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A reading response is a thoughtful summary, reflection, and analysis. When reading, make sure to jot down questions and important ideas that arise. Your response should be 1-

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Summary - What were the author’s main concerns?

2. Analysis - What do think of the author’s argument?

3. Response - What ideas does the article inspire for you?

4. Questions – What questions do you have about the argument or ideas presented?

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11 T-Mobile 2:50 PM 1 79% X 03-Nicholas-Mirzoef... 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. 125 126 HOW TO SEE THE WORLD - 127 is to say, the railways were world-cream u T-Mobile combination of financial globalizatio 2:50 PM 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 Х 03-Nicholas-Mirzoef... III 000 130 HOW TO SEE THE WORLD THE WORLD ON SCREEN 131 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 132 HOW TO SEE THE WORLD THE WORLD ON SCREEN 133 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 134 HOW TO SEE THE WORLD THE WORLD ON SCREEN 135 The camera sees like the train and the tracks fill the T-Mobile 2:50 PM The result is that if more than @7 79% 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 х 03-Nicholas-Mirzoef... 125 - 127 126 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 128 HOW TO SEE THE WORLD THE WORLD ON SCREEN 129 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 Tur mon can @7 79% 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 х 03-Nicholas-Mirzoef... 7 ... 134 HOW TO SEE THE WORLD THE WORLD ON SCREEN 135 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 136 HOW TO SEE THE WORLD THE WORLD ON SCREEN 137 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 138 HOW TO SEE THE WORLD THE WORLD ON SCREEN 139 g Kong is organized, fifty years after T-Mobile 2:50 PM 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 layers vision, putting different spaces @ 1 79% 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 ... х 03-Nicholas-Mirzoef... 142 HOW TO SEE THE WORLD THE WORLD ON SCREEN 143 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 144 HOW TO SEE THE WORLD THE WORLD ON SCREEN 145 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. HOW TO SEE THE WORLD THE WORLD ON SCREEN 147
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