''L'Auberge du bon repos'', sold in the United States as ''The Inn Where No Man Rests'' and in Britain as ''The Inn of "Good Rest"'', is a 1903 French silent

comic a medium used to express ideas with images, often combined with text or other visual information. It typically the form of a sequence of panels of images. Textual devices such as speech balloons, captions, and onomatopoeia can indicat ...

trick film In the early history of cinema, trick films were short silent films designed to feature innovative special effects. History The trick film genre was developed by Georges Méliès in some of his first cinematic experiments, and his works remain ...

Georges Méliès Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès ( , ; 8 December 1861 – 21 January 1938) was a French magic (illusion), magician, toymaker, actor, and filmmaker. He led many technical and narrative developments in the early days of film, cinema, primarily in th ...

. Set in an inn, the film addresses the state of the drunken mind with light heartedness.

Production

''The Inn Where No Man Rests'' is an expanded version of an earlier Méliès film, '' The Bewitched Inn'' (1897). The Moon and a manic chase, as featured in the film, are both common motifs in Méliès's work. As usual for his films, the chase here is circular, within a single set; however, Méliès did eventually try the linear, multi-scene chase format of his contemporaries (such as

Ferdinand Zecca Ferdinand Zecca (19 February 1864 – 23 March 1947) was a pioneer French film director, film producer, actor and screenwriter. He worked primarily for the Pathé company, first in artistic endeavors then in administration of the internationall ...

and Lucien Nonguet) in his film '' A Desperate Crime''. Méliès himself plays the traveler in the film. The table and pendulum are animated using

stage machinery Stage machinery, also known as stage mechanics, comprises the mechanical devices used to create special effects in theatrical productions, including scene changes, lowering actors through the stage floor (traps) and enabling actors to 'fly' ove ...

; other objects are pulled or suspended using wire, and additional effects are worked using

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 t ...

s. ''The Inn Where No Man Rests'' was sold by Méliès's Star Film Company and is numbered 465–469 in its catalogues.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Inn Where No Man Rests, The 1903 films French black-and-white films Films directed by Georges Méliès 1903 comedy films 1903 short films Silent French comedy short films Trick films Articles containing video clips