Le Miroir Magique (1908)
Article 5656 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-25-2019
Directed by Segundo de Chomon
Featuring Julienne Mathieu
Country: France
What it is: Decorative short

A woman sees visions of other women in her mirror and her jewelry.

There’s a certain type of silent short that I’ve decided to call “decorative” shorts. They’re usually very short, have no real plot, and seem to be focused on pretty visual tableaus above anything else. This is an example; it mostly consists of a woman sitting by her makeup bureau and seeing visions of dancing women in her mirror, and then her jewelry. It’s pretty enough to look at (which I suspect is its main goal), and it’s too short to really get dull, so it could be said that it succeeds. Still, it’s rather difficult to assess shorts like this beyond these points.