The IMDB Canon, Vol. 15: Four Heads Are Better Than One (1898)

IMDB user votes (as of this writing): 2,081
Number of user reviews: 15
User score: 7.6

Four Heads Are Better Than One is the first of several IMDB Canon films from the great wizard of early movies, Georges Melies. My use of the word "movies" here is deliberate, for we are no longer in a world of mere experimentation, no longer one of simple technical curiosity. Four Heads is the point at which the craft of film evolves from novelty to spectacle, where its ambitions evolve from the mere recording of reality to the creation of spectacular images. Hence Melies' privileged place in the film canon; while historians respect earlier filmmakers (Le Prince, Dickson, the Lumieres), they adore Melies. He is, in conventional historiography, the first great master of the craft, the first one to elevate film from distraction to rapture. Critical reactions to Melies are typically described with a number of stock phrases: "movie magic", "delightful whimsy", or that most insidious of phrases, "childlike wonder", as though one of the most desirable qualities of a film is to reduce the viewer to a blubbering baby. In this sense, Melies' style of filmmaking is a perfect reflection of his background as a stage magician--for the key feature of stage magic (indeed, the very thing that makes it magic) is its anti-intellectualism, its brazen opposition to critical thought. The spectator is in every case to be reduced to the helpless stupor of infancy, neither able to comprehend cause-and-effect nor to do anything but visually follow the motions of the person in front of them. And unlike many of the earlier films in the Canon so far, there is no scientific or archival purpose to Four Heads; it is pure spectacle, meant simply to entertain; it is an early example of a "fun" film (though without the knee-jerk defensiveness typically associated with "fun", i.e., "just turn your brain off, it's a 'fun' movie!") Unapologetically vapid fluff pieces like Four Heads still exist today, though they are now euphemistically called "high concept" films--the kind where the entire premise can be summed up in a sentence, so that even a child can grasp its hook (e.g., the superhero fights the bad guy, or some dinosaurs escape from a theme park, etc.)

There is little doubt that Melies was (and is) successful in infantilizing his audience--even now, I look at Melies crawling under the table upon which his head sits, and can do little but stare, slack-jawed, dribbling, thinking only, "how?" The film taps directly into a viewer's primal desire to be dominated by the machine; as mentioned previously, one of the main functions of cinema is to enlargen its subject matter and thereby engulf its viewer. But perhaps even more pervasive than that is the utopian view of cinema as a window into the past, a way to live out opportunities and possibilities that have passed the viewer by. The usual method of doing this is to include a surrogate character for the audience; but Four Heads breaks (or should I say, precedes) convention here. There is no protagonist in Four Heads; Melies performs the film for his audience directly, as though he were onstage before them--there is no character upon whom the viewers can project themselves, for they are the character, a direct embodiment of themselves and undisguised placation of their narcissism. This is a narrative with only three walls; the film is effectively a third-person narration, the camera being the omniscient narrator, and Melies its deuteragonist. The film's affect operates not within Melies' character, but is instead projected outward onto the audience. Accordingly, the emotional force of Four Heads resides entirely within the audience's shock and surprise at seeing a man take off his head; the man himself seems perfectly at ease. The dismemberment of the body becomes a source not of horror, but of amusement.

And there is another first for cinema: the glorification of violence, the idea that decapitation is merely a game--another consequence of the childhood naivete bludgeoned into the viewer by Melies' sleight-of-hand. Slapstick comedy--by which is meant violent comedy--will be built on this principle, the idea that horrific abuse of the body is funny as long as it does not happen to the audience or their surrogate. It's always hilarious to watch the other guy get hurt, for laughter is aggressive, sadistic, a vicarious infliction of pain upon the Other, closely tied with humanity's basal urges to dominate and destroy all those beneath them. Therefore, there is little difference between laughing at a man severing his own head and someone else severing it; the only determinant for humor is whether or not the audience Otherizes the victim, and if so, it's hysterical. Violent gratification will shortly become one of the main modes of visual pleasure in the film industry; Four Heads is, in retrospect, its bellwether.

Other connections: Melies' life took the perfect trajectory for him to be lionized after the fact. While his films were widely distributed (especially A Voyage to the Moon), he made little to no money from international showings, due to widespread piracy. Thus, Melies is easy to portray as the first great martyr of film, the perfect example of why we need to stop BitTorrent and its ilk. In 1913, he left the film industry, penniless. In 1923, he burned all of the original negatives of his work. He lived out the rest of his days selling candy on a Parisian street corner. He is the magician who made himself a disappear, an irresistible figure for historians to mythologize.

Other most-voted titles of 1898:

2. Tossing a Nigger in a Blanket (William "Daddy" Paley | 1,842 votes)

3. A Trip to the Moon (Georges Melies | 1,732 votes) -- Not to be confused with Melies' 1902 film of the same name.

4. Santa Claus (George Albert Smith | 473 votes)

5. The Temptation of St. Anthony (Georges Melies | 456 votes)

6. The Magician (Georges Melies | 419 votes)

7. Le squelette jjoyeux (Louis Lumiere | 385 votes)

8. Pack Train at Chilkoot Pass (362 votes)

9. Come Along, Do! (Robert W. Paul | 324 votes)

10. Panorama pris d'un train en marche (Georges Melies | 302 votes)

IMDB lists 1,741 titles for the year altogether.