From Pel-Thenhior to Leivanin:
A Brief History of Cinema

CHAPTER ONE: THE CAL’OPERANEISEI

Until the advent of sound, film-making was not truly its own art form. It was an extension of photography, an ambitious second son who could certainly dream of inheriting his brother’s promised title, but never dared take the necessary action. It was an intention, not an experience. It was nascent.

The absence of sound did not go unnoticed. From the day that The Airman’s Wife (8 E’has VII) first appeared on screen, reviewers noted several points at which their minds reached for noises which never emerged, from the thunderous turning of an airship engine to the smack of a child’s jumping-rope across brick pavements. “When Merrem Norezho discovers her husband in chains,” wrote the Arts and Culture columnist for the Amalo Arbiter, “one can practically hear her cry of anguish.”

At the time, these passing comments amounted to very little; the success of The Airman’s Wife was more than enough to overshadow what was, ultimately, praise for director Odiret Veschar’s use of the medium. What they reveal to us, however, is expectation. Upon witnessing the on-screen figure part their lips in speech, the viewer anticipates sound. To not receive the expected result is a direct breach of our contract with reality; action, reaction. As a temporal artform, film-making deals in the currency of reaction, and for the first nine years of its life, it could trade in none.

Recall that heavy-trod adage which states that necessity begets invention, so long as the required manpower remains available. In the case of the early Amaleise film-making industry, there was no shortage of manpower. Following the War for Independence, the opera industry was facing insolvency. Opera is, and always has been, an expensive mode of entertainment. Performers and stage-workers require payment for as long as the show goes on, and even in the days before the secession of Thu-Athamar, these performances were not possible without the assistance of wealthy patrons to absorb the initial costs. As the now independent Thu-Athamar got her feet back under her, the opera industry suffered from a surfeit of workers and a lack of paychecks to meet them with.

The involvement of operaneisei in the film-making industry had established itself well before The Airman’s Wife, with select short films playing in opera houses prior to the existence of stages intended for the projektor alone. But then the cinema arrived, absorbing the audiences for its own purposes and leaving the operaneisei without. The first and perhaps most obvious solution was that the opera singers could perform hand-tailored scores for the films. This had worked for them back when it was their stages that served as cinema; it did not, however, resolve the singers requiring payment for every night that they performed.

It is at this point that the first of our notable contributors comes into play. Born in Barizhan to an unwed mother, Iäna Pel-Thenhior first came to Amalo at three years old. A natural musician, Pel-Thenhior’s dedication to opera began as a child in the chorus. Once he hit adolescence, he retired from singing, and instead turned his attention to administration. He served as the director of the Vermilion Opera during the War for Independence and, arguably, held primary responsibility for its continued relevance during the reigns of Edrehasivars VII and VIII.

It was Pel-Thenhior who decided that the Vermilion would host short films on evenings where the opera did not perform. The film suites that he chose were curated towards his own taste, and many of the early Amaleise filmmakers owe their artistic sensibilities to the simple fact that they happened to attend a film night at the Vermilion.

Once feature films became the standard, Pel-Thenhior continued to involve himself (and his employees) by renting out the opera house as a filming set. The Vermilion, with its large stage and impressive lights, pleased the film-makers greatly. Recognising the advantage he held, Pel-Thenhior leveraged access to his stage in order to convince film-makers to hire both cast and crew from the Vermilion’s own pool.

For the most part, Pel-Thenhior did not advertise his involvement with the Amaleise film-makers in the silent era. As a result, it is entirely possible that a great deal of his contributions to the artform have gone, and will continue to go, unrecognised. This is impossible in the case of the so-called ‘Pel-Thenhior lens’. Initially developed for Pel-Thenhior’s Opera The Grief of Stones, the purpose of the lens was to allow the Vermilion’s ghost light to mimic the central bulb of a lighthouse.

Noting the intense degree of light that the film kameras required, Pel-Thenhior re-designed the lens to even further amplify the light that could be reflected from the source. This significantly cut the amount of gas required to keep a light running for the duration of a film shoot, a precaution that, given the infamous flammability of film stock, proved essential to the industry. Though the designer himself wished them to be called calo’merroi (lit. ‘ladies of light’) for the silhouette created by the slim stand, this nomenclature ultimately would not stick. According to legend, the Pel-Thenhior lens is named for the shadow cast by its large head—a legend later repeated by the man himself.

The usefulness of the Pel-Thenhior lens cannot be overstated. To this day, it remains a staple of most film sets. His work, however, was far from finished; encouraged by his recent success, Mer Pel-Thenhior set about solving the conundrum that was simultaneous sound. All the while, mere city-blocks away, a pair of young ladies stood on the verge of a solution.

 

As the eldest daughter of the Halomekheda, Doreno Halomekhed’s path was all but set in stone. She spent the last years of her childhood assisting in the operation of her family’s many calazhoänin. Unlike her siblings, who focused more on advertisement and collecting the profits from the coin-pan, Doreno had a special knack for knowing when a calazhoän was soon to break down. From the “misplaced whirring” of an off-balance projektor to the “dreadful click-click-click” of a nearly dislodged reel, Doreno’s remarkably sensitive hearing granted her an insight into the inner workings of the calazhoänin that others simply lacked. Her family’s investment in calazhoänin would extend long past the War for Independence. When her father returned from the front lines, he made the auspicious decision to merge the Halomekhedeise calazhoänin business with that of the Denechada. The Denechar-Halomekhed dachencalazhoän was one of the earliest of its kind, and easily one of the most successful. Its profits would not only keep both families well-fed, but would soon be put towards the founding of the Silkmarket Cinema Stage, the very theater at which The Airman’s Wife debuted.

As the family’s business grew, so did Halomekhed’s technical abilities. She dedicated much of her adolescence to fixing and upgrading the projektor, and is likely the primary reason for the Denechar-Halomekhed dachencalazhoän’s famed consistency. Her loyalty would not, however, be rewarded. Rather than moving her to the apartments above the Silkmarket Cinema Stage along with the rest of the family, her father ordered her to remain at the dachencalazhoän, where she took up residence in the back rooms. It was his intention to marry her to the eldest son of Mer Denechar and solidify their business relationship; the Denechada had not invested nearly as much into Silkmarket as the Halomekheda, and therefore did not reap the same rewards. Mer Halomekhed could sense his business partner’s resentment brewing. Like many businessmen before him, he weighed his daughter as the lesser sacrifice.

Unfortunately for her father, however, Doreno Halomekhed was already married to her work. She remained in the Denechar-Halomekhed, as she would for the rest of her living days, but never married–not to the eldest Denechar boy, not to anyone.

The only company she regularly kept was that of Tareän Ranezho (née Tolemin), whose husband owned the hardware and cutlery shop down the street. Formerly asheno, Merrem Ranezho had a particular eye for the more finicky workings of contemporary airship designs, from in-ship pneumatics to voicepipes. When the aftermath of an eisonsar explosion took her dominant arm, she was forced to retire from airship work. She was quickly married to a friend of her father’s, a man who valued his young wife for her ability to watch the store on alternate weekdays.

Halomekhed and Ranezho first met on opposite ends of Mer Ranezh’s front counter. Soon, Ranezho would become a regular fixture at the dachencalazhoän, tinkering away with Halomekhed well into the evening. Together, they took full advantage of the nightly audiences–smaller since the arrival of Cinema Stages but still present–to test both inventions and improvements. Some of their notable achievements include an early attempt at using multiple projektors, which did improve the clarity of the image by a small margin, the implementation of treadle drives, both as a facilitator for the take-up process and as a more accessible wheel drive for Merrem Ranezho, and a system of hidden pipes which, when they worked, created a terrible rumbling sensation beneath the seats.

Not every experiment was successful, but success was not necessarily the aim. Between the success of Halomekhed’s family and the steadiness of Mer Ranezh’s business, the women were able to engage directly in one another’s creativity without fear of failure. And it worked; in the current day, we do not remember them for their failures, but instead for the one success that washes away all else.

 

In the autumn of 15 E’has VII, Iäna Pel-Thenhior purchased a ticket to see a film known as Unending Circus at the Denechar-Halomekhed dachencalazhoän. Though it was still early in the season, the aching winds of a brutal winter snapped at Amalo’s heels. Perhaps Pel-Thenhior had heard of Ranezho and Halomekhed’s newest creation; perhaps he simply wished to escape from the cold. Whatever his purpose was that day, he would soon find himself spirited down a greater path.

Unending Circus was not a film by any established standards. Rather, it was a collection of short films that had been re-edited to tell a singular narrative. The central plot is a rather simple love story: the female acrobat must perform during the day, but the male acrobat performs only at night, a rule that appears to be enforced by the man who owns the circus itself. Inexplicably, day and night are not separate times, but rather separate places which exist on either side of a great window.

Over the course of the film, which is mostly just a mixture of street performer films with the subjects cut-and-pasted into other settings, the day circus and the night circus slowly meld into a singular setting. In the final performance, a vague and blurry trapeze act, the acrobats swing into the window at the same time, thus breaking the barrier between circuses. The circus owner, apparently defeated, storms off into a crack in the facade and is presumably never heard from again.

The film itself, unfortunately, is not one of Ranezho and Halomekhed’s successes. The illusion of each separate element existing within the same space is broken within the first five minutes and never truly mends itself. In truth, it is more of a great moving collage than it is a proper film. Even at the emotional climax of the story, when the two acrobats finally embrace after who-knows-how-long spent apart, it is exceedingly clear that the actors who fall into one another’s arms are very much not the acrobats seen mere moments before.

What truly made Unending Circus impressive was its presentation within the dachencalazhoän. The final scene is set to the Maidens’ Duet from The Castle of Shorivee. and appears to be sung by a pair of operaneisoi, one from Day and one from Night. On the night that Pel-Thenhior saw it, the song was piped in from the basement via one of Merrem Ranezho’s many systems of tubes, filling the entire room with a version of Maidens’ Duet that became at once both enthralled and haunted with its odd, distant timbre. By the time the lights returned, Pel-Thenhior had already stormed into the projektor room, where he began to interrogate a somewhat startled Halomekhed.

The “trick” of Unending Circus was both startlingly simple and discouragingly complex. The basement phonograph existed at one end of a long series of switches. The receiving reel, once filled to a certain mark, would trigger the first of these switches, a process which took an entire minute of runtime to complete. It was the final switch which released a specialised spring-loaded barrier within the phonograph, allowing the stylus to move across the cylinder. The phonograph’s turning mechanism was turned by the same treadle as the projektor, ensuring both to move at the same speed.

For as replicable as each individual section may have been, the sheer scale that this system required was, perhaps, overwhelming. It could not, for example, be removed from the dachencalazhoän and reassembled elsewhere, as the sound-pipes, treadle-pulley, and switch-line were all designed specifically around the distance from the theater to the basement. Additionally, it did not always work as planned; a series of mirrors was used to project a smaller, blurrier instance of the film onto a bedsheet below, where Ranezho sat at the ready. Should any of the switches fail to trigger, she would manually release the stylus at the exact moment that the operaneiso from Day adjusted the third rose on her neckline.

For a larger venue, such as the Vermilion or even the stage at Silkmarket, this degree of fallibility was unacceptable. Pel-Thenhior understood this. He would therefore present them not with promises of riches or opportunity, but the simple offer of introducing them to his opera singers. If Unending Circus represented what the women could achieve with mere scraps, then what might an array of passionate operaneisei inspire them to create? Thus began the creative partnership between the Denechar-Halomekhed dachencalazhoän and the Vermilion Opera.

 

Over the course of the next year, developments on the simultaneous sound system followed in a rapid, rarely stable fashion. Still accustomed to their cloistered lifestyle, Ranezho and Halomekhed did not always communicate the current state of a given experiment with their collaborators. There was, for example, the limited debut of The Cavalier (16 E’has VII), which debuted not only the thirty minute medley adaptation of the opera The Cavaliers of Zhaö, but also the very first use of amplifying diaphragms within Ranezho’s pipe systems. Notably, none of the limited audience were prepared for—or even aware of—the way these new additions would physically shake the dachencalazhoän walls.

Though progress did continue apace, the rocky state of communications between the partnership of Ranezho and Halomekhed and their associates at the Vermilion posed a new challenge for Pel-Thenhior. In the world of opera, he possessed both the reputation and authority to steer the great ship Vermilion as he saw fit. In the newer, stranger waters of cinema, however, whatever command he held existed only as an extension of his successes in the other medium. If he had any interest in the quickly-gestating artform, he would have to treat it as its own beast to tame.

It is perhaps for that reason that Pel-Thenhior brought Stanet Delara to the maiden screening of Call Her Seleno, a contemporary interpretation of the opera of the same name. Though the circumstances of how Delara and Pel-Thenhior met are unclear, it is unlikely that Pel-Thenhior was entirely honest about the nature of their association; Delara was, for lack of more polite description, a scion of the local procurers’ guild. Most of his money was made in dealing cards, an evergreen pursuit in Amalo. His passion, however, lay in storytelling.

Delara, having been raised in and around the lush salons of the industry’s respectable craftswomen, began his fascination with opera in boyhood. Even as the son of a successful practitioner, however, he could rarely afford the price of tickets, and while his mother could regularly attend at her patrons’ goodwill, Delara himself was (quite understandably) not permitted to join her. To Delara, the cinema presented to him an opportunity to right this grievous wrong—opera for the son of every mother, opera for all.

As far as material for adaptation goes, The Hotel Hanaveise is by no means an unwise choice. In the stage version, the story unfolds in the lobby of the eponymous hotel, with the other three locations (the widow’s room, the young dach’osmer’s room, and the in-hotel teahouse) taking place on the smaller stages that are nested within the set. With only three locations to concern oneself with, more time and money could be put towards the capturing of both visual and aural materials.

Whatever method it was that Delara utilised in presenting this argument to Ranezho and Halomekhed, they clearly found his reasoning sound. Within a month, all roles were cast and all crew hired. Strangely, none of the operaneisei involved in Hotel’s production were, as one might expect, on loan from the Vermilion. Allegedly, Pel-Thenhior would not permit his singers to adhere to the gruelling schedule that came of rehearsing for both stage and screen. This was very much in spite of the fact that he himself was assigned to such a schedule.

The theatrical release of The Hotel Hanaveise arrived at the Silkmarket Cinema Stage in the early winter of 17 E’has VII, just over two years after the screening of Unending Circus that introduced Vermilion and dachencalazhoän. Reception to the film was, at first, remarkably lukewarm. According to a number of Silkmarket’s postscreening response forms, many guests did not truly believe that the sounds they heard were prerecorded and played simultaneously. It was not until the first wave of re-attendance—spurred by a newspaper interview in which Pel-Thenhior offered a cash prize for anyone who could deliver conclusive proof that he was simply hiding his opera singers behind the screen—that Hotel began to receive acclaim.

 

Though this was only one of an uncountable number of films for which Pel-Thenhior played midwife, it was the very first in which he would actually be credited as Producer. He would continue to work with Ranezho and Halomekhed until their retirement some two decades later and, even past that point, would bring one or both in for consultation.

His friendship with Delara continued, on and off, until Delara’s death in 19 E’has VIII, more than a decade before Pel-Thenhior’s own. Their creative partnership, though much rockier, would have the both of them working on one another’s films for—as Delara’s favoured Assistant Director would put it—“As long as the two can stand one another.” Pel-Thenhior would also go on to mentor the youngest Delara brother, Paviret, in the projects that approached his own adaptation of The Dream of the Empress Corivero (25 E’has VII).

In all creative industries, there exists a rare and invaluable group of individuals whose contributions go far beyond what any given work could accomplish. Art is more than just the artist; it is the distributor, the editor, the man who brought muse and maker together. Even rarer are those who play both parts. It is impossible to say how long it would have taken for sound to emerge without Pel-Thenhior’s enthusiastic interference. What can be said, however, is that films were not truly films until he encouraged their makers forwards.