Velocities of the image c. 1900

Art History

Volumn 27, Issue 5, 2004, Pages 745-769

  Nead, Lynda ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33846423314     PISSN: 01416790     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.0141-6790.2004.00447.x     Document Type: Review

References (54)

1. Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', in Illuminations, ed. with an introduction Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn. London, 1973, 240.
2. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media, Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1999, 15.
3. On the history of the Ferris wheel, see Norman D. Anderson, Ferris Wheels: An Illustrated History, Ohio, 1992.
4. See also Paul Overy, 'Re-inventing the Wheel - Speed in Slow Motion: The London Eye (Millennium Wheel)', Visual Culture in Britain, 4:2, 2003, 21-40.
5. On the shift from spectator to participant through the mechanical attractions of the amusement parks, see John F. Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century, New York, 1978, 7-8.
6. For details of the trottoir roulant, see Harper's Guide to Paris and the Exposition of 1900, London and New York, 1900, 145, 189-90.
7. See also Richard D. Mandell, Paris 1900: The Great World's Fair, Toronto, 1967, 63 and fig. 39.
8. On the history of the escalator, see Jason Goodwin, Otis: Giving Rise to the Modern City, Chicago, 2001, 105-107.
9. There is an extensive literature on the history of optical devices: for a good recent source, see Barbara Maria Stafford and Frances Terpak, Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen, Los Angeles, 2001.
10. A useful account of this notion and an alternative explanation is given in Joseph and Barabara Anderson, 'Motion Perception in Motion Pictures', in Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath, eds, The Cinematic Apparatus, London and Basingstoke, 1980, 76-95.
11. See, for example, C. Francis Jenkins, Animated Pictures: An Exposition of Chronophotography, Its Present Scientific Applications and Future Possibilities and of the Methods and Apparatus Employed in the Entertainment of Large Audiences by Means of Projecting Lanterns to Give the Appearance of Objects in Motion, Washington DC, 1898, especially 45.
12. An important revision of 'persistence of vision' was given by Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, New York and London, 1916.
13. On the phenomenon of visual flicker in early film, see Bill Nichols and Susan J. Lederman, 'Flicker and Motion in Film', in de Lauretis and Heath, eds, Cinematic Apparatus, 96-105.
14. See the cameras advertised in the Warwick Trading Company Catalogue, 1901, 10. Film companies in this period commonly produced catalogues giving a synopsis of every film and advertising for sale.
15. Warwick Trading Company Catalogue, 18.
16. Jenkins, Animated Pictures, 77-8.
17. British film pioneer Cecil Hepworth recommended reversal: 'The effect is extremely funny. It is a variation of the usual order of things which, if confined to once in an evening, is sure to raise a laugh.' Cecil M. Hepworth, Animated Photography: The ABC of the Cinematograph. A Simple and Thorough Guide to the Projection of Living Photographs, with Notes on the Production of Cinematograph Negatives, London, 1897, 87.
18. Lantern Record, 6 January 1899, 1, recommends soldiers marching and men diving as particularly suitable for reversal.
19. See Henry Peach Robinson's discussion of this issue in Picture-Making by Photography, London, 1902, chapter 13: 'On Sea and Shore'.
20. For a helpful discussion of audience behaviour in relation to changes in film form and conditions of exhibition, see Lise Shapiro Sanders, '"Indecent Incentives to Vice": Regulating Films and Audience Behaviour from the 1890s to the 1910s', in Andrew Higson, ed., Young and Innocent? The Cinema in Britain 1896-1930, Exeter, 2002, 97-110.
21. The most frequently cited publication of this term is Tom Gunning, 'The Cinema of Attractions: Early Cinema, Its Spectator and the Avant Garde', Wide Angle, 8:3-4, 1986, 63-70.
22. André Gaudreault has also developed this conceptualization of early cinema in a number of articles: see, for example, 'Showing and Telling', in Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker, eds, Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, London, 1990, 274-81.
23. For a helpful summary of revisionist approaches to narrative in early cinema, see Lynne Kirby, Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema, Exeter, 1997, 102-104.
24. See Gunning's own revision of the term in '"Now You See It, Now You Don't": The Temporality of the Cinema of Attractions', Velvet Light Trap, 32, Fall 1993, 3-12,
25. the excellent historical argument given in Charles Musser, 'Rethinking Early Cinema: Cinemas of Attraction and Narrativity', Yale Journal of Criticism, 7:2, 1994, 203-233.
26. see Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film, Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1991, 25-30.
27. th Century, Leamington Spa, Hamburg, New York, 1986 (first published in German in 1977). Schivelbusch argues that the experience of train travel produced a new kind of mobile, 'cinematic', perception. Whilst acknowledging the significance of his work, this article moves on from Schivelbusch to examine more closely the diverse concepts of velocity during this period and their relationship with visual media and modes of viewing.
28. For an extended discussion, see Philip Codling, 'The Road Becomes Alive: Moving Towards an Understanding of the Phantom Ride', MA diss., British Film Institute and Birkbeck College, 1995 which informed the following discussion.
29. From Phonoscope, August-September 6, as cited in Charles Musser, 'The Travel Genre in 1903-1904: Moving Towards Fictional Narrative', Iris, 2:1, 1984, 53.
30. On the technical qualities of the Biograph, see John Barnes, The Rise of the Cinema in Great Britain: The Beginnings of the Cinema in England 1894-1901, 5 vols, 2, Jubilee Year 1897, London, 1983, 154;
31. also Stephen Bottomore, 'The Panicking Audience?: Early Cinema and the "Train Effect"', Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 19:2, 1999, 187, 194.
32. Era, 30 October 1897, 19
33. as cited in Barnes, Rise of the Cinema, 145.
34. 'At the Palace', Punch, Or the London Charivari, 6 August 1898, 57.
35. On Hale's Tours, see Raymond Fielding, 'Hale's Tours: Ultrarealism in the Pre-1910 Motion Picture', in John L. Fell, ed., Film Before Griffith, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1983, 116-130.
36. For an example of this earlier conception see David Brewster, The Stereoscope: Its History, Theory and Construction, London, 1856, 41, fig. 56.
37. Jonathan Crary has traced this new conception of seeing in relation to the work of Manet, Seurat and Cézanne in Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture, Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1999, to which I am indebted.
38. B. Joy Jeffries, The Eye in Health and Disease. Being a Series of Articles on the Anatomy and Physiology of the Human Eye, and Its Surgical and Medical Treatment, Boston, 1871, 77.
39. On the impact of physiology on the development of British psychology, see Kurt Danziger, 'Mid-Nineteenth-Century British Psycho-Physiology: A Neglected Chapter in the History of Psychology', in William R. Woodward and Mitchell G. Ash, eds, The Problematic Science: Psychology in Nineteenth-Century Thought, New York, 1982, 119-46.
40. th edn, London, 1894, 252.
41. James Sully, The Human Mind: A Text-Book of Psychology, 2 vols, London, 1892, vol. 1, 237, 243-4;
42. see also Sully, Illusions: A Psychologogical Study, London, 1881, 50-1.
43. rd edn, London, 1890, vol. 2, 639.
44. See Münsterberg, Photoplay. On his work at Harvard, see Matthew Hale Jr, Human Science and Social Order: Hugo Münsterberg and the Origins of Applied Psychology, Philadelphia, 1980.
45. Hugo Münsterberg, Psychology and Life, London, 1899, 152
46. from the chapter 'Psychology and Art', 145-78.
47. For a biography of Lee, see Peter Gunn, Vernon Lee: Violet Paget 1856-1935, London, 1964.
48. See also Hilary Fraser, 'Women and the Ends of Art History: Vision and Corporeality in Nineteenth-Century Critical Discourse', Victorian Studies, 42:1, 1998/ 1999, 77-100.
49. V. Lee and C. Anstruther-Thomson, 'Beauty and Ugliness, I', Contemporary Review, 72, October 1897, 544-69;
50. 'Beauty and Ugliness, II', 72, November 1897, 669-88.
51. Reprinted in Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, Beauty and Ugliness and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics, London, 1912, 156-239, in which Lee identified their separate contributions. Page references to the 1912 reprint are given in parentheses within the main text.
52. A similar scanning of an image is given in Bain, Senses, 256. Of course, the concept of the eye 'reading' the image has been a staple of art-historical method: see E.H. Gombrich, 'Moment and Movement in Art', Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 27, 1964, 301-302.
53. 'Aesthetic Responsiveness: Its Variations and Accompaniments. Extracts from Vernon Lee's Gallery Diaries, 1901-4', in Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, Beauty and Ugliness, 241-350. Page references to the 1912 publication are given in parentheses within the main text.
54. Münsterberg, Photoplay, 71.