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.

Georges Méliès man asleep--woman, csinger, pierrot appear in bed...giant evil moon at end...three reapear to annoy him. Awakens and they're all gone

"Le Cauchemar" is one of Georges Méliès' earliest films. Because of that, I'll cut it some slack. While his later films would usually be longer and more complex, for 1896, this one is truly amazing...far better than the output of any other filmmaker.

The story is simple. A man is tossing and turning. He then has a nightmare and a woman, then a guy playing a banjo and then Pierrot (from the Italian Commedia dell'arte) appear on the bed and annoy him. Finally, the moon grows to a huge size and threatens to eat him....and he awakens.

Again...this is a simple film but for 1896, it's truly spectacular...one of the best of the era.

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.

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.

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