I’m back, and ready to talk movies. The first film on my list is actually 7 short films, all from French director Georges Méliès. He was one of the earliest filmmakers, though not the very first, but he seemed like the best place to start. Méliès is considered the originator of special effects in movies, and pioneered techniques like substitution splices, multiple exposures, time-lapse photography, and dissolves.
Before discovering movies, Méliès was a stage magician. He purchased Robert-Houdin’s old theater, which had fallen into disrepair, and thoroughly renovated it. He became hugely successful, in large part by concluding each night’s entertainments with a lavishly staged, original illusion that not only mystified his audience with magic, but told a story in the process. It’s no surprise that when he switched to making movies he achieved fame by recreating many of his stage effects on film, and used the new possibilities of the medium to augment them. He did things that were at the time incredibly difficult to create very realistic illusions onscreen.
Méliès first film was made in 1896. He made 78 short films that year, but the earliest of his films that I watched is actually the 199th he’d made, at least according to IMDB. I imagine it’s possible he made others that aren’t listed, and many of his works are lost. Who knows?
Most of what I watched was on the blu-ray linked below, which contains 13 of his short fairy tales. I hunted down a 14th on Youtube, also linked, because I wanted to watch his version of Bluebeard. I’m going to split the 14 short films into two segments, or episodes, I supposed you’d call them, and today I’ll cover the following:
1899 The Pillar of Fire [release date unknown]
1900 Joan of Arc [released November 11, 1900]
1901 Bluebeard [released July 10, 1901]
1902 Robinson Crusoe [release date unknown]
1902 A Trip to the Moon [released September 1, 1902]
1903 The Kingdom of Fairies [released September 5, 1903]
1903 The Infernal Cauldron [released October 17, 1903]
These are hardly movies by the modern definition. The plots are very simple, and what makes them interesting are the effects. The shorts on the blu-ray have all been restored, which included hand-painting the films with the original colors Méliès used over 100 years ago. That’s right, these are in color, or what passed for color at the turn of the last century. The black and white films were painted by hand, cel by cel, with several colors, and it results in a very unique and interesting product. The colors aren’t realistic, but they are vibrant and eye-catching. Also included in the restorations were Méliès’ original narrations. He wrote lines that were spoken by a narrator as his films played, and even translated them into English himself, so we can hear exactly what he intended us to hear. It’s quite different from what I think of when I think of silent films, but that’s what being a pioneer is all about. There were no preconceived notions of what a film should or should not be in the 1890s, so Méliès did his own thing, more or less making it up as he went along.
A Trip to the Moon is the only one of the bunch that I know for certain I’ve seen before. I watched it in black and white on a video tape I rented a long time ago, back when I was still in college, I believe, and then saw a restored version, with the images hand-painted, but without narration, in a cinema at some point after that. The rest of these were new to me. They’re all quite interesting. The situations are sometimes ludicrous— to leave the moon, the scientists push their ship off the edge of the moon and it falls to earth, for example— but you’re not watching for believability. You’re watching for fantastic ideas and images, and Méliès delivers. I can only imagine how astonishing these must have been to theater patrons when they, and the medium of film, were new.
You can click the above image if you’d like go buy a copy of the same blu-ray I watched. If you’d like to watch Bluebeard, here it is.
Next I’m watching: The Great Train Robbery [1903], directed by Edwin S. Porter.
The Fairy Tales of Georges Méliès, pt. 1 (1899-1903)