Honestly, I was pleasantly surprised by how engaging I found Nekes’s film (and how easily I was able to ignore the background music). In fact, I found the repetitive music fitting and ultimately soothing; I think it nicely mirrored the seemingly-endless cycle of the phenakisticope and many of the other toys featured. I also found the toys to be really innovative and appreciated the glimpse of the technological (as well as artistic) timeline of film.
The pairing of Nekes’s film with the two shorts by the Lumiere brothers was also really effective, since it kind of showed the logical progression of the same train of thought. If people were satisfied to sit around and watch a little girl feeding hens or a dog jumping in the air for eternity (as they did with devices such as the phenakisticope), then it makes sense that they would be similarly enthralled by such everyday activities as leaving a factory. If you think about it, the expectations of film audiences having changed so much is no different than any other new technology. For example, when video games were first introduced, people were enthralled by slow-moving, highly pixilated images, just as they were satisfied with black and white TV’s, or 8-inch cell phones. But now we expect more from these devices—the higher technology is a given. Now we expect entertainment with a shinier finish.
In their respective films, the Lumiere brothers and Nekes simply document this timeline, showing us all just how far we’ve come and the potential of what lies ahead.
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