Mutoscope, animation and moving images. A project by Mathew Lippincott, of The SIP 2011 grant winners
In 1894 Herman Casler, a former engineer for Edison, brought to market a motion picture machine that avoided expensive and dangerously flammable nitrate film. A circular flipbook with a gear attached, the mutoscope was immediately put to use filling bars and arcades with one to three-minute doses of penny-per-play peep shows. In England the machine was known by the name of its earliest soft-core feature, “What the Butler Saw.” Middle Class Moralizers went bonkers, even though the names were racier than the content.
I saw my first mutoscope in the fall of 2007, when Janine and I visited the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. I loved the machine for a mechanical elegance directly embodying the process of animation. In a film machine the photo medium and the motion mechanism are separate, but the mutoscope relies on the picture medium itself for the motion mechanics. In an age of bits, I was enthralled by the ambiguous line between player and content found in the mutoscope.
All Images are Courtesy of Mathew Lippimcott
Although mechanical beauty drew me to the mutoscope, any expensive niche medium competing with less expensive and widely available systems must have a design rationale and purpose in it’s own right beyond the purely aesthetic. Within the context of the art world mutoscopes have a place as more than a curiosity- they are a solution to a real problems facing animators like Fernando Renes, for whom I built a very large projection mutoscope.
Fernando Renes is an animator but his drawings don’t move. All of his animations are digital movies of static drawings one degree removed from his works on paper. If you want to see his work, you’ll have to go to a gallery or museum showing them, because Fernando’s income is dependent on the sales of limited editions of his animations. He can’t just post a video to YouTube, it would devalue the work for his collectors. Online and in print there are plenty of stills from his work, but you can’t see any reproduction of his finished pieces anywhere outside of a gallery.
This is problematic for Fernando and other animators in the fine art world, as well as for the art world in general. Painters can be known by their prints- I don’t have to fly to Paris to have seen the Mona Lisa- because prints don’t devalue the originals. But animators’ drawings don’t move, only the movies of their drawings do (Harry Smith, Stan Brackage, and other film scratchers excepted). The “original” is always a print, and the number of prints must be severely limited to control their value for the artist to make a living.
Photograph by Anna Gonick
Animators are therefore marginalized within the fine art world. Their work is the hardest to see, so fewer people know of them than artists in other media. Critics, students, and art lovers can’t sit with the work and come to know it the way they can when good prints exist. As a result, the entire field lacks a sense of history and development.
Large-scale mutoscopes can address this problem for Fernando and other animators that draw animations frame by frame. A mutoscope is a circular flip book with its pages radiating out from a central binding, played in a mechanical player. Traditionally they were used for photo reproductions of short peep show movies. The Mutoscope for Fernando is for original drawings, and so must be substantially larger (a 4″ x 3″ drawing area) than a traditional mutoscope (1 7/8″ square). The Mutoscope for Fernando can accept reels of original drawings from 500 to 2500 frames in length, or 30 seconds to 3 minutes, playing back at 8-20 frames per second.
By drawing directly into mutoscope reels, Fernando can make his original drawings move, creating an original object bearing his mark as an artist that is also an animation. Since it is an original, “prints” may be made from it – movies of the machine in action- that have the same relationship that paintings bear to prints. My hope is that mutoscopes can bring the same level of study and distribution to Fernando’s animation that paintings currently enjoy, strengthening the art world and widening his audience.
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