''A Mysterious Portrait'' (french: Le Portrait mystérieux), also known as ''The Mysterious Portrait'', is an 1899 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 Sound recording and reproduction, 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) ...

directed by Georges Méliès. It was released by Méliès's Star Film Company and is numbered 196 in its catalogs, where it is advertised as a ''grande nouveauté photographique extraordinaire''.

Summary

A magician displays an empty picture frame against a stage backdrop, including posters on the wall. Unrolling this backdrop to reveal another, he places a neutral canvas and a stool inside the picture frame. With a gesture, the magician makes his own image come slowly into focus in the frame. It comes immediately to life, and the magician and his image hold a conversation before the image fades out of focus and disappears again.

Production

Méliès himself plays the magician in the film. The posters on the wall advertise his own Paris theatre of illusions, the

Théâtre Robert-Houdin The Théâtre Robert-Houdin, initially advertised as the Théâtre des Soirées Fantastiques de Robert-Houdin, was a Paris theatre dedicated primarily to the performance of stage illusions. Founded by the famous magician Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdi ...

. Effects in the film were created using the substitution splice, two

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 id ...

s, dissolves, and defocusing the lens to create a

soft focus In photography, soft focus is a lens flaw, in which the lens forms images that are blurred due to spherical aberration. A soft focus lens deliberately introduces spherical aberration in order to give the appearance of blurring the image while ...

effect. The portrait effect is an early example of a matte effect in filmmaking, in which a mask over the lens ensured that only a specific section of the image in view would be filmed and exposed. Matting had been used in still photography since the 1850s, when photographers such as

Henry Peach Robinson Henry Peach Robinson (9 July 1830, Ludlow, Shropshire – 21 February 1901, Royal Tunbridge Wells, Kent) was an English pictorialist photographer best known for his pioneering combination printing - joining multiple negatives or prints to form ...

and

Oscar Gustave Rejlander Oscar Gustave Rejlander (Stockholm, 19 October 1813 – Clapham, London, 18 January 1875) was a pioneering Victorian art photographer and an expert in photomontage. His collaboration with Charles Darwin on ''The Expression of the Emotions in ...

used them to compose painting-like scenes. The first filmmaker to take advantage of it was likely the British cinematic pioneer

George Albert Smith George Albert Smith Sr. (April 4, 1870 – April 4, 1951) was an American religious leader who served as the eighth president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). Early life Born in Salt Lake City, Utah Territor ...

(who knew of Méliès through their mutual colleague

Charles Urban Charles Urban (April 15, 1867 – August 29, 1942) was an Anglo-American film producer and distributor, and one of the most significant figures in British cinema before the First World War. He was a pioneer of the documentary, educational, propa ...

). Méliès continued to experiment with matting techniques in later films, such as '' The One Man Band'' and '' A Spiritualist Photographer''.

Themes

The film repeats the theme of doubling or duplication, previously explored by Méliès in '' The Four Troublesome Heads'' but now expanded from the head to the whole body. As the film historian John Frazer pointed out, the film is inherently

self-referential Self-reference occurs in natural or formal languages when a sentence, idea or formula refers to itself. The reference may be expressed either directly—through some intermediate sentence or formula—or by means of some encoding. In philoso ...

, but was "made seventy years before that concept came into the critical language."

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Mysterious Portrait, A 1899 films French silent short films French black-and-white films Films directed by Georges Méliès 1899 short films 1890s French films Films about magic and magicians