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17-515: The film, shot outdoors in Méliès's garden on a platform decorated with theatrical scenery, is based on a famous stage illusion by Buatier de Kolta , in which a woman disappeared by escaping through a hidden trapdoor . However, using an editing technique known as the substitution splice , Méliès carried out the trick using cinematic special effects rather than conventional stage machinery . The substitution splice also allowed Méliès to add new material to

34-636: A British woman, Alice Constance Mumford, who had him buried in London in the Hendon cemetery. De Kolta is the subject of the book Buatier de Kolta: Genius of Illusion by Peter Warlock . The city of Lyon named a street in the Quartier Le Vernay after him. de Kolta was a contemporary of fellow French magician Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin . He was highly creative and developed illusions using his engineering skills. Many of his illusions, such as Multiplying Balls,

51-521: A hand-colored version of the film in 1979, using authentic materials. In 2017, the Cinémathèque Française digitized their black-and-white 35 mm copy in 4K resolution . Buatier de Kolta Buatier de Kolta (né Joseph Buatier ; Caluire-et-Cuire , 18 November 1845 – New Orleans , 7 October 1903) was a French magician who performed throughout the latter part of the 1800s in Europe and

68-491: A studio in Lyon with his more talented friend Elie-Joseph Laurent (1841–1926). He also resumed his performances as an amateur magician, and one was noticed by Hungarian impresario Julius Vida de Kolta, who persuaded him to make magic his profession. His shows were immediately successful and he took the stage name Buatier de Kolta, acknowledging his debt to the impresario. In 1870, he started a European tour taking him to Italy, Germany,

85-489: Is hidden there) and places a chair on top of it. He has his assistant sit in the chair, and spreads a shawl over her. When he removes the shawl, she has disappeared. He then waves his arms in the air and conjures up a skeleton. He places the shawl over the skeleton and removes it to reveal his assistant, alive and well. The Vanishing Lady is based on a magic act by the French magician Buatier de Kolta . Méliès had already imitated

102-443: Is the first known use of the effect for magical as opposed to practical purposes, and the substitution splice became the most fundamental special effect in Méliès' oeuvre. The Vanishing Lady was released by Méliès's Star Film Company and is numbered 70 in its catalogues. Though surviving prints of the film are in black-and-white, hand-colored prints of Méliès's films were also sold; the Méliès expert Jacques Malthête reconstructed

119-400: The substitution splice —the first known instance of his using this effect. The substitution splice allowed Méliès and D'Alcy to cut directly from a shot of D'Alcy, seated in the chair under the shawl, to a shot where she was offscreen; between the two shots, Méliès held his position, creating the illusion of a magical disappearance. Méliès also took advantage of the substitution splice to expand

136-614: The Expanding Die, the Vanishing Lady, Spring Flowers from a Cone, and the vanishing bird cage , are performed by magicians today. It is the Vanishing Lady that is so particularly known today and still used that magicians now refer to it as the De Kolta Chair. A woman is seated on a chair, was then covered by a large cloth, and would appear to vanish before an audience. The effect was a signature piece of Richiardi Jr – after he made

153-750: The Netherlands, and Spain, and was invited to perform at the Théâtre Robert-Houdin in Paris. In 1874, he left Vida de Kolta and continued with a different impresario, who in 1875 took him to the Egyptian Hall in London and to Russia. In 1891, he went for his first tour to the United States. He started a second tour there in 1902, but died in New Orleans in 1903 of acute Bright's disease . He had married in 1879

170-468: The United States. Joseph Buatier was born in Caluire-et-Cuire (Rhône, France). His parents were fabric merchants. He started reading books on magic at age six, and as a teenager he was already performing in amateur magic shows in his school. However his father, a devout Catholic, wanted him to become a priest, and persuaded him to enter a seminary. At age 18, he left it and worked as a painter, sharing

187-400: The act onstage in his own venue, the Théâtre Robert-Houdin in Paris. When the illusion was produced onstage, stage machinery was used to make the magician's assistant disappear. The newspaper and shawl were crucial for the trick to work; the newspaper, actually a custom-made rubber prop, concealed a trapdoor on the stage floor, while the shawl covered the assistant during her "vanishing" into

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204-420: The end of the trick, inventing the appearance and transformation of the skeleton prop and D'Alcy's return. The film, notable as Méliès's first known use of cinematic special effects, survives in film archives; a hand-colored version has also been reconstructed by a Méliès scholar. A magician walks onto a stage and brings out his assistant. He spreads a newspaper on the floor (thus demonstrating that no trap door

221-497: The trapdoor and out of sight. (The chair onstage was constructed with a breakaway seat, allowing the assistant to slide downwards behind the shawl, through a hidden flap in the rubber newspaper.) In the filmed version, Méliès appears as the magician, and his assistant is Jehanne d'Alcy . D'Alcy, a performer at the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, had had much experience with the stage version of the illusion, in which her small stature

238-490: The trick for the film, adding the transformation to and from a skeleton; the Buatier de Kolta stage illusion ended with the assistant's appearance. Although he later claimed to have invented the technique independently, after his camera accidentally became jammed, Méliès probably developed the splice after seeing a rudimentary version in an 1895 Edison Manufacturing Company film The Execution of Mary Stuart . The Vanishing Lady

255-410: The woman vanish, she apparently reappeared moments later from an empty trunk on the other side of the stage. During his career, perhaps his most famous illusion was the one known as "The Expanding Dice." A 200 mm-side dice on a table grew up to 800 mm and opened to reveal a young lady inside, who often was Buatier's wife. Harry Houdini purchased the dice after Buatier's death. However, the illusion

272-620: Was difficult to perform, so Houdini did not continue with this apparatus. David Copperfield has performed the Expanding Die trick, and the original die is kept in Copperfield's private museum. Caluire-et-Cuire Caluire-et-Cuire ( French pronunciation: [kalɥiʁ e kɥiʁ] ; Arpitan : Caluéres-et-Cuéres ) is a commune in the Metropolis of Lyon in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region in eastern France . It

289-476: Was ideal for the escape down the trapdoor. The setting, seemingly an interior in Rococo style, was built of theatrical flats on a small outdoor platform Méliès had set up in his garden at Montreuil-sous-Bois . The beginning of the film closely follows the Buatier de Kolta stage illusion, complete with the newspaper and shawl props. On film, however, Méliès needed no trapdoor, using instead an editing technique called

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