Lets talk about film!

Film has often been heralded by cultural critics and intellectuals as the quintessential art-form of the 20th century, and not without good reason. The medium developed in the late 1800's as a product of technological ingenuity as well as artistic ambition. The camera had replaced painting as the primary means of "capturing" reality, and the modern art world had begun its ascent into the more abstract realms of representation and aesthetic.

The aim of this blog is to discuss the development of the medium throughout the century while considering some of its many benchmarks and giving readers a richer understanding of the history of a medium which we have all but taken for granted.

The mythical train of terror.
So, lets start from the beginning.
Now we've all heard the famous anecdote of the train. Either from our parents, grandparents, friends, professors, or perhaps a popular media source. The story goes something like this: The first ever film patrons sat in a dark room with a photograph of a train projected onto a screen. All of a sudden the image came to life and, thinking the train was about to burst through the screen and crush them, audience members fled from their seats in terror. The film in question is generally cited to be The Lumière brothers' 1895 work Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat and while the purported reaction has somehow been heavily etched into our modern day cultural milieu, the truth of the matter is far different It is important to recall the context that early film screenings took place in. There were of course no town movie houses, and the predominant venues for the new craft to be exhibited were circus sideshows, and carnivals of wonder where the medium was actively promoted as a spectacular novelty. In this regard, audiences were heavily primed before the film was screened, warned by enthusiastic spokesmen of the marvel and majesty they were about to experience. So, the early patrons were certainly shocked at the experience, but by no means were they fooled, and creating magical, marvelous spectacle was precisely the framework which early filmmakers like the Lumière brothers, Thomas Edison and George Melies (who was in fact a magician) were looking to work within. Some critics, most notably Tom Gunning, have taken particular interest in the train terror myth as a strange reversal of how how we view films now versus how people viewed them more than a century ago. Its all about credulity. These days we like to think of ourselves as enlightened, self aware and under no delusion in regards to what we see on a film screen. We know that Spiderman isn't really scaling the walls of the empire state building, and even in more plausible scenarios like a screen romance, we know that we are looking at actors reading from a script. But there is an element to the modern film viewing experience that was not shared by the earliest film patrons, namely suspension of disbelief. Though we do indeed come out of a film knowing we have just viewed a work of fiction, for the duration of the film we indeed maintain an emotional investment in the characters and plot. This paradigm runs completely counter to the cinema of the spectacle that early film-goers were presented with. They did not get lost in the action of the onscreen events. They had no suspension of disbelief. They knew very well that what they were being presented with was a carefully crafted technological illusion. It is important for us to take this paradigm under consideration when discussing the early history of film. It opens up a number of relevant questions. Perhaps most pertinently, how then did it come to be that film became a means of creating believable narrative, akin to novels and plays as opposed to mere whimsical phenomena. This subject will be the primary topic of my next post, which will concern the birth and development of film syntax: the language of cinema.