Shooting space, tracking time: the city from animated photography to vernacular relativity

Abstract

The article reflects on the visualization of the city in the late 1890s and early 1900s, with reference to English animated photography and film: two media that are intimately related in terms of technology but worlds apart in terms of form. While both animated photography and film shared an elective affinity with the city, each was drawn to the urban environment for different reasons. Anima-photographers were particularly concerned with the movement and pace of the city and endeavoured to capture the `true motion' of such a dynamic space. Film, by contrast, began to probe the `optical unconscious' of urban space as a way of drawing out its undisclosed potential. Consequently, concerns with rendering `true motion' gave way to an appreciation of modernity's `vernacular relativity', especially in the form of montage. It was this shift that enabled filmmakers to re-engineer space and time, developing all manner of editing techniques with which to rearticulate the world. Hence the revolutionary potential of film. To demonstrate the significance of this shift, two recent projects that rework animated photographs taken in the 1890s and 1900s are explored: Patrick Keiller's The City of the Future (2005), which splices together a number of animated photographs to create a work of narrative cinema; and Gustav Deutsch's Welt Spiegel Kino ( World Mirror Cinema) (2005), which uses archival panning shots of city squares as the basis for a hypertextual montage. The article concludes by outlining the specificity of the ways in which animated photography and film, respectively, envisage the city.