O cinema de atrações de Georges Méliès e o espetáculo digital de Martin Scorsese

Abstract

The end of the XIX century marks the appearance of the cinema and the beginning of the era where image started to be predominant. This dissertation analyses the relevance of the silent movies, especially the Early Cinema, defined by Costa (2008), as the one produced from 1894 to 1908, whose characteristics such as ‘general view’ and ‘still camera’ are determinant for its visual composition, whose discoveries and innovations are being used again and renewed in digital movies. Being little studied, because of the lack of material which has been lost over the years, the first movies make an extraordinary asset of the first experiments in the history of the world cinema, yet until now, only around twenty percent of all that was produced in that period is actually known. Starting from this premise, this study intends to show how important Georges Méliès was during the first years of the world cinema, mainly by the fact that he is considered ‘the father of the science fiction’ in a period when there was no technological resources able to represent/reproduce fictitious events of a dystopian future. Méliès produced the ‘entertainment movies’ a kind of film that arouses visual curiosity being, many times, the main attraction per se. This study is meant, still, to analyze the creative process of this artist/moviemaker Frenchman’s works, discussing the limitations of the tools in the movie making process in the beginning of the XX century comparing it to the contemporary movies, highlighting the importance that the first experiments have had on the current technologies. To enrich this research, some works of Méliès were analyzed, comparing them with Martin Scorsese’s 2011 The Invention of Hugo Cabret, who uses digital resources widely to produce it. The theoretical basis for this research starts from the concepts developed by: Machado (2011), Manovich (2001), Sadoul (1983), Xavier (1996/2012), besides the contributions provided by Costa (2008) and Gunning (1996/2006), among others.