A Terrible Night (French: Une nuit terrible) is an 1896 French silent comedy film by Georges Méliès. It was released by Méliès's Star Film Company and is numbered 26 in its catalogues, where it is listed with the descriptive subtitle scène comique.
Plot[]
A Terrible Night (also known as Une nuit terrible) is a short silent film directed by Georges Méliès in 1896. The film is a comedy that tells the story of a man who has a series of misadventures during a night out on the town.
The film begins with the man leaving his house, saying goodbye to his wife and child. He heads to a café, where he drinks too much and gets into a fight with another patron. The fight spills out into the street, where the man is hit by a passing carriage.
The man is then taken to a hospital, where he is treated by a group of incompetent doctors who are more interested in playing practical jokes on each other than helping their patient. One of the doctors even accidentally sets the man's bed on fire.
Eventually, the man is released from the hospital and heads back out into the night. He goes to a restaurant, where he tries to eat a meal, but is constantly interrupted by various distractions, including a pair of arguing lovers and a group of musicians.
Finally, the man returns home, exhausted and battered from his night of misfortune. He collapses into bed, and his wife wakes up and scolds him for his behavior.
Despite its simple plot, A Terrible Night is a landmark film in the history of cinema, as it is one of the first examples of narrative filmmaking and demonstrates the emerging artistry of early filmmakers like Méliès. The film's use of special effects, such as stop-motion animation and substitution splices, also helped establish Méliès as a master of visual storytelling.
Production[]
A Terrible Night may have been inspired by a series of comic magic lantern slides, published in the 1880s by the English firm of Bamforth & Co Ltd. The film predates Méliès's famous use of cinematic special effects; the first known Méliès film with camera effects is The Vanishing Lady, made later in 1896. Rather, the giant bug is a simple pasteboard prop controlled with wire.
The film was made with the Méliès-Reulos portable camera in the open air, in the garden of Méliès's home in Montreuil, using natural sunlight and a cloth backdrop. Méliès himself played the man attempting to sleep.
Survival[]
A film commonly identified as A Terrible Night is known to survive and has appeared on various DVD collections. However, Méliès's great-great-granddaughter, Pauline Méliès, published findings in 2013 suggesting that the film commonly believed to be A Terrible Night is actually a later Méliès film, A Midnight Episode, numbered 190 in the Star Films catalogues, and that the original A Terrible Night—featuring simpler scenery and different camera placement, but the same plot and the same bed—survives in two print copies: a photocollage held by the Cinémathèque Française and a flipbook published by Lèon Beaulieu around the turn of the century. If this hypothesis is accurate, both A Terrible Night and A Midnight Episode survive.