The Conjuring of a Woman at the House of Robert Houdin (French: Escamotage d'une dame chez Robert-Houdin, literally "Magical Disappearance of a Lady at the Théâtre Robert-Houdin") is an 1896 French short silent trick film directed by Georges Méliès. It features Méliès and Jehanne d'Alcy performing a trick in the manner of a stage illusion, in which D'Alcy disappears into thin air. A skeleton appears in her place before she finally returns for a curtain call.
Plot[]
The Conjuring of a Woman at the House of Robert Houdin is a short silent film directed by Georges Méliès in 1896. The film is a magic trick performed on film, rather than a narrative story.
The film begins with a magician, played by Méliès, entering a room and greeting the audience. He then calls for a woman from the audience to come forward, and he places her on a small platform. He then begins to perform a series of magic tricks, making the woman float in mid-air, disappear, and reappear in different parts of the room.
At one point, the magician also conjures a large butterfly, which he uses to transform the woman's dress into a butterfly costume. He then causes the butterfly to disappear, revealing the woman in her original clothes once again.
Throughout the performance, the audience members react with amazement and surprise, and the magician takes several bows before the film comes to an end.
The Conjuring of a Woman at the House of Robert Houdin is notable for its innovative use of special effects and camera tricks, which were used to create the illusion of levitation and other magical feats. The film is also significant as one of the earliest examples of a filmed magic trick, and it helped establish Méliès as one of the most inventive and creative filmmakers of his time.
Production[]
The Vanishing Lady is based on a magic act by the French magician Buatier de Kolta. Méliès had already imitated the act onstage in his own venue, the Théâtre Robert-Houdin in Paris. When the illusion was produced onstage, stage machinery was used to make the magician's assistant disappear. The newspaper and shawl were crucial for the trick to work; the newspaper, actually a custom-made rubber prop, concealed a trapdoor on the stage floor, while the shawl covered the assistant during her "vanishing" into the trapdoor and out of sight. (The chair onstage was constructed with a breakaway seat, allowing the assistant to slide downwards behind the shawl, through a hidden flap in the rubber newspaper.)
In the filmed version, Méliès himself appears as the magician, and his assistant is Jehanne d'Alcy. D'Alcy, a performer at the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, had had much experience with the stage version of the illusion, in which her small stature was ideal for the escape down the trapdoor. The setting, seemingly an interior in Rococo style, was built of theatrical flats on a small outdoor platform Méliès had set up in his garden at Montreuil-sous-Bois.
The beginning of the film closely follows the Buatier de Kolta stage illusion, complete with the newspaper and shawl props. On film, however, Méliès needed no trapdoor, using instead an editing technique called the substitution splice—the first known instance of his using this effect. The substitution splice allowed Méliès and d'Alcy to cut directly from a shot of d'Alcy, seated in the chair under the shawl, to a shot where she was offscreen; between the two shots, Méliès held his position, creating the illusion of a magical disappearance. Méliès also took advantage of the substitution splice to expand the trick for the film, adding the transformation to and from a skeleton; the Buatier de Kolta stage illusion ended with the assistant's appearance.
Though he later claimed to have invented the technique independently, after his camera accidentally became jammed, Méliès probably developed the splice after seeing a rudimentary version in an 1895 Edison Manufacturing Company film, The Execution of Mary Stuart. The Vanishing Lady is the first known use of the effect for magical as opposed to practical purposes, and the substitution splice would go on to become the most fundamental special effect in Méliès' oeuvre.
Release[]
The Vanishing Lady was released by Méliès's Star Film Company and is numbered 70 in its catalogues. Though surviving prints of the film are in black-and-white, hand-colored prints of Méliès's films were also sold; the Méliès expert Jacques Malthête reconstructed a hand-colored version of the film in 1979, using authentic materials. In 2017, the Cinémathèque Française digitized their black-and-white 35 mm copy in 4K resolution.