What is the history of people filming recreations of contemporary events and passing them off as legitimate?

by skiueli

I recall reading (possibly here) a story of a man who would hire actors to film fake coronations (or similar ceremonies) and then have them shown in theatres. This would have been in the early days of film, and would have been a recreation of a contemporary event (so, not a historical re-enactment).

Similar to art forgery, is there some kind of tradition of creating high quality film fakes? For political or monetary purposes I suppose.

gerardmenfin

Filmed reenactments of contemporary events were a staple of early cinema up to the first decade of the 20th century. Before the advent of the newsreel circa 1908, filmed news took the form of short movies called actualities (actualités in French), which could be either filmed on site or recreated in the studio. Wikipedia has a [list of the actualités reconstituées (reconstructed actualities)] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_reconstructed_actualities_by_Georges_M%C3%A9li%C3%A8s) created by Georges Méliès up to 1902. Méliès was only one of the many filmmakers to do that, and this list covers the range of filmed reenactments popular at the time: battles, catastrophes, political events, ceremonies, etc.

Technology was still unable to film certain types of events, so reenactement was the only solution available to show them. In 1902, Méliès and his producer Charles Urban of the Warwick Trading Company planned to shoot real footage of the coronation of Edward VII, but the insufficient light in Westminster Abbey, the noisy cameras, and, ultimately, the refusal of authorities, made filming the ceremony impossible. Instead, it was recreated in Montreuil as faithfully as the budget allowed it, though the ceremony was accelerated for time reasons. The final movie, Le Couronnement d'Edouard VII, included actual filmed scenes of the arrival and departure of carriages (Frazer, 1979).

In fact, even if filming a real event was possible, the staged version was sometimes thought to be preferable: an actual battle, for instance, could only be filmed from afar, while a staged one could show the thrilling and sensational action up close. Wars were (and are...) indeed a favourite topic for filmed reenactments. Movies at that time were often fairground attractions and were expected to be sensational, just like our "3D/4D" rides in theme parks. People did not yet go to see them to enjoy narratives, not long ones anyway.

The separation between genuine actualités filmed on site and reenactements filmed on stage was porous. Some of the companies who sold movies to exhibitors made the difference clear in their advertising: for instance, the R.W. Paul catalogue of 1903 distinguished between "Pictures of the Transvaal War" and "Reproductions of Incidents of the Boer War". Companies could even be proud of the quality of their reenactement movies: the Wrench company advertised its "Boer War" and "Boxer uprising" movies not only as "very entertaining", but as "an excellent substitute for the real thing", and "more sensational and exciting" than live footage (Bottomore, 2007).

The case of Méliès' Couronnement d'Edouard VII is interesting, as there seems to have been a brief outrage in England at the movie being (allegedly) sold as genuine footage. From what I can see in French newspapers, advertising seems to have been a little ambiguous at least. However, this ambiguity was solved when Méliès was interviewed in a major newspaper (Le Petit Parisien, 29 June 1902), which described the process admiratively ("a tribute to French art"). Méliès absolutely denied that deception was involved. Audiences, he said, were not stupid:

And let it be said, by the way, that the Warwick C° never intended to deceive the English people, any more than I usually pretend to deceive my audience. Audiences were not born yesterday. When I give them the epic of Joan of Arc or the episodes of the Transvaal War, there is not one of them who imagines that I have gone to set the lens of my cinematograph at Spion-Kop or on the plains of Patay. We only pretend to give them the illusion, by cinematography, of the movements of animated beings. To interest them further, we take the great episodes of history or contemporary life, reconstruct them on a suitable stage as scrupulously as possible, and the cinematograph then sets itself in motion.

The Joan of Arc, the Dewet, or the Edward VII that we serve to our spectators are indeed living beings who take on the attitudes, costumes and physiognomy of the characters they represent. The public does not ask for more and knows very well that it is not these heroes or these great men of the world who have posed before my humble camera.

Some companies were less straightforward and failed to mention that the films were fake. For example, the Walter Gibbons advertising listed "the latest Chinese war pictures" without saying that they were staged. The Warwick Trading Co. actually warned its customers against such "fake" movies, telling them to not be "misled into the belief that they are genuine". Warwick's own Chinese movies, indeed, were "secured by us at great Expense and much Risk to our Photographers".

The questions of the reception of early movies by the public and of the relation of movies with "truth" have been the topic of much (historical and theoretical) debate between film scholars. For several authors (Abel, Kessel, Whissel), the very question of "fakeness" is anachronistic. Abel (1998) notes that there was a continuity in Pathé's catalogues between its obviously "historical" movies about Napoléon or Joan of Arc and its staged-or-not-staged "contemporary" ones, and that the difference between them was not significant: genuine or fake, the proto-newsreels were perceived as historical tableaux. Before the advent of photography and film, popular art forms like giant panoramas and dioramas, now largely forgotten, had already been trying to bridge the gap between representation and reality (Daguerre got interested in photography in order to improve his diorama painting business!).

Were people actually misled by staged actualités into thinking that they were watching actual events? Anecdotal evidence (such as letters to editor or fiction) suggests that it happened, and the fact that some companies insisted that they were producing good fakes (better than the genuine articles!) or genuine movies (obtained at great risk!) shows that the genuine-vs-fake debate existed already.

In his book about Méliès, Frazer cites an anonymous paper published on 23 June 1902 in the Petit Bleu de Paris where the author rants about the fakeness of the Coronation movie: Frazer calls this an expression of "naive outrage" towards a deception meant to trick the public (Méliès' answer to that accusation, cited above, was published a few days later). I'm not fully convinced that it was a genuine rant: it rather looks like a snide way to mock those silly Englishmen (there's some tongue-in-cheekness in the article that may been missed by a non-native French speaker) but it remains true that the fakeness of actualités was debated in France, enough to be mocked in a revue (a show consisting in humorous skits about news and entertainment) in 1904, where a worker explains how he makes money on the side playing a Japanese warlord in a movie shot on the fortifs, the shanty towns surrounding Paris (Tralongo, 2017).

For Bottomore, the nascent film industry felt, in the early years of the 20th century, that it was at risk of being associated with deception and fraud if its advertising kept selling staged movies as real, and that it could lose the trust of the public. In any case, reenactments actualities disappeared progressively after 1908, and newsreels featuring only real footage took over (Bottomore, 2007).

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