Rip's Dream
About Rip's Dream
Méliès plays Rip Van Winkle in seventeen tableaux taken from Washington Irving's story and from Robert Planquette's 1882 operetta. After trouble with the authorities, Rip flees into the mountains, falls asleep, and dreams that a mountain spirit turns into a huge snake and then into other spirits. Apparitions tell him he must sleep for twenty years. A village idiot, a figure Méliès added, is what lets the film pass from the town into the dream and back out again.
Cast & crew
More about Rip's Dream
Star Film numbers 756–775, catalogued as a grande pièce fantastique en 17 tableaux. The French title is printed as La Légende de Rip Van Vinckle. André Méliès plays a village child with a large lantern, and the snake is a wire-and-spring machine brought from England and worked on a raked stage.
Themes
Background
Irving's Rip Van Winkle was already a stage perennial in France through Planquette's operetta before Méliès filmed it.
Making
The snake gadget, imported from England, expands on wires and springs in front of the painted mountain set.
Preservation
The 1905 boniment survives at the Cinémathèque Française. A print of the film survives as well.
Notes
- Two additions are Méliès's own: the snake and the village idiot. The rest follows Irving's 1819 tale and the Planquette operetta, with a libretto by Henri Meilhac, Philippe Gille, and Henry Brougham Farnie.
- The friends' lanterns are Bastille Day lanterns marked RF, for République française.
- Ghosts are actors under white sheets and silhouettes cut from cardboard.
- Other changes of scene use stage machinery, substitution splices, and dissolves.
- A boniment, the spoken commentary Méliès published in 1905, is in the archives of the Cinémathèque Française.
- A 1981 study produced by the Centre national du cinéma singled out the way the dream is built up and then left behind.
Scenes
- In the dream the mountain spirit stretches into a huge snake worked by wires.
- Sheeted actors and cardboard silhouettes crowd Rip and sentence him to twenty years of sleep.
- Village children carry Bastille Day lanterns marked RF.
Influenced by
- Washington Irving's 1819 story Rip Van Winkle
- Robert Planquette's 1882 operetta Rip Van Winkle
Also available
- Wikimedia Commons (La Légende de Rip Van Winckle (Georges Méliès, 1905).webm)
