GEORGE MELIES

 Following the initial success of the Lumiere Cinematographe in 1895, other film production firms appeared in France. Among these was a small company started by a man who was perhaps the single most important filmmaker of the cinema‘s early years, George Melies. Melies was a perfoming magician who owned his own theater. After seeing the Lumiere Cinematographe in 1895, he decided to add films to his program, but the Lumiere brothers were not yet selling machines. In early 1896 he obtained a projector from English inventor and by studying it was able to build his own camera. He was soon showing films at his theater. Although Melies is remembered mainly for his delightful fantasy movies, replete with camera tricks and painted scenery, he made films in all the genres of the day. His earliest work, most of which is lost, included many Lumiere styles scenics and brief comedies, filmed outdoors. During his first year of production, he made seventy-eight films, incuding his first trick film The Vanishing Lady.In it , Melies appears as a magician who transforms a woman into a skeleton. The trick was accomplished by stopping the camera and substituting the skeleton for the woman. Later, Melies used stop-motion and other special effects to create more complex magic and fantasy scenes. Melies also acted in many of his films. In able to control the mise-en-scene and cinematography of his films, Melies built a small glass enclosed studio. Melies‘s films, and especially his fantasies, were extremely popular in France and abroad, and they were widely imitated. Among the most celebrated of his films was A Trip to The Moon (1902), a comic science fiction story of a group of scientists travelling to the moon in a space capsule and escaping after beig taken prisoner by a race of subterranean creatures. He often enhanced the beauty of elaborately designed mise-en-scene by using hand applied tinting. Except in Melies first years of production, many of his films involved sophisticated stop-motion effects. Some historians have criticized Melies for depending on static theatrical sets instead of editing. Yet recent research has shown that in fact his stop-motion effects also utilized editing. He would cut the film in order to match the movement of one object perfectly with that of the thing into which it was transformed. Such cuts were designed to be unnoticeable but clearly Melies was a master of one type of editing. Melies stopped producing, having made 510 films(about 40 percent of which survive).