Last updated Sept. 28, 1998.
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When movies were still silent, Japanese audiences had benshi preside over shows. These announcers were more popular than the films! As Joseph Anderson and Donald Richie explain in their book, The Japanese Film, movie screens were pushed over to the side, and the projection crew was out in plain view of the audience. Benshi would explain what was going on in the films, and how all the machinery worked, too. While Americans are still catching up after a century, they have realized that media production methods are often just as interesting as the finished products.
Perspective, Forced and Otherwise:
People can look at and make photographs so easily nowadays, that they don't stop and wonder how much they really know about visual media. Perspective is considered to be a man-made phenomenon, so if you take a photo with a "wide-angle" or short lens, it will be a different perspective than if you used a "telephoto" or long lens. "Pictorial Guide to Photographic Lenses," an article that appeared in the magazine Peterson's PhotoGraphic in April, 1991, showed that apparent image size can be misleading. The original article compared photos taken from the same vantage point with different lenses, which all wound up looking the same. Then the photographer inverted the process for another set of photos, taken from differing camera-to-subject distances, which all looked startlingly odd, even while the apparent size of the person never changed much. The Art of Renaissance Science offers a related movie clip in a display on perspective in architecture and graphics. Worth the wait! Some illusions depend on angle and distance together. The Ames Room is so powerful, that it works after you've been told how it works. But it also works while you watch it working.
FX:
Various studies of photographed stage effects have been written since movies were invented. There's A. Hopkins' study, Magic: Stage Illusions, Special Effects and Trick Photography, reprinted by Dover, 1990. John Brosnan covers the major effects from the silent period in Movie Magic, Plume Books, NY, 1976. A. N. Vardac's 1949 Stage to Screen is available in a 1987 Da Capo reprint. Martin Quigley's 1948 history Magic Shadows: The Story of the Origin of Motion Pictures reaches back to late medieval optics experimentors, and their detractors.
J. Stuart Blackton:
Roy Madsen's 1969 book, Animated Film, listed the man who starred in "The Enchanted Drawing" as anonymous. Now we know he's the J. Stuart Blackton mentioned in Erik Barnouw's The Magician and the Cinema. He used to play the girl in a box-jumping routine during shows, even if he hadn't shaved! That and more silly stories can be found in J. Stuart Blackton: A Personal Biography by His Daughter; Marian B. Trimble, published by Scarecrow Press in 1985.
Houdini, Doyle and O'Brien:
Houdini was good at double exposures when he was developing fake "spirit" stills, just to bug A. Conan Doyle. A good example is the "out of body experience" photo reproduced in Milbourne Christopher's Houdini: The Untold Story, in 1969, by the Thomas Y. Crowell Company of New York. But even Houdini was reportedly caught up short when Doyle showed Willis O'Brien's raw footage animation from The Lost World at a 1922 dinner for the Society of American Magicians. The material was far superior to anything O'Brien had done for Edison, but Doyle refused to explain that the dinosaurs were really inanimate. Ernst and Carrington may have told the first version of this story in their 1932 biography Houdini and Conan Doyle, but it's also mentioned in the McFarland book Flights of Fancy by Kenneth Von Gunden, and in the liner notes for the restoration of The Lost World.
Melies and Alice Guy Blache:
Alice Guy Blache started out with the Lumiere Brothers, but she soon relocated to the US to start her own production company. She was immediately involved in the big center of film production before Hollywood came along. The Movies Begin: Making Movies in New Jersey, 1887-1920, was published by the Newark Museum of New Jersey in 1977. That and Ally Acker's one-volume encyclopedia Reel Women: Pioneers of the Cinema, 1896 to the Present (Continuum, New York, 1991) are the most likely sources for information on Guy Blache and other women directors of the silent period. The Memoirs of Alice Guy Blache, from Scarecrow Press, 1986, is a more recent addition to published material on this neglected pioneer. Melies and Guy Blache are both in Georges Sadoul's material, such as his Dictionary of Filmmakers, translated by Peter Morris in 1972 for the UC Press at Berkeley, and French Film, which Sadoul wrote in 1953.
-- compiled by J. Kramer