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Magnificent Mélies: The Authorized Biography by Madeleine Malthete-Mélies. Oakland: University of Michigan Press, 2022. 369 pp., illus. Hardcover: $90.00.
In 1971, Madeleine Malthete-Mélies set to work on a biography of her grandfather, the illusionist and early cinema pioneer Georges Mélies, which would be called Georges Mélies, l'enchanteur. At its inception, and at the urging of the publisher, Hachette, the book was to be co-authored with Mélies youngest son, André. Yet, by the time the first pages were drafted, this highly personal biographical enterprise had become Madeleine's pursuit alone. It was the product of an unusually intense relationship between the surviving relative-and later, the descendants more broadly-of a great filmmaker and the material archive of his work. The "family business" philosophy of Jean-Louis Mélies's shoe company, which dominated his son's early life and was later run by Georges' two brothers, also characterized Georges Mélies's production model as a filmmaker. In his films, his brother, daughter, son, future wife, and others featured ubiquitously as performers, foreign sales agents, camera operators, assistants, and set designers. Famously, the garden of his country home in Montreuil served as the site of the world's first film studio. In an interesting parallel, subsequent generations of the Mélies family would take up the work of locating, archiving, cataloguing, and writing about his work.
After her mother, Georgette, died in 1930, Madeleine went to live with Georges and his second wife, Fanny Mélies, better known by her stage name Jehanne d'Alcy, the star of Mélies's early works. These were the years when her grandfather, whose filmmaking and theatrical career had ended in financial ruin, worked as a candy seller at the Gare Montparnasse in Paris. As a child, she was witness to both this infamous indignity and later to the renewed recognition of Mélies as a significant figure in both French cinema history and cinema history in general. She was at his side when visits to the old master by perspicacious early film historians and eager international cinephiles-including Henri Langlois and Georges Franju-first began to occur, and then also as he was feted by institutions and by the French state alike. By 1938, Georges Mélies was dead; by 1940, German troops invaded France and the Mélies chateau was requisitioned by the French air force....