"[T]his well-documented study, which includes many illustrations from private collections, offers a productive fresh look at the life and work of Georges Méliès that enriches our understanding of this unique figure’s role in early film history."
— Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film
“Matthew Solomon’s Méliès Boots is a groundbreaking account of the material history of Georges Méliès’ working life. Rather than offer another biography or survey of his films, Méliès Boots points us to something unexpected: Méliès’ relation to the material cultures of fin-de-siècle manufacturing and innovation in France. This work expands studies of Méliès (and early trick films more broadly) beyond the heritage of the magic theater and into the ‘stuff’—the objects, materials, machineries, labors, and processes of modernity—that made filmmaking possible at the time.”— Joshua Yumibe, Michigan State University
"What Solomon has adeptly done instead is to take the films – and more so the man – of George Méliès as a place to tether a history of French cultural change in the face of the
Second Industrial Revolution. . . The book’s main contribution is found in the way it characterizes for readers the array of cultural changes, symbiotically linked to the production and popularity of George Méliès’ motion pictures, that were a response to the industrial transformation of France around the turn of the last century."
— W. D. Philiips, Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television
“Méliès Boots is an extremely compelling and remarkably researched contribution to cinema studies, and it brings fresh insight to the figure of Georges Méliès by situating his work deeply within the cultural and media archaeological context of his time.”— Colin Williamson, Rutgers University
"Méliès Boots provides an unprecedented take on the work of Georges Méliès. Matthew Solomon’s dogged pursuit of the bigger picture gives us valuable original insights."— Donald Crafton, Global Nineteenth-Century Studies
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