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Cinema in the History of Media, “On Photography” by Susan Sontag discusses…

- - - - Camera Obscura and Linear Perspective from Friedrich Kittler's Optical Media reading states that “the camera obscura made the revolutionary concept of a perfect perspective painting possible.”
  - - - Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window explores the concept of the camera as an extension of the human eye. The cinematography, setting, and camera perspectives used in Rear Window are explored by Miran Bozovic in The Man Behind His Retina. The use of lighting and camera perspective to manipulate human perception of images functions in the film to aide in telling the story.
- - - - The relationship between humans and technology becomes phenomena that gets depicted to humans through the media produced by the technology and humans end up in a cycle of experiencing their own existence through images and media produced by the technology it comments on.
        
        “Haneke’s films are always at heart concerned with revealing something not about society, but about the spectators relationship to the screen.” explains Catherine Wheatley in "Shame and Guilt" which studied Haneke's films as an exploration into the topics of shame and guilt between the audience and the images screened proposed by Haneke throughout his films, particularly in "Cache".
  - - - As technology evolved and cameras were invented, introducing photography which could take an image and store it. The film once developed would reveal an image. Following the development of photography came the combination of images and movement, which we know as film and video, which uses long periods of exposure to record a scene resulting in moving images.
        
        According to Invisible Images by Trevor Paglen “Human visual culture has become a special case of vision, an exception to the rule. The overwhelming majority of images are now made by machines for other machines, with humans rarely in the loop.”
        
        Images have evolved to a point where humans have invented machines to build the tools used to capture an image, the image capture is then processed and displayed by a secondary (or tertiary) machine, leaving human and human vision far removed from the visuals produced for viewing.
        
        In "Operational Images" Trevor Paglen explores Harun Farocki's analysis of machine vision. "Instead of simply representing things in the world, the machines and their images were starting to “do” things in the world. In fields from marketing to warfare, human eyes were becoming anachronistic." Paglen is referring too drone images, robots, military projectiles and other machines with visual aspects that can recognize images themselves.
        
        The shift from cameras as artistic tools that enhance visual experiences to tools used by militaries and government shows a duality in the way tools, vision, and art forms are developed as history progresses.
  - - - While the invention of the railway transformed human vision by a horizontal perspective, and by adding motion and movement. The drone has not only increased the motion, enabled more movement, but also now established a new human vertical perspective.
        
        In Free Fall discusses vertical perspective and explains "While falling, people may sense themselves as being things, while things may sense they are people. Traditional modes of seeing and feeling are shattered. Any sense of balance is disrupted. Perspectives and twisted and manipulated. New types of visuality arise." A machine generated image from a drone can now distort human vision and perspective.
- - - - Human perspective is altered by the motion and movement of the steam engine. The change in the way people perceived motion became more linear, this horizontal perspective is often explored in cinema.
  - - - What Algorithms Want by Ed Finn looks at the expansion of digital economies, and the technological developments of computerized machines. “Algorithms are everywhere. They already dominate the stock market, compose music, drive cars, write news articles, and author long mathematical proofs- and their powers of creative authorship are just beginning to take shape.” These algorithms mentioned by Finn are the same types of algorithms seen used by military projectiles, GPS systems, automatic cameras, and all other digital technologies.
    - - Capitalism has served as a drive for technological advancement. The economy's need to grow, advance, and stay ahead of potential competition has driven people to industrialize and develop new technologies rapidly. Including digital technologies such as cameras, film, and digital media.
- - - - Kracauer elaborates by saying “Historicism is concerned with the photography of time, The equivalent of its temporal photography would be a giant film depicting the temporally interconnected events from every vantage point.”
        
        In Kracauer's context historicism's principle focuses on images in the context time. Photography from a temporal perspective involves a form of movement expressed per frame, therefore to look at photography from a temporal perspective would involve sequential images which would translate into a film, or sequence of interrelated images from various perspective points.
  - - - Kittler's "3.2 Film" states “However it was precisely because painters learned to break motion down to successive phases in the nineteenth century that they did not want to relinquish this new art form once again and replace it with technical media.” This shows humans were actively reinventing technology across the world, which would combine and influence one another. Human technological advancement more importantly binds together various ideas and concepts from media and art.
        
        These early concepts of adding motion to images create the basic understanding of video but are most clearly displayed in film and cinema by retaining the purpose of creating an art or media.
  - - - Video and film use images to show movement, and utilizing moving images as means of telling a story. Films can be cut down to individual scenes and image frames which would resemble the original series of chromophotography pictures that depicted movement of an event through the progression of a series of images.
        
        Friedrich Kittler's "3.2 Film" discusses the various stages at which moving images, in the form of film were presented to the public. There was the silent era, followed by the addition of sound, voice, and music to create the fundamentals of modern cinema.
        
        Film now are evolved to explore the themes once presented by the questions of humans images and technology. Miran Bozovic's The Man Behind His Retina looks at Rear Window as an exploration of the camera as an extension of the human eye, but focuses heavily on perspectives of the cinematography to achieve particular images for the film. Cinematography looks specifically at the individual images seen throughout a film and how the images influence the story told.
        
        Television is invented as another media that uses images to tell a story or share information
        
        According to Friedrich Kittler's "3.3 Television" Television's four basic functions are:
        -convert images into currents, allowing for television signal
        -function as a fully electronic transmission circuit, creating a television channel
        -function as a fully electronic converter of currents to images, serving as television receiver
        -the final function wouldn't develop until later, but would allow for television to electronically store images.
        
        TV's ability to transmit, receive and eventually store images revolutionized the way humans could intake images and receive their information.