Georges Méliès: the conjuror who turned cinema into magic
From illusionist at the Théâtre Robert-Houdin to pioneer of special effects: how Georges Méliès made the cinematograph a new instrument of wonder.
When the Lumière brothers presented their cinematograph in Paris on 28 December 1895, the audience included a man whose job was making people vanish. Georges Méliès, born in Paris in 1861 into a family of shoe manufacturers, had run the Théâtre Robert-Houdin since 1888, the hall of illusion founded by the great conjuror from Blois. He understood at once that moving pictures could become the most powerful trick ever seen on a stage.
From the stage of illusion to the camera
Méliès was unable to buy a machine from the Lumières, who refused to sell one, so he obtained a projector in London and adapted it to his needs. In 1896 he began shooting short films and founded Star Film, whose trademark was a star. His first titles imitated the documentary views then in fashion, but his repertoire soon filled with devils, skeletons, fairies and alchemists, the figures that had peopled the acts of magic theatres for decades.
According to an account by Méliès himself, the decisive discovery happened by chance: while he was filming the Place de l'Opéra the film jammed, and at the screening an omnibus seemed to turn into a hearse. Whether the anecdote is true or embellished, Méliès realised that by stopping the camera and changing what stood before the lens he could make objects and people appear and disappear. This was the principle of substitution, the heart of all his visual spells.
The glass studio at Montreuil
In 1897 Méliès had a studio built at Montreuil, on the outskirts of Paris, with walls and roof of glass, like a greenhouse, to exploit natural light. There he painted backdrops in shades of grey, designed trapdoors, trolleys and machinery as in a theatre, and combined multiple exposures, dissolves and masks. In Le Manoir du diable of 1896 a bat changes into Mephistopheles; in L'Homme à la tête en caoutchouc of 1901 a head swells like a balloon.
Many of his films were coloured by hand, frame by frame, in colouring workshops. The result recalled popular prints and magic lantern slides, to which Méliès owed a great deal. His cinema was not born of a wish to reproduce reality but of a desire to deceive the eye with elegance, exactly as the parlour magicians of the nineteenth century had done.
Journeys into the impossible
His most famous title remains Le Voyage dans la Lune of 1902, in which a group of astronomers who look like wizards, in long robes and pointed hats, reach the Moon. It was followed by Le Royaume des fées in 1903 and Le Voyage à travers l'impossible in 1904. Méliès himself often appeared on screen as the magician, the devil or the eccentric professor, signing each film with his own figure as an illusionist.
Competition from the large production companies and changing tastes ruined him in the 1910s. For a time he sold toys at a kiosk in the Montparnasse station, until in the late 1920s a number of journalists and filmmakers rediscovered him, and in 1931 he received the Legion of Honour. He died in 1938. Today he is remembered as the man who gave cinema its fantastic vocation: not a window onto the world, but a box of wonders in which the magic of the theatre found a new life.