Le paravent de Cagliostro

A truly pathetic smidgeon of this film does at least survive and I came across it in a compilation of "Early Trick Films" in the Huntley Archive (their film no 2630) which is available on youtube.

Unfortunately the fragment, the third or fourth film in the compilation (seemingly called The Magic Screen and wrongly dated 1909) is only a minute or so long in black and white (the original was nearly five minutes long and hand-coloured). It does however match the catalogue description for this film in which France Mathieu appears dressed as an eighteenth-century page (I assume France must have been De Chomón's sister-in-law, earlier films having featured his wife, Julienne Mathieu)who spreads out a folding screen.

The illusions begin but, alas, the fragment ends before we see the supple dancers, amphitrites and Venus emerging from her nacreous shell as promised by the catalogue.

Cagliostro, I may say, never figured at all even in the full film. It is just supposed to be his magic screen.

In this film by Segundo de Chomón, there isn't any real plot...just some seemingly magical stuff going on for the audience. Everyone in the film is dressed in mid-18th century attire. A woman stands net to a folding screen and then various images appear on each separate screen. To do this, it meant doing many takes and perfectly trimming and inserting them onto each screen....a very time-consuming and difficult task for 1912.

As far as the style of the film goes, it's very typical of Chomón's work...which was inspired by the film so of French filmmaker Georges Méliès. Nothing brilliant here but a cleanly made and technically fascinating film for its time. And, unlike other review, the copy I found on YouTube was not one minute but three minutes long and seemed to be the entire film (such short films were very common in the early days of movies)....and it was also hand painted to make it a color film.