LECTURE II: The Prehistory of Documentary Film
So…where do documentary films begin?
The invention of the movies is the culmination of

several centuries of toys, gizmos, whirly gigs meant largely
to amuse the viewer with the illusion of people, animals,
everyday things in motion.

all manners of moving gewgaws and whirlygigs aimed at
tricking the eye.
In the mid to late 19th century, inventors and enterprising tinkers
upped the ante in the attempt to capture images of the real
world and make them come alive.
The real history of the movies may be said to have started with a
completely whacked out Brit expatriate named Eadweard
Muybridge.
1878 – Palo Alto: Stanford’s horse
Persistence of vision
SHOW DOG
Thomas Edison.
William Dickson
A year before Muybridge's experiments in Palo Alto, Edison
unveiled another, perhaps more startling invention--the
phonograph.

Edison had met with both Muybridge in the late 1880's…the
potential of "moving pictures" whetted his inventor and
businessman's appetite.
In an attempt to protect his future, he filed a patent on October 17,
1888, describing his ideas for a device that would "do for the eye
what the phonograph does for the ear.". He called it a
"Kinetoscope," using the Greek words "kineto" meaning "movement"
and "scopos" meaning "to watch."
Although the project interested Edison, his main interest in the
invention seems to have been to provide visual accompanyment to
his phonograph.
Edison's motion picture had more than a few shortcoming

Edison's camera was a monsterously huge contraption…the
camera--which had to remain fixed due to its size and
weight--was situated in a kind of rambling lean-to studio in
West Orange New Jersey, which was nick-named THE
BLACK MARIA.

Filming was dependent on natural sunlight and the subjects
of the film had to be brought in front of the camera, filmed at
a fixed distance from the camera against a dark backdrop,
devoid of context.
Edison's earliest films were not projected for audiences at all…:
they were initially produced and marketed as a single-viewer peep
show … carnivals, midways, nickelodeons…
In general, Edison showed only passing interest in the invention…at
least not early on..
The real breakthroughs were happening across the Atlantic in
France.
SHOW DAWN OF THE EYE CLIP
Audiences were dumbfounded...
This most definitely was NOT the kind of theatrical spectacle most
audiences of the day were used to…these were images that captured
life and hurled them at the audience.
When a similar showing was held the following year that featured a a
moving image of a train entering the railroad station in the town of
Ciotat, members of the audience reportedly cowered in fear, ran for
the back of the café, or fled into the street in terror.
Maxim Gorky reporting on the exhibition:
"Last nite I was in the kingdom of shadows - it is terrifying to
see, but it is the movement of shadows. Suddenly something
clicks, everything vanishes and a train appears on the screen.
It speeds straight at you -- Watch out! It seems as though it will
plunge into the darkness in which you sit, turning you into a
ripped sack of lacerated flesh and broken fragments this hall
and building, so full of women, wine, music, and vice.
Discuss: Does this huge cognitive revolution have any
counterpart today…?
Is anything as transformative human perception and culture?
Can anyone raised in the past century put yourself in the place
of these first movie audiences? Or are we too worked over…
What part of the experience would fascinate you the most?
 Unlike Edisons elephant of a camera, Lumiere's camera, which he
called the "Cinematographe" weighed only 16 lbs-- less than
1/100th the weight of the Edison camera.
 It was powered by a hand-crank (unlike edison's electrically-driven
contraption) and could easily be carried into the streets.
 Just as significant was the fact that the camera not only shoot the
filmed but also developed and projected it--unlike Edison's peep
show…
If you were the inventor of the first portable camera…with
no film vocabulary, no movie-going and little movie-making
experience, What would you film? How would you film it?
What do home movie enthusiasts film?
The Lumieres and other early filmmakers inevitably turned to one of
several subjects: perhaps the most common was life on the street.
Both brothers rejected the theatre as a model for motion pictures.
Instead, their express interest was in capturing "Vie sur le vif" -- life
being lived…early films did just that: babies being fed; trains coming
and going; workmen working, workers leaving a factory. The
Lumieres their called short pieces (usually no longer than a minute)
ACTUALITIES…
The Lumieres, Edison, other citizens of the late 19th century, had
certainly been exposed to prevailing trends in the arts. One of
movement which had currency at this time in both literature and
visual arts was -- Realism.
Realism attempted

to create objective representation of the world based on
impartial observation of contemporary life…

it sought to portray both the surface look of a subject and the
psychological underpinnings beneath this surface.

Realism was consciously democratic, including in its subjectmatter and audience activities and social classes previously
considered unworthy of representation in high art
This artistic trend toward recording the visible facts of everyday life,
combined with the newness and technological limits of the new
moving picture medium, undoubtedly shaped the subject matter of
the Lumieres earliest films.
The notion that film could be shaped and used to tell a story or
to create a narrative would be a good twenty years in coming.
................
If these were perfectly ordinary things--things that could be seen
everyday on the street--what were early audiences reacting to so
enthusiastically… ???

fidelity of the images to their subject (even more so than
photography and certainly more so than painting): direct
evidence of what the camera saw…

The novelty of motion itself held the audience in thrall

A fascination with the surface look of the world.
The voice of the filmmaker--the filmmakers point of view,
shaping of the images--didn't have to be present to enthrall
audiences at this point .
These images seem to provide an unprecedented window
into the real/historical world…a revelation and sense of
seeing things previously obscured or at least overlooked.
SHOW LUMIERE FIRST FILMS (62 min)
Watch these very closely…
QUESTIONS:

Are these films really straight reportage…or do they bear
glimmerings of a "voice" and style shaped by the filmmaker?

Any glimmerings of feature films or narrative films? (i.e. film
doing something more than reporting?)