The Man with the Rubber Head

Méliès advertised it as a grande nouveauté, Star Film 382-383, and it remains the trick that looks most like a thought. In a laboratory he sets a living copy of his own head on a table, attaches a bellows, and inflates it until the face is colossal. He deflates it, then lets an assistant try. The assistant overblows; the head explodes. The inflation is not a zoom. Méliès built a ramp, sat in a pulley-controlled chair, and had an assistant refocus the lens as he rolled toward a locked-off camera, superimposing the approach onto a pre-shot set so the head appeared to sit on the table and grow. Historians still argue whether this is an early close-up. It is something stranger: a close-up that the character himself is manufacturing.