In an attempt to make procrastination sweeter, I’ve been indulging in watching shorts by the great Georges Méliès, who, frankly said, is currently much less known than he would have deserved. His wonderful talent of combining the grotesque and sometimes even macabre with satire, his love for representing the bizarre and the unknown – it is as if Méliès was good-humouredly pointing out that the world can be seen otherwise than just how your eyes perceive it. His films are a little like peepshows: they allow you a glimpse into a world that’s far away and mostly hidden from view, but they don’t just show everything – there’s always a little somthing that’s left to your own imagination.
One of the shorts I particularly enjoyed was ‘Barbe-Bleue/Bluebeard’, Méliès’s adaptation of the classic tale by Charles Perrault. His version, though, is notably more burlesque, featuring a ridiculous Bluebeard, a reluctant bride, an ‘Harlequinian’ Mephistopheles, a ‘Cinderellian’ fairy godmother, as well as an unexpected ending dealt by seven revived wives. It is quite difficult to find the film on-line, but fortunately not impossible, so you can watch it below (background commentary in French):
