The Kingdom of the Fairies
Le Royaume des fées | |
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File:Royaume des fees.jpg
A frame from the film
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Directed by | Georges Méliès |
Produced by | Georges Méliès |
Written by | Georges Méliès |
Starring | Bleuette Bernon Georges Méliès |
Release dates
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Running time
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320 meters[1] (16-17 minutes) |
Country | France |
Language | Silent |
The Kingdom of the Fairies (French: Le Royaume des fées),[2][3] initially released in the United States as Fairyland, or the Kingdom of the Fairies and in Great Britain as The Wonders of the Deep, or Kingdom of the Fairies, is a 1903 French silent film directed by Georges Méliès.[1] The film is freely adapted from Biche au Bois, a popular stage pantomime that had originated at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin in 1845.[4] Prints of the film survive in the film archives of the British Film Institute and the Library of Congress.[5]
Cast
- Georges Méliès as Prince Bel-Azor[6]
- Marguerite Thévenard as Princess Azurine[6]
- Bleuette Bernon as the fairy Aurora[6]
Release
The Kingdom of the Fairies was released by Méliès's Star Film Company and is numbered 483–498 in its catalogues.[1] (In Méliès's numbering system, films were listed and numbered according to their order of production, and each catalogue number denotes about 20 meters of film.)[7] The film was registered for American copyright at the Library of Congress on 3 September 1903.[1]
According to the Méliès scholar John Frazer, the film was "the most ambitious Star Film production to date" and "was widely distributed and heavily promoted."[4] An original film score was prepared for the film's projection in larger cities.[4] As with at least 4% of Méliès's entire output (including such films as A Trip to the Moon, The Impossible Voyage, The Rajah's Dream, and The Barber of Seville), some prints were individually hand-colored and sold at a higher price.[8]
Reception
The Kingdom of the Fairies, like Méliès's similarly spectacular films A Trip to the Moon (1902) and The Impossible Voyage (1904), was one of the most popular films of the first few years of the twentieth century.[9] When Thomas L. Tally debuted the film at his Lyric Theater in Los Angeles in 1903 (billing it as "Better than A Trip to the Moon"), the Los Angeles Times called the film "an interesting exhibit of the limits to which moving picture making can be carried in the hands of experts equipped with time and money to carry out their devices."[10]
The film theorist Jean Mitry called it "undoubtedly Méliès's best film, and in any case the most intensely poetic."[11]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
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- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Frazer 1979, p. 118
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- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 Malthête & Mannoni 2008, p. 148
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- ↑ Solomon 2011, p. 3
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External links
- Lua error in Module:WikidataCheck at line 28: attempt to index field 'wikibase' (a nil value). The Kingdom of the Fairies at IMDb
- The Kingdom of the Fairies is available for free download at the Internet Archive
- Use dmy dates from May 2015
- Pages with broken file links
- 1903 films
- Silent films
- Articles containing French-language text
- Articles with Internet Archive links
- French films
- French silent short films
- French-language films
- Black-and-white films
- Films directed by Georges Méliès
- 1900s short films
- Fairies and sprites in popular culture