‘Never Has One Seen Reality Enveloped in Such a Phantasmagoria’: Watching Spectacular Transformations, 1860–1889
2009; Edinburgh University Press; Volume: 6; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.3366/e1744185409000846
ISSN1750-0109
Autores Tópico(s)Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
ResumoIn cinema’s first decade, feeries such as A Trip to the Moon (Melies, 1902) and The Kingdom of the Fairies (Melies, 1903) were among the most popular films in the world.1 With fantastic subject matter, elaborate spectacles, relatively lengthy running times, the use of colour and prominent trick effects, such films offered many different attractions. These films borrowed heavily from the narratives and spectacles of their stage antecedent, the theatrical feerie.2 Roughly translatable as a ‘fairy play’, this type of theatrical show ran alongside melodramas and vaudevilles in the popular stages of nineteenth-century France, particularly in Paris.3 As well as being an extension of this stage tradition, the cinematic feerie also extended a tradition of transformation. This is evident in the terms used to describe them; they were both ‘feeries’ and a type of ‘transformation view’.4 Seen in this light, this important genre of early cinema can be drawn into a wider context of nineteenth-century visual culture in which the depiction of spectacular transformation had developed its own set of associations, specific sites and vernacular. While this discussion focuses on France, the taste for transformation was by no means exclusively national – for example, it was also evident in pantomime transformation scenes on the London stage and the international popularity (and production) of the cinematic feerie. However, this essay limits the scope mainly to French newspapers and periodicals in order to examine more closely specific examples of how such transformations were discussed. In particular, I focus on the revival
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