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The Christmas Dream

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The Christmas Dream
As a full moon shines in the night sky, angels appear on village rooftops covered with snow.
A scene from the film
Directed byGeorges Méliès
Production
company
Release date
  • 1900 (1900)
CountryFrance
LanguageSilent

The Christmas Dream (Template:Lang-fr) is a 1900 French short silent Christmas film directed by Georges Méliès. It was released by Méliès's Star Film Company and is numbered 298–305 in its catalogues, where it was advertised as a féerie cinématographique à grand spectacle en 20 tableaux.[1]

The film, one of Méliès's cinematic contributions to the féerie genre, may have been inspired by a stage production produced in 1897 at the Olympia music hall in Paris.[2] Méliès appears in the film twice, as a magician and as a beggar.[3]

The Christmas Dream includes symbols derived from the Christian tradition, including a sheep and a lion, as well as a motif emblematic of Méliès himself: a jester.[2] The sustained and (for Méliès) atypically serene scene of a church bell ringing also functions as a symbol, readable as a communal ritual of peace seen through a gently nostalgic lens.[4] Special effects used in the film include stage machinery (for the church bell and the Christmas tree that opens up), substitution splices, and dissolves,[3] which are used partially to help connect adjacent spaces, such as the inside of a church followed by the inside of its bell tower.[2]

References

  1. ^ Malthête, Jacques; Mannoni, Laurent (2008), L'oeuvre de Georges Méliès, Paris: Éditions de La Martinière, p. 108
  2. ^ a b c Abel, Richard (1998), The Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema, 1896–1914, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 70–71, ISBN 9780520912915
  3. ^ a b 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, pp. 87–89
  4. ^ Moen, Kristian (2012), Film and Fairy Tales: The Birth of Modern Fantasy, London: I.B. Tauris & Co, p. 64, ISBN 9780857722218
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