Customer Reviews

Georges Melies: First Wizard of Cinema 1896-1913

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Flicker Alley has been coming up with some interesting sets focusing on early cinema. This is their latest set, and it looks to rival Kino's DVD set on Edison on being a real contribution to the history of cinema on DVD. There is a cheaper set out there on Melies, but ultimately you get what you pay for when it comes to silent film. If you are interested in Melies I suggest you wait for this set. The following is the press release for this set:

This 5-disc DVD set, includes Méliès's first film, Partie de Cartes and his last, Voyage de la Famille Bourrichon, and brackets more than 170 others. Included are the celebrated and famous journey films, among them A Trip to the Moon, The Impossible Voyage, The Kingdom of Fairies, The Merry Frolics of Satan, The Palace of the Arabian Nights, and The Conquest of the Pole. Fifteen films are reproduced from partial or complete hand-colored original prints, thirteen are presented with the original English narrations written by Méliès. The duration of these films ranges from less than half a minute (The Misfortunes of an Explorer, 1900), to more than half an hour (Conquest of the North Pole, 1912). Also included is a filmed tribute, Le Grand Méliès (1953) by Georges Franju in its original English version, and a substantial booklet containing essays by filmmaker Norman McLaren and historian John Frazer.

This unparalleled collection, several years in the making and produced by Eric Lange and David Shepard, calls for a re-evaluation of the early years of cinema by scholars and historians, for it reveals Méliès to have been the most accomplished filmmaker in the world during that time. For example, his 1896 film The Nightmare has seven shots with exact matches on cuts, when Lumiere, Edison and Biograph films of that year were one shot each. By 1902, Méliès was making wondrous films such as Gulliver's Travels Among the Lilliputians, which are enormously entertaining even today.

The films were gathered from archives and collectors all over the world. Pictorial quality of most of the films is remarkably good; in addition, they have been digitally stabilized and cleaned as necessary. New music has been commissioned for all of the original Méliès films by some of the finest practitioners of silent film accompaniment, including Brian Benison, Eric Beheim, Frederick Hodges, Robert Israel, Neal Kurz, Alexander Rannie, Joseph Rinaudo, Rodney Sauer and the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, and Donald Sosin.

Of all the early film pioneers, I have always had a soft spot for Georges Melies. I love tricks and magic as they invite you to suspend disbelief and make you believe, if only temporarily, that anything is possible. After all that is what movies do especially silent movies and no one in the silent era did it better than Melies. The amazing thing about him is that he did it so early starting back in 1896! This 5 DVD set collects films from a 17 year period (1896-1913) and presents them under the best of conditions.

The bulk of these have never been on home video before and they are a revelation. In addition to the famous fantasy films (A TRIP TO THE MOON, THE IMPOSSIBLE VOYAGE) and trick films (THE LIVING PLAYING CARDS, THE UNTAMEABLE WHISKERS), there are serious films like those relating the story of the Dreyfus affair, a hand tinted version of the life of Joan Of Arc from 1900, and even a woman taking a bath standing up in AFTER THE BALL (nudity in 1897!). This set reportedly contains all 173 known surviviving films by Melies which were collected from archives all over the world. The films range from around 1 minute to Melies' magnum opus THE CONQUEST OF THE POLE (1912) which lasts for half an hour. I especially enjoy the later films with their Gustave Dore' like backgrounds and 19th century stage mechanics. The quality of the shorts is very good for the most part with the earliest ones being in the roughest shape. The musical accompaniment by various artists is uniformly fine and helps to bring these century old treasures to life.

If there is a problem with the set it's that Melies has a tendency to do many of the same things over and over again which doesn't bother me but will probably annoy many viewers. Just remember that Melies had no idea that we'd be watching his movies over and over again courtesy of DVD but I'm sure he'd be delighted. The set also comes with Georges Franju's 1952 touching tribute LE GRANDE MELIES which features son Andre Melies as his father and his long time collaborater and later wife Jeanne D'Alcy (the woman taking the bath in AFTER THE BALL way back in 1897) still going strong at 87.

Although the set is rather pricey it does come from Flicker Alley so you know that it's a quality presentation complete with lots of extras. If you are truly interested in the history of early cinema or like me you enjoy being fooled by a magician's tricks or enjoy the idea of traveling back in time, then you need to find a way to get this set. You won't be disappointed.

UPDATE 12/7/2011: Martin Scorsese's HUGO showcases films featured in this set and the flashback information in his movie comes from Franju's LE GRAND MELIES. If you enjoyed HUGO, then this is the place to go to see more Melies movies and get background info on him.

Five dvd's that contain every known surviving Melies film, and a book.
Sounds good, but what is revelatory is the visual quality of the films here. While a few exist only in fragments, and some films have, of course, rough quality, the vast bulk of this set is extraordinary. I wouldn't hesitate to say that noone alive right now has ever seen any of these films in better condition. Absolutely beautiful; it's obvious that putting this set together was an arduous labor of love, and a gift for film lovers everywhere. This set is expensive, but don't let that stop you if you like Melies. It's worth every cent, believe me.

Since others have already submitted detailed reviews of this set, I will keep it short. I can't imagine a better Melies compendium than this one. If you've any interest at all in this delightful filmmaker, grab it. Bravo, Flicker Alley! Bravo, Jeffery Masino and David Shepard, and all others who contributed to this labour of love!

No wonder this collection recived a prize at the Bologna Film Festival "Cinema Ritrovato"! Flicker Alley has done an amazing job, hunting for all the surviving Melies films throughout film archives all over the world...

The other reviews do justice to the content, but I just recently noticed that the Flicker Alley website mentions an updated second edition, which will contain the material from the single disc MELIES ENCORE: Melies Encore
No mention of any other changes/additions, and there are no dates given by the website, though they say they're trying to get the set out in "3 to 4 weeks". It's probably worth waiting for the new edition, even just to see if the old edition can be had a steep discount.

I can only reiterate that the material in the original 5dvd box is marvelous and beautifully and lovingly presented (Jonathan Rosenbaum called it "one of the best box sets ever released" in his "Global Discoveries" column at Cinemascope). What do you get for being a towering and jolly, originary, visionary genius of the infant medium of cinema? You get driven out of business by moneygrubbing wolves, and reduced to selling toys at the train station. I can almost guarantee that a true omnivorous lover of cinematic art---maybe a young talent who toothed on the sublime play of filmmakers like Michel Gondry, then saw things like Stan Brakhage and Jack Smith with awe rather than irritation---would be TICKLED PINK by this as a gift. (I say this with melancholy, because my own family is too clueless to buy me things like this, so I have to pay for them myself.) Flicker Alley is also a tremendously dedicated little label (they're the Criterion Collection of early cinema) who does infinitely superior work compared to evil crooks like Westlake (the abhorrent and dishonest D.W. Griffith and Eisenstein OCTOBER issues, among others) and sloppy moneygrubbers like Kino (whose work has been quite uneven and undependable in the past, and still seems a bit slipshod, even on some of the Blu-Rays); Flicker Alley is an endeavor worth supporting!

This wonderful five DVD set reproduces the entire catelogue of currently available Georges Melies silent classics filmed between 1896 and 1913.

It includes A Trip to the Moon, The Impossible Journey, The Merry Frolics of Satan among many others of his classics which range from less than a minute running time to over a half hour. Trip to the Moon is perhaps most iconically known for the scene where the adventurer's rocket lands near one of the moon's eyes, causing a perceptible squint on its face.

A magician and showman by inclination, many of these classics focus on magic tricks made possible by the use of cinema such as The Man with the Rubber Head where a magician using a billows seems to inflate his assistant's head larger and larger.

Many of the longer classics are narrated by a Frenchman whose voice sounds like a combination of Louis Jourdan and Pepe LePew but it still works because the wording of the narrative was actually written by Melies himself.

Though Edison studios, among others, easily preceded Melies in the production of silent movies (Edison's first experimental production was in 1889) no one matched the artistry and sense of magic Melies so naturally brought to the medium.

At the beginning of the first DVD is a special documentary on Melies in which you meet his wife and son and get to hear the waltz Melies composed for his wife. You also learn that after Melies was forced out of the movie making business he turned to selling children's toys in a children's toy store.

The idea of this wonderful man still focused on providing wonder even after his movie career only enhances our appreciation of this genuis who first piloted us to the realms of the (im)possible through his movie making magic.

This collection of films from cinema's foremost pioneer wizard, Georges Melies, is an enchanting viewing experience. 173 titles made between 1896 and 1913 have been restored and compiled for this beautifully packaged set from Flicker Alley. The quality in most cases is stunning considering the age of the material, and the fact that the films survived at all is a blessing in itself.

After his inevitable decline, the embittered Melies set about destroying his own works, believing no one would care to watch his old films again. While many are gone, we can be thankful for what was spared, leaving us with a precious treasure-trove of this prolific filmmaker's early cinematic wonders.

The films themselves are more sophisticated than we may initially think. Many of the double exposures and stop-start camera tricks are amazingly precise and totally convincing today. The hand stenciled color tints are charmingly effective, lending a period, picture post card - like ambience.

But the films also contain a cleverness that isn't always of a technical nature. For example, consider Melies' most popular production, A TRIP TO THE MOON from 1902. We 21st century viewers are quick to point out the quaint depiction of scale in the iconic shot of the rocket embedding itself in the eye of the moon's "face". Actually, the joke's on us because Melies didn't intend the shot to serve any kind of purpose other than metaphoric, and it isn't part of the sequential action. The shot is iconic not just for its vivid, haunting imagery, but also because it signifies visually the turn of the century notion of how a lunar landing could be seen as mankind's brazen intrusion of the cosmic realm, perceived as some place where we didn't belong. In effect, it would be like a proverbial poke in the eye. The shot seems to be deliberately set up as a statement on the subject of the film - a satire about space travel. This is a valid interpretation because in the next shot the rocket actually lands on the moon's surface and the scale is once again in proper proportion.

The films are laid out over 5 discs and have newly composed music scores. Also included is a handsomely illustraterd booklet that details Melies' career and lists all the selections in chronological order with proper running times. I cannot praise this fascinating collection enough. It is, quite simply, something that should be mandatory viewing for anyone who truly loves cinema.

For anyone interested in the origins of the horror genre in its entirety, this collection must be in their collection. Georges Melies was more than a filmmaker, he was an entertainer. Most of what he made, he made himself. After watching the 30-minute biography, it must be understood that everything he did was based on simple parlor tricks and trick photography. Modern filmmakers should take a lesson from this man. Hollywood has forgotten and left behind what makes a film great. Trying to place Melies in a scale of things can't do him justice. Without him, Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolf Man, and Jekyll and Hyde would have never come to pass. Without him, there would have been no Jaws, Nightmare on Elm Street, or Psycho. Every horror filmmaker needs to know who Melies is, and every horror fan as well. Melies did not recognize genres in his short films, but were experiments in various subjects, including documenataries and erotic pictures. I'm tired of people assuming horror movies began with Dracula, or Nosferatu. They did not, they began with The Haunted Castle all the way back in 1896. There are still many movies lost and unknown from 1896 to 1910. But now, this collection reveals the pre-heyday of horror cinema. Even before Paul Wegener and Fritz Lang. Melies supposedly destroyed his life's work when his competition beat him out, but he was the first, and nobody can take that away from him.

I just cannot give this product the 5 stars I want to give it due to a few limitations or poor problem-solving by those restoring these films: like the unthinkable decision in "Trip to the Moon" to choose a shot from a print that cuts off half the top of the heads of everyone on the upper platform (and COMPLETELY tops off the guy on the right-end) in the shot where the girls push the spaceship into the gun. I cannot understand this, as prints do exist that clearly show the whole frame. In fact, I'm always miffed that DVD producers do not full-frame or letterbox all movies, since most flatscreens cut a little bit off the top and bottom of the movie image anyway, and this is especially noticeable in the tight-framing of vintage films.

Also, if there were ever a case to be made for colorization, this is it. Some of these movies have spectacular hand-painted color, but it comes and goes very disturbingly. I would love to see the color films restored a little better with the help of some kind of colorizing process; maybe paying some high school students to use a Photoshop-like software on the black-and-white sections of the color movies. C'mon, there must be a way...

The sound is not equalized. That means that sometimes it's very soft, and I actually have to turn the volume up ALL the way; and then suddenly it becomes blasting loud (most the films with narration are blasting loud, except "The Impossible Voyage", which is so soft that I had trouble hearing the narration even with the volume turned up ALL the way!). Sometimes this poor equalization (too soft then way too loud) happens within a single film. There is no excuse for poorly equalizing films on a DVD.

I also wish that these films had been transferred using higher definition so that there is not pixelation disturbing the already small and soft detail in the constant far-shots of these movies. Example: the rough-edges of the pixels around the faces of the characters in "The Merry Frolics of Satan" obliterate what little detail there is.

Beyond these complaints, what you get here is the largest set of the most creative films I've ever seen. The fantasies in particular are mind-boggling. This beats any film festival I've ever been to in terms of humour, story-telling, and creative use of the camera and sets (particularly considering the primitive technology of 1900 filmmaking). At the time of release I suppose audiences found these films amazingly "realistic" (or maybe not), but now they can be considered originally and amazingly stylized. The film-styling of the whimsical stories is like watching "Yellow Submarine" animation.

I really appreciate that Shepard and company have done such a phenomenal job of stabilizing the "registration" of the films; that is, they have managed to absolutely eliminate the up-and-down shaking that afflicts all these old movies. I have the Kino release of "The Magic of Melies", and there is just no comparison between that DVD and this Flicker Alley DVD set. The films on the Kino DVD are impossible for me to watch, let alone enjoy, because the image jitters around so much, constantly reminding me that I am watching an antique film. It's very hard on the eyes and makes me sick to my stomach. The Flicker Alley films here are tremendously restored, and in terms of image stability perhaps look even better than when they were originally shown! While watching the best prints in this collection, I get used to Melies' cinematic style and I actually forget I'm watching a movie made over 100 years ago!! This becomes a collection of the most engaging and creative short movies I have ever seen, and I love to watch them over and over.

In this otherwise magnificent set of films, it's REALLY too bad that the final few steps were not taken to "restore" things like contrast, color correction, erase a few blobs here and there, use some digital noise-reduction to get rid of more scratches and speckles, and the previously mentioned sound equalization. Some films, like the "Eclipse..." and the "Conquest of the Pole" have sections where you can see the fake backgrounds, which really hurts the films; a little tweaking with the brightness control and contrast completely fixes this, and they should have made these adjustments before releasing the films. My copy of "Pole" is SUPPOSED to include English subtitling to explain the German titles they left on the print, but the English titles do not exist. This is a minor defect that does not preclude enjoyment of the film. Also some of the colors on the hand-colored films are odd, like green water and green sky, which should obviously be blue, and which do come out blue in the Kino set. There is a synchronization problem with "The Astronomer's Dream" (the sound is late to the image, which dulls the effect of the exciting music and visuals), and "The Melomaniac" (sound is a little early at first, then the last half of the movie is COMPOSED way, way out of sync to the solfege cards the girls hold up. What a shame!). I would certainly welcome (and purchase) a Blu-Ray version of this set for sharper image (getting rid of all pixelation) and correcting the above problems. Actually, a Blu-Ray version isn't even necessary: I have a DVD collection of Roscoe Arbuckle films from Laughsmith Entertainment, and the image is perfectly clear; in fact, Flicker Alley's own set of "Chaplin at Keystone" is more clear with less pixelation than this Melies set. So it appears that Flicker Alley just didn't transfer the films to digital in high-enough resolution. That's a real problem given the EXTREME far shots used in most early cinema, and in Melies' films here; you need much higher definition that we have here to be able to make out the actors faces and other detail.

As a bonus on the DVD is a 1952 documentary with Melies' wife and son. Unfortunately, the sound is wildly out of synchronization to the picture. Fortunately, you can still enjoy the documentary, since the most important part of the sound is the narration, which does not have to be perfectly in sync; still, the shots of piano playing way out of sync are disturbing, as are the couple of times people talk or when there is (presumably) live sound.

So, given the indifference to the very final stages of making this release perfect, I must give it four stars instead of five, ALTHOUGH, given the world-shattering job they have done on things like cleaning up the images, stabilizing them, putting together various prints, and synchronizing excellent soundtracks, what I'd really like to do is give this a rating of 5 stars out of 6... If you catch my drift...

This is the most enjoyable release of movies made before the 1920s that I have ever had the extreme pleasure to see, and withstanding my criticisms, if you like vintage movies, and if you like humour, story-telling, fantasy and artwork, I strongly, STRONGLY urge you to buy this set of DVDs. Believe me, it's worth the money. Do NOT buy the Kino set.