Three basic features in Sandow

What is film? To be more detailed, what features within film can distinguish itself from other forms of visual arts? The fundamental question was inquired and is still being explored by various means from different practitioners and researchers, and the answers remain indefinite and various. This sequence analysis aims at the same basic yet complicated question, trying to partly conclude film’s essential features through examining one of the very earliest film practice, Sandow (William Dickson, 1894). This particular film presented three interrelated features: movement, materiality and performance. Through these features we can draw a rather specific rather than general conclusion towards the opening question, that film is a sequence of organised movements, these movements functioned as a performance with the purpose to draw the audience’s attention.

Sandow is far from what we know as film today. It appears as merely a 40-second-long sequence of moving images without narrative plot. In the sequence, the first modern bodybuilder (also a prestigious educator and entertainer of physical science) Eugene Sandow, gives his opening stage act in which he moved through a series of randomly held poses (around 15 ones), each one continued for 2-3 seconds; these movements were taken by medium shot mainly focused on the upper body of the strong man, and were presented before a black interior background. Despite the utter simplicity of the contents, the short sequence contained adequate elements to generate three basic features of film: movement, materiality, and performance.

Movement is the first thing we perceive when watching Sandow. The film displayed the bodybuilder as the sole character and the only object throughout the sequence. The moving and stretching of his arms and upper body was frequent and clear against the dark and blank environment. Here the film raised the difference between still images and moving images: The latter added the dimensionality of “time” to the visuality. Containing a certain duration of time means that the images were no longer still, the object within the images became movable, changeable, moldable, and most importantly, fluid. The adding of fluidity gave Sandow’s body possibility to show how the structures of muscles, the textures of skins, the shapes of the figure and the different poses and positions were gradually forming and reforming, which was beyond the approach of simply animating a sequence of still images in order. This type of change applied a slight but crucial chronological logic to the film. This logic might not implicate specific “events” to happen in chronological order, but it aroused both difference and succession between “now” and “then”: audience was aware of the differences between the poses Sandow held, yet felt the continuity or durée in the process of his posing through the fluid and chronological changes. So, to break down to the basic sequence sections of this film, the feature of movement created a process in which the images changing from “now” to “then” are not totally separate and sudden, but rather has a gradual connection between them. The 2 or 3 seconds of Sandow’s reforming and re-posing affirmed the film’s completion to visually integrate moments of time into duration of time. Also can we find out that from this aspect, the representation of movement since then has became one of the most direct and vivid ways for people to visually experience the time as a duration.

After perceiving the fluidly changing movements of Sandow, we then came to realise the certain preconditions under which the movements were possible to be seen; we began to recognise that those movements were based on and conveyed through realistic medium, there must have had a real man performing real stage act behind the peephole on the kinetoscope. This certain medium is the second feature of film: materiality. The materiality in Sandow referred to the physicality or reality dimension of the content (re)presented on screen. In Sandow, the strong man’s material existence, including his muscular power and strength and his variously and randomly changing poses, was based on a kind of realness which the spectators were able to recognise. We knew from our experience and knowledge that the man must be real, though he was seen by us under a less realistic condition, the viewing machine. As a human being and physical existence in the real world, Sandow’s material substance — his body and ability to move were captured and adopted to (re)produce a new visual material. In other word, unlike other kinds of visual arts, Sandow not only chose the materials in reality and made imitation or portrait, it physically reconstructed a different reality in and alternative space (the kinetoscopic screen) using human body and movement. Those constructed materials of Sandow were alike yet different from the real person, using which the film created a new “Sandow” as object. The Sandow on screen took the real person’s shapes and forms, holding the poses; he is immortal among the moving images and can be shown and played endlessly, while assuring to present the exactly invariable look. Meanwhile, the Sandow on screen was originated from a person we (the audience back then) could make actual contacts in real life, and was inhabited in the milieus we were able to recognise (even the background was dark and blank, we could infer with our knowledge how the person was filmed in artificial environment) and connect to what we perceived as the reality in which we lived. A quote from a contemporary newsletter report might also be evidential: Sandow’s “almost preternatural muscular fibre is depicted with an almost uncanny lifelike verisimilitude”; he was “reproduced before the beholder’s rapt gaze with absolute fidelity to nature” (Phillips, 1997:184). The physicality of Sandow’s presence, the reality of his “nature” thus showed not only how the film was representing, but also how it was reconstructing and reproducing a constructed reality/materiality on screen through the deployment of the materiality from the real world.

Through the analysis above, the third significant feature — performance finally came into play. After the first impression of the movement and the later recognition of the materiality, we can now consider the film’s whole practice (from production to presentation) to be a certain performance, in its general meaning. Being titled of the Professor of Scientific and Physical Culture to King George V, Sandow advertised his exercise methods and exhibited his muscular physique through multiple media including Edison’s kinetoscope film (Crompton, 2011:37-41). Sandow’s logic and strategy was to stage this well-known public figure and represent his performance without interference from the outside world. In this way it could build a “filmed theatre” and a “world of commercial amusement” opposite to the everyday life (Musser, 2004:15-30). The selection of a well-known subject, the presentation of attractive movement and the construction of a separate environment were all part of the performing process. The process aimed to present spectacle and entertainment for the audience, so rather than being done indifferently, it was realised out of certain purpose: to draw the audience’s attention, to drive them away from the world of working and living. It is comprehensible to state that Sandow was like a transcript of the theatrical amusement into a whole new technology-based form. And just like the theatrical practice, the content within the film was never simple recordings and neutral representations of events happened in real life, it was humanly constructed and arranged towards the purpose of amusement.

Sandow, as well as many coeval works of Edison company, adopted raw materials from the real world (the bodybuilder, the stage act of showing physique and holding poses) to construct a represented materiality on the kinetoscope. This materiality conveyed continuous and fluid movements in order to be perceived by the audience at first sight. In consequence, the movement distinguished the film from still images; the materiality endowed realness, which was familiar to the audience’s experience and knowledge, to the film; the performance both transcribed and transferred a theatrical amusement to the new-born art form. It is worth noting that the three aspects were not separate at all. Movement was the outer manifestation of materiality (Sandow’s body and movements reminded audience the realness of the sequence); materiality was the inner fundament to present movement (those movements had to be conveyed to and understood by the audience through their preexisted knowledge of reality); performance was the integration and the practical summary of the former two, it connoted more of a method of practice and a general production process of the film (showing how the film was organised with certain purpose). At last, Sandow was presented as an attractive performance with organised, fluid movements and reconstruction of real-world materiality.

Citation

Crompton, Constance. "Eugen Sandow (1867-1925)." Victorian Review 37, no. 1 (2011): 37-41.

Musser, Charles. "At the beginning: Motion Picture production, representation and ideology at the Edison and Lumiere companies." The silent cinema reader (2004): 15-30.

Phillips, Ray. Edison's Kinetoscope and Its Films : A History to 1896. London: Flick Books, 1997.