The animation of the photographic: stereoscopy and cinema. The experiments of Aurélio da Paz dos Reis

Abstract

Cinema was born in a visual culture where stereoscopy played a crucial role. In this paper, I will discuss how stereoscopy and cinema derived from a common programme caused by photography that brought images and life closer, boosting an unseen period of mergers and experiments in the history of the image. The project of moving images was also a stereoscopic project. To animate the images in relief was one of the main challenges of the realism desired by nineteenth-century visual culture. In particular, I will reflect on the stereoscopic photography of Aurélio da Paz dos Reis, his cinematic experiments, the major discourses that followed and the ‘archive fever’ that hit it. Furthermore, I will consider the specificities of stereoscopy as a personal, as opposed to communal, medium and technique. I also argue that if the nineteenth-century stereo visual culture has anticipated our current personal media age, the unstable presence of stereoscopy in the twentieth-century mass media culture becomes an understandable and inevitable phenomenon.