The Fat and Lean Wrestling Match (1900)

Pretty Good

People are voting emotionally.

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

Blistering performances.

At the very, very beginning of cinema, cinemagician Georges Melies refused to be caught between the boundaries of limit. Despite lack of cinematic technique at the time, Melies worked hard to crate what his imagination desired, and thus, film as an art form significantly developed in the process. This early action-comedy hybrid is a wacky, cartoonish depiction of a manic wrestling match made all the more insane by the constant disappearing, reappearing, morphing, etc. of the wrestlers. Men are torn apart and put back together, they are surrealistically flattened, and keep switching back and forth from being women. it's a ridiculous little movie, and hugely imaginative and impressive for its time, particularly in a visual sense. I was legitimately wow-ed by this film's special effects, even more so than with Melies' other movies. Remember: this movie was made back in 1901, well over 100 years ago, and yet it still is jam packed with some of the most magical cinematic tricks of all time 9not to mention, much of it is still also genuinely funny).

"The Fat and the Lean Wrestling Match" is a Georges Méliès short film that tells us a but about gender roles around 1900, 115 years ago. Very early, we see two women in fancy dresses and they reappear in this almost 2-minute-long short film, but most of the time we see two men wrestling. But it's more than that. Méliès uses trick photography again to create 3 funny and awkward situations where obviously one of the fighters was a doll used for that particular moment. All in all, it's a solid Méliès film, not among his best. Obviously, this is still black-and-white and silent, even if there are versions out there where people used soundtracks. Not that great too watch though except the scenes where the master used the trick photography I mentioned before.

Fat And Lean Wrestling Match (1900) *** (out of 4)aka Nouvelles luttes extravagantes This here is one of the director's most loved films. The film starts off with a fat woman and a lean woman wrestling but then they morph into a fat man and a lean man (played by Melies). This film is highly enjoyable from start to finish and contains some pretty good special effects. The highlight of the film is a hilarious sequence where one of the men gets decapitated and then ripped to shreds before being brought back to life again. The silly, child like humor throughout this short makes it one of the director's most loved films.

We see two women covering themselves with blankets. When they uncover themselves, they are now two men. These two men start to wrestle. One of them manages to throw the other around. The other one then literally knocks his head off as well as his arms, legs, and feet! He then puts the dismembered parts together when he places the body together on the bench. The women come back to take the men away from the screen. Two different men appear who are much bigger. The bigger of the big manages to flatten the other one like a pancake. After the flattened one comes back to normal, he throws the other one up before that other one lands back on him! They wrestle a little before the less heavy of the big men manages to pin him down and jump on him, causing his arms, legs, and head to disassemble on impact! After he leaves, the disassembled man assembles and walks out of screen. The end. It is here that Georges Melies takes a popular fairground sport and gives it a cartoonish feel on film. It certainly should be fascinating to today's wrestling fans who think wrestling was invented only recently!