Less than two years after Tyler's book was published, Billy Wilder was making Sunset Boulevard. "Camera trickery really is camera magic," Tyler wrote in his 1947 Magic and Myth of the Movies for the spectator, the "cinematic illusion" promotes an atavistic receptivity to ancient beliefs in "ghosts, secret forces, telepathy, etc". While some theorists, notably Godard's critical mentor André Bazin, focused on the nature of photographic reality, others, like the American surrealist Parker Tyler, pointed out that all motion pictures were intrinsically fanciful. I think just the opposite …" In other words, Méliès's trick films were now documentaries while the Lumiéres' actualities were science-fiction – both equally uncanny. But there was also Méliès, who made fiction. The first films of the Lumiére brothers were simple recordings ("actualities") that established the photographic basis of the medium those produced by the stage magician Georges Méliès, the subject of Martin Scorsese's impressive 3D spectacle Hugo, were fantastic and predicated on special effects – namely stop-motion, the simple technique that made animation possible.įilm history, as conventionally taught, begins with the opposition of Lumiére and Méliès – truth and illusion – although, in his 1967 film La Chinoise, Jean-Luc Godard wittily reversed the equation: "They say Lumiére invented current events.
Is there a phrase more hackneyed than "the magic of the movies"? From the moment of their invention at the end of the 19th century, motion pictures have been perceived as simultaneously hyper natural and supernatural.
S hould you stay up for the Oscars, here's a surefire way to be hammered by the end: pour yourself a drink each time you hear the word "magic", and you'll be watching the winner's tearful acceptance speech in an alcoholic haze.