Cinderella (1899)
A servant girl is transformed by her fairy godmother into a ballgown-clad guest for the royal ball via a pumpkin-turned-coach and mice-turned-footmen, dances with the Prince until the stroke of midnight strips the magic away, and is found again by her lost slipper.
Assembled across six sets and staged as twenty tableaux for Méliès’s own Star Film catalogue, Cinderella was his first multi-scene production and the earliest known film version of Perrault’s tale, built on the in-camera substitution splices and dissolves he had already been developing in his single-scene trick films of the 1890s.
Background
Cinderella is an 1899 film by Georges Melies, produced under his own Star Film company, and it was one of his first multi-scene productions. Melies built the film from a sequence of staged tableaux and used the in-camera trick techniques he had developed in his earlier single-scene films, including substitution splices and dissolves. The story is Perrault’s fairy tale, adapted for an audience used to stage fairy plays. The film is one of the earliest surviving screen versions of the tale and shows how quickly cinema was adopting the narrative forms of the theater.
What to watch for
The pleasure lies in the transformations, which Melies accomplishes with the trick effects of his early practice. Watch the pumpkin becoming a coach and the mice becoming footmen as the fairy godmother’s magic takes effect. The ball scene shows the Prince and Cinderella dancing until the stroke of midnight, when the magic fades and the guest is restored to her rags. The reunion with the lost slipper closes the story. Because the film plays as a series of tableaux with a fixed camera, the composition and set design carry the storytelling, and the viewer’s attention goes to the stage-like arrangement of each scene.
