Archaeology of the Cinema
Today, a book about movies. The University of Houston presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.
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It’s 1965. Movies have matured. No CGI yet. But we have grand, Technicolor, large-screen epics. Like the three-hour-long Cleopatra. (That one seems no less grand than today’s movies.) Now one Kurt Marek, writing under a pseudonym, offers a wonderfully illustrated book: the Archaeology of the Cinema.
Marek finally gets around to the first commercial movies. But that feels more like an afterthought. His book is all about antecedents. And it drives home an important insight. Whether or not he meant to, he awakens me to a dilemma: It is that our eyes provide us with one movie – the long, long movie of our own lives. But how to enjoy those moving worlds we do not see?
Well, down through history, that’s what we’ve tried to do. Marek begins with Chinese and Turkish shadow plays. And Javanese puppets: All projecting moving puppet shadows to tell stories. That idea of successive images took so many forms. Take the peepshow: A device with an eyepiece. You’d view a sequence of images telling some dramatic story.
Java Wayang-sejarah puppet image
Here’s another variant in our quest for moving images. This time, no pictures, no story. Just a dazzling pattern that keeps shifting as we watch – I mean the kaleidoscope. But, of course, we wanted more. We wanted motion and a story.
So another wrinkle: the panorama. This took so many forms. A huge canvas, for example – maybe ten thousand square feet – might unfurl around us telling us a story. Then, the invention of the camera: Nineteenth-century plays narrated as we show sequences of projected photographs.
Panorama of Venice in 1870
I skip over so much in our yearning search for moving pictures. Maybe you’re aware of the late nineteenth-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge. He set up batteries of cameras to take sequential photos of galloping horses, or the action of nude humans. Flip those images in a fast sequence and you see a movie. He actually made a device, his zoopraxiscope, to do just that.
Muybridge sequence of a nude walking down stairs
His driving interest was the mechanics of motion. Still, he gave us the beginning of movies. And Étienne Marey followed up with his chronophotographic gun – an early camera that made a movie sequence.
So our yearning might seem resolved at that point. Now Edison made a movie of a man sneezing. Méliès, a movie of A Trip to the Moon. Mankiewicz made Cleopatra. Now we have CGI explosions.
Stereopticon photo of a scene from A Voyage to the moon
It seems odd that we now capture motion all around us all the time. Movie cameras in our pockets. And I wonder if we’ve satisfied our long yearning to replicate the one movie that is our ongoing life? Well, it remains, does it not? The gap between the movie of our lives, and all the motion we now capture “out there”.
I’m John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we’re interested in the way inventive minds work.
(Theme music)
C. W. Ceram, Archaeology of the Cinema, Harcourt, Brace, & World, Inc. 1965. Written by Kurt M. Marek
Some Wikipedia sources for further information:
Panoramania | The Engines of Our Ingenuity
Eadweard Muybridge - Wikipedia
A Trip to the Moon - Wikipedia
Cleopatra (1963 film) - Wikipedia
Étienne-Jules Marey - Wikipedia
https://engines.egr.uh.edu/episode/1890
All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
This Episode first aired October 5, 2026.