Star Film

The stage illusionist Georges Méliès began making films in 1896 and distributed them under the Star Film name. His experience at the Théâtre Robert-Houdin shaped the company from the start: cinema became a new stage machinery in which appearances, disappearances, transformations, and impossible changes of scale could be repeated for audiences anywhere.

In 1897 Méliès built a glass-walled studio on his family property at Montreuil. Daylight illuminated painted scenery while traps, wires, smoke, costumes, and hand-applied color worked together with the camera. The studio's controlled space made it possible to plan films as chains of tableaux and to manufacture fantasy with unusual consistency.

Star Film sold prints internationally by catalogue number, and Méliès attempted to protect the company from piracy with branches abroad. A Trip to the Moon became its emblem: a compact 1902 féerie that combined Jules Verne–like adventure, theatrical spectacle, and the unforgettable image of a rocket lodged in the Moon's eye.

The system that gave Méliès control also made adaptation difficult. Longer narratives, industrial production, and changing distribution practices overtook the company; war and financial pressure contributed to the loss and destruction of much of its catalogue. Later preservation and archival research reconstructed a filmography whose surviving works now define early cinematic fantasy.