Chapter 3 - Classical Cinematism

Summary

This chapter takes us to the classical precursors of the cinema and its pre-modern origin. The camera obscura was the earliest film apparatus, and Aristotle was believed to have known of it. The chapter next describes pre-cinema and traces this concept’s influence and its ramifications. While the moving bodies in prehistoric cave paintings were the first to exhibit cinematism, archaic Greek poet Simonides expressly pointed to the affinities between word and image; the Augustan Roman poet Horace later put them in canonical terms: ut pictura poesis. The chapter then surveys the pre-cinematic nature of ancient visual arts by interpreting a variety of examples (the Minoan fresco of bull jumpers, Greek vase paintings, the Roman Alexander mosaic, Trajan’s Column, many others) and introduces the rhetorical principles of enargeia (“vividness”) and epic ecphrasis. The chapter closes with an appreciation of the ingenious stage automata of Damascius and Heron of Alexandria.