Beystiman It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Sameer Callahan It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Cristal The movie really just wants to entertain people.

Francene Odetta It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Hitchcoc Not only is this a clever use of the limited technology of the time, it is an utterly hilarious minute. Melies plays the main character, a man who is able to remove his own head and put it on a table. Now there are two heads, but that's only the beginning. I see this guy sitting up nights, imagining what this new form of entertainment can do and then improvising how he can manage it.

Chrissie Georges Melies was a stage magician before turning to film, so it's no surprise that he plays a stage magician. But in his films, Georges does what no stage magician could possibly do.In "Un homme de tete", Melies repeatedly takes his head off and grows a new one three times, then gets out a banjo and sings a quartet with bodyless selves. The fluidity and aplomb with which he performs is nothing short of remarkable.While many early films are primarily interesting for their historical value, Melies' transcend mere museum pieces. Like Buster Keaton's silent films, they are timeless and retain their charm -- in this case, well over 100 years later.

Michael_Elliott Four Troublesome Heads, The (1898) *** (out of 4) aka Un Homme de teteClassic Meiles film has him playing a magician who removes his head three different times and lays them on a table where they naturally act up. This is perhaps one of the director's most popular films and it's easy to see why as the effects are pretty good and the film is just fun throughout. The highlight is without a doubt the scene where Melies removes him head and then throws it up into the air where it eventually falls back into place. I think the distraction of the heads could have been done better and with more imagination but overall this is another delightful film from the magical Melies.

Cineanalyst "The Four Troublesome Heads" is one of the earliest surviving films by Georges Méliès to employ the multiple exposure technique, or superimposition effect. He used the technique earlier in "The Cabinet of Mephistopheles" (Le Cebinet de Méphistophélès)(1897), but it appears to be lost. (There's also a brief superimposition in "The Magician" (Le magicien)(1898), for a head on a stand.) It's uncertain whether Méliès or George Albert Smith introduced the trick to cinema, although what seems to be the earliest relevant film that I know of is the aforementioned film by Méliès. Smith tried to patent "the invention of double exposure applied to animated photography", but that was frivolous since the technique was already in use in still photography. Somewhere from around July to October 1898, Smith made at least six films that employed the trick. In "The Corsican Brothers", "Photographing a Ghost" and "The Mesmerist, or Body and Soul", Smith used multiple exposures to make transparent ghosts. He also used the technique, coupled with a masked camera lens, to create a scene-within-a-scene vision in "The Corscican Brothers", "Cinderella", "Faust and Mephistopheles" and "Santa Claus". In regards to masking the camera, Smith, indeed, seems to have introduced it to motion pictures. Méliès would later use masking for his multiple-exposure trick films, such as "A Mysterious Portrait" (Le Portrait Mystérieux) (1899) and "The One-Man Band" (L' Homme orchestre) (1900). Nevertheless, the uncertainty is somewhat moot given that Méliès and Smith are known to have had discussions around the time of these inventions, and both filmmakers were leaders in exploring the possibilities of motion pictures.The superimpositions of "The Four Troublesome Heads" are not for ghosts, but, rather, are for four cloned heads of same texture; this effect of same texture is achieved with the black background. In this film, Méliès accomplished the headless and no body effects by masking himself with black clothing. Additionally, a dummy head was used while the Méliès with a body moved the heads to the table. For these transitions, Méliès employed his second essential trick of stop-substitutions (a.k.a. substitution splicing). The camera operator stopped the camera – the scene was rearranged – and filming resumed. They are essentially jump cuts touched up by post-production splicing. Méliès had already used the stop-substitution trick in such films as "The Vanishing Lady" (Escamotage d'une dame au théâtre Robert Houdin) (1896), and it would continue to be probably his most used trick during his film-making career.Yet, these tricks are only of a technical and filmic history interest without Méliès's unique showmanship and enthusiasm, which was largely responsible for the immense popularity of his films in his own day and the preference of today's audiences for the films of Méliès over those by other early filmmakers. Méliès was, indeed, more cultured and absorbed with theatrical traditions than were his contemporaries. Later, filmmakers would surpass much of his theatrical style, but at the time of this film, he was leading the way with it.