In the Barber Shop
About In the Barber Shop
In a barbershop the staff are clumsy and the customers rude. Haircuts go wrong. Fernande Albany plays a plump client and Manuel plays one of the barbers. The tricks are done with substitution splices.
Cast & crew
More about In the Barber Shop
Georges Méliès's Star Film Company sold it as numbers 1102–1103. The French title is Salon de coiffure. A Black customer is played as a caricature of the "dandy nègre," a stock figure in French popular images of the period. The film appears to take off from a 1906 Pathé short in which a Black man uses bootblack on a woman who mocks him.
Themes
Preservation
A print survives.
Notes
- Fernande Albany is the plump client. Manuel is one of the barbers.
- Georges Méliès is also billed.
- The effects are substitution splices, not a built trick set.
- Enrique Seknadje, writing on otherness in popular entertainment, says the film ties desire to Blackness and that the woman's anger can be read as a jab at casual racism.
