The expected reading time of this write-up is almost seven minutes. Thanking you in advance for sparing your valuable time.
Let us start from there itself. How do I know the probability that the readers will finish reading this blog in seven minutes? I must have read myself alongside a clock time equal to or under seven minutes. However, how can I compare objective time with la durée, as Henri Bergson’s theory of time states? As time is subjective, and my seven minutes, irrespective of whether a clock quantifies it, cannot be the same as your seven minutes. Furthermore, as Aristotle says, time is the most unknown of all unknown things. Time can be felt but not contested in that it can be quantified.
One of the primary reasons we cannot periodise Modernism and movements like Surrealism, Cubism, and alike is the difficulty of tracking down the time period. Every day was a “make it new,” and so many remarkable historical events were happening in a single day. Just like in James Joyce’s Ulysses, the modern-day day in the life of Leonard Bloom, many things are happening in and around him. By the time Joyce pens it down, it already belongs to the past. It can only be read as a diary entry and nothing more.
Modernism or Modernisms is the synonym for dynamicity. It was devoid of pause, stillness, and inaction amidst the cacophonical voices. That was when photography, which was first invented to study optics, was later developed into a significant source of mass entertainment. Furthermore, in June 1878, Eadweard Muybridge published his The Horse in Motion, a series of six photograph cards depicting the movement of a horse.
Image taken from:
https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/becoming-modern/early-photo/early-photo-france/a/eadweard-muybridge-the-horse-in-motion
This picture can be considered one of the earliest manifestations of the photographic technique called Stop action photography. The Horse in Motion is a collage of multiple still photographs placed across each other. On the other hand, cinematic stop action is taking pictures of a single frame by physically moving the elements in tiny increments present in the frame and, when edited into a film strip, will produce movements out of still photographs.
Gif taken from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_motion#/media/File:Julienne_Mathieu_having_her_hair_brushed.gif
It is also essential to highlight the existing forms of capturing snapshots of time and movements, photography and videography. The significant difference between the three modes was that camera captures the essence of the present, the videography captures the continuity of time, whereas stop motion captures slices of time. In stop motion, both the moment and movement are recorded. It literally stops the motion and captures it whereas, in videography there is no stopping of the running reel. Stop motion is more precise when paused in between, unlike videos. Stop motion can be contested against chronophotograph, but since human motion is involuntary, stop motion is more accurate than chronophotographs since increments are made in tiny proportion by human intervention. It is hence very difficult to make a proper animation using this technique.
In addition, maximum frames are turned into life, which is often missing in photographs and videographs. There is always a before and after, and stop motion tries its best to capture all movement slices since it is deliberate. When sequentially arranged, outputs as frozen slices of before, present, after, and so on.
From the world’s first stop motion animation, The Humpty Dumpty Circus (1829), to Academy Award Best Animated feature film Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022), stop motion is still in vogue. It is a laborious task for everyone behind the project since objective time moves on, but the lived time is short compared to the former. The task is to photograph the tiny increments and animate it.
In conclusion, stop motion photography is an excellent example of how time is elusive and how human interventions try to record the time stamp of death of a moment and the movement. It is a blend of both photography and videography. It is a linear arrow leading to death. It is an illusion, an advanced animated flip book, so each tiny moment and movement must be photographed so that the movements become smooth. Stop motion photography subverted the idea of a “tiny spark of contingent” proposed by Walter Benjamin since the photographer here plays a vital role as much as the frozen slices of life. Amidst the dynamicity of Modernism, stop motion was a combination of both stillness and dynamicity.
Thank you for reading! I would love to hear your comments on the blog. That is it. Byeee!
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