ABSTRACT

Morrison is an archaeologist of cinema. His Outerborough references not only the earliest years of cinema history but also perceptional mechanisms. Reworking a Biograph film from 1899, Morrison transforms the film document into a structuralist meditation on cinematic space that references American avant-garde films of the 1970s. Morrison also points to the fact that the birth of cinema coincides with the development of modern modes of transportation, both technologies radically altering human perception of space and time. Suddenly, the world becomes much smaller. Yet, through early cinema and its mechanisms of perception, which emphasized visual pleasure and spectacle, audiences were able to confront their fears of a constantly changing environment and leave the cinema unharmed.

KEYWORDS

American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, avant-garde, early cinema, stereo Vision

The invention of cinema coincides with the development of mass transportation and urbanization. In major cities like New York, Paris, and London, the acceleration of time manifests itself in a compacting of space in which humans, buildings, and transportation systems tumble over one another. The resulting fragmentation of vision catalyzes a change in perception, which is not only articulated through Modernist art, but also in moments of early cinema. Urbanization and the speed of modern transportation, however, also generate anxiety in individuals, afraid of losing control of their environment. Both the apparatus of cinema and mass transport expand the experience of space and time, allowing the world to appear much smaller, but also lead to a drastic increase in perceptual data processed by individuals. Through early cinema, which focusses on visual attractions and spectacle, audiences could safely confront their anxieties about the dangers of modern life and then exit the cinema renewed.

In Outerborough (2005), an eight-and-a-half minute reworking of New York to Brooklyn Across Brooklyn Bridge, an 1899 film produced by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, Bill Morrison meditates on the interrelationship between early cinema and avant-garde cinema, defining their commonality in the perception of movement through space and, simultaneously, the construction of cinematic space. Originally conceived of as silent, Morrison asked Todd Reynolds to compose a modern musical score for a live performance, benefitting the Filmmaker's Coop in New York in September 2005, leading to the creation of a sound version, as well as the original silent version (Morrison 2015, personal email).