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30 I. GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS
a rule the former take precedence over the latter in the sense that they are responsible for the cinematic quality of a film. Imagine a film which, in keeping with the basic properties, records interesting aspects of physical reality but does so in a technically imperfect manner; perhaps the lighting is awkward or the editing uninspired. Nevertheless such a film is more specifically a film than one which utilizes brilliantly all the cinematic devices and tricks to produce a statement disregarding camera-reality. Yet this should not lead one to underestimate the influence of the technical properties. It will be seen that in certain cases the knowing use of a variety of techniques may endow otherwise nonrealistic films with a cinematic flavor.*
THE TWO MAIN TENDENCIES
If film grows out of photography, the realistic and formative tendencies must be operative in it also. Is it by sheer accident that the two tendencies manifested themselves side by side immediately after the rise of the medium? As if to encompass the whole range of cinematic endeavors at the outset, each went the limit in exhausting its own possibilities. Their prototypes were Lumiere, a strict realist, and Melies, who gave free rein to his artistic imagination. The films they made embody, so to speak, thesis and antithesis in a Hegelian sense.9
humieie and Melies
Lumiere's films contained a true innovation, as compared with the repertoire of the zootropes or Edison's peep boxes:10 they pictured everyday life after the manner of photographs.11 Some of his early pictures, such as Baby's Breakfast (he Dejeuner de hebe) or The Card Players (ha Partie d'ecarte), testify to the amateur photographers's delight in family idyls and genre scenes.12 And there was Teasing the Gardener (L/Arroseur arrose), which enjoyed immense popularity because it elicited from the flow of everyday life a proper story with a funny climax to boot. A gardener is watering flowers and, as he unsuspectingly proceeds, an impish boy steps on the hose, releasing it at the very moment when his perplexed victim examines the dried-up nozzle. Water squirts out and hits the gardener smack in the face. The denouement is true to style, with the gardener chasing and spanking the boy. This film, the germ cell and archetype of all film comedies to come, represented an imaginative attempt on the part of Lumiere to develop photography into a means of story telling.13 Yet the
* See pp. 61-2, 87.