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

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 Solomon examines Melies’ unpublished drawings and published caricatures, the role of laughter in his magic theater productions, and the constituent elements of what Melies called the new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