A Note on the Idea of Seeing Things Backwards

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1873

Leonardo wrote backwards and from right to left, Benjamin Button lived backwards at the hands of Scott Fitzgerald, Rene Magritte's man in the mirror saw the back of his head, Ignatz the Mouse I am sure saw the back of his head looking around the world with the world's most powerful telescope, rugby passes are all done backwards, paper images of vue optiques appear backwards, lightning for all intents and purposes starts backwards from the ground up, reverse mathematics are worked from theorems to axioms, the Chicago River (1900) was engineered to flow backwards for the foreseeable future, while the Mississippi River famously flowed backwards for just a bit in the New Madrid earthquake of 1812. 

I can only imagine what audiences must have felt when they saw the first moving pictures played backwards--seeing them played forwards was a novel-enough (and revolutionary) idea, but the simple idea of reversing the direction of the film would have proved to be equally fascinating.  Imagine the first time you witnessed a staged train wreck on film, back there in 1895¹, and imagine being able to see it played over and over again, until you were filled.  I'm not so sure that there were even any still photographs of a train wreck as it occurred to this point, even with advances in film speed and lens, so seeing the even unfold in front of you at leisure must have been overwhelming.  Now imagine these same folks seeing the event and watching the locomotives reconstitute themselves.  It would have been an extraordinary event.  Even observing the Marey sequences (above) and seeing what actually happens when a person bends over to pick up a pail of water would have revealed almost as much in new detail as when Galileo was in the middle of his earliest observations. 

In a way the chance of controlling the direction telling of a story and seeing it displayed via moving images, and being able to see them backwards, may well have seemed a form of third-person time travel.  This came on the heals of what is for all intents and purposes the first time travel novel in  H.G. Wells' (also in) 1895 The Time Machine (appearing earlier as "The Chronic Argonauts," in 1888)² and Mark Twain's 1889 but much earlier than the first motion picture to use the idea of time travel (which was in 1921 and based on Twain's work).  Being able to show a motion picture, and then stop it at will, and then reverse the order of time to begin everything all over again--visually--must have seemed a magnificent advantage. 

Notes:

1.  It is interesting that this very early motion picture , made by the great scientist-brothers Lumiere, l'Arrivee d'un train en gare, was produced in the same year as the Wells book.  Just two years later, the Lumiere Brothers published a catalog of their available movie strips, numbering 338 productions.  In 1898, after six catalogs, there were over a thousand strips.  This is remarkable, especially considering that there wasn't a cinema industry yet.  The Lumieres are an interesting pair of people (both of whom survived their invention by about a half-century), making perhaps the most important discoveries in the history of cinema, and continued to be interested in other fields throughout their lives.  The cinema-industry part of their work didn't seem to interest them all that much. 

The history of moving images is complex and long.  I'm not saying at all that it begins with the Lumieres, or with Edison, as the pre-1900 field is well sprinkled with different and interesting attempts at fooling our eye--Chronophotograposcopes, Counterfivoscopes, Phantasmagorias, Klondikiscopes, Vileocigraphiscope, and so on, are just a few examples of the many attempts at locating the seat of photographic motion in the brain.  There are very early efforts, principally by J.A.F. Plateau (1801-1883) who rediscovered in 1829 the "persistence of vision" effect in which the eye will see a continuous stream of images if presented with a flow of static pictures at 16 frames per second over a one second period, which of course is the basis for the rest of everything that was to come.  There's much more, but I wanted to at least point out these few important bits. 

2..  I'm not sure what to  with Mr. Dickens, if he fits in this order with the time traveling Scrooge in A Christmas Carol (1843), or not.  Perhaps he does, and if so, then he precedes Mr. Wells, though the latter's time traveler is outfitted with a machine and a scientific basis for the belief in it.  At the very least he is worth mentioning in the same moment.

Comments

[Ray Girvan]

The work on this theme that I most recall - and your reference to the concept spurred me to Google it and find its title that I'd forgotten - is Damon Knight's 1956 Backward O Time.

The sole bit I remembered was this:

Professor Toohey was an old duck who took a fancy to Sullivan before he had been in college a year. They used to spout beer, down in Toohey's dark cellar where he kept a keg for it, and talk philosophy.

But Googling finds more, as in this bit about anti-shaving:

In the evenings his familiar face stared back at him from the mirror haggard and gray. His fingers rubbed the smooth cheek; the razor came riding diagonally up with a crisp sound, trailing lather and making the bristles sprout behind it. Then the warm brush to remove the lather, and the same face, with its beard restored.

[John F. Ptak]

Thanks very much for that note, Ray. THis is such an ENORMOUS subject, this sdrawkcab stuff. I've been thinking about people seeing the train running backwards (sucking in steam and such) and seeing it for the first time...it must have been extraordinarily powerful to realize the power of this capacity...like suddenly gaining a new dimension.

[Ray Girvan]

I forget where I first heard this - it might have been a comic sketch - but it involved a description of the plot of "Jaws" backwards: the story of a shark which vomits up so many people that they have to open a beach.