Méliès Boots: Footwear and Film Manufacturing in Second Industrial Revolution Paris

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Méliès Boots: Footwear and Film Manufacturing in Second Industrial Revolution Paris

by Matthew Solomon

University of Michigan Press, 2022

ISBNs

Paper: 978-0-472-05558-6

eISBN: 978-0-472-90295-8 (OA)

About the Book

Winner of the 2024 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Katherine Singer Kovacs Book Award

Before he became an influential cinematic innovator, Georges Méliès (1861–1938) was a maker of deluxe French footwear, an illusionist, and a caricaturist. Proceeding from these beginnings, Méliès Boots traces how the full trajectory of Georges Méliès’ career during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, along with the larger cultural and historical contexts in which Méliès operated, shaped his cinematic oeuvre. Solomon examines Méliès’ unpublished drawings and published caricatures, the role of laughter in his magic theater productions, and the constituent elements of what Méliès called "the new profession of the cinéaste." The book also reveals Méliès' connections to the Incohérents, a group of ephemeral artists from the 1880s, demonstrating the group’s relevance for Méliès, early cinema, and modernity. By positioning Méliès in relation to the material culture of his time, Solomon demonstrates that Méliès’ work was expressive of a distinctly modern, and modernist, sensibility that appeared in France during the 1880s in the wake of the Second Industrial Revolution.

About the Author

Matthew Solomon is Professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Media at the University of Michigan.

Reviews

2024 Katherine Singer Kovacs Book Award Winner

— Society for Cinema and Media Studies

"Méliès Boots provides an unprecedented take on the work of Georges Méliès. Matthew Solomon’s dogged pursuit of the bigger picture gives us valuable original insights."— Donald Crafton, Global Nineteenth-Century Studies

“Méliès Boots is an extremely compelling and remarkably researched contribution to cinema studies, and it brings fresh insight to the figure of Georges Méliès by situating his work deeply within the cultural and media archaeological context of his time.”— Colin Williamson, Rutgers University

“Matthew Solomon’s Méliès Boots is a groundbreaking account of the material history of Georges Méliès’ working life. Rather than offer another biography or survey of his films, Méliès Boots points us to something unexpected: Méliès’ relation to the material cultures of fin-de-siècle manufacturing and innovation in France. This work expands studies of Méliès (and early trick films more broadly) beyond the heritage of the magic theater and into the ‘stuff’—the objects, materials, machineries, labors, and processes of modernity—that made filmmaking possible at the time.”— Joshua Yumibe, Michigan State University

"[T]his well-documented study, which includes many illustrations from private collections, offers a productive fresh look at the life and work of Georges Méliès that enriches our understanding of this unique figure’s role in early film history."

— Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film

"What Solomon has adeptly done instead is to take the films – and more so the man – of George Méliès as a place to tether a history of French cultural change in the face of the Second Industrial Revolution. . . The book’s main contribution is found in the way it characterizes for readers the array of cultural changes, symbiotically linked to the production and popularity of George Méliès’ motion pictures, that were a response to the industrial transformation of France around the turn of the last century."

— W. D. Philiips, Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television