Self
A documentary that details the process of restoring 270 of the 520 lost films of pioneering director Georges Méliès, all orchestrated by a Franco-American collaboration between Lobster Films, the National Film Center, and the Library of Congress.
Self
Born in Berlin in 1896, Lotte Eisner became famous for her passionate involvement in the world of both German and French cinema. In 1936, together with Henri Langlois, she founded the Cinémathèque Française with the goal of saving from destruction films, costumes, sets, posters, and other treasures of the 7th Art. A Jew exiled in Paris, she became a pillar of the capital's cultural scene, where she promoted German cinema.
Producer
A patchwork of the first animated movies from the collections of La Cinémathèque française : Stroboscopic Discs (1833), Zoetropes (since 1867), Reynaud's Praxinoscope (1878-1879), plates of Muybridge and Anschütz (1880-1890), an unseen Marey's chronophotography (1889), Chromolithographs films (since 1897), including one inspired by the second Georges Méliès' film, "Une séance de prestidigitation" (1896), with a photographic version, unseen until now.
Himself
The documentary’s starting point is the discovery and restoration of a rare and unknown photography reel reproduced from a mutoscope film, made in 1901 in London, about Santos Dumont (1873 – 1932). The work approaches historic and artistic aspects from the beginning of Cinema (pre cinema, variety film) and a cinema that appropriates archive material (found footage, recycled films), through interviews, documents, visual metaphors and the articulation of a poetic essay.
