Méliès & de Chomón on the Moon

Georges Méliès was a French filmmaker and illusionist. Having chosen magic as his profession, he used a donation from his father to become the owner and director of the Robert-Houdin Theatre in 1888, which had been dormant since the death of the famous illusionist. In December 1895, he discovered moving images with wonder during the first public screening of the Cinématographe by the Lumière brothers in Paris and offered to buy the machine's patent. A polite but mocking refusal led him to turn to a London friend, the first British filmmaker, Robert W. Paul, who provided him with an intermittent mechanism to shot his first film in 1896, Playing Cards, a remake of the Louis Lumière’s film. That same year, with The Vanishing Lady, he used for the first time in Europe the stop trick, an American discovery, which ensured him great success in his theatre, where he mixed live performances with large-screen projections. Méliès is considered one of the main creators of early film special effects, including superimpositions, dissolves, and enlargements and reductions of characters. He was also the first filmmaker to use storyboards. He built the first film studio in France on a property in Montreuil given by his father. With his film about the Dreyfus affair, he is also considered the first director of a political film in cinema history.