| Le Voyage de Gulliver à Lilliput et chez les géants | |
|---|---|
Le Voyage de Gulliver à Lilliput et chez les Géants, full film | |
| Directed by | Georges Méliès |
| Based on | |
Production companies | |
| Distributed by | Georges Méliès (1903) Star-Film (1902) American Mutoscope & Biograph (1903) Edison Manufacturing Company Flicker Alley (2008, US-DVD) |
Release date |
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| Country | France |
| Language | Silent film |
Le Voyage de Gulliver à Lilliput et chez les Géants, released in the United States asGulliver's Travels Among the Lilliputians and the Giants and in the United Kingdom asGulliver's Travels—In the land of the Lilliputians and the Giants,[1] is a 1902 Frenchsilenttrick film directed byGeorges Méliès, based onJonathan Swift's 1726 novelGulliver's Travels.
Méliès himself plays Gulliver in the film.[2] The visual differences of scale between Gulliver and the countries he visits were created usingmultiple exposures andminiature models; Méliès usessubstitution splices and careful exposure design to merge the various elements and give them a sense of apparently seamless action.[3] Some scenes were filmed outdoors, in Méliès's garden inMontreuil, Seine-Saint-Denis, so that the camera could be far away enough from the Lilliputians to make them look small.[2]
Gulliver's Travels Among the Lilliputians and the Giants was released by Méliès'sStar Film Company and is numbered 426–429 in its catalogues.[1] In early 1903, theEdison Manufacturing Company sold duplicated prints ofGulliver's Travels Among the Lilliputians and the Giants, as well as of Méliès's other filmsJoan of Arc andRobinson Crusoe, in the United States.[4]Siegmund Lubin also advertised aGulliver's Travels film in 1903; this may have been an attempt by Lubin to ride on the popularity of Méliès's version.[5]
In 1988,Jean-Pierre Mocky directedGulliver, a three-minuteremake of Méliès's film, as part of theTF1 television programMéliès 88. At the time, the film was one of 158 Méliès films presumedlost, but for which writtenscenarios survived; Mocky based his remake on Méliès's original scenario, but used a style and tone markedly different from Méliès's works.[6]
Astencil-colored print of the film is held at the Cineteca di Milano. It is unknown whether Méliès authorized the coloring, as the stencil process is highly unusual in his oeuvre;[7] normally, his films were colored using an entirely freehand method supervised by the coloristElisabeth Thuillier.[8]
Flicker Alley released the film on DVD in the US in 2008.
In their study offilm adaptations of British literature, Gregory M. Colón Semenza and Robert J. Hasenfratz calledGulliver's Travels Among the Lilliputians and the Giants a "gorgeous film" that "remains very watchable due to its sheer imaginative and visual invention".[3]
