The IMDB Canon, Vol. 23: Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906)

IMDB user votes (as of this writing): 1,266
Number of user reviews: 16
User score: 6.8

The question of fantasy, and its role in cinema, is one that I've been thinking about with Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (directed by Edwin S. Porter and Wallace McCutcheon.) As with Melies' The Black Imp, Rarebit Fiend is best described as mischievous; it gives us a helpless protagonist who is helplessly manhandled and abused by various special effects for a few minutes, and then ends. For early filmmakers, there seems to be a certain appeal in humans' loss of control before the wonders of new technology. Films such as Rarebit Fiend not only unsettle their protagonists' ideas of the boundaries of possibility, but the viewers' also; neither the Fiend himself nor the audience watching him has (I assume) ever seen a bed fly. And yet, despite this shared novelty between character and audience, the reaction of the Fiend to these events vs. the intended reaction of those watching him are sharply opposed. For the Fiend, the experience is a horrible terror, akin to a bad salvia trip; but for the audience, it's a comedy.

I could simply attribute this dissonance to the inherent sadism of comedy in general--that is to say, most humor derives from the relief that something bad isn't happening to us--but I think there's more at work here. The hallucinogenic nature of the Fiend's ordeal is both a reflection of the 1906 moviegoer's relation to the medium and a reassurance that things are still under their control. An audience of the day would have had little idea of the technical details behind the film's production, and the act of viewing a film was itself still a novelty; while Rarebit Fiend (as with Georges Melies' work) is obviously influenced by the various stage magic shows and parlor tricks of the time, the transportive quality of a projected film is considerably more potent in its ability to manipulate reality. Rarebit Fiend presents phenomena that would not have been possible in any live show, some of them inherent to the medium (e.g., the projected image making performers literally larger than life), and others (i.e., the Fiend's dream) making use of the ability to stop and start filming to move and conjure objects. Yet the film hedges itself, containing its fantasy within the use of narcotics (thinly disguised as Welsh rarebit), as if hesitant to present a magical world without encasing it in the frame of the real world. Rarebit Fiend thus marks a departure from previous fantasy films in the Canon; the appeal for the audience lies not in its fantastical elements, but in the protagonist's reaction to them. It is a step removed from the depersonalized fantasy of Melies--or, if you will, a step beyond--in its focusing of attention on a character, with effects as the backdrop, rather than the whole point.

I suppose one could argue that Dream of a Rarebit Fiend is the first stoner film, but this seems too easy, and anachronistic at that (this is, after all, before most drug use had been outlawed and its consequent rise in countercultural stature); perhaps it is more accurate to say that Rarebit Fiend is the first "faux-cautionary" film. This is not a film meant to scare the audience straight, despite its terrified protagonist; this is a film that exploits fear for fun. It is not a warning against drugs, but a celebration of what drugs make possible. However, as with all trips, the possibilities end with the dose, which is, in this case, the film: upon ending, all of its marvels disappear and the viewer is back in the theatre, a few minutes older.


Other connections: Dream of a Rarebit Fiend indirectly marks the cinematic debut on cartooning virtuoso Winsor McCay, being based on his slighty-differently-named comic strip, Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend. He is, of course, best-known for Little Nemo, but was also a prolific filmmaker in his own right, beginning with the extravagantly-titled Nemo adaptation called Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His Moving Comics (though Gertie the Dinosaur is probably his most famous film.)


Other most-voted titles of 1906:

2. Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (J. Stuart Blackton | 735 votes)

3. The Hilarious Posters (Georges Melies | 685 votes)

4. The 400 Tricks of the Devil (Georges Melies | 561 votes)

5. The '?' Motorist (Walter R. Booth | 558 votes)

6. San Francisco: Aftermath of Earthquake (No director credited | 449 votes)

7. The Mysterious Retort (Georges Melies | 433 votes)

8. The Story of the Kelly Gang (Charles Tait | 367 votes) -- Generally considered the first feature-length film.

9. A Trip Down Market Street Before the Fire (No director credited | 333 votes)

10. Three American Beauties (Wallace McCutcheon and Edwin S. Porter | 274 votes)

IMDB lists 1,846 titles for the year altogether.

The IMDB Canon, Vol. 22: The Black Imp (1905)

IMDB user votes (as of this writing): 1,408
Number of user reviews: 13
User score: 7.2

The Black Imp is minor Melies (at least, compared to A Trip to the Moon), but it's still the Canon's entry for 1905, which appears to have produced little competition. There is nothing from the year--at least, not from a well-known auteur like Melies who has been thoroughly canonized--that advances the medium in any way significant enough to beat even this second-string Melies short. Perhaps The Black Imp is best characterized as an early B-movie; it clearly was nowhere near as expensive or complex as A Trip to the Moon or Voyage Across the Impossible, and is much smaller in scope and length.

Nevertheless, the film does offer at least one interesting point of discussion in its characterization of special effects as torment. This is not a film in which effects are a source of wonder or even horror, but rather of mischief. The imp isn't a menace, but a pain in the ass. This may be a symptom of the diminishing returns of effects in general: the impressive becomes commonplace; the mysterious, known; the novel, tedious. Just as on the stage, a magic trick is always most amazing the first time it's seen. The jump cut--Melies' signature trick--has accordingly degraded from profundity to competence. To view The Black Imp is to view an elaborate chore, the tedium of the constant jump cuts reflected in the exasperation of its protagonist. Why can't the effects just stop? Why can't they leave me alone? Can the film just end already so I can return to my daily routine? But the imp laughs at the viewer, for the act of viewing films has already become routine; in 1905, its tropes are already laid bare, its wonders no longer wondrous. And this is perhaps the real significance of The Black Imp: it is a film that knows you will continue to watch, even though you've seen it all. And it knows you'll come back the next time, too, because film is no longer something new to you; it has become part of life, part of discourse. It is now standard entertainment--and I do not mean "entertainment" as "something that entertains", but as something intended to distract.  

Black Imp marks the point in he Canon at which films start being more about the self-sustainment of an industry than of advancing a craft; its production simply perpetuates the production pipeline set up by previous Melies films, ensures that the gears of his studio keep moving, that the livelihoods invested in that studio continue to be lively. It is busiwork both for its crew and the audience; for both parties, the purpose of the film is to fill time. The Imp is himself almost literally an embodiment of distraction; he is the thing that provides some kind of event to the otherwise empty existence of its protagonist. Yet the audience is not meant to identify with the protagonist here; no, the Imp  himself is clearly the vessel for the viewer's escapism, a means by which they can imagine themselves having some sort of effect on the world, some kind of purpose, some kind of impact--any impact, any reaction, anything at all that would lead to an acknowledgment of their existence, an assurance that their actions can affect the world around them. But they will never do that by merely watching the film, and this is the whole idea, for the act of viewing a film is an exercise in pretending, of imagining (or projecting) an existence outside one's body; what is striking about The Black Imp, then, is the withering optimism of the medium. Where before an audience might imagine going to the moon, now, their fantasy is to annoy someone for a few minutes.


Other connections: Not much to say here. Wikipedia doesn't even have an article for this film.



Other most-voted titles of 1905:

2. Rescued By Rover (Lewin Fitzhamon and Cecil M. Hepworth | 763 votes)

3. The Mermaid (Georges Melies | 610 votes)

4. The Scheming Gambler's Paradise (Georges Melies | 585 votes)

5. The Whole Dam Family and the Dam Dog (Edwin S. Porter | 525 votes)

6.  New York Subway (G.W. Bitzer | 496 votes)

7. The Enchanted Sedan Chair (Georges Melies | 327 votes)

8. The Night Before Christmas (Edwin S. Porter | 324 votes)

9. The Palace of Arabia Nights (Georges Melies | 233 votes)

10. The Kleptomaniac (Edwin S. Porter | 226 votes)

IMDB lists 1,702 titles for the year altogether.

The IMDB Canon, Vol. 21: The Voyage Across the Impossible (1904)

IMDB user votes (as of this writing): 2,340
Number of user reviews: 19
User score: 7.7

A common observation about The Voyage Across the Impossible is that it is just like A Trip to the Moon, except the explorers go left, instead of right. Banal as it may be, I cannot quite disagree with this claim, maybe because this is Georges Melies' sixth entry in the Canon in seven years and I'm running out of things to say about him. At least, one can certainly argue that this is the first sequel in the Canon, even if only in spirit. Voyage aims, to a greater extent than any previous film we've looked at, to reproduce a winning formula, to replicate past success. It also follows the trends of later sequels in that it is longer, more complex, and more lavishly-budgeted than its predecessor. Where A Trip has just a spaceship, The Voyage has an automobile, a balloon, a train, and a submarine, with corresponding changes in scenery for each segment. Even moreso than in A Trip, the actual voyage in The Voyage is practically irrelevant: the film is an excuse to link together backdrops, to show off some cinematic parlor tricks. This is not a film in which characters matter; there is no dialogue, there are no intertitles, and none of the travelers are named. The film is in a constant rush to get to the next setpiece, never stopping to consider the people within in it, who are dragged around the film as if the plot itself was a force of nature driving their journey.

And perhaps this is why I find The Voyage Across the Impossible boring. It is the first dumb blockbuster in the history of the movies. Unlike those of A Trip to the Moon, the images of The Voyage do not stick with me, and I have difficulty recalling the general shape of the plot in my mind, despite having watched the film three times. Melies is the model for all the movie magicians after him who view films more as theme park rides than stories. Yet even this comparison may be too generous: a rollercoaster may still be thrilling on one's second, third, or fourth ride, but a movie rarely is, unless there are layers and nuances to its craftmanship. But nuance is a foreign concept to Melies, and I don't even mean that as a put-down; his style simply does not allow for anything more than the simple pleasures of surface spectacle. I will also clarify here that "style" does not refer to the "stylized" reality that Melies creates in both A Trip and The Voyage (the faces on the sun and moon, the willful breaks from the laws of physics, and so on), for "stylization" ultimately adds nothing to a film other than another permutation of image fetishism (hence fascism's obsession with aesthetic: novel styles discourage thought or analysis, directing the viewer's attention to exterior appearances only.) "Style" in this context simply refers to the boundaries of Melies' craft, the limits that he will not (or cannot) exceed. Melies hits those limits wherever a film would go beyond the visual stimulation of a magic show; hence the lack of any real characters or even coherent plots in his films. He is defiantly shallow, a celebrator of artifice and whimsy; you give him some of the precious time out of your life, and you get to see a few neat tricks. Whether or not those tricks are neat enough to offset the microportion of your existence required to view them will be up each viewer's tastes. I can only speak for myself when I say that Melies' schtick has gotten old and I'm eager to look at someone else's oeuvre.


Other connections: This was pretty much the high-water mark for Georges Melies' creative control, as he soon encountered diminishing returns afterward and eventually lost all of his money on a few expensive flops. Then, his studio was wrested away from him and (as recounted in a previous entry) Melies burned all of his work in frustration. Also, The Voyage features one of the first deleted scenes in film history, a "supplementary section" that gave the film a more complete ending, and had to be purchased separately from the rest. This segment went missing for 70 years after the film's initial run.


Other most-voted titles of 1904:

2. The Living Playing Cards (Georges Melies | 1,016 votes)

3. The Untamable Whiskers (Georges Melies | 772 votes)

4. The Cook in Trouble (Georges Melies | 595 votes)

5. Tchin-Chao, the Chinese Conjuror (Georges Melies | 573 votes)

6. The Wonderful Living Fan (Georges Melies | 396 votes)

7. An Interesting Story (James Williamson | 381 votes)

8. The Great Train Robbery (Siegmund Lubin | 273 votes) -- Not to be confused with the more famous 1903 Edwin S. Porter film of the same name.

9. Decapitation in Turkey (Georges Melies | 273 votes)

10. Dog Factory (Edwin S. Porter | 258 votes)

IMDB lists 1,824 titles for the year altogether.

The IMDB Canon, Vol. 20: The Great Train Robbery (1903)

IMDB user votes (as of this writing): 12,159
Number of user reviews: 82
User score: 7.3

Westerns, as a genre, have been so extensively theorized by this point that it seems useless to analyze Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery on the level of genre. Is there anyone, at this point, who is not aware of the role that Westerns have played in America's self-mythologization? We know that they are hyper-masculine, they glorify lawlessness and violence, they divide the world into childish caricatures of good and evil, they perpetuate the nation's gun fetish, and they pander to Americans' collective narcissism regarding Manifest Destiny. The ideological work of the Western is more than just well-worn ground; it's a canyon. Likewise, The Great Train Robbery is widely acknowledged for its many technical innovations, such as camera movement and cross-cutting within a scene. And that is about as far as the scholarship goes on Te Great Train Robbery. There hasn't been a single new thing said about it for decades upon decades; everyone is in agreement on how and why it is important. It is as close as film criticism has ever come to a "finished project".

But this all seems based on the mistaken assumption that The Great Train Robbery was (and is) popular because of its adherence to convention. Let me be clear, TGTR is highly conventional in both concept and execution--the mistake lies in the conception of what those conventions are. There is a school of critical thought--perhaps even the dominant school--that views film as a life-affirming, utopian medium that animates the dead and rejuvenates the staid and the ancient. They are, again, half-right: right that film is utopian, but wrong that this utopia is found in life. The conundrum behind all utopia that no one likes to talk about is the question of its opposition: if utopia were indeed attainable, how could anyone want to stop it? How could it not already exist? The only answer is sabotage, whether out of malice or stupidity. If everyone acted in good faith, or if everyone weren't so darn dumb, then utopia would already be here! So, if the world is to be made perfect, it follows that the visionaries must somehow "fix" the problem of the people who don't want it. Some can be re-educated yes, but if their opposition persists, they must be eliminated. And that means death. Every utopia is ultimately a vision of genocide, one that sweeps disagreement to the side so that a certain faction can implement their agenda. It's for the greater good, and all that.

The Great Train Robbery is a death cult, with the film finding ultimate triumph in the complete slaughter of its principal characters, and subsequently, of the audience as well (via the famous "shooting the audience" shot.) Unlike A Trip to the Moon, The Great Train Robbery does not imagine a future, but a present; it is not concerned with possibilities, but with imminent inevitabilities. TGTR forecloses the future in favor of an ending, the ending, death. Yet the film finds this finality gleeful and fun, not so much a source of anxiety as one of relief. The bad guys have been caught, they are dead; the guy onscreen has shot you, and now you're dead; and now the movie is over. The film's correspondence between resolution and death makes it a development over the blunt nihilism of Melies' work (The India Rubber Head, for example), which treat death as a meaningless amusement; there is at least a sense here that lives are bounded, that people cannot be endlessly replicated and re-killed through "movie magic", but that they are singular and finite beings who stay dead. Porter offers no hope of salvation through film, no immortality; if anything, he does the opposite, reminding his audience constantly of the oblivion ahead. The Great Train Robbery offers people one life, and in so doing exhorts them to their most realistic chance for utopia: to find one's meaning and purpose while alive, because there's nothing more after this. 


Other connections: Edwin S. Porter was yet another cog in the Edison machine that dominated American film at this point; his most famous work otherwise was probably Life of an American Fireman, which was arguably the first film to feature cross-cutting--though, since that was also released in 1903, it will not be featured in this series. Porter would later direct Niagara Falls (1915), which was the first 3D film ever shown to a public audience.


Other most-voted titles of 1903:



2. Alice in Wonderland (Cecil M. Hepworth and Percy Stow | 1,784 votes)

3. Life of an American Fireman (George S. Fleming and Edwin S. Porter | 1,409 votes)

4. The Music Lover (Georges Melies | 1,287 votes)

5. Electrocuting an Elephant (1,062 votes)

6. The Infernal Boiling Pot (Georges Melies | 834 votes)

7. The Gay Shoe Clerk (Edwin S. Porter | 798 votes)

8. The Monster (Georges Melies | 766 votes)

9. Fairyland: A Kingdom of Fairies (Georges Melies | 711 votes)

10. The Cake-Walk Infernal (Georges Melies | 659 votes)

IMDB lists 2,659 titles for the year altogether.

The IMDB Canon, Vol. 19: A Trip to the Moon (1902)

IMDB user votes (as of this writing): 30,616
Number of user reviews: 152
User score: 8.2

Here it is, the small-c canonical First Movie Ever, the first entry in every edition of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, the film everyone watches on their first day of their first college film class, the movie that is almost certainly the first film that will come to someone's mind if asked to name an "early film." One only has to look at its number of user votes to see how much A Trip to the Moon has been ensconced within the canon: over 30,000, almost an order of magnitude more than Roundhay Garden Scene's 3900, which was previously the highest total.

Oh, wait, I sad movie there a couple of sentences back, didn't I? Well, yes. You see, until now, I have been sticking mostly to the term film, not as some academic affectation, but because the previous films in the IMDB Canon were a prelude to the main event, more experiments or proofs-of-concepts than the developed narratives we associate with the word movie. That all changes today. A Trip to the Moon is a movie-ass movie.

There are several reasons that A Trip to the Moon has became the de facto beginning of film as we know it. First, it was exceptionally popular in its time, achieving wider distribution than any other comparable film--though, as histories usually point out, many of the prints were pirate copies for which Melies received no remuneration. Second, it is an early effects film; this is not a film where one needs to udnerstand the historical context to "get it". Films like Monkeyshines hold little interest other than the time and place in which they were made, the technology used to make them, the people involved; they are entirely paratext. Conversely, A Trip to the Moon stands on its own. While not the first self-sufficient entry of the IMDB Canon (that would be Cinderella, or perhaps Four Heads), A Trip is a much longer and more complex narrative than anything Melies (or, for that matter, anyone else) has done so far.

But maybe a more important factor than all of those is the fact that A Trip to the Moon is sci-fi. Genre has not been much discussed in this project so far (Cinderella and fantasy being the exception), owing to the dearth of narratives up to this point. But here, it feels especially relevant: A Trip is almost unanimously regarded as the first science fiction film, a genre that, in 2017, is more current and popular than it has ever been. A Trip to the Moon simply appeals more to the cultural imagination of 2017 than its contemporaries, such as, say, The Great Train Robbery, which is steeped in a Western frontier ideology that has since faded. That is not to say that the endurance of sci-fi is in any way "organic"; even ignoring its inextricable ties to the growth of industrial capitalism (hence the libertarian leanings of most sci-fi in its view of technology as inherently liberatory), the film business itself has become increasingly compatible with sci-fi as a form. In an increasingly globalized film market, the idea of looking away from Earth, and thus, not being tied down to its politics, is an attractive notion. But it is just that--a notion. There are no "apolitical" films so long as those films are made by human beings in concert with other human beings (and even a robot could only make a film as "apolitical" as its programming.) Sci-fi is of course well-acquainted with techno-fetishism, at its worst making technology into outright religion, promising to free humanity from its feeble limitations, to raise homo sapiens to godhood. And what better way to show humanity exceeding its limits than by showing them venturing from Earth altogether?

This idea of "humanity" as an undifferentiated mass, hurtling as a single unit toward the future, is, surprisingly, reflected in Melies' film. Unlike Four Heads or The India Rubber Head, A Trip to the Moon features not Melies the Genius, nor any other singular character; the protagonists are instead a group of unnamed Earthlings with no apparent motivations or biographies beyond being the subjects of space travel. They go to the moon, they kill some moon-men (again with the cartoonish murderous comedy that Melies was so fond of), and they go back to Earth. Where Melies' previous films focused on the individual, A Trip concerns itself with race. Ostensibly this is the human race we're talking about, but the astronauts' genocidal treatment of the moon-men--who resemble Native American stereotypes--feels not like a conflict between humans and aliens, but like a colonizer murdering their would-be subjects into submission. The moon-men may have chased the astronauts off for now, but while the humans can always come back to finish the slaughter, the natives can only sit and wait to be conquered. In that sense, the film is chauvinistic--presenting murder as fun adventure--without specifying chauvinism over anyone in particular, except non-humans, of course. Human supremacy over aliens is taken as a given in A Trip to the Moon, but this attitude opens up an uncomfortable discussion; when the aliens still look and act like humans, where does that leave the movie, ideologically? Is the human who acts like an alien then a subhuman who can be killed without mercy or guilt? If so (and frankly, even if not), A Trip to the Moon is the earliest cinematic example of sci-fi legitimizing reactionary nationalism under the guise of human universalism. Melies' ideology will strongly influence later films in the genre, even those made today.


Other connections: It's safe to say that A Trip to the Moon is one of the most influential films in history, from its technical tricks, to its narrative structure, to its sci-fi theme, to its stylized set design. It was also an early hand-colored film (the current source print being rediscovered in 1993.)


Other most-voted titles of 1902:    


2. Gulliver's Travels (Georges Melies | 516 votes)

3. Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (Edwin S. Porter | 510 votes)

4. Jack and the Beanstalk (George S. Fleming and Edwin S. Porter | 489 votes)

5. Fun in a Bakery Shop (Edwin S. Porter | 258 votes)

6. The Human Fly (Georges Melies | 235 votes)

7. Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (Ferdinand Zecca | 213 votes)

8. The Colonel's Shower Bath (Georges Melies | 211 votes)

9. The Terrible Eruption of Mount Pelee and Destruction of St. Pierre, Martinique (Georges Melies | 208 votes)

10. Mephistopheles' School of Magic (Georges Melies | 208 votes)

IMDB lists 1,815 titles for the year altogether.

The IMDB Canon, Vol. 18: The India Rubber Head (1901)

IMDB user votes (as of this writing): 1,727
Number of user reviews: 13
User score: 7.2

Georges Melies' fourth entry in the Canon in as many years does not leave me with much new to say about him (or so I thought.) The India Rubber Head is a combination of Melies' two previously-demonstrated tendencies: first, his self-advertisement, and second, his celebration of violence against the human body.

Melies wants the viewer to see his face, and see it big. The entire purpose of India Rubber Head seems to be the enlargement of his visage. While most evaluations of this film focus on the technical dimension of Melies' ever-growing face, identifying it simply as vehicle for the introduction of zooming to cinema, I argue that this conception is backwards. Zooming is, rather, an innovation of necessity, created specifically so that Melies can make his face the front-and-center focus of the film. Close-up shots have not been seen yet at this point in the Canon; sure, there have been several films focusing on singular subjects, but always as a full body. Yet the most distinctive markers of human identity lie not in the feet, hands, or torso of a person, but in their face. To fill an entire shot with a face is to take the magnifying potential of cinema to its logical conclusion. With cinema, a person no longer has to be confined to the physical dimensions of their flesh; they can make larger than life, larger than death, larger than just about anything they want; they can engulf a room, overwhelm the senses, make their faces not only visible, but impossible not to see. From here on, film's obsession with the face will go beyond fetishism to outright deification. Melies can thus be seen as a pioneer in yet another respect: the first filmmaker to ossify his own face, to make himself into a cinematic messiah, eternal, immortal, and omnipresent.

At the same time, Melies wants his face to explode. There is a distinctly sadistic (or, should I say, masochistic) tone to this production, as with many of Melies' other films; the maiming and destruction of a living head is not used here for horror, but for comedy. It is even more radical than Four Heads in that the punchline is simply death; there is nothing more to the humor than the fact that someone's life has been cruelly ended for no reason. No other film to date has been so utterly blase about dying, or placed less worth in the value of a human life. In Melies' world, to die is to puff away into a cloud of smoke, as though the cessation of life was simply a disappearing act, perhaps to an invisible "backstage" somewhere. One could view this trope as the influence of stage magic creeping into film; after all, an inordinate amount of magic revolved around people suffering seemingly-deadly fates, and then being brought back unharmed. But that is the key difference between The India Rubber Head and its stage counterparts; in this film, the head is never brought back. It stays dead, but the theatrical and comedic framework of the magic show otherwise remains intact. This mutation, an artifact of the transition between stage and screen, has (unintended?) consequences for the nascent medium of film. It opens the door for narratives such as The India Rubber Head, which are at once nihilistic and jolly, fatalist and flippant, bloodthirsty and playful. It begins the trend that the film industry will follow en masse, wherein killing is treated as desirable, even triumphant, the ultimate crowd-pleaser. It is the beginning of death as catharsis, not for the characters, but for the audience. It is the first snuff film.


Other connections: Not much to add here, since Melies is again the only actor in the picture. Zooming will soon become a standard filmmaking technique, but you already know that.


Other most-voted titles of 1901:

2. Bluebeard (Georges Melies | 1,051 votes)

3. A Photographic Contortion (James Williamson | 969 votes)

4. What Happened on Twenty-third Street, New York City (George S. Fleming and Edwin S. Porter | 670 votes)

5. Demolishing and Building Up the Star Theatre (Frederick S. Armitage | 653 votes)

6. The Countryman's First Sight of the Animated Pictures (Robert W. Paul | 428 votes)

7. History of a Crime (Ferdinand Zecca | 411 votes)

8. Fire! (James Williamson | 395 votes)

9. Stop Thief! (James Williamson | 374 votes)

10. Pan-American Exposition By Night (Edwin S. Porter | 372 votes)

IMDB lists 1,753 titles for the year altogether.

The IMDB Canon, Vol. 17: The One-Man Band (1900)

IMDB user votes (as of this writing): 1,484
Number of user reviews: 15
User score: 7.1

It's Georges Melies again, this time with one of his greatest feats: the septuple exposure. Yes, it is true, it really does look like Melies is playing all those instruments at the same time. Even now, my mind wonders--to a degree, at least--"how did he do that?", even though I already have a pretty good idea. Surely this is his most impressive technical accomplishment yet, a real landmark in special effects.

Yet I am bored by it. I already feel burnt out by the multiple-exposure tricks in The One-Man Band, its novelty already having been used up with Four Heads and Cinderella from the previous two years. If there s something historically significant about The One-Man Band, it's that it introduced the diminishing returns of special effects to cinema. If the trend of the late 19th century was toward "art for art's sake" (Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, etc.), Melies' films are that principle's apotheosis, the eschewing of justification or purpose combined with the theatrical flair of the showman. Melies makes art into spectacle, spectacle into art; his films are spectacle for spectacle's sake. They exist for no other reason than that they can. They are an expression of Melies' expression, and little else.

It seems pointless to even review such a film. To congratulate Melies on perpetuating his own brand seems as much a waste of time as celebrating Coca-Cola's latest Super Bowl ad (the fact that people already do this not detracting from the point.) I know who Melies is by now, and so do you. And that could be the real significance of The One-Man Band: it is the first time in this project that the director overshadows the film, where reputation precedes content. It is proof that one can make something in the quote-unquote amazing sense and still fail to amaze. For this is the limit both of the effects film and of the "auteur": the fetishism of the event, the consumption of a film by its paratext.

For the effects film, the interest is never in the content, but in the process: how was it made, how does this advance the medium, how is it demonstrating new technology? No one wonders what the thoughts of the seven band members in The One-Man Band are, after all. No one is analyzing the psyche of the man who can magically split himself, and few would care about subtleties of his clones' performances. Likewise, the motivations of, say, the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, or the TIE fighters in Star Wars, are never of interest. Nor should they be ("should" being an odd, but appropriate word here: this is not a moral judgment, but of their fulfillment of the requirements of the form.) Effects films are modern-day stage magic, their allure lying entirely within the question of how they were made. And here lies the fallacy made in so many pieces on "movie magic": the idea that the appeal of special effects lies in the "possibilities" they create, in the fantasies they "bring to life". This is, in fact, the exact opposite of their appeal. The draw of effects lies in their limitations, their groundedness, their answer to the question, "what has SFX made boring?" The story of the behind-the-scenes work that went into the effects is invariably more interesting than the fictional frame into which they are inserted; the banalities of chroma keys and stop-motion are more fascinating than the creatures they bring to life. The only amazing thing about "effects wizards" is that they are not wizards at all. They do not make the world magical, but mundane, and this mundanity is what audiences have always desired above all else. It is entirely fitting (and maybe even necessary) that this race toward boredom was pioneered by a stage magician, a man who made his livelihood from converting the incredible to the banal. To that end, The One-Man Band must be considered one of his greatest successes, for it marks the point in cinematic history where special effects became dull, their gasping marvel reduced to a wheezing bore.


Other connections: Given the film's singular focus on Melies' persona, there is little to say about it that is not already covered in the previous two entries. However, Buster Keaton did borrow the concept for his 1921 short, The Playhouse. So that's something, I guess.



Other most-voted titles of 1900:

2. The Enchanted Drawing (J. Stuart Blackton | 719 votes)

3. Grandma's Reading Glass (George Albert Smith | 676 votes)

4. The Fat and the Lean Wrestling Match (Georges Melies | 605 votes)

5. The Delights of Automobiling (Cecil M. Hepworth | 585 votes)

6. Joan of Arc (Georges Melies | 555 votes)

7. How It Feels to Be Run Over (Cecil M. Hepworth | 500 votes)

8. Let Me Dream Again (George Albert Smith | 468 votes)

9. The Professor and His Field Glass (George Albert Smith | 444 votes)

10. Going to Bed Under Difficulties (Georges Melies | 361 votes)

The IMDB Canon, Vol. 16: Cinderella (1899)

IMDB user votes (as of this writing): 871
Number of user reviews: 6
User score: 6.5

Is there a more repulsive phrase in the history of storytelling than "happily ever after"? It is no accident that it is associated with the monarchist circlejerks that are fairy tales; it implies stasis, assures that its idyllic view of social hierarchy will not be disturbed or challenged, that magic is real after all. For magic, that basis of all fantasy, is anti-intellectual by definition: it is simply a force that makes things happen, and no science or reason can explain it. That is not to say that film does not already fetishize science, since that is the whole point of science fiction, but rather that fantasy proves the perfect inverse to sci-fi in its staunch refusal to think about what makes the world work. In a way, this is actually wiser than the naive technological determinism endemic to sci-fi, since fantasy accepts that no one single paradigm (i.e., science) can explain everything, but it is also the root of what makes fantasy so disturbing: that it is so relished by smart and experienced people. It is a rejection of learning, a right-wing Hail Mary to reclaim the "innocence" of a childhood in which nothing made sense, a time before the creator got older, everything started changing, and the grasp they thought they had on the world as a young adult slipped away. This is why fantasy usually models itself on the past, its gaze centered on some mythical notion of chivalry or what-have-you--and I emphasize the mythical part, for it so often disguises its traditionalist view of our world by inventing a new world altogether. This is perhaps the most honest aspect of fantasy, a tacit admission that a real Golden Age has never existed and that a new world must be invented to contain it. It is not, of course, ambitious to argue that magic does not exist. Most would counter-argue that, duh, they know magic isn't real, but they like to pretend it is, because the real world is "boring" (and there will be more to say on the acute narcissism of this viewpoint.) But those people have it backwards: magic is indeed real, in the sense of stage magic, for every fantasy novel is a series of distractions, of sleight-of-hand tricks, built upon the social relations of the present even as it pretends those relations don't exist. To consume fantasy is not to pretend that magic exists, but to decontextualize reality until it becomes magic.

Cinderella is an intensely reactionary tale. The only problem it has with aristocrats is that Cinderella is not one of them; she alone deserves, with her noble heart and pure love and (retch), to be plucked from the misery of poverty, having earned the privilege to conspicuously consume for "happily ever after". The film makes a simple equivalence between luxury and happiness, as it marks Cinderella's visual and emotional transformation by her wearing of ornate clothing. But ideology has never been the focus of criticism of any of Georges Melies' works, Cinderella being no exception; film histories instead discuss his technical expertise. I could go on and on about the various innovations of form he displays here; his use of cross-fading, his multi-scene storytelling, his ornate production design--anything to distract from the actual message conveyed with that form, which is among the most misguided ever put to film. If Melies' ambition was to unlock the magic of film, he succeeded; this is, after all, practically the first narrative film that has ever existed, a true advance for the craft. The problem with this line of criticism is that it uncritically invokes "magic" as a positive end in and of itself, a sterile and uncontingent sentiment that fits perfectly with the dreadful politics behind Cinderella (and which probably explains why it was chosen as one of the first film narratives.)

Melies demonstrates better than any other that the "magic" of film is to reify a profoundly unjust social order. If the medium is the message, then Cinderella indicates beyond any doubt film's allegiance to traditionalism, its allergy to change, its revulsion of thought. Film is little more than a tool to divide the world into good and bad, to defend the current social order, and to tell its audiences that they are common, unexceptional, and deservedly miserable. For no viewer can ever be as hard-working or as gracious as Cinderella; to watch her is to be reminded of one's inferiority, one's unworthiness to happiness. Cinderella, as with almost every fairy tale, is a twisted meritocracy that selects one perfect peasant to ascend to a world of comfort. The film takes its ideology to its logical conclusion, ending with a tableaux showing Cinderella's ascension to godhood, bathed in angelic light, frozen in time for all eternity. The almost-cryonic stasis in which the film ends reflects its earlier preoccupation with clocks: what torments Cinderella even more than her evil stepfamily, or even the social mores that make her debased servitude possible, is time (hallucinations of clocks everywhere, evil gnomes banging on bells, etc.) Whatever it is she needs to do, she's running out of time to do it--but don't worry, she'll have plenty more time not to do it now, because she's happy ever after. And the film isn't quite sure what that entails, because one isn't actually supposed to do anything when one is happy ever after; it's just supposed to stay that way forever. And ever. And ever. Melies' Cinderella is a perfect demonstration that "happily ever after" is not so much a celebration as a desperate plea, a plaintive cry to the fourth dimension to please, God, stop! But perhaps it is the nature of film (another medium-as-message thing) to freeze time in an idealized state, to ignore the future, to cling to the past. Whether this aligns the whole medium with reactionary politics, or just the fairy tale genre, is a question that will grow only more pressing as narrative films become the norm.


Other connections: Cinderella is one of the most frequently-filmed stories in existence, with Wikipedia listing at least 57 different adaptations. though this is its only appearance in the Canon. Also, this version was one of the first color films, each frame being painted by hand. And for what it's worth, two of the actors in this film, Jeanne D'Alcy (Melies' wife) and Bleuette Bernon, also appear in Melies' more famous A Trip to the Moon. D'Alcy, in particular, is notable for being possibly the first career film actor.


Other most-voted titles of 1899:

2. A Kiss in the Tunnel (Gorge Albert Smith | 863 votes) 

3. A Turn of the Century Illusionist (Georges Melies | 684 votes)

4. The Devil's Castle (Georges Melies | 540 votes)

5. The Sign of the Cross (Georges Melies | 506 votes)

6. L'affaire Dreyfus (Georges Melies | 317 votes)

7. King John (Walter Pfeffer Dando, William K. Dickson, and Herbert Beerbohm Tree | 306 votes)

8. Haggard's She: The Pillar of Fire (Georges Melies | 306 votes)

9. Louis petite fils et son chat (Louis Lumiere | 281 votes)

10. A Mysterious Portrait (Georges Melies | 281 votes) 

IMDB lists 1,792 titles for the year altogether. 

The IMDB Canon, Vol. 15: Four Heads Are Better Than One (1898)

IMDB user votes (as of this writing): 2,081
Number of user reviews: 15
User score: 7.6

Four Heads Are Better Than One is the first of several IMDB Canon films from the great wizard of early movies, Georges Melies. My use of the word "movies" here is deliberate, for we are no longer in a world of mere experimentation, no longer one of simple technical curiosity. Four Heads is the point at which the craft of film evolves from novelty to spectacle, where its ambitions evolve from the mere recording of reality to the creation of spectacular images. Hence Melies' privileged place in the film canon; while historians respect earlier filmmakers (Le Prince, Dickson, the Lumieres), they adore Melies. He is, in conventional historiography, the first great master of the craft, the first one to elevate film from distraction to rapture. Critical reactions to Melies are typically described with a number of stock phrases: "movie magic", "delightful whimsy", or that most insidious of phrases, "childlike wonder", as though one of the most desirable qualities of a film is to reduce the viewer to a blubbering baby. In this sense, Melies' style of filmmaking is a perfect reflection of his background as a stage magician--for the key feature of stage magic (indeed, the very thing that makes it magic) is its anti-intellectualism, its brazen opposition to critical thought. The spectator is in every case to be reduced to the helpless stupor of infancy, neither able to comprehend cause-and-effect nor to do anything but visually follow the motions of the person in front of them. And unlike many of the earlier films in the Canon so far, there is no scientific or archival purpose to Four Heads; it is pure spectacle, meant simply to entertain; it is an early example of a "fun" film (though without the knee-jerk defensiveness typically associated with "fun", i.e., "just turn your brain off, it's a 'fun' movie!") Unapologetically vapid fluff pieces like Four Heads still exist today, though they are now euphemistically called "high concept" films--the kind where the entire premise can be summed up in a sentence, so that even a child can grasp its hook (e.g., the superhero fights the bad guy, or some dinosaurs escape from a theme park, etc.)

There is little doubt that Melies was (and is) successful in infantilizing his audience--even now, I look at Melies crawling under the table upon which his head sits, and can do little but stare, slack-jawed, dribbling, thinking only, "how?" The film taps directly into a viewer's primal desire to be dominated by the machine; as mentioned previously, one of the main functions of cinema is to enlargen its subject matter and thereby engulf its viewer. But perhaps even more pervasive than that is the utopian view of cinema as a window into the past, a way to live out opportunities and possibilities that have passed the viewer by. The usual method of doing this is to include a surrogate character for the audience; but Four Heads breaks (or should I say, precedes) convention here. There is no protagonist in Four Heads; Melies performs the film for his audience directly, as though he were onstage before them--there is no character upon whom the viewers can project themselves, for they are the character, a direct embodiment of themselves and undisguised placation of their narcissism. This is a narrative with only three walls; the film is effectively a third-person narration, the camera being the omniscient narrator, and Melies its deuteragonist. The film's affect operates not within Melies' character, but is instead projected outward onto the audience. Accordingly, the emotional force of Four Heads resides entirely within the audience's shock and surprise at seeing a man take off his head; the man himself seems perfectly at ease. The dismemberment of the body becomes a source not of horror, but of amusement.

And there is another first for cinema: the glorification of violence, the idea that decapitation is merely a game--another consequence of the childhood naivete bludgeoned into the viewer by Melies' sleight-of-hand. Slapstick comedy--by which is meant violent comedy--will be built on this principle, the idea that horrific abuse of the body is funny as long as it does not happen to the audience or their surrogate. It's always hilarious to watch the other guy get hurt, for laughter is aggressive, sadistic, a vicarious infliction of pain upon the Other, closely tied with humanity's basal urges to dominate and destroy all those beneath them. Therefore, there is little difference between laughing at a man severing his own head and someone else severing it; the only determinant for humor is whether or not the audience Otherizes the victim, and if so, it's hysterical. Violent gratification will shortly become one of the main modes of visual pleasure in the film industry; Four Heads is, in retrospect, its bellwether.

Other connections: Melies' life took the perfect trajectory for him to be lionized after the fact. While his films were widely distributed (especially A Voyage to the Moon), he made little to no money from international showings, due to widespread piracy. Thus, Melies is easy to portray as the first great martyr of film, the perfect example of why we need to stop BitTorrent and its ilk. In 1913, he left the film industry, penniless. In 1923, he burned all of the original negatives of his work. He lived out the rest of his days selling candy on a Parisian street corner. He is the magician who made himself a disappear, an irresistible figure for historians to mythologize.

Other most-voted titles of 1898:

2. Tossing a Nigger in a Blanket (William "Daddy" Paley | 1,842 votes)

3. A Trip to the Moon (Georges Melies | 1,732 votes) -- Not to be confused with Melies' 1902 film of the same name.

4. Santa Claus (George Albert Smith | 473 votes)

5. The Temptation of St. Anthony (Georges Melies | 456 votes)

6. The Magician (Georges Melies | 419 votes)

7. Le squelette jjoyeux (Louis Lumiere | 385 votes)

8. Pack Train at Chilkoot Pass (362 votes)

9. Come Along, Do! (Robert W. Paul | 324 votes)

10. Panorama pris d'un train en marche (Georges Melies | 302 votes)

IMDB lists 1,741 titles for the year altogether.

The IMDB Canon, Vol. 14: Bataille de neige (1897)

IMDB user votes (as of this writing): 967
Number of user reviews: 6
User score: 6.7

The Lumieres return again, but unlike in The Arrival of a Train, Bataille de neige focuses on the actions of humans, rather than machines. The film still contains signs of industrial urbanity--the snowball fight clearly takes place on a city street--but this is not the picture of order and power that The Arrival was. On the contrary, Bataille de neige is a Bakhtinian carnivalesque, a breakdown of social class and propriety, and a chaotic and spontaneous revolution against urban technocracy. Note the lack of contemporary technology in the film; the one reminder of modern machinery is the cyclist, who is quickly pelted and thrown to the ground. This is not a space in which humans submit to the implacable trundle of industrial innovation; no, this space is a return to the basic, the primitive, even the savage; there is nothing here but bare hands in snow, flinging the snow at each other in a blatantly, or should I say, defiantly unproductive fashion.

Yet, the Lumieres' vision of mass rebellion is reactionary. The action of the collective is ineffectual, mutually hostile, and violent; as soon as the old hierarchy is overthrown, chaos reigns. This is not a world in which the spontaneous action of the proletariat (or even the petit-bourgeoisie) will ever lead to anything but senseless slaughter and mayhem. These workers need to keep being cogs in the industrial machine, you see, or else they would be lazy or criminal or both. The only factor stopping Bataille de neige from being a factory-owner's nightmare is the weapon of choice used, that being snow. And what better way is there to show the uselessness of protest than to demonstrate that, even when given the chance to rise up against their masters, the protesters choose a mildly-discomforting ball of slush as their means of attack? This is not revolution so much as bacchanalia (not that a nineteenth-century conservative would see any difference); furthermore, its "spontaneity" is a complete illusion. The snowball fight is, of course, staged, and this artificiality only highlights its Bakhtinian hue--for carnivalesque is always contained chaos, rebellion permitted within a particular time and space, thereby neutering its ability to threaten the established order. And this is the paradox behind any "anarchic" film, for as soon as anarchy is scripted, it is no longer anarchy; it is instead a bounded aesthetic using the dead signifiers of counterculture, a contradiction along the lines of "pop punk" (granted, punk has always been pop) and Che shirts from Walmart.

It would be easy to label such recuperation as a feature of capitalism, but this would be misleading, as Bakhtin originally applied his ideas specifically to medieval carnival, wherein serfs would be granted a few days a year for drinking and whoring before returning to the back-breaking grind of feudal farming. Bataille de neige should thus be viewed as a symptom of power. It is a common misconception to think that, as state power grows, individual freedom of expression shrinks. In reality, power works in exactly the opposite way: the more power a state has over its subjects, the more freedom it gives those subjects to express themselves. Hence why every authoritarian loves social Darwinism, and hence Nietzsche's appropriation by fascists. This dynamic is, of course, closely linked to the development of technology; observe the parallel course of Moore's law, wherein the number of transistors on a chip (and thus computing power) doubles every 18 months, and Zimmerman's law, in which the government's power to spy on its citizenry also doubles every 18 months. We are freer now than ever to entertain ourselves, freer than ever to shun reality in favor of a comfortable cocoon of fantasy, mediated via the various screens that many of us now spend most of our lives looking at. Likewise, it is easier than ever to express one's self; you could, for example, start your own blog (for free!), or your own Youtube channel (for free!), and be instantly accessible to people around the world. And while these services are, indeed, "free", in the sense that you don't have to pay money for them, they are very costly in another sense, i that they involve the complete surrender of privacy to whichever organization hosts them, and exposure to surveillance by whoever wants to mine data from them. I do not know what the end result of this escalating freedom-surveillance dialectic will be, but I do know where its starting point on film was: the Lumiere brothers, and their successful synthesis of spontaneity, their incorporation of anarchy into order, their transformation of political upheaval into depoliticized aesthetic.

Other connections: Since this film is considerably less famous than the previous two Lumiere films in this project, there aren't any good anecdotes relating to it. Also, the performers' identities appear to be unknown.

Other most-voted titles of 1897:

2. Seminary Girls (James H. White | 623 votes) 

3. Leaving Jerusalem by Railway (Alexandre Promio | 520 votes) 

4. Mr. Edison at Work in His Chemical Laboratory (James H. White | 472 votes) 

5. The Bewitched Inn (Georges Melies | 453 votes)

6. Admiral Cigarette (William Heise | 358 votes)

7. The Miller and Chimney Sweep (George Albert Smith | 345 votes) 

8. Chicago Police Parade (Alexandre Promio | 336 votes)

9. Niagara Falls (303 votes)

10. Partie de cartes (Leopoldo Fregoli | 299 votes)

IMDB lists 1,327 titles for the year altogether.