This is 11 minutes of film from 1906.
1906!
Film was only invented roughly 30 years before. By some estimates, 6 billion people worldwide will have their own MOBILE web media viewers by the year 2013. That means that 6 billion people will have access to mobile cameras and youtube.
How do you think life was different for people before we had the ability to film our lives? If you could go back and ask one of these people walking down Market Street in San Francisco questions about their lives without movies everywhere, what would you ask them?
One consequence of a new medium that always fascinates me is that way that old media try to appropriate, undermine, or out-evolve the new medium. For instance, the rise of black and white photography coincides with painters deciding that representational art was not truly artistic. What now mattered what color, abstraction, and interiority. You have Paul Klee for instance saying "I don't paint what I see; I paint what's really there." That kind of statement was an oblique swipe at the status of photography as an art and as a way of revealing truth. "Reality" was now what COULDN'T be depicted by photography.
ReplyDeleteOf course years later, photography returned the favor by focusing on color, abstraction, and impressionism.
I'm sure someone, somewhere, has described the effect that film had on literature. In terms of appropriation of techniques, I wonder if the floating, comprehensive consciousness of many of the high modernists' narrators like James Joyce's Leopold Bloom or Marcel Proust's unnamed narrator would have connected with readers if not for the emergence of film. On the other hand, the restless, subjective quality of those narrations goes beyond anything that static mount film cameras could do at the time.
If I could ask people in pre-film days any question, I guess the question would just be "describe what you're feeling and thinking at this very moment." I wonder if people thought about the narrative of their lives differently before they had the ability to capture everything for playback later.
Susan Sontag said, "to collect photographs is to collect the world." We have compiled and archived all this human data over the past 100 or so years through photo, video, and audio. It strikes me that we must be more confident in this kind of data to represent us outside of ourselves. Yet on the other hand, we must be more wary and paranoid of how recorded data can misrepresent us.
ReplyDeleteWow! 6 million people? that is a lot! I personally do not enjoy black and white films as much as colored films, but I guess that is just my opinion. It is weird how much technology has evolved through the ages. These days, there are t.v. sets that can play shows and movies in 3-D, when in those days, you were lucky if you could see it in black and white! The same sort of thing goes for all technology, including photography. =)
ReplyDeleteSIX BILLION Morgan! Six billion people who can watch all the black and white movies they want when they are riding the train to grandma's house. Six billion people who have their own video and audio recorder.
ReplyDeleteIt's quite amazing! If I'm not mistaken, right now, the world's population is 7 billion people. This would mean that 6 out of 7 random people in the world will have access to video cameras and Youtube. WOW! I never even thought that so many had portable video cameras and Youtube. Also, like pointed out on the text, nowadays there are movies everywhere. Not only in TVs but everywhere you see an electronic device with a motion picture screen it is a movie. Short or long, it doesn't matter. The point is that this fact is amazing, and it really makes you learn this interesting fact.
ReplyDeleteWhen I see this video, I think of something quite interesting. From my point of view, video seems like the first outburst of visual imagery that could actually file pictures so that one could see them later. It was in the late 1800's that video was created, and since then we can watch and watch again scenes from the past's daily life.
ReplyDeleteI think that it's kind of like a way to record how life was back then and today; how do we know that life before the 1800's was like we think we know was when there was no 'film' to show it to us aside from inaccurate drawings and written descriptions? Pretty interesting stuff.
I think this video is very interesting. It help us see how was the life back then.
ReplyDeleteOver the years films are getting better and teaches us different stuff.
Movies ARE everywhere and the fact that so many people can have access to it is amazing!I mean really, how many people do you know who don't own their own computers, or T.Vs or anything like those devices?
ReplyDeleteWow, interesting. 6 billion people.. That's a lot of people. I hate to watch black and white movies because sometimes I get interested in backgrounds or what the characters are wearing. Also because I am not used to watch black and white movies. People living in the past would be amazed on life that we are living right now. They might be like, "wow. new generation! cool things. What's this? how do you use this?" According to the past, everything improved. I think it is good for me that I am not living in the 1900s
ReplyDeletethe concept of the movies in the old days was just filming a street and know a days thats not a movie thats like recording a trip. but it amazing how we have advanced in tecnology . And i love the idea that the movies starrted by recording a street and thats how the whole concept of the movies began
ReplyDeleteYou know what Sofia, movies arose out of people filming scenes like this, then realizing that they could take different scenes and place them in an order that represents a story. For example, a scene of a man dancing followed by a scene of a baby crying suddenly becomes a story about a man making a baby cry by his terrible dancing.
ReplyDeleteLars! Think about how having a recorded image to look at later changed our concept of the self.
ReplyDeleteTechnology has been having a really fast growth... I can't believe that it was only 30 years ago, when they didn't have videos like we do right now. If you think about it, 30 years are short time... It is amazing that 6 BILLION people are going to have access to web. I decided to NOT take a video of myself and post it on You Tube, I don't want 6 BILLION people getting access to what I have done. But I still think it is cool that more people are getting access to Internet...
ReplyDeleteHaha, Ha Nuel. Yes, if you think about it 30years are short time. But to me, 30years are long. But, I still can't believe that technology had been improved this much in 30 years! It's amazing. I might take a long time to make a device or electronic things. Those people might took long time and their hard work had been improved the world! I just want to say "Thanks!"
ReplyDelete0 to 6 billion in thirty years that was fast. Who knows about the future anyway maybe somebody might develop something better and make video obsolete. Or maybe even more than 6 billion will have mobiles.
ReplyDeleteI think that it's great that by 2013 we will all have our own video cameras! that means that we will be able to film what ever we want and where ever we want. I think that before so many people had access to cameras, to represent how they'r lives were like, they either painted what they saw, or they wrote it. I think that the access to cameras has changed how we express what we see and how we see it because for people who don't like to write, or they can't paint, they can take a video. But, grom my point of view, when someone takes a video, the other people are not that able to see how the artist sees the world, because the artist can't represent exactly how they see the world, because they cannot change how the world looks like through a video, while writing or painting it, the artist can do any changes he or she wants to do on the world they see.
ReplyDeleteFilm has changed the world completely and in a couple of more year it will change the world even more, because technology gets more advanced every day. Now a days technology surrounds us and technology is used now for almost everything, and in a couple of year technology will be used for everything. I can't wait to see how the future is going be and what new technology is going to be invented.
ReplyDeleteOur way of arranging and taking films have changed a lot. I mean ANIMATION? movies like TRON,TRANSFORMERS? We can move from one scene to another easily with a few clicks and do many different things with a few keys pressed and a few clicks and movements with your mouse and we can communicate and share videos as well as watch them online. This is an Amazing accomplishment! Communicating and seeing things you might not see otherwise!
ReplyDeleteGo Film!