The Diabolical Church Window (1910)
Here we have an old scholar/alchemist brooding over a book, challenged by the devil, and going through the familiar sorcery to create a woman by throwing pieces of clothing against a stain-glass church window, like a jigsaw puzzle (and later in reverse). The woman also multiplies herself five-fold so as to match a similar paravent.
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Powerful
An unexpected masterpiece
Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.
The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.
This is yet another obtuse treatment of Melies in hell. I wonder if he feared going there or was just fascinated with the concept. This involves a Sorcerer or Alchemist who is messing with spells. He has an assistant. For whatever reason, he summons Satan and Old Scratch begins to torment him. There is a bit with a stained glass window and woman who is put together. Of course, Melies always brings women in out of the blue. Usually, they pose or dance. The visual effects are OK but it's well trampled territory.
Lord only knows what this one was about. Georges Melies was clearly running out of ideas by the time he made this, so there's nothing particularly new here. There's certainly no story-line as far as I could make out, other than perhaps one chap being drugged by some devil type and then awakening to perform magic tricks on a lady in a window that he brings to life. People appear, disappear then re-appear before disappearing again with monotonous regularity, apparently until Melies' camera ran out of film.I can't imagine even audiences from 1910 being impressed by this one, and on this evidence it's hardly surprising that Melies' film-making career would be over in a couple more years.
I noticed that the "Georges Méliès Encore" DVD put all the bizarre and difficult to understand shorts towards the end of the disc. Among them, this is THE most confusing. I do understand that the weird looking guy with the feather on his head is supposed to be the Devil--but he looks nothing like what modern illustrators would conceive. It's Georges Méliès himself in this role. Without intertitle cards, it's hard to know exactly what's transpiring--and I watched it twice to be as certain as I could! A guy is apparently working on stained glass panels for a church. The Devil sneaks in and gives the guy a Mickey. While asleep, the Devil messes with the stained glass. Then, the guy awakens and does a whole lotta magic (a trademark of a Georges Méliès film) in which he makes ladies appear and disappear--all to the detriment of the story--which, is appears, is practically non-existent. Nice effects, incomprehensible story.
Le vitrail diabolique (1911) *** (out of 4) aka The Diabolical Church Window A man is sitting at his desk reading a book when a church window has some female clothes float up to it. These clothes eventually turn into a real woman so the man then tries doing some experiments on her, which causes her to turn into five women as well as various other things. This is the type of film that Melies made countless times in his career. We've had the director deal with a lot of films where someone would throw clothes on a wall (or in this case a mirror) and then a human would form. The quality of the special effects here were certainly impressive as the edits used to do them weren't nearly as obvious as some of the earlier pictures. I also enjoyed the second portion of the film and especially the sequence where the one woman turn to two then three and so on. Another major plus is that once again Melies is in front of the camera and he just seems to have so much passion that you really can't help but smile as he performs his tricks. While this isn't one of the director's strongest films there's still enough charm to make it worth viewing.