La lecon de musique (1909)
Article 5903 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 12-16-2020
Directed by Segundo de Chomon
Cast unknown
Country: France
What it is: Special effects short about music

A manic conductor finds a way to illustrate the music he conducts.

I remember Georges Melies had a similar short called THE MELOMANIAC where he threw up copies of his head to form notes on a musical staff. This one is in the same vein, but fortunately the tricks are different, so this isn’t just a copy. The opening bit is the best; the heads of the seated singers are place in a stock, and as they sing their heads raise up into the air on extended necks, and those necks then turn into the bodies of dancing stick figures. The remaining special effects use straightforward animation, as various time signatures are illustrated on a staff, and after the music has been built, we have more dancing stick figures; the latter effect starts to get old as it’s repeated three times with different time signature and dancing figures. Still, it is entertaining to see how Chomon would come up with variations to Melies’s work.