Quite possibly the weirdest video ever

 

This beast of a machine is giving me trouble today, so I don't know if this is even gonna work. But I'll give it a shot.

Every so often I go on a Melies kick. Y'know, Melies. Weird guy from the early 20th century, actually the late 19th, a cinematic innovator who started out filming magic tricks on a stage in one shot, and went on to phantasmagorical fantasies with a lot of men dressed as wizards running around with telescopes. 

His most famous film is A Trip to the Moon, a bizarre take on a Jules Verne classic (with lots of men in wizard costumes running around with - ). The moon is depicted as a big gooey cream-pie sort of thing with an actual face on it, and the space craft, a big bullet, hits it in the eye. The story is disjointed: I never did get how they (the scientists) got back to earth. But at that time, "pictures" were new and innovation was free and open. No matter what a filmmaker did, some audience, somewhere would be enthralled. 

Eventually Melies' work went out of style, perhaps being just too weird for later audiences (and those quivering cardboard flats in the background didn't help much). When you look at Melies, you see where Terry Gilliam got most of his ideas. Bodies fly through the air, particularly semi-nude women's bodies in mermaid-like poses. Big puppetlike heads appear for no reason and open and close their mouths. Things drop out of sight in a puff of smoke, then pop back up out of thin air. It's a kind of fever dream mixed with an acid trip. 

Sadly, once Melies' work went out of style around 1912, he went bankrupt and had to resort to selling toys in a Paris train station. The films were confiscated during World War I, the celluloid melted down to make boot heels for soldiers: so they were literally walking all over poor Georges. But a few fragments survive. 

I don't understand this passage at all (an excerpt from a picture called The Eclipse), and it appears it might be cut off on the right-hand side. It's pretty gay, to be sure, but I'm not sure why. And I don't know why they're licking their lips like that. It's all too squirmingly sexual. Why not have a seductive woman as the moon, and a nicer-looking man as the sun who didn't look so much like freaking Satan? Never mind, I am somehow drawn to Melies and his strangeness and sat through the Turner Classics compilation for the second time last night. I didn't want to do it, I didn't want to do it. But I did.

I think I'm going out of my head

Ah yes, Georges Melies. I keep encountering him, this odd little Frenchie/genius. The other night (I still have a hangover from it), Turner Classics had a special on him. Sixteen short films. Sixteen. Ay-ay-ay. These are hallucinatory otherworlds, the strangest things I've ever seen.

He started in France, a hotbed of early film, around 1896, when the medium was so new it was mostly seen as a form of amusement, a toy. No one saw the potential in it. An accomplished magician and visual artist extraordinaire, Melies began to film some of his more potent stunts. Audiences loved it: and to this day, more than 110 years later, they still ask themselves, "How did he do that?"

This weird and funny business with the heads, technically remarkable for its day, was made (incredibly) in 1898, back when a sneeze or an unromantic kiss was considered filmworthy. The unbelievable split-exposure film in his one-man band was later ripped off by no less a personage than Buster Keaton, who was credited with inventing it. Much, much later, Oscar Levant tried the same thing in An American in Paris. Ho, hum.

The Melies experience last night wasn't entirely pleasant. Those early, quick, magical stunts were fun, though filmed in a static manner, with one camera in long shot pointing at a stage. (Please forgive the horrible cropping and truncated music in this clip: it wasn't me.) This seemed to indicate that Melies' imagination sometimes ran ahead of his skills as a cinematographer/director, so that he never attained the revered status of a Fritz Lang or a Murnau.

As his films evolved, florid sets made of cardboard and papier-mache seethed and quivered visibly in the background. Leaping devils (a Melies favorite) appeared and disappeared, and lovely maidens in white gauze tiptoed in and out (or flew through the air in a way which seems to explain the inspired lunacy of Monty Python's Terry Gilliam. I don't know how much Melies Gilliam watched, but maybe he was infected with the same moonstruck folly.)

Or folie. These little weirdies had little or no discernable plot, to the point that a man with a French accent thicker than mayonnaise had to narrate the incomprehensible action. While we listened to his bizarre Clousea-esque pronunciation, with the em-PHA-sis on the wrong syl-LA-ble, we (or I) became more and more disoriented. Things were blowing up. People were winking out, or jumping out of things. Man went to the moon in a giant bullet, landing in the eye of a nasty-looking guy with white icing all over his face.

I didn't last the full sixteen films, but kept fast-forwarding my PVR recording, skipping over some florid hand-colored things in which the color wavered and strobed like some sort of acid-inspired hallucination.

Obviously, this fellow colored outside the lines of reality.

I don't know a lot about Melies, and right now I'm too exhausted to find out. Robert Osborne, who must be very ill because he is 50 pounds lighter and could barely speak, told us something I had already read somewhere.

Most of Melies' 500-or-so films were destroyed, and for a very practical reason. His studio went bankrupt in 1913 (for Melies had lost his audience, too baffled to sit through all that escalating strangeness), and his movies were stashed away, only to be confiscated by the French government when World War I broke out.

His films were made of celluloid (or -lose, can't remember which), a substance that had real value to the army: they were melted down to make boot heels for the soldiers. So all those men, dying in the trenches and singing "inky binky polly voo" (just kidding - that was the Americans) were literally walking all over him.

A sad and ignominious end for a unique and very strange artist, who seemed to want to do Spielberg-esque effects with cardboard and smoke bombs. But these two little gems are enjoyable and, in true Melies style, a little bit creepy.

And no, I don't know how he did that.

L´homme orchestre George Melies