It is difficult today to imagine a world in which we could not record the human image in movement. Yet this was a goal which frustrated many inventors, until in the early 1890s Thomas Edison and others succeeded in devising a practical form of serial photography using strips of celluloid, which could then be viewed and reproduced. The result seemed little short of a miracle. Early reviews of moving picture shows in 1895 spoke of ‘bringing the dead back to life’, while the experiments that preceded this success solved long-standing questions about, for instance, how horses' legs moved while galloping (Eadweard Muybridge) or how athletes performed intricate actions (Etienne-Jules Marey). By the end of the century, what had started as mainly a scientific quest was already becoming a familiar entertainment, sandwiched between live acts in variety programmes. Soon it became the dominant leisure activity of the twentieth century — watching images of remote humans and animals perform while sitting in a darkened room.
But if lifelike reproduction of movement was the first aim, this was soon overtaken by the realization that cinematography could make the impossible seem credible. Georges Méliès was a French magician turned film-maker who specialized in fantasy from 1898 to 1912, creating images such as his own head appearing to expand like a balloon and explode, and of every kind of grotesque transformation or mutilation of the body. Several basic techniques pioneered by Méliès have remained standard: stop-action permits remarkable transformations; reverse action negates normal causality; overprinted or ‘matted’ images place the familiar in unrelated settings. The result of these techniques, later reinforced by computer generated images (CGI), has been to create a screen world in which almost any action, however impossible or bizarre, appears convincingly real.
Alongside this largely unforeseen by-product of cinematography, its use as a recording medium contributed to both scientific research and popularization of science from an early stage. The French surgeon Etienne-Louis Doyen had his pioneering operations filmed in 1898, proposing to colleagues that this would teach students more efficiently, but discovered the pitfalls of cinema in 1902 when his film of the separation of Siamese twins was pirated and sold to fairground freak shows. Such occasional scandals did not impede the steady growth of scientific uses of film, which spread to the social sciences as ethnographers became enthusiastic recorders of tribal customs and vanishing ways of life. Explorers also soon realized that film of their exotic adventures could help fund expeditions, as was the case with Captain Scott's tragic Antarctic expedition of 1911-12. Herbert Ponting's record of Scott before he left base camp was actually being shown in London after its subject had died — an eerie reminder of film's ‘resurrectionary’ quality. Ten years later, Robert Flaherty's portrait of an Inuit hunter and his family, Nanook of the North, enjoyed a world-wide success and helped launch the new genre of ‘documentary’ film.
Much controversy has since arisen from the claim that documentary is or should be truthful. Flaherty did not scruple to teach his subjects how to perform their own forgotten ‘traditional’ customs, but many other documentarists believe that the camera can either reveal what the unaided human observer would not see (Vertov), or what is provoked by its presence (the Maysles brothers; Rouch). Both of these amount to a claim that film offers a privileged view of human behaviour, although whether this can be regarded as ‘objective’, given the manipulation of editing, remains highly controversial. What is certain is that much of our information about how ‘real’ people appear and behave is channelled through the conventions of television news and documentary.
From its beginnings, cinema has also been a powerful source of fictionalized images, of performances intended to entertain, amuse, seduce, and inspire. Erotic display, whether in the form of exotic dances, or a prolonged close-up kiss (which formed the entire action of a 1900 Edison film), or frankly pornographic scenes, were an early source of voyeuristic appeal. This trend arguably helped to shape twentieth-century personal behaviour patterns, replacing national customs with a new international etiquette learned from the screen. Early film stars, such as Asta Nielsen in Europe or Mary Pickford in America, created new ideals of female appearance — essentially slimmer and more athletic — which quickly became global as cinema-going became a universal pastime by the eve of World War I. The male body was also transformed by such popular stars as the dapper Max Linder and Charlie Chaplin's Tramp, both of whom shaped the growth of a balletic slapstick as the main genre of film comedy until the coming of sound in the 1930s.
This period saw the emergence of a genre in fiction cinema that has since become vitally important in popularizing the idea of ‘bionic’, or mechanically modified, bodies. Although there had been many previous gothic and technological fantasies, the series of ‘horror’ films produced by Universal in the 1930s launched a new vogue; and in particular the make-up devised for Boris Karloff as the monster in Frankenstein (1931) set a pattern which, while often played for laughs, also leads to such conceptually more sophisticated composites as the humanoid ‘replicants’ of Blade Runner (1982), or the eponymous RoboCop (1987), or the self-repairing ‘cyborgs’ of Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991). Through increasingly elaborate special effects, the image of the human body in contemporary cinema can now routinely appear super-human, and can apparently withstand devastating injury. What effect this near-universal entertainment idiom has on our idea of actual bodies, and on attitudes to medical treatment and research, is surely an important, yet under-researched topic. More common is a recurring undercurrent of moral concern about the likelihood of imitative behaviour, often expressed in relation to the portrayal of violence or drug-taking, or the dangerous appeal of extreme thinness, fashionable among film stars, as a role model for young women susceptible to anorexia.
There is, however, renewed research interest in how we perceive and interpret moving images. Historically, four main paradigms in this field can be distinguished. The first, dating from the 1910s, conceived moving pictures broadly as a new form of pictorial language, potentially related to hieroglyphic or ideogrammatic languages, or to primitive sign systems. A second wave of theory challenged this view in the 1920s, inspired by the kinetic editing of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and other exponents of Soviet Russian ‘montage’ cinema. Two important influences on this were Ivan Pavlov's study of reflexes and Lev Vygotsky's investigation of ‘inner speech’: the spectator's response to a film was conceived in terms of conditioned reflexes to visual stimuli, or as a process of linking seemingly unconnected images by means of pre-cognitive associations such as those involved in metaphor. During the early decades of synchronized-sound cinema, such theories were largely forgotten and most theoretical reflection was based on either the principles of mimesis or generic convention. Thus, it was claimed, we understand film images because they ‘model’ the world as we ordinarily perceive it; and we grasp the conventions of film narrative because these follow other forms of visual and verbal narrative.
During the 1970s, a new wave of film theory emerged which drew upon semiotics, or the study of sign-systems, and a revisionist psychoanalysis identified with French analyst Jacques Lacan. This identified mainstream cinema as an ‘apparatus’, which effectively conditions its spectators to believe that they are privileged witnesses of a seamless reality and idealized characters on the screen. But there is also a ‘mirroring’ effect, similar to that which, according to Lacan, marks a crucial stage in the formation of the individual's sense of self. So, in the cinema we ‘recognize’ the process of acquiring subjectivity — which is also a misrecognition, an illusion. Through such reasoning, 1970s film theory radically revised traditional theories of ‘identification’, introducing a sophisticated view of gender relations between viewer and actor, but also encouraging the view that the film ‘text’ produces its spectator's orientation towards it.
Psychoanalytic spectatorship theory has always been as controversial as psychoanalysis itself, and yet it became something of an orthodoxy in academic film studies during the 1980s and 1990s, and began to influence critical approaches in other media, such as literature and the visual arts. But an opposing paradigm emerged during the 1990s which seems to be gathering strength. Often known loosely as ‘cognitivism’, this attempts to return to a ‘realist’ view of what happens when we watch a film. Thus, for example, the philosopher Greg Currie claims that films are actually moving pictures, rather than illusions, that they are realistic, and that they encourage us to imagine the events portrayed taking place — all common sense views, but ones that raise issues of definition. This in turn has led to a considerable amount of philosophical interest in explaining what we mean by such claims and descriptions. It has also prompted some film scholars to turn to experimental physiology and psychology to gain a better understanding of what ‘really’ happens when we watch and understand films. In this latest, and equally controversial, stage of film theory, the moving image has perhaps returned to its origins, as a by-product of mid-nineteenth-century enthusiasm to explore perceptual phenomena and of technology's ability to exploit them. Meanwhile, the total manipulation of digital image and sound and their use in the simulation of ‘virtual reality’ promises a new era in which cinema may become a purely historical term.
— Ian Christie
Bibliography
- Clover, C. (1992). Men, woman and chain saws: gender in the modern horror film. Princeton, Princeton NJ.
- Hill, J. and Gibson, P. C. (ed.) (1998). The Oxford guide to film studies. Oxford University Press. Especially section on ‘The film text: theoretical frameworks’.
- Williams, L. (ed.) (1995). Viewing positions: ways of seeing film. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ
See also photography; spectator.
