The Fine Arts Review 1

Early French Cinema

The Lumière brothers, Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas (19 October 1862, Besançon, France – 10 April 1954, Lyon) and Louis Jean (5 October 1864, Besançon, France – 6 June 1948, Bandol[1] [2]), were among the earliest filmmakers. (Appropriately, "lumière" translates as "light" in English

 

!Above...1895 Lumieres film Projector

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The Lumières held their first private screening of projected motion pictures March 22, 1895.[3] Their first public screening of movies at which admission was charged was held on December 28, 1895, at Paris's Salon Indien du Grand Café. This history-making presentation featured ten short films, including their first film, Sortie des Usines Lumière à Lyon (Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory).[4] Each film is 17 meters long, which, when hand cranked through a projector, runs approximately 46 seconds.

It is believed their first film was actually recorded that same year (1895)[5] with Léon Bouly's cinématographe device, which was patented the previous year. The cinématographe— a three-in-one device that could record, develop, and project motion pictures— was further developed by the Lumières.

Above...Auguste Lumiere...

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Max and Emil Skladanowsky, inventors of the Bioskope, had offered projected moving images to a paying public one month earlier (November 1, 1895, in Berlin). Neverless, film historians consider the Grand Café screening to be the true birth of the cinema as a commercial medium, because the Skladanowsky brothers' screening used an extremely impractical dual system motion picture projector that was immediately supplanted by the Lumiere cinematographe.

The Lumiere Brothers' - First films (1895)

Georges Méliès (December 8, 1861 – January 21, 1938), full name Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès, was a French filmmaker famous for leading many technical and narrative developments in the earliest cinema. He was born in Paris, where his family manufactured shoes.

He was very innovative in the use of special effects. He accidentally discovered the stop trick, or substitution, in 1896, and was one of the first filmmakers to use multiple exposures, time-lapse photography, dissolves, and hand-painted colour in his films. Because of his ability to seemingly manipulate and transform reality with the cinematography, Méliès is sometimes referred to as the "Cinemagician."

The Eclipse

George Melies

1907

Before making films, he was a stage magician at the Theatre Robert-Houdin. In 1895, he became interested in film after seeing a demonstration of the Lumière brothers' camera. In 1897, he established a studio on a rooftop property in Montreuil. Actors performed in front of a painted set as inspired by the conventions of magic and musical theater. He directed 531 films between 1896 and 1914, ranging in length from one to forty minutes. In subject matter, these films are often similar to the magic theater shows that Méliès had been doing, containing "tricks" and impossible events, such as objects disappearing or changing size.

Voyage a travers l'impossible

George Melies

1904

His most famous film is A Trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans la Lune) made in 1902, which includes the celebrated scene in which a spaceship hits the eye of the man in the moon. Also famous is The Impossible Voyage (Le voyage à travers l'impossible) from 1904. Both of these films are about strange voyages, somewhat in the style of Jules Verne. These are considered to be some of the most important early science fiction films, although their approach is closer to fantasy.

In addition horror cinema can be traced back to Georges Méliès's Le Manoir du diable (1896).

His 1899 short film Cleopatra was believed to be a lost film until a copy was discovered in 2005 in Paris.

In 1913 Georges Méliès' film company was forced into bankruptcy by the large French and American studios and his company was bought out of receivership by Pathé Frères. After being driven out of business Méliès became a toy salesman at the Montparnasse station. In 1932 the Cinema Society gave Méliès a home in Château d'Orly.

Le Voyage dans la Lune 1902

Realisé par Georges Méliès.Le film est l'adaptation du célèbre roman de Jules Verne, "De la Terre à la Lune".

Alice Guy Blache was the first Major European filmmaker.At first,as Gaumont's secretary she was given tactit and tepid permission to experiment with film(Gaumont was skeptical of the new medium)...She began below with just filiming herself and then by the early 1900s she was going on a 15 year streak that saw her establish Gaumont as the leading international voice in the new Cinema.

Sadly,as has happened to the work of so many artists and in particularly female artists her work was quickly trampled under and disappeared.

She made many determined efforts to find her many hundreds of films in later years but met mostly with the tragic fact that her work had preceded her into oblivion.Today the work to rediscover her lost Ouevre has been taken up by film historians and more and more has been found.But sadly it is not only difficult to find the old films but then they are often in a state of irreperable dacay.So much of humanity on film which was to be a great heritage for us was simply allowed to pass into oblivion....

Les baigneurs

1890's

Alice Guy Blache starring in her own experiment

Above...the resting place of Georges Melies,one of film's foremost visionary artistic talents

La vie du Christ

Alice Guy Blache

1900s

This film is one of the few major critical successes from the peak of Alice Guy's career that hasn't disappeared.

This video shows Alice Guy in one of her early films and then plays the life of Christ....

Méliès did not grasp the value of his films, and with some 500 films recorded on cellulose, the French Army seized most of this stock to be melted down into boot heels during World War I. Many of the other films were sold to be recycled into new film. As a result many of these films do not exist today. In time, Méliès was rediscovered and honored for his work, eventually taking up stage performance.

Melies began what was later known as the Cinema of Attractions, a style of early film production that worked with only the prescenium space. The director would set up the camera and then perform actions in front of the camera, (This area in front of the camera being known as the prescenium space, containing no depth to the images) The Lumiere Brothers, Edison Kinetoscope Films, Black Maria, all aspects of the Cinema of Attractions.

Georges Méliès has been awarded the Légion d'honneur (Legion of honor).

Méliès died in Paris and he was buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery

George Melies - The Hilarious Posters (1907)

Paragraph.

Georges Meliés- Le Locataire Diabolique

1909

Melies was so blase about his work that he allowed the French Army to seize most of it and melt it down for Army Boot heels!

Yuck and Ugh!!!!

Melies - Le Cake-Walk Infernal -Music: "Satan's Cakewalk"

Early 1900s

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