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The Christmas Dream (French: Le Rêve de Noël) is a 1900 French short silent Christmas film directed by Georges Méliès. It was released by Méliès's Star Film Company and is numbered 298–305 in its catalogues, where it was advertised as a féerie cinématographique à grand spectacle en 20 tableaux.[2]

The Christmas Dream
A scene from the film
Directed by	Georges Méliès
Production company	Star Film Company
Release date	1900 (1900)
Running time	70 meters/230 feet (3.5 minutes at 18 fps)[1]
Country	France
Language	Silent

Production and themes

The film, one of Méliès's cinematic contributions to the féerie genre, may have been inspired by a stage production produced in 1897 at the Olympia music hall in Paris.[3] The film's structure is highly theatrical, alternating familiar genre scenes with fantasy elements in the manner of a stage féerie; the sequence with the hungry poor in the streets calls back to scenes from nineteenth-century melodrama.[1]

Méliès appears in The Christmas Dream twice, as a magician and as a beggar.[4] The film includes symbols derived from the Christian tradition, including a sheep and a lion, as well as a motif emblematic of Méliès himself: a jester.[3] The sustained and (for Méliès) atypically serene scene of a church bell ringing also functions as a symbol, readable as a communal ritual of peace seen through a gently nostalgic lens.[5]

The production style is eclectic and theatrical, with a mix of clothing styles from several different eras[1] and stylistic juxtapositions such as live pigeons in the same frame as a flat, painted cutout church bell.[6] However, the film also includes more in-depth diagonal staging, realistically painted scenery, and naturalistic acting than is usual in Méliès's major productions.[1]

Special effects used in the film include stage machinery (for the church bell and the Christmas tree that opens up), substitution splices, and dissolves,[4] which are used partially to help connect adjacent spaces, such as the inside of a church followed by the inside of its bell tower.[3] Méliès, one of the first filmmakers to use dissolves as a connecting transition, was likely inspired by the smooth scene changes in theatrical melodramas, which often used lighting, stage machinery, and other effects to flow continuously from one scene to another without dropping a curtain.[1] The scene arrangement and staging combine to give a sense of dynamic, free-flowing movement, helping build a coherent atmosphere for the film's urban spaces.[6]

Survival

An incomplete print of The Christmas Dream, structured differently from Méliès's catalogue description and seemingly missing about 20 feet of film, survives at the British Film Institute in London.[1] It was released to home video in the 2000s, still incomplete.[7] In an 1979 study, another print of the film was believed to survive in a private collection, but was unavailable for viewing at the time.[1]

See also

• List of Christmas films

References

External links

• The Christmas Dream at IMDb

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