a starter pack featuring twenty pairs of identical twins in the world of cinema • Journal • A Magazine • , Life in canada

Film gimmickry, like film grammar in general, has its roots in the silent period, when the possibilities of the new medium of cinema were being discovered in real time. In these exciting early decades, the emerging art of special effects wowed audiences, showing them things they had never seen before. One of those impossible tricks was watching an actor talk to themselves—or kiss themselves, as Mary Pickford did playing a mother and her son in 1921’s Little Lord Fauntleroy—an effect accomplished through the use of a technique known as double exposure.

Double exposures were invented in still photography, then developed for motion pictures: basically, a strip of film is shot twice, with a matte covering one side and then on the other to block off the part of the frame that’s not being exposed. When the complete film is developed, the same person appears on both sides of the screen. Everything else has to remain exactly the same—if the camera moves even a millimeter between takes, the final image won’t line up correctly. But skilled silent-era technicians were able to accomplish it seamlessly, and single actors were cast in multiple roles as early as 1912, when George Lessey portrayed the title characters in The Corsican Brothers, a short produced by Thomas Edison’s company.

There are other, less technical ways of creating twin illusions in movies; sometimes, it can be as basic as clever framing and a body double in a wig. But, on the whole, the history of dual roles is a history of special effects. Optical printing—and, later, digital compositing—expanded what was possible, but variations on the double-exposure technique are still used to accomplish miraculous shots in films like the newly released Sinners, in which Michael B. Jordan plays twin brothers who uncover a terrifying secret in the Jim Crow-era South.