Blindspot: Strike (1925)

It's time to begin my 2015 Blindspot Challenge and what better place to begin than with the earliest film on my list, Sergei Eisenstein's Strike. This one was something of an unexpected addition, and included for different reasons from the other entries in my blindspot list. I had actually never heard of Strike until we covered Soviet Montage cinema in one of my classes. We spent two weeks looking at how the Russians influenced filmmaking in the 1920's. The first week we watched Vsevolod Pudovkin's Mother, which I can't say I enjoyed. It was boring and tedious. Between that and Solaris, I was starting to wonder if I would ever find a Russian film that I actually liked. Little did I realize that I would... only a week later.

The next film we watched was Battleship Potempkin, a movie that completely won me over and opened my eyes to so many things. A week earlier I had been wondering why Soviet Montage was such a big deal, but after seeing Battleship Potempkin it all seemed to make sense. It was so effective in turning me around I even went an wrote a whole article detailing everything I'd learned about why the Soviet Montage movement was such a crucial part of film history. After that I was starting to wonder if Sergei Eisenstein, was a director I could get into. The following week I told my professor how I felt and asked if he could recommend any other films by the same guy, and he gave me the title of Strike, a film that had been referred to in the readings and the lecture but to which I never gave much thought.

Fast forward a few weeks later, and I actually managed to find a copy. The only way I could get it was as a double feature with Battleship Potempkin (not that I'm complaining) and it cost me just about every bit of money I had on hand at the time, but it was worth it. My professor was amazed that I even managed to find a copy. The trouble is sometimes even when I own these old movies I sometimes tend to put them off for one reason or another (as was arguably the case for five other movies also on my list). My solution was to include Strike as a candidate for my Blindspot List, and I decided to start off the new year with it.

I could definitely see a lot of Eisenstein's directorial style in Strike. A lot of the ideas he experimented with here are developed a lot more in Battleship Potempkin. The most obvious parallel is the use of the proletariat masses as a "collective" protagonist, instead of having one single hero. In this case, the Bourgeoisie and the police also serve as a sort of "collective" antagonist. Focusing on groups of characters instead of including a designated hero and villain allows Eisenstein to directly address the issues of the class system and how it affects the people as a whole. This same idea is revisited on a smaller scale in Battleship Potempkin, where the same division of class and the need for change is presented through an allegory in the form of the divide between a battleship's officers and its crew.

Building off of Kuleshov's experiments that demonstrated how editing could be used to create an emotional response in the viewers, Eisenstein believed that editing could be used to create meaning. His theory was that two contrasting images that each have separate meanings could be combined together to create a new message, one that was not originally present in either shot. This idea would be refined in Battleship Potempkin but it is more obviously present in Strike.

The example that was often cited in my readings was the climactic scene in which the massacre of the workers is cut alongside shots of a bull being slaughtered (incidentally, I do wonder if this inspired Francis Ford Coppola when he was making Apocalypse Now). On their own, these visuals would have nothing to do with each other, but placed together there is a connection to be drawn. They even set it up with shots of an apartment complex that make it look suspiciously like a corral. That's a great example, but it's one of many.

Another instance where Eisenstein applies his theory to great effect is in the way he shows the factory shutting down due to the workers' strike (you may recognize this moment, as it was a still from this scene I used in my Blindspot list). In this case he juxtaposes two separate shots: three workers folding their arms, and a wheel slowing down and finally stopping. Once again, on their own, these shots would not mean much. When placed together, it symbolizes a simple connection: as soon as the workers stop operating the machinery, the factory shuts down.

As you can imagine, this is hardly a conventional story. Much like Battleship Potempkin, Strike is very much an allegory for a much larger issue, that being the luxury of the bourgeoisie at the expense of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie are represented by a group of businessmen who respond to the workers' demands not with any serious consideration but instead skim through them, dismiss them all as ridiculous, and then pull out wine and lemons while sitting around smoking huge cigars. They even demonstrate how little these men think of the workers when one of them spills a bit of lemon on his shoe. He seems to be appalled by the idea of picking it up himself, and instead uses the paper containing the workers' demands to wipe it off before calling a valet over to "clean it up". In addition to all that, Eisenstein even cuts the men sitting together with scenes of the police rounding up the workers outside.

Strike is a brilliant film in many ways. After seeing Battleship Potempkin I thought I could get into Sergei Eisenstein and if this film was anything to go on, he doesn't disappoint. I have no idea how I will go about finding any of his other films, or indeed which films of his I would pursue if I did. What I can say is that I have a new director to add to my list of auteurs I admire. There is definitely an interesting quality to his work, and a lot of stuff to be said simply analysing his movies. It is nice to be able to add a foreign name to that list, and one from the silent era at that. If Battleship Potempkin and Strike were anything to go on, I'm open to seeing more of Sergei Eisenstein.

Action Heroines Before the Rise of Action Films

I was looking through my blog feed when I stumbled across a Gif posted by my friend Fritzi Kramer of Movies Silently, another movie blog that specializes almost exclusively in silent films. This may not be my strongest area of expertise, but I was interested in what she had to say. It seems a lot of people were led to her blog through search tags referring to women being tied to railroad tracks. This is something of an infamous cliche, though I had always understood it to be something more common in serials.

It turns out even then it was extremely rare, and nowhere near as sexist as people make it out to be. Fritzi herself did a whole video in which she explained in detail the origins of the misconception that women were often tied to railroad tracks in silent movies. To put it simply, critics who make this claim are usually citing one of two films, Teddy At the Throttle or Barry Oakfield's Race for Life. Both films were actually comedies that were intended as a parody of an old idea that was considered a tired cliché even then. In fact, as far as women are to be concerned, the silent era is actually a lot more progressive than people give it credit for.

For one thing, it seems that for the few cases of the "tied to the railroad track" cliché actually happening, it was not exclusively women waiting to be rescued by men. In fact, the play from which this cliché is believed to originate, Under the Gaslight, actually had a male victim who needed to be rescued by a woman. Adding to that is that Teddy At the Throttle has a female victim who ultimately has to save herself. So in actuality there are very few instances of people being tied to the tracks actually happened, and the few cases that do exist have not in fact been gender-exclusive, nor do the female victims always require rescuing by a man.

To be fair, I'm not even sure how practical a method it would be to dispose of someone. In order to do it, you would first have to find an isolated bit of track somewhere nobody would see you, plus you would have to get the rope or chains under the railroad ties (if you just tie the person up, they can simply roll off the track as soon as you leave). On top of that, trains are fast, so you wouldn't be able to predict when a train is coming. Supposing a train approaches before you have finished tying your victim down? You would have very little time to get out of the way plus it would give your victim an opportunity to escape. Even for the diabolical masterminds that did not in fact do this kind of thing, it would not be a very effective method.

Action heroines were actually a lot more common in the silent period than one would expect. Fritzi herself has cited several. The original Perils of Pauline cast the title character as a free-spirited adventurer, and to be fair the old serials liked to put everyone in danger regardless of gender. It was all part of the strategy to keep viewers coming back, the idea being to end each instalment with the hero or heroine in some sort of dangerous situation that seems impossible to survive. Audiences would have to come back to see the next part to find out how they get out of their current predicament. This is actually where the term "cliffhanger" originated, as a popular choice for ending serial instalments was to have the hero literally hanging over a cliff.

In that film, it is a woman who takes over as the telegraph operator when her father is ill, and then takes action when two outlaws arrive at her station. We do see the male lead rushing to the rescue, but the heroine has to think on her own long before he arrives. Instead of sitting around waiting to be rescued, she does everything she can to call for help and then proceeds to hold the two outlaws at gunpoint (or so it seems). By the time her lover finally arrives to rescue her, she has everything under control, and all he has to do is take them away.

So why is this idea of the woman tied to the tracks so popular? It is likely a combination of different things, but I have a theory of my own. You see, there were very few movies at the time that actually had a person getting tied down to the tracks, but there were plenty of movies that prominently featured trains. Many of these films about trains involved chases and a series of dangerous situations experienced by the main characters. It became a popular genre at the time, known as the Train-Chase film. Many will not recognise such a genre, as it faded out of popularity near the end of the silent era. While it has re-emerged on occasion, with movies such as Tony Scott's Unstoppable presenting a modern interpretation, the train-chase movie never experienced a full revival.

Train-chase movies were a huge part of silent era-Hollywood. In many ways they were an early precedent for the modern action film. The genre goes back as early as Edwin S. Porter with The Great Train Robbery and continues through the 20's. The Lonedale Operator also followed the pattern of a train-chase movie that puts the heroine into peril. To get a good look at the role of the train-chase movies, we should look at one of Buster Keaton's most famous features, The General.

The General was a movie that took place almost entirely on a single locomotive (well, technically two, but the focus is on one at a time), and had no shortage of dangerous situations for its main character. Scenes like the moment when Keaton tries to fire a cannon at the train he is chasing only for it to fall and almost hit him create tension, as well as a comedic effect when Keaton runs into trouble evading the unexpected threat and survives by accident (his train happens to run around a bend, allowing the cannon to hit the enemy he originally intended to fire at).

Buster Keaton was not alone in his perils during this adventure. There was also a romantic sub-plot involving his lover Annabelle Lee, and it is her being kidnapped by the Union that sets the story in motion. Buster Keaton's objective is of course to rescue his girlfriend and his engine. However, it is worth noting that the "rescue the kidnapped girlfriend" plot only makes up half the movie. In the first act, Annabelle is indeed a distressed damsel in need of rescuing, but then we get to the second half which inverts the setup of the first.

While The General begins with the male lead, Johnny Clay pursuing his stolen lover, he manages to rescue her around the middle point, during which time he also overhears the Union's attack plans. The rest of the movie turns everything around, with both now running away from the Union and trying to get back to their own lines and relay the information they have obtained. At this point, Annabelle stops being the damsel in distress, and instead the dynamic becomes one of co-operation. Both  Johnny and Annabelle face their share of perils in this second half, and have to work together in order to solve each problem.

Looking at the information available, it quickly becomes clear that while there were not a lot of films or serials that actually had women being tied to railroad tracks, there were plenty that put characters both male and female into dangerous situations that often involved trains. There was indeed a great deal of variety in precisely what situations were faced in each film, and being tied to the tracks seems to fit right into the many possibilities.

I suspect this is in large part where the misconception that silent movies often did it comes from. Audiences who may have been influenced by the train-chase movies but who do not understand the silent era enough to understand how they worked associate situations like a woman being tied to the tracks with the types of dangers that were actually faced by many silent heroes and heroines. Men and women were both victims of these situations, and in fact women rescued men just as much as the other way around.

Fritzi had a pretty suitable analogy for people who make the misconception that all silent films involved women being tied to railroad tracks, but I'll present my own, It is very much like a modern critic watching Dirty Harry and using it to claim that all 70's action movies were about rogue cops. While urban vigilante films were popular in the 1970's, many of them centred on civilians, and they were not the only form of action movie that was known at the time. For instance, some filmmakers were also making big-budget disaster movies like The Towering Inferno.

I will not pretend I wasn't surprised to find out how rare the "women tied to the railroad track" cliché actually was in silent film, and I also won't claim to be an expert in the field. Out of the two of us Fritzi is definitely far more qualified to be discussing silent film than I am (she would have to be, otherwise her blog dedicated to silent cinema would not have gotten very far), but I thought it was worth sharing my thoughts on the matter. One would expect that due to the social standards of the time silent film would have been very predominantly male, and at first glance it seems to make sense that there would be a lot of "damsel in distress" movies, but it turns out that is not the case. Perhaps the silent era was a lot more progressive in its treatment of women than modern viewers realise.

So What is the Deal With Soviet Montage Cinema Anyway?

That was certainly a question I was asking about a week ago. At first glance after sitting through the less than pleasant experience of Vsevelod Pudovkin's Mother I was left wondering what was so special about this obscure but crucial part of film history. It didn't seem to be a whole lot different from what people like Griffith were doing at the time, but it turned out I had to look a little deeper. While it was technically the work of several different people working simultaneously on different projects, they all built on what came before in more ways than one.

The whole history of film can be looked at as different people building up on each other's accomplishments over periods of time. It starts with the old-fashioned magic lanterns. One day Edward Muybridge figured out how to record a live action by using multiple cameras at once, followed by Étienne-Jules Marey coming along and figuring out how to combine all the cameras into one machine and Thomas Edison figuring out how to record images onto celluloid. The Lumière brothers come along and begin exhibiting their recordings of everyday activities which in turn inspired Georges Méliès to come along and begin experimenting with early editing techniques. Porter came along and experimented with slightly more advanced techniques and other filmmakers followed suit. Then D.W. Griffith, himself a director of shorts, went on to make his ambitious feature Birth of a Nation.

It can also be seen in other forms too, another big one being the different movements that affected many films on a technical level. German Expressionism, for instance, was a movement that didn't last very long and had barely a handful of films that few people wanted to see but still became a strong influence on other filmmakers. In fact, old fashioned Hollywood film noir owes something to the German Expressionist movement, something probably helped by the fact that a lot of Expressionist directors later went on to use their skills in Hollywood.

Soviet Montage is a bit of both, technical in what was discovered during its time but also a movement in that it contained several different people. Many of these were young filmmakers who were inspired by Hollywood films and fascinated by the then-revolutionary idea of continuity editing which was (and still is) employed in the majority of American films. Putting it simply Griffith was the man who pioneered the idea of using edits to create continuity , and to an extent that is used in Soviet productions, but these pioneers took it one step further.

Though Russian films did exist at the time, they had to make due in large part with imports. I won't get into the complicated politics surrounding it but the local films produced at the time were largely filmed plays. The camera would be placed at one point with an entire scene happening in a single shot, much like the films of Méliès. Due to the political turmoil affecting society film stock was hard to come by, and a lot of early filmmakers had to resort to recording on used film and editing imported movies. However these early projects did allow the groundwork to be set for major Russian productions.

One of the most famous Russian filmmakers of the time was Lev Kuleshov, a filmmaker who conducted a series of experiments in which he attempted to see what effects he could achieve through different types of editing. The one that is best remembered resulted in the "Kuleshov effect" and worked quite simply. The film consisted of a still image of a man's face, which would then be cut together with different images such as a bowl of soup, a dead child, and an attractive woman. I'm not entirely sure if this is the original print or a later filmmaker experimenting with the same technique, but either way it should give you an idea:

The result of this experiment was to see what emotions were generated by the audience. They found that the man seemed to express hunger when looking at the soup and sadness when looking at the coffin. The best part? It was the same face every time. The actor gave off a blank expression but when juxtaposed with other images viewers began to project their images onto the film. This experiment revealed two things about editing. First, it could be used not just as a way to establish continuity but also to create emotion where there was none previously. Second, it could create the illusion of space that doesn't exist; in this case audiences assumed that the man was in the same location as the various things he was supposedly looking at.

Kuleshov's experiment was a major stepping stone, but it was another man by the name of Sergei Eisenstein who would take it to the next level. It's not hard to see Eisenstein's influence on later artists. In fact you don't even have to look at his films, just seeing photographs of him shows you just how much he may have inspired other people and not even just filmmakers. There's actually several photographs where he bears a remarkable resemblance to the character of Henry Spencer in David Lynch's Eraserhead.

Even Kate Bush might owe a bit to Soviet Montage

What Eisenstein did is a whole other story, though. Kuleshov worked out how editing can be used to generate an emotional response from the viewer, but Eisenstein realized it went a little bit deeper. He developed a theory that he could piece together two contrasting images with very different meanings to create a third, brand new meaning that did not previously exist. By doing this, he could create emotions through editing alone.

At the time, this process was known as "montage", which can be a bit jarring to viewers familiar with its more modern usage. However, is that not what contemporary montages ultimately aim to achieve? The "gearing up" montages you see in action movies or the training sequences in martial arts films essentially do the same thing, if on a smaller scale. In those cases, they use editing to excite the viewer. In that sense, many modern Hollywood productions owe a great deal to these old Soviet Montage films.

So ultimately, the big question is why it was the Russians who worked this out? Why not Hollywood (where they that had already been using continuity editing for some time) or Germany (which ironically, despite being more or less bankrupt after World War I, had one of the most successful film industries in the world)? The answer has to do with the messages often found in these old movies.

One of the key factors, perhaps the most important influence on Soviet Montage Cinema, was the circumstances that motivated its filmmakers. Russia was in a state of political turmoil, having just come out of a revolution. Vladimir Lenin had noble intentions but his means were somewhat questionable, and the result was a violent bloodbath that ended with the slaughter of not just the Tsar but also his entire family (and before you bring it up, the urban legend about his youngest daughter Anastasia escaping the massacre has been officially debunked). This led to a period of chaos as the Russian people struggled to rebuild, unfortunately making way for Joseph Stalin to come into power and make things even worse.

Propaganda was a key factor in driving the success of the revolution. The famous story of Grigori Rasputin being shot, stabbed, poisoned, and drowned only to later be found to have died of hypothermia while trying to claw his way out of the ice never happened. In actuality, Rasputin was only shot once and died instantly. The numerous failed assassination attempts were made up to make him seem less human and thus generate support for the revolution, and it worked so well that it was accepted as fact for decades before the original autopsy report was discovered.

The problem of course was that Russia was a very isolated community. Lenin wanted to appeal to the masses, but many people proved harder to reach than others. Film turned out to be an effective technique for promoting the ideology of the revolution. Even after it was over, the creation of propaganda films served not necessarily to support the revolution, but to justify it to the population. Though anti-Tzar films were not the only things produced in Russia at the time, they were at the forefront of their film industry.

While I wasn't particularly keen on this one film, Pudovkin's Mother is a great example of this ideology being reflected. This film takes on an approach reminiscent of the World War II combat films Hollywood would later produce, with themes of sacrifice. The Tzar's army is treated as inhuman and anonymous, with a group of characters bonding together. In this case it is the titular Mother gradually coming to join the common people in the struggle. In the end the Tzar's troops emerge victorious, but the film ends with the apparent intention of inspiring the viewer to take up arms and ensure that these people did not die in vain.

More effectively is Eisenstein's surprisingly good Battleship Potemkin, which creates an allegory for the struggles of the common people by scaling it down to a single battleship crew. This film was inspired by a real event (though I can't verify with certainly how close it is to what really happened), but represents the plight of the Russian people in the form of the mistreatment of the crew at the hands of their officers. One crew member then rallies the crew together and start a mutiny after which point they begin to inspire the people around them, beginning with the civilians in a nearby port and ultimately other ships in the Russian navy.

Curiously enough, Battleship Potemkin has no one true protagonist. It has several different characters who are given a degree of notability, but for the most part it is the collective proletariat masses that are cast as one protagonist. This is fitting to the ideas Lenin hoped to promote, as he aimed to unite the common people and to end the oppression of the bourgeois. Naturally, Eisenstein applies his techniques effectively with the intent to create this sense of anger and ultimately triumph as the brave men of the Potemkin set the way for a brighter future.

Much like Birth of a Nation, it isn't always easy to agree with what the ideologies that are promoted by these films. Personally, I can't begin to make a judgement call on whether the Russian Revolution was ultimately justified, seeing as my knowledge of the period is extremely limited. Still, the significance of these films cannot ultimately be denied. The period of montage brought out a number of filmmakers besides the ones I've referred to in this article, all of whom contributed something. Ultimately they took Griffith's continuity editing in directions he never would have imagined. Even after the movement ended in the 1930's, echoes of Soviet Montage can still be found in modern filmmaking, including mainstream Hollywood films.

Trains, Trains, and Automobiles

School has started up again, and among the many different courses I have, I managed to get into one dedicated to studying the history of action movies. Our course materials make the case that action movies as we know them today really only started to come about in the 1970's, it is derived from a variety of different genres. This first week alone, we looked at the silent era, and something that I would never have even considered a sub-genre, but one which is has played a crucial role in the history of action cinema.

That is the "train chase" movie. In the silent era, trains were (and still are) hugely popular subjects for filmmakers. One of the earliest film recordings, and arguably the most famous of the moving photographs created by the Lumiere Brothers, depicted a train pulling into a station. 1903 Edwin S. Porter directed The Great Train Robbery, which was arguably also the first western film, and it does not stop there.

Action and suspense at its finest.

The "train chase" is a sub-genre that became strangely popular as the silent area progressed. As we have seen in class, it comes in a wide variety of forms, but generally the way it works is that it, as the name implies, there is a train and it is in some way chased or chasing something. A variation on this was the 1911 film The Lonedale Operator by D.W. Griffith, where instead of a direct chase, it was a group of outlaws trying to break into a train station while the engineers try to reach it on time.

This particular film is notable for the fact that it might just have the first real action heroine. While she still has to rely somewhat on the men, the female protagonist is amazingly resourceful and has to rely on herself until the guys (who are trying to reach the station in a locomotive) can get to her. She initially tries to lock herself in the station while persistently trying to send out a call for help. Even when the two bandits finally break in, she manages to keep them pinned down when she apparently pulls a gun on them, forcing them to surrender just before the male leads arrive and take them away.

Even when the silent era really took off, trains remained popular. One of the most famous examples is arguably Buster Keaton's The General where he spends the first half of the movie chasing after the Union Soldiers that stole his both girlfriend and his locomotive, before finally rescuing both and having to spend the second half running away. Though not in itself an action movie, The General contains a lot of the stunt work that could easily have inspired more action-oriented films.

The funny thing about these train chase movies is that, while perhaps not as popular today, they may just have unwittingly set the stage for something we all should be very familiar with in present-day Hollywood. You might not often see one train chasing another quite like in The General, but you do often see vehicle-based chase sequences. One of the best-known action movie conventions is of course the car chase.

We've all seen the classic car chase at some point or another. It can come in all forms, but the simplest case is that you have two cars: one with the hero and one with the bad guy. One of them ends up getting the other's attention and tries to make a run for it by hopping into their car and driving off. The pursuer does not give up without a fight, and the result is an extended sequence in which both drivers have to navigate their urban environment at high speeds. Sometimes obstacles might present themselves along the way or the participants might try to find ways to slow each other down either by shooting at each other or improvisation.

The car chase is something so popular it's practically synonymous with action, and with good reason. Done right it can lend itself to a lot of creative situations. The overall outcome of the chase will vary depending on the various factors such as whether it is the villain chasing the hero or vice versa, the environment they are in, the types of cars that are being used, how late into the movie the chase is happening. The thing is that it can lend itself to a wide variety of environments and by extension plenty of great stunts.

Now it is often known as a "car chase", but technically the same effect can be achieved with other vehicles. The Tourist had plenty of great boat chases that made use of its Venice setting. Sometimes you can mix and match different types of vehicles (Terminator 2: Judgement Day sees the heroes in a car being chased by the T-1000 in a truck). Planes can be used to create some impressive aerial stunts, and yes, even trains are not out of the question.

Even in the present day, trains continue to be popular sources of action. Tony Scott's 2010 film Unstoppable was basically a modern take on the train chase sub-genre of the silent era. This time around instead of a single locomotive or a small train, the film deals with the danger posed by a mile-long freight train (something a bit more common now) barreling down the track at increasing speed because some idiot failed to do his job correctly. The "chase" part comes from the fact that pretty much everyone is chasing the train and trying to find some way to stop it, but the climax sees Chris Pine and Denzel Washington in hot pursuit using their own locomotive and figuring out a plan to use it to stop the train.

So what is it with trains in these movies? why is it that even today trains continue to be a great source of tension? Well, in the early 20th century, they were still a fairly new piece of equipment (it's not too far-fetched that some viewers of The Great Train Robbery still had memories of the first railroads coming through their hometowns). Even today, there is still a certain amount of risk to be found around railroads under normal circumstances.

In addition to that, let's face it, steam locomotives are pretty impressive-looking machines, so having one alone is great for visual spectacle, but the way they are designed also lends itself to a variety of stunts. In The General, Buster Keaton does a whole bunch of crazy things on his engine, probably getting at least one scene on each part (he even rides on the valve gear in one early scene). Steam locomotives are practically built to be climbed over, why do you think they're such a common choice for playgrounds?

Part of it could also have to do with the general speed of trains. After all, you don't normally see a lot of action happening on static trains. They are usually moving when things are going down (Thomas and the Magic Railroad doesn't count) and often the situations require people to climb around on the outside. While climbing around on a static train might not be the greatest experience, imagine being on one that's moving at full speed. If the action is on the outside of the train (which often it is), then there are a variety of ways you could fall off.

Let's say for the sake of argument that you have to climb along the roof of the train (which happens in Unstoppable and the 1979 The Great Train Robbery, among other films). On a static train, it might not be so bad, but while its moving, and you are balancing on a roof that wasn't designed to be stood on, it is going to be very hard to stay on. You do not want to fall off of a moving train (even if you're not hurt by the fall, you won't exactly be able to get back onto the train).

Whatever the reasons, cinema seems to have a strange fascination for the railroad. Trains have been a part of film history right from the beginning, and they still continue to play into today's action films. There seems to be something about the tension that comes from running into problems aboard a moving train that draws the attention of filmmakers from the silent era to the present. Train robberies, train chases, or just about any other problem that could possibly warrant the presence of a train are subjects that have always been popular and which will likely continue to be so as long as there is a railroad industry.

A Tribute to Georges Méliès: Pioneer of Cinema

Some people that I know have this silly notion that I hate all European directors, and when I point out several that I do like I'm told they conformed to Hollywood standards and thus don't count. Well, much as I've criticized Jean-Luc Godard it's time now to go a little bit further back and look at a good French director. Not only a talented man but quite possibly one of the most significant auteurs in the history of film, the man who made a few crucial discoveries that would begin to shape cinema as an art form and clear the way for others to shape it into what it is today. That man was Georges Méliès.

You may or may not immediately recognize the name, but either way there was no doubting the influence this man had on the film industry. You may remember him from Martin Scorese's Hugo where he was played by Ben Kingsley and we got to learn in great detail much of his life story. Alternatively you may also recall one of his most famous movies, 1902's La Voyage dans la Lune (better known in English as A Trip to the Moon) and its famous image of the bullet crashing into the moon's eye. As a film genre, science fiction would not become widely recognized until the 1950's with George Pal's Destination Moon, but it has been a part of cinema since the beginning thanks to Méliès.

Méliès' story is indeed a fascinating one. It is a tale of triumph and tragedy. Before Méliès came along, film was just a passing commercial fad and nobody understood its full potential. For a while there was a popular attraction known as the "nickelodeon" (not to be confused with the modern children's television network). Essentially the way it worked was you would walk into a bar or some other public place and there would be a few boxes you could look into. Placing a nickel into one would allow you to glimpse a moving image, you'd watch that and then you would go to the next one and put another nickel in and see that image. For a while they were popular but after a while people got bored with them. It was believed there was no future.

Meanwhile, we also had the Lumiere Brothers, a pair of filmmakers who also never fully understood the potential of what they had access to. To them, a film camera was not much different from a photo camera. You simply set it up and recorded things as they happened, the only difference being that you could now produce a moving picture instead of a single still frame. They did a lot of these documentations of everyday occurrences like workers leaving a factory or a train pulling into a station, and loved to show them off to audiences. 

Enter Georges Méliès, a simple magician who became so fascinated with the "moving pictures" he decided to create a few of his own. Then one day he made an incredible discovery. The story goes that he was one day out on the side of the road with his camera. At that point he was still just photographing it, but then his camera jammed and it took him some time to fix it. 

When he went back over the footage, he saw something remarkable (I've heard a few different versions of exactly what, but the one I've usually described is that he saw a car apparently disappear). By total accident, Méliès discovered the "stop trick" (a technique he would use a lot in the years to come) and realized that film was much more than a simple photographic tool. 

At the time, he may not have fully understood the world he was about to open up. He certainly would not have realized how many people would be inspired by and build off of his work. He would not have known how much of an impact this simple accident would have on the following decades, unknowingly clearing a path for thousands of filmmakers to come, making it possible for this very blog to exist. 

To him, as a magician, he was simply interested in creating illusions and that was exactly what he did. Méliès realized that film could be used not just for documenting everyday life but also to create incredible fantasies. In the years to come he would gain his own studio with a cast and crew and plenty of then-cutting edge special effects at his disposal with which he let his imagination run wild. He was also the first person to really edit his movies, although the nature of his editing may seem primitive to modern audiences (he'd always shoot entire scenes from one angle, although he would often put each scene in a different set and used his "stop trick" to create various illusions of transformations and people appearing and disappearing).

The sad part is one that you should be all too familiar with if you've seen Hugo. As great as Méliès was he ultimately just could not keep up with other filmmakers. For a long time his works were a novelty, but then Edwin Porter came along with The Life of an American Fireman and The Great Train Robbery which brought about more sophisticated filmmaking techniques. Those were followed by D.W. Griffith making the first feature film Birth of a Nation which brought about methods of filming and editing still used today. Various other misfortunes began to pile up on him and a lot of Méliès' films were destroyed in order to re-purpose their material for use in World War I.  In the end, Méliès ended up running a toy shop in Gare Montparnasse, a train station in Paris (you may remember this part being explored in Hugo) and died of cancer in 1938.

The influence of Méliès on modern cinema cannot be denied. He was the first person to recognize that film was an art form, not just a new way to document things as they happened. In that sense, Méliès is essentially the first major auteur of cinema. Looking at his films it is clear that the man had not only quite the imagination but also a sheer passion for the films he made, and it all ties back to his beginnings as a magician. He simply loved to create illusions, but found a whole new way to express that love which would open the door for many others over the following decades. Even today many of the greatest filmmakers owe something to Georges Méliès.

Sadly, only a small fraction of Méliès' films have survived, but the ones that have continue to be studied and analyzed. Even with technological advancements since his time it is hard not to see his passion carried through his work. Méliès was an actor, a magician, and the first major film director, and he was a genius in all those respects.