Early Cinema to 1915

Please post your comments on the readings for this week:

–Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (London: BFI, 1990), pp56-62.
–Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetics of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator,” Viewing Positions (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 114-133.
–Thomas Elsaesser, “The New Film History as Media Archaeology,” pp.75-117.

TIME

This weeks reading raised many points in reference to time — including the thoughts of Freud and Marey. While Marey and Freud had two different theories about time, I feel the reading had one common theme: ourselves within time. Marey raises questions like, how are our movements played out within time? Freud raises questions like, how do we preceive and store time within our unconcious? None the less, Frued, Marey and more specfically, early cinema attempted to expose our daily activites within time. And in this sense, I agree with the theory that time is more a product…. a product of our existence within landscape. (For example, Marey studies the way we move on ground whereby time is a product of this movement that can be measured.)

I find myself thinking how this relates to early cinema. As the article states, cinema was the first instance in which time could be represented in “real time” — without breaks between images. Time was represented just as we saw it in real life — with no particular purpose to understand it — but merely to view it instead. Therefore, cinema inherently took on the idea of narrative insofar as it captured everyday life in real time. The article argues that, it is the result of this lack of understanding of time that has creating “noise” — an overstimulation of images within continous time. We have no way to draw meaning from these images within time. We simply accept them without entirely underastanding them.

I feel as if these anxieities surrounding time have appeared quite recently. While Frued theorized the notion of time, Marey or Muybridge and their use of technology turned time into a sheer enigma. And now with the advent of cinema, time is even more so an enigma. The rise of technology has forced us to tamper with something that we would have otherwise accepted as natural. So my question is, has technology made us ever so objective to the notion of time that it has produced a culture of confusion? In a borader sense, has technology forced us to confront things that are meant to just be? I feel technology in general has produced a culture of over stimulation, of excess, of cloudiness within modernity. Maybe things are better left to the unkown.

Adamo Ruggiero

I thought the article was interesting because it took two seemingly dichotomous positions on the subject of cinema. One focusing on the psychical, the other on the physical. Doane’ perspective was interesting, at least for me, because it delineated the idea of cinematography in a way that was not theoritcally articulated to me before. The notion “resistance” and “storage” are both, in a sense, acurrate, in that the image has the ability both destroy and yet preserve time, and this anxiety is something that contemporary film and media scholars as well as film makers (One Hour Photo w. Robin Williams being a good example) have been investigating. Indeed all the “anxieties” pertainning to the process of the cinema (apparatus, structure, narrative, the image, editing) is not a contemporary phenomenon, but rather a contium of the ever historized fear of “otherness”, “otherness” representing that which is un known, which can attemptively be had and is continuously elusive. Doanne recognizes, at least in this chapter, the inability to conclusively decypher the specificities of the binary. She demonstrates the intersticed network that functions between all the relations, suggesting that what is keen to the cinema is not what it is, and it wi not, but rather the pleasure, and perhaps, displeasure unmediated transferance of subject, image, editing. Angelo

Readings for week were given out in class or are in your mailbox if you are a grad student. Please post your reading questions/comments on the blog before class.
–Mary Ann Doane, “Temporality, Storage, Legibility,” from The Emergence of Cinematic Time, pp33-68.