and Jean Epstein: Corporeal Cinema and Film Philosophy, and translator of Jean Epstein’s The Intelligence of a Machine as well as Gilbert Simondon’s Imagination and Invention.
Wall-Romana applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Black Light: Revealing the Hidden History of Photography and Cinema, and reported the following:
In Black Light, page 99 acts as a hinge between two sections of Chapter 2. These sections are titled “Herschelian Cosmology and the Chrono-Imaging Equation,” (94) and “Animating History: Astronomical Culture and the Specter of Slavery,” on 99. These somewhat technical titles address two central components of the overall argument of the book. That argument is the following: “astronomical and cosmological visualization within the purview of natural history—together with the accounts of racial differentiation and Blackness that linked Earth to the cosmos, as well as photochemistry to skin color—were integral to the new models of imaging that progressively shaped the matrix of photocinema from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries” (24). In other words, in the history of technical images that led to photography and cinema, I argue that modeling the cosmos and modeling race were key imperatives that predated the goal of simply reproducing visual reality.Learn more about Black Light at the University of Minnesota Press website.
The first section ending on 99 explains the dynamic cosmology of William Herschel, a German musician who migrated to England and became passionate for astronomy. Herschel is famous for being the first (identified) person to discover a new planet in the solar system in 1783: Uranus. But in the history of astronomy, he played a more crucial role: he was the first to propose a general theory of the formation of all objects in the cosmos, from planetary systems to galaxies, based on actual data. His driving insight came out of the patient cataloguing of star clusters which he conducted with his sister Caroline—the first woman scientist to receive a state salary from in 1785 (at her insistence!). With their thousands of sketches of variegated star groupings, they realized that a single dynamic process could account for all of them. That process is the opposite tug of gravity condensing them and centrifugal force giving them an ellipsoid form (like the spiral Andromeda galaxy). For media studies what is noteworthy is that William expressly pointed out that the thousands of still sketches they amassed amounted to freeze frames within a single dynamic process, a single ‘film’ as it were. That is exactly how cinema emerged from the work of photographers in the 1860s and 70s who decided to ‘animate’ the sequential shots (chronophotographs) that they took when studying motion. Cosmology thus ‘invented’ the idea of animating still images.
The page 99 section titled “Animating History: Astronomical Culture and the Specter of Slavery,” goes on to link Herschel’s dynamic cosmology with a late 18th-century view of human history as equally cinematic. While cosmic objects evolve from physical forces alone—a radically atheistic notion!—Enlightenment thinkers puzzled over what propelled human history. Their answer was civilizational progress. And the only measure of it for Europe’s white intelligentsia was cultural comparison, which was at that time inherently racial and overwhelmingly racist. It was indeed an astronomer, Condorcet, who first posited progress explicitly on the model of cosmological dynamism. Condorcet was an abolitionist, largely because slavery was obviously an inhumane and backward practice. This section shows that astronomical culture tended to reject slavery also on optical grounds, knowing that Black skin is a simple matter of light reflectance rather than physiological difference. This goes a long way towards explaining why 19th century antislavery legislation was spearheaded in England and France by two actors trained in photochemistry: Henry Brougham and François Arago.
Page 99 provides a very solid preview of the book as a whole which endeavors to rethink media history through astronomy, slavery, and anti-Blackness. Of course there are important aspects missing. For instance, the ‘multiple word hypothesis’, which was taken for granted in the 18th century, limned out rational grounds for thinking that all planets of the solar system were inhabited. This turns out to be a pivotal component for linking astronomy and race since extra-terrestrials were invariably envisioned through racial and racist lenses. It’s also vital to know that philosopher Immanuel Kant, who penned an original dynamic cosmology that likely inspired Herschel, considered that the decomposition of white light into spectral colors ultimately presages the racial superiority of whiteness.
The Page 99 Test is thus rather successful here. Pages 97 and 98, as well as 100 and 101—to sample a few neighbors—would certainly not give as full an idea of the book’s main argument as 99. Of course, there is a substantial element of probability in choosing 99. The first 20 to 30 pages are obviously selected out from the test since their introductory bent might serve to illustrate the book too well. A later page, say 140 or 160, might either not be present in a shorter book or veer towards concluding matters. So, the test applies realistically to a span of pages ranging, let’s say, from page 40 to 120. Is 99 better than all or even most of these? I’m a bit skeptical... On the other hand, my book shows that European ideas about race and especially Blackness were based on just the kind of magical thinking as the Page 99 Test—only, with devastating consequences for millions of people, to this day. I do believe some magical thinking can be benign, even beneficent. I know the sun isn’t rising and setting: Earth is just rotating. But the sun remains the extraordinary agent in my experience of sunrise and sunset. The Page 99 Test for me is about wonder as a guide in life and thought. And wonder is exactly what I felt when I cracked up my freshly printed book to its fated page 99!
--Marshal Zeringue
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