Le Cauchemar

An early dream from the first minutes of cinema. We might as well be looking at some of the first images not just captured from reality, but really dreamed up with light. Now it seems modest, naive, primitive, but what outlandish phantasmagoria it must have been at the time; how modern, vibrant, strange, new, dangerous, exhilarating to see this with 1896 eyes. Imagine. The 19th century.

A man is sleeping at his bed. A woman appears, he reaches out to touch her and she turns into a minstrel, into a giant moon - an emblematic Melies motif - into a dancing troupe at his balcony.

By now, we have devised many different ways of both issuing these visions and shifting them within the context of a story, many devices to dream. Watching this, you get the picture that it goes back much further, further back into magic lantern shows and cameras obscura. The point? To bring internal worlds to life, and has not changed 100 years later.

Silly and slightly scary, Méliès's somewhat minor one minute short 'A Nightmare' fits perfectly in with the rest of his filmography. It's a trick film, a comedy, a fantasy, a portrayal of a dream, and something of a horror film, if not in any conventional sense, all of which are genres/styles of film that Méliès so often loved to explore. The strange giant head that appears somewhere around the middle of this minute is simultaneously amusing and successfully creepy (and remains so to this day), add to that a cast of characters that includes an energetically dancing and mischievous clown and you have a film that gives off an atmosphere dominated by both humour and uneasiness.

This, "A Nightmare", is one of Georges Méliès's earliest films. It's one of his first films to feature a formula he would return to for many of his subsequent productions, from "The Bewitched Inn" (L'Auberge ensorcelée (1897)) to "The Black Imp" (Le Diable noir (1905)). The setup is simply a man trying to sleep despite nightmares or bizarre happenings to his surroundings (often, furniture and such moving, disappearing and appearing). These films provided Méliès with plenty of opportunities for his trick effects--mostly stop-substitutions (or substitution-splicing).

"A Terrible Night" (Une Nuit terrible (1896), an earlier film by Méliès, is the earliest available example of this genre, but that film didn't contain any filmic trick effects. Another previous film of his, "The Vanishing Lady" (1896), had stop-substitution tricks presented within a magic trick. "A Nightmare" features a different device to present its magic--that is, dreams. In later films, Méliès would also introduce fairies, malevolent wizards and other devices (i.e. science fiction and aliens in the case of the more elaborate "A Trip to the Moon") to present his trick effects, which allowed them to be at least within something resembling a narrative.

The most noteworthy of the dream images, I think, is the moon with a face, which bites the protagonist's hand. Méliès would again use the moon in such films as "The Astronomer's Dream" (1898) and "A Trip to the Moon" (1902). Additionally, this film contains five backdrop changes, all accomplished through editing, as with the character appearances and disappearances. The film was shot in the open air, as indicated by the shadows. The early history of film is scattered with knockoffs of Méliès's films; for example, one of the more popular early films remaining today, "Dream of a Rarebit Fiend" (1906) was clearly a product of this genre "A Nightmare" helped initiate.

Beware of the moon - that is one creepy cool moon I tell ya. There are three bizarre characters that shows up in Melies dream and a hungry looking moon.

Worth the minute it takes to watch it.

8.5/10

Having discovered -- whether purposefully or, as the story would have us believe, accidentally -- the magical qualities of the cut and used it in the previous years ESCAMOTAGE D'UNE DAME CHEZ ROBERT-HOUDIN, Melies elaborated on it in this short in which a man suffers a series of terrible nightmares. As in the best of Melies, we can not only see his enormous creativity, but perceive his great sense of humor and appreciate his playfulness in the new medium. When they're doing Oscars for 1897, this gets my vote for best foreign film!

This is one of the many previously lost or infrequently seen Melies pictures that have been made available by Serge Bromberg, David Shepherd and a myriad of other hands in the newly issued DVD set GEORGES MELIES: FIRST WIZARD OF CINEMA. Required viewing for anyone interested in the history of movies ..... and a lot of fun.