Number of user reviews: 13
User score: 7.2
Georges Melies' fourth entry in the Canon in as many years does not leave me with much new to say about him (or so I thought.) The India Rubber Head is a combination of Melies' two previously-demonstrated tendencies: first, his self-advertisement, and second, his celebration of violence against the human body.
Melies wants the viewer to see his face, and see it big. The entire purpose of India Rubber Head seems to be the enlargement of his visage. While most evaluations of this film focus on the technical dimension of Melies' ever-growing face, identifying it simply as vehicle for the introduction of zooming to cinema, I argue that this conception is backwards. Zooming is, rather, an innovation of necessity, created specifically so that Melies can make his face the front-and-center focus of the film. Close-up shots have not been seen yet at this point in the Canon; sure, there have been several films focusing on singular subjects, but always as a full body. Yet the most distinctive markers of human identity lie not in the feet, hands, or torso of a person, but in their face. To fill an entire shot with a face is to take the magnifying potential of cinema to its logical conclusion. With cinema, a person no longer has to be confined to the physical dimensions of their flesh; they can make larger than life, larger than death, larger than just about anything they want; they can engulf a room, overwhelm the senses, make their faces not only visible, but impossible not to see. From here on, film's obsession with the face will go beyond fetishism to outright deification. Melies can thus be seen as a pioneer in yet another respect: the first filmmaker to ossify his own face, to make himself into a cinematic messiah, eternal, immortal, and omnipresent.
At the same time, Melies wants his face to explode. There is a distinctly sadistic (or, should I say, masochistic) tone to this production, as with many of Melies' other films; the maiming and destruction of a living head is not used here for horror, but for comedy. It is even more radical than Four Heads in that the punchline is simply death; there is nothing more to the humor than the fact that someone's life has been cruelly ended for no reason. No other film to date has been so utterly blase about dying, or placed less worth in the value of a human life. In Melies' world, to die is to puff away into a cloud of smoke, as though the cessation of life was simply a disappearing act, perhaps to an invisible "backstage" somewhere. One could view this trope as the influence of stage magic creeping into film; after all, an inordinate amount of magic revolved around people suffering seemingly-deadly fates, and then being brought back unharmed. But that is the key difference between The India Rubber Head and its stage counterparts; in this film, the head is never brought back. It stays dead, but the theatrical and comedic framework of the magic show otherwise remains intact. This mutation, an artifact of the transition between stage and screen, has (unintended?) consequences for the nascent medium of film. It opens the door for narratives such as The India Rubber Head, which are at once nihilistic and jolly, fatalist and flippant, bloodthirsty and playful. It begins the trend that the film industry will follow en masse, wherein killing is treated as desirable, even triumphant, the ultimate crowd-pleaser. It is the beginning of death as catharsis, not for the characters, but for the audience. It is the first snuff film.
Other connections: Not much to add here, since Melies is again the only actor in the picture. Zooming will soon become a standard filmmaking technique, but you already know that.
Other most-voted titles of 1901:
2. Bluebeard (Georges Melies | 1,051 votes)
3. A Photographic Contortion (James Williamson | 969 votes)
4. What Happened on Twenty-third Street, New York City (George S. Fleming and Edwin S. Porter | 670 votes)
5. Demolishing and Building Up the Star Theatre (Frederick S. Armitage | 653 votes)
6. The Countryman's First Sight of the Animated Pictures (Robert W. Paul | 428 votes)
7. History of a Crime (Ferdinand Zecca | 411 votes)
8. Fire! (James Williamson | 395 votes)
9. Stop Thief! (James Williamson | 374 votes)
10. Pan-American Exposition By Night (Edwin S. Porter | 372 votes)
IMDB lists 1,753 titles for the year altogether.
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