Imagination, Technology and Pleasure

A comprehensive account of the development of the cinema. It explores how a technology emerged from the laboratory in one form yet engaged the public as something quite different. It also examines the relationship between technology and the broader constituency that participated in the invention of the cinematograph. With the massive investment in the power of the individual to shape history, technology has been regarded as subordinate to science, despite the evidence that the cinematograph was the outcome of collaborative, and even collective, participation in invention. The invention of the cinematograph and the early period of cinema have been mainly seen in the context of entertainment and this has overlooked cinema's role as a site of interplay between technology and culture. This work suggests that, to enrich our understanding of the meaning of early films, the task is to include a more detailed dissection of the ways that technology and culture were interacting. The author also examines the processes of invention through which the machines and systems that endure achieve a mutual intelligibility.
The volume uses historical data to say why 1895 became the start of this visual revolution in a way that provides a useful model for considering technologies through the wider historical developments that have direct implications for the emergence of cinema.