HG Wells: Modernity and the Movies

Keith Williams.
Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007.

Technology (esp. film) was treated by Victorians with the same supernatural awe as Sherlock Holmes' powers of deduction...."visual conjuring."  "By the autumn of 1896 stage magician Georges Melies was experimenting with deliberate visual conjuring made possible by editing and 'stop motion effects'"(Williams 4).

Williams uses the term "realist of the fantastic" to describe Wells.  He attributes this term to a letter Joseph Conrad wrote in 1898.

The dissolve = being in two places at one time.

The time traveller's invention resembles visual gadgets of the time, like the kintetoscope.  "It's posssible, as Terry Ramsaye argued in 1926, that Wells's machine is more like Edison's kinetoscope: its motion is controlled by a lever not unlike the kinetoscope's crank and it gives a 'private', individual view (although not a miniaturised one).  The kinteoscope also afforded the entertainment novelty of seeing ordinary actions temporally speeded up or reversed" (Williams 27-28).

The Time Machine questions human perception of time and The Invisible Man questions human perception of space!  (Film questions both of these things....inspiration?)

Edmund Parish, Hallucinations and Illusions: A Study of th Fallacies of Perception (London: Walter Scott, 1897).  *****CHECK THIS OUT

"Even more so than the simulacral moving picture, the perfection of the synchronised soundtrack was promoted as a guarantee of the medium's faithful mimiesis of a bodily reality, an extension of the tendency to offer representations as unmediated perceptions, as Armstrong documents.  It was argued that whereas film-images can never be anything more than illusions of movement in three-dimensional space, projected from static frames on a two=dimensional surface, recorded sound when played back was an actual vibration of air layers authentically apprehended by the ear..."(Williams 57).

"Suffice it to say that, in the 1890s, the striking convergences between Wells's scientific romances and stories and the new visual technology established a slender but vital critical synergy between literature and the upstart, popular medium, which much two-way traffic has re-energised ever since" (Williams 48).

"Thus Wells' initial coup as COnrad's 'realist of the fantastic' explicitly focuses on the very boundary between virtualism and reality, just as that ambiguity would come to characterise the visual culture of modernity exemplified by cinema.  Similarly, like the medium as it evolved, Wells's machine is, as Bignell puts it, 'a curious mixture of scientific experiment and fairground thrills.'  The Time Traveller describes the invention's motion as a kind of 'switchback' (TM 19).  (Pioneer director D.W. Griffith would use exactly the same metaphor for the interruption of temporal continuity in cinematic narrative by the past.)  Thus the connection between Wells and Paul is a perfect illustration of Jean-Louis Baudry's argument that cinema grew out of a cultural desire 'to construct a simulation machine capable of offering the subject perceptions which are really representations mistaken for perceptions'."  (Williams 30).

After pointing out that the Time Traveller is accused by the Meidcal Man of being a conjurer ("like the ghost you showed us last Christmas?), Williams says "Film was the modern medium in which the conjuror's art became consummately invisible and it was no wonder that magic shops became frequent subjects of early British stop-motion animation.  Nevertheless, as Wells acknowledged, it rendered the most fantastic impossibilities paradoxically 'hyperreal'"(Williams 45).  (He's talking about this in the context of Wells' short story, "The Magic Shop" 1903.)

absent presences