Avant la Musique/La Leçon de Musique (Pathé, 1907 & 1909)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Once Charles and I got home I looked up YouTube to see if they had the three films that had been listed for the silent-film showcast but hadn’t actually been shown: Avant la Musique, La Leçon de Musique and the 1920 Neighbors. Avant la Musique and La Leçon de Musique both turned out to be the brainchildren of one Segundo de Chomón, who was obviously hired by the French Pathé studio to make movies in blatant imitation of the films of Georges Méliès. Méliès was a former stage magician who had pioneered the use of stop-motion photography and other camera tricks – eventually they would come to be called “special effects” – and his films were sensationally popular worldwide until the advent of World War I in 1914, when French movie audiences decided they wanted more serious fare. Chomón was definitely “segundo” to Méliès in more ways than just his first name, but the two films were quite clever and well done, audacious fantasies in which, among other things,musicians’ heads were literally pulled off their necks and thrown onto a staff of music paper, and in La Leçon de Musique the musicians’ necks become elongated (when I saw this I thought, ”If Modigliani had made a movie, tihs is what it would have looked like) and look like animated representations of flowers growing and blooming. There are also stick-figure animations that dance in time to the music – at least that’s what we think they are doing, since no music is heard. (The post Charloes and I found for Avant la Musique was scored with John Philip Sousa’s “Liberty Bell” march – these days best known as the theme from Monty Python’s Flying Circus – but the one from La Leçon de Musique was, alas, not scored with anything at all.) The two Chomón films Charles and I watched last night were both charming child-like fantasies, and I’m sorry they were not performed “live” at the Organ Pavilion because it would have been nice to hear what Clara Gerdes could have done with them.