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The Wonderful Living Fan

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1904 French film
The Wonderful Living Fan
Directed byGeorges Méliès
StarringGeorges Méliès
Production
company
Star Film Company
Release date
  • 1904 (1904)
CountryFrance
LanguageSilent

The Wonderful Living Fan (French: Le Merveilleux Éventail vivant) is a 1904 French silent trick film by Georges Méliès. It was sold by Méliès's Star Film Company and is numbered 581–584 in its catalogues.

Production

The concept for the living fan is derived from a scene in The Sun Prince, a stage spectacle produced in 1899 at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. Méliès plays the fan maker in the film, which works its tricks using stage machinery, substitution splices, and dissolves. The film's costuming and decor sets the trick in the era of Louis XV.

Survival and reception

Prints of the film survive in several archives, including a hand-colored print at the Cinémathèque Française. A black-and-white print restored by the film preservationist David Shepard was released on home video in 2008.

In a book on Méliès, film historian John Frazer cited The Wonderful Living Fan as "characteristic of Méliès's best fantasy," comparing the arrangement of women on the fan to "a tableau in a Florenz Ziegfeld musical."

References

  1. Malthête, Jacques; Mannoni, Laurent (2008), L'oeuvre de Georges Méliès, Paris: Éditions de La Martinière, p. 347, ISBN 9782732437323
  2. ^ Frazer, John (1979), Artificially Arranged Scenes: The Films of Georges Méliès, Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., p. 142, ISBN 0816183686
  3. 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, p. 195, ISBN 2903053073
  4. Méliès, Georges (2008), Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema (DVD; short film collection), Los Angeles: Flicker Alley, ISBN 1893967352

External links

Georges Méliès
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