Magic act of recovery
The lack of preservation of early films is a bewildering and heartbreaking truth of movie history. Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation estimates the 90% of all silent films are lost and 50% of all pre-1950 films are lost. Granted, the huge majority of those are cheaply made nickelodeon schlock of minimal artistic or even historical merit. The number of lost films that we’d be regularly watching today is certainly small. The ones we’d care about are mostly important historical milestones or early works of great directors. But tastes and perspectives change with time; surely some director’s lost work would be reevaluated and canonized, or at least better understood. The concept of annihilated art stings especially in an era where nearly everything created is instantly backed up on globally distributed servers and shareable in instants. It is, frankly, a challenge in the 21st century to even comprehend the idea of creative works being lost to the sands of time.
As frustrating as it is to confront the reality of lost films, there remains the tantalizing hope of rediscovery. We are probably past the days where intact copies of lost legendary films will be discovered in closets, a la The Passion of Joan of Arc, but that hasn’t stopped people from scanning crumbling celluloid found in warehouses to try and save what we can. The most plausible “white whale” out there is footage trimmed from Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons: Turner Classic Movies funded a search expedition for the footage in Brazil just last year (though filming of the associated documentary has wrapped and I’ve read no headlines of the film’s rediscovery).
I bring all of this up because I am reading a book about Georges Méliès’s filmography. It was published in 2000 — more than a century after his career began — and some of his early films have been recovered since the book book was published. It’s crazy to think that more than 100 years have passed and we’re still making significant progress on scrounging up scraps of celluloid from the Grover Cleveland presidency. You’d think we’ve discovered all there is to find, but preservation of early cinema is very much an ongoing, dynamic process. So long as there are closets, warehouses, and attics that remain unperturbed, it will continue as such.
Consider the following miracle: Méliès’s very first two films ever (according to the catalog of his production company Star Film Company), both made in the 19th century, have both been recovered and released in the past 15 years. Playing Cards, his debut, exists in a complete and clean state, published for the first time in 2008.
Conjuring, his second film, was discovered in 2015, but in a more fragmentary condition. (A copy of the print hand-rotoscoped was found a year earlier, as well.) In French, the film has the title Séance de prestidigitation, which is a bit more evocative. All of the copies I can find uploaded online run between 6 and 12 seconds, and it’s not 100% clear if this is a snippet or the complete original film. The fact that both the live action and rotoscoped copies are essentially identical in content suggests that this might have just been a very short experiment rather than an actual film.
Indeed, Conjuring in its few frames shows Méliès breaking new ground and trying a visual technique that would become one of his technical signatures: the substitution splice, i.e. pausing recording (or cutting out film) to suggest something happening instantly, perhaps something appearing or disappearing. (If you ever messed around with a camcorder as a kid like me, this was the first gimmick you figured out.) In this case, it’s to show an on-screen Méliès make a stuffed devil head transport between two containers as he lifts and lowers the containers. He’d go on to use expanded versions this technique for years to come — it’s one of the main special effects in Voyage to the Moon, for example.
Where Playing Cards was a pure actuality, Conjuring shows Méliès’s curiosity in trick film techniques to use the medium as an extension of his magic act. All of this was made when he was still cranking his own homemade “coffee-grinder” camera in corners of his house, before he acquired an easier-to-use Lumiere camera or finished building his film studio. At just a few seconds in length, it doesn’t offer much to soak in, but it remains a compelling curiosity, and one that shows Méliès’s natural entertainment and spectacle instincts.
- Review Series: Georges Melies
Is It Good?
Nearly Good (4/8)
A few words on "Is It Good?" ratings for early cinema.
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