Background
Georges Mélies was born on 8 December 1861 in Paris, Ile-de-France, France. Méliès came from a background of successful Parisian trade. The father owned a shoe factory in an age of city pavements. The son had artistic-leanings that the father discouraged.
Education
He worked in the factory for several years, and any higher thoughts were diverted into amateur magic. Sleight of hand and the sighs of bourgeois wonder preoccupied Méliès. When the father retired, Georges asked his brother Gaston to look after the shoes while he took over the Theatre Robert-Houdin. From 1888, the pointed beard and beady eyes compelled audiences to be caught in his illusions. In addition, Méliès wrote, produced, designed, engineered, and acted in a succession of theatrical performances that emphasized magical change. Magic lantern shows and his stature as a showman ensured his presence at the Lumières’ first show in December 1895, and his acumen suffered their famous rebuff that cinema had no future.
Méliès had no doubt about the prospects for film and rapidly identified himself with it. From England, he bought a camera and film, and set to work. But this pioneer could at first only imitate the Lumière films, until one dav in 1897 the film jammed in his camera. In Sadoul's words, “This ghostly accident did not stop the Paris traffic." The jammed and multiexposed frame showed seething metamorphoses that liberated Méliès’s engineering spirit. He built a studio at Montreuil and began to manufacture trick movies, stimulated by Albert Hopkins’s book, Magic.
Career
He worked until 1913 at Montreuil, helplessly dominated by technique. He made over a thousand films, the bulk of them before 1905, with a new burst of activity in 1908. The failure of Méliès was in relating his often childish delight in trickery to any greater purpose. There is something wearying in all his tricks, isolated as they are from meaning: superimposition, multiexposure, models and live action together, stop motion, slow and quick action, etc. But all these devices were kept within a proscenium arch. The Méliès films are photographed verv flatly, partly because a conjuror likes the spectator directly in front of him, but also because Méliès failed to see that audiences might be more interested in people than in magic. More damaging, he set these homemade wonders in methodical, melodramaticstories. It is difficult to grant Méliès insight as a magician, when his structures were so pedestrian. For instance, in one of his last films, A la Conquête du Pole, made in 1912, and no real advance on films made twelve years before, he is still putting on one trick after another, failing to see that the wonder or terror of the journey could be more profound if the audience identified with any of the voyagers. A year later, in America, Grif fith's Judith of Bethulia had close-ups that brought human individuality to the director’s Victorian biblical sensibility.
Of course, Méliès was immensely successful in the years around 1900. But he began to bore even his own audiences. The rigid filming techniques proved more influential than the skillful deceptions of the eye. And Méliès made hardly anything longer than twenty minutes, always seeing film as a rival to variety “acts" in the theatre. It was Griffith who had the ponderous daring to insist on length. That was rewarded by the faith of audiences in the perilously preserved honor of his young ladies.
There are magical moments in Méliès that have more than historical interest. Behind all his stage- bound pantomime transformations, there lurked a solid factory owner and the vague apprehension of authorship.
The composition of a scene, an episode, a drama, a fairy story, a comedy or an artistic- tableau naturally requires a scenario taken from the imagination. Then there is a search for ways of affecting the audience: drawings and models for costumes and scenery; the settling on a chief attraction, without which there is no chance ol success. And as for tales of illusion or fairy stories, the tricks and processes must be studied with particular care. The rendering on film must be prepared in advance, just as much as the groupings and movements of the players. It is exactly like preparing a stage play. The only difference is that the author must know how to do everything himself and, consequently, be author, director, designer and, sometimes, actor, if everything is to be as he wishes it. The author of a scene must direct it himself, because it is absolutely impossible if two people meddle in it.
Such independence made Méliès no easy collaborator and may have blinded him to the changes in the film industry. His American distribution suffered from the Edison monopoly; in France, he became subordinate to Pathé. Longer films and the real imaginative departure from the atricality eluded Méliès. Nineteen-thirteen was the turning point, when his brother and w ife died. War disrupted his world and turned him back into a conjuror entertaining troops. His studio was converted into a theatre and he made no more films. In 1923, the Robert-Houdin was torn down and Méliès sold his negatives. When cinéastes rediscovered him he was living in poverty. Happily, his last years were more comfortable, and in 1931 he was awarded the cross of the Legion d'Honneur. Doubtless lie spent his last years turning it into bouquets and white rabbits.
Personality
Firmly but kindly, Mélies needs to be restored to his true role of stage conjuror who designed so many of the illusions available to the filmmaker— no longer regarded as the father figure of cinema of the imagination.
“Kindly” because of a plausible cult grown up around Mélies that confuses the homeliness of his primitivism and ingenuity with serious imaginative insight. That owes something to the melancholy of Mélies’s virtual disappearance after the First World War, the subsequent sale and dispersal of most of his movies, and his rehabilitation in 1930-31. We readily respond to the spectacle of a cinematic innovator who ends his life neglected or disappointed. Mélies is the first of a line that includes Griffith, von Stroheim, von Sternberg, and Orson Welles.
That wistful old age was tenderly caught in Georges Fran jus documentary tribute, Le Grand Mélies, made in 1952. Franju and many others tried to resurrect Mélies as the first surrealist in cinema and as the harbinger of the medium's appeal to fantasy. Mélies clearly felt that power, but only as a conjuror. The poetic, visual, or imag-inative content of his films seems to me theatrical, crude, and monotonous. Which is only to sav that he was an inventor and not an artist. Cinema has always been too ready to read art into technical mastery or novelty. It is useful to recall the words of Georges Sadoul, the foremost authority on Mélies: "But, with Mélies, the gimmick is always trying to startle us: it is the end, and not a means of expression. Mélies invents the syllables of a future language, but still prefers 'abracadabras' to words. He illustrates the gap between magic formulae and the use of language.” Arguably, there is more lasting mystery in the mundane images of the Lumière brothers; as for art, that had to wait until Louis Feuillade.