Several unrecorded movies made by French director Georges Méliès over a century ago were found in a wardrobe filled with reels by an antique dealer in Western France early this year. Not knowing what to do with some 80 kilos of reels, the antique dealer
approached two collectors of old movies who decided to acquire that lot. They started to sift through the reels, many of which were so badly damaged that they could not be saved and called upon Serge Bromberg, known as the « Sherlock Holmes » of old movies and head of the Lobster films company specialising in the restoration of damaged films.
The two collectors bartered the lot against new copies of what they had found after Serge Bromberg had carried out the painstaking task of viewing the 98 reels that had been saved. As a result, he discovered 30 short movies by Méliès produced between 1896 and 1903. All these were not known by movie historians who had so far recorded some 200 films out of 503 produced until 1912 by the inventor of film effects.
It was announced that these films, now restored, would be shown at the Louvre Museum Auditorium from September 25th until October 28th 1999.
Méliès created a fantasy world of its own making characters appear and disappear like a magician in his studio situated in the Parisian suburb of Montreuil. He was the first to produce stunning fairy tale scenes which baffled viewers of his time and made him a true pionnier of modern science fiction and special effects movies.
Méliès was altogether a producer, director, author and decorator and had some incredible imagination in the art of film making. In many of his movies he showed dancing skeletons, flying devils and monsters, a spaceship reaching the moon which itself had a human face, people disappearing in fumes or flames and all sorts of women, witches, fairies, maids, elegant ladies and so on...
Méliès paved the way to the Hollywood film industry with Mack Sennett who created burlesque movies in annexing many of his ideas after 1910 but the French movie genius soon faced financial problems which made him bankrupt and led him soon to be forgotten during the First World War.
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