Right now, somewhere in the universe, someone is rolling a camera. The actors are getting into their places, the lights are being switched on, and someone is shouting action. These people are making a film--whether in Hollywood or in Texas or in Germany or in Japan. These people are taking a moment and transferring it onto celluloid.
It is said that when audiences viewed the Lumiere Brothers' film of a train coming into the station in 1896, they screamed in terror. Some fainted, overwhelmed by what they saw. Why did people supposedly react this way? The sight of a train coming into a station was nothing new to this audience--by the 1890s, trains were a common mode of transportation around the industrialized world. It is true that the images had depth and were realistic, but photographs were just as vivid.
They screamed because this image was moving. People saw moving images everyday with their eyes, except that the moment depicted on the Paris screen was not happening in the present. This train had already pulled into the station. Its passengers had gotten off, and the train had gone on. Maybe now it was in Germany or Italy. Still, wherever it was now, this film, playing in the present, showed the train in a French railway station.
The film blurred the line between the past and the present. It seemed that the Lumiere Brothers had captured a moment a time, and now, months after the actual event, were replaying for in audience. However, the brothers were doing more than just preserving a moment. They did not capture the whole moment--they did not capture all of the people in the train station or the entirety of the scene--instead, they chose only to capture the train. In making this choice of what to show and what to ignore, the Lumiere Brothers created cinema.
The possibilities of the medium seemed endless. Soon, cinema expanded beyond just documentaries. Pioneers like Edwin S. Porter and D.W. Griffith began creating fictional stories using the new technology of film. Actors would play out a scene in the present, and it would be captured on film. What these actors were doing were creating a wholly fictional moment and passing it off as reality. Cinema made us believe that there was a moment when Dorothy set off on her quest on the Yellow Brick Road or when Maria taught the von Trapp children the fundamentals of music.
The filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard once said that "cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world." What people are doing when they roll a camera and shout action are transforming reality into fiction and the present into a cinematic past. Right now, somewhere in the universe, someone is using a camera to determine how we see this moment in the future.
fantastic
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