Georges Méliès

Abstract

Georges Méliès (b. 1861–d. 1938) was a magician and a French cinema pioneer with an extensive, inventive, and protean body of work. His films have been celebrated for both their technical innovations and their imaginary worlds, having at times a fantastic air and at others the appearance of fairy plays. The son of a manufacturer who made his fortune in the production of luxury footwear, in the 1880s Méliès went against his father’s wishes by learning the art of magic. With his share of the family business, he acquired and from 1888 to 1914 ran a famous Parisian theatre specializing in magic, the Théâtre Robert-Houdin. Méliès worked mostly behind the scenes, where his administrative activities went hand in hand with the creation of a repertoire of illusions. Keeping a foot in the magic field as president of the Chambre syndicale de la prestidigitation from 1904 to 1934, he became interested in the cinematograph early on, and added films to his theatre’s programming in April 1896. From 1896 to 1912 he worked intensively in the manufacture of films, employing an artisanal mode of production: he took on the roles of author, draftsman, painter, actor, and director, and he financed his own work. Distancing himself from the Lumière model, Méliès preferred to produce “artificially arranged scenes” in the studio he built in 1897, and later in a second studio built in 1907. Although his output of around 520 films was extremely varied, he specialized in “fantastic pictures” based on both stage tricks and the reiteration of these tricks thanks to the technical possibilities of cinema. In 1902, his film A Trip to the Moon was seen around the world, but largely at Méliès’ expense because of the massive pirating of the film in the United States. As chair of two international congresses of film producers in Paris in 1908 and 1909, Méliès helped organize the film industry, but new production, distribution, and exhibition methods forced him to suspend the manufacture of films in 1909. He made a final six films for the Pathé company in the years 1911 and 1912. During the First World War, he acted in dramatic and lyric plays in his second studio, which was converted into the Théâtre des Variétés artistiques from 1917 to 1923. When he was rediscovered in the mid-1920s, numerous filmmakers paid him tribute (René Clair, Abel Gance, Hans Richter, etc.), and he himself contributed to valorizing his work.