Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès (1861-1938), better known simply as Georges Méliès, was one of the true pioneers of cinema history not only in his inventiveness in film editing, but also for his unwavering dedication to creating films as art or as unreal events rather than mere documentations of perceived reality, or “actualitiés.” Influenced by his background as an illusionist, his landmark trick films of the late 1800s and early 1900s were the first moving images to not simply depict everyday experiences, but also to celebrate cinema’s magical possibilities. Though Méliès was not the first to create moving images with a camera, through his magical exploration into the art of filmmaking he far surpassed his contemporaries and laid the groundwork for the movies we experience today.

Georges Méliès was an innovator in every sense of the word with regard to cinema. Through his experimentations, Méliès invented fundamental editing techniques that remain relevant to this day, including jump cuts, double exposures, superimpositions and stop tricks. As folklore has it—and in macabre Méliès fashion—he mistakenly discovered stop-trick editing when his camera temporarily jammed while filming a car on the street; the result was the transformation of a car into a hearse on screen. Even when it came to the perforations that allow film to be pulled through a camera or projector, Méliès came up with an arduous improvised solution using a hand-operated hammer. American inventor and patent-obsessed businessman Thomas Edison was the only known person with film perforation technology at the time, and he was certainly unwilling to provide his assistance without monopolizing Méliès’ work.

Even the Lumière brothers refused to help Méliès in his technical quest. In December of 1895, Méliès attended a private film projection demonstration of L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat (1895) by Auguste and Louis Lumière. He was so enthralled by the experience that he immediately approached the brothers about purchasing one of their moving-image camera machines. The Lumières refused his offer, and in 1896 Méliès decided to try to create his own version of the machine by modifying a Theatrograph 35mm projector designed by British inventor Robert W. Paul. Méliès was successful, and through trial-and-error approaches, he learned to process, develop and print his own films. Unlike the Lumière brothers’ fascination with linking filmmaking to the study of history and science in an ethnographic sense, Méliès preferred to utilize the technology as a form of artmaking.

Méliès purchased the Théâtre Robert-Houdin in 1888 in Paris, which was founded by the renowned conjurer Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin. (Houdin also served as the namesake of another magician-actor, Harry Houdini.) Méliès revamped the failing theater and restored its glory, staging intricate and extravagant illusion shows that were extremely popular. By 1896, Méliès began showing his own films at the Théâtre Robert-Houdin beginning with The Vanishing Lady (1896). In establishing his own cinema theater, Méliès accomplished yet another momentous feat; he constructed one of the first indoor spaces dedicated to ongoing film-viewing by audiences, rather than just temporarily repurposing various exhibition spaces.

Georges Méliès was truly a one-man show. Not only did he manage the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, but he also wrote, produced, acted in, directed, edited and processed his own films, in addition to designing the costumes and sets. However, there was one element of the filmmaking process Méliès did outsource. From 1897 through 1912, he engaged a firm run by Élisabeth Thuillier and her daughter Marie-Berthe Thuillier to oversee the manual hand-coloring of his prints. Though some of these hand-colored prints have survived and have been restored, many are deemed lost, leaving only the black-and-white versions for posterity. Over the span of his filmmaking career (1896 – 1913), Méliès created more than 500 short films, which included a diverse range of approaches: early Lumière-influenced documentaries, comedies, horror stories, illusions, historical retellings, fantasy fables, dramas and science fiction tales. Of these works, only around 200 are known to exist today.

In 1902, Méliès released one of his most widely recognized films, Le Voyage dans la lune. The film was met with phenomenal reception within France and the United States. However, bootleg copies of the film—including prints produced by Thomas Edison—contributed to this positive reaction within the States, and Méliès saw none of the massive profits. This led to the founding of the American division of the production company Star Film by Méliès and his brother Gaston who aimed to ensure that screening royalties were appropriately received and copyright violation avoided. The Star Film trademark was originally patented in 1896 and was one of the earliest production companies in France. A dominating force in the newly established film industry, Thomas Edison founded the Motion Picture Patents Company in 1908 as a means of controlling the production, distribution and exhibition of all moving images within the United States and Europe as well as capitalizing on the work of other motion picture pioneers. Unfortunately, Star Film was not spared, and Méliès was forced to produce films under Edison’s corporate umbrella. Edison treated his conglomerate company like an assembly line, requiring Méliès to produce on a weekly basis at least one thousand feet of film.

Despite Méliès’ immense impact on the establishment of moving image film as a new medium of storytelling, his career as a filmmaker was relatively short-lived. By 1911, Méliès struck a deal with powerful French film distributor Pathé, who financed his films between 1911 and 1913. Though some of Méliès’ longest and most extravagant films came out of this brief era, none of his works were profitable for Pathé and they began taking editing liberties with Méliès’ films until he broke his contract with the company by 1913. With the worldwide industrial transition in cinema toward profitable product over creative freedom, Méliès faded from filmmaking. During WWI, the French Army forced Méliès to hand over approximately 400 original prints of his films to be melted down and used as army vestments. By 1923, Méliès had lost most of his cinema empire, including the Théâtre Robert-Houdin. In turn, he burned his own film negatives, costumes and sets and walked away from the film industry altogether.

Though Méliès never produced another film after that point, by the mid- to late-1920s, interest in his impact on the dawn of cinema began to grow. In 1931, he was presented with the medal of the Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur, the highest order of merit within France. Decades later, legendary film scholar Tom Gunning would posit Méliès’ work as  a “cinema of attraction” in which significance is placed on filmic theatricality and spectacle over narrative grounding. This concept concretely recognized Méliès’ films as not only foundational pieces of canonical cinematic history, but also as key precursors to underground avant-garde filmmaking.

By highlighting both hand-colored and black and white versions of Georges Méliès’ works, The Illusory Tableaux of Georges Méliès in part hopes to draw attention to the ways in which hand-coloring techniques were used to enhance and augment filmic storytelling approaches in imaginative ways as precursors to later cinematic coloring techniques. These hand-colored works are unique in that each print was individually colored, making no print exactly alike. The series also draws on Méliès’ unbridled interest in the occult, unabashedly displayed in works such as Le diable au couvent (1899), Le chaudron infernal (1903) and Les quatre cents farces du diable (1906). Méliès’ background as a performing magician ultimately led him to filmmaking, and works including Illusions fantasmagoriques (1898), Le mélomane (1903) and Les illusions fantaisistes (1909) showcase the ways in which Méliès elevated his illusionary tricks to statures unattainable without cinema magic. In works like Voyage à travers l'impossible (1904) and Le dirigeable fantastique (1906), Méliès delves into his own fears and fascinations with the technologies of modern times that simultaneously advance and consume humankind. Above all else, Méliès’ brilliance as a performer with an unrivaled ability to consider audience perspective and construct artworks that reflect this careful contemplation enthrones him as the world’s first cinematic auteur. – Alexandra Vasile