Motion Picture Persistence of Vision: “How You See It” 1936 Chevrolet 8min
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“How persistence of vision makes motion pictures possible.”
NEW VERSION with improved video & sound:
Public domain film from the Library of Congress Prelinger Archive, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).
Persistence of vision is the phenomenon of the eye by which an afterimage is thought to persist for approximately one twenty-fifth of a second on the retina.
The myth of persistence of vision is the belief that human perception of motion (brain centered) is the result of persistence of vision (eye centred). The myth was debunked in 1912 by Wertheimer but persists in many citations in many classic and modern film-theory texts. A more plausible theory to explain motion perception (at least on a descriptive level) are two distinct perceptual illusions: phi phenomenon and beta movement.
A visual form of memory known as iconic memory has been described as the cause of this phenomenon. Although psychologists and physiologists have rejected the relevance of this theory to film viewership, film academics and theorists generally have not. Some scientists nowadays consider the entire theory a myth.
In contrasting persistence of vision theory with phi phenomena, a critical part of understanding that emerges with these visual perception phenomena is that the eye is not a camera. In other words vision is not as simple as light registering on a medium, since the brain has to make sense of the visual data the eye provides and construct a coherent picture of reality. Joseph Anderson and Barbara Fisher argue that the phi phenomena privileges a more constructionist approach to the cinema (David Bordwell, Noël Carroll, Kirsten Thompson), whereas the persistence of vision privileges a realist approach (André Bazin, Christian Metz, Jean-Louis Baudry).
The discovery of persistence of vision is attributed to the Roman poet Lucretius, although he only mentions it in connection with images seen in a dream. In the modern era, some stroboscopic experiments performed by Peter Mark Roget in 1824 were also cited as the basis for the theory.
Film systems
Persistence of vision is still the accepted term for this phenomenon in the realm of cinema history and theory. In the early days of film innovation, it was scientifically determined that a frame rate of less than 16 frames per second (frame/s) caused the mind to see flashing images. Audiences still interpret motion at rates as low as ten frames per second or slower (as in a flipbook), but the flicker caused by the shutter of a film projector is distracting below the 16-frame threshold.
Modern theatrical film runs at 24 frames a second. This is the case for both physical film and digital cinema systems.
It is important to distinguish between the frame rate and the flicker rate, which are not necessarily the same. In physical film systems, it is necessary to pull down the film frame, and this pulling-down needs to be obscured by a shutter to avoid the appearance of blurring; therefore, there needs to be at least one flicker per frame in film. To reduce the appearance of flicker, virtually all modern projector shutters are designed to add additional flicker periods, typically doubling the flicker rate to 48 Hz (single-bladed shutters make two rotations per frame — double-bladed shutters make one rotation per frame), which is less visible. (Some three-bladed projector shutters even triple it to 72 Hz.)
In digital film systems, the scan rate may be decoupled from the image update rate. In some systems, such as the Digital Light Processing (DLP) system, there is no flying spot or raster scan at all, so there is no flicker other than that generated by the temporal aliasing of the film image capture.
The new film system MaxiVision 48 films at 48 frames per second, which, according to film critic Roger Ebert, offers even a strobeless tracking shot past picket fences. The lack of strobe (as opposed to flicker) is due to the higher sampling rate of the camera relative to the speed of movement of the image across the film plane. This ultra-smooth imaging is called High motion. It is critical for sports and motion simulation, but unpopular for drama…
