Translation of Charles Cros, ‘process for recording and reproducing colors, forms and movements’ (1867) with an introduction

Abstract

ABSTRACT This 1867 document, akin to a patent application for the US Patent Office, is among the first to describe processes for producing both motion and color photography. It precedes by 20 years Edison’s 1888 kinetograph/kinetoscope design, the earliest working prototype of cinema. Its author is Charles Cros, who also outlined a phonograph system in 1877, a few months before Edison displayed his working phonograph. Cros is mostly known as a poet, fiction writer and playwright associated with members of the French Symbolist and Decadent movements (Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam). Yet he was an accomplished technician and inspired media innovator who deserves reconsideration in media history. Evidence of his status comes for instance from his close collaboration with Jules-Adrien Carpentier, the very engineer the Lumière Brothers tasked with constructing their Cinématographe camera. Sent to and received by the French Academy of Sciences, this document is in three parts. The first describes with prescient specificity the photographic synthesis of motion. The second offers several ways of achieving the photographic synthesis of color using filters and projection (rather than pigment and print, as later achieved in the 1890s). The last and more cryptic section concerns an ambitious theory of perception. Unpublished in French until 1970, this document will be of wide interest to scholars of media history, cinema and photography studies, literary studies, and modernist studies. The introductory essay makes a strong case for rehabilitating Charles Cros as a key inceptor of modern audiovisual media.