Shakespeare the Illusionist. Neil Forsyth

as Méliès later explained in a letter (now in the MOMA Film Library), had not yet accepted playing roles in cinema films, because they considered the motion pictures far below the theatre—an attitude that was to change within a year¹²—in such films the cinema became an extension of the theatre: “[N]ot until about 1900, when the imported films of George Méliès startled American producers, was the theatrical potentiality of the new medium realized.”¹³ Until that point anything that moved was worth photographing—people walking, trees swaying, trains speeding, horses jumping, and soon news events and police department activities. But not, crucially, what happened inside the theatre. It was Méliès who introduced costuming, settings, and professional actors.

      * * *

      The art of movies developed quickly. As the story is usually told, the key figure was D. W. Griffith, whose use of cross editing in Death’s Marathon (1913), two years before The Birth of a Nation, frightened the distributors, who thought—like Castelvetro four centuries earlier—that audiences would be confused by this innovation.¹⁴ Especially because of his development of editing, Griffith is usually credited with finally guiding silent cinema away from the conventions of theatre.¹⁵ The Ku Klux Klan’s rescue of besieged whites in The Birth of a Nation became a locus classicus in the traditional account of film history largely because Griffith’s crosscutting would have been impossible on stage.¹⁶

      The next step, as the story is usually told, was Edwin S. Porter’s discovery of the principle of editing in The Life of an American Fireman (1902); Porter developed editing methods to include direct story construction in The Great Train Robbery (1903), then contrast construction (The Ex-convict) and parallel construction (The Kleptomaniac). Yet it was his contact with the fairy-tale films of Méliès that struck the spark in Porter,¹⁷ who could examine these films firsthand in the Edison laboratory where he worked. He noted that they contained more than one scene or shot and that they were strung together to make, or at least to illustrate, a story. Thus, Porter hit upon the idea that he might make stories by cutting and joining together in a certain order scenes he had already shot. He called up quantities of film of fire-department activity and began to put them together to make a story.

      Even though this realistic, practical world of the fire station was a far cry from the magic and whimsy of the Méliès world, Porter felt the need for a Méliès-like opening scene. A fire chief seated at his desk and finishing the evening paper falls asleep and dreams of a woman and child, perhaps his own, “and the vision of his dream appears in a circular portrait on the wall.” Dissolve to a close view of a New York fire-alarm box, and a figure steps in front of it, “hastily opens the door and pulls the hook, thus sending the electric current which alarms hundreds of firemen and brings to the scene of the fire the wonderful apparatus of a great city’s Fire Department.”¹⁸ The appeal is obvious in the childlike and adventurous world of the fire truck and the heroic rescue being prepared, but also in that vision or dream with which the film opens.

      Throughout these films is that admiration for the “apparatus,” so much a part of early cinema in the revised version of it we have from Tom Gunning.¹⁹ An additional scene usually placed at the end of The Great Train Robbery, but which Porter said in his script could also appear at the beginning, is a close-up of the leader of the bandits (Justus D. Barnes) emptying his pistol directly at the camera.²⁰ By this time the term shot was ubiquitous in film terminology, and Porter is making a visual joke or pun about it. Gun and camera have a shootout.

      Recent research on Porter suggests that two versions of Life of an American Fireman survive. In the earlier, which has more claims to being “authentic,” the rescue scenes of mother and child are presented twice, and in only two shots, once from inside and once from outside the burning building. The innovations attributed to Porter—continuity of duration achieved by parallel editing and matching action—were based on the modernized version.²¹ How that version came into being is uncertain, but Porter continued to repeat action across scenes in later films and did not adopt genuine crosscutting until 1907, when other directors were doing so. The history of progress in the film industry is thus more halting than the standard version of the story, the one promoted by directors in retrospect. Porter claimed in 1915 that he was “the first man to tell a complete story with moving pictures,” and historians took him at his word: he became the father of film narrative. But that is not, apparently, what he was doing at the time.

      In fact, he seems to have been imitating Méliès. In Voyage to the Moon, Méliès solved the problem of action in different locales as time progresses on-screen by a temporal overlap: the rocket lands on the moon, smacks the moon in the eye, and in the next shot, now on the moon’s surface, is shown landing again. Porter used this idea for How They Do Things on the Bowery (1902) and again apparently in the earlier version of Life of an American Fireman. Studies of medieval painting have shown that the presentation of different episodes of a story in the same painting are not simply naïve ideas of representation to be disposed of once the Renaissance invented perspectival focus; instead, they respond to a different conception of what a painting is for. Similarly, this multiple narration is not to be read as an unsteady groping after smooth editing techniques. Indeed, Gunning has shown that Méliès was not so innocent of “later” developments like editing.²² The stop-motion tricks required splicing to chop out overexposed frames; he relies on screen direction when characters pass from one locale to an adjacent one, a key ingredient in continuity editing; and even the arrangement of the tableaux to produce a story has been seen as quite modern. But as Bordwell says, Porter’s main interest was clearly not in perfecting the idea of film narrative but rather in heightening the effects of his “legerdemain and theatrical spectacle.”²³

      * * *

      In the fine series of television programs that Martin Scorsese put together in 1995 for the British Film Institute and Channel 4, A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese through American Movies (released on DVD in 2000), the seventh program, or chapter, is called “The Director as Illusionist” (Scorsese is an unashamed auteurist). Though he does not refer directly to Méliès, the focus is essentially the legacy of Méliès. Scorsese begins by quoting King Vidor: “The cinema is the greatest means of expression ever invented. But it is an illusion and should therefore be in the hands of the magicians and wizards who can bring it to life.” A brief sequence from Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman follows in which he shows his double-exposed film to MGM executives. Scorsese comments that “what Keaton needs is to learn and master the language of film.” This chapter clearly becomes the focus of the whole series as Scorsese explores this language: the language of images and its various ingredients. He soon quotes Lillian Gish calling Griffith the father of film and saying that Griffith gave us “the grammar of film-making.” Scorsese tells us he has seen Cecil B. DeMille’s 1954 remake of his own silent Ten Commandments many times since he saw it first as a child: “What I remember most vividly are the tableaux vivants [over a shot of Yul Brunner and his wife on the Pharaoh’s throne], the color, the dream-like quality of the imagery, and of course the special effects. . . . The great illusionists of the past, Cecil B. DeMille, D. W. Griffith, Frank Borzage, King Vidor, were conductors, they orchestrated visual symphonies, what Vidor called ‘silent music.’ They would fade away as Hollywood embraced sound, but the legacy of the silent era was remarkable.” Everything Scorsese says about that early period is Méliès-based. He goes on to discuss two films of 1927—F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise and Frank Borzage’s Seventh Heaven—both of which he sees in those terms: the first reproduces subjective vison as if it were the objective world, and indeed fades one in over the other, so that a couple cross a busy street without looking and are magically preserved from harm; in the second, says Scorsese, “for the lovers reality itself is immaterial.” These are accurate observations about the two films, as far as they go, but what is interesting is that this is what Scorsese chooses to show us. He follows this with a voice-over quotation from Brian De Palma, saying, “In any kind of art film, you’re creating an illusion for the audience to look at reality through your special eye.” But these last words we immediately hear again as “special lie,” as De Palma—now a talking head—continues, “The camera lies all the time, lies twenty-four times a second,” and