The Cinema in Flux: The Evolution of Motion Picture Technology from the Magic Lantern to the Digital Era by Lenny Lipton (review)

What's the best way to describe the nature of cinema? An old joke circulating among film archivists captures it very well: Outside of a movie theater, a group of people discusses the show they have just seen. One person asks, "What did you think of the film?" "Awesome, beautifully written and masterfully directed," says a regular patron. "Awful, all scratched and full of splices," says the projectionist. This imaginary conversation reflects the twofold nature of film as narrative text and physical artifact, and consequently of cinema as art form and technology. This dichotomy is apparent in most cinema scholarship, where the material aspect of the medium is usually subordinated to the aesthetic one. Lenny Lipton, on the contrary, takes the opposite route by writing a monumental history of motion picture technology from the magic lantern to the digital era. The choice of the magic lantern as point of departure for his 800-page journey through the evolution of cinema technology needs some explanation, which Lipton himself provides in his preface: he favors the idea that "the magic lantern is not pre-cinema but cinema itself," a notion that, he argues, is "based on the most fundamental definition of cinema technology, which in my view is the projection of motion" (p. xi).

Lipton's premise is revelatory of his approach to the medium, which mostly favors a technological perspective rather than a cultural or aesthetic reading of history. While this angle may be perceived as limiting, it is certainly welcome given the absence of a comprehensive and detailed account of the different (and sometimes obscure) technologies that have competed against each other in the four centuries covered by the book. The history of the medium's technology is also a history of the people who made this technology possible, and one of the praiseworthy aspects of The Cinema in Flux is the tribute it pays to many inventors and innovators whose names and contributions are often unknown even to the most devoted cinema lover.

Lipton's approach is reflected in the way he organizes cinema history according to the material carrier of moving image information: the Glass Era, the Celluloid Era, and the Digital Era, which also serve as markers for the three main sections of the book, each divided into smaller subsections (like "The 35mm Medium," "Small Formats," and "The Big Wide Screen") and chapters dedicated to individual technologies. Unsurprisingly, the Celluloid Era constitutes the bulk of the book, spanning over 400 pages; still, the other two sections do not just bookend the age of flexible film, but rather expand the notion of cinema before and after the hegemony of celluloid.

Overlaps are of course unavoidable and indeed reflective of the nonlinear evolution of cinema technology: each subsection follows a chronological order, so that, for example, the "Sound" part in the Celluloid cinema section begins with live sound for magic lantern shows (Chapter 25) and ends with a discussion of multichannel, magnetic, and digital sound (Chapter 39). This structure confirms the theoretical idea at the core of the book—namely, the continuity between the three major eras into which Lipton divides cinema history—while making the intimidating size of the book more manageable, as the different topics can be approached separately depending on the reader's interests. In fact, the book itself invites this approach, as it functions more as a detailed, chronologically organized encyclopedia than as a traditional academic book engaging new theories or new archival materials (the sources used, though numerous, are almost exclusively secondary). Its strength is in the way in which it encompasses the entirety of moving image projection's technological history rather than in the newness of its theses, which is consistent with Lipton's background as inventor and scientist as opposed to academic or traditional scholar—which is reflected also in his writing style, straightforward and clear...