Last week I went with a group of friends to see an exhibition of early photographs at the local museum. Over coffee later we got into a discussion about the relationship between technology and what’s possible in art. During the discussion I remembered a short piece I had written in my university studies that touched on this and I have included it below as I think it is worth pondering.
Cinema relies on the technology of photography. We can thus say that cinema is a technological art form, where what can be done, at a given point in time, is limited by and defined by the technology that is available.
The development of photography was one driven by the scientists and chemists. From Nicophore’s first photograph in 1926 (Peres 2007, pp.3-7) to Luminaire’s Cinematograph in 1895 technological developments that impacted exposure times, limited and defined what could be photographed, and how. Long exposure times meant that images of cities needed to be shot early in the morning before people were about, who would record as blurs and ruin the image. Landscapes were shot on days of little wind and people needed to be photographed in stiff, formal poses that could be held (often constrained by clamps and straps) for long periods of time (most recently shown in Kiroshi Kurosawa’s 2016 horror film Daguerreotype). Because of the long exposure times motion pictures were not possible until right at the end of this period.
The development of sufficiently fast processes brought in the era of the movie. Again rapid (for the time) technological development saw improvements in the size and capabilities of movie cameras that allowed more types of film to be produced. Changes in the sensitivity of material allowed natural light film making to occur and steadily broadened the range of lighting conditions that could be reliably captured. This broadening allowed cinema to escape from Plato’s Cave (Sontag 1977, p.3) and explore more realistic and perhaps more invasive situations, just as happened with still photography (Sontag 1977, p.11).
References
Daguerreotype 2016, Film-In-Evolution and Balthazar Productions
Peres, MR (ed) 2007, the Focal Encyclopedia of Photography, 4th Edition, Focal Press, Oxford
Sontag, S 1977, ‘In Plato’s Cave’ in On Photography, Penguin, London
Catcha Later Filmmakers
“Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I’m going to take tomorrow.”
Imogen Cunningham
