Home | Movies By Year | Movies from 1896
A Terrible Night
Buy A Terrible Night now from AmazonFirst, read the Wikipedia article. Then, scroll down to see what other TopShelfReviews readers thought about the movie. And once you've experienced the movie, tell everyone what you thought about it.
Wikipedia article
'A Terrible Night' is an 1896 French silent comedy film by Georges Mlis. It was released by Mlis's Star Film Company and is numbered 26 in its catalogues, where it is listed with the descriptive subtitle 'scne comique'.
Synopsis
A man tries to go to sleep, but is disturbed by a giant bug climbing up the bed and onto the wall. He attacks the bug with a broom and disposes of it in a chamber pot in a compartment of his bedside table.
Production
'A Terrible Night' may have been inspired by a series of comic magic lantern slides, published in the 1880s by the English firm of Bamforth & Co Ltd. The film predates Mlis's famous use of cinematic special effects; the first known Mlis film with camera effects is 'The Vanishing Lady', made later in 1896. Rather, the giant bug is a simple pasteboard prop controlled with wire.
The film was made with the Mlis-Reulos portable camera in the open air, in the garden of Mlis's home in Montreuil, using natural sunlight and a cloth backdrop. Mlis himself played the man attempting to sleep.
Survival
A film commonly identified as 'A Terrible Night' is known to survive and has appeared on various DVD collections. However, Mlis's great-great-granddaughter, Pauline Mlis, published findings in 2013 suggesting that the film commonly believed to be 'A Terrible Night' is actually a later Mlis film, 'A Midnight Episode', numbered 190 in the Star Films catalogues, and that the original 'A Terrible Night'featuring simpler scenery and different camera placement, but the same plot and the same bedsurvives in two print copies: a photocollage held by the Cinmathque Franaise and a flipbook published by Lon Beaulieu around the turn of the century. If this hypothesis is accurate, both 'A Terrible Night' and 'A Midnight Episode' survive.
References
Buy A Terrible Night now from Amazon
<-- Return to movies from 1896