George Meliès

(On Cable TV, September 2021) The more I learn about the history of cinema, the more I understand how perilous film preservation can be. There are a mind-boggling number of examples of films that didn’t survive to the present, or nearly didn’t survive — Oscar-nominated films that we can still see because one single copy survived to be restored, for instance. George Méliès’s place in cinema history is now secure as the first showman of the medium and the first to truly understand what was possible with cinematic special effects over theatrical production. But as Le mystère Méliès demonstrates, being able to see a good fraction of his body of work is a recent and hard-fought victory. Méliès, after all, burned down his entire film archive in a fit of despair back in the 1920s, and for decades there was no comprehensive catalogue of his work. Five hundred short movies at the genesis of the art form: gone. What re-emerged over the years was pieced together from private collectors, archive donations and, in one recent spectacular find, film negatives sent to the United States during Méliès attempt to establish an American distribution company and then forgotten. Le mystère Méliès doubles both as a succinct examination of Meliès extraordinary life (once a giant of cinema in middle-age, reduced to being a shopkeeper as a pensioner, then gradually rehabilitated late in life), and as a thriller in which contemporary film archivists manage to find and preserve a good chunk of his catalogue. Leonard Maltin narrates with charm and expressiveness, while archive footage gives us a generous glimpse at Méliès’s surviving body of work. As a deep dive into early cinema, it’s unusually accessible and entertaining — and as a primer on how narrowly some films can survive to the modern age, it’s quite enlightening. A too-short sequence even shows how digital techniques are being used to piece together movies from damaged reels. Le mystère Méliès is well worth a look—not just for cinema historians, but anyone interested in the medium.