The Méliès Mystery (ARTE, Lobster Films, Steamboat Films, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Much to my amazement, just after showing the 1961 King of Kings TCM ran a “Silent Sunday Showcase” episode consisting not of the 1927 Cecil B. DeMille The King of Kings but a freshly restored color version of Georges Méliès’ pioneering 1902 film A Trip to the Moon followed by a documentary, over an hour long, called The Méliès Mystery (Le Mystère Méliès), directed by Eric Lange and co-written by him and Serge Bromberg, who also narrated the French version. It was made in 2021 for French television and this English version was narrated by Leonard Maltin, an acceptable enough choice. The film told me some facts about Méliès’ life and rather sad career I hadn’t known before, such as his father was a successful shoe manufacturer and expected Georges to follow him into the family business. Alas, Méliès was fascinated by vaudeville shows and in particular by stage magic; in 1888, at age 27, he cashed out his share of his father’s inheritance and used the money to buy the old Theâtre Robert-Houdin, which had been built in the early 19th century by the pioneering French magician Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin. Méliès put a lot of money into restoring the old theatre and putting on magic shows, though as with a lot of his later projects he spent too much money on them and they didn’t turn a profit.

In the 1890’s Méliès saw one of the earliest demonstrations of moving pictures projected on a screen by Louis and August Lumière, and he immediately fell in love with the new medium. He bought a movie camera from the Lumières and one day when he was shooting a typical Parisian street scene, the camera jammed briefly. When he developed his film, a horse-drawn cart had magically disappeared – and Méliès realized that with film he could easily and quickly do illusions that took hours of preparation on stage. He launched a company called Star-Film – though he made the mistake of never actually incorporating it, therefore he personally was responsible for its debts when the popularity of trick films started to wane in the early 1910’s – and incorporated its logo into every movie as a futile attempt to keep his works from being pirated. One book I read about early filmmaking told a story about a U.S. company that got hold of one of Méliès’ films, duplicated it and tried to sell it to a distributor from France. Unfortunately for them the “distributor” was Méliès himself, who recognized his own product and angrily chewed out the thieves who had tried to sell his own work back to him.

Méliès lived on a large estate in Montreuil, France and built two film studios on the grounds; they were made entirely of glass because, since artificial lights weren’t yet bright or powerful enough to use for filmmaking, all movies in the early days were shot by daylight. When Thomas A. Edison organized the Motion Picture Patents Company, Méliès and his brother Gaston, his U.S. distributor, made the mistake of joining it – only by the rules of Edison’s trust, Méliès’ French-made films couldn’t be shown in the U.S. So Gaston Méliès started making his own films in the U.S. and concentrated on Westerns and other genres of popular entertainment – and since both brothers signed their works “G. Méliès,” there’s ongoing confusion about which films so signed were made by which brother. World War I drove the final nail into the coffin of Georges Méliès’ business and also ended the market for the kinds of whimsical fantasies his studio had specialized in – even though Méliès had made the first political film ever, The Wandering Jew (1905), and he was inspired by the Alfred Dreyfus case and the tale of a French army officer wrongfully convicted of espionage and treason because he was Jewish.

In 1923 he was forced to sell his Montreuil estate and, in a fit of panic and rage, destroyed the negatives and prints of all 520 films he was storing there. By the early 1930’s he and his wife were reduced to running a toy shop in the Gare Montparnasse train station. When Henri Langlois of the Cinemathéque Française tried to engage a showing of Méliès’ works to get him some income, Méliès had to admit that he didn’t have any copies and had no idea where any prints of his films were. Eventually a few turned up here and there, mostly from private collections, and many of the films actually had survived courtesy of Gaston Méliès’ demand for pristine negatives and prints he could use for U.S. releases. Georges Méliès actually invented a camera with two lenses that could shoot on two strips of film simultaneously – which at first suggested that in addition to everything else (including inventing the whole art of “special effects” on screen) Méliès might have been the pioneer of 3-D movies. (At the time 3-D movies were a dream but 3-D still photos were an established commercial product, sold as two adjacent images which you saw through a stereoscopic viewer that melded the two images into one and gave an illusion of depth.) The reason for the two-lensed camera was quite different: it was simply to give Gaston Méliès back in the U.S. a duplicate negative of equal quality to the ones Georges was making prints from for their French releases.

Meliès’ American negatives ended up being purchased by Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies producer Leon Schlesinger and eventually were donated to a film archive that is in the process of restoring them frame-by-frame, after first using a chemical to soften up the original negatives or prints that due to environmental issues has been banned in the U.S. but is still allowed in France. Today, according to a post at Lost Media Archives [https://lostmediaarchive.fandom.com/wiki/Georges_Méliès_Missing_Films_(1890s-1910s)], 231 of Méliès’ 520 films are known to exist in some form, though it’s unclear just how many are actually watchable today, and the 1902 color version of A Trip to the Moon is intriguing but lacked the crispness and definition of the black-and-white version – at least partly because the colors were hand-painted onto the original film, an early and brave attempt at colorization.