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Summary Lectures and Articles Film II Film History Week 1 - Week 6 (Block 1)
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Summary of the Lecture slides and Articles from the Film History Reader. Week 1 - Week 6 (block 1) are covered in the summary.
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Summary Film II: Film HistoryWeek 1 – Lecture 1: Inventing Cinema
Pre-cinema: Anything that the historian might subsequently consider relevant to out
understanding of cinema as a cultural, economic, or social practice.
3 parallel genealogies:
1. The dream of reproducing life
2. The dream of capturing movement
3. The dream of seeing the invisible
1 - The Dream of Reproducing Life
Shift from magic to great art
- Demystification
- Rationalism (Scientific Revolution)
Shift from life to life-like
- Observer = spectator
Complex special effects
Impression of motion
Pure spectacle
Photography (1820s-40s)
- Physical process at the core of cinema
- Initially scientific tool, deemed incompatible with entertainment
- (too) realistic
Stereopticon (1830s)
- Photographic slides on glass + peephole viewer
(later on screen)
- Combination of drawings and slides to tell stories
- Format of the illustrated lecture
- Spatial and causal relations between slides anticipating editing
2 – Capturing Movement
Optical toys
Based on perceptual illusion
- Flipbooks
- Thaumatrope
- Phenakistoscope
Praxinoscope and zoetrope: Addition of the screen to older optical toys
- Projected moving pictures = close approximation to what cinema is
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,3 – Seeing the Invisible
Series photography – Eadweard Muybridge (1872-1878)
- Lelend Stanford’s bet on horse motion
Chronophotography - Etienne-Jules Marey (1880s)
- Research on human/animal locomotion
Takeaways on pre-cinema:
- 19th century: many technological revolutions
- Humankind tries to realize Frankenstein’s dream of recreating life in different forma
and shapes
- Different inventions make cinema imaginable for the first time
Cinema’s Multiple Inventions:
- Historiographical quarrels over primacy
- Response to deep-seeted needs
- Testimony of the global(ized) nature of the medium
The US Lineage: 2 inventions by Edison
1 – Kinetoscope:
- Edison’s refusal of projection in order to increase sales of the device
- Peephole viewing heightening voyeurism
- For commercial entertainment only
2 – Kinetograph
- Electrically power, non-portable
- Indoor, Edison builds studio
- Edison films are fully on the side of entertainment
Edison films:
- Authentic celebration of US popular culture (entertainment)
o Broadway stars, boxing matches, trained animals etc.
The French Lineage: The Cinématographe Lumière
Cinématographe:
- Portable
o Compact, small, light, hand-cracked
- Easy to use
o Consistent frame rate
- Reversible
o Camera-printer projector
2
,Lumière films:
- Actualities
o Workers leaving factory, family scenes, natural landscapes etc.
Consuming the world as never before
Device can make films without any supporting infrastructure
At first, the technology itself it more attractive than what it shows
Enables an affordable, captivating form of collective experience
Transcending social boundaries and have shared connection among audience
Article 1 - The Persistence of Cinema in a Post-Cinematic Age (Casetti, 2015)
Darkness creates condition of suspension
- The environment loses its consistency and becomes an indistinct container
Individuals lose all conception of themselves
Enter into a kind of hypnotic state
Disappearance of the dark may signal the dissolution of the cinematic experience itself
2 factors that allow cinema to continue to be itself:
- Experiences are repeatable and relocatable
- Bridge between past and present
- Fainting of the Medium and Paradoxes of Recognition
1 - The Fainting of the Medium
- Medium: not a technical dispositive but modality with which a work, language or
technology actuates (bedienen) its meditation
o Fabric of an experience
It is not that the works change, their modes of accessibility change
Availability and immediacy works become a more familiar presence and show their true
characteristics
Cinema becomes thinner and lighter Atmosphere changes
- Contact with a film becomes easier and more direct
In early cinema the medium was very visible (projector), now it is not. It is more about the
film than the medium.
2 – Paradoxes of Recognition
- The act of Recognition: allows us to identify who or what we have in front of us and
leads us to accept the identity of whoever or whatever does not yet have one
o Detection or acknowledgement: makes something what it is
3
, Implementing recognition:
- We move from a certain idea of cinema that is part of our cultural heritage
o Identification (typical traits of cinema) and acceptance (that what we have in
front of us is cinema)
We set aside the fact that we are not in a movie theatre. Instead, we accentuate that we are
viewing mechanically produced images, which must cope with reality and concretize fantasy
- Even when elements are recognized as familiar, there is room for innovative and
unexpected interpretations
o Tension between familiar and novel creates a paradox
- Films refer or allure to other films, literature, art, cultural symbols
o Recognition and new layers of meaning
- Subversion of recognizable elements
o Surprising experience
- Audience’s psychological engagement with narrative and character
o Central aspect of cinematic experience
‘Inventing’ a continuity:
- We accept the difference of contemporary cinema in respect to its past
o We no longer claim that it’s the same
- New possibilities
o We give cinema an identity that links it not to a fixed model, but whose basis
is a continual process of transformation
We recognize identity based on difference and allow cinema to continue to live
The History of Cinema Seen from its Aftermath:
Fainting of medium
Find a truth about cinema that can only be realized when the atmosphere around it has
lost its destiny
Paradoxical recognition
Find a truth about cinema that emerges from past, but only when it is interrogated in the
present
Walter Benjamin: Dialectical Situations
- We use yesterday to define today rethink cinema and its history
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