An article for Flash: Lancaster University Critical and Creative Journal
Man has long looked towards
light, towards the glowing sun which is the giver of life, for many things –
not least for artistic fulfilment. The primordial desire for the moving image
which enchants so many of us in theatre houses around the world today is one
which can be traced back through our history. Our cave-dwelling ancestors
sought entertainment in a distinct form of proto-cinema that involved creating
wonderful paintings on their cave walls which, by the light of a flickering
fire within the cave, are animated into life. In his awe-inspiring 3D
documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams, illustrious
director Werner Herzog traces “the beginnings of the modern human soul” [1]
to the Chauvet cave in the south of France where sophisticated drawings of
mammoths, horses and lions hunting caught the imagination of early man.
In these caves there is an
uncanny sense of shared consciousness with beings that once seemed so distant
to us, twenty thousand years distant to be exact. Light was shown to give life
in these caves, providing impressions of reality which aimed to satisfy our
cinematic desire. Whilst these cave paintings can hardly be called cinema, they
do show a fascination with the moving image that caught human curiosity and was
never let go.
Technological restrictions meant
that proto-cinema remained just that. The cinematic desire, however, can continue
to be traced in our history. The projection of an object reality, that is the
outside world, has been focused on by great thinkers such as Aristotle in
Ancient Greece and Mozi in Ancient China who both made references to the camera
obscura in their writings. This rudimentary ‘camera’ was placed inside a
darkened room (where the properties of light can be most practically honed)
with a hole in one side which light passed through, creating an inverted image
of the object world before the onlooker. As time and technology progressed, an
array of inventions was created with the aim of satisfying our cinematic
desire; including the zoetrope and daguerreotype to name just two.
Keith Cohen in Film and Fiction: the Dynamics of Exchange asserts
that cinematic desire could only truly be realised “when the two essentials of
motion pictures where at hand: the pictures (i.e. the photographic principle)
and the motion (i.e. the means of mechanically synthesizing the discrete part
of any action).”[2]
The gradual perfection of the photographic medium in the nineteenth century
gave birth to a cinema which projected movement, albeit within a fixed spatial
frame at first, of workers leaving a factory[3],
or a train pulling into a station.[4]
This documentary style of filmmaking became synonymous with the Lumière brothers (a suitable name deriving from the French word for
‘light’) and led to a wealth of important works rooted in reality, such
as Herzog’s film cited here. It was magician Georges Méliès, however, that first understood the
creative capacity of cinema. By use of camera tricks and elaborate sets Méliès created a cinema in
which time and space were at the hands of the filmmaker. With this came the
birth of modern cinema and an unprecedented acceleration in the technology of
the medium (sound, colour, widescreen, 3D…) and the symbolic language of film
which engrosses us all.
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