Introduction: The First Film Fiction

This issue of Film History took tentative form in 2011 when I was asked to edit one of the final issues under the present editorship. I considered a few subjects, and gave particular thought to reprints, an area that I thought had been rather neglected by Film History in recent years. In thinking about possible reprints, my mind immediately went back to one of the most enjoyable collaborations of my career: working with the late Ken Wlaschin to create a bibliography of silent film fiction, which appeared in 2008 in an issue of Film History entitled “Moving Picture Fiction”.¹ Perhaps, I thought, for the new issue of Film History we could find and reprint, with brief introductions, some of the more interesting short stories from that bibliography.

Initially I planned to set the date limits for this proposed collection as approximately the first ten years of cinema, 1896–1905, but on further discussion we decided that this could be too limited. There would be more variety, we considered, and a greater sense of development of the film as medium and industry, by setting the cut-off date several years later when the cinema was starting to become a major, industrialised business. The Editor-in-Chief proposed the year 1912, which would have the additional benefit of making the collection a centenary volume. The start date was never in doubt, and was to be 1896, the year when cinema began to spread throughout the world, and when it started to be reflected in fictional sources. This range of seventeen years was, needless to say, a period of rapid change in the film business, from the first tentative showings of short films in variety theatres and fairgrounds in the 1890s, all the way through to the early teen years when full-length feature films were being screened in sumptuous picture-palaces.²

Having set the date limits as 1896 to 1912, I then started to try and make an actual selection of stories about cinema from these years. I hit a number of snags. Firstly, many of the stories were not illustrated, and Film History has always prided itself on its pictorial content; secondly, some of the stories were too lengthy or the plots were not entirely related to cinema, so might not be of interest to film scholars; thirdly, of those stories that had not already been reprinted in retrospective collections, the range of subjects and plotlines was rather narrow and repetitious, and (no matter which ones were selected) did not seem to offer a fully rounded picture of cinema in its first decade and a half.

I decided, therefore, to take a more radical approach: to broaden the range of material beyond just short stories to include an assortment of all kinds of fictional and artistic reflections about cinema in the given period of seventeen years. So I started searching my collection for cartoons, poems, stories, songs, extracts from novels, etc. I looked for items which would be reasonably short, entertaining, on a range of themes about the film industry, and from a variety of authors, perspectives and countries. Also, I sought if at all possible to select items which were illustrated. I was obliged to impose one practical limit: I had little time and budget for translations, so items would come mainly from English-language sources – though in the event, some exceptions have been possible due to the translation efforts of fellow scholars. For their fine work in this connection I would like to thank Alan Williams (in the 1903 and 1908 sections) and Giorgio Bertellini and John P. Welle (in the 1910 section).

I decided from the outset to try and avoid material that was easily available online or had previously been reprinted. The latter condition was not an easy one to fulfill because so much has been reprinted in recent years in a number of books and other collections, so it meant missing some significant examples of early film fiction and illustration. Perhaps the most notable omission is Rudyard Kipling’s 1904 story, “Mrs Bathurst,” which has been reprinted and discussed in critical essays several times...