This week I watched a very interesting French documentary Le fantôme d'Henri Langlois about the manic-obsessive-brilliant-wonderful film preservationist who founded the Cinémathéque Française. Along the way, he mentioned the two contrasting foundational figures of French cinema, the Lumière Brothers, and George Méliès. Here's a sample of the former:
The Lumière clips they included were definitely fascinating—how could documentary footage of people walking around in 1895 not be fascinating? but the Meiloc ones really piqued my interest (as they did Langlois'—he used to pull out the old, flammable prints to show them as a special treat to the Cinematique's imployees). I'd heard him mentioned in Michael Silverblatt's interview with Brian Selznik, whose illustrated novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret is full of magical Méliès referencces and tips-of-the-hat. The thing that stuck with me there was the comment that, although Méliès discovered and pioneered all of these amazing and surreal special effects, he never discovered (or at least used) that most basic of effects: moving the camera. All of his shots are framed more or less like a theater stage—or, better said, the stage in a magic show.
Here are two Meiloc films from YouTube, L'homme a la tête en caoutchoc ("The man with the rubber head", 1901) which is a more basic magic-show setup, and the delightfully surreal (and famous-in-places) Le voyage dans la lune ("A Trip to the Moon", 1902), which crams near-infinite motion into that non-moving camera.
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