Happy Birthday, George Méliès! Born today in 1861 as Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès, this French illusionist, actor and film director led many technical and narrative developments in the earliest days of cinema.
Méliès was an early French experimenter with motion pictures, famous for his many innovations in motion film.
He was one of the first to film fictional narratives, and is regarded as the inventor of special effects in film. His films were among the first to use such techniques as double exposure, stop-motion, and slow motion.
Born in Paris, France, Méliés was the third child of wealthy parents due to a high-quality boot factory.
Years later, Méliès attended the Lycée Michelet from age seven until it was bombed during the Franco-Prussian War; he was then sent to the prestigious Parisian secondary school Lycée Louis-le-Grand.
In his memoirs, Méliès emphasized his formal, classical education, in contrast to accusations early in his career that most filmmakers had been "illiterates incapable of producing anything artistic."
However, he acknowledged that his creative instincts usually outweighed intellectual ones:
"The artistic passion was too strong for him, and while he would ponder a French composition or Latin verse, his pen mechanically sketched portraits or caricatures of his professors or classmates, if not some fantasy palace or an original landscape that already had the look of a theatre set."
Often disciplined by teachers for covering his notebooks and textbooks with drawings, the young Méliès began building cardboard puppet theatres at age ten.
Afterwards, his parents sent him to London to work as a clerk for a family friend and to improve his English.
While there, Méliés began to visit the Egyptian Hall. From this, he developed a lifelong passion for stage magic.
While working at the family factory, Méliès continued to cultivate his interest in stage magic, attending performances at the Théâtre Robert-Houdin.
He also began taking magic lessons from French merchant and manufacturer of magic devices Émile Voisin, who gave him the opportunity to perform his first public shows.
After seeing the Lumière brothers' films in 1895, Méliès became a filmmaker and made over five hundred short films between 1896 and 1913.
Méliès was well-known for the use of special effects, popularizing such techniques as substitution splices, multiple exposures, time-lapse photography, dissolves, and hand-painted color. He was also one of the first filmmakers to use storyboards.
His first two films both involve strange, surreal journeys somewhat in the style of Jules Verne, and are considered among the most important early science fiction films, though their approach is closer to fantasy.
In the early 1900s, Méliès wrote, produced, directed and starred in the most notable of his features.
This was the fourteen-minute 1902 French silent black and white sci-fi/adventure short film 'Le Voyage dans la Lune' ('A Trip to the Moon'). It is considered one of the first science fiction film.
The short film was inspired by Verne's 1865 novel (De la terre à la lune) (From the Earth to the Moon) and its 1870 sequel Autour de la Lune (Around the Moon).
In 'A Trip to the Moon', Méliès stars as Professor Barbenfouillis. This was a character similar to the astronomer he played in his three-minute 1898 French silent black and white fantasy/short film 'Le Reve D'un Astronome'('The Astronomer's Dream' also known as 'The Moon at One Meter').
Set in turn-of-the-century France, Professor Barbenfouillis (Méliès) is the President of the Astronomer's Club and proposes an expedition to the Moon.
A space vehicle in the form of a large artillery shell is built in his laboratory, and he uses it to launch six men (including himself) on a voyage to the Moon. The vehicle is shot out of a large cannon into space and hits the Man in the Moon in the eye.
Upon landing, the group explores the Moon's surface before going to sleep. As they dream, they are observed by the Moon goddess Phoebe, played by French film actress Bleuette Bernon, who causes it to snow.
Later, while underground, the group are attacked and captured by a group of Moon aliens, known as Selenites, played by acrobats from the Parisian cabaret music hall Folies Bergère.
Taken before the Selenite king, the group manages to escape (by hitting some Selenites with an umbrella who then puff into a cloud of smoke) and are chased back to their spaceship.
Then, with the aid of a rope attached to the spaceship, the men, along with a Selenite, fall from the Moon back to Earth, landing in the ocean (where a superimposed fish tank creates the illusion of the deep ocean).
Eventually, the spaceship is towed ashore and the returning adventurers are celebrated by the townspeople.
At only fourteen minutes, it was Méliès' longest film up to that date and had cost ten thousand francs to produce.
Upon release, 'A Trip to the Moon' an enormous success in France and around the world, and Méliès sold both black-and-white and hand-painted coloured versions to exhibitors.
The film made Méliès famous in the United States, where such producers had produced illegal copies and made large amounts of money from them.
These included Thomas Edison, German-American motion picture pioneer Siegmund Lubin and pioneer of the American motion picture industry William Selig.
'A Trip to the Moon' was an internationally popular success on its release, and was extensively pirated by other studios, especially in the United States.
Its unusual length, lavish production values, innovative special effects, and emphasis on storytelling were markedly influential on other filmmakers and ultimately on the development of narrative film as a whole.
However, this copyright violation caused Méliès to open a Star Films office in New York City, New York with his brother, French film director Gaston Méliès, in charge.
Gaston had been unsuccessful in the shoe business and agreed to join his more successful brother in the film industry.
In 1913, after the bankruptcy of his company Star Film, Méliès worked in obscurity in a toy store in a Paris train station.
In 1924, French journalist Georges-Michel Coissac managed to track Méliès down and interview him for a book on cinema history.
Coissac, who hoped to underline the importance of French pioneers to early film, was the first film historian to demonstrate Méliès's importance to the industry.
In December 1925, Méliès was largely forgotten and financially ruined. This was when he married his long-time mistress, the French film actress Charlotte Lucie Marie Adèle Stephanie Adrienne Faës (known by her stage name Jehanne d'Alcy).
The couple scraped together a living by working at a small candy and toy stand d'Alcy owned in the main hall of the Gare Montparnasse.
Around the same time, the gradual rediscovery of Méliès' career began.
In 1926, spurred on by Coissac's book, the French magazine Ciné-Journal, also located Méliès, now working at the Gare Montparnasse, and commissioned a memoir from him.
By the late 1920s, several journalists had begun to research Méliès and his life's work, creating new interest in him. As his prestige began to grow in the film world, he was given more recognition.
In December 1929, a gala retrospective of his work was held at the Parisian concert hall Salle Pleyel. In his memoirs, Méliès said that at the event he "experienced one of the most brilliant moments of his life."
Scholars have commented upon the extensive use of pataphysical and anti-imperialist satire in 'A Trip to the Moon'.
They had also commented on its wide influence on later filmmakers and its artistic significance within the French theatrical féerie tradition.
Though the 'A Trip to the Moon' disappeared into obscurity after Méliès's retirement from the film industry, it was rediscovered around 1930, when Méliès's importance to the history of cinema was beginning to be recognized by film devotees.
Eventually Méliès was made a Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur, the medal of which was presented to him in October 1931 by one-half of the French filmmaking brothers Louis Lumière.
It was Lumière himself who said that Méliès was the "creator of the cinematic spectacle."
However, the enormous amount of praise that he was receiving did not help his livelihood or decrease his poverty.
In a letter written to French inventor and filmmaker Eugène Lauste, Méliès wrote that "luckily enough, I am strong and in good health.
But it is hard to work fourteen hours a day without getting my Sundays or holidays, in an icebox in winter and a furnace in summer."
In 1932, the Cinema Society arranged a place for Méliès, his granddaughter Madeleine and Jeanne d'Alcy at La Maison du Retraite du Cinéma, the film industry's retirement home in Orly, a commune in the southern suburbs of Paris.
Because of this, Méliès was greatly relieved to be admitted to the home and wrote to an American journalist: "My best satisfaction in all is to be sure not to be one day without bread and home!"
In Orly, Méliès worked with several younger directors on scripts for films that never came to be made. Most notably, these included Marcel Carné ('Daybreak', 'Children of Paradise') and Georges Franju '(Eyes Without a Face').
Franju had met Méliès in 1935, along with René Clair ('Le Million', 'Freedom For Us').
in 1936, they rented an abandoned building on the property of the Orly retirement home to store their collection of film prints.
They then entrusted the key to the building to Méliès, and he became the first conservator of what would eventually become the French non-profit film organization Cinémathèque Française.
Although he was never able to make another film after 1912 or stage another theatrical performance after 1923, Méliès continued to draw, write to and advise younger film and theatrical admirers until the end of his life.
By late 1937, Méliès had become very ill. French film archivist and cinephile Henri Langlois (of whom Méliés worked with on some scripts arranged for him to be admitted to the Léopold Bellan Hospital in Paris.
Langlois had become close to Méliès, and he and Franju visited him in the hospital shortly before his death.
When they arrived, Méliès showed them one of his last drawings of a champagne bottle with the cork popped and bubbling over.
He then told them: "Laugh, my friends. Laugh with me, laugh for me, because I dream your dreams."
The following year, Méliès passed from cancer on January 21, 1938 in Paris, France. He was 76.
Mèliés was later buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery. This is the largest cemetery in Paris.
Due to a variety of factors, roughly two hundred out of over five hundred Méliès' films remain in existence today.
These factors include Méliès' destruction of his original negatives, the French army's confiscation of his prints and the typical deterioration of the majority (an estimated eighty percent) of films made before 1950.
Several of Méliès' new films have occasionally been discovered but the majority that were preserved come from the Library of Congress, due to Gaston submitting paper prints of each frame of all new Star Films in order to preserve copyright.
This was when he set up the American branch of Manufacture de Films pour Cinématographes (often known as the Star Film Company) in 1902.
The most significant creative artist of very early motion pictures, Méliès was the first master filmmaker.
Though most of his films are one century old and counting, they still serve as a source of delight and wonder.
The scene in which the spaceship hits the Man in the Moon's eye would go on to become one of the most iconic images in cinematic history.
At their first revival in 1929, only eight of Méliès' films could be found of the five hundred and twelve subjects he made.
In 2001, through the worldwide cooperation of film collectors and archives, more than two hundred titles are extant and more are being found.
Each new title found is of unique interest, as no filmmaker in history had more to say about demonology, mythos, and the spirit world than Méliès himself; the father of cinematic horror, fantasy, and science fiction.
In 2007, American illustrator and writer Brian Selznick wrote and illustrated the historical fiction children's literature graphic book The Invention of Hugo Cabret.
Martin Scorsese's daughter asked her father to make a film that she could watch.
Scorsese, inspired, made his first family film in the early 2010s. This was the 2011 British/American/French adventure fantasy/drama film 'Hugo'.
The film was adapted for the screen by American playwright, screenwriter, film producer, and television producer John Logan.
'Hugo' is Scorsese's first film shot in 3D, about which the filmmaker remarked, "I found 3D to be really interesting, because the actors were more upfront emotionally. Their slightest move, their slightest intention is picked up much more precisely."
Today, 'A Trip to the Moon' was named one of the 100 Greatest Films of the 20th century by The Village Voice, ranked 84th.
The film remains the best known of the hundreds of films made by Méliès, and the moment in which the capsule lands in the Man in the Moon's eye remains one of the most iconic and frequently referenced images in the history of cinema.
It is widely regarded as the earliest example of the science fiction film genre and, more generally, as one of the most influential films in cinema history.
On May 3, 2018, Google created its first-ever Virtual Reality (VR) / 360° interactive Doodle—created in collaboration with the Google Spotlight Stories, Google Arts & Culture, and Cinémathèque Française teams—celebrating Méliès, the trailblazing French illusionist and film director.
This was due upon the release date of what is considered to be one of his greatest masterpieces: 'À la conquête du pôle' ('The Conquest of the Pole') in 1912.
Méliès pioneered numerous technical and narrative film techniques in the early days of cinema, primarily in the use of special effects and creation of some of the earliest films of the science fiction genre.
Over one century later, we can thank the pioneering mind of Georges Méliès for much of the cinematographic wonder and special effects we see today.
A cartoonist, painter, caricaturist, magician, director of Robert-Houdin theater, set designer, comedian, writer, actor, technician, fantasy enthusiast, visionary of more than five hundred films, and owner of the first glazed studio designed for the cinema.
He was involved in each and every aspects of production for his works, from drawing set concepts to directing actors.
Méliès’ contribution to the seventh art was revolutionary. In a time when cinematography was nascent and almost exclusively documentary-style, Méliès single handedly opened the doors of the dream, the magic, and the fiction.
He had accomplished this fundamental act by uniting the universes of Robert-Houdin with the chronophotography and cinematography of Marey and the Lumière brothers.
The entire body of Méliès' work shines with dynamic fantasy, boundless imagination, and an irresistible jubilation. He brought magic to filmmaking through dozens of tricks and illusions.
The worlds he created were explosive and a unique mixture of phantasmagoria, devilry, trompe-l'oeil, illusions, flames, fumes, and vapors. Méliés was an amazingly agile actor and remarkable mime, and also starred in almost all of his own films.
The magic of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg today could not have been possible without Méliès’ development of techniques across theatrical machinery.
These included pyrotechnics, optical effects, horizontal and vertical dropouts, camera stops, crossfades, overprints, conjuring, editing effects, and color effects on film.
Méliès was fascinated by new technologies and was constantly on the lookout for new inventions.
We could only imagine that he would have been delighted to live in our era, which is so rich with immersive cinema, digital effects, and spectacular images on screen.
Méliès transformed the world of cinema (and our lives!) more than a century ago. He saw film and cameras as more than just tools to capture images. He saw them as vehicles to transport and truly immerse people into a story.
Méliès had been active from 1888–1923.
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