Cinema: the Script of Life

As the centenary approaches of the first public exhibitions of projected moving images, it has become commonplace to discuss the cinema in terms that acknowledge its cultural function: of having introduced a radically new, universally comprehensible and yet deeply contradictory logic of the visible. The quantum leap taken by the audio-visual media not just as entertainment, but in public life, politics, education and science also alerts us to the historical role of cinema in the more general transformation of the ways knowledge is stored and disseminated, social experience is recorded and subjectivity constructed. Some of this was already recognised by proselytising film-makers like D.W. Griffith1 or early theorists like Hugo Munsterberg.2 Inspired perhaps by Lenin's famous dictum, Walter Benjamin was convinced that the very existence of the cinema necessitated a new archeology of the art work, because of the fundamental changes film had brought to the notion of time, space and material culture.3

The cinematograph, bioscope or vitascope, despite their many antecedents and an almost total dependence on technologies typical of the 19th century, were right from the start recognised to convey a wholly modern experience. By involving the spectator with an uncanny directness and immediacy, by investing the world with presence, and the technological apparatus with a taboo-breaking power over life and death, a metaphysical wager seemed to have been entered that was reflected in the very name given to the invention. A direct line can be drawn from Prometheus, Faust, and Dr Frankenstein to Thomas A. Edison – all obsessed with the integral (re)production of life, which in turn needs to be juxtaposed to the desire for a new script, a mode of writing with images, associated with a scientific urge to analyse movement and break it down into constituent parts.4

A Historical Conjuncture

This Reader wants to be an introduction to some of the work laying the ground, both historically and theoretically, for a systematic account of early cinema: a precondition also for a cultural archeology of the new medium. Apart from Noel Burch and Michael Chanan (both influenced by Benjamin), there is perhaps not much evidence that interest in early cinema was prompted by reflections such as those above. Yet the renewed attention paid to its first manifestations and complex developments unquestionably springs from very diverse sources. Local initiatives, practical needs, individual enthusiasm have intersected with several critical debates. Some can be listed fairly briefly, others may only emerge as research is becoming surveyable in book form.

As far as a more popular interest in early cinema goes, one influence was, paradoxically, television. Kevin Brownlow and David Gill’s restoration of Abel Gance's Napoleon for Thames Television brought seemingly esoteric issues such as print quality, preservation techniques and proper aspect ratios to the attention of a general public. Their previous series Hollywood5 had already proven that a televisual history of the cinema could make for lively viewing. David Robinson was surely right, when he wrote

Through these snatched extracts of films and fragments of old men’s Memories, the makers [of Hollywood] have nevertheless succeeded triumphantly in their broader aim, which was to capture and convey the mood, the atmosphere, the excitement, the essence of the era. It is indeed the first time since the actual demise of the silent film that so large a public has been brought so close to the actual experience of the silent cinema as our fathers and grandfathers knew it.6

No loving recreation or nostalgic celebration of a bygone age was in the minds of Jean Louis Comolli, Jean Louis Baudry and others when they set out to challenge Andre Basin’s influential realist ontology, in the name of a new epistemological, anti-teleological and ‘materialist’ history of the cinema. This critical agenda is most evident in Burch’s essays devoted to early cinema. ‘Porter or Ambivalence’ marked for many in film studies their first encounter with a decisively different way of conceptualising the origins and early forms of cinema.7

Burch's paper, as it happens, was written for an event that will remain a key date for locating the beginning of a new era of research, the FIAF conference held in Brighton which brought together for the first time archivists and film scholars around a common purpose.8 The spirit of cooperation, even of a crusade has continued, not least thanks to the annual Pordenone ‘Giornate del cinema muto’. The Brighton meeting was itself symptomatic of a new urgency felt by film archives about the preservation and accessibility of materials from the early period. The urgency was partly in response to specific crises (the Langlois affair in 1968, various disastrous fires, the lifespan of nitrate film coming to an end), and also reflected the increased call made on all kinds of audio-visual records by television, with its appetite for authentic archive footage in political, documentary, biographical, educational programming.

The demand for preservation and access put a strain on the resources of all but the largest archives. Filmic and non-filmic material had to be processed, new ways of reliably identifying films had to be found, and thus methods of dating, attributing, periodising films and especially film-fragments. Hence the need for an internationalisation of research, and collaboration between archivists and scholars. For the latter it implied a change of focus: not aesthetic excellence and artistic value were at issue, but normative and comparative criteria had to be found. Here the work of Barry Salt, who for some time prior to the FIAF congress had worked on the possibilities of statistical and comparative style analysis. proved ground-breaking.

A New Historicism

One major effort in re-writing this history has been directed at establishing verifiable data, deciding not only what is verifiable, but what is pertinent. Are we to rely on the films alone, given how each surviving print has its own problematic history; are we to treat as fact what contemporary sources say about particular films and the often anecdotal histories of their production? The tendency in recent years has been to distrust received wisdom and widely held assumptions, to ‘suspect every biography and check every monograph’, as Robert Allen put it.9

A new generation of film historians mainly in the United States took up this task, and began a thorough re-examination of those accounts which told the history of the cinema as the story of fearless pioneers, of ‘firsts’. Of adventure and discovery, of great masters and masterpieces. Gomery, Allen, Janet Staiger, Kristin Thompson, Charles Musser and Russell Merritt among others queried the textbooks in the name of different determinants (mainly demographic, economic, industrial, technological). They also proved how intimately the cinema in America fed on and was implicated in the history of above all vaudeville, but also other popular entertainments, such as penny arcades, medicine tent shows and Hale’s tours: a history that runs counter to traditional ‘theoretical’ speculations about the cinema’s relation to the novel and the theatre.

The media-intertext of early cinema, the industrialisation of entertainment and leisure turned out to be a rich source of insight, as well as opening up entirely new areas of research. It showed, for instance, that the study of the exhibition context could be the key to answering questions about production, as well as the development of film form. In the process, it suggested a quite different argument regarding the crucial transformations between early cinema and ‘Hollywood’ from those given by, say, Terry Ramsaye or Lewis Jacobs. The result was a revision of what counts as evidence in film history (local records, city planning ordinances, business files, law-suits and patent infringements) and a demotion of intrinsic filmic evidence. Gomery and Allen were not afraid of being blunt: ‘For certain investigations. film viewing is really an inappropriate research method.’10 In the case of early cinema. the combination of these new kinds of evidence with new conceptual models of cultural history have fundamentally changed our view of the period, especially that between 1905 to 1917. As so often in historiography, new criteria of pertinence necessarily affect the hypotheses historians forge, consciously or unconsciously, about the data in question.11

If much of the new film history has focussed on early cinema because here the claim was strongest that the models for understanding the cinema as a whole were inadequate, contradictory or based on unsound scholarship, there was a similarly strong sense that traditionally film scholars had misconstrued the meaning of the films themselves. Burch had indicated one possible direction by positing the so-called ‘primitive cinema’ as a distinct ‘mode of representation’ (the FMR), based on a different logic of the relation between viewer and film, on a different thinking about images and their presentation, on a different conception of space and narrative, when compared to the ‘institutional mode’ (the FMR). As the Reader makes clear, Burch’s distinction has also led to some very productive reformulations, most notably perhaps those of Tom Gunning and Andre Gaudreault. Gunning’s ‘cinema of attractions’ and ‘cinema of narrative Integration’ pinpoint the dissatisfaction felt with traditional premises:

These terms are an attempt to overcome the two primary approaches of the previous generation to understanding the change which occurs in film-making prior to the introduction of feature films. One (the most discredited now) has been the simple progress explanation which sees a movement, basically due to trial and error and the intervention of certain men of genius, from ‘primitive’ film-making to the foundation of the later narrative style. The other (somewhat more sophisticated, but we feel equally misleading) explanation has described this change as a movement from a reliance on theatrical models to a more cinematic approach to narrative.12

The Sense of and Ending of (Classical) Cinema?

There is also another more diffuse. but nonetheless important conjuncture. When Burch championed Edwin Porter over D.W. Griffith, it was clear that he also spoke on behalf of an avant garde who had recourse to early cinema in order to displace, at least conceptually, the hegemony of Hollywood.13 The rediscovery of the ‘primitives’ seemed like a vindication of the avant garde‘s fifty-year struggle to rethink the foundations of ‘film language’, and dispel the idea that the cinema’s turn to fictional narrative or adoption of illusionist representational fomis was its inevitable destiny.

These polemics seemed the more timely, since the l970s began to speculate on the demise of the classical cinema’s hegemony from a quite different perspective. The transformation of film viewing, the re-privatisation of consumption of audiovisual material through television, videotape and other recent technologies of storage and reproduction were obliging historians to try and integrate the history of the cinema into the wider cultural and economic context of the entertainment and consciousness industries. ln other words. important developments in the contemporary cinema itself appeared to have significant analogies with early cinema. Looking at the increasing predominance of technology and special effects in providing the primary audience attraction, and considering the resurgence (through television and popular music) of performative and spectacle modes, as against purely narrative modes, classical cinema may yet come to be seen as itself a ‘transitional’ stage in the overall history of the audio-visual media and the technologies of mechanical recording and reproduction.

As one would expect, such diverse motives do not make for unanimity. There is a perceptible tension between scholars with an interest in early Cinema as part of a ‘cultural’ or ideological-theoretical history, and scholars who are simply concerned with ‘facts’ and micro-analyses, some of whom would not be offended at being called 'revisionists’ or ‘neo-empiricists’. It is nonetheless remarkable – and a sign of the vigour in this field of research – that the diverse contributions do actually form part of recognisable debates, perhaps even of a project. One of the premises of this Reader is that a perceptible coherence exists, which the diversity of approaches only helps to underline. Whether the collection manages to represent these debates in both their diversity and cogency is of course another matter.

Brighton and After

In this last respect the present volume differs from the publications that followed the l978 FIAF meeting in Brighton, Cinema 1900–1906: An Analytical Study and John Fell’s Film before Griffith, both of which this Reader tries to complement rather than duplicate. Ce que je vois de mon ciné (edited by Andre Gaudreault) and the American Federation of Arts’ Before Hollywood are two other recent collections of essays, accompanying exhibitions and programmes of screenings, to which must be added the impressive catalogues edited by the organisers of the Pordenone festival.14 By foregrounding the need to retrace the intellectual repercussions of the FIAF conference, the Reader wants to bring together some of the crucial contributions since Brighton, respecting the arguments in their complexity, as befits primary research, but also focussing on a range of circumscribed issues. The aim is to encourage the current generation of film scholars to study and teach more early cinema. With this in mind, it has seemed a risk worth taking, to weave, via the introductions, a kind of story, in the hope that the debates around early cinema will seem to recast film history, and also help reformulate a number of problems in traditional film theory. This story has two salient strands, which to a greater or lesser degree act as explanatory foils for each other: the first is the cinema’s turn to narrative as its main form of textual and ideological support, and the second is the industrialisation and commodification of its standard product, the feature film. In one sense, this might seem an inadmissibly restrictive focus, running the danger of reproducing all the teleological and deterministic moves which the new history is trying to deconstruct. In another sense, it is the very intertwining of mode (narrative) and material support (commodity) that makes the cinema such a complex cultural force, and the history of early cinema in particular a site of shifts and struggles, of roads not taken and paths unexpectedly crossing.

For, finally, the double historical moment – that of the cinema between 1896 and 1917, and of its rediscovery in the late 1970s – does situate early cinema in a particular context, the one opened up by the revitalisation of film theory during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and its subsequent (post-Saussurean, post-Lacanian, post-modern) crises in the 1980s. Hence, several sets of questions have influenced the selection. Firstly, how did the diverse technical processes and economic pressures feeding into early film production undergo the kind of integration that was necessary before film-making became an industry? Secondly, how did this industrial logic impose itself to the point of becoming inextricably bound up with the narrative logic of the cinema we call ‘classical’? Thirdly, and perhaps most intriguingly, given that the cinema manifests a unique combination of the drives towards pleasure and towards intelligibility, what is its psychic dimension, its cognitive role, its connection with the desire to picture the world in images and to experience it as doubled and mirrored, offering spectators idealised images of themselves, and therefore also letting us see other audiences’ self images?

The Reader is organised into three parts: ‘Early Film Form – Articulations of Space and Time’, ‘The Institution of Cinema: industry, Commodity, Audiences’, and ‘The Continuity System: Griffith and Beyond’. The first part addresses the question whether early cinema in its manifest otherness demonstrates a coherence of its own, or whether its contradictory logic demands a wider analytic framework. The second part asks whether such a framework can be derived from its specific historical, economic and technological development. The last part is concerned with the emergence of continuity cinema and cinematic subjectivity, and the role played by Griffith’s work, representative but also a-typical, amenable to so many different interpretations and applications, and thus prototype of alternative or nationally distinct variants to continuity cinema and its imaginary. Several themes, however, run through the collection as a whole, of which the most important one is how the cinema came to develop a particular kind of narrational logic. The research presented here into the formal articulation of cinematic space, into the questions of narration, into the material determinants shaping the cinema seem to me to provide new answers by pointing to hitherto neglected connections. One conclusion might be that the issue of the primitiveness or otherness of early cinema needs to be recast: not in a binary opposition to the classical, but as a signpost on the way to the increasing detachment of images from their material referents, ‘freeing’ them for narrative, for becoming bearers of cultural and social identities, which in turn support an industry. If only for this reason the history of early cinema has implications for a general history of the cinema, and of any medium dependent on a mass public and subject to technological change as well as institutional transformations.

As with any Reader, the choice of what to include was easy, what to finally exclude a painful one, since so much that is both pertinent and excellent is not present. Some essays were unfortunately not available for republication; in one or two instances the originals were slightly shortened. Even at a relatively late stage in the selection process, almost a quarter of the material had to be cut out for reasons of space. The rather lengthy introductions to the individual sections cannot hope to make up for the gaps, but they are an attempt, however inadequate, to synthesise issues and provide contexts. They also want to point in the directions where more relevant material can be found, as does the bibliography which lays no claim to being complete or exhaustive.

The idea and title for this Reader were first conceived in 1982, when Film Studies at the University of East Anglia organised its own post-Brighton conference on early cinema. Although the papers presented there still await publication, I want to thank all the participants for their contributions, as well as my colleagues Charles Barr and Don Ranvaud, who, together with Andrew Higson and Helen McNeil, have over the years made teaching Early Cinema such exciting journeys of discovery. To their enthusiasm, and that of our students, both undergraduate and postgraduate, both past and future, this volume is dedicated. As editor, however, my thanks go to the authors, including those from whose work and cooperation I have benefited without being finally able to represent them here. Adam Barker, during the time he was associated with the project, contributed generously with ideas and practical assistance. His first draft of the introduction to the Griffith section has been very helpful, and I trust he recognises his formulations without objecting too much to the direction in which I have taken them. Barry Salt has always found time to answer queries and has given invaluable help by producing framestills for Leon Hunt’s article as well as for his own. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith at the BFI proved to be a steady source of sound advice, patience and encouragement, especially in the belief that the subtle and self-evident pleasures of early films can be celebrated in many ways, of which scholarly debate and academic argument are certainly not the only, though neither the least passionate ones.