Le Tunnel sous la manche ou Le cauchemar franco-anglais

Another curious approach to documenting reality is Méliès' development of hypotheses about the possible causes of certain events. In this image, French President Armand Fallières and King Edward VII of England meet on a train. At night, the two have a fanciful dream about the construction of an undersea tunnel under the English Channel. As the two trains collide, the two politicians awaken and swear that no construction will ever take place. Let us not forget that at that time there were already over a hundred underwater tunnel projects. One of them is the underwater locomotive introduced in 1869 or the “tube bridge” proposed in 1875. In addition to the comic plot, the film is also notable for the fact that surviving copies contain intertitles, which actually began to appear in Méliès's work in the 1900s. (Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival)