Georges Méliès's was often at his best when lampooning contemporary scientific inventions, ideas and fiction--things that by today, if not by then, have become reality. He took man to the Moon ("A Trip to the Moon", 1902), to the North Pole via a hodgepodge helicopter plane ("The Conquest of the Pole", 1912), undersea in a submarine ("Under the Seas", 1907), let them drive those newfangled automobiles ("An Adventurous Automobile Trip", 1905), terrorized them with Zeppelins ("The Inventor Crazybrains and His Wonderful Airship", 1907), took them just about everywhere in "The Impossible Voyage" (1904) and built a railroad tunnel through the English Channel ("Tunnelling the English Channel", 1907). In "Long Distance Wireless Photography" (which is a misleading translated title), Méliès demonstrated an intentionally-laughable invention for transmitting moving images to a screen--a kind of television.
This is an otherwise routine single shot-scene trick film for Méliès, which can be generally amusing by itself, but I find the lampooning of invention especially interesting here. Reportedly, there were already ideas around this time for television-like contraptions. Allan Archibald Campbell-Swinton, for one, described a television method in the scientific journal "Nature" the same year that Méliès made this film. But, of course, no one had conjured quite as fantastical a version as the cinema magician did here.
In the film, some supposed electric machinery is shown off before a photograph or painting of three women is used to produce moving pictures of those women on a screen. Next, a woman is photographed and her noticeably unsynchronized, superimposed self appears "live" on the black flat. Finally, "live" head close-ups of the elderly guests are projected. A knockabout finale is completed after the man's face is transmitted as some kind of grotesque monkey-looking clown. Thusly, this remote electromechanical TV system doesn't merely transmit and broadcast moving pictures, it does so with an image projector and has the ability to both create movement from still images and to mischievously transform and distort images.
Méliès had previously made similar self-referential films "The Mysterious Portrait" (Le portrait mystérieux) (1899) and "The Magic Lantern" (La lanterne magique) (1903), which were also described in terms of media for still images, but the films obviously contained moving images within the outer moving images of the film proper. Whereas those films-within-films looked at the predecessors of motion pictures--photography and the magic lantern--this one looked to the future of movies: television. Its prank-to-punitive retribution comedy structure also resembles that of "The Countryman and the Cinematograph" (1901), among other early films to follow this popular formula. Yet, unlike these earlier films, this one doesn't only reveal cinema's great trick to be reproducing or mirroring life; the greatest trick is the ability to distort reality and invent something new.
