The spectacle of twenty four animated images a second suggests a familiar sensorial experience of everyday reality. This establishes the suspension of disbelief, the fundamental condition for attentional immersion in the flow of images. What the film re-presents appears to be happening in the present.

The photograph often has the feeling of depicting something that happened in the past. Frozen in time, photography suggests a thing that “is already dead” (Barthes).

Filmmaker Peter Kubelka describes time as “a measuring system for a change in position of material objects.” Sound is an articulation of time. In and out of synchronous allignment, from jack-hammer to synesthetic rupture, the temporal unfolding of the soundtrack re-imagines what we see through rhythm and meter.

The contrapuntal use of sound infuses a series of still images with a unifying atmosphere and emotional tone. Elsewhere it performs the intellectual montage. Discrete sonic events direct attention to visual details, while unfolding sound, located both within and beyond the frame, spatially and temporally expand each image. This summons all the movement and activity attributed to familiar reality.

Film Selection:

GUO4 [2019] dir. Peter Strickland
Nostalgia [1971] dir. Hollis Frampton
Viet Flakes [1965] dir. Carolee Schneemann
Ishi no Uta [1963] dir. Toshio Matsumoto
Salut les Cubains [1963] dir. Agnes Varda
La Jetée [1962] dir. Chris Marker

It is in this urban dark that the body’s freedom is generated; this invisible work of possible affects emerges from a veritable cinematographic cocoon; the movie spectator could easily appropriate the silkworm’s motto: inclusum labor illustrat; It is because I am enclosed that I work and glow with all my desire. (Roland Barthes, Leaving the Movie Theatre)

Beginning in 1888 Thomas Edison, along with his assistant William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, began to develop the Kinetoscope - a peep-hole motion picture viewer. Inspired by the work of Eadweard Muybridge, Edison described his ideas for a device which would "do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear" - record and reproduce objects in motion. Initially it was hoped that the Kinetoscope would play synchronised sound and image. Edison believed that this could help drive sales of the Phonograph. In 1893 he gave the Kinetoscope its first public presentation at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences in New York.

The Kinetoscope was designed for private viewing. A peep-hole at the top of the cabinet allowed the viewer to see the animated images moving inside. By 1894 Kinetoscope parlous were being setup in New York. A parlour consisted of several machines each playing a different film of between 30-60 seconds in length.

In 1895 the Lumiere brothers publicly unveiled their own camera-projector invention - the Cinematographe. Later that year they organised the world’s first commercial movie screening at the Grand Cafe in Paris. The Cinemtographe was smaller and lighter than Edison’s moving image technology. The machine’s ability to project light meant it could display moving images on a screen for an audience.

In 1905 popular showman Harry Davis established the first Nickelodeon motion picture theatre in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Often combining short film screenings with vaudeville performances, these storefront theatres quickly spread in populatority throughout the United States. By 1910 there were more than10,000 such theatres across the country.

In 1925 Scottish engineer John Logie Baird demostrated the world’s first working television system. Mechanical television systems were soon replaced by electronic systems that used a Cathode Ray Tube (CRT). In 1934 Telefunken manufactured the first commercial CRT television sets.

Beginning with the Kinetoscope, the early viewing parlous and the grand movie palaces that followed, through to the high street cinema, consumer television, 20th century digital communication, the Internet and online streaming services, the history of moving image technology and the corresponding cultivation of viewing habits, seemingly circles back on itself: From private peeping to public spectacle to home viewing and mobile streaming.