Un Homme de têtes

Early French filmmaker Georges Méliès is universally known as a pioneering cinematic visionary, courtesy of the phenomenal success of his most famous film, 'Le Voyage dans la lune / A Trip to the Moon (1902).' However, the director's undeniable genius is also apparent in many of his earlier, lesser-known shorts, most running less than one minute in length. Throughout the 1890's, most filmmakers had only exploited the cinematic medium for experimental or documentary purposes, capturing images of everyday objects or situations. Méliès, a magician by trade, saw things much differently. He imagined cinema being used to translate the impossible onto screen, to surprise and baffle the audience, to transport them into a world unlike their own. His 'Un homme de têtes / The Four Troublesome Heads' of 1898 is an absolute gem, and an incredible exhibition of how far Méliès was ahead of his time in terms of visual effects.

The film begins when a magician (as always, played by Méliès himself) appears on stage and, remarkably, removes his own head. When he places the singing head onto the table, a new one suddenly appears on the his shoulders, and the magician and the head interact with each other, with the former scrambling beneath the table to prove to the audience that he is not playing a cheap magical trick on them. The magician repeats this stunning feat twice more, until there are three enthusiastically singing Méliès heads sitting on the table, and the intact magician entertains them with his banjo.

Probably the first use of split-screen in cinema history, the visual effects in 'Un homme de têtes' are nothing short of remarkable. The countless uses of split screen, dissolves and double exposures blend seamlessly into the finished product, convincingly passing itself off as having been filmed in a single take. The director's extraordinary on screen charisma is once again on show for all to see, and you can certainly tell that he was formerly a magician; his vibrant enthusiasm for the performance is almost infectious. There's also the sheer casualness with which Méliès removes his own head, as if it's nothing at all to him. Despite already knowing that an exceptional amount of work must have gone into producing the film, somehow it is all made to seem so easy… almost like magic.

Four Troublesome Heads, The (1898)

*** (out of 4)

aka Un Homme de tete

Classic Meiles film has him playing a magician who removes his head three different times and lays them on a table where they naturally act up. This is perhaps one of the director's most popular films and it's easy to see why as the effects are pretty good and the film is just fun throughout. The highlight is without a doubt the scene where Melies removes him head and then throws it up into the air where it eventually falls back into place. I think the distraction of the heads could have been done better and with more imagination but overall this is another delightful film from the magical Melies.

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

"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.

For 1898 totally amazing. Even when we rode around like cars on our buts in the early 70s it was amazing. He was the first and father of imagination of that sort.