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The close relation of the two traditions of early film may be seen in the works of Buster Keaton, who grew up in variety theatre and retained a love of stunts. There too he learned his great trademark, the Stone Face. The Playhouse (1921) featured a one-man vaudeville review with up to nine Keatons on-screen at the same time. Buster is the orchestra and conductor, the nine minstrels, and the members of the audience, one of whom says, “This fellow Keaton seems to be the whole show.” The effect was obtained by having the cameraman shoot through separate apertures in the casing, rewinding the film each time and cranking the film through again at the exact speed (which was not standard until the advent of the talkie). The end result when projected looks like “a seamless single frame”—a characteristically Méliès-style effect. Other Keaton films exploit Méliès’s ideas as the basis for the story: in the film-within-a-film section of Sherlock, Junior (1924), for example, the projectionist falls asleep and in the ensuing dream sequence appears to jump straight into the movie he is screening. In The Cameraman (1928) when the rookie newsreel cameraman produces his first inexpert documentary effort, it turns out to be a ghostly double-exposed wonderland in which battleships cruise down Main Street. The contrast aptly brings together Lumière-style realism with Méliès-style screen magic: the film moguls may laugh in the background of the scene, but the audience is invited to see it as an immensely creative mistake, despite or perhaps even because of the immovable face of Keaton as the cameraman in the front row.
In his most famous film, The General (1926), based on the Civil War highjacking of a passenger train in Georgia by Union spies, Keaton exploits the same ideas as the early films of both Méliès and the Lumières. “Railways are a great prop,” he proclaimed in the heading of the script for The General, knowing as he did Porter’s The Great Train Robbery of 1903 and knowing also about the famous impact, further back in film history, of the 1895 Louis Lumière film L’arrivée du train en gare de la Ciotat, from which the audience is said to have fled in panic. This encouraged Keaton toward his most expensive stunt, the collapse of a bridge under a passing locomotive that falls into the river below, which did indeed terrify the spectators.24 But Keaton also took pains to re-create the Civil War context outdoors, using period trains and building sets copied from engravings of the time. And his copy of a primitive bicycle for the start of Our Hospitality (1923) was so precise that the Smithsonian asked for it. For Keaton the illusion of historical reality was as important as the comic or fearful impact of his vaudeville-style acts, and he inhabits that border country between the art that conceals and the art that reveals its art, the quintessential country of the conjurer.
Stage magic thus marked the screen tradition to the point that it could never be simply a realist medium. A new art form was born, even though the point of view given to the film viewer in these early days was essentially that of the theatre audience. Méliès makes things happen in front of a static camera (the early cameras were large and heavy and difficult to move). We are out front, so that we look at the screen in the same way we look at the stage through its proscenium arch, aware (more or less) that we are attending a show, a framed spectacle: the result is what André Bazin called a “straightforward photographic respect for the unity of space,” preserving spatial continuity, or what Noël Burch calls “unicity of the frame.”25 This point of view is familiar to anyone who has seen one of those early Méliès films. It was seriously modified as further techniques were invented but remains, nonetheless, a key element of cinematic allusions to Méliès. Méliès could intensify this point of view on occasion, as when he frames a man’s inflated rubber head in an archway (The Man with the Rubber Head, 1902), which shows that he was well aware of what he was doing and could make self-conscious use of his devices.26
What began with Méliès continued in the grand guignol ideas of Sergei Eisenstein and his “montage of attractions,” in Jean Cocteau’s surrealism, in experiments like James Stewart’s dream of falling in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and the far more elaborate final sequences of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), with camera and computer allied; it is manifest in animation, in the Steven Spielberg–style special effects that have so outdistanced what Méliès could manage; and it survives especially in the immensely popular horror movie genre, in which ghosts and witches and diabolical possession are six-a-penny.
These two contradictory traditions, the realistic and the magical, come together, as in Shakespeare’s theatre, in the idea of illusion: stage or film magic depends on visual illusion, but then so does the representation in sequences of still cinematic shots on celluloid to make apparently moving images of familiar, recognizable settings—exploiting the tendency of the eye to perceive a sequence of still shots as moving when projected at the right speed. Indeed, Méliès’s reaction to the first Lumière showing brings the two explicitly together: he was at first dismissive of what he saw as merely a still photo of a street scene, but then it started to move, and he was enchanted. He wrote that “a still shot of the Place Bellecour in Lyon was shown. Somewhat surprised, I just had time to say to my neighbor, ‘They got us all here for projections like this? I’ve been doing them for over ten years,’ when a horse pulling a wagon began to walk toward us, followed by other vehicles and then pedestrians, in a word, all the animation of the street. Before this spectacle we sat openmouthed, stupefied, astonished beyond all expression.”27 Almost immediately Méliès started to adapt stage magic to film.
The Méliès kind of trucage was part of a wider phenomenon in the days of the nascent cinema. Spiritualism and table-tapping were frequently practiced by stage magicians turned charlatans, as a more lucrative source of income. Hypnotism, or mesmerism, was a common theatrical spectacle. Apart from the enormously popular stage conjuring as practiced by Méliès at the Théâtre Robert Houdin and by his English mentor John Neville Maskleyne at London’s Egyptian Hall,28 another ingredient in the background of early film is the popular genre of Victorian fairy paintings, some of which were actually illustrations for A Midsummer Night’s Dream or The Tempest.29 Recall too those late Victorian photographs of fairies taken by children that Arthur Conan Doyle believed in (they were admitted to be fakes in 1983, when the children had become very old women).30 Méliès and his followers thus had a lot to draw on in fashioning their new art form. In his reaction to the first film shown in New York (on April 23, 1896), an associate of Thomas Edison’s, W. K. L. Dickson, called it “an object of magical wonder, the crown and flower of nineteenth century magic.”31
The distinction between the Lumière and Méliès tendencies is really between, on the one hand, the art that conceals its own artifice beneath the pretense of quotidian realism, the kind of illusionism that developed in the nineteenth century and that we see in wax museums and photography or, at a more interesting level, in George Eliot’s homage to Dutch realist painting in the seventeenth chapter of Adam Bede or to John Constable in the opening paragraphs of The Mill on the Floss, and on the other hand, that which celebrates its own artifice even though it may, like a conjuror (an “illusionist”), deliberately mystify the spectator about how its magic is performed. As Peter Wollen puts it, “Lumière and Méliès are not like Cain and Abel: there is no need for one to eliminate the other.”32 Indeed, because Antoine Lumière, father of the photographic brothers, rented a studio above the Robert Houdin theatre where Méliès performed, it is possible Méliès knew about the new invention before the famous viewing of the street scene in Lyon.
Part Two
SHAKESPEARE FILMS