5 things about Georges Melies

1. Georges Méliès [also called George Melies ]was a former magician who became involved in film as a way to further his obsession with illusion.

2. He was born on December 8th, 1861 in Paris France. His father was a shoe maker and together with his two brothers he was trained in that business. He studied with the Parisian magic dealer Voison and eventually even started building his own apparatus and automaton. Then in 1888, he bought the famous Robert-Houdin Theatre! He began to present magic shows in this historic location.

In 1895, Melies witnessed a demonstration of a new invention by the Lumiere Brothers called the Cinematographe. By 1896, he had developed his own cine camera and began makingfilms.

3.  His trademark brand of phantasmagorical wizardry made him the godfather of special effects cinema in the hundreds of films he created in his Paris studio.

 Méliès’s most famous film, Le Voyage dans lalune (1902), distributed in the United States and England as A Trip to the Moon, ranks as one of the cinema’s first (if not the first) science fiction films, combining spectacle, sensation, and technical wizardry to create a cosmic fantasy that was an international sensation.

4 . Méliès’s films relied on a fixed camera position, but within this limitation he created a basic library of special effects that would dominate the cinema until the advent of the digital era in the late twentieth century: double exposures, dissolves (one image “melts” into another), mattes (in which one portion of the image is “masked off” and then rephotographed to create spatial, or spectacular, illusions), reverse motion, cutting in the camera (to make objects appear and/or disappear), and numerous other cinematic techniques.

5. George Melies died in Paris in 1938, and is buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery along with other such notables as Edith Piaf, Oscar Wilde, and Marcel Marceau.

[click on the links for a sample of his films]