Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/07093_Field_TCUM T658.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 1KB | 16 lines

     In England the movie theatre was originally called “The
Bioscope,” because of its visual presentation of the actual
movements of the forms of life (from Greek bios , way of life).
The movie, by which we roll up the real world on a spool in order
to unroll it as a magic carpet of fantasy, is a spectacular
wedding of the old mechanical technology and the new electric
world. In the chapter on The Wheel, the story was told of how
the movie had a kind of symbolic origin in an attempt to
photograph the flying hooves of galloping horses, for to set a
series of cameras to study animal movement is to merge the
mechanical and the organic in a special way. In the medieval
world, curiously, the idea of change in organic beings was that
of the substitution of one static form for another, in sequence.
They imagined the life of a flower as a kind of cinematic strip of
phases or essences. The movie is the total realization of the
medieval idea of change, in the form of an entertaining illusion.