Open University for the Trans-Armies Database & Future Classics: cinetagmatics_001

On January 4th, 1903, Topsy the elephant, who had become a nuisance from the standpoint of the top brass at Luna Park, was put to death, poisoned and then electrocuted—call it precautionary overkill—before an audience of curious onlookers. In that audience, famously, was a film crew from Edison Studios, Thomas Edison’s burgeoning film company. We all know Thomas Edison for the proprietary zeal with which he pursued his business interests, popular mythology positing him as the Roman goon, for example, in counterpoint to a Christ-like Nikola Tesla. Edison would very much like you to believe he invented the motion picture camera. It isn’t an especially simple matter. Auguste and Louis Lumière over in France would not have been in a position to steal any of his ideas, but they too were inventing the movie camera in the 1890s. Edison had the newfangled New World Malarkey Complex behind him. And boffo legal counsel. We might err on the side of reserve and muse that the moving picture camera might well have been invented in two places at once, the separate parties wholly unaware of each other’s doings, like calculus was purported to have been “discovered” both by Newton and Leibniz independently. No need for rancour and litigation, though, one wouldn’t imagine. Edison and the Lumières invented two different kinds of cinema. It is commonplace to oppose the Lumière brothers and Georges Méliès, the magician who went to the moon, suggesting that this dualism gives us the future trajectory of cinema, the Lumières, with their workaday Impressionist tableaus, presaging documentary but also naturalism or realism as well as plain old down-home sentimentalism, Méliès foreseeing a nightmare cinema of attractions, your Star Wars and Avengers hellscape. What of Edison? And what of poor Topsy? In his book The Original Accident, French philosopher Paul Virilio avers that the invention of the Titanic is the invention of its sinking, just as the invention of the railroad is the invention of derailment. This is not at all what Topsy was about (nine years before the Titanic went down). What we have here is something closer to what in his epochal One-Dimensional Man Herbert Marcuse called “technological rationalism.” As plain as the nose in front of your face: the electricity and the cameras did exactly what they were supposed to do, Edison immediately submitting the film to the Library of Congress. This too marks the dawn of a critical cinematographic tradition. Is not the peerless American genius John Ford carrying the torch when he oversees the filming of the battle at Midway in 1942, embedded, less surly than he would ever be again, with the United States Navy? If we think of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and the events of 9.11 we are again in similar territory, though here it is clearly a matter of original accident rearing once again its infernal visage. But what are we to make of the stock footage of mushroom clouds with which our reeling civilization is so ostentatiously glutted?