Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Wells's Prescience
- 1 Optical Speculations in the Early Writings: The Time Machine and the Short Stories
- 2 The Dis/Appearance of the Subject: Wells, Whale and The Invisible Man
- 3 ‘Seeing the Future’: Visual Technology in When the Sleeper Wakes and Fritz Lang's Metropolis
- 4 The ‘Broadbrow’ and the Big Screen: Wells's Film Writing
- 5 Afterimages: Adaptations and Influences
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Optical Speculations in the Early Writings: The Time Machine and the Short Stories
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Wells's Prescience
- 1 Optical Speculations in the Early Writings: The Time Machine and the Short Stories
- 2 The Dis/Appearance of the Subject: Wells, Whale and The Invisible Man
- 3 ‘Seeing the Future’: Visual Technology in When the Sleeper Wakes and Fritz Lang's Metropolis
- 4 The ‘Broadbrow’ and the Big Screen: Wells's Film Writing
- 5 Afterimages: Adaptations and Influences
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Wells's early stories in particular (and this is also true of many scientific romances, though their techniques seem to have been ‘tried out’ in the stories) display a visual self-consciousness remarkable in its inventiveness and multiformity. Hence his 1890s fictions ‘conjure’ with causality, space and time in ways that would also become distinctive of the cinema.
The Time Machine
Wells's writing yokes into a striking parallelism with cinema from the outset. The year in which his first great scientific romance, TM, was published was also when the Lumière brothers invented the cinematograph, a virtual ‘space and time machine’ itself, in Ian Christie's phrase. Wells's Time Traveller models the theory of time as the fourth dimension in terms that parallel the technological extension of the photograph's virtual stereoscopy into filmic movement:
You know how on a flat surface, which has only two dimensions, we can represent a figure of a three-dimensional solid and similarly they think that by models of three dimensions they could represent one of four – if they could master the perspective of the thing. See?
He also uses a series of pictures of a man taken at different ages – ‘All these are evidently sections, as it were. Three-Dimensional representations of his Four-Dimensioned being, which is a fixed and unalterable thing.’ (TM, p. 5) – as if imagining the course of a life as one vast chronophotograph. He conceives of intermittent subjective movement in time (mentally ‘jump[ing] back’ as he calls it (p. 6)) in terms similar to Henri Bergson's contemporary theory of consciousness and memory. The Time Traveller's machine is, in effect, a vehicle for making such movement both possible and prolonged within ‘objective’ or external time.
To outside observation, the machine's invisible accelerated motion through time is ‘presentation below the threshold’, a kind of subliminal blurring related to the persistence of vision effect that makes the kine matic illusion work. But it is the specific effects on the vision of the Time Traveller himself which are most cinematic (indeed, many of them were more or less directly realised in the 1960 film, principally using stop-motion object- and graphic-animation, time-lapse camerawork, etc., and in the 2002 version by Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI) (see Chapter 5)).
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- H. G. Wells, Modernity and the Movies , pp. 24 - 48Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2007