The Looking Machine

Abstract

When an early Lumi ere Company film set in French Indochina shows two white European women in the elaborate dress of the Edwardian period throwing coins to local children who busily pick them up, it’s common today to hear that what we are really seeing there is “colonialism at work.” As it stands, that utterance isn’t wrong. The sins of colonialism were and are real. The mistake however is to conclude that this is all that we’re seeing. For if this was indeed a “typical colonial film” those were also two particular women captured in a particular place at a particular time, and real children grabbing at the coins. Many of the Lumi ere films, as David MacDougall says, “are now profoundly moving glimpses of the past, as well as being important historical records” (158 and Fig. 12.1). Part of the attraction of early documentary was watching things that happened in the past as if they were happening in the present. MacDougall notes that an early genre of still photography was a cataloging of petits m etiers—and this attraction in photography with craftspeople, artists and other workers (later including industrial ones), along with people at play, has waxed and waned in different forms right down to the present. Film added a new dimension to such images: “the uncanny emanation of life being lived... the sensation that, like oneself, people elsewhere were experiencing their own lives” (160). Paradoxically, by use of mechanical means, film enabled the possibility of a strange but poignant kinship with others, with other vulnerable and ephemeral human beings and the settings they lived in—scenes that have long since passed. We might wonder about the individual fates of those children in Indochina, but we do know that they are dead. A kind of “spiritual wound” could be opened by film, a “new intimacy” that was both “painful and fascinating.” This existential/magical dimension of film and our experience of it was something written about by diverse poets, novelists and other artists, and is still alive today in the best of writing on film. But in documentary it would soon be “softened and contained, by a system of quotation,” MacDougall observes. Documentary films would begin to treat images “not as scenes of actual events but as cinematic illustrations of them.” They would retreat from the present moment and begin approaching their subjects in “increasingly