io, maintained by many to this day, the eye is deficient and weak, while the
machine is powerful.
As Mary Ann Doane emphasized (and Crary indicated) optical devices pre-
sent the machine as a toy, unthreatening and inviting. Part of its attraction lies in
the manipulation of the apparatus itself, which one holds in one’s hand, as
much as in the evanescent image it produces, which Doane characterizes as
their tactility, manipulability and materiality. These optical toys, as she elegantly
puts it, mark a moment when the viewer“seemed to hold movement in his or
her hands.”Yet, even acknowledging the nostalgia that such a simple control
of the device evokes, the production of the moving virtual image remains a
crucial threshold in the modern transformation of the image I am tracing. As
Doane describes it,“a hesitation in the transition from still to moving image
underscores the wondrous nature of its effect, its alliance with the toy that takes
on life.”While the trick of motion undoubtedly partakes of the uncanny effect
of the animating of the inanimate, the stuff of childhood fables and myth for
millennia, it takes on new meanings in the modern era. No longer restricted to
the myths of archaic culture or the fairytales of the nursery, we now dwell with-
in a environment enlivened by moving images, even though the new dimen-
sions implicit in this modern revolution in image has now been rendered banal
by its omnipresence. It is our duty as theorists to rediscover and pay attention to
it.
My survey of several nineteenth-century devices for the production of moving
images has tried to break away from simply drawing up a linear series of the
devices that“led”to the movies. While not denying that narrative, in this chap-
ter I tried to show the deeply dialectical relation between still and moving
images which these devices reveal, especially when approached phenomenolo-
gically, rather than simply technically. Most centrally, I am arguing that the ab-
solute novelty of the moving image–so delightfully evident in all these devices
- posed a sources of anxiety (or at least confusion) for its early explicators, who
used their explanation to reduce the moving image to an“illusion”founded in
the“reality”of still images and the fallacy of human perception. A strong pre-
judice against recognizing the mobile nature of visual perception is revealed by
this discourse, a prejudice that the cinema and media studies must still labor to
overturn.
The best introductory textbook on Cinema, David Bordwell and Kristin
Thompson’sFilm Art: An Introductionstill promotes this view, claiming in its
opening pages:“Moving-image media such as film and video couldn’t exist if
human vision were perfect.”One wonders how to imagine this“perfect”vi-
sion in which all motion would presumably cease and dissolve into a succession
of still images. Although Bordwell and Thompson simply invoke this perfect
The Play between Still and Moving Images 41