The french director Georges Méliès is today considered by its merits, between the pioneers of the cinema. He is responsible for the introduction and experimentation of a series of important technical and narrative innovations in the early life of cinematographic art; was one of the first filmmakers to use multiple exposure, fading and color (painted on film manually), he is also universally recognized as the pioneer and “father” of special effects: it was the year 1896, when Melies he discovered the substitution trick almost by chance.
Maries-Georges-Jean Méliès, more commonly known only as Georges, was born in Paris, on December 8, 1861, in a family that owns a small artisan shoe company. In 1884 he went to London, where he worked as a clerk in a bust shop; there he began to attend magic theaters. He met David Devant, conjurer of the Egyptian Hall: under his guidance he became an apprentice illusionist. In 1885 he returned to Paris, where he became interested in cinema, working as a magician at the Robert-Houdin Theater. In 1888 he acquired the theater and assumed its management.
In 1895 he had the opportunity to attend a public demonstration by the brothers Auguste Lumière and Louis Lumière. He then began to take an interest in and study equipment for creating moving images: two years later he had an equipped studio, located in an attic in Montreuil. Its actors (and many times the same Méliès) recited in front of a painted backdrop following theatrical traditions, they also performed magic displays with which the new director was very familiar.
In about twenty years (between 1896 and 1914), Méliès he would direct as many as 531 films, most of them of variable length, some as short as one minute, others as long as forty minutes. The theme of his productions often derived from experiences in shows and magic tricks that he knew personally; the scenes were full of impossible tricks and events, like objects disappearing or changing dimensions.
The film company of Méliès, Star Films, knew the bankruptcy in 1913, because of the commercial policies of the great American and French rivals. The director was excluded from the production of films, so he decided to dedicate himself only to magic: the Robert-Houdin theater was demolished and on its ashes the Boulevard Haussmann was born.
Méliès he managed to license a toy stand at Montparnasse station, with which he tried to raise some money in the following years.
Slowly his work was rediscovered and sustained. In 1925 a journalist from a movie magazine found him at his newsstand and a movie theater owner found some of his movies in abandoned warehouses in a shopping center. In the years that followed, it was his granddaughter Madeleine Malthête Méliès who saved what was left of her grandfather’s work. In fact, a priceless heritage on the origins of cinema was saved from oblivion.
In 1931 he was awarded the highest prize awarded in France, the Legion of Honor, received directly from the hands of Louis Lumière. The following year, thanks to the interest of a film union, he was granted a pension and was accommodated in a retirement home for artists. He even acted in some commercials.
Georges Méliès he died in Paris, at the Leopold Bellan clinic, on January 21, 1938. He is buried in the Parisian cemetery of Père Lachaisem.