A D V E N T U R E S in C Y B E R S O U N DThe Movies Begin by Geoffrey O'BrienA hundred years ago--to be precise, on March 22, 1895, the Lumiere brothers, Louis and Auguste, scientific entrepreneurs in their early 30s, made the first public demonstration of their invention the cinematograph, a combination camera, projector and film printer. The occasion was a lecture at the Society for the Encouragement of National Industry in Paris, and the cinematograph figured as only one among a number of exhibits designed to show the latest developments in "the photographic sciences." The Lumieres appear not to have anticipated the audience's astonished response. It did not take long for the Lumieres' invention to move beyond the domain of scientific discussion. By December they were giving their first commercial exhibitions in the basement of the Grand Cafe on the Boulevard des Capucines, and by June of the following year their films, each consisting of a single shot, a single chunk of reality captured by an immobile camera, were being shown in America, billed as "the greatest attraction of the century.... The original, the greatest and the only perfect scientific projection of animated photographs in the world": from technical curiosity to global industry in fifteen months. There are of course alternate and equally plausible versions of the genesis of movies. It is not so much a single trail as a profusion of strands, converging somewhere around 1895; from the Renaissance camera obscura and the seventeenth-century magic lantern through the variety of nineteenth-century toys and gadgets simulating animation (zoetrope, stereopticon, choreutoscope, phasmatrope, zoopraxiscope) to the inventions of half a dozen other pioneers, Marey, Demeny, Reynaud and above all Thomas Edison and W. K.L. Dickson, who by April 1894 were exhibiting at New York's Kinetoscope. These were parlor films that lacked only one element of movies as we know them: they were viewed in peepshow form rather than projected on a screen. The question of who invented movies has been contentious from the outset, because so many were working toward essentially the same end. It was not by accident that researchers stumbled on a machine for annihilating the constraints of space and time and making dreams visible. As Andre Bazin remarked in 1946, in his essay "The Myth of Total Cinema," the cinema was a fully formed Platonic ideal long before it existed materially. According to legend, the first Lumiere screenings at the Grand Cafe elicited cries of terror as the first train in movie history steamed into view. It was an incomparable and unrepeatable shock effect, one that filmmakers have perennially, and with ever more difficulty, tried to emulate: the roller-coaster dynamics of Die Hard or Speed deploy a century's worth of technological advances toward achieving the same visceral surprise that the Lumieres accomplished less strenuously by planting a camera on the platform of La Ciotat Station as a train was arriving. Something of that shock can be experienced again thanks to a remarkable five-cassette compilation recently released by Kino Video, The Movies Begin, a survey of the earliest cinema encompassing 122 films made between 1894 and 1914. It actually begins even further back, with the "simultaneous photography" developed by Eadward Muybridge in the 1880s. Muybridge's sequential exposures are here projected at film speed and brought uncannily to life: seeing still photographs set so convincingly in motion is a little like watching a mummy come back to life. But then, reversing time is one of the primal powers of film, a fact grasped early on by the exhibitors who, after showing the Lumieres' Demolition of a Wall, liked to project it a second time backward so that audiences could marvel at the demolished wall springing back out of smoke and debris into perfect order. The collection radiates a rough vitality, a powerful sense of life existing beyond the edges of the frame and spilling into it in exuberant and disorderly fashion. What a range of life is on display here, either caught on the sly or acted out with boisterous enthusiasm: cockfights, boxing matches, horse races, a fracas in a barber shop, a pillow fight in a girls' dormitory, New York skyscrapers and the San Francisco earthquake, holdups and executions, reenactments of the Boxer Rebellion and the Russian Revolution of 1905, flirts and peeping toms and practical jokers, countless horses and dogs and babies, a coal mine and a biscuit factory, Ali Baba and Little Nemo, Nero and President McKinley, not to mention an unforgettable 1897 advertisement for Dewar's Scotch in which four moustached men in kilts perform a madly energetic reel with evident indifference to how very silly they look. For every more or less realistic vignette, equal space is accorded to fantastic jokes and flights of absurd invention. Imps pop out of ovens and pots to bedevil a hapless kitchen staff, planets and posters and playing cards come to life, time is speeded up so that everyone ages in a matter of seconds, a city is destroyed by sneezing. As the filmmakers feel out the possible uses of screen space, they undermine the viewer's sense of stability in ways that are still surprising. In The Big Swallow, the British film of 1901, an elegantly dressed man on the street, apparently angry at being filmed, advances toward the camera remonstrating furiously: as he moves into extreme close-up, his mouth fills the screen, which goes black. Cut to the cameraman, tumbling head first into a dark abyss, after which we return to the mouth in close-up, chewing vigorously, as the offended gentleman smiles with satisfaction. The images take revenge on those who look at them. As the irate subject munches his victim, the spectator might well feel that he himself has been swallowed. In effect, the package makes available a whole archive of early film, ranging from the earliest one-shot films of Edison and Lumiere, through a whole cassette's worth of Georges Melies's fantasy films, to a D.W Griffith melodrama, The Girl and Her Trust (1912), an early enough film in most contexts but figuring here as the highly evolved culmination of two decades of work. Throughout there is blessedly little obtrusive commentary to get between the viewer and the films themselves; the snippets of voice-over explication on two of the cassettes could have been spared, but for the most part comments are restricted to a set of excellent printed notes by Charles Musser, the historian of early cinema best known for his indispensable study, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907. So successfully does The Movies Begin make its case for the rich variety of early filmmaking that one might conceivably begin to question how much more is to be gained from watching movies made after 1914. Dialogue aside, most of what came later is already here, in exhilaratingly compact form. Indeed, a whole canon of future films surfaces in embryo. How much does John Ford's How Green Was My Valley add to the authenticity of the mining scenes in A Day in the Life of a Coalminer (1910), or Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin to the reenactment of the Odessa mutiny and massacre in the 1905 Revolution in Russia? The languid Italian spectacle Nero, or The Fall of Rome (1909) offers all the essential ingredients of Mervyn LeRoy's Quo Vadis or Anthony Mann's The Fall of the Roman Empire in roughly a thirty-sixth of the running time. The earliest movies still induce a sense of wonder, even if it is attenuated by the fact that with a VCR we can control the images that once overwhelmed their viewers. Even freezing the frame or reversing the action cannot annul the recalcitrant power of these movies. It's like watching one form of life collide with another. New beginnings in art, paleolithic cave-painting, or Sumerian epic, are also points of breakage. By initiating new forms of knowledge, they have the effect of plunging what came before them into the realm of the unknowable. In that sense, our era begins in 1895: the era of playback. Everything previous eludes our new-found capability for resurrection. The henceforth increasingly unimaginable pre-filmic world persists in the casual demeanor of these performers, mountebanks and bystanders pressed into service. They become, by accident, mythic figures, carrying with them the air of a different world; they seem still to confront a live audience, and to be unaware of the implications and after-effects of capturing living motion on film. Less self-conscious than any future movie actors would be, they act as if the images had no tomorrow, as if they were evanescent like a circus turn or a slice of street theater. The future was an empty screen next week that needed to be filled. Most of the images, of course, had no tomorrow, and it is just luck that these ones survived. Movies weren't made to last. A print was shown until it wore out; if a film's popularity warranted, it could always be shot again. Cecil Hepworth's beautifully concise Rescued by Rover (1905), one of the most entertaining movies in the whole set, was made in at least three different versions. (Musser neglects to note whether the same gifted dog played Rover in each version; the vigor with which he shakes the water off, after crossing a stream on his way to rescue an abducted child, marks him as the most charismatic performer in the whole series, the very embodiment of animate movement.) A film could equally well be remade by competing filmmakers. Here, a favorite gag--the old man flirting with a vivacious young woman wakes up to find himself embracing his hag of a wife, shows up in two different but essentially indistinguishable incarnations, English and French. To satisfy curiosity and to provide a good laugh were the chief ends of most early movies, although graver ambitions (or at any rate more complex forms of exploitation) are evident as early as Ferdinand Zecca's 1901 tableau of murder, remorse and punishment, The Story of a Crime. Beauty for its own sake may not have been a major drawing card, but it crops up everywhere, whether by design or by accident. Knockabout farces and industrial documentaries become the inadvertent repositories of city streets, unrehearsed facial reactions, animal movement, shifts of light. Nowhere are such beauties more abundant that in the Lumiere films. My only complaint about The Movies Begin is that it doesn't contain even more Lumiere; there can never be too much. These endlessly fascinating remnants are both a point of origin for movies as we know them and a haunting suggestion of what they might have become. They might, for one thing, have remained short. The pleasures of one-shot movies elicit a keen regret that they aren't made anymore; it's ironic that the simplest possible cinematic form should be out of bounds to filmmakers, that brevity should be the most forbidden of virtues. A movie consisting of a single shot focuses the attention wonderfully. If it is amusing to imagine a Lumiere "view" as the establishing shot for an imaginary movie--the adventures, say, of one of the passengers disembarking from that train at La Ciotat Station, that is only because we have almost forgotten how to consider a filmed moment in isolation rather than as part of a sequence. If narrative has been our unavoidable destiny, so much so that we find ourselves living in terms framed by the stories movies have chosen to tell--the Lumiere films offer, even at this late date, a momentary reprieve from the fixed orders of storytelling. When the Lumieres filed for their first patent, their invention was described as "an apparatus for obtaining and showing chronophotographic prints. quot; It is indeed as photographs of time that they exert their fascination, the purest possible distillation of a single moment. Those tiny pieces of duration, perhaps forty-five seconds, are nonetheless extraordinarily dense with human activity. To describe everything that goes on in Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory or The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station, every fugitive movement and sudden glance a dog scampering into the frame, a worker tugging at another worker's wrist, a man grinning as he sets his bicycle in motion, a child adjusting her hat as she descends from the train, could take many pages. The more times one plays them back, the more they contain. Movies have learned to leave out most of that detail, pruning the scene of distractions so that we look only at what is significant; here, everything is of equal significance. Within their little compass, the unwitting subjects bustle, their existences narrowed to the length of a railroad station platform and some forty-five seconds of duration, bounded on either side by abrupt darkness. The return of the black screen has the shock of life truncated without warning, a reminder of how much art has been lavished subsequently on gently easing viewers out of movies. Clearly the Lumieres were not trying to emulate the art of haiku, the concept was something like an animated postcard--but they did make art of a profoundly contemplative order. I use the name "Lumiere" in the emblematic sense of "Homer." The brothers took joint creditfor their work, although Louis was principally responsible for the invention and at first almost solely responsible for the actual filming. Yet the bulk of the Lumiere canon, consisting of more than 1,000 films, is made up largely of work by other cinematographers trained by Louis, who brought back views from all over the world. What the Lumieres established in their first films was a standard of visual acuity at once technological and aesthetic. It was out of technical necessity that they planted the camera in one place and let the world happen in front of it. Whatever the motive, the results suggest how much of the real movie magic is a passive phenomenon, a matter of standing back and letting things take place. I cannot otherwise account for the power of Boat Leaving the Harbor, in which some women stand on a jetty watching some men set off into a fairly rough sea in a small boat. It's really nothing more than a home movie; the women are relatives, the waters are in the Mediterranean off La Ciotat. Yet the image--balancing the women's waves of farewell with the rolling of the choppy waters, the firmness of rock against the fragility of the boat, is indelible, its ramifications unending: it might be a compression of whole epochs of European history, a somber ideogram encapsulating the exhilaration and terror of departure. Movies at their beginning promised an ultimate and unconditional satisfaction of the desire to see: to see everything everywhere, to roam over the earth and through the heavens like God's eye, and all without even budging from one's seat. The audience had an infinite curiosity, and there was an apparently infinite supply of objects for that curiosity to batten on. It was as if they had seen nothing. Every subject becomes exotic by virtue of being filmed. The world was to be made over for their benefit, brick by brick and dog by dog. We, on the other hand, begin to feel that we have seen everything. Life imitates movies, and movies themselves imitate other movies. Have 100 years really been long enough to exhaust that promise? Have we seen enough parades, coronations, beauty pageants, earthquakes, invasions? Have enough murderers been hauled off to justice, enough lovers found contentment on the other side of the hedge? As the stop-motion tricks of Melies give way to the newest morphing techniques, are there any magical transformations we have not already imagined? As the medium branches out into new shapes--with screens as big as living-room walls or small enough to fit in the palm of a hand, with the promise of more images than ever before, available at the slightest whim, endlessly replayable, malleable at the viewer's command, it is hard to avoid a nostalgia for cinema's roots, which is the same as saying a nostalgia for the world on which it has fed almost to satiety. We would like to go back, and the irony is that through the machinery of movies we can enjoy the illusion of doing so. That world isn't gone; the train continues to arrive, the porters continue to bustle importantly along the platform, the little girl persists in straightening her hat. It isn't lost, it's merely lost to us, who are condemned to inhabit the other side of the screen. The 100-year-old moving images nag at us as if to suggest that perhaps we missed the train at La Ciotat after all.
Geoffrey O'Brien is the author of The Phantom Empire: Movies in the Mind of the 20th Century
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