SOURCE: "Georges Méliès and the 'Féerie'," in Cinema Journal, Vol. XVI, No. 1, Fall, 1976, pp. 1-13.

In the following excerpt, Kovacs examines the influence of theater in the films of Méliès.

Soon after the motion picture was invented, two opposing tendencies became apparent. While the Lumière brothers used the camera to record events and incidents from everyday life, Georges Méliès eschewed the realism of street scenes in favor of artificially arranged tableaux. Méliès prided himself on the fact that his scenes were invented and that he used theatrical forms and techniques.¹ For his films he borrowed from spectacle shows such as operas, melodramas, historical mimodramas, and especially féeries. That Georges Méliès looked to the féerie should not surprise us. Although it has vanished into almost complete oblivion, during its heyday in the nineteenth century, the...