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Part I: The Ghost Opera in the Kingdom of Shadows

Although movie scholar Kevin Brownlow will probably always remain my favorite overall writer on silent film, for sheer aesthetic pleasure the finest contemporary writer about the silent era—certainly its most evocative exponent—has to be American poet and cultural historian Geoffrey O’Brien. O’Brien’s 1995 book The Phantom Empire is an enthralling meditation upon the entire history of cinema. But in his book O’Brien muses most compellingly, I think, upon cinema’s earliest years—cinema’s darkest, most dream-like years; its silent years. And it’s when he’s reflecting on silent film’s early days that his prose has an almost devilishly opulent quality; his ruminations upon the dark visual poetics of early film are pure reading pleasure. And it’s precisely the dark visual poetics of early cinema that are the focus of this primarily meditative and photographic essay.

The invention of cinema, O’Brien writes in Phantom Empire, revealed “a space beyond even the oversight of heaven.” This newly unveiled, strange and godless shadow-space encompassed, O’Brien states, “a softfocus feminine Otherland defined by cunningly interwoven dream sequences and flashbacks, by spiraling camera movements, by aestheticized reenactments of childhood cruelties and whirlwind romances with quietly menacing strangers.” The sum of the phenomena of these pictures in motion, says O’Brien, comprise an “active dream, a waking trance cunningly orchestrated by visual musicians: a ghost opera.”

Like O’Brien, Russian writer Maxim Gorky painted an unsettling picture of the new medium, but his observations precede the American poet’s by almost a century. Gorky wrote during the time—in fact, at nearly the exact moment—of the birth of the new art form. He was lucky enough to have seen an early moving picture exhibition in the 1890s thanks to the Lumière brothers and their Cinématographe machine that was exhibited at the 1896 Nizhni-Novgorod Fair (referred to also as The All-Russia Industrial and Art Exhibition of 1896). The Lumière Cinématographe could act as both a movie camera and a film projector; some versions even functioned as a film printer. It was reputed to be a spectacularly advanced iteration of the magic lanterns of old, but the Lumière innovation produced (somehow) living pictures. Or so it was said. Gorky’s report on the exhibit at the 1896 fair is famous, and rightly so. For him, seeing the new technology in action was a life-altering experience.

 

In writing about the new technology, Gorky found that the language of the occult, rich as it is with metaphors about the spirit world and all things phantasmagoric, was best suited for describing the uncanny nature of what he experienced. Other early film writers also employed language usually reserved for supernatural phenomena; they were just as unsettled by the nascent technology—yet also just as spellbound—as their Russian colleague. Film historian George C. Pratt titled his 548-page major work on the silent era Spellbound in Darkness after a phrase used in 1896 by American journalist Henry Tyrrell. Tyrrell described bewitched crowds at an early film viewing: Ghostly images “are projected in life-like animation upon the luminous screen, while the audience sits spellbound in darkness,” Tyrrell wrote in the July 11, 1896 edition of The Illustrated American. Pratt’s Spellbound in Darkness was published in 1973.

Cinema transported one into the “Kingdom of Shadows,” Maxim Gorky reported in his famous 1896 essay. Through the projections of the Cinématographe one was delivered into a mute realm of depthless apparitions, placed into a parallel and uncanny dreamworld populated by bloodless, disquieting beings that were the simulacra of human life. These apparitions spoke in soundless voices while grey foliage noiselessly swayed behind them in their flickering otherworld. Drifting around this shadow-world’s scenery were grey leaves that, like large flakes of ash, were carried aloft by mysterious and silent winds. The sky was always the dead-grey color of lead.

 

Almost 100 years after Maxim Gorky referred to film’s “Kingdom of Shadows,” O’Brien dubbed the same liminal space a “Phantom Empire.” Its imperial “environment consists of phantom space,” O’Brien wrote, “like the phantom limbs of amputees which they persist in wanting to scratch”—but which, of course, they cannot, since they are illusory. The inhabitants of this phantom space are not the people one thinks they must (or should) be. They are not even phantoms. Instead, they are mere shadows—or so Thomas Mann wrote in his 1924 novel The Magic Mountain when describing an early viewing of a silent movie:

[W]hen the last flicker of the last picture in a reel had faded away, when the lights in the auditorium went up, and the field of vision stood revealed as an empty sheet of canvas, there was not even applause. Nobody was there to be applauded, to be called before the curtain and thanked for the rendition. The actors who had assembled to present the scenes they had just enjoyed were scattered to the winds; only their shadows had been here…

But let’s return to Maxim Gorky before going any further. His 1896 account of witnessing motion pictures for the first time is worth quoting at length:

Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. If you only knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without colour. Everything there—the earth, the trees, the people, the water and the air—is dipped in monotonous grey. Grey rays of the sun across the grey sky, grey eyes in grey faces, and the leaves of the trees are ashen grey. It is not life but its shadow. It is not motion but its soundless spectre.

Gorky continues: Here I shall try to explain myself, lest I be suspected of madness or indulgence in symbolism. I was at Aumont’s and saw Lumière’s cinematograph—moving photography. The extraordinary impression it creates is so unique and complex that I doubt my ability to describe it with all its nuances. However, I shall try to convey its fundamentals. When the lights go out in the room in which Lumière’s invention is shown, there suddenly appears on the screen a large grey picture, “A Street in Paris”—shadows of a bad engraving. As you gaze at it, you see carriages, buildings, and people in various poses, all frozen into immobility.

Gorky continues: All this is in grey, and the sky above is also grey—you anticipate nothing new in this all too familiar scene, for you have seen pictures of Paris streets more than once. But suddenly a strange flicker passes through the screen and the picture stirs to life. Carriages coming from somewhere in the perspective of the picture are moving straight at you, into the darkness in which you sit; somewhere from afar people appear and loom larger as they come closer to you… All this moves, teems with life and, upon approaching the edge of the screen, vanishes somewhere beyond it.

Gorky continues: And all this in strange silence where no rumble of the wheels is heard, no sound of footsteps or of speech. Nothing. Not a single note of the intricate symphony that always accompanies the movements of people. Noiselessly, the ashen-grey foliage of the trees sways in the wind, and the grey silhouettes of the people, as though condemned to eternal silence and cruelly punished by being deprived of all the colours of life, glide noiselessly along the grey ground.

Their smiles are lifeless, even though their movements are full of living energy and are so swift as to be almost imperceptible. Their laughter is soundless although you see the muscles contracting in their grey faces. Before you a life is surging, a life deprived of words and shorn of the living spectrum of colours—the grey, the soundless, the bleak and dismal life.

Gorky continues: It is terrifying to see, but it is the movement of shadows, only of shadows… Suddenly something clicks, everything vanishes and a train appears on the screen. It speeds straight at you—watch out!

It seems as though it will plunge into the darkness in which you sit, turning you into a ripped sack full of lacerated flesh and splintered bones, and crushing into dust and into broken fragments this hall and this building, so full of women, wine, music and vice.

But this, too, is but a train of shadows. Noiselessly, the locomotive disappears beyond the edge of the screen…

Gorky concludes: This mute, grey life finally begins to disturb and depress you. It seems as though it carries a warning, fraught with a vague but sinister meaning that makes your heart grow faint. You are forgetting where you are. Strange imaginings invade your mind and your consciousness begins to wane and grow dim.

—text originally from Maxim Gorky’s review of the Lumière program at the Nizhni-Novgorod Fair, written for the July 4, 1896 edition of Nizhegorodski listok. Gorky wrote this piece under the pseudonym “I. M. Pacatus.” The above are excerpts from his article.

 

Gorky paints a tableau—unsettling, dreary, even ghoulish—of a world devoid of human warmth. And there is something manifestly sinister on display, too; there’s a feeling that something is off about the semblances of living beings that flicker, wraithlike, through the darkness of the exhibition room. (As if they were “a warning, fraught with a vague but sinister meaning that makes your heart grow faint.”) Gorky relays the sense that the new technology has opened an aperture onto—or even a portal into—the Erebus of another world. In Homer’s Odyssey, the twilight realm of the Underworld, Erebus, houses the insubstantial shades of former human beings who are doomed to eternally wander as ghostly simulacra, living their un-lives in “a region always wrapped in mist and cloud” (as Homer wrote). That empire of death, described in Book 11 of The Odyssey, was now available to witness firsthand. It resembled the “Phantom Empire” that Geoffrey O’Brien would write about a century later. Nowadays, movies serving as interdimensional portals for demons, or as gateways to nightmare realms—are not an uncommon story device in the horror genre, with 1998’s Ring and 2012’s Sinister being but two recent examples. (The 2023 horror novel Jump Cut, by Helen Grant, about an infamous, sinister lost film titled “The Simulacrum,” also employs this concept to terrific effect.)

Returning to the early period that concerns this piece, in the same year that Maxim Gorky produced his essay on “The Kingdom of Shadows” in Russia, an English writer going under the mysterious byline “O. Winter” published, coincidentally, a very similar article in the February 1896 issue of The New Review. In this piece, simply titled “The Cinematograph,” Winter echoes (or, rather, prefigures) many of Gorky’s sentiments. Unlike Gorky, however, Winter speaks of his first silent film experience in language downright Thomas Ligotti-esque: “[There is] the sound and flicker of machinery,” he writes, “and [then] you see on the bare cloth [i.e., the screen] a tumbling sea, with a crowd of urchins leaping and scrambling in the waves. The picture varies, but the effect is always the same—the terrifying effect of life, but of life with a difference…”

O. Winter continues:

It is life stripped of colour and of sound. Though you are conscious of the sunshine, the picture is subdued to a uniform and baffling grey. Though the waves break upon an imagined shore, they break in a silence which doubles your shrinking from their reality. The boys laugh with eyes and mouth—that you can see at a glance. But they laugh in a stillness which no ripple disturbs.

The figures move after their appointed habit; it is thus and not otherwise that they have behaved yesterday and will behave tomorrow. They are not marionettes, because they are individuals, while a marionette is always generalised into an aspect of pity or ridicule. The disproportion of foreground and background adds to your embarrassment, and although you know that the scene has a mechanical and intimate correspondence; with truth, you recognise its inherent falsity…

O. Winter writes further: The grey photograph unfolds at an equal pace and with a sad deliberation. We cannot follow the shadows in their enthusiasm of recognition; the scene is forced to trickle upon our nerves with an equal effect; it is neither so quick nor as changeful as life…. [T]hough the spectacle frightens rather than attracts, we owe it a debt of gratitude, because it proves the complete despair of modern realism.

—excerpted from O. Winter, “The Cinematograph,” The New Review, May 1896, pp. 507-513

Interestingly, when O. Winter writes that the figures in the silent film “laugh in a stillness which no ripple disturbs” and that “the figures move after their appointed habit; it is thus and not otherwise that they have behaved yesterday and will behave tomorrow”—it strikes with some amazement how similar this sounds to a statement made by philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, though perhaps in Schopenhauer’s case there is a slightly different context involved. (And even then, only perhaps.) The German “Father of Philosophical Pessimism”—as Schopenhauer is known—makes a remark similar to Winter’s in his 1852 essay titled “On the Doctrine of the Indestructibility of Our True Essence by Death.” It’s there that Schopenhauer writes, in this passage—

However much the plays and masks on the world’s stage may change it is always the same actors who appear. We sit together and talk and grow excited, and our eyes glitter and our voices grow shriller: just so did others sit and talk a thousand years ago: it was the same thing, and it was the same people: and it will be just so a thousand years hence. The contrivance which prevents us from perceiving this is time.

Sidestepping the thorny issue of how O. Winter and Schopenhauer’s observations may or may not play into Nietzsche’s idea of “Eternal Return” (or “Eternal Recurrence”) is probably, for now, best. But it is true that in Thus Spake Zarathustra Nietzsche wrote, “I shall return eternally to this identical and self-same life, in that which is greatest as well as that most small, to teach once more the eternal return of all things.” (“—ich komme ewig wieder zu diesem gleichen und selbigen Leben, im Groéssten und auch im Kleinsten, dass ich wieder aller Dinge ewige Wiederkunft lehre.”) This was a notion Nietzsche would return to more than a few times. Through the necromancy of cinema, something similar to what Schopenhauer and Nietzsche described was in evidence—or at least some strange parallel version of it in which “figures move after their appointed habit”—as O. Winter wrote in 1896, and in which “it is thus and not otherwise that they have behaved yesterday and will behave tomorrow.”

Immortality—a thing commonly held to be conferred onto actors by virtue of their cinematic work. Isn’t there an important sense in which Eternal Recurrence is tantamount to everlasting life? Life lived again, exactly as before, on and on, ad infinitum, death never lasting—death, for all practical purposes, in the end, abolished. Cinema turned the Nietzschean concept of Eternal Recurrence into a real-world technological, artistic, and cultural fact. In 1895, a French journalist, having just witnessed the operation of an early movie camera, wrote excitedly in La Poste, “When these [motion picture] cameras are made available to the public, when everyone can photograph their dear ones, no longer in a motionless form but in their movements . . . death will have ceased to be absolute.”

Similarly, 19th-century French inventor Georges Demenÿ, in his 1892 article “The Talking Photographs,” waxed enthusiastic:

“The future will see the replacement of motionless photographs, frozen in their frames, with animated portraits that can be brought to life at the turn of a handle… We will do more than analyze, we will bring back to life.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Selections from the Turconi’s Collection’s selection of ghostly nitrate film selections can be found at Laura Chenault’s website HERE.

Even more of those ghostly images are at the 50 Watts blog-site’s “Nitrate Nocturne” post HERE.

One of my current favorite publishers of horror fiction (both historical and modern), Wakefield Press, has begun using the Turconi Collection’s ghostly nitrate images for brilliant covers of its horror novels.

Next week we’ll go into Part 2 of this series, with more eerie visuals, and text about cinema’s early adoption of the horror genre, including the many adaptations of Poe that appeared in cinema’s first three decades, before sound pictures (“talkies”) took over from the silents.

—Oliver Sheppard, April 15, 2024, Somewhere in Texas

 

 

 

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