O Homem Orquestra

There are seven chairs lined up on stage. A man (Melies) fills on, and then reproduces himself and fills the next, and so on. Each of the incarnations has a musical instrument. First they play in a conventional way, but eventually they will merge and become one man again. There is some clever reshuffling on the stage. One of the better ones.

One of the visual effects that French "Cinemagician" Georges Méliès pioneered and mastered was the double exposure, in which a piece of film is exposed twice, to two different images. The resulting photographic image shows the second image superimposed over the first. 'L' Homme orchestre' is, for its time, a rather advanced experiment into his effect, and, rather than just two images captured together, Méliès has created seven clones of himself, each posing as the various members of an orchestra. As the first magician/musician eases himself onto the first chair, another semi-transparent double rises from his body to occupy the second chair, and so forth.

After the enthusiastic "one-man band" has performed a musical piece, they sequentially dissolve into one another, leaving only the conductor of the orchestra, who hangs around for one final display of magic. As a large fan emerges behind him (apparently to his complete surprise, as Méliès demonstrates one of those classic silent comedy double-takes), the conductor takes a seat on the single remaining chair, which sinks into the floor. Quick as a flash, a semi-transparent Méliès comes hurtling from behind the fan, disappearing on impact with the floor with one of those whiz-bang puffs of smoke that the director so adored. The huge fan lowers again to reveal a smugly-grinning Méliès standing there, safe and well.

More than a century after it was produced, 'L' Homme orchestre,' though not popularly known among most people, is notable in its innovative use of a newly-discovered visual effect, and as a brief demonstration of Georges Méliès' boundless creativity and enthusiasm. If you've got a couple of minutes of spare time, why not occupy yourself by watching this enjoyable little film?

"The One-Man Band" is one of early cinema pioneer Georges Méliès's more amusing and ingenious trick film attractions. It exploits multiple-exposure photography (a.k.a. superimpositions), which he had already employed in some of his earlier trick films, including "The Four Troublesome Heads" (1898) and "The Mysterious Portrait" (1899). There is also some substitution splicing (a.k.a. stop substitutions), which was Méliès's most common trick. In this film, he uses multiple-exposure photography to reproduce his own image sevenfold—to create a band, who then play their various instruments in an amusingly hammy manner. To accomplish this feat took precise acting and direction from Méliès, as well as from his cameraman; camera masks were used and exact timing was required for the seven different exposures of the negative. It was all done in-camera. As indication of the sophistication of Méliès's trick here, Buster Keaton has received praise for technical and creative brilliance by doing the same thing 21 years later in "The Playhouse".

I'm sure there has been at least one time in our lives when we wanted to replicate ourselves. Just this weekend I needed to wash my car, get gas, go to the store, and do laundry. I did two of the four things. It was too damn hot! If I could've replicated myself, I could've gotten all four things done with minimal effort.

In "The One Man Orchestra" Georges Meilies does replicate himself to become a seven piece orchestra. You know what they say, "If you want things done right, then do them yourself." Georges, with the help of some camera tricks, made it seem like he filled seven seats and then reconsolidated back to one individual.

To create the illusion of seven identical musicians, the film required seven simultaneous multiple exposures; only one other known Méliès film, The Melomaniac, uses so many exposures at once.

At the turn of the century, Georges Méliès' amazing shorts were the most famous motion pictures of the world, as his highly creative and technically innovative "Cinemagic" had proved that cinema was not only a quite useful device for scientific purposes, but also a very promising new way of entertainment. Méliès' most famous works are without a doubt the fantasy movies he made in the first decade of the 20th century, where he used all his special effects tricks to narrate stories of magic, horror and science fiction as the first director of fiction movies in history (1902's "Le Voyage Dans la lune" is an icon of cinema history). However, his earlier films, a collection of shorts where a magician makes impossible tricks, are as amazing as his stories, as it was in those early shorts where he polished his technique and singlehandedly invented the art of special effects.

1900's short film "L' Homme Orchestre" (Known in English as "The One-Man Band") is one of those movies that would set the basis for what would become his trademark "Cinemagic" in the years to come. In this short film, the magician (as usual, played by Méliès himself) prepares for his next trick by putting seven chairs for the members of his band even when there is no sign of anyone else in the place. Suddenly, the magician sits in one of the chairs, and after he rises, a cymbal player appears sit on the chair the magician used to be. The magician moves to the next chair and repeats the trick, appearing another band member in the process, and he continues doing the same until the six chairs are occupied by a member of his orchestra. The magician has successfully replicated himself six times in order to play a song like truly a "One-Man Band".

True to his theatrical style and his training as a magician, in "L' Homme Orchestre" director Georges Méliès conceived a charming and very funny way to show off a camera trick he had discovered a few years before and was truly mastering by this stage: multiple exposures. Mixing this quite interesting property of film with his great skill at editing, Georges Méliès crafted an effect that flows seamlessly and in a very fluid way. However, the movie is more than a camera trick, as the funny way that Méliès uses to set his film (making good use of pantomime) enhances the atmosphere and overall makes for a better experience. While Méliès made the multiple exposures trick very popular, and soon most of the early pioneers began to use it in their films too, it was his care for the building of the story what made his films feel different, more like a complete show and less like a mere "gimmick film".

By 1900, Méliès' films had already started to be studied and imitated by many other pioneers, who followed the path traced by the "Cinemagician" in the discovery and development of the mysteries of the new art. While people like Edwin S. Porter and Ferdinand Zecca had quickly mastered the tricks that Méliès discovered (even imitating his style and plots), Méliès' were still superior in both technical achievement and artistic conception. In the following years Méliès would continue the development of this and many other effects, and his efforts would be crowned with the release of his fantasy films, where he exploited his tools to bring fairy tales to screen. "L' Homme Orchestre" is probably not one of Méliès' best known films, but it's historical importance and beautiful craftsmanship makes it a joy to watch even today, more than 100 years after its release. 7/10