By Martin Keady · July 3, 2024
No other art form has ever undergone the technological and creative revolution that cinema has in the past century and a half. Having been dreamt of throughout history, movies finally arrived at the end of the 19th century and have transformed and been transformed by the world. What once involved little more than capturing reality has become the creation of an alternative, augmented reality, in which truth and fiction co-exist and are often indistinguishable.
Here are 10 films, from the beginning of cinema to now, that show the evolution of visual effects, collectively charting cinema’s journey from photographing reality to altering reality. Two of them also involve sonic revolutions, emphasizing that, as the title of probably the world’s greatest English-language film magazine continually reminds us, cinema is both sight and sound.
Directed by: Auguste and Louis Lumière
As André Bazin, arguably the greatest and most influential film critic ever (because of his role in the French New Wave of the early 1960s) put it in his seminal book, Qu’est-ce que le cinema? (What is cinema?), just as humans had always dreamed of flight, they had also always dreamed of cinema, going right back to the first shadows that they created on cave walls. Consequently, when the technological advances of the 19th century finally made it possible for humans to film their actions, it was literally the realization of a dream.
Consequently, early film often consisted of little more than reality itself. Probably the most spectacular example is the 1896 film by the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station) (1895). Less than a minute long, it literally shows a train arriving at a station, which today appears almost as unremarkable as all the endless shots and streams of different types of travel that we see on social media.
Yet L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station) is one of the most important films ever made because it proved how captivating the capturing of seemingly ordinary reality could be. Whether or not the first people in Paris who saw the film actually believed that a train was approaching them and ran for their lives, as legend (or the Lumières’ genius for publicity) has it, is almost irrelevant and, in any case, is certainly impossible to prove now. What really matters is that the simple depiction of a train arriving at a station was considered so striking that it was readily believed that people would react powerfully, even uncontrollably, to it.
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Screenplay by: Georges Méliès
Within a few years, it became clear that reality no longer attracted, let alone enchanted (or alarmed), the earliest cinema-goers. Consequently, filmmakers supplanted the archetypal earth-bound image of a steam train arriving at a station with the more cinematic and symbolic image of a rocket ship striking the Man in the Moon right in the eye.
Like L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station), Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon) (1902) was a ground-breaking film; indeed, it is arguably the first great film (or at least great short film) ever made. For one thing, it is generally regarded as being the first film ever to have a “screenplay,” even if in truth that was little more than a rough blueprint for the film, with some camera directions and a few lines of dialogue.
Even more importantly, however, Georges Méliès dispensed with the simple rendering of reality that his compatriots the Lumières had perfected. By contrast, he presented a highly stylized representation of reality where grandly behatted elders attend legions of servants with maps and easels, attempting to plan the titular journey to the earth’s satellite, followed by preparing to load and launch a test rocket.
Then, of course, comes probably the most famous image of all early cinema, and arguably the defining image of all cinema (or at least all sci-fi cinema), in which the mythical Man in the Moon has the rocket land right in his eye. It is a fleeting image (Méliès does not dwell on it) but it has continued to exert a powerful influence on cinema, showing how film could combine reality and the visualization of myth or artifice to create something new and truly cinematic.
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Screenplay by: F.W. Murnau
In the next quarter-century or so, most silent movies attempted to emulate the simple recording of reality like L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station), the more artful recreation of reality of Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon), or a combination of the two. At the end of that period came Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) by F.W. Murnau, probably the greatest silent film of them all, which was the high watermark of silent movies before the coming of sound later that year.
Silent film is arguably the ultimate misnomer in movie history. Although silent films lacked synchronized dialogue, they were invariably accompanied by sound, specifically music, that was either recorded or played live (ideally by an entire orchestra, but far more commonly by a single organist or piano player). Nevertheless, there is no denying that early cinema was overwhelmingly visual. Throughout the silent era, there was far more manipulation of and experimentation with cinematic imagery. Murnau crystallized that.
He was one of the first great German or Mitteleuropean filmmakers to come to Hollywood after California’s sunny climate, limitless land (for studios and location shots), and even more limitless supply of writers, directors, actors, and extras had made it the capital of the world’s film industry. The success of Nosferatu (1922) in Europe, one of the earliest and best vampire films, eventually led Murnau to Hollywood.
Sunrise is a classic “coming to the city” story of the kind that was almost universal at the start of the 20th century when the greatest period of urbanization in history began (a process that continues today, nearly a century on). However, within the relatively simple story of a love triangle in which a “darker” woman tries to lure a husband away from his more innocent wife, there is a truly cinematic creation of the whole process of urbanization, with the titular humans leaving the relative safety of the countryside behind them to venture into an all-consuming city.
With continual fades and dissolves, and forced perspectives that made the city’s skyscrapers scrape the sky, Sunrise was truly the end-point of silent cinema.
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Screenplay by: Alfred A. Cohn
Judged purely as a film, The Jazz Singer (1927) does not bear comparison with Sunrise, even though they were released in the same year. The Jazz Singer was a fictionalized biopic of Al Jolson, who, after a strict Jewish upbringing, had become a hugely popular performer. It has little of the visual invention of Sunrise; indeed, in its depiction of the singer performing in “blackface” (literally wearing black face paint, to make him appear African-American), it is astonishingly old-fashioned and downright offensive.
However, the film possesses the one ingredient that Sunrise and every other silent film lacked, namely synchronized sound, which allowed actors to speak or even sing on screen for the first time. Sound is often forgotten in cinema, but it is central to the medium’s success.
For all its obvious faults, the film that finally made sound as important as sight in cinema is The Jazz Singer. And as hard as it is to imagine now, perhaps cinema has never offered a more astonishing spectacle than when people opened their mouths in that film and were heard to speak or sing for the first time.
Screenplay by: Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles
If The Jazz Singer introduced sound to cinema, then Citizen Kane (1941) introduced complexity—genuine complexity—to cinema, especially to American cinema, of a kind that was already commonplace in all other art forms.
The complexity of Citizen Kane began with its script by Herman J. Mankiewicz, which was intended to be a refutation of the man who had initially been a fan of Mankiewicz, the press baron Randolph Hearst. As told in David Fincher’s magisterial biopic Mank (2020), Mankiewicz felt that Hearst had betrayed both him and American democracy, and he was determined to gain revenge, even if, as ultimately proved to be the case, it cost him his screenwriting career. He found a way to examine all that angst and anguish by modeling his script on the flashback structure of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925).
Crucially, Orson Welles and his cinematographer, Gregg Toland, found a way to visualize all that narrative complexity. The neophyte Welles leaned heavily on Toland to realize his most fantastical ideas, using almost all the filmmaking techniques used in films before Kane (expressionism, jump-cuts, etc.). Most famously, Toland perfected deep-focus photography, the cinematographic technique whereby he could focus equally well on anyone and anything in his frame of view however near or far they were from the camera.
This simple but revolutionary technique truly leveled the playing field in cinema, allowing all characters (or even objects) in a scene to receive equal importance and enabling the audience to equally perceive everyone and everything in that scene. With deep-focus photography, Toland found the perfect visual technique to match the deep-character and deep-plot writing of Mankiewicz.
Screenplay by: Michael Poweel and Emeric Pressburger
Black Narcissus (1947) is the cinematic equivalent of The Beach Boys‘ Pet Sounds, i.e. the medium’s greatest ever studio creation. Made just over half a century after L’arrivée D’un Train En Gare De La Ciotat, it showed how far film had come in that time.
Black Narcissus famously brought the mountain to Muhammad, or, more precisely, the Himalayas to London. Specifically, W. Percy Day, the special effects technician, created enormous color matte paintings and landscape paintings that made possible the recreation of the world’s most famous mountain range at London’s Pinewood Studios. There were just a few exterior scenes at the end in the garden of a retired English Colonel, which had the requisite Indian vegetation.
Black Narcissus was the large-scale, cinematic equivalent of putting a ship inside a bottle, whereby the act of compression somehow heightens the sense and even the scale of what is being compressed. And by deciding to shoot Black Narcissus, the tale of English nuns who find themselves being sexually awakened by the arrival of a handsome adventurer, Powell and Pressburger not only evoked the atmosphere of the Indian-set story but somehow magnified it, ultimately making the emotions on display as magical, indeed uncanny, as Day’s matte mountains.
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Screenplay by: Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick
Two decades after Black Narcissus, Stanley Kubrick attempted another act of what might be called cinematic escapology (that is, escaping through cinema to somewhere else entirely) by creating what he always hoped would be the first good sci-fi film in a studio (specifically the MGM-British Studios and Shepperton Studios in England, where he was in self-imposed exile from his native America). Powell and Pressburger may have taken cinema audiences to another part of the world, but Kubrick took them to another world entirely.
Kubrick is perhaps the finest film director in the English language, but he was also indebted to others who helped him to create a succession of masterpieces throughout his career, and of no film is that truer than 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). As well as leaning heavily on Arthur C. Clarke for his writing (and mythological underpinning), Kubrick also relied on numerous technical assistants and even external organizations to realize his vision of travel that was simultaneously interstellar and inner.
Chief amongst them was Douglas Trumbull, the special effects supervisor for the film, who went on to become probably the greatest special effects supervisor ever on other sci-fi classics including Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Blade Runner (1982).
In addition to the unique and ultra-high-definition cameras that Kubrick secured from NASA, which he also used in later films including Barry Lyndon (1975), Kubrick relied on Trumbull and his small army of experts to create the illusion of outer space and, in the film’s celebrated “Stargate” ending, something approaching the hallucinatory effects of LSD and other mind-altering substances.
Screenplay by: George Lucas
Star Wars (1977), of course, is the film or series of films that virtually ate popular culture, including cinema itself, such has been its unprecedented success since the release of the first Star Wars film in 1977. Yet, Star Wars would almost certainly never have become the greatest fairytale or myth of the late 20th century and early 21st century without the amazing visual effects of the original Star Wars movie.
I am one of the last generation of cinema-going children and teenagers who got to see Star Wars on its original release in the cinema, so I can personally testify to its incredible visual impact, which has been so all-pervasive that it is easy to forget. The big screen never seemed quite so big and indeed would never seem quite so big again, from the now utterly familiar opening where the words “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” projected caterpillar-track style, to the seemingly infinite array of stars from which one transmogrifies into a spaceship.
What sealed that extraordinary opening sequence was the long, indeed seemingly unending, tracking shot that showed the underside of the Imperial Star Destroyer. When my siblings, cousins, millions of others, and I first saw it, we certainly gasped in awe.
Screenplay by: Lilly and Lana Wachowski
So awful were the sequels that it is not easy to remember just how visually remarkable The Matrix (1999) was upon its release. In fact, so remarkable was The Matrix that it seemed the perfect film to mark both the end of the first century of cinema and the start of its second (and very different) century.
The Matrix of the title is ostensibly the artificial reality that future hyper-intelligent machines or computers have created to distract human beings from the actuality of their imprisonment by those machines, who then harvest their natural energy to power themselves and their world. However, the other and more enduring Matrix that the film created was an all-digital visual world in which human beings could nonchalantly achieve the impossible, such as leaning out of the way of speeding bullets.
Effectively, The Matrix began 21st-century cinema, in which extraordinary, indeed unbelievable, visual effects have eroded the traditional 20th-century idea of cinema being the ultimate truth-telling medium; as Jean-Luc Godard famously put it, “Photography is truth, cinema is truth 24 times per second”. Well, post-Matrix, 21st-century cinema might be regarded as fiction mixed with truth 240 times a second, or even faster, the overall effect of which can be complete sensory overload and complete narrative deficiency, as epitomized by the commercial and critical failure of the Matrix sequels and indeed so much other 21st-century cinema.
Screenplay by: Jonathan Glazer
It is entirely appropriate to complete this exploration of the history of visual (and sonic) effects in cinema with probably the most visually, sonically, and indeed narratively fascinating film of the 21st century so far, namely The Zone of Interest (2023).
In any profession, it is probably the admiration of one’s peers that means the most, and cinema is no exception. So, it was telling that The Zone of Interest should have commanded the admiration of other filmmakers in a way that hardly any other film of recent decades has done. For example, Todd Field, director of In The Bedroom (2001), wrote in Variety: “Over his twenty-four-year career as one of our finest filmmakers, Glazer has consistently executed high-wire interpretations of genre, and in the process completely reinvented them: crime (Sexy Beast), the paranormal (Birth), science fiction (Under the Skin). His pictures within these frames are mind-blowingly unique as if he’d never seen anything that had been done before.”
Glazer’s ability to show us something that has never been shown or “done before” stamps him as a great filmmaker and positions him as the closest that 21st-century cinema has to Kubrick or Murnau. He used a variety of cutting-edge cinematic techniques to film The Zone of Interest, which documents ordinary life (at least for the captors and their families) in a Nazi death camp. Using rotoscope, a succession of fixed cameras rather than a few mobile cameras, and even military-grade “night vision” cameras, Glazer convincingly recreates the horrendous reality of Auschwitz without ever really showing us the camp and its inhabitants at all.
Glazer also shows us the intermingling, or even quantum entanglement, of sight and sound in cinema, even in the most visually arresting cinema. That is because it is above all the sound of The Zone of Interest that captures the sheer horror of its setting.
Glazer escapes the eternal criticism of “Holocaust cinema” that “it cannot really show the Holocaust” by not showing the Holocaust at all. Instead, we hear it, perpetually, off-screen. In effect, this agonizing and agonized-sounding droning, which is the sound of the incinerators that run 24 hours a day, is the great Manic Street Preachers song, The Intense Humming of Evil (written by Richey Manic after he visited Auschwitz in the early 1990s), brought completely to life, or at least the screen.
It is the most awful (in both senses) sound in all of cinema and means that The Zone of Interest is not only a visual masterpiece but possibly the most sonically important film since The Jazz Singer, nearly a century ago.
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