ABSTRACT

The history of the early cinema first came into being as an oral history, a folklore belonging to the industry itself. This is the source of many of the stories in the books which form the first generation of accounts of cinema’s history, including Frederick Talbot’s Moving Pictures, How they are Made and Worked, which first appeared in 1912, and Terry Ramsaye’s A Million and One Nights, an American book which first appeared in 1926 and earned its author the title of ‘the first authentic film historian’. Further volumes, by British writers, which also belong to this category, although they represent the tail-end of the genre and appeared in the 1930s, include Low Warren’s The Film Game and Leslie Wood’s The Romance of the Movies. To these must be added, as

The fact that in a moving picture successive film frames are fit flush into the fixed screen frame results in a phenomenological frame that is indefinitely extendible and contractible, limited in the smallness of the object it can grasp only by the state of its technology, and in largeness only by the span of the world. Drawing the camera back, and panning it, are two ways of extending the frame; a close-up is of a part of the body, or of one object or small set of objects, supported by and reverberating the whole frame of nature. The altering frame is the image of perfect attention. Early in its history the cinema discovered the possibility of calling attention to persons and parts of persons and objects; but it is equally a possibility of the medium not to call attention to them but, rather, to let the world happen, to let its parts draw attention to themselves according to their natural weight. This possibility is less explored than its opposite. Dreyer, Flaherty, Vigo, Renoir, and Antonioni are masters of it.