* omslag Between Stillness PB:DEF

vices I discuss here form a circular logic in which the devices are the cause of
visual illusions as well as demonstrating their explanation. Besides spawning
images of motion, these devices forged a new dependent relation between the
still and the moving image, as each enacted the trick of a transition from a static
image to a moving image. However, we might claim the real trick lies in making
the moving images appear as nothing more than a peculiarly tricky modifica-
tion of the still image, an epiphenomenon founded in the inert and reliable still
image. That the theory of persistence of vision has been debunked therefore
takes on more significance than simply a passing moment in the explanatory
fashions of science. Persistent afterimages offered a theory of perception which
parsed movement into static phases and still images, an attempt thereby not
only to discipline the moving image, but to dissolve its movement into its oppo-
site.
So what is this theory in which movement is paradoxically explained through
persistence? The theory is founded on the fact that motion picture devices
(whether the first nineteenth-century devices such as the phenakistiscope or zoe-
trope or the later motion picture films) all employ a continuous series of still
drawings or photographs depicting separate phases of an action on some sort of
material support. A device moves these still images through some sort of viewer
at a sufficient speed to create what is often called“apparent motion”. A dancer
dances, a horse gallops, a man walks. How does this happen? Inone of the
earliest books published on the nature of cinema, Frederic Talbot’sMoving Pic-
tures: How They Are Made and Workedprovides an especially vivid description:

Suppose, for instance, that a series of pictures depicting a man walking along the

street, are being shown on the screen. In the first picture the man is shown with his

left foot in the air. This remains in sight for/of a second, and then disappears

suddenly. Though the picture has vanished from the eye, the brain still persists in

seeing the left foot slightly raised. One thirty second part of a second later the next

picture shows the man with his left foot on the ground. The shops, houses, and other

stationary objects in the second image occupy the positions shown in the first picture,

and consequently the dying impression of these objects is revived, while the brain

receives the impression that the man has changed the position of his foot in relation

to the stationary objects, and the left foot which was raised melts into the left foot

upon the ground. The eye imagines that it sees the left foot descend.

The first book written about film by an experimental psychologist,The Photoplay
a Psychological Study, was published inby Hugo Munsterberg and offered a
summary–as well as an early rejection–of the persistence of vision theory in
psychological terms:

Every picture of a particular position left in the eye an afterimage until the next pic-

ture with the slightly changed position of the jumping animal or the marching men

The Play between Still and Moving Images 29