The Méliès Mystery

Film buffs will already know who Melies was, but for anyone else, this is a solid look and informative documentary. The only downside is Leonard Maltin's narration which is slurred at times and makes him sound like he's either drunk or had a stroke. Maybe both?

"Le Mystère Méliès" is yet another movie about Georges Méliès. After most of his, as this documentary points out, 200-some surviving films (of the original 520-some that he made, which is actually a rather good record for the silent era--especially for a guy who burned his negatives of them) have been available for a few years now on home video from Flicker Alley (and thereafter ripped (off) to YouTube) and after Martin Scorsese made that popular movie, "Hugo" (2011), that's partly about him, I don't think there's as much mystery left to Méliès--at least not relative to other important figures in early cinema. There's more to the timeline than Edison and Lumière, then Méliès, then Griffith, with maybe a nod nowadays to the first female filmmaker Guy or the interesting beard of Muybridge, after all. I'd still like to see, for instance, a Brighton School box set of the surviving work of G. A. Smith, James Williamson, Esmé Collings, Charles Urban, with even the series work of William Friese-Greene thrown in some day. Or, heck, how about a huge Pathé collection (and one with preferably an English subtitles option, you Francophile home-video distributors... but I digress).

Anyways, the 1997 "The Magic of Méliès" (La magie Méliès) does more justice to enthusiastically covering the cine-magician's life and films. "The Méliès Mystery" does do a better job discussing the rediscovery and preservation of the films, which isn't surprising given that it's made by the preservationists at Lobster Films--Eric Lange, Serge Bromberg and company. And the same was true of the last Méliès restoration documentary they did, "The Extraordinary Voyage" (2011). Their approach to Méliès himself, however, is popular rather than scholarly.

Evidence of this is that it repeats a couple apocryphal tales, albeit ones told by the cine-magician himself. One narrativizes the novelty of cinema by him witnessing the audience's fear of an approaching train on screen at the public introduction of the Lumière Cinématographe in the basement of a Parisian café on 28 December 1895, which is partly demonstrably false given that there was no such Lumière film of a train until the following month and that the famous approaching one we know to this day may not have been made until 1897 (see Martin Loiperdinger's essay " Lumière's 'Arrival of the Train': Cinema's Founding Myth" for more on that).

The second case is the self-promoted myth that Méliès discovered the stop-substitution effect by an accident of a camera jam as he recorded an ordinary actuality film of a street scene. Fact is many actualities from that era contain jump cuts--where the filmmakers stopped recording and, then, restarted from the same position as the action of a scene picked up again. None I've seen are as enthrallingly full of magical transformations as Méliès would have us believe. If the stop-substitution, touched up by editing, which is how they actually did it back then, weren't already obvious to a magician like Méliès and a connoisseur of screen entertainment such as the magic lantern that had existed for centuries with transformation effects and, more recently, photographic ones, he might've seen that the trick had already been done in the Edison Kinetoscope films, such as "The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots" (1895), where it's employed to substitute a dummy for the decapitation spectacle.

Uh-huh, and Louis Lumière invented cinema from a dream about the mechanics of a sewing machine and not as based on the prior work on film cameras and, sometimes, projectors from the likes of Marey, Anschütz, Dickson, Edison, Jenkins, Armat, Reynaud, Demenÿ, etc. Indeed, the story told in this documentary regarding the impetus for the brothers Lumière inventing the Cinématographe is but one of several the family told over the years. A eureka moment of Archimedes jumping from his bathtub to run naked through the streets, or a falling apple knocking the idea of gravity into Newton's noggin is more entertaining than the reality of invention based on hard work and the long history of making slight variations to other people's work.

Another quibble I had was that the documentarians pretend a mystery over the parallax of the doubled prints Méliès made of his films--speculating it had something to do with stereoscopy (which actually did have a long history in motion pictures before Méliès and long before "Avatar" (2009), but that's another story)--before they explain that it was so that he'd have a European and an American print for duplication. Indeed, thereafter, this practice would become common in Hollywood and elsewhere. A more amusing story is made of Pathé's dedication to making pastiches of Méliès films, although they were the best in the business at imitating others' work in general; it's why they were the biggest movie studio in the world before the counterattack of Edison's Trust for control of the American market, WWI and such got in the way. American piracy of Star films are also covered, as is the tale of the American negatives of Méliès's films from his brother's laboratory, to basement, to Leon Schlesinger's private collection, to the Academy and Library of Congress and back to France. There are plenty of clips, the usual talking heads and a narrator, as well.

But, listen to me, so spoiled, with fading memories of being sustained by a few Méliès trick films and féeries being released on VHS by Kino or from black-and-white reduction prints by smaller distributors, now nitpicking the growing abundance of riches that have come our way, from DVD and Blu-ray and since to streaming. This documentary paired with a few of the more colorful prints of his pictures not only appearing on TCM, but also to a potentially wider audience at HBO Max, and in the same first few months of the year where I could also listen in on a Zoom presentation of early Méliès films that were distributed as flip books. Point is, I make a lot of criticisms, but I am thankful. Keep up the good work, film preservationists.

"The Mystery of Méliès" is an hour long documentary which is essentially in two parts. The first half is about the film career of Georges Méliès. The second half is about what happened to his over 500 movies...most of which today are lost. According to the film, about 200 of his movies remain, at least in part (I have seen and reviewed 160 of them). So where did the prints and negatives go? Well, the film tells you and the journey of the existing negatives and their preservation is fascinating and VERY important to film historians and buffs.

I loved this documentary and strongly recommend it. It is being a bit nit-picky but the film does miss one thing...how other film makers literally took a Méliès story and refilmed it themselves, nearly scene-for-scene, and passing it off as their own! Segundo de Chomón, in particular, was notorious for doing this...and talk about his and Edison's and others' knockoff versions was oddly missing from the documentary. A minor, minor detail....and no reason not to see the picture.

In addition to showcasing well known old movies from the golden age of cinema, TCM also boasts an array of films and documentaries they have made themselves. One of these is the Méliès Mystery. Georges Méliès was a french film maker who was arguably the first person in history to popularize film. Born in the 1860s, he would go on to make literally hundreds of films, probably the most famous of which is "A Trip to the Moon" from 1902. It's one of the most iconic silent films ever. Unfortunately, due to simply how old these things are, most of his work is gone forever. This hour long documentary tries to show what happened to Méliès' lost films, in addition to showing how much of a genius he was by pioneering things like special effects and multiple exposures. Today, these things don't seem out of the ordinary, but Méliès was born at the right time and just so happened to be one of the first people to do all this. Méliès' talents weren't just confined to his work in film, though. He was also a stage performer and learned how to perform illusions in front of audiences. Watching these things so many decades later still confuses me, and it shows how convincing of a magician he was. Later in the film, they attempt to find out what happened to Méliès' lost films, concluding that Méliès himself burned all the negatives in his studio because he was angry that a company called Pathe bought out his production company, Star Films. Because of this ridiculously impulsive act, most of his things are gone permanently, but modern film enthusiasts have manage to save around 200 of them. Less than half, but better than nothing. They also go over the painstaking process people utilize in order to restore Méliès' films to their former glory, which is a frustrating and tedious endeavor, but film history is well worth it. In all, I thought this was a good overview of what Georges did with his life. There are many sad parts in it, such as when he and his brother never talk to each other again or when he burns all his films, but he didn't realize at the time how influential he was going to be. We can only hope that more of his films turn up sometime, no matter how unlikely it sounds.

This is a documentary on early filmmaker Georges Méliès and his special effect tricks. It's great to see the old films, or what's left of them. It's a great life. The film is a simple biography. It has an interesting story about the early film business. This is very informative.