The magic of Georges Melies
In those years, filmmakers were in a state of fierce competition with each other. This forced them to improve their products all the time, to make them more attractive to the viewer. The directors tried to master film tricks and at the same time focused on the world of the fair, as well as on the art of circus, pantomime and aviation entertainment (shooting from balloons).
Russian silent filmmakers were inspired by the work of the outstanding French master of stunt photography Georges Méliès (1861-1938). This innovator and inventor, tireless on inventions, has devoted his entire life to cinema. Having set up a movie factory in the backyard of his house, he tirelessly experimented with moving tape, filling films with a whole cascade of stunts. He resorted to multiple expositions, bringing to life translucent ghosts, made engravings "come to life", personified household items. Méliès's heroes knew how to dissolve in the air, hover above the ground and juggle with their own heads.
He worked in the genres of extravaganza, fairy tale, mystical history. But the greatest fame was brought to the director of the film adaptation of Jules Verne. The films "Journey to the Moon" and "Journey through the Impossible" became the first swallows of the space theme in cinema.
The secrets of some of Melies' film tricks have not been revealed to this day. And individual shots from his films have become symbols of the era. We find them on the covers and bindings of modern publications by Jules Verne and other science fiction writers. And on the movie posters of the time of Méliès, deliberately simplified images of submarines, balloons, rockets in the form of iron cans and planets with human faces appeared. This was a reflection of the naive perception of the world in which one can walk on the moon without a spacesuit, and move underwater in a bathyscaphe without navigational devices. But the viewer did not think about it. He watched fairy tales and admired movie wonders.
Space travel of the Shogun to de Chaumont
Next to the name of Melies, another talented silent film director is mentioned - the Spaniard Segundo de Chaumont (1871-1929). He followed Méliès to work on films about space travel.
The gifted Spaniard started out as a specialist in film coloring and achieved great success in this. He was a pioneer of color films and received orders for color processing of films from other directors. But then he was fascinated by the work of the operator, and the young filmmaker, trying to imitate Méliès, began to create one stunt film after another. He was fascinated by the space theme, and in 1908 a parody of Melies' film "A Journey to the Moon" was born (Chaumont called the film "Excursion to the Moon").
Among Chaumont's favorite gadgets was working with contrasting shadows. He made extensive use of the achievements of the Chinese shadow theater and, along with three-dimensional heroes, created silhouette black and white characters. Chaumont was especially fond of images of devils and made them either funny or scary. Demons, devils, and ghosts were densely populated in Chaumont's films, and film tricks made these characters even more expressive. Characters could emerge from the void, disintegrate into pieces and dissolve in the air, and sometimes they turned into black shadows.
Experiments with insects
The amazing techniques introduced into cinema by Melies captivated the audience, and it is natural that this talented director became widely known not only in Western Europe and the USA, but also in Russia. In those years, domestic film factories competed with each other and ingenuity was a very sought-after quality. The demand for creative people who could speak their mind in the field of stunt photography was very high.
Vladislav Aleksandrovich Starevich (1882-1965) turned out to be such a person. While studying at the gymnasium, Vladislav became interested in entomology and learned a lot about the life of insects. After graduating from high school, the future director worked as a photographer and at the same time showed himself as a talented artist.
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One fine day Vladislav decided to shoot tapes about insects. In them, his gift as a cinematographer was fully realized. For example, he used the method of time-lapse photography, achieving the illusion of movement of beetles, dragonflies and butterflies. These tapes shocked the audience. The audience got used to the drawn cinematography, and suddenly a completely new type of cinematography appears. If the images drawn by the artist can move on the screen, why can't things, stuffed animals and "models" of beetles move? And Starevich unfolded on the movie screen hitherto unusual types of movement - the dynamics of playing models (it is difficult to call artificial beetles puppets or dolls).
At first, Starevich tried to make films with real insects, but, unfortunately, they turned out to be bad actors and did not give in to training. The director would love to work with real beetles, but they could not do in front of the camera what the director wanted. I had to make "models" and work with them. The illusion was amazing. Viewers mistook the animated insects for real ones.
War of the barbel with the stag
Starevich quickly mastered the techniques of stunt photography. He combined the scientific credibility of insect imagery with a humorous interpretation of the characters. The famous Khanzhonkov Film Factory became the base for his work.
In 1912, Starevich created the film "Beautiful Lucanida, or the War of the Barbel with the Stag". On the screen, battles flared up over the beautiful wife of the king of beetles. The behavior of insects in the frame is realistic, the viewer believed what was happening. It was the first puppet battle film in the history of cinema. The battle of beetles today looks somewhat archaic, but there is no doubt that this battle epic was staged by a man with a rich imagination. The tape remained in the box office after 1917, finding itself in demand during the Soviet era.
After the revolution, Starevich ended up in France. He continued to make films and directed stunt films, the most famous of which was the film "Reinecke-fox" (based on the work of Goethe). And although the movie became sound, Starevich's fox expressed a lot in the language of gestures and facial expressions. Silent movie gadgets remained in the arsenal of the famous trick master until the end of his career.
Models of the future
In 1927, the famous German filmmaker Fritz Lang released the film Metropolis, which showed the city of the future with striking contrasts between the lives of the rich and the poor. Huge vertical structures were adjacent to transport arteries located at several levels. The audience wondered how this was done. After all, the feeling of believability was amazing.
The city was filmed using mockups. The movement of toy cars along highways was recorded on the tape using the method of time-lapse photography. At the same time, an important trick of the director was the use of many mirrors, thanks to which the fragments of the models were doubled and quadrupled. Despite the fact that the use of mirrors made the production process cheaper, this tape became the most expensive in the history of silent cinema in Germany.
Another model of the future that demanded the highest ingenuity from filmmakers was Yakov Protazanov's film Aelita. It is hard to believe that more than 90 years have passed since the release of this tape. Protazanov has established himself as one of the largest directors of Russian silent films. He boldly experimented with a sharp change in close-up and medium-sized shots and was almost the first to use film tricks that anticipated surrealism: in the film "The Queen of Spades" he reflected Hermann's insanity through a nightmare in the form of a terrible interweaving of rope ties.
Aelita
During the Soviet period, Protazanov did not lower the high bar and continued to create masterpieces, however, with the advent of sound, he pinned special hopes on the image and camera techniques.
The story of the Martian woman Aelita and the uprising on Mars became the director's most famous film, which influenced not only domestic, but also world space fiction. This groundbreaking film immediately attracted the attention of not only moviegoers, but also masters of decorative and applied arts. The decorator was faced with an important and interesting task - to reproduce the Martian "object environment".
The director boldly began to use the techniques of futuristic art. The artist Alexandra Exter had to create a costume for the Martian woman - Aelita (as well as for other characters in this extraordinary film). A beautiful headdress, from which sharp rods resembling rays diverged, made Aelita (actress Yulia Solntseva) a real Martian. Moreover, she moved in a very unusual way. In an era when cinema did not know sound, stage movement and, above all, the plasticity of the hands, played an important role. Aelita made sharp unusual movements, and this was another daring find.
Protazanov's film was not the world's first film about space life. But it became the first full-length space fiction film. "Aelita" is considered a masterpiece of science fiction cinema.
Magazine: Secrets of the 20th century №27, Andrey Dyachenko