Tchin-Chao, the Chinese Conjuror

I watched this as one of the shorts on The magic of Melies video cassette released by Kino on Video, 1994. Image quality was good. Music matched the mood of the film. No color was added. Cropping did not appear to interfere with the film. Frame speed appeared to be to fast. This should give an idea of the technical quality of the release I watched.

This film consists mainly of special effects being used to create a magic show. The chinese magician dances across the screen with a parasol. As his swings his parasol past places on the screen various items appear. A dog appears and becomes a woman. A chinaman is conjured to pair with her. They dance and fade from one part of the screen to another. The effect is dizzying, but I think this may have been partly because frame speed was too fast an the copy I watched.

I recommend this film to people interested in very early film history. For general viewers it is amusing, and not long enough to be tedious, but not that interesting either.

This short silent film is part of the DVD collection entitled "The Magic of Méliès" and is the fourth volume of THE MOVIES BEGIN series from Kino Video. Unlike copies of Méliès' films that are posted on the internet, the prints for these short films are exceptionally crisp and clean and feature wonderful musical scores. Oddly, though, is that aside from a few films such as THE BLACK IMP and THE IMPOSSIBLE VOYAGE, most of the shorts chosen for this DVD are actually not among the best of Méliès' films--having a strong tendency to show is "stagy" material as opposed to the films that have elaborate sets and plots. In particular, my favorites such as BARBE-BLEUE and LE VOYAGE DANS LE LUNE (his most famous film) are not on this DVD.

This video makes it very obvious that Méliès began his career as a stage magician. In this film, he is almost unrecognizable in Chinese makeup and dress, but the act is pure stage magic. Because it is simply a magic act, the trick cinematography instead of enhancing the film just makes the magic seem not so "magical" as you can tell the camera is stopping and starting to make the tricks come to be.

Tchin-Chao, The Chinese Conjurer (1904)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

aka Le Thaumaturge chinois

This time out director Melies plays a Chinaman magician who does a stageshow, which includes putting a woman in a box and a similar box next to her and making the woman appear in the opposite box. You can sometimes tell how these tricks were done, through editing, but the special effects here were very good and I honestly didn't see how the trick was pulled off. The final gag is a funny one but overall this didn't contain enough magic to where I'd call it one of Melies' best films.

It's the usual disappearing female who leaves one location and comes back in another. The characters pretend to be Chinese which is different, I guess. The tricks are less than astounding and it's really obvious that someone came in and rearranged things before the shoot. There is no real plot and no Wow moment.

Another one of French wizard Georges Melies countless number of early twentieth-century films, this one resembles many other films of the time in being a reproduction of a stage act. Melies plays a Chinese conjurer who performs various feats of magic on-stage. The trouble with this film is that it uses trick photography to perform the tricks which, when you think about it, pretty much defeats the object. It's not a magic trick when it's performed by camera trickery - it's a camera trick. Still, this kind of thing seemed to please audiences back then so I suppose it's churlish to complain. Ten lines - that equates to two-and-a-half lines for each minute of film...