TEACHERS' RESOURCE - The Courtauld Institute of Art

As his cinematic style became increasingly
illusionistic and magical, Méliès’
preoccupation with card games and the
cards themselves returned as a regular
motif throughout his substantial oeuvre.
The Living Playing Cards (1904) features
Méliès as a magician on a small music
hall-style stage. His first task is to increase
the size of a playing card, stretching it to
life-size and then setting it up as a central
portal on the stage. He then invites the
Queen of Hearts to emerge, conjuring her
out of her paper frame.
Miraculously, a woman dressed as a playing
card queen regally proceeds from the flat
confines of the card-portal. In the final
scene, Méliès walks through the card,
demonstrating its double status as mere
paper and the site of magical creativity
and delight. The flatness of both card and
screen are juxtaposed with the animated
movement of figures across the camera’s
mechanical eye, and the everyday simplicity
of a pack of cards and its stock characters
takes on new dimensions with surprising
and entertaining results.
In Méliès’ drawing of a scene from The
Lilliputian Minuet (1905), the artist’s
magician persona holds up a series of
oversized playing cards on a card table in
another theatre space. One curtain in the
background is tied back, but the further
curtain is still drawn, suggesting that we are
privileged viewers of a spectacular behind
the scenes event to which the theatre’s
audience is not invited. Here, the solitary
magician aloofly releases the animated
royal figures from their cards, as king of
diamonds joins hands with the queen of
spades.
This is a game of solitaire, which the film
audience observes much in the same
way that the fourth standing figure in the
Met Card Players looks on at the game
unfolding in front of him, mirroring the
viewer’s own experience of the picture.
In each of Cézanne’s Card Players images,
the viewer is drawn in to the action of the
game and led to consider the meaning
of the cards themselves. We find parallels
between the small paper cards passed from
hand to hand in the succession of rounds,
the network of peasants in small rural
communities and Cézanne’s involvement
in that social network, and the materiality
of mere paint, canvas and cards, flat
surfaces which, when animated by purpose
and social interaction, gain and proclaim
meaning.
One of the most important meanings
conveyed in these films and images
connected by game-playing is the nature
of social relationships and the place
of interactivity in attractions. Gunning
observed that ‘film lies between drama and
narrative: going ot the movies is something
more private than the theatre and more
public than reading a novel. A film is shown
in public, a performance for the public, but
the performers are not [present] before the
public, we are not exactly in their company.
Nor are we exactly alone’.
Occupying a darkened cinema together
is a communal act. The participants
are together alone, each individually
entertained and engaged and through the
corporate act of looking, they are bound
together in mutual experience. So too is
the experience of visitors to a gallery to
view an exhibition. Moreover, it is possible
to go beyond the boundary of the frame
and the screen, considering social relations
displayed to the public in Méliès’ Playing
Cards (1896) and Cézanne’s Card Players
(1890-92). Meyer Schapiro believed that
Cézanne’s card players are markedly
different from other French pictures of the
same topic because they are devoid of
the ‘drama of rival expectations’ and are
not ‘convivial and loud’. Méliès’ players,
while boisterous, also do not appear to be
invested in the competitive aspects of their
game, and seem to have an awareness of
playing for the camera’s pleasure and the
viewer’s desire to experience the rapid
dimming and brightening of film rather
than the mere observation of a familiar card
game scene. Card playing is a social activity
which, in the artistic invocations described
above in film and painting, allows its
participants to remain solitary.
As in all of the works involving playing
cards in Méliès and Cézanne’s output,
the game with its suggestion of timeless
tradition and endless hands or rounds
to play is a metaphor for the routine
encounters of French social networks and
interactivity both in labour and leisure.
Most importantly however, the cards hint at
the independent agency of the artist and
film-maker magician, serving as a way of
proclaiming what Schapiro calls ‘a kind of
collective solitaire’.
KEY IDEAS
Surface and painting techniques
Film technology and cinematography
Narrative and visual story-telling
Leisure, labour and the everyday
Social relations and public audiences
Magic and illusion
Display in art and exhibitions
FURTHER READING:
Richard Abel (ed.), Silent Film
(London: Athlone, 1999).
Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of
Modern Life and Other Essays
(London: Phaidon, 1995).
Michael Doran (ed.), Conversations
with Cézanne
(London: University of California Press,
2001).
John Fraser, Artificially Arranged Scenes:
The Films of Georges Méliès
(Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979).
Paul Hammond, Marvellous Méliès
(London: Gordon Fraser, 1974).
Terence Maloon (ed.), Classic Cézanne
(Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales,
1998).
Gerald Mast, A Short History of the Movies
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Educational
Publishing, 1981).
Meyer Schapiro, Paul Cézanne
(New York: Abrams, 1988).
Screenings of some of the short films
mentioned in this essay will take place in
the gallery during the late events on Oct
28, Nov 25 2010 and Jan 13 2011. Most
films are also viewable on youtube.
Top:
George Méliès
The Living Playing Cards
1904
Film still
Bottom:
George Méliès
The Lilliputian Minuet
1905
Graphite on paper
[In Paul Hammond Marvellous Méliès, 1974]