Georges Méliès, magicien du cinéma

www.cinematheque.fr

Why so much activity concerning Georges Méliès just now? First the (virtually) complete DVD box set of his work released by Flicker Alley, and now a major exhibition with lavish catalogue, screenings, DVDs etc from the Cinémathèque française. He’s neither one hundred years born nor one hundred years dead. In fact he’s seventy years dead, and that’s the point. Under European copyright law, 2008 is the year when the works of Georges Méliès, who died in 1938, come out of copyright, under the rule which says a creative work remains in copyright until seventy years after the death of the author.

So M. Méliès has become fair game - a fact which can be of no small amount of irritation to the Malthete-Méliès family which has so assiduously guarded his legacy until now. They had nothing to do with the acclaimed Flicker Alley set, but they have co-operated with the Cinémathèque française exhibition, which opens in Paris on 16 April and which is described in some detail (in French) on the Cinémathèque’s website.

Where to start? The exhibition itself is divided into three sections: Magie et cinématographe, Le Studio Méliès de Montreuil and L’univers fantastique de Méliès, covering his life, background, work and influence. Many artefacts not previously exhibited in public are promised, and Méliès is championed for the modern generation as the master of special effects and fantasy cinema, foreshadowing Georges Lucas and Steven Spielberg. A 360-page catalogue has been produced, edited by Jacques Malthete et Laurent Mannoni, with some 500 illustrations, which from reports I’ve had so far sounds like an outstanding production in itself.

There are two DVDs published to coincide with the exhibition. The first, Georges Méliès, produced by StudioCanal/Fechner Productions, is a two-disc set featuring thirty remastered Méliès films 1896-1912, with 32-page booklet but no indication of what film titles are included nor their source.

The second DVD is Méliès, le cinémagicien, another two-disc set, produced by Arte Vidéo. This features a documentary, La magie Méliès, by Jacques Mény (1997, 130 mins), a selection of fifteen of the films from 1898 to 1909 (55 mins in total) and the renowned Georges Franju film Le grand Méliès (1952, 37 mins) which is also available on the Flicker Alley set.

This documentary, which introduced many to his films for the first time, features Méliès’ son André, playing his father, and Méliès’ second wife and star of many of his films, Jehanne d’Alcy (then aged ninety).

And there’s more. There are screenings in April-May of Méliès films and in June-July of ‘L’héritage méliès’. A complete Méliès filmography is also promised, which will be a boon, particularly if it goes the whole hog and identifies the films by Star-Film catalogue number (his production company), length, English release title, which copies are extant and where. Meanwhile, Méliès, magicien du cinéma looks like a very good reason to visit Paris over the next few months (as though there weren’t reasons enough anyway, but you know what I mean).

Where to find out more about Georges Méliès? It’s a shame - indeed something of a mystery why there isn’t a single good site dedicated to him (interesting to see that www.melies.com, www.georgesmelies.com, www.georgesmelies.org and www.georgesmelies.fr have all been bought up opportunistically by domain sellers). Cinémathèque Méliès (in French) is a so-so effort of ancient design which I’ve had trouble accessing, but you can trace it back through the Wayback Machine. The Magical World of Georges Méliès likewise isn’t going to win any design awards, but it has a biography, filmography, and links to his films on YouTube. There’s a useful one page biography (written by David Robinson) on the Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema website. The Flicker Alley DVD set Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema (1896-1913) has already been championed here, and serious questions will have to be asked of any silent film enthusiast who hasn’t purchased a copy before the year is out.

As for reading matter, apart from the new catalogue (which is in French, of course), a really good book in English doesn’t exist. The best, albeit slim and not easy to track down nowadays, is David Robinson’s Georges Méliès: Father of Film Fantasy (1993). Elizabeth Ezra’s Georges Méliès (2000) is one for the film studies courses. A standard, substantial, up-to-date biography in English (I don’t know of one in French, either) ought to be written - we repeat so much that has already been written in the film history/film studies field, and yet we leave a yawning gap like this. So you will have to make do with Brian Selznick’s haunting children’s book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret (2007), already championed by The Bioscope, in which Georges Méliès features as a central character. And wait to see if Martin Scorsese really does decide to make a film out of it.

Moving pictures going around London

Whitehall, Cheam, from www.friendsofwhitehallcheam.co.uk

The touring exhibition, Moving Pictures Come to London, already reported on here, continues on its tours around London. Currently it can be found at the Whitehall, Cheam (which looks a delightful spot), where it runs until 30 March. Based on research carried out at Birkbeck College, the exhibition focuses on the history of moving pictures in London before World War I, looking at the filmmakers, the technology and the audiences. It’s a fine small exhibition, not least for showing how academic research can - indeed should - find a popular outlet. Each version of the exhibition has had a section reflecting the area of London where it is being put on. It’s already been to Camden, Hornsey, Hampstead and Westminster, plus a whirlwind couple of days in Leicester Square, and other venues that I think I’ve missed. Take a look if you can.

What happens next?

Sleep with me series, Pihla, Nanna Saarhelo, 2007, from PM Gallery

Occasionally on the Bioscope we look to cinema’s roots in chronophotography, optical toys, magic lanterns and such like, and a new exhibition has just opened which both takes us back to chronophotography and up to the present day.

What Happens Next? is an exhibition dedicated to the photographic sequence. It takes as its inspiration the work of the nineteenth century photographer, Eadweard Muybridge, whose sequence photography - or chronophotography - of the 1870s/80s did so much to inspire the creation of cinema. The exhibition runs at the PM Gallery in West London 8 February-15 March 2008, and it explores the work of artists working in sequence photography from the nineteenth century to today. The artists featured are John Blakemore, Julie Cassels, Matt Finn, Steffi Klenz, Mari Mahr, Edweard Muybridge, James Newton, Nanna Saarhelo, Andrew Warstat, Sally Waterman and Cary Welling.

Coinciding with the exhibition is an article on Muybridge in this week’s New Scientist magazine (only an extract is available online). It’s a thoughtful piece (certainly a lot more thoughtful than its dire title, ‘Lights, camera, action!’ would seem to promise), with more emphasis on Muybridge’s Zoopraxiscope discs that one normally finds. The Zoopraxiscope was Muybridge’s proto-animation device, whereby he transferred some of his photographic sequences in silhouette form onto the edges of a glass disc so that they could be projected as fleeting animated images.

What Muybridge did not do was ever show his photographic sequences themselves as projected images in motion - he wasn’t able to. And yet how often to we see something like the animated sequences featured in this video?

This short piece on the exhibition has been posted on YouTube by the New Scientist, which rather goes to show that there are some limits to its knowledge of science. Muybridge’s photographic sequences were never seen in motion like this. To make them move he had to produce silhouettes derived from the photographs, making him a genuine pioneer of the animation film. The pure photographs he only displayed like so:

Ascending Stairs

Of course, it is hugely tempting to animated Muybridge’s images, as has been done ever since Thom Andersen’s 1975 film Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer. Animated Muybridge sequences are found all over the Web, and have become an iconographic staple. But they falsify history - unless one argues that they display what Muybridge wanted to have displayed but was unable to achieve himself. In which case, they are a form of virtual history, which is all well and good, so long as we do not foget the true one.

As What Happens Next? demonstrates, chronophotography or sequence photography is alive and well today, practiced both as an art and as a science (either equally appropriate for Muybridge), for a sequential series both demonstrates a process and betrays a narrative. Chronophotographic sequences were used to striking effect for analysis in the BBC’s coverage of the last Winter Olympics, and there are numerous artists’ sites which display the possibilities of the medium. Some choice examples include P.J. Reptilehouse, Sequences, and my particular favourite, David Crawford, who photographs sequence of people on tube trains and at airports.

There’s also this review of What Happens Next?, which connects Muybridge with The Matrix, on the Telegraph’s website.

Le Cinéma Expressionniste Allemand

Rudolph Kurtz’s Expressionismus und Film (1926), from http://cinema.expressionnisme.bifi.fr

I’ve just learned about an online exhibition on German Expressionisst cinema, which was published by BiFi (La Bibliothèque du film) towards the end of 2006.

The exhibition is entitled Le Cinéma Expressionniste Allemand, so yes it’s in French, but I encourage you to look even if you’re not able to read much. The exhibition was put together by regular Bioscopist Frank Kessler, of Utrecht university, and it examines the idea of Expressionism as it found expression in German cinema of the 1920s, and as it was interpreted subsequently by critics.

The exhibition is in two main parts: Exposition - which takes us through the history, the ideas, their realisation, and their critical exegesis; and Les repères documentaires, which proides supporting information and documentation, including a filmography, bibliography, a text by Laurent Mannoni on film historian-critic Lotte Eisner (author of The Haunted Screen), links and a glossary for such terms as Cubisme, Futurisme and ‘Caligarisme’.

It is handsomely illustrated with stills and documents, and is well-laid out and easy to navigate. Well worth investigating.

The City of the Future

Carrington Street, Nottingham in 2003, with inset from Tram Ride Through Nottingham, Carrington Street (Mitchell & Kenyon, 1902)

An exhibition, The City of the Future, has just opened at the BFI Southbank. It has been created by the psychogeographical filmmaker Patrick Keiller, director of London (1994) and Robinson in Space (1997). Keiller is currently a Research Fellow at the Royal College of Art, where he has been developing his City of the Future research project. His exploration of urban space through archival film has found varied expressions. This multi-screen installation creates a virtual landscape composed of sixty-eight early actuality films from the years 1896-1909, arranged in the BFI Southbank gallery on a network of maps from the period, and displayed over five screens.

Keiller casts a fascinated eye on the mysteries of the urban environment as expressed through archive film which is so much a part of its time and yet can connect with the here and now. Keiller makes particular use of that distinctive genre of the period, the ‘phantom ride’ (which must be such an evocative phrase for him) - journeys filmed at the front or back of moving vehicles. One haunting expression of his vision is Keiller’s simple idea of placing the original film image within a wider frame of the same location filmed today, as illustrated above. The exhibition (which I’ve not seen as yet), also promises visitor interaction:

Visitors are invited to explore this landscape, both by moving among its various screens, and by departing from the sequences displayed on them to create an individual journey using the ‘menu’ functions of a DVD.

The site of Queensbury station in 2004, with inset from Queensbury Tunnel (Riley Brothers, 1898)

The exhibition is open until 3 February 2008. For other expressions of Keiller’s research, a description of The City of the Future and a downloadable ‘database’ (Excel) of titles from the BFI National Archive that he has viewed and identified as relevant to his investigations is on the Visual Arts Data Service website. There is also an account of his project as a ‘case study’ demonstrating the academic use of archive film on the Moving History site.

There’s an interview with Keiller about the exhibition on the Time Out site.

A striking example of phantom ride, A Trip on the Metropolitan Railway (1910), is available from the BFI’s Creative Archive pages. This is a remarkable, prolonged journey filmed from the front of an Underground train on London’s Metropolitan Line, travelling from Baker Street outwards to Uxbridge and Aylesbury. (The original is seventeen minutes long, but the downloadable clip is just under five minutes)

Visual archaeology

A couple of items on magic lanterns in America. Firstly, the Museum of Modern Art in New York is currently hosting an exhibition, Panoramas of the Moving Image: Mechanical Slides and Dissolving Views from Nineteenth-Century Magic Lantern Shows. This is a combination of modern and traditional takes on ‘pre-cinema’ technology. At the heart of the exhibition is experimental media artist Ernie Gehr’s Panoramas of the Moving Image (2005), a synchronized five-channel video installation that uses eighty-seven original slides and views selected from Gehr’s personal collection and that of film archivist and magic lantern collector David Francis. This is accompanied by a display of paper Zoetrope strips and Phenakistiscope discs, complementary nineteenth-century moving image technologies. The exhibition runs until 25 February 2008.

Herman Bollaert uses all three lenses of his 19th-century magic lantern to give the “Warehouse in Flames” image added smoke-and-fire effects, from www.washingtonpost.com

Meanwhile, in Washington, we have the Belgian Herman Bollaert and his troupe of musicians putting on the The Lanterna Magica Galantee Show at the French embassy. There’s a fine review by Philip Kennicott of this recreation of a nineteenth-century magic lantern show in The Washington Post, which places the lantern within a wider history of visual technologies, following its inheritance through to PowerPoint and the Xbox:

Watching Herman Bollaert and his crew of projectionists manipulate his 19th-century magic lantern is a bit like watching a very old and finicky sailboat being steered into the wind. There is a lot of fussing and fiddling, turning and cranking, all in the service of a charmingly antiquated technology. If you would rather take a powerboat than sail, or watch “The Matrix” on DVD than spend an evening with hand-painted slides of country cottages and windmills, there’s really no point in showing up this evening at the French Embassy, where Bollaert and his Belgian troupe of musicians and lanternists are performing a bit of visual archaeology.

Bollaert’s contraption, a three-lens wooden box from 1880, was made during the great era of magic-lantern shows. Its basic technology was in use during the 17th century, and quite possibly much, much earlier. But in the 19th century, with the growth of all forms of popular entertainment, lanterns became the precursors of the cinema. Slides with moving parts created special effects. Popular novels were presented in narrated slide shows, and science was taught to professionals and amateurs alike through projected images. Musicians often accompanied such popular entertainments, which could include a survey of historic places, short parables and stories, religious spectacles and Gothic horror shows.

The technology was basic - limelight (made by superheated limestone) or kerosene flames were used to project the images onto screens - but its impact was long-lasting. The magic lantern enjoyed popularity well into the 20th century, fading only as cinema took over. It persisted in the form of school slide shows and filmstrips, and is still the animating spirit behind projected PowerPoint presentations. Whole generations of Americans got their first glimpse of human sex organs in health class through a filmstrip projector - a descendant of Bollaert’s machine - which cast lurid pictures into the semi-darkness, into a room of tittering, blushing and sometimes salivating adolescents.

You can read the rest of the article, which brings in Arthur Schopenhauer and Marcel Proust, on the Washington Post site. But here’s the thoughtful final paragraph:

It’s difficult to coax the contemporary mind into the position of someone of two or three centuries ago, who found the basic images projected by lanterns to be amazingly lifelike (aesthetically), emotionally powerful (artistically) and profoundly troubling (philosophically). But like the water wheel set turning by Bollaert’s expert hand, things will come full circle. With the rise of ever more complex virtual realities, once again the philosophical mind is set puzzling over the nature of the real. But now, in our world of Xboxes and Wii consoles, one is hardly aware of the machine that creates the representation, there is no tactile connection between the image and its master, and the boat of illusions sails forth with no hands on deck.

The so-called optical toys of the nineteenth-century, such as the Phenakistiscope, the Zoetrope and the Thaumatrope, were sometimes referred to as philosophical toys. We should always bring a philosophical mind to the moving images placed before us. It is what they are there for.

The Turner Prize

Steve McQueen’s Deadpan, from www.bbc.co.uk/news

I visited Tate Britain today and saw the Turner Prize retrospective exhibition. There are exhibits there which relate to silent film. Best known probably is Steve McQueen’s Deadpan (1997), where the artist recreates Buster Keaton’s legendary stunt from Steamboat Bill Jr, with a similar wooden frontage of a house seen falling around McQueen from assorted angles. But you can also see Gillian Wearing’s 60 Minutes’ Silence (1996), a hilarious work in which a group of twenty-six police officers pose for a photograph in rows but have to stay still for sixty minutes. The more you look, the more they wobble, and the more hypnotic it becomes. And equally hypnotic is Douglas Gordon’s video installation Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1995), which shows blown-up sequences from the 1931 Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, with Fredric March, one positive and one negative side-by-side, eerily run slowly (and silently) as though digging inside the agony.

All this and the usual cows split in half, elephant dung and light bulbs switching on and off. Well worth seeing.

Now Playing

Now Playing is the title of a book and an exhibition on the hand-painted movie poster. The book is by Anthony Slide, Jane Burman Powell and Lori Goldman Berthelsen, and its full title is Now Playing: Hand-Painted Poster Art from the 1910s through the 1950s. The beautifully illustrated book cover the history of posters which were commissioned by individual cinema theatres and theatre chains, and celebrates the work of artists most of us have never heard of, such as Batiste Madalena, Ike Checketts, O.M. Wise and R.J. Rogers. There’s a really interesting interview with Slide, one of the most prolific and knowledgeable of silent film historians, on the Alternative Film Guide. Some amazing research has clearly gone into recovering a lost history of promotion and extraordinary artistic vision.

The book is complemented by an exhibition of original hand-painted movie posters at the Linwood Dunn Theater, at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study in Hollywood. The exhibition is entitled Now Playing at the Dunn, and it looks gorgeous.

West End Live

This weekend, why not come to Leicester Square (should you be in London) and see West End Live, billed as “Free for all the family, this spectacular event includes performances from top West End shows alongside a variety of other musical acts. There will be a host of interactive displays and exhibits for a fun-filled action packed day.” Billed among all this fun for the family, which includes a Saturday Morning at the Pictures event organised by the BFI, you will find the Moving Pictures exhibition of film production and exhibition in London before the First World War, hosted by London’s Screen Archives. I was involved in the research for this, so do pop by if you can. You’ll find it in the same marquee as the BFI and Film London. Failing that, the exhibition returns to Westminster Archives Centre thereafter until the end of June.

Nineteen (Obscure) Frames that Changed the World

In October 1888 the French-born inventor Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince recorded what is thought to be the first ‘film’ in the history of cinema. His subject was Leeds Bridge – the ebb and flow of humanity – people going about their daily business unaware that their motions were being inscribed into history. The surviving frames of this footage are owned by the National Media Museum in Bradford where Curator of Cinematography, Michael Harvey, has been working with New York video artist Ken Jacobs for 18 months to provide footage for the unique exhibition Nineteen (Obscure) Frames That Changed the World. As the blurb puts it, “Ken Jacobs probes the magnitude and infinity of the existing frames, using a unique 3D projection system (with 3d glasses) to reveal hidden beauty and unlock great waves of motion. Ken Jacobs’ films, performances and installations inspire a sense of awe and mystery that audiences must have felt when confronted by moving images at the very start of cinema.” The exhibition opens on Thursday 24 May and runs from 25 May–1 June, 11.30am–6.30pm with free entry. Further information here.