Abstract
Open Access: https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/8p58pf91v
Arguably, Georges Méliès is the most written-about among early filmmakers. Thanks mainly to the untiring efforts of the Méliès family and in particular the shows presented by the late Madeleine Malthête-Méliès, his granddaughter who grew up with him after her mother's death, his work was a continuous presence for audiences all over the world. (I saw my first Méliès films as a student in the late 1970s at the Frankfurt Kommunales Kino in a programme presented by her.) Madeleine Malthête-Méliès also wrote her grandfather's biography, first published in France in 1973 and re-edited several times, which now becomes available in English, translated by Kel Pero, and edited by Matthew Solomon.
Madeleine Malthête-Méliès’ pioneering work is still an important source on the life of her grandfather. As Solomon observes in his introduction, contrary to most other studies on Méliès that focus on his filmmaking years, her book pays particular attention to Méliès’s formative years during the Second Empire and the Third Republic and ‘obliges us to take stock of the remarkable range of Méliès’s creative work, which traversed and united the industrial, plastic and performing arts’ (p. xvii). Malthête-Méliès paints a rich and lively portrait of her grandfather, combining the results of her own extensive research into her family history as well as the life and work of Georges Méliès with anecdotes and scenes including imagined dialogues. The latter had been required by her French publisher who was interested first and foremost in a popular book for a wide readership. That is the one point to regret regarding this otherwise wonderful initiative of an English translation: for the time being, at least, the book is available only in a rather expensive hardcover edition while it is certainly of interest to anyone interested in film history, and to those who enjoyed reading Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret or watching Martin Scorsese's adaptation.
The English edition includes a number of rare illustrations from private collections, many of which do not appear in the original French edition. It also has an appendix with an essay by Anne-Marie Malthête-Quévrain describing her mother's painstaking efforts to collect the films of her grandfather and to document his career from 1949 onward, which provided the foundations for the biography. Translator's notes and annotations by Matthew Solomon provide useful information on French terms left untranslated as well as references and explanations connecting the biography to recent scholarship without overburdening the text.
Since the first publication of the biography, scholarship on Méliès has been continuously evolving, not least because of the many contributions of family members such as Madeleine Méliès-Malthête's children Anne-Marie Malthête-Quévrain and Jacques Malthête as well as her cousin, André Méliès's daughter Marie-Hélène Lehérissey. Their research, published over many years, partly in the bulletin of the association ‘Les Amis de Georges Méliès’, has inspired several generations of scholars. The various phases of scholarly work on Méliès are particularly visible when one looks at the three conferences held at the famous venue of Cerisy-la-Salle in 1981, 1996, and 2011. In 1981, the contributions to the conference ‘Méliès et la naissance du spectacle cinématographique’ were mainly concerned with determining the position of Méliès in the early years of film history and led to debates between representatives of an older generation of historians, most notably Charles Ford and Jean Mitry, and younger scholars such as Pierre Jenn and André Gaudreault. In 1996, ‘Georges Méliès, l’illusionniste fin de siècle?’ mainly focused on the various cultural contexts that shaped Méliès's films in terms of their aesthetics, their themes, and their iconography. Another 15 years later, in 2011, for ‘Méliès, carrefour des attractions’, scholars explored his oeuvre through the lenses of an even larger array of contemporary cultural practices to understand how these informed his conception of the kinematograph.
Mathew Solomon's new book continues the latter line of research (the second chapter is based on his contribution to the 2011 Cerisy conference), while widening the scope of Méliès's activities even before he was involved in stage magic and filmmaking. Solomon starts with the Méliès family's footwear business, a period in Méliès's life that normally is seen as the one he had to leave behind to find his vocation as a magician and filmmaker. For Solomon, however, it is precisely the experience in this enterprise, characterized by a combination of ‘new technologies powered by electricity and the internal combustion engine along with industrial applications of modern organic chemistry’ (p. 2) and individual craftsmanship, typical for the Second Industrial Revolution? that shaped Méliès's mode of film production. In the fifth chapter, Solomon reads the filmmaker's famous causerie ‘Les Vues cinématographiques’, especially the illustrations, through the lens of Second Industrial Revolution practices, which provides many original insights concerning Méliès's conception of the ‘new profession of the cineaste’.
The second chapter discusses the art group Les Incohérents that emerged in the 1880s as a reaction to the new forms of coherence that resulted from modernization and the Second Industrial Revolution, while at the same time, terrible accidents and crises provoked by these very same processes jolted French society. Solomon detects numerous connections between Les Incohérents and Méliès's films, but also to themes discussed in the footwear trade press at the time. Méliès's drawings as a political caricaturist in 1889–1890, discussed in chapter three, show similar traits as those by caricaturists that were part of the Incohérents, but also to the specific aesthetic of some of the films. As the fourth chapter argues, the specific kind of incoherent, sometimes absurd humour of ‘modern laughter’, in turn, is an important ingredient in Méliès's productions for both the magic stage and the screen.
Throughout the book, Solomon draws many surprising and often eye-opening parallels between developments in the footwear industry, Les Incohérents, and Méliès's subsequent activities at the Théâtre Robert-Houdin and as a film producer. Some of them may occasionally raise questions or invite discussions, but overall, this well-documented study, which includes many illustrations from private collections, offers a productive fresh look at the life and work of Georges Méliès that enriches our understanding of this unique figure's role in early film history.
