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NEXT year is not only the centenary of the cinema but of a novel which shaped the future of the cinema, HG Wells's The Time Machine. Shortly after publication, Wells was approached by the British pioneer film-maker Robert Paul, who proposed not a mere adaptation of the literary property to the screen but the invention of a new medium for entertainment and education, using the mechanisms of the cinema and the images of the novel.
"My invention," Paul wrote in his patent application, "consists of a novel form of exhibition whereby the spectators have presented to their view scenes which are supposed to occur in the future or past, while they are given the sensation of voyaging upon a machine through time." Not content merely to show audiences motion pictures, then a startling marvel in itself, Paul proposed to put them on a platform which pitched like a fast-moving vehicle. Paul and Wells, of course, never realised their ideas, but the Disneyworld Back To The Future ride seems to replicate exactly their proposed device.
Before Wells, literary time travel was accomplished by contrivances like the blow to the head that sends Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee to Camelot. After The Time Machine, pseudo-scientific devices became the norm for such trips to past or future. As the cinema developed, it was often viewed as a kind of time machine: early historical films, from D W Griffith's Prehistoric mini-epic Man's Genesis to the Italian spectacle Cabiria, sold themselves on their "authenticity", affording audiences a "window into the past".
Actual time travel in films was first used as a mainly comic device to get contemporary funnymen into a past where they could poke fun at parodied historical characters. A rare trip to the future on these lines occurs in Just Imagine, a 1930 musical comedy set in 1980, where El Brendel borrows another Wells device and wakes up after years in suspended animation (one of the few almost credible time travel methods, used also by Buck Rogers and Mel Gibson in Forever Young), to find a world of flying machines and skyscrapers where Prohibition is still in force and names are replaced by numbers. The other strain of time travel that crops up in films made before the...