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This chapter examines Georges Méliès's glass-and-iron studio, the first studio in France and the model that would become the standard form for studio architecture through the 1910s. Situating the development of “glass house” studios in nineteenth-century glass-and-iron architecture, the chapter argues that the same spatial and material qualities–including spatial fluidity, material plasticity, and artificiality–that contemporary critics observed in the late nineteenth-century architectural forms characterized the glass studios and reappeared in the form of the films made in them.

In its earliest years of existence, cinema seems to have been fascinated by stasis and stillness. As if emphasizing its capacity to represent movement, early cinema comprises many scenes in which moving people interact with static paintings and sculptures. Moreover, films made shortly before and after 1900 often make explicit the contrast between the new medium of film and the traditional arts by means of the motif of the statue or the painting coming to life. In so doing, early film continued a form of popular entertainment that combined the art of the theater with those of painting and sculpture, namely the tableau vivant, or living picture. Focusing on the trick films of Georges Méliès and the early erotic films by the Viennese Saturn Company, this chapter reveals the importance and continuity of nineteenth-century motifs and traditions with regard to tableaux vivants as they were presented on the legitimate stage, in magic, in vaudeville, and in burlesque.

This chapter discusses the film sequel from its origins in cinema's early years throughout the developments of the twentieth century. It concentrates on cultural forces at two historical junctures: namely modernity and postmodernity. Georges Méliès' contribution to cinema is still marked today in terms of his development of a rather sophisticated form of narrative spectacle. His ‘sequel’ arguably departs from a very successful earlier work to showcase his improvements both technologically and artistically within an increasingly progressive and competitive market. Ishirô Honda's Gojira (Godzilla) and its sequels play an important role in charting cross-cultural relations between the USA and Japan after the US attack on Hiroshima. Roland Emmerich's film represents a model of filmmaking unique to a specific era of Hollywood history. The sequel's long catalogue of historical interactions with the serial continues to grow in the twenty-first century, but arguably in ways that have not previously been realised.

The chapter argues that one of the lasting imprints of silent film culture on poetry was the movie program: a heterogeneous assemblage of newsreels, comic and fiction films, both short and long footage. Key modernist poets influenced by cinema such as Pierre Reverdy and Max Jacob re-problematized the question of the prose poem and the poem collection based in large part on differing attitudes vis-à-vis the movie program. Through discussions of Walter Benjamin's readings of Baudelaire's collection Les Fleurs du mal, and illustrations of movie programs in cinepoem sets by Jacob, Jarry, Segalen, Hillel-Erlanger, Dugas and Alferi, which respectively refract films by the Lumière bros., Méliès and television/cable programs, the chapter shows the continuing poetic productivity of assemblages of moving image works.

This chapter discusses the technical and inventive basis for cinema, and briefly describes the important pioneers. It covers the developments prior to the invention of cinema and the first decade of its development, approximately 1895 to 1905. This is a distinct period in film, sometimes characterised by the term ‘primitives and pioneers’. Not all scholars are happy with the term primitive. The films seem simple compared with the complexities of late silent features, but they are also sophisticated in their own way. The screening of a good quality copy of a Georges Méliès' film would emphasise this point of view. There are three clear avenues for study: the technology itself, technique and language, and the idea of the ‘cinema of attractions’. It should be clear that even though these early films are not strictly narratives in the accustomed sense, they are full of opportunities for the study of representations and value systems.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the French cinema. The French like to think the first cinematic experiments originated from France in 1895 with the realist cinema of the Lumière Brothers' Sortie d'usine/Workers Leaving the Factory and L'Arrivée du train dans la gare de la Ciotat/Arrival of a Train at a Station, and the magical film moments of Georges Méliès's Voyage dans la lune/A Trip to the Moon (1902). These directors initiated a polarised vision of French cinema, which led to the familiar distinctions between realism and fantasy, documentary and fiction film. Even nowadays, French films continue to be introduced and defined in reviews and essays in relation to these two poles. A third early influence was the intellectual cinema of ideas of Louis Delluc in the 1910s and his critical writings, which initiated the first avant-garde period of French cinema after the First World War and have remained a fundamental influence for French cinema. The chapter then outlines some of the main key concepts underlying Film Studies, such as the importance of 'Auteur theory' and certain generic specificities associated with French films.

To early filmmakers, Jules Verne was not only a legend but also a contemporary author of international repute. The author’s own stage versions of Around the World in Eighty Days, The Children of Captain Grant, and Michael Strogoff had been immediately translated for the English-language theater, and an assortment of other playwrights composed their own unauthorized versions. Hence, Verne was familiar to both readers and theater-going audiences, and the first films made from his stories drew on their respective stage background. By 1916, modern special effects (as opposed to Georges Méliès’s trick films) began to emerge with the first blockbuster fiction film to utilize undersea photography, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, an adaptation of two Verne novels that was also timely because of the submarine warfare of World War I.

Thanks to George Méliès, France can claim paternity of science fiction cinema. Yet, past this promising start, it is quite difficult to identify the heirs to A Trip to the Moon. This chapter explores the many faces and transformations of the genre and tries to find the cultural and artistic coherence of movies spanning a broad aesthetic spectrum. From early experimentation at the turn of the twentieth century, to the New Wave and postmodernist retro-futures, black and white, animation, surrealist poetry and dystopian noir, French science fiction cinema has kept reinventing itself, exploring new territories and eluding conclusive definition. At the crossroads between high brow and low brow culture, art and industry, French science fiction cinema bears the marks of the conflicted relationship between French cultural institutions, authors and genres. It remains a laboratory thriving on its paradoxes.

Thanks to George Méliès, France can claim paternity of science fiction cinema. Yet, past this promising start, it is quite difficult to identify the heirs to A Trip to the Moon. This chapter explores the many faces and transformations of the genre and tries to find the cultural and artistic coherence of movies spanning a broad aesthetic spectrum. From early experimentation at the turn of the twentieth century, to the New Wave and postmodernist retro-futures, black and white, animation, surrealist poetry and dystopian noir, French science fiction cinema has kept reinventing itself, exploring new territories and eluding conclusive definition. At the crossroads between high brow and low brow culture, art and industry, French science fiction cinema bears the marks of the conflicted relationship between French cultural institutions, authors and genres. It remains a laboratory thriving on its paradoxes.