''The Living Playing Cards'' (french: Les Cartes vivantes) is a 1905 French short silent film directed 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 ...
.
Synopsis
A magician enters a stage set on which a large white screen has been placed. Taking a deck of playing cards, he shows one to the camera, makes it grow larger, and finally throws it upon the screen, creating a gigantic reproduction of the card. He does the same with two face cards, a queen and king, each of which comes to life and steps out of the card. The king chases the magician off the stage, before ripping off his disguise to reveal the magician himself.
Production
The film is based on a
stage magic act performed at Méliès's theatre of illusions, the
Théâtre Robert-Houdin in Paris. In the stage version, the magician was
Gaston Velle
Gaston Velle (1868–1953) was a French silent film director and pioneer of special effects, who was prominent in early French and Italian cinema during the first two decades of the 20th century. Like his father, the Hungarian entertainer Joseph ...
, who would himself later become a director of Méliès-like
trick films for
Pathé Frères.
In the film version, Méliès himself plays the magician. The special effects used 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
dissolves.
References
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Living Playing Cards
French black-and-white films
French silent short films
Films directed by Georges Méliès
1905 films