Georges Melies | Biography, Films, & Facts | Britannica (2024)

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What is Georges Méliès famous for? What is Georges Méliès’s most famous film? What was Georges Méliès’s occupation? References

French filmmaker

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What is Georges Méliès famous for?

Georges Méliès is famous for his many innovations in motion pictures. He was one of the first to film fictional narratives, and he is regarded as the inventor of special effects in movies. His films were among the first to use such techniques as double exposure, stop-motion, and slow motion.

What is Georges Méliès’s most famous film?

Georges Méliès’s most famous film is Le Voyage dans la lune (1902; A Trip to the Moon). The film is a very loose adaptation of Jules Verne’s novel De la terre à la lune (1865; From the Earth to the Moon) and has the famous image of the spacecraft from Earth hitting the “man in the moon” in his eye.

What was Georges Méliès’s occupation?

Georges Méliès began his career as a magician. After seeing the Lumière brothers’ films in 1895, he became a filmmaker and made over 500 short films between 1896 and 1913. After the bankruptcy of his film company in 1913, Méliès worked in obscurity in a toy store in a Paris train station. He and his films were rediscovered in the 1920s, and he was honoured for his role in film history.

Georges Méliès (born December 8, 1861, Paris, France—died January 21, 1938, Paris) was an early French experimenter with motion pictures, the first to film fictional narratives.

(Read Martin Scorsese’s Britannica essay on film preservation.)

When the first genuine movies, made by the Lumière brothers, were shown in Paris in 1895, Méliès, a professional magician and manager-director of the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, was among the spectators. The films were scenes from real life having the novelty of motion, but Méliès saw at once their further possibilities. He acquired a camera, built a glass-enclosed studio near Paris, wrote scripts, designed ingenious sets, and used actors to film stories. With a magician’s intuition, he discovered and exploited the basic camera tricks: stop motion, slow motion, dissolve, fade-out, superimposition, and double exposure.

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From 1899 to 1912 Méliès made more than 400 films, the best of which combine illusion, comic burlesque, and pantomime to treat themes of fantasy in a playful and absurd fashion. He specialized in depicting extreme physical transformations of the human body (such as the dismemberment of heads and limbs) for comic effect. His films included pictures as diverse as Cléopâtre (1899; Cleopatra’s Tomb), Le Christ marchant sur les eaux (1899; Christ Walking on Water), Le Voyage dans la lune (1902; A Trip to the Moon), Le Voyage à travers l’impossible (1904; The Voyage Across the Impossible), and Hamlet (1908). He also filmed studio reconstructions of news events as an early kind of newsreel. It never occurred to him to move the camera for close-ups or long shots. The commercial growth of the industry forced him out of business in 1913, and he died in poverty.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaThis article was most recently revised and updated by Encyclopaedia Britannica.