A Brilliant Conflict

It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

I would retitle this the not very funny posters. It's the same old idea of a set of eight posters, with various subjects, coming to life. It's just that the things they do aren't very interesting. They dump stuff on people. They fight. Melies came a long way in his films. A few of these later ones just don't cut the mustard.

'The Hilarious Posters (1906)' is a clever effects film from French cinemagician Georges Méliès. A workman affixes a giant poster to a wall and departs, before all the posters come to life to cause mischief. A group of policemen arrive on the scene, but are bombarded with flour, and the poster-figures eventually escape into the real world. The transition from the two-dimensional posters to their flesh-and-blood counterparts is a little abrupt, and might have worked better as a slow fade, but otherwise the effect is impressive. Méliès must have built a nifty film set to house each of the poster characters in the one frame, especially the figures in the top poster (who are depicted, unlike their companions, in full profile). The visual effect - that is, an assumed still image suddenly coming to life - mirrors the advent of cinema itself, at which photographs were suddenly made to move. Méliès later wrote of his first experience with cinema: "a still photograph showing the place Bellecour in Lyon was projected... I had hardly finished speaking when a horse pulling a wagon began to walk towards us, followed by other vehicles and then pedestrians, in short all the animation of the street. Before this spectacle we sat with gaping mouths, struck with amazement, astonished beyond all expression." By recreating this experience with posters we at first assume to be two-dimensional and lifeless, Méliès makes a self-reflexive statement about cinema itself.

Another bizarre little tale from the warped imagination of French pioneer Georges Melies, this short film lacks his usual smooth technique but compensates by delivering a truly original and entertaining piece of nonsense.The action centres around a set of posters that come to life and interact with each other and, eventually, on passers-by. The police get involved and it's not long before the arm of the law is being pelted with flour and soaked with liquor. Although the use of stop-motion here is a little ragged, Melies pretty much gets as much mileage as it is possible to get out of a wall full of posters...

Hilarious Posters, The (1906) *** (out of 4)aka Les Affiches en goguetteThis here remains one of Melies best known works due in large part to it being shown on countless compilations as well as various free sites (like Youtube). The film has a billboard showing off various people and it quickly comes to life before going back to the billboard. In a twist, the billboard jumps back to life so that those on it can throw things at the man making money off of it. This type of trick show really isn't anything new from Melies but it still works simply because of the charm. The movie runs a quick three-minutes and manages to get a few nice laughs but the technology of the trick shot is pretty low-key especially when compared to some of the work the director was doing even earlier than this.