Méliès and “The Divisible Man”

Georges Méliès reimagined physics. And, in the process, put to shame Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Renaissance empiricism was, momentarily, kaput. If one had a mind to catalogue Méliès’ ingenious transformations, then a plausible title might be “The Divisible Man”: detachable head, multiplying detachable head, expanding detachable head, the head as heavenly body, the body smithereened and reassembled… But of course a modern, tech-based art form like cinema makes “originality” itself suspect. Méliès cannibalized the works of Verne, H.G. Wells and Poe, or poached from their hunting grounds, without worrying in the least about copyright, and documented the same sorts of fantastic voyages to the moon, the south pole and the ocean floor, by outsize, inhabited artillery shell, by balloon or airship, rocket-train, or whatever fantastical machine could be cobbled together in his greenhouse studio. While the literary fantasists were somewhat concerned with credibility, with the science part of science fiction, the Frenchman with the upside-down head (bald top, hairy underside) focussed purely on visual possibilities: an idea was only any good if it gave you an IMAGE.

Motion pictures spasm and never resolve. Would that Descartes could have witnessed a movie projector in action, that bundle of nerves and nervous energy. His rationalism become pandemonium. 

Mind and body — Méliès delights in unlinking them. A case of Cartesian dualism as dance? 

By David Cairns and Daniel Riccuito