A Companion to Early Cinema E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1424

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

A COMPANION TO EARLY CINEMA

“This collection of essays by early cinema scholars from Europe and North America offers manifold perspectives on early cinema fiction which perfectly reflect the state of international research.”

– Martin Loiperdinger, Universitaet Trier

“A fabulous selection of first-rate articles!”

– Rick Altman, University of Iowa

“One of the most challenging books in recent film studies: in it, early cinema is both a historical object and a contemporary presence. As in a great novel, we can retrace the adventures of the past – the films, styles, discourses, and receptions that made cinema the breakthrough reality it was in its first decades. But we can also come to appreciate how much of this reality is still present in our digital world.”

– Francesco Casetti, Yale University

A Companion to Early Cinema is an authoritative reference on the field of early cinema. Its 30 peer-reviewed chapters offer cutting-edge research and original perspectives on the major concerns in early cinema studies, and take an ambitious look at ideas and themes that will lead discussions about early cinema into the future.

Including work by both established and up-and-coming scholars in early cinema, film theory, and film history, this will be the definitive volume on early cinema history for years to come and a must-have reference for all those working in the field.

Leseprobe

Contents

List of Contributors

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I Early Cinema Cultures

1 The Culture Broth and the Froth of Cultures of So-called Early Cinema

2 Toward a History of Peep Practice

The Incubation Era of Peep Media

Peep Shows and the Culture of Attractions

Peep Media in Private

The Cosmorama – An Urban Peeping Institution

Peeping in Public: From Stereoscopy to Moving Images

Between Peep Practice and Screen Practice

Conclusion: From Peep Media to Mediated Voyeurism

3 “We are Here and Not Here”: Late Nineteenth-CenturyStage Magic and the Roots of Cinema in the Appearance (and Disappearance) of the Virtual Image

4 The Féerie between Stage and Screen

The Stage Féerie: Stunning Magic and Visual Splendor

Châtelet 1896: La biche au bois

Châtelet 1905: Les 400 coups du diable

Conclusion

5 The Théâtrophone, an Anachronistic Hybrid Experiment or One of the First Immobile Traveler Devices?

Between Performance and Attraction: Taking Another Look at the Théâtrophone

From the Imagination to International Networks

The Hybridization of the Théâtrophone as a Model for Future Applications

6 The “Silent” Arts: Modern Pantomime and the Making of an Art Cinema in Belle Époque Paris: The Case of Georges Wague and Germaine Dulac

The Art of Running History Backwards

The Modernization of the Arts in Belle Époque France

The “Silent” Arts: Concepts of Wordlessness

Pantomime and Cinema: A Shared Intermediality

Pantomime, Cinema, and the Language of Signs: Early Abstraction

“Classical” Pantomime and Early Cinema: From Adaptation to Integration

Modern Pantomime: The Case of Georges Wague and Germaine Dulac

Wague on Stage: Gestural Abstraction

“Modern” Pantomime and “Pure” Cinema: A Shared “Visibilization”

Beyond Word and Phrase: An Impressionist Proposal

Part II Early Cinema Discourses

7 First Discourses on Film and the Constructionof a “Cinematic Episteme”

The Cinematic Episteme

Mechanics and the Mechanism

The Modern Mind

Epistemology and Film History

8 The Discourses of Art in Early Film, or, Why Not Rancière?

The Representative Regime: Quality Films and Historicism

The Modes of Art: National Heritage and Reform in the Quality Film

Aesthetic Regimes: Classical Cinema and the Avant-Garde

Histories of Early Cinema: Rancière and Film Historiography

9 Sensationalism and Early Cinema

Introduction

The Concept and Phenomenon of Sensationalism

Explanations of Sensationalism

Cine-sensationalism

10 From Craft to Industry: Series and Serial Production Discourses and Practices in France

The “Craft” Era

The Transition to Another System

An Industrial Conception of Kinematography

The “Industrial” Discourse Becomes Generalized

Putting Industrial Discourse into Practice

Scenes in Series

Series, Serial Production, and Mode of Exhibition

11 Early American Film Publications: Film Consciousness, Self Consciousness

The Four Language Traits of Early Film Publications

Regions of Film Consciousness

Regions of Self Consciousness

Conclusion

12 Early Cinema and Film Theory

Topical Contributions

Conceptual Contributions

Film Theory Finally in Crisis

Part III Early Cinema Forms

13 A Bunch of Violets

14 Modernity Stops at Nothing: The American Chase Film and the Specter of Lynching

Preamble

Scholarship

The Chase Model

Newspaper Archives

Putting Lynching in Context

Bloodhounds

Racial Merriment: Chickens, Watermelons – and Pumpkins

Unscripted Vigilantism

Conclusion

15 “The Knowledge Which Comes in Pictures”: Educational Films and Early Cinema Audiences

The Campaign to Promote Educational Films, 1910–13

Spectators and Educational Films

16 Motion Picture Color and Pathé-Frères: The Aesthetic Consequences of Industrialization

Motion Picture Color before World War I

Pathé’s Commitment to Stencil Color

Pathé’s Color Production: Some Statistics

The Realist Aesthetic

Early Stencil Color

The New Stencil Films

Kinemacolor

Part IV Early Cinema Presentations

17 The European Fairground Cinema: (Re)defining and (Re)contextualizing the “Cinema of Attractions”

The Concept “Cinema of Attractions”

Fairground Cinema

Audiences and Film Programs

A European Institution

Summary and Discussion

18 Early Film Programs: An Overture, Five Acts, and an Interlude

Overture

Act I: Novelty Era Programming

Act II: Traveling Motion Picture Shows

Act III: Variety Theater Shows

Interlude: Alternative or Non-Theatrical Programs

Act IV: Nickelodeon and Other Permanent-Venue Programs

Act V: Multiple-Reel and Feature Film Programming

Bonsoir or Good Night

19 “Half Real-Half Reel”: Alternation Format Stage-and-Screen Hybrids

Case Study: Winchester

From Featured Sequences to Integration

20 Advance Newspaper Publicity for the Vitascope and the Mass Address of Cinema ’ s Reading Public

Readers, Publics, Audiences

Telegraphing Cinematic Experience: The Vitascope’s Advance Publicity

Cinema’s Publicity Beyond the Vitascope

21 Storefront Theater Advertising and the Evolution of the American Film Poster

First Film Advertising

Show Printer Offerings

Nickelodeon Posters

Better Cinema Posters

Nickelodeon Poster Practices

Advertising Controversies

Conclusion: Toward the Classical Hollywood Cinema Poster

22 Bound by Cinematic Chains: Film and Prisons during the Early Era

Film Spectatorship in Prison: The Early Years

Cinemagoing at Sing Sing: The Emergence of Film Culture Behind Bars

Reform and the Female Prisoner: Uplift and Knowing One’s Place

“An Education in Americanism”: Concluding Thoughts

Part V Early Cinema Identities

23 Anonymity: Uncredited and Unknown in Early Cinema

Conclusion: Retrospective Credit

24 The Invention of Cinematic Celebrity in the United Kingdom

Another Cinema

A New Industry

A Prehistory of the Picture Personality

The Place of the United States

25 The Film Lecturer

Introduction

History

Politics

Semiology

Conclusion

26 Richard Hoff man: A Collector ’ s Archive

Pictures and Posters: The Airdome at Point Pleasant

Commuting to the Movies

In and Around Germantown

Downtown Philly

The Database

Part VI Early Cinema Recollections

27 Early Films in the Age of Content; or, “Cinema of Attractions” Pursued by Digital Means

28 Multiple Originals: The (Digital) Restoration and Exhibition of Early Films

The Restoration of Early Films in Light of a Theory of Film Archival Practice

Frameworks

Concepts

(Digital) Restoration of Early Films

(Digital) Exhibition of Early Films

29 Pointing Forward, Looking Back: Refl exivity and Deixis in Early Cinema and Contemporary Installations

Reflexivity of the Medium

Ride Films and Deixis of the Image

Placing Screens

Looking Forward: Archival Presence in Deictic Time

30 Is Nothing New? Turn-of-the-Century Epistemes in Film History

Epistemes 1900/2000: Nothing is New …

Pre-cinema, Para-cinema, Proto-cinema

Early Cinema: “Nitrate Can’t Wait” and the Policy of the Archive and the Festival

Revisionist Historiographies

Beginnings, Becomings, and Fateful Divisions

Against Convergence: The Cinema Does Not (Yet) Exist

Film History or Cinema History

The Cinema is Always Complete

Index

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A companion to early cinema / edited by André Gaudreault, Nicolas Dulac, Santiago Hidalgo ; assisted by Pierre Chemartin. p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4443-3231-5 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Motion pictures–History. 2. Silent films–History and criticism. I. Gaudreault, André. II. Dulac, Nicolas. III. Hidalgo, Santiago. PN1994.C584 2012 791.4309–dc23

2011048257

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

List of Contributors

Richard Abel is Robert Altman Collegiate Professor of Film Studies in Screen Arts & Cultures at the University of Michigan. Most recently he published Americanizing the Movies and “Movie-Mad” Audiences, 1910–1914 (2006), co-edited Early Cinema and the “National” (2008), and edited a paperback version of the Encyclopedia of Early Cinema (2010). His current project is Menus for Movie Land: Newspapers and the Emergence of American Film Culture, 1913–1916.François Albera is Professor of History and Aesthetics of Cinema at the Université de Lausanne (Switzerland). A specialist in Soviet and Russian Cinema Studies, he has written Eisenstein et le constructivisme russe (1989), Albatros; des russes à Paris 1919–1929 (1995), and L’avant-garde au cinéma (2006), and edited many books, including S. M. Eisenstein: cinématisme (1980) and Les Formalistes russes et le cinéma, poétique du film (1995). Albera is also a regular contributor to 1895 Revue d’Histoire du Cinéma and was for many years its chief editor.Ben Brewster has just retired from a position as Assistant Director of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He formerly taught at the University of Kent at Canterbury, and was editor of Screen. He has published on early and silent cinema in such journals as Screen, Cinema Journal, and Film History.Paolo Cherchi Usai, Senior Curator of Film at George Eastman House in Rochester, NY, is Curator Emeritus of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia and co-founder of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival and the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation. He directed the experimental film Passio (2007), adapted from his book The Death of Cinema (2001). His most recent work is Film Curatorship: Archives, Museums, and the Digital Marketplace (2008).Nicolas Dulac is Lecturer in Film Studies at the Université de Montréal, where he is also a researcher for GRAFICS (Groupe de recherche sur l’avènement et la formation des institutions cinématographique et scénique). He has published on early cinema and turn-of-the-century popular culture in journals such as 1895Revue d’Histoire duCinéma,Cinéma & Cie, and Early Popular Visual Culture.Thomas Elsaesser is Professor Emeritus of Film and Television Studies at the Universiteit van Amsterdam and, since 2006, Visiting Professor at Yale University. He has authored, edited, and co-edited some twenty volumes. Among his recent books as author are European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (2005), Terror und Trauma (2007), Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses (2010, with Malte Hagener), and The Persistence of Hollywood (2011).Giovanna Fossati is Head Curator of EYE Film Institute Netherlands. She holds a Ph.D. in Media Studies (Universiteit Utrecht) and teaches in the MA Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image (Universiteit van Amsterdam). Her recent publications include articles in The YouTube Reader (Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau, eds., 2009) and the book From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in Transition (2009).Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley is a Professor in the Department of Communication at Georgia State University. A cultural historian of film, radio, and television, she is the author of numerous essays and has written or edited four books, including, as editor, Hollywood in the Neighborhood: Historical Case Studies of Local Moviegoing (2008), and the single-author volumes At the Picture Show: Small Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture (2000) and Celebrate Richmond Theater (2001).Jane M. Gaines is a Professor of Film Studies at Columbia University in New York. She has won national awards for two books: Contested Culture: The Image, the Voice, and the Law (1991) and Fire and Desire: Mixed Race Movies in the Silent Era (2001). She has published articles on intellectual property and early piracy as well as documentary film and video and co-edited Collecting Visible Evidence (1999). Currently, she is completing Fictioning Histories: Women Film Pioneers, a project for which she received an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences scholar award.Joseph Garncarz is currently Privatdozent for Theater, Film, and Television Studies at the Universität zu Köln, Germany, and has regularly been a visiting professor at several European universities. A social historian of media, his publications include Hollywood in Deutschland: Zur Internationalisierung der Kinokultur 1925–1990 (2012) and Maßlose Unterhaltung: Zur Etablierung des Films in Deutschland 1896–1914 (2010). Many of his articles have been translated from German into English, French, Czech, and Polish.André Gaudreault is a Professor in the Département d’histoire de l’art et d’études cinématographiques at the Université de Montréal. He is the author of From Plato to Lumière: Narration and Monstration in Literature and Cinema (2009) and Film and Attraction (2011), and the editor of American Cinema 1890–1909: Themes and Variations (2009). He is preparing with Philippe Gauthier a book entitled From Pathé to Griffith: Crosscutting in Early Cinema, to be published in 2013.Alison Griffiths is Professor of Film and Media at Baruch College, The City University of New York and a member of the doctoral faculty in theater at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of the award-winning volume Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture (2002), Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View (2008) and numerous essays on pre-cinema, museums, and visual culture. Her current book project is entitled Screens behind Bars: Cinema, Prisons, and the Making of Modern America.Tom Gunning is Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor, Department of Cinema and Media, University of Chicago. He is the author of D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film (1993) and The Films of Fritz Lang; Allegories of Vision and Modernity (2008), as well as over a hundred articles. In 2009 he was awarded a Andrew A. Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award. He is working on a book on the invention of the moving image.Santiago Hidalgo is a Lecturer in Film Studies at the Université de Montréal, where he has worked as researcher and translator for GRAFICS (Groupe de recherche sur l’avènement et la formation des institutions cinématographique et scénique). He was formerly coordinator of the Research Team on the History and Epistemology of Film Studies at Concordia University. He has published on the subject of early cinema and film criticism in Cinémas and in conference proceedings for events in Udine, Italy and Cerisy, France.Erkki Huhtamo is a Professor of Design and Media Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has published extensively on various aspects of media culture and media arts. Recently he co-edited with Jussi Parikka Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications (2011). His major monograph Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles is ­forthcoming in 2012.Frank Kessler is a Professor of Media History at the Universiteit Utrecht. He has published widely on early cinema and the history of film theory. He co-founded and co-edited KINtop: Jahrbuch zur Erforschung des frühen Films and co-edits the KINtop-Schriften book series. From 2003 to 2007 he was the president of the ­international association DOMITOR. Together with Nanna Verhoeff he edited Networks of Entertainment: Early Film Distribution 1895–1915 (2007).Rob King is an Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies and History at the University of Toronto. His published work includes The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture (2009) and the co-edited collections Slapstick Comedy (2010) and Early Cinema and the “National” (2008).Richard Koszarski is editor-in-chief of Film History: An International Journal. His books include Hollywood on the Hudson (2008), Fort Lee, the Film Town (2004), Von: The Life and Films of Erich von Stroheim (2001), and An Evening’s Entertainment (1990). He is currently Professor of English at Rutgers University.Germain Lacasse is a Professor in the Département d’histoire de l’art et d’études cinématographiques at Université de Montréal. Specializing in early cinema and Quebec cinema, he is the author of a comparative study of the film lecturer in different countries. For the past several years, he has been directing a research project studying the historical and theoretical relationship between film and the oral tradition. His research projects focus on film’s contribution to the emergence of artistic culture in Quebec. His principal publications are Histoires de scopes (1989) and Le Bonimenteur de vues animées (2001).Laurent Le Forestier is a Professor of Film Studies at the Université Haute Bretagne – Rennes 2. A member of the editorial board of the journal 1895 Revue d’Histoire du Cinéma, he is also the author of several dozen articles, mostly on early cinema, film historiography, and the history of critical discourse in France. On the subject of early cinema, he is the author of Aux sources de l’industrie du ­cinema: le modèle Pathé (1905–1908) (2006).Annemone Ligensa has worked as a Lecturer in Film History and Media Psychology and is currently a member of the research project “Visual Communities: Relationships of the Local, National, and Global in Early Cinema” at the Universität zu Köln, Germany. Her publications include Film 1900: Technology, Perception, Culture (with Klaus Kreimeier, 2009) and “Urban Legend: Early Cinema, Moder­nization, and Urbanization in Germany” in Cinema Audiences and Modernity: New Perspectives on European Cinema History (Daniel Biltereyst, Richard Maltby, and Philippe Meers, eds., forthcoming).Paul S. Moore is Associate Professor at Ryerson University in Toronto. His histories of cinema exhibition include articles in theCanadian Journal of Film Studies andNewfoundland & Labrador Studies, chapters inCovering Niagara andExplorations in New Cinema History, and a book about the nickel show in Toronto,Now Playing: Early Moviegoing and the Regulation of Fun (2008). With Sandra Gabriele, he is writing an intermedial history of weekend newspapers in North America.Charles O’Brien is an Associate Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. He is the author of Cinema’s Conversion to Sound (2005) along with various pieces on silent cinema and the history of film technology. He is currently completing a new book provisionally entitled Entertainment for Export: Movies, Songs, and Electric Sound.Roger Odin is Emeritus Professor of Communication and was head of the Institut de recherche sur le cinéma et l’audiovisuel at the Université Paris 3-Sorbonne-Nouvelle from 1983 to 2004. A communication theorist, he has written or edited several books, including Cinéma et production de sens (1990), Le film de famille (1995), L’âge d’or du cinéma documentaire: Europe années 50 (2 vols., 1997), De la fiction (2000), and Les espaces de communication (2011).Jan Olsson is Professor of Cinema Studies at Stockholms Universitet. He has ­published widely on Scandinavian and American cinema. His latest monograph is Los Angeles before Hollywood: Journalism and American Film Culture, 1905–1915 (2008). His latest collection, with Kingsley Bolton, is Media, Popular Culture, and the American Century (2010).Jennifer Peterson is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is the author of Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film (forthcoming). Her articles include publications in Camera Obscura, Cinema Journal, and the edited collections Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States (2011), and Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel (2006).Giusy Pisano is a Professor of Cinema and Audiovisual Studies at Université Paris-Est Marne la Vallée. She is the director of the Cinéma, Audiovisuel, Arts Sonores et Numériques department. Her research interest is the anthropology of sounds and images. She is the author of L’Amour fou au cinéma (2010) and Une archéologie du cinéma sonore (2004). With Valérie Pozner she co-edited the volume Le muet a la parole: cinéma et performances à l’aube du XXe siècle (2005) and with François Albera a special issue on music in1895 Revue d’Histoire du Cinéma (2002). She has contributed to several anthologies and has published articles on film history and aesthetics.Andrew Shail is a Lecturer in Film at Newcastle University. His publications include The Cinema and the Origins of Literary Modernism (2012) and articles on early and silent cinema in Film History, Journal of British Cinema and Television, Early Popular Visual Culture, and Critical Quarterly. Reading the Cinematograph (2011) is the most recent of his edited collections. He also specializes in the history of menstruation 1700–1900.Nanna Verhoeff is Associate Professor of Media and Culture Studies at the Universiteit Utrecht. She has written The West in Early Cinema: After the Beginning (2006) and Mobile Screens: The Visual Regime of Navigation (2012) where she analyzes media in transition. She analyzes mobility in media ranging from panoramas to handheld gadgets. Her current project is a study of screen-based interfaces for ­digital (audiovisual) collections.Gwendolyn Waltz is a theater historian and independent scholar whose work focuses on late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century multimedia presentations involving film and live performers. She has contributed articles about early ­stage-and-screen hybrids, as well as the aesthetics of dimension in multimedia ­performance, to Cinéma & Cie, Theatre Journal, and several film studies anthologies published by Forum for the University of Udine.Tami Williams is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She recently completed a critical history of 1920s French film pioneer Germaine Dulac, and edited Germaine Dulac: au delà des impressions (2006). She has numerous essays in international journals and anthologies, and has curated programs on Dulac for the Musée d’Orsay, Cinema Ritrovato, the Greek Film Archive, and the National Gallery of Art. She is currently co-editing a volume on contemporary global cinema.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank our many contributors for their enthusiasm, energy, and original chapters, without which a project of this scale and breadth would not have been possible. We would like to give special thanks to our advisory board, François Albera, Jennifer Bean, Paolo Cherchi Usai, Jane Gaines, Richard Koszarski, Michèle Lagny, and Charles Musser, who not only anonymously reviewed several chapters in this book, but also provided valuable guidance throughout the process. Our assistant editor, Pierre Chemartin, and Professor Richard Abel also deserve special mention for their editorial comments on several articles. We are indebted as well to all of the members of our research team at Université de Montréal – Groupe de recherche sur l’avènement et la formation des institutions cinématographique et scénique (GRAFICS) – who invested countless hours and resources over a period of three years to make sure this book would meet the highest professional standards, beginning with our coordinator Lisa Pietrocatelli, our second coordinator, Dominique Noujeim (during Lisa’s maternity leave), formatting assistant Marnie Mariscalchi, reviser Louis Pelletier, and researchers Hubert Sabino, Laurie-Anne Torres, and Dolorès Parenteau-Rodriguez. GRAFICS is supported in part by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC), whose members include, among others, André Habib, Germain Lacasse, Jean-Marc Larrue, Rosanna Maule, Viva Paci, Bernard Perron, Jean-Pierre Sirois-Trahan, and Pierre Véronneau. GRAFICS is also supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for individual projects. We also want to thank Philippe Gauthier for his assistance early in the project, Jane Jackel for revisions to some of the chapters, and Timothy Barnard for his editorial comments, revisions, and translations of several chapters. We are extremely grateful to the Wiley-Blackwell editorial team who showed support and gave valuable advice throughout the whole process.

Introduction

Nicolas Dulac, André Gaudreault, and Santiago Hidalgo

The title of this book,A Companion to Early Cinema, confidently asserts the existence of something called “early cinema.” At this moment there are conferences in preparation, publications written, and grants being justified across the globe under the banner of this term. Compared to other areas of research within the broader field of film studies, early cinema has been the focus of growing attention since the 1980s, an impressive feat considering the short span and limited territory it was originally meant to cover within film history. Is this unflinching enthusiasm the result of a visceral fascination with origins, the exhilaration of archival discovery, the sheer nostalgic appeal of these films from another era, a higher degree of ­recognition from universities, publishers, and granting institutions? A definitive answer is unlikely, being inextricably bound to all of these factors. Or we could look at the situation differently and ask ourselves if it is not “early cinema,” as a concept, as an intellectual category, that nourished this enthusiasm by constantly reshaping itself and adapting to new inquiries and currents of thought, to the impulses of the discipline and the unearthing of new documents and archival materials.

In fact, one of the oddities of early cinema, which raises significant confusion for both early cinema scholars and outside observers, is that its existence partially depends on the performative act of declaring it exists. This is because whenever someone speaks about “early cinema” they are generally talking about at least two things, without necessarily acknowledging an interesting distinction between them. On the one hand, the term refers to the existence of an agreed-upon, factual reality – cinema before roughly 1914–15. The institutional function of the term corresponds with other similar terms intended to divide the field into predefined objects, periods, genres, and geographic locations for study: Silent Cinema, Postwar Cinema, Science Fiction, French Cinema, and so forth. And at the same time that it refers to this agreed-upon reality, the term has the secondary function of designating a conceptualization of this reality, instituted over the last forty years or so, into a broad, heterogeneous research paradigm, which in fact comes to have a bearing on the parameters of the first designation. This process of conceptualization even results in seemingly counterintuitive, self-negating, questions, such as is there such a thing as “early cinema.”

Although the terms “film” and “cinema” sometimes designate material objects – a type of format, movie theaters, the projection of motion pictures – there is a sense in which cinema designates a kind of representational practice which is not necessarily present during the first fifteen years of motion pictures. It is more accurate to suggest that cinema begins in earnest in the 1910s with the institutionalization of motion pictures within a defined industry that included shared aesthetics and modes of production. There is also the secondary issue that (at least in English) the term “cinema” was not yet used at the time to describe the technology, let alone its status as a cultural phenomenon.1 Instead, a variety of other terms were used, derived either from certain film-related technologies or from motion picture effects (animated views, animated pictures, moving pictures, pictured scenes, motography, kinematography, and many more). Therefore, cinema was neither present as a term (and therefore as the concept it designates today), nor was there an institutional practice in the way cinema exists today, such that one could unproblematically assert “cinema” existed during this early period. Perhaps the most salient criticism of the use of “early cinema” is that it suggests not only a false conceptualization from the point of view of the period, but also a false sense of determinism between earlier practices (such as phantasmagoria, fairy plays, prestidigitation, etc.) and cinema, as if these inevitably converged to give rise to this new technology, which erases them as soon as it establishes itself as a “new beginning.”

A similar situation exists with the precise meaning of “early,” which in fact seems to respond to some of the problems raised by the application of cinema to this time frame. The end of early cinema, as mentioned, is generally accepted as falling around 1914–15, corresponding roughly with the beginning of World War I (and film’s integration into war propaganda), and a more codified aesthetic in the form of narrative features (the most cited example being D. W. Griffith’sBirth of a Nation), which came to be known as, variously, the institutional mode of representation,2 a system of narrative integration3 or simply classical cinema.4 The starting point is less clear, however, spanning roughly from 1893 to 1910, depending on the particular criteria applied: first film viewings, the first film projections, or the beginnings of institutional film. This periodization is further complicated if we see cinema as falling along an even longer continuum of moving picture cultures and screen practices that includes everything that came before the technological invention of film, sometimes defined as “pre-cinema” (itself a term that contributes to the notion that “cinema” existed in a more entrenched form at the moment the technology was invented). Indeed, many contributions to the field of early cinema, as this Companion illustrates in the first section, now focus on these earlier practices (what André Gaudreault defines as “cultural series”) that predate the Kinetoscope, the Vitascope, and the Cinématographe, the traditional technologies used to mark the beginnings of cinema. Thus, even as early cinema exists as a fairly unified field of study, with its encyclopedia,5 its international association,6 and its mythical place of germination,7 debates among its members about the identity of the field demand a sort of constant self-questioning and self-doubt about what it is precisely that is being studied. The outcome of this reflection could have weakened the integrity of the field or contributed to its fragmentation into various disciplines. As Tom Gunning suggests, early cinema runs the risk of losing its center of gravity and being “absorbed into the almost boundless topic of visual culture.”8 Or it simply could have turned toward scholarly cynicism, which is sometimes the case with categories that present a far-reaching interpretative framework such as genre or postmodernist criticism. It led, rather, to a collective acceptance and recognition that the paradigm is partially grounded on arbitrary agreements for the benefit of ensuring research continues and prospers in spite of the self-questioning. It is in this sense that we say “early cinema” almost functions as a “performative,” to use J. L. Austin’s expression.9 Of course, it does not have the same performative character as verbal utterances that are in themselves actions (such as “I promise”), but it nonethelessacts in this sense in that the very term “early cinema” not only creates an operative intellectual category to which scholars can relate, but also gives shape to a complex object of study that would otherwise remain elusive.10

It is from this confrontation with documents that the reconceptualization of early cinema within university institutions consolidated into an emerging field of study starting in the 1970s, namely with the celebrated Brighton Congress attended by several scholars who would come to define the field.11 Even though an obvious disciplinary objective is to uncover and analyze new historical data, the field itself has perhaps been made noteworthy within cinema studies more broadly by the invention of new concepts which have come to determine the way film is thought about. The most influential of these concepts might be “cinema of attractions,” still referenced frequently today after 25 years of circulation, as many of the chapters in this collection attest. By challenging teleological accounts that envisioned the invention of film techniques and aesthetics as oriented toward narrative from the very beginning, it managed to turn on its head decades of conventional wisdom about the way film developed. The concept also contested the premise that filmmakers and audiences shared a mutual desire for narrative and offered a persuasive alternative history that subverted this telos; rather than having future institutional objectives in mind, such as narrative film, filmmakers also followed rules originating in practices preceding the invention of film technologies. In addition, the public was represented as more complex in its interests and behavior than previously assumed. The cinema of attractions contributed to the shattering of two conjoined myths sharing a similar conceptualization – that early cinema and early spectators were primitive (in an evolutionary sense).12 What became apparent in this reconceptualization – or perhaps more accurately, recontextualization of early cinema – resulting from passionate empirical research, was that film was embedded in a series of cultures from which it derived its sense, purpose, and meaning, and that the public experienced these new aesthetics as much as continuities as ruptures and shocks.

Indeed, judging from the contributions in this collection, one might say that early cinema is often spoken about, even when the importance of grounding inferences in local knowledge is acknowledged, as a sort of culture extending across the Atlantic, its most dominant players England, France, and the United States, within which a multiplicity of vibrant communities and identities existed, each requiring a certain level of thick description to become demarcated and distinguished as meaningful and relevant in their own right. As with culture more broadly, the description of early cinema brings to bear a host of interdisciplinary approaches – sociological, anthropological, economic, philosophical, psychological – that divide the cinema world into discrete components and which, depending on the particular theory adopted, often suggest ways of organizing and describing the causes and effects. Early film historians, however, offer something more in applying these disciplines: not just a knowledge of film history, but a sort of aesthetic and formal awareness, an attention to the relationship between film, public, and context, and a willingness, perhaps, to gamble intellectually. In this way, the early film historian is not merely a historian of early film, but a particular type of versatile identity who has developed a disposition toward weaving a multitude of complementary and sometimes discordant vocabularies with the purpose of seeing early cinema under as many descriptions as there are languages. It is the sense of participating in this project of recontextualization, of seeing this as a valid enterprise and contribution within the humanities, as much as the thrill of making new empirical discoveries, which attracts scholars to the field of early cinema. The vitality of the community is derived from the dialectic tension between the archival impulse and the disposition toward recontextualization. One of the essential functions of the concept of early cinema, then, is to bring these various identities, interests, and vocabularies – which pull in every direction, sometimes making only oblique reference to that increasingly archaic object “film” (as the first section of this book exemplifies) – under a common rubric. This ensures that fruitful dialogue continues to take place among the various members, who all willingly agree to identify their concerns as related to “early cinema” even if the boundaries of the concept itself remain under constant dispute. It is in this spirit that we present the many dialogues contained within the pages of this volume.

Scope of the Volume

In line with the view that “early cinema” as a concept generally circumscribes a Western phenomenon, contributions to this volume concentrate on the development of early cinema in Europe (England, Germany, France, and Italy) and the United States, which is not to say that “cinema” did not exist elsewhere ­concurrently. Even within such limits, the variety of research subjects is considerable, extending into all areas of cinema life – movies, exhibition, industry, audiences, general public, publications, archiving, programming, discourse, and cultural significance. In effect, an editorial choice was made to provide a deep background understanding of early cinema within the Western tradition, rather than extend the scope to include the global development of cinema, even while recognizing the necessity of incorporating such contributions to the renewal and understanding of our field. This would have required – to constitute more than mere token references – a reconceptualization of the periodization and limits of the concept “early cinema” as it stands today. In a sense, the limit of this book echoes the limit of “early cinema” as a concept. With its chronological parameters, aesthetic forms, institutional life, and social statuses and functions, “early cinema” is deeply inscribed in the modernity, industrialization, and urbanization characteristic of Western cultures, from which it is not easily separated and reapplied as a model to other cultural contexts – at least not without the potential of superficially glossing, or worse misrepresenting and effacing other cultures under the rubric of a totalizing concept. Instead, we see the value of someday soon dedicating an entire volume strictly to global early cinema, which would perhaps imply a radical rethinking of the concept – if this ruptured current axiomatic understandings, as occurred with the cinema of attractions. Such a project would involve the discovery of other narrative forms, other publics, other concepts, and other chronological timelines from technological emergence to institutionalization.

Thus, the thirty chapters presented in this Companion reflect the multidisciplinary diversity of the field of early cinema today within the parameters of cinema’s development in the West. Contributors were encouraged to present original essays intended for both students and experts, all of which were anonymously refereed to ensure the publications met the highest standards in terms of scientific rigor and quality. We have made every effort to give voice to both the older generation that helped establish the field, who continue to be inventive thinkers and to produce essential reading, and the new generation courageously forging ahead in an ever expanding and complex digital environment that constantly threatens to undermine the very foundations on which the field stands. Indeed, this historical intersection is worth emphasizing – it is against the backdrop of the digital world melting all that is cinema into air, of a panoply of visual forms and environments that escapes essential definition, that early cinema emerges as a terrain that resists infinite fragmentation, and which frankly recognizes the importance of some objective epistemological stakes, of the need for cinema, even as cinema itself is paradoxically shown to have never existed at all. Because of these various concerns and multidisciplinary approaches, categorizing early cinema articles can be quite challenging, with many defying singular descriptions as types of texts. No author, scholar, or artist likes having his or her work misidentified, least of all because, as most readers of Gérard Genette know, the way a text is eventually understood, especially in the humanities in which the value and interest of articles lie as much in the rhetoric, style, and argument as in the raw presentation of information, is partially determined by the particular context in which the article is found – the book, the section heading, the title. All of these suggest a way of interpreting and appreciating the text to some degree, invoking particular ongoing discursive frameworks that provide the argument with meaning and corresponding interlocutors. As editors, we have taken seriously the responsibility of finding appropriate companions for the chapters within this larger Companion – in the way they are brought together under a common rubric, defined not according to a series of terms (as an example, at one point we considered naming one section “theory, methods and history”), but rather by attempting to find evocative but unifying titles that are more suggestive than circumscriptive. In these divisions are proposed a way of thinking about the field of early cinema in terms of the particular issues that seem relevant and exciting today.

Part I, “Early Cinema Cultures,” concerns the activities, practices, and technologies preceding 1895 that partake in the beginnings of cinema. The story of how these “cultural series” (theater, fairy plays, photography, magic lanterns) relate to cinema has been told from a number of perspectives, each identifying particular causal links, the most common early historical accounts placing emphasis on the connection between film and theater; that is, seeing the first films as adhering to theatrical aesthetics, becoming in a sense “filmed theater.” In time, so this story goes, filmmakers discovered aesthetics that were particular to film (editing, camera movement, framing, and so forth) and transformed film from a recording apparatus to an art form in its own right. While theater was certainly a fruitful and convincing way of explaining some early cinema aesthetics, further research complicated this narrative, while nevertheless confirming some premises. It seems reasonable to suggest, for instance, that film was initially not yet a distinct art form, either in the way it was conceptualized, or in the way it was used (that is, with film-specific conventions), in spite of some commentary at the time that alluded to film in this way, and in spite of some filmmakers discovering some essentially characteristic film aesthetics earlier than the dominant narrative about cinema’s beginnings typically accepts (such as editing). In fact, rather than inventing new aesthetics corresponding with a new technology, many early films obeyed rules characteristic of other cultural series. These were not limited to just theater, however. The more these other cultural series are studied, the more we are able to understand the relationship between the before and after, seeing film not as a radical rupture, but rather as a continuation of what was already familiar, already entrenched, in other stage, screen, and optical practices, including the way these were exhibited, programmed, used, and received. Part I thus charts some of the relationships, intersections, and continuities existing between cultural series preceding and even existing concurrently with film. These cultural series constitute cinema in significant and determining ways, ultimately receding into the background as film consolidated into a distinct medium and art form recognized as such by practitioners and commentators.

The way cinema was understood, experienced, and spoken about has indeed become a major area of interest, falling in line with the idea of early cinema as a culture that requires investigation into the mental and conceptual reality of the public and practitioners. This turn has come to refashion the historian as a quasi-ethnographer who adopts as much as possible a relativist approach to describing phenomena. Much as ethnocentric and evolutionary approaches in anthropology have been eclipsed by cultural relativism – which calls attention to contextual features and experiences while advocating empirical observations and an attention to plurality – deterministic and teleological accounts of early cinema history have yielded close historical inquiries and a concern for the diversity of film practices. As Part II, “Early Cinema Discourses,” shows, our knowledge of this “internal” reality is derived from documentation that enables historians to chart ongoing concerns, discourses, and ways of talking about film. Concurrent with the advent of cinema is the emergence of specialized publications that covered different aspects of film, some more directly than others. Its scientific interest and influence, for example, might be written about in scientific journals; connections to photography in photography journals; widespread public reception in daily newspapers. The result is that there existed a multitude of publication vehicles from which an understanding of the evolving and moving picture of cinema is revealed, made progressively accessible to modern readers thanks to the concerted attention of archivists and the digital revolution. Publications are nevertheless merely one area of discourse, with catalogues, posters, flyers, and programs also being mined to reconstruct the parallel, sometimes determining, universe of imagination, language, and consciousness that came into being alongside cinema.

If one idea emerges as central from these early discourses, covered in Part III, “Early Cinema Forms,” it is that film takes many shapes and serves many functions. Describing its formal complexity is certainly as challenging today as it was back then, but it now requires a precise vocabulary, a keen awareness of aesthetic considerations, and an ability to identify multiple levels of relationships existing both within the film itself and between the film and the social world. Thus, “film form” is not merely understood in these pages as a set of relations between a film’s intrinsic elements and the meaning they convey, but rather as a larger network of significance that inextricably links film’s formal characteristics with its mode of production and exhibition as well as its cultural and historical context. Whether it is the way a particular motif operates within a film narrative to organize scenes and guide spectator interpretation; the potential cultural significance of familiar genres when examined in relation to local intertexts; the growing educational appeal of cinema; or the often ignored industry of colorization some fifty years before it became commonplace; the study of film forms involves attention to both aesthetic concerns and the way these intersect with culture. In many ways, it is this particular aesthetic knowledge and sensitivity to visual, non-verbal phenomena that transforms the historian of early film into an early film historian, someone specialized in describing and relating visual phenomena to society at large.

Obviously, such film forms become particular types of experiences and objects in definable contexts, an area of study taken up in Part IV, “Early Cinema Presentations.” It is widely recognized today that the reception of films is determined by the context of exhibition, which includes screening locations, programming (exclusively film or with other shows), and publicity (newspapers, storefront posters). Each of these factors of presentation provides a horizon of signs – vocabularies, genre categories, images, intertexts – against which film is compared, interpreted, and rationalized. In the earliest years, films were presented in fairgrounds, cafés, and regular theaters, varying according to country. Sometimes, as in the United States, film was presented in variety shows, eventually finding its own specific exhibition context in nickelodeons around 1905, which accelerated the growth of the industry and its public dissemination. The presentation of films was not limited to entertainment venues such as vaudeville theaters and nickelodeons, however; it found completely different uses and meanings in churches, schools, and prisons. Combining the study of film forms with the study of film presentations provides a far more accurate and detailed understanding of the relationship between spectators and films, in terms of defining a potential field of effects and reactions. Although we gain some understanding of the relationship based on the way films address spectators, everything surrounding the film is just as important in this process of constructing a reception and spectator position.

Part V, “Early Cinema Identities,” draws attention to some of the new identities associated with film. In the early years, collaborators involved in the production of films – actors, filmmakers, and writers – usually went unnamed (a rare exception that proved the rule was Georges Méliès, who quickly became associated with a genre of filmmaking, trick films, and was thus foregrounded, or at least referenced, in the publicity of the films). The more typical approach was to present films by manufacturer – a Pathé film, an Edison film, a Biograph production, etc. Although some of the actors may have been recognizable to audiences, individual participants involved in the film production process were rendered anonymous. Around the time films developed a more narrative orientation, roughly in 1907–8, characters became more important. Consequently, greater attention was given to the actors, who gradually became celebrities and stars, and which enabled production companies to use them, like today, as promotional vehicles. Mediating many film exhibitions was the figure of the film lecturer who explained elements of the story, sometimes even undermining the intended meaning or mood. Finally, a latecomer in early cinema, who stands as a representative of the future early cinema scholar, is the film archivist, displaying the essential traits of the cinephile, collector, and researcher. Thus, along with film spectators, many other identities were created in the world of early cinema, some of which were cultivated with specific functions in mind while others emerged as a consequence of the film phenomenon, creating new professions, hobbies, and institutional roles.

Part VI, “Early Cinema Recollections,” stands as a rejoinder to the conclusion of the previous section on the film archivist, presenting reflections on the theories underlying contemporary film archiving practices and rethinking early cinema in light of a modern, digital context. The notion of recollection represents some of the thematic structure of the section. Archiving implies collecting and preserving, attending to the difficulties of maintaining the material and conceptual integrity of the objects; but it also refers to a conscious process of bringing the past to our attention, to making it relevant today in a new context. In this way it fulfills one of the ideals of early cinema. Even if one of the most common disputes of the last century was the misguided patriotic imperative of determining which nationality was most involved in the invention of cinema, early cinema research is usually apolitical. Yet, there seems to exist an ideologically driven impulse in this field toward what Richard Rorty identified as the most salient contribution of the humanities, the continual renewal of the human imagination confronted with an epistemologically subjective and shifting terrain of evidence.13 Early cinema studies accepts, in other words, that part of the value of the field lies not just in the discovery of new documents or data, but in the ability to find new ways of making the subjective relevant, interesting, and exciting, “to recontextualize for the hell of it,” for the sake of performing what-it-is-to-be-living-on-an-epistemological-precipice-but-finding-a-way-forward.14 For early cinema studies, like most if not all fields in the humanities and the social sciences, contends daily with the epistemological fragility that is one of the legacies of postmodernism and poststructuralism. In performing the role of an inclusive community of scholars that welcomes the relativity, diversity, and challenge of finding a raison d’être, of seeing this community comprised not of a hierarchy of archivists at the bottom, historians in the middle, and theorists at the top, but as a level playing field in which each gains equal representation, a sort of political statement is suggested that seems meaningful to us: a concept of academic life perhaps. This book is intended, among other things, as a representation of this concept.

Notes

1 According to Jean Giraud, the French word cinéma, derived from cinématographe, began to enter public discourse around 1910 (although it was used on occasion before this). Its plurality of meanings was apparent from the outset: it could refer to the moving picture camera, to film manufacturing companies, to the movie-making profession, or to movie theaters (the latter two connotations have been carried over into English). It also designated, at times, “film in terms of art” or a “means of expression,” but it took another decade before these superseded the other uses of the word. See Jean Giraud, Le lexique français du cinéma des origines à 1930 (Paris: CNRS, 1958), 79–82. The same holds true for the English use of “cinema,” which began to gain currency as a term designating films collectively in the mid-1910s.

2 See Noël Burch, Life to those Shadows, ed. and trans. Ben Brewster (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

3 See André Gaudreault and Tom Gunning, “Le cinéma des premiers temps: un défi à l’histoire du cinéma?,” in Histoire du cinéma. Nouvelles approches, eds. Jacques Aumont, André Gaudreault, and Michel Marie (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1989),49–63, published in English as “Early Cinema as a Challenge to Film History?,” in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Strauven (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 365–80; and Tom Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American NarrativeFilm: The Early Years at Biograph (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).

4 Although André Bazin is sometimes credited with the first use of the term “classical cinema,” David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson’s Classical Hollywood Cinema has probably been the most influential in cementing the notion into an academic category. See David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema:Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

5 See Richard Abel, ed., Encyclopedia of Early Cinema (London: Routledge, 2005).

6 DOMITOR is an international society for the study of early cinema, founded in 1985 by five scholars from different countries (Stephen Bottomore, Paolo Cherchi Usai, André Gaudreault, Tom Gunning, and Emmanuelle Toulet). Since 1990, it holds a biennial conference dealing with a certain aspect of early cinema.

7 The 34th Congress of the International Federation of Film Archives (FiAF), organized by David Francis and Eileen Bowser in Brighton, is widely considered as the turning point in the development of early cinema studies. Richard Abel, “Intérêt(s) de l’historiographie du cinema des premiers temps,” in Thierry Lefebvre and Michel Marie, eds., “Le cinéma des premiers temps. Nouvelles contributions françaises,” Théorème, no. 4 (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1996), 113–30.

8 Tom Gunning, “Phantasmagoria and the Manufacturing of Illusions and Wonder: Towards a Cultural Optics of the Cinematic Apparatus,” in Le cinématographe, nouvelle technologie du XXesiècle / The Cinema, a New Technology for the 20th Century, eds. André Gaudreault, Catherine Russell, and Pierre Véronneau (Lausanne: Payot Lausanne, 2004), 33.

9 See J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962).

10 In this respect, it shares similarities with categories such as “cultural history,” a term that came to designate a discipline after methodological and epistemological concerns among historians made it necessary to rethink their very object of study, to create a new object of study.

11 Among them Noël Burch, Tom Gunning, Charles Musser, Barry Salt, and André Gaudreault.

12 Although Gaudreault and Gunning rightfully contested the term “primitive” to describe early cinema for its pejorative connotations and teleological bias (which carries over from the anthropological use of the term), some argue it remains useful and defend Noël Burch’s use of “primitive mode of expression.” The crux of the issue is that while the term “primitive” becomes increasingly offensive as the scope of early cinema shifts toward culture more broadly, it was initially intended to highlight the unique, non-institutional aesthetic of films from the period, even its subversive character in light of later industrialization of cinema. For an overview of this debate see André Gaudreault, “From ‘Primitive Cinema’ to ‘Kine-Attractography’,” in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Strauven (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007), 85–104; and Wanda Strauven, “From ‘Primitive Cinema’ to ‘Marvelous’,” in Strauven, Cinema of Attractions, 105–20.

13 See Richard Rorty, “Inquiry as Recontextualization: An Anti-dualist Account of Interpretation,” in Objectivity, Relativism and Truth:Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 93–110.

14 Ibid., 110.

Part I

Early Cinema Cultures

1

The Culture Broth and the Froth of Cultures of So-called Early Cinema1

André Gaudreault

In order to understand the conditions in which a media phenomenon as complex as cinema emerged and developed, it seems to me to be indispensable to look at the way it unfolded on the path to its institutional phase in terms of profoundly intertwined cultural factors. Cinema’s emergence was an evolutionary process, one that proceeded by way of sometimes conflictual and turbulent encounters and exchanges with other cultural sectors present at the advent of moving pictures. As I have attempted to describe elsewhere,2 what the earliest users of the kinematograph did was simply to employ a new device within other cultural series,3 each of which already had its own practices. At the turn of the twentieth century, the kinematograph was thus simply a new work tool, neither more nor less. It was used within various cultural practices; cinema, at that point, did not yet exist as an autonomous medium.

It is thus going to extremes, in my view, to see cinema as having been invented in 1895, the year the Lumière Cinématographe – but not the cinema – was invented. The Cinématographe was the most advanced device of the day for capturing and restoring moving photographic images, but this procedure cannot be equated with “cinema.” “Cinématographe” and “cinema” are thus not the same thing. What’s more, if we pass from the specific French term for the Lumière device to the more generic English term in wide use at the time and take this word in its most general sense, the kinematograph and cinema are not equivalent either. The Lumière Cinématographe and similar other devices were in fact only a preliminary to what would become, first of all, kinematography, and later cinema. We might thus say that the invention of the moving picture camera was a necessary but insufficient condition for cinema to emerge. This, essentially, is why French theory around the “dispositif” in the 1970s instinctively came up with the apt expression “appareil de base” (base apparatus), found in the work of Jean-Louis Baudry,4 Jean-Louis Comolli,5 and others: the Lumière Cinématographe, the Edison Kinetograph, the Bioskop, etc. were the base, not the summit.

For the cinema is a sociocultural phenomenon which one does not “invent” just like that: there is no “cinema” patent, because the cinema is not a procedure; it is a social, cultural, economic, etc. system. Cinema, then, is something that was constituted, established, and finally institutionalized. Once the elements of the initial procedure were invented – a certain kind of mechanism for stopping the film stock intermittently in front of the shutter, a certain kind of shutter for letting in light, a certain rate of movement to expose the negative, a certain kind of film stock with certain kinds of perforations, a certain kind of mechanism for transporting the film through the camera, etc. – it was still necessary to perfect various techniques for making moving pictures (moving thus from hardware to software). It was also necessary that this latest novelty item take its place in the ways and customs of all sorts of people (if only by establishing the new habit of “going to the movies”). It was necessary also to try out various ways of exhibiting these pictures by setting up a system in which the various agents involved would interact (from the person who shot the pictures to the person who showed them). And it was necessary that these agents emerge (or that others try their hand at kinematography and incorporate it into their existing practice). All these things required time; years in fact.

To attain a certain plateau of stability a fairly long period of trial and error first had to pass (this is essentially what “early cinema” was). In the final decade of the nineteenth century and a little beyond, a few hundred so-called “film pioneers” (all kinematographic neophytes, naturally) applied their wits to this task, drawn to the charms of the new device and to what had been made possible by individual viewing (with the Kinetoscope) or public projection (with the Cinématographe) of illuminated moving pictures. But at the time they laid their hands on this latest novelty and incorporated it into their own practice, all these neophytes, with the exception of a few, were already a part of – rooted in, we could even say – a profession connected to kinematography to varying degrees (but at the same time alien to it) and to the things tied up in its invention (scientific research, photography, the magic lantern, stage shows, itinerant attractions, etc.). And each of these professions had a specific culture, and rules and norms as well. Cinema’s emergence was thus the work of a variety of people with a variety of specific cultures, and it was out of this culture broth – we might even say this froth of cultures – that cinema emerged, many years after its initial procedure was in place.

The primary quality of early kinematography was thus that it was the site of a particularly polyphonic form of expression,6 something we must absolutely keep in mind if we wish to understand how the institution “cinema” was able to take shape out of the cultural and institutional hodgepodge of early kinematography. We must also keep this fundamental historical fact in mind if we wish to understand how cinema managed to extract itself from this seemingly ungoverned world and become a new, autonomous medium, finally free of the grip of the cultural series which nourished it early on.