"Man Walking Around a Corner"

Sixteen frames of pure genius: "Man Walking Around a Corner" - which is exactly what it is. This cinematic fragment may be even older and worse quality than the immortal Roundhay Garden Scene, which is often called the "first movie ever made". But this is definitely the first movie ever made of a man walking around a corner. It even has its own Wikipedia entry:

"Man Walking Around a Corner was an early film shot in Paris by Louis Le Prince. According to David Wilkinson's 2015 documentary The First Film it is not film, but a series of photographs, 16 in all, each taken from one of the lens from Le Prince's camera. Le Prince went on to develop the one lens camera and on the 14th October 1888 he finally made the world's first moving image."

Quite possibly the weirdest video ever

 

This beast of a machine is giving me trouble today, so I don't know if this is even gonna work. But I'll give it a shot.

Every so often I go on a Melies kick. Y'know, Melies. Weird guy from the early 20th century, actually the late 19th, a cinematic innovator who started out filming magic tricks on a stage in one shot, and went on to phantasmagorical fantasies with a lot of men dressed as wizards running around with telescopes. 

His most famous film is A Trip to the Moon, a bizarre take on a Jules Verne classic (with lots of men in wizard costumes running around with - ). The moon is depicted as a big gooey cream-pie sort of thing with an actual face on it, and the space craft, a big bullet, hits it in the eye. The story is disjointed: I never did get how they (the scientists) got back to earth. But at that time, "pictures" were new and innovation was free and open. No matter what a filmmaker did, some audience, somewhere would be enthralled. 

Eventually Melies' work went out of style, perhaps being just too weird for later audiences (and those quivering cardboard flats in the background didn't help much). When you look at Melies, you see where Terry Gilliam got most of his ideas. Bodies fly through the air, particularly semi-nude women's bodies in mermaid-like poses. Big puppetlike heads appear for no reason and open and close their mouths. Things drop out of sight in a puff of smoke, then pop back up out of thin air. It's a kind of fever dream mixed with an acid trip. 

Sadly, once Melies' work went out of style around 1912, he went bankrupt and had to resort to selling toys in a Paris train station. The films were confiscated during World War I, the celluloid melted down to make boot heels for soldiers: so they were literally walking all over poor Georges. But a few fragments survive. 

I don't understand this passage at all (an excerpt from a picture called The Eclipse), and it appears it might be cut off on the right-hand side. It's pretty gay, to be sure, but I'm not sure why. And I don't know why they're licking their lips like that. It's all too squirmingly sexual. Why not have a seductive woman as the moon, and a nicer-looking man as the sun who didn't look so much like freaking Satan? Never mind, I am somehow drawn to Melies and his strangeness and sat through the Turner Classics compilation for the second time last night. I didn't want to do it, I didn't want to do it. But I did.