And thirdly there is the reality of the parameters used in criticism to comment on the nature of

reality in cinema. All these merit elaboration.

Out of the cradle: The Film-maker

Lumiere Brothers - the pioneers - [in 1895] simply captured whatever was going on in daily life

at the hour of the shooting. They made no attempt to specially compose the visuals or control the

time. Their conception of the camera was no more than a passive recording device. The subject

of their filming were simple daily life occurrences like the demolition of a wall or a boat leaving

the jetty or a baby having her breakfast and so on.

Georges Melies- a contemporary of Lumiere Brothers - was a magician and saw from the very

beginning a special potential in this device. He made camera watch the show or the reality of

magic like a spectator in the auditorium. Trick effects introduced by him in the lexicon of cinema

have come to stay.

Lumiere's depiction of reality was an anthology of unrelated pieces of action strung together.

There was no cohesive narrative in them. Melies presented the variety of magic show in to the

tableaux form. Trip to the Moon, Cinderella, Merry Frolics of The Satan happened to be his

subjects. In Lumiere's work nothing was made to happen especially for the camera. To Melies on

the contrary, cinema was a reality completely created for the camera. Lumiere and Melies have

rightly been called as the sources of the two polarities viz. the realistic and the formative

tendencies in cinema.

D. W. Griffith [mostly between 1907-1921] in America and D. G. Phalke [ from 1913 to 1921]

in India emerged as the first sophisticated story tellers of cinema. It was left to Griffith to break
free from the mould of tableaux and theatrical presentation of filmic drama. Griffith realised that

discontinuous description of action could be achieved in cinema by means of editing and mobile

camera. He believed that the audiences would infer and imaginatively fill in the physically

missing portions. He was proved right and this was the beginning of cinematic interaction

between the film and the audience. Grifith varied the pace of narrative and usually led it to a

climactic finish through the technique of parallel montage. By means of this technique, two

different spaces were linked dramatically in the narrative. Grifith's greatest achievement was

coming to terms with the most elusive element in cinema viz. Time. Griffith succeeded in

creating on screen a narrative as powerful as a novel. Dickens was always an inspiration and a

model for him. After Grifith it was possible to say that, film is a narrative art that exists in the

medium of time, using temporal space as its material.