Page 183 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

Expanded Media - and the MediaPlex 183/206
Auguste + Louis Lumière: Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat 1896.
The 1890s was a period of widespread innovation as inventors, stage magicians, theatrical impresarios, instrument-engineers, showmen and hustlers sought for the Holy Grail of the practical moving image. From Robert Paul’s Theatroscope, and Edison’s Kinetoscope, Woodville Latham’s Panoptikon, through to the Skladanowsky’s Bioskop, Casler’s Mutoscope, Muybridge’s Zoopraxiscope (etc, etc) - it was Edison and the Lumiere brothers who emerged as the eventual victors. In 1895 the Lumiere’s made several short films - no more than one minute long, illustrating their invention of the cinematograph - 35mm celluloid film shot at around 16 frames/sec and projected onto a screen at the same speed. By far the most famous (notorious) of the short films is Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, fmade in late 1895,f irst projected for the public in January 1896. It is notorious because of the various myths that have attached themselves to its first projection - ‘that audiences panicked and fled the cinema’ and other exaggerations, - all debunked by recent researchers, especially Tom Gunning of the University of Chicago (The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde, Wide Angle, Vol. 8, nos. 3 & 4 Fall, 1986).
The film theorist Tom Gunning has this to say about L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat : "As I have shown elsewhere, many early spectators recognised the first projection of films as a crowning achievement in the extremely sophisticated developments in the magic theatre, as practiced by Melies at the Theatre Robert Houdin, and his English mentor Maskelyne at London's Egyptian Hall. At the turn of the century. This tradition used the latest technology (such as focused electric light, and elaborate stage machinery) to produce apparent miracles.The seeming transcendence of the laws of the material universe by the magical theatre defines the dialectical nature of its illusions. The craft of late nineteenth century stage illusions consisted of making visible something which could not exist, of managing the play of appearances in order to confound the expectations of logic and experience.”Tom Gunning: An Aesthetic of Astonishment in Linda Williams (ed): Viewing Positions - Ways of Seeing Film 1994
Of course, many popular (blockbuster) movies in the 21st century rely upon the dialectical tension between the aesthetic of attraction, and storytelling, and computer graphics provides the magical tool- kit for making the impossible apparently real. The current buzzy idea that films may contain VR episodes is possibly the ultimate extension of this dialectic - it is coming from credible new media experimentalists like Chris Milk so must be taken seriously. But we are aware that this tension between