La Cinémathèque Française: Méliès Museum

Additional Information & Description

The Méliès Museum at La Cinémathèque Française traces cinema’s early experiments through the life and work of Georges Méliès. Follow a journey from Montreuil to Hollywood, exploring how a pioneering filmmaker’s imaginative approach to moving images helped shape the possibilities of cinema.

300 rare objects from cinema’s early years

The museum brings together 300 rare artifacts, including machines, costumes, posters, drawings and models. These give you concrete points of contact with Méliès’ work: the equipment, visual ideas and objects behind his filmmaking, rather than a story told through films alone. A century of research by the CNC, France’s National Centre for Cinema and the Moving Image, underpins the collection. Its range lets you explore several sides of his creative practice, from technical apparatus to the designs and costumes that helped bring imagined worlds to the screen.

From a trip to the Moon to modern special effects

Méliès’ Le Voyage dans la Lune provides a focus for understanding his pioneering techniques and their influence on the next century of cinematic special effects. The museum connects his cinematographic surrealism with generations of later filmmakers, including Wes Anderson, Guillermo del Toro, Peter Jackson and Tim Burton. Those connections give the visit a reach beyond early film history: you can trace the legacy of Méliès’ inventions through the DIY-style filmmaking of Anderson and the blockbuster worlds of del Toro, Jackson and Burton.

A virtual journey with Méliès’ camera

A virtual reality experience created by Ubisoft takes the story into a different medium. Join Georges Méliès’ camera for a cinematographic journey through time and space, with encounters that include taking down the Moon, facing a snow giant and approaching an infernal cauldron. This part of the museum shifts from examining filmmaking objects to entering a sequence of fantastical scenes inspired by Méliès’ imaginative universe.

Your museum ticket and arrival

The ticket includes entrance to the Méliès Museum. You’ll find it inside La Cinémathèque Française at 51 Rue de Bercy in Paris, in a postmodern building designed by Frank Gehry. The venue houses one of the world’s largest archives of film documents and film-related objects, placing the museum within a wider institution devoted to cinema. Wheelchair access is available. Tickets are delivered instantly and can be presented on a smartphone.