Today, world cinema has achieved remarkable pictorial effects that not only recreate reality, but can also create unreality that is unattainable for human perception. But to achieve this, cinema has come a long way in innovating in the ideas and technologies associated with famous people. One of them is Georges Melies.
He is called the “wizard of cinema” because he was the first to “upload” the audience to the moon and present a new artistic reality on the screen. In 2011, Hollywood revived his film “Journey to the Moon”, and in 2018 Google honored the name of Georges Melies with a logo dedicated to one of his latest films – “The Conquest of the Pole”.
Considered lost, the color copy of Georges Melies’ Journey to the Moon was saved by digital restoration and screened at the opening of the Cannes Film Festival. This is how France paid tribute to the pioneer of French cinema, Georges Melies. The 140-second video showed film techniques he first used in cinema.
And if the Lumiere brothers go down in history as the founders of cinema and one of the first screenwriters, directors and cameramen, creators of the camera and the color film, Melies can rightly be called the “wizard” who continues their innovative line of a uniquely resourceful for your time way. The Lumière brothers’ father owned a photography studio where the two future inventors could experiment. They were the first to capture a moving image, and they made sure that from static photography, humanity already had a method for “living” motion. A new art is being born – cinema.
But at first the Lumiere brothers saw their invention as something that had no future. Only then did they reconsider and refuse to sell their patent to Georges Melies, who wanted to turn film production into an industry.
Georges Melies began experimenting with capturing motion from a single point, i.e. he makes a “moving theater”, but his merits are much greater than that – both figuratively and ideologically. According to film critics, Melies is the creator of the attraction cinema, ie the cinema that the viewer marvels at and admires the picture on the screen.
Melies, can rightly be called the creator of artistic unreality. Impressive multimedia experiments in our time would not be possible without the selfless search for people like the brothers Lumiere and Georges Melies.
It is their innovative ideas that make it possible to harmonize image, sound and effects as a whole. Cinema has come a long way, and in this long history the name of Georges Melies shines with its own irresistible light.
Georges Melies was born on December 8, 1861 in Paris, France. This year marks the 160th anniversary of the birth of this famous man.
Marie-Georges-Jean Melies was born into the family of wealthy manufacturer Louis Melies, owner of a shoe factory chain. He has shown artistic inclinations since he was very young. He plays in a puppet theater and draws cartoons at school. He was sent to study in London, where in his spare time he did not miss the performances of the famous illusionists John Neville Maskelain and George Cook.
On his return to Paris, Melies had no choice but to start working in his father’s factories. From time to time he published his cartoons in the Grif newspaper. His desire to engage in the art of illusion on stage disappointed his father. Only after the death of Louis Melies, George can decide for himself what he will continue to do. He sold his share of the family business to his brothers, and invested the money in the purchase of the Robert-Uden Theater. There he puts the modern “extravaganzas” – short plays with a fantastic story and a little “flat” humor to entertain the audience.
In 1895, the young man saw for the first time the Lumiere brothers’ cinematographic apparatus, which could simultaneously record and screen films, and was very excited about the invention. He is ready to buy the machine immediately, but his brothers refuse.
This makes him ambitious and Melies keeps looking. He managed to get a movie machine from the British inventor Robert Paul. Initially, he used it to screen films during the breaks of his theatrical productions. Until he came up with the idea that the movie camera has the ability to “create worlds.”
Georges Melies was one of the first authors of short stories in cinema, as well as one of the first inventors of special visual effects in films. He was the first to use the so-called double exposure (i.e. picture overlay), still image and slow motion (cadence). According to experts, Melies’ film Journey to the Moon once evoked the same experience that we viewers experienced today with the advent of Star Wars in the 1970s or Avatar in more recent times.
Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès was a professional “magician”, i.e. illusionist. He was the first to apply the art of illusion to cinema. Conversely, use the progress of cinema to create the illusion of the screen.
Soon after buying the projector, Melies founded Star Film and built a small glass studio in his house in Montreux, where he produced, directed, shot and starred in more than 500 films made between 1896 and 1913. .
His first attempts were with stop-motion photography (the camera stops shooting to add or remove something from the scene). Thus, Melies creates one-off tricks, which leave the viewer with the impression that something on the screen “disappears” or “appears”.
Soon after, the innovator began experimenting with short scenes such as The Dreyfus Affair, 1899. In slow steps, he achieved the effect of causal sequence in action by telling complete but short stories.
In this way, in 1902, he created a film short story of 30 scenes “Le Voyage dans la Lune” (“Journey to the Moon”), based on the novel by Jules Verne. The film lasts a total of 14 minutes. With this film, Georges Melies paved the way for science fiction in cinema and was recognized as the father of visual effects.
Melies’ Star Film distributed the film through the world’s largest producers and managed to open an American branch of the company. And although Melies’ films remain rather “stage plays”, he manages to dethrone the Lumiere brothers and show the world that cinema is not only art, but also industry. His last successful film fantasy was The Conquest of the Pole, 1912. From 1913, Melies had a hard time.
In fact, Melies’ decline began as early as 1910, when the industrialization of French and European cinema in general was taken over by Charles Pate’s Pathé Frères. Funded by some of the largest French corporations, Pathé acquired the Lumière patents in 1902 and commissioned the design of an improved studio camera, which began to dominate the world market as soon as it was released. 60% of all films at that time, including the first Bulgarian films, were shot with a Pathé camera. Duck, and after him Gomon’s company, covered almost the entire production of pre-World War I European films, effectively putting an end to the “craftsmanship” of people like Georges Melies.
In the United States, movie theaters are beginning to sprout like mushrooms. In 1908 they were already over 10,000. “Nickelodeons” are increasingly liked by the middle class. Tickets cost about 10 cents for a one-hour screening.
By 1908, there were about 20 film companies in the United States, such as Edison, Biograph, Vitagraph, and others. 16 of them combine their patents and come together in one – Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC). The company signed a contract with Eastman Kodak Company for the supply of raw film stocks, thus closing the circle.
MPPC began to control every segment of the industry and even set up a licensing system to assess remuneration in cinema. The time of dreamers like Melies is coming to an end. From then on, the films could only be sold to licensed producers.
Movie attendance in the United States alone is growing to 26 million a week. Cinema is already an industry with its own rules and a very lucrative future.
Melies has directed a total of 531 films, each lasting 1 to 40 minutes. His most famous film, “Le voyage dans la Lune”, includes the famous scene in which a spaceship hits the eye of the moon. “Journey to the Moon” from 1902 and “Journey through the Impossible” from 1904 are films in the style of Jules Verne – considered one of the most important early fantasy films, forerunners of the fantasy genre. And Georges Melies’ 1896 film The House of the Devil is considered one of the earliest horror films. A copy of it was bought by Thomas Edison, who made more copies of it and distributed it in the United States with great financial success, but did not give a cent of his profit to the author of the film – Melies.
Georges Melies remains a true dreamer and in this respect – an inexperienced money “producer of illusions”.
When his company went bankrupt in 1913, displaced by major French and American studios, more than 500 of his films on cellulose tape were confiscated by the French army and melted down for … heel boots.
Others have been sold for recycling for new films. As a result, many of Melies’ films, such as Cleopatra, have been lost. A copy of “Cleopatra” was unveiled in 2005 in Paris and the event is a real sensation for French cultural life.
Melies himself, after his bankruptcy, made a living selling toys at Paris’s Montparnasse train station. The former factory son was even left homeless. In 1932, the French film society provided him with shelter. Melies was awarded the Order of the Legion of Honor, presented to him personally by Louis Lumiere.
Georges Melies died in his native Paris on January 21, 1938.
For his life, Martin Scorsese made the film “Hugo’s Invention” based on the book of the same name by Brian Selznick. In 2012, the film won five Oscars, but in it Melies is more of an artistic image than a biographically described character.
Today, it is easy to say that Melies viewed cinema as a filmed theater, shooting from the same point of view without moving the camera, but for his time, he was a true innovator and cinema “magician”. After Melies, cinema was further developed by many masters of storytelling, technology and editing, but this can not in the least overshadow his great contribution to the development of the global film industry.
Many innovators years later will admit that it was Melies’ films that gave them the idea of telling a story in a continuous form. The spatial forms that are possible for cinema today have been a matter of a long innovative process, thanks to people like Melies.
Photo: Georges Melies’ studio at his home in Montreux
