Sound asleep in his comfortable armchair next to a high-pressure retort, a mystic silver-haired alchemist can't even notice the strange manifestations emerging from the vessel's bottom. Is this a dream, or a cornucopia of secreted desires?
A poor but honest young man wins the hand of a beautiful Princess after facing a series of exciting adventures involving apparitions, cartwheeling skeletons, a dragon, and plump dancing girls from the Folies Bergere.
Gulliver washes ashore on Lilliput, the inhabitants of which are no more than six inches tall. He later travels to Brobdingnag, a country populated by giants.
A humongous and obese anthropomorphic swine dressed like a fine gentleman in a fancy dinner attire tries to make a pass at a solitary lady having a picnic.
In this hand-colored short, a magician and his assistant do a series of magic tricks, including making potted plants appear, among others. Melies played the magician, and the actor Manuel played his assistant.
In a public place in Constantinople at the corner of a bazaar, the executioner is seated upon a stone and is resting from his daily labors while eating a crust of bread. Suddenly there come... See full summary »
In this spectacular free adaptation of the popular theatre play "La Biche au Bois", the valiant Prince Bel-Azor pursues a baleful old witch to her impregnable castle, to save the beautiful young Princess Azurine.
Director:
Georges Méliès
Stars:
Georges Méliès,
Marguerite Thévenard,
Bleuette Bernon
Ulysses finds himself on a strange island where he passes out shortly after getting there. A bunch of nymphs then do a dance around him and offer him to their goddess Calypso. Ulysses awakes and goes after the woman but he's stopped by a cyclops who he must do battle against. Okay, this is a pretty interesting little film for a number of reasons but the biggest is the inclusion of the cyclops. I'm not sure if this was the first time one was put in a movie but I really loved how it's used here. It's funny because when we see the creature we only get to see its head and the strange thing is that the director did a good job building up its fake one eye yet he left the actors other two (real) eyes clearly visible and only had the actor keep them closed. A great touch is when the cyclops gets an arrow through the eye and it starts leaking white liquid. Quite violent for 1905! The film uses narration (on DVD in French or English) to tell its story and it's probably best that you use it even with the Music Only track. Melies does a good job playing Ulysses so fans will enjoy seeing him here.
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L'île de Calypso (1905)
*** (out of 4)
aka The Mysterious Island
Ulysses finds himself on a strange island where he passes out shortly after getting there. A bunch of nymphs then do a dance around him and offer him to their goddess Calypso. Ulysses awakes and goes after the woman but he's stopped by a cyclops who he must do battle against. Okay, this is a pretty interesting little film for a number of reasons but the biggest is the inclusion of the cyclops. I'm not sure if this was the first time one was put in a movie but I really loved how it's used here. It's funny because when we see the creature we only get to see its head and the strange thing is that the director did a good job building up its fake one eye yet he left the actors other two (real) eyes clearly visible and only had the actor keep them closed. A great touch is when the cyclops gets an arrow through the eye and it starts leaking white liquid. Quite violent for 1905! The film uses narration (on DVD in French or English) to tell its story and it's probably best that you use it even with the Music Only track. Melies does a good job playing Ulysses so fans will enjoy seeing him here.