Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1124770
20 CINEMONTAGE / Q2 2019 THIS QUARTER IN FILM HISTORY magician he was — walks onto a theatrical stage, passes behind and steps through a large empty picture frame center stage. He places a landscape painting in the frame and a stool on the frame's lower edge in the landscape. With a wave of his hand, the landscape and stool in the frame "cut" to black and a second Méliès sitting on the stool in the painting dissolves into focus in the frame. The two men acknowledge and speak to one another; the Méliès outside the picture frame waves again, and the landscape with the Méliès inside the painting un-focuses into black. A "cut" brings the image of the hilly landscape with the empty stool back into the picture frame — and the movie is over. To achieve the effect of a cut, the filmmaker used mattes and stop motion. By the 1890s, mattes were common practice of still photographers to create double exposure photos. For The Mysterious Portrait, a matte masked the interior of the picture frame while the whole scene outside the frame was photographed. Then, after rewinding this master shot to the precise film frame, another matte masked the entire shot outside the picture frame and the interior of the frame was shot. To simulate these "cuts" within the picture frame, Méliès utilized the stop-motion technique he had developed to make people and objects appear, disappear or change form in his earlier fantastical movies. Méliès had discovered moving pictures — a series of photographs projected rapidly enough to create the illusion of movement on the screen — on December 28, 1895, at the Grand Café's Salon Indien in Paris. He was invited there by Auguste and Louis Lumière for the first public screening of 10 actualités (documentary views) the brothers had filmed — and projected — with their patented cinématographe (a combination movie camera and projector). In 1890, Thomas Alva Edison and W.K.L. Dickson first created movies on their Kinetograph. But these films could only be viewed by one person at a time on Edison and Dickson's bulky, peepshow-like Kinetoscope. However, the Lumières' cinématographe could also project its films for viewing on a screen by an audience. More than anyone in the late 1890s, Méliès persistently tried to invent ways to use these machines to tell stories. Since 1888, he had been the owner and director of the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, founded in 1845 by Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, the first great modern magician. Up through his introduction to film, Méliès had invented more than 30 elaborate "theatrical illusions" or magic tricks and, in 1895, was elected president of the Chambre Syndicale des Artistes Illusionnistes (Trade Association of Illusion Artists). The Lumières refused to sell him a cinématographe, but others were fabricating similar moving picture machines. In February 1896, Méliès bought a Kinetoscope copy manufactured by Robert W. Paul, an English instrument maker and early filmmaker. The magician studied its mechanism, designed his own camera/projector and had it constructed by his theatre's machinist, Lucien Korsten. While in London, Méliès also bought a crate of Eastman Kodak film; back in Paris, he perforated it with holes to fit the sprockets of his own machine. Théâtre Robert-Houdin presented its first film program on April 4, 1896, and went on to screen CONTINUED ON PAGE 22 Le Portrait Mystérieux (The Mysterious Portrait), 1899. Star Film Company Georges Méliès, right, with workers constructing his glass-walled Star Film studio in Montreuil, a suburb of Paris, in 1897. Star Film Company CONTINUED FROM PAGE 18