Le cake-walk infernal

Although the original motivation behind this Georges Méliès feature was to spoof a popular dance craze of the day, it has so much of Méliès's wit and camera wizardry that it is still quite funny and entertaining today. This kind of popular culture parody is just one of the many genres to which Méliès applied his extraordinary imagination.

The feature takes the "Cake-Walk" dance and uses it is the subject for a series of short dance numbers, some of which would almost look at home in an MGM musical, and others of which are enjoyably bizarre. The backgrounds are stage-like, but they usually contain plenty of interesting detail in themselves. Some of the sequences feature amusing sights without any camera tricks, while at other times Méliès demonstrates the special effects for which he was so well-known.

There isn't really a story so much as a succession of images, which yet somehow seem connected by a strange logic all their own. There are so many unusual and skillful Méliès movies that it gets awkward to say of all of them that, "any fan of Méliès would enjoy this", but in this case it is once again true.

There are recurring characters in the Melies canon, and the devil is one of them. Apparently, there is a fixation on what hell would be like and what the devil would look like. I thought the dancing was really fantastic. George's Melies was obviously a multi-talented performer. He was a magician, an actor, director, creator and scene stylist. His closing dance was incredibly addictive. No plot, but has that ever mattered with him?

The first cinemaphotographers were merely interested in shooting scenes exactly as they happened, resulting in documentaries (or cinéma vérité) that are mainly kept for their pioneer function in film history. Interesting in so far as they allow us to see how people looked over a century ago, they are just what their title describes: a train arriving in a station, people leaving a factory, etc. If you don't want to know what is going to happen in "The unloading of a cart", you better not read the title.

Then came Georges Méliès who waved the train that was 'cinéma vérité' goodbye and chose instead for the wacky path of outlandish fiction. Méliès is not just important because he was a pioneer in film fiction. If you watch his work, you'll have to admit it is so good it has no trouble overclassing films that were shot a generation later. Frankly, you need to see German expressionist films like "Das Cabinett des Dr. Caligari" to watch something equally rich in imagination and imagery.

I forgot who it was, but there was a director who said directing was the easiest job in the world. You let other people do the job (actors, directors of photography, sound engineers, set designers, .) and all you basically have to do is say "action!", "cut!" and eventually "it's a wrap". This too makes Méliès special: he was not just a director, his jobs included author, producer, director and set designer. "Voyage dans la lune" (1902), one of his most famous works, has an incredibly beautiful set. Some of it really reminds you of paintings by Bosch. The story may not the most staggering you've ever heard, it's how it's filmed that makes it special and excellent. A professor and crew are shot out of a giant canon and land on the moon. They're overhappy to have made the trip when they encounter the moon people, creatures that a century later still look more terrifying than the stuff you see on shows like "Buffy". Like the vampires in the teen show Méliès's moon creatures disappear into thin air when they're hit. The scientists run for their life, manage to escape and are welcomed back to Earth as the heroes of the century. The image of the giant bullet shot in the moon's eye didn't accidently make it to myriads of posters and t-shirts. No, it's just a very good example of how beautiful Méliès's works were and are.

But does he need a story to entertain the viewer? No. Take "Le cake-walk infernal", a film he shot a year later. There isn't a real story to tell here, Méliès used a very popular dance at the time and used it as the basis for a film. How would the cake-walk be danced if they knew it in Hell? Méliès himself appears as the demon who jumps out of the cake in the second part of the film and that's where the man goes experimental again. Méliès manages to shoot himself in two parts: a dancing torso, dancing legs and a void in between. By today's standards the trickery isn't too convincing, but you'd have to be of bad will to say it's poorly done. Then you have to think of this short movie being made nearly a century ago and it's then you fully realise Méliès was more than a pioneer, he was a genius. A genius who sometimes told a story and sometimes just went for lavish eye-candy.

Sadly not much of a story here in this 1903 Georges Melies classic. We are introduced to a inferno and these demons and other people start dancing. In the end they conjure up the devil played by Georges Melies who gets down and boogies. Melies was trying to wow audiences introducing fire into the dance, making the devil's limbs move and reappear on his body and a great explosion at the end. Much more silly than frightening, but worth a look if you enjoy silent classics or would like to see a silly film from early within the 20th century. To let you be aware as well some of the actors are wearing what appears to be "blackface".

Melies made hundreds upon hundreds of short films; some of them masterpiece,s others mediocre, many falling somewhere in between. It can be proposed that "The Cake-Walk Infernal" is among his better known works (that is casting aside legendary films like "A Trip to the Moon", "The Voyage Across the Impossible ", or even "The Merry Frolics of Satan"), mainly because of Martin Scorsese's recommendation of it for aspiring filmmakers/film students. This film is just simple, classic Melies with an extra dose of weird. It mostly consists of a parodic version of a dance that seems to have been popular at the time of the film's release; it takes place in Hell, despite the merry mood, and Melies himself plays a reasonably athletic Satan. The visual effects here are quite phenomenal, particularly for 1903 (!), and the sets, while sort of cheesy, are charming and appealing to the eye. There are also plenty of laughs to be had, mainly because of Melies' comic and over the top performance and the trick photography that soon ensues. Those that are rather familiar with Melies and his style will likely be able to appreciate this for what it is: another unique and wild entry in the vast Melies cannon.