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

By Matthew Solomon

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 Solomon examines M?li?s' unpublished drawings and published caricatures, the role of laughter in his magic theater productions, and the constituent elements of what M?li?s called "the new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

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0472055585
• ISBN13: 9780472055586
• Release Date: September 2022
• Publisher: University of Michigan Press
• Length: 230 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.9" x 8.9"