|
>1.< Courses Links >1.< Courses Links |
1. The Emergence of Moving Images. Despite many claims by inventors (and court cases in the early years of our century), moving pictures were not invented by any single person. The various mechanisms for displaying a series of images in quick succession, to produce the illusion of movement, were developed by people from different countries - and with varying degrees of success - throughout the nineteenth century. But no one was trying to invent the movies. When Eadweard Muybridge exhibited the first recorded public display of moving pictures to the zoological society of San Francisco in 1885, it was to analyse the movement of animals. His experiments had been designed to freeze movement, not reproduce it! The idea of re-assembling the images to create an impression of movement was an after-thought actually suggested by someone else! Though apparently quite a showman, Muybridge's pretensions to science are evident in his naming of the projecting device a "zoopraxiscope". Other inventors conjured notions of biology or savoured the life-like qualities of moving photographs, by coining names like "The Vitascope" (vision of life) or "The Bioscope". No one yet knew what they were inventing, so how could they know what to call it? And certainly no one yet had notions of telling stories in moving images. The apparatus was developed largely by manufacturers of (still) photgraphic or scientific equipment, who saw in these images a great educational and instructional aid - for medicine, for example. Some pioneers in the early 1900's filmed surgical operations for doctors - but were disturbed to find these films being exhibited for profit. When the first paying audiences (10 years after Muybridge's presentation) saw the Lumiere's collection of what looks to us like home movies, spectators were fascinated. For some, these 30 second slices of time-and-space inspired memories of scenes from novels. Others saw significance in things that were not intended. From the beginning then, even though they were witnessed collectively, moving images demonstrated an uncanny ability to provoke as many interpretations as there were spectators. And this is one of the reasons they can now be studied as cultural artifacts. They carry cultural baggage. |
|
>1.< Courses Links >1.< Courses Links |