Text: Xi | This article was first published on WeChat public account artag
"Journey to the Moon" is called "the first science fiction film in history", written and directed by Georges Méliès (1861-1938), based on Jules Verne's novel "From the Earth to the Moon" " and Herbert George Wells' novel "The First Men to the Moon", depicting the lunar expedition of six astronomers , who built a bullet-shaped space capsule and launched cannonballs to the moon, Hit the moon in the eye, this shot is the earliest known stop-motion animation.
On May 3, 2018, Google commemorated George Méliès with the homepage image of the VR animation version. The cover of the video is a full moon. After clicking the play button in the middle of the full moon, you can see Méliès dressed as a magician and his "Journey to the Moon".
Méliès was the first director to try color film technology at that time. The film was released in black and white and hand-painted color in 1902, with a total length of about 14 minutes. However, the ending and the color version were once lost. In 1993, the badly damaged color edition was donated by a private collector to the Film Archive in Barcelona, Spain. In 2002, the finale "Return in Triumph" was rediscovered in France. The film restoration program lasted for more than ten years. In 2011, a fully restored color version of the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival to commemorate Méliès' 150th birthday, 109 years after the film's release. There is a sad story behind this bumpy road to restoration. Méliès's life is not all romantic like in the VR animation.
Magician and puppeteer
George Méliès spent his life chasing dreams, and was a brilliant magician and puppeteer before he ventured into film.
On December 8, 1861, Méliès was born in a relatively wealthy shoe-making family in Paris, France, and showed talent for painting and acting from an early age. Little Merry was punished by teachers for scribbling on notebooks and textbooks when she was a student. At the age of 10, she started making "puppet theaters" with cardboard. More complex marionettes can now be made.
After graduating from high school, Méliès joined the family shoe-making business. Although he has always been interested in painting and stage magic, he could only study in his spare time due to the opposition of his parents. Until the age of 27, when Méliès's father retired, he sold the business his father left to his brother to his brother, and with the help of his first wife, he bought the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, and since then Devote himself fully to acting, incorporating comedy and flamboyant sitcoms into performances.
The Teatro Robbe Houdin was funded by the father of modern magic, Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin. Méliès's 1896 short The Vanishing Lady was shot here.
One of his most famous tricks was the "Recalcitrant Decapitated Man" - the professor's head was chopped off in the middle of a lecture, yet he continued to speak until the head came back to his neck. Méliès's 1898 short "Four Heads Are Better Than One" also featured the separation of the head and the body.
The advent of the film
Méliès's career as a magician was changed by a film. On December 28, 1895, Méliès, 34, attended a private screening of the Lumiere Brothers. The Lumiere brothers were the inventors of the film and the film projector. They transformed the "diorama" created by the American inventor Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931), and their moving images could be enlarged by projection , so that more people can watch it at the same time. (Yes, Edison who invented the light bulb)
The pioneering works of the world's films, "The Arrival of the Train" and "The Gate of the Factory" were both released in 1895. The realism of the film surprised the audience. When the train in "The Arrival of the Train" approached the audience, people thought they were real. will be hit and run around in fright.
Méliès was deeply attracted by the film "pictures of activity", and immediately offered to spend 10,000 francs to buy a "movie machine", but out of technical protection, the Lumiere brothers refused Méliès' request. Méliès did not give up, and eventually bought a camera and several short films in London made by Robert W. Paul, which could use Edison's "KINETOSCOPE" specification film, and then he and two engineers, in his own Rope · After several improvements in the workshop of the Ulten Theatre, he finally made a camera of his own, and applied for a patent in 1896.
movie magician
Magic and movies actually have a lot in common, both are visual tricks. The principle of the motion of the movie picture is the principle of visual temporality, which means that the image will disappear completely after about a tenth of a second on the retina of the human eye. Long before the invention of film, there were already many visual toys based on the principle of persistence of vision, such as "flip book", "magic picture", "magic lens", "diorama".
Magic picture: It is a disc with different patterns painted on both sides. Thin lines are tied at both ends of the disc. After tightening the thin lines, release them. Because of the principle of persistence of vision, the two patterns will merge together.
Méliès first imitated the Lumiere brothers and Edison, and the more than 80 short films he started shooting were nothing new. As a magician, Méliès was not satisfied with recording the pictures truthfully, and creatively incorporated magic techniques into film creation, inventing early films such as stop and reshoot, multiple exposures, fade in and fade out, slow motion, fast motion, reverse playback, and fusion. Shooting special effects, created a style of "expressive aesthetics" opposite to "realism", and was called "film magician" and "technological film pioneer".
The invention of stopping and re-shooting originated from an accident. When Merry was showing the film that had been filmed, he found that a moving stagecoach suddenly turned into a carriage for carrying coffins. The fault was hung up, and when the film was taken again, a carriage carrying the coffin happened to be driving in the position of the original carriage. This accidental accident made Méliès stunned and understood the mystery of "stop and shoot again", which is the predecessor of editing. He applied this technique to the 1899 film "Cinderella," creating fantastic scenes of pumpkins turning into carriages and Cinderella's tattered clothes suddenly turning into gorgeous evening gowns. In addition, he used slow motion photography to make the dancing images of little fairies fly in the air.
In "Eraser Head", shot in 1902, Méliès used the split-screen technique for the first time, and used the method of sub-exposure to film two different roles played by himself in the same frame, achieving a hilarious visual. Effect.
Méliès is also known as the "father of theatrical director", he put many excellent plays on the screen, and systematically applied the laws of theatrical art to the film. He instructed the actors to focus on exaggerated movements, gestures, rather than expressive performances, to play characters in silent films.
Before Méliès, the films of the Lumiere brothers and others were mostly shot outdoors to record real life. However , Méliès built a glass "Montreuil studio" in France in 1897. ), the mainstream view is that this is the first studio in the history of world cinema. The Montrouil studio is convenient for shooting with natural light, but also with artificial landscaping that is not affected by the weather. One end of the studio is a camera, and the other end is a stage space designed by Méliès, which is equipped with a set device, which can present complex scheduling scenes. Most of Méliès’s works were shot in the Montrouil Studio. "not excluded.
Although Edison's "Black Mary" studio built in 1893 is older in year, "Black Mary" has only a small skylight that moves with the track, and can only be viewed by one person at a time, which is not considered a true sense of photography. shed.
In addition, Méliès is also the founder of the film distribution industry. He founded the "Star Film Company", which integrates production and distribution . The film is screened by the Rope Utan Theater, a laboratory and a sales office set up next to the theater. , Montluy Studios, he also designed posters for the film, which can be described as the earliest film promotion. The company regularly hosts film premieres and brings together distributors to watch it, transforming the film from market vaudeville to high-society highbrow entertainment.
forgotten by the world
Movies are the art of dreaming, and the price of dreaming is huge. "Journey to the Moon" is only 14 minutes long, but it costs 1,500 louis. Méliès had wanted to get the film released in the United States for greater commercial gain, but after Thomas Edison saw the film in London, his aides secretly made copies of the film. Since there was no copyright protection at the time, a lot of money earned after being released nationwide in the United States was all owned by Edison, and Méliès received nothing. (I didn't expect Edison to have such a black history)
The film career after Méliès declined, did not keep pace with the times, and no longer met the tastes of the audience. Coupled with the arrival of the First World War, the company finally declared bankruptcy in 1914 . During the war, Méliès's studio was requisitioned as a military hospital, and more than 400 original film reels were confiscated and melted into the army's heels. Méliès, whose first wife died in 1913, was alone with his two children, converted a studio into a theater, and made a living by acting.
The Rope Outain Theatre has always been the pride of Méliès, however it was demolished in 1923 for the reconstruction of Boulevard Haussmann. In the same year, EMI took over Méliès to establish "Montluy Studio" and "Star Film Company". Méliès was hit hard, he gave everything for the movie, but in the end he had nothing, and he vowed never to touch the movie again in his life. In that year, he lit a fire with his own hands and set fire to all the movie copies and props in the warehouse. The ending and color edition copies of "Journey to the Moon" were lost in the fire.
In 1925, Méliès married the actress Jehanne d'Alcy, whom she had fallen in love with for a long time. -Méliès lived together and lived a life forgotten by the world.
rediscovered
Fortunately, Méliès's story didn't end there, and in the late 1920s, journalists and film historians began to recognize Méliès' contribution to cinema and began to study it. In 1929, Méliès's personal work retrospective ceremony was held in Salle Pleyel, people re-acquainted with the 68-year-old man. In later recollections, Merry called the event "one of the most glorious moments of my life."
On January 21, 1938, Méliès died of cancer at the age of 76 and was buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery, ending the legendary movie life.
Now George Méliès is written into film textbooks, and people cherish the memory of the great movie magician in various forms. Brian Selznick's 2007 novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which focuses on Méliès' later life, was published in 2011 by Martin Scorsese (Martin Scorsese) adapted into the film "Hugo", known as a three-dimensional love letter to Méliès. Although the rating of the movie is not high, many people find it boring, but after learning about the life of George Méliès, it is a heartwarming feeling to watch this movie.
Works exist because they are seen, and authors have meaning because they are remembered. Thank you to the people who discovered Merry's love, let us see his magical movies and legendary dream-chasing life.
as a film creator
I think everything about movies today
All from Georges Méliès
—Martin Scorsese
Original: Magical Moon Trip, Dream Chasing Movie Life
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