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Narrative time and film time

Melies, however, out of his professional instincts as a magician, discovered and made use of a number of illusionary techniques that remain part of the vocabulary of film.

One of these is the `` dissolve '', which makes possible a visually smooth transition from scene to scene.

As the first scene begins to fade, the succeeding scene begins to appear.

For a moment or two, both scenes are present simultaneously, one growing weaker, one growing stronger.

In a series of fairy tales and fantasies, Melies demonstrated that the film is superbly equipped to tell a straightforward story, with beginning, middle and end, complications, resolutions, climaxes, and conclusions.

Immediately, the film improved and it improved because in narrative it found a content based on time to complement its own unbreakable connection with time.

Physically, a movie is possible because a series of images is projected one at a time at such a speed that the eye `` remembers '' the one that has gone before even as it registers the one now appearing.

Linking the smoothly changing images together, the eye itself endows them with the illusion of movement.

The `` projection '' time of painting and sculpture is highly subjective, varying from person to person and even varying for a given person on different occasions.

So is the time of the novel.

The drama in the theater and the concert in the hall both have a fixed time, but the time is fixed by the director and the players, the conductor and the instrumentalists, subject, therefore, to much variation, as record collectors well know.

The time of the motion picture is fixed absolutely.

The film consists of a series of still, transparent photographs, or `` frames '', 35-mm.-wide.

Each frame comes between the light and the lens and is individually projected on the screen, at the rate, for silent movies, of 16 frames per second, and, for sound films, 24 frames per second.

This is the rate of projection ; ;

it is also the rate of photographing.

Time is built into the motion picture, which cannot exist without time.

Now time is also the concern of the fictional narrative, which is, at its simplest, the story of an action with, usually, a beginning, a middle, and an end -- elements which demand time as the first condition for their existence.

The `` moving '' picture of the train or the wave coming at the audience is, to be sure, more intense than a still picture of the same subject, but the difference is really one of degree ; ;

the cinematic element of time is merely used to increase the realism of an object which would still be reasonably realistic in a still photo.

In narrative, time is essential, as it is in film.

Almost everything about the movies that is peculiarly of the movies derives from a tension created and maintained between narrative time and film time.

This discovery of Melies was vastly more important than his sometimes dazzling, magician's tricks produced on film.