There is the take on Cinderella where we ask our heroine to wait out her terrible circumstances, a moral that encourages us to work all day according to the clock for later reward, a perfect capitalistic dictum. But then there is this other interpretation – that is all about luck, coincidence, and blessings. A moment seemingly only tied to the clock can be a moment away from it. Magical substitutions yield unexpected results, and our happy pair rushes off to eternity.
* * *
Filmed just over two hundred years after the Charles Perrault fairy tale it was based on was written, Georges Méliès’s 1899 six-minute four-scene Cendrillon is a gorgeous confection. Méliès starts by hitting all the familiar pumpkin-laden beats of this beloved fairy tale, and then baffles with hopping, tormenting, dancing clocks that test the boundaries of storybook and cinematic time.
Cinderella was a fitting subject for Méliès, a theater illusionist who had fallen in love with movies at the very first projected film screening, in 1895, and had promptly set out to create and capture a fantastical array of mermaids, astronauts, and haunted castles. Much of the world of early cinema that he joined and then shaped was built from moments, not stories. A man flexing his muscles. A ballerina pirouetting. Mark Cousins describes a 1900 Thomas Edison film of a couple kissing as “a little moment that everyone could understand.” The story of Cinderella is much more complex than that stolen moment – it requires scene changes, multiple characters, bodily transformations, sudden appearances, and verbal exchanges – but what is brilliant about it as a choice for a silent filmmaker is that its story, which has roots in ancient Greece and Tang Dynasty China and has been described as a global tale, is so familiar as to be nearly a universal signifier. You can tell it in myriad ways – in a few lines on a graph, as Kurt Vonnegut once did, charting Cinderella’s ascent from bad fortune to everlasting happiness, or in just a few scenes with no dialogue or title cards, as Méliès did in this film. Like a kissing couple, his Cinderella was a little narrative that everyone could understand.
In the opening scene of Méliès’s film, Cinderella is in a kitchen, raggedly dressed and messy haired. At the center of the set is a huge empty hearth in which a beautiful godmother appears. Before Cinderella’s wondering eyes, she magics a cat-sized mouse into a much larger dog-sized mouse and then into a man. He is flustered to find himself a coachman. Two more mice become two more men. They are all perfectly attired in stockings, coats, ruffles, wigs. The godmother proceeds to turn a large pumpkin into a much, much larger pumpkin, and then a glorious, gilded coach. Suddenly, Cinderella, too, is transformed: her long hair pinned up into a bun, lace dripping down her arms, a ribbon wider than her body adorning her waist. One of the men who used to be a mouse helps her up onto the chariot, where she fluffs her skirt and settles in. The footmen jump onto the back of the carriage, which slides out of frame. All at once, she is free.
In Perrault’s rags-to-riches tale, Cinderella is possessed with an abundance of grace, a quality he recommends to his readers in his closing moral. Like Jane Austen’s whirlwind final chapters, in which nearly everybody either gets tossed out of polite society or blissfully married, Perrault’s endings are so pat as to conflict with the complexities of his stories. Still, taking his happy resolution seriously, as Freudian scholar Bruno Bettelheim did, we might see how Cinderella, first, validates the pain that even well-treated children might sometimes feel when they find themselves not in control of their own lives while, second, asking them to sublimate their current miseries in anticipation of later rewards. Suffer now because things will improve later.
In his take on Perrault’s fairy tale, Méliès dramatizes the darker undercurrents of this fairy tale through an incredible relationship to filmed time. Among the many accolades attached to Méliès’s name are the “father of cinematic spectacle” and the “first special effects director.” He described an early stab at making his own movies on a street in Paris as follows:
A fault in the device I used early on . . . produced an unexpected effect. . . . It took a minute to release the film and restart the camera. During this moment passers-by, buses and carriages, had of course moved. When viewing the film, at the point where the fault occurred, I suddenly saw a . . . bus transformed into a hearse and men changed into women. I thus discovered the substitution trick . . . and two days later I performed the first metamorphoses from men into women, and the first sudden disappearances that were to be so successful in the early days.
Through a canny combination of chance and technique, time was suspended. Méliès loved big poufs of smoke and disappearances and trap doors and dissolves and put them to great effect in many of his movies, along with this new substitution trick, which served him especially well when adapting fairy tales. “Cinderella,” which is so full of magic and transformation and so ripe for fantasy and special effects, was a perfect vehicle for him, just as it was a perfect silent film: already familiar, requiring no words to communicate its story, yet magicked by Méliès, and preoccupied with the passage of time.
Before midnight ever struck at the ball, Cinderella’s days were already lived according to the grandfather clock that towered over her kitchen. It was there every time she labored over whatever menial task her stepmother has assigned to her. Its urgencies were her urgencies. Grandfather clocks like it first started appearing in Europe in the middle of the seventeenth century, about fifty years before Perrault wrote Cendrillon. In Saving Time (2023), Jenny Odell writes that “for most of human history there has been no need to divide the day into equal numerical units, much less to know the hour at any particular moment.” She roots our focus on measurable, equal hours in Christian canonical hours and in the capitalistic goals of punctuality, efficiency, and profit, a journey from monasteries to industrial spaces that can be traced from about the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century, or from Perrault’s fairy tale to Méliès’s take on it. If that arc is a bit pat – and Jonathan Crary’s 24/7 (2013) offers different take on it – it reflects the tight relationship between the tick-tock-tick-tock of a clock and the gears of capitalism, as also explored in, for example, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936). Melies’s Cendrillon is a whimsical forerunner of those films, a strange and wonderful flight of clock-bound fancy.
In Cinderella’s kitchen, when the godmother appears in the chimney, she steps toward the clock and stands in front of it. Its face floats above her head, a bit like a halo. Hovering over the kitchen as it does, the clock is a reminder to work hard and be patient. But layered under the godmother as it is, it suggests that Méliès has other plans for time in this film. Before the carriage departs and before the godmother disappears into the floor without a trace, she walks back into the room and points meaningfully to the clock. We’ve been warned: time is of the essence. When she arrives at the ball, Cinderella quickly parts the crowd, meets the king, and dances with the prince. Behind her, a clock reads almost twelve midnight. Rarely in this film, however, is a clock just a gentle ticking measure of time. Out of this one jumps a beleaguered bearded man, an altogether unexpected guest at the ball. He crouches, hops, and dances. He moves to the center of the room. He makes himself known; time makes itself known. When Cinderella finds herself suddenly in her old clothes with her hair unpinned, it is not because of some mysterious invisible force. It is because of the clock.
All of this – the transforming mice and pumpkin, the dance, the magical clock – was staged in Méliès’s iron-and-glass production space just outside of Paris, which had its own fraught relationship to cinematic time, as set up, acted, and filmed. In his Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin quotes an 1849 architecture journal as saying that “In place of thick walls whose solidity and resistance is diminished by a large number of apertures, our houses will be so filled with openings that they will appear diaphanous. These wide openings, furnished with thick glass, single- or double-paned, frosted or transparent, will transmit . . . a magical radiance.” Méliès’s iron-and-glass production space, which Brian R. Jacobson has described at great length, took this nineteenth-century trend to its turn-of-the-century extreme. His studio was amazingly contemporary. As Méliès described in an essay on the subject, by a combination of clear and frosted glass and movable shutters and canvases, daylight could be painstakingly manipulated, eliminating shadows and illuminating fantastical scenes. The space was diaphanous-at-will, and within it Méliès achieved a measure of control over the logistics of outdoor shooting, where sound, weather, and light had baffled him. The latter, however, continued to dog him. “The sun will not wait,” Méliès said, and also “the pitiless sun rises and sets.” The act of early filming was a magic trick that needed to be finished according to sunlight.
Imagine Méliès in his iron-and-glass studio, insisting that every crew member arrive promptly, rushing his cast through their paces, in order to film a movie about leaving the ball on time. He might feel like Father Time, a dancing embodiment of how we waste away minutes. It is appropriate, then, that Méliès casts himself as Father Time, both in the ballroom and in the following scene, which comes with a heaping serving of magical clocks. Back home, in a simple, large domestic space, Cinderella is frantic to find that a tall grandfather clock is unwilling to sit still at the side of the room. Rather, it wiggles toward her and hops up to a stool then to a table at the center of the room. Out jumps Méliès. He is athletic and bendy, crouching down low and hopping up. In an especially layered note in Arcades Project (quoting someone quoting someone else), Benjamin reports that “Baudelaire had removed the hands from his clock and written on the face: ‘It’s later than you think!’” If the clock itself is not enough, here is Father Time, come to show you that it is later than you think.
Time, though, does not forward in this scene. In a manner weirdly approximate to theories of relativity, the faster Méliès’s characters and objects whir about the room, the slower time passes. The film proceeds. The actors experience seconds ticking by. Méliès does. We do. But the clockfaces at the ball and in the bedroom read midnight. It is midnight for the two ladies who leap out to the right and left of Méliès. And for the two more after that. Méliès clangs a bell at regular increments, one second, two seconds, three seconds. The ladies become clocks and then ladies again, and then finally transform into a single clock, almost as big as the frame. But the hands on the clock don’t budge. Father Time appears at its center splaying out his legs, wiggling in his strange abstract dance, his head aligned with midnight, as if he is stuck at this time, like the clocks. As for Cinderella, she darts back and forth between the clocks that become people that become clocks, seemingly stuck inside of a timepiece. And then, as suddenly as he had arrived, Father Time is gone, and so are his lady-clock attendants. The character Dream tells a new acquaintance in Neil Gaiman’s Overture: “Time goes in so many ways. . . . It runs. Sometimes it even flies.” Here, it evaporates.
If Méliès was inspired to conjure up men and women and fairies and mice and pumpkins and clocks by the chance disappearance of a bus on the street, then this midnight interlude brackets the moment between appearance and disappearance. It lets us into something, a strange dream within a dream, only accessible by the very new combination of film and fantasy or very late nineteenth-century film technique and very late seventeenth-century narrative-making mechanics. The term for disappearing and re-appearing objects and people by stopping filming and starting it is “stopwatch.” You are literally stopping watching one thing and starting watching another – or, the film is stopping and then starting again with a different subject in view. It seems like it is about substituting one thing for another, and it is, but it is also about the mechanical possibilities of cinema. Méliès would use the same trick in a similar way five years later, when he made Le Reve d l’horloger, or The Clockmaker’s Dream, in which a bearded clockmaker – Méliès again – falls asleep in his workshop, surrounded by clocks who become ladies who become clocks. Méliès, who also liked to cast himself as kings, devils, or wizards, can be time and clock and clockmaker. He can remind us that it is later than we think, and that the sun rises and sets. At the same time, he can deploy film to capture, extend, and manipulate moments in time. To demonstrate urgency then offer escape.
In the case of this fairy tale as for some of his others, Perrault inserted a second moral, less on the nose than his praise of good grace and patience:
You have a great advantage, I admit
If you receive from Heaven at your birth
Good breeding, courage, sense, a ready wit,
And other things of comparable worth;
But that is not enough, unless you know
How best to use such precious gifts: you need
A godfather or godmother to show
What you must do in order to succeed.
There is the take on Cinderella where we ask our heroine to wait out her terrible circumstances, a moral that encourages us to work all day according to the clock for later reward, a perfect capitalistic dictum. But then there is this other interpretation – that is all about luck, coincidence, and blessings. A moment seemingly only tied to the clock can be a moment away from it. Magical substitutions yield unexpected results, and our happy pair rushes off to eternity.
When Kurt Vonnegut graphed Cinderella onto axes of time and fortune, he had Cinderella rise and rise into a good fortune so complete that it ran off his chart. He marked this trajectory with a small infinity sign at the peak of his graph. In her coy verse take on the fairy tale, Anne Sexton wrote:
Cinderella and the prince
lived, they say, happily ever after
like two dolls in a museum case
never bothered by diapers or dust,
never arguing over the timing of an egg,
never telling the same story twice,
never getting a middle-aged spread,
their darling smiles pasted on for eternity.
Graphs and boiled eggs work at too small a scale; infinity or eternity are the only useful markers for this story. The clocks control the day, and then they do not. In Cendrillon, when Time and his attendants Time, Time, Time, Time, and Time vanish, it is a relief, a nightmare puffed away in a cloud of illusionist’s smoke. Cinderella goes to the door, opens it, and lets in the prince, who promptly fails to fit the glass slipper he has brought with him onto the stepsisters’ feet, and succeeds on Cinderella’s. He is delighted. She is a lady again. In the last shot of the film, after a swift wedding in a church, the background behind a gathering of revelers is lifted to reveal an unexpected arrangement: the prince, Cinderella, lady attendants, and ministering over them all, with a halo and wand, the godmother.
Méliès’s film is an answer to a question posed both by Perrault’s fairy tale and by film as a nascent medium: how, without words, in just a few scenes, through only set décor, illusionist’s flourishes, gestures and blocking, to dramatize a story in which a happily ever after transports us out of the world of clock time. With his show-offy clocks, Méliès drew attention to the unfolding of different kinds of time – the length of the film in front of us, the time it took to make it, the ticking away of minutes, the suspension of clock time, and the arrival of a kind of eternity – all while filming in a studio as glassy as Cinderella’s lost slipper.
Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2002.
Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. Vintage, 2010.
Bordwell, David. On the History of Film Style. Harvard University Press, 1998.
Cendrillon. Directed by Georges Méliès, 1899.
Cousins, Mark. The Story of Film (Revised Edition). Rizzoli, 2020.
Crary, Jonathan. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. Verso, 2014.
Gaiman, Neil. The Sandman: Overture. National Geographic Books, 2016.
Jacobson, Brian. Studios before the System: Architecture, Technology, and the Emergence of Cinematic Space. Columbia University Press, 2015.
Martin, Michelle H. “Cinderella: Ancient Story, Global Tale.” Seattle Opera Blog, https://www.seattleoperablog.com/2019/10/cinderella-ancient-story-global-tale.html.
Méliès, Georges, and Jon Spira. The Long-Lost Autobiography of Georges Méliès, Father of Sci-Fi and Fantasy Cinema. Jon Spira, 2019.
Metropolis. Directed by Fritz Lang, Parufamet, 1927.
Modern Times. Directed by Charlie Chaplin, United Artists, 1936.
Odell, Jenny. Saving Time: Discovering a Life beyond the Clock. Random House, 2023.
Perrault, Charles. The Complete Fairy Tales. Translated by Christopher Betts, Oxford University Press, 2018.
Le Reve d l’horloger. Directed by Georges Méliès, 1904.
Sexton, Anne. Anne Sexton: The Complete Poems. Mariner Books, 1999.
Tatar, Maria. The Classic Fairy Tales: Texts, Criticism. W. W. Norton, 2017.
Vonnegut, Kurt. A Man without a Country. Random House Publishing Group, 2017.
Worley, Alec. Empires of the Imagination: A Critical Survey of Fantasy Cinema from Georges Melies to The Lord of the Rings. McFarland, 2005.
