Copresented by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival
The cinema and aviation go arm in arm through life; they are born on the same day.-Fernand Léger
For many years, the vehicle in which most people first experienced flight was not the airplane, but the movie theater. The new flying machines were still prohibitively expensive and often dangerous, but the vertiginous thrills they provided could safely be simulated with a fisticuffs-on-the-wing film like Dizzy Heights and Daring Hearts (1915). That is, when the idea of mechanical flight did not seem simply far-fetched. If a ship could actually fly, it was thought, well then anything might fly: beds, houses, people. The great silent fantasists-Winsor McCay, Georges Méliès, Walt Disney-all explored these possibilities.
Others imagined how life might be lived in a world of commonplace flight. The London of High Treason (1929), a science-fictional “aerotropolis” of conspirators and saboteurs, suggests that such speculation was not without attendant anxieties. This was, after all, the first generation to see these machines put to war. In A Trip to Mars (1918), made at the war's end, we find a pacific message gleaned from the new technology of flight. Above all, the new way of seeing-the aerial view-is savored in these films. In The Mystery of the Eiffel Tower (1927), director Julien Duvivier steals glances at the world below from every available purchase, possessed by the view from above-a harbinger of our present life in the air.