For thousands of years human beings made images in order to retain what could not remain. A face was carved in stone, painted on a wall, written into an icon, impressed upon a coin. Photography intensified this possibility during the nineteenth century: light itself could leave a trace. Yet the trace remained still. Then, toward the end of that century, something unprecedented occurred: the image began to move.

Cinema was not suddenly invented in one place. Experiments with photography, optical devices and the reproduction of movement were developing in several countries: Edison and Dickson in the United States, Marey in France, Anschütz and the Skladanowskys in Germany, among others.

Yet it was not accidental that cinema crystallized so powerfully in France. France already possessed a remarkable culture of public visual spectacle: magic lanterns, panoramas, optical entertainments, theatres, fairs and cafés had accustomed people to gathering in order to see constructed worlds. At the same time, late nineteenth-century France was unusually receptive to the conjunction of science, industry, mechanical invention and art. Étienne-Jules Marey used chronophotography to decompose movement that the unaided eye could scarcely analyse. The Lumière family came from photographic industry; Georges Méliès came from theatre, illusion and magic.

In December 1895, the Lumières’ public screenings in Paris was remarkably simple: a train entering a station. The railway carried bodies through space; cinematography would carry appearances through time. A civilization increasingly fascinated by mechanical movement had found a means of retaining movement.

Méliès almost immediately discovered the complementary possibility. The camera need not merely witness what happened. It could show what had never happened. People could vanish, time could jump, travellers could reach the Moon. From its beginnings cinema therefore contained a tension it has never lost: record and invention, evidence and illusion, memory and dream.

Even its names reveal how difficult the invention was to define. English film originally named a thin skin or membrane and eventually the photographic strip. Moving picture, shortened to movie, emphasized motion. Cinema and Russian kino/кино, ultimately related to Greek κίνημα and κίνησις, likewise placed movement at the centre. Dutch bioscoop, Scandinavian bio and Icelandic bíómynd approached it through life and its image.

Eliezer Ben Yehudah chose something wonderfully material in Hebrew: סרט – seret, a strip, ribbon or band. It was an old word long before cinematography. Mishnah Kilayim 9:9 already speaks of סרט של צמר, a strip of wool, in discussing wool and linen. The word continued through later Hebrew literary usage, including Hebrew renderings of Don Quixote, before acquiring its cinematographic meaning: the physical ribbon eventually gave its name to the motion picture itself. Modern סרטון – sarton, a little film or video clip, has made that ancient ribbon small enough to inhabit a telephone.

A man filmed a few decades........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)