http://www.brevestoriadelcinema.org/02-il-cinema-delle-origini/
The One Man Band (French: L'Homme-Orchestre) is a 1900 French short silent film directed by Georges Méliès. It was released by Méliès's Star Film Company and is numbered 262–263 in its catalogs.
o create the illusion of seven identical musicians, the film required seven simultaneous multiple exposures; only one other known Méliès film, The Melomaniac, uses so many exposures at once. In addition, the effect required careful coordination in timing and body position between exposures. First, Méliès walked down a line, arranging the seven chairs in a row and sitting in the last one; then, the film was rewound in the camera six times to allow Méliès to play the part of each musician. While filming each musician's part, all other chairs were masked from the lens to prevent them from being exposed. The process was repeated until the entire band had been filmed, all on a single strip of film. In 1906, Méliès commented on the difficulty of multiple exposure: "you go into a rage when after three quarters of an hour of work and attention, a sprocket rips forcing you to start all over again, repair being impossible."
The other effects in the film were created with stage machinery, pyrotechnics, and the substitution splice. A similar effect had previously been created by Méliès in his 1898 film The Triple Lady, in which two copies of a woman emerge from her body and sit beside her. The theme of multiplying chairs returned in Méliès's later film The Black Imp, although that film uses no multiple exposures.
