Text: Xi | This article was first published on the WeChat public account artag
< h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > a lunar travelogue</h1>
When the Mid-Autumn Festival saw the full moon, a full moon with a human face appeared in his mind, and his eyes were hit by the space capsule, which was the picture in the old 1902 movie "Journey to the Moon".
Le voyage dans la lune (1902)
Watch online: https://v.qq.com/x/page/c0166kdu3fy.html
Known as "the first science fiction film of all time", Travels to the Moon, written and directed by Georges Méliès (1861-1938), adapted from Jules Verne's novel From the Earth to the Moon and Herbert George Wells's Novel The First Man to the Moon, represents the lunar expedition of six astronomers who built a bullet-shaped capsule and fired a cannonball onto the moon, hitting the moon's eye. This shot is the earliest known stop-motion animation.
After watching "Journey to the Moon", it was like having a wonderful dream, the actresses of the Goddess Arcade took me back to Paris in the early 20th century, and Méri's imagination and advanced technology took me to outer space.
Stills from "Journey to the Moon"
On May 3, 2018, Google commemorated George Méliès with the homepage of the VR animated version, the video cover is a full moon, click on the play button in the middle of the full moon to see the magician dressed up Méliès and his "Journey to the Moon".
Watch online: https://v.qq.com/x/page/s0644pk58ol.html
Méliès was one of the first directors to experiment with color film techniques, and the film was released in 1902 in black and white and hand-painted editions, which were about 14 minutes long, but the ending and color plates were lost. In 1993, heavily damaged copies of the color plates were donated by private collectors to the Barcelona Film Archive in Spain. In 2002, the ending "Triumphant Return" was rediscovered in France. The film's restoration program lasted for more than a decade. In 2011, a complete color restoration of the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Méliès's birth, 109 years after the film's release. Behind this bumpy road to repair is a regrettable story, and Merry's life is not as romantic as in VR animation.
George Mérière
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > magicians and puppeteers</h1>
George Merière has spent his life chasing dreams, and before dabbling in film, he was a brilliant magician and puppeteer.
29-year-old Mérière
Born on December 8, 1861, Méliès was born in Paris, France, to a wealthy shoemaking family, and showed a talent for painting and acting from an early age. Often punished by her teachers for scribbling scribbles on notebooks and textbooks as a student, Mériès began a "puppet theater" made of cardboard at the age of 10, and by the time she was a teenager, Mérière's craft had advanced to the point where she could make more complex marionettes.
After graduating from high school, Méliès joined the family shoe business, and although he had always been fond of painting and stage magic, due to the opposition of his parents, he had to attend classes in his spare time. It wasn't until the age of 27 that Mélières' father retired, and he sold the business he had left to his brother, and with the financial support of his first wife, he bought the Théâtre Robert-Houdin Theatre, and from then on devoted himself to acting, integrating comedy and gorgeous sitcoms into performance.
Georges Méliès in The Living Playing Cards （1905）
La source enchantée (1890's, Georges Méliès)
The Roppé Utan Theatre was funded by Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, the father of modern magic. Méliès's 1896 short film The Vanishing Lady was filmed here.
One of his most famous magic tricks was the "Recalcitrant Decapitated Man"—the professor's head was cut off during his speech, yet he continued to speak until his head returned to his neck.
Méliès's 1898 short film Four Heads Are Better Than One also featured a split head.
Watch online: https://v.qq.com/x/page/a0165zo5ktn.html
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > the advent of the movie</h1>
Mérières' career as a magician was changed by a film on December 28, 1895, when the 34-year-old Mérière attended a private screening of the Lumière brothers' films. The Lumiere brothers, the inventors of cinema and the film projector, transformed the "diorama" created by the American inventor Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) to enlarge its moving image through projection, allowing more people to watch at the same time. (That's right, Edison, who invented the electric light)
Lumiere brothers in their youth
The pioneering works of world cinema, "Train In" and "Factory Gate", both appeared in 1895, and the realism of the film amazed the audience, when the train in "Train Into the Station" approached the audience, people thought that they would really be hit and frightened to flee around.
火车进站 The arrival of a train in La Ciotat (1895)
Watch online: https://v.qq.com/x/page/c0170c6ac4f.html
工厂大门 The exit from the Lumière factory in Lyon (1895)
Watch online: https://v.qq.com/x/page/h0559kjzarz.html
Fascinated by the "picture of the event" of the film, Mérières immediately offered to buy a "cinema machine" for 10,000 francs, but out of protection for technology, the Lumière brothers refused Mérières' request. Méliès did not give up, and eventually bought a camera and several short films made by Robert W. Paul in London, which could use Edison's "KINETOSCOPE" specification film, and then together with two engineers, he improved several times in his factory at the Roppe Utan Theater to build his own camera, which he patented in 1896.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > movie magician</h1>
Magic and movies actually have a lot in common, both are visual tricks. The principle of cinematic image activity is the principle of visual temporary, that is, the image lasts for about one-tenth of a second on the retina of the human eye before it completely disappears. Long before the invention of cinema, there were already many visual toys based on the principle of visual persistence, such as "hand flip book", "magic picture", "magic lens", "diorama".
Magic painting: it is a disc painted with different patterns on both sides, tie thin lines at both ends of the disk, tighten the thin lines and let go, because of the principle of visual retention, the two patterns will be fused together
Méliès first imitated the Lumiere brothers and Edison, and the more than 80 short films he had just shot were nothing new. As a magician, Méliès was not satisfied with recording pictures truthfully, creatively integrated magic techniques into film creation, invented early film shooting special effects such as downtime remake, multiple exposures, fade-in and fade-out, slow-motion, fast-motion, upside-down, and superimposed, and created a "expressive aesthetics" style that was opposed to "realism", known as "film magician" and "pioneer of techno-technocratic film".
The invention of the stop-and-shoot originated from a coincidence, when Méliès showed the film, found a moving public carriage suddenly turned into a coffin carriage, felt puzzled, it turned out that when the filming that day, the film was hung due to machine failure, and when the film was filmed again, a coffin carriage happened to be driving in the position of the original carriage. This accidental accident made Meri Ai Mao Seth open up and understand the mystery of "stopping and re-shooting", which is the predecessor of editing. He applied this technique to the 1899 film Cinderella, creating a wonderful scene where pumpkins turn into carriages and Cinderella's worn-out clothes suddenly turn into gorgeous evening dresses. In addition, he uses slow-motion photography to make the little fairy dance like flying in the air.
Watch online: https://v.qq.com/x/cover/0ik8swvli3774ab.html
In the 1902 film "Eraserhead", Méliès used the split-screen process for the first time, using the method of split exposure to shoot two different roles of himself in the same picture, achieving a hilarious visual effect.
Watch online: https://v.qq.com/x/page/w0132zfrenl.html
Méliès is also known as the "father of the theatre director", who brought many excellent plays to the screen and systematically applied the laws of theatrical arts to films. He instructed the actors to play the roles in the silent film with exaggerated movements, gestures, and expressions.
Before Mélière, films by the Lumière brothers and others were mostly shot outdoors to record real life, but Mélières built a glass "Montreuil studio" in France in 1897, which was considered by the mainstream to be the first studio in the history of world cinema. MonteLuy Studio is convenient for shooting with natural light and artificial landscaping without weather. At one end of the studio is a camera, and at the other end is mélière's stage space with a mechanism set installation that can present complex scheduling scenes, and most of Méliès's works were shot in montluy studios, and "Journey to the Moon" is no exception.
Méliès (at left) in his Montreuil studio
Although the "Black Mary" studio built by Edison in 1893 is earlier in the year, the "Black Mary" has only a small skylight that moves with the orbit, which can only be viewed by one person at a time, and is considered to be not a real studio.
The active film projector invented by Edison, the device is placed in a cabinet, allowing only one person to watch movies through a small window.
In addition, Méliès was the founder of the film industry, and he founded the "Star Film Company", which was a combination of production and distribution, consisting of the Roppe Utan Theater, which screened the films, the printing workshop and sales office set up next door to the theater, the Montrouil Studio, and he also designed posters for the films, which can be said to be the earliest film publicity. The company regularly hosts film premieres and convenes distributors to watch them, transforming the film from a game juggler in the city into an elegant entertainment of high society.
On the left wall of the movie "Rubberhead" hangs the logo of "Star Film Company"
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > forgotten by the world</h1>
Cinema is the art of dreaming, and the price of dreams is enormous. "Journey to the Moon" is only 14 minutes long, but it costs 1500 gold Louis. Méliès wanted to get the film to be screened in the United States for greater commercial gain, but after Thomas Edison saw the film in London, his assistants secretly made copies of the film. Because there was no copyright protection that year, the large amount of money earned after the release of the film in the United States was all owned by Edison, and Merry loved nothing. (I didn't expect Edison to have such a black history)
Méliès's film career after the epidemic did not keep pace with the times, no longer conformed to the tastes of the audience, and coupled with the arrival of the First World War, the company finally declared bankruptcy in 1914. During the war, Mélières' studio was requisitioned as a military hospital, and more than 400 original film films were confiscated and melted into army heels. Mérière's first wife died in 1913, and he took his two children alone, turning a studio into a theater and making a living from acting.
The Roppé Utan Theatre has always been the pride of Mérières, however the theatre was demolished in 1923 due to the reconstruction of the Haussmann Boulevard. In the same year, EMI Film took over the establishment of the "Montluy Studios" and the "Star Film Company" by Méliès. Méliès was devastated, he gave everything for the film, but in the end he had nothing, and he vowed never to touch the movie again in his life. That same year, he personally lit a fire and burned all the copies of the movie and props in the storeroom, and the ending and color copies of "Journey to the Moon" were lost in the fire.
In 1925, Mérière married the long-time actress Jehanne d'Alcy, and the two made a living in a small open-air candy and toy shop at the Gare montparnasse train station in Paris, living with their young granddaughter Madeleine Malthête-Méliès, living a life that was forgotten by the world.
Jehanne d'Alcy has starred in many of Mérières' films, including Journey to the Moon.
Merry loves in the toy shop
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > rediscovered</h1>
Fortunately, Mérieux's story did not end there, and in the late 1920s, journalists and film historians began to recognize Mélières' contribution to film and began to study it. In 1929, mélières' recapture of his personal works was held in Sale Pleyel, where the 68-year-old was rediscovered. In later recollections, Méliès called the event "one of the most glorious moments of my life."
Stills from the movie "Hugo" Méliès attended the personal retrospective ceremony after being rediscovered, tearful
On January 21, 1938, Méliès died of cancer at the age of 76 and was buried in the Labhez Cemetery, ending his legendary film life.
Merière's tombstone in The Cemetery of Father Lachaise
Today, Georges Mérières is written into film textbooks, and the great film magician is remembered in various forms. Brian Selznick's 2007 novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which focuses on Mérière's later life, was adapted by Martin Scorsese into the film Hugo in 2011 and has been called a three-dimensional love letter dedicated to Mériès. Although the movie rating is not high, many people feel bored, but after learning about the life of George Meri, watching this movie has a warm feeling.
Hugo Hugo (2011)
Works exist because they are seen, and authors are meaningful because they are remembered. Thank you to the people who discovered Merrie, let us see his magical movies and legendary dream-chasing life.
As a film creator
I think everything about movies today
It all originated from Georges Mérière
—Martin Scorsese
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