Early Popular Visual Culture, Vol. 5, No. 2, July 2007, pp.

167–174

MÉLIÈS THE MAGICIAN

The magical magic of the magic image 1

André Gaudreault
andre.gaudreault@umontreal.ca
Early
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1746-0654
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Taylor
5202007
AndreGaudreault
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Francis
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Francis
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The title of this article is “The Magical Magic of the Magic Image”, but I might also have
chosen as its title: “The Magical Magic of Magic Montage”, such is the importance, in
Méliès, of gluing, matching and assemblage. Indeed the essential quality of Méliès’ magic
is produced, in a remarkable and primordial way, by fragmentation, cutting, and breaks in
continuity. In his films, Méliès’ magic wand was, first and foremost, a pair of scissors.
And yet, until as recently as the early 1980s, Méliès had always been seen, paradox-
ically, as a kinematographer who contributed very little, if anything at all, to the devel-
opment of editing. This, in my view, is a perfect example of the historicism of historians
– historians in denial whom we have now caught red handed. For reasons that I have
explained elsewhere,2 but which are increasingly evident today, “traditional” film histo-
rians have always denied the role of editing in Méliès’ work and his contribution to its
development. Whether it was Sadoul, Mitry or Jacobs, each had his reasons, axiological
and ideological, for bestowing upon others than the “magician of Montreuil” the so-
called paternity of the “syntactical” and “language-like” function par excellence that is edit-
ing. And, I would now say, that is assemblage.
And yet practically without exception Méliès’ films all bear the stigmata of the
numerous cuts found throughout them. Take for example the film Le Diable Noir (The
Black Imp), something of a classic of the genre. This is a truly Meccano-like film, made
up as it is of no fewer than sixty fragments—fragments sometimes no more than a few
frames in length and whose traces are easy to locate (at points where there are appear-
ances or disappearances) when one is prepared to see them and knows to look up (in a
Méliès film, the traces of gluing are always located in the upper part of the image, where
the viewer is not inclined to gaze, since no action occurs there).
For in fact, as an examination of the film strip would reveal, the traces of gluing are
well and truly located in the upper part of the frame, while the viewer is summoned to
look towards the bottom, because of the actions of the characters there. We can assume
that, like every good magician, Méliès knew, even when wearing his kinematographer’s
cap, one must draw the viewer’s attention towards areas where nothing is happening
but where everything appears to be happening in order, as he must, not to reveal his
secret.
Since each cut in the film shows traces of gluing, creating the trick effect supposes
the existence, as we are now well aware, of two distinct successive moments (the only
way not to reveal the secret of the trick):
- The first moment, during the film shoot: the camera is stopped, interrupting the film-
ing, in order to manipulate the profilmic reality and re-arrange it a little, to doctor
it a bit in order to give the illusion that an object has disappeared, or that it has
taken the place of another object, has suddenly appeared, has been transformed,
and so on.
ISSN 1746-0654 (print)/ISSN 1746-0662 (online)/07/020167-08
© 2007 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/17460650701433822
168 EARLY POPULAR VISUAL CULTURE

- The second moment: next, it was necessary, after the shooting was finished and once
the film was developed, for Méliès to lay his hands on the film and remove any excess
frames. The purpose of this was to enable him to adjust the two parts of the scene
in relation to each other—to enable him, through a subtractive process, to match
the actors’ movements. These actors, while shooting the film, had suddenly to stop
what they were doing, to suspend their activity and wait for the manipulation of the
profilmic objects to be completed before resuming their activity where they left off.
Not to resort to editing, not to carefully remove a considerable number of images and
not to artfully direct the interruption and suspension of the acting was to expose oneself
to producing a view which, like Uncle Josh in a Spooky Hotel (Edison, 1900), for example,
made in Mélièsian fashion, thoroughly revealed the tricks with which it was made.
Since the first Cerisy symposium on Méliès, in 1981, research has focused on reveal-
ing the various elements which support a new view of Méliès as a prophet of “montage”.
This work, carried out in particular by Jacques Malthête and the author of the present
text—research we have sometimes carried out together but, more often, individually
has enabled us to bring to light a number of facts which contradict a good part of what
traditional film historians have always told us:
- Contrary to what we have always been told, trick effects by means of the stop-
camera technique in order to carry out a substitution are accompanied, in Méliès’
work, by a touching up carried out after the fact, using scissors and glue.
- In fact, there is no example in Méliès’ work of a trick effect that is not accompanied
by some sort of touching up.
- Méliès’ work is at the very least an early, and singular, occurrence of the essential
form of editing known as “rapid cutting”: think of the five shots in less than 20 seconds
when the rocket returns to Earth in Le Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon) in 1902.
- As early as 1897, for the production of his longer films, Méliès compensated for the
lack of long strips of raw film stock on the market by using editing, once again with
scissors and glue. In order to do so, after the film shoot he used a process of abutting
several 20-metre strips, thereby presenting without interruption one and the same
action, shot from the same camera angle. For example: Le Couronnement d’Édouard
VII (The Coronation of Edward VII) in 1902.
- Méliès’s output provides early examples of shots matching movement (see in
particular the 1899 film L’Impressionniste fin de siècle).
- We can even see in Méliès’ work an early example of the essential editing device
known as “analytic editing”, the result of the camera “circulating” in an apparently
fluid manner within the profilmic space: see the last five or six shots, before the final
“apotheosis”, at the end of Le Royaume des fées (Kingdom of the Fairies) in 1903.
In fact we might have grounds for granting Méliès a certificate of paternity… . But
historians’ methods have changed, as have the issues at stake and our ways of doing and
seeing… . Thankfully, it is no longer a question of trying to find the father of editing,
nor its grandfather, nor its grandmother for that matter…
What’s more, we no longer view editing procedures as an undifferentiated
magma or see no distinction between early editing and institutional editing. No more
than we view, at least so far as my work is concerned, the editing, fragmentation,
assemblage or abutting found in what I suggest we call kine-attractography3 (in French:
 M É L I ÈS T H E M A G I C I A N 169

“cinématographie-attraction”) as a prelude to narrative editing, which ushered in the

institutional cinema’s glory days, its days of narrative integration.
The importance of the manipulation of the film strip in Méliès’ work, the way it is
chopped up and fragmented, has thus become a well-recognised fact in research into
early cinema. The time has come to move to another dimension and begin to ask
ourselves questions of a methodological—and philological—nature. And to revise, in
light of the discoveries made about Méliès’ work, other bits of conventional wisdom
found in the traditional history of editing. Among these, in particular, is the view that
we should regard as negligible the amount of editing, assemblage and fragmentation of
the film strip in the period before 1900 in bodies of work beyond that of Méliès alone.
This is the task I set for myself fifteen or so years ago, through research whose goal
was to confirm whether, by examining the matter quite closely, we could validate the
commonplace view that films shot before 1900, apart from rare exceptions, respected the
principle of strict photogrammic continuity. And that they were shot in one go, on one
strip of film, without any fragmentation, without any break in continuity whatsoever.
This research provided no end of surprises. First, I noticed that Méliès’ views,
before the turn of the century, were not the only ones to bear the stigmata of fragmen-
tation, abutting and assemblage. Far from it! Bodies of work as well known for their
“photogrammic continuity” as the Lumière views contained, against all expectations, a
good number of views showing the signs of breaks in sacrosanct so-called continuity.
Finally, I was led to conclude that, contrary to what traditional film historians have
taught us, editing and assemblage are present in relatively gigantic proportions, often in
views which contain only a single apparent shot.
A single apparent shot… . Here is where something seemed fishy. And this is what
will bring us, in the twinkling of an eye, with the mere wave of a wand, back to dear old
Méliès. But first we have to consider a few historical matters.
An “elementary” form of editing thus well and truly did exist in the work of the first
camera operators, before “artificially arranged scenes” took over from on-the-spot
shooting out of doors. Could this be one of the chapters which traditionally have been
“forgotten” in traditional film histories?
This indeed was the case, and today this practice has in large part been docu-
mented, thanks to the research carried out over the past fifteen years. To the point that
we can now put forward statistics which speak for themselves: nearly 20% of the
Lumière views shot in 1899 contain, against all expectations, traces of photogrammic
discontinuity. In addition, and here the figures are truly “astronomical”, nearly 60% of
Edison views produced that same year seem to resort in one form or another to frag-
menting the film strip.
These are astounding figures, if we think that editing has always been seen as a rela-
tively late phenomenon, dating from after the turn of the century. These figures are also
astounding because they derive from bodies of work such as those of Edison and
Lumière, which are principally composed, at least before 1900, of views shot out of
doors with subjects apparently shot on the fly.
The form of fragmentation most responsible for inflating these figures would appear
to be the famous stop-camera “trick” which, contrary to what everyone has always
thought, myself included, was widely used by camera operators of all sorts. They did so
in a highly prosaic manner, it is true, and not at all for magical purposes, in the views
they shot out of doors and on the fly. I won’t belabour this point, because I have covered
170 EARLY POPULAR VISUAL CULTURE

it amply in other articles or conference papers, but it was common for camera opera-
tors, well before 1900, to have recourse to the stop-camera technique, or what we
might call camera resumption.
Film historians have always thought that the stop-camera technique was used only
in Mélièsian artificially arranged scenes and that it was practically absent from views
taken spontaneously and out of doors. Resumptions are legion among the breaks and
interruptions that can be identified in the very earliest views. Note that because resump-
tion is carried out, almost by definition, by maintaining the framing of the camera, it was
entirely possible that the interruption would not be noticed by film historians, who tend
to think they are in the presence of a break that has occurred in the old copy of the film
they are viewing, a break occurring sometime between the zero time when the film was
made and the zero + n time of the present moment. But this, very often, was not the
case at all! Resumption truly was one of the strategies used by the earliest handle turn-
ers, well before 1900, in order to introduce the profilmic world into their image box.
We find thousands of examples of this in films of the period. And we even find its justi-
fication in books of the period:

… however promising the beginning may be, long before the end all interesting
incident may have given out. In which case, perhaps the best thing to do is at once
to leave off turning, without moving the instrument, and resume turning when suit-
able incidents recur. 4

The first conclusion we should draw, with respect to Méliès, is this: the stop-
camera technique was seemingly already a part of the culture of kinematographers when
Méliès made his entry into the profession, which therefore means that this practice was
highly likely to have been known to him when he supposedly “discovered”, unexpect-
edly, trick effects through the stop-camera technique while filming at the Place de
l’Opéra. Indeed, in his famous text of 1907, Méliès pretended to have suddenly discov-
ered the famous stop-camera trick shortly before his own first use of the technique for
magic purposes, around October-November 1896, or some five or six months after he
began filmmaking:

One day, when I was photographing as usual in the Place de l’Opéra, the camera I
used in the early days (a primitive thing in which the film tore or frequently caught
and refused to advance) jammed and produced an unexpected result. It took a
minute to disengage the film and to start the camera up again. In the meantime, the
passers-by, a horse trolley and other vehicles had, of course, changed positions.
When I projected the film strip, which I had glued back together at the point of the
break, I suddenly saw a Madeleine-Bastille horse trolley change into a hearse and
men become women. The substitution or stop-camera trick had been discovered.
Two days later, I produced the first metamorphoses of men into women and the
first sudden disappearances which, in the beginning, had such great success. 5

In any event, we know that the trick in question had already been used on at least
two occasions by Edison operators, in August 1895, four months before the public
premiere of the Lumière films at the Grand Café but, especially, some fifteen months
before the supposed incident in the Place de l’Opéra. The Kinetoscope film The Execution
 M É L I ÈS T H E M A G I C I A N 171

of Mary, Queen of Scots (Edison), shot on 28 August 1895, had employed a mannequin,
making possible a painless royal beheading. Edison operators also used the same trick
when they shot the film Joan of Arc the same day. This is August 1895, and Méliès did
not use the stop-camera substitution trick until November or December 1896, for his
famous Escamotage d’une dame chez Robert-Houdin (A Vanishing Lady).
At the same time, Méliès’ text recounts a situation almost too good to be true (“a
Madeleine-Bastille horse trolley changed into a hearse and men became women”). It’s
practically a case of “Mélièsian phantasmagoria” avant la lettre, and obtained by pure
chance. Whatever the truth of this incident, Méliès’ text is useful in at least one sense,
on a historical level: it reveals the necessary historicity of the way historians work! There
is one word in this text which no traditional film historian ever remarked upon, and for
good reason, but which historians today, especially if they are working like I am on the
history of the emergence of editing, see right away. One word, for which we need to
use three words to translate it into English:

When I projected the film strip, which I had glued back together [ressoudée] at the
point of the break, I suddenly saw a Madeleine-Bastille horse trolley change into a
hearse and men become women.

Méliès had thus glued the film strip back together, where the break had occurred …
But this break, we must point out, was not even mentioned in Méliès’ text. Here then
is a very early example of editing which has not attracted the attention of commentators
on the text. The stop-camera technique used by the Edison operators in their film on the
execution of the queen of Scotland had also been “touched up” after the fact, because the
cutting, not of her head but of the film, is quite visible in the film’s images.
We should also note that the stop-camera technique in the Edison film is not used
for magic purposes but rather for purely pragmatic ones: it is assumed the viewer will
see nothing and believe that the queen’s head had indeed been cut off. Neither are magic
effects sought in the case of the stop-camera being used when filming on the fly. Here it
is simply a matter of the camera operator reacting to the unfolding of events before his
camera and of taking the unexpected into account, in particular when the profilmic, the
“stuff being shot”, is found wanting. Thus when shooting a parade, for example, when-
ever there is too much time between two groups filing past one after the other, the
operator simply stops turning and later resumes shooting when the “action” itself
resumes. This is a variation on the kind of thing Méliès described: the shooting is
affected by some sort of incident, some sort of break in continuity, except with Méliès
this incident took place in the camera rather than in front of it!
Méliès’ refinement of the stop-camera technique lies precisely in the fact that this
procedure is used in his work for its magic effects; it is employed to produce appearances,
disappearances and sleight-of-hand tricks. It is thus a part of the cultural series “magic
show”. Like The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, there is no ellipsis produced, but this
time it is not merely for convenience that the operator uses trickery. It is used to signify,
even if this signification is of the magical variety. With Méliès, interruption has become
a true signifier. This is not true of the two Edison films, and is not true, except in an entirely
incidental manner, and by inference on the part of the viewer, of films shot on the fly.
Let’s stop here for a moment and think about this kind of disappearing act, so dear
to Méliès, and ask ourselves what the relationship is between the various players in the
172 EARLY POPULAR VISUAL CULTURE

sphere of early cinema and the cultural spheres to which they belonged—their cultural
spheres, but especially the cultural series which derived from these spheres. In the case of
Méliès, this was the cultural series “magic show”.
The first question that comes to my mind is this: is it a coincidence that the first
Méliès film to use the stop-camera technique for magic purposes was a disappearing act?
I dare say that it is not a coincidence, and that there may be some meaning in this. I like
to think that when we look at the question from the point of view of the cultural series
“magic show”, any film editing consists in a sense of sleight-of-hand, of a disappearing
act. One image drives another one out, one image is made to disappear and another
takes its place: “Now you see it, now you don’t …”, as Tom Gunning describes it. 6 And
this is the magic of cinema, this is the magic of editing …
One thing is clear, in the case of the stop-camera technique being used for magical
purposes: the passage from one image to another is well and truly a form of sleight of
hand because—and this is a factor of discontinuity—one image (or rather part of its
content) drives out another. This is the complete opposite, then, of the editing found in
the paradigm of narration, which—and this is a factor of continuity—is founded upon
the sequence of shots, on their suture.
Méliès never forgot to wear his magician’s cap under his kinematographer’s cap. It
is not by chance that he became president of the French Chamber of Illusionists and that
he occupied this post for thirty years! And this is the point I would like to emphasise to
conclude. I’d like to suggest that we change the way we look at Méliès, that we see him
differently: Méliès was a magician before he was kinematographer. This is true in a
temporal sense: Méliès had in fact worked as a magician before becoming a kinematog-
rapher. Granted! This is all the more true in that he was a magician years before the kine-
matograph was invented. But this is not what I mean. What I mean is that Méliès was,
first and foremost, a magician, and he was a magician even when he was, and at the same
time as he was, a kinematographer. Here too everything is to be gained, I believe, by
looking at so-called early cinema not from the point of view of what it would become,
the new “cultural series” called the cinema, but from the point of view of the other
cultural series which annexed, in a sense, the kinematograph, in order to do differently
what was already being done within these cultural series even before the introduction
of the new device.
This is exactly the same position I suggested we adopt, in 1996, at the second Cerisy
conference on Méliès, but on that occasion I suggested we do so in relation to the
cultural series “theatre”. At the time, I said that we should perhaps stop thinking of
Méliès as introducing this or that into the cinema and instead privilege the opposite:
Méliès not only introduced the theatre into the cinema; he also, and quite effectively,
introduced the kinematograph into the theatre. And so I was not at all surprised, when
recently re-reading Méliès’ famous text from 1907, to see that I may have been on the
right track when I made this proposal, because in it I found a hint, at the very least, of a
justification for my proposal, in the very words of Charles Pathé, related to us here by
Méliès:

The manufacturers of artificially arranged scenes have all more or less followed the
path I laid down, and one of them, the head of the world’s largest kinematographic
company, known for its mass, low-cost production, told me himself: “Thanks to you,
the kinematograph has managed to sustain itself and has become an unprecedented
 M É L I ÈS T H E M A G I C I A N 173

success. By applying animated photographs to the theatre, to its infinite variety of

subjects, you prevented its decline, which would otherwise have rapidly occurred
with natural scenes, whose inevitable similarities would have quickly bored the
audience.” 7

“By applying animated photographs to the theatre…” Nothing will ever prove that
these words were ever spoken by Charles Pathé, but just the same they were written by
Méliès …
At the Cerisy conference I also suggested that this inverted vision of things made all
the difference in the way we perceive the work of the earliest kinematographers. For
the arrival of the kinematograph in Méliès’ world was an extension of already well-
established practices. And by situating this new practice, kinematography, as an exten-
sion of these earlier practices it becomes possible for us to better grasp their deepest
significance. Because in the end, Méliès’ magic films have as much to do with the history
of magic as they do with the history of cinema. And his fairy films with the history of
fairy plays. Moreover, by seeing Méliès’ text as an extension of the cultural series to
which he belonged we are better able to understand the underlying meaning that he tries
to explain to us in it. Take for example this passage in the text:

The actor, playing different scenes ten times, must remember precisely to the
second, while the film is running, what he was doing at the same time in previous
passages and his exact location on stage. This alone makes it possible to show ten
characters played by one actor with the necessary precision. If, at some point in the
procedure, the actor makes an untoward gesture, if his arm moves in front of a char-
acter already photographed, this will be superimposed and out of focus, which reveals
the secret of the trick.8

To reveal the secret of the trick: this is what the magician who slumbers in Méliès is
horrified of (and what obsesses him). Who slumbers in Méliès? No, who is constantly
on the look-out, rather. Because here magic functions as an autonomous cultural series,
autonomous in particular in relation to the cinema, as a sphere of which Méliès’ work
was a part and to which it conformed. Magic was an already highly institutionalised
series at the turn of the twentieth century, while cinema was not yet institutionalised
and was even far from being so. This is something, in my view, that scholars must
think of not only as the pass-key to understanding Méliès’ work but also as the key to its
interpretation.
One might reply that there is nothing particularly new in this position, because we
always have acknowledged magic’s contribution to the kinematograph. Exactly, I say!
Here, perhaps, is where the mistake lies: maybe we have to invert our way of looking
at things and no longer think of magic as coming to the kinematograph, but rather,
precisely, of the kinematograph being placed in the service of magic. All I am suggesting
here is a change of attitude, based on a reversal of perspective, which will enable us to
perceive the relationship between magic and the kinematograph in a new light.
Don’t “reveal the secret of the trick” … Isn’t this the very essence of the first
commandment of the world of magic, which Méliès applied to his application of the kine-
matograph? Isn’t this an intrinsic principle of the world of magic, and one that has nothing
to do, in and of itself, with the Lumière Cinématographe? Don’t reveal the secret of the
174 EARLY POPULAR VISUAL CULTURE

trick: this is an example of the contribution of external principles to the inner world of
kinematography.
I hope now to have revealed the trick of Méliès’ magic films as far as our under-
standing of them is concerned—that they belong to the cultural series magic …
Translated by Timothy Barnard

Notes
1. This article was written under the aegis of GRAFICS (Groupe de recherche sur
l’avènement et la formation des instititions cinématographique et scénique) at the
Université de Montréal, which is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Fonds québécois de recherche sur la
société et la culture (FQRSC). GRAFICS is a member of the Centre de recherche sur
l’intermédialité (CRI) at the Université de Montréal.
2. See for example André Gaudreault, “Theatricality, Narrativity, and ‘Trickality’:
Reevaluating the Cinema of Georges Méliès”, Journal of Popular Film and Television,
Vol. XV, No 3 (Fall 1987): 110-19.
3. André Gaudreault, “From ‘Primitive Cinema’ to ‘Kine-Attractography’”, in Wanda
Strauven, ed., The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press, 2006), 85-104.
4. Cecil M. Hepworth, Animated Photography: The ABC of the Cinematograph (New York:
Arno Press/New York Times, 1970 [1900]), 127-28.
5. Georges Méliès, “Cinematographic Views”, in Richard Abel, ed., French Film Theory
and Criticism, vol. 1, 1907-1939 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 44.
(Translation modified—Trans.)
6. Tom Gunning, “’Now You See It, Now You Don’t’: The Temporality of the Cinema
of Attractions”, The Velvet Light Trap 32 (Fall 1993): 3-12.
7. Georges Méliès, op. cit., 44 (my emphasis). (Translation modified—Trans.)
8. Ibid., 45. (Translation modified—Trans.)