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dvd
review:
Méliès
The Magician
Director: Georges Méliès
Studio: Facets Video
reviewed
by Jesse Walker
January
13, 2004
| Georges Méliès gets a bad rap. The pioneering filmmaker,
who lived from 1861 to 1938, is remembered as one of the founding
icons of the movies; in the traditional formulation, he's seen as
the godfather of film fantasy while his contemporaries the Lumiere
brothers are hailed as the creators of documentary realism. But
then the criticisms creep in. He never moved his camera. He almost
always shot inside. His editing was primitive. His camera wasn't
just stationary -- he kept it bolted to the studio floor. Geoff
Andrew's book The Director's Vision sums up the conventional
wisdom when it declares that Méliès "was insufficiently imaginative
to proceed beyond anecdotal shorts." David Cook's History of
Narrative Film is more positive -- it gives Méliès credit for
developing the fade-in, the fade-out, the lap dissolve, and stop-motion
photography -- but still concludes that he "appropriated a conventional
and unimaginative narrative model because it was what he knew best."
In fact, Méliès did occasionally break with his usual pattern --
by shooting outside, by attempting a more realistic story, or by
otherwise imitating other directors' work. The results were not
inspiring. This shouldn't be surprising: If Méliès had trouble adopting
his rivals' innovations, the flipside is that his primitive pictures
are still delightful to watch today, while his more forward-looking
colleagues' efforts feel dated and dull.
For evidence, turn to Méliès the Magician,
a DVD collecting 15 of his films (including his masterpiece, 1902's
Voyage to the Moon) alongside Jacques Mény's documentary
The Magic of Méliès. The disc is a baroque
feast. Each scene is crammed with bizarre details; each film is
filled with simple but clever trick shots. A man like Edwin S. Porter
may have done more to develop the grammar of the medium, but who
today watches The Great Train Robbery for pleasure? The miracle
of Méliès' work is that his best films still feel
fresh -- that they're interesting as more than an exercise in archeology.
Or perhaps that isn't a miracle. Méliès wasn't a man struggling
with the rudiments of a new medium so much as a man using that medium
to develop a much older art. His background was in stage magic,
and he saw his filmmaking as a natural extension of that work. Magicians
had already been projecting slides via magic lanterns for centuries;
film simply combined projected images with images that move. (For
that matter, magic lantern shows frequently included some forms
of movement -- the movies merely pushed that farther.) Méliès' films
may not take advantage of every tool cinema has to offer, but as
magic they represent an art at one of its peaks. Indeed, according
to Modern Enchantments, Simon During's history of stage magic,
Méliès didn't fail to adopt the new techniques so much as
he refused them, on the grounds that they were a violation
of the illusionist's aesthetic.
Méliès the Magician is a fine introduction to his body of
work. The selections strike a nice balance between showing the best
and the breadth of Méliès, and the documentary is informative if
a bit bland. The latter's high points are clips from films that
didn't make it onto the disc, some of which look very enticing --
I'd love to see the full version of The Merry Frolics of Satan
someday. Perhaps it's time for volume two...
bio:
Jesse
Walker is managing editor of Reason and author of Rebels
on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America (NYU
Press).
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