To the Moon and Back
Matthew Solomon (ed.) Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination: Georges Méliès's Trip to the Moon, SUNY Press, 2011.
This anthology of essays devoted to George Méliès 1902 one-reel motion picture sensation LE VOYAGE DANS LA LUNE makes it clear how much the assessment of Méliès has changed. That may be the volume's chief value. On the one hand, the essays do not tell us all that much about the man's work we did not know; key essays by Paolo Cherchi Usai, Thierry Lefebvre and Andre Gaureault are not new. On the other, there are significant omissions likewise not new.
Perhaps a fantastical idea in 1902 the original tale of a voyage to the moon as a "nowhere land" appears to have been True History, the work of a second-century Syrian author writing in Greek, Lucian of Samosata.
In mid January 1898, The New York Journal began publication of a serialization entitled "Edison's Conquest of Mars". Was the illustrated fire-cracker shaped rocket approaching the faraway red planet featured in the first installment the inspiration for the Méliès space ship?
Responding to the reality of a range of prints of the film, in black and white, tinted and at different lengths Chechi Usai urges we treat each print as an entity unto itself and not seek definitiveness. Richard Abel tells us that as a consequence of a range of dubious though by no means unique practices many members of the film's large original American audience had no idea of the identity of its French creator, increasingly associating the film with the Edison studio.
The invitation to pronounce on the famous movie granted contributors license to revisit an older question: what did Georges Méliès have to do with the emergence of the edited narrative? The answer: little if anything.
In a reversal of what had been a cliché of early cinema history, the Méliès opus is now regarded as pre-cinema. This is a point reinforced in part by the deliberately backward-looking perspective of many of the essays. The illusionism of the féerie, a popular nineteenth-century show of fanciful plots, trucage, ballet and music, an unrecognized forebear of film animation, Méliès's evident debt to the litterateurs Jules Verne and H.G.Wells, and perhaps to Jacques Offenbach's 1875 "fairy-opera" La Voyage dans la lune from which he might have borrowed the concept rather than the story line, are now seen to have had virtually nothing to do with cinema.
Victoria Duckett offers a reading of Méliès's manipulation of female presence in VOYAGE that draws on Laura Mulvey's appropriation of Jacques Lacan's concept of the gaze. Having lost its one-time enormous audience the gaze the film itself now attracts is the gaze of the specialist in aesthetic and historical contemplation examining a museum piece.
The essays conclude with a citation by Viva Paci of words from Georges Franju's hommage in LE GRAND MELIES (1953): "...I think perhaps you understand now why without Georges Méliès this movie and many others could never have been made."
In the context this is a sentiment at odds with the anthology's larger unspoken hypothesis about the severe limits of the Frenchman's influence, no longer hailed as the great inspiration of Edwin Porter and D.W.Griffith and the beginning of the American cinema. Murray Pomerance finds in each of VOYAGE's scenes "a dreamlike condensation" of abstract distances, which makes a point not unrelated to Tom Gunning's now familiar claim that the work of Méliès represented a pre-narrartive "cinema of attractions."
Seizing on the Gunning claim, André Gaudeault has proposed that we understand the Méliès moonshot as sui generis, i.e. as a species of kine-attractography rather than as a stage, however primitive, in the evolution the edited narrative. " Our task is to convince ourselves that the fundamental point of rupture in film history was not the invention of the moving picture camera in the 1890s (the Kinetograph, the Cinematograph ) but rather the constitution of the institution "cinema" in the 1910s, an institution whose first principle was a systematic rejection of the ways and customs of early cinema, of a past to which the institution no longer owed a thing (which, moreover, is not entirely untrue). From this perspective, we must insist upon what I have called elsewhere early cinema's alien quality, a properly irreducible alien quality which traditional film historians have always tried to paper over." [1]
Classifying Méliès as an amusing but irrelevant relic arises mostly in support of that hypothesis, in an enlarged version, the subject of a recent conference devoted to the notion of a second cinema birth. Born the first time as a technology, born the second as an institution at the heart of which is the edited narrative. Surely an altogether bizarre obstetrical phenomenon. Méliès seemed always to be looking beyond movie narratives. There is in LONG DISTANCE WIRELESS PHOTOGRAPHY (1908) his prediction of television, an apparently quite logical next step following the emergence of photography in 1839, the telegraph six years later, and the telephone in 1876. Could the notion of TV have been inspired by the French artist Albert Robida who in 1869, imagined a large oval TV monitor displaying soft-pornographic imagery? In 1879, coinciding with the first Muybridge show, Punch published a drawing of a rectangular screen, transmitting "light as well as sound", inaccurately described as"Edison's telephonoscope". The image depicts a sports event: gentlemen and ladies engaged in a tennis match.
A character in Jean-Luc Godard's La Chinoisie tells us that the Lumières were no more pioneering realists than Méliès was a mere magician, that the Lumières were inspired by Impressionist painting whereas Méliès filmed a range of news events, as Andy Sarris put it, Brechtian newsreels, among them the staged visit to France of Balkan royalty.
A nineteenth century tradition generally ignored by Méliès scholars is the painterly tradition of Paul Delaroche, whose work preceded photography. A devotee of empirical accuracy, Delaroche, whose students included Crimean War photographer Roger Fenton, was supposed to have said when he first saw a daguerreotype that: "...from today, painting is dead!" The "photographic clarity" of Delaroche's Edouard V et Richard Duc d'York, also known as Les Enfants d'Edouard (1830) established a type of 'implied spectator' unknown to early nineteenth-century painting. Delaroche was the teacher of Jean-Leon Gerome. Gerome's The Death of Marshal Ney (1868) represented a deliberate retreat from the idealist construction of history, the terrible scene anticipating the framing of Weegee.
The work of Delaroche and Gerome was available and likely familiar to Méliès who had by 1898 become an experienced hand at re-constructing topical and historical action. In 1897, he'd reproduced scenes from the Greco-Turkish War of 1897, WAR EPISODE, MASSACRE AT CRETE AND SEA FIGHTING IN GREECE. THE LAST CARTRIDGES, based on a painting depicting an incident in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, was also done that year, as were other battle subjects and related works, THE SURRENDER OF TOURNAVOS, EXECUTION OF A SPY, FIGHTING IN THE STREETS OF INDIA and ATTACK ON AN ENGLISH BLOCKHOUSE. Méliès, who understood that crowd-pleasing footage could be produced without venturing anywhere near Cuba or the Philippines, produced THE BLOWING UP OF THE MAINE IN HAVANA HARBOR; A VIEW OF THE WRECK OF THE MAINE, and DIVERS AT WORK ON THE WRECK OF THE MAINE. Melies also turned out the Philippines action scene DEFENDING THE FORT AT MANILA. [2]
In 1902, Georges Méliès filmed a pre-enactment, a staging of the Coronation of Edward VII in Westminster Cathedral for Charles Urban on the day before it had actually occurred. This enabled Urban to show the film in theatres the same evening as the actual event, i.e. a temporal compression that anticipated the television news story. [3]
In the fall of 1898, Lumiere cameraman Francois Doublier, on a tour of Russia, mounted a bogus exhibition titled L'AFFAIRE DREYFUS. Doublier arrived in the Jewish districts of Southern Russia at a time when Jewish communities throughout the world were troubled by events then transpiring in France. In an attempt to exploit that concern Doublier assembled a sequence that included footage of a parade led by an officer, a Paris street scene, a Finnish tugboat, and the Nile delta, claiming the result was a film about the Dreyfus affair. [4]
Méliès, now an accomplished fake newsreel specialist, produced a thirteen-minute, twelve-part, 780-foot version of the Dreyfus affair, L'AFFAIRE DREYFUS(1899) some of the sets based on illustrations that had appeared in French weeklies. A series of tableaux that replayed the key elements of the case, the film was described as "a sort of animated waxworks". Méliès, who was pro-Dreyfus, cast in the role of Dreyfus an ironmonger who bore a great resemblance to the French army officer. [5]
The Méliès version was advertised as a fictionalized treatment of a topical event, a form that many years later would be labeled docudrama. Méliès incorporated the compositional features of an actuality into an acknowledged studio work. Barry Salt has drawn our attention to the staging in depth in a courtroom scene and in a street scene, which, he said represented one of the earliest uses of a "purely cinematographic angle": "In these scenes, apparently unique in Melies work, and indeed in the fictional films of the period, bystanders and observers of the action fill the space between the principle actors from the upper background to the bottom foreground in a way that copies framing occurring in actuality footage in the period." [6] A "purely cinematic angle" meant it was done in newsreelese.
A hand coloured print of Voyage, the sole such copy known to have survived, was discovered in 1993 by the Filmoteca de Catalunya. Painstakingly restored over an eighteen-year period, it was shown at Cannes in May 2011 (with a freshly recorded soundtrack) and subsequently, to great acclaim, at Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna. The anthology makes no reference to this print, but readers can find a well-illustrated monograph inspired by the preservation at http://www.fondation-groupama-gan.com/fileadmin/user_upload/pdf/livretvoyagedanslalune.
Among the critical achievements of Georges Méliès was the demonstration that realism was perhaps no less a trick than the cinema of fantastical scenes. Among the lessons he taught was that the medium was not static, that its true creativity lay in its aesthetic pluralism, in its varieties out of which transformations a k a new births would emerge.
Matthew Solomon, a professor of cinema studies at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, deserves much credit for making the point that the study of an individual film by a range of scholars ought to find a larger place among the more traditional auteur and genre studies.