Der Mann mit dem Gummikopf

In less than 5 years, the cinema had made a gigantic jump from the short "documentaries" of the early pioneers (Le Prince, Dickson and the Lumière brothers) to the amazing Cinemagic of french director Georges Méliès, who became one of the first filmmakers to focus entirely in making fiction movies. Ever since he watched a movie for the first time (as a member of the Lumières' first audience), Méliès was convinced of the enormous potential of the new invention as a form of entertainment, as as soon as he could he started to make his own films. By 1901, stage magician Georges Méliès had already 5 years of making films and experimenting with special effects, and his movies were well-known around the world as the finest films of his time. With his many discoveries in the field of special effects, Méliès was able of making films that looked like real magic, and his movies became more complex with time, and even more fascinating.

"L' Homme à la Tête en Caoutchouc" (literally, "The Man with the Rubber Head") is another one of Méliès' many "trick films", which were short movies that showed him making an impossible magical trick. In this movie, an alchemist (as usual, Méliès himself) is preparing a strange experiment in his laboratory. The alchemist puts an odd devise on a table, and connects it to his bizarre creation: a living copy of his own head (Méliès again) that stands over the table without a clue about what will happen to it. Using an air pump he connected to the head, the alchemist begins to blow, and the living head begins to increase its size as if it was a balloon made of rubber. The head reaches a gigantic size, but the alchemist decides to release the air from it as he fears the head may explode. Proud of his invention, the alchemist decides to show it to his assistant (quite probably played by his wife Jeanne d'Alcy, but this is not confirmed), but the assistant may not be as careful as he was.

As in many of his early shorts, this movie is a "gimmick film", in other words, a movie devised around a special effect in order to show it like a magician would make a trick. In this case, the movie combines an excellent use of multiple exposures and editing to create the two heads, and a remarkably creative use of zoom to create the illusion of a head increasing its size. While a quite simple trick to our modern standards, the effect achieved is one of Méliès' most amazing and better done special effects, making "The Man with the Rubber Head" one of the best "gimmick films" in the Cinemagician's career. However, this short is more than an excellent gimmick, as what makes "The Man with the Rubber Head" different from his earlier films (and the similar movies of his competitors) is the care Méliès put to create a "story" to his trick.

While in his first films he simply appeared as a magician doing his show, in this movie there is a set build for the scene (instead of a simple circus stage), and while simple, the movie is clearly set in the middle ages. This gives the movie a distinct atmosphere, and already shows the path that Méliès was taking at that stage in his career, as that very same year he would start making his now famous series of fantasy films, which would be far more complex than his "gimmick films". One can say that it was with in those movies where Méliès tested his craft before making his masterpieces like "Le Voyage Dans la lune" the following years. 8/10

Melies had a sense of playfulness about his films, and this is one of the more amusing ones: Melies takes a head -- which is Melies' head -- attaches it to some bellows, and blows it up like a balloon. True, there's no deep thought involved, but there needn't be. It's less than a minute and easily sustains the one joke.

Melies was inventing techniques as he went along, borrowing from other media, just as D.W. Griffith shortly would. There is an exuberance in seeing something done for the first time that is sorely lacking in later uses of the same editing effect. I suppose it's because Melies was having fun himself.

George Melies was a magician before he was a filmmaker, and he often discovered these film tricks while filming. George Melies stars in this film as a man who is able to inflate and then deflate a duplicate of his own talking head. He decides to let his assistant in on the fun with disastrous results. It's funny how today we have all of the technology and none of the imagination that these early film pioneers had. Melies' work can be found on youtube - it is not copyrighted - or on DVD if you prefer a hard copy with a bit of commentary. Melies has a tendency to do many of the same kinds of things repeatedly which will probably annoy many viewers. Just remember that Melies had no idea that we'd be watching his movies 100-120 years later, but I'm sure he would be delighted.

In Georges Melies film 'The Man With the Rubber Head', what is it that is suspended? Our belief or our disbelief? The modern audience is desensitised to what is witnessed, which to the films modern audience would have seemed particularly, lets say 'futuristic'. If technological advancements have affected the way in which we apprehend phenomena on-screen, does it affect the way in which we apprehend further life? Is it possible that life in a technological advanced society is less real than before? However, will the 'real' and the 'possible' be "more" as technology advances?

What this film does more than any other in the digital age is demonstrate artistic creativity. The illusion which (really) exists before us was not borne by the touch of a button, but crafted with a patience, that is rare in our postmodern dullness.

Georges Méliès had been using the trick of multiple-exposure photography (or superimpositions) since at least "The Cabinet of Mephistopheles" (Le cabinet de Méphistophélès) (1897) (a lost film). One of his earliest and best surviving examples of this trick remains "The Four Troublesome Heads" (Un homme de têtes) (1898). By 1901, he and nearly every other filmmaker had employed the trick in dozens to hundreds of films. He took the gimmick about as far as he could in this form with the sevenfold exposure of "The One-Man Band" (L'homme orchestre) (1900). In other words, the effect could use some new life, even by then. Méliès gave it just that with "The Man with the Rubber Head".

It appears to be the first film, or at least the earliest surviving or available one, in which the director discovered the fantastical and amusing possibilities of enlarging or shrinking one exposure while not the other. He loved it so much that his next two films listed in the Star catalogue (and also available on the Flicker Alley set) employed the same technique. As usual, other filmmakers, too, were quick to imitate his work; one example might be the giant ogre in Walter Booth and Robert W. Paul's "The Magic Sword" (1901) (although it's contested who did it first - see my review of "The Magic Sword" for more details). For the growing and shrinking head in "The Man with the Rubber Head", Méliès moved towards and away from the camera via a chair and pulley for one exposure, which was to be joined with the other of the chemist (also Méliès) and his assistant. All of this was done in-camera and thus required precise execution. Méliès's body excepting his head was covered by black as to prevent exposure (i.e. masking). A stop-substitution (or substitution-splicing) was used for the explosion of the head-this trick was even more tired than superimpositions.

It's also worth noting that this is, in a way, a rare and early use of the close-up by Méliès. It's actually one of the earliest close-ups of the face that I've seen or know of (not counting the medium close-up popularized by "The Kiss" (1896) - that not being as close of framing). Other early close-ups tended not to be of the face, such as the magnified objects in George Albert Smith's "As Seen Through a Telescope" and "Grandma's Reading Glass" (both 1900). Méliès's close-up is also interesting because it's the reverse or ersatz of a dolly or trucking inward shot-moving the actor rather than the camera. The dolly shot becoming a close-up was later used as the attraction in single-shot Biograph films "Hooligan in Jail" (1903) and "Photographing a Female Crook" (1904). Méliès's close-up also remains within the long-shot framing of the outer exposure.