''Conjuring'' (french: Séance de prestidigitation) is a 1896 French short silent film directed by

Georges Méliès Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès (; ; 8 December 1861 – 21 January 1938) was a French illusionist, actor, and film director. He led many technical and narrative developments in the earliest days of cinema. Méliès was well known for the use o ...

Production and release

The film reproduces a magic act Méliès performed at his Paris theater-of-illusions, the

Théâtre Robert-Houdin The Théâtre Robert-Houdin, initially advertised as the Théâtre des Soirées Fantastiques de Robert-Houdin, was a Paris theatre dedicated primarily to the performance of stage illusions. Founded by the famous magician Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin ...

. ''Conjuring'' is notable as Méliès's second film, and as his first to move beyond the

actuality film The actuality film is a non-fiction film genre that, like the documentary film, uses footage of real events, places, and things. Unlike the documentaries, actuality films are not structured into a larger argument, picture of the phenomenon or coh ...

genre pioneered by the

Lumière brothers Lumière is French for 'light'. Lumiere, Lumière or Lumieres may refer to: *Lumières, the philosophical movement in the Age of Enlightenment People *Auguste and Louis Lumière, French pioneers in film-making Film and TV * Institut Lumière, a ...

and experiment with using the camera to capture a theatrical magic act. (Later in 1896, with his discovery of the

substitution splice The substitution splice or stop trick is a cinematic special effect in which filmmakers achieve an appearance, disappearance, or transformation by altering one or more selected aspects of the mise-en-scène between two shots while maintaining th ...

technique, Méliès was able to begin augmenting his theatrical illusions with new

special effect Special effects (often abbreviated as SFX, F/X or simply FX) are illusions or visual tricks used in the theatre, film, television, video game, amusement park and simulator industries to simulate the imagined events in a story or virtual w ...

s unique to film.) ''Conjuring'' can thus be seen as Méliès's first foray into the world of fiction film. The film was released by Méliès's Star Film Company and numbered 2 in its catalogues.

Rediscovery

Séance de prestidigitation Méliès rotoscopie

In 2014, the

Cinémathèque française The Cinémathèque Française (), founded in 1936, is a French non-profit film organization that holds one of the largest archives of film documents and film-related objects in the world. Based in Paris's 12th arrondissement, the archive offers ...

received a donation from the collector François Binétruy: a short fragment of chromolithographed animated film,

rotoscope Rotoscoping is an animation technique that animators use to trace over motion picture footage, frame by frame, to produce realistic action. Originally, animators projected photographed live-action movie images onto a glass panel and traced ov ...

d from an unidentified 1896 Méliès film and showing Méliès himself performing a conjuring trick. Such fragments of animation had been manufactured from 1897 onward in Germany and France, for home use in toy projectors. In 2015, the Cinémathèque uncovered another fragmentary home-projector version of the same film, this time reproducing the original black-and-white live-action frames. In July 2015, the film scholar Jacques Malthête identified the film as Georges Méliès's ''Conjuring''.

References

External links

* * {{Georges Méliès 1896 films 1890s French films French silent short films French black-and-white films Films directed by Georges Méliès 1890s rediscovered films Films about magic and magicians Rediscovered French films 1896 short films