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Over at Mindjack–"the beat of digital culture"–Reason Managing Editor gives two thumbs way up to a new DVD anthology of films by the pioneering Georges M?li?s, best remembered for the pre-LSD trip film, Voyage to the Moon (1902):
M?li?s wasn't a man struggling with the rudiments of a new medium so much as a man using that medium to develop a much older art. His background was in stage magic, and he saw his filmmaking as a natural extension of that work. Magicians had already been projecting slides via magic lanterns for centuries; film simply combined projected images with images that move. (For that matter, magic lantern shows frequently included some forms of movement—the movies merely pushed that farther.) M?li?s' films may not take advantage of every tool cinema has to offer, but as magic they represent an art at one of its peaks.