Live magic interludes.

The year 1900 marked a turning point in the work of Georges Méliès. Over the winter of 1899-1900 he began enlarging and improving his first studio, which had been built in 1897. By the end of 1899 he had already made over 200 films, ranging from 20 to 120 metres long, in which he developed and combined impressive special effects (the stop-motion tricks for appearances, disappearances and substitutions, fades in and out, slow focus in transitions, dissolves, simple and multiple exposures) and he took up a variety of genres that he called Natural Views (documentaries), Composed Subjects or Scenic Genres (comic skits, stage plays, ballets, reconstituted newsreels), and Fantastic Films (transformation views, trick films). One of his first productions of 1900 (a record year, with almost 80 films), was a series of 17 20m films shot at the Paris Exposition. That same year Méliès shot 20 advertising films for various products (a brand of aperitif, feeding bottles, whiskey, shoe polish, mustard, etc.). It was also the year in which he made Jeanne d’Arc, his first film longer than 200 m, and the year in which, thanks to multiple exposures, he managed to play six musicians conducted by himself in L’Homme-orchestre, a tour-de-force that he repeated three years later in Le Mélomane, throwing his head six times on a musical stave. Also, that year he experimented with accelerating speed in Spiritisme abracadabrant, Le Déshabillage impossible and Le Réveil d’un monsieur pressé, and he employed a horizontally divided stage in Le Savant et le Chimpanzé and La Maison tranquille. Lastly, in 1900 he directed Rêve de Noël, a filmed féerie of 160 m in 20 tableaux. For this film, the Méliès catalogue offers an additional, optional tableau (Le grand orgue et la maîtrise) between the numbers 11 and 12. The same year, Nouvelles luttes extravagantes was available (for sale) without the previous version Luttes extravagantes from 1899, with which the film was usually put together. We can see from these two examples and from others found in the catalogue that early silent cinema was far from immobile.

Jacques Malthête