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Georges Méliès
What is Georges Méliès famous for?
Georges Méliès is famous for his many innovations inmotion pictures. He was one of the first to film fictional narratives, and he is regarded as the inventor of special effects in movies. His films were among the first to use such techniques as double exposure, stop-motion, and slow motion.
What is Georges Méliès’s most famous film?
Georges Méliès’s most famous film isLe Voyage dans la lune (1902;A Trip to the Moon). The film is a very loose adaptation ofJules Verne’s novelDe la terre à la lune (1865;From the Earth to the Moon) and has the famous image of the spacecraft fromEarth hitting the “man in the moon” in his eye.
What was Georges Méliès’s occupation?
Georges Méliès began his career as a magician. After seeing theLumière brothers’ films in 1895, he became a filmmaker and made over 500 short films between 1896 and 1913. After the bankruptcy of his film company in 1913, Méliès worked in obscurity in a toy store in a Paris train station. He and his films were rediscovered in the 1920s, and he was honoured for his role in film history.
Georges Méliès (born December 8, 1861, Paris, France—died January 21, 1938, Paris) was an early French experimenter withmotion pictures, the first to film fictional narratives.
(Read Martin Scorsese’s Britannica essay on film preservation.)
When the first genuine movies, made by theLumière brothers, were shown inParis in 1895, Méliès, a professional magician and manager-director of theThéâtre Robert-Houdin, was among the spectators. The films were scenes from real life having the novelty of motion, but Méliès saw at once their further possibilities. He acquired acamera, built a glass-enclosed studio near Paris, wrote scripts, designed ingenious sets, and used actors to film stories. With a magician’sintuition, he discovered and exploited the basic camera tricks: stop motion, slow motion, dissolve, fade-out, superimposition, and double exposure.
- Died:
- January 21, 1938,Paris (aged 76)
- Notable Works:
- “Cleopatra’s Tomb”
From 1899 to 1912 Méliès made more than 400 films, the best of which combineillusion, comic burlesque, and pantomime to treat themes of fantasy in a playful and absurd fashion. He specialized in depicting extreme physical transformations of thehuman body (such as the dismemberment of heads and limbs) for comic effect. His films included pictures asdiverse asCléopâtre (1899;Cleopatra’s Tomb),Le Christ marchant sur les eaux (1899;Christ Walking on Water),Le Voyage dans la lune (1902;A Trip to the Moon),Le Voyage à travers l’impossible (1904;The Voyage Across the Impossible), andHamlet (1908). He also filmed studio reconstructions of news events as an early kind of newsreel. It never occurred to him to move the camera for close-ups or long shots. The commercial growth of the industry forced him out of business in 1913, and he died in poverty.