The Melies Mystery 2021 Son of a shoe manufacturer, Georges Melies decided to devote himself to magic In 1888, he used his share of the inheritance to buy the Robert Houdin Theater, Boulevard des Italiens, where his fairy tale shows drew crowds Seven years later, dazzled by the animated image of the Lumiere brothers, he launches into a new art form, cinema His thirst for enchantment led him to invent special effects But the evolution of the publics taste and the passage of the cinema to the industrial era put away his dream machine Forgotten, he ends up running a toy store in the Montparnasse train station In 1923, in a fit of despair, he destroyed the negatives of his films Since then, film buffs all over the world have found and restored reels