L’Homme orchestre (1900) - film review

A musician arrives on a stage on which there are seven chairs in a row.  He sits on each chair in turn and as he does so he leaves an identical copy of himself.  Once the seven chairs are filled, the seven clones start to play a tune.  The six copies then vanish, leaving the original musician to perform a conjuring trick with the seven chairs before taking his bow.

In this early work from the man credited as the father of cinema, Georges Méliès shows how far he came to perfecting the technique of multiple exposure.  To create the illusion of seven copies of the same man playing in a band, the film was exposed seven times – an extraordinary technical feat requiring meticulous preparation and painstaking precision.  Like most of Méliès work, the pleasure of watching this film has just as much to do with Méliès’ manic performance as with the artistic design and accomplished special effects.

© James Travers 2003

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