Well before the invention of the [finally] spurious question, "Beatles or Stones?", some movie lovers asked each other "Lumiere or Melies?" As in, did your articles of faith lie with the documentary "realism" practiced by the pioneering early filmmakers the Lumiere brothers, with their simple but simply beautiful chronicles of trains entering stations or workers leaving factories, or with the fantastical visions of Georges Melies, whose whacked-out scenarios and always-staggering in-camera or on-stage special effects couldn't quite obscure an approach to cinematic story-telling that was stodgy and stagebound even by 1896 standards (or so it seems today)?
It's great, really, that we don't have to choose, but to be honest with you, my root sensibility's always been with Melies. So I'm kind of dizzied by the new box set from the fabulous curators of Flicker Alley, a five-disc set comprising over 170 films by Melies, entitled Georges Melies: First Wizard of Cinema (1896-1913). I'm still grappling with this more-than-half-a-day long collection, lovingly assembled by stalwarts David Shepard and Eric Lange. But already it's inspiring and dazzling me, not only with thoughts that there's nothing new under the sun but that the old can be forever new, as in the staggering image above, from the 1902 classic A Trip to the Moon. Below, a tableau from the memorably titled 1907 Sightseeing Through Whiskey.
It's funny, I've only gone through about one tenth of the set, but I've been dipping in to every one of the nearly 20 years of work it covers...and I can't say that our hero Melies was one for what we call "artistic growth," a bugaboo I've never had much faith in anyway. One might want to adapt the fox-and-hedgehog theory to aesthetics and say that the Lumieres were foxes, intent on chronicling many things, while Melies was a hedgehog, intent on one big thing.
One thing's for sure: this box is a wonderful thing.
Hedgehog astronauts unite!
And, you know, I've seen work from both fox and hedgehog. I think I've seen Lumiere bros.' work used as stock footage, whereas I've seen A Trip To The Moon in its entirety on PBS more than 100 years later. Fantasy generally wins out in the end....
Posted by: oakling | March 16, 2008 at 05:02 PM