A Trip Through the Beginnings of Cinema.

by Ruby Gerhardt Greco.

As the 19th century developed into the 20th, creators and inventors were starting to push the boundaries of film into both a communal experience and a technical spectacle.

Whilst the birth of modern cinema contraptions began famously with Edisons Kinetograph and the Lumiere Brothers Cinématographe, Georges Méliès lifted cinema into the narrative artform that we know today.

Georges Méliès, a stage illusionist and manager-director of the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, took it upon himself to use moving images as a novelty extravaganza with the creation of the very first narrative feature. Working from his garden studio in a Parisian suburb, he made 500 films between 1897-1913. A pioneer of in-camera effects such as the fade, lap dissolve, double exposure, and even the beginning of technicolour, Méliès not only created but planted these effectively within a narrative. To have narrative creation within seven years of the birth of cinema was a massive turning point for 20th-century film.

When the film medium came about in the 19th century, many traditions of screening moving images were already popular with audiences with magic lanterns and shadow plays.

During the early years, most motion pictures had a 50-second duration, without synchronised sound and colour. These were mainly marketed as novelty attractions such as The Horse In Motion (1878) , a series of cabinet cards by Eadweard Muybridge. Within the first steps of the 20th century, films grew longer and the medium quickly developed into one of the most important tools of communication and communal entertainment.

In 1877 Edison was confronted with ideas to combine photography with moving images with the Kinetograh. Whilst it inspired live-action recorded projections, limitations included a heavy body and a singular viewer.

In 1895 the Lumière brothers developed the Cinématographe, an apparatus that captured film, developed it, and showcased it. The mechanism involved sprocket gears that needed to stop the film long enough to expose each frame to light before the claw would pull down the next. By 1897 Oskar Messter created the Maltese Cross mechanise inspired by mechanical watches of Switzerland, a version of which is still used in modern-day projectors. The Cinématographe was compact and light to carry and operated by a hand crank which meant the absence of an electrical power source, it used 35 mm film that it also developed and then projected.

Initially, a lack of standardisation meant that there were a variety of different film widths and projection speeds which meant that all equipment had to be calibrated to each gauge independently; 35 mm became accepted as the international standard gauge in 1909 through the international monopolisation of Edison. Standardisation meant a uniform format for the production and distribution of films internationally which meant that films such as A Trip to the Moon (Georges Méliès, 1902) could be seen globally. Technical innovations such as the Latham Loop meant longer and more complex films and made way for the first narrative films through editing.

Whilst the Lumière brothers and Edison were focusing on innovations, Méliès was developing illusions and magic tricks. Having been invited to the first exclusive screening with the Lumière brothers he could see the possibilities for stage magic.

Le papillon fantastique (1909)

He bought an Animatograph, which jammed and created the first cut. Hence, magic was created through editing. He manipulated time and space, harnessing the fact that all films present an illusion to push his illusions forward.

By 1898, Georges Méliès was the largest producer of fiction films in France, including his in-camera effects that were largely popular with audiences; so popular that it sparked the first global pirating of film.

The creation of his longer films, which were several minutes long from 1899 onwards, led other makers to start producing longer films dominating today.

A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la Lune) is a 1902 Sci-Fi directed by Georges Méliès and loosely based on a Jules Verne novel. The 14 min film follows a group of scientists who travel to the moon, battle aliens (Selenites) and escape back to earth triumphant having captured one. Both the length and budget of the film were impressive, costing 10,000 francs and taking three months to finish. The film resulted in 825 feet of film, 3x the average lengths of films at the time, and spans from 9-18 minutes depending on the frame rate displayed.

Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902)

Whilst the film battles with themes of colonisation, pataphysical and anti-imperialist satire, its importance lies in its further influence in film and fame within the French theatrical féerie tradition. The film's theatrical style includes an elaborate set placed in front of a static camera which is set back from the action to capture the entire scene in one shot, giving the audience the voyeuristic resemblance of the proscenium arch. The pseudo-tracking shots were created in Méliès’ previous film The Man with the Ruber Head (1901) by moving the actor towards the camera using a pulley-operated chair fitted to a railed ramp.

Although such conceptions as the substitution splice technique, transitional dissolves and pseudo-tracking shots were groundbreaking, the real magic came from Méliès straying away from actuality films into what he called his scènes composées or "artificially arranged scenes". By employing juxtapositioned shots, in-camera effects and cutting he created a new cinematic vocabulary soon to become the grammar of modern cinema. An example of the narrative technique is when he plays with temporal continuity by showing an event twice. First, the capsule is shown suddenly appearing in the eye of an anthropomorphic moon, labelled as the most famous shot in cinematic history, then once more landing on the terrain of the moon. Rather than considering time and space in a causal and linear narrative, this non-linear storytelling is flexible and irregular for this period. Whilst his influence on film history is undeniable, some academics have argued that his films should be considered under the umbrella of spectacular theatrical creations rooted in the 19th-century stage tradition of the féerie.

His films included Cléopâtre (1899) , Le Christ marchant sur les eaux (1899) , Le Voyage dans la lune (1902) Le Voyage à travers l’impossible (1904) . Despite his initial commercial success, he was driven out of the film industry into poverty in 1913 where he was reduced to selling sweets. This inevitable downfall was sparked both by piracy and by the natural introduction of sound, colour and the moving camera.

As A Short History of Film notes, "A Trip to the Moon combined "spectacle, sensation, and technical wizardry to create a cosmic fantasy that was an international sensation."

It was influential in the sense it offered up a new purpose for cinema; narrative entertainment. Demonstrating how perceived reality can be transformed on camera through cinematic fantasy, Georges Méliès favoured formalism over realism; making way for the Classicism of films we know today.

Having come a long way from hand-cranked cameras, the industry is dominated by digital cinematography: the process of capturing film images using digital image sensors rather than through celluloid film stock. Méliès's influence with themed narrative cinema and complex features spans throughout the next century. As Chiara Ferrari says: "his films deserve a legitimate place among the milestones in world cinema history".

by Ruby Gerhardt Greco, August 2022.