Print

Kiss, the film depicted a rather awkward kiss between two stage actors, May Irwin and John Rice. The first cinema “still” of a motion picture image—the actors poised with lips together—was drawn from Edison’s film, appearing in an American newspaper and raising even more eyebrows. In the end, The Kiss elicited the first calls for censor- ship of the radical new medium (Lewis, 2008). Edison had neglected to secure international patents for his kinetoscope, and invent- ers in Europe began to develop their own motion picture projectors. Two of the most tal- ented of these European inventors were the French-born brothers Auguste and Louis Lumiere ` (see: Lumiere ` Brothers, The). Familiar with, and inspired by, Edison’s kineto- scope, the Lumieres ` created a complex machine that was camera, projector, and film developer rolled into one. Much more practical than Edison’s machine, the Lumieres’` cinematographe ´ ran at 16 fps (frames-per-second), which became the standard for silent pictures. It also allowed images to be taken “out of the box,” as it were, and to be pro- jected on a screen so that they could be viewed by multi-member audiences. Toward that end, the Lumieres ` rented out the basement of the Grand Cafe ´ in Paris on December 28, 1895, and the brothers became the first filmmakers to screen their cinematic offerings for a paying audience when they exhibited a series of motion pic- ture shorts. They opened their 1895 screening with a picture titled La sortie des usines Lumiere ` (Leaving the Lumiere ` Factory). In a certain sense the picture was much like those produced by Edison, as it merely recorded workers leaving a factory in Lyon after a long day of work. Yet La sortie des usines had a very different feel to it, as the film- makers had staged the scene—by the use of special lighting, camera position, and the- atrical blocking—in a way that gave it a certain expressive depth. Other films followed that had the same depth-level quality, perhaps the most famous the startling L’arrivee` d’un train en gare a ´ la Ciotat (The Arrival of a Train at la Ciotat), which legend has it had viewers covering their eyes and turning away from the screen for fear that the train would land in their laps. The Creation of Narrative Films and the Spread of Early Movie Houses Unlike Edison, then, the Lumieres ` by way of their use of innovative filmmaking techniques, began to define what came to be known as the cinematic mise-en-scene.` Borrowed from the stage, the phrase, which may be translated as “putting on the scene,” defines the process by which the film set (much like the theatrical stage) is framed—how it is lit, where the camera is placed, where the actors are positioned. Rather than just recording action, then, filmmakers began to “put on scenes” that conveyed meaning to their viewers. Ironically, the first filmmaker who began to make a name for himself as a master of mise-en-scene ` in America was another Frenchman, Georges Melies ´ ` (see: Melies, ´ ` Georges).Melies ´ ` was a magician who had experimented with trick photography and what would come to be understood as special effects. Although like other filmmakers he had begun his cinematic career by making actualities, he eventually began to make motion pictures that told stories—Barbe-Bleue (Bluebeard) in 1902, for instance, and later, La sirene ` (The Mermaid) in 1904 and Le diable noir (The Black Imp) in 1905. Introduction xxi