A Film Canon

The apotheosis of the actuality tradition, James White's documentation of the 1900 Paris Exposition comprises five shorts - Eiffel Tower From Trocadero Palace, Palace Of Electricity, Champs De Mars, Panorama Of Eiffel Tower and Elevator Ascending Eiffel Tower - which chart an epic journey from the perimeters of the city centre to its highest point. It's extraordinary to see the Tower set against a nineteenth-century cityscape, or, more accurately, to experience the sublime conflict between vertical and horizontal panoramas that White so systematically exploits, most explicitly in his refusal to depict the top of it until late into the fourth short. Even then, the tip is occluded, reserved for the final attempt to embody, rather than merely depict, its sacrosanct space and, in doing so, to conflate vertical and horizontal in a vision of the emergent modernist metropolis made available to the individual eye. This takes the form of the diagonal movement of the elevator from which that vision is shot, whose passage is rendered even more spatially ambiguous by shifting camera angles. However, the flipside of this localised spatial confusion is a more general spatial clarification, with the cityscape gradually receding to a grid-like two-dimensionality that must have been as shocking as it was amazing to contemporaries.