Too much of everything

Highly Overrated But Still Good

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Not only is this a clever use of the limited technology of the time, it is an utterly hilarious minute. Melies plays the main character, a man who is able to remove his own head and put it on a table. Now there are two heads, but that's only the beginning. I see this guy sitting up nights, imagining what this new form of entertainment can do and then improvising how he can manage it.

"The Four Troublesome Heads" is one of the earliest surviving films by Georges Méliès to employ the multiple exposure technique, or superimposition effect. He used the technique earlier in "The Cabinet of Mephistopheles" (Le Cebinet de Méphistophélès)(1897), but it appears to be lost. (There's also a brief superimposition in "The Magician" (Le magicien)(1898), for a head on a stand.) It's uncertain whether Méliès or George Albert Smith introduced the trick to cinema, although what seems to be the earliest relevant film that I know of is the aforementioned film by Méliès. Smith tried to patent "the invention of double exposure applied to animated photography", but that was frivolous since the technique was already in use in still photography. Somewhere from around July to October 1898, Smith made at least six films that employed the trick. In "The Corsican Brothers", "Photographing a Ghost" and "The Mesmerist, or Body and Soul", Smith used multiple exposures to make transparent ghosts. He also used the technique, coupled with a masked camera lens, to create a scene-within-a-scene vision in "The Corscican Brothers", "Cinderella", "Faust and Mephistopheles" and "Santa Claus". In regards to masking the camera, Smith, indeed, seems to have introduced it to motion pictures. Méliès would later use masking for his multiple-exposure trick films, such as "A Mysterious Portrait" (Le Portrait Mystérieux) (1899) and "The One-Man Band" (L' Homme orchestre) (1900). Nevertheless, the uncertainty is somewhat moot given that Méliès and Smith are known to have had discussions around the time of these inventions, and both filmmakers were leaders in exploring the possibilities of motion pictures.The superimpositions of "The Four Troublesome Heads" are not for ghosts, but, rather, are for four cloned heads of same texture; this effect of same texture is achieved with the black background. In this film, Méliès accomplished the headless and no body effects by masking himself with black clothing. Additionally, a dummy head was used while the Méliès with a body moved the heads to the table. For these transitions, Méliès employed his second essential trick of stop-substitutions (a.k.a. substitution splicing). The camera operator stopped the camera – the scene was rearranged – and filming resumed. They are essentially jump cuts touched up by post-production splicing. Méliès had already used the stop-substitution trick in such films as "The Vanishing Lady" (Escamotage d'une dame au théâtre Robert Houdin) (1896), and it would continue to be probably his most used trick during his film-making career.Yet, these tricks are only of a technical and filmic history interest without Méliès's unique showmanship and enthusiasm, which was largely responsible for the immense popularity of his films in his own day and the preference of today's audiences for the films of Méliès over those by other early filmmakers. Méliès was, indeed, more cultured and absorbed with theatrical traditions than were his contemporaries. Later, filmmakers would surpass much of his theatrical style, but at the time of this film, he was leading the way with it.

I must agree with Méliès' granddaughter's description of this film. While there isn't really a plot, the film exudes pure genius in its construction. Although it looks like a single 55-second scene, the film actually combines dozens of snippets of performances and does so amazingly fluidly. The effects in this film could easily be done today using computer graphics, but would have been difficult to achieve before the 1990's. And yet Méliès was able to pull them off almost a century before that.Although Méliès would later go on to produce some dramatic films, the most famous being his "Trip to the Moon", the pacing and energy of his later works generally fall far short of what he exhibits here. Further, while many of his later films have at least some noticeable mismatch edits or other problems, his technique on this film is perfect. Absolutely amazing.

I saw that one teen boy gave this short (how else to call a movie lasting only 50 seconds?) a poor 2 out of 10. No sense of history there. Un Homme de Têtes may not even last a minute, but it's incredibly fast-paced and extremely well done. Hey, it even looks more convincing than most of those computer-generated special effects you see in the cinemas these days. Méliès takes off his head a few times and sings a song with the head clones. A simple idea but brilliantly executed by the cinemagician (as the French DVD aptly describes this pioneer).