It’s Christmas, folks, as you may have noticed, and the Bioscope is closing its doors for a few days while it spends time with the nearest and dearest, trying very hard to be Bob Cratchit and not Ebeneezer Scrooge. I hope you all have a merry Christmas yourselves, and the happiest of new years.

To mark the season, sort of, and by way of tribute to the man whose accomplishments have been so rightly championed all year, here’s Conquest of my Poles, Jean Lambert-wild and Jeremiah McDonald’s droll interpretation/interpolation of Georges Méliès’s À la conquête du pôle (1912). A film with all the visual wit and ingenuity of a Méliès original.

The duo have made other examples of what they call ‘screen calentures‘ in which a bewildered modern figure (McDonald) intrudes upon a silent film landscape, as in the pleasingly clever Keaton and I in which McDonald travels through assorted classic sequences from Keaton’s films.

Or try out My Serpentine, where he joins in with a 1890s hand-coloured serpentine dancer in a joyous fin de siècle knees-up.

Here’s hoping we all have as much fun over the holidays.