Gaston Méliès and his Wandering Star Film Company (2005)

• 74%
• 2005
• Documentary
• Raphaël Millet

In 1912-1913, Gaston Méliès, brother of Georges Méliès, undertook a ten-month long trip around Asia-Pacific. While Georges was making imaginary trips in his Montreuil studio, Gaston was traveling for real, to the most remote places. Boarding an ocean liner in San Francisco with his wife Hortense and a team of about 15 collaborators, he journeyed to Polynesia, New Zealand, Australia, Java, Singapore, Cambodia, and finally Japan. During this transoceanic adventure, Gaston Méliès shot no less than 64 movies, either documentaries or fictions, of which only a few have survived. Some of them were among the first ones ever filmed on location in Tahiti, Java, Singapore, and Cambodia. Moreover, Gaston Méliès, very much ahead of its time in that matter, was the first filmmaker to give fiction roles to Tahitians, Maoris, Aborigines and Cambodians. He did not return to the USA but traveled straight back from Japan to France, where he settled with his wife, and died shortly after, in 1915, quickly falling into oblivion, as the world was engulfed in World War I. On the occasion of the centenary of his death, this documentary finally pays tribute to this long-forgotten pioneer of the last days of early cinema, while taking the few surviving images of his voyage as an opportunity to reflect upon questions of otherness, identity and representation.