L'homme à la tête en caoutchouc

This amusing Georges Méliès feature makes good use of a simple idea, and it features some camera tricks that are very nicely done for 1901. This is one of many movies that show Méliès himself as he makes use of his considerable talent and imagination, and here, as in many of his movies, he also seems to be having an awfully good time doing it.

The idea of "The Man With the Rubber Head" is the kind of offbeat, slightly macabre concept that Méliès seemed to be able to come up with almost effortlessly. It resembles a number of his other features from around the same time, in using multiple screen images of his own head as a source of special camera effects and humor, which in this case is sometimes of a rather morbid kind. It works quite well, and the quality of the effects is, as is almost always the case in a Méliès film, quite high, especially given its age.

Georges Méliès had been using the trick of multiple-exposure photography (or superimpositions) since at least "The Cabinet of Mephistopheles" (Le cabinet de Méphistophélès) (1897) (a lost film). One of his earliest and best surviving examples of this trick remains "The Four Troublesome Heads" (Un homme de têtes) (1898). By 1901, he and nearly every other filmmaker had employed the trick in dozens to hundreds of films. He took the gimmick about as far as he could in this form with the sevenfold exposure of "The One-Man Band" (L'homme orchestre) (1900). In other words, the effect could use some new life, even by then. Méliès gave it just that with "The Man with the Rubber Head".

It appears to be the first film, or at least the earliest surviving or available one, in which the director discovered the fantastical and amusing possibilities of enlarging or shrinking one exposure while not the other. He loved it so much that his next two films listed in the Star catalogue (and also available on the Flicker Alley set) employed the same technique. As usual, other filmmakers, too, were quick to imitate his work; one example might be the giant ogre in Walter Booth and Robert W. Paul's "The Magic Sword" (1901) (although it's contested who did it first - see my review of "The Magic Sword" for more details). For the growing and shrinking head in "The Man with the Rubber Head", Méliès moved towards and away from the camera via a chair and pulley for one exposure, which was to be joined with the other of the chemist (also Méliès) and his assistant. All of this was done in-camera and thus required precise execution. Méliès's body excepting his head was covered by black as to prevent exposure (i.e. masking). A stop-substitution (or substitution-splicing) was used for the explosion of the head-this trick was even more tired than superimpositions.

It's also worth noting that this is, in a way, a rare and early use of the close-up by Méliès. It's actually one of the earliest close-ups of the face that I've seen or know of (not counting the medium close-up popularized by "The Kiss" (1896) - that not being as close of framing). Other early close-ups tended not to be of the face, such as the magnified objects in George Albert Smith's "As Seen Through a Telescope" and "Grandma's Reading Glass" (both 1900). Méliès's close-up is also interesting because it's the reverse or ersatz of a dolly or trucking inward shot-moving the actor rather than the camera. The dolly shot becoming a close-up was later used as the attraction in single-shot Biograph films "Hooligan in Jail" (1903) and "Photographing a Female Crook" (1904). Méliès's close-up also remains within the long-shot framing of the outer exposure.

Wow. This is basically an exact copy of that Mario Party mini game with the balloon heads! Pretty funny, I wonder if this is where they got the idea?

Man With The Rubber Head, The (1901)

*** 1/2 (out of 4)

aka L'Homme à la tête en caoutchouc

This here is one of the director's best known and most loved films and that's understandable due to the wonderful magic created here. Meiles once again plays the magician who puts a head (again Meiles') on a table and blows it up to a large side, lets the air out and then blows it back up again. This is certainly one of the director's best films as it's guaranteed to keep a smile on your face the entire time. The special effects are very well done and hold up quite well today but the highlight is certainly the ending but I won't ruin that for you. If you're new to the director's work then this here would be a great place to start.

A chemist is hard at work in his laboratory creating a copy of his own head. When he succeeds he places it on a table and watches it animatedly respond to him. However, then he gets a pair of bellows and decides to see ho big he can make this rubber head by inflating it himself – with awful results.

Back when many films were very descriptive and very 'real' in their subjects, Méliès must have been a bewildering influence. Films called 'man riding a horse' were wowing them in the moving pictures (or movies as they are still called) by doing exactly what they said on the tin, or in other words, such a film would feature a man on a horse, a training coming into a station and so on. Méliès created short films that contain visual images that still retain their appeal today and will be known to many people (even if they don't know that they are his images!) and this is the modern appeal of his films to me. Sure they are simple in terms of substance and are more style over content but remember these are a century old – think of how they must have been viewed then!

This is one example but it is not one of his best for my money. The film is weird even watching it now and it is far more about visual impact than about its narrative foundation or substance. It looks great and some of the effects show him to have been years ahead of his time – anyone looking for meaning or plot will be annoyed but the focus is visuals and, in this regard, it still works and is very imaginative and funny. True, it is obvious now and we all know how the effects were done and what the joke is going to be, but it is impossible to watch this without being impressed by how visionary Méliès was and what an impact the sheer originality and imagination of this film must have made back then.

I have watched many rubbish films and many good films that have lasted two hours; this film lasts only a very minutes and is well worth the amount of time it took for me to watch it. Méliès' images are still in the public psyche today and this film, while not his most famous, is another good example of why that is the case.