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E-book Méliès Boots : Footwear and Film Manufacturing in Second Industrial Revolution Paris

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Penilaian

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M -? -?   (?–??),  was called Georges Méliès, was the most accomplished filmmaker of cinema’s first decade, and one of its most prolific. (Hereafter, I refer to him by his surname only, unlike other members of the Méliès family.) When I set out to write a book about Méliès, I imagined it as a comprehensive study of the entirety of Méliès’ oeuvre: all of his films, extant and nonextant (some 520 in all), along with his work as a visual, graphic, and performing artist—the latter spanning a long career directing the Théâtre Robert-Houdin and the Théâtre des Variétés Artistiques. But, I quickly came to the same conclusion Paolo Cher-chi Usai had reached in 1991 when he wrote, “despite the imposing number of writings published on Méliès in the last fifteen years—the task of writing a comprehensive (‘definitive’?) survey of the life and art of Georges Méliès is, all in all, still a prohibitive one.”? So, I redirected my research from the “texts” of the numerous films, images, objects, and performances Méliès created to the historical contexts in which they were made. I soon realized the Second Indus-trial Revolution comprised perhaps the most important historical context of all. The First Industrial Revolution roughly spanned the years from 1760 to 1830, with the advent of steam power, mechanization, and development of the factory system. Some fifty years later, economic and business historians like François Caron and Michael Stephen Smith insist, there was a Second Industrial Revo-lution, beginning around 1880. The Second Industrial Revolution accelerated ndustrialization through new technologies powered by electricity and the inter-nal combustion engine along with industrial applications of modern organic chemistr y.? Just as the First Industrial Revolution depended not only on technol-ogies like the cotton gin and power loom as well as on unremunerated plantation slave labor, so too was the Second Industrial Revolution similarly dependent on a bedrock of exploited labor and rapaciously plundered natural environments, many in colonized settings. This was the story of the Méliès family’s successful footwear manufacturing busi-ness and the historical context for the beginnings of Méliès’ work as a cultural producer, which centered on Paris—the “capital of the nineteenth century” for Benjamin and the “capital of modernity,” as David Harvey evocatively puts it.?Méliès described his father Jean-Louis Stanislas Méliès, called Jean-Louis Méliès, as “a large industrial mass manufacturer of de luxe shoes.”? While Méliès used the word chaussures (shoes) to describe the products of the family business, when Méliès worked there during the 1880s (shortly after it was legally incor-porated as the Société Méliès), the company in fact manufactured both shoes and boots, which comprised an important distinction for nineteenth-century French cobblers, many of whom only made shoes. Along with men’s and wom-en’s shoes, the Société Méliès produced boots for both men and women in a factory that employed one hundred and fifty workers.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

-

No. Panggil

778.53 SOL m

Penerbit

USA : University of Michigan Press., 2022

Deskripsi Fisik

221 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9780472902958

Klasifikasi

778.53

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

-

Subjek

Cinematography

Info Detail Spesifik

-

Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

-

Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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