International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Vol. 1, Nº. 2 (2016)
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Item British stereo photographers in Spain: Frank M. Good(Edições Universitárias Lusófonas, 2016) Fernández Rivero, Juan AntonioUnlike French stereo photographers, who flooded the market with Spanish views, the most important British publishers and photographers rarely made Spanish views. Quite possibly this was precisely because of the rapid market penetration of the French, such as Gaudin, Ferrier and others, and in spite of the leading British photographic houses, such as Frith or George W. Wilson, also wanting to include Spanish views in their catalogues. The photographer Frank Good would be the only British photographic editor to make a collection of some importance of Spanish stereoscopic views during the first decades of the history of photography, visiting and photographing the cities of San Sebastian, Zaragoza, Barcelona, Tarragona, Valencia, Seville and Cordoba. About one hundred views, of which more than half are of Cordoba and Seville, do not include, strangely, cities such as Madrid, Toledo and Granada.Item Stereoscopy in nineteenth century Brazil : the case of Rio de Janeiro(Edições Universitárias Lusófonas, 2016) Silva, Maria Cristina Miranda dathe stereographs that are part of the public collections of Rio de Janeiro. We start with an investigation of the presence of optical devices in nineteenth century Brazil, especially in the city of Rio de Janeiro, examining both users and diffusers, as well as the forms of observation and social contexts of their use. Our original research was based on the studies of the first cinema, especially the work of Tom Gunning and Charles Musser, and on art history by Jonathan Crary, authors who helped us analyse, respectively, the re-contextualization process regarding the use of optical devices and the resizing of the observer of modernity. Our empirical work was based on the systematic study of advertisements published in the newspapers of the period in question, especially in the Jornal do Commercio, between the 1850s and the 1870s. We conducted a survey of the establishments that imported and marketed these devices during the period, using advertisements published in Almanak Laemmert, between the years 1844 and 1889. We place a special emphasis on the arrival of photography in Brazil and to the precocity with which stereoscopy was developed here by the photographer Revert Henrique Klumb. We mapped themes as a reference for Brazilian visuality, and made an inventory of the Brazilian photographers who developed this technique in their works. From the information gathered, we answered research questions about the presence of optical devices in the city of Rio de Janeiro in the nineteenth century, especially stereoscopy considering its particularities in the historical, economic and social context of the time.Item Stereoscopic therapy: fun or remedy?(Edições Universitárias Lusófonas, 2016) Raposo, SaraOnce the material of playful gatherings, stereoscopic photographs of cities, the moon, landscapes and fashion scenes are now cherished collectors’ items that keep on inspiring new generations of enthusiasts. Nevertheless, for a stereoblind observer, a stereoscopic photograph will merely be two similar images placed side by side. The perspective created by stereoscopic fusion can only be experienced by those who have binocular vision, or stereopsis. There are several causes of a lack of stereopsis. They include eye disorders such as strabismus with double vision. Interestingly, stereoscopy can be used as a therapy for that condition. This paper approaches this kind of therapy through the exploration of North American collections of stereoscopic charts that were used for diagnosis and training purposes until recently.Item Between the point of view and the point of being: the space of the stereoscopic tours(Edições Universitárias Lusófonas, 2016) Parmeggiani, PaoloOne of the most interesting features of the travel stereoview series is not their three-dimensional effect but rather the intertwined outcome of realism and “being-thereness” in the experience of early twentieth century armchair travellers. On the set of Italy through the Stereoscope, the viewer’s “path of the gaze” was a novelty compared to two dimensional photographs and stereoviews. The Underwood & Underwood publishing company created a stereoscopic multimodal tour to improve the impression of realism with a proprioceptive perception of the scene. The procedure of textual débrayage, the description of the experience as it is happening here and now, the direction of the viewer’s gaze with a narrative itinerary, the changing of the visual convergence with the variation in the points of attention: all of these elements fostered a synaesthesia for the spectator. The result was immersion in an explorable space between the “point of view” (2D images) and the “point of being” (virtual reality).Item Between immersion and media reflexivity: virtual travel media in the 19th century(Edições Universitárias Lusófonas, 2016) Mathias, NikitaDeviating from Oliver Grau’s notion of the panorama’s immersive features, this article will discuss the receptive impact of virtual travel media of the 19th century in a more ambivalent and nuanced manner by employing two theoretical texts by Walter Benjamin, Clemens Brentano and Heinrich von Kleist. In Berlin Childhood around 1900 Benjamin draws on and reflects his childhood experience of the Kaiserpanorama in Berlin. Brentano and Kleist’s text elucidates the authors’ ‘strange feeling’ towards Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Monk by the Sea. What both texts share is a fundamental experience of ambivalence regarding the topographies depicted in both media. Other than merely being ‘enchanted’ and taken into a far distant land, it is precisely the mediality of the Kaiserpanorama and the Friedrich painting that provides a more complex experience, oscillating between distance and familiar terrain, between immersion and media reflexivity, between past, present and future. After introducing and discussing both theoretical accounts, I will apply their receptive principles to the analysis of the virtual travel media panorama and early cinema.Item Hacking stereoscopic vision: the nineteenthcentury culture of critical inquiry in stereoscope use(Edições Universitárias Lusófonas, 2016) Bantjes, RodWhile recent scholarship has emphasised the narratives of immersive realism that surrounded the parlour stereoscope, my aim in this paper is to better understand the counter-currents of nineteenth century stereoscopic culture – the artefacts, practices and discourses that powerfully undermined realist assumptions about spatial perception and the “truth” of stereoscopic representation. Wheatstone’s original stereoscopes were designed to “hack” spatial perception and subject each of its component principles to artificial manipulation. What Wheatstone uncovered were glaring anomalies in the prevailing theories of veridical sight, which had relied upon the principle of binocular convergence (understood as a precise trigonometric measure of depth). Following a popular tradition of critical inquiry known as “rational recreation,” amateurs too used their stereoscopes to reflect on the perplexities of binocular spatial perception. Analytic line drawings highlighted the inexplicable binocular suture of strikingly disparate images. Stereoviews with their images transposed revealed the capacity of the mind to constitute volumetric objects irrespective of binocular cues. Hyper-stereo images (taken from a wide separation and therefore at an increased angle of binocular convergence) sparked debate and perceptual uncertainty as to whether their 3D effects, or indeed all stereoviews, were distorted – elongated along the z axis and/or miniaturised. Realists, including some astronomers hoping to use hyper-stereo photographs as visual evidence of the shape of the moon’s surface, sought unsuccessfully to solve the problem of elongation by ensuring that the angles at which stereo photographs were taken were reproduced in the angles at which the eyes viewed them in the stereoscope. Astronomers were forced to quietly abandon the stereoscope as a reliable witness of spatial form. Others, artists in particular, revelled in the anti-realist implications of a spatial imagination which constructed the perceptual world in a sometimes capricious fashion.