The Mechanical Age October 1, 2006

As our culture -- cinematic and otherwise -- moves ever deeper into digital dependency, we would do well to look back at the period that preceded the digital era: the mechanical age, which also happens to be the age of the movies. From its very beginnings, cinema has been obsessed with the machine. For the avant-garde filmmakers of the 1920s, mechanical motion and speed were objects of formal fascination, paralleling movements in painting and photography of the period, examples of which you are invited to view in the BAM exhibition 'Measure of Time.'