L'Homme-orchestre

In this short film Georges Mélies makes the first use of double-exposing, making seven "clones" of Himself playing an orchestra. The trick is now easy to do, but then it was quite expensive to film seven different shots to one roll of film. Although Mélies makes a professional and well-coordinated work.

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?

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.

"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".

Georges Melies was the founder of special effects in movies. Its really quite wonderful watching these little shorts: imagine you had the opportunity to realise for the first time the things that were possible with filmed images. By filming a scene, then removing or moving one element and filming it again and editing the two shots together you can make things disappear or jump from one side of the room to the other. This is true magic, and watching Melies discover these things is a special thing i'm glad i've had the opportunity to see.

Aside from this value, the shorts still retain their immense fun for audiences an entire century after their creation. Now THAT is called staying power.

In this short, Melies clones himself six times to fill six seats of an orchestra, then makes the seats disappear, then reappear, then makes himself disappear in a cloud of smoke. The music, i believe is Robert Israel, a great modern composer who's been doing us the honour of writing scores for many great silent movies, which adds immeasurably to our enjoyment of them.