First Fantasy Films Revealed on New DVD Set

First, a quick reminder that the student projects from the UND English Department’s class in movie production will be screening next Tuesday, May 6 at 7:30 pm in the Empire Theatre, downtown Grand Forks. Admission is free to members of the class and $3 for the general public. Immediately after finals week, a two-week moviemaking workshop for people 18 and over will begin May 12, running evenings starting at 6:00 through May 23. Those movies will play at the Empire the last Sunday of June, along with movies from the UND teen movie camp being held in mid-June.

Next, a correction for a typo in last week’s column: The UND Summer Movie Camp for teens that will run from June 9 through 20 is for ages 12 (twelve) through 18 (eighteen), and not 12-13 as accidentally printed. Unlike the adult workshop, the teens will meet afternoons instead of evenings.

This weekend the Fire Hall Theatre is opening their final production of this season. Neil Simon’s “Brighton Beach Memoirs” will run Thursday through Saturday evenings at 7:30 for the next three weeks, with 2 pm Sunday matinees this week and next. I hope to see it this weekend and have a review for next week’s Reader.

As this is the end of the semester and I’ve been grading papers, wrapping up classes, and taking care of various other projects (like three upcoming moviemaking workshops), I haven’t gotten around to see any new movies playing commercially. On the other hand, none of the titles in current release really look particularly tempting to watch. I have been catching up on additional recent DVD releases over the past two months, over and above the notable “Potemkin” restoration, the Harry Houdini set, and Sessue Hayakawa films I reviewed a few weeks ago.

An amazing five-DVD set crammed with 13 hours worth of incredibly rare films by French cinema pioneer Georges Méliès came out last month. Many people may know Méliès from his famous 1902 sci-fi film “A Trip to the Moon” (or at least from the recreation done for a music video by Smashing Pumpkins).

The box set from Flicker Alley, a company specializing in preservation of early cinema, is entitled “Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema (1896-1913). It contains 173 short films made between those years, giving a representative sample of his huge output and including almost all of his surviving work.

Very few people will want to watch these discs straight through, but will find that viewing the films in half-hour doses is very rewarding. Many become repetitive and some are much better than others, but all have a quaint charm and undeniable enthusiasm by the performers. A few are true gems that can amaze modern audiences as much if not more than those of a century ago, particularly the frequent surreal moments ("A Crazy Composer” from 1905 and “The Merry Frolics of Satan” from 1906 come immediately to mind).

The films range from about a minute to a half-hour each, arranged chronologically so viewers can see the progression of style, techniques, and content (and later, the lack of it). Méliès was bankrupt by the time of his last productions, just before World War I. Méliès had been a stage magician and embraced cinema technology as a means to create newer and increasingly more elaborate illusions, yet nearly always rooted in the tradition of stage performance. In fact his films preserve for modern generations the art of the 19th century French theatre and stage pantomime by those who would have experienced it in its heyday.

His later films did not look substantially different from his fanciful and theatrical films that had delighted audiences a decade earlier. By 1912 and 13 filmmakers like D. W. Griffith were already making fast-paced action adventures, with newer, more subtle acting styles and filmed on real locations, and Italian producers were already making feature-length historical epics.

Méliès’ very first film starts off the collection, a one-minute view of some men playing cards filmed in 1896, and nearly identical to a film of the Lumiere brothers shot the year before. By the end of the year, Méliès had made over 80 films (four from 1896 are on the DVD) and had already begun to specialize in the “dream film” or “magic/trickfilm” that made his reputation.

Viewing the vast number of his films in the set reveals that Méliès tried a variety of genres in the early years, including actualities and historical re-enactments (prototypical documentaries and docudramas), straight narrative (and often gruesome) melodramas, broad comic farces, and simple magic tricks, as well as his more famous and imaginative special effects fantasies. The inclusion of outdoor locations every so often comes as something of a shock after becoming accustomed to his (often literally) trademarked painted stage backdrops.

Picture quality on the films varies, depending on the state of the surviving material, which was sometimes fragmentary. A majority of the films, surprisingly, look as if they had just been shot yesterday, while others are merely adequate and some are fuzzy, contrasty copies of copies of beat-up copies. Several are pieced together from different sources in different conditions to present as complete a version as possible, and these films vividly demonstrate the difficulties of effective film preservation. This is especially noticeable on films assembled from a mix of black and white and differently colored versions.

Many of the films show the elaborate colors that were painstakingly painted onto each frame by hand in the 1890s and by about 1904 were applied by a mechanized stencil process. A few are black and white copies made from color prints that unfortunately no longer survive.

All of the films have appropriate musical accompaniment by a variety of performers, and a few include the original narration written to be spoken as the films were presented. The DVD set includes a 1953 documentary by noted French director Georges Franju that serves as a nostalgic eulogy to Méliès, featuring his 90-year-old widow and episodes from his life re-enacted by Méliès’ son. There’s also a nice, slick, 36-page color booklet on Méliès and the films.

Flicker Alley’s “Georges Méliès: First Wizard of the Cinema” set is a perfect companion to last year’s Thomas Edison box set from Kino Video. It’s obviously a must-have for any library, and a good addition to any film buff’s video collection, with individual titles making great and unique treats before watching some full-length classic movie or standard Hollywood release.

If You Go

WHAT: UND student film projects
WHERE: Empire Theatre, GF
WHEN: Tues, May 6, 7:30pm
HOW MUCH: $3
INFO: (701) 777-3321