1. Craquelure
2. Pigment
Sources:
San Diego Air and Space Museum Archive, Theodore (TP) Hall Collection, catalog number TP Hall_000311;
J. Paul Getty Museum, http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=56192.
Both images post-processed for contrast.
As the daguerreotype returns to life, it recedes into the dark behind its protective glass. In the dark we are vouchsafed a glimpse of an image in flight from us toward the not seen.
Source: M. P. Simons, “Portrait of a Man,” 1846. Museum of Photographic Arts, accession number 1984.019.010. Online at http://www.flickr.com/photos/mopa1/8136354655/
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At http://www.loc.gov/item/00694394, annotators have been employed by the Library of Congress to research and write this history.
The camera platform was on the front of a New York subway train following another train on the same track. Lighting is provided by a specially constructed work car on a parallel track. At the time of filming, the subway was only seven months old, having opened on October 27, 1904. The ride begins at 14th Street (Union Square) following the route of today’s east side IRT, and ends at the old Grand Central Station, built by Cornelius Vanderbuilt in 1869. The Grand Central Station in use today was not completed until 1913.
On the camera platform rode a voyager: Thomas Edison’s cinematographer W. G. “Billy” Bitzer. The date of his voyage was May 21, 1905. About the digitized restoration of his camera’s record now visible at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J10-aYVG6HY,
employees of the Internet Movie Database have written a supplementary history. Reading it as testimony in advance, we suspend disbelief and begin thinking that we are about to see, in good verbal faith, this.
One of the 50 films in the 4-disk boxed DVD set called “Treasures from American Film Archives (2000)”, compiled by the National Film Preservation Foundation from 18 American film archives. This film was preserved by the Museum of Modern Art.
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We read the words. Words have always taught us to think we know.
But then
Click. See the sudden coming of the light where the dead still live. A moment after you’ve seen it, you’ll be carried off to finish the time you serve in the dark. But as you pass back into the dark you’ll remember the light as if it were a word speaking itself. In its silence, the light will have taught you to hear what words aren’t still enough to say.
* Era
Bounded by soft dusty curtains on either side of their narrow screen, the characters in a 1940s movie modify daylight in a 1940s way. On its 1940s emulsion, daylight’s world is an office where light is split by venetian blinds into shards of black and white. It is all hard. It is the seen, only. It is unequivocal. But at night, in night’s club, other senses join sight and uncase their equivocation equipment: saxophones, voices habited in clouds of cigarette smoke, the single combined smell of smoke and whiskey and the memory name of Kreml hair tonic.
* Trophy
Men seeking memories walked into the forest of the animals, who cannot know a past. Once they were present among the unspeaking animals they went silent, raised their rifles to their shoulders, and blasted the animals to death. Then they picked up the dead, had them formaldehyded, carried them into their dwellings, and hung them on interior walls. The idea was that the men’s sons would look at them in later years, speak of them, and in that way bring their fathers’ memories back to life.