''In the Barber Shop'' (french: Salon de coiffure) is a 1908 French short silent film by

Georges Méliès Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès (; ; 8 December 1861 – 21 January 1938) was a French illusionist, actor, and film director. He led many technical and narrative developments in the earliest days of cinema. Méliès was well known for the use of ...

. It was sold by Méliès's

Star Film Company The Manufacture de films pour cinématographes, often known as Star Film, was a French film production company run by the illusionist and film director Georges Méliès. History On 28 December 1895, Méliès attended the celebrated first publi ...

and is numbered 1102–1103 in its catalogues. Two of Méliès's frequent collaborators appear in the film: Fernande Albany as the plump client, and Manuel as one of the barbers. The film's

special effect Special effects (often abbreviated as SFX, F/X or simply FX) are illusions or visual tricks used in the theatre, film, television, video game, amusement park and simulator industries to simulate the imagined events in a story or virtual wor ...

s are created with

substitution splice The substitution splice or stop trick is a cinematic special effect in which filmmakers achieve an appearance, disappearance, or transformation by altering one or more selected aspects of the mise-en-scène between two shots while maintaining th ...

s. The film appears to have been inspired by a 1906

Pathé Pathé or Pathé Frères (, styled as PATHÉ!) is the name of various French people, French businesses that were founded and originally run by the Pathé Brothers of France starting in 1896. In the early 1900s, Pathé became the world's largest ...

film in which a Black man uses bootblack to darken the face of a woman who mocks him. The Black character in Méliès's film is played as a pejorative caricature, typifying the stereotypical figure of the ''dandy nègre'' ("Black dandy") that frequently appeared in turn-of-the-century French imagery. There may also be some influence from American minstrel shows. In a study of otherness in popular entertainment, French writer Enrique Seknadje comments that the film perpetuates racist stereotyping by associating erotic desire with Blackness, but also that the woman's anger seems to imply a criticism of society's casual racism.

References

External links

* French black-and-white films Films directed by Georges Méliès French silent short films {{France-silent-film-stub