February 23, 1906 [The 400 Tricks of the Devil]

The man who filmed—is that the right word?—because for about fifteen minutes I thought some great store had been tilted and flung and out poured everything, all the camera tricks and sleight-of-hand, all the pots and pans and carpenters and kings of everything tossed like salad without stopping—again: the Frenchman* who filmed The 400 Tricks of the Devil has built, either through design or by accident, what may be the first "epic" cinema—and by that I mean not Homer's heights but his excesses, the conviction that every turn broadens the road, and that the road is a dream without boundaries.

Like Dante we go from the mundane to the Infernal—but unlike the poet no moral vision emerges—but it is a vision, one that upends Aristotle's rules—in which great drama cares nothing for spectacle—and places spectacle at the pinnacle, no longer merely a decorative means but an end, a purposeful trajectory into the audience, spitting Roman Candle comets, "trailing clouds of glory" all the way back to the couple sneaking a kiss in the back row, all the way up to the kids in the front yelling 400 times and more at whatever may land in their laps, whether geese or bones, locomotives or valises, acrobatic demons or tumbling chefs—and at the end Satan's carriage, the skeletal puppet-horse tumbling into Hell and serving up souls on a spit.

---

*Editor's note: Georges Méliès (1861-1938), innovative stage magician and film pioneer.

[To watch the film, go HERE.]