From the very birth of the moving picture in the late 19th century, the revolutionary medium has had an inherent fascination with its own creation. Like the mise en abyme or dream within a dream, the movie often seems to hold up a tilted mirror to its own feats of illusion, to enchant its audience while concealing its optical legerdemain. The movie, in other words, has always been in love with itself.
In the Lumière brothers’ short Workers Leaving the Factory (1895), considered by many historians to be the first cinematographic film recording, the onscreen laborers are actually leaving their jobs at the Lumières’ factory, where photographic plates were produced and developed. So the short film becomes an inward-looking glimpse of the filmmaking process at its birth—and also, simultaneously, the first meta film. During the subsequent century, filmmakers returned to this reflexive mode of cinema for a variety of reasons, either to examine their artistic process, explore formal innovations, expose some horrible secret, or, perhaps most often, satirize the ivory-tower industry itself.
On the occasion of Vogue World: Hollywood at Paramount Studios—the location of classic films from Citizen Kane and Double Indemnity to The Godfather and Chinatown—Vogue has put together a list of standout movies about movies and the movie industry. In their copious meta imagery, each of these selections captures something particular and unique about the era during which they were made while also affirming a more universal message about the medium: that all movies are about, in some way or another, the mystery of moviemaking.
The Magic Lantern (1903) and Hugo (2011)
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