Discovering Lost Films of Georges Melies in fin-de-siecle Flip Books (1896-1901)

No living person has seen the earliest films of pioneering cinema magician, Georges Melies. All that remain are his catalogs and a few archival images. The 2013 discovery of a flip book manufactured by an obscure Parisian bimbelotier, Leon Beaulieu, promised a glimpse of an unseen Melies film. This idea inspired years of investigation by researcher Thierry Lecointe - a trail that led him to collector and historian Pascal Fouche and his amazing collection of more than 10,000 flip books, including 27 produced by the mysterious Beaulieu. The conclusions of Lecointe’s ground- breaking research are astonishing. Leon Beaulieu’s primitive flip books were comprised of images appropriated from early films, many of them lost treasures. Early films by Melies, but also Gaumont, Skladanowsky and Pathe suddenly came to life after more than a century! This meticulously researched volume reveals how these miraculous discoveries were made and features more than 500 previously unpublished images that you won’t have seen anywhere else.