The Eruption of Mount Pelee

CountryFranceLanguageSilent

Éruption volcanique à la Martinique, released in the United States as The Eruption of Mount Pelee and in Britain as The Terrible Eruption of Mount Pelée and Destruction of St. Pierre, Martinique, is a 1902 French short silent film directed by Georges Méliès.^[1] The film is a short reconstruction, using miniature models, of a recent historical event: the eruption on 8 May 1902 of Mount Pelée, which destroyed the town of Saint-Pierre, Martinique.^[2]

Summary

Mount Pelée looms over the town of Saint-Pierre. Fire and smoke rises from the crater; then lava begins pouring down the sides of the mountain. The village is soon engulfed in smoke and flames.

Production

The film is one of the most frequently cited examples^[3] of Méliès's "reconstructed newsreels," staged re-enactments of current events. The Eruption of Mount Pelee was his third-to-last work in the genre. It was followed by two others also made in 1902: The Catastrophe of the Balloon "Le Pax" and the most complex one of all, The Coronation of Edward VII.^[4] Stylistically, the film is reminiscent of the dioramas popular in the 19th century, which offered simulated views of places and events that would otherwise be inaccessible to spectators.^[2] Méliès's table-top miniature models recreate the eruption in a "storybook illustration" style highly indebted to Romanticism.^[2]

Academic opinion is divided on the exact method Méliès used to create the eruption. The Méliès descendant and film scholar Jacques Malthête hypothesized that a type of flare known as the Feu de Bengale was used (as Méliès did four years later to create an eruption of Mount Vesuvius in The Merry Frolics of Satan); film historians René Jeanne and Charles Ford nominated a flammable combination of cloth, colored water, cinders, and a kind of powdered chalk called Blanc d'Espagne; Méliès's granddaughter, Madeleine Malthête-Méliès, indicated that starch was poured down the model to simulate lava, and that pieces of paper and unseasoned wood were burned to create smoke; and the Méliès expert John Frazer suggested that the model was made of cardboard and paper and that "the eruption [was] created by a combination of flashing lights, powdered chalk, and cinders."^[3]

According to the film historian Pierre Lephrohon, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire once asked Méliès himself how he made The Eruption of Mount Pelee. Méliès said simply: "By photographing cinders and chalk." Apollinaire remarked to a friend who was with them: "Monsieur and I have the same occupation, we enchant ordinary materials."^[2]

Release and other versions

The Eruption of Mount Pelee was released by Méliès's Star Film Company and is numbered 397 in its catalogues.^[1] Two other filmmakers contemporary with Méliès, Ferdinand Zecca and Thomas Edison, produced their own miniature-model reconstructions of the Pelée eruption.^[2] Zecca's version, produced in May 1902 as Catastrophe de la Martinique (number 544 in the Pathé Frères catalogue), used four stagehands to create the eruption effect: one burning sulfur behind the model mountain, another pouring down smoke from a ladder off screen, a third on another ladder throwing down handfuls of sawdust to represent cinders, and a fourth agitating the miniature sea and raising the water level to suggest a tidal wave.^[3] The film historian Georges Sadoul notes that Zecca's version aims for academic realism in its style, creating an effect markedly different from Méliès's deliberately Romanticized portrayal.^[2]

The Edison Manufacturing Company version was released in three parts: Mt. Pelee Smoking Before Eruption (St. Pierre, Martinique), Mt. Pelee in Eruption and Destruction of St. Pierre (Martinique), and Burning of St. Pierre (Martinique).^[5][6][7] The Edison Company had sent the photographer J. Blair Smith to Martinique to film the aftermath of the accident; meanwhile, the filmmaker Edwin S. Porter stayed at the Edison studio in Orange, New Jersey to recreate the eruption using a studio model. A dozen clips of Smith's real-life footage, and all three of Porter's films simulating different stages of the eruption, were sold by the Edison Company in July 1902; the catalogue encouraged exhibitors to combine the real and faked films to "make a complete show in themselves."^[8] According to the film historian Lewis Jacobs, the crew that created the Edison version found their own unique way to simulate the eruption: they exposed a barrel of beer to direct sunlight and waited for it to explode.^[2]

The Eruption of Mount Pelee was presumed lost for many years; a film in the collection of the Cinémathèque Française was sometimes misidentified as Méliès's film, but it was in fact Zecca's version.^[9] Méliès's film was finally recovered in 2007, when a copy was found and restored by the Filmoteca de Catalunya.^[10]

References

External links

• The Eruption of Mount Pelee at IMDb
• The Eruption of Mount Pelee at SilentEra
• The Eruption of Mount Pelee on YouTube