This compilation program traces the development of narrative in some of the earliest films in our series (only the Lumière actualities, to be presented in February, date back earlier, to 1895). Georges Méliès, who made his first film in 1896, has been called "the cinema's first conscious artist" in using the camera not simply to record, but to express. In introducing spectacle, costumes, special effects, and most importantly, fantasy to the nascent cinema, he was in effect introducing narrative fiction. By 1908, as changes were occurring in the presentation of film, and fairgrounds began to give way to "picture palaces," film producers (beginning with Charles Pathé) began to vie for the theatre's (bourgeois) audience. They drew on the great actors and actresses from the Comédie Française in a new type of film known as Film d'art. Among our selection tonight we see Sarah Bernhardt as Marguerite in La Dame aux camélias, the Dumas story about the courtesan whose upper class lover Armand Duvall is kept from her by his family until she is dying of consumption; and Gabrielle Réjane in Madame Sans-Gêne, about the rise of a washerwoman to become Duchess of Danzig grace à Napoleon.