from “Home Movies”
Michael Wheaton | Home Movies | Bunny Presse | February 2024 | 67 Pages
Early Cinema
The first movies are referred to as actualities: single-shot recordings of physical moments in real space and time. In the US, Edison’s company made them. In France, the Lumiere brothers. Workers leave a factory, parents feed a baby, man rides a bull. The legend goes that in the Lumiere’s first public premiere, a passenger train on screen chugged fast into the foreground, and the audience screamed out of their seats as the image sped off frame. One-hundred-twenty-five years later, on the first day of the Intro to Film class my community college lets me teach once a year, I beam a haze of light from a projector on the ceiling to the whiteboard and show a YouTube video of the first Lumiere actuality from my computer screen, and a bunch of students roll their eyes to the phones in their hands. They have hundreds of their own actualities in vivid color right there, and they’re not looking at those either. I watch text-blocks and bright icons scroll up in the lenses of a student’s glasses.
My next example: the Lumiere’s pillow fight sequence. In the clip, a couple adults look over a group of kids in beds, and when the adults leave the room, the kids rise and fill the frame ten strong, swinging white feathers from the white pillows onto their white sheets and gowns. The students pay attention to the movie because it’s more obviously staged. A TV bit. But the joy on screen is still real. Imagine, the big new camera’s watching, and if you pretend to have fun spontaneously, then spontaneously you will have fun, and this moment of you having fun will be fun for others to watch later, fun for you to watch too, this second life on screen that’s safe from ever turning back to suffering. The joy of the prospect is tangled into the joy of doing it, and the magic trick always ends in reappearance. Lifetimes ago, these kids on the screen could not have had any idea how long that minute of their lives might exist for people of the future to witness anywhere, anytime there’s an internet connection. I like that about it. But even for me, with the grainy black and white stock, no cuts, the drudge of real time unfolding out of context, watching the clip is hardly more exciting than surveilling random security footage.
Is this art, I wonder sometimes about media I encounter. Or evidence?
The room is so quiet that I question whether I’ve said this aloud or thought it to myself again, but not answering is the correct answer, so it’s fine. The clip smash-cuts to black at the climax of feathers. I minimize the video. Forty seconds. That’s all that’s left of it. I check the view count: 617. Uploaded four years ago. The low number should make witnessing the video feel more special, but it makes it seem less important. For the second or third time today, I reconsider every decision I’ve ever made that led me to the job I have. I’d like the work I do to matter somehow, which is all the proof I need that it doesn’t. In the shadow under the brim of a student’s ballcap, his stoned blurry eyes, his cross-arm slouch, I remember myself: same course, same college, different campus and teacher. I will soon realize that telling stories in movie form means relying a lot on other people (and their money), so instead I’ll try to tell stories in book form even though I’ll find that also means relying on other people (and their money). Nothing remains of that me except some scattered digital photographs, a handful of misremembered moments, and this lingering desire to face the reality of death by turning to the illusion of permanence. This paragraph is evidence of that.
I click into the search box. I tell the class, Just one more. Another Lumiere brothers clip, the first-ever tracking shot, where they set-up a camera on the back of a train crossing a river. Likely in Paris. Old brick buildings off the bridge on a clear day, an ad on the side of one blurring past, the streak of another passing train. The camera feels subjective because no one on screen can pretend it’s not there. The camera becomes you. Around the room, students with underlit faces hide their hands under desks, but even without them looking, the film stock cracks and flutters, half alive. Sometimes I well up a little when I see the video projected big like this. The way we see what doesn’t exist anymore for the first time, and then it’s gone again so fast. The way the camera seems that it’s always leaving things behind.
From Home Movies by Michael Wheaton.
Copyright © 2024 Michael Wheaton.
Reprinted with permission of Bunny Presse / Fonograf Editions.