Abstract
This chapter begins with a discussion of the ambivalent chord Méliès struck for the pioneering documentary historians for whom Méliès was rendered an uncanny, estranged autre, an incontestable rival of the (by that time) nearly century-old documentary tradition. On the one hand, Méliès was never considered to be a meaningful or even relevant player in the progression of documentarism. On the other, film historians were then—as they are now—aware of the notion that no mythology is enabled or made viable without a perfect antagonist, a role for which Méliès’s personal characteristics and professional traits were perfectly suited: eccentric, rebellious, extremely innovative, wildly imaginative, hyper-aesthetic, and outrageously creative. In this chapter I present a close reading of a nearly forgotten paragraph from his private memoirs in which he describes his epic journey, with a camera, to the storm-swept beaches of Trouville and Le Havre. Back in Paris with the developed materials, the unexpected, excited audience reaction to the naturalistic documentary marvel he had just produced inspired him to shout at the top of his lungs: “That’s it, exactly!” a cry that, half a century later, would be echoed by the masters of direct cinema. This chapter begins with a discussion of the ambivalent chord Méliès struck for the pioneering documentary historians for whom Méliès was rendered an uncanny, estranged autre, an incontestable rival of the (by that time) nearly century-old documentary tradition. On the one hand, Méliès was never considered to be a meaningful or even relevant player in the progression of documentarism. On the other, film historians were then—as they are now—aware of the notion that no mythology is enabled or made viable without a perfect antagonist, a role for which Méliès’s personal characteristics and professional traits were perfectly suited: eccentric, rebellious, extremely innovative, wildly imaginative, hyper-aesthetic, and outrageously creative. In this chapter I present a close reading of a nearly forgotten paragraph from his private memoirs in which he describes his epic journey, with a camera, to the storm-swept beaches of Trouville and Le Havre. Back in Paris with the developed materials, the unexpected, excited audience reaction to the naturalistic documentary marvel he had just produced inspired him to shout at the top of his lungs: “That’s it, exactly!” a cry that, half a century later, would be echoed by the masters of direct cinema.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
For more on Méliès’s role in the advancement of early cinema, see Jacobson (2010).
- 3.
Barsam [1992 (1973), 19, 30, 42, 93].
- 4.
Barnouw (1974, 11).
- 5.
Ibid., 22.
- 6.
Barnouw provides no source for this quote. Therefore, as in the case of his quotation of the Lumières’ “life on the run” (see Chap. 2 herein), I do not use “authentic reconstitution,” a proper definition for this volume, even though it could serve us well in that purpose. Nonetheless, the fundamental idea Méliès is forwarding here is nothing less than a priori to any future discussion on the nature of documentary in general, and the concept of documentary truth and documentary method in particular.
- 7.
Ibid., 24–25. Barnouw treats at length the period’s custom of building miniature models and using occasional stand-ins for faked battle scenes.
- 8.
Jacobs (1979a [1969]).
- 9.
- 10.
Ibid., 10–19.
- 11.
Jacobs (1979a, 10).
- 12.
For more on the concept of “cinema of attractions,” see Gunning (2005, 124–127).
- 13.
Jacobs (1979a, 10).
- 14.
Ibid., 11. See also a version of the same story in Pauline D-L Méliès (2020).
- 15.
In Kessler (2005). His filmography includes more than 500 film titles and some of the medium’s formal innovations. See Ezra (2000). Pauline D-L Méliès says: “He pioneered the first double exposure (La Caverne Maudite, 1898), the first split screen with performers acting opposite themselves (Un Homme de tête, 1898), and the first dissolve (Cendrillon, 1899).” Pauline D-L Méliès (2020).
- 16.
Doel (2002).
- 17.
Méliès (1946). Reprinted in part in Cousins and Macdonald (1996, 10–11).
- 18.
Cousins and Macdonald (1996, 10).
- 19.
- 20.
In particular, I refer to the division “fiction”/“documentary” discussed at length and tightly enmeshed in the chapters to follow herein.
- 21.
For a detailed account of the entrance of the word documentary into use in the context of the French application of the words documentaires and actualités as early as 1914, see Winston (1995, 11–14). See also Charles Musser’s discussion (2013, 119–129). There he argues that the term “documentary evidence” came into use in the press as early as in 1786, and “documentary photograph” came into use in the early 1890s (p. 119).
- 22.
The Lumière camera operator Abdullaly Esoofally says: “When I started my bioscope shows in Singapore in 1901, little documentary films I got from London helped me….” Barnouw (1974, 21).
- 23.
Gunning (2005, 124).
- 24.
For a discussion about a future case in which a fiction film director (Frank Capra) and a documentary director (John Grierson) defined in a similar manner grounds for documentary, see Chap. 25 herein (Frank Capra).
- 25.
- 26.
- 27.
See Plato’s view of the part played by the nomos in the mimetic sign, in J.E. Tiles, “Meaning,” in The Oxford Companion to the Mind, ed. Richard L. Gregory (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
- 28.
This argument is not brought to the fore in order to claim that there is no phenomenological difference between the two modes of expression. It acts solely as a preemptive measure against any claim to innate, a priori phenomenological division between whatever human expressions are tagged under the conventional names “documentary” and “fiction.” For a later and more comprehensive phenomenology of documentary spectatorship, see Sobchack (1992).
- 29.
See in Cousins and Macdonald (1996, 10).
- 30.
Writing his memoirs in the third-person voice, Méliès writes: “A storm was raging as Méliès had chosen on purpose a period of bad weather as to obtain more attractive effects” (Cousins and Macdonald, 1996, 10).
- 31.
Lumière, Auguste & Louis (1895–1897).
- 32.
- 33.
For an in-depth analysis of the case, see Loiperdinger (2004).
- 34.
In later years, phenomenological approaches would yield more definitional attempts. See in Vol. III forthcoming.
- 35.
In his Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Gaudreault 2009), Italo Calvino speaks of “exactitude” as one of the six most essential virtues. To that we must add Aristotle’s relativist remark that each science demands its own measure of exactitude, whereas no two sciences gauge their objects of observation by the same scale (1999).
- 36.
Regarding the problem of the mimetic desire in documentary spectatorship, see Michael Renov’s psychoanalytical consideration of the mythological competition between Zeuxis and Parrhasios, in the light of Jacques Lacan’s treatment of the story (2014, 93–103).
- 37.
In Sullivan (1979, 453).
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Beugnet, Martine, and Elizabeth Ezra. 2010. Traces of the Modern: An Alternative History of French Cinema. Studies in French Cinema 10 (1): 11–38.
Cousins, Mark, and Kevin Macdonald. 1996. George Méliès and the Illusion of Reality. In Imagining Reality, ed. Mark Cousins and Kevin Macdonald, 10–11. London: Faber and Faber.
Doel, Marcus. 2002. Pivotal Film History: Georges Méliès as a Vanishing Mediator. Film-Philosophy 6 (2).
Ezra, Elizabeth. 2000. Georges Méliès: The Birth of the Auteur. Manchester: St. Martin’s Press.
Frazer, John. 2008. Notes on the Work of Georges Méliès. In Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema (1896–1913), ed. Norman Maclaren and John Frazer, 9–19. Los Angeles: Flicker Alley.
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———. 2005. Cinema of Attractions. In Encyclopedia of Early Cinema, ed. Richard Abel, 124–127. Abingdon, UK and New York: Taylor & Francis Ltd.
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———. 2012. ‘We Are Here and Not Here’: Late Nineteenth-Century Stage Magic and the Roots of Cinema in the Appearance (and Disappearance) of the Virtual Image. In A Companion to Early Cinema, ed. André Gaudreault, 52–63. Chichester, England: Wiley Blackwell.
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———. 2013. Ambiguous Audience. In The Documentary Film Book, ed. Brian Winston, 83–89. London: BFI.
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———. 1979b. Georges Méliès: Artificially Arranged Scenes. In The Emergence of Film Art: The Evolution and Development of the Motion Picture as an Art from 1900 to the Present, ed. Lewis Jacobs, 10–19. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company.
———. 1979c. The Documentary Tradition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
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Geva, D. (2021). 1896: Georges Méliès. In: A Philosophical History of Documentary, 1895–1959. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79466-8_3
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