An Up-to-Date Conjurer
About An Up-to-Date Conjurer
A conjuror and a ballet dancer run through a string of tricks. People and objects vanish, come back, and change into something else, the cuts hidden inside the motion.
Cast & crew
More about An Up-to-Date Conjurer
Georges Méliès directed it and plays the conjuror. Star Film released it in 1899 as catalogue number 183. The negative is 20 meters. A timed copy runs 57 seconds. The French title is L'Illusionniste fin de siècle. The American title is An Up-to-Date Conjurer. The British title is An Up-to-Date Conjuror. The effects are substitution splices, matched so a change can happen in the middle of a gesture. He shot two versions, with a different dancer and different scenery.
Themes
Making
Méliès plays the conjuror and cuts the substitutions himself so the change sits inside a movement.
Look
Méliès photographed it, matching the splices so a change falls inside a gesture.
Technique
The transformations are substitution splices, matched in the middle of a gesture.
Preservation
A print was known again by 1947 and was shown that year at the San Francisco Museum of Art.
Notes
- Other titles are L'Impressionniste fin de siècle, The Conjurer, and, in Spanish, Muñeca transformista.
- The scenery of the copy usually shown was used again in Fat and Lean Wrestling Match.
- A print was back in circulation by 1947, when the San Francisco Museum of Art ran it with A Trip to the Moon, The Palace of the Arabian Nights, The Conquest of the Pole, and The Doctor's Secret.
- The two versions differ slightly in the action as well as in the dancer and the set.
Scenes
- The dancer disappears in the middle of a movement.
- A figure comes back as someone else.
Influenced
- Fat and Lean Wrestling Match
Also available
- Wikimedia Commons (An Up-to-date conjuror (1899).webm)
