Cinema's First Flight

Abstract

As the Lumiere brothers’ cinematographe and its expanding catalog travelled around France and then the world in 1896, its projectionists, more than its famous inventors, became cinema’s true pioneers. This group of twenty-four men covered the six inhabitable continents within a single year, their geographical conquests matched by their many improvised artistic and technical feats. With their ingenuity, these operators developed the cinematic practices that would long outlast their contemporary camera-projector technology, that notorious ‘invention without a future.’ 1 Beginning with the Lumiere brothers’ L’Arrivee d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, early cinema’s fascination with motion had found iconic form in the locomotive. The popularity of The Arrival of a Train inevitably led to its imaginative reverse shot, with one of the Lumiere projectionists mounting a camera on board a train in order to record the station’s arrival from the train’s perspective. The Algerian-born projectionist Felix Mesguich was the first to strap the motion picture machine to the front of the locomotive: the resulting film’s speed was arresting, culminating with the camera’s plunge into a tunnel’s darkness. Film historian Jacques Rittaud-Hutinet posits, in light of this seemingly unprecedented maneuver, that “Perhaps [Mesguich] ‘truly’ invented the subjective camera.” 2 Rittaud-Hutinet’s grammatical montage of ‘perhaps’ and ‘truly’ screens the way in which the stories of early cinema are just that, stories that share the fleeting enthusiasm of their objects, before descending as myths. 3 Mesguich, more than the other under-sung projectionists, takes part in cinematic history’s sensational and sometimes apocryphal myth-making. In 1933 he published Tours de manivelle: