Introduction: Fin de Cyclé

 

 

IS THIS A STORY ABOUT BICYCLES, or is it about the beginnings of film? You tell me. I always give stories a reference title (before I give them a real one) by some private name—this I always thought of as “the velocipede story.” But as I wrote it, it came to be as much or more about film as about two-wheeled vehicles.

The early history of film is about what is called grammar. At first, films were one- or two-minute pieces of life—trains arriving at stations, waves breaking on the coast, workers leaving a factory. Audiences would watch anything because it moved. The idea itself was astounding to them.

But then film started telling stories. (The Waterer Watered: gardener watering flowers; kid steps on hose; gardener looks in hose; kid steps off hose; gardener gets face-full; gardener beats shit out of kid. The End.) It was a minute long and it packed them in like ET.

But to do that, the Lumière Bros. had to figure out how to tell it: Show the gardener watering. Show the kid stepping on the hose. Show the water flow stopping. Pretty simple. Cause and effect. Shot continuously, like you’re watching a stage show. Gardener over here, kid over there, hose, flowers, etc.

It was a little later, when people tried to show simultaneous action that things got complicated. That’s why to us early narrative film seems so slow moving. This happens. Then a title: Meanwhile, over at the sawmill . . . Oil Can Harry has Pearl tied to the log. Another title: Back at the Roundhouse . . . Teddy the Keystone Dog unties Tom Oakheart, who gets on a handcar to make for the sawmill. The titles had to do the early work. There was no grammar of editing yet. It was only later that filmmakers (Griffith gets credit for a hundred other people) cut to: sawmill, Oil Can Harry, Pearl, the whirring saw blade. Cut to: the roundhouse, Teddy, Tom Oakheart, the bonds gnawed through, Tom and Teddy running to the handcar.

Also, you’ll notice, in this (my and Mack Sennett’s) universal scenario: Harry faces screen right; Pearl, in the middle, the whirring saw blade at the edge of the screen. When Tom’s bonds are chewed through, he moves screen right (toward the screen sawmill)—and when Tom bursts in on Harry’s plan to turn Pearl into red wet 2x4s, he’d damn well better come in from screen left, behind Harry (from the direction of the screen roundhouse).

This is screen orientation, part of the grammar of film movement and editing. (And the W/S u-plot is the kind of thing that was being done twenty years into film history—the kind of thing Sennett made fun of while he was making money from it.)

Nobody knew any of this stuff in the 1890s. They had to figure it out from Day One.

The other thing the early filmmakers (especially Méliès, who was a stage magician and illusionist) didn’t realize was that MAGIC does not work on the screen; the screen is magic. In other words, you can do the most complicated illusion in the world, one that, if you did it outdoors, in broad daylight with two hundred thousand spectators, would be the most astounding thing ever seen. Let’s say you make some behemoth of an elephant disappear. Bravo! Astounding! How’d he do it?

Now on film (and Méliès did discover this; he just never understood its impact): Daylight. Two hundred thousand spectators. Méliès waves his wand. We stop the camera. Europe holds still. We remove the elephant by walking it off to one side. We start the camera, Méliès finishes the wave. The elephant is gone. Bravo! (in the film) Astounding! (in the film) How’d he do it? (in the film)

I can make an elephant disappear, so can you and so can your Aunt Minnie, on film. Méliès never understood this (beautiful as some of his tricks were). Houdini didn’t, and neither did David Copperfield (the illusionist, not the Victorian journalist).

Elaborate tricks and trick photography have equal weight on the screen.

Houdini could show his escape from a welded-shut, chained-up milk can on the bottom of the near-frozen Hudson River. You could see him do it; his contortions are amazing, his manipulations have never been equaled. BUT—

I can escape from a welded-shut, chained-up milk can on film, and so can you. Because it wouldn’t be those things—it would be a cinematic milk can (one side cut away so I could be filmed); it wouldn’t be welded shut. The chains would be papier-mâché; through the use of editing and with doubles hidden behind and under me (or now with the use of morphing) I could make my body move around like Plastic Man; and the damned thing wouldn’t be at the bottom of the Hudson River (I’d be dropped in there, and swim out there, like Tony Curtis); it would be in some tank somewhere when it needed to be shown. (I’d be somewhere else high and dry doing the contortions.) Then I’d come out of the milk can in the tank and swim upward and then—again like Tony Curtis—I’d surface in the Hudson.

And, as in this story, the early filmmakers filmed in sequence, consecutively. It took awhile for them to realize they didn’t have to; in fact, it was more costly to do it that way, even if you had time and space for standing sets. (You film Pearl’s house; you film Tom at the roundhouse; you film Harry at the sawmill; you go back and forth to each set as needed, till the film is done. NO—WAIT! Hey, we can film all the scenes at Pearl’s house, early, middle, late; all the scenes at the roundhouse, all at the sawmill, with appropriate costume changes—hence the industry need for script girls and continuity directors—and send the sets all back to the scene shop when we’re through! We’ll save a bundle!)

None of this stuff existed when this story starts. It was all out there, waiting—how to tell a story, how to edit it, how to make it work without confusing the audience.

I asked at the first of this whether this was about film or velocipedes.

It’s mostly about Alfred Jarry, one of those truly unique people we are allowed to glimpse every century or so (we’re overdue). He was the perfect counterpoint to the history of his times—in someone’s phrase about someone else, he marched to the tune of a different kazoo, altogether. Some things in this story are a little exaggerated—but not the rancor of the Dreyfus Affair, and though some of the incidents are made up, Jarry did all the things here, or things far more—uh, individualistic. Go read a couple of books about him and his times, starting with Roger Shattuck’s The Banquet Years (1958 and rev. later).

This story was originally written in two goes, October 1989, the first half, and March through May 1990, the rest. It was the original in Night of the Cooters, was reprinted in the Mid-December 1991 issue of Asimov’s, and was a Hugo nominee.

Back into the depths of the camera’s mast, then . . .