From Méliès to New Media

Wendy Haslem

Description

From Méliès to New Media contributes to a dynamic stream of film history that is just beginning to understand that new media forms are not only indebted to but firmly embedded within the traditions and conventions of early film culture. Adopting a media archaeology, this book will present a comparative examination of cinema including early film experiments with light and contemporary music videos, silent film and their digital restorations, German Expressionist film and post-noir cinema, French Gothic film and the contemporary digital remake, Alfred Hitchcock’s films exhibited in the gallery, post medium films as abstracted light forms and interactive digital screens revising experiments in precinema. Media archaeology is an approach that uncovers the potential of intermedial research as a fluid form of history. It envisages the potential of new discoveries that foreground forgotten or marginalised contributions to history. It is also an approach that has been championed by influential new historicists like Thomas Elsaesser as providing the most vibrant and productive new histories (2014).

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Beginnings and Ends: Historical Collusion 

Chapter 1: Cigarette Burns and Bullet Holes: Celluloid Cues in Digital Cinema

Section I: Early Cinema: Colour and Spectrality

Chapter 2: Applied Colour: Chromatic Frankenstein's Monsters?

Chapter 3: The Serpentine Dance Films: 'Dream Visions That Change Ten Thousand Times a Minute'

Section II: Luminescence, Montage and Frame Ratios

Chapter 4: Memory and Noir: Neon Contrasts 

Chapter 5: Cutting: Shock and Endurance

Chapter 6: Screens, Scale Ratio: Vertical Celluloid in the Digital Age

Section III: Cinema Beyond the Frame

Chapter 7: Hallucinatory Framing and Kaleidoscopic Vision

Chapter 8: Ephemeral Screens: The Muybridgizer

Bibliography 

Index

Sujets

• Cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinema
• Roman Polanski
• Blade Runner
• Film
• ART
• Sergueï Eisenstein
• Digital
• Electronic
• Internet
• Cultural Studies
• Auguste and Louis Lumière
• History of film
• Media studies
• Sergei Eisenstein
• Video
• The First Men in the Moon
• Digital Media

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781789380316
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2019 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2019 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2019 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas
Cover image: Lobster Films 2011
Production manager: Mareike Wehner
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-989-7
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78938-032-3
ePub ISBN: 978-1-78938-031-6
Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK.
This is a peer-reviewed publication.
Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Beginnings and Ends: Historical Collusion
Chapter 1: Cigarette Burns and Bullet Holes: Celluloid Cues in Digital Cinema
Section I: Early Cinema: Colour and Spectrality
Chapter 2: Applied Colour: Chromatic Frankenstein’s Monsters?
Chapter 3: The Serpentine Dance Films: ‘Dream Visions That Change Ten Thousand Times a Minute’
Section II: Luminescence, Montage and Frame Ratios
Chapter 4: Memory and Noir: Neon Contrasts
Chapter 5: Cutting: Shock and Endurance
Chapter 6: Screens, Scale Ratio: Vertical Celluloid in the Digital Age
Section III: Cinema Beyond the Frame
Chapter 7: Hallucinatory Framing and Kaleidoscopic Vision
Chapter 8: Ephemeral Screens: The Muybridgizer
Bibliography
Index
List of Illustrations

Figure 1: Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945).
Figure 2: Voyage dans la Lune/Trip to the Moon (Georges Méliès, 1902, Lobster Films, 2011). Image reproduced with kind permission from Eric Lange and Serge Bromberg, Lobster films.
Figure 3: Loie Fuller Dancing , Samuel Joshua Beckett, 1900.
Figure 4: Annabelle Dances and Dances (Edison, 1894–1897).
Figure 5: Shades of Cool (Jake Nava, 2014).
Figure 6: Yelizaveta Svilova, Man With a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929).
Figure 7 and 8:  Justus D Barnes shoots the spectator in The Great Train Robbery (Edwin S. Porter, 1903).
Figure 9: Chance (Christian Boltanski, 2011). Photograph: Simon McLean, 2011.
Figure 10: Chance (Christian Boltanski, 2011). Photograph: Simon McLean, 2011.
Figure 11: Phantom Ride (Daniel Crooks, 2016). Image courtesy of the artist, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne and Starkwhite, Auckland.
Figure 12: Jim Campbell, Illuminated Average #1 (2000). Image reproduced with kind permission from Jim Campbell, 2018.
Figure 13: Valstar Barbie (Claude Lévêque, 2003). Photograph: Simon McLean, 2006.
Figure 14: The Muybridgizer (Watson and Gobeille, 2010).
Figure 15: Eadweard Muybridge, ‘The Horse In Motion’, 1878.
Acknowledgements

This book has benefited from the expertise and influence of some outstanding film scholars, who are also my colleagues and friends. As an undergraduate student in Cinema Studies, I took subjects taught by Professor Barbara Creed where I learned how to recognise the depth and detail that is beyond the surface and how to use cinematic language to explore complex ideas. Equally important was the influence of Professor Angela Ndalianis, a brilliant film scholar who was my colleague for fifteen years. Angela supported my research and encouraged me to develop subjects in the Screen Studies program at The University of Melbourne.
Just as important was the opportunity to teach early film and new media to Screen Studies students. It has been a pleasure to be able to explore cinema beyond traditional screening spaces like art galleries or in virtual spaces where we were able to reconsider the intersection of new media and film history. Teaching our own research is a privilege and I thank the students who may not realise that they also teach us. The production of this book was generously supported by a publication grant from the School of Culture and Communication.
The book was improved in response to some insightful feedback from three anonymous readers. I appreciate their close reading and constructive commentary on my manuscript. Leonie Cooper helped to edit drafts of two chapters and it was wonderful to work with her.
Finally, I am grateful to my family, Simon, Janine, Bessy, Linda, Rick and Jade. I dedicate this book with love to my parents – Alfred and Beverley Haslem.
Introduction

Beginnings and Ends: Historical Collusion
Chapter 1

Cigarette Burns and Bullet Holes: Celluloid Cues in Digital Cinema
Did you ever want to cut away a piece of your memory, or blot it out? You can’t you know, no matter how hard you try. You can change the scenery, but sooner or later you’ll get a whiff of perfume, or somebody will say a certain phrase or maybe hum something, then you’re licked again!
(Al Roberts, Detour , 1945)
Thus, what I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface; I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again. Which has nothing to do with the deep laceration the text of bliss inflicts upon language itself, and not upon the simple temporality of its reading.
(Roland Barthes 1973: 11–12)
N ot so long ago whilst on the tram on my way home from work I began watching the 1945 celluloid print of Edgar G. Ulmer’s B film noir Detour downloaded and configured for my mobile screen. As the tram ferried me home along Melbourne’s wide boulevards, I became aware of traces of the history of Detour , particularly the visual and sonic signs that reveal an intricate confluence of older and newer technologies that produced this layered, fragmented view. I had always understood film history as a dynamic force, but looking at this film through a tiny screen, I could see, hear, touch and experience some of the ways that new technologies interact with film and how celluloid retains its presence as a subtle but intrinsic force within a pervasive digital media ecology. Detour was presented as a celluloid film displayed within a digital context, a constellation of older and newer media, technologies and materials. Within a culture fearful of cinema’s obsolescence, I could experience the presence of film history in the impression of celluloid displayed digitally. In this case, the digital offers a sensory experience that enlivens the past within the present. This experience of watching Detour presents a complex arrangement of temporalities, one that displays the present image as both contingent on and haunted by the past, a co-existence of tense. Impressions of film history become evident as more than seventy years of the film’s life is animated by the pixels and back lighting of this small screen. As Gilles Deleuze points out, ‘It is characteristic of cinema to seize this past and the future which coexist with the present image’ (2014: 38).
As I travelled on the tram watching the ‘original’ version of Detour , this small mobile screen presented a significantly different experience of the same version of the theatrical film. Thomas Elsaesser describes the experiential culture of contemporary cinema as one in which everything has changed, but nothing has changed (2013: 26). Against the fear of imminent cinematic obsolescence, the digital display often preserves analogue traces. As Elsaesser points out, contemporary cinema is ‘doing the same thing with different means’ (2013: 26). These differing means re-situate the cinema into spaces beyond the traditional theatre. Theatrical cinematic screenings include familiar rituals such as scheduled exhibition times with audiences gathering, buying tickets and perhaps popcorn or an ice cream, moving into the theatre, selecting the best possible vantage point and watching (or ignoring) slides, advertisements, warnings about inappropriate behaviour in the cinema and previews for forthcoming films. On the tram the ritual differs. My digital screen provided an illusion of ubiquitous access to audio-visual content where there are few restrictions on the time and space of screening. I could avoid the advertisements and watch Detour in transit, uninterrupted, or even paused, rewound. I could change contrast to add to the brightness or darkness of the noir aesthetic and if I selected mute, I could watch it in silence. The options at my fingertips were not necessarily evidence of the domination of digital media (the film holds tight to its celluloid form), but it certainly illustrated how these different means created new experiences of cinema supported by technologies that reconfigure, reframe and provide new experiences of traditional media. I had the potential to manipulate this film, just as it created my experience. Watching Detour on the tram illustrates Elsaesser’s ultimate point that the digital turn signals a soft revolution, a second Renaissance in visual culture (2013: 15). This soft revolution, however, seems also to reconfirm the significance of celluloid film history. The past remains evident as spectral, influential traces on the material foundation of film, even in more contemporary modes of digital display.
Originally, Detour was produced as a low budget film from the Producer’s Releasing Corporation (PRC Pictures), a studio that occupied the poverty row edge of the Hollywood system. Detour ’s director Edgar G. Ulmer was one of a group of influential European filmmakers working in Hollywood during the 1940s. These directors were responsible for creating a particular aesthetic that was high in contrast, an effect produced by heightening the key lighting and dimming (or excluding altogether) the fill lights. Noir filmmakers like Ulmer favoured night for night shooting producing the deepest blacks. Shooting at night helped to affect a pervasive ambience of dread, claustrophobia and a deep sense of hopelessness th