Although Georges Méliès (1861-1938) favoured extravaganzas, he turned his hand to all the genres that existed in film including reconstructed topical events, historical film, drama, comedy, opera, advertising film, war scenes and antique and mythological scenes as in this film.  But whatever the subject he dealt with, from 1896 Méliès tackled cinema as if it was a stage in a theatre.  For him the screen was delimited by the frame of a stage and the title of the film was the same as the curtain.  Furthermore Méliès placed his motionless camera as if it was the eye of a spectator sitting in the middle of the seats.  The stage area was organised to give the cinema public a privileged viewpoint, thus obtaining a unique viewpoint.

In Le Juif errant (The Wandering Jew) Méliès divided the film into three pictures that corresponded to three decor changes.  In his “cinematic screen” he staged the techniques that he had borrowed from his theatre of illusion (freeze frame, collage, double exposure providing a number of special effects) to aid the narration and reinforce the words’ dramatic intensity.  As the camera doesn’t follow the hero as he moves around the onstage actor must exaggerate his acting and gesticulate to best express the character’s feelings and give him some dimension.

To optimise the decor’s flexibility and remedy the vagaries of the weather and the light, Méliès had the first special studio for film making built in Montreuil-sous-Bois in 1897. He took photographic studios as a model and drew up the plan of a big room with lots of windows on all sides covered with a glass roof.  The part where the actors act is lit from the front by day.  This part is equipped with trapdoors, traps, rising buffers for the apparitions, decorative flagpoles and winches as you’d find on a magical theatre stage.  With its growing success over the years the studio expanded to be able to handle increasingly complex subjects like his first major extravaganza, A trip to the moon, which was screened all around the world.

The original music for this film was composed by Antonio Coppola in 2009.