frfilmtv1-2, Exercise 2: Lumière and Méliès; two legends

Model answer:

Lumière: filmed real life and simple staged gags with a fixed camera in a single take, for example workers leaving the factory or L'Arroseur arrosé. Méliès: a stage magician who used film as magic, with painted sets, stopped-camera tricks, dissolves, double exposures and hand-coloured prints, for example A Trip to the Moon (1902).

The train legend says the first audiences fled in terror from the film of a train arriving at La Ciotat. Historians treat it as a heavy exaggeration, since the evidence is weak and the audience knew they were watching a projected image. The jammed-camera story says Méliès discovered his trick by accident when his camera jammed. It is a good story and may be partly true, but he told several versions himself.

Both are better treated as legends: widely repeated, tidier than the facts, and expressive of something true about the new medium.