Out of the past

The discussion about whether movies are "better" or "worse" today vis-à-vis an earlier time is a pointless and irresolvable one, subject to shifting benchmarks, individual tastes and hard-line biases that run from the Golden Ageist syndrome (the past was always a better place than the present) to contemporary chauvinism (old movies are awkward and black-and-white is boring). But one area where consensus is possible is in assessing technological improvements. Though I haven't seen the new Superman movie yet, I have no trouble accepting that it is probably much more visually fluid - and a grander aesthetic experience - than the 1978 Superman; and this despite the fact that I have irrationally defensive feelings about the latter, having grown up with it.

However, agreeing that technology is objectively superior today is not the same as saying that modern CGI is always more effective than techniques used in the distant past. In films like the silent fantasy Siegfried or the original King Kong, the use of a papier-mâche dragon or stop-motion animation creates a primal, viscerally stirring quality, because it feels otherworldly and removed from our regular experience. Whereas modern computer effects by their very nature make everything crystal-clear, credible... and eventually, commonplace.

Personally I feel a thrill every time I see "special effects" in a very old film because one gets a firsthand sense of human minds working with a young medium, trying to supersede the limitedness of available resources. Cinema has, almost since its inception, adapted literary works with supernatural or fantastic elements - watch a 1903 version of Alice in Wonderland here: http://bit.ly/104b7Ja - and some of the early filmmakers seem like masochists, setting themselves impossible tasks rather than simply using the motion-picture camera to record everyday things. Today, with an adequate scale of production, it is possible to create a visual representation of any story, no matter how outlandish the setting. But 110 years ago, just figuring out how to show the disembodied head of the Cheshire Cat in such a way that it looked like a halfway-alive thing would have required intense brainstorming.

In 1910, Thomas Edison's studio made a 12-minute-long version of Frankenstein, which is extant today and can be found on YouTube. The film is jerky and theatrical to modern eyes, but there is genuine inventiveness too. For the scene in which Frankenstein's unworldly creation comes alive, the filmmakers put a life-size wax replica of a skeleton in a vat and set fire to it so that it slowly dissolved and crumpled (meanwhile someone out of sight moved its arms around). They then played the film backwards, so that one gets the impression of something hideous being forged out of fire, until it sits upright.

Or consider a later movie, the stylish 1931 version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Audiences of the time were seriously spooked by two scenes where the actor Fredric March's face appears to darken and change in full view of the camera (as Jekyll starts to become Hyde), without any cuts or dissolves. The secret was revealed years later: different layers of coloured makeup had been applied on March's face, and matching light filters were used at the beginning so that the makeup wasn't visible on black-and-white film; as the scene progressed, the filters were changed and the makeup came into view, "magically" casting shadows on the actor's face.

Much of the pleasure of watching these scenes comes from imagining the problem-solving process: the discussions that these pioneers must have engaged in, the possibility that they needed to build multiple wax figures or experiment with different filters and lenses because the first few attempts didn't work. How random and slapdash it seems to us today, yet how vital it was to the writing of movie grammar, and to the creative growth of a medium that was often dismissed at the time as having no artistic future because it was just a bland reproduction of reality.

Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer