MARVELOUS SUSPENSION (1902)
aka La femme volante, Marvelous Suspension and Evolution
Article 4429 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 1-24-2014
Directed by Georges Melies
Cast unknown
Country: France
What it is: Trick film

A magician turns a vase into a beautiful woman who can float in mid-air and do tricks while suspended.

This is one of those trick films that Melies made that seems to be more interested in pulling off a specific effect (in this case, the appearance of a woman suspended in midair with no visible support while she does gymnastics) than telling any sort of story. From that perspective, the short is a success; though it’s obvious that in some of the sequences the woman was filmed while lying down on the floor and rolling around, there are other sequences that can’t be sorted out that easily. There’s a bit of a plot involving a group of women who surround the one that appears, but I’m not really sure what that is all about. At any rate, this is fairly minor Melies.