Summoning the Spirits (1899)

The movie's only flaw is also a virtue: It's jammed with characters, stories, warmth and laughs.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

We've seen films like this from Méliès before. Because he was an actual stage magician in real life, the man was obsessed with set-ups like this: a magic show for camera (although the tricks here are made by camera special effects). This minute-long film is all about the magician (as usual, Méliès himself) hanging up a wreath. He then makes (as you can imagine) people appear inside the wreath: the devil, a pretty young woman, and himself. Since Melies turned out "A Mysterious Portrait" the same year as this, I can't help but think that he was fascinated with matte shots and de-focuses at this point in his career. That said, while the tricks here are very well done (such as the de-focusing to make the people appear and disappear in the wreath), we've seen this before from Méliès and it doesn't feel like anything special. This isn't a bad film but it feels very same ole and Méliès obviously felt he had nothing better to do.

This short film which runs for slightly under a minute is basically another showreel for director and early film pioneer Geoges Méliès. He does one of his trademark magic shows here and it's nothing really out of the ordinary and probably not as interesting as some of his other work from 1899, like his version of Cinderella. In "Évocation spirite" we see Mélies in control of a magic wreath. And as if it was a television, we see several characters appear therein. First Lucifer the personified devil, than a beautiful dark-haired girl, both common themes in Méliès' work and finally Méliès is shown himself inside the wreath. Notable about this short film is that his magician movements and gestures are way more over the top than usual and it's an okay watch for silent film enthusiasts, but really not that interesting to everybody else.

Évocation Spirite is a simple trick film from Georges Méliès. In it he plays a magician who presents us with a wreath. From within this a woman's head appears. This in turn transforms into the head of the devil and then into Méliès himself. It's a basic set up and is only really a showcase for one visual bit of trickery. It's nicely done though and does illustrate again the imagination of Méliès. I wouldn't say it's one of his more inspired efforts though. It does seem merely a little diversion, rather than a fully-fledged piece. Still, like all films from this innovator, it's yet another example of the crazy visual ideas of this genius of the first age of cinema. For that reason, it's worth seeing.

I find it hilarious that with all the advances in CGI and various other special effects technologies these days that something made over one-hundred years ago could have more convincing special effects! It's no wonder director Georges Méliès is called a "Cinemagician" by many film historians. His ability to create a range of special effects utilizing simple, though highly innovative in their day, techniques is something not only contemporary audiences can still enjoy to watch, but something contemporary filmmakers can learn a lesson from. Some of the tricks he used include, but aren't limited to, editing stop tricks, time-lapse photography, optical effects, multiple exposures and dissolves. He was also one of the pioneers of color tinting film, which became an increasingly more popular technique as the silent era moved on from shorts to feature-length films. Sometimes you can spot a slight jump just where the effect is inserted, but other times he does an impressively seamless job blending the action of the actors and the insertion of the effect(s). This one-minute short is a perfect example of his early work.A bearded man hangs up a wreath and, like any good magician, waves his hands inside of it and under it to show us it's only a wreath. He then waves his arms and the inside of the wreath turns black. Hazy white light turns into a demon, which is summoned away, then turns into a woman, who is waved away, which is finally turned into the man himself, who is waved away. At the end, the man again stick his hands and head back through the wreath to show us it's just a wreath. Here, Méliès does a great job inserting the blurry 'spirit' light effect as well as matching actor continuity to the editing splice.