1895
Lumiere exhibition, first public screening in the Grand Cafe in Paris. the first audience comprises of 35 people, the numbers gradually swell to 2000
X -ray Wireless telegraphy Automobiles
Dada moves to Godhra(a railway junction surrounded by small tribal kingdoms), starts indpendent photography career.
It was long ago suggested that the Kinestoscope could be wedded to the phonograph. Prince Louis suggested a mechanism like that used in sewing machines, to advance the cloth step by step. The cotton shirting of the Industrial Revolution for the first time reversed the relationship. There was everything: a dog coming and going, bicycles, feeding a baby, the gardener's piepe, a blcsith, firemen lighting a fire, workers leaving the railway loco.
"I wanted to learn at all costs what photography was in itself, by what essential features it was to be distinguished from he community of images. The photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially. The photograph always leads the corpus. I constitute myself, I make another body for myself. I transform myself to advance into an image. I fel that the photographs creates my body or mortifies it. Some soldiers paid with their lives for the photographs. Defeated they were recognised and shot, almost every one. Posing in front of the lens, even fleetingly. No doubt it is metaphorically that I derive my existence from the photograph. I don't know how to work upon my skin from within. My aroused/amused?? consciousness of the whole photographic ritual, what I am apart from my effigy.
(Every body in its natural state was made of a series of ghostly images superimposed in layers to infinity, wrapped in infinitesimal films... Man never having been able to create, that is to make something material from something impalpable, or to make from nothing, an object- each Daguerrian operation was therefore going to lay, detatch and use up on of the layers of the body on which it Focused)
" Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"
Phalke's family life is a happy one- he feeds the baby and waters the garden with a hose. A dog scampers around here and there.
Phalke is taking photographs of his wife and child.
While he is developing the pictures in the dark room, someone(Kamala) opens the door by mistake, and the pictures evaporate from the paper.
The large number of rats that are dying around them frightens Phalke's wife.
Kamala is happy in Godhra and restless too. She has waited for this, time still as a pond enclosing her, her baby and her husband.. but here she also often feels alone. She has no conversations with anyone else, none at all. Who would she talk to? It seems almost like all the outcastes live in this city. Her husbands scolds her when she talks like this, but she knows, it is true..
He is getting more and more engrossed in his work, he tells her less. He did try to tell her in the beginning, quite what magic he was upto with his camera box, but she was too bewildered by the harsh sounding words, the odd concepts he talked of. She wondered where he had managed to come to this knowledge, both of them were from the same family, the same city and still, Dhundiraj seemed to carry so many other worlds within him.
She remembered the sight of that image disappearing, the people who lay underwater in those trays and who had, almost like they sensed her presence, left at once. Phalke scolded her for opening the door, but she felt sometimes that he must have engineered it, their disappearance. It was her unrestrainable curiosity to know just what her husband did behind that closed door for hours on end, that had prompted her, in violation of all rules set by him, to open it.
They had left at once, leaving a white silence floating on those trays.
It was late night. The Muslim noise was starting from the mosque. The pillow by her head was empty, the head that lay on it was bent over those trays, shut in that room. Her child lay a little lower, next to her, unsupported by the dam her father's body should make on the other side. Kamala fell into a troubled sleep.
Ravi and Raja Varma closely follow the proceedings of the case against a seller of German oleographs in Bombay, who is being charged with selling obscene pictures. The two judges, one British, one Indian, rule that it is not nakedness of the classical subjects that is objectionable, because loftier ideals than just a exciting of the sensual appetite, are visible- rather, it is the tasteless insertion of modern objects like a silk umbrella that is taking away from the idealism the pictures would other wise have.
Raja Varma savoured the quiet of walking the broad roads of the city with his brother, going for an evening play, sitting around ornate living room chairs with important people of the city, discussing possible paintings. Life had changed so effortlessly since he had left Trivandrum, he had flowed with the new. Now, quite like the fob watch that might hang from a well stitched pocket, he completed the delicate embroidery of his gentlemanness with the gesture of keeping a diary. And new pleasures unfolded, of seeing your life become an image, in the unusual sounds of an adopted language(if you paused to think about it). His diary was his photoalbum. He felt the pleasure of writing 'Thackers and company' renew the pleasure of finding himself in a situation, where he could step out of his house and stroll into a 'Thackers and company'. He repeated his day everyday to savour it some more. And then, as he got accustomed to this little hand mirror called a diary that accompanied his everywhere, he began to forget the self conscious pleasure of looking at himself, it became habit, and he could allow his writing to be reflection in a deeper sense.. he could fall, further, into the looking glass.
Thursday 17th January 1895
Messers Dharmsey and Narotam Morarji invited us to his house the China Bay a beautiful building to see a novel performance in which first an earthern pot was transformed into a living human head which again turned into a glass fish pond and so on. The illusion was startling.''
Ravi Varma's brother, Raja Varma starts to keep a diary. The diary entries in Bombay, suggest the routines of the lives of two gentlemen painters, not very different from their European counterparts. A good day at work, a browse through a bookshop, an evening's entertainment, which could be a play, a nautch performance. There is also a lot of giddy, and perhaps, difficult travel from princely state to state, with shifting weather conditions, attrition because of various palace intrigues( as in Hyderabad, where professional jealously from Raja Deen Dayal, who had first invited them, leads to difficulties in completing the assignment). In princely states they see scenic sights, architectural wonders, as possibilities for paintings. Raja Raja Varma specialises in landscapes, Ravi Varma is coveted for the amazing likenesses he creates of his subject's faces.
In Bombay, there is a visit to "Tivoli Theatres" to see School of Scandala visit with Justice Jardine to see the High Court, a drive to Fort in the evening, or permission some day to see P and O company's steamer, 'Caledonia', "one of the largest we have ever seen. The first class accomodations and furniture were splendid".
Hansa Christian. in an attempt to recover the great tradition of Andersen, a humble story of my contemporary times. Translated from the original German published by the Marionettestylo Publishers, Munich
B.C.
The dancer was dancing for a mirror. His particles tenderly held her image in his arms.
“You return me to myself”, the dancer said. “You make me happy. I wish I could really show you the things I do.” “If I could show you how I breathe through my fingertips when I dance, how my stomach cleaves to my ribs, how I cut into the air with my shoulder, how my body minutely changes its shapes ..but you always see me entire”
“I feel you move in every particle” the mirror thought but could not say it, could not speak
He then imagined breaking into a million pieces that scattered to reflect her. One piece of him could catch the moving neck; one part of him could hold her eyes; one jagged piece could fill up with the vision of her stretching fingers.
Then she could see herself. ( The mirror thought that she did not want to really show him anything really except to see herself – and perhaps that was the truth..). He imagined a small figure, his dancer, almost a dancing doll, surrounded by many large broken shards which were him, each shard shimmering with a detail of her dance- here her waist, there her brow, here the wrinkle on her foot when she stretched.
A dance in a night sky lit up by constellations of the dancer, in pieces.
A man saw a moving horse. The horse was running outside his window, the man saw it in the mirror inside and he ran towards it from where he was lying supine in the bed. By the time he reached the 'horse', the horse had disappeared, there was only the vista of the road before him. Moreover, in the mirror, he could not look down the road.
He had been lying in bed so full of ennui, the sight of the magnificent steed had roused him- he wished he could have caught it in that mirror, the sight of it galloping, kept it there forever.
A friend said- well you have money, more than you will ever need, so why don't you get a painter to skilfully paint if for you, you can hang it on your wall. The man said “Tche!”
Another friend, always storing every little story he ever heard about the big city, said “ Oh they can graph those things you know nowadays. Onto a plate of glass..they can capture the horse, as he is, exactly, in real life”
It was the late 19th century I suppose. Well, the third quarter approximately.
Anyhow, our man, who seemed to his friends to be quite knowledgable- though god knows why, since he was rich, quite a bed himself with his constant lying down, doing nothing the whole day and generally affecting a bored and sour demeanour- was so consumed by the image of the running horse in the mirror that he left for the city one day
‘But I only need to move away” she had teased him, and he saw the vanity of her youth, her skill, her prettiness, and even her recognition of feeling tender towards a mirror, like a presage of an odd impossible love “One step, and I will be gone”. ”That is how easily I will forget you” the mirror replied sadly with his silence as he felt her leave his arms and even as he felt himself forgetting, he quickly wished for her an ever hopeful mind buoyed by the image of herself dancing before the excited warmth of a waiting audience.
Over the clutter of sound, of footstamp, of sewage rush, of ferry ride separating the
waters of the river, the sun was a rolling turbine, a cycle wheel turned by a million foot pedals. The river was broken glass.
When a man leaned out of a small dark room and aimed a photogun to 'capture' the moving sun, Pascal had to concede, that while he had been wasting away on his bed feeling too good for his world, the world was dreaming far ahead of him.
When the man put his head back inside, Pascal picked the gun out of his hands and looked into the circle of glass at its tip and wished he could peer further inside its dark.
The dreamer told him “Inside is a plate of glass, coated with silver. It is a mirror that can remember.”
