Among the many museums in Paris, the Musée Méliès may slip through visitors' attention. That should not be the case.
This museum is a permanent exhibition of the Cinemathèque Francaise in Bercy, across the Seine from the fortresses of the Bibliotheque, offering an elegant and illuminating narrative of early cinema constructed around the life and work of Georges Méliès, the 20th century pioneer in film art and special effects.
A portrait of Georges Méliès at the Musée Méliès, a permanent exhibition at Cinematheque Francaise in Paris.
Film geeks will think they've died and gone straight to heaven. But even for casual visitors with the slightest interest in movies -- including children -- "Méliès Museum: The Magic Of Cinema" is a rich showcase of objects, paintings, posters, photographs, optical toys, projectors and mechanical contraptions that constituted the evolution of motion pictures since the mid-19th century (and before). In short -- for the streaming generation -- this is an odyssey to the genesis, to how it all began.
You may think you don't know Georges Méliès. In fact, you do. Or at least you've seen his signature image: the face of the moon, round, pimply, wincing as a bullet-like rocket sticks into its right eye. This image from Voyage Dans La Lune (1902), the forefather of all science fiction films, has become so popular, however decontextualised and unnamed, yet remains a landmark of early-cinema aesthetic, capturing the oddball, fantastic and visionary quality of Méliès' work.
In case you still need references, watch (or rewatch) Martin Scorsese's 2011 film Hugo. The film hinges partly on Méliès' biography and his contribution to filmic trickery -- the early attempt to create visual magic in cinema through manual technique and editing, or what the later, computer-oriented generations would come to know as special effects. (It's apt that the Cinemathèque Francaise also hosts a touring exhibition "The Art Of James Cameron" on a floor upstairs from the Méliès Museum, thus highlighting the creative fruit of what Méliès had planted over a century ago).
A 17th-century optical instrument that projects hand-painted pictures onto a screen.
A praxinoscope, which spins still images to create ‘moving images’.
The Scorsese film shows Méliès during the later part of his life, after his film business has gone bankrupt and he makes ends meet running a toy kiosk in Gare Montparnasse. But the Méliès Museum doesn't narrowly focus on his biography.
Instead, it introduces us to Méliès and his family (his father was a shoemaker and stage magician, and Méliès himself started off in the same professions) before expanding into a history of film, guiding us through the evolution of laboratory photography and moving image, and highlighting other key inventors from the late 19th century such as Thomas Edison, Eadweard Muybridge, Etienne-Jules Maray, and Auguste and Louis Lumière.
Portraits, posters, sketches, film clips and dioramas, many of them original, greet visitors upon entering the exhibition. The walls are plastered to look like a black universe dotted with shining stars and bearded, feathered "scientists" from Voyage Dans La Lune. The automaton from Hugo and an excerpt from the film also make an appearance early on to shift the story towards Méliès knack for magic -- visual, mechanical, cinematic.
From left: The automaton from the film Hugo, directed by Martin Scorsese; A bull’s eye magic lantern, another early ‘projector’.
The Lumière brothers’ Cinematographe.
Cinema was born on Dec 28, 1895, when the first film projection by the Lumière brothers took place in a Parisian café on Boulevard Capucines. Méliès was there in the audience. The experience shook, hooked and transformed him. Between 1896 to 1912, he made around 520 films, nearly all of them works of fantasy, science fiction and fairytale-like stories that heavily flaunted special effects (space travels, rockets, phantoms, head-switching tricks, film splices, double exposure etc). The exhibition tells us Méliès was the first person to realise how close cinema was to magic -- that they are both "the art of deception".
The Méliès exhibition offers a feel of historic authenticity through a selection of vintage devices. These gadgets remind us that while film is often associated with storytelling, imagination or art, originally it was a mechanical invention. We dial back to 1659, when Christiaan Huygens invented the magic lantern -- an optical instrument that projects hand-painted pictures onto a screen.
"Peddlers, opticians and toy manufacturers soon introduced the device into people's homes," says the description.
Later in late 18th century, a popular optical magic trick was the "phantasmagoria", in which images from a lantern were projected from behind a screen or onto smoke, with a moving frame that replicated today's tracking shot. Then in the 19th century, optical toys such as the stroboscopic disc, phenakistiscope, thaumatrope, zoetrope and praxinoscope represented manual attempts to animate still pictures through the phenomenon of persistence of vision -- how our eyes see an illusion of "moving pictures" from a quick succession of stationary pictures.
Méliès’ films are full of fantastical creatures.
After the daguerreotype emerged in 1839, inventors immediately dreamed of creating "animated photography". In 1889, Etienne-Jules Narey developed the first celluloid film camera. The idea of constructing a machine that can "move images" was perfected by Thomas Edison and Eadweard Muybridge in the US, and finally the Lumière brothers in France. Cinema, we learn, is an amalgam of technology, art and industrial ambition.
The exhibition showcases the Lumière's Cinematographe, the world's first movie camera and film projector. After the witnessing the historic projection on Dec 28, 1895, Georges Méliès said of the experience: "We were all open-mouthed, thunderstruck with amazement." As if in response to that, the Lumières made a famous prediction that would later transform into the ultimate irony: "The machine is just a passing fad. It'll last six months… Cinema is an invention with no future." How inaccurate the inventors of cinema were!
If those scientists and inventors were obsessed with making images move, Méliès pushes moving images from being a record of actuality into an adventure of dream and fancy. The Musée Méliès shows several excerpts of his films made in the first decade of the 20th century, and guides us through his use of special effects with a step-by-step explanation.
From left: Equipment for the ‘phantasmagoria’ optical trick, which projected images from behind a screen or onto smoke; The Lumière brothers’ Cinematographe.
But the museum's narrative goes beyond just film history -- we get a crash course on Méliès's pre-computer efforts to conjure up visual tricks, and how it evolved into other modern techniques such as compositing, matte painting, creature design and computer-generated imagery. This is to emphasise that cinema may start with people like the Lumières and Méliès, but the torch has been passed and the story is still far from finished.
As Hugo shows, Méliès' life took a downward spin. His brilliant works, full of bold innovations, first enjoyed huge success, but soon he found himself wrecked by declining popularity and unfortunate business decisions. He was reduced to insignificance as the film world marched on. But then, in the 1930s, journalists and film historians "discovered" him and revived his name; his genius and contributions were acknowledged and his films had a resurgence. Critics, filmmakers and archivists of subsequent generations -- French first, then elsewhere, such as Scorsese -- also realised his important role in pushing the frontier of cinema.
Paris is a city of museums. But if the queues at the Louvre and the d'Orsay always seem long and the crowds massive, now you know which museum you should add to your list.
Musée Méliès, Cinematheque Francaise, Paris. Metro stop: Bercy. Tickets cost €10 (365 baht).
