RetroClips

Segundo de Chomon is often called the Spanish Melies, and The Electric Hotel is his best-known surviving trick film, built almost entirely from stop-motion effects where luggage packs itself, boots lace themselves, and hair styles itself with no operator ever entering the frame. Working independently of Melies's own studio, Chomon achieved some of the era's most convincing object animation through frame-by-frame pixilation, painstakingly repositioning each item a fraction at a time between exposures. The film's premise, an imaginary hotel where every mundane task happens automatically, reads almost like an accidental prediction of a century of home-automation advertising.