The X-Ray Fiend - how can you pass up a title like that?
My new favourite short film, courtesy of an awesome blog post, The 10 Best Films of the 1890s:
“The X-Ray Fiend” (1897)
X-rays were discovered in 1895, and became a source of public fascination in editorial cartoons and scientific exhibitions. (Scientific American ran an article in 1896 inviting people to make their X-rays at home with a simple device, which apparently saved money over visiting a public X-ray show.) So when pioneering British filmmaker George Albert Smith created his short “The X-Ray Fiend,” he was capitalizing on a minor public obsession, and turning it into what qualified as a mildly smutty joke. In the 45-second piece, a man romances a reluctant woman, until a second man with an X-ray machine enters to turn them into canoodling skeletons. Méliès had recently discovered, through a camera malfunction, that jump cuts could be used to enable abrupt physical transformations onscreen, and the era’s film pioneers used the technique for shorts like this one, where something familiar turns into something unlikely. It’s cute and eye-catching, and a lot more comprehensible than Méliès’ contemporary experiments with jump cuts in baffling films like “The Astronomer’s Dream.”
Click to view“The X-Ray Fiend” (1897)
X-rays were discovered in 1895, and became a source of public fascination in editorial cartoons and scientific exhibitions. (Scientific American ran an article in 1896 inviting people to make their X-rays at home with a simple device, which apparently saved money over visiting a public X-ray show.) So when pioneering British filmmaker George Albert Smith created his short “The X-Ray Fiend,” he was capitalizing on a minor public obsession, and turning it into what qualified as a mildly smutty joke. In the 45-second piece, a man romances a reluctant woman, until a second man with an X-ray machine enters to turn them into canoodling skeletons. Méliès had recently discovered, through a camera malfunction, that jump cuts could be used to enable abrupt physical transformations onscreen, and the era’s film pioneers used the technique for shorts like this one, where something familiar turns into something unlikely. It’s cute and eye-catching, and a lot more comprehensible than Méliès’ contemporary experiments with jump cuts in baffling films like “The Astronomer’s Dream.”