A Spiritualist Photographer
About A Spiritualist Photographer
Méliès plays a magician-photographer who mocks the ghost pictures sold by Spiritualist mediums. He turns a woman into a portrait of herself with a dissolve on a white ground, then brings her back.
Cast & crew
More about A Spiritualist Photographer
French title Le Portrait spirite. Star Film numbers 477–478. Méliès produced it and plays the magician.
Themes
Background
Made for the French fairground trade, where mocking mediums was already a stage turn.
Technique
A transformation made by dissolving on a white background.
Preservation
Survives as a 35mm paper print.
Notes
- The change is a dissolve laid over a white background, which Méliès was showing off as a new trick.
- The idea runs backward from The Living Playing Cards and The Lilliputian Minuet, where people come out of pictures. Here the picture comes second.
- Fairground magic acts of the time used the same joke on Spiritualism.
Scenes
- The woman becomes a portrait on a white ground, then returns.
Also available
- Wikimedia Commons (Le Portrait spirite (1903).webm)
