Ancient Cinema

People often think historians find real stories in old records, while fiction writers invent them from scratch. Philosopher Hayden White notes that this idea is a myth: historians do not just discover the past; they actively invent and shape their narratives, too.(1)

Hollis Frampton, an American avant-garde filmmaker, photographer, writer and theoretician, tackled this problem in his essay, “For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses.” He wrote that the true history of cinema includes every single film ever made, for any reason at all. A film historian cannot watch everything, but they cannot ignore anything either, or they will miss the point entirely.(2)

Because recording the full breadth of film history is impossible, Frampton looked outside traditional film theory for help. He turned to the writer Jorge Luis Borges.

To Borges, the Argentine master of short fiction, poetry and essays, history is not a straight line of hard facts. It exists only inside human memory, which is unstable, subjective, and always changing.

In his view, history and fiction bleed into one another, because we always imagine and reinterpret what happened; time splits into infinite possibilities rather than a single official story. Facts, to Borges, are just artificial constructs we lean on to make sense of the chaos.(3) He frequently wrote “fictions about fictions,” blurring the line between reality and illusion, often inventing fake books, imaginary authorities, or alternate histories.

Historians do not just discover the past;
they actively invent and shape their narratives, too.

Inspired by Borges, Frampton rejected linear timelines of movie history. Instead, he championed a playful, self-aware “metahistory” of cinema.

Frampton's theory of metahistory proposes that traditional film history is an illusion, and that a true cinematic lineage must be actively engineered.

Instead of listing dates and titles, his metahistory weaves together ideas, art, and events. It creates “rational fictions” — creative frameworks grounded in real evidence — that capture tactile, site-specific, lived human experiences of a place and time, instead of chasing an impossible, total record of the past.(4)

In his installation, Ancient Cinema, the Canadian artist, Henry Jesionka, takes on Frampton's metahistorical challenge and makes a plausible case – a rational fiction – for extending the history of cinema to the ancient world.

Jesionka fabricates a Graeco-Roman "film" projector consistent with the sophisticated technological and artistic skills of Greek and Roman artisans at the turn of the millennium, and he presents artifacts (inscribed coins, lamps, glass slides) to support his claim.

Jesionka creates a missing link in the recorded history of cinema to bridge the unacceptably large gap between Paleolithic cave art, in 32,000 BCE, and William Lincoln's zoopraxiscope, the first modern film projector, in 1867.

Although the installation is entirely speculative, it tackles the very real project of history and its construction.

Paleolithic Cinema

"During the Old Stone Age, between 37,000 and 11,000 years ago, some of the most remarkable art ever conceived was etched or painted on the walls of caves in southern France and northern Spain," writes Judith Thurman in The New Yorker, in 2008. "After a visit to Lascaux, in the Dordogne, which was discovered in 1940, Picasso reportedly said to his guide, 'They've invented everything.' What those first artists invented was a language of signs for which there will never be a Rosetta stone; perspective, a technique that was not rediscovered until the Athenian Golden Age; and a bestiary of such vitality and finesse that, by the flicker of torchlight, the animals seem to surge from the walls, and move across them like figures in a magic lantern show (in that sense, the artists invented animation)." (1)

The filmmaker Werner Herzog was reportedly so intrigued by Thurman's article, he petitioned the French government the following year for permission to film in the Cave of Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc, in the South of France. The resulting film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, was released in 2010.

"Among the film's most fascinating insights," writes Adam Cook, "is the discovery of how those who created the [cave] paintings would use torchlight and shadows, in conjunction with the images, as dramatic tools. One bison, as Herzog points out, is painted with eight legs, to give it a sense of motion. It is what he refers to as a 'proto-cinema,' and indeed all the elements are there, which when considering how old these works are in comparison to the cinema, is startling, and moving." (2)

"When our Magdalenian ancestors painted and etched the walls of caves in southern France and northern Spain, they were… making images that were essentially cinematic," writes Edward Wachtel in the abstract for his article, "The First Picture Show: Cinematic Aspects of Cave Art." "Their creations have generally been presented as still images — etchings, drawings, paintings — predecessors to photography. However, the tools and techniques they used, including brushes and blowguns, the irregular cave surfaces and lamps fueled by animal fat, conspired to create works and viewing conditions that made images that appeared to move, change color, dissolve, cut, appear and disappear. In short, they made cinematic images — precursors to film and television."(3)

Other scholars agree and even theorize about the genesis of the proto-cinematic nature of cave art. Matt Gatton argues, in The Camera Obscura and the Origin of Art: The Case for Image Projection in the Paleolithic, that "harsh climates during the Paleolithic forced members of the human lineage to make rudimentary huts and tents. Survival depended on the ability to seal out the elements… [but] random holes in these rough shelters coincidentally and occasionally formed camera obscuras, projecting moving images inside the dwelling spaces," which were then traced or copied. (4)

Gatton's theory may be debatable; Herzog's Paleolithic fantasy is, ironically, somewhat more plausible: "Arguably, or for me," says Herzog, in an interview with Archaeology Magazine, "the greatest single sequence in all of film history [is] Fred Astaire dancing with his own shadows, and all of a sudden he stops and the shadows become independent and dance without him and he has to catch up with them. It's so quintessentially 'movie'. It can't get more beautiful. It's actually from Swing Time (1936).

"And when you look at the [Chauvet] cave and certain panels, there's evidence of some fires on the ground. They're not for cooking. They were used for illumination. You have to step in front of these fires to look at the images, and when you move, you must see your own shadow. And immediately, Fred Astaire comes to mind — who did something 32,000 years later which is essentially what we can imagine for early Paleolithic people." (5)

Cinema Desires

Since ancient times, stargazers and astronomers have employed different models to describe the way in which time was harnessed to space, and dreamed about the possibility of seeing the universe in a way that could lately be described as cinematographic.

The recent discovery of the Nebra Sky Disk, which dates to the Bronze Age, around 1700 BCE, has astonished archeologists. The 32-centimeter-wide (12.6-inch) bronze disc with gold-leaf appliqués representing the sun, the moon, the stars, and what appears to be a mythological "solar boat," is the oldest visual representation of the cosmos known to date — two-hundred years earlier than the oldest known images found in Egypt.

The symbols in the Nebra Star Disk "are all part of a complex European-wide belief system… whereby people looked at the heavens, worshipped them, worshipped the sun, worshipped the moon, [and] aligned their monuments on the sunrise or the moonrise," explains Miranda Aldhouse Green, Professor of Archaeology at Cardiff University. "And because Nebra has brought all these symbols together it tells us for the first time perhaps what people were really seeing, perceiving and believing."(6)

"The explanation of the disc's purpose sheds new light on the astronomical knowledge and abilities of the Bronze Age people, who used a combination of solar and lunar calendars as important indicators for agricultural seasons and passage of time," adds Harald Meller, State Archaeologist of Saxony-Anhalt.(7)

Cinema as a technology was preceded, long before its genesis,
by cinema as a desire…

Throughout recorded history, "a number of different pictorial techniques for depicting the unfolding of time in visual terms had been widely employed [by scientists]," writes Jimena Canales. "Most prominently, these included sequential images, blurred images (primarily of wheels and disks), slightly superimposed or side-by-side figures (often in single canvas or sheet), symbols of time or instantaneity (skulls, clocks, bubbles, and lightning) and bodily poses and severed body parts associated with direction and sequence (such as pointing, poking, pulling and jumping)."(8)

Most people, however, find the roots of cinematography in ancient technologies for entertainment and spectacle, not in science, adds Canales. Indeed, the Chinese are generally credited with inventing the proto-cinematic art form known as Shadow Play, or Shadow Puppetry, during the Han Dynasty (206 BCE – 220 CE) — although examples of Chinese "cinema" spheres, found in the Museo del Precinema in Padua, Italy, have been dated even earlier, to 500 BCE., and Plato, in his famous "Allegory of the Cave," written in 380 BCE, uses shadow play as a metaphor to distinguish between perception and knowledge.

Some scholars date shadow play to the Paleolithic, emphasizing the role shadows played in re-animating cave art paintings. Whatever its true origin, Shadow Puppetry was subsequently spread by the Chinese, and later by the Turks and Egyptians, throughout much of the known world.

Canales, a professor at Harvard University, argues that the technical history of cinema is only one dimension of its evolution. "Scientists observe, develop theory and experiment," she writes, "but first they redraw metaphysical boundaries, redefining the very meaning of what is considered to be human, nonhuman, and beast. They shape the contours and alter hierarchies between the social, the political, the historical and the natural." (9)

Cinema as a technology was preceded, long before its genesis, by cinema as a desire — to capture the stars, to reproduce the world, and to share our dreams.

"Attention to desire," she writes, "permits us to explore the complex relation between discourse and things, dreams and reality, without having to focus exclusively on one or the other. The differences between what 'is' (the technical), what 'ought' (the ethical), and what 'could' be (the fantastical) led scientific research into new, unexpected directions. We must remember… that the "technical reality" of objects is only one aspect of a denser set of meanings. To the "technical reality" of cinematography, we [must] add the components of desire and anticipation — of finding a camera to capture the world in its own image." (10)

Henry Jesionka, whose monograph on the iconography of the Danubian provinces remains unjustly neglected, always maintained that his discovery in the spring of 2011 was entirely a matter of chance. While navigating the chaotic geometry of an open-air market in Zadar, his eye was caught by a minor, corroded anomaly: a flat, tapered wedge of bronze, marred by oxidation and interrupted by two vertical features, the left-most of which bore an inexplicable groove.

The vendor, an illiterate man from the hinterlands of Dalmatia, muttered that the object was merely a weight for a scale, or perhaps a broken hinge from a vanished chest. In truth, he did not know what it was. He knew only where it had surfaced — a lagoon a little to the north, near Nin, where such things sometimes worked their way up out of the mud, as the dead are said to do in the low countries during flood years.

Who determines the context in which an artifact is displayed or how is it used to tell a story?

Guided less by curiosity than by a certain pedantic stubbornness, Jesionka visited the site the following afternoon. There, in a marshy depression where the salt-crusted earth meets the sea, he unearthed a small, anonymous cache that would later cause such bitter controversy at the University of Graz.

What came out of that lagoon over the following weeks I will not list in detail, since an inventory seems to me a way of refusing a story rather than telling one. There were coins bearing the dubious crowned profile of a provincial emperor; the aforementioned wedge of bronze; fragments of a clay lamp whose wick had burned out some eighteen centuries ago, and, most disturbingly, a ceramic chest containing shards of hand-painted glass tablets.

The cataloging of the Nin fragments was undertaken during the humid summer months of 2011, a labor that soon deteriorated into a kind of obsession. The most legible artifact was a bronze denarius coin, heavily oxidized by salt, which bore on its obverse the words Inventori Lucis — to the creator of light — a reference to an archaic, almost forgotten Roman sun god. Yet, it was the reverse of the coin that troubled him: a crude, hand-stamped representation of a solar disc surrounded by eight rigid, rectangular blocks. This exact geometric motif — the sun trapped within a frame of rectangles — was repeated with liturgical precision across the other finds. It was etched into the soot-stained clay of the oil lamp, and it formed the central medallion of the ceramic chest. The true enigma, however, slept within the chest.

Among the debris were several dozen shattered shards of hand-painted glass. With the patience of a man reconstructing a forgotten language, Jesionka pieced them together at his desk in Graz. They did not reveal a map or a text, but rather a single, monotonous archetype: a woman pouring water from an amphora.

To the casual observer, many of the fragments of Roman glass were identical; to Jesionka, who suffered from the hyper-visual mania of the archivist, the subtle discrepancies were blinding. In one shard, the trajectory of the water was a steep vertical; in the next, it curved slightly outward; in a third, a single droplet had detached from the lip of the jar. They were, he realized with a shudder, sequential.

It was at this precise juncture of his despair that Jesionka ceased to behave as an archaeologist and began to act as a counterfeiter of time. Utilizing the hand-stamped solar disc of a Roman denarius as a blueprint, he constructed an artifice of brass mirrors, an electric motor, and a halogen lamp — an anachronistic projector designed to force the ancient glass to yield its shadow. The result, which now resides in the Ancient Cinema exhibition, projects a woman endlessly pouring water from a jar. Is this loop of light the world's first animated illusion, or merely a mirror reflecting Jesionka's own patience?

Predictably, the University of Graz viewed this apparatus with a hostility bordering on theological outrage. They accused Jesionka — who, like all true creators, was a filmmaker by training and a heretic by necessity — of having invented the antiquity he claimed to discover. They argued that to read a cinematic sequence into disparate fragments of glass was an act of retroactive forgery.

The only certain fact about the ancient world is that most information about it has been lost.

Jesionka, whose indifference to contemporary opinion resembled that of the stone deities he studied, wrote in his sparse diary, “History is not what happened, but the apocrypha we are capable of imagining. Who among us can dictate the language an artifact chooses to speak? The past is a fluid text, and my machine is simply a more lucid way of forging it.”

This vertiginous uncertainty is not unique to the sands of Nin. In a well-known passage of his The Roman World, the historian Martin Goodman observes that our knowledge of antiquity is an architecture built entirely of gaps. He reminds us that the only immutable fact concerning the Roman empire is that almost everything has been obliterated; what remains has been filtered through the fastidious prejudices of Christian monks who, in the silence of medieval scriptoriums, copied only what they deemed worthy of eternity. To demand direct evidence for every ancient truth is, for Goodman, a form of intellectual blindness.(1)

History requires a certain rigorous empathy — a disciplined imagination that does not fear to bridge the abyss between what was lost and what must have been. Jesionka's projector, therefore, is not a falsification of Rome, but its logical conclusion. Like the universe itself, it is a mechanism that requires our collusion to exist. It proves that the past is a labyrinth from which no thread can be removed without altering the shape of the entire maze, and that the artist, by dreaming a false history, becomes the only true chronicler of reality.

An unusual Roman bronze artifact, purchased at a flea market in Zadar, Croatia, was the first in a series of discoveries leading to the reconstruction of a Graeco-Roman film projector from the first century CE.

Metals and metalworking had been known since the Bronze Age, but the Romans' most significant contribution to the field was arguably the mass production of metal objects at scale. Central Italy was never rich in metal ores, which forced the empire to excavate and ship metal across vast trade networks to keep pace with demand.(1)

"It is believed that metal procurement and manufacturing were controlled to some degree by the state during the Roman Empire," writes Harold Kory Cooper, "with the army often being directly involved in the mining industry in areas new to Roman control." Spanish mines, by contrast, were run by leaseholders rather than large companies, and, by the time of Augustus (27 BCE), operation of mines had shifted generally from large companies toward private individuals.

The bronze artifact featured in Ancient Cinema is believed to be a modular component of a projector made up of 24 such bronze wedges, measuring 66cm in diameter. As convection currents from a central heat source caused the device to spin, light from an oil lamp, focused by a series of lenses and reflected by a mirror through glass "animation" slides, would have cast a faint image on an adjacent wall or curtain.

These modular bronze components would have been cast in a two-piece mold, which gave a more finished result, or in a cheaper mold made by packing an object in clay and cutting the clay open to fire it. The "lost wax" method, which required beeswax, was generally reserved for more ornate, decorative work such as statues.

The glass mirrors would have been made by inflating a bubble of glass, coating its interior with molten lead, and then breaking the bubble into fragments trimmed to size.(2)

Jesionka, whose hands would later assemble the intricate gears of the projection device, hints at a sacred origin, suggesting the instrument served some forgotten ritual within a temple consecrated to Sol, the unblinking god of the sun.

Yet, in a universe where every object is a labyrinth of multiple histories, it is no less reasonable to suspect a more trivial genesis. Perhaps it was merely an expensive whim, a clever illusion forged to dispel the boredom of wealthy provincial noblemen, who sought in its fleeting shadows a momentary refuge from the tedious maintenance of their estates.

The bronze coins featured in Ancient Cinema were discovered in 2011 in Nin, Croatia. They include Latin text, but no date or denomination.

Coins from the late Roman Republic (250-27 BCE) were sometimes produced in bronze, emulating coins of Greek colonies in southern Italy. Coins from this period often included mythological subjects, though from 44-27 BCE Roman coins briefly featured portraits of wealthy individuals, part of the increasing competition among the Roman elite to enhance their social and political status. More typically, coins from the late Republican and Roman imperial period (27 BCE-565 CE) were manufactured in precious metals such as gold, silver, brass or copper and, after 27 BCE, generally portrayed the emperor on the obverse.

The coins in Ancient Cinema are most likely from the tail end of the Roman Republic or very early in the Roman Empire, and were probably made in Zadar, or a neighboring Roman colony.

"[So-called] barbarous Roman coins were made by the local inhabitants around the edges of the Empire, perhaps to act as semi-legitimate currency in the absence of an adequate supply of officially minted coins, or perhaps so that the local tribes could maintain a degree of independence." (1)

The image on the obverse is of a bearded male figure wearing a radiate crown — a reference to the sun. The text, INVENTORI LVCIS, "to the creator of light," supports this reading. The figure is most likely a mythological representation of Sol, the Roman sun god.

As the numismatics site What I Like About Ancient Coins notes, Sol is depicted radiate without exception across Roman coinage — even a miniature Sol carried by the figure of Aeternitas on a denarius of Trajan (111 CE) keeps the crown. That coin shows Sol and Luna carried together, symbolizing day and night as parts of a single eternity; the type is sometimes labelled Oriens, "the rising sun in the east."(2)

Worship of Sol was known in Republican Rome, but was of minor importance. In imperial Rome, by contrast, the cult of the sun god grew into a major, at times dominant, force in Roman religion during the third century CE, the last century of pagan Rome. In 274 CE the emperor Aurelian pushed a vigorous propaganda campaign celebrating Sol as the exclusive protector of Rome's imperial might; under the epithet Sol Invictus, Sol was hailed as the rising sun who dispels the forces of evil, the invincible conqueror of Rome's enemies, and companion and guardian of the emperor.(3)

The coinage behind that campaign shows Sol wearing the radiate crown and holding the globe — a symbol of world rule — with a vanquished enemy underfoot, or riding a four-horse chariot (a quadriga), or holding a whip.

This imagery descends from Greek mythology, which portrayed Helios crowned with a radiant halo, driving a quadriga across the sky to light the earth — as on a 5th-century-BCE Athenian red-figure krater in the British Museum's collection, below.

The coins in Ancient Cinema clearly pre-date Aurelian's reign: their reverse refers instead to Sol Indiges — the "native" or "invoked" sun — an earlier, more agrarian form of sun worship closer in spirit to the Greek Helios.(4)

Sir James Frazer traces that agrarian reverence to Italy's earliest rustic population, noting that Varro — an authority on both agriculture and mythology — opens his treatise on farming by invoking the Sun and Moon, Sol Indiges and Luna, among the twelve gods who guide the farmer through seedtime and harvest, ranked just after Jupiter and Mother Earth and ahead of Ceres, Liber, Flora and Robigus, the god of mildew.(5)

Sol kept an old temple in the Circus Maximus, attested by Tacitus, that remained important through Rome's first three centuries CE. A separate old shrine on the Quirinal held an annual sacrifice to Sol Indiges each August 9th, and the Roman ritual calendars record a further feast for Sol Indiges on December 11th and a joint sacrifice to Sol and Luna on August 28th.(6)

The reverse of the coins in Ancient Cinema shows the sun surrounded by eight rectangles — an arrangement repeated on a clay lamp and a small box found near the coins, and unmatched elsewhere in Roman currency.

Superficially, the image recalls the circular stone arrangements at prehistoric religious, burial or astronomical sites such as Stonehenge, though nothing else suggests the Romans borrowed megalithic motifs for their coinage. Whether the eight rectangles instead represent orbiting heavenly bodies, a lunar calendar, or a sundial is unresolved; the Roman lunar calendar ran ten to twelve months, and a sundial marked twelve hours, so neither maps cleanly onto eight.

Because the reverse imagery is unique, it may have been cast to commemorate a unique event, though that class of coin — a quadrans — was typically cast in lead rather than bronze. Roman leads of this kind are common and coin-like in design, carrying birds, animals, plants, heads, busts or full figures alongside abbreviations or initials.(7)

Romans also used tokens to pay for services such as theater admission or sex.

Coins of this class, known as spintriae, are widely believed to be brothel tokens. With many foreign visitors in the city who didn't speak the language, and many prostitutes enslaved from elsewhere, a token made the transaction simpler for everyone involved.(8)

Jesionka suggests these coins were not currency but keys to an illusion: tokens struck for a singular ceremony dedicated to Sol Indiges, the primordial sun. It is a terrifying and beautiful conjecture that the ritual featured moving images, summoned from the dark by the very device etched upon the coins' reverse. Thus, the coin becomes a mirror of a mirror — a Graeco-Roman "film" projector that projected not merely light and shadow, but a cyclical, infinite history.

Ancient Cinema was first exhibited at the gallery of the Church of St. Donatus, in Zadar, Croatia, in 2012. Built in the 8th to 9th century, the circular shape of this church is typical of the early Medieval Age in Dalmatia. It was constructed upon the remains of an ancient Roman forum, using materials from the forum. (1) Among the ancient fragments built into the church's foundation is an altar on which is written —

Traditional Roman custom frowned upon worshiping a living human being as a full god. However, Romans could worship the divine spirit of the emperor, or attach his title to existing gods. Therefore, sacrificing on an altar to Jupiter Augustus allowed Romans to demonstrate their political loyalty and pay homage to the Emperor Augustus without technically violating religious taboos. (2)

Remarkably, this inscription also dates the Roman forum upon which the church stands to the late 1st century BCE to 1st century CE, contemporaneous with the reign of Augustus and with the artifacts presented in Ancient Cinema.

The exhibition, in its inaugural iteration, utilized rich wooden display cases and glass-top vitrines to mimic an old-world natural history museum. The result was a darkly atmospheric, nostalgic environment that transformed artifacts into historic specimens and invited visitors to experience this metahistorical fantasia as an act of raw, tactile discovery.

The exhibition, however, is scalable and can take many forms.