This 43-Second Short May Be the First Sci-Fi Film

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This 43-Second Short May Be the First Sci-Fi Film

There’s a case to be made that the first science fiction ever filmed wasn’t about spaceships, aliens, or trips to the moon.

There's a case to be made that the first science fiction ever filmed wasn't about spaceships, aliens, or trips to the moon. Our rich history of cinematic sci-fi may have begun instead with a 43-second, single-reel film about a box that turns pigs into pork products. It's true: Some of the earliest sci-fi ever predicted factory farming.

Last week, a colleague forwarded me a link purporting to contain ​"The World's First Science Fiction Film." I'd never heard of it. But the French short, The Mechanical Butcher (La Charcuterie mécanique), made by the Lumiére brothers in Paris in 1895, does in fact have a legitimate claim to the throne. What's more, it elucidates a divide still yawning in sci-fi today, between realism and fantasy—and it's about automation; a topic the genre hasn't stopped tackling because it's never been more relevant.

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The Butcher, which the Overlook Film Encylopedia classifies as the "first science fiction film," is shorter than a Super Bowl Ad, extremely simple, and has no real narrative. Men lead a hog into the auto-butcher box; within seconds, they pull out its head, fully-formed sausages, and prime cuts, all ready for sale on the market. The whole thing relies on a single, simple camera trick, and was likely played for audience backwards, too, to achieve the opposite effect—the putting of the pig back together.

"Audiences might well have also seen the film projected in reverse," the author and academic Mark Bould writes in the Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, "and one of its imitators, Dog Factory, utilized this basic technique to depict a machine that reconstituted strings of sausages into whatever breed of dog the customer required." That trickery would prove to be central to the development of the entire sci-fi film genre.

"The first twenty years of sf cinema were dominated by similar one-reel trick movies which exploited the basic special effects made possible by undercranking or overcranking the camera, split screens, dissolves, stop-motion and reversed footage," the Cambridge Companion notes. Bould also figures Butcher for one of, if not the earliest example of filmic sci-fi: "Such narratives as these films possessed hinged on Xrays, elixirs, giant insects, flying bicycles, hair-restoring tonics, supercars, dirigibles, invisibility and the mysterious powers of electricity, magnetism and monkey glands."

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And, of course, more automated butcher shops. Butcher and Dog Factory weren't the only two early automaton-focused films; another copycat, ​Making Sausage (The End of All Things), which debuted in 1897, was overtly political—it purported to show the number of unsavory things that went into our industry-made sausage (cats, dogs, old boots); it was sort of like a mini-The Jungle for the screen.

"What is magic in your 'first SF film' is the evasion of the slaughter itself, along with the shift of work to technology"

This foresight is also what Margaret Morse, Emerita Professor of Film and Digital Studies at UC Santa Cruz, finds most striking about the work.

"To think one of the most horrid aspects of contemporary culture and the way we treat farm animals—the factory farm and the automated slaughter house—is anticipated and, just as we do presently, evaded in this film," Morse wrote me in an email. "What is magic in your 'first SF film' is the evasion of the slaughter itself, along with the shift of work to technology."

It's no accident that proto-sci-fi films often found automata at their center. Mechanical Butcher and its successors were shot smack dab in the middle of the so-called ​'Golden Age of Automata' that unfolded in France between 1860 and 1910. At the time, semi-automatic dolls and artisanal gadgets were big business, and a popular source of entertainment.

That's perhaps why the Lumiére brothers, who typically trafficked in film actualité—short clips of everyday life, such as the infamous "Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat" that allegedly sent viewers running from the theater—can plausibly be credited with jumpstarting the genre that would give rise to our most fantastic fictions.

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Along with just about anyone who's taken an Intro to Film Studies course, I'd long assumed that honor belonged to the actor, magician, and filmmaker Georges Méliès, whose 1902 classic "A Trip to the Moon" (Le Voyage dans la Lune) is most often cited in textbooks as the first science fiction movie. (That film, about a troop of white men who use superior technology to board a vessel, travel to and invade a foreign land, murder the locals, and depose their leader, also, sadly, still seems relevant.) AMC ​calls it the "pioneering" science fiction film.

Yet AMC also describes sci-fi films as "usually scientific, visionary, comic-strip-like, and imaginative, and usually visualized through fanciful, imaginative settings, expert film production design, advanced technology gadgets (i.e., robots and spaceships), scientific developments, or by fantastic special effects." Our robo-butcher checks quite a few of those boxes—as a film, it embraces a protean version of special effects—an element essential to the genre today. But critics and scholars are in disagreement about its legacy.

"The Mechanical Butcher isn't really the first science fiction film," Dr. Keith M. Johnston, the Director of University of East Anglia's Film Archive, wrote me in an email, "although it is an early trick film that uses the late 19th century's interest in automation technologies as a central conceit."

Johnston says that there's "an issue around applying later generic concepts ('science fiction') to early film such as this, when such a term was not in general use—indeed, this would be seen as a trick film, possibly an example of cinematic illusion (traits that may be mirrored in later SF, but not intended as such here)."

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"It shows 'mechanization' in a dream state, but does that necessarily count as sci-fi?"

Yet our cinema is as concerned as ever about automation—from the enemy alien drones of Oblivion to the revolting robot laborers of I, Robot—yet filmographic giddiness about its potential, as relayed in Butcher, has given way to concerns that it will rule our lives.

"[The Mechanical Butcher] shows 'mechanization' in a dream state, but does that necessarily count as sci-fi? Remember that old saw about early technology appearing as magic," she wrote, referring to the famous Arthur C. Clarke line about the two becoming indistinguishable when tech becomes sufficiently advanced.

Genre semantics aside, The Mechanical Butcher is undoubtedly a work of speculative fiction—it posits a future in which animals are efficiently converted into consumable bits for hungry humans. It also contains what is perhaps the earliest filmed example of a fictional mechanical device.

If that device was chiefly created to capitalize on a camera trick, to me, that's almost more fascinating; that technological limitations of media gave rise to an early—and, as Morse notes, accurate—cinematic prediction of the future. Our assembly-line slaughterhouses are more automated and efficient than ever, and we're as blissfully ignorant of what goes on inside the box.