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It’s Still Moving
Before film could become an art medium, ‘motion pictures’ had to be invented and the conventions of ‘cinema’ set-out
The appetite for film grew from the Victorian craze for stereograms and the ensuing pier-end Mutoscopes that used the ‘flip-book’ method to create moving pictures, often revealing ‘what the butler saw’. Cinema started out as the stuff of quick-thrill sideshows, a form of novelty entertainment having more in common with a stage conjuror or burlesque show than it did with fine art or literature. It was immediately popular, though many of its pioneers thought it was just a fad.
To begin with, photography was used to ape other formats, but faster and cheaper. Generally, it was a method of recording what was in front of the camera — documentation rather than a creative medium. Sometimes, photographers would spend time creating and staging a tableaux, often with separate elements complied within a single print — Fading Away, Henry Peach Robinson’s photograph of 1853, being a well-known example. It terms of approach, that wasn’t very different to a painter making preliminary sketches for a larger scene brought together on their final canvas. Instead of hiring an accomplished painter to make family portraits, it became fashionable to use a photographer who could produce an accurate likeness in minutes…
