title: The Mermaid (1904 film)
text: # The Mermaid (1904 film)
  
  The Mermaid (French: La Sirène) is a 1904 French short silent film by Georges Méliès. It was sold by Méliès's Star Film Company and is numbered 593–595 in its catalogues.
  
  Méliès himself plays the gentleman in the film. The special effects include stage machinery, pyrotechnics, substitution splices, multiple exposures, dissolves, and what reads as a traveling shot (though in fact it is the action wheeling toward the camera, not the reverse). Film critic William B. Parrill suspects this film's visuals influenced Vasili Goncharov's The Water Nymph (1910).
  
  