"A Terrible Night" is director Georges Méliès's 26th film, numbered, as you can imagine, as #26 in his Star Film Catalogue. Truly enough, most of Méliès's earliest movies do not survive to be seen today, many of which were mostly just Lumiere-based subjects with absolutely no plot. You can't actually blame him for this, because special effects didn't really exist (okay, there was "The Execution of Mary Stuart" by Edison, but that's more just a film edit than an effect) and he was more or less just messing with the medium. Of course, later the same year he would get on with the trick films he is most known for (particularly "The House of the Devil") but until then, he was mostly like everybody else, playing with their new invention.
However, until the moment he'd begin with special effects, he did have SOME new stuff he could film with his camera. He could film himself performing a conjuring trick in "Seance de Prestidigitation" (his second film); he could film bill posters slapping up posters on incompetently guarded walls in "Defense D'afficher" (his fifteenth); and he could film a frustrated guy in a bed swatting at bugs with a broom in this film. Considering actuality stuff was the norm for the day, movies like these were a little more innovative and had a little more plot. So looking at even special-effects-less films like this one by him, you have a little hint how much more inventive and playful his work would become.
With that said, no one is quite certain about this film's survival. Until the past several years, everybody has assumed that a print of the film, featuring a background which is basically a sheet draped behind the action and starring Méliès himself as the unfortunate man in the bed, is the original Terrible Night by this director now available on YouTube and a DVD collection with a piano accompaniment by Frederick Hodges. However, according to a hypothesis made by Méliès's great-great granddaughter, Pauline Méliès, a misidentification error was made and the film now available online is actually believed by her to have been made in 1899 by the same director, featuring the same plot and bed and apparently the same actor (Méliès himself, of course), and entitled "A Midnight Episode"! I have absolutely no idea why he would have made two separate versions of this particular film and it just goes to show how he began to repeat his own work as the years progressed.
As for the original movie, it too apparently survives. Only instead of an actual film print, a flip-book (you read that right) that was published by Leon Bealieu around the turn of the century showing a black backdrop for the background, but the same basic idea, preserves fifteen seconds of the original work. For anyone who cares, this flip-book is available online right now--but it's obvious that the entire film it was made from isn't all there. It's really just a quarter of the original running time because films were about a minute at that point.
I would like to point out some things concerning this hypothesis. While I would agree that the visual look of the film is simpler in the flip-book (after all, a black background is simpler from the background in the commonly available film) I'm actually fairly sure that Mlle. Méliès's theory isn't correct. For one thing, Méliès's Star Film Catalogue originally describes the short as having the man slaughter 'four or five' bugs in 'rapid succession'. Now, while you only see one here, he could be talking about not just that bug, but the bugs he pretends to fight at the end (even though you can't see them). Fortunately, we are lucky enough to also have a description of "A Midnight Episode", which reads as follows: "A sleeping apartment of a friend who retires for the night. The rays of the moon are shining upon the bed through the window. He is suddenly awakened by a bug of gigantic proportions crawling over him. This he attacks and destroys, but before again retiring he notices three more climbing up the wall. He lights the candle and applies the flame to each, causing them to explode with fine smoke effect. After this slaughter he retires in contentment and soon sleeps the sleep of the just. A very funny subject". From the film we have today, there are no 'fine smoke effects' to be seen. Which draws this conclusion: the film originally identified as "A Terrible Night" is probably this film, and the flip-book is either based on a ripoff by competitors of the original, or is in fact only an excerpt of "A Midnight Episode" which excludes the smoke effects part. This second assumption I highly doubt, considering there is no window against the black backdrop we see and no 'rays of the moon' either, which could have been implied with special lighting. Simply put, this Beaulieu flip-book is neither short.
Speaking of which, I think I know why Méliès remade his work in 1899. He probably thought that while the original plot in "A Terrible Night" was good, the gag with the candle could enhance and embellish the idea. Which just goes to show he had room for improvement, but not enough improvement to be able to catch up with filmmaking when it began to progress as the years flew by.
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