Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 6 No. 24, September 2002
Marcus Doel
Pivotal Film History
Georges Melies as a Vanishing Mediator
Elizabeth Ezra _Georges Melies: The Birth
of the Auteur_ Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2000 ISBN 071905396 x + 166 pp. Elizabeth Ezra's almost
pocket-sized book on Georges Melies -- magician and film
pioneer -- is part of Manchester University Press's 'French
Film Directors' series. According to the series editors,
Diana Holmes and Robert Ingram, the series 'is designed for
students and teachers seeking information and accessible but
rigorous critical study of French cinema, and for the
enthusiastic filmgoer who wants to know more' (vii). They
'intend the series to contribute to the promotion of the
informal and formal study of French films, and to the
pleasure of those who watch them' (viii). Despite having almost
nothing whatsoever to say about why one should be interested
in either French cinema per se, or French film directors
specifically, the book no doubt succeeds in conveying a
considerable amount of information about the 500 or so films
that Georges Melies was involved in making between 1896 and
1912, for the benefit of those students, teachers, and
filmgoers who have such an interest. The book contains a
useful list of around 170 of the surviving films -- complete
with French and English titles, estimated lengths (in
metres), and years of production (although there is no
specific information on their archive location) -- and a
lightly-annotated bibliography of some influential studies
of Melies and early French cinema. Since the book is mostly
empiricist, with an encyclopaedic bent, there is a lot of
information about Melies's films for the interested reader
to engage with. This information is spread across four
substantive chapters that deal with his cinematic trickery,
fantastic realism, flying and disappearing women, and
imaginary voyages. And yet, amid the seemingly endless
proliferation of lists and film descriptions, there is also
a brief illustration of the relevance of contemporary film
theory to Melies's films: Georges Melies and Christian Metz
(34-48). This illustration is brief because it is simply
meant to demonstrate the affinity between our time and
Melies's time, and so close the gaping chasm that has been
opened up between the so-called 'cinema of attractions' on
the one hand, and 'narrative cinema' and its avant-garde
adversaries on the other: to sweep away the widely-held but
crass notion that 'films before Griffith and theory after
Bazin were separated by an unbreachable divide' (34). The
fundamental thing for Ezra is that Melies was one of us. So,
we must refuse the temptation to treat Melies's films as if
they had 'the status of 'primitive otherness'', and
recognize in them a 'kinship with the work of later
film-makers, as well as [their] suitability for
analysis using techniques of structuralist,
post-structuralist, and post-post-structuralist film theory'
(151). Editing, montage, narration, sublation, surrealism,
etc., can all be found in Melies's oeuvre. Whence Ezra's
ambivalence about the specific affinity between Melies and
Metz that she is deploying in order to demonstrate the
essential contemporaneity -- or 'shared kinship' (35) -- of
*all* filmmaking and film theory. Rather than Melies and
Metz, it could no doubt have been Melies and
any-film-theorist-whatsoever. Indeed, she sets the scene for
the encounter between Melies's filmmaking and Metz's film
theory by noting that she will be bringing 'quite dated'
(34) concepts to bear on the earliest films: a structuralist
analysis developed in the mid-1960s (Metz's model of the
grande syntagmatique). Despite this ambivalence, Ezra lists
eight elements of Metz's model which are fully-illustrated
by excerpts from Melies's films: insert, parallel syntagma,
bracket syntagma, descriptive syntagma, alternating
syntagma, scene, episodic sequence, and ordinary
sequence. Furthermore, it is not
entirely clear why Melies has been selected for special
attention, other than the contingent fact that this series
takes a director-based approach to French cinema. While it
may well be true that Melies was a 'pioneering' filmmaker
who 'was personally involved in every aspect of production'
(17), filmmaking in this period was inevitably a collective
enterprise, not least because plagiarism was effectively the
rule of the game. Moreover, this innovative plagiarism was
itself based on a highly-sophisticated visual culture awash
with all manner of optical novelties and long-standing
techniques for producing 'living pictures': everything from
camera obscura, magic lanterns, and flick books, to
peep-shows, panoramas, and dioramas. All of the pioneering
editing practices that Ezra finds in the work of Melies were
already well rehearsed in other media: especially on paper
(literally). In short, one may suspect that Melies can be
made to stand out in film history only because he has been
cut out from a wider historical geography of animated and
living pictures. The absence of this broader context
considerably hampers the book. Indeed, it is almost as if
one were watching Melies through an iris diaphragm as it
closes. While the choice of both
Melies and Metz may appear arbitrary, there is, however, a
more persuasive rationale. 'The distinction of 'primitive'
par excellence has always been reserved for Melies' (3). His
work is the foremost example of the so-called 'primitive
mode of representation' (2), whose traits of depthlessness,
frontal presentation, histrionic acting, unicity of frame,
noncentred image, medium long-shot, and narrative
non-closure are anathema to the narrative cinema which
achieved hegemony around 1906, and found its apogee in the
Hollywood studio system. So, if Ezra can rid Melies of his
apparent primitivism and irrealism, then the whole edifice
of theory, history, and practice which is built upon it will
topple. Specifically, the primitive otherness of early film
is often attributed to its emphasis on *spectacle*
(theatrical attraction) rather than *narrative* (cinematic
story-telling). It is supposed to be 'more 'show' than
'tell'' (3). Whence the turn to Metz, who was one of the
first theorists to insist on this distinction as a way to
differentiate 'moving photographs' from film proper. So, 'to
invoke Metz as a way of demonstrating narrative complexity
in Melies is to pit Metz against himself' (34), and thereby
to deconstruct the fundamental distinction between early
film and modern film. Since the narrative case has already
been made for the Lumiere films, and 'all of the seeds have
been planted for establishing the narrative force of
Melies's films' (4), it turns out to be rather easy to
uncover the tell-tale signs of narrative in Melies's
filmmaking. By drawing on the well-established narrative
structure of tableaux, 'he was able to tell stories within a
single scene' (33). Put simply, his single-shot films used
mise-en-scene to fulfil a narrative function. This
''montage' without editing' was spatially rather than
temporally arrayed: 'enframed rather than emplotted' (36).
Even still lives tell stories. All in all, then, 'Melies's
place in film history' (3) requires us to reassess how we
conceptualize film history itself. Specifically, Ezra wants
to move us beyond the equation of early film (c.1895-1906)
with either a 'primitive mode of representation' or a
'cinema of attractions' towards something else: the
combination and permutation of reproduction, spectacle, and
narration; a 'continuous tension between narrative and
spectacle, rather than a series of mutually exclusive
epistemological breaks' (48). Such is the implicit
structuralism that animates an ostensibly empiricist text.
'Rather than a progression from recording (Lumiere) to
spectacle (Melies) to narrative (nearly everyone who
followed, with the exception of certain avant-garde
filmmakers), film history is made up of different
combinations of all three elements. Melies's films, like
most films, both show and tell' (5). By refusing to estrange
the practices of early filmmaking from those of modern
filmmaking, Ezra attempts to dispel three myths about
Melies: that he only made fairytales and fantasies
characterized by childlike naivete; that he used theatrical
rather than truly cinematic techniques; and that his films
were largely devoid of narrative content, and so beyond the
reach of modern film theory. Through the detailed analysis
of innumerable films across a wide range of genres, Ezra
argues that Melies not only 'performed magic in front of the
camera . . . he also performed magic in the editing room'
(24). He was one of the first to use and refine substitution
splicing (i.e. stop-motion), multiple exposure, dissolves,
matte shots, model shots, point-of-view shots, replication
effects, transparency, panning and tracking effects,
close-ups, staging in depth, montage, and overlapping
editing. Whence 'the modernity of Melies's work' (46),
despite the many constraints under which he and other
filmmakers of the period worked -- such as an overwhelming
reliance on natural lighting, indoor shooting, immobile
cameras, short lengths of film stock, histrionic codes of
acting, lecturers, and unregulated exhibition. Beyond mere encyclopaedism
and illustrated film theory, then, the point of the book is
to demystify early film in general, and Melies's place
within film history in particular. Basically, Ezra
forcefully insists that neither early films nor Melies
should be estranged and excluded from the concerns of
contemporary film practice, film studies, and film theory.
This is excellent advice. The comeuppance of Ezra's
demystification is twofold. First: 'What is most clear is
that Melies was a Janus-faced figure linking two centuries:
he drew upon and developed the theatrical traditions of the
nineteenth, but he also had a profound influence on
cinematic art of the twentieth' (151). Melies was a pivot of
film history, and Ezra compiles lots of case-notes to prove
it. Second, Melies effectively took command of the
cinematographe, a late-nineteenth-century 'optical novelty'
that Louis Lumiere famously described to him as 'an
invention without a future'. [1] (And while the
novelty-value of 'living photographs' was rather short lived
-- with interest waning even in the 1890s -- the
self-serving hyperbole continues to live on.) Indeed, Melies
was pivotal in giving film a future: of making films worthy
of a future -- both as a technology for miraculously
engineering space and time, and as a popular form of
commodified mass entertainment. Above all, 'he was an auteur
in every sense, and his work paved the way for future
auteurs' (151), writes Ezra, having noted earlier that 'such
absolute independence would never again be possible' (17).
Little wonder, then, that Ezra should conclude her study by
lamenting the fact that 'Melies's work has been detached
from the body of film history. The traditional opposition
between Melies and Lumiere has long been dismantled; it is
now time to question the rigidity of the distinction between
Melies and the century of film-makers he has (so far)
inspired' (151). On that note the book ends. I think that Ezra is
absolutely right to reject both the difference in kind that
is often set up between early filmmaking and modern
filmmaking, and the difference in degree that regards the
former as nothing more than an incomplete, inferior, and
ultimately flawed version of the latter. However, I think
that Ezra is wrong to elide the difference and argue for the
continuity and contemporaneity of early and modern
filmmaking. There is much more at stake in reassessing
Melies's place in film history than merely welcoming him
into our extended family and slotting his work into a matrix
of cinematic combinations and permutations. Indeed, while
the book suggests that a reassessment of Melies will disturb
film history and film theory, the coupling of early and
modern filmmaking has all of the explosive and revolutionary
potential of one of Hollywood's happy heterosexual endings.
No matter how much the pivotal characters deviate from the
norm, one always has the impression that nothing will come
of it. When all is said and done, film history and film
theory are shaken but not stirred. We are simply asked to
let Melies take his rightful place in the pantheon of
cinematic auteurs. It seems to me that in her
eagerness to demystify film history and film theory, Ezra
has missed the essential point about early film. Rather than
consisting of a set of practices that may or may not add up
to something truly 'other', 'primitive', or 'alternative',
early filmmaking existed as an untotalizable *problematic*.
This is why one should take Louis Lumiere's apocryphal quip
literally: his cinematographe really was an 'invention
without a future'. Take the London-based _The Optical Magic
Lantern Journal and Photographic Enlarger_ of the 1890s and
1900s: the equipment, techniques, practices, contexts, and
uses of 'living photography' all posed considerable problems
-- for filmmakers, exhibitors, audiences, and other media.
If Melies is to be considered a pivot of film history, then
it is not because he employed this or that set of cinematic
techniques, but because he was able to isolate a specific
problem for which film would become the solution (just as
Marx can be considered a pivot of political history insofar
as he isolated a specific problem for which the working
class would become the solution: the antagonistic nature of
capitalism). However, for all of the detailed
demystification of Melies in Ezra's book, there is little
engagement with this pivotal issue. Moreover, to encounter
early filmmaking as a problematic rather than as a regime or
a matrix is to disrupt what we take for granted about
filmmaking, exhibition, and reception, and about film qua
film. These untimely disruptions vanish almost without trace
in Ezra's familial tale. As for Georges Melies himself, he
is made to disappear during the course of the Introduction.
He is treated as if he were merely a magician's assistant
whose sole purpose was to facilitate a seemingly impossible
feat of transformation: of the 'primitive otherness' of
early film as a 'cinema of attractions' into modern film
pure and simple. 'Like the running story
lines that Melies brought to disparate tricks in his magic
acts, the seminal moments that punctuate his life can be
strung together to form a cohesive narrative, bringing a
sense of purpose and meaning to what might otherwise appear
as little more than a series of spectacular feats. This
narrative may be called Melies's Life Story' (6). It boils
down to this. The French-speaking Melies went to
English-speaking London in 1884, and took solace in the
visual spectacles of the pantomime, through which he
encountered all manner of fantastical creatures unfettered
by the laws of physics, and acquired a passion for a certain
class of magic act interwoven with narrative that both
amused and amazed audiences. With an interest in fantasy
(*feeries*), trickery (magic), automata, and optical
novelties, Melies took charge of the Theatre Robert-Houdin
in Paris in 1888. Eventually, these interests found
themselves articulated through a new medium once Melies
experienced his life-changing encounter with the public
debut of the Lumiere cinematographe on the 28th of December
1895. 'As he sat spellbound in that darkened room, the
master illusionist realized that the power of film was no
illusion: 'I immediately said, That's the thing for me . . .
an extraordinary trick!'' (12). Previously, he had been
'waiting to be impressed' (1). The rest, as they say, is
history: 'film's seemingly magical effects, such as
dissolves, splicing, and multiple exposure, became the basic
vocabulary of realist film. Film history is in fact the
story of this shift, this process of turning magic into
reality; and Melies is the magician who first performed this
feat' (2). The problem with this account is that Ezra takes
for granted that Melies and others were overwhelmingly
impressed by the power of film, and she begins her study
with the obligatory spectacle of unsuspecting audiences
being left awestruck by seeing for the first time realistic
images of vehicles coming out of the screen: horse-drawn
carts, bicycles, motor-cars, and especially trains. 'In the
early days of cinema, watching a film . . . was an
experience unlike any other that had been known before' (2).
To the contrary. Consider in this regard Rev. Edward
Stanley's recollection of the opening of the Liverpool and
Manchester railway line: 'In the rapid movement of
these engines, there is an optical deception worth noticing.
A spectator observing their approach, when at extreme speed,
can scarcely divest himself of the idea, that they are not
enlarging and increasing in size rather than moving. I know
not how to explain my meaning better, than by referring to
the enlargement of objects in a phantasmagoria. At first the
image is barely discernible, but as it advances from the
focal point, it seems to increase beyond all limit. Thus an
engine, as it draws near, appears to become rapidly
magnified, and as if it would fill up the entire space
between the banks, and absorb everything within its vortex'.
[2] So, even real trains could
function as optical novelties and static vehicles. Their
novelty consisted in the fact that they did not move: they
grew. Indeed, the optical oddity of regarding
three-dimensional movement as if it were two-dimensional
expansion was famously exploited by Melies himself in _The
Man with the Rubber Head_ (1901). Having played his pivotal
role as Ezra's vanishing mediator, Melies will only reappear
throughout the rest of the book as a ghostly after-image. He
returns as a repertoire of editing techniques that have
always already been drawn into the combinations and
permutations of the cinematic matrix. Ironically, by giving
Melies a pivotal position in film history he is all the more
concealed from us. Accordingly, there is almost no trace of
Melies himself in the book's Index. All but twelve of its
entries are people and film titles. These residual entries
are: advertisements, cinema of attractions, deep staging,
documentary, erotic films, *feerie*, Musee Grevin,
pornography, realism, science fiction, stag films, and
staging in depth. Meanwhile, the specificity of the 1890s
and 1900s also disappear almost without trace, along with
the transformations of the city, everyday life, and visual
culture. Even Paris, France, and Europe vanish from the
scene. Only fin-de-siecle imperial rivalries and gender
relations retain a significant presence: and only then
because they are impressed upon us in the content of many of
Melies's films. So, Melies becomes for Ezra a good example
of male anxiety about female sexuality. The prevalence of
flying women and disappearing women in many of his films is
interpreted as playing to the voyeurism and revenge
fantasies of men with 'womb envy' -- 'the male magician
appropriates the role of reproductive agent' (94). 'The
desire for mastery, the wish to see punished those who
threatened to disrupt established social order, was an
explicit component of the literary genre from which Melies's
*feeries* ultimately derived: the fairy tale' (99). As for
Melies's 'outrageous flights of fancy', it is 'as if his
voyage films were compensating for the camera's immobility'
(118). Moreover, Ezra is keen to locate them in a context of
imperial anxiety: 'the old world is shown in confrontation
with the new; the inevitable collisions depicted in these
films -- the smashing of cars into buildings, the crash
landings of airbuses and rocket ships -- suggest . . . the
collision of different cultural traditions and collective
identities' (119). On this basis, _A Trip to the Moon_
(1902) 'can easily be read as a parable of colonial
conflict', in which 'Melies mocks the pretensions of
colonialist accounts of the conquest of one culture by
another' (120). Nevertheless, 'many of his films trade in
exoticism (and indeed, in overt racism)' (142), and 'the
value placed on exoticism indicates a desire to preserve
cultural differences that were threatened with disappearance
as contact between different cultures increased' (146). So,
although we often associate Melies with innocent and
infantile fantasies, his films reflected the social and
political anxieties of the time, and he actually worked in
all of the emerging genres (including panoramas,
advertising, and re-enactments). In addition, even his
fantasy films strove for realism. In fact, Ezra reminds us
that Melies helped problematize the very distinction between
reality and fantasy, but that distinction had been
problematized since at least the sixteenth century, and its
instability was something of an obsession in
nineteenth-century visual culture, as the experience of Rev.
Stanley suggests. Overall, Ezra does a good
job of dispelling the dominant myths that hamper a full and
proper appreciation of early film in general and Melies in
particular. She also provides a considerable amount of
information about many of Melies's films that will be of
great interest to students, teachers, and filmgoers.
However, I think that the book is let down by its failure to
question the apparent self-evidence that Melies has a
pivotal place in film history, film theory, and film
practice. This failure has two main causes. First, Melies
and his films are isolated from broader considerations of
late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century visual culture
-- yet much of what happened in these formative years of
filmmaking is only intelligible in relation to a wider set
of practices, values, and institutions. Second, and much
more importantly, Ezra fails to appreciate the fundamental
contingency of film's emergence as a medium for engineering
space and time. Unlike Melies's own experimental engagement
with a problematic 'invention without a future', Ezra's film
history -- like virtually all film histories -- remains
settled. In this case, it settles on a certain set of
ready-made editing techniques and the inseparability of
showing and telling. We are still a very long way from
composing film histories and film theories that live up to
the challenge of film itself. In conclusion, I cannot help
but feel that Ezra has given us a rather good *still life*
when we, rather like Georges Melies, were 'waiting to be
impressed' (1) by the promise of a truly *living
photograph*. University of Wales
Swansea Footnotes 1. See Ian Christie, _The
Last Machine: Early Cinema and the Birth of the Modern
World_ (London: British Film Institute/BBC, 1994), p. 95;
and also Marcus Doel and David Clarke, 'An Invention without
a Future, a Solution without a Problem: Motor Pirates, Time
Machines and Drunkenness on the Screen', in Rob Kitchin and
James Kneale, eds, _Lost in Space: Geographies of Science
Fiction_ (London: Continuum, 2002), pp. 136-155. 1. Rev. Edward Stanley, 'The
Railer', _Blackwood's Magazine_, no. 28, 1830, p. 825.
Copyright ©
_Film-Philosophy_ 2002 Marcus Doel, 'Pivotal Film
History: Georges Melies as a Vanishing Mediator',
_Film-Philosophy_, vol. 6 no. 24, September 2002
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n24doel>.
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