One of the pleasures of silent film is that there’s no such thing as a definitive viewing. There’s always a new take on an old film—be it a new score, or restored footage, or new footage, once thought lost. Perhaps the addition of colours or tints that recover, for audiences in the early 21st Century, a theatrical experience more authentic to the early 20th. We are part of a paradox here: one in which current art is impressed upon the art of the past; and that past, in turn, appears to us like something more fully of its own time.
These thoughts were in my mind as I watched Flicker Alley’s new restoration of Behind the Door (1919). I’d seen this film once before, at a Cinefest screening back in 2013. It impressed me enough then to write about, and in the years since it has remained strong in my memory—usually bubbling up whenever I see some new example of depravity depicted onscreen. ‘You don’t need to show the terrible thing,’ I say to myself. ‘Not if your audience feels it, through to the bone.’
The films of Georges Méliès are always busy. They were born of a theatre tradition that was itself outsized, loud and flamboyant. Minus sound, those tendencies became even more extreme.
But they worked, often memorably. In the hands of Méliès—a genius designer of sets and costumes, and a magician both onstage and in-camera—these short films set a bar for artistry and imagination that in some respects has never been exceeded. We could produce a long, smug list of the ways Méliès movies seem primitive today: starting with the fixed camera, anchored, always, at medium distance. But the director’s designs remain first-rank; and he knew, most of the time, what his manic little films were truly about.
That last part is key. A Trip to the Moon (1902), and The Impossible Voyage (1904), for all their lunacy, have characters fixated on goals. Those characters are fools, yes, but their intentions are clear enough. It is their attempts to make their dreams come true that generates the spectacle.
By this measure, The Merry Frolics of Satan doesn’t quite succeed. Another of Méliès’ quest films, it too concerns a man of science, embarking on a Jules Verne-style journey, encountering bizarre obstacles along the way. But we get little sense of who this man is or what he hopes to achieve. And it is surprisingly damaging to the film.
Excelsior really was the prince of magicians. His trickery touched the limits of the temporal world. In matters of speed and sleight of hand, a more accomplished artist could not be imagined.
Is this the man we see in Excelsior!: a brief film, only two minutes long; and old—dating to nearly the dawn of the medium? In it, Excelsior delivers his stage show, with an assistant who doubles as his chief prop. The magician is played by Georges Méliès, the French cartoonist, theatre owner and (yes) stage magician, turned filmmaker.
