EARLY CAREER
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On 28 December 1895, Melies saw the premiere of the Lumière brothers' films at the Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris. Melies lit up with inspiration and, through a lot of traveling and inventiveness, started airing film at the theater in addition to his magic shows, resulting in Melies making over 500 films between 1896 and 1913. some were as short as five minutes and some were as long as forty minutes. Most of his early works didn't have a plot and stayed closer to portraying tricks and stunts that would normally be impossible if it weren't for the benefit of editing. Most of this experimentation was purely to awe audiences with the potential film has to offer as far as breaking reality, such as how Melies portrays seven of himself in one shot in the film, One Man Band.
At the end of 1896, Melies founded the Star Film Company where he really started to delve into the narrative possibilities of film. Some of his films were derivative from the works of the Lumiere brothers like Card Party, but most of his films portrayed his taste for creativity and fantasy, liker A Terrible Night which is about a giant bed bug attacking a hotel guest. By 1896, Melies came up with the idea to create his own film studio. He built it on a property in Montreuil entirely out of glass as to let more sunlight in for lighting the film set. Here, Melies would continue making films for the rest of his career and then premiere them at the Theatre Robert-Houdin. He would film Lumière-like documentaries, comedies, historical reconstructions, dramas, horror, magic tricks, pornography (yeah), and féeries (films about faries and his most famous genre). George Brunel commented on Georges's work saying, "MM. Méliès and Reulos have, above all, made a speciality of fantastic or artistic scenes, reproductions of theatre scenes, etc., so as to create a special genre, entirely distinct from the ordinary cinematographic views consisting of street scenes or genre subjects." As his films kept being made, his income increased which gave him the freedom to keep experimenting and becoming increasingly innovative with his film techniques.
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