La charité du prestidigitateur

A poor man asks for alms and the well dressed man opens his suitcase and produces a table laden with food, a chef to gratify his particular demands and even a new set of clothes.

Although this may appear to be a knock off of a Melies picture, Alice Guy, who may have been not only the first woman director, but the first motion picture director, does things differently. Her actors behave in a less flamboyant fashion and the attitudes evinced are distinctly middle class. Most important, while Melies shot almost all his movies in the carefully controlled environment of his film studio in Montreuil, Madame Guy shot this one out of doors. This caused a lot of technical problems, including issues of lighting, but also yielded a much more realistic-looking movie.

More magical in Alice Guy's "The Magician's Alms" than the stop-substitutions for the magician's trick effects, or the trite resolution of not being paid alms for his work, is the use of depth of field in the opening scene of this three-scene narrative. It's a nice shot. The magician is already framed from a very long perspective and through a doorway and past the outside tables and chairs, from inside a bar. The composition is further demarcated by the bar, with a couple tenders behind it, while another figure is to the right of frame partially obscured by the outside wall. Farther back still is the reflections of their backs through the glass window at the other end of the establishment, for which we can make out some window writing. That's more layers than there are scenes throughout. The basic continuity and those tired tricks of splicing the film doesn't have the same magic--after all, that technique was already a decade old by the time this early Gaumont film was made, having been employed as early as for the Edison production "The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots" (1895) and since reused by cine-magician Georges Méliès hundreds of times over.