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The Eruption of Mount Pelee

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The Eruption of Mount Pelee
A frame from the film
Directed byGeorges Méliès
Produced byGeorges Méliès
Production
company
Release date
  • 1902 (1902)
CountryFrance
LanguageSilent

Éruption volcanique à la Martinique, released in the United States as The Eruption of Mount Pelee and in Britain as The Terrible Eruption of Mount Pelée and Destruction of St. Pierre, Martinique, is a 1902 French short silent film directed by Georges Méliès.[1] The film is a short reconstruction, using miniature models, of a recent historical event: the eruption on 8 May 1902 of Mount Pelée, which destroyed the town of Saint-Pierre, Martinique.[2]

Summary

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Mount Pelée looms over the town of Saint-Pierre. Fire and smoke rises from the crater; then lava begins pouring down the sides of the mountain. The village is soon engulfed in smoke and flames.

Production

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The film is one of the most frequently cited examples[3] of Méliès's "reconstructed newsreels," staged re-enactments of current events. The Eruption of Mount Pelee was his third-to-last work in the genre. It was followed by two others also made in 1902: The Catastrophe of the Balloon "Le Pax" and the most complex one of all, The Coronation of Edward VII.[4] Stylistically, the film is reminiscent of the dioramas popular in the 19th century, which offered simulated views of places and events that would otherwise be inaccessible to spectators.[2] Méliès's table-top miniature models recreate the eruption in a "storybook illustration" style highly indebted to Romanticism.[2]

Academic opinion is divided on the exact method Méliès used to create the eruption. The Méliès descendant and film scholar Jacques Malthête hypothesized that a type of flare known as the Feu de Bengale was used (as Méliès did four years later to create an eruption of Mount Vesuvius in The Merry Frolics of Satan); film historians René Jeanne and Charles Ford nominated a flammable combination of cloth, colored water, cinders, and a kind of powdered chalk called Blanc d'Espagne; Méliès's granddaughter, Madeleine Malthête-Méliès, indicated that starch was poured down the model to simulate lava, and that pieces of paper and unseasoned wood were burned to create smoke; and the Méliès expert John Frazer suggested that the model was made of cardboard and paper and that "the eruption [was] created by a combination of flashing lights, powdered chalk, and cinders."[3]

According to the film historian Pierre Lephrohon, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire once asked Méliès himself how he made The Eruption of Mount Pelee. Méliès said simply: "By photographing cinders and chalk." Apollinaire remarked to a friend who was with them: "Monsieur and I have the same occupation, we enchant ordinary materials."[2]

Release and other versions

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The Eruption of Mount Pelee was released by Méliès's Star Film Company and is numbered 397 in its catalogues.[1] Two other filmmakers contemporary with Méliès, Ferdinand Zecca and Thomas Edison, produced their own miniature-model reconstructions of the Pelée eruption.[2] Zecca's version, produced in May 1902 as Catastrophe de la Martinique (number 544 in the Pathé Frères catalogue), used four stagehands to create the eruption effect: one burning sulfur behind the model mountain, another pouring down smoke from a ladder off screen, a third on another ladder throwing down handfuls of sawdust to represent cinders, and a fourth agitating the miniature sea and raising the water level to suggest a tidal wave.[3] The film historian Georges Sadoul notes that Zecca's version aims for academic realism in its style, creating an effect markedly different from Méliès's deliberately Romanticized portrayal.[2]

The Edison Manufacturing Company version was released in three parts: Mt. Pelee Smoking Before Eruption (St. Pierre, Martinique), Mt. Pelee in Eruption and Destruction of St. Pierre (Martinique), and Burning of St. Pierre (Martinique).[5][6][7] The Edison Company had sent the photographer J. Blair Smith to Martinique to film the aftermath of the accident; meanwhile, the filmmaker Edwin S. Porter stayed at the Edison studio in Orange, New Jersey to recreate the eruption using a studio model. A dozen clips of Smith's real-life footage, and all three of Porter's films simulating different stages of the eruption, were sold by the Edison Company in July 1902; the catalogue encouraged exhibitors to combine the real and faked films to "make a complete show in themselves."[8] According to the film historian Lewis Jacobs, the crew that created the Edison version found their own unique way to simulate the eruption: they exposed a barrel of beer to direct sunlight and waited for it to explode.[2]

The Eruption of Mount Pelee was presumed lost for many years; a film in the collection of the Cinémathèque Française was sometimes misidentified as Méliès's film, but it was in fact Zecca's version.[9] Méliès's film was finally recovered in 2007, when a copy was found and restored by the Filmoteca de Catalunya.[10]

References

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  1. ^ a b Malthête, Jacques; Mannoni, Laurent (2008), L'oeuvre de Georges Méliès (in French), Paris: Éditions de La Martinière, p. 344, ISBN 978-2-7324-3732-3
  2. ^ a b c d e f g Frazer, John (1979), Artificially Arranged Scenes: The Films of Georges Méliès, Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., pp. 93–95, ISBN 0-8161-8368-6
  3. ^ a b c Malthête, Jacques (2003), "Un feu d'artifice improvisé? Les effets pyrotechniques chez Méliès", Mille Huit Cent Quatre-vingt-quinze (in French), 39: 61–72, retrieved 5 December 2014
  4. ^ Rosen, Miriam (1987), "Méliès, Georges", in Wakeman, John (ed.), World Film Directors: Volume I, 1890–1945, New York: The H. W. Wilson Company, p. 755
  5. ^ Bennett, Carl (14 March 2008), "Mt. Pelee Smoking Before Eruption (St. Pierre, Martinique)", Silent Era, retrieved 5 December 2014
  6. ^ Bennett, Carl (14 March 2008), "Mt. Pelee in Eruption and Destruction of St. Pierre (Martinique)", Silent Era, retrieved 5 December 2014
  7. ^ Bennett, Carl (14 March 2008), "Burning of St. Pierre (Martinique)", Silent Era, retrieved 5 December 2014
  8. ^ Musser, Charles (1991), Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company, Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 208, ISBN 0520060806, retrieved 5 December 2014
  9. ^ Essai de reconstitution du catalogue français de la Star-Film; suivi d'une analyse catalographique des films de Georges Méliès recensés en France, Bois d'Arcy: Service des archives du film du Centre national de la cinématographie, 1981, p. 6, ISBN 2903053073, OCLC 10506429
  10. ^ "La Filmoteca de Catalunya rescata quatre pel·lícules de Méliès que es donaven per perdudes", Vilaweb (in Catalan), 27 September 2007, retrieved 5 December 2014
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