The Christmas Dream

The Christmas Dream

As a full moon shines in the night sky, angels appear on village rooftops covered with snow.

A scene from the film
Directed by Georges Méliès
Production
company
Release dates
  • 1900 (1900)
Country France
Language Silent

The Christmas Dream (French: Rêve de Noël) is a 1900 French short silent Christmas film directed by Georges Méliès. It was released by Méliès's Star Film Company and is numbered 298–305 in its catalogues, where it was advertised as a féerie cinématographique à grand spectacle en 20 tableaux.[1]

The film, one of Méliès's cinematic contributions to the féerie genre, may have been inspired by a stage production produced in 1897 at the Olympia music hall in Paris.[2] Méliès appears in the film twice, as a magician and as a beggar.[3]

The Christmas Dream includes symbols derived from the Christian tradition, including a sheep and a lion, as well as a motif emblematic of Méliès himself: a jester.[2] The sustained and (for Méliès) atypically serene scene of a church bell ringing also functions as a symbol, readable as a communal ritual of peace seen through a gently nostalgic lens.[4] Special effects used in the film include stage machinery (for the church bell and the Christmas tree that opens up), substitution splices, and dissolves,[3] which are used partially to help connect adjacent spaces, such as the inside of a church followed by the inside of its bell tower.[2]

References

  1. Malthête, Jacques; Mannoni, Laurent (2008), L'oeuvre de Georges Méliès, Paris: Éditions de La Martinière, p. 108
  2. 1 2 3 Abel, Richard (1998), The Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema, 1896–1914, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 70–71
  3. 1 2 Essai de reconstitution du catalogue français de la Star-Film; suivi d'une analyse catalographique des films de Georges Méliès recensés en France, Bois d'Arcy: Service des archives du film du Centre national de la cinématographie, 1981, pp. 87–89
  4. Moen, Kristian (2012), Film and Fairy Tales: The Birth of Modern Fantasy, London: I.B. Tauris & Co, p. 64
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