Technologies of Seeing

Photography, Cinema and Television

Brian Winston

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781838718466
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Arts & Humanities

This text examines the complex forces pushing and constraining technological developments in cinema. It contests the view that technological advance is simply the result of scientific progress. Rather, the author argues that social forces control the media technology agenda at every stage.

Chapter 1: The Case of the Cinema

The Invention' of the Cinema: Accelerators and Brakes

In What Is Cinema? André Bazin raises the question of why the cinema was created in 1895 when, technologically speaking, no particular innovation occurred in that year. That is to say, everything the Lumières put together to create a moving image system was already to hand. Most historians are dismissive of this as a problem and either implicitly or explicitly deny that the technology involved was (or could have been) to hand earlier. But this is exactly the sort of question the model proposed in the introduction is designed to help answer. In order to understand how it might do so, however, it is necessary to consider how the history of the birth of the cinema has been treated hitherto.

Great Men Invent the Cinema

In its simplest form, that is prior to a spate of work beginning in the 1970s on the cinematic apparatus, the dominant received history explained the 'essentially internal process of research and development' on the cinema as nothing more than the chronologically arranged biographies of the scientists and technologists involved in a particular line of inquiry. This sort of account tended to see the development and impact of any technology as an aspect of the progress of great (white) men, women and people of colour or of different cultures not figuring much, if at all.

Such an account of the development of the cinema usually began in 1553 in Italy with della Porta, who refined the dark room, or camera obscura, used by astronomers for observation purposes by placing a lens in front of the lens-less pinhole which previously had created the image within the room. Within a century or so, one German monk, Johann Zahn, would shrink this room to the size of a box, the camera obscura portabilis, while another, the Jesuit Athanius Kircher, placed a candle within the shrunk box (as it were) and an image drawn on glass between the light source and the lens to create a magic lantern.

So much for lenses and projection; now for movement. Peter Roget, some nineteen years after he began work on his Thesaurus, conceived of an explanation (termed 'persistence of vision') as to why the eye can be deceived into thinking a series of slightly different images to be a single moving image. This was in 1824. Device after device, with names like zootrope or thaumatrope, were produced (or 'invented') to animate drawings using the phenomenon of persistence of vision: for example by Paris (English, 1824), Plateau (Belgian, early 1830s), Stampfér (German, 1832).

Next, the principle of persistence of vision must be put together with the idea of projection. In 1852 Captain Franz von Uchatius did this as an aid to his teaching of physics in the Artillery School in Vienna. He animated projected lantern slides of cannon-ball flight. (However, he became Baron von Uchatius because of a subsequent invention in 1879 of the gun metal known as 'Uchatius Steel', the Austrian Empire having its own clear understanding of the relative importance of the two technologies.)

The problem now was how to produce long sequences of minutely variant images. By the time von Uchatius combined the magic lantern with the zootrope, photography was to hand to do this.

That light affected substances was known to everybody who had ever noticed the bleaching properties of sunlight on fabrics. By the first years of the 19th century, investigators such as Thomas Wedgwood, the potter, understood that silver nitrates, conversely, darkened in sunlight. By placing a painting done on glass on top of a piece of leather sensitised with a silver nitrate solution he, in effect, produced a half-tone negative sometime before 1802. (We would call this a photogram because it used light and chemicals to make an image but no camera.) Wedgwood was unable to inspect his result because further exposure to light simply continued the darkening process. He did not know how to 'fix' the image so that, at a given point during its emergence or development, this darkening would stop.

On the other side of the Channel, Nicephore Niépce in 1816 took the idea of photography forward by placing his silver-nitrate sensitised paper against the glass-screen of a very small camera obscura. Although annoyed by the negative results he thereby obtained, he did not appreciate that the answer was to repeat the process in a photogram mode by laying the negative against a second sheet of sensitised material to produce a positive. Why would he? He had not yet discovered how to stop the blackening process and his negative was opaque. His solution was to search through the pharmacopoeia until he found a substance that bleached in light and was 'fixable' - that is, capable of being treated chemically to stop the bleaching process. Such a substance would produce a positive.

He came up with a sort of asphalt - bitumen of Judea. Fixing could be achieved with a mixture of oil of lavender and white petrol. Niépce treated a pewter plate with this bitumen and left it attached to a moderate-sized camera for eight sunny hours one day in the summer of 1826. The image, a view from his window, he then fixed, producing what he called an 'heliograph'. A shy and secretive man, it was not to be Niépce's lot to bring this process before the world. Instead this fell to Louis Daguerre, a showman in the business of exhibiting moving Dioramas, who used cameras of considerable refinement to help him make the huge 70' by 45' paintings he needed for his show. Their mutual lens maker put them in touch with each other.

Niépce died in 1833 and Daguerre continued alone. He returned to the search for a process that used a darkening compound solution based on silver. A copper plate was used as a base. The process he eventually elaborated required considerable chemical treatments, boilings and washings to produce a positive image which was then fixed with a saline solution. In 1839, the patents for 'daguerreotyping', as Daguerre termed his system, were bought by the French nation and given to the world. One immediate problem was that the process was comparatively insensitive to light but within a year or so Peter Voigtländer in Germany had produced a lens sixteen times 'faster' than the one Daguerre used originally and John Godard in London discovered that adding bromines to the process also improved the sensitivity of the plate. An image could be obtain in good light after a mere thirty seconds.

The daguerreotype was not quite photography of course, if you define photography as a system of image making whereby light and chemicals create a negative which can then produce an infinite number of positives. Daguerreotypes were unique positive images - 'as fragile as butterfly's wings', according to one early enthusiast. For all the amazing speed with which daguerreotyping spread across the face of the globe, creating as it went a whole new industry, it was nevertheless a vulnerable technology.

Henry Fox-Talbot, a wealthy English amateur, had produced an alternative process, the Calotype, after pursuing many of the same lines of inquiry as the French during the 1830s. But, crucially, he realised that the second exposure to convert the darkened substance to a positive ought to be on a separate base from the original negative. He also knew how to stop the darkening, to 'fix' the image. In 1841 he patented a process using paper sensitised with silver nitrate. The exposed negative was then developed, fixed, dried and oiled to render it transparent. It was then re-exposed against a second sheet of paper which had been treated with silver chloride. This sheet was then itself developed and fixed. The terms 'photography', 'positive' and 'negative' were all coined by Talbot's friend, the great astronomer Sir John Hershel, to describe the process and elements within it.

Calotypes could not match the exquisite detail of daguerreotypes because of the imperfect transparency of the paper negative; but within a decade, a new negative/positive system was introduced which solved this difficulty. In 1851 Frederick Scott Archer, a British sculptor, took a glass plate which had been washed in collodion - a solution of the explosive substance guncotton in ether, which was originally developed as a dressing for wounds by Christian Schönbein in 1846 in Basle. (Another investigator, Böttger, shadowed Schönbein by developing the same dressing at the same time in Frankfurt.) Scott Archer dipped the glass covered with this gummy transparent wash into a silver nitrate solution. He then exposed the treated plate before the collodion had time to dry and thereby produced transparent negatives every bit as capable of capturing detail as daguerreotypes. He also reduced exposure time to a matter of two or three seconds. He gave the process to the world and died penniless six years later at the age of forty-four.

All this is not quite enough to enable the cinema to be invented. That required a flexible substitute for the glass Uchatius and Scott Archer were using so that sequences of images could be projected rapidly enough for persistence of vision to create the illusion of movement. In 1871 a Dr Richard Leach Maddox suggested in the British Journal of Photography that perhaps gelatine might be used instead of collodion.¹ It too was a transparent sticky substance which would cause the silver nitrate to adhere to the glass plate but it could be used in a dry state. In the course of the next decade or so, the application of this possibility allowed a new industry, the commercial manufacturing of dry-plate films, to be established. This advance was the first stage in getting rid of the glass.

During the course of 1884/5, George Eastman, an American bank clerk, produced machinery to put a gelatine emulsion (silver bromide) onto a paper backing which could then be stripped off leaving a transparent negative. He called this film 'Kodak' - in his words a term 'as meaningless as a child's first "goo"'.² Previously he too had been making silver-bromide dry-plates on glass, but using paper allowed for the development of a rolled film strip. Four years later, he dispensed with the paper for the emulsion by using instead a transparent celluloid film as the base. Celluloid was a collodion variant which had been patented by one Parkes as a 'transparent support for sensitive coating' in 1856. (Parkes, however, had been unable to make it work.³ ) John Hyatt, an American printer, was able to produce serviceable celluloid sheets in 1869, but he and his brother were primarily interested in the stuff for use (in molded forms) as a substitute for ivory to make, for example, cheap billiard balls or piano keys. It could however also be applied in photography to produce a film base for the light-sensitive silver nitrates. By 1889 this is exactly what Eastman was doing, thereby creating a flexible transparent film strip.

So we now have the projector and the photographic camera and the flexible film as well as a slough of different devices producing the illusion of movement. All that is lacking is the notion that these various elements could be brought together in a system that would project sequences of transparent photographic images. This was not as obvious a connection as it now seems. The real issue of the day was not creating the illusion of movement but rather using the camera as a scientific instrument to stop motion. Investigators, for example the Englishman Eadweard Muybridge who was working in America in the 1870s, produced elaborate photographic apparatuses to solve such age-old conundra as how many feet did a galloping horse have on the ground at any one time. But although Muybridge also built a projection animation device, the zoopraxiscope, he did not use his sequential photographic images in it. Photography was, perhaps, too closely bound up with stop motion.

Muybridge used many cameras for his stop-motion experiments but a French correspondent of his, the physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey, devised a camera that could take twelve images a second on a single glass plate. By 1888 Marey was using flexible paper-backed roll film in this machine. The following year he was using celluloid in his 'photographic rifle'. However, with him too the stop-motion project loomed large and he was even less interested than Muybridge in using his images to re-create a representation of motion.

On Saturday 25 February 1888, Muybridge projected both stop-motion photographs and brief moving sequences of drawings in his zoopraxiscope to an audience in the Musi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• INTRODUCTION: NECESSITIES AND CONSTRAINTS
• CHAPTER 1: THE CASE OF THE CINEMA
• CHAPTER 2: THE CASE OF COLOUR FILM
• CHAPTER 3: THE CASE OF 16MM FILM
• CHAPTER 4: THE CASE OF HDTV
• CHAPTER 5: THE CASE OF THE THIRD DIMENSION
• Notes
• Index
• eCopyright