Chez le magnétiseur

Alice Guy takes on fellow Frenchman Georges Melies, but the hypnotist theme is thin cover for a few visual effects which sees various characters instantaneously swapping clothes.

The story consists of a hypnotist using his powers to make a subject's clothes magically change again and again. Of course, to do this, the camera was turned on and off...allowing the actress to change her clothes and then the camera was restarted.

In the 1890s, moving pictures were in their infancy and many of the plots of these films were dull...such as watching babies eating porridge and people walking down the street. However, a few filmmakers were trying new techniques and experiments with the camera. Using stop-motion, Georges Méliès began using his training as a magician and putting it on camera--with all sorts of crazy stunts stunning the audiences of the day. And, as was so common back then, other filmmakers simply stole or 'borrowed' his work to make similar films. The most famous of these 'borrowers' was Segundo de Chomón....but in the case of "Chez le Magnétiseur" his work was being 'borrowed' by the famous director, Alice Guy...who made a ton of her own and more original films. Original, this one is not. But it's competently made and easy to watch.

This, like all the titles listed by the other reviewer, appears in the C-series Gaumont catalogue, films that Alice Guy categorically denied having made and which are in fact almost certainly the work of Georges Hatot during his brief employ by Gaumont 1898-99. Two of the other films listed by the other reviewer (The Burglars and Surprise Attack on a House at Daybreak) are in fact remakes of films that Hatot had already made for the Lumières during his stay there (1896-1898). All these films probably date from 1898 rather than 1897.

The principal actor here (also the magician in Scène d'escamotage) is very likely Hatot's longtime collaborator Gaston Breteau who had also played Christ in Hatot's two versions of The Passion (one made for Lumière, the other for Gaumont). Hatot and Breteau had worked together in the theatre both as actors and as managers of crowd-scenes in the mid 1890s (Théâtre des Menus-Plaisirs, the Odéon and perhaps also the Hippodrome). They worked together for Lumières, for Gaumont and for Pathé (1900-1905) and were more or less inseparable until Breteau's death in 1905, after which Hatot joined another old friend and former theatre colleague Victorin-Hippolyte Jasset at Éclair.