Through the analysis of two case studies — namely, images of Venus’ transit across the Sun, captured in 1874 by Pierre J.C. Janssen’s photographic revolver, and the advent of spectro-cinematography performed for the first time by Josep Comas i Solà during the solar eclipse of 1912 — the present article seeks to claim and substantiate the strict correlation between photography and cinematic device, recalling what Jean Epstein has defined as ‘the lens philosophy’. In fact, both the photographic and cinematic apparatuses, along with the microscope and the telescope, not only surpass the physiological flaws of the human eye, allowing us to see the un-observable, but moreover contribute to the elaboration and development of new philosophical-scientific systems about the Universe, via their images of celestial bodies. I demonstrate therefore how both of the cases under analysis delimit a specific phase of the history of astronomical images. Changes in the latter relate to the production technique and its underlying representation models, thus corroborating the role played by the astronomical image in the permanent dissolution, attenuation, and redefinition of the frontier between photography and film, instantaneity and duration, and the discrete and the continuous.
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From Stillness (in)to Motion through Astronomical Images: The Cases of Jules Janssen’s Photographic Revolver and Josep Comas i Solà’s Spectrographic Cinematography
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15
From Stillness (in)to Motion through Astronomical Images:
The Cases of Jules Janssen’s Photographic Revolver and Josep
Comas i Solà’s Spectrographic Cinematography
Francesco Giarrusso, Centro de Filosofia das Ciências da
Universidade de Lisboa




Abstract
    Through the analysis of two case studies — namely, images of Venus’ transit
    across the Sun, captured in 1874 by Pierre J.C. Janssen’s photographic revolver,
    and the advent of spectro-cinematography performed for the first time by Josep
    Comas i Solà during the solar eclipse of 1912 — the present article seeks to
    claim and substantiate the strict correlation between photography and cinematic
    device, recalling what Jean Epstein has defined as ‘the lens philosophy’. In fact,
    both the photographic and cinematic apparatuses, along with the microscope
    and the telescope, not only surpass the physiological flaws of the human eye, al-
    lowing us to see the un-observable, but moreover contribute to the elaboration
    and development of new philosophical-scientific systems about the Universe,
    via their images of celestial bodies. I demonstrate therefore how both of the
    cases under analysis delimit a specific phase of the history of astronomical im-
    ages. Changes in the latter relate to the production technique and its underlying
    representation models, thus corroborating the role played by the astronomical
    image in the permanent dissolution, attenuation, and redefinition of the frontier
    between photography and film, instantaneity and duration, and the discrete and
    the continuous.


   From its origins, photography has found in astronomy a privileged field of
application,1 especially in regards to astronomical observation and calculation.
As early as 1849, Hervé Auguste Étienne Albans Faye — Dominique François
Jean Arago’s disciple and astronomer in the Paris Observatory — stated ‘l’usage
le plus important […] de la photographie, dans les observatoires, est de résoudre
un singulier problème […] la détermination du temps absolu’,2 reiterating what


1
  The attention paid by François Arago, French astronomer and politician, to the daguerreotype
and its relation with astronomy, since its invention, is emblematic. In this regard, see Arago,
‘Fixation des images qui se forment au foyer d’une chambre obscure, séance du lundi 7 janvier
1839’, Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des séances de l’Académie des sciences, 8 (1839), 4–7; and
Arago, ‘Le daguerréotype, séance du lundi 19 août 1839’, Comptes rendus, 9 (1839), 250–67.
2
  Hervé Faye, ‘Sur les observations du Soleil, séance du lundi 19 février 1849’, Comptes rendus, 18

                                                          Cinéma & Cie, vol. XV, no. 25, Fall 2015
                                      Francesco Giarrusso


will be the prerogative of the French astronomical school. In those years, the
scientists in the Paris Observatory were especially dedicated to the meridian ob-
servations, that is, to the assertion of the

     instant précis du passage des astres au méridien, derrière les fils du micromètre de la
     lunette fixée invariablement dans le plan méridien, et de mesurer leur distance aux
     pôles. On obtient ainsi les deux coordonnées établissant les positions exactes des
     astres sur la voûte céleste et c’est là la base fondamentale de l’astronomie mathéma-
     tique.3

   This strongly complex and delicate operation was what Faye decided to en-
trust to photography, dismissing the observer in order to elude the fallibility
of our own senses. Furthermore, according to Faye, the photographic device
would, with great skill and precision, substitute human observation, suppressing
any type of personal error; because, as Faye will continue to confidently sus-
tain throughout the years, in this way we would eliminate ‘l’anxiété, la fatigue,
l’éblouissement, la précipitation, les erreurs de nos sens, en un mot l’intervention
toujours suspectes de notre système nerveux’.4
   Indeed it will be with Pierre Jules César Janssen’s photographic revolver that
photography will become ‘la véritable rétine du savant’,5 as it will allow to cap-
ture Venus’ passage across the Sun in 1874. This had already been envisaged
and foreboded by Faye, his direct predecessor, when he stated on 28 May 1869
in ‘Sur l’état de la photographie astronomique en France’ that the photographic
plate would have come to substitute the human retina.6

                                                *

   It was an exceptional event, both by the rareness of the phenomenon7 and by
the scientific intention underlying its observation. As such, it needed the support
of a device of a really high precision. Part of the scientific world, among all and
particularly Janssen,8 recognized this quality in the photomechanical register,


(1849), 241–44 (p. 243).
3
  Faye in Quentin Bajac, ‘1840–1875: les faux départs de la photographie astronomique’, in Dans
le champ des étoiles. Les photographes et le ciel 1850–2000, ed. by Quentin Bajac and Agnés de
Gouvion Saint-Cyr (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 2000), pp. 11–21 (p. 16).
4
  Faye, ‘Sur l’observation photographique des passages de Vénus et sur un appareil de M. Laussedat,
séance du lundi 14 mars 1870’, Comptes rendus, 70 (1870), 541–48 (p. 543).
5
  Pierre Janssen, ‘La Photographie céleste’, in Œuvres scientifiques, ed. by Henri Dehérain, 2 vols
(Paris: Société d’éditions géographiques, maritimes et coloniales, 1929–1930), ii, 27–50 (p. 50).
6
  Faye, ‘Sur l’état de la photographie astronomique en France, séance du lundi 28 mai 1860’,
Comptes rendus, 50 (1860), 965–67.
7
  Venus passes across the Sun twice each 113 years, with an interval of eight years between them.
8
  As declared by Janssen himself: ‘Pour moi c’est l’observation du passage de Vénus qui a attiré
plus spécialment mon attention sur cette branche [la photographie] si féconde et si délaissée chez
nous.’ See Janssen, ‘Presentation de quelques spécimen de photographies solaires obtenues avec
un appareil construit pour la mission du Japon, séance du lundi 22 juin 1874’, Comptes rendus, 78

30
                  From Stillness (in)to Motion through Astronomical Images


the only that guaranteed that result, according to the astronomer Nicolas Camille
Flammarion.9 In other words, this event was the first astronomical occurrence
that, in its promulgators’ intentions,10 should have confirmed photography as the
main observation and measurement device, because of its ability to overcome the
physiologic limitations of human sight.
   On 8 December 1874, the aim of the countless expeditions around the world
was the optical determination of the exact instant of the entry and exit of Venus’
dark disc in that of the Sun. The confirmation of these contacts, observed by
two distant observers, along with the data on their position in space, was com-
bined with the comparison of the schedule of those contacts. This would allow
obtaining the value of the distance between the Earth and the Sun — i.e. ‘la base
de toutes les mesures astronomiques. […] le mètre du système du monde et de
toutes les évaluations des distances célestes’.� Furthermore, Janssen’s gesture of
pointing the photographic revolver to the sky to describe the movement of the
heavenly bodies corroborates the affiliation of his proto-cinematic device with
Galileo’s telescope, and with all other optical instruments.11 It made possible
to overcome the physiological shortcomings of the human eye in the percep-
tion and capture of the infinitely large and the infinitely small. If the telescope
and the microscope explore the dimensions of space, the photographic revolver
and the daguerreotype plate, with the several printed phases of Venus’ passage
across the Sun, allow for a more precise measurement of the distance between
the Earth and the Sun. The photographic revolver and the daguerreotype plate
also widened the spectrum of analysis of the so-called ‘philosophies de la lunette
et de la loupe’,12 initiating the studies on movement and its variation in time, and
premiered an instrument capable of recording the phenomena in order to per-
petuate them in time for continued analysis and future sharing of observations.
   Although the photographic revolver was not able to reproduce movement in
its dynamism, Janssen’s device was strongly connected to its observation and
analysis, through a series of photographic images whose function was to decom-
pose in several phases and at regular intervals the passage of a heavenly body
across another one. It was an anticipation of the so-called time-lapse cinema-
tography with which real-time condensation is performed, thus allowing for the


(1874), 1730–31 (p. 1731).
9
   Camille Flammarion in Monique Sicard, ‘Passage de Vénus. Le Revolver photographique de
Jules Janssen’, Études photographiques, 4 (1998) <http://etudesphotographiques.revues.org/157>
[accessed 18 September 2015] (para. 11 of 24).
10
   Despite the forces and means deployed, the photographs taken were actually not able to de-
termine with absolute precision the moment of contact. The results were scarce. For instance, in
1882, by the time of the second passage of Venus across the Sun, the scientific journalist Wilfrid de
Fonvielle denounced the failure of the photographic record and how it would further induce the
astronomers to abandon the photographic support in favour of the data provided by the old kind
of observations. Bajac and de Gouvion Saint-Cyr, p. 19.
11
   Flammarion in Sicard, ‘Passage de Vénus’ (para. 11 of 24).
12
   Jean Epstein, ‘Le Cinéma du diable’, in Écrits sur le cinéma, ed. by Pierre Lherminier and Marie
Epstein, 2 vols (Paris: Éditions Seghers, 1974–1975), i, 335–410 (p. 339).

                                                                                                  31
                                        Francesco Giarrusso


examination of movements too slow to be observed by the naked eye. Janssen
was thereby able to study and follow the phenomenon, in order to analyse their
constituent parts and highlight the contacts between the discs of Venus and the
Sun. As Janssen wrote,

     le revolver résout le problème inverse du phénakistiscope. Le phénakistiscope de M.
     Plateau est destiné à produire l’illusion d’un mouvement ou d’une action au moyen de
     la série des aspects dont ce mouvement ou cette action se compose. Le revolver pho-
     tographique donne au contraire l’analyse d’un phénomène en reproduisant la série de
     ses aspects élémentaires.13

   For these reasons, Janssen considered photography as a precious instrument
for scientific research, both by its ability to faithfully fix and reproduce a pos-
teriori the observed phenomenon and by its aptitude to overcome the intrinsic
limits of human nature. In this regard, Janssen’s own words are iconic, when he
stated that photography is ‘l’œil universel’,14 and added: ‘bien supérieure à l’œil
humain; car, d’une part, elle garde la trace du phénomène qu’elle a perçu et, de
l’autre, dans certains cas, elle voit plus que celui-ci’,15 and also that: ‘en raison de
cette admirable propriété de nous donner la fixation des images, de les former
avec un ensembles de rayons beaucoup plus étendu que ceux qui affectent notre
rétine, et enfin de permettre l’accumulation des actions radiantes pendant un
temps, pour ainsi dire, illimité’.16

                                                   *

   The rapid decline of the daguerreotype, substituted by the wet-plate collo-
dion technique (1851), and later by silver bromide dry plates (1871–1879), has
favoured not only the birth of astronomical photography, whose images, until
about 1880, fixated the observations made by the human eye, but also propelled
the photographic method beyond the possibilities of visual observation. Visual
observation will be substituted by the arrival of spectroscopy and photometry,
whose images provide information inaccessible to the human eye, like tempera-
ture, density and chemical composition, or the measurement of the power and
energy that sustain the light sources, giving life to modern astrophysics. Hence,
Janssen’s quote mentioned above refers inevitably to the ability of the photo-
sensitive medium to capture every electromagnetic radiations, from the infrared


13
   Janssen, ‘Présentation du revolver photographique et d’épreuves obtenues avec cet instrument’,
Bulletin de la Société Française de Photographie, 22 (1876), 100–08 (pp. 105–06).
14
   Janssen, ‘Discours prononcé à la fête du cinquantenaire de la divulgation de la photographie, le
19 août 1889’, in Œuvres scientifiques, ii, 166–170 (p. 169).
15
   Janssen in Albert Londe, La Photographie dans les arts, les sciences et l’industrie (Paris: Gauthier-
Villars, 1888), p. 8.
16
   Janssen in François Launay, ‘Jules Janssen et la photographie’, in Bajac and de Gouvion Saint-
Cyr, p. 26.

32
                   From Stillness (in)to Motion through Astronomical Images


to the gamma rays. This ability renders possible not only the measurement of
distances between the celestial bodies and the galaxies, but also the time analysis
of light, whose remote origin will allow us to see the past of the Universe, its
primordial images.
   By then Janssen was referring to the study of the nebulae, the eclipses, the co-
mets, and the effect of the photographic irradiation regarding the photosphere,
despite the fact that his device was starting to weaken the Newtonian building
of absolute time and space — already giving us a glimpse of the possibilities of
visual representation of a trans-Cartesian universe: an asymmetric and heteroge-
neous space-time.

     C’est bien ce que nous montre l’expérience cinématographique, qui n’est point si
     isolée d’observations jugées plus scientifiques qu’elle ne puisse être confirmée par
     ces dernières. Par exemple, telle nébuleuse, nous la voyons aujourd’hui dans son état
     d’il y a exactement un siècle. L’expansion de l’univers peut faire que cette galaxie et
     notre globe s’éloignent, l’une de l’autre, tous deux animés d’une vitesse égale aux trois
     quarts de celle de la lumière. Au bout d’un an, nous pourrons voir la nébuleuse dans
     un état antérieur, datant de cent ans et six mois d’après notre chronologie. Donc, au
     cours du laps de temps, pendant lequel, nous, nous aurons vieilli en vivant une année
     dirigée du passé vers l’avenir, la nébuleuse, elle, aura rajeuni sous notre regard, dévécu
     six mois dirigés de l’avenir vers le passé.17

   Returning to the object of this analysis, i.e. the astronomical images produced
by Janssen’s photographic revolver, two things are evident. On the one hand,
the photographic record has confirmed once again the indexical value, the pre-
sumed objectivity of the space-time fragment taken from the observed reality.
On the other hand, it contributed to set the basis for a new visual practice, able
to describe ‘un univers mouvant, découpé en tranches de 72 secondes, celle
qui, décomposant les phénomènes, ne les percevrait que par intermittence’.18
Janssen’s device, in which the continuous and the discontinuous overlap, and
the analytical photography of movements anticipates the motion and prefigures
the synthesis of movement itself, redefining the status of the photomechanical
image. Janssen forecasts the advent of the kinetic, of the movement understood
as a flux composed by discrete units, through which time is conceived in its
atomistic nature, in that each element is marked by a clock’s mechanical sys-
tem. Moreover, the clock itself provided, by means of the hands movements,
the parcelled model of time, whose passage was seen as the sum of moments
quantitatively identifiable. Clocks and metronomes were used even in scientific
laboratories as essential instruments to study and measure the flow of life, its
constituent temporal units.19 The science of the second half of the nineteenth


17
   Epstein, ‘Le Cinéma du diable’, pp. 377–78.
18
   Sicard, La Fabrique du regard (Paris: Éditions Odile Jacob, 1998), pp. 164–65.
19
   Despite the great relevance of Muybridge and Marey’s studies, I will not delve in the exam of the
technical devices and the countless experiences of Muybridge’s serial photography and Marey’s

                                                                                                 33
                                      Francesco Giarrusso


century was committed to the attempt of finding devices that could photograph
time, rendering it visible, ductile, measurable, and representable through the
mathematization of movement into qualitative and quantitative data that could
be scientifically verified.20
   In this regard, Janssen was the first, just as Marey declared,21 to transform
photography into a kind of recording clock capable of simultaneously perform
the indexation of sight and the measurement of time, mechanically combining
the view of the observed phenomenon with the detection of its fundamental
time units, by means of immobilizing and decomposing the movement and its
duration.
   Therefore, the photographic revolver’s double-faced nature was configured
in the observer’s experiential horizon. The ‘pregnant instant’22 coexists with the
impression of the duration in which the kinetic of the photographic image is
given by the circularity and repetition of the frames, ideally infinite, while the
photographic nature of the revolver’s images succession is given by the discon-
tinuous pose, by the immobility of each photograph. To the fixity of the frame is
added the transition of a long exposure, thus combining the pose with the view
and the immobility with the return to movement. What’s more, the device con-
ceived by Janssen possesses and displays a dual overlapping, both technical and
epistemological. Although Janssen, during the Congress of the Union Nationale
des Sociétés Photographiques de France which took place in Lyon in July 1895,
had stressed the distinction between the ‘analytical photography of movements’
of Marey’s chronophotography — a scientific procedure perfected and derived
from the photographic revolver — and the ‘animated photography’ from the
Lumière Brothers’ projections — the naturalistic reproduction of pictures in
motion —, both devices presented the Maltese cross gear, responsible for the
intermittent progression of the photosensitive surface,23 and the shutter, whose


chronophotography, in what concerns the study of the relationship of the space-time coordinates
with the physiological movements whose dynamic and mechanism they intended to analyse.
20
    In those years, Marey’s research on the study of movement have contributed to the process
of mathematization of physiology, raising a considerable interest in the scientific (Hermann von
Helmholtz and Charles Fremont) and industrial (Frederick W. Taylor and Frank B. Gilbreth)
fields. This interest focused in the measurement of the preservation/energetic expenditure of the
labour force and their harmonisation with the movements of the industrial machines. See Anson
Rabinbach, The Human Motor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
21
   ‘C’est M. Janssen qui le premier, dans un but scientifique, imagina de prendre automatiquement
une série d’images photographiques pour représenter les phases successives d’une phénomène.
C’est donc à lui que revient l’honneur d’avoir inauguré ce qu’on appelle aujourd’hui la Chronopho-
tographie sur plaque mobile.’ Étienne-Jules Marey, ‘Chronophotographie sur plaque mobile’, in Le
Mouvement (Paris: G. Masson Éditeur, 1894), pp. 102–23 (p. 102).
22
   Here I refer to Lessing’s notion, postulated in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, ‘Laoköon: oder über
die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie’ (Berlin: Christian Friedrich Voss, 1766) and resumed by
Jacques Aumont, L’Œil interminable: cinéma et peinture (Paris: Librairie Séguier, 1989) and Ro-
land Barthes, L’Obvie et l’obtus (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1982), among others.
23
   While the photographic revolver had a sensitive, circular plate, Lumière’s cinematograph used
perforated film.

34
                  From Stillness (in)to Motion through Astronomical Images


function is to prevent the passage of the light during the advancement of the
support. As mentioned above, the proximity is not limited to what concerns the
components and the operation of the devices in question. It also encompasses
two distinct paradigms related to the techniques and the visual practices implied.

                                                 *

   Indeed, Janssen’s astronomical photography redefined the image status not
only in respect of the production technique, due to the unprecedented conjunc-
tion of heliostat, telescope and daguerreotype, but also in the profound change
related to the scopic regime — that is, the new dialectic relationship between the
geometric optics of the camera obscura and the onset of the physiological optics
of the consecutive image.24 As far as the first visual model is concerned, Janssen’s
device shares with the camera obscura one of its main functions: the indirect
observation of the Sun. Just as Johannes Kepler and Sir Isaac Newton used the
camera obscura to avoid the direct observation of the Sun during its analysis,
Janssen’s device was also designed to capture the inscrutable, the unobservable.
In both cases, the aim was to capture and concentrate sunlight almost as if they
were mirrors capable of returning with absolute clarity, according to the mecha-
nisms of propagation of the light beam and the laws of optical transmission, ‘the
light of reason, not the potentially dangerous dazzlement of the senses by the
light of the sun’.25
   The camera obscura model performed a separation between the act of sight
and the observer’s body, excluding the deceiving senses of the capture of the phe-
nomenon, so that the subject could go from organizer to witness in the process
of the objective and mechanical register of the observed reality. The observer’s
body did not intervene, his physical position before the observed phenomenon
was irrelevant, since the trust was placed solely in ‘a disembodied cyclopean eye,
detached from the observer’,26 able to establish a rational space, a transcenden-
tal representation of the world, away from the corruption of the senses and the
uncertainty and confusion of the human eye. As aforementioned, the photome-
chanical image in the astronomical field was also always conceived within a de-
vice that, since Faye and his project to bind photography and electromagnetism,27
intended to do without the intervention of the observer’s senses, since ‘la fatigue
oculaire, le travail analytique de l’esprit ou des maladresses de la main’28 could
harm the work of the scientist.
   Faye’s project and Janssen’s device to substitute the human retina by the pho-

24
   For a more complete presentation of the concepts related to the optical regime of the camera
obscura and to the physiological optics of consecutive images, I refer to Jonathan Crary, Techniques
of the Observer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990).
25
   Ivi, p. 44.
26
   Ivi, p. 47.
27
   Faye in Bajac and de Gouvion Saint-Cyr, p. 17.
28
   Bajac, ibidem.

                                                                                                 35
                                          Francesco Giarrusso


tographic plate referred inevitably to the objective and immaterial eye of the
camera obscura. Furthermore, the photographic revolver and the attempt to de-
compose the movement, slowing it down and condensing it, somehow attested
the assertion of the observer’s physical subjectivity as the active place where, and
through which, the visual representations take shape. As the words of Jonathan
Crary corroborate, from the beginning of the nineteenth century ‘the visible es-
capes from the timeless order of the camera obscura and becomes lodged in
another apparatus, within the unstable physiology and temporality of the human
body’.29 Actually, the photographic revolver was not only an autonomous opti-
cal device, a neutral apparatus of instantaneous transmission of data proceeding
exclusively from the observation of an object. On the contrary, the observer’s
presence became mandatory to the interpretation of the observed phenomenon,
constituting the basis of the visual experience, the individual who produces the
movement and the passage of time, in synergy with the machine of which he
became an integral part.
   If, during the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, the human being made
optical instruments that reproduced the principle of the camera obscura — such
as the microscope and the telescope for example —, proposing its monocular,
motionless and immaterial vision, then from the advent of the photographic re-
volver it was no longer just the human being using a device made by himself, but
the observer’s own body using and interacting with the machine, guaranteeing
the succession of images and his experience of time.
   In fairness, it will be the cinematograph, this automaton of sight whose me-
chanism ensures for the first time in history the photographic inscription of time
and the simultaneous recording of space that will go beyond this apparent over-
lapping, displaying a new image of the universe, the inconsistency of the dichoto-
mies instantaneous/duration, discrete/continuous. The cinematograph: this sort
of brain-machine able to reveal in the continuity of the projection a subjective
transfiguration of a more true discontinuity and, at the same time, in disconti-
nuity an arbitrary and mechanical interpretation of a fundamental continuity.
Paraphrasing Jean Epstein, it is then discovered that the cinematic continuous
and discontinuous are inexistent, since

      [l]e cinématographe nous indique que le continu et le discontinu, le repos et le mou-
      vement, loin d’être deux modes de réalité incompatibles, sont deux modes d’irréalité
      facilement interchangeables [...]. Il n’y a pas plus d’exclusive entre eux, qu’il n’y en
      a entre les couleurs d’un disque à l’arrêt et le blanc du même disque en rotation.
      Continu et discontinu, repos et mouvement, couleur et blanc jouent alternativement le
      rôle de réalité, laquelle n’est, ici comme ailleurs, jamais, nulle part, autre chose qu’une
      fonction […].30




29
     Crary, p. 70.
30
     Epstein, ‘L’Intelligence d’une machine’, in Écrits sur le cinéma, i, 255–334 (p. 281).

36
                  From Stillness (in)to Motion through Astronomical Images


   It was no longer a matter of understanding the superficial continuity of mun-
dane phenomena, or of probing the molecular and subatomic discontinuity, be-
cause the Universe is not made of matter but of energy, as stated by Epstein.31
The cinematic device, in accordance with the scientific materialism of the second
half of the nineteenth century of which it derives, enables the visualization of
new shapes and new relations that break with the homogenous, non deformable
and isotropic continuous of the Newtonian conception of the Universe. In other
words, it is as if the advent of the cinematograph had revealed the inconsistency
of the classical conception of space and time, seen as distinct and unchanging do-
mains in which movement is measured in regard to a fixed and absolute referen-
ce system. The inconstant mobility of the forms that run on the cinematographic
screen and the dilation and/or reduction of the extension and succession of re-
corded phenomena reveal the most intimate nature of matter, whose consistence
is no other than energy, located within a certain, limited space-time section, per-
ceptible and understood by our senses.

     Le cinématographe nous montre que la forme n’est que l’état précaire d’une mobilité
     fondamentale, et que, le mouvement étant universel et variablement variable, toute
     forme est inconstante, inconsistante, fluide. Le solide se trouve tout à coup mena-
     cé dans sa suprématie ; il ne représente plus qu’un genre particulier d’apparences
     propres aux systèmes d’ordinaire expérience et d’échelle humaine, qui sont à mouve-
     ment constant ou faiblement et uniformément varié.32

                                               *

  By then the third phase of space observation was taking shape: after drawing
and photography,33 the third great advance in astronomy was in cine-photograph-
ing the spectra of the stars. During the first years, however, the use of cinematic
devices in the astronomical field did not achieve great results immediately.
  I mainly point out the observations made by Josep Comas i Solà, director of
Fabra Observatory in Barcelona, who during the solar eclipse of 1900 in Elche,
performed a series of photographs of the corona and of the spectrum of the
chromosphere with a prismatic camera34 — a conventional photographic camera
with a prism attached to the lens. Furthermore, during the solar eclipse of 30


31
   Epstein, ‘Le Cinéma du diable’, ivi, pp. 335–410.
32
   Ivi, pp. 403–04.
33
   This was a preponderant phase of the scientific representations in the astronomical field. It
encompasses the drawings of the lunar phases observed by Galilei through a telescope and pub-
lished in Galileo Galilei, Sidereus Nuncius (Venice: Tommaso Baglioni, 1610), and the work of
Nasmyth and Carpenter, published in James Nasmyth and James Carpenter, The Moon Considered
as a World, a Planet and a Satellite (London: John Murray, 1874). In the later case, the Moon im-
ages were accomplished by photographing it from different perspectives and building plaster scale
models of the satellite from drawings drawn by Nasmyth himself.
34
   M. Encarnació Soler i Alomà, ‘Va filmar Chomón I’Eclipsi?’, Cinema Rescat, 15 (2004), 11–16
(p. 12).

                                                                                              37
                                         Francesco Giarrusso


August 1905, Comas i Solà went even further and, besides the photographs of
several chromospheric spectra, made some images with ‘un cinématographe de
M. Gaumont, dans lequel [il avait] placé devant son objectif de Goerz un prisme
de M. Mailhat’, adding ‘[o]n doit conseiller ce procédé spectro-cinématogra-
phique comme un puissant auxiliaire des autres observations spectroscopique.’35
Yet, Comas i Solà’s big astronomical success was achieved later with the eclipse
of 1912, when he adapted two equilateral prisms to the lens of a normal, com-
mercial camera ‘in order to record with a convenient temporal resolution the
occurrence and evolution of the flash spectrum of the solar chromosphere’.36
For the first time, the cinematographic image was used not only to document
eclipses, comets’ movements, sunspots and every dynamic phenomena concern-
ing positional astronomy, but also to identify the different energies of the elec-
tromagnetic spectrum. This assisted in the transition ‘to the new astrophysical
studies, process in which the eclipses of the beginning of the century (1900, 1905
e 1912) were a relevant driving factor (Ruiz, 2009)’.37
   Comas i Solà’s cinematic prismatic camera and his footage of the flash spec-
trum, performed with a pace of five photograms per second for a total of about
one hundred images,38 confirmed the access to a new universe that questioned
Kantian categories of space and time. Now the cinematograph had the power to
challenge the space-time relationships conceived for centuries as fixed and abso-
lute entities. It was therefore enough to modify the time of cinematic representa-
tion to destroy the usual experience of things. Or, making mine Epstein’s words,
changing the time of recording and projection sufficed to reveal a ‘[m]onde pro-
fondément fluide, d’où la permanence des formes a disparu dans un espace qui
ne connaît plus de symétrie et dans un temps qui a cessé d’être uniforme’.39 This
is the reason why nothing is motionless in the universe, everything changes, and
everything is transformed.
   Just as previously with the photographic revolver, the astronomical image
came to redefine once more the already subtle frontier between photograph-
ic and cinematic, whose statuses were even questioned by the spectrographic
cinematography. These new astronomical shootings showed features of the ob-
served phenomena that the human body could not and cannot experience, not
only because they insinuate themselves in the folds of time, inconspicuous to the
physiology of our eyes, but because they give us back arbitrarily encoded images
from outer space.40


35
   Josep Comas i Solà, ‘Observations sur l’éclipse totale du Soleil du 30 août 1905, séance du lundi
16 octobre 1905’, Comptes rendus, 141 (1905), 616–17 (p. 617).
36
   Salvador X. Bará Viñas, ‘Innovación tecnolóxica e astronomía social na eclipse de sol do 17 de
abril de 1912 no Barco de Valdeorras’, Revista Real Academia Galega de Ciencias, 31 (2012), 55–68
(p. 56, my translation).
37
   Ivi, pp. 59–60 (my translation).
38
   Ivi, p. 58.
39
   Epstein, ‘Esprit de cinéma 1946–1949’, in Écrits sur le cinéma, ii, 11–128 (p. 107).
40
   As de Gouvion Saint-Cyr reminds us: ‘Le pied sur la lune, la tête dans les étoiles...’, in Bajac and de

38
                  From Stillness (in)to Motion through Astronomical Images


   It would be possible to assert that with the spectrographic cinematography
nothing of what we see will ever be within our sight’s reach, both by the huge
distance between us and the observed celestial object, and by the progressive
separation between the body and the organ of sight, be it human or artificial. In
the measurements of the electromagnetic spectrum, within balloons in the 1930s
and within artificial satellites from the 1950s onwards, we have seen observa-
tion devices being placed beyond the atmosphere to also capture the radiation
that does not reach the terrestrial observatories. Thus, a vision without sight is
outlined, in an automatism of perception that ousts the body from its role of
fundamental referent of the human action as centre of observation and measure-
ment of space. Furthermore, the transcription of invisible radiations through a
code and a chromatic scale, intentionally developed to render intelligible the
data from spectral range explorations, constituted the first step towards the total
computerisation of image production and reception. This is why the simulation
mechanism that brought the eye closer to the photomechanical representation
will leave its position to a substitution process, by which the machine will pro-
duce images by itself, with no physical mediation whatsoever of a human being.
   In this sense, the technical progress of the astronomical image will put forth
the implementation of a new vision, of a new image — the electro-numerical —
whose elaboration and transmission will envelop the Earth in an infographic net
in which space and time will implode in the ubiquity and concomitance of the
teletopological phenomenon,41 in the synthesis between the photographic and
the cinematic,42 in which the instantaneousness of the event and the duration of
the transmission overlap. Otherwise, how do we define the images of 18 March
1965 of humanity’s first EVA43 performed by the cosmonaut Alexey Arkhipovich
Leonov, whose production, transmission and reception involved, respectively,
photomechanical, radio-electronic and broadcasting processes? And above all,
what is the place of the earthly observer who admires the Globe spinning behind
the cosmonaut?




Gouvion Saint-Cyr, p. 41: ‘Telle onde lumineuse n’ayant pas de nom — donc pas de représentation
— dans notre langage visuel, il convient de lui attribuer un code qui, par rapport à d’autres sources
de rayonnement, permette de situer l’astre dans l’Univers. On comprend alors pourquoi il devient
désormais illusoire de dresser des cartes du ciel sans les accompagner de légendes précises.’
41
   Paul Virilio, La Machine de vision (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1988).
42
   As Mitchell writes: ‘The first cameras in space used photographic film, which was automatically
developed and scanned for transmission to Earth.’ See Donald P. Mitchell, ‘Soviet Space
Cameras’, <http://mentallandscape.com/V_Cameras.htm> [accessed 15 July 2015]. For a deeper
understanding of the history of the soviet missions and for technical information about the space
photographs and shootings, visit the websites <https://donpmitchell.wordpress.com/> and
<http://mentallandscape.com/> [accessed 30 September 2015].
43
   EVA stands for Extra Vehicular Activity.

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