Latin Literature In Film : 'Lurid Fantasy & The Fetid Mind'

In the 17th century in France, writers like Charles Perrault, Madame d'Aulnoy and Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve wrote fairy tales with fantastical elements that seeped in to the national consciousness (and drew from the romanticism of Madeleine de Scudéry's writings). The light-footed style they pioneered was later satirised by Voltaire before being wickedly distorted by Jacques Cazotte.
The work of experimental filmmaker Georges Méliès, a pioneer of science-fiction, horror and fantasy cinema, drew heavily from the stories of Madame d'Aulnoy. Experimental filmmaker Jean Cocteau's fantasy 'Beauty And The Beast' (1946) was an adaptation of Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont's version of the story, an abridged rewrite of Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve's epic fairy tale.


Filmmakers have sometimes compounded or subverted the accepted meanings of traditional fairy tales by making significantly darker versions or variations on a theme. 'The Beauty And The Beast' in particular has been a source of wonder in this regard, inspiring horror treatments as diverse as Walerian Borowczyk's 'The Beast' (1975), Juraj Herz's 'Beauty And The Beast' (1978) and Charles Band's 'Meridian' (1990). Borowczyk's 'The Beast' is said to have been primarily influenced by Prosper Mérimée's mystery novella 'Lokis' (1869) which was the basis for his fellow Pole Janusz Majewski's atmospheric horror feature 'Lokis' (1970).

Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (born 18 November 1787, Cormeilles-en-Parisis, Val-d'Oise, France), better known as Louis Daguerre, was a French artist and photographer, recognized for his invention of the daguerreotype process of photography. He became known as one of the fathers of photography. Though he is most famous for his contributions to photography, he was also an accomplished painter and a developer of the diorama theatre.

Antoine Claudet (born 18 August 1797, La Croix-Rousse, France) was a French photographer and artist active in London who produced daguerreotypes. Early in his career Claudet headed a glass factory at Choisy-le-Roi, Paris, together with Georges Bontemps, and moved to England to promote the factory with a shop in High Holborn, London. Having acquired a share in L. J. M. Daguerre's invention, he became one of England's first commercial photographers using the daguerreotype process for portraiture, improving the sensitizing process by using chlorine (instead of bromine) in addition to iodine, thus gaining greater rapidity of action.
Claudet invented the red darkroom safelight, and it was he who suggested the idea of using a series of photographs to create the illusion of movement. The idea of using painted backdrops has also been attributed to him.

Pierre Jules César Janssen (born 22 February 1824, Paris, France), also known as Jules Janssen, or Julie Cesar, was a French astronomer who, along with English scientist Joseph Norman Lockyer, is credited with discovering the gaseous nature of the solar chromosphere, and with some justification the element helium.
Janssen also came up with the idea for a "revolver photographic". This huge camera system used a Maltese cross-type mechanism, very similar to the system that would later be of great importance in the development of movie cameras. He successfully captured both transits of Venus, 1874 in Japan, that of 1882 at Oran in Algeria. The motion picture was known as Passage de Venus.

Étienne-Jules Marey (born 5 March 1830, Beaune, Côte-d'Or, France) was a French scientist, physiologist and chronophotographer. His work was significant in the development of cardiology, physical instrumentation, aviation, cinematography and the science of laboratory photography.

Louis Le Prince (born 28 August 1841, Metz, France) was a French artist and the inventor of an early motion picture camera, possibly the first person to shoot a moving picture sequence using a single lens camera and a strip of (paper) film. Although some have credited him as the "Father of Cinematography", his work did not influence the commercial development of cinema — owing at least in part to the great secrecy surrounding it.
A Frenchman who also worked in the United Kingdom and the United States, Le Prince's motion-picture experiments culminated in 1888 in the city of Leeds, England. In October of that year, he filmed moving-picture sequences of family members in Roundhay Garden and his son playing the accordion, using his single-lens camera and Eastman's paper negative film. At some point in the following eighteen months he also made a film of Leeds Bridge. This work may have been slightly in advance of the inventions of contemporaneous moving-picture pioneers such as the British inventors William Friese-Greene and Wordsworth Donisthorpe, and was years in advance of that of Auguste and Louis Lumière, and William Kennedy Dickson (who did the moving image work for Thomas Edison).
Le Prince was never able to perform a planned public demonstration in the US because he mysteriously vanished; he was last known to be boarding a train on 16 September 1890. The reason for his disappearance is not known and his family and supporters invented a series of conspiracy theories, including: a murder set up by Edison, secret homosexuality, disappearance in order to start a new life, and a murder by his brother over their mother's will. No evidence exists for any of these and the most likely explanation remains that he committed suicide, overcome by the shame of heavy debts and the failure of his experiments.

Charles-Émile Reynaud (born 8 December 1844, Montreuil, Seine-Saint-Denis, France) was a French inventor, responsible for the praxinoscope (an animation device patented in 1877 that improved on the zoetrope) and the first projected animated films. His Théâtre Optique film system, patented in 1888, is notable as the first known instance of film perforations being used.
On 28 October 1892 Reynaud gave the first public performance of a moving picture show at the Musée Grévin in Paris, the Théâtre Optique. The show, billed as Pantomimes Lumineuses, included three cartoons, Pauvre Pierrot, Un bon bock, and Le Clown et ses chiens, each consisting of 500 to 600 individually painted images and lasting about 15 minutes. The film was the first to use perforations. The performances predated Auguste and Louis Lumière's first paid public screening of the cinematographe on 26 December 1895, often seen as the birth of cinema.

William Kennedy Dickson (born 3 August 1860, Le Minihic-sur-Rance, Brittany, France) was a Franco-Scottish inventor who devised an early motion picture camera under the employment of Thomas Edison. Blacksmith Scene, by Dickson, is the first Kinetoscope film shown in public exhibition on May 9, 1893 and is the earliest known example of actors performing a role in a film. The Dickson Experimental Sound Film is the first known film with live-recorded sound and appears to be the first motion picture made for the Kinetophone, the proto-sound-film system developed by Dickson and Thomas Edison.

Marius Sestier (born 8 August 1861, Sauzet, Drôme, France) was a French cinematographer, best known for his work in Australia, where he shot some of the country's first films. A pharmacist by profession, Sestier was employed by early filmmakers the Lumière brothers (Auguste and Louis Lumière) to demonstrate their cinématographe abroad. In this capacity he travelled to India in June 1896, where he held a showcase of six short films made by the Lumière brothers at Watson's Hotel, Bombay on 7 July 1896; this was the first time moving pictures had been shown in India. Sestier also shot his own films while in Bombay, but the Lumière brothers rejected these for their catalogue as they were not satisfied with the quality as French customs had opened the package of undeveloped film.
Sestier's short subject documentary Passengers Alighting from Ferry Brighton at Manly (1896) was the first film shot and screened in Australia. Sestier, together with Australian photographer Henry Walter Barnett, made approximately 19 films in Sydney and Melbourne between October and November 1896, these being the very first films recorded in Australia. In September 1896, Sestier and Barnett opened Australia's first cinema, the Salon Lumière in Pitt Street, Sydney.

Victorin-Hippolyte Jasset (born 30 March 1862, Fumay, Ardennes, France) was an early film pioneer in France, active between the years 1905 and 1913. He worked on many genres of film and was particularly associated with the development of detective or crime serials, such as the Nick Carter (possibly the first in history) and Zigomar series.

The Lumière brothers were Auguste Lumière (born 19 October 1862, Besançon, France) and Louis Lumière (born 5 October 1864, Besançon, France). They were manufacturers of photography equipment, best known for their Cinématographe motion picture system and the short films they produced between 1895 and 1905. Their screening of a single film on 22 March 1895 for around 200 members of the "Society for the Development of the National Industry" in Paris was probably the first presentation of projected film. Their first commercial public screening on 28 December 1895 for around 40 paying visitors and invited relations has traditionally been regarded as the birth of cinema, although it had in fact been preceded by paying shows to thousands of people in the USA and Germany.
L'Arroseur Arrosé (also known as The Waterer Watered and The Sprinkler Sprinkled) is an 1895 French short black-and-white silent comedy film directed and produced by Louis Lumière and starring François Clerc and Benoît Duval. It was first screened on June 10, 1895. It is the earliest known instance of film comedy, the first use of film to portray a fictional story, and the first use of a promotional film poster. The film was originally known as Le Jardinier ("The Gardener") or Le Jardinier et le petit espiègle, and is sometimes referred to in English as The Tables Turned on the Gardener, and The Sprinkler Sprinkled.

Michel-Antoine Carré (born 7 February 1865, Paris, France) was a French actor, stage and film director, and writer of opera librettos, stage plays and film scripts. He was the son of the librettist Michel Carré (père) (1821–1872) and cousin of the theatre director Albert Carré (his father's nephew). His libretto for André Messager's 1894 opera Mirette was never performed in France but was performed in an English adaptation in London at the Savoy Theatre.
L'Enfant prodigue ("The Prodigal Son") was the first feature-length motion picture produced in Europe, running 90 minutes. Directed by Michel Carré, from his own three-act stage pantomime, the film was basically an unmodified, filmed record of his play. It was filmed at the Gaumont Film Company studios in May 1907 and the movie premiered at the Théâtre des Variétés on the Boulevard Montmartre, in Paris, on 20 June 1907.

Ferdinand Zecca (born 19 February 1864, Paris, France) was a pioneer French film director, film producer, actor and screenwriter. He worked primarily for the Pathé company, first in artistic endeavors then in administration of the internationally based company.
Alice Guy-Blaché (born 1 July 1873, Saint-Mandé, Val-de-Marne, France) was a French pioneer filmmaker, active from the late 19th century, and one of the first to make a narrative fiction film. She was the first woman to direct a film. From 1896 to 1906, she was probably the only female filmmaker in the world. She experimented with Gaumont's Chronophone sync-sound system, and with color-tinting, interracial casting, and special effects.
In 1896, Guy-Blaché directed La Fée aux Choux (The Fairy of the Cabbages) which is significant in the history of cinema. The Cabbage Fairy is often acknowledged as the first narrative fiction film. This movie is also credited as having introduced screenplays for the first time.