The Man With The Rubber Head

 

A man enters into what appears to be a workshop, filled with mechanical contraptions. Suddenly, he takes out a box from which he extracts a small head, which is placed on a table, and begins to pump air into it. The head, obligingly, inflates. Deflates. And inflates again. Before: pop! It explodes.

Such is the tale, at once surreal and humorous, told in Georges Méliès’s aptly named 1901 film, The Man With The Rubber Head. As with The Lumière Brothers, Edison, and Williamson, Méliès has been often associated with a specific type of early filmmaking that Tom Gunning has called ‘the cinema of attractions’ (1990).

However, so singular were Méliès’s films that it might be more adequate to put him in a genre of his own: ‘a cinema of decapitations’. He was, after all, the director of a vast number of films in which the face/head was dislodged from the body, played with, modified, or discarded. These included: The Four Troublesome Heads (1898); A Good Farce with my Head/aka Tit for Tat (1903); The Melomaniac (1903); The Man with the Rubber Head (1901); The Terrible Turkish Executioner (1904), as well as his stage show, The Uncooperative Decapitated Man. The question is: can a severed head think?

Want to know more?

Watch the film here.

Read about Méliès here.

Read about the 'cinema of attractions' here.