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MÉLIÈS AND THE PIONEERS

FROM ITS BEGINNINGS the art of film has pulled in two different directions: toward realism and toward magic.¹ One tendency derives from the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, who came to film from photography and tried to reproduce time and event accurately—a train arriving at the station of La Ciotat or workers leaving the Lumière factory. This trend was restricted by the Hollywood conventions that came to govern the industry, based as they were, like Lodovico Castelvetro’s version of Aristotle,² on a distrustful sense of the spectators’ limitations: what will the poor sap be able to understand? But it reappears in many more appealing ways, as in the documentary impulse, in Direct Cinema, or in the hyperrealism of a Mike Leigh. The Lumière workers knew what was going on and were all in their best work clothes, though the shot is designed to look as if it is what happened every day. Thus, the impulse to record staged performances was there from the early years of cinema. Indeed, the earliest surviving Shakespeare film is a minute-long fragment of Beerbohm Tree’s 1899 King John, shown on-screen in the Palace Theatre of Varieties on Shaftesbury Avenue but announcing the stage production as “now playing at Her Majesty’s Theatre.”³ The other tendency, quite different from what the Lumière brothers were doing, is the tradition of Georges Méliès the illusionist, many of whose films, like one version of the title of his Shakespeare film, had the words nightmare or dream in their titles. The Lumières are frequently said to have recorded reality; Méliès transformed it.

Film magic began with Méliès.⁴ At first there was a strong continuity with theatrical magic shows (which included as regular attractions a magic-lantern show and a shadow projection).⁵ But Méliès quickly realized how much more film could do and invented many new tricks that celebrate the possibilities of the new medium. The vanishing-lady trick is a good example. In this classic magic act, a cloth is placed over the seated woman, and when it is removed she has disappeared. Méliès discovered that he could stop the camera while the woman got out, then start it rolling again to whisk away the cloth. Through that simple stop-action method (or substitution splicing), which has become a basic film technique,⁶ reel time was liberated from real time. Two years later (1898) Méliès was already doing more-complex transformations, as when the magician leaps from a table and turns into his female assistant in midair. Méliès repeated this kind of stop-substitution trick countless times,⁷ and he quickly invented other tricks including dissolve, multiple-exposure (surimpression) or transparency for a ghost walking across a room through chairs and tables, and matte shots such that two Méliès can seem to observe and face each other.⁸ The first Hamlet ghost recorded on-screen, in Hay Plumb’s 1913 Hamlet, uses the double-exposure trick; soon it became widespread, as in Victor Sjöström’s famous movie Phantom Carriage (1921).

Despite what is sometimes said about Méliès and his followers, they were not working for an audience of credulous bumpkins. Their shows depend on a double sense of belief and incredulity, as Méliès’s theatre of magic depended on a decline in belief in the supernatural. We admire the magician’s skill, and in film we admire the power of the apparatus. Successful illusion is still understood as illusion, even if we cannot see exactly how it is done. Furthermore, the prevalence of images of machines such as the train and the rocket that goes to the moon in Méliès’s best-known film, Voyage to the Moon (1902), directs our attention (or reflection) toward the mechanical power of the means of reproduction.⁹

Beyond his obvious delight in trucage in the films, and thus in the sequence of shots, Méliès was the first to establish the basic principles by which the structure of a complete film could be fashioned. His idea of what he called “artificially arranged scenes” made film a medium in which a whole story could be told, as in Cinderella (1900), the first of his films to have a major impact in America.¹⁰ In his original plan the film is a sequence of twenty scenes, or “motion tableaux,” as he called them.¹¹ These scenes could be staged and selected especially for the camera, such that the moviemaker could control both the material and its arrangement. Méliès became even more ambitious in this respect with the famous Voyage to the Moon of 1902. Although theatre actors, as Méliès later explained in a letter (now in the MOMA Film Library), had not yet accepted playing roles in cinema films, because they considered the motion pictures far below the theatre—an attitude that was to change within a year¹²—in such films the cinema became an extension of the theatre: “[N]ot until about 1900, when the imported films of George Méliès startled American producers, was the theatrical potentiality of the new medium realized.”¹³ Until that point anything that moved was worth photographing—people walking, trees swaying, trains speeding, horses jumping, and soon news events and police department activities. But not, crucially, what happened inside the theatre. It was Méliès who introduced costuming, settings, and professional actors.

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The art of movies developed quickly. As the story is usually told, the key figure was D. W. Griffith, whose use of cross editing in Death’s Marathon (1913), two years before The Birth of a Nation, frightened the distributors, who thought—like Castelvetro four centuries earlier—that audiences would be confused by this innovation.¹⁴ Especially because of his development of editing, Griffith is usually credited with finally guiding silent cinema away from the conventions of theatre.¹⁵ The Ku Klux Klan’s rescue of besieged whites in The Birth of a Nation became a locus classicus in the traditional account of film history largely because Griffith’s crosscutting would have been impossible on stage.¹⁶

The next step, as the story is usually told, was Edwin S. Porter’s discovery of the principle of editing in The Life of an American Fireman (1902); Porter developed editing methods to include direct story construction in The Great Train Robbery (1903), then contrast construction (The Ex-convict) and parallel construction (The Kleptomaniac). Yet it was his contact with the fairy-tale films of Méliès that struck the spark in Porter,¹⁷ who could examine these films firsthand in the Edison laboratory where he worked. He noted that they contained more than one scene or shot and that they were strung together to make, or at least to illustrate, a story. Thus, Porter hit upon the idea that he might make stories by cutting and joining together in a certain order scenes he had already shot. He called up quantities of film of fire-department activity and began to put them together to make a story.

Even though this realistic, practical world of the fire station was a far cry from the magic and whimsy of the Méliès world, Porter felt the need for a Méliès-like opening scene. A fire chief seated at his desk and finishing the evening paper falls asleep and dreams of a woman and child, perhaps his own, “and the vision of his dream appears in a circular portrait on the wall.” Dissolve to a close view of a New York fire-alarm box, and a figure steps in front of it, “hastily opens the door and pulls the hook, thus sending the electric current which alarms hundreds of firemen and brings to the scene of the fire the wonderful apparatus of a great city’s Fire Department.”¹⁸ The appeal is obvious in the childlike and adventurous world of the fire truck and the heroic rescue being prepared, but also in that vision or dream with which the film opens.

Throughout these films is that admiration for the “apparatus,” so much a part of early cinema in the revised version of it we have from Tom Gunning.¹⁹ An additional scene usually placed at the end of The Great Train Robbery, but which Porter said in his script could also appear at the beginning, is a close-up of the leader of the bandits (Justus D. Barnes) emptying his pistol directly at the camera.²⁰ By this time the term shot was ubiquitous in film terminology, and Porter is making a visual joke or pun about it. Gun and camera have a shootout.

Recent research on Porter suggests that two versions of Life of an American Fireman survive. In the earlier, which has more claims to being “authentic,” the rescue scenes of mother and child are presented twice, and in only two shots, once from inside and once from outside the burning building. The innovations attributed to Porter—continuity of duration achieved by parallel editing and matching action—were based on the modernized version.²¹ How that version came into being is uncertain, but Porter continued to repeat action across scenes in later films and did not adopt genuine crosscutting until 1907, when other directors were doing so. The history of progress in the film industry is thus more halting than the standard version of the story, the one promoted by directors in retrospect. Porter claimed in 1915 that he was “the first man to tell a complete story with moving pictures,” and historians took him at his word: he became the father of film narrative. But that is not, apparently, what he was doing at the time.

In fact, he seems to have been imitating Méliès. In Voyage to the Moon, Méliès solved the problem of action in different locales as time progresses on-screen by a temporal overlap: the rocket lands on the moon, smacks the moon in the eye, and in the next shot, now on the moon’s surface, is shown landing again. Porter used this idea for How They Do Things on the Bowery (1902) and again apparently in the earlier version of Life of an American Fireman. Studies of medieval painting have shown that the presentation of different episodes of a story in the same painting are not simply naïve ideas of representation to be disposed of once the Renaissance invented perspectival focus; instead, they respond to a different conception of what a painting is for. Similarly, this multiple narration is not to be read as an unsteady groping after smooth editing techniques. Indeed, Gunning has shown that Méliès was not so innocent of “later” developments like editing.²² The stop-motion tricks required splicing to chop out overexposed frames; he relies on screen direction when characters pass from one locale to an adjacent one, a key ingredient in continuity editing; and even the arrangement of the tableaux to produce a story has been seen as quite modern. But as Bordwell says, Porter’s main interest was clearly not in perfecting the idea of film narrative but rather in heightening the effects of his “legerdemain and theatrical spectacle.”²³

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In the fine series of television programs that Martin Scorsese put together in 1995 for the British Film Institute and Channel 4, A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese through American Movies (released on DVD in 2000), the seventh program, or chapter, is called “The Director as Illusionist” (Scorsese is an unashamed auteurist). Though he does not refer directly to Méliès, the focus is essentially the legacy of Méliès. Scorsese begins by quoting King Vidor: “The cinema is the greatest means of expression ever invented. But it is an illusion and should therefore be in the hands of the magicians and wizards who can bring it to life.” A brief sequence from Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman follows in which he shows his double-exposed film to MGM executives. Scorsese comments that “what Keaton needs is to learn and master the language of film.” This chapter clearly becomes the focus of the whole series as Scorsese explores this language: the language of images and its various ingredients. He soon quotes Lillian Gish calling Griffith the father of film and saying that Griffith gave us “the grammar of film-making.” Scorsese tells us he has seen Cecil B. DeMille’s 1954 remake of his own silent Ten Commandments many times since he saw it first as a child: “What I remember most vividly are the tableaux vivants [over a shot of Yul Brunner and his wife on the Pharaoh’s throne], the color, the dream-like quality of the imagery, and of course the special effects. . . . The great illusionists of the past, Cecil B. DeMille, D. W. Griffith, Frank Borzage, King Vidor, were conductors, they orchestrated visual symphonies, what Vidor called ‘silent music.’ They would fade away as Hollywood embraced sound, but the legacy of the silent era was remarkable.” Everything Scorsese says about that early period is Méliès-based. He goes on to discuss two films of 1927—F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise and Frank Borzage’s Seventh Heaven—both of which he sees in those terms: the first reproduces subjective vison as if it were the objective world, and indeed fades one in over the other, so that a couple cross a busy street without looking and are magically preserved from harm; in the second, says Scorsese, “for the lovers reality itself is immaterial.” These are accurate observations about the two films, as far as they go, but what is interesting is that this is what Scorsese chooses to show us. He follows this with a voice-over quotation from Brian De Palma, saying, “In any kind of art film, you’re creating an illusion for the audience to look at reality through your special eye.” But these last words we immediately hear again as “special lie,” as De Palma—now a talking head—continues, “The camera lies all the time, lies twenty-four times a second,” and then gives a typically sinister laugh.

This chapter of Scorsese’s series then traces this tradition rapidly through the innovations of sound, color, and the wide-screen format down to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, adding that we are all the children of Griffith and Kubrick. The chapter ends with a reference to scenes from Jacques Tourneur’s very low-budget Cat People (1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943) and tells us that for the representation of the supernatural or magic world, the techniques of illusion can be either elementary or advanced; what counts is that the vision be strong. Presumably Scorsese avoids any mention of Méliès at least partly because the series is about American movies, and perhaps he was also thinking about what would become his film Hugo.

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The close relation of the two traditions of early film may be seen in the works of Buster Keaton, who grew up in variety theatre and retained a love of stunts. There too he learned his great trademark, the Stone Face. The Playhouse (1921) featured a one-man vaudeville review with up to nine Keatons on-screen at the same time. Buster is the orchestra and conductor, the nine minstrels, and the members of the audience, one of whom says, “This fellow Keaton seems to be the whole show.” The effect was obtained by having the cameraman shoot through separate apertures in the casing, rewinding the film each time and cranking the film through again at the exact speed (which was not standard until the advent of the talkie). The end result when projected looks like “a seamless single frame”—a characteristically Méliès-style effect. Other Keaton films exploit Méliès’s ideas as the basis for the story: in the film-within-a-film section of Sherlock, Junior (1924), for example, the projectionist falls asleep and in the ensuing dream sequence appears to jump straight into the movie he is screening. In The Cameraman (1928) when the rookie newsreel cameraman produces his first inexpert documentary effort, it turns out to be a ghostly double-exposed wonderland in which battleships cruise down Main Street. The contrast aptly brings together Lumière-style realism with Méliès-style screen magic: the film moguls may laugh in the background of the scene, but the audience is invited to see it as an immensely creative mistake, despite or perhaps even because of the immovable face of Keaton as the cameraman in the front row.

In his most famous film, The General (1926), based on the Civil War highjacking of a passenger train in Georgia by Union spies, Keaton exploits the same ideas as the early films of both Méliès and the Lumières. “Railways are a great prop,” he proclaimed in the heading of the script for The General, knowing as he did Porter’s The Great Train Robbery of 1903 and knowing also about the famous impact, further back in film history, of the 1895 Louis Lumière film L’arrivée du train en gare de la Ciotat, from which the audience is said to have fled in panic. This encouraged Keaton toward his most expensive stunt, the collapse of a bridge under a passing locomotive that falls into the river below, which did indeed terrify the spectators.²⁴ But Keaton also took pains to re-create the Civil War context outdoors, using period trains and building sets copied from engravings of the time. And his copy of a primitive bicycle for the start of Our Hospitality (1923) was so precise that the Smithsonian asked for it. For Keaton the illusion of historical reality was as important as the comic or fearful impact of his vaudeville-style acts, and he inhabits that border country between the art that conceals and the art that reveals its art, the quintessential country of the conjurer.

Stage magic thus marked the screen tradition to the point that it could never be simply a realist medium. A new art form was born, even though the point of view given to the film viewer in these early days was essentially that of the theatre audience. Méliès makes things happen in front of a static camera (the early cameras were large and heavy and difficult to move). We are out front, so that we look at the screen in the same way we look at the stage through its proscenium arch, aware (more or less) that we are attending a show, a framed spectacle: the result is what André Bazin called a “straightforward photographic respect for the unity of space,” preserving spatial continuity, or what Noël Burch calls “unicity of the frame.”²⁵ This point of view is familiar to anyone who has seen one of those early Méliès films. It was seriously modified as further techniques were invented but remains, nonetheless, a key element of cinematic allusions to Méliès. Méliès could intensify this point of view on occasion, as when he frames a man’s inflated rubber head in an archway (The Man with the Rubber Head, 1902), which shows that he was well aware of what he was doing and could make self-conscious use of his devices.²⁶

What began with Méliès continued in the grand guignol ideas of Sergei Eisenstein and his “montage of attractions,” in Jean Cocteau’s surrealism, in experiments like James Stewart’s dream of falling in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and the far more elaborate final sequences of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), with camera and computer allied; it is manifest in animation, in the Steven Spielberg–style special effects that have so outdistanced what Méliès could manage; and it survives especially in the immensely popular horror movie genre, in which ghosts and witches and diabolical possession are six-a-penny.

These two contradictory traditions, the realistic and the magical, come together, as in Shakespeare’s theatre, in the idea of illusion: stage or film magic depends on visual illusion, but then so does the representation in sequences of still cinematic shots on celluloid to make apparently moving images of familiar, recognizable settings—exploiting the tendency of the eye to perceive a sequence of still shots as moving when projected at the right speed. Indeed, Méliès’s reaction to the first Lumière showing brings the two explicitly together: he was at first dismissive of what he saw as merely a still photo of a street scene, but then it started to move, and he was enchanted. He wrote that “a still shot of the Place Bellecour in Lyon was shown. Somewhat surprised, I just had time to say to my neighbor, ‘They got us all here for projections like this? I’ve been doing them for over ten years,’ when a horse pulling a wagon began to walk toward us, followed by other vehicles and then pedestrians, in a word, all the animation of the street. Before this spectacle we sat openmouthed, stupefied, astonished beyond all expression.”²⁷ Almost immediately Méliès started to adapt stage magic to film.

The Méliès kind of trucage was part of a wider phenomenon in the days of the nascent cinema. Spiritualism and table-tapping were frequently practiced by stage magicians turned charlatans, as a more lucrative source of income. Hypnotism, or mesmerism, was a common theatrical spectacle. Apart from the enormously popular stage conjuring as practiced by Méliès at the Théâtre Robert Houdin and by his English mentor John Neville Maskleyne at London’s Egyptian Hall,²⁸ another ingredient in the background of early film is the popular genre of Victorian fairy paintings, some of which were actually illustrations for A Midsummer Night’s Dream or The Tempest.²⁹ Recall too those late Victorian photographs of fairies taken by children that Arthur Conan Doyle believed in (they were admitted to be fakes in 1983, when the children had become very old women).³⁰ Méliès and his followers thus had a lot to draw on in fashioning their new art form. In his reaction to the first film shown in New York (on April 23, 1896), an associate of Thomas Edison’s, W. K. L. Dickson, called it “an object of magical wonder, the crown and flower of nineteenth century magic.”³¹

The distinction between the Lumière and Méliès tendencies is really between, on the one hand, the art that conceals its own artifice beneath the pretense of quotidian realism, the kind of illusionism that developed in the nineteenth century and that we see in wax museums and photography or, at a more interesting level, in George Eliot’s homage to Dutch realist painting in the seventeenth chapter of Adam Bede or to John Constable in the opening paragraphs of The Mill on the Floss, and on the other hand, that which celebrates its own artifice even though it may, like a conjuror (an “illusionist”), deliberately mystify the spectator about how its magic is performed. As Peter Wollen puts it, “Lumière and Méliès are not like Cain and Abel: there is no need for one to eliminate the other.”³² Indeed, because Antoine Lumière, father of the photographic brothers, rented a studio above the Robert Houdin theatre where Méliès performed, it is possible Méliès knew about the new invention before the famous viewing of the street scene in Lyon.