Moving Words/Motion Pictures: Proto-Cinematic Narrative In Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

In the broadest sense, this project is about nineteenth-century narrative texts and optical toys, or those devices that were originally created to demonstrate scientific knowledge related to vision but that would also become popular for home and public consumption. I argue that nineteenth-century British writers borrowed and adapted the visual effects of such toys, making fiction as participatory as the toys themselves in the development of image culture and the viewing practices that would become necessary for the production and dissemination of cinema in the early twentieth century. Narrative fiction, then, should be considered along with the other precursors of filmic technology as a form of the proto-cinematic, a term I use as media scholars do—to describe devices integral to film history but that also each had a cultural impact in its own unique way. To demonstrate and support this argument, my project first introduces readers to a range of proto-cinematic technologies, toys that were important during the nineteenth century, and establishes these as a lens through which we might read Victorian narratives. The subsequent chapters offer close readings that delineate my proposed methodology; texts include Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby, Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle\u27s Sherlock Holmes stories

Body image distortion in photography

This thesis investigates the theory that photography is, in terms of body image perception, an intrinsically distorting and often fattening medium. In the professional practice of photography, film and television, there is a widely held belief that the camera "adds 10lbs" to the portrayed weight of actors and presenters. The primary questions addressed here relate to the true extent of the fattening effect, to what perceptual mechanisms it can be ascribed and if it can be counteracted in common practice. Current theories in the perception of photographic images rarely, if ever discuss the medium's perceptual accuracy in recording the original scene. It is assumed by many users that most photographs convey essentially the same information they would have seen had they been present when they were taken. Further, it is generally accepted that photographs are an accurate, veridical and scientific method of record and their content should be trusted unless there is evidence of a technical failure, editing or deliberate tampering. This thesis investigates whether this level of trust is appropriate, specifically by examining the reliability of photography in relation to reproducing the face and form of human subjects. Body Image Distortion (B.I.D.) is a term normally used to describe the primary diagnostic symptom of the slimming disease, anorexia nervosa. However, it is demonstrated here that people viewing 2D photographic portraits often make very significant overestimations of size when comparing otherwise identical stereoscopic images. The conclusion is that losing stereoscopic information in conventional 2D photography will cause distortions of perceived body image, and that this is often seen as a distinct flattening and fattening effect. A second fattening effect was also identified in the use of telephoto lenses. It is demonstrated, using psychophysical experiments and geometry that these 2D images cannot convey the same spatial or volumetric information that normal human orthostereoscopic perception will give. The evidence gathered suggests that the Human Visual System requires images to be orthostereoscopic, and be captured using two cameras that mimic as closely as possible the natural vergences, angle of view, depth of field, magnification, brightness, contrast and colour to reproduce scenes as accurately as possible. The experiments reported use three different size estimation methodologies: stereoscopic versus monocular comparisons of human and virtual targets, bodyweight estimations in portraits taken at differing camera to subject distances and synoptic versus direct viewing comparisons. The three techniques were used because photographic images are typically made without disparity and accommodation/vergence information, but with magnifications that are greater than found with direct viewing of a target. By separately analysing the effects of disparity, magnification and accommodation/vergence the reported experiments show how changes in each condition can effect size estimation in photographs. The data suggest that photographs made without orthostereoscopic information will lead to predictably distorted perception and that conventional 2D imaging will almost always cause a significant flattening and fattening effect. In addition, it is argued that the conveyed jaw size, in relation to neck width is an important factor in body-weight perception and this will lead to sexually dimorphic perception: disproportionately larger estimations of bodyweight are made for female faces than male faces under the same photographic conditions

A Space and Time Machine: Actuality Cinema in New York City, 1890s to c. 1905

Urban actuality films are short, single shot views of street scenes, skyscrapers or construction sites, or views from moving vehicles. They are, typically, regarded as simple filmic snap-shots. Conversely, early cinema is conventionally thought to be a complex hybrid medium, a crucible for the idea and representation of the modern. Through close, contextualised analysis of a series of New York films, this study addresses the discrepancy between the putative insubstantiality of actuality films and the evident complexity of early cinema. A hitherto overlooked historical coincidence of actuality cinema, the modernisation of New York and its intermedial culture is shown to provide both a subject and setting for filmmakers. Actuality cinema is a technology of the present; accordingly, temporality is pivotal for this study. Tom Gunning's 'cinema of attractions' thesis and a neurological conception of modernity posit a familiar shocks-and-jolts axis of the relations between cinema and modernity. In contrast, I argue for an alternative axis, founded in periods, rather than moments, of time and seek to demonstrate cinema's role as a technology of an expanded present time. Fifteen films of transport systems, skyscraper building sites and ways of seeing New York's streets, make up the primary source material. In these films, time provides a space for the representation and negotiation of the modern. An expanded present fosters a thickened visuality. Within New York's intermedial culture, the adoption of stereoscopic visual practices was key to constructing a coherent filmic present, and a place for the spectator within a cinematic world. As a functioning space and time machine, a cinema of simultaneity, the complexity of actuality filmmaking practices increasingly moved actualities towards, and enabled their interrelation with, an emerging narrative cinema. Rather than a failed experiment, New York actuality cinema is here demonstrated to be an example of cinema working

A Space and Time Machine: Actuality Cinema in New York City, 1890s to c. 1905

Urban actuality films are short, single shot views of street scenes, skyscrapers or construction sites, or views from moving vehicles. They are, typically, regarded as simple filmic snap-shots. Conversely, early cinema is conventionally thought to be a complex hybrid medium, a crucible for the idea and representation of the modern. Through close, contextualised analysis of a series of New York films, this study addresses the discrepancy between the putative insubstantiality of actuality films and the evident complexity of early cinema. A hitherto overlooked historical coincidence of actuality cinema, the modernisation of New York and its intermedial culture is shown to provide both a subject and setting for filmmakers. Actuality cinema is a technology of the present; accordingly, temporality is pivotal for this study. Tom Gunning's 'cinema of attractions' thesis and a neurological conception of modernity posit a familiar shocks-and-jolts axis of the relations between cinema and modernity. In contrast, I argue for an alternative axis, founded in periods, rather than moments, of time and seek to demonstrate cinema's role as a technology of an expanded present time. Fifteen films of transport systems, skyscraper building sites and ways of seeing New York's streets, make up the primary source material. In these films, time provides a space for the representation and negotiation of the modern. An expanded present fosters a thickened visuality. Within New York's intermedial culture, the adoption of stereoscopic visual practices was key to constructing a coherent filmic present, and a place for the spectator within a cinematic world. As a functioning space and time machine, a cinema of simultaneity, the complexity of actuality filmmaking practices increasingly moved actualities towards, and enabled their interrelation with, an emerging narrative cinema. Rather than a failed experiment, New York actuality cinema is here demonstrated to be an example of cinema working

Mapping the Sensible

Mapping figures in cinema as an experiential process inscribed within historically specific aesthetic regimes. The three long essays in this book explore mapping as a process of violent inscription on colonial landscapes (Malcomess) a practice of colonial racialisation through what Rancière terms a ‘distribution of the sensible’ (Carter) and a mode of culturally and historically located cinematic thinking (Rositzka)

Mapping the Sensible

Mapping figures in cinema as an experiential process inscribed within historically specific aesthetic regimes. The three long essays in this book explore mapping as a process of violent inscription on colonial landscapes (Malcomess) a practice of colonial racialisation through what Rancière terms a ‘distribution of the sensible’ (Carter) and a mode of culturally and historically located cinematic thinking (Rositzka)