Hans Richter and George Méliès, 1937
Hans Richter and George Méliès, 1937
The man who had pioneered the art of film before World War I, Georges Méliès, was rediscovered during the 1920s by mere chance. A journalist who happened to be in the department store Trois Quartiers in Paris, heard the shopgirl say to a small gentleman with a pointed beard: “Cui, Monsieur Méliès.” The journalist pricked up his ears. Wasn’t that the name of the film pioneer who had dropped out of sight? He followed the gentleman and saw him eventually squeeze his way into a small kiosk at Montparnasse station. In the kiosk there was a fat lady who sold sweets. The journalist asked: “Are you Monsieur Georges Méliès, the famous filmmaker from before the war?” He was.
Soon he and his wife, Jeanne d’Alcy, the star of his prewar films, had no further need to sell sweets for a living. Modern artists and writers launched a public campaign that forced the government to give this unique artist a rent-free apartment. So he exchanged his tiny kiosk of barely two square meters for an unoccupied apartment in the Château Orly. Even then, this apartment was also small, and the pension he received was even smaller.
When I met him in 1936, he took delight in cigars of a kind he could not (on his pension) afford, and I took delight in Méliès, in his very old-fashioned French ways and his amiable charm. He was as charming and old-fashioned as his now famous films.
His domain was the world of prefabricated marvels. Jules Verne’s science fiction stories (which have long since become reality)—it was in these that Méliès believed, as did a public that had not yet been trained by Hollywood to respond to cleverly contrived banality. Before the war he was famous as a master of magical ceremonies in the Robert Houdin Theater. As a result of the war he was forgotten.
His world is that of the French petite bourgeoisie, not so very distant from that of Balzac’s and Flaubert’s characters. It is light-years away from the brutal swank of contemporary science fiction stories. But precisely this distance enables us to see his world as a work of art.
Méliès’s films belong to the world of dreams.
He was a forerunner not so much of naive Surrealism as of esoteric Surrealism, and he was a link in the living chain of artists whose social task is to see and to present the marvelous as a reality.
The rediscovery of Méliès coincided roughly with the beginning of Surrealism, in which the urge to combine dreamlike experience with waking reality opened unimagined new perspectives in art.
On one of my many visits in Orly, I suggested to him that we should make a film about Baron Münchhausen together: a series of avant-garde adventures in his old-fashioned fabricated ambiance! Why not? In this way we could unite the beginnings of film art with the extravagancies of our present experiments . . . it would be an extravagance worth experiencing. Contradictions, uncertainties, experiments—these were for me the attractions of such a project, even though at the time I had no proper idea how this combination of old-fashioned and extravagant might be realized. I believe Méliès felt the same way. For when I showed him (thanks to Henri Langlois, master of magical appearances and disappearances at the Cinémathèque Française) my experimental films, including the abstract Rhythmus 21, he was nonplussed, and he admitted frankly that he couldn’t understand a thing . . . although he did see some technical possibilities in my Ghosts Before Breakfast.
Yet the satirical and fantastic spirit world of a modern Münchhausen, for which I had written a text, did dawn upon him—as a risk. But where would anyone ever get without taking risks? There’d be no experience, nothing would happen to anyone. It was this “nothing” that came of our plan. In early 1938, while making a potboiler commercial film in Switzerland,10 I heard by telegram from Langlois that Méliès had died.
He had long since found his place in the history of film art. His work, as old-fashioned as his style may be, points the way to the visionary possibilities of film. He was the first filmmaker to penetrate the region between the seen and the unseen, to which film, as a medium of light, is essentially suited. Another attempt was made on the Münchhausen film without him. Jean Renoir arranged a contract, providing collateral himself, just before the outbreak of World War II. The war dissolved the contract. Münchhausen remained a dream.