Complex Numbers

Birth of a Spaceship

The headline may be a bit misleading, but as a movie fan, I find this stuff fascinating. Also because it's Cracked, it's funny.

How A Jammed Camera Helped Create All Of Science-Fiction  

Like I said, the title's misleading -- science fiction predates movies by nearly a hundred years. I suppose "helped create science fiction movies" would be more accurate.

The movie camera was the internet of its day. As in, it was touted as this great technical achievement that would revolutionize science and usher in a new era of progress and enlightenment. But, instead, people almost immediately started using it to make dirty movies and goof around.

Someone has probably enshrined this into a law already, but it seems to me that the first thing anyone does with any new technology is figure out how to make porn with, or of, it.

Hence the old observation that the holodeck will be humankind's last invention.

Born in the mid-19th century, Méliès was an illusionist who wanted to use the camera to film plays and his magic acts.

Turns out magic acts don't translate well to recorded media, for the simple reason that it's too easy for cameras to do tricks, and audiences will think it's all film effects. This is why magic acts are usually filmed in front of studio audiences.

Then one day, a weird thing happened. When filming scenes of city life, Méliès’ camera jammed. It took him a few seconds to fix, and when he later developed the film, he noticed that he accidentally invented the jump cut/stop trick. While the camera was malfunctioning, the scenery around the amateur filmmaker continued to change, none of which was being captured on film until Méliès started rolling again. And because the angle and position of the camera didn’t change, the resulting film seemed to show objects disappearing, a man turning into a woman, or a carriage turning into a hearse, etc.

While it's inevitable that someone would have thought of this sort of thing eventually, accidents can absolutely drive invention.

Méliès immediately realized he had stumbled onto something big, and he continued to experiment with other camera tricks until he was ready to put them all into a short film: A Trip to the Moon.

That's the one with the space capsule in the man in the moon's eye. Yeah, you know the one. It's iconic, and for a reason. Go to the original article; the video is embedded there, so I won't reproduce it again here.

Released in 1902, it was heavily influenced by the writings of Jules Verne and depicted the thing from the title. It also employed “every trick had learned or invented” to create what some consider the first science-fiction movie ever.

It is my unshakable opinion that the first science fiction book was Frankenstein. Whether this movie was the first SF movie or not, I'm not as sure of. But like I said, it's iconic.

And great job, Méliès, since A Trip to the Moon apparently convinced the world that movies could be full of fantastical scenes, flights of imagination, and, eventually, pants-shitting horror. Seriously, watching some of those old-timey movies feels like snorting bath salts off a heavily decomposed clown corpse dressed in your mother’s wedding gown.

Just leaving this here so I'm sure you read that imagery.

The point is, Méliès ushered in an era of fantasy and sci-fi movies, which officially ended in 2015 when Mila Kunis said out loud that she wanted to bone the half-human half-dog Channing Tatum in Jupiter Ascending.

Come on now, Jupiter Ascending wasn't that bad. I mean, it was bad, but it certainly didn't end SF movies. Hell, Dune just came out. I'm not seeing it until Sunday. Which reminds me, I keep forgetting to do a review of the movie I saw earlier this week (which was definitely not science fiction for once), so now's as good a time as any.

One-Sentence Movie Review: The Last Duel

I keep going back to Ridley Scott movies in the vain hope that at some point, one of them will come close to the greatness that is Blade Runner: The Director's Cut; this hope is inevitably dashed, but The Last Duel, unlike some of his other historical fiction movies, doesn't completely suck -- it's longer than it needs to be; Matt Damon has already been in France once before this year; and Kylo Ren has already gratuitously taken his shirt off approximately 143 times, but the acting is superb and the movie is surprisingly topical for modern audiences despite being set in medieval France (which the director doesn't let you forget even though everyone speaks American English, because you keep seeing shots of Notre Dame de Paris under construction).

Rating: 3.5/5