Princess Nicotine; or, The Smoke Fairy (1909, dir.J. Stuart Blackton) (via brightlightsfilm.com)

This 5-minute silent film is less notable for its relatively simple plot (a smoker is woken up by two mischievous fairies who proceed to torment him) than for its groundbreaking visual effects (many of the shots are designed to show the tiny fairies interacting with objects much larger than themselves). When Princess Nicotine; or, The Smoke Fairy was released a century ago, the special effects were considered so advanced & state-of-the-art that scientific journals published articles about them.

The film is viewable on youtube here.

Robert Walker & Laura Elliot in Strangers on a Train (1951, dir. Alfred Hitchcock)

In one of Hitchcock’s most famous shots, Strangers on a Train’s pivotal murder is seen as reflected in a pair of glasses. Hitchcock & his director of photography, Robert Burks, achieved this effect by placing a concave mirror on the floor and having the actress, Laura Elliott, stand next to it as she simulated slowly falling dead to the floor. Elliot’s reflection in the concave mirror as she fell was filmed and the shot was then printed onto the lenses of the glasses (scene on youtube here).

Crew members prepare Emil Jannings for the scene in Faust (1926, dir. F.W. Murnau) in which Mephisto’s wings obscure the sky as he hovers above a city. (via)

The Lost World (1925, dir. Harry O. Hoyt, adapted from Arthur Conan Doyle’s book), the silent fantasy epic that inspired King Kong, and ultimately Jurassic Park.

In the film, Professor Challenger (Wallace Beery) & his research team go on an expedition to authenticate his claims that a “lost world” of dinosaurs exists in the Brazilian jungle. Chaos, of the rampaging dinosaur variety, inevitably ensues.

The team members manage to escape the island, but like many science-fiction movie characters to come, they have the brilliant idea of bringing a member of the dangerous species they’ve discovered back home with them as some kind of ill-tempered, homicidal souvenir. Luckily, too, as this opens the door for the terrific sequence in which the brontosaurus escapes and runs amuck through the streets of London.

The film, the first live-action dinosaur adventure, is also notable for its groundbreaking special effects, courtesy of Willis O’Brien, the pioneering FX artist.

The original trailer for the film can be seen here, the entire film is online at Internet Archive here.

L’Inferno (1911, dir. Giuseppe de Liguoro)

The hurricane of Hell in perpetual motion                                            

Sweeping the ravaged spirits as it rends,
Twists, and torments them. Driven as if to land,
They reach the ruin: groaning, tears, laments,

And cursing of the power of Heaven. I learned
They suffer here who sinned in carnal things—
Their reason mastered by desire, suborned.

As winter starlings riding on their wings
Form crowded flocks, so spirits dip and veer
Foundering in the wind’s rough buffetings,

Upward or downward, driven here and there
With never ease from pain nor hope of rest.
As chanting cranes will form a line in air,

So I saw souls come uttering cries—wind-tossed,
And lofted by the storm.

-Canto V, The Divine Comedy: Inferno

L’Inferno (1911, dir. Giuseppe de Liguoro)

“I saw it clearly, and still seem to see, a headless trunk, that goes on before, like the others, in that miserable crew, and holds its severed head, by the hair, swinging, like a lantern, in its hand. It looked at us, and said: ‘Ah me!’.

When it was right at the foot of our bridge, it lifted its arm high, complete with the head, to bring its words near to us, which were: ‘Now you see the grievous punishment, you, who go, alive and breathing, to see the dead: look if any are as great as this. And so that you may carry news of me, know that I am Bertrand de Born, he who gave evil counsel to the Young King. I made the father and the son rebel against each other: Ahithophel did no more for Absalom and David, by his malicious stirrings.

Because I parted those who were once joined, I carry my intellect, alas, split from its origin in this body. So, in me, is seen just retribution.”

-Canto XXVIII, The Divine Comedy: Inferno

Brigitte Helm in Metropolis (1927, dir. Fritz Lang)

On the creation of Robot Maria:

“The concentric rings of light that surround her and move from top to bottom were in fact a little ball of silver rapidly swung in a circle and filmed on a background of black velvet. We superimposed those shots, in the lab, over the shot of the robot in a sitting position that we had filmed previously.”

-Fritz Lang

A Trip to the Moon (1902, dir. Georges Méliès) 

“That same evening everything was ready; the crowd was beginning to arrive, the public was crowding in front of the big moon, but the poster, while it made people laugh, was greeted with all kinds of wisecracks. ‘It’s a joke, it’s trickery! Do they think we’re idiots around here? Do you imagine they could have gone to the moon to photograph it? They’re pulling our legs!’ The audiences of that day imagined that it was impossible to photograph anything but real objects.”

-Méliès, on public reaction to his poster for A Trip to the Moon, which featured the scene from the film in which a rocket ship lands on the moon’s eye (via)

 Full film online here/here.

Drama in the Air (1904, dir. Gaston Velle) (via)

“Who are nobler than the martyrs of science?” cried the lunatic. “They are canonized by posterity!”

(May this terrible narrative, though instructing those who read it, not discourage the explorers of the air.)

-Jules Verne, Drama in the Air (1851)

Prof. Ned Brainard (Fred MacMurray) tests out “Flubber”, the anti-gravity flying rubber he’s invented in The Absent Minded Professor (1961, dir. Robert Stevenson)

via The Fabulous World of Jules Verne (1958, dir. Karel Zeman), an adventure film based on 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Mysterious Island and other Verne tales:

“This is a live-action black and white movie — but it uses every camera trick and every form of animation known in 1958…Methods include stop-motion, paper cutout, drawing and painting animation, drawn foregrounds and backdrops, dissolves, miniatures and models, double exposure (probably in-camera and superimposition), still images, traveling and stationary mattes — they’re all here. There were at least eight people watching; someone yelled out at one point ‘There are at least seven different things going on in this scene!’ (I counted eight.) And all this before the invention of blue screens!

…There are lines drawn on sets, and even on people, to keep the original steel-engraving feel. The scenes of ships of the water have been treated with some sort of light, striped screen that makes the moving waves of real water take on the appearance of the engraved lines in a 19th century drawing of the sea. There’s a scene of a train coming down a track — the train is drawn; the wheels and the tracks are animated; the (real) engineer stands on an open platform in the engine’s cab and (real) people lean out of the (drawn) passenger car. (It’s so simple and powerful it takes your breath away.) Actors walk through back-projected sets; at the same time they’re walking behind animated full-sized paper cutouts of spinning flywheels and meshing gears, all this in front of a painted set in the middle-background. For maybe five seconds of screen time. There’s a scene of an animated shark attacking a real diver in a model set with painted water. We could go on…” 

-excerpted from Locus magazine review (via)

Trailer for the film here/ full film online starting here.