Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
temporality of life on the screen, representing time and space as discontinu-
ous. Montages, for example, could juxtapose disparate images. The
rst pub-
lic shows, in the 1890s, showed their audiences how the universality and
irreversibility of time could be distorted, expanded, or reversed, how inter-
vals could be omitted: time in the silver screen, it seemed, could be
refashioned at will according to the intent of the director and editor. In the
1890s, movies were taken at 16 frames per second and projected at 24, making
movement seem jerky and overly rapid. Audiences, unused to the new
medium, often took the screen's representations to be literal, ducking in their
seats at the sight of an oncoming train. Spatially, too, cinema could lie, des-
pite its ostensible promise of objective representation. The close-up, for
example,
fi
first used in 1916, mimicked the way in which the mind focused on
important objects, simulating intimacy. In short, far more than photography,
the cinema challenged the ostensible objectivity of mechanical representa-
tions of the past. Kern (1983:130) states that “of all the technology that
a
fi
ected the pace of life, the early cinema most heightened public conscious-
ness of di
ff
erential speeds.”
The new medium gained instant mass appeal: by 1910, the U.S. had more
than 10,000 nickelodeons. Within the decade the
ff
fi
first major internationaliza-
tion of mass culture began with
film screenings in Paris and Berlin in 1895,
followed the next year by New York and Brussels. Hollywood started life as a
series of independent studios between 1909 and 1913. Soon news programs
became a staple of theater shows, allowing cinema to represent the real world
as well as cinematic fantasy. The invention of “talkies,” or movies with
sound, in the 1920s gave
fi
films ever greater realism and authenticity but also
raised production costs, in turn requiring large audiences for the requisite
economies of scale, but deepened and accelerated the role of this medium in
the reconstitution of everyday notions of time and space.
Zweig (1964:25) captures the cultural transition that accompanied the
destruction of the Victorian era, in which “Speed was not only thought to be
unre
fi
ned, but indeed was considered unnecessary, for in that stabilized bour-
geois world with its countless little securities, well palisaded on all sides,
nothing unexpected ever occurred . . . The rhythm of the new speed had not
yet carried over from the machines, the automobile, the telephone, the radio,
and airplane, to mankind; time and age had another measure.” In this read-
ing, the taken-for-granted world of the nineteenth century was repositioned
in twentieth-century memory as slow and ine
fi
cient, the object of nostalgia,
a world lived in slow motion. Similarly, Kern's (1983) famous analysis
explores how the numerous innovations of the period blurred conventional
meanings of near and far, bringing into mutual contact peoples and societies
that had long been isolated. He (1983:34) argues that the time-space compres-
sion of the Industrial Revolution led inexorably to a greater appreciation of
cultural di
erence: “As human consciousness expanded across space people
could not help noticing that in di
ff
ff
erent places there were vastly di
ff
erent
customs, even di
ff
erent ways of keeping time.” Rapid transportation and
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