Les affiches en goguette

This short feature is based on some very amusing ideas by Georges Méliès, although they do not entirely come off due to slightly imperfect execution. It's still worth seeing.

The movie starts with a wall full of posters for various entertainers, which become the source of a series of antics involving passers-by. The story that follows is clever, but the visual effects in this one are below the standard you come to expect from Méliès. Instead of the usual smooth dissolves and careful background continuity, the special effects here unfortunately come across as a little clumsy.

It helps a lot that the story really is a funny one, with some clever ideas, and is worth watching. It's just too bad that the technical side of it was not quite up to the visual wizard's usual standard, because it could have been a truly fine feature if the special effects had worked better.

In the large body of work produced by the French cinemagician Georges Méliès, the films he is mainly remembered for mainly include his fantasy/science fiction features, as well as his trick films, due to their wonderful charm and great visual effects that were ahead of their time when first premiered. However, this is not to say he was above producing films of other genres; on occasion, he would produce the standard drama/crime film more recognized as being the Edison Manufacturing Company's trademark, and sometimes, especially later in his career, slapstick was particularly prominent in the Star Film Catalog. Unfortunately, most fans of his work have dismissed his films of the latter genre, and for a good reason: Méliès did better with comedy and slapstick when it was in little humorous touches than with actually fully focusing a film on these elements. "The Hilarious Posters" is in many ways more of a comedy than a trick film, with limited effects that serve mainly to bring out the plot - a good thing considering Méliès usually did the opposite, but causing the effects to be shoved to the side and done much more abruptly and clumsily.

In "The Hilarious Posters", the filmmaker makes use of a concept he did numerous themes on throughout his career: the inanimate coming to life, in this case a wall of advertising posters becoming animated. It's an amusing little story, with some good elements of humor and a great finale, but, as other reviewers have already pointed out, the execution of the effects is rather sloppily pulled off. For Méliès, preventing this could easily have been a case of better judgement: to bring the posters to life, he uses an abrupt substitution splice, causing a quick jump from the pictures to the live human actors. Had the actors been better positioned in the poses of their drawn counterparts, this would not be a problem, but because the poses are a lot harder to keep for so long, it would have been far better for them to have kept the poses they did in the final product and use a slow dissolve to transition the images smoothly. Although the drawings and the actors would still not have matched up quite as well, doing this would have disguised it a lot better, and made more sense in addition given the scenario of the film.

Nevertheless, it is the creativity that pulls off the film, and the result is a very humorous comedy far better than later ones by the filmmaker. In 1908, he and his team would split into two studios, A and B; Méliès would create films in A, while his production assistant and actor known as Manuel would direct films in B. Because none of the slapstick comedies turned out that year had this element of the fantastic along with the slapstick, the majority of those films are today regarded as failures (it also didn't help that without Méliès onscreen, none of the ones by Manuel came off as especially distinctive to his style). "The Hilarious Posters" is thus a success in that it uses its effects (albeit poorly done) as a way of executing a genuinely creative story, something Méliès needed more of to survive in those later years.

Hilarious Posters, The (1906)

*** (out of 4)

aka Les Affiches en goguette

This here remains one of Melies best known works due in large part to it being shown on countless compilations as well as various free sites (like Youtube). The film has a billboard showing off various people and it quickly comes to life before going back to the billboard. In a twist, the billboard jumps back to life so that those on it can throw things at the man making money off of it. This type of trick show really isn't anything new from Melies but it still works simply because of the charm. The movie runs a quick three-minutes and manages to get a few nice laughs but the technology of the trick shot is pretty low-key especially when compared to some of the work the director was doing even earlier than this.

'The Hilarious Posters (1906)' is a clever effects film from French cinemagician Georges Méliès. A workman affixes a giant poster to a wall and departs, before all the posters come to life to cause mischief. A group of policemen arrive on the scene, but are bombarded with flour, and the poster-figures eventually escape into the real world. The transition from the two-dimensional posters to their flesh-and-blood counterparts is a little abrupt, and might have worked better as a slow fade, but otherwise the effect is impressive. Méliès must have built a nifty film set to house each of the poster characters in the one frame, especially the figures in the top poster (who are depicted, unlike their companions, in full profile). The visual effect - that is, an assumed still image suddenly coming to life - mirrors the advent of cinema itself, at which photographs were suddenly made to move. Méliès later wrote of his first experience with cinema: "a still photograph showing the place Bellecour in Lyon was projected... I had hardly finished speaking when a horse pulling a wagon began to walk towards us, followed by other vehicles and then pedestrians, in short all the animation of the street. Before this spectacle we sat with gaping mouths, struck with amazement, astonished beyond all expression." By recreating this experience with posters we at first assume to be two-dimensional and lifeless, Méliès makes a self-reflexive statement about cinema itself.

Another bizarre little tale from the warped imagination of French pioneer Georges Melies, this short film lacks his usual smooth technique but compensates by delivering a truly original and entertaining piece of nonsense.

The action centres around a set of posters that come to life and interact with each other and, eventually, on passers-by. The police get involved and it's not long before the arm of the law is being pelted with flour and soaked with liquor. Although the use of stop-motion here is a little ragged, Melies pretty much gets as much mileage as it is possible to get out of a wall full of posters...