The Play between Still and Moving Images:
Nineteenth-Century“Philosophical Toys”
and Their Discourse
Tom Gunning
Cinema is an art of the moving image, yet materially it could be said simply to
be made up from a series of still images. This apparent paradox between still
and moving images has been noted by nearly all accounts of cinema, but resol-
ving this exchange between stillness and motion, or rather the transformation of
one into the other, still eludes both empirical scientific explanation and, I feel,
reflects deeply rooted ideological prejudices. The moving image, I claim, consti-
tutes a sort of a scandal, which has been consistently resolved by being de-
scribed as an illusion, something in other words that does not“really”exist. I
want to explore the complexities of the introduction of the moving image in the
nineteenth century and the limitations that come from seeing simply as an illu-
sion.
Persistence of Vision: Vision and Its Fallacies
Jonathan Crary has claimed that nineteenth-century visual devices focused on
the question of the body and the senses, emphasizing defining and measuring
the processes of the body and the senses and thereby disciplining them. Thus
the nineteenth century approached vision in a new mode:“Vision, rather than a
privileged form of knowing, becomes itself an object of knowledge, of observa-
tion. From the beginning of the nineteenth century a science of vision will tend
to mean increasingly an interrogation of the physiological make-up of the hu-
man subject, rather than the mechanics of light and optical transmission.”Op-
tical illusions do not simply obscure the truth about the world, but rather offer
new information about the process of perceiving and the perceiver’s body.
Focusing on human perception redefined the complex problem of seeing
things that are“not there.”Discovering the nature of visual illusion revealed
the essential processes of vision, just as knowledge of disease reveals the pro-
cesses of the health. The most common form of seeing something which was
“not there”may be the afterimage, which at the turn of the nineteenth century
became the subject of intense investigation. Close attention to this subjective