Film-Philosophy 2.1 1998 C. Paul Sellors Rediscovering the Cinema Brian Winston Technologies of Seeing: Photography, Cinematography and Television London: British Film Institute, 1996 0-85170-601-0 0-85170-602-0 (pbk) 143 pages Conventional film history locates the medium's beginning in the Grand Cafe in Paris on December 28th, 1895, where the Lumiere brothers first projected films on a screen for a paying audience. Beginning at least with Andre Bazin, historians of the cinema have begun to question the accuracy of this beginning, sceptical not of the event's date and location, but the historical explanation that presents this screening as the cinema's genesis. This scepticism forces us to reconsider both the historiography within the discipline and the very definition of the cinema itself. Why has cinema been defined in such a manner that the Grand Cafe screening should inaugurate cinema, relegating all previous screenings and inventions to the realm of the proto-cinematic? In Technologies of Seeing Brian Winston considers these questions carefully. He contends that the Lumiere's screening does not mark the successful completion of the requisite technology for the cinema, but instead that the cinema, like all communications technologies, emerges within a dynamic structural interaction of science, technology, and society. Winston does not simply offer a more complex perspective of the history of communications technologies. Through his analysis he demonstrates that the received wisdom of film history is inflected by ideology and a desire for logical causation. Many of the cinema's technologies are subsequently misplaced within its historical narrative (often to the benefit of white euro-american males) so that the arrival of the medium's component technologies directly causes the appearance of the phenomenon in society. Within these historical narratives Winston discovers hyperbolic discourses that attribute fundamental changes in human society to technological developments. Such proclamations are not restricted to communications technologies, but are the product of the technological determinist's discourse in general. Yet, remarks Winston, after at least two centuries of hyperbole, the same social structures persist: 'stand close to the technologies and they loom very large; stand away and they blend into the fabric of society' (7). The introduction of communications technologies does not alter, but participates in the slow, conservative pace of social change. This embeddedness of technology in society challenges the perception Winston believes prevalent: technological innovations occur outside the social sphere and are then injected into it. If technology is not offered to society, he asks, then '[h]ow does technological change occur in mass communications . . . ?' (1). His book offers both a theoretical and empirical response to this question.