M. J. Roche | Amour et science (Love and Science) / 1912

alternative realities

by Douglas Messerli

 

M. J. Roche (screenwriter, based on a story “Liefde en Westenschap,” and director) Amour et science (Love and Science) / 1912

 

In this wonderfully clairvoyant short film from 1912, a young genius, Max Pledge (Émile Dehelly) is attempting to perfect his new invention that will enable someone speaking on a telephone to see the person in action, a sort of early imaginative vision of a home cinema or what we now use every day in our cellphone technology.

     Pledge is so involved with his work that several men who come to call on him are turned away by his butler. And so too are his fiancée, Daisy, who has arrived with her friend Maud to discuss their wedding plans.

      In the meantime, Max, tinkering with his telephonic-cinematic invention, discovers that it actually works, and he immediately calls his sweetheart to schedule a telephone conversation later that afternoon.

      Still upset and angered by Max’s seeming disinterest in even discussing a definitive date for their wedding, Daisy decides to play a trick on Max.

      Trimming off some of Maud’s beautiful bangs, she suggests that her friend dress up as a man, using the trimmings for an outrageously large moustache. At first Maud refuses, but as the two engage in dressing her up as a male, they so laugh and enjoy themselves in the process that for a few moments it appears that real focus of the film might almost be said to demonstrate the pleasures of drag, the process of dressing up as someone far different from the self you have been born into and never fully explored. In all the films of the early 20th century, dressing in drag was never again revealed as being so much fun. RuPaul would love this prescient short movie.

       In the telephone conversation we see the screen split, another cinema first, showing both Max on his end of the line and Daisy in her bedroom. As the two speak, Maud, dressed as a gentleman caller, suddenly appears in the background and moves closer to Maud to begin to kiss her fervently—which almost takes this short film into lesbian territory—seeming to affirm that Max’s fiancée is two-timing him.

       The revelation is disastrous, with Max destroying his invention before he falls into a faint, over the next few days remaining into a kind of semi-catatonic trance of depression from which the doctors are unable to restore him. One of the doctors suggests that only by re-witnessing the scene might Max return to normal life.

        We see Daisy consult a filmmaker in his studio to convince him to film just such a scene. Visiting Max in his workshop, where she has set up her cinema version behind the very machine which he had created, Daisy and others bring in Max and seat him before the “screen.” As Daisy hides, we observe a similar scene in which, as Daisy is speaking on the phone to Max, her suitor (Maud in drag) suddenly appears. But this time Daisy begins to giggle, which again turns into hearty laughter as she tears off Maud’s whiskers, Maud pulling off her wig and waving it like a trophy, the two finding the whole stunt hilarious.

 

        Max, at first, doesn’t even view the screen, but hearing Daisy’s voice turns toward it to witness the same horrors as early before finally perceiving that it has all been a stunt. He returns to his normal self, as Daisy reappears to hug him. All is forgiven.

        Not only has this early film used drag to explore a science fiction-like new media of the future, but further takes cinema into its future, and perhaps unfortunate role, as a device for altering reality—or in this case, altering a misconception that the medium had earlier conveyed. Roche’s short film explores how the movies themselves might be used to present alternative realities.

 

Los Angeles, June 16, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).