The Hallucinations of Baron Munchausen

I think at first Melies' putting Baron Munchausen in the middle of these hallucinations or dreams or what have you distracted me; this is why cross-cutting between different points of view became such a wonderful innovation in cinema, because prior to that, like here, you had to simply show the actor in the middle of the situation. That's what Baron does for the first few dreams/hallucinations he is having, which includes mysterious and alluring women, historical backdrops (ancient Egypt and Rome), and, uh, other women acting like giant water fountains spraying out water from their mouths in formation... sure, why not.

But what is in this short's favor is that Melies isn't afraid to get weird and disturbing with the imagery; on the contrary, he is soaking up what is one of the hallmarks of Munchausen stories: the bizarre, the alluring, the devilish, the exciting and the truly surreal. Oh, and the moon makes an appearance, or two or more. For those who come to this having seen Terry Gilliam's Munchausen (and this was just something I thought of watching it, ironically, the main actor playing Munchausen looks like Gilliam in a wig, major hammy comic acting included), the moon is a big part of it, as are the alluring women (remember Robin Williams and Uma Thurman?)

I think what makes Melies film distinct is how fluid all of the set pieces go, like in an actual dream, where one thing goes into another into another, and moments like the women suddenly turning into lizard people, or when a monster in a f***ed up suit (almost like a pet dragon or something with googly-eyes), it feels all OF a piece. It's all stream of consciousness and maybe repetitive in a few points, but it carries a boldness that makes this director's work so distinct even today. It's playful, erratic, and magnificent.

This fantasy-comedy is one of the later works of "trick film" pioneer Georges Méliès, who started production in 1896 and made literally hundreds of these charming little movies before his career foundered in 1914. For viewers familiar with his style Baron Munchhausen's Dream (as it was known in the U.S.) presents a number of the director's characteristic touches, while for newcomers it may serve as a succinct digest of the special effects and comic motifs he had perfected during his fifteen years of film-making, rather like a cinematic medley of Georges' Greatest Hits.

As the film begins we join a dinner party of 18th century aristocrats, periwigged gentlemen and ladies in silk dresses, dining and drinking and chatting with great animation. It is suggested they move to the ballroom to dance, and most of the celebrants exit, but the host, Baron Munchausen, is too intoxicated to dance -- in fact, he can barely walk, and has to be helped to bed by servants. We notice immediately that his bedroom is dominated by an enormous mirror. Soon, as Munchausen falls asleep, this mirror becomes a stage-like setting for the baron's elaborate and disturbing dream. He travels to Egypt and is terrorized by the Pharaoh; he sees a trio of women (the Three Fates?) who turn into monstrous animals; he is menaced by giant insects; he sees women in Greek-style costumes who strike classical poses and then transform into an ornate fountain; he finds himself in a grotto where acrobatic demons tumble in every direction; he is confronted by a dragon; he is horrified by a spider-like woman in a giant web, then encounters a moon man with a bizarre face. The moon man's tongue becomes grotesquely long, and then his nose does likewise. When the moon man turns into an elephant wearing eye-glasses the baron reaches his limit of endurance. He smashes the mirror with a bedside table, then plummets through it. He falls out the window of his home, but fortunately his night-shirt snags on an iron fence and he is discovered by his servants dangling above the sidewalk, unhurt but caught in a most undignified position. We get one last look at Baron Munchausen the following morning, as he grimaces into his mirror with a pained expression.

This is a funny short as far as it goes, and if you've never seen a Méliès comedy it's well worth a look, but those wondering why his career ended so abruptly will find some clues here: while other directors were forging ahead with new cinematic techniques, Méliès was still producing the same sort of film he'd made repeatedly since the 1890s, with all the same effects produced from the same dwindling bag of tricks. The camera maintains its usual distance from the actors, with no close-ups. Méliès seemed to regard his actors as interchangeable puppets who were there to undergo transformations, strike tableaux-like poses or to react, but not to have any existence as recognizable characters. The movies were maturing past their infancy by 1911, and audience expectations were changing; the pioneer producers who survived into the new era of feature-length films were the ones who were able to accommodate movie-goers' new demands. Georges Méliès apparently saw no need to adapt or update his style and, as enjoyable as his films undeniably were, this creative paralysis was one of the reasons his career ended prematurely. Poor business decisions, exacerbated by the outbreak of the First World War and its impact on trade in Europe, were also major factors in his downfall.

Meanwhile, Baron Munchhausen's Dream is a perfectly enjoyable example of this director's work, and serves as something of a summation of his best creative qualities, but it also demonstrates Georges Méliès' perilous limitations as a filmmaker.

The good Baron has too much to drink and is put to bed. What happens next are a series of wild dreams. It's non-stop. We go from Egyptian pharaohs to female statues, to lizard men, elephants, Spanish conquistadors, and so on. Each provides a threat to the Baron and he is in constant distress. There are some clever effects such as using other actors too provide mirror images (ala Harpo Marx who may have seen this). The last minute is a bit unsatisfying, but the whole thing is quite a bit of fun.

Baron Munchhausen was a character created in the late 18th century. This fictional guy was a German character who had a great penchant for lying and exaggerating his adventures. However, in this Georges Méliès film, you have the Baron....but he really seemed little like the fictional character. He doesn't exaggerate anything and the film consists of him seeing a ton of weird things during a long series of nightmares following his eating a huge meal.

To describe the plot of this one is practically impossible. It honestly looked as if the director simply was reusing every set and prop and costume he'd accumulated! It's interesting but also nonsensical Not one of the director's best efforts.

The way dreams are presented in "Baron Munchausen's Dream" make it one of Georges Méliès's most interesting films. The use of the mirror and the baron's interactions in the rapidly-changing dream scenes make it unique and sets the stage for the films of Buster Keaton where dreams are explicitly associated self-reflexively with movies themselves instead of with the reflexive nature of a mirror.

In it, the Baron overindulges at dinner and, consequently, his dreams morph into wilder and more frightening episodes, in which he interacts, until he's finally upset enough to break through his mirror and fall outside. The film's title character, by the way, was a real person. According to the Wikipedia website, he was known for telling far-fetched stories about himself. Since his lifetime, he's become a popular fictional literary character and both the medical Münchausen syndrome and the philosophical Münchausen trilemma are named after him. Méliès's film turns the Baron's tendency to implant himself in unbelievable adventures against him, as he becomes the victim of his own imagination or, rather, that of cinema's first magician and storyteller of fantastic tales.

Dreams are one of the most popular subjects in Méliès's oeuvre. Due to this, the Flicker Alley five-DVD set's filmography lists "Dream Film" as a genre, of which 16 of the 173 titles are catalogued. His earliest film to be framed as a dream and, indeed, the earliest dream film I know of, is "A Nightmare" (1896). This scenario allowed Méliès to use his favorite tricks of substitution splicing and superimpositions to create the strange happenings, as well as theatrical designs and scene changes. In "A Nightmare" and, more so, in "The Astronomer's Dream" (1898), there are the beginnings of the multi-shot film, as settings are changed to the befuddlement of the protagonist. His earliest story films also contained dreams-within-scenes, such as those in "Cinderella", "Bluebeard" and "A Trip to the Moon". Later longer fantasies ("Rip's Dream", "Under the Seas", "Tunnelling the English Channel and "A Grandmother's Story") were framed entirely as dreams.

Other early filmmakers were also quick to depict dreams in cinema. George Albert Smith's "Santa Clause" (1898) features a superimposed dream-scene-within-a-scene, and he used lens focusing in "Let Me Dream Again" (1900) to transition out of the fantasy. Ferdinand Zecca, in his remake of the latter film, used a dissolve--a technique that Méliès seems to have even changed his use of for transitioning in and out of a dream in "A Grandmother's Story".

"Baron Munchausen's Dream" takes up the dream-scene-within-a-scene form, but in the way of a stage-within-a-stage, so that the Baron may interact with the dream world. The dream stage replaces the large mirror in the Baron's bedroom and, then, replaces the entire stage. The Baron's entering of this mirrored dream world and, especially, how the dream scenes are changed by cutting-on-action to the bewilderment of the Baron, who is the only constant, is similar to Buster Keaton's dream of entering a film and finding himself in changing scenes in "Sherlock Jr." (1924). One incongruous difference with Méliès's film, however, is his inconsistent use of both dissolves and direct cuts for these scene changes. Yet, it doesn't seem far fetched that Keaton may've found inspiration in this film; after all, part of Keaton's "The Playhouse" (1921) is even more obviously inspired by a Méliès picture, "The One-Man Band" (1900).

Although other early films used superimpositions (or matte shots) to make movies about people watching movies (including R.W. Paul's "The Countryman and the Cinematograph" (1901) and Méliès's own "The Magic Lantern" (1903) and "Long Distance Wireless Photography" (1908)), I haven't seen an explicit associative connection made between dreams and cinema before Keaton's work. The dreams in this film are likely more so playing on the literary traditions of the Baron's adventures. The first images involve attractive ladies, including in an aristocratic dance and a Cleopatra-style Egyptian setting, whom the Baron tries to interact with and for which he is initially tossed off the dream stage. Some of the other dream imagery is somewhat interesting, such as the seemingly suggestive sights of women turning into kneeling fountains spurting water from their mouths and a superimposed devil-faced Moon with a long waggling tongue and a nose that transforms into an elephant's trunk. Others are, as a title card described, bland and, certainly, incoherent.

This is Méliès's most cinematic film in a couple other respects. By 1911, Méliès had adopted some continuity editing, including the temporal continuity of actions across scenes transitioned by direct cuts. The substitution splicing for scene and character changes, appearances and disappearances that Méliès had been using for years within scenes also prefigures the classical editing style of cutting on action between scenes. More unique to Méliès's oeuvre is the mirror and added dimension of the bedroom scene. The mirror reflects a fourth wall in the set, which takes the film out of the theatricality of every other Méliès film and, indeed, many other old movies. According to historian John Frazer, in his book "Artificially Arranged Scenes", Méliès's set designer at this time was a man named Claudel. This may be the only case in a Méliès fiction film where they got away from what Frazer calls "proscenium-bound thinking". The settings are also quite ornate.

Other early films featured interesting uses of mirrors to show actions that would otherwise be out of frame. Films such as the 1910 "Frankenstein" and the "Student of Prague" films incorporated mirrors into their horrific trickery. Although "Baron Munchausen's Dream" doesn't make the self-reflexive association between dreams and movies that Keaton's films do, it does use this other means of reflecting images, the mirror, to reflect dreams, which occur at first on a theatrical stage, but end up consuming the entire frame of the movie. And like the original movie about movies, "The Countryman and the Cinematograph", the trickery of the moving images and the protagonist's misery are only escaped when the wall (be it screen or mirror) is smashed through.