Georges Méliès

Biography: life and films

The Lumière brothers may have created the machinery for the new medium of cinema in the last decade of the 19th century, but it was another man, Georges Méliès, who made cinema an art. Unlike the Lumières, who were convinced that cinema was a passing fad, Méliès saw its artistic potential straight away and then spent the next 16 years of his life tapping into this potential. In doing so, he not only played a crucial part in developing the basic syntax of cinema, he also helped to establish it as the most popular entertainment medium the world has ever known. It was Georges Méliès, an accomplished and very successful stage magician, who first saw the magic in cinema and adopted it as his black art.

Méliès's obsession with finding new acts for his stage shows is what led him to discover cinema and then to invent special effects that would allow him to seemingly alter reality. Whilst the Lumières were projecting filmed reproductions of scenes from everyday life, Méliès offered his audiences the most extraordinary flights of fancy, into realms of the imagination that were both amazing and terrifying, and often highly comical. Between 1896 and 1913, Georges Méliès made around 500 films, varying in length from one minute to forty minutes, encompassing just about genre under the sun - and quite a few that are way beyond the sun. Even today, over a century after they were made, you cannot but be impressed by the technical innovation and sheer artistic flair of Méliès's films. They have a beauty and poetry that is unique to them, and also a sense of fun that is irresistible.

A Frustrated Artist

By the time Georges Méliès was born, on 8th December 1861, his father Louis Stanislas Méliès had become a wealthy man, having made his fortune manufacturing luxury shoes for the cream of Parisian society during the Second Empire. Georges was the youngest of three sons and, if his father had got his way, he and his older brothers, Henri and Gaston, would have had a dull but comfortable life by continuing to run Louis Méliès's successful business. But from an early age, Georges had his sights set on an artistic career. He spent his leisure hours painting and drawing, and his love of the stage was apparent when he built a puppet theatre at the age of 15. He was a good student and completed his education in 1880 with a degree in Latin and Greek. After his military service, aged 21, he made up his mind to study at the Académie des Beaux-Arts, but his father had other ideas, and Louis Méliès always got his way. Young Georges spent the next five years of his life unhappily confined to his father's workshop, engaged mostly on repairing machines. Over this period, he acquired skills as a mechanic that would be invaluable in his future careers as a stage magician and film pioneer.

Georges Méliès still harboured aspirations of a career in the arts and devoted his free time to his artistic pursuits, which now included music, poetry, sculpture and photography. It was in a bid to quash his son's ambitions to be an artist that Louis Méliès sent him to London in 1884, to work for a friend of the family and improve his English. Whilst in London, Georges met the renowned stage magician David Devant when he was performing at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly. It was through Devant that the young Méliès acquired an instant fascination with conjuring and immediately decided to adopt this as his profession. On his return to France, at the age of 23, he began performing magic tricks for a private audience. He then worked in partnership with the illusionist Émile Voisin at the Cabinet Fantastique in the Musée Grévin, under the stage name Melius. In 1885 he married his first wife, Eugénie Génin, an accomplished pianist; their daughter Georgette was born in 1888, and their son André in 1901.

The Master of Illusion and the Caricaturist

Four years later, on 1st July 1888, Georges Méliès was sufficiently confident in his abilities that he bought the exhibition rights to the Theatre Robert-Houdin on the Boulevard des Italiens in Paris, with money obtained by selling his stake in his father's company to one of his brothers. He was still only 26, but already he was set on following in the footsteps of the world's greatest illusionist, Robert Houdin. As well as inheriting Houdin's stage devices (which included a remarkable collection of mechanical dolls, his automates), Méliès renovated the theatre and equipped it for his own acts. He ran the theatre for the next thirty years and used it as a venue for screening his films. It was demolished in 1925 when the Boulevard Haussmann was built.

As well as performing magic acts, Méliès introduced scripted sketches performed by as many as ten actors to revive the popularity of his theatre. Among these actors was a young woman named Charlotte Faës, better known by her stage name Jehanne d'Alcy. She not only featured in many of Méliès's stage acts, she also appeared in several of his films and became his mistress and second wife. Whilst pursuing a successful career as a stage magician, Méliès made use of his talent for drawing as a regular contributor to the satirical newspaper La Griffe, which was edited by his cousin Adolphe Méliès. Under the cheeky pseudonym Smile, Méliès played his part in thwarting the political ambitions of General Georges Boulanger through his anti-boulangist caricatures.

The Cinema Bug Bites

Georges Méliès liked to end all of his shows with animated magic lantern displays. The popularity of these dazzling effects was such that Méliès was always on the look-out for similar attractions for his theatre. He took an interest in Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope and Charles-Émile Reynaud's Praxinoscope - two devices that allowed moving images to be seen through a small aperture in a box. Whereas the pictures in Edison's machine were on strips of film moved in front of a light source, those in Reynaud's were mounted on the inner circumference of a rotating drum. Neither device offered what Méliès was looking for - moving images that could be projected onto an external screen. It was then that he discovered the Lumière brothers' Cinématographe - at the first public demonstration of the device on 27th December 1895.

So impressed was Méliès by the Lumières' invention that he immediately offered to buy it for ten thousand francs. The offer was declined - the Lumières were convinced that their Cinématographe would only have a limited use as a piece of scientific apparatus and had no future as a means of entertainment. Méliès was convinced otherwise and, being unable to get his hands on the Lumières' creation, he set about trying to obtain a similar device from another manufacturer. He bought a suitable projector, known as the Theatrograph, from the British inventor Robert William Paul in 1896 and used this to screen shots from Edison's Kinetoscope. Now he wanted to start making his own films. Unable to find a suitable camera on the market, he decided to make his own, by reversing the operation of his Theatrograph. The film camera he created was a large and cumbersome machine and could only hold 20 metres of film stock, but it was adequate for his initial needs. Méliès took out a patent on his invention, christened the Kinètographe Robert-Houdin, although he referred to as the Coffee Grinder because it was so noisy. A few years later, Méliès would discard his own camera and instead use better made equipment that had become available, from manufacturers such as Gaumont.

In May 1896, Georges Méliès shot his first film in the family garden at Montreuil. Entitled Partie de cartes, this one-minute long short was an almost exact copy of a film that Louis Lumière had made a few months previously (Une partie d'écarté). It shows three men (one being Méliès himself) playing cards at a table in a sunny garden and drinking wine. Unable to convert his camera back into a projector, Méliès had to buy himself another projector, which he obtained from another inventor, Louis Charles. By now, Méliès was equipped to shoot and exhibit his own films, incorporating them into his shows at the Theatre Robert-Houdin. Towards the end of 1896, he founded his own company, Star Film.

The Movie Magician

Méliès's earliest films were mostly blatant copies of films already made by the Lumière brothers, but he soon realised that there was a limited appeal in moving pictures of everyday life. What helped him in his migration towards more fantastic subjects was his discovery of the so-called 'substitution trick'. This involves stopping the camera mid-way through a shot, adding or removing something from the scene, and then restarting the camera. When the film is projected this trickery creates the illusion of an object vanishing or appearing from nowhere. Méliès always maintained that he discovered this effect by chance, when the camera jammed whilst he was filming a busy street scene on the Place de l'Opéra in Paris. It took a minute for him to fix the fault, by which time the traffic had moved on. Viewing the film, Méliès was surprised to see a carriage suddenly turn into a hearse.

In fact, Georges Méliès was not the first person to use the substitution trick. Thomas Edison had already employed it in his film The Execution of Mary Stuart to realise the decapitation of the title character. This film was widely available in Europe at the time, so it is possible that Méliès may have seen it and, having worked out how the effect was achieved, used it in his own films. The first of his films to utilise the substitution trick was Escamotage d'une dame chez Robert-Houdin (1896), which reproduces the famous vanishing lady stage trick invented by the magician Buatier de Kolta. In the original trick, a lady sits on a chair, is covered by a shawl and then falls through a trap door, giving the impression she has vanished into thin air. In his film, Méliès achieves the same effect by stopping the film in mid-shot, waiting for the woman (Jehanne d'Alcy) to leave the set, and then restarting the film. By creating a splice (removing a few frames of film from just before the camera is stopped until just after it is restarted) he creates a seamless illusion.

Another piece of trickery that was crucial to Méliès's art was superimposition (or multiple exposure), which had been used for many years in still photography to overlay images. This involves running the same piece of film stock through the camera several times, exposing different parts of the film at a time. In each pass, a different part of the set is blacked out (with drapes), so that only the part of the set that is not blacked out will be captured on the film. In this way, Méliès manages to multiply people or objects in a shot, as he does magnificently in L'Homme orchestre (1900), in which he gets to appear simultaneously on screen as all seven members of an orchestra.

By combining superimposition with the substitution trick, Méliès created some even more impressive effects. In Le Mélomane (1903), he apparently pulls off his own head several times, each time throwing his head up onto some telegraph wires to form the notes in a piece of music. Films such as this (which barely last two minutes) required around thirty splices and took a considerable amount of preparation. Méliès also experimented with camera motion, moving the camera forward or backward on an ingenious pulley system to create the illusion of something growing or shrinking. The best example of this is L'Homme à la tête en caoutchouc (1901), in which his own head is seen to be inflated by bellows, allowed to deflate, and then pumped up again until it explodes.

Méliès developed many other tricks, such as fade-ins which allow characters to appear or disappear gradually - a good example being the slow transformation of a playing card image into a living woman in Les Cartes vivantes (1904). Méliès also experimented with camera shots. By placing a camera high above the stage on a catwalk he achieved overhead shots which, when combined with superimposition, created some truly bizarre effects. Many of the standard tricks of the theatre were readily adapted for the cinema, for example a canvas background rolling upwards or sidewards creates the illusion of movement without having to move the camera.

From Garden to Studio

There is a quaint amateurishness or bricolage feel to Georges Méliès's earliest cinematic exploits. Most were no more than short one-scene sketches that allowed the film pioneer to experiment with camera trickery. He shot all of his first films in his family's ample garden at Montreuil, with wooden sets that he himself had built and painted. Unfortunately, the weather was not always on his side and this led him to build a large workshop in 1897. 17 metres long and 6 metres wide, this was the first studio in the world that was specifically constructed for the making of moving pictures. Because electric lighting was not yet powerful enough, Méliès was totally reliant on natural light, which explains why his studio was made entirely of glass, held together by a steel frame. The stage was positioned on the north side of this enormous greenhouse-like construction, but because it was illuminated for only part of the day (from 11 am to 3 pm), this limited how many hours Méliès could shoot his films.

Over time, Méliès refined his workshop to allow him to obtain more sophisticated results. He attached moveable shutters to the roof to prevent shadows from appearing on the backdrop. He dug a pit under the stage for trapdoors. Other devices were added to allow actors to be propelled as if my magic across the stage. Underwater shots were achieved by filming through a large water tank placed in front of the stage, and models were used extensively. There was a large workshop where the sets and props could be constructed and stored. Méliès's actors were originally recruited from the staff of his theatre, his family and servants. Later on, he hired dancers from the Théâtre du Châtelet and the Folies Bergère, and also theatre actors and cabaret performers.

Méliès took charge of every last aspect of the making of his films. He was the film auteur at its most extreme. He not only directed his films, he ensured the cameras were set up correctly, he designed the sets and costumes and oversaw their creation. It's worth noting that the sets, props and costumes all had to be painted in shades of grey, because at the time film stock was not equally sensitive to all colours (for example blue came out as white). In the absence of editing techniques that were still some way off, Méliès had to carefully choreograph the action so that the film had the correct rhythm - in this his actors were guided by a metronome or someone playing a tune on a piano. Before he even went into the studio, Méliès had worked out every last detail of his film in an elaborate series of sketches (he rarely, if ever, worked from a written script).

Méliès also appeared in many of his films. Having become a natural showman through his stage work, he proved to be a very capable actor, and he was still performing his own stunts at the age of fifty. Because of the limited time available for filming, Méliès was strict about hours and ran his entire film production process like a clockwork machine. In the evening he met up with the fairground clients who would buy his films, he oversaw the processing of his films and then attended shows at his theatre, grabbing any odd moment he could to prepare for the next day's filming. Georges Méliès was working insane hours but he could not be happier. He was using every skill he possessed, both practical and artistic, to create works of art that his public adored.

A Filmmaker in Every Genre

Méliès took his inspiration mainly from stage shows that his audiences of the time would have been familiar with - melodramas, historical plays, operas and fairy tales. One important influence was the feérie, a very popular form of stage show that combined melodrama, dance, music and acrobatics. Many of his more fantastic films (notably Le Chaudron infernal and Le Royaume des fées) are cinematic equivalents of the feérie at its most fanciful. With Cendrillon (1899), cinema's first telling of the Cinderella story, Méliès's art took a big leap forward as this was his first film to employ multiple tableaux and present a complete coherent narrative.

Méliès not only had a popular line in historical reconstructions - such as his ambitious telling of the Joan of Arc story - Jeanne d'Arc (1900) - he also had great success with his actualités reconstituées, reconstructions of present day news stories. The most well-known of these is L'Affaire Dreyfus (1899), which comprises eleven short films depicting episodes in the cause célèbre of the disgraced military man Alfred Dreyfus. So contentious was the Dreyfus affair that when the film was first screened in France riots often broke out between opposing factions. The success of this film earned Méliès a commission from Charles Urban (Star Film's London representative) to film a reconstruction of the coronation of Edward VII, to be included in newsreels following the actual coronation of the British monarch (the event itself could not be filmed as cameras were not permitted in Westminster Abbey).

Georges Méliès had a preference for fantasy films, as these offered more scope for creativity and a chance to develop ever more spectacular special effects, but he was not adverse to working in other genres. Some of his films are adaptations of well-known plays (L'Avare, Hamlet) and novels (Gulliver's Travels); some are taken from popular operas and operettas (Faust). With Le Manoir du diable (1896) he gave cinema its first horror film, complete with vampire bats, ghouls and other monstrous apparitions in the familiar old dark house setting. La Tentation de St Antoine (1898) was the first in a series of religious satires, in which the crucified Christ metamorphoses into a desirable young woman. Après le bal (1897), depicting a woman (Jehanne d'Alcy) innocently stripping and taking a bath, is one of the earliest examples of film pornography. Méliès even lent his talents to advertising, for products as diverse as baby food and whisky. Barbe-Bleue (1901) offers the first example of product placement in a motion picture, with a bottle of Mercier champagne prominently on display.

Always with an eye to innovation, Méliès soon began producing colourised versions of his films. The colourisation was actually undertaken by a company owned by Madame Thuillier in Vincennes that specialised in this work. Thuillier's workshop employed around 200 women on a production line, colouring the film one frame at a time with a small paintbrush using auramine dyes. It was a slow and laborious process, and it added greatly to the cost of the film, but exhibitors were more than willing to pay for the novelty of a coloured moving picture.

Up into Orbit and Back Down to Earth

In 1902, Méliès created his most famous film, Le Voyage dans la lune, a.k.a. Trip to the Moon. Inspired by novels by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, this science-fiction fantasy was an epic for its time, running to thirteen minutes and comprising thirty tableaux. The shot of the space rocket crashing into one of the moon's eyes has become one of cinema's most iconic images - a powerful visual metaphor for man's reckless abuse of the natural world. The film took three months to complete and was expensive to make, but when it reached the fairgrounds and early cinema theatres it became a worldwide hit. The film's popularity made Georges Méliès known throughout the world and it was an inspiration for other emerging filmmakers. Unfortunately, it also became the victim of piracy and plagiarism on an unprecedented scale. American fairground owners would buy a single copy in France and then create several hundred copies from this one print, without Méliès receiving a centime in royalties. Inferior versions of the film were also being churned out, many deliberate attempts to copy the original film.

It was the rampant piracy in America that led Méliès to open a New York branch of Star Film in 1902. Managed by his brother Gaston, this would oversee the sale of all of Méliès's movies in the United States and ensure they were copyright registered in this country. Just when Star Film was at its commercial peak it faced the first major threat to its existence. Because of his patent on perforated film, Thomas Edison insisted he had the exclusive rights to all films exhibited in the US. To continue distributing films in the country, Gaston Méliès had no option but to enter into a contract with Edison, which required him and his brother to produce 300 metres of new film every week. To meet this sudden increase in output, Georges Méliès had to build a second studio on his plot at Montreuil in 1907 and share the directing duties with his assistant. With both studios now working at full tilt, the quality of Méliès's films soon began to suffer, and this helped Star Film to fall behind its competitors.

Decline and Fall

By now, Gaumont and Pathé had overtaken Star Film and vastly exceeded Méliès's output in quality, quantity and diversity. Public tastes were changing. Audiences no longer craved fantasy extravaganzas like Le Palais des mille et une nuits and Le Voyage à travers l'impossible; they wanted more realistic dramas, filmed in real locations, or burlesque comedies with characterful comedians. His creative resources depleted, Méliès was now stuck in a time warp, developing too slowly to keep up with changing fashions. In 1909, he only made ten films and already he was growing disillusioned with his art. The world was moving too fast for him. To survive he would have to expand his operations, which meant going into business with other partners - but this he doggedly refused to do. Méliès's adherence to his independence is what sealed his fate and made his downfall inevitable.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, Gaston had started producing his own films, setting up studios in New Jersey and Texas so that he could honour his contract with Edison. Between 1909 and 1912 he made over two hundred films, including a number of westerns filmed in Texas. These were reasonably successful and the receipts helped to keep Star Film solvent. It all went wrong when Gaston took a troupe of actors to the South Seas in the summer of 1912, to make a series of films in Tahiti, New Zealand and Australia, finally ending up in the Far East. These sold badly and Star Film was soon in dire straits financially. To cover his debts, Gaston Méliès had to sell the American branch of his brother's company to a rival, Vitagraph Studios.

Méliès's decline was hastened by his decision to enter into a catastrophic deal with Pathé in 1911, one which gave the company the rights to distribute and edit his films. Méliès made some impressive films for Pathé - À la Conquête du Pôle (1912) is one of his finest achievements - but none of these films sold well. In 1913, Méliès's commercial woes were compounded by personal grief when his wife Eugénie died. In the spring of 1913, aged 52, Georges Méliès yielded to the inevitable and gave up filmmaking for good. His 16 year long career as a film director was at an end.

Obscurity and Resurrection

With the outbreak of the First World War, Georges Méliès was forced to close the Theatre Robert-Houdin and he converted his second film studio into a theatre, which ran successfully from 1915 to 1923. With creditors hounding him relentlessly, Méliès was finally forced to sell his Montreuil plot to Pathé in 1923. His original studio was used as a warehouse for some time but was demolished shortly after WWII. With nowhere to store the negatives of his films, Méliès gathered these together in 1923 and burned them all, along with his sets. At the time, he could not have known that many hundred prints of his films had already been destroyed during WWI, so that the silver could be recovered and used in the heels of soldiers' boots. Of the five hundred films Méliès made, three hundred are still missing, most likely lost forever. It is ironic that of the 200 or so that survive many are pirated copies.

In 1925, Georges Méliès met up with his former leading lady, Jehanne d'Alcy, who was now selling sweets and toys in a little kiosk at the Gare Montparnasse. They married that year and continued running the shop together, working from 7 am to 10 pm, exposed to the elements all year round. For the next four years Méliès was forgotten. It wasn't until 1929 that he was recognised in his shop, by Léon Druhot, the editor of Ciné-Journal. He initiated a publicity campaign that resulted in a visit by Jean Mauclaire, the founder of the avant-garde theatre Studio 28. After somehow recovering eight of Méliès's films, Mauclaire organised a gala screening of these in the director's honour on 16th December 1929. The venue was the Grande Salle Pleyel and 2000 people turned up to give Méliès a standing ovation when he put in an unexpected appearance on stage.

Two years later, Méliès's achievements were recognised when he received the Légion d'honneur. In 1932, he was found a place at the Maison du Retraite du Cinéma, a retirement home in the Château d'Orly, where he lived out his remaining years with his wife and their granddaughter Madeleine Malthête-Méliès. In 1933, he appeared in front of the camera for the last time in an advertisement for cigarettes (Régie des Tabacs) at the invitation of Jean Aurenche and Jacques Brunius. Georges Méliès died from cancer on 21st January 1938 at Léopold Bellan hospital in Paris. He is now buried in Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris. Since, interest in Georges Méliès's films has grown steadily and he is now universally recognised as being not only an inspired film pioneer but, more signficantly, one of the founders of cinema.

Filmography

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