Conjuring (film)

Conjuring (French: Séance de prestidigitation) is a 1896 French short silent film directed by Georges Méliès.

This article is about the 1896 film. For the 2013 film, see The Conjuring. For other uses, see Conjuration (disambiguation).
Conjuring
A still from the film
Directed byGeorges Méliès
Production
company
Release date
  • 1896 (1896) (France)
Running time
20 meters[1]
CountryFrance
LanguageSilent

Production and release

The film reproduces a magic act Méliès performed at his Paris theater-of-illusions, the Théâtre Robert-Houdin.[2]

Conjuring is notable as Méliès's second film, and as his first to move beyond the actuality film genre pioneered by the Lumière brothers and experiment with using the camera to capture a theatrical magic act. (Later in 1896, with his discovery of the substitution splice technique, Méliès was able to begin augmenting his theatrical illusions with new special effects unique to film.)[3] Conjuring can thus be seen as Méliès's first foray into the world of fiction film.[2]

The film was released by Méliès's Star Film Company and numbered 2 in its catalogues.[1]

Rediscovery
A frame from the rotoscoped version

In 2014,[4] the Cinémathèque française received a donation from the collector François Binétruy: a short fragment of chromolithographed animated film, rotoscoped from an unidentified 1896 Méliès film and showing Méliès himself performing a conjuring trick. Such fragments of animation had been manufactured from 1897 onward in Germany and France, for home use in toy projectors.[5]

In 2015, the Cinémathèque uncovered another fragmentary home-projector version of the same film, this time reproducing the original black-and-white live-action frames.[4] In July 2015, the film scholar Jacques Malthête identified the film as Georges Méliès's Conjuring.[4]

References
  1. Malthête, Jacques; Mannoni, Laurent (2008), L'oeuvre de Georges Méliès, Paris: Éditions de La Martinière, p. 335, ISBN 9782732437323
  2. Kessler, Frank; Lenk, Sabine (1997), "L'addresse-Méliès", in Malthête, Jacques; Marie, Michel (eds.), Georges Méliès, l'illusionniste fin de siècle?: actes du colloque de Cerisy-la-Salle, 13–22 août 1996, Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne nouvelle, p. 186
  3. Rosen, Miriam (1987), "Méliès, Georges", in Wakeman, John (ed.), World Film Directors: Volume I, 1890–1945, New York: The H. W. Wilson Company, p. 750, ISBN 0824207572
  4. Mannoni, Laurent, "[Film lithographique] da Une séance de prestidigitation di Georges Méliès", Il Cinema Ritrovato, Cineteca di Bologna, retrieved 1 October 2016
  5. Mannoni, Laurent, Les premiers dessins animés sur pellicule de l'histoire du cinéma, Cinémathèque française, archived from the original on 6 April 2015, retrieved 1 October 2016
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