Writing about cinematography in the 1920s and 1930s involved an extraordinary, celestial vocabulary, which both derived and departed from scientific and philosophical ideas of the previous century. Prior to the invention of cinema, scientists, photographers, astronomers, meteorologists and psychoanalysts of the mid-nineteenth century debated the potential wonders (and dangers) of seeing at a lesser or greater speed than one-tenth of a second, the unit of ‘microtime’ then believed to represent the standard time a human being took to react to external stimuli. Consequently, ‘[n]ew arrangements between keys, bodies, wires, clocks, texts, images, and screens were set in place to understand this moment and solve the problems it posed’ (Canales 2009: 217). The Transit of Venus (which took place in 1874 and 1882), lightning storms, electrical sparks, and solar and lunar events were some of the camera’s early muses. These natural and man-made phenomena occurred at a pace or velocity, a distance or scale, that required the focal range and mobility of early cinematographic technologies.

Until the arrival of the Lumière cinematographic camera in 1895, advances in cinematography were often battles fought in laboratories and observatories, but these advances also presented philosophical conundrums. Frances Guerin argues that ‘Technologies such as electrical light and cinema – with their impetus toward instantaneity, fragmentation and ephemerality – arguably frustrate the totalities and hinder the reconciliation between the world of things and that of the spiritual in technological modernity’ (Guerin 2005: 20). As technologies pushed humans to attempt ever more accurate recordings of the exterior world, the unreliability of the observer, and the discrepancy between individual reactions to events and memories of them, became clearer, as did categorical factors such racial and ethnic discrimination based on an assumed biological determinism. The quest for the technological expansion of human ocular and neurological faculties necessarily invoked a rethinking ‘of basic conceptions of the self […] the difference between subjectivity and objectivity. […The camera] was used to investigate what was distinctly personal and individual about particular observations and about the testimony of these observations’ (Canales 2009: 215).