Projections: Time & the Image
A 500-Year History of the Movies
The history of the cinema begins in dreams, at night, the play of shadow and light.
What dreams? Fundamental human impossibilities: the dream of flying; of walking on the moon; of living machines; of stopping time; and of projecting moving images on to screens.
Yes it moves, and yes there is a man in the moon. From Plato’s Cave to the camera obscura, the magic lantern to the thaumatrope and phenakistescope, from Muybridge to Marey, and finally to the Lumieres’ Cinematographe and the dream fully realized.
The Dream of Cinema: the union of the magic lantern and chronophotography – projected.
Cinema “begins” centuries ago; its sources are multiple (science, magic, entertainment – has anything changed?); till finally; it emerges out of centuries of screen and moving image practices and becomes an actuality. The big screen dominates the 20th century, and then disperses into this 21st century’s multiple media/screen cultures and practices – from spectacle and narrative to platforms and interfaces … our contemporary screen cultures (giant close-ups on tiny telephones – things have changed again indeed). And though the screens have grown infinitely smaller, the image’s “truth / reality” become all but done away with, and a variety of modes of exhibition omnipresent, the cinematic forms – the close-up, the voiceover, the mobile camera, a variety of transitions of time and space – remain. In time and consciousness, cinema was once so prevalent and dominant – for centuries as a dream, and then as a reality of everyday life – that we can say that it now performs a haunting upon us; it lurks within and around us; its practices and desires suffuse us. And it is this – this continued practice and haunting, this continued presence of cinema’s sources and forms – that this course will examine. I will begin with a long introduction to the history of Pre-Cinema; then we will play with some examples of philosophical/optical toys; then look at some examples of Early Cinema; and finally look at some specific clips and a few films that are particularly concerned with four prime notions:
- The Screen
- Projection
- Movement
- Time
Within these main themes, we will think about these issues:
The Cinematic Apparatus
The Cinema, the Projector, the Screen, the Spectator.
An auditorium filled with other strangers, dreamers; a machine behind them throwing forward a cone of light; a flat support for an image, neither window nor mirror; the dreamers.
The ‘Philosophical Toy’
Coming mid-way in the history of the Magic Lantern, these are intimate and physical, more craftsmanlike than machine, as well as being repetitious (looping) and momentary.
Projection
To project – an alchemical term – to throw forward – an imageless cone of light – or an image, a desire (images of desire) – motion itself is a form of projection – an idea of the future – new dimensions (an architecture of the future).
The Close-up
Garbo, Hitchcockian objects, Warholian superstars: the face and the object, surface and screen; fragment or whole; proximity or scale; – intimacy, ambiguity, or human unknowability;?
Time and Movement
Muybridge and Marey, the men who ‘split the second’; instantaneous and chronophotography. What is cinematic time, cinematic movement? Does cinema represent movement or actually produce it? How much is too much, how little too little?
Slow-Motion: the speed of slowness, bullet time.
Some of the films I will draw from:
8 ½ (Fellini, 1963)
2001 (Kubrick, 1968)
A Matter of Life and Death (Powell & Pressburger, 1946)
Curse of the Demon (J. Tourneur, 1957)
La Jetee (Marker, 1962)
Works by Georges Melies (1896-1907)
Metropolis (Lang,1927)
The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes (Quay Brothers, 2005)
Sherlock Jr. (Keaton, 1924)
Spirit of the Beehive (Erice, 1973)
Time Regained (Ruiz, 1999)
NB: Attendance at the first class is required; no one admitted after the show has begun.
