The Conquest of the Pole
About The Conquest of the Pole
At an aero club congress, Professor Maboul of France proposes an Aero-Bus for the North Pole. Suffragettes who want to go themselves are chased out. Delegates from England, America, Germany, Spain, China, and Japan join him. Rival machines fail: one explorer falls from a balloon, and the suffragette leader lands on a church steeple. The Aero-Bus passes planets, crashes on the ice, and meets the Giant of the Snows, a pipe-smoking frost giant driven off by cannon. At the Pole a magnetic needle pulls them into the water. An airship picks them up, and they return to the club while penguins and seals wave.
Cast & crew
More about The Conquest of the Pole
Georges Méliès wrote, directed, photographed, and plays Maboul, with a brief extra turn as a worker in the balloon scene. Charles Pathé produced. Under a 1911 contract Pathé was sole distributor and supervised the cut. The studio stage at Montreuil was thirty feet wide, with an elevator crane. The frost giant is a marionette with a head two meters high. Twelve men operated it, some inside, moving the eyes, ears, mouth, and pipe. Released in France on 3 May 1912. The negative is 650 meters.
Themes
Background
Méliès made it near the end of his production life, after the polar claims of 1909 and during Pathé's control of his releases.
Making
Pathé's editors controlled structure and length. The giant was built as a huge puppet rather than a costume on a single actor.
Reviews
Le Cinéma in France compared Méliès to Jules Verne working with a camera. The Bioscope in Britain called the film an extraordinary voyage and Méliès the H. G. Wells of picturedom.
Audiences
It failed at the box office and added to the debt at Star Film.
Look
Méliès photographed it on the Montreuil stage, combining the Aero-Bus, painted skies, and the giant puppet in the same trick style as his earlier voyages.
Technique
The Giant of the Snows is a marionette with a two-meter head, worked by twelve operators, and scared off with cannon fire on the ice set.
Preservation
A heavily abridged print survives.
Notes
- Méliès said he stepped into the Cook–Peary argument: both men claimed the Pole, he thought neither had, and he would go there himself on film.
- Robert E. Peary's party claimed the North Pole on 6 April 1909. Roald Amundsen reached the South Pole on 14 December 1911. Frederick Cook's earlier claim is the other half of the joke.
- The names are gags: Run-Ever, Bluff-Allo-Bill, Choukroutman, Cerveza, Tching-Tchun, Ka-Ko-Ku.
- It is loosely in the manner of Jules Verne's Voyages extraordinaires and of Albert Robida, not a straight adaptation of The Adventures of Captain Hatteras.
- Fernande Albany is in the cast.
Scenes
- The suffragette's machine drops her onto a church steeple.
- The Giant of the Snows, pipe in his mouth, grabs at the explorers until the cannon fires.
- The magnetic needle at the Pole snaps and dumps them into the water.
Influenced by
- Jules Verne's Voyages extraordinaires
- the Cook–Peary polar controversy
Also available
- Internet Archive (1912GeorgesMeliesALaConqueteDuPoleConquestOfTheNorthPole)
Quotes
I intervened in the controversy between Cook and Peary. Both pretended to have reached the Pole. In fact I don't think either one did. I said to myself, I'm going to go there.
