The Hilarious Posters (1906)

I would retitle this the not very funny posters. It's the same old idea of a set of eight posters, with various subjects, coming to life. It's just that the things they do aren't very interesting. They dump stuff on people. They fight. Melies came a long way in his films. A few of these later ones just don't cut the mustard.

'The Hilarious Posters (1906)' is a clever effects film from French cinemagician Georges Méliès. A workman affixes a giant poster to a wall and departs, before all the posters come to life to cause mischief. A group of policemen arrive on the scene, but are bombarded with flour, and the poster-figures eventually escape into the real world. The transition from the two-dimensional posters to their flesh-and-blood counterparts is a little abrupt, and might have worked better as a slow fade, but otherwise the effect is impressive. Méliès must have built a nifty film set to house each of the poster characters in the one frame, especially the figures in the top poster (who are depicted, unlike their companions, in full profile). The visual effect - that is, an assumed still image suddenly coming to life - mirrors the advent of cinema itself, at which photographs were suddenly made to move. Méliès later wrote of his first experience with cinema: "a still photograph showing the place Bellecour in Lyon was projected... I had hardly finished speaking when a horse pulling a wagon began to walk towards us, followed by other vehicles and then pedestrians, in short all the animation of the street. Before this spectacle we sat with gaping mouths, struck with amazement, astonished beyond all expression." By recreating this experience with posters we at first assume to be two-dimensional and lifeless, Méliès makes a self-reflexive statement about cinema itself.

Director Georges Méliès was well-known for his absolutely astounding creativity and camera tricks in the very, very early years of films. No other director came close to him in these respects and he is my favorite early film maker. While this is a super-original and clever film, I must admit that the camera tricks look pretty primitive compared to his other works. But, considering just how funny the film it, I can forgive this.The short film starts with a couple guys putting up some posters. Then after they leave, the posters come to life and some even leave their frames and play pranks on each other AND unsuspecting passers by. This ultimately leads to a funny showdown with the police. A cute and amiable little film.If you want to see this film online, go to Google and type in "Méliès" and then click the video button for a long list of his films that are viewable without special software.

This short feature is based on some very amusing ideas by Georges Méliès, although they do not entirely come off due to slightly imperfect execution. It's still worth seeing.The movie starts with a wall full of posters for various entertainers, which become the source of a series of antics involving passers-by. The story that follows is clever, but the visual effects in this one are below the standard you come to expect from Méliès. Instead of the usual smooth dissolves and careful background continuity, the special effects here unfortunately come across as a little clumsy.It helps a lot that the story really is a funny one, with some clever ideas, and is worth watching. It's just too bad that the technical side of it was not quite up to the visual wizard's usual standard, because it could have been a truly fine feature if the special effects had worked better.