Le nouveau seigneur du village

The New Lord of the Village (1908)

*** (out of 4)

aka Le Nouveau seigneur du village

This Georges Melies film would have benefited from some of the narration that a few of his movies have or at least title cards as the start of it is somewhat confusing. I'm going to guess from the title of the film that a new Lord arrives in a small village and appears to either kick someone out or causes some harm to a female. From here we see the Lord enter a strange cave where the typical Melies madness happens as he sees various spirits, a large crab and frog and other strange things. THE NEW LORD OF THE VILLAGE clocks in at just under 9-minutes and this here seemed a bit too long. For starters, as I said the film starts off pretty slow and it was hard to really know what was going on. Once the tricks started to happen you certain enter a deja vu area but some of them were so charming that they make the film worth sitting through. We didn't stop at the tricks because we then flash to another sequence outside the cave but fans of Melies will still want to view this one even though it's no where near his best work.

"The New Lord of the Village" was among numerous films to be released as part of the extraordinary, all-inclusive "Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema" DVD set back in 1908. The reviews on this page are all written by people who have seen this film on disc four of the set (which comprises mainly slapstick comedies and melodramas directed by Méliès and his production assistant Manuel) - a nine-minute, three-scene morality tale that serves largely as a device for a number of camera tricks. However, as with plenty of other early rediscovered shorts, this film that most have viewed is a misidentification, a film that was pointed out by film historian David Bond as actually being a completely different short.

On the same set, located in disc five which comprises only ten films, is included an unidentified film fragment of a 1908 short - the same year Méliès produced "The New Lord of the Village". I had long speculated as to the title of this short, first thinking of it as being a lost or cut scene from the filmmaker's second adaptation of Cinderella from 1912. But, this being a reasonable identification in visual look only (since it featured similarities in set and costume design but otherwise made no logical sense) I then took up the theory that the one-and-a-half minute fragment was a scene from the 1908 film by Méliès I had not seen entitled "Tribulation; or, the Misfortunes of a Cobbler." This made much more sense, so much so that I identified it as such in my IMDb list of films from the DVD set. The brief scene includes a large crowd of people at a wedding, which then leaves the scene only for a man, dressed as what seems to be a cobbler, to enter and drink copious amounts of alcohol before the crowd returns and finds him drunk. The events seemed to make sense overall with the title, and thus for a long time I believed it to be that film.

However, according to Bond, the identity of these two shorts is mixed up. The film on the box set identified as "The New Lord of the Village", when first discovered, had on it the label of the other 1908 film, "Tribulation; or, the Misfortunes of a Cobbler". Analyzing the unidentified fragment, the film historian came to the conclusion that that fragment was actually a scene from the former film, and that the nine-minute morality tale that most identify as "Le nouveau seigneur du village" is in fact an unknown title, not "Tribulation" or any other film. This would make sense to me when one further considers the fact that "No Trifling With Love" was an alternate title to this film, and the short reviewed on this IMDb page has nothing to do with romance in any way, while the fragment included a wedding that would fit the title better. In any case, judging the short clip that is apparently left of "The New Lord of the Village" is hard, considering the confusing action and the lack of context; but at least future reviewers should be aware of this misidentification and ignore the film on the set as being neither short.

The three-tableaux "The New Lord of the Village" is a lesser film from Georges Méliès's oeuvre. Without the narration based on those Méliès provided for his earlier work that accompany other films on the Flicker Alley DVDs or a catalogue description, this film becomes somewhat confusing. Fortunately, John Frazer's book "Artificially Arranged Scenes" is an excellent companion to watching Méliès's pictures-providing synopses based on those aforementioned sources. Yet, even Frazer comments on this one that, "There is a moral underlying this film presumably, but it is finally all rather labored and confused."

In "The New Lord of the Village", the Lord inspects a marketplace before being led by a gypsy to a cave. Many of the usual Méliès tricks abound in the cave, including a giant crab and toad, appearances and disappearances and flying superimposed ghosts. There's a tableau of "science, fortune and labor". The Lord relishes in the fortune, but the ghost of Caesar (at least, that's how Frazer describes this character, who doesn't remind me at all of Caesar) punishes the Lord by putting him in tattered rags and transforms the two commoners who accompanied him into noblemen. Back at the marketplace, however, the gypsy restores the social order, and the Lord is given to now sharing his wealth with his subjects. The labored and confused, quasi-Dickensian moral, it would seem, is a rather medieval one of social hierarchy being sustained by noblesse oblige--that is, the Scrooge-Lord's responsibility to take care of his subjects.

As competition intensified in the second half of the 20th Century's first decade, Georges Melies tried to weave a narrative around his increasingly stale trick photography. This example demonstrates just how difficult he found it to make even the simplest of storylines coherent and how clumsy he was at combining trick photography with a storyline.