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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The French filmmaker and magician Georges Méliès (1861–1938) is the subject of various written works, including biographies, essays, and monographs. The literature about him is abundant and spans many decades and languages, including English, French, Italian, Spanish, and German.[1] Frank Kessler, a professor of media history, believes Méliès is arguably the most written about early filmmaker.[2] Conversely, his name often appears in the titles of books, chapters, or articles not necessarily because his films are discussed but rather to signify the concept or time period of early cinema.[1] Works in this bibliography have been reviewed in magazines or journals or are included in annotated bibliographies by Stéphane Tralongo or Elizabeth Ezra.
French film historians wrote pioneering, if constrained, works about Méliès between the 1940s and 1960s.[1][3] Later, descendants of his and Anglosphere film historians wrote authoritative monographs and specialist works began to appear about his writings, magic, theater, film studios, film colorization, editing, and international reception.[1] Conferences about Méliès held at the Centre culturel international de Cerisy-la-Salle suggest three phases in his scholarship.[2] A conference in 1981 that studied his position in early cinema created debates between older and younger historians, such as Jean Mitry and André Gaudreault, respectively. A theoretical framework developed by Tom Gunning and Gaudreault, the "cinema of attractions", influenced a 1996 conference that studied the cultural contexts that shaped the motifs in his films. A conference in 2011 studied his attitudes toward an even wider array of contexts.[1][2] Between these conferences, exhibition catalogs with materials related to the films, magic shows, paintings, and caricatures of Méliès have advanced his scholarship.[1]
The descendants of Méliès are large contributors to his scholarship.[2] His granddaughter Madeleine Malthête-Méliès, who grew up with him after her mother's death, began archiving his films and related materials in 1949.[4] The archivist Henri Langlois of the Cinémathèque Française assisted her, and she founded the association Les Amis de Georges Méliès with her husband in 1961 to formalize the work.[1][4] Her son Jacques Malthête expanded upon her work by cataloguing the films of Méliès across publications through the late 1970s and 1980s. From the 1980s onwards, Malthête-Méliès hosted or initiated the international conferences about Méliès that allowed scholars to refine their opinions of him.[4] The publications of her son Malthête, daughter Anne-Marie Quévrain, and cousin Marie-Hélène Lehérissey in the bulletin of Les Amis de Georges Méliès have "inspired several generations of scholars", as Kessler writes.[2]
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