The Conjuring of a Woman at the House of Robert Houdin / The Vanishing Lady (1896) FULL VIDEO

 

The Conjuring of a Woman at the House of Robert Houdin / The Vanishing Lady (1896) 

Original Title: Escamotage d'une Dame au Théâtre Robert Houdin

Director: Georges Méliès

Cast: Jehanne d'Alcy, Georges Méliès

Original Release Date: October 1896

Country of Origin: France

To our astonishment, the lovely female helper disappears into thin air as a sophisticated master of illusion and delusion covers her with a gauzy cloth.

A well-dressed man walks through a stage door into a set that has a tiny table, chair, and painted back screen. He opens the door for a well-dressed woman, lays the chair on the floor, and spreads a newspaper. He covers her with a delicate cloth while she sits and fans herself. She vanishes, and his attempts to summon her back are unsuccessful. Is it possible for him to accomplish the full reconstitution of a lady, going beyond the bare minimum of a conjuring trick?

A magician enters a stage and calls forth his helper. In order to show that there isn't a trap door there, he spreads a newspaper on the ground and sets a chair on top of it. He covers his assistant with a shawl after seating her in the chair. He takes off the scarf, and she's gone. Then he conjures up a skeleton while waving his arms in the air. He covers the skeleton with the shawl and takes it off to reveal his living assistant.

Georges Méliès directed the 1896 French silent trick film The Vanishing Lady (French: Escamotage d'une dame chez Robert-Houdin, literally "Magical Disappearance of a Lady at the Théâtre Robert-Houdin"). In it, Méliès and Jehanne d'Alcy conduct a theatrical illusion-style performance in which D'Alcy vanishes into thin air. Before she eventually reappears for a curtain call, a skeleton takes her place.

The movie is based on a well-known stage illusion by Buatier de Kolta in which a woman vanished by escaping down a secret trapdoor. It was filmed outside in Méliès's garden on a platform adorned with theatrical set. Instead of employing traditional stage equipment, Méliès used cinematic special effects to execute the trick using an editing technique called the substitute splice. By creating the appearance and change of the skeleton prop and D'Alcy's return, Méliès was also able to add new material to the trick's conclusion thanks to the substitute splice. A historian of Méliès has also recreated a hand-colored version of the picture, which is preserved in film archives and is remarkable for being the earliest known application of cinematic special effects.

Released in October 1896, Escamotage d'une dame au théâtre Robert-Houdin (The Vanishing Lady) is a landmark in cinematic history, marking the transition from simple recorded reality to the birth of "trick films" and modern special effects. 

Its pioneering achievements include:

First Deliberate Use of the "Stop Trick": While Thomas Edison's studio had used a similar technique previously, this film is widely cited as the first time Georges Méliès purposefully applied the stop trick (also known as a substitution splice) to achieve a magical transformation. By stopping the camera, swapping his assistant for a skeleton, and resuming filming, he created a seamless on-screen illusion.

Birth of Cinematic Illusion: The film demonstrated that cinema could achieve "impossible" feats that surpassed traditional stage magic. On stage, Méliès used trapdoors and hidden machinery; in this film, he replaced those physical constraints with purely cinematic special effects.

Establishment of the "Trick Film" Genre: This work was the oldest surviving example of the Star Film Company's signature style, which combined theatrical showmanship with whimsical editing.

Introduction of Jehanne d'Alcy to Film: The woman in the film, Jehanne d'Alcy, became one of the first professional film actresses, eventually appearing in many of Méliès's most famous works.