While visiting the Museo Picasso Málaga, we unexpectedly encountered a small piece of film history: Un Homme de Tête (1898) by the French filmmaker and magician Georges Méliès.
The film lasts barely a minute. Méliès sits at a table, removes his own head, places it on the table, and then calmly grows a new one. Soon several identical heads are singing and moving next to each other like a strange little choir.
For audiences in 1898, this must have looked like pure magic. In reality Méliès used simple but ingenious techniques such as multiple exposures and stop-camera editing—methods that made the camera itself a magician’s tool.
Seeing this playful experiment in the Picasso Museum makes sense in an unexpected way. Artists of the early twentieth century were fascinated by new ways of showing reality. Just as Méliès multiplied his own head on screen, Pablo Picasso would later fragment faces and perspectives in his paintings.
Different media, but the same spirit: curiosity, experimentation, and the joy of discovering what images can do.
And all of it captured in a film that lasts barely a minute.
