One could see this pirouetting dancer as the origin of the optical moving image
(in other words, as a continuous moving image produced by an optical device).
Like the Thaumatrope, the Phenakistiscope or Stampfer’s Stroboscope create a
virtual image, an optical phenomenon that is not identical to any of the images
that make it up. Rather than an image with a single material base it is a percep-
tual image produced by motion, and thus virtual. In this sense it could be called
a“trick”produced as it is by a device that must be operated. But the same
process of revolving disc and slotted shuttered viewing could produce an
equally“tricked”stillimage, as in Plateau’s Anorthoscope (or the more famous
Faraday Wheel). Motion is necessary for the trick, but the trick does not have to
yield a moving image.
But the effect of the motion produced remains powerful, and Paris describes
“the great astonishment they felt, at observing the figures in constant motion,
and exhibiting the most grotesque attitudes.”In spite of these uncanny and gro-
tesque effects, Paris, however, (or his narrator) uses the device to explain our
normal perception of motion:
Each figure is seen through the aperture and as it passes and is succeeded in rapid
succession by another and another, differing from the former in attitude, the eye is
cheated into the belief of its being the same object successively changing the position
of its body. Consider what takes place in an image on the retina when we actually
witness a man in motion; for instance, a man jumping over a gate, in the first moment
he appears on the ground, in the next his legs are a few winches above it, in the third
they are nearly on a level with the rail, in the fourth he is above it, and then in the
successive moments he is seen descending as he had previously risen. A precisely
similar effect is produced on the retina, by the successive substitution of figures in
corresponding attitudes as through the orifices of the revolving disc; each figure re-
maining on the retina long enough to allow its successor to take its place without an
interval that would destroy the illusion.The true sleight of hand employed here is that the devices that produce motion
from a series of still images are now being used to explain–not the process of
the toy itself–but normal human perception. If the toy creates an illusion of
motion, one wonders if the precisely similar process of the toy and what hap-
pens“when we actually witness”motion indicates that all perception of motion
should also be considered an illusion, and if not why not? Like Lord Broug-
ham’s description of movement as a process of reasoning and comparing, Paris’s
explanation of actually witnessing movement starts from the assumption that in
perception the still image is primary, that movement consists of a mental deduc-
tion based on comparing static positions. What we see happening in Broug-
ham’s explanation and Paris’s lesson drawn from the Phenakistiscope–and this
is one reason the discourse about the invention of cinema involves more than
The Play between Still and Moving Images 37