A Terrible Night

A Terrible Night (French: Une nuit terrible) is an 1896 French silent comedy film by Georges Méliès. It was released by Méliès's Star Film Company and is numbered 26 in its catalogues,[1] where it is listed with the descriptive subtitle scène comique.[2]

A Terrible Night
Scene from the common version of the film
Directed byGeorges Méliès
Produced byGeorges Méliès
Release date
  • 1896 (1896)
CountryFrance
LanguageSilent

Synopsis

A man tries to go to sleep, but is disturbed by a giant bug climbing up the bed and onto the wall. He attacks the bug with a broom and disposes of it in a chamber pot in a compartment of his bedside table.

Production

A Terrible Night may have been inspired by a series of comic magic lantern slides, published in the 1880s by the English firm of Bamforth & Co Ltd.[3] The film predates Méliès's famous use of cinematic special effects; the first known Méliès film with camera effects is The Vanishing Lady, made later in 1896. Rather, the giant bug is a simple pasteboard prop controlled with wire.[4]

The film was made with the Méliès-Reulos portable camera in the open air, in the garden of Méliès's home in Montreuil, using natural sunlight and a cloth backdrop.[4] Méliès himself played the man attempting to sleep.[2]

Survival
Frame from the film suspected to be the original A Terrible Night

A film commonly identified as A Terrible Night is known to survive[1] and has appeared on various DVD collections.[5][6] However, Méliès's great-great-granddaughter, Pauline Méliès, published findings in 2013 suggesting that the film commonly believed to be A Terrible Night is actually a later Méliès film, A Midnight Episode, numbered 190 in the Star Films catalogues, and that the original A Terrible Night—featuring simpler scenery and different camera placement, but the same plot and the same bed—survives in two print copies: a photocollage held by the Cinémathèque Française and a flipbook published by Lèon Beaulieu around the turn of the century. If this hypothesis is accurate, both A Terrible Night and A Midnight Episode survive.[7]

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References
  1. Hammond, Paul (1974), Marvellous Méliès, London: Gordon Fraser, p. 135, ISBN 0900406380
  2. Malthête, Jacques; Mannoni, Laurent (2008), L'oeuvre de Georges Méliès, Paris: Éditions de La Martinière, p. 89, ISBN 9782732437323
  3. Pisano, Giusy; Renouard, Caroline (2014), "Méliès et la lanterne magique", in Malthête, Jacques; Gaudreault, André; Le Forestier, Laurent (eds.), Méliès, carrefour des attractions; suivi de Correspondances de Georges Méliès (1904-1937), Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, pp. 217–229 (here 218)
  4. Frazer, John (1979), Artificially Arranged Scenes: The Films of Georges Méliès, Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., pp. 59–60, ISBN 0816183686
  5. Méliès, Georges (2008), Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema (DVD; short film collection), Los Angeles: Flicker Alley, ISBN 1893967352
  6. Méliès, Georges (2011), Georges Méliès (DVD; short film collection), Issy-les-Moulineaux: StudioCanal
  7. Méliès, Pauline (2013), "A-t-on retrouvé 15 secondes d'un film de Georges Méliès?", Georges Méliès site officiel, retrieved 30 December 2013
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