The Early French Film Industry and George Méliès: Magician of the Cinema
The Lumières’ early screenings were successful
1) but the brothers believed that film would be a short-lived fad.
2) As a result, they moved quickly to exploit the Cinématographe.
3)They initially avoided selling their machines, instead sending operators to tour abroad,
showing films in rented theaters and cafés.
4)These operators also made one-shot scenics of local points of interest.
5)From 1896 on, the Lumière catalogue rapidly expanded to include hundreds of views of
Spain, Egypt, Italy, Japan, and other countries.
6)Although the Lumière brothers are usually remembered for their scenics and topicals,
they also produced many staged films, usually brief comic scenes.
Some of the Lumière operators’ films were technically innovative.
1) Alexandre Promio, for example, is usually credited with originating the moving camera.
2) The earliest cameras were supported by rigid tripods that did not allow the camera to swivel
and make panorama, or panning, shots.
3) In 1896, Promio introduced movement into a view of Venice by placing the tripod and
camera in a gondola.
4) Promio and other filmmakers continued this practice, placing their cameras in boats and on
trains.
5) Traveling shots of this type (and soon panning movements as well) were associated mainly
with scenics and topicals during this era.
Egypt: Panorama of the Bank of the Nile (Alexandre Promio, 1896)
Egypt Film Clip
(Subnote about Film and Egypt)
Side Note: The Cinématographe Lumière
On 28 December 1895, the Lumière brothers unveiled the Cinématographe—a three-in-one device that could record, develop and project motion pictures—in their first public screening at the Grand Café on Paris’s Boulevard de Capucines. In early 1896, they would open Cinématographe theatres in London, Brussels, Belgium and New York. Egypt was not far behind.
On Thursday, 5 November 1896, less than a year after their Paris premiere, the Lumière brothers screened their first films to an excited audience at Café Zavani in the Tousson Pasha Stock Exchange area in Alexandria. Such was the charm of Alexandria that the Lumière cameraman, Alexandre Promio, announced that he would film authentic Egyptian scenes to display all over the world as well as to promote the new films in Egypt. Promio shot Egypt’s first film in 1897 in Alexandria depicting scenery at the Place de Consuls, the tram station at Schutz and the arrival of a train at San Stephano before traveling on to Cairo to film further scenes there.
In 1906, the Lumière brothers sent a second mission to Egypt headed by the French-Algerian photographer Félix Mesguich to film more scenes portraying the customs and traditions of the Egyptian people as well as popular locations such as the Pyramids, the Nile and the Sphinx. Throughout their one-year sojourn in Egypt, travelling from Alexandria, to Cairo and then on to Upper Egypt, Wadi Halfa and finally Khartoum, the Lumière representatives rented and sold cinematic equipment and films.
End of footnote from this article
Georges Méliès
1)Was a performing magician who owned his own theater.
2)After seeing the Lumière Cinématographe in 1895,
3)he decided to add films to his program,
4) but the Lumière brothers were not yet selling machines.
5) In early 1896, he obtained a projector from English inventor R. W. Paul
and by studying it was able to build his own camera.
6)He was soon showing films at his theater.
7)Méliès’s films, and especially his fantasies, were extremely popular in France and abroad,
and they were widely imitated.
8)They were also commonly pirated, and Méliès had to open a sales office in the United States
in 1903 to protect his interests.
9)Among the most celebrated of his films was A Trip to the Moon (1902),
a comic science-fiction story of a group of scientists traveling to the moon in a space
capsule and escaping after being taken prisoner by a race of subterranean creatures.
10)Méliès often enhanced the beauty of his elaborately designed mise-en-scène
by using hand-applied tinting.
A Trip to the Moon (Georges Méliès, 1902)
(NO DIALOGUE, MUSICAL ACCOMPANIMENT ON ORIGINAL)
A Trip to the Moon film clip
Side Note from Wikipedia
Georges Méliès as Professor Barbenfouillis.[1][12] Méliès, a pioneering French film-maker and magician now generally regarded as the first person to recognise the potential of narrative film,[1
His extensive involvement in all of his films as director, producer, writer, designer, technician, publicist, editor, and often actor makes him one of the first cinematic auteurs.[15] Speaking about his work late in life, Méliès commented: "The greatest difficulty in realising my own ideas forced me to sometimes play the leading role in my films ... I was a star without knowing I was one, since the term did not yet exist."[16] All told, Méliès took an acting role in at least 300 of his 520 films.[17]
Many of the special effects in A Trip to the Moon, as in numerous other Méliès films, were created using the substitution splice technique, in which the camera operator stopped filming long enough for something onscreen to be altered, added, or taken away. Méliès carefully spliced the resulting shots together to create apparently magical effects, such as the transformation of the astronomers' telescopes into stools[38] or the disappearance of the exploding Selenites in puffs of smoke.[39] Other effects were created using theatrical means, such as stage machinery and pyrotechnics. The film also features transitional dissolves.[40]
The pseudo-tracking shot in which the camera appears to approach the Man in the Moon was accomplished using an effect Méliès had invented the previous year for the film The Man with the Rubber Head.[41] Rather than attempting to move his weighty camera toward an actor, he set a pulley-operated chair upon a rail-fitted ramp, placed the actor (covered up to the neck in black velvet) on the chair, and pulled him toward the camera.[42] In addition to its technical practicality, this technique also allowed Méliès to control the placement of the face within the frame to a much greater degree of specificity than moving his camera allowed.[42] A substitution splice allowed a model capsule to suddenly appear in the eye of the actor playing the Moon, completing the shot.[38] Another notable sequence in the film, the plunge of the capsule into real ocean waves filmed on location, was created through multiple exposure, with a shot of the capsule falling in front of a black background superimposed upon the footage of the ocean. The shot is followed by an underwater glimpse of the capsule floating back to the surface, created by combining a moving cardboard cutout of the capsule with an aquarium containing tadpoles and air jets.[10] The descent of the capsule from the Moon was covered in four shots, taking up about twenty seconds of film time.[43]
lthough he had initially followed the popular trend of the time by making mainly actuality films (short "slice of life" documentary films capturing actual scenes and events for the camera), in his first few years of filming Méliès gradually moved into the far less common genre of fictional narrative films, which he called his scènes composées or "artificially arranged scenes".[11] The new genre was extensively influenced by Méliès's experience in theatre and magic, especially his familiarity with the popular French féerie stage tradition, known for their fantasy plots and spectacular visuals, including lavish scenery and mechanically worked stage effects.[59] In an advertisement he proudly described the difference between his innovative films and the actualities still being made by his contemporaries: "these fantastic and artistic films reproduce stage scenes and create a new genre entirely different from the ordinary cinematographic views of real people and real streets."[60]
Similarly, film scholars have noted that the most famous moment in A Trip to the Moon plays with temporal continuity by showing an event twice: first the capsule is shown suddenly appearing in the eye of an anthropomorphic moon; then, in a much closer shot, the landing occurs very differently, and much more realistically, with the capsule actually plummeting into believable lunar terrain.[64] This kind of nonlinear storytelling—in which time and space are treated as repeatable and flexible rather than linear and causal—is highly unconventional by the standards of Griffith and his followers; before the development of continuity editing; however, other filmmakers performed similar experiments with time. (Porter, for instance, used temporal discontinuity and repetition extensively in his 1903 film Life of an American Fireman.)[64][65] Later in the twentieth century, with sports television's development of the instant replay, temporal repetition again became a familiar device to screen audiences.[64]
Méliès was well known for the use of special effects, popularizing such techniques as substitution splices, multiple exposures, time-lapse photography, dissolves, and hand-painted colour. He was also one of the first filmmakers to use storyboards.[2] His films include A Trip to the Moon (1902) and The Impossible Voyage (1904), both involving strange, surreal journeys somewhat in the style of Jules Verne, and are considered among the most important early science fiction films, though their approach is closer to fantasy.
Méliès directed over 500 films between 1896 and 1913, ranging in length from one to forty minutes. In subject matter, these films are often similar to the magic theatre shows that Méliès had been doing,
In total, Méliès made 78 films in 1896 and 52 in 1897. By this time he had covered every genre of film that he would
continue to film for the rest of his career. These included the Lumière-like documentaries, comedies, historical reconstructions, dramas, magic tricks, and féeries (fairy stories), which would become his most well-known genre.
Méliès made only 27 films in 1898, but his work was becoming more ambitious and elaborate.
Due to a variety of factors, only roughly 200 out of over 500 Méliès' films remain in existence today. These factors include Méliès' destruction of his original negatives, the French army's confiscation of his prints and the typical deterioration of the majority (an estimated 80 percent) of films made before 1950. Several of Méliès' new films have occasionally been discovered but the majority that were preserved come from the U.S. Library of Congress, due to Gaston Méliès submitting paper prints of each frame of all new Star Films in order to preserve copyright when he set up the American branch of Star Films in 1902.[25]
End of Side Note from Wikipedia
Pathé Frères
1)Two other firms that would dominate the French film industry were formed shortly after the
invention of the cinema.
2)Charles Pathé was a phonograph seller and exhibitor in the early 1890s.
3)In 1895, he purchased some of R. W. Paul’s imitation Kinetoscopes,
4)and the following year formed Pathé Frères,
5)which initially made most of its money on phonographs.
6)From 1901, however, Pathé concentrated more on film production, and profits soared.
7)The firm expanded rapidly. In 1902, it built a glass-sided studio and began selling
the Pathé camera, which became the world’s most widely used camera until the end of the
1910s.
8)At first Pathé’s production was somewhat derivative,
9)borrowing ideas from Méliès and from American and English films.
10)Ferdinand Zecca For example, in 1901, Ferdinand Zecca, the company’s most important director, made
Scenes from My Balcony
11)It picked up on the vogue, recently started in England, for shots presenting things as if seen
through telescopes or microscopes.
Scenes from My Balcony (Ferdinand Zecca, 1901)
Scenes from My Balcony Film Clip
Pathé Frères's vs. Léon Gaumont
1) Pathé Frères's main rival in France was a smaller firm formed by inventor Léon Gaumont.
2) Gaumont initially dealt in still photographic equipment.
3)The firm began producing films in 1897.
4)These were mostly actualities made by Alice Guy,
the first female filmmaker (the next Module will feature Guy's work).
5)Gaumont’s involvement in film production remained limited in this era, since Léon was
more concerned with technical innovations in film equipment.
6)Building a production studio in 1905 made Gaumont more prominent,
7)largely through the work of director Louis Feuillade.
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