🎬 #208 The First Ever Sci-Fi Film.
I’ve written a few times about silent films here before, but it never ceases to amaze me of how fun, innocent and ingenious they are in their execution. Far away from huge visual or practical effects budgets - these were the technicians, storytellers and magicians of the day experimenting with the germ of what cinema could be.
Please enjoy
Bry
FILM: Gugusse et l’Automate (aka The Clown and the Automaton)
1897 Dir Georges Méliès
1 mins 14 seconds
Le Voyage dans la lune, 1902, is Georges Méliès’ most famous work - the story of a voyage to the moon, where the rocket ends up jammed in one of the moon’s eyes. Even if you haven’t seen the film, you’ve probably seen that image. Again one of those visuals that has embedded itself in collective visual consciousness somehow. But before he made that sci-fi epic, that has been influential ever since it was released over 120 years ago, he made another sci-fi film about a man playing with and then battling a ‘robot’ of his own making. The film was just rediscovered this year and restored to its former glory. Link to watch is below :)
Georges Méliès started his career as a magician and illusionist, before making over 500 short film works in about a decade and a half. Blending practical theatre sets and props with the stop-motion effects afforded by motion picture photography, he crafted cinema into the medium that can achieve almost anything that can be imagined.
Méliès was ruined financially by his feature length excursions and World War 1. He became a toy seller to make a living, and destroyed many of his original negatives, presumably in a state of anger and frustration, given the situation.
He and his works faded away from view until they were rediscovered in 1920 - and he has been celebrated ever since as a trailblazer of what narrative film could be. Like a turn of the century James Cameron.
Enjoy the film :)