Movie Archaeology

Movie Archaeology

The Camera Sequence (Owen Barfield)

Projection according to Owen Barfield

Movie ArchaeologyAthanasius Kircher

Movie ArchaeologyA Camera Obscura

Movie ArchaeologyA Camera Obscura

Movie ArchaeologyMagic Lantern

Movie Archaeology

Ettienne Jules Marey

Movie Archaeology

Marey’s Chronophotographic Gun

Movie ArchaeologyPhenakistoscope

Movie ArchaeologyZoetrope

Movie Archaeology

Zogroscope

Movie Archaeology

Eadweard Muybridge

Movie Archaeology

Eadweard Muybridge

Muybridge Building, Kingston University, UK

Movie ArchaeologyAugust Lumiere

Movie ArchaeologyLouis Lumiere

Movie ArchaeologyThe Lumiere Brothers

Movie Archaeology

The Lumiere Brothers’ Cinematographe

Movie Archaeology

Mutoscope

Movie Archaeology

Triuniallantern

Movie Archaeology

Thomas Edison

Movie Archaeology

Kinetoscope Parlor

Movie Archaeology

Mechanism of a Kinetoscope

Movie Archaeology

Georges Melies

It is not perhaps entirely chance that the invention of motion photography, this sudden great leap in our powers of exploring and imitating the outward of perception, coincided so exactly with the journey into inner space initiated by Freud and his compeers. The year 1895 saw not only the very first film but also the publication of Studies in Hysteria, that is, the birth of psychoanalysis.--John Fowles

Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It’s another part of the twentieth-century mind. It’s the world seen from inside. We’ve come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing itself. This is where we are. The twentieth century is on film. . . . You have to ask yourself if there’s anything about us more important than the fact that we’re constantly on film, constantly watching ourselves. --Don DeLillo

I was born during the Age of Machines. A machine was a thing made up of distinguishable  "parts," organized in imitation of some function of the human body. . . How a machine "worked" was readily apparent to an adept, from inspection of the shape of its working parts. . . .

The cinema was the typical survival form of the Age of Machines. Together with still photographs, it performed prizeworthy functions: it taught and reminded us (after what then seemed a bearable delay)  how things looked, how things worked, how we do things . . . and of course (by example) how to feel and think.

We believed it would go on forever, but when I was a little boy, the Age of Machines ended. . . .

Cinema is the Last Machine. It is probably the last art that will reach the mind through the senses.--Hollis Frampton

It was for the construction of those micro-bubbles that human intelligence and science had evolved, that savants and engineers and whimsical caricaturists had put together the separate pieces of the great invention. In a roundabout, absurdly elaborated fashion- requiring special effects laboratories, wagonloads of art directors and prop men, years of systematic alchemical research-the brain had set about creating an image of itself, with a view toward projecting it into every corner of This Island Earth. --Geoffrey O’Brien, The Phantom Empire

Once regarded as a puerile, cowardly escape from life because they begot and simulated dreaming, the movies are now recognizable as an extension of the supreme power inherent in a universe of energy, chance, evolution, explosiveness, and creativity. In such a youthful, exuberant universe the movies' kind of dreaming gives concrete probability and direction to the ongoing drive of energy, and as a consequence what at one time was thought to be a vitiating defect is now their greatest virtue. The new freedom they reflect and extend is freedom within the world, contingent and not absolute, a heightened vision of existence through concrete form beyond abstraction. In a world of light and

a light world—unanalyzable, uninterpretable, without substance or essence, meaning or direction—being and non-being magically breed existence. Out of the darkness and chaos of the theater beams a light; out of nothingness is generated brilliant form, existence suspended  somewhere between the extremes of total darkness and total light. Performing its rhythmic dance to energy's tune, the movie of the imagination proves, should there be any doubt, that cinema, an art of light, contributes more than any other art today to fleshing out the possibilities for good within an imaginative universe.

–W. R. Robinson, “The Movies, Too, Will Set You Free”