The Famous Box Trick is a 1898

1898 in film

-Events:*May 19 - Vitagraph is founded in New York.*Birt Acres invents the first amateur format, Birtac, by splitting 35 mm film into two halves of 17.5 mm.-Films released in 1898:*The Ball Game*The Nearsighted School Teacher...

 French

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 short

Short subject

A short film is any film not long enough to be considered a feature film. No consensus exists as to where that boundary is drawn: the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences defines a short film as "an original motion picture that has a running time of 40 minutes or less, including all...

 black-and-white

Black-and-white

Black-and-white, often abbreviated B/W or B&W, is a term referring to a number of monochrome forms in visual arts.Black-and-white as a description is also something of a misnomer, for in addition to black and white, most of these media included varying shades of gray...

 silent

Silent film

A silent film is a film with no synchronized recorded sound, especially with no spoken dialogue. In silent films for entertainment the dialogue is transmitted through muted gestures, pantomime and title cards...

 trick film, directed by Georges Méliès

Georges Méliès

Georges Méliès , full name Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès, was a French filmmaker famous for leading many technical and narrative developments in the earliest cinema. He was very innovative in the use of special effects...

, featuring a stage magician who transforms one boy into two with the aid of an axe. The film, "harks back to stage magic," and, according to Michael Brooke of BFI Screenonline, "can be viewed as a kind of sequel to The Vanishing Lady (Escamotage d’une dame chez Robert-Houdin, 1896) in that it reprises many of the same elements."

Synopsis

A stage magician conjures up a dove which he then places in a box with a set of clothes. A boy appears from the box, who the magician divides into two with an axe. The two boys squabble and the magician transforms one into a paper tissue which he shreds and places the other back in the box. The magician then destroys the box with a hammer to show the boy has vanished. The boy reappears and is transformed into flags. The magician then disappears in a puff of smoke only to re-enter through a door to take his bow.