Méliès: Cinematic Techniques In Martin Scorsese's Hugo

Looking back at Méliès, multiple views crop up depending on the viewer. My peers have naught a clue as to who he is, or if they have heard of him they never heard of Méliès. Fewer know about Trip to the Moon; usually through of Martin Scorsese’s Hugo. When I first saw his films, they enchanted me with their fantasy worlds and unique look. However, I did not see the multitude of techniques he used to create his visuals. Critics of early cinema certainly recognize him, but his “place in film history is problematic. Although he is universally acknowledged to be an early film pioneer, his work has often been dismissed as simplistic, both narratively and technically” (Ezra, 2). Films of Méliès’ era were, and in some cases still are, considered to
The stage was rather small. A critique of early film, thereby Méliès too, was the containment of the scene, and lack of movement. Summed up by Noel Burch, “films made before around 1906 were characterized by four traits: the ‘autarky and unicity of each frame’, or framing that is self-contained and unchanged throughout the scene; “the noncentered quality of the image’, or the use of the edges of the frame as well as the center” (Ezra 2).This assessment is not completely accurate. Méliès found ways to create movement. Even though his stage was small. One of his simplest solutions was to cram people onto the stage, such as the scene in Cendrillon (1889). Another way to give the illusion of movement happened to be the actors running off stage, circling behind the scenery, and running across the scene again. An example is Les Derniere Cartouches (1897), where a seemingly enormous amount of soldiers run to the back room, but are in reality a few running in