Georges Méliès and the Gothic Advent of Cinema (Patreon)

Cinema is the Gothic mode of art. Still images arranged as the simulacra of movement, ageless, timeless, and haunting. Each image its own Picture of Dorian Grey. The business of making motion pictures is the business of creating ghosts.

Georges Méliès was one of these founding conjurers. A conjurer is an appropriate title here for Méliès cut his teeth on the 1800’s stage magic scene in France and England. It was tricks like The Vanishing Lady that inspired films by the same name and his, now foundational, approach to special effects. Méliès made the movement from stage shows to cinema after being one of the first people to experience the Lumière Brothers Cinématograph.

Georges Méliès was in attendance at the 1895 public demonstration of the Lumière Brothers Cinématograph—the first film projector that caught on. Méliès had this to say about the experience: 

We found ourselves in the presence of a small screen rather like those used for magic lantern projection and after some moments, a photograph of the Place des Cordeliers in Lyon appeared. A bit surprised, I said to my neighbor “They troubled us to come and see a slideshow? Why I’ve been doing that for ten years.” I scarcely finished the sentence when a horse pulling a cart began to walk towards us, then passersby. In a word, all the bustle of a street. We sat there open mouthed, dumbfound.

Prior to Méliès, most cinema was as he described. They were short, descriptional films that depicted scenes of everyday life. Even these, however, could shock. Reports of people ducking out of the way of the Lumière Brothers’ L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat were common. Méliès embrace of the fantastic aspects of stage magic pushed cinema into a new direction, and a spooky one. 

Méliès’ films include titles like Faust aux Enfers, Le Manoir duh Diable, and Á la conquête du pôle which features a giant skeleton monster. It’s worth noting here that many of Méliès’ films would have been accompanied by live music and a narrator to enhance the experience. These titles are all riddled with demons, monsters, and skeletons. Moreover, Méliès’ artistic desire to push cinema into something less documentary and more surreal naturally crept into Gothic spaces. Moving from the worlds of stage magic and Magic Lanterns created a natural, or perhaps preternatural, gateway for the Gothic to possess the core of cinematic language. 

Méliès radicalized special effects. He borrowed heavily from his stage magic days to create, at the time, mind bending illusions on the screen. In particular, he enjoyed beheadings. Films like Un homme de têtes, Le bourreau turc, and various early news real recreations all feature severed human heads. Sometimes they cause trouble, other times they were so startling real the French government banned their depiction at the time. An obvious connection can be drawn to the French use of the guillotine at the time, but when read in concert with Méliès’ body of work we can see a clear Gothic imprint at the dawn of film as an art form.