From Phantom Rides to GoPro Videos: Exploring the Magic of the Moving Image
At Film Love’s screening at the High, we’ll look at cinema’s trajectory from the 1890s to now.
By Andy Ditzler, Film Love Founder and Curator, with Eva Berlin, Digital Content Specialist, High Museum of Art
Anthony McCall’s 1974 film Line Describing a Cone takes thirty minutes to draw a full circle onscreen. That is the extent of the imagery on the reel, and the film is silent. But unlike almost all other films, this film’s primary action does not happen on the screen; It takes places in the space inhabited by you, the viewer. As the circle is drawn on the screen, the film gradually forms a cone of light between the projector and the screen, made visible by the fog of a hazer.
Line Describing a Cone is surely one of the most engaging films ever made. Wherever it is shown, a crowd gathers. Inevitably, curious viewers approach the cone, looking inside, touching it, interrupting the light to make temporary marks. The cone feels surprisingly tactile, like a sculpture, despite the fact that it is made only of light and fog. Whatever happens (and each screening is necessarily different), Line Describing a Cone is an experience as spectacular as it is rare.
You’ll get your chance to interact with McCall’s illusory cone and see other notable films at Film Love’s February 7 Screening at the High Museum of Art.
The evening’s film selections, curated by Film Love’s Andy Ditzler, will stretch from silent films from cinema’s earliest days in the 1890s to GoPro videos in the present day. We’ll explore the moving image and how cinema creates magic through its unique combination of three different qualities:
- light projected through a room
- the representation of photographic depth on a flat surface
- the illusion of motion on screen.
Motion is not actually inherent to a reel of film, which consists only of still images placed sequentially on a long strip. At twenty-four frames per second, a film projector animates these images and makes them appear to move in time.
In the process, the projector’s lens magnifies the images while a bright lamp “throws” them through the air onto the screen on the opposite wall. This magical-seeming process created the illusion of motion onscreen that has kept audiences enthralled for more than a century.
The Lumière brothers’ 1896 film of a train arriving at a station in France is one of early cinema’s most enduring images. The camera is on the platform, and the train thus approaches the audience at a diagonal, nearly overwhelming the left side of the frame. After the train stops, patrons bustle about. (The combination of visual spectacle and quotidian imagery signals the Lumières at their best.) The oft-repeated tale of viewers at this film’s premiere cowering in fear at the onrushing train is almost certainly false — But there is no doubt that the approaching train represented a new and uniquely cinematic form of visuality.
Not long after, cameramen were attaching themselves to the front of trains, recording onrushing movement through space. These “phantom ride” films became one of cinema’s early popular genres. They were so profitable that many examples were made, including the selection at this screening, released by Thomas Edison in 1902 and known as Panorama of the Golden Gate.
These train films extended into a new dimension beyond photography’s illusion of depth on the flat surface of the screen. If the landscape painting of the nineteenth century implied a visual mastery over the entire scene, and contemporaneous 360-degree panorama paintings (such as Atlanta’s Cyclorama) put the viewers into the scene, the phantom ride catapulted viewers directly through it.
As film historian Tom Gunning aptly describes these movies, “All space is in constant motion — everything is continuously both approaching and slipping away from us.” This kind of film comes down to us today in the numerous videos of thrill-seeking sports: free-flying wingsuiters, mountain climbers, bike riders and skateboarders all strap tiny GoPro cameras to helmets, feet and handlebars, often capturing the same kinds of views that attracted movie audiences in the 1910s.
Many artists’ films of the 1970s shared early cinema’s focus on movies as interlocking processes of projected light, the conversion of still frames into motion, and photographic depth onscreen.
For his ingenious Pasadena Freeway Stills (1974), Gary Beydler took film footage from inside his car during a California road trip, and converted each film frame to a separate photograph. He then reanimated the photographs within the frame, by holding each one up to a glass and filming them in sequence.
He gradually sped up the cutting so that the drive is recreated in real time in the center of the frame. At the same time, we see Beydler’s hands holding the photos; his fingertips pressed against the glass provide a counterpoint of flatness to the depth of the car film. Pasadena Freeway Stills is both an homage to the motion thrills of early cinema and an elegant demonstration of how movies work.
A magician of cinema, Ken Jacobs is known for over a half-century of work in filmmaking and dynamic projection performances utilizing visual phenomena. His film Opening the Nineteenth Century: 1896 (1991) takes early films from the Lumières and applies to them a visual phenomenon known as the Pulfrich Effect, in which viewers can perceive three-dimensional depth using a simple eye filter (filters will be provided at the screening). The result is a 3-D film that does not require elaborate projection technology — it’s simply a 16mm projection.
Like Beydler’s film, Paul Sharits’ fascinating 16mm projection piece Shutter Interface (1975) exploits film’s standard projection rate of twenty-four frames per second. The film consists of two 16mm reels (simultaneously projected) of single color frames, in groups of two to eight frames in length — that is, each color is seen for one twelfth to one third of a second. These groups are separated by single black frames, during which a gentle tone sounds. The two projections overlap in the middle, causing three different colors to be seen at once, with the middle color necessarily a combination of whatever two colors are being projected at that moment.
Sharits’ film composed of color frames is vibrant and attractive to watch, but it also raises a fundamental question about what cinema is. Since we are dealing with solid color frames, there is no motion within the images, and no depth either. What, then, can “motion pictures” mean here? As with some of the earliest films, Shutter Interface offers a kind of pure experience of motion, but one that is untethered to narrative or even imagery of the world. It renews a sense of astonishment at the dynamism of the moving image.
REFERENCES
Gunning, Tom. “The Attraction of Motion: Modern Representation and the Image of Movement.” In Film 1900: Technology, Perception, Culture, edited by Annemone Ligensa and Klaus Kreimeier. New Barnet, UK: John Libbey, 2009.
Cathcart, Linda. “An Interview with Paul Sharits.” Film Culture no. 65–66, 1978.
