Approaches to understanding the
moment of cinema’s birth
1. THE CINEMA IMAGE
the most basic technical features
2. PREHISTORY
Proto-cinematic technologies -fooling the eye
3. SPECTATORS
- describing the modern subject
- how life in modern times was thought to impact
human experience
4. EXHBITION
- how early films were watched
5. FILMS Watching at the films themselves
main features of the
CINEMATIC IMAGE:
1.
2.
3.
4.
Illusion of motion
Produces Depth - 2D image appears 3D
Projected light
Photographic image
1.
Illusion of motion depends upon
a shuttered intermittent motion
machine
• synchronized to the exact failures of our
visual perception
• illusion exploits the threshold of seen and
unseen
• flicker fusion + apparent motion
• we’re in the dark
The speed of flash is imperceptible
+
seeing motion where there is none
(fill in the blanks)
Depth Cues
• Movement within the frame
• Movement of camera through space
• Linear perspective: Photographic technology
produces an image consistent with how depth has
been represented for almost 700 years of art
• Overlap and size diminution
Renaissance perspective
Photographic image
1. The realism of the image -- not only looks
close to life but made from life.
2. Technology depends upon serial
photography
- film starts when flexible celluloid ground
possible
Bazin’s photograph
- physical imprint of reality, transfer,
imprint, a tracing of life….not just about
likeness, or being realistic in appearance.
- his metaphors (death masks, shroud of
turin).
We are aware that the photograph of a tree
can’t exist without a specific tree being put
in front of the camera.
There’s a physical connection btwn the
photograph and the objects it depicts.
Bazin’s photograph
• automatically generated, unconscious
• For the first time, representation is not
routed through a human mind
Bazin’s photograph
- spooky, occult qualities, necromancy, mummies
- the image has a living presence, an uncanny lifelike
quality
- violate the given order of time
the wonder of being able to capture time’s
constant passage, human compulsion to preserve
time, repeatable
- The photograph “hands down to future ages a
picture of the sunshine of yesterday” (an early
philosopher of photography)
The exhibition environment of
Early Cinema
•
•
•
•
•
Lecturer/explainer/ showman
Various musicians
Boisterous and heckling audience
Doors left open (no clear starting or ending)
Projection technologies are on display, a key
attraction is the machine (not hidden/disavowed as
in CHN)
• distraction
Precursors to a
culture dominated by
screen images
Pre-cinematic
Screen and Projection
Technologies
•
•
•
•
•
- magic lantern shows
- shadow performances
- painted panoramas
- the camera obscura
- increasingly elaborate stage special effects
Pepper’s Ghost
Seeing is believing
• Vision serves as the ground for knowledge
• Truth comes via the senses
• Vision as the basis of empiricism (all
knowledge is derived from the senses -leads to scientific method and
experimentation)
Interest in the
Fallibility of Vision
• 19th-Century obsession with how vision
fails us
• Our eyes are easy to trick
• Persistence of vision -- the retinal retention
of after-images, the blur
19th C. Cultural Obsession
with
the Limits of Visual Perception
• Magic tricks, parlor tricks, slight of hand
• Stereoscopes
• Spinning Disc toys
(e.g., Zoetrope pictured in B&T)
• Flip book toys
Littau
• Those who attended the first Lumiere
screenings, even before seeing their first
film, “were already seeing
protocinematically.”
• She doesn’t mean only because of these
vision technologies and toys
Modern Life
Urban living
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Fast, intoxicating, onrushing stimuli
Restless succession of sensations
Everything always in flux
Being in the crowd (overpopulation)
Machinization of everyday life
Shopping, window displays, barrage of signage
Travel, speed of travels and trolleys
Timekeeping -- standardization of time, schedules
Artificial lighting -- night brightened
New Modern Sensibility
• Historical shift in what it means to be Human
• Sensibility = more than a mindset or set of
attitudes
• Effects the human at their deepest core
• A new mode of being human, experiencing life
• Impact on sensation, nervous system, attention
spans, perception, how humans engaged with the
world
The Human in Modernity
(the conditions of Modern life)
• Under assault
• Everything is fleeting, rushing past us
• Must live with fragmentation, seeing things in fragments,
“endless series of partial impressions”
• Anonymous -- driven to observation
• Eyes never allowed to rest -- the constant onslaught of the
visual
• Live in contingency -- sudden shifts, accidents, the
unexpected
The Modern Subject
• Nervous, agitated, nervous system = fried
• Body jostled, one day = a series of shocks
• Overwhelmed with vibrations, velocity,
rhythms
• Drained of energy and focus
• Eyes strained
• Overloaded and overwhelmed
Experience of Cinema =
the Experience of Modern
Everyday Life
• “rapid crowd of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the
grasp of a single glance, and the unexpectedness of onrushing
impressions.” (Simmel in Littau, 47)
• Film is a response to modernity.
– Rapidity disallows contemplation. (Kracauer)
– Shocks of life shaped into a formal system (film).
The rhythm of the “conveyer belt is the basis of the rhythm of
reception in the film.” (Benjamin)
Eye-Hunger
• Constant thirst for new sensations
• B/c of modern life’s constant onslaught of
sensations, the modern viewer needed more
and more, stronger and stronger impressions
“Cinema of Attractions”
• Movies are not only an extension of novels or theater.
• Early cinema is more akin to amusement park rides than
in literature or drama.
• Thrill rides --- managed fear
• Sensations of acceleration and falling, but security
guaranteed by machine.
• Heritage in dangerous body stunts of vaudeville, travel and
porn postcards, the circus
“Cinema of Attractions”
Not about absorption in narrative world (story), as we assume
today.
Early films = largely non narrative,
A “cinema of instants” -- direct visual impact
Aggressive -- the image confronts and tries to shock the
viewer. Collisions, crashes, accidents, deaths.
Display, astonishment, quick views, shows off
Obsessed with showing off spectacular sights, and spectacular
points of view
Tendency towards showmanship and exhibitionism
Circus-like atmosphere
C of A
• Spectator is not lulled into a dreamy state (like in CHNs)
• Spectator = continually startled and astonished by thrilling
displays
• Privileges distraction over contemplation
– just seeing over understanding
• Spectator: cheers, screams, flinching in terror or delight
• CofA persists in action spectacles today
• Littau’s argument what’s missing in the history of cinema
is a history of these attractions afforded by all films, even
the most overtly contemplative.
Edison’s Kinetoscope