First Take

Some early reactions to cinema

In the summer of 2020 I did some work for a friend who’s a VR director. During the pandemic he had a lot of work. VR was going to be the next big thing. He asked me to come up with more ideas for new “experiences” that we could pitch to production companies. I realized, with a certain anxiety, that this was  a completely new art form I'd paid no attention to. It was slightly burdensome to think that in the coming years I would have to see, hear, and be moved by artwork in an entirely new medium. Nevertheless it was a lot of fun to sit and think about potential VR pieces. Since I would not have to direct them, much less work out any technical problems, my ideas were little more than organized daydreams.

You are inside TV static. (The sound is different, experienced from the inside.)

Adaptation of Charles and Ray Eames' famous “Powers of Ten” film.

Synaesthesia experience. You can sing, for example, and see the precise color and shape of the pitch and timbre you’re producing.

Game based on Edgar Allan Poe story “The Premature Burial,” in which you wake up having been buried alive and have to claw your way out of the coffin.

Court-ordered VR instead of prison time. Teaching empathy, impulse control, etc. the hard way.

Conduct a sunrise like in The Phantom Tollbooth.

And many more. Unfortunately, when I put on my Quest 2 headset and tried out the experiences that came with it, I was bored. The headset was uncomfortable. The games themselves were not more fun than ordinary video games, with the disadvantage that they imprinted themselves much more strongly on my brain, so that for hours afterwards I could not stop "playing" them in my head. It was more fun to imagine new VR experiences than to experience the experiences themselves. It seems like most people felt that way. Instead of being a major new art form, VR went nowhere. Still, I'd enjoyed that feeling of starting completely from scratch. And I'd enjoyed watching my friends, people relatively sophisticated about art and media, groping blindly in the headset, in a state of confusion, disorientation and possibly wonder.

The last time this happened was the advent of film. VR turned out to be nothing, but film turned out to be something: the last new art form we got. What was the reaction to it at the time? The story is that at the premiere of the Lumière brothers' first film, in 1896, the audience fled in terror, thinking the train on the screen was real. Apparently this did not actually happen. Still, it's useful as an illustration of the most naive reaction possible: “They thought it was real.” But there are many levels of astonishment between panic and total complacency. What was it like, that first encounter? What was it like for artists and writers, in particular?

I'd assumed there would be a book or at least an academic paper about this. If there is, I haven't found it. The closest I've come is Walter Benjamin's famous essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Critics of the day, Benjamin says, misunderstand film because they try to look at it like high art of pre-industrial times. In a way, they take it too seriously. Benjamin writes, "It is instructive to note how their desire to class the film among the 'arts' forces these theoreticians to read ritual elements into it—with a striking lack of discretion." For example, Franz Werfel: “The film has not yet realized its true meaning, its real possibilities . . . these consist in its unique faculty to express by natural means and with incomparable persuasiveness all that is fairylike, marvelous, supernatural.” Or the novelist Alexandre Arnoux: “Do not all the bold descriptions we have given [of a silent film] amount to the definition of prayer?”

I am not sure, though, what Benjamin thinks is the proper way to look at cinema or what he thinks is its true artistic potential. It's not clear to me whether he exposes these critics' misunderstanding or his own. They may sound excitable and foolish, but their vision of cinema is not so different from our present-day one. We also think of the theater as a place with a special ambience, where we can sometimes attain a state of reverential wonder. I don't imagine David Lynch would have disagreed with the above quotations.

One writer Benjamin does not mention is Virginia Woolf, who wrote a wonderful essay in 1926 on cinema, entitled "The Cinema." Unlike the commentators Benjamin quotes, Woolf is indeed unambiguously wrong about cinema. Her intelligent, sensitive and insightful essay reveals her to be a literary person totally incapable of understanding film. She writes that this new medium had so far not risen to the level of art because it only copied literature, which it could do only in the most crude and superficial way. She gives as an example an adaptation of Anna Karenina, probably the German production of 1920 directed by Frederic Zelnik. She points out that the woman in pearls and a velvet dress we see onscreen has nothing to do with the heroine of Tolstoy's novel, "For the brain knows Anna almost entirely by the inside of her mind – her charm, her passion, her despair." She's right about this. Literary adaptations are always bad, except, as the truism goes, for second-rate books. Her criticisms are on the mark. But what does she like about this new medium? Well, she likes newsreel footage. Here, she says,

We see life as it is when we have no part in it. As we gaze we seem to be removed from the pettiness of actual existence. The horse will not knock us down. The king will not grasp our hands. The wave will not wet our feet. From this point of vantage, as we watch the antics of our kind, we have time to feel pity and amusement, to generalize, to endow one man with the attributes of the race.

This is how a novelist watches film: as a magic window to stand at and muse. A totally quaint attitude to cinema, which I respect and admire. (It is still possible to watch film this way, on Youtube. Life as it is when we have no part in it: childbirth, political assassination, the molting of insects, a storm in Malaysia, etc.) But film, she thinks, does have artistic potential of its own. As an example, she cites her experience at a screening of the 1920 German expressionist film The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. What impressed her so much as she sat in the darkened cinema, however, was not the film's direction, sets, acting or photography but a moment when a flaw in the projection caused a dark blob to appear on the screen.

It swelled to an immense size, quivered, bulged, and sank back again into nonentity. For a moment it seemed to embody some monstrous diseased imagination of the lunatic’s brain. For a moment it seemed as if thought could be conveyed by shape more effectively than by words. The monstrous quivering tadpole seemed to be fear itself...

Hopeless. Woolf wants cinema to be modernist art: challenging, abstract, unpopular. She wants the content and form of the movie to be as radical as the new medium it's created for.

Woolf is too intelligent for cinema. But her eccentric essay is close to what I am looking for: the naive response of sophisticated people to a totally new art form. Their first reactions and reflections. As I mentioned, these are surprisingly hard to find, and these notes have all been an introduction to the small collection I've started to put together. Lacking any background on the subject, I've just made a list of various important artists and writers from the early 20th century and gone through their diaries and letters looking for the words "cinema," "film," and "movies." Cinemas appeared at different times in different places, but in general I'm looking for people born before 1890, preferably at least ten years before. Mature pre-movie minds, at the movies. I keep looking and will put up more examples as I find them.

I should add that I've seen a million movies but I know nothing about film history or technique and am not particularly interested in them. My interest is in people seeing things with fresh eyes. At base, I think it is inspired not by love of movies but by exhaustion with them, and by nostalgia for a time before the movies – before any recorded media, in fact.

FIRST TAKES:

Luigi Pirandello, Si Gira, 1926 (quoted in Benjamin):

The film actor feels as if in exile—exiled not only from the stage but also from himself. With a vague sense of discomfort he feels inexplicable emptiness: his body loses its corporeality, it evaporates, it is deprived of reality, life, voice, and the noises caused by his moving about, in order to be changed into a mute image, flickering an instant on the screen, then vanishing into silence . . . The projector will play with his shadow before the public, and he himself must be content to play before the camera.

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, published 1924 but set between 1907 and 1914

Nobody was there to be applauded, to be called before the curtain and thanked for the rendition. The actors who had assembled to present the scenes they had just enjoyed were scattered to the winds; only their shadows had been here, their activity had been split up into millions of pictures, each with the shortest possible period of focus, in order to give it back to the present and reel it off again at will. The silence of the crowd, as the illusion passed, had about it something nerveless and repellent.

Jules Claretie (writer and theater director), 1896 (another very interesting short essay)

This is reality itself. Bathers throw themselves into the sea, the wave breaks, breaking into clumps of foam. A train arrives on a railway track; travelers get off, stretching, visibly tired; others run up, open the doors, get into the wagons. The drivers ram them, push them. [...] Interestingly enough, when the scene is composed, when we are shown, for example, two friends arguing over a newspaper article, or a kid putting his foot on a gardener's watering hose, the sensation of absolute truth, strict reality, disappears.

[...] And will this marvelous cinematography, which gives us the ghosts of the living, give us, by allowing us to preserve the ghost and the gestures, and the very sound of voices, the sweetness and caresses of dearly departed beings?

[The year of the first commercial screening, viewers were already imagining Black Mirror!]

Ezra Pound, from an essay, "Mr. James Joyce and the Modern Stage," 1916

The "movie" is perhaps the best friend of the few people who hope for a really serious stage. I do not mean to say that it is not the medium for the expression of more utter and abject forms of human asininity than are to be found anywhere else... save possibly on the contemporary stage. ... [However] whether the violet-tinted aesthete like it or not—it is developing an art sense. The minute the spectator begins to wonder why Charles Chaplin amuses him, the minute he comes to the conclusion that Chaplin is better than X-, and Z, because he, Chaplin, gets the maximum effect with the minimum effort, minimum expenditure, etc., etc., the said spectator is infinitely nearer a conception of art and infinitely more fit to watch creditable drama than when he, or she, is entranced by Mrs. So-and-So's gown or by the color of Mr. So-and-So's eyes.

Edith Wharton, Summer, 1917

Mr. Miles's pictures had been shown in an austere Y.M.C.A. hall, with white walls and an organ; but Harney led Charity to a glittering place--everything she saw seemed to glitter--where they passed, between immense pictures of yellow-haired beauties stabbing villains in evening dress, into a velvet-curtained auditorium packed with spectators to the last limit of compression. After that, for a while, everything was merged in her brain in swimming circles of heat and blinding alternations of light and darkness. All the world has to show seemed to pass before her in a chaos of palms and minarets, charging cavalry regiments, roaring lions, comic policemen and scowling murderers; and the crowd around her, the hundreds of hot sallow candy-munching faces, young, old, middle-aged, but all kindled with the same contagious excitement, became part of the spectacle, and danced on the screen with the rest.

Kafka, from his travel diaries, winter 1911

An old man reading a volume of the Illustrierte Welt at a little table lighted by a lamp was in charge of everything. After a while he showed magic-lantern slides for me. [...] The pictures more alive than in the cinema because they offer the eye all the repose of reality. The cinema communicates the restlessness of its motion to the things pictured in it; the eye’s repose would seem to be more important. The smooth floors of the cathedrals at the tip of our tongues. Why can’t they combine the cinema and stereoscope in this way?" (You could say that here Kafka "invented" VR in the same way he did the answering machine, in a letter to Felice in 1913)

Robert Musil, diaries, 1904

Space is a representation derived from something else and time is not a continuum but, in sense perception, always something singular. We don’t think discursively at all; instead, we think in leaps. The illusion is the same as with a cine-film. All active attention is discontinuous.

Walter Benjamin, “The Formula in Which the Dialectical Structure of Film Finds Expression,” 1935

Each single movement [Chaplin] makes is composed of a succession of staccato bits of movement … always the same jerky sequence of tiny movements applies the law of the cinematic image sequence to human motorial functions... the human being is integrated into the film image by way of his gestures.

James Joyce, letter to his brother Stanislaus, 1907

I look at God and his theatre through the eyes of my fellow-clerks so that nothing surprises,moves, excites or disgusts me. Nothing of my former mind seems to have remained except a heightened emotiveness which satisfies itself in the sixty-miles-an-hour pathos of some cinematograph or before some crude Italian gazette-picture.