The Moving Image: From Imprint to Expression

Address at the Convocation of the University of Colombo, on being awarded an Honorary Doctorate, on June 29 by film director Tissa Abeysekera.

Honoured: I am, I think, the second film person to be honoured by this distinguished seat of learning, the first of its kind in this country. The first to be honoured was my guru, Dr. Lester James Peries, it was he who taught me the basics of moviemaking, its craft and its aesthetics.

Perhaps he taught us all, in the way pioneers do, by clearing a path, creating standards and values, and showing the way for all who come afterwards. It may be that I am here today, because he made movies respectable in this country, gave it dignity, and a Sri Lankan face.

I dedicate this address to him.

It is natural therefore that I talk of film. I am associated with certain other areas of activity; literature and broadcasting to be more specific, and in that order. But I am primarily a film person, who also occasionally dabbles in other exercises. That gives me another reason to talk of film, today.

In the groves of academe where the world is neatly divided into various disciplines, humanities, social sciences, hard sciences, natural sciences, etcetera, where does one slot film into? In American Universities it is almost always part of the Arts division.

In Sri Lanka, where it is still not a subject for graduate studies, it is a segment in Mass Communication studies, and that is in the Social Sciences category. But, is film pure art, in the traditional sense?

Art or science

When I first addressed a class of undergraduates, thirty years ago, I was asked a question at the end of my lecture. Is film, an art or a science? I did not hesitate to answer, because when I was thirty years younger, I had no doubts. Film, I said, is an art born out of science. I am not so sure today.

Where does art end and science begin? The boundaries have begun to overlap. In the beautiful short story by Arthur C. Clarke The Ten Billion Names of God, an American Scientist has come all the way to a monastery in Tibet where all the names by which God has been referred to down the ages lay inscribed in scrolls, and he - the scientist - over several months downloads all those names into his computer.

His mission accomplished, the American is taking off in his twin-seater plane, and as it hovers over the snowy vastness where the sky and the earth seem one, the pilot says, "look!" and the scientist gazes with awe at the indefinable space out there. Clarke ends his story on the haunting line: "And one by one, without a fuss, the stars were going out".

No other expression in the whole of literature has captured for me with such clarity and holistic completeness, the mystery of the universe. The phenomenon of the moving image is suspended somewhere there, between terra firma, and the vault of heaven, between the material and the void.

To begin with, the moving image was the end of man's search to obtain a perfect imprint of the real world. When Leonardo Da Vinci, brought in perspective to drawing during the Renaissance, he was getting closer to capturing the element of space, and painting in the next few centuries was becoming more and more representational.

Accuracy of reproduction and thereby the veracity of the image as an imprint of the original was the test of a picture.

But in this exercise the human hand stops at a particular point, and it does so for several reasons. The hand draws what the eye sees, and from person to person, the eye perceives differently.

Similarly, the hand movement is conditioned by personal circumstances of draughtsmanship, and culture, of sensibility and taste. Pictorial truth when depicted by the hand could never be absolute. Evidence of place and object could not be definite.

This crisis in pictorial representation occurred at precisely the same point in European history when concrete evidence of the flora and the fauna, the topography and the lifestyles of the newly discovered lands had to be produced by the explorers to their masters - the rulers and the merchant sponsors - back home, at a time when travel was minimal, and communications primitive.

As Milan Kundera says with his customary finesse and precision in his masterly treatise on the European novel, Man Friday's footprint on the sand as evidence of the existence of 'Another' in the island in Robinson Crusoe, becomes the central motif of indexical realism in western fiction.

Deeper quest

In an obsessive pursuit to make this 'footprint' more acceptable as evidence, man discovered photography. The discovery of the photo-electric cell, and the use of emulsion to obtain an imprint of the physical shapes and forms as they existed in life through the response to varying degrees of light and shadow, were essentially achievements of science.

There are no aesthetics here, only chemistry and physics. But beneath the scientific exercise there was a deeper quest, a motivation rooted in the innermost recesses of the human psyche.

Without going into the minutiae of all the experiments, the theories and the formulae which contributed to the birth of photography, let me turn to the result. No one has spoken with greater precision and clarity, authority and eloquence on this matter than, the Frenchman Andre Bazin, easily the finest critical mind that served the moving image.

In his seminal essay, The Ontology of the Photographic Image, Bazin has, and for all time, laid bare the basic principle of the photograph, what makes it unique in the family of plastic arts, if it belongs there at all.

"Originality in photography as distinct from originality in painting lies in the essentially objective character of photography. For the first time between the originating object and its reproduction there intervenes, only the instrumentality of a non-living agent.

For the first time, an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention of man. The personality of the photographer enters into the proceedings only in his selection of the object to be photographed and by way of the purpose he has in mind. Although the final result may reflect something of his personality this does not play the same role as is played in that of the painter.

All the arts are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence."

The advantage referred to here, as being the result of the absence of the human element, is the advantage of clinical veracity. Human interference brings in the element of subjectivity, of bias and prejudice, of selectivity and deletion, in the representational act.

For this reason, only a photograph is acceptable as a token of personal identification, where a portrait painting is not. A photograph, even an amateur snapshot taken from a box camera, is acceptable to be considered as evidence, than the detailed sketches of a Rembrandt.

In recreating 19th century Ceylon, the beautiful paintings by Andrew Nicholls, so perfect in detail, would not be as useful to the historical researcher as the photographs of W.L.H. Skeen. Once more, Bazin has the last word here.

"Only a photographic lens can give us the kind of image that is capable of satisfying the deep need man has to substitute for it something more than a mere approximation, a kind of decal or a transfer.

The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it." Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida, spoke of a property in the photographic image which establishes the evidence of place and presence; he termed it the sense of 'having been there'.

From our travels we bring back photographs not only as mementos but also as proof of our 'having been there'. Such is also the significance of the wedding portrait as a proof of marital legitimacy to be displayed prominently in the home.

If pictorial reproduction gained veracity through the photographic process, one could say it was only a further development in what painting attempted since the renaissance by incorporating the element of perspective.

Sculpting in time

This was the evocation of the sense of space by presenting the various objects within the picture in relative proportions corresponding to their positions from foreground to background in relation to each other. Such depiction of spatial dimension would make the picture more 'real', more acceptable as an accurate representation of the original.

However if the imprint was to be a complete reproduction of the real, one element was still missing. And that was time.

The first strip of film, shown exactly 112 years ago in a caf, in the Boulevard du Capucine in Paris, can still be seen. A train which arrived at a railway platform at the Ciotad station in 1895 still keeps arriving at our will and pleasure.

The time of 35 seconds taken by the train to appear at the far end of the frame, draw up to the platform, and stop, has been captured and preserved for ever. The moving image and the motion picture, have become so much taken for granted by us today, like people before Isaac Newton saw nothing strange about apples falling from trees, that we can never imagine, the impact Lumiere's moving picture had on the little audience gathered in the winter afternoon in the Paris caf,, on the 28th of December 1895.

Nearly one hundred years later, Andre Tarkovsky, perhaps the greatest moviemaker since the motion picture camera was invented, rediscovered the significance and the magic of that moment.

Tarkovsky re-wrote the text book of film and in doing so called us to go back to that moment and start all over again. In the only book he wrote - and he wrote whilst he lay dying - Sculpting In Time, he claimed for film a unique capacity, the frightening capacity to capture time and reproduce it at will. Permit me to go into a long quote from Tarkovsky, simply because no one until now or perhaps no one ever will, put it better than this Russian visionary.

"I still cannot forget that work of genius shown in the last century, the film with which it all started - L 'Arrivee d'un Train en Gare de La Ciotad. That film made by Auguste and Louis Lumiere was simply the result of the invention of the camera, the film and the projector.

The spectacle which only lasts half a minute, shows a section of railway platform, bathed in sunlight, ladies and gentlemen walking about, and the train coming from the depths of the frame and heading straight for the camera.

As the train approached panic started in the theatre; people jumped up and ran away. That was the moment when cinema was born; it was not simply a question of technique, or just a new way of reproducing the world. What came into being was a new aesthetic principle.

For the first time in the history of the arts, in the history of culture, man found the means to take an impression of time and simultaneously the possibility of reproducing that time on screen as often as he wanted, to repeat and go back to it. He acquired a matrix for real time. Once seen and recorded time could now be preserved in metal boxes over a long period of time.

Volumes have been written about Tarkovsky's theory of sculpting with time, which he claimed was cinema's central exercise and the one, congenital to it, and it would be tempting to continue talking on this. But let me keep on course and return to some of the positions I began with. If science was enlisted in the service of man's pursuit to obtain a truer imprint of space and matter which surround him, it was science which once again facilitated man's quest to capture time, or in Tarkovsky's words, to acquire a matrix for real time.

The inexorable flow of time through all of material existence is reflected in motion, and motion could be both visible and invisible. It could be growth, it could be decay Whether it is in the 35 second shot of a train arriving at a platform or in the static six hour shot of Andy Warhol's film The Empire State Building, time flows through, and there is a change in the material shown, however infinitesimal.

'Motion' pictures

To obtain an imprint of that time is to capture and reproduce movement, because motion is the measure of time. From the cave drawings of Altamira at the foothills of the Pyrennees, done by a primitive cave dweller in an eloquent exercise to capture the movement of a running bison by illustrating the multiple positions of the beast's splayed legs, it took another fifteen-thousand years for man to discover the scientific principle through which he could capture and reproduce motion.

It was in 1824, also in the winter month of December, in a small auditorium in London, attended by fewer than fifty people, that Peter Mark Roget presented his findings of a four year research.

He claimed that he discovered an inherent defect in the human eye by which the imprint of an object beheld for a certain minimum length of time is retained for an extra length of time even after the object is withdrawn or the eye looks away from the object.

The imprint is not held by any physical properties of the optical system but retained in the subconscious as a shadow, an optic ghost. This phenomenon was termed, the Theory of the Persistence of Vision, and promptly became part of the vocabulary of physics.

Quite apart from its contribution to the study in physics, Mark Roget's discovery led to a toy industry, where various mechanisms and contraptions were invented to reproduce motion. The illustrations for creating the illusion of movement - it is important to note that it is only an illusion - were entirely hand drawn.

The amusement at this point was only in the reproduction of the element of movement. The pursuit of actuality lay still in the future. And that came by an accident which has become an important point in the archaeology of film.

A wealthy racehorse owner of California in 1872, Leland Stanford maintained that a galloping horse had, at a particular point of its movement, all four legs in the air. This was contested, because the steed in its long history of association with man had never been portrayed by the plastic and representational arts in that position.

(To be Continued)