Category Archives: Film History

Mar­tin Scorce’s HUGO is a trib­ute to film pio­neer Georges Melies

Like many peo­ple who were charmed by Scorcese’s recent film HUGO, I had lit­tle knowl­edge of ear­ly film his­to­ry or Georges Melies before see­ing the movie, so I head­ed to the inter­net after­wards to find out a lit­tle more about him.

Ben Kings­ley (cen­ter right, as Georges Melies) con­fers with director/producer Mar­tin Scors­ese (far right) on the set of HUGO, from Para­mount Pic­tures and GK Films. Pho­to: Jaap Buitendijk.

Although Melies is rec­og­nized today as an ear­ly film inno­va­tor with a fab­u­lous imag­i­na­tion, he fell out of favor dur­ing his life­time and many of his films were melt­ed down or destroyed.

Still from Melies’s THE MAN WITH THE RUBBER HEAD

While read­ing about Melies, I ran across Wikipedia’s list of Redis­cov­ered Films. Hap­pi­ly a cou­ple of Melies’s films from the 1890s have been redis­cov­ered in this century.

Excerpt from Wikipedi­a’s List of Redis­cov­ered Films — 1890s

Scrolling down the list, look what film shows up in the 1940’s … Rey Scott’s KUKAN!

Excerpt from Wikipedi­a’s List of Redis­cov­ered Films — 1940s

And that’s the answer to a film triv­ia ques­tion that might some­day be asked on a game show in the far future – HUGO and FINDING KUKAN are both about redis­cov­er­ing lost films and for­got­ten filmmakers.

In 1961 the French gov­ern­ment issued a postage stamp in hon­or of Georges Melies’s cin­e­mat­ic contributions.

Maybe some­day KUKAN, Rey Scott, and Li Ling-Ai will have a postage stamp ded­i­cat­ed to them too.