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Méliès (credit: Rene Dazy/J.P. Ziolo)

(born Dec. 8, 1861, Paris, France — died Jan. 21, 1938, Paris) French filmmaker. He was a professional magician and manager-director of the Théâtre Robert-Houdin in Paris when he saw the first movies made by Auguste and Louis Lumière in 1895. In his film experiments he exploited the basic camera tricks of slow motion, dissolve, and fade-out. The first to film fiction narratives, from 1899 to 1912 he made more than 400 films, which combined illusion, comic burlesque, and pantomime in fantasy productions, including A Trip to the Moon (1902). He also filmed reconstructed news events as an early form of newsreel. Overtaken by the commercial growth of the film industry, he was forced to sell his studio in 1913.

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