Cinephiles who visit the grave of French film pioneer Georges Méliès in Paris’s Père Lachaise cemetery have their work cut out. The memorial is not easy to find, set back from the cemetery path behind another row of gravestones.
The grave itself has fallen into a state of disrepair. A creeping green stain has overtaken the crumbling stonework, some of the iron posts and chains are missing and the lettering is now indistinct. Still, the final resting place of Méliès has become a place of pilgrimage for many, who come from around the world to leave tributes. “Each time I visit it’s like a little new adventure,” says his great-great-granddaughter Pauline Duclaud-Lacoste.
“My heart beats fast because I don’t know what kind of things I will see on his grave. When I arrive I see letters, drawings, movie tickets, movie programmes, business cards, tube tickets with little notes on them. The notes are in Japanese, German, Spanish, Greek, Chinese.” Méliès once had a theatre and a studio in Paris, but they are no longer standing, so his grave is where his admirers come to pay their respects. Sadly, despite growing interest in early cinema and Méliès himself, the family has no funds to fix up to the grave. They are launching a Kickstarter campaign this month to restore it to its former splendour and protect it from further decay.
It is impossible to talk about Georges Méliès without talking about magic and the art of transmutation. The French director was a master of illusion: he segued from stage conjuror to fantasy film-maker when, in 1896, he began to experiment with a movie camera designed by English inventor RW Paul. He is famous for his pioneering use of special effects, making films with supernatural or sci-fi themes and “trick films”, such as 1901’s The Man With the Rubber Head, in which Méliès uses a pair of bellows to inflate his own head to giant proportions. Many people consider The Haunted Castle (1896) – which features various demonic characters, including one in the form of a bat – to be the world’s first horror movie. He made literary adaptations with similarly extravagant flourishes, such as The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1902). These fantastical films were characterised by his ingenious use of in-camera editing and vivid, hand-applied colour. In more than 500 films made between 1896 and 1912, Méliès used disappearing tricks, dissolves and superimpositions to create seemingly impossible images. Now his descendants are attempting a far more prosaic transformation on his Paris memorial, one that will cost upwards of $40,000 to achieve and maintain.
Restoring Méliès’s grave will be a mark of respect for the filmmaker, who experienced mixed fortunes during his life and whose work, historically, has been hard to see. Despite his vast importance to film history, most of Méliès’s films are lost, and his career ended unhappily, as depicted recently in Martin Scorsese’s 2011 movie Hugo. In 1912, financial trouble forced him to stop making films and return to the stage. During the first world war, many of his film prints were melted down to make the heels of soldiers’ boots. In 1924, Méliès set fire to his collection of negatives because he didn’t have room to store them in his family home. The following year he left his old career behind to run a toyshop kiosk in the Gare Montparnasse, where he worked until 1932. Although Méliès was no longer making films, he was not forgotten by his peers. In 1929, a gala retrospective of his work was staged in Paris, following the discovery of some prints that had escaped the flames. In 1931, Louis Lumière presented Méliès with the Legion of Honour.
When Méliès died in 1938, he was buried in Père Lachaise, in the city where he was born and lived. A bust of the filmmaker by Italian artist Renato Carvillani was installed in 1954, adding his distinctive bearded face, which appeared in so many of his movies, to his grave. But it has been untouched since.
The current dilapidation of Méliès’s grave is mostly due to simple wear-and-tear, though some of the ironwork was stolen by vandals. Historically, there have been some more serious cases of vandalism of early film-makers’ resting places. Charlie Chaplin’s body was stolen from his Swiss grave in 1978, two months after he was buried. The culprits attempted to hold the Chaplin family to ransom for its return, but the police tracked them down and eventually recovered the body. In 2015, the skull of German director FW Murnau, who made the vampire classic Nosferatu, was removed from his grave in Stahsndorf, Germany. His head has never been returned, and there has been speculation that the desecration had an occult motive.
At 110 acres, Père Lachaise is the largest park as well as the largest cemetery in Paris, and it is one of the city’s biggest tourist attractions. Over 3.5m people a year come to visit the graves of famous figures including Oscar Wilde, Chopin, Edith Piaf, Marcel Proust, Isadora Duncan, Sarah Bernhardt, Molière, Colette and Bizet. The most notorious spot in the cemetery is the grave of Jim Morrison, which became so overwhelmed with visitors that in 2004 it was given its own security guard. Not content with simply leaving flowers and candles on the grave, fans of the singer would gather there to smoke pot and, allegedly, to have sex. Méliès’s memorial is a quiet corner in comparison, but a consistently popular destination even so, says Duclaud-Lacoste. “Each time I go there I meet a lot of different people and we talk to each other. You’ve got magicians from all around the world, you’ve got movie students, but also Parisians who love Georges. ”
The release of Hugo and the full-colour restoration of one of his most famous films, A Trip to the Moon (1902), which premiered at Cannes with a soundtrack by Air, led to a brief flurry of interest in all things Méliès. “It was a bit crazy after Hugo,” says Duclaud-Lacoste. “Because Scorsese made a movie about Méliès, suddenly Méliès became cool and someone important that people must talk about.”
Although Duclaud-Lacoste says that the buzz created by Hugo was shortlived, there have been positive developments for Méliès fans in recent years. More of his films that were thought lost have been discovered, restored and screened to audiences – and last year a separate crowdfunding campaign to publish Méliès’s out-of-print memoir in English reached its target within 24 hours.
The grave restoration project is just the first stage in Duclaud-Lacoste’s plan to reinvigorate her great-great-grandfather’s legacy. “This project is the starting point of much more we, as his family, want to do. I want him to be known by a much larger audience,” says Duclaud-Lacoste. “I’m the fourth generation to talk about him. People have done many, many things, my family before me, and they’ve done a wonderful job, but I have other ideas.
“I can see him in a lot of different works and articles and books, and he’s still really present, really alive. My work for the next 40 years is to preserve Georges Méliès’s legacy, but also to link it with nowadays.”
The Kickstarter launches on 26 March 2019 and will run until 18 April 2019. You can read more at The Georges Méliès Project website.
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