Georges Méliès, ca. 1890
PHOTO COURTESY OF WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Returning to our discussion of the politique des auteurs, one final example may suffice to show how the theory of the auteur had not begun with Truffaut and co. after all. If the Lumière brothers, along with Edison, shared dual parentage over the technological realization of the cinema, then Georges Méliès may be said to have been the first film auteur the world had ever seen. Méliès not only built his own film camera by modeling it on a projector he bought from English film pioneer Robert Paul, he even developed his own way of sprocketing and processing raw film stock without any prior training or experience. A born showman who owned, managed, and starred in the Théâtre Robert-Houdin (in which Méliès frequently used the magic lantern, the direct predecessor of the cinema, as a star attraction), Méliès instinctually began to record card tricks and feats of magic on camera. It wasn’t until he accidentally discovered how to employ the “stop-trick” (in which objects and people “disappear” or change into other objects and people, merely by stopping the camera, rearranging the scene, and recording again) that Méliès effectively became an auteur: with the creation of the first special effect, Méliès stumbled on a means of cinematic manipulation that would stand in for his signature technique. Méliès’ short film L’Homme d’orchestre, which Drazin describes with particular relish, is probably the most succinct expression of auteur theory available, made more than fifty years before the concept would be articulated. Méliès’ film is only sixty seconds and its action is direct and simple: Méliès walks into a room of empty chairs, proceeds to sit down in one of them, then, by using a single special effect repeatedly, he manages to rise up from the chair leaving a ghostly double behind him, only for this second Méliès to leave a third, and the third to leave a fourth Méliès, and so forth, until all seven chairs are filled with multiple versions of himself holding and playing different musical instruments, and the “orchestra” is completed. Méliès conducts himself with great aplomb, and while all the different ghostly versions of him play and chatter independently, it is always Méliès at the forefront, Méliès who directs himself and who plays himself, whose imagination makes full use of the caméra-stylo he constructed himself.

When Gaumont and Pathé, the first French movie studios, respectively consolidated their talent and resources in the attempt of competing with the American studios, they advanced the state and production of filmmaking so quickly that Méliès’ cinema of primitive special effects became suddenly anachronistic. Méliès, who was nevertheless respected and admired by his peers and by the heads of Gaumont and Pathé for his workhorse qualities, was offered multiple chances of working for the big studios, who promised to provide him with solid financial backing and creative freedom. Méliès declined repeatedly to work under them (giving in only once toward the end of his career), so stubbornly was he committed to his own private vision of the world, a world which was formed by his personal conception of the cinema, and to which he would remain as committed as Jean-Pierre Melville and Jean-Luc Godard would later prove to be to their sense of craft. Drazin observes that “Méliès may have brought his filmmaking career to a premature close, but it is a reason why today his films still live, while those of his more commercially minded contemporaries belong in a museum,” a point which Drazin makes again in the last pages of his book, only this time in reminiscence of the career of Eric Rohmer (whose death in January 2010 situates the opening and closing of the book):