#3 Film: Spectacle or Reality?

Many people think of film as the “truest” of media; very good at capturing reality. It’s also good at telling stories and creating an absorbing narrative. But that wasn’t always the case, and in fact, the early days of cinema suggest very different uses and attractions of the medium.

Film historian Tom Gunning suggests that early cinema was much more interested in creating spectacles and attractions. Rather than telling stories, movies recreated magic tricks, drew attention to the kinds of illusions and effects they could create, and played with ideas of truth and veracity. We don’t need to understand this as just a strange and mistaken path that failed prior to the onset of the mainstream film industry, but rather as responses to changes in 19th century social, political and technological contexts. Science, wonder, and modernity were key words of the day, but so was a sense of fragmentation, or, in the words of Charles Baudelaire, “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent.” (Tom Gunning, “The Whole Town’s Gawking: Early Cinema and the Visual Experience of Modernity” Yale Journal of Criticism, Vol. 7 #2, Jan 1994, p.193)

For class tomorrow, please read this article by Tom Gunning, in which he lays out the argument about the appeal of illusion and magic for early cinema audiences:

Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator

Here are some links to the films we talked about in class, in case you want to watch them again as you read the Gunning article.

George Méliès was an extraordinary filmmaker who made 500 films between 1896 and 1912. He began his career as a magician and used films to extend and elaborate on visual illusion. His work is interesting in the context of this course because of the ways he used cinematographic language to say something about the possibilities of the medium as well as viewers’ capacity for belief or disbelief. He did all of this with a wacky sense of humor and a relentless pursuit of technical virtuosity.

Here’s a short film he made in 1903, Le Melomane

Here is the best known of his films, Le voyage dans la lune (1902)

Are these films “realistic” or “unrealistic”? In what sense?

If fantasy and tricks was one way early filmmakers envisioned film, another was for documentation and memory. The US Library of Congress has a wonderful collection of films of the Spanish-Cuban-Philippine-American War of 1898:

Take a look at a couple of these films (be patient, they can be a little slow!) and think about the potential uses of films like these.

Library of Congress: Spanish American War in Motion Pictures

Finally, I want to end this unit by thinking about one of the ways film does in fact have to power to capture or represent “reality.”  People have been using film recently, to bear witness to crimes, by civilians and law enforcement alike. This was made possible by the emergence of hand held video cameras, which changed the dynamic of who had access to the production of film, as changing the ways it was consumed. Here is a link to some examples on the Vice News website. Note that the search I did called up 27,100 results. NOTE: you do not have to watch these.

We’ll look at some examples in class (I’ll avoid the most difficult to watch), and think about how they resonate with some of these earlier uses of film.