Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology, and the Emergence of Cinematic Space

IN DECEMBER 1937, only a month before his death, Georges Méliès recalled his early role in cinema’s development with a characteristically bold exclamation: “I built the first studio in the world!”¹ Méliès was already recognized, much as he is today, as the inventor of “trick” or science fiction cinema, but in the waning moments of his life he felt compelled to lay claim to another title: the architect of the world’s first film studio. True or not, Méliès could confidently insist upon his place at the forefront of cinema’s initial forays into architecture.² In 1897 he had designed and overseen the construction of the first French studio on his family’s estate in the Parisian suburb of Montreuil-sous-Bois. Méliès’s “glass house”—a greenhouse-like iron frame with plate glass tiles—represents the first instance of what would become the predominant studio form through World War I and into the 1920s.

Although based on similar aims as Dickson’s Black Maria—especially precise control of light and temperature—glass studios developed from a different architectural tradition that had important effects on the first studios’ forms, functions, and film products. This chapter situates Méliès’s glass house in the history of glass-and-iron architecture, with emphasis on three building types that shaped early studio design: winter gardens and international exposition structures such as London’s Crystal Palace (1851) and the Galeries des Machines that wowed visitors at Paris’s nineteenth-century expositions; the glass-and-iron photography studios found on Paris rooftops in the second half of the nineteenth century; and industrial spaces such as rail stations and factories that used large glass windows and iron-supported frames to bring light and air into increasingly large interiors.

The first glass-and-iron studios and the films made in them reproduced the formal characteristics and oft-cited experiences that fascinated critics and theorists of late-nineteenth-century architecture: spatial plasticity, fluidity, and artificiality. They housed early cinema’s most celebrated formal innovators, including Méliès and Ferdinand Zecca in France, Robert W. Paul and G. A. Smith in Britain, and Edwin S. Porter in America. Departing from the Black Maria’s “framed aesthetic,” these filmmakers developed the formal techniques that later inspired critics such as art historian Elie Faure to celebrate cinema’s “moving architecture” as an “art of cineplastics [la cinéplastique].”3 The spatial manipulations and abstractions that defined this budding cinematic plasticity were of a kind with the artificial materials underpinning glass-and-iron studio architecture. Just as glass and iron could be forged, shaped, easily transported, and applied to a growing variety of architectural forms and building practices, so glass studios allowed for a diverse set of formal techniques and cinematic innovations in both content and style. Glass and iron opened the studio to passing figures, objects, and most importantly, sunlight. And in turn, the new films “opened” film space to new types and degrees of motion across the frame’s borders, within the frame itself, and across multiple locations. Put simply, versatile studio spaces fostered filmmaking experimentation. In the years that followed, film’s early experimenters would, in turn, help inspire new studio designs.

Beyond these formal developments, the first glass studios also contributed to developments in set design and storytelling that allowed filmmakers to produce stunning responses to the changes shaping modern life and the “human-built world.” Méliès’s Jules Verne–inspired “voyages extraordinaires” represent only the most apparent examples of this period’s widespread fascination with and commentary on technological changes to the built environment. His use of cinematic technologies—including the studio—offers important insights into how films simultaneously used and represented the technological developments that produced cinema in the first place. By examining Méliès’s science fiction and trick films in relation to the origins of his studios, this chapter recasts Méliès as more than a magician-turned-filmmaker or special effects innovator. Armed with an imaging technology and a built space that could reproduce, record, and transform the varied and shifting built world, Méliès became an insightful observer of the technological environment of modernity and posed film as an interpretation as much as a representation of that new technological environment.

The first glass house—an iron conservatory in Stuttgart—was completed in 1789, the same year that James Watt perfected the steam engine, the machine that literally drove the large-scale iron projects of the nineteenth century.5 By the mid-nineteenth century, a period of large-scale and increasingly complex building led to new spatial designs and structural techniques, the mass production of iron, and, after 1870, the availability of cheap steel. Structures such as the monumental Jardin d’Hiver in Paris (1848) and Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace (1851) matched the artificiality of their materials with their unprecedented designs.⁶ Foremost among these buildings were the series of Galeries des Machines built at the Paris expositions of 1855, 1867, 1878, and 1889.⁷ The Galeries opened architectural frames for light and movement, creating spaces that required, in Sigfried Giedion’s words, “new aesthetic reactions.”⁸ Commenting on the 1878 Galerie, for instance, French architect Louis-Auguste Boileau neatly encapsulated contemporary visitors’ inability to comprehend the new materials and forms. “The spectator is not aware of the weight of transparent surfaces,” Boileau wrote. “These surfaces are to him [sic] air and light, that is to say, an imponderable fluidity.”⁹

The “imponderable fluidity” of interiors seemingly enclosed by nothing more than “air and light” created new visual aesthetics and spatial paradoxes that helped define the modern built environment. The widespread use of iron and glass in the second half of the nineteenth century made brightened spaces of fluid motion a common experience in Western cities. Parisian architects notably used iron and glass in François Duquesney’s Gare de l’Est station (1847–1852), Henri Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Nationale (1858–1868), Victor Baltard’s Les Halles market pavilions (1853–1855), and Eiffel and Louis Charles Boileau’s Magasin au Bon Marché (1876).¹⁰

By the early twentieth century, these new forms—which seemed to confound traditional distinctions between interior and exterior, public and private, and nature and artifice—had become a source of fascination for architects and critics. As Wolfgang Schivelbusch argues, the use of “ferro-vitreous architecture created a novel condition [in which] light and atmosphere were . . . no longer subject to the rules of the natural world.”¹¹ Critics located these tensions in new building materials. In a 1907 treatise on iron construction, German architectural historian Alfred Meyer, for instance, argued that, “iron inspired a certain distrust because it was not immediately furnished by nature but instead had to be artificially prepared as a building material.”¹²

Meyer’s recognition of the “distrust” created by mechanical synthesis would be an important source of inspiration for Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project. Continuing in the vein of his earlier and better-known argument about the ontological status of art in the age of photography and film, Benjamin uses Meyer to make a similar argument about architecture. Just as mechanical reproducibility displaced artworks from their natural state, so too it would transform both the practice and character of architecture. To wit, iron’s “technological derivation,” Benjamin recognized, did more than simply modernize building materials. It altered the very character of modern technological space by becoming, in Benjamin’s words, “the signature of everything now produced.”13 Those changes escaped neither nineteenth-century architects and observers (like Boileau) nor the public who experienced them en masse.

Inspired by Benjamin, film historians have shown that these architectural developments set the stage for cinema’s emergence. Three decades before the architects, filmmakers, and theorists of modernism debated the realities of architectural and cinematic spaces, iron-and-glass buildings shaped visual perception and institutionalized practices of viewing in the spaces of the modern city. Architectures of spectacular display and new technologies of movement—from window shopping, museums, and the Paris Morgue to panoramas, elevators, and moving walkways—reconfigured spatial and perceptual experience for the urban inhabitants who soon became film’s first spectators.¹⁴

In their tendency to focus on film exhibition and reception, however, scholars have overlooked the degree to which nineteenth-century architecture simultaneously shaped cinematic production. Indeed, the cinematic spaces that urban modernity would condition most directly would be the first studios. For early spectators, film viewing often meant gazing (unknowingly) back into glass-and-iron worlds not unlike the ones they left behind when they stepped from arcades, department stores, and exhibition halls into darkened theaters.

The virtual circuit linking Paris’s arcade-goers back to film’s glass-and-iron production studios ran through the Méliès estate on Paris’s eastern periphery. In May 1896, Méliès began making films in the garden of his family’s property and at locations around Paris.15 Although he produced eighty films that year, Méliès found outdoor production laborious and inefficient due to the often-changing weather conditions that destroyed his sets and ruined his exposures. Finally, as he would later write, “I was becoming famous, success seemed assured, and a quite simple idea came to me: to avoid all of that, let’s take shelter.”¹⁶ Méliès’s seemingly simple decision to escape the vagaries of the often moist Parisian skies marked a profound shift in cinematic production—the decided movement away from the natural environment and toward the artifice of studio sets—that filmmakers and theorists would debate into the 1920s and beyond. Like Dickson before him, Méliès recognized the competing demands created by film’s reliance on natural light and the filmmaker’s need to regulate the production environment. He sought to resolve this tension through studio architecture.

Méliès designed the studio himself using his Théâtre Robert-Houdin and contemporary photography studios as a guide. After hiring a carpenter to build a wooden frame, Méliès faced a major and costly setback that Dickson had avoided by electing to enclose the Black Maria in wood and tarpaper: the frame was too weak to support the glass panes for the walls and roof. Discouraged but resilient, he elected to reinforce the wooden frame with iron rather than rebuilding from scratch, doubling his already large investment to 70,000 francs (fig. 2.1).¹⁷

In its initial form, the studio consisted of a simple quadrilateral frame, 17 × 6 meters with 4-meter-high walls and a triangular roof that reached six meters (fig. 2.2). Méliès covered all sides in frosted glass with the exception of several rows of transparent glass facing the stage, and he oriented the studio to the south-southwest so that the stage was frontally lit at approximately one o’clock each day. In order to control the amount and direction of light, he equipped the studio with retractable cloth shutters as well as a darkroom for developing film.¹⁸

Historians have almost exclusively associated Méliès’s first studio with his Théâtre Robert-Houdin, emphasizing the ways that the studio replicated the stage setup, trap doors, rollers and winches, and electric projectors found in the theater.19 But while Méliès did note the similarities between his studio and the Robert-Houdin, he also emphasized their key differences and highlighted the importance of photography studios. In the same often-cited text in which he describes the studio as “a small-scale likeness of a théâtre de féerie,” Méliès first compares it to a photographic studio “in gigantic scale.”²⁰ Indeed, the photography studio was a more important spatial precursor.

Photography studios had become a recognizable feature of the Parisian landscape in the second half of the nineteenth century. As art historian Elizabeth Anne McCauley has described, commercial photography studios spread rapidly in the late 1840s and reached their peak of production in the late 1860s, with 368 studios in Paris in 1868. By the mid-1880s, the number of studios leveled off at just over 300, a figure that remained consistent through the first years of cinema.²¹ For photographers, the studio offered practical solutions for regulating both the shooting space—using lighting and climate control—as well as the spaces depicted in their images. Like cinema in its first decade, photography depended on vast amounts of sunlight for its lengthy exposures, and entrepreneurs seeking suitable lighting conditions would purchase or rent the upper floors of existing structures, where they added glass-and-iron enclosures.²²

Historians have rarely noted these photographic spaces’ influence on early cinema, even within the plentiful work on the ontological relationship between film and photographic media.²³ This neglect has obscured the important influence on early cinema that came not only from modern spaces of urban exhibition and spectacular experience but also from spaces of image production. In their material similarities to glass-and-iron structures such as train stations and market halls, photography studios reflected and contributed to the artificiality, opening and fluidity of space, and incorporation of light that defined modern space more generally. And as spaces of image production, they provide a more direct link between these themes and the creation of moving-image worlds.

What’s more, photography studios trouble common assumptions about what cinema took from photography—namely, indexical realism. Especially in its studio form, cinema also inherited photography’s capacity for both creating spectacular fiction and making the unreal look real. In each medium, the artificiality of the studio provided the basis for indexical reproductions of unreal productions, the results of which struck a delicate balance between realism and artifice. That balance would become crucial to early cinema, perhaps no more so than in Méliès’s films. While many historians have tied Méliès’s filmmaking to his magical stage work, his blending of realism, artifice, and spectacle had as much to do with nineteenth-century photography studios as his theatrical experience.

Méliès likely forged a mental link between theater and photography long before he ever imagined moving images, much less a studio for producing them. From his earliest days as a spectator and later as a magician at the Robert-Houdin, Méliès would have found theater and photography housed under the same (glass-and-iron) roof.24 Since the 1850s, the building at 8, boulevard des Italiens housed theatrical productions on the first two floors and photographic reproductions above. In 1854, André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri, portrait photographer and inventor of the carte de visite, set up his studio above the Maison Robert-Houdin.²⁵ This magic theater and part-time diorama show was managed by Robert-Houdin’s brother-in-law and fellow magician, Pierre Etienne Auguste Chocat.²⁶ The building itself offers a striking instance of the spatial links between spectacular displays that characterized the experience of “modern life” in the latter half of the nineteenth century in Paris. Positioned in the heart of the city’s burgeoning boulevard culture, it encompassed theater, magic, and diorama shows, scientific and technical exhibitions (including electrical automata and the first public demonstration of the telephone in 1878), and Disdéri’s photography studio, the largest in Paris at the time of its opening.²⁷

Disdéri remodeled the studio in 1860 to bring a new, more holistic spectacle to the portrait sitter’s visit. The experience began at the street, where visitors passed through “a Moorish door in an oriental façade . . . up a well-carpeted staircase, by Hamilton’s [Robert-Houdin] theatre on the second floor, and into the first of Disdéri’s three waiting rooms,” which he filled with exotic objects, paintings, and sample cartes de visite.²⁸ The Robert-Houdin offered one magical view in an entrance that, like earlier nineteenth-century attractions such as Etienne-Gaspart Robertson’s phantasmagoria (first opened in 1799), used a series of displays to condition the visitor for the main attraction to come—in this case, the uncanny spectacle of photographic reproduction.²⁹ As with Robertson’s phantasmagoria, as visitors moved past the magic theater to Disdéri’s studio, they found themselves positioned in the interstices of science and superstition, rationality and spectacle, and photography and magic.³⁰

The tension between reality and artifice established in the entryways would have been most marked, however, in the studio itself. Here, Disdéri combined the indexical certainty promised by mechanical reproduction with an artifice guaranteed by backdrops, props, and costumes. This combination signaled the spatial paradoxes of the studio’s materiality—the same uncanny blending of interior and exterior that characterized contemporary observers’ accounts of other glass-and-iron structures. The artificiality of the materials used (glass, iron, props, costumes, and the camera itself) betrayed architecture and photography’s respective dissociations from both the natural environment and indexical reality.31 The same paradoxes and tensions would come to define glass-and-iron film studios and their films.

To what degree might Méliès have been conscious of these conditions? Do his films—marked, as they so often were, by experiments with space, time, and technology—betray a canny awareness of the changing qualities of modern spaces and materials? In 1906, Méliès produced a film titled Une Chute de cinq étages (A Mix-Up in the Gallery) that put these conditions to comic use.³² The film’s setting—a rooftop photography studio—suggests that Méliès did, in fact, reflect upon the character of the spaces of modern image making and perhaps his own studio’s origins.

Disguised with a long beard and wig, Méliès plays a studio portrait photographer whose boisterous demeanor recalls frequent characterizations of photographers as hucksters.33 The film begins with a stereotypical shoot in which Méliès’s efforts to take a couple’s portrait are thwarted by an incompetent assistant who first drops a stack of sample photographs, then, just after Méliès uncovers the lens to record an image, falls from a ladder, knocking everyone to the floor and sending the camera flying out the window. In the second scene, set on the street below, the camera lands on an unsuspecting woman who is mistaken by bystanders for a beast with tripod legs for horns. After knocking over a lamppost, the woman/beast “battles” an épée-weilding gendarme before being unmasked and rolled off in a wheelbarrow. Just behind her, the couple from the studio beat a quick retreat despite Méliès’s pleas to return (instead, they return him a parting kick in the pants). The film concludes with the photographer tumbling through the street over the remains of his shattered apparatus.

Although easily overlooked among his more canonical trick films and longer narrative subjects, the film suggests a great deal about Méliès’s studio production. First and foremost, it points to his knowledge of photographic studio designs and to the similarities between the forms and functions of photography and film studios. The first scene’s mise-en-scène reproduces a rooftop studio in striking detail. Méliès created the scene using a painted backdrop for the studio’s rear wall and roof, a wooden frame for its left wall, and a cluttered wall of real shelves, paintings, and books on the right. The backdrop depicts distant rooftops seen through simulated glass and includes drapes on two of the painted rooftop panes that mimic the method Méliès used to control light in his film studio. This backdrop extends to the left of the frame, creating an illusion of depth and transparency behind the open wooden skeleton of the left wall, the materiality of which becomes clear when the camera goes through the window in the film’s title “chute” (fig. 2.3).³⁴

By setting the film in a photography studio, Méliès subtly reveals the kind of artifice that filmmakers—like photographers—used to produce image spaces, realistic or otherwise. The set features all the trappings of a studio like Disdéri’s: a sculpture of a ballet dancer, a faux-marble column, oil paintings, a table of photographs, and the portraitist’s painted backdrop of a natural setting—precisely the artificial objects that allowed photographers to generate artificial scenes. In Méliès’s film studio, these objects served a dual function. The backdrop and props replicate a “real” photography studio, making the film realistic, while also emphasizing the artifice of the film studio—a space built from artificial materials that uses artificial objects to generate artificial screen worlds.

In this film, Méliès plays on the collapsing distinction between interior and exterior and the uncertain materiality of glass-and-iron architecture. He highlights the simulated studio’s boundary between inside and out by literally projecting the image-making apparatus through the “glass” surface and into the city below. This movement of the camera becomes a kind of metaphor for the fluidity that contemporary observers identified in modern spaces. In an instant, the faux-glass wall—which initially seems like a stable divider separating the photo studio scene from the film studio around it—is revealed to be both material and traversable. What seemed like little more than a simulation—another painted world—acquires a new degree of realism and becomes an active component of the film’s staged reality. That it does so in the moment of recording—just after the diegetic Méliès-photographer opens the lens to activate the recording apparatus—seems apt, as if Méliès means to illustrate the dynamic interaction between pro-filmic spaces and the machines that turn them into lively virtual worlds.

The subtle references to the filmmaking process continue as the film shifts to its second scene on the boulevard below.35 Here, Méliès turns the common distinction between studio-produced fiction and urban actualities on its head through what might be read as an implicit reference to urban filmmaking and even to the Lumières. Such a reading is supported by the history of the photography studio above the Robert-Houdin, a history that includes a seldom-acknowledged link between Méliès and the Lumière family business.

By the time Méliès took over the Robert-Houdin, Disdéri had gone bankrupt several times, opened a second rooftop studio in the adjoining building, and, in 1875, departed for Nice, leaving both studios in the hands of new photographers.36 During the spring of 1895, another notable photographer moved into the studio on Méliès’s roof. Clément Maurice, a former worker at the Lumière factory in Lyon, took over the studio as part of his continuing work for the Lumières in Paris.³⁷ Maurice organized the famed first public screening of the Cinématographe at the Salon Indien, and Antoine Lumière, father of “les frères,” reportedly invited Méliès to the screening outside the Robert-Houdin after one of his frequent visits to Maurice upstairs.³⁸ Remarkably, at the moment of cinema’s “birth,” the nominal inventors of cinematic realism and fiction shared an address. Their physical proximity evokes the close relationship and often-porous boundaries between realism and spectacle that photography and early cinema shared, especially, but not exclusively, in their studio-produced forms.³⁹

Méliès highlights this mix of realism and spectacle in the second scene of Une Chute de cinq étages by overturning the idea of the Lumière operator who simply documents actualités for a spectator who is invited to view these scenes as reproductions of reality. Instead, the camera itself becomes the event of spectacular chaos and misapprehension—perhaps a joke about the chaos that street filming caused in this period.⁴⁰ The bystanders’ confused response to the woman-as-beast implies the kind of staged illusion that often structured the actualité’s depicted reality. Whether or not the film is a direct reference to the Lumières or Clément Maurice, it draws a striking comparison between the “fictional” and “real” settings of the studio and the street. Like the juxtaposition of Méliès and the Lumières at 8, boulevard des Italiens, the film’s two scenes suggest that fiction and reality were never far apart in early film production. Neither the studio nor the street offered privileged access to the real or its imitation. In a metropolis increasingly marked by artificial spaces and synthetic materials, filmmakers recorded unnatural scenes with every turn of the “manivelle.”

Méliès’s studio played a significant but underappreciated role in his development of a multifaceted system for constructing and manipulating cinematic space. Indeed, it seems no coincidence that many of cinema’s earliest formal innovators were also the first to work in glass-and-iron studios: Méliès in 1897, R. W. Paul in 1898, G. A. Smith in 1899, Cecil Hepworth in 1900, Edwin S. Porter in 1901, and Ferdinand Zecca at Pathé’s new studio beginning in 1902.⁴¹ Here, Méliès developed not only the “tricks” for which he is typically remembered but also multi-shot films, entrance and exit continuity of characters and objects across shots, dissolves and fades between shots, and basic narrative structures.

Although historians have noted that the studio contributed to Méliès’s technical proficiency, they have only begun to explore how the studio may have affected cinematic form. Barry Salt, for instance, has argued that the studio, by providing a consistent working space, made Méliès’s understanding of spatial continuity possible.42 But while Salt is right that Méliès’s studio gave him an element of continuity that was initially (although not for long) rare for other filmmakers, he too quickly moves past the pressures that the studio itself put on how action was shot and space constructed.

The studio provided more than simply a site for repeated filmmaking, which many filmmakers used even as early as 1897, whether on rooftops, makeshift outdoor stages, or gardens, not to mention Dickson’s Black Maria. As direct physical links to the changing architecture of the late nineteenth century, the studios also placed filmmakers and filmmaking in the framework of that period’s new conceptions and uses of space. In Méliès’s case, the fluidity, plasticity, and artificiality that defined architecture would reappear in both the content and form—the early roots of Elie Faure’s notion of “cineplastics”—of his studio films.

Much like the “imponderable fluidity” that visitors identified in international exposition halls, Méliès’s early trick films were remarkable, in no small part, because of the new forms of spatial dynamism they generated. These films worked by demonstrating the new medium’s ability to activate pro-filmic spaces in ways that made their on-screen corollaries “imponderable.”⁴³ Having quickly identified the diverse kinds and combinations of movements that “moving images” offered, even without ever moving the camera during a shot, Méliès produced this imponderability through a dynamic tension between stillness and the fluid motion that linked his tricks, shots, and settings. The basis of his earliest innovation—the stop-action substitution trick, or jump cut—plays, for instance, on the tension between still and moving images.⁴⁴ By stopping the camera during shooting and changing some aspect of the mise-en-scène, Méliès could make objects and characters appear, disappear, and transform in ways that generated dynamic on-screen worlds.

Such dynamism depended on precise control of the pro-filmic environment. For Tom Gunning, Méliès’s use of the substitution effect created narratives of “non-continuity” in which transitions from shot to shot are “emphasized (and explained) by a discontinuity or disruption on the level of story.”45 Such dis- or non-continuity did not define the films’ spaces. Rather, their success came from the spatial (and narrative) continuity that framed the films’ hidden suspensions, or cuts.⁴⁶ These films’ magical transitions seem so magical because the pro-filmic space in which they were performed remains unchanged. In other words, precisely regulated, unmoving, stilled studio interiors made fluid transitions possible.

The difference is easily seen if one compares an early film such as Escamotage d’une dame chez Robert-Houdin (1896) with similar films made in the new studio. In the earlier film, shot, most likely, in the Montreuil garden, the key substitutions do succeed, but they appear as conspicuous interruptions more than smooth transformations. Within a year of opening the studio, in contrast, Méliès could emphasize the fluid seamlessness of the substitution trick by transforming objects in rapid motion. Films such as Le magicien (1898) and La lune à un mètre (The Astronomer’s Dream, 1898) feature endless streams of objects that appear, disappear, and transform with astonishing immediacy. Méliès would soon emphasize such tricks by transforming running and jumping characters and objects in mid-flight with a seamlessness that would have seemed unimaginable only months before. To be sure, this was, in part, a case of practice makes perfect. But by ensuring these tricks’ consistent success, the studio helped encourage Méliès to repeat and revise them in future films.

The kind of dynamism generated using these tricks helped define many of the films’ story worlds. In films with such titles as Le Château hanté (The Haunted Castle, 1897), L’Auberge ensorcelée (The Bewitched Inn, 1897), and L’Auberge de bon repos (The Inn Where No Man Rests, 1903), Méliès used the studio’s regulated environment to create irregular diegetic ones. In worlds that transform with a rapidity and irregularity that pushes characters to madness, objects flip, turn, expand, contract, change locations, or simply disappear. Méliès repeated this basic scenario throughout his career, even up to his last film, Le Voyage de la famille Bourrichon (1913).47 In other films, characters themselves transform their surroundings, typically in order to fool or torment their adversaries. In Le Tripot clandestine (The Scheming Gamblers’ Paradise, 1906), for instance, crooks alter their gambling den to outwit the police, and in Le Locataire diabolique (The Diabolical Tenant, 1909), a man deceives his landlords by magically filling and emptying his apartment with items taken from only one suitcase. These spatial transformations would become even more complex in Méliès’s multi-shot films, but already in his single-tableau works, Méliès used substitutions not only for magic tricks taken from his stage acts but also to create a spatial dynamism that appears across his oeuvre.

The critics and theorists in the 1920s who recognized film’s unique ability to manipulate space were often simply recognizing the outgrowth of these kinds of formal developments from the 1890s. Indeed, the “new plastic impressions” that astonished Elie Faure at his local cinema make for a fitting definition of the spatial plasticity first seen in Méliès’s films. To use Faure’s words, the cinematic space produced in Méliès’s studios was “ceaselessly renewed, ceaselessly broken and remade, fading away and reviving and breaking down, monumental for one flashing instant, impressionistic the second.”⁴⁸

The on-screen space that appeared in Méliès’s films was consistent with a studio space in which anything was possible—a blank slate that could be remade in any desirable form. This functional plasticity echoed the architectural plasticity that underpinned the studio’s very existence. Although long prefigured by theatrical stage sets and artists’ studios in which props and backdrops could simulate worlds of all sorts, the studio reproduced a new kind of plasticity that was proper to industrial modernity. The interchangeability of modular glass-and-iron structures defined a new plasticity formed from the synthetic (“untrustworthy”) materials that Walter Benjamin recognized as part of a world changed by mechanical reproduction. Méliès’s films represented the logical extension of that world and the plastic spaces—like his studio—that it produced. Put another way, the studio’s function followed its form.

The films’ form—their cineplasticity—followed the studio’s formal and functional plasticity. Much as stop-motion substitution generated spatial dynamism by activating the studio’s blank slate, two of Méliès’s other common effects—multiple exposures and matte inserts—created cineplasticity by using film technology to capitalize on the potential embedded in the studio’s plastic pro-filmic space. Méliès used multiple exposures—rewinding the film in the camera and rerecording over already-exposed film—at least as early as 1898 in Un Homme de tête (The Four Troublesome Heads) to create the illusion of three disembodied heads singing while Méliès plays the banjo. Early the following year, he used a matte insert—again involving shooting on the same film stock multiple times but with portions of the emulsion masked—in Le Portrait mystérieux (The Mysterious Portrait, 1899) to create two Méliès figures on screen, one framed as if in a painting (fig. 2.4).

Using these techniques, Méliès created shifting screen spaces by combining different versions of the studio set in a single image. As Faure might have put it, this was the studio “ceaselessly renewed, ceaselessly broken and remade” on screen. Méliès reveled in creating multiple versions of himself, as in L’Homme orchestre (The One-Man Band, 1900), or transfiguring his image, as in L’Homme à la tête en caoutchouc (The Man with the Rubber Head, 1901). But he also emphasized his ability to generate worlds defined by impossible movement and fluidity. In L’Homme-mouche (The Human Fly, 1902), for instance, he uses a double exposure to combine two shots: one of several women standing in front of a black backdrop on opposite sides of the frame; the other taken from above the studio floor (which is painted to look like a wall) on which an acrobat performs stunts. The double exposure creates the effect of a man who defies gravity to walk (or fly) on the wall while the women look on in amazement.49

In other films, Méliès uses the transparency created by the double exposure to animate the space with ghosts, phantoms, and apparitions that fly across the top of the frame. In films such as La Guirlande merveilleuse (The Marvelous Wreath, 1903) and Le Coffre enchanté (The Bewitched Trunk, 1904), for instance, he uses double exposures combined with dissolves to make characters float in midair and slowly appear or disappear. As with the substitutions, these films play on the spectacle of magically produced presence and absence, here further animated by “reviving and breaking down” the space through the dissolve.

Just as the studio’s glass-and-iron architecture presented unique spatial qualities and aesthetics in the unity of interior and exterior, so Méliès produced dynamic cinematic spaces by blending contrasting studio sets into a single film image. He most often relied on black backgrounds—akin to Muybridge and Marey’s motion studies and the Black Maria films—to create locations in the frame that could be transformed. These blank frames within the frame—typically in the form of doors, windows, or fireplaces, but also picture frames, cavern walls, and the night sky—recur throughout Méliès’s films and may be the dominant characteristic of his décor.⁵⁰ Indeed, his 1903 film Le Portrait spirite (Spiritualistic Photographer) suggests just how accustomed audiences must have become to Méliès’s combination of black backgrounds and dissolves (fig. 2.5).

The film begins with an announcer holding up two signs (in French and English) that read: “Spiritualistic Photo. Dissolving Effect Obtained Without Black Backdrop. Great Novelty.” Méliès then uses a framed white background to dissolve an actress dressed as a sailor into her own drawing on the white canvas. The film’s “great novelty” is somewhat exaggerated—the main change in the trick is the color of the background. But the film nonetheless shows how consciously Méliès explored new techniques to manipulate film space. Whatever their color, the blank sections Méliès used to produce this cineplasticity served the same function as the studio itself, which became a kind of what Michel Foucault termed the “heterotopia,” a unique and typically modern space that could be transformed to fit any purpose or serve as any location.51

As he shifted to multi-shot films, Méliès’s cineplastics became even more pronounced as the studio began to function not only as a different location for each new film but also for related locations that had to be linked within a single film narrative. The multi-shot film allowed Méliès to expand his creation of cinematic worlds, while also requiring new formal techniques for making those worlds intelligible to audiences. Méliès became a key innovator in the development of a formal language for linking shots and locations (even if aspects of this language were abandoned later). Devices such as “correct” entrance/exit directions and dissolves between shots expanded Méliès’s use of the studio space while also extending the fluidity and plasticity that he used in the single-shot films.

While the latter remained the norm until at least 1900 and multi-shot story films did not become common until around 1903, Méliès produced notable long examples in the pre-1903 period as well as numerous others in 1903.⁵² As Richard Abel has noted, these early fairy tale films (or féeries) “forced Méliès to consider various means of producing spatial coherence through an episodic sequence of tableaux.”⁵³ Given Méliès’s work at his Théâtre Robert-Houdin and his use of stage actors in the films, there can be little doubt that he drew, at least in part, on the theatrical tradition for this spatial logic.

As Maurice Noverre has described, shortly after production began in 1897, Méliès modified the studio by adding features of the Robert-Houdin, including trapdoors, rollers, and winches. In order to retain the size of the tableau and utilize both the trapdoors from below and the winches from above, Méliès also dug a pit three meters below the stage, built a balcony above, and raised the portion of the roof directly overhead. These features began to appear in films by 1898, and over the next two years Méliès also added a hanger for building and painting backdrops as well as annexes on each side with large doors to allow cars, trains, horses, and people to pass across the stage from outside.54 With these additions in place, the studio became, as Méliès later described it, “a small-scale likeness of a théâtre de féerie.”⁵⁵ The new features added to the spatial dynamism already being created through substitutions, double exposures, and matting effects by allowing characters to enter and exit from all sides of the film frame.

Méliès also used these stage devices to create new levels of depth and virtual movement within single shots. In Faust aux enfers (1903), for instance, Faust’s descent into hell with Mephistopheles is represented through a series of changing scene décors. Méliès raises and lowers partial backdrops to move the characters incrementally through the cavern. Although the camera does not move, the changing set pieces create the illusion of movement into the depth of the frame. This film demonstrates that Méliès did not, however, simply use the studio to re-create theatrical scenes in single tableaux. In Faust’s descent, Méliès uses a dissolve to reintroduce Faust and Mephistopheles into the cavern in a new shot. Similarly, in the final tableau of Barbe-bleue he uses the trapdoor to raise cutout ghost figures of Blue Beard’s dead wives that are then transformed by a jump cut into live actresses.

While Méliès’s use of theatrical devices helps to explain how he developed his conception of cinematic space, the theater was only one influence on his formal strategies. Unlike the single-shot trick films, in which he maintained spatial continuity by retaining the scene’s basic mise-en-scène across jump cuts or around matte inserts, for the multi-shot films Méliès faced the more complex problem of building an intelligible story world by creating spatial continuity between shifting versions of the studio’s malleable interior. Salt and Gunning note that Méliès quickly identified the importance of entrance/exit directions for creating this continuity through mise-en-scène, with films such as Le voyage dans la lune (1902) becoming early prototypes for the continuity developed more fully in the “chase” film.⁵⁶

Méliès also combined these strategies with the camera effects that he mastered in the trick films. An important example of such techniques is his use of the dissolve to transition between scenes. As others have noted, Méliès did not use the dissolve to signify the passage of time but instead seems to have used it in part as an attraction that emphasizes the “trick” of having multiple shots at all.57 Many critics have ignored Méliès’s use of this device because, as Salt argues, it works against claims that Méliès “invented” classical editing forms. Those who do discuss the dissolve have dismissed it as a “dead-end” that was quickly replaced by the “more efficient” and soon standard straight cut.⁵⁸ But rather than seeing this technique as a failure to develop classical editing strategies, we should understand it as an important example of the ways that Méliès used editing to develop his conception of cinematic space.

Méliès used the dissolve as another means to create links between diegetic spaces, especially for an audience that could not necessarily be assumed to understand the spatial logic of the straight cut. Dissolves create a visual link between two unlike spaces, signifying their spatial unity by momentarily making them a single space on the screen, as in the scene in Cendrillon in which a dissolve links Cinderella’s house with the ball, which she arrives at moments later. At times the dissolve also creates symbolism through spatial juxtaposition. In Barbe-bleue, for instance, after the queen leaves Blue Beard’s forbidden chamber, the dissolve creates an image of his former wives’ hanging bodies suspended over the now-sleeping queen, as if to show her dreams, or perhaps as a foreboding image of her possible future.

Given Méliès’s well-known claim that the stories in his “narrative” films were only an excuse for staging tricks, we should be attentive to the ways that such strategies for linking shots were, like the tricks themselves, about the production of intelligible spaces for spectacular displays.⁵⁹ And despite Méliès’s claims about his own disregard for narrative, we should also take note of the ways that his strategies for constructing space influenced the development of early narrative form. These strategies bear striking resemblance to the spatial characteristics of late-nineteenth-century architecture and the “imponderable fluidity” and plasticity that observers identified with it. The plasticity of the studio’s shifting interior, combined with the various forms of fluidity that Méliès created both within and between shots, mirrored the flexible materials and versatile designs that gave form to glass-and-iron studios.

Thus while it would be too much to say that Méliès drew direct inspiration from the studio’s semitransparent and malleable physical form for his dynamic treatment of film space, two points should be underscored. First, the studio allowed Méliès to test his ability to generate dynamic on-screen worlds by manipulating the studio’s interior. It did so by providing not just a consist location, but a controlled environment that facilitated technical precision thanks to consistent lighting, stable sets and cameras, a ready supply of props, and doors and windows that could be opened easily to move objects through the scene. And second, the technological changes that shaped the experience of fin-de-siècle architecture—especially spatial fluidity, plasticity, and artificiality—suggest new ways of conceptualizing Méliès’s well-known tricks and formal innovations as recognizable components of the new spatial character of the modern built environment.

It should come as no surprise that filmmakers used the developing forms of illusionary, studio-produced realism seen in such films as Une Chute de cinq étages to explore the technologies that created modernity’s new architectures and artificial spaces. Méliès had even greater motivation to do so. A son of industry, he grew up playing in his father’s glass-and-iron-roofed shoe factory near Paris, where he later developed technical skills repairing factory machines. Although he ultimately rejected his place in the family business, his films nonetheless betray this industrial upbringing.60 Many of Méliès’s most popular films made new technologies and technological environments—both real and imagined—popular early film subjects. These films were also allegories for the possibilities and uncertainties created by new technologies, and by extension cinema itself. As urban populations adjusted to the artificiality of built space, cinematic technology offered a means both to reimagine the built environment and to re-create artificial worlds on the screen. In this context, Méliès’s world-building became exemplary of a system of production and representation that would come to define studio cinema and which gave filmmakers an important means for evaluating technological change.

In the advertising campaign for À la conquête du pôle (1911), Pathé Frères, the rival company for whom Méliès ironically made his final films, proclaimed Méliès the “Jules Verne of cinema.”61 The title is somewhat misleading. The film was loosely based on Verne’s Voyages et aventures du Capitaine Hatteras (first published serially between March 1864 and February 1865), but it was one of only four “adaptations” of Verne’s work, including Le Voyage dans la lune (inspired, in part, by Verne’s story Autour de la lune, published serially in 1869), Le Voyage à travers l’impossible (1904, from the play completed in 1882 and staged in 1882–83), and Vingt milles lieus sous les mers (1907, published serially between 1869 and 1870).⁶² Pathé must have hoped to build on the success of these earlier films and Verne’s stories by linking Méliès’s newest voyage with his earlier adaptations, all of which included thrilling representations of travel and technology.

Despite so few Verne adaptations, the “Verne” moniker remains suggestive because the Verne-inspired and other technology-themed narratives represent such a crucial and oft-celebrated component of Méliès’s work. Such films demonstrate that Méliès was more than just a magician or special effects wizard. In his “voyages extraordinaires,” as well as films depicting more familiar technologies such as trains and automobiles, Méliès proves to be an insightful commentator on the technologies that transformed the built environment.

In this respect, Pathé’s Verne comparison underscores a key feature of Méliès’s films. As many scholars have noted, Verne based the technological environments depicted in the Voyages Extraordinaires not on far-flung images of the future but on tangible components of late-nineteenth-century modernity.⁶³ Méliès’s representations of technology similarly reflected contemporary concerns more than visionary predictions. If Méliès was the “Jules Verne of cinema,” it was not because he created visions of the future or the unknown, but because he shared Verne’s critical eye toward the technological cutting edge of their society.⁶⁴

Like Verne, Méliès repeatedly used technological change, scientific discovery, and global exploration to guide his films and only rarely portrayed unknown or futuristic machines.65 From Visite sous-marine du Maine (1898) and Chirurgie fin de siècle (1900) to Le Raid New York–Paris en automobile (1908) and À la conquête du pôle, Méliès drew his subjects from current events, technological developments, and scientific discoveries. While Méliès’s representations do, at times, stray into seemingly unfamiliar technologies (and carry travelers to unknown worlds), more often they represent forms of transit and technological spaces commonly found in turn-of-the-century Western cities.

In Le voyage dans la lune, for instance, the industrial landscape and machine workshop represent familiar sites of the Industrial Revolution—the same technological settings that produced the ideas about space travel that inspired Verne and Méliès. Méliès replicated these spaces in Le voyage à travers l’impossible and À la conquête du pôle, along with viaducts, railroad stations, ateliers, and laboratories. These familiar settings underpin both the known devices (balloons, automobiles, trains, submarines, and flying machines)⁶⁶ as well as the more fantastic scenarios (space travel, flying trains, lunar inhabitants, and polar monsters) that Méliès depicts. More importantly, they provide a frame for both the films’ fantastic components and their critical portrayals of new and potential future technologies.

Méliès did not simply populate his films with new technologies; like Verne’s stories, the films also cast a critical eye on the dangers and uncertainties that new technologies produced.⁶⁷ Indeed, Méliès rarely depicts a technology that does not put its users in peril. Such fantastical machines as the rocket to the moon in Le Voyage dans la lune and the flying train in Le Voyage à travers l’impossible suffer devastating crashes from which their passengers narrowly escape. Even more frequently, Méliès’s characters suffer at the hands of such common technologies as automobiles, railroads, and the machinery in workshops, laboratories, and factories.

These kinds of technological disasters and workplace injuries were common in the late nineteenth century. Méliès likely based images of railroad catastrophes such as those depicted in Le Voyage à travers l’impossible and Les Quatre cents farces du diable (1906) on real events such as the June 1891 collapse of a railway bridge built by Gustave Eiffel near Münchenstein, Switzerland, in which seventy-three passengers died and 171 others were injured.68 Such major accidents represent only the most memorable of a more pervasive experience of technological danger in urban modernity. As Ben Singer has shown, the turn-of-the-century pictorial press put the quotidian disasters of electric trolleys, automobiles, factory machines, and tenement architecture into stark, if exaggerated relief.⁶⁹ Méliès’s representations of technological danger may have been packaged in seemingly fantastic narratives, but they offered much more pointed criticisms and parodies of the technological hazards of modernity.⁷⁰

The technologies Méliès depicted and allegorized also shared an intimate relationship to his studios. Much as he made contemporary machines and modes of transport the stuff of his films, so Méliès filled his fictional worlds with modern glass-and-iron spaces. From the photography studio in Une Chute de cinq étages to the glass-enclosed atelier in La Photographie électrique à distance (1908) and the machine shops in Le Voyage dans la lune, Le Voyage à travers l’impossible, and À la conquête du pôle, the spaces of the modern built environment that shaped Méliès’s filmmaking world became the spaces of the films produced there. Not surprisingly, these spaces at times uncannily resemble the very studios in which they were produced. Such similarities underscore the degree to which the process of creating imaginary worlds on film was inextricably tied to the process of creating new worlds in which to film. In 1911 Méliès brought these two processes closer than ever in the production of À la conquête du pôle, the film for which he earned the “Verne” moniker and in which his second studio made the artificial worlds of cinematic production and representation one and the same.

In 1907 Méliès designed and built a second studio (Studio B) as an extension to the family home on his estate in Montreuil.71 Méliès enclosed the roughly triangular structure in glass but also equipped it with Cooper Hewitt mercury vapor lamps for artificial lighting.⁷² He built the new studio in an effort to take advantage of distribution offices established by his brother Gaston Méliès in New York and the company’s impending inclusion in Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company. With the new studio in place, Méliès produced hundreds of films during 1907–1909, his most active period of production.⁷³ Within two years, however, he was on the verge of bankruptcy, had ceased film production of his own, and would make only five more films, ironically for his rival Pathé Frères.⁷⁴ Among these Pathé productions was À la conquête du pôle, the longest (at thirty minutes) and perhaps most ambitious film of Méliès’s career. Méliès’s use of the second studio—both for the film’s production and as a setting in the film itself (fig. 2.6)—typifies the close relationship between technological and cinematic production that he had helped establish more than a decade earlier.

À la conquête du pôle continues in the tradition of travel film parodies from Méliès’s earlier career. In this case, Méliès lampoons the polar expeditions captured on film by adventurers and filmmakers such as Robert K. Bonine and Thomas Crahan for Edison in 1898, Baldwin and Ziegler for the Warwick Trading Company in 1901, and Sandon Perkins in 1908.75 Méliès’s Arctic voyage follows a Dr. Maboul (Méliès) and his crew (comprised of caricatured delegates from America, England, Germany, Spain, China, and Japan) as they construct a flying machine, suppress a group of suffragists who want to accompany them on their voyage, and avoid a series of technological disasters (and one Arctic monster) on their trip to the North Pole and back. In many ways, the film merely reproduces the basic parodies and technological criticism found in Méliès’s earlier Voyages. Its significance, however, lies in Méliès’s use of the second studio as the centerpiece of what is arguably a subtle depiction of the spaces and practices of filmmaking, represented in the film by the creation of a flying machine.

The film opens in a reception hall (shot in Studio A, recognizable by its wood plank floor) with a brief survey of contemporary modes of transport. The would-be polar voyagers pitch schemes involving balloons, automobiles, trains, sleds, ships, and submarines before Maboul finally introduces his own bid to fly over the Arctic Ocean. His proposed aluminum and bronze “Aero-Bus” represents the most fantastic of the proposed machines, but once again reflects contemporary technological developments, in this case the well-publicized efforts of numerous aircraft designers such as French aviator and engineer Henri Farman to turn early flying machines into viable military tools and modes of transport.⁷⁶

Following the selection of the Aero-Bus and its passengers, Maboul leads the crew on a tour of his laboratory and production facilities, a tour that also becomes a virtual presentation of the film’s own production. Maboul begins the “tour” in his design studio, which is sparsely furnished with a drafting table, several small chairs, and drawings of planes and balloons. Here Maboul presents the crew with a model of the Aero-Bus suspended from the ceiling on thin strings. For the audience this demonstration (by Méliès, no less) offers a preview of the film’s later flying sequences, in which Méliès uses the same model to simulate the voyage over the Arctic. This scene introduces a set of parallels—Maboul/Méliès and crew/audience—that structure the remainder of the film. As Maboul presents his factory and the construction of the flying machine to the crew, Méliès gives the audience a kind of behind-the-scenes tour of the film’s production.

Maboul/Méliès, crew, and audience proceed from the model presentation into a large “electrified factory” (again in Studio A, fig. 2.7) with props and a painted backdrop that recalls the 1889 Galerie des Machines. A quick review of the factory machines sets up the next scene, in which the tour continues with an examination of the Aero-Bus flying machine’s production. Here, in a smaller factory workshop (Studio A, fig. 2.7), eight workers put the finishing touches on the Aero-Bus. Maboul and the crew watch as two women in the foreground sew canvas for the machine’s wings, a man shaves boards for its body, two others affix panels to the roof, and the man and child in the center of the frame prepare and apply solder to the machine’s joints.

While this scene can easily be read simply as a representation of the Aero-Bus’s construction, it also documents the production of the film’s main prop: the life-size “flying” machine. Remarkably, the “characters” in this staged workshop are not only Maboul’s workers; they are also Méliès’s film crew. In this key scene, Méliès draws a subtle parallel between the preparation for the voyage in the film world and the production process in the studios.

Méliès’s use of painted backdrops and Studio B itself as a diegetic space underscores this duality. The left edge of the workshop scene’s backdrop resembles not only the 1889 Galerie’s glass-and-iron skeleton but also the front wall and door of Méliès’s second studio. The flying machine faces this simulated glass wall, anticipating the following scene, in which the completed machine is rolled out of Studio B (fig. 2.8).

Following the Aero-Bus’s launch, the studio reappears several scenes later (fig. 2.6), this time viewed from the front, with doors open to reveal a group of men (the workshop/studio crew) who watch as a caravan of automobiles passes by. With the exception of the rolled-up tableau suspended from the ceiling, the space bears no ready markers of its cinematic function. Rather, the glass-and-iron exterior, large hanging lights, and ladder reproduce the workshop space created earlier in Studio A using props and a painted backdrop. Méliès’s choice to use the studio rather than painting another large backdrop is not surprising—the studio easily passes as a machine workshop. More importantly, the studio does not simply look like a workshop; indeed, it was a space of industrial production. While its malleable interior allowed the studio to perform as virtually any setting in Méliès’s films, this interior was always framed, just off the screen, by the same glass-and-iron surface that framed industrial architecture. The duality that Méliès creates by using the studio as the workshop highlights cinema’s close relationship to these technological spaces and the industrial practices that gave rise to the “human-built world.”