Cinema's first special effect was born when a camera jammed
Georges Méliès was a Paris stage magician when he saw the Lumière brothers' machine in 1895 and tried to buy one on the spot. Refused, he built his own. Then a jam mid-take turned a bus into a hearse on screen, and the stop trick, one of film's first illusions, was his.
Born in Paris in 1861 into a wealthy family of bootmakers, Méliès filled his school notebooks with caricatures and was building cardboard puppet theatres by the age of ten. His father sent him to London as a clerk, where visits to John Nevil Maskelyne's shows at the Egyptian Hall gave him a lifelong love of magic. Back home and barred by his father from art school, he supervised factory machinery, took magic lessons, and eventually bought the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, where he devised more than 30 illusions, including a professor whose severed head keeps lecturing.
On 27 December 1895 he attended a private screening of the Lumière cinematograph and offered 10,000 francs for one. The brothers, keen to present their device as a scientific tool, refused him and higher bids from rivals. Méliès went to London, bought Robert W. Paul's Animatograph projector, and converted it into a camera. With no film stock or labs yet in Paris, he bought unperforated film in London and learned to develop it by trial and error. His theatre was showing films daily by April 1896.
He founded the Star Film Company at the end of 1896 and built a glass-walled studio at Montreuil sized exactly like his theatre stage. Sets, costumes and make-up were painted in shades of grey because colours photographed unpredictably. Filming singer Paulus, who would not perform outdoors, required some thirty arc and mercury lamps, among the first uses of artificial light for cinema. His routine was punishing: set-building by day, the theatre in the evening, filming on Fridays and Saturdays.
Where the Lumières sent cameramen around the world to document real life, Méliès aimed at a fairground audience that wanted magic. He made 78 films in 1896 alone and over 500 by 1913, and in The One-Man Band used multiple exposures to play seven characters at once. He popularised dissolves, time-lapse and hand-painted colour, was among the first to use storyboards, and made A Trip to the Moon in 1902.
Source: Georges Méliès
