The Cinema of Dreams - A Short History of Fantasy Cinema

Part One - Early Fantasy Cinema

THE ORIGINS OF FANTASY CINEMA

Long before the invention of the motion picure camera and projector, audiences around the world delighted in various forms of fantasy storytelling. Novelists spun tales of fantastic machines and amazing advenures. Magicians made people and objects vanish and re-appear in flashes of light and smoke. Spectral images of skeletons and devils abounded in magic lantern shows, dancing about in simple animation. And shadow puppet images of mythical beasts flickered on curtain screens and cavern walls.

The first movies were not fantasies, but were motion picture documents of reality: a train arriving at a railroad station; workers leaving a factory at the end of their day; carnival acrobats performing. In general, the inventors of the first movie cameras and projectors were more interested in the new medium's practical applications than in its potential for more fanciful uses. But as the early movie cameras became available to a wider range of filmmakers, the potential of the cinema for storytelling began to be explored, and the possibilities for a cinema of fantasy began to be realized.

The first fantasy films were produced in France by Georges Méliès (1861-1938) shortly after he acquired his first movie camera in 1896. A popular stage magician, Méliès began by making the same documents of reality as the other early filmmakers, but within a year he began producing fictional films and incorporating primitive special effects into his short movies. As his special effects techniques improved, Méliès began producing longer fantasy films, and filling his movies with more and more trick film effects.

Georges Méliès was not the only European filmmaker in the early years of cinema to experiment with trick film techniques or present fantastic storylines. Ferdinand Zecca (1864-1947) produced short films for the Pathé studios, often taking their inspiration from Méliès. Emile Cohl (1857-1938) pioneered a variety of specieal effects and animation techniques, creating a simply-animated cartoon character named "Fantoche," who became the first recurrant character in animation. The Spanish filmmaker Segundo de Chomón (1871-1929) was perhaps the most "international" of the European pioneers. A gifted cinematographer who experimented with a variety of animation techniques, trick and color effects, Chomón began his career in Spain, worked in France for Pathé, and went on to become the cinematographer for several of the early Italian epic films.

In the United States, Edwin S. Porter made several trick films inspired by Méliès before he directed The Great Train Robbery in 1903. (Although not a fantasy film, The Great Train Robbery used trick film effects that had been developed in fantasy films in a western genre setting.)

Imitation and invention flourished in the early years of cinema. Novice filmmakers learned how to operate their new cameras by copying the works of other filmmakers, and then adapted the emerging film techniques to their personal skills and experience. J. Stuart Blackton began experimenting with animation in 1906, applying the skills he'd used as vaudeville "lightning-sketch artist" to create movies in which caricatures seemed to draw themselves. Blackton also was the first filmmaker to successfully apply stop-motion animation in The Haunted Hotel (1906).

With technical assistance by J. Stuart Blackton, newspaper illustrator and cartoonist Winsor McCay began to produce animated films in 1910. McCay released a cartoon featuring his Little Nemo in Slumberland characters in 1911, and presented the world with he first animated dinosaur, Gertie, in 1914.

By 1915, twenty years after the first movies were screened before the public, most the cinema's special effects and animation techniques had been developed. Although some of these tools were still somewhat primitive, filmmakers were able to apply an entire range of special techniques to creating fantasy movies, and technicians were able to adopt a particular special effect and develop it as a central focus of their film career.

In the early years of cinema, Emile Cohl had been forced to divide his attention between several types of animation and live-action filmwork, and the quality of his work sometimes suffered as a result. By the mid-1920s, filmmakers were focusing an individual aspects of their craft, and the films began to be more reflective of the filmmaker's personal talent that of unrealistic production deadlines. Animators Willis O'Brien and Ladislas Starevitch were separately advancing the incorporation of live-action footage with detailed stop-action animation; Otto Mesmer, Paul Terry, and Max and Dave Fleischer were creating the first great studio cartoons; and German filmmakers had established fantasy feature films as a major movie genre.

Part Two - Early Fantasy Feature Films.