Georges Melies

Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès (Paris, December 8, 1861 - Paris, January 21, 1938) was a French illusionist and filmmaker famous for leading many technical and narrative developments at the dawn of of cinematography.

A prolific innovator in the use of special effects, Méliès popularized techniques such as the stop trick and was one of the first filmmakers to use multiple exposures, fast motion, image dissolves, and color film. He was also a pioneer in the use of storyboards.Thanks to his ability to manipulate and transform reality through cinematography, Méliès is remembered as a "movie magician."

Two of his most famous films, Trip to the Moon (1902) and Journey Through the Impossible (1904), narrate strange, surreal and fantastic journeys inspired by by Jules Verne and are considered among the most important and influential films of science fiction cinema. Méliès was also a pioneer of horror cinema with his early film Le Manoir du Diable (1896).

Biography

Beginnings

He was born on December 8, 1861 in his Saint-Martin home in Paris. Theater director and actor, his father was a well-known Parisian shoe businessman. Since childhood he showed interest and ability in drawing. During his stay in England, and because his lack of fluency with the language prevented him from understanding plays, he came into contact with the world of illusionism by frequenting the "Egyptian Hall", a variety hall directed by the celebrated magician Jasper Maskelyne.

He later returns to Paris, and despite his intentions to enter the School of Fine Arts, he is forced by his family to participate in the shoe business. He was in charge of the repair and technological improvement of this industry, showing the mechanical skills that would later be so useful to him. When his father retired from the business, Méliès refused to continue with it, using his part of the deal to buy the theater "Robert Houdin" in 1888, of which he was a regular. visitor.

Theater

With the incessant capacity for work that characterized his life, between 1889 and 1890 he combined his duties as theater director with those of reporter and draftsman for the satirical newspaper La Griffe, where his Cousin Adolphe worked as editor-in-chief. During the following years, illusionism shows are staged in the theater, whose sets, tricks and machinery were mostly created by Méliès himself.

Cinema

The first film studio in France, Méliès in Montreuil (Paris).

When Méliès attended the first performance of the Cinematograph, invited by the Lumières, on December 28, 1895, Méliès was impressed and his inexhaustible mind, which is always concocting ideas, made him launch an offer to include him in his show. Faced with the refusal, Méliès experiments to build his own cinematograph. He finally ends up buying the device from another inventor, Robert William Paul, and in April 1896 he is already making projections in his theater. His desire to create his own films leads him to transform Paul's contraption into a camera with which he shoots his first film, A Game of Cards.

On April 5, 1896, he showed the first films at his Robert Houdin Theater; they were small outdoor scenes, documentaries similar to those of the Lumière brothers. His style evolved rapidly, seeking to create films similar to his illusion shows.

Photogram Journey to the moon.

He was a pioneer in the use of the element substitution trick by stopping the camera, and he was also a pioneer in the multiple exposure of the negative (double overprint), and the fades to black and from black. He invested a large amount of money for the creation of what was considered the first film studio, in which mechanical systems were used to hide areas from the sun, trap doors and other staging mechanisms.

In 1902, he created what is considered his capital work, Viaje a la Luna . In it, the evolution of cinematographic narrative continuity takes a giant step forward, editing the sequence of the cannon firing that takes the astronomers to the Moon, and then staging a set with its animated face, which it grows in reverse travelling and on which the ship/cannonball ends up landing, sticking into it.

Méliès tried to commercially distribute A Trip to the Moon in the United States. Technicians working for Thomas Alva Edison managed to make copies of the film and distributed them throughout North America. Although it was a success, Méliès never received any money for its exploitation. Creator of around five hundred films, the gradual transformation of the industry (monopolized by Edison in the United States and Pathé in France), together with the arrival of the First World War, affected his business, which was declining without remedy. His film negatives were melted down by a creditor, as they contained silver.In 1923, he withdrew from all contact with cinema.

Withdrawal

Georges Méliès in 1938.

From 1915 to 1923, Méliès put on, with the help of his family, numerous shows in one of his two film studios converted into a theater. Plagiarism by various creators of cinematographic works of the time was added to the list of reasons why the director leaves the medium. In 1923, plagued by debt, he had to sell property and leave Montreuil.

In 1925, he met one of his leading actresses, Jehanne d'Alcy, who then ran a toy and candy kiosk at the Montparnasse station. Méliès married her and they began to run the shop together. There he will be recognized later by Léon Druhot, director of Ciné-Journal , who rescued him from oblivion. Since 1925, his work was rediscovered by the French cinematographic avant-garde, especially by the surrealists, who vindicated his figure to the point that Méliès was recognized with the Legion of Honor in 1931 for his entire career.

In 1932, he found himself in the Château d'Orly, the retirement home of the Mutual Society of Cinema (an institution founded in 1921 by Léon Brézillon, president of the French union of film producers), and there he will live the rest of his days with his wife Jeanne d'Alcy. He died at the Léopold Bellan hospital in Paris and his remains rest in the Père-Lachaise cemetery.

Shortly before Méliès' death in 1938, Henri Langlois, creator of the French Cinematheque, recovered and restored some of his films. Georges Méliès was the great creator of spectacle and fantasy cinema, taking the step towards the creation of a fictional language for cinema that the Lumière's stills lacked. Since 1946, the Méliès prize has been awarded annually for the best French film.

Filmography

Pop Culture

The Tonight, Tonight music video by The Smashing Pumpkins is inspired by the silent film A Trip to the Moon.

The 2011 film Hugo by director Martin Scorsese, which is based on Brian Selznick's novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, is a tribute to this great illusionist of the cinema. In it Méliès is played by British actor Ben Kingsley.

In the novel The Mechanics of the Heart, by Mathias Malzieu, the story of Méliès is partially narrated, who intervenes as a secondary character.

The video Heaven for Everyone, by the English group Queen, contains images from the films A Trip to the Moon, Voyage through the Impossible (Voyage à travers l'impossible) and L'Éclipse du Soleil en Pleine Lune (The Eclipse of the Sun at Full Moon).

On May 3, 2018, the Google search engine dedicated the first 360º interactive doodle to him to commemorate the release of the film À la conquête du Pôle (To the conquest of the Pole) which premiered on May 3, 1912.

Further reading

• Gubern, Roman (1998). «The era of the pioneers». History of cinema (5th edition). Lumen. pp. 21-62. ISBN 84-264-1179-7. |fechaacceso= requires |url= (help)