"SF Film recommendations Before the Golden Age (1895-1949)" Topic

"Since the medium of film was first created there has been science fiction cinema. Further than that, were it not for science fiction films then, then cinema as we know it today would not exist. These may appear to be bold statements when taken at face value, but the ideas behind them are easily enough demonstrated. It is generally agreed that cinema, the showing of the then new 'moving pictures', began in late-1895 with the pioneering work of Louis and Auguste Lumiere and one of the first films they produced and co-directed was Charcuterie Mechanique (1895), or The Mechanical Butcher, in which a live pig enters one end of a device and emerges at the other as hams, sausages, ribs and bacon. Now science fiction is a notoriously difficult beast to define, not least because its many strands depict it as something of a 'broad church', but it is certainly true that one of its themes is the introduction and impact of new technologies, and by that definition the above film is definitely science fiction, notwithstanding any dismissal of it as 'a one-minute piece of trick photography'. And if, as many commentators now agree, the first real work of science fiction (not counting proto-SF forms) is Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein (1818) and/or that Jules Verne's work from the 1860s on is SF, then it follows that from that perspective moving pictures and the associated technology is itself a science fictional development. Certainly most of Shelley's contemporaries would have considered film to be just pie in the sky. Besides, moving pictures are, by definition, 'trick photography' in that film is a succession of still images shown so rapidly that the eye is tricked into seeing motion…"

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Armand