10-02-2011, 10:16 PM
I missed this film when it first came out, so it was nice to have the opportunity to finally see it, and on the big screen. It was a cornerstone event of the Palo Alto Film Festival, and Lady Cranefly got guest tickets through work. This is the colorized version, by the way (Melies hired a bunch of women to paint every frame (over 30,000 of them) and released a colorized version). This version was thought to have been lost until a copy was discovered in 1998. The copy had become a brittle block of glass, and it took over ten years of painstaking work using vaporization techniques, etc., to slowly unpeel and photograph frames before each frame disintegrated completely (a side effect of the process). Even then, they had to "resurrect" missing frames or portions of frames through a process of referencing (or borrowing info from) adjacent frames or the black and white version. An incredible accomplishment.
The film lasts 15 minutes, which was very long back in 1902. Oh, and it has a storyline, which was unheard of. Back in the day, someone would read a script to make sure everyone understood what was going on (Melies had no idea how comprehensible it would come across to a general public that had never experienced motion picture storytelling), and of course there'd be organ or piano accompaniment. For this resurrected version, they hired the French group Air to provide a score. It's a surprising piece of music, at first seeming whacky, but it quickly grows on you and I believe it works extremely well.
Neither of us had ever seen this film in its entirety. We found it surprisingly good and very surreal, very trippy. Some really tight corsets stood out for me, but also a lot of other unexpected weirdities. Highly recommended, even if not the colorized version.
One caveat. This film borrows heavily from a children's book called Piko the Penguinaut, so if you've read that, this might all seem too familiar.
The film lasts 15 minutes, which was very long back in 1902. Oh, and it has a storyline, which was unheard of. Back in the day, someone would read a script to make sure everyone understood what was going on (Melies had no idea how comprehensible it would come across to a general public that had never experienced motion picture storytelling), and of course there'd be organ or piano accompaniment. For this resurrected version, they hired the French group Air to provide a score. It's a surprising piece of music, at first seeming whacky, but it quickly grows on you and I believe it works extremely well.
Neither of us had ever seen this film in its entirety. We found it surprisingly good and very surreal, very trippy. Some really tight corsets stood out for me, but also a lot of other unexpected weirdities. Highly recommended, even if not the colorized version.
One caveat. This film borrows heavily from a children's book called Piko the Penguinaut, so if you've read that, this might all seem too familiar.
I'm nobody's pony.
