In Memory of George
George Melies has been without doubt one of Cinema’s pioneers, especially of cinematic fiction. His movie of 1902 called Le voyage dans la lune could be described as the first science fiction film (sci fi) in cinema’s history. It definitely was though one of the first films that contributed to the development of the juvenile ideas of the filmic “cut”, something that will be later evolved and named “montage” by the russian theoriticians and cinematographists.
One of these first ideas or, in better words, “small discoveries” was the so-called “magic image” or as it’s adressed nowadays, “jump cut”, which is the sudden transition in time without any changes in the camera’s position (frame). It is said that Melies discovered the power of this narrative tool randomly, when during a shooting he attempted in the urban streets of Paris, his camera stopped due to some error. It took him a while till he restored the problem and was able to make his camera work again, continuing filming till the end.
However later, when he developed the film and studied it, he realized, much to his surprise, that a bus that had been passing in front of the camera at the very moment it stopped working, had unexpectedly transformed into a hearse! The camera’s glitch and its restart lead to the amalgamation of two different time periods on the same negative, namely the first “magic image” in Cinema’s history. Melies realized the value of the relation between two different situations and purposedly repeated it in his films since then.
These thoughts ran in my mind as I glanced at a certain picture, part of a small body of work I had taken during my trip at Romania in 2015. This picture in particular was slightly different from the others…
I remember that, every now and then, I turned and photographed the sunset through the glass of the bus, highlighting a blue grayish, humid and foggy atmosphere. The whole process was more spontaneous, without a specific intention, I was just reacting to the mysterious scenery. I lifted the camera and took a couple of pictures. I have this habbit of not looking at my camera’s screen, whether I have photographed something important or not, so I continued like nothing happened.
However, when I returned to Greece, and sat to study the photos, I realized that in one of the two frames regarding these moments, an uninvited, peculiar visitor had entered. A “full” hearse! Moving towards the opposite direction, obviously at a high speed, it appeared in front of my camera at the very moment of the shot. This random element caused a rapid change in the picture’s context, or at least, added a few abstract, symbolic references, highlighting the importance of the small or big percentage of randomness that can enter the photographic frame, creating a new kind of magic image, uninvited, but in the end, welcome.
