The Origins of Cinema

Although its basic technical details are clear enough, the origins of cinema are shrouded in doubt, dispute, and even death. As with other media technologies, among the earliest uses of sequential images were in scientific projects, such as those of Marey and Muybridge. The technical problem confronting them both was how to get a series of images in quick, measured sequence. Muybridge used timers and tripwires to obtain sequential images; Marey, more direct, invented a cinematic gun which "fired" a cylinder of small photonegatives; it looked somewhat like a Thompson submachine gun but was limited to 12 exposures. What was really needed was some kind of double movement -- a shutter which would open and close quickly and repeatedly, and a mechanism which would advance the photosensitive material. When the material in question was glass plates, the problem was overwhelming -- but with the invention of celluloid photo "film" by George Eastman, a solution was in sight, and the prize belonged to the inventor who could best employ it.

Louis Augustin Le Prince (above) is my personal favorite among the many candidates for first filmmaker. He had gotten his start working on great-circle panoramas, where his job was projecting glass plate photos onto the canvas for artists to trace. Arriving in Leeds, England, in the late 1880's, he married into a well-off family, and his father-in-law financed further experiments. Le Prince's first design was a 16-lens camera, using a series of "mutilated gears" to fire off 16 frames in short order on two strips of film. He later designed a single-lens camera, with a mechanical movement using smooth rollers (sprockets not yet having been tried) to advance the film. He planned to stage a grand début in New York City, and had rented a private mansion for his demonstration; his equipment was packed into custom-made crates, and his tickets were purchased for crossing on a luxurious Cunard liner. And yet just then, as he was returning from visiting his brother in Dijon, France, he vanished from the Dijon-Paris express and was never seen again, alive or dead.

As with many early cinematographers, Le Prince's films do not survive. Eastman's celluloid turned out to be volatile; it could disintegrate into a brown powder, burst into flame, or even explode without warning. However, at some point, paper prints were made of three of his films, and these have been reconstructed into short, viewable sequences. The films were made in 1888, earlier than any others. His first film, "Roundhay Garden Scene," shows his family dancing about in his father-in-law's back garden; his second, "Leeds Bridge," shows traffic and pedestrians crossing a bridge in the city where he worked; the third, untitled, shows his young son playing an accordion as he dances upon a set of stairs. The only question is: with what camera were these shot? Distortions and perspective problems with the frames, as well as the fact that there are rarely more than 16 of them, suggest that the 16-lens camera is the most likely source, but some believe he used his single-lens camera for some or all of the films. If so, he was certainly the first person in the world to make what we have come to regard as cinema film.

The Magic Lantern and Projected Photographs

In some ways, it's the original optical medium, the lanterna magica, the method behind the madness of Robertson's Phantasmagoria, the first device ever to "throw" an image on a screen. The great-granddaddy of the slide projector and the PowerPoint presentation, the technology that made the 'carousel' of life go 'round for Kodak, a mass medium and later a home entertainment system.

And, as Don Draper observed, it's about coming back to where we began, and feeling that strange 'twinge' of nostalgia -- which is why, I think, the Magic Lantern is presently enjoying a new life, a new vogue, and a new kind of magic. It began with folks such as Terry and Deborah Borton, who quit their day jobs to form the American Magic Lantern Theatre, and to write the first comprehensive account of the work of Joseph Boggs Beale, the premiere American lantern slide artist. It began with Joe and Alice Koch back in Tacoma, Washington in the 1960's; it began with Bill Douglas, Bob Bishop, Oldřich Albrecht, Judith Thurman and Jonathan David, Julius Pfranger, John Barnes, and Steve Humphries -- all of whom rediscovered this lost medium and helped retrace its history even as they brought it back to life. For, as it turned out, audiences today were as readily enthralled -- though perhaps for different reasons -- as were their grandparent and great-grandparents in the heyday of the Magic Lantern. Old lanterns could be found and collected, as could old slides; put the two together, add a top-hat and a booming voice, and all the ingredients were there for a revival of this lost art.

In 1851, a crucial innovation in photography -- that of the wet-plate collodion process -- enabled the production of photographic lantern slides. The glass plates produced by this process were negative images, from which any number of glass positives or paper prints might be made; a more common method, for portraits and single-use images, was simply to place black paper or cloth behind the negative. A downside of the process was that the plates had to be exposed while still wet -- a very narrow window -- but this was later solved (1871) and various dry plate processes were developed.

For a good introduction, I've scanned the first section of the hard-to-find book Projected Photography, which is available to you in .pdf for via this link. As discussed in class, I'm also asking everyone to bring in a photo from you own personal or family archive -- it doesn't have to be an antique, simply a photo that has particular significance that you'd like to share.

The Fiendish Mirror of Daguerre

The arrival of photography was not, as we conceive of it now, the arrival of the possibility of accurate representations of reality. The eyes of the times were as yet untrained to decipher the "real" within photographical realism. The Duke of Wellington complained that his nose looked too big (never mind that his nickname in the Army had been "Old Nosey"), and many public figures avoided photography as though it were the plague. In the cartoon shown here, Punch magazine satirized the "Interesting and Valuable Result" of a family photograph; to many at the time, the camera's eye seemed a lie, almost an instant caricature of the sitter's worst qualities.

The Daguerreotype, the very first commercial process, was expensive and time-consuming; early sitters had to remain still for at least three minutes, assisted in this task by a metal neck-brace. The cost of the photo was based on the size of the copper plate from which it was made; a "sixteenth plate" was the smallest, and cost the modern equivalent of more than $100; a quarter- or half-plate such as was ideal for a family portrait could cost well over $500. Daguerreotypes were also "one offs," in that the plate was the positive and (because opaque) could not be printed off. Yet at around the same time, William Henry Fox Talbot developed his "Talbotype" process (also known as a Calotype), using sensitized paper to produce a negative image. From this paper negative, any number of positives could be made, although since their medium was paper, the outlines were far less sharp than with Daguerreotypes. Finally, the invention of glass-plate negative processes such as the Ambrotype (also known as a Collodion Positive) created a medium in which many excellent copies could easily be made from a single negative. By the era of the American Civil War, inexpensive photographic processes such as the Tintype meant that very few soldiers went off to battle without leaving a photo behind, and quite often took a family photo with them. The final step in cheapness and availability was George Eastman's invention of flexible celluloid film, which was used both in still and in moving picture cameras; with its inexpensive "Brownie" box cameras and rolled film that could be processed anywhere, Eastman and Kodak (who later merged) made the "snapshot" a part of the American, and the world, landscape.

For this week, since we won't have an in-person class (due to the Monday/Wednesday shift following the Columbus Day holiday), so I'm asking everyone to undertake a small special project: locate a photograph taken some time prior to 1870 -- these might be Daguerreotypes, Collodion (glass plates), Tintypes, or Ambrotypes -- and write a brief analysis/reflection about it. You can choose a photo which related to the larger theme or subject you've chosen for your project -- indeed, I'd encourage you to. Send the photo and your text to me via e-mail, and I will add them to this site as individual "pages," so that we can all read each other's reflections -- here is the link!

A Picture of Light: Daguerre's Diorama

A surviving Diorama Scene (in the "night"view)

We've looked at static forms of Victorian virtual reality, such as the great-circle Panorama, and we've looked at movement both mechanical (the Eidophusikon) and scrolling (the moving panorama). But riddle me this: what Victorian medium involved change over time, despite it having no "motion" at all?

The answer is Daguerre's "Diorama," for which he was famous many years before he became known as one of the inventors of photography. In the Diorama, a scene changed slowly, unutterably slowly, from night to day, from fall to winter, from sunlight to moonlight; its subtlety, along with its resemblance to natural changes of light and color, was its attraction. The changes were obtained by varied means: some of the surface of the canvas was prepared without gesso or sizing, making it translucent; on the opposite side of the canvas, there were other colors revealed only when illuminated. Behind stage, lamps, colored filters, and other apparati invisible to the viewers was brought into play to heighten these effects.

Until recently, we believed that only one original Diorama canvas had survived (see above); it had been hanging in a church for more than a century, its colors muted by a coat of shellac, until restored with help from the Getty Trust. Now, however, a second Diorama, attributed to Daguerre and Bouton (his partner in the business); you can watch some of the effects in this video posted by the gallery.  And, as with panoramas, there was been some interest in re-creating the illusion, most of them using digital technology. The original Diorama building in Regent's Park in London, though long gutted, is still visible in aerial shots; one can see the two theatres, with the circle in the middle which housed the rotating platform that turned from one view to the next (this view is from Google Earth). The original building in Paris is long gone, and there was even an affiliated establishment right near us in Boston, though its exact location is unclear. The Diorama has also attracted great interest among art historians, such as Dore Bowen and Stephen Pinson; Pinson's 2012 book, Speculating Daguerre, argues that the Diorama was as significant an invention as photography.