Méliès The Magician DVD, 1997

For anyone interested in the history and the magic of cinema this is an essential watch, with fifteen of Méliès’s films featured dating from 1898-1909 and including his famous A Trip to the Moon. Other highlights are The Man with the Rubber Head in which he removes his own head and expands or contracts it with bellows according to his whim, The One-Man Band in which he plays all seven members of a musical group simultaneously, The Music Lover, in which he uses a number of his own heads as music notes, and the beautifully hand-tinted The Devilish Tenant. The main characteristic of the films is a sense of sheer exuberant fun and experimental vitality.

As producer, distributor, lead actor, scriptwriter, set-designer, special effects man and gag writer, Méliès could allow his talents and imagination to run free in his studio in Montreuil. The most succesful period of his ‘Star Films’ was 1902-3, before competition from Pathé and Gaumont and piracy of his films in America affected sales. He stopped filmmaking altogether in 1912, having made over 500 in the space of 16 years. In 1923 he was forced into selling his studio to a property developer and had to burn many of his film negatives for lack of storage space. Debts led to him odd-jobbing and working for a few years in his wife’s toy and sweet shop in the Gare de Montparnasse, where a chance greeting overheard by a young cinephile led to his rediscovery and reappreciation.

The accompanying 2-hour documentary is thorough and informative, outlining Méliès’s early years as the director of the Robert Houdin Magic Theatre, the incorporation of cinematography into his magic shows and likewise, the importance of illusion in his films. It also reconstructs his studio and outlines his filmmaking techniques. There are tantalising glimpses too of very early cinema from other filmmakers, including Thomas Edison’s Boxing Cats and Annie Oakley (both 1894), Emile Raynaud’s Pauvre Pierrot (1892) and The Lumiere Brothers’ La Sortie des Usines (1895).

Graeme Hobbs on 22nd October 2004
View all 252 of Graeme Hobbs's reviews