February 21, 1908 [Cupid's Pranks]

Melies continues to be American-ized. Here, we peer at Valentine antics through a kind of binocular view--as though we were illicitly spying on love's labors. At first, Cupid seems his typical self: Determined, self-assured, mischievous, a Valentine's Day card come to life, he orchestrates romance--but now with a sure grasp of the modern world, as he turns back the hands of a clock and dismantles the inner workings of an automobile. No pastoral sprite flitting from heart to heart, Cupid becomes instead a dedicated tinkerer, like Edison himself.

I don't believe I'll follow that particular thread. The image of Edison, winged and suspended--and with the requisite costume (I shudder at the thought of that amorous Union Suit!)--is a bit too bizarre, perhaps even more than Melies would have dared. But maybe we should put the Wizard of Menlo Park through these paces; after all, he's smitten us enough with celluloid missiles--as willing to indulge in the ridiculous as the sublime, for the sake of silliness as much as true love.

February 8, 1908 [Rescued from an Eagle's Nest]

Last month a "time ball" dropped on Times Square to herald in the New Year; New Yorkers dutifully formed a crowd. Wireless messages fly from the top of the Eiffel Tower--and Count Zeppelin also promises to fill the skies, with airships. Movements heatedly press to prohibit women from smoking in public. Last week a mob assassinated the King of Portugal. And just a few months ago, a Spanish painter committed a beautiful atrocity, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Earlier today, an eagle plucked a small child from a farmyard and soared to its aerie. Rescue, thank goodness, was forthcoming.

And I am not sure which of these disconcerts me the most, sends me reeling. The filmed abduction occurs in a typical cinema-space whose loyalties are torn between artifice and Nature--and neither manage to reconcile; instead, a dream ensues, in which the world is at first painted and flat, then deep and precipitous--like Picasso's stunning mule-women, the mob's surge, the New Year falling through the lighter-than-air. In the cinema-world, the innocent is coveted by mechanical prey--but to reach the papier-mâché height, actual slopes must be clambered, branches parted, the sweating rescuer emerging amid prop-vistas.

In Hezekiah Butterworth's The Log School-House on the Columbia [1890], the Indian and white worlds meet--on Romantic terms, mingling awe and condescension, tragic loss and sentimental yearning. I remember the Fourth of July incident, a flag plucked by an eagle:

"It was a beautiful sight. The air was clear, the far peaks were serene, and the glaciers of Mount Hood gleamed like a glory of crystallized light. The children cheered. The bird soared away in the blue heavens, and the flag streamed after him in his talons. He dropped the flag at last over a dark, green forest. The children cheered again."

Once more, as in a half-remembered tale, the cinema smoothes the jarring rhythms of the world, and cobbles together a tune for children to sing. And as usual, despite myself I sing along.

December 29, 1907 [L’Éclipse du soleil en pleine lune/The Eclipse: Courtship of the Sun and Moon]

Georges Méliès once again travels into the ether, and once more manages to combine the sublime with the grotesque--and the burlesque, especially of, as Whitman put it, "the learn’d astronomer," whose capering command of the heavens is tenuous, to say the least, as the planets, again animated--with hilariously obscene visages, licking lips, eyeballs rolling, constantly mouthing occult French utterances of love and lust--literally take on a life independent of the scientist who observes them, and pass one another in comic satiation. Like Whitman, Méliès asserts himself above the empiricist--and in so doing, constructs a new rationality: his own, as camera-magician, attuned to the stars--and, it appears, their varied appetites--as no astronomer could ever hope to be.

And when we trust the magician, and go to the stars with him, what do we receive? The music of the spheres, a harmony that presages Eternity? Heavens forbid--so to speak. In this quintessence, erotically charged pranks and slapstick reign, and all the "the proofs, the figures ... ranged in columns, ... the charts and the diagrams" scatter like a deck of cards tossed without skill, until--if I may do damage to Whitman's poem--we are led to the decidedly "moist night-air" to look "up in perfect[ly appalled] silence at the stars." Méliès is no poet, but an iconoclast, deriding the decorous and the rational as he crams the come-hither world into the camera, cutting and jumping whatever he films until it can only be a film.

This is, in the end, a grand accomplishment, for Méliès' stories can be told only as animated pictures. The stage will not do, and the printed page even less so. This is a true cinematic reality, take it or leave it, vulgar and startling, approaching beauty--but with lovey-dovey smirks, nervous excitement brimming as the planets curl their lascivious lips and the Medieval astronomer dons his motley, more a clown than the white-face Sun and Moon.

December 14, 1907 [The Little Girl Who Did Not Believe in Santa Claus]

If any doubt remains among the Virginias of the world, Edison has settled the matter at long last: Yes, there is a Santa Claus, in close-up--and in bondage. The poor girl will get no toys, while the rich boy's home--stockinged to the rafters (at least mantel-high)--is guaranteed their Christmas miracle. But the boy in typical Edison fashion experiences a deep sense of class-guilt, compelling him to kidnap Santa at gunpoint and send him to the poor girl's house--where the boy assumes St. Nick's purview and goes down the chimney himself. It's toys all around, and to all a good night.

I won't quibble (although it seems a bit presumptuous for the boy to usurp Santa's role--exactly whom are we to thank for Christmas?), if only because my children so heartily approved of the proceedings. They did wonder, in that knowing way children have (in my experience, the truth of Santa is kept more from parents than their offspring), why Santa would have excluded the girl. We decided she may have been on the Naughty list, which meant that the boy was at fault for usurping Santa's powers of judgment--and thus Naughty himself, it appears--and my dear little demons concocted a sequel in which Santa and the little girl make their way to the boy's house to remove his presents and give them to--whom? My children were at a loss. A child even poorer than the little girl? Someone on the Naughty list who may have done something particularly Nice at the last minute, perhaps after Santa had departed on his rounds?

The politics of listing seemed to be draining the Holiday of its cheer, so I suggested that this year we would ask Santa not to bother--he seemed so busy, and his occupation increasingly perilous--and to pass us by; we had enough toys and sweets already, thank you. This was greeted with appalled silence; they stood there in the snow, staring at me as if my forehead had sprouted its own "right jolly old elf." I looked down at them, neither smiling nor frowning, and walked on. They followed, whispering among themselves, eventually laughing--and informing me I had just been placed on the Naughty list.

I am willing to accept demotion, as long as they do not inform their mother--of which discretion I have very little hope.

November 25, 1907 [The Rivals, College Chums]

I set down my newspaper and discard my playbill and walk into the nickelodeon--and there they are again, comic strips and Broadway, postcards and Tin Pan Alley, flickering and large--too big to hold, but cozy in their familiar shades. The Rivals ply their awkward wares--their selves--to the sly-coy young lady, the men thwarting one another, trading wins and losses--and of course at the end she chooses a third; predictable--because we've seen it all before, as with the College Chums--Charley's Aunt without the bother of character and discernable plot--shedding then donning garments in a low-Shakespeare gender-switch as the man dresses as a woman, and finds he may be losing the girl, but seems to be gaining the father. The jig is, eventually, up. (I pause to yawn.)

But along the way, taken together, something--or at least some things--rescue these films from pale-copy oblivion. In College Chums, the telephone conversation between the girl and one of the chums capers like Melies. Their words form in air, float in a line toward one another; even his stammering finds its animated-letter equivalent. I watched it twice just for that sequence, a jarring interruption in the "plot" but a telling, albeit momentary, tear in the fabric of banality, the film asserting itself as cinematic--that is, visual, technical, even (almost) without boundaries. And when she interrupts him her words demolish his, a silly but potent visual metaphor for all the trouble these two encounter. The later scene of dress-up pales in comparison. For a moment, they were nowhere but in a film.

And the leap is not only trick effects. These two pictures hint at things to come, as cinema expands to meet, not merely the comic strip--which of late seems the motion picture's truest model--but the mind itself, leaping from interior to exterior, person to person, view to view, emotion to emotion, ever-more-rapid jumps daring the viewer to keep up, despite cinema's stagy quality and often-wearying familiarity--or perhaps it is precisely that familiarity with which moving pictures cannot dispense, the dependence on the visual cues repeated--signaling direction, time, occupied and empty spaces--all in terms of the succession of images; and the demand on the viewer to make the connections--spatial, temporal, personal--from space to space, person to person. I think we might need familiar plots, then--or images--to help us fashion these bonds of narrative--or simple recognition of the "real": human faces, motions, gestures seen all at once with their surroundings, the "back"-ground no longer so, incorporating itself into the lives of the figures, as setting, character, and action blend into a distinctly cinematic whole--united by the viewer's gaze, witnessing motion and tableau, the only one to make sense of it.

It is much to consume at once; we may, then, be lucky that so far it's all Sunday comics and song-snippets, "scenes from life" and popular melodramas. Seeing is difficult enough; any sense of believing in "film art" will have to flow like a torrent from our eyes into our heads, with "thinking" a last concern. What I'm fumbling toward is a sense of film-as-art, the technical in service to the theatrical--or perhaps something more, not mere service but usurpation; or some third development, beyond the mechanisms of both cinema and narrative. In any case, it appears we must begin in familiar territory before striking out for parts unknown.

July 22, 1907 [Les Affiches en goguette/Hilarious Posters]

The threat of cinema's juxtapositions has been lying heavily on my mind--a growing suspicion that there was only one art in the cinema: that of the confidence-man, smiling as he gives me what I desire--which melts to less than nothing as soon as he departs. A bleak prospect--but I am rescued by Melies, who brings a wall of posters to life, pouring soup and affections--and imprecations--on one another, receding as the police threaten this harmless chaos--then breaking free of their paper bonds, the police now caught on the wall. Can one be innocent and sly? Is this cinema's saving--well, if not "grace," then talent--or at the best its gift to the viewer?

Melies' three-minute game of living cups-and-balls is awkward in execution, but (as with so many of his conjurations) it engenders subtleties, gaining in delicacy and ingenuity the more I contemplate them. The posters are like the motion-picture screen itself, a fleeting glimpse of mysterious things--all right, perhaps a mere prank, waiting to tweak our noses and run off--but effecting magic, as it draws us within the frame, the viewer becoming the subject of viewing. It is a picture-within-a-picture--and more: a picture-within-a-picture-within the picture in my head, the same that I have always seen, its invitation to come closer sometimes a promise, sometimes a threat. And while I am not always happy with the man I see in the frame (disconcertingly familiar as he is), I give him his freedom.

I seem to have written myself into a strange place, where for a nickel I am both Adam and the Maker, the object and the agent, allowed to do as I please--as long as I can pay. (The moralist in me wonders, with some grounds, whether that nickel will be enough, or whether the cinema will exact a higher price for all this freedom. For now, no matter: the thing is as obvious as it is potent, and as long as I keep up my guard--there's the rub, as someone famous once said--I should be able to keep the cinema in its place. Where that is, I'm still discovering.)

July 1, 1907 [Cohen's Fire Sale]

The moving picture urges us to live in dual worlds: the ersatz and the actual, the pleasant and the grotesque, the light-hearted and the vicious. And these dualities are not merely juxtaposed but substituted, the artificial flung at the real, coating it like paste or mud--but am I too harsh? Isn't there something giddy, almost joyous, in the plunge from performance to actuality, from laughter to grimace? I cannot honestly assert otherwise: I love the cinema because of its indiscretions and excesses, its unapologetic clumsiness. I can feel the camera operator's hands resting on my eyes, in an odd way closing them, replacing my vision with his own.

Something whispers a warning, though: Here, for instance, in Cohen's Fire Sale, we begin as usual on the stage, a millinery, the flat swaying as an actor brushes against it, the gestures broad--keeping the back row's attention--the action more so. Hats arrive, are mistakenly taken away as rubbish--a clever commentary on the value of the latest from France?--and the chase ensues, as the hats fall here and there, providing amusement and accidental haute couture for all--children dancing to the organ grinder, washer-women, even the workers at the dump. All the while Mr. Cohen fumes and rants helplessly--until he enlists his cat(!) to help him start a fire to collect the insurance, with resultant explosion, flame, and actual firemen. And, oh once more, we end with a kiss.

It is vulgar and hilarious, obvious and startling--and beneath it all one more substitution: derision for kindness, the Jewish proprietor, long nose interfering with his kiss, our scorned hero, irritating and oily. It is the kind of thing one would have barely noticed without the cinema, this meanness. In the midst of my laughter the film revealed itself--no, myself--and not as a villain, but simply another fool. I will admit I feel more embarrassed than ashamed--the picture was so ridiculous--and funny; but, once more, uncertainty lingers, and with a wink and a whisper the picture hints at what I am asked to surrender in order to allow the cinema to go on as it will.

My moral sense cringes, but so do my aesthetic sensibilities. Perhaps that dual response is the one I should examine, if only to catch myself as I fall into the moving picture.

March 6, 1907 [The "Teddy" Bears]

Of course, there is something slapdash and lazy about the art of the Nickelodeon. Between the slovenly patrons crowding, standing, expelling all manner of sounds and odors and so on (modesty forbids further description) and the desperate jumble of the program itself--moving pictures, and pamphleteering "lectures," and magic lantern shows (still surviving, despite their animated counterparts), and sweaty exertions both gymnastic and (more or less) melodic, both solo and sing-along--all of it straining to please, to keep uninterrupted the flow of nickels--it is no wonder individual films should begin to reflect the atmosphere of their venue, to wear nothing but motley.

The "Teddy" Bears is a decidedly lunatic manifestation of this tendency. It is stagy and transcendent, an admixture of theater and circus, history and fable. The bears dance, their flopping costumes clumsy, as they emerge--at first toy themselves--from a knothole(!) and surprise Goldilocks (ironically clutching her "Teddy" bear), the bears in their nightclothes, ill-fitting and somehow unsettling, shifting dimly in a painted-flats narrow space, awkward and confined.

Then the chase begins--and we are in the actual out-of-doors, with snowy path and wooded hillock. And Teddy Roosevelt "himself" arrives--how easy it is, with glasses and mustache and grin, to impersonate a President!--and the little girl hides behind the ready Chief Executive, who, indeed all bully-bully, blithely dispatches the fairy-tale characters, sparing only (as he famously did in real life two years ago) Baby Bear--here, at Goldilocks' pleading.

And we are back on the creaking boards of the stage, where Goldilocks gets her armful of toy bears and forgets the real-world slaughter by the man with the Big Stick--as any child would. That is the accidental truth of this picture: the quicksilver adaptations of children to the strangest and the worst, clutching the sudden toy like a shield. Actually, I'm the one who needs shielding, who is off-balanced by the events; Goldilocks remains in childish control, managing both the beasts and the grandiloquent adult. At the end, I'm befuddled, but Goldilocks looks perfectly at ease, the world fitting her just right.

October 3, 1906 [Tripot clandestine/The Scheming Gambler's Paradise]

Georges Melies abandons camera tricks and depends entirely on his set--so that the pleasures are almost exclusively visual. The human beings--croupiers, bawds, gamblers, gendarmes--are almost incidental. It's the set-as-prop that matters, a casino that seamlessly transforms into a millinery, all mechanical sliding and shifting, not a single in-camera trick or stop-start film effect. The police enter--seemingly as enforcers of the law, but in practical terms only there to activate the machinery that instantly reforms tous les roués et les filles, demurely admiring hats, conducting proper business, their cards and wheel forgotten. And then it all pitches forward again as the law departs--and back and forth, until the mechanism folds everyone into its workings, and the police join in, seduced by Melies' spinning world.

Any social commentary here is incidental; again, Melies fulfills the primal desire to watch and appreciates the lifelong delight in cunning motion--and extends an invitation to the viewer to join him, as we smile and exclaim, "That's how it's done!"--and wait to see it again.

August 4, 1906 [The Terrible Kids]

I have committed a grave parental error and allowed my children to see The Terrible Kids--which will undoubtedly make them terrible as well. In Porter's motion picture, the two little anarchists are joined by a vigorous dog, whose keen attention to their mayhem gives him a decidedly knowing air; this canine understands chaos, and larceny, and snatching victory from the jaws of defeat--of course, with his own jaws.

Porter's camera gives us close-up images of the boys, allowing for immediate identification with them--does that make us all terrible kids? Or is there a shift in moral perception, as I come to believe they do not live in an immoral or even amoral world; the more we see it through the boys' (and dog's) eyes, the more we understand it has its own rules--of merriment and even justice--skewing, re-aligning all expectations, in favor of the boys. They steal a puppy, tug on Chinese pigtails, disrupt the workday of apple vendors and billposters--bounding with boundless energy down those typically empty streets of the filmed comedy--an otherworldly effect, as though official society has receded, leaving only the grinning revolutionaries--and the police who pursue them, all rolling uphill in the "eternal delight" of pure energy. And captured in the Black Maria (a literal one, not merely the nickname for Edison's studio!), the boys still find comedic justice--which in the end is, simply, freedom--as their loyal hell-hound effects their escape, and off they go, taking with them our surprised affection.

I am watching my own kids closely now, but as of yet have seen no overt sign that they will turn the tables and scatter all order. Then again, like their cinematic counterparts, children live in secret, and tell us only those stories they deem us ready to hear. I wish them well--and remind them, no matter where they roam, to take the dog.

June 19, 1906 [San Francisco Earthquake films]

Five thousand dead and injured, according to Edison--and one more loss, as he shows us: the city's life, its past, its place against the horizon. It's all ragged and smoking, broken teeth, wandering lone figures--but also groups, gatherings, either looking on or pitching in, building.

San Francisco needs money. We'll need to move in as a nation--as a government, with funds and manpower, engineers and architects, doctors and nurses. I know I'm descending into cliche, but this is an opportunity--I saw it already in the films, the San Franciscans lifting and hauling, re-imagining their homes--still crumbled, but in their hands. And the blunt truth is that our hands must join theirs.

February 27, 1906 [The Dream of a Rarebit Fiend]

I've had rarebit with cayenne and mustard or without, infused with ale or beer--or neither--with flour or flour-less. I prefer all of them together--well, beer OR ale (the former seems better, "lighter," if I can use a word so out of place in the gelatinous realm of rarebit). And I've buttered my toast or let it be, and even tried it with biscuits--although a crunchy rye works best. And no accompaniments, just the cheese-sodden toast, alone on the plate--but only for a moment, until my flashing knife and fork undo the steaming mess. Who dares call the rarebit a "side" dish? It sits squarely, smoothly--and oh so heavily--at the center, always viscous, never vicious.

And I've never suffered a post-rarebit nightmare in my life.

But I won't tell that to Winsor McKay, whose daffy moral tales in his newspaper comic, Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend, plunge their hapless heroes and heroines into dire dream-straits, nocturnal retribution for not only various waking sins--gossiping, leering, lying, prevaricating--but, most of all, gustatory monomania for the slippery pleasures of soaking rarebit. And in the last panel, as rarebit-induced guilt springs the sinner into consciousness, I must admit I feel a pang--and not in my stomach, but within my rarebit-loving heart, sorry that this humble melange is degraded so. But still I must smile at the fine, bemused line of McKay's pen--even though nothing can match his newest, Little Nemo in Slumberland, which rivals the Alice books for unalloyed night-terrors; but his rarebit fiends hint at the exploding house of cards reality becomes, not just in dreams, but all around, even at the dinner-table.

Watching an all-but-perfectly realized moving picture version of the comic strip, I can at last appreciate its cautionary tone. The fiend's rarebit is a watery slop that he throws at his mouth, and his bed a machine-driven juggernaut, crashing through the ceiling, spinning its grinning occupant above the city, painlessly impaling him on a weather-vane, as un-moored from the laws of motion as the drunkard's bed in Reve a la lune [1905]--and, like Gaston Velle's pledge-taking inebriate, McKay's glutton must be tossed like a cork on the open sea before he can set down his spoon.

--Unlike the brave few of us, dedicated, passionate--oh, all right: heedless grabbers and gobblers, gourmands if we're wealthy and pigs if we're poor--but happily smeared and soused, either at the table or in the motion-picture theater, crammed like geese but smiling. And to any who might read these private words: Do not scorn my cinema-comestible abandon, for you, too, may be a fiend some day.