My friends, I address you all tonight as you truly are; wizards, mermaids, travelers, adventurers, magicians… Come and dream with me
Georges Méliès, filmmaker, A Trip to the Moon
Stage magician. Owned a theater in Paris, made people believe in impossible things. Then 1895, he sees the Lumière brothers’ films and his brain explodes. Gets a camera. Starts making movies. But not boring shit, trains arriving at stations, workers leaving factories. Hell no. He wants magic.
He figures out stop-motion by accident when his camera jams. Realizes he can make things appear and disappear. Multiple exposures. Dissolves. Hand-painted color, frame by goddamn frame. He builds sets that look like fever dreams. Creates entire worlds.
1902: A Trip to the Moon. That rocket hitting the moon in the eye. That’s his. Five hundred films. He invented special effects. Invented cinema as art, as hallucination, as the impossible made possible.
Then the world chewed him up and spit him out.
Feature films. Hollywood. Bigger budgets, different tastes. His theater goes under. His films? Most of them melted down during World War I. For boot heels. For fucking boot heels for soldiers.
By the 1920s he’s running a toy stand in Montparnasse station. The man who showed the world how to dream on film, hawking wind-up toys to commuters who don’t know who he is, don’t care, just want to catch their train.
They rediscovered him in the ’30s. Gave him a medal, some recognition. He died in 1938.
Too little, too late.
It’s always too little… and too late.
Shot on infrared film in Père Lachaise Cemetery. Signed Limited Edition 11” x17” print of 10; stamped on verso. Professional black & white printing on Hahnemühle fibre-based Matt paper.
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