Capture

Edward Dimendberg

With remote control in hand or fingers on keyboard, every viewer of

moving images is today a master of velocity, speeding up, slowing
down, reversing direction, and repeating pictures (and often sounds)
at will. Recording devices become ever smaller, and the production
of moving, still, and animated facsimiles has never been technically easier, more inexpensive, or required less training. Whether to
escape boredom, search for information, or re-experience pleasurable moments, controlling audio-visual flow and the time and space
in which it is experienced has become a widely distributed social
privilege, as has the making of images itself. For centuries the
visual narratives provided by paintings, frescoes, or murals depended on a patronage system and the passage of the body through
unique architectural or artistic environments of stationary images
to create a sensation of movement.1 Later technologies such as the
motion-picture projector and the instant replay of video recording
and television allowed for controlling the speed and direction of
images, typically in collective settings such as the classroom or the
home living room.2

The uncoupling of moving pictures from a single velocity or
direction of movement, as well as a necessary environment for
their consumption, that contemporary digital technologies facilitate
suggests at once the culmination of prior tendencies but also a
profoundly new development. Anyone can make movies with a
camcorder and post them to the Internet for the world to see. With
more expensive equipment, training, and talent, the results can
rival commercial cinema at a fraction of the cost and with less
interference and pressure to turn a profit. Yet whether this represents the culmination of the myth of total cinema and audio-visual
realism postulated by film theorist Andr Bazin, a dismantling of
linear sequential expression advocated by early-twentieth-century
modernists through contemporary hypertext and interactive narrative forms, or the emergence of a new and unprecedented form of
culture, remains widely debated.3 Undeniably, the impulse to capture reality in visual form has become a social and economic fact
of enormous consequence, an equation in political debates about
surveillance and civil liberties and cultural debates about representation, and has crystallized contemporary attitudes about the
74

1. See Stephan
Oetterman, The
Panorama: The
History of a Mass
Medium, trans.
Deborah Lucas
Schneider (New
York: Zone Books,
1997) and C. W.
Ceram, Archaeology
of the Cinema
(New York:
Pantheon, 1960).
2. Anne Friedberg,
Window Shopping:
Cinema and
the Postmodern
(Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University
of California Press,
1995). On the history
of instant replay
video recording
introduced
to television
about 1958, see
Irving Fang, A
History of Mass
Communication:
Six Information
Revolutions (New
York: Focal Press,
1997), 176.

3. Andr Bazin,
The Myth of
Total Cinema, in
What is Cinema?,
trans. Hugh Gray
(Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University
of California Press,
2004). The standard
discussion of
hypertext is found
in George Landow,
Hypertext 3.0:
Critical Theory and
New Media in an
Era of Globalization
(Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University
Press, 2006). On
the disruption of

linearity, see Susan

McCabe, Cinematic
Modernism:
Modernist Poetry and
Film (Cambridge:
Cambridge
University Press,
2005) and Marshall
McLuhan, The
Mechanical Bride:
Studies in the
Folklore of Industrial
Man (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1967).
4. Wolfgang
Schivelbusch, The
Railway Journey:
Trains and Travel
in the Nineteenth
Century, trans.
Anselm Hollo
(New York: Urizen
Books, 1977).

visual presentation and representation of the self and the other.

Few developments in twenty-first-century societies and cultures
transpire without images.

The voyeur in thrall to a scene, the victim of attention-deficit
disorder incapable of concentrating, or the squeamish who skip over
scenes of sex and violence find their preferences served in a world in
which the playback of moving images appears ever more individualized, and the circulation of still images over the Internet ever more
rapid. To each viewer, the motto might be phrased, his or her own attention span and viewing speed. Yet if it is difficult to grasp the rules
of this new cultural order and the power relations it implies, for surely
it entails both, it is equally challenging to reconstruct the intellectual
and political debates about the speed and duration of moving images. Recalling their immense stakes over the course of more than two
centuries in the definitions of knowledge, leisure, work, if not the very
notions of time and space which have become the norm in advanced
industrial societies, is to recognize the inextricability of technologies
of representation from industrialization, mass production, and urbanization. Although the idea of speed is as old as human beings, given
its ubiquity across world religion and mythology, its representation in
externalized moving images rather than animal locomotion or the
events of the natural world is far more recent and contemporaneous
with the technologies of the nineteenth century.

The invention of motion pictures in the 1890s more or less
concurrently by Thomas Alva Edison in the United States, Auguste
and Louis Lumire in France, and Max Skladanowsky in Germany,
is a milestone in modern urban society and culture. Drawing upon
the medium of photography popularized after the invention of the
Daguerreotype process in 1839 and the Calotype process by Fox
Talbot in 1841, as well as older media such as painting, line engraving, literature, music, and theater, the cinema was the most
successful of the many nineteenth-century popular entertainments,
such as the diorama and the panorama, that sought to create a realistic image of the external world. Like other contemporaneous
technologies, the railroad, the sewing machine, and the wind-up
pocket watch, it made industrialization tangible in the everyday
lives of city dwellers through the imposition of schedules, work
quotas, and standardized time, and seemed miraculous to contemporaries for whom a train moving at thirty miles per hour was
unaccustomedly rapid.4

Photography in its earliest technical incarnations was poorly
suited to register speed because of the slow exposure times neces75

sitated by the Daguerreotype and Calotype processes. If sitting for a

portrait could take hours, the resulting image, widely accessible to
people in many social stations by the end of the nineteenth century,
unquestionably changed the perception of time, aging, and duration.5 Whether one mocked the proliferation of photographs as did
Charles Baudelaire, or celebrated it as did the middle classes, the
impact upon culture and society was rapid, profound, and diverse.6
Impressionist painters turned toward capturing ephemeral and
transient features of light and the external world so as not to be
outdone by the upstart medium.7 The emergence of the academic
discipline of history, understood as a search for origins and organic
forms of events analogous to the record of the time made visible by
photography, coincided with its popularization, as did the notion
of historic preservation.8 In ways no one could have anticipated,
making photographic images of the present incited curiosity about
the past and how human beings might know it.

Yet it also sparked curiosity about the natural world and
the dynamics of motion invisible to the naked eye. Early pioneers
of the technology that led to cinema, such as Eadweard Muybridge
and tienne-Jules Marey, understood themselves as scientists
engaged in studying anatomy and motion.9 Muybridge devised a
series of cameras tripped by strings that allowed the gallop of
a horse to be recorded in a series of individual exposures and
demonstrated that it actually moved with all of its feet off the
ground. Marey invented a photographic gun that allowed the
flight of a bird to be traced in a single continuous image (fig. 1).
Muybridge later invented the zoopraxiscope, which allowed him
to project images at the 1893 Columbia Exposition in Chicago, and
Marey perfected a system of slow motion moving images. Although
their experiments were not commercially implemented, they established a key precedent for cinema, if one whose intertwining of
science and art was eventually overtaken by the impulse to create
fictional narratives.

By bringing distant objects nearer, magnifying the invisible,
slowing down or speeding up actions, juxtaposing images through
editing, or the mere fact of being able to endlessly repeat a single
process, the cinema generated new possibilities of an enhanced
cognitive insight into reality, the possibility of a vision superior to
that of the human eye, which fascinated filmmaker-theorists such
as Jean Epstein in France and Dziga Vertov in the Soviet Union. The
objectivity of mechanical vision implied distinct political valences
for the Soviet Vertov, whose 1929 Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Man
76

5. Susan Sontag, On
Photography (New
York: Farrar Straus
and Giroux, 1977).
6. Charles
Baudelaire, The
Salon of 1859, in
Selected Writings on
Art and Literature,
ed. and trans.
P. E. Charvet
(Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 2003), esp.
21997.
7. See Kirk T.
Varnedoe, The
Artifice of Candor:
Impressionism
and Photography
Reconsidered, Art
in America, no. 68
(January 1980): 6678.
8. On this property
of photography, see
Siegfried Kracauer,
On Photography
(1927), in The Mass
Ornament: Weimar
Essays, trans.
Thomas Y. Levin
(Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University
Press, 1995), 4764.
9. See Philip
Prodger, Time Stands
Still: Muybridge and
the Instantaneous
Photograph (New
York: Oxford
University Press,
2003) and Marta
Braun, Picturing
Time: The Work
of Etienne-Jules
Marey (18301904)
(Chicago: University
of Chicago Press,
1995).

Right (fig. 1):

tienne Jules Marey,
photographic
shotgun with
resulting motion
photographs of a
gulls flight. From La
Nature. Revue des
sciences et de leurs
applications aux arts
et lindustrie (Paris:
Masson, 1882), 329.

10. Jean Epstein

Photognie and
the Imponderable
(1935), in French
Film Theory and
Criticism, A History/
Anthology, ed.
Richard Abel
(Princeton: Princeton
University Press,
1988), 18892.

with the Movie Camera), freely manipulated the speed of time and
cause and effect on behalf of a communist decoding of reality. Yet
these tendencies represented a path essentially not pursued by
cinema, which developed in the direction of storytelling and channeled speed toward the advancement of suspense and narrative, if
not the production of visual pleasure accompanying movement that
for Epstein defined photognie.10

The flowering of the feature-length narrative film following
the success of D. W. Griffiths The Birth of a Nation (1914) demonstrated
the commercial success that was to be had by the employment of
77

parallel editing through which the illusion

of a simultaneous action could be created,
winning out over an earlier aesthetic of the
cinema of attractions in which the display
of movement itself dominated.11 Before a
cranking speed of twenty-four frames per
second became established as standard
in 1926, films were recorded and projected
at variable speeds ranging from sixteen
to twenty-three frames per second, with
the possibility of undercranking for subject
matter, such as chase scenes, requiring
greater speed. Unlike early nickelodeon
screenings, which were shown in a continuous loop, the feature films pioneered
by Griffith had specific show times that
required spectators to coordinate their
viewing with theater schedules. The dedication of entire city neighborhoods to mass
commodified spectacle, following the earlier proliferation of department stores, signaled a decisive transformation in the identity of the metropolis. Film
promoted new physical forms of the built environment, new social
relations, and new aesthetic ideals. Its images captured not merely
a particular slice of space and time but an audience, most likely
initially proletarian and immigrant but, by its second decade,
increasingly middle-class and respectable.

Trading upon the popularity of newspapers, mass-produced
books, and photographic images in the nineteenth century, the silent
cinema was quickly heralded as a universal language capable
of fostering a global community.12 Genres such as the melodrama,
newsreels depicting topical events, and images of urban landmarks
traveled rapidly across national and linguistic boundaries and
established the first true cultural form of globalization. Cinema
made the world seem smaller, more akin to a single global city, as
heterogeneous audiences in far-flung locations now felt that they
were visiting the same places, consuming the same stories, and pining for the same movie idols. Popular culture, once the local domain
of folk songs or craft traditions passed down across the generations,
was now on the defensive, as a new mass culture, international and
changing at a far more rapid pace, appeared on the movie screen.
Audience participation, often raucous and political in character and
78

Above (fig. 2): Worker

at his desk with
Gilbreth clock,
c. 1919. Single frame
of stereograph. The
Virginia and Kelly
Karnes Archives and
Special Collections
Research Center,
Purdue University.
The Gilbreth clock
was used to time the
efficiency of motions,
according to Frederick
Winslow Taylors
system of scientific
management.

11. Tom Gunning,

An Aesthetic of
Astonishment: Early
Film and the (In)
credulous Spectator,
Art & Text, no. 34
(Spring 1989): 11433.
12. Miriam Hansen,
Babel and Babylon:
Spectatorship in
American Silent Film
(Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University
Press, 1996).

13. See Cinema

and the Invention
of Modern Life, eds.
Leo Charney and
Vanessa R. Schwartz
(Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University
of California Press,
1995).
14. The most
informative analysis
of Clairs film
remains Annette
Michelson, Dr
Crase and Mr.
Clair, October,
no. 11 (Winter 1979):
3154.

15. Elspeth H. Brown,

The Corporate Eye:
Photography and
the Rationalization
of American
Commercial
Culture, 18841929
(Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University
Press, 2005) explores
the relation
between scientific
management
and cinematic
techniques.
16. See Janet Staiger,
Dividing Labor for
Production Control:
Thomas Ince and the
Rise of the Studio
System, Cinema
Journal 18, no. 2
(Spring 1979): 1625,
for a discussion
of the increasing
rationalization
of the Hollywood
production system.

a hallmark of the nickelodeon era, gave way to a standardized

exhibition format in which the clear separation between spectator
and spectacle was enforced. A far more passive relation to spectacle
increasingly became the norm.

Representing motion more effectively and realistically than
earlier devices, such as the zoetrope and the phenakistoscope, and
projecting it on a screen viewable by an audience of spectators, film
excelled at representing the temporal dimension of modern city life.13
Ren Clairs 1925 film Paris qui dort (The Crazy Ray) depicted what
would happen if all movement in Paris were to be stopped by the
invention of a mad scientist and made effective use of the techniques
of stop and slow motion to illuminate the character of the modern
metropolis.14 Whether depicting the latest clothing fashions or urban
neighborhoods on the verge of destruction, cinema has fascinated
serious commentators since its invention for its remarkable ability to
recordand hence preserve for future viewersthe urban here and
now, whose subsequently forgotten appearance often triggers the
greatest reaction by viewers.

Equally aligned with the rationalization of labor and the
body, the film medium was no less an essential tool in the imposition
of the system of scientific management associated with the ideas
of Henry Ford and Frederick Winslow Taylor (fig. 2). At the service
of biomechanics, the recording of movement in labor celebrated
by Vertov became a key tool to increase industrial productivity, no
longer cognitive or descriptive but now prescriptive in its presentation of the ideal working body.15 These ideas eventually came full
circle and led to the importation of techniques resembling those of
the assembly line into film production as the older artisanal mode
of movie making gave way to the rise of the modern Hollywood
film studio, with its maximally efficient use of actors and sets and
rationalization of filming from a shooting script.16 Romantically
tinged as the dream factory, the American film studio system,
with its elaborate division of labor and imperative to produce films
most economically, was nonetheless a factory, for which reason it
was able to undercut the European competition and, in combination
with the disastrous consequences of the First World War, eventually
obtain domination of the global market.

Harold Lloyds performance as a time-imprisoned aspirant
to the American middle class in Safety Last (Fred C. Newmeyer
and Sam Taylor, 1923) and King Vidors The Crowd (1921) explored
the implications of leisure in the city and suggest how the logic of
Fordism, the dynamic cycle of industrial production and consump79

80

Opposite (fig. 3):

Film still, Safety Last,
1923. From Harold
Lloyd and Wesley
Stout, An American
Comedy (New York:
Longmans, Green
and Co., 1928), 145.
The comic actor
Harold Lloyd is
suspended above
Los Angeles.

17. Walter Benjamin,

On Some Motifs in
Baudelaire (1939),
in Selected Writings
4, 19381940, ed.
Michael Jennings
and trans. Harry
Zohn (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard
University Press,
2003), 328.
18. Kracauer,
The Little Shopgirls
Go to the Movies,
in The Mass
Ornament, 291306.
19. See Sabine
Hake, Chaplin
Reception in Weimar
Germany, New
German Critique,
no. 51 (Autumn 1990):
87111.
20. On the notion
of imagined
community,
see Benedict
Anderson, Imagined
Communities:
Reflections on the
Origin and Spread
of Nationalism, rev.
ed. (London: Verso,
2006).

tion, had thoroughly permeated silent cinema, now a respectable

form of middle-class entertainment and a huge global industry (fig.
3). In the early 1920s the genre of the city symphony investigated
the dynamism of the large city. Films such as Manhatta (Charles
Sheeler and Paul Strand, 1921) and Berlin: Die Symphonie der
Grostadt (Berlin: Symphony of a Great City; Walther Ruttman,
1927) presented a cross-section of the speed, mechanization, and
social heterogeneity of the city. Generally avoiding staged action
and filming people without their conscious awareness, these films
critically engaged with political and economic realities of life in
industrialized society and led the way toward the emergence of a
documentary cinema.

Cultural critics such as Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer
writing in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s were struck by the affinities
between film and the metropolis. Benjamin compared film to the
impact of the assembly line on the consciousness of workers and
understood its representation of urban shock as a decisive element
in training modern sense perception.17 Kracauer praised the female
white-collar workers who attended film screenings for their ability to glean practical wisdom about urban life from the cinema.18
Both writers deeply admired the films of Charlie Chaplin, such as
Modern Times (1936), with its comic yet deadly serious portrait of the
human body at the mercy of urban technological society.19 Creating
a sense of imagined community, the moving image was to the
twentieth century what the newspaper was to the nineteenth, and
facilitated a contraction of space in travel films and newsreels that
was invaluable to the nation-building efforts of the modern state, in
its liberal capitalist or fascist incarnations.20 Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Benito Mussolini are but
four of the countless political leaders of the twentieth century who
recognized the value of cinema to the processes of political legitimation and mobilization.

Yet the kineticism of motion pictures has just as frequently
been employed without a specific ideological agenda in chase films,
records of daredevil stunts, road movies, and action cinema from
Keystone Kops comedy chases to Hong Kong martial arts films. The
intoxication with movement described by early modernists and associated with technologies such as the automobile and airplane
found its cinematic analogue in the crowd-pleasing chase scenes in
crime films but also in avant-garde efforts, such as Scorpio Rising
(Kenneth Anger, 1964) and Vanishing Point (Richard C. Sarafian,
1971), which relate a fascination with speed to a death wish (fig. 4).
81

Experimental filmmakers Stan Brakhage, Kurt

Kren, and Bruce Conner, clearly indebted to
the montage explorations of Sergei Eisenstein,
made films with shots lasting only a few frames.
Film editing, the technique of space/time compression par excellence, proved as versatile
and multivalent as the filmmakers who employed it.

Yet the utility of slow-motion cinema
was evident to practitioners of scientific cinema,
for whom time-lapse techniques shortened the
duration of natural processes. French scientific
film master Jean Painlev excelled at illuminating the life of frequently microscopic aquatic
life forms and revealing a continuum of the
visible world that ultimately challenged the
assumption of human centrality in the world
at the heart of the narrative film enterprise.21
Cinema was contemporaneous with the birth
of psychoanalysis, whose topographical model of the human mind and sensitivity to the dynamics of condensation and displacement film theorists later reinterpreted in relation to
notions of metaphor and metonymy. 22 No other medium had more
effectively allowed for the exploration of what Benjamin called the
optical unconscious.23 Nor did any prove better suited for representing the world of dreams and eroticism, frequently through the employment of slow motion cinematography evident in films such as Un
chien andalou (Andalusian Dog; Luis Buuel and Salvador Dal,
1929) and Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren, 1943), but also
through the genre of pornography that found cinema a perfect medium for explicit representations of sexuality.

Filming in long takes, slowness of pace, and the substitution
of duration for montage became hallmarks of an exploratory impulse
in narrative cinema, initially associated by Bazin with Italian neorealism and later culminating in the work of art film directors such as
Michelangelo Antonioni and Philippe Garrel, as well as the avantgarde cinema of Chantal Akerman or Andy Warhol. By the late
twentieth century, the presentation of activities or processes in long
takes in real time without editing had become a radical aesthetic
strategy and the most potent counter tendency to the formulaic
productions of narrative cinema, whose ubiquity had spread beyond
Hollywood. If the montage investigated by Eisenstein and Vertov was
82

21. See Science is

Fiction: The Films of
Jean Painlev, eds.
Andy Masaki Bellows,
Marina McDougall,
and Brigitte Berg
(Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2001).
22. The parallel
development
of cinema and
psychoanalysis is
treated in Stephen
Heath, Cinema
and Psychoanalysis:
Parallel Histories,
in Endless Night:
Cinema and
Psychoanalysis,
Parallel Histories
(Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University
of California Press,
1999), 2556.
23. See Walter
Benjamin, The Work
of Art in the Age of
its Technological
Reproducibility, and
other Essays on Media,
ed. Michael Jennings
(Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University
Press, 2008), esp.
26466, 27879.

Opposite (fig. 4):

Movie poster for
Vanishing Point, 1971.
1971 Twentieth
Century Fox.
All rights reserved.

now routinely employed in television advertising and MTV clips and

had lost its claim to political efficacy, filmmakers found themselves
needing to reinvent and re-conceive of their formal language in an
environment vastly different from that in which the essentially
modernist film medium developed.

The proliferation of the DVD and home entertainment systems, satellite and cable delivery of films, and suburban multiplexes
has attenuated the traditional connection between cinema viewing
and the metropolitan movie theater. As viewers consume all manner
of audio-visual material on laptop computers or the screens poised to
appear on every available surface, the identity of the new technology
and its viewing patterns with the older film medium has come to
the fore. Whether this will entail a complete fragmentation of the
audience into viewers with ever more specialized interests remains
to be seen. Film piracy and illegal distribution through file-sharing
software on the Internet have realized the instantaneous global
circulation of mass culture, as has the technology of YouTube, with
similarly unpredictable implications. More than a century since the
invention of moving pictures, the sheer variety of the practices and
programs in which they have been enlisted speaks against attempts
to discern essential properties and tendencies in a medium whose
transformation continues.

83