The image of a locomotive moving in the direction of the spectators made them scream and run away when moving pictures were first shown to the public. Movement enhanced the realism of the image, captured on film to the extent of blurring the borderline between reality and the newly established convention of cinematographic expression. In the movies of the silent era, the literacy-based realism of the image- actually an illustration of the script-successfully compensated for the impossibility of providing the sound of dialogue. The experience of literacy and that of writing movement onto film were tightly coupled. Short scenes, designed with close attention to visual details, could be understood without the presence of the word, because of the shared background of language. The convention of cinematography is based on sharing the extended white page on which the projection of moving images takes place. Humor was the preferred structure, since the mechanical reproduction of movement had, due to rudimentary technology and lack of sound, a comic quality in itself. Later, music was inserted, then dialogue. Everyone was looking forward to the day when image and sound would be synchronized, when color movies would become possible.
It adds to the arguments thus far advanced that cinematographic human experience, an experience dominantly visual, revealed the role of language as a synchronizing device, while the mechanics of cameras and projectors took care of the optical illusion. Cinematography also suggested that this role could be exercised by other means of expression and communication as well. Language is related to body movement, and often participates in the rhythmic patterns of this movement. Before language, other rhythmic devices better adapted to the unsettled self-constitutive practical experience of the Homo Hominis were used to synchronize the effort of several beings involved in the endeavor of survival. Although there is no relation between the experience of cinematography and that of primitive beings on the move after migrating herds of animals, it is worth pointing out the underlying structure of synchronicity. The means involved in achieving this synchronicity are characteristic of the various stages in human evolution. At a very small scale of existence, such as autarchic existence, the means were very simple, and very few. At the scale that makes the writing of movement possible, these means had become complex, but were dominated by literacy. With cinematography, a new strategy of synchronization was arrived at. In many ways, the story of how films became what they are today is also the story of a conflict between literacy and image-based strategies of synchronization.
The intermediary phases are well known: the film accompanied by music ("Don't kill the pianist"), recorded sound, sound integrated in the movie, stereophonic sound. Their significance is also known: emulate the rhythm of filmed movement, provide a dramatic background, integrate the realism of dialogue and other real sounds in the realism of action, expand the means of expression in order to synthesize new realities. Some of the conventions of the emerging film are cultural accomplishments, probably comparable to the convention of ideographic writing. They belong, nevertheless, to a pragmatic context based on the characteristics of literacy. They ensue also from an activity that will result in higher and higher levels of human productivity and efficiency. Each film is a mold for the many copies to be shown to millions of spectators. The personal touch of handwriting is obfuscated by the neutral camera-a mechanical device, after all. That the same story can be told in many different ways does not change the fact that, once told, it addresses enormous numbers of potential viewers, no longer required to master literacy in order to understand the film's content. The experience of filmmaking is industrially defined. It also bears witness to the many components of human interaction, opening a window on experiences irreducible to words; and it points to the possibility of going beyond literacy, and even beyond the first layers of the visible-that is, to appropriate the imaginary in the self-constitution of the human being.
Some of the changes sketched above occurred when cinematography, after its phase of theater on film, started to compress language, and to search for its own expressive potential. Compression of language means the use of images to diminish the quantity of words necessary to constitute a viable filmic expression, as well as the effort to summarize literature. Indeed, in view of the limitations of the medium, especially during its imitative phase, it could not support scripts based on literary works that exceeded film's own complexity. Cinematography had also to deal with the limited span of its viewers' attention, their lack of any previous exposure to moving images, and the conditions for viewing a film. When, later on, filmmakers compressed entire books into 90 to 120 minutes, we entered a phase of human experience characterized by substituting written with non- or para-linguistic means.
The generations since the beginning of cinematography learned the new filmic convention while still involved in practical experiences characteristic of literacy. Conventions of film, as a medium with its own characteristics, started to be experienced relatively recently, in the broader context of a human praxis in the process of freeing itself from the constraints of literacy. Films are an appropriate medium for integration of the visual, the aural, and motion. People can record on film some of their most intricate experiences, and afterwards submit the record to fast, slow, entire, or partial evaluation. The experience of filming is an experience with space and time in their interrelationship. But as opposed to the space and time projected in language, and uniformly shared by a literate community, space and time on film can be varied, and made extremely personal. Within the convention of film, we can uncouple ourselves from the physical limitations of our universe of existence, from social or cultural commitments, and generate a new frame for action. The love affair between Hollywood and emerging technologies for creating the impossible in the virtual space of digital synthesis testifies to this. But we cannot, after all, transcend the limitations of the underlying structure on which cinematography is based. Generated near the height of the civilization of literacy, cinematography represents the borderline between practical experiences corresponding to the scale for which literacy was optimal, and the new scale for which both literacy and film are only partially adequate. It is even doubtful that the film medium will survive as an alternative to the new media because it is, for all practical purposes, inefficient.
Cinematography influenced our experience with language, while simultaneously pointing to the limits of this experience. A film is not a visually illustrated text, or a transcription of a play. Rather, it is a mapping from a universe of sentences and meanings assigned to a text, to a more complex universe, one of consecutive images forming (or not) a new coherent entity. In the process, language performs sometimes as language (dialogue among characters), other times as a pre-text for the visual cinematographic text.
Before film, we moved only in the universe of our natural, physical existence, on the theatrical stage, or in the universe of our imagination, in our dreams. The synchronizing function of language made this movement (such as working, going from one place to another, from one person to another) socially relevant. Our movement in language descriptions (do this, go there, meet so-and-so) is an abstraction. Our movement recorded on film is the re-concretized abstraction. This explains the role of filmed images for teaching people how to carry out certain operations, for educating, or for indoctrinating them, or for acquainting them with things and actions never experienced directly. It also explains why, once efficiency criteria become important, film no longer addresses the individual, or small groups; rather, it addresses audiences at the only scale at which it can still be economically justified. The industry called Hollywood (and its various copies around the world) is based on an equation of efficiency that keys in the globality of the world, of illiteracy, and of the distribution network already in place. On an investment in a film of over $100 million, five continents of viewers are needed, and this is still no guarantee of breaking even. It is not at all clear whether Dreamworks, the offspring of the affair between Hollywood and the computer industry, will eventually create its own distribution channels on the global digital network.
The temptation to ask whether the language of moving images made literacy superfluous, or whether illiteracy created the need for film, and the risk of falling prey to a simplifying cause-and-effect explanation should not prevent us from acknowledging that there are many relations among the factors involved. Nevertheless, the key element is the underlying structure. Books embody the characteristics of language and trigger experiences within the confines of these characteristics. When faced with practical requirements and challenges resulting from a new scale of existence, the human being constitutes alternatives better adapted to a dynamics of change for which books and the experience they entail are only partially appropriate.
Books in which even literate people sometimes got lost, or for which we do not have time or patience, are interpreted for us, condensed in the movie. The fact is that more than a generation has now had access to established works of fiction and drama, as well as scientific, historic, or geographic accounts only through films. A price was paid-there is no equivalent between the book and film-and is being paid, but this is not the issue here. What is the issue is the advent of cinematography in the framework in which literacy ceased to support experiences other than those based on its structure.
Films are mediating expressions better adapted than language to a more segmented reality of social existence. They are also adapted to the dynamics of change and to the global nature of human existence. They prepared us for electronic media, but not before generating those strange books (or are they?) that transcribe films for a market so obsessed with success that it will buy the rudimentary transcription together with the paraphernalia derived from the stage design and from the costumes used by the characters. We can find substitutes for coal or oil or tin, but seemingly not for success and stars. As a result, everything they touch or are associated with enters the circuit of our own practical existence. An American journalist ended his commentary occasioned by Greta Garbo's death: "Today they no longer make legends, but celebrities."