The Diabolic Tenant

The Diabolic Tenant
Directed by Georges Méliès
Starring Georges Méliès
Production
company
Release date
  • 1909 (1909)
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Country France
Language Silent

The Diabolic Tenant (French: Le Locataire diabolique),[1] originally released in English-speaking countries as The Fiendish Tenant, is a 1909 French short silent film directed by Georges Méliès. It was released by Méliès's Star Film Company and is numbered 1495–1501 in its catalogues.[2]

Cast

Méliès's films have no closing credits, but the following cast list can be reconstructed from recollections by Georges Méliès's son, André Méliès.[3]

  • Georges Méliès as the diabolic tenant. Méliès acted in at least 300 of his 520 films.[4]
  • André Méliès as the child. The previous year, when he was seven years old, he had played the lead role in his father's film A Grandmother's Story.[5] André Méliès grew up to be a professional actor and operetta singer, and played his father in Georges Franju's 1952 biographical film Le Grand Méliès.[6]
  • François Lallement as the young soldier. Lallement was one of Méliès's salaried cameramen; he had previously appeared onscreen as the officer of marines in A Trip to the Moon.[7]
  • Charles Claudel as the male janitor. Claudel was one of the artists who painted scenery based on Méliès's designs.[8]
  • Octavie Huvier as the female janitor. Huvier was a maidservant for the Méliès family.[3]

Production

The Diabolic Tenant is an expanded treatment of plot ideas that had previously appeared in an earlier Méliès film, Satan in Prison. Méliès's concept of large things coming from a small bag returned in later films, including Walt Disney's Mary Poppins and Jerry Lewis's Hardly Working.[3] The film's special effects were created using pyrotechnics, stage machinery, and furniture props moved by people hidden inside them, including the young André Méliès. The only cinematic effect used in the film is the editing technique known as the substitution splice.[3]

As is typical for Méliès's work, most of the action is filmed in long shots. Unusually, a medium shot also occurs, to clarify the action—probably, in this case, to show the janitor's astonishment more clearly.[3]

References

  1. ↑ Méliès, Georges (2008), Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema (DVD; short film collection), Los Angeles: Flicker Alley, ISBN 1893967352
  2. ↑ Malthête, Jacques; Mannoni, Laurent (2008), L'oeuvre de Georges Méliès, Paris: Éditions de La Martinière, p. 278, ISBN 9782732437323
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 Essai de reconstitution du catalogue français de la Star-Film; suivi d'une analyse catalographique des films de Georges Méliès recensés en France, Bois d'Arcy: Service des archives du film du Centre national de la cinématographie, 1981, pp. 338–340, ISBN 2903053073
  4. ↑ Malthête & Mannoni 2008, p. 88
  5. ↑ Essai de reconstitution 1981, p. 325
  6. ↑ Brumagne, Marie-Magdeleine (1977), Georges Franju: impressions et aveux, Lausanne: Ed. l'Age d'Homme, p. 28
  7. ↑ Wemaere, Séverine; Duval, Gilles (2011), La couleur retrouvée du Voyage dans la Lune (PDF), Groupama Gan Foundation for Cinema and Technicolor Foundation for Cinema Heritage, p. 165, archived from the original (PDF) on 11 November 2011, retrieved 15 April 2015
  8. ↑ Rivière-Petitot, Anne, "L'énigme Charles Claudel (1873-?)", Association Camille Claudel, archived from the original on 20 December 2014


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