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The 1956 Best Oscar® winner Around the World in 80 Days begins with a
montage of old silent film clips and a digest version of Georges
Méliès' A Trip to the Moon, filmed in 1902. The montage
treats the fanciful French science fiction film as a quaint relic, not worth
serious consideration in the years of Todd A-O and Cinerama. At that time
Méliès' newest work was forty years old; by now most of it has gone
largely unseen for a full century. Thanks to DVD, the French master's hundreds of
painstaking short films, miniature marvels of art and special effects, are again
readily viewable.
Archivists Jeffery Masino and David Shepard's five-disc set Georges
Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema (1896-1913) gathers over 170 of
the French pioneer's films, many of them only a minute in length. Catalogued and
organized for easy viewing, the collection is an invaluable record of the work of
an underappreciated genius.
Méliès is said to have been the first producer-director to construct
a special studio for the making of films. As with the other film pioneers, his
early work includes unadorned 'reality samples that simply celebrate the cinema's
ability to capture moments in time. His first film Card Party is just a
shot of some gentlemen playing cards, and runs all of sixty-seven seconds. Being
an accomplished musician and music hall performer, Méliès,
immediately began using his films as an extension of his stage act. Rather than
record reality, he interpreted it in the form of magic tricks, jokes and
exhibitions of special effects, turning the screen into a fantasyland with visuals
that couldn't be replicated on any stage.
Méliès' films proved that film audiences would accept stylized
renderings of reality. The scenery backdrops, theatrical costumes and painted
makeup fascinated storefront patrons of 1897, and his outlandish imagination of
his visuals would soon give him the reputation of a maker of marvels -- the
skeletal devil's coach in The Merry Frolics of Satan, the space cannon in
A Trip to the Moon that fires its capsule into the Man in the Moon's eye.
Some of his large-scale stage props required scores of puppeteer-operators.
Méliès uses perspective tricks to make people into puppets or
giants. The Man With the Rubber Head (1901) relies on one surefire gag: a
man with an air bellows 'inflates' the hero's head, which grows to five times its
size.
Many of these special effects are pulled off with uncommon dexterity. A man
tosses disembodied heads in a row on a table, and even now it's not immediately
apparent how the trick is done. Through the magic of stop-motion, a Rajah's harem
girl multiplies into seven, unfolding like a scroll. Méliès
sometimes presents these miracles as simple tricks, but often they are part of a
story about dreams, ghosts or the adventures of fantastic creatures. His male
characters (often Méliès himself) prance about in tuxedoes or period
costumes, while his women appear as princesses and dazzling winged fairies. Many
of the films in this set appear in original hand-tinted color, that makes the
bat-wings of magical pixies all the more enchanting.
The collection spreads the many films across five discs, with easily navigated
menus. Inside the folding disc holder is a booklet printed on quality paper with a
full index. Each entry includes the film's title in French and English, the year,
the running time and whether the film is in B&W or color. It also includes the
composer of the music score, by a noted group of composers: Eric Beheim, Brian
Benison, Frederick Hodges, Robert Israel, Neal Kurz, Alexander Rannie, Rodney
Sauer, Donald Sosin, Joseph Rinaudo and the Mont Alto Motion Picture
Orchestra.
The quality of the presentation varies a bit, as the films have been drawn from
archival sources from around the world. The selection isn't just a collection of
the holdings of one company; the package text says that the set contains nearly
all of Méliès' surviving films. A number of the films have
commentary tracks as well. The 'big' titles are all here. In addition to the ones
mentioned above, the set contains The Conquest of the Pole (tinted, 31 min.),
Tunneling the English Channel (15 min.), The Impossible Voyage (color, 21 min.),
Gulliver's Travels among the Lilliputians and the Giants (5 min.) and Baron
Munchausen's Dream (11 min.). Also included are all nine episodes of
Méliès' 1899 film about the Dreyfus affair -- eight one-minute
episodes followed by a marathon 2-minute final chapter.
As a special extra, the set begins with a tribute film from the legendary Georges
Franju, 1953's Le grand Méliès. The B&W film is an
affectionate meditation on the passing of cinema's first legendary showman,
starring Méliès' son André as his own father.André
Méliès is shown trying to buy a camera and then making his own,
designing his studio and putting on a fairground exhibition of A Trip to the
Moon to prove to exhibitors that it is worth his higher asking price. The
half-hour film has the same slowed, gentle pace as Franju's later Judex,
and uses similar titles. It begins with scenes of Méliès elderly
widow in an empty room. We learn that most of the filmmaker's best work was
immediately pirated all over the world, even by Edison! Méliès
didn't return to show business after WW1 and instead opened a small toy and magic
shop. The most endearing scene shows him entertaining two little kids with magic
tricks. At one point he puts a handful of flowers to his face, and his head
transforms into a full bouquet, like something out of a painting by Magritte. The
surreal sight points straight to the Cocteau-influenced visuals in later Franju
films: the bird-headed magician in Judex and the masked madwoman in Eyes
Without a Face.
Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema (1896-1913) is a great
entertainment and an invaluable research resource. Méliès' sense of
fun and magic is very modern, and makes us feel as if the dawn of cinema happened
just the day before yesterday.
For more information about Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema
(1896-1913), visit Flicker Alley. To
order Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema (1896-1913), go
to
TCM Shopping.
by Glenn Erickson
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