Melies and Early Cinema(gic): Conjuring the Science-Fiction Film Genre
2011; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2562-2528
Autores Tópico(s)Cinema and Media Studies
ResumoThis article is a theoretical analysis of a particular niche in film studies. It examines the profound influence of early cinema on the development of the science-fiction genre by considering: the concept of spectatorship, the apparatus of exhibition, the manipulation of temporality, and the influence of master conjurer and filmmaker Georges Melies and his use of trick photography. This article seeks to reconstruct the genealogy of sci-fi from the fragmented remnants of early cinema. By adopting a historiographical and archival approach to research, each scholarly text presents a unique concept to the study of film history. Critical attention focuses on the theoretical framework of such notable scholars as Rick Altman, Mary Ann Doane, Thomas Elsaesser, Tom Gunning, Brooks Landon, Albert J.La Valley, Christian Metz, Simon Popple and Vivian Sobchack. Their work cumulatively proposes an interpretive history of early sci-fi cinema through a critical analysis of the genre in its formative era, of which Georges Melies is the foremost author. Before discussing the origins of the contemporary science-fiction genre, one must extrapolate a modern definition that is consistent with its earliest cinematic form. In one of the leading critical studies of American sci-fi cinema, Screening Space, Sobchack distills science-fiction to its first principles by analyzing its decisive role in the broad landscape of cinema. genre is quite broad, in a sense, with various theorists offering numerous competing definitions. Sobchack, however, narrows her focus on the genre's speculative nature, noting that: [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] SF film attempts to meet our expectations by using the magic of design and special effects cinematography to show us things which do not exist, things which are highly speculative, which astonish us by the very fact of their visual realization on the screen since they have no counterparts in the world outside the theatre. (1) In his essay, A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre, Altman distinguishes between two methods of analyzing genre theory. sci-fi genre may be examined in terms of its semantic properties--a set of common characters types, locations, camera movements, and so forth--as well as its syntax--the denotation of meaning from its aforementioned semantic characteristics. (2) Altman notes that, The semantic approach thus stresses the genre's building blocks, while the syntactic view privileges the structures into which they are arranged. (3) Though still in its gestational period, early cinema employs recurring motifs to define science-fiction's syntactic theme of speculation. If traditional genre theory does indeed dictate science-fiction, then semantics are its bricks and mortar. In Aesthetics of Ambivalence, Landon surmises that, Special effects facilitate the depiction of SF stories by providing the necessary images of non-existent phenomena--futuristic cities, other planets, space ships, aliens, faster-than-light travel (4) and the like. Arguably then, the first science-fiction motion picture in the history of cinema is Georges Melies' Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902), a film that entertains several salient examples of such visual speculation. Influenced by the earlier literary traditions of Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon and H.G. Wells' First Men and the Moon, the story follows a spectacular journey to the moon aboard a makeshift rocket. (5) After a group of explorers lands on its rocky and unstable surface, they are immediately surrounded by the strange and unfamiliar: streams of fire explode from beneath the surface; stars turn into women and snow appears to fall from the sky; after descending into the lunar surface, an umbrella magically transforms into a mushroom; the explorers encounter hostile moon creatures; captured by a society of civilized beings, the men escape in their rocket and fall back to earth unscathed. …
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