The narrator evokes the Château d’Orly care home, where Georges Méliès spent the last days of his life, in the autumn of 1937, and where Franju and Henri Langlois used to visit him. At a window, there is an old lady. In the present time, she remembers the waltz her husband composed for her and Méliès (played by his son) is seen at the piano as his granddaughter speaks the words of the song. In 1928, Méliès who had been declared bankrupt many years before, was discovered running a toyshop at Montparnasse Station. He had lost nothing of his fondness for children nor his taste for magic tricks. Then the film shuttles back 40 years to when Méliès was running and performing in the Robert-Houdin Theatre. “One night in 1895…” runs the commentary as it relates the legendary occasion when Lumière refused to sell Méliès the rights to his new invention, the Cinematograph. Méliès went on to build his own version. The narrative moves on to describe the way he created the first studio in the world and to cover both his talent for special effects and his financial failure. Back in 1953, the narrator’s grandmother, Jehanne d’Alcy, Méliès’ widow and his former star is seen, aged 89, making her way from the station at Montparnasse, to the cemetery where the great Méliès lies buried.

Bernard Eisenschitz