User Reviews

Georges Melies' film The Conquest Of The Pole is similar to several of his earlier adventure films except this film is much longer than most. As a result, many viewers claim this film is not quite as good as the others due to the padding of some scenes, especially the flying to the North Pole sequence when the aircraft passes constellation after constellation. The aircraft, though crude and ridiculously unrealistic, is synonymous with the backdrop/sets and other effects in the film. Remember, The Wright Brothers had only paved the way for air travel a few years before. Once at the pole, terrific action sequences occur with an ice monster of some sort followed by a rescue. By now Melies had fallen behind the times with developing film techniques, such as crosscutting, meaning Melies' development as a filmmaker was related more to his being a magician and an effects wizard and not necessarily his being a storyteller. The only issue in the film is there are only five explorers visible at the pole when several more were selected to go to begin with. *** of 4 stars.

For this movie Méliès create a monster with playing on the perspective . It's one of the first monster maybe the first long time before the lost world (1925) or King Kong (1933) .

"À la conquête du pôle" is a French black-and-white silent film from 1912, so despite not being among the very earliest in film, this movie i already way over 100 years old already. The international title is "The Conquest of the Pole" and the director is of course movie making pioneer Gorges Méliès, who had understood by then that it is time to take film to the next level. Very short films about little magic tricks and illusions had become a thing of the past by then already, so he is elaborating on what really moved the people. And while the trip to the moon was still far away in the early 20th century, the exploration of the poles wasn't and served as an interesting subject here. But it is never a serious adventure film. The people's reactions, some plays on words about scientists' and explorers' origins and more keep it light. Much lighter than these explorations actually where if you take a look at the fates of Amundsen and Scott for example. But back to this movie now: It runs for half an hour exactly, so it is also a pretty long work for for Méliès standards admittedly, And sets and costumes, especially the former, were really special for when this was made. Pay attention to the pole animals on some occasions, especially at the very end and decide for yourself what you think about their looks. Also a bit unusual is how big the cast really is here. You won't find that many actors in such old films as a general rule, at least not fro another 5-10 years until the next step in terms of full feature films with big cast lists was taken. So for back then, this film we got here was okay, not among the best either, but as this rating is in general for movies, I must take 2 stars away because there is a reason why films like these are not made anymore today and we should appreciate the existentce of sound and color and especially the latter would have really helped this one. Unless you are a silent film junkie, skip the watch here.

Georges Méliès had already travelled to the moon, the Sun, to the undersea kingdom of the fairies, and tunnelled through the English Channel, among various other adventures. This time, he goes to the North Pole--a journey already accomplished in reality, but not the way Méliès saw it. For his trip, he employs a plane with helicopter lift, has encounters with personified celestial bodies (which was common in his fantasy films) and fights off a pipe-smoking giant inhabiting the pole. There's even a contemporary offhand rib at the women's suffrage movement (as John Frazer points out in his book "Artificially Arranged Scenes", and for which I probably wouldn't have gathered otherwise from the two versions I've seen), including the rather outrageously suggestive impaling of one woman.

"The Conquest of the Pole" follows the same formulaic narrative structure that Méliès had begun with "Le Voyage dans la lune" (1902). They begin with a meeting where Méliès's character introduces the plan for the trip. This is followed by a scene at a factory where the journey's vehicle is manufactured – scenes of launching and travelling – a fight with an enemy encountered at the destination - and, finally, the successful return home. "The Conquest of the Pole" was inspired by a Jules Verne story, as were "Le Voyage dans la lune" and "An Impossible Voyage" (1904). Additionally, it's derived in part from Robert W. Paul's lost film, "Voyage of the Arctic, or How Capitain Kettle Discovered the North Pole" (1903), which apparently also included a giant inhabiting the pole.

"The Conquest of the Pole" was, if not the last, one of the filmmaker's last fantastical adventure spectacles. In a way, this film represents the end of an era in film history. Méliès had already been becoming increasingly irrelevant as far as the advancement of film technique and cinematic storytelling, and not long after this film, he would be done with the industry--pushed out mainly by competition (or, rather, the monopolization of the competition) from more financially savvy companies such as Pathé, which distributed this film, and the other studios of the Motion Picture Patents Company. Some of the narrative changes that had occurred during and since Méliès's heyday (from about 1899 to 1905) even creep into this film, including some scene dissection, the use of intertitles, and the general loss of some of the shot-scene, theatrical style that dominated Méliès's earlier work. By 1912, films had changed: filmmakers like D.W. Griffith were regularly using such techniques as crosscutting and scene dissection between varied camera positions and perspectives. Feature-length films were becoming increasingly more popular and would soon become the dominant form--transcending the one and two reel structures that Méliès had helped make industry standards. The art and industry that Méliès built had by now outgrown him.