A Mysterious Portrait (French: Le Portrait mystérieux),[1] also known as The Mysterious Portrait,[2] is an 1899 French silenttrick film directed by Georges Méliès. It was released by Méliès's Star Film Company and is numbered 196 in its catalogs, where it is advertised as a grande nouveauté photographique extraordinaire.[1]
Summary
A magician displays an empty picture frame against a stage backdrop, including posters on the wall. Unrolling this backdrop to reveal another, he places a neutral canvas and a stool inside the picture frame. With a gesture, the magician makes his own image come slowly into focus in the frame. It comes immediately to life, and the magician and his image hold a conversation before the image fades out of focus and disappears again.
Production
Méliès himself plays the magician in the film. The posters on the wall advertise his own Paris theatre of illusions, the Théâtre Robert-Houdin.[3]
The film repeats the theme of doubling or duplication, previously explored by Méliès in The Four Troublesome Heads but now expanded from the head to the whole body.[3] As the film historian John Frazer pointed out, the film is inherently self-referential, but was "made seventy years before that concept came into the critical language."[4]
References
^ abMalthête, Jacques; Mannoni, Laurent (2008), L'oeuvre de Georges Méliès, Paris: Éditions de La Martinière, p. 340, ISBN9782732437323
^Méliès, Georges (2008), Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema (DVD; short film collection), Los Angeles: Flicker Alley, ISBN1893967352
^ abcEssai de reconstitution du catalogue français de la Star-Film; suivi d'une analyse catalographique des films de Georges Méliès recensés en France, Bois d'Arcy: Service des archives du film du Centre national de la cinématographie, 1981, p. 69, ISBN2903053073, OCLC10506429
^ abcFrazer, John (1979), Artificially Arranged Scenes: The Films of Georges Méliès, Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., pp. 75–6, ISBN0-8161-8368-6