Page 125 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 125/146
James Sibley Watson + Melville Webber: Lot in Sodom 1933
This is probably Watson and Webber’s masterpiece - a 27 minute silent film - a mythopoetic
stream of consciousness visual interpretation of the biblical story warning of the ‘evils’ of homosexuality. Done in sotto-voce black and white, with extensive use of the experimental tropes of Modernist avant garde film-making - multiple exposures, looped repeats, chrono- photo sequences, exaggerated expressionist sets and lighting, split-screen, kaliedoscope- lens-filters - and remarkable final sequence (above right) as the Angel of Retribution destroys Sodom & Gomorrah, and Lot’s wife fatally turns, looks back at the doomed city and is meta- morphosed cinematically into the Salt pillar. Watson and Webber as joint directors (Watson also the cinematographer, Webber the costume and set designer) excel themselves with this unique short - its like a purely visual poem - with original music by Alec Wilder. True to its Bi- blical references, it is an apocalyptic epiphany, fascinating in its beauty and originality.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGJCerkKK70&vl=en
So, the visual tropes that are more or less a common feature of the avant garde movies of the 1920s and 1930s, are echoed, reiterated and explored in both cinematography and photogra- phy. It’s especially notable in the work of photographers like Bruguière, Blumenfeld, and Br- zeski - the most radical practitioners of this generation. These extensions of the filmic image are essentially reflections of the transition away from Renaissance vanishing-point perspecti- ve models of perception towards an awareness catalysed by the Cubists that we humans don’t actually ‘see’ like that, that seeing is more of a scanning process, guided by our atten- tion and perceptual analysis - factors analysed some decades later by Alfred Yarbus in his study of eye-tracking and perception (Yarbus: Eye Movements and Vision 1967). This volte- face away from the vanishing-point perspective - a norm since the Renaissance - was trigge- red by events in art and science circa 1905-1910: Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity (1905) - a description of the universe that encouraged a rethinking of the idea that there’s anything special about our singular ‘point of view’. It was further reinforced by the first psychological studies of motion pictures and perception by the Gestalt psychologists - from 1912.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3563050/