Sixty years earlier, Niepce and Daguerre had met purely by chance, even though they both lived in France, and their
collaboration
had to be insured through a civil contract.
Kittler-Friedrich-Optical-Media-pdf
Nevertheless, I would like to raise two objections.
The first concerns Crary's over- emphasis on the body, which is fashionable among contemporary scholars.
There seem to be entire branches of scholarship today that believe they have not said anything at all if they have not said the word"body" a hundred times.
There is no doubt that in the nine- teenth century the geometric model of optics, which prevailed from the time of Brunelleschi to Lambert, was replaced with a materialis- tic one, but that by no way means that the material effects of light always impact on human bodies and eyes.
It can just as easily be, as we have seen, Schulze's photochemical effect on silver salts and, even more conclusively, Herschel and Ritter's history of infrared and ultraviolet.
Crary's thesis would therefore be more precise if he had not spoken about physiology but rather about material effects in general, which can impact on human bodies just as well as on technical storage media.
Second, I do not see how Crary can equate Goethe's gentle experi- ments with the more brutal and in my eyes first true physiological experiments and self-experiments of his successors. Goethe himself boasted of his "delicate empiricism," and he surely never caused pain for the sake of his theory of colors. However, the Weber brothers, to whom the sciences of motion (as they were called in the nineteenth century) owe much, falsified the alleged creative power of Goethe's eye by simply delivering a mechanical blow to their own eyes: what then emerged as an after-image or lighting on the retina was no longer a totality, but rather the trace of a shock (Crary, 1991).
The Leipzig scientist Gustav Theodor Fechner was even worse than the Webers because he first attempted to prove Goethe's pre- cious theory of after-images experimentally. As a physicist, Fechner also wanted to determine the measurable quantities and measurable periods of this after-image effect, and he spent three years reading all the relevant books on the subject and then staring into the sun. At the end of this series of experiments, which exposed his eyes to two rather opposed extremes, he was blind and fit only for a mental institution (see Lasswitz, 1910). You can see that in the nineteenth century the physiology of the senses did not simply ruin experimen- tal rabbits - or rats, like today - but rather it ruined the research pioneers themselves. Media always presuppose disabilities, and thus
optical media also presuppose the blindness of their researchers (in addition to a lack of natural pigments). Enlightenment philosophers like Diderot or Condorcet had only postulated theories about the
148
? OPTICAL MEDIA
blIndness of others, because the Enlightenment itself was supposed to be pure light. Fechner, on the other hand, was able to write the general mathematical formula of all sensory perception, the so-called basic law of psychophysics, precisely because he sacrificed his eyes to research his subject and then only managed to improve his condition again through sheer force of will. According to this basic law, a linear increase in objective stimulation only corresponds to a logarithmic increase in subjective sensation; by the same token, an exponential increase in stimulation is necessary for a linear increase in sensation - in Fechner's tragic case, therefore, the sun must shine four times hrighter to blind twice as much. With such optimistic and also not undisputed assumptions about sensory resistance, one can imagine how much solar power Fechner exposed his eyes to.
Fechner is admittedly less important for the physiology of film than another hlind man, to whom we will shortly come. Fechner only serves to illustrate a research field that began making numerical state- ments about perceptual processes and above all stimulus thresholds. It is clear that eyes can only believe in the apparent continuity of film movements when the projected images change quickly enough that the sequence of individual frames drops below a certain temporal threshold. The so-called positive after-image then takes effect. In contrast to Goethe's celebrated concept of the negative after-image, the positive after-image occurs when the eye continues to see an object in the same place a moment after it has already disappeared or moved away. This happens because the stimnlation of the nerve fibers only wears off gradually, and the after-image remains in the same color as the original image rather than the complementary color, as with a negative after-image. Since about 1750, it has been known (or rather rediscovered, as Ptolemy'S Optics was reportedly aware of the after-image effect) that the positive after-image lasts for an eighth of a second. The eye is therefore no longer able to differen- tiate movements faster than this from one another. It was not until the nineteenth century, however, that researchers proceeded to take advantage of this effect with small technical devices that produced
illusionistic effects as toys. In 1824, for example, Sir John Herschel, the son of the aforementioned astronomer and discoverer of infrared, rotated a coin so quickly that by all appearances the front and the back, the number and the emblem, were visible at the same time as a single image (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 109).
And yet the after-image effect alone is still not enough to make cinema possible. It only supports the cinematic illusion in one respect: it dampens the flickering during the film advance and completely
149
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
suppresses it upon reaching the flicker fusion threshold. But to produce the illusion that one and the same object has moved from the place it occupied on frame A to another place on frame B, another optical effect must be added: the stroboscope effect. Hopefully, it IS not necessary to say much about the effectiveness of this effect, as all of the better discos employ stroboscopic lights so that people's dance movements can be cut up into their individual phases, much like film editing. The twentieth century, in other words, has successfully reimported a film effect into everyday life. The nineteenth century, on the other hand, had to first discover the stroboscope effect to make film possible at all.
It is a great pleasure to inform you that the great physicist Michael Faraday was among these discoverers. Faraday will appear later in these lectures as a genius at theater lighting, but in 1831 he also discovered electromagnetic induction or the possibility of produc- ing voltage and ultimately alternating current through the circular motion of an electric circuit in a magnetic field. What he discov- ered for optics is not so very far from induction, because it already prepared for the possibility of one day electrifying optical media like film and television. As in the case of the rotation press or the revolver, circular motion once again plays the decisive role, which will culminate in roll film. Through his fundamental electromagnetic discovery, Faraday took notice of circular motion in general, and he reportedly observed two gears in a mine whose motion was normally not perceptible at all because of speed and thus because of the after- image effect (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 114). On the basis of this observa- tion, Faraday constructed purely experimental gear couplings, until he determined a new optical law: the periodic breaks in the equally p. eriodic images - which occur approximately when the front gear allows the viewer to see the individual teeth of the rear wheel but then conceals them again - leads to the lovely illusion that the eye mistakenly identifies tooth A from image 1 with another tooth B from image 2 with a third tooth C from image 3, etc. A virtual movement thus emerges, and at certain rotation speeds or frequencies the gears even virtually stop. Electro-technicians and information theorists like Shannon would say that the sampling frequency together with the frequency of the samples produces an aliasing effect, which is perhaps a free English translation of Brecht's alienation effect. The possibility of this aliasing effect is only present when the sampling frequency is not at least twice as large as the maximum frequency in the signal of interest. For this reason, sophisticated filter chains provide for a meticulously precise observation of Shannon's sampling theorem
i I
I
150
< 'j
? OPTICAL MEDIA
during the digital recording and playback of compact discs. And the fact that the stroboscope effect does not hinder but is actually neces- sary for film says everything about the difference between film and electro-acoustics, the imaginary and the real (this is already a slight anticipation of statements that are yet to come). It only becomes obtrusive and disruptive when film scenes themselves demonstrate the very effect on which they are based. You all know that when a western is shown at 24 frames per second and the famous covered wagons of the American pioneers have exactly the right frequency, their spokes appear to be standing still or even running backwards.
So much for Faraday, who admittedly appears to have been more mterested in a basic theory of frequency than in its media-technical applications. The physicist neglected to demonstrate his stroboscope effect not only with the teeth of gears and slits but rather with images, which was a small but decisive step in the development of film. However, Joseph Plateau, the Belgian professor of experimental physics and astronomy at Ghent University, was working on optical illusions at the same time and completely independent of Faraday. In 1832, he thought of feeding the stroboscope with 16 drawings of a dancer, presenting her in successive phases of movement and ending once again in the initial position.
On the outer edge of the disk and between the individual images there were 16 slits. When the spectator positioned the disk in front of a mirror, set it in motion, and continued looking through the same slit into the mirror, the dancer herself would proceed to perform endless pirouettes or circular movements. For the first time, a tecbni- cal trick had changed the zero frequency, which was the rate at which all representative artworks had been displayed ever since the Stone Age, into frequencies as high as one likes. This must have so deeply fascinated Plateau that he was no longer able to leave his optical experiment alone and he gradually went blind; in contrast to his col- league Fechner, however, his blindness was permanent.
Perhaps the extent of the sacrifice that Plateau made enables us to appreciate the advance that his stroboscope represented. If one thinks back to Athanasius Kircher's smicroscope, which was able to present the 14 Stations of the Cross one after another, the first important difference is the novelty of Plateau's representation of the successive phases of the dancer's movements. The 14 Stations of the Cross were 14 different images as such, one on the Mount of Olives, one with Pilate, one on Golgatha, etc. , from the night before Good Friday until the famous sixth hour. The 16 drawings of the dancer, on the other hand, are absolute snapshots of one and the same object - and
151
? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
this was done seven years before Daguerre was able to reduce photo- graphic recording time to two to three minutes. Imagine if the devout Jesuit Kircher had presented the passion playas endless pirouettes. With his virtual circular motion, Plateau is a worthy contemporary of all the acoustic experimenters between 1830 and 1880, or between Weber and Edison, who made analogous attemps to achieve millisec- ond recordings of sound and speech periods, which finally culminated in Edison's phonograph in 1877.
That means at the same time that film was not yet techmcally possible during Plateau's lIfetime simply because mstantaneous pho- tography lagged far behind the rotation speeds that were attainable with the stroboscope. For this reason, only scientific deVices and toys were initially developed from the stroboscope. The device was sng- gested by Doppler, who also discovered the acoustic effect that was named after him: to analyze motion, whose speed strips it of every visual perception, Doppler employed a systematic reversal of the stroboscope, which did not set images and slits into periodic motion but rather the light source itself - as a rapid snccession of electrical sparks, for example (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 120). This is precisely what in the meantime is employed in discos, most likely to train the speed of our perception - in defiance of all physiology - for the extreme requirements of a technical war.
The development of toys also proceeds in a similarly militaristic way. You may recall that one of the reasons why Leibniz developed his wonderful differential calculus was to make missile trajectories calculable. Now in 1811, a certain Franz von Uchatius came into the world, which at that time still had an Austrian Empire. In 1829, Uchatius voluntarily joined the second field artillery regiment as an artillery gunner. After graduating from the Bombardier Corps Academy iu 1837, he was promoted to sergeant and commissioned to teach physical chemistry. In 1841, he began his - at least for the Austrian artillery - groundbreaking research on canuon casting, which ultimately led him to the invention of steelbronze and also of the aforementioned explosive Uchatius powder, which is chemically closely related to old roll film. As a reward, Kaiser Franz Joseph pro- moted him to Field Marshal Lieutenant and at the same time, because this promotion would have otherwise been impossible, made him a
baron. In the symbolic world, on which monarchies are based, things fell into place very well, but Austria-Hungary did not have the least interest in the technical real world. After walking a great distance, a certain Mitterhofer from South Tyrol was permitted to present his wooden typewriter - the very first that we know of - to this same
152
? OPTICAL MEDIA
Kaiser. He received a personal donatIOn, but hIS machine dId not go into production. Uchatius fared even worse: due to bureaucratic difficultIes with the introduction of Uchatius cannons in the impe- rial army, the artilleryman and Field Marshal Lieutenant became his own target. On June 4, 1881 he shot himself in the head (Zglinicki, 1979, pp. 130-5).
After this requiem we now return to the history of film. Before Field Marshal Lieutenant Franz von Uchatius took aim at himself, it must have been important to him to teach all cadets and officer candidates the principle of artilleristic shooting. Plateau's newly dis- covered stroboscope lent itself easily to this purpose. Like Edison's kinetoscope, it also admittedly had the one crucial disadvantage that it was not a mass medium, but rather it always only allowed a single viewer to look through the observation slit. For his lectures on weapons technology, therefore, Uchatius spent his scarce free time first combining the well-known lanterna magica witb the strobo- scope. And behold: all of the cadets were immediately able to watch Uchatius' sketches of projectiles flying through the air at the same time, as they were projected onto the wall of the auditorium. The lanterna magica thus no longer produced merely virtual motion, like Schriipfer's curtains of smoke, but by means of a crank - much like early cinema - made successive images really dance in front of a fixed light source. It is no wonder, then, that Uchatius' constructions were purchased by a carnival showman, who gave magical performances that turned the weapon back into money, as Schriipfer or Robertson had once done (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 133).
What is interesting here is not this reversion, but rather the fact that the individual technical elements of film - the recording device, the storage medium, the projection apparatus - were combined with one another very gradually and in stages. Technical media are never the inventions of individual geniuses, but rather they are a chain of assemblages that are sometimes shot down and that sometimes crys- tallize (to quote Stendhal). After Uchatius combined the stroboscope and the lanterna magica, the only element that was still missing was the camera obscura that Talbot had already automated. However, its inclusion in the communication system known as film not only encountered technical obstacles, such as exposure times that were much too long, but also the traditionalism of an entire artistic epoch. As contemporaries of these experiments, draughtsmen like Toepfer in Geneva and Wilhelm Busch in his village near Giittingen were actu- ally quick enough to grasp the new method of drawing in phases as an art form, which means quite simply that they invented the comic
153
? OPTICAL MEDIA
strip, which led in turn to the animated cartoon. However, it was precisely because painters learned to break motion down into suc- cessive phases in the oineteenth century that they did not want to relinquish this new art form once again and replace it with technical media. On December 1, 1888, a certain Emile Reynaud received the French patent number 194 482 for his projection praxinoscope. As the name already suggests, this device projects moving stories, which Reynaud drew on perforated and flexible ribbons as animated films. All of these features, but above all the interplay between the perfora- tions and a gripping mechanism, guaranteed perfect synchronization. The musical accompaniment synchronized with the projection also practically anticipated Edison's kinetoscope, except that throughout his lifetime Reynaud stubbornly refused to replace his "artistic" drawings with photographs (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 136). As Hiilderlin so accurately wrote, it is hard to leave a place when one lives near the source. And what lives closer to the source than art according to European tradition?
3. 2. 2 Implementation
It was thus left to a European emigrant to the US to take the last step. Edward Muggeridge from Kingston-on-Thames, who changed his name to Eadweard Muybridge either out of Anglo-Saxon pride or an American desire for self-promotion, combined for the first time all the elements of film: instantaneous photography, iantema magica, and stroboscope. Muybridge's zoopraxiscope of 1879 showed, as its name claims, life (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 175).
The key word "life" naturally compels us to disregard momen- tarily this lecture's physical image of the world and to touch upon nineteenth-century zoology. However, to understand Muybridge's feat we are now in the same fortunate position as film history: we only need to combine the already existing or already recounted ele- ments. Colt's revolver, Daguerre's photography, Weber's acoustic experiments - all of these elements recur once again.
The initial push was supplied by acoustics. It was possible to record the frequencies of the human voice long before Edison, but there were no researchers who also thought to play back this voice at another place and time. The trick simply consisted in sending the voice into an amplifying funnel at whose end a membrane vibrated. The other side of this membrane was attached to an innocent hog's bristle, which finally scrawled the captured frequencies onto a lamp- blackened glass plate - provided that the experimenter rolled this
154
? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
plate past the bristle fast enough. In this simple way, for example, the very voice of the British phonetician who was the inspiration for Professor Higgins in Shaw's Pygmalion and the musical My Fair Lady has been preserved to this very day. For the first time, the physiology of a living human being was coupled with a storage medium rather than a chain of symbols with a repertoire of signs, as with writing.
3. 2. 2. 1 Marey and Muybridge
Phonographic recording, which at that time was also called visible speech, became the accepted thing among European physiologists. When France established a professorship in natural history at the Parisian College de France at the instigation of the great physiolo- gist Claude Bernard, for whom we have Zola's entire naturalism to thank, the holder, Prof. Etienne-Jules Marey, immediately began constructing devices. Doctors like Goethe's Mephisto had actually already strongly recommended taking the pulse of, above all, women with tenderness, and it was precisely because of such pleasures that it had not occurred to a doctor before Marey to replace his own hand with a machine. At the College de France, one device emerged after another: a heart recorder, a pulse recorder, and finally also a device that was connected to the four extremities of animals and could record their movements. None of these devices bore the least similarity to photographic cameras, but rather they worked, exactly like visible speech, with a pencil and a steadily moving paper cylinder.
As only luck would have it, Marey became acquainted with a captain in the French army who was also a horse enthusiast. This captain converted the results of the professor's measurements back into traditional art. His visual reconstruction of the measurements of a horse's legs manifested the incredible fact that there is a moment while galloping when only one of the horse's legs is touching the ground? The Anglo-Saxon world in particular was overrun with watercolors featuring horses and riders, yet there was not a single picture showing the leg position that Marey claimed.
Imagine for the blink of an eye if film had been invented in India and the leg position was not that of horses but rather of women and men according to the rules of the Kama Sutra . . .
7Kittler is incorrect here and in the following paragraphs when he states that one horse's leg is always touching the ground during a gallop. The theory of "unsup- ported transit" referred to here actually claimed that all of the horse's legs were in the air at the same time.
155
? OPTICAL MEDIA
Instead, the story continues m puritamcal America, where Leland Stanford Sr. became a millionaire by constructing a pacific railroad and consequently, long before Ronald Reagan, also became governor of the state of California. Stanford, the horse enthusiast and trotting horse breeder, saw the measurements of the horse's legs, but was unable to believe the results of Marey's experiments. We can only assume the reason was that the watercolor images of horses' legs remained so deeply imbedded in the subconscious minds of people who had not yet seen a film. However, where belief is lackmg, m America there is money and experimentation. Stanford had the for- tunate idea of calling in Muybridge, the landscape photographer, and commissioning a photographic test of tl,e horse's leg problem.
Muybridge thus exchanged the Californian wilderness for Califor- nian civilization, or the timelessness of Yosemite Valley, which he had immortalized in his landscape photographs, for the millisecond realm of telegraphy. Stanford's breeding establishment for trotting horses was located at his ranch in Palo Alto, precisely where the Leland Stanford Junior University - renowned for being the best for the study of electronics - stands today. Muybridge constructed a white wall with a short race track in front of it, and in front of this race track he placed a row of 12 instant cameras, which were all connected electronically. With relay circuits supplied notably by the San Francisco Telegraph Supply Company, another media industry firm, Muybridge succeeded in triggering these 12 cameras one after another at intervals of only 40 milliseconds, whereby each individual camera had a shutter speed of a single millisecond. Then all he needed was to make a horse gallop along the race track and Governor Stanford had a black-and-white photograph proving that during a certain phase of movement while galloping only one of the horse's hooves was touching the ground.
You see: Muybridge's experimental set-up no longer had even the smallest resemblance to the stroboscope, but rather it recorded movements for as long and extensively as the experimenter wanted and the race track allowed. Cylindrical storage media, which - from Plateau to Marey - were confined to repetitions and periods, and thus choreography and poetry, were superseded by the prose of science and later also of entertainment media. You know that in poetry, which was formerly identical to dance, everything must come back around as in the stroboscope; in novels, on the other hand, there is always an unforeseen and contingent future, as in Muybridge's series of instantaneous photographs, which can consequently also only stop through an interruption. All of so-called modern life therefore depends entirely on nineteenth-century media technologies.
156
? OPTICAL MEDIA
Muybridge's empincal confirmation of Marey's experiment took place in 1878. Five years later, the very same instantaneous record- ing technology used by Muybridge also made all of Field Marshal Lieutenant von Uchatius' dreams of artillery pedagogy come true. The physicist Ernst Mach sealed a wire in a glass tube, connected the wire electrically to the shutter of an instant camera, and then fired on the glass tube. The result was a photographic speed record: a real bullet, rather than a drawn one as in the stroboscope, generated shock waves as It entered the chamber. It is no wonder that the same Mach was also the first to achieve the opposite record: the time-lapse film for analyzing infinitely slow movements (Eder, 1978, p. 523).
Muybridge, as far as I can trust my optical memory, also invented another trick. The library of Stanford University, which the old gover- nor founded on the site of his fonner horse breeding establishment to memorialize his son (whose death was caused by bungling European doctors, of course) and to prevent similar tragic cases in the future through science, contains stacks of enormous photo albums, in which Muybridge gradually shifts from horses and cows to people. When- ever an athletic Stanford student and sprinter enters the photograph from behind, he is naked, but whenever he turns his front towards the camera a swimsuit suddenly appears out of nowhere, as if the image has been retouched. Muybridge thus invented the stop trick, one of the most important film tricks, long before George Meli"s. As far as I can see, frontal nudity first appears in Muybridge's photographs only during his later time at the University of Pennsylvania.
The purpose of the swimsuit in California is clear: only the nude photographs require some explanation. After Muybridge finally abol- ished the hand of the artist (which had appeared so irreplaceable to his predecessor Reynaud) and manufactured a pure multimedia system, he also wanted to reform painting. His magnificent volumes on "animal locomotion" were published for the express purpose of preventing artists from drawing or painting false positions, like the galloping horse. Muybridge's nude photographs provided them instead with a scientific model of all possible body movements. Like Renaissance perspective and the camera obscura, instantaneous pho- tography was supposed to discipline art. Admittedly, this time it did not involve abolishing the dominance of the symbolic, as in medieval holy images, and introducing a human scale through perspective, but rather at the end of the nineteenth century the imaginary also had to believe in it. The reason we never see three legs of a horse in the air is because the eye projects a familiar general shape on all of the phases of an animal's movements.
157
? OPTICAL MEDIA
I am pleased to be able to say that Muybridge's propaganda was a crowning success in at least one famous case. Duriug his European travels, Muybridge's patron Leland Stanford Senior also went to Paris, where he became acquainted - presumably in Muybridge's company - with the painter Meissonier. Jean Louis Ernest Meisso- nier, who unfortunately hardly anyone appreciates any more except for Salvador Dali and myself, had already painted practically all of the legs of the horses in Napoleon's Great Army on extremely expensive canvas out of an explicit admiration for Napoleon's "orga- nizational genius" (Greard, 1897, p. 47), but he confessed that he only knew how to represent these legs while striding and trotting and not while galloping (Greard, 1897, p. 194). Stanford demanded that Meissonier paint his portrait, which the painter would have refused to do had Stanford not revealed to him on this occasion the secret of Muybridge's instantaneous photographs of horses. Meis- sonier was converted, and it was because of him that this secret was eventually conveyed to the vice-president of the Paris Academy of Fine Arts. From then on, Meissonier employed photographic source material to paint real horses' legs rather than picturesque imagi- nary ones. According to his biography, he used these photographic models"only for verification," but in his private park in Poissy, near Versailles, he built a short railroad track, seated himself in a sleigh- like locomotive whose speed could be adjusted, and studied a gallop- ing horse in motion with his own mobilized painter's eye (Greard, 1897, p. 73). You see once again how the railroad replaced the horse in media history, and how the nineteenth-century railroad journey celebrated by Schivelbusch (1986) was not limited to being passively transported, but rather in the wonderful case of Meissonier it was already an active automobile in the literal sense of a forward-moving, self-propelling technology. It is hard to say whether this tremendous expense made Meissonier's war paintings more valuable or realistic, and there is no need to know. The death of traditional painting was quickly approaching, for in the same Paris salon where Stanford had met Meissonier, Muybridge also met Marey.
For the first time in this history of invention, therefore, we are con- fronted with a case of positive feedback.
Sixty years earlier, Niepce and Daguerre had met purely by chance, even though they both lived in France, and their collaboration had to be insured through a civil contract. Now, in 1882, Marey's machine for measuring movement inspired Muybridge to design a follow-up invention in California, and Muybridge's serial photography, in turn, inspired Marey to design his own follow-up invention. Muybridge, as I have
158
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
said, went as far as inserting his sequences of images - which were photographic and no longer merely drawn - into a stroboscope in order to be able to project real movements. This was still not a film, however, not only because a minute of horse galloping would have required 270 images instead of the available 12 (see Clark, 1977), but also because Muybridge was stubborn: as a prior landscape pho- tographer, he never gave up using the heavy, immovable glass plates that Niepce's cousin had introduced to photography in 1847. For this reason, namely, because a human life is far too short to comprehend avalanches of technical innovations, teamwork and feedback loops
become essential . . .
Muybridge and Marey, these twins or Dioscuri who were present
at the birth of fillll, were both born in 1830 and died in 1904. It is therefore possible to shift from one to the other without any prob- lems. After the soiree at Meissonier's, Marey realized that all of his machines for measuring heartbeats, pulse rates, and the movements of horses' legs had been historically superseded by Muybridge's serial photography - with one exception. By holding tight to the unifying, linearizing power of writing paper, Marey always only needed one single piece of equipment, while Muybridge had to position 12 dif- ferent cameras. The task, therefore, was to dispose of 11 cameras and still be able to supply serial photographs. In the process, Colt's good old revolver was once again honored, as it had also reduced the need for six pistols down to one. In 1874, a French astronomer, Pierre Jules Cesar Janssen, had already converted the revolver from the wars with the Red Indians into a revolver for the stars in order to capture 18 different positions of the planet Venus on a single photographic plate, whereby the astronomical revolver repeatedly closed his camera lens between these 18 instantaneous recordings
with a Maltese cross (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 170). While Marey still had to install his individual images into a stroboscope by hand, this new device supplied the stroboscopes all by itself. After this preparatory work, it was easy for Marey to improve on Jannssen's astronomical revolver. Marey developed a device that was roughly 50 centimeters long, which he dubbed a chronophotographic gun or fusil chronophotographique because it handles photographs much in the same way as a gun. It was braced against the shoulder for stabil- ity, it had gun sights for aiming, and firing the trigger produced an instantaneous photograph, whereupon the barrel, which contained 11 more unexposed negatives, turned 30 degrees, bringing the next negative into position. If the metaphor of shooting a photograph was ever taken literally, then it was in the case of Marey, whose assistant
159
? OPTICAL MEDIA
Georges Demeny was reportedly even ordered by the French general staff to record and optimize the standardized marches of soldiers using serial photography in 1904.
At a time when France was mourning a lost war and the lost provinces of Alsace-Lorraine, Marey's photographic rearmament considerably helped his career. The physiologist, who had already received his own physiological institute, rose even further to become president of the French photographic society. In this position, he put into place the penultimate step to film technology. The rigid barrel or disk, which had been maintained from Plateau's stroboscope through to tbe chronophotographic gun, was transformed into a flexible roll, which was transported automatically past the lens through a clock- work mechanism in the camera. And even though it still was not a celluloid roll, the technique of fihu recording was in principle fixed. Marey would only have had to put his photographic paper rolls into a projection apparatus driven by clockwork, but he did not, and he thus missed the chance of becoming Lumiere or technical light itself. For this reason, we are still faced with the pressing task of recon- structing the commercialization of the half-military, half-scientific technology of instantaneons photography throngh Edison and the Lnmiere brothers.
3. 2. 3 Silent Film
We no longer need, as in previons lectnres, to represent the history of this industrialization as a detailed acconnt of individual inventions. Up until now, the presentation of these individual inventions illus- trated the simplest, namely earliest attempts to solve the fundamental problems of optical media technology. This no longer applies, as the individual inventions and patents related to film began to explode in 1890: while there were only around 200 film-related patents issued worldwide between 1875 and 1890, this number had already risen to 500 between 1890 and 1910. In the age of indnstry, therefore, film emerged from pure teamwork. That is why I will only make rough cuts that treat silent film, sound film and color film as epochal structures. The two world wars will also serve as crude landmarks.
Before discussing the actual development of silent film, I want to point out again how far Marey had already come conceptually despite the fact that he failed to project his sequences of images. In 1891, his assistant, the aforementioned Georges Demeny, developed the won- drous photography of speech or photographie de la parole. Precisely like the earlier telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell, Demeny
160
? ? ? oPTICAL MEDIA
also wanted to cure a physiological handicap, namely deaf-muteness, through media technology: he combined a photographic gun afa Marey with one of Edison's phonographs, turned the experimental apparatus towards himself, as was usual at the time, and shouted two very significant sentences into both devices at the same time: first "Vi ve la Fran ee! " and second "Je vous ai me. " It was the first declaration of love in history that was no longer directed at women, but rather at the medium of film, which has since become the norm. At the same time, however, it was also a lesson for deaf-mutes, whose mouths reportedly managed to produce audible declarations of love to no one at all by imitating Demeny's individual mouth positions.
We can see, then, how desperately the couplmg of optical and acoustic media technology was sought from the very beginning, long before the introduction of sound film. This is even truer of the inven- tor who actually applied it to commercial cinema: Thomas Alva Edison himself.
Edison worked as a telegraph operator during the American Civil War, which made him partially deaf but also provided him with technical know-how and money. On this double basis, his laboratory - which was trnly the first laboratory in the history of technology - first realized two dreams of the century: the mechanical record- ing of sound, namely the phonograph, and the perfect light source, namely the light bulb. The phonograph, as the first form of visible speech capable of also being played back, was developed in 1877 as a byproduct of Edison's attempt to accelerate the transmission of telegraph signals. It therefore shows that the opposition between discrete and analog media was already beginning to become fluid in Edison's time. The light bulb, which in turn led to the tubes that were the basis of all electronics for a long time, emerged from the search for a light source that would avoid the smoke and fumes (and thus the signal noise) of ancient candles. At the same time, it was also supposed to avoid the short life span of carbon arc lamps and the rather deadly dangers of gaslight - the two light sources that had immediately preceded the electric ligbt bulb in the nineteenth century.
It is important to note here that Edison's kinetoscope - the immedi- ate predecessor of film - was directly connected to these two previous inventions. To begin with, this is true biographically. The phono- graph and the light bulb made Edison renowned, so to speak, for being able to invent as if on command. One ofthe first to bow to his fame was the great Berlin physicist Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz, the founding hero of all eye and ear physiology. His acquaintance with Muybridge provided Edison with the same fame
161
? oPTICAL MEDIA
in America. During his trip to France in 1881, where hIS attempts to meet the science-fiction novelist Villiers de elsIe-Adam unfortu- nately fell through, Edison also made the acquaintance precisely not of poets but rather of fellow researchers like Marey. After both of these meetings, nothing seemed more obvious to Edison than turning a scientific experiment into a money-making entertainment medium.
After the phonograph and the light bulb, therefore, Edison also developed the first commercial film system. And hecause entertain- ment media had to be sold and distributed worldwide, Edison's stroke of genius was standardizing the serial instantaneous photogra- phy of Muybridge and Marey, just as Colonel Colt had standardized the revolver as the first serial murder weapon. After he had become acquainted with Marey in Paris, Edison found Eastman-Kodak's cel- luloid film. By choosing the 35 mm format and furnishing the film roll with perforations, which have remained the standard practically ever since, Edison solved all of Marey's problems of film synchroni- zation in one fell swoop. He subsequently constructed a component called the kinetograph, which recorded moving pictures, as well as a compatible or standardized component called the kinetoscope, which could play back the developed film.
One year later, Edison finally acquired the patent for the so-called escapement disc mechanism from another American, which ensured that the individual frames of the film stood beautifully still during the sixteenth of a second in which they were recorded or observed, while all further transport between the individual frames fell pre- cisely in the pauses in between. Since this fundamental solution, at the very latest, film has been a hybrid medium that combines analog or continuous single frames with a discontinuous or discrete image sequence; this will be amplified even further in connection with tele- vision. In 1888, Edison placed this entire digital-analog construction in a box that was essentially an electrified version of the peep show cabinets at eighteenth-century fairs: an electric motor pulled the film roll, which was illuminated from behind by a light bulb, past a mag- nifying glass, through which the primarily individual observer, upon inserting a coin, was supposed to follow the moving film and experi- ence the illusion of continuous motion. Edison's sales success was so great that nickelodeons, as they were called, sprang up everywhere in America (they are predecessors, so to speak, of contemporary arcades). William Fox, among others, later made his money as the inventor of Movietone talking newsreels (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 208).
In addition to the financial effect of this new illusion, it is also important to point out its technical basis: the acoustics of telegraph
162
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
sIgnals also provided apparent continuity on the basIs of actual discontinuity, which was no longer humanly controllable, and this had originally inspired Edison's phonograph. For this reason, he was justified in writing: "the idea occurred to me that it was pos- sible to devise an instrument which should do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear, and tbat by a combination of the two, all motion and sound could be recorded and reproduced simultane- ously" (Clark, 1977, p. 171). Edison's kinetoscope was accordingly also called the optICal phonograph. This fact is not only significant for EdIson's practical kinetoscope, but It is also theoretically sigmficant: as with Demeny, the first experiments in the direction of multimedia were already happening at the end of tbe nineteenth century. After the individual sensory channels had been physiologically measured and technically replaced, what followed was the systematic creation of multimedia systems, which all media have since become. What emerged were simulations or virtual realities, as tbey are now called, which reach as many sensory channels as possible at the same time.
Edison built the first film studio in the history of media, his so- called Black Mary, precisely for this purpose. This Black Maria was, in memory of the camera obscura, a large box, which could be turned in the direction of the sun for tbe purpose of lighting, which was equipped with light bulbs for the same reason, and which had black interior walls so that the illuminated and recorded actors - the first in the history of film who actually performed short, fictional scenes - could act in front of a uniform background. In contrast to the arts, media always play against the backdrop of noise, which in the case of Edison's optics was a black painted wall. The acoustics were more of a problem, as Edison wanted to record the picture and sound at the same time. Without microphones he had difficulty in bridging the distance between the actors' mouths and the phonograph trumpets without disruptive acoustic background noise. The synchronization of "movies," as Edison already called them, with the phonograph cylinder also created problems during playback. Apparently, it was historically still too early for the audiovisual Gesamtmedienwerk. Edison also confirmed this after several kinetoscope experiments, when he told students that instruction through film and vision (and not through gramophony) would soon replace instruction through
books.
Film, in other words, began at least technically as silent film, and
it did not combine all three of Edison's innovations - film, light bulb, and phonograph. It is probably a historical rule of post-print media technologies that individual and isolated sensory channels must first
163
? OPTICAL MEDIA
be completely and thoroughly tested before any thought about con- necting them is at all possible. The mulumerua system of kinetoscope and light bulb was thus the only one that took hold - first in Berlin, with a rather inconsequential film presentation by the Skladanowsky brothers on November 1, 1895, and soon thereafter, namely on December 28, 1895, in the Indian Salon of the Grand Caf" on the Boulevard des Capncines in Paris, where the brothers Augnste and Louis Lumiere gave their first pnblic film demonstration before a paying audience with worldwide resnlts.
The two Lumi"res - whose surname has already been commented npon thonsands of times - really brought light to film. This was for the simple reason that they npgraded the equipment, which had been purchased from Edison along with Edison's film standard, in one small way: they projected films onto a large screen for a paying mass andience, who gathered aronnd a single vision like in the old theater. Above all, however, they developed along with what has since been called the cinematographe, or cinema for short, a device that can record, copy, and play back moving images. The cinematograph recorded films when it worked with a lens like a camera obscura, it copied films when the lens was replaced with simple sunlight, and finally it projected films when sunlight was replaced with a light bulb behind the film roll. Every spectator paid one franc, and in exchange they simultaneously saw exactly what the other spectators saw. With the phonograph, such distribution was more or less natural due to the fact that the ear cannot be closed, but with film it had to be constructed. The Lumi"res typically employed front projection with a strong lamp illuminating the celluloid from behind, which has since become standard practice. Once, at the Exposition Internatiol1ale in Paris, they successfully experimented with front and back projection at the same time. Iu an enormous hall with spectators sitting every- where, they were all supposedly able to see the film well. For this reason, a screen was first submerged in water before every showing and stretched across the middle of the room - then half of the audi- ence was able to watch the film projected from the front and the other half from the back due to the water.
If this switch between front and back projection reminds you of someone, so much the better, for the logical coherence of film history then becomes clear. Daguerre's diorama of Vesuvius had switched between day and night views by switching between front and back projection in precisely the same way. Already for this reason it could be no coincidence that film, despite Edison, did not originate in the USA. The conversion of the representative arts into optical media
164
? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
took place ill a country that had long known the arts as such. I mean, to quote The Song o f Roland, "la dulce France. " Like Daguerre, the father of the Lumiere brothers was also originally a painter who became a photographer. But it was precisely because of this techniza- tion of his prior handwork that he was concerned that the technology could do without him as a professional photographer simply because people would go on to photograph themselves. Lumiere thus directed himself and his sons away from photography and towards the manu- facturing of photographic materials . . .
The history of the development of this medium in one genera- tion was continued by his sons, who proceeded no longer simply to take photographs, but also to supply their father and the business in general with better photographic negatives (Telerama). They were therefore both scientists and industrialists who developed a method of storing and projecting moving and thus living people, as well as the first technique of making corpses imperishable and thus storable using formaldehyde. There is no better way to illustrate the connec- tion between media technology and physiology that existed in the nineteenth century.
The contents of the films that the paying spectators on the Boule- vard des Capuciues saw also resulted from the Lumieres' occupation. The first film to be privately screened, which to my knowledge is now lost, was shown at an annual meeting of the French society for photography, where President Marey and all the other scientists were able to watch themselves (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 171). The first film to be publicly shown, on the other hand, showed the employee side of this science, as it presented the Lumieres' workers streaming out of the factory gate in Lyon during a shift change. It is characteristic for the difference between media and arts that this film did not present an infantile or humorous but still planned and composed American plot, as with Edison, but rather it was taken purely from everyday life. The Lumieres had no Black Mary to bring fictions into the world, but rather at the beginning they only made daylight recordings, which made them the founders of documentary film.
Another confrontation, which was more in keeping with the Grand Cafe's Indian Salon (the name implies that it was designed for exotic wonders), was experienced by the 35 spectators at the public pre- miere. Among the Lumieres' documentary films was L'arrivee d'un train ala Ciotat, or the arrival of a train at the station of a French city on the Mediterranean, which has since become famous. The favorite toy of the nineteenth century thus entered, the old Renais- sance perspective went into effect as usual, and the locomotive on
165
? OPTICAL MEDIA
the screen became larger and less well defined until the spectators reportedly fled the Parisian cafe in fear. Without planning it, the Lumieres had actually transformed the spectators not into targets of their fixed camera, but rather into (as Virilio formulates it) targets of the imaginary locomotive. When the American director Griffith later proceeded to put the film camera itself into apparent motion and directly approach the actors with it, this shock effect supposedly increased: the spectators could allegedly only explain the enormous close-ups of faces that filled the screen by concluding that Griffith had literally decapitated the actors' heads.
In the eyes of these deceived spectators, and behind the back of silent film producers who did not have such shocks and murders in mind at all, cinema thus transformed from the very beginning into an illusionary medium. In contrast to the scientific experiments of a Muybridge, which were supposed to replace everything imaginary or figurative in the eyes of people with the real, and in contrast to the phonograph as well, which could only reproduce the reality of noise for lack of cutting or editing possibilities, a new imaginary sphere emerged. It was no longer literary, as in the Romantic period, but rather technogenic. Tzvetan Todorov's theory that the fantastic in literature died after it was elucidated by Freud and psychoanalysis (Todorov, 1973, pp. 160-2) is partly false: the fantastic experienced a triumphant resurrection through film.
Nothing could attest to this more perfectly than the fact that a certain Georges Melies, who had once been the director of the Robert-Boudin theater, was among the many people who pur- chased a cinematograph from the Lumieres. Robert-Boudin, whom Bans Magnus Enzensberger had appropriately evoked in one of his mausoleum poems, was neither a playwright nor a director, but rather the most famous magician and escape artist of the nineteenth century. His grandson consequently transformed magical artworks into modern tourism by inventing the French specialty of son et tumi! ;re, a Bengal sound and light show for old castles that designates tourism as the worthy heir of absolutist lighting effects. As the heir of Houdin, Melies consequently transformed the documentary film into the modern fantastic. He invented a vast number of fihn tricks, but I will only focus on two elementary ones: backwards projection and the stop trick.
Melies employed backwards projection perhaps most success- fully in his film Charcuterie mecanique (Mechanical Delicatessen). A pair of scenes were filmed in a butcher's shop, and they recorded in sequence the slaughtering of a pig, its dismemberment, and the
166
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
production of a finished sausage. These same scenes were shown at the screening, except that within each scene the last frame had heen made the first and the first had been made the last. In the spellbound eyes of the spectators, the resulting film showed a finished sausage transforming back into the corpse of a pig and the corpse then transforming back into a living pig. For the first time in history, the resurrection of the flesh - this 2,OOO-year-old proclamation - actually came to pass in real life. The ability of film to visually produce appar- ent continUIty could not be demonstrated more triumphantly, as his working principle - the cutting up of living movements into lifeless, static frames - was blatantly disclosed in the form of the mechani- cal butcher shop, yet the process was nevertheless reversed again in the imaginary sphere. It is therefore precisely because film works in physical time, unlike the arts, that it is in a position to manipulate time. According to a wonderful dictum of the physicist Sir Arthur Eddington, the irreversibility of physical time or the constant increase of entropy, which is a result of the second law of thermodynamics, is shown by the impossibility of films like Charcuterie mi! canique, which reverse the time axis.
The time reversal trick could also be performed with a sound recording on cylinder or record instead of a film, as Edison had already experimented with playing noises or voices backwards. However, no sound storage device prior to the tape recorder would have been able to keep up with the second trick introduced by MeIies. He apparently discovered the so-called stop trick by accident while filming a Parisian street scene with a hearse. He always filmed with a tripod, which represented for him the unchangeable and therefore illusionary position of the spectator. The celluloid roll ran out in the middle of the scene, however, as the length of these rolls was still not sufficient for feature films before the turn of the century. Without moving the camera from the tripod, a new roll was inserted and the filming continued. Upon projecting the finished product, MeIies was astonished to find that the spectator did not notice the temporal dis- ruption at all (which would be entirely out of the question with the abrupt interruption of a recorded noise). The pedestrians and vehicles passing by on the street had been removed as if by magic, and they had been replaced with other pedestrians in other positions on the street. M"lies immediately incorporated this principle or trick into his next film: L'escamotement d'une dame, or the vanishing lady, dem- onstrated that under media-technical conditions a Robert-Houdin is no longer necessary to conjure people and more specifically ladies away from the stage. And if "lady" is interpreted as Mother Nature,
167
? OPTICAL MEDIA
as would be appropriate in classICal-romantic literature, then film tricks signify simply a female sacrifice, which has since liquidated all of nature. With the stop trick, film incorporated its own working principle, namely placing cuts in sequence, into its narrative. All that remained was to explain Mohos' technical discovery as the focus of a particular profession, and the job of cutter was born.
So much for the origin of silent film, which from the start had already measured out the entire range of possibilities between acci- dental realism and illusionary theater, and between documentary and feature film. The only element that was still missing in order to plumb all these possibilities was a moving camera. This task was left primarily to American directors like Porter and Griffith. Zglinicb showed insight for once when he noted that the moving camera, with the possibility of tracking in for close-ups and tracking other moving objects, gave birth to the urcinematic genre of the western (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 492). Classical western scenes that depict enemies, primar- ily Indians on moving horses, from the point of view of a moving wagon, completely dismiss Melios' fixed theatrical perspective; they sacrifice the constraint of the spectator's gaze, which was necessary for them to be deceived by stop tricks, in exchange for another and more mobile illusion, which Einstein had described not by chance at the same time, namely in 1905, in his special theory of relativity. Einstein's theory begins with the impossibility of determining, when two movements are relative to each another, such as when two trains pass each other, which movement is virtual and which is real.
The mobile illusion called film thus changed thinking and feeling. Stephane Mallarme, who traced literature back to its 24 naked letters without any optical or acoustic illusions, was once asked in a survey what he thought of illustrated books. The answer: he did not think much of them, because readers of Mallarme, unlike readers of Hoffmann, were not supposed to hallucinate, but rather simply to read; whoever needed illustrations should put away their books and go to the cinema instead (Mallarme, 1945, p. 878). In another interview, the same Mallarme was asked how art could improve technology, and he answered by suggesting that the driver's seat in the recently invented automobile be relocated to the rear, behind the automobile owners, who at that time were upper class, and the front windshield be enlarged as much as possible. Without perceiving their own move- ment at all, and without any visual obstacles such as the driver, these automobile owners would then be fully immersed in the illusion that the streets and landscapes in front of them were opening up and increasing in size as they rode past (Mallarme, 1945, p. 880).
168
? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
Mallarme had correspondingly written a prose poem that Immor- talized this automobile in the poetic or overly poetic disguise of a self-rowing boat. The aforementioned boat floats down the river where Mallarme's own country home in Valvins was located, slips through white water lilies (from which the poem takes its title), at first with the practical goal of carrying the rower, Mallarme, to a lady friend. The visual spectacle of a gliding perspective delights the poet so much, however, that he soon abandons his visit and instead celebrates the lady as the "absent one" - Mallarme's most solemn poetical category (Mallarme, 1945, pp. 283-6). Mallarme's poem thus does exactly what Meissonier (presumably his neighbor) did with his mobile railroad carriage, which proves that 15 years before the first tracking shots were made the dream of them already existed. The mobile images of film are inextricably linked with the new automobiles and the only slightly older railroad journey. Further evi- dence, namely from instantaneous photographer Ernst Mach and the originator of psychoanalysis Sigmund Frend, will follow later today.
The systematics of optical mobilization is in the first instance more important. First, the step from a static to a mobile camera had elimi- nated every similarity between film and the ancient art of theater. From Plato's cave to the peep show theater, spectators were and are fixed in place - not out of old Enropean sadism, but rather becanse before the invention of computers the calculation of moving gazes would have exceeded all computational capacities. Macroscopically, film does not actually alter the fixed position of the spectators' bodies. Microscopically, on the other hand, an apparatus representing their own eyes performs random cuts and movements, from which the spectators cannot distance themselves as they have no other possibili- ties of optical control in the darkness of the cinema. For this reason, according to Edgar Morin's brilliant formulation, "the spectator reacts before the screen as before an external retina telelinked to his
brain" (Morin, 2005, pp. 134-5; italics in original).
Before continuing with the actnal history of film, I wonld like to follow another thread through to the end.
Second, I do not see how Crary can equate Goethe's gentle experi- ments with the more brutal and in my eyes first true physiological experiments and self-experiments of his successors. Goethe himself boasted of his "delicate empiricism," and he surely never caused pain for the sake of his theory of colors. However, the Weber brothers, to whom the sciences of motion (as they were called in the nineteenth century) owe much, falsified the alleged creative power of Goethe's eye by simply delivering a mechanical blow to their own eyes: what then emerged as an after-image or lighting on the retina was no longer a totality, but rather the trace of a shock (Crary, 1991).
The Leipzig scientist Gustav Theodor Fechner was even worse than the Webers because he first attempted to prove Goethe's pre- cious theory of after-images experimentally. As a physicist, Fechner also wanted to determine the measurable quantities and measurable periods of this after-image effect, and he spent three years reading all the relevant books on the subject and then staring into the sun. At the end of this series of experiments, which exposed his eyes to two rather opposed extremes, he was blind and fit only for a mental institution (see Lasswitz, 1910). You can see that in the nineteenth century the physiology of the senses did not simply ruin experimen- tal rabbits - or rats, like today - but rather it ruined the research pioneers themselves. Media always presuppose disabilities, and thus
optical media also presuppose the blindness of their researchers (in addition to a lack of natural pigments). Enlightenment philosophers like Diderot or Condorcet had only postulated theories about the
148
? OPTICAL MEDIA
blIndness of others, because the Enlightenment itself was supposed to be pure light. Fechner, on the other hand, was able to write the general mathematical formula of all sensory perception, the so-called basic law of psychophysics, precisely because he sacrificed his eyes to research his subject and then only managed to improve his condition again through sheer force of will. According to this basic law, a linear increase in objective stimulation only corresponds to a logarithmic increase in subjective sensation; by the same token, an exponential increase in stimulation is necessary for a linear increase in sensation - in Fechner's tragic case, therefore, the sun must shine four times hrighter to blind twice as much. With such optimistic and also not undisputed assumptions about sensory resistance, one can imagine how much solar power Fechner exposed his eyes to.
Fechner is admittedly less important for the physiology of film than another hlind man, to whom we will shortly come. Fechner only serves to illustrate a research field that began making numerical state- ments about perceptual processes and above all stimulus thresholds. It is clear that eyes can only believe in the apparent continuity of film movements when the projected images change quickly enough that the sequence of individual frames drops below a certain temporal threshold. The so-called positive after-image then takes effect. In contrast to Goethe's celebrated concept of the negative after-image, the positive after-image occurs when the eye continues to see an object in the same place a moment after it has already disappeared or moved away. This happens because the stimnlation of the nerve fibers only wears off gradually, and the after-image remains in the same color as the original image rather than the complementary color, as with a negative after-image. Since about 1750, it has been known (or rather rediscovered, as Ptolemy'S Optics was reportedly aware of the after-image effect) that the positive after-image lasts for an eighth of a second. The eye is therefore no longer able to differen- tiate movements faster than this from one another. It was not until the nineteenth century, however, that researchers proceeded to take advantage of this effect with small technical devices that produced
illusionistic effects as toys. In 1824, for example, Sir John Herschel, the son of the aforementioned astronomer and discoverer of infrared, rotated a coin so quickly that by all appearances the front and the back, the number and the emblem, were visible at the same time as a single image (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 109).
And yet the after-image effect alone is still not enough to make cinema possible. It only supports the cinematic illusion in one respect: it dampens the flickering during the film advance and completely
149
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
suppresses it upon reaching the flicker fusion threshold. But to produce the illusion that one and the same object has moved from the place it occupied on frame A to another place on frame B, another optical effect must be added: the stroboscope effect. Hopefully, it IS not necessary to say much about the effectiveness of this effect, as all of the better discos employ stroboscopic lights so that people's dance movements can be cut up into their individual phases, much like film editing. The twentieth century, in other words, has successfully reimported a film effect into everyday life. The nineteenth century, on the other hand, had to first discover the stroboscope effect to make film possible at all.
It is a great pleasure to inform you that the great physicist Michael Faraday was among these discoverers. Faraday will appear later in these lectures as a genius at theater lighting, but in 1831 he also discovered electromagnetic induction or the possibility of produc- ing voltage and ultimately alternating current through the circular motion of an electric circuit in a magnetic field. What he discov- ered for optics is not so very far from induction, because it already prepared for the possibility of one day electrifying optical media like film and television. As in the case of the rotation press or the revolver, circular motion once again plays the decisive role, which will culminate in roll film. Through his fundamental electromagnetic discovery, Faraday took notice of circular motion in general, and he reportedly observed two gears in a mine whose motion was normally not perceptible at all because of speed and thus because of the after- image effect (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 114). On the basis of this observa- tion, Faraday constructed purely experimental gear couplings, until he determined a new optical law: the periodic breaks in the equally p. eriodic images - which occur approximately when the front gear allows the viewer to see the individual teeth of the rear wheel but then conceals them again - leads to the lovely illusion that the eye mistakenly identifies tooth A from image 1 with another tooth B from image 2 with a third tooth C from image 3, etc. A virtual movement thus emerges, and at certain rotation speeds or frequencies the gears even virtually stop. Electro-technicians and information theorists like Shannon would say that the sampling frequency together with the frequency of the samples produces an aliasing effect, which is perhaps a free English translation of Brecht's alienation effect. The possibility of this aliasing effect is only present when the sampling frequency is not at least twice as large as the maximum frequency in the signal of interest. For this reason, sophisticated filter chains provide for a meticulously precise observation of Shannon's sampling theorem
i I
I
150
< 'j
? OPTICAL MEDIA
during the digital recording and playback of compact discs. And the fact that the stroboscope effect does not hinder but is actually neces- sary for film says everything about the difference between film and electro-acoustics, the imaginary and the real (this is already a slight anticipation of statements that are yet to come). It only becomes obtrusive and disruptive when film scenes themselves demonstrate the very effect on which they are based. You all know that when a western is shown at 24 frames per second and the famous covered wagons of the American pioneers have exactly the right frequency, their spokes appear to be standing still or even running backwards.
So much for Faraday, who admittedly appears to have been more mterested in a basic theory of frequency than in its media-technical applications. The physicist neglected to demonstrate his stroboscope effect not only with the teeth of gears and slits but rather with images, which was a small but decisive step in the development of film. However, Joseph Plateau, the Belgian professor of experimental physics and astronomy at Ghent University, was working on optical illusions at the same time and completely independent of Faraday. In 1832, he thought of feeding the stroboscope with 16 drawings of a dancer, presenting her in successive phases of movement and ending once again in the initial position.
On the outer edge of the disk and between the individual images there were 16 slits. When the spectator positioned the disk in front of a mirror, set it in motion, and continued looking through the same slit into the mirror, the dancer herself would proceed to perform endless pirouettes or circular movements. For the first time, a tecbni- cal trick had changed the zero frequency, which was the rate at which all representative artworks had been displayed ever since the Stone Age, into frequencies as high as one likes. This must have so deeply fascinated Plateau that he was no longer able to leave his optical experiment alone and he gradually went blind; in contrast to his col- league Fechner, however, his blindness was permanent.
Perhaps the extent of the sacrifice that Plateau made enables us to appreciate the advance that his stroboscope represented. If one thinks back to Athanasius Kircher's smicroscope, which was able to present the 14 Stations of the Cross one after another, the first important difference is the novelty of Plateau's representation of the successive phases of the dancer's movements. The 14 Stations of the Cross were 14 different images as such, one on the Mount of Olives, one with Pilate, one on Golgatha, etc. , from the night before Good Friday until the famous sixth hour. The 16 drawings of the dancer, on the other hand, are absolute snapshots of one and the same object - and
151
? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
this was done seven years before Daguerre was able to reduce photo- graphic recording time to two to three minutes. Imagine if the devout Jesuit Kircher had presented the passion playas endless pirouettes. With his virtual circular motion, Plateau is a worthy contemporary of all the acoustic experimenters between 1830 and 1880, or between Weber and Edison, who made analogous attemps to achieve millisec- ond recordings of sound and speech periods, which finally culminated in Edison's phonograph in 1877.
That means at the same time that film was not yet techmcally possible during Plateau's lIfetime simply because mstantaneous pho- tography lagged far behind the rotation speeds that were attainable with the stroboscope. For this reason, only scientific deVices and toys were initially developed from the stroboscope. The device was sng- gested by Doppler, who also discovered the acoustic effect that was named after him: to analyze motion, whose speed strips it of every visual perception, Doppler employed a systematic reversal of the stroboscope, which did not set images and slits into periodic motion but rather the light source itself - as a rapid snccession of electrical sparks, for example (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 120). This is precisely what in the meantime is employed in discos, most likely to train the speed of our perception - in defiance of all physiology - for the extreme requirements of a technical war.
The development of toys also proceeds in a similarly militaristic way. You may recall that one of the reasons why Leibniz developed his wonderful differential calculus was to make missile trajectories calculable. Now in 1811, a certain Franz von Uchatius came into the world, which at that time still had an Austrian Empire. In 1829, Uchatius voluntarily joined the second field artillery regiment as an artillery gunner. After graduating from the Bombardier Corps Academy iu 1837, he was promoted to sergeant and commissioned to teach physical chemistry. In 1841, he began his - at least for the Austrian artillery - groundbreaking research on canuon casting, which ultimately led him to the invention of steelbronze and also of the aforementioned explosive Uchatius powder, which is chemically closely related to old roll film. As a reward, Kaiser Franz Joseph pro- moted him to Field Marshal Lieutenant and at the same time, because this promotion would have otherwise been impossible, made him a
baron. In the symbolic world, on which monarchies are based, things fell into place very well, but Austria-Hungary did not have the least interest in the technical real world. After walking a great distance, a certain Mitterhofer from South Tyrol was permitted to present his wooden typewriter - the very first that we know of - to this same
152
? OPTICAL MEDIA
Kaiser. He received a personal donatIOn, but hIS machine dId not go into production. Uchatius fared even worse: due to bureaucratic difficultIes with the introduction of Uchatius cannons in the impe- rial army, the artilleryman and Field Marshal Lieutenant became his own target. On June 4, 1881 he shot himself in the head (Zglinicki, 1979, pp. 130-5).
After this requiem we now return to the history of film. Before Field Marshal Lieutenant Franz von Uchatius took aim at himself, it must have been important to him to teach all cadets and officer candidates the principle of artilleristic shooting. Plateau's newly dis- covered stroboscope lent itself easily to this purpose. Like Edison's kinetoscope, it also admittedly had the one crucial disadvantage that it was not a mass medium, but rather it always only allowed a single viewer to look through the observation slit. For his lectures on weapons technology, therefore, Uchatius spent his scarce free time first combining the well-known lanterna magica witb the strobo- scope. And behold: all of the cadets were immediately able to watch Uchatius' sketches of projectiles flying through the air at the same time, as they were projected onto the wall of the auditorium. The lanterna magica thus no longer produced merely virtual motion, like Schriipfer's curtains of smoke, but by means of a crank - much like early cinema - made successive images really dance in front of a fixed light source. It is no wonder, then, that Uchatius' constructions were purchased by a carnival showman, who gave magical performances that turned the weapon back into money, as Schriipfer or Robertson had once done (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 133).
What is interesting here is not this reversion, but rather the fact that the individual technical elements of film - the recording device, the storage medium, the projection apparatus - were combined with one another very gradually and in stages. Technical media are never the inventions of individual geniuses, but rather they are a chain of assemblages that are sometimes shot down and that sometimes crys- tallize (to quote Stendhal). After Uchatius combined the stroboscope and the lanterna magica, the only element that was still missing was the camera obscura that Talbot had already automated. However, its inclusion in the communication system known as film not only encountered technical obstacles, such as exposure times that were much too long, but also the traditionalism of an entire artistic epoch. As contemporaries of these experiments, draughtsmen like Toepfer in Geneva and Wilhelm Busch in his village near Giittingen were actu- ally quick enough to grasp the new method of drawing in phases as an art form, which means quite simply that they invented the comic
153
? OPTICAL MEDIA
strip, which led in turn to the animated cartoon. However, it was precisely because painters learned to break motion down into suc- cessive phases in the oineteenth century that they did not want to relinquish this new art form once again and replace it with technical media. On December 1, 1888, a certain Emile Reynaud received the French patent number 194 482 for his projection praxinoscope. As the name already suggests, this device projects moving stories, which Reynaud drew on perforated and flexible ribbons as animated films. All of these features, but above all the interplay between the perfora- tions and a gripping mechanism, guaranteed perfect synchronization. The musical accompaniment synchronized with the projection also practically anticipated Edison's kinetoscope, except that throughout his lifetime Reynaud stubbornly refused to replace his "artistic" drawings with photographs (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 136). As Hiilderlin so accurately wrote, it is hard to leave a place when one lives near the source. And what lives closer to the source than art according to European tradition?
3. 2. 2 Implementation
It was thus left to a European emigrant to the US to take the last step. Edward Muggeridge from Kingston-on-Thames, who changed his name to Eadweard Muybridge either out of Anglo-Saxon pride or an American desire for self-promotion, combined for the first time all the elements of film: instantaneous photography, iantema magica, and stroboscope. Muybridge's zoopraxiscope of 1879 showed, as its name claims, life (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 175).
The key word "life" naturally compels us to disregard momen- tarily this lecture's physical image of the world and to touch upon nineteenth-century zoology. However, to understand Muybridge's feat we are now in the same fortunate position as film history: we only need to combine the already existing or already recounted ele- ments. Colt's revolver, Daguerre's photography, Weber's acoustic experiments - all of these elements recur once again.
The initial push was supplied by acoustics. It was possible to record the frequencies of the human voice long before Edison, but there were no researchers who also thought to play back this voice at another place and time. The trick simply consisted in sending the voice into an amplifying funnel at whose end a membrane vibrated. The other side of this membrane was attached to an innocent hog's bristle, which finally scrawled the captured frequencies onto a lamp- blackened glass plate - provided that the experimenter rolled this
154
? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
plate past the bristle fast enough. In this simple way, for example, the very voice of the British phonetician who was the inspiration for Professor Higgins in Shaw's Pygmalion and the musical My Fair Lady has been preserved to this very day. For the first time, the physiology of a living human being was coupled with a storage medium rather than a chain of symbols with a repertoire of signs, as with writing.
3. 2. 2. 1 Marey and Muybridge
Phonographic recording, which at that time was also called visible speech, became the accepted thing among European physiologists. When France established a professorship in natural history at the Parisian College de France at the instigation of the great physiolo- gist Claude Bernard, for whom we have Zola's entire naturalism to thank, the holder, Prof. Etienne-Jules Marey, immediately began constructing devices. Doctors like Goethe's Mephisto had actually already strongly recommended taking the pulse of, above all, women with tenderness, and it was precisely because of such pleasures that it had not occurred to a doctor before Marey to replace his own hand with a machine. At the College de France, one device emerged after another: a heart recorder, a pulse recorder, and finally also a device that was connected to the four extremities of animals and could record their movements. None of these devices bore the least similarity to photographic cameras, but rather they worked, exactly like visible speech, with a pencil and a steadily moving paper cylinder.
As only luck would have it, Marey became acquainted with a captain in the French army who was also a horse enthusiast. This captain converted the results of the professor's measurements back into traditional art. His visual reconstruction of the measurements of a horse's legs manifested the incredible fact that there is a moment while galloping when only one of the horse's legs is touching the ground? The Anglo-Saxon world in particular was overrun with watercolors featuring horses and riders, yet there was not a single picture showing the leg position that Marey claimed.
Imagine for the blink of an eye if film had been invented in India and the leg position was not that of horses but rather of women and men according to the rules of the Kama Sutra . . .
7Kittler is incorrect here and in the following paragraphs when he states that one horse's leg is always touching the ground during a gallop. The theory of "unsup- ported transit" referred to here actually claimed that all of the horse's legs were in the air at the same time.
155
? OPTICAL MEDIA
Instead, the story continues m puritamcal America, where Leland Stanford Sr. became a millionaire by constructing a pacific railroad and consequently, long before Ronald Reagan, also became governor of the state of California. Stanford, the horse enthusiast and trotting horse breeder, saw the measurements of the horse's legs, but was unable to believe the results of Marey's experiments. We can only assume the reason was that the watercolor images of horses' legs remained so deeply imbedded in the subconscious minds of people who had not yet seen a film. However, where belief is lackmg, m America there is money and experimentation. Stanford had the for- tunate idea of calling in Muybridge, the landscape photographer, and commissioning a photographic test of tl,e horse's leg problem.
Muybridge thus exchanged the Californian wilderness for Califor- nian civilization, or the timelessness of Yosemite Valley, which he had immortalized in his landscape photographs, for the millisecond realm of telegraphy. Stanford's breeding establishment for trotting horses was located at his ranch in Palo Alto, precisely where the Leland Stanford Junior University - renowned for being the best for the study of electronics - stands today. Muybridge constructed a white wall with a short race track in front of it, and in front of this race track he placed a row of 12 instant cameras, which were all connected electronically. With relay circuits supplied notably by the San Francisco Telegraph Supply Company, another media industry firm, Muybridge succeeded in triggering these 12 cameras one after another at intervals of only 40 milliseconds, whereby each individual camera had a shutter speed of a single millisecond. Then all he needed was to make a horse gallop along the race track and Governor Stanford had a black-and-white photograph proving that during a certain phase of movement while galloping only one of the horse's hooves was touching the ground.
You see: Muybridge's experimental set-up no longer had even the smallest resemblance to the stroboscope, but rather it recorded movements for as long and extensively as the experimenter wanted and the race track allowed. Cylindrical storage media, which - from Plateau to Marey - were confined to repetitions and periods, and thus choreography and poetry, were superseded by the prose of science and later also of entertainment media. You know that in poetry, which was formerly identical to dance, everything must come back around as in the stroboscope; in novels, on the other hand, there is always an unforeseen and contingent future, as in Muybridge's series of instantaneous photographs, which can consequently also only stop through an interruption. All of so-called modern life therefore depends entirely on nineteenth-century media technologies.
156
? OPTICAL MEDIA
Muybridge's empincal confirmation of Marey's experiment took place in 1878. Five years later, the very same instantaneous record- ing technology used by Muybridge also made all of Field Marshal Lieutenant von Uchatius' dreams of artillery pedagogy come true. The physicist Ernst Mach sealed a wire in a glass tube, connected the wire electrically to the shutter of an instant camera, and then fired on the glass tube. The result was a photographic speed record: a real bullet, rather than a drawn one as in the stroboscope, generated shock waves as It entered the chamber. It is no wonder that the same Mach was also the first to achieve the opposite record: the time-lapse film for analyzing infinitely slow movements (Eder, 1978, p. 523).
Muybridge, as far as I can trust my optical memory, also invented another trick. The library of Stanford University, which the old gover- nor founded on the site of his fonner horse breeding establishment to memorialize his son (whose death was caused by bungling European doctors, of course) and to prevent similar tragic cases in the future through science, contains stacks of enormous photo albums, in which Muybridge gradually shifts from horses and cows to people. When- ever an athletic Stanford student and sprinter enters the photograph from behind, he is naked, but whenever he turns his front towards the camera a swimsuit suddenly appears out of nowhere, as if the image has been retouched. Muybridge thus invented the stop trick, one of the most important film tricks, long before George Meli"s. As far as I can see, frontal nudity first appears in Muybridge's photographs only during his later time at the University of Pennsylvania.
The purpose of the swimsuit in California is clear: only the nude photographs require some explanation. After Muybridge finally abol- ished the hand of the artist (which had appeared so irreplaceable to his predecessor Reynaud) and manufactured a pure multimedia system, he also wanted to reform painting. His magnificent volumes on "animal locomotion" were published for the express purpose of preventing artists from drawing or painting false positions, like the galloping horse. Muybridge's nude photographs provided them instead with a scientific model of all possible body movements. Like Renaissance perspective and the camera obscura, instantaneous pho- tography was supposed to discipline art. Admittedly, this time it did not involve abolishing the dominance of the symbolic, as in medieval holy images, and introducing a human scale through perspective, but rather at the end of the nineteenth century the imaginary also had to believe in it. The reason we never see three legs of a horse in the air is because the eye projects a familiar general shape on all of the phases of an animal's movements.
157
? OPTICAL MEDIA
I am pleased to be able to say that Muybridge's propaganda was a crowning success in at least one famous case. Duriug his European travels, Muybridge's patron Leland Stanford Senior also went to Paris, where he became acquainted - presumably in Muybridge's company - with the painter Meissonier. Jean Louis Ernest Meisso- nier, who unfortunately hardly anyone appreciates any more except for Salvador Dali and myself, had already painted practically all of the legs of the horses in Napoleon's Great Army on extremely expensive canvas out of an explicit admiration for Napoleon's "orga- nizational genius" (Greard, 1897, p. 47), but he confessed that he only knew how to represent these legs while striding and trotting and not while galloping (Greard, 1897, p. 194). Stanford demanded that Meissonier paint his portrait, which the painter would have refused to do had Stanford not revealed to him on this occasion the secret of Muybridge's instantaneous photographs of horses. Meis- sonier was converted, and it was because of him that this secret was eventually conveyed to the vice-president of the Paris Academy of Fine Arts. From then on, Meissonier employed photographic source material to paint real horses' legs rather than picturesque imagi- nary ones. According to his biography, he used these photographic models"only for verification," but in his private park in Poissy, near Versailles, he built a short railroad track, seated himself in a sleigh- like locomotive whose speed could be adjusted, and studied a gallop- ing horse in motion with his own mobilized painter's eye (Greard, 1897, p. 73). You see once again how the railroad replaced the horse in media history, and how the nineteenth-century railroad journey celebrated by Schivelbusch (1986) was not limited to being passively transported, but rather in the wonderful case of Meissonier it was already an active automobile in the literal sense of a forward-moving, self-propelling technology. It is hard to say whether this tremendous expense made Meissonier's war paintings more valuable or realistic, and there is no need to know. The death of traditional painting was quickly approaching, for in the same Paris salon where Stanford had met Meissonier, Muybridge also met Marey.
For the first time in this history of invention, therefore, we are con- fronted with a case of positive feedback.
Sixty years earlier, Niepce and Daguerre had met purely by chance, even though they both lived in France, and their collaboration had to be insured through a civil contract. Now, in 1882, Marey's machine for measuring movement inspired Muybridge to design a follow-up invention in California, and Muybridge's serial photography, in turn, inspired Marey to design his own follow-up invention. Muybridge, as I have
158
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
said, went as far as inserting his sequences of images - which were photographic and no longer merely drawn - into a stroboscope in order to be able to project real movements. This was still not a film, however, not only because a minute of horse galloping would have required 270 images instead of the available 12 (see Clark, 1977), but also because Muybridge was stubborn: as a prior landscape pho- tographer, he never gave up using the heavy, immovable glass plates that Niepce's cousin had introduced to photography in 1847. For this reason, namely, because a human life is far too short to comprehend avalanches of technical innovations, teamwork and feedback loops
become essential . . .
Muybridge and Marey, these twins or Dioscuri who were present
at the birth of fillll, were both born in 1830 and died in 1904. It is therefore possible to shift from one to the other without any prob- lems. After the soiree at Meissonier's, Marey realized that all of his machines for measuring heartbeats, pulse rates, and the movements of horses' legs had been historically superseded by Muybridge's serial photography - with one exception. By holding tight to the unifying, linearizing power of writing paper, Marey always only needed one single piece of equipment, while Muybridge had to position 12 dif- ferent cameras. The task, therefore, was to dispose of 11 cameras and still be able to supply serial photographs. In the process, Colt's good old revolver was once again honored, as it had also reduced the need for six pistols down to one. In 1874, a French astronomer, Pierre Jules Cesar Janssen, had already converted the revolver from the wars with the Red Indians into a revolver for the stars in order to capture 18 different positions of the planet Venus on a single photographic plate, whereby the astronomical revolver repeatedly closed his camera lens between these 18 instantaneous recordings
with a Maltese cross (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 170). While Marey still had to install his individual images into a stroboscope by hand, this new device supplied the stroboscopes all by itself. After this preparatory work, it was easy for Marey to improve on Jannssen's astronomical revolver. Marey developed a device that was roughly 50 centimeters long, which he dubbed a chronophotographic gun or fusil chronophotographique because it handles photographs much in the same way as a gun. It was braced against the shoulder for stabil- ity, it had gun sights for aiming, and firing the trigger produced an instantaneous photograph, whereupon the barrel, which contained 11 more unexposed negatives, turned 30 degrees, bringing the next negative into position. If the metaphor of shooting a photograph was ever taken literally, then it was in the case of Marey, whose assistant
159
? OPTICAL MEDIA
Georges Demeny was reportedly even ordered by the French general staff to record and optimize the standardized marches of soldiers using serial photography in 1904.
At a time when France was mourning a lost war and the lost provinces of Alsace-Lorraine, Marey's photographic rearmament considerably helped his career. The physiologist, who had already received his own physiological institute, rose even further to become president of the French photographic society. In this position, he put into place the penultimate step to film technology. The rigid barrel or disk, which had been maintained from Plateau's stroboscope through to tbe chronophotographic gun, was transformed into a flexible roll, which was transported automatically past the lens through a clock- work mechanism in the camera. And even though it still was not a celluloid roll, the technique of fihu recording was in principle fixed. Marey would only have had to put his photographic paper rolls into a projection apparatus driven by clockwork, but he did not, and he thus missed the chance of becoming Lumiere or technical light itself. For this reason, we are still faced with the pressing task of recon- structing the commercialization of the half-military, half-scientific technology of instantaneons photography throngh Edison and the Lnmiere brothers.
3. 2. 3 Silent Film
We no longer need, as in previons lectnres, to represent the history of this industrialization as a detailed acconnt of individual inventions. Up until now, the presentation of these individual inventions illus- trated the simplest, namely earliest attempts to solve the fundamental problems of optical media technology. This no longer applies, as the individual inventions and patents related to film began to explode in 1890: while there were only around 200 film-related patents issued worldwide between 1875 and 1890, this number had already risen to 500 between 1890 and 1910. In the age of indnstry, therefore, film emerged from pure teamwork. That is why I will only make rough cuts that treat silent film, sound film and color film as epochal structures. The two world wars will also serve as crude landmarks.
Before discussing the actual development of silent film, I want to point out again how far Marey had already come conceptually despite the fact that he failed to project his sequences of images. In 1891, his assistant, the aforementioned Georges Demeny, developed the won- drous photography of speech or photographie de la parole. Precisely like the earlier telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell, Demeny
160
? ? ? oPTICAL MEDIA
also wanted to cure a physiological handicap, namely deaf-muteness, through media technology: he combined a photographic gun afa Marey with one of Edison's phonographs, turned the experimental apparatus towards himself, as was usual at the time, and shouted two very significant sentences into both devices at the same time: first "Vi ve la Fran ee! " and second "Je vous ai me. " It was the first declaration of love in history that was no longer directed at women, but rather at the medium of film, which has since become the norm. At the same time, however, it was also a lesson for deaf-mutes, whose mouths reportedly managed to produce audible declarations of love to no one at all by imitating Demeny's individual mouth positions.
We can see, then, how desperately the couplmg of optical and acoustic media technology was sought from the very beginning, long before the introduction of sound film. This is even truer of the inven- tor who actually applied it to commercial cinema: Thomas Alva Edison himself.
Edison worked as a telegraph operator during the American Civil War, which made him partially deaf but also provided him with technical know-how and money. On this double basis, his laboratory - which was trnly the first laboratory in the history of technology - first realized two dreams of the century: the mechanical record- ing of sound, namely the phonograph, and the perfect light source, namely the light bulb. The phonograph, as the first form of visible speech capable of also being played back, was developed in 1877 as a byproduct of Edison's attempt to accelerate the transmission of telegraph signals. It therefore shows that the opposition between discrete and analog media was already beginning to become fluid in Edison's time. The light bulb, which in turn led to the tubes that were the basis of all electronics for a long time, emerged from the search for a light source that would avoid the smoke and fumes (and thus the signal noise) of ancient candles. At the same time, it was also supposed to avoid the short life span of carbon arc lamps and the rather deadly dangers of gaslight - the two light sources that had immediately preceded the electric ligbt bulb in the nineteenth century.
It is important to note here that Edison's kinetoscope - the immedi- ate predecessor of film - was directly connected to these two previous inventions. To begin with, this is true biographically. The phono- graph and the light bulb made Edison renowned, so to speak, for being able to invent as if on command. One ofthe first to bow to his fame was the great Berlin physicist Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz, the founding hero of all eye and ear physiology. His acquaintance with Muybridge provided Edison with the same fame
161
? oPTICAL MEDIA
in America. During his trip to France in 1881, where hIS attempts to meet the science-fiction novelist Villiers de elsIe-Adam unfortu- nately fell through, Edison also made the acquaintance precisely not of poets but rather of fellow researchers like Marey. After both of these meetings, nothing seemed more obvious to Edison than turning a scientific experiment into a money-making entertainment medium.
After the phonograph and the light bulb, therefore, Edison also developed the first commercial film system. And hecause entertain- ment media had to be sold and distributed worldwide, Edison's stroke of genius was standardizing the serial instantaneous photogra- phy of Muybridge and Marey, just as Colonel Colt had standardized the revolver as the first serial murder weapon. After he had become acquainted with Marey in Paris, Edison found Eastman-Kodak's cel- luloid film. By choosing the 35 mm format and furnishing the film roll with perforations, which have remained the standard practically ever since, Edison solved all of Marey's problems of film synchroni- zation in one fell swoop. He subsequently constructed a component called the kinetograph, which recorded moving pictures, as well as a compatible or standardized component called the kinetoscope, which could play back the developed film.
One year later, Edison finally acquired the patent for the so-called escapement disc mechanism from another American, which ensured that the individual frames of the film stood beautifully still during the sixteenth of a second in which they were recorded or observed, while all further transport between the individual frames fell pre- cisely in the pauses in between. Since this fundamental solution, at the very latest, film has been a hybrid medium that combines analog or continuous single frames with a discontinuous or discrete image sequence; this will be amplified even further in connection with tele- vision. In 1888, Edison placed this entire digital-analog construction in a box that was essentially an electrified version of the peep show cabinets at eighteenth-century fairs: an electric motor pulled the film roll, which was illuminated from behind by a light bulb, past a mag- nifying glass, through which the primarily individual observer, upon inserting a coin, was supposed to follow the moving film and experi- ence the illusion of continuous motion. Edison's sales success was so great that nickelodeons, as they were called, sprang up everywhere in America (they are predecessors, so to speak, of contemporary arcades). William Fox, among others, later made his money as the inventor of Movietone talking newsreels (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 208).
In addition to the financial effect of this new illusion, it is also important to point out its technical basis: the acoustics of telegraph
162
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
sIgnals also provided apparent continuity on the basIs of actual discontinuity, which was no longer humanly controllable, and this had originally inspired Edison's phonograph. For this reason, he was justified in writing: "the idea occurred to me that it was pos- sible to devise an instrument which should do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear, and tbat by a combination of the two, all motion and sound could be recorded and reproduced simultane- ously" (Clark, 1977, p. 171). Edison's kinetoscope was accordingly also called the optICal phonograph. This fact is not only significant for EdIson's practical kinetoscope, but It is also theoretically sigmficant: as with Demeny, the first experiments in the direction of multimedia were already happening at the end of tbe nineteenth century. After the individual sensory channels had been physiologically measured and technically replaced, what followed was the systematic creation of multimedia systems, which all media have since become. What emerged were simulations or virtual realities, as tbey are now called, which reach as many sensory channels as possible at the same time.
Edison built the first film studio in the history of media, his so- called Black Mary, precisely for this purpose. This Black Maria was, in memory of the camera obscura, a large box, which could be turned in the direction of the sun for tbe purpose of lighting, which was equipped with light bulbs for the same reason, and which had black interior walls so that the illuminated and recorded actors - the first in the history of film who actually performed short, fictional scenes - could act in front of a uniform background. In contrast to the arts, media always play against the backdrop of noise, which in the case of Edison's optics was a black painted wall. The acoustics were more of a problem, as Edison wanted to record the picture and sound at the same time. Without microphones he had difficulty in bridging the distance between the actors' mouths and the phonograph trumpets without disruptive acoustic background noise. The synchronization of "movies," as Edison already called them, with the phonograph cylinder also created problems during playback. Apparently, it was historically still too early for the audiovisual Gesamtmedienwerk. Edison also confirmed this after several kinetoscope experiments, when he told students that instruction through film and vision (and not through gramophony) would soon replace instruction through
books.
Film, in other words, began at least technically as silent film, and
it did not combine all three of Edison's innovations - film, light bulb, and phonograph. It is probably a historical rule of post-print media technologies that individual and isolated sensory channels must first
163
? OPTICAL MEDIA
be completely and thoroughly tested before any thought about con- necting them is at all possible. The mulumerua system of kinetoscope and light bulb was thus the only one that took hold - first in Berlin, with a rather inconsequential film presentation by the Skladanowsky brothers on November 1, 1895, and soon thereafter, namely on December 28, 1895, in the Indian Salon of the Grand Caf" on the Boulevard des Capncines in Paris, where the brothers Augnste and Louis Lumiere gave their first pnblic film demonstration before a paying audience with worldwide resnlts.
The two Lumi"res - whose surname has already been commented npon thonsands of times - really brought light to film. This was for the simple reason that they npgraded the equipment, which had been purchased from Edison along with Edison's film standard, in one small way: they projected films onto a large screen for a paying mass andience, who gathered aronnd a single vision like in the old theater. Above all, however, they developed along with what has since been called the cinematographe, or cinema for short, a device that can record, copy, and play back moving images. The cinematograph recorded films when it worked with a lens like a camera obscura, it copied films when the lens was replaced with simple sunlight, and finally it projected films when sunlight was replaced with a light bulb behind the film roll. Every spectator paid one franc, and in exchange they simultaneously saw exactly what the other spectators saw. With the phonograph, such distribution was more or less natural due to the fact that the ear cannot be closed, but with film it had to be constructed. The Lumi"res typically employed front projection with a strong lamp illuminating the celluloid from behind, which has since become standard practice. Once, at the Exposition Internatiol1ale in Paris, they successfully experimented with front and back projection at the same time. Iu an enormous hall with spectators sitting every- where, they were all supposedly able to see the film well. For this reason, a screen was first submerged in water before every showing and stretched across the middle of the room - then half of the audi- ence was able to watch the film projected from the front and the other half from the back due to the water.
If this switch between front and back projection reminds you of someone, so much the better, for the logical coherence of film history then becomes clear. Daguerre's diorama of Vesuvius had switched between day and night views by switching between front and back projection in precisely the same way. Already for this reason it could be no coincidence that film, despite Edison, did not originate in the USA. The conversion of the representative arts into optical media
164
? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
took place ill a country that had long known the arts as such. I mean, to quote The Song o f Roland, "la dulce France. " Like Daguerre, the father of the Lumiere brothers was also originally a painter who became a photographer. But it was precisely because of this techniza- tion of his prior handwork that he was concerned that the technology could do without him as a professional photographer simply because people would go on to photograph themselves. Lumiere thus directed himself and his sons away from photography and towards the manu- facturing of photographic materials . . .
The history of the development of this medium in one genera- tion was continued by his sons, who proceeded no longer simply to take photographs, but also to supply their father and the business in general with better photographic negatives (Telerama). They were therefore both scientists and industrialists who developed a method of storing and projecting moving and thus living people, as well as the first technique of making corpses imperishable and thus storable using formaldehyde. There is no better way to illustrate the connec- tion between media technology and physiology that existed in the nineteenth century.
The contents of the films that the paying spectators on the Boule- vard des Capuciues saw also resulted from the Lumieres' occupation. The first film to be privately screened, which to my knowledge is now lost, was shown at an annual meeting of the French society for photography, where President Marey and all the other scientists were able to watch themselves (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 171). The first film to be publicly shown, on the other hand, showed the employee side of this science, as it presented the Lumieres' workers streaming out of the factory gate in Lyon during a shift change. It is characteristic for the difference between media and arts that this film did not present an infantile or humorous but still planned and composed American plot, as with Edison, but rather it was taken purely from everyday life. The Lumieres had no Black Mary to bring fictions into the world, but rather at the beginning they only made daylight recordings, which made them the founders of documentary film.
Another confrontation, which was more in keeping with the Grand Cafe's Indian Salon (the name implies that it was designed for exotic wonders), was experienced by the 35 spectators at the public pre- miere. Among the Lumieres' documentary films was L'arrivee d'un train ala Ciotat, or the arrival of a train at the station of a French city on the Mediterranean, which has since become famous. The favorite toy of the nineteenth century thus entered, the old Renais- sance perspective went into effect as usual, and the locomotive on
165
? OPTICAL MEDIA
the screen became larger and less well defined until the spectators reportedly fled the Parisian cafe in fear. Without planning it, the Lumieres had actually transformed the spectators not into targets of their fixed camera, but rather into (as Virilio formulates it) targets of the imaginary locomotive. When the American director Griffith later proceeded to put the film camera itself into apparent motion and directly approach the actors with it, this shock effect supposedly increased: the spectators could allegedly only explain the enormous close-ups of faces that filled the screen by concluding that Griffith had literally decapitated the actors' heads.
In the eyes of these deceived spectators, and behind the back of silent film producers who did not have such shocks and murders in mind at all, cinema thus transformed from the very beginning into an illusionary medium. In contrast to the scientific experiments of a Muybridge, which were supposed to replace everything imaginary or figurative in the eyes of people with the real, and in contrast to the phonograph as well, which could only reproduce the reality of noise for lack of cutting or editing possibilities, a new imaginary sphere emerged. It was no longer literary, as in the Romantic period, but rather technogenic. Tzvetan Todorov's theory that the fantastic in literature died after it was elucidated by Freud and psychoanalysis (Todorov, 1973, pp. 160-2) is partly false: the fantastic experienced a triumphant resurrection through film.
Nothing could attest to this more perfectly than the fact that a certain Georges Melies, who had once been the director of the Robert-Boudin theater, was among the many people who pur- chased a cinematograph from the Lumieres. Robert-Boudin, whom Bans Magnus Enzensberger had appropriately evoked in one of his mausoleum poems, was neither a playwright nor a director, but rather the most famous magician and escape artist of the nineteenth century. His grandson consequently transformed magical artworks into modern tourism by inventing the French specialty of son et tumi! ;re, a Bengal sound and light show for old castles that designates tourism as the worthy heir of absolutist lighting effects. As the heir of Houdin, Melies consequently transformed the documentary film into the modern fantastic. He invented a vast number of fihn tricks, but I will only focus on two elementary ones: backwards projection and the stop trick.
Melies employed backwards projection perhaps most success- fully in his film Charcuterie mecanique (Mechanical Delicatessen). A pair of scenes were filmed in a butcher's shop, and they recorded in sequence the slaughtering of a pig, its dismemberment, and the
166
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
production of a finished sausage. These same scenes were shown at the screening, except that within each scene the last frame had heen made the first and the first had been made the last. In the spellbound eyes of the spectators, the resulting film showed a finished sausage transforming back into the corpse of a pig and the corpse then transforming back into a living pig. For the first time in history, the resurrection of the flesh - this 2,OOO-year-old proclamation - actually came to pass in real life. The ability of film to visually produce appar- ent continUIty could not be demonstrated more triumphantly, as his working principle - the cutting up of living movements into lifeless, static frames - was blatantly disclosed in the form of the mechani- cal butcher shop, yet the process was nevertheless reversed again in the imaginary sphere. It is therefore precisely because film works in physical time, unlike the arts, that it is in a position to manipulate time. According to a wonderful dictum of the physicist Sir Arthur Eddington, the irreversibility of physical time or the constant increase of entropy, which is a result of the second law of thermodynamics, is shown by the impossibility of films like Charcuterie mi! canique, which reverse the time axis.
The time reversal trick could also be performed with a sound recording on cylinder or record instead of a film, as Edison had already experimented with playing noises or voices backwards. However, no sound storage device prior to the tape recorder would have been able to keep up with the second trick introduced by MeIies. He apparently discovered the so-called stop trick by accident while filming a Parisian street scene with a hearse. He always filmed with a tripod, which represented for him the unchangeable and therefore illusionary position of the spectator. The celluloid roll ran out in the middle of the scene, however, as the length of these rolls was still not sufficient for feature films before the turn of the century. Without moving the camera from the tripod, a new roll was inserted and the filming continued. Upon projecting the finished product, MeIies was astonished to find that the spectator did not notice the temporal dis- ruption at all (which would be entirely out of the question with the abrupt interruption of a recorded noise). The pedestrians and vehicles passing by on the street had been removed as if by magic, and they had been replaced with other pedestrians in other positions on the street. M"lies immediately incorporated this principle or trick into his next film: L'escamotement d'une dame, or the vanishing lady, dem- onstrated that under media-technical conditions a Robert-Houdin is no longer necessary to conjure people and more specifically ladies away from the stage. And if "lady" is interpreted as Mother Nature,
167
? OPTICAL MEDIA
as would be appropriate in classICal-romantic literature, then film tricks signify simply a female sacrifice, which has since liquidated all of nature. With the stop trick, film incorporated its own working principle, namely placing cuts in sequence, into its narrative. All that remained was to explain Mohos' technical discovery as the focus of a particular profession, and the job of cutter was born.
So much for the origin of silent film, which from the start had already measured out the entire range of possibilities between acci- dental realism and illusionary theater, and between documentary and feature film. The only element that was still missing in order to plumb all these possibilities was a moving camera. This task was left primarily to American directors like Porter and Griffith. Zglinicb showed insight for once when he noted that the moving camera, with the possibility of tracking in for close-ups and tracking other moving objects, gave birth to the urcinematic genre of the western (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 492). Classical western scenes that depict enemies, primar- ily Indians on moving horses, from the point of view of a moving wagon, completely dismiss Melios' fixed theatrical perspective; they sacrifice the constraint of the spectator's gaze, which was necessary for them to be deceived by stop tricks, in exchange for another and more mobile illusion, which Einstein had described not by chance at the same time, namely in 1905, in his special theory of relativity. Einstein's theory begins with the impossibility of determining, when two movements are relative to each another, such as when two trains pass each other, which movement is virtual and which is real.
The mobile illusion called film thus changed thinking and feeling. Stephane Mallarme, who traced literature back to its 24 naked letters without any optical or acoustic illusions, was once asked in a survey what he thought of illustrated books. The answer: he did not think much of them, because readers of Mallarme, unlike readers of Hoffmann, were not supposed to hallucinate, but rather simply to read; whoever needed illustrations should put away their books and go to the cinema instead (Mallarme, 1945, p. 878). In another interview, the same Mallarme was asked how art could improve technology, and he answered by suggesting that the driver's seat in the recently invented automobile be relocated to the rear, behind the automobile owners, who at that time were upper class, and the front windshield be enlarged as much as possible. Without perceiving their own move- ment at all, and without any visual obstacles such as the driver, these automobile owners would then be fully immersed in the illusion that the streets and landscapes in front of them were opening up and increasing in size as they rode past (Mallarme, 1945, p. 880).
168
? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
Mallarme had correspondingly written a prose poem that Immor- talized this automobile in the poetic or overly poetic disguise of a self-rowing boat. The aforementioned boat floats down the river where Mallarme's own country home in Valvins was located, slips through white water lilies (from which the poem takes its title), at first with the practical goal of carrying the rower, Mallarme, to a lady friend. The visual spectacle of a gliding perspective delights the poet so much, however, that he soon abandons his visit and instead celebrates the lady as the "absent one" - Mallarme's most solemn poetical category (Mallarme, 1945, pp. 283-6). Mallarme's poem thus does exactly what Meissonier (presumably his neighbor) did with his mobile railroad carriage, which proves that 15 years before the first tracking shots were made the dream of them already existed. The mobile images of film are inextricably linked with the new automobiles and the only slightly older railroad journey. Further evi- dence, namely from instantaneous photographer Ernst Mach and the originator of psychoanalysis Sigmund Frend, will follow later today.
The systematics of optical mobilization is in the first instance more important. First, the step from a static to a mobile camera had elimi- nated every similarity between film and the ancient art of theater. From Plato's cave to the peep show theater, spectators were and are fixed in place - not out of old Enropean sadism, but rather becanse before the invention of computers the calculation of moving gazes would have exceeded all computational capacities. Macroscopically, film does not actually alter the fixed position of the spectators' bodies. Microscopically, on the other hand, an apparatus representing their own eyes performs random cuts and movements, from which the spectators cannot distance themselves as they have no other possibili- ties of optical control in the darkness of the cinema. For this reason, according to Edgar Morin's brilliant formulation, "the spectator reacts before the screen as before an external retina telelinked to his
brain" (Morin, 2005, pp. 134-5; italics in original).
Before continuing with the actnal history of film, I wonld like to follow another thread through to the end.
