François Gilbert Méliès (1925-1984) is today largely disregarded within the history of 20th-century critical thought. To his adherents, however, he remains a vital figure of enduring influence and prefigurative provocation.

From his earliest work, Méliès argued that the postwar era, and thereby its cultural output, was defined by impermanence, intangibility, and ahistoricity. In Le Sens et La Solitude (1957), the only published book of his that he himself considered complete, Méliès remarked “le savant qui habite en allusion comprendre seulement pitances et entre parentheses.” His wide-ranging writings on art, politics, and culture were sporadic, often aphoristic to the point of impenetrability, gruelingly pessimistic, and controversial. In 1970, his sprawling essay “Les tendances sataniques à Lautremont” mocked the May ’68 movement as “aussi conséquent qu'un pet,” and jeered at France’s student protesters as “les démons crédules de De Gaulle.” This irascibility and unrepentant self-alienation, often lashing out at his peers—in a BBC interview, he dismissed Deleuze as a “cosmic dimwit”—would prove a prolonged act of sabotage: after he was fired from his teaching post at the University of Vincennes in Saint-Denis in 1971, his career was largely mired in short teaching stints at colleges in California, a place he called “mon enfer Technicolor personnel.”

Cripplingly alcoholic and thrice divorced, Méliès was fifty-nine when he parked his Citröen DS on the Colorado Street Bridge in Pasadena and leaped to the Arroyo Seco riverbed below. He perished having published nothing of note in more than a decade.

AFTER FRANÇOIS MÉLIÈS is an eight-track collection of instrumental music by Tigre Benvie inspired by this elusive figure and his frustrating, yet still compelling, oeuvre. In keeping with Méliès’ 1963 declaration that “l'art du futur sera aussi éthéré qu'un murmure étranglé,” this music is available as a free digital download/stream.