The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (281 page)

Georges Méliès
(1861–1938), b. Paris
Firmly but kindly, Méliès needs to be restored to his true role of stage conjuror who designed so many of the illusions available to the filmmaker—no longer regarded as the father figure of cinema of the imagination.

I say “kindly” because of a plausible cult grown up around Méliès that confuses the homeliness of his primitivism and ingenuity with serious imaginative insight. That owes something to the melancholy of Méliès’s virtual disappearance after the First World War, the subsequent sale and dispersal of most of his movies, and his rehabilitation in 1930–31. We readily respond to the spectacle of a cinematic innovator who ends his life neglected or disappointed. Méliès is the first of a line that includes Griffith, von Stroheim, von Sternberg, and Orson Welles.

That wistful old age was tenderly caught in Georges Franju’s documentary tribute,
Le Grand Méliès
, made in 1952. Franju and many others tried to resurrect Méliès as the first surrealist in cinema and as the harbinger of the medium’s appeal to fantasy. Méliès clearly felt that power, but only as a conjuror. The poetic, visual, or imaginative content of his films seems to me theatrical, crude, and monotonous. Which is only to say that he was an inventor and not an artist. Cinema has always been too ready to read art into technical mastery or novelty. It is useful to recall the words of Georges Sadoul, the foremost authority on Méliès: “But, with Méliès, the gimmick is always trying to startle us: it is the end, and not a means of expression. Méliès invents the syllables of a future language, but still prefers ‘abracadabras’ to words. He illustrates the gap between magic formulae and the use of language.” Arguably, there is more lasting mystery in the mundane images of the Lumière brothers; as for art, that had to wait until Louis Feuillade.

Méliès came from a background of successful Parisian trade. The father owned a shoe factory in an age of city pavements. The son had artistic leanings that the father discouraged. Thus he worked in the factory for several years, and any higher thoughts were diverted into amateur magic. Sleight of hand and the sighs of bourgeois wonder preoccupied Méliès. When the father retired, Georges asked his brother Gaston to look after the shoes while he took over the Theatre Robert-Houdin. From 1888, the pointed beard and beady eyes compelled audiences to be caught in his illusions. In addition, Méliès wrote, produced, designed, engineered, and acted in a succession of theatrical performances that emphasized magical change. Magic lantern shows and his stature as a showman ensured his presence at the Lumières’ first show in December 1895, and his acumen suffered their famous rebuff: that cinema had no future.

Méliès had no doubt about the prospects for film and rapidly identified himself with it. From England, he bought a camera and film, and set to work. But this pioneer could at first only imitate the Lumière films, until one day in 1897 the film jammed in his camera. In Sadoul’s words, “This ghostly accident did not stop the Paris traffic.” The jammed and multiexposed frame showed seething metamorphoses that liberated Méliès’s engineering spirit. He built a studio at Montreuil and began to manufacture trick movies, stimulated by Albert Hopkins’s book,
Magic
.

He worked until 1913 at Montreuil, helplessly dominated by technique. He made over a thousand films, the bulk of them before 1905, with a new burst of activity in 1908. The failure of Méliès was in relating his often childish delight in trickery to any greater purpose. There is something wearying in all his tricks, isolated as they are from meaning: superimposition, multiexposure, models and live action together, stop motion, slow and quick action,
etc.
But all these devices were kept within a proscenium arch. The Méliès films are photographed very flatly, partly because a conjuror likes the spectator directly in front of him, but also because Méliès failed to see that audiences might be more interested in people than in magic. More damaging, he set these homemade wonders in methodical, melodramatic stories. It is difficult to grant Méliès insight as a magician, when his structures were so pedestrian. For instance, in one of his last films,
À la Conquête du Pole
, made in 1912, and no real advance on films made twelve years before, he is still putting on one trick after another, failing to see that the wonder or terror of the journey could be more profound if the audience identified with any of the voyagers. A year later, in America, Griffith’s
Judith of Bethulia
had close-ups that brought human individuality to the director’s Victorian biblical sensibility.

Of course, Méliès was immensely successful in the years around 1900. But he began to bore even his own audiences. The rigid filming techniques proved more influential than the skillful deceptions of the eye. And Méliès made hardly anything longer than twenty minutes, always seeing film as a rival to variety “acts” in the theatre. It was Griffith who had the ponderous daring to insist on length. That was rewarded by the faith of audiences in the perilously preserved honor of his young ladies.

There are magical moments in Méliès that have more than historical interest. But I cannot see a coherent sense of cinema language or a challenging notion of the audience. Behind all his stage-bound pantomime transformations, there lurked a solid factory owner and the vague apprehension of authorship:

The composition of a scene, an episode, a drama, a fairy story, a comedy or an artistic tableau naturally requires a scenario taken from the imagination. Then there is a search for ways of affecting the audience: drawings and models for costumes and scenery; the settling on a chief attraction, without which there is no chance of success. And as for tales of illusion or fairy stories, the tricks and processes must be studied with particular care. The rendering on film must be prepared in advance, just as much as the groupings and movements of the players. It is exactly like preparing a stage play. The only difference is that the author must know how to do everything himself and, consequently, be author, director, designer and, sometimes, actor, if everything is to be as he wishes it. The author of a scene must direct it himself, because it is absolutely impossible if two people meddle in it.

Such independence made Méliès no easy collaborator and may have blinded him to the changes in the film industry. His American distribution suffered from the Edison monopoly; in France, he became subordinate to Pathé. Longer films and the real imaginative departure from theatricality eluded Méliès. Nineteen-thirteen was the turning point, when his brother and wife died. War disrupted his world and turned him back into a conjuror entertaining troops. His studio was converted into a theatre and he made no more films. In 1923, the Robert-Houdin was torn down and Méliès sold his negatives. When cinéastes rediscovered him he was living in poverty. Happily, his last years were more comfortable, and in 1931 he was awarded the cross of the Legion d’Honneur. Doubtless he spent his last years turning it into bouquets and white rabbits.

Jean-Pierre Melville
(Jean-Pierre Grumbach) (1917–73), b. Paris
1946:
Vingt-Quatre Heures de la Vie d’un Clown
(s). 1947:
Le Silence de la Mer
. 1949:
Les Enfants Terribles
. 1952:
Quand Tu Liras Cette Lettre
. 1955:
Bob le Flambeur
. 1958:
Deux Hommes à Manhattan
. 1961:
Léon Morin, Prêtre
. 1962:
Le Doulos
. 1963:
L’Aîné des Ferchaux/Magnet of Doom
. 1966:
Le Deuxième Souffle/The Second Breath
. 1967:
Le Samourai
. 1969:
L’Armée des Ombres/Shadow Army
. 1970:
Le Cercle Rouge
. 1972:
Un Flic/Dirty Money
.

As acknowledged by his appearance in
Breathless
(59, Jean-Luc Godard), Melville was an ancestor of the New Wave.
Le Silence de la Mer
was an heroic instance of the outsider making a film and renovating the medium as he did so.
Bob le Flambeur
was immensely influential in the way it recreated the ambiance of the American thriller and yet encouraged spontaneous, location shooting. No one who had named himself after the author of
Moby Dick
, who had Melville’s affection for American cinema of the 1930s, and yet who insisted on prickly French truths, could fail to appeal to the new generation. Good enough, but Melville exists in his own right.

Bob
was a turning point for Melville himself, inaugurating a Hustonian dream of tough, self-sufficient men in trench coats, fickle girls, and a maelstrom of treachery and heroic gestures. The romance was made astringent by the casual humor, the remarkable eye for honor, friendship, and double-cross, and the pleasure at a world Melville made his own, even to the extent of having his own studio. There is a haphazard grace in his pictures that stems from the deliberate offhandedness with which they were made: “I’m incapable of doing anything but rough drafts. Each time I see one of my films again, then and only then can I see what I should have done. But I only see things this clearly once the finished print is being shown on the screen everywhere and it’s too late to do anything about it.”

He had a built-in breathlessness, in fact, an adopted resignation to transience and mutability that is partly an eccentric individualism and partly what Melville inherited from American mobility and obsolescence. It gives his gangster films a true supercharge—“en quatrième vitesse”—and he transformed Belmondo and Delon into beautiful destructive angels of the dark street. But this gain was at some cost. For Melville’s later films were more youthful than his earlier ones.

Melville was in the Resistance and in Britain during the war. Afterwards, he reverted to an amateur interest in moviemaking and, in 1947, he made his first feature from the story by Vercors about a German officer billeted in rural France who falls in love with a French girl. It was a more concentrated, sensitive, and interior film than the later movies would suggest. Sadly, it is little known today. If memories are accurate, it is a major film, important to the development of Bresson, Astruc, Resnais, and possibly Rohmer. In 1949, Melville played a small part in Cocteau’s
Orphée
and then directed an adaptation of Cocteau’s
Les Enfants Terribles
, this at the author’s request. At a time when Cocteau the filmmaker was at his peak, the personality of
Les Enfants Terribles
is still Melville’s. Cocteau collaborated on the script and haunted the set, and the film is faithful to the novel; but its sense of complicity and betrayal, of disorder and luminous death, are all part of Melville’s persistent vision.

But the dream world of
Les Enfants
was over a decade in crystallizing.
Quand Tu Liras Cette Lettre
is a pedestrian melodrama.
Bob le Flambeur
, although a turning point, was a sort of lyrical documentary thriller.
Deux Hommes à Manhattan
, in which Melville played a leading role, was filmed in America and meant as a love letter to New York. In fact, its intentions are stronger than its effects.
Léon Morin
was nearly a return to the delicate unpicking of emotion in
Silence de la Mer
, and an odd reappearance of Melville’s interest in the spirit and the Occupation.

Le Doulos
was the first of the new thrillers and the beginning of Melville’s development of a world filled with doors through which bullets may come at any moment. These films are virtually interchangeable; for the environment and legend are important above everything else. It was an independent path, very entertaining, but not as demanding of Melville himself as his first films, as evident in the late return to France during the war
—L’Armée des Ombres
—which subtly turns the underworld into the Resistance.

Still, it was in this last period that Melville made a masterpiece of French noir—
Le Samourai
—with Alain Delon as a fatalistic icon moving toward certain closure. Done on the wide screen, with mysteries in every corner, the film is quick, deadly, and so tough that its impassive romanticism is not just fascinating, but nearly comic.

Sam
(Samuel)
Mendes
, b. Reading, England, 1965
1999:
American Beauty
. 2002:
Road to Perdition
. 2005:
Jarhead
. 2008:
Revolutionary Road
. 2009:
Away We Go
.

When
American Beauty
won the Oscar for best picture, and Sam Mendes pocketed another for best director, there was sniffiness in some circles—that
American Beauty
wasn’t really very good or new, and that it was a sign of unhappy times when a British stage director could win everything on his first shot. There was another line that said, just notice how closely and fondly Mendes is working with veteran cameraman Conrad Hall—see how eager he is to learn, and how excited by the new toys. It was worth adding that
American Beauty
was an uncommonly tart, melancholy view of Americana that looks all the more prescient and striking in the Bushy empire of Crawford, Texas.

In other words, I think Sam Mendes is going to do very well indeed in an age when so many talents raised in British theatre do seem able to grasp sufficient rudiments of American film in a quick, greedy look: I’m thinking of David Hare, Anthony Minghella, Stephen Daldry, Richard Eyre, and Nicholas Hytner. Let me go one step further: in an age of excessive concentration on “filmic effects” it is absolutely refreshing to feel some sense of the large world and life experience, some real knowledge of dramaturgy, acting, and rehearsal in people coming into movie directing. The lessons and experience of good theatre still have enormous value for filmmaking.

American Beauty
was a film that helped crystallize the uncertain mood of self-criticism in America. It was a fine movie, and I don’t see Sam Mendes as anything but someone who means to get better. But
Road to Perdition
was a dreadful reach for class and “beauty.”
Jarhead
was a brave, semiabstract combat film, but
Revolutionary Road
was another mishap. The Richard Yates novel was fatally softened, and Leonardo DiCaprio was not ready for the male role. But Kate Winslet (Mrs. Mendes at the time) was very good—good enough to lead her husband in future.