Le papillon fantastique

This is a slightly nightmarish short from Georges Méliès. In it a magician creates a butterfly woman and then a spider woman. This malignant being threatens to wreak havoc but is repelled in an explosion.

Like others this one is colour tinted which definitely adds a lot to the aesthetic. It also has a much more macabre and creepy feel than other Méliès fantasy shorts although it is at heart still a magic show. It's quite bizarre really. The other commentators have mentioned that this is only a section of a larger film. No matter, what remains is like a fragment of a weird dream you can half remember.

A conjurer (Georges Méliès) creates a beautiful lady 'butterfly' and a 'star' that then changes into a loathsome spider who frightens, and almost captures, the butterfly before the magician intervenes. Only a colourised fragment of Méliès' fanciful film remains and the images are striking, but by 1909, this style of narrative free film was passé and the great French film-innovator's star was fading

Le papillon fantastique (1909)

aka The Spider and the Butterfly

Even though there are nearly two-hundred Georges Melies films available on DVD, the sad fact remains that there are many more lost. This film here is only available in a fragment piece that runs just under two minutes. The story is pretty simple as a magician (played by Melies) creates a butterfly (a female actress with wings) and then he creates a spider (again, a female actress) who pulls the butterfly into its web. I'm not sure what all originally happened in this film but what's remaining is pretty interesting and is certainly worth watching for fans of Melies as well as the horror genre. One major plus is that the film was hand-tinted and this adds a lot of charm to the film including a great bit where Melies fires a gun and we see an orange color being used for the shot. I really enjoyed the colors that he used once the attack started and it's quite creepy in its own way. While this thing is far from a masterpiece it's still worth viewing and this fragment will have to do until something more turns up.

By 1909, Méliès's film company was ceasing production after exhaustively turning out a series of comedies and dramas which was becoming the new fad of filmmaking. The next year, 1910, he would stop production completely and resume in 1911, turning out his last few movies under the supervision of Pathé Frères.

"The Spider and the Butterfly" is one of his last trick films, notable for being one out of ten of the movies which was rediscovered years later to be projected at the Gala Méliès in 1929, colorized specially for the event. Unfortunately, the colorized print vanished thereafter, and now is only available in a brief, 2-minute fragment. Méliès plays a magician once again, disguised in a wig but still the playful, energetic Frenchman from years before. First, he makes a woman appear who is dressed as a butterfly, and shooting a gun then creates another woman in a five pointed star. Tired, he falls asleep only to wake up discovering the star woman has turned into a huge, scary octopus creature and is about to capture the butterfly in her web. The octopus tentacles are obviously reused from Méliès's "Under the Seas" from two years before.

The coloring job, while a little sloppy, looks very beautiful and uses some nice golds and reds to achieve a good visual look. It also feels less of a magic show and more of a fantasy/horror. Even so, this is evidently missing part of the beginning, and possibly more of the end, because the conclusion just doesn't feel complete. Maybe it was originally a dream film, and the magician only dreamed his creation turned into a octopus creature. Maybe it's sort of a variation on "Frankenstein". Who knows?

Whenever one encounters these fragments, it''s hard to evaluate them in totality. What we do see is very well done. The young woman who plays the butterfly is quite striking in appearance. The colors are vivid and the special effects are clean and sharp. Once again, Melies draws on his talents as a magician and presents a "show" to the audience. Obviously, he does things that could not have been done on a conventional stage. But that's why he became a director.