Mapping Méliès


This is draft written in December 2020 by RF Lack and publish posthumously in July 2021

Georges Méliès’s first film, number one in his catalogue, shows three men at a table in a garden playing cards. One of the men is Méliès himself, another is his brother Gaston, and the third is I think Méliès’s fellow-magician and associate Harmington. Though there are no distinguishing features that might help identify the location, film historian Georges Sadoul placed the making of Une partie de cartes in the 8000 square metres of garden surrounding Méliès’s house in Montreuil-sous-Bois.[1] Sadoul added that in 1896 Méliès also shot several conjuring films in the garden at Montreuil, in front of a painted backdrop. Even though his first studio was built in 1897, a photograph from 1898 shows that Méliès still used sets erected in the garden.[2] The film being made in that photograph is La Lune à un mètre, which has its place in the history of cinema on two counts. One: it is probably the first film to be made up of distinct tableaux. The three tableaux are only just distinct, since they represent the same space with slightly adjusted décor, but they are different, and hence an innovation. Two: this may be the first film to show a map. I shall return at the end of this article to this and other maps in Méliès’s films.

            Plotted on a map of Méliésian topography, the property in Montreuil – garden, houses, studios and associated buildings – would be the equivalent of the Lumière factory in Lyon, the fixed point from which radiated the trajectories of films out towards Paris, across France, then Europe, the world and, in Méliès’s case, the universe. Like the Lumière brothers at their La Ciotat residence, Méliès had a second base, the Théâtre Robert-Houdin on the Boulevard des Italiens, and the contiguous premises in the Passage de l’Opéra, where Méliès also shot some of his first films. A line tracing Méliès’s movement back and forth between the Boulevard des Italiens in Paris and the Boulevard de l’Hôtel de Ville in Montreuil would be ferature prominently on that map.

            If this map were combined with one showing Lumière filmmaking in France, a line could be drawn between the location of Une partie de cartes and the location of the Lumière film Une partie d’écarté (1896). This line would be of a different colour and the key to the map would explain that it represents intertextual relations between film locations, rather than directly topographical relations. Méliès’s film is an imitation, with variations, of the Lumière film. In the latter three men are at a table in a garden playing cards. One of the men is Antoine Lumière, father to the brothers; another is Alphonse Winckler, their father-in-law; and the third is the magician Félicien Trewey, friend of Antoine and business associate of Louis and Auguste.

            Of the first hundred titles in the Méliès catalogue, forty-three are close and sometimes identical to titles in the Lumière catalogue. Of these forty-three, only the card-game film survives, but we can be certain enough that film six, L’Arroseur, was an imitation of Le Jardinier (Lumière 1895), also known as Arroseur et arrosé, and it is fair to assume that Méliès filmed his version of the gardening-related farce in his garden at Montreuil. A parallel line on that imaginary map would cross France to connect this garden with the garden at La Ciotat, where the first Lumière Le Jardinier was filmed.[3] If the map were to include films made by other companies, other lines would connect the Lyon garden to the locations of the several gardener films that proliferated in and after 1896.

            Other identifiable places among Méliès first hundred films would link intertextually with La Ciotat, such as the locations of Méliès’s two ‘train entering a station’ films, Arrivée d’un train (gare de Vincennes) and Arrivée d’un train (gare de Joinville). There would also be some sort of graphic representation showing the intertextual connections between the dozen or so films Méliès made while holidaying on the Normandy coast, mainly at Trouville, and the Lumières’ coastal films, not only the home-movies they made at La Ciotat but also those made elsewhere on the Mediterranean coast and on the Atlantic coast, at Biarritz.

            Méliès always holidayed in Normandy; the Lumières spent their summers at La Ciotat. A comparison of the coastal locations on the Lumière and Méliès maps of France reveals a north-south divergence determined by such personal proclivities, but also a difference due to the scale of their respective operations. Méliès made almost all of his films himself, whereas much of the Lumière output was delegated to operators. The Lumières’ Villefranche-sur-Mer films were made by Alexandre Promio, under instructions; likewise the Biarritz films made by Félix Mesguich.

 

 

Méliès’s Paris

 

There are significant overlaps in the territory worked by Méliès and Lumière’s operators only in Paris, where they were covering the same ground. All but one of Méliès's actualité views of Paris seem to be lost. As well as nineteen films documenting the 1900 Exposition Universelle, there are fifteen listed that record squares and boulevards of Paris, all of them familiar subjects from postcards and actualités by other filmmakers: the Place de l'Opéra, the Place de la Concorde, the Place du Théatre-Français, the Boulevard des Italiens, the Place de la Bastille, the Place Saint Augustin, the Gare Saint-Lazare; there are also films made in the Bois de Boulogne, and of boats on the Seine. Some of these films are related to specific events: the state visit of the Tsar and Tsarina (October 1896), parades for the start or mid-point of Lent (February 28th and March 25th 1897), the funeral of the French President Félix Faure (February 23rd 1899). There are several more lost films with generic titles that are likely to have shown Paris locations.

            Regarding choice of subject, these Paris films are straightforward, city-wide views. Several of the subjects listed in Méliès’s catalogue are the same as subjects in the Lumière catalogue: the permanent attractions of Paris or the attraction of significant events such as parades and processions. Méliès’s choice of Paris locations is informed by conventions already established by 1896 through the rapid dissemination of Lumière films and their imitation by other filmmakers. Méliès certainly was happy to imitate Lumière subjects, though of the Lumière-like, Paris-related titles in the Méliès catalogue, not all are imitations: some, like the funeral of Félix Faure, are events filmed by Méliès and a Lumière operator on the same day, others may just be coincidence.

            In its early stages the Pathé company also followed the Lumière model, in general and when it came to filming in Paris. Films dated 1896 include ‘Boulevards à Paris’ and ‘Arrivée du Tzar à Paris’, and from the following years, grouped together as ‘vues de Paris’, were films taken at these locations: Place de l’Etoile, Place de la Concorde, Rue Royale, Place de l’Opéra, Place Saint Augustin, Boulevard et Porte Saint Denis, Place de la République, Place de la Bastille. Like Lumière and Méliès, Pathé filmed the funeral of Félix Faure in 1899. The twenty or so Paris views listed in an 1897 Gaumont catalogue include three of the Tsar’s visit and three of the same Mi-Carême parade filmed by Lumière operators and by Méliès in March 1897.[4]

            The films made of the Lenten parades by Méliès, Lumière, Gaumont and others[5] would not all have been taken in the same place. The Lumière mid-Lent film (catalogue no. 156) looks like it was taken on the Avenue de Marigny; a Gaumont catalogue specifies that their three films were taken on the Place de la Concorde. Méliès doesn’t indicate where his two mid-Lent films were taken, but does note that his films for the start of Lent, showing the boeuf gras, were taken on the Place de la Concorde and the Boulevard des Italiens.

            In general Méliès’s Paris actualité films are the same as everyone else’s, but for some we can discern a personal motivation behind the choice of location. He lists two films made on the Boulevard des Italiens; wherever exactly he placed the camera on that 400-metre-long thoroughfare, he was within that distance from his Paris premises. The three Place de l’Opéra films were made no more than 600 metres from his office in the Passage de l’Opéra, and the films at the Place du Théatre-Français, the Place Saint Augustin and the Gare Saint-Lazare would not have taken him much further out of his way. These locations are all, effectively, local.

            As well as being his local landmark of choice, the Place de l’Opéra is, thanks to Méliès, the first Paris location of significance for the history of film form. The story he tells of how he discovered trucage while filming in front of the Opéra-Garnier is well-known:

 

One day when I was prosaically photographing the Place de l’Opéra, the camera jammed and produced an unexpected result. It took a minute to release the film and set the camera running again. During that minute the passers-by, the buses, the vehicles had all moved, of course. When I projected the film, repaired at the point where it had broken, I suddenly saw a Madeleine-Bastille omnibus transformed into a hearse, and men transformed into women. The truc par substitution was discovered, and two days later I filmed my first metamorphoses of men into women, and my first sudden disappearances.[6]

 

Historians seem keen to cast doubt on this story. Jacques Deslandes and Jacques Richard write: ‘the circumstances are picturesque, the facts plausible. Where is the legend? Where is the truth?’ Pierre Jenn reads this to mean that ‘the incident of the Place de l’Opéra probably never happened’. Jacques Malthète calls this type of anecdote ‘unverifiable’, Elizabeth Ezra and Brian R. Jacobson call the story ‘apocryphal’.[7] I prefer to believe Méliès’s story; there is, at least, no doubt that he was filming on the Place de l’Opéra in 1896, and that he came to think of this as the place where he discovered substitutive montage.

            He was at this location, firstly, because it was convenient. It had the further appeal of heavy traffic – horse-drawn and then motor vehicles, as well as pedestrians – against the impressive backdrop of the opera house. Unlike postcards, filmic views of Paris monuments combined the interest of familiar sights with the attraction of animated activity. A particularity of the Place de l’Opéra was the safe vantage points in the middle of traffic from which to film – not only the terrace in front of the opera house but also the islands on which were positioned the square’s distinctive lamp-posts.

            Other makers of actualités exploited these advantages. There were two Lumière films shot here, and the editor of a Lumière catalogue identifies four films by competitors made there in 1896.[8] That same year Georges Demenÿ made a Place de l’Opéra film for Gaumont, as did, in 1900, Alice Guy. Pathé’s Place de l’Opéra film is from 1897. A film for British Mutoscope shot by W.K.L. Dickson in 1897 was described thus in the company’s catalogue: ‘This view was made from a point opposite the Opera House, taking in the greater portion of the square, which is filled with vehicles and pedestrians, and is very characteristic of life in the French capital.’[9] In 1900 James White shot a panoramic view for Edison in what the catalogue describes as ‘the busiest square in all Paris’.[10] In October 1904, the entrance to the Opéra métro station was installed in the middle of the square, reducing the available space for cameras but adding the spectacle of passengers emerging from underground.

            The appeal of this location as an actualité transferred to its use as a setting in narrative films, such as Odyssée d’un paysan à Paris (Pathé 1905), where the protagonist emerges from the métro entrance and marvels at the sights around him. Place de l’Opéra scenes recur in later ‘journey to Paris’ films such L’Attrait de Paris (Pathé 1912), and by 1929 a frontal view of the Opéra had become a cliché, prompting a title-card in the film L’Effet d’un rayon de soleil sur Paris that reads: ‘To situate a film in Paris, it is best to begin with a view of the Place de l’Opéra. Here is the inevitable Opéra.’

            In composing views of landmark locations, recognisability is the starting point. For most Paris squares filmed in the first years of the cinema the recognisable feature is the monument in the centre – the Arc de Triomphe on the Place de l’Etoile, the obelisk on the Place de la Concorde, the column in the Place de la Bastille, the statue in the Place de la République. There is no such central feature in the Place de l’Opéra; what makes it recognisable, both in early actualités and in narrative films to this day, is the façade of the opera house itself, filling the north side of the square like a theatrical backdrop. In the opening scene of Méliès’s 1904 film Le Raid Paris-Monte Carlo en deux heures it is precisely that, a painted backdrop in front of which is staged an animated arrangement of pedestrians and traffic. Though none survives of the actualités Méliès made earlier on the Place de l’Opéra, we can guess that for one or two at least the spatial arrangement was similar.

            The Place de l’Opéra scene in Le Raid Paris-Monte Carlo was staged in the garden at Montreuil, a space in which Méliès continued to build sets, even when he had two covered studios at his disposal. The transposition of Paris to Montreuil doesn’t complicate the topography of this scene as much as did the context of the film’s exhibition. It was commissioned for and first screened as part of the Revue des Folies-Bergère, which ran from December 31st 1904 to June 1905. The film was inserted into this variety show as a transitional device between a set of scenes showing Paris, including one at the newly opened Opéra métro station, and scenes set on the Côte d’Azur.[11] For the revue’s audience the film offered a competing mode of topographical representation, most obviously in the ‘frenzied automobilism’ whereby the King of the Belgians ‘crosses mountains, plunges into precipices, bounces up to the peaks, crushes passers-by, demolishes houses’.[12]

            By contrast with these ‘scènes de sport fantastique’,[13] the opening scene in front of the Opéra presents a heightened realism. The disposition and depiction of the opera house and neighbouring buildings are topographically exact; in fact it looks like the backdrop is a photographic image that has been modified. We cannot see if Méliès has also been chronologically exact by including the entrance to the métro station because the crowd blocks our view of where it would be.

            The scene’s relation to the real is intensified by the people positioned in front of the backdrop. Among the stars of the preceding live-action parts of the Revue were Harry Fragson, Louis Maurel and Jane Yvon. The two men, both well-known comic performers, reappear in the film as the two automobilists, and the singer Jane Yvon is on screen among those seeing them off. There are probably other members of the cast in the crowd. In a ‘texte explicatif’ Méliès provided a detailed description of the scene, identifying Maurel, Fragson and Yvon but also several other stars who were not performers in the Revue: Félix Galipeux of the Palais-Royal, the mime Séverin, the giant wrestler Antonich and the comic Little Pich (a Parisian imitator of England’s Little Tich).[14] The baritone Jean Noté of the Opéra is there, as if he has just stepped out from his place of work to join the well-wishers, rather than having had to make the journey out to Montreuil.

            The appearance of these stage celebrities on the screen brings together opposing media, the theatrical and the cinematic, as contrasted realities. In investigating space in early French cinema I privilege the ‘real on screen’, at the risk of anachronistically privileging cinematic realism. Others are more circumspect. Tom Gunning warns that ‘a dichotomy between theatricality and cinematic approaches to space no longer holds as the dominant description of space in early cinema’; ‘this is a hybrid space, an assemblage of intersecting, and even competing spatial practices, reflecting the way early cinema is not only intermedial, as Gaudreault and others have emphasized, but also multidimensional’.[15]

            The real and its apprehension is one of the multiple dimensions of this hybrid space. Bazin had suggested as much in 1946 when challenging those who opposed the cinema that documents reality and the cinema that escapes into dream and fantasy: ‘Méliès and his Voyage To the Moon did not come to negate Lumière  and his Arrival of a Train At the Station of La Ciotat. The one is inconceivable without the other. […] The fantastic in the cinema is made possible only by the irresistible realism of the photographic image.’[16]

            Because Gunning is writing about the unreal world discovered by Méliès’s voyagers to the moon, he does not discuss the real as an audience might register it, whether onstage or on screen. I would argue that when those voyagers witness ‘the spectacle of the earth rising as seen from the moon’, it is, as Gunning says, a reversal of the coordinates of visual logic, but it is also and at the same time a reality effect, induced by an intermedial comparison with the cartographic. What the spectator sees rising in the moon’s sky is something they know in reality, a map.

            This reality effect is all the more evident back on earth, where what the spectator sees corresponds to a place they may actually have been to, such as the Opéra-Garnier in Paris, but the thing experienced in reality can as easily be a representation, such as a photographic image in a newspaper or on a postcard. I only know that the Place de l’Opéra in Le Raid Paris-Monte Carlo is the most realistic depiction of a real place in Méliès’s fictional oeuvre because I have compared it with contemporary postcards. Its topographical accuracy compares favourably with the depiction of the Place de la Concorde in the film Le Raid New York-Paris en automobile (1908), with its emaciated silhouette of the Arc de Triomphe in the distance, painted onto a sagging backdrop.[17] The reality referenced in this case, I conjecture, is that of backdrops produced for the theatre. This film, like the earlier Raid, was incorporated into a theatrical revue, so that spectatorial competence in intermedial reality is ensured.

            The spectator I am imagining is one who can read heterogeneous spatial practices together. They may happily comprehend  the hybridity of the theatrical and cinematic spaces presented without worrying about, as Gunning puts it, ‘which was host and which was parasite’.[18] This spectator will, however, sometimes read representations in terms of a familiar reality, seeing what is on screen or on stage as the specular double (Lyotard) of that reality. And the reality with which the spectator is familiar can be a representation.

            Familiarity with representations is how the generic is received. Méliès often combined the topographically specific and the generic. His description of the bridge scene in Détresse et charité (1904) says that ‘to the left is the silhouette of the Palais de Justice’, suggesting that the depiction could be recognised;[19] the bridge from which we see the Palais de Justice should be the Pont Notre-Dame, but the bridge we see is just a generic hybrid of bridges over the Seine. The backdrop functions semi-generically, placing the scene somewhere near the Seine in Paris, which then supports the suggestion made by Thierry Lefebvre that the church shown in an earlier tableau is a specific church, ‘probably Notre-Dame de Paris’.[20] In truth, most of Méliès’s representations of Paris are not concerned with topographical exactitude, relying more on generic backgrounds recycled from film to film.

            Where there are no grounds for comparing a generic representation of place with a specific place, or with the representation of a specific place, a connection can still be made to a real place through signage. Méliès makes generic backdrops Parisian by Paris-specific advertisements, such as the poster for the Grands Magasins du Louvre in La Colle universelle (1907) or, in Un malheur n’arrive jamais seul (1903), the advertisements on a colonne Morris for the chocolate makers Menier and the piano makers Pleyel, both Paris-based companies.[21] In this same film are two self-referential advertisements, the first reading ‘Manufacture de Films pour Cinématographe – G. Méliès – marque déposée – Star’, the second ‘G. Méliès – Paris – 13 Passage de l’Opéra’, the address of his offices and trade counter.

            The Paris-setting of the 1908 film Why That Actor Was Late is established by a combination of generic and place-specific elements. The opening scene shows the eponymous actor leaving the ‘Café de la Porte Maillot’ (the name just decipherable on the painted backdrop). The next scene is a street where he tries to take a taxi in front of a generic café frontage that bears the punning name ‘C. Labarbe’ and the words ‘American bar - café américain’, a backdrop Méliès had already used as part of a clearly defined Paris-setting in Robert Macaire et Bertrand (1906). There is also a colonne Morris, street furniture which suffices to situate a film in Paris, according to Lefebvre.[22] The actor’s high-speed journey to the theatre where he is due to perform takes him from the Porte Maillot at the north-west edge of Paris to the centre, though where isn’t exactly clear: above the door at which he arrives are the names Folies Bergère, Parisiana and Olympia, all theatres situated on or near the grand boulevards. The posters around the entrance are for wrestling competitions and for the stage show of the comic artiste Henri Vilbert. From the former we can deduce that this is meant to be the entrance to the Folies Bergère, the venue of many ‘grandes luttes’ in this period.

            In the actor’s changing room there are three more Vilbert posters, from which we conclude that the actor is himself Vilbert, though actually that would have been evident to the film’s first audience from the beginning. Why That Actor Was Late is another Méliès film incorporated into a theatrical review, this time the 1908 Revue des Folies Bergère, of which Vilbert was a star. The film would have been screened before his appearance on stage so that once again there is intermedial play between competing spatial practices. The opening café scene showed Vilbert in ordinary life, drinking beer with a friend; in the closing scene he is putting on his costume and wig for the role he will assume in the flesh, on stage.

            The intermedial contrast in Why That Actor Was Late centres on the performer’s body, as it did also in other films Méliès made to be inserted into theatrical productions.[23] The body is another of the multiple dimensions of early cinema’s spatial hybridity. As we have seen, in Le Raid Paris Monte-Carlo the performing body can combine with the representation of place as a site of intermedial contrast. A now-lost film called Course en ballon or Dans les airs was inserted into the Olympia Theatre’s féeric ballet Vers les étoiles (November 1906), taking a shepherd, an astronomer and a soldier from the earth to the moon via hot-air balloon, removing these performers from the stage and projecting them cinematically upwards, towards the stars. The stage-setting they leave is Paris and the cinematic spectacle they witness as they travel through the skies is also Paris: ‘the three travellers, at first anxious, are happily distracted by the panorama of illuminated Paris passing beneath their eyes.’[24]

            A production still showing the three travellers in the balloon survives, from which we can see that Méliès used the same balloon in his film Robert Macaire et Bertrand, from January 1907. It is possible that in this film, as Deslandes and Richard have suggested, Méliès re-used the panoramic views of Paris he had created for Vers les étoiles. Four gendarmes who are chasing the robbers Macaire and Bertrand have been lifted up by a storm and are transported through the sky over the city. Their frantically gesticulating bodies are superimposed on a night-time cityscape that could well have been recycled from the Olympia ballet. The panorama unfurls from west to east along the river, punctuated by illuminated landmarks. The order in which these appear – Tour Eiffel, Palais du Trocadero, Arc de Triomphe, Sacré Coeur (still under construction), Place de la Concorde, Opéra-Garnier, Louvre, Colonne Vendôme and Hôtel de Ville – is topographically exact, an exactitude sustained at the film’s climax when the miscreants escape in a hot-air balloon from the Place de la Bastille, which is just east of the Hôtel de Ville.

            The Place de la Bastille is identifiable by an accurate depiction on the backdrop of its central feature, the ‘colonne de Juillet’. Méliès had filmed the Place de la Bastille in 1896 (catalogue no. 58). It would have been interesting to compare the scene in Robert Macaire et Bertrand with that film, and interesting to compare the opening scene of Le Raid Paris-Monte Carlo with his Place de l’Opéra films, but the loss of his actualités makes impossible any comparison between the documentary and fictive representations of these places. As I have suggested, the proximity of the Place de l’Opéra to his office and theatre makes a personal connection and may explain the number of times he filmed there. I am tempted to see a comparable personal connection with the Place de la Bastille, in that his journey home to Montreuil from Paris may have involved him taking the train from there out to Vincennes, with a bus or cab then to Montreuil. The film called in the catalogue Arrivée d’un train (gare de Vincennes) probably refers to the terminus of the ligne de Vincennes on the Place de la Bastille, rather than to the station at Vincennes.[25] Of course he may have travelled directly to Montreuil by other means – I have not seen it mentioned whether he had a car or not[26] – but we know that he took the train from the Place de la Bastille towards Vincennes at least once. In 1898 he filmed the Panorama d’un train en marche (ponts et tunnels) on a stretch of the ligne de Vincennes between the Place de la Bastille and the city’s outer limits. I map this film at the ned of this article.

 

 

Méliès in Montreuil

 

From the evidence of the catalogues and the surviving films, we can only be sure of two occasions on which Méliès took his camera out into the public spaces of Montreuil. The first instance is a lost film, number fifty-one in the catalogue, titled ‘Sortie des Ateliers Vibert’. The subject promises an imitation of the Lumière film of workers leaving the factory, though Méliès has filmed not his own workers but those of the perfume and soap manufacturer Vibert, whose factory was in Montreuil and who was, according to Sadoul, related to Méliès.[27] Méliès himself tells us that, initially, the extras in his films were workers hired from nearby factories in Montreuil, and it is not too fanciful to imagine that the men or women we might have seen leaving the Vibert factory on the Rue de Paris in that lost film could be recognised in the crowd scenes of, for example, Jeanne d’Arc (1900) or Barbe-bleue (1901).[28]

            In his memoirs, Méliès lists the Vibert film alongside films showing a laundry, Les Blanchisseuses, and a blacksmith’s workshop, Les Forgerons (vue d’atelier), describing them as instructive for children and even for adults. It is possible that these and other generic titles in his catalogue are the titles of Montreuil-made films. Across the street from Méliès’s property there was an ‘Institution pour demoiselles’ that could be the subject of film nineteen, Un lycée de jeunes filles. Film thirteen, Couronnement de la Rosière, showing the award of a prize to a poor but virtuous young woman, could well depict the ceremony that took place in Montreuil in July 1896.

            Speculation aside, the one other Méliès film known to have been made in Montreuil but beyond the confines of his own property is Les Incendiaires (1906), a sensational drama depicting the capture and execution of an arsonist. By 1906 the output of the Pathé and Gaumont companies, like that of Méliès, was dominated by fictions, but whereas Pathé and Gaumont fictions habitually left the studios to find locations in their vicinities, Méliès seems to have done so only this once. A letter from Méliès to the Mayor of Montreuil survives in the town’s archives, asking for official permission to shoot exteriors for Les Incendiaires:

 

I have the intention, tomorrow, to take a Cinematograph scene in the former quarries of Montreuil, representing tramps chased by policemen, who will be firing shots, blanks of course, at the wrongdoers. I am, as a consequence, soliciting your goodwill for a written authorisation, for fear that the municipality’s agents, should they be passing, might take the thing seriously, which might lead to unpleasantness. Can you imagine our poor artists, made up to look louche for the occasion, and then genuinely taken into custody. It would start a local revolution. We shall be choosing, of course, an area that is deserted and far from the dwellings, so as not to alarm the inhabitants. I am counting, Monsieur le Maire, on your habitual goodwill and proffer my sincere greetings, as well as my thanks.[29]

 

Méliès’s reference to the Mayor’s habitual goodwill suggests that such requests had been made before, but no similar letters have yet been found in the archives.

            It shouldn’t surprise us that Montreuil features so little in Méliès’s films. He built his studios there in order to create imaginary spaces and places,[30] not to document the reality of this modest suburb. In the five hundred or so surviving films he made there, there are few glimpses of the real world beyond. The dramatic landscape of the Montreuil chalk quarries provided a spectacular setting but Les Incendiaires is one of his most un-Mélièsian films. Paul Méliès affirmed that the scenario of this film was written by his father, Georges’s brother Gaston, he who took the Méliès brand to the United States and would make films in Texas and California, before embarking on a tour of the Pacific to make films in Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, Java, Cambodia, Vietnam, Singapore and Japan, while his stay-at-home brother remained in Montreuil.[31]

            In Georges’s films we sometimes see an exterior that appears to be a Montreuil street but is in fact the façade of the house he inherited from his father Louis (La Marche funèbre de Chopin, Il y a un dieu pour les ivrognes, Pour l’étoile S.V.P.). A few films show the house he had built for himself (Le Mariage de Victoire, L’Ascension de la rosière, Les Hallucinations du baron de Munchausen); he filmed several exteriors in his garden (Jack le ramoneur, Les Incendiaires, Robert Macaire et Bertrand, L’Avare, Le Jugement du garde champêtre), and a few films show the studio buildings themselves (L’Agent gelé, The Mischances of a Photographer, A La conquête du pôle). Other than this, the visual record of Montreuil between 1897 and 1912 provided by Méliès’s substantial corpus of films is negligible, almost nil. The comparison with Pathé is striking: every street in the vicinity of the Pathé studio in Montreuil at some point or another appears in a Pathé film, many of them several times.[32]

            If Méliès documented little of the town in which he made his films, the town has reciprocated by preserving nothing of the various buildings associated with him. His father’s house and the second of the two studios were demolished between the wars. The first studio survived until 1947. A plaque on the site was unveiled by Abel Gance in 1957; a plaque was also placed on his house. In the early 1970s the house was demolished and the plaque affixed to the building that replaced it. A building used to store costumes and props survived until the early 1990s. The municipality commemorates Méliès with these plaques, with a Rue Georges Méliès and with ‘Le Méliès’, the name of Montreuil’s principal cinema.

 

 

 

Mapping Méliès

 

The easiest Méliès map to make would be a biographical map. This could be most simply plotted by marking the places where he already is or should be commemorated: the house where he was born, at 29 Boulevard Saint Martin in Paris; the address of his father’s nearby factory, where Georges worked for a while; the location of the theatre he bought in 1888 and where he first showed his films, the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, at 8 Boulevard des Italiens (demolished 1925); the premises in the Passage de l’Opéra; the location of the studios he built in the grounds of his father’s house in Montreuil, Rue François Delbergue, and nearby the site of the house he built for himself in 1902; the house at 107 Rue Lafayette where he lived from 1923 until 1932, when he moved to rooms at the Château d’Orly; the site of the boutique selling toys that he ran at the Gare Montparnasse; the Léopold-Bellan hospital where he died on January 21st 1938; the plot in the Père-Lachaise cemetery where he was buried.

            These biographical sites are all mappable places, even those that have disappeared. Some of them overlap with places represented in his films, but these could be visualised more clearly if mapped apart. In so doing, we might make a distinction between places where films were actually made and places reconstructed on a stage or in a studio. My original idea had been to produce a Méliès-map that could be read next to or overlaid on the Lumière-map of France, but I soon saw that this comparative reading could only work with a map of actual places, and that a map showing only actual places would not sufficiently visualise the topographical specificities of Méliésian cinema.

            Better might be an atlas made up of eight differently scaled maps, interconnecting and overlapping. The first would show the houses, studios and grounds in Montreuil. This would be based on the map drawn by Georges’s son André at Henri Langlois’s request in 1961, showing the state of the property in 1923 before it was broken up and sold. Further details would be taken from the map showing the arrangement of buildings in 1908, drawn by Jacques Malthète in 1996.[33] The films referenced would be those showing the two houses, the garden and the studio buildings.

            The second map would be of the town of Montreuil, with the Vibert factory on the Rue de Paris and the quarries. The third would show the suburbs to the east of Paris, including: Joinville, where Méliès filmed a train entering the station and a boxing match at the military school there; Charenton and Bicêtre, where there are lunatic asylums served by the Omnibus des toqués (1901) and the omnibus in Les Fromages automobiles (1907); and Vincennes, the mairie of which appears as a backdrop in the penultimate tableau of the Voyage dans la lune (1902).

            The fourth would be a map of Paris, connected to the third by the train line that runs from Bastille to Vincennes. It would show all of the real places documented in actualités and also those reconstructed or evoked in the studio. The fifth would be a map of France, with mostly views of real places (Trouville, Le Havre, Marseille) but also some places recreated for documentary or historical reconstructions (Rennes in the Dreyfus films (1898); Orléans, Reims and Rouen in Jeanne d’Arc) or for pure fictions (Dijon and Monte-Carlo in Le Raid Paris-Monte Carlo). The sixth would be a map of Europe, with some documentary views of real places (Jersey, Germany), thpough it would mostly show places recreated in the studio (London, Switzerland, Italy, Greece). The seventh would be a map of the world, almost always showing reconstructed actualités (Havana, Martinique, Guyana, India, Manila, Beijing). This map would bear comparison with a world-map of Lumière actualités, or with a map of Gaston Méliès’s travels.

            The eighth and last map in this atlas would show locations beyond the earth: the moon, the sun and beyond. However much voyages to these destinations are presented as fantastical, they are not in themselves unmappable locations. Méliès shows globes in his films that represent the heavens, signalling that the places to which his impossible journeys go are real places, even if, in his films, they are phantasmatically configured.

            This last map would take us back to the starting point, the real place where these imagined places were confected. Though Méliès’s invented spaces could be plotted according to which of Studios A or B was used, or whether a set was constructed in the garden, as for La Lune à un mètre, the resulting map would be somewhat basic and no more useful than a list. The studio stage is a non-place. In front of the camera is the unmappable, heterotopic space in which all other places can be configured, including, of course, Space, the regions remote from the earth where Méliès locates the moon, the sun and the stars.[34]

 

 

 

Méliès’s Maps

 

There are very few maps in the surviving corpus. Two of the voyage films show travellers consulting folding maps: in Voyage à travers l’impossible we cannot read the map, in A la conquête du pôle we can just about make out that it shows the Arctic region. Globes appear in the opening tableaux of four voyage films: Voyage dans la lune, Voyage à travers l’impossible, Les Quat’cents farces du diable and A la conquête du pôle. In the first of these the map is distorted, showing the Mediterranean on the Equator. In none of the others can the detail on the globes be read, even when, at the end of the voyage to the North Pole, Méliès as ‘le Napoléon du Pôle’ points to the top of a globe to indicate that the film had reached its destination.

            The globe in A la conquête du pôle is the last map in the Méliès corpus; the first, as I mentioned at the beginning of this article, is the globe in the 1898 film La Lune à un mètre. This is, very possibly, the first map to appear in a film; almost certainly it is the cinema’s first readable map. The map is a distortion, showing France as disproportionately large and worryingly close to the Equator. We can read this as a chauvinistic marker of the film’s provenance, like the proprietary marks that had begun to appear in Méliès’s films as insurance against copyright infringement. We might also read the distorted map as a self-reflexive commentary on the topography of the film.

            I am inclined to read this map as a warning. In 1898 a map in a Méliès film tells me that maps of Méliès films won’t tell me very much, that the map onto which could be plotted a Mélièsian topography, from Montreuil to the Moon, is an unfeasible map. Even if, instead, I could confect an atlas of intermediary maps, from outer space to the inner space of the studio, each on their own would say very little. Moreover, to make maps of individual films – which I do in my work on other early French studios – is a pointless exercise when it comes to Méliès. Although there are many voyages in Méliès films, almost seem to have been undertaken, like the Voyage à travers l’impossible, by members of the Institut de Géographie Incohérente. They are impossible to map other than by the means used at the beginning of the Voyage dans la lune, where Barbenfouillis draws a dotted line on a blackboard from the earth to the moon, a rudimentary tracing of the proposed trajectory.

            Whether or not their protagonists draw maps, Méliès’s voyage, race and chase films all thematise topography.[35] A familiar and recurrent thematisation is the safe return, usually to the point of departure. Another is the voyage as dream or, more often, nightmare, as in Le Dirigeable fantastique ou le Cauchemar d’un inventeur, Deux cents milles sous les mers ou le Cauchemar du pêcheur and Le Tunnel sous la manche ou le Cauchemar anglo-français. A third thematisation is the terror of speed, evident in the many people crushed and buildings demolished in the two-hour journey from Paris to Monte Carlo (Le Raid Paris-Monte Carlo), or in the 500-kilometre-per-hour omnibus journey in the Swiss Alps that ends in ‘terrible catastrophe’ (Voyage à travers l’impossible). The complement of this is the rapid fall, sometimes ensuring a happy homecoming (from the moon, from ‘the impossible’) but also inducing terror, as when, at the end of his dream, Baron Munchausen falls from his bedroom and is found suspended from the railings outside Méliès’s house in Montreuil.

            High-speed travel and rapid descent are variants of a dominant theme in Méliès’s work, first manifest in La Lune à un mètre. Here he articulates for the first time a preoccupation with overcoming, by cinematic means, distance as an obstacle. ‘Distance does not exist’,[36] affirms the protagonist of Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon. Observing the moon in the night sky, an astronomer draws the earth and moon on a blackboard with a view to calculating the distance between them. His calculations are upset by the transformation of his diagram into an animated figure. When he tries to observe the moon with a hand-held telescope this is transformed into a syringe, and when he tries to look through a larger telescope the moon appears in his room and devours the telescope. At this shift from the first to the second tableau the globe disappears from the set, only to return in the third tableau when the astronomer’s nightmare is over and order is restored.

            The opening tableau of this film presents the overcoming of the distance between Earth and Moon as both mathematical and ocular endeavour, through calculations in the astronomer’s books and on his blackboard, and through telescopes. ‘To look through the telescopic lens in this film is to eradicate entirely the distance between observer and celestial body and the ensuing tussle between the moon and the astronomer is an hysterical enactment of the collapse of a fixed point of view and of measurable distance’, writes Lynda Nead.[37] In this same tableau, distance is also overcome through cinematic process, when the moon’s approach is animated on the astronomer’s blackboard. When substitutive montage brings about the disappearance and return of the globe, the film signals that all topographical considerations are subject to cinematic process. In 1898, no more than two years into his film-making career, Méliès announces that in his films topography will not be his prime concern.

            La Lune à un mètre is an emblematic film for my research, the first of many by Méliès that mark the outer limits of my topographical endeavours. But another film by Méliès, made at more or less the same time and listed in the catalogue only ten films away from La Lune à un mètre, is equally emblematic, because absolutely central to my project.

            The Panorama d’un train en marche (ponts et tunnels), has the virtue of being the most easily mapped of the many mutiple-location films I have examined. It is a one-shot ‘phantom ride’ along a stretch of railway that is clearly identifiable from signage and landmarks. The camera is on a train travelling on a small section of the ligne de Vincennes in Paris between Picpus and the fortifications at Montempoivre:

 

 

As simple as this film may seem, the choice of this particular part of the line manifests a sophisticated and, I would suggest, playful sense of how cinema might register the complexities of urban topography. There is a clue in the film’s subtitle: ‘Panorama from a moving train (bridges and tunnels)’. The train moves not only through but also above and beneath the city: above because it is travelling on a viaduct some ten metres up from ground level, looking down on streets, shops, houses and factories, on workers, pedestrians and passengers; beneath because in the space of sixty seconds it passes under three bridges. The first is the viaduct carrying the Boulevard de Picpus, the last is the bridge bearing the landscaped fortifications that mark the city’s limits. Between these two the Vincennes line is crossed by another railway line, the Petite Ceinture, and the train actually travels beneath the Bel-Air (Ceinture) railway station. On these last two bridges there are passers-by looking down on the train as it passes.

            Trains no longer run on this viaduct. They have been replaced by La Coulée Verte René Dumont, an elevated urban park inaugurated in 1993. The protagonists of Before Sunset (2004) take a long walk along this garden path, talking about memory and the past – unsurprisingly, no one remembers Méliès. Along the course of the walkway now are panels relating the history of the area, indicating landmarks, historical sites and significant architecture. More surprisingly, no mention is made of the viaduct’s connection with Méliès and its place in the history of early cinema. On the other hand, on the north side of the Coulée Verte, exactly at the point where Méliès’s film ends, just after the Poterne de Montempoivre, there is a public space named after him. In 1938, straightway after his death and that of his friend Emile Cohl the previous day, a project was formed to name streets in Paris after these two pioneers of cinema. The Square Georges-Méliès and Square Emile-Cohl were so designated in April 1946. It is entirely a concidence, I am certain, that the place chosen to commemorate Georges Méliès was one that could be seen from the train he had taken almost fifty years before.


[1] Georges Sadoul, Georges Méliès (Paris: Seghers, 1961), p.169.

 

[2] In Jacques Malthète, Méliès: images et illusions (Paris: Exporégie, 1996), p.48.

 

[3] A second Lumière gardener film was made the next year in Lyon. See Claude Beylie and Philippe d’Hugues, ‘Côté jardin’, in Les Oubliés du cinéma français (Paris: Cerf, 2000), pp.281-84.

 

[4] Henri Bousquet’s catalogue of Pathé films can be accessed here: http://filmographie.fondation-jeromeseydoux-pathe.com/. The 1897 Gaumont catalogue is reproduced in Stephen Herbert (ed.), Victorian Film Catalogues (London: Projection Box, 1996), p.18.

 

[5] A film by the Normandin company of the 1897 Mi-Carême procession had just been shown when, in May of that year, fire broke out in the projection room at the Bazar de la Charité, a fire that resulted in around 120 deaths.

 

[6] Georges Méliès, ‘Les Vues cinématographiques’ [1907], edited by Jacques Malthète, in André Gaudreault, Cinéma et attraction: pour une nouvelle histoire du cinématographe (Paris : CNRS Editions, 2008), pp.213-14. All translations mine unless otherwise indicated.

 

[7] Jacques Deslandes and Jacques Richard, Histoire comparée du cinéma, II (Tournai: Casterman, 1968), p.419; Pierre Jenn, Georges Méliès cinéaste (Paris: Albatros, 1984); Jacques Malthète, ‘Méliès, technicien du collage’, in Madeleine Malthète-Méliès (ed.), Méliès et la naissance du spectacle cinématographique (Paris: Klincksieck, 1984), p.169; Elizabeth Ezra, Georges Méliès (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p.132; Brian R. Jacobson, Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology, and the Emergence of Cinematic Space (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), p.230.

 

[8] Jacques Rittaud-Hutinet, Auguste et Louis Lumière: Les 1000 premiers films (Paris: Philippe Sers, 1990), p.159.

 

[9] Richard Brown and Barry Anthony, A Victorian Film Enterprise: the history of the British Mutoscope and Biograph Company, 1897-1915 (Trowbridge, Wilts: Flicks Books, 1999), p.294.

 

[10] Charles Musser (ed.), Edison Motion Pictures, 1890-1900 (Bologna: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, 1997), p.607.

 

[11] See Stéphane Tralongo, ‘Rêve d’artiste. La collaboration de Georges Méliès aux spectacles du Châtelet et des Folies-Bergère’, in André Gaudreault and Laurent Le Forestier (eds), Méliès, carrefour des attractions, suivi de Correspondance de Georges Méliès (1904-1937) (Rennes: Colloque de Cerisy/Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2014), p.132.

 

[12] L’Intransigeant (03.01.1905) and Gil Blas (05.01.1905).

 

[13] La Vie au grand air (12.01.1905), p.26.

 

[14] See Jacques Malthète and Laurent Mannoni (eds), L’Oeuvre de Georges Méliès (Paris: Editions de la Martinière, 2008), p.188.

 

[15] Tom Gunning, ‘Shooting into Outer Space: Reframing Modern Vision’, in Matthew Solomon (ed.), Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination: Georges Méliès’s Trip to the Moon (Albany: SUNY Press, 2011), pp.101 & 103. Gunning is referring to the re-evaluation that came after the 1978 Brighton FIAF conference, where the teleological opposition of the theatrical and the cinematic in historians such as Sadoul and Mitry was redressed. Eight years before Brighton, Jean-François Lyotard was challenging that opposition. Discussing the simultaneous deployment on screen of theatrical and cinematic effects, he affirmed that ‘the coexistence of techniques relating to “Italian” [i.e. theatrical] space and to filmic space should not be considered simply as a compromise and as the source of Méliès’s “Baroquism”,  but rather as the key to his “youthfulness” and his subversive power’. Discours, figure (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971), p.276. Lyotard made these comments in a tantalising reference to a presentation that he and some friends gave on Méliès at the Cinémathèque française, at Henri Langlois’s behest. I have found no further information regarding this presentation.

 

[16] André Bazin, ‘Vie et mort de la surimpression’ [1946], in Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? 1. Ontologie et Langage (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1958), p.27.

 

[17] This depiction survives only as a production still: see Malthète and Mannoni (eds), L’Oeuvre de Georges Méliès, p.244. The horse, carriage and crowd in the foreground of this image make it impossible to see if the obelisk is depicted.

 

[18] Tom Gunning, ‘Shooting into Outer Space: Reframing Modern Vision’, p.103.

 

[19] See Malthète, Méliès: images et illusions, p.230 [my translation].

 

[20] Thierry Lefebvre, ‘Le Paris de Georges Méliès: quelques pistes’, Sociétés et Représentations, 17 (2004), p.367.

 

[21] At 56 Rue de Chateaudun and 22 rue de Rochechouart respectively. Both are, like Méliès’s offices, in the ninth arrondissement.

 

[22] Thierry Lefebvre, ‘Le Paris de Georges Méliès: quelques pistes’, p.366. I would nuance Lefebvre’s categorical assertion, insofar as colonnes Morris were used in cities and towns across France, not just in Paris. Nonetheless, their appearance in L’Omnibus des toqués ou Blancs et Noirs (1901), Un malheur n’arrive jamais seul (1903), Pour les p’tiots (1908) and Trop vieux! (1908) does suggest that these films are meant to have Paris settings.

 

[23] For a close analysis of these see See Stéphane Tralongo, ‘Rêve d’artiste. La collaboration de Georges Méliès aux spectacles du Châtelet et des Folies-Bergère’, in Gaudreault and Le Forestier (eds), Méliès, carrefour des attractions.

 

[24] Text cited in Jacques Deslandes and Jacques Richard, Histoire comparée du cinéma, II, p.483. A production still showing the travellers in the balloon is reproduced in Jacques Malthète and Laurent Mannoni (eds), L’Oeuvre de Georges Méliès, p.213.

 

[25] There has been speculation that a flipbook showing a train entering a station, published by Léon Beaulieu in the late 1890s, was made with images from Méliès’s Arrivée d’un train film. Nothing conclusive has been established, though it is clear to me that the station in the flipbook is not the station at Vincennes.

 

[26] In his memoirs Méliès specifies that the journey between Montreuil and Paris took just under an hour. Georges Méliès, La Vie et l’oeuvre d’un pionnier du cinéma, ed. Jean-Pierre Sirois-Trahan (Paris: Les Editions du Sonneur, 2012), pp.78-79.

 

[27] Georges Sadoul, Georges Méliès, p.172.

 

[28] Georges Méliès, La Vie et l’oeuvre d’un pionnier du cinéma, p.72. Méliès complains that the women especially looked awkward in period costume so that eventually he turned to professionals from the chorus of the Châtelet theatre and the Opéra.

 

[29] André Gaudreault and Laurent Le Forestier (eds), Méliès, carrefour des attractions, suivi de Correspondance de Georges Méliès (1904-1937), p.321. The letter is dated April 3rd 1906.

 

[30] Jacques Malthète has ben the most assiduous historian of Méliès’s studios and associated buildings. See: ‘Techniques de l’illusion’, in Méliès, images et illusions (Paris: Exporégie, 1996), pp.52-63; ‘Les deux studios de Georges Méliès’, in Jacques Malthète and Laurent Mannoni (eds), Méliès, magie et cinéma (Paris: Paris musées, 2002), pp.134-69; ‘L’appentis-sorcier de Montreuil-sous-Bois’, in Gaudreault and Le Forestier (eds), Méliès, carrefour des attractions, pp.145-55; ‘Ateliers, studios, laboratoires, bureaux et logements’, in Jacques Malthète and Laurent Mannoni (eds), L’Oeuvre de Georges Méliès, pp.310-13. I am also much indebted to Brian R. Jacobson’s illuminating account and analysis of the studios in ‘Georges Méliès’s “Glass House”: Cineplasticity for a Human-Built World’, in Studios Before the System, pp. 68-85.

 

[31] See Jacques Malthète and Laurent Mannoni (eds), L’Oeuvre de Georges Méliès, p.196. For a summary of Gaston Méliès’s travels see Jacques Malthète, ‘Biographie de Gaston Méliès’, 1895, 7 (1990), pp.85-90, and for a list of his films see Jacques Malthète, Méliès: images et illusions, pp.245-52.

 

[32] These are documented here: https://www.thecinetourist.net/montreuil-in-pathe-films.html. See also the discussion of Montreuil in R.-F. Lack, ‘Lumière, Méliès, Pathé, Gaumont: French filmmaking in the suburbs, 1896-1920’, in Philippe Met & Derek Schilling (eds), Screening the Paris suburbs, from the silent era to the 1990s (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018).

 

[33] See Jacques Malthète and Laurent Mannoni (eds), Méliès, magie et cinéma, p.158 and Jacques Malthète, Méliès: images et illusions, p.55.

 

[34] ‘The studio itself, which became a kind of what Michel Foucault termed the “heterotopia”, a unique and typically modern space that could be transformed to fit any purpose or serve as any location’; ‘As a site of dynamic spatial experimentation and critical evaluation of modern space, the studio should be understood as perhaps the prototypical heterotopia’. Brian R. Jacobson, Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology, and the Emergence of Cinematic Space, pp.74 & 231.

 

[35] See: Voyage dans la Lune (1902), Le Voyage de Gulliver à Lilliput et chez les Géants (1902), Les Aventures de Robinson Crusoé (1902), Le Royaume des fées (1903), Voyage à travers l’impossible (1904), Le Raid Paris-Monte Carlo en automobile (1904), Le Dirigeable fantastique (1905), Jack le ramoneur (1906), Robert Macaire et Bertrand (1906), Le Quat’cents farces du Diable (1906), Deux cents milles sous les mers (1907), Le Tunnel sous la manche (1907), Le Raid New-York Paris en automobile (1908), Les Hallucinations du baron de Munchausen (1911), A la conquête du Pôle (1911), Le Voyage de la famille Bourrichon (1912).

 

[36] A phrase aptly applied to Méliès’s lunar exploits by Murray Pomerance: ‘“Distance does not exist”: Méliès, le Cinéma, and the Moon’, in Matthew Solomon (ed.), Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination, pp.81-96.

 

[37] Lynda Nead, The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography, Film c.1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), p.228.

 

 




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