Image and the Mind
THE IMAGE AGE
Let us consider the effect film has had on the way we live and how future generations will live. First we need to look at how we arrived at the point in modern film where images of the real or imagined worlds can be captured, manipulated into any form and presented to make even the most outlandish idea seem real and believable.
It has been a little more than a hundred years since itinerant filmmakers began traveling from town to town recording the simple activities of everyday life using a hand cranked camera that would, with the change of a few parts, become a projector for an evening's showing. And people gladly paid to see images they thought once having taken place would only be reviewed again in some heavenly framework.
The discovery of the phenomenon that makes 'movies' possible, that being images hitting the eye are retained in the mind for a fraction of a second and thus the optical illusion of movement is produced by rapidly bombarding the eye with successive images, was employed by clever artisans even before the invention of photography. Devices in the early 1830's made use of successive drawings on rotating disks or drums(you remember the flip books of drawings that used to come with bubble gum) to produce the illusion of movement, "motion drawings" presaging the much later animation. It wasn't until English scientist William Henry Fox devised a negative photographic process that motion pictures became possible.
Any desire for motion photography at that time however was blocked by the fact the early photography took nearly an hour to produce an image on the negative-no candid camera there- and the negative emulsion was still coated onto bulky glass plates. The technological advances in the 1870's that brought the photographic process down to one thousandth of a second set the stage for the earliest set of motion pictures. Leland Stanford, the Governor of California, employed photographer Eadweard Muybridge to help prove a point about horses. Stanford believed that galloping horses lifted all four hooves off the ground and to prove the point Muybridge set up a succession of twelve cameras along a race track with trip wires attached to the shutters. A horse was galloped past the cameras and when the resulting negatives, printed on glass, were developed and mounted on a rotating drum, a throwback to the earlier motion drawings, the true motion of a living animal that happened too fast for the human eye to see was seen. Stanford proved his point, when at full gallop all four hooves of a horse do leave the ground, but more important for the first time an action-not just a single image, in the natural world had been captured and controlled to increase man's knowledge.
