Informed that Psyche -- Stacia Napierkowska -- is lovelier that she, Venus sends her son, Cupid, to give her hives or something. Instead he falls in love.
It's a film version of the late Greek myth "The Wedding of Psyche and Cupid", which was intended to demonstrate that physical and psychological love must merge. It's interesting as a movie, not only for the good stenciled color work that exists, but because it uses Melies-style tricks -- double exposure, items dragged invisibly from offstage or rising from the floor -- in the context of the more modern film grammar. As a deliberately intermediate form, it seems bizarre as neither fish nor fowl nor good red meat, but in the era it definitely would have worked.
Alas, only about a third of this elaborate two-reel movie survives.
It's a film version of the late Greek myth "The Wedding of Psyche and Cupid", which was intended to demonstrate that physical and psychological love must merge. It's interesting as a movie, not only for the good stenciled color work that exists, but because it uses Melies-style tricks -- double exposure, items dragged invisibly from offstage or rising from the floor -- in the context of the more modern film grammar. As a deliberately intermediate form, it seems bizarre as neither fish nor fowl nor good red meat, but in the era it definitely would have worked.
Alas, only about a third of this elaborate two-reel movie survives.