„Voyage à travers l’impossible”. Georges Méliès, Andrei Tarkovskij, Raúl Ruiz, Paolo Sorrentino, Woody Allen
„Voyage à travers l’impossible”. Georges Méliès, Andrei Tarkovskij, Raúl Ruiz, Paolo Sorrentino, Woody Allen

Summary/Abstract: David Damrosch argues that our literary studies continue to be largely informed by the 19th century belief in a national framing, although no culture was formed in a purely national context. The same could be argued about the arts; no art was formed in or remained limited to its own medium, but rather is part of a transmedial dialogue. The visionary Georges Méliès – illusionist, film director, writer, actor, painter – is a perfect example of both: his work is indebted to both French and foreign artists and will be taken up by numerous filmmakers from Chile to the USA, to Russia, and to Japan, while his films would never have been possible without Rabelais, Jules Verne and H.G. Welles’s writings, the science of automata and clockmakers or without the art of illusionism. In this essay, I will trace the forgotten pathway that led from Georges Méliès’s revolutionary early films into surrealism’s notion of the “real” and then to a range of influential filmmakers today including Andrei Tarkovsky, Raúl Ruiz, Paolo Sorrentino, and Woody Allen.

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