The Brahmin and the Butterfly

Méliès as a Brahmin who finds a giant chrysalis, waits, and is rewarded with a woman who was a butterfly, or a butterfly who was a woman. Star Film, 1901, catalogue no. 357 to 358. Hand-colored, two minutes, a transformation trick that is also a seduction. The worm, the cocoon, the emergence: Méliès treating metamorphosis as a stage illusion he can do in camera. It is slight, and it is the whole Méliès method in miniature: a man in a robe, a box, a woman who appears because the film says she can.