Continuing with our series of seminal moments in the history of cinema, we leave the early days and move into a more complex and exceptionally rich decade. From 1917 until 1927, producers and directors across the globe made impressive strides in delivering movies to an increasingly more demanding audience. Stories evolved. The value of good narrative and expressive editing became a determining factor of market success.

Some of the earliest legends of the silver screen began to take centre stage, and the film world grew into the unstoppable and beautiful monster we cannot be without today. With the spike in the overall number of productions, filmmakers became bolder and tested the limits of comedy, of montage and sound, of acting styles and directorial decisions. The end results became an integral part of the world’s cinematic patrimony.

1918: The King of Comedy Is Born

Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle wasn’t just a master of silent comedy. He was also responsible for discovering new talents such as Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. ‘The Cook’, which Mr Arbuckle directed, not only demonstrates his creativity, it shows how much Mr Keaton owes to him. The two-reeler that survived is incomplete, yet the many gags squeezed within a handful of minutes of running time are enough to prove the point.

Buster Keaton is the assistant chef in a joint whose kitchen is managed by Fatty Arbuckle with a great deal of nonchalance; in-between orders, Arbuckle’s character decides to stage an improvised version of the Salome story by dressing up as the biblical character. Hilarity ensues as he puts a colander on his head, then applies frying pans and other kitchen accoutrements around his apron and over his chest to recreate Salome’s subversive dance. John the Baptist’s head is a cauliflower. This film is a key moment in cinematic history because it launched Buster Keaton’s career and it made the undeniable connection between him and Fatty Arbuckle. The latter was an established master of the comedic genre, and the former was just getting started, fated to become a legend.

‘THE COOK’ (1918), ©COMIQUE FILM COMPANY

1919: The Founding of United Artists

On 5 February, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, D.W. Griffith, and William S. Heart signed a contract that brought United Artists into existence. In the early days of cinema, movie moguls had been leery of even giving credit to performing artists in their productions, but public demand and commercial necessity had led to the emergence of the movie star. Four of the founders behind UA were the biggest in Hollywood at the time.

The principals, all working under various other non-exclusive contracts, were committed to making films for the company and would receive a hefty share of any profits, thus moving away from the usual meagre salaries that that actors had received until then. The problem with United Artists (as with other subsequent endeavours such as First Artists, established by Steve McQueen, Sidney Poitier, Paul Newman, and Barbra Streisand) was that the actors involved ended up using their UA deals to make non-commercial projects—Chaplin and Griffith being prime examples here.

These initiatives were derided as ‘the lunatics taking over the asylum’, eventually leading to the original artists losing control of the company before the end of the ‘20s. However, UA remained in business for another 60 years before it was bought by MGM. Learning from the past mistakes of their predecessors, Steven Spielberg, David Geffen, and Jeffrey Katzenberg founded Dreamworks SKG in 1996 and made sure to keep the word ‘artists’ out of the company’s name. Needless to say, it worked out rather nicely.

UNITED ARTISTS SIGNING

1920: The Kuleshov Effect

Around this year, Soviet director and theoretician Lev Kuleshov devised an experiment at his State Film School workshop, meant to gauge the audience’s reactions to paired images. He started by taking a close-up of pre-revolutionary matinee darling Ivan Mozhukin as he stared blankly. Mr Kuleshov then intercut this with shots of a bowl of soup, a woman in a coffin, and a child with a toy. Once it was shown to the public, the edited film caused viewers to read a remarkably appropriate emotion: hunger, sorrow, and paternal love, respectively, which were basically infused into the actor’s otherwise empty expression.

Instead of passively absorbing images, the spectators were made to feel like they had helped create meaning and thus implying a fundamental interactivity of the film medium. Today, it is considered a foundational principle of cinema, as the discovery provided theoretical foundations for Soviet-based filmmaking and proved that the content of individual shots is less significant than their sequencing.

Kuleshov, who introduced the term ‘montage’ to begin with, concluded that editing virtually changes the meaning of any shot, thus implying the primacy of director over actor and the undoubtedness of the powerful pull of intuitive truth.

EXAMPLE OF THE KULESHOV EFFECT

1921: Keaton Rises and Arbuckle Falls

‘The High Sign’ was an important film of its generation. It was Buster Keaton’s first solo short after an apprenticeship in Fatty Arbuckle’s raucous comedies, and it shows his stunningly original comic invention and his mastery of the medium itself. The movie spills over with often nonsensical and borderline-surrealistic gags and situations that have already come to define Keaton’s style. But what is truly praiseworthy in ‘The High Sign’ is his sense of structure, his intricate construction of shticks and motifs that echo each other from one sequence to the next.

When rediscovered, Buster Keaton’s shorts were shown to modern audience in the ‘70s. The gag that had initially stirred barely a giggle during the film’s first release in 1921 got one of the biggest laughs of the entire movie in 1970. Undoubtedly, Buster Keaton’s comedic art wasn’t just light years away from Fatty Arbuckles’, it was way ahead of its time.

And speaking of Mr Arbuckles, his career took a devastating hit that same year. It began with Virginia Rappé’s arrival at a Labor Day party thrown by the famed comedian at the Saint Francis Hotel in San Francisco. On 9 September, the young and mostly uncredited actress died of peritonitis, caused by a ruptured bladder. Rumours soon circulated that Arbuckle was involved and had sexually assaulted her, and a flurry of grifters and lurid press coverage quickly devolved into Hollywood’s first scandal. The allegations were never corroborated, but Arbuckle became an instant pariah and was viciously blacklisted, even after three trials—the last resulting in his acquittal. During the Prohibition Era, simply holding a boozy party would’ve been enough of a shocker. Adding an accidental death in there only made it worse.

ROSCOE ‘FATTY’ ARBUCKLE, MUGSHOT

1922: The Vampire Comes to Light

F.W. Murnau made history with ‘Nosferatu’. Max Schreck played the legendary bloodsucker, and he pretty much paved the way for all the seductive monsters who later followed. Most movie vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Christopher Lee to even Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in ‘Interview with the Vampire’ (1994) depend on charisma to capture their prey. Which is why, to this day, it’s equally unsettling to see beautiful women crumple in sleepy ecstasy as Schreck’s grotesque and shrivelled Nosferatu approaches.

The film, an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’, is pure light and darkness, and Murnau’s ability to terrorize the audience the same way the vampire charms his victims stands out. It is considered by many to be the vampire’s first appearance on the silver screen, if one is to gloss over ‘Le Manoir du Diable’ by Georges Méliès.

MAX SCHRECK AS ‘NOSFERATU’ (1922), ©JOFA-ATELIER BERLIN-JOHANNISTHAL

1924: Eisenstein Makes His Debut

‘Stachka’, better known as ‘Strike’, was the exuberant first creation of a 26-year-old Sergei Eisenstein. He justified Lenin’s visionary policy of funding cinema as an important tool for both public education and social agitation. Armed with geometric expertise from his engineering studies, Eisenstein used the story of a 1912 locomotive factory attack to teach techniques for recognizing spies and provocateurs, as well as resisting the psychological toll of a long-term strike and opposing concessions.

The film is made up of a horizontal narrative that pits heroic workers against cartoonish capitalists, and a vertical dimension that experiments with form as it depicts an event from multiple angles. The speed resembles simultaneity, and it achieves the so-called ‘cubist’ montage since Eisenstein challenges Hollywood’s seamless concealment of edits with shock juxtapositions that jolt audiences out of their habitual perception.

‘STACHKA’ (1924), ©GOSKINO/PROLETKULT

1925: A Year Full of Wonders

Newly formed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer invested all its cash in an adaptation of Lew Wallace’s bestseller, ‘Ben Hur’. It cost $6 million to make, and action specialist B. Reeves Eason was commissioned to re-conceive the stage adaptation’s chariot race centrepiece, which featured horses on treadmills. This was the most expensive production of the silent era, using 42 cameras to capture the sheer pulse-racing dynamism of this 12-minute ‘film within a film’. Future filmmakers took notes from such a triumphant achievement. The fast-moving spectacle and kinetic excitement of the chariot scene could later be seen in Sergei Eisenstein’s ‘Alexander Nevsky’ (1937), George Lucas’s ‘Star Wars’ (1977), Zhang Yimou’s ‘Hero’ (2002), and also William Wyler’s remake of ‘Ben-Hur’ in 1939.

‘Battleship Potemkin’ (1925) seared itself into the memory of cinema with the same force as ‘Ben Hur’. The Odessa steps sequence in Eisenstein’s magnum opus is the textbook example of his excellent theories of montage, and it has been widely imitated—not to mention endlessly discussed. The Soviet director had a perfect understanding of the film medium’s propaganda potential, thus pushing the audience into easily identifying with the people against the barbaric Cossacks during this scene. The sequence is also a flawless illustration of his dictum that ‘montage is conflict’, achieved here on both form and content.

CHARLIE CHAPLIN IN ‘GOLD RUSH’ (1925), ©CHARLES CHAPLIN PRODUCTIONS

Charlie Chaplin had an indelible effect over the world of cinema with ‘The Gold Rush’. In 1951, Theodore Huff called it ‘probably Chaplin’s most celebrated picture’, and for good reason. Though ‘The Gold Rush’ is still a classic, viewers today likely remember him better for works such as ‘City Lights’ (1931) and ‘Modern Times’ (1936), but it deserves a chance at rediscovery. The film’s dream scene basically sums up many of Chaplin’s essential qualities: his interest in dream and fantasy, his love of improvisation and ingenuity, the tremendous concentration of his face, and his artful pathos.

‘The Phantom of the Opera’ by Rupert Julian took its own seat at the table among the giants of the big screen with its unmasking scene. Even today, it is unequalled as a ‘shock’ reveal of the monster. With Lon Chaney as the Phantom, known to have designed and applied his own make-up for this film, ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ brought the monster’s shock value into the spotlight, as the viewing reportedly caused many among the original audiences to faint.

LON CHANEY AND MARY PHILBIN IN ‘THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA’ (1925), ©UNIVERSAL PICTURES

1926: The Death of Rudolph Valentino

‘The Sheik’, a hypnotizing creature of the silent film era, should have perished in a swordfight or in a firing squad execution—or anything as dramatic as his memorable characters endured on celluloid. But Rudolph Valentino succumbed to a most undignified malady at the tragic age of 31. It was a fatal peritonitis precipitated by a bleeding ulcer that did him in, and something in the public imagination went unhinged when the receptacle for so much loving flat-out disappeared. Almost 100,000 people mobbed Valentino’s wake. Their hysterical surge towards the entrance blew up into a crushing riot. The bereft crowds that mobbed New York streets in the hours after their idol’s death had no precedent for how to behave in such an instance. They didn’t know what to do with themselves. Rudolph Valentino’s death pushed celebrity worship to first reveal its dark side in the aftermath of sudden tragedy.

VILMA BANKY AND RUDOLPH VALENTINO IN ‘THE SON OF THE SHEIK’ (1926), ©FEATURE PRODUCTIONS

1925: Sound in Film

‘The Jazz Singer’ is not the first motion picture with sound. Technically speaking, Thomas Edison’s original demonstration of movies was the first to fit images with gramophone records. ‘The Jazz Singer’ isn’t even an ‘all-talking, all-singing’ picture, either, but a silent that was supposed to burst into sound whenever Al Jolson’s character got up on stage to sing.

But this historic moment of sound in film came almost by accident, as the irrepressible entertainer improvised a bit of a preamble before launching into his big number. It paved the way for the musical as a major movie genre, and it told America’s audiences that the future was already here. That this future would be continuously astonishing.

AL JOLSON IN ‘THE JAZZ SINGER’ (1927), ©WARNER BROS.

Unfortunately, and looking back on a socially and politically complicated time in the United States of America, Al Jolson and director Michael Curtiz’s accomplishment is marred by the choice of using a most hideous and incredibly racist blackface mask for the main character. The history of film never was and will never be remembered as immaculate.

Contemporary cinema would not exist without the artistic and technological struggles of the past. Everything that makes our audio-visual experience an extraordinary one today finds its roots in things that seemed impossible roughly a hundred years ago. The wonder of moving pictures transcended all cultural and language barriers, stirring the paying public’s imagination and desire for more.

A good story can do the same, if not more, even today. Bong Joon-Ho’s ‘Parasite’ (2019) proved just that when it won the Academy Awards for Best Motion Picture of the Year and Best International Feature Film. But before ‘Parasite’ and other Oscar darlings hit the silver screen, luminaries of the early 20^th century strived to create movies for a world that had yet to fully grasp the beauty and historical importance of cinema.

To better understand the incredible evolution of this much beloved medium of artistic expression, we must peel away at the layers, decade by decade.

‘INTOLERANCE’ (1916) BY D. W. GRIFFITH, ©TRIANGLE FILM CORP

1906: The First Drama

26 December 1906. It was Boxing Day in the Commonwealth of Nations, and Proclamation Day in Australia. It also marked the opening of ‘The Story of the Kelly Gang’ at the Athenaeum Hall in Melbourne, proudly advertised as 4,000ft in length—roughly an hour’s runtime, which was longer than any other ‘feature’ film produced anywhere in the world.

Accompanied by an orchestra, sound effects, and a live narrator, the film was enormously popular. In the weeks that followed, ‘additional scenes’ were promoted, and multiple screenings took place all over the country. It even made it to the United Kingdom in 1907 and still billed as ‘the longest film ever made’, telling the story of the Kelly gang, notorious ‘bushrangers’ who became folk heroes for their defiance of authority and for their daring raids.

THE STORY OF THE KELLY GANG’ (1906)

Ever since the capture and the hanging of the real Ned Kelly back in 1880, his gang’s deeds had become an iconic piece of Australian popular culture. Canadian actor Frank Mills played the lead role of Ned, alongside Elizabeth Tait and John Tait. Primarily responsible for this production was a family of successful theatre entrepreneurs—John, Nevin, and Charles Tait, the latter also its director. As some of the actors’ names will have already evidenced, members of their big family were also part of the cast.

‘The Story of the Kelly Gang’ was also made possible by the involvement of Millard Johnson and William Gibson, two chemists who’d taken an interest in film and, much like the Taits, had previously shown film programmes to large crowds in Melbourne. Unfortunately, and despite its roaring success, only fragments of the world’s first dramatic feature film survive today.

1908: D.W. Griffith Begins His Directorial Work at Biograph

He was merely a barely successful actor and aspiring writer when he approached the New York production house ‘The American Mutoscope & Biograph Co.’ with ideas for a few stories. His interest was noticed when he was acting on the set of one of the company’s productions, and when the house director fell ill, D.W. Griffith was offered the job on 18 June of that year.

Funny enough, Mr Griffith seemed reluctant in accepting the role at the time, worried that if he failed, it would also jeopardize his career as a writer and actor. One of Biograph’s two in-house cameramen, Billy Bitzer, gave him some coaching in film directing. From the available synopses, Mr Griffith chose ‘The Adventures of Dollie’ as his first movie, since it could be filmed on locations away from the eyes of his bosses. Despite his initial concerns, the first short film ventures were all crackling successes which led to Griffith’s becoming the studio’s principal producer-director until his departure in 1913.

D.W. GRIFFITH (2875-1948), ©GETTY IMAGES

This decision from Biograph ultimately positioned D.W. Griffith to play a major role in the shaping of the American cinema. Around 450 films—roughly his entire output at Biograph (1908-1913) survived, providing an inestimable marker for the transition from early cinema to the golden era of Hollywood. What made his work at Biograph seminal for the entire industry was his fearlessness in adapting existing filmic devices to the demand of storytelling.

He was at the forefront of breaking up the film narrative into a constantly growing number of shots and inserting crosscuts for suspense, or to contrast ways of life, or to get moral points across. In that sense, Mr Griffith elevated the cinematic industry to a whole new level. He combined imaginative shot selections with an eye for composition and location, along with the intensity of characterisation and performance. Griffith also played a key role in transforming the thespian art from histrionic to more realistic styles.

1910: Cinema Proves It’s More Than Seeing and Hearing

‘A Trip to Davy Jones’ Locker’ was only known by its English title when it was rediscovered in 1934 during a screening of John Grierson’s ‘The Song of Ceylon’ at the Film Society in London. All we know of it, to this day, is that it’s a French production and likely one of the first examples of ‘colour being applied direct on to the positive film’.

No one knows who directed it, or the actors’ names. This French féerie made history, however, and its nitrate copy was eventually housed at the British Film Institute. From a colourist’s point of view, it was truly an epiphany. ‘Blue, yellow, red tinting and toning were still leaping from the emulsion; splashes of other stencilled colours exploded in consecutive images until they filled the entire frame’, Paolo Cherchi Usai remembered.

©BART EVERSON/COCA COLA (NOT ACTUAL FOOTAGE FROM ‘A TRIP TO DAVY JONES’ LOCKER’)

It was proof that early cinema was more of a multisensory experience than we’d originally thought. There were modern copies of the film, but Mr Usai said it wasn’t the same, that the magic was gone. ‘I don’t know if the original still exists. […] it may be gone forever, in which case it will remain beautiful for as long as I can project it in my mind.’

1912: The Introduction of Panchromatic Film

Léon Gaumont asked Kodak to devise a new kind of film stock for the colour process he was developing, named Chronochrome. He needed an emulsion sensitive to the entire spectrum of visible radiations. Prior to his request, filmmakers had been using orthochromatic film, which required a modest amount of light. It was, however, fully sensitive only to certain colours (violet and blue), partially ‘blind’ to yellow and green, and unable to capture red objects at all—lipstick and roses appeared as black spots on the screen, which forced the set designers to paint their decors accordingly.

EXAMPLE OF ORTHOCHROMATIC VS. PANCHROMATIC FILM, ©TWOSTRIPTECHNICOLOR/TUMBLR

Panchromatic stock changed everything. It offered an almost infinite range of greys to the cameramen, allowing directors like Josef von Sternberg to become masters of the chiaroscuro style. It changed the way we perceived moving images, as well. Requiring much stronger set lights, panchromatic stock also meant the loss of the distinctive orthochromatic look, which can be easily observed on any original film print before the 1920s. ‘The Headless Horseman’ (1922) was the first feature-length film entirely made with the new emulsion.

1914: The Death of Intertitles

Aficionados of early cinema works will surely remember Lydia Quaranta and Umberto Mozzato in Giovani Pastrone’s ‘Cabiria’. However, not everyone knows how Pastrone lured the greedy Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio with a check of 50,000 Liras (a huge sum back then) in exchange for his agreement to appear as the ‘author’ of the film. It was a stroke of genius from a marketing point of view, and it helped push Italian cinema beyond the highbrow intellectuals’ contempt.

POSTER FOR ‘CABIRIA’ (1914), ©LATIN FILMS

D’Annunzio’s contribution was minimal, at best, as he’d offered the first draft of the intertitles and a few suggestions regarding the characters’ names. Over the years, it became obvious that ‘Cabiria’ was Pastrone’s vision, with barely a symbolic input from D’Annunzio. What was striking about the film was its camerawork, and not its flamboyant intertitles, which were so convoluted at times that not even an Italian reader could make sense out of them.

Some were still considered as miniature poems, the last one being particularly ambiguous as it could either reflect Cabiria’s love for her hero, or the filmmaker’s love for cinema. Either way, D’Annunzio’s texts for ‘Cabiria’ were the last intertitles in a movie.

1915: A Nation Is Born on the Silver Screen

D.W. Griffith’s creation was widely recognized as the first masterpiece of American cinema. ‘The Birth of a Nation’ is, to this day, begrudgingly recognized as a key moment in the evolution of the film art. It’s impossible to separate its innovative style from the inflammatory racial issues it depicts.

It wasn’t the first time that Griffith’s thought and form blended in an unpalatable fashion. ‘The Escape’ was basically a disturbing defence of eugenics as a tool for social reform. But it was the very first shot of ‘The Birth of a Nation’ that underlined his persistence in protesting all forms of cultural censorship, convinced that he was simply telling an uncomfortable truth. This first shot makes his point crystal clear: the deportation of African slaves to America was the original sin, and the Puritan settlers of the Northern states were responsible for it.

‘BIRTH OF A NATION’ (1915), ©JERRY TAVIN/EVERETT COLLECTION

In his view, the Civil War that followed between the North and the Confederate states was pure hypocrisy, dividing a nation with the pretext of defending egalitarian values which the Unionists had been the first to deny as former slave traders. The film revealed Griffith’s political thought, and it was one of the earliest ‘conversation starters’ in American cinema—as well as one of its most racist. Talk about a controversial heritage…

1916: The French Introduce the Supervillain

We’ll end this lush decade of cinematic development with Louis Feuillade’s ‘Les Vampires’, the fifth episode of a mysterious French saga that got people talking almost as much as Griffith’s ‘Birth of a Nation’.

The film alternated scenes of people returning to consciousness and people losing it. The thief Moréno, played by Fernand Hermann, was the archrival of the Vampires’ criminal gang. Irma, portrayed by Musidora, was his sexy accomplice.

‘MUSIDORA AS IRMA IN ‘LES VAMPIRES’ (1915)

This exciting, devious formula of the supervillain and his right hand was incredibly successful—the characters wore disguises and turned the devices of modernity against the people that they’d been invented to help. It turned criminal anarchy and terror into entertainment, which Feuillade, in turn, made into art.

It seems like ages ago that the film industry came to life. Discussing cinema today wouldn’t be possible without the decades of technological and artistic progress dating back to the end of the 19th century. Sometimes, we seem to forget exactly how fortunate we are that this medium exists, and that we are able to create immortal pieces of art through it. With that in mind, and solely for the purpose of a most absorbing and instructive experience, we’ve decided to sift through the dusty pages of cinematic history and take a trip down celluloid memory lane.

The first decade of cinema history pretty much begins in 1895. Up to that point, mankind’s main forms of entertainment revolved around literature, theatre, the visual arts (painting and ballet, for the most part), musical concertos, and storytelling. But the moving image as an art form was difficult to establish, mainly due to technical insufficiencies. Apart from the magic lantern phantasmagoria shows of the 18th century and the camera obscura, we didn’t get to the seedlings of cinema until the development of chronophotography. 

This was an antique photographic technique of the Victorian era, which captured movement in several frames of print. These, in turn, could be subsequently arranged either like animation boards or layered into a single frame. It started with Eadward Muybridge’s studies of the motion of animals and humans, swiftly followed by other esteemed chronophotographers such as Étienne Jules Marey, Ottomar Anschütz, and Georges Demenÿ. These efforts led to viewing moving images through zoetropes, and later to animating the same sequences into short films.

CHRONOPHOTOGRAPHY ON A FIXED DISK WITH A ROTATING MIRROR, 1888, BY ÉTIENNE JULES MAREY

The real breakthrough came through the invention and the progression of the camera, then merely fastened to tripods. Once the aspiring filmmakers had this first device, they were able to shoot and screen their earliest work.

1895: The Film Luminaries Who Made History

It all started with the Lumière brothers, who gave us the first camera movements by mounting the camera on a moving vehicle. ‘Arrival of a Train at Ciotat Station’ was basically a scene from the back of a train, and it was screened on December 28th, 1895 for paying customers. This marked the birth of cinema as entertainment and of motion-picture exhibition as a business.

ARRIVAL OF A TRAIN AT LA CIOTAT STATION (1895), ©LUMIÉRE

Auguste and Louis Lumière were manufacturers of photographic products from Lyon, France, and they were responsible for devising the patented apparatus capable of both photographing motion on film stock and projecting its results onto a screen. Prior to their December showing, they’d managed to introduce their ‘Cinématographe’ to Parisian industrialists and scientists, playing the one film they’d shot at the time: ‘Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory’. Later, they were able to produce more ‘views’, as they called them, further arousing interest among photography specialists.

THE BROTHERS LUMIÉRE

But it was ‘Arrival of a Train at Ciotat Station’ that was a truly seminal moment, as they introduced the new wonder machine to the general public. The premiere took place in a room called the ‘Salon Indien’ in the basement of the Grand Café on Boulevard des Capucines, close to the Opéra, which could seat about a hundred people. There were four evening shows on that historic date in December 1895, and they brought in a mere 35 francs—which didn’t cover the brothers’ expenses, but business rapidly picked up afterwards. 

Long lines of eager spectators stretched across the boulevard, and the success drove the Lumière brothers to rent a new and larger venue in April 1896. They called it ‘Cinéma Lumière’.

1896: Stop Motion by Mistake

An accident was at the origin of the development of the first special effects in cinema, and Georges Méliès was responsible for this amazing breakthrough. His rudimentary first camera was prone to jamming, a defect which, according to Mr Méliès, ‘produced an unexpected effect one day when I was prosaically photographing the Place de l’Opéra. It took a minute to unblock the film and get the camera going again. During this minute, passers-by, buses, cars had changed their places, of course. In projecting the film, joined together again at the point where the break had occurred, I suddenly saw a Madeleine-Bastille bus change into a hearse, and men change into women’.

GEORGES MÉLIÈS

He had stumbled upon an exquisite and crucial trick which he quickly transformed into an intentional application with ‘Escamotage d’Une Dame au Thèâtre Robert Houdin (The Vanishing Lady)’ in October 1896. Discovering discontinuity within the apparent continuity of existence later paved the way for the enduring art of stop-motion animation, best represented by Willis O’Brien’s ‘The Lost World’ (1925), followed by ‘King Kong’ (1933), and by Ray Harryhausen’s ‘The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms’ (1953) and ‘Jason and the Argonauts’ (1963).

‘CORALINE’ (2009), ©FOCUS FEATURES/LAIKA ENTERTAINMENT

More recent examples of glorious stop motion animation films include ‘Coraline’ (2009) by Henry Selick and based on Neil Gaiman’s superb children’s book, ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’ (1993) by Tim Burton, and ‘Isle of Dogs’ (2018) by Wes Anderson. In an era of CGI and special effects, stop motion animations have become veritable gems of cinematic passion.

1897: The World of Cinema Evolves

Three key events best defined this year. First, Robert William Paul developed the first rotating camera, which was able to take panning shots. He used it on the occasion of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. Panning describes the movement of one’s camera horizontally, either left to right or right to left, while its base is fixed on a certain point, and it’s an excellent method of establishing a sense of location within the story. D.W Griffith was one known adept of the panning shots, using them not only to provide visual information, but also to engage the audience in the complete environment of his films.

QUEEN VICTORIA’S DIAMOND JUBILEE (1897)

Second, Georges Méliès built one of the first film studios in May 1897. Conceived after the model of large still photography studios, it had three glass walls and a glass roof, and it was fitted with thin pieces of cotton fabric which could be stretched to diffuse the brighter sunlight. From that studio, Mr Méliès went on to produce, direct, and distribute more than 500 short films—most of them one-shot pieces completed in one take.

GEORGES MÉLIÈS’ STUDIO

Third, the world’s first film archive was established, now considered an unfulfilled promise of historical awareness. Robert William Paul donated some of his films to the British Museum, hoping they would begin acquiring other reproductions of notable events in the form of moving pictures. The venerable institution didn’t really know what to do with the reels, however, and there never was a second donation. The first film archive was a mystery even for its owners. Denmark and Sweden tried the same later in the early 20th century, but there’s a certain pathos in the British precedent—there are hundreds of film archives all over the world today, yet their status is as fragile today as it was in 1897.

1901: Fatal Attraction, Beta Version

Films made before 1906 were generally categorized as ‘cinema of attractions’, a form of narration based on a single event of curious, extraordinary or otherwise remarkable nature—a train arriving in a station, the expression of a man suffering from indigestion, the grimaces of a playful child, and so on.

Georges Méliès’ ‘The Brahmin and the Butterfly’ is something else entirely. At first glance, it’s a two-minute scene, apparently made in a single shot, but there are in fact optical tricks that required in-camera editing. This wonderfully hand-coloured oriental garden of events depicts a Brahmin who summons a large caterpillar with his magic flute, then puts it into a cocoon, thus giving life to a gorgeous female butterfly.

‘THE BRAHMIN AND THE BUTTERLY’ (1901)

Mesmerized by her beauty, the Brahmin wraps the butterfly in a striped cloth, and she turns into a ravishing Hindu princess. The man declares his unrequited love, only to see his courtship rebuffed, ending up with his head under her foot, then suddenly transformed into a crawling caterpillar similar to the one at the beginning of the story. Originally titled ‘La Chrysalide et le Papillon’, Méliès’ film is the most concise and cynical tale of ‘fatal attraction’ or ‘amor fou’. It’s the first of its kind, and possibly also the meanest.

1903: American Cinema Takes Centre Stage

The early 20th century can best be described by the speed with which cinema advanced and its visionary pioneers. Prominent among them is Edwin S. Porter, a jack-of-all-trades of turn-of-the-century America who is credited as the first filmmaker to assemble separate individual shots into a continuous sequence of parallel actions.

‘THE LIFE OF AN AMERICAN FIREFIGHTER’ (1903)

He began his foray into the film industry when he joined the company that marketed Thomas A. Edison’s Vitascope back in 1896. Later teaming up with Mr Edison in New York as a machinist, then as a projectionist, Mr Porter finally had the opportunity to shoot and edit his own film. In 1903, he combined stock footage of horse-drawn fire engines leaving a fire station house with staged sequences of firemen saving a woman from a burning house. Crosscuts of the rescue both inside and outside the building were compressed into a six-minute film that, for the first time, created the illusion of linear continuity.

JUSTUS D. BARNES IN ‘THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY’ (1903)

After ‘The Life of an American Fireman’, Mr Porter went on to create over 50 movies. Among them, his most memorable and a true masterpiece of its era remains ‘The Great Train Robbery’, also filmed in 1903. With the former, he gave us the first film where single shots were edited together to form a narrative story. With the latter, he gave us one of the best-known shots in primitive cinema—the outlaw firing at the camera. This moment of Justus D. Barnes’ outlaw character looking directly at the camera lens and emptying his revolver point blank at the audience has often been imitated since, and for good reason, too. It remains wickedly effective even for the more sophisticated modern audience. 

1905: Little Hitchcock Goes to Jail

Around this time, Alfred Hitchcock recalled having ended up in prison, though he was only a child. According to Donald Spotto’s ‘The Dark Side of Genius’, which dates back from 1979, Mr Hitchcock repeated a quite memorable anecdote: ‘When I was no more than six years of age, I did something that my father considered worthy of reprimand. He sent me to the local police station with a note. The officer on duty read it and locked me in a jail cell for five minutes, saying “This is what we do to naughty boys”’. He told François Truffaut the same story 17 years earlier, and both times, he could not remember what he’d been punished for.

JUSTUS D. BARNES IN ‘THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY’ (1903)

Mr Hitchcock did go on to state numerous times that his youthful incarceration might have played a part in his subsequent interest in crime and punishment. This aforementioned insistence that he didn’t know his ‘crime’ also connects to his films’ repeated emphasis on unjust penalties: in ‘The 39 Steps’ (1935), Richard Hannay is plunged into a nightmare for showing casual sexual interest; in ‘Strangers on a Train’ (1951), Guy Haines is punished for simply desiring his wife’s death; in ‘The Wrong Man’ (1956), Manny Balestrero is persecuted by a Kafkaesque justice system; and in ‘Psycho’ (1960), Marion Crane is murdered after deciding to do the right thing and return the money she stole from her employer.

Whether it is true or not, Mr Hitchcock’s prison anecdote certainly goes to show exactly how personal his work really was. In fact, most of cinema’s early productions revolve around a most intimate side of the filmmakers—their own lives and their daily observations. The very events that sparked their interest and their imagination gave birth to what is now a multi-billion-dollar industry that shows absolutely no sign of stopping. And we wouldn’t have it any other way.