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Ingenuity worthy of Franklin
Dan Rottenberg
Could the past be animated?
At a dinner he once threw for America’s Nobel Prize winners, President John F. Kennedy joked that never before had such an array of brainpower gathered together in the White House, “with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” Much the same notion applies to the National Constitution Center’s Franklin Tercentenary exhibit: It’s the largest collection of Franklin materials ever assembled in one place; it draws on the holdings and creativity of five major institutions as well as dozens of others; and its ingenuity is surely unrivaled, with the possible exception of Franklin’s when he was left all by himself.
The exhibit’s 8,000-square-foot space offers plenty for the knowledgeable and the novice, for children as well as adults, and for visitors with short and long attention spans alike. A few exercises will convince you in a matter of minutes that the good old days of the Enlightenment weren’t really all that good— for the rich or the poor—and that Franklin was well advised to seek something better than the 18th-Century’s status quo.
One interactive device, for example, puts you in the place of a 21-year-old former apprentice trying to travel from Boston to New York in Franklin’s day (I chose to make the journey by sea and wound up being blown off course to the Bahamas, where I had to work for eight years to earn my passage back to the mainland). Or you can experience the backbreaking labor of a poor print shop assistant or, conversely, the agony of gout that afflicted rich men on rich diets. (Franklin’s gout-induced groans may convince many visitors to swear off red meat and rich wines altogether). You can also stand by Franklin’s side and experience his tongue-lashing before the British Privy Council in 1774— a humiliating exercise in British arrogance that effectively converted Franklin from loyal subject of the Crown to an effective if belated revolutionary.
From Rembrandt to Disney
But let me focus on one small item that Franklin himself never thought of but reflects the sort of ingenuity I’m sure he’d demonstrate were he living today.
Animation in motion pictures is usually associated with cartoons, and consequently it’s rarely regarded as a form of high art. But I’ve sometimes wondered: Suppose a Rembrandt or Rubens painting could be brought to life through animation? A landscape, or an infinitely detailed seascape like Claude Lorrain’s 17th Century Harbor at Toulon? Suppose the figures in Seurat’s Dimanche a la Grande Jatte could move and speak on film? Once having seen it, I think, you wouldn’t be content to watch a movie with live actors again.
The animation of live art has been tried occasionally. The 1969 film The Picasso Summer featured a sequence involving animated sketches by Picasso. Robert Crumb’s backdrops in Fritz the Cat (1972 ) were such novel evocations of urban ambience that I found myself wishing the camera would freeze so I could study them more closely. Ditto for The Triplets of Belleville (2005).
And of course the Walt Disney studio’s early cartoons represented the collective work of dozens of artists lovingly hand-painting images onto thousands of film frames for features like Snow White and Bambi, each film a triumph of attention to color, depth and detail. Disney’s Mary Poppins (1964) opens with a panoramic overhead view of the city of London; as the credits flash on the screen, the camera moves slowly up the Thames in travelogue fashion. But this London is not a moving photograph, it’s a moving painting of London in 1910— a huge mural encompassing hundreds of buildings, with just enough movement thrown in (lights blinking in windows, boats rocking on rivers) to make you mistake it for the real thing. But as I said, it’s better.
Now, suppose, with the help of computers, those old Currier & Ives woodcuts could be animated? Suppose we could bring to life the images from Franklin’s day— not by using actors, but by using the actual prints, paintings and sketches from the period?
A 1753 fire comes to life
One small item at the Constitution Center— and only one— suggests the possibilities. An exhibit on 18th-Century fire-fighting takes a black-and-white engraving from 1753 depicting firemen standing on either side of a horizontal pump, pumping water for hoses to spray on a burning building. The engraving, of course, is a still etching. But with the aid of computers, the image moves: the firemen pump up and down; the flames shoot outward from windows; there’s even a dog running around. Yet this scene was sketched 150 years before the first motion pictures.
It’s the sort of innovation that would have delighted Franklin, who was always more interested in he future than the present or the past. I think he’d be tickled to know that his spirit is still driving innovation in the 21st Century. So what are we waiting for? Let’s get to work on that moving version of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment.— Dan Rottenberg.
To read a response to this rview, click here.
At a dinner he once threw for America’s Nobel Prize winners, President John F. Kennedy joked that never before had such an array of brainpower gathered together in the White House, “with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” Much the same notion applies to the National Constitution Center’s Franklin Tercentenary exhibit: It’s the largest collection of Franklin materials ever assembled in one place; it draws on the holdings and creativity of five major institutions as well as dozens of others; and its ingenuity is surely unrivaled, with the possible exception of Franklin’s when he was left all by himself.
The exhibit’s 8,000-square-foot space offers plenty for the knowledgeable and the novice, for children as well as adults, and for visitors with short and long attention spans alike. A few exercises will convince you in a matter of minutes that the good old days of the Enlightenment weren’t really all that good— for the rich or the poor—and that Franklin was well advised to seek something better than the 18th-Century’s status quo.
One interactive device, for example, puts you in the place of a 21-year-old former apprentice trying to travel from Boston to New York in Franklin’s day (I chose to make the journey by sea and wound up being blown off course to the Bahamas, where I had to work for eight years to earn my passage back to the mainland). Or you can experience the backbreaking labor of a poor print shop assistant or, conversely, the agony of gout that afflicted rich men on rich diets. (Franklin’s gout-induced groans may convince many visitors to swear off red meat and rich wines altogether). You can also stand by Franklin’s side and experience his tongue-lashing before the British Privy Council in 1774— a humiliating exercise in British arrogance that effectively converted Franklin from loyal subject of the Crown to an effective if belated revolutionary.
From Rembrandt to Disney
But let me focus on one small item that Franklin himself never thought of but reflects the sort of ingenuity I’m sure he’d demonstrate were he living today.
Animation in motion pictures is usually associated with cartoons, and consequently it’s rarely regarded as a form of high art. But I’ve sometimes wondered: Suppose a Rembrandt or Rubens painting could be brought to life through animation? A landscape, or an infinitely detailed seascape like Claude Lorrain’s 17th Century Harbor at Toulon? Suppose the figures in Seurat’s Dimanche a la Grande Jatte could move and speak on film? Once having seen it, I think, you wouldn’t be content to watch a movie with live actors again.
The animation of live art has been tried occasionally. The 1969 film The Picasso Summer featured a sequence involving animated sketches by Picasso. Robert Crumb’s backdrops in Fritz the Cat (1972 ) were such novel evocations of urban ambience that I found myself wishing the camera would freeze so I could study them more closely. Ditto for The Triplets of Belleville (2005).
And of course the Walt Disney studio’s early cartoons represented the collective work of dozens of artists lovingly hand-painting images onto thousands of film frames for features like Snow White and Bambi, each film a triumph of attention to color, depth and detail. Disney’s Mary Poppins (1964) opens with a panoramic overhead view of the city of London; as the credits flash on the screen, the camera moves slowly up the Thames in travelogue fashion. But this London is not a moving photograph, it’s a moving painting of London in 1910— a huge mural encompassing hundreds of buildings, with just enough movement thrown in (lights blinking in windows, boats rocking on rivers) to make you mistake it for the real thing. But as I said, it’s better.
Now, suppose, with the help of computers, those old Currier & Ives woodcuts could be animated? Suppose we could bring to life the images from Franklin’s day— not by using actors, but by using the actual prints, paintings and sketches from the period?
A 1753 fire comes to life
One small item at the Constitution Center— and only one— suggests the possibilities. An exhibit on 18th-Century fire-fighting takes a black-and-white engraving from 1753 depicting firemen standing on either side of a horizontal pump, pumping water for hoses to spray on a burning building. The engraving, of course, is a still etching. But with the aid of computers, the image moves: the firemen pump up and down; the flames shoot outward from windows; there’s even a dog running around. Yet this scene was sketched 150 years before the first motion pictures.
It’s the sort of innovation that would have delighted Franklin, who was always more interested in he future than the present or the past. I think he’d be tickled to know that his spirit is still driving innovation in the 21st Century. So what are we waiting for? Let’s get to work on that moving version of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment.— Dan Rottenberg.
To read a response to this rview, click here.
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