Georges Méliès

Georges Méliès, born Marie Georges Jean Méliès on December 8, 1861, in Paris and who died on January 21, 1938, in the same city, was a French film director and illusionist. Having chosen conjuring as his profession, he used a donation from his father, a shoe industrialist, to become the owner and director in 1888 of the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, which had been dormant since the death of the famous illusionist.

On December 28, 1895, he marvelled at the animated photographic images during the first public screening in Paris of the Cinématographe by the Lumière brothers and even offered to buy the patent for the machine. A polite but mocking refusal led him to turn to a London friend, the first British director, Robert W. Paul, who provided him with an intermittent mechanism with which he shot his first film in 1896, Une partie de cartes, a replica of the same subject made by Louis Lumière.

In the same year, with L’Escamotage d’une dame au théâtre Robert Houdin, he used for the first time in Europe the principle of the stop-camera trick, an American discovery, which ensured him great success in his theatre where he mixed live shows and large-screen projections. He then transformed his tableaux, as he called his films, into a new illusory and magical world, making use of the drawing and painting talents that everyone had noticed in his adolescence.

Georges Méliès is considered one of the main creators of early cinema special effects, including superimpositions, dissolves, and the enlargement and reduction of characters. He was also the first filmmaker to use storyboards. He had the first film studio built in France on the Montreuil property that his father had also provided him with. Through his film on the Dreyfus affair, he is also considered the first director of a political film in the history of cinema.