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The Mysterious Retort
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Wikipedia article
'L'Alchimiste Parafaragaramus ou la Cornue infernale', released in the United States as 'The Mysterious Retort' and in Britain as 'The Alchemist and the Demon', is a 1906 French silent film directed by Georges Mlis. It was released by Mlis's Star Film Company and is numbered 874876 in its catalogues.
Plot
In a laboratory, an alchemist is working with a large retort on a stove. After consulting a book, he falls asleep in a chair near the retort. As he sleeps, a giant snake comes out of the stove and transforms into a jester, who wakes the alchemist and forces him to look in a hand-mirror. When the alchemist does so, the retort grows much larger, the alchemist falls back to sleep, and a giant spider with a human face appears inside the retort. The spider dissolves into a young woman sprinkling coins onto the ground. Sparks escape from the retort and transform into a ghost. The alchemist wakes in terror, and the giant retort explodes. Two assistants run to the alchemist, who has fallen prostrate on the ground. The jester reappears and stands triumphant over the fallen alchemist.
Production
Mlis appears in the film as the alchemist. Though he often took roles in his own films, 'The Mysterious Retort' marks one of the very few instances in which Mlis's character is defeated and apparently dead at the film's end.
At least two items in the film are recognizable from previous Mlis productions: the alchemist's wizard robe was frequently used, including in 'A Trip to the Moon' (1902), while the puppet snake that comes out of the fire had previously appeared in 'Rip's Dream' (1905). Special effects for the film were created using stage machinery, pyrotechnics, substitution splices, and superimpositions.
Versions
Mlis's pre-1903 films, especially the popular 'A Trip to the Moon', were frequently pirated by American producers such as Siegmund Lubin. In order to combat the piracy, Mlis opened an American branch of his Star Film Company and began producing two negatives of each film he made: one for domestic markets, and one for foreign release. To produce the two separate negatives, Mlis built a special camera that used two lenses and two reels of film simultaneously.
In the 2000s, researchers at the French film company Lobster Films noticed that Mlis's two-lens system was in effect an unintentional, but fully functional, stereo film camera, and therefore that 3D versions of Mlis films could be made simply by combining the domestic and foreign prints of the film. Serge Bromberg, the founder of Lobster Films, presented 3D versions of 'The Mysterious Retort' and two 1903 Mlis films, 'The Infernal Cauldron' and 'The Oracle of Delphi', at a September 2011 presentation at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. A similar screening by Bromberg, without 'The Mysterious Retort' but including the other two films, had occurred at a January 2010 presentation at the Cinmathque Franaise. According to the film critic Kristin Thompson, "the effect of 3D was delightful the films as synchronized by Lobster looked exactly as if Mlis had designed them for 3D."
One of the surviving prints of the film, held at the Cinmathque franaise, is a stencil-colored version. 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.
References
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