Week 1

This week we watched Arrival of the Train at La Ciotat Station (Lumiere Brothers, 1895), The Adventures of Prince Achmed (Lotte Reiniger, 1926), Danse Serpentine (Lumiere rothers, 1896), Chiens Savants. La Danse Serpentine (1897), Danse Serpentine (in a lion’s cage) Alice Guy Blanche, 1900), Explosion of a Motorcar (Cecil M. Hempworth, 1900), and finally Le Voyage Dans Le Lune (Georges Melies, 1902).

Something that was incredibly evident to me while watching these films was their ability to tell whole and cohesive stories without synchronous sound. This is especially evident in Explosion of a Motorcar, and Le Voyage Dans Le Lune. A use of over-accentuated body movement (to a point of near ridiculousness) highlight’s early cinema’s focus on spectacle and a saturation of reality. Further, parts of Le Voyage Dans Le Lune could easily be transferrable into a classic vaudeville show—with the girls that regularly line up to wave at the spectator or frill feathers “provocatively”.

The employment of circus sideshows in cinema is found in all of the Danse Serpentine films, where the performances shown are literal side-show material. The tigers that bounce off walls as the woman elegantly dances once again links these pieces to cinema’s beginning spectator intrigue as being based purely in a desire to be shocked and amazed.

In watching Arrival of the Train at La Ciotat Station, and then The Adventures of Prince Achmed, we can easily see the dramatic advances in cinema that took place between 1895 and 1926. By the time The Adventures of Prince Achmed was released, cinema had gone from short one-minute long or so spectacles to feature length masterpieces. The film world itself had transitioned from novelty into a fully-fledged industry. This marks The Adventures of Prince Achmed as incredibly important not only because it is considered the first feature-length animated film, but because it showcases the beginnings of cinema’s transition into the high arts, where focus shifts from shock factor and spectacle to that of nuanced societal messaging and wild fantasy.