Chronophotography and Marey - Week 2
After reading "Marey, the analytic, and the digital" by Steve Mamber, I was intersted in his arguement that Marey's experimentaion and development of the chronophotography should not so closely be seen as "pre-cinema" but instead as its own medium. Mamber insists, Marey would not have nessecarily believed that the Lumiere Brothers' "cinema" was the inevitable path of his analysisand experimentation, but rather an alternative.
Marey was must more interested in the physics behind 'movement,' and the scientific nature of movement more so than the photographic aspect. In the article it is stated that he has said about chronophotography: "... photography like all forms of graphic representation, is faithful memory which preserves unaltered the impressions it has recieved... the photograph, then is praised for its obvious recording capabilities." However he mentions also, that there still remains "perspective" issues with phorotgraphs of movement.
Because of this suggested difference I wanted to research and explain some of the beginnings of history, particularly dealing with how the Lumiere Brothers used the medium.
The Lumiere Brothers, (Auguste and Louis) are, among others, credited as the first inventors to develop what is known as cinema and usually the first two to actually understand how the camera worked. In 1894, the brothers', after analyzing Edison's Kinetoscope identified two main problems with his device: firstly it was bulky, the camera, was a big piece of machinery and its weight and size were combersome. Secondly, the nature of the kinetoscope only allowed one viewer to experience the films at a time.
By early 1895, the brothers had invented their own device combining camera with printer and projector and called it the Cinematographe. This new device was smaller, lighter, and was hand cranked to run at 16 frames per second. The brothers included an intermittent device to their camera which helped display movment better.
Unlike Marey's interests in photograph's ability to display the physics behind movement and its science, the Lumiere Brothers immeidatly used their new invention to record 'actuality' footage such as workers coming out of their factory. Or a train arriving to the station.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nj0vEO4Q6s
The Lumiere Brothers pioneered not just the technical attributes of the camera but also its artistic attributes, creating a dialogue of relaism that has since been a crux of cinema narrative.
So, while Marey may have wanted his chronophotography to be a scientific medium, the pleasurable aesthetic properties the Lumiere Brothers developed through motion pictures altered the medium greatly.
"Cinematographe" - Lumiere
Marey's - "Photographic Gun
-Baxter Frick
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_and_Louis_Lumière
http://www.holonet.khm.de/visual_alchemy/lumiere-x.html
http://www.earlycinema.com/pioneers/lumiere_bio.html