In Living Color

[Jihadjoe]

Film and photography are stunning mediums and only still very new and recent if you consider other artforms of music, poetry, painting etc. The 'language' of them is still being learnt and developed.

When you consider that people ducked and screamed in shock when the Lumière brothers showed L'Arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat in 1895, assuming the train on the screen was going to burst through from this strange paralel dimension into their laps...

It was only after the 1890s became the 1900s that people started to understand that this new medium could be used to tell storys, rather than being some novelty box from which moving pictures appeared. Film makers had to learn how to say "meanwhile" and "some time later". It wasn't until 1903 when Edwin Porter made Life of an American Fireman that film makers realised you could jump between locations and maintain some continuity in the minds of an audience.

People belived that doing so would be too jarring and confusing for people to watch. Without that development we wouldn't have cinema as we know it today. Storytelling would be stilted and difficult, having to be told following one protagonist in real time...

1903 may seem like a long time ago, but if you compare it to the development of another medium, say music, that's an astonishingly fast progression. Only 80 years after that we started to render completely imaginary landscapes and scenarios digitally, creating things people have never, and never will be able to see with their own eyes.

That in it's own right is astonishing, but the speed with which film has progressed from audiences panicing at an image of a train moving towards them, to people being unfussed by a liquid metal terminator walking out of a fire, and considering it to look a little dated is beyond remarkable.

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