ACMI’s new exhibition shows a world constantly evolving

The passive consumption of commercial entertainment almost instantly destroyed the culture of amateur performance. That, and other stark realities, are presented in a fascinating new exhibition

Installation shot of ACMI’s Story of the Moving Image exhibition. Picture: Adam Gibson

Story of the moving image
ACMI [new permanent exhibition]

Images have fascinated humans since the earliest rock art that survives from the Stone Age. Undoubtedly these paintings, whether schematic in many cases or vividly animated in the caves of Lascaux, seemed charged with magical power to their makers, as potent as spells and invocations. Perhaps too, seen by torchlight deep underground, they seemed to move on the stone walls, to be alive.

The first suggestion of the illusion of moving images in literature is found in the elaborate ekphrastic description of the Shield of Achilles in Iliad XVIII. Here the figures worked into the bronze surface of the shield by the divine craftsman Hephaestus are so vivid that they seem to move, and the metal seems to assume the colours of natural things. This memorable passage created a trope that is repeated in almost all subsequent ecphrastic passages and especially in Hellenistic literature, with its self-conscious meditation on the magic of artifice.

Images that really appear to move have been contrived in a variety of ways, and in fact the most fascinating sections of this new exhibition are the early ones that introduce us to the many and elaborate precursors of the modern cinematic image. As in the case of photography, made possible by advances in chemistry from the later 18th century but building on principles of optics and lens technology that were centuries older, film combines and adds to a number of elements that had already been in existence for many decades.

Before we come to the direct predecessors of modern film, though, there are other forms of literally moving imagery such as puppetry; the most proto-filmic of these is shadow puppetry, especially Javanese wayang kulit, because it is projected onto a two-dimensional surface. In the west, shadow puppets were more of a children’s game, and there are some intriguing sets of shadow figures from the 19th century, usually with grotesque and slightly sinister overtones.

One of the important precursors of the cinematic image was the magic lantern, illustrated here with numerous examples of the devices themselves and of the slides they projected, which were initially handpainted and later photographically transferred, and could deal with anything from landscapes to biblical stories and fairytales. There is famous passage at the beginning of A la Recherche du temps perdu where Marcel Proust speaks of the disturbing and mysterious images he recalls being projected on the bedroom of his room as a little boy, in an attempt to calm him and distract him for the distress of going to bed.

Proust speaks of a variety of magic lantern that could be mounted on his bedside light, but many of the other machines in the exhibition, powered by gaslight and later electricity, look more like small cameras, with their adjustable lenses for focusing. But if the magic lantern process could project a series of lively tableaux — and thus foreshadowed one aspect of cinema — it could not make the individual images or the figures in them move. In the same way stereographic photography, also popular from an early date and represented in the exhibition, could make images appear three-dimensional, but still not actually in motion. This would require other techniques.

The simplest of these was the flipbook, where each page has an image representing successive states of an action; as the book is flipped between finger and thumb, the images passing before our eyes in quick succession appear to blend into continuous motion. But this could only be done on a very small scale, was experienced by one person at a time and required the active participation of the viewer.

Passive viewing machines involved spinning or rolling images mechanically while controlling our viewpoint. Very early photographs could not be used for these purposes, because they required a long exposure time and portrait sitters sometimes had their head supported by a brace to help them remain still long enough. But as exposure times were shortened, the situation changed dramatically: in Muybridge’s famous photographs of bodies in motion, the camera captures and separates instants that the eye itself cannot discriminate.

The exhibition includes modern interactive demonstrations of this process with clips of a skateboarder leaping, a leopard running and pigeons landing: we can operate the film with a hand crank and slow time down to reveal things we could never see for ourselves, and even make time go backwards, as Heurtebise does, breaking the laws of the underworld, to bring Eurydice back from the dead in Cocteau’s film Orphée (1950).

An early device using the same principle was called a Mutoscope: it is essentially a mechanical flipbook in which photographs flash past us and combine to produce the illusion of movement. The example in the exhibition has a short skit by Charlie Chaplin, but as the wall text explains, the most famous Mutoscope show was of a woman undressing seen through a keyhole and entitled What the butler saw.

One of the most important things we learn from history is that things do not emerge from nowhere, but in stages and for a combination of reasons that we can retrospectively unpick, helping us better understand, critique and even change our present circumstances. This exhibition allows us to see more clearly than we had perhaps before how film grew out of the experiments in visual illusion that we have mentioned, various forms of mechanical animation and light projection.

Cinema involved the combination of these two principles: a sufficiently rapid and consistent sequence of still frames, plus projection to allow the resulting image to be seen by a whole audience at the same time. Later technologies, like television, did not require projection onto a screen, although television images, like digital images which are also native to screens, can also be projected. But the fundamental principle remains the same: all moving pictures are made up of a sequence of still shots that blend into the appearance of motion; we still have no way of truly registering the continuous flow of real duration.

After this early section which deals with the beginnings of moving images and the origin of film, the exhibition opens out both thematically and physically in the way it is displayed, like a river reaching an estuary and breaking up into different streams. There are separate sections on colour and sound, on costume, on sets and costumes, and on editing.

There are examples of the editing equipment that I remember using as a teenager to cut 8mm film; teenagers today use digital editing software for the same purposes.

There is a section on special effects which includes examples of the way effects were created in some recent popular films, and there is a model showing how easily the illusion of reality can be created when the filmmaker, as in the illusionist peepshows that were popular in 17th century Holland, can control our point of view.

Another section deals with Australian cinema and television, including early classics like The Kelly Gang (1906) and more recent works, with an emphasis on Aboriginal cinema and the representation of ethnic and gender diversity over the past few decades.

Then there are video games and examples of imagery on social media; this is the populist end of the exhibition, with lots of interactive opportunities for people who play video games.

The exhibition concludes with a couple of examples of moving image art. One is a very early example of the immersive installations that have become ubiquitous in recent years: a series of projections of mostly abstract images by Oskar Fischinger, originally shown in 1926 with a live percussion accompaniment and recently restored with a soundtrack that seems to match the intention quite effectively.

The other piece is Daniel Crooks’s Phantom Ride, the second Ian Potter Moving Image Commission which was first shown at ACMI in 2016 and reviewed here in May 2016. The work is an appropriate choice for this exhibition, because the title refers to a very early genre of cinema where a camera would be mounted on the front (or sometimes the rear) of a train and film the world it travelled through. Among the earliest “ghost ride” films — both available on YouTube — are a clip of a ride through Barnstaple in 1898, and one by the Lumière brothers of a train leaving the station in Jerusalem in 1897.

Crooks’s film, like all his work, plays with ideas of time and its reversibility, combining images shot on a real dolly driving along sometimes disused tracks in the Victorian countryside with others that appear to be digitally manipulated to look as though we are advancing in space; and while the journey seems to be a smooth, almost relentless directional progression, in reality we pass through a series of portals that loom before us and then admit us into another track and another landscape. The second screen, meanwhile, originally shown on the reverse of the first, shows the return journey, and yet the way back proves to be not quite the same as the way out.

One of the most interesting displays in the exhibition is about the changing place of television in our lives. The story is told wordlessly in a series of little models of the successive interiors in which television has taken its place since it first came into Australian homes in 1956, and the change — with implications for culture in Australia in general — is truly drastic. In the first model, the new invention has found a place in the corner of a sitting room that is otherwise more or less as it might have been for the previous half-century or more. There are comfortable armchairs, a fireplace, a bookcase filled with books, landscape paintings on the walls, and perhaps most significantly of all, a standard piano against one wall with sheet music open on the stool.

This was to be the first thing to go. The passive consumption of commercial entertainment almost instantly destroyed the culture of amateur performance. In later rooms there are glimpses of what the following few decades would bring: fast food, the television in the kitchen, posters on the walls instead of paintings. And yet the model representing the present, although meant to be stylish and elegant compared to the dereliction of previous decades, is actually the most frightening.

Large lounges in cheap commercial leather face a huge flat screen on the wall. There are no books; and real paintings have been replaced by a large piece of decorator abstraction. This is a world in which television’s junk food for the mind has driven out all other forms of culture. But this is not the end of the story.

In reality television today has become obsolete; computers and in more recent years tablets and smartphones have opened unimagined dimensions of addiction to the moving shadows of the digital world.