Flicker Alley

[What A Disgrace]

I have a big, stupid, happy grin on my face, but those are rather ugly covers. "A Film by Abel Gance" may not be enough to save them from the Worst DVD Covers Ever thread.

The train is dying to be photoshopped.

[domino harvey]

Those look like DVDs procured from a Mardel's.

[Zazou dans le Metro]

I never realised the antecedents of Thomas the Tank engine lay in the oeuvre of Abel Gance. Was Ringo in it too?

[vogler]

I never realised the antecedents of Thomas the Tank engine lay in the oeuvre of Abel Gance. Was Ringo in it too?

Oh my fucking word! That cover is the most hilarious thing I've ever seen. That's got to be a joke right?

For those who haven't seen the film, I can you assure you that at no point does a personified train appear with the visage of Séverin-Mars.

[domino harvey]

I've been dying to see these since Cinema Europe, but it's times like these I'm glad that you can't see the covers when they're on your shelf-- unless that image shows up on the spine of course, in which case J'Puke

[vogler]

I've been dying to see these since Cinema Europe

The copy of La roue that I have (and love) is a hideous VHS rip. I've seen the excellent Cinema Europe documentary and it made me desperately long to see a restored version. This is one of my most sought after treasures in the entire annals of cinema history, and one of my favourite films. Now it looks like Flicker Alley have finally made my dream come true. But yes, the cover is still phenomenally silly.

[Cold Bishop]

I was always hoping that whoever got around to releasing J'Accuse would include the 1938 version.

[Adam]

The English texts were themselves written in English by Melies (who had been partly educated in England and knew English) for reading in English territories.

How were the movies presented in France - with French narration, or with none at all? The answer to that question is how the movies should have been presented on the DVD set.

Is there a list somewhere with all titles included in Milies set?

There is a full list of contents here

As I understand it, they were presented both ways, with and without narration, at different times, but more often with when possible. But not all of his films - really more the longer "epics."

[Adam]

I have a big, stupid, happy grin on my face, but those are rather ugly covers. "A Film by Abel Gance" may not be enough to save them from the Worst DVD Covers Ever thread.

The train is dying to be photoshopped.

Jeff showed me those mock-ups. I think J'Accuse is fine, but I also looked long & hard at La Roue. He said they felt that there was no one still from the film that summarized it, and that this image was based on an original ad for it. I think they are still working on it.

[Adam]

NY Times DVD pick today is the Melies set:

New DVDs: Georges Méliès

By DAVE KEHR

GEORGES MéLIèS: FIRST WIZARD OF CINEMA

There is an often repeated story about Georges Méliès, probably apocryphal but highly poetic. In 1895 Méliès, a professional magician and the owner of a small theater along the Boulevard des Italiens in Paris, approached the Lumière Brothers, the inventors of the process that enabled motion pictures to be projected on a large screen, with the intention of licensing the process to make films for his theater. The Lumières rebuffed him.

“The motion picture is an invention without a future,” Antoine Lumière supposedly proclaimed, no doubt feeling that he was doing Méliès a favor by refusing him the rights to what would certainly be a short-lived fad.

What we do know is that Méliès went to one of the Lumières’ many rivals, the British inventor Robert W. Paul, and bought a primitive projector. With his assistants he built his own camera and set to work.

By June of 1896, filming largely in the garden of his home in the Parisian suburb Montreuil, in a studio he had built based on the exact dimensions of his theater, Méliès embarked on a series of productions. These short films grew from two or three minutes to half an hour or more, and drew on his vast imaginative powers and the tricks he had learned as a successful stage magician to create an outpouring of special-effects extravaganzas. Often hand-colored and designed to be shown with live narrative accompaniment, his films soon toured the world, playing a central role in the establishment of the new medium.

By 1903 Méliès was successful enough to open a branch office in New York (at 204 East 38th Street) under the direction of his brother Gaston (who himself produced several significant early westerns in the wilds of New Jersey). Other booking offices opened in Berlin, Barcelona and London, and Méliès was on his way to becoming one of the first international film moguls.

From the ambitious new company Flicker Alley comes “Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema (1896-1913),” a major act of scholarship produced by Eric Lange and David Shepard that brings together surviving Méliès films from eight countries. The five-disc box set, with more than 170 titles and a total running time of 13 hours, includes prints patiently pieced together from incomplete sources all over the world. Among the highlights are hand-colored versions of several of Méliès’s spectaculars, some presented for the first time accompanied by the detailed narrations that he wrote for their public showings.

His technique essentially consisted of extended, frontally filmed scenes presented in continuous takes. Meant to capture the experience of sitting in his boulevard theater, his style was far more suited to the presentation of elaborate tableaus than to the telling of stories. Even a film as well known as “A Trip to the Moon” (1902) relies on spoken word rather than visual style to flesh out its characters and develop its narration.

The Lumière Brothers — scientists and industrialists — saw their invention as a way of dispassionately recording reality for study purposes, but Méliès was their temperamental and professional opposite: a veteran showman who saw in the new technology a bigger and better way of continuing to bamboozle the public that flocked to his magic shows.

Many of his early films are simply cinematic variations on classic stage illusions: sudden appearances and disappearances, made possible by his discovery that you could stop the camera, introduce some new props and actors, and then start it up again. To audiences of the time, these transformations seemed miraculous.

Méliès learned to structure a series of magical effects into a provisional narrative (stage magicians were doing the same thing), and in the process helped set the form for the 10-minute story films that were soon to emerge in Britain and the United States. His “Temptation of Saint Anthony” from 1898 presents that holy man afflicted by the sudden appearances and disappearances of chorus girls in tights: perhaps not anthropologically accurate, but a highly satisfying spectacle for the sensation-seekers of the Parisian boulevards.

But another, equally important influence on Méliès was the magic lantern shows, often incorporated into magicians’ performances in fairs and urban music halls, which presented a single view — of an old mill at the top of a stream, for example — that moved and mutated, thanks to ingenious mechanical devices. The earliest Méliès “hits,” like “The Man With the Rubber Head” (1901), represent magic lantern ideas continued by other means, in this case, a severed head (Méliès’s own) inflated to gigantic proportions by a scientist (Méliès again) equipped with a pair of bellows.

As Méliès films became longer and more elaborate (most famously, “A Trip to the Moon,” but also 1904’s “Impossible Voyage” and 1905’s “Palace of the Arabian Nights”), the individual effects grew in technical complexity and artistic ambition. But the films remained progressions of disconnected scenes — a series of disruptively different “views,” changed by an invisible operator — rather than seamless narrations.

That, and Méliès’s apparent inability to conceive of cutting within a scene, made his work seem distinctly old-fashioned. (Right up to his final film in 1913, “The Voyage of the Bourrichon Family,” he continued to shoot each scene as a single shot from a fixed, rather distant position.)

As the first decade of the 20th century drew to a close, Méliès found himself surpassed by other filmmakers and eventually lost his business. By 1925 he was installed in a stand at the Gare Montparnasse, where he and his wife sold snacks and trinkets to travelers (the premise for Brian Selznick’s recent children’s book, “The Invention of Hugo Cabret”).

But Méliès may yet have the last word. It is his universe of nearly complete artificiality, built out of painted flats and camera tricks, that has come to dominate the aesthetic of popular film in the digital age. Films as different as “Zodiac” and “The Golden Compass” may use computer-generated imagery — created through the magic of manipulated pixels, rather than optical effects and painted backgrounds — to replace the observable world, but the ultimate end is the same: to transport the viewer into a sphere of untrammeled imagination.

There are moments these days when a filmgoer may pine for at least a touch of Lumière-style realism in the increasingly insular, abstract world of popular entertainment: a touch of the actual to offset the imagined. But for the moment, we are living in the movie world created by Georges Méliès more than a century ago, smug in the illusion that we are experiencing the very latest thing. (Flicker Alley, $89.95, not rated.)

[Saturnome]

Anybody noticed the new cover for La Roue? They also show the original poster that inspired the previous artwork.

[Cabiria21]

I like it, now it's a must buy.

[domino harvey]

Anybody noticed the new cover for La Roue? They also show the original poster that inspired the previous artwork.

Thank. You. God.

[What A Disgrace]

2008 belongs to Flicker Alley.

[Knappen]

Just ordered La Roue. A great moment.
With the preorder price I don't even have to worry about Norwegian customs.

[zone_resident]

DVD Savant Review of Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema

DVD Talk Review of Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema

[TIVOLI]

Does anyone know if the TCM documentary on Gance scheduled for April 27th will appear on either of the extraordinary-sounding Flicker Alley releases?

[HerrSchreck]

I have a rather early copy of La Roue. Absolutely glorious indeed, although some may cluck at the replaced intertitles. If they did this with LArgent there'd be a second hole in my ceiling (first created by the sublime news of this sending me into full launch, with the 270 minute running time).

Film is spread over two dual layered discs. Bitrates hovering nicely within the 5-7 mb/s range. Image is wonderful, and brings the original 32 reel (subsequently reduced by gance to twelve... then cut down again to 8 reels for a 1928 revival)from previous lows back up to twenty reels... and is considered by far the most complete version seen anywhere since 1923. Apparently this is not from any previous resto, but a brand new restoration project carried out jointly between Lobster films/Eric Lange and David Shepard-Blackhawk in tandem w Flicker Alley money. So this is indeed new, previously unseen and trumps all prior editions. Of course French Speakers may lament the replaced intertitles, but it's truly a lovely presentation done with a lot of love, like Phantom. English speakers will cream in their dry habedashery!!.The tinting schema seems faithful, very subtle, and seems to come and go depending on the print that went into the composite at any given point in the film... as opposed to "let's tint this silent film in vintage style, all night shots blue, all day shots sepia... pink for dawn breaking, green for under trees etc, so that all frames are tinted."

Not at all: there's a lot of black and white here. Indoors and out. So they seem to have remained faithful to the MoMa maxim: if you're not sure, don't tint. Restore tints only to material that you can see was tinted.

Lovely full color 16 page glossy booklet with essays by William Drew on the film itself (great article) and Robert Israel on scoring this monumental film. And it includes the full vintage Cendrars documentary-- 'Autour de 'La Roue'. As well as a page by page digitization of the pressbook... which incidentally has a page with the precise picture that constituted the previous cover... so that wasn't "bad original art". It was actually vintage art produced by the production co upon its release in the handout pressbook.

Fans of silent films will go black & blue from flopping around on the floor in ecstacy. It's official: Flicker Alley are truly the CC of silent films. Major props to these dudes. And thank god Shepard is doing well after his accident. The man is stepping up to the qualitative plate in a major way, and his future with Massino is looking glorious. Certainly no cause to lament his leaving Kino... he's found, qualitatively, a company that pings Kino off the fence (though Kino have been stepping up the quality themselves lately too.. i e Nosferatu etc).

All Hail Flicker Alley!

[denti alligator]

Thanks for the review, Schreck!

Shame about the intertitles (why replace them??), but with the final product still triggering orgasm, I'll take it.

Got mine pre-ordered. Anxiously await its arrival!

[HerrSchreck]

I suspect the hook on the intertitles being replaced is the close association between flicker alley/Massino and TCM. I think the network is far more comfortable programming (and helping finance) projects which are more American-TV-Viewer-Friendly. We are the hard hardcore, but the casual viewer the way they perceive it would rather see the films the way they would have looked in their own country in the cinema... ie with english language title cards... not tiny subs on a small screen. Massino mentioned to me in a correspondence that he regrets doing it, but he's pretty much obligated.

I think the companies like Kino & Flicker Alley, which have a huge market share in this zone of film viz tv and cinema, have to yeild to the average american viewer and corresponding "popular" (advisedly relative in the case of silents of course.. but the Sunday silents & specials on TCM are not public television; they exist to turn a profit and aim to be as user-friendly as possible).. at least vs CC, who merely sort've "dabble in it".

[domino harvey]

That sucks about the intertitles but the fact that this is being released at all means I'm willing to accept certain sacrifices. Can you post some caps Schreck?

[Tommaso]

Absolutely glorious indeed, although some may cluck at the replaced intertitles.

Cluck cluck cluck.

Seriously, great review Schreck, and of course I'll have to get this any time soon (I didn't even abstain from the Kino "Secrets of a soul", though I haven't found time to watch it yet). You say this resto was made in co-operation with Lobster films, so I'd say it seems pretty likely this will see the light of day on some arte France disc soon, with French titles, of course. But Gance is far too important to wait.

[Saturnome]

Thanks. French is my natural, everyday language, so the replaced intertitles is a sad thing... but I can live with it. I ordered the dvd a few weeks ago and I can't wait now

[HerrSchreck]

I'd be glad to post caps but (head screwing down between shoulders) I *cough* don't know uh how. I seem to recall instructions for it lurking somewhere around here, but don't remember where.

If some kind soul will recount the procedure in brief for a Dell PC laptop with no capping software, I'd be glad to give it a whack tonight after a nap. I've been up approx 28 hrs straight (no, no drugs.. just work-related and site setup on another end) and need z's real bad.

[Saturnome]

Well... most dvd-player programs have a snapshot key/button. But wouldn't the printscreen key (and paste in Paint) do the job? It work fine on my PC, but some get a black screen by doing this.