Abstract
One of the key features in the union of camera and human subject is a type of reverse evolution, often evoked explicitly in the name of Darwinism, of the body from a complex biological and social organism into an artifact. This transformation is similar but by no means identical to the objectification of the body. Many possibilities present themselves in the history of modern media for studying this transformation, but one commonly cited origin is the stop-action photography of Eadweard Muybridge.1 Muybridge’s famous time motion studies of the 1870s and 1880s were published as photo sequences and were also displayed during his lectures on animal and human locomotion as transparencies projected by his “zoopraxiscope.” Arguably the most striking feature of Muybridge’s work is the scientific impulse underlying the photography. Muybridge’s photographs were originally intended as proof of a particular hypothesis regarding the stride of horses. From the horses, he moved on to other animals such as dogs, deer, and oxen as they walked or trotted along a track, and finally to humans leaping, wrestling, performing somersaults, and running. Cameras, strung along a track, recorded the action in a precise manner, with each shot exposed for 1/500 of a second, the exposures separated by 1/25 of a second. As Linda Williams notes in her discussion of Muybridge, the bodies in these photographs are figured as “repeatable mechanisms,” controlled by a battery of machines, and hence mirror the technological advancement of the recording devices.2
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Notes
See, for instance, Charles Musser’s account of Muybridge in The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907. vol. 1, History of the American Cinem. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990), 48–53.
Linda Williams, “Film Body,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 511.
See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Science. (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 312.
Jean Rouch, “The Camera and Man,” in Principles of Visual Anthropology. ed. Paul Hockings (The Hague: Mouton Press, 1975), 84.
David MacDougall, “The Visual in Anthropology,” in Rethinking Visual Anthropology. eds. Marcus Banks and Howard Morphy (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), 277. MacDougall claims that the visual object is a metaphor for anthropology itself: “The visual world was like the husk you removed to get at the conceptual and verbal worlds inside, but having done so you couldn’t in good conscience throw it away. Visible objects, having exerted great fascination as the products and indicator of culture, but failing as expositors of it, began to acquire a new function (in museums) as metaphors for anthropology” (277). Within the context of the museum, the body as artifact and metaphor remains, according to MacDougall, disquietingly “mute.” This same interplay between the fascination of the viewer and the muteness of the object might apply to screened images in the silent era of film, as well, I would suggest.
Elizabeth Cowie, “The Spectacle of Actuality,” in Collecting Visible Evidence. eds. Jane M. Gaines and Michael Renov (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 19.
Kristin Thompson, “From Primitive to Classical,” in The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Production to 1960. eds. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 158.
Tom Gunning, “Primitive Cinema—A Frame-up? or The Trick’s on Us,” Cinema Journa. 28, no. 2 (Winter 1989): 4.
Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Realit. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 32.
See Alexander Kluge, Bestandsaufnahme: Utopie Fil. (Munich: Zweitausendeins, 1985), 161–66.
See Dai Vaughan, “Let There be Lumière,” in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative. ed. Thomas Elsaesser, with Adam Barker (London: BFI Publishing, 1990), 63–67.
Marshall Deutelbaum, “Structural Patterning in the Lumière Films,” Wide Angl. 3, no. 1 (1979): 29–30.
Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Cultur. (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1995), 3.
George Méliès, “Cinematographic Views,” in French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 1907–1939. ed. Richard Abel, vol. 1, 1907–192. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 35–46.
André Bazin, What is Cinema?. trans. Hugh Gray, 2 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967, 1971), 1: 24. In his discussion of silent cinema, Bazin cites “plastics” and montage as two instances of conscious human intervention in constructing a cinematic image.
Richard Allen, Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship and the Impression of Realit. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 89.
Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinem. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 68.
See Ian Dunlop, “Ethnographic Filmmaking in Australia: The First Seventy Years (1898–1968),” Visual Communicatio. 9, no. 1 (Winter 1983): 14.
Quoted in Eliot Weinberger, “The Camera People,” in Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from V.A.R., 1990–1994. ed. Lucien Taylor (London: Routledge, 1994), 4.
Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetics of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In) Credulous Spectator,” in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film. ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 115.
See Stephan Oetterman, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium. trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 79.
“Bodily Irruptions: The Corporeal Assault on Ethnographic Narration,” Cinema Journa. 34, no. 3 (Spring 1995): 57–76.
Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think. trans. Lilian A. Clare (1926; reprint Salem, N.H.: Ayer Publishing, 1984), 58. Lévy-Bruhl disputes the theory that the “natives” confuse representation and reality. Instead, he claims that they do not limit themselves, as do Western thinkers, to “objective” reality alone, but privilege the representations of dreams, rituals, and likenesses (58–59). For further discussion of Lévy-Bruhl, see Chapter Six.
Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animal. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 351–52. Darwin places more emphasis upon heredity in this work than in his earlier ones. Subsequently, imitation is almost completely determined by the laws of heredity and can be seen as a type of habitual “imprint” that is passed down in individual species. The fact that he considers imitation to be largely independent of the will or of consciousness is significant for later conceptions of this function.
James Frazer, The Golden Boug. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 55. Michael Taussig turns to Frazer’s classic work in order to launch a critique of two types of imitation, that of “copy” and of “contact.” The latter, he suggests, implies a tactile element that involves “a palpable, sensuous, connection between the very body of the perceiver and the perceived.” Taussig, “The Eye as Organ of Tactility: The Optical Unconscious,” in Taylor, Visualizing Theory. 206. The tactile nature of this type of imitation has a critical potential in defetishizing the visualized object and destroying “aura” in the sense used by Walter Benjamin. Although this type of tactile visualization will play a role in my study, I am referring to the more traditional sense of “copy” within the present discussion of how a primitive viewer is actively constructed and contained by early discourses on cinema.
This crucial point is obscured in the English translation, which reads: “The highest capacity for producing similarities, however, is man’s. His gift of seeing resemblances is nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else.” Walter Benjamin, Reflections. ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 333. In the original German, there is no reference to the “something else” that acts as origin of the mimetic process: “Die höchste Fähigkeit im Produzieren von Ähnlichkeiten aber hat der Mensch. Die Gabe, Ähnlichkeit zu sehen, die er besitzt, ist nichts als ein Rudiment des ehemals gewaltigen Zwanges, ähnlich zu werden und sich zu verhalten.” “Über das mimetische Vermögen,” in Angelus Novus. vol. 2, Ausgewählte Schrifte. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 96.
See Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Fil. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991).
Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacl. (Durham, N. C: Duke University Press, 1996), 28.
See Claudia Honegger, Die Ordnung der Geschlechter: Die Wissenschaften vom Menschen und das Wei. (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1991), 107–111. As Honegger notes, many were practicing medical doctors with an interest in philosophy. One of the broader goals among them was a reassessment of the “organization” of the body, shirting from a mechanical, machine-like model to a more organic notion of a self-sustaining organism (see Honegger, 109).
See Arnold Gehlen, Anthropologische Forschung: Zur Selbstbegegnung und Selbstentdeckung des Mensche. (Munich: Rowohlt, 1980).
Rudolf Martin, quoted in Christoph Keller, Der Schädelvermesser: Otto Schlaginhaufen, Anthropologe und Rassenhygieniker. Eine biographische Reportag. (Zürich: Limmat Verlag, 1995), 21.
See, for instance, G. Schwalbe, “Ziele und Wege einer vergleichenden physischen Anthropologie,” Zeitschrift der Morphologie und Anthropolog. 1 (1899): 1–15.
Quoted in John R. Baker, Rac. (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), 26.
Excerpt from Paul Broca’s address to the Anthropological Society of Paris, reprinted in Handbook of Social and Cultural Anthropology. ed. John J. Honigmann (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1973), 14.
See Benoit Massin, “From Virchow to Fischer: Physical Anthropology and ‘Modern Race Theories’ in Wilhelmine Germany,” in Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition. ed. George W Stocking Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 79–154, especially 82–94.
See Fritz Graebner, Methode der Ethnologi. (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1911), 8–13.
Richard A. Schweder, “On Savages and Other Children,” American Anthropologis. 84, no. 2 (June 1982): 356.
Alfred C. Haddon, Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Strait. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935), 1: 283.
Wilhelm Wundt, Elements of Folk Psychology. trans. Edward L. Schaub (New York: MacMillan, 1921), 73.
Quoted in Martin Taureg, “The Development of Standards for Scientific Films in German Ethnography,” Visual Communicatio. 9, no. 1 (Winter 1983): 19. Many of the early German films to which I refer are collected in this series.
The popular account was written by an artist who accompanied the research team. The volume also included a number of his drawings. See Hans Vogel, Eine Forschungsreise im Bismark-Archipe. (Hamburg: Friederichsen, 1911).
For a discussion of ethnological displays in the United States, see Allison Margaret Griffiths, “Origins of Ethnographic Film” (Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1998), abstract in Dissertation Abstracts International (1998): AAT9831717, 71–112.
For an extremely thorough account of the Hagenbeck shows, see Hilke Thode-Arora, Für Fünfzig Pfennig um die Welt: Die Hagenbeckschen Völkerschaue. (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 1989).
Johannes Umlaugg, quoted in Hilde Thode-Arora, “Herbeigeholte Ferne: Völkerschauen als Vorläufer exotiseierender Abenteuerfilme,” in Triviale Tropen: Exotische Reise- und Abenteuerfilme aus Deutschland, 1919–1939. ed. Jörg Schöning (Munich: edition text & kritik, 1997), 29.
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© 2001 Assenka Oksiloff
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Oksiloff, A. (2001). The Body as Artifact. In: Picturing the Primitive. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-05687-0_2
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