Méliès 88

There is a technique in sculpting known as the “lost wax” process, in which the molten bronze is poured directly into the mould containing the artist’s wax model, causing the original to melt away completely. Méliès is something like it. His films are either lost or little-known – apart form a few stock shots of the Moon poked in the eye by a rocket, or a devil in a shellpacked landscape – but almost all fiction pictures and their offshoots ( advertising films, video-clips, research, etc.) and a sizeable proportion of all film-making techniques descend directly from Méliès. He has been emulated, imitated and plundered and often as quickly forgotten. Now, at a time when the French audiovisual scene acts moody and box-office figures are in free-fall, Jacques Malthête has just published a treasure-chest of clever, wild and original ideas: “158 scripts of lost Méliès films”. The idea was to introduce some of today’s top media artists to Méliès ‘s universe, to send them back to Square One, so to speak, and see what came out of this meeting of words, of techniques (35 mm, video, computer graphics, 3D, etc.), of current events and those of the Master. The directors each chose a topic from the Malthête anthology and treated it in their own way, faithfully, tangentially or irreverently, to produce a 3 min. film. The aim was neither to copy Méliès, or to mark the 50th anniversary of his death with a museum-style tribute, but to play at making living pictures, as he did himself in all his many genres...