Filming Years 18901900s

by zecoathediesel

Inspired from the Video Game Years. In this new series, it's just a documentary of the film industry. But instead of going year by year. It'll be decade by decade. In this series I'll be writing facts about people's favorite director, actor/actresses, and movies. I'll also be covering anything connected to film industry such as real wars, rise of television and more.

5. Georges Melies

After the first private screening of the Lumiere Brother's films, the audiences were so impressive that some of them wanted to buy the camera and projector from the Lumiere brothers to make their own film. But as stated last chapter, the Lumiere brother believed that film was going to fade away later on and refused to sell the camera to any of the audiences including future director, Georges Melies. So George made up his mind and went with his future wife and friends to find a camera and a projector to make some films. For a camera, his future wife, Jehanne d'Alcy found an Animatograph invented by Robert W. Paul in London. Meiles purchased the camera and he study and modified the camera to make his own film camera. For the projector, Melies and his friends, Lucien Korsten and Lucien Reulos painted a projector known as the Kinetographe a cast iron camera-projector.

With the equipment ready, Melies and his team set out to make some films, at first the films were just people doing basic things, like a woman washing herself, a group of men playing cards, it was just something that people have already seen, but one day while Melies was recording something off the streets his camera jammed in the middle of a take, after he fixed the camera and he look over the film he saw that while he was un-jamming the camera he notice that the bus and women were changed into a horse and men. After witnessing this moment, Melies had a brilliant idea that would make him famous. Before he was a filmmaker Melies first job was a magician and Melies would always look for new ways to from art and illusions for his tricks and make even bigger and better magic happen behind the camera. In most of Melies films he would explore a new style of editing and film tricks he would come up with to impress the audiences. One editing style he's most known for is the stop tricks, where he would film one scene with some sort of object or person and in the next scene the object or the person would change into something else. Melies would sometimes committed on how much hard work would go with these effects, like the multiple exposures where he would making copies of a certain person as they interact with one another in the final production. For this effect you have to be really creative and careful as well. This effects needs careful timing and body position as to where is this body going to go and who or what would it interact with, and as Melies noted that even if you work very hard, if the sprocket brakes you have to start all over again, as repairing the sprocket was impossible.

Dang, it makes me glad we have flash drives and computers now to solve that problem. Still, it is crazy and admirable that someone would create the video again if everything else falls apart.

Anyway, with the special effects, Melies was also credited as the first director to direct narrative or fantasy films. When his films aren't just magic tricks, or him trying out a new effect, Melies would use these effects to tell a story. Sometimes the story would be a fiction one like Cinderella or a Trip to the Moon, and sometimes the stories would be based on a real event. The Dreyfus Affair is a film that was based on a true event that was going on at the time where a Jewish French artillery officer was accused for being a spy and was put on trial and Melies believed that the man is innocent so he wanted this film to be as real as possible and to make the character look also innocent to the people watching the film. In fact it was so realistic, that audiences believe that they were watching a documentary of the events, and it is regarded as the first politically engaged film, so engaged that fights were broken out between the debate of Dreyfus and his innocence that it was also one of the first films to get banned in France at the time.

From the late 1890s and 1900s Georges Melies set a lot of groundbreaking moments in both filming and editing. His films were very popular because of the effects and storytelling and the imagination he share with his audience. He help influence many directors such as D.W. Griffith. His films were also a victim of piracy across America due to his popularity around the world. We'll talk about that later, for now there was one thing about Melies that is a weak point and that's his shots.

Much like the other early directors, Melies would only place his camera in one spot and just that one spot alone. I mean sure he would put different sets in his movies and sometimes would shot a scene outside, but never in is films, that I know of, would he move the camera in any of the scenes. Now like I said a lot of early directors did this as well, but by the time the 1910s came along, directors and producers have found and discovered new ways to move the camera along with the set and actors, because of this people were starting to become less interested in Melies' work. So after making over 500 films and having to file for bankruptcy, Melies retired from his directing career in 1914.

After the hard deal of giving up his career, Melies disappeared from the public and work as a toy salesman in Paris near a train station, but by the late 1920's journalists have discovered Melies and his life work and realized how much this man has contributed to film and set the stage for a whole new entertainment. So on December of 1929, Salle Pleyel invented Melies at the gala as they were paying tribute to his work by showing people his films. Melies describe the event as one of the most brilliant moments of his life, and that wasn't all, in 1932, the Cinema Society arranged a place for Melies, his granddaughter and his second wife at the film industry's retirement home in Orly. He stayed at the home until he passed away on January 21th, 1938.

Today Georges Melies is seen as the father of special effects and people are still recognizing him as the starter of narrative and editing in terms of films. People like D.W. Griffith and Walt Disney gave their feelings towards Melies, with Griffith saying he owns everything to him, and Walt Disney saying he discovered the means of placing poetry within the reach of the man in the street.

On 2007, author Brian Selznick published a novel called The Invention of Hugo Cabret that was turned into a movie called Hugo in 2011, that depicts the later life of George Melies as a shop owner.

Today most of Georges Melies movies can be found on YouTube and are available for anyone to watch and download them for free. They are must watch for both an average viewer or a major film buff.