As mentioned last time, in “Impossible Voyages”, I’m watching and writing about a run of new (to me) science fiction films to be watched over this year (and possibly beyond). You can read the rationale and ground rules here. In the meantime, we are advancing from 1904 to 1908 with this movie, the second in this series.
El Hotel Electrico [The Electric Hotel] (1908)
Directed by Segundo de Chomón
Spoilers ahead.
Segundo de Chomón is a figure I’ve never heard of before, but apparently he was a Spanish filmmaker who did a lot of work in France. He worked with a variety of film genres but is best known for his “trick” films, and is often compared to Georges Méliès, though is obviously less well known.
El Hotel Electrico (as the film is actually titled on screen, although I’ve also read it referred to “Hôtel électrique“) is about nine and half minutes long, and is freely available to watch on the internet archive. Because of its length, the experience of viewing it is a little like watching an old animated cartoon. There is a story, but it is obviously pretty thin, with the attention instead going into the movie’s singular gimmick: a hotel where nearly everything is automated, which we get to see brought to life through stop-motion animation. The movie also makes heavy use of “pixilation,” which I learned in reading about the movie means when human actors are also manipulated via stop-motion animation.
And so thanks to all this, we get to see things like luggage unpacking itself, a letter writing itself, and shoes being polished automatically. Maybe most impressively, the two main hotel guests are shown having a shave and having their hair brushed and styled, all automatically. It’s pretty funny and an impressive effect, although it’s obviously tame by today’s standards. Indeed, some of the sequences go on for a quite a long time–particularly when a travel bag’s contents unpack themselves and automatically sort into a cupboard–a product of these filming techniques still being quite new at the time. It wasn’t the very first time anybody did this stuff, but it’s kind of close.
It’s said that the movie may have been inspired by an earlier movie called The Haunted Hotel, where similar things happened. While in that case it was all down to supernatural circumstances, here we are definitely in the realm of some sort of science fiction, as all of the hotel’s special functions are operated via various control panels. In the end, a drunken hotel employee presses a whole bunch of switches to produce the movie’s final gag, when everything (and everybody) just starts flying around everywhere in absolute chaos. It’s a great bit.
Watching this movie after seeing Méliès’ Le Voyage à travers l’impossible, it’s natural to compare the two, since they are both from the same basic time period and are part of the same overall genre. They are notably different, however. Le Voyage feels like the film equivalent of a theatrical experience–we aren’t fooled by any of the illusions, but we are in awe of the way they seem to be presented “live” in front of us.
El Hotel‘s animations, on the other hand, draw attention to the cinematic quality of the work–the things we are seeing could only happen on film. That’s not to say that Méliès’ work is less cinematic, I’m just talking about the impressions the movies make most strongly–one feels more like stage magic, one feels more like movie magic.
The actual story of El Hotel is also a bit clearer, perhaps just by virtue of being simpler. Le Voyage has a lot going on that is a bit tricky to understand due to the lack of spelled-out information given, but El Hotel doesn’t really need that kind of exposition. Some guests have come to a hotel, and they marvel at its modern conveniences–until movie’s crazy ending, anyway.
El Hotel Electrico is quirky bit of early cinema, and if that’s something you want to know more about, it’s worth the nine and half minutes of time it’d take to wath it.
