Barbe-bleue is not the first film out of the 520 Georges Méliès made
b. Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès
b. December 8, 1861, Paris, France
d. January 21, 1938, Paris, France
Then, if you plan it, he
Changes organity,
With an urbanity,
Full of Satanity,
Vexes humanity
With an inanity
Fatal to vanity -
Driving your foes to the verge of insanity
- W.S. Gilbert, The Sorcerer (1877)
A young woman is sold into marriage to the notorious Barbe-bleue (Blue-beard, 1901). In three tableaux, a rigid social world is set out, where freedom is bartered, fathers rule children, men rule women and aristocrats rule servants, all formalised in an elaborate wedding ceremony. One day, Barbe-bleue goes off on business, entrusting the key of the castle to his wife with one proviso - DO NOT OPEN THIS DOOR. Naturally, this is the door she unlocks, prompted by an imp whose sudden appearance breaks the previous theatricality. She enters a darkened room, switches on a light and sees horrors and marvels that were pushed out of the public space that introduced the film: the corpses of seven women hanging on hooks like meat in a butcher’s window; prancing devils; fairy godmothers and magically expanding objects. These visions provoke nightmare images when the heroine tries to sleep.
Barbe-bleue is not the first film out of the 520 Georges Méliès made that one would immediately offer as the key to his work, but it crystallises many of the features that would lead the Surrealists to hail him as a great poet, in particular his erasure or subversion of boundaries (e.g. between life and death, reality and dream, freedom and confinement, the animate and inanimate, the integrity of the body). The locked room, containing forbidden sights, darkened but illumined, becomes the metaphor for Méliès’ cinema, a manifestation of private desires in a public or communal medium. The flat theatricality of the social world gives way to ‘effects’, visions, dreams, nightmares, desires, fears, perversions - the releasing of the unconscious and the inner life.
b. December 8, 1861, Paris, France
d. January 21, 1938, Paris, France
Then, if you plan it, he
Changes organity,
With an urbanity,
Full of Satanity,
Vexes humanity
With an inanity
Fatal to vanity -
Driving your foes to the verge of insanity
- W.S. Gilbert, The Sorcerer (1877)
A young woman is sold into marriage to the notorious Barbe-bleue (Blue-beard, 1901). In three tableaux, a rigid social world is set out, where freedom is bartered, fathers rule children, men rule women and aristocrats rule servants, all formalised in an elaborate wedding ceremony. One day, Barbe-bleue goes off on business, entrusting the key of the castle to his wife with one proviso - DO NOT OPEN THIS DOOR. Naturally, this is the door she unlocks, prompted by an imp whose sudden appearance breaks the previous theatricality. She enters a darkened room, switches on a light and sees horrors and marvels that were pushed out of the public space that introduced the film: the corpses of seven women hanging on hooks like meat in a butcher’s window; prancing devils; fairy godmothers and magically expanding objects. These visions provoke nightmare images when the heroine tries to sleep.
Barbe-bleue is not the first film out of the 520 Georges Méliès made that one would immediately offer as the key to his work, but it crystallises many of the features that would lead the Surrealists to hail him as a great poet, in particular his erasure or subversion of boundaries (e.g. between life and death, reality and dream, freedom and confinement, the animate and inanimate, the integrity of the body). The locked room, containing forbidden sights, darkened but illumined, becomes the metaphor for Méliès’ cinema, a manifestation of private desires in a public or communal medium. The flat theatricality of the social world gives way to ‘effects’, visions, dreams, nightmares, desires, fears, perversions - the releasing of the unconscious and the inner life.
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