O Homem com a Cabeça de Borracha

In Georges Melies film 'The Man With the Rubber Head', what is it that is suspended? Our belief or our disbelief? The modern audience is desensitised to what is witnessed, which to the films modern audience would have seemed particularly, lets say 'futuristic'. If technological advancements have affected the way in which we apprehend phenomena on-screen, does it affect the way in which we apprehend further life? Is it possible that life in a technological advanced society is less real than before? However, will the 'real' and the 'possible' be "more" as technology advances?

What this film does more than any other in the digital age is demonstrate artistic creativity. The illusion which (really) exists before us was not borne by the touch of a button, but crafted with a patience, that is rare in our postmodern dullness.

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?

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.

George Melies was a magician before he was a filmmaker, and he often discovered these film tricks while filming. George Melies stars in this film as a man who is able to inflate and then deflate a duplicate of his own talking head. He decides to let his assistant in on the fun with disastrous results. It's funny how today we have all of the technology and none of the imagination that these early film pioneers had. Melies' work can be found on youtube - it is not copyrighted - or on DVD if you prefer a hard copy with a bit of commentary. Melies has a tendency to do many of the same kinds of things repeatedly which will probably annoy many viewers. Just remember that Melies had no idea that we'd be watching his movies 100-120 years later, but I'm sure he would be delighted.

Melies had a sense of playfulness about his films, and this is one of the more amusing ones: Melies takes a head -- which is Melies' head -- attaches it to some bellows, and blows it up like a balloon. True, there's no deep thought involved, but there needn't be. It's less than a minute and easily sustains the one joke.

Melies was inventing techniques as he went along, borrowing from other media, just as D.W. Griffith shortly would. There is an exuberance in seeing something done for the first time that is sorely lacking in later uses of the same editing effect. I suppose it's because Melies was having fun himself.