March 14, 1900 [The New Kiss]

We are only a few months into the new century, but the old one persists, at least in the cinema--although the millennial shift is felt in The New Kiss. Of course, the cinema has imitated itself before--how many "bad boy" comedies, scenes of arriving (and departing) trains, real and staged fires can it now "boast"?--not to mention how it has engaged in "borrowing"--and not only by Edison, filching from the Lumières, but Mutoscope and Biograph in turn copying Edison; but perhaps we cannot entirely call it theft. A kind of almost-benign incest is working itself into legitimacy, as though the moving picture industry, arbiter of its own morality, were instantly forming a tradition, as any art inevitably does, from which all kinds of borrowings and references and re-workings combine--again, though, not in decades-long movements, as Turner's Romantic landscapes eventually deferred to Manet, who himself leads us to Monet, Matisse, and all those painters who today have transformed the label "Impressionism" from an insult to a rallying-cry. But the motion picture is impatient--after all, it moves--and so it wants its heresies to become traditions in mere weeks, accelerating film culture as easily as it can the film spooling from the projector.

I hope only that the result is better--or at least more consistently watchable--cinema, the cinematographic equivalent of Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy becoming Hamlet--or that cinema will create its own magnificent inspirations as one instant motion-picture-age follows another, as the Odyssey became the Aeneid--or as Genesis became Paradise Lost.

Of course--and unfortunately--cinema has yet to find its Shakespeares, its Virgils, its Miltons--which does not lessen the achievements of Muybridge, Edison, the Lumières, and others. But they have merely* applied mechanical technology to the rules that have governed pictorial representation and the composition within a frame. Perhaps, then, the first cinematographic artists will rise within the ranks of the technicians themselves; like any of the arts, the technical will merge with technique and--I write without over-much embarrassment--"genius" to give us more than, for instance, The New Kiss.

My first thought was that this version is merely a bit longer, a bit more intimate (the woman seems especially taken with the opportunity of being kissed--and kissing--with regularity)--but in another sense not so, having lost the spontaneity of the original Irwin-Rice moment--or something more: again that word, "experience." The first Kiss seemed a living thing, and powerful, changing in mere seconds much within me. This new Kiss reminds us of its original, but does not re-imagine it, nor does it even hint it desires to. If it adds something new, it is the man's insistence on looking at the camera, even winking at the audience. At first it seemed we, in being acknowledged as spectators, were being invited into the moment. But his demeanor seemed proprietary, his wink a sign of his favored position within the camera itself--and so, having been acknowledged, we are actually distanced, made to see that we are explicitly viewers--and almost illicitly so. Our posture as we bent to view the already-old Kinetescope "peephole" now becomes discomfiting as we sit and watch the projected image--and this scolding moment may actually be quite significant: Already the cinema asks us to recognize our role, as we conspire with the camera to conjure and control these silent ghosts. If, then, we are to find cinema genius, it seems we will have to look not merely behind the camera and on the screen, but in the audience itself. We will all have to make room for this leap--forward? into the dark? We shall, if I may state the obvious, see.

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*I am with contrition deeply aware that to call the invention of the cinema "merely" anything is an understatement that borders on insult.

May 23, 1899 [A Wringing Good Joke]

It's obvious that this seems more attuned to the visual effect of a prank--here, a boy ties a string between a washer-tub handle and a man's chair, so that the chair tips over as the woman works the wringer--than to the child himself. I will not denigrate the gag: It is satisfyingly orchestrated, with a nice application of basic mechanics to upend the chair and its occupant, with a particularly pleasing--well-timed as well as -aimed--plunge by Grandpa into the water.

I am distracted only by the bad boy himself, who seems to exist not as any child I ever knew but merely as a starting-lever of the gag-machine. I'll admit it is the kind of thing I would have liked to have attempted in my own childhood, but had neither the opportunity nor temerity--nor freedom, it appears, as the boy seems intent not on parental retribution but simply the joy of chaos--and this may be the attraction: as in Edison's ersatz fires--or even executions of insurgents--moving pictures provide a safe haven for disruptions of all kinds. I may worry at some point over the leveling effect of cinema--all upendings are equally staged, thus free of repercussion--as it moves from domestic to political shenanigans, the stakes rising in direct proportion to our acceptance of their equal unimportance--after all, these are mere entertainments--but I will not worry today. For now, I'll ignore that school-marm voice in me that fusses over where this may lead us, and simply enjoy the precision with which that boy catalyzes mayhem.

April 1, 1899 [Firemen Rescuing Men and Women]

The childhood rapture over a fire persists. How many minor conflagrations did my pals and I set ourselves, our prone bodies keeping us eye-level with the tiny flames so that they might loom larger, a performance as much as a fire?

So I will not fault this little film for its artificiality, the stagy puffs of smoke and the firemen's unhurried portage of the "victims"; still, an actual fire--the Windsor Hotel in New York--smolders behind this recreation, and one is perhaps relieved to see how efficiently the firemen work. But the fire itself remains in the distance, and we are allowed to suspend our moral sensibilities to enjoy the artifice, even less dangerous than the miniature blazes I kindled and watched so merrily as a boy. And although I remember one or two curls of flame that threatened to slip from our control, the almost-danger only added to the excitement. This is a lesson the cinema is learning: The actual and the artificial must hone as closely to one another as possible, infusing the coolly observed moment with enough panic to keep one's gaze level and wide, as much an avid maker as a detached observer.

September 13, 1898 [Shooting Captured Insurgents]

The atrocious continues matter-of-factly. The staging of the Spanish execution of insurgents, falling quietly for Cuba libre, reminds me of the Lumières' Démolition d'un mur: a bit of preparatory fussing, a tug and a raised arm, and down they tumble. The cinema already understands it can travel where it likes, even to Hell, but it still needs to find a way to express the nausea of the descent. The camera refuses to move--remains unmoved, if I may state the obvious--as it conspires, not only with the actual but the intentional--political and personal--to tell us what is, to make history as it sees fit.

Soon, I think, cinema's steady gaze will begin to tilt on its axis, and respond with human gestures. But even that will be manufactured--and such manipulation of the camera may even prove the new imperialism, enthralling us with its mimetic truths, the puppets bobbing with more conviction than their models.

August 10, 1898 [U.S. Troops Landing at Daiquirí, Cuba]

The American Empire grows; Teddy Roosevelt gets his way; we are provided with amusements. Is it more than that? Am I growing cynical? After all, shouldn't every nation be self-determining? And as we prepare, freedom-loving peoples of varying nationalities and races, to defend that right of self-rule, why am I not among the well-wishers at the dock--let alone a Rough Rider myself, from Tampa to Cuba, rising with the swell of not only the waves but my own resolve?

I'll admit I am ill-suited to make a final judgment--but I know what I feel, and it is a maddening irritation, a sense that, with this war, those ideals of liberty will erode without hope of reclamation. All that prevents me from turning inward, away from the "noisy world outside"--a phrase that echoes in me more every day--is the demand of the cinema, the silent arresting image, large on the screen, insisting I perform a fundamental act--seeing--and, no matter how painful or deadening or frustrating, look outward once more, always, whether in understanding or not.

But the cold eye within knows we serve ourselves, and while this war feeds the appetites of many, not all of them deserve their hunger.

June 22, 1898 [Troop Ships for the Philippines]

The motion picture continues to move beyond the everyday--and the daydream--to serve as a document. Here, as American troops set off for the Philippines, I felt for once a kinship with President McKinley, whose official opposition to these empire-building adventures has proven as ineffective as my own private disgust. The innocuous scene, as the men march onto the ship, on its surface almost dull in its presentation, belies the yellow journalism that screams beneath--no: above, loud in our ears from Hearst's gaping mouth.

And while the picture seems merely an embarkation recorded, it remains the viewer's task to supply meaning to the event. We have told ourselves that we are engaging in yet another crusade for independence, as well as a new and inevitable civil war, both of which will heal our own nation. But only a fool ignores the swelling pride that comes with this, the colonial urge fulfilled--at a smaller scale than Victoria has managed, to be sure, but we Americans are good at making much with whatever's available--for who among us cared about the people of the Philippines before this moment? But no matter: We have found an opportunity to measure our international worth against the long shadow of Great Britain, the last true colonial power; and as we rattle our swords and prepare to liberate a downtrodden people, we also reassure ourselves that we too have finally, if I may appropriate an American sacred document, seized the opportunity to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station which we believe the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle us--with all due apologies to that first empire-builder, Thomas Jefferson, whose own vision extended "from sea to shining sea"--and further apologies to Katharine Lee Bates (that rapt Wellesley woman)--but as I watched the brief parade of Philippines-bound soldiers, I wondered not where they were going but where we were bound--and to what we bind ourselves.

January 15, 1898 [Pack Train at Chilkoot Pass]

My interest in actualities has waned considerably, but I was pleased to see a visual echo of the kind of composition employed in, among others, the Lumières' L'Arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat. The long line of pack-horses trudging along the Alaskan pass was reminiscent of the many trains and streetcars and boats of previous cinematic efforts. Pack Train at Chilkoot Pass became more than another work-scene or glimpse of Americana, but a reminder that certain rules of composition will last, from the canvas to the photographic plate to the cinema screen.

But this affected me beyond the visual cue; it had a certain mood, at once stately and dogged, a fey progress west that seemed drained of the mythic power of crossing the frontier. It seemed a reflection of my own distaste for the price we've paid for our coast-to-coast nation, remarkable and unfortunate, the signposts both Romantic and brutal. The Chilkoot Pass particularly fits my bleak outlook. Known as "the meanest 32 miles in the world," it is the Klondike in extremis. Jack London is just now writing of these harsh lands, in which the search for wealth has supplanted what one might wistfully call "the pioneer spirit," and the result seems all too often to be behavior as savage as the privations that come with such endeavors. And while Pack Train at Chilkoot Pass is sedate enough, the line described by the horses seems endless, daunting, and their weary backs laden with something weightier than gold.

May 19, 1897 [Mr. Edison at Work in His Chemical Laboratory]

A study in white, as if the Pope were in an Easter Sunday performance of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, his surplice swiping along the film's surface as he scampers among the beakers and tubes, rows of bottles behind him in reliquian solidity, the whole thing ridiculous but necessary, the final layer of performance-artifice-actuality. It is an imitation of Edison by Edison, as real--and as imagined--as his comment that "everything comes to him who hustles while he waits." And as we watch him hustle, we find ourselves waiting for yet another moving image--always more, if not better--and it seems we have not asked for much better, but may turn away from cinematographics, satiated with vaudeville acts and actualities, waiting for Edison to get to some new consecration--or to leave the altar and go back to the drawing room. In any case, I'm glad to have seen the Old Guy, in a typical motion: preparing some new explosion, one hopes, to rouse the almost-dormant Parliaments of cinema.

May 8, 1897 [Fifth Avenue, New York]

I am finding it increasingly difficult to rise above sentimentality. Watching the passers-by--many of them turning toward the camera, pleased, even eager, to be photographed, others, backs turned, faces averted, simply going their way, either oblivious to or studiously ignoring the camera--I thought little of the composition, or the quality of the camera-work, even less of the actual subject. I have been aware lately of a growing certainty that cinema will be with us for a long time, despite its current relegation to the vaudeville house and amusement arcade. I am not certain where it will fit in--perhaps as an adjunct to the theater--perhaps even as its rival, even usurper. Or cinema may simply be the next pictorial art, an extension of still photography, allowing painters the increasing freedom they seem to need these days to move beyond external representation, as painting moves within, eliciting increasingly personal impressions--but then again, this may be where cinema leads, not toward representation of objects but of thoughts--and I could use the word "impressions" but, for now, the camera seems tied to things as they are.

But one more turning: not "things as they are," but as we recall them. I know that the camera is an eye--but the eye leads its consumed object only to the mind, where almost immediately, as I've noted so often before, the object becomes subject, and the reality a memory. And so here is the sentimentality I mentioned, watching the New Yorkers promenade: If cinema persists, then so will these little snippets, these glancing moments, long after the persons represented by the images are gone. So I am looking at living beings who, in the act of being photographed, are already near-effluence, moving into my eyes, my mind, my memory. And silly fool that I am, all I wanted to do was to cry out a promise to remember them all my days.

January 12, 1897 [President McKinley at Home]

The Vitascope of President McKinley at his Ohio home is, I must say with all due respect, less than engaging. He's a stolid man, not, in my opinion, the most impressive American President--but he has shown himself forward-thinking, at least in terms of his willingness to display himself. During the campaign, Bryan jack-rabbited himself around the country delivering hundreds of speeches--but McKinley remained on his front porch, bringing voters to him, delivering speeches--while famed Republican orators like Roosevelt went on the campaign trail for him. Even before he was President, McKinley made himself a stationary subject.

With cinema, however, McKinley has a new opportunity. And while he by no means cuts a dramatic figure, he is using Edison's Vitascope to travel by proxy across the country, keeping all of us mindful of his solid bulk, becoming himself a performer, joining all those who have been captured with only minimal interference by the camera. His stroll outside his home is staged, but it is he strolling, marking a halfway-point between actuality and fiction.

July 25, 1896 [The Kiss (Between May Irwin and John Rice)]

It lasted less than twenty seconds--and was merely a re-enactment of the closing scene of The Widow Jones, currently playing on the New York Stage--but I was transfixed, stunned into attention. Edison has moved on to projected cinema with his Vitascope, and, as with the Lumières' Cinématographe, suddenly the intimate has become impersonal--no, shared like any object. I knew I was watching something entirely manufactured--which means, then, that it was real, an object turned into an action, almost praxis, and so no longer divorced from human meaning, even feeling, as abrupt and devoid of context as it was--but perhaps that is its context, the intent to uncover the essence of the moment, the private coupling as public display.

This may perhpas mean that the motion picture is allowing us to gaze at the world--here, at each other--with passive acceptance--but in that acceptance we act, we become agents of the moment of watching. The sheer size of their faces, the attention we could not help but pay to their lips, their cheeks, their bearing--toward one another, of course, but also to us, their presentation of themselves simplified, like any irresistible urge--all this combines to draw us in and ask us to, well, exchange our selves with those of the couple on the screen.

And it was not the same as a stage performance, where, despite--and yes because of--their talents, we see them not only as actors but as other persons, with their voices, their feet sounding on the stage, even the rustling of their garments. And although they are disguised with makeup and costume, and live in a strange world where their fourth wall disappears so that we may watch them, they live there in front of us, with a recognizable height and depth, and we see them as we choose. But on the screen, that quarter-minute of kissing becomes more than performance bestowed and contact made with other living creatures. We have no choices but the one the camera has made, and it becomes almost an intrusion, a shameless act--not theirs, not Irwin's or Rice's, but ours, watching their huge faces connect with easy, monumental intimacy, a preposterous sight, a beautiful trespass. I felt I should not look, but I knew I could not turn away, as I perceive a firm shift in my seeing, and in what my eye desires.

April 17, 1896 [Chapeaux à transformations]

A simple vaudeville performance, as a man dons and doffs a series of hat-and-nose-or-whiskers disguises in rapid succession. I am finding more and more that these little scenes are uninteresting per se; what makes them memorable is the associations they engender in me, either of other moving pictures, occurrences in my own life, or some other sudden connection. Here, I was drawn inside the mechanics of cinema, individual images streaming along, creating the illusion of motion. And as the performer went through his routine, he reenacted that mechanism, but not to produce a single smooth action, but a series of images--of himself, to be sure, but different, shifting suddenly from one self to another. Somehow this also puts me in mind of the demolished wall un-demolished, images changing with no logic, but only as unexpected as a magician's trick, in which, of course, one expects the unexpected.

April 3, 1896 [Démolition d'un mur]

A mundane event: A wall of ten feet or so is toppled by workmen. But the demolition itself is deeply satisfying in a "masculine" way, a sight difficult for the little boy in any man to resist--although I do remember one of my daughters finding the blowing down of a house of cards endlessly amusing. The wall is thick and solid, and comes down in a single piece, sending up a great cloud of plaster-dust--through which the workmen wave their arms and approach immediately with pickaxes, the dust still billowing.

Not the most significant moment to record, and a small voice inside wondered how the effect would change if someone were placed behind the wall, scurrying away just in time before the structure came down upon him. I must admit, such violence has gone beyond babies quarreling over a spoon or a little boy squirting his neighbor. But sight itself is only a "sensation" in the literal sense, and I want to see more than the scenes afforded by a casual stroll--and I may not be alone: I've heard that at certain showings it is run backwards, so that the wall "magically" reassembles itself, suddenly more spectacle than sight, another intimation of Wonderland.

February 10, 1896 [Childish Quarrel]

As with Le Repas de bébé, the Lumières provide a glimpse into the smaller details of home life, as two little ones, their bonnets rising above them like Bishops' mitres, engage in miniature combat--well, at least one does, the aggressor who taps and tugs at the other, eliciting "tears, idle tears" of a touching nature. As a father I know it is all but impossible to forestall such sudden altercations, but I am also uncertain about the decision to allow the children to quarrel in order to photograph it. I will not make too much of this--breaking precedent, I know--but if the Lumières, Edison and others continue to focus on "actualities," while striving to achieve narrative, what must they allow to occur unimpeded to ensure a finished product? Again, these little ones most certainly suffer no lasting harm, but we are on the verge of something new, I think, and both its makers and its audience will have to decide what boundaries may be crossed.

February 2, 1896 [Autruches (Promenade of Ostriches, Paris Botanical Gardens)]

Actually the ostriches--pulling a cart with passengers--are merely the beginning. There follow a donkey-cart, children on horses, camels, even elephants. The fable-like nonchalance of the procession is matched only by the adults who remain after the parade of beasts, sedate Parisians unmoved by what may be an everyday event, but which, being photographed, seems more like something out of Alice in Wonderland, even down to the quality of the light, which reminds me of Tenniel's drawings for Carroll's book. The strollers, both engaging and strange, are like the figures in Gustave Caillebotte's painting, Paris Street, Rainy Day, 1877--perhaps ostriches all, as they step and preen. The bourgeoisie and the fairytale combine to make one eccentric, the other commonplace.

January 25, 1896 [L'Arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat]

Rumor has it that, at the French premiere, the audience panicked as the train approached the camera. I'll admit the scene is striking in its forward--actually, diagonal--movement. But I was no more frightened of being struck by the train than I was of being sprayed by Fred Ott's sneeze.

What I noticed most was the painterly construction of the scene. As the train arrives along its diagonal, it stretches the frame--as well as the train. We are left with an interlocked set of three elongated triangles composed of the sky above, the train itself, then the platform. The eye is drawn to all three, but as the passengers disembark, the platform triangle fills with less definable movement, less "geometric"--because, like the Lumiere workers leaving their factory, it is casual, human, not straitened by the train's narrow passage, cutting through the middle of the frame, nor aloof and impassive, like the sky above. The platform filling with people is the organic element of the scene, and it dominates.

This is the importance of L'Arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat: Precise composition in the service of natural movement. This combination of the mechanical and the organic lies at the heart of cinema's process, acknowledged near the end by the man who walks into the frame and looks directly at us, almost pausing--for me, commanding the moment, more than any silently roaring train could hope to do.

December 28, 1895 [Le Cinématographe Lumière, continued: L'Arroseur arrosé]

With The Sprinkler Sprinkled it seems as if I saw the entire future history of the Cinématographe. Its carefully staged silliness, as fleeting as it is, presages the narrative structure that will surely overwhelm moving pictures. And while I remain bound to the pleasures of the image itself, I also cannot deny the power of the story, as well-worn as it may be: A man is watering a garden. A boy sidles up behind him and steps on the hose, halting the flow. The man is puzzled, eventually peering into the hose--and of course the boy lifts his foot and the man is drenched, his hat flying from his head. He chases the boy, catches him before he leaves the picture's edge, and returns him to the scene of the crime, lowering the boy's head to face the hose, then spanking him for his wrongdoing. The boy leaves the picture, the man resumes sprinkling.

As with other presentations this evening, this one is staged. And while it seems as artificial as La Voltige, in which a man "comically"--and repeatedly--attempts to mount a horse, or the amateur blacksmiths of Les Forgerons, its stiff morality is forgiven to make room for its insistence that photographed action can be purposeful, with a definable arc. I am not left with the impression that the action will continue after the camera turns away, that the subjects will repeat their actions or simply wander off. The fiction is complete, in that all we need to know about the man and boy is already captured; they have no life beyond their little comic drama of crime and punishment. And so I am able to distance myself from the sight, just as it proclaims its independence from me. It is primarily a story, and its persons simply actors. My emotional involvement lies only with the minor violence of the water, and I am free to laugh at the mischief as well as the retribution. Another remove, then, occurs, from the way I see the world to the comfortably distanced reality imposed by the Cinématographe.

December 28, 1895 [Le Cinématographe Lumière, continued: Le Repas de bébé]

I had heard that this family scene features Auguste Lumière himself with his wife and baby. This is a great comfort, even a promise of what the Cinématographe may offer: After all the comic boxers and serpentine dancers, figures pinned to the frame like specimens--walking down steps, sneezing--or even the scenes of commonplace business, we are finally at home. And watching Auguste--the domestic intimacy of the scene allowing me to address him so familiarly--feed his child, attentive, his head tilted parentally--and never toward the camera, all but unconscious of its scrutiny--offering the baby a biscuit, which he tentatively samples before passing it on politely to his mother, who has been stirring her coffee, filled me suddenly with yearning for my own children.

Oh, a sentimental reflex to be sure, too easy, I know: But there it was, another delicate filigree on the monument--but not cold stone, nor even fine gold. Just the soft whey-color of baby's porridge, allowing me to cross the ocean and recollect--and even more: see my own, a living memory borrowed with grinning approval from Auguste.

December 28, 1895 [Le Cinématographe Lumière, continued: La Sortie des usines Lumière]

The first piece is, in a sense, about the Cinématographe itself: We see workers leaving the Lumière factory, mostly women, spilling out en masse and going their separate ways. But some men are scattered about in the crowd, two of them jocular, perhaps even flirting, on bicycles, as well as a horse and carriage, even a dog. It is an interesting beginning, as though we are the next feature. The workers, you see, are done--and what is left behind is the moving picture itself, which we see--not as finished product, but as egress toward us, as though the commodity they have helped to produce is the thing in which they now appear. And the only relief from this dizzying paradox of viewer, observer, object observed, subject observing--or is that object observing? My head swims--again, the only respite from sheer intellectual musing is the smiles on their faces, their pleasure at being photographed, the cheerful chaos attendant upon going home at the end of the day.

So yes: Those of us who love this new entertainment are the common folk--so what better first subject than this confluence of makers and audience, both objects independent of the process and subjects of that process, but not lost in a conundrum, simply happy that the camera is there?

December 28, 1895 [First public exhibition of le Cinématographe Lumière]

A permanent shift in the position of the moving picture has occurred at Paris' Salon Indien du Grand Café with "la première séance publique"--and there again is that word, in English evocative of the spirit-world, and for me increasingly apt to describe moving pictures--especially now, as Auguste and Louis Lumiere present their Cinématographe, which projects the images onto a flat surface, larger than any Edison Kinetoscope peepshow. And while I've lost the intimacy of the individual viewing--my eyes against the opening, the small images looming as large as anything in my view, with nothing else to intrude--and the experience becomes more "theatrical," at least with the sheer size of the pictures and the shared responses of other viewers--an audience, no less--new possibilities emerge.

I may not be completely happy that the theater has joined with the peephole, but I am excited that the Cinématographe provides a scope and size--and new opportunities for the makers of these "épreuves instantanées" to profit by their work (and thus increase their production). The peepshows are dwindling in popularity--and while I continue to enjoy them--despite the charge that they are entertainments for fools and vulgarians (and so be it: I'll join them, and we shall see where it leads)--I must admit they grow monotonous, not merely in their subjects, but in their mode of presentation. More and more, I feel I am bending over to peer at something incidental, more transient than ephemeral. But with the projected image, I feel close to something--I will use the word "monumental," as ridiculous as that may seem, if only to convey the sense that moving pictures act as monuments themselves, imposing--in various senses of the word--records of the everyday and the outré, often both at once, especially now, as the small things in life expand, at times exceeding the persons and objects themselves--or, if smaller on the wall, captured in motion, both photographic and theatrical, implying in their very presence a significance beyond themselves. The viewer, then, is both encompassed by and in command of the picture--and my desire finds yet another opportunity to swell.

October 12, 1894 [Comic Boxing]

The Glenroy Brothers, one a neatly attired athletic type, the other a tramp, have at each other like giddy boys; on the stage this is merely Vaudeville, but inside the Kinetoscope they, like Annabelle and her Serpentine Dance, become children. The tramp especially gets to flop around like a rag doll, at one point cartwheeling his way to the left, then lifting his opponent by sliding his head under the other's arm. But even the athletic type cheerfully regresses, batting at his silly brother ineffectually while the other expends a great deal of energy to inflict no harm at all. Children themselves can be like puppies as they tumble--and sometimes someone is hurt, an all-but-imagined bruise, small but tearful. But no one lays lasting blame, and the tears subside, and they continue. So I put in another coin and renew the match, and the Brothers once more forgive each other their footloose cuffs and scrapes and tumble on.

September 16, 1894 [Annabelle Serpentine Dances]

Annabelle is the first tinted Kinetoscope I've seen, the colors painted on in lazy waves, the colorist keeping pace with the dancer as she spins unhurriedly, the long gauze of her garment streaming behind, marking her passage.

Annabelle seemed at times a little child, especially when she smiled or circled on her tiptoes—not a ballerina by any stretch of the imagination, but charming me, as either of my own little girls would, showing me some new dance they had invented. But she also moved me with certain flourishes, as she made her trailing veils circle like billows or rise like fairies' wings behind her. Again, the color tinting, delicate and almost smudged in the effort to convey her motions, brought her closer to me—a transporting thirty seconds, a glimpse into something as close to beauty as this contraption has given me so far.

I am reminded of Muybridge's nudes, attractive for their own sake—but not beautiful, not more than themselves. No accomplished artists, Annabelle and those who photographed her nonetheless provided a glimpse into the possibility of something that is more than visual, more than dramatic. Perhaps I can for now simply call it an “experience of persistent impressions.” An awkward phrase, but I’ll hold onto it as long as I can.

June 20, 1894 [Sandow]

The strong man poses against a black background, his pasty skin bulging with ropy muscles. It was vaguely obscene, not quite titillating--but still, if I may hazard the expression, consumed by flesh. Nothing else matters here but Sandow sliding serenely from one pose to the next, his face turned down to his body--also watching himself--his gestures ambiguous: Is he admitting defeat here as his arms stretch downward? Does he show an almost girlish charm as he spins to present his back to us? And as he turns his face away, is he smiling while his back ripples and legs extend?

I wish Sandow had marveled us with feats of strength, bending an iron bar or lifting a great weight. Alone and all but naked, he seemed not merely Narcissus but somehow Achilles at the end, his strength and weakness combining to draw him toward us once more, displaying in some kind of defeat everything about him.

May 12, 1894 [The Barbershop]

The customer arrives, receives his shave and haircut, while another customer smokes, reads his paper, chats, laughs. The attendants circle, the everyday event rapidly unfolds.

I'm in a barbershop every two weeks; and I know every detail. But Edison's Black Maria Studio composes the event like a swift and balanced melody, allegro for tonsorial delights. It does not ask me to observe more than I already know--but unlike the ghost-park of the camera obscura, the barbershop is not merely displayed, but framed and orchestrated. The men seem almost to stylize the moment, their movements dancing with the unheard song.

The familiar, then, dominates--but is made extra-familiar, action becoming performance. The theater is making its way into the peephole.

January 9, 1894 [Fred Ott's Sneeze]

I saw in Harper's Weekly Edison's publicity photographs that form part of his "Kinetoscope" of a man sneezing. It seems this semi-autonomous convulsive expulsion takes only five seconds--but I think we will be hearing Ott for many years to come, polite but still honking like William Cullen Bryant's waterfowl, "darkly painted" but reassuring in its "certain flight." I look forward to every explosion, whether hiccough or belch or yawn, as flatulent or mellifluous as each may be.

In passing, I note the fact that it is a comfort that all arrives in silence, allowing us to provide our own politely muffled hiss or wet ratcheting, ridiculously, reassuringly human.

November 28, 1893 [Optical Devices]

The gadgets and experiments—Muybridge’s parlor Zoopraxiscope, the Phenakistoscope, as well as the Praxinoscope, Zoetrope, Electrotachyscope, Kineograph—all of them amusements dedicated to the cause of seeing as believing, are crossing the divide between toy and tool; in fact, the more toys we demand, the more tools we will receive. And while I'm not positive we need these tools--the toys, certainly; they have encouraged me to extend my childhood indefinitely--I understand they are not simply marvels or mysteries, but promises.

But what is this promise? Surely more than continued entertainment--although I will not refuse the opportunity. Still, is all this effort to be expended just so that I can watch a simple drawing of a dragon spout tiny fire or so that my evening is illuminated by a herky-jerky animated waltz of two seconds' duration? Or are we seeing moments at which the child's desires and the inventor's questions come together to change not just how we see and believe but why? One does not need to be particularly clever to recognize that we are on the verge of new things--and a new way that they will begin: as gimcracks and gewgaws, forcing our eyes to follow them closely so that we can see, jittering and uncertain, the world that is perhaps more easily apprehended without them, but somehow not as compelling. This is disturbing, if the horse galloping in the Zoetrope attracts us more than the horse itself. But we may have no choice in the matter--once we look closely enough. For myself, I know I have already succumbed to the gravitational pull of the projected, manipulated images--each of them still, but together in motion--spirit-hands beckoning in tabletop light.

August 7, 1892 [The Zoopraxiscope, continued]

Muybridge continues to entice us toward his contraption. The pleasure of watching moving pictures is still for me only vaguely definable, but continues irresistible; however, after a decade of horses and painted birds in flight, Muybridge arrives at startlingly unadorned expositions of the human form, and the impression is both beautiful and unnerving. I know the artist's purview includes a close examination of the body, whether with paintbrush or camera. But as a moving object it becomes a personal affair--and I don't mean a matter of modesty, or embarrassment, or even morality (perhaps); no, I mean that something personal is happening between the viewer and the nude figure, a private display that forces me to look and capture the moving image for myself. I am laying claim to it with a proprietary gaze that marks my control over the image.

But just at that moment of ownership I am denied my claim. The woman--or child, or young man throwing a ball--may not gaze back at me, but I know they too can see, and know they are being watched. I am rescued from guilt only by my anonymity--and even this troubles me. If I am to continue watching, I must do so with the virtues of passivity, allowing the images their separate reality--while insinuating myself into them, almost secretly. I'm not yet certain how much of myself, or of those I observe, must be sacrificed in this--what? exchange? surrender?--but I will continue, as much as I may risk.

October 4, 1879 [The Zoopraxiscope]

It was a moment when simple inquiry--here, about a horse--merged with obsession. Eadweard Muybridge presented his Zoopraxiscope, and the spinning glass disk exerted a kind of mesmerism. I had seen his photographs of Yosemite at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, but these did not prepare me for his slightly mad conviction: for him, the meticulous image-captures of the Zoopraxiscope seemed a vindication for some unnamed transgression--of his own?--against a fundamental truth of seeing, one that should never have been doubted--but there is a beauty to the effect I cannot deny--as well as a wariness that rises in me, until I suspect I also have somehow overstepped.

While the images were captured simply to prove an equestrian point, the result reaches further than the question of whether a trotting horse's four hooves at any point leave the ground simultaneously. Muybridge's twenty-four electrically triggered photographs define a single motion, and of course every time I watched the sequence it was the same; it was I who changed, in my eagerness to see the simple action again and again, the disk spinning, its regular clicking whir almost an apology for bringing a horse into the parlor, a new sound for a new figure.

July 14, 1876 [The Camera Obscura]

The sign by the door read, "MAGIC MIRROR OF LIFE--FAIRMOUNT PARK IN MINIATURE--GLIMPSE A FAIRY LAND." I found myself before a small six-sided building, a camera obscura. Inside, it was stifling and quiet, its refracting-mirror opening above spilling the light of the world down to the circular table before us. The "dark room" seemed more cisterna than camera; and with the door closed, leaving us in a ring, in almost total darkness, comparisons to a séance were inevitable, and not entirely inappropriate.

On the table was a ghost of the world outside, the Philadelphia park projected from above. I saw people moving, trees nodding in the light breeze, all in sharp focus, but with tones that seemed thin somehow--not so much dim as pale. And although I knew it was simply an exercise in optical science, a Modern diversion for visitors to the Centennial Exhibition, it remained somehow disorienting. We were more than mere witnesses to an optical principle--but less than the enchanted denizens of a pleasant fairy land. I felt myself instead a contrivance of the room/camera, another lens capturing the image.

Still, I could leave the mechanism and take the images with me in my memory--even more: I could go out into the world it caught and bent and threw down on the table, and myself become an image in the camera obscura, a player in the silent pageant of that dark room, for other observers to watch, object becoming subject. And so I stepped into the sunshine--but something in me wanted to go back to the room and let the shadow-ghosts of others lie there on the table; I'd somehow rather not be outside--yes, perhaps free in the summer weather, but also drawn back, the open air funneling me into the lens and mirror to become another's entertainment.

I know I'm making much of a simple thing, but the camera obscura poses a dilemma: Is one the observer or the thing observed? I suppose it depends on not only where one stands, but also who is watching. And while the magic mirror tells the truth, it does so obscurely.