In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Introduction
  • Matthew Solomon, editor (bio)

Performances of various kinds have been fundamental to moving pictures since even before the inception of cinema. Eadweard Muybridge's sequential photographs of movement—representations of which he projected onto a screen with a zoopraxis-cope— typically made use of subjects trained to perform the depicted actions.1 In preparing his magnum opus, Animal Locomotion, between 1884 and 1887, Muybridge photographed student athletes from the University of Pennsylvania, models, and a professional dancer, all of whom were adept at comporting their bodies and were accustomed to performing for the view of spectators.2 The performative character of many of the human movements depicted in Animal Locomotion was further emphasized by Muybridge's penchant for photographing his subjects while acting out little scenarios with a range of props. While Muybridge's work thus looks forward to both the narratives and the fantasies of cinema, as Linda Williams and Marta Braun have argued, his serial photographs also encapsulate the crucial dialectic between performance and mechanical reproduction that helps define the entire history of moving images.3 These photographs captured people performing in particular ways under uniquely modern circumstances. Blanche Epler, Edith Tadd, and more than ninety other subjects performed not so much for an audience of people as for an audience of cameras. A bank of adjacent cameras pixelated their movements in both time and space. With sequentially operated shutters, these cameras captured series of staccato instantaneities that were each from an incrementally different point of view. As the recent rediscovery of the [End Page 119] Animal Locomotion proofs makes clear, Muybridge also subsequently altered the resulting photographs by carefully cropping, enlarging, eliminating, adding, and reordering individual images within a series.4 Muybridge recorded, parsed, and reformatted hundreds of performances to create composite and virtual renderings of movement.

As such, Muybridge's Animal Locomotion photographs mark the advent of a new and unprecedented relationship between performance and mechanical reproduction— one in which performances were recalibrated in relation to the apparatus both post facto and, to a lesser extent, pre facto. The battery of cameras before which Muybridge's subjects moved effectively created a new set of temporal and spatial parameters that altered their performances, whether or not the subjects consciously chose to alter their performances for these peculiar conditions. This subtle (or perhaps not-so-subtle) dialectic of performance and mechanical reproduction would come to define the making of moving images, even though it has not received adequate consideration. Film theory, for example, has grappled long and hard with the concepts of mechanical reproducibility and photographic ontology, but the other side of the performance-reproduction dialectic has almost always tended to get short shrift.

This "In Focus" aims to open up a fuller consideration of performance in Cinema and Media Studies, as well as to point to several possible directions for further research. While rethinking the relation between the performer and the apparatus is one potential area for consideration and elaboration, another is investigating the role performance has played in exhibition and reception. Historically, cinema was itself a performance before the adoption of synchronized recorded sound: no two screenings were ever truly identical despite the often-noted mechanical reproducibility of the films. Most projectors were hand-cranked, and so the varying speeds at which a film was unspooled constituted an unseen manual performance by the projectionist, however rote and monotonous these laborious "performances" might typically have been. Sound accompaniment—whether musical, verbal, or otherwise—was a central nexus between projection and performance during the so-called silent period.5 Sound cinema tended to systematize and mechanize the experience of cinema, but in many exhibition venues, performances of various kinds retained an important place in the movie program as preludes to a feature film. Nor did all performance take place on the stage. While the disciplining of audience members (who were strongly encouraged to remain more or less silent in their seats once the lights dimmed) was a precondition for theater's emergence as a mass medium at the end of the nineteenth century, neither theater nor movie audiences have always been compliant. Indeed, stories of quasi-performative audience behavior are ubiquitous and would likely constitute a fascinating...

pdf

Share