Translation of Charles Cros, ‘process for recording and reproducing colors, forms and movements’ (1867) with an introduction

ABSTRACT

This 1867 document, akin to a patent application for the US Patent Office, is among the first to describe processes for producing both motion and color photography. It precedes by 20 years Edison’s 1888 kinetograph/kinetoscope design, the earliest working prototype of cinema. Its author is Charles Cros, who also outlined a phonograph system in 1877, a few months before Edison displayed his working phonograph. Cros is mostly known as a poet, fiction writer and playwright associated with members of the French Symbolist and Decadent movements (Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam). Yet he was an accomplished technician and inspired media innovator who deserves reconsideration in media history. Evidence of his status comes for instance from his close collaboration with Jules-Adrien Carpentier, the very engineer the Lumière Brothers tasked with constructing their Cinématographe camera. Sent to and received by the French Academy of Sciences, this document is in three parts. The first describes with prescient specificity the photographic synthesis of motion. The second offers several ways of achieving the photographic synthesis of color using filters and projection (rather than pigment and print, as later achieved in the 1890s). The last and more cryptic section concerns an ambitious theory of perception. Unpublished in French until 1970, this document will be of wide interest to scholars of media history, cinema and photography studies, literary studies, and modernist studies. The introductory essay makes a strong case for rehabilitating Charles Cros as a key inceptor of modern audiovisual media.

KEYWORDS:

• Cinema
• media archaeology
• translation
• French studies
• science studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Stéphane Mallarmé used the pseudonym ‘Miss Satin’ for a column he wrote in a Lady’s journal of his making (Lyu 2000).

2. For the history of color photography see Friedman (1968).

3. Cros has 10 fps where Edison’s 1888 Caveat Patent mentions ‘at least 8’ fps, both remaining well below the threshold of motion perception. By 1891 Edison stipulates 46 fps when he describes his process to newspapers.

4. Cros’ photographic work was well-covered by the English-speaking press in its two peak production years: 1869 and 1879. See The British Journal of Photography, vol. 16 (over 12 mentions of Cros over the whole year). See Cros (1869), Anon (1879), Cros (1879), Harrison (1879), Versnaeyen (1879). For Cros’ status as a competitor to Edison, see /www.nps.gov/edis/learn/historyculture/origins-of-sound-recording-charles-cros.htm.

5. I want to thank Éditions Gallimard, Paris, France, for graciously allowing the translation of this important document.

6. Cros is using a technical term here – plaque cassée – denoting a fraction of a regular plate. A photography manual of 1867 explains: ‘We call a normal plate or a full plate (plaque normale ou plaque entière) a piece of glass 18 centimeters wide by 24 centimeters long. The half-plate (demi-plaque) is 13 by 18 centimeters; and the quarter-plate (quart de plaque), 9 by 12.’ (Robertson 1867, 17). Characteristically, Cros does not address the problem of cutting and dealing with pieces of glass of 1 × 1 mm and probably at least a few millimeters thick …

7. It is possible but less likely that by tableau Cros means a painted canvas, since he later assisted Manet with reproducing his paintings. Here the context lends itself better to a broader subject, subject-matter or visual model.

8. Ostensibly, Cros is envisioning three magic lanterns at a slight angle from each other superimposing their three projected images on the same screen.

9. The suggestion here is that the same projector quickly alternates between the three prints, each with its appropriate color filter, like in a rotating phenakistiscope. The opposition of ‘direct’ vs. ‘transparent’ vision likely means an opaque or translucent screen.

10. Here we have Cros’s most complex apparatus involving a single camera equipped with a synchronous prism taking three or more successive photographs of the same view but in various parts of the spectrum, and a multi-print projector equipped with a synchronous prism (in lieu of colored filters) for projecting the prints in quick succession. Because the projecting apparatus functions at 10 fps in order to synthesize the colored prints (via the retinal persistence theory Cros embraces), Cros extends the application to color cinematography functioning on the same principle, although likely at 30 fps at least (since each frame requires separate color and motion synthesis).

11. Cros registers the problem of the previous footnote, and alleges that 10 fps is sufficient so long as the recorded action is not very fast.

12. With this statement, Cros presents himself as foremost a theoretician formulating new general principles.

13. This is Cros’s new theory of color in a highly condensed sketch.

14. This puzzling section is really a preview for the ‘Principles of Cerebral Mechanics’ which develops this device made of a suspended disk with an inscribed triangle, and which reframes trichromatic visual sensation as a case that can be extrapolated to perception and cognition more generally.

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Notes on contributors

Christophe Wall-Romana

Christophe Wall-Romana is a professor in the Department of French and Italian and Samuel Russell Chair in the Humanities. His work specializes on French film culture. He is the author of Cinepoetry: Imaginary Cinemas in French Poetry (Fordham, 2012), and Jean Epstein: Film Philosophy and Corporeal Cinema (Manchester, 2013). He has translated books by Judy Blume, Philip K. Dick, William Merwin and Jean Epstein.