The haunted gallery
by Tom Ruffles
[ bookreviews ]
The typical approach to writing about visual media is to take a vertical slice and analyse some aspect, either in isolation or with a few socio-economic trimmings thrown in. Lynda Nead, in contrast, has looked horizontally at visual forms in Britain between about 1895 and 1907 (the latter a point when cinema was beginning to mature into the narrative style we know today). She has thereby avoided a staid linear progression and teased apart interconnections between different media, showing just how unusual the influences on them could be, and what a remarkable ferment there was. The result is a wonderful smorgasbord, with insights on every page that explore how these media cross-fertilised to constitute a rich cultural environment.
The key motif of the book is the transition from stasis to motion. Film was part of a general perception that life was changing, and speeding up. But not just getting faster. There was a feeling of what Nead calls "temporal scrambling", with a sense of past, present and future colliding in the headlong rush towards the modern. She makes the strong claim that "the history of visual media in this period can be properly described as the history of the velocities of the image", and her wide-ranging analysis successfully captures a sense of this flux.
The book is divided into three sections, each with two chapters: Ghosts and Machines; Cameras and Cars; and Earthly and Astral Bodies. The first chapter looks at mechanical means of movement over a range of products, from the mutoscope viewing device which was like a kinetoscope peep-show but using separate photographic prints instead of film, through moving walkways and escalators at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle, the Ferris wheel, Etienne-Jules Marey's photographic gun experiments, the reception of projected moving pictures, and taking in optics, 19th century psychology and physiology and Vernon Lee's writings on aesthetics.
Chapter Two switches from the machines to the ghosts, though only loosely, examining impulses to movement that were implicit in art works over a long period. So we have Pygmalion's Galatea descending from her pedestal; the remarkable transformations that could be achieved with the magic lantern (a pity that the accompanying photograph shows only a single-lensed lantern rather than the triunial that would have allowed maximum flexibility); tableaux vivants and poses plastiques; weird portraits in the form of classical busts that are more like photographs of amputees; stage magic; Freud's The Uncanny; Spiritualism; Georges Méliès; the enchanted painting genre of early film - stillness was giving way to movement, and the animated painting was emblematic of this shift.
After this race through 19th century culture, its influences and products, that seems to bear out Nead's thesis by the pace she sets, subsequent chapters calm down somewhat and expand on the foundations laid in the first section. Section Two examines a pair of technologies that are representative of modern living. Its first chapter plunges us into London, its complexities as a major city that faced both backwards and forwards, and the use of the hand camera from the 1880s onwards. The detective camera could be used discreetly, perhaps disguised as a parcel, so that the subject was unaware of being photographed. This threw up questions of privacy, individual rights and etiquette that were hotly debated, and which could be circumvented to a large extent by middle-class photographers focusing on the working class, whose protests would not carry any weight. Such considerations were still relevant when the first moving picture cameras went onto the streets to capture life in all its bustle.
The next chapter is devoted to the now-obscure Hubert von Herkomer, RA, who, despite the Teutonic name, grew up in Southampton and was a long-time resident of Bushey in Hertfordshire. He achieved huge artistic success with his idealised rural scenes and later turned to film making (and is probably due for the sort of reassessment that Lord Leighton has received in recent years). Nead's interest is in his obsession with the motor car, of which he was an early and enthusiastic adopter. She uses his relationship with cars and travel as a case study to unpick contemporary ambivalences about the motorised vehicle and how it changed the traveller's relationship to the countryside, "the rural adventure machine" as Nead aptly describes it (von Herkomer maintained the fiction of a rural idyll in his paintings even while the reality was becoming increasingly suburban and driven-through).
The result of this vehicular obsession was a new type of perception, "motorised vision" as Nead calls it, which differed from that associated with train travel. Again these were issues absorbed into early films, which are full of cars having extraordinary adventures and extraordinary accidents. Our Edwardian forebears were as conscious as we are that the car could be as much a source of harm to the individual and degradation to the environment as it was a source of personal liberation. It is an irony of the growth of car use that it led to a greater awareness of the countryside and its vulnerability, resulting in a particular national identity based on nostalgia that we still see depicted in heritage cinema.
The final section introduces sex by observing the way the female body was depicted within early film and how it foregrounds issues of scophophilia. This may have a familiar ring to those who have followed film studies debates on the male gaze over the past 30 years (though we are spared Laura Mulvey's overexposed article Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema), and Muybridge's serial photographs, and frame enlargements of early films depicting women disrobing, have been well (un)covered. However, this short chapter does have interesting discussions of the stereoscope, ladies' underthings and the origins of the stag film. Nead points out that the nude has always had a problematic place in high art, and photography and films pushed the boundaries of public acceptability - included is an amusing advertisement from Philipp Wolff offering for sale such delights as A Bride Unrobing (sic); Graeco-Turkish War, Afloat; Temptation of St Anthony; Graeco-Turkish War, Ashore; and French Lady's Bath (clearly more stimulating than the ablutions of her staid English counterpart), all mixed indiscriminately and illustrated by stills. One wonders what the content of Passion Play, offered on the same list, might be.
The last chapter scrutinises bodies too, but celestial ones, and examines how astronomical writing and illustration created a mobile point of view that could traverse vast distances in a moment, and consequently back in time (the Victorians appreciated that looking a long way away meant seeing something as it existed in the past), coming back to Nead's starting point of the flexibility of motion and time. Accompanied by contemporary photographs of stars, the chapter also looks at the images of Nasmyth and Carpenter which showed hypothetical viewpoints of and from the moon. This section could usefully be read in conjunction with Jennifer Tucker's passages on astronomy in her Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science, which looks at turn-of-the-century discussions of life on Mars as well as at Nasmyth, and an article in Victorian Studies (Summer 2006) by Frances Robertson on Nasmyth's pictures of the moon. Astronomical themes seem to have been everywhere, from the globe at the Paris World's Fair, depictions of the moon by Méliès, to planets on company letterheads.
Intriguingly, Nead mentions German philosopher Felix Eberty speculating that every event on earth was projected into space on "the wings of a ray of light". Another key figure discussed is Camille Flammarion, astronomer, science populariser and psychical researcher, who envisioned a soul, Lumen, released from the body at death. Travelling far into space, Lumen would be able to see earth's history as it approached, carried on beams of light, showing the dead as if they were alive. One wonders if Einstein had come across these speculations when he started thinking about relativity. By his own account he pondered the implications of riding a beam of light when he was 16, which would have been in 1895, coincidentally a key year in cinema history of course, and after Eberty and Flammarion wrote about the subject with slightly less spectacular results than Einstein achieved. Nead supplies examples of imagery containing beams of light in a cinema context (one of which makes up the fabulous front cover design) to show how powerful this ‘magical illumination' was to audiences for whom electric lighting was a novelty. This was an age of marvels, and Nead has done a tremendous job in dissecting some of its key elements.
As far as the use of haunting as a device is concerned, I was less convinced. It is a vague concept that covers a variety of situations, from an uncanny sense of presence to the way it is used here, in the sense of immanence: "The dream of motion haunts the visual arts... statues step down from their pedestals, portrait figures break free of their frames and enter the world of the living... The gallery, it is clear, is haunted by the possibilities of life and imminent movement." This is a feeling inherent in figurative art that the statue might move, the eyes in the painting might follow you round the room or wink as you stare at them.
But haunting in any significant sense suggests agency, whereas a suspicion that the artwork is capable of movement is within the spectator, not projected by the object contemplated. Early commentators, watching the first films flicker to life (these metaphors are deeply ingrained) were impressed by the sense that somehow death was overcome. After the Lumière show on 22 March 1895, a reporter wrote: "With this new invention, death will be no longer absolute, final. The people we have seen on the screen will be with us, moving and alive after their deaths", and Gorky famously saw film as "the life of ghosts". Numerous commentators before Nead, to the point of cliché, have alluded to this property of film to reanimate the dead, but as Gorky concluded, it is only "a pale imitation of life". The Lumière spectator was unduly optimistic about death overcome.
One thing I found slightly puzzling. Nead is Professor of Art History at Birkbeck College. That is also the home of Ian Christie, Professor of Art, Film and Visual Media, one of our foremost historians of early cinema and a particular authority on pioneer Robert Paul, who is cited extensively in the book. (Laura Mulvey is also a professor there.) Yet Christie is not mentioned in the acknowledgments nor the index. Nor is there any reference to his work on Paul or the book he wrote to support a 1995 BBC televisions series, The Last Machine: Early Cinema and the Birth of the Modern World, which covers some of the same ground as The Haunted Gallery. Indeed, many of Christie's chapter titles could have come from Nead's book: Space and Time Machine, Tales from the City, The Body Electric. Never mind: this is a superb book, beautifully produced and illustrated - Yale University Press have done her proud - and a valuable addition to the literature on fin de siècle culture.
