The King Who was a King

by H.G. Wells

Genres: Classics; Science Fiction; Post-Apocalyptic sci-fi; Genetic Engineering

Synopsis

"The King Who Was a King - The Book of a Film" is a fascinating treatise on the development of film written by H. G. Wells and first published in 1929. Writing at the when cinema was beginning to explode, Wells explores the emerging industry''s history, future, and the elements of contemporary film.

Release date: April 30, 2017

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 320

Sample

§ 1. THE FILM, THE ART FORM OF THE FUTURE

It has been interesting to watch the elegant and dignified traditions of the world of literature and cultivated appreciation, under the stresses and thrusts produced by the development of rapid photography during the past half-century. Fifty years ago not the most penetrating of prophets could have detected in the Zoetrope and the dry-plate camera the intimations of a means of expression, exceeding in force, beauty and universality any that have hitherto been available for mankind. Now that advent becomes the most obvious of probabilities.

The line of progress that was to open up those unsuspected possibilities lay through the research for more and more sensitive photographic plates, until at last a type was attained to justify the epithet “instantaneous.” Various motives stimulated such a research. The disputes of Governor Stanford of California with his sporting friends about the real paces of horses made him anxious to fix attitudes too transitory for the ordinary eye, and he was a rich man and could offer considerable inducements to the inventive. He got his inventors and his snapshots. And also working in the same direction to stimulate rapid photography there must have been a desire to put the ordinary photographers’ “sitters” more at their ease, and attempts to facilitate the operations of the amateur photographer, and so promote the sale of cameras.

The Stanford snapshots came to Paris and played an effective part in a discussion of the representation of horses in movement that raged there about Meissonier as a centre. Meissonier saw more quickly than most of us, and his representation of horses was at war with established conventions. It was Meissonier apparently who suggested the reconstruction of animal movements by running the new “instantaneous” photographs together. So in Paris Zoetrope and rapid plate met and the moving picture was born. But while the photography was done on glass the achievement remained a clumsy one. Mr. George Eastman, of the Kodak Company, hot in pursuit of the amateur photographer as a buyer of material, was the man chiefly responsible for the replacement of glass plates by a flexible film. By 1890, the “moving picture” was in existence, and the bottling-up and decanting of drama by means of film and record an established possibility. In 1895, it seems—I had completely forgotten about it until I was reminded of it by Mr. Terry Ramsaye’s history of the film—Mr. Robert W. Paul and myself had initiated a patent application for a Time Machine that anticipated most of the stock methods and devices of the screen drama.

That something more than a new method of reproducing and distributing dramatic scenes had appeared, does not seem to have been realized for some years. The films began with “actualities.” the record of more or less formal current events, and with an almost normal drama, freed only from a limitation to fixed “scenes”; and with these two items they prospered and were content for a long time.

Indeed, the idea that the film was just a way of telling stories in moving pictures dominated the cinema theatre entirely for nearly a couple of decades, and still dominates it. It satisfied a hitherto unsuspected need for visual story-telling. It worked out lucratively. The themes, the concepts, the methods that ruled in popular fiction, popular drama and the music-hall were transferred to the cinemas copiously and profitably, and with the greatest possible economy of adaptation. It would be ungracious for a novelist to complain. Through a happy term of years “world cinema rights” distended the income of every well-known novelist and playwright. The deserving class of fiction writers was enriched even by the sale of the “cinema rights” of tales quite impossible to put upon the films, rights which the purchasers, nothing loth, were willing to buy again so soon as the period of the sale had elapsed. The industry clamoured for “stories,” and its chief anxiety was that the supply of “stories” might presently come to an end. It bought right and left; it bought high and low; it was so opulent it could buy with its eyes shut. It did. Its methods were simple and direct. It took all the stories it could get, and changed all that were not absolutely intractable into one old, old story, with variations of costume, scenery and social position. That story included, almost of necessity, a treachery and a vindication, a partial rape and a pursuit. The new industry drew its actors from the stage and the music-halls and packed them off with the cameras to wherever in the sunlight the scene happened to be “laid.” We saw Carmen in a real Spanish cigarette factory, Louis XI., only slightly out of place, at Carcassonne, Les Miserables in a perfect French setting, manhood stark and strong in a hundred variations of the Blue Lagoon, and the Sheik served hot upon his native desert. The wild Far West exhausted all its stories, and fresh ones were bred from the old. They bred true to type. Unless human invention cracks under the strain of a demand for variations that do not innovate, there is no reason why this naive film-story business, real in appearance and easy and conventional in sentiment, with the punishment of bullying and treachery, the reward of sacrifice, virtue saved in the nick of time and true love coming to its own, seed time and harvest, should not continue indefinitely a staple article of consumption. And so, too, the exploitation of amusing personalities in series of well-contrived comic or humorous adventures, depends only upon the appearance of these rare gifts of God, the personalities themselves. (How rare they are! How rare and wonderful!) But more of them will be discovered, rare though they are, and the cinema will watch for and welcome them and, with a thoroughness no form of success has ever known before, embalm and cherish their memories.

Beyond these first established and permanent uses of the film, the critical and discerning few have always suspected other possibilities. I do not refer here to its obvious educational applications: a matter merely of adaptation and organization to class-room and lecture-room needs. Progress in the scholastic world is deliberate, yet there seems no reason to deny its occurrence; in a generation or so the “educational film” may have become a recognized instrument of education. But from the first it was evident that a quantity of possible cinema effects were not being utilized at all in the current methods of exploitation, and enquiring spirits sought opportunity to explore this undeveloped hinterland. It is this hinterland of real novelty that is the most interesting aspect of the cinema to-day to people who have outgrown the story-consuming stage. It may be that many of these early investigators realized little of the vastness of the region into which they were pressing. It may be that many of their earlier experiments were silly or affected. For a time, moreover, their enterprise was restrained by the huge commercial success of the commonplace quasi-realistic story. The cinema theatre was doing far too well to welcome any disturbing experiments. It would even block them. Collateral developments with a flavour of criticism and competition were not wanted.

These honest pioneers were for the most part young and unknown people, and they got little help or encouragement from those of us who had achieved any popular standing as novelists or playwrights. We had learnt our tricks and mastered the limitations of the old conditions. We were set in our careers. The magnificent marketing of our “film rights” in what we had already done, helped our willing blindness to the fact that that was not at all the sort of thing we could do for the films. It was expecting too much of us that we should hail the advent of a greater and richer artistic process. Some of us said, “This business is not for us, whatever its possibilities—if it have any possibilities—may be”; and others of us held that there was nothing here but a handmaid for the master crafts we followed. We were pre-disposed in every way to think upon such lines. Within our own special limits we had learnt to handle considerable complexes of ideas and emotional developments; it was appalling to think of learning over again the conditions of a medium. We knew how to convey much that we had to say by a woven fabric of printed words or by scene and actor, fine “lines” and preface assisting, and it was with extraordinary reluctance, if at all, that we could be won to admit that on the screen a greater depth of intimation, a more subtle and delicate fabric of suggestion, a completer beauty and power, might be possible than any our tried and trusted equipment could achieve.

Yet lying awake of nights it was possible for some of us to forget the crude, shallow trade “movies” we had seen, and to realize something of the splendour of the new powers that were coming into the hands of our happy successors. First there is the Spectacle. No limitations remain of scene, stage or arena. It may be the convolutions of a tendril which fill the picture, or the bird’s-eye view of a mountain chain, or a great city. We can pass in an instant from the infinitely great to the infinitely little. The picture may be real, realistic or conventionalized in a thousand ways; it may flow into and out of a play of “absolute” forms. And colour has become completely detachable from form. Colour in the films is no longer as it is in real life, a confusing and often unmeaning complication of vision. It can be introduced into the spectacle for effect, slowly flushing the normal black and white with glows of significant hue, chilling, intensifying, gladdening. It can be used to pick out and intensify small forms. It can play gaily or grotesquely over the scene with or without reference to the black and white forms. Sound too has become detached for the artist to use as he will. So long as it is irrelevant it can be made insignificant, or it can be brought in as a sustaining but unimportant accompaniment. Then it can gradually usurp value. The effective practical synchronizing of sound with film is plainly possible and close at hand. Then film and music will be composed together.

The spectacle will march to music, sink to silence or rise to thunder as its effects require. The incessant tiresome chatter of the drama sinks out of necessity, the recurrent exasperating “What did he say then?” When once people have been put upon the actual stage, they must talk and flap about for a certain time before they can be got rid of. Getting people on and getting them off is a vast, laborious part of dramatic technique. How it must bore playwrights! But with the film the voice may be flung in here or there, or the word may be made visible and vanish again.

Plainly we have something here that can be raised to parallelism with the greatest musical compositions; we have possibilities of a Spectacle equal to any music that has been or can be written, comprehending indeed the completest music as one of its factors. Behind the first cheap triumphs of the film to-day rises the possibility of a spectacle-music-drama, greater, more beautiful and intellectually deeper and richer than any artistic form humanity has hitherto achieved.

It may need generations of experience to work out that great possibility, but there it is, challenging creative effort. Few of us who are in the world to-day will live to see masterpieces of the new form, but the temptation to make an essay at least a little more in the direction of that hinterland than the current film, may attract even a writer past his middle years. This book is the story and description of such an excursion. It is the slightest excursion, a mere trip. Years ago the writer had a joy-ride in an aeroplane over the Medway and prophesied Lindbergh. This is the same sort of thing. We ask, Can we get off the ground of the realistic story-film? The writer discusses an imaginary film with the reader; it is a film dealing with a theme of world-wide importance. The problem to which we set ourselves he. . .