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Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the group of
serpentine and butterfly dances anticipates a conception of the cinematic image
as an enclosed and self-contained space; a conception that soon comes to
define Mélièsian cinema with its “artificially arranged scenes.” The dances make
maximum impact when the costume fills the visual field with its presence—in
many cases, the moving costumes quite literally demarcate the boundaries of the
frame. Fanning out and sweeping across the screen, their fabric presents itself
as the screen’s moving counterpart. This doubling becomes even more apparent
in a number of the so-called “transformation scenes” 12 where actors face the
static camera and metamorphose into screens through simple gestures of opening
overized wings, cloaks or peacock tails which can then be further animated,
especially with color variations.
These so-called “transformation scenes” are characteristic
of two genres within early cinema: the trick film and the féerie. Both were
developed by Méliès 13 and drew heavily on the theatrical féerie and stage magic.
Méliès was an ardent fan and also a practitioner of both (as the impresario in his
own magic theatre, the Théâtre Robert-Houdin). His films adopted these as well
as other traditions of nineteenth-century popular entertainment and science to
conjure a world of supernatural wonders, introducing into the language of cinema
the baroque concept of the marvelous (le merveilleux). 14 Méliès himself called this
brand of cinema “fantastical scenes” (les vues fantastiques), positioning them in
direct contrast to “ordinary subjects” (les vues ordinaires). He emphasized that
besides transformation “there is also a great number [of films] involving tricks,
theatrical machinery, mise-en-scène, optical illusions.” 15 This suggests that
transformation was far from being the only major ingredient in his box of tricks.
In Méliès’s cinema, there is a shift from a primary sense
of amazement at the technological wonder of motion—
the key aspect of what Tom Gunning has called the
“aesthetic of astonishment” 16 —toward an amazement at
the manifestation of visual opulence in its imaginative
excess. Motion here is devised as a structuring tool in
the staging of “special effects” that animate the lavish
mises-en-scène. For Méliès, the artistry and charm of
décor and costumes was as important as the originality
of his tricks or that of the “star attraction.” 17 Méliès was
particularly proud of pointing cinema towards aesthetic
concerns derived from the theater, claiming that he
gave cinema a new lease of life, effectively rescuing it
from being a one-hit wonder. He was also proud that
he designed his own sets, décor and costumes, and
that he was generally present at every stage in a film’s
production, and it was this auteurist approach that enabled
Pathé, with its industrial model of production, to
quickly establish itself as a serious rival in the trick film
and féerie genres.
The aesthetic of opulence is characterised by the “grand
spectacle” of butterflies, fairies and devils who—gracefully or grotesquely—pose
and gesture with their wings and cloaks, as in Méliès’s Conte de la grand-mère
et le rêve de l’enfant (1908), or de Chomón’s La Légende du fantôme (1908), Le
charmeur (1906) and Le Spectre rouge (1907); exotic vegetation, as in Méliès’s La
Chrysalide et le papillon d’or (1901); palatial interiors and multi-corps processions
and ballets, as in Méliès’s Le Palais des Mille et une nuits (1905); “optical effects”
such as pyrotechnics, showers of gold coins and rays of light emanating from bodies,
as in de Chomón’s Le scarabée d’or (1907), Zecca’s Ali Baba et les quarante
Frame enlargement from Métempsycose, dir Segundo de Chomón, 1907. Courtesy of AFF/CNC, France.
voleurs (1902) or Velle’s La poule aux oeufs d’or (1905); or dazzling underwater
kingdoms, as in Ferdinand Zecca’s Pêcheur de perles (1907). Many of these themes
appear at their best in the so-called apotheoses, the triumphal scenes and the ultimate
glorifications of opulence which typically involve the whole troupe in ballets
or other, more ambitious formations. This is where cinema used and reinvented
some of the theatrical machinery that defined the nineteenth-century féerique.
Among all the motifs that showcase costume as a living
screen, those of women-butterflies (femme-papillon),
women-insects and winged fairies are the most persistent
and also the most emblematic. These fin-de-siècle
phenomena were already familiar tropes from stage
magic and féerie; one of Méliès’s first cinematic butterfly-women,
in La Chrysalide et le papillon d’or, was in
fact based on a famous stage illusion called The Cocoon
(Le Cocon) by French magician Buatier de Kolta 18 shown
in the Egyptian Hall in London in 1887, shortly after
Méliès’s own brief stint there. 19 De Kolta’s trick was then recreated again in Gaston
Velle’s Métamorpsoses du papillon (1904) and de Chomón’s Mariposas japonesas/Papillons
japonais (1908), both of which are colored. Another remarkable film
by de Chomón, Métempsycose (1907), was also based on an eponymous popular
magic illusion which was essentially a variation on the Pepper’s Ghost. The film’s
main attraction is a female figure who repeatedly opens and closes arms, each
time unveiling a new pair of wings that turn into a cape decorated with motifs
that, once again, evoke Fuller’s early painted costumes.