Georges Méliès

Georges Méliès, born Marie Georges Jean Méliès on 8 December 1861 in Paris and died on 21 January 1938 in the same city, was a French film director and illusionist. Having chosen conjuring as his profession, he took advantage of a gift from his father, a shoe manufacturer, to become the owner and director in 1888 of the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, dormant since the death of the famous illusionist.

On 28 December 1895, he discovered, with wonder, moving photographic images at the first public screening in Paris of the Lumière brothers' Cinematograph, and even offered to buy the patent for the machine. A polite but mocking refusal led him to turn to a London friend, the first British film director, Robert W. Paul, who supplied him with an intermittent mechanism with which he shot his first film in 1896, Une partie de cartes, a remake of the same subject made by Louis Lumière.

That same year, with L'Escamotage d'une dame au théâtre Robert Houdin, he used for the first time in Europe the stop-motion technique, an American discovery, which brought him great success in his theatre, where he mixed live performances with screenings on a big screen. He then turned his 'tableaux', as he called his films, into a new illusory and fantastical world, drawing on the talents of a draughtsman and painter that everyone had noticed in his youth.

Georges Méliès is regarded as one of the principal creators of the earliest cinema tricks, including double exposure, fades, and enlarging and shrinking characters. He was also the first film-maker to use storyboards. He had the first film studio built in France constructed on the property in Montreuil that his father had also given him. Through his film on the Dreyfus Affair, he is also considered the first director of a political film in the history of cinema.