Une excursion incohérente

IMDb attributes this film to Camille de Morlhon, while the copy of the film I saw indicated that Segundo de Chomón was responsible. Judging by the special effects, I could understand the film being attributed to Chomón but think IMDb might be right here as the style doesn't seem to be exactly his. Normally, you'd have expected Chomón to have more natural outdoor sets, a bit more subtlety and a bit more artistry.

"A Fancy Picnic" starts off well enough. Four folks head out in a wagon (about circa 1830) on a picnic. However, their food is infested with mice, worms and bugs (all used by stopping the camera and making the food appear to become infested when the film was restarted). Then, they all return home and the narrative of the story gets completely lost. There is a lengthy animated section (one of the earliest known, actually) that really contributes nothing to the film and is more a distraction than anything else. In fact, the entire last 75% of the film is a non-stop demonstration of camera tricks, costumes and beautiful sets but none of this conveys a coherent story. All in all, there are a lot of neat tricks in a film that doesn't seem to say anything other than 'hey, look at my camera tricks!'.

This late version of Melies' THE HAUNTED INN was the product of Segundo de Chomon and Camile de Morlhon -- with, I suspect, the stop-motion animation of Emile Cohl. A family tries to have a picnic, with distressing results; they retreat to a nearby house, where demons torment them, and they wind up doing acrobatic tumbles through windows.

It was a very popular type of movie in its time, but it had peaked some time a year or two earlier. Now films telling more traditional stories were coming strongly into favor, and if the camera magic that Melies and de Chomon had specialized in did not vanish, it changed. It became the techniques used to tell the details of a story, the grammar of film.