Conclusion The Matrix of Photocinema and the Moral Universe

Global Justice and Polymathy

This study began as a work of media archaeology focused on astronomical culture, until I realized that what that meant in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was not at all the same as today. Well into the development of this book, I realized that what had begun as a work of media archaeology had morphed into something else. At its best, media archaeology puts in question the disciplinary contours of its objects—media. But it has not been proactive at addressing how race figures in their inception. The reigning presumption is that race entered only through representations within constituted media. In other words, in current media archaeology, race is unseeable. To a large extent, this is also true for media theory. Take Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (1980). It was canonized for thirty years in media studies until Shawn Michelle Smith demonstrated the pivotal role of racist and antiracist discourse within Barthes’s notion of photographic punctum.2 My intent, however, had not been to race media archaeology—quite the opposite. I proceeded to set aside the references to race I came across in my corpus as being beyond the scope of this study, as the chaste expression goes, following media archaeology’s premise. But then I came across Susan Buck-Morss’s luminous injunction that “disciplinary boundaries allow counterevidence to belong to someone else’s story” and her concomitant call for our “loyalty to the idea of a universal humanity,” to the exact extent that it has historically been betrayed by its white inceptors.3

As a result, this book committed to cross-disciplinarity or, rather, critical polymathy. As Siegfried Zielinski, Jussi Parikka, and other media archaeologists show, early media thinking was inherently polymathic.4 Moreover, Black diasporic thinkers and thinkers of color like Édouard Glissant, Sylvia Wynter, Fred Moten, Arjun Appadurai, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Achille Mbembe, Lisa Lowe, and Denise Ferreira da Silva (among many others) have taught us to examine racialization critically across disciplines, at long durations, and at the scale of the planet.5 This is the purview of racial and colonial reparations. For Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, that perspective entails a “worldmaking project” in which the acknowledgment of five centuries of white supremacy over the globe is a necessary propaedeutic step for reconstructive practices honed on racial injustice and justice to come.6 What I find striking in Táíwò’s work is its reliance on envisioning history by making visible the “structure and motion” of enslaved and free peoples over centuries, the unequal distribution and reproduction of their dis/advantages, and the field of forces generated by historical flows of goods. He foregrounds “nested scale” and an expanded awareness of “real space-time” to counter Rawlsian approaches that he calls “a ‘snapshot view’ of distributive justice,” limited to analyzing discrete places and times (Táíwò, Reconsidering Reparations, 20, 33, 74). In this endeavor to reframe reparative justice, retracing the origins of photocinema becomes more than an academic exercise. It helps us contextualize the relationship Táíwò uncovers between history seen as mere snapshots and history rethought as a kinemorphic “trajectory . . . in the unfolding of a process . . . about today, about yesterday, and about the narrative arc that unites them” (85). In this sense, the origins of photocinema outlined in the present study partake of a larger model of racialized historicity that still subtends the temporality of our world system. In the last section, I return to that model and the temporal purview of Táíwò’s constructive reparations.7

The Beginnings of Cinema at the End of Indigenous Rule

The findings of this study can help us understand nonintuitive connections between astronomy and race in early moving pictures. Cinema as an artful medium arguably began with Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon in 1902. Relying on colorized frames, trick shots (stop action), féerie sets, and tableau staging, it follows five white males’ journey to the Moon, where they encounter Lunarians. The thin plot has little ambition beyond showcasing the technical wizardry of the cinema of attractions.

The movie was inspired not directly by Jules Verne’s popular 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon but by A Trip to the Moon, an 1875 derivative operetta by Jacques Offenbach. It centers on a scientist named Microscope, who takes his king Vlan and retinue to the Moon. There they meet blue Selenites, their king Cosmos, and his counselor Cactus. “How backward they are on the Moon,” Vlan remarks as Cosmos mounts a dromedary—a transparent Orientalist cliché.8 Male Selenites sell females they find displeasing, and the third act centers on the public auction of a lunar princess, one of the bidders being “a slave merchant.” One character is a Selenite photographer who displays insect-like characteristics, Orientalized clothing, a hooked “Semitic” nose, and an accordion-camera body (see Figure C.3). Other Selenites have bat-like features that were influenced by 1835 Great Moon Hoax illustrations (see Figure C.2), while the operetta’s moonscape sets imitate “lunar landscapes from Flammarion” (Vanloo et al., Le Voyage dans la Lune, 132, iv).

The success of Offenbach’s lunar fairy show, with its overt racism and primitivism, was widely emulated. In 1901, a fair attraction called “Trip to the Moon” was shown at the Buffalo Pan-American Exposition, while H. G. Wells published The First Men in the Moon.9 Méliès leveraged the success of this turn-of-the-century lunar revival.

Recent critics note the colonial racism at the core of Méliès’s film but not the proximal context obvious to French viewers: the conquest of Madagascar.10 With near-total hegemony across continents, Western powers in the 1890s turned to strategic island nations in the Pacific and Indian Oceans: Madagascar for France, Hawai‘i and the Philippines for the United States, and federated Australia for the British Empire. The lobster-like costumes of Méliès’s Selenites barely conceal the movie’s anti-Indigenous, anti-African, and anti-Islamic stance (the king’s house is adorned with crescents). Selenites bear the long lances characteristic of depictions of islander Native people in Western visual culture. The white explorers carry no weapons, only umbrellas that nonetheless transform into both shields and ray guns that disintegrate Native people into smoke for a laugh.11 A Selenite who has piggybacked on the spaceship and survived the ocean splash is paraded like a war prisoner in a Roman triumph. For French viewers, that closing vignette recalled the 112 Merina and Malagasy Native people deported to the “ethnographic zoo” of the Madagascar pavilion at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle, which expressly celebrated France’s final victory. A description of the Madagascar pavilion makes this clear: “Indigenous peoples in motion in the gardens provided animation and local color to this spectacle, whose picturesque was enhanced by the presence of several detachments of Malagasy militiamen and scouts. . . . At the center of the Madagascar exhibit, and part of its very body as a felicitous complement, is located the panorama of the taking of Antananarivo, with a series of dioramas picturing various episodes of the conquest.”12 Méliès’s movie falls back on the exoticism and racism of seventeenth-century Moon travel tales, but with two notable differences.13 As a work of colonial propaganda at the height of the Scramble for Africa, the movie no longer depicts Selenites as culturally or technologically advanced. To the contrary, recycling seventeenth-century visualizations of Moon travel for the screen becomes a way of training viewers through a familiar imaginary and couching the cinema apparatus itself as a supposedly innocuous new visualization tool rather than as the weapon for colonialism that it is. Méliès had certainly heard of or watched Camille Flammarion’s 1898 astronomical animated shorts, but in his A Trip to the Moon he merely sends up the animist astronomical context from which Flammarion devised cinema.

A few films attempted to revive the antiracist and antihegemonic potential of the matrix of photocinema, such as Jean Renoir’s subversive 1927 film Charleston Parade.14 It takes place in a war-devastated 2028 Paris, where the sole survivor is a white woman played by Renoir’s then-wife Catherine Hessling. She has devolved into a so-called primitive state and is accompanied by a pet ape (played by Renoir himself), whom she frees from bondage at the beginning of the film. Action begins when atop her hut—an advertising column—an African astronaut lands his shiny spacecraft. He is played in blackface by African American vaudeville performer Johnny Hudgins, a former member of the Harlem Chocolate Dandies.15 But it is she, as a white “primitive,” who teaches him the Charleston, an ironic twist reviving the discursive use of photonegative inversion for antiracist purposes. Henry Louis Gates Jr. rightly reads the film as satirizing colonial conquest and anti-Black clichés, especially since the astronaut’s map shows “Europa Deserta.”16 The film’s key sequence crosscuts between Hessling and Hudgins dancing “at” each other in medium shots, then medium close-ups, and finally slow motion. The back-and-forth crosscutting between their closely dancing bodies and excited faces suggests intercourse. It makes visible the miscegenation that cannot be shown. At the end of the film, he rescues her from European savagery, and both fly back to Africa—the phantasmatic origin of photographic and televisual technologies in Giphantie.17 Curiously, the Black astronaut’s hand-cranked map system reprises the earliest prototype of two-reel devices: Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg’s 1753 chronographic machine. Through Charleston Parade’s astronautical send-up of the colonial fiction of L’Afrique française, and its embrace of interracial love, the anti-Black origins of photocinema return in palimpsest as avant-garde critique.

A few decades earlier, W. E. B. Du Bois penned a plot similarly leveraging miscegenation in his short story titled “The Comet.”18 Jim, a Black bank employee, and Julia, the white daughter of a banker, are the sole survivors of a cataclysmic comet that wiped out New York City. When they encounter each other, he is at the wheel of a luxury automobile: “Of all the sorts of men she had pictured as coming to her rescue she had not dreamed of one like him” (Du Bois, “Comet,” 259). They look for her father and other survivors, accessing the telephone exchange to send an open call across the world, but it is left unanswered. Intimacy builds and they are on the brink of having sex when her white fiancé and father reappear ex machina. The fiancé wastes no time fantasizing that Jim raped Julia, calling for his lynching. The story ends with the return of Jim’s Black wife, holding their dead son. While Jim’s life was preserved by the bank’s basement vault, Julia owed hers to a “dark room” where she was “developing pictures of the comet” (260). The fated collision of celestial bodies stands here in direct relation to the taboo of sex between interracial bodies. The dark vault and the dark room signal the two extremes of the camera obscura: exploitation crystallized into white wealth and snapshots of a comet as ephemeral as breaches in the color line. Significantly, for both Du Bois and Renoir, only at the end of history can anti-Blackness be rescinded—from an astronomical perspective.

Backward Motion as Forward Thinking: Cinema and the Machining of History

Both Du Bois and Renoir take white positivist teleology as predicated on anti-Blackness. As mentioned earlier, the chronological order of the present study does not celebrate the arrival of cinema as a culmination. Indeed, the technical inception of cinema for Flammarion resulted from retrospection—how to access the past in its present, albeit distant, visibility. It was meant neither as an apparatus for or evidence of progress nor as a media of reproduction. The 1753 chronographic machine of Barbeu-Dubourg and the 1760 photo canvases of Charles François Tiphaigne de la Roche had similar aims of retrospective access rather than reproduction. This is the case as well with an apparatus that cinema archaeologists consider the least ambiguous antecedent to moving pictures: Robertson’s Fantasmagorie shows, which started in Paris after the end of the Reign of Terror.19 In the wake of the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions, the Hegelian and then positivist structure of historicity took the form of universal recapitulation in which progressive stages overcome the past. Progress served not only to leave the past behind but also to justify and overwrite its enormous human cost. The matrix of photocinema, in this respect, is rather ambiguous. While the telescope and the first combinations of photography and telescopes arose within explicitly military and racist contexts, photoimaging and the history machines of Barbeu-Dubourg, Tiphaigne de la Roche, Restif de la Bretonne, and Flammarion developed a backward-forward temporality blunting the telos of the conquests of progress. Similarly, for Táíwò, “bending the arc of the moral universe” by “join[ing] actions up across time and space—even with those we have never met and may never know of,” and doing so by invoking as well “the moral perspective of the ancestor,” represent the proper mode of visualizing how to start carrying out the work of global reparations (Táíwò, Reconsidering Reparations, 200–01).

Flammarion’s telechronoscope proposed more literally that past history could be filmically imaged in the future so that the past also lies in the future. That paradoxical temporality remained subjacent within the development of photocinema. As Shawn Michelle Smith puts it: “Photographs move physically as material objects (or as digital information viewed on physical platforms). . . . If the photograph is emblematic of the way the past persists in the present, it also foreshadows how fragments of the present will punctuate a future moment.”20 It was Du Bois again who anticipated the potential of cinema for making visible a counterhegemonic historiography. In his short story “The Princess Steel,” written between 1908 and 1910, Du Bois restaged double consciousness by deploying cinema as a tool of historical visualization and repair.21 A Black sociology professor from Pittsburgh named Johnson has invented the “megascope,” an apparatus capable of replaying, as virtual reality, two centuries of unrecorded African American history. It is made of a glass sphere described as “a scintillating captive star” in which the diagrammatic “curves” and “counter-curves” encoding structural racism are projected (Du Bois, “Princess Steel,” 823). A single white couple responds to Johnson’s public invitation to watch the film. Their ears and eyes plugged into the megascope, they watch the virtual reality footage of how Pittsburgh derived its steelmaking wealth. The film depicts a captive African princess whose hair is plucked by white “Over-Men” to make steel. Johnson calls their undisputed power a “Zeit-Geist,” so ingrained that “we vaguely identify it with the universe,” an echo of the historical simultaneity of celestial mechanics and slave codes in the 1680s (823). The incarcerated African princess embodies at once the origins of enslaved African Americans and Pittsburgh’s Black lumpenproletariat in the era of segregation. The white couple grows uneasy and, unwilling to watch the film to the end, untethers themselves and leaves without a word. The story breaks at this point, as if white people’s refusal to acknowledge Black history broke the film. But Du Bois’s point is also that the archive of Black enslavement, dehumanization, and social subalternity, though unrecorded, persists within history, and cinema might be able to partially rematerialize it on screen.

“The Princess Steel” leveraged Du Bois’s lifelong interest in visual and visualization media, from telescope observation and Étienne L. Trouvelot’s astronomical illustrations to socioeconomic diagrams, photos, and film.22 It is very possible that he read Flammarion’s Lumen in his student days. For the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, he organized an exhibit titled “The American Negro” displaying hundreds of photographs of African Americans from all walks of life, offering a critical sociological portrait through longitudinal data. This gave white fairgoers an unfiltered glimpse of two centuries of Black American culture—the very aim of Johnson’s megascope.23

The newly invented cinema apparatus was the star of the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, with another booth dedicated to the history of chronophotography, organized by Étienne-Jules Marey. Among various kinds of film technologies exhibited was a color film projector called the “chromo-mégascope,” Du Bois’s likely proximal source for Johnson’s machine.24 The original “mégascope,” of course, was that of Jacques-Alexandre-César Charles in the 1780s (see chapter 3). The chromo-megascope’s introduction of color to cinema suggested a polysemy not lost on Du Bois. The new kinds of movies African American and Black diaspora filmmakers have undertaken to make over the last decade generically partake of Johnson’s unseeable movie.25 That is, they endeavor to make visible the unrecorded history of racial injustice—bending the arc of the moral universe.