Maya IV

For me, it will always remain uncertain whether what is said of a thing is the thing itself. For one is not a single thing when in mutation. But what does not change with time? Nothing. Everything mutates: from the white vessels projected onto a dark screen forming images, to matter itself, which is nothing but energy. Light is both wave and particle. Cinema is time preserved, life petrified: eternity.

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Twenty frames in a second and a fraction, captured on October 14, 1888, in Roundhay, Leeds, England, and humanity’s timeline split into a dead-end street (or perhaps a roundabout). An island of time was born like an egg laid by History. The Aleph dreamed by Borges, the search of Proust, is cinema’s antechamber. What art and philosophy have struggled for centuries to imagine, the camera achieves mechanically and effortlessly. So, what is the game of Cinema?

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The signs can be found in what makes cinema unique: time. To watch a person walking implies movement through space and time (the mutations of the I Ching). These signs, extracted from change, help us form a mental image of the film. We can determine that a young man in black walks around three people dancing in place. We did not yet know that the young man is Adolphe Le Prince, son of Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince, inventor and artist who built the first camera prototypes (including experiments in three dimensions, as he insisted only this way could the reality of experience be transmitted), until he created the camera that would duplicate life for the first time in History.

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A brief moment in time and the Whole opens to interpretation: how to understand the half-turn of the mysterious lady (Harriet or Annie Hartley), the inexplicable backward dancing of the mother-in-law (Sarah Whitley), the cut in the negative that causes the father-in-law (Joseph Whitley) to disappear for a few moments, or the semicircle traced by Adolphe until he faces the grandmother and, behind her, the grandfather—all of them being watched by Louis Le Prince through his machine? We can see the sky in the background, the garden, the house’s façade, and a part shaded by trees. But that sky is already mythical, our window to the universe; the garden is the order of nature; the house is the product of civilization; and the shadow is what it has always been in its terrible absence.

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Speaking of nothingness—might forgetfulness be its temporal equivalent? The ellipsis. The momentary disappearance of the father-in-law might be the first ellipsis, the first magic trick—perhaps accidental—just like the shattered glass in The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even by Duchamp. Or perhaps the first ellipsis is the eternity that preceded the moment of filming, all the black frames since prehistory. Perhaps it opened toward the future with the death of Sarah Whitley ten days after the filming. Is not death itself an ellipsis?

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It should be noted that what appears black in a film print is in fact a hole—an absence of film—which, through a projector, would translate into pure white light. The shadows of cinema returned to us the idea of nothingness as a beam of light. The void ceases to be darkness; just as it will later be said that sound invented silence in cinema. Cinema resolves the false problem detected by Bergson: nothingness does not precede everything. “...in the representation of an abolition of the real, there is only the image of all realities chasing one another endlessly, in a circle.” (Bergson, 1987, p. 30). The circle traced by Adolphe is fatal and unchangeable, it is time’s memory folding back onto itself, crystallized into frames revived by light and motion. The idea of destiny is a dead end—cinema made eternity and hell real, cyclical memory: reincarnation. Doesn’t all this have a cost?

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The inventor Le Prince vanished without a trace during a train journey through France, shortly before he was to travel to New York to exhibit his invention. Four theories were proposed: his family wished to be rid of him due to his alleged homosexuality; he committed suicide or fled to avoid his debts; his brother got rid of him for money; or, the one supported by his wife and son—he was assassinated under orders from Thomas Alva Edison, who wanted to be the first to patent the cinematograph. This theory is reinforced by the later death of Adolphe, who was shot in the head during a hunting trip. It was reported as a suicide. Just days earlier, he had testified in the case against Edison, defending his father's claim as the true father of cinema. It would be the second title taken from Edison, as in early 2008, a paper-based audio recording was deciphered, predating Edison’s by 28 years. It was the line “Au clair de la lune, Pierrot répondit…” from the French folk song Au clair de la lune, recorded in 1860 by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville.

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Though in 2003, a photograph of a drowned man resembling Louis Le Prince was discovered in the Paris police archives, it does not resolve his disappearance—only multiplies the clues, now indecipherable with time. The mystery continues to grow around the absent and forgotten inventor of cinema, now almost 120 years later. Perhaps overshadowed by the macabre murders of Jack the Ripper that same autumn, the birth of Cinema—its square foundation—is veiled by an English fog that confuses it with that inextricable paradox created by light within shadow.

 

Bergson, Henri; Deleuze, Gilles. Memoria y vida. Spain: Alianza Editorial, 1987.