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Reviewed by:
  • Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema (1896–1913), and: Georges Méliès Encore: New Discoveries (1896–1911)
  • Matthew Solomon (bio)
Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema (1896–1913); DVD distributed by Flicker Alley, 2008
Georges Méliès Encore: New Discoveries (1896–1911); DVD distributed by Flicker Alley, 2010

Until quite recently, seeing more than a few dozen of the more than 520 films Georges Méliès made during his career was difficult. Although Méliès has long stood alongside the Lumières as a fountainhead of film history, his reputation as a pioneer of the fantasy film and cinematic special effects rests on a relatively small number of trick films and féeries that have been widely available since the 1940s in various formats. Only five years ago, if one wanted to see a more extensive and truly representative sample of Méliès’s films, several days at one of a select few international archives would likely have been necessary. Flicker Alley’s invaluable five-disc compilation Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema (1896–1913) has rendered such extensive travel superfluous for all but the most specialized researcher, marking an exciting new era in the availability of Méliès’s oeuvre. Just as his work entered the public domain with the expiration of the droit des auteur, his films became accessible to an extent that would previously have been inconceivable. A more recent supplemental disc, Georges Méliès Encore: New Discoveries (1896–1911), rounds out a very nearly comprehensive survey of what survives of Méliès’s extraordinary cinematic output. At long last, the majority of what remains in Méliès’s vast filmography can be contemplated at the touch of a button.

Although more than half of the films credited to Méliès are currently considered lost, his films have survived at a higher rate than that of silent films more generally. At last count, 214 different Méliès titles appear to have survived, although some only as fragments. Together, the six discs that together compose First Wizard and Encore list 199 titles attributed to Méliès. The enormous task of locating and digitizing such a large proportion of Méliès’s surviving corpus from archives and private collections around the world is truly a remarkable achievement and would make for a revealing documentary film in its own right. (Seventeen sources of film materials are credited in First Wizard—only one of which chose to watermark the films contributed with a logo in the corner of the frame—and ten more are credited in Encore.) If nearly two hundred Méliès titles are somehow not enough, First Wizard also contains Georges Franju’s legendary homage Le Grand Méliès (1953) dubbed in English (disc 1), and Encore includes two titles by Segundo de Chomón, the Spanish émigré who worked for Méliès’s competitor Pathé-Frères and has recently been rediscovered as a key early filmmaker in his own right.1First Wizard is packaged with a pamphlet reprinting a short appreciation of Méliès by filmmaker Norman McLaren and an excerpt from John Frazer’s 1979 book Artificially Arranged Scenes.

In 1912, near the end of a filmmaking career that began in 1896, Méliès claimed to be “the first to have done theater of all kinds in the cinema: comedy, drama, buffoonery, war scenes, fairy plays, tricks, and so on.”2 Méliès adapted many different theatrical genres for the cinematograph, and his placement of comedy at the head of this list surely seems apt. Comedy and buffoonery seem to have a place in nearly all Méliès’s films, and no journey, however distant its destination, is complete, [End Page 187] much less begun in many cases, without a few pratfalls. The voyage in A Trip to the Moon (1902), for example, starts only after a scene in which the hunchbacked Micromegas tumbles comically into a tub of nitric acid while the capsule is constructed (First Wizard, disc 2). Likewise, The Impossible Voyage (1904) begins only...

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