You know me, i’m not one to go try and please the algorhythm, and since there’s no really much in terms of full lenght features trying to adapt the whole Odyssey itself (there is a recent UK production called Itaka: The Return, but even that is mostly focused on the titular return of Odysseus at his home in Itaka after decades, and not much else)…… you know what, we’re going REALLY back this time around.
Not to the 70s miniseries for TV, back to the 1900s, when cinema was in its “puppet stage”… actually, more aptly it’s “parlor trick era”, since today we’re talking about one of the many films (by now not even registering as short films, or shorts) by the profilic primordial magician of cinema, Georges Meliès, which i feel needs no introduction, otherwise this will turn into an introduction to the early days of cinema, but basically, he was a magician in the literal sense, a stage magician but using film as his tool, and to which we owe a LOT of early cinematic special effects, which now look primitive, but sure as hell weren’t when people weren’t used to video footage of any kind.
For the time it must have felt like real magic, to say the least.
Even more impressive, Melies had been doing these films for a decade, so in a way it’s not too surprising this 1905 adaptation isn’t more remembered than his Voyage To The Moon or The Impossible Voyage, despite not being lost or anything like that, quite the opposite, since – as far as i know – this always appeared in the catalogues of production by Melies’ company, Star Films.
Sure as hell it doesn’t help that its original title was L’ilè De Calypso, literally “Calypso’s Island”, even less when it was sold internationally as The Mysterious Island, or given the subtitle of “Ulysse et le geant Polypheme”, Ulysses And The Giant Polyphemus.
So yes, as you could guess from that and the runtime being 4 minutes long, this isn’t an integral adaptation of Homer’s epic, nor nobody could have reasonably expected (or wanted) it to be.
As it had been common (and would continue to be, especially for UK and US cinematic adaptation of Greek epics and mythology), this is basically a mash up of two separate episodes from the original story, those being the 7 years captivity of Odysseus on the island of Ogygia (situated in the Ionian Sea, a bay of the Mediterrean Sea) by the hand of nymph Calypso, and the more famous encounter with the one-eyed giant Polyphemus in its cave near Mount Etna in Sicily.
Odysseus obviously being played by Melies itself, who also plays Polyphemus by basically projecting himself wearing a beard and a prosthetic third eye on his forehead over the cave background, which is kinda disappointing, i guess, i know is the literal 1900s, but couldn’t he have made a face mask to hide his visible closed eyes or something?
Again, remember, this is a actually 3 minutes and 30 seconds long silent film that mashes together two unrelated episodes of the Odyssey, so criticizing it in any detail seems pointless (unless you’re doing a Meliès retrospective, which i am not right now), yet, for my nitpick about Polyphemus face, the eye does move around, most likely operated by string, and the film does get the point of the two stories across, as Odysseus does stab Polyphemus in the eye and blinds him, and he does meet Calypso who wants him to stay, though here Odysseus-Melies does manage to escape right away.
Can’t blame him, after all this was just one of the twenty plus films he released just in 1905 alone.
It’s a cinematic curiosity from the early days that you can quench your “thirst” for easily, since you can find it on Youtube very easily, and i’m sure it’s archived on some other sites and physical collection.
Guess we’ll see how it fares out with Nolan’s upcoming take/version, which launches today in theathers here as well.
Wise Cafe (International) 