Light Had Learned to Remember

For thousands of years human beings made images in order to retain what could not remain. A face was carved in stone, painted on a wall, written into an icon, impressed upon a coin. Photography intensified this possibility during the nineteenth century: light itself could leave a trace. Yet the trace remained still. Then, toward the end of that century, something unprecedented occurred: the image began to move.

Cinema was not suddenly invented in one place. Experiments with photography, optical devices and the reproduction of movement were developing in several countries: Edison and Dickson in the United States, Marey in France, Anschütz and the Skladanowskys in Germany, among others.

Yet it was not accidental that cinema crystallized so powerfully in France. France already possessed a remarkable culture of public visual spectacle: magic lanterns, panoramas, optical entertainments, theatres, fairs and cafés had accustomed people to gathering in order to see constructed worlds. At the same time, late nineteenth-century France was unusually receptive to the conjunction of science, industry, mechanical invention and art. Étienne-Jules Marey used chronophotography to decompose movement that the unaided eye could scarcely analyse. The Lumière family came from photographic industry; Georges Méliès came from theatre, illusion and magic.

In December 1895, the Lumières’ public screenings in Paris was remarkably simple: a train entering a station. The railway carried bodies through space; cinematography would carry appearances through time. A civilization increasingly fascinated by mechanical movement had found a means of retaining movement.

Méliès almost immediately discovered the complementary possibility. The camera need not merely witness what happened. It could show what had never happened. People could vanish, time could jump, travellers could reach the Moon. From its beginnings cinema therefore contained a tension it has never lost: record and invention, evidence and illusion, memory and dream.

Even its names reveal how difficult the invention was to define. English film originally named a thin skin or membrane and eventually the photographic strip. Moving picture, shortened to movie, emphasized motion. Cinema and Russian kino/кино, ultimately related to Greek κίνημα and κίνησις, likewise placed movement at the centre. Dutch bioscoop, Scandinavian bio and Icelandic bíómynd approached it through life and its image.

Eliezer Ben Yehudah chose something wonderfully material in Hebrew: סרט – seret, a strip, ribbon or band. It was an old word long before cinematography. Mishnah Kilayim 9:9 already speaks of סרט של צמר, a strip of wool, in discussing wool and linen. The word continued through later Hebrew literary usage, including Hebrew renderings of Don Quixote, before acquiring its cinematographic meaning: the physical ribbon eventually gave its name to the motion picture itself. Modern סרטון – sarton, a little film or video clip, has made that ancient ribbon small enough to inhabit a telephone.

A man filmed a few decades later can walk toward us. He has disappeared, but his gesture can begin again. Cinema had not stopped time. It had discovered something stranger: light had learned to remember.

Cinema did not remain for long a European technical curiosity. Cameras, projectors and films travelled rapidly across countries and continents. Yet the same apparatus did not produce the same cinema everywhere. France, Germany, Russia and later the Soviet Union, the United States, Italy, Egypt, India, Japan and many other societies developed recognizable ways of looking at themselves and at others. The technology travelled; the gaze remained culturally particular.

This is why the immense filmographies accumulated during the twentieth century are more than collections of entertainment. Soviet kino, American movies, Egyptian cinema, the numerous cinemas of India, and French, German, Italian or Japanese traditions constructed different relations between individuals, families, landscapes, work, authority, religion, humour and tragedy. The moving image acquired different cultural grammars.

The camera simultaneously transformed the scale of seeing. A lens could approach what the unaided eye scarcely perceived: an insect, a cell, a drop of water, minute organisms whose microcosm suddenly became an immense landscape. Another camera could withdraw until a city, desert, mountain range or ocean fitted within the frame. Cinematography could slow movements too rapid for ordinary sight and accelerate processes too gradual to be noticed. The immense became graspable; the nearly invisible could fill a screen.

Cinema soon began to modify the societies it recorded. People encountered distant cities before travelling to them. They discovered fashions, gestures, songs, accents and ways of speaking through actors and stories. The influence moved in both directions: cinema observed society, while society increasingly borrowed from cinema.

With sound this circulation became still more powerful. Hebrew expresses this: kolnoa – קולנוע was a new word that matches sound and motion. Voices and languages survived beside faces. Egyptian films travelled throughout the Arabic-speaking world; the cinemas of India carried different languages and musical traditions; Soviet, American and European productions exported not merely stories but intonations, social types and conceptions of everyday life.

The deepest transformation brought by cinema may concern neither entertainment nor technology, but time itself. Human beings had always remembered, narrated and imagined the past. Writing could describe what had happened; painting could represent a chosen instant; photography could retain its visible trace. Cinema introduced another possibility: an event that had ended could apparently happen again.

A person enters a room. In ordinary life the action is irreversible. The door opens, the person crosses the threshold, and the moment is gone. On film the same entrance may be repeated, slowed down, accelerated, interrupted or shown backward. The event remains historically unique while its image becomes repeatable.

There is something of a total hapax in every filmed instant: it happened once and can never happen again, yet what happened once can be made to move again and again.

Cinema consequently altered storytelling itself. Film learned to cut. One face could suddenly replace a landscape; Moscow could follow Paris within a second; childhood could interrupt old age. Montage placed events beside one another that had never been physically adjacent. Flashback and anticipation accustomed spectators to moving backward and forward through a life without leaving their chairs.

These techniques eventually escaped the cinema. We now speak naturally of a “flashback,” a “close-up,” something happening “off-screen,” rewinding, fast-forwarding or cutting from one subject to another. Written narratives absorbed cinematic habits. More profoundly, our perception of history increasingly became organized through sequences of moving images. For many events of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, what we think we remember may partly be what cameras have taught us to remember.

This gives the filmed image a peculiar historical authority: we have seen it. Yet seeing is not identical with possessing the whole event. An hour may become twenty seconds; sequences may be displaced; what happened before or afterward may remain unseen. Cinema created an unprecedented form of evidence while simultaneously requiring us to learn how that evidence should be read.

Nor did cinema truly master the fourth dimension. The projected image is two-dimensional, although perspective and movement allow us to perceive three-dimensional space. Actual lived time has escaped. Nobody inside an old film can be reached.

The material carrying this peculiar survival is itself subject to time. Celluloid shrinks and decomposes; nitrate can burn; colours fade; scratches accumulate. What remembers can itself require care.

Here cinema acquired another relationship with time: repair. A damaged film need not simply remain damaged. It can be cleaned, reconstructed, copied and restored. Missing fragments may sometimes be discovered elsewhere and reinstated.

Cinema therefore changed our intuition of the past. The past was no longer only something left behind. Its moving traces could be preserved, lost, rediscovered, repaired, reinterpreted and set in motion once more.

The filmed instant remains a hapax. Its continuing life does not repeat the instant itself.

It gives the instant a future.

For most of cinema’s first century, the moving image remained attached to an object and usually to a place. Even television kept the spectator before an apparatus occupying a recognizable place in the home. Today the moving image has entered the hand: a smartphone does not merely make the old cinema smaller. It changes the status of the image. A moving picture may last three hours – or seven seconds. It may record a wedding, a war, a cat crossing a kitchen, a liturgy, a grandchild learning to walk, a political declaration or somebody laughing. All can inhabit the same little luminous rectangle.

The old words have survived the materials they once described. We still say film when there is no photographic film, while Hebrew סרט, seret continues without a physical ribbon. The persistence of the vocabulary itself connects the digital image with the long history from which it developed.

The smartphone has introduced an extraordinary versatility – and breakability. An image can be made in seconds, watched a handful of times, shortened, corrected, retaped, copied, sent across continents, placed in digital trash, deleted and sometimes caught again. It may disappear from its maker’s device while continuing to exist elsewhere. What seems immaterial can prove both surprisingly fragile and unexpectedly persistent.

This reverses something in the first intuition of film. Photography and cinema seemed to promise preservation: this happened, and its visible trace can remain. Today we produce so many traces that memory increasingly requires selection. A family once possessed a limited number of photographs and perhaps a few precious reels. A single afternoon can now generate hundreds of images. The question is no longer only how to capture an instant, but what should be kept, what may be discarded and what might one day be worth recovering.

This need not be understood as a decline from a durable past into a disposable present. Digital versatility also creates new forms of continuation. Images can migrate between technologies and generations in ways that the makers of the first films could hardly have imagined.

There is another consequence. The distinction between the person who makes moving images and the person who watches them has largely disappeared. For the early cinema, a comparatively small number of people possessed cameras and films were shown to assembled audiences. Today billions of people can become camera operator, actor, editor, archivist and spectator within the same few minutes. Cinema has moved not merely from the theatre to the telephone but from a specialized practice into an ordinary human activity.

This abundance changes memory. Much of what is filmed today is not intended for an archive or even for tomorrow. A short video may exist only to say: look where I am; look what is happening now. It can be sent, seen and discarded almost as quickly as a spoken sentence. Yet the apparently ephemeral image may unexpectedly survive and acquire significance years later. What was trivial at the moment of recording can become testimony.

Today’s digital images may become the Qumran scrolls of the future.

What began as the astonishing possibility of making a photographed instant move and speak has become a developing human practice of constructing stories, preserving evidence, exchanging moments and carrying visible traces from one technological age into another.

Cinema did not conquer time. It opened a passage through which images could travel beyond the circumstances in which they were made.

The first audiences watched movement arrive.  We are still discovering where it can go – a new remake of Don Quixote’s megillah: the scroll unrolls, the story moves, and history travels with it.