Un Homme de têtes

Not only is this a clever use of the limited technology of the time, it is an utterly hilarious minute. Melies plays the main character, a man who is able to remove his own head and put it on a table. Now there are two heads, but that's only the beginning. I see this guy sitting up nights, imagining what this new form of entertainment can do and then improvising how he can manage it.

Even though it's only 1898, filmmaker Georges Méliès is already starting to move beyond the substitution splice which made possible the various spectacular illusions on film which he produced. "The Four Troublesome Heads" not only uses such an effect, it also continues on to employ multiple exposures (or superimposing) to create even crazier illusions which are amazing for the time. In this brief film, director Méliès stars as a magician or prestidigitator who is able to detach his head from his shoulders and set it on a table, where it is able to converse with the magician in an amusingly delightful way. He continues to repeat the same illusion until there are three heads on two tables which are able to perform a sing-a-long with the master. Finally, in an amazing twist which I won't spoil, the magician is able to return everything to normal.

Even though it's only a minute, "The Four Troublesome Heads" contains some points of interest that make its context more interesting. Not only was the theme of dismembered body-parts a common one in the filmmaker's career, the director would often perform tricks with dismembered heads--his own, most often--and this movie was the first. In "The Man With the Rubber Head" of 1901, he is able to blow it up using bellows (or so it appears) and the trick of a zoom combined with superimposition. In "The Melomaniac" the heads are music notes, thrown up on a telephone wire to form a line of "God Save the King". In "The Mysterious Knight" the head is actually that of a young woman who he can make appear and disappear, and even in "Dislocation Extraordinary" a clown is able to take his head off and sit on top of it. The disembodied was clearly a fascination of Méliès's is general; and the head was no doubt the most useful for the films in his perspective because it could show amusing facial reactions to delight and amuse the viewers.

Yet, when you do look at it closely, you can figure out how the magic was accomplished. First of all, note how the head is not living when the director is holding it: merely a dummy head, used only briefly to fool the audience. The headless person effect was very simple also: a dark cloth used to cover the director's own head. This explains why a black background (very bland for a Méliès production as opposed to the beautiful sets he would paint for other movies) was necessary to carry the illusion. Why, I cannot explain. It's more obvious here than in the aforementioned films because the entire set is black, but if you pay more attention to where the head is disembodied in the later movies, you will notice it's the same way. Furthermore, while the heads are on the table, the tabletops will generally tend to shake around a lot, again because they and the heads are being superimposed onto the set. Méliès would later improve on this, but for the time it probably didn't matter since audiences had absolutely no clue how he achieved it anyway.

Nowadays, "The Four Troublesome Heads" is often considered one of the director's best known films, and it's easy to see why. Not only are the effects amazingly well-done for 1898, Méliès's humorous performance carries the sight gags and makes them fun and amusing to see. He was a gifted actor, whether he played a frightened inn guest, a magician or Satan, and his joyful charm onscreen makes these shorts put a smile on your face. It's no wonder he played the lead roles in most of his films; not only was he forced to play them, he did a great job in them. Even though this film is 120 years old as of this writing, it holds up very well today and no doubt will keep you entertained throughout its brief run-time.

In December of 1895, the Lumière brothers began the first series of screenings of their "moving pictures" starting with this the history of cinema as a form of entertainment. Among those first impressed by the magic of motion pictures was a man who differed from the Lumière's idea of using cinema only for scientific purposes, the stage magician Georges Méliès. Story says that the very day he watched a movie for the first time, Méliès bought a Lumière cinematographer to do his own movies as he discovered the potential of movies as an art form. Like all the early pioneers, Méliès started with short documentaries, but quickly he put in practice his idea of using the invention to tell stories. His continuous experimentation took him in 1896 to the discovery of many special effects where he was finally able to "transform reality" in his movies. The amazing "Cinemagician" had arrived and with him, cinema as a narrative art had been born.

1898's "Un Homme De Têtes" (Literally "A man of heads", but better known as "The Four Troublesome Heads") is one of the earliest surviving films done by Méliès, and while not as well known as his posterior work, it already shows the amazing talent that the magician had as a creator of special effects. As many of his earliest movies, "Un Homme De Têtes" is basically a short movie where he shows a magical trick impossible to achieve in real life. In this case, a magician (Méliès himself) appears on stage, and removes his own head with magic, putting it in a table next to him. Suddenly, another head appears over his shoulders and the head on the table begins to sing. The magician repeats the trick until he has three heads on a table besides his own, and now he has four singing heads to perform a song.

Barely with little less of a minute of duration, "Un Homme De Têtes" is a wonderful display of Méliès' talent with special effects, as with a mixture of prosthetics, dissolves and multiple exposures he achieves a very lively representation of his magic. While for today's technologies this little trick is pretty easy to achieve, it is a remarkable achievement for early film-making, as the "gimmick" surprisingly looks very real and still is very effective despite being over 100 years old. The way Méliès conceived the trick is also worthy of praise, as the movie feels very fluid and the necessary cuts for the trick are done very smoothly. As with most "gimmick films", there is no plot other than a magician performing his act as if it was a theater presentation, however, Méliès makes a very charming performance as the magician that adds a lot to the movie's atmosphere of being in a circus.

French director Georges Méliès is definitely better remembered for his early fantasy films like his version of "Cinderella" ("Cendrillon") or his famous "A Trip to the Moon" ("Le Voyage Dans la lune"), movies where not only he showed wonderful special effects, but also a brilliant narrative skill and a vision for set designs. However, it was with films like "Un Homme De Têtes" where everything started, and when one compares Méliès' early work with the early films of other pioneers, one can see who was truly the superior filmmaker at the time. Definitely one of the early masters of cinema, Georges Méliès' work is one of clever tricks, enormous imagination and true magic, as he was probably the first person who knew that cinema was the factory of dreams. After all, he was not called the "Cinemagician" for nothing. 7/10

Okay, this is NOT a great film compared to later films--even the later films of this film's creator, Méliès (who created many, many magical films such as Le Voyage Dans le Lune). But, and this is the important part, for 1898, the film is without peer for its brilliant use of camera tricks. Like ALL other films of the era, this is a short film--lasting between one and two minutes (depending on the frame rate at which it is played), but in all other respects it is different. Showing his love for the absurd and fantastic, Méliès features a performer who pulls off his head and places it on a table--where it sings away. Then, a new head re-appears and he does it again until there are four heads in total!! It is amazing for its time and not to be missed by film historians.

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.

"The Four Troublesome Heads" is one of the earliest surviving films by Georges Méliès to employ the multiple exposure technique, or superimposition effect. He used the technique earlier in "The Cabinet of Mephistopheles" (Le Cebinet de Méphistophélès)(1897), but it appears to be lost. (There's also a brief superimposition in "The Magician" (Le magicien)(1898), for a head on a stand.) It's uncertain whether Méliès or George Albert Smith introduced the trick to cinema, although what seems to be the earliest relevant film that I know of is the aforementioned film by Méliès. Smith tried to patent "the invention of double exposure applied to animated photography", but that was frivolous since the technique was already in use in still photography. Somewhere from around July to October 1898, Smith made at least six films that employed the trick. In "The Corsican Brothers", "Photographing a Ghost" and "The Mesmerist, or Body and Soul", Smith used multiple exposures to make transparent ghosts. He also used the technique, coupled with a masked camera lens, to create a scene-within-a-scene vision in "The Corscican Brothers", "Cinderella", "Faust and Mephistopheles" and "Santa Claus". In regards to masking the camera, Smith, indeed, seems to have introduced it to motion pictures. Méliès would later use masking for his multiple-exposure trick films, such as "A Mysterious Portrait" (Le Portrait Mystérieux) (1899) and "The One-Man Band" (L' Homme orchestre) (1900). Nevertheless, the uncertainty is somewhat moot given that Méliès and Smith are known to have had discussions around the time of these inventions, and both filmmakers were leaders in exploring the possibilities of motion pictures.

The superimpositions of "The Four Troublesome Heads" are not for ghosts, but, rather, are for four cloned heads of same texture; this effect of same texture is achieved with the black background. In this film, Méliès accomplished the headless and no body effects by masking himself with black clothing. Additionally, a dummy head was used while the Méliès with a body moved the heads to the table. For these transitions, Méliès employed his second essential trick of stop-substitutions (a.k.a. substitution splicing). The camera operator stopped the camera – the scene was rearranged – and filming resumed. They are essentially jump cuts touched up by post-production splicing. Méliès had already used the stop-substitution trick in such films as "The Vanishing Lady" (Escamotage d'une dame au théâtre Robert Houdin) (1896), and it would continue to be probably his most used trick during his film-making career.

Yet, these tricks are only of a technical and filmic history interest without Méliès's unique showmanship and enthusiasm, which was largely responsible for the immense popularity of his films in his own day and the preference of today's audiences for the films of Méliès over those by other early filmmakers. Méliès was, indeed, more cultured and absorbed with theatrical traditions than were his contemporaries. Later, filmmakers would surpass much of his theatrical style, but at the time of this film, he was leading the way with it.