The Hallucinated Alchemist

L'hallucination de l'alchimiste (1897)

*** (out of 4)

aka The Hallucinated Alchemist

Wonderfully entertaining film from French master Georges Melies has a alchemist sitting in front of a glass container, which soon begins to capture the dreams of the man. Inside this dream includes images of a spider in its web, a demon-like creature and eventually fire begins to come from the glass. Melies will always be remembered for his trick films and this one here is a pretty effective one. The tricks are all obvious today but that doesn't take away from any of their charm and even when viewed today one can't help but be impressed with what Melies was able to do so I can't imagine what it would have been like seeing this back in 1897. Another major bonus here is that this was hand-tinted and the colors look absolutely breathtaking. I was really, really shocked with how wonderful the tinting looked because usually this early stuff is a mess that never looks right. I used to defend films made a decade later for their rough shape but after viewing this film I'm going to have to reconsider. A perfect place for a Melies newbie to begin.

As I have said in a few other reviews, films back before the beginning of the 20th century were pretty lame. The film makers simply didn't understand that so much more was possible and films were amazingly mundane. Folks sitting about playing cards, workers leaving the factory and children eating were the norm and films were seldom longer than about 30 seconds. So, when Georges Méliès created products like "The Hallucinated Alchemist", it stands head and shoulders above the rest.

The film is gorgeous and is among the first to be hand-colored (a process that became a bit more common in the following decade). It gives it a luminous quality that will no doubt shock some viewers who never expected colors. The film consists of an alchemist sitting in front of a giant glass container as he dreams...and lots of crazy stuff appears inside the container. The only problems with the film is that there isn't a lot of plot otherwise and it ends abruptly--like it's missing the last few seconds of the film. But it looks amazing.

If you think you've seen this Melies film on the 2010 DVD compilation of recently rediscovered Melies pieces..... well, I'm sorry to tell you that you haven't. It turns out that it is a nicely preserved and edited copy of Melies' 1906 short THE MYSTERIOUS RETORT that was misidentified.

It's amazing that anything at all of Melies' work survives, given that he destroyed his remaining copies in despair more than ninety years ago, but they do occasionally turn up, as well as other films of similarly unlikely antiquity. So keep your eyes open at those garage sales and the contact number of a dedicated fan handy.

Sorry about my continued rating of the movie, but I can't quite figure out how to remove it.