georges Méliès, who became one of the first filmmakers to focus entirely in making fiction movies. Ever since he watched a movie for the first time (as a member of the Lumières' first audience), Méliès was convinced of the enormous potential of the new invention as a form of entertainment, as as soon as he could he started to make his own films. By 1901, stage magician Georges Méliès had already 5 years of making films and experimenting with special effects, and his movies were well-known around the world as the finest films of his time. With his many discoveries in the field of special effects, Méliès was able of making films that looked like real magic, and his movies became more complex with time, and even more fascinating.

"L' Homme à la Tête en Caoutchouc" (literally, "The Man with the Rubber Head") is another one of Méliès' many "trick films", which were short movies that showed him making an impossible magical trick. In this movie, an alchemist (as usual, Méliès himself) is preparing a strange experiment in his laboratory. The alchemist puts an odd devise on a table, and connects it to his bizarre creation: a living copy of his own head (Méliès again) that stands over the table without a clue about what will happen to it. Using an air pump he connected to the head, the alchemist begins to blow, and the living head begins to increase its size as if it was a balloon made of rubber. The head reaches a gigantic size, but the alchemist decides to release the air from it as he fears the head may explode. Proud of his invention, the alchemist decides to show it to his assistant (quite probably played by his wife Jeanne d'Alcy, but this is not confirmed), but the assistant may not be as careful as he was.

As in many of his early shorts, this movie is a "gimmick film", in other words, a movie devised around a special effect in order to show it like a magician would make a trick. In this case, the movie combines an excellent use of multiple exposures and editing to create the two heads, and a remarkably creative use of zoom to create the illusion of a head increasing its size. While a quite simple trick to our modern standards, the effect achieved is one of Méliès' most amazing and better done special effects, making "The Man with the Rubber Head" one of the best "gimmick films" in the Cinemagician's career. However, this short is more than an excellent gimmick, as what makes "The Man with the Rubber Head" different from his earlier films (and the similar movies of his competitors) is the care Méliès put to create a "story" to his trick.

While in his first films he simply appeared as a magician doing his show, in this movie there is a set build for the scene (instead of a simple circus stage), and while simple, the movie is clearly set in the middle ages. This gives the movie a distinct atmosphere, and already shows the path that Méliès was taking at that stage in his career, as that very same year he would start making his now famous series of fantasy films, which would be far more complex than his "gimmick films". One can say that it was with in those movies where Méliès tested his craft before making his masterpieces like "Le Voyage Dans la lune" the following years. 8/10