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Original set design for Conquest of the Pole

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323. Original set design by Georges Melies for Conquest of the Pole [La Conquete Du Pole]. (1912) Drawing in ink and pencil on heavy stock paper of the terrain of the North Pole (from final section of film), 9 ¾ x 6 3/8" (21.6 x 16.5 cm.) by Georges Méliès (1861-1938). Méliès was one of the earliest directors of fiction films, and almost certainly was the inventor of science fiction and fantasy films, with his 1902 A Trip to the Moom being one of the mythic early silent movies. Conquest of the Pole is one of Méliès' final films and his longest. In a film career, which lasted less than two decades, this former magician created 552 separate movies. He was the inventor of various special effects, including the stop trick, and was one of the very first to use multiple exposures and time-lapse photography. His 1896 Le Manoir du Diable is generally considered the first horror movie. But, by the time of this film, he was facing severe financial problems, and his kind of cinema was already looking old-fashioned. He made only five films after this, and then went into bankruptcy, and became a forgotten man. In the 1920's, he was eking out a tiny living with his wife running a tiny toy store in Paris. And it was then that he began to be rediscovered by a new generation of cineastes. This culminated in a French film magazine, La Revue du Cinema, which devoted its entire 41-page, 15 October 1929 issue to Méliès. This specific drawing is reproduced on page 38, and a facsimile of that issue is included with this lot. How important was Méliès? Well, D.W. Griffith once said about him "I owe him everything." Original artifacts of this master's career never surface on the market---and let's not forget that this drawing is probably the earliest artifact of science fiction cinema that will ever be available. $30,000 - $50,000

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