Conte de la grand-mère et rêve de l'enfant (1908) watch online HD

Melies turned out a lot of poor movies in 1908 as he tried to compete with Pathe and Gaumont, who could outspend him, by sheer volume. Many of his surviving movies are, by today's standards, primitive slapstick, or unsubtly acted melodramas, shot far too simply to be interesting -- Griffith was learning his craft this year and would soon turn every convention on its head.

But in the midst of this mass of poorly digestible slop, occasionally Melies made a beautiful picture, which even today speaks to us from one heart to another, in which his camera tricks and, to our eyes, odd film grammar add to our enjoyment, transporting us into a world that, seemingly, can't exist; in VOYAGE DANS LA LUNE or VOYAGE A TRAVERS L'IMPOSSIBLE or LE ROYAUME DES FEES and others, he lets us enter this world, again and again.

But in order to enter that world, we must set aside our modern, adult preconceptions of what is right and what makes sense. We must accept as truth, as we did when we were children, the fairy tales we were told. Then we can know right and wrong, and travel, with a guardian angel, into the realm of dreams.

This was, alas, the final great example of this journey into wonder in Melies' works. The competition was eating him alive at this point and he would basically shut down production in a couple of years, then be briefly revived for mechanical renditions of wonder only by the financial backing of his rivals, who would never even bother to release his last film. He would lose his beloved theater and his home, watch his primary prints be melted down for silver and to be made into boot heels during the First World War, and burn his backup copies in despair. He would be reduced to running a kiosk in a train station. In the 1920s, when the Parisian film clubs -- run by people like Rene Clair, tried to put together a show of Melies' movies, they couldn't even be sure he was alive. He had disappeared like a devil in one of his stage magic films and only eight of his films could be located.

Somehow, over the years, people have discovered others, in barns, in flea markets... fewer than 200 of his five hundred movies. Well, if we are missing much of the magic, at least some survives. Enjoy them all, good, bad, but never indifferent.

A Grandmother's Story (1908)

*** (out of 4)

aka Au pays des jouets

Director Georges Melies made quite a few bad films in 1908, as going through Flicker Alley's boxset made me realize but this one here is a good throwback to his earlier films. A grandmother tells her grandchild a bedtime story and tucks him into bed. A fairy then visits him and takes him to a fantasy world. A GRANDMOTHER'S STORY isn't a masterpiece and it doesn't rank among the director's greatest films but I think it's a refreshing throwback to his earlier days when there was still magic in his work. One thing I noticed about this film is that the special effects weren't nearly as good as some of the same type of films Melies was making even earlier in the year. I think this shows that his budgets simply couldn't keep up with the changing times but I still thought they were good enough to be entertaining. Another plus is that the fairies, looking like human butterflies, were quite fun and I thought they contained enough charm to carry the picture. Again, this certainly isn't Melies best film but it's charming enough to where fans will want to see it.

There's not much to the plot, other than a grandmother tells a little girl a bedtime story. After she is tucked away, an angel of sorts stand over her and takes her to the place in the story. All the girl does is observe because while interesting things happen in fairyland, she doesn't really participate. A woman dressed as a butterfly brings her back to her normal setting.

"A Grandmother's Story" is one of Georges Méliès's better films from later in his filmmaking career. Perhaps, this is because it's so much a children's movie, which always seemed a natural fit for Méliès's brand of magical wonder, fantasy and enthusiasm. In its four scenes and five-minutes running time, a grandmother reads her grandson a bedtime story and puts him to bed. Dreaming, an angel takes him to a toyland and, then, to see butterfly fairies borne from flowers. The boy goes to sleep in his dream, to wake up in reality. It's a visually pleasant, wholesome picture with a nice dream framework.

According to John Frazer in his book "Artificially Arranged Scenes", "A Grandmother's Story" was originally 12 minutes, but the Flicker Alley DVD-set makes no mention of their print being only a fragment, as they do with other films, and as it is, I didn't notice any indication that it was incomplete. There are dissolves as scene transitions between the first two and the last two tableaux while there is a direct cut between tableaux two and three, but this might be a salient editorial separation between real world and dream world.

French special effects wizard Georges Melies reins in the tricks for this slight tale from 1908, and the film is a lot less manic than many of his films - perhaps because he remains behind the camera for this one.

The film begins with a grandmother reading a story to a small child before tucking him or her into bed (it's a bit difficult to tell which the tot is). No sooner has the mite fallen asleep than s/he begins dreaming of an angel standing over his/her bed and whisking him/her off to a land of giant toys. The kid wanders around for a bit before being led away by a lady who takes him/her to a jungle or forest where other young ladies dressed as butterflies dance around a bit. It's all a bit tame to be honest, but it's only five minutes long so it's bearable at least.