Méliès, Georges

Méliès, Georges (1861-1938), French film director and pioneer film-maker. Born into a family of wealthy shoe-makers, Méliès studied in Paris and London, where he learnt conjuring tricks rather than commerce, then began his career in his father's firm. He bought the Robert Houdin Theatre in Paris in order to stage magic shows and present conjurers.

In 1895 Méliès attended one of the first shows by the Lumière brothers, and immediately perceived the possibilities of cinematography. While Lumière operators travelled the world in search of new pictures, Méliès envisaged the cinema as an illusion factory. He bought a film-projector in London, and created his own production company, which he fortuitously named Star Film, with no foreknowledge of the future universal significance of those words. At his home in Montreuil, near Paris, he built one of the first film studios; he turned his theatre into a cinema, became a producer, director, screenplay-writer, designer, and occasional actor, and, between 1896 and 1914, made 503 “travels through the impossible”, entrancing films of extraordinary poetic beauty and mystery. His first full-length feature film was L'Affaire Dreyfus (1899), in which he showed his concern for political reality. He achieved widespread recognition with Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902; A Trip to the Moon), a masterpiece of trick photography and technical innovation.

Unfortunately, Méliès was unable to compete with the emergence of big production companies. World War I brought about his financial ruin, and his effects were destroyed or sold off. After the war he was a forgotten man and was reduced to selling confectionery for a living. Before Méliès's death in a retirement home, Henri Langlois, who created the Cinémathèque Française in 1934, rescued the majority of Méliès's films, which had miraculously survived, and supervised their restoration. D. W. Griffith said of Méliès: “I owe him everything.”