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A History of the Cinema

Now, Méliès.

I was gnawed by the tooth of remorse for putting him off so long. He dogged me for days -- unobtrusively, as only a magician can who chooses not to be seen. With his effects hidden most likely under his high silk hat, he crept behind me through the bush.

My heart began to misgive me in Entebbe. I stopped and turned in time to see him slip beyond my sight lines. A glimpse of black sleeve with a trick or two up it, a colored scarf, an egg -- a fleeting glimpse was all I had before he disappeared. He was a virtuoso of legerdemain -- grant him that -- the toast of Parisian variety before taking up the cinema after the success of the Lumières. I would not hesitate even now to climb into the sword cabinet under his direction.

"Now, Méliès!" I shouted, throwing my voice into the jungle so that he'd know that I, too, am capable of theatrical illusion.

Out he came.

The landscape no longer pleased us, nor the myriad of colorful birds. Why, I could not say unless satiety had accomplished what the seroot with its vicious bite and the sleeping-sickness fly could not: turned us away. We could not leave; our return ticket was contingent upon the fulfillment of our commission. But we could decorate the interior with hand-painted undersea plants, jeweled fish, and gold stars pasted to the black dome of unconsciousness. Méliès with his cinema of enchantment was just what we needed. We drank powerful herbal infusions and dreamt.

"Is it heavy?" I asked Ali, the porter, who had a piece of Méliès' cinema apparatus on his back.

"No, it weighs nothing at all," he said. "It is a feather -- it weighs no more than a dream."

And so did they all say, each in his blue porter's blouse moving through the liquid night. For it was night, of course, in which we moved -- night with its sweet airs, its moon and stars, and with the strange cries of birds. Later, the stars would sift down onto the lawn, the moon catch in the high branches of a thorn tree while the song of the night birds dropped like stones into the silence.

"My God," I said, "I had no idea it was beautiful!"

"It isn't," said Méliès, adjusting his camera lens to admit the light from an instrument. "It is my art that makes it so."

And the infusions.

And our terrible need.

And the many delicate motors humming all about us, which may be the sound of our autonomic systems.

"Light the gas," said Méliès.

We did, and the blue flames jumped up into the night.

"Softer," said Méliès.

We turned the jets down and the night flooded back, a black Nile.

Ross caught the walking sickness and set off at a brisk pace towards the equator.

"Ross!" we called, knowing full well there was nothing we could do to stop him.

"If Louis and Auguste were here, they would make a film of his walking," said Méliès. "I, however, prefer something more meaningful."

He was referring to the Lumières, who with their cinématographe captured movement for its own sake.

"Méliès enjoys the narrative possibilities contained in movement," asserted Quigley, who had seen the film-maker's Cinderella in 20 Scenes in 1900 and, two years later, his charming fantasy The Trip to the Moon.

"But the Lumière brothers take as their subject the ordinary femme and homme!" cried Dr. Landis, a naturalist from the Smithsonian whose aversion to unlicensed imagination was well known even in Africa.

He was unhappy with our "escapism," not to mention our use of native pharmaceuticals. He struck a solemn pose and unstoppered himself:

"Are we to have a cinema of childish fancy or one of social engagement?" He adjusted his pose for the camera. "Are we to abandon the hard-won realism of Zola and Ibsen for the commedia dell'arte?" he thundered so that the night birds grew silent.

"Social responsibility is all well and good," replied Hanby, who had none. "But I go to the theater, when I go to the theater, to take in a little stage dishabille and have a good laugh."

"You are an ignorant man," said Dr. Landis, growing taller and taller in his high dudgeon.

"That is precisely the reply I would expect from a man who wears his socks to bed."

The two of them would have begun to brawl had not a timely procession of giraffes paraded by, their long necks swaying indolently.

"Enchanting!" Méliès said as he cranked his camera. "This is just the thing I'm looking for! Where can I find more?"

I proposed the banks of the Guaso Nyero on the edge of a mimosa grove.

The Guaso Nyero runs along the equator eastward into the dismal Lorian Swamp where it disappears, save in very wet seasons, when it continues into the Tana. At our camp it was a broad, muddy stream infested with crocodiles.

"You will like the crocodiles," I promised Méliès. "Crocodiles in the moonlight are splendid."

The moonlight changed the landscape into legend, the same landscape which we had recently come to loathe. We stared in rapt fascination at the crocodiles whose backs wore silver scales. They drifted down the river or stirred in the mud, dreaming saurian dreams.

Perhaps I should mention here that we had entered a time neither geologic nor historic. It was not quite the Dream Time of the Australian Aborigines either, but it did emit stirring semi-quavers that entranced us.

Méliès was ecstatic. The film clattered in his camera. The porters shifted scenery or operated lighting instruments to "enhance the effect." I wound the gramophone: a serenade for strings enhanced the silence. Reconciled, Quigley and Dr. Landis danced in the intricate shadows of the mimosa trees while the Guaso Nyero tumbled towards the Tana.

"I crave the suspension of your disbelief," said Méliès; and we suspended it, willingly.

The gas jets bloomed.

The crocodiles slipped through the water like silver daggers.

The porters enhanced.

I wound the gramophone.

Quigley and Dr. Landis went into the mimosas to be alone.

Just then Halley's Comet fizzed across the black, black night.

"What an effect!" we shouted.

Méliès bowed.

Our applause was extreme, our admiration unbounded. Were we wrong to love him?

"The film will be a triumph," he said with a simplicity most becoming in a man of genius.

Ross returned from the equator, tears streaming from his eyes.

"Thank you!" he called. "Thank you, my friends, for this dream!"

Yes, I would have climbed into the sword cabinet gladly and -- should the trick misfire and I be pierced to the quick -- I would have smiled.

Smiled!

We kept watch through the luminous hours, refusing sleep and all infusions. No rhino appeared, nor did any harm befall us. By first light the old affection for Africa had returned -- such was our pleasure, such was our joy.

Were we wrong to love him when all around us wild beasts waited to spring with their sharp teeth?

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