The Birth of Cinema

In the years before the First World War, France led the world in film. The Lumière brothers gave one of the first public screenings, Georges Méliès turned the camera into a magician's tool, the companies Pathé and Gaumont became the largest film businesses on earth, and a young woman called Alice Guy directed some of the earliest story films and later ran a studio in New Jersey. This chapter tells that story and, true to the course, separates the record from the legends that have grown round it. Dates and details are given from general knowledge and flagged where they should be checked.

The Lumière Brothers

Auguste and Louis Lumière ran a successful photographic-plate business in Lyon. In 1895 they patented the Cinématographe, a compact device that worked as a camera, a developer and a projector in one, and which was light enough to be taken anywhere. They first showed films to invited audiences in the spring of 1895 (check), and on 28 December 1895 they gave a public screening to a paying audience in the basement of the Grand Café in Paris. It is the date most often given as the birth of commercial cinema.

• What was shown. A programme of short films, each lasting less than a minute: workers leaving the Lumière factory, a baby being fed, and a comic scene in which a boy plays a trick on a gardener with a hose (L'Arroseur arrosé, "the sprinkler sprinkled").
• The style. A fixed camera, one scene, no editing. These are real life and staged gags filmed in a single take.
• The spread. The company trained operators and sent them around the world to film and show the Cinématographe, which helped to spread the new medium quickly.

The Train Legend

The film L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat ("Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station") shows a train arriving at a platform at an angle. The popular story is that the first audiences were terrified and fled, convinced that the train would run them down. Film historians generally treat this as a legend, or at least a heavy exaggeration: the evidence for such panic is weak, and the audience knew they were watching a projected image (check). The story is retold because it expresses something true, the shock of a new medium, even if the details are probably not.

Méliès and the Trick Film

Georges Méliès was a Parisian stage magician who owned a theatre. After seeing the Lumière show he bought a camera and began making films in a different spirit, as magic. He built a glass-walled studio near Paris, designed painted sets and costumes, and used a series of tricks that he is credited with developing: stopping the camera and changing the scene so that a person seems to vanish, dissolves, double exposures and hand-coloured prints.

• The Moon film. His best-known film, A Trip to the Moon (1902), shows astronomers travelling in a shell fired from a cannon, and its image of the rocket in the Moon's eye is one of the most recognisable pictures in film history.
• Piracy. The film was widely copied abroad, particularly in the United States, and Méliès received little from its success.
• Decline and rediscovery. He fell out of fashion, went bankrupt before the First World War, and later ran a toy and sweet stall at a Paris railway station. He was rediscovered in the 1920s and honoured with a state award (check). The 2011 film Hugo retells part of his story.

Pathé and Gaumont

Business followed invention. Two French companies grew into global firms.

By the early 1900s French firms supplied a large share of the films shown around the world, including in the United States. This early lead was lost during the First World War, when production was disrupted and American companies took over the international market, a change that explains much of what follows in the course, including French worries about American competition (Chapter 10).

Alice Guy

One of the most interesting figures of the period is Alice Guy, later known as Alice Guy-Blaché. She began as a secretary to Léon Gaumont in the 1890s and became one of the first directors at his company, making short films in the late 1890s and after. She is often credited with directing one of the earliest story films, La Fée aux choux ("The Cabbage Fairy"), from around 1896, though the date and whether it was the very first are disputed (check). She went on to direct and supervise a large number of short films, and was involved in early experiments with synchronised sound.

• Move to America. After marrying Herbert Blaché, a colleague from Gaumont, she moved to the United States around 1907 (check).
• Solax. In 1910 she founded her own company, Solax, and later built a large studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey, at a time when that town, and not Hollywood, was a centre of American film-making. The studio is often described as one of the largest and best equipped of its day (check the wording).
• Return and neglect. Her company did not last, she left film-making in the early 1920s and went back to France. For decades her work was forgotten or credited to others, and she has been rediscovered, including in a documentary about her life in 2018 (check).

The Bridge to the Next Chapter

Another Gaumont director of the period, Louis Feuillade, made long serial crime films in the 1910s that were very popular. They lead naturally into the next chapter, in which French cinema, having lost its commercial lead, found a new role as an art.

Exercises

Next chapter: Silent Experiment & Poetic Realism, which follows French film as an art through the 1920s and 1930s.