Editorial: “Starting, Stopping and Synthesizing Cinematographic Art”

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Corrigendum

It is a privilege to have edited this issue of Art in Translation. That is, to have chosen the texts to be translated and, more fundamentally, to have set the rationale underpinning the selection.

As a general working premise, this special issue assumes—not uncritically—that there is or can be such a thing as “cinematographic art.” On this basis, it would be enough to assemble any texts dealing with the moving image. However, given that this is an issue of Art in Translation and not of a film journal, I felt it right to choose texts that discuss in some way the relationship between cinematography and other visual arts or literature, and beyond that, in many cases, science and technology. This has the valuable effect of underscoring comparative, interdisciplinary lines of enquiry.

The more specific approach I have taken directly reflects an ongoing research project that first coalesced in 2010¹ and deals with two interwoven threads: cinematography’s frames or photogrammes, and the place of cinematography—as well as photography—within the graphic arts. This is a historical and theoretical project that looks to the esthetics, technologies, science and practices which attend these two related areas. The articles translated here are all in some way connected with—but not reducible to—these issues.

As a consequence of focusing attention on the graphic face of the moving image, cinematography is my preferred general designatory term, rather than an abbreviated cinema, or film, which suggests a problematic medium specificity. In practice, I have not been so dogmatic. With regard to the translations, great care has been taken to reflect the authors’ original terminologies and phrases, which are varied, to say the least. In the last two articles in this issue, for example, we can recognize the influence of the useful filmological distinction between cinema and film; that is, institution/milieu and textual object, respectively.²

Within the histories and theories of the moving image (especially surveys/summaries), cinematography’s frames or photogrammes are predominantly mentioned anecdotally—if at all—and in passing, as the basis for the “illusion of movement.” This is often the case even in accounts of animation, where frame-by-frame processes abound. In such cases, this approach is generally fitting. The view I share with a number of filmmakers, scholars and critics is that there is much to be gained from dwelling on cinematography’s frames.³ The frame-based structure of cinematography is placed among a number of technological, and thus creative, possibilities, recognized by science, that correspond to some of our perceptual and cognitive faculties and ultimately facilitate the cultural emergence of cinematography. In the 1960s and 1970s, cinematography’s frames became caught up in a debate around perceived “minimal units” necessary for film analysis. The closing texts by Michel Ghuede and Sylvie Pierre Ulmann are directly linked to this debate. The influential film theorist Christian Metz articulated an end to the debate, warning against the reductive dangers of seeking such “minimal units” by holding up the photogramme as a case in point. Certainly, the recognition of cinematography, “the cinema” and the “film text” as complex entities that combine various codes, technologies and other sociocultural factors is essential. I do feel, however, that the verdict of Metz (and others who follow similar lines) regarding cinematography’s frames has served to impede, marginalize and eclipse certain lines of thought that do carry a sense of something fundamental about them (in a nonreductivist way). As one outcome of my ongoing research project, this issue of Art in Translation is designed to signpost the rich insights we find already voiced when we hold our attention on cinematography’s frames and look back over the 180 years since their unequivocal appearance.

The frame-based structure of cinematography indicates, advances and exemplifies a radical shift within the modern graphic arts that cannot be overstated. This shift relates to the unprecedented number of discrete images—frames—required by cinematographic displays. However, this proliferation of discrete images is not solely limited to their quantity: they are, of course, also tightly grouped and presented in rapid succession; almost “compressed.” This is nothing short of a form of “image-inflation”, which carries significant implications for the wider value or economy of images in society. Walter Benjamin was aware of this situation, noting down sometime around 1935: “The formula in which the dialectical structure of film […] finds expression runs as follows. Discontinuous images replace one another in a continuous sequence. A theory of film would need to take account of both these facts.”⁴ Again, Michel Gheude and Sylvie Pierre Ulmann pursue this goal admirably in the last two articles included here.

Taken together, the twelve articles comprising this issue offer a more or less chronological survey, which compliments existing anglophone views on the evolution of cinematographic art sensitive to its frames/photogrammes and/or connections with the graphic arts. Some thematic groups also emerge: proto-cinematography; abstract film; caricature; and radical, political critical theory. A diverse range of cinematographic approaches is offered, with no hard and fast distinction between “live-action” and “animation.” That said, the work of the Disney Studio functions as something of a running case study, as we follow, in step with its development, shifts in critical responses to its productions. We had hoped to include some illustrations of Disney material, but the company declined to grant permission. This is particularly unfortunate for Pierre Mac Orlan’s article, which originally featured frames from The Grasshopper and the Ants (1934) for purposes of comparison with the work of J.J. Grandville. Readers can of course formulate a more substantial comparison by simply watching the film for themselves.

The selected texts, their authors or their subjects have already attracted attention within anglophone debate, but largely in limited ways through second-hand reports and quotations or short extracts. Letting these pieces stand on their own terms in this setting helps to raise them out of their current status as anecdotal points of reference, reveals many nuances that have been previously overlooked and, above all, offers them an active role in anglophone understanding of the history of cinematography.

We begin in the 1830s. In doing so, we must admit the use of cinematography as anachronistic (Léon-Guillaume Bouly patenting a Cinématographe in 1892⁵). However, this is done on the basis of widespread acknowledgement of so-called proto-cinematography or pre-cinematography. We are dealing, then, with a recognizable principle and with material configurations that exceed the historical appearance of a term. Looking beyond the 1890s as the site of the “invention” of cinematography has long been recognized as important if we are to understand its emergence out of various cultural tributaries. The challenge of doing so is that we must let go of ontological claims for cinematography predicated on photographic live-action and narrative as “neutral” norms. This proto-cinematographic or pre-cinematographic area/era of cultural development also offers its own novelties. As Stephen Herbert notes,

To view pre-cinema devices merely as steps towards the cinema […] would be a very narrow perspective. They were—and in some cases still are—self-contained media with their own particularities, differences, potential, and limitations. Much work still needs to be done to document the histories of these media, histories which in most cases started “pre-cinema” but did not end with the introduction of cinematography.⁶

Joseph Plateau’s and Simon Stampfer’s reports of their cinematographic experiments, both published in 1833, stand as foundational texts; the first unequivocal descriptions of kinetic, frame-based—or, in their terminology, sector-based—cinematographic displays that, significantly, accompanied the widespread appearance of devices that followed their specifications. That Plateau and Stampfer were the first to recognize and study these principles has been questioned. Nicholas Wade, for example, has recently championed Peter Mark Roget’s claim to have developed such a device at a slightly earlier date.⁷ While this is plausible, Roget certainly did not see enough potential in these experiments to take them very far. Laurent Mannoni, meanwhile, sees in one of Johannes Zahn’s illustrations for his 1685 Oculus Artificialis Teledioptricus sive Telescopium a “lantern disc carr[ying] six images, representing six successive phases of a movement: a man twirling a cane in his hand.”⁸ This claim is as intriguing as it is tenuous and questionable, because the individual figures can also be seen as different figures: some seem to have hats, others not; are they all canes, or are some swords? In 1962, Joseph Needham discussed reports of ancient Chinese “zoetropes” (the proto-cinematographic spinning drum-based device)—or, more precisely, rotating lanterns adorned with figures. There is no indication in any of the reports cited by Needham that these undoubtedly wonderful objects ever utilized an intermittent (i.e. frame-based) system or, if they did, that they span fast enough to generate the “illusion of movement.”⁹ There is nothing ambiguous about Plateau’s and Stampfer’s statements and the devices associated with them: they demonstrate a clear recognition and exploitation of key principles that directly ignited what has rapidly grown into today’s all-pervasive cinematographic culture.

An additional important feature of the Plateau Phenakistiscope and the Stampfer Stroboscope discs is that from the outset abstract and figurative designs were given equal attention. This has far-reaching implications. As David Robinson’s catalogue Masterpieces of Animation, 1833–1908¹⁰ shows, not only does animation stand as the first cinematographic mode, it also facilitated some path-breaking exercises in abstraction.

Stampfer’s detailed descriptions and thoughts for future developments, coupled with the later remarks of Purkyně, are highly thought-provoking. They clearly show that Stampfer and Purkyně—and by extension their readers—could envisage not only that the principles of these devices could be utilized in more complex set-ups, which, for example, would extend the length of the animations, enhance their presentation, or employ photography, but that in doing so new graphic and narrative possibilities would arise. Put bluntly, Stampfer, in 1833, publicly voiced a clear, albeit speculative, description of the discursive, and thus institutional, framework of cinema that was to arise in the 1890s. We can thus judiciously point to a clear developmental program for cinematography.

G. Maréchal’s article on Émile Reynaud’s ill-fated Stéréo-Cinéma and its animated stereoscopic portraits reminds us that cinematographic developments remained and remain multivalent; and that, as Herbert notes, proto-cinematographic devices did not disappear in the cinematographic era. In seeking to offer stereoscopic cinematographic portraits, Reynaud’s device connects its inventor with current trends in both three-dimensional films and film portraiture.

Bernhard Diebold’s assessments of abstract animation of the 1920s and 1930s are valuable, not only for their attention to the work of Walther Ruttmann and Oskar Fischinger, but equally for the complexity of the critic’s response and hopes for this project. We are reminded that these abstract works—more than simply cinematographic demonstrations of avant-garde concerns—took shape firmly within the context of film production. We also face a historiographic challenge: it has long been customary to locate the emergence of abstract animation within the avant-garde of the 1910s and 1920s. How is this narrative to be modified when we recognize the appearance of abstract animation in the 1830s, as already noted? This remains an open question; one that Joshua Yumibe has considered with care and insight, bridging nineteenth-century and twentieth-century avant-garde and vernacular cultures.¹¹

Gus Bofa’s 1925 text takes a caricaturist’s view on animation and is notable for applying Henri Bergson’s theories of laughter and the comical. It is worth pointing out two obvious twists that Bofa performs on Bergson’s ideas. The first relates to Bergon’s tenet that the comic arises when the “body reminds us of a mere machine”¹² in the clash between the “infinitely supple and perpetually moving” soul and the “resistant,” “obstinate” physical matter of the body.¹³ In developing this insight in relation to animation and cinematography in general, Bofa, in effect, makes a modification of Bergson’s statement that “Any arrangement of acts and events is comic which gives us, in a single combination, the illusion of life and the distinct impression of a mechanical arrangement.”¹⁴ Bofa sees this configuration leading not to the comic, but to “tragic anxiety.” To remedy this, he takes the illusion of life out of the equation and pushes towards an account that positions a living, perceiving viewer in relation to a mechanized on-screen image; a conception no less compatible with Bergson’s proposition that the absurd and the comic both attend disruptions to “the moving continuity of our attention to life.”¹⁵ Secondly, Bofa places the absurd center-stage, notable given the importance this term will gain in later years, teasing it out from its subsidiary role in Bergson—who refers to Théophile Gautier’s recognition of a “logic of the absurd” arising from “the comic in its extreme form.”¹⁶

Writing in 1934, Pierre Mac Orlan—a collaborator and close friend of Bofa’s— presents nineteenth-century graphic artist J.J. Grandville as a precursor of surrealism, Walt Disney and George Méliès. I would like to note a particular problem with Mac Orlan’s assessment of Grandville, who the critic considers to have been “often let down by a skillful though unimaginative pencil, […] [his] hand and ideas […] not always perfectly synchronized.” With prints rather than drawings mistakenly in mind, Mac Orlan overlooks the fact that Grandville’s published (i.e. reproduced) work was consistently prepared by professional engravers, as was common at the time.¹⁷ Mac Orlan, then, misses a trick in comparing Grandville’s original drawings with their published versions, or at least in asking after some of the consequences of graphic reproduction for the kinds of “ideas” the critic recognizes as seeking outlets.¹⁸ Here, we have taken the opportunity to include one of Grandville’s original drawings instead of the reproduction that originally accompanied Mac Orlan’s article. Comparing this preparatory drawing with that published in Un autre monde (1844) reveals clear differences, although, by the same token, impressive similarity.

Anglophone scholars can find increasing numbers of studies on Japanese film culture, and the arts in general, a number of which are Japanese writings in translation.¹⁹ Hanada Kiyoteru’s 1954 text suggests that the tendency to draw a sharp distinction between animation and live-action has, perhaps, been a predominantly Western concern. Indeed, his use of the Disney studio’s animation production model as a means to advance approaches to documentary form still has a freshness that can contribute much to current anglophone interest in animated documentary.²⁰

The selection ends with three texts that emerged at close quarters to one another following the revolutionary uprisings of May 1968. Sylvie Pierre Ulmann and Jacques Aumont’s review of the Mickey Mouse Anniversary Show (1968) rounds off the attention paid to Disney in this issue with a short, sharp politicized critique that trades precisely on the importance of the company and its key creation. Michel Gheude’s and Sylvie Pierre Ulmann’s respective articles on cinematography’s photogrammes perform an important wider function: they indicate the fuller, political dimensions of the debate around this topic at the time (discussed earlier). This is particularly significant in relation to Roland Barthes’s now famous essay, “Le troisième sens: Notes de recherche sur quelques photogrammes de S.M. Eisenstein,” which appeared in Cahiers du Cinéma in 1970.²¹ Indeed, Sylvie Pierre Ulmann’s piece is, in part, a direct response to Barthes. His ideas around a “third”, “obtuse” level of signification beyond denotation and connotation have predominantly been utilized for generalized semiotic ends, stripped of their fundamental political motivations. As touched on earlier, Christian Metz played a significant role in curtailing enquiry into cinematography’s photogrammes. With regard to Michel Gheude, Metz acknowledges, assimilates, depoliticizes, fixes (as a technological code) and, finally, dispenses with his schema.²² With regard to both Roland Barthes and Sylvie Pierre Ulmann, Metz considers their proposals to be “foreign” to his own.²³ We can take this positively, indicating the radical promise of alternative film theories and histories that carry only distant connections with the still-dominant models and canons that house Metz and his ilk.

I am grateful to a number of people for their assistance in bringing this issue to fruition. The chief editors, editorial board, team and publishers of the journal; the translators; all of the license holders and suppliers of the illustrations; contributors Michel Gheude and Sylvie Pierre Ulmann, for invaluable and generous correspondence; Cindy Keefer, for her insights with regard to Fischinger and visual music; the Comité des amis de Pierre Mac Orlan and the Musée départemental de la Seine-et-Marne, especially Noëlle Rain, for key correspondence regarding Mac Orlan; Amy Davis and Chris Pallant, for clarification on early Disney; Aaron Gerow, for advice on Japanese film theory; Nicholas Wade, for guidance on Wheatstone and proto-cinematography; Joshua Yumibe, for clarification on early cinematographic experiments with color and abstraction; Johanna Brückl, for assistance with the Stampfer text; and Atsuko Ueda and J. Keith Vincent, for indentifying Hanada’s copyright holder. I am very grateful to Felicity Gee, for crucial image scanning when she had no real time to spare. Special thanks and gratitude are extended to Yuriko Furuhata for key, substantial assistance and input with regard to the inclusion of Hanada’s essay. I owe much to Eva, Lorelei, Emiljan and Aurelia for being so accommodating, understanding and caring during the final stages of preparation. I dedicate my editorial work to my mother, Rosemary Dicker, who fell ill and died within the period of this issue’s gestation.

My hope is that these texts contribute to recapturing some of the productive tensions, frictions and optimisms through which cinematography came to be recognized and understood in relation to other arts, media and discourses over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and, in so doing, offer some fresh food for thought for today.

Barnaby Dicker
Royal College of Art
Guest Editor

Notes

1. See my PhD thesis: Barnaby Dicker, Cinematographic Atavism, Graphic Proteanism—Visibly Frame-based Cinematography: Practice, History, Theory (London: Department of Media Arts, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2010). My thanks to supervisor Christopher Townsend, advisor Gideon Koppel and examiners Stephen Forcer and Patrick ffrench for their ongoing support of this project. See also my essays: Barnaby Dicker, "Notes on Eadweard Muybridge’s Chickens; scared by torpedo, Plate 781 of Animal Locomotion (1887)” in At The Borders of (Film) History. Temporality, Archaeology, Theories (Proceedings of the XXI Udine-Gorizia FilmForum International Film Studies Conference) (Udine: Forum, 2015), 431-439; and [forthcoming] idem, “Vernacular Studies: 49/95 Tausendjahrekino (1995) and 50/96 Snapspots (for Bruce) (1996),” in Kurt Kren: Structural Films, ed. Nicky Hamlyn, Simon Payne and Al Rees (Bristol: Intellect, 2016).

2. For a concise overview see: Annette Kuhn and Guy Westwell, A Dictionary of Film Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 171.

3. Filmmakers who have emphasized the potential of cinematography’s frames include Robert Breer, Tony Conrad, Nicky Hamlyn, Kurt Kren, Peter Kubelka, Christian Lebrat, Maurice Lemaître, Rose Lowder, Gregory J. Markopoulos, Jonas Mekas, Werner Nekes and Paul Sharits. Historians, theorists and critics to do the same include François Albera, Raymond Bellour, Vincent Deville, Trond Lundemo, Garret Stewart, Thierry Kuntzel and Maria Tortajada.

4. Walter Benjamin, “The Formula in Which the Dialectical Structure of Film Finds Expression,” in Selected Writings, vol. 3 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2006), 94.

5. See: Laurent Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000), 421.

6. Stephen Herbert, A History of Pre-cinema, vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 2000), i. See also Herbert’s extensive online resource: The Wheel of Life, 〈http://www.stephenherbert.co.uk/wheelHOME.htm, accessed 18 January 2015.

7. Nicholas Wade, “Wheatstone and the Origins of Moving Stereoscopic Images,” Perception 41 (2012): 901–24.

8. Mannoni, Great Art of Light and Shadow, 64–5.

9. Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 4: Physics and Physical Technology, Part 1: Physics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 122–5.

10. David Robinson, Masterpieces of Animation 1833–1908, Griffithiana no. 43 (Gemona del Friuli: La Cineteca del Friuli, 1991).

11. See: Joshua Yumibe, “‘Harmonious Sensations of Sound by Means of Colours’: Vernacular Colour Abstractions in Silent Cinema.” Film History 21, no. 2 (special issue, 2009: Color): 164–76; idem, “On the Education of the Senses: Synaesthetic Perception from the ‘Democratic Art’ of Chromolithography to Modernism.” New Review of Film and Television Studies 7, no. 3 (September 2009): 257–74; and idem, Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012).

12. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (London: Macmillan, 1921), 29.

13. Ibid., 28.

14. Ibid., 69.

15. Ibid., 183.

16. Ibid., 181.

17. For a historically and theoretically illuminating account of these nineteenth-century practices see: Estelle Jussim, Visual Communication and the Graphic Arts: Photographic Technologies in the Nineteenth Century, 2nd edn (New York and London: R. R. Bowker, 1983).

18. For discussion of issues around this topic, see my essay: Barnaby Dicker, “André Breton, Rodolphe Töpffer, and the Automatic Message,” in Surrealism, Science Fiction, and Comics, ed. Gavin Parkinson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 40-61.

19. See, for example, studies by Yuriko Furuhata, Aaron Gerow and Thomas Lamarre. For Japanese work in translation see, for example: A. Gerow (ed.), Review of Japanese Culture and Society 22 (special issue, December 2010: “Decentering Theory: Reconsidering the History of Japanese Film Theory”); and Ivan Vartanian, Akihiro Hatanaka and Yutaka Kanbayashi (eds), Setting Sun: Writings by Japanese Photographers (New York: Aperture, 2006).

20. See: Annabelle Honess Roe, Animated Documentary (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); and Jeffrey Skoller (ed.), Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 6, no. 3 (special issue, November 2011: “Making it (Un)Real: Contemporary Theories and Practices in Documentary Animation”).

21. Roland Barthes, “Le troisième sens: Notes de recherche sur quelques photogrammes de S.M. Eisenstein,” Cahiers du Cinéma 222 (July 1970): 12–19, translated as “The Third Meaning: Research Notes on some Eisenstein Stills,” in Roland Barthes, Image Music Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 52–68.

22. Christian Metz, Language and Cinema (The Hague, Paris: Mouton, [1971] 1974), 187–96.

23. Ibid., 190.