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Gulliver's Travels Among the Lilliputians and the Giants
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Wikipedia article
'Le Voyage de Gulliver Lilliput et chez les Gants', released in the United States as 'Gulliver's Travels Among the Lilliputians and the Giants' and in the United Kingdom as 'Gulliver's TravelsIn the land of the Lilliputians and the Giants', is a 1902 French short silent film directed by Georges Mlis, based on Jonathan Swift's 1726 novel 'Gulliver's Travels'.
Production
Mlis himself plays Gulliver in the film. The visual differences of scale between Gulliver and the countries he visits were created using multiple exposures and miniature models; Mlis uses substitution splices and careful exposure design to merge the various elements and give them a sense of apparently seamless action. Some scenes were filmed outdoors, in Mlis's garden in Montreuil, Seine-Saint-Denis, so that the camera could be far away enough from the Lilliputians to make them look small.
Release and legacy
'Gulliver's Travels Among the Lilliputians and the Giants' was released by Mlis's Star Film Company and is numbered 426429 in its catalogues. In early 1903, the Edison Manufacturing Company sold duplicated prints of 'Gulliver's Travels Among the Lilliputians and the Giants', as well as of Mlis's other films 'Joan of Arc' and 'Robinson Crusoe', in the United States. Siegmund Lubin also advertised a 'Gulliver's Travels' film in 1903; this may have been an attempt by Lubin to ride on the popularity of Mlis's version.
In 1988, Jean-Pierre Mocky directed 'Gulliver', a three-minute remake of Mlis's film, as part of the TF1 television program 'Mlis 88'. At the time, the film was one of 158 Mlis films presumed lost, but for which written scenarios survived; Mocky based his remake on Mlis's original scenario, but used a style and tone markedly different from Mlis's works.
A stencil-colored print of the film is held at the Cineteca di Milano. It is unknown whether Mlis authorized the coloring, as the stencil process is highly unusual in his oeuvre; normally, his films were colored using an entirely freehand method supervised by the colorist Elisabeth Thuillier.
Flicker Alley released the film on DVD in the US in 2008.
Reception
In their study of film adaptations of British literature, Gregory M. Coln Semenza and Robert J. Hasenfratz called 'Gulliver's Travels Among the Lilliputians and the Giants' a "gorgeous film" that "remains very watchable due to its sheer imaginative and visual invention".
References
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