The Routledge Companion to Film History

William Guynn, William Guynn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136899393
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Geschichte des 21. Jahrhunderts

The Routledge Companion to Film History is an indispensable guide for anyone studying film history for the first time. The approach taken presents a substantial and readable overview of the field and provides students with a tool of reference that will be valuable throughout their studies.

The volume is divided into two parts. The first is a set of eleven essays that approaches film history around the following themes:

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• History of the moving image

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• Film as art and popular culture

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• Production process

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• Evolution of sound

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• Alternative modes: experimental, documentary, animation

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• Cultural difference

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• Film's relationship to history

The second is a critical dictionary that explains concepts, summarizes debates in film studies, defines technical terms, describes major periods and movements, and discusses historical situations and the film industry. The volume as a whole is designed as an active system of cross-references: readers of the essays are referred to dictionary entries (and vice versa) and both provide short bibliographies that encourage readers to investigate topics.

Part I
FILM HISTORY: A THEMATIC APPROACH

1
NATURAL MAGIC

A short cultural history of moving images

ERKKI HUHTAMO

It was not a very long time ago that the history of moving images was considered to go back barely a 100 years. Their hundredth anniversary was celebrated either in 1994 or 1995. The former year was chosen in the United States, using the public introduction of the Edison Company’s Kinetoscope in 1894 as the landmark, while in France, the latter year was selected to commemorate Louis and Auguste Lumière’s first public screenings of films both shot and projected with their Cinématographe in 1895. As it often happens in the history of inventions, other candidates to the title of inventor of moving images were also suggested and the dates were adjusted along national, cultural, or technological lines. Yet whoever the “true inventor” may have been, the dates varied only slightly. The 1890s were, it was generally agreed, the period that gave birth to moving images.

There were a few voices that did not join the chorus. In 1995–6, Laurent Mannoni curated in Paris an exhibition carrying the provocative title Trois siècles de cinéma de la lanterne magique au Cinématographe (“Three centuries of cinema from the magic lantern to the Cinématographe”). It highlighted magic lanterns, peepshows, and other pre-twentieth-century devices from the fabulous collections of the French Cinématheque. Mannoni’s aim was to present an “archaeology of cinema,” emphasizing that its “long history is complex, full of surprises, mysteries, and extraordinary findings”(Mannoni, 1995, p. 13). In 2009 he went even further by organizing another exhibition with Donata Pesenti Campagnoni from the Turin Film Museum. Titled Lanterne magique et film peint: 400 ans de cinéma (“Magic lantern and painted film: 400 years of cinema”), it focused on magic lantern slides and extended the history of moving images by yet another 100 years (Mannoni and Campagnoni, 2009).

The celebration of the hundredth anniversary of moving images has begun to feel more and more spurious. Since then, there has been a flurry of books and articles that have not only questioned and gone beyond prevailing ideas about moving images but also pointed out links with other media forms and hitherto neglected cultural contexts within which they developed.¹ The emerging picture is very different from the one routinely found in cinema histories of just a few decades ago. The developments that preceded the appearance of the Kinetoscope and the Cinématographe used to be lumped together under the title “pre-cinema” and briefly presented as a succession of steps leading to the climax: the classical cinema, epitomized by narrative feature film, movie palaces, the star cult, and the Hollywood dream factory.

The recent shift of emphasis reflects fundamental changes within audiovisual culture itself. Cinema is no longer its uncontested fulcrum. A multitude of other media forms, channels of distribution, and modes of presentation have emerged that vie for attention. Labeling all the developments that took place before the emergence of cinema as pre-cinema has begun to feel unjustified, not the least because early forms considered so far as “primitives” of the cinema are now seen to have contained seeds of very different media forms than the ones generally projected via cinema. If the dominance of the cinema was really just a stage in a much longer and broader trend, it is time to rethink the history of moving images. In his preface to a massive collection of sources bearing a problematic title, A History of Pre-Cinema (2000), Stephen Herbert stated the challenges ahead with admirable clarity:

Perhaps the most useful way to look at these problems is to recognize that cinema is just one of the many time-based visual media that have existed over a number of centuries. Because it is so familiar to us, we naturally relate the previous time-based media to it, and these recognizable similarities can, to some extent, help us to understand those media. But new time-based media continue to be invented and developed, and since cinema is no longer the dominant form of time-based media—television, video, computer games and the internet have overtaken it to a large extent—we can no longer expect to consider all of the earlier media as precursors of cinema alone.

(Herbert, 2000, vol. 1, p. xii)²

What is the “shape” of the history of moving images? What are its ingredients, and how have they been related with each other and to other developments? In what kinds of cultural conditions have moving images developed, flourished, and perished? It is impossible to provide conclusive answers in a short introduction, but guidelines can be laid out. Above all, one should avoid considering the history of moving images as a single linear development. There are multiple trajectories that don’t necessarily run neatly side by side; they often intermingle in confusing and unpredictable ways. Motives and ideas disappear and reappear again. Dead-ends occur, but outlets are found, too, perhaps decades, or even centuries, later. Media hybrids are repeatedly formed and dissolved. Tracing the paths of moving images across centuries is a fascinating adventure without closure.

THE CONTINUING SPELL OF NATURAL MAGIC

Ancient cave paintings depicting animals with more than four legs have been proposed as the earliest representations of living beings in motion. Likewise, references to optical phenomena scattered in ancient texts have been considered as primitives of moving pictures. Aristotle, and, centuries later, medieval savants, like Roger Bacon, and the eleventh-century Arab scientist, Ibn Al-Hazen [Alhazen], are said to have known the principle of the camera obscura. Empedocles developed a theory of vision and perception, anticipating the nineteenth-century theorizing on “afterimage” (see Zielinski, 2006, pp. 47–50), and the ancient Chinese developed an optical science of their own, discussing, among other things, the idea of the camera obscura (see Needham, 1954–2004, vol. 4, p. 98).

For millennia, knowledge about optical phenomena existed, but had little impact on the lives of ordinary people. It was limited to theoretical discussions and observations by savants. Apparitions and perceptual illusions (later often linked with optics) were evoked but more often in relation to mythology, religion, folklore, and poetry, rather than communication, science, and technology. Why it took so long for a more widespread desire for practical visual media to develop—in spite of the fact that some applications would have been easy to realize—is a complex question that cannot be answered here. What is clear is that it was only during the transition from the Middle Ages to the early modern era in Europe that optical media began to gain more prominent roles in people’s lives.

The decisive developments extended from “natural magic,” an intellectual current prevalent among the Jesuits, to the early modern experimental science represented by figures like Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, and Christiaan Huygens. For the Jesuits, practicing natural magic was a way of investigating and explaining the God-created universe. An important part of natural magic was “artificial magic,” the use of human-made contraptions to demonstrate phenomena found in nature. Applied by polymaths like Giambattista della Porta and Athanasius Kircher, such demonstrations often tended to slip into pseudoscientific showmanship, where explanations of rational causes were overshadowed by a desire to impress, mystify, and exercise power. The Jesuits also exported marvels of Western science into other parts of the world as part of an effort to gain political supremacy and ideological dominion.

The repertory of objects displayed by the Jesuits included optical devices, among them mirrors inside “catoptric theaters” (endless reflection cabinets), peepshow boxes, camera obscuras, and magic lanterns. All of them had by no means been invented by Jesuits. The origins of the magic lantern, for example, point in the direction of the Dutch savant Christiaan Huygens, one of the beacons of the emerging experimental science. Huygens’s knowledge of optics, as well as his mastery of the art of lens grinding, allowed him to project hand-painted glass slides already around 1659—a device he had constructed himself (Mannoni, 2000, pp. 38–9). Lens grinding was also a precondition, although not the primary cause, of the invention of the telescope and the microscope. These devices played tangential roles in media culture but had a momentous influence on human understanding, extending its reach into macroscopic and microscopic dimensions.

Optical instruments became an indispensable feature of the “cabinets of physics” amassed by savants. However, attitudes toward them were not uniform, which reflected the raging scientific and ideological debates of the time. Concerned about its potentially ruinous impact on his career, Huygens disavowed his association with the magic lantern (which he may have invented), allowing unscrupulous experimenters like the Danish mathematician Thomas Walgenstein and Kircher himself to popularize it across Europe. Huygens feared the magic lantern would associate his name with the kind of charlatanism that natural magic represented for him. His fears were justified, because the magic lantern did not remain a privilege of the learned for long. Already by 1700 it had been introduced to common people by touring showmen, who used it for colorful, coarse, and sensationalist amusement (Rossell, 2008).

The influence of natural magic has been felt in an enormous number of popular “how to” handbooks, courses, and demonstrations up to the present day. The Scottish scientist Sir David Brewster still used the concept in his popular Letters on Natural Magic (1832), an easy-reading manual that covered, among other things, optical devices like the magic lantern and the camera obscura. By that time the impulses of natural magic had been merged with the discoveries of Newtonian experimental science. The spirit of natural magic appears whenever new media technology is introduced, be it the widescreen Cinerama in the 1950s, or Apple’s iPhone or Nintendo’s Wii today. Ads laud the awe-inspiring, near-uncanny quality of such “breakthroughs” but ultimately attribute it to human ingenuity. Special effect films and the fan cultures surrounding them are another example of the continuing appeal of natural magic.

Interestingly, there are aspects of media culture that purport to retreat back to the occult. In the eighteenth century, magic lanterns were not only used to provide “rational entertainment” but also to create horror in séances of necromancy. In phantasmagoria, a form of the magic lantern show that became popular in the late eighteenth century, “fantascope” projectors were hidden behind the screen to invoke ghosts whose identity was left deliberately ambiguous (Heard, 2006). Audience members may have resorted to a “willing suspension of disbelief,” but this did not fully dissipate the uncanny aura surrounding the spectacle. A similar uncertainty prevailed in the nineteenth-century debate about spirit photography. Belief in occult interventions has persisted in later media contexts as well (see Sconce, 2000).

VARIETIES OF MOVING IMAGES

The misconceptions behind the hundredth-anniversary celebration of moving pictures were partly based on the idea that images started moving only when celluloid film became available. The introduction and quick adoption of film by industrial experimenters like Edison and Lumière helped to create the false impression that all preceding visual forms had been static, little different from the 35-mm holiday slides projected in countless twentieth-century living rooms with the slide projector (a descendant of the magic lantern). Early cinema rarely referred to media cultural forms that had anticipated it, contributing to the impression of a sudden technological and cultural rupture. This coincided with the idea of a sharp break between the Victorian and the modern society, extolled in its most extreme form by the manifestoes of the Italian Futurists calling for the destruction of past culture and the erection of a new one amidst its smoldering ruins.

However, the moving images made possible by running exposed reels of celluloid film through a film projector represent just one possible form among many. Ever since their origins in the mid-seventeenth century, lantern slides had been made to move. The first existing piece of evidence about magic lantern slides, a sketch by Huygens depicting a “dance of the death” motive, a skeleton removing and replacing its skull, is already animated (Mannoni, 2000, p. 39). Many types of animated lantern slides were described in handbooks of optics as early as the early eighteenth century. The tricks included brass levers, rotating rackwork mechanisms, and superimposed sliding glass plates. In the nineteenth century, the selection of effects was enriched by chromatropes (abstract kaleidoscopic rackwork slides), moving astronomical diagrams, and other innovations. From around 1870 onward, slides known as the “Beale Choreutoscope” and the “Ross Wheel of Life” could even be used to produce continuous moving images by means of shutter blades rotating in front of a few sequential views—directly anticipating mechanisms used in moving picture projectors of the celluloid film era.

Even when lantern slides did not contain actual movable elements, they were animated by the projectionist. Pushing a long slide of a wide landscape or many painted figures through the slide stage of the magic lantern could create an impression of a moving procession or sweeping panoramic gaze. The optician Philip Carpenter suggested in the 1820s that a small magic lantern could be attached to the projectionist’s belt; by moving behind the screen, the projectionist could make the figures “come alive” (see facsimile in Mannoni, Campagnoni, and Robinson, 1995). After their introduction in the 1820s–30s, the “dissolving views” made smooth transitions from day to night possible. Such effects were realized by a pair of identical magic lanterns provided with a mechanical shutter that revealed and blocked their lens tubes in turn. Two slides with identical views but depicting different times of the day could be made to dissolve into each other. Later, such effects would be made even more impressive by a biunial, a magic lantern with two optical tubes and adjustable oxy-hydrogen gas jets as illuminants.

Magic lantern slides were not the only type of imagery that provided sensations of movement or passing time; such effects were also realized with the peepshow box—another popular optical device that seems to have had its origins in the world of natural magic. Peepshow boxes were exhibited by itinerant showmen already in the eighteenth century. Changing the direction and amount of light falling on the translucent perspective views placed inside the box (by opening and closing panels on the sides of the box) caused atmospheric transitions: the day could be seen to turn into the night. The camera obscura also contributed to the culture of moving images. It is often considered just as a pre-form of the photographic camera and, therefore, associated with still images. However, one should not forget that the scenes transmitted by the rays of light entering a darkened room or box through a pinhole are actually in motion. This fact was appreciated by early commentators such as della Porta who described in his Magia naturalis (1589 edition) how a room-sized camera obscura could be used for spectacles staged outside in real time. His stupefied friends did not believe that the spectacle they had witnessed inside the dark chamber had been produced by natural causes until della Porta opened the panels and “demonstrated them the artifice” (see facsimile in Mannoni, Campagnoni, and Robinson, 1995, p. 51).

There were many types of optical illusions capable of effecting transformations in images when perceived by an observer. Distorted anamorphic images could be rectified by viewing them from a curved mirror or slanted angle. Experiments were also made by spinning glowing sticks in the dark and observing the momentary traces they left behind. When sc...