Les cartes vivantes

I love the "Alice in Wonderland" feel to this one - the idea of bring to life the playing cards. I just wished it was longer - the Queen lasted longer than the King (he took off the King outfit too fast) but otherwise a pretty neat little film.

8.5/10

This score of 8 is really relative to other films by director Georges Méliès. If any of his work is compared to his contemporaries, even his worst films would probably merit a 9 because they are so much more complex, fun and timeless compared to the fare of the day. This film is about a magician (played by Méliès), and this isn't surprising as he was, before moving to films, a stage magician himself. The magician pulls out a small playing card and shows it to the audience. Since it is so small, he magically increases its size several times. Ultimately, he makes the tiny card become about 6 to 7 feet high AND the characters of a queen and king become REAL (through the use of stop-motion and slow dissolves). This is very entertaining and amazing because no others were able to do such brilliant camera tricks.

If you want to see this film online, go to Google and type in "Méliès" and then click the video button for a long list of his films that are viewable without special software.

Few persons have meant as much to the history of cinema as Georges Méliès, the now legendary French stage magician that revolutionized film-making with his enormous narrative creativity and his many discoveries and inventions in the field of special effects. As a member of the first audience that experienced the Lumières' first screening, Méliès discovered cinema and immediately realized the enormous potential it had as a narrative art. During the following 15 years, Méliès would become one of the most important producers of movies, and he went from making amusing "gimmick movies" (films about Méliès making an impossible magic trick) to creating some of the most amazing stories of those years, using his skills to enter the genres of horror, fantasy and science fiction. By the year of 1902, Méliès was focusing more on his major projects than on "gimmick movies", but he still made several ones to test some new tricks. 1904's "Les Cartes Vivantes" was one of those shorts.

As usual in his "gimmick films", "Les Cartes Vivantes" (literally, "The Living Playing Cards") is about a Magician (Méliès) performing an amazing magic trick. This time, the trick involves a simple deck of playing cards, and a large cardboard that resembles a blank card. The trick begins with the Magician making one card grow bigger, to the size of a book. Then, by simply throwing the card towards the cardboard, it becomes an enormous version of the card the Magician threw. As if that wasn't enough, the Magician transforms the giant card (a 9 of Spades) into the card of the Queen of Hearts. With that card on the cardboard, the Magician proceeds to to make the image come alive by transforming the drawing into a real life Queen of Hearts who walks out of the card. To finish the trick, he returns the Queen to the card and decides to transform the card into the King of Clubs; but the trick may be really on him.

As written above, for Méliès this kind of short films were more than a way of having a fresh and original catalog of movies in his theater, they were a chance to test new or improved tricks and special effects he could later use in his major projects. "The Living Playing Cards" is a prime example of this, as it is composed of many of the tricks that Méliès had used in many previous occasions (dissolves, multiple exposures and several editing tricks), but the way they look in this movie is considerably better than when Méliès used them for the first time. When one watches the movies Méliès did before 1901, the effects look marvelous but primitive; "The Living Playing Cards" is the direct evolution of his talents, and it's easy to notice that his work of editing has improved considerably since his early years. His use of props and set design to build up an atmosphere has also improved, and he captures perfectly what his real performances as a magician would had been.

Honestly, there's nothing really remarkable in "Les Cartes Vivantes" besides its amazing display of special effects, but like every Méliès film, it has a special magic that makes difficult not to enjoy them. Méliès had an enormous charm as a performer, and despite the shortcomings of the technology of his time, he really knew how to use cinema's potential to entertain his audience the best he could. While in the end, "The Living Playing Cards" may not be anything more than a "gimmick trick", one has to remember that in 1904, the legendary Méliès was preparing his most ambitious project to date: that often forgotten masterpiece named "Le Voyage à Travers l'impossible", better known in English as "The Voyage Through the Impossible". 8/10

One thing that always comes over in a George Melies film is the man's energy and heightened sense of fun. He must have been exhausting to work with. Here he adopts the persona of stage magician - which is exactly what he used to be in the years before film - to perform card tricks. These are no ordinary playing cards, however, because he increases their size ten-fold so that the audience can see their face value.

The film is a series of trick shots, which makes the stage element redundant really, and in less talented hands these might quickly grow dull. But Melies certainly knew how to entertain his audience, and throws in a couple of clever surprises to round things off. This is one of Melies' less extravagant films, but it's still great fun to watch.

While the ideas are mostly simple ones, this film packs several skillfully done visual effects into a short running time. Like a number of Méliès features, it starts off with a stage magician doing tricks, here using playing cards, and then gets more involved as it goes along. It works pretty well because of a lot of good camera tricks, almost all of which are done with care. Many of the visual effects are nearly seamless, and are fairly impressive given the limited resources available at the time. There isn't anything really spectacular in this one, and many of the features that Méliès made are more complex and have more action than this does, but this little movie scores pretty well in terms of its craftsmanship.