Really Surprised!

Absolutely the worst movie.

Your blood may run cold, but you now find yourself pinioned to the story.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

In The One-Man Band, Georges Melies uses multiple exposure photography to show himself as several band members playing different instruments in unison. Melies also continues to use jump-cut editing to make objects appear and disappear (the chairs in this case) and advance the action. The work it must have taken Melies to synchronize the footage must have been extraordinary. Just as Melies makes the likenesses of himself as band members appear, he makes them disappear also echoing the many other previous films he's done with creating a scenario and then dismantling it in the context of a sole creator/creative force. *** of 4 stars.

In this innovative short Georges Méliès - the man who invented cinematic special effects - plays an entire band. The specific technology that Méliès showcases here is multiple exposures. This technique was used to populate a single scene with a number of separate images, filmed independently. In this case Méliès appears as seven different characters, all making up the little orchestra. It's a typically ambitious idea from the master showman of early cinema. And like his other experiments, it's done very well. It really is remarkable how successfully Méliès produced his crazy ideas at this extremely early stage in the development of the medium. Not only is it technically expert but Méliès also acts out seven characters in one simultaneous scene and his timing is very precise. This film was one of many from the director's first phase where his movies were essentially showcases for his visual trickery and cinematic sleight of hand. He would soon go on to expand his repertoire with story-telling, such as the seminal A Trip to the Moon. But these earlier experiments are still a great way of seeing the development of a true pioneer.

"The One-Man Band" is one of early cinema pioneer Georges Méliès's more amusing and ingenious trick film attractions. It exploits multiple-exposure photography (a.k.a. superimpositions), which he had already employed in some of his earlier trick films, including "The Four Troublesome Heads" (1898) and "The Mysterious Portrait" (1899). There is also some substitution splicing (a.k.a. stop substitutions), which was Méliès's most common trick. In this film, he uses multiple-exposure photography to reproduce his own image sevenfold—to create a band, who then play their various instruments in an amusingly hammy manner. To accomplish this feat took precise acting and direction from Méliès, as well as from his cameraman; camera masks were used and exact timing was required for the seven different exposures of the negative. It was all done in-camera. As indication of the sophistication of Méliès's trick here, Buster Keaton has received praise for technical and creative brilliance by doing the same thing 21 years later in "The Playhouse".

Director Méliès later went on to make several other shorts where he acted and replicated himself (in two cases, popping off his head and using it to make a whole bunch of singing heads), but I think this is one of the earliest of this type of film (the first coming in 1898). But, instead of pulling off his head, he is able replicate himself many times until he is an entire performing ensemble. While compared to later trick cinematography this isn't a great special effect, for its day it was amazing and quite funny. For a similar type experience (though of course a lot better because of advancements in camera-work), see Buster Keaton's THE PERFORMANCE--where he not only plays all the performers, but all the members of the audience (including the women)!If you want to see this film online, go to Google and type in "Méliès" and then click the video button for a long list of his films that are viewable without special software.