''The Man with the Rubber Head'' (french: L'Homme à la tête en caoutchouc), also known as ''A Swelled Head'', is a 1901 French

short Short may refer to: Places * Short (crater), a lunar impact crater on the near side of the Moon * Short, Mississippi, an unincorporated community * Short, Oklahoma, a census-designated place People * Short (surname) * List of people known as ...

silent film A silent film is a film with no synchronized recorded sound (or more generally, no audible dialogue). Though silent films convey narrative and emotion visually, various plot elements (such as a setting or era) or key lines of dialogue may, when ...

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 ...

. The film stars Méliès himself as an apothecary who blows a copy of his own head up to enormous dimensions, but who is unable to get his assistant to perform the stunt as expertly. The special effect of the inflated head, made with a novel combination of purpose-built moving equipment and

multiple exposure In photography and cinematography, a multiple exposure is the superimposition of two or more exposures to create a single image, and double exposure has a corresponding meaning in respect of two images. The exposure values may or may not be ide ...

s, evokes the modern

close-up A close-up or closeup in filmmaking, television production, still photography, and the comic strip medium is a type of shot that tightly frames a person or object. Close-ups are one of the standard shots used regularly with medium and long s ...

and enjoys an iconic place among Méliès's works.

Plot

In a laboratory, an apothecary plans a novel experiment. Putting a living duplicate of his own head on a table, he uses a

bellows A bellows or pair of bellows is a device constructed to furnish a strong blast of air. The simplest type consists of a flexible bag comprising a pair of rigid boards with handles joined by flexible leather sides enclosing an approximately airtigh ...

to swell the head up to gigantic size. The head enjoys itself by making faces and laughing with the apothecary, who then completes the experiment by letting the air out and returning the head to normal. The apothecary then attempts to have his assistant reproduce the experiment, but the assistant inflates the head too much, and it explodes in a bang of smoke. The angry apothecary throws the assistant out of the room.

Production

Méliès appears in the film as the apothecary and as his duplicate head. To create the illusion of the expanding head, Méliès first filmed the surrounding action on the laboratory set. Then he surrounded his head with a black background and used a specially built ramp to move himself, sitting in a pulley-controlled chair, gradually closer to the stationary camera. Using distance calculations made in advance, an assistant refocused the camera lens in real time as the head moved, so that Méliès's face would remain in focus throughout. Méliès chose to move himself toward the camera, rather than the other way around (as in the technique later named the

tracking shot A tracking shot is any shot where the camera follows backward, forward or moves alongside the subject being recorded. In cinematography, the term refers to a shot in which the camera is mounted on a camera dolly that is then placed on rails – ...

), to ensure that his head would appear to be sitting on the tabletop and would stay aligned with it throughout the growing process. Méliès's camera recorded the expanding head directly onto the same piece of

film negative In photography, a negative is an image, usually on a strip or sheet of transparent plastic film, in which the lightest areas of the photographed subject appear darkest and the darkest areas appear lightest. This reversed order occurs because th ...

on which the laboratory action was shot, creating a

in which the head was superimposed on the blank area of the set. The movement of the chair back and forth on the ramp was carefully timed to match the pre-recorded action. The other special effects used in the film are

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 and

pyrotechnics Pyrotechnics is the science and craft of creating such things as fireworks, safety matches, oxygen candles, explosive bolts and other fasteners, parts of automotive airbags, as well as gas-pressure blasting in mining, quarrying, and demolition. ...

Release and reception

''The Man with the Rubber Head'' was released 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 382–383 in its catalogues, where it was advertised as a ''grande nouveauté''. The film was sold in American catalogues as ''The Man With the Rubber Head'' and in British catalogues as ''A Swelled Head''.Malthête & Mannoni 2008, p. 344. The film is one of Méliès's best known works. Some historians have argued it is an early example of a

in film; however, as the head is meant to appear gigantic rather than simply close to the viewer, others have disputed this interpretation.

References

External links

*
Interactive display about the film
from the

Cinémathèque française The Cinémathèque Française (), founded in 1936, is a French non-profit film organization that holds one of the largest archives of film documents and film-related objects in the world. Based in Paris's 12th arrondissement, the archive offers ...

{{DEFAULTSORT:Man With The Rubber Head, The 1901 films French silent short films French black-and-white films Films directed by Georges Méliès 1900s fantasy comedy films French fantasy comedy films Silent fantasy comedy films