Radical Hybridity in Early Silent Film

In seeking to describe the sensation of something irreducibly different about films made prior to the institutionalisation of cinema in 1915, film historian Andre Gaudreault refers to the “alien quality” of early cinema (2011, 36). In this blog post, I explore a technique found in the first decades of filmmaking which is certainly alien to commercial cinema today – the representation of an object, character or place in multiple styles within the same film e.g. live action, illustration, puppetry, stop motion. The presence of this technique (either by design or driven by technological constraints) illuminates the contingent nature of the development of cinematic continuity which, far from propelled by natural forces, is mired in aesthetic, economic and technological discourses. The early silent films showcased here offer a historically situated approach to issues around continuity and hybridity, exhibiting a decidedly composite aesthetic which operates through difference and discontinuity. In this way, these films run counter to the culture and spectatorial impact of vfx work today which so often seeks to conceal the very processes of compositing which were (and remain) an essential part of its use and popular appeal. Furthermore, to take seriously this long forgotten cinematic practice is to support more recent arguments made by theorists and historians of special effects, such as Julie Turnock (2014; 2022) and Katharina Loew (2022) who assert the importance of recognising current practices in vfx and sfx work as highly stylised and historically situated.

The work of film historians such as Gaudreault and Tom Gunning has illuminated the clear hybridity of early film culture which, as they argue, was highly eclectic in both its mode of exhibition and its formal content (Gunning, 2006, 66). The earliest silent films were, of course, part of vaudeville programmes, putting them in close proximity with magic tricks, prestidigitation (sleight of hand tricks) and ventriloquism - practices which are themselves closely aligned with both fantasy and animation. This hybridity extended into ontology, and a tradition of intermedial filmmaking in which techniques such as stop motion, puppetry, clay animation and shadow theatre were thrown together with live action photography. In what I argue is their most radical configuration, these different mediums were also used to represent the same object in different scenes.

**Fig. 1 - Fairies take flight in *The Bluebird* (Maurice Tourner, 1918).**

Georges Méliès is, of course, the best known early fantastical filmmaker and no less one of cinema’s first animators, whose work Gunning describes as an “intermedial palimpsest” (2011, 100). In the jingling, jangling, multi-layered space of The Merry Frolics of Satan (Georges Méliès, 1906) we are presented with a multiplanar skyscape where various stylistic species jostle against one another, held together in a single yet multidimensional space which does not try to conceal the discrepancies between its different components (puppets, human actors, animated objects, static painted scenery, etc.), but instead exhibits an unabashedly artificial, composite style. We can think of Méliès’ work as operating through a composite aesthetic that is synchronic rather than diachronic – each frame contains different styles or forms within it. However, early film history contains many intermedial films exhibiting a successive, synchronic hybridity which is even more alien to the contemporary viewer than Méliès’ collages.

While varied in its use of puppets, illustration and human actors, The Merry Frolics of Satan is stylistically consistent from frame to frame. An even more radical approach to hybridity is found when filmmakers depict the same place or character in multiple forms. Maurice Tourner’s The Bluebird (1918) is an example of a diegetic world which, though conventional in its approach to narrative, sidesteps the demands for aesthetic and formal continuity. Lackadaisical in pace, Tourner creates a patchwork world of contrasting scenes of fantastical architecture, shadow theatre, static outlines, stop motion and exterior live action scenes (Figs. 1-3). This is a playful and fluid world which maintains its cohesion while shifting in form and style.

Edwin S. Porter’s The Night Before Christmas (1905) likewise operates outside the laws of aesthetic continuity. The film opens with a scene of live action footage shot on location – a group of reindeer are filmed in a snow-covered field eating hay (Fig. 4). Moments later the flock are shown standing outside their stall, but now they are portrayed as static illustrations (Fig. 5). In the picturesque sleigh ride sequence which follows, they appear as eight tiny model reindeer pulling Father Christmas’ sleigh over a moonlit mountain range (Fig. 6). This practice of multiple depictions is also found in Méliès’ Kingdom of the Fairies (1903) in a tripartite sequence of a shipwreck in which the ship is depicted in three different forms. Setting sail out of the harbour, the vessel is shown as a painted cut-out which glides off stage left. Then as it sails across the sea, battered by a storm, it is represented as a model boat which eventually sinks underwater. In its shipwrecked state it is part of a painted backdrop of an underwater scene, a sunken vessel which is just one element in an illustration of a submerged landscape.

**Fig. 5 - Illustrated reindeer waiting to take to the sky in *The Night Before Christmas*.**

**Fig.4 - Live action reindeer in *The Night Before Christmas* (Edwin S. Porter, 1905).**

**Fig. 6 - Model reindeer pulling Father Christmas’s sleigh in *The Night Before Christmas*.**

Early filmmakers such as Porter, Tourner, and Méliès were unconstrained by the imperative for both continuity and the requirement to provide narrative justification for changes in form and style. While a culture of hybrid, intermedial filmmaking has flourished since the silent era thanks to the acceleration of special and visual effects, the relationships between different forms are now signposted and more highly regulated. A prime example of a more stable, consistent and logical relationship being established between different forms is provided by Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Robert Zemeckis, 1988). Unlike The Bluebird or The Night Before Christmas which fluctuate in their modes of representation in an illogical fashion, here the diegetic world is established as a compound of animation and live-action from the outset, and both narrative logic and aesthetic consistency seal the different parts of the fictional world together. The film follows a consistent set of aesthetic rules - there is nothing random about which parts of the film are animated and which are live action, the different elements are consistent; the cartoon characters remain cartoons throughout the film, the live action humans remain live action (in fact the animated world is clearly geographically demarcated as ‘Toon Town’). While Toon Town is shown to have its own animistic qualities when the human character Eddie Valiant crosses into the animated world and his body takes on new, cartoonish properties, the division established in the film between these two spaces nonetheless maintains its function as a stable border between styles.

The regulation of changes in style in contemporary filmmaking also occurs through the use of narrative logic (the transgressive invasion of an alien style is legitimised by the plot). Frequently a contrasting style is used to represent a break with reality such as in dream sequences where a departure from aesthetic norms signifies a departure from the norms of waking life, signalling entry into the decidedly unruly realm of the unconscious. A powerful example of this transgression is the dream sequence in Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) where Scottie endures a garish, psychedelic nightmare as fragments from his waking life morph, twist and turn before his eyes, changing colour and form and moving between live action, animation and illustration, intermingling with imagined encounters and suggesting hidden connections. Rather than a seemingly random succession of forms (live action reindeer followed by illustrations followed by models), a logic now accompanies a change in the mode of representation. In other instances in modern intermedial filmmaking, a change in style or form is legitimised by functioning as a surreal interludes interlude into a parallel world such as in Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006) or by providing illustration to an origin story, as in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 (David Yates, 2010) and Evil Dead II (Sam Raimi, 1987). This is a move distinct from the use of vfx to create creatures or objects which are made to cohere with the established world, rather in a surreal interlude the mode of narration moves into a different ontological realm.

As well as illuminating the freedom of early filmmakers to move between forms without explanation, another important development that these early films highlight is the emergence of the imperative to conceal the composite nature of an image, a development which is a central concern in the field of special effects. As Loew (2022) argues, early cinema was not driven by a desire for “imperceptible” effects and it was only between 1910s and the early 1930s that techniques including matte paintings, travelling mattes and rear projection emerged as discrete ways of suturing together the different parts of an image, techniques which sought to be undetectable.

The depiction of the same object is multiple forms is a radical practice from early filmmaking which has gone largely unnoticed, yet which offers further confirmation of a different approach to both intermediality and a composite aesthetic. In The Empire of Effects: Industrial Light and Magic and the Rendering of Realism, Turnock laments the nostalgia that governs ILM’s dominant aesthetic and which evidences a lack of innovation in vfx work. She describes ILM as developing a new-old Star Wars style (which evokes the 1980s without being ‘too’ 1980s), which is often discussed in ahistorical terms as a kind of naturalistic “photorealism” (Turnock 2022, 220). Rather than looking to the 1980s however, perhaps it’s time to cast our nostalgic gaze even further back in time to mobilise that ‘alien quality’ of early silent films in the hope that this mode of filmmaking that moves playfully between different ontological regimes could inspire new ways of thinking about the use of vfx. Instead of assessing these films through some ill-defined sense of ‘realism’, we can see them as operating through a piecemeal, composite aesthetic which mirrors the composite, fluctuating nature of perception itself.

**Article published: November 17, 2023**

Bibliography

Gaudreault, André. 2011. Film and Attraction: From Kinematography to Cinema. Illinois: University of Illinois Press.

Gunning, Tom. 2006. "The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde.” In The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Strauven, 381-388. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Gunning, Tom. 2011. “Shooting into Outer Space Reframing Modern Vision.” In Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination: Georges Méliès's Trip to the Moon, 97-114. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Loew, Katharina. “From Trick to Special Effect : Standardization and the Rise of Imperceptible Cinematic Illusions.” In Special Effects on the Screen: Faking the View from Méliès to Motion Capture, eds. Martin Lefebvre and Marc Furstenau, 271-310. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Turnock, Julie A. 2015. Plastic Reality: Special Effects, Technology and the Emergence of 1970s Blockbuster Aesthetics. New York: Columbia University Press.

Turnock, Julie A. 2022. The Empire of Effects: Industrial Light & Magic and the Rendering of Realism. Austin : University of Texas Press.

Wells, Paul. 1998. Understanding Animation. London: Routledge.

Biography

Dr. Judy Harris is an independent scholar living in London. She holds a PhD in Media and Communications from Goldsmiths University. Her thesis explores the utopian film theory of the American troubadour poet Vachel Lindsay, author of The Art of the Moving Picture (1915). Her research interests include silent film, sci-fi, regional and amateur filmmaking, and the history of special effects. Her MA dissertation ‘Can the Subaltern Teach?’ was published in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies (2015). She is presenting her paper “Fluid Forms In A Hybrid World: Maurice Tourneur’s The Bluebird (1918)” at the Queer Children’s Film and Television conference in November 2023.