A
Mystery?
To talk about the cinema's
present, one must first acknowledge its past. Roundhay Garden Scene (1888), one
of the oldest surviving fragments of motion picture history, could be called,
at its most dismissive, a camera test; a two-second recording that captures
four individuals wandering around the gardens at Oakwood Grange in the suburb
of Roundhay, Leeds, West Yorkshire. Obviously intended as an experiment in
recording movement, the few seconds of surviving footage have, with the passage
of time, become possessed with a feeling of mystery, if not anxiety. Scratch
beneath the surface of its seemingly benign exterior and Roundhay Garden Scene
becomes a precursor to the subconscious cinema of filmmakers like Fritz Lang,
Jacques Rivette, Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch and others. Films that are charged
with an air of conspiracy, or obscurity; of dream-worlds and paranoia,
controlled and manipulated by an unseen system of influences.
Like the aforementioned
Kubrick's final masterwork Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Roundhay Garden Scene is a
film so suggestive and enigmatic that it lends itself to the kind of
Rorschach-like approach to film criticism that I've indulged in here. It
becomes a black mirror, so void of deeper meaning that we're compelled to
project our own meanings onto it; inventing a narrative where none exists;
enlivening its minimal presentation with our own thoughts, fears and concerns.
Like the way the metaphorical noose tightens around the lives of the
protagonists in Kubrick's last film, the observation of the participants here
has an undercurrent of something more sinister. It's as if the events unfolding
are being manipulated by an unseen organisation; shadowy forces again at
work. It suggests something of the private made public; a kind of open doll's
house or glasshouse facade that the audience is invited to peer into; becoming
witness to some recreation of "normal" behaviour that's too stylised,
mechanical or forced to be considered real.
Roundhay Garden Scene [Louis
Le Prince, 1888]:
Much of this particular
reading of the film - as something more ominous or insidious than its no doubt
innocent intentions - has been undoubtedly coloured by the strange events
surrounding its production. Firstly, the death of one of its on-screen
participants, Sarah Whitley, ten days after the filming was complete. More
significantly, the mysterious disappearance of its 'author' - the early cinema
pioneer Louis Le Prince - two years later. The body of Le Prince was never
discovered, and several conspiracy theories exist that attempt to explain the
course of events. Lastly, Le Prince's son, Adolphe Le Prince, another
participant in the film, was discovered shot dead around two years after he
testified in court against Thomas Edison about his father's inventions. Such
tragedies become like black clouds that hover over the legacy of this film and
lead the mind to wander about its conception. While I'm no great conspiracy
theorist, I do think it's interesting to speculate.
With its matter of fact
title and the mysterious system of circumstances surrounding its release, Roundhay
Garden Scene is a film that gives the audience room to dream and to project
onto its surface their own subjective and subconscious narrative. It transcends
categorisation, being at once a documentary - a recording of an actual scene
that captures people long-dead and preserves them forever in this prison of
celluloid - and a dramatisation; a recreation of something real turned fiction.
The presentation of its participants as they move through the space becomes a
dance like the planets in orbit. Like the investigation into the photograph in Michelangelo
Antonioni's great masterpiece Blow-Up (1966) I feel like I need to go deeper
into this film, to scrutinise the shadows in the window, the gaps between the
bushes, the suggestions at the corners of the frame; to unlock the mysteries
that surround the film and define its legacy. Another time perhaps.
