Hôtel électrique

Hôtel électrique (or El hotel eléctrico in Spanish: The Electric Hotel) is a 1908 silent French[1] comedy-fantasy film directed by Segundo de Chomón and produced by Pathé Frères. The short appears to be inspired by the 1907 American short film The Haunted Hotel.[2]

Hôtel électrique
Directed bySegundo de Chomón
Produced byPathé Frères
StarringSegundo de Chomón, Julienne Mathieu
Distributed byPathé Frères
Release date
  • 31 October 1908 (1908-10-31)
Running time
8 minutes
CountryFrance
LanguageSilent

Plot

Laure and Bertrand arrive at the Electric Hotel, where a control board allows inanimate objects to come to life. For most of the film, the effects are used to perform tasks such as polishing shoes, styling hair and putting away luggage, to the two guests' great pleasure. At the end, a drunken concierge erratically throws switches that cause the system to go haywire, sending all of the hotel's furniture into a jumbled, chaotic mess.

Background

The film displays one of the earliest uses of stop motion animation in history, though it is not de Chomón's first try at this technique: his 1906 film, Le théâtre de Bob, uses animated puppets. However, Hôtel électrique is also an early use of pixilation.

Julienne Mathieu's hair appears to brush itself, one of the first uses of stop-motion animation in film.

Cast
    gollark: Well, you can if you want.
    gollark: (because it's bad, and won't do that automatically)
    gollark: (technically it also has some code to force it to respond to an instant-lose/instant-win situation)
    gollark: It is funny that people keep losing to a fairly trivial piece of code which just decides how good a move is by playing 100 *entirely random games* starting from it and seeing how many it wins.
    gollark: Okay, I am now decreasing my estimate of your programming competence.

    References
    1. "Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé - Hôtel électrique". filmographie.fondation-jeromeseydoux-pathe.com. Retrieved 2020-05-05.
    2. Hamus-Vallée, Rejane; Renouard, Caroline (2018). "La American Vitagraph Company: les effets de l'amination". Special effects in the cinema: 120 years of creations in France and worldwide. Armand Colin. ISBN 9782200622237. Retrieved 16 July 2020.
    An excerpt from Hôtel électrique by Segundo de Chomón
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