Georges Méliès

Since the beginning, the art of making films – action, science fiction and fantasy films, in particular – have gone hand in hand with special and visual effects. The first pioneer of these effects, Georges Méliès is responsible for the development of stop trick effects, dissolves, multiple exposures, hand painting, forced perspective, and black screens – the precursor to green screens. Many of the techniques and ideas he developed have been enormously influential in modern filmmaking, inevitably establishing the basic concepts on which many modern effects are based.

Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès was born in 1861 to a family of shoemakers in Paris. Detesting shoemaking, he sold his share of the family company to study under the French magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin around 1888. Soon after, he purchased the Théâtre Robert-Houdin where he worked as a professional magician and would later exhibit many of his films (The Cinemagician).

Méliès discovered, on December 28, 1895, the Lumière brothers screening their first short films based on non-narrative day-to-day life. Though the Lumières refused to sell him a projector or a camera (The Cinemagician), Méliès magical mind was incapable of letting go of the theatrical possibilities on stage and on screen. He built his own camera based on an English projector that he purchased and dismantled (Bordwell 177, 461) and then combined with parts and clockworks from his automatons (The Cinemagician). Initially, he merely shot simple, documentary-style footage like the Lumière brothers. Yet one day, while filming a bus driving down a road in Paris, his camera jammed. A few minutes of tinkering later, he continued rolling but by then, the bus had passed and a hearse had taken its place. After developing the film, he saw that, owing to of the camera malfunction, the bus seemed to transform instantaneously from a bus into a hearse (Bordwell 178, Griffith 6). From that point on, what had been an accident became a deliberate occurrence in most of his films, narrative and non-narrative.

His films exposed possibilities, leading him to constantly explore the question, “What else can film show or do that cannot be done in real life?” Méliès experimented with this question as he performed tricks on screen for his audience in his Théâtre Robert-Houdin that would be impossible outside of the film world. The Vanishing Lady (1896), for example, is exactly as the title implies. Méliès films himself inviting the lady to sit down on an inconspicuous chair and throws a blanket over her. Once the blanket is lifted, she is gone. Without the blanket, he attempts to summon her back but a human skeleton appears in the chair instead. In frantic and humorous surprise, Méliès quickly throws the blanket over the skeleton, lifts it again, and she reappears. It was, in part, from films such as this that he earned the title, ‘Cinemagician’ (The Cinemagician).

By 1897, as his mind latched onto the concept of narrative filmmaking, he built his own film studio described as a glass green house to take advantage of the natural sunlight. He used his knowledge derived from his theatrical experiences on stage and as a magician to incorporate “theatrical machinery, balconies, trapdoors, and sliding backdrops,” to his new studio (Bordwell 178, 461). It was here that similar technical discoveries to his ‘stop motion trick’ were made over the years, allowing him to create surreal, yet incredibly realistic for the time, films covering a wide variety of genres from science fiction and fantasy to comedies and drama. These discoveries included, “double exposure, stop motion, fast and slow motion, animation, fades, dissolves, and the entire repertory of the trick film as it exists now,” (Griffith 6).

Méliès performed in his films (Bordwell 178), he directed, he designed and painted sets, he established how the effects would be used and when they would be used. He wrote his own stories and adapted familiar stores like Cinderella (1899), (Bordwell, 468). He even painstakingly color painted many of his films a frame at a time by hand (Pramaggiore 166).

Méliès was certainly a pioneer and auteur in filmmaking. He created over 500 films, all of them short films, by the 1910s. His use of cinematographic techniques, particularly for his created imaginary worlds, earned him the notation of cinema’s first master of mise-en-scène (Bordwell 177). “Special effects … require the time, patience, and rehearsal afforded by control over mise-en-scène. It is, then, no surprise that Méliès, the first person to exploit fully the possibilities of studio filmmaking, excelled at special-effects cinematography,” (Bordwell 291). These techniques, many of them meticulous at the time, have been adapted to modern filmmaking in the digital realm as well as the analog.

To manage the stop motion trick, for example, all characters had to stay perfectly still as the objects/persons being manipulated were placed (see The Trip to the Moon, 1902). A pre-CGI , but relatively modern example is Star Wars: A New Hope, when Obi-Wan Kenobi gave Luke Skywalker a light saber. The camera was stopped and the actor held very still as a crewmember replaced the plain light saber handle with a bladed light saber that would be rotoscoped in postproduction. Rotoscoping is physically drawing over the top of live action footage, a process which evolved over the decades from techniques like hand painted color.

For multiple exposures, the camera operators had to rewind the hand-cranked cameras carefully with perfect timing as the character or object being doubled moved into place (see One Man Band, 1900) (Ezra 29). In 1964, the technique was adapted in Mary Poppins with overlaying one image over another for the song “Feed the Birds” as the cathedral is superimposed over Mary Poppins’ face.

One of Méliès’ films, The Man with the Rubber Head (1901), uses a wide variety of his methods including forced perspective and the use of a black screen. A scientist, performed by Méliès himself, places a replica of his own head, using multiple exposures, on a table where he uses a bellows to fill the head with air, expanding its size. Méliès sat on a cart, which was on a ramp that moved toward the camera. The camera’s single eye decreases depth perception, creating the illusion that his head was growing larger. Méliès took advantage of this as his head moved closer to the camera, making the enlargement seemingly possible. The use of the black screen was pivotal, since anything else behind the head might have given away the superimposition (Bordwell 245).

Other famous uses of forced perspective include Walt Disney’s Darby O’Gill and the Little People (1959) which used this technique in lieu of animating his leprechauns because Disney sincerely wanted children to whole-heartedly believe that leprechauns were real. For example, by making King Brian stand four times further away from the camera than Darby O’Gill, the human, while they pretended to be matching eye contact gives the illusion that King Brian is in fact not much taller than a standard baby doll. More recently, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (2003, 2004, and 2005) and the upcoming The Hobbit films (2012 and 2013) additionally use the same techniques.

Not only was Méliès a pioneer in the advancement of filmmaking on technical levels, he is also known for the advancement of several genres including horror, fantasy, and science fiction. “Georges Méliès’ Le Voyage dans la Lune [The Trip to the Moon] (1902), was a landmark in the history of cinema, as much for its sophisticated narrative and epic length as for its subject matter … [it] marks the real beginnings of the Science Fiction cinema… [identifying] the theme of space travel which became one of the abiding themes of the genre. Other directors isolated other themes and began to elaborate upon them… but it was Méliès who laid its foundation,” (Hardy 18)

Unfortunately, his childlike energy and fanciful imagery, which had been so dearly loved, failed to lure in audiences after the arrival of World War I. “Méliès’ fantastic voyages were supplanted by less imaginative but more directly compelling scenarios, such as those of the future-war subgenre,” (Hardy 18). He was not a businessman; he did not rent out his films, he had been selling them. In 1911, He made a contract with Pathé, a distribution company, after he put his house and his studio up as collateral in order to get distribution from them. By the end of 1912, people were no longer interested in seeing his films and Pathé told him, no more. In despair, Méliès destroyed his studio, his props, costumes and sold what films he had to a company that would melt them down into chemicals. Ironically, for a man who hated shoe factories, these chemicals would then be made into shoe heels (The Cinemagician). It took years for Méliès to realize the mark he made on the cinema. Between 1913 and 1929, he worked as a toyshop keeper in a train station in Paris, earning a meager living until a journalist recognized him. Under the belief that his films were completely lost, he was relieved when a colleague, Jean Mauclaire, discovered over 80 films in Normandy in 1929. Periodically, more collections of Méliès’ films have been discovered in vaults all over the world. Today, out of his films, only about 200 have survived (The Cinemagician).

Modern filmmaking is indebted to Georges Méliès’ expertise. It is fitting that in October 1931, Méliès received the Légion d’honneur, the highest decoration in France. In addition, Pauline Duclaud-Lacoste, Méliès’ great-great granddaughter, said, “In March 1931 … Léon Butionne [was] the president [of the cinema commission]. And he made a wonderful speech, and said Georges Méliès and Lumière are the founding fathers of the cinema,” (The Cinemagician).

Filmmaker Martin Scorsese said, “Méliès pretty much did everything that we’re doing now with a computer, with a green screen, with digital, but he did it in the camera. … [He] established everything we’re doing today. There’s no doubt if he had his hands on the equipment we have now, he would advance it another hundred years,” (The Cinemagician). Technology may have made special effects easier in many respects but the techniques evolved from Georges Méliès.

Bibliography

Boggs, Joseph M, and Dennis W Petrie. The Art of Watching Films. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004.

Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. Film Art An Introduction. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004.

Ezra, Elizabeth. Georges Méliès : The birth of the auteur. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000.

Griffith, Richard. The Movies. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970.

Hardy, Phil. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Movies. London: Aurum Press, 1984.

Pramaggiore, Maria, and Tom Wallis. Film A Critical Introduction. London: Laurence King Publishing Ltd., 2008.

The Cinemagician: George Méliès. Prod. Barbara J Toennies and Gidion Phillips. Blu-ray. Paramount. 2012.