Tinted Wraith

Magic mirrors; celestial mandalas; a sinuous puppet rising like a malign concertina from a well.

Segundo de Chomόn is such a significant player in film history that it’d be possible to fill an article with his achievements without even describing the films he made at all – special effects artist, photographer, director, he refined color cinematography, combined live action with animation, and built the first camera dolly. The hundreds of films he worked on span the full range of early cinema, from one-shot travelogues in 1903 to Abel Gance’s Napoleon in 1927, for which he devised special effects, he was in the forefront of movie magic his entire life, but the films he’s chiefly remembered for are in the Méliès vein.

This is in some ways unfortunate, since Georges Méliès’ place in cinema history is securely occupied by Geroges Méliès. There’s no getting away from the fact that the French magician preceded the Spanish technician, and that Chomόn’s films often pilfer outrageously from the master’s. But Méliès himself was a gleeful thief, seeing no reason to buy copyright in Jules Verne or H.G. Wells before adapting them, jointly, in A Trip to the Moon (1902). Chomόn eventually remade the movie, twice, as Excursion to the Moon (1908) and A Trip to Jupiter (1909), cutting out the tedious planning stages of the launch and getting straight into the fabulous theatrical effects. His astronaut, an intrepid king, reaches the heavens by rope ladder, before encountering exploding acrobats clearly much influenced by Méliès’ back-flipping Selenites. Jupiter is both god and planet, the one inhabiting and ruling the other, eventually scissoring the explorer’s rope ladder and sending him tumbling back to Terra.

Japanese acrobats performing impossible tricks in the vertical plane, like Adam West scaling a wall; a human-headed spider gurning in his web; toy soldiers waging toy wars.

Chomόn’s creations are even lovelier than his great rivals! His production design is sturdier and more three-dimensional, but its theatrical stylisation is just as flamboyant and beautiful. Maybe he had a bigger team than Méliès, who practically worked from home, but the design sense is stronger and the tricks even more imaginative, even if his women are less sturdily built. Méliès didn’t have the patience for stop-motion, whereas Chomόn used it to bring objects to life and transform them, adding another layer of the uncanny to his miniature fantasies.

Chomόn won’t get a supporting role in a Hollywood blockbuster anytime soon, as Méliès has in Scorsese’s Hugo (2011), but his movies offer another side-door into the looking-glass world of early cinema. As oneiric and alien as Méliès’ work is, Chomόn’s is even more baffling: the actors mug and telegraph for all they’re worth, anxious to convey something, but what exactly is going on often remains fantastically elusive. Distortions of scale, animation of the inanimate, every kind of grotesque transmogrification and wanton peculiarity is trundled out, color-tinted and gesticulating. In The Red Spectre (1907), a caped skeleton performs tricks with tiny people in glass jars, harking forward to the menagerie of Doctor Pretorius in The Bride of Frankenstein (1936), and in The Creation of the Serpentine (1902), even that weary staple of nineteen-noughties cinema, the serpentine dancer, is rendered surprising by being cast into a narrative in which the dance is shown being brought into being by black magic, which may well be true.

Giant eggs, butterfly women, a moon with a Salvador Dali mustache.

George Lucas, a man whose grasp of cinematic principles is perhaps not what it might be, once referred to the history of the effects film as beginning “with the Méliès brothers.” Perhaps he’s not so wrong. As younger brother, Segundo (literally, the Second) has to try harder to make his mark, and he succeeds. He also performs a weird, contradictory service for his older brother by a different mother and father: by doing all Méliès’ tricks better than Méliès could do them, he affirms that the French magician is important not just for being first on the scene, but for being beautiful.

But Segundo de Chomόn is still more beautiful.

by David Cairns