This Cinema and That Cinema
In 1896, Georges Méliès, a magician, saw a program of the early films of the Lumière brothers. He asked one of them if he could purchase one of their cameras, a dual use machine featuring a projector. Lumière declined, even refusing a doubled offer. He said that cinema had no future (!). The Lumière brothers photographed reality as it happened, their film titles indicating this style: The Gardener, Fishing for Goldfish, Jumping Onto the Blanket, Horse Trick Riders, among others. Méliès, undeterred, made his own camera, built his own studio, and began making films, focusing on manufactured, precisely choreographed and stylized fantasies, like, Robbing Cleopatra's Tomb, The Mysterious Knight, The Rajah's Dream, and his most famous film, A Trip to the Moon. Most of his films are lost because near the end of his life in 1938, forgotten like many early cinema pioneers, he destroyed much of his work. After retiring from filmmaking in 1912 at the age of fifty-one, he operated a children's toy shop. His sense of inspiring wonder never left him, apparently.
In 1952, Georges Franju (Eyes Without a Face, Thérèse Desqueyroux) made his fourth short film, Le grand Méliès, a thirty minute work of strong imagination, a paean to a great and influential French director, who had been dead for fourteen years by then, but whose widow and son still lived. André Méliès plays his father in a few sequences that reproduce the filmmaker's important career moments. Marie-George Méliès, the real person, purchases flowers for her husband's grave from the same site where he tended his toy shop. Franju's image at the end, showing her solitary walk to the cemetery accentuates the man's death and his obscurity in his post-filmmaking career.
Many years ago I came across a sentence that stuck with me--I don't recall who wrote it. The idea is that the Lumière brothers and Méliès represent two major strands of cinematic technique practiced from the 1890s to the present. The former, with their depictions, like a train arriving at a station or workers leaving a factory, practiced documentary-style filmmaking, deemphasizing whimsy or artificiality. The term "realistic" applies here, and to this day, many film watchers like their movies to look and seem "real."
Méliès chose to make fantasies, although he also made many more "realistic" documentary-style films. What's remembered are his bizarre concoctions, images of lunar inhabitants, of a head growing bigger and bigger until it explodes, of an impossible horse skeleton galloping across the sky, or familiar constellations like the Big Dipper, each star framing a living human face. His work, alive and boisterous with boundless imagination, uses the medium to create new realities non-existent outside cinema. Luke Skywalker, in Star Wars, gazing with a yearning to find himself in the greater universe beyond his small homebound existence, sees not one, but two differently colored suns in the sky of his home planet. This image derives from Méliès, not the Lumière brothers.
These filmmakers contributed much that's important to cinema, but Méliès, as he created an artificial studio environment to film his work, paved the way for what came to be the Hollywood method of doing things: shooting indoors, rear projection screens giving the illusion of traffic seen through car windows in cars that were actually just automobile frames sliced open to allow the camera and sound equipment access to the actors. So much of this style of filmmaking was used, to the extent that everyone became used to it. A friend of mine was startled when I told her that
Casablanca was shot on the Warner Brothers lot in southern California, not in Morocco. Set design, costuming, sound effects, rain when it isn't actually raining, all make a stage-derived illusion, and Georges Méliès is that illusion's grandfather.
In retrospect, having seen so many Golden Age Hollywood films, I wish more productions had been made on location. The businessmen running the studios liked to stay, for financial reasons, close to Los Angeles for film production. One of the reasons Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront stands out so vividly is its Hoboken, New Jersey, filming locations. It's so refreshing to see an actual place in an old Hollywood film.
This latter style could be attributed to the "grandparents" Lumière.
There's something mournful about Georges Franju's films. I've only seen a few of them, but they possess great beauty and an ability to stimulate emotions in their imagery. Le grand Méliès is not only a beautiful and easy to digest film, it teaches something vital about a man who worked at such an early stage of the film business that the capacity for intelligent and imaginative minds to make new processes from no precedents was limitless. This is, of course, still true today, and all filmmakers would be wise to know that repeating old formulas is far less exciting than inventing new cinematic languages, as did both the Lumière brothers and Georges Méliès.
Vic Neptune
In 1896, Georges Méliès, a magician, saw a program of the early films of the Lumière brothers. He asked one of them if he could purchase one of their cameras, a dual use machine featuring a projector. Lumière declined, even refusing a doubled offer. He said that cinema had no future (!). The Lumière brothers photographed reality as it happened, their film titles indicating this style: The Gardener, Fishing for Goldfish, Jumping Onto the Blanket, Horse Trick Riders, among others. Méliès, undeterred, made his own camera, built his own studio, and began making films, focusing on manufactured, precisely choreographed and stylized fantasies, like, Robbing Cleopatra's Tomb, The Mysterious Knight, The Rajah's Dream, and his most famous film, A Trip to the Moon. Most of his films are lost because near the end of his life in 1938, forgotten like many early cinema pioneers, he destroyed much of his work. After retiring from filmmaking in 1912 at the age of fifty-one, he operated a children's toy shop. His sense of inspiring wonder never left him, apparently.
In 1952, Georges Franju (Eyes Without a Face, Thérèse Desqueyroux) made his fourth short film, Le grand Méliès, a thirty minute work of strong imagination, a paean to a great and influential French director, who had been dead for fourteen years by then, but whose widow and son still lived. André Méliès plays his father in a few sequences that reproduce the filmmaker's important career moments. Marie-George Méliès, the real person, purchases flowers for her husband's grave from the same site where he tended his toy shop. Franju's image at the end, showing her solitary walk to the cemetery accentuates the man's death and his obscurity in his post-filmmaking career.
Many years ago I came across a sentence that stuck with me--I don't recall who wrote it. The idea is that the Lumière brothers and Méliès represent two major strands of cinematic technique practiced from the 1890s to the present. The former, with their depictions, like a train arriving at a station or workers leaving a factory, practiced documentary-style filmmaking, deemphasizing whimsy or artificiality. The term "realistic" applies here, and to this day, many film watchers like their movies to look and seem "real."
Méliès chose to make fantasies, although he also made many more "realistic" documentary-style films. What's remembered are his bizarre concoctions, images of lunar inhabitants, of a head growing bigger and bigger until it explodes, of an impossible horse skeleton galloping across the sky, or familiar constellations like the Big Dipper, each star framing a living human face. His work, alive and boisterous with boundless imagination, uses the medium to create new realities non-existent outside cinema. Luke Skywalker, in Star Wars, gazing with a yearning to find himself in the greater universe beyond his small homebound existence, sees not one, but two differently colored suns in the sky of his home planet. This image derives from Méliès, not the Lumière brothers.
These filmmakers contributed much that's important to cinema, but Méliès, as he created an artificial studio environment to film his work, paved the way for what came to be the Hollywood method of doing things: shooting indoors, rear projection screens giving the illusion of traffic seen through car windows in cars that were actually just automobile frames sliced open to allow the camera and sound equipment access to the actors. So much of this style of filmmaking was used, to the extent that everyone became used to it. A friend of mine was startled when I told her that
Casablanca was shot on the Warner Brothers lot in southern California, not in Morocco. Set design, costuming, sound effects, rain when it isn't actually raining, all make a stage-derived illusion, and Georges Méliès is that illusion's grandfather.
In retrospect, having seen so many Golden Age Hollywood films, I wish more productions had been made on location. The businessmen running the studios liked to stay, for financial reasons, close to Los Angeles for film production. One of the reasons Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront stands out so vividly is its Hoboken, New Jersey, filming locations. It's so refreshing to see an actual place in an old Hollywood film.
This latter style could be attributed to the "grandparents" Lumière.
There's something mournful about Georges Franju's films. I've only seen a few of them, but they possess great beauty and an ability to stimulate emotions in their imagery. Le grand Méliès is not only a beautiful and easy to digest film, it teaches something vital about a man who worked at such an early stage of the film business that the capacity for intelligent and imaginative minds to make new processes from no precedents was limitless. This is, of course, still true today, and all filmmakers would be wise to know that repeating old formulas is far less exciting than inventing new cinematic languages, as did both the Lumière brothers and Georges Méliès.
Vic Neptune
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