The Living Playing Cards (1905) User Reviews

Pure magic!

[ackstasis · 8/10 · 14 June 2008]

Considering that Georges Méliès was a stage magician before he took an interest in cinema, it's no surprise that he liked to incorporate countless little "magic acts" into his films. As a rule, his narrative-driven films {such as 'A Trip to the Moon (1902)' and 'The Impossible Voyage (1904)'} are by far his most impressive works, not only for their revolutionary storytelling structures, but also for their seemingly-boundless imagination and creativity. Nevertheless, further genius is to be found in Méliès' shorter "gimmick films," which translated the magician's tricks to the cinema screen and proved crucial in the development of visual effects. Too often, early filmmakers like Edison and the Lumière brothers employed this new technology for purely documentary purposes, presenting audiences with brief snippets of everyday life. However, this French "Cinemagician" took a vastly different outlook on the possibilities made feasible by the humble cinematograph: he made the impossible happen before our very eyes.

'The Living Playing Cards (1904),' along with the delightfully-whimsical 'The Four Troublesome Heads (1898),' is one of Méliès' most inventive special-effects showcases. The film starts simply enough, with Méliès – our host, as always – stepping out onto the stage and showing the audience a playing card. It is too small for anybody to decipher, so, with a quick slide of the wrist, the card is suddenly substantially larger. He then manages to transfer the card image onto a large, blank sheet of paper, and then the Queen on the life-sized card is magically transformed into a living, breathing queen who emerges from the paper and walks around the stage. These transformations – some more refined than others – employ the use of quick cuts, multiple dissolves and cross-fades, techniques with which Méliès had been experimenting for many years. The two-minute film is presented in the style of a traditional magic act, presenting contemporary audiences with a format with which they were familiar, but somewhat furtively offering the magician a greater flexibility with his tricks.

The most entertaining part of the film takes place at the very end, when Méliès accidentally transforms the King on the playing card into a real-life King, who bursts threateningly from his sheet of paper. Terrified, Méliès flees the stage in fear. Just as he does this, the King throws off his costume to reveal that he is Méliès himself! The first time I saw this, I was genuinely taken aback by the unexpected reveal, and it took several closer inspections to deduce how the trick was actually performed; from what I was able to tell, the director substituted himself into the King's clothes at the very moment that the costume were cast aside. Such an act demonstrates very effectively the advantages enjoyed by Méliès once he had adopted this revolutionary new technology, and, ever since, magicians have struggled vainly to keep up with the advancements presented by the cinematic medium. If magicians are now a dying breed, they can blame their unemployment on clever little films like this one.

A powerful display of special effects

[jluis1984 · 8/10 · 6 September 2007]

Few persons have meant as much to the history of cinema as Georges Méliès, the now legendary French stage magician that revolutionized film-making with his enormous narrative creativity and his many discoveries and inventions in the field of special effects. As a member of the first audience that experienced the Lumières' first screening, Méliès discovered cinema and immediately realized the enormous potential it had as a narrative art. During the following 15 years, Méliès would become one of the most important producers of movies, and he went from making amusing "gimmick movies" (films about Méliès making an impossible magic trick) to creating some of the most amazing stories of those years, using his skills to enter the genres of horror, fantasy and science fiction. By the year of 1902, Méliès was focusing more on his major projects than on "gimmick movies", but he still made several ones to test some new tricks. 1904's "Les Cartes Vivantes" was one of those shorts.

As usual in his "gimmick films", "Les Cartes Vivantes" (literally, "The Living Playing Cards") is about a Magician (Méliès) performing an amazing magic trick. This time, the trick involves a simple deck of playing cards, and a large cardboard that resembles a blank card. The trick begins with the Magician making one card grow bigger, to the size of a book. Then, by simply throwing the card towards the cardboard, it becomes an enormous version of the card the Magician threw. As if that wasn't enough, the Magician transforms the giant card (a 9 of Spades) into the card of the Queen of Hearts. With that card on the cardboard, the Magician proceeds to to make the image come alive by transforming the drawing into a real life Queen of Hearts who walks out of the card. To finish the trick, he returns the Queen to the card and decides to transform the card into the King of Clubs; but the trick may be really on him.

As written above, for Méliès this kind of short films were more than a way of having a fresh and original catalog of movies in his theater, they were a chance to test new or improved tricks and special effects he could later use in his major projects. "The Living Playing Cards" is a prime example of this, as it is composed of many of the tricks that Méliès had used in many previous occasions (dissolves, multiple exposures and several editing tricks), but the way they look in this movie is considerably better than when Méliès used them for the first time. When one watches the movies Méliès did before 1901, the effects look marvelous but primitive; "The Living Playing Cards" is the direct evolution of his talents, and it's easy to notice that his work of editing has improved considerably since his early years. His use of props and set design to build up an atmosphere has also improved, and he captures perfectly what his real performances as a magician would had been.

Honestly, there's nothing really remarkable in "Les Cartes Vivantes" besides its amazing display of special effects, but like every Méliès film, it has a special magic that makes difficult not to enjoy them. Méliès had an enormous charm as a performer, and despite the shortcomings of the technology of his time, he really knew how to use cinema's potential to entertain his audience the best he could. While in the end, "The Living Playing Cards" may not be anything more than a "gimmick trick", one has to remember that in 1904, the legendary Méliès was preparing his most ambitious project to date: that often forgotten masterpiece named "Le Voyage à Travers l'impossible", better known in English as "The Voyage Through the Impossible". 8/10

THIS is what the movies are all about!

[Grand · 8/10 · 11 April 2004]

"The Living Playing Cards" (_Les Cartes vivantes_) is what cinema is all about -- *magic!* Méliès himself plays The Magician, and he is truly amazing as he performs card tricks on stage, acting well as he asks the audience if a card he has drawn is "our" card, then reacts with disappointment as he realizes it is not, but then recovering with aplomb as he attempts to make up for his error by outdoing himself with each new card trick, culminating in his not just making a life-sized card come to life, but finally ... well, that would be telling!

Méliès once wrote that a film director must be prepared to work not only as the director, but as the writer, the camera operator, and an actor as well, if necessary. He was all of those things and did them all extremely well. Now if only I could figure out how he pulled off that last card trick....

Simple Ideas, Good Craftsmanship

[Snow Leopard · 11 April 2002]

While the ideas are mostly simple ones, this film packs several skillfully done visual effects into a short running time. Like a number of Méliès features, it starts off with a stage magician doing tricks, here using playing cards, and then gets more involved as it goes along. It works pretty well because of a lot of good camera tricks, almost all of which are done with care. Many of the visual effects are nearly seamless, and are fairly impressive given the limited resources available at the time. There isn't anything really spectacular in this one, and many of the features that Méliès made are more complex and have more action than this does, but this little movie scores pretty well in terms of its craftsmanship.

Pretty mediocre until the ending

[Horst_In_Translation · 6/10 · 7 December 2017]

"Les cartes vivantes" or "The Living Playing Cards" is a French black-and-white short film from 1904 (other sources say 1905) and this one runs for 3 minutes only. No matter what kind of music you hear while listening to this one, it is nonetheless a silent film in the original. Of course it is at way over 100 years. The writer, director and star of it is Georges Méliès, the defining filmmakers from its time and like many other of his works, this is basically a little magic show presentation and we, with a static camera, are the audience here. That's perfectly fine. Some minor card tricks early on, then the Queen steps out of her card life-sized, which I found could have looked a bit better. But the ending with the boastful king who's not interested at all into returning to the deck was handled very well again. Other filmmakers just would have repeated the queen part with the king, but Méliès gets in a really clever and funny new component with which he closes this short film here and this twist is eventually the reason why I give it a thumbs-up, even if I am not entirely sure if it's worth sitting through all before that, even if it is just 150 seconds. Oh well maybe it is. It was okay to watch and I can somewhat see how this is among Méliès' more seen these days. Go check it out.

Somewhat static, but so amazing and worth seeing

[planktonrules · 8/10 · 3 September 2006]

This score of 8 is really relative to other films by director Georges Méliès. If any of his work is compared to his contemporaries, even his worst films would probably merit a 9 because they are so much more complex, fun and timeless compared to the fare of the day. This film is about a magician (played by Méliès), and this isn't surprising as he was, before moving to films, a stage magician himself. The magician pulls out a small playing card and shows it to the audience. Since it is so small, he magically increases its size several times. Ultimately, he makes the tiny card become about 6 to 7 feet high AND the characters of a queen and king become REAL (through the use of stop-motion and slow dissolves). This is very entertaining and amazing because no others were able to do such brilliant camera tricks.

If you want to see this film online, go to Google and type in "Méliès" and then click the video button for a long list of his films that are viewable without special software.

Up to His Tricks Again

[JoeytheBrit · 8/10 · 8 July 2009]

One thing that always comes over in a George Melies film is the man's energy and heightened sense of fun. He must have been exhausting to work with. Here he adopts the persona of stage magician - which is exactly what he used to be in the years before film - to perform card tricks. These are no ordinary playing cards, however, because he increases their size ten-fold so that the audience can see their face value.

The film is a series of trick shots, which makes the stage element redundant really, and in less talented hands these might quickly grow dull. But Melies certainly knew how to entertain his audience, and throws in a couple of clever surprises to round things off. This is one of Melies' less extravagant films, but it's still great fun to watch.

The Living Playing Cards

[Michael_Elliott · 20 March 2010]

Living Playing Cards, The (1905)

*** (out of 4)

aka Les Cartes vivantes

Extremely entertaining and fun film from the French master has him playing (what else) a magician who puts a plane piece of paper on a stool and magically turns it into cards. He then takes the trick even further by having the Queen and King walk off the paper. This here is certainly one of the director's most known films as the tricks are pure magic even though it's obvious to see how they're done. What makes this film work so well is the fact that Melies, the actor, really is charming and sells everything we're seeing. He has that certain grace about him that draws you to whatever he's doing and whoever is playing the King is also a real hoot. The final trick in the film is priceless and makes this one of the more memorable films from the director.

Kinda Neat

[Rainey-Dawn · 8/10 · 12 July 2019]

I love the "Alice in Wonderland" feel to this one - the idea of bring to life the playing cards. I just wished it was longer - the Queen lasted longer than the King (he took off the King outfit too fast) but otherwise a pretty neat little film.

8.5/10

Wonderful Clarity. Nice Transitions.

[Hitchcoc · 8/10 · 16 November 2017]

Melies does some excellent work here. First of all, his work with the magical cards is nice. The quality of the film makes us see the great one and his presence so much better than the past. He doe multiple tricks with cards turning into people and vice-versa. I really like his finale when he, himself, goes through the big card and appears in another place. But there is even more.

Well done and once again great special effects.

[ofpsmith · 8/10 · 14 November 2014]

Georges Melies appears as a magician to do some card tricks. These however are not you typical card tricks. Melies makes the cards bigger and then they appear on the big white sheet of paper behind him. But then even more crazy magic appears. The playing cards come to life. First the queen and then the king. Then Melies reveals to the audience that he somehow duplicated himself and reveals the king to be another Melies. Then when the show is done, Melies wraps everything up and leaves. It's entertaining, as it holds you're interest for the 3 minutes that it is. As is usually the case with Melies films the special effects are good, so yeah. Go see it if you're a Melies fan.