Early Interactions of Static and Moving Images

Abstract

One of the keys to the understanding of visual culture at the beginning of the twentieth century is the relationship between the static and the moving images. There is good reason, then, to investigate the interactions not only between the image that preceded the movie (the photograph) but also the image that came into being under the influence of film. In this entry we shall call this kind of image the static-moved image. This essay takes its point of departure from the conviction that Walter Benjamin was one of the first authors to have written about the link between the media of photography and film, the new technologies of the beginning of the twentieth century, and that it was he that created the foundation for a discussion of the crucial themes that appeared at the turn of the century. As well as in his best-known work, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1939), in his much more extensive work, The Arcades Project, which will be invoked here, he also drew attention to the key role of the new visual media of the static and the moving images. The fact that in this text Benjamin refers equally to the photograph as a technological invention and a new means of artistic expression will enable us to define the context within which interaction between the different visual media occurs. The medium of photography, for instance, to be discussed at the beginning of this essay, will be considered in the following ways: (1) in the period of modernity, characterized by the ambivalence of the concept of modernity, as a not entirely new phenomenon, but in the new circumstances of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a new environment for the analysis of phenomena such as beauty or “presentness” (Calinescu) or the “divided pathos of Modernism” (Hoffmann); (2) within the new socially and technologically produced observer: precisely because of the appearance of new visualization techniques, Jonathan Crary thinks that the germs of Modernism were at the beginning of the nineteenth century; (3) within the new multimedial observer: in this sense, we have referred to John Fullerton, who shows that the new technologies meant a new experience in the person of the observer, the user of the new optical inventions that were a form of popular entertainment.