Becoming attractions
Now you see it... a historic horror film poster has done a disappearing act at a hammer house in downtown Dallas for £147,000, writes John Vincent.
To this day, I can recall sitting before the 12-inch screen of my parents’ black and white television and watching transfixed as a man, laughing maniacally, removes the bandages from his face followed by his clothes to reveal he is completely invisible. His tormentors can only gape in astonishment as he flees.
The scene which gave me nightmares was from a TV adaptation of the 1933 science fiction film The Invisible Man, based on the 1897 novel by HG Wells and starring Claude Rains and Gloria Stuart.
Now one of only a handful of surviving posters for the movie classic has fetched £147,000 at Heritage Auctions in Dallas, Texas, in a sale which coincided with the digital release of a remake starring Elisabeth Moss.
For those unfamiliar with Wells’ book and the 1933 film, it featured Dr Jack Griffin, a chemist who discovered the secret of invisibility while conducting a series of tests involving an obscure drug. Rains portrayed his role mostly only as a disembodied voice and is shown clearly for just a brief time at the end of the film. In 2008, The Invisible Man was selected for the United States National Film Registry as being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant”.
The sale in America follows that at a Sotheby’s online-only auction of the 1896 poster Cinématographe Lumière for £160,000, against an estimate of £40,000£60,000. The ultimate collector’s poster was designed by French artist Henri Brispot in 1896 to promote the first film to be screened in public: a series of short clips about everyday life in France, created by the Lumière brothers Louis and Auguste.
The event – the first in the history of cinema – occurred on December 28, 1895, in the Salon Indien of the Grand Café in Paris and was a humble affair, lasting 20 minutes and with an audience of fewer than 30 people.
The screening showed a selection of the Louis Lumière shorts, each lasting no more than a minute. Some people were suspicious, others shocked by the experience. When the lights went down, one woman shrieked in terror and there was widespread talk of magic and trickery, as though the moving images were the ruse of a clever conjurer.
But within a few days the idea had caught on and in the first two days of 1896 up to 2,500 spectators paid one franc each to see Lumière’s moving images. Brispot’s promotional poster depicting a throng of people waiting to enter the Salon Indien was printed and pasted onto walls in Paris. Within a few months, Lumière cinemas had opened in all major international cities and screenings were held for most heads of state, kings, queens and even the Tsar and
Tsarina of Russia.