Week 1 - intro to film history
Lecture Slides + Seminar notes
What is film history for?
- A repository of stories
- Shaped by time, place, and the people involved in making the film
- A way to appreciate the present
- Echoes of past in present films
- Understanding on a deeper level
- A way to escape the present
- depressing times for cinema as everything is either a reboot or a sequel
- An economic resource
- museums, tourist sites, streaming services, festivals
- A portal to different societies and cultures
Teaching film history:
- Recognising the plurality of what cinema was/is
- Forms and practices → many ways of making, watching, and thinking films
- Exploring the technological, industrial, social, and cultural dimensions of cinema as well
as key moments in history
- Expanding the canon so as to do justice to the global reach of cinema
Inventing cinema
- The stages of film history are pretty hard to pin down and not really established
Cinema’s messy genealogies
- Pre-cinema: “anything that might be considered relevant to our understanding of cinema
as a cultural, economic, or social practice”
- Cinema’s history is very messy, many different developments
- Full of experiments which laid the groundwork for what cinema would become
- Also cultural habits.
- Three parallel genealogies:
1. The dream of reproducing life
- Magic lantern → glass slides and light to project
images
- Portability → accessible to a variety of
events and audiences
- Immense popularity throughout the 18th
and 19th centuries
- Combination of entertainment and
education → music and sound effects, (e.g.) lectures
, - Wonder and knowledge
- A. Kircher’s Ars Magna Lucis et umbrae (Jesuit priest active in Rome,
mid-1600s)
- Shift from magic to great art
- Demystification of the technology behind it
- Rationalism (scientific revolution)
- Shift from life to life-like
- Observer = spectator
- Robertson’s fantasmagorie (1799)
- Complex special effects
- Impression of motion
- Pure spectacle
- Popularised in Paris
- Photography (1820s-40s)
- Physical process at the core of cinema
- Initially scientific tool, deemed incompatible with entertainment
- Lacked the “artistry” that painting had (eg)
- (too) realistic
- Stereopticon (1830s)
- Earliest 3D visualisation
- Photographic slides on glass + peephole
viewer (later on screen)
- Combination of drawings and slides to tell
stories
- Format of the illustrated lecture
- Spatial and casual relations between slides
anticipating editing
2. The dream of capturing movement
- Understanding how movement works
- 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
- Praxinoscope
- Zoetrope
3. The dream of seeing the invisible
- Trying to use technology to reveal what the human eye can’t see
- Series photography, Eadweard Muybridge (1872-1878, United States)
- Leland Stanford’s bet on horse movement
, - The horse motion pictures revealed that artists had been
painting the way horses run wrong for a long time
- Captures the discreet motions
- Contribution to anatomical science
- Chronophotographie, Etienne-Jules Marey (France)
- Research on human/animal locomotion (1880s)
- 12 images per second → come out as one photo
- Single continuous sequence in one picture
- Chronophotographic cameras, Etienne-Jules Marey
Takeaways on pre-cinema
- 19th century: many technological revolutions → Efforts to realise Frankenstein’s dream
of recreating life in different forms and shapes.
- A host for different inventions → pertaining to the realm of science as much as to that of
commercial entertainment → make cinema imaginable for the first time
Cinema’s multiple inventions
- Historiographical quarrels over primacy
- Response to deep-seated needs
- Testimony of the global(ised) nature of the medium
- Worldwide network of experts
- Global communication infrastructure
- Shared professional culture
- Common industrial standards
- Homogenous IP regimes
The US lineage: Edison
- Kinetoscope: to watch the recordings
Lecture Slides + Seminar notes
What is film history for?
- A repository of stories
- Shaped by time, place, and the people involved in making the film
- A way to appreciate the present
- Echoes of past in present films
- Understanding on a deeper level
- A way to escape the present
- depressing times for cinema as everything is either a reboot or a sequel
- An economic resource
- museums, tourist sites, streaming services, festivals
- A portal to different societies and cultures
Teaching film history:
- Recognising the plurality of what cinema was/is
- Forms and practices → many ways of making, watching, and thinking films
- Exploring the technological, industrial, social, and cultural dimensions of cinema as well
as key moments in history
- Expanding the canon so as to do justice to the global reach of cinema
Inventing cinema
- The stages of film history are pretty hard to pin down and not really established
Cinema’s messy genealogies
- Pre-cinema: “anything that might be considered relevant to our understanding of cinema
as a cultural, economic, or social practice”
- Cinema’s history is very messy, many different developments
- Full of experiments which laid the groundwork for what cinema would become
- Also cultural habits.
- Three parallel genealogies:
1. The dream of reproducing life
- Magic lantern → glass slides and light to project
images
- Portability → accessible to a variety of
events and audiences
- Immense popularity throughout the 18th
and 19th centuries
- Combination of entertainment and
education → music and sound effects, (e.g.) lectures
, - Wonder and knowledge
- A. Kircher’s Ars Magna Lucis et umbrae (Jesuit priest active in Rome,
mid-1600s)
- Shift from magic to great art
- Demystification of the technology behind it
- Rationalism (scientific revolution)
- Shift from life to life-like
- Observer = spectator
- Robertson’s fantasmagorie (1799)
- Complex special effects
- Impression of motion
- Pure spectacle
- Popularised in Paris
- Photography (1820s-40s)
- Physical process at the core of cinema
- Initially scientific tool, deemed incompatible with entertainment
- Lacked the “artistry” that painting had (eg)
- (too) realistic
- Stereopticon (1830s)
- Earliest 3D visualisation
- Photographic slides on glass + peephole
viewer (later on screen)
- Combination of drawings and slides to tell
stories
- Format of the illustrated lecture
- Spatial and casual relations between slides
anticipating editing
2. The dream of capturing movement
- Understanding how movement works
- 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
- Praxinoscope
- Zoetrope
3. The dream of seeing the invisible
- Trying to use technology to reveal what the human eye can’t see
- Series photography, Eadweard Muybridge (1872-1878, United States)
- Leland Stanford’s bet on horse movement
, - The horse motion pictures revealed that artists had been
painting the way horses run wrong for a long time
- Captures the discreet motions
- Contribution to anatomical science
- Chronophotographie, Etienne-Jules Marey (France)
- Research on human/animal locomotion (1880s)
- 12 images per second → come out as one photo
- Single continuous sequence in one picture
- Chronophotographic cameras, Etienne-Jules Marey
Takeaways on pre-cinema
- 19th century: many technological revolutions → Efforts to realise Frankenstein’s dream
of recreating life in different forms and shapes.
- A host for different inventions → pertaining to the realm of science as much as to that of
commercial entertainment → make cinema imaginable for the first time
Cinema’s multiple inventions
- Historiographical quarrels over primacy
- Response to deep-seated needs
- Testimony of the global(ised) nature of the medium
- Worldwide network of experts
- Global communication infrastructure
- Shared professional culture
- Common industrial standards
- Homogenous IP regimes
The US lineage: Edison
- Kinetoscope: to watch the recordings
