Content area
Full Text
Death shadows, specters, the photograph, as it does the cinema. That this is the case for the photograph is now a common understanding. I will come back to it. As for the cinema, death is inscribed there from its very advent, including in the first substantial account of it, Maxim Gorky's on July 4, 1896, when he saw the Lumière Bros. films at the Nizhni-Novgorod fair in Russia. Gorky began his review with these extraordinary, and extraordinarily apt, words:
Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows.
If you only knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without colour. Everything there-the earth, the trees, the people, the water and the air-is dipped in monotonous grey. Grey rays of the sun across the grey sky, grey eyes in grey faces, and the leaves of the trees are ashen grey. It is not life but its shadow, it is not motion but its soundless spectre.
Here I shall try to explain myself, lest I be suspected of madness or indulgence in symbolism. I was at Aumont's and saw Lumière's cinématograph-moving photography.1
Of course, Gorky's characterization of the cinema as moving photography not only describes cinema but photography, but "negatively" as it were, as not moving. Building on Gorky's description, Tom Gunning proposes in his essay "An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Film and The (In)credulous Spectator" that the "ur" attraction/shock/experience of cinema-the experience in and by which it demonstrates its powers to the spectator-is the sudden transformation, the "magical metamorphosis," of what the first spectators were first presented with-the "all too familiar" still photographic image-into the all too strange mobile cinematographic image of living moving shadows of people and things. Quoting Gorky's famous description of it-"Suddenly a strange flicker passes through the screen and the picture stirs to life"2-Gunning sums up this process, what he calls "this cataclysmic event," as "this still projection takes on motion, becomes endowed with animation, and it is this unbelievable moving image that so astounds."3
Coming to photography through "cinema," I was struck by the possibility that the term "still" may not have been used in front of the term "photography" until the advent of cinema-"moving photography." I have in fact asked photography historians about this...