Teaching Film 04: Le Voyage dans la Lune
Georges Méliès' early sci-fi adventure (1905), and the surrounding developments
With an art form as new as film, it’s fun and interesting to share its early history - but I do it pretty quickly in the Intro to Film course, for the same reason I don’t show Battleship Potemkin or Citizen Kane: I think it’s an error to make students new to a field slog through that field’s early days before allowing them to study something they personally already love.
Get to the Good Stuff
A friend told me of a colleague at her school who taught photography and would not allow students to touch a camera until they’d learned its history and how it worked. This seemed to me petty and Calvinistic. It has always seemed clear to me that teaching/engaging the exciting and relevant aspects of a thing should be the hook, for two reasons:
A lot of people learn just the basics, and that’s enough. Dipping a toe into a topic is just fine, and a course should leave students with something useful or memorable to take away.
Passion is nearly impossible to create - so it should not be trampled on in the interests of discipline or “rigour.” Students who fall in love with photography will be likely to go back and dig into how it works. There may be some students who fall in love with cameras after only reading about them, but I wouldn’t count on it.
The Early Bits of Movie History
What would it have been like to see a photograph move, the first time? This is a profoundly useful mental exercise, since we can hardly imagine a world without moving pictures. Taking it backward, it might be akin to how people in oral cultures marvelled at the transmission of words via paper and writing. What in our lifetimes could be allegorically similar? A first step into really good VR, maybe, but not really. Taking psychedelic mushrooms, perhaps, but it’ll be some time before we can mention that in any class. It’s a massive step in cognition and technology.
Early motion picture histories will show the many different ways humans have tried to make images move, and they’re all really cool. In a future class, I would love to incorporate practical experiments with magic lanterns and pinhole cameras, etc., maybe in collaboration with a maker-leaning arts teacher. I haven’t yet.
There are many sources online for examples of early motion picture technology, but in short, pictures could be seen to move because we have an inherent visual tendency for “persistence of vision.” Images leave a tiny leftover image (look at a lit lightbulb and then look at a blank wall – there it is), and if a series of images is shown at specific rates, we see motion, not a series of still images.
Even before the invention of film, gadgets like the Zoetrope that created the illusion of movement were popular forms of entertainment. The film version of motion pictures became popular with the Kinetoscope, which one could view at a Nickelodeon in the early 1900s. (This can be a fun, short etymology lesson: nickel means 5 cents, and odeon means a covered theatre).
The Kinetoscope was patented – but not invented – by ol’ Thomas Edison, a very famous and successful bully. It allowed a person to peer into a machine that showed short motion pictures. (The question of who invented the Kinetoscope can be a fun, short look at the issue of who gets credit for inventions, the Great Man of History framework, and the wonderful idea of synchronous invention or discovery – another example being the concept of natural selection, which was formulated by both Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace). The history of film is full of these cross-global inventions: Edison and the Lumière brothers developing film projection, Edwin S. Porter and Méliès discovering film editing.
I tend to run through these developments in one class period, showing the inventions above and some of the early films – the one-minute “people leaving a factory” and “dude looking into a hose” and “boxing cats” stuff. I usually ask the kids to go look around on YouTube and share their best finds themselves. This depends on the class and their style.
The Edit
The key to motion pictures being more than a novelty was the discovery of the power of the edit. Prior to that, movies were whatever was captured between turning a camera on and turning it off. In the USA, credit is given to Edwin Porter, who found out how to join two separate pieces of recorded film together, essentially taking film from being akin to a phrase (cats are boxing) to its being able to express stories (a kid watching cats boxing then joined the circus). In France, Georges Méliès’ happy accident with a stuck film camera gave him an opportunity to discover in-camera tricks like disappearing or transforming.
With all of that explained, I show his 1905 hit A Trip to the Moon. It’s an interesting film to look at for a bunch of reasons, it’s mostly fun, and it’s just a little over ten minutes long.
1. The camera is absolutely stationary, filming a stage. In my experience, this is a stage people go through when they start making videos, and it’s interesting that the art of filmmaking had to go through it too. Point it out, and draw attention to the singular, unmoving camera perspective and how different it looks from, say, anything from five years later, when someone realizes the camera can be wherever.
2. The in-camera effects are fun, and show the learning and creation involved in filmmaking: the scientists all switch into wizards, for example – bing! Get the students to try these tricks out on their phones. One person turns into something else. Someone disappears. All done by just pausing.
3. The characters are always in full shots (the whole person is shown, no closeups), and they’re almost always moving – they practically jiggle, which is really funny. Directors wanted to get the most out of the moving aspect of moving pictures.
4. The 1905 conception of space travel – and what awaited us on the moon – is hilarious. When the travellers need to escape back to Earth, for example, they leap off the edge and fall back to Earth. Because the moon is up.
5. Purely bizarre: The first thing the scientists/wizards do when they get to the moon is … take a nap!
6. The colonialism of the era is on ugly display in this short movie. The scientist/wizards kill the first Moon Man they meet, fight the rest, and happily kidnap a couple to take home. A good look into a radically different moral setup than our own, and a good intro to how film can show us much more than what is onscreen.
7. The film has been restored with amazing efforts, which can introduce the notion of preservation and 4K updating. You can easily find “4K updates” of early films such as Train Pulling into a Station. They’re sort of uncanny.
8. The restored film is in colour(!) – as were select versions of it in 1905, because each cell was hand-tinted. The colours waver slightly for this reason. The amount of labour involved is shocking; perhaps discuss how many frames per second are needed for motion pictures to work (24) and ask somebody to figure out how many cells make up a 13-minute film.
I usually turn the sound off. No sound was inherent to the film, though there would have likely been live music in the movie theatre (the restored version features a cool soundtrack by Air).
I invite kids to interpret and discuss what’s happening onscreen out loud. It’s a nice break from having to be quiet, and allows for a good group discussion as we watch.
All of this is very extendable. These Amazing Shadows is a doc about the National Film Registry and the process of how movies earned respect as an art form almost 100 years after it began(!). It explains how many films have been permanently lost to attrition or simply discarded, and the work that now goes into preserving film.
If any of your students want more Georges Méliès, turn them on to Hugo, Scorcese’s movie about a kid and a robot, with Méliès’ film studio as a backdrop. There are nice analytical videos on YouTube (for nearly every important film). The one below, despite a very bored tone, is not bad.
Speaking of YouTube film resources, I must share Crash Course’s Film Studies series. The Green brothers’ Crash Course videos are among the greatest resources on the internet, and cover ten zillion fascinating topics. As a sample, here are the entries on Méliès and Porter’s contributions to film storytelling:
Go check out the rest of Crash Course, if you haven’t already.
Thanks for coming by. If you like it, please share it.
peace out
jep