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Also by Nicholas Mirzoeff:
An Introduction to Visual Culture
The Visual Culture Reader
The Right to Look
HOW TO SEE
THE WORLD
An Introduction to Images, from Self-Portraits
to Selfies, Maps to Movies, and More
NICHOLAS MIRZOEFF
BASIC BOOKS
A MEMBER OF THE PERSEUS BOOKS GROUP
NEW YORK
CHAPTER 4
THE WORLD ON SCREEN
n 1895, two brothers arranged for a new distraction in the
I frenzied modern city of Paris
, Auguste and Louis
Lumière rented a billiard hall downstairs in the Grand
Café to show their version of the new moving pictures. All
kinds of entertainments had tried to create the illusion of
moving images. One Louis Aimé Le Prince, a French pho-
tographer, was the first to think of cutting up photographs,
mounting them on a strip, and projecting light through
them, in 1888. Thomas Edison had patented his Kineto-
cope in 1891 and held public demonstrations from 1894.
The human eye retains an image for an instant after it per-
ceives it, a phenomenon known as the persistence of vision.
The result is that if more than 12 frames are shown in a
econd, an illusion of movement occurs. Edison showed 48
frames per second, making his device noisy. The Lumières
opted for 16 to 20 frames per second and adapted a sew-
ing machine mechanism to make the transitions smoother.
We now see these screenings as one of the beginnings of
modern cinema.
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is to say, the railways were world-cream
u T-Mobile combination of financial globalizatio
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networked computers has created the 24/7 constantly
updating-and-refreshed world in its own image. The
adopted by most national clocks bas, alth
profession continued to use loc @ 7 79%
lar pattern was followed in the United States. In 1883, US
railroad companies created standardized time zones, only
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legalized by Congress in 1918. Whereas time had been
highly local, it now became uniform for wide areas and
then changed abruptly at arbitrary points. Another way to
describe this would be to say that time before the train was
analog, meaning that it calibrated evenly with each place's
relation to the sun. Afterward, it became digital, meaning
that it shifted in arbitrary units of an hour (like the one or
the zero in the computer).
Factories made this change real for the new industrial
workforce. At the beginning of industrialization, workers
would wander out during the workday as they felt inclined,
or take naps if they were tired (Thompson 1991). They
brought the habits of agricultural life into industrial prac-
tice. Soon, though, it came to feel “natural” that there is
a working day and that as much of that day as possible
should be devoted to work. Employers and employees bat-
tled then and now to extend or shorten the hours of that
day. The creation of the railway network enabled people to
live outside city centers and travel there for work. By 1910,
a third of all French people were season-ticket holders on
the train, traveling in and out of urban centers on a daily
basis. A century later, France was still the leading Euro-
pean nation in terms of rail transport, with over 54 billion
passenger miles of rail journeys a year.
Both the scenes filmed by the Lumières depicted a
tremendous and visible imposition of abstract order onto
time and space. The train arrives at a given time, just as
the timetable says it should, enabled by the network of
tracks across the country. Passengers wait until the train
has slowed before opening the doors, while those waiting
on the platform hang back to allow them off. Our bodies
adjust to the rhythm and demands of the machine. In the
factory scene, the symbolic swinging-open of the gates at
the end of the day, followed by an orderly procession of
calm workers streaming home, was nothing less than a
visual representation of the triumph of work discipline.
The train and the cinema merged in the form of the
tracking shot. In the Lumière brothers' films, the sense of
movement came from the train or from the people leav-
ing. The camera itself remained static. Around the time
of the First World War, directors began to mount cameras
on what is known as a dolly, a trolley on wheels. The dolly
was and is moved along a set of tracks, directly imitating
railway tracks. If the cinematic view is the scene seen from
the train, the shot is made from the tracks. Around this
time moving pictures became less of a novelty and audi-
ences began to decline. Some operators sat spectators in
spaces designed to resemble train carriages and projected
their images on the windows. The train became a cinema
and a place of modem spectacle.
The avant-garde Soviet film director Dziga Vertov
wanted to liberate the camera from the limitations of the
human eye and offer a way of seeing that the unaided eye
could not achieve. It began with the train:
I was returning from the railroad station. In my ears,
there remained chugs and bursts of steam from a
departing train. Somebody cries in laughter, a whistle,
the station bell, the clanking locomotive ... whispers,
shouts, farewells. And walking away I thought, I need
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to find a machine not only to describe but to register,
to photograph these sounds ... To organize the visual
world and not the audible world? Is this the answer?'
And so Vertov came to imagine the camera as a new
form of sensory organization as a whole, affecting more
than just sight. This is the meaning of his famous punning
declaration in 1919: “I am eye. I am a mechanical eye. I, a
machine, show you the world as only I can see it.”?
Along with other artists, Vertov took cinema to the
Soviet people on the Agit Trains, which brought art to
localities outside the urban centers. Films were screened
to rural audiences directly from the train. In moments
such as this, the train, visual culture, and the ideal of the
modern interacted to create new ways of seeing the world.
Trains made visible worlds: worlds to live in, to work in,
and to imagine yourself in.
event was interpreted as part of a titanic struggle between
the superpowers” (1996). Edwards stresses that “metaphors,
technique and fiction” were just as important as weapons
ystems and computers in constructing the hyperbolic
belief that every aspect of global life could be monitored
and controlled. Cinema used the train as a key metaphor
for closed worlds, and made them believable.
In 1951, director Alfred Hitchcock brought these themes
together in his classic Strangers on a Train. In the dramatic
opening sequence, we see as the camera does, or more
exactly, as if we were a camera. The camera tracks two
men arriving at a railway station. We see only their shoes,
enough to tell us that one is something of a dandy because
he has two-tone black-and-white shoes, while the other is
wearing the then standard black leather and carrying tennis
rackets. Then we cut to a view as if from the train itself.
CLOSED WORLDS
In the Cold War era (1945-91), classic studio films like Brief
Encounter (1945, director David Lean), 3:10 to Yuma (1957,
director Delmer Daves) or Lady on a Train (1945, director
Charles David) made the train the central place of action.
Love and murder now took place on the train. Cinema
had moved from being what was seen from the train to
being set on the train. These were metaphorical depic-
tions of what historian Paul Edwards has called the "closed
world” imagined by the Cold War, "within which every
Figure 40. Still from Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train
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The camera sees like the train and the tracks fill the
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econd, an illusion of movement occurs. Edison showed 40
frames per second, making his device noisy. The Lumières
opted for 16 to 20 frames per second and adapted a sew-
ing machic mechanism to maket ions smoother.
e screenings as o
beginnings ...
modern cinem
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126 HOW TO SEE THE WORLD
Since 1895, we have watched the world as moving pic-
tures on screen. The world we see has in turn been shaped
and ordered by the way we see it, from film to television
and today's digital networks. The difference is that whereas
we once had to go somewhere specific to watch a screen,
the screens now go everywhere we do. This chapter con-
siders railways and digital media as two material networks
that produced different ways to see the world. The railway
network that enabled the Industrial Revolution from 1840
onward interfaced with cinema to create one form of visual
world. Today, the distributed networks created by the Inter-
net are producing another world that we see on small pix-
elated screens. While we know how the development of
railways changed the world, we are only just beginning to
experience and understand the impact of portable screen
culture.
Figure 38. Still from Lumière brothers' Arrival of a Train at
La Ciotat
SCENE FROM THE TRAIN
In many accounts, the Lumières' film Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat
is said to be their very first. In fact, they did not film a train
until 1896, and the fifty-second film that is now familiar to
us was shot in 1897
What seems to have in fact been their first effort was
shot on December 28, 1895. Entitled Workers Leaving the
Factory, it showed exactly what the title suggests. The
women we see here were working in the successful factory,
owned by the Lumières, which made photographic plates,
giving the brothers the time and resources to experiment
Figure 39. Still from Lumière brothers' Workers Leaving
the Factory
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with other projects. If we take these two celebrated films
together, we can see how the industrial time and space cre-
ated by factory work and the railway produced a way to see
a world of its own: moving pictures.
In these brief films, shot in one continuous take, a
moment of action unfolds. Workers, many of them women,
leave the factory at the end of their allotted work period and
pass by the camera. A train arrives in a station. According
to a popular tale, the audience at the first screening were
so startled by the sight of a train moving toward them that
they fled the room. Film historians have shown this to be
false, not least because the film of the train was not shown
(Loiperdinger and Elzer 2004). It is striking that the sub-
jects of these first ever moving pictures studiously ignore
the fact that they are being filmed. No doubt the Lumières
instructed their employees to do so, and arranged for the
visual surprises that appear in the crowd of women: first, a
man on a bicycle, and then a horse and carriage. Arrival of
a Train at La Ciotat was similarly choreographed, with sev-
eral family members appearing in the film.
The apparently simple fact of film shoots at a factory
and a train station marks the convergence of several key
forces of modernity. Writers of the period had compared
the decade of railway expansion of 1847-57 with the era
of the European encounters with the Americas after
Columbus. That is to say, the railways were world-creating,
just as today's combination of financial globalization and
networked computers has created the 24/7 constantly
updating-and-refreshed world in its own image. The
railway created a new world economy that produced its
own time and space; this has been seen as leading to the
invention of moving images. The first moving images
were, after all, those that people saw from the windows of
trains (Schivelbusch 1987).
As the age of rail was beginning, political philoso-
pher Karl Marx used the metaphor of its technology as a
worldview (1859) 1977). It was no more surprising that a
mid-nineteenth-century European would use a railway
metaphor than it is to hear someone comparing the mind
to a computer today. In what became very influential
terms, Marx claimed that human society and conscious-
ness are what he called the superstructure, resting on the
economic infrastructure of factories, mines, and other
forms of production. These were terms taken directly from
the railway. Infrastructure meant tracks and associated sys-
tems, while the superstructure was the train. In short, for
Marx, the human mind was a train running on a set of
economic tracks.
The railway changed the way people lived, creating
its own time and space. The modern time zones still in
use today were first devised so that accurate railway time-
tables could be created. Until then, local time was spe-
cific to each place. British railways took London time as
their standard. The resulting Greenwich Mean Time was
adopted by most national clocks by 1855, although the legal
profession continued to use local time until 1880. A simi-
lar pattern was followed in the United States. In 1883, US
railroad companies created standardized time zones, only
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e and murder now took place on the train. Cinema
u T-Mobile being what was seen from the tra 2:50 PM
being set on the train. These were metaphorical depic-
tions of what historian Paul Edwards has called the “closed
world” imagined by the Cold War, "within which every
Figure 40. Still from Hitchcock's Strangers on a T
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Figure 41. Still from Strangers on a Train
The camera sees like the train, and the tracks fill the
screen. Here the train is acting as the dolly for the camera,
so that "I am a camera" has also become "I am a train."
The train is a closed world that must follow set tracks. Just
then, it changes tracks, carrying our gaze with it, showing
that we are not free to look but set on a particular path.
Cut. We learn the identities of the two men we saw enter-
ing the station, for they have both boarded “our” train and
are sitting opposite each other. The dandy Bruno Antony
(Robert Walker) recognizes the tennis player Guy Haines
(Farley Granger) and engages him in a conversation about
his desire to do something."
Over lunch in his compartment, Bruno presents Guy
with his theory of the perfect murder. Two people meet
on a train, each wanting a person in his life killed. In their
case, Bruno hates his father and Guy needs to escape his
wife so he can remarry. So, each does the other's murder
and there's no way to connect them to the crime. At the
exact moment Bruno begins to outline his scheme, Hitch-
cock alters the camera's viewpoint. Until this point it has
been tracking each speaker, cutting back and forth in
the standard process known as shot/reverse shot. This is
intended to make the viewer feel part of the conversation.
The new view allows us to see the whole scene.
Bruno is on the right, as we see it. The blurry line is
a telegraph pole passing the window, left in to make the
viewer believe that they are really witnessing what is seen
on a train. The cut makes us aware that we are watching
a film, just as all moving images are descended from the
view from the train. What matters now is what happens
within the closed world of the train, not what we can see
from it. The closed world became the preferred environ-
ment of the “male gaze," discussed in Chapter 1. The male
characters move the plot forward but they are able to do so
only within the limited options presented.
Fast-forward to 1967 and another scene on a train in
the avant-garde film La Chinoise, directed by Jean-Luc
Godard. The jump cut makes a leap across time and space.
Once considered very daring because the audience might
not be able to follow the changes, the jump cut is now stan-
dard TV fare in shows like Law and Order, announced in
their case with the signature da-dum sound. La Chinoise is
a highly stylized film and is often difficult to watch. In the
middle of the film, however, there's a dramatic exchange
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But your action
will lead to nothing
between Véronique (Anne Wiazemsky), a young Maoist
militant, and the activist-philosopher Francis Jeanson,
playing himself. Godard posed his actors either side of the
train window, which is in view throughout, reminding us
again of the moving image as that which is seen from the
train by the camera. Intertitles spell out the French phrase
en train de, meaning in the middle of something. The pun
is intended to show that the train is a space in between, a
space between the infrastructure of technology (the tracks),
the superstructure of ideas (the carriage space), and the
actions that connect them. That space is a visual rhyme
for cinema itself. When we are en train de, we are in the
closed world created by the overlap between cinematic and
railway networks.
In Godard's scene, Véronique describes her hopes for a
Maoist action to close universities and drive students into
real-world encounters. At first Jeanson is interested and
describes his own project for cultural action. Then, he asks
Véronique how she plans to do it, and she proposes violent
action-terrorism, in effect, as Jeanson says.
He contrasts her proposal to the Algerian revolution, in
which he was involved, which was supported by the people
as a whole rather than a small group. He has the advan-
tage over her, right until the moment when she turns the
tables on him by pointing out that she is still a student, and
therefore oppressed, and he is not. Jeanson concedes this
point, even though he clearly does not think she can suc-
ceed. Véronique's insistence on the new privilege of youth
and the possibility of transcending the limits of the closed
Figure 42. Still from Godard's La Chinoise
world, despite her naive approach, gains her the advantage.
A year later, the student uprising of 1968 seemed retrospec-
tively to vindicate her position.
We see less of trains in Western movies these days
than we once did. While that is in part due to the reduced
dependency on trains, especially in the United States, it
may also be because the cultural significance, and there-
fore the cinematic resonance, of the train has changed
even more. For many passengers, trains are just a sub-
urban connection, rather than the avatar of progressive
modernity. In cinema, trains are now haunted by their use
in the Holocaust to transport millions to their deaths in
extermination camps. As the marathon documentary film
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g Kong is organized, fifty years after
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Colon was formally returned. Protests calli
the democracy provided in the 1997 handover to China led
to the Occupy movement of 2014, decades in advance of
2046. This the vehicle” by which all these
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coming the limitations of time a stand
For both sides in the Cold War, it came to seem
that space was, to quote Star Trek, “the final frontier” in
abolishing the restraints on hun
on. When the
nik satellite first went
in 1957, it ...
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something that had never been seen before. The United
States felt in danger of being eclipsed technologically and
made a huge investment in space. A prototype communi-
cations satellite was launched as soon as 1960, leading to
the successful launch of Telstar, a transnational project,
in 1962. While satellites were primarily military, they had
enormous effects on everyday life. Events could now be
shown on television nationally and internationally in real
time. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the
subsequent murder of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby,
and Kennedy's funeral in November 1963 were the first
"live" media events to shape national public opinion in the
United States.
During the four days from the assassination to the
funeral, 166 million people watched TV coverage. All reg-
ular programs were canceled, no advertising was shown
and all three networks (as it was in those days) carried news
without a break. Television montaged scenes of Kennedy's
career with those of his death, fixing the Kennedy legend
in people's minds and creating instant icons, like the shot
of the young John F. Kennedy Jr. saluting his father's coffin.
Kennedy's death and that of Oswald were the first homi-
cides to be seen live. Watching Oswald being shot close-up
while also seeing the murderer was especially shocking. In
households with televisions, people watched for an average
of 32 hours, meaning the set was on 8 hours a day. What
was then exceptional soon became the norm.
The global audience, all watching the same events,
using the same broadcast television pictures and coming
to a collective viewpoint on them, seemed to mark a new
direction in world history. The Canadian media theorist
Marshall McLuhan called this collective viewing the
"global village." He felt that the total electric field cul-
ture of our time" had re-created the conditions of what he
called “tribal societies" (1962). For the electronic extension
of the senses had reduced space to such an extent that the
world was now a village. In Understanding Media (1964),
McLuhan announced that the world was in fact now
imploding. He believed that what he called, perhaps for
the first time, the “visual culture” of modernity was being
transformed into a new “auditory-tactile” form by televi-
sion. For McLuhan, television was a "cool" medium that
required the audience to do a good deal of work recon-
structing and developing the message, unlike “hot” media
such as film. In short, to quote his famous phrase, “The
medium is the message." It was the way media work rather
than what they were doing that mattered. This emphasis
on form did not mean that media were not important. To
the contrary, McLuhan insisted that “any understanding of
social and cultural change is impossible without a knowl-
edge of how media work as environments.”: In that sense,
this chapter follows McLuhan in seeing different media
forms as creating different worlds.
The period of the global village was, in retrospect,
quite short. It extended from the death of Kennedy to the
9/11 attacks. In this period, global television audiences
watched dramatic events like the first moon landing (1969),
the wedding of Charles and Diana (1981), the fall of the
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Berlin Wall (1989), and the 9/11 attacks (2001). So, in the
course of just fifty years, watching a world-changing event
became a routine consequence of technology, available
to hundreds of millions of people who might have lit-
tle understanding of how that technology works. People
who were alive at the time can all recall seeing the TV
broadcasts when President Kennedy was killed, or the gui
attacks occurred. Today, news breaks as much through
Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, and other such applications as it
does through television bulletins.
Media no longer prize form so much as content. A
book might be available as an e-book, an audiobook, a
video, or a Braille text, as well as a printed volume. Broad-
casting itself has largely shifted to “narrow casting,” orga-
nized around content rather than form. Broadcasting was a
mass medium, in which the audience was given very lim-
ited choice over content but was able to receive the form
very widely and usually free or at low cost. Narrow casting
aims at specific audiences organized around preferences
for content, such as channels devoted to specific sports,
independent films, home decorating, and so on. The audi-
ence may be substantial but are more alike than differ-
ent. Narrow casting usually has to be paid for and is often
expensive. Truly mass audiences now tend to gather for rit-
ualized media events such as the Super Bowl, the World
Cup, or the Oscars, whose content is not wholly known in
advance but has very few variables.
Outside the Anglophone world, the single viewpoint of
the global village had never seemed convincing. In 1950,
the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa caused a sensation
with his film Rashomon, winner of the Academy Award for
Best Foreign Language film in 1952, among many other
awards. It showed four different versions of the same event:
a rape and a murder. What at first seemed a wanton crime
later comes to seem very different as the versions of the story
are told. Although the film “solved” the mystery, its version
of global media now seems prescient: whether by choice or
not, we see a version of events that makes no effort to be
comprehensive. All of us with access to social networking
choose a set of media sources with which we are sympa-
thetic, a process that media scholar Richard Grusin calls
“premediation" (2010). We are all living in our own version
of Rashomon. Amazon tries to recommend other purchases
to you based on what you have already bought, even if it's
often another book by the same author. Facebook, which
steers us to those of our friends” its algorithm thinks we
have most in common with, even launched its Paper app
in 2014, designed to create a “newspaper" precustomized to
the user's interests. The end of a single media narrative is
often lamented by the media themselves. Broadcasters like
Walter Cronkite in the United States or Richard Dimbleby
in Great Britain are held up as lions of a lost era, in which
we were all watching the same screen.
TOTAL NOISE ON SCREEN
In 2013, marketing reports estimated that the average American
now spends more time online than watching television.
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