This is one of the earliest trick films I've seen--and the earliest I know of from the Pathé studio. Its "trick" is the substitution splice--that is, a jump cut to conceal the substitution of something within the frame. In this brief film, "Turn-of-the-Century Barber", the trick is employed to have a barber remove and return a customer's head during a shave. It's an obvious and primitive effect, but this is one of the earliest instances of its use. The substitution splice was likely invented in the making of the Edison Company film "The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots" (1895). In the Edison film, it was used to enhance realism: the chopping off the queen's head. Early cinema's foremost magician Georges Méliès adopted the trick as early as, if not earlier than, "The Vanishing Lady" (Escamotage d'une dame au théâtre Robert Houdin), which was made in the same year as this Pathé trick film. Méliès' used the trick for its own sake, to present magic. Here, Pathé also used it for shock value, as well as humor.
It wasn't long before Méliès topped Pathé by employing the next big "trick" effect in the history of early cinema, multiple-exposure photography, to dismember his own head four times in "The Four Troublesome Heads" (1898). With this trick, Méliès own head was photographed five times, and a dummy head like the one used by Pathé was employed only sparingly by Méliès during his heads' transition from his neck to a table.
This was the beginning of intensive competition between the studios of Méliès and Pathé, with Méliès tending to lead the way in introducing new trick effects, film techniques and styles, which Pathé was quick to imitate. After a few years, however, (roughly from 1904 to 1911 according to Richard Abel), Pathé became the leading movie studio in France and, indeed, the rest of the world, and Méliès was, eventually, pushed out of the movie-making business and reduced to burning his own films in despair. Pathé accomplished this largely by adopting more cinematic film techniques, such as crosscutting, while Méliès continued to produce more theatrical-inspired pictures; by diversifying the genre of movies they produced; by incorporating mass-production techniques; and by monopolization, including through the Motion Picture Patents Company.