The Origins of Scientific Cinematography: The Pioneers

"The Pioneers" is the first part of a three-part documentary series "The Origins of Scientific Cinematography" by historian Virgilio Tosi, which were meant for teachers' use in educational settings and to accompany his book "Cinema Before Cinema: The Origins of Scientific Cinematography" (or "Il cinema prima di Lumière" in the original Italian). It's the longest of the three films and, for my purposes, of the most interest, as it deals with the three earliest "chronophotographers" most responsible for pioneering the inventions of the cinematographic camera, projection devices and motion pictures. I'm generally more interested in fiction films than in scientific ones and so am mostly interested in this series for better understanding the origins of movies. Tosi's thesis is "that cinematography had its roots in science".

The three men covered are the French astronomer Pierre Jules César Janssen, the English photographer located in America Eadweard Muybridge and the French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey. All three developed and used chronophotography (or cinematography) for discovering natural truths: from Janssen proving that the corona was part of the Sun and not a refraction effect of the Earth's atmosphere, to Muybridge proving there was a moment of "unsupported transit" in a horse's gallop, and Marey's extensive investigations into mechanical laws.

Janssen used a photographic revolver—a cylindrical camera that took photographs by mechanics similar to those of guns—which he attached to a horizontal telescope that peered into heliostat to record the 9 December 1874 transit of Venus across the Sun. By these means, 48 images could be taken in 72 seconds on a Daguerreotype metal disc. According to Tosi, this was the "first process to use cinematographic techniques". Unfortunately, Janssen's successful recording of the transit is no longer known to survive, but a disc of a test simulation of it remains. Animations based on it appear in this documentary and have also been available on the web. Janssen presented such artificial passages to the Académie des Sciences on 6 July 1874 before traveling with a group to Japan to film the real thing.

In California, beginning in 1878, Muybridge used multiple cameras for individual exposures of animal locomotion, especially the gait of horses (see "Sallie Gardner at a Gallop" (1880)). These experiments were funded by multi-millionaire railroad tycoon Leland Stanford, who was interested in finding a scientific basis for the training of his racehorses. Later, Muybridge also produced more artistically composed series images—often of nude models—for the University of Pennsylvania. Here, the film's narrator even says of Muybridge's Pennsylvania work that it "anticipated the function of a fiction film director." Muybridge also made a projection device called the Zoöpraxiscope to project drawn animations based on his chronophotography to the public and esteemed institutions and guests (including Marey) on his tours throughout the U.S. and Europe in between his photographic work and during the 1880s and early 1890s.

Marey was inspired to take up chronophotography for his motion studies, especially that of the flight of birds, by the work of Muybridge, but decided to use a single photographic rifle, with a rotating glass plate, based on Janssen's camera. Between 1888 and 1890, he made cameras more akin to early commercial cinematographic cameras and used paper roll film and, then, when it became available, celluloid film. Marey was among the first to record on film and, as in Tosi's book and this film, is a central influence in the invention of cinema (see "Falling Cat" (1894)).

Not only does this film provide a good historical overview of these three chronophotographers, which one can also just as well find in books, such as Tosi's, but it also includes excellent and sometimes rare images, including modern animations of the chronophotography. Additionally, there's explanation and demonstrations of photographic devices, such as a viewing from an original Zoöpraxiscope for color-painted drawings on circular phenakistoscope discs. There's only so much one can teach by telling; the benefit of the film is teaching by showing. This series, however, is probably only of interest to scholars of this field, especially academically, as the presentation is, apart from the purposes of learning, quite dull. The pauses in narration are sleep inducing—even if one takes the opportunities to jot down notes. Regardless, it's appropriate that a film about scientific filmmaking should itself be so educational and as was often the case with the images from Janssen, Muybridge and Marey, it shows us what we otherwise could not have seen.