The Limits of Image Literacy

by Geoff Pevere

One of the most famous of all birth-of-motion-picture stories concerns the Lumiéres’ train.

It goes like this: On December 28, 1895, Louis and Auguste Lumiére – sons of a French photographic equipment manufacturer – ran the very first program of moving pictures to a paying public at the Grand Café in Paris. It consisted of a number of single-shot, fixed-camera tableaux of non-fiction Parisian scenes, including the arrival of a train at a local station.

While all of the Lumiéres’ scenes caused a sensation that day, the train, so the story goes, nearly caused a riot. When people saw the image of the locomotive apparently coming in their direction (actually, it was photographed at an angle), they screamed and lurched backward in their chairs. Some accounts have them actually running from the café, others merely gasping at the sight.

Whatever the truth, it seems clear that something happened that day resulting from these pioneering spectators’ “illiteracy” when it came to reading moving images. Watching this projected two-dimensional moving image of a locomotive heading roughly their way, they did not yet have the visual literacy to interpret the image as a representation. As far as Grand Café patrons were concerned, they were in danger.

Twenty years later, the Canadian-born pioneer filmmaker Allan Dwan stood on a New York location trying to figure out how to shoot a scene. In the film David Harum, the title character is required to stroll down a street greeting everyone he meets. He’s a hail-fellow-well-met kind of guy, as this scene was supposed to demonstrate. Conventionally, the walk would have been broken down into edited shots showing David greeting different people: the camera would shoot, stop, move back, set up, shoot again, stop, move back, and so on. This suddenly struck Dwan as cumbersome and wasteful. He looked at the camera.