Underplayed Gems

The Firefall (1904)

The Firefall poster
Original title
La Cascade de feu
Directed by
Georges Méliès
Genre
fantasy film, silent film
Country
France
Runtime
3 min
Rating
4.6 of 10 from 24 voters
Elsewhere
IMDb
The 3D catalogue: film cases on wooden shelves, with the cat sitting at the counter next to its greeting.

The catalogue in 3D

The film shelves have a room of their own that you can walk around in. The cat behind the counter is the AI Catbot, and they pick real films from the same catalogue when you tell them what you feel like watching. Nothing is for sale, here or in there. Go in from here and this film is already out on the counter, with more like it waiting on the shelf next to it.

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How it feels

This is a short silent film from 1904. It shows a satanic figure playing with fire and special effects. The movie is a series of magical tricks and visual illusions.

slow-burntheatricalwhimsicaldatedexperimentalvisually busycerebral

What happens

La Cascade de feu, sold in the United States as The Firefall and in Britain as Cascade of Fire, is a 1904 French silent trick film by Georges Méliès. It was sold by Méliès's Star Film Company and is numbered 665–667 in its catalogues. Méliès plays Satan in the film, which uses pyrotechnics, substitution splices, multiple exposures, and dissolves for its special effects. The baroque frame prop was reused from the aquarium featured in Méliès's film The Mermaid earlier that year. A print of the film survives, and has been known to film scholarship since at least 1979, when John Frazer described it in his book Artificially Arranged Scenes: The Films of Georges Méliès. However, Frazer misidentified this film as a different Méliès film, Beelzebub's Daughters. (In turn, the film Frazer describes as The Firefall is in fact a film by Ferdinand Zecca.) Reviewing the film, which he found slow-moving compared to other Méliès works of the same period, Frazer speculated that it may have been a "casual production generated out of a number of stock props," loosely inspired by H. Rider Haggard's novel She. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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