The Christmas Dream
The Christmas Dream 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.
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. Méliès appears in the film twice, as a magician and as a beggar.
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. The sustained and 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. Special effects used in the film include stage machinery, substitution splices, and dissolves, which are used partially to help connect adjacent spaces, such as the inside of a church followed by the inside of its bell tower.
