TO MOVE OR NOT TO MOVE

The Pre-Cinema program critically explores the history and development of the photographic medium, inspired by the question: Why did the Greeks not invent cinema. For the ancient Greeks, time flowed naturally like a river. But synchronized – clocked – abstract time or a stroboscope is required to create the animated illusion of movement through a narrow slit. For the stroboscopic phase-image recording of the illusion of movement, it was fundamentally important to have the slits on the rotating cylinder, for this was the only way that the still photographic sequences – flashed in regular time intervals – could be presented as moving images. The stroboscopic method, called the zoetrope or magical cylinder, or even the wheel of life, first became known in the 1830s. The starting point for the photofilms compiled here consists of the chronophotographic research work conducted by Étienne-Jules Marey and Edward James Muybridge, which first rendered visible the sequences of motion in phase-images that had remained hidden to the human eye up to then.