The Christmas Dream
| The Christmas Dream | |
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| As a full moon shines in the night sky, angels appear on village rooftops covered with snow.
A scene from the film
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| Directed by | Georges Méliès |
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| Country | France |
| Language | Silent |
The Christmas Dream (French: Rêve de Noël) is a 1900 French short silent Christmas film directed by Georges Méliès. It was released by Méliès's Star Film Company and is numbered 298–305 in its catalogues, where it was advertised as a féerie cinématographique à grand spectacle en 20 tableaux.[1]
The film, one of Méliès's cinematic contributions to the féerie genre, may have been inspired by a stage production produced in 1897 at the Olympia music hall in Paris.[2] Méliès appears in the film twice, as a magician and as a beggar.[3]
The Christmas Dream includes symbols derived from the Christian tradition, including a sheep and a lion, as well as a motif emblematic of Méliès himself: a jester.[2] The sustained and (for Méliès) atypically serene scene of a church bell ringing also functions as a symbol, readable as a communal ritual of peace seen through a gently nostalgic lens.[4] Special effects used in the film include stage machinery (for the church bell and the Christmas tree that opens up), substitution splices, and dissolves,[3] which are used partially to help connect adjacent spaces, such as the inside of a church followed by the inside of its bell tower.[2]
