eight pages due by 48 hurs
modernity and the “cinema of attractions”
-Brooklyn Dodgers is a shortened version of their previous team name: the Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers.
-“trolley dodging” referrers to the pedestrian practice of quickly moving out of the way as a fast- approaching trolley was barreling down the street.
-Brooklyn trolley network from the 1890s to 1940s
-Brooklyn trolley network from the 1890s to 1940s
NYC trolley
Trolley Ride Through New York City Early 1900s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=954L9MpfCEo
1894 article in Newark Daily Advisor: “Isaac Bartle, a prominent citizen of New Brunswick was instantly killed at the Market street station of the Pennsylvania Railroad this morning. his body was so horribly mangled that the remains had to be gathered up with a shovel and taken away in a basket…he was ground into an unrecognizable mass under the wheels of a heavy freight engine. the engine struck Mr. Bartle in the back and dragged him several yards along the track; mangling his body in a horrible manner. almost every bone was broken, the flesh was torn away and distributed along the track, and so completely was the body torn apart at the coins and a knife in the trousers pocket were bent or broken, and the checkbook, pocketbook, and papers were torn to pieces.”
-1892: 8 people killed by a trolley. -1893: 51 killed. -1894: 34 killed. -by April 1895 the trolley had killed 107 people and injured about 450.
-1892: 8 people killed by a trolley. -1893: 51 killed. -1894: 34 killed. -by April 1895 the trolley had killed 107 people and injured about 450.
“the Brooklyn trolley, in particular, became an exemplar of random death. the explorer R.E. Peary said he thought the Brooklyn trolley as dangerous as an Arctic expedition. a restaurant keeper in Yellowstone Park told his guests that he had left Brooklyn and fled to the West only after the trolley had killed his family…the team, like the Yellowstone restaurant keeper, eventually deserted Brooklyn but kept its history in its new name—the Los Angeles Dodgers.” –Joseph P. Sullivan
Spectator’s editor, 1900: “the Spectator is not unduly timorous, but he confesses that in these days of haste he often gets a little nervous in the city streets let something may happen to somebody.”
Henry Adams’ 1905: “forces grasped this [modern man’s] wrists and flung him about as though he had hold of a live wire…every day nature violently revolted, causing so called accidents with enormous destruction of property and life, while plainly laughing at a man, who helplessly groaned and shrieked and shuddered, but never for a single instant could stop. the railways alone approached the carnage of war; automobiles and fire- arms ravaged society, until an earthquake became almost a nervous relaxation.”
“the rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance, and the unexpectedness of onrushing impression: these are the psychological conditions which the metropolis creates. with each crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life, the city sets up a deep contrast with small town and rural life with reference to the sensory foundations of psychic life.”
-Simmel “The Metropolis and Mental Life”
Ben Singer: “modernity suggests the ‘ideological shelterlessness’ of a postsacred, postfeudal world in which all norms and values are open to question. as a cognitive concept, modernity points to the emergence of instrumental rationality as the intellectual framework through which the world is perceived and constructed. ss a socioeconomic concept, modernity designates an array of technological and social changes that took shape in the last two centuries and reached a kind of critical mass near the end of the nineteenth century: rapid industrialization, urbanization, and population growth; the proliferation of new technologies and transportations; the saturation of advanced capitalism; the explosion of mass consumer culture; and so on.”
population of New York City: 1890: 309,002 1900: 1,921,901 8.54% increase is the largest population boom on record.
“modernity implied a phenomenal world—a specifically urban one—that was markedly quicker, more chaotic, fragmented, and disorienting then in previous phases or human culture. amid the unprecedented turbulence of the big city’s traffic, noise, billboards, street signs, jostling crowds, window displays, and advertisements, the individual faced a new intensity of sensory stimulation. the metropolis subjected the individual to a barrage of impressions, shocks, and jolts. the tempo of life also became more frenzied, sped up by new forms of rapid transportation, the pressing schedules of modern capitalism, and the ever- accelerating pace of the assembly line. modernity, in short, was conceived as a barrage of stimuli.”
“[there are those who believe that there] might be [a] neurological conception of modernity. they insisted that modernity must also be understood in terms of a fundamentally different register of subjective experience, characterized by the physical and perceptual shocks of the modern urban environment.”
Sigmund Freud: anxiety protects one from trauma.
Walter Benjamin: “the acceptance of shocks…is facilitated by training in coping with stimuli.”
Berlin: Symphony of a Great Metropolis dir. Walter Ruttmann (1927)
Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, clip from 45:38-49:17: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NQgIvG-kBM&t=2617s
Eiffel Tower: built from 1887-1889
Benjamin: “the damming of the stream of real life, the moment when its flow comes to a standstill, makes itself felt as reflux: this reflux is astonishment.”
-Singer: modernity thesis: implies that a new perception of life is needed in order to establish the habits and skills required to negotiate it.
-Singer: modernity thesis: implies that a new perception of life is needed in order to establish the habits and skills required to negotiate it.
-modernity has 3 components:
1) cinema is like modernity in all of its fragmentation and abruptness.
2) cinema is a part of modernity since it itself is a new technology.
3) cinema is a consequence of modernity.
“the intensity of modern experience generated in individuals a psychological predisposition toward strong sensations, reflecting profound changes in the ‘perceptual mode’ prevailing in modern society”
L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat 1895: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJdVEgOMQPM
Tom Gunning: “the first audiences, according to this myth, were naïve, encountering this threatening and rampant image with no defenses, with no tradition by which to understand it….therefore reduced them to a state usually attributed to savages in their primal encounter with the advanced technology of Western colonialists, howling and fleeing in impotent terror before the power of the machine. this audience of the first exhibitions exists outside of the willing suspension of disbelief…”
Tom Gunning: “this primal scene at the cinema underpins certain contemporary theorisations of spectatorship. the terrorized spectator of the Grand Café still stalks the imagination of film theorists who envision audiences submitting passively to an all- dominating apparatus, hypnotized and transfixed by its illusionist power. contemporary film theorists have made careers out of underestimating the basic intelligence and reality-testing abilities of the average film viewer and have no trouble treating previous audiences with similar disdain.”
“the audience this theater addressed was not primarily gullible country bumkins, but sophisticated urban pleasure seekers, well aware that they were seeing the most modern techniques in stage craft.”
1896 review: “it speeds right at you—watch out! It seems as though it will plunge into the darkness in which you sit, turning you into a ripped sack full of lacerated fleadh and splintered bones, [but] this too is but a train of shadows.”
-“before you a life surging, and life deprived of words and shorn of the living spectrum of colours—the gray, the soundless, and bleak and dismal life.”
Gunning: “only a careful consideration of the historical context of these earliest images can restore an understanding of the uncanny and agitating power they exerted on audiences. this context includes the first modes of exhibition, the tradition of turn-of the century visual entertainments, and a basic aesthetic of early cinema I have called cinema of attractions, which envisioned cinema as a series of visual shocks.”
cinema of attractions: “the aesthetic of attraction addresses the audience directly, sometimes, as in these early train films, exaggerating this confrontation in an experience of assault. rather than being an involvement with narrative action of empathy with character psychology, the cinema of attractions solicits a highly conscious awareness of the film image engaging the viewer’s curiosity and its fulfillment. through a variety of formal means, the images of the cinema of attractions rush forward to meet their viewers…in fulfilling this curiosity, it delivers a generally brief dose of scopic pleasure..”
Démolition d'un mur (1896): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI_Rxa0YFWg
Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory (1895): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEQeIRLxaM4
Barque sortant du port (1895): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtYCgO-1d34
Broadway & Union Square, New York (1901): https://archive.org/details/BroadwayUnionSquareNewYork
Railroad Smashup (1904): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0ID2BRx-DU
Débarquement du congrès des photographes à Lyon (1895): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ESMQDR-pwo
Electrocuting an Elephant (1903): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoKi4coyFw0
Annie Oakley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQSTSNq5dOM
The Boxing Cats: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qre61opE_g
Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) experimental / scientific photographer
Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) experimental / scientific photographer
Zoetrope
Zoetrope
zoetrope: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3yarT_h2ws
Zoetrope
Masstransiscope: A Zoetrope Hidden in an Abandoned NYC Subway Station: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6X9sNau9ok
Thomas Edison (1847-1931) inventor of the lightbulb, the first power grid in NYC, DC power, the phonograph, the first moving image technology in the U.S., the first movie studio, the kinetoscope.
Thomas Edison (1847-1931) inventor of the lightbulb, the first power grid in NYC, DC power, the phonograph, the first moving image technology in the U.S., the first movie studio, the kinetoscope.
Black Maria -movie studio in West Orange, New Jersey
The Black Maria: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuzFqGEIs_k
Black Maria -movie studio in West Orange, New Jersey
Edison’s Biograph company showed their movies on a Kinetoscope
Étienne Jules Marey (1830-1904) French scientist, physiologist, and chronophotographer
Étienne Jules Marey (1830-1904) French scientist, physiologist, and chronophotographer
Auguste and Louis Lumière French inventors of the cinematograph, a portable movie camera that also projected the first motion pictures.
Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze, Jan. 7, 1894: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wnOpDWSbyw
Fred Ott’s Sneeze, dir. William K.L. Dickson (1894)
-oldest surviving movie with a copyright.
-made for publicity purposes, as a series of still photographs to accompany an article in Harper’s Weekly.
Fred Ott’s Sneeze, dir. William K.L. Dickson (1894)
-oldest surviving movie with a copyright.
-made for publicity purposes, as a series of still photographs to accompany an article in Harper’s Weekly.
-shows in involuntary bodily spasm, similar to the type of bodily spasms that are fetishized in pornography.
-these spasms reveal the “bodily truth.”
May Irwin Kiss: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q690-IexNB4
New York World: “for the first time in the history of the world it is possible to see what a kiss looks like…such pictures were never before made. in the forty-two feet of kiss recorded by the kinetoscope every phase is shown with startling distinctness…the real kiss is a revelation. The idea of a kinetoscopic kiss has unlimited possibilities.”
Boston Herald: “of the 10 pictures included in yesterday’s programmes…there is no shadow of a doubt as to which created the most laughter. that kissing scene in the ‘Widow Jones,’ taken part in by May Irwin and John C. Rice, was reproduced in the screen, and the very evident delight of the actor and the undistinguished pleasure of the actress were absolutely ‘too funny’ for anything.”
Chap Book: “within a natural scale, such things [as kisses] are sufficiently bestial. monstrously enlarged and show repeatedly, they become positively disgusting.”
Siegfried Kracauer: “huge images of small material phenomena” become in cinema “disclosures of new aspects of physical reality.”
Eugene Sandow (1867-1925)
-joined the circus after escaping Prussia to avoid military service.
-won a strongman competition in London and 1889 and gained instant fame for his remarkable prowess.
-founded Sandow’s Magazine of Physical Culture and published a series of books where he coined the term
“body-building.”
-purposefully modeled his body in Greek and Roman statues.
Dickson Experimental Sound Film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PPBkVTIxjo
Annabelle - Serpentine Dance (1894): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNXNfcEo5dQ
Lumière Brothers - The Serpentine Dance (1899): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkT54BetFBI
L'arroseur arose (1896): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlbiNuT7EDI
Chinese Laundry (1894): https://www.loc.gov/item/00694137/
Photographing a Female Crook (1904): https://archive.org/details/PhotographingAFemaleC rook1904
Baby’s Lunch (1895): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WmimQd0q W8