Number of user reviews: 3
User score: 7.0
In this series, I am primarily concerned with articulating the reasons for canonization of each entry--that is, I aim to answer the question of why a particular film became the most-voted film for a particular year. Yet at the very outset of this project, I encounter a problem, as Passage de Venus resists utterly any attempt at qualitative evaluation (i.e., critique) in the familiar sense. It lacks, first of all, anything else to compare it to, being the only IMDB entry for 1874, and for several years after. It is an outlier, an anomaly, an experiment born into a world that had no concept of film, a world in which the 20th century was yet a distant dream. In 1874, Ulysses S. Grant was President of the United States; the telephone, the light bulb, and the doorknob were not yet invented; automobiles were limited to a few steam-driven experiments; Richard Wagner, Brigham Young, George Eliot, Benjamin Disraeli, Jesse James, Billy the Kid were all still alive; the germ theory of disease was not yet codified; heavier-than-air flight was in the realm of fantasy. Hence, our journey through the IMDB user-determined canon of film begins in a world before film existed, unless one is to consider this particular curiosity, a mechanical novelty from French astronomer Pierre Janssen, a film. For although the trivia page for Passage de Venus credits it with a spate of firsts--oldest film listed on IMDB, first documentary ever made, first chronophotographic sequence, first step in the development of movie cameras, and so on--it may be more accurately classified as an early experiment in time-lapse photography. If considered the first film--and I henceforth refer to it as a film, if only out of convenience--it was ahead of the curve to a ludicrous degree, preceding the first commercial exhibition of a film (Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory in 1895) by 21 years. To watch Passage de Venus is to watch primordial soup of cinema beginning to coalesce into a chain reaction, not quite yet movement, but something resembling it. The film's interest is, of course, primarily historical; it precedes (by many years) the idea that film can tell a story, or even that film can record the movements of human beings.
Passage de Venus defies the usual narrative of the early history of film in several ways: first, it was created not in the core countries (France, UK, US) that would dominate the early film industry, but in Japan (albeit by a European), which, in 1874, was only 6 years removed from the Meiji Restoration that ended the shogunate and began the country's transition away from feudalism. Second, Janssen had no intention of commercializing his work; he was not an entrepeneur--as Le Prince or Edison or the Lumieres were--but a scientist, devoted to the acquisition of knowledge, rather than money. Third, the film is utterly unconcerned with the capture of living subjects. The "director"'s concern is not with humans or with any other animal, but with the movement of a big rock--that is to say, Venus, which appears a black spot moving gradually downward across a lighter curved object (the sun) in a sequence of 47 photographs, captured over 72 seconds with a "photographic revolver" of Janssen's own design. It may be viewed as the beginning of film's detachment from not only social, but Earthly concern altogether. Likewise, it can be viewed as the earliest progenitor of speculative cinema, wherein film looks upon other worlds beyond our own, under the justification that Earth is too dull, mundane, or otherwise not worth looking at. Yet to view Passage de Venus as the vapid predecessor of the fantasy or sci-fi genres would be to misrepresent its purpose, for unlike the frivolous and/or mundane curiosities that characterize many other early films (Roundhay Garden Scene, Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge, and the like), Janssen's film is the result of a scientific mission to record a rare event. Passage de Venus may be millions of miles away from the concerns of the common folk, but it is nevertheless a real event, not just in the sense of lacking the pretense of fiction, but in its utter lack of manipulation. There is no montage theory at work here--we are decades away from Vertov--no concept of editing, or post-production, or narration. The event captured is simply that, an event, in its most utterly raw and untampered form. It is an event at once both completely true and utterly remote, grounded on Earth but pointed away from it.
And this is where Passage de Venus retains its relevance to film criticism, as alien as it may be to latter-day conceptions of the medium. This scientific curio, the very earliest manifestation of what could be called "film", demonstrates the central tension that will dominate the analysis, critique, and scholarship of the medium over 140 years hence; that is to say, the push-and-pull between realism and escapism, spectacle and contemplation, instruction and delight, aesthetic and politics, social context and formal mastery. When is it acceptable to eschew social context in the name of art, and to what degree are they separable? Passage de Venus, obviously, has no answer to this question, yet its purpose is embryonically ambiguous, both divorced from political relevance and completely real, presaging the conflict between message and form that will gradually develop as the medium matures. Janssen, for his part, was well aware of the potential of rapid photography to capture Earthly subjects, but his design lacked the necessary speed and exposure time to capture the fine details of motion that later film pioneers, such as Eadward Muybridge, would perfect.
Other connections: By the way, Janssen also discovered helium. Oh yeah, and he was also one of the earliest collaborators with the Lumiere brothers, appearing in two of their experimental films in 1895, prior to their first public exhibitions.
Other most-voted films of 1874: Nope. Passage de Venus is IMDB's only entry for 1874, and there are no entries at all for 1875, 1876, or 1877.
No comments:
Post a Comment