The Untamable Whiskers

Like many of the films of Georges Méliès, the director himself is the star of this little silent film. He is an artist who draws pictures on a chalk board. Then, moments later, he magically is transformed into the image on the board! It's all cute fun and shows Méliès roots as a stage magician. While the film isn't as outrageous, complex or original as his more famous works (such as Le Voyage Dans le Lune), it is still head and shoulders above other films of the time. In general, his competitors (such as Lumiere and Edison) were filming very mundane scenes from real life (sort of like short and boring home movies). Georges Méliès storytelling and creativity make this film transcendent of the age and well worth seeing even today.

If you want to see this film online, go to Google and type in "Méliès" and then click the video button for a long list of his films that are viewable without special software.

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 was chipper and matched the lighthearted mood of the film. No color was added. Cropping did not appear to interfere with the film, although it is hard to tell without titles. This should give an idea of the technical quality of the release I watched.

This film was mainly done to show off a particular special effect. A magician draws pictures on a chalkboard, and then his facial hair grows to fit the image he has drawn. This is part magic act, part comic routine. It is amusing, but special effects are so common today that it is not amazing, as it must have been to the people who first viewed it. Basically an image of the magician with one type of hair fades into an image of the same magician in the same position with another type of hair. The quality of this special effect is fairly good, so it didn't seem cheap, just redundant.

My recommendation is to watch it if you are interested in very early film history. It is a good example of a setup that is similar to a booth or simple theater show, but depicts something that could never be shown live. This film predates plots being the norm in movies, and itself has no plot.

The premise is simple; the execution is not. Melies draws faces on a chalkboard. After each drawing, he stands front and center and become the picture. Eventually, our old friend the devil takes his turn after being drawn. The neat thing in this is the ability to match up these chalk drawings with the figures Melies creates. Very good.

They didn't call Georges Méliès "the Magician" for nothing – though I am more partial to the great filmmaker's plot-driven masterpieces, he was also hugely popular for fascinating, special effects-driven snippets like this. Basically the cinematic equivalent of a magician's stage act, 'The Untamable Whiskers' gives Méliès an opportunity to show off the cross-fade effect, which allows him to fade discreetly between similar images.

A "man with whiskers" (played by the director himself) waltzes up to a blackboard and quickly sketches the image of a man with long hair. Shifting the board to the side, the man presents himself to the camera, stands still for a few moments and – voila! – he magically grows long hair. Méliès does this several times, experimenting with different hair styles, beard lengths and costumes. Best of all, he appears to be having a fun time doing it! Though the act (and the primitive special effect) is hardly interesting to modern audiences, the film has an odd charm about it, possibly aided by the director's apparently unyielding enthusiasm. Like any good stage magician, Méliès knows he's being clever, and I'm sure audiences back in 1904 were conversing amongst themselves about how on Earth he managed to pull it off!

Nothing too special here - Melies draws a chalk picture and then becomes the picture he draws. Then becomes a clown and it ends up he's the devil and disappears.

6/10