History of Foreign Film｜Georges Méliès

Méliès’s contribution to film

From Lumière’s “real recording of life” to “creating surreal phantoms”, he followed the same path as Lumière. El's completely different creative path. His films represent another opposing film aesthetics - the source of expressive aesthetics. It is completely different from the ordinary street scenes and daily life scenes shown in the "Kinet Cinema". He created another film style, which not only brought an update of means, but also a change in the concept of film. His representative works include "Journey to the Moon", "Arabian Nights", "The Witch" and "Cinderella"

1. Discovered the film technology of "stop and shoot again", which has unlimited possibilities to break through the constraints of time and space.

2. He was the first to explore and invent a series of film stunts: stopping and reshooting, overprinting, multiple exposures, composite photography, etc., and used these stunts to shoot many "magic films", such as "The Lady" "People Disappear" and "The Little Dancer" have made certain contributions to the unique form of film expression, greatly improved the filming technology of the film, and introduced drama into the film to turn the film content into a story.

3. Preliminarily determined the film production model. He established the "Star Production Company" and built a glass-roofed "studio" the size of a theater in Montluy near Paris. This was the first "studio" in the history of world cinema and the future. A model followed by film studios around the world.

4. He systematically applied most of the theater methods to movies, forming his aesthetic concept of "screen as stage". The concept of creating the illusion of life is applied to movies, relying on the "hypothetical" principle of drama, from "fake drama to real filming", thus leading the movie to the path of drama.

Limitations of Méliès

1. Although he made a lot of successful artistic explorations in film art, his film concepts stayed in the aesthetic tradition of drama. The characteristic of his films is that he is obsessed with drama. The camera is always facing the stage space, the camera's view frame is the frame of the stage, and the screen space faced by the audience is still subordinate to the structural space of the stage. While "the machine of modern life", he was not able to break away from the constraints of his theater era, his own cultural background and his traditional stage audience.

2. Since he built a studio After that, his creation never left this false and closed production space; all his efforts were devoted to the object of the film, not the film itself; he discovered that film narrative is the fundamental way out for films, but he fell into The concept of "dramatic aesthetics" replaces film narrative with dramatic narrative; he discovered the film technique of stopping and reshooting, but did not expect to turn it into a narrative element; he discovered the method of scene change, but only used it in admiration and admiration.

3. His basic understanding of film is pragmatism, which hinders him from reaching a deeper and higher realm of art. Filmmaking is a business. and corporate behavior, so his films are full of intelligent imagination, but almost no touching and passion from the depths of the soul.

4. Objectively speaking, after World War I, movies had become a big industry. In terms of production, his manual workshop-style production model has fallen behind, and its elimination is inevitable.

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