Mlis Boots

Before he became the father of cinematic special effects, George Mlis (1861-1938) was a maker of deluxe French footwear, an illusionist, and a caricaturist. Proceeding from these beginnings, Mlis Boots traces how the full trajectory of Georges Mlis career during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, along with the larger cultural and historical contexts in which Mlis operated, shaped his cinematic oeuvre. Solomon examines Mlis unpublished drawings and published caricatures, the role of laughter in his magic theater productions, and the constituent elements of what Mlis called "the new profession of the cinaste." The book also reveals Mlis' connections to the Incohrents, a group of ephemeral artists from the 1880s, demonstrating the groups relevance for Mlis, early cinema, and modernity. By positioning Mlis in relation to the material culture of his time, Solomon demonstrates that Mlis work was expressive of a distinctly modern, and modernist, sensibility that appeared in France during the 1880s in the wake of the Second Industrial Revolution.