Scopic Drive, Time Travel, and Film Spectatorship

Abstract

Sometime around 1895 Albert Einstein, a 16 year-old schoolboy from Ulm, in Germany, began to think about what it would be like to ride on the crest of a light wave -or, as one could say, to surf it. Ten years later he published ’On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies’, a paper that dramatically changed our way of perceiving space, time, and their relationship. Given that cinema was officially born in that same year 1895, one could wonder if the new invention, with its ray of light clearly visible against the darkness of the auditorium, played any role in the young boy’s reflection. Probably not. Nevertheless, the theory of relativity and cinema do have something in common -a fatal attraction for time travel.