INTRODUCTION: Fantastic Voyages

Georges Melies is usually accorded pride of place for his pioneering work in the science fiction/speculative/horror genres.1 But one wonders whether the prosaic events filmed by those protorealists, the Lumiere brothers–and Melies himself–nearly a decade before Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902) were experienced as equally fantastic voyages by a fin-de-siecle viewer. Contrary to cineaste urban legend, L'Arivee d'un Train en Gare de la Ciotat (1895) did not send audiences screaming into Parisian streets. Nevertheless, to an audience at that brief historical moment before the introjection of standard cinematic tropes, the flickering vision of a train pulling into a station on a screen in a darkened cafe exhibition space may well have seemed as uncanny as the Jupiter landing of the space pod in 2001 (1968).