The Image Moves

At  the beginning of the 20th century a new dramatic medium was being pioneered. The  Lumiere brothers started to show off their Cinematography machine in 1885.  Almost immediately people began to exploit its ability to show the fantastical  or impossible through clever trickery and invention.

George  Melies, a theatre owner and magician was impressed by the Cinematograph. In  1896 he obtained a British version of the machine and began to make his own  films.

In  1902 Melie filmed 'Le Voyage Dans la Lune' - a pastiche of both  Vernes and Wells' Moon journey stories. Though considered the first science  fiction film, it was better described as a zany pantomime, played strictly for  laughs.

However,  with its coming, science fiction had a new dimension, It had 'Image'.

The  early versions of Twenty Thousand leagues under the sea and First men in the moonwere heavily adapted, both to suite the new  medium and the tastes of the current audience.

The  year 1926 saw the release of Metropolis directed by Fritz Lang,  now regarded as the first classic science fiction film. Set amidst the gothic  skyscrapers of a huge futuristic city, it shows a modernised world gone  mad.

Lang  was the son of an architect and was himself a trained engineer. He had great  visual flair and his production designers were more expressionistic than their  American counterparts.

20th  Century Fox's 'Just Imagine' (a musical with S.F. elements) was  set in New York n 1980. Its hugely elaborate City model was obviously inspired  by Fritz Lang's Metropolis. It was a matter of record that Metropolis had been  inspired by Lang's first view of the New York skyline.

Just  Image's cityscape out-gothed the gothic towers of Metropolis. It had skyscrapers  250 storeys high as well as a canal network of ocean liners.

The  Gothem city of the recentBatman films looks very similar to  both Metropolis and Just Imagine's 1980 New York. Batman's art  director Anton Furst made Gotham more dehumanising than either-"As if Hell  had erupted through the sidewalks and continued to grow". Gothem is less  a prediction of the future, more an uglified reflection of today. It is meaner  and more warped than Metropolis. Even though Lang's film is an early warning  against the 'dangers' of 'progress' getting out of control, it is still a visual  celebration of modernism, which was yet to be tainted by its real life  failures.

High  treason was set only a decade into the future. Its 1940's London and New  York were designed to be credible, steering clear of the wildly exaggerated 'Metropolis' look. Indeed its forecast of London would probably find much  favor with the traditionalists like Prince Charles, with its clean neoclassical  forms and low skyline.

These  films are not so much about but simply set in the future. Things to  Come however is very much about the future. Alex Korda, film impresario,  persuaded H.G. Wells to adapt his own book - 'The shape of things to  come' for the big screen. Wells was by this time in his late sixties and  had transformed from being a radical to being an elder statesman, who had long  discarded his early work, calling it frivolous fantasy.

Getting  Wells to write the screenplay is now thought to have been a bad decision,  although at the time Korda considered it a great coup.

Wells  had no experience with cinematic or screenplay writing. Korda however was  determined to get the H.G. Wells stamp to ensure success and consequently offset  the risks of working with a very large budget.

The Film plots  the history of mankind from an apocalyptic war from 1940 to the mid 1960's, then  from an age of recovery sustained by the 'Airmen' to an age of enlightenment a  hundred years from the films release (1936). The film ends with a Journey to the  moon ripped straight out of Verne's From Earth to the Moon. It was  suprisingly a box office failure.

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