The substitution splice[1][2] or stop trick[3] is a cinematic special effect in which filmmakers achieve an appearance, disappearance, or transformation[2] by altering one or more selected aspects of the mise-en-scène between two shots while maintaining the same framing and other aspects of the scene in both shots. The effect is usually polished by careful editing to establish a seamless cut and optimal moment of change.[4] It has also been referred to as stop motion substitution or stop-action.

The pioneering French filmmaker Georges Méliès claimed to have accidentally developed the stop trick, as he wrote in Les Vues Cinématographiques in 1907[5][6] (translated from French):

An obstruction of the apparatus that I used in the beginning (a rudimentary apparatus in which the film would often tear or get stuck and refuse to advance) produced an unexpected effect, one day when I was prosaically filming the Place de L'Opéra; I had to stop for a minute to free the film and to get the machine going again. During this time passersby, omnibuses, cars, had all changed places, of course. When I later projected the film, reattached at the point of the rupture, I suddenly saw the Madeleine-Bastille bus changed into a hearse, and men changed into women. The trick-by-substitution, called the stop trick, had been invented and two days later I performed the first metamorphosis of men into women and the first sudden disappearances that had, at the beginning, such a great success.

According to the film scholar Jacques Deslandes, it is more likely that Méliès discovered the trick by carefully examining a print of the Edison Manufacturing Company's 1895 film The Execution of Mary Stuart, in which a primitive version of the trick appears. In any case, the substitution splice was both the first special effect Méliès perfected, and the most important in his body of work.[2]

Film historians such as Richard Abel and Elizabeth Ezra established that much of the effect was the result of Méliès's careful frame matching during the editing process, creating a seamless match cut out of two separately staged shots.[4] Indeed, Méliès often used substitution splicing not as an obvious special effect, but as an inconspicuous editing technique, matching and combining short takes into one apparently seamless longer shot.[7] Substitution splicing could become even more seamless when the film was colored by hand, as many of Méliès's films were; the addition of painted color acts as a sleight of hand technique allowing the cuts to pass by unnoticed.[8]

The substitution splice was the most popular cinematic special effect in trick films and early film fantasies, especially those that evolved from the stage tradition of the féerie.[1] Segundo de Chomón is among the other filmmakers who used substitution splicing to create elaborate fantasy effects.[1] D.W. Griffith's 1909 film The Curtain Pole, starring Mack Sennett, used substitution splices for comedic effect.[9] The transformations made possible by the substitution splice were so central to early fantasy films that, in France, such films were often described simply as scènes à transformation.[10]

This technique is different from the stop motion technique, in which the entire shot is created frame by frame.[11]

References

  1. 1 2 3 Moen, Kristian (2012), Film and Fairy Tales: The Birth of Modern Fantasy, London: I.B. Tauris & Co, p. 41, ISBN 9781780762517
  2. 1 2 3 Williams, Alan Larson (1992), Republic of Images: A History of French Filmmaking, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 36, ISBN 9780674762688
  3. ↑ Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew (2012), The Vampire Film: Undead Cinema, London: Wallflower, p. 76, ISBN 9780231850032
  4. 1 2 Lim, Bliss Cua (2009), Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique, Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 279–80, ISBN 9780822390992
  5. ↑ "Les vues cinématographiques | La Cinémathèque québécoise" (in French). Retrieved 2019-11-05.
  6. ↑ Gallimard (1928–1929). La Revue du cinéma (1928 - 1929). New York The Museum of Modern Art Library. Paris, Gallimard.
  7. ↑ Solomon, Matthew (2011), "Introduction" (PDF), in Solomon, Matthew (ed.), Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination: Georges Méliès's Trip to the Moon, Albany: State University of New York Press, pp. 6–7
  8. ↑ Yumibe, Joshua (2012), Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pp. 71–2, ISBN 9780813552989
  9. ↑ Gunning, Tom (1991), D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, p. 132, ISBN 9780252063664
  10. ↑ Kessler, Frank (2005), "Trick films", in Abel, Richard (ed.), Encyclopedia of Early Cinema, Abingdon: Routledge, p. 644, ISBN 9780415234405
  11. ↑ Gunning, Tom (1989). ""Primitive" Cinema: A Frame-up? Or the Trick's on Us". Cinema Journal. 28 (2): 3–12. doi:10.2307/1225114. JSTOR 1225114. Retrieved 22 June 2021.
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