Georges Melies

Born on December 8, 1861 in Paris, Marie-George-Jean Méliès worked as a professional illusionist, eventually becoming the director of the Robert Houdin Theatre, a venue specializing in magic shows. The brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière thought it interesting to invite him to the first public screening where they were going to show the world his great discovery: the cinematograph. Dazzled by the invention, at the end of the screening Méliès approached the brothers to ask them to sell him the new device at any price. But Antoine, father of the Lumières, in one of the biggest mistakes in history, told him that it was not for sale because “it had no economic future.”

Méliès saw many possibilities in the invention, so in the end he bought a similar gizmo from Robert William Paul, an English electrician who had created an invention similar to that of the Lumières, although technically inferior. Even so, Méliès was a handyman who perfected the acquisition of it, and launched into the filming of natural scenes, that is, the factory departures and train arrivals that were filmed at the beginning of cinema. One day, the crank got stuck, and he was unable to shoot for a few seconds, until the camera continued to work. When he revealed the material he realized that “a bus seemed to suddenly turn into a hearse and men turned into women,” he wrote in his memoir. Thus was born the technique known as ‘Crank Step’, which allowed Méliès to carry out magic tricks in the cinema.Méliès himself made a woman disappear by stealing a lady .

In April 1897, Méliès opened the first studio in Europe, at his Montreuil estate, where he filmed more than four hundred similar shorts, inventing techniques such as substitution, overprinting, and even hand-colouring. From 1900 he began to narrate stories, such as Cinderella (1912) , or Trip to the Moon, his most famous work. His films became very popular, especially among children, but Méliès was dedicated to innovation without worrying about economic issues. Coinciding with the birth of the first important production companies, such as Pathé and Gaumont, the artisan Méliès ended up going bankrupt due to a series of financial failures. After the death of his first wife, Eugéne, who had always supported him, in 1926 he married Jeanne D’Alcy, one of his actresses, who offered him to run the candy kiosk at the Montparnasse station. There, a journalist discovered that the little man who had revolutionized the cinema was a forgotten old man who sold sweets to travelers. After the discovery, Méliès was the subject of all kinds of tributes and commemorations. He died in Paris on January 21, 1938.