For about as long as cinema has existed, people have been blowing shit up and capturing it on camera, but the medium’s earliest example of pyrotechnics would leave Michael Bay sneering in disapproval and contempt.
Not that it would have been reasonable to expect the earliest proponents of the new-fangled celluloid technology to set about creating period-accurate Bayhem. There’s even sleight-of-hand at play in an early trick film that used post-production subterfuge for comedic effect.
Cecil Hepworth’s 1900 short Explosion of a Motor Car only runs for less than two minutes, but it more than lives up to its title. As can no doubt be easily inferred from its moniker, the 105-second film does indeed focus entirely on a motor car blowing up, using the evisceration of an unwitting couple as a means for tickling the funny bone of audiences everywhere.
A car gradually trundles towards the camera along a dusty road, only to suddenly go up in a puff of smoke and debris. Sure, the editing techniques are hardly subtle when appraised through the modern lens of the 21st century, but at the time, it no doubt left viewers roaring in the aisles.
An unfortunate police officer appears on the scene to investigate the grisly discovery, only to be showered in a hail of body parts. It sounds like it has the makings of a stomach-churning horror, but it’s infinitely more light-hearted in execution despite the fact the disembodied heads of the victims don’t end up returning to earth.
Clearly made of the sternest stuff, the policeman neatly assembles the assorted remains of the tragic victims into neat piles before they’ve even finished plummeting back down to the hard and unforgiving ground because nothing screams ‘frivolous comedy’ like piecing together a crime scene in the aftermath of a car bombing.
As mentioned, Explosion of a Motor Car set its stall out from the title, and on that front, it does not disappoint. The trick photography was lifted right from the Georges Méliès school of technological pioneering, and as clunky as the jump cut appears, defying the laws of nature and physics in the name of entertaining audiences wasn’t exactly a common practice at the time.
Bay may have built his career on the back of destroying as much as he possibly can with a well-placed detonation or ten, while Christopher Nolan had done much the same on increasingly bigger scales across his own filmography. However, they wouldn’t have been able to reach those smouldering heights in the first place if it wasn’t for Hepworth, some trick photography, a game member of local law enforcement, and a captive audience quite literally blown away by something the likes of which they’d never seen before.