Friday A/V Club: GIFs of the 19th Century

My chief contribution to the November Reason is an
essay about
animated GIFs, described in the article as “simultaneously the
shortest variety of motion picture (just a few seconds) and the
longest (those seconds loop forever).” Here’s how the piece
ends:

The animated GIF is not the first species of motion
picture to combine brevity and eternity in this way, with a simple
sequence repeating potentially forever. In the 19th century,
optical toys with peculiar names—zoetropes, praxinoscopes,
zoopraxi­scopes—created the illusion of motion by showing a
succession of images in rapid sequence, helping pave the way for
the movies. But unlike a 20th-century film (and unlike other
19th-century moving picture amusements, such as the flipbook) they
span in a circle rather than progressing from beginning to end.
Some of them feel surprisingly modern, even psychedelic.

How do I know what those ancient motion pictures look like? Because
fans of early cinema have posted many of them online. Frequently as
GIFs.

I didn’t mention it in the story, but the best place on the Web
to see those 19th-century GIFs is a Tumblr run by the photographer
Dick Balzer and his assistant Brian Duffy. Here, for example, are
six praxinoscope strips
that Balzer collected, all crafted by the French animator
Émile
Reynaud in the 1880s:

I especially like the one on the lower left, which feels like
something from psychedelic-era
Sesame Street but was made about 90 years too early for
that.

Here, meanwhile, is a phenakistoscope
disc that someone conjured up in the Netherlands around 1850. Put
on some music while you watch it—I recommend this or this,
but any funky soundtrack will do:

Finally, check this out:

Balzer doesn’t give a date or place of origin for that one, let
alone identify its creator. Too bad: That artist deserved to be
remembered.

These early animations aren’t just entertaining amusements.
They’re the seeds from which cinema was born, paving the way
eventually for everything from newsreels to teleconferencing.
There’s a lesson there about progress, one expressed ably by
Jane
Jacobs in her great book Cities
and the Wealth of Nations:

The first successful
railroad in the world was an amusement ride in London. Many of us
can remember when plastics were used for little except toys and
kitchen gadgets, and for piano keys as a lower-cost replacement for
ivory. Tennis rackets, golf clubs and fishing rods afforded the
first uses of strong, lightweight composites of plastics reinforced
with fibers of glass, boron and carbon; now those composites are
starting to replace metals in some construction products, some
types of springs, pipelines, and aircraft and automobile parts.
Computer games preceded personal computers for workaday use. For
years before artificial voices were being incorporated into
computerized work tools to call out the temperatures of equipment
or to sound explanatory warnings, they were being used in
computerized toys and gimmickry for children (e.g., “Speak and
Spell”) and were being prematurely written off by “serious”
developers and users of computers as cute but useless. In my own
city today I notice that solar heating is largely a passion of
hobbyists, as is drip irrigation, which conserves labor,
fertilizer, water and space in home vegetable gardening.

“All big things grow from little things,” [Cyril Stanley] Smith
comments, “but new little things are destroyed by their
environments unless they are cherished for reasons more like
esthetic appreciation than practical utility.”

Visit Balzer’s Tumblr here, and explore his site
devoted to old optical toys here. Read The Verge‘s
profile of Balzer
here. Check out past editions of the Friday A/V Club here.