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|
| Festival Year |
Festival Section |
| 2006 |
Magic in Film - Prog. 1 |
| Film Title |
LE PORTRAIT SPIRITE |
| Alternative Title 1 |
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| Alternative Title 2 |
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| Alternative Title 3 |
|
| Country |
France |
| Release Date |
1903 |
| Production Co. |
Star-Film |
| Director |
Georges Méliès |
| Format |
|
Speed (fps) |
| 35mm |
|
16 |
| |
|
|
| Footage |
|
Time |
| 145 ft. |
|
2'25" |
| Archive Source |
Library of Congress |
| |
|
| Print Notes |
Copia preservata da un positivo 35mm in bianco e nero su carta / Preserved from a 35mm black & white paper positive.
Senza didascalie / No intertitles
|
| Program Notes |
| Throughout his career as a magician, Méliès was a polemical opponent of Spiritism who deployed techniques of theatrical illusionism and trick photography to create mock spirit manifestations on stage and screen. Here, spirit photography – widely discredited by the 1875 Buguet trial in Paris – figures as the pretext for Méliès to show off a new cinematic trick: “an absolute novelty, for the effects obtained are made by a process only recently discovered. For the first time, one sees a dissolving effect upon a background absolutely white” (Complete Catalogue of Genuine and Original “Star” Films, 1905, p.25). Such so-called “anti-Spiritist tricks,” which appropriated the spectacular form of purported spirit phenomena while mocking their fraudulence, were a popular attraction in the French fairground shows that often screened Méliès’s films. |
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