User Reviews

This Georges Méliès is very simple...but also very lovely to watch as well as a most unusual story in many ways. It begins with a grandmother reading a child a story. Then the child goes to sleep and almost immediately (too quickly actually) an angel appears and the pair go off to a toy land to have adventures.

There really isn't a lot in the way of plot, but it sure is lovely to see....a real treat. And, while Georges Méliès did make a lot of films where fanciful things happen, none are quite like this....mostly because he almost never used kids as actors. But here, it's a nice change of pace and is a clever but almost plotless film.

Melies turned out a lot of poor movies in 1908 as he tried to compete with Pathe and Gaumont, who could outspend him, by sheer volume. Many of his surviving movies are, by today's standards, primitive slapstick, or unsubtly acted melodramas, shot far too simply to be interesting -- Griffith was learning his craft this year and would soon turn every convention on its head.

But in the midst of this mass of poorly digestible slop, occasionally Melies made a beautiful picture, which even today speaks to us from one heart to another, in which his camera tricks and, to our eyes, odd film grammar add to our enjoyment, transporting us into a world that, seemingly, can't exist; in VOYAGE DANS LA LUNE or VOYAGE A TRAVERS L'IMPOSSIBLE or LE ROYAUME DES FEES and others, he lets us enter this world, again and again.

But in order to enter that world, we must set aside our modern, adult preconceptions of what is right and what makes sense. We must accept as truth, as we did when we were children, the fairy tales we were told. Then we can know right and wrong, and travel, with a guardian angel, into the realm of dreams.

This was, alas, the final great example of this journey into wonder in Melies' works. The competition was eating him alive at this point and he would basically shut down production in a couple of years, then be briefly revived for mechanical renditions of wonder only by the financial backing of his rivals, who would never even bother to release his last film. He would lose his beloved theater and his home, watch his primary prints be melted down for silver and to be made into boot heels during the First World War, and burn his backup copies in despair. He would be reduced to running a kiosk in a train station. In the 1920s, when the Parisian film clubs -- run by people like Rene Clair, tried to put together a show of Melies' movies, they couldn't even be sure he was alive. He had disappeared like a devil in one of his stage magic films and only eight of his films could be located.

Somehow, over the years, people have discovered others, in barns, in flea markets... fewer than 200 of his five hundred movies. Well, if we are missing much of the magic, at least some survives. Enjoy them all, good, bad, but never indifferent.

A Grandmother's Story (1908)

*** (out of 4)

aka Au pays des jouets

Director Georges Melies made quite a few bad films in 1908, as going through Flicker Alley's boxset made me realize but this one here is a good throwback to his earlier films. A grandmother tells her grandchild a bedtime story and tucks him into bed. A fairy then visits him and takes him to a fantasy world. A GRANDMOTHER'S STORY isn't a masterpiece and it doesn't rank among the director's greatest films but I think it's a refreshing throwback to his earlier days when there was still magic in his work. One thing I noticed about this film is that the special effects weren't nearly as good as some of the same type of films Melies was making even earlier in the year. I think this shows that his budgets simply couldn't keep up with the changing times but I still thought they were good enough to be entertaining. Another plus is that the fairies, looking like human butterflies, were quite fun and I thought they contained enough charm to carry the picture. Again, this certainly isn't Melies best film but it's charming enough to where fans will want to see it.

There's not much to the plot, other than a grandmother tells a little girl a bedtime story. After she is tucked away, an angel of sorts stand over her and takes her to the place in the story. All the girl does is observe because while interesting things happen in fairyland, she doesn't really participate. A woman dressed as a butterfly brings her back to her normal setting.

"A Grandmother's Story" is one of Georges Méliès's better films from later in his filmmaking career. Perhaps, this is because it's so much a children's picture, which always seemed a natural fit for Méliès's brand of magical wonder, fantasy and enthusiasm. In its four scenes and five-minutes running time, a grandmother reads her grandson a bedtime story and puts him to bed. Dreaming, an angel takes him to a toyland and, then, to see butterfly fairies borne from flowers. The boy goes to sleep in his dream, to wake up in reality. It's a visually pleasant, wholesome picture with a nice dream framework.

According to John Frazer in his book "Artificially Arranged Scenes", "A Grandmother's Story" was originally 12 minutes, but the Flicker Alley DVD-set makes no mention of their print being only a fragment, as they do with other films, and as it is, I didn't notice any indication that it was incomplete. There are dissolves as scene transitions between the first two and the last two tableaux while there is a direct cut between tableaux two and three, but this might be a salient editorial separation between real world and dream world.

1908 was the last big year in the film career of director Georges Méliès, and despite being generally considered as his worst year in the entirety of his career, it was also one of his most productive in quite some time. This was mainly due to having two studios by this point - Studio A, that produced films under his own direction, and Studio B, the films of which were supervised by his production assistant Manuel. But quality did not prevail over quantity; the majority of these films were not the usual magic shows or trick films of previous years, instead delving into an infrequently seen genre throughout Méliès's career: slapstick comedies. Not only did many of them rely upon physical gags that, while sometimes creative, did not nearly match up to the humor found within his 'haunted inn' movies, many of them are simply unfunny by today's standards - and possibly the standards of then.

"A Grandmother's Story" is thus seen as a refreshing breath of clean air after many of these poor comedies, reminding one of the greatness of the filmmaker's previous features even if not being especially good on its own. The film runs five minutes and while mostly plotless makes up for it in visual detail. Its narrative is a simple one, focusing on a child (André Méliès, the director's own son) who is read a bedtime story by his grandmother before going to bed. It doesn't take long for him to be transported into the typical dream world of the director that we have seen again and again, as a fairy takes him away to two locations: a toyland setting, and a beautiful woodsy area with flowers and butterflies.

As a whole, very little happens within the film action-wise. The 'story' of the title is unknown, probably related in some way to the dreams that follow, and very little occurs within the dreams themselves, which are mainly there to show off some gorgeous set designs. The toyland is the most rare of any set pieces seen in any Méliès movie, which is very distinct, almost as if it were pulled from a child's picture book. The second set is every bit as beautiful, with some wonderful butterfly costumes and scenery that give it the exact feel it desires. It is unfortunate that these designs were not put to a more effective purpose, as this first scene consists of the child simply wandering around the set, while the other one is mostly dancing. As such, the film is more bland with this in mind, being more visually interesting than anything else, and hence not as good as earlier efforts that told a stronger story which were enhanced through the additionally well-composed imagery.

Furthermore, "A Grandmother's Story", while little recognized as such, is actually a film fragment, not a complete film, with twelve numbers attributed to in the Star Film Catalogue. This indicates the full film was around twelve minutes, a longer effort with probably many more scenes in addition further illustrating the child's dream. This is particularly unnoticeable when one notes that the story seems to be quite complete in itself, having a beginning, body, and conclusion that would suggest it is all there. However, this supposition is incorrect, as half-way through, between the two dream sequences, there is a direct cut (Cineanalyst points out this could be used to show both scenes take place in a dream, while the other dissolve transitions would suggest moving from dream to reality) which definitely indicates missing scenes. However, while a complete print would be nice, it would also needlessly expand on what was already a basic plot; the two dream sequences we already have are fine, and little more is needed to make it better.