The baron is dining with his guests in aristocratic splendor. The shot is framed as a tight medium shot, suggesting the influence of Pathé, who released and distributed the film. The baron has eaten too well and must be escorted to bed by the guests. They leave him on his bed before an enormous gift mirror. It is a real mirror that reflects the opposite side of the room and its chandeliers, an innovation requiring a two-sided set and careful attention to camera placement. The view in the mirror dessolves into a ballroom where elegant couples are dancing a minuet. Méliès has largely abandoned superimposed matte work in favor of a stage within a stage. The lighting is carefully modeled and the props and costumes have seldom been as elegant as they are in this film. As a result of these two features the film gains in clarity and steadiness, but loses some of the dreamlike surreality. The scene changes from the dreamer observing the festive dancers to Cleopatra reclining on her royal coach. Egyptian attendants repulse Münchhausen's attentions, tossing him back on his bed. The splendors of Egypt dissolve into Three Graces. The baron enters the scene again, circles admiringly around the beauties. They turn into beasts who trample on the baron's overly full stomach then change into devils who threaten with pitchforks. Münchhausen wakes up and comforts himself by checking the solidity of his mirror before going back to sleep. His bed begins bouncing around, carrying him into a delicate Chinese landscape. Acrobatic insects begin tumbling over his bed and one crouches on his stomach, resembling the creature in Fuseli's painting, "Nightmare. Bed and insects glide offstage as the baron rises up before and encrusted fountain adorned by five lovelies. Two of the women kneel and jets of water spurt from their mouths. Summer turns to winter chill and snow. The dreamer next finds himself in front of Colubia, who proptly sinks into the ocean, leaving her painted radiance behind. This may be Méliès' wry comment on Star Films' disastrous adventure in America. A burst of smoke and Münchhausen finds himself in Hell beset by demons. A wonderful winged dragon marionette begins cavorting about. The demons put the terrified baron back in his bed. The winged dragon reappears, enlarged, followed by an octopus-tentacled woman who descends from a spider web. These two scenes are photographically superimposed. Next, the baron is fired upon by revolutionary troops. A grotesque moon face appears in the mirror waggling its head and long, obscene tongue. The moon's nose grows into an elephant's trunk as the moon becomes a demented elephant wearing beads and horn-rimmed glasses. The elephant sprays the baron with water. Münchhausen picks up an armoire and throws it at the vision, which disappears as the armoire goes through the mirror with Münchhausen tumbling after it. Suddenly the baron is awake, impaled through his weskit on an iron fence outside of his home, the exterior of the house at Montreuil. Servants run in and help him down. The morning finds the battered baron in front of another mirror feeling his liver and searing off rich food. (texten ur Artificially Arranged Scenes. The Films of Georges Méliès av John Frazer 1979)
