Endless Intervals: Cinema, Psychology, and Semiotechnics Around 1900

During the nineteenth century a number of inventions were developed that used the opportunities afforded when the flow of a motion was momentarily stopped. These included the rotary sewing machine, the Gatling gun, the typewriter, and chronophotographic devices. Various iterations of this principle were also used to capture photographic images in ways that lent themselves to resynthesis, including projection. There were a great many variations on this theme of taking and viewing images so that they appear to recreate movement—many of which continued well into the twentieth century. The technological arrangement that currently enjoys most interest (because it used a continuous strip of material, was used to project images, and schematically resembled the technology of an institutional mode of reception called cinema during the twentieth century) falls under the generally accepted rubric of cinematographe. It is worth being a little pedantic over this, because the tendency to conflate quite distinct...