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Georges Mėliės (1861-1938) was one of early cinema's major figures. He is credited with producing more than 520 films but died believing nearly all were lost. His granddaughter Madeleine Malthete-Mėliės (1923-2018) dedicated much of her long life to his legacy, searching the world for surviving copies. Even now, rediscovery of a single Mėliės film makes news in the film world. So, the apparent discovery of some 20 Mėliės film fragments, all of which were previously considered lost or were previously unknown, reproduced in the pages of a private collection of flip books dating from "between late 1896 and early 1898" (p.50), occasioned the publication of this volume, which is actually two books: Discovering Lost Films of Georges Mélies in fin-de-siėcle Flip Books (1896-1901), by Robert Byrne and Pamela Hutchinson, and Des fragments de films Mélies disparus ressuscités par des flip books (1896-1901), by Thierry Lecointe, with Pascal Fouché. The two books are bound together in a single volume that shares a common bank of illustrations but are otherwise quite different from one another. Byrne and Hutchinson's English text offers a very abbreviated summary and a very partial translation of Lecointe's French text, which is based primarily on Fouché's collection of more than 10,000 flip books, of which 27 are the subject of this volume (p.182). But readers who consult only the English text will miss a great deal, including much of the substance of Lecointe's narrowly defined historical claims, along with many of the illustrations, diagrams, and endnotes that accompany the French text.
In an uncredited English translation of Andrė Gaudreault's preface to the French text, which misleadingly precedes the English text in the volume, one finds this sentence, which ought to be treated as a caveat: "We are, unfortunately, not used to reading books in which the author constantly revises his hypotheses" (p.2). Fortunate or unfortunate, this makes the French text a challenging read. More caveats follow shortly thereafter in the uncredited English translation of the short introduction by Jacques Malthete, Malthete-Mėliės's son and author of numerous careful studies of Mėliės, which likewise precedes the English text in the volume despite referring to the French text. Characteristically circumspect, Malthete writes, "Lecointe believes he has identified about 20 films by Georges Mėliės [...]...