As I watched this early short subject showing competitive skiing, I was struck by the thought that they still photograph these things exactly the same way more than a century later. True, they use color now, and there's spoken commentary and it comes into your home instead of your having to go see it with an audience, but the motion still starts at the top of the frame on the right and proceeds diagonally to the bottom left.
This is the sort of big, mechanical movement that was in existence in the earliest subjects: the Lumieres used it for ARRIVAL OF A TRAIN ten years earlier.
Why? I can understand starting at the top and moving down. That feels like something falling on the audience, and that frisson of danger produces excitement. You also want some movement across the screen to give you a sense of, well, movement. But why right to left? Is it laziness, simple habit on the part of tens of thousands of film makers over more than a century? Are we hard-wired to think motion from right to left is more interesting than left to right? Or is it training, something that society teaches us? If we all read Hebrew, in which the reading proceeds from right to left, would film makers have done it the other way?
This is the sort of big, mechanical movement that was in existence in the earliest subjects: the Lumieres used it for ARRIVAL OF A TRAIN ten years earlier.
Why? I can understand starting at the top and moving down. That feels like something falling on the audience, and that frisson of danger produces excitement. You also want some movement across the screen to give you a sense of, well, movement. But why right to left? Is it laziness, simple habit on the part of tens of thousands of film makers over more than a century? Are we hard-wired to think motion from right to left is more interesting than left to right? Or is it training, something that society teaches us? If we all read Hebrew, in which the reading proceeds from right to left, would film makers have done it the other way?