Modernism And Stereoscopes

This essay offers a contextual, and theoretical explanation as to why Stereoscopes are a product of modernity: drawing particular attention to the stereoscope - that enables what many viewers perceive as a greater level of realism in the cinematic image -, existing arguments around the topic which have been developed to interpret and explain its social significance within the modern period. The discussion begins with an informative differentiation of both ideologies, which we identify as Modernism and Modernity; the second paragraph, is a brief background of the optical instrument which hopefully bleeds into the main body of ideas conceived from thorough research via David Trotter, Jonathan Crary and Goethe. My interest in this particular subject arose out of empirical knowledge of cameras from studying Photography at A Level and a prior thesis I conducted in regards to Capitalism: Slavery, an excerpt by filmmaker Ken Jacobs. A metaphorical screening considering the relationship of both fields not only in their shared money form but also the difference surrounding these two highly charged and complex kinds of bodies: the slave body and the corporate body which in reality are the a biological form and a wealth form.

Modernism indicates a branch of movements in art (Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism; Cubism; Expressionism; Dada, Surrealism, Pop Art. Etc.) with distinct characteristics, it firmly rejects its classical precedent and classical style, what Walter Benjamin would refer to as “destructive liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage”; and it explores the etiology of a present historical situation and of its attendant forms of self-consciousness in the West. Whereas Modernity is often used as ...

... middle of paper ...

.... 'It is a moment when the visible escapes from the timeless incorporeal order of the camera obscura and becomes lodged in another apparatus, within the unstable physiology and temporality of the human body'. Crary further demonstrates the shift in vision's location from camera to body by examining the way in which it was reproduced in various optical devices invented during this same period, specifically the stereoscope, the kaleidoscope, the phenakistiscope, and the diorama. His examination is based on a provocative premise: 'There is a tendency to conflate all optical devices in the nineteenth century as equally implicated in a vague collective drive to higher and higher standards of verisimilitude' (110). According to Crary, such an approach tends to neglect entirely how some of these devices were expressions of what he calls 'nonveridical' models of perception.