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Whimsical Illusions
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Wikipedia article
'Whimsical Illusions' is a 1909 French short silent film directed by Georges Mlis.
Production
Mlis appears in the film as the magician, with the actor Manuel as his assistant. Special effects in the film were created using stage machinery and substitution splices.
The film includes magic tricks Mlis had previously performed live on stage at his Paris theatre of illusions, the Thtre Robert-Houdin: one in which giant playing-cards come from a display stand, and one in which a head comes out of a crate and chases the magician around the stage. (This latter stage illusion was created by Mlis as "Le dcapit recalcitrant" in 1891, with the head being that of a talkative pedant, Professor Barbenfouillis.)
Release and survival
The film was released in 1909 by Mlis's Star Film Company and is numbered 15081512 in its catalogues. A surviving print of the film was rediscovered in the 1920s by Jean P. Mauclaire, director of the French art house cinema Studio 28. (The print was one of a batch of Mlis films that had been owned by and shown at the Dufayel department store in Paris, and which had then been stored at the Chteau de Jeufosse in Normandy, where Mauclaire came across them.) Mauclaire exhibited the film as part of the Gala Mlis at the Salle Pleyel on 16 December 1929.
The surviving print of the film is hand-colored, but it is unclear when the coloring was done; the Gala Mlis program identified the print as an original copy, but it is known that some prints shown at the Gala were hand-colored in 1929 specifically for that event. One legend claims that the 1929 coloring was done by Berthe Thuillier, an artist who had collaborated prolifically with Mlis on film colorization at the turn of the century. However, this was disproved in an interview with Thuillier herself in the journal 'Le Nouvel Art Cinmatographique' (volume 5, January 1930, page 74).
References
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