Film Through The Ages, Tuesday, Period 3

[chosehumanity]

"Morning."

Mitchell clapped his gloved hands once. His appearance before the class was in all aspects a lot healthier-looking than the last time he did this; after a few months, he was feeling better about this entire 'cold turkey' business. He grinned at the class, shifting his stance lightly. "I'm Mitchell. Please don't call me professor, I'm not that old." Liar. "Welcome to Film Through the Ages, where I'll be asking you all to put your Ace Ventura Ray Venturous crap aside to talk about the classics. Some of you might not come from a time where they've got films. I'll be making sure you all manage to keep up, all right?"

He pressed a button on the laptop he had in front of him, displaying some pictures. "This is the start of film," he said, "Or at least in the history as we're looking at it. Eadweard Muybridge, a photographer, made these around 1878. He mostly did them to contribute to the anatomical sciences." He tilted his head at the pictures. "Heh. Anyway, these pictures were done in the shape of something that was already common at the time: lanterns, in use since the seventeenth century, could show pictures. Add a spinning disk, or Zoetrope, and it looks as if the pictures are moving." He pressed a key again, causing the pictures to move. "Neat, yeah?"

He moved on. "He wasn't interested in making films," he continued, "That was left to the people who were inspired by this work, such as Thomas Edison. Although it was really his assistance, Dickson, who did most of the work. Lazy git." He grinned at the screen for a few seconds before he continued. "They practically invented film stock. Took film, in use for cameras, and spliced them together, slapped four holes in them and made it ready to put it through their invention, the Kinetoscope. The first device that could ever show film. They were these boxes," he made a gesture, "You'd have to lean over to take a peek at the film inside. Couldn't last much longer than twenty seconds, but it was huge for the time."

He looked up at the picture on the screen. "What followed were films that might seem simple now, but they were a huge crowd-gatherer back in 1895, when they were first shown." Also the year in which he was born, which meant he was approaching steadier ground. "Just a single shot. It was experimenting on a large scale. The Lumieres got involved - they made loads of these small films. Got their work all over the place by 1897. Things really started to pick up around then - by 1902, you had George Melies and A Trip to the Moon, the first science fiction movie ever made. But we'll get to that next week."

He had maybe gotten carried away just a bit. "I'd like you all to introduce yourselves. That's normal for these classes. Your name, your favorite film if any, and one thing you've encountered in your life that really should be put on film." He pointed at a student at random. "Go ahead."

[[ Wait for the OCD up! ]]

Comments

Re: Introduce Yourself

[bitten_notshy]

"Jack Priest, I haven't seen a great many films yet but my favorite I've seen is metaMaltese Falcon, and .... something to put on film." He mused for a moment before deciding he could talk about the first thing he thought of. "There was a murder during our voyage here. That case might make for an interesting sort of film."

Re: Introduce Yourself

[chosehumanity]

"You continue to have taste," Mitchell pointed out, easily enough. "And that would work in a detective. What'd you focus on if you did?"

Re: Introduce Yourself

[bitten_notshy]

"The killers," Jack said, smiling at the compliment (and thinking until he had an answer that didn't shine too much of a spotlight on Sebastien or, for that matter, the sorcerer who'd helped him). "It was a married couple who were being blackmailed, and I think they were more desperate than evil -- it's a sad story all the way around."

Re: Introduce Yourself

[chosehumanity]

"A tragedy," he said, thoughtfully. "Most of the worst evil is born out of desperation, it's said. People scrambling to get a hold of their lives." He nodded lightly. "I'd save that one for an actual film, if I were you."

Re: Introduce Yourself

[bitten_notshy]

"You might not be wrong," came the careful reply. Jack thought there was desperate evil, the Leatherbies' kind, and then there was some that was just dark and rotting and awful.

Still, optimism was a good thing. Maybe even the saddest stories had some grain of humanity at their core.

"And what, you think I could write one? I never fancied doing that."

Re: Introduce Yourself

[chosehumanity]

Mitchell's ideas about evil were skewed to begin with, but if he could drag himself out of that cesspit into humanity...

Well, monsters were complicated, and he wasn't about to go into that in class.

So he skipped that bit. "You're young, you're human," he said, shrugging lightly. "It's worth trying out what you can until you settle, and it sounds like you've seen a bit."