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The Christmas Dream
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Wikipedia article
'The Christmas Dream' is a 1900 French short silent Christmas film directed by Georges Mlis. It was released by Mlis's Star Film Company and is numbered 298305 in its catalogues, where it was advertised as a 'ferie cinmatographique grand spectacle en 20 tableaux'.
Production and themes
The film, one of Mlis's cinematic contributions to the 'ferie' genre, may have been inspired by a stage production produced in 1897 at the Olympia music hall in Paris. The film's structure is highly theatrical, alternating familiar genre scenes with fantasy elements in the manner of a stage ferie; the sequence with the hungry poor in the streets calls back to scenes from nineteenth-century melodrama.
Mlis appears in 'The Christmas Dream' twice, as a magician and as a beggar. The film includes symbols derived from the Christian tradition, including a sheep and a lion, as well as a motif emblematic of Mlis himself: a jester. The sustained and (for Mlis) atypically serene scene of a church bell ringing also functions as a symbol, readable as a communal ritual of peace seen through a gently nostalgic lens.
The production style is eclectic and theatrical, with a mix of clothing styles from several different eras and stylistic juxtapositions such as live pigeons in the same frame as a flat, painted cutout church bell. However, the film also includes more in-depth diagonal staging, realistically painted scenery, and naturalistic acting than is usual in Mlis's major productions.
Special effects used in the film include stage machinery (for the church bell and the Christmas tree that opens up), substitution splices, and dissolves, which are used partially to help connect adjacent spaces, such as the inside of a church followed by the inside of its bell tower. Mlis, one of the first filmmakers to use dissolves as a connecting transition, was likely inspired by the smooth scene changes in theatrical melodramas, which often used lighting, stage machinery, and other effects to flow continuously from one scene to another without dropping a curtain. The scene arrangement and staging combine to give a sense of dynamic, free-flowing movement, helping build a coherent atmosphere for the film's urban spaces.
Survival
An incomplete print of 'The Christmas Dream', structured differently from Mlis's catalogue description and seemingly missing about 20 feet of film, survives at the British Film Institute in London. It was released to home video in the 2000s, still incomplete. In an 1979 study, another print of the film was believed to survive in a private collection, but was unavailable for viewing at the time.
See also
* List of Christmas films
References
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