The ancestor of the cartoon

‘The actors are treated like figurines which have to be worked on and manipulated. Bodies are materials to be shaped,’ analyses the researcher. Georges Méliès himself said as much: he did not choose actors for their ability to express emotions but indeed for their physical performances. And because when a job is worth doing it is better to do it yourself, he regularly played the leading role in his short films. He was the first to understand that the cinema actor has to develop a specific form of acting. ‘There is nothing worse than watching him [the spectator] and attending to him when one is acting, which is what inevitably happens the first few times for actors who are used to the stage and not the cinematograph,’ he stated, adding that the actor had to ‘gifted with agility, an acrobat, a sportsperson,’ rather than a thinker.

Nonetheless, despite all the incidents which they seem to go through, ‘these bodies do not at all have the appearance of suffering,’ points out Dick Tomasovic. ‘There is no psychology in these characters. We are really dealing with the same logic as that found in cartoons.’ A little like when Tweety Pie plays the worst tricks on Sylvester. The latter explodes, burns, falls, smashes his head against tree trunks, takes blows from a baseball bat, etc. but always ends up picking himself up without ever grimacing in pain.

This ‘cartoon aspect’ found in the work of Méliès leads Dick Tomasovic to say that the former was not only a magician of images, but also an ‘animator.’ ‘We find in him the premises of an aesthetic which we would discover later in animated cinema,’ he thinks. ‘The way he treats bodies, animating them by making them move also curiously resembles the technique of pixilation, which consists of ‘animating’ living bodies or objects in filming them image by image.’

The last of the conjurors

The director obviously does not forget his roots. The ‘fantastic’ figures which he makes use of on the screen are strongly inspired by his past as a conjuror. As when he exercised his talents on the boards of the Paris Robert-Houdin theatre, the optical illusions and doctored images are ever present. ‘He made films with doctored scenes, but he was to completely modify his relationship with magic. The nature of the illusion changes and is placed at the service of narration. Conjuring brings with it a problem of credibility. People ask themselves: how is it done? In his films, on the on the other hand, we no longer ask the question ‘how?’ but instead ‘why?’ It is always a question of dazzling, surprising and astounding the spectator, but by immersing him or her in a magical and marvellous story.’