Music, Forward!
About Music, Forward!
A woman in a colonial costume, played by Julienne Mathieu, calls "Music, forward!" Tiny players appear along her baton, then a band marches in. She lines the musicians up, lifts off each head, and throws the heads onto a giant music staff, where they become notes. The bodies return. She wraps the band in a sheet of music, and the sheet is then shown empty.
Cast & crew
More about Music, Forward!
Segundo de Chomón directed the trick film for Pathé Frères. The French title is En avant la musique. It runs 3 minutes and was hand-colored after shooting. It plays as a parody of Georges Méliès's Le Mélomane (1903), with a woman conductor taking the heads instead of Méliès himself. The Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin digitized and restored a copy in 2011.
Themes
Making
Mathieu is staged as the person who runs the trick, not as an assistant to a male magician.
Look
The camera stays fixed while stop-motion and substitution splices move the heads onto the staff. Colored prints were stenciled or hand-painted afterward.
Music
Silent.
Preservation
The Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin restored a copy in 2011. A 3-minute-37-second file is on Wikimedia Commons.
Notes
- Julienne Mathieu, Chomón's wife and usual lead, plays the conductor.
- English title Music, Forward! Spanish title Adelante con la música.
- A Wikimedia file of a restored copy runs 3 minutes 37 seconds.
- The heads-on-a-staff gag is the joke Méliès had used four years earlier in Le Mélomane.
- Pathé sold both black-and-white and colored prints.
Scenes
- Mathieu pulls the musicians' heads off and tosses them onto a painted staff, where they sit as notes.
- She folds the band into a sheet of music and opens it empty.
Influenced by
- Le Mélomane (1903)
Also available
- Wikimedia Commons (En avant la musique (1907).webm)
