Thoughts On: “The Four Troublesome Heads” (1898)

Well over a century old and only over a minute long, Un homme de têtes is one of Georges Méliès’s earliest and best-known works. I think the French title literally translates to “a man of heads,” but we know it today as The Four Troublesome Heads. Either way it’s one of your oddly blunt 1890s silent film titles. Classic 1890s cinema, am I right? Haw!

Georges Méliès: Pioneer Of Cinematic Spectacle

[His films] had a visual style as distinctive as Douanier Rousseau or Chagall, and a sense of fantasy, fun and nonsense whose exuberance is still infectious…. —David Robinson

His full name was Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès, and he was born on December 8, 1861 in beautiful Paris. His wealthy parents, Jean-Louis-Stanislas Méliès and Johannah-Catherine Schuering, owned a successful factory for high-quality boots. Their parents imagined that Georges and his older brothers Henri and Gaston would simply take over the family business one day. But little did they know that Georges would not only take up a cutting-edge industry they had never even imagined, but that he would attain global fame as one of its greatest pioneers.

Segundo De Chomon–The Man You Think Is Melies

So you’re browsing the Interwebs and you stumble across a short film that’s clearly from the dawn of the 20th century. It has that stationary camera facing a set that’s basically a theater stage, people in quaint outfits, fairyland imagery, hand-applied coloring, and those special effects that involve sudden edits and puffs of smoke. Yes, you know exactly what this film is–it is most definitely a work by the ever-imaginative moving picture pioneer, Georges Méliès! ‘Tis himself!

But maybe take another look at that film, because there’s a good chance that it’s actually by Segundo de Chomón.

“Wha…?”