Article. October. — 1979 — Vol. 11 (Essays in Honor of Jay Leyda, Winter) — pp. 97-112.
When Louis and Auguste Lumière first presented their cinematographic machine to the public, Baudelaire had been dead for twenty-eight years. In the histories of cinema that initial projection in 1895 marks the conventional division between cinema proper and the long protohistory of machines for the representation of movement. Yet Baudelaire had already written on the two fundamental elements of the Lumière brothers' invention. In his review of the Salon of 1857 he recorded his hostility to the influence of photography on painting. What would later be called the indexicality of photographic signs gave them, according to Baudelaire, an illusory authority, a falsely privileged ontological status, over painted representations. While he condemns the aesthetics of photography, in "Morale de Joujou" he extolls the phenekistoscope as a machine of the poetic imagination. What distressed Baudelaire about photography, the seductiveness of its illusionism, was absent from the phenekistoscope. In fact, the mechanics of the toy emphasized the contrivance of its illusion. The child playing with it may be thrilled but not seduced into conferring an ontological stability upon the image he animates, precisely because he animates it himself. Baudelaire's reactions to photography and to synthetic motion machines prefigure a later contradictory response of advanced literary sensibilities to the cinema itself.
