Flicker Alley presents

Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema (1896-1913) (1896-1913)

"During the confusion, the cheeses appear. One of them, a magnificent brie, darts for the head of the magistrate and the poor man dies of asphyxiation, a victim of duty."- Narrator Serge Bromberg, in The Skipping Cheeses

Stars: Georges Méliès
Director: Georges Méliès

MPAA Rating: Not Rated for (mildly risque material)
Run Time: 13h:00m:27s
Release Date: 2008-03-11
Genre: fantasy

Style Grade	Substance Grade	Image Transfer Grade	Audio Transfer Grade	Extras Grade
B+	A-	B+	B+	B-

 

DVD Review

French cinema pioneer Georges Méliès contributed a vast amount of firsts to the early stages of moviemaking. Among other firsts, he created the first film studio, made the first horror and science fiction films, and was the first to use special effects extensively. Although he made many hundreds of pictures over the period 1896 to 1913, he burned the negatives of many of them in a fit of disappointment over his failed fortunes in the 1920s. This amazing collection gathers from diverse archives around the globe 173 of Méliès' pictures, virtually all of those that survive.

While Méliès did contribute many innovations to the cinema, most of the films here feature an entirely static camera. That was a necessity for many of the trickier effects, but it does provide a certain amount of monotony to the viewer. The roughly-painted theatrical backdrops of the earlier picture also betray their shoestring origins. Nevertheless, the ingenuity of Méliès (who had done stage magic and theatrical effects at his Theatre Robert-Houdin) is undeniable, and this collection is to be heartily welcomed by all with an interest in early film.

Disc 1 covers the years 1896-1901, which are largely devoted to short one-to-two minute pictures that feature startling trick effects. But the first picture of Méliès, The Card Party (1896) is an actuality in the style of the Lumiere brothers, shot in the director's garden. He quickly moves on to fantasy and horror, with A Troubled Night (1896) with its sleeper being attacked by a gigantic bug. The Vanishing Lady is a re-creation of the famous stage trick, with the added oomph of a skeleton being placed in the lady's stead thanks to camera-stopping trickery. The Haunted Castle (1896) is considered by some to be the first horror, and it's presented here in hand-tinted color. The naughty side was present right from the beginning too, as After the Ball presents an erotic undressing. Divers Work on the Wreck of the Maine features some brilliant underwater effects. Méliès' sense of humor is demonstrated in The Four Troublesome Heads, as he removes his head repeatedly to create a quartet that apparently sings intolerably off-key. One could even credit Méliès with the first nunsploitation picture, since The Devil in a Convent (1899) features Satan taking the guise of a priest and then shocking the sisters with a lewd sermon before being driven away by St. Michael. The antics of Tex Avery are anticipated in the wildly rowdy Fat and Lean Wrestling Match.

While the first disc tends to rely heavily on short trick pictures, there are also some fascinatingly ambitious projects that point toward the classic era of Méliès' work. A series of nine re-enactments of events in the Dreyfus Affair is certainly far from what one would expect from Méliès, but here it is. A four-minute adaptation of Cinderella offers plenty of inventiveness, with a highly memorable sequence of the title character being attacked by a series of gigantic clocks as midnight approaches. The most ambitious of the projects on this disc is a ten-minute retelling of the life of Joan of Arc (1900), which features spoken narration and eye-popping color. It's an astonishing piece of work for 1900, and it richly deserves rediscovery on this set.

The second disc continues with a an accumulation of trick films, but also includes a number of important pictures, such as Méliès' most famous film, A Trip to the Moon (1902). Delightfully imaginative from beginning to end, it features such bizarre moments as a troop of girls in short shorts loading the vehicle into a massive gun and Selenites that evaporate in a puff of smoke when struck by an umbrella. Effects work is at the forefront with Gulliver's Travels (1902), as Méliès is both huge in Lilliput and tiny in Brobdingnag. This film features outstanding hand coloring that pops right off the screen. An amusing re-creation of the coronation of Edward VII serves as a fanciful substitute for primitive newsreels. The Infernal Cakewalk (1903) is a combination of a dance movie with increasingly wild effects, accompanied by the effervescent piano of Donald Sosin. The Kingdom of Fairies retells the story of Sleeping Beauty with attractive colors and better-than-usual production values.

Disc 3 opens with The Impossible Voyage (1904), a rollicking adventure/comedy that is a sequel of sorts to A Trip to the Moon, featuring a ridiculous voyage to the surface of the sun and back via locomotive, dirigible, automobileand submarine. The Black Imp (1905) is one of the best of Méliès' furniture-rearrangement gags, with a hotel room plagued by mischievous spirit. The Palace of the Arabian Nights is a lengthy piece on Eastern themes, featuring several elaborate dance numbers. The tale of Rip van Winkle is retold in Rip's Dream, which seems to be missing its beginning. Oddly, it seems to be told largely in interpretive dance, which leads to mind-boggling visuals. Some of the shorts are veering into slapstick territory and awkward baggy pants comedy. It's apparent that Méliès will soon become passed by in the industry that he jump-started.

The fourth disc features some incredibly bizarre material amongst the knockabout comedy. Easily the strangest film on the disc is The Skipping Cheeses (1907), which features a cheesemonger with a basket of smelly cheeses who causes a stir on a crowded railway car; when she is charged criminally, the cheeses come to her rescue. It's totally surreal and dreamlike, though there is no sleeper and no awakening. Dreams are the order of the day in several other important shorts here. The most involved is Tunneling the English Channel, a joint dream of the English king and the French president about the Chunnel being dug with corkscrews and the adventures undertaken to link the two nations. Sightseeing thru Whiskey features a drunkard who passes out amongst ancient ruins and finds himself back in ancient time amidst historic revelry. Dream of an Opium Fiend is quite strange itself, with the title character sharing a beer with the man in the moon, and then being pursued by a terrifying clown. Perhaps these films were influenced by Winsor McCay's comic strip Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend. There are elements of the Grand Guignol present in In the Bogie Man's Cave, which uses dismemberment and cannibalism for humorous purposes as an ogre's victims return to seek retribution. Justinian's Human Torches is pretty self-descriptive, though the callousness of the Romans as they party on while the titular people burn is truly horrifying. In Good Luck of a Souse, Méliès begins to turn toward actual scenery for at least a portion of the film.

The fifth and final disc covers the years 1909-1913, as Méliès' fortunes declined and he went into hock with Pathé, eventually losing his studio. There are some fascinating pieces of work in these last years, however. Baron Munchausen's Dream (1911) is more than just another dream film; the occurrences in the dream are used to depict character and not just to show off camera trickery. The Conquest of the Pole (1912) follows the pattern of story of A Trip to the Moon, with the added fillip of political satire as suffragettes keep getting involved in the story for comic effect. The source print used is a German one with color tinting, with optional English subtitles. Cinderella is revisited in a far more substantial manner. The package is rounded out with Méliès' final movie, The Voyage of the Bourrichon Family (1913), which was never actually released due to the financial failure of the company. Appropriately enough, it features a family fleeing its creditors and dealing with both the problems of travel and the antic furnishings that were a staple of Méliès work for years. Even in the last moments, he clearly kept a sense of humor about the situation.

Rating for Style: B+
Rating for Substance: A-

 

Image Transfer

	One
Aspect Ratio	1.33:1 - Full Frame
Original Aspect Ratio	yes
Anamorphic	no

Image Transfer Review: The full frame picture is variable in condition; some source prints are obviously early generation and in excellent shape, while about a dozen films exist only as fragments. In between are varying degrees of dupiness and nitrate decomposition, but on the whole this is an assemblage created with great care to use the best available materials. The main problem is that those best available materials sometimes aren't all that good. A few pictures, notably The Palace of the Arabian Nights and Tunneling the English Channel, have fragmentary color prints that are gorgeous, but are supplemented with poor quality black & white footage, especially at the beginning and end. Happily, there is no sign of PAL/NTSC ghosting or other mastering problems, making this a very satisfying viewing experience.

Image Transfer Grade: B+
 

Audio Transfer

	Language	Remote Access
DS 2.0	Music only, English	no

Audio Transfer Review: The musical accompaniments are provided by a Who's Who of silent movie music, including Eric Beheim, Donald Sosin, Robert Istrael, Neal Kurz, Brian Benison, Frederick Hedges, Alexander Rannie, the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, and Joe Rinaudo at the Fotoplayer. The audio quality is very good, with nice texture and depth. On about fifteen films English narration based on the texts by Méliès is included, though they're recited by Serge Bromberg of Lobster Films, whose accent is occasionally impenetrable. But the audio quality is about as good as one can ask for.

Audio Transfer Grade: B+ 

Disc Extras

Static menu
Scene Access with 173 cues and remote access
1 Documentaries
Packaging: Digipak
Picture Disc
5 Discs
1-Sided disc(s)
Layers: dual

Extra Extras:

1. Booklet

Extras Review: The five discs are accompanied by a healthy booklet, which contains an homage to Méliès by Canadian filmmaker Norman McLaren, and a solid career overview by John Frazer. It also includes a handy index of the 173 films included, with indications as to their genre and giving some production details.

A fictionalized 1953 biography, Le grand Méliès (31m:20s), directed by Georges Franju (Eyes without a Face), is the principal on-disc extra. It has the merit of having Méliès be played by his son André, though his tale is somewhat romanticized. The menu design is rather slow, unresponsive and awkward, but that's about the only drawback to this first-rate set.

Extras Grade: B-
 

Final Comments

Just about everything you could ever want to see by Méliès that still survives is here, often in beautiful prints. From the first horror and sci-fi films to wildly imaginative comedies, there's a little bit of everything here in a set of the highest historical importance.

Mark Zimmer 2008-03-10