Considering just how long the trick film genre had been around (having originated in the year 1896) this minute-long 'magician' film is pitifully outdated. During the first years of the once-popular genre, the audiences had first been astounded by the camera trickery, at how objects and people could appear and disappear out of thin air; as the trick films progressed into the early 1900s, the audiences saw them as pleasant enough diversion pieces compared to the bigger works made by Pathé and Edison; and by 1906 or so, they were becoming a passing fad no one cared to invest in. At least when director Segundo de Chomòn (who was the cinematographer for this short) made trick films to compete with the cinemagician Georges Méliès's movies, he improved the style by incorporating up-to-date medium closeups, stop-motion animation and pixilation to give them a not so basic feel. None of that is evidenced in this film. "Transformations Élastiques", though made in 1908 (or 1909), feels so basic and short that it seems Méliès (who initiated the genre) could have made this movie a decade earlier.
The one-scene trick film consists of a woman in a bridal costume making a dummy from dismembered body parts she gets from another man--the man apparently played by actor Joaquim Renez. Then, grabbing the clothes of the man on her right (there's no nudity, the moment she rips off his clothes he turns into a dummy also) she throws them onto the dummy--which is on the left--to bring him to life so that the two roles have been reversed (and vice-versa). This goes on for about a minute, as the caricatures and clothing of the men vary from a chinaman to a soldier to Napoleon, with the dummy alternating from one person to the next. Only at the end, where the woman whips out a flag for some foreign country (probably France), do both dummies wear clothing and live simultaneously.
It has to be said that the fact you see different people from different nationalities makes this slightly interesting. The problem is, the tricks are so old. The transformations are accomplished via substitution splicing (a very old technique that started in 1895 with Alfred Clark's "The Execution of Mary Stuart"). The concept of dummies coming to life had been thought up a decade or more earlier, with Georges Méliès's films "Pygmalion and Galatea" and "The Adventures of William Tell" (both from 1898). At a minute long, the film is too short for a movie of 1908 (or 1909--different sources state different years). It astounds me that Chomòn didn't try to step in and alert Jean Durand to the dated look of the tricks. He, at least, knew what it meant to modernize trick movies.
All this brings me to the conclusion that this film might very well be a misidentified copy of a much, much earlier film possibly directed by Chomòn himself. The picture is grainy and not up to the quality of 1908. Furthermore, the description from the Moving Picture World Synopsis states that the actual "Transformations Élastiques" featured a different set-up involving some 'pretty women' and glasses. Has IMDb uploaded this description for the wrong film? An alternative french title for the film is "Les Vêtements Cascadeurs", which translates to "The Clothing Stuntmen". This corresponds correctly with the action in the film, does it not? In addition, the sudden ending and all-too-short runtime make me think that this movie could be a fragment. Is that possible? Or am I right in stating the short runtime eludes to this movie being from a far earlier year? I have no answers. Either way, this brief film, while certainly watchable and enjoyable enough, seems extremely outdated for such a later year and was probably dismissed due to its primitive level of camera tricks.
The one-scene trick film consists of a woman in a bridal costume making a dummy from dismembered body parts she gets from another man--the man apparently played by actor Joaquim Renez. Then, grabbing the clothes of the man on her right (there's no nudity, the moment she rips off his clothes he turns into a dummy also) she throws them onto the dummy--which is on the left--to bring him to life so that the two roles have been reversed (and vice-versa). This goes on for about a minute, as the caricatures and clothing of the men vary from a chinaman to a soldier to Napoleon, with the dummy alternating from one person to the next. Only at the end, where the woman whips out a flag for some foreign country (probably France), do both dummies wear clothing and live simultaneously.
It has to be said that the fact you see different people from different nationalities makes this slightly interesting. The problem is, the tricks are so old. The transformations are accomplished via substitution splicing (a very old technique that started in 1895 with Alfred Clark's "The Execution of Mary Stuart"). The concept of dummies coming to life had been thought up a decade or more earlier, with Georges Méliès's films "Pygmalion and Galatea" and "The Adventures of William Tell" (both from 1898). At a minute long, the film is too short for a movie of 1908 (or 1909--different sources state different years). It astounds me that Chomòn didn't try to step in and alert Jean Durand to the dated look of the tricks. He, at least, knew what it meant to modernize trick movies.
All this brings me to the conclusion that this film might very well be a misidentified copy of a much, much earlier film possibly directed by Chomòn himself. The picture is grainy and not up to the quality of 1908. Furthermore, the description from the Moving Picture World Synopsis states that the actual "Transformations Élastiques" featured a different set-up involving some 'pretty women' and glasses. Has IMDb uploaded this description for the wrong film? An alternative french title for the film is "Les Vêtements Cascadeurs", which translates to "The Clothing Stuntmen". This corresponds correctly with the action in the film, does it not? In addition, the sudden ending and all-too-short runtime make me think that this movie could be a fragment. Is that possible? Or am I right in stating the short runtime eludes to this movie being from a far earlier year? I have no answers. Either way, this brief film, while certainly watchable and enjoyable enough, seems extremely outdated for such a later year and was probably dismissed due to its primitive level of camera tricks.