Film History Essentials: Cendrillon (1899)
(English: Cinderella)
The story of Cinderella needs very little introduction. Very few fairy tales are known as well or as widely. There are versions of the story that are thousands of years old, and they have been told from Europe to Asia. It has been a perennial favorite of audiences for centuries. The story has been adapted on film dozens of times, and perhaps hundreds (if films that reference or were inspired by the story are included). Georges Méliès’s Cendrillon is the first of these many, many film adaptations.
As with many later adaptations, Méliès’s film is based on the 17th-century French version by Charles Perrault, the one best-known to western audiences. His film version was probably most directly inspired by a stage production that had played at Méliès’s own theater (the Théâtre Robert-Houdin) two years earlier, though he also drew from famous illustrations of the story by Gustave Doré. However, Méliès may also have been motivated to tell this particular story at this particular time by a different production entirely. A few months earlier, Jules Massenet’s opera Cendrillon (see right) premiered at the Opéra-Comique and was hugely popular.
There is also a surprising amount of information available about the cast, particularly for such an early film. Cendrillon has a relatively large cast (well over 30, including extras), and film scholars have identified several who appear in major roles. Méliès himself is easy to identify: He plays le gnome de la pendule (“the clock gnome”) and the Swiss guard standing at the church entrance as the wedding procession enters. Jeanne d’Alcy, as the queen (the prince’s mother), is harder to spot.
Other roles, including Cinderella and the Prince, were filled by performers who are mostly known from their other collaborations with Méliès. The Fairy Godmother was played by Bleuette Bernon (see left), who would go on to play key roles in a few of Méliès’s best-known films. She had been a singer at Cabaret de l’Enfer (“the Cabaret of Hell”), a themed establishment where the doormen wore devil costumes and the proprietor dressed as Mephistopheles. It sounds like exactly the kind of place Georges Méliès would have frequented.
At first glance, Cendrillon is full of Méliès’s familiar tricks. There are several substitution splices to effect transformations, appearances, and disappearances. The story is full of whimsical and fantastical elements. Many of the props and sets have a distinctly stagey look. In fact, when the fairy godmother departs at the end of the first scene, she drops down through what is very obviously a stage trapdoor.
All of this is typical of Méliès, but nevertheless Cendrillon is a significant link between his earliest films and the films that he would soon be best known for. It is the first of many films in the féerie (“fairy play”) genre that would be among his most successful and elaborate productions during the following decade. It is also his first multi-scene film, and one of the first multi-scene films ever made.
The first known multi-scene film, Come Along, Do!, was of course released the previous year. While there may have been others in the interim (now lost), Cendrillon presents us with a whole series of scenes that attempt to tell a coherent story. This was one of the first films Méliès made after his multi-scene series L’Affaire Dreyfus. But unlike those films, and previous “series” films like La Vie et la Passion de Jésus-Christ or Rip Van Winkle, these scenes are all edited together into a single film, and were not sold separately as stand-alone products to exhibitors.
Even more significantly, Méliès introduced dissolves to transition between scenes. Each scene fades seamlessly into the next over a couple of seconds. It’s a move so basic and so simple that, to a modern audience, it might pass entirely without notice. However, this is believed to be the first film where that technique was employed.
Certainly Méliès’s contemporaries would have been familiar with the details of the Cinderella story, as most audiences are today. Even so, it’s possible to follow the main action of the film without knowledge of the story, though knowing something about stage traditions (like the final dance number and tableaux) is helpful. Each event follows pretty clearly from the one before: Cendrillon is sad because she has to stay home. Her Fairy Godmother appears and gets her ready to go to the ball, but cautions her to watch the time. She doesn’t, and is exposed, etc.
This stands in contrast with a multi-scene series like L’Affaire Dreyfus. Most of those series not only require some outside context to understand individual scenes, but frequently don’t bother to make strong story connections from one scene to the next. The audience (or an in-theater narrator) is expected to provide all of the necessary context, and it is assumed that some exhibitors won’t be showing all of the scenes, or all in the same order. Cendrillon heralds a new kind of cinematic storytelling, distinct from most of what had come before.
Screening:
A fragment of the first scene shows that a hand-tinted version of this film once existed. Sadly, it is now almost entirely lost. Only those few seconds, reincorporated into the most recently-restored version, are known to have survived. It is easy to imagine how spectacular some of the later scenes must have looked with color.
What’s most interesting and unique about this version of Cinderella is its focus on clocks as a recurring visual motif. This Cinderella is, as film historian J.B. Kaufman puts it, “haunted by the tyranny of time.” It’s difficult to know now whether this was a Méliès innovation, or was drawn from some other contemporary production. Still, it is notable that this, the very first film version, introduces elements that are so unfamiliar in such an otherwise familiar story, but that nevertheless fit perfectly with a major theme of the story.
Time is the true antagonist of this film. Cendrillon’s stepmother and stepsisters are a bit mean to her, but they are barely developed as characters at all. Time is the adversary that actually torments Cendrillon. This culminates in the film’s most original and visually-stunning sequence: Cendrillon’s nightmare. It does seem clear that the audience is meant to understand that this is a dream sequence. The clock in the room doesn’t move until after Cendrillon lays her head down on the table, and the room returns to normal as the stepsisters shake her awake at the end.
In this dream, the bedroom clock first chases a horrified Cendrillon around the room, and then the clock gnome leaps out of it and begins to hammer on a bell. He rings it exactly 12 times as four dancers emerge, then disappears to be replaced by a fifth dancer in the center. All five hold clocks set to midnight, which they wave in Cendrillon’s face. Then they, too, transform into clocks (still set to midnight) and begin to dance. Turning back into their original form, they unite and transform again into one giant clock. The clock gnome reappears in its center and mocks Cendrillon before she finally wakes up.
Notice that a clock is featured prominently in every scene until the prince arrives with the missing slipper. After that, clocks disappear from the film entirely. Freed from their tyranny, Cendrillon now has all the time in the world . . . which is really just another way of saying “she lived happily ever after.”
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