Life Without Film

Imagine, if you will, for a fleeting and hesitant moment, that films as we know them never came into existence. Suppose that the pioneers that experimented in the earlier days of cinematic exploration had stopped, or never even started. What if, by chance, the Lumiere Brothers, Edison, and Augustin failed to come up with any motion capturing devices? What if the Phenakistoscope, the Zoetrope, the Cinématographe, or even the Electrical Tachyscope had never come to be? Where would that put us now? How would the human race have been affected by the absence of technology that, by today’s standards, is strictly archaic? Compared to the complexity and ability of today’s emerging technology the magic lantern is but a paper airplane. Yet regardless of current technology’s distancing from its predecessors, humans have relied on its presence in every form.

Our world is a visual onslaught from every direction, so much so that we often shut it out, not realizing all that we have experienced. At the same time, though, we intentionally seek out certain forms of stimulation. We want the experiences we are offered. We have come to expect their presence. We are accustomed to what they offer, what they can tell us, and what they can show us. Yet only rarely do we think about their saturation into who we are and how we operate. Only rarely do we realize that because of them we have unprecedented access to years passed. Our forefathers had less opportunity than we do, much the same as our followers who will know more about our selves than we do. Films are transcribing our history, or rather, we are transcribing our history into visually printed form, a record for the future.

So what would become of us without this ability? Would the written word, perhaps the artistic rendition, maybe even the photographic process should I wish to give ample freedom from the above scenario, be enough to capture the existence of our civilization? And with that thought, will the power of film, the recorded image, even be enough? Once we blow the planet to kingdom come, will the DVD’s that goes screaming through space be valid proof of our existence? Hardly.

Film is but one step that satisfies us for the time. Writing did it, painting did it, and photography did it. Film is doing it but even that is beginning to wane. We can no longer trust what we see, nor can we see all that we trust. We know that as long as we live on this planet that gravity will hold us to it. We do not, however, know that future generations will be privy to our actuality. Proof of our being does not last forever; VHS is a prime example. But we do know, whether consciously or not, that for the time being film is more than satisfactory. For the time being, film is a form of immortality. And that should we live in a world without film, we would likely be very, very lost. At least I would.