Rip's Dream

Rip's Dream (French: La Légende de Rip Van Vinckle [sic]) is a 1905 French silent film directed by Georges Méliès.

Rip's Dream is based on two sources: the original "Rip Van Winkle" story by Washington Irving, and the 1882 operetta version of Rip Van Winkle (with music by Robert Planquette and libretto by Henri Meilhac, Philippe Gille, and Henry Brougham Farnie). Two elements, the mysterious snake and the village idiot, are Méliès's own creations.

Méliès himself plays Rip. His son André appears as a village child carrying a large lantern. (Rip's friends' lanterns are in fact Bastille Day celebratory lanterns with the initials RF, for République française, clearly marked upon them.)

Like many of Méliès's films made around 1905, Rip's Dream revels in theatricality. While some of Méliès's earlier major films, such as The Impossible Voyage and The Kingdom of the Fairies, had experimented with innovative cinematic continuity techniques, these later films are based fully upon the storytelling traditions of the stage. According to recollections by André Méliès, the snake was a "gadget" his father had brought back from England, worked by wires and springs. The snake scene was done on a raked stage to allow the gadget's movements to be seen more clearly. Some of the ghosts in the dream sequence are actors wearing white sheets; others are silhouettes cut out of cardboard. Other effects in the film were created using stage machinery, substitution splices, and dissolves.