History+pt+1'+Its+Alive'

=History Part I: "It's Alive!"=

© [|Elizabeth Burton] [|Apr 13, 1999]

In 1895, the Lumiere brothers presented the first public showing of an on-screen movie. Seven years later, magician and filmmaker [|Georges Melies] gave us the very first sci-fi movie. "From the outset, the cinema specialized in illusion to a degree that had been impossible on the stage," wrote John Clute and Peter Nichols in [|//The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction//]. "SF itself takes as its subject matter that which does not exist, now, in the real world (though it might one day), so it has a natural affinity with the cinema...." In Melies's //A Trip to the Moon//, the first SF movie, there weren't any deep thoughts or philosophical musings, just a series of vignettes guaranteed to awe audiences already staring in strained belief at this new medium. Has anyone not at one time or another seen the wonderful clip of the man in the moon wincing as the rocket lands in his eye? And if Melies's moon was populated by dancing girls in scandalously short (for 1902) satin tap pants, it also boasts the first cinematic Bug-Eyed Monsters. Germany's [|Fritz Lang] used some of Melies's tricks and added more of his own in his 1926 silent film [|//Metropolis//], the first dystopian film. This classic, despite its socialist overtones, is filled with stark images of dronelike workers marching in lockstep to the endless hours of labor that support the futuristic Art Deco city far above them in more than geography. Rotwang, part inventor, part alchemist and ancestor to Victor Frankenstein, Doctor X and a host of future mad scientists, has a laboratory jammed with bubbling flasks and coiled wires that generates enough lightning to power three cities. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic filmmakers were also exploring the world of science fiction and fantasy. One of the earliest entries to remain extant is a 1920 version of the often redone //Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde//. It was one of two made that year; and an even earlier one, most of which has been lost, had been done in 1911. The 1920 film starred John Barrymore as the ill-fated doctor and was directed by John S. Robertson. The story was done again (and again and again) in 1932 under director Rouben Mamoulian with Frederic March in the title role, an interpretation of R.L. Stevenson's novel many consider to be the best of the bunch. By 1931, the world of science fiction cinema was ripe for development. That year, James Whale directed a newcomer named Boris Karloff in an adaptation of Mary Shelley's story of "A Modern Prometheus" and gave the world a new synonym for horror - [|//Frankenstein//]. Although the title referred to Colin Clive's obsessed scientist Victor Frankenstein, the name was ever thereafter owned by his pathetic creation. Karloff's monster manages to arouse our sympathy even while we shudder at its amoral, unnatural parody of life. Like many of the BEMs to follow, Frankenstein's monster was an alien, a creature from some place other than //here//, and its fiery end did not bode well for the aliens that were to follow in the coming decades. Our fascination with this story is evident not only in the number of films that bear its name, but also by the information that a [|1910 version] of this story, filmed by none other than Thomas Edison himself, has been found and is currently undergoing restoration. Hard on //Frankenstein//'s heels came the first true "creature feature," the exquisite "eighth wonder of the world," [|//King Kong//]. Using a combination of stop-action animation, rear photography and countless hours of study, F/X pioneer [|Willis O'Brien] gives us a completely believable world populated by extinct reptiles and a giant anthropoid. His attention to detail is what makes it possible for us to empathize with the beleagured Kong despite the destruction he causes. Is there anyone who doesn't, right up until the moment his huge body tumbles to the ground, have a sneaking wish that somehow the great beast will survive and find a way back home? That same year, Erle Kenton directed the first and best take on H.G. Wells's novel [|//The Island of Doctor Moreau//], a tale of the evils of vivisection. Titled [|//The Island of Lost Souls//], it keeps to the theme of the novel, arousing sick horror at the thought of Moreau's agonizing experiments on his captive creatures as he seeks, like Frankenstein, to create man. Unlike Clive's raving obsessive, however, Charles Laughton's Moreau is a model of scientific detachment. The tragedy lies in that, in his effort to make man, he has become completely isolated from his own humanity. Also in 1933, James Whale returned to direct yet another Wells-inspired script, [|//The Invisible Man//], starring the voice of Claude Rains and the F/X of John Fulton. Then, in 1935, Whale was tapped to return to the lab to assist Dr. Frankenstein once again in the wonderfully ironic [|//The Bride of Frankenstein//]. This film marked one of the few times when the sequel really is as good as its predecessor. The 1930's was also the decade of the movie serial, giving us the first adventures of [|Flash Gordon] and Buck Rogers. Hilarious, now, with their tin-can rockets suspended form highly visible wires and their tacky "alien landscapes," these are nevertheless pulp space opera at its best. By now, the world was wallowing in disaster and sliding toward the brink of chaos. The Great Depression was six years old and an upstart political party with an anti-Semitic agenda was slowly taking over Germany. In 1937, the same year that Flash and Dale first saved the earth from Ming the Merciless, Frank Capra explored the question of utopia in a screen adaptation of James Hilton's novel [|//Lost Horizon//]. In this tale of a group of political refugees stranded in a long-lost valley of the Himalayas where death is no more than a memory, Capra seems to be foreshadowing the political debate that preceded World War II as he explores the question of whether Paradise requires a higher price than we should be willing to spend. At the same time, William Cameron Menzies was doing another take on Eden with [|//Things to Come//], again based on a Wells novella. In some near future, society seeks to repair the damage of war through the application of technology, only to find that technology and good intentions alone are not sufficient. In these first decades of the 20th Century, science fiction cinema did what all good SF does - it looked at existing conditions and asked, "What if...?" Unlike literary SF, however, the movies as a rule tended to show a mistrust of science and technology. One suspects that this happened in large part because the two had different audiences. One of the limitations of film is that, unlike the written word, it encounters several levels of overt and covert censorship as it moves from concept to finished product. Those who provide the funds would like to have some return on their investment, and rightfully so. As a result, however, there is a hefty emphasis on how any given film is going to "play in Peoria," - i.e., how a general audience is likely to react to its theme and its images. This criterion was in place in 1933, when a scene showing characters being crunched between Kong's teeth was considered too graphic for distribution; and it was still there in 1991 when Paramount gave Klingons antacid-colored blood in //Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country// lest the sight of floating globules of gore cause an epidemic of upchucked popcorn. In addition, science fiction films are written to appeal to a broad audience rather than the SF/Fantasy "elite." The kind of deep thought and speculative analysis that characterize the very best of the genre simply don't always translate well onto the big screen. If they did, there would still need to be some kind of space-opera action, unless you're selling the movie as a cure for insomnia. The end result is that often the big lessons SF tries to tell get lost in oversimplification. These first decades of the modern era were times of astonishingly rapid developments in science and technology. Telephones, phonographs, electric lights, airplanes, automobiles and, yes, the movies - all of these went from science fiction to science fact in the space of twenty years. In the next twenty, many of them went on to become commonplace conveniences. So many changes in so little time may well have made more than a few people uncomfortable, wondering whether all of this sudden progress was actually very good for us. Small wonder, then, that astute movie moguls gave approval to scripts that contained a warning that uncontrolled science could pose a danger. With rare exceptions, that theme has been used over and over again in the area of science fiction cinema, as we will see next month when we explore the next three decades and The Blitz of the B-Movie. http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/sf_and_fantasy_on_film/18307