Moving Images, Understanding Media

Chapter 2 Inventions and Origins 53

see and make sense of the light in front of us. Th us, it is entirely appropriate

that the man who fully embraced the potential of this new medium built on

illusion was, in fact, a professionally trained illusionist, a magician.

Georges Méliès began to explore the more expressive aspects of this

medium soon aft er he acquired a camera. At fi rst, he fi lmed travel scenes and

everyday events in the mode of the Lumière studios, but Méliès capitalized on

a chance occurrence while shooting in Paris. Th is discovery refl ects a “stop-

trick” fi rst seen on kinetoscopes in a brief 1895 fi lm by Alfred Clark, Execution

of Mary, Queen of Scots, in which an actor was replaced by a dummy when

the camera was stopped and “beheaded” once the shot was resumed. As you

see, interest in gruesome eff ects has been around since the beginning.

Méliès made his discovery when the camera jammed while photographing

a shot on a busy street. Aft er fi xing the jam, he continued to shoot the reel of

fi lm. In the space between the two moments of running the camera, a “jump”

occurred: An omnibus that had entered the shot turned into a hearse as it

exited the shot. By the end of that year, 1896, he had made Th e Vanishing

Lady in which a woman “disappeared” from the scene and Th e Nightmare in

which a sleeper’s visions transform abruptly. During these years, Méliès was

not only stopping and starting the camera but making actual edits—cutting

between frames of fi lm to remove a section and pasting the remaining two

pieces together.

In 1897, Méliès built a glassed-in fi lm studio and began to shoot fi lms

using the conventions of magic shows and theater. In this working space,

he produced and directed hundreds of fi lms, acted in many of them, led a

studio staff , and oversaw the creation of a body of work from conception to

printing. Building on his initial realization of a jump cut and the possibilities

of working within and between motion picture frames, Méliès developed

and utilized superimposition, matte shots, dissolves, and simple camera

movement.

An Emerging Form of Communication

During this time, many fi lmmakers were creating shorts that refl ected the

style and tone of Méliès’s work, and there were a number of innovations. In

Britain, R. W. Paul and G. A. Smith made many short fi lms. Smith began

Figure 2-16 Cameras and their recording platforms: fi lm, video, and

digital formats.

VIEWFINDER

“Everything human is

expressed in the face...

The face is the mirror

of the soul: this must

become the slogan of the

silent era”

–Carl Dreyer–

Danish director of Th e Passion

of Joan of Arc (1928), Vampyr

(1932), Day of Wrath (1943),

and Ordet (1955)

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