André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231173575
- eISBN:
- 9780231539388
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231173575.003.0005
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter revisits a model of the “double birth of media.” The expression “the double birth of cinema” refers to, on one hand, the invention between 1890 and 1895 of a device for ...
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This chapter revisits a model of the “double birth of media.” The expression “the double birth of cinema” refers to, on one hand, the invention between 1890 and 1895 of a device for capturing-restoring moving images—Lumière Cinématographe being the most successful example—and, on the other, the establishment of an institution for producing and exhibiting moving pictures. Cinema, however, cannot be simply reduced to merely projecting photographic images; it is not something one “invents.” There is no cinema patent because cinema is not a technique but rather a social, cultural, and economic system. The justification for the double birth model is its implied refusal of a one-dimensional conception of something as complex as the emergence of a new medium. The chapter argues for a pluralistic view of cinema's birth, one that projects how the history of cinema is a succession of deaths and beginnings.Less
This chapter revisits a model of the “double birth of media.” The expression “the double birth of cinema” refers to, on one hand, the invention between 1890 and 1895 of a device for capturing-restoring moving images—Lumière Cinématographe being the most successful example—and, on the other, the establishment of an institution for producing and exhibiting moving pictures. Cinema, however, cannot be simply reduced to merely projecting photographic images; it is not something one “invents.” There is no cinema patent because cinema is not a technique but rather a social, cultural, and economic system. The justification for the double birth model is its implied refusal of a one-dimensional conception of something as complex as the emergence of a new medium. The chapter argues for a pluralistic view of cinema's birth, one that projects how the history of cinema is a succession of deaths and beginnings.
