light falling on the change of the images is interrupted, and the eye receives
only a momentary visual impression of each separate image when it is in the
proper position.”The production of motion was founded upon a breakdown
of vision into flashes, flickers of instantaneous vision produced by a rapidly
revolving shutter. The complexity of effects triggered by this simple device is
worth extensive contemplation. Stampfer indicates the role of the aperture and
shutter in aligning image and viewer and exposing the still images to a brief
view in such a way that the transition between images is occluded. Like a me-
chanical conjuror, the shutter hid the moment of change (when one image re-
placed another) from view.
Paris’s book for young scientists explains the apparent movement produced
by these devices in terms of a theory of motion which claims that perceiving
motion is less somethingseenthan somethingdeduced:“Now it is evident, that
before the eye can ascertain a body to be in motion, it must observe it in two
successive portions of time, in order to compare its change of place.”He sup-
ports this statement with a quote from Lord Brougham (Lord Chancellor and
member of the Royal Society),“Our knowledge of motion is a deduction of rea-
soning, not a perception of sense; it is derived from the comparison of two posi-
tion; the idea of a change of place is the result of that comparison attained by a
short process of reasoning.”This claim seems somewhat different from the
more physiologically based persistence of vision theory, but it reveals a central
prejudice about the actual perception of motion: that motion must be the pro-
duct of a mental (or physical) processing of still images. This persistence of the
still image as the true substance of the moving image is the specter that haunts
the nineteenth-century understanding of the moving image.
While the explanations of vision offered by Lord Brougham resolve motion
back into still images, the toys more commonly ran the other way, as is seen in
the Phenakistiscope, invented by Belgian scientist Joseph Plateau (and basically
identical in principle and manufacture to the Stroboscope invented and pre-
sented about the same time by Simon Stampfer).Curiously, Plateau first pro-
duced a device whose turning wheel and aperture and shutter mechanism pro-
duced a still image rather than a moving one. In the Anorthoscope (described
by Mannoni) a distorted anamorphic drawing rotated and viewed through a
revolving slotted disc produced a“perfectly steady and recognizable image.”
Although produced for sale in, the Anorthoscope was a commercial fail-
ure, while Plateau’s next revolving wheel toy, set off what Mannoni has called a
“Phenakistiscope craze.”It could be claimed that this device provided the first
unambiguous example of a optical moving image. The name of the device, de-
rived from the Greekphenax–cheater or deceiver–marked the view it offered
as deceptive. Here is Plateau’s physical description of the device:
The Play between Still and Moving Images 35