Les Hallucinations du baron de Münchhausen

After a night of hard drinking, Baron Munchausen is brought to bed by his servants. He has a series of bizarre dreams and nightmares. He wakes up outside hung by his iron fence as his servants gather to help him.

This is a French silent short film directed by Georges Méliès. It's almost a decade after his iconic A Trip to the Moon. I really love some of the costumes, the set designs, and a few of the transitions. This doesn't have many of the Baron Munchausen story's most memorable scenes. He doesn't ride a cannon ball. On the other hand, this has other imagines. I really like the dragon and the moon. The camera is stationary which leaves the screen confined. It's still a fun silent short, but it was probably not pushing any envelopes back in the day.

Baron Munchhausen was a character created in the late 18th century. This fictional guy was a German character who had a great penchant for lying and exaggerating his adventures. However, in this Georges Méliès film, you have the Baron....but he really seemed little like the fictional character. He doesn't exaggerate anything and the film consists of him seeing a ton of weird things during a long series of nightmares following his eating a huge meal.

To describe the plot of this one is practically impossible. It honestly looked as if the director simply was reusing every set and prop and costume he'd accumulated! It's interesting but also nonsensical Not one of the director's best efforts.

Also known as Baron Munchausen's Dream.

It is in no way a masterpiece but it is a nice short film to watch - about 10 minutes long. I do give it extra credit for being an early film as they were still learning the techniques of film-making at the time.

You can find this film online to watch - will not cost you anything but a little time to find it and about 10 minutes to watch.

7/10

The good Baron has too much to drink and is put to bed. What happens next are a series of wild dreams. It's non-stop. We go from Egyptian pharaohs to female statues, to lizard men, elephants, Spanish conquistadors, and so on. Each provides a threat to the Baron and he is in constant distress. There are some clever effects such as using other actors too provide mirror images (ala Harpo Marx who may have seen this). The last minute is a bit unsatisfying, but the whole thing is quite a bit of fun.

This fantasy-comedy is one of the later works of "trick film" pioneer Georges Méliès, who started production in 1896 and made literally hundreds of these charming little movies before his career foundered in 1914. For viewers familiar with his style Baron Munchhausen's Dream (as it was known in the U.S.) presents a number of the director's characteristic touches, while for newcomers it may serve as a succinct digest of the special effects and comic motifs he had perfected during his fifteen years of film-making, rather like a cinematic medley of Georges' Greatest Hits.

As the film begins we join a dinner party of 18th century aristocrats, periwigged gentlemen and ladies in silk dresses, dining and drinking and chatting with great animation. It is suggested they move to the ballroom to dance, and most of the celebrants exit, but the host, Baron Munchausen, is too intoxicated to dance -- in fact, he can barely walk, and has to be helped to bed by servants. We notice immediately that his bedroom is dominated by an enormous mirror. Soon, as Munchausen falls asleep, this mirror becomes a stage-like setting for the baron's elaborate and disturbing dream. He travels to Egypt and is terrorized by the Pharaoh; he sees a trio of women (the Three Fates?) who turn into monstrous animals; he is menaced by giant insects; he sees women in Greek-style costumes who strike classical poses and then transform into an ornate fountain; he finds himself in a grotto where acrobatic demons tumble in every direction; he is confronted by a dragon; he is horrified by a spider-like woman in a giant web, then encounters a moon man with a bizarre face. The moon man's tongue becomes grotesquely long, and then his nose does likewise. When the moon man turns into an elephant wearing eye-glasses the baron reaches his limit of endurance. He smashes the mirror with a bedside table, then plummets through it. He falls out the window of his home, but fortunately his night-shirt snags on an iron fence and he is discovered by his servants dangling above the sidewalk, unhurt but caught in a most undignified position. We get one last look at Baron Munchausen the following morning, as he grimaces into his mirror with a pained expression.

This is a funny short as far as it goes, and if you've never seen a Méliès comedy it's well worth a look, but those wondering why his career ended so abruptly will find some clues here: while other directors were forging ahead with new cinematic techniques, Méliès was still producing the same sort of film he'd made repeatedly since the 1890s, with all the same effects produced from the same dwindling bag of tricks. The camera maintains its usual distance from the actors, with no close-ups. Méliès seemed to regard his actors as interchangeable puppets who were there to undergo transformations, strike tableaux-like poses or to react, but not to have any existence as recognizable characters. The movies were maturing past their infancy by 1911, and audience expectations were changing; the pioneer producers who survived into the new era of feature-length films were the ones who were able to accommodate movie-goers' new demands. Georges Méliès apparently saw no need to adapt or update his style and, as enjoyable as his films undeniably were, this creative paralysis was one of the reasons his career ended prematurely. Poor business decisions, exacerbated by the outbreak of the First World War and its impact on trade in Europe, were also major factors in his downfall.

Meanwhile, Baron Munchhausen's Dream is a perfectly enjoyable example of this director's work, and serves as something of a summation of his best creative qualities, but it also demonstrates Georges Méliès' perilous limitations as a filmmaker.