Early Cinema and the "National" 0861966899, 9780861966899

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction • Richard Abel, Giorgio Bertellini and Rob King
Part I: Interrogating the “National”
1 Early cinema as global cinema: the encyclopedic ambition • Tom Gunning
2 Nationalizing attractions • Jonathan Auerbach
3 Images of the “National” in early non-fiction films • Frank Kessler
4 National and racial landscapes and the photographic form • Giorgio Bertellini
5 Sound-on-disc cinema and electrification in pre-WWI Britain, France, Germany and the United States • Charles O’Brien
6 Mind-reading/mind-speaking: dialogue in The Birth of a Nation (1915) and the emergence of speech in American silent cinema • Torey Liepa
7 Living Canada: selling the nation through images • Marta Braun and Charlie Keil
8 Early cinema and “the Polish question” • Sheila Skaff
Part II: Colonialism/Imperialism
9 Our Navy and patriotic entertainment in Brighton at the start of the Boer War • Frank Gray
10 “An England of our Dreams”?: early patriotic entertainments with film in Britain during the Anglo-Boer War • Ian Christie
11 “The transport of audiences”: making cinema “National” • Nico de Klerk
12 Enlisting early cinema in the service of “la plus grande France” • Panivong Norindr
13 Teaching citizenship via celluloid • Marina Dahlquist
14 Fights of Nations and national fights • David Mayer
15 Japan on American screens, 1908–1915 • Gregory A. Waller
Part III: Locating/Relocating the “National” in Film Exhibition
16 Nationalist film-going without Canadian-made films? • Paul S. Moore
17 The cinema arrives in Italy: city, region and nation in early film discourse • John Welle
18 Wondrous pictures in Istanbul: from cosmopolitanism to nationalism • Canan Balan
19 The emergence of nationally specific film cultures in Europe, 1911–1914 • Joseph Garncarz
20 The Norwegian municipal cinema system and the development of a national cinema • Gunnar Iversen
21 Spanish lecturers and their relations with the national • Daniel Sánchaz Salas
22 Joseph Dumais and the language of French-Canadian silent cinema • Germain Lacasse
23 Localizing serials: translating daily life in Les Mystères de New-York (1915) • Rudmer Canjels
Part IV: Genre and the ‘National’
24 Seeing the world while staying at home: slapstick, modernity and American-ness • Amanda Keeler
25 “A purely American product”: tramp comedy and white working-class formation in the 1910s • Rob King
26 The “Chinese” conjurer: orientalist magic in variety theater and the trick film • Matthew Solomon
27 A note on the national character of early popular science films • Oliver Gaycken
28 European melodramas and World War I: narrated time and historical time as reflections of national identity • Dominique Nasta and Muriel Andrin
29 “Cow-punchers, bull-whackers and tin horn gamblers”: generic formulae, sensational literature, and early American cinema • W.D. Phillips
30 Early ethnographic film and the museum • Wolfgang Fuhrmann
Part V: Gender and the ‘National’
31 Black hair, black eyes, black heart: Theda Bara and race suicide panic • Mark Hain
32 Who is the “right” star to adore?: nationality, masculinity and the female cinema audience in Germany during World War I • Andrea Haller
Part VI: Memory, Imagination, and the ‘National’
33 From Switzerland to Italy and all around the world: the Joseph Joye and Davide Turconi collections • Joshua Yumibe
34 The imagination of early Hollywood: movie-land and the magic cities, 1914–1916 • Jennifer M. Bean
Editors and contributors
Index

Citation preview

Early Cinema and the “National” Edited by

Richard Abel Giorgio Bertellini Rob King

Early Cinema and the “National”

Cover image: From Judge, vol.23, no.583 (17 December 1892): 436–437.

Early Cinema and the “National” Edited by

Richard Abel, Giorgio Bertellini and Rob King

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Early Cinema and the “National” A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 9780 86196 689 9 (Paperback)

Published by

Ebook edition ISBN: 9780-86196-915-9 John Libbey Publishing Ltd, 3 Leicester Road, New Barnet, Herts EN5 5EW, United Kingdom e-mail: [email protected]; web site: www.johnlibbey.com Orders:edition Combined Academic Ebook published by Publishers Ltd., 15a Lewin’s Yard, East Street, Chesham HP5 1HQ, United KingdomLtd, [email protected] www.combinedacademic.co.uk John Libbey Publishing 3 Leicester Road, New Barnet, Herts EN5 5EW, United Kingdom Distributed in North America by Indiana University Press, 601 North Morton St, e-mail: [email protected]; web site: www.johnlibbey.com Bloomington, IN 47404, USA. www.iupress.indiana.edu

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Contents CONTENTS

Introduction Richard Abel, Giorgio Bertellini and Rob King PART I Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6

Chapter 7 Chapter 8 PART II Chapter 9 Chapter 10

Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 PART III Chapter 16

Interrogating the “National” Tom Gunning, Early cinema as global cinema: the encyclopedic ambition Jonathan Auerbach, Nationalizing attractions Frank Kessler, Images of the “National” in early non-fiction films Giorgio Bertellini, National and racial landscapes and the photographic form Charles O’Brien, Sound-on-disc cinema and electrification in pre-WWI Britain, France, Germany and the United States Torey Liepa, Mind-reading/mind-speaking: dialogue in The Birth of a Nation (1915) and the emergence of speech in American silent cinema Marta Braun and Charlie Keil, Living Canada: selling the nation through images Sheila Skaff, Early cinema and “the Polish question” Colonialism/Imperialism Frank Gray, Our Navy and patriotic entertainment in Brighton at the start of the Boer War Ian Christie, “An England of our Dreams”?: early patriotic entertainments with film in Britain during the Anglo-Boer War Nico de Klerk, “The transport of audiences”: making cinema “National” Panivong Norindr, Enlisting early cinema in the service of “la plus grande France” Marina Dahlquist, Teaching citizenship via celluloid David Mayer, Fights of Nations and national fights Gregory A. Waller, Japan on American screens, 1908–1915 Locating/Relocating the “National” in Film Exhibition Paul S. Moore, Nationalist film-going without Canadian-made films?

1 9 11 17 22 27 42

52 63 69 77 79

90 101 109 118 132 139 153 155

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EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL”

Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23

PART IV Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30 PART V Chapter 31 Chapter 32

PART VI Chapter 33 Chapter 34

vi

John Welle, The cinema arrives in Italy: city, region and nation in early film discourse Canan Balan, Wondrous pictures in Istanbul: from cosmopolitanism to nationalism Joseph Garncarz, The emergence of nationally specific film cultures in Europe, 1911–1914 Gunnar Iversen, The Norwegian municipal cinema system and the development of a national cinema Daniel Sánchaz Salas, Spanish lecturers and their relations with the national Germain Lacasse, Joseph Dumais and the language of French-Canadian silent cinema Rudmer Canjels, Localizing serials: translating daily life in Les Mystères de New-York (1915) Genre and the ‘National’ Amanda Keeler, Seeing the world while staying at home: slapstick, modernity and American-ness Rob King, “A purely American product”: tramp comedy and white working-class formation in the 1910s Matthew Solomon, The “Chinese” conjurer: orientalist magic in variety theater and the trick film Oliver Gaycken, A note on the national character of early popular science films Dominique Nasta and Muriel Andrin, European melodramas and World War I: narrated time and historical time as reflections of national identity W.D. Phillips, “Cow-punchers, bull-whackers and tin horn gamblers”: generic formulae, sensational literature, and early American cinema Wolfgang Fuhrmann, Early ethnographic film and the museum Gender and the ‘National’ Mark Hain, Black hair, black eyes, black heart: Theda Bara and race suicide panic Andrea Haller, Who is the “right” star to adore?: nationality, masculinity and the female cinema audience in Germany during World War I

164 172 185 195 199 207 215 227 229 236 248 258

268

275 285 293 295

307

Memory, Imagination, and the ‘National’ Joshua Yumibe, From Switzerland to Italy and all around the world: the Joseph Joye and Davide Turconi collections Jennifer M. Bean, The imagination of early Hollywood: movie-land and the magic cities, 1914–1916

321

Editors and contributors Index

343 347

319

332

Introduction Introduction

Richard Abel, Giorgio Bertellini and Rob King A nation presupposes a past; it is summarized, however, in the present by a tangible fact, namely consent, the clearly expressed desire to continue a common life. Ernest Renan, “What is a nation? [1882],” trans. Martin Thom, in Homi Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990). All what I see wit’ me own eyes I knows an’ unnerstan’s When I see movin’ pitchers of de far off, furrin’ lans Where de Hunks an Ginnies come from – yer can betcher life I knows Dat of all de lans’ an’ countries, ‘taint no matter where yer goes Dis here country’s got ‘em beaten – take my oat dat ain’t no kid – ‘Cause we learned it from de movin’ pitchers, me an’ Maggie did. “The Newsie’s Point of View”, Moving Picture World (5 March 1910). he nation and the national have long circulated as useful, supposedly definitive categories in cinema history. One can find them in early film manufacturer catalogues such as the 1896 Lumière sales catalogue of films shot in distant parts of the globe and organized according to country of origin. Or in early trade press attempts “to classify the film product of the world”, such as New York Dramatic Mirror’s 1908 compilation of the “distinguishing characteristics” or “infallible ear marks” of films produced by different countries.1 Or in early histories of the cinema’s aesthetic development, such as Léon Moussinac’s Naissance du cinéma (1925), which singles out the American, French, German, and Swedish cinemas for special treatment.2 Or in early museum film programs, such as those of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), in the 1930s, that were influential in producing a canon of American, French, German, Swedish, and Russian/Soviet films.3 And one can still find them in the curricular offerings – even required courses – of most university and college film programs, at least in the USA. Relatively recent theoretical work, moreover, has given the nation and the national substantial analytical force, especially for historical studies of late 19th- and early 20th-century mass culture. Benedict Anderson’s argument that national consciousness depended historically on the development of print-as-commodity as well as a “horizontal secular time” brought about by mass-market publishing is especially provocative.4 If one draws a homology with the situation at the turn of the last century, cinema

T

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EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL”

then took the vernacularizing thrust of mass culture a step further, becoming a new venue for “imagining the nation” as an “imagined community”. Nearly as influential has been Homi Bhabha’s concept of the nation “as a system of cultural signification ... [or] representation of social life” whose ideological parameters increasingly were defined in terms of the foreign “other” (see that Newsie’s doggerel epigraph).5 One could argue, for instance, that when “systems of signification” began to coalesce within early cinema, they emerged as articulations of “the nation”, perhaps most clearly in the development of visual and narrative forms charged with national and racial connotations. In cinema studies today, in the early 21st century, however, we have to ask whether current film historiography and criticism have fully explored the heuristics of the problematized and revitalized notions of nation and national. That question has particular pertinence for the theory and history of early cinema, as the ninth International Domitor Conference, held at the University of Michigan (30 May – 2 June 2006), attests.6 The essays in this volume, all derived from that conference, stake out a variety of positions for rethinking nation and national as productive concepts in writing the history of early cinema and for envisioning them as dynamic rather than static categories. Those positions depend in part on which of several more specific questions writers have chosen to address. Can we assume that moving pictures were an international or global phenomenon from at least the time when the Lumières’ cinématographe was being exhibited around the world? Even if so, when, where, how, and to what degree did moving pictures become national or nationalized? What conceptions of the national (other than Renan’s, for instance) in circulation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries became bound up with early cinema – e.g. how was the national aligned with or against European colonialism, American imperialism, and the oceanic migration of peoples? What other visual media were co-opted in early cinema’s representation and embodiment of national difference? To what degree could specific practices – from production and distribution to exhibition and marketing or promotion – be characterized as national rather than something else? How did racial, ethnic, class, gender, and/or religious differences complicate national conceptions of early cinema? And what were the ideological or commercial implications of those complicating differences? Were certain emerging genres (e.g. westerns, historical films, comic series) and/or early movie stars considered national phenomena, and what were the consequences when either circulated beyond national borders?7 The following essays are organized more or less according to the interests they share. The first cluster addresses questions of terminology that proved crucial during the conference and offers a range of positions with regard to whether early cinema is best considered a national or an international phenomenon. Arguably this is an ambiguity that touches on the question of medium specificity: unlike the print media that provided a new venue for the emergence of national consciousness as early as the 16th century, according to Anderson, the circulation of visual images was never as limited by national/linguistic competencies. Thus, to whatever extent moving pictures were involved in imagining nations, they could do so only against the background of a de facto cosmopolitanism of the image.8 The “imagined communities” to which early cinema lent its images can then be approached as both inter- and intra-national phenomena. Tom Gunning, for instance, makes a compelling argument for the former, demonstrating the transnational character of early moving pictures, both in “the global pathways opened up by worldwide capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism” and in the representation of a “new consciousness of the global ... a system of knowledge” that inventoried an “accumulation of data” according to a Western hierarchy of value. Offering a counterargument to Gunning and the current paradigm defining early

2

Introduction

cinema, which tends to “ignore national differences under the broader rubric of modernity”, Jonathan Auerbach instead follows Noël Burch’s lead and chooses British filmmaking as a test case to demonstrate that “both form and content [of early films] can be distinguished along national lines”.9 Indeed, it is in terms of the transnational, regional, or local dimensions of early cinema that a number of contributors complicate the notion of nation as a framing historiographic concept. Frank Kessler usefully unpacks the term national into distinctive, if overlapping components – as a sign of (1) geographical origin, (2) an imagined sense of belonging that becomes nationalistic, and (3) a cultural cliché or constructed image – and then illustrates their complex layering in single films: e.g. disentangling Frenchness, German-ness, and Tyrolese-ness in Lumières’ Danse Tyrolienne (1896). Giorgio Bertellini complements Auerbach and Kessler by arguing that pre-cinematic traditions of visual representation informed and inextricably conflated racial, regional, and national differences in early cinema, as in the transmedial and transnational circulation of stereotypical images of picturesque Southern Italian landscapes representing the “South of Europe”. Charles O’Brien demonstrates how regional variations in the technology of electrification – in London, Berlin, Paris, New York, and Chicago – determined the uneven global development of sound-on-disc technology prior to World War I; while Torey Liepa focuses on dialogue intertitles in 1910s American films, specifically D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), and their function “as sites of cultural negotiation, upon which national, class, racial and other tensions were played out”. Finally, an essay by Marta Braun and Charlie Keil and another by Sheila Skaff offer contrasting analyses of how, on the one hand, the Living Canada series of motion pictures could successfully construct “a distinct notion of a Canadian identity, one indebted to a British heritage”, for the purposes of spurring immigration and tourism, yet, on the other, how local filmmaking in the tripartite Polish territories could not aid in any construction of Polish identity because of fragmentation in the region’s nationalist movements. A second cluster of essays focuses on specific instances in which colonialism or imperialism serve as crucially significant factors in the visual imagining of the national in early cinema. Frank Gray and Ian Christie, for instance, analyse popular patriotic entertainments that included moving pictures in Great Britain. Gray argues that the “quick magic” of A.J. West’s Our Navy, a multi-media extravaganza that toured the country for fifteen years, “was part of an imperial culture that uncritically promoted Britain and its vision and practices up until World War I”; by contrast, Christie demonstrates that Robert Paul’s films of the Anglo-Boer War, shown in music halls and fairgrounds, “reflected many of the ambiguities and dilemmas [...] exposed by the war itself: the price demanded by as well as the pride involved in war with Boer nationalists”. Nico de Klerk and Panivong Norindr explore the ideological implications of motion pictures produced and/or circulated within specific colonial contexts. de Klerk offers a wide-ranging study of the nonfiction films produced, distributed, and exhibited in the early 1910s by the Dutch Colonial Institute, with the aim of stimulating emigration to the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia); Norindr focuses on how cinema was imagined and put into practice in the French colonies – notably in a 1916 Pathé-Frères document – and suggests that motion pictures at the periphery had an unexpected impact in shaping national film policy in France. Other contributors within this section examine the different roles that motion pictures played in debates over immigration in the USA, the controversial influx of different peoples within a single country. Marina Dahlquist contrasts the “better citizenship” work of organizations such as the Civic Theatre in Pawtucket, Rhode Island – using fiction and nonfiction films to help assimilate and “Americanize” recent immigrants – with early 1910s Swedish films made

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EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL”

specifically for the home market as “explicit propaganda against emigration”. Contextualizing the short variety sketches that comprise AM&B’s Fights of Nations (1907) – one comes from Macbeth – David Mayer argues that the film’s chiefly comic “racial and ethnic battles ... were, concurrently, also being played out for real and with far greater heat and seriousness” for the American public. Gregory Waller situates a large body of “Japan films” (1908–1915) within a “widespread and surprisingly diverse network of mass-produced images of Japan that [...] circulated in the United States” and teases out their “knotted strands of desire, fear, admiration, curiosity, and appreciation – of Japanophilia tempered by Japanophobia” – all bound up with efforts to cope with a newly powerful “other”. A third cluster of essays, as do several of those previously mentioned, presents one of the more striking discoveries of the conference: that recent research methods focusing on local film practices, especially in exhibition, force us to rethink the national in terms of marketing and publicity, programming and lecturing, and appropriation (e.g. through translation and/or regulation). On the one hand, Paul Moore uses the case study of Toronto, Ontario, to argue that “nationalism is most easily and perhaps necessarily first instituted through [local] exhibition practices supported by state regulation and censorship, always already in response to the global, mass character of mainstream cinema”. On the other, John Welle shows that, in the case of Italy before 1905, “the underlying currents of Italian identity, favoring the city and the region rather than the nation”, determined locally specific forms of moving pictures’ cultural reception. In the case of cosmopolitan Istanbul, Canan Balan counters the binaries framing prior histories of early Turkish cinema to argue that a multi-ethnic, multi-religious spectatorship culture determined the “wondrous” reception of moving pictures from abroad, a reception finally transformed by nationalization after World War I and by the increasingly contested presence of women in public life. Redefining a “national cinema culture” based on the films “most favorably received” in a country rather than on those produced there, Joseph Garncarz cites statistics on pre-war German audiences who favored multiple-reel German and Danish films even though together they accounted for only 20 per cent of those in circulation. The unique system of municipal cinema ownership in Norway, by contrast, seems not to have created a “national cinema culture”, for it took the successful import of Swedish films in the late 1910s, Gunnar Iverson suggests, to inspire a “national style” of indigenous film production. Finally, three essays focus on the “naturalization” or appropriation of foreign imports through the language of lecturers, translated intertitles, and/or novelized tie-ins. Daniel Sanchéz Salas examines the ingenious ways that film lecturers in Spain negotiated between local audiences and Spanish popular culture by, on the one hand, “adapting places and characters to settings familiar to the viewer” and, on the other, invoking a sense of national identity by “making marginal comments on current events”. In a case study of exhibition in Montréal, Québec, Germain Lacasse points to the important role of language in constructing French Canadian national identity, exemplified by Joseph Dumais’ vain attempt to override American film intertitles translated into the vernacular or joual through his lectures delivered in academic French. In an even more specific case in France, Rudmer Canjels argues that Les Mystères de New-York, in both Pathé’s imported film version and Pierre Decourcelle’ serial novelization, added anti-German and pro-American views that ensured its successful integration into French daily public experience during the wartime period of 1915–1916.10 A fourth cluster of essays address the question of whether the concept of genre has particular salience for an understanding of national imaginaries, not only because of historical specificity (the early western and the USA, the early epic and Italy, etc.) but also perhaps because the legacy of Lévi-Strauss within cinema studies makes genre a

4

Introduction

prime topic for issues of the nation or national. To return to Bhabha: if nations are “narrative strategies”, then the existence of recurrent narrative formulae – in genres – is a necessary (if not sufficient) symptom of national consciousness. The problem, however, lies in the balance between the national and global character of early cinema: given the transnational circulation of generic templates (e.g. the trick film, slapstick, etc.), how might we trace the accents of national particularity? What is it, for instance, about Pathé’s French-produced imitation westerns that makes them “French”, and for whom? Or, to what extent can Keystone-style slapstick films be read as “American”, when Mack Sennett freely acknowledged the influence of French filmmakers? One fruitful area concerns the traditional issues of generic iconography and thematic structure (what Rick Altman terms the “semantic” and “syntactic” dimensions of genre).11 Two essays in this section, both on American slapstick, uncover the national precisely in relation to these twinned dimensions – Amanda Keeler, by focusing on syntactic contrasts between America’s rural past and technological modernity in Keystone’s 1915 Mabel and Fatty series; Rob King, by exploring the nativist meanings of the comic tramp as an iconographic element of 1910s comedy. Iconography also frames Matthew Solomon’s compelling account of Ching Ling Foo imitators in turn-of-thecentury stage magic and trick films, where Orientalist impersonations allowed EuroAmerican magicians and audiences to inhabit a “shared whiteness imagined behind the mask” of Asian stereotypes. Two other essays locate the national in the semantic distinctions that film texts construct between representations and what they consider knowledge or ultimate realities. For Oliver Gaycken, popular science films are inflected by national/nationalistic discourses in their reliance upon nationally specific knowledge (e.g. French science films about the snail industry) as well as nationalizing tropes through which scientific knowledge is represented (“The ants are the Japanese of the insect world”, as one such film declares). Dominique Nasta and Muriel Andrin, meanwhile, draw upon Paul Ricoeur’s distinction between “narrated” and “historical” time to explore how several European fiction films encode real historical events (specifically, World War I) within the affective mode of film melodrama. Finally, a pair of essays shifts the locus of genre consciousness to national institutions and industries. Charting productive homologies between the dime novel and transition-era fiction cinema, Wyatt Phillips traces the origins of American film genres to the standardization and rationalization of American mass culture industries. Wolfgang Fuhrmann sustains the materialist caste of Phillips’s argument by delving into the contrasting institutional climate of ethnographic museums in early-20th-century Germany and then arguing that ethnographic filmmaking’s early development should be explained less as a national phenomenon than as a specific result of local competition between museums. Concluding this collection are two clusters of paired essays. The first pair takes up issues of gender, already broached in the Balan, Keeler, and King essays. Theda Bara’s star image as an “independent, non-procreative ‘modern’ woman and ... beguiling but racially inferior female exotic” (the predatory vamp), Mark Hain argues, could be read by American audiences as either a “cautionary device” allaying nativist anxiety, according to “the logic of Social Darwinsim and eugenics”, or else a potential means of feinting or counterfeint, “refiguring anxiety into a field of play”. Andrea Haller, by contrast, uses a German fan magazine’s debate over women’s unusual attraction to Gunnar Tolnaes, a Norwegian actor who “played characters as ‘foreign’ as an Indian maharaja” (rather than to General Paul von Hindenburg), in order to explore “the tensions that marked not only the longings and desires of female moviegoers but also the national identity of German society as a whole during World War I”. The last pair of essays offers different takes on our “historical imagination” of early cinema, the one through the “national character of [archive] collections”, the other through that of the idealized

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EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL”

discursive world of “movie land”. Skillfully teasing out “the interweavings of the national and the transnational contexts that the [Joseph] Joye and [Davide] Turconi Collections moved through” (from Switzerland to Italy, England, and the USA), Joshua Yumibe reflects on what the migration of “different local collections ... mean for the project of cinema historiography”. Focusing on the immateriality of “movie land” as a magical utopic space, Jennifer Bean argues that “the American film industry’s privileged position in the dream world of modernity” derived from its transformation of “the rationalizing imperatives of capitalism ... and the numbing effects of assembly line labor” into a “phenomenological realm of endlessly variegated metamorphosis and play”. Just as the Ninth International Domitor Conference represented an invaluable venue for initiating a discussion of these issues, the editors hope that the essays collected here will provoke further efforts in research, writing, and dialogue to rethink the nation and national as productive concepts for writing the history of early cinema. Such rethinking is also profoundly relevant in our current era of newly globalized capitalism, mass migrations of peoples across borders, and deceptive imperialist adventures. The editors would like to thank the Office for the Vice-President of Research and the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan for granting a crucial subvention for the publication of this volume. Thanks also to John Libbey for so quickly agreeing to support this volume, to Don Crafton for helping to organize the essays, and to Ilka Rasch for doing some initial copyediting.

Notes 1.

“Earmarks of the Makers”, New York Dramatic Mirror (14 November 1908): 10.

2.

Léon Moussinac, Naissance du cinéma (Paris: Povolovsky, 1925).

3.

See, for instance, Heidi Wasson, Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 152–157, 196–198.

4.

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991 [1983]). See also Eric Hobsbawn’s trenchant discussion of the late 19th-century nation-state in The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (New York: Pantheon, 1987), 34–83.

5.

Homi Bhabha, “Introduction: Narrating the Nation”, Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), 1–7.

6.

The organizing committee for the Ninth International Domitor Conference included Richard Abel, Giorgio Bertellini, Rob King, Don Crafton (Notre Dame), Mary Lou Chlipala, and three Screen Arts & Cultures Graduate Certificate students (Ken Garner, Amy Rodgers, Susanne Unger). Contributing outstanding facilities, technical, and translation support were Mary Jo Grand, Bill Aydelotte, Jim Pyke, and Mireille Belloni, respectively. Generous funding for the conference came from the Avern Cohn Endowment of the Department of Screen Arts & Cultures, Office of the Vice-President for Research, Office of the Provost, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, Rackham School of Graduate Studies, Institute for the Humanities, International Institute, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Department of German Studies, and Program in American Culture.

7.

In conjunction with the conference, the Michigan Theater (a restored 1928 palace cinema) screened four evenings of rare films, with generous assistance from Russ Collins (director), Tara McComb (program coordinator), J. Scott Clarke and Walt Bishop (projectionists) and with marvelous organ and piano accompaniment by Stephen Warner. The first evening featured a rare multi-media event, “Our Empire”, based in part on the popular “Our Navy” show that toured Great Britain from 1900 to 1914. “Our Empire” included glass slides projected on a three-turret magic lantern (operated by David Francis, former head of the Motion Picture Division, US Library of Congress), early British patriotic films, popular tunes sung by Celia L. (Rose) Randall-Bengry, and a lecture performed with gusto by Frank Gray. The second evening screening was equally special: a dozen French nonfiction films from the British Film Institute’s Joseph Joye collection (all shown in restored color prints), introduced by Bryony Dixon, and a half dozen

6

Introduction nonfiction Colonial Institute films from the Nederlands Filmmuseum, introduced by Nico de Klerk. The third evening saw a change of pace: a selection of French, Italian, and American comic films from the early 1910s, with stars like Max Linder, Rigadin, John Bunny, Fatty Arbuckle, and Mabel Normand. The last evening was devoted to national “epics” and sensational melodramas, including Itala’s spectacular Fall of Troy (also shown in a restored color print), Bison-101’s stunning The Indian Massacre, and Gaumont’s action-packed Their Lives for Gold. 8.

9.

On cosmopolitanism in relation to contemporary global society, see Ulrich Beck, Cosmopolitan Vision (Cambridge: Polity, 2006). Beck glosses the concept in an earlier essay: “We all are living by birth in two worlds, two communities – in the cosmos (that is nature) and in the polis (that is, the city/state). To be more precise: individuals are rooted in one cosmos but in different cities, territories, ethnicities, hierarchies, nations, religions – all at the same time.” Beck, “Cosmopolitan Europe: A Confederation of States, a Federal State or Something Altogether New?” in S. Stern and E. Seligmann, eds., Desperately Seeking Europe (London: Archetype Publications, 2003), 6. The term, we suggest, may be applicable to an earlier moment in global capitalism’s development. Noel Burch’s 1980 lectures on early French, American, British filmmaking were collected and translated in Life to those Shadows (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 43–142.

10.

For another example of appropriation, see the promotion of Quo Vadis? in the USA, where newspaper ads uniformly attributed the film to George Kleine, its US distributor, and erased nearly all references to its Italian production

11.

See Rick Altman’s oft-reprinted essay, “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre”, Cinema Journal 23.3 (Spring 1984): 6–18.

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PART I Interrogating the “National”

9

1

Early cinema as global cinema: the encyclopedic ambition •

Early cinema as global cinema: The encycloped ic ambition

Tom Gunning

“E

arly cinema is a global cinema.” “National cinema only appears later in film history.” I would endorse both these statements as important historical principles, and might restate them, borrowing a phrase from my colleague Michael Raine, one of the finest historians of Japanese cinema, as “cinema was international before it was national”. However, immediately a flurry of problems intervene, mainly dealing with terminology. What do we mean by: “global”, “international” or even “national”? I am reminded of a story I heard from my former colleague Homi Bahbha (my apologies to him if my memory is not exact). Interviewing an executive of Coca-Cola, Bahbha referred to Coca-Cola as an “international corporation”. The executive corrected him, saying that Coca-Cola considered themselves a “global corporation” Bhabha asked him to explain the difference. The executive paused, rang for his secretary, who eventually entered with an official statement about the global identity of Coca-Cola. I confess I have forgotten what this definition was (and perhaps Bhabha did not recall when he told the story). But my point lies less in promoting any single definition, than in the relation among these terms, what they articulate and conceal, their power as markers of the power to define and articulate meanings. Thus, I am not claiming that early cinema represents an era beyond and above nationalist squabbles or power plays, a utopian period that ignored borders from idealistic motives. If cinema crossed borders easily in its first decades, it followed global pathways opened up by worldwide capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism. In its first decade cinema production remained concentrated in the industrial and technologically developed countries of the northern and western hemispheres. Although film exhibition moved quickly across the globe (and indeed filmmaking as well, although primarily controlled by production companies located in the USA or Europe, in the form of filmmakers sent out on global voyages as “hunters of images”), it initially appears almost exclusively in the metropolitan centers of imperialistic commerce. Certainly the national economies and politics of these dominant nations determine many aspects of early cinema. If Auguste Lumière in 1896 announced to an inquirer from Grenoble that the Lumière firm intended to exhibit the Cinématographe in the “capitals of Europe” before touring the cities of France, the motivation certainly lay in potential financial return and publicity, not an internationalist sentiment.1 Rather than proclaiming a prelapsarian status for early cinema, I would claim that in its first decades (prior, say, to World War I) a primary way that film understood itself was as a medium that could express a new sense of a global identity. The frequently stated ability of cinema to place the “world within your reach”, while neither its only impulse, nor restricted

11

EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL”

to this period, provides one of the most powerful images of what cinema was called to do when it first appeared. One must place cinema’s global and international impulse at the turn of the century within a broader cultural context. While the expansion of exploration and trade through the eighteenth century certainly influenced the Enlightenment’s concepts of universal human rights, the enormous industrial and technological expansion that took place during the nineteenth century converted this ideal into capitalist systems of co-operation and exploitation across the globe. The exploitation of colonial spheres of influence as sources of raw material and then as markets for manufactured goods received tangible, as well as ideological, form in the World Expositions, which demonstrated and celebrated, as Prince Albert proclaimed of the Crystal Place Exhibition, the pathway from material to commodity as the power that made the new world turn round. At a previous Domitor conference I examined the way early cinema dovetailed into the ideology and patterns of display of the Universal Expositions at the turn of the century.2 An experience of this newly accessible globe could become a commodity in numerous and novel forms, such as worldwide tourism, packaged by the Cooks Travel Agency, or the widely popular travel writings and lectures, revolutionized by photography, and the possibility of magic lantern projections, and eventually motion pictures. A variety of new media supplied a global consciousness for capitalist consumers. The rise of mass circulation newspapers and journals promoted the systematization of foreign correspondents and the gathering of news from all areas. Entertainment, especially the vaudeville and music hall stage, crossed borders and oceans, with international tours undertaken by singers, magicians, acrobats, clowns and dancers (this often exotic potpourri of performers was promoted by early cinema as well, as Charles Musser’s analysis of Edison’s first kinetoscope films shows3). Even overtly nationalistic forms of entertainment took on international aspects. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, the quintessential entertainment form of the myth of American expansionism, not only found the spectacle of the “winning of the West” a profitable commodity for export through its highly successful international tours, but began to incorporate a global perspective in its presentation of aggressive Americanism, including restaging of recent imperialist adventures into the Philippines, Cuba and Peking, as well as offering an “international congress of rough riders of the world”.4 The global as a form of entertainment and commodity at the turn of the century shadowed more official institutional markers of the single world that imperialism and capitalism had fashioned. The establishment of Standard Time and the Prime Meridian in 1885, regulating clocks across the hemispheres, was paralleled by the formation of scientific and scholarly organizations with international scope, often inaugurated or given impetus through congresses held in conjunction with the World Fairs.5 The Olympics held the first international games in Athens in 1896 (with the second games occurring in Paris in 1900, somewhat overshadowed by the Universal Exposition). The Second Socialist Internationale met in 1886, and established May Day as the official Worker’s Holiday across the globe. The disciplines of cultural geography and anthropology, which took the full scope of global human culture as their topic, became academically recognized in this period, as programs of exploration and survey brought the whole world into a systematic process of measurement and mapping. The “global” as I am using the concept represents a system of knowledge, not simply an infinite expanse of space: a broad and varied accumulation of data certainly, but one subject to inventory, hierarchy, and use. Achieving such global knowledge dominated the scientific and scholarly agendas of the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century.

12

1 • Early cinema as global cinema: The encyclopedic ambition

Cinema played an essential role in conveying this new consciousness of the global, not only in popular entertainment, but also in scholarly endeavors. Defenses of cinema (and this continues into the 1930s, at least) against the onslaught of critics of the new sensational mass entertainments frequently quoted scholars who claimed that films of travel offered the best means of bringing an awareness of the global dimension home to average citizens. Film shows constituted the poor man’s or average citizen’s geography lessons, performing a basic pedagogical function. Certain reformers attempted to create an alternative to the commercial film program by presenting model film programs that conveyed a systematic view of the world to gawking slum dwellers, restless children, or complacent bourgeois.6 Beyond the pedagogic mission of reformed film exhibition, Alison Griffith’s masterful Wondrous Difference reveals that the new sciences of global observation, such as anthropology, outfitted themselves with a variety of recording technologies, including, as a rule, still photography, sound recordings and motion picture cameras.7 In the discourse of film reformers, this global cinema, primarily made up of non-fiction, stood as cinema’s one excuse, a possible exhibition strategy that could contrast with and ultimately combat the apparent addiction to sensational story films of violent crimes and sexual titillation that, it was claimed, would rot the minds of the proletariats that flocked to them. Thus an interlocking logic of both production and exhibition arose whose purpose was either pedagogical or scientific (either gathering and recording data or disseminating it) or both, and for whom the concept of the global becomes the ultimate frame of reference. Global cinema, therefore, represents more than a worldwide pattern of distribution and exhibition; it reveals an essential gestalt of cinema’s ambition during its era of novelty and innovation. Early films may appear brief and limited in scope compared to later feature films. But while short films constitute the basic component parts of early cinema, rather than the individual film canonized by later film history, the unit of cinema for this early period may more properly be understood as the program, the exhibitor’s assembly of a number of films in a single presentation. Although the modes and purposes for assembling a film program were varied, early cinema, like the newspaper or the vaudeville bill, could, and frequently did, draw on the global as a readily understood means of uniting a variety of interrelated attractions. The film program provides an example of the way early cinema built complex and extensive structures out of fairly self-sufficient films (recalling Brooks McNamara’s definition of the variety format as one in which there is no transfer of information between elements),8 forming a whole whose sum is greater than its parts without creating a coherent narrative. Likewise, the film catalogue issued by production companies functions as more, I would claim, than simply an inventory of available merchandise. The commercial catalogue of the turn of the century (and this would be true of the great merchandizing publications of Sears and Roebuck, and Montgomery Ward, as well as film catalogues) performed the function of a systematic gathering and presentation of information that could best be compared to the first great global projects of the Encyclopedia of Diderot and d’Alembert. In commodity form, the mail catalogue placed the world within the reach of its customers, much as the Internet does today. The film catalogues of the early film companies, but most obviously those of PathéFrères and Lumière, offered the world in the form of consumable images.9 Although such catalogues offered varieties of films in many genres (a range of fictional and non-fictional forms: travel images, news events, gag and trick films, comedies and eventually melodramas, piquant erotic scenes and re-enactments of historical events), the global sensibility provided the all-encompassing metaphor.10

13

EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL”

I propose the encyclopedia as an organizing concept for early cinema, the textual form of the global consciousness I have been describing. This term establishes a mode of filmic practice that avoids simply contrasting its forms with the standards of later cinema (as “short films” is opposed, anachronistically and rather denigratingly, to the later longer feature films). From a formal perspective, the concept of the encyclopedia, like the variety format, stresses that the individual film in this era was primarily conceived as part of a larger whole, not only of the exhibitor’s program, but also of the production logic of early production companies. Conceptually, an encyclopedia aspires to an all-encompassing delivery of knowledge, but in the modern era the form also acknowledges knowledge itself as ever-expanding, never final. Therefore, unlike most forms of documentary or fiction, the encyclopedia does not claim a final completeness of form. Made up of component parts or fragments (in the case of cinema, individual films) the encyclopedia can be constantly expanded and added to, the very self-contained nature of its individual components allowing this process of addition. I would claim that, as early film companies and at least certain viewers, thought of cinema as a global form, they also conceived of cinema as encyclopedic, an ever renewable catalogue made up of new editions through the addition of new films. Film programs and catalogues represent two basic aspects of the industry, exhibition and distribution, both of which saw their roles as the bringing together of various attractions into a loosely structured but potentially global context. Film production, the third leg of the film industry’s tripod, perhaps most directly presented itself in global terms, especially in cinema’s earliest era. Thus the Lumière’s decision not simply to market domestic films of children, streets of Lyon and Paris, or local sights, but to equip companies of operators who would give exhibitions and gather new films globally indicates how quickly the inventors recognized a global potential for their new product. The Lumière catalogue of films demonstrates the global role that cinema took on, and the film views gathered by the cameramen Promio, Veyne, Mesquich and Doublier, as well as their globetrotting pattern of exhibitions, often given by the same cameramen as they toured the metropolitan centers of the world, delivered to the first film audiences a vivid visual demonstration of a new global consciousness. As the Lumière company moved out of the production of films, this global legacy was taken up by Pathé-Frères, whose non-fiction film views shot around the world presented even more systematically a living catalogue of the world and its people, and eventually by the Gaumont company (who even offered a Gaumont “Encyclopedia” as one of their film catalogues), as well as other companies who in a somewhat less systematic and extensive way offered views of travel.11 But perhaps the most ambitious and consistently worked-out global concept of cinema came with its least commercial project, the Archive of the Planet of French financier and philanthropist Albert Kahn. I draw here on the superb dissertation and research of my student Paula Amad on this archive.12 Kahn’s project, emerging between 1909 and 1912, comes towards the end of the period we define as early cinema and marks the survival and systematization of its encyclopedic ambition. As I intend to be a bit provocative by referring to the early film program as encyclopedic, merging entertainment with models of knowledge, to class Kahn’s project as encyclopedic, while hardly counter-intuitive, should not blind us to the difference between an archive and an encyclopedia. Encyclopedias are designed for the dissemination of knowledge, archives for its storage and retrieval. The encyclopedia recalls the archive in its range of topics and the modular nature of its entries, but it offers an actualized assembly, while the archive works in potentia, the source of many possible encyclopedias. The archive, therefore, remains the domain of the scholars who consult it, while the encyclopedia aims at a wider public.

14

1 • Early cinema as global cinema: The encyclopedic ambition

Kahn’s Archive of the Planet remained very much an archive, although scholars may yet fashion an encyclopedia from it. Rarely, if ever, viewed by the broad public, it aspired to be a source for contemporary and future scholars to understand the global nature of twentieth-century human culture and everyday life. Emerging from Kahn’s own global travel and his belief that scholars must travel to understand the world, the Archive consisted of photographic records (principally motion pictures and autochromes, still photographs using the Lumière company’s color photography process) that Kahn commissioned from professional cameramen who traveled around the world and filmed aspects of everyday life. These were carefully catalogued in a system of fiches and were shown to visiting scholars – these included, Amad informs us, writers such as Rabinath Tagore, Bernard Shaw and Colette as well as Kahn’s mentor, philosopher Henri Bergson. Indeed Bergson’s interest in everyday life, and the cultural geography of his disciple Bruhnes shaped the project which was unfortunately curtailed by the loss of Kahn’s fortune in the 1929 stock market crash. Amad does a masterful job of relating this project to the modern idea of an archive (or indeed, given its emphasis on the everyday, what she calls a “counter-archive”) and the pre-war French culture that fostered it. These films, whether of men passing into a sidewalk urinal in Paris, an Algerian prostitute interacting with her costumers, or an Indo-Chinese woman disrobing for the camera, ostensibly to show the layers of her native costume (with the cameraman “discreetly” throwing the lens out of focus as she appears nude) fascinate for their blend of the everyday and the exotic. The lack of a single specific interpretive context, rather than rendering them simply opaque, actually makes them rich in implications. Not that these films are free of ideology: the observing camera, its voyeuristic appetite for recording the details of behavior, express precisely the modern Western demand for a world consumed as pictures and information that marks what I am calling global consciousness. And yet in their contingency, their immediacy of gesture and movement, we sense a fascination in the fragments of reality that these cameras tore away. It would be the ambition of later filmmakers to either place such fragments into a whole (e.g. the montage theorists and practioners of the 1920s, such Vertov or Shub) or, even later, to let the fragment stand as a part of an implied whole (as in Bazin’s promotion of the realism of ellipsis in the work of Rossellini and the Italian neo-realists). But here in these brief films found within the Kahn archives not only does ambiguity but ambivalence reigns, a wondering sense that these images both add up to something we could never grasp and constitute in themselves a world we could never plumb. To paraphrase Amad, they are parts of both an encyclopedia and an “anti-encyclopedia”. Two temptations surround the investigation of early cinema, and while neither of them can be easily dismissed, the limitations of each should be kept in mind. The first is to view this era (as Noel Burch once put it) as a “lost paradise”, a period of purity before commercialization and institutionalization. Although the commerce was different from that of later cinema and the institutions were primarily pre-existent ones, they certainly determined the nature of early cinema. But the other temptation is to see the early period simply as the origin of later practices, the fount of all later conceptions even if embryonic in form. The differences of early cinema, while they should not be romanticized, should not be eclipsed either in a search for paternity. The global nature of early cinema relates to global practices that persist to this day. But just as importantly, early cinema provided an image of the global as a new gestalt. As a highly technological form, able to circulate from place to place and thereby to annihilate the separation inherent in space and time, films collapsed these distances into the new proximity of an image culture. The exchange of images derived partly from their fragmentary and modular nature, their relative independence allowing modes of assembly that recalled

15

EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL”

the universality envisioned by the Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment. The rise of nationalist discourse through and around cinema, while not absolutely absent from early cinema, seems rather to depend on narrative forms and the use of documentary to create ideological arguments that appear in the 1910s using complex editing based structures of contrast and suspense. Cinema’s relation to both global and national discourses arose in the first decades of the twentieth century. It is our job as film historians to investigate the forms and practices that enabled their emergence rather than assume that either discourse is somehow inherent in cinema or simple readymade material that cinema can adopt naturally.

Notes 1. 2.

See the letter to Paul de Montal of 27 January 1896 in Auguste and Louis Lumière, Correspondances 1890–1953, ed. Jacques Rittaud-Hutinet (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 1994), 126. Tom Gunning, “The World as Object Lesson: Cinema Audiences, Visual Culture and the St. Louis World’s Fair, 1904”, Film History 6.4 (Winter 1995): 422–444.

3.

Charles Musser, “Before the Rapid Firing Kinetograph: Edison Film Production, Representation and Exploitation in the 1890’s”, Edison Motion Pictures 1890–1900, An Annotated Filmography (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 43–45.

4.

See the particularly fine discussion of Buffalo Bill in Kristin Whissel, “Placing the Spectator on the Scene of History: the battle re-enactment at the turn of the century, from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West to the Early Cinema”, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 22/23 (2002): 225–243. See among other treatments, Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 11–16; and Michael O’Malley, Keeping Watch: A History of American Time (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990), 99–143.

5.

6.

See, for instance, Scott Curtis’ discussion of reformist film programs in Germany in the early 1910s in “The taste of a nation: Training the senses and sensibility of cinema audiences in imperial Germany”, Film History 6.4 (1994): 445–469.

7.

Alison Griffiths, Wondrous Difference: Cinema Anthropology and turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). Brooks McNamara, “Popular Scenography” The Drama Review 61 (March 1974): 119.

8. 9.

Many film catalogues from this era, including those of Lumière and Gaumont are available in film archives. A readily accessible source of American catalogues is Charles Musser, A Guide to motion picture catalogs by American producers and distributors, 1894–1908: a microfilm edition (Frederick, Maryland: University Publications of America, 1985). The French catalogues of Pathé-Frères have been republished in Henri Bousquet, ed., Catalogue Pathé [1896–1914], 4 vols. (Bassac: Editions Henri Bousquet, 1993–1996).

10.

I discus the categories of early film genres found in these catalogues in “‘Those that are Drawn with a Fine Camel Haired Brush’: The Origins of Film Genres”, iris 20 (Autumn 1995). Beginning in 1904, Pathé extended its global reach by spawning distribution systems across the world and, beginning in 1908, spinning off regional production companies throughout Europe and the USA.

11.

12.

16

Paula Tatla Amad, “Archiving the everyday: a topos in French film history, 1895–1931” (PhD Thesis, University of Chicago, 2002).

2

Nationalizing attractions •

Nationalizing attractions

Jonathan Auerbach ike most of us, I manage to wear more than one academic hat, having been trained in literary analysis, which I continue to pursue, along with my research in early cinema for the past decade or so, with American studies serving as something like a bridge between these two very different modes of representation, the verbal and the visual. Given the pressure to be “interdisciplinary” (whatever that means, exactly), I tried at first to combine these two interests, but have since learned the hard way that it is sometimes best to keep your hats separate. Attempting to import key operational concepts from one field into another without sufficient pause or historical reflection threatens to produce more confusion than fusion. In other words, however permeable or changing, disciplines have borders and boundaries, just as countries do. I have self-consciously introduced this metaphor of borders in relation to disciplinary difference because it seems to me “nation” and “the national” as crucial concepts for both literary and cinema scholarship in fact function in markedly dissimilar ways. In the first half of this essay I propose to discuss some of these differences, focusing on how concepts of nation and nationalism have recently fared in American literary history and American studies. In the second half, I will then quickly shift gears, jumping across the Atlantic to discuss a group of turn-of-the-century British filmmakers, using their work as a kind of test case to probe certain very suggestive but somewhat loose claims first made by Noël Burch over twenty years ago, propositions that bear directly on this question of the nationalizing of early cinema attractions. When I mentioned the theme of this Domitor conference to colleagues in my English department, I was greeted with surprise. To put it baldly: nationalism is currently something of a dirty word these days in literature departments, at least here in the United States. How it got that way is worth briefly tracing. As has been amply documented, the academic study of languages and literature in the late nineteenth-century emerged from a century-old tradition of European romanticism that regarded texts as a kind of secular scripture, defining the particular “geist” or spirit of individual nations. In this model of reading, Shakespeare, for instance, becomes a touchstone to understand English culture and character.1 Partly because Great Britain and the United States shared a common language, American authors from the early nineteenth-century often felt burdened by a massive inferiority complex, the apprehension that their writing was mere imitation. As a result, during this period we find all kinds of rhetorical gestures seemingly intended to liberate American authors from this yoke of cultural servitude, gestures that twentieth-century critics tended to accept and amplify in their analysis of these writers. So in 1837 Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his famous Phi Betta Kappa address at Harvard, “The American Scholar”, which later in the century became known as our “intellectual declaration of independence”, a characterization that continued to be reiterated in virtually every textbook until very recently.2 In terms of form, theme, and/or language, this search to locate the special otherness of American literature

L

17

EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL”

became the central concern of a generation of scholars during the 1950s and 60s. To cite just two examples, Richard Chase, drawing on Hawthorne’s prefaces, proposed “romance” as a characteristically American symbolic genre in opposition to the “novel”, which in its realistic rendering of social life was a European mode, while R.W.B. Lewis around the same time coined the phrase “American Adam” to designate a set of preoccupations with innocence at the heart of the American experience.3 With the growth of the academic field of American studies during the cold war, scholars tended to offer an even sharper evaluation or celebration of US culture not simply as different from the rest of the world (especially the Soviet Union), but exceptional, outside of history as it were, at once unique but also paradoxically a model of democracy for other countries to follow. Well, those days of American exceptionalism are pretty much over, at least in the academy. In the wake of the Vietnam War, the rise of feminism, and the social agitation of blacks and other minorities, the very idea of the nation as a unified totality, historically forged by consensus and compromise, began to crumble. Responding to the collapse of this master narrative, Americanists began to write a more inclusive literary history that would pay attention to contributions of formerly marginalized authors (mostly women and African-Americans). While the first impulse of such revision was primarily to open up the canon, around 1990 scholars more fundamentally began to challenge the underlying assumption that the nation itself should be “the basic unit of, and frame for, analysis”. To think outside such narrow confines, Carolyn Porter continued, the United States must be understood hemispherically, a perspective that would attend to “cultural, political, and economic relations between and within the Americas”.4 This wasn’t simply a comparative model, but a more radical reconstitution that imagined the United States as a network of overlapping regional and global forces, a “web of contact zones”.5 Paul Gilroy similarly described “the Black Atlantic” as a mixed space – neither African, American, British or Caribbean.16 This was one of the first of many studies to replace the geopolitics of the nation-state and its imperial ambitions with an emphasis on diaspora, hybridity, and borderlands. By the late 1990s this skepticism about US exceptionalism had so accelerated that the head of the American Studies Association would deliver a presidential address seriously questioning not only the name of the organization, but its very mission and subject matter.7 And as we might have expected, founding literary father Emerson has lately undergone some revision, from being regarded as the parochial voice of an idealized nationalism to a more cosmopolitan champion of world literature, including Asian religion and culture.8 Just as this transnational turn was gaining ascendancy in American studies (to attain a certain sort of orthodoxy today), I became interested in early cinema. As I look back, what first attracted and excited me about the field was the ease with which it took for granted its transnational status. Apart from a few patriotically-inclined historians who once worried about which inventors and filmmakers deserved which “firsts”, scholars by and large understood that early cinema from the start was a market-driven phenomenon of global modernity, with films being distributed and mimicked across the world map without any clear unilateral direction of influence. Even though our own discourse might be nationally and linguistically bound, the images we studied largely were not. I do think it is indisputable that images can cross borders more easily than words, to evoke the theme of a previous Domitor conference held in 1992.9 And so this shifting attention in early cinema studies from the transnational to the national some fourteen years later would seem to move in exactly the opposite direction from the shift in American studies, which has turned away from the national to embrace the transnational. Clearly the two concepts are mutually constituting – you can’t have one

18

2 • Nationalizing attractions

without the other – but I do think it is instructive to consider this dramatic difference in emphasis between the two disciplines, with current American studies concerns seeming a bit belated to us, while this year’s Domitor theme sounding a little to me like a 1950’s American studies conference dedicated to uncovering the distinct national properties of US literature as it developed shortly after the American Revolution. Given this disciplinary difference, how have scholars recently construed nationalism in early cinema? In terms of theme, Charles Musser has shown how from the start Edison introduced patriotic films like Monroe Doctrine (1896) to appeal to the jingoism of American audiences, while Richard Abel has provided an extremely rich historical analysis of the emergence of the Western as the key genre intended to combat the threatened supremacy of Pathé in the US.10 When we turn from content to form, however, the case is less clear, primarily because the prevailing paradigm for explaining early filmmaking’s mode of representation, the “cinema of attractions”, has tended for twenty years to collapse or ignore national differences under the broader rubric of modernity. While Tom Gunning has offered a very interesting set of contrasts between Lumière and Edison actualities, emphasizing the Lyon company’s firm grounding in amateur photography, this is less an argument rooted in national traditions than a more local distinction between two kinds of visual practice.11 And so I think we need to return to a trio of essays by Noël Burch delivered as talks in 1980, and then published in Life to those Shadows a decade later that ambitiously seek to discriminate between French, American, and British early cinema, at the level of aesthetics as well as exhibition and audience.12 Although Burch makes some intriguing generalizations about early French and American cinema, I will focus on his examination of British filmmaking, which seems to me the strongest and most compelling of his cases. Now clearly Burch is sometimes not a very accurate historian, and his work in this regard has been dramatically superseded by the research of Abel, Musser, and Gunning, among many others. But despite the shakiness of his scholarship, it is a bit surprising that so few people have engaged his suggestive insights in these three chapters, especially his fundamental premise that early films by both form and content can be distinguished along national lines. And here I would ask you to consider, hypothetically, if an unknown early film suddenly surfaced without any indication of origin, would we be able to identity the nationality of the filmmaker based solely on looking at its formal features? Burch’s analysis of British filmmaking around the turn of the century is based on three overlapping claims, which I will discuss one by one: first, that these films display a visual flair and precocity unseen in French or American movies from the same period; second, that this formal innovation stems from a tradition of magic lantern practice, which was in turn part of a larger culture of “rational recreation”, enabling the middle class to socially control the working class;13 and third, that these mass pastimes such as filmmaking were national in scope. First: the modes of representation of early British films made by Hepworth, Smith, Paul, Williamson, and others. Here Burch seems to me to be on very solid ground, offering plenty of examples indicating how these movies exemplify a “certain ubiquity of the camera” including mixed shot-scales, varying angles, and a staged in depth hyper-kineticism that taken as a whole suggest a kind of sophisticated aspiration to render the visual world in as many different ways and perspectives as possible.14 The direct assault on the viewer of Hepworth’s How it Feels To be Run Over (1900), the furious action taking place below the frame in Paul’s A Chess Dispute (1903), the foregrounding of the act of vision itself by way of inserts in Smith’s Grandma’s Reading Glass (1900) and As Seen Through a Telescope (1900), the sudden ostensible shift to the backside of an object in Bamforth’s Ladies’ Skirts Nailed to a Fence (1900), and perhaps

19

EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL”

most extravagantly the attempt to consume the movie apparatus itself in Williamson’s The Big Swallow (1901), a complex one-minute allegorical contest between vocalization and visualization, as I argue at length elsewhere:15 all these films testify en masse to a culture of new media experimentation that on the one hand, transcends any single filmmaker or film technique, and, on the other, seems typical if not unique to this English group as opposed to Méliès or Edison. When I see a film like Hagger’s frenetic Desperate Poaching Affray (1903), or Alf Collins’s The Runaway Match (1903), with its stunning point of view tracking shots of one car pursuing another, as well as its extreme zoom in on a wedding ring until it surreally fills the entire screen, I know that I am watching an English movie. Discussing these “experimental gag films” as Burch calls them, Barry Salt invokes “the extra-filmic tradition of British nonsense”, which doesn’t seem to be a very useful explanation, since presumably the French and Americans have their own brands of nonsense as well.16 I think Burch’s explanation of the magic lantern is far more helpful, since it specifically pinpoints a precursor screen medium to account for this optical exuberance. Noting that many of these early British filmmakers began their careers as magic lanternists, and often mixed slide shows with animated pictures in their entertainments, Burch pursues this line of reasoning along two related fronts – first, a social class analysis of magic lantern exhibition, both the showmen and their audiences, whom he presumes is mainly working-class, and second, a discussion of the formal relation between magic lantern effects and early films. Burch’s historical treatment is rather flimsy, I must confess, primarily based on a series of Marxist-inflected conjectures largely unsupported by empirical evidence of reception. More detailed work clearly needs to be done to verify Burch’s problematic claims. His formal argument is stronger, but also a bit suspect, relying at times on loose metaphors, such as “extrapolation” to tie lantern-slide practice to the insert close-ups in Smith’s films, for example.17 But this formal linkage between the two media strikes me as very promising, and can be substantiated by looking more closely at discussions of aesthetic matters in magic lantern trade journals and manuals, such as an 1894 article in The Optical Lantern Journal and Photographic Enlarger analysing “scales of representation”, or the advice about how to make common objects look strange given by T.C. Hepworth (Cecil’s father) in his well-known 1888 lantern guidebook.18 While 90 per cent of this material focuses on the hardware of the apparatus, which lenses to use, various types of illumination, and so on, there’s enough in that remaining 10 per cent to help us appreciate the intimate connection between slide projection and moving pictures. These references to magic lantern print culture bring me to the third and for our purposes the most important aspect of Burch’s argument, which he mainly leaves implicit: namely, that this amusement practice spans the British nation. Magic lanterns were very popular throughout Europe and America, after all, so why did this medium have such an impact on this particular group of English practitioners, and not filmmakers in other countries? Or we can pose this question another way, shifting from the supra-national to the sub-national, to ask if these affiliated lanternist-filmmakers chiefly represented a region, Brighton (for Williamson and Smith most clearly), rather than a country. In both cases, I think it is the nation as a unit of analysis which makes more sense, given the circulation of magic lantern print culture and “the imagined community” of readers it created, to borrow Benedict Anderson’s influential theory of nationalism.19 Beyond their current documentary value, in other words, these print publications actually helped forge a nation of showmen and audiences. Now there were certainly trade journals in other countries devoted to the magic lantern. But the sheer size and frequency of journals such as The Optical Lantern Journal and The British Journal of Photography (which published a monthly supplement The Lantern Record between 1892

20

2 • Nationalizing attractions

and 1901), the wealth of detail these publications supplied, along with institutions such as the Royal Polytechnic, which was famous for its frequent lantern demonstrations, point to a far deeper and richer culture of magic lantern practice than in France or the United States.20 To nationalize attractions we therefore need to institutionalize and particularize early cinema beyond sweeping claims about modernity, as Cecil Hepworth suggested when he was asked late in his life about the origins of the movies: “in stable parlance the cinematograph might be described as ‘by Magic Lantern out of Camera’ and the old Poly would certainly have been its birthplace”.21 Not a bad genesis account, if not for the world over, then for Great Britain at least.

Notes 1.

See, for instance, Raymond Williams, “Literature”, Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976)

2.

See Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1884), quoted in Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 263.

3.

Richard Chase, The American Novel and its Tradition (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1957), and R.W.B. Lewis, American Adam: innocence, tragedy and tradition in the nineteenth century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955).

4.

Carolyn Porter, “What We Know That We Don’t Know: Remapping American Literary Studies”, American Literary History 6.3 (1994): 470, 510.

5.

See Shelley Fisher Fishkin, “Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies”, American Quarterly 57. 1 (2005): 21.

6.

Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993).

7.

Janice Radway, “What’s in a Name?” American Quarterly 51. 1 (1999): 1–32.

8.

See Lawrence Buell, Emerson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).

9.

See Roland Cosandey and Francois Albera, eds. Cinéma sans frontiers 1896–1918/Images Across Borders (Payot/Lausanne: Lausanne, 1995).

10.

Charles Musser, “Nationalism and the Beginnings of Cinema: the Lumière cinematographe in the US, 1896–1897”, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 19. 2 (1999): 149–176; and Richard Abel, The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

11.

Tom Gunning, “New thresholds of vision: instantaneous photography and the early cinema of Lumière”, in Terry Smith (ed.) Impossible Presence: surface and screen in the photographic era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 71–100.

12.

Noël Burch, Life to those Shadows (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 43–142.

13.

Ibid., 83.

14.

Ibid., 87.

15.

Jonathan Auerbach, Body Shots: Early Cinema’s Incarnations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 78–81.

16.

Burch, Life to those Shadows, 95; Barry Salt, Film Style and Technology (2nd edn) (London: Starword, 1993), 47.

17.

Burch, Life to those Shadows, 89.

18.

Duncan Moore, “Size or Realism”, The Optical Lantern Journal and Photographic Enlarger 5. 58 (1 March, 1894), 55–57, and T.C. Hepworth, The Book of the Lantern (London: Wyman & Sons, 1889), 245.

19.

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: reflections on the origins and spread of nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).

20.

For the Royal Polytechnic Institution, see Laurent Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow, trans. Richard Crangle (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000), 264–268.

21.

Quoted in Joost Hunningher, “Premiere on Regent Street”, in Christopher Williams, ed., Cinema: the Beginnings and the Future (London: University of Westminster Press, 1996), 46.

21

3

Images of the “National” in early non-fiction films •

Images of the “National” in early non-fiction films

Frank Kessler n 21 September 1896 a young Frenchman, sent abroad by the Lyon-based firm Lumière, records a Tyrolese dance, a Schuhplattler, with a Cinématographe camera.1 The young man’s name is Constant Girel,2 twenty-three years old, and the scene he films is set in Cologne, possibly somewhere in a public park, far from the Alps where Tyrolese dancers are part of the local folklore. Obviously, the dancing couple are performers who are part of a Tyrolese show and otherwise present on a stage somewhere in Cologne a spectacle that – apparently – is exotic enough for audiences in the Rhineland (similar shows can be found at that time in many other parts of Germany). In that respect, the Danse Tyrolienne is not any different from the Sioux Ghost Dance or the Buffalo Dance that were “kinetographed” almost exactly two years earlier (on 24 September 1894) in Edison’s Black Maria studio.3 In both cases, a folkloristic performance is executed in front of a moving picture camera; they are not, however, genuine folklore executed in situ as part of a local tradition, but performances by professionals who are part of a touring show (in Cologne, this is probably the Tiroler-Gesellschaft “Ploner”,4 and in the case of Edison, of course, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show).5 With regard to the question of the “national”, such examples provide the historian with rather curious constellations, especially in the case of the Lumière film: a French cameraman, working for a French company, shoots one of the earliest cinematographic views made in Germany in Cologne, a city located in the Western part of the country, filming a traditional dance from the alpine regions of Southern Germany and Austria. The national, in other words, appears here in a complexly layered fashion, each of the different levels referring to another aspect of this category. Encountering similar constellations in the field of early Westerns (American branches of French firms shooting films about the Far West on the East Coast of the United States), Nanna Verhoeff has proposed a distinction between different semantic layers that come together in a category of the “nation” when employed for a cultural product circulating internationally, such as film: • The “national” referring to an origin; • The “nationalist” referring to a sense of cultural belonging ownership; • The “nation-ness” referring to a recognizable, visualized image of “nation”.6 In the case of the Lumière film, the national-as-origin is French with regard to the cameraman and the firm for which he works; German with regard to the location where it is filmed; and Tyrolese with regard to the object that is filmed. The national-as-be-

O

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3 • Images of the “National” in early non-fiction films

longing would be again French (in terms of legal ownership), but also German insofar as the film is undoubtedly also part of German film history. But furthermore, such a question of cultural ownership can become a crucial – and sometimes even painful – issue with regard to the history of formerly colonized nations: in how far are images filmed by the colonizers part of the cinematic heritage of the colonized? Who “owns” the images of aboriginals? To which national history do they belong and in what way? Questions that become even more complex, when images were taken in the context of Fairs and on other sites of exhibitions, where the people filmed were “performing” their nationality (the aforementioned Edison films are also a case in point).7 Finally, the national-as-image in Danse Tyrolienne is Tyrolese, albeit in a rather broad and unspecific way. The “nation-ness” in Verhoeff’s study, translated into Roland Barthes’ terminology, would be a connotation seme (sème de connotation), in this case Tyroleseness, produced by a series of recognizable (and often more or less stereotyped) signs at the level of, for instance, clothing and the type of performance.8 Nation-ness, in this sense, obviously is a common feature whenever nationality has to be signified in fiction films, but such representational strategies are used in non-fiction films, too, whether explicitly turned into a performance, as in Danse Tyrolienne, or more subtly displayed in the disguise of an “authentic recording” of everyday life activities. Travelogues constitute a genre that, almost by definition, is concerned with the representation of the national as nation-ness (and, often enough, nation-ness as otherness). Landscapes and landmarks, customs and costumes become typical attributes that represent the national, in both senses of this phrase: “being representative of” or “standing for” (by means of a synecdoche), and “producing an image of” the national. The Tyrolese couple dancing a Schuhplattler thus represent pars pro toto the Alpine regions and, by the same token, turn into or reaffirm a cultural cliché, a representation of a region where men wear Lederhosen and women a Dirndlkleid. For a French audience, for instance, these images may furthermore connote German-ness in a more general sense, whereas for German viewers they refer to a relatively specific geographic region. The obvious fact that the Tyrolese dance is a performance which takes place far away from the Alps is hardly of any importance in this context. Rather unsurprisingly, catalogue descriptions of travelogues and related subjects tend to highlight such instances of nation-ness in terms of the “typical” and “characteristic”, the “native” and the “authentic”, the “quaint” and the “picturesque”. Moving to a later period and choosing as a more or less random example the August 1906 sales list of the Charles Urban Trading Co., one finds numerous instances of this strategy: Fan Dance by Geishas (cat. no. 1762) A couple of very dainty Japanese maidens dance a charming fan dance to music provided on quaint native instruments by their two companions who are seated on a mat just behind the dancers in the typical Japanese manner.9 English Pheasant Shooting (cat. no. 1768) [...] The truly typical English scenery as the film takes us from place to place with the shooters makes up a fine picture.10 Scenes in Gwalior, India (cat. no. 1773) Beginning with a general panoramic view, succeeded by replicas of many famous buildings and temples, and then presenting many aspects of truly Indian life in the streets and squares, with the natives promenading in their leisurely and characteristic Oriental fashion.11

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EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL”

“Quaint Holland” (cat. no. 1855) A grand series of views of the most picturesque scenery and quaint people – their dress, customs and vocations.12 Venice and the Grand Canal (cat. no. 3068) The beauties of Venice are well depicted on this film, in a fine series of pictures taken from gondolas which traversed the Grand Canal past the imposing and famous buildings, which are shown from the best points of view.13 Nation-ness, in these and many other films, is thus both constructed and referred to by means of cultural clichés offering a tourist point of view. The relations with forms of modern tourism are indeed quite obvious. The images are presented as both typical and true – typical, because they are true; and true, because they are typical. This is exactly the form of circular reasoning on which the logic of tourism is built. And this also constitutes the paradox of tourism, as the authentic has to correspond to the cliché, and thus the cliché determines what can appear as authentic. In tourism, as in travelogues, the “truly typical” and the “authentic cliché” of nation-ness become a commodity that can be offered as an experience and a visual spectacle. Cameramen are looking for the typical and authentic, but do so building upon mediated cultural knowledge concerning sights, buildings, traditions, costumes, and ways of life. Hence the possibility to perform nation-ness, as the Tyrolese dancers do in front of Constant Girel’s Cinématographe, or the Japanese fan dancers do for the benefit of Charles Urban’s cameraman. But also in less obviously staged pictures, the nationalas-image can be the result of a performance. Pathé-Frères’ Comment se fait le Fromage de Hollande (1909), which belongs to the company’s series, “scènes arts et industries”, represents the production process of Dutch cheese, from milking the cows to trading on the Alkmaar cheese market, finishing with a scene where the cheeses are colored in red for exportation.14 Even though this film appears to be a typical “process film”, rather than a “place film”,15 it actually is both, presenting a picturesque view of “Dutch-ness” alongside the production process of cheese. After two introductory titles explaining that one third of the Netherlands consists of pastures and that Dutch cheese has a spherical form, a young girl in a traditional dress appears in a medium close shot, presenting a cheese directly to the camera. In the background there is a “typical” Dutch landscape with a windmill. Then cows are milked by a man and a woman. The milk is transported in a cart pulled by a dog, followed by a little boy. All the people we see wear traditional dresses and wooden shoes – clothes, which do look like they were worn at special occasions rather than for everyday work. Furthermore, the production process, as it is represented here, step by step, appears to be entirely manual, using simple and traditional wooden tools and machines. Comment se fait le Fromage de Hollande, in other words, portrays the Netherlands as a pre-industrial, folkloristic environment with “picturesque scenery and quaint people”, as the Charles Urban Trading Co. writes in its 1906 catalogue about the film “Quaint Holland”. Not surprisingly, perhaps, nation-ness, in terms of the “typical” and the “authentic”, quite often refers to pre-modern ways of life, to manual work and craft rather than industry, to the rural rather than to the urban, to tradition rather than to modernity. Accordingly the individuals featured in the “types-and-physiognomies” section of many travelogues, often represent the “characteristic” or “authentic” by wearing traditional clothes, attires, hairdos etc., or by doing things the “age-old way”. Nation-ness, that is nation-as-image, thus is a construction, which may or may not be linked to nation-as-belonging and nation-as-origin. Indeed, the way Dutch-ness appears in, for instance, Holland in IJS (Willy Mullens, 1917) is hardly any different from the earlier film made for Pathé Frères. Again, it is a rural, traditional, folkloric Holland

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3 • Images of the “National” in early non-fiction films

and her customs and costumes which dominate the image. A sense of nation-as-origin or nation-as-belonging, then, would have to be produced by means of a paratextual discourse, presenting the film explicitly as a Dutch film on Holland (or, otherwise, through textual markers in intertitles, referring to a collective national “we” and characterizing buildings, landscapes, people, etc. as “our”). Generally, however, nation-as-origin seems to have been not much of an issue with regard to non-fiction film (prior to the First World War, at least), whereas the argument of the national origin of fiction films did play an important role commercially and culturally, as Richard Abel’s study on the “Americanization” of cinema in the USA shows in an exemplary way.16 There is one aspect, however, where nation-as-belonging (either in combination with nation-as-origin or not) does play an important role: the representation of national symbols such as the flag, the army, or heads of state. In this context, the filming of the German Kaiser by foreign, especially French firms, presents a rather interesting case. Wilhelm II and his family, apostrophized by Martin Loiperdinger as “the first German film stars”, were indeed extensively filmed, not only by German firms such as Oskar Messter’s company or the Deutsche Mutoskop- und Biograph-Gesellschaft (a firm with Anglo-American roots, in fact),17 but also foreign ones, among them Pathé Frères. The inventory of films offered on the German market between 1895 and 1911, established by Herbert Birett, lists, for example, the following Pathé titles: Eine zu Ehren des deutschen Kaisers in Tanger veranstaltete Feier (1905), Der Kaiser in Österreich (1906) and Die Kaisermanöver in Gross-Mesertisch (1909).18 A surviving print of S.M. Kaiser Wilhelm II bei der Hirschjagd in Bückeburg (1913) opens with a title carrying the Pathé trademark and acknowledging gratefully the privilege granted by His Majesty, who authorized the company to take these pictures during the hunt. Interestingly, none of these titles appear in Henri Bousquet’s reconstruction of the Pathé catalogues between 1896 and 1914, at least according to the French titles and descriptions.19 It looks as though the internationally operating French company, in the case of the German market, catered to the sentiment of nationalism – both in the common use of the word and in the sense of Verhoeff’s “nation-as-belonging” – by highlighting the nation-as-origin dimension of the subject filmed, while downplaying this aspect with regard to the producer. For audiences in France, on the contrary, such images quite probably were considered unattractive or even unwanted. At such a level nationalism, in both of the aforementioned meanings, also manifests itself with regard to early non-fiction cinema. Here the category of the “nation” in cinema can come into play in its most disturbing form, indeed. In his autobiographical Die Welt von gestern. Erinnerungen eines Europäers (1941), the writer Stefan Zweig recalls an evening he spent in a small cinema in the French town of Tours in 1914, shortly before the outbreak of the First World War. The audience composed of workers, soldiers, shop girls, clerks, and children, was relatively noisy, people were smoking and seemed relatively indifferent to the newsreels that were screened. Then came an item on Kaiser Wilhelm II visiting the Austrian Emperor Franz-Joseph. When the German Kaiser appeared on the screen: “[...] a spontaneous wild whistling and stamping of feet began in the dark hall. Everybody yelled and whistled, men, women, and children, as if they had been personally insulted. The good-natured people of Tours, who knew no more about the world and politics than what they had read in their newspapers, had gone mad for an instant. I was frightened. I was frightened to the depths of my heart. For I sensed how deeply the poison of the propaganda of hate must have been advanced through the years, when even here in a small provincial city the simple citizens and soldiers had been so greatly incited against the Kaiser and

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EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL”

against Germany that a passing picture on the screen could produce such a commotion”.20 Thus the pacifist Stefan Zweig was shocked not so much by the effect caused by the image itself, but rather by the reaction such an image could trigger as a consequence of the way people had been influenced to think about other people. A “fleeting image on the screen” could become an image of the national in a brutally simple way.

Notes 1.

Danse Tyrolienne, Lumière catalogue #31. For comments on this film, see Martin Loiperdinger, Film & Schokolade. Stollwercks Geschäfte mit lebenden Bildern (Frankfurt am Main/Basel: Stroemfeld Verlag, 1999), 216.

2.

On Constant Girel’s filming in Germany see Denise Böhm-Girel, “Constant Girel, LumièreOperateur in Deutschland”, KINtop 5 (1996): 171–176.

3.

See Charles Musser, Edison Motion Pictures, 1890–1900. An Annotated Filmography (Gemona: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, 1997), 125–126.

4.

See Loiperdinger, Film & Schokolade, 216.

5.

See Musser, Edison Motion Pictures, 1890–1900, 125–129.

6.

Nanna Verhoeff, The West in Early Cinema. After the Beginning (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 160. Verhoeff, in fact, adds a fourth layer referring to the relation between different national identities within the diegesis of Western films, between Native Americans and the European immigrants opposing each other as “Indians” and “cowboys”.

7.

Such issues are raised also in the documentary Bontoc Eulogy by Marlon Fuentes (1995), recounting the history of the filmmaker’s grandfather who appeared in an exhibit at the St. Louis World Fair in 1904. See also Nico de Klerk’s contribution in this volume.

8.

See Roland Barthes, “Rhétorique de l’image”, Communications 4 (1964): 40–51.

9.

Charles Urban Trading Co., List of New, High-class and Original Urban Film Subjects (London, August 1906), 46.

10.

Ibid.

11.

Ibid., 50.

12.

Ibid., 120.

13.

Ibid., 160–161.

14.

For a detailed discussion of this film see my “Wie der Käse in Holland gemacht wird. Anmerkungen zum frühen nonfiction-Film”, in Malte Hagener, Johann N. Schmidt, and Michael Wedel, eds., Die Spur durch den Spiegel. Der Film in der Kultur der Moderne (Berlin: Bertz Verlag, 2004), 159–166.

15.

I borrow these terms from Tom Gunning, “Before Documentary: Early nonfiction films and the ‘view’ aesthetic”, in Daan Hertogs and Nico de Klerk, eds., Uncharted territory. Essays on early nonfiction film (Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1997), 9–24.

16.

Richard Abel, Tbe Red Rooster Scare. Making Cinema American 1900–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

17.

See Richard Brown and Barry Anthony, A Victorian Film Enterprise. The History of the British Mutoscope and Biograph Company, 1897–1915 (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 1999).

18.

Herbert Birett, Das Filmangebot in Deutschland 1895–1911 (München: Winterberg, 1991).

19.

Henri Bousquet, Catalogue Pathé des années 1896–1914 (4 volumes), Henri Bousquet, 1993–1996.

20.

Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday, trans. Harry Zohn (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), 210–211. This passage receives comments from Anne Paech and Joachim Paech in Menschen im Kino. Film und Literatur erzählen (Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler, 2000), 88–89.

26

4

National and racial landscapes and the photographic form •

National and racial landscapes and the photographic form

Giorgio Bertellini “Any viable history of photography has to be part of a history of picturemaking, and any viable history of picturemaking must include photography.” Carl Chiarenza1 “The idea of race was [at the turn of the 20th century] in many ways and for many people not very different from what we would call today national character […] race was a determinant of national cultural experience, it was at the same time an outgrowth of previous national and cultural tradition.” George W. Stocking,2 for Antonia Lant ow do historians usually address the relationship between early cinema and national differences? There is a wealth of methodological approaches. They range from discussions of subject matter, social themes, historical circumstances (i.e. Spanish-American War, World War I), genre/intertextual form (i.e. the western film), institutional affiliation (i.e. the Albert Kahn Archive, the Dutch Colonial Institute), economy of production, marketing, and cultural reception (i.e. French cinema in the USA). Less often is the notion of national difference articulated with racial difference and then included in discussions about cinema’s formal and technological relationship with other media of visual representations – particularly when scholars stress the cinematic medium’s allegedly unique capacity to photograph reality and movement. Surely, film theorists and critics have always hailed national/racial representations as a significant phenomenon. Yet early film scholars have generally approached such representations as somewhat contingent phenomena, rather than as constituent of the very form of cinematic representation. Indeed, national/racial representations, the argument implicitly goes, do not fundamentally contribute to the morphological alignment of early cinema with modernity. In this essay I question this methodological approach and offer a different, yet complementary perspective. Early moving pictures, I argue, entertained lasting formal relationships with pre-existing visual patterns and ideologies of national/racial differences, which the novelty of the photographic form, both still and moving, did not obliterate.

H

Viewfinders and blindspots The established modernist emphasis on cinema’s formal and technological distinction

27

EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL”

from earlier forms of representation rests upon a long and influential tradition positing that photographic reproductions of still or moving images constituted a radical mimetic novelty because of their visual correspondence to their material referent.3 The historical and critical investments in photographic images’ realist mimesis have had significant aesthetic and political consequences for racial representations. Still, when photography entered the scene, as is well known, the negative and positive reactions to its visual representations were widespread and intense. Arguably Baudelaire voiced the most famous responses to photography, which he described as an artificial, mechanized, and alienating process of image-reproduction.4 By contrast, photographers like Nadar campaigned for the medium’s artistic merits and multiple uses. Likewise, scientists generally found photography “equally useful in all the sciences of observation, where visible forms are to be represented”.5 Despite their difference in approach and judgment, these positions shared the claim that photography entertained a very close relationship with the material world it depicts – one of unprecedented resemblance. That no human hand played an apparent role in the process of image reproduction was interpreted as a sign of the image’s objective and thus accurate rendering of the exterior world. Even such “purist” movements as “straight” photography accepted the notion of photography’s iconic truthfulness in their effort to grant full artistic entitlement to the new medium.6 Twentieth-century visual theorists have variously endorsed this fundamental claim by negatively and teleologically juxtaposing photography and films to earlier media of visual representations.7 “As compared to paintings”, wrote Walter Benjamin in 1937, “filmed behavior lends itself more readily to analysis because of its incomparably more precise statements of the situation”. Seven years later, in a rhetorical turn of phrase, André Bazin even claimed that “the photographic image is the object itself”. In 1947, in what became the definitive version of an essay first appeared in 1934, Erwin Panofsky held a similar position: “the medium of the movies is physical reality as such”.8 Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, both older and younger generations of film scholars never fundamentally challenged the core of the argument. In 1960, Siegfried Kracauer advanced a position already voiced in the 1920s by positing that film is “an extension of photography: and as such shares with this medium a marked affinity with the visible world around us”. In 1971, the founding father of film semiotics, Christian Metz, famously defined cinema as “the ‘phenomenological’ art par excellence”. In the same period, Stanley Cavell insisted that “photography overcame subjectivity in a way undreamed of by painting … by automatism, by removing the human agent from the task of reproduction” with the result that photography is “of the world” whereas painting “is a world”. Similarly, in the first issue of Critical Inquiry (1974), Rudolph Arnheim repeated the arguments put forward in his 1932 classic Film as Art by attributing to photographs an “authenticity from which painting is barred by birth”. In his book-length essay Camera Lucida (1980), Roland Barthes seemingly applied the Bazinian argument to photography by stressing its “evidential force”, and arguing that its “power of authentication exceeds [its] power of representation”.9 The question is not one of methodological naïvete, but of balance. I concur with Miriam Hansen’s historical contextualization of Kracauer’s “photographic approach” to films, which, she argues, did not imply “a transparent, iconically motivated relation between sign and referent”.10 What remains cogent however, to return to Barthes’ expression, is the “evidential force” that photographic reproductions have historically secured. Over time the “transparency fallacy” (or its however justified temptation) has prompted both a general acceptance of still/moving pictures’ realistic charge and, by reaction, the detection of their poetic constructedness. Both this realistic investment and the related emphasis on images’ non-transparent qualities have had a remarkable

28

4 • National and racial landscapes and the photographic form

political influence on the ways racial ideologies have relied on photographs and cinematic representations, whether for aesthetic, scientific, or political purposes. They have also exerted a profound methodological influence on how early film historiography has dealt with race when addressing cinema’s technological inception, its relationship with other media, and the historical circumstances of its emergence.11 On a more general level, the positions insisting on early cinema’s photographic referencing and its equation to ultimate expression of modernity show a common epistemological penchant: a repeated (and quite heuristic, admittedly) use of the tropes of time and history at the expense of space and geography. What links the re-presentational framework and temporal tropes is the implicit argument that photographic objectivity holds a “singular, existential import”, as Noël Carroll puts it, “because it is produced from something that existed which caused it to be”. “Photography” for Bazin “embalms time [and] viewed in this perspective, the cinema is objectivity in time”.12 This critical approach has a long history, especially in German philosophical culture. Kracauer and Benjamin were particularly sensitive to the simultaneous emergence of photographic technology and historicist thinking. While engaged in a polemical dialogue with Dilthey, in 1927 Kracauer wrote: if “photography presents a spatial continuum; historicism seeks to provide the temporal continuum. […] Historicism is concerned with the photography of time”.13 Later, in the posthumously published History: The Last Things Before Last (1969), the German critic envisioned a powerful equivalence between cinema and the writing of history by advancing for films a role (telos) modeled on a distinct historiographical method. Suspicious of large, synoptic overviews and of the conceptual tenability of a single notion of chronology, Kracauer spoke of a microhistorical approach that, like a series of penetrating close-ups (“time atoms”), could render the world in a painstaking and objective manner.14 The sustained relationship between the photographic form, temporality, and modernity (itself a temporal/historical category) has veiled the “new” medium’s complicity with space and geography, with notions of geopolitical differences and their nationallyand racially-specific articulations. When generally addressing such issues as “cinematic form” and “spectator”, for instance, “modernist” theorizations on early cinema have tended to elide considerations of geographical distinctions between (and within) European and American contexts. Thus, they repeat a recurring feature of Weimar critical culture, which frequently allegorized “Amerika”, “Berlin”, and “Paris” as different moments of modernity – not as actual places with specific, sociohistorically defined visual cultures and audiences.15 Such close linkage between photographic form, temporality, and modernity – I would contend – also pervades that convergence of recent inquiries on early cinema known as the “modernity thesis” (as its detractors have called it). Indebted to the theories and practices of Western artistic modernism, particularly the avant-garde, and the philosophical perspectives of the Frankfurt School, the modernity thesis rethinks, in one of its defenders’ words, “cinema’s emergence within the sensory environment of urban modernity, its relationship to late nineteenth-century technology of space and time, and its interactions with adjacent elements in the new visual culture of advanced capitalism”.16 The scholars most explicitly aligned with the “thesis”, from Tom Gunning, Miriam Hansen, and Anne Friedberg to Ben Singer and Lynne Kirby, have theorized not only on film language and representation, but also on film spectatorship and cultural consumption.17 Recurring in their work is the emphasis on the novelty of the cinematic medium in technological, semiotic, sensorial and experiential terms. Cinema’s novelty is regularly spelled out in conjunction with the productive and influential notion of the attraction, which then defines an earlier phase of filmmaking

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EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL”

known as the cinema of attractions. Theorized since the mid-1980s by Tom Gunning (in partial collaboration with André Gaudreault), the attraction identifies a particular form of film practice and address, an act of pure and astonishing display, experienced “less as a way of telling stories than as a way of presenting a series of views to an audience, fascinating because of their illusory power […] and exoticism”.18 In his search for a historiographical space that accounted for cinema’s non-narrative dimension, Gunning drew the concept of the attraction from the writings of Sergei Eisenstein (and F. T Marinetti), where it referred not to moving pictures exclusively, but more in general to a striking spectacle, whether a circus number, a stage routine, or a cinematic show – or to their most outstanding moment. For Gunning, however, the attraction mainly identifies early cinema’s capacity to “mak[e] images seen,” a feature that is “best understood if a purpose other than storytelling is factored in”.19 The emphasis on the illusion of early moving pictures, whether realistic or magical, whether linked to an exotic “view” aesthetic or a locally staged re-creation, hinges on the technological means of representation – that is, on photography. Gunning is explicit on this in a number of his essays. Many forms of entertainments could constitute and function as attractions – public ceremonies, staged scenes, and vaudeville or circus routines. Yet, “all such events were absorbed by a cinematic gesture of presentation, and it was this technological means of representation that constituted the initial fascination of cinema”.20 In asserting the “extremely individualizing processes of photography”,21 in the name of “photography’s unique bond with its referent […] its indexicality”22 Gunning explicitly uses a Piercean language. He thus identifies photography’s indexical aspect (because of “its exposure to a preexisting entity, it directly bears the entity’s imprint”) and iconic aspect (“it produces a direct resemblance to its object which allows immediate recognition”).23 To put it in Carroll’s words: “Once the relation between the image – the photograph or the cinematic shot – [and its referent] is thought of as some sort of identity relation, the ruling idea of representation becomes re-presentation, i.e. the image is thought to present again some object or event”.24 No genre, in Gunning’s wide-ranging writings, is ultimately exempt. If actualités explicitly exhibits the capacity “to capture a view of something that maintains a large degree of independence from the act of filming”, Gunning writes,25 Georges Méliès’ trick films are astonishing precisely because of the way they dislodge the “identity relation” between a referent and its images (“appearance, disappearance, transformation and reappearance”).26 Because of early films’ distinct form of optical rendering and vibrant visual rhythm, the attraction enjoys a morphological affinity with the experiential regime and kinesthetic thrills of modern time. “As a major form of mass entertainment employing technological representation and narrative,“ Gunning recently reasserted, “[early cinema] always engaged the experience of modernity”.27 “Not just one among a number of perceptual technologies”, Miriam Hansen earlier contended, cinema “was above all […] the single most expansive discursive horizon in which the effects of modernity were reflected, rejected or denied, transmuted or negotiated”.28 Thus, a certain air of positivist and thus teleological euphoria for the medium suffuses the modernity thesis in its avowal of cinema’s semiotic and cultural exceptionalism. When viewed from the standpoint of racial and national representations, these positions appear problematic. To understand how films were experienced at the time of their first viewing is one thing; it is another is to understand how they operated, semiotically and ideologically. In other words, one may acknowledge the degree of realism that photographs held as “windows on the world” in an epoch of wide-ranging realist poetics, yet not grant them immunity, even implicitly, from semiotic and thus ideological constructedness.

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The general problem with the “modernity argument” lies in two debatable premises. The first one is twofold. Because of their reproductive technology, films’ photographic representations a) fundamentally signify on the basis of an “identity relation” with their referent; b) such an “identity relation” is alleged as new. The second premise relies on a stark juxtaposition of form versus content and unsurprisingly privileges the former. It is a position clearly indebted to a modernist rhetoric that admittedly infuses Gunning’s prose and conceptualization. Form, it is implied, is what aesthetically defines a medium’s mode of signification and what enables the alleged isomorphism of cinema and modernity. If certain films foreground the modern technology of trains, telephones, and telegraphs, they simply showcase an isomorphism that is already always there and in no need of overdetermination. It follows that not being form, race (just as gender, class, and sexuality) is simply content or subject matter, and thus “secondary” to any analysis of early films’ cinematic signification.29 This reasoning, of course, conceals the possibility that racial depictions resulted from a history of formal characterizations that preceded and informed photographic representations. Returning to the first “realist” premise (supporting an “identify relation” between referent and representation, and hailing it as “new”), one could present two interrelated objections, semiotic and ontological. In 1975, Joel Snyder and Neil Walsh Allen invalidated a range of arguments supporting photographic transparency by critiquing any equation of human perception with the photographic process of optical capturing and reproduction. As complex semiotic machines, they contended, photographs make use of determinants that can be easily manipulated and which are never “innocent:” framing, mise-en-scène, lighting, multiple exposures, and so forth.30 From an ontological standpoint, as Kendall Walton and Richard Allen have more recently suggested, just because the process of image-making is mechanical and we are in the habit of “seeing reality through” photographs, that does not imply that the camera has access to an authentically existing world; it could very well reproduce an illusion.31 Or, we may add, it could reproduce a reality that is already visually and thus ideologically coded – nationally and racially. Overall, the acknowledgment of the rhetorical charge of the realist attribution and its ideological underpinnings opens questions that are both aesthetic and political, related to the formal, material and social investments in film’s mass appeal. Furthermore, if we fully acknowledge the “productive” (and not just imitative) dimension of the image-making process, we may also question the claim that early films relied on a novel form of representation. The method of this refutation has a recent name, intermediality, but it identifies an older historiographical practice. The relationships between early films and other media of visual reproduction and staging (i.e. paintings, magic lanterns, lithography, photography, theater, pyrodramas etc.) account for some of the richest traditions in early film history. Without denying cinema’s distinct social, economic, and cultural history, an intermedial approach would not identify a single aesthetic feature – the attraction or montage – as the fundamental trait of film’s semiotic expression. Instead, it would argue that not only did cinema from the beginning adopt visual and narrative formats from other media, but its current terminological singularity should also be opened up to identify an historical variety of filmmaking practices. The diversity and plurality of films’ genres (i.e. actualités as “visual newspapers;” travelogues as a vicarious form of tourism; film dramas as “photoplays”), further complicated by national film cultures, are the most obvious indicators of a range of production and reception practices that should alert us to the inherent multiplicity of cinema’s aesthetic constituents.32 With regards to representations of national and racial differences, the notion of

31

EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL”

intermediality could also apply to photography’s multimedia referencing and would thus loosen its iconic and indexical relationship with the referent. “Photography”, as Peter Galassi has pointed out “was not a bastard left by science on the doorstep of art, but a legitimate child of the Western pictorial tradition”.33 This reasoning challenges the second premise of the modernity thesis, the strict dichotomy of form versus content. For example, the one-shot films representing distant places and populations may reveal a formal reliance on the characterizing formats of similar painterly and lithographic representations, which were well known to films’ producers and consumers.34 Likewise, the study of early film narratives may expose their reworking of nationally and racially “othered” character-types circulating in high- and low-brow literature, vernacular and legitimate theatre, and popular amusements, and featured in the rationalizing narratives of antiquarian history, eugenics and anthropology.35 Cinema’s unprecedented popularity and its exceptional broadcasting of images of distant lands, eras, and populations hardly implies that their cinematic rendering was fundamentally new in terms of racial and ideological signification. All these objections to film’s photographic mimesis can be productively combined. If cinema does not reproduce reality through a zero-degree mirroring, but rather represents a world through a porous adoption and original reworking of a number of past representational forms (painterly, optical, theatrical), then these older forms’ own ideological penchants and, more radically, the social and material conditions that informed them to begin with, continued to thrive at the turn of the 20th century.

Picturesque landscapes of modern ruins One terrain to assess the pervasiveness of pre-cinematic and pre-photographic patterns in early film culture is the visual representation of landscapes. By drawing from my own work on how early Italian cinema acquired national/racial distinction, I wish to focus briefly on the cinematic representations of Italy’s natural and archeological landscapes as enduring, highly politicized spatializations of national and racial difference. To begin with, what is represented as “Italian” in early Italian cinema is not necessarily of Italian making, does not only pertain to Italy, and it is not limited to the turn of the 20th century. It concerns instead a larger aesthetic and geopolitical scene – the post-17th century Western culture – when some Northern European nations readily embraced industrial and technological progress, and embarked in campaigns of political and ideological nationalization, while others, like Italy, deferred. Two film genres, the historical epic and Southern Italian melodrama, emblematically embodied this alignment between aesthetics and geopolitics. Even before the industrial revolution, Italy became known as the “South of Europe:” a living museum of unique historical, archeological and artistic remnants, a site of untamed natural sceneries, and the only place in Europe with significant telluric and volcanic activity. A favorite destination of the Grand Tour, the nation of Dante and Vesuvius was the subject of countless travel diaries and master setting of new painterly styles, from the architectural view painting to the paysage classique to the picturesque. Post-17th century Western visual culture celebrated Claude Lorrain’s brightly sunlit, pastoral views of the ruin-dotted Roman countryside for their classical associations with an Arcadia of learned literary references. Neapolitan Salvator Rosa’s darker and more atmospheric renderings of savage wilderness were admired for their “armed men” and wayward banditti. In the second half of the 18th century, the spectacular night scenes of volcanic eruptions by Wright of Derby, Pierre Jacques Volaire and Claude Joseph Vernet flaunted high visual and thematic contrasts and impressive pictorial effects. The horrific, devilish and

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sublime effects of incandescent lava flows contrasted, like a split-screen effect, with an undersized human presence of moonlit aristocrats, fishermen, and peasants. The eruptions of Vesuvius in Naples and Mt. Etna in Sicily, systematically recorded since the 17th century, projected onto the Southern Italian landscape an aura of primeval and destructive nature. In this imaginative geography, the South of Italy contrasted starkly with the agricultural and industrial advancements of modern European nations – including the “European” North of Italy. Thus, the widely celebrated excavations of Herculaneum (1738) and Pompeii (1748) bestowed upon the South of Italy another recognizable cultural identity, that of Europe’s supreme archeological site and unique vestige of antique history and untamed nature. The “timeless” and antiquarian images of the Coliseum, Roman temples, Venetian squares, and the newly discovered ruins of Pompeii pervaded paintings, engravings, prints, magic lantern slides, photographs, and films – of Italian and international manufacturing (Figs. 1 and 2).36

Fig. 1. Pierre-Jacques Volaire, The Eruption of Vesuvius, 1771, Oil on canvas, 46 x 95 5/8 in. (116.8 x 242.9 cm), Charles H. and Mary F.S. Worcester Collection, 1978.426, The Art Institute of Chicago; Photography ©The Art Institute of Chicago.

For instance, the rendering of ancient volcanic firestorms became a visual currency for different media, whether literary, performative, or visual. More than mere subject matter, it implied a series of recurring visual forms that involved framing and composition, with the depiction of eruptions in the background and the appearance of a human presence in the foreground. Such currency was successfully narrated in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s topical melodrama The Last Days of Pompeii (1834). Volcanic reenactments inspired stage reproductions and spectacular pyrodramas. Their representation pervaded ceramics, periodicals’ printed illustrations, painterly styles, magic lantern slides, and photographic reproductions of mass or artistic appeal, from tourist postcards to the work of Giorgio Sommer.37 They also pervaded moving pictures, both travelogues and fiction films, on both sides of the Atlantic. Italian film companies knew very well the degree of international fascination for natural disasters and narratives of eruption set in the South of Italy. They readily employed this primal scene of landscape imagery for fiction films that quickly became early “blockbusters”, from The Last Days of Pompeii (Ambrosio, 1908, remade into a spectacular feature-length film in 1913) to Cabiria (Itala, 1914). Other examples of this enduring antiquarian imagery included the exact repetition of visual perspectives of the outside and the inside of the Roman Coliseum, featured in the widely circulating prints of Piranesi etchings, in national and international photographs, and in such Italian historical epics as Spartacus (Pasquali,

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EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL”

Fig. 2. William Charles Hughes, The Fire of Pompeii (London), wood framed and hand painted magic lantern slide, 17.5 x 11.3 cm; ca.1880. [Courtesy of Collezione Minici Zotti. Padua, Italy.]

1913) and Quo Vadis? (Cines, 1913). These few examples should alert us to the complementary and interrelated dimensions of the new photographic reproduction of movement and pre-photographic visual legacies (Figs. 3 and 4). This convergence of old and new visual forms also showcases the enduring imbrications of national and racial distinctions. Since the 18th century, volcanic eruptions and archeological excavations had projected racializing connotations onto Southern Italians, centered on arrested development, primitive proximity to an untamed nature, and sudden violence. The argument was simple: excellence belonged to the past, while decadence, as Edward Gibbon had famously put it, dominated the present. Captured by the sight of old ruins merging with nature, Madame de Staël self-assuredly declared in her Corinne, ou l’Italie (1807) that “Italians are much more outstanding for what they have been and by what they might be than by what they are now”.38 A few years later, the comparison of “Italy” with the “shadow of a nation” was J.W. v. Goethe’s memorable and analogous comment.39 The ensuing racialized aestheticization reduced the South of Italy to a touristic destination worthy of picturesque delectation where one could easily be attacked, as several traveling accounts, drawings, and film narratives reported.40

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4 • National and racial landscapes and the photographic form

Fig. 3. Eruption of Vesuvius in The Last Days of Pompeii (Ambrosio, 1913).

Fig. 4. Eruption of Mt. Etna in Cabiria (Itala, 1914).

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EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL”

Fig. 5. Jules Gourdault, etching of Naples in L’Italie pittoresque (1886).

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4 • National and racial landscapes and the photographic form

Fig. 6. Giovanni Grasso and Nina Balestrieri in Sperduti nel buio (Morgana Film, 1914) [Courtesy of Cineteca Nazionale, Rome, Italy.]

The geopolitics of the landscape affected the other major vector of signification of national/racial difference: the physical demeanor and the face of the characters inhabiting those landscapes. Once again, cinema’s photographic form actualized earlier visual and ideological crystallizations. Outside of the historical genre, two of the most celebrated Italian films of the time were love melodramas of jealousy and violent passions: the now lost Sperduti nel buio/Lost in Darkness (Morgana Film, 1914) and the extant Assunta Spina (Caesar Film, 1915). Both re-articulated the dialectical tension of background and foreground that defined picturesque paintings by highlighting the presence of localized protagonists against the backdrop of familiar landscapes. The former placed its spirited and histrionic characters right in the resilient visual currency of the picturesque Neapolitan scenery, even though they are played by celebrated Sicilian performers. The latter, through the use of dissolves and multiple exposures, introduced its title character, played by the Neapolitan stage and film star Francesca Bertini, as literally transpiring out of the same widely reproduced landscape (Figs. 5, 6 and 7).41 This racializing alliance character/landscape was also a trope readily employed by American cinema: it was not unfamiliar to George Beban, for instance, the famous American impersonator of Italian racial types. In the immigrant melodrama The Italian (1915), Beban capitalized on the picturesque imagery of Venice and on the plebeian alleys of the Lower East Side, respectively, homeland of the protagonist, gondolier Beppo Donnetti, and his American destination. Not surprisingly, in a booklet on acting style written in the early 1920s, Beban described his screen characterizations as grounded in “picturesqueness” – an expression that film reviews had adopted for his films since the mid-1910s and that encapsulated the endurance of past visual and thematic morphologies.42 When it comes to representation of national/racial distinction, the novelty of photographic indexicality cannot tell the whole story. * * * * The photographic reproduction of movement embodied in filmic attractions and the development of filmic editing techniques that generated ever more complex narratives

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EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL”

Fig. 7. Francesca Bertini, against the Posillipo shoreline, in Assunta Spina (Caesar Film, 1915) [Courtesy of the Cineteca di Bologna, Italy.]

were indeed innovative “linguistic” forms. The popular consumption of film images of distant lands, eras, and populations was unprecedented for turn-of-the-century Western audiences. Yet, the novelty of photographic rendering could not wholly replace previous forms of racial and national representation because it did not replace their well-established and much needed ideological function. Instead, it naturalized them as timeless and, as such, realistic. “Initial emphasis on the realism and truthfulness of photography”, as Joan M. Schwartz and James R. Ryan argue, “effectively […] veiled the power of photography to mediate the human encounter with people and places”.43 Photographic images’ rhetoric of iconic accuracy pervaded illustrated periodicals and tourist guidebooks, the ubiquitous picture postcard, newspaper reportages, catalogs of local folklore, criminal portraiture, and films. Within a positivist framework, “geographical imagination”, as David Harvey has shown, imposed itself “with the full force of objective facts, to which all individuals and institutions necessarily respond”.44 When Bazin writes that “photography embalms time”45 and when Benjamin aligns cinema with the necessary acceleration of the new, what gets veiled is the “new” medium’s complicity with consolidated and widely-circulating notions of social and national space. In modernist terms, “Paris”, “Berlin”, “Amerika”, and “Naples” appear as temporal stages of larger historical and universal trajectories, within an idea of modernity based on universally-defined perceptual and phenomenological categories, and heavily indebted to the formalist artistic poetics of the early 20th-century avantgarde.46 There has been much to gain, admittedly, in adopting the modernist framework, particularly in terms of the linkages between technology, film form, and the development of film narrative. Yet, there are also geopolitical blindspots that are quite evident with regards to certain “political” film genres, from the Italian historical epics and Southern melodramas to American cinema’s western films and tenement dramas. These films showcase the morphological continuity of representational traditions

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4 • National and racial landscapes and the photographic form

indebted to older phenomena that non-film historians regard as quintessentially modern: nationalism, imperialism, and the intercontinental commerce of people and goods – from slavery to migration. The discipline of film studies has been very fond of a formulation of modernity neatly positioned at the end of the 19th century and fittingly coinciding with the emergence of cinema. When it comes to national/racial discourses, however, a longer dureé of the category of the Modern, one for instance adopted by the discipline of history, may expand even further the interdisciplinary heuristics of early cinema history. Acknowledgements: I wish to thank Richard Abel, Angela Dalle Vacche, Claudia Gianetto, Mark Kligerman, Jacqueline Reich, C. Paul Sellors, and the faculty members of the Department of Screen Arts and Culture at the University of Michigan for supremely useful discussions and suggestions.

Notes 1.

C. Chiarenza, “Notes Toward an Integrated History of Picturemaking”, Afterimage 7.1–2 (Summer 1979): 37.

2.

G.W. Stocking, “The Turn-of-the-Century Concept of Race”, Modernism/Modernity 1.1 (1994): 6 (emphasis in the original).

3.

My aim here is not to discuss the ontology or phenomenological nature of the photographic still and moving picture in general. Noël Carroll has quite successfully attended to this task by deconstructing all the major arguments supporting film’s medium-specificity. See Carroll, Theorizing The Moving Image (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 3–48.

4.

“It is nonetheless obvious that this [photographic] industry, by invading the territories of art, has become art’s most mortal enemy, and that the confusion of their several functions prevents any of them from being properly fulfilled.” Charles Baudelaire, “The Salon of 1859”, trans. Jonathan Mayne in Vicki Goldberg ed., Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981), 125. On this influential Baudelairean view, see Aaron Sharf, Art and Photography (London: Penguin, 1968), particularly 145. For a cogent rebuttal to the notion that photography meant a radical reframing in visual perception and artistic representation, see Kirk Varnedoe, “The Artifice of Candor: Impression and Photography Reconsidered”, Art in America, 68.1 (January 1980): 66–78.

5.

Anonymous, The Edinburgh Review (January 1843) – in Goldberg, Photography in Print, 67.

6.

The proponents of “straight photography” were in direct opposition to the exponents of pictorialism or “photo-painting” who instead identified photography with painterly arts and rejected the “transparency fallacy” by emphasizing its controllable semiotic arrangements (i.e. framing, blurring, and multiple exposures).

7.

Supporters of cinematic realism such as André Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer located the essence of the cinematic medium in its photographic representation and, on this ground, defended cinema’s artistic – realist, that is – possibilities. Another cluster of theorists, beginning with the formalist exponents of the Soviet montage, claimed instead that it was editing what defined cinema’s essence and true artistic vocation. Here I focus on the earlier, more resilient stance.

8.

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, trans. Harry Zohn, in Illuminations (ed. Hannah Arendt) (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 236; André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image [1945]”, in What is Cinema? ed. and trans. Hugh Grey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 14; Erwin Panofsky, “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures”, in Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen eds., Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 263.

9.

Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), ix; and “Photography [1927]”, trans. Thomas Y. Levin, Critical Inquiry 19 (Spring 1993): 421–436; Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (New York: Viking Press, 1971), 23 and The World Viewed (rev. edn) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 24 [all italics in the original]; Rudolph Arnheim, “On the Nature of Photography”, Critical Inquiry 1:1 (September 1974): 155; Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974 [1971]), 43; and Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981 [1980]), 88–89.

39

EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL” 10.

Miriam Hansen, “”With Skin and Hair:” Kracauer’s Theory of Film, Marseille 1940”, Critical Inquiry 19 (Spring 1993): 446.

11.

Analytical film theory has been the most actively engaged in discussing transparency theories, starting with Kendall L. Walton’s ‘seeing through’ thesis and its challenges by Nigel Warburton, Gregory Currie and Jerrold Levinson. For a cogent discussion of these positions, see C. Paul Sellors, Representing Fictions in Film (Ph.D Dissertation, New York University, 2002), particularly chapter 3.

12.

Carroll, Theorizing, 37–38 [italics mine]; and Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image”, 14. Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes have variously and notoriously written about the value of photography’s memorializing effect.

13.

Kracauer, “Photography”, 425. Whereas Kracauer had privileged a historiographical reading of history as historia rerum gestarum in “Photography”, he drew a parallelism between “historical reality” and “camera reality” in History. The Last Things Before the Last (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995 [1969]): 3. On this point, see Carlo Ginzburg, “Particolari, primi piani, microanalisi: in margine a un libro di Siegfried Kracauer”, Paragone, 54.48/50 (August-December 2003): 20–37. For a more general contextualization, see Miriam Hansen, “With Skin and Hair”.

14.

Kracauer, History, 60–163.

15.

Not fully immune from this methodological penchant, Hansen however recognizes its unique critical intensity in Benjamin, whose “concept of the masses as the subject of cinema passes over the actual and unprecedented mixture of classes –and genders and generations – [and] remains a philosophical, if not aesthetic, abstraction”. M. Hansen, “America, Paris, the Alps: Kracauer (and Benjamin) on Cinema and Modernity”, in Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz (eds), Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 381–382. A recent, book-length example of the modernist (and thus time-oriented) approach to early cinema is Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), which symptomatically opens with a quote from Kracauer’s 1927 essay on photography.

16.

Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Context (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).

17.

For an in-depth discussion on the “thesis”, see the essays by Tom Gunning, Ben Singer, and Charlie Keil in Charlie Keil and Shelley Stamp (eds), American Cinema’s Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

18.

Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde [1986]”, in Thomas Elsaesser (ed.), Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (London: British Film Institute, 1990), 56–57. Gunning developed the notion of the attraction in collaboration with André Gaudreault, with whom he also authored a 1986 essay, “Le cinema des premiers temps: un défi à l’histoire du cinema?”, now included in an excellent anthology edited by Wanda Strauven, The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 365–380. Charles Musser has forcefully argued that, “while cinema of attractions provides a way to conceptualize cinema’s links to modernity via novelty, one can also be struck by the ways in which cinema also resisted this”. What defined cinema instead was “the reworking of the familiar – not only a reworking of old subjects in a new register but of established methods of seeing and reception”. Charles Musser, “A Cinema of Contemplation, A Cinema of Discernment: Spectatorship, Intertextuality and Attractions in the 1890s”, in Strauven, 172, 176.

19.

Tom Gunning, “‘Now You See It, Now you Don’t:’ The Temporality of the Cinema of Attraction [1993]”, in Lee Grieveson and Peter Krämer (eds), The Silent Cinema Reader (London: Routledge, 2004), 42. Gunning borrows the expression from Fernand Léger.

20.

Ibid., 42–43.

21.

Tom Gunning, “In Your Face: Physiognomy, Photography, and the Gnostic Mission of Early Film”, Modernism/Modernity, 4.1 (1997): 5.

22.

Tom Gunning, “Tracing the Individual Body: Photography, Detectives, and Early cinema”, in Charney and Schwartz, Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, 20.

23.

Ibid.

24.

Carroll, Theorizing, 37 [italics in the original].

25.

Tom Gunning, “Before Documentary: Early NonFiction Films and the ‘View’ Aesthetic”, in

40

4 • National and racial landscapes and the photographic form Daan Hertogs and Nico De Klerk (eds), Uncharted Territory: Essays on Early Nonfiction Film (Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1997), 14 26.

Tom Gunning, “Attractions, truquages et photogénie: l’explosion du présent dans les films à truc français produits entre 1896 et 1907”, in Jean A. Gili et al. (eds), Les Vingt premières années du cinéma français (Paris: Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1995), 185.

27.

Tom Gunning, “Systematizing the Electric Message: Narrative Form, Gender, and Modernity in The Lonedale Operator”, in Keil and Stamp, American Cinema’s Transitional Era, 44.

28.

Hansen, “America, Paris, the Alps”, 365.

29.

Kracauer admitted films’ photographic indexicality, even while challenging it: “My book […] rests upon the assumption that film is essentially an extension of photography and therefore shares with this medium a marked affinity for the visible world around us”. “Preface”, Theory of Film, xlix.

30.

Joel Snyder and Neil Walsh Allen, “Photography, Vision, and Representation”, Critical Inquiry 2.1 (Autumn 1975): 149.

31.

Kendall L. Walton, “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism”, Critical Inquiry 11.2 (1984): especially 252; and Richard Allen, Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship and the Impression of Reality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 87ff.

32.

André Gaudreault, “From ‘Primitive Cinema’ to ‘Kine-Attractography”, in Strauven, 86–87.

33.

Peter Galassi, Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1981), 13.

34.

For a recent, impressive example, see Nancy Mowll Mathews (ed.), Moving Pictures; American Art and Early Film, 1880–1910 (Manchester: Hudson Hills Press, 2005).

35.

I have explored the link between eugenics and “film typage” in “Black Hands and White Hearts. Italian Immigrants as Urban Racial Types in Early 20th Century American Cinema”, Urban History 31.3 (2004): 374–398.

36.

The internationally celebrated Florentine photographic firm, Alinari Brothers, specialized in views of Italy’s urban architectures and in reproductions of art works.

37.

James C. Simmons, “Bulwer and Vesuvius: The Topicality of The Last Days of Pompeii”, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 24.1 (June 1969): 103–105.

38.

Madame de Staël, Corinne, or Italy, trans. Sylvia Raphael (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 19.

39.

J.W. v. Goethe, Italian Journey [1786–1788], trans. W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer (London: Penguin Books, 1970), 60.

40.

In the Edison travelogue, European Rest Cure (1904), a group of picturesquely dressed locals rob an American tourist during his visit to Pompeii.

41.

On Southern Italian cinema, see Adriano Aprà (ed.), Napoletana: Images of a City (New York: Museum of Modern Art/Bompiani, 1993); and Nino Genovese and Sebastiano Gesù, E venne il cinematografo. Le origini del cinema in Sicilia (Catania: Maimone, 1995).

42.

George Beban, Photoplay Characterization; One of a Series of Lectures Especially Prepared for StudentMembers of The Palmer Plan (Los Angeles: Palmer Photoplay, 1921), 19. On picturesque representations of Italians in American photography and literature, see Joseph P. Cosco, Imagining Italians: The Clash of Romance and Race in American Perceptions, 1880–1910 (New York: SUNY Press, 2003).

43.

Joan M. Schwartz and James R. Ryan, “Photography and the Geographical Imagination”, in Schwartz-Ryan (eds), Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003), 3.

44.

David Harvey, “Between Space and Time: Reflections on the Geographical Imagination”, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 80.3 (September 1990): 418.

45.

Carroll, Theorizing, 37–38 [italics mine]; and Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image”, 14.

46.

Consider Benjamin’s 1926 essay on Naples, Mediterranean “decadence”, and historical transiency, included in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings I, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 414–421.

41

5

Sound-on-disc cinema and electrification in pre-WWI Britain, France, Germany and the United States •

Sound-on-disc

Charles O’Brien n the following essay I examine sound-on-disc cinema prior to World War I through a framework of national and urban comparisons. The objective is to explore sound-on-disc’s international diffusion as an example of how the cinema’s uneven global development, its geographical diversity, was conditioned by regional variations in electric power. The focus on sound-on-disc thus involves an argument that bears implications for cinema history as a whole. One aspect of the argument concerns difficulties posed to the established nation-state film historiography by electrification, a sub- or transnational phenomenon more than a national one. The essay is organized in three parts. First, I outline sound-on-disc cinema’s dependence on electric motors, and hence on patterns of electrification, that varied from one city, nation, or region to the next. Second, drawing on film-trade periodicals and daily newspapers, I survey how electrification in London, Berlin, New York, Paris, and Chicago affected – or may have affected – sound-on-disc’s commercialization in these cities. Finally, in my conclusion, I draw out from the sound-on-disc situation implications for early cinema study generally.

I

Sound-on-disc cinema and electric motors Numerous synch-sound devices were marketed prior to World War I in Europe and North America, and especially during the late aughts. Regarding the United States, Rick Altman, in his recent book on silent film sound, identifies 1907 through 1909 as sound-on-disc’s zenith in the United States.1 With respect to Germany, scholars such as Corinna Müller and Martin Loiperdinger also identify 1907–1909 as sound-ondisc’s boom years.2 By Loiperdinger’s count, German companies made 519 sound films or tonbilder during 1907–1910 – a figure comprising one-third of the total number of such films estimated to have been produced in Germany prior to World War I.3 Of the pre-war sound-on-disc systems, those employing electric motors to drive the gramophone player were regarded as technically superior. The reason had to do with the illusion that the voice came from the singer appearing in the image, the main criterion for evaluating synch-sound films.4 The challenge was formidable, insofar as “[t]he slightest deviation from perfect synchronism is so strongly and immediately manifest to the observer that what little illusion his imagination might allow is dispelled forthwith”.5 The impression that the voice emitted from the actor appearing in the

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5 • Sound-on-disc

moving image required placing the gramophone player, and its reproducing horn, close to the movie screen, and hence distant from the projector, located in a booth at the opposite end of the room. Under these conditions, the linkage of two machines required an electrical rather than mechanical connection.6 The electrical link between projector and disc player did not necessarily require an electric motor. Sound-disc-systems such as the Cameraphone used a hand-cranked projector together with a springwound disc player, tripped by the projectionist via a battery-powered electro-magnetic switch.7 The motor-free Cinephone used motion pictures stamped with the image of a rotating dial; the operator, one eye on the projected image’s dial and the other on a comparable dial on the gramophone player, would crank the projector so as to match the former dial with the latter, to thereby (in principle) maintain synchronization.8 But systems of this sort entailed certain problems. The speed and volume of a spring-wound disc player could vary as the disc played, according to the record groove’s resistance against the weight of the sound box and tone arm, whereas motor-driven players functioned more uniformly.9 But the main difficulty of the motor-free systems was their intolerably high margin for human error, stemming from their reliance on “the skill of the operator in turning the crank handle of the cinematograph more or less quickly while following the sounds emitted by the phonograph”.10 The use of electric motors opened the possibility for a mechanized and, in principle, error-proof approach to voice-image synchronization. Thus the best-regarded sound-on-disc systems used electric players, as did Gaumont’s Chronophone and Messter’s Biophon. In fact, these systems employed two motors, one for the disc player and another for the projector, both powered by the same current. The motors were coordinated by an electrical distributor, which allowed the operator to compensate for synchronization problems by adjusting the projector’s speed to match the disc player’s.11

National differences in electrification The combination of electric disc player, projector, and distributor made the Messter and Gaumont systems technically superior, but it also introduced a significant barrier to commercialization in creating special electric-power needs. To drive a motorized sound-on-disc system required a powerful electrical supply. A portable battery wasn’t enough, so exhibitors using these systems had to connect with a public-power supply, and pay higher electric bills. Further problems came from the wide variety of types of electric power in use during the period, or put otherwise, the absence of standardization. Initially public power in major cities like New York, London, and Berlin employed direct current exclusively. In the 1890s, however, the direct-current systems were supplemented with new alternating-current stations, which distributed power far more widely, in a fifty-mile radius from the plant, rather than the one-mile maximum of direct current.12 By the time of the sound-on-disc boom of the mid-aughts, American and European cities typically had mixes of both systems, as well as a mix of voltages. Partial exceptions were Berlin and Chicago, where new technologies such as steam turbines and rotary converters were used to standardize the power supply across an urban region. In most cases, however, one neighborhood’s or town’s power supply differed in its technical fundamentals from another’s. The diversity of public-power systems carried powerful implications for the movie industry. For one, “[a]rc lamps and motors built for use with a direct current are unsuitable for use with an alternating current supply”, as one trade-press commentator noted in 1910.13 Projectionists in Britain and the United States preferred direct current, which had been designed for illumination, and thus offered a “steadier, clearer, and

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EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL”

whiter light”.14 Alternating current was said to produce “a humming noise and a scattered [and yellowish] light” that required exhibitors using alternating current to use a rotary converter to change the current and, in some cases, a transformer to cut or boost the voltage.15 In addition, alternating current came not only in different voltages but in a great diversity of frequencies. These ranged from 133 and 1/3 cycles per second to 125, 83 and 1/3, 66 and 2/3, 60, 50, 40, 30, and 25 – to name the common types.16 “The proprietor or manager of a picture theatre, as a consumer of electric current, generally has no choice as to the kind of current. It is supplied to him a certain definite voltage, either direct or alternating, and he must make the most of it.”17 As a consequence, a motor-propelled sound-on-disc system that worked in one locale might not work in an adjacent one – unless the exhibitor took on the hassle and expense of altering the current through a rheostat, generator, rotary converter, transformer, or some combination of the above.

Sound-on-disc and electric power in the U.S. Electrification in the U.S. during 1907–1910 was less regionally uniform than in Germany. In the U.S. the power supply was most varied in the northeast, the region with the highest concentration of movie houses. Here sound-on-disc, whatever the publicity draw of “talking pictures”, encountered formidable commercial barriers. New York City provides a case in point. The Moving Picture World reported in 1909 that a year had passed since the Cameraphone “startled the world […] in New York City [yet] there is [now] only one public exhibition [there] of singing and talking pictures. A somewhat peculiar state of affairs when you consider there are over 400 theatres in the city.”18 Gaumont, in a 1909 trade-press interview, reported that “business conditions” in New York were making it impossible to market the Chronophone there, although the device was catching on in the west and midwest.19 Scattered references to Chronophone shows in daily newspapers help fill out Gaumont’s assessment, showing the Chronophone doing well in some theatres. In Los Angeles, for instance, the Fischer Chronophone Theater opened in May 1908 to draw “capacity houses at each afternoon and night performance”.20 Still, results in the United States for the Chronophone fell far short of expectations, as noted in The Moving Picture World in May 1910: “We heard and favorably commented on this beautiful piece of apparatus [i.e. the Chronophone] about a year ago. Yet curious to tell, it does not seem to have made its way into the moving picture theatre of New York City, and we do not hear so much of it in the country as we should like to.”21 One explanation for sound-on-disc’s brief and incomplete commercial exploitation in the United States lies in the country’s insufficiently standardized municipal power networks, which required exhibitors aiming to use motor-driven systems like the Chronophone to make costly and complicated electrical modifications.22 Circumstances were perhaps more propitious in the Chicago area, whose standardized power supply during the late aughts rivaled that in Germany. The Chicago-area power network owed much to the vision of Samuel Insull, who invites comparison to Emil Rathenau, the founder of Allgemeine Elektrizitäts Gesellschaft (1887), Germany’s second largest power company.23 Insull, like Rathenau, wanted a unified supply system whose distribution would encompass all power needs for the entire population, twenty-four hours-a-day, across a fifty-mile radius from the main plant. Insull’s effort to unify the Chicago-area power supply reached fruition between 1906 and 1909, precisely when sound-on-disc enjoyed its vogue in the United States.24 In the Chicago area during those four years the power output jumped by over 400 percent, and rates for small businesses fell by 20 percent. Chicago’s electricity conditions may help explain

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5 • Sound-on-disc

why in 1910 Chicago had more movie theatres, and seats, than New York, relative to population size.25 Still, reports on electrification published in the Chicago-based Nickelodeon enumerate a variety of power-related problems faced by exhibitors: in locales where electric power was used mainly for illumination, power was available only during night time; in locales where power stations supplied street cars, motion-picture screenings were disrupted by random drops and hikes in voltage; in certain locales, movie-house owners paid exorbitantly high electricity bills, at rates up to five time higher than those charged for “an auto garage, saloon or butcher shop a few doors away”.26 Such conditions posed intractable barriers to the commercialization of the electricity-dependent Chronophone.

Cinema and electricity in Britain Sound-on-disc met overwhelming obstacles in Britain, where different cities and even neighborhoods used different current, voltages, and frequencies. Variation in London was extreme. Whereas Berlin and Chicago were served by a few large power stations, driven by turbo-generators of unprecedented power, London’s electrical supply came from numerous small stations. In 1911, Berlin and Chicago each had six power stations, whereas London had 64.27 Moreover, London’s power stations typically differed greatly from one another in their technical fundamentals. Technology historian Thomas Hughes reports that in London during the early 1910s “at least ten different frequencies and a bewildering assortment of voltages were in use”.28 London’s public electricity was characterized in the film press as “more or less unsuitable” for film projection, “being either of alternating current or else of [direct] current at a high voltage”.29 One 1910 film-press report estimated the average power voltage for England as 200 volts.30 But to run a film projector’s arc lamp required only 60 volts. To avoid overloading the lamps and wasting valuable electricity, movie exhibitors used motor generators and other devices to reduce and alter the current.31 Detailed discussion of these gadgets and their associated methods can be found in The Bioscope, the London-based film-trade weekly, which routinely counseled exhibitors on how to cope with their electricity needs. The basic advice was to opt out of the public system altogether: “With a variety of small gas and oil engines on the market it is not difficult, in conjunction with efficient dynamos, for showmen to generate their own electricity, in many cases at a cheaper rate than that charged by supply corporations”.32 One 1910 report identified coal-burning steam engines as a common method in England for generating electricity in movie theatres.33 Steam engines were said to produce power at half the price of public electricity, even when the engine’s depreciation was factored into the costs; a further plus was that the steam exhaust could be ventilated into the theatre interior during cold weather!34 Another article in The Bioscope explained how the generation of movie-house electricity via water wheel was viable “if you are lucky enough to have a stream of water running to waste through the ground adjacent to your hall”.35 In any case, many exhibitors in England, one way or another, bypassed the public system to generate their own current using “steam, gas, oil or petrol-driven engines”.36 In this context, only non-electric synch-sound systems were commercially feasible – except in the case of large theatres, such as London’s Hippodrome, which showcased the Gaumont Chronophone beginning in December 1906.37 Not surprisingly, the ingenious Cinephone, the most successful of the non-electric sound-on-disc systems of the time, was marketed initially in Britain, where it was reportedly used in some 1,000 theatres.38

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EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL”

The Tonbilder in Germany The electricity situation in Germany, where sound-on-disc cinema flourished to a degree well beyond that of any other country, offers an instructive contrast to that in Britain and the United States. Film scholar Herbert Birett, based on a study of ads in the German film press, estimated that some 850 sound films were made in Germany between 1903 and 1911.39 Germany’s high output of sound films is noteworthy because much of what has been written in English on sound-on-disc cinema prior to WWI refers only to Edison and Gaumont as the main players in the field. In the United States and Britain, Messter’s Biophon, the most popular German system, seems to have been largely unknown. The American author John Rathbun, in his 1914 book Motion Picture Making and Exhibiting, devotes a chapter to Gaumont and Edison as the makers of “the most successful of all talking picture devices”, without mentioning Messter.40 The Briton Frederick Talbot does the same in Moving Pictures: How They Are Made and Worked, a motion-picture manual published in London in 1912.41 The exclusion of Messter from the English-language film historiography has skewed the latter’s assessment of sound-on-disc technology’s importance for film history. Edison failed to commercialize the Kinetophone, as is well known.42 Gaumont, using compressed-air amplification, succeeded in marketing his Chronophone in large venues in Paris and London, but was much less successful in the U.S., as noted above. Thus, the project of synching motion pictures with gramophone or phonograph is characterized as a commercial failure. But the situation appears quite differently when the focus shifts to circumstances in Germany, where, during the late aughts, Messter and other inventor/manufacturers successfully marketed systems for synching movies with recorded songs. Indeed, Germany was the main sound-film-producing nation, as a trade-press journalist observed in 1908, the country where “die Tonbildindustrie hat ihren Sitz haupsächlich”.43 Enabling sound-on-disc’s success in Germany was Berlin’s large, super-efficient electric-power system, which served as a model for electric power in other cities and regions in Germany. By 1900 electrical power extended throughout the country, with most cities adopting Berlin’s standard of 220 volts and fifty cycles.44 Moreover, Berlin’s power technologies and standards operated not only elsewhere in Germany but in other countries throughout northern and central Europe, thus enabling the export of German sound-on-disc systems and Tonbilder. Messter, in his 1936 memoirs, claimed that his Tonbilder had been distributed in Austria, Hungary, Russia, Denmark, Italy, and the Netherlands.45 Also serving as an export market for the Tonbilder were the Polish territories, where, as Malgozata Hendrykowska states, “[i]n 1908, Polish spectators had the chance to see many sound films, especially the German works of Oskar Messter”.46 Further evidence for the export market’s relevance can be found in Messter’s practice of producing song discs for certain Tonbilder in three languages.47 The distribution situation for sound-on-disc systems differed in France, where electrification was limited mainly to central districts in Paris. Located in these districts were the large music halls and other entertainment palaces where the Chronophone enjoyed its greatest success, venues such as the Moulin-Rouge, the Olympia, the Hippodrome, the Parisiana, the Antoine and others.48 Among the Parisian theatres where Gaumont’s Chronophone was featured was the Phonocinéma Gaumont, “situated in the busiest part of the Boulevard Monmartre”, and seating up to 800 people. The Phonocinéma Gaumont provided what one British reporter called “one of the best picture shows” in Paris – and one of the most prominent: with an amplified gramophone playing “selections of music to the crowd outside […] there was no chance of passing along the Boulevard without being aware of [the theatre’s] existence”.49

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5 • Sound-on-disc

The big-city, big-hall market may help explain why Gaumont felt it necessary to invest in the Elgéphone, an amplification technology: whereas Germany’s homogenized public power allowed Messter to distribute the Biophon to a large number of smalland mid-sized halls, Gaumont worked at outfitting a small number of large halls.50 In any case, Gaumont – Messter’s main rival in the sound-on-disc domain – appears to have produced under 300 sound films during the aughts, whereas Messter, a much smaller manufacturer, made over 500.51 Messter claimed that he and Gaumont had agreed to divide the European market geographically so as not to waste resources competing with each other.52 The agreement reduced the cost of manufacture and marketing by allowing Gaumont and Messter to make their motor-driven systems only for a single region’s power supply. Thus, Gaumont’s Chronophone used direct-current motors compatible with the Edison-designed 110 volt direct-current power supply available in central Paris, whereas Messter, based in Berlin, used motors made for Germany’s 220 volt alternating-current supply. Income from the Biophon apparatus and films allowed Messter to build up the most powerful film company in Germany during the aughts. By mid-decade, as the German film industry became centered on the Tonbilder, Messter’s sound-on-disc success inspired competitors.53 1907 marked a boom in applications in Germany for soundfilm patents, and numerous firms began offering sound-film systems. The turning point occurred in 1909, when sound-on-disc’s centrality to German cinema eroded as the film industry in Europe shifted away from the single-reel short and toward the feature-length movie. The Tonbilder were short split-reel films, limited to the three- to four-minute duration of the 78 rpm gramophone disc. In the emergent feature-film context, such films served only as a special attraction, an adjunct to the main show. In 1909 Messter, after years of increasing success, lost money for the first time, and quickly curtailed the production of Tonbilder. Signaling the shift in France were the bi-annual editions of the Catalogue Gaumont pour projections parlants, which beginning in 1909, “accorderont de moins en moins d’égard aux phono-scènes”, as Edouard Arnoldy observes.54 During the next few years the downward trend accelerated, including in Germany, where the sound-on-disc market had been so strong just a few years before. Michael Wedel points out that “after 1911, only a few production companies [in Germany] still provided the market with sound pictures”, and that “in the 1913–1914 season the production of sound pictures in Germany had come to a virtual standstill”.55 At that point, sound-on-disc endured only on the film industry’s margins. When Edison marketed his improved Kinetophone in 1913, he sold licenses to the Keith-Orpheum chain of vaudeville houses rather than to movie theatres – a debacle alleged to have created a half-million dollar loss for Keith-Orpheum.56 The case of sound-on-disc prior to World War I suggests two points regarding electrification’s relevance to film history, which I will try briefly to spell out in these concluding comments. The first point concerns the scope of this relevance, which goes beyond the question of how regional differences in electrification skewed the fate of synch-sound cinema in the U.S., Britain, and Europe. During 1907–1910, electrification also affected other aspects of cinema, such as projection – as captured in the common belief that movie projection required direct current rather than alternating. In addition, electrification transformed film production and cinematography, as film studios increasingly used electric illumination for shooting; and it had overwhelming consequences for exhibition and advertising. Electrification’s significance for the motion-picture business is demonstrated in the period’s film-trade press, packed with detailed discussion of electricity-related questions. The second point concerns electrification’s implications for film historiography’s

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EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL”

established practice of dividing cinema history in terms of nation-state boundaries. Electrification prior to World War I – like cinema itself – evolved geographically according to patterns rarely coinciding with the territorial limits of the nation state. Electricity developments initiated in city centers may only gradually have radiated outward to other districts, as well as to broader regions. Regarding Germany, electrification’s scope, like that of the Tonbild industry, can perhaps be said to have been transnational, inasmuch as other countries adopted German electrical technologies and norms, thereby enabling the export of German systems and films across parts of central and northern Europe. Given the unique electricity resources of the large cities, the movie-going experience in a capital city likely had less in common with that in the nation’s hinterlands than in a different nation’s capital. In any case, electric power’s importance for virtually all aspects of cinema justifies further inquiry into how electricity’s geographical diversity conditioned the cinema’s evolution.

Notes 1.

Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 157–178.

2.

See Corinna Müller, Frühe deutsche kinematographie: Formale, wirtschaftliche und kulturelle Entwicklungen (Stuttgart and Weimar: J.B. Metzler, 1994), 79–83.

3.

Loiperdinger’s figure of 519 Tonbilder was presented in an unpublished conference paper, and is reported in Jens Ulff-Moller, “Biophon Sound Films in Danish Cinemas, 1904–1914: the ‘Talking and Singing Movies’ in Constantin Philipsen’s Kosmorama Cinemas”, Film History 11 (1999): 456–463. The claim that some 1,500 sound-on-disc negatives were produced in Germany between 1903 and 1913 can be found in Albert Narath, Oskar Messter, der Begründer der deutschen Kino- und Filmindustrie (Berlin: Deutsche Kinemathek, 1966), 31.

4.

Regarding the imperative of synchronization, see, for example, John B. Rathbun, Motion Picture Making and Exhibiting (Chicago: Charles Thompson, 1914), 231; and “Singing and Talking Pictures”, Moving Picture World (6 March 1909): 1.

5.

In “Edison’s Talking Pictures”, Nickelodeon (September 1910): 119.

6.

See Robert L. Hastings, “Combining the Motion Picture and the Phonograph”, Moving Picture World (31 July 1909): 158. The same point is made in F. P., “Singing Picture Synchronisers”, The Bioscope (7 October 1909): 73. “As it is essential that the gramophone should be placed facing the audience, and in the general case the bioscope projects from the back, any mechanical contrivance is useless, and the aid of electricity must be employed.” A counter-example can be found in a negative review of a Chronophone show at New York’s Unique Theatre: “Owing probably to the fact that the talking machine must be located at the side of the stage in this house, instead of back of the curtain, the picture curtain being fixed to a solid wall, the illusion of talking pictures is wholly destroyed”. In “Gaumont Talking Pictures”, New York Dramatic Mirror (31 October 1908): 8. A related problem concerned the need during shooting to keep the recording horn close to the singer yet out of camera range. See “Difficulties of Talking Pictures”, New York Dramatic Mirror (26 December 1908), 8.

7.

See “Cameraphone, the Latest Wonder”, Moving Picture World (25 April 1908): 370. “The two [i.e. projector and graphophone] are operated by one man, who controls them by electricity. The moving picture film and machine is generated by a spring motor, as is the graphophone. The operator remains at the moving picture machine and by pressing a button starts the graphophone …”

8.

See “Singing Pictures: The ‘Cinephone’ Synchroniser”, Moving Picture World (6 March 1909): 277.

9.

See Henry Seymour, “Hints on Gramophones and How to obtain the Best Results”, The Bioscope (27 October 1910): 37. When Cinephone was introduced into the U.S. market in 1909, the technicians tried to meliorate the mechanical gramophone player’s inconsistent speed by upgrading the player to a special model made by the Victor Talking Machine Company, which used a “quick starting talking machine with an unusually heavy double spring”. See “Singing Pictures: The ‘Cinephone’ Synchroniser”.

48

5 • Sound-on-disc 10.

In “The Perfection of the Phono-Cinematograph”, The Moving Picture World (14 September 1907): 435.

11.

On the Chronophone’s mechanical workings, see John Rathbun, Motion Picture Making and Exhibiting (Chicago: Charles C. Thompson Co., 1914), 235–236; “A Talking Picture Demonstration”, Nickelodeon (18 February 1911): 189–190; and “Progress in Talking Pictures”, Talking Machine World (15 April 1911): 26.

12.

See the account of direct current’s endurance in the face of alternating current’s far superior distribution potential in Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 120ff. “GE, Siemens, AEG and the smaller British equipment manufacturing companies remained partially committed to direct current through capital investments in patents, equipment, and operating facilities as well as in experience and expertise” (120).

13.

In G. Basil Barham, “Electricity and the Showman”, The Bioscope (7 April 1910): 26. See also Ralph Hulton, “Cutting Electrical Costs”, The Bioscope (27 October 1910): 23.

14.

On illumination’s centrality for the development of electric power in North America, see Jacob Martin Gould, Output and Productivity in the Electric and Gas Utilities, 1899–1942 (Washington, D.C.: National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc., 1946), 20. “In 1902 more than four-fifths of the electric service revenue of all central electric stations came from the sale of current for domestic and street lighting.”

15.

Regarding direct current’s superiority for movie projection, see F.H. Richardson, “Lessons for Operators”, Moving Picture World (22 February 1908): 134. On the defects of alternating current projection, see “The Alternating Current”, The Bioscope (11 November 1909).

16.

On alternating current’s diversity of periodicities, see T. Hughes, Networks of Power, 128ff. On the situation in the United States, Hughes notes that “[b]y about 1900 Westinghouse, the other manufacturers, and the utilities were settling for two standards: 25 cycles for transmission and for large motors, and 60 cycles for more general-purpose systems” (128).

17.

In F.F. Hermanson, “Direct and Alternating Current”, Nickelodeon (April 1909): 107.

18.

In T.B., “News from America”, The Bioscope (16 September 1909): 35. The theatre in question may have been the Eden Musée on 23rd Street, where L.P. Valiquet’s Photophone technology had been installed. See here “The Singing and Talking Picture: What Is Its Future?” Moving Picture World (7 May 1910): 727.

19.

See “News from America”, The Bioscope (13 May 1909): 11. “Gaumont informed me that the Gaumont talking photograph is meeting with great success in the middle and Western States of America. It has not, however, caught on in New York City …”.

20.

In “Music and the Stage”, Los Angeles Times (13 May 1908): II5. The reference to afternoon performances is telling. In many American towns the power supply was available only during nightfall, thus making impossible afternoon shows featuring the motor-driven Chronophone. L.F. Cook, “Electricity for Pictorial Shows”, Nickelodeon (1 October 1910): 202.

21.

In “The Singing and Talking Picture: What Is Its Future?” Further discussion of the difficulties faced by sound films in the pre-WWI U.S. can be found in Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound; and Richard Abel, The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900–1910 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 114, 246–247n. Gaumont’s ambitions for the Chronophone in the United States are taken up in “The Gaumont ‘Chronophone,’” New York Daily Mirror (5 September 1908), 8.

22.

An additional factor were fire insurance rules, which banned the use of “motor-driven picture machines” in movie theatres. See Carl Herbert, “The Truth about Talking Pictures”, Moving Picture World (20 March 1909): 327.

23.

Thomas Hughes observes that on the eve of WWI electricity engineers and managers “looked to the Berliner Elektricitäts-Werke, along with the Commonwealth Edison Company of Chicago, “as pacesetters in the establishment of world standards, both technical and commercial, for the electric supply industry”. In T. Hughes, Networks of Power, 182.

24.

See Harold L. Platt, The Electric City: Energy and the Growth of the Chicago Area, 1880–1930 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 173–180; and Richard Hirsch, Technology and Transformation in the American Electric Utility Industry (Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 16–19.

49

EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL” 25.

In 1910 New York City’s population was estimated at 4,338,322, whereas Chicago’s was reported at 2,000,000, yet NYC’s exhibition market was proportionately smaller than Chicago’s. NYC had 450 movie houses with a seating capacity of 150,000, while Chicago contained 310 houses with 93,000 seats. In “Moving Picture Popularity”, Talking Machine World (15 November 1910): 32.

26.

See L.F. Cook, “Electricity for Pictorial Shows”.

27.

In T.P. Hughes, Networks of Power, 257.

28.

In T.P. Hughes, Networks of Power, 129.

29.

In G. Basil Barham, “Electricity and the Showman”, The Bioscope (8 December 1910): 21.

30.

In A.E. Brewerton, “Rotary Transformers”, The Bioscope (16 June 1910): 19.

31.

On the situation in the United States, see W.O. Longworthy, “Waste of Electricity as It Appears to the Show Man”, The Moving Picture World (29 February 1908): 162.

32.

In G. Barham, “Electricity and the Showman”; and Oliver Hudson, “Making Your Own Electric Light”, The Bioscope (15 June 1910): 94. See also “Your Own Current”, The Bioscope (19 May 1910).

33.

In G. Barham, “Electricity and the Showman”.

34.

In G. Barham, “Electricity and the Showman”.

35.

In “Electricity for Nothing”, The Bioscope (16 June 1910): 73.

36.

In G. Barham, “Electricity and the Showman”.

37.

See “A Mechanical Synchroniser”, The Bioscope (22 December 1910): 57.

38.

See “Singing Pictures: The ‘Cinephone’ Synchroniser”.

39.

In H. Birett, Das Filmangebot in Deutschland zwischen 1895 und 1911 (Munich: Filmbuchverlag Winterberg, 1991). Birett’s figures are cited in J. Ulff-Moller, “Biophon Sound Films in Danish Cinemas, 1904–1914”: 457–458, 460n.

40.

See John Rathbun, Motion Picture Making and Exhibiting.

41.

See Frederick A. Talbot, Moving Pictures: How They Are Made and Worked (London: William Heinemann, 1912).

42.

See “’Talking Pictures’ Booed in Union Square Theatre”, Variety (2 January 1929): 10. This piece is a reprint of one originally published in Variety (21 March 1913).

43.

The quoted phrase is from a piece appearing in the trade journal Der Kinematograph in October 1908, cited in C. Müller, Frühe deutsche kinematographie, 81, 291n. Harald Jossé estimates that 3,500–4,000 sound films were produced prior to WWI, with the consequence that Germany’s purported production of 1,500 of such films works out to more than one-third of the world’s total. In H. Jossé, Die Entstehung des Tonfilms: Beitrag zu einer faktorientierten Mediengeschichtsschreibung (Munich: Verlag Karl Alber Freiburg, 1984), 101.

44.

See Edmund N. Todd III, “Electricity”, in Modern Germany: An Encyclopedia of History, People, and Culture, 1871–1990, I, Dieter Buse and Juergen Doerr, eds. (New York and London: Garland, 1998), 273–274.

45.

See J. Ulff-Moller, “Biophon Sound Films in Danish Cinemas, 1904–1914”: 458, 460n.

46.

In Malgozata Hendrykowska, “From the Phonograph to the Kinetophone: Sound in the Cinema within the Polish Territory prior to 1914”, Film History 11 (1999): 444–448.

47.

See C. Müller, Frühe deutsche Kinematographie, 81, 292n.

48.

The list of halls is taken from the Catalogue Gaumont pour projections parlants of January 1908, cited and discussed in Roger Icart, “En feuilletant le catalogue Gaumont de janvier 1908”, Cahiers de la cinémathèque 63/64 (December 1995): 127. At the Gaumont-Palace phonoscènes remained a regular component of the program as late as 1913. See Isabelle Aimone, “Une séance au Gaumont Palace en 1913”, Cahiers de la cinémathèque 63/64 (December 1995): 77.

49.

In “Picture Shows in Paris”, The Bioscope (19 May 1910): 7.

50.

Gaumont did produce a motor-less, “modèle à main” Chronophone for use in “des petits salles, même sous des tentes en toile, par exemple aux colonies”, as described in Catalogue Gaumont pour projections parlants. See R. Icart, “En feuilletant le catalogue Gaumont de janvier 1908”.

51.

The Catalogue Gaumont pour projections parlants of January 1908 lists 284 “phonoscènes”, as reported

50

5 • Sound-on-disc in Edouard Arnoldy, Pour une histoire culturelle du cinema (Liège, Belgium: Céfal, 2004), 39, 187–188n. 52. 53.

In Messter’s 1936 memoires, quoted in Harald Jossé, Die Entstehung des Tonfilms, 78. On sound-on-disc’s centrality to German film culture during the late aughts, see C. Müller, Frühe deutsche Kinematographie. On Messter’s efforts during this time to protect his patents from competitors such as Alfred Duskes, who had copied Messter’s synchronization device for the Cinephon, a rival technology, see Harald Jossé, Die Entstehung des Tonfilms, 76–78ff.

54.

In E. Arnoldy, Pour une histoire culturelle du cinema, 187–188n.

55.

In M. Wedel, “Messter’s ‘Silent’ Heirs: Sync Systems of the German Music Film, 1914–1929”, Film History 11 (1999): 465. See “Thos. A. Edison’s New Talking Picture Invention”, Talking Machine World (15 January 1913): 4; and “Talking Pictures’ Booed in Union Square Theatre”.

56.

51

6

Mind-reading/mind-speaking: dialogue in ‘The Birth of a Nation (1915) and the emergence of speech in American silent cinema •

Mind-reading/mind-spe aking

Torey Liepa espite the seemingly uncanny pithiness of Al Jolson’s famous lines, “Wait a minute! Wait a minute! You ain’t heard nothin’ yet”, in 1927, speech was not new to the cinema. In fact, speech had played a substantial role in silent films for nearly two decades. Dialogue intertitles and character-written inserts allowed cinematic representations to extend beyond the pictorial exterior and into the linguistic consciousness of characters. Silent film dialogue, however, brought more than a symbolic image of individual consciousness to the cinema. Reflecting a broader social matrix of language and power, written dialogue gave voice to the cultural politics endemic to spoken language. As such, these devices would play a major role in mediating a public sphere that was undergoing a seismic shift in character. In 1910s American cinema, dialogue intertitles functioned as sites of cultural negotiation, upon which national, class, racial and other tensions were played out. The emergence of this mass-produced, -presented and -consumed visible language within a predominantly pictorial medium represents a unique moment in the cultural and aesthetic history of film (and mass media) – a moment that raises fundamental questions about established understandings of the relationship between a growing though chaotic culture industry and a society equally in flux. Dialogue introduced an entirely new form of representation into cinematic storytelling. Audible speaking had existed, of course, prior to the introduction of intertitles in the form of in-house voice-performance and occasional attempts at sound synchronization. Yet a fundamentally new form materialized when the dialogue was merged into the film text itself: dialogue could be controlled from “above” by film producers, as opposed to the often unpredictable exhibitor and live performer “below”. In the producers’ hands, mediated speech promised to add a degree of standardization to film exhibition, removing one more distraction from the exhibition environment, and concretizing for the medium a new representational device. Until the early 1910s, if and when films communicated via intertitles, the titles typically presented expository information emanating from an undefined, external narrator. This often-brusque exposition was in many ways suitable for a mode of representation precisely intending to expose.1 Character speech did, nevertheless, occasionally find

D

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its way into pre-nickelodeon cinema. One of the first examples of speech in a silent film, Hepworth’s short British film, How it Feels to Be Run Over (1900), includes the proto-dialogic endtitle that reads, “Oh! Mother Will Be Pleased”. Porter’s film, The Ex-Convict (Edison, 1904), presents another noted example of a dialogue title.2 From these earliest instances on, commercial film manufacturers experimented with different economies of language en route to developing an industrial norm by the mid-1910s that would dominate intertitling practice until the coming of sound. Speech intertitles began surfacing in film texts with some regularity around 1909, but it wasn’t until shortly after the proliferation of multiple-reel films in 1912 that dialogue fully emerged as a regular feature of film texts. By 1913 dialogue had come close to rivaling expository titles in number, and by 1915 dialogue represented, on average, over 50 percent of intertitles in American films.3 By then, as Kristin Thompson writes, “usage had hardened into a redundant schema”, and filmmakers had generally settled upon a standard approach to title placement, the relationship between dialogue intertitles and lip movement and the use of quotation marks.4 Charlie Keil explains this emergence of dialogue as a necessity of the causally motivated plot: “Character actions required motivation [...] and for that reason, how to provide causally significant information became an ongoing concern”.5 As the cinema attempted to transcend its working-class base, it began to lengthen narratives, often adapting well-known stories and established storytelling forms from other media. While one-reel films were often able to convey meaning solely through moving images, these new, and often lengthier plots required a kind of linguistic anchor to successfully propel narratives across several reels of images, as well as develop rounded characters with psychological depth. While descriptive exposition could grant access to non-pictorial elements of character and motivation, character speech allowed audiences entry with much less effort into character psyche. Unlike exposition, which emerged ex nihilo to guide the spectator’s attitude and attention within the film, dialogue emerged, at least in a narrative sense if not an obvious visual one, from a more easily determined source. Although visually distinct from the pictorial images, as diegetic linguistic emanations, dialogue intertitles were narratively more fully integrated into the text. In this regard, dialogue provided audiences with the possibility of a kind of “mind-reading” – direct access to the thoughts, motivations and feelings of film characters. It offered, therefore, yet another step on the path towards the “classical Hollywood” style, by simultaneously augmenting the transparency of film narratives and the voyeuristic experience of film spectators. One obvious difficulty with this interpretation, however, was predicted in the objections of many 1910s commentators: intertitles disrupted the visual diegetic field. As visually distinct forms in a predominantly pictorial medium, intertitles ruptured increasingly seamless pictorial narratives, challenging, rather than enabling narrative transparency and pictorial continuity. Furthermore, intertitles themselves could serve as divisive cultural shibboleths, decipherable only by those with access to a cultural or linguistic literacy. Yet it is not simply the formal characteristics of intertitles (as symbolic or linguistic forms) that render them a hindrance to the classical or transitory models.6 Ultimately the semantic content and cultural and ideological underpinnings of titled-language conditioned their position within filmic narratives. For while the imprint of culture and economy is not absent from the presentational form of intertitles, it was predominantly through their representation of living languages, through their content, that intertitles wielded their greatest power – not only for the way that language fit into the film text, but the way that language “spoke to” the collective unconscious of the audience.

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How do we decipher, for example, a dialogue title from Vitagraph’s Sweeney’s Christmas Bird (1914), a send-up of two poor Irish couples, that exclaims, “Begorrah, Maggie, Oi must hev a bracer – me grief is killin’ me”, and is followed by a shot of Sweeney coyly sneaking into the nearby saloon? One cannot help but recognize the ample excess and disruption caused by the “grain” of this speech. And such stylistic flourishes were not uncommon. Despite its presumed intention of clarification, often dialogue further complicated narratives precisely because of its communicative nature – that is, its proximity to everyday discourse. Dialogue itself, of course, refers specifically to a social activity. Etymologically derived from the Greek dia (across) and legein (speak), the word implies a hailing or calling outwards. Accordingly, one is often given a distinct sense by the language of silent film dialogue that it is intended to directly address, or at times even grandstand to the audience, rather than covertly represent “overheard” communication between characters crucial for the narrative intelligibility.7 Understood as such, dialogue in silent film can be recognized not simply as a statement of character motivation or an act of narrative propulsion, but also as a unique kind of culturally specific subject-positioning, challenging the spectator with a more complex socio-cultural gambit. While representing the isolated utterances of discrete, psychologically-unified characters, the voice or spoken word – reinforced through the ambiguously authored, analytical form of silent film dialogue itself – existed not within, but simultaneously between, across and among. As such, dialogue participated in a polyphony of culturally- and politically-informed discourses, dialogically held in tension inside and outside of the film text. Dialogue engaged in a type of Bakhtinian refraction in which the cultural sources of the filmic material and the film’s discourse were refracted at various angles through the presence of other languages, continually challenging one another.8 The film itself spoke, and the language it spoke was one conditioned by its nature as a hybrid mass medium steeped in culture. From its earliest origins, in fact, the cinematic voice began to acquire a distinctly cultural, or often national character. Even Georges Demenÿ’s first attempts at silently rendering the voice in the “cinema” were immersed within national discourse. In 1891, using a serial camera to record his own visage, Demenÿ spoke the lines “Vive la France!” producing what Friedrich Kittler calls “a freeze-framed patriotism”.9 There is something endemic, it would seem, in the human voice that automatically summons a cultural and social context – a summoning that compels the hearer or reader to seek out its source. Language, thus, is always culturally coded, never neutral, and, moreover, never universal. Understood as such, dialogue reinforces Noël Burch’s categorization of silent cinematic stylistic development as first and foremost conditioned by national socialeconomic context, such that distinct modes of representation can be discerned in different national cinemas.10 Silent cinematic dialogue, moreover, often spoke beneath even the national level, presenting a complex map of local or locally generic linguistic “universes”.11 As written language acquired an increasingly significant position within cinematic narratives (intertitles often representing 20–25 per cent of film lengths), such language preserved a kind of linguistic specificity that allowed films that might circulate globally to maintain an element of vernacular or local correspondence with their audiences.12 While translation from one language to another presented the most obvious example of the vernacularization of film language within circulating film texts, the tailoring of language to appeal to specific audiences within a national context offered a more subtle, yet no less important vernacularization of text. In the American context, film dialogue emerged into a post-Babel chronotope charac-

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terized by a cacophony of distinct voices and languages circulating through channels of modern media. Accordingly, American filmmakers actively sought out a diversity of languages for dialogue in order to better reflect a tonal vernacular realism. Combined with a massive public participation in scriptwriting and movie culture in general, this development resulted in what can be described as an osmotic popular influence on filmic character language. Whether serving as the immediate authors of photoplays, or more often the popular sources of material that liminal figures such as journalists and writers then channeled into their product, the speakers of popular languages, dialects, pidgins and creoles found and maintained a significant place in the earliest speech in the American cinema.13 The desire for a kind of vernacular realism, when applied to writing dialogue intertitles, in turn engendered a culling of the everyday languages and dialects of the amorphous body of spectators also known as “Americans”.14 One common thread connecting much of the advice in screenplay manuals and trade paper commentaries was the idea that the language of dialogue titles should reflect the everyday conditions and environment of the audience. As Epes Winthrop Sargent, columnist for The Moving Picture World and occasional champion of the popular screenwriting movement put it, dialogue intertitles “should be [written in] everyday speech or they will sound absurd. People of today do not speak in blank verse”.15 And writers, amateur and otherwise, wrote accordingly. Recommendations such as Sargent’s would directly affect not only intertitle writing but also the cinematic adaptation of previously written materials as well as the choice of which to adapt. Character language, via dialogue intertitles, thus opened up spaces within increasingly uniform, increasingly controlled film narratives for a greater degree of representational play and the possibility of communicating through alternative modes of address. While 1910s American cinema as a whole may have developed through “embourgeoisment”, intertitular dialogue would remain a constant challenge to “classical” cinema, providing a bridge to the particularly “non-classical” aspects of the early sound era. The emergence of dialogue cannot be sufficiently explained, therefore, as another step toward the paradigms of “total cinema”, “classical cinema” or even as an instance of “vernacular modernism”.16 Rather, a new calculus is needed to account for both the multiplicity of representational forms engendered by intertitles and the cultural sources and reverberations of language contained therein for a fuller understanding of the complexity that lies submerged within these representations.

“Sic semper tyrannis!”: Dialogue in The Birth of a Nation As an oft-discussed historical elephant in an historiographical room, The Birth of a Nation (1915) represents at once a benchmark, a limit case and a canonical text to be reckoned with for analyses of films from the 1910s. Foregrounding race and cultural conflict as it does, Birth provides a salient example of the way that dialogue emerged into a contested field of representation, though perhaps less subtly than in other contemporaneous films. And while Griffith’s films are not necessarily “average” examples of filmmaking from the time, his stylistic diversity and willingness to experiment render his films particularly important objects for historical study – objects that both illustrate typical practices and demonstrate exceptional ones. To Griffith, as an established filmmaker, dialogue neatly represented the challenge of a changing industry with a changing representational discourse, which demanded in turn stylistic experimentation. Adapted from Thomas Dixon Jr.’s well-known novel and play, The Clansman, Birth took some representational cues from its source material and ignored others, channeling many of the issues that were central to the incorporation of dialogue

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in the cinema as a whole. As can be seen in many American films of the mid-1910s, dialogue, when translated into a new medium, emerged as its own unique form of representation. Ironically, as a director known for his formal innovation, Griffith’s use of intertitles in Birth was relatively antiquated. Famously late in giving his actors screen credit, Griffith was also stubbornly late in giving his characters substantial voices of their own, yet quicker than many to interject his own external commentary. Birth provides evidence of Griffith’s unique recalcitrance towards the character autonomy granted through dialogue, reflecting his director-centric method of creating and narrating films, but also demonstrates succinctly how, even when minimized, dialogue alters filmic representation (and vice versa).17 Overall, Birth contains 233 intertitles, 203 of which are expository, and only 30 of which represent character speech. By 1915, this ratio of just over one dialogue title for every 10 expository titles (12.8 per cent) was particularly anachronistic. As Keil has shown, by 1913 dialogue typically constituted nearly 30 per cent of intertitles.18 Another 1915 feature length film – Ince’s The Italian – includes 52 intertitles, 17 or 33 per cent of which present dialogue. More representative of the norm, this percentage of dialogue to expository titles would steadily increase throughout the remainder of the 1910s. While Birth’s titling allocation situates it as something of an outlier among other films from the period, the specific economy of titling within the narrative further distinguishes it. While a relative balance occurs in Birth in terms of the placement of expository titles (102 in Part 1, 101 in Part 2), a unique disequilibrium exists in regards to the dialogue titles: twice as many are found in the second half of the film (20), which even includes the significant and lengthy chase scene at the end in which no titles are found whatsoever. This stylistic peculiarity provides an important clue that reveals much about Griffith’s filmmaking and opens a window onto the relationship between silent cinematic dialogue and the source material of early feature films. Of the thirty dialogue titles in the film, only one, in fact, appears in the first 450 shots, or roughly one-third of the film. It is not until shot 465 that the film’s characters begin to speak with some regularity. Not coincidentally, shot 454 represents the beginning of the scene in which Elsie Stoneman tends to Ben Cameron in the military hospital – the scene that also opens Dixon’s story. The first roughly 450 shots of the film present material essentially absent from Dixon, and, interestingly, these shots contain only one line of character-spoken dialogue. As material created explicitly for the film, these scenes bear the unique stamp of Griffith’s hand, reflected in his general aversion to character speech. The lone instance of speech belongs to young Duke Cameron who asks, “Where did you get that hat?” of his ‘chum’ Tod Stoneman.19 When Griffith does allow additional character voice to emerge in the first portion of the film, it is only through epistolic mediations. The first 500 shots of the film include the only three character-written inserts of the entire film – a device with which Griffith evidently felt more comfortable, and one that had been popular longer than dialogue, yet a device that had fallen somewhat out of favor by 1915 as dialogue gained prominence. Although Griffith is successful early on at containing his unruly characters, he ultimately cannot contain the dominant influence latent in his text. The Clansman, particularly the play, but the earlier novel version as well, contains copious amounts of dialogue, and when Griffith shifts to filming Dixon’s scenes, as if unavoidably, dialogue seeps into the text.20 Dialogue, in fact, plays a major formal and ideological role in Dixon’s narrative, and the dialogue that Griffith grudgingly allows into the film carries the traces of that in the novel and play, along with the thematic and ideological weight that that dialogue maintains. In all versions of the story, however, dialogue reflects a

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fundamental force that attracted audiences. The particular medium of expression employed would fundamentally govern the particular inflection that each representation of dialogue would take. A closer look at this dialogue bears out these claims. In the film, the thirty dialogue titles are distributed amongst the characters similarly as is dialogue in the book. The two major characters – Austin Stoneman and Ben Cameron – are each allowed five speech intertitles, delivering a plurality of the lines in the film. Silas Lynch has four, but given his reduced presence within the entirety of the film, these four lines place his relative vocal presence at least on par with that of Stoneman and Cameron. The remainder of the titles is dispersed fairly evenly amongst the other characters. Aside from this dialogue, especially noticeable are the five instances of distinct vernacular speech, attributed to Mammy, Gus and an elderly black voter – a vernacular similar to the language found on the vaudeville stage and in popular novels of the previous half-century. During and throughout the emergence and development of character language in the cinema, films often mobilized a wide variety of vernacular language as a means to broaden their appeal and augment their realism, while at the same time offering up vernacular language as a type of attraction in and of itself. Popularized in the works of colossal figures such as Mark Twain and Herman Melville, American vernacular language remained prominent in the writings of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charles Chesnutt, Joel Chandler Harris and many others. The fascination with the Babelesque excess of dialects circulating throughout the country resulted in a kind of bourgeois literary tourism – what Gavin Jones calls the ‘cult of the vernacular’ – in which an author’s craft and credibility could be judged by his ability to skillfully reproduce “authentic” parole.21 Such vernacular language was prominent in both Dixon’s novel and play. The play, in particular, is replete with dialect, opening with the following exchange: 1st Negro: 2nd Negro: 1st Negro: 2nd Negro: 1st Negro:

“How many times ye vote, brudder?” “Ev’y chance I git – hain’t keep no count.” “We take dat vote away frum de white man –” “We down de old marter ter-day.” “An’ we keep ‘im down, chile.”

Dialect as racial comedy was not atypical for the time. Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, according to cultural historians, racially- and ethnically-motivated routines maintained a significant presence in American comedic entertainment.22 Transferred to the cinema, vernacular dialogue may have increased the realism of narrative cinema by allowing characters to speak, and speak “naturally”, but more importantly its reverberations extended, both literally and figuratively, beyond any kind of integrated text, displaying prominently and comedically (albeit aggressively) a polyphony of different character types speaking different kinds of vernacular speech. In Griffith’s film, the vernacular dialogue is certainly intended as comedic attraction. Griffith in one instance almost exactly reproduces the rendering of dialect found in the novel and play: “I is yo’ equal?” “Yes”. “Des lak any white man?” becomes “Is I yo’ equal, cap’n – jes like any white man?” Though a subtle, inexplicable shift changes “I is” to “Is I” and “Des lak” into “jes like”, perhaps for purposes of mass legibility, Griffith retains the essence of Dixon’s material.23 Other instances, however, like the brief encounter between Mammy and the Stonemans’ servant featuring Mammy’s lines, “Yo’ northern low down black trash, don’t try no airs on me”, and “Dem free-niggers f’um de N’of am sho’ crazy”, are absent from the novel and play, narratively unmotivated in the film and yet, distinctly highlighted. Such flourishes offer a clear clue as to

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Griffith’s handling of the dialogue. When not directly channeling Dixon, Griffith, aided by Frank Woods, mobilized narratively unmotivated vernacular dialogue as folksy racist humor. Yet, while Griffith reproduces Dixon’s general attempt at rendering blacks less intelligent through their speech, Griffith’s dialogue, as a recontextualized representation, reduces the maliciousness of Dixon’s novel. For Dixon, however, the most egregious racial assault via dialogue does not involve ascribing a vernacular to the characters he intends to demean. In the novel the two reviled mulatto characters both speak in the Standard English similar to that of the Camerons and Stonemans.24 It is not their grammar or pronunciation but rather the subtle usage of Lynch and Lydia’s speech, as well as that of their champion Austin Stoneman, which often betrays these characters’ sinister intentions. Accordingly, in The Clansman a distinct dichotomy is set up in which a subtle mastery of language becomes associated with the noble, pastoral, peaceful, white South, while unruly, unregulated speech, is associated with violence, primitiveness and dissent, personified in the disorderly freed blacks and carpetbaggers of the South, but also in the speech of Lynch and Stoneman. In the novel, Lynch is described as “an orator of great power, [who] stirred a Negro audience as by magic”.25 For Dixon, he is dangerous precisely because of his education and his ability to use language manipulatively, and for purportedly evil purposes. Yet, in Birth, Lynch’s speech loses its charismatic power and instead is replaced by the simple, brusque declarations of a melodramatic villain.26 While such language may serve the interests of characterization and psychological motivation, it does so in a particularly melodramatic, particularly hyperbolic manner, rendering the speech a representational shock in and of itself. Stoneman, while maintaining less mastery of speech than Lynch, is dangerous in the novel precisely for his perceived abuse of language. Dixon presents him as “not an orator”, but rather one whose speech was “curt”, “biting” and “coarse”. However, as Dixon adds, “His speech had a nameless fascination ... . He left on public record no speech worth reading, and yet these powerful men shrank under his glance ... . the scream of an eagle rang in his voice, ... his tongue flew with the hiss of an adder”.27 In Birth, by contrast, Stoneman is granted only short declarations of malicious political intent. Unlike these speakers, in both book and film the Camerons are simultaneously associated with both silence and a firm, yet responsible mastery of rhetoric. Ben Cameron is endowed with a particularly charismatic power of oratory, through his ritualistic intonations at the baptism of the Klan.28 The Camerons, aside from Ben, are given few lines in the film, and yet, in the novel, Ben and Dr. Cameron are known for their masterful control of language. Dr. Cameron writes and speaks in “the fine language of the old school”, and maintains some power over his slaves through a type of hypnotic manipulation.29 Ben’s voice is described as “tender and penetrating, with soft caresses in its tones”, and his supposedly dignified Klan ceremonial speech stands in stark contrast on the one hand with the forceful yet unfeeling rhetoric of Stoneman and Lynch, and on the other with the supposedly uneducated vernacular of the low-caste black characters.30 Ironically, through a mastery of speech, or rather the ability to use speech selectively yet authoritatively, the Camerons represent the quiet, pastoral nature of Dixon’s mythological past. They value speech not for speech’s sake, but for the charismatic power contained within finely crafted, yet seldom-invoked oratory. Similarly, John Wilkes Booth’s pithy Latin exclamation “Sic Semper Tyrannis”, efficiently reflects his knowledge of Roman history and understanding of the

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power of timely rhetoric, not to mention Griffith’s self-avowed commitment to historical realism. Yet even this famous phrase, ostensibly historically accurate, illustrates the complexities of dialogue in film. Shouted directly at the audience from the stage in the midst of a performance of Our American Cousin, Booth’s line interjects a measure of profound political realism into the midst of a theatrical distraction. Interpolated into Griffith’s film, the line mixes fact with fiction, language with image, and speech attraction with narratively-motivated speech. Griffith’s rendering of speech, accordingly, is not quite as monologic as Dixon’s carefully controlled text, and rather than simply reinforce narrative polarities by buttressing cultural-linguistic relations, as it did in The Clansman, speech in Birth yields more ambiguous results. Whereas Dixon’s story operates as an extended polemic, Griffith grants a degree, however slight and grudgingly, of autonomy and agency to the social forces at work in his film. As culturally specific language presented together with pictorial images of the “speaking” characters, dialogue offers a unique combination of fully embodied characters with myriad “speaking” voices. Such a dialectic of bodies and voices reflecting the related relationships of character and author, inside and outside, and text and audience inevitably distances Griffith’s silently speaking representations from “classical” values of unified characterization and narrative transparency. Griffith’s rendering of the story thus stands at odds with the ‘classicality’ of Dixon’s text, precisely through the economy of text and language. Furthermore, the vernacular, though likely intended as a comedic stereotype, carries with it a logic of diversity and difference – what Bakhtin would call the “centrifugal” nature of a living language31 – positioning speech as a counterforce to the centripetal forces of unified language that attempt to consolidate the verbal-ideological world – evident in Dixon’s solemn quasi-religious incantations of the Klan’s Scottish Rite but also in the diegetic world constructed through Griffith’s continuity editing. As cinematic attraction, that is, the polyphonic speech in Birth subverts the dominance of authorial voice present in Dixon’s work, despite its relatively minimal presence amongst the film’s diverse arsenal of representational devices. For cinema more broadly, dialogue would emerge at a key moment in film history, offering a stylistic solution for an industry in the process of reinventing itself. Borrowing dialogue from fiction and theater, the cinema gained both the declamatory force and cultural resonance that the human voice maintained in those media. Once transferred into film, however, dialogue occupied a unique representational position. Griffith’s reproduction thus retained Dixon’s polarization of speech types, but rendered in film the arrangement transformed. Of course, the speech ideologies of The Clansman and Birth, both set in the past, more accurately reflect the discourse of the time of their production – the early 20th century, and accordingly, the popular ideologies of that period. Rife with racism and xenophobia, the United States in the first decades of the 20th century spoke a language in which one’s accent often did matter as a marker of ethnicity or class, and cruel and damaging parodies were common. As can be seen in Birth, character speech in the cinema emerged into this world of conflict and contestation, and was fundamentally shaped by it. Silent film dialogue, moreover, did not only represent the psychological depth of cinematic characters, but also selected, repackaged and ultimately reshaped the everyday speech of its subjects. As such, this dialogue set the precedent for a form that would profoundly affect cinematic storytelling long after it ceased being “spoken” silently. The historical complexities lurking within Birth’s dialogue reflect a chorus of voices that remain to be heard in other films of the era – voices that retain traces of the unique confluence of source

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material and recipient text, writer and director, producer and consumer that circumscribes American filmmaking, culture and society of the 1910s.

Notes 1.

For a description of this mode, see Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde’, Wide Angle 8.3–4 (1986): 63–70.

2.

Kristin Thompson, “The Formulation of the Classical Style, 1909–1928”, in David Bordwell et al., The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 184. Charles Musser credits G.A. Smith’s Dorothy’s Dream (1902) as containing the earliest use of expository intertitles, followed by Porter’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1903). These films, however, only used expository intertitles. See Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 243. Richard Abel notes that, at least by 1903, Pathé-Frères féerie films such as Don Quichotte and Le Chat botte included expository intertitles. See Abel, The Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema, 1896–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 85.

3.

These statistics come from my forthcoming dissertation, “Figures of Silent Speech: Silent Film Dialogue and the American Vernacular Tradition, 1909–1916” (New York University).

4.

Thompson, 184; also see Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 1907–1915 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 144–145.

5.

Charlie Keil, Early American Cinema in Transition: Story, Style, and Filmmaking (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 58.

6.

For a sample of the debates surrounding the “transitory model”, see Charlie Keil and Shelly Stamp (eds), American Cinema’s Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

7.

In the 1910s, dialogue intertitles were typically referred to as “cut-ins”, emphasizing their position in the middle of shots, though the term essentially served simply to distinguish dialogue from expository titles, which were referred to as “leaders”, and later, “subtitles” or “captions”, rather than to describe their disruptive force.

8.

See Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel”, in The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 259–422 or “Dostoyevsky’s Polyphonic Novel and Its Treatment in Critical Literature”, in Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 5–46.

9.

Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 136.

10.

Noël Burch, Life to Those Shadows, trans. Ben Brewster (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

11.

Two full length studies that explore this type of cultural specificity, linguistic and otherwise, in the silent cinema are Giuliana Bruno’s Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) and Zhang Zhen’s An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896–1937 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

12.

Miriam Hansen’s paper, “The Mass Production of the Senses”, was instrumental in introducing the concept of the vernacular to the study of silent cinema, and to me as well. However, as a model for understanding silent cinematic dialogue, Hansen’s concept of vernacular modernism does not seem sufficient. Focusing on specific types of pictorial representations in silent cinema, vernacular modernism stops short of providing a model for interpreting vernacular linguistic representations on the everyday, local level. Hansen’s theory has, nevertheless, opened up a valuable opportunity for a critique of established understandings of the dominant modes of cinematic subject formation. See Miriam Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism”, in Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (eds), Reinventing Film Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 332–350.

13.

The best examination of the popular screenwriting movement of the early 1910s remains unpublished: Edward Azlant’s dissertation, “The Theory, History, and Practice of Screenwriting, 1897–1920” (University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1980). Another excellent discussion can be found in Anne Morey, Hollywood Outsiders: The Adaptation of the Film Industry, 1913–1934 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).

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6 • Mind-reading/mind-speaking 14.

Screenwriting manuals and trade commentary called repeatedly for this type of language. See, for example, Eustace Hale Ball, The Art of the Photoplay (New York: Veritas, 1913), 31; or J. Arthur Nelson, The Photo-Play: How to Write, How to Sell (Los Angeles: Photoplay, 1913), 83–84.

15.

Epes Winthrop Sargent, Technique of the Photoplay (3rd edn) (New York: The Moving Picture World, 1916 [1913], 171.

16.

I take these terms, respectively, from André Bazin, “The Myth of Total Cinema”, in What is Cinema? 1 trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967) 17–22; Bordwell et al.; and Hansen.

17.

Of course, Birth is known to have changed its appearance over the course of its theatrical release and afterward. The same is true of the film’s intertitles, taking on different appearances and phrasings throughout the 1920s and beyond. However, the basic relation of title to image seems to remain fairly constant across various versions, as does the relationship of the content of the titles to the other material in the film. For this analysis I consulted the 1610-shot version of the film analysed by John Cuniberti in 1979, which seeks to reconstruct the film as it was when first exhibited at Clune’s in Los Angeles on February 8, 1915. For a discussion of the production process of Birth’s intertitles, see Karl Brown, Adventures with D.W. Griffith (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 84–88. For a discussion of title variations in prints of the film, see John Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation: A Formal Shot-By-Shot Analysis Together with Microfiche (Woodbridge, Conn.: Research Publications, 1979), 15–27.

18.

Charlie Keil, Early American Cinema in Transition: Story, Style, and Filmmaking (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 62.

19.

Further betraying Griffith’s aversion to dialogue, the line that Duke speaks was actually the title of a popular song from late 19th century, and as such, to knowing audiences would offer a metatextual wink rather than insight into Duke’s psyche. I thank Tom Gunning for assiduously pointing this out to me. The song, written and published by Joseph J. Sullivan in 1888, runs: Where did you get that hat? Where did you get that tile? Isn’t it a nobby one, And just the proper style? I should like to have one Just the same as that! Where’er I go they shout! “Hello! Where did you get that hat?”

20.

Dixon’s play was composed “From the material of his Two Novels ‘The Leopard’s Spots’ and ‘The Clansman’”. Two copies of the play were deposited in the Library of Congress on 7 October 1905.

21.

Gavin Jones, Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

22.

For example, see Eric Lott, Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); or Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

23.

In the play the word is rendered as “lak” as well, but is spoken by Nelse, a character taken from The Leopard’s Spots.

24.

The character of Lydia, along with the entire Northern drama, is absent from the play.

25.

Thomas Dixon Jr. The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (Ridgewood, N.J.: The Gregg Press, 1967 [1905]), 93.

26.

Such as “I want to marry a white woman”. The play presents similar bursts of melodramatic dialogue, such as: Lynch: There’s going to be a wedding here to-night. Your daughter, once compromised – must submit. Stoneman: You fiend! (seizes revolver.)

27.

Ibid., 210, 96, 143.

28.

In the film, the dialogue intertitles read, “Brethren, this flag bears the red stain of the life of a Southern woman, a priceless sacrifice on the altar of an outraged civilization”, and “Here I raise the ancient symbol of an unconquered race of men, the fiery cross of old Scotland’s hills ... I

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EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL” quench its flames in the sweetest blood that ever stained the sands of Time!” In the play Ben’s speech reads: “In olden times, the Fiery Cross, extinguished in sacrificial blood, called every Clansman from the hills! And so tonight in the new world. Here on this spot made holy ground by the sacrifice of a daughter of the South I raise the symbol of an unconquered race of men – (High above his head in the darkness of the cave he lifts the blazing cross) I quench its flame in the sweetest blood that ever stained the sands of time!” 29. 30.

Dixon, 226, 213. Ibid., 113, 325.

31.

Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 270–272.

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7

Living Canada: selling the nation through images •

“

Livi ng Canada : Selling the

Nation through Images”

Marta Braun and Charlie Keil istinctively in the Western world, Canada’s identity as a nation was forged at the same moment as technologies of mechanized reproduction became prevalent. Early cinema, indeed, assumed a privileged place in defining Canada to its inhabitants and to the larger world. No set of texts reinforces cinema’s role in the formative nation-building exercise more clearly than the changing program of film series known as Living Canada, first exhibited in 1903. Living Canada offers a revealing example of the ways in which film was employed to envision and give form to concepts of nation at that crucial time before World War I. More specifically, the series, filmed under the aegis of the Charles Urban Trading Company in 1902, indicates how closely intertwined the category of nation was with the notion of economic potential. The idea of Canada was predicated on the image of its seemingly infinite natural resources, the visual confirmation of which film was especially well suited to provide. Clichéd notions of Canada as a vast land of forests and mountains, lakes and rivers – notions so successful and persuasive that they retain their usefulness more than a century after Living Canada’s debut – were instrumental in promoting an unknown land as a desirable destination for both immigration and tourism. But while we might be tempted to see Living Canada as a straightforward effort in constructing the identity of a nation, our estimation of the series’ means and aims must take into account the variations introduced by exhibition context and programming strategies. Significantly, Living Canada was the by-product of Canadian industrial, and British filmmaking, enterprise. The Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), the animating force behind Living Canada, had already sponsored a tour of films shot by Canadian farmer James Freer in 1898. Freer’s films had traveled to Britain, where they were used to promote immigration. CPR decided to repeat the experiment in 1902, but this time the company elected to employ the services of the Charles Urban Trading Company, a British outfit. The filmmaking personnel, which included the renowned cameraman Joe Rosenthal, were in the employ of Urban, but operated under the name the Bioscope Company of Canada. The trajectory of filming followed the route of the railway itself, thereby tying together the twin technologies of train and film: some films featured views of the landscape taken from the perspective of a moving train, which literalized the appeal and function of both railway and cinema – technologies particularly wellequipped to convey the vastness of Canada as a nation at the same time that they contained it. Cinema was also understood by the CPR as an effective way to further the settlement

D

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efforts the railway had initiated. Laying track to link the regions of the west to the towns and cities in the east would assume near-mythic status in histories of Canada’s formation: where the railway made inhabiting western regions physically possible, filmic representations of these same regions rendered the remote terrain visually accessible while promoting it as economically desirable. The railway provided entry to virgin lands; cinema the concomitant visual record and the invitation to experience in person what it showed its viewer. CPR’s decision to hire a British firm to be the eyes of this exploration might have been an acknowledgement of Urban’s status, as he had been a successful figure within the British filmmaking industry since 1898. More likely, however, the railway company wanted to ensure that its films would find a receptive audience within the British market, as its chief aim was to encourage British immigration through the Living Canada series. Recalling the genesis of the Living Canada project nearly forty years later, one of the three filmmakers involved, Clifford Denham, makes this clear: On our arrival in Canada we reported to a Mr. Kerr in Montreal, who was then General Passenger Agent for the CPR, and with the help of Mr. George Ham and a Mr. Armstrong, who I believe was Colonization Agent for the Company, we mapped out a program of what we thought would stimulate emigration from other countries to Canada. These included many scenic shots of the country which the railway road passed through ... . It took us about two years to finish up this work as we could only operate in the summer and we had definite instructions from the CPR not to take any winter scenes under any conditions, as they wanted to dispel from the Englishman’s mind that Canada was a land of Ice and Snow ... . These films were then shown in England in Corn Exchanges, Town Halls and Theatres, if available, and all through Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, always with a fully qualified lecturer in attendance at all performances. Results from the emigration standpoint were more than successful, according to reports we received from the CPR.1 That the CPR’s chief aim through Living Canada was to bolster interest among prospective British immigrants is affirmed by the fact that the first screenings of the series were held in England. The films had their debut in the Palace Theatre in London in January of 1903, in the presence of the Canadian High Commissioner, Lord Strathcona, who had financed much of the railway’s construction and had driven the famous “last spike” at its completion. The British Journal of Photography reported that the “harvesting, ranching, and lumbering views are ... full of instruction in characteristic phases of Canadian life”.2 The aim of the films seems to have been to create the perception relayed by the Journal – i.e. that “Canadian life” is characterized by activities where income is generated and a livelihood provided by exploiting the country’s natural resources. In this way, the label Living Canada takes on numerous associated meanings: Canada as identified with nature; nature as the source of beauty, bounty and productive labor; Canada/nature as a wellspring of employment opportunities that will enhance the quality of life. The various films included in the initial programs of Living Canada confirm the emphasis on natural splendor and productive labor, with titles ranging from Niagara, the World’s Wonder and The Glorious Fraser Canyon, B.C., to Threshing Wheat on a Manitoba Farm, Trapping Salmon on the Fraser River, and Felling Pines in North West Territory. Rather than simply extolling the virtues of Canada’s natural beauty, the Living Canada series draws a causal connection between the sites displayed and the economic activities that can be derived from them. And note how the inclusion of the geographical location in each title attests to the country’s regions, emphasizing both the diversity of opportunity

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7 • “Living Canada: Selling the Nation through Images”

and the distinctiveness of those regions that constituted the nation. But balancing the sense of Canada as a land of regions and natural resources (to be observed, exploited, or both) is the idea of Canada as a place of both colonial and indigenous cultures. For that reason, recreation and settlement are also featured within the range of titles making up the Living Canada series: Ice Yachting on the St. Lawrence, The Outing of the “Old Tuque Bleu” Snow-Shoeing Club of Montreal, and Indian Canoe Races. Eschewing an initial prohibition of scenes depicting the country’s wintry climate, the camera crew came to revel in the exoticism of Canada’s winter activities, occasionally aligning cultural pastimes with entire cities (Montreal on Skates) or tying notions of nationhood to sports (Canada’s National Game, Lacrosse). As much as the initial intent of the series appears to be to define Canada as a nation in terms of the beauty and economic potential of its natural resources, the series as a whole incorporates attempts to convey the idea that Canada is also a nation already at least partly settled. This partial settlement is both by visible minorities – native Indians and Chinese – and the descendants of settlers from the British Isles and France. The presence of the former is carefully rendered so as not to discourage further emigration by the latter. For this reason, Asian immigrants and Native Canadians appear in catalogue descriptions as under the control of white men (when incorporated in depictions of logging and salmon fishing), or as unthreatening in films such as Chinese Merchant’s Funeral Procession Through Streets of Vancouver or The North American Indian at Peace Dance, where the subject is further domesticated by being labeled “picturesque”. In just one instance does a Living Canada entry appear to introduce the idea of savagery, and only then to refute it. In Is It War or Peace?, one finds “a life-size view of a warrior in his canoe, mocking and threatening his enemies, after which the expressions on his face change to that of a friendly smile and invitation to join him in smoking the Pipe of Peace”. The civilizing force of the colony is also evident in images of urban settlement, as exemplified in the catalogue description of Montreal on Skates, where a view of the Montreal Skating Rink encompasses “thousands of men, women and children all on ‘blades’”.3 Meanwhile, the entry for Labour Day Parade in Vancouver, British Columbia alludes to “a procession of marching members of Labor Societies in uniforms characteristic of their trades, headed by bands and banners, while many floats of elaborate design, bearing machinery in motion, manufacturing processes in operation, and others representing various trades, are drawn past the camera by teams of four, six and eight horses each”.4 A film such as this astutely synthesizes all the attributes of Canada promoted collectively by the Living Canada series: exotic spectacle, displayed benefits of labor and settlement, the wonders of technology, pacified minorities, and the continued existence of European traditions. If the immediate aim of the Living Canada series was to encourage immigration from the British Isles to offset that from eastern and southern Europe, the series also contained films to entice another audience, the tourist. The language of the catalogue descriptions for such entries as Banff and Its Surroundings promotes the scenic value of the sites on view, employing adjectives such as “charming” and “picturesque”, while other films, like Spearing Fish in British Columbia, make it clear that the activities on view are for sport. The potential of railways to benefit from Canada’s burgeoning reputation as a destination for outdoor sporting enthusiasts is confirmed by an initiative undertaken by the Grand Trunk Railway at the same time as the Living Canada screenings. As reported by The Toronto World, The Grand Trunk has arranged to make two extensive exhibits, one at the Sportsmen’s Show in New York City and the other of a traveling nature. The exhibits will be somewhat similar in both instances. They will consist of large

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EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL”

photographs identical with those shown at the World’s Fair last year, representing scenes along the line of the railway, in the haunts of the summer tourist, and where the huntsman finds his paradise. There will also be moving pictures illustrative of Canadian life, also mounted fish and game. The Sportsmen’s Show opens in Madison Square Gardens, on Feb. 21, and will last for two weeks, and it is expected that 150,000 people will attend ... . Subsequent exhibits will be made in all the principal cities of [a variety of] states ... . This vigorous policy of advertising means a great deal to Canada in attracting summer visitors to her confines.5 Clearly, the Grand Trunk screenings and other similarly oriented films, such as Moose-Hunting in Canada (1905) and Deer Hunting in Canada (1908) were aimed primarily at American hunters, whose proximity to the Canadian border rendered them the most likely to transform what Gaumont labeled “a veritable hunting trip for the audience”6 into an actual sportsmen’s holiday. Perhaps most important to our understanding of the way in which Living Canada works to construct a Canadian identity is the effect that the series had on Canadians themselves, remembering that for those in Southern Ontario, the mountains of the West were as foreign as the Alps, while for the (Anglo) inhabitants of urban Quebec the prairies and the bustling town of Winnipeg would be emblematic of the idea of progress and modernization defining the emergent nation. Two of the core members of the Bioscope Company of Canada, Cliff Denham and Guy Bradford, organized distinct programs for exhibition in Canada, beginning with a six-week run in Montreal in the last months of 1903.7 Newspaper records of the programs shown in Toronto in January and May of 1904 reveal three aspects of the Living Canada series which we would do well to remember when assessing its value as a tool for defining nationhood: first, that the collection of films deviated from that listed in the Urban catalogue; second, that the programming was changed within a run; third, that various aspects of the series’ presentation further altered and inflected what was shown on the screen. When we view the list of films shown at Toronto’s Massey Hall during Living Canada’s two separate runs in January and May of 1904, we find that the films of the series are offset by numerous other titles, including Urban’s The Unseen World, The Rise and Fall of Napoleon, and films related to the Russo-Japanese War. Interestingly, press coverage for the first week of the January run is devoted primarily to a film entitled John Bull and the Tariff Reform Question in England, a satirical short which dramatizes reaction to a controversial British fiscal policy of the day. That a filmic representation of England’s approach to free trade should take precedence in the Toronto press’s response to a program advertised primarily as Living Canada, speaks to another aspect of national identity: the country’s place within the British Empire. One can note, for example, the distinctly British emphasis of a late addition to the May 1903 bill: the running of the King’s Plate horse race. This locally filmed actualité, the first example of its kind to be incorporated into a pre-existing program in Toronto, according to historian Robert Gutteridge,8 indicates again how strong the ties to Britain were at this time. The Globe, in fact, described the Living Canada program itself as “pictures which illustrate scenes in Canada and England chiefly”.9 And the 1902 precursor to Living Canada was entitled Canada: England’s Premier Colony. More than one-half of the white population of the Empire’s dominions resided in Canada, a racial status that gave it a particular cultural consistency compared to other colonies. In its British production origins, and in the constitution of its Canadian programs, Living Canada provided a distinct notion of a Canadian identity, one indebted to a British heritage even as it emerged as more modern and “progressive”. One also

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7 • “Living Canada: Selling the Nation through Images”

sees this in the selection of live music for each of the Living Canada programs at Massey Hall in 1903. The 48th Highlanders’ Band provided accompaniment: presumably, the presence of a musical group indebted to a Scottish heritage offered a distinctly Canadian flavor. Newspaper reports do not indicate whether the Living Canada programs also featured a lecturer; certainly James Freer had toured with his films in that capacity when they were shown in England in 1898–89. How the Living Canada programs might have been affected by a lecturer speaking to issues of Canadian nationhood we can only speculate, but it might be instructive to point to another figure who provided illustrated lectures promoting recreational tourism during a similar period. That person is Frank Yeigh, a popular lecturer who toured Canada and the United Kingdom, providing talks on the British Empire which assumed a decidedly pro-Canadian slant from 1901 onward, inaugurated by a lecture from that year entitled, fittingly enough, “Twentieth-Century Canada”. Yeigh’s talks appear to parallel the agenda of Living Canada, insofar as they are equal parts travelogue, descriptions of the country’s natural resources, and an inducement to emigrate. For example, in a lecture entitled “Canada’s Golden West”, Yeigh speaks to what The Globe characterizes as “[Canada’s] newly discovered heritage, which, with repeated description, discloses more of its inexhaustible beauty and abundance”. Near the end of his lecture, Yeigh “commented on the mixed elements that make up the population of the ‘hopeful, wakeful west’, and elicited loud applause by his figures on the tide of immigration from across the border into Canada”.10 In this way, Yeigh draws a link between the desirability of Canada’s natural resources and its reputation as an immigrant magnet, while also stirring nationalist sentiments amongst his Canadian audience. While linking Canada to England quite literally in lectures such as “Britain and Brittany”, Yeigh still managed to celebrate the virtues of the colony, as the Toronto World pointed out: “On the homeward run the coasts of Cornwall and Evon were visited, as well as Wales and the Isle of Man, ending in Toronto, with the remark by the lecturer that wherever a Canadian roams, in lands old or new, he returns to his native shores believing more firmly than ever that Canada is one of the best countries in the world”.11 When lecturing abroad, Yeigh managed to combine national boosterism with acknowledgement of the role the United Kingdom could play in contributing to the future of Canada: the Globe reported that “Mr. Yeigh was flattering to the Scot in Canada. He would like to see more of our country-men there, and he would also like to see more money used to exploit the resources of our transatlantic colony ... . The Scotsman reports that the large audiences present were deeply interested in the graphic description of the natural features of the Dominion, its rich resources and vast potentialities”.12 Apparently, audiences in the U.K. were equally taken with the canny work of promotion enacted by Living Canada, which counted on the same combination of elements to push the country as an investment (be it of capital or manpower) and a nation-state, or more accurately, a nation-state as investment. In this way, Living Canada is emblematic of how cinema became the ideal vehicle for helping to define a sense of national identity in the modern era, where technology acts as an emissary designed to sell – quite literally – the imagery of nationhood.

Notes 1.

Clifford Denham, “Recollections of the Canadian Bioscope Company”, Film Weekly, Year Book of the Canadian Motion Picture Industry, 1951, 29–30 – cited in Robert W. Gutteridge, Magic Moments: First Twenty Years of Moving Pictures in Toronto, 1894–1914 (Whitby, Ont.: Gutteridge-Pratley Publications, 2000), 224.

67

EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL” 2.

British Journal of Photography (23 January 1903), 70 – quoted in Jan Morris, Pax Britannica (London: Faber & Faber, 1998), 35.

3. 4.

Charles Urban Trading Co. Ltd. Catalogue (February 1905), 130. Charles Urban Trading Co. Ltd. Catalogue (February 1905), 135.

5.

The Toronto World (1 March 1905), 6.

6. 7.

Gaumont and Co., The “Elge” Lists 71 (November 1905), 13. Morris, 35.

8.

Gutteridge, Magic Moments, 107.

9. 10.

The Globe (4 January 1904), 10. The Globe (20 October 1902), 12.

11.

The Toronto World (22 October 1901), 2.

12.

The Globe (1 July 1901), 10.

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8

Early cinema and “the Polish question” •

Early cinema and “the Polish question”

Sheila Skaff he failure of the first local filmmakers to earn broad recognition for their achievements fulfilled the expectations of the inhabitants of the Polish nation – a stateless entity in parts of the Kingdom of Prussia, Russian Empire, and Austro-Hungarian Empire comprising ethnically, religiously, and linguistically diverse populations committed to the restoration of eighteenth century borders – perfectly. In no other aspect of Polish national culture was fatalism more widespread, more profound, or more advantageous for foreign entrepreneurs. In Warsaw, this fatalism was manifest in initial praise, and eventual dismissal, of the first short films to document the daily routines and weekend pleasures of the city’s inhabitants. Following an initial period of enthrallment with local actualities, Warsaw audiences expressed disappointment in them and shunned local filmmakers in favor of traveling exhibitors. The first local filmmaker’s declining prosperity should be attributed to apprehension concerning the continued non-resolution of “the Polish question” (what the West should do for the millions of stateless Poles), and the complex relationship of modernity, nationalism, and cinema in Eastern Europe at the end of the 19th century. Domestic pressure placed on public figures under the empires forced the first exhibitors to join visible social-political groups. They could have been traveling entrepreneurs from outside the empires, representatives of one empire, religious leaders, positivists who saw parallels between technological advancement and nationhood, socialists, national democrats whose vision of the nation excluded all minorities, Marxists, or struggling members of the disenfranchised intellectual elite. Belonging was not optional, however. Inhabitants of the stateless nation demanded that their public figures – including entertainers – make their interests clear. In light of the ambivalence toward complex ideologies that had sprouted from a century of overly verbalized, and ultimately failed, revolutions, this was no surprise. The first Warsaw-based filmmaker, Kazimierz Prószy〉ski, however, had a strictly non-political and non-commercial curiosity about live photography. He did not claim that the cinematic apparatus was part of a larger picture of modernity or that its records were somehow truthful. Financial profit did not interest him. He did not intend to astonish viewers with the unfamiliar but only to present motion pictures of his native city to local and regional audiences. Yet he did not receive the recognition that he expected during his years in Warsaw. Poet Anatol Stern’s description of Prószyñski concisely illustrates the filmmaker’s fate. Stern recalls, I still remember well a meeting and conversation with Kazimierz Prószy〉ski, a pale, thin man of somewhat diabolic appearance, who argued with the Lumière brothers over the victor’s palm in the invention of the motion picture apparatus. What’s more, I have been always deeply convinced that, if Prószy〉ski

T

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EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL”

Fig. 1. Pleograf apparatus.

had been born under a lucky star, then his Pleograf would have replaced the Cinematographe and today, along with millions of people, we would be talking about world “pleography” and not “cinematography”.1 An engineer and photographer’s son, Prószy〉ski created the first model of his cameraprojector, the Pleograf (alternately called the Kinematograf and the BioPleograf ), between

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8 • Early cinema and “the Polish question”

1894 and 1896 in Warsaw, when he was in his mid-twenties. He was aided in his endeavors by many friends and family members, who comprised the region’s elite in terms of scientific thought. In 1898 and 1899, he offered public demonstrations of his invention in Warsaw, where pictures of the apparatus and frames of his first short films appeared in newspapers (Fig. 1). Prószy〉ski’s goals in constructing the Pleograf had little to do with nationalism. He sought to eliminate the flickering of images on the screen that was endemic to early cinema, reduce the noise associated with the first demonstrations, and make the camera inexpensive enough for use by amateurs. The Pleograf was similar to the cinematic apparatuses that were constructed in other parts of the world except for one unique feature. This was a special type of clasp, which functioned as a device for advancing the film. Instead of placing the perforations on the edges of the film, Prószy〉ski placed them between the 45 x 38 millimeter frames. The film advanced with the help of little cogs placed underneath the lens and put into motion by a crank.2 In his biography of the inventor, W»adys»aw Jewsiewicki writes that Prószy〉ski strived “to adapt the camera to the needs of science, education, and use by amateurs. These intentions, modest, but unusually difficult to realize, completely absorbed the inventor, who wrote that he devised the Pleograf and drew it in detail in one night, but that it took several months of patient work to carry out the first model, and a couple of years to perfect its details.”3 In 1899, Prószy〉ski developed a variant of the camera (BioPlegraf) as well as a smaller, lighter camera specifically for amateurs. The BioPlegraf, which was a stationary, commercial-use camera-projector that used an arc lamp for light, differed from the first Pleograf in that it used two lenses and two strips of film in order to eliminate flickering. It also had a device that would allow a lecturer, when using a film to illustrate a point, to show the same film multiple times. The first, widely praised demonstrations of the BioPlegraf took place in the chemical laboratory of the Wawelberg and Rotwand Technical School on 23 June 1899. Demonstrations followed in the Museum of Industry and Agriculture, the Association of Technicians, and other institutions in Warsaw. Early actualités made with the camera-projector included Aleje Ujazdowskie [Ujazdowski Avenue], Ulica Franciszka〉ska [Francziska〉ska Street], Przed pomnikiem Mickiewicza w Warszawie [In Front of the Mickiewicz Monument in Warsaw], and Kurier Warszawski [The Warsaw Courier], which showed the bustle of newspaper carriers in front of the newspaper’s headquarters.4 At first, most observers considered the Pleograf a victory for the educational, public and private life of the nation. Tygodnik Ilustrowany [The Illustrated Weekly] called it less of an object for play than for scientific education.5 In a piece in the Polish-language Gazeta Toru〉ska [The Torun Gazette], an anonymous correspondent described the Pleograf as very light, inexpensive, and generally perfect after seeing a demonstration of it in Warsaw.6 According to another article, the Pleograf was simpler and quieter, functioned more easily, and allowed more exact movement of the film through the camera than did the Cinematographe.7 In April 1898, an editorial in Kurier Warszawski claimed that the difference between the Pleograf and Edison’s invention was that the film in the Pleograf did not flicker and, therefore, did not hurt the viewer’s eyes or ruin the illusion. The editorial claimed that the apparatus did not make noise. In addition, it stated that the Pleograf allowed the images to move through the projector twice as fast as the Edison apparatus. A different June 1898 Kurier Warszawski editorial praised the Pleograf and claimed that it could aid surgeons during medical operations, zoologists while studying the ways that animals and birds move, and teachers during their lectures.8 The praise continued for a year. Novelist Boles»aw Prus declared Prószy〉ski a herald

71

EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL”

of positivism, claiming that the inventor secured his nation’s right to exist.9 An article published in the trade magazine, wiat»o: miesi⎢cznik poÑwi⎢cony fotografii i wiadomoÑciom z ni zwizanym [The Light: A Monthly Magazine Devoted to Photography and Photography News], in 1899, reads, Prószy〉ski’s camera, like all such apparatuses, must fulfill two functions. The first is to take motion pictures. Prószy〉ski’s apparatus fulfills this function flawlessly. We watched various pictures taken with this camera, such as cavalry maneuvers, exercises, artillery fire, the lively play of children in a garden, and similar scenes. It is impossible to find fault in these pictures. The second function, namely projecting the captured images on the screen, is designed by Mr. Prószy〉ski in a completely different way than it has been designed thus far by foreign makers of the cinematograph, and the main purpose of introducing a change in the invention is the complete elimination of the flickering that ruins the impression for motion picture audiences. Mr. Prószy〉ski’s basic idea, in our opinion, might be, if not to get rid of the flickering completely, to reduce it to the minimum possible. The idea is basically rational and can be implemented; nevertheless it requires impeccable precision in the workmanship and regulation of the apparatus. For our part, we wish Mr. Prószy〉ski the greatest success in completing his project and we are deeply convinced that good wishes will accompany him in his endeavors from all of us, who delight in all of the manifestations of our development and who desire the development of our own strengths.10 Prószy〉ski took advantage of every opportunity to project his films in Warsaw, a city that quickly became the center of filmmaking activity due to its relatively large population and convenient railway connection to Berlin. He appeared at such events as a festival for the terminally ill, and at well-known indoor and outdoor exhibition sites. He projected motion picture advertisements on makeshift screens in major city intersections. He also traveled to other parts of the Russian Empire. For example, he participated in an agricultural exhibition in Vilnius and gave a Pleograf demonstration in Kiev. He even traveled westward, to Berlin and Paris.11 Prószy〉ski’s opportunities to exhibit the Pleograf in various locations of the AustroHungarian Empire might have been made difficult by poor rail connections from Warsaw. He did appear at least in Cracow and Lviv. A quote from Juliusz Kaden-Bandrowski, however, points to the fatalism that accompanied early cinema exhibition in that part of the Polish territories. Ethic Poles in this empire generally suffered from poverty more than did ethnic Poles in the other territories, even though they were allowed more freedom to express themselves in the Polish language. These factors may have influenced audiences’ immediate refusal to accept Prószy〉ski’s projections in the region. Kaden-Bandrowski recalls one of the first demonstrations in Lviv: “During the break, some people said that, in spite of everything, the show would not make it to the end because, sooner or later, something must go wrong. And still others were certain that it all had to be some kind of false imitation and, sooner or later, it would turn out to be a devilish hoax.”12 The audience’s skepticism reflects the general frustration created by the combination of poverty and fractured national identity in the region. It is unlikely that the correspondant describing Prószy〉ski’s work for readers in The Torun Gazette actually had the opportunity to see a Pleograf demonstration in Torun. After all, cities in the Kingdom of Prussia, where Polish culture was relatively repressed, are remarkably absent from Prószy〉ski’s list of venues, and the Polish-language Torun Gazette was an anomaly in the Kingdom. As Mariusz Guzek explains in Filmowa Bydgoszcz, 1896–1939, information about early cinema was most often located in

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German-language newspapers. Not only did this lead, ostensibly, to the Germanization of cinema in the western lands, it added a cultural aspect to the physical distance between Polish speakers in the Russian Empire and those in the Kingdom of Prussia. Guzek writes, “Popularizing the demand for an apparatus such as Prószy〉ski’s Pleograf seemed exceedingly daring in a situation, in which the distance between Warsaw and the first demonstrations in Bydgoszcz and Torun did not bode well for the future of the ‘light pictures’”.13 Prószy〉ski did put the Pleograf to use in Warsaw’s first production company, also named Pleograf, which Prószy〉ski founded in late 1901 or early 1902. Over the next year and a half, the company completed and exhibited at least thirteen productions averaging two hundred to three hundred meters in length. These included actualités documenting ambulance runs, horse races, sledding in Warsaw parks, a summer concert of the philharmonic, part of a live opera performance, and a one-shot fictional comedy, Powrót birbanta [The Return of the Merry Fellow], in which a young drunk attempts to walk home after an evening of heavy drinking. Yet the difficulty with obtaining high-quality celluloid, the camera’s technical problems, audiences’ declining interest, and a lack of trust in Prószy〉ski eventually turned entrepreneurs away from the Pleograf company. Interest had fallen so greatly that Prószy〉ski failed to win any awards for the BioPlegraf at Warsaw’s first cinematographic exhibit in September 1901. (According to Jewsiewicki, the jury claimed that Prószy〉ski had refused to explain how his apparatus worked.)14 The middle perforations in Pleograf films that allowed for smooth movement of the film through the camera differed from the side perforations of foreign films. Ostensibly for this reason, foreign films could not be projected using the Pleograf – a fact that turned the invention’s major attribute into a perceived inadequacy. Despite their initial enthusiasm, critics ultimately associated the apparatus with its inventor’s shortcomings, which included his failure to solve the system’s technical problems, to make films outside of Warsaw, and to excite audiences in a sustained way. In short, they condemned him for failing to do what the foreign exhibitors were doing. Audiences in Poland never took to the Pleograf. Beyond those in Prószy〉ski’s family and close friends, investors avoided the company and its founder, who showed no interest in record-keeping or potential material gain. Still, the most intriguing aspect of Prószy〉ski’s failures has to do with his lack of interest in serving the integration of the Polish territories into a single nation. As the local liaison for film culture, critics and audiences alike expected him to satisfy their need for confirmation that their imagined nation’s aesthetic was as intriguing as that of other European nations. As much as for the Pleograf, therefore, Prószy〉ski was known for his aversion to what he considered lofty nationalist slogans.15 In his short films, he allowed Warsaw to appear unoriginal and flawed. Devoid of national pride, his exhibitions may have seemed overly cool, even depressing. As a result of a broad, categorical dissatisfaction with both himself and his films, Prószy〉ski closed the Pleograf company in 1903. He then returned to Belgium in 1906, in order to finish his mechanical engineering degree. In the same year, he patented his final version of the Pleograf in France, England, and Germany. Later, he worked on his inventions in Belgium, France, and England. The story of the rise and fall of the Pleograf is not unique. In “Early Cinema and Modernity in Latin America”, Ana M. López examines the context in which the Cinematographe was welcomed on the South American continent. Her study supports the argument that Prószy〉ski would have had more success if he had catered to his audiences’ demand for films that portrayed regions of the world with markedly higher or lower levels of modernization. López offers insight into the ways that non-Western

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European audiences expressed excitement and eventual disenchantment with locally produced cinematic apparatuses. Describing the fragmentary process of modernity, she rejects a teleological narrative of cinema’s development because, “In turn-of-the-century Latin America, modernity was, above all, still a fantasy and a profound desire”.16 She writes that the “aesthetics of astonishment was complicated by the ontological and epistemological status of the apparatus. The cinematic attraction is ‘attractive’ in and of itself and as an import. However, beyond any purported fit with the experience of modernity in local urban life, its appeal is – and perhaps first of all – the appeal of the other, the shock of difference.”17 If the important political and cultural differences between Eastern Europe and Latin America in this time period are set aside, the introduction of cinema in the two regions seems strikingly similar. López continues, “The cinema’s complex images of distance and otherness problematized the meaning of locality and self. On the one hand, the cinema fed the national self-confidence that its own modernity was ‘in progress’ by enabling viewers to share and participate in the experience of modernity as developed elsewhere, to respond to the thrill. On the other hand, to do so, the national subject was also caught up in a dialectics of seeing: viewers had to assume the position of spectators and become voyeurs of, rather than participants in, modernity.”18 As in Latin America, the relationship with modernity in Eastern Europe varied from region to region. The differences in technical quality and cultural significance between exhibitions in Poznan (in the Kingdom of Prussia) and Lviv (in the Austro-Hungarian Empire) may have been more pronounced than the differences between exhibitions in Poznan and Berlin, for example. Prószy〉ski’s lack of interest in creating a nationalist agenda in order to bridge this gap may have contributed to his lack of success outside of Warsaw. At the same time, his non-embellished depictions of daily life failed to satisfy audiences in his own hometown. It was not uncommon for the first filmmakers from Eastern Europe to search for recognition outside of their native lands. Ostensibly, the reason for this may have been the impossibility of establishing a national film industry in an occupied region on par with that of France or the United States. However, Prószy〉ski’s fate had as much to do with audiences’ distrust of local filmmaking in general, which, in its non-critical portrayal of daily life, accepted the status quo. In order to be successful at home, local filmmakers would have had to incorporate some version of a national ideal in their films that could co-exist with reality; the first films were vehicles for audience identification with a myriad of inconsistencies in their daily and long-term existence. Local film had to become national – in an abstract, non-threatening form that all of the political groups vying for attention at the time could accept – in order to become desirable. Immune to these pressures, traveling exhibitors fared better, particularly in the Russian Empire and Austro-Hungarian Empire. Perhaps they were seen as impartial, even ineffectual; or perhaps sympathy for the national cause was the only requirement for acceptance – the reasons are not clear, but certainly expectations were not as great. The situation is similar to the one that López describes when she writes, “The earliest Latin American films recirculated the parameters of modernity as cinematically experienced elsewhere, while simultaneously enabling viewers to participate in and promote whatever forms of that modernity were available locally”.19 Prószy〉ski’s major shortcoming was that he was more interested in the cinematic apparatus itself than in the statements that the apparatus could make. To audiences of the time, he seemed unwilling to communicate the reasons for his interest in cinema. The skepticism with which he eventually was received – as expressed in reviews of his projections and memoirs – was

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due to his seeming lack of interest in political, financial, or social gain. At some point, he would have had to put forward an answer to “the Polish Question” in order to be taken seriously. His lack of a firm position on matters of national importance left him vulnerable to criticism by nationalists and dismissal by others. It is important to note that the similarity between Eastern Europe and Latin America becomes less pronounced as the language-based national differences in Eastern Europe are taken into consideration. López’s construction of “nationness” may be sufficient for understanding Latin America but not Eastern Europe. López writes, “Beyond the drive to identify ‘local’ modern thrills – almost, but not quite, the same as those of the imported views – or to record current events, the new technology was used for the benefit of the imagined national community, to negotiate precisely the conflicts generated by the dilemmas of a modernity that was precariously balanced between indigenous traditions and foreign influences, between nationalist aspiration and internationalist desires.” As an exhibitor, Prószy〉ski would have had to acknowledge the relationship between the Polish language and nationalist aspirations, and immunize his product against foreign influences. He would have had to inflect “the epiphenomenal manifestations of modernity and their perceptual thrills”, as López writes, “with explicit exaltations of nationness – these are not just ‘our’ railroads but symbols of our national belongingness, in a sense as ‘modern’ as the new technological forms themselves – linked in many instances to current events”.20 A notice placed in a Buenos Aires newspaper in late 1897 announcing where and when a film would be made was strikingly similar to one that Prószy〉ski placed soon after in Warsaw newspapers. Why, then, did he not receive the same type of response? It is tempting to attribute the difference to class structure. López claims, “In Latin America as a whole, the cinema was, from its earliest moments, closely aligned with those in power, be they wealthy and socially prominent or simply in government, and this alignment was a first step towards nationalist projects”.21 At this time, the Polish territories lacked local elites with as much power as the turn-of-the-twentieth century leaders of Latin American nations. Prószy〉ski would have had a difficult time finding a single, local, political leader to promote through his films. In any case, he showed little interest in using film to gather support for any political cause. It is perhaps for this reason that Warsaw’s inhabitants demonstrated dwindling excitement over the prospect of seeing themselves on screen. Because it neither aligned them with those seeking to increase their power nor made them feel that they were participating in modernity, local filmmaking eventually failed to thrill audiences. Few situations were as advantageous for traveling entrepreneurs as an Eastern Europe that was carved and divided among empires. Films presented by traveling exhibitors in the partitioned lands influenced the political and cultural reality of the day more than films made and presented by local exhibitors. The question of how they influenced it is more difficult to determine. What might people in a stateless nation such as Poland have seen in the first foreign films? Malgorzata Hendrykowska, for example, has claimed that early cinema created the illusion that viewers were participating in the observed events themselves. She writes, “Today almost every child knows how the skyscrapers of New York, the canals of Venice and the plazas of Paris look. At that time, viewers – most often those, who had never stuck their noses beyond the borders of the local dive bar in their entire lives – saw these for the first time. I think that films were often the source of information about the world for them.”22 It may be worthwhile to reconsider the appeal of the foreign in early cinema in Eastern Europe. The main reason is that people’s first source of information about the world – and undoubtedly, the one upon which they relied the most – was family. Would the

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first audiences have been awed by the skyscrapers of New York or by the possibility of finding work on the docks, whose existence was seemingly proven by the signs on the screen? Would they have been awed by the canals of Venice or by thoughts of the Polish Legion in Italy? Did they search the images of the plazas of Paris for their expatriated cousins? In short, and to turn their criticisms of Prószy〉ski back onto them, what did they really want from foreign films? Perhaps they wanted confirmation of the forward movement of their own territory’s place in a modernizing agenda that seemed to blow in with the westerly winds. In the end, Prószy〉ski failed not because of a lack of vision for the cinema, but because of a lack of vision for the nation. In order to succeed in one territory after another, even exhibitors had to have an answer – however simply or falsely stated – to “the Polish Question”.

Notes 1.

Stanis»aw Janicki, W starym polskim kinie (Warsaw: Krajowa Agencja Wydawnicza, 1985), 11.

2.

W»adys»aw Jewsiewicki, Kazimierz Prószy〉ski (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Interpress, 1974), 18–19.

3.

Jewsiewicki, Kazimierz Prószy〉ski, 23.

4.

Ibid., 26–32.

5.

Irena Nowak-Zaorska, Polski film o wiatowy w okresie mi⎢dzywojennym (Wroc»aw: Zak»ad Narodowy im. Ossolinskich, 1969), 46.

6.

Mariusz Guzek, Filmowa Bydgoszcz: 1896–1939 (Toru〉: Dom Wydawniczy Duet, 2004), 14.

7.

“Pleograf”, editorial, Kurier Warszawski 184 (1899), Stefania Beylin, ed., Nowiny i nowinki filmowe: 1896–1939 (Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Artystyczne i Filmowe, 1973), 24.

8.

Jewsiewicki, Kazimierz Prószy〉ski, 22–23.

9.

Stanis»aw Fuks, Kazimierz Prószy〉ski: monografia bibliograficzna 1881–1975 (Warsaw: Filmoteka Polska, 1980), n.p. wiat»o: miesi⎢cznik poÑwi⎢cony fotografii i wiadomoÑciom z ni

10.

Bio-Pleograf p. Prószy〉skiego”, zwizanym 8 (1899), 345–346.

11.

W»adys»aw Banaszkiewicz and Witold Witczak, Historia filmu polskiego: Tom I, 1895–1929 (Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Artystyczne i Filmowe, 1966), 41.

12.

Janicki, W starym polskim kinie, 14.

13.

Guzek, Filmowa Bydgoszcz, 1896–1939, 15.

14.

Jewsiewicki, Kazimierz Prószy〉ski, 33.

15.

Janicki, W starym polskim kinie, 13.

16.

Ana M. López, “Early Cinema and Modernity in Latin America”, in Valentina Vitali and Paul Willemen (eds), Theorizing National Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 2006), 210.

17.

Lopez, “Early Cinema and Modernity in Latin America”, 213.

18.

Ibid.

19.

Ibid., 214.

20.

Ibid., 217.

21.

Ibid., 218.

22.

Ma»gorzata Hendrykowska, „Kinematograf na prze»omie stuleci – w poszukiwaniu formu»y rozwoju. Kilka uwag o filmie na ziemiach polskich przed rokiem 1908”, in Jolanta Lemann-Zajiek (ed.), Polska kultura filmowa do 1939 roku (ºódï: Pa½stwowa Wyósza Szko»a Filmowa, Telewizyna i Teatralna, 2003), 28.

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PART II Colonialism/Imperialism

77

9

Our Navy and patriotic entertainment in Brighton at the start of the Boer War •

Our Navy and patriotic entertainment

in Brighton at the start of the Boer War

Frank Gray ritain, as an imperial power, dominated the world at the end of nineteenth century. Jan Morris described it succinctly as, “the largest empire in the history of the world, comprising nearly a quarter of the landmass of the earth, and a quarter of its population”.1 Its role as a global superpower was to assert its political and economic authority, especially in Africa and Asia. The so-called Pax Britannica (British peace) was a product of this status. It was expressed profoundly in 1900 by the fact that Britain and its global interests were defended by its navy – the largest navy in the world. From 1899 to 1913, a film and magic lantern entertainment entitled Our Navy was performed throughout Britain and the British colonies. It celebrated the Royal Navy and the British imperial spirit. It was unashamedly patriotic and designed to celebrate the nation, its greatness and its naval traditions. This paper outlines the history of Our Navy and then positions it within a very precise exhibition context, Brighton at the start of the Boer War 1899–1900, in order to account for its early popularity.

B

West’s Our Navy Our Navy was devised by the photographer and cinematographer, Alfred John West (1858–1937) of Southsea, near Portsmouth on the south coast of England. Portsmouth and its harbor were the home of the Royal Navy and its most iconic vessel, HMS Victory – Nelson’s last ship. In 1881, West began to specialize in marine photography, photographing ships of the Royal Navy, racing yachts and key events such as the America’s Cup and the Jubilee Review of the Fleet. In 1897, he began to make his first 35mm films, recording naval training exercises. In 1898, West joined HMS Crescent for a three-month cruise during which he filmed life on board ship. On its return to Portsmouth, he organized a screening of his films from the cruise for the ship’s company. Its success led to a special performance of the same show to Queen Victoria and then to its first public presentations employing film, lantern slides, a singer and musicians during the course of a two-hour performance. His show was now entitled Our Navy. Our Navy drew the attention of the Navy League and, with its support, West was invited to present his show in London in early November of 1898. The British Navy League had been established in 1895 to support the Royal Navy. Its belief was that Britain, its empire and its economic interests depended on sea power and that effective lobbying and educational activities were needed in order to promote this ideology, especially to young people. These performances in London marked an important development in

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the staging of Our Navy because they saw the introduction of both a lecturer and sound effects. West described this event in these terms. The stage was profusely decorated, the screen being draped with the Union Jack and the White Ensign flanked by palms and banks of flowers. A large orchestra was engaged together with a professional lady singer. The Hall was packed with an appreciative audience which included some of the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, members of the Navy League, and many representatives of the Press [...]. I decided to act as compère myself and to introduce sound effects, as I considered that it would not do for the audience to see, for instance, a gun fired and hear no report, and so I arranged with someone behind the screen to hit a big drum at the right moment. With such effect was this done that it quite startled the audience, particularly the ladies, and caused roars of laughter. Sheets of coarse sandpaper rubbed together gave a realistic enough impression of the splashing of waves, and words of command delivered at the right juncture ... .2 Reviews of these performances in London highlighted the show’s ability to serve as a powerful advocate and recruiting agent for the Royal Navy. The show toured England and Scotland in 1899 and then found a home at the Polytechnic in London, beginning 14 October 1899. The Polytechnic Institution had opened on Regent Street in 1838 and was devoted to science and spectacle with demonstrations of modern industrial machines, lectures and optical entertainment. At the Polytechnic, to quote West, “the show came to anchor”,3 and would remain in residence for the next fourteen years (Fig. 1). From its London base, the show’s great popularity led to the establishment of touring companies for Britain and its colonies, especially Canada and Australia. West’s phenomenal success serves as an important measure of the imperial and militaristic nature of this period. This was a well-crafted imperial entertainment that delivered an unambiguous expression of national pride and duty. It represented the modernity of Britain through its representation of the country’s sea power and through its use of projected films and slides and their inclusion and combination within a unique multi-media display of sound and vision. Writing in 1936, West was very clear about Our Navy’s ideological role. [... ] I was the first to take films of scenes at sea, and to my program were later added films of the Army, the Mercantile Marine and the Dominions overseas. Thus was formed an entertainment of imperial interest, in which I was greatly encouraged by the intense enthusiasm with which it was received by the public. [... .] The Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty and the members of the Army Council recognized that my efforts were proving splendid propaganda for recruiting purposes, and granted me every facility for obtaining films. I felt that in stimulating patriotic interest with my pictures, I was making myself useful to my country ... .4

Film exhibition in Brighton in 1899 and 1900 To understand the early popularity of Our Navy in Britain, its first exhibition at the English seaside resort of Brighton in early 1900 provides a valuable context. At the end of the nineteenth century and the Victorian era, Brighton and its twin-town Hove were a distinctive conurbation on the Sussex coast of England that had undergone a radical transformation across that century. In 1800, Brighton was known as a genteel, fashionable royal resort but after the coming of the railway in the 1840s, it literally exploded into a Victorian “Las Vegas” of hotels, guest houses, theatres, music halls, piers,

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9 • Our Navy and patriotic entertainment in Brighton at the start of the Boer War

Fig. 1. Playbill for Our Navy, The Polytechnic, 1900.

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amusements, an aquarium, restaurants and shops. Over two miles of the seafront was developed to accommodate this ‘pleasure world’, known as ‘London-by-the-sea’. In the 1890s, each year millions of visitors visited this Victorian tourist centre of amusement and spectacle. Film exhibition began in Brighton (and Britain) in 1896 and over the next five years five distinct film exhibition modes emerged in this town. We find films: (i) as an element, or “turn”, within either a touring or fixed-venue music hall show; (ii) within dedicated film programs of mixed subjects from 1896, such as that presented by the American Biograph; (iii) as part of demonstrations of photographic and cinematographic apparatus; (iv) as elements within pantomimes, magic lantern shows and magic shows; (v) integrated into thematic multi-media productions such as Our Navy. With modes one to four, the film program consisted of a range of subject matter embracing both fiction and non-fiction and usually with a lecturer and musical accompaniment. The most prevalent film exhibition mode in Brighton in this period was that film program that was presented as an element within a music hall show (mode one). In this respect, Brighton was mirroring the success that this same exhibition mode was having in other urban centers in the country. Mode five, as we will see, did not emerge in Brighton until 1900. For Brighton, the Alhambra Opera House and Music Hall and its use of film best represents this history especially given the fact that for most of this period films were only exhibited at this single venue in the town. This seafront theatre that had opened in 1888 with 2,000 seats, was in the very heart of the town and in good proximity to its piers, hotels and other services. The Alhambra offered no films within its programming in 1896, waiting instead until late 1897 to begin its relationship with ‘animated photography’. The next two years saw a dramatic rise in the number of weeks of film “turns” at the Alhambra. Estimates of the number of screening weeks at the Alhambra in this period are: 1896 no screenings 1897 4 weeks (The American Biograph and the Vitamotograph) 1898 15 weeks (the Vitamotograph and the Edison-Thomas Pictures) 1899 29 weeks (continuation of the Edison-Thomas Pictures under the new name of Edison’s Life Size Pictures) 1900 52 weeks (the Edison-Thomas War Pictures)5 The film exhibition pattern that emerged at the Alhambra in 1898 and 1899 was one being determined by the decision to exploit film during the Christmas, Easter and summer periods – the busiest parts of the year for the town’s tourist industry. The steady increase in exhibition weeks is evidence of the Alhambra’s success in developing an audience for film. However from a London perspective, the case of the Alhambra in Brighton presents a cautious and tentative approach to the addition of film into the nightly mixed program of acts. In comparison, London music halls such as the Alhambra and the Empire became associated very quickly with the programming of film “turns” from the spring of 1896 and venues such as these soon provided permanent homes for film exhibitors and their films. The larger volume of the London music hall audiences and the correlated ability to afford the cost of contracting film exhibitors probably accounts for this much more confidant approach. The start of the Boer War in October 1899 initiated a very new use of film by the Alhambra in Brighton. The arrival of what the Alhambra called its “War Pictures” in late November 1899 and their continuation throughout 1900 signaled a new emphasis on war-related films and the guaranteed presence of film ‘packages’ within every day’s

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9 • Our Navy and patriotic entertainment in Brighton at the start of the Boer War

program. Film screenings now became an expected and constant part of each program and not just a seasonal feature. The War Pictures offered Brighton and its visitors simplified representations of the conflict and served, it can be argued, a collective need for representations of the war that could visualize and dramatize this “news”. Ideologically, this practice was related to the war news as found in newspapers and periodicals but obviously quite different in terms of its means of production and its exhibition and its consumption within a “public” venue such as a music hall. In this new context, film, as a cultural and a commercial form, was becoming less associated with visual amusement. It was now being re-positioned through the extensive use of “actualities” (generic scenes of people and places) and “topicalities” (specific events) so that it could engage directly with this conflict. By doing so, it could both invoke and provoke a collective sense of patriotism and national unity. This re-alignment enabled the Alhambra to present itself as serving the domestic war effort. We also have to imagine, given the absence of all relevant business records, that this theatre also appreciated the significant new income that resulted from this decision. Of course, what happened to the Alhambra’s program and its balance sheet was not a unique phenomenon in Britain. British popular culture had become a war culture very quickly in late 1899, a development that was first mobilized by conservative political interests and then sustained by the popular press, popular song, popular poetry, the music hall and film production companies. As a consequence, there was a rapid increase in war-related film screenings in music halls throughout the country and this boom in exhibition was made possible by the fact that film production companies, such as the Warwick Trading Company, were actively exploiting and fuelling this war culture through their production of new war-related films. The war-related elements within the Alhambra’s program of the final week of November 1899 established the theatre’s new film programming consciousness. At the conclusion of the program during this week, one that contained a typical mix of different acts, the theatre presented a war-themed ensemble. It featured a reading of Rudyard Kipling’s new war poem, “The Absent-Minded Beggar”, a related tableau devoted to the British soldier, a patriotic song and, in conclusion, films related to the beginning of the conflict. The poem by Kipling urged the nation to support the British soldiers and their families. This combination of elements placed the chosen films within a very charged and prescribed context. A Brighton newspaper described this patriotic spectacle in these terms: “The Absent-Minded Beggar” has reached the Alhambra, and on Monday evening was received with the greatest enthusiasm. By permission of “The Daily Mail” Kipling’s now well-known poem was recited by Mr. Arthur Ring (from Mr. George Edwardes’ company), a collection being made among the audience, while copies of the verses were retailed at one shilling each. Mr. Ring certainly gave a highly effective recitation of the poem, his delivery being forcible and clear. He appeared on the stage in the uniform of a Lancer, and at the end of the recital two more Lancers appeared, and Miss Sophie Harris, also attired in military costume, sang the two verses of “Rule, Britannia”, to the accompaniment of ringing cheers from the audience. But perhaps what aroused the greatest applause was the final scene, when the curtain was raised and a wounded soldier, in the position to receive cavalry, was observed at the back. Then, indeed, did the cheers break out afresh, and the curtain had to be twice raised before the audience were [sic] satisfied. One’s patriotism was further fired by the war pictures. Those of General Buller, Kruger, Mr. Chamberlain,

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as well as the troops embarking at Southampton, a field day of the 12th Lancers, the Colonial troops, and others of an equally, inspiriting nature aroused the wildest enthusiasm.6 The Alhambra’s engagement with the war and the public’s interest in it was not a cultural activity that it could monopolize. By early 1900, other Brighton venues began to exploit the war “fever” by engaging touring companies that had also adapted their programs so that they could not only represent this national interest in the Boer War but also make use of war-related films. The third week of February 1900 marked this change most dramatically with the presence of three such companies in the town: Joseph Poole’s “New Myriorama”, Horace Bank’s “Dioramic Excursions” and West’s Our Navy. Together with the nightly War Pictures at the Alhambra, this was the very first occasion in Brighton that there had been four film-related productions on simultaneously at different venues in the same week. Obviously, this was in marked contrast to the recent history of film exhibition that had been centered exclusively on the Alhambra. In terms of our appreciation of the public reception of the war at home, clearly theatres in Brighton and elsewhere with their new war-related programs provided a communal site for the public to express its emotional responses to the war, especially for those who knew of men who were serving in the armed forces. February of 1900, the month that witnessed a dramatic expansion of film exhibition activity in Brighton, happened to be a particularly difficult period in the course of the war. National despair was pervasive because of the knowledge that the British Army had suffered a number of defeats especially at Spion Kop. By late February, however, this anxiety was lifted with the news of the relief of Ladysmith. In the midst of these uncertainties, the 1st Battalion of the Royal Sussex Regiment was dispatched from England for South Africa on the 20th of February. As this Regiment served Brighton, it contained the first soldiers from the town to be involved in the conflict. The Alhambra’s three competitors – Poole, Banks and West – were all associated with the production of multi-media thematic shows that employed a narrative structure that organized selected subject matter around either a journey (Poole and Banks and their virtual tours) or a single subject (the Navy in the case of West). They also presented a high level understanding of modern stagecraft through their careful blending of various technologies and performance practices. Arguably, all of these features combined successfully in order to provide effective vehicles for the delivery of war-related content to audiences. As such, they were very different in conception from the traditional variety/music hall acts as found at the Alhambra. Joseph Poole’s “Myriorama” (“to view many scenes and objects”), traveled across Britain in the 1880s and 1890s and frequently visited Brighton and Hove. Poole’s shows presented audiences with a virtual tour consisting of separate painted canvases of famous scenes that were combined into a single continuous canvas, a mile in length and fifteen feet in height. Accompanying this grand and gigantic moving panorama was a band, a lecturer, singers and dancers. Its visit to Hove Town Hall during the third week of February 1900 presented a world tour that visited, “SAVAGE SOUTH AFRICA – THE TRANSVAAL AND THE BOER WAR”.7 The films incorporated in this war sequence were described as, “the siege of Ladysmith [...] the military hospital with the Red Cross nurses attending to the wounded, instantaneously changed to a scene of desolation by the bursting of a Boer shell within the building [... .]”.8 Horace Bank’s “Dioramic Excursions, Animated Photographs & Concert Party” was presented at the Brighton Aquarium first in February and again in August and December of 1900. The February show, which was introduced and led by Banks,

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9 • Our Navy and patriotic entertainment in Brighton at the start of the Boer War

featured a lantern tour of America and Africa. The latter also featured films from South Africa, lantern slides of war scenes from illustrated journals, illustrated songs, and Sir Arthur Sullivan’s new musical setting for Kipling’s war poem, “The Absent-Minded Beggar”. The Brighton Herald caught the patriotic purpose of this multi-media entertainment. The Aquarium will be no place today for Pro-Boers. If they go there this afternoon or evening they will see a portrait of President Kruger thrown upon a screen and hear it hissed, and they will hear the portraits of our Commanders received with rounds of applause.9

Our Navy in Brighton The arrival of Our Navy in Brighton at the West Pier in February 1900 marked its first visit to the town. It not only presented the modern navy but also now contained films made since October 1899 on the departure of the British Army and Navy for South Africa. Our Navy, as a thematic entertainment, employed a naval narrative to combine lantern slides, films, music, and sound effects with a “descriptive commentary” by a lecturer in order to create a “grand patriotic entertainment”. Clearly, West’s thematic show shared many of the characteristics found within contemporary magic lantern and panorama shows, such as those devised by Poole and Banks, but it was distinctive because of its focus on a single subject. West enjoyed great success in Brighton, being contracted by the West Pier for a total of seven weeks over the year: four weeks across February and March and three in June and July. Brighton’s West Pier was a perfect venue for West given that it was an icon of the town’s tourist economy. It had opened in 1866 as a model of Victorian engineering and it became a symbol of Brighton’s full participation in the Victorian culture of enterprise and leisure. The West Pier’s Pavilion Theatre had been added in 1893 with seating for 1,400. Its attractions included magic lantern shows, music hall varieties, concerts, and novelties such as the Kinetoscope in the spring of 1895. During this decade its visitor numbers were around one million each year. In a Brighton press interview, West summarized his show’s concept. “I have taken to showing how the boy from the raw material, upon entering the Navy, is turned into an efficient bluejacket [and then into] a fighting man”.10 The press reviews were unified in their acclaim for the show. During its first week, the Brighton Herald declared its fascination for this modern spectacle. “You mustn’t believe all you see”, says a certain maxim. It certainly would not do for people to believe all they see at the West Pier this week. Otherwise they would fancy that the stage and all behind it in the way of walls and so on, had vanished into thin air, and that they were looking directly on to the sea that that they can hear moaning and rolling around underneath them. They see the clouds and the sky, and a great expanse of water, heaving and tumbling, while great ships glide or white sailed yachts speed by, cleaving the surface into crested foam, and leaving behind a long turbulent wake. The illusion is as perfect as an illusion can be. The explanation is that the entertainment at the Pier this week is supplied by a series of animated photographs, illustrative of all the phases of life in Our Navy. It is safe to say that the entertainment is the best thing of its kind seen in Brighton.11 The Brighton Herald, in particular, was convinced of Our Navy’s contemporary political and cultural significance. “In stirring times like these, of course, the exhibition appeals greatly to the patriotism of Englishmen. At the same time, its intrinsic merits apart from this consideration are of the highest”.12

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West recounted in his autobiography that the West Pier’s Manager had first only wanted to contract him for a week of matinee performances. West proposed a more ambitious schedule of performances. [I] insisted on two evening shows being given on Saturday and Wednesday the first week as a trial to see whether they would be as well attended as the matinees. I also arranged that should the evening shows prove successful, performances should be given every night the next week in addition to the matinees, and the same for the two weeks following that. Thus the show was booked for four weeks in the “off” season, when others seldom stayed for longer than a week. It was arranged that my proportion of the net takings should rise in ratio to the receipts [... .] West’s confidence proved to be very well founded. Each week the attendances rose higher and higher, until on the last Saturday the demands for admission were so great that an extra show had to be provided in the morning. Despite heavy falls of snow, on all occasions the audiences were most enthusiastic, and the manager told me that it was the most successful run he had ever known on the Pier.13 Having established the contemporary film exhibition context in Brighton in late 1899 and early 1900, it’s not surprising that this visit to Brighton proved to be very lucrative for West. The West Pier had a record number of 31,412 visitors during Our Navy’s four-week run, over which time the show was performed over fifty times.14 This success was repeated on the show’s return in June. Brighton and Britain in February 1900 provided the perfect moment for Our Navy as West’s show was devoted to British seamanship, technology, patriotism and the ‘glory’ of its armed forces. Despite his non-theatrical background, West expressed through Our Navy a shrewd understanding of both the national mood and commercial showmanship. After his first visit to Brighton, West soon discovered that his show enjoyed the same popularity across the country. In order to meet the public demand for Our Navy, he devised an expansive touring campaign and, as Barnes discovered, this would involve the creation of three touring companies (Fig. 2).15 All of the British multi-media shows, specifically those referred to in this paper and the others that would also emerge during and after 1900, would flourish in the early years of the new century. Their formats were easily adapted to incorporate other conflicts such as the Boxer Rebellion, the Russo-Japanese War and the First World War and mark such royal events as the Funeral of Queen Victoria and the Coronation of King Edward. Our Navy would place special emphasis on the centenary of the death of Nelson in 1905. Our Navy, like the other contemporary patriotic entertainments, projected and represented the pro-war and pro-imperial politics of the period. At this time, John Atkinson Hobson offered one of the few voices of dissent. Through his two works, The Psychology of Jingoism (1901) and Imperialism: A Study (1902), Hobson expressed his grave concerns about the nature of contemporary Britain. He believed that British foreign policy was aggressively imperial in its nature, the government was committed to the use of war in order to defend and extend its global interests, and agencies such as the popular press and the music hall were proactively promoting this state ideology. In particular, he was frightened by the manipulation of the public’s “passions” through jingoism. He defined it as “that inverted patriotism whereby the love of one’s nation is transformed into the hatred of another nation, and the fierce craving to destroy the individual members of that other nation [...]”.16 At a relatively early stage in the history of modern sociology, Hobson’s understanding

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9 • Our Navy and patriotic entertainment in Brighton at the start of the Boer War

Fig. 2. Front cover of damaged program for Grand Patriotic Entertainment – Our Navy, West Pier Theatre, Brighton, for the week commencing 5 February 1900.

of the hegemonic relationship between the state, business and popular culture is of value to us because it provides an intriguing attempt to analyse the creation and circulation of a particular ideology through particular commercial and cultural practices. His analysis was founded on the intersection for the first time of government policy with the new popular press (in this case the Daily Mail), popular performance (the music hall) and a war (the Boer War). He focused his attention to what he

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Fig. 3. Postcard from a photograph by G. West & Sons of the HMS Indefatigable: Royal Nay battlecruiser, launched in 1909 and sunk at the Battle of Jutland in 1916. Four of her crew of 1,017 survived.

perceived to be the manipulative power of the music hall. Hobson did not refer explicitly to either film or to shows such as Our Navy, but both were very much part of the music hall culture that he was addressing. He said: In ordinary times politics plays no important part in these feasts of sensationalism, but the glorification of brute force and an ignorant contempt for foreigners are ever-present factors which at great political crises make the music-hall a very serviceable engine for generating military passion. The art of the music hall is the only popular art of the present day: its words and melodies pass by quick magic from the Empire or the Alhambra over the length and breadth of the land [... ]17

Further studies of the Our Navy and similar productions in the context of late Victorian and Edwardian culture will need to more fully investigate this ideological landscape and Hobson’s analysis of it. Embedded into such work will be the knowledge that Our Navy and its “quick magic” was part of an imperial culture that promoted uncritically Britain and its vision and practices up until the First World War. Tragically, no one in the Edwardian period could have imagined that many of the modern warships of the Royal Navy celebrated by Our Navy, would be sunk during this new war. It was the experience of World War I that would begin to both contest and unravel Imperial Britain (Fig. 3). Research for this paper inspired the production of an early Edwardian multi-media show for the first evening of the 2006 International Domitor Conference at the Michigan Theater. Together with David Francis, his remarkable collection of late Victorian and early Edwardian lantern slides, and his biunial magic lantern, we created our own version of a patriotic entertainment circa 1900. Entitled, “Our Empire: a Celebration of Britain, her Empire and her Heroic Sons”, this show wove together slides from the Francis Collection and films from the British Film Institute with an

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oral narrative in order to present Britain’s interests around the world, the heroism of its armed forces and its civilians, the conflicts in South Africa and China, and the virtues of being loyal and moral subjects. Period music and song and sound effects (bell, drum and whip) also accompanied the “lecture” thanks to the talents of the pianist Stephen Warner and singer Rose Randall-Bengry.

Notes All illustrations from the Barnes Collection at Hove Museum and Art Gallery. 1.

Jan Morris, Pax Britannica (London: Faber & Faber, 1998), 6.

2.

Alfred J. West, Seasalts and Celluloid (Portsmouth, unpublished, 1936), 16. West’s autobiography is available as a PDF from the website developed by his great grandson, David Clover. It also lists, describes and illustrates the few surviving films made by West. See “Our Navy: Alfred John West F.R.G.S. – Film Pioneer” http://mcs.open.ac.uk/dac3/OurNavy/indexold.htm John Barnes provides a very good introduction to the firm of G. West & Son, of which A. J. West was a part. His books include descriptions of many of his films and reviews from performances of “Our Navy” from 1898 to 1900. See John Barnes, Pioneers of the British Film, The Beginnings of the Cinema in England 1894–1901, Volume Three: 1898 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996 [1988]), 45–53; Barnes, Filming the Boer War, The Beginnings of the Cinema in England 1894–1901, Volume Four: 1899 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996 [1992]), 97–102; and Barnes, The Beginnings of the Cinema in England 1894–1901, Volume Five: 1900 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997), 55–60.

3.

Ibid., 17.

4.

Ibid., 5.

5.

Edison-Thomas was the business name of the traveling film exhibitor, A. D. Thomas, and his associates. Under this name, both Thomas and his many projectionists served venues throughout Britain in 1899 and 1900. Barnes refers to him as the “exhibitor par excellence”. Given the absence of any evidence, we have to imagine that the use of the surname Edison was employed to give these presentations the allure of being associated with the real Thomas A. Edison and his company’s prominent role within the American film business. In fact many, if not all, of the films used by Edison-Thomas were of British and European origin. See Barnes, Filming the Boer War, 81–83.

6.

Brighton & Hove Guardian (22 November 1899), 5.

7.

Brighton & Hove Guardian (21 February 1900), 1.

8.

Brighton & Hove Guardian (22 November 1899), 5.

9.

Ibid.

10.

“The Navy All Alive at the West Pier. Interview with Mr. West”, Brighton & Hove Guardian (7 February 1900), 5.

11.

Brighton Herald (10 February 1900), 3.

12.

Brighton Herald (3 March 1900), 3.

13.

West, Seasalts and Celluloid, 74.

14.

The figure of 31,412 attendees is found within the Brighton Herald’s review of Our Navy: Brighton Herald (10 March 1900), 3.

15.

Barnes, The Beginnings of the Cinema in England, 58.

16.

J.A. Hobson, The Psychology of Jingoism (London: E. Grant Richards, 1901). 1.

17.

Ibid., 3.

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10

“An England of our Dreams”?: early patriotic entertainments with film in Britain during the Anglo-Boer War •

“An England of our Dreams”?

Ian Christie he Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902 has long been known as one of the first conflicts in which modern media played an important role, with photographic illustration, telegraphy and film all actively involved.1 But it would be more accurate to say that these “new media” were finding their place amid the established media of print and performance. Rather than stake a simple claim for the novelty of film, historians of the medium and its place in visual culture can offer the more complex insights that arise from tracing how film borrowed from and echoed the themes expressed in other media, and how in doing so it negotiated its place in the hierarchy of media consumption – and thus contributed to popular sentiment. Above all, by focusing on how and to whom film was shown, rather than merely on the surviving textual examples, it should be possible to contribute substantially to the continuing debates among historians about the implications of this arch-imperialist war.2 The significance of the turn of the century music hall as a locus of jingoistic patriotism has long been recognized, but the place of film in the music hall, one of its earliest venues, has hardly received the attention it merits.3 As film was conscripted into a wide variety of roles, it accurately reflected many of the ambiguities and dilemmas that were exposed by the war itself: the price demanded by as well as the pride involved in war with the Boer nationalists. The casus belli of what was actually the second war between Britain and the Boer provinces, after their successful resistance in 1880–1881, proved to be neither onesided nor clear-cut; and it seemed very likely that accommodation would be reached until September 1899.4 Then, Paul Kruger, president of the Transvaal, hardened his stance on the outstanding issues with Britain, and Joseph Chamberlain similarly withdrew from his previously conciliatory position, so that the Boer ultimatum of 9 October could be contemptuously rejected, provoking a declaration of war that was now welcomed on both sides. Initially, many in Britain expected that it would be over by Christmas, after a large force of troops was dispatched to the Cape. But within weeks, the campaign was going badly, with news of British forces besieged in Mafeking, Kimberley and Ladysmith, and meeting stiff resistance from the Boers and Cape Afrikaners. Coming just two years after Queen Victoria’s Jubilee celebrations had triumphantly revived enthusiasm for an unpopular monarchy and boosted national self-confidence,

T

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the news from the Cape was worrying. Already in 1897, a warning note had been sounded by the most popular poet of the age, Rudyard Kipling, in his poem “Recessional”: If, drunk with sight of power, we loose Wild tongues that have not thee in awe Such boastings as the Gentiles use, Or lesser breeds without the Law – Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget – lest we forget!5 Kipling’s message was hardly anti-imperialist, but in the spirit of his later poem, “The White Man’s burden”, he urged Britain not to forget that its power and imperial reach were held in trust, were responsibilities as much as rewards, and that the nation must beware of hubris.6 The “lesser breeds”, often later assumed to be native peoples of the Empire, were widely understood at the time to be other European powers, especially Germany, then vying with Britain for a stake in Africa.7 The sentiment proved to be a popular one, after the poem appeared in The Times accompanied by an approving editorial, and by Queen Victoria’s Jubilee letter to her people.8 When the new South African war began in October 1899, Kipling again rallied to the cause, this time with a popular ballad intended to raise money for supporting the British troops dispatched to the Cape. Typically, “The Absent-Minded Beggar” was no obvious rabble-rouser, but a reminder that the war would demand sacrifices, and that Britain was far from prepared: When you’ve shouted ‘Rule Britannia’, when you’ve sung ‘God Save the Queen’ When you’ve finished killing Kruger with your mouth, Will you kindly drop a shilling in my little tambourine For a gentleman in khaki ordered South?9 Many thought the tone of the poem, with its refrain, “Pass the hat for your credit’s sake / and pay – pay – pay!”, vulgar, but Kipling was unrepentant.10 The war would exact a heavy price of all, and the country needed reminding of this at the outset. We, in turn, perhaps need to be reminded that the popular mood was far from what is conventionally assumed to be “jingoistic” by the end of the year; and an editorial in a North London local paper captured this feeling:11 It is not with the usual feeling of content and quiet satisfaction that we approach this Christmas of 1899. There was no war cloud on the horizon twelve months ago, but we have now plunged into the hurly burly and it is impossible to say when we will emerge from it.12 Although the writer had no doubt that eventual “triumph” was “all but certain”, given the “resolution of Britain and the British empire”, there is a strikingly somber tone to this and other better-known indicators of national morale at the year’s end. This is the background to two presentations using film that took place in the North London catchment area of the Hornsey Journal in December 1899. What is of interest to cinema historians is that these show very clearly how moving pictures were inserted into pre-existing presentational forms, here the lantern lecture and the musical hall program. And what is of wider interest is the evidence of how these forms were inflected by external political events, even before there was any actual film from the scene of the war. Thus, in a lantern lecture apparently given twice within the same week in the new suburb of Muswell Hill, a Mr. Salmond from Glasgow took his audiences on “a trip to the Transvaal” by means of some 150 lantern slides interspersed with four or five films, noting from time to time how the places shown had become topical by virtue of the war.13 This is quite different from either the “passing off” of an

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early Cinematograph operator, claiming to show the Dreyfus affair, or the later “reproductions” of scenes from the South African war.14 It was a classic lantern-lecture “travelogue”, enlarging on the history of the places and people shown and emphasizing the first-hand experience of the lecturer. The second war-related presentation from December 1899 was a “bioscope” show on the program of the newly-opened Holloway Empire music hall, which was located about three miles south of Muswell Hill in the more working class district of Holloway Road. Walter Gibbons’ “American Bio-Tableau” was a regular fixture on the variety program of the new venue, but the advertisements rarely included any program detail – except on this one occasion, during the week before Christmas in the third month of the war, when some three column inches was devoted to listing “animated photographs of War Scenes, Episodes and Incidents”.15 Here, by contrast with the Muswell Hill shows, there was an element of “passing off”, since the films were almost all pre-war subjects of South African places and personalities, given relevance only by the inclusion of films showing troop embarkation and recreation on board the transport ships. And at a time before titles were commonly printed on films, a lecturer would have been essential to explain what was being shown and to relate it to more recent developments since the outbreak of war. What do these programs tell us about the status of moving pictures in relation to nationalism at the end of century? If we accept that nationalism was essentially a discourse – generated and propagated within a nation to assert its identity, especially in time of adversity – then these series of films (and lantern slides) can be understood as counterparts to the popular songs of the period, as fragments able to be incorporated into the general discourse that imbricate “honor”, “duty”, “valor” and “race”. However, these images hardly lent themselves to association with such abstract concepts; so the typical early form of image-discourse is the narrative of a journey. Both the Muswell Hill lectures and Holloway Empire film sequence, doubtless repeated at many other venues, “took” their audiences to Southern Africa, offering visions of a prosperous land that had been plunged into war, ostensibly by the intransigence of the Dutch settlers. What was fundamentally new in Britain’s experience of empire was that her adversaries in the Cape were the “lesser breeds without the Law” that Kipling had invoked: settlers of European origin, competing for control of this rich territory. And as the war progressed, Britain found its motives and its prowess being called into question internationally as never before. That Britain wanted to annex the rich Transvaal, whatever its declared motives, was widely believed; and contemporary cartoons from Germany, France and the United States vividly portray Britain, and often Queen Victoria, as the aggressor and Kruger as the sturdy defender of his people.16 During the first half of 1900, a series of British military successes – including the “relief of Mafeking”, which provoked near-hysterical scenes of public rejoicing – boosted morale and support for what was clearly going to be a long and bitter struggle. Moreover, the war was costing lives and so, in its second year, we find film being conscripted into two more active roles. One is to convey the immediacy of military life and action in the Transvaal – by means of “reproductions” of typical scenes from the front. The other is to fulfill a more traditional role of providing ideological underpinning for the war, stressing the themes of “sacrifice” and “duty”. One of the most active producers in Britain of war-related films was Robert Paul,17 and a contributory reason for his commitment may have been the fact that his two younger brothers served with the City Imperial Volunteers, one of the popular middle-class regiments that “reflected the appeal of patriotic propaganda”.18 Paul produced no less than five distinguishable kinds of war-related films between 1900–1902. These were, in approximate order of

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appearance (although several overlapped): (1) topicals, or actualités, featuring troop departures and arrivals, together with scenes on board transport ships; (2) a limited number of scenes from the battlegrounds on the Cape, usually filmed after major engagements;19 (3) a documentary series, Army Life, which seems to have had recruiting aims; (4) “reproductions” of typical scenes from the war, filmed in North London with actors; and 5) frankly propagandist “patriotic” films.20 My initial focus here is on the “patriotic” films, which have been relatively neglected but are certainly the most elaborate and ideologically charged of Paul’s war-related films. One reason for their neglect is certainly that none are known to survive, but there are detailed catalogue descriptions and three stills, which should be enough to draw some conclusions.21 These were not the first patriotic films produced in time of war: Edison had already produced a number of patriotic titles during the SpanishAmerican war of 1898, and seems to have originated the genre of the “flag film” – essentially a close-up of the national flag filling the screen – which may be the first wholly nationalistic film genre.22 Others would follow his lead, with both Paul and Cecil Hepworth in Britain producing close-ups of flags flying.23 The purpose of these, we may assume, was to heighten patriotic emotion during a program of mixed subjects, offering a cue for the playing of the national anthem or similar music.24 However, the five patriotic films that Paul produced in 1900–1901 – Kruger’s Dream of Empire, His Mother’s Portrait, A Soldier’s Vision, Britain’s Welcome to her Sons, and Britain’s Tribute to her Sons – are considerably more complex, presenting as they do highly compressed narratives or allegorical tableaux. Unlike the “punctuating” effect of flag films, they may well have been intended to form the climax of a show, although I have not found any accounts of their screening. We can make some formal distinctions between Paul’s films in this genre. Kruger’s Dream draws on the tradition of political caricature, and shows the Boer leader dreaming that he might be offered the English crown, only to awake and read a reminder that his general Cronje had surrendered to the British, before being captured by a squad of British soldiers and finally transformed into the figure of Britannia. This “transformation” film, similar to others by Georges Méliès, Gaston Velle and Paul, also shows the influence of the patriotic stage tableau, animated by the newly discovered potential of stop-motion for magical effect. Kruger’s ambitions are mocked and frustrated, with the allegorical figure of Britannia imported from the tradition of coinage and statuary (Fig. 1).25 The most overtly imperialist of all Paul’s 1900 subjects prompted by the war were two allegorical tableaux, Britain’s Welcome to her Sons and Britain’s Tribute to her Sons.26 In both, the traditional warrior-mother figure of Britannia is central. The dramatic ancestry of this image again lies in earlier forms and media: the Jacobean masque;27 the patriotic tableau in such popular venues as Astley’s Amphitheatre, as well as in music

Fig. 1. Rule Britannia.

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halls;28 the “living pictures” that were staples of amateur theatricals; the lantern slide and the host of cheap printed media that would include postcards, cigarette cards and many other such tokens.29 Paul was therefore invoking a pervasive “intermedial” image of Britannia that had long been mobilized in times of war, and a “Britannia” sketch had in fact been presented at the Oxford music hall in 1885,30 while Paul himself had filmed a performance by Charles Bertram, the Court Conjuror, entitled Britannia: Hail, Britannia!, in 1898.31 There is indeed continuity between the rhetoric of the two films. In Britain’s Welcome, Britannia draws back a curtain to reveal a “rustic cottage”, where a one-armed pensioner awaits the return of his son, who receives the Victoria Cross from Britannia before his heroic action is also seen. The scene then “fades to the home of an officer, where a wife and child are reading a letter as the returning husband appears, before his [missing words] he is seen leading his men in attack”. In a final transformation, Britannia appears on the sea shore “in front of a large group of national flags, with supporting sailors, while the two family groups appear and the soldiers clasp hands, with Britannia adding her hand” and thus, as the catalogue explains, “ratifying the bond of fellowship and the leveling of class and the common cause of Queen and Country”.32 What is striking about this film of less than two minutes is its highly sophisticated visual apparatus serving to unite the stock music hall figures of Britannia and the veteran,33 with the theme of class and Empire solidarity in the service of imperialism that Kipling had adumbrated in “The Absent-Minded Beggar”.34 For Britain’s Tribute to her Sons, Paul reached out beyond the film itself, to offer especially composed music for hire in what may have been the first such “package”, encouraging exhibitors to make this a fullblown patriotic spectacle.35 From the description, this film’s theme is the rallying of “the sons of Empire who have come to the assistance of the Mother Country in the Transvaal War”, that echoes the sentiment of imperial solidarity voiced in, for instance, the Hornsey Journal editorial mentioned above, and frequently repeated throughout the first year of the war (Fig. 2). These films could be seen as a modernization of the classical triumph or apotheosis – a transitional composite form combining allegory and realism that would become wholly realist within a few years. Another of the patriotic trick films, His Mother’s Portrait, dispenses with the allegorical but uses the “vision scene” device. This is achieved by a vignette in which a soldier wounded on the Veldt sees in an inset “vision” his mother waiting for him – while it transpires that his life has been saved by carrying her portrait. Here, it would seem that the allegorical Britannia has been elided with the loving mother in the trope of the nation as maternal. How do these films stand in relation to the rest of Paul’s output? Significantly, and slightly incongruously, they are classified in his catalogues as “Patriotic Trick films” amid other trick films that Paul produced in 1900–1901, such as The Haunted Curiosity Shop and The Hindoo Jugglers. So self-conscious virtuosity and visuality was reckoned at least part of their appeal. They are, I have suggested, backward-looking in their genres and sources; so we might consider them prime examples of the process of “remediation” proposed by Jay David Boulter and Richard Grusin, since they undertake to reproduce past forms in enhanced ways, helping also to validate the claims of film to be taken seriously as a new medium.36 And the fanfare of special music for Britain’s Tribute suggests an aspiration toward film as new form of nationalistic spectacle. However, it would appear that these proved to be short-lived attractions, disappearing from Paul’s catalogue by the 1902 edition. Does this suggest a poor response from showmen? Or does it reflect the growing unpopularity of the Transvaal war as it dragged on through 1901? Or does it indicate that the other new genre called into

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Fig. 2. Return of Sir George White and Sir Alfred Milner.

existence by the war, the battlefield “reproductions” produced by Paul, and also – in more sensational form – by Mitchell and Kenyon, and even in the United States by Edison, was more popular? We only have the inconclusive evidence of the patriotic films’ disappearance from the next catalogue. But it is undeniable that such scenes, in Paul’s case staged on Muswell Hill golf course under the supervision of military personnel, offered a foretaste of the vicarious excitement that would be generated by later fictional portrayals of war action. And compared with the highly stylized portrayals of combat that were common on the stage, they too could be considered instances of the “immediacy” that successive new media have promoted.37 But as well as considering arguments based on spectator theory, it is surely also worth remembering the economic dimension. Allegorical and rhetorically patriotic films would have had little export potential, other than within the British Empire, while the battlefield films were in an important sense “neutral”. Even if some of these purported to show “typical” Boer treachery or British heroism, this could easily be ignored or even redescribed by lecturers and showmen if the films were shown to audiences unsympathetic to Britain.38 The other important new genre apparently prompted by the Anglo-Boer war was the extended documentary series dealing with the work of a branch of the armed services. Paul’s contribution to this was the large series, Army Life, launched in 1900 and running for up to 50 minutes of screen time.39 Detailing every stage of induction and all the branches of the modern army, this makes no textual reference to the current conflict. Yet its appearance in 1900 was not coincidental, and in his preface to the special

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Fig. 3. Army Life, or How Soldiers Are Made.

catalogue brochure, Paul writes of “the interest at present manifested in all matters concerning the Army” and of how “the project was laid before the War Office authorities, who, foreseeing that recruiting would be stimulated by a more wide-spread knowledge of Army Life, courteously gave every facility”.40 We have no way of knowing whether this resulted from Paul spontaneously approaching the War Office, as he states, or whether it resulted from some discussion of the recruitment situation in mid-1900. However, if this is judged “nationalistic”, then it is a distinctly modern “technocratic” form of nationalism compared with the traditional “call to arms”, and the series was intended to be shown as a self-contained complete program.41 Films of military ceremonial had been common currency since the Lumières’ debut, but with Army Life, Paul (together with Hepworth, and later Cricks & Martin) would move into the kind of “process” actualité filmmaking that is an ancestor of the modern documentary. And, once again, such films could easily be distributed internationally (Fig. 3). It may be tempting to judge films such as Paul’s 1900 “patriotics” archaic in their symbolism, and so see them as doomed to extinction in a Darwinian view of the progress of film form. But of course such a view is inappropriate, since there is no “progress” in the arts as such, even though there are changing fashions and technical innovation. The allegorical personification of the nation, and even of History and Civilization, would reappear in cinema during World War I. In this sense, Paul’s patriotic films are entirely characteristic of national self-definition in time of war, in terms of the pathos of military heroism and the sublimated figure of the nation replacing the conventional peacetime monarch as mother/father figure. And in terms of the non-Darwinian “remediation” hypothesis, with its emphasis on “hyper-mediacy” within patterns of media succession, the technical virtuosity of Paul’s films fills an important ecological niche.

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By the time a peace treaty was signed with the Boers in May 1902, after a long stalemate, active interest in the war had waned. Inevitably, Kipling was on hand again to mark the end of the war in a poem entitled “The Return”, which looks forward to the peace with a mixture of apprehension and celebration of a national “ideal” that cannot be reduced to material signs or the trappings of nationalism: But now, discharged, I fall away To do with little things again… Gawd, ‘oo knows all I cannot say, Look after me in Thamesfontein! If England was what England seems An’ not the England of our dreams, But only putty, brass an’ paint, ‘Ow quick we’d chuck ‘er! But she ain’t! Over the following years of the new century, celluloid could be added to Kipling’s list of base materials through which national identity was blazoned; and in doing so, it would help fashion what might be considered “an England of our dreams”, although one that was often constructed in terms of how England seemed to others.42 But during the first eighteen months of the South African War, we can see in early films the coexistence of two traditional modes of representing patriotism – the allegorical and the pathetic – as well as the emergence of newer modes, which would eventually be termed “documentary”. Shown in music halls, fairgrounds and various kinds of halls, invariably as part of a larger presentation (except in the case of Paul’s Army Life), these brief but often powerful images would no doubt have been largely subordinated to the prevailing discourses of nationalism, whether conservative or liberal, jingoistic or skeptical. But might they also have escaped this on occasions, inflecting the prevailing discourses? Press reviews alone are hardly enough to gauge audience response with any depth or precision, yet they are all we have to set the surviving films and the many more catalogue descriptions in context. Simon Popple quotes a range of reviews in his thoughtful survey of how films fitted into the visual culture of the Anglo-Boer War, one of which testifies how, at the Leeds Empire music hall in January 1900, “these patriotic pictures stirred deeply the emotions of the crowded audience”.43 Against this we might set a review from the Melbourne Argus, a month later, describing a program presented by Lindesay Campbell at Harry Rickards’ Bijou Theatre that consisted of “half a dozen of the cinematograph films” interspersed with lantern slides of “leading figures, both Boer and British”.44 Three of the films shown appear to be Paul’s “reproductions of incidents of the Boer War” – Shooting the Spy, Nurses on the Battlefield and Attack on a Piquet – all of which are reviewed as if they were as authentic as the earlier films of Kruger and of Boer troops leaving for the front, despite the writer’s puzzlement as to “how a cinematograph operator could possibly be a witness of such [episodes].45 But despite such apparent naiveté, the review ends by recording the “somber fascination” which the show had for this colonial audience, as distant from the Cape as the Leeds audience, and also from the Mother Country. Both accounts speak of emotion and imply a sense of contact with the scene of war, which was clearly provided by early film – not yet functioning autonomously, but as part of the lantern lecture or variety program. Out of such experiences would grow the future mass cinema audience and the new media empires of the twentieth century.

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Notes 1.

I have previously reviewed some of the coverage of the Anglo-Boer War as a “media war” in “The Anglo-Boer War in North London: A Micro-Study”, in Laraine Porter and Bryony Dixon, eds., Picture Perfect: Landscape, Place and Travel in British Cinema before 1930 (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2007), 82–91.

2.

Eric J. Hobsbawn, for instance, saw “the imperialist South African War” as giving nationalism “a wider and less instrumental appeal”, in The Age of Empire 1875–1914 (London: Abacus, 1994), 160.

3.

The claim that the music hall fomented popular support for imperialism was first made by J. A. Hobson in The Psychology of Jingoism (London 1901). Although John MacKenzie has done much to focus attention on the role of popular culture in shaping political attitudes, notably in his Propaganda and Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), there is no mention of early film in Penny Summerfield’s “Patriotism and Empire: Music hall entertainment 1870–1914”, in MacKenzie (ed.), Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986).

4.

The path that led to this unexpectedly damaging and protracted war is most vividly traced by Thomas Pakenham in The Boer War (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1979).

5.

Kipling had achieved remarkable fame by 1890, with the publication of his Barrack Room Ballads and many striking stories drawing on his experience of India. See Lord Birkenhead, Rudyard Kipling (London: Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1978), 122ff. For the full text of “Recessional” and other poems quoted, see T.S. Eliot (ed.), A Choice of Kipling’s Verse (London: Faber, 1963), 139.

6.

Kipling began writing the “ode” which would finally become “The White Man’s Burden” (1899), during June 1897, after a lunch with the prime ministers of all the self-governing English colonies. Shortly before, he admitted to “loathing” the Jubilee. See Harry Ricketts, The Unforgiving Minute: A Life of Rudyard Kipling (London: Chato and Windus, 1999), 232.

7.

George Orwell challenged the “pansy-Left” interpretation that had become common by the 1930s, observing that “the whole poem, conventionally thought of as an orgy of boasting, is a denunciation of power politics”. Orwell, “Rudyard Kipling”, Horizon (February 1942), quoted in Birkenhead, 188.

8.

The poem first appeared in The Times on 17 July 1897. It was begun immediately after the Jubilee celebrations, on 21 June, and described by Kipling as a nuzzur-wattu or “averter of the evil eye” in his memoir, Something of Myself [for Friends Known and Unknown] (London: Macmillan, 1937), 149. A detailed account of the circumstances appears in Birkenhead, 184–188.

9.

Eliot, A Choice of Kipling’s Verse, 222–223.

10.

Birkenhead describes the poem as “a rhymed invitation, of singular vulgarity, to subscribe to a fund for soldiers”, in Rudyard Kipling, 205. It appeared in the Daily Mail, was set to music by Sir Arthur Sullivan, and raised over £250,000 from reproduction and performance fees.

11.

“Jingoism” dated from 1878, when a music hall song supported the dispatch of a British fleet into Russian waters. For a thoughtful account of this sentiment, characterized as “a drive for action, of a heedless and careless kind, [with] cries of send-a-gunboat, damn-the-torpedoes, and my-country-right-or-wrong”, see A. P. Thornton, “The Roots of Jingoism”, in For the File on Empire (London: Macmillan, 1968), 265–282.

12.

Hornsey Journal (23 December 1899). I am grateful to the Hornsey Historical Society for access to its archival run of the Hornsey Journal.

13.

“A Trip to the Transvaal” appears to have been given on Friday, 1 December, and on the following Monday, as reviewed in the Wood Green Weekly Herald (7 December 1899), and the Hornsey Journal, (12 December 1899), respectively. In the article cited above, “The Anglo-Boer War in North London”, I inadvertently elided these two presentations, one of which may have been due to the high demand for places.

14.

The Lumière operator François Doublier famously described how he persuaded a Russian provincial audience in 1898 that a group of scenic films he had brought to Russia were actually an account of the Dreyfus affair, which had taken place in 1894. Doubler’s account appears in Jay Leyda, Kino: a History of the Russian and Soviet Film (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1960), 23.

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Advertisement in the Hornsey Journal (15 January 1899).

16.

See, for instance, the cartoons reproduced in the television series, The Boer War (Twenty-Twenty Television for Channel 4, 1999), and in Tabitha Jackson, The Boer War (Channel 4 Books/Macmillan, 1999), 17, 45, 61, 143.

17.

Other major British producers of war-related films were British Mutoscope & Biograph, Cecil Hepworth, and the Warwick Trading Company, whose cameraman Joseph Rosenthal sent back a large number of films from the Cape. Although the Biograph and Warwick war lists were considerably larger than Paul’s, they did not produce the same variety of films. For an overview of Anglo-Boer War films, see Luke McKernan, The Boer War (1899–1902): Films in BFI Collections, National Film and Television Archive (London: British Film Institute, 1999 [typescript]).

18.

Hobsbawm, Age of Imperialism, 161.

19.

Paul sent two cameras to the Cape, and these produced, inter alia, an impressive film of British troops marching into Ladysmith after its siege was relieved, and a distant image of the Boer general, Piet Cronje, after his surrender in February 1900.

20.

See my “The Anglo-Boer War in North London” for more discussion of several of these categories: the present essay is intended to be complementary.

21.

The majority of early films, some have estimated as many as 80 per cent, are lost. Yet discoveries continue to be made, most notably the vast Mitchell and Kenyon Collection now restored and preserved in the UK National Film and Television Archive. Until recently, none of Paul’s “reproductions” was known to exist, but two have been discovered in recent years, and are included in the DVD, R. W. Paul: the Collected Films (BFI Video Publishing, 2006). However, my contention here is that “lost” films can be analysed to some extent on the basis of surviving evidence.

22.

Edison “flag films” included three versions of Old Glory and the Cuban Flag and two of American Flag, with hand-colored versions available, said to “[appeal] to the popular sentiment”. Charles Musser, Edison Motion Pictures 1890–1900: An Annotated Filmography (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 408–410.

23.

Paul’s film of the Union Jack, code-named Flag, was released in 1897, possibly to coincide with Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations.

24.

On “[stirring] the audience with the sight of a flag or the sound of a tune”, see the New York Tribune account of 25 February 1898, quoted by Charles Musser in The Emergence of Cinema: the American Screen to 1907 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 241.

25.

Britannia, derived from the Roman name for the British isles, was revived as an allegorical personification for the United Kingdom, after the Scottish king James became James I of England, Scotland and Wales in 1603. “Rule Britannia”, originally part of the masque Alfred (words by James Thompson, music by Thomas Arne, 1740), became an important patriotic song during the Georgian and Victorian periods, celebrating British naval power. The image of a helmeted Britannia has appeared continuously on British coins since the late 18th century.

26.

Britain’s Tribute appears to have been filmed before Queen Victoria’s death in January 1901, from the “VR” emblem that forms the centerpiece, although it was not released until afterwards, since the 1901 catalogue entry refers to “King and Flag”, as does the new entry for Britain’s Welcome.

27.

Britannia Triumphans, devised in 1638 by Sir John Davenant for Charles I, with designs by Inigo Jones, was one of the most lavish of court masques; its imagery is linked with Rubens’ decoration of the Banqueting Hall at Whitehall Palace. See Roy Strong, Britannia Triumphans: Inigo Jones, Rubens and Whitehall Palace (London: Thames and Hudson, 1981).

28.

Perhaps significantly, the first challenge to a long-standing monopoly of the “patent” theaters in London was the Britannia, opened in 1841 by Sam Lane, which became a bastion of working-class theater.

29.

For an overview of the evolution of the Britannia allegory, see Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985), 45–49.

30.

Described in Penny Summerfield, “Patriotism and Empire”, 28–29.

31.

Catalogue description quoted in John Barnes, The Beginnings of the Cinema in England (1894–1901) 3: Pioneers of the British Film (London: Bishopsgate Press, 1983), 176.

32.

The Hundred Best Animated Photograph Films, Season 1900–01, Robt. W. Paul Animatograph Depot

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EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL” (London), 1. I am grateful to Vanessa Toulmin of the National Fairground Archive at Sheffield University for access to this catalogue. 33.

34.

An example is the “Inkerman scena”, described by Dave Russell in “‘We Carved Our Way to Glory’: the British soldier in music hall song and sketch, c. 1880–1914”, in J. MacKenzie (ed.), Popular Imperialism and the Military (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 69–71. The theme of classes united in common service runs through the poem, beginning with “Duke’s son – cook’s son – son of a hundred kings”.

35.

The film is billed in Paul’s 1901 catalogue as a “Patriotic Song with Animated Illustrations”, with words by Clarence Hunt and music by Frank Byng, and is one of four such “songs with animated illustration”, which no doubt reflect the intense interest in synchronising image and sound at this time – many systems offering this were on show at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900.

36.

On the concept of “remediation” as re-presentation and enhancement of older media in new media, see Jay David Boulter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 44–50. On the “Logic of Immediacy”, see Boulter and Grusin, Remediation, 21–31.

37. 38.

In 1901, British producers enjoyed a leading position in international sales, with the United States an important market – where many sections of the population were actively hostile to British imperialism, and especially to the war against the Boer states.

39.

Other such series were Hepworth’s multi-part The British Navy (1901) and T.J. West’s Our Navy – see Frank Gray’s essay in this volume. R.W. Paul, brochure for Army Life; or How Soldiers are Made, London, 1900. The series is described as “under the patronage of the Commander-in-Chief” and “taken by permission of Sir Evelyn Wood, Adjutant-General”.

40.

41.

Paul’s brochure quotes glowing press comment on a special afternoon showing of Army Life at the Alhambra on 18 September 1900. Unfortunately, only one fragment of this whole series survives: Mounted Infantry. (See the Paul DVD, The Collected Films, cited above).

42.

As has often been noted, many of the best-known “imperial” films of the 1930s were made by foreign-born filmmakers such as the Korda brothers in Britain or by their equivalent in Hollywood – the Hungarian Michael Curtiz and the Irish-born John Ford. This fits well with Paul Langford’s thesis that “Englishness” has traditionally been defined by the observations of travellers and visitors to Britain, whose views have subsequently been adopted by the natives. See Langford, Englishness Identified, Manners and Character 1650–1850 (Oxford University Press, 2000). Yorkshire Post (9 January 1900), quoted in Simon Popple, “‘But the Khaki-Covered Camera is the Latest Thing’: the Boer War Cinema and Visual Culture in Britain”, in Andrew Higson (ed.), Young and Innocent? The Cinema in Britain, 1896–1930 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002), 24.

43.

44.

“A Cinematographe of the War”, The Argus (12 February, 1900). It should be remembered that Australia’s “Bushmen” volunteers attracted intense domestic interest during the early months of the war.

45.

The first of Paul’s “reproductions”, Nurses on the Battlefield, appeared in his 1900–1901 catalogue, while the rest appear in the 1901 catalogue, indicating that they were made in the later part of 1900. In a later memoir, he would say that “these were issued for what they were, though I cannot answer for the descriptions applied by the showmen”, indicating that he was well aware of their being shown as actualités: R.W. Paul, C.M. Hepworth, W.G. Barker, “Before 1910: Kinematograph Experiences”, Proceedings of the British Kinematograph Society 38 (1936), 5.

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“The transport of audiences”: making cinema “National” •

“The transport of audiences”: making cinema “National”

Nico de Klerk he materials that are the subject of this essay, films and their accompanying printed texts, were produced in the early and mid-1910s by the Association Koloniaal Instituut, in Amsterdam. This association was founded in 1910 as a centre for the promotion of science, education, trade, and manufacture. Alerted by a lack of interest in the Dutch colonies, in particular the East Indies (now Indonesia), the association’s founders conceived of the Colonial Institute as a center for the collection and study of data and objects of, and the dissemination of knowledge about, Dutch overseas territories. Besides exhibitions, publications or lectures, they decided to use a modern aid in their campaign: photographic and cinematographic records of the Dutch East Indies. In an early description, in 1911,1 the association described the film project in general terms as a means to give “a vivid impression of the social conditions and the everyday life of the people living in the East Indies”. Besides this idealistic motive, the correspondence and minutes of the association’s board meetings reveal another motive that shaped the initiative: the recruitment of “colonial manpower”. Self-interest was not foreign to this motive, as the association undoubtedly saw an opportunity to prove its value by contributing to relieve a perceived need for new, Dutch employees in the colony. Because the colony was rapidly modernizing around this time, lots of new jobs were created, not only in the traditional sectors of agriculture, industry, government, and the army, but also in health care, education, the legal and penal system, architecture, engineering, and construction, retail, public transport and communication, tourism, etc. The economic expansion at the beginning of the twentieth century could have absorbed members of the local, mostly Indo-European – and often Europeanized – work force. But representatives of colonial interests in patria sided with many local companies and government offices in their preference for newcomers from Holland and other western countries.2 For the realization of the photographs and films, an army captain in the Dutch East-Indies, a man called J.C. Lamster, was approached while he was on leave in Holland, in 1911. The decisive factor in selecting him was his knowledge of the colony, its people, and their customs, not his filmmaking experience, of which he probably had none. In fact, he was sent to Pathé, in Paris, for a crash course in filmmaking. He left for the Dutch East-Indies in February 1912 with instructions and a list of topics for films and photographs to be made over the next year. These topics are reflected in the categories used in the institute’s later film catalogues: nature; native customs and

T

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traditions; native manufacture and industry; everyday life of both the European and native populations; traffic; education; hygiene and health care; and cash crops, among others. It should be said, though, that enthusiasm for the idea of cinematographic records was not unanimous. Some board members insisted that the films, when ready, should not be part of the regular screenings in cinema theatres. The association, they claimed, should position its films as educational tools for “the dissemination of serious and solid knowledge”, not as cheap amusement. Others were wondering whether the initiative would really create a demand among the target group, universities in particular. This scattered skepsis rose to alarm all-round when the board’s secretary visited Lamster in the colony and reported, among other things, that Lamster had been infected with “the cinema fever”.3 A description of Lamster’s proposal for a film about the colonial army, involving a series of re-enactments of events from the recently ended war in Aceh (a film, by the way, that Lamster actually went on to make) illustrated his worries. Re-enactments and other forms of staging must have been anathema to the board, as such measures contradicted its goal of providing reliable information. So, even before the films were finished, it was decided, firstly, that the films would serve strictly as illustrations to lectures by speakers with a thorough knowledge of the colony. Secondly, the films were made available for serious educational purposes only (to universities, teacher training courses, secondary schools, and even primary schools). Moreover, in order to dispel any association with the film business, the films were not rented; only a small user fee was asked. After the first few screenings of the films, in 1914 and 1915, however, the restrictive policy of the Colonial Institute was criticized. The Department of Colonial Affairs, which had sponsored the association’s film plans, made it clear that more should be done to enable potentially interested spectators to see the films. This led to the publication of a catalogue, in 1915, and plans for a mobile projection booth. Still, the condition that the films were part of a serious lecture, delivered by a competent speaker, remained basically unchanged.4 In addition, the association began to publish so-called Commentaries. These were booklets, from three to ten pages, that accompanied the films and expanded on their intertitles. Phrases such as “Here you see …” or “On the left …” indicate that these texts were meant to be read aloud while the films were running. So, apart from what an expert told during his presentation preceding and/or in between the film program, he could, if he so wished, rely on the Colonial Institute’s explanations when the films were being screened. Basically, then, the Commentaries were a set of instructions, albeit optional, for lecturers. In other words, what we have here is the lecturer’s discourse, whether or not it was actually delivered (Fig. 1). Even though over the years the association somewhat attenuated the strictness of its policy, its initial decision to steer clear of commercial cinemas was quite understandable. The films differ in important ways from standard fare in commercial cinema programs of the era. In these programs, most films recorded outside the urbanized western world were unambiguously exotic, often making people and their customs look outdated and strange, if not ridiculous. Such films appeared to have been made, not in another place, but in another time. In comparison, the Colonial Institute’s films are remarkable for showing a contemporary cross-section of phenomena that potential emigrants would encounter in the colony. Topics comprised both the European and the indigenous, the familiar and the new, the west and the east, as well as the ways these two worlds intersected or even affected each other. The films were also up-to-date in the sense that they reflected the new political attitude towards the colony, the so-called ethical policy. After decades of polemics and debate

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11 • “The transport of audiences”: making cinema “National” Fig. 1. Commentary booklet for Tocht per auto door Weltevreden.

this policy was officially proclaimed in 1901. The ethical policy proposed that a moral obligation to consider the benefit of the indigenous populations should prevail over self-interested exploitation. Furthermore, it promised a more autonomous, self-governing role for the colony. This rather altruistic formulation should not blind us to interests more advantageous to the Dutch government; and the vagueness about the moment when the colony would be ready for autonomy was, of course, deliberate. Still, the policy did lead to a number of new initiatives. The association’s films on various forms of health care and education show some of the most visible changes this policy introduced. Because of the motives of the institute – information and propaganda on the one hand, stimulating emigration on the other – and because of the contemporariness of the films’ subject matter, I would venture that, up to a point, the films and the commentaries provide – or rather: had to provide – an accurate impression of the colony. The qualifier “up to a point” is necessary, of course, because politically sensitive or less savory aspects of life in and the administration of the colony were not (or not allowed to be) recorded. For example, hygienic conditions in indigenous quarters of the bigger cities were appalling, the ethical policy notwithstanding.5 The lack of indigenous political repre-

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sentation was not considered either. Furthermore, the films reflect a rather systematic, dichotomous pattern of European and indigenous topics. As a result a significant part of the population, the Indo-Europeans – i.e. those of mixed descent, have been vanished as if by a racially motivated magical trick. Nevertheless, such “sanitizing” measures and political agendas were a far cry from the easy stereotyping to which many films at the time resorted. I would maintain therefore that, despite their biases, both the films and the Commentaries were a genuine effort to show Dutch audiences a largely unknown place, the people who lived there, and their customs and culture. Spectators were provided with factual information – geographical, historical, demographic, ethnographic, technical, statistical, or practical – and descriptive scenes of landscape, infrastructure, professional and cultural activities, and everyday life. Yet, interestingly, the descriptive nature of the Commentaries is interrupted here and there by remarks that have no counterpart in the films. Admittedly, we have much less commentaries at our disposal than films – thirty booklets out of some eighty films produced in the mid-1910s, but I nevertheless think these moments are systematic and significant enough to merit some discussion. One can range these moments under the following headings: reliability With ‘reliability’ I mean that the texts point out where and in what way depicted scenes differ from the real thing. That is to say, they distinguish re-enactments and other forms of staging. Particularly in the films of court dances, the texts take pains to inform the spectator about the differences between these recordings and official performances of these dances. They tell us that what we actually see are a few “episodes” from classical narrative dances; in what ways the costumes differ from those worn for official performances; that the dances are performed without the story being recited by a dalang or storyteller; and that changes have been made to accommodate the camera in order to get a clearer picture. The latter circumstance, in fact, occurred more often. But what is intriguing is that these other instances are sometimes left unmentioned. That lighting conditions, for instance, necessitated the filming of indoor activities in the open air, is not always indicated. Thus, the commentary for a film called Inlandsche huisnijverheid [Native Cottage Industries] is silent about the reason as to why the various stages of weaving that are portrayed were all performed in an unsheltered yard under the hot sun – an unlikely spot. Whether the authors of the commentaries lacked knowledge about how and where activities were performed was the reason for such oversights cannot be established A particular type of reliability was updating. Over the years the films were re-cut, re-compiled, and re-titled; shots, even entire films, were added or removed. Looking at the various editions of the Colonial Institute’s catalogue – of 1915, 1919, and 1923 – there’s hardly a film that has not undergone changes in length.6 The reprints of the Commentaries pointed out the differences that had occurred between the moment of recording and the present. In a copy of the 1923 catalogue, for example, the word “verouderd” (outmoded) is scribbled in the margin next to the title of a film about the city of Bandung. From the reprinted commentary to that film we learn that because of “feverish construction activities” the city seems to change its aspect daily. As a result, it says, “these images of Bandung of 1913 are not representative of the present city”. Similarly, a remark in the commentary to the film, Gezichten in Bali [Views of Bali], informs spectators, probably to the disappointment of some,

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about the recent development that Balinese women tend to cover their upper bodies. “realism” The texts, more emphatically than the films, contrast European and indigenous or Chinese aspects of life in the colony. Filmed scenes of indigenous or Chinese quarters show what seem ordinary streets and houses. But the commentaries are more graphic and do not shun words as “dirty”, “uncomfortable”, and “grimy”. Realism has replaced exotic cuteness, underlining that this will not be a mere tourist trip. For instance, both film and text of Een tocht per auto door Weltevreden [A car ride through Weltevreden], a part of the Dutch East Indies capital Batavia (now Djakarta), follow a route through the old, dilapidated Dutch city, the Chinese quarter, the European shopping district, and the many government and other offices of spacious, uptown Weltevreden, again followed by shots of a less well-to-do neighborhood. But in the commentary’s introduction to the film doom is spelled for this “park town”, when it states that lack of land, due to population growth, will mean the end of the town’s grandeur, as new houses have to be built on smaller plots local color The texts of these booklets are laced with words and terms from Bahasa Indonesia, the colony’s accepted lingua franca. This may reflect the institute’s policy of limiting its screenings to a potentially interested, even knowledgeable audience. On the other hand, such terms may also have gently and vicariously transported the spectator to that faraway world conjured up by the images projected on the screen. This strategy is reinforced by another quality of these texts: form of address One of the most significant differences between the texts and films is that the commentaries sometimes address their audiences as potential inhabitants of the colony. On a number of very practical issues the spectator is as it were prepared for a life in the tropics. For instance, the text to a film about a railroad line begins as follows: “On the platform one can see a couple of European men wearing the typical white costume, with high-necked coats. Despite the fact that in these regions it can be cool and wet in the morning, people are usually dressed very lightly.” Here, the spectator is addressed as a future emigrant and given free advice on how to dress for the tropics. And the commentary to the film, Het Batikken [Batik], states that “for Europeans, the use of batik is restricted to pajamas for gentlemen and sarongs for the ladies; lately one hardly appears in this type of dress”. The last part of the quotation, referring to the old habit of wearing one’s pajamas around the house and, more generally, of “dressing native”, marks the text as in fact extremely up-to-date and would have kept the future emigrant from making a gaffe. The quotation reflects a then recent demographic trend in the colony’s European population from more permanently to more temporarily settled families, who were not as ready as their predecessors to give up their European ways of life in terms of dress, food, housekeeping or choice of entertainments. As more or less accurate, often updated information on a range of relevant, contemporary topics, phrased in ways meant to engage their listeners, the Commentaries were indeed more than just expanded intertitles. Rather, they attest to the strategies in which films showing foreign or unfamiliar scenes were inserted in and shaped by a national framework and by national interests. The films the Colonial Institute produced and collected, its restrictions on their exhibition, and their Commentaries form just one case, albeit a special one, in Dutch national film culture. Rather than “national film history”, this is the preferred term in a

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project the Nederlands Filmmuseum wants to undertake (and which, by the way, will not be restricted to early cinema only). Part of our research will consist of looking at the ways in which films of foreign origin and/or content were adapted to the Dutch market. With this approach we hope to restore some aspects that we think are of central importance to national film historiography, but are not always considered to be so, if at all. Admittedly, such an approach might be more to the point for a country, such as the Netherlands, where film production has always been of much less significance than the distribution and exhibition of foreign films. In the remainder of this essay I want to briefly discuss, on the basis of the case of the Colonial Institute, a few aspects that our approach highlights. The first and most obvious aspect is the notion of colonialism. From the association’s initiative onwards, i.e. ever since the mid-1910s, colonial films were a part of Dutch film culture. However, they do not form part of Dutch film historiography. In fact, until today colonial cinema tout court is still largely absent from the notion of national cinema, in both the histories of former colonies and of former colonial empires. The reasons why differ from country to country. But, in general, twisting the meanings of “national” and “production” has effectively kept the colonial era largely out of film historiography. “National”, for instance, has predominantly been restricted to the mother country, or, in the case of former colonies, to the post-independence era. “Production” has predominantly been restricted to professional filmmaking; filmmaking for scientific, educational, industrial, news or private purposes is hardly ever considered.7 Yet such films constituted many of the genres that prevailed in colonial filmmaking The Colonial Institute deliberately stayed out of the mainstream of cinema. With their screenings they continued the tradition of non-theatrical exhibition. The institute’s screenings lasted well into the early 1960s; after the Dutch government’s late recognition of Indonesia’s independence, in 1949, and the institute’s name change to Royal Institute for the Tropics, in 1950, its screenings shifted to topics concerning what came to be known as the Third World. During the same period, incidentally, there were a number of other practitioners of such screenings in the Netherlands, individuals as well as organizations. This type of exhibition usually featured specific topics – e.g. religion, the natural world, and less fictionalized, ethnographic images – and specific ways of presentation – notably lecturing. It continued a type of show that, with the emergence of purpose-built cinema theatres, quickly disappeared from the mainstream as well as from national film history. Hence the easy dismissal of non-theatrical screenings as consisting of “minor” genres.8 According to international law, the Dutch East Indies was not a state, but an indissoluble part – first called a possession and, since the 1922 constitution, a territory – of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.9 Because it was perceptually and culturally a faraway and different land, however, there also was an unmistakably transcultural dimension to relations with the colony. Take for instance the film trade with the colony: the export of films by Dutch distributors to and the screenings by Dutch and other theatre owners in the colony. Acknowledging this business restores an older notion of national cinema. This is the notion, to be found in early trade magazines for example, of national cinema as the export of national hardware – cameras, projectors, cinemas – and software – films – on a global scale.10 Both this export to the colony as well as the exhibition in Holland of films shot in the colony were part of a transcultural project, involving dozens of firms and thousands of films, that has never been equaled by the country’s film industry again. From the point of view of cultural heritage, the subject matter of the Colonial Institute’s

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films also is pertinent, as they belong – together with a number of earlier Pathé nonfiction films – to the oldest extant moving images of the Indonesian archipelago.11 This perspective, in other words, restores location as an aspect of national film history. This, too, is an aspect that seems to have disappeared with the ‘modern’ approach to national cinema behind conceptions of a country’s often expediently drawn national borders. As a result foreigners’ views of a country have been largely excluded from national film historiographies. The international dimension of cinema also has an archival component. Since the restoration of the institute’s films and the retrieval of the commentaries, interest in this type of colonial cinema is growing – in Holland, that is, and in the (western) film historical community. Apart from ideological and historical reasons to dismiss this type of cinema in Indonesian film histories, the fact that these materials are in archives in The Netherlands, not in Indonesia, may also play a role in the conception of a national cinema heritage. With the Commentaries, the Colonial Institute tried to impose control over the film’s reception. They led spectators’ eyes to the right spot and positioned the images in a certain way. A nation’s viewing experience is another, admittedly difficult but nonetheless under-developed aspect of national film historiography. Certainly for countries with a small production infrastructure the idea of ‘national reception’ may be a more relevant concept, as their film industry is dependent on foreign imports Finally, what the practices of the Colonial Institute point up are a number of activities that can be subsumed under the name appropriation. I use this term to describe measures that are aimed at adapting films to domestic markets, laws, manners, and audiences. Such measures include censorship (e.g. showing less or more of the film than in its production country; self-censorship by distributors and/or exhibitors), translation (e.g. the degree to which translations are “domesticated”; degree of completeness; selection of linguistic and wider cultural markers), marketing (e.g. high end vs. low end; target groups; choice of exhibition venue), publicity (e.g. type of media; degree of saturation; tie-ins), and presentation (e.g. programmatic contexts – line-up, live events, oral and musical accompaniment, etc.; booking strategies). Whether or not all these measures succeed in facilitating or improving reception, local meaning and local appreciation are crucially dependent on them. Appropriation, therefore, may well be the most distinctive aspect of Dutch film culture, if not of other small production countries. The very initiative of the Colonial Institute to produce films, aim their screenings at a high-end market, frame them within expert lecturers’ introductions, publish the Commentaries with their quasi-objective, factual information and their particular forms of address, are all measures that served to make generations of audiences more familiar with the colony and influence their attitude towards it. There is no record of how many people, in fact, were moved to emigrate to the colony as a result of their presentations. But what we do know is that such measures were always at work to transport audiences to places and people formerly unknown.

Notes 1.

Letter of 7 November, 1911, from the Association Koloniaal Instituut to the Minister of Colonial Affairs. (ARA 2.10.36.04 INV 878)

2.

Ulbe Bosma, Remco Raben, De oude Indische wereld 1500–1920 (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2003), 291, 304–305; Ulbe Bosma, Remco Raben, Wim Willems, De geschiedenis van de Indische Nederlanders (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2006), 160.

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Letter of 20 January, 1913, written in Sukabumi, Java, from Professor H. P. Wijsman to the Colonial Institute. (KIT 4314)

4.

Minutes of the the Board of Trustees meeting of the Association Koloniaal Instituut, May 1915. (ARA 2.21.043) Dutch businessman, city councillor, and tireless propagandist H.F. Tillema, alarmed by the cholera epidemic of 1910, drew attention to this problem and campaigned for the improvement of hygienic conditions in the poorer quarters of his residence, Semarang, with his 1911 pamphlet Riooliana (which would translate as Seweriana), the effect of which was aided by its uncompromising photographs. See Ewald Vanvugt, Een propagandist van het zuiverste water: H.F. Tillema (1870–1952) en de fotografie van tempo doeloe (Amsterdam: Jan Mets, 1993).

5.

6.

In 1919, the Colonial Institute bought 1,000 meters of additional material from Pathé. As a result, subsequent editions of the catalogue marked those films wholly or partly made up of Pathé material as restricted to exhibitions in the Netherlands only. See also Carinda Strangio, “Standplaats Soekaboemi: de Lamster-collectie van het Filmmuseum”, Tijdschrift voor Mediageschiedenis, 2. 1 (1999), 22–36.

7.

It is no an exaggeration to state that feature fiction films occupy center stage in such publications. A typical statement, from Mushtaq Gazdar’s Pakistan cinema 1947–1997 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 4–5, is: “Lahore’s first silent film, The Daughter of Today, was made in 1924 [….] [It] was the brainchild of G.K. Mehta […], who managed to bring a movie camera from abroad. Mehta started with supplying newsreel coverage to international agencies and made some documentaries as well.” In other words, all Mehta’s experience with cinema before his “first” film is discounted. With this term Abdelkader Benali, in Le cinéma colonial au Maghreb: l’imaginaire en trompe-l’œil (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1998), 15, justifies his restriction to feature fiction films in his discussion of colonial cinema: “Ne répondant pas aux critères esthétiques valorisés par l’histoire du cinéma, les films coloniaux furent reconnus très vite après les indépendances comme des films de propagande, et se trouvent relégués dans la catégorie des genres mineurs”. (emphasis in the original)

8.

9.

See Jan A. Somers, Nederlandsch-Indië: staatkundige ontwikkelingen binnen een koloniale relatie (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2005), 14.

10.

See for example, “Kino-Theater im heiligen Land Palästina”, Der Kinematograph 120 (14 April 1909); “Wiener Brief”, Der Kinematograph 144 (29 September 1909); “Kinematograpentheater und Filmabsatz in Siam”, Der Kinematograph 198 (12 October 1910); Erich O. Moeller, “Der Kinematograph in der Türkei”, Erste Internationale Film-Zeitung 1 (7 January 1911); “Der Kinematograph in Mexiko”, Erste Internationale Film-Zeitung, 10 (11 March 1911). The earliest Pathé films of the Indonesian archipelago date to 1907. The earliest title in the collection of the Nederlands Filmmuseum is: Récolte et industrie de la cane (1910).

11.

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Enlisting early cinema in the service of “la plus grande France” •

Enlisting early cinema in the service of “la plus grande France”

Panivong Norindr he use of the term “enlisting” in my title is not meant simply to marshal the image of a nation at war but to suggest the potential or promise of early cinema in reconfiguring the new boundaries of the French imperial nation-state,1 a sociopolitical system that linked a parliamentary republic, the Third Republic, to an administrative empire of colonies and protectorates. “L’idée coloniale”, to use Raoul Girardet’s term, entered popular French consciousness as “la plus Grande France”, so named after the French imperial doctrine2 conceived after the bloody aftermath of the Great War to challenge the hegemony of the British empire and counter its slogan of “Greater Britain”. The idea of “la plus Grande France” complicates the idea of the nation as elaborated in such a poetic and abstract fashion by Ernest Renan in his famous 1882 Sorbonne lecture, “What is a Nation?” According to Renan, the nation is not defined by geography, language, or religion: “A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things, which in truth are but one, constitute this soul or spiritual principle. One lies in the past, one in the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present-day consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form.”3 Renan also asserts that “l’oubli”4 [forgetfulness] and “historical error”, what in our postcolonial time we would call “historical amnesia”, also shape the modern nation: “Forgetting, I would even go as far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation, which is why progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger for [the principle of] nationality. Indeed, historical enquiry brings to light deeds of violence which took place at the origin of all political formations, even of those whose consequences have been altogether beneficial. Unity is always effected by means of brutality.”5 Here Renan’s pointed observation should be taken seriously by the postcolonial film critic whose task may be precisely to shed light on these “acts of violence” and attempt to write a cultural film history that provincializes France, and by extension Europe, to use Dipesh Chakravarty’s felicitous phrase, a subaltern film historiography that foregrounds the colonies and the story of these elided subjects of history, tirailleurs and other nameless “native, colonial subjects”, conscripted en masse, when the French patrie was in danger, as it was the case during the Great War (and again during World War II).6

T

These “sujets français” of a vast French overseas empire were subjects “sans nationalité”, without citizenship, whose valor on the war front, earned them the dubious reputation of having being used as cannon fodder. Let us not forget that the number of colonial troops, conscripted for the allied war effort from all parts of the French overseas empire, from the Maghreb and West Africa (collectively known as the

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Senegalese tirailleurs) and Indochina (Annamites tirailleurs and Indochinese workers) reached almost a million during the period of 1914–1918. Of this million, 205 000 men, or more than 1 in 5, were killed in the various theaters of operation. These men should find their rightful place in our collective memory for having safeguarded the interests of the French imperial nation, by contributing to the imperial nation-building effort, and for their heroic “fait d’armes” and not simply remembered because of the infamous “Y-a bon Banania” slogan, first invented in 1915, which further commodified them.7 It has become a common place to assert that, for the first time in history, moving images were used to document the Great War on a truly massive scale. Laurent Véray, in his seminal Les films d’actualité français de la Grande Guerre, catalogued the films shot during the Great War. Pathé-Frères, Gaumont, Éclair, and Eclipse all participated in the war effort and shifted their production to actualités during the war, in part because no new investments were required. But an exhaustive list of these films fails to tell the entire story. One must also examine the political and economic context of their production. As is now well known, the war had a disastrous effect on the French film industry. Only a few weeks after Germany had declared war on France [3 August 1914], movie directors, cinema workers, and film critics joined forces and sent a collective letter to the French government to request that the government intervene, a request that went unanswered.8 Léon Gaumont even wrote a personal letter to the Minister of War, Alexandre Millerand, on 11 November 1914, and argued for “the necessity of taking [filmic] views of these events”, to counter the “lies of the enemies”.9 Assuring him that he wanted to offer “de réels services à la patrie”, and was willing to submit to any prescriptions to make the views acceptable to the censorship board, he asserted that: “Le film cinématographique constitue, en effet, sans contredit, le document le plus intéressant parce que sa sincérité ne peut être mise en doute”. Of course, as Véray clearly demonstrates, these films allegedly shot “live”, relied on mise-en-scène (staging) and montage (editing); a few were even problematic reenactments. Pathé-Frères, through the intermediary of M. Prévost, also failed to get the French government to allow the company to film war actualités early on in the war. Although the military authorities had authorized print journalists to be on the front line, they would not be so forthcoming with camera operators. The authorities did not give in to Pathé-Frères and Gaumont’s demands, suspicious that their “engagement, en faveur de la propagande”, their patriotism and civic zeal were mere ploys for financial gain.10 However, Véray does not take up an important Pathé-Frères document, Gérard Madieu’s Le Cinéma colonisateur.11 Madieu describes himself as an agent for the “Compagnie Générale des Etablissements Pathé Frères in Algiers”. The fact that Le Cinéma colonisateur was published in 1916 in Algiers, a French colony, is, I contend, a critical factor because the colonies continued to be a laboratory for modernity during the war, not only in the relatively new disciplines of anthropology and tropical medicine but also, more important, for the moving image industry.12 It was in the colonies that the cinema could be mobilized as a modernizing agent of progress and civilization. Although important lessons about early cinema can be learned from a comparative analysis of the formation of a national or cultural identity in metropolitan centers like Paris, London, New York, Berlin, Oslo, or Stockholm, which set the national against the international, the local or municipal against the national, the rural against the urban, modernity against tradition (as several contributions in this volume have shown convincingly), a remapping and re-territorialization of early cinema as it was imagined and put into practice in the colonies would undoubtedly broaden our cinematic referential frame and unsettle our common assumptions about the filmic apparatus

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12 • Enlisting early cinema in the service of “la plus grande France” Fig. 1. Film still from Coolies à Saigon (Lumière, 1896).

and nexus of production, distribution, and exhibition. The incipient film policies emerging from the colonies – in particular, Algeria, Indochina, the Dutch Indies and the East Indies – although never fully realized or implemented, may have helped shape, in perhaps unexpected fashion, a national film policy or “politique du film” as it will be called later on, in the early 1930s, in France. These film policies and early films may also have had a more important impact and lasting influence than has been heretofore acknowledged for they also have been reclaimed by autochtonous critics as being the foundational texts of the emerging national cinema of such countries as Thailand and Indonesia. Let me illustrate how early cinema represented the Indochinese colony with another of Constant Girel’s films, this one strikingly different from “Danse Tyrolienne”, which Frank Kessler discusses earlier in this volume. Les coolies de Saigon was also shot in 1896 and is perhaps the earliest Lumière film shot in French Indochina (Fig. 1). In La Production cinématographique des Frères Lumière, Michele Aubert and Jean-Claude Seguin provide the following information about the film.13 Shot on 30 December 1896, by Constant Girel in Saigon, it was shown in the city of Lyon on 26 December 1897. The subject is described as being “Deux colonnes d’ouvriers tirent un rouleau compresseur”, but the title, “Coolies à Saigon”, seems to reflect more accurately the subjects seen on screen. The Vietnamese workers are immediately identifiable by their conical hats and their drab clothing. They are, moreover, pulling the road roller, barefoot. What is striking is not only the contrast between the labor these workers are providing to transform a Saigon street into a modern urban thoroughfare and the nonchalance of the Frenchman, impeccably dressed in his white colonial suit and hat, carrying a walking stick or cane, but also the capture of movement: in the foreground and dead center, a Frenchman is crossing a street – followed just a few steps behind by what appears to be his native boy or domestic – as the gang of coolies pulling the road roller enter the frame from the right background (Fig. 2). One of the compelling aspects of this film is the fluidity of the movement that delimits in ephemeral fashion the space of labor and leisure, bound by the trademark Lumière diagonal trajectory constituted by machines and human bodies; the grace and dignity of these workers whose hard labor helped transfigure Saigon into the “Pearl of the Orient”; the ordered landscape and beauty of the modern city, with its tidy façade, rows of balconies, tree-lined street, and wide sidewalk. Thus represented is a familiar and inviting metropolitan space where the white colonizer can feel at home, transfigured into a tropical flâneur. Of course, there are other disrupting micro-narratives that complicate this all too familiar scenario: a native domestic may be following in the footsteps of his white master, but there is another Vietnamese man who also walks on the same sidewalk as the white

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EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL” Fig. 2. Film still from Coolies à Saigon (first frame).

man; Vietnamese children also cross the street and turn to look straight at the camera; finally the once busy street seems almost quiet when a single Vietnamese worker is seen pushing his wheelbarrow in the now almost empty space. So what does this short film divulge about the French imperial nation-state? And what can we infer more generally about the place of the Lumière films in the constitution of a national cinema? My attempt to answer these questions will follow a circuitous route and return to a discussion of French cinema during the Great War. I suggested earlier that certain film policies were elaborated in the colonies and reintroduced in the metropolitan center at a much later date, perhaps not fully realized, but certainly readapted. Let me be more specific about the promise and potential projected onto early cinema as outlined by Madieu in his short pamphlet. Whereas in Paris, the French government and the commercial cinema industry clashed over how to film the war and include France’s colonial subjects in the narrative of nation-state formation, in Algeria the political climate was much more conducive to collaboration. It should come as no surprise to learn that the Governor General of Algeria, Charles Lutaud, wrote the preface to Madieu’s short book (only 32 pages long), which could be seen as an unqualified official endorsement. Like Madieu, Lutaud staunchly defended cinema’s potential as “one of the instruments of our economic and national regeneration” because it would determine, between France and its colony, “a network of exchanges of all kinds” – words that foreground a bi-directional flow and circulation of knowledge.14 One of the most compelling aspects of this document beyond its programmatic title, “the colonizing cinema” – we expect it to be an unapologetic endorsement of French colonialism, and, of course, it is fully committed to France’s civilizing mission – is the qualified and complex treatment of how it should be achieved. In other words, one of the important aspects of Madieu’s text is the thick discourse on cinema and more explicitly the process by which cinema becomes instrumentalized as a tool for colonization, as a pivotal element of the colonial apparatus. Madieu praised the cinema for its ability to convey pure, unmediated reality, as an ethnographic “document” that strips the exotic veneer of legends conveyed by French exotic writers and painters such as Eugéne Fromentin and Eugène Delacroix. Demythologizing Algeria, he believed was one of the tasks of the cinema, which would reveal to a French metropolitan audience, “cette Algérie vraie, objet constant de convoitises germaniques [...] réservoir inépuisable d’hommes, de richesses agricoles et minières [... ] cette Algérie que beaucoup de Français soupçonne à peine et méconnaissent encore”.15 As a modernizing agent, cinema also had the potential to educate the natives, which would enable “the rapid evolution of the native”.16 Influenced by the positivist philosophy of Hippolyte Taine, Madieu subscribed whole-

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heartedly to its main tenets, declaring that the cinematograph is determined by the three great principles of art: “le milieu, la race et le moment”.17 Not surprisingly, he claimed for France, and in a jingoistic fashion, the paternity of the invention, “le cinéma oeuvre française par excellence”.18 But he also acknowledged the full pedagogical potential of the cinema: “Il est l’auxiliaire précieux de toutes les manifestations de la science, des arts et des lettres. L’enseignement, aux trois degrés, fait appel à ce nouveau moyen d’education et d’instruction.”19 The new and relatively untested technology was not a deterrent. He argued for its early adoption at all levels of the French educational system. Although Madieu, as a Pathé-Frères agent, dedicated himself to developing the economy of the early French cinema industry – he focused his attention on the economy of its production, what he calls “la fixation sur la pellicule”, and exhibition20 – he was also not insensitive to its “plastic beauty”: The “spectacle cinématographique”, he writes, is “une oeuvre d’art, une leçon de choses, un enseignement esthétique et moral”.21 But he also considered film to be a “material object” susceptible to being reproduced, exchanged and transacted: Il y a deux conditions inséparables: la fixation sur la pellicule et le projection sur l’écran, qui font naître différents droits et obligations. En effet, un film est susceptible de transactions comme étant un objet matériel; mais, pris en lui-même, il n’a de valeur qu’en relation étroite avec la projection. Une pellicule isolée, obtenue d’un appareil enregistreur, ne constitue, à elle seule, qu’une reproduction imparfaite et tronquée, à tel point que l’épreuve positive, peut-être essentielle dans une projection, ne joue guère en pratique le rôle d’une image-indépendante. D’autre part, le film peut exister en un seul exemplaire ou être multiplié par un procédé de copie mécanique, c’est-à-dire édité en un nombre infini d’exemplaires. Il faut distinguer entre l’oeuvre proprement dite, l’oeuvre originale, et la pure forme matérielle des pellicules impressionnées.”22 The vocabulary deployed, “the original work of art”, “mechanical copy”, “reproduction” prefigures Walter Benjamin’s famous essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, without, of course, reaching Benjamin’s complex level of argumentation. Madieu’s position is much closer to the one articulated by Jean-Michel Frodon who considered that there exists “a solidarity between the history of nations and that of cinema” and, perhaps a little more imaginatively, that they share an ontology: “nation et cinéma ne peuvent exister, que par un même mécanisme: la projection”.23 Madieu’s understanding of the mission and potential of the cinema is not couched in abstract or complex terms; rather, his vision is pragmatic. He proposes what he believed to be a rather straightforward program for his “colonizing cinema”: “Le programme est simple: vulgariser en France le domaine colonial et surtout et toujours l’Algérie; diffuser, dans les milieux indigènes, les visions de la grande Patrie commune; enseigner nos méthodes générales, montrer notre puissance dans le monde, sous toutes les formes, nos moeurs, nos arts, nos sciences, notre vie nationale en un mot” [my emphasis].24 His objective to convince the natives of France’s grandeur via the cinematic medium might be difficult to achieve but more interesting is his attempt to convey and disseminate a vision of La plus Grande France that would appeal to the colonized Algerians’ putative sense of a shared desire to live peacefully with the French colonizers. He believed that cinema could reach everyone, even those who do not live in urban centers but in remote villages: On pourrait, par exemple, concevoir un cinéma forain, donnant des

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représentations dans les moindre douars, dans les plus petits centres de colonisation et apportant ainsi dans le bled, jusqu’aux régions les plus lointaines, le bon film attrayant et propagandiste, mis en harmonie avec les besoins et les aspirations. Et des légendes appropriées, en langue arabe, donneraient l’explication des vues et des sujets projetés.25 He put forward the idea of an itinerant cinema, modeled after “l’instar du remarquable service cinématographique de l’Armée”, that would be privately owned: “Mais il est urgent que la méthode s’organise et qu’une liberté intelligente soit laissée à l’initiative privée pour permettre l’utilisation pratique immédiate du cinéma colonisateur. Il le faut, car l’heure est propice. Jamais aux yeux des indigènes la France n’a eu autant de prestige, prestige né des conditions de la guerre actuelle et des rapports de plus en plus fréquents, dus au séjour aux Armées de nombreux contigents africains, à l’emploi sans cesse plus étendu de la main d’oeuvre indigène.”26 France’s prestige and grandeur are evoked here because of the natives’ encounter with a France at war. One can also detect in his writing a certain sense of urgency due to the current historical conjuncture – the presence of large number of colonial subjects who are fighting for France – the Senegalese tirailleurs – or working as laborers in ammunition factories, plane assembly lines, etc. The Indochinese, for instance, were reputed to be very good mechanics with superior dexterity, as revealed in the army archive films preserved in the ECPA, at Fort d’Ivry.27 But as Tyler Stoval has shown, these workers were excluded from France and returned to their country of origin in large numbers immediately after the war, in order to preserve the “whiteness” of France.28 Madieu also calls for new legislation to be introduced and enacted in the French National Assembly to regulate French cinema and protect the economic interest of an incipient national film industry, which he believes an international or “foreign” (his word) treaty like the Berne International Convention – and in particular article 1429 – was incapable of protecting. For Madieu, the Convention merely protected the rights of an author who had been undermined by these new technologies of reproduction: 1. L’interprétation extensive du droit d’auteur, par l’incorporation du droit exclusif appartenant à l’auteur de chaque oeuvre individuelle, d’en autoriser la reproduction et la représentation publique par la cinématographie ou tout autre procédé analogue. 2. L’interprétation, à l’égal de tout autre oeuvre de l’esprit, des oeuvres cinématographiques créées par l’exercice de ce droit, qu’il s’agisse d’oeuvre originales (productions) ou de reproductions.30 He also recommended that French leaders who were attuned to the “progrès de l’expansion coloniale française sous toutes ses formes” turn their attention to cinema and “créer une réglementation spéciale” because “[...] la nature même de la cinématographie ne semble-t-elle pas demander des lois nouvelles?”.31 These new laws would be applied not only in France but the entire French empire: “Il faut un status du cinéma constitués par les textes législatifs à intervenir et applicable dans toute la France et les colonies”.32 Ultimately, Madieu demanded nothing less than a national film policy that would regulate film production, distribution and exhibition in every part of the world that France governed and ruled. One could certainly be impressed by such an ambitious plan and original vision. But colonial realities and the different regimes by which colonies and protectorates were governed would make a single film policy unmanageable and pointless. To support and illustrate this argument, it suffices to point to Madieu’s own plea to use the power of cinema to shape public opinion: “Les grands mouvements d’intérêts divers ont

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d’ailleurs si bien compris la chose, que la Ligue Maritime française, depuis cinq ans déjà, a établi tout un système de conférence cinématographiques adaptées au but à atteindre, c’est-à-dire à former un courant d’opinion favorable aux question maritimes”.33 Much like the Dutch Colonial Institute, the French Ligue Maritime française, a pro-colonial lobby, made ample use of the cinematograph to illustrate lectures on the legitimacy of France’s civilizing mission in its overseas territory. But Madieu adds: “C’est dans le même esprit que la Ligue contre l’alcoolisme a demandé au cinéma une série de films dénonçant les dangers de l’alcool pour l’éducation et la vitalité de la race”. This is where the exhibition of the same film, if it had been regulated by a unique national film policy, could have had a ruinous effect on the colonies. Temperance films perhaps might be effective in France and certain parts of the French empire, but certainly not in Indochina because the Government General of Indochina relied very heavily on its alcohol and opium monopolies to generate much needed revenues. Instead, such films would have been censored by the local authorities because they would undermine the economic welfare of the Indochinese Union. In spite of his mistaken assumptions, Madieu also expressed many far-sighted ideas about early cinema. From a military perspective, and particularly in the context of an air war, the cinema could also play an important role in gathering information and visual intelligence over enemy territory or a field of combat. But he could not reveal more of these “merveilles en matière militaire”: “La discrétion s’impose, en raison même des circonstances”.34 Yet one of his greatest insights was not his own but derived from the keen observation of the cinematic practice of France’s greatest rival in that industrial domain, the USA: C’est d’Amérique que vient une innovation rééllement admirable, qui semble déjà tracer la voie à suivre pour le cinéma colonisateur, quant aux méthodes de propagande: Pour développer sous les yeux du public l’oeuvre utile de son administration, le Gouvernement américain a fait établir par le “Reclamation Service” une série de films magnifiques. Ceux-ci montrent, avec la plus grande exactitude, le travail qui se fait dans les entreprises importantes, telles que la construction des routes, des digues, des barrages, le percement des tunnels, le creusement des canaux, les méthodes modernes mises en pratique par l’administration des forêts, l’abatage des arbres, l’emploi des nouvelles machines dans l’industrie et la culture, etc.35 Madieu turns to the USA for an inspiring and novel use of educational cinema. He identifies the “series of magnificent [American] films” produced by the Reclamation Service of the U.S. Government to showcase these ambitious public works projects for a large American audience as a praiseworthy model for his “cinéma colonisateur”. This acknowledgment of the trailblazing American way by a nationalist Frenchman who is, moreover, a Pathé-Frères agent, is indeed remarkable. For Madieu, the early production of government-sponsored educational films in the USA and their success proved that motion pictures can indeed be used to educate a large audience, validating at the same time his call for the use of a powerful emerging technology for instructional purposes. The French, of course, had used motion pictures, from the very beginning, as a powerful propaganda tool. Paul Doumer, then General-Governor of Indochina, had commissioned another Lumière camera operator, Gabriel Veyre, to film “views” of his Indochinese colonies to elicit popular support for them at the 1900 Paris World’s Fair.36 But here, Madieu is particularly attentive to the fact that these American films show “avec la plus grande exactitude, le travail qui se fait dans les entreprises importantes”. In other words, the “accuracy” or “exactitude” of the filmic image is not simply seen

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in terms of the grandiose project it captures but in the “work” or labor that is being performed on those sites. In short, Madieu minimizes the importance of film’s capture of great works, a rather static and conventional filmic view, and privileges a much more dynamic representation of these sites as invested by laboring workers, who, admittedly, remain anonymous, but are now fully acknowledged by the camera as being worthy subjects. Of course, filming in such a fashion would require longer takes and another frame of mind, not necessarily shared by the early camera operators who shot views of important Indochinese industrial sites like the Hongay mine or the port of Haiphong, which relegated Indochinese workers to being simply part and parcel of that industrial landscape. We now may come to a fuller understanding of the importance of the Lumière films, and in particular, Constant Girel’s ambivalent Coolies de Saigon. It can be seen as both an uncompromising endorsement of the modernizing “bienfaits” of French colonialism in the tropics or as an irrefutable filmic record of the cruel treatment of the natives in Indochina at the turn of the 20th century. The task of the postcolonial film critic is to complicate this kind of Manichean view and provide a thicker context in order to decode that ambivalence. At the same time, a sustained analysis of early films that even fleetingly reveal the work performed by the natives in the colonies may give us a more accurate image of the building of the French imperial nation-state and provide rare insights into how early film practitioners conceived and imagined the potential of cinema.

Notes 1.

In his important book, The French Imperial Nation-State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), Gary Wilder works through the concept of the French Republic as a disjointed imperial nation-state that linked a parliamentary republic to an administrative empire.

2.

Raoul Girardet, “L’apothéose de la ‘plus grande France’: l’idée coloniale devant l’opinion française (1930–1935”, Revue française de science politique 18.6 (1968), 1086–1087.

3.

Ernst Renan, “What is a Nation”, in Homi Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), 19.

4.

No French citizen, Renan points out, can tell you if he is Burgundian, Visigoth or Frank in origin; every French citizen is required to have forgotten the massacre of Protestants during SaintBarthélemy in 1572.

5.

Ibid., 11.

6.

Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Poctcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

7.

“Le slogan ‘Y’a bon Banania’ radié à jamais. Le célèbre slogan ‘Y’a bon Banania’ n’aura plus jamais droit de cité. L’entreprise Nutrimaine, qui fabrique la poudre de cacao pour petits déjeuner, a annoncé qu’elle le radiait définitivement à la suite de la plainte déposée par le collectif des Antillais, Guyanais et Réunionnais. Inventé en pleine première Guerre Mondiale en référence aux régiments de tirailleurs sénégalais, ce slogan, perçu aujourd’hui comme raciste et portant atteinte à la dignité humaine, n’était pourtant plus utilisé depuis trente ans!” / “The advertising slogan ‘Y’a bon Banania’ erased for good. The famous slogan ‘Y’a bon Banania’ will never be used again. Nutrimaine, the company that produces the breakfast cocoa powder, announced that it was permanently banned from usage following the complaint lodged by the collective of French West Indians, Guyanese, and Reunionais. Invented in the middle of World War I to refer to the regiments of Senegalese tirailleurs, this slogan, perceived today as racist and incompatible with human dignity, has, however, not been in use for the past thirty years!” L’Expansion(1 February 2006).

8.

See their letter dating from the end of August 1914, finally published in Le Cinéma (31 December 1915): 1 – quoted in Laurant Véray, Les films d’actualité française de la Grande Guerre (Paris: AFRHC, 1995), 81 n53.

9.

Ibid., 76 [or 81 n 54?].

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12 • Enlisting early cinema in the service of “la plus grande France” 10.

Ibid., 77.

11.

Gérard Madieu, Le Cinéma colonisateur, Algiers: Adolphe Jourdan, 1916. The Bibliothèque Nationale de France does not own a copy of Le cinéma colonisateur in spite of its Dépôt légal status. I want to thank Jean-Jacques Meusy who uncovered the text in the Tunis National Library and very graciously sent me a copy of the text.

12.

Much like modern zoos and botanical gardens, cinema may owe a greater debt to the colonies than it has ever been acknowledged. I have begun a comparative research project on the interesting nexus of zoos, botanical gardens, and cinema during the heyday of European colonialism.

13.

Michele Aubert and Jean-Claude Seguin, eds., La Production cinématographique des Frères Lumière, Paris: Bibliothèque du film/Mémoires du cinéma, 1996.

14.

Madieu, Le Cinéma colonisateur, 3. The term “régénération” harks back to the theories of Edouard Drumont, Charles Maurras and Maurice Barrès, leading proponents of a militarist French nationalism that was also critical of French colonial expansionism. They were revanchards and believed that French energy would be put to better use to recover the provinces of Alsace-Lorraine annexed by its powerful neighbor during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. The Great War would provide that opportunity.

15.

Ibid., 7.

16.

Ibid., 6.

17.

Ibid., 11.

18.

Ibid., 9.

19.

Ibid.

20.

Ibid., 11.

21.

Ibid.

22.

Ibid., 12.

23.

Ibid. See also the bold claim, made by Jean-Michel Frodon, that links together cinema and nation: “Il existe une affinité de nature entre cinéma et nation. Elle est due à un mécanisme commun, qui les constitue l’un et l’autre: la projection.” Jean-Michel Frodon, La projection nationale: cinéma et nation (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1998), 17.

24.

Ibid., 28.

25.

Ibid., 29–30.

26.

Ibid., 30.

27.

I want to thank Eric Deroo for introducing me to this remarkable archive.

28.

Tyler Stoval, “National Identity and Shifting Imperial Frontiers: Whiteness and the Exclusion of Colonial Writers after World War I”, Representations 84 (2000), 52–72. Are there traces, displaced or sublimated, of these events in French early cinema? Yet, unlike the German case as dramatized in melodramatic films and fan magazines analysed elsewhere in this volume, the union between colonized men and French women did not seem to have been marked as being “unpatriotic”.

29.

Sam Ricketson and Jane Ginsburg, International Copyright and Neighbouring Rights: The Berne Convention and Beyond (2nd edn) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). An analysis of international copyright laws and the various emendations of the Berne Convention, as they were introduced, seems to me, a rather understudied aspect of early cinema and the question of the national and international.

30.

Madieu, Le Cinéma colonisateur, 13.

31.

Ibid.

32.

Ibid.

33.

Ibid., 17.

34.

Ibid., 21.

35.

Ibid., 22–23.

36.

See my “’La Trace Lumière’: Early Cinema and Colonial Propaganda in French Indochina”, in André Gaudreault, Catherine Russell, and Pierre Véronneau, eds., Le cinématographe, nouvelle technologie du XXe siècle (Lausanne: Payot, 2004), 329–339.

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Teaching citizenship via celluloid •

Teaching citizenship via celluloid

Marina Dahlquist n the summer of 1910, Francis Oliver, the Chief of the Bureau of Licenses in New York City, conducted a study of moving picture theaters and concluded: “the motion picture theaters which were just now being condemned by a great many people, [are] a potent factor in the education of the foreign element and therefore an advantage to the city”.1 Challenging misgivings that moving pictures suggested “bad” ideas, he further claimed “that many foreigners who could neither read nor write were enabled through the proper kind of pictures to get a good working idea of the customs of this their adopted country”.2 A month earlier, Reverend W.H. Jackson had arrived at a similar assessment in a reflection on the universal nature of moving pictures: “The ear may comprehend but one language; descendants of Hebrew, Greek, Latin and Teutonic races may sit side by side and together read in the universal language of the eye the selfsame subject”.3 This celebration of moving pictures as a universal language, as a form of “visual Esperanto”, was, as Miriam Hansen and others have argued, in vogue during the transitional period.4 The perennial example from the mid 1910s is, of course, Vachel Lindsay’s discussion about hieroglyphics and moving picture Esperanto.5 Moving pictures were overall considered to facilitate cross-cultural communication between people belonging to different nationalities and speaking different languages. The conviction that the new visual medium was superior to written language was prevalent. Prominent figures from Thomas Edison to D. W. Griffith predicted a glorious future for moving pictures as the successor to books in schools and libraries.6 This alleged universal nature of film incurred considerable pedagogical clout and prospects for social uplift. Moving pictures were not only valued as a form of universal language, but as Rev. Jackson declared: “It requires no education to look at a picture, but looking at the moving picture is educational”.7 The film medium’s potential to educate and influence immigrants made it an ideal vehicle for Americanization, as well as a tool for civic education for rising generations. I would argue that the principal reason behind the increasing production of educational films was to promote better citizenship: to turn immigrants, children, and women into patriotic and well-adjusted social subjects in line with the requirements of modern American society. These groups, that constituted the majority of the population, were more or less excluded from public debate and social power structures and lacked full citizenship and the right to vote. According to a widespread perception, moving pictures would make good citizens out of these allegedly problematic groups. The underlying tenet was social order, with morality as a keyword. Recent immigrants were singled out, primarily Italians and Jews, as problematic groups; for different reasons so were women and children.

I

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In the early 1900s, the “Americanization project” became a pivotal concern for municipal authorities, health departments, employers, as well as the general public. No other country was so cosmopolitan in character as the United States – or, rather, its metropolises – and the task of merging all the different nationalities into one was not considered to be an easy one. The problem was especially pressing in New York City with its constant influx of immigrants arriving via Ellis Island with a limited knowledge of spoken and written English. During the 1910s, immigrants constituted more than 40 per cent of the population of New York City, and around 80 per cent were estimated to be children of foreign-born. To strengthen traditional, cultural, economical, and moral values, at a time of concern about social and political stability, moving pictures were mobilized as a prospective educational tool. According to Progressive reformers, moving pictures could and should be used to mold and socialize these groups. Giorgio Bertellini calls the end-result of this process a form of “domestication”. But as Bertellini also points out, the immigrants’ leisure-time habits in New York City did not inevitably result in embracing an already existing “American” identity but in creating new forms.8 The popularity of moving pictures, especially amongst the working-class and children, was a major argument for using the film medium for educational purposes.9 Many contemporary reports in daily newspapers and trade papers as well as scattered accounts in film manuals emphasize moving pictures as a useful educational tool for Americanizing the population. Specific campaigns were launched where moving pictures were used both within regular theater programming as well as screened at other public venues – depending on what seemed to be the best strategy to reach the targeted audience. According to Lee Grieveson, there were even special screenings of Traffic in Souls on the steam ships headed for New York to alert immigrant women about the threat of white slavery.10 Later such practice would be more widespread and in 1921–1923, for example, the National Board of Review collaborated with the moving picture industry and the Commissioner of Immigration to enable screenings of both nonfiction and fiction films on Ellis Island for newly arrived immigrants.11 As Miriam Hansen has shown, it was from around 1910 that discussions on immigrant spectators more systematically were linked to ideas of integration and uplift.12 The project of Americanizing immigrants, however vague in defining what counted as American, was two sided: on the one hand, the goal was to educate immigrant groups into adapting American values and ideals; on the other hand, it was more practical: taking out citizen papers, informing about personal hygiene, or acquiring everyday knowledge like sending money orders through the post office.13 After passing through Ellis Island the most important cultural “translators” for the immigrants were local churches and ethnic newspapers. In addition, a number of local campaigns were carried out by an array of sponsors. The Ford Motor Car Company, for example, used motion pictures to educate foreigners in its employ to increase efficiency.14 And the municipal authorities in St. Louis started to use moving pictures in 1915 to educate “ignorant” foreigners about the main features of life in that city in particular and the United States in general. Perhaps the most ambitious campaigns that targeted immigrant audiences were organized by New York City’s Health Department. During the 1910s, the Department regularly used motion pictures in its campaigns for a cleaner and healthier city. New York City was considered especially hazardous due to its congestion; as a result, the Department held a prominent position when it came to health campaigns in the United States. Recognizing the popularity and general educational value of the moving picture show, the Health Department, together with the Committee on the Prevention of

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Tuberculosis, screened ”health films” each summer night in the city parks and on waterfront piers. Beginning in 1912 and continuing through every summer in the 1910s with exception of 1916, due to the polio epidemic, the films informed people about such health topics as the dangers of flies, the risks of typhoid fever, and how to care for babies. The screenings were obviously a success for nearly 20,000 people attended the open-air moving picture shows during the first week in 1912. The audience largely consisted of those who could not afford regular moving picture shows, but the target groups were primarily children and immigrants.15 A pioneering use of the medium was launched by the Civic Theatre in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, to make more “intelligent citizens” of those who were not yet naturalized by familiarizing them with American customs and way of life.16 The project was supposedly non-sectarian, non-political and noncommercial. Ernest Dench, the author of Motion Picture Education (1917), characterized the Pawtucket project as an exceptional effort. As did Royal Dixon, the vice president of the League of Foreign-Born Citizens, in his special lecture for the Board of Education in 1916. Reverend James Dingwell, pastor of the city’s Broad Street Congregational Church, established the Civic Theater in 1913. The intention was to educate the large percentage of immigrants in the area with programs on historical, biographical, sociological, hygienic and scenic subjects. In the early 1910s, Pawtucket, together with the neighboring town of Central Falls, was an industrial and manufacturing community of 105,000 inhabitants where nine out of ten were immigrants.17 At least twenty different languages were spoken in the area. The project was endorsed by the Governor of Rhode Island, the Rhode Island Commissioner of Education, the president of the North American Civic League for immigrants, amongst other prominent persons. The president of the committee and organization was the ex-Governor James H. Higgins. The first season held at the Star Theater, with a capacity of 1,500 seats, at times crowded to 1,800, ran for five weeks on Sunday evenings. As the seating capacity was limited only foreign-speaking patrons, who were admitted free, were allowed to enter.18 Moving pictures were generally considered to bring different groups of people together in a community of sorts. And the moving picture theater was a venue where immigrants mixed with native-born Americans. As Mary Heaton Vorse maintains in her famous account from the East Side in 1911, the moving picture audience was anything but homogeneous: “The American-born sat next to the emigrant who arrived but a week before”.19 The Pawtucket example suggests a more homogeneous group than the one Vorse describes; even if it represented a number of nationalities, the audience was exclusively immigrants and apparently all working class. Youths fourteen years of age and older were allowed to enter the theater unaccompanied and were considered the best interpreters of American ideals to their families. The films were chosen with the distinct consideration of their educational value from an American point of view. Three one-reel films were screened every night; one industrial or scenic, one film with a social theme and a closing film that was always of a patriotic character. Citizens in Pawtucket and Central Falls also contributed financially, but the most conspicuous gift came from the Pawtucket’s Woman’s Club. As is evidenced in the overall discourse about educational film, women’s organizations were often of crucial importance in the Americanization work as well as when it came to social projects in general. The native-born Americans also attended the meetings in order to break down barriers vis-à-vis the so-called “foreigners”.20 Moving pictures were the major educational instrument and attraction in the program, as they were regarded as the only means of reaching all nationalities represented in the audience. Before the screenings several interpreters outlined each story in Polish,

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Syrian, Italian, Armenian, Yiddish and Greek. Through these presentations the majority of the audience was supposedly reached. War pictures were apparently the biggest hits with audiences, next in popularity were western films. According to Dingwell, the theater committee, consisting of leading men and women of “all religious types”, were responsible for the selection of films. Their opinion was that war pictures should be avoided as far as possible and that “wild west scenes” only should be shown in a very limited number. In order to exclude any objectionable film, both the committee and interpreters reviewed each title prior to the screenings. Programs also included music often presented by non-American music groups like the Polish or German Singing Society performing culturally specific music. And every meeting was presided over by a prominent businessman, educator or social worker who made a brief address along some patriotic lines.21 According to Reverend Dingwell’s article in The Immigrants in America Review (1915), the work for “better citizenship” would be considerably advanced if there was a civic center in every community – and if it was conspicuously located and equipped as was the Y.M.C.A. My own understanding of a civic centre building, in the interest of better citizenship, is an institution in the community life, based upon the broad and vital principles of American citizenship; an institution whose superlative concern will be first, last and always, the making of intelligent and cultured American citizens; an institution as moral and religious as America is moral and religious in principle and ideal, and yet absolutely devoid of sectarian, propaganda methods and motives.22 Such a distinctly American institution would, writes Dingwell, be especially valuable in industrial and manufacturing communities replete with immigrants from a number of different language communities. A meeting place was called for to maintain stability and homogeneity in thinking, habits and government. According to the United States Constitution, the foreign born were entitled to personal liberty in civil and religious matters; still it was vital that they could be offered a civic center for “instruction and fellowship in things fundamentally American, if we would have a democracy that would be unified, intelligent, influential and permanent”.23 These ideas underline the apprehension of the medium as a democratic art, not only because its popularity and cheap entrance fee enabled even persons of modest income to attend but also, as Hansen points out, because it could play an important role in moral and political issues. It was therefore vital to control the representations by way of local or centralized censorship. The scarcity of films with civic educational themes resulted in a petition published in Moving Picture News in the late summer of 1913. The petition was signed by the Civic Theatre Committee and included an extensive list of organizations from municipal officials, representatives from business, health associations, schools and immigration groups. They felt obligated to encourage the moving picture manufacturers to produce films for the purpose of patriotic and civic education, and they also urged them to translate intertitles into the most prevalent languages.24 Overall, manufacturers considered making translations “impractical”, but, according to the Moving Picture World, several did prepare special reels as requested. During the Civic Theatre’s second year, historical subjects were considered to have generally increased in number, and there was less difficulty in finding a series of reels that suited its programming needs.25 Another example of a prominent project to use motion pictures in dense immigrant areas was the Neighborhood Playhouse on New York City’s Lower East Side. From 1915 to 1920, an amateur acting group called the Neighborhood Players from the

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Henry Street Settlement performed at the Neighborhood Playhouse, including motion pictures as part of the program. The ethnic diversity in the neighborhood was highlighted in the programs as a means to put forward principles of internationalism, peace, and unity. In this way the immigrants were thought to acquire the common visions and aspirations of all people.26 A January 1913 report from the National Board of Review, however, considered the main obstacle not to be a scarcity of educational films but rather the lack of information about them as well as a proper distribution network. During the late 1910s, the Board received numerous letters asking for lists of films suitable in fields like health, sanitation, child welfare, industrial processes, and Americanization.27 And the Board, in turn, contacted the production companies for suggestions of film titles, to which the latter dutifully complied.28 As a result, the Board was able to publish a number of catalogues concerning educational films and films fit for certain venues such as churches and schools. In the late 1910s and early 1920s, numerous surveys and lists of films suitable for civic and Americanization programs were also published by the municipalities in New York City for use on a local level.29 On the basis that “perhaps the most successful medium for awakening public interest in questions of this kind [that is, teaching citizenship] is the moving picture”, the films suggested within the category of Americanization included An American in the Making (Thanhouser 1913), Foundation of Citizenship [production year and company unknown], Teaching English to Foreigners [production year and company unknown], and The Immigrant (Mutual 1917).30 In January 1920, the National Board of Review promoted an extensive list consisting of 224 motion pictures suitable for use in Americanization programs. The list included films of different genres such as dramas dealing with American life, travel films highlighting different parts of the country, as well as American industrials.31 In the late 1910s, small production companies also were established that exclusively produced and distributed films in the social service field; for example, Autographed Films that took on commission work for public authorities and organizations.32 Another example was the Department of Americanization of the State of Connecticut that produced and distributed the public service short, The Making of an American (1920), in which immigrants were encouraged to learn English as a first step in becoming good citizens. This title was presented as a prime example of Americanization films at the New York City Federation of Women’s Clubs to illustrate the suitability of motion pictures in teaching.33 By 1920, numerous cities were cooperating with their State Board of Education in educating the foreign-born.34 Americanization was obviously a particularly urgent matter during World War I and a concern addressed on the highest political level. In January 1920, due to the upheaval following the war, there was an Americanization campaign under the auspices of Franklin K. Lane, Secretary of the Interior, as well as chairman of the Americanization committee. Being well aware of the power of the screen, Lane outlined a plan for using motion pictures “to combat Bolshevism”.35 In a speech at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City, Lane invited the film industry to take an active part in the movement. Specifically, he urged the industry to “breathe Americanism through themes, sub-titles, incidents and scenes”. Since motion pictures supposedly reached ten million Americans daily, the task was to teach fortitude and patriotism to the country’s immigrants, as well as the illiterate native born. The project was a result of a resolution adopted in December 1919 by the Joint Committee on Education of the Senate and House in Washington, D.C., requesting the motion picture industry “to do all in its power to build up and strengthen the spirit of Americanization within our people”.36 The

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meeting at the Waldorf was well attended by the industry, and a committee was appointed. Lincoln’s Birthday was suggested as kick-off date for the project.37 Only one week after the trade press report on the project, the first Americanization production was advertised, The Land of Opportunity – a two reel feature that “embodies the spirit of Lincoln – the spirit of America” – a Ralph Ince production starring Ince himself as Lincoln.38 The strategy to Americanize immigrant groups through moving pictures devoted to traditional American subjects seems to have worked very well, particularly in Pawtucket. However, there were oppositional efforts. Reverend A.M. Herenius of the Lutheran Church, Centreville, Rhode Island, himself an immigrant, highly praised the Swedish periodical Allsvensk Samling published by Riksföreningen för Svenskhetens bevarande i utlandet (an organization to preserve the Swedish emigrants’ national identity) because it brought together Swedish immigrants and emphasized the links to their native country and thereby worked against Americanization.39 The idea of a rapid and smooth Americanization was also problematized by G.H. von Koch in his book, Emigranternas land. Studier i amerikanskt samhällsliv (1910), where he discusses the Americanization of immigrants in general and of Swedish immigrants in particular. In a discussion about Americanization in schools, Koch recounts an anecdote from a classroom. When the children were asked “Which is the largest and best country in the world?” a little boy, only arriving from Italy a few month before, hesitates with the pointer in front of a map of the world. The boy who cannot instantly choose between his land of birth and that of his future is reprimanded by the teacher, who, as it turns out, is an immigrant from Italy himself.40 The Americanization of immigrants also raised voices in the “old” countries. In Sweden, for example, several organizations worked to preserve the Swedish native culture and language amongst emigrants all over the world. If the perspective is reversed and we approach immigration by way of Swedish material, the issue becomes not so much to create a national identity out of a heterogeneous population but rather to create an “imagined community” in which Swedes in Sweden were bound up with those who had emigrated.41 At the beginning of the 20th century, the most urgent political issue in Sweden was emigration. From 1850 to 1900, more than one million Swedes emigrated, most of them to the United States, and from the turn of the century until the outbreak of World War I another 200 000 followed.42 This constituted more than 20 per cent of the Swedish population, most of them of working age between 15 and 35 years of age. The depleted level of manpower created a highly vocal debate at the turn of the century. The two major concerns were: a decline in Swedish defense forces and a decrease in economic growth, especially within the field of agriculture but also in industrial development. In 1904, two legislative measures were proposed to alter the trend. One sought to regulate emigration by legal restrictions, but was never enforced. The second, and more important, promoted a strategy of spreading accurate information about actual conditions in the United States, as many Swedes were strongly influenced by the letters sent home by emigrants who supposedly overstated their success in their new country. Postcards, with parodic, exaggerated illustrations of American abundance, tied into this discourse (Fig. 1). Several organizations were launched to counteract emigration as well as lure emigrants back to their native land. One was “Nationalföreningen mot emigrationen” (the Swedish association against emigration), constituted in 1907. A year later “Riksföreningen för svenskhetens bevarande i utlandet” was founded to improve the links between Sweden and the Swedish-speaking emigrants. Distinguished members of the latter association went to the United States to lecture at newly founded local associa-

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Fig. 1. Postcard sent back home by Swedish emigrants showing oversized melons from the new fertile country.

tions as well as at well established ones such as Augustana College, founded by Swedish settlers in Chicago in 1860. In 1914, the periodical Allsvensk Samling was introduced with the task of preserving the Swedish language and nationality across the globe as well as giving news coverage of Swedish societies. Published until 1971 by Riksföreningen för svenskhetens bevarande i utlandet, the periodical provided information to Swedes around the world. The main cause of emigration, however, was identified as the underdeveloped social, political, and economical conditions in Sweden itself. A final report from the National Committee on Emigration in 1913 proposed a number of reforms to entice Swedes to remain. The own-your-own-home movement was considered to be the most crucial of these reforms. Information about these reforms was distributed abroad, and the possibility of obtaining a home of one’s own by the way of favorable loans was especially important in convincing some emigrants to return. The associations also published deterrent stories about unsuccessful emigrants as well as warnings for potential emigrants.43 In the early 1910’s, Swedish film producers began addressing emigration. A number of films such as Guldgossen (Frans Lundberg 1912), Samhällets dom (Swedish Biograph 1912), Broder och syster (Frans Lundberg 1912), Bränningar eller stulen lycka (Swedish Biograph 1912),44 depict criminals or other kinds of characters who are forced to emigrate. While some eventually return wealthy, others succumb due to hardship in the United States. In Samhällets dom (directed by Eric Malmberg), Harald, at heart an upright young man, decides to emigrate to America after an imprisonment (Fig. 2). However, he soon discovers that it is as difficult to get a job as an ex-convict in New York as in Sweden. He is recognized and ordered to leave wherever he goes. Finally his ex-wife, Ebba, who has earlier neglected both Harald and their child, comes to America only to find out that he is dead. Contrite, she collapses at his grave. Preserved stills from the film illustrate that the production was planned for an international market. At least five versions of the biblical quotation on the grave were made – in

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Fig. 2. Eric Malmberg, the director and leading actor of Samhällets dom (Swedish Biograph, 1912), in New York City.

Fig. 3. Ebba at Harald’s grave in Samhällets dom (Swedish Biograph, 1912).

Swedish, Russian, French, German, and English (Fig. 3). The film was supposedly shown in New York City, and well received. Scenes were shot in Sweden, New York City, and on the “emigration ship”, Lusitania, during the Swedish Biograph crew’s journey around Europe and the United States in 1911. The purpose of the journey was to shoot on location for a number of productions, among them several with an emigrant theme.

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Fig. 4. Sven is brutally assaulted, robbed, and left in an alley shortly after his arrival in New York City, in Emigrant (Swedish Biograph, 1910).

Fig. 5. Hardship in the USA, in Emigrant (Swedish Biograph, 1910).

Other titles offered explicit propaganda against emigration, several of them produced by Swedish Biograph, a company that was best known for accentuating national themes as well as contemporary social problems. In 1910, Swedish Biograph produced two films with confusingly similar titles, Emigranten (Robert Olsson) and Emigrant (Gustaf

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Fig. 6. Non-fictional footage of the S.S. Ariosto’s departure from Göteborg in the spring of 1910, in Emigranten (Swedish Biograph, 1910).

Linden). Henning Berger, who had treated the topic of emigration in several novels, was able to sell several scripts to Swedish Biograph, and Emigrant was one of them. The company’s third film on the emigrant theme, Två svenska emigranters äfventyr i amerika (also 1912) feature scenes from Sweden, New York City, and Niagara Falls. This film, in contrast to the two others, was put into regular distribution. Together, the three films describe the vicissitudes immigrants face in the United States, and the protagonists in all three finally decide to return to Sweden. In Emigrant, a young Swede becomes the victim of deceit and theft upon his arrival in New York City (Fig. 4). Even though he is unemployed and starving, he writes home with “the common emigrant lie that everything is working out fine” (Fig. 5). Finally he dies at a hospital for the poor while his friend Åke manages to return to Sweden to get married. The program booklet concludes: “the two of them will build a future and settle in their own country, in good, old Sweden”.45 In his recent dissertation, Pelle Snickars thoroughly analyses the other 1912 film, Emigranten, discussing its production and bricolage of fiction and nonfiction scenes.46 This film tells the story of an emigrant farm couple tired of the hard work on their land. In a series of scenes they journey away from their farm, buy tickets to the United States, and board the ship S/S Ariosto (Wilson-line) in Göteborg. These images were shot on location in Göteborg, while the scenes where the actors board the ship are lifted from nonfiction footage depicting real emigrants and their friends and relatives waving them off (Fig. 6). The scenes on board also show nonfiction footage of Swedish emigrants. After their arrival in New York City, scenes actually taken in Hull in England, the emigrants manage to purchase a piece of land, which proves useless. Overall, the life in the new country does not live up to the emigrants’ expectations; in fact, conditions prove to be even worse than in Sweden, and they soon decide to return to their native country (Fig. 7). The film ends with the couple’s happy reunion with their family in Sweden (Fig. 8).

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Fig. 7. A different kind of “America letter”, one of retuning to the old country, in Emigranten (Swedish Biograph, 1910).

Fig. 8. Returning emigrants are happily back home, in Emigranten (Swedish Biograph, 1910).

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In June 1910, the non-political association, “Föreningen för Svenskhetens Bevarande i Amerika”, (an association for the preservation of Swedishness in America), was established in Rock Island, Illinois, as a subsidiary of the national association in Sweden. The goal was to support efforts to preserve the Swedish language and culture amongst Swedes in the United States, and to unite the Swedes in the work of preserving what they had in common “our race, blood and language”.47 In 1916, Swedish-American Line, the fleet of Swedish ocean liners, invited a number of journalist and editors from Swedish-language newspapers in the United States to visit Sweden. One of the results of that visit drew public attention: the formation of a film corporation that would provide film titles of Swedish subjects, such as Swedish natural landscapes and industries, to emigrants in the United States. Two of the guests, Karl Fredin, editor of Svea Worcester (Massachusetts), and Professor A.A. Stomberg, a representative of Minnesota Stads Tidning (Minnesota), stressed the importance of using moving pictures in their work of promoting Swedishness in the United States.48 A year later, at least one traveling showman screened such films for Swedish emigrants, at supposedly well-attended and popular screenings.49 During the 1920’s, Swedish films were regularly screened within Swedish culture societies in the United States. These examples represent, as common currency, the overall efforts to Americanize immigrants with moving pictures. Even if Reverend Dingwell’s request for civic centers in every community went unheeded, the work of integration and Americanization moved from local initiatives to the highest political level. But there was also an articulated resistance to assimilation and Americanization by groups both within and without the United States. Indeed, in Sweden, authorities tried several strategies to counteract the flow of emigration, and film manufacturers repeatedly highlighted the futility of dreams of a better life elsewhere.

Notes 1.

Editorial, “Favorable Comment on Moving Pictures By Civic Authorities”, Moving Picture World (2 July 1910), 13.

2.

Ibid.

3.

Rev. William Henry Jackson, “The Moving Picture ’World’”, Moving Picture World (4 June 1910), 931. Jackson is here alluding to Biblical languages rather than the languages of contemporary immigrants.

4.

Miriam Hansen, “Universal Language and Democratic Culture: Myths of Origin in Early American Cinema”, Mythos und Aufklärung in der amerikanischen Literatur (Erlangen: Universitätsbund Erlangen-Nürnberg, 1985), as in Babel & Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), especially 76–89.

5.

Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture [1915] (Norwood, Mass: Norwood Press, 1916), 177.

6.

Hansen, “Universal Language and Democratic Culture”, 324.

7.

Jackson, 931.

8.

Giorgio Bertellini, “Italian Imageries, Historical Feature Films and the Fabrication of Italy’s Spectators in Early 1900s New York”, in Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby (eds), American Movie Audiences. From the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound Era (London: British Film Institute, 1999), 31.

9.

The popularity of moving pictures amongst the working-class, mostly immigrants, in New York City in the nickelodeon era has often been emphasized for instance by Judith Thissen (Jewish immigrant audiences) and Giorgio Bertellini (Italian audiences). Immigrant groups’ national identities were at times actually constituted in the United States rather than in their country of birth, as Bertellini’s example about immigrants from different regions of Italy shows. Many of the Italian immigrants came from the southern part of the country and did not consider themselves Italian before their arrival in the United States. Thissen, “Jewish Immigrant Audiences in New

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EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL” York City, 1905–15”, in Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby (eds), American Movie Audiences. From the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound Era (London: British Film Institute, 1999), 15–28; and Bertellini, “Italian Imageries”. 10.

Lee Grieveson, Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early-Twentieth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 156, and “Policing the Cinema. Traffic in Souls in Ellis Island, 1913”, Screen 38 (Summer 1997).

11.

National Board of Review of Motion Pictures Collection, Rare Books and Manuscript Division, New York Public Library, Box 36.

12.

Hansen, “Universal Language and Democratic Culture”, 328ff.

13.

“American Press Comments”, Foreign-Born (March 1920), 12.

14.

Ernest A. Dench, Motion Picture Education (Cincinnati: Standard Publishing, 1917), 196.

15.

“Moving Picture for Health”, New York Evening Post (20 June 1912), 4. Dench, 193.

16.

I would like to thank Richard Abel who has generously shared articles on the Pawtucket project. See also Abel, Americanizing the Movies and “Movie-Mad” Audiences, 1910–1914 (University of California Press, 2006), 95, 299nn54, 57; and Abel, “Patchwork Maps of Movie-Going, 1911–1913”, in Melvyn Stokes, Richard Maltby, and Robert C. Allen (eds), Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema (Exeter University Press, 2007).

17.

Unsigned, “Pawtucket Has Civic Theater. Moving Pictures Employed in Teaching Foreigners – Institution Realized by Rev. J.D. Dingwell – Is Non-Sectarian, Non-Political, Uncommercial”. Moving Picture World (20 March 1915), 1752.

18.

Dench, Motion Picture Education, 197–199; Royal Dixon, Americanization (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1916), 102–111; and “Pawtucket Has Civic Theatre”, 1752.

19.

Mary Heaton Vorse “Some Picture Show Audiences”, Outlook 98 (24 June 1911), 441–447, reprinted in Gregory A. Waller (ed.), Moviegoing in America (Malden, Mass: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 2002), 50–54.

20.

Rev. James D. Dingwell, “The Civic Centre and Better Citizenship”, in The Immigrants in America Review 1. 3 (September 1915), 85ff.

21.

“Pawtucket Has Civic Theatre”, 1752. The President of Brown University, for example, in his address spoke of the contribution to American life made by the incoming foreigners. Dingwell, 86.

22.

Ibid., 84.

23.

Ibid., 85.

24.

“Resolutions Passed by the Civic Theatre Committee of Pawtucket and Central Falls, R.I., June 2, 1913”, Moving Picture News (2 August 1913), 8.

25.

“Pawtucket Has Civic Theatre”, 1752.

26.

Neighborhood Playhouse Records, Rare Books and Manuscript Division, New York Public Library.

27.

See, for example, the letter to the National Board of Review from the American Red Cross dated 22 September 1919, and another to the American Red Cross from the National Board of Review dated 9 October 1919. National Board of Review, Box 15.

28.

National Board of Review, Box 10.

29.

“Teaching citizenship via the movies; a survey of civic motion pictures and their availability for use by municipalities”, Special report no. 2/ Municipal Reference Library. (New York City, 1918); “Visualizing citizenship”, Special report no. 4/ Municipal Reference Library (New York City, 1920). In 1920, Moving Picture Age published a volume containing an extensive list of film titles suggested for Americanization programs – Moving Picture Age. 1001 Film Suggestions for the Compilation of Film Programs for Americanization (Chicago: Moving Picture Age, 1920).

30.

“Municipal Reference Library Notes”, (23 June, 1920).

31.

“National Board Lists ’American’ Subject”, Billboard (24 January, 1920) 84–85.

32.

Margaret I. MacDonald, “Educational and Non-theatrical News”, Moving Picture World (24 January 1920), 607. They commissioned work for the Children’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor, YWCA, National Organization for Public Health Nursing Association, etc.

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13 • Teaching citizenship via celluloid 33.

Margaret I. MacDonald, “Educational and Non-theatrical News”, Moving Picture World (3 January, 1920), 129.

34. 35.

Foreign-Born (April 1920), 16. “Industry’s Leaders pledge Support to Lane’s Americanization Plan”, Moving Picture World (24 January 1920), 565.

36.

“National Board Lists ’American’ Subject”, Motion Picture News (24 January 1920), 1039.

37.

Editorial, “Lane and Americanization”, Moving Picture World (24 January, 1920), 547, 565, 586; Wm. A. Johnston, “Americanization – and Past Lessons”, Motion Picture News (24 January, 1920), 1027ff; and “Americanization Campaign Under Way”, 1032. See, for example, the advertisement in Motion Picture News (31 January 1920), 1173.

38. 39.

Letter dated 7 June 1916 from A.M.L. Herenius, Reverend at the Lutheran Church in Centreville, to Mr Professor Lundström, Allsvensk Samling, Göteborg. Riksföreningen Sverigekontakt, Riksföreningens arkiv LIb:5, Landsarkivet, Göteborg.

40.

G.H. von Koch, Emigranternas land. Studier i amerikanskt samhällslif (Stockholm: Aktiebolaget ljus, 1910), 37–38. See, for example, the first editorial, “Allsvensk Samling!” in Allsvensk Samling (1 May 1914), 1.

41. 42.

During years of crop failure and the years after the general strike in 1909, the number of emigrants increased.

43.

For a synthesized presentation of the emigration and its effects in Sweden, see Tom O’Dell, Culture Unbound: Americanization and Everyday Life in Sweden (Lund: Wallin & Dalholm, 1997), and Rolf Lundén and Erik Åsard (eds), Networks of Americanization: Aspects of the American Influence in Sweden (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1992). Another example is Patriks äventyr produced by Pathé-Frères’s Swedish branch in 1915. The film was directed by Arvid Englind.

44. 45.

Lars Åhlander (ed.), Svensk Filmografi 1 (Stockholm: Norstedt, 1986), 132.

46. 47.

Pelle Snickars, Svensk film och visuell masskultur 1900 (Stockholm: Aura förlag, 2001), 193–196. Leaflet published in Sioux City, IA (1 December 1922) – Landsarkivet in Göteborg Riksföreningen Sverigekontakt, Riksföreningen’s archive Lib:5.

48.

“Svenska filmer till Amerika”, Allsvensk Samling 10 (15 May, 1916), 3.

49.

“Sverige i rörliga bilder”, Allsvensk Samling 12 (15 June, 1917), 2.

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Fights of Nations and national fights •

Fights of Nations

and national fights

David Mayer y subject, a brief film shot for American Mutoscope & Biograph (AM&B) by Billy Bitzer, initially attracted me because four of the six episodes are cleverly choreographed variety stage acts – i.e. theatrical vaudeville sketches – restaged for the camera. Each sketch is undeniably abridged, but not otherwise altered: filmed straight-on in what appear to be single takes, the camera set-ups and lighting (or exposures) sometimes differ for different episodes. As a theater historian aware of how many scraps of the Victorian theater – narratives, genres, staging, effects – can be recovered from early film, I scour these films for evidential remnants, and Fights of Nations opens directly onto the American vaudeville stage at the turn of the last century. It reminds me, yet again, of how we, as theater and film scholars, have largely failed to note the impact on early narrative film of the vaudeville dramatic sketch, both comic and serious. It is a matter that we must address. It also prompts me to add that we have yet to assess the appeal of combats and fights as stage and film entertainments. And it further underscores the point that films – and I’m thinking immediately of Luke McKernan’s brilliant DVD compilation Silent Shakespeare – help us to understand how Shakespeare’s plays were known and seen by large swathes of Europeans and Americans who rarely, if ever, witnessed full-scale Shakespearean performances. However, this film also compels my attention because the racial and ethnic battles – which we see in Fights of Nations in largely comic terms (to which have been added elements of American nationalism, patriotism, and self-congratulation) – were, concurrently, also being played out for real and with far greater heat and seriousness within and before the American people. Fights of Nations catches America looking outward and inward, contemplating past and potential enemies and assessing migrant arrivals from foreign and local diasporas. The dates of this film are also a significant part of the national and sectional battles to which I have just alluded. Fights of Nations was released by AM&B in 1907, although one segment – the one prefaced by the intertitle, “Hoot mon! A Scottish combat” – had been shot and released in 1905. Thus this essay is about race, national consciousness, and dramatic narrative in the context of 1907. The six brief sketches tell us something about how Americans experienced the world in this decade. I am by no means the first to link narrative film to historical reportage, but this tiny film, a mere 306 feet, running for a fraction over 5 minutes at 16 fps, offers us a micro-historical document: a core from which ripples spread in all directions to interrogate the early 1900s with such critical – and often unanswerable – questions. Who first saw these variety sketches on stage and recognized, that abbreviated and brought together, Fights of Nations might offer an expression of current views on the theme of ethnic conflict? Or was such a conscious thought ever formulated? How active or passive are these

M

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views? Who contested these views? Who took responsibility for the film’s content? As this is an AM&B film, is there any evidence of the company repeating this approach with other products? Who are the audiences for the film, and what responses are expected? What nations and ethnicities are missing from this film? Why, when Americans have been fighting in the so-called Boxer Rebellion, is there no combat between Chinese and American opponents, or, why, with the Seige of Port Arthur a recent memory, is there no fight between Japanese and Russian adversaries? When women are seeking the vote and competing with men for positions in the workplace, why – apart from possible issues of decency and decorum – is there no female combatant and a male adversary? The answer, of course, is that the conflicts included in this film are current vaudeville stage acts; those that might seem missing simply weren’t immediately accessible to New York vaudeville circuits or to AM&B or – as likely – simply did not exist at all. Before these questions can be addressed, however, a brief account is in order of what Fights of Nations enacts and how these enactments were sold to exhibitors. In the text of Biograph Bulletin #94, attached as an appendix, the reader will find, described for potential exhibitors, both a synopsis of the action and attitudes towards its contents. To add a further gloss, Fights of Nations is described as a compilation of five discrete variety sketches and a final coda, at least four of the sketches originally performed on American vaudeville circuits before being brought before Bitzer’s camera and there abridged and prefaced by intertitles which thematically link them. The exception, as mentioned earlier, is the “Scottish combat”. Although five of the episodes were filmed in the company’s New York City studio in January 1907, there is no apparent effort to blend them pictorially. The sketches were shot using different lighting and from different distances and are further distinct from one another in that some are intentionally comic whilst others are grimly serious. Nevertheless, as a brief entertainment, each justifies its own inclusion, and, in total, the sketches and coda of Fights of Nations encapsulate current American attitudes on race and ethnicity. In a somewhat offhand and unfocused manner, the compilation gives vent to standing national prejudices and concludes with the myth of America’s European heritage and innate purity, arguing that “other” or different or alien cultures fight dangerously and sometimes ludicrously, whereas those of Western European origin or of American birth are more peaceful and benign in their actions. “Mexico vs. Spain” is the only sketch in the group which, apart from the coda, appears to have been created entirely for film and which, although it had no immediate pre-existence on the variety stage, leads directly back to Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West, where the “Mexican knife duel” was a permanent feature, as was a reenactment of Buffalo’s Bill’s famous “duel with Yellowhand” in which a Native American, armed with a tomahawk, fought a knife-wielding actor impersonating the young frontiersman. The knife fight between Spaniard and Mexican for a señorita’s affections – in Bitzer’s film this is more a choreographic pas de trois than a vicious hand-to-hand encounter – refers, if obliquely, both to the recent Spanish-American War with battles against Spaniards in Cuba and the Philippines and to increasing frontier problems with Mexico as its revolution spilled across America’s southern borders. U.S. victory in the Spanish-American War and the annexation of the Philippines had suddenly bestowed American citizenship on many thousands of dark-skinned Roman Catholics. Both native Protestant Americans and recent Catholic immigrants from Ireland, Germany, and Eastern Europe looked on askance. “Our Hebrew Friends:” Jews, at this date, make up one of the more conspicuous immigrant groups and are especially visible in the larger East Coast and Midwest cities.

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What was sometimes called “Kosher Komedy”, spelled with Ks, was a common sketch subject, and such sketches assert the frequent comic cliché that Jews don’t really fight: they push and jostle, but aren’t up to much as real fighters. Here the sketch is performed by acrobats, against a backcloth depicting a city street, as two Jews, then three, have a comic scuffle on the pavement – first (for no visible or specified reason) pushing each other, then holding on to their opponents’ coat lapels and kicking their adversaries’ shins, their struggle inconveniencing passers-by. Comedy, such as it is, lies in the Jews’ appearance, their quarrelsome nature, their use of money to buy their way out of trouble, and the implication that Jews both bribe and steal, although stealing from a bribe-soliciting Irish cop is acknowledged less of a crime than other forms of theft. “Hoot Mon! A Scottish Combat:” This sketch is, in some ways, the most problematic inclusion. It was filmed a full two years earlier and released by AM & B as Duel in Macbeth with no apparent thought of incorporation into a subsequent film.1 Its presence in this film is purely gratuitous, something stuck in to bulk-up the anecdotal content and to add a further – somewhat inappropriate – racial or ethnic element, one that in some respects jars by its inclusion. Scots, especially the Protestant “Scotch-Irish” – unlike the genuine Irish Irish – were among the favored immigrants to the New World. In Fights of Nations the “Scottish combat” is a misplaced addition. However, as Duel in Macbeth, it depicts three actors – none of them recognizable as “America’s leading actors” in kilts and armor where, before a forest glade backcloth, Macbeth slays Young Seward, then fights Macduff, who eventually overcomes him and stands, gloating, with one foot upon Macbeth’s prostrate body.2 This film reminds us of the excerpted combat as a variety turn in its own right.3 It further illustrates the way in which Shakespeare, in brief abridgements, was sometimes offered to 19th-century spectators and how both Shakespeare and combats moved into early film.4 “Sunny Africa. Eighth Avenue, New York:” Here, African-Americans are depicted as urban, not rural, dwellers. The sketch is built both around dance and the racial cliché of African-Americans assaulting each other with razors, the duel with razors following after the White “bully’s” eccentric quick-stepping break-down and the African-American couple’s cake-walk, both racial clichés. But there is also recognition of deep racial animosity in this slashing combat. This encounter follows from John Burgess’s racist sociology, a contemporary link to William Dunning’s southern historiography, informing, in turn, Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Dixon, Jr., and D.W. Griffith. These men argued or will argue that Negroes are child-like or savage. So, Q.E.D.: child-like in their dancing, savage in their deadly fight. To contextualize further; when Fights of Nations was filmed, Jack Johnson, the African-American prizefighter, had not yet taken the World Heavyweight title from a white boxer, but Americans were conscious of Johnson’s preparations for the impending fight, and racial tensions were acute. Spectators would have been aware, too, of more local racial conflicts in several American cities, some of these arising from the year-long tour of Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman. “Sons of the Ould Sod:” Here, an effectively choreographed comic battle ranges on two levels of a practicable tenement exterior, the extremely physical comedy based on the misunderstanding of who accidentally started a fray between two Irish laborers by dropping a sodden sheet on a one’s head and the means then used to continue the battle. Again, it is work for acrobats and pantomimes. The two Irishmen fight with any domestic prop that comes into their hands: a hose, a bucket of ashes, and a barrel. Eventually, they are reconciled with mugs of stout. Although the Irish immigrants are here subjects of amusement and easily derided because Fogarty is not intelligent enough to deduce that Haggerty is not the instigator of his drenching, a darker bias against the Roman Catholic Irish remains unspoken. In American conurbations, the

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Irish are still close to the bottom of the social food chain, and the Irish remain the subjects of jokes, hostility, and aggression. Finally, “America, the Land of the Free”: This segment, shot with the same lighting values and with some of the characters from the first episode, is not so much a sketch as a concluding framing device that brings together a succession of allegorical and metaphorical personages. From the portico adorned with a patriotic display of bunting and flags emerge the uniformed representatives of France and Germany, John Bull, and the Spanish and Mexican adversaries, who sequentially arrive and greet one another. Then an iconic American Indian maiden in fringed buckskin appears and kneels as two Americans in military uniform enter. The picture is completed with the arrival of Uncle Sam. The entire group of sketches, offered here as a single condensed sketch, has been exhibited in a mere five minutes and fifteen seconds. As Fights of Nations was released, Americans in all parts of the Continental United States and in its newly acquired overseas territories had been questioning what constituted an American identity and, further, which people within a growing and unstable national population might legitimately call themselves American and thus enjoy the full privileges of citizenship allied with American identity. Plays, variety sketches, and films were both participants in the debate and, equally, evidence that debate had far from concluded and would be on-going for decades ahead. Americans of many stripes and conditions were verbally outspoken and abusive in their dislike of racial and ethnic presence within their national society, and AM&B’s film, influenced by contemporary American thinking and current jingoist rhetoric, played to both latent and open hostilities, functioning as an extension of the nativist, anti-foreigner yellow press. An intense barrage of nationalist polemic had arisen, characterized by attempts to define and reinforce “Americanism”. The principal voice in this call for explicit American values and instant assimilation of foreigners was that of the nation’s 26th President, Theodore Roosevelt (1901–1909). Between 1894 and 1915, in a series of books, pamphlets, and speeches, Roosevelt inveighed against “hyphenated-Americans” who resolutely clung to Old World ways while concurrently benefiting from American life.5 Initially, his rhetoric was directed against Chinese and Japanese immigrants on the West Coast and their distinctive otherness, but as Americans became increasingly aware of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, Roosevelt’s demands for assimilation became more inclusive. In his second term in office, Roosevelt supported a Congressional inquiry and subsequent legislation relating to “new immigrants” from the Balkans, Russia, and Southern Europe. Curiously, his dismay at aliens who remained apart did not extend to African Americans, perhaps because he viewed them as inherently distinct and beyond the possibilities of assimilation into white culture. His rhetoric thus stood apart from much of the current anti-black polemic, although it ran in parallel lines and doubtless fueled the overall climate of racism in which Thomas Dixon worked. Between 1896 and 1914, the number of immigrants entering America reached an all-time peak. Many of these fourteen million migrants, physically distinct from those who had left Western Europe in earlier decades, were from Eastern and Southern Europe. Unlike their light-skinned, often blue-eyed, fair-haired predecessors, the newcomers were of sallow complexion, brown-eyed, brown and black or red-haired. Many immigrants were Christian but, rather than the predominately Protestant migrants who had emigrated from Britain, Scandinavia, and Germany, these newcomers – from Portugal, Italy, Greece, and the Balkans – were Roman Catholic or members of Eastern Orthodox sects. Moreover, some were Jews emigrating from Poland and Russia. In 1898 the United States had the questionable fortune to win its war with

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Spain, a victory that automatically bestowed citizenship upon Philippine and some Latino Roman Catholics. Within the same two decades, large waves of Mexican migrants arrived in California to work on railroads and farms. These new citizens were added to a national population, which, thirty years earlier, had experienced the liberation of nearly four million African-American slaves6 and had notionally, if not in practice, invested these freed people with citizens’ rights. Chinese migrants had arrived at West Coast ports to work on the railroads and in mines, and a still-large number of Native Americans – “Indians” – although assigned and sometimes confined to “reservations”, moved and worked among the general population. The sense of swelling numbers and of both local and national overcrowding was exacerbated in 1890 by the U.S. Census Bureau’s declaration that the Western Frontier had “closed”. Three years later, speaking to a convention of scholars in Chicago, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner described the frontier in terms of an imaginary line running from the Canadian Border to the Rio Grande. It had been the obligation of the American pioneer, claimed Turner, to push that frontier, “the meeting point between savagery and civilization”, ever westward to be rewarded with free land. However, that liminal frontier line was already at the Pacific’s edge. There no longer was any free – unowned or unoccupied – land. There was nowhere to go. Cities were increasingly crowded. In the perception of assimilated Americans, their fears fed by the “yellow press”, immigrant people were entering America in record numbers. The taps admitting foreigners were still wide open, and the land was filling up like a vast urn, hitherto only partly filled, but its contents now lapping at the rim. When, in 1904, Russian forces were defeated by the Japanese navy at Port Arthur, it seemed possible that once-dominant white colonizers were in danger of being colonized by “colored” peoples. Soon there would be few places where the alien, the other, would not be visibly present, and small likelihood that these newcomers would be assimilated. In line with this possibility, it became a cliché of the “Western” stage-play that subordinate, often comic, characters include a Negro, an Indian, a Chinese cook or laundryman, an Eastern “dude”, and a spinster.7 Thus, the alien other, the conspicuously different, would be present but neither wholly accommodated within the dramatic narrative nor made welcome or essential to the dramatic action. By 1900, the United States had become an openly racist nation, acutely aware of what mainstream journals openly referred to as “the Black and White problem”. Issues of race and ethnicity were closely allied with those of national and – in an immigrantconscious society – personal identity, where maintaining the so-called integrity and “purity” of the White Race became a national preoccupation. That concern for racial purity thus extends to – and implicates – live theater and film alike. The years 1905–1915 constituted a decade for racial confrontation in entertainment media. Elsewhere in 1907, specifically, three companies of Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman, the source of Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, were in their second year of major sectional tours, gaining assent and provoking protests and disturbances, Dixon, writing in a popular monthly theatrical magazine, attempted to justify his play and challenged his audience with this conclusion: In the fierce white glare of the footlights its purpose and the lesson it conveys [the inequality of the races] become clear to every man and woman in this broad fair land of ours. It is indeed the “writing on the wall”. Will the American people heed a warning?8 Concurrently, dramatized racial, inter-racial, and ethnic issues were being placed before Broadway audiences who witnessed such dramas as David Belasco’s Madame Butterfly, Israel Zangwill’s The Melting Pot and Children of the Ghetto, William DeMille’s

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14 • Fights of Nations and national fights

Strongheart, Edward Milton Royal’s The Squaw Man, and Edward Sheldon’s The Nigger. An adaptation of Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel, Ramona, appeared on the West Coast. Each and every one of these dramas explored the ramifications and impossibilities of sexual liaisons and intermarriage between White Anglo-Saxon Americans and other races and cultures. And, incidentally, each and every one of these plays was subsequently filmed, sometimes more than once. As a compilation of live variety stage sketches, Fights of Nations is an early example of the way in which movies stepped into this national debate. Although briefer, clumsier, and far less articulate than its theatrical counterparts and its conclusions confused, AM&B’s film is an active participant: a strident, if silent, participant nonetheless.

APPENDIX Fights of Nations9 Biograph Bulletin #94 Affairs of Honor a la Mode Shown by the Biograph Length 750 feet, Price 12 cents per foot Our latest production, under six titles, represents various types and nationalities, with tragedy and comedy intermingled. Every scene is beautifully staged, and each nationality well represented. 1. “Mexico vs Spain, the first scene, shows the rejected Mexican suitor, in a jealous rage, watching the love-making between Carlos, the Spaniard, his hated rival, and the beautiful senorita. With drawn stiletto, he pounces upon the Don, but the señorita seizes his arm, thus saving her lover from a horrible death. After a terrific hand-to-hand encounter, the Don has the point of vantage over the Mexican, but, through the pleadings of the girl releases him and bids him go – ”. 2. “Next is shown two of ‘Our Hebrew Friends’ in a characteristic battle – all talk but no blows. A third Hebrew is drawn into the argument, in the heat of which a policeman appears and threatens to arrest them.The third Hebrew is made the innocent victim. He offers the officer a bribe of a roll of money which is accepted, but the Jew steals it back.” 3.

4.

“Hoot mon!, A Scottish combat: Then follows ‘A Scottish Combat’. A broadsword engagement between two of America’s leading actors in Scotch costumes showing how quick and accurate these deadly weapons can be handled.” “Sunny Africa. Eighth Avenue, New York” A comedy scene “Sunny Africa” takes place in a concert hall on Eighth Avenue, New York, frequented by the colored element. Buck dancing, cake walking, etc. are indulged in. The Bully resents the attentions paid to his sweetheart by a dusky gentleman. Immediately razors are drawn and the affair winds up in a rough-house.”

5.

In “Sons of the Ould Sod” we show a laughable scrap between Haggerty and Fogarty caused by the accidental dropping of a wet sheet by Mrs. Haggerty from her window upon the head of Fogarty. The men battle furiously until that soothing balm to hurt feelings, Beer, is proferred by the everthoughtful Mrs. Haggerty.

6.

“America, the land of the free” then serves as an appropriate finale. The scene is magnificently decorated with emblems of all nations, the American Eagle surmounting them. In harmony, peace, and goodwill the characters of the different nations appear, making it an allegorical representation of “Peace” with Uncle Sam presiding at a Congress of the Powers”.10

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Notes 1.

2.

Duel in Macbeth. Filmed at the AM&B studio by G.W. Bitzer, July 24, 1905. Copyright H63805, 21 feet. The film survives in the Library of Congress’ Paper Print Collection as FLA 4591. Kemp R. Niver, Early Motion Pictures/The Paper Print Collection in the Library of Congress (Washington, D.C., US Library of Congress, 1985), 84–85. Macbeth’s costume and appearance suggests that the performer might be the English actor, Sir Frank Benson, in 1905 on a North American tour, but there is no record of the actors used in this scene.

3.

One of the Paper Print Collection’s holdings is AM&B’s Duel Scene “By Right of Sword”, filmed by A.E. Weed, 7 January, 1904, and released 16 January. Copyright H40943, FLA4950, 40 feet. Kemp R. Niver, Ibid., 84. Arthur Marchmont’s By Right of Sword had reached New York as a touring production, and this excerpt was actually filmed eleven days before the play’s opening at the American Theater. The duel depicts the American hero, played by Ralph Stuart, fighting a Russian officer who has questioned his honor.

4.

For a comic version of the Shakespearean extract as a variety entertainment, see the extended “the King” and “the Duke” chapters in Huckleberry Finn, notably the episode in which Mark Twain’s Huck meets two scam artists who attempt to flim-flam a rural audience with a preposterous entertainment, then escape with the takings. Two of their offerings, which persuade the hick audience that the entertainers are, in fact, scions of the Kemble and Kean acting stock, are an athletic broad-sword combat between Richard III and Richmond and a supposed soliloquy from Hamlet which is a weird, unsteady mélange of several dozen half-remembered lines from as many plays. Most notably in “True Americanism” (1894) and “American Ideals”, True Americanism (New York: Ariel Booklets, 1903) – republished as True Americanism (Colorado Springs: Freedonia Books/Patrick Henry University Press, 2002).

5.

6.

The U.S. Census Bureau’s notional figure of slaves emancipated in former slave-holding states in 1865 is put between 395,000 and 400,000. An additional 50,000 free African-Americans were estimated to live in Northern states. Eric Foner and Joshua Brown, Forever Free, the Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2005), 99.

7.

Such a cast is present in Scott Marble’s stage play, The Great Train Robbery (1893–1897). Edwin Porter’s 1903 film of the same title, while preserving some elements of the original drama, eliminates these comic roles and also removes most of the recognizable dramatic roles. Thomas Dixon, Jr., “Why I wrote The Clansman”, The Theatre (February 1906): 20–22.

8. 9.

Fights of Nations, Filmed at the Biograph Studio by G.W. Bitzer, 17, 19, 23, and 28 January, 1907; released 18 February; copyright H90564; 308 feet. The film survives in the Library of Congress’ Paper Print Collection as FRA5382. Kemp R. Niver, Early Motion Pictures: The Paper Print Collection in the Library of Congress, Bebe Bergsten (ed.) (Washington: Library of Congress, 1985), 103.

10.

Fights of Nations, Biograph Bulletin #94, 2 March 1907 – in Kemp R. Niver, Biograph Bulletins, 1896–1908, Bebe Bergsten (ed.) (Los Angeles: Locare Research Group, 1971), 290.

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15

Japan on American screens, 1908–1915 •

Japan on American

screens, 19 08–19 15

Gregory A. Waller apan invaded the United States sometime in May 1910. Or at least that is what a Moving Picture World editorial claimed in its 28 May 1910 issue, as it contemplated a forthcoming release entitled, Love of Chrysanthemum. Moving Picture World readily identified this Vitagraph film as yet one more refashioning of Madame Butterfly, that is, a contemporary story in which an ill-fated, cross-cultural and inter-racial romance between a Japanese woman and an American man ends with her suicide. For this preeminent American trade magazine, the “Japanese Invasion” was not literally a matter of spies, immigrants, or imported goods, and not a case of Japanese performers or stage productions making their way into the American entertainment market. New releases from Edison, Kalem, and Vitagraph had put Japan on view for American motion picture audiences and prompted Moving Picture World to ask two related rhetorical questions: what accounts for America’s “peculiar interest” in Japan, and “what is the connection ... between the United States and Japan?” The answer, according to Moving Picture World, was somewhat complicated: • First, there is a “sentimental link” between the two nations, typically figured as an “inevitable love story” in which “the occident mixes with the orient”. • Second, there is an aesthetic (and decidedly anti- or un-modern) appeal of Japan: “there is idyllism in everything Japanese” – its “grace ... charm ... poetry”, its “prettiness ... art ... simplicity”. • And, third, there is the highly topical logic of contemporary geopolitics: America’s former protégé had become its “rival in the Pacific”, for the New Japan had emerged as a “world power by virtue of its conquests, its army, its navy, and its ambitions”.1 Into the mid-1910s these knotted strands of desire, fear, admiration, curiosity, and appreciation – of Japanophilia tempered by Japanophobia – would find expression and validation in a significant body of films. This fascination with things Japanese and concern over trans-Pacific relations was hardly limited to the film industry. Japan’s victories first over China (in the Sino-Japanese War of 1895) and then over Russia (in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905), its occupation of Formosa and Korea, its foothold on the Chinese mainland, its much-noted modernization and militarization – all these “achievements” earned Japan the status in Western eyes as a veritable nation on the Euro-American model. Within a generation, Japan had emerged as a new colonialist force to be reckoned with in the Pacific, where the United States had by the turn of the twentieth century staked its own imperial claims to Hawaii and the Philippines. From the late 1890s on, but especially after 1905, the United States and Japan both experienced a series of loudly declaimed war scares, crises often driven by

J

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Fig. 1. Editorial cartoon: “Have a Look! Have look!” American Review of Reviews (August 1907).

the unabashedly racist attempts of elected officials in California to segregate and deny full citizenship to Japanese Americans and to curtail Japanese immigration to the United States. In such a climate, the “Yellow Peril” became more than a handy slur for nativists. The prospect of armed conflict between the United States and Japan was played out across American media, including Kalem’s 1909 release, The Japanese Invasion. In May–June 1909, the Washington Post, for example, published in serial form Banzai!, a full-length novel that ends with Japanese and U.S. troops battling in the American heartland. Four years later, Kay-Bee would release a three-reel spy melodrama with the same title. Predictably, heightened tensions between Japan and the United States were prime fodder for daily editorial cartoons, a feature of most large American newspapers. One particularly germane image from the Cleveland Plain Dealer (reprinted in the news magazine, American Review of Reviews) shows Uncle Sam as a barker, inviting customers to his mutoscope parlor while a startled “Jap” cranks a machine showing “Uncle Sam’s Asiatic Fleet”: here actualité footage serves as a propagandistic adjunct to the building of real battleships (Fig. 1). These representations form part of what I call Japan-in-America, the widespread and surprisingly diverse network of mass-produced images of Japan that publicly circulated in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century across a host of media and cultural channels, including postcards, stereoviews, magic lantern slides, magazines, photographs, sheet music, advertisements, and books.2 In order to track how motion pictures contributed to this complex, historically specific example of cross-cultural representation, I have compiled a comprehensive list of Japan-related titles released in the United States between 1908 and 1915, which is appended to this essay.

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This filmography includes what would have passed as non-fiction as well as fiction, for it covers any film advertised or reviewed in the United States that prominently features characters, locations, or activities identified as “Japanese”, including films that recount the experiences of Americans in Japan or of Japanese in the United States. For the sake of expediency I will refer to these as “Japan films”. (Admittedly, this is, at the edges, a hazy category: how much self-styled Japanese content makes for a Japan film? what distinguishes a marker of Japanese-ness from all-purpose Asian-ness?) Any film that satisfies my basic criterion is cited in the filmography, regardless of its length or genre, regardless of where it was shot or if it features performers of Japanese descent, regardless of its titular country of origin. Constructing such a filmography, I would argue, is a useful and necessary step in analysing this significant instance of cross-cultural representation. As a heuristic, this filmography helps identify similarities and dissimilarities between and across fiction and non-fiction film, American-made and “foreign” product, scenics and star vehicles. It allows us to see the centrality of Madame Butterfly, but not to reduce the field to one influential text or cycle of texts. It provides some measure of the visibility and marketability of Japan in the American film industry and a framework for examining how Japan films are positioned within a rich and varied cultural discourse operating across a broad range of popular media. In so doing, it offers what I think is an important model for conceptualizing the “national” in early American cinema. My primary sources for identifying Japan films are principally company catalogues and trade magazines that were published in the United States, most notably, Moving Picture World. These period documents provide information beyond release dates, plot summaries, and the names of actors, crew members, and production companies. Industry discourse, as I will later discuss, also reveals how Japan was marketed to motion picture audiences in the United States and suggests the ways that Japan films engaged or prompted consideration of broader issues concerning performance and casting, genre and intertextuality, topicality and verisimilitude. According to these print sources, the cinematic presence of Japan in America surged after 1908 and remained notable well into the 1910s, reflecting topical interest in Japan as well as the growth of the motion picture industry at large, the increasing popularity of narrative films, and, later, the advent of multiple-reel features. Chronologically, this filmography moves from Biograph’s The Heart of O Yama (1908) and Edison’s Daughter of the Sun (1909) to Famous Players’ Madame Butterfly (1915), starring Mary Pickford, and Sessue Hayakawa’s first major roles, in The Typhoon (1914) and The Wrath of the Gods (1914). The list covers split-reel, one-reel films and multiple-reel features; productions from (or at least handled by) [Gaston] Méliès, Pathé, Éclair, and Powers, as well as from Thanhouser, Majestic, Kalem, Kay-Bee, Selig, Domino, and Vitagraph. It covers scenics as well as comedies, topical dramas as well as period pieces, “educational subjects” and trick films as well as star vehicles. In addition to films shot in the United States, the list includes a number of films that ostensibly were produced in Japan by Japanese filmmakers and others that were shot on location in Japan by foreign companies. Although the filmography focuses on 1908–1915, it is worth underscoring that from the late 1890s, Japan was a familiar subject on American screens, in the form of motion pictures – as well as, more frequently, lantern slides used for illustrated lectures.3 Japanese dancers and acrobats figured early on as cinematic attractions, as did Japanese railroads, harbors, and military forces, and the Russo-Japanese War occasioned a flurry of films, including one of American Mutoscope & Biograph’s first two-reel narratives, The Hero of Liao-Yang(1904).4 Newspaper accounts suggest that Russo-Japanese War

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films were widely exhibited in the United States, as might be expected given the extensive coverage in all American popular media of what was billed as the first modern war between an Asian and a Western nation. Barely three months into the conflict, an American weekly periodical in May 1904 decried “kinetoscope fakes” of Russo-Japanese War battles produced on the streets of Paris to satisfy the “spectators at vaudeville entertainments” who were clamoring for war footage.5 Throughout the war, both “fake” and “real” films of the conflict were screened at vaudeville theaters and other commercial venues, as well as at Chautauqua assemblies, fairs, and other non-theatrical sites. For instance, more than twenty of “the latest and best [moving picture] productions in the world” – shown in “2,000 feet films” – were featured in a lecture by a Japanese national who spoke on the Russo-Japanese War at the Bedford, Pennsylvania courthouse in July 1905.6 And the Japanese exhibit at the Portland, Oregon fair that year offered a show composed of a live jiu-jitsu performance and “horrifying” war footage – “realism with a vengeance” – depicting the casualties of Russian artillery and the heroic charge of Japanese infantry.7 In fact, scattered evidence from local newspapers suggests that films related to Japan (and not only topical war footage) were often screened non-theatrically, most likely remaining in circulation for years as part of the repertoire of professional lecturers, missionaries, and traveling exhibitors. Charles Musser’s research on Lyman Howe’s career is invaluable in this regard, and contemporary reviews regularly point to the use of motion pictures by Burton Holmes, who would soon become the pre-eminent travel lecturer in the United States. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle noted that Holmes’ 1900 lecture on Japan featured motion pictures of jinrikisha, a funeral procession, a “crowd of Japanese feeding a very tame flock of pigeons”, and dancing geisha who, when projected on the screen, had about them “an atmosphere of unreality as if they were characters out of a fairy story and not real persons in a real land before a real camera”.8 A decade later, motion pictures had become part of the stock in trade for travel lecturers who covered Japan, like Thomas Jefferson Clark whose appearance at a school in Fort Wayne, Indiana, included films identified as The Making of a Fan, Shooting the Rapids, and Japanese Wrestlers.9 As well as including notices about non-theatrical screenings, newspapers provide invaluable information about the theatrical exhibition and public circulation of Japan films in the United States. At the very least, theater ads help verify whether the films promoted (or, even more vaguely, “announced”) in the trade press actually made it to the screen. Yet theater ads, almost by definition, counter the classificatory “purity” of a filmography. To be attentive to exhibition practices is to be continually reminded that the individual motion pictures I have grouped together as Japan films were actually embedded in eclectic programs that were not necessarily unified along national or thematic lines. For example, The Love of Chrysanthemum, which prompted Moving Picture World’s editorial on “The Japanese Invasion”, showed with What Americans Are Made Of at the Arris Theater in Mansfield, Ohio (3 June 1910), while at the Wizard Theatre in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania (23 June 1910), it ran with an Essanay western and a film about “aboriginal life in America”.10 (For me, such information always raises fascinating questions about programming strategies and the reception of individual films and the movies at large.) By contrast, I’ve found no examples of multiple-film programs devoted solely to Japanese subjects in movie theaters, aside from the offerings of professional lecturers who occasionally played metropolitan venues (Fig. 2). At the same time, it is also worth recalling that split-reel films were frequently combined on a single reel by distributors and thus, in a fashion, pre-programmed before they even reached a theater. Variety was no doubt served when Selig, for

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15 • Japan on American screens, 1908–1915 Fig. 2. Alhambra Theatre ad, with Love of Chrysanthemum, Washington Post (12 May 1910).

example, paired The Ainus of Japan (1913) (about Japan’s “aborigines”) with the “farce comedy”, The Suffragette, or when Éclair’s Holy Cities of Japan (1913), picturing the “scenic beauty” and religious practices of “Mikadoland”, shared a reel with Greasepaint Indians, a burlesque in which Indians attack a French film crew making a Western in Oklahoma.11 At the other extreme, when The Wrath of the Gods (1914), a spectacular feature film set in Japan, played the Strand in New York City, the goal was to provide a thematically and stylistically unified experience. Variety noted that “special and incidental music was written by Joseph Littau, pianist of the orchestra there. The stage [at the Strand] was given a Japanesy air and atmosphere by the management.”12 Other ads point in sometimes quite surprising ways to the “Japanesy” presence in American movie theaters, off as well as on screen. It is not clear what exactly made the Alvin in Mansfield, Ohio a “Japanese Theater”, but that was how it was advertised in 1910. How widespread was this phenomena? A construction company boasted in a 1914 ad in the Detroit News that it had built for a client what it called “A Japanese Theater”: “the only theater finished in the Japanese style east of the Mississippi River ... the interior is strikingly Japanese in design and color”, complete with lights “imported from Japan” (Fig. 3).13 Did this venue or the Nikko Theatre, run by K. Uyehara in Seattle, Washington, make a concerted effort to show films in the “Japanese style?” How many other theaters on the Pacific Coast operated according to what seems to have been the segregated policy of the Nikko, which was advertised in 1909 as “Half White and Half Japanese?” (Fig. 4).14 The Nikko Theatre – whose proprietor seems to have been Japanese – offers such an intriguing example because it operated during a time marked by war scares and highly charged debate over the status of Japanese residents of the United States.15 The

143

EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL” Fig. 3. Japanese Theater ad, Detroit News (27 August 1914).

situation had not become any easier in 1914 when the Japanese-American Film Company was formed. Described in Moving Picture World as “the first company in America to be owned, controlled and operated by Japanese”, this enterprise supposedly featured a troupe of 40 players brought directly from Japan and a commitment to filming “the customs of the old country with absolute fidelity”.16 The Japanese-American Film Company’s first (and perhaps only production) was The Oath of the Sword, said to have been shot in Japan and on the University of California campus. Ads for theaters in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Oshosh, Wisconsin, prove that this film – promising “real Japanese actors” and “not a dull moment” – was actually in release during 1914–1915.17 Trade press accounts identify The Oath of the Sword as a cautionary tale in which cross-cultural marriage and even travel between Japan and the United States lead inevitably to homicide and hara-kiri. Although “according to Anglo-Saxon ideas the story leaves much to be desired”, the film was still praised by Moving Picture World’s reviewer, who found the peculiar otherness of Japan to be desirable as well as undesirable.18 He was impressed in particular with what we might call the ethnographic attractions of this fictional narrative: the Japanese-American Film Company’s “extremely attractive and fascinating portrayal of Japanese manners and customs, their home life, their fisheries, their betrothal and marriage ceremonies, and, lastly, their peculiar code of honor”.19 Such subjects – quite common in the period’s larger discourse on Japan – were hardly unique to The Oath of the Sword, as a careful reading of promotional material, adver-

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15 • Japan on American screens, 1908–1915 Fig. 4. Nikko Theatre ad, Coast Magazine (November 1909).

tisements, synopses, and reviews of the Japan films makes clear. Through the lens of industry discourse, we can readily see certain motifs, narrative strategies, thematic concerns, mimetic imperatives, and generic preoccupations that broadly inform cinematic representations of Japan in this period. With these concerns in mind, let me briefly propose some preliminary ways of mapping the territory covered by this filmography. One-third of these Japan films are scenics, travelogues, industrials, or educational motion pictures usually no more than one reel in length, including several titles from Pathé, Méliès, and Selig, as well as a group of films shot by a Vitagraph troupe on its 1913 trip to Japan.20 Certain of these films reprise topics common from a decade before, like jiu-jitsu demonstrations and geisha performances. Rural Japan and picturesque natural splendor appear prominently, while other scenics focus on Tokyo or Yokohama, festivals and rituals, acrobatic firemen, famous temples, the modern silk industry, or the age-old practices of Japanese craftsmen. Diminutive Japan is also a recurrent motif, reflected in films about Japanese children, like Méliès’ Things Japanese (1913) and Pathé’s The Children of Japan (1913), or about ”miniature gardens” like Mutual’s Japanese Gardens (1913). All these activities, sites, set pieces, and attractions appear regularly in postcards, travel literature, illustrated lectures, and stereoviews of the period. And in fiction films as well: a review notes that Domino’s The Courtship of O San (1914) has “enough real Japanese atmosphere ... heightened by the typical Japanese ceremonies, tea drinking, formal calling, at weddings and the like, all of which the average spectator has become familiar with from tropical [sic] pictures of Japan”.21 The continuity between non-fiction films and the larger discourse concerning Japan is strikingly apparent in, for example, an episode on Japan from the Post Weekly Travel Series (produced by the Post Film Company in New York City, likely in the mid-1910s), which has been preserved by the Nederlands Filmmuseum.22 Drawing on footage from various sources, some of which likely dates back more than decade, the Post Weekly’s tour of Japan ranges from the famed Buddha at Kamakura and hairdressing techniques to military training for children, Tokyo street scenes, and leisure activities in Yokohama. Each stage of the tour covers what was by 1915 familiar Japanese terrain, yet the Post Weekly’s itinerary – like most travel literature – follows no master narrative. The dissimilar episodes together recall the contradictory appeals of Japan outlined by the Moving Picture World’s speculations about a “Japanese Invasion”. Although two-hour illustrated lectures about Japan were commonplace, apparently only one non-fiction feature film on America’s Pacific neighbor/competitor circulated in this period: the Dorsey Expedition in Japan, a six-reel “travel feature” that was given a

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limited release by the United Photo-Plays Company in 1915 and was subsequently distributed in abridged form by Universal.23 George A. Dorsey, then curator of anthropology at the Field Columbian Museum in Chicago, promised “remarkable scenic effects” and glimpses into “unfamiliar corners of the Orient”, including Japanese pearl diving and whale hunting.24 It is very rare to find any written record of the reception of such films, but the Chicago Daily Tribune published the reaction of a Japanese viewer to the screening of the Dorsey film at the Studebaker Theater in Chicago. “There is too much of the geishas and the gay Japan – too little of the practical and virile Japan”, wrote Souno Imouye, who fully sensed how deeply United StatesJapanese relations hinged on the politics of representation. What, according to Imouye, were the absences informing Dorsey’s cinematic/anthropological foray? “In all those six reels we see nothing of Osaka, the biggest factory town in Japan”, he declared, “nor any of the stately feudal castles, today filled with the empire’s troops, nor of the elegant Christian edifices now flourishing all over the country ... the real Japan of today is teeming with electric plants, iron works, foundries, and factories of every sort”.25 Kinemacolor’s 1913 production, With the Japanese Army, probably came closer to picturing the “virility” – if not the thriving Christianity and bustling industrialism – that Imouye found lacking in the Dorsey travel films. Virility figured as physical prowess was also on display in certain films, dating back to early American Mutoscope & Biograph productions like Japanese Fencing (1901), that continued to evince a fascination with Japanese martial arts. Méliès’ Japanese ‘Judo’ – Commonly Known as Jiu Jitsu (1913) was one example, though even a period piece like A Love Story of Old Japan (1912) could make room for a “very spirited jiu-jitsu duel”.26 Yet masculinist, if not always modernized, Japan was most likely to appear on American screens in dramatic narratives rather than in scenic non-fiction. For example, feudal Japan was the setting for tales of samurai honor, and the Russo-Japanese War provided the backdrop for Pathé’s Japanese Girl (1908), Méliès’ The Yellow Slave (1913), Apex’s Hari-Kari (1914), and Pathé’s The Death of a Geisha (1914). At the same time, a number of American companies offered contemporary melodramas picturing Japanese spies at work in the United States, like Imp’s The Peril (1912), in which a Japanese butler is prevented from absconding with secret American military information. Adjacent, complementary, or in counter-distinction to films that play upon fears of a Japanese-tinged yellow peril were tragic dramas of cross-cultural and inter-racial romance, usually involving literal movement between the United States and Japan and frequently ending with the suicide of the Japanese heroine. Balboa’s Sacrificial Fires (1914) offers a particularly overdetermined example, for it concludes with the young Japanese bride, abandoned by her Yankee lover, wrapping an American flag about her body before killing herself. In only one of the 25 versions of doomed romance is the male lead Japanese and the female lead Euro-American; in only a few of these films does the inter-racial couple survive together. All the rest follow the pattern of Madame Butterfly, which had appeared as a novella in Century Magazine in 1898, then soon thereafter in book form, before being adapted for the stage by David Belasco in 1900. (Puccini’s opera premiered in New York City in 1906.) One abiding paradox of this cycle of inter-racial romances is that all these Japanese corpses (the product, at least indirectly, of an American and European presence in Japan) do not signify the death of Japan. Quite the contrary. It is as if the willingness of individual Japanese to sacrifice themselves, samurai-like, for honor or shame, for love or patriotism in films like The Japanese Spy (Kalem 1910) only served to bolster the nation, rendering it ever more truly “Japanese” even as it embraced the geopolitics of the twentieth century. These heroic victims all in some fashion die “for the Mikado”, like the heroine of Thanhouser’s 1913 film of that title.

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Fig. 5. Méliès ad for The Yellow Slave and Things Japanese, Moving Picture World (4 October 1913).

Not surprisingly, industry discourse concerning Japan films frequently reveals an essentialist understanding of national identity, coupled with an awareness that authenticity is marketable and that Japan’s otherness (for better or worse) is part of its appeal for American audiences. The ads for Méliès’ The Yellow Slave – typical of the promotion for its series of Japanese subjects in 1913 – announce in boldface that this production is “the real stuff”: a film about “modern Japan”, whose prime selling point is that it was “taken at Yokohama and enacted throughout by real Japanese” (Fig. 5).27 But what about films that were not actually shot on location in Japan? Could the intangible but visible Japanese “atmosphere” be effectively evoked through the careful selection of costumes and sets? This was Edison’s solution when it filmed In a Japanese Tea Garden (1913) at the Japanese tea garden at Coronado Beach, California.28 Production design could even overcome the fact that a film’s leading Japanese role was played by a non-Japanese performer, most notably in the case of Pickford’s Madame Butterfly, in which “dozens of Japanese men and women are seen in support of the star”. Moving Picture World had no complaints about this compensatory logic, praising both Pickford’s performance and the film’s extreme care in constructing its Japan through shots of gardens, interior sets, and “quaint ceremonies of ordinary intercourse”.29 In keeping with this strategy, Famous Players’ promotional notices for Madame Butterfly claim that the producers had relied on the advice of a “member of the New York Nipponese colony” and made extensive use of “beautiful Japanese gardens in the United States”.30 As with the case of Pickford playing the doomed Cho-Cho-San, it seemed possible for Westerners to imitate the movements and gestures of “Japanese” performance. A reviewer for Moving Picture World praised Gaumont’s O Koma San (1913) because its “feminine [French] actors were well trained in the short-stepping movements of the

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Japanese women and their docile manner”.31 Yet Taku Takagi, Japanese-born star of Thanhouser’s Birth of the Lotus Blossom, pinpointed the ambiguity (and naiveté) inherent in the idea that imitative performance could capture cultural authenticity when she told an interviewer that the “hardest part” in acting for an American film company, “is that they want me to play an Americanized Japanese. They want me to play just like a Japanese girl the American imagines”.32 By 1912, versions of the “Japanese girl” had long been a fixture in American popular culture. All questions of performativity notwithstanding, according to industry discourse the race of the player absolutely mattered. The problem with Hara-Kiri (1914), wrote a review, is that “the Japanese characters are obviously not native Japs”, while the “jarring note” in the otherwise “splendid” A Tragedy of the Orient (1914), which features “mostly Japanese players”, is that “the director casts a non-Japanese woman utterly lacking in the physical characteristics which would make it possible for her to create even a fair illusion”.33 Selig’s Among the Japanese (1911) was even more roundly criticized: “‘Orientals Tramping around the Studio’ would have been another good and appropriate title ... . the number of critical and sharpeyed fans is increasing every day and they know enough to know that pictures of Japan should be taken in Japan”.34 Conversely, the promotional material and the reviews for The Wrath of the Gods emphasize that Thomas Ince not only gave his principal female role to Tsuru Aoki, said to be from the actual Japanese island where the story is set, but he also “scour[ed] the lower part of California for Japanese laborers, which are to be worked in as peasants in the picture”.35 Authenticity was worth promoting. Thanhouser made sure to announce in August 1915 that it had hired a troupe of Japanese actors then appearing at San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific Exposition to perform in its In a Japanese Garden.36 Threaded through the industry discourse related to Japan films there are ideologically charged assumptions concerning racial purity, the legibility of Japan’s difference, and the presumed convergence in Japan of race, culture, and nation. Of course, these points require further analysis beyond what is offered here. As we know, early and transitionera cinema obsessively, if selectively, screened the world (past and present) for audiences in the United States – mapping, touring, constructing one place after another and another. Yet more than other areas of the non-European screen world – more than Egypt, China, India, or Mexico, the South Seas or Africa – Japan was perceived to be a modern nation state as well as an ancient civilization, and so it constituted a telling point of comparison for the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. To analyse Japan’s place in early American cinema we must take into account non-fiction as well as fiction and American as well as non-American productions, drawing on industry discourse along with information about theatrical and non-theatrical exhibition. A similar strategy would be effective in considering, for example, Japan films during the 1950s, a period that involved much more than the distribution of Rashomon (1950) and the production of Sayonara (1957). It remains to be seen to what extent this way of approaching the cross-cultural representation and circulation of an alien nation (Japan) within a home nation (United States) can be applied to historically specific situations involving America as the alien cinematic other circulating, for example, within Japan or Iran or the Netherlands.

Appendix: Japan Films, 1908–1915 Across the Broad Pacific (Essanay 1912) The Ainus of Japan (Selig, 1913) An Almond-Eyed Maid (Edison, 1913) Among the Japanese (Selig 1911)

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15 • Japan on American screens, 1908–1915 An Affair of Three Nations (Pathé, 1915) At the Flame the Butterfly Burnt Its Wings (Éclair 1912) The Bad Light (Great Northern/Nordisk, 1911) Banzai (Kay-Bee, 1913) The Birth of the Lotus Blossom (Thanhouser, 1912) The Biwa Canal (Selig, 1912) Buddha (Selig, 1913) The Buddhist Priestess (Thanhouser, 1911) The Butterflies (Cines, 1908) Carnival of Japanese Fireman (Pathé, 1911) The Cheat (Lasky Feature Play Company, 1915) The Children of Japan (Pathé, 1913) Cities of Japan (Méliès, 1913) The Clue (Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company, 1915) The Cormorants, or Japanese Catching Fish with Birds (Urban-Eclipse, 1911) The Courtship of O San (Domino, 1914) Daughter of the Sun (Edison, 1909) The Death of a Geisha (Pathé, 1914) Dorsey Expedition in Japan (United Photo-Plays, 1915), composed of the following films, with separate copyrights: Japanese Pearl Fishing Kyoto, the Ancient Capital of Japan Nara, the Cradle of Japanese Art, Literature, and History Scenic Japan Tokyo, Japan Whaling Industry, Aikawa, Japan The East and the West (Thanhouser, 1911) Enchanting Japan (Selig, 1912) The Engine of Death (Apex, 1913) The Famine (Kay-Bee, 1915) Flowers of Japan (Pathé, 1913) For the Mikado (Thanhouser, 1912) The Fox Woman (Majestic, 1915) The Geisha (Kay-Bee, 1914) The Geishas Girls of Japan (Selig, 1912) The Geisha’s Love Story (Pathé, 1912) The Geisha Who Saved Japan (Kalem, 1909) The Hairy Ainus (Pathé, 1913) Hako’s Sacrifice (Vitagraph, 1910) Hara Kiri (Apex, 1914) The Heart of Oyama (Biograph, 1908) The Holy Cities of Japan (Éclair 1913) Home Life in Japan (Méliès, 1913) In a Japanese Garden (Selig, 1912) In a Japanese Garden (Thanhouser, 1915) In a Japanese Tea Garden (Edison, 1913)

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EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL” In Diplomatic Circles (Biograph, 1913) The Industrial Japan (Kalem, 1913) In Japan (Selig, 1911) In the Land of the Mikado with Homer Croy (Nestor, 1915) It Happened in Japan (Méliès, 1913) Jack’s Chrysanthemum (Vitagraph, 1913) Japan (Post Film Company, circa 1915) A Japanese Courtship (Majestic, 1913 The Japanese Dagger (Eclipse, 1913) Japanese Dice and Butterflies (Pathé, 1911) Japanese Funeral (Méliès, 1913) Japanese Gardens (Mutual, 1913) A Japanese Idyll (Rex, 1912) The Japanese Invasion (Kalem, 1909) Japanese ‘Judo’ – Commonly Known as Jiu Jitsu (Méliès, 1913) A Japanese Love Story (Lux, 1911) The Japanese Mask (Pathé, 1915) A Japanese Peach Boy (Edison, 1910) Japanese Shoemaker at Work (Méliès, 1913) The Japanese Silk Industry (Powers, 1914) The Japanese Spy (Kalem, 1910) The Japanese Swordmaker (Méliès, 1913) Japanese Vaudeville (Cines, 1907) A Japanese Wedding (Méliès, 1913) Jiu Jitsu (Pathé, 1913) Katsura River – Picturesque Japan (Pathé, 1914) The Legend of the Chrysanthemum (Universal,1912) Life in Japan (Pathé, 1914) Little Chrysanthemum (Beauty, 1915) The Love of Chrysanthemum (Vitagraph, 1910) The Love of Loti San (Selig, 1915) The Love of Oro San (Lubin, 1914) The Love of Tokiwa (Vitagraph, 1914) A Love Story of Old Japan (Pathé, 1912) The Lure of the Geisha (101 Bison, 1914) Madame Butterfly (Famous Players, 1915) Mimosa’s Sweetheart (Majestic 1913) Miss Taku of Tokio (Thanhouser, 1912) New Year in Japan (Pathé, 1912) The Oath of O’Tsuru San (Majestic, 1913) The Oath of the Sword (Japanese-American Film Company, 1914) O Koma San (Gaumont, 1913) O Mimi San (Domino, 1914) Opening of the Shichijio Bridge, Japan (Méliès, 1913) The Peril (Imp, 1912)

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15 • Japan on American screens, 1908–1915 Raising Barley in Japan (Selig, 1912) A Relic of Old Japan (Domino, 1914) Rice Industry in Japan (Pathé, 1911) Sacrificial Fires (Balboa, 1914) The Samourai’s [sic] Expiation (Pathé, 1911) The Samurai School (Pathé, 1912) Scenes in Japan (Vitagraph, 1913) Seeing the Funny Side of the World with Homer Croy (Joker, 1915) Shooting the Famous Hozu Rapids of Japan (Méliès, 1913) Shooting the Rapids at Katsuragawa, Japan (Selig, 1912) Shooting the Rapids in Japan (Pathé, 1911) Sight-Seeing in Japan (Vitagraph, 1913) Some Japanese Workmen (Pathé, 1915) The Spider (Éclair 1913) Street Scenes, Yokohama, Japan (Vitagraph, 1913) Temples of Japan (Méliès, 1914) Things Japanese (Méliès, 1913) A Trade Secret (Gotham Film Company, 1915) A Tragedy of the Orient (Broncho, 1914) A Trip to the Famous Picnic Grounds, Arashyma, Japan (Méliès, 1913) The Typhoon (New York Motion Picture Corporation, 1914) Victims of Fate (Pathé, 1912) The Vigil (Domino, 1914) The Vitagraphers at Kama Kura (Vitagraph, 1913) The White Pearl (Famous Players, 1915) With the Japanese Army (Kinemacolor, 1913) The Wrath of Osaka (Vitagraph, 1913) The Wrath of the Gods: The Destruction of Sakurajima (Mutual, 1914) The Yellow Slave (Méliès, 1913) Yokohama Fire Department (Vitagraph, 1913)

Notes 1. 2.

“The Japanese Invasion”, Moving Picture World (28 May 1910), 873. Moving Picture World will hereafter be abbreviated as MPW. For more on this project, see the digital archive, http://www.indiana.edu/~jia1915/

3.

See, for example, American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures Produced in the United States, Film Beginnings, 1893–1910 (Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press, 1995), 540–544; and Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema (New York: Scribner’s 1990), 38–41, 359–360, 368, 381–382, 446.

4.

5.

The American Mutoscope & Biograph Company, for example, included films like Japanese Troops on the Taku Road (1901) in its coverage of the Boxer Uprising. I discuss representations of the Japanese in the Russo-Japanese War texts in “Narrating the New Japan: Biograph’s The Hero of Liao-Yang (1904)”, Screen 47.1 (Spring 2006), 45–65. “Kinetoscope Fakes”, Independent 56 (May 26, 1904), 1215.

6.

“Lecture by a Japanese”, Bedford (Pennsylvania) Gazette (21 July 1905), 1.

7. 8.

“Some Side Glances at Portland Fair”, Los Angeles Times (29 June 1905), III8. “Pretty Customs of the Japs”, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (6 January 1900), 11.

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“School Lecture”, Fort Wayne (Indiana) News (16 April 1910), 2.

10.

Mansfield (Ohio) News (3 June 1910), 12; Gettysburg (Pennsylvania) Times (23 June 1910), 1.

11.

MPW (8 February 1913), 572; MPW (9 August 1913), 903.

12.

Variety (12 June 1914), 22. The Wrath of the Gods was purported to have attracted 21,000 spectators when Marcus Loew screened it along with a vaudeville bill for the opening of his summertime evening entertainment at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn – New York Times (23 June 1914), 11.

13.

Detroit News (27 August 1914). Thanks to Paul Moore for this information and for providing a copy of the advertisement.

14.

Advertisement in Coast Magazine (November 1909). For a sense of West Coast exhibition specifically geared toward Japanese-American audiences, see Jan Olsson, “Pressing inroads: metaspectators and the nickelodeon culture”, in John Fullerton (ed.), Screen Culture: History and Textuality (Eastleigh: John Libbey, 2004), 126–128; and Junko Ogihara, “The Exhibition of Films for Japanese-Americans in Los Angeles in the Silent Film Era”, Film History 4.1 (1990), 81–87.

15.

A news item entitled “The Yellow Peril” – MPW (25 February 1911), 418 – claimed that the Japanese were working “cooperatively” to gain a foothold in the exhibition business in Los Angeles.

16.

MPW (17 October1914), 314.

17.

Daily Northwestern (Oshkosh, Wisconsin) (22 December 1914), 15; Fort Wayne (Indiana) Sentinel (16 April 1915), 6.

18.

MPW (10 October 1914), 200. Perhaps “Anglo-Saxon ideas” were also behind the decision of Chicago’s municipal censors to insist on the elimination of a scene in The Oath of the Sword showing a “Japanese holding man under water” and two subtitles that cast an American character is a particularly bad light – Chicago Daily Tribune (13 November 1914), 14.

19.

MPW (10 October 1914), 202. W. Stephen Bush made a similar point when he praised The Japanese Sword-Maker (1913) for its “fidelity” in representing the Japanese landscapes and ceremonial occasions and expressing “the Japanese way of looking at life” – MPW (8 October1913), 243.

20.

“Picture Making in the Far East”, MPW (21 June 1913), 1231–1232.

21.

MPW (28 February 1914), 1090.

22.

Thanks to Nico de Klerk for making this and other films from this collection available for the 2006 Domitor conference.

23.

MPW (2 September1916), 1559. This footage might also have been released by Powers in 1916 as the one-reel film, Hunting Whales in Japan – MPW (16 September 1916), 1877 – and Behind the Scenes in Japan – MPW (30 September 1916), 2130.

24.

Chicago Daily Tribune (12 May 1915), 17.

25.

Chicago Daily Tribune (13 June 1915), B11.

26.

MPW (31 August 1912), 864.

27.

MPW (4 October 1913), 107. See also the description of Domino’s O Mimi San (1914) – “A strongly developed Japanese subject, with Jap actors in the leads. The costuming and garden scenes are excellent” – MPW (7 February 1914), 678.

28.

MPW (1 March 1913), 920. Mutual filmed parts of The Fox Woman at a tea garden in Coronado that was “decorated entirely with Japanese plants and bric a brac” – MPW (19 June 1915), 1926.

29.

MPW (13 November 1915), 1323.

30.

MPW (30 October 1915), 977.

31.

MPW (19 April 1913), 291.

32.

MPW (28 September 1912), 1286.

33.

MPW (17 January 1914), 295; MPW (13 June 1914), 1542.

34.

MPW (21 October 1911), 198.

35.

MPW (31 January 1914), 545. Part of the irony here is that Aoki was also regularly cast as a Native American in westerns from Domino and Kay Bee – MPW (5 December 1914), 1385; MPW (12 December 1914), 1586.

36.

MPW (28 August 1915), 1496.

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PART III Locating/Relocating the “National” in Film Exhibition

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Nationalist film-going without Canadian-made films? •

Nationalist film-going without Canadian-made films?

Paul S. Moore n urban, English Canada, the First World War was a significant marker of Canadian independence, maturing into a nation after British colonial adolescence. In defense of the British motherland, Canada found its national pride. This is especially applicable to Ontario, where stalwart Loyalist patriotism and a remarkable volunteerism signaled how Toronto would eventually eclipse Montreal culturally, industrially and economically as the national metropolis, having already done so in fact in the war effort.1 But a Toronto-centric Canadian nation would never have that metropolis as a sentimental focus, neither as the heartland of a folk or an avant-garde culture, nor even as a center for a national mass-produced culture. As is first evident in the shift from Montreal to Toronto during the First World War, whatever Canadian nationhood meant, it would be a distinctly modern amalgam tenuously linked by an imported mass culture, distributed out of Toronto but not created there. This is certainly the case with cinema, in which the city supplied an exemplary prototype of nationalist movie-going, of consumption and showmanship. In later decades, it became a cliché to note how Toronto cinemas turned up their lights every Saturday night, played God Save the Queen, and sent the audience home for a sober Sunday. This was in fact the law, but began only after the war, in 1919, as a nationalist memorial to the conflict and, to my mind, as a permanent reminder of the role movie-going had played in sustaining the patriotism of the homefront.2 Already late in August 1914, showmen in Toronto collectively organized to make going to the movies part of the city’s War Relief fund-raising campaign. The movies became a constant part of Toronto’s war effort because a pseudo-professional and highly regulated system of civic showmanship was already in place by 1913. It was easily given the veneer of patriotism in August 1914, the final brushstroke to make movie-going an act of citizenship. The act of movie-going, of gathering as a mass public, demonstrated how the new mass culture effectively enfranchised those without formal citizenship. Juveniles, women, and foreign-born were welcomed to join the mass public, facilitated by the patronage of the city’s showmen working collectively to make movie-going a form of practical patriotism.3 For the War Relief Fund, dollar donations from the middle-class, from merchants and industry, were solicited at prominent but still-exclusive mass meetings, the context given through battle hymns and stirring speeches. With their supplementary campaign, movie showmen uncannily and quickly introduced a more pragmatic form of mass gathering. Nickel and dime donations came indirectly through the box office, rewarded

I

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not so much with a sense of patriotic pride but with ordinary entertainment. In that early effort, only film showmen donated their gross receipts directly to the fund, in hindsight a hint that the continuity of ordinary consumption would become key to the war effort. It is as if showmen upended aspersions of their audience’s immaturity and provided a paternalistic way for the disenfranchised to give to the fund regardless of altruistic or patriotic intentions. While there might have been rousing songs and a speech, at least on screen there was no overt propaganda. The main program was focused on the same American-made films that would have been shown anyway. Before long, cinemas became an important part of suburban training camps, where nightly movies were said to have eliminated requests for leave and absenteeism. Late in 1915, when volunteer recruiting was reaching its limits, Toronto’s movie showmen again organized collectively by opening their doors for recruiting rallies, the only time Sunday shows were permitted in Ontario until the 1960s. In May 1916, the Ontario government formalized the prior two years’ effort of showmen by sanctioning all movie-going under an amusement tax. Only in 1917 were official Canadian war films commissioned as propaganda, but they hardly had an impact on ordinary movie-going. When important propaganda features appeared like Battle of the Somme, On the Battlefields of France, and Canada in Action, they were sponsored by city newspapers rather than officially sanctioned by government. Unlike the amusement tax, propaganda was never inserted into theaters, except when 1918 Victory Bond films from Hollywood were supported, again, by the collective organization of dozens of ordinary showmen. I propose that Toronto’s civic showmanship produced a nationalist form of film-going largely without propaganda and without Canadian-made films or even Allied imports. It thus stands as an important case for thinking about the relation of exhibition and regulation to nationalism in early cinema. Early Canadian film history can be treated entirely as exhibition history. Not even a staunchly nationalist collection of dozens of obscure exceptions of local films can allow one to pretend that there was a national film production industry, at least not before government-sponsored filmmaking culminated much later with the National Film Board.4 This means Canadian film history too often has been conceived as a lament, given the obvious lack of its own object of study, Canadian films. Exhibition becomes the focus by default, searching for the prohibitive cause of the phantom corpus of unmade films rather than out of a genuine curiosity for the character of showmanship and mass consumption. American domination is the failsafe culprit, rarely acknowledged as the predetermined result of the framing problematic. It was thus with great surprise that my study of early movie-going in Toronto, pursued as a project in urban sociology and initially without a national scope or nationalist intentions, uncovered a rich, regional sensitivity in the history of showmanship. I consistently found that local voices, showmen, reformers, and regulators alike, accepted Ontario film exhibition’s place within the American domestic market rather than lamented those conditions, and proceeded to forge a prototype for nationalist film-going without Canadian-made films. In effect, I am presenting a simple reminder of the relative independence of production from exhibition and regulation. More ambitiously, I want to tentatively argue for the priority of regulation and exhibition in establishing any nationalist or propagandist system of film production. Perhaps I have spoken too strictly of the lack of Canadian-made films, for there is an exception, even for Toronto. In the winter months early in 1915, advertising began for the Toronto-made films of the Conness-Till Company, founded in April 1914 by Edward H. Robins, with backing from financiers in his hometown Philadelphia. The men whose names formed the company’s moniker also contributed money, American

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theatrical producer Luke Edwin Conness and Toronto businessman Louis A. Till.5 The company’s first move was a publicity campaign and amateur screenwriting contest in August 1914, and Robins began a weekly newspaper column, “Behind the Screen”.6 $50,000 was spent building a studio in suburban Toronto. After first releasing a few short films of Toronto scenes, by the end of January 1915 ads for Conness-Till began appearing in the weekend newspaper editions’ film pages, announcing “All Ready Mr. Exhibitor To Talk Service”, with a schedule of four upcoming film titles. The logo for the company was a beaver on top of a maple leaf, and the films were known as the “Made In Canada”, or even just “M in C” films.7 It was no hands-down success, as the local scandal sheet printed a cynical exposé, citing with glee how the American actress employed as the company’s star was complaining about the bitter cold and low pay.8 A preview of Conness-Till’s first film, On the King’s Highway, was held at the city’s premiere movie palace, but ultimately opened in only a small downtown theater.9 The film was screened for a few days, although that theater did book subsequent Made in Canada features. At least five other neighborhood theaters advertised a Conness-Till film between February and April.10 In the meantime, preview screenings were held for showmen in Montreal, where another feature, Canada in Peace and War, played at that city’s key early movie palace.11 Back in Toronto, there were attempts to hype the hometown studio as sharing in the glamour and fame of the movie business. Actors, directors, and managers of Conness-Till appeared at an important neighborhood theater for a special “formal opening”. The following week Robins and other players from the studio appeared in person at another.12 After three months releasing new multi-reel features almost weekly, on 17 April the Star Weekly published a lengthy illustrated article about the company with a photo of the studio, the actresses, the acting company under the bright arc-lights, and a dramatic scene being filmed. Although the article began with the understatement, “quite a number of people in Toronto are perhaps not aware that the business of film production in this city is now an accomplished fact”, the profile then proceeded with praise: These people enjoy the signal honor of being the first in the Canadian market to promote this particular industry, hence their slogan ‘Made in Canada’. … Speaking to some of the local talent who have embraced the movies as an occupation, the Star Weekly man learned that the business though hard was interesting and in many ways opportunities arose for advancement for those persons who were sincere in their efforts.13 The story took a tour through the sound stage with a ballroom scene under direction, the prop room, developing room, drying room, printing room, and lunch room. A sense of the technical expertise and high cost came with a calculation that the highvoltage arc-lights cost $300 a day to keep lit. The studio was an all-in-one fully operational facility that could deliver finished prints to the local distributor. The ad just below this article, one of the last, listed ten films available, averaging three reels each. There must have been some dissatisfaction or impatience on the part of the Philadelphia financiers, because late in April 1915, the company was reorganized and renamed with its own surname.14 A month later, in the middle of production of an anti-smoking social issue film, Nicotine, the suburban Toronto film studio went up in flames.15 Despite some insurance on the property, the investors called it quits rather than renew their investment. No copies of the company’s films remain. The fire destroying the Conness-Till film studio might be seen as an abrupt end to Toronto-made movies. On the other hand, a more “natural” death of bankruptcy seems just as likely, given the promotions alongside its “Made in Canada” newspaper ads. The small, independent Toronto film company could not even monopolize the local

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wartime patriotism that was its hook. Conness-Till’s patriotic advantage paled next to the Strand Weekly war series, scenes of preparations and news from Europe (The Toronto Strand was an early link in the Mark-Brock chain, which had opened the Broadway Strand in New York in 1914).16 There could hardly have been a worse time to enter the film business. In exactly these months the serial melodrama fad was at its peak, and there were six stories blanketing the city in theaters and in print. Even the Toronto-made advantage was lost as it was announced that Toronto-born Lottie Pickford, sister of Mary, would star in the serial, Diamond from the Sky.17 Mary Pickford herself, in the few months of the Conness-Till film releases, had become the highest paid and best known movie star, and newspapers began claiming her Toronto roots as cause for celebration.18 The same week that the Star Weekly profiled the local film studio, the Strand downtown had a special Pickford repertoire festival, playing a different film of hers every day and offering lady patrons a souvenir, “Mary Pickford’s Own Story”.19 In retrospect, even worse, a parallel advertising campaign began early in 1915 to brand and anchor Paramount feature films from Famous Players–Lasky productions. Mary Pickford, along with other well-known stars of the moment, was listed as exclusively appearing in Paramount films. The young local manager of the Famous Players Film Service was a heavy self-promoter who got his picture printed and “meteoric” career written up in the paper. He probably did not exactly intend to sabotage the efforts of the Conness-Till company, but advertising for the Paramount films of the Famous Players company were often adjacent to the Made in Canada campaign. Compared to the stoic beaver on top of the Conness-Till maple leaf were pithy slogans to forcefully argue and claim the importance of Paramount films, as if Mary Pickford alone was insufficient:20 “Give the Public What They Want”, “I Am Going to Make Paramount a Household Word”, “Does Quality Mean Anything to You?” as well as occasional more direct links to the local audience, “The Toronto Theatres Listed Below Show Our Productions”, followed by a list of several dozen local theaters.21 The emerging corporate transnational structure of the film business was even becoming a topic of general interest for feature stories in Toronto’s weekend newspaper editions. The World printed a story early in 1916, “Life of One Film in Canada, What Happens to a Film After It Reaches Toronto”, and another proudly proclaimed, “Canada is No Longer Graveyard of Features”.22 In general, film distributors used their regional branches to both situate local showmen in a personable and manageable regional context as well as openly claim the advantages of economies of scale that the continental reach of a chain structure afforded. In trade press ads, Canadian cities (not Canada as a nation) were equals alongside American cities. In this solidification of the chain structure of the film market, the Conness-Till Company’s Made in Canada films are remarkable not for their failure but for their relative success. There were not many other companies anywhere in North America that were as small but still managed to release a film each week for three months. Had it been founded just a few years earlier, it might have really taken off. In the end, only a handful of local theaters picked up the Made in Canada films and promoted them, even as all of the 90 movie theaters in Toronto were specifically mentioned as offering Paramount, World, or Metro features, not to mention serials from Mutual, Universal, or Pathé. There was a similar studio in Montreal in 1913, the British-American or Bri-Am Company. Louis Pelletier, researcher for Pierre Veronneau at the Cinémathèque Québéçoise, has recovered much more about this case.23 Its single feature, The Battle of Long Sault (1913), turned up in Toronto and elsewhere in Ontario, and it received a great deal of publicity that hyped the Canadian theme and production and looked

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behind the scenes in Montreal sets and locations. It might even have been a box office success for its day. However, it was a single feature film. It played for a week and moved on, as did every film in this and other second-tier cities. In Toronto, it would seem that no film lasted more than two weeks at a single theater until after the war, nationalist or otherwise. Queen Elizabeth played a week at the first-run Strand in November 1912. Quo Vadis? was booked as a roadshow event at the Princess Theater for just two weeks in June 1913. Beginning in January 1914, each episode of Adventures of Kathlyn ran a single week or less, whether first- or twelth-run. There are two obvious exceptions in the twin extravaganzas of The Birth of a Nation in 1915 and The Battle of the Somme in 1916, each representing a distinct sort of imported nationalism – that of the epic blockbuster of the United States and that of British wartime patriotism. Thus two films out of a few thousand had any staying power. How could a single Canadian-made feature spur a national industry in that environment? The dozen features from Conness-Till in 1915, even if they were well-made entertainments with strong box office (which they weren’t), hardly made a ripple in the ocean of film distribution and exhibition. In this context of mass exhibition, the problem of a Canadian national cinema is not really a matter of nationalism, although the U.S. border makes it look like it. I want to bracket the decades of subsequent debates over state intervention and free trade in order to think about the first decades of cinema on their own terms. The Canadian problem then becomes instead a matter of how the mass practice of the film industry undermined regionalism in general, perhaps even eliminated it. In other words, to ask why there was no film production in Canada – in Montreal, Toronto, or anywhere else – makes as much sense as asking why there was none in Buffalo or Cleveland. Such questions do surface in the U.S. about the failures of studios to take root in Florida and endure in New Jersey, or why the Chicago network of Selig, Essanay, and American lasted a mere decade.24 But even if one thinks of the Chicago or Florida question in terms of Hollywood imperialism, it is not really framed in terms of nationalism. Consider the case of the Cincinnati-in-Motion studios alongside my Toronto story of Conness-Till. From 1913 to 1915, the dominant film advertiser in Cincinnati was a local studio, billing its products as Cincinnati-In-Motion. It specialized in industrial, advertising, and local films, but was also the Ohio Valley stringer for the Universal news weekly.25 The studio was able to combine income from specialty industrial production and its duties as a news service with an emphasis on the appeal and immediacy of local and regional film viewing. It advertised constantly and with great hype, and stood out as unique in a city strangely restrained in movie advertising overall. Its ads were the first to mention neighborhood theaters around Cincinnati, compiling a list of the places showing their local films and calling them the largest chain of theaters in the region. At one point it listed 50 by name, more than one-third of those then operating. It is truly a remarkable and exceptional case of local showmanship carving out a space for its marginal product, and lasted several years. In terms of regionalism, the Cincinnati case could become a point of pride, a relatively successfully system of local film production, distribution, and exhibition. If Cincinnati-in-Motion had to be thought of in terms of regional autonomy and nationalism – as Toronto’s Conness-Till and Montreal’s Bri-Am always are – it would similarly have to be considered a failure. In all regions of North America, there was simply no room for local production within the integrated system of continental distribution. Looking back to 1908 and the Edison Trust agreements, it seems ironic that the Canadian border prompted direct vertical integration rather than protecting against

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consolidation. The Trust could not be enforced north of the border, where there were similarly notorious problems with copyright enforcement. But if the law could not pass through customs, capital investment easily could. American film companies responded by buying Toronto film exchanges wholesale and later by setting up franchises run by their own envoys. For example, Percy Waters is listed as the head of the Dominion Film Exchange in Toronto by 1909, as far as I can tell months before his involvement, in April 1910, in the organization of General Film Company that took control of branch film exchanges throughout the United States.26 Already by 1910, there were effectively no autonomous film exchanges in Toronto, as all either represented the Sales Company or were branches of General Film. That situation was already in effect when Canadian provincial governments began strict bureaucratic regulation and censorship, in Ontario from 1911. Ultimately, local censorship mattered because it was a direct outgrowth of the responsibilities of urban policing, and it was unfathomable and politically unpalatable for territories, especially across international borders, to accept an external authority, let alone the voluntary efforts of a self-regulating industry. But just what difference did censorship have in Ontario in terms of what ended up projected onto picture screens? With American film studios more attuned to censorship efforts closer to home, like the National Board of Censorship in New York, how did the Ontario Board of Censors really change what was being seen?27 While the reciprocal effect on production is likely minimal, it is clear that the Ontario Board of Censors, under its first Chief Censor G.E. Armstrong, made radical cuts to reshape film according to a perceived particularity of the Ontario audience. Most obviously and widely commented on was the decision to bar images of the American flag if used with patriotic fervor. Just months after Armstrong’s work began, a brief controversy erupted when a film based on the war of 1812 portrayed the American perspective to the detriment of the Canadian victors. British Loyalist Canadian soldiers had, after all, burned down the White House and won that war. In Toronto picture shows, the movie drew hisses and was interrupted by patriotic protests. Reports of the incident even reached the American film trade press. Censoring overt American patriotism in imported films became the first urgent matter of the Ontario Board of Censors. Beginning late in 1911, scenes of Old Glory were cut from imported films before they were shown to audiences in Toronto. An October 1911 article sarcastically compared the censor’s stamp to the mark of the devil and facetiously joked that waving the American flag was a “heinous offense indeed, far worse than the murders so vividly portrayed this past week!”28 An editorial in the Star Weekly reviewed how American film producers were at first merely perturbed by the moral strictness of the Ontario censors for banning films “not considered injurious to the honest people of Kansas and Michigan”. Soon, movie studios’ indignation escalated, and they took the banning of the Stars and Stripes to the U.S. Secretary of State as a trade issue spilling over onto concerns of sovereignty. In Toronto, a newspaper editorial remarked that the more valid concern for sovereignty actually lay on the other side of the border with Canada. This must be considered one of the most curious appeals ever made to a Government. These men bedeck their films with their own flag because they know their own flag appeals to the sentiments of their own people. Yet they actually fail to understand that our people want to see our flag bedecking similar pictures if they are to get equal pleasure out of them. … Let them substitute our flag for their own on their total output for a month, and see

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whether the people of the United States would be as tolerant for one night as we have been for years past in a matter of this kind.29 Such sympathies with the Canadian side were not entirely unheard of on the other side of the border. Some writing in Moving Picture World recognized that patriotism run amok in films cheapened the possibilities of the art of filmmaking, not to mention limited profits from the international market for American films.30 On a simple matter of good management, one Chicago film exchange dismissed the kafuffle over which flag appeared on Toronto movie screens. His inspection of the Canadian territory convinced him that the centralized censorship boards of Ontario and Québéc were liberal in judgment, and efficient in practice. Once passed through the board, exchanges had full and unobstructed access to the vast territories of Canadian provinces, in stark contrast to the local censor nuisance then rampant all over America.31 A dichotomy of nationalist approaches was articulated at the time: either to produce depictions of parochial life and Canadian history or to censor the worst flag-waving of imported American films. Advocates of neither side demonstrated a nuanced or complex understanding of the appeal of movie-going as a mass practice, imagining a nationalist cinema emerging either out of films of Canadian lumber camps or from simply cutting out the Stars and Stripes. With the censor board the only office in a position to act, the latter option emerged as a rule to fight the ill effects of incipient nationalism in American films. Garth Jowett speculates this sentiment did not emerge until after the war, when “the nation was in no mood to tolerate American movie claims which showed the Americans winning the War almost singlehandedly”32 In fact, resentment of American flag-waving was expressed most vociferously around 1911. An alternative form of nationalist cinema emerged only during the war, when movie theaters were used to produce nationalist practices of gathering to watch films, regardless of what movies were shown. That leads me to propose that a national cinema, a national system of filmmaking, can only emerge within the development of these urban and regional systems of film exhibition. Richard Abel has shown for both France and America before the war (implicitly for the dominant cities of film production, Paris, New York, and Chicago within those nations) that an increasingly nationalist and protectionist cinema emerged only after the ciné and the nickelodeon became widespread.33 Recognizing national film production as distinct from exhibition processes embedding film into communities opens up the possibility that practices of film-going can be nationalist in character without the films themselves being produced nationally. This appears to be exactly what happened in Toronto during the First World War. But what if the case of Toronto could be generalized? It would mean nationalism is most easily and perhaps necessarily first instituted through exhibition practices supported by state regulation and censorship, always already in response to the global, mass character of mainstream cinema. Nationalism then becomes a variation of reform, a parallel process to local policing and the management of showmanship. In this sense, nationalism – although civics is perhaps the best word – is the latent rationale behind the various attempts to reform the escapist character of film entertainment, such as the Better Films Movement and other civic and educational cases, or MoMA Film Library, or even the Catholic Legion of Decency.34 Recent studies of these efforts and of film clubs and amateur cinema have reconstructed statistics to show that these efforts amassed great numbers of members, viewers, and enthusiasts. Yet, the efforts remained almost by definition marginal. They established alternative subcultures of exhibition and regulation created specifically against the global, mass culture of the mainstream. By contrast, but with a similarly civic impulse, Toronto’s showmen during the First

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World War were able to attach nationalist practices of movie-going to the mainstream of American-made movies.

Notes 1.

Adam Crerar, “Ontario and the Great War”, and Paul Litt, “Canada Invaded! The Great War, Mass Culture, and Canadian Cultural Nationalism”, both in David MacKenzie (ed.), Canada and the First World War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005).

2.

Ontario, Statutes, “An Act to amend the Theatres and Cinematographs Act”, 9 George V, Chapter 66 (24 April 1919).

3.

For an elaboration of this argument, with further details of the case of the movies in Toronto during World War I, see the conclusion of my forthcoming book, Now Playing: Early Movie-going and the Regulation of Fun (Albany: SUNY Press).

4.

Zoe Druick, Projecting Canada: Government Policy and Documentary Film at the National Film Board (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007).

5.

Peter Morris, Embattled Shadows: A History of Canadian Cinema 1895–1939 (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press 1992), 51–54.

6.

Advertising for the Coness-Till Photoplay contest appeared in all Toronto daily newspapers for three days, from 27 August 1914. Reports of the progress of the Conness-Till appears in Moving Picture World [henceforth MPW] (19 September 1914): 1667, and (28 November 1914): 1257. The first microfilmed copy of “Behind the Screen Conducted by E.H. Robins” is in the Toronto World (8 November 1914): 8.

7.

“Canadian-Made Motion Pictures”, Star Weekly (23 January 1915): 21. Ads for Conness-Till Film Co. first appear in Star Weekly (23 January 1915) and thereafter until 1 May 1915; they also appear in the Sunday World, in February 1915.

8.

“Conness-Till Company Harshly Criticized”, MPW (23 January 1915): 550.

9.

The Strand preview is noted in MPW (13 February 1915): 1021. See also the Photodrome playdates in MPW (20 February 1915): 1170.

10.

“Toronto-Made Play at the Photodrome”, Star Weekly (6 February 1915): 21. Advertising first appears for these Conness-Till films: On the King’s Highway (6 February 1915), His Awakening (13 February 1915), Motto On the Wall (21 February 1915), Canada in Peace and War (27 February 1915), Military Parade of the 2nd Contingent (28 March 1915), His Soul’s Affinity (27 March 1915), To Err is Human (10 April 1915), and The Morland Mystery (17 April 1915). Three other titles are promoted as available, but never advertised as playing in theaters: In the Hands of Fate, Sham Battle, and the studio’s final feature, The Faithful Servant.

11.

The preview is noted in MPW (13 March 1915): 1639. Playdates at the Montreal Strand are noted in MPW (17 April 1915): 431.

12.

“Formal Opening of United Features Co.”, Star Weekly (6 March 1915): 21. Mary Pickford Theater ad, Sunday World (14 March 1915): 12.

13.

“Film Plays are Made in Toronto”, Star Weekly (17 April 1915): 22.

14.

“Beury Feature Film”, MPW (8 May 1915): 937.

15.

The production of Nicotine is noted in MPW (29 May 1915): 1482. The film studio fire is reported in all Toronto daily newspapers, 1 June 1915.

16.

Not really “news” as much as “views”, the Strand Weekly war series began in Toronto at the Strand on 21 September 1914, two weeks after the films first appeared at the Broadway Strand in New York City. There were at least 16 weekly programs in the series, and the films played elsewhere in the city after their debut at the Strand downtown.

17.

“Lottie Pickford, Toronto Girl, Chosen for Big Part”, Star Weekly (10 April 1915): 21.

18.

“A Toronto Girl Who Is Paid $104,000 a Year”, Sunday World (21 February 1915): 1, 7; “Mary Pickford, Toronto Film Artist, Paid Great Compliment”, Star Weekly (31 October 1914): 21.

19.

Strand ad, Star Weekly (17 April 1915), 23.

20.

“Mr. P. Kauffman”, Star Weekly (6 March 1915): 21. “Philip Kauffman’s Meteoric Career”, Star Weekly (12 June 1915): 22.

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16 • Nationalist film-going without Canadian-made films? 21.

These three Paramount ads were adjacent to Conness-Till ads: “Give the Public What They Want”, Star Weekly (6 February 1915): 21; “I Am Going to Make …” Star Weekly (27 February 1915): 21; “Does Quality Mean Anything …” Star Weekly (20 March 1915): 21.

22.

“John Doe’s Release Tells Life Of One Film in Canada”, Sunday World (30 January 1916): 2; “Canada is No Longer Graveyard of Features”, Sunday World (6 February 1916): 3. Louis Pelletier, “An Experiment in ‘Historically Correct’ Canadian Photoplays: Montreal’s British American Film Manufacturing Co.”, Film History 19.1 (2007): 34–48.

23. 24.

Richard Koszarski reviews the demise of New York City-based filmmaking in New Jersey in Fort Lee: The Film Town (Eastleigh, UK: John Libbey, 2004); Andrew Brodie Smith reviews the Western genre specialty of Chicago movie studios in Shooting Cowboys and Indians (Oklahoma City: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004).

25. 26.

My synopsis here is based entirely on local newspaper ads for Cincinnati-in-Motion. Perhaps this is not so exceptional, and the groundwork to form General Film occurred in many other places and far in advance of the official incorporation and capitalization. Robert Anderson, “The Motion Picture Patents Company: A Re-evaluation”, in Tino Balio, ed., The American Film Industry (2nd edn) (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 133–152.

27.

Some examples of the analysis of censorship pressure at the time include Francis G. Couvares, “Hollywood, Main Street, and the Church: Trying to Censor the Movies Before the Production Code”, American Quarterly 44. 4 (1992): 584–616; Daniel Czitrom, “The Politics of Performance: From Theater Licensing to Movie Censorship in Turn-of-the-Century New York”, American Quarterly 44. 4 (1992): 525–553.

28.

“Senseless Censors”, Jack Canuck (28 October 1911): 8; “Bar Stars and Stripes, By Board of Censors, Talk With Men Who Inspect Moving Picture Films”, Telegram (17 October 1911): 23. “Editorial: Flags and Films”, Star Weekly (4 November 1911): 20.

29. 30.

“Facts and Comments”, MPW (28 October 1911): 272; “The Flag Question”, MPW (11 November 1911): 487; “Canadian Censors and the U.S. Flag”, MPW (9 December 1911): 795. “American Flag in Canada”, MPW (13 December 1913): 1259.

31. 32.

“Chicago Letter: Interesting News of the Trade in Canada”, MPW (17 October 1914): 317. Garth S. Jowett, “American Domination of the Motion Picture Industry: Canada as a Test Case”, Journal of the University Film Association 27. 3 (1975): 60.

33.

Richard Abel, “Booming the Film Business: The Historical Specificity of Early French Cinema”, in Abel, ed., Silent Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 109–124; Abel, The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

34.

Jennifer Horne, Exhibition and Inhibition: The Better Films Movement (forthcoming); Haidee Wasson, Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Frank Walsh, Sin and Censorship: The Catholic Church and the Motion Picture Industry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).

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17

The cinema arrives in Italy: city, region and nation in early film discourse •

The cinema arrives in Italy:city, region and nation in early film discourse

John P. Welle n Early Cinema in Russia and Its Cultural Reception, Yuri Tsivian reconstructs the response to early cinema of an educated Russian public. In describing the methodology he adopts for analysing written traces of early cinema, he writes: At the input we have a simple moving image, at the output we get a “reception text” ... The task of those who take up the study of cultural reception is quite similar to that of the Rorschach psychologist: to summarize and interpret the recurrent associations and fixed ideas that each culture reads into the “moving smudges” of early cinema.1 Tom Gunning describes cultural reception in these terms: “The writer on films filters his or her perception of the films through more than a subjective grid. As they participate in the passions and tacit assumptions of their age and nation (not to mention class and gender) they stain the image they present of the film with them.”2 As these scholars indicate, cultural reception entails tracing the recurring patterns, dominant motifs, and familiar metaphors contained in each culture’s written accounts of early cinema. A curious sonnet in romanesco, the dialect of Rome, entitled “Cinematografo Lumière” by Vincenzo Cecchetti, constitutes a reception text of considerable interest. In the spring of 1896, licensees and operators working for the Lumière brothers began to organize screenings of the cinématographe throughout the Italian peninsula, starting in Rome on March 12, and in Milan two weeks later. The cinématographe was also unveiled in Naples and Genoa in late March with showings in Venice, Trieste and Bologna in the spring and summer months. In November, the Lumières’ invention had its debut in Turin.3 Vincenzo Cecchetti’s sonnet offers an intriguing local response to the international phenomenon of animated photographs. It appeared on the first page of a popular Roman newspaper, Il Ghettanaccio di Borgo, in April of 1897. Remarkable for the adjectives of identity that it puts into play, this poem depicts the arrival of a mysterious man associated with an unfamiliar object, an object, moreover, which remains slightly out of focus. The poem follows in English translation. The Lumière Cinématographe He’s wearing a tall hat in the French manner, a greasy worn-out ruff,

I

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and Abruzzese side-whiskers, looking for the whole world just like a monkey. He rides in a carriage as the English do which looks just like a wooden box, the coachman’s above, he’s below, it seems like a Japanese see-saw. To each his own, but well, for heaven’s sake, that really is a strange custom to go close oneself up in a glass case! I’m telling you, he’s quite a type, a real original, the way he’s sitting down in there, he looks like he’s about to squeeze one over the chamber pot.4 Although other writers provide more complete and informative descriptions of the screenings arranged by the Lumières’ agents in Italy, Cecchetti’s sonnet is of interest, nevertheless. The value of this poem for cultural reception, I would argue, and its pertinence to the themes of this volume, consists in its evocation of the Lumière cinématographe through markers of identity and difference. The French hat, the Abbruzzese side-whiskers, the English coach, and the Japanese seesaw all command attention. In effect, the poem attempts to name and to construct an identity for a highly vaunted novelty – animated photographs – through adjectives denoting regional and national provenance. The only Italian identity invoked specifically, we might note, is regional (not national) in nature: the Lumière representative wears sideburns like the men of the Abruzzi region of central Italy. Furthermore, the poem is written, as already indicated, in the popular dialect of the city of Rome; a linguistic fact that is itself a strong marker of identity. Rather than describe the apparatus of the Lumière cinématographe, the short films, “views” or “vedute” as they were called in Italian, or the audience, for that matter – three discursive options pursued by journalists when writing on the cinématographe – Cecchetti focuses on a human agent, as well on as the coach in which he travels.5 The poem associates “il cinematografo” with a technician, commenting on the style and quality of his clothes, his preferred manner of wearing his hair and the coach he rides in. The Lumière cinématographe has not impressed our poet, as the associations of a low order clearly indicate. In the first stanza, for example, the technician is compared to a monkey. And the poem’s concluding reference to a chamber pot speaks for itself. The identity of the “cinematografo Lumière”, at least for Cecchetti writing in 1897, we might conclude, is clearly not yet one constructed as a “good object”, in the theoretical terms developed by Christian Metz. In fact, as Metz writes: In a history of contemporary culture the concern for the good object … can only be understood in relation to the bad-object status that society initially conferred on the cinema and to which it still confines it to some extent.6 Cecchetti’s poem may strike us as a particularly odd response to animated photographs. And yet, with regard to reception, Tsvian observes that “reflective rather than reactive” responses are of particular interest. He posits as reflective “a response that is active, creative, interventionist, or even aggressive”.7 “Early film reception”, he goes on to argue, “works very much like the mechanism of ‘de-familiarisation’ [ostranenei] that Viktor Shklovsky … believed was the basic principle of art. It is a complex game of similarities and dissimilarities, of the presence and absence of familiar features”.8 Cecchetti’s response to the Lumières’ invention belongs to this “reflective” category.

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The poem is clearly “active, creative and aggressive” in its response to the novelty of moving pictures. Cecchetti’s poem seems even more peculiar when seen in the broader context of the cultural reception of the Lumières in Italy. According to Gian Piero Brunetta, for example, “the Lumières’ invention is immediately received with a mixture of marvel, curiosity, attraction and admiration”.9 At the same time, however, as Paolo Caneppele observes “the cinema/novelty represents and impersonates modernity, and, because of this, it unleashes great enthusiasms and strong resistances”.10 Moreover, Cecchetti’s poem, with its image of the carriage and its plethora of adjectives denoting national identity – the French hat, the English coach, and the Japanese seesaw – reminds us that the cinema, unlike the sonnet, for example, or lyric opera, for that matter, is not “invented” or “born” in Italy, two familiar tropes in the rhetoric of beginnings. Rather, in Italy, the “cinema” arrives. Indeed, the “arrival of the cinema in […]” fill in the blank with your favorite Italian city, region or town, has become – over the course of the past fifty years – a veritable topos of early Italian film scholarship. The “arrival of the cinema in [...]” has been the dominant paradigm, from the late 1960s, until the present, in Italian historiography of the initial phases of film history.11 Italian film scholars, together with local historians, and university students, have produced a wealth of municipal and regional chronicles based on the researching of local and regional newspapers and other archival materials. This work has produced a large body of information that has been organized primarily into narratives presented from a local point of view. In 1992, Sergio Raffaelli commented on this trend, calling attention to “the minute exploration of every source of information particularly local (public and private archives, town chronicles from the press of the period)”.12 In this light, the Abbruzzese side-whiskers of the Lumières’ representative in Cecchetti’s poem serve as a metonymic marker of regional identity and provide a fitting emblem for the regional, indeed, often municipal, character of early Italian film historiography. A bibliography of Italian scholarship on the first decade of film history, edited by Aldo Bernardini,13 contains such titles as Il cinema arriva in Romagna [The Cinema Arrives in Romagna], E venne il cinema: Le origini del cinema in Sicilia [And the Cinema Came: Origins of the Cinema in Sicily], Quando i friulani andavano al cinema [When the Friulians Went to the Cinema], Tempo e passatempo: Pubblico e spettacolo a Treviso fra otto e novecento, [Time and Pass-Time: The Public and Spectacle at Treviso Between the Nineteenth and the Twentieth Century’, “Quando il cinema arrivò a Belluno” [When the Cinema Arrived in Belluno], “Le origini del cinematografo a Acireale” [The Origins of the Cinema in Acireale], “Le origini del cinema in Liguria: Metodi d’analisi, prospettive e disavventure di uno storico ‘locale’” [The Origins of the Cinema in Liguria: Methods of Analysis, Prospectives and Misadventures of a ‘Local’ Historian], La “fotografia animata” a Lucca: Memorie e cronache del cinema delle origini (1897–1915) [Animated Photographs in Lucca: Memories and Chronicles of the Cinema of the Origins, 1897–1915]. Many more titles of a similar nature could be cited. Far from being unique to film history, however, the historiographical paradigm emphasizing the city and the region rather than the nation would seem to express an underlying historical reality of Italian civilization. As John Agnew argues: “Unlike Germany in the nineteenth century, where identification with a Heimat [‘homeland’] allowed for widening identification with territorial state and nation … local identity in Italy has not led easily toward a wider sense of national identity”.14 Moreover, the use of dialect in Cecchetti’s poem testifies to the pluri-lingualism of Italian civilization, to the regional nature of Italian culture and identity, and to the

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fundamental importance of cities in Italian history. These factors play a key role in Italian culture. As Giuliana Bruno has argued Although it may be said that every nation is divided, every country is based, and thrives, on difference, this is particularly true of Italy. Italy has been a nation only since 1861, a rather short time, considering the long history of its city-states, provincial and regional governments, and diverse cultural identities … Within the Italian territory is a conglomerate of diverse regional and local forces that express differences in language as well as in history and culture. The national scene of Italy is better described as one of metonymic and self-referential micro-histories.15 According to Aldo Bernardini, a number of regional diversities are indeed to be found in film exhibition practices in Italy in the early decades. The Lumière brothers, for example, between 1896 and the first half of 1897 developed a promotional strategy based on their perceptions of Italian regional differences. While in the north, the personnel working for the Lumières presented the cinématographe primarily as a scientific and technological marvel, in the south and in central Italy they took greater care to present it as a popular spectacle, an “attraction among other attractions”.16 In Naples, the first screenings were held at the Salone Margherita, which had been open since 1890 in the lower reaches of the Galleria Umberto I and was an important venue for the variety theater. The following newspaper announcement illustrates the emphasis on novelty and attraction. This evening the re-opening of the Salone Margherita with a completely new program. The Lumière Cinématographe will be featured, the greatest novelty of the century. There will also be the Benedetti family, unparalleled flying acrobats expressly brought in from Berlin. The dwarf couple, the Vargas Bisaccia, recently returned from their triumphant artistic tour in Russia, Spain, and Germany. The eccentric French star Bloquelle, the German singer Baroness Milford, Herman the snake man, Belvalle the cabaret singer. In a word, a most attractive spectacle.17 In Northern Italy, by contrast, the Lumières’ invention was unveiled with a different clientele in mind, and screenings revealed a different strategy. In Milan, for example, the cinématographe was first shown to a society of amateur and professional photographers. The public screenings that followed were meant to associate the new spectacle with learned or refined culture and with “legitimate” forms of entertainment. Established theaters were booked for the screenings. “The first screenings in Italy” constitute a popular topic in Italian film scholarship. We might say that this historical subject forms a subset within the larger category of the “cinema arrives in […]”. In fact, the title of an article by Raffaele De Berti, links the two: “L’arrivo del cinema a Milano e le prime proiezioni” [The Arrival of the Cinema in Milan and the First Screenings].18 With regard to “firsts”, however, Gian Franco Gori reminds us that The cinema arrives in Italy in March of 1896, and, in the following months, it spreads through the entire peninsula. A clear success had been obtained the year before by Edison’s kinetoscope – a device for individual viewing, made up of a case furnished with an eye-piece through which the spectator, by introducing a coin, could see moving images – , but its diffusion did not go beyond the fairground tents and the business premises reserved for mechanized entertainment devices.19 Due in part to its ability to provide a collective rather than individual viewing experience, and to its technical superiority, the cinématographe experienced a greater

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success in Italy than the kinetoscope and the Vitascope associated with Thomas Edison. Nevertheless, the American inventor, scientist and entrepreneur played a fundamental role in the cultural reception of moving pictures in Italy. The research of Gian Franco Gori sheds light on the reception of Edison, giving further credence to Bernardini’s thesis cited earlier that animated photographs in northern Italy are associated with technology and science; but with an important distinction: Gori points to the role played by Edison. In the association of moving images with scientific prestige, he writes: This attitude is common to all of northern Italy. Indeed it is not rare to find in the cities of the North cinematic debuts preceded by lectures that explain the functions of the apparatus. This is the case of Turin, and also of Genoa. In Romagna, we do not have events of this type, but our sources nevertheless leave no doubts: the cinema is a great scientific discovery. And that it was considered such is attested to also by the presence of schools at the screenings and above all by the constant reference to Edison that is characteristic of the Romagna region … What counts is the image of Edison. That of a scientist of international fame who at this time – as a newspaper of Reggio recounts – was working on a machine that would restore sight to the blind. A symbol of progress and of science which if coupled with any type of device would guarantee much more than its quality. It was normal therefore that the cinema arrived in Romagna under his sign.20 Given his role in the advances of electric power and his fame as an inventor, Edison’s reception in Italy precedes his contributions to the cinema. With regard to movingpicture technology, Milanese photography magazines begin to feature articles on the Edison kinetograph as early as 1891.21 In sum, and to return to my central point, in light of the tendency of Italian film scholarship to focus on the local, and the widespread use of the trope of “arrival”, the coach depicted in Cecchetti’s 1897 sonnet on the Lumière cinématographe constitutes a fitting emblem for the broader patterns of Italian cultural reception as enshrined in municipal archives and as transmitted through academic research. Although it may seem an inauspicious beginning, this sonnet in romanesco published in a neighborhood gazette marks a local encounter with a foreign object. Film historians in Italy have used this encounter, this “moment of arrival”, as a point of departure for constructing a wide range of local micro-histories. The transition to purpose-built cinemas, beginning around 1905, provides another starting point for many Italian chronicles. In fact, Italian scholarship on the early period reveals a number of intersecting lines of inquiry. The first constitutes what we have called “the arrival of the cinema in […]” and finds expression in numerous articles and monographic studies. Closely related to this paradigm is the topic of the “evenings of the first screenings”. A third historiographical tendency anticipates by a number of decades Giuseppe Tornatore’s 1988 film, Cinema Paradiso: this historiographical strand focuses on municipal film theaters. Let me cite just a few of many examples: I cinematografi di Milano [The Cinemas of Milan], “Notizie sui cinematografi a Rovereto” [News About the Cinemas in Rovereto], Breve storia dei cinema torinesi [A Brief History of the Cinemas of Turin], I cinematografi di Parma: 100 anni di cinema a Parma 1880 – 1980 [The Cinemas of Parma: One Hundred Years of Cinema in Parma], and Vecchi cinema udinesi [Old Cinemas of Udine].22 The focus on local, micro- history as embedded in the chronicles of film theaters reflects the fragmentary history of Italy itself. As Bruno has pointed out, as noted earlier, “The national scene of Italy is better described as one of metonymic and self-referential micro-histories”.23 Other representative publications that demonstrate the regional focus of film historiography in

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Italy include such titles as Pionieri del cinematografo in Sardegna, 1897–1907 [Pioneers of the Cinema in Sardegna], and, one of the most striking examples of this tendency, Dizionario cinematografico di Milano [The Cinema Dictionary of Milan].24 Cultural reception, as Tsvian observes, “is a complex game of similarities and dissimilarities, of the presence and absence of familiar features”.25 Cecchetti’s sonnet provides an excellent example of reception as a complex game. The poet relies on familiar features in an attempt to describe the unfamiliar. In the process, he creates a string of adjectives involving national and regional identities. The two Italian identities involve a city, Rome, and a region, the Abruzzi. There is no specific reference to Italy as a “nation”. Italian film historiography of the initial decades as it has developed over the past half century has tended to follow a similar pattern. However, in the years between 1905 and 1909, with the transition to fixed film theaters, with the development of film production in Italy, with the beginnings of film journalism, with the exportation of Italian films to international markets, with a remarkable increase in the quality of Italian films, and with two national film exhibitions or “concorsi”, first in Turin in 1907 and then in Milan in 1909, Italian discourse on the cinema, considered synchronically in this particular historic moment, finally begins to be tinged with appeals to the “nation” and the “national”. In the decade prior to 1905, however, the international phenomena of early cinema, including Edison and the Lumières, are received in Italy, according to the dominant historiographical paradigms, through mediating local filters of long standing. Like Cecchetti’s poem in Roman dialect, these mediating filters, over-determined parameters of cultural reception, are associated with the city, the town, and the region. In reflecting on almost half a century of Italian scholarship on early cinema conducted from a local perspective, Gian Piero Brunetta, writing in 2003, observes: By now the bibliography on the first screenings covers practically the entire national territory. Almost all these works have their strong points in the considerable quantity of unpublished data … that they manage to bring to light and ... in making territories familiar that were forgotten until just a few years ago. Their weakness, at the same time, stems almost always from the lack of a ... historiographical attitude that might make it also possible to interrogate the materials, to bring them to life in wider contexts.26 In linking Cecchetti’s poem to a body of historiographical studies, I am suggesting there is a connection between the strength of an historical paradigm and the underlying currents of Italian identity, favoring the city and the region rather than the nation. In closing, however, we might also do well to remember that the practice of local film history, at the international level, has grown in importance since the 1980s, and continues to be vital. As Paolo Cannepele argues: “Cinematic micro-history has a role that is ever more indispensable because it makes available information that a perspective focused on the general cannot single out, and, therefore, it will be the basis on which other scholars will be able to bring to fruition realistic syntheses”.27

Notes 1.

Yuri Tsvian, Early Cinema in Russia and Its Cultural Reception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 2–3.

2.

Tom Gunning, “Foreword”, in Tsvian, Early Cinema in Russia and Its Cultural Reception, xvii.

3.

Aldo Bernardini, Cinema italiano degli origini. Gli ambulanti (Gemona: La Cineteca del Friuli, 2001), 153–154.

4.

[Porta ‘na mirza arta a la francese / Un cravuse bisonto e mar ridotto; / E o’ li scopettoni a l’abbruzzese / E tutto spiccicato a ‘no scimmiotto. / Va drento a ‘na carozza a l’uso inglese / Che

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EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL” s’assomija propio a un bussolotto, / Er cucchiere sta sopra, lui sta sotto / Pare ‘na canoffiena giapponese. / Tutto so gusti, ma, pe’ S. Mucchione, / Quello è un gusto davero da nun crede / D’annassa a chiude drento a un vetrione! / Ve dico è propio un tipo originale: / Ner modo come sta lì drento a sede/ Pare che se stii a spreme sur pitale]. Cited in Aldo Bernardini, Cinema muto italiano. I. Ambiente, spettacoli e spettatori (1896 1904) (Bari: Laterza, 1980), 275. All translations in this essay are my own. 5.

For a descriptive analysis of the Lumières’ organization and business practices, see Aldo Bernardini, “L’avventura italiana del Cinématographe”, in Riccardo Redi, ed., Verso il centenario: Lumière (Rome: Di Giacomo Editore, 1986), 79–85.

6.

Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 14.

7.

Tsvian, Early Cinema in Russia, 1.

8.

Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia, 6.

9.

Gian Piero Brunetta, Guida alla storia del cinema italiano, 1905–2003 (Turin: Einaudi, 2003), 11.

10.

Paolo Caneppele, “Metodologia della ricerca storiografica sul cinema in ambito locale”, in Gian Piero Brunetta (ed.), Storia del cinema mondiale. Vol.5. Teorie, strumenti, memorie (Turin: Einaudi, 2001), 294.

11.

An overview of the initial Lumière screenings in various Italian cities and regions, along with the subsequent traveling exhibition period, can be found in Aldo Bernardini, Cinema italiano degli origini. Gli ambulanti. For a synthesis of the early period in Italy in a comparative European context, see Aldo Bernardini, “L’epopea del cinema ambulante”, in Brunetta (ed.), Storia del cinema mondiale,. L’Europa. Vol.1. Miti, luoghi, divi (Turin: Einaudi, 1999), 109–146.

12.

Sergio Raffaelli, La lingua filmata. Didascalie e dialoghi nel cinema italiano (Firenze: Casa Editrice Le Lettere, 1992), 22.

13.

Bernardini, Cinema italiano degli origini. Gli ambulanti, 175–182.

14.

John Agnew, “The Myth of Backward Italy in Modern Europe”, in Beverly Allen and Mary Russo (eds), Revisioning Italy: National Identity and Global Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 34.

15.

Giuliana Bruno, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 11.

16.

Bernardini, Cinema muto italiano I, 52.

17.

“Questa sera riapertura del salone Margherita con programma completamente nuovo. Verrà esposto il Cinematografo Lumière, la più grande novità del secolo. Poi vi saranno: la famiglia Benedetti, acrobati icariani non plus ultra espressamente scritturati da Berlino. La coppia in miniatura Vargas Bisaccia reduce dal suo trionfale giro artistico in Russia, Spagna e Germania. L’étoile eccentrica francese Bloquelle, la baronessa Milford cantante tedesca, Hermand uomo serpente, la Belvalle canzonettista. In una parola, uno spettacolo attraentissimo.” Cited in Bernardini, Cinema muto italiano I, 31.

18.

Raffaelle De Berti, “L’arrivo del cinema a Milano e le prime proiezioni”, in De Berti (ed.), Un secolo di cinema a Milano (Milan: Il Castoro, 1996), 29–41.

19.

“Il cinematografo arriva in Italia, nel marzo del 1896 e, nei mesi succesivi, si diffonde in tutta la penisola. Un buon successo aveva ottentuto, l’anno prima, il kinetoscopio di Edison – un apparecchio per la visione individuale, costituito da una cassetta munita di oculare attraverso il quale lo spettatore, introducendo una moneta, poteva vedere immagini animate – , ma la sua diffusione non andò oltre i baracconi e i locali destinati agli ‘automatici.’" Gori, Gianfranco, Il cinema arriva in Romagna. Ambulanti, sale permanenti, spettacoli e spettatori tra otto e novecento (Rimini: Maggioli, 1987), 17.

20.

“Questo atteggiamento è comune a tutta l’Italia settentrionale. Addirittura non è raro trovare nelle città del nord debutti cinematografici preceduti da conferenze che spiegano il funzionamento del mezzo. E il caso di Torino, oppure di Genova. In Romagna, non abbiamo eventi di questo tipo, le nostre fonti tuttavia non lasciano adito a dubbi: il cinematografo è una grande scoperta scientifica. E che fosse considerato tale è attestato pure dalla presenza della scuola alle proiezioni e soprattutto dal riferimento costante a Edison che è una caratteristica della Romagna ... . Ciò che conta è l’immagine di Edison. Quella di uno scienziato di fama internazionale che all’epoca –

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17 • The cinema arrives in Italy: city, region and nation in early film discourse come ci ricorda un quotidiano di Reggio – stava lavorando ad una macchina che avrebbe ridato la vista ai ciechi. Un simbolo del progresso e della scienza che accostato a qualsiasi apparecchio ne garantiva molto più che la qualità. Era dunque normale che il cinematografo giungesse in Romagna nel suo segno.” Gori, Il cinema arriva in Romagna, 31–32. 21. 22.

De Berti, “L’arrivo del cinema a Milano”, 30. Bernardini, Cinema italiano degli origini. Gli ambulanti, 176–180.

23.

Bruno, Streetwalking, 11.

24. 25.

Bernardini, Cinema italiano degli origini, Gli ambulanti, 177–178. Tsvian, Early Cinema in Russia, 6.

26.

Brunetta, Guida alla storia del cinema italiano, 11–12.

27.

Caneppele, “Metodologia della ricerca storiografica”, 294.

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Wondrous pictures in Istanbul: from cosmopolitanism to nationalism •

Wondrous pictures in Istanbul: from cosmopolitanism to nationalism

Canan Balan his essay presents a panorama of the evolution of viewing conventions in Istanbul, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (from the 1890s to the 1930s). Within the Ottoman Empire, Westernist, Turkist and Islamist schools of thought were in keen competition when the cinématographe arrived in Istanbul, in 1896. Traces of the discursive space configured by these schools are quite visible in Turkish cultural history, specifically in the history of cinematic spectatorship. A set of binary oppositions – between East and West, between National and International, and, finally, between Islamist and Secular – dominated the framework for reactions to the cinématographe. Yet, examining this history of reception within the influences of such discourses, embroiled as they are with essentialism and reductionism, is no longer productive. Instead, we need to reconsider the theoretical assumptions of prevalent approaches to cinema history and move away from this essentialist perspective by historicizing the Istanbulite spectatorship. In other words, spectatorship in this context needs to be situated as part of a specific public space within a particular cultural period. In order to situate and analyse Istanbulite spectatorship, I will begin by discussing the cultural influences in writing Turkish Film History and continue by sketching precinematic viewing traditions in Istanbul. I will then explore the significance of cinema for the Istanbulites by analysing some journals, memoirs, questionnaires and trade reports.

T

Many Turkish film histories underscore the extent to which early cinema entrepreneurs and audiences were westernized. One of the first established Turkish film histories was written in the 1970s by Nijat Özön, whose approach later became highly influential. Özön, in his analysis of the cinema shows, cites the role of Pera, one of the main districts in the city, and describes it as “off-country” with its “purely” foreign and non-Muslim inhabitants.1 Another historian Agah Özgüç, disregards the previous attempts of foreigners and minorities and starts Turkish film history in 1914 with the launch of the first cinema theater, named Milli Sinema [“National Cinema”], owned solely by Turks.2 These views must be read against a background in which a non-Muslim subject of the empire could benefit from the legal advantages of being able to acquire the status of a European merchant in international trade. This is significant because it may explain why most cinematic entrepreneurs were non-Muslims.3 It is worth noting that over ninety per cent of the industrial establishments with more than ten workers in Istanbul were run by non-Muslims.4 Although this commercial situation favored enterprises launched and managed by non-Muslims, that does not mean

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18 • Wondrous pictures in Istanbul: from cosmopolitanism to nationalism

Fig. 1. View of the city of Istanbul.

that cultural and religious differences were the dominant determinant in defining spectatorship. Nezih Erdo™an’s recent essay on Turkish national cinema and the Turkish identity crisis also is crucial for coming to terms with the notion that cinema-going was imbricated with Westernism. According to Erdo™an, cinema was, from the outset, a western form of entertainment for the late Ottoman/Turkish audience. He also points out that the first film projectionist and filmmaker was a Polish Jew of Romanian nationality, and he cites the names of foreign companies such as Lumière, Pathé, Gaumont and Ciné Théâtrale d’Orient, which began to distribute French, American, German and Danish films. Erdo™an views spectatorship within the same framework elaborated above: The audience of these films consisted mostly of the non-Muslim minorities who lived in Pera, a district of Istanbul marked by a western life style. D. Henri screened films in a pub named “Sponeck”; Matalon, another Jew, in the “Luxemburg Buildings” and Camdon, probably a Lumière man, in “Varyete Theatre” – all places with Western names. In addition, publicity was printed in French, German, Armenian and Greek but not in Turkish. Pera was posed as an object of desire for the Muslim upper class and, partly, for the intelligentsia at a time of modernization fuelled by western-oriented policies, and cinema seems to have served as the latest desiring machine – the films that were shown presented glamorous scenes from various European centers, and film-going itself had the charm of being a western-style ritual.5 The concept of nation and the assumption of cultural distinctions between East and West initially might seem valuable for anyone writing the history of a relatively under-researched area like Istanbul at the beginning of the 20th century. Özön and Erdo™an’s work certainly has played a pioneering role in initiating various lines of inquiry with respect to early cinema in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey. Yet neither sought to examine the early period of cinema in any depth; rather, they focused on later periods or on Turkish film history in general. When one does mount such an

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examination, however, their framework proves inadequate for investigating the motivations for and the meanings of film-going in that particular period. For one thing, according to Palmira Brummet, the European nation-state model is not readily translatable to the Ottoman Empire, even at that late date. In her view, a French “citizen” or an English “citizen” (even if imaginary) was far easier to construct than an Ottoman “citizen” who resided anywhere from Macedonia to Arabia until World War I. National identity, for the subjects of the Ottomans, adds Brummet, “was never merely a question linking one’s destiny to an Ottomanist or nationalist program. Nowhere has it ever been demonstrated that any but a few of the sultan’s subjects ever identified themselves primarily as Osmanli (Ottoman).”6 Taking this into consideration, it seems anachronistic to analyse the emergence of cinema in Istanbul within a national context when the city was historically so cosmopolitan. To make this more clear, let me quote some figures from a census in 1885, eleven years before the first public screening took place in Istanbul. According to this census, 44 per cent of the city’s population was Muslim – their ethnicities were not specified – 18 per cent was Greek Orthodox, 17 per cent was Armenian, 5 per cent was Jewish, 2 per cent was Catholic, 0.5 per cent was Bulgarian, 0.12 per cent was Latin, 0.09 per cent was Protestant and almost 15 per cent were foreign subjects (or one kind or another).7 These figures are based on categories that are not only ambiguous but based on sometimes overlapping definitions, which could make it difficult to identify the cultural drives that led spectators to the cinema. For another thing, previous statements that the Istanbul audience was westernized also appear problematic because they rely on certain, somewhat misleading characterizations of the district in which the first screenings took place. Pera, which was described as “European”, was in fact a district populated by Muslim as well as Jewish, Armenian and Greek families along with foreign ambassadors and bankers. Moreover, Pera as an entertainment center did not only attract elites with high incomes or European businessmen, but also sailors, laborers, tramps, all sorts of dandies, tavern hoppers and prostitutes, as well as ordinary (“non-westernized”) Muslims or Jews whose main motivation was amusement.8 To provide an example, a historian of the period, Ahmet Lütfi Efendi, blamed the government and the inhabitants for being morally corrupt for permitting licenses for brothels and bars.9 Consequently, it seems preferable to examine cinema spectatorship in late Ottoman Istanbul by disregarding the Westernism discourse and, instead, contextualizing it within the visual culture of the pre-cinema period. Cemal Kafadar’s approach to Ottoman visual anthropology in the 16th and the 17th centuries is worth considering in this perspective. He notes the significance of the terms hayret (“wonder”) and hayran (“wondrous”) in the history of Ottoman visual culture prior to the cinématographe. Sharing the same origin, these words were commonly used by critics to describe art objects, from buildings to miniatures. Wonder is traditionally depicted in miniatures through the illustrated image of a voyeur whose “finger of wonder” (i.e. thumb finger) was on his/her mouth. The term hayran here inevitably reveals similarities to Tom Gunning’s “cinema of attractions”.10 Yet, as indicated by Kafadar, the Ottoman corpus of popular imagery (i.e. vampires or devils) was different, sometimes strikingly different, from its Western counterpart, at least until the rupture created by the boom of imported images in the era of filmic and photographic reproduction.11 An illustrative case of the experience of cinematic wonder is recorded in a diary entry from another major city in the empire. A young woman, whose family had just moved from a provincial Macedonian town to cosmopolitan Thessaloniki circa 1909, recalled her astonishment in front of moving images, which led her to hide herself under a chair

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18 • Wondrous pictures in Istanbul: from cosmopolitanism to nationalism

in the theater.12 The word atraksiyon (“attraction”) also was used by another Turkish cinema historian, Giovanni Scognomillo, in his description of the initial screenings in Istanbul. In the winter of 1896, the beer hall Salle Sponeck booked the cinématographe as what he called an “attraction”.13 Another young female spectator in 1896, apparently Sultan Abdulhamid’s daughter, used neither atraksiyon nor hayret in her memoirs, yet to her cinema as a novelty provoked curiosity.14 Most of the memoirs about the initial screenings in Istanbul began to be published in the 1940s, in the period of the secular Turkish Republic. One, written by Sermet Alus, a popular novelist, declared that even though the promotion of “living pictures” was trendy at the time, they nonetheless irritated some older people who were under the influence of (their understanding of) Islam. This was because they viewed animating (literally “life-giving”) as adverse to God’s wishes; consequently, in their eyes, the spectators of these pictures were sinners. Alus also relates that he had witnessed an old woman who prayed loudly just after the film had begun and ran away from the hall.15 Another author suggests that Sultan Abdulhamid II, who is well known for his anxieties regarding all types of uncontrolled social and political gatherings and for his repressive regime and censorship, banned the cinématographe for Turkish spectators because it was a “devilish invention”.16 These memoirs, written long after the introduction of cinema and in a very different political environment, along with the examples of Turkish film history cited earlier, seem to imply indifference, if not objection, by the “non-Westernized public”. This appears to be far from the case, however, for there was a complex relationship between Ottoman society and Western technology in general, and the cinema in particular. Brummet critiques the depiction of Ottoman society as hostile to Western “progress”. This discourse, she argues, is often based on assumptions about Islam, particularly the assumption that Islamic societies naturally reject all forms of innovation: “Characterizations of Ottoman aloofness to Western technology are a grave form of reductionism. The assessment of Ottoman interest in western technology must be based more on evaluation of the empire’s economic and political situation and less on cultural assumptions.”17 If discussions of political ideas were relatively limited in the press during the late 19th century, such restrictions on current political affairs and anything related to liberalism, nationalism and constitutionalism tended to incite enthusiasm for news regarding scientific novelties and rapid transformations in society.18 This led newspapers and periodicals of the time to concentrate on encyclopedic articles about science, geography, history, technology and literature. Reading some of the articles published at that time, one can observe a broad curiosity for philosophical and scientific novelties. Indeed, in 1897, when censorship severely affected political content, printed articles eagerly introduced concepts of aesthetics, metaphysics, theodicy, philosophie de droit, and sociology.19 In 1896, the news related to technology appeared frequently under headings such as “The Great American Telescope”, “The Talmud, Its Spirit and History”, “The Bicycle Tours of the Globe”, and “The Balloon Expedition to the North Pole”.20 Before analysing the purchasing power of the population and the expense of cinemagoing in Istanbul, I have to mention some of the pre-cinematic shows and how they were received. Meddah [“story-teller”] performances constituted a popular form of entertainment with a developed mode of theatrical story-telling. As described by Metin And, the narrator “would rely mainly upon two props, a cudgel and a handkerchief wrapped around his neck, to produce the appropriate audible and visible effects. His description of places helped the audience to picture the scene.”21 The pre-cinema public enjoyed not only the narratives of meddahs but also those of shadow plays. Droor

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Fig. 2. A figure from Karagöz repertoire.

Ze’evi explains the Turkish shadow play as follows: “Just as in the medieval carnival, these shows constituted a social activity in which high and low classes took part on an equal basis. Ulema (that is, religious and legal scholars) as well as the secular intelligentsia and peasants, effendis (sirs) and Gypsies watched it together. Some plays originated in the royal palace and found their way to the street.”22 Projected onto a flat screen, the shadow plays were most commonly known as Karagöz. Under the influence of Sufi thought, with its references to the real world as an imitation of the world of ideas, Karagöz were reminiscent of Plato’s cave (Fig. 2). The prologue and the representational style of the plays demanded an active mode of viewing as captured by its former and modern names, Hayal and Golge Oyunu [“Shadow Play”], as well as by the main character’s name, Karagöz [literally, “Black Eyed”]. In one of the plays staged at the turn of the 20th century, Karagöz tells his friend of his half-dreamt experience at a cinema hall: “When I tell you this, you will go mad”, he says. “In this building I arrived at, I began to walk, swaying to and fro. No matter how far I went, the same things happened. Someone called out: “Hey, bearded guy, come here”. I looked around. All around me there were these red and blue, showily dressed “matmezeller” [mademoiselles], eighty or ninety years old, tugging and trying to seduce me”. After getting lost in the giant whorehouse, finally he finds his way out and immediately tumbles upon an almost identical institution: “Suddenly, I’ll be damned, all these madamlar, müsyüler, matmazeller, efendiler [sirs], beyler [gentlemen], agalar [patrons], dandies, bums and hooligans. The whole nation is there … all buying tickets. I am not sure, is it called a “sinematograf” or a “minagotoraf”?”23 So Karagöz, who often represents the simple people, was acquainted with the cinématographe as a novel yet popular form of entertainment that could be added to his rich repertoire of social satire, without any hint of religious opprobrium.

The economic state and cinema of World War I An economic historian of the late Ottoman era, Zafer Toprak, puts the monthly budget of a mid-level government official, in July 1914, at a minimum of 235 piastres.24 The

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Table 1. Sources: General Report on the Trade and Economic Conditions of Turkey; British Consular Report; Annuaire Oriental.

chart below demonstrates the entrance prices for some theaters in the previous year in relation to certain essential goods [see Table 1].25 According to Mustafa Gökmen, there were approximately 25 movie theaters in Istanbul in 1914.26 On the data available in the French commercial and industrial consular report, the average ticket prices were 3 piastres for 2nd class seating and 7 piastres for reserved class seating. Therefore, the 2nd class movie tickets were equal to one kilogram of sugar and the first class prices were equal to one kilogram of meat. It also is revealing to compare movie ticket prices to that of chocolate: one kilogram of chocolate was almost twelve times more expensive than a first-class movie ticket. During World War I, the popularity of the cinema among the public in Istanbul did not decline. Based on the formal and trade-minded dispatches of the British Embassy in Istanbul, “cinematographs are perhaps the most popular form of amusement in the larger towns of Turkey, as theatres are almost completely lacking. British films are quite unknown, but at the present moment would undoubtedly be very well received. All war pictures draw a large audience.”27 The consulate also sadly reports that most films shown in the city were German propaganda films (Fig. 3). Indeed, the records of the local trade press in 1914 support this statement. As the closest ally of the Ottomans, the German army had a dominant presence in the city. Indeed, some German commanders attended local theater plays, which narrated stories of historical and military successes (e.g. one on the foundation of the Ottoman Empire), in order to raise public

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Fig. 3. German propaganda films.

solidarity during wartime. One of the German propaganda films was The 300 Years of the History of German Army, repeatedly screened – “upon public request” – at Ferah Tiyatrosu in 1915.28 The film showed the “heroes of Bismarck’s army during the war in Paris in 1870–1871, together with the armies of Bavaria and Saxony in the FrenchGerman war of 1915”.29 A second film on the same program depicted the yacht travels of Emperor Wilhelm and the maneuvers of the German Navy in 1914, while the third,

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fourth and fifth films were composed of more scenes from the French-German War of 1915. It is striking to note that the journal Ferah also printed some patriotic and heroic words by Prince Bismarck, the Great Diplomat, which are rendered in Turkish translation as: “We Germans are scared only of Allah in the battlefield”. The German original of the same boast, given under a picture of Bismarck, can be translated as “We Germans are scared of God and nothing else [Wir Deutschen fürchten Gott, sonst nichts auf der Welt]”.30 The word “battlefield” is added perhaps as a sign of the public belief that the Ottoman Army will be successful with the Germans, but more likely the Turkish translation is a concealed expression of the insecurity created by widespread hesitations regarding the necessity of the war. Nevertheless, both the trade press and the films screened in the period seem to demonstrate a general interest in getting to know the “friends of the empire”. One of the consequences of the end of the war was the power exercised by the occupation armies (of the British and French empires) in the distribution of Turkish films. One of the earliest Turkish films, Mürebbiye [The Governess, Ahmet Fehim, 1919], was censored by the occupied forces in Anatolia after screenings in Istanbul because of its “misrepresentation of French women”.31 The film was based on a novel depicting a “morally corrupt” French governess who tempts the members of a Turkish family. The main reason for this censorship must have been that the film demonstrated a passive resistance towards the occupation forces. This episode of defiance and censorship constitutes a telling example of the momentous transformation that characterizes the history of cinema in Istanbul during these early decades: national concerns, not so visible in the early years of the industry, came to dominate the scene during and especially after the war. Just before the end of the Ottoman Empire, in 1922, the author of a cinema journal, Vedat Örf, reproached the filmmaking industry for the dearth of national production following the “first national film”, Binnaz (Ahmet Fehim, 1919). According to Örf, there was great audience interest in Binnaz and strong public demand for new productions in the same vein.32 Furthermore, movie theaters underwent a considerable boom in numbers. In May 1921, there were approximately 32 permanent and 12 “temporary” motion picture theaters in Istanbul, and they multiplied rapidly in later years [see Table 2].33 These 26 movie theaters had a total seating capacity of almost 11,500, in a city with a population of approximately one million. A survey conducted by the British occupation administration in 1922 declares that “undoubtedly an increasing number of people frequent cinema shows. The films shown are French, Italian, German and American. There is no censorship of films, except political and military; some of the films are very suggestive and would not be allowed in America or England.”34 The statistics shown above draw attention to the large audience attendance after the war. It appears that cinema-going was also popular among women, notwithstanding the fact that in film magazines, novels, memoirs and a revealing questionnaire that will be discussed later, a moralistic attitude towards cinema-going can also be observed. One magazine, Le Film, published in 1927, had a column that tried to teach the readers/audience film-viewing manners. According to the author, the only irritating part of watching a film in a particular movie theater was the young couples who came to the show for only one purpose. Instead of watching films, these couples were kissing and “loving” each other.35 Peyami Safa’s novel, Fatih-Harbiye [the names of two Istanbul neighborhoods, one known as traditional-conservative, the other as modern-westernized), depicts the transformation in lifestyles in Istanbul of the late 1920s (Fig. 4). The heroine, Neriman, is a young admirer of a more liberated life. In one of her complaints against the

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Table 2. Source: Constantinople To-Day or the Pathfinder Survey of Constantinople.

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18 • Wondrous pictures in Istanbul: from cosmopolitanism to nationalism

Fig. 4. Istanbul party scene.

restrictions in her life, she explodes: “I cannot even go to the cinema”, because cinema-going gives her the opportunity to see the outside world.36 Another novel by the same author, Sinema Delisi Kiz [“The Girl Who Is Crazy for Cinema”], narrates the story of an even more enthusiastic woman whose only motivation in life is cinema-going and who falls in love with a man merely because he resembles a movie star. The dominant role of cinema in both protagonists’ lives leads to serious quarrels with their families. Such characters bring to mind Miriam Hansen’s description of early female movie-goers as “those who neglect their duties at home”.37 In the Turkish case, the same concern was obviously shared, but it seems to be compounded by a slightly different moralistic attitude towards women; cinema represented the lives of fallen or corrupted women with whom these young girls could identify only at their own hazard. Hansen also signals our attention to the film industry’s new attraction for women, namely stars. Similar to the case in Sinema Delisi Kiz, Sermet Muhtar Alus in his memoirs recalls the close relationship of young women to stars but specifically to female stars. Without hesitating to hide his own temptation, Alus sarcastically describes Pina Menichelli and her imitators amongst young Turkish women. He recalls women trying to impress men by copying Menichelli’s gestures, her décolleté, her flirtatious glance and her half-open lips.38 The passion of these female spectators can surely be considered a “threat to patriarchal divisions of public and private”.39 Children apparently also were recognized as potential victims of American films; hence, they needed to be controlled. According to a law passed in 1930, children under the age of 12 were not allowed to go to the cinema unless they were accompanied by their parents and the film was for children. In 1932, an ambitious questionnaire was conducted about the influence of cinema among the youth. The questions were answered by a group of students aged between 8 and 15, who were asked to write down the genres they prefer to watch: 1.

Comedies: These films are fun and make them laugh

2.

Newsreels: These films are informing and thought provoking

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3. Serious films: Because they are serious students! It is noteworthy that they strongly preferred Turkish films to foreign productions. Here is the list of the films the students (supposedly) said they disliked: 1. Mystery films: “Because they are scary”. 2. Sentimental films: Male students found them unnecessary! 3. Hollywood: Because they are meaningless. 4. “Films about marriage”: Male students found them boring! 5. Demoralising films: – 6. Adaptations: – 7. Foreign films: – – 8. Melodramas: “They are about love and love is no good for students” Here are some film titles they said they disliked: Iron Mask, La Derniere Campaigne, Titanic. They listed their reasons to go to the movies as follows: • To see the big film stars • For fun • For enthusiasm • Cinema is good for them • To see the love scenes • To develop their social life • To listen to some good music • Cinema is a science. • To contemplate and to see, “which are essential things to do for students”. The author who prepared the questions and wrote the book based on them aimed to draw attention to the dangers of cinema for schoolchildren. He proposed that film censorship had to become much stricter as 95 per cent of the movies were about love, theft, alcohol, religion and luxurious (decadent?) life. Instead of watching such films, which could have a bad influence, the students should be encouraged to see films that dealt with science and progress.40

Conclusion Even on the basis of this preliminary investigation of official trade records, census records, consular reports, magazines, and relevant books written in that period, cinema-going in Istanbul appears to be a much more complex phenomenon than can be illuminated by conventional cultural classifications. Although the Ottoman Empire was not formally colonized, Istanbul was part of the colonial world ruled by the great powers in the late 19th century. The initiators of the cinématographe were foreigners or non-Muslim subjects of the Empire, which could be understood as a consequence of the city’s cosmopolitan structure along with its economic and commercial circumstances controlled by the great powers. The “comprador” bourgeois, to a large degree, shaped its cosmopolitanism, and the cinématographe arrived in an environment of pre-national cosmopolitanism, which was overtaken by patriotic concerns by the end of World War I. The boom of movie theaters coincided with the beginning of that war. Yet, a full-fledged Turkish national cinema could not be said to begin until the first local products (narrative films) appeared after the war, when the city was still occupied by the great powers. While national forces emerged to

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expel the occupiers and establish the Turkish Republic between 1919–1923, women in public life became increasingly linked to the cinema’s function of encouraging more liberated lifestyles. This should not necessarily indicate that cinema liberated women, but it was clear that their curiosity about the cinema was seen as a threat to the traditional family and its patriarchal norms. Children in movie theaters were also understood as subjects of control by the new nation state. If that 1932 questionnaire is to be believed, children’s perception of cinema was shaped, to some degree, by this moralistic attitude. In this overall context, cinema became, at least in part, a positivistic and progressive tool in a public arena contested by various agents responding to the political and social exigencies of nation-building. If students of Turkish film history problematize the paradigm of East and West imposed on the emergence of cinema in the Ottoman empire, and instead attempt to analyse the Istanbul audiences in terms of their own spectatorship culture and from the perspective of the international system of distribution, a more historicized and textured view of the early years of the cinema experience is likely to emerge. Even though the initial exhibitors were non-Muslims or foreigners, the spectators still reflected the multi-ethnic, multi-religious characteristics of the empire. They shared the same spectatorship culture that prepared them for the cinématographe. Spectators, who were accustomed to (or perhaps trained by) the sense of “wonder” cultivated in their pre-cinematic culture of visual aesthetics and entertainment, went to the cinema to enjoy another “wondrous” pleasure. Yet within several decades, discontinuities emerged in the form of the increasingly visible and contested role of women, on the one hand, and the rupture created by the irreversible tide of nationalization, on the other.

Notes 1.

Nijat Özön, Karagözden Sinemaya Türk Sinemasi ve Sorunlari (Ankara: Kitle Yayinlari, 1995), 17.

2.

Agah Özgüç, Kronolojik Türk Sinema Tarihi 1914–1988 (Ankara: Kültür ve Turizm Bakanli™i Güzel Sanatlar Genel Müdürlü™ü Sinema Dairesi BaÕkanli™i Yayini, 1988), 5.

3.

The notion of “cinema as another foreign import” seems to be relevant also for the historiography of cinema in Latin America. See Ana M. Lopez, “Early Cinema and Modernity in Latin America”, Cinema Journal 40. 1 (2000): 48–78.

4.

Erik J. Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History (London and New York: I. B. Taurus, 2004), 85.

5.

Nezih Erdoðan, “Narratives of Resistance: National Identity and Ambivalence in the Turkish Melodrama between 1965 and 1975”, Screen 39. 3 (1998): 260.

6.

Palmira Brummet, Image and Imperialism in the Ottoman Revolutionary Press, 1908–1911 (New York: SUNY.Press, 2000), 11.

7.

Zeynep Çelik, Degisen Istanbul, 19. Yuzyilda Osmanli Baskenti (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfi Yurt Yayinlari, 1998), 34.

8.

The novels and the memoirs written by Evangelinos Misailidis and Ahmet Rasim and printed in the newspaper Ikdam, along with the records of the different courts in Istanbul and Galata, are among the useful sources in understanding this appeal.

9.

Cited in Ilber Ortayli, “Istanbul in the Industrial Age”, in Afife Batur (ed.), Istanbul World City (Istanbul: Turkiye Ekonomik ve Toplumsal Tarih Vakfi, 1996), 55.

10.

Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction, Early Film, Its Spectators and the Avant-Garde”, Wide Angle 8. 3–4 (1986): 63–70. See also Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator”, in Linda Williams (ed.), Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 114–133. For the relationship between optical illusions and wonder, astonishment, and curiosity see also Tom Gunning, “Phantasmagoria and the Manufacturing of Illusions and Wonder: Towards a Cultural Optics of the Cinematic Apparatus”, in André Gaudreault, Catherine Russell, and Pierre Veronneau (eds), A New Technology for the 20th Century (Lausanne: Payot, 2004), 31–44.

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EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL” 11.

Cemal Kafadar “Hayretten Hayrete: Osmanli Seyir Kültürünün Evrimi Üzerine DüÕünceler”, paper presented at the Turkish Film Studies Conference V, BahçeÕehir University, Istanbul, 24–26 June 2004.

12.

Gündüz Vassaf, Annem Belkis (Istanbul: Iletisim, 2000), 63.

13.

Giovanni Scognomillo, Cadde-i Kebir’de Sinema (Istanbul: Metis Yayinlari, 1991), 12.

14.

AyÕe Osmano™lu, Babam Sultan Abdulhamid (Istanbul: Güven Yayinevi, 1960), 68.

15.

Sermet Muhtar Alus, Eski Günlerde (Istanbul: ¤letiÕim, 2001), 61.

16.

See Rakým Ziyao™lu, Yüzyil YaklaÕýrken Beyo™lu (Istanbul: Belediye BaÕkanli—i Yayýnlarý, 1989), 21.

17.

Brummet, 314–315.

18.

Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey (London: Hurst & Company, 1998), 196–197.

19.

See “Kamus El Ilim Yahud Muhid El Maarif”, Ikdam (26 November 1897).

20.

See La Moniteur Oriental, Istanbul (June-July 1896).

21.

Metin And, History of Theatre and Popular Entertainment in Turkey (Ankara: Forum Yayinlari, 1963–1964), 28.

22.

See Dror Ze’evi, Producing Desire: Changing Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle East, 1500–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press 2006).

23.

Cited in Ze’evi, 134.

24.

Alan Duben and Cem Behar, Istanbul Households, Marriage, Family and Fertility, 1880–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 43.

25.

See Great Britain, Foreign Office, Turkey: Report for the Year 1913 in the Trade Record of the Consular District of Constantinople (London: H.M.S.O, 1914) and Annuaire Oriental du Commerce de L’industrie, de L’administration et de la Magisture de L’Orient (Istanbul: The Annuaire Oriental Ltd, 1914).

26.

Mustafa Gökmen, Eski Istanbul Sinemalari (Istanbul: Istanbul Kitapligi Yayinlari, 1991), 21–24).

27.

Great Britain, Foreign Office, Turkey.

28.

Ferah 57 (1914): 2.

29.

Ibid.

30.

Ibid.

31.

Rekin Teksoy, “Türkiye’de Sinema” in Teksoy (ed.), Arkýn Sinema Ansiklopedisi (Istanbul: Arkin Kitabevi, 1975), 455.

32.

Vedat Örf, “Milli Filmler”, Sinema Postasi 2 (1922): 2.

33.

Clarence Richard Johnson, Constantinople To-Day or the Pathfinder Survey of Constantinople (New York: Macmillan Company, 1922), 264–265.

34.

Ibid.

35.

Le Grincheux, “Propos du Grincheux”, Le Film 8 (16 November 1927): 6.

36.

See Peyami Safa, Fatih-Harbiye (Istanbul: Ötüken NeÕriyat, 1995) and Server Bedii (a pen-name of Peyami Safa), Sinema Delisi Kiz (Istanbul: Semih Lutfu Kitabevi, 1932).

37.

Miriam Hansen “Early Silent Cinema: Whose Public Sphere?”, New German Critique 29 (SpringSummer 1983), 176.

38.

Sermet Muhtar Alus, Eski Günlerde (Istanbul: ¤letiÕim, 2001), 64.

39.

See Hansen, 147–184.

40.

Hilmi Malik, Türkiye’de Sinema ve Tesirleri (Ankara: Hakimiyeti Milliye Matbaasi, 1933), 32–40.

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19

The emergence of nationally specific film cultures in Europe, 1911–1914 •

The emergence of nationally specific film cultures in Europe, 191 1–191 4

Joseph Garncarz n this essay, I wish to introduce the notion of “national film culture”, trace the process of the emergence of nationally specific film cultures in Europe, and offer an explanation for that emergence, which I hope will be fruitful for the USA and other countries as well.1 Germany will be my main case study because it has been the focus of my empirical research on early cinema. Through the notion of national film culture I wish to avoid the usual ideological and essentializing connotations implicated in the term “nation”. As a concept, national film culture aims to define popular culture according to neither a canon of films nor simply the films produced in a country but rather the films most favorably received. As an empirical measure of film demand, this theoretical reframing relies on a crucial source of evidence: the list of the films most popular with German audiences between 1911 and 1914. It was the scale, context, and structure of a new film exhibition venue, the permanent cinema, that allowed German audiences to select films based on nationally specific traditions, which in turn further stimulated the production of such films.

I

A theory of national cultures I would like to use the term “national” in a descriptive rather than a normative or essentialist manner. By national I simply refer to the geographical boundaries of a state, not to the general ideas and values that are associated with certain language communities or their cultural productions. In this sense, national culture is nothing more than the culture of a specific country. When different people live together in a state, their cultural commonalities usually increase, due to their manifold interdependencies.2 This does not necessarily mean that such a national culture is different from all others in absolute ways – i.e. that it is necessarily and nationally specific. Cultural institutions and productions – e.g. literature, theater, film – may, but need not, differentiate themselves from those of other countries. However, the longer societies are separated by state boundaries, the higher the probability that cultures acquire distinct features. Further enhancing this cultural process of internal homogenization and external differentiation is the presence of a shared language by the country’s majority. Formulated in this way, the notion of national culture is linked with processes of state formation. In Europe, nation-states developed in different periods. France, Spain and Great Britain were full-fledged nations by the 18th century, whereas Germany and Italy became nation-states only in the second half of the 19th century. Most European states included more than one language community. However, the presence of a

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dominant linguistic majority – e.g. in Great Britain the English and not the Welsh or Scots, in France the French and not the Corsicans, in Spain the Spaniards and not the Basques, in Germany the Germans and not the Poles – meant the adoption of that community’s language as the national language. Since commercial entertainment institutions are interested in maximizing their audience for economic reasons, the popular culture of any one country is dominated by the preferences of its largest population group. National cultures are subject to dynamic processes. Internal factors, such as social differentiation or changes in media institutions, or changing international relations, such as increasing dependency, can lead to radical cultural change. Not only can the driving forces of such change be manifold, its speed can also greatly vary. The assumption that national cultures are static can be understood as a feature of a nation’s ideology to represent itself as an unchanging, essentialist, integrated, and highly valued social system, which always already pre-existed the formation of its state. On the basis of these reflections I would like to propose a revision of the concept of “national cinema”. As it is commonly understood, the concept identifies the films produced by a country, whether with reference to the entire output or a specific portion of it.3 In the first case, “national cinema” implies that a certain country’s film supply is dominated by domestic films.4 In the second case, it refers to the selection of a country’s output that constructs a homogeneous and imaginary national identity.5 By contrast, I would like to define national culture as the popular culture of the majority of a country’s population, independent of the national origin of the most popular products and without normatively defining the function of these products. Thus, my concept of a “national film culture” is based on film demand, not film supply. Consequently, one can speak of national profiles of film preferences. This does not necessarily mean that audiences select only films produced by their own country, although these will likely predominate because domestic producers are best in touch with their audience’s preferences. However, this will succeed only if the domestic market is large enough to be economically viable, so that a regular production large enough to satisfy demand can be guaranteed. If this is not the case, or when film production is not substantial enough – e.g. when foreign competition is too strong or when political measures restrict the market – audiences can turn to films from countries culturally most compatible. The characteristics of a national film culture can be ascertained by interpreting the patterns of films’ popularity, because they reveal what an audience of a certain country favors. Comparing such success patterns with those of other countries can show whether they are nationally specific. If the national profiles of film preferences differ significantly from one country to another, the success patterns can share some films but will mostly comprise different films. The popularity of films cannot be measured by film supply, because audiences select from the supply according to their preferences.6 The best sources for audience demand, of course, are revenue data or surveys, but when these are not available, exhibition data is preferable to production data because exhibitors are in more direct contact with audiences than are producers. For early cinema, one should examine entire programs, not only individual films, because that was the standard pattern of film exhibition. As my research on Germany indicates, the owners of traveling cinemas, which were crucial exhibition venues before permanent cinemas appeared, put together their programs from films they acquired individually and selectively. Furthermore, in contrast to prior claims, permanent cinema owners put together programs themselves rather than rent them ready-made. Thus, the German film programs of the early 1910s can be taken as

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a fairly good measure of demand, albeit an indirect one, because exhibitors were likely to be sensitive to audience preferences. In a representative sample of film programs of a certain country, therefore, a film’s popularity is reflected by the number of its screenings. Around 1910–1911, with the introduction of the multiple-reel film (thirty minutes or more in length), the popularity of single films becomes more measurable, because they were specially advertised and a major draw for audiences.

“Cinema of attractions” When we follow contemporary terminology and define “cinema” as an exhibition venue specialized in showing films, then cinemas appeared in Europe with the introduction of moving pictures in 1896 – but as traveling cinemas. Traveling cinemas were generally solid buildings, which could be disassembled for transport but could nevertheless accommodate up to 700 patrons.7 Even though in Europe films were also shown in variety theaters, traveling cinemas were the most important form of exhibition before permanent cinemas – a significant cultural contrast to the USA. As a regular fairground attraction, traveling cinemas reached more film patrons than variety theaters. The fairground audience saw a 15- to 20-minute film program of short films that focused more on spectacle than narrative.8 This mode of representation – i.e. showing spectacular attractions – was based in the culture of fairs, which catered to an audience of “sensation seekers”.9 Thus, early European cinema can only be understood in relation to the turn-of-the-century context of fairs. In Europe, the traveling cinema became nothing less than a new media institution, but it was based on a well-established one. It appeared in many different countries simultaneously, due to pre-existing entertainment circuits. Europe had a rich culture of festivals, markets and fairs, as well as a strong tradition of showmanship. This cultural infrastructure was based in practices of the Catholic Church – e.g. celebrations of religious holidays and annual church consecration festivals. Catholic regions had more festivals than Protestant regions. During the last two decades of the 19th century in Germany, the traveling show trade had developed into a professional institution with its own organizations, trade press, equipment suppliers, etc. One of its popular attractions was the traveling variety theater, from which the traveling cinema derived through a simple transformation: the installment of a screen and projector into the existing architectural structure. Furthermore, the well-developed European railway network allowed easy transportation of the necessary equipment, which in turn allowed the ever more popular mobile cinemas to grow in size and elaboration, so that often an entire train was required. The architectural differences between traveling cinemas originating in different countries were small, except for the name and some of the artwork, so that showmen would buy from both domestic and foreign suppliers. Since all the basic characteristics of the institution were the same in different European countries, traveling showmen were able to cross national borders with their presentations as well. German traveling cinemas appeared in Austria-Hungary, Switzerland, Italy, France, Luxemburg, Belgium and the Netherlands, just as foreign companies reciprocally visited Germany. For example, between 1897 and 1908, the Bläser family from Worms traveled extensively, not only in Germany, but also in Luxemburg, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. Conversely, between 1899 and 1909, the Praiss family from Geneva operated in Switzerland, Austria-Hungary, and Germany. Thus, the “cinema of attractions” was not nationally specific, but rather a transnational phenomenon. The films circulated even more freely than the exhibitors did: before 1908, 92.2 per cent of films shown in Germany were European productions, but only

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20.9 per cent of them were German, while 37.1 per cent. were French.10 The films produced for the traveling cinema market were rarely nationally specific; instead, they usually reflected common traditions of the countries in which they were shown – e.g. fictional genres such as magic films and physical comedies, as well as nonfictional genres such as travelogues. The majority of the films produced dealt with themes of common European interest, such as Christian narratives, views of European cities and landscapes, and well-known fairy tales. Many of these European subjects were also of interest in the USA, but did not necessarily have a global appeal – e.g. the films of the Passion of Christ would not have achieved the same popularity in non-Christian countries.11 Since fairground culture created and catered to sensations, which were transnational in character, the film programs showed little national variation. The extant film programs from different European countries and regions reveal more commonality than difference. Just as French, German, and Italian youths could equally enjoy the newest thrill rides, they could go to the traveling cinemas and take pleasure in the same films. Fairs were able to satisfy culturally diverse audiences with the same cultural products because they offered a type of entertainment that did not involve illusionistic narrative experiences, but rather the testing of basic physical and psychic boundaries. Thus, the new film medium furthered the integration of cultures on both a national and European level. Views of European cities and landscapes, particularly those of touristic appeal, such as Venice and the Alps, became part of the common experience and collective memory of all Europeans – much more than previously had been the case with magic lanterns, because films reached a much greater number of people. At the same time, since traveling cinema companies owned stocks of several hundreds of films, including actualités of the localities they visited, they could adapt their programs to the special interests of local audiences.

Transformation of the film market The extremely large number of films produced for the European traveling cinema market was one of the prerequisites for the establishment of permanent cinemas because regular patrons necessitated a more frequent change of program. In Germany, the crucial incentive was a dramatic development in the retail sector. Many small shops were put out of business by the new large department stores.12 Facing economic failure, the small shop-owners looked for a new line of business, and many found it viable to turn their premises into permanent cinemas, which became known as Ladenkinos (“store-front cinemas”). This new exhibition venue had such an enormous success that openings boomed between 1905 and 1907. The new entrepreneurs, who had no prior experience in show business, turned to the traveling cinema as a model. Traveling cinema owners were not motivated to open store-front cinemas, by contrast, because their business was going well. Within a very few years in Germany, permanent cinemas spread from metropolitan centers to medium-size cities and finally to small towns. They represented a new entertainment institution, affordable for everyone, regularly accessible and, by 1911, virtually ubiquitous. One consequence of this phenomenon was that the audiences of the traveling cinemas, which had mainly supplied small and medium-size towns, migrated to permanent cinemas. In larger cities, the audience that had previously attended variety theaters and Geschäftstheater (“commercial theaters”), both of which declined in popularity, also migrated to permanent cinemas. Thus, film audiences grew quickly and massively, turning moving pictures into a mass medium. In the beginning, German permanent cinemas showed the same programs as the

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traveling cinemas. By 1908, however, they had developed a distinct profile, and their main feature was the one-reel drama. Unlike the traveling cinemas, whose 15- to 20-minute offerings complemented all the other attractions available at festivals, markets and fairs, permanent cinemas had to provide entertainment for an entire afternoon or evening. Their programs became longer, up to 60 minutes or more, and they more readily welcomed multiple-reel films. Among these, the most popular was the dramatic feature, whose length and complex narrative was foreign to the fairground traditions of traveling cinemas. The “dramatization” of films gave the medium entirely different characteristics: audiences now moved in fictional, narrative worlds, similar to what they had been experiencing in legitimate theaters. The fairgrounds presented a “cinema of attractions”, whereas the dramas of the permanent cinemas offered emotional involvement in illusionistic worlds. Theatrical precedent proved to be influential. Germany had a long tradition of stage dramas and comedies. At the beginning of the 20th century, most German cities and larger towns had commercial theaters that presented popular plays. Their playbills were dominated by German-language authors – e.g. Adolph L’Arronge, Rudolf Kneisel, Gustav von Moser, Franz von Schönthan, and Hermann Sudermann.13 In choosing their evening entertainment, audiences of permanent cinemas selected films according to national preferences, as they had in choosing theatrical dramas. In touch with their patrons, German film producers and exhibitors began to manufacture and exhibit films that catered more specifically to domestic audiences.

Selection through demand In a research project at the University of Siegen we have collected a database of programs advertised by permanent cinemas between 1905 and 1914 in nine German cities of representative size and geographical distribution.14 We have then compiled a list of the films most frequently and widely programmed between 1911 and 1914. The following Table lists the films that were shown in at least three cities.15 The data shows that German film audiences enthusiastically turned to long dramas produced in Germany. That this trend was driven by demand and not supply is evident by the following comparisons. Around 1911, the average length of the films produced in Germany was 212 meters,16 but the most screened films of that year, according to our data, had an average length of 600 meters, three times as long. Concerning genre, of all films offered in Germany in 1912, 42.4 per cent were dramas, 39.5 per cent were comedies, and the rest non-fiction films.17 Yet in the program top lists of the period between 1911 and 1914, 86 per cent of the films were dramas and only 14 per cent comedies. The country of origin also reflects the trend. Even though at the time both Germany and Denmark had a smaller production output than France or the USA, demand showed the opposite relationship.18 Between 1911 and 1914, films from Germany and Denmark were the most popular. German productions made up only 17.5 per cent of all films supplied, but they amounted to 35.7 per cent of the films in the program top list. Danish productions made up a marginal share of 2.8 per cent of all films exhibited, but an impressive 21.4 per cent of the program top list. For French films demand was almost equal to supply: the share in supply was 27.5 per cent, the share in demand 28.6 per cent. By contrast, the USA had a share of supply of 28.4 per cent, but not a single American film appears in the program top list. Content also vividly illustrates the selection according to national traditions. From the list three patterns can be identified, which represent different audience segments.

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EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL” Table 1. Title

Country of origin Abgründe/Afgrunden DK Aus Deutschlands Ruhmestagen 1870/71 D Desdemona / Desdemona DK Deutsch-dänische Krieg 1864, Der / ? DK Die das Glück narrt D fliegende Zirkus, Der / Den flyvende circus DK Fritzchen als Zauberkünstler / Bébé F prestigitateur Fritzchen lauscht im Küchenschrank / ? F gefährliche Alter, Das D Haus Falkenberg D Ketten der Vergangenheit D Kind von Paris, Das / ? F Königin Luise D Lebens Würfelspiel, Des D Max als Tragöde / Max joue le drame F Rosenmontag / Livets baal DK Schlange am Busen, Die D Schrecken der Wüste, Der / ? F Schrecken, Der / ? F Sklaven des Goldes / ? F So stand es geschrieben / Era scritto così I Trojas Fall / La caduta di Troia I Um fremde Schuld D Um Liebe und Ehre D Unaussprechlichen, Die / ? F Unbekannte, Der A Versuchungen der Großstadt, Die / Ved DK fængslets port Zuma, die Tänzerin / Zuma I

190

Length

Genre

850 m 850 m ? 800 m 1650 m 1141 m 94 m

Drama Drama Drama Drama Drama Drama Comedy

? 760 m 650 m 1100 m ? 657 m 1125 m ? ? 830 m ? 235 m ? ? 605 m 850 m ? ? 1080 m 900 m

Comedy Drama Drama Drama Drama Drama Drama Comedy Drama Drama Drama Drama Drama Drama Drama Drama Drama Comedy Drama Drama

?

Drama

1.

As Emilie Altenloh explains in a sociological study based on interviews conducted in Mannheim in 1912, most of the popular film dramas dealt with “a woman’s struggle between her natural, sensual instincts and the social conditions she faces that contradict these instincts”.19 Thus, the central theme of these Sittendramen (dramas of social mores) is a woman’s breach of taboos. A mother seduces her daughter’s fiancé in Das Gefährliche Alter (The Dangerous Age, 1911); a professor’s wife gets involved with her husband’s younger friend in Rosenmontag (Carnival Monday, 1912), or an aristocrat’s wife, having committed adultery, leaves her husband in Ketten der Vergangenheit (Chains of the Past, 1913). The story of a man’s extramarital affair in Des Lebens Würfelspiel (The Dice Game of Life, 1911) is an exception.20 As Altenloh shows, these dramas were especially popular with women, and as depictions of a social milieu they were culturally specific.

2.

The second pattern is the popularity of historical films and spectacular adventure films. The most prominent example is the Italian film La caduta di Troia (The Fall of Troy, 1911). It narrates the mythical story of Helena’s abduction by the son of Troy’s ruler. The film centers on the revenge of the

19 • The emergence of nationally specific film cultures in Europe, 1911–1914

Greek noblemen, which ends in the conquest of Troy and its destruction. Contemporary audiences were impressed by the film’s production values. For example, it was noted that the battle of Troy was filmed with “more than 500 extras”, and the “downfall in a sea of flames is of overwhelming effect”.21 Another example is Sklaven des Goldes (Slaves of Gold, 1913), a French film set in the Wild West. Contemporary critics especially singled out its spectacular elements, such as “the wagon train on the beach at high tide, the towering waves, [and] the moment when the snakes unleashed by the sea coil around the gold-addicted highwayman’s wife”.22 In contrast to the first pattern, these films probably appealed to men as much as women. Also in contrast to the others on the list, these films were imported, since Germany did not produce enough films of this type to satisfy demand, the themes and emphasis on the spectacular are less nationally specific, and thus similar to the “cinema of attractions”. 3.

The third pattern is comprised of “national” films in the narrow sense – e.g. Aus Deutschlands Ruhmestagen (From Germany’s Glory Days, 1913), Der deutsch-dänische Krieg (The German-Danish War, 1911), and Königin Luise (Queen Luise, 1913). Such national epics presented German history in a manner intended to incite patriotic emotions and construct national identity. The nation was presented as a social system of high value that pre-existed the formation of the state. For example, a contemporary review of Königin Luise states: “The memorable year 1913 prompted the Mutoskop-Company to look back 100 years, when Germany’s hardest times began to lighten and the German people broke free from Napoleonic oppression. From the darkness of those days, Queen Luise shines towards us as the brightest and most joyous light.”23 The press even noted that “His Majesty the Emperor and King most graciously” gave his support by providing a horse-carriage during the film’s production.24 It is very likely that these national epics were especially popular with the upper classes.25

Two contemporary sources support the validity of the program top list. First, in her sociological study, Altenloh came to similar conclusions: “Films that allow members of an audience to make a connection with their own social environment, whether depicting life as it is or as they wish it could be, are the most popular and allow for greater emotional identification. [... ] Foreign films are less able to arouse this sort of interest because they are characterized by a foreign sensibility and only seldom strike a chord.”26 Second, an audience survey on the most popular actors and actresses from the year 1914 shows a structurally similar pattern. Actors and actresses of German nationality or known from German films were most popular, receiving 45.1 per cent of the votes; the Danes received 26.6 per cent of the votes; the French, 20.3 per cent (mainly due to Max Linder’s popularity); while Americans played a very minor role (John Bunny reached eleventh place, but with only 2.1 per cent of the votes).27 By making their choices at the box-office, German audiences determined what type of films were most frequently and widely programmed. They favored films and stars based on familiar cultural traditions, which during the period in question were best represented by German productions, but also by similar Danish productions. Even without relying on similar data for other countries, it is possible to hypothesize that the described profile of film preferences between 1911 and 1914 is quite specific to Germany, because it is highly unlikely that the dramas of social mores and national epics would have had equal appeal for other European countries or the USA. Political and economic factors certainly influenced film supply and demand, but did

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not fully determine them. The most dramatic political event, of course, was World War I, but since a nationally specific film culture emerged in Germany before 1914, the war cannot have been the cause, but only an amplifier of developments. Around 1910–1911, German film companies began to distribute feature films of two or more reels in length with a new distribution system called Monopolfilm (monopoly film).28 Before that, films were sold to cinemas, which then could distribute them to others. The monopoly-film-system, by contrast, established a rental arrangement that granted exhibition rights to individual cinemas within a certain region and for a limited time. To justify the relatively high rental price, the films distributed in this manner were of above-average length, had high production values, and featured star actors. However, the program top list contains many films that were not rented out according to the monopoly-film-system, but actually sold – e.g. Aus Deutschlands Ruhmestagen, Königin Luise, Die Schlange am Busen (The Snake at the Breast, 1912). Thus, the distribution system’s impact on demand was limited.

Conclusions The concept of a “national cinema” is usually based on the films produced in a certain country, whereas my concept of a “national film culture” is based on the profile of film preferences of a country’s audience. This concept is intended to expand our understanding: both a specific part of a country’s film production, namely the “national” films in the narrow sense of a “national identity”, as well as a country’s entire film output can be interpreted coherently through this perspective. Concretely, through the new institution of permanent cinemas, which were regularly attended by a large part of the population, films became both a mass medium and at the same time a more nationally specific one. The German audience’s preferences did not change significantly between the introduction of film in 1895 and 1914, but the film market did, due to the establishment of the new film exhibition venue, which provided a different form of cultural experience. The German legitimate theater provided the model for feature-length film dramas and their mode of reception. Just as audiences had selected theatrical dramas according to nationally specific preferences, they now selected the new kind of film by similar criteria. On the basis of a list of films most screened in Germany between 1911 and 1914, a profile of preferences can be identified, which was not only represented in large part by German productions, but was also in all probability nationally specific. The German audience of the period favored German and Danish dramas of social mores as well as German national epics, but also adventure or historical spectacles from diverse European countries. American films did not play a significant role. The significance of the German national epics can only be fully understood within the larger context. They were indeed popular, but neither were they the only popular genre nor the most popular one; the dominant genre was the social drama. The German audience’s preference for German films was the basis for the development of a large and regular domestic production. The traditional explanation for the emergence of a national cinema is that the film markets that were originally dominated by foreign productions were nationalized through the power elites’ promotion of political and/or economic policies. In the case of Germany, World War I is usually identified as the turning point. In 1914, the argument goes, a ban was imposed on the import of foreign films, which supposedly boosted domestic production so that the continued demand could be met. Yet in reality, during the war production of German films in absolute numbers did not increase, but rather slightly decreased: the share of German productions in supply increased from an average of 17.7 per cent between 1911 and

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1914 to an average of 67 per cent between 1915 and 1918 because the number of foreign imports on the market had fallen.29 Several years before the war, in reaction to demand, the production of German films had already significantly increased, from approximately 1,200 films between 1908 and 1909, to 1,700 between 1910 and 1911, and to 2,100 films between 1912 and 1913. Thus, German production was not stimulated by World War I, but by audience demand long before. Finally, I would like to note that these results are in accord with what we know about film culture more generally, from studies of other periods and cultural contexts.30 But particularly for the research on early cinema, I hope that this new concept as well as this model of the emergence of a nationally specific film culture could be fruitful for further discussion, and I would like to make a concrete suggestion for this: to undertake more comparative studies. For this purpose, we would need to collect and analyse data on film demand during the relevant period for other countries, since only demand-data can help us more fully understand the development of national film cultures in Europe and elsewhere. Only if film programs from other countries are systematically researched and compared could we determine with certainty whether the identified profile of preferences are nationally specific to Germany or not. And only on the basis of such work could we decide whether the hypothesis formed for the German example – i.e. that national audiences selected films according to nationally specific criteria and traditions in the context of a new and different exhibition venue – holds true for other countries as well, including the USA.

Notes 1.

I would like to thank Peter Krämer as well as the editors of this volume, Richard Abel, Giorgio Bertellini and Rob King for their stimulating comments on my essay.

2.

Norbert Elias, “Processes of state formation and nation building”, Transactions of the Seventh World Congress of Sociology [Varna, 14–19 September 1970] (Sofia: International Sociological Association, 1972), 274–284.

3.

Andrew Higson, “The Concept of National Cinema”, Screen 30.4 (Autumn 1989): 36–46.

4.

Richard Abel: The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

5.

Richard Abel, Americanizing the Movies and “Movie-Mad” Audiences, 1910–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

6.

Unless one finds Say’s Theorem, that supply creates its demand, more plausible than a demandoriented economic theory, I argue that it would be a methodological mistake to measure demand with supply data. The most influential example of a supply-oriented approach is Kristin Thompson, Exporting Entertainment: America in the World Film Market, 1907–1934 (London: British Film Institute, 1985).

7.

For a sample of the literature on traveling cinemas, see Ernst Kieninger, Das “Klassische Wanderkino” 1896–1914: Filmkommunikation auf dem Weg zur Institution am Beispiel Niederösterreich und Umland (Master’s Thesis, University of Vienna, 1992); Blaise Aurora, Histoire du Cinéma en Lorraine: Du cinématographe au cinéma forain 1896–1914 (Metz: Editions Serpenoise, 1996); Kevin Scrivens and Stephen Smith (eds), The Travelling Cinematograph Show (Tweedale: New Era Publications, 1999); Guido Convents, Van kinetoscoop tot café-ciné: De eerste jaren van de film in België 1894–1908 (Leuven: Universitaire Pers Leuven, 2000); and Aldo Bernardini: Cinema italiano delle origini: Gli ambulanti (Gemona: La Cineteca del Friuli, 2001).

8.

Tom Gunning: “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde”, Wide Angle 8: 3/4 (1986): 63–70; reprinted in Thomas Elsaesser with Adam Barker, eds., Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (London: British Film Institute, 1990), 56–62.

9.

Annemone Ligensa fruitfully applies Marvin Zuckerman’s psychological concept of “sensation seeking” to early cinema in her forthcoming dissertation, “Sensation Seeking and Early Cinema” (University of Cologne). See also Marvin Zuckerman: “Sensation Seeking in Entertainment”,

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EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL” in Jennings Bryant (ed.), Psychology of Entertainment (Mahway, N.J.: Erlbaum Association, 2006), 367–387. 10.

These figures come from the Siegen research project’s film supply database. See Joseph Garncarz and Michael Ross, “Die Siegener Datenbanken zum frühen Kino in Deutschland”, KINtop 14/15 (2006): 151–163.

11.

Seen in this light, it is an over-generalization to take early cinema out of its cultural context completely by calling it “global”, as Tom Gunning does in the essay included in this collection.

12.

Käthe Lux, Studien über die Warenhäuser in Deutschland (Jena: Fischer, 1910).

13.

Susanne Brachetti: Kultur und Kommerz: Geschäftstheater in Bochum während des ausgehenden 19. Jahrhunderts (Herne: Verlag für Wissenschaft und Kunst, 1996), 101.

14.

Garncarz and Ross, “Die Siegener Datenbanken ...”, 159–161.

15.

The list represents the state of research as of May 2006. Since work on the database of film programs is not finished, it is possible that the list may change. For this reason I do not list the films according to the number of screenings, but only alphabetically. The definitive list appears in my book on early German cinema (Frankfurt/M.: Stroemfeld, 2008). Researchers can use our database on line: http://www.fk615.uni-siegen.de/earlycinema/

16.

Herbert Birett: Das Filmangebot in Deutschland 1895–1911 (München: Winterberg, 1991), XV.

17.

Emilie Altenloh, Zur Soziologie des Kino: Die Kino-Unternehmung und die sozialen Schichten ihrer Besucher (Jena: Diederichs, 1914), 10. See also Altenloh, “A Sociology of the Cinema: the Audience”, trans. Kathleen Cross, Screen 42: 3 (2001): 249–293. [The part I reference is not included in this translation].

18.

Based on the Siegen research project’s film supply database. See Garncarz and Ross.

19.

Altenloh, Zur Soziologie des Kino, 58. See also Althenloh, “A Sociology of the Cinema”: 259.

20.

Heide Schlüpmann, Unheimlichkeit des Blicks: Das Drama des frühen deutschen Kinos (Frankfurt/M.: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1990)

21.

Deutsche Lichtbildtheater-Besitzer 14 (6 April 1911): n.p.

22.

Kinematographische Rundschau 270 (11 Mary 1913): 73.

23.

Allgemeine Kino-Börse 3: 2 (13 January 1913): 3.

24.

Der Kinematograph 309 (27 November 1912): n.p.

25.

The patriotic non-fiction film programs – e.g. of the Emperor and his family – were shown predominantly in the international variety theaters in Germany, which were attended by the upper classes, and were very popular there. See Joseph Garncarz: “Filmprogramm im Varieté: Die optische Berichterstattung,“ in Martin Loiperdinger and Uli Jung (eds), Geschichte des dokumentarischen Films in Deutschland, Band 1: Kaiserreich 1895 – 1918 (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005), 80–100.

26.

Altenloh, Zur Soziologie des Kino, 58. See also Altenloh, “A Sociology of the Cinema”: 259.

27.

“Wer ist der Liebling des Publikums”, Illustrierte Kino-Woche (2 January 1914): 7. The list has seventeen ranks and is based on 1648 votes.

28.

Corinna Müller: Frühe deutsche Kinematographie: Formale, wirtschaftliche und kulturelle Entwicklungen 1907–1912 (Stuttgart und Weimar: Metzler, 1994), 126ff.

29.

Based on the Siegen research project’s film supply database. See Garncarz and Ross.

30.

See, for instance, Joseph Garncarz, “Hollywood in Germany: The Role of American Films in Germany, 1925–1990,“ in David W. Ellwood and Rob Kroes (eds), Hollywood in Europe: Experiences of a Cultural Hegemony (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1994), 94–135. See also Colin Crisp, The Classic French Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), and Leif Furhammar, Filmen i Sverige (Stockholm: Wiken, 1991).

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20

The Norwegian municipal cinema system and the development of a national cinema •

Norwegian mun icipal cinema system and the development of a national cinema

Gunnar Iversen n his latest book, Messages (2005), Brian Winston lashes out in typical parent terrible fashion against the concept of nationality in media history. “It is not for nothing that the industry has always been organised around ‘territories’ and ‘markets,’ not ‘nations’”, he writes before concluding, “Film ‘nations’ are the concern of criticism, history and cultural politics”.1 Cinema was from the outset a matter of transnational co-operation. Ideas of national identity and national policies regulating the film business, however, shaped several aspects of film production, distribution, and exhibition. Most obviously, national film production involved strategies of opposition to, and resistance against, international film industries, particularly Hollywood. Plans to create a different product, together with state and local protectionist regulations, exerted a nationalizing effect on the film industry as a whole. In this essay, I discuss how, in 1910s and 1920s Norway, the emergence of a unique municipal cinema system, in conjunction with changes in state policies and infrastructure ownership, played a significant role in transforming film production, yet did not immediately create a national cinema in terms of audience taste. Between 1906 and 1919, the Norwegian film industry produced seventeen feature films, but production was irregular and the films exhibited few references to Norwegian society, cities or landscapes. Instead, they presented a rather international or nationally unspecific character. The year 1920 marked the beginning of continuous industrial film production. Stimulated by the cultural pressures of national romanticism and by an intense output of films set in rural landscapes, the Norwegian film industry began to acquire the semblance of a national cinema. This radical change in production was closely linked to the development of the municipal cinema system.

I

The Norwegian municipal cinema system The first permanent movie theaters in Norway opened in late 1904. Between 1905 and 1906, as if contracting a “film fever”, most Norwegian cities and towns could rely on several permanent venues for film exhibition. Apart from very few feature fiction films and a modest output of actualités, mostly manufactured locally by the largest theater owners, until the late 1910s there was no steady domestic film production in Norway. The nation’s dependence on foreign films was nearly absolute. Until World War I,

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French and Danish films largely dominated the Norwegian market. American pictures steadily became more popular until, after the war, Hollywood alone held a position of commercial dominance. As in other countries, moviegoing changed people’s lives in the cities and towns of Norway, and many objected to the continuous opening of new permanent theaters, their business practices, and the content of the films shown. By 1907, local newspapers frequently published readers’ complaints about the aggressive advertisement campaigns used by film exhibitors and the hand-outs that regularly littered the streets.2 By 1910, particularly common and intense were objections from local school teachers and authorities to the cinema’s harmful effect on learning and education, and its morally corrupting influence on younger generations. These local initiatives soon acquired a nation-wide scale once the Society for the Promotion of Morality (Foreningen til Sædelighetens Fremme), a national institution established in 1880, joined in. In 1910, the population of Kristiania (now known as Oslo) successfully pressed the passing of a resolution that allowed the city to limit the number of movie theaters and recommended that a municipally appointed committee oversee programming. The idea that a municipal government could and should regulate film exhibition was hardly unusual because, since 1837, the state had granted municipalities a fair measure of jurisdictional self-determination. The call for a greater control over film exhibition simply aligned with the traditional practice of regulating local licensing. In 1913, after a period when debates concerning motion pictures came to resemble a “moral panic” and in a convergence of political convenience and constitutional tradition, the national Parliament passed The Film Theaters Act. This Act instituted a National Board of Film Censors based in the capital of Kristiania but also granted to municipal councils local licensing power over the public exhibition of films. This legislation thus crucially shifted the control of film exhibition – a rapidly growing business, despite all the protests – from the local police to the municipality. Even before the Act had been signed, the northern town of Harstad established Norway’s first municipal cinema. The Town Council countered widespread concerns over the cinema’s harmful effects with an economic argument based on the report of what had happened hundreds of miles away, in the southern town of Notodden, where the local Home-Owners’ Association had opened a moving picture theater in 1912. Regulated as a municipal enterprise, film exhibition soon proved be a beneficial business for the city, enabling the payment of tariff wages and agreements and still making a profit for the city.3 Shortly after the institution of the Film Theaters Act, several local municipalities throughout Norway began buying movie theaters from private owners. Municipal control could have been restricted to granting licenses to private owners and censoring the contents of the film shown, but many local authorities had reasons other than moral anxiety. As in Notodden and Harstad, they saw financial advantages in owning and operating movie theaters. This direct control of the new and powerful medium allowed local authorities to earn profits that could be used for municipal needs and cultural purposes. By mid-1917, fifteen municipalities owned and operated their own movie theaters, a figure that amounted to 20 per cent of Norway’s total number of venues. Competition with the private sector, however, was fierce. Film rental companies, mostly in the hands of private movie theater owners, founded a National Association of Film Bureaus in 1915 and one year later raised film rental fees from 25 to 30 per cent of the gross box-office income.4 The municipal cinemas responded by organizing a parallel association. In 1917, nine municipally owned movie theaters formed the National Asso-

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ciation of Municipal Cinemas [Kommunale Kinematografers Landsforbund]. The National Association of Film Bureaus tried to resist this growing municipalization, but without success. The privately owned rental companies even boycotted the municipal cinemas for a short period in 1919, but the latter established another parallel organization, the Municipal Films Exchange [Kommunernes Filmscentral], and defied their plan. By 1920, 46 municipalities owned and operated movie theaters, and they generated 85 per cent of the nation’s box-office receipts. All major cities had either municipal ownership of film exhibition or a combination of private and municipal ownership. In 1926, film exhibition in Oslo (Kristiania was renamed in 1925) became a solely municipal business, and the process of municipalization was complete. Even though many smaller towns retained privately owned cinemas (and still do), most of the Norwegian movie theaters were (and remain) owned by local municipalities.

The creation of a “national style” Between 1913 and 1926, this shift to municipal cinema ownership changed Norwegian film culture. Because the income generated through film exhibitions was used for the common good of the entire community, municipal cinemas operated as a cultural and social institution rather than as a mere commercial enterprise.5 Described as a “public service cinema”, the municipal cinema system has been compared to the more recent notion of a public broadcasting service.6 However, this is not the whole story. The municipalization of movie theaters neither altered exhibition practices nor apparently affected audience tastes, but it did impact film production. The same kinds of films were shown before and after the Film Theaters Act, and, as everywhere else, American films dominated the Norwegian film scene, particularly after World War I. Yet, in contrast to what was occurring elsewhere, municipalization broke the circular economy inherent in the usual cycle of film industries, whereby exhibition profits generate production capital. In Norway, profits from the municipal cinemas funded the construction of new schools and hospitals, subsidized local theater productions, and supported art institutions. In sum, the municipalization system actually made it more difficult to produce feature fiction films. In the 1910s, fiction film production was mainly concentrated in two distinct periods: eight films were made between 1911 and 1913, and eight films between 1917 and 1919. In the years between 1914 and 1917, known as the most important phase of municipalization, no features were made at all. The movie theater owners who had produced feature films between 1911 and 1913 discontinued any production activity due to the changes and uncertainties of the film business. When production resumed in 1917, it was at the initiative of a single director-producer, Peter Lykke-Seest, who was forced to halt two years later because none of the municipal cinemas wanted to show his films.7 After mounting complaints within the municipal cinema organizations that the system did not support film production, in 1920 the Municipal Films Exchange finally gave moral and financial support to the production of a feature film, Fante-Anne (Anne, the Tramp), directed by Rasmus Breistein. Radically different from previous productions, this film marked the beginning of a so-called “national breakthrough”. Fante-Anne, in fact, was closely aligned with the New Norwegian Movement in its premise that “true” Norwegian culture was to be found in farming communities and remote villages and not in large urban areas.8 The success of Fante-Anne led to a change in production policy, from a generic, non-specific orientation to a “national style”. Of the 29 features produced in Norway in the 1920s, only five told stories set in urban locations. Most films, instead, involved rural characters, and their narratives relied on national symbols

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– the landscapes, costumes, and customs associated with Norwegian folk life. In this period, rural melodramas assumed a nostalgic tone, feeding on what has been called the “rural homesickness” that pervaded the recently urbanized country.9

Nation and style When moving pictures emerged as a major form of mass entertainment, Norway was a young nation, having only won independence in 1905. Norwegian society experienced a period of cultural nation-building, in which social and cultural life served as a “didactic space” functional to the creation of a new Norway.10 In this regard, the municipalities active in film exhibition felt a pressing urgency to curtail or limit the Americanization of domestic film culture. Although their efforts failed – ever since the 1920s, between 45 and 70 percent of the films shown in Norway have been American – the results were different on the production side. The success of Fante-Anne prompted the Municipal Films Exchange to finance several feature films and documentaries that celebrated different aspects of rural Norway, and those enjoyed great domestic popularity. However, features such as Fante-Anne and Pan (Harald Schwenzen, 1922) clearly were indebted stylistically to influential Swedish “Golden Age” films that had adapted classics of Norwegian literature, such as Victor Sjöström’s Terje Vigen (1916) and John W. Brunius’s Synnöve Solbakken (1919), both of which involved location shooting in Norwegian landscapes. Norwegian feature film production after 1920, therefore, demonstrates that the concepts of “nation” and “style” can be conjoined in unexpected ways. The municipal cinema system’s impact on the nationalization of Norwegian film culture was limited and indirect, occurring largely through the financing of feature film production. A more powerful impact came from the success of Swedish film imports, especially those that seemed to align with the aesthetics of the emerging New Norwegian Movement. Thus, Norway as a “Film Nation”, to return to the words of Brian Winston, depended on a cultural politics that was transnational as much as national.

Notes 1.

Brian Winston, Messages: Free Expression, Media and the West from Gutenberg to Google (London: Routledge, 2005), 308–309.

2.

Gunnar Iversen, “Cutting Bordello Scenes and Dances: Local Regulation and Film Censorship in Norway before 1913”, Film History 17.1 (2005): 108.

3.

Nils Klevjer Aas, “Municipal Cinemas 1910–1925: Building a Unique Exhibition”, in Jostein Gripsrud and Kathrine Skretting (eds), History of Moving Images: Reports from a Norwegian Project (Oslo: The Research Council of Norway 1994), 60.

4.

Ibid., 66.

5.

Gunnar Iversen, “Norway”, in Tytti Soila, Astrid Söderbergh Widding and Gunnar Iversen, Nordic National Cinemas (London: Routledge, 1998), 102–141.

6.

Ove Solum, Helt og Skurk – om den kommunale film- og kinoinstitusjonens etablering i Norge (Ph.D. dissertation, Universitetet i Oslo/ University of Oslo, 2004).

7.

Gunnar Iversen: ”Lykke-Seest, Per”, in Richard Abel, ed., Encyclopedia of Early Cinema (London: Routledge, 2005), 400.

8.

Anne Marit Myrstad, “National Romanticism and Norwegian silent Cinema”, in Richard Dyer and Ginette Vincendeau eds., Popular European Cinema (London: Routledge, 1992).

9. 10.

198

Ibid., 192. Solum, Helt og Skurk, 311.

21

Spanish lecturers and their relations with the national •

Spanish lecturers and their relations with the national

Daniel Sánchez-Salas Introduction his essay addresses the question of how the concept of the national provides a context for the work of the Spanish lecturer in early cinema. As is well known, previous studies have always stressed that the film lecturer was responsible for mediating between the screen and viewers, for whom, at least in the beginning, moving pictures were something strange.1 Also we should not forget that he was dealing with a specific public, determined not only by the period of time, but also by the location. Generally, histories of early cinema have analysed film lecturing from a local perspective. In the case of itinerant exhibitors, however, the lecturer often was not part of the group of people accompanying the film show, but rather a different person at each venue, chosen from among the inhabitants of the various locales in which the film show was presented. This recurring circumstance increased the likelihood that the lecturer, in mediating the show, tended to make references to the local context he shared with the audience. Nevertheless, in order better to understand what the lecturer said and did, at least in the case of Spain, it is essential to analyse his work from the point of view of the national. For, between 1896 and 1913, the national context was just as important as the local to the various tasks of the Spanish lecturer. Today, more is known about the work that he carried out, from acting as a barker at the entrance to the theater to commenting on the films and translating the intertitles, although he might not perform all of these tasks on every occasion. To these we must add an additional task – his so-called performative function2 – in other words, the way in which the lecturer made his performance a part of the show. Taking all of these into account, the following analysis of how the national and the local were interrelated in early Spanish film lecturing will illuminate four distinct yet highly interconnected aspects of the lecturer’s work. First of all, I examine the work of the lecturer from the perspective of linguistic identity, from his use of the various languages found in Spain to the way in which his words were interpreted with respect to the viewer’s own national feelings. Second, I discuss two of the most important strategies used by lecturers in their attempt to adapt the film show to different audiences: re-locating the events depicted and changing the characters’ names. Third, I discuss the practice of explaining films with respect to current national events, including how some newspapers adopted the lecturer’s verbal discourse as a rhetorical device in their own discussion of current events. Finally, I explore how lecturing made the early film show part of the dominant national popular culture.

T

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Throughout the subsequent four sections of the essay, I demonstrate how inseparably linked were the national and the local in film lecturing.

The lecturer and linguistic identity Undoubtedly, the first arena in which the national informed the work of the lecturer in Spain was spoken language. The mere fact that lecturers carried out their work using a specific language means that a more or less heterogeneous range of visual and, to a considerable extent, foreign material could be adapted to the language spoken in various regions of the country, each of which assumes its own vision of the world. Evaluating the linguistic manifestations of the cognitive processes derived from using language to explain the world exceeds the scope of this essay; instead, I focus on more explicit manifestations of the national as the subject and context of what the lecturer said and did. The era of the Franco dictatorship (1939–1975) is an extreme example of the effectiveness of adapting the content of films to national parameters through language. The obligatory dubbing of films was introduced early in that period and, with the passing of time, became so deeply rooted in society that today dubbing is still the most common technique for screening foreign films. Curiously, one of the key bureaucrats behind this obligatory system of cultural “Spanishization” was Tomás Borrás, a former film lecturer in Madrid at the turn of the last century.3 It is not known to what extent his background as a lecturer played a role in his support for this measure, which put to totalitarian use the known ability of languages to adapt foreign elements. However, in a clear example of the multi-social and linguistic composition of a nation-state such as Spain, during the time that he was lecturing films in Spanish in a makeshift cinema in the Retiro park in Madrid, some lecturers in Catalonia were carrying out their tasks in Catalan. To date, no evidence demonstrates that in Galicia and the Basque Country there were lecturers who commented on the films in Galician or Euskera, respectively, but given the wide use of these two languages, it is likely that there were indeed lecturers in those languages. The fact that these two languages were predominantly rural, however, in comparison to Catalan, which traditionally has been more equally spread between city and country, has mitigated against finding documented evidence in such sources as newspapers and books. Nor is there yet any indication that lecturers spoke in Spanish or, above all, in Catalan as a militant nationalist gesture against the presence of other languages. On the contrary, the surviving evidence suggests that Catalan was sometimes spoken alongside Spanish in the same film screening.4 A recent Spanish study written from an openly nationalistic position, however, maintains that the use of Catalan by Catalonian lecturers was widespread, although the author acknowledges that no evidence for this assertion exists.5 It is impossible to speak authoritatively of a national consciousness, given the lack of information available about how the public reacted when listening to lecturers in languages other than Spanish. Nevertheless, viewers apparently sometimes judged the show from a national perspective, as, for example, when it was pointed out that the French exhibitor Charles Kalb presented his films “in a truly delicious broken Spanish”.6 National sentiment could thus become an inducement, although as evidence of difference. But “authentic” inducement seems more likely to have been localized: for example, when a Catalan viewer considered the Spanish used by a lecturer to whom he was listening had the familiar accent of the Lavapiés neighborhood in central Madrid.7 Or it could depend on recognition of what is proper to one’s own culture, as was the case with one of the most popular lecturers, Juan del Cid, who worked in the

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21 • Spanish lecturers and their relations with the national

Salón La Rosa in Cádiz around 1907 and gained the admiration of local audiences by explaining all kinds of films using the Cádiz dialect.8 The use of the local dialect – again, that from Madrid – could also attract audiences, according to an indirect source: the recreation of the lecturer in the short stage plays typical of the “teatro por horas” or “theater by the hour”, a theatrical form which eventually came to dominate, especially in Madrid, at the end of the 19th century and during the first decade of the 20th.9 In the latter case, the primary intention was to reach audiences in the capital, who enjoyed parodies of their own identity. Yet, when these works were put on in other cities, they gave rise to the stereotypical “Madrid-style” lecturer who was subjected to a reception determined by his difference.

The custom of relocating and re-baptizing Indirect and direct sources agree on another of the ways in which the lecturer sought to make the film show more familiar to the national public: his “Spanishization” of foreign content. Beyond the simple use of the Spanish language, sources reveal that lecturers such as Juan del Cid10 could make unfamiliar circumstances or places understood in Spanish terms through the use of typical Spanish elements such as sayings or jokes. There is no lack of examples of lecturers who, faced with occurrences such as an unexpected cut in the middle of a film, would turn to the clichéd joke by indicating that the suddenly darkened screen was nothing more than the nocturnal view of a particular Spanish city. Other strategies such as relocating places and renaming characters with Spanish names with a strong local flavor can be found in literary fiction. Films so altered usually had well-known titles and/or plot lines. In this way, according to a fictional lecturer, a Catalan fireman could rescue one by one the inhabitants of a burning building,11 and comic characters with typical names drawn from Spanish popular culture¯Mariquita “la vinagrera”, Pedro Tonel, and Calzas Largas¯could wait for a late train that seemed to come right out of the screen when it reached the station of Matalasviejas, a fictitious place whose name sounds like a parody of a Spanish town.12 Although one has to be cautious when dealing with fictional texts, such naturalizing patterns seem plausible, not only because they accord with the documentary evidence about lecturers in Spain and elsewhere but also because Spanish distributors acted in a similar way when translating the titles and intertitles of foreign films. Moreover, throughout the silent era, there was a custom, deeply rooted in the industry as well as the public, of re-baptizing their favorite stars with Spanish names.

The use of Spanish current affairs The national context was perhaps most evident, however, when Spanish current events, especially political and social events, became the lecturer’s subject. Lecturers sometimes apparently took advantage of the opportunity to introduce a “political quip” as a film was being projected, making some critical comment on “what was known at the time as a ‘social problem’”.13 Once again, literary fiction, dating both from the era of the lecturer and later, indicates the existence of this practice. Here one can find criticism of the problem of internal Spanish migration caused by poverty,14 fiery patriotic hymns to the soldiers who defended the Spanish colony in Morocco,15 and situations where the moving picture theater became a political venue, as when film lecturers were described as “reputable spokespeople for minorities who need to let off steam, because here [in Spain] the Parliament is almost never open”.16 Extending the notion of the moving picture theater as a rhetorical device, one finds a most peculiar expression of the lecturer’s commentary within the national context: the adoption, in articles and characters present in certain newspapers and literary works,

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of the lecturer’s verbal style. Newspaper editorials from as early as 1898 and 1899, for example, use the film lecturer’s verbal presentation as an instrument for criticizing events and policies such as Spain’s defeat in Cuba, censorship of the press,17 the Spanish liberal revolution of 1868, or the persecution of the Catholic Church in the name of freedom.18

Adapting dominant popular culture to the Spanish context Stage plays and newspaper recreations such as these agree with primary sources in connecting the lecturer with another fundamental aspect of the national: the dominant cultural context. The most public image of the lecturer in fairground sideshows, itinerant theaters, or café back rooms differed from that of the lecturer in more restricted venues such as Catholic organisations, in that humor and drama were inherent to his discourse. And not just any humor or drama, but that closest to current Spanish popular culture. The two popular forms that the lecturer most relied on to incorporate cultural references familiar to Spanish audiences in their daily lives were the sainete or one-act farce, the comic theatrical genre that had dominated the popular Spanish stage since at least the 19th century, and the folletín in the dramatic or, better yet, melodramatic vein. The sainete was particularly favored as a model for the lecturer’s performance, and its brand of humor was not unlike that of the lecturer. In fact, the Spanish lecturer was so well known as a comedian that he often used humor even when the films shown were actually melodramas. Many of the lecturer’s verbal strategies also derived from the comic repertoire on which the sainete drew, beginning with stage genres such as the zarzuela,19 the variety show, and the revue, whether musical or not. In the majority of these genres, humour was forged out of the local language used by the working classes of a given sector of society, where the humor came from contrasting the countryside with the city and vice versa. Given this premise, humor emerged through linguistic mistakes, catchwords, plays on words, simple rhymes or intense moments of retorts and counter-retorts. All of these resources were fundamental to the lecturer’s performance, enacted through a language charged with the localisms of popular speech. Retorts and counter-retorts constantly defined the battle between audience and lecturer for control of the show. Simple rhymes and catchwords were so typical that a lecturer’s popularity sometimes extended beyond the theater. And audiences so appreciated linguistic mistakes as well as plays on words that a lecturer could even achieve great recognition for always executing the “gag” of changing the stress within a word.20 Although not the high culture best known in most histories, of course, popular culture was what Spaniards chiefly consumed at the time. Going to popular stage shows was one of the principal leisure activities, if not the principal one. Melodrama, which ran longer than the sainete, was also immensely popular on the stage, but it played an even more influential role in the folletin, the serial melodramas published in newspapers or sold in newsstands, and commonly the subject of public readings organised by Catholic groups, cultural clubs, and labor associations. One need only consider the testimony of the lecturers themselves21 or the parodies of their work at the time to discover the language and overstated emotions so typical of the world of the folletín. The following poem, for example, was published in a local newspaper: [T]he audience takes as a joke the words of the “lecturer” and barely has he let slip a romantic phrase a tone of voice

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in an “ad hoc” dialogue they break out in mocking laughter and jeer and go crazy.22 Underneath the poem’s comic tone, it is clear that the lecturer did not just explain typical romantic scenes in the melodrama but deployed a range of words and gestures proper to the genre. The poem is not making fun of the film, but rather the lecturer’s performance.

Popular theater as the model for the film show The Spanish lecturer, therefore, integrated the film show, sometimes almost simultaneously with both national and local forms and practices of popular culture. Much like a master of ceremonies, the lecturer connected the different parts of a show in which films initially were an added attraction, alongside variety performances such as carnival acts, musical fragments from zarzuelas, couplets, brief one-act farces, etc. The interpenetration of variety acts and moving pictures developed in such a way, however, that the word “cinema” became identified with a show where both were present. In this respect, it is significant that in one of the short comic works that addressed the cinema, Su majestad el cine ... (His Majesty the Cinema ...), there are these lines: “In the Cinema, as you can see/there is room for song, room for dance/and room for the spicy couplet/ imported from France”.23 Spanish newspapers leave little doubt as to the predominance of these variety shows on the popular stage at the turn of the last century. These sources also leave little doubt about the extent to which moving pictures were an important part of these shows and the lecturer, an important performer. Although no record has yet been found of what he did, or rather what he said, during these shows, it seems logical to suppose that the lecturer must have given the show a sense of continuity, combining commentary on the films with that on the variety acts, as is often the case in popular entertainment. As suggested in the cited fiction works, however, he most likely was obliged to link very different numbers, improvise, tell jokes, respond with wit, and, in short, control the attention of the audience, guiding and channelling its responses to what was happening on the screen and on stage.24 And this implies a further step in the integration of the cinema into the dominant popular culture in Spain at the time.25

Conclusion The national, no less than the local, definitely appears to be a useful concept for studying the role of the lecturer in early Spanish cinema as well as his performative personality in general. The Spanish lecturer had to be attentive to local dialects and, to a certain extent, to the various languages spoken in the country. Speech was his major means of mediation, and his audiences responded in a range of ways, from immediate connection to estrangement. At each end of this spectrum, audiences used their national or local consciousness to judge what they heard and saw.26 It is worth emphasising that, according to the evidence now available, a local consciousness was more important when it came to adapting places and characters to settings familiar to the viewer. A national consciousness came into play when it came to making marginal comments on current events, whether in the case of specific film images or in the case of newspapers and literary texts in which the moving picture theater served as a rhetorical device. Similarly, periodicals, memoirs, and works of fiction reveal how the lecturer was profoundly a part of the dominant popular Spanish culture. The lecturer’s language drew on the traditions of the farcical sainete and melodramatic folletin. Both of these played a major role in Spanish popular culture of the day and provided the lecturer

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with the rhetorical devices he used as part of his performance to explain the films. As a result of this borrowing, the lecturer linked the cinema closely to the country’s dominant popular culture.

Notes 1.

André Gaudreault and Denis Simard, « L’extranéité du cinéma des premiers temps : bilan et perspectives de recherche », in Jean A. Gili, Michèle Lagny, Michel Marie and Vicent Pinel (eds) Les vingt premières années du cinéma français (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle/AFRHC, 1995), 15–28.

2.

Germain Lacasse. Le Bonimenteur de vues animées : le cinéma muet entre tradition et modernité (QuébecParis: Nota-bene/Méridiens Klincksieck, 2000: 128–132).

3.

Over time, Borrás became a recognised writer who, in the 1920’s, also made a decisive contribution to the development of that other “sound universe”, the radio. Armand Balsebre. Historia de la radio en España, vol. I (1874–1939) (Madrid: Cátedra, 2001), 298–304). One of his first and best known programs was called Los sonidos del día (The Sounds of the Day), in which, it appears, everyday noises were reproduced.

4.

Francesc Espinet i Burunat, “L’exhibició del cinema a Catalunya, segons els egodocumentalistes, fins a la Guerra Civil”, Cinematograph 2 (1995): 223. The author includes the recollection of the writer Tomàs Roig concerning a makeshift cinema in the city of Girona at the beginning of the 20th century, when a group of persons located behind the screen used Catalan to put voices to the characters’ dialogues while the promoter and the projectionist in front of the screen commented on the film in Spanish.

5.

Joaquim Romaguera i Ramió. “Els ‘explicadors’ cinematogràfics Catalans”, Treballs de comunicació 4 (1993): 75.

6.

Jean Claude Seguin and Jon Letamendi. Los orígenes del cine en Bizcaia y sus pioneros (Bilbao: Filmoteca Vasca, 1998, 136).

7.

Francesc Espinet i Burunat, “L’exhibició del cinema a Catalunya, segons els egodocumentalistes, fins a la Guerra Civil” Cinematograph 2 (1995): 223.

8.

Rafael Garofano. El cinematógrafo en Cádiz: una sociología de la imagen (1896–1930), (Cádiz: Fundación Municipal de Cultura, Cátedra “Adolfo de Castro”, 1986), 137.

9.

The teatro por horas or por secciones consisted of “fragmenting the ‘uninterrupted program’ show, in the language of the day, which offered a single, lengthy work (of two, three or more acts) into various short one-act parts whose performance could not exceed one hour each”. Audiences could buy a ticket for one, several, or all of the works that made up the program. María Pilar Espín Templado, El teatro por horas en Madrid (1870–1910) (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Madrileños/Fundación Jacinto e Inocencio Guerrero, 1995), 37. In principle, this format had much in common with what was known in Russia, beginning in 1909, as “miniature theatre”. Valérie Pozner, “La ciné-déclamation en Russie”, in Giusy Pisano and Valérie Pozner (eds), Le muet a la parole (Paris: AFRHC, 2005), 140.

10.

Rafael Garofano. El cinematógrafo en Cádiz: una sociología de la imagen (1896–1930), (Cádiz: Fundación Municipal de Cultura, Cátedra “Adolfo de Castro”, 1986), 137.

11.

Alonso Zamora Vicente, “Tenía buena voz”, in Alonso Zamora Vicente. Examen de ingreso. Madrid años veinte, (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1991), 110–111.

12.

César M. Arconada. Tres cómicos del cine, (Madrid: Miguel Castellote, 1974 [1931]), 129. The one-act farce, ¡¡Al cine!! (“Let’s Go to the Movies!!”), reverses the process of re-location to reflect the Spanish context. At a screening of a moving picture, which begins by showing the “[a]rea around Constantinople, according to St. Matthew”, a viewer reproaches the lecturer by remarking that the images correspond to what then was a poor district of Madrid. La Guindalera (Ramón López-Montenegro), ¡¡Al cine!! (Madrid: R. Velasco, 1907), 20. Is the author making fun of the usual practice in early cinema of recreating events which had occurred elsewhere? Or is he parodying the lecturer’s habit of freely making up stories about the images?

13.

Primer Plano, 10 August 1941, n.p.

14.

López-Montenegro. ¡¡Al cine!!, 23.

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21 • Spanish lecturers and their relations with the national 15.

Alonso Zamora Vicente, “Tenía buena voz”, in Alonso Zamora Vicente, Examen de ingreso. Madrid años veinte (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1991), 111.

16. 17.

Guillermo Perrín, Miguel de Palacios, and Jerónimo Giménez. Cinematógrafo Nacional (Madrid: Sociedad de Autores Españoles, 1907), 18. Diario de Lérida, 23 August 1898, n.p.

18.

Diario de Lérida, 11 May 1899, n.p.

19.

20.

The zarzuela is a Spanish musical stage genre that dates back to the Spanish Baroque era (17th century) and survived into the 1930s. It reached its zenith in the mid-19th century, when it divided into a longer format, the zarzuela grande, which was similar to opera and dramatic in nature, and a shorter format, generally one or two acts in length and predominantly comic in nature. This latter genre mixed with the sainete (the one-act farce) and became one of the most common forms of the teatro por horas (“theater by the hour”). At the same time, the most popular songs and comic numbers became independent from the stage performance and part of the repertoire of the variety show. Mundo Gráfico, May 27, 1936, n.p.

21.

Estampa, 28 February 28, 1931, n.p.

22.

La Rioja, March 1913, n.p. “[E]l público toma a guasa/eso del “explicador”/y apenas éste desliza/alguna/inflexión de voz/alguna frase romántica/por algún diálogo hecho “ad hoc”/estalla en risas guasonas/y el abucheo es atroz.” This poem can also be seen as an example of the struggle between audience and lecturer for control of the show and of the lecturer’s fall from grace by this point in time, 1913. “En el cine, como ves/cabe el baile, cabe el cante/y cabe el cuplet picante/importado del francés.” José González Ampuero, José Rafart, and Vicente Romero, Su majestad el cine... (Salón Moderno) (Madrid: Imprenta A. Marzo, 1906), 11. Surely, the theatrical work that best reflects this situation is the comedy sketch, ¡¡Al cine!! (“Let’s Go to the Movies!”), in which the lecturer leads a session where the showing of films is interspersed with the “famous English singer Miss Palangani, coming to us from the Paris Opera”, the “presentation of the eminent Doctor Frescales and his marvellous automatons”, and a number by “Bella Salada. Famous French couplet singer and introducer of our popular songs to the Folies Bérgères ...” López-Montenegro, ¡¡Al cine!!, 20, 24, 28.

23.

24.

On this function of the Spanish lecturer, see also Luis Miguel Martínez, “Una figura desconocida del espectáculo finisecular español: el explicador cinematográfico”, in Javier Serrano Alonso, ed., Literatura modernista y tiempo del 98 (Santiago de Compostela: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, 2000), 215–229; Nancy Jane Membrez, The Teatro por Horas: History, Dinamics and Comprehensive Bibliography of a Madrid Industry, 1867–1922 (género chico, género ínfimo and early cinema). (Ph. D. Dissertation. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan, 1990); and Daniel Sánchez Salas, “El explicador español, a través de su reflejo cultural”, Archivos de la Filmoteca 48 (2004): 40–60.

25.

The lecturer, in other words, was also an entertainer charged with giving continuity to the mix of films and variety acts – or attractions – that characterized early cinema. I will have to leave to another opportunity a concrete discussion of the extent to which moving pictures were seen by Spanish audiences as something foreign and the role the Spanish lecturer may have played in mitigating this.

26.

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Joseph Dumais and the language of French-Canadian silent cinema •

Joseph Dumais and the language of French-Canadian

silent cinema

Germain Lacasse Cinema, nation, and language

“T

he rampant and winged vulgarity that is infiltrating our lives by means of the cinema, the gramophone, and even more so by the radio, the emporium and other establishments where articles, often overpriced, are sold cheap, is starting to trouble the informed public, people who value traditions as much as they value our forefathers’ language.”1 Between 1910 and 1960 or so, the religious authorities in Québec as well as the lay conservatives who supported them would voice that opinion, a quotation from Joseph Dumais, an odd character who was a renowned diction teacher in the early 20th century. He also wrote, published, declaimed and recorded a large number of texts almost entirely written in the vernacular. However, the main goal of that work was to parody the vernacular in order to criticize and discipline it, and to link national identity to an elitist and old-fashioned conception of the language. At the time, a rather strong nationalist movement was emerging in Québec. Its most important political representatives were Henri Bourassa and his newspaper, Le Devoir, and the historian Lionel Groulx and his review, L’Action française. But a nationalist sentiment was also developing in the cultural field. Its “founding text” was an article by the literature professor Camille Roy: “Pour la nationalisation de la littérature canadienne [In support of the nationalization of French-Canadian literature]”. In order to establish a “national”2 literature, the intellectuals of the time wanted to link it to the promotion of a French-Canadian language, which they saw as distinct from the French used in France.3 They founded the “Société du bon parler français [Society for Proper French]” and embarked on an exhaustive inventory and compilation of the language spoken in Québec. Probably because of the social model that they held dear, however, that language was defined above all as an earthy language, an old French whose vocabulary corresponded to a rural, traditionalist and Catholic economy, following the political model of monarchical France and the “classical” French symbolically associated with it. The nationalist sentiment also inspired other cultural models, less well known but as important to the history of Québec nationalism as the contributions of intellectuals and politicians. Those models appeared in the vernacular culture that emerged in the entertainment business where the cinema and theater, whose agents were often the same, came together. The language of writers and burlesque revue comedians, who were often stage actors and film narrators as well, was a hybrid language incorporating

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modern and urban Québec vocabulary. That language was peppered with Anglicisms, but that developed through borrowing from industry and economy the vocabulary of the contemporary world. When the “révolution tranquille [quiet revolution]” began in 1960 and the Québec governments decided to legislate in order to protect the French language in Québec, this vernacular called joual was gradually abandoned in favor of a more academic French, this time the French spoken and written in Québec, not in France. Reaching that point, however, assumed the very strong development of a joual literature and culture that for a long time took pride of place. No one explained its relevance better than the playwright Michel Tremblay, one of its main proponents. Born to a working-class family, Tremblay opted to write in the Montréal vernacular in reaction to both bourgeois theater and French imperialism: “The elite does not have the exclusivity of profoundly human problems. [... ] I prefer to have something to say in Québécois rather than nothing in French”.4 Along with the poet Gaston Miron, Tremblay was one of the main artisans and supporters of popular language in literature, and their works contributed to the emergence of this Québécois French that is now one of the foundations of Québec’s national culture. Yet, fifty years earlier in Montréal, a vernacular was blossoming, the ancestor of joual. It emerged in the language used by film narrators and stage actors who lectured American movies or adapted American burlesque plays. What was at stake is illustrated by the work of a paradoxical character. A man who relied on both the academic and popular languages, became a lecturer-projectionist whose goal was to improve the language and culture popularized by the cinema, and whose endeavors brought to the fore the importance of what he was fighting against: the modern and urban vernacular that had emerged in the world of the burlesque, with cinema as its mainstay. That language would later become one of the most important factors in the crystallization of a Québec culture.

Who was Joseph Dumais? Joseph Dumais was born in 1870 in Trois-Pistoles in the province of Québec.5 After studying in France around 1900 under the guidance of abbé Rousselot, a diction expert, he became a journalist in New England. In Manchester (New Hampshire), he directed a monthly magazine, Coeur français [French Heart], which promoted the French language and was aimed mainly at the very large French-Canadian community then living in the eastern United States. Dumais soon moved back to Montreal and in 1904, with the support of Archbishop Bruchési,6 launched a free public diction class in the Montcalm school. In 1905, he published in Montréal a manual of phonetics, Parlons français [Let’s speak French], in which his qualifications, but also his beliefs, are apparent: “ Are we degenerates? Has our national pride completely vanished? Is our patriotism dead? Are we going to allow a foreign idiom to weaken or even take over the French language that has been for us French-Canadians our very own safeguard, making it possible for us to maintain our laws and creed? Are we? I trust not.”7 Not surprisingly then, we find him on 5 June 1910, at the founding meeting of the “Comité d’étude de Montréal” de la “Société du bon parler français [the Montreal study group of the Society for Proper French]”. That meeting followed a conference by president Adjutor Rivard on regionalist poets.8 Also around that time, Dumais published historical essays, notably Héros d’autrefois: Jacques Cartier et Samuel de Champlain.9 In a lecture published in Le Devoir, Dumais criticized the moral weakness of the times and asked his readers to act as courageously as did Dollard des Ormeaux and other heroes from New France.10 In 1922, he was

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back in Québec City where he founded the Québec Conservatory and taught diction and proper French. He then became a lecturer at the Jacques Cartier teacher training college, the Marchand Academy, and the Collège de France where he set up an experimental phonetics laboratory. Until 1937, he published extensively on language and history: Le Parler de chez nous; Le Capitaine malouin Jacques Cartier, découvreur officiel du Canada; Vive le doux parler de France.11 In 1932, he launched L’Art de dire, a periodical on phonetics. One of his publications summarizes his goals: “The French Pride Institute, 57 St Jean Street, was founded by the undersigned in 1923, in order to give the fervent admirers of our beautiful French language an efficient means of protecting it against the invading Anglicisms, the terrible plague that is deflowering our language and taking away from it the singularly captivating charm of its musical qualities and limpid clarity”.12

Diction, poems and monologues His first book on diction is organized like a scientific treaty on the subject. It is divided into chapters on the correct pronunciation of vowels and consonants, and has pictures of the face of Dumais showing the position of lips and tongue to achieve the prescribed pronunciation. In the preface and in his comments, Dumais explains that the pronunciation targeted in his book is the pronunciation taught in France and that it is necessary to assimilate it well in order to promote Canadian French, which, according to him, has been debased by the English language and the American influence. In 1932, Dumais published a collection of his monologues and songs, many in vernacular French, in Ma boutique, comptoir aux coupons, stock étamine, linon, coton ouaté, toile écrue, catalognes et ”cheese cloth”: rimettes, chansonnettes et monologues. Here is a representative excerpt: “Edgardina Goodness, la plus smart des weaveuses, Runnait ses huit grands looms dans la big Oswego, Son boss, Patrick O’Cain, le scar’crow des snuffeuses, Irishman, red whiskers, importé de Sligo, La trouvait ben steady.”13 Here, Dumais is having fun imitating the “franglais” spoken by male and female factory workers who often lived and worked for a while in the United States and brought back the English vocabulary of industry. But such vocabulary could just as easily have been picked up in the Montréal factories, which belonged for the most part to English-speaking Canadian, British, or American owners. The language used almost exclusively in manufacturing was English, as well as in trade, business and billposting in the entire city at the time – and until around 1970. In other passages in the same book, Dumais reiterates his credo: speaking academic French is a must, as is fighting all the encroachments of a language that was urban, modern and foreign. «Je dis ceci sans amertume, Car, pour changer notre coutume, O quel effort!... Mais choisissez Entre le doux parler de France, Si prisé pour son élégance, Et ceux du pays!...Concluez.»14 For him and many Québécois at that time, the enemy resided south of the border, the source of modernity and its evils, a modernity which threatened the traditional culture and language of French-Canadians by bringing in all those calamities mentioned at the beginning: the cinema, gramophone, radio and emporium :

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«Si l’Oncle Sam restait chez lui Aujourd’hui, S’il allait nous couper les vivres : Radio, jazz, magazines, livres Et nous traiter en ennemis!»15

The other Dumais: vernacular Yet it is possible to draw a different portrait of Joseph Dumais, a portrait in which modernity and vernacular play an important role. At the beginning of the century, he performed in theaters under the stage name of “Du May d’Amour”. He wrote songs on current events and humorous pieces such as À bas la marine: pièces de vers et chansons d’actualité.16 From 1917 on, he made numerous recordings for the phonograph company, “His Master’s Voice”, in Montreal: humorous monologues starring “Père Ladébauche”, a character in a comic-strip published by the newspaper, La Presse. In the 1920s, he even performed at times with vaudeville companies. The list of Dumais’s records reveals his somewhat ambiguous stance. The majority of his recordings are monologues in which he plays Ladébauche, a character who became extremely popular in Québec around 1900, and who was played on stage by a variety of comedians and monologists. In 1907, there was even a small theater in Montréal called “Ladébauchoscope”, where motion pictures and monologues were presented. Ladébauche personified the country yokel, ill at ease in the city, baffled by technology, but whose credibility and dignity were restored in the end by his down-to-earth good sense. How Dumais played this character is unfortunately not clear: did he emphasize the ridicule? Did he maintain some dignity? Still, the titles of the monologues seem to indicate that, as in his written texts, Dumais opted for the vernacular in order to poke fun at the character’s archaic French and to promote a more refined language. Let us look at the titles of his records, all made in Montréal for the Berliner Gram-O-Phone Co.: Ladébauche: Anne veillée d’contes and Ladébauche: L’clog de blagueurs, both recorded in 1918; Ladébauche aux states, and Ladébauche: David Larouche le farceux, in 1921; Edgardina veut loafer quoted above, which was recorded in 1919 and also appears in the collection Ma boutique. Yet, in his recordings, one also finds monologues recited in a very academic French. He also recorded famous texts, such as “La leçon des érables” by Lionel Groulx, “Ô soldat de l’an deux” by Victor Hugo, “L’éternelle chanson” by Edmond Rostand, and “Les coquelicots”, a text by the Breton bard, Théodore Botrel.17 Dumais’s goal was undoubtedly to reach a wide audience with his message on the improvement of French. At the same time, he had no qualms about pocketing the small and big profits from his performances in vernacular. It seems, therefore, that, while his career was built on a crusade for the defense of “proper French” and against the popular language, he was not above adapting his shows for the benefit of more vernacular audiences.

Dumais lecturer–projectionist We do not know how Dumais came to be interested in the cinema, but his interest in language and his connections with the church probably played a part. Whatever the reasons, around 1913 he set up a company first called “Cinéma éducateur”, launched in the presence of the mayor of Montréal and Archbishop Bruchési.18 He claimed that his goal was to give a better image of the cinema, which he found too vulgar and too American. The reviews were favorable, such as that of Madeleine, a woman journalist: “With his ‘Cinéma Éducateur,’ Mr. Dumais aims to promote French cinema, written

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and acted in French, to counterbalance American cinema written in an often baroque English. It is my belief that such a laudable endeavor needs to be brought to the attention of all the film fans who are shocked by the ever-growing influence of Americanism that films and songs are introducing in our country (Fig. 1)”.19

Fig. 1913 advertisement for Joseph Dumais’ company, Le cinéma educateur.

Dumais then took part, around 1914, in the founding of a company, the “Société coopérative des conférenciers projectionnistes canadiens”, located at 319 rue Craig Ouest in Montréal. Its goal was to “Facilitate over the entire Federal (sic) territory the organization of periodic lectures with illuminated projections, made possible by a central Library providing prepared documents for a low price, and by large collections of selected images ... ”.20 The goals are underlined in a pamphlet probably written by Dumais and published by the Société coopérative: There are some people whose sole ambition and task is to project for auditors – or rather spectators – long sequences of silent views, one after another, to which, during the projection, they casually add here and there a few remarks taken from the script, or a banal running commentary that they improvise haphazardly. Preparation is the key to good improvisation. Since they have not taken the time to study their subject in depth or each individual view, these so-called projectionists do not always find an appropriate explanation [...] To the artists, whose job it is, we leave the SHOWS WITH PROJECTIONS. For our part, we give LECTURES WITH PROJECTIONS.21 This pamphlet, with its twenty or so pages, is above all a collection of quotations by French priests who set up La Bonne Presse in France, a church endeavor that used the magic lantern for social and religious education. Quoting their laudatory arguments, the pamphlet’s authors propose to do the very same thing in Canada, by buying and putting at the disposal of potential lecturers as wide a range of equipment as possible: “Chromatropes, kaleidoscopes, choreutoscopes, sidotropes, anosthoscopes, cycloidotropes, pandiscopes, megascopes, episcopes, etc., etc.”.22 We know that Dumais gave lectures with projections, as they are mentioned in the Montréal newspapers. The only cinema enterprise that the religious authorities supported was that of Dumais who showed religious films all over the place. Archbishop Bruchési himself was seen at one of these lectures: he came to deliver a long speech

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on the abolition of cinemas!23 One can surmise that Dumais’s lectures resembled his discourse on language and the Société coopérative’s pamphlet. Criticizing and challenging the “so-called projectionists”, he most certainly made it his duty to prepare academic explanations, which he must have read with a careful diction. If at times he gave himself permission to use the vernacular, it must have nearly always been in derision. We do not know if his venture met with success, nor how long the Société coopérative lasted. Neither do we know why Dumais left Montréal a few years later for Québec City, but he does not seem to have done any more projection lectures after leaving Montréal. Yet, his work in this domain, even if it did not last long, clearly shows the dilemma that intellectuals of the time faced when they reflected on the question of cinema within a national perspective. Québec as yet had no language policy; English was the language of business; the francophone culture was in its infancy; and nearly all films were imported. If there were intertitles, they were in English. The fact that films were imported largely explains the enduring presence of lecturers, whose main function was to translate the intertitles. But the opinion on their talent and level of culture was far from unanimous. Many of the criticisms were rather acerbic or condescending: For some days now, there has indeed been an ‘explainer’ for the views, but we are unable to tell if his commentaries are in French. Here are some of his own words describing a cock-and-bull story: “Les savages ils tusent tous les personnes d’un caravane, mais pas un petit gas et un petit fille trouvés par des mineurs dans la désert. (‘La désert’ sur l’écran est une forêt). Un vieu aveugle du chanquier des mineurs emmène le petits gas et le petit fille à la ville où que le vieux aveugle il ‘voira’ à leurs zinstructions. [The savages, they kills everybodys in a caravan, but not a little boy and a little girl founded by miners in the desert. (‘The desert’ on the screen is a forest). An old blind miner take the little boy and the little girl to the city where the old blind man, he ‘will sees’ to the education of them.]”24 The critics thought that lecturers were unnecessary, at least for them, and added that if the public wanted them, theater owners should at least hire educated lecturers who could speak good French. It seems to us today that the learned critics did not want to have the same lecturers as the “common” people. Hence the arguments and taunts of Dumais and other more elitist journalists who were discouraged by so much vernacular.

Vernacular and cinema The quotation above leads us to conclude that the critics’ attacks were sometimes justified. But with their elitism and attachment to a French culture and language from France and the bygones days of its history, the critics were unaware of a major cultural transformation that was taking shape in the entertainment world, and that was also linked to the emergence of a national sentiment and culture. Even if the burlesque artists did not all use a perfect language with perfect diction, they did not shy from using a new vocabulary, urban and modern. If at times the vocabulary was borrowed from British or American English, it was the outcome of the recent history of the French-Canadian community that had to learn English in order to work, be it in Canada or in the United States. We know very little about the language spoken by the lecturers, besides the criticisms leveled at them. To have an idea of the language they used, we can compare it to that of the numerous news “shows” in which several of them acted, and which were produced for the most part by one lecturer who was also a theater producer, Alex Silvio.

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These shows were written in a French very different from the one used in the traditional novels so highly praised by the Société du bon parler français. The language in the shows is very similar to the language that Dumais mocked in his books and lectures. It is no surprise that one of the subjects of predilection was the cinema, an urban and modern practice to which city-dwellers were introduced via the vernacular. An example is La grande revue de Lucien Boyer, performed at the Théâtre CanadienFrançais around 1920, under the direction of Silvio. Here is the song in scene 4, “On cinema”: Mais dans le Far West, voyez-vous Madame, on s’en fout (bis) Quand on va vous brûler vive En auto l’cow boy arrive La voitur’ tomb’ dans un trou Mais l’cowboy s’en fout, Il rampe sur les genoux De la jeun’ fill’ il coup’ les liens Et zigouill’ tous les Indiens […[ Voilà pourquoi Les bons bourgeois Maint’nant cirent leurs bottines Font la cuisine Et gueul’nt comme des putois Pendant c’temps-là C’est beau n’est-ce pas Tous les soirs leurs dometiques Dieu qu’c’est comique S’en vont au cinéma25 This song mocks the implausible developments in adventure movies set in the West, but also perhaps the immense popularity among the working-class public of the emerging western. Still, it was that same public that made the fortune of popular theater, as noted and deplored by the critics of the time who refused to see any value in these shows and continually put down their artistic value. This success was due in large part to a popular language, a mixture of the Parisian accent of the many actors from France, of the Québec vernacular spoken by the French-Canadian actors, and the urban and modern vocabulary often borrowed from Canadian or American English or from the world of cinema and entertainment. Even the titles of the revues are a good indication of the language in which they were written and performed: “A-e-o-u-hein!” (1910), “Acréyé! Le ‘sacre’ de Georges 5” ou “Le sacre de Georges 5” (1911), “Ça t’la bouche” (1911), “Psitt!! Gare au trou…ble” (1911?), “As-tu vu la r’vue” (1913), “Tape dans le tas” (1917), “Prend su’ toé!” (1919) “C’t’une forçante” (Alex Silvio and R. Léry, 1922), “Y’en a d’dans” (Alex Silvio and Eddy Gélinas, 1927). These revues were written and played by the same actors and comedians who performed in the “burlesque québécois” shows, themselves a mixture of comic vaudeville that most of the time included American movies lectured in the Montréal vernacular.26

Conclusion We have seen, with the example of Joseph Dumais, that the language of the silent cinema has in this case been an important factor in the emergence of a national identity

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among French-Canadians. But it is necessary to go beyond the “noiseless” history that texts and films offer us. We need to pay attention to the accents forgotten by history, and even in “elitist” texts we need to find the discourse that they attempt to censor or ban, and that ends up contaminating the national “culture”. From the monologues and the texts recorded by Dumais, we can extract the vernacular discourse that he was trying to eradicate and that he unwittingly helped to popularize and conserve. This vernacular discourse, which came to life in other strata of society, infiltrated the common culture to finally become one of the vectors of its consolidation. Indeed, in the 1960s, when the turmoil that hit Europe and the United States reached Québec, what we call “the Quiet Revolution”, this vernacular discourse was one of the components of Québec’s new national culture. When the playwright Michel Tremblay praised joual, his stance was in a way similar to that of Dumais. He was somewhat condescending towards this working-class language, but, instead of ridiculing it, he promoted it as a culture that needs to be accepted before it can develop or be refined. Recalling what Michel Foucault wrote on the author and the subject, we can surmise that Dumais, while an author, was also the transition point of divergent discourses that later found another form of crystallization and became what Deleuze would call “collective apparatus of utterance”: the Québec vernacular. It made possible the emergence of a culture, now recognized and institutionalized, whose vernacular is still today a factor of transformation, of evolution, towards an awareness, national or otherwise, that takes into account non-dominant and non-hegemonic discourses. Translation by Mireile Belloni

Notes 1.

Anonymous (probably Joseph Dumais), De la création de nouvelles forces pour la grandeur du Canada (Montréal: Société coopérative des conférenciers projectionnistes canadiens, 1913), n.p.

2.

We use quotation marks for “national” because at that time the French-Canadian nationalists wanted to stress their difference, without however questioning the Canadian political entity. Unlike today’s Québécois nationalism whose goal for the last fifty years has been the political separation of Québec.

3.

Marie-Andrée Beaudet, Langue et littérature au Québec, 1895–1914: l’impact de la situation linguistique sur la formation du champ littéraire (Montréal: L’Hexagone, 1991).

4.

Michel Tremblay, quoted by Karim Larose in La langue de papier. Spéculations linguistiques au Québec (Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2004), 240 and 244.

5.

These biographical notes on Dumais are taken from the biography written by Robert Thérien, a researcher in musicography, for the Gramophone virtuel website of the National Archives of Canada: http://www.collectionscanada.ca/gramophone/index-f.html. Information on Dumais’s work as a lecturer-projectionist comes from my own personal research in the newspapers of the time and various archival sources.

6.

Joseph Dumais, Parlons français (Montreal: J. Dumais, 1905), III.

7.

Ibid., VII.

8.

Anonymous, “Le comité d’étude de Montréal”, Bulletin du parler français au Canada 9 (September 1910 – September 1911): 111.

9.

Joseph Dumais, Héros d’autrefois: Jacques Cartier et Samuel de Champlain (Québec: l’Action sociale, 1913).

10.

Joseph Dumais, “Le combat du Long Sault”, Le Devoir (4 June 1910), 2, (6 June 1910), 2, and (7 June 1910), 2 – quoted in Patrice Groulx, “Entre histoire et commémoration. L’itinéraire Dollard de l’abbé Groulx”, in Les cahiers d’histoire du Québec au XXème siècle 8 (autômne 1997): 56.

11.

Joseph Dumais, Le Parler de chez nous, Québec: J. Dumais, 1922; Le Capitaine malouin Jacques Cartier, découvreur officiel du Canada, Québec: La Fierté française, 1934; and Vive le doux parler de France (Québec: J. Dumais, 1937).

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Du May d’Amour (pseudonym of Dumais), Ma boutique. Comptoir aux Coupons, étamine, linon, coton ouaté, toile écrue, catalognes”,cheese cloth”, Rimettes Chansonnettes et Monologues (Québec: La Fierté française, 1932).

13. 14.

Ibid., 119. Ibid., 128.

15.

Ibid., 17. The last stanza reads as follows: “Qu’un bon jour Sam reste chez lui,/ Cher ami,/ Nous pourrons raviver la flamme/ À nos foyers, scruter notre âme/ Auprès du grand fleuve endormi./ Reprendre nos vieilles coutumes, / Nos chants joyeux, nos gais costumes/ Et, désormais plus assagis,/ Chasser bien loin de nos logis/ l’ennemi.”

16. 17.

Joseph Dumais, À bas la marine: pièces de vers et chansons d’actualité (Montréal: Joseph Dumais, 1910). Dumais’s monologues are available on the Gramophone virtuel website, as quoted above, in endnote 6.

18.

Anonymous, “Le cinéma éducateur”, La Patrie (21 November 1913): 7.

19. 20.

Madeleine, “Chronique”, La Patrie (11 May 1914): 4. Anonymous, De la création de nouvelles forces pour la grandeur du Canada, n.p.

21.

Ibid., 4. The Society loudly proclaimed its moral objectives: “On the other hand, as the cinematograph, so ubiquitous today, is not always moral (since there is no control over the choice of topics), there will never be a sufficient number of organizations focusing on instructive and honest projections to counterbalance its nefarious influence.”

22. 23.

Ibid., 17. Anonymous, “Le cinéma éducateur”, La Presse (22 November 22 1914): 18.

24.

Trebla (pseudonym), “Meli-Melo. À propos du Bennett’s Nouveautés”, Le Canard (10 January 1909): 4. The journalist continues with the following: “In other words, a true diction class in mumbo-jumbo. (…) Along with a strong English accent (to please the boss), and delivered like a funeral service, in a flat voice, while the clarinet plays harmonious ‘jarring notes’. (…) The funniest part is that the explainer’s name on the program is very Canadian and very French. But it does not work.”

25.

Lucien Boyer, La grande revue de Lucien Boyer, program of the Théâtre Canadien Français (Montréal, circa 1920): 6. See Germain Lacasse, Le Bonimenteur de vues animées: le cinéma muet entre tradition et modernité (Québec/Paris: Nota-bene/Méridiens Klincksieck, 2000).

26.

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Localizing serials: Translating daily life in Les Mystères de New-York (1915) •

Localizing serials:T ranslating daily life in Les Mystères de New-York (1915 )

Rudmer Canjels ear the end of 1915, the young French writer Philippe Soupault witnessed an unprecedented cinematic inundation that flooded Paris and left distinctive markers in French daily life. One day you saw huge posters, as long as snakes, stretching out along the walls. At each street corner a man, his face covered with a red handkerchief, was pointing a revolver at the unconcerned passersby. You thought you heard galloping, a motor kicking over, screams of death. We descended on the cinemas and understood that everything had changed. Pearl White’s smile appeared on the screen; this almost ferocious smile announced the upheavals of the new world. We finally understood that the cinema was not a perfected toy but the terrible and magnificent flag of life.1 The film to which Soupault was referring was an American serial that in France was called Les Mystères de New-York. The menacing revolver and the red handkerchief belonged to a criminal who terrorized the famous American actress Pearl White for many episodes. However, this serial was not exactly the same as the one previously released in the USA. This serial version was positioned quite firmly in its new French setting, not only given a different structure but also an adjusted content. An important tool to accomplish this was the tie-in, which Soupault most likely took note of since the posters of Les Mystères de New-York carried the inscription: “Grand Roman Cinéma Américain adapté par Pierre Decourcelle, publié par Le Matin” (Fig. 1). The present, past, and future episodes of a serial did not only refer to and interact with one another, but they also had a connection to the extra-cinematic world, confronting daily life. This essay will examine how French customs, speech, and views were used to bridge the gap between American and French culture, and how patriotic undertones and anti-German slurs were used in a war-related context to accommodate and appeal to national sensibilities. If seriality could manifest itself in several forms globally (and not only in short American serials), at the same time it could absorb and integrate locality.2 The serial format emerged, therefore, as a particularly effective global film form through an inventive mixture of globalization and localization. Homogeneity and heterogeneity, like the global and local, are thus not necessarily each other’s opposites.3

N

Transmedia expositions Marketing played an important role in the success of film serials, and the tie-in was among the most effective marketing strategies. Pace and timing also were essential. The

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Fig. 1. Poster for Les Mystères de New-York.

American newspapers’ tie-in told the story of the film serial episode concurrently exhibited in movie theaters. The tie-ins created a resonating vibe of seriality that helped push distribution and consumption in a rhythmic manner, as was first witnessed in August 1912 with the Edison serial What Happened to Mary? It was only in 1915 when American serials had already been popular for several years and were widely publicized, that the European film market was introduced to the serial. Without question the most successful star of the American serial was Pearl White. She was not known in Europe before the release of her serials, but massive marketing campaigns soon remedied that.4 Her early serials were produced by Pathé Exchange, the American arm of the French company, Pathé-Frères, and directed by the Frenchman Louis Gasnier, who had left France in 1910. It was thus through a boomerang effect that the first American serial to be released on a large scale in France was Pathé’s Les Mystères de New-York.5 Les Mystères de New-York was not an original Pearl White serial, but a combination of three Pathé-Exchange serials that in America had been released in succession in 1914 and 1915. Each starred the famous serial queen Pearl White: the fourteen-part The Exploits of Elaine (1914), the ten-part The New Exploits of Elaine (1915), and the twelve-part The Romance of Elaine (1915). For their French release, the original episodes were variously edited, with some left out or left untouched. The result was a French serial of twenty-two episodes, each of which maintained more or less the same length as the original – around 600 meters – and altogether followed the narrative order of the three American serials. Elaine Dodge (Pearl White) with the help of Craig Kennedy (Arnold Daly) now has to deal successively with The Clutching Hand (Sheldon Lewis), the evil Wu Fang (Edwin Arden) and the international spy Marcus Del Mar (Lionel

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Barrymore). Pathé released the serial’s first episode in at least 49 Parisian cinemas in France on 4 December 1915.6 Up until 29 April 1916, a new episode was released each week, while at the same time a new installment of Pierre Decourcelle’s serial novel appeared in the newspapers. Although it went unmentioned in the novel or advertisements, Decourcelle did not start writing from scratch but relied heavily on the three American serial novels that the well-known American detective writer, Arthur B. Reeve, had produced expressly as tie-ins to the film serials. In the USA, Reeve already had introduced the popular character of Craig Kennedy in the December 1910 issue of the Hearst-owned Cosmopolitan. A Columbia University professor as well as a scientific detective, Kennedy quickly became known as the American Sherlock Holmes. Kennedy used his knowledge of chemistry to solve cases, but he also invented numerous devices such as a wireless telephone, a wireless fax machine, and a portable seismograph that could distinguish the footsteps of various individuals. In the three Elaine stories, the title character functions not so much as a sidekick, or a Dr. Watson, but more as an independent young woman whose actions sometimes assist and sometimes endanger Kennedy. Perhaps not unexpectedly, the two fall in love with each other. The serial instalments connected to the Pathé films first appeared in the Sunday editions of Hearst-syndicated newspapers and later were bound together and published as a single novel.7 Much like other American serials (including those of later date), the Elaine film serials did not engage in significant character development or dramatic complexity. Sensation and shock were more important than psychological insight. Compared to the surviving film episodes of The Exploits of Elaine, Reeve’s novelization added psychological and dramatic depth to the relationship between Kennedy and Elaine.8 The two characters openly reflect on the dangerous situations they encounter, Kennedy’s scientific experiments and gadgets are more fully detailed, and narrative coincidences are more logically explained. In general, the serial novel enriched and contextualized the film’s fast-paced narratives.9 Yet the American tie-in nevertheless remained much simpler when compared to the elaborate French version.

American and French crimes: changing and creating a narrative Each week, for twenty-two weeks, a different episode of Les Mystères de New-York was exhibited in Paris, while, on a daily basis, the city’s Le Matin and many French provincial newspapers were printing Decourcelle’s story. Concurrently, the publishing house La Renaissance du Livre was releasing weekly booklets that for 25 centimes offered a novelization of a film episode (Fig. 2). Later these booklets went on sale bound together as a book. Because of its close ties to the serial novel, the film serial became known in France as ciné-roman.10 Pierre Decourcelle was a popular fiction writer, who had composed the successful novel Les Deux gosses and, with Eugène Guggenheim in 1908, had co-founded the film production company, SCAGL.11 Les Mystères de New-York benefited from Decourcelle’s writing skills as well as his ability to translate a story from one medium into another. Compared to Reeve’s novel, Decourcelle’s Les Mystères de New-York elaborated much more on the story and its characters. Sometimes Decourcelle translated parts of Reeve’s text word by word, but more often he developed the story in inventive and creative ways. This narrative expansion is evident, for instance, in the gunman Limpy Red, a minor character that appears early in both the film and the novel. Reeve introduces him as “a red-headed, lame, partly paralysed crook”.12 When Limpy Red, pressed by Elaine’s

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Fig. 2. Booklet cover of the first episode of Les Mystères de New-York.

father, snitches on his evil boss and gives the father an envelope with directions to The Clutching Hand’s whereabouts, Reeve writes: When Limpy Red, still trembling, left the office of Dodge earlier in the evening, he had repaired as fast as his shambling feet would take him to his favourite dive upon Park Row. There he might have been seen drinking with any one who came along, for Limpy had money – blood money – and the recollection of his treachery and revenge must both be forgotten and celebrated.13 When Limpy goes to another “dive” to drink some more, one of The Clutching Hand’s associates kills him with a lead pipe. In Les Mystères de New-York, Le Bancal Rouge (as Limpy Red is called) is given an extended background and turns out to be a more interesting character. Le Bancal Rouge used to be a rifleman in music halls and circuses, but became addicted to alcohol and as a result came under the influence of La Main Qui Étreint (The Clutching Hand). After revealing the whereabouts of the evil gang, Le Bancal Rouge goes to a pub, not to drink away his blood money, but to seek safety in the company of other people before being escorted to the port for a promised passage to France on the ship “La Lorraine”. He had received enough money to build a new life, and he dreams of opening a bar in Paris. While waiting, he orders a bottle of extra dry Pommery champagne, rather than a German brand.14 After several hours of hoping in vain for his transport to arrive, a rather slatternly, strong-armed, red-haired woman of German descent with a glass eye

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Fig. 3. Postcard of La Lorraine.

starts flirting with him, trying to profit from his apparent wealth. Getting restless and drunk he tries to perform a Wilhelm Tell trick on her, but she refuses. When the bar closes, Le Bancal Rouge leaves frightened and full of doubt. Outside the bar an accomplice of La Main Qui Étreint kills him with a sand-filled pouch. Through narrative expansion and precise detail, Decourcelle succeeds in producing a more compelling story than the basic and rather stilted version that Reeve had written. Decourcelle often employs a more verbose prose style to describe a setting that, when compared to the film version, appears more suitable to the story and the characters. In the process, he also includes historical references and real-world insights. “La Lorraine”, for instance, was the name of an actual ship that had sailed between Le Havre and New York between 1900 and 1914 (Fig. 3). During the war the ship was used as an armed merchant cruiser and renamed Lorraine II.15 Lorraine was, of course, also a French province that, together with Alsace, had been lost during the Franco-Prussian war in 1871, and which France wished to recover during the World War I. Similarly, the reference to Pommery champagne can be linked to the Franco-Prussian war as well as to World War I. Champagne was probably the region that had experienced more violent invasions than any other part of France. At the time, the German front line was near the soon-to-be-blown-up Pommery Chateau.16 Overall the French novelization gained patriotic connotations by expressing explicitly anti-German feelings. Le Bancal Rouge’s rejection of German champagne was only the first of these small but significant changes. Others make allusions to a common French history as well as French clichés and customs. Constructed this way, the French novelization eased the domestic acceptance of the American import. Pathé had already begun restructuring itself to act more like a distribution company, at the expense of regularized production. Due to exhibitors’ increased demand for films, in 1915, the circulation of American films appeared like a benign invasion.17 Judging from advertisements and articles in film journals, Les Mystères de New-York probably was the most famous new American film in France, with the exception of the short films starring Charlie Chaplin (known in France as Charlot).

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Serialized war relations invade the fabric of life While in America most serialized novels and films appeared once a week (usually on Sunday), in France the fictional serialization was a daily affair. The need for a much longer story, together with the fact that, like other serial writers, Decourcelle was probably paid by the word, may explain both the author’s verbose prose and his expansion of Le Bancal Rouge’s exploits. The resulting richer fictional world tended to oppose anything German but also to conjoin France and America, the Old World and the New World. Although the story remained set in the USA, the most significant change in the “French adaptation” was the substitution of the Frenchman Justin Clarel for the American leading character Craig Kennedy. By contrast, no mention of France occurs in any of the original novels. In the French version Justin Clarel is introduced as a famous fearless Frenchman, holding two positions, one as Professor at Columbia University and the other as crime detective. Early in the novel, a flashback explains to the reader why Clarel went to America. Years before he had told his godfather and mentor Alphonse Bertillon that he wanted to start a private practice that researched the most difficult police cases. At which point Bertillon replied: Between you and me, the private police service in Paris and in the whole of France generally does not get good press. It consists for the most part of former police inspectors who left their job because of some bothersome affair or disagreement with their chief. Consequently, we do not hold the profession in the high regard that you rightly aspire to.18 Apart from Decourcelle’s obvious critique of the Parisian private police force, other references give a realistic touch to the narrative. Clarel’s mentor Alphonse Bertillon, for instance, was a real historical figure who had died just one year earlier. As a Parisian police officer and renowned biometrics researcher, he had developed the first scientific method of criminal identification.19 Given his reputation and his recent death, it is very likely the reading public knew full well who Bertillon was. In the novelization, Justin Clarel follows his advice, and within two years he achieves fame in America, as his mentor had predicted. In addition to references to contemporary French figures and events, it is the dialogue between Clarel and Elaine that showcases the most vivid contrasts between their two countries. Their exchanges abound with clichés about the courteous, passionate, and seductive Frenchman, references to the dispiriting French bureaucracy (“Et, dans cette France ouverte à toutes les grandes idées, capable des élans les plus généreux, cette montagne demeure obstinément debout.”), French vernacular expressions (“dont on dit en France”), as well as typical Parisian or French customs.20 America also is often stereotypically presented as the “land of opportunity” and the emblem of modern progress where one can make a career more easily than in Europe. Yet negative aspects of American culture do crop up. For instance, like “many young American ladies”, Elaine likes to spend large sums of money and goes on a shopping spree in search of antiques, even though she already possesses “many of those useless things with which the rich fill their lives and drawers”.21 The serial novelization thus gives us a French view of French reality, a typical French perspective on America, and a rather conventional American perspective on France. The strongest allusion to the serial’s extra-fictional world, however, involved World War I, which was seriously impacting Parisian life. The Romance of Elaine (1915), the third serial instalment of the Elaine adventures, was one of the first film serials in America to extensively deal with a foreign threat (most so-called American “preparedness serials” would be produced from 1916 on). In both

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the film and the serialized novel, there is mention of foreign spies who control a secret submarine base and who manage to steal Craig Kennedy’s wireless torpedoes. In Reeve’s serial novel, the spies’ nationality was never mentioned; they remained simply “foreign”.22 Only when the international spy Marcus del Mar (who is the head of the Anti-American League) faces certain death after his submarine is torpedoed does he reveal his German nationality in a final note addressed to “his” emperor.23 At the time of the release of The Romance of Elaine in the summer of 1915, American entry into the war was still nearly two years away. While Reeve never mentions either France or Germany, his account recorded a growing sense of uneasiness about the war that was devastating Europe. Thus while the action of the American serial seems to take place during the war, the action of Les Mystères de New-York is set almost entirely before the war: only the last episode narrativizes the outbreak of the conflict by referring to a devious foreign plot to cut the Atlantic cable that would inform the USA about France’s entrance into the war (in Reeve’s version the spies try to cut the cable without any explanation of the objective). From episode sixteen on, however, the French serial makes cursory war references that bring Clarel’s Frenchness into relief. Because the first episode suggested that Clarel had left France in search of fortune and fame, the question remained whether he was a true Frenchman or an assimilated American. At the time, official French culture did not view immigration to the USA favourably. Instead, France discouraged that by arguing that French citizens did not need to emigrate. Immigration figures confirm that of the more than 20 million immigrants that went to the USA between 1870 and 1914, only a few tens of thousands were French.24 The inclusion of war references thus served the purpose of drawing Clarel much nearer to what his native France was going through. In episode sixteen it was made very clear that not only had the expatriate Clarel remained French, but also that it was because of his Frenchness that he had been successful in the USA, both personally and professionally. In all of his aspirations, hopes, and dreams, he had remained deeply a son of French soil. And everything that harmed France, no matter how small the affront, struck his heart. The ups and downs of life had forced him to seek happiness abroad, but he had long wondered how in exile he could serve the country that had nurtured him and from which he was temporarily separated.25 While still back in France, Clarel had understood the military danger posed by neighboring Germany and had devoted his technical expertise to counteracting such a threat. Years ago he had realized the insatiable desires of Germany and understood that despite a peaceful façade the predatory Kaiser was only waiting for the opportunity to unsheathe his concealed sword and throw himself on his enemies lulled in a false sense of security.26 Thus only by going to the USA, where he could find more opportunities to develop his radio-controlled torpedo, could Clarel save France (Fig. 4). He shared his invention with the American government (in gratitude for its hospitality) under the sole condition that, upon completion, the USA would immediately share the invention, but only with France. “Only the two sister republics would have the monopoly over the remarkable machine, which would ensure them, from a naval point of view, an incomparable advance and an uncontested superiority.”27 The last episodes of Les Mystères de New-York concern the search for Julius Del Mar who had stolen Clarel’s torpedoes. In the end everything goes well, and together with the US Navy Clarel upsets the German plot to sink ships carrying vital reinforcements

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Fig. 4. Production still in which Clarel shows Elaine a miniature version of his torpedo invention.

to France. Clarel and Elaine reunite after these adventures, but where the American novel and film end, the serial novel of Les Mystères de New-York continues. Decourcelle has Clarel and Elaine leave for France on 9 August 1914 aboard “La Lorraine”, “exactly seven days after the declaration of war”.28 They promise to marry one another when the war has been won. In France, Clarel offers his newly developed military device to the French government, while Elaine nurses the wounded. The brilliant son of France thus returns to the country that needs him most, immediately upon the outbreak of war. Clarel brings with him the aid of the USA, in the person of Elaine as well as the US Navy. Narrative closure could not be complete, however, because by then the actual war was far from over. The marriage that would define the story’s happy ending (an event absent in the original American novel) could only come years later, after the war with Germany had been won.29 The war-related narrative of Les Mystères de New-York (as well as other serials that would follow) darkly complemented daily life in France. Newspapers announced the release of new episodes next to obituaries, remembrances, and funds for widows, while in cinemas the screening of new episodes alternated with special War Bulletins. According to an unidentified American source from June 1916, many French soldiers read Elaine’s adventures in Le Matin (a figure of two million was cited) and were eager to see her exploits on screen during their six-day leaves. Because normally it would have been impossible to see all the episodes in such a short time, The War Office has asked Pathé-Frères to arrange to show the entire serial each week for the benefit of soldiers on furlough. Accordingly a circuit of screenings has been arranged, and Pearl White now plays to vast audiences of bearded men in uniform, fresh from the shock of war, who find in the great Pathe serial a much needed diversion.30

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Although the USA had not yet joined the war and American anti-German films such as The Kaiser, the Beast from Berlin (1918) had yet to be made, the serialized novels and the newspapers that published them, such as Le Matin, engaged simultaneously in both anti-German and pro-American propaganda. They portrayed the image of a rescuing America that held France close to its heart and shared its fears.31 While before the war the relationship with America had been a non-issue, now the bond with its “sister republic” was exaggerated. From 1916 until the end of the war, the French press idolized President Wilson, published many articles on America’s love for France (including stories about female American volunteers at the front), and indulged in a highly rhetorical pro-Americanism.32 This form of propaganda was not unique to Les Mystères de New-York. Other French novelizations of Pearl White serials added plenty of anti-German propganda that were absent in the original American story. In Marc Mario’s Les Exploits de Elaine (The Perils of Pauline, 1914), Karl Summers sacrifices his life for Germany in an attempt to sink an American submarine; in Jean Petithuguenin’s Le Masque aux dents blanches (The Iron Claw, 1916), Karl Legar pledges allegiance to the D.U.A. group (standing for Deutschland Uber Alles); and in Marcel Allain’s Le Courrier de Washington (Pearl of the Army, 1916), Major Brent kills himself after confessing his loyalty to Germany.33 References to French life were less present in these productions, perhaps because the character of Pearl White had no French companion. Her concern for the war in France, which was still explicit, therefore expressed a more American point of view. Because most of the film episodes of Les Mystères de New-York are lost or not available for research, the question of how much the film serials drew from the nationalism of their literary sources cannot be comprehensively answered. Further, the overall effect that these popular adaptations had in France remains unclear.34 The nationalistic tone of the serial novels, however, is evident from advertisements published in the trade press. From the thirteenth episode on, Pathé proudly described the serial’s narrative development in terms of Clarel’s patriotic work for France.35 While in the USA the serial novel had simply to match, and perhaps elaborate on, the film serial, in France the serial novel contextualized the American narrative into French culture. Eventually, it became a mouthpiece for French views of America. French adjustments to the American format of the Pearl White serials provide a significant example of how serials became worldwide sensations. Because of their resilience, serial content and form could be made to respond to national sensibilities, as is evident in local promotional techniques.36 The production of Les Mystères de New-York, in conjunction with its novelization, proved an effective way to adjust to French culture. By adding anti-German and pro-American views and adjusting to French history and everyday life, the French film serial softened its original American cultural imprint and transformed its story to more closely connect with French experience. This form of creative adaptation thus went far beyond the usual practice of translating intertitles and was soon applied to other American film serials distributed in France throughout the war and even into the 1920s, when serials from other countries (including Germany) were imported. Under the stress of war, localization transformed a supposedly national body of “foreign” films into a highly flexible transnational film form.

Notes 1.

Paul Hammond (ed.), The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on the Cinema (3rd edn) (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2000), 56. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

2.

I have written about distribution practices and adjustments involving silent films serials in various countries in my unpublished doctoral dissertation, “Beyond the Cliffhanger: Distributing Silent Serials. Local Practices, Changing Forms, Cultural Transformation”, Utrecht University, 2005.

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This relates to the concept of “glocalization” theorized by the American sociologist Roland Robertson to address “the dynamics of the production and reproduction of difference and, in the broadest sense, locality”. Robertson, “Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity”, in Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash, and Roland Robertson (eds), Global Modernities (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995), 29.

4.

About the same time that Les Mystères de New-York was released in Paris, The Exploits of Elaine opened in Britain. There Pathé-Frères launched what was claimed at the time to be the greatest publicity campaign on record. “The vogue of the serial”, The Bioscope (1 July 1915): 51; and “‘Elaine’ Makes Wonderful Showing in England”, Moving Picture World (23 October 1915): 637.

5.

The claim that Les Mystères de New-York was the first American serial shown in France cannot hold up to close scrutiny. According to both the British and American trade press, the serial Trey of Hearts (1914) was being screened just prior to the release of Les Mystères de New-York. See The Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly (23 September 1915): 75; and Moving Picture World (30 October 1915): 957.

6.

Advertisement, Ciné-journal 327 (20 November 1915).

7.

In addition to the Elaine serials, Arthur B. Reeve wrote the screenplays for other serials such as The House of Hate (1918), Houdini’s The Master Mystery (1919), The Tiger’s Trail (1919), and The Radio Detective (1926) as well as the newspaper serialization of Tarzan the Mighty (1928). John Harwood, “Arthur B. Reeve and the American Sherlock Holmes”, The Armchair Detective 10.4 (1977): 354–357; J. Randolph Cox, “A Reading of Reeve: Some Thoughts on the Creator of Craig Kennedy”, The Armchair Detective 11.1 (1978): 28–33.

8.

I have viewed and compared episodes eight, nine, and ten from The Exploits of Elaine, previously available through Grapevine Video and Glenn Video Vistas.

9.

The novelization did not function as an essential tool for comprehension, as Ben Singer claims, analysing a different serial. For more on the function of the serial novelization, see Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001) and Shelley Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture after the Nickelodeon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

10.

Richard Abel, French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915–1929 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 72.

11.

SCAGL (Société cinématographique des auteurs et gens de lettres) was set up with the purpose of monopolizing film adaptations in order to diversify the activities of Pathé-Frères. Decourcelle left SCAGL around 1914. Louis Mercanton filmed an eight-part serial of Les Deux gosses in 1924. Richard Abel, The Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema, 1896–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 40–41.

12.

Arthur B. Reeve, The Exploits of Elaine. A Detective Novel. (New York: Hearst’s International Library, 1915), 6.

13.

Ibid., 15.

14.

Pierre Decourcelle, Les Mystères de New-York (Paris: Edouard Mignot, 1916), 20.

15.

N.R.P. Bonsor, North Atlantic Seaway: An Illustrated History of the Passenger Services Linking the Old World with the New (rev. edn) (Cambridge: Stephens, 1978), 658.

16.

Frederic Coleman, From Mons to Ypres with French: A Personal Narrative (London: S. Low, Marston, 1916), 179.

17.

William Uricchio, “The First World War and the Crisis in Europe”, The Oxford History of World Cinema, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (ed.) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) 63. See also Abel, French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915–1929.

18.

Decourcelle, Les Mystères de New-York, 10–11.

19.

The Bertillon system, based on the classification of skeletal and other body measurements and characteristics together with a mug shot, was officially adopted in France in 1888 and soon after in other countries. On Bertillon, see Henry Taylor Fowkes Rhodes, Alphonse Bertillon, Father of Scientific Detection (London: George G. Harrap, 1956).

20.

Decourcelle, Les Mystères de New-York, 224, 460.

21.

Ibid., 243, 338.

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Arthur B. Reeve, The Romance of Elaine (New York: Hearst’s International Library, 1916), 194.

23.

Ibid., 350. The sympathies of the spy could also lie with the Austrians or the Japanese. Although Japan was on the side of the Allies, several preparedness serials, such as Patria (1917), made use of a threat from the East. Jacques Portes, Fascination and Misgivings: The United States in French Opinion, 1870–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 343.

24. 25.

Decourcelle, Les Mystères de New-York, 364 (emphasis in original).

26. 27.

Ibid. Ibid., 459.

28.

Ibid., 527.

29.

Pearl White continued to have a close relationship with France. In 1918, she married actor and World War I veteran Major Wallace McCutcheon, who would also perform with her in the serial The Black Secret (1919). After a failed attempt to go into features with Fox and the disappearance and subsequent divorce of her husband who suffered from emotional war trauma, she left the USA for France in 1922. In Paris she successfully headlined a Montmartre revue called Tu perds la boule (You Lost the Ball). In 1923 she made her last American serial, Plunder, and a year later her last feature, Terreur (The Perils of Paris, 1924), in France. She died in 1938 in the American hospital in Neuilly and was buried in the Passy cemetery in Paris. Buck Rainey, Those Fabulous Serial Heroines: Their Lives and Films (Metuchen, N.J: Scarecrow, 1990), 224–239. Further information about Pearl White’s private life is not very reliable. She wrote an unreliable autobiography called Just Me (New York: G.H. Doran, 1919), and later there appeared a dubious biography, The Fearless, Peerless Girl (South Brunswick: A. S. Barnes, 1969), composed in a fictional dialogue style. “Pearl White the idol of the French soldiers”, June 1916. Unidentified source found in the Pearl White clipping file, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, New York.

30. 31.

French serial novels with anti-German themes were already circulating as early as 1912. See Hans-Jörg Neuschäfer, Dorothee Fritz-El Ahmad, and Klaus-Peter Walter, Der französische Feuilletonroman: Die Entstehung der Serienliteratur im Medium der Tageszeitung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1986), 322–331.

32.

Charles W. Brooks, America in France’s Hopes and Fears, 1890–1920 (New York: Garland, 1987), 320–372. Marcel Allain was joint-author of the famous pre-war French series of Fantômas novels.

33. 34.

In episodes one, two, and fourteen (previously available through Glenn Video Vistas), there are no references to war or patriotic subjects, and the intertitles simply mention that Clarel was French (“le célèbre détective scientifique français”). As noted, war-related material made their way into the print version only from episode sixteen on. Lobster Films may be in possession of more episodes of Les Mystères de New-York, but the extant 28mm nitrate print needs to be restored before it can be viewed. Apart from statements in the press that Les Mystères de New-York was successful, this can also be deduced from the several parodies that appeared in 1915, such as Jacques Feyder’s Le Pied qui étreint or Max Linder’s Max et la main qui étreint.

35. 36.

Advertisement, Ciné-journal 341 (20 February 1916). The latter, for instance, can be seen with serial productions of Louis Feuillade, such as Les Vampires (1915–1916) or Judex (1916). Canjels, “Beyond the Cliffhanger”, 86–88 and 197–207. For more on Feuillade, see Francis Lacassin, Louis Feuillade: Maître des lions et des vampires (Paris: Bordas, 1995).

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PART IV Genre and the “National”

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Seeing the world while staying at home: slapstick, modernity and American-ness •

Seeing the world while staying at home

Amanda R. Keeler etween 14 January 1915 and 22 April 1915, Mabel Normand and Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle released six films in the “Mabel and Fatty” series for Keystone Films, including Mabel and Fatty’s Wash Day, Mabel and Fatty’s Simple Life, Fatty and Mabel at the San Diego Exposition, Mabel, Fatty and the Law, Mabel and Fatty’s Married Life, and Mabel and Fatty Viewing the World’s Fair at San Francisco. A year later they made a seventh film in the same series titled Fatty and Mabel Adrift, longer and more elaborate than the previous six mentioned.1 Throughout the 1910s Normand and Arbuckle made numerous films together outside of the seven discussed in this essay, but I choose to examine these films for several reasons. For one, that these films share similar titles clearly suggests that they were intended as a series. For another, they form both a diegetic and non-diegetic relationship to one another, between the characters in the films and through their production company, Keystone. As a whole the series also speaks directly to questions of national identity. Lastly, the seven films are connected by genre, as slapstick films, with the associated fare of bodies acting out, propelling themselves through the air and water, wildly down streets and sidewalks, over rooftops, and in automobiles. Aside from these similarities, however, the films diverge thematically into two categories – five domestic situation comedies and two exposition films – each group with distinct and provocative elements. This essay intends to show how each sub-group examines national identity in relation to modernity and how the films are situated in the greater American society through their subject matter and setting.

B

Do the “Mabel and Fatty” films complicate existing accounts of early cinema’s engagement with American identity? In “The ‘Imagined Community’ of the Western”, Richard Abel makes a compelling argument for the western genre’s inclusion and participation in American national identity formation. Abel writes that his “overall aim is to argue for the significance of the western – a crucial instance of what Miriam Hansen has called the ‘new sensibility’ of ‘action’ that characterized American modernity – to a discussion of the intersection of those long-contested cultural artifacts of historical consciousness – genre and nation – in the ‘transitional era’ of cinema in the United States”.2 Abel’s argument for the western’s significance rests on its popularity in the transitional era and thus its implicit and explicit participation in the contested genre/nation debate. I cite Abel at length not to challenge his notions of the western as the primary genre that helped shape American identity in this time period but because his analysis also speaks to some tendencies of slapstick films, the spaces they occupy, and their own participation in the construction and reflection of national identity.

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In terms of numbers, the popularity of slapstick films matches that of the western in the early 1910s in the USA. As Abel notes in Red Rooster Scare, “by 1910 one in five films produced by American film companies were westerns”.3 Eileen Bowser cites similar statistics for comedic films: in the same year comedy releases accounted for one in five films as well.4 In his analysis of “new humor”, Henry Jenkins writes, “by 1912 … some forty comic films a week were being released into the country for exhibition in nickelodeons, making comedy the largest single genre in early cinema”.5 With these numbers in mind, it seems important to question the extent to which comedy, specifically slapstick comedy, along with the western, was also influential in constructing and reflecting American national identity during the early to middle 1910s. In addition to these numbers, another reason for including slapstick in the discussion of genre and identity formation comes from Miriam Hansen’s argument of a “new sensibility, to be found in particular genres … with their emphasis on action” characteristic of American modernism.6 If the slapstick film (one of Hansen’s examples) also is especially marked by “action”, then its significance should be considered as well. The five domestic “Mabel and Fatty” comedies all are located in a similar setting that functions much like early situation comedy. Although, as Jenkins writes, the emergence of the Keystone Studios in 1912 and the resulting popularity of their films generally ran counter to the overall industry’s move towards producing films that appealed to “middle-class viewers”, these five “Mabel and Fatty” films allowed Keystone to maintain its successful slapstick formula while also appealing to a wider audience. The “slapstick” remained intact, but the overt emphasis was on middle-class values and sentiments. The first film produced in this series, Mabel and Fatty’s Wash Day, follows the two title characters doing exactly what the title suggests – household chores. Incidentally, Wash Day is the only film in the series that Normand and Arbuckle’s characters are not married or engaged to one another; instead, they are neighbors, brought together by their proximity. I categorize this film and the four others under the rubric of domestic comedy because of their settings. All are situated in domestic spaces: the home or farm, usually in a rural landscape, with brief comic interludes outside these spaces. The films also depict the plight of romantic love in relation to familial obligations. In both Mabel and Fatty’s Simple Life and Mabel and Fatty Adrift, Mabel refuses to marry a suitor because she is in love with Fatty, despite the suitor’s offer of money and land to her parents. As in the western, the Mabel and Fatty films frequently include scenes full of activity and action, shot in outdoor spaces. Instead of the wide, open spaces of the western, however, these are relatively structured outdoor spaces: parks, fenced in farmyards, dusty but well defined roads, and docks. The rural landscape, especially in Simple Life, is depicted as quiet and calm, with a serenity repeatedly disrupted by Fatty and Mabel, who are both depicted as young, playful and generally apt to not follow the everyday routine of their elders. The dominant American society evoked in these films is one of tradition, a blind acceptance of older ways of life (and fear of the new), of children expected to run the farm after their parents can no longer manage, but challenged by youth who refuse to marry for financial obligations or to stay on the farm, as depicted in Mabel and Fatty Adrift. As with cinema itself as a medium, an apparatus that is at once modernity on display while projecting the same, these films show a fascination with the modern, with moving forward and moving on. In Mabel and Fatty’s Simple Life the young couple runs away together to escape an arranged marriage. They flee the poverty-stricken farm in a stolen automobile and are chased by an inept police force: the power of new technology is here aligned with youth, while the older and perhaps less wise father and

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police officers are relegated to travel by bicycle. This display of modernity is further highlighted in an elaborate slapstick sequence with a car that drives itself and three sleeping police officers unexpectedly roused by the noise of gunfire. There is a tie in to consumer culture as well within the depictions of modern household objects. In Mabel and Fatty’s Wash Day Mabel is lured to Fatty’s yard by his laundry wringer, a device that Mabel lacks, and her flirtations lead him to let her borrow it. In their last film in the series, Mabel and Fatty Adrift, the young couple receives a cottage as a wedding present from Mabel’s parents. Not only does this new cottage move them away from her parent’s farm to a seaside location, it is also depicted as a treasured object, with modern conveniences, although Mabel is unable to employ them properly, failing to produce edible biscuits for their dinner. These films rely on the humor of the everyday, such as Mabel’s inability to bake, a humor that comes at her expense – not only at her failure to succeed in traditional domesticity but also at her inability to use these new objects effectively. Interestingly, although these films in one way or another both display and challenge modernity, they do so by using the stock character of the “rube”. This character type’s presence can be seen as an antithesis to the modern world of consumer goods, another version of the “old” versus “new” binary. Additionally, the use of the “rube” character type works to root these films in the tradition of previous slapstick films more traditionally located in rural settings. Not only do objects in these films represent American modernization in process, but so do attitudes and practices. Idealized romantic love in Mabel and Fatty’s Simple Life manifests itself in the rejection of the old (Mabel’s father’s authority over her) and the adoption of the new (Mabel’s marriage to Fatty despite her father’s objections). In Fatty and Mabel Adrift the purchase of a cottage as Mabel’s wedding gift shifts the family from poor farm laborers to middle class homeowners. At the same time, the films explore and negotiate tensions between youth and old age, new and old traditions, anxieties between the urban and rural, and authority and free will, all matters pertaining to the American experience in the culturally fluid years of the early 20th century. The “Mabel and Fatty” series represents a whole generation in the so-called progressive era, Americans workers who, according to historian Michael McGerr, were in search of “More safety for the home, more justice and power for women, more uniform opportunities and experiences for different classes, more external control and regulation” (Fig. 1).7 In the five films discussed thus far, Mabel and Fatty enjoy a close relationship. In all but one film, Mabel and Fatty’s Wash Day, the title characters are either married or engaged. The use of stock characters creates a sense of stability that allows the situations and actions of the story to be more fluid. Mabel and Fatty are free to partake in comic adventures and innocent extra-marital flirtations precisely because they are solidly fixed in their onscreen marriage, a filmic relationship that would perhaps have been deemed appropriate and acceptable by the progressivists. The audiences’ presumed familiarity with these stock characters also eliminates any desire for character development, instead focusing attention on their comic adventures and the playful treatment of the greater society at work in the films. In this way the films deal with offbeat subject matter, under the guise of comedy, while commenting on and negotiating a changing world. Although Hansen is most interested in theorizing “the juncture of cinema and modernism”, she makes some compelling arguments about the popularity of slapstick films and what “action” in this period’s films means in terms of American modernity.8 She writes that slapstick specifically helped “deflate the terror of consumption” associated with technology and modernity and that it also helped to negotiate tensions between

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Fig. 1. Glass slide ad for Fatty and Mabel Adrift (10 January 1916).

ethnic groups. Finally, she suggests that slapstick “allowed for a playful and physical expression of anxieties over changed gender roles and new forms of sexuality and intimacy”.9 Hansen deems slapstick films from the 1920s on as the privileged example of “vernacular modernism”, but the earlier “Mabel and Fatty” series works in many of the same ways. Furthermore, these films negotiate and ease those social tensions in novel ways, using rural settings and domestic narratives to express the fear of the new mixed with the fascination of change. The two remaining films stand out from the others: Fatty and Mabel at the San Diego Exposition and Mabel and Fatty Viewing the World’s Fair at San Francisco. Both the 1915 San Diego Exposition and the 1915 San Francisco World’s Fair celebrated the opening of the Panama Canal in August 1914, with the San Francisco World’s Fair additionally celebrating that city’s rebuilding efforts after the 1906 earthquake. While the other five films in the series focus primarily on domesticity, marriage and the everyday, these two films take the characters outside their everyday world and put them into a public arena that is a celebration of both the past and the future, all accomplished within the framework of the slapstick genre. Fatty and Mabel at the San Diego Exposition in particular relies on standard slapstick fare: an argument between Mabel and Fatty leads to Fatty’s flirtations with another woman, resulting in a chase or two, a misunderstanding or two, and finally a bumbling police officer who doesn’t exactly save the day. As in Mabel and Fatty’s Simple Life, the film relies on several symbols of modernity, although they appear in the context of the Exposition. Mabel and Fatty ride electric cars around the fair and stop to enter a pavilion with a sign: “See How Movies Are Made”. The “Mabel” and “Fatty” touring the San Diego Exposition are the same characters from the earlier films, a married couple, evidenced by Mabel’s repeated gestures to her ring finger in her angry rant about Fatty’s flirting, a gesture she has used several times before to indicate the relationship that binds them (Fig. 2). Four months after Fatty and Mabel at the San Diego Exposition came another exposition film, Mabel and Fatty Viewing the World’s Fair at San Francisco. This film differs greatly from their earlier San Diego film, and from all the other films discussed so far. Throughout, Mabel and Fatty only briefly participate in their usual slapstick routines. Except for one brief kiss at the beginning of the film, indicating their usual comic couple

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Fig. 2. Film still from Fatty and Mabel at the San Diego Exposition (1915).

status, they appear to be playing themselves rather than their filmic personas. This is evidenced by three separate conversations and interactions they have with “real” people in the film: the opera singer Madame Schuman-Heinck, an unnamed tour guide, and San Francisco Mayor James Rolph. It is only in the company of other people in this film that the two stars engage in slapstick humor. With Mayor Rolph, Fatty pretends to trip on the stairs outside of City Hall. With Madame Schuman-Heink he attempts to sing for her, and she puts her hand over his mouth twice in an effort to prevent his (assumed) warbling. Lastly, during their guided tour, Mabel steps inside the Iron Maiden and Fatty closes the cover, nearly pinning her in its spiny interior (Fig. 3). Also quite different from the San Diego Exposition film are the objects on display at the fair and the sites that Mabel and Fatty tour. At the 1915 San Francisco World’s Fair (also known as the Panama Pacific International Exposition), rather than displays of new technology, such as the “See How Movies are Made” Pavilion, the duo instead view relics of years past, such as the battleship Oregon, and the ship Success, built in 1790. The film does include a few modern objects, from the jitney taxicabs to the display of electric lights, as well as the Aeroscope, a 285-foot crane that served as an amusement ride. They also witness several new structures built after the 1906 earthquake, but these are architectural rather than technological displays. The film works

Fig. 3. Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, Mayor James Rolph, and Mabel Normand in Mabel and Fatty Viewing the World’s Fair at San Francisco (1915).

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Fig. 4. Panama Pacific International Exposition ticket.

as an educational tour for which Fatty and Mabel function as engaging personalities, guiding visitors around the relics of yesteryear; at the same time the fair acts as a convenient and interesting enough backdrop for a film about the two stars (Fig. 4). Why the San Diego Exposition and the San Francisco World’s Fair, then, as subject matter? What made them settings worth filming? In The Anthropology of World Fairs, Burton Benedict writes, “The Panama Pacific International Exposition epitomized a whole view of American society, conceived in optimism and carried through despite the outbreak of World War I. It was, perhaps, the last collective outburst of this sort of naïve optomism [sic].”10 Although World’s Fairs had occurred outside as well as within the United States prior to 1915, the latter had become decidedly American, showcasing the achievements of the American people in contrast to the ancient practices and rituals of other cultures. On the one hand, the San Diego Exposition pavilion enticed fairgoers to “See How Movies are Made”, an homage to Edison’s successful invention and the laboratory that would eventually lead to the “Mabel and Fatty” film itself. Also on display were the American battleship “Oregon” and the electric lights courtesy of General Electric. On the other hand, fairs quenched the American public’s thirst for knowledge about foreign lands and peoples, an education reconfigured and disguised as entertainment, evidenced by the San Diego screen audience’s rapture over the Royal Hula Dancers, presented as consumable knowledge of a foreign culture. Although many nations and cultures were on display or in attendance, the spectators in Fatty and Mabel at the San Diego Exposition were white, middle-class patrons, like Mabel and Fatty, which set them off visually from the Royal Hula Dancers on stage. But even with this performer/audience division, the San Diego Exposition presented a more diverse environment than the rural world pictured in earlier “Mabel and Fatty” films. The two main characters could also be considered performers within the San Diego Exposition film, not only as stars but also within the context of the Hula performance. Both Mabel and Fatty come on stage and briefly take part in the performance, at one point inserting a slapstick routine. Again, here is an instance of the new inserting itself into the old, new comic slapstick in a traditional native dance. Given the frequent repetition across these films, the variations that do occur are intriguing, particularly in Mabel and Fatty Viewing the World’s Fair at San Francisco. This film differs from the others in a way that calls for closer examination. The San Francisco World’s Fair offered an ideal backdrop for inserting the stars in hopes of creating an entertaining film, and the film articulated a desire for new technologies and products similar to that in their domestic comedies – but in different, more concrete form. In the domestic comedies such desire appeared in character motivation, setting and plot. In the Exposition films, upwardly mobile desire instead was implicit, suggested by the

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importance and interest attributed to the Fair’s exhibits by the filmed visit of two key movie stars of the 1910s. In terms of national identity there is something very telling about the American experience at work implicitly and explicitly in the “Mabel and Fatty” series. The characters that Mabel Normand and Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle play, as a couple, occur in all seven films as a microcosm of the American family – defined by marriage through romantic love, a quest for upward mobility, and an attraction to the larger world around them. All of these are afforded them through a visit to the San Francisco World’s Fair, or, to other middle-class folks, through a screening of the Exposition and World’s Fair films at their local motion picture theater. Fatty and Mabel at the San Diego Exposition exemplifies slapstick’s participation in American society of the time; just as ordinary citizens went to the Fair for education and entertainment, slapstick films with Mabel Normand and Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle became part of the fair as well, forming an advertisement for emulation: visit the fair and be like the film stars, or, inversely, see how the stars are like everyone else, visiting the World’s Fair, like everyday, normal people. Both the domestic comedies and Exposition films give a sense that Mabel and Fatty were just ordinary citizens (characters), which suggests that their films offered ways for audiences to work through the tensions brought about by the new technologies and changing society of the 1910s – and possibly accept them. In much the same way that audiences found relevance and a collective national identity in the western, slapstick film offered some of the same “benefits” in a different package. Acknowledgements: I wish to thank Rob King for his comments and suggestions on the original draft of this essay.

Notes 1.

The release dates are as follows: Mabel and Fatty’s Wash Day (14 January 1915); Mabel and Fatty’s Simple Life (18 January 1915); Fatty and Mabel at the San Diego Exposition (23 January 1915); Mabel, Fatty and the Law (28 January 1915); Mabel and Fatty’s Married Life (11 February 1915); Mabel and Fatty Viewing the World’s Fair at San Francisco (22 April 1915); and Fatty and Mabel Adrift (10 January 1916). I can find no overt reason why some of the titles lead with “Fatty” while others begin with “Mabel”.

2.

Richard Abel, “The Imagined Community of the Western, 1910–1913”, in Charlie Keil and Shelley Stamp (eds), American Cinema’s Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 132.

3.

Richard Abel, The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 172.

4.

Eileen Bowser, History of the American Cinema 2: The Transformation of Cinema, 1907–1915 (New York: Scribner’s, 1990), 180.

5.

Henry Jenkins, What Made Pistachio Nuts?, 39.

6.

Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Fallen Women, Rising Stars, New Horizons”, Film Quarterly 54.1 (2000): 13.

7.

Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York: Free Press, 2003), 114.

8.

Miriam Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism”, Modernism/Modernity 6.2 (1999): 59.

9.

Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses”, 71.

10.

Burton Benedict, The Anthropology of World’s Fairs (London: Scholar Press, 1983), 60.

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“A purely American product”: tramp comedy and white working-class formation in the 1910s •

“A Purely American Product”

Rob King n February 1915, Jeff Davis, the self-styled “King of the Hobos”, took the stage of New York’s Hammerstein’s theater to give audiences a tramp’s perspective on their nation’s history. America, Davis explained, was a nation founded on the tramp spirit. “He said Christopher Columbus was the first hobo ‘gink’ – since Queen Isabella had to ‘stake him’ for the trip over.” Yet, while Davis admired Columbus as a hobo prototype, he was less enthusiastic about others who had followed the explorer’s trans-Atlantic journey: he ended his act by calling for immigration restriction, the better to give the American-born a shot at finding work. As reported in New York’s Dramatic Mirror, “Davis intimated that emigration should be stopped for five years in order that gentlemen now unemployed might investigate pending business openings”.1 We do not know whether Davis convinced his audience. We do know – any reading of the culture of the 1910s confirms it – that his idea of the tramp as authentically “American” was in abundant evidence in the rhetoric of the period, a fundamental image that spoke deeply to popular constructions of working-class manhood. Davis’s call for immigration restriction – and the dichotomy that it constructs: tramp vs. immigrant – was not a new rhetorical flourish. But it is one with significant implications for an understanding of popular representations of the tramp during this period, particularly in vaudeville and film comedy. We are not accustomed to reading the comic tramp racially, as white or “non-foreign”, in large part because of a generalizing rhetoric that has claimed such characters – notably Chaplin’s – as universalized “little fellows”. This essay, however, treats race as central to the tramp’s comic meaning. It examines the role that tramp comedy played as a site for actualizing ideologies of whiteness. But it also examines the hobo in terms of the processes whereby US cinema of the 1910s became an “Americanized phenomenon” (the phrase is Richard Abel’s) and considers how the tramp created new possibilities for conflating a concept of clowning with a concept of American.2

I

“A real American man”: the tramp in popular culture To appreciate the form these developments took, we need first to explore the tramp’s genealogy against the class hostilities that followed the economic crises of the late nineteenth century. In 1877, during the first years of a moral panic branded as the “tramp evil”, the Chicago Tribune had proposed do-it-yourself genocide as a creative

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Fig. 1. A “timber lesson” from Josiah Flynt, Tramping with Tramps (1899).

solution: “The simplest plan … [is to put] arsenic in the meat and other supplies furnished [for] the tramp. This produces death within a comparatively short period of time, … keeps the coroner in good humor, and saves one’s chickens … from constant destruction”.3 That may just have been an idea, but actual responses were scarcely less cruel: a common practice involved forcing tramps to run through a town’s streets while townspeople clubbed them with sticks. Known as a “timber lesson”, the practice was reportedly common in Ohio (Fig. 1).4 Certainly, there was plenty of hostility to go round. Contemporary accounts emphasized the unprecedented magnitude of the tramp problem, particularly following the depressions of 1873 and 1893, when the press cited figures ranging between two and three million homeless workers.5 And yet, even amidst a lineage of seemingly unrelieved prejudice, tramping carried striking complexity during these years: what appeared to many “reformers” as the mark of Cain was also paradoxically defended by native-born workers and labor sympathizers as the very emblem of an “American” working-class racial identity. At a time when the industrial working class was taking on a distinctively “foreign” cast with heavy immigration from Catholic and Slavic nations, native-born workers seized on the despised figure of the tramp as nothing less than the true inheritor of an Anglo-Saxon labor culture. “I find on the road no immigrant hoboes”, noted a writer for the labor newspaper, Los Angeles Citizen, in late 1913. “They are all American-born.”6 The tramp, noted another writer at the Citizen, “is a real American man … good in emergencies, when the ordinary European laborer is likely to be a ‘quitter’”.7 The conception of the tramp as “American-born” was, in fact, a myth. The percentages of foreign-born among the homeless were substantial – anywhere between 22 and 55 per cent, according to samples studied by historian John Schneider.8 But it was a myth with a powerful necessity for workers for whom a certain notion of “Americanism” offered advantages in asserting the legitimacy of itinerant labor in the face of anti-tramp hysteria. Tramping was, after all, part of both the common work experience of turn-of-the-century industrial America, when anywhere between ten and twenty per

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cent of the entire US population came from families with a member who had spent some time on the road.9 Definitions of tramping consequently became the pivots of an ideological class struggle between conservative institutions on the one hand and labor and the left on the other. While charity reformers and their patrons manipulated fears of the “tramp evil” to pass vagrancy laws criminalizing unemployment, nativeborn workers for their part called upon the central traditions of republican virtue to assert their right to tramp. A minor genre of “life on the road” accounts reclaimed the tramp as the lasting invocation of the frontier spirit, even as the frontier was finally closing. Jack London’s 1907 memoir of his youthful hobo experiences, The Road, described the “charm” of tramping as the “absence of monotony”, “an ever changing phantasmagoria” in which the tramp, having “learned the futility of telic endeavor”, lives “only in the present moment”.10 Nels Anderson’s sociological study, The Hobo (1923), meanwhile presented the tramp as an avatar of Anglo-American whiteness, the very model for American traditions of mobility and individualism – “American in the same sense that the cowboy was”, in the author’s words.11 “The tramp is an American product”, Anderson also wrote. “The foreign-born in this group are chiefly of the older immigration … [while] the number … from the newer immigration is small”.12 The tramp, in sum, had come to name that which was not foreign within the ranks of America’s workers. It also served as a barometer of Americanization, designating a field of whiteness into which, as Anderson suggests, older immigrants had been admitted, while new immigrants remained on the margins. The issue then arises whether this conception of hobo Americanism had any bearing on the meanings of tramp comedy in turn-of-the-century theater and film. Certainly, the tramp’s nativist associations were reflected in the field of comic performance, where tramp comedy likewise played into debates over national culture. So firmly and so fully did tramp comedians take their place on the vaudeville stage that critics began pointing to the tramp as the figure that made American vaudeville uniquely American. As a writer for the Dramatic Mirror baldly put it in 1915, “the tramp comedian is distinctly American – already a sort of tradition like the Pierrot and the clown of the Harlequinade”.13 Caroline Caffin, in her 1914 book on vaudeville, struck a similar note, describing the comic tramp as “purely American”.14 During the first decade of the twentieth century, the comic tramp had indeed flourished across multiple genres of popular culture in a series of vaudeville acts and comic strips that made tramp comedy a staple of modern commercial entertainment. The key to the tramp’s success, it would appear, lay in creating a figure that was, first of all, socially prismatic, a figure whose behavior had comic appeal to those approaching it from different class and ethnic perspectives.15 Thus, from 1900, working-class readers of the popular-priced New York Journal could enjoy Frederick Burr Opper’s “Happy Hooligan” cartoon strip, no doubt delighting in Hooligan’s bumbling confrontations with figures of authority as he tries to get a job. Yet, also during the same period, illustrator James Montgomery Flagg developed the comic tramp for genteel readers, in a series of “Nervy Nat” cartoons in the magazine Judge between 1903 and 1907. The dynamics of mass appeal were likewise reflected in vaudeville where a gradual decline in divisive traditions of immigrant stereotyping had, from the late 1890s, created a space within which tramp comedy emerged as a less conflict-ridden form of performance, a point to which I return later. An avatar of working-class Americanism, the tramp clearly also occupied a key moment in the consolidation of new forms of mass cultural representation that appealed across traditional hierarchies. The historical problem here is that cinema did not participate in this trend, at least not during the first decade of the twentieth century. Charles Musser cites American

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Mutoscope & Biograph’s 1897 The Tramp and the Bathers as the comic hobo’s film debut, but tramp comedy’s cinematic heyday in fact awaited the mid-1910s, by which time this style of performance had already begun to recede in other cultural forms.16 For instance, taking a sample of over 500 vaudeville performances reviewed in Variety’s “New Acts” listings between 1914 and 1916, I find that tramp comedians constituted barely more than one per cent.17 During the same period, however, production of tramp comic films more than tripled as almost every production company began launching series centered upon comic hoboes. The years 1915 and 1916, in particular, can be counted as a vogue period for the cinematic tramp, with the launching of Kalem’s successful “Ham and Bud” series, the hobo antics of Cub’s “Jerry” films, Rolin’s “Willie Work” and “Lonesome Luke” comedies, George Kleine’s “The Mishaps of Musty Suffer”, and Universal’s “Timothy Dobbs, That’s Me” series, along with a host of more short-lived, if no less colorfully named characters like Ino Eatt at Beauty and Weary Willie at Vogue. Animated cartoons meanwhile took up the exploits of comic-strip tramps, with Happy Hooligan appearing on the Hearst International newsreel in late 1916 and odd-job men Mutt and Jeff making their debut in cartoons penned by Charley Bowers earlier that year. Simply stated, the locus of production for tramp comedy had shifted from vaudeville and comic strips to cinema. The question, then, is: Why?

“Funny Germans” and “funny drunks”: ethnic typology and comic performance at Keystone Chaplin’s influence here is inescapable, but his significance in shaping the social iconography of comic performance has too often been missed. The point is not that his famous bowler-hatted persona was, at its inception in Mabel’s Strange Predicament (February 1914), ever specifically intended as a “tramp” – there is not a shred of evidence to indicate that any of his Keystone performances were understood as such at the time – rather, it is that this persona, first developed at Keystone, opened up a space within which a tramp identity could later be more decisively convoked, both by Chaplin himself, beginning at Essanay, and by the comedians he influenced. In order to see how that space was created, it’s important to stress Chaplin’s detachment from the typological conventions established at Keystone prior to his arrival there. From its founding in the fall of 1912, the Keystone Film Company had grounded its product in the comedy of immigrant impersonation. Out of 126 comic subjects released in the studio’s first twelve months of operations, 43 (around a third) can be identified as featuring prominent ethnic or racial characterizations.18 Promotional copy for the studio’s releases frequently pointed up immigrant caricature as a comic attraction, such as the ad for The Riot (1913) which promised viewers the hilarious spectacle of a race riot, describing how “Mrs. Kelly upholds the fighting reputation of [her] race” while the “Jews rally to the defense of their fellowman”.19 The tradition of immigrant caricature also gave rise to one of Keystone’s first major stars, Ford Sterling, whose work in the tradition of “Dutch” (that is, German) impersonation made him the top-ranked comedian in Photoplay’s 1913 popularity contest.20 Mark Winokur, in his suggestive study of the figure of the immigrant in film comedy, argues that Chaplin’s contribution in this context was to engage familiar ethnic iconographies, while stripping them of overt ethnic meaning. Chaplin’s persona may have shared qualities with particular ethnic types, the stage Irish in particular, but was only “secondarily” immigrant, only “secondarily” revelatory as an immigrant type.21 Where Keystone’s previous comedians fell squarely within pre-existing traditions of immigrant costume and make-up, Chaplin was immediately acknowledged as a bricoleur of those traditions, a borrower who brought together distinct costume elements to

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create his famous “little fellow”. The earliest account of that persona’s origins, published in Photoplay in 1915, explicitly identified the character as an amalgam: a shabby derby (traditional accoutrement of the stage Jew), a “drooping moustache” trimmed down to become a “little toothbrush”, and a pair of Ford Sterling’s shoes.22 Likely apocryphal, the account remains important for the way it presents Chaplin’s persona as a composite figure: the tramp appears as a visualization of incompatible immigrant characteristics, a hybridized mechanism for obscuring overt ethnic affiliations. Where the trade press had commonly used names like “Krause” or “Schnitzel” to refer to Sterling’s performances, Chaplin’s persona was customarily described as a more generalized, ethnically neutral comic figure, a “goat” or “funny drunk”, to quote only two examples. (This aspect of Chaplin’s persona holds even in the case of a superficial exception, his 1917 two-reeler, The Immigrant. Here the tramp is explicitly identified as an immigrant; yet, unlike his fellow passengers – all clearly typed as Eastern European – the tramp lacks the distinguishing traits that would assign him any particular ethnic affiliation.) All of this was preface to a radical shift in comic typology at Keystone. For Chaplin’s influence was, in part, to recast the hierarchies within which Keystone’s performers had formerly arranged ethnic types. In a context in which immigrant caricature had become a target of increasingly vocal censure – from the trade press (which lobbied against “low” comedy traditions in the name of industry uplift) and from the new immigrants themselves (who now formed organizations to oppose their defamation, such as the Chicago Anti-Stage Jew Ridicule Committee in 1913) – Chaplin’s example provided the model for a hybrid typology capable of repressing ethnicity’s primary characteristics. At Keystone, that trajectory led comedians decisively toward the comic tramp. Instead of the ubiquitous Cohens and Schnitzels of the studio’s earlier releases, ethnically-neutral lumpenproletariat characterizations were now announced for the

Fig. 2. Roscoe Arbuckle as a tramp in Fatty’s New Role (Keystone, February 1915). [Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.]

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studio’s top performers. As Motion Picture News reported in 1915, “Keystone players … [are] to be assigned definite names for all productions. Roscoe Arbuckle is to be known as Fatty, Miss Normand as Mabel, Mack Swain as Ambrose, Chester Conklin … as Mr. Droppington, and Sid [sic] Chaplin as Mr. Gussell”.23 Characters like Conklin’s Walrus and Charles Murray’s Hogan consistently appeared in tramp roles that suppressed traditions of ethnic impersonation beneath an ersatz whiteness. Even Arbuckle began to experiment with the tropes of tramp comedy, first assaying a hobo role in Fatty and Minnie-He-Haw (December 1914) – which opens with Fatty riding the rails – before appearing as an unusually destitute comic tramp in the assertively titled Fatty’s New Role (February 1915) (Fig. 2). Yet it was not only at Keystone that this shift occurred. Though far from comprehensive, Figures 3 and 4) provide clear evidence that tramp comedy stepped in at the precise moment that ethnic characterizations were beginning to recede. Kathryn Oberdeck’s reading of vaudeville is useful to us in this analysis: for just as, according to Oberdeck, vaudeville’s courting of the mass audience put pressures on ethnic stereotyping during the 1890s, giving rise to new and less divisive comic characters, so can the same be observed in film during the 1910s, as the newer medium began to consolidate its mass cultural appeal.24 Indeed it is hard to observe such shifts without some sense of a

Fig. 3. Short comedies (two reels or less) featuring tramps and ethnic/nonwhite characters, 1914–1917. Statistics derived exclusively from plot descriptions in the “Stories of the Films” section of Moving Picture World, for the months of January, May, and September of each year.

Fig. 4. Breakdown by types of ethnic/nonwhite stereotypes (only those that appeared ten times or more during the sample period).

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relation between comic typology and social structure, the suspicion that this change in comic characterization answered to a change in the social order itself. The older tradition of immigrant caricature had assumed an ethnically separatist working class; but, as several historians have observed, those separations began to loosen during the 1900s and 1910s, as workers of all backgrounds increasingly came together in new sites of commercialized amusement. Roy Rosenzweig has argued that mass culture fostered “new opportunities for class solidarity across ethnic lines”.25 Kathy Peiss has described how the commercialization of leisure “decisively” broke down the ethnic segmentation of working-class recreation.26 Cinema’s growing presence as a form of mass entertainment simply could not sustain older stereotyping traditions, a lesson learned by Keystone in 1914 when a local censor board banned The Peddler, citing the ridicule of a Jewish character as its chief objection.27 That it was the tramp that came to the fore at this moment likely owed much to the figure’s association, within the working-class imaginary, with a whiteness untainted by foreign affiliations. As such, the tramp provided an image of class identity that could assuage rather than exacerbate ethnic divisions, perhaps even contributing to a sense of whiteness that cut across lines of ethnicity, mobilizing patterns of empathy and belonging that allowed audiences to participate imaginatively in a shared identity as American workers. That tramp comedy achieved this kind of symbolic language – a unity across ethnic differences – is suggested by specific evidence on reception, for example, by the National Labor Tribune, which in 1915 described Chaplin’s tramp as a “national hero” among working-class filmgoers, and by a letter to Kalem that year from a Mr. Bauernfreund, manager of two theaters in the immigrant neighborhoods of the Bronx, explaining that the “Ham and Bud” comedies “are great favorites with the people who patronize my theatres”.28 Kalem comedies were also popular in the steel-mill town of Monessen, Pennsylvania, where first- and second-generation immigrants constituted three-quarters of the population and where Ham and Bud were publicized as “our old friends” at the five-cent Bijou Theatre.29 Such a use of language (“great favorites”, “old friends”, “national hero”) suggests that some concept of comic identification is necessary to understand the popularity of the tramp among early 20th-century workers; but it also indicates the emergence of a new, nativist hierarchy of comic performance that ceded priority to whiteness as the vehicle for that identification – as a closer look at Kalem’s “Ham and Bud” series will now show.

“Two slapstick roughnecks”: popular realism and cultural hierarchy in the “Ham and Bud” films No doubt it is true, as Stuart Hall has insisted, that there is no such thing as “popular” culture, if what is meant by popular is an authentic culture of the people, existing wholly outside the sphere of influence of the dominant cultural production.30 Still, it should be permissible to posit the theoretical possibility of such a culture, if only as an abstraction to which actual cultural practices may approach asymptotically. For it is within the ambit of that possibility, I would suggest, that Ham and Bud – more formally, Lloyd V. Hamilton and Bud Duncan – achieved their distinctiveness as tramp comedians.31 Concerned neither with the sentimentalizing appropriations that would recast the tramp as an ethical symbol (the way of Alger and Chaplin) nor with a pictorial realism that would render social inequality as commodified spectacle (the way of Jacob Riis or George Bellows), Ham and Bud sustained a register of gross farce and sexual innuendo that conceded remarkably little to the gentrifying pressures of cultural hierarchy. Not only was their slapstick often of the most brutally violent variety – frequently shading into darkly cruel extremes, as in The Star Boarders (1916), where the pair deliberately gas their fellow boarding house lodgers into unconsciousness – but their comic plots

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Fig. 5. Advertisement for Ham and Bud comedies, Moving Picture World (8 May 1915).

were often motivated by a sexual aggressiveness far removed from Chaplin’s idealizing romanticism. Nor was the sadism limited to what audiences saw onscreen: whereas “behind the scenes” reports on other comedians commonly emphasized the stamina and skill required to execute comic stunts, articles on Ham and Bud gravitated toward the simpler spectacle of two performers brutalizing one another. In a 1915 piece from Photoplay Vogue, one writer described how he entered the Kalem Studio “in time to see Hamilton amiably endeavor to kick his diminutive pal through the side of a brick wall”.32 An article in Motion Picture Magazine meanwhile commented approvingly on the pair’s work ethic in rehearsing violent routines: “‘You lift me high up in the air by one hand,’ you may hear Bud suggest, ‘and then kick me, and I’ll fly straight out of the picture’” (Fig. 5).33 What one encounters in the comedy of Ham and Bud is perhaps best approached through the concept of “popular realism”, as an aesthetic of turn-of-the-century vaudeville and variety. As Kathryn Oberdeck has defined it, popular realism shared many themes and techniques with the “high” realism of Riis, Howells, and Dreiser, yet differed in its avoidance of moral purpose and its contestation of established cultural hierarchies.34 Thus it is characteristic of Ham and Bud comedies to find, on the one hand, verisimilar articulations of hobo experience, often characterized by a high ratio of location work (including a remarkable chase up and down Los Angeles’ Bunker Hill in the 1917 A Whirlwind of Whiskers). The films’ explicit engagement with horizons of

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hobo life is also commonly flagged in the opening shots, which might find the pair asleep on a bench (A Flyer in Flapjacks, 1917), thrown out of a saloon (“Ham and Bud suffer their daily insult”, in Ham and the Masked Marvel, 1916), “window shopping” restaurant menus (in Ham and the Sausage Factory, 1915), or engaged in various other forms of “getting by”.35 Yet it is also the case that this is a “realism” in which conventional polarities are reversed, so that the tramp, no longer the object of a social analysis, becomes instead its subject, the vehicle for a subversion of existing hierarchies. There was, noted the Chicago Tribune’s Kitty Kelly, an “original flipness” in the comedy of these “two slapstick roughnecks”, a quality manifest alike in their frequent – and rather conventional – drubbings of highbrow culture (e.g. Ham the Statue, 1915; The Model Janitor, 1917) as in their more uniquely violent – and often unprovoked – assaults on the police (A Flyer in Flapjacks; A Whirlwind of Whiskers).36 What is distinctive is how commonly these violations of cultural decorum go unpunished: the tramp’s conventional, ritual beating, which routinely ends most tramp comedies prior to the mid1910s, is almost completely absent in the case of Ham and Bud. It is, in fact, precisely within these alternate constructions of cultural hierarchy that ethnicity finds its relevance in these films; for, even as Ham and Bud wreak comic havoc upon the world of the elite (a world “above”), so also are they commonly pitted in opposition against the world of the immigrant (a world “below”). In a kind of parsing of working-class identities, the tramp is aligned with a candor and virility set in comic juxtaposition with the flamboyance, dim-wittedness, and/or overwrought emotions of the ethnic worker. In most instances, this contrast forms the basis for isolated comic scenes, as when the two tramps are enthusiastically kissed by a French barber in A Whirlwind of Whiskers, or when the pair dupe an Italian bootblack into buying an abandoned streetcar in The Boot and the Loot (1917). A more sustained example can be found in Ham’s Whirlwind Finish (1916), where the pair’s unpretentious strength is defined against the Italian immigrant’s stereotypically “normal” affiliation with treacherous banditry and criminal gangs.37 The opening sequence ties découpage to ethnic difference, as a series of title cards and shots differentiate the film’s major characters as racial types: first, “Turn and Run, the dynamite twins”, a pair of earringed Italian quarry workers who we see setting a stick of dynamite; second, “Our heroes … discussing the War declared by Iceland on Africa” and nonchalantly ignoring the quarry detonations around them. A third title introduces “Tony Slambango, the foreman of the gang, who eats knives and plays with bombs”, followed by a shot of Tony in looming close-up. Ham and Bud are brought into his office – “Stronga men!” declares Tony, “I giva you da job!” – and the film launches into a series of scenes in which the tramps make play with a stereotyped iconography of Italian culture. Told to “bringa da vino”, they bring out a pitcher of red ink. Serving dinner, they slap spaghetti into their co-workers’ faces. Ham even flirts with Tony’s “sacred sweetheart”, Bombino Souptureeno, easily winning her affections away from the gang’s leader. Activating the trope of the tramp as “purely American”, the film thus conflates a populist sense of working-class identity with a nativist insistence on whiteness: the class hierarchies that Ham and Bud typically mock from below are doubled by racial hierarchies that they poke fun at from above. Further, since this is a structure – tramp vs. Italian – that recurs in a number of these films (e.g. Ham, the Detective, The Hypnotic Monkey, and The Bandits of Macaroni Mountains, to name only examples from 1915), it would appear that the stereotype of the impassioned Italian was particularly important as the central “other” against which Ham and Bud’s more dependable machismo could be situated. We can, then, see in such structures both the strands of a nativist class assertiveness and an attempt to rehabilitate a distinctly Anglo-Saxon ideal of manhood: the tramp as both a “real American” and a “real American man”.

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“Jerry joins the army”: tramping, border crossings, and wartime nationalism Here, however, one has to venture a final step, by asking: with what kinds of stories was the comic tramp associated, and to what extent did those stories engage the racial connotations of his image? It is one matter to establish a hierarchy of types, and quite another to consider how those types were mobilized in narratives mapping out terrains of national identity. In this respect, one of the most striking characteristics of mid-1910s tramp comedy – Chaplin’s 1915 The Tramp is a turning point of sorts – was the introduction of melodramatic frameworks indebted to earlier dime-novel traditions of tramp fiction, such as Horatio Alger’s Tony, the Tramp (1876), in which the hobo had figured as a hero in plots of melodramatic rescue. While never in the majority – most tramp comedies preserved familiar situations of slapstick havoc – the comic melodramas supplied an ethical framework for comic action that occasionally drew color from the tramp’s nationalist meanings. A number of the films told stories of heroic tramps pitted in conflict against foreign-born villains, as in Essanay’s 1914 Into Society and Out, in which two tramps pummel a dastardly French nobleman who is seducing an American girl, or Lubin’s The Careless Anarchist (1915), in which a tramp unravels the plot of a Russian radical. A similar structuring occurs in the 1917 Ham and Bud comedy Blundering Blacksmiths, where the unfolding of a rural melodrama requires that Ham confront a Scandinavian boxing champ to save a farmer’s daughter’s honor. As a matter of fact, around this time, the tramp’s cinematic image achieved a nationalist synthesis of some significance, as the tramp began to appear in a small number of military comedies tied to the American war effort. An example would be David Horsley’s Cub Comedies, with the diminutive George Ovey as the jobless “Jerry”, and where attempts to engage patriotic content seems to have been a deliberate production strategy. A trade press report on Jerry’s Master Stroke, produced in the weeks following President Wilson’s declaration of war, spoke of Ovey’s desire to “cultivat[e] an air of ‘mystery’” in comedies “dealing with the present ‘spy scare’”.38 Meanwhile, titles such as The Traitors (1916), Preparedness (1916), and Jerry Joins the Army (1917) provided further evidence of Cub Comedy’s inscription within the discursive orbit of wartime nationalism. Even Ham and Bud found themselves enlisted in the military during this period, battling foreign spies in Ham Agrees with Sherman (1916). The nationalist lineage of tramp comedy here crested in full-blown patriotism, the hobo’s Americanism defined across national borders, not only ethnic distinctions. Such was also true of several tramp comedies released during the period of American intervention in the Mexican Revolution, such as Jerry in Mexico (1915) and Ham and Preparedness (1916). Indeed, Jerry in Mexico – a lost film – seems to have overtly thematized the figure of the tramp around the logic of border defense and national boundaries. Released at a time of intensifying tensions between the US and the Villistas, the film set much of its action “at the boundary line post, one side reading ‘U.S.’ and the other ‘Mexico’”, where Jerry meets the distraught Farmer Brown, whose daughter has been kidnapped by Black Gomez, a Mexican bandit. Gomez’s capture is effectuated when Farmer Brown leans against the boundary post, turning the signs in the reverse direction. Jerry then tricks the bandit by luring him to the border and pointing to the reversed sign: “Gomez is astonished to read ‘U.S.’ [when he believed he was in Mexico], weakly yields his gun to Jerry and obeys orders to step over the line – but really into the land of the free”, whereupon Jerry triumphantly hands Gomez over to a nearby constable.39 In limning the figure of the tramp here as keeper of the gate, an arbitrator of the boundaries of exclusion and inclusion that define the “national”, Jerry in Mexico provides an appropriate conclusion to this essay. What I have been sketching is a development

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in comic typology as it relates to the overlapping spheres of class, race, and nation in early 20th-century America. The image of the tramp had a trajectory that extended from anti-immigrant nativism to patriotic nationalism; at the same time, it supplied an image of whiteness that worked to forge a distinctly “American” mass cultural identity out of an ethnically heterogeneous working class. Understanding this nationalist logic undoubtedly adds resonance to familiar films like Chaplin’s 1918 Shoulder Arms, to say nothing of how Chaplin’s tramp persona was used to promote war bonds. But it also, in the end, points to the need for a more flexible conception of comic performance than current scholarship provides. Within the field of cultural studies, the politics of comic performance has chiefly been understood through an ethics of otherness, from Umberto Eco’s analysis of the “comic effect” produced by an “animal-like” clown to David Roediger’s reading of blackface as a form of symbolic exclusion.40 Yet, if the foregoing analysis suggests anything, it is that this can only be one side of the comic coin. For the question posed by tramp comedy – and it is a much more difficult one – is how we can historicize comic performance through an ethics of the same, the clown designating not that which is to be excluded but a space for shared identification. We need to ask, then, how the figure of the clown may have functioned not simply as an other against which early audiences defined themselves, but as a parallel self that enacted, through the mode of slapstick, constitutive moments in the audience’s own social formation – moments linked also to national structures and their rhetorics of integration and assimilation. Only thus could the tramp have appealed as a “purely American product”, a whiteness proclaimed even as ethnic difference was revoked, and whose comic incarnation facilitated patterns of mass cultural participation through identification with a white and eccentric self.

Notes 1.

“The Week in Review”, New York Dramatic Mirror (3 February 1915): 18.

2.

See Richard Abel, Americanizing the Movies and “Movie-Mad” Audiences, 1910–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

3.

Chicago Tribune, 12 July 1877, quoted in Tim Cresswell, The Tramp in America (London: Reaktion Books, 2001), 9.

4.

Josiah Flynt, Tramping with Tramps: Studies and Sketches of Vagabond Life (New York: Century, 1901 [1899]), 99–100.

5.

See Michael Davis, “Forced to Tramp: The Perspective of the Labor Press, 1870–1900”, in Eric Monkkonen (ed.), Walking to Work: Tramps in America, 1790–1935 (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 142.

6.

“No Foreign-Born Hoboes”, Los Angeles Citizen (28 November 1913): 8.

7.

“The Hobo”, Los Angeles Citizen (29 November 1914): 11.

8.

John C. Schneider, “Tramping Workers, 1890–1920: A Subcultural View”, in Monkonnen, Walking to Work, 216.

9.

Monkkonen, “Introduction”, in Monkkonen, Walking to Work, 8.

10.

Jack London, The Road (Santa Barbara: Peregrine Press, 1970 [1907]), 53.

11.

Nels Anderson, The Hobo: The Sociology of the Homeless Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961 [1923]), xiv.

12.

Anderson, 150–151.

13.

“Vaudeville”, New York Dramatic Mirror (10 February 1915): 17.

14.

Caroline Caffin, Vaudeville (New York: M. Kennerley, 1914), 205.

15.

The concept of the “socially prismatic” is advanced by William Taylor, “The Launching of a Commercial Culture: New York City, 1860–1930”, in John H. Mollenkopf (ed.), Power, Culture, and Place: Essays on New York City (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1988), 122.

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25 • “A Purely American Product” 16.

Charles Musser, “Work, Ideology, and Chaplin’s Tramp”, in Robert Sklar and Charles Musser (eds.), Resisting Images: Essays on Cinema and History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 40–41.

17.

My sample includes all acts reviewed in the January, May, and September issues of Variety during these years.

18.

The output of Keystone’s first twelve months is taken to include every release from the studio’s debut reel, featuring Cohen Collects a Debt and The Water Nymph (released 23 September 1912), to the one-reel comedy When Dreams Come True (released 22 September 1913).

19.

Advertisement for The Riot, Moving Picture World (16 August 1913): 703.

20.

“Photoplay Magazine’s Great Popularity Contest”, Photoplay (July 1913): 61.

21.

Mark Winokur, American Laughter: Immigrants, Ethnicity, and 1930s Hollywood Film Comedy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 90.

22.

Harry Carr, “Charlie Chaplin’s Story, Part III”, Photoplay (September 1915): 107.

23.

“In and Out of Los Angeles Studios”, Motion Picture News (16 January 1915): 31.

24.

Kathryn Oberdeck, The Evangelist and the Impresario: Religion, Entertainment, and Cultural Politics in America, 1884–1914 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 96, 198–203.

25.

Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 172.

26.

Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 186.

27.

“Censors Reject Six Films”, Chicago Tribune (26 May 1914): 11.

28.

National Labor Tribune (11 November 1915), quoted in Francis C. Couvares, “The Triumph of Commerce: Class Culture and Mass Culture in Pittsburgh”, in Michael H. Frisch and Daniel J. Walkowitz, eds., Working-Class America: Essays on Labor, Community, and American Society (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 143 (my italics); advertisement for “Ham and Bud” comedies, Moving Picture World (15 May 1915): 1030.

29.

Advertisement for Bijou Theatre, Monessen Daily Independent (13 December 1915): 2.

30.

Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘The Popular,’” from Raphael Samuel, ed., People’s History and Socialist Theory (London: Routledge, 1981), 227–240.

31.

For overviews of the Ham and Bud series, see the special issue of Griffithiana 44–45 (May – September 1992), including Bo Berglund, “Lloyd Hamilton: His Film Beginnings”, 189–192 and Richard M. Roberts, “Lloyd Hamilton: Silent Comedy’s Poor Soul”, 196–206.

32.

Allan Buckingham, “Just ‘Ham and – Bud,’” Photoplay Vogue (20 August 1915): 16, from the Robinson Locke Collection of Dramatic Scrapbooks, Envelope 580, Billy Rose Theater Collection, New York Public Library.

33.

“Our Versatile Comedians”, Motion Picture Magazine (March 1917): 64.

34.

Oberdeck, 22.

35.

Anderson, 40–41. “‘Getting by’”, explains Anderson, “may mean anything from putting in a few hours a day at the most casual labor to picking a pocket or purloining an overcoat. It includes working at odd jobs, peddling small articles, street faking, [and] ‘putting over’ old and new forms of grafts” – all familiar tropes from tramp comedies.

36.

Kitty Kelly, “Flickerings from Film Land”, Chicago Tribune (1 July 1915): 14.

37.

See Giorgio Bertellini, “Black Hands and White Hearts: Italian Immigrants as ‘Urban Racial Types’ in Early American Film Culture”, Urban History 31.3 (2004): 375–399.

38.

“Cub Comedy Starts ‘Jerry’s Master Stroke’”, Moving Picture World (23 May 1917): 1314.

39.

“Stories of the Films”, Moving Picture World (15 January 1916): 486, 488.

40.

Umberto Eco, “The Frames of Comic ‘Freedom’”, in Thomas A. Sebeok, Carnival! (Berlin: Mouton, 1985), 1–9; David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991).

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The “Chinese” conjurer: orientalist magic in variety theater and the trick film •

The “Chinese” conjurer: orientalist magic in variety theater and the trick film

Matthew Solomon for Peter Wollen ne of the main roles in the ballet Parade, the historic collaboration that brought Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, and Erik Satie together with Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, is the “Chinese” Conjurer. Set outside of a fairground show, this 1917 one-act ballet réaliste features a series of performers whose feats are meant to draw paying spectators inside. The ballet’s eponymous “parade” began with a dance choreographed and performed by Léonide Massine that consisted of a series of leaps and an elaborate pantomime of several conjuring tricks: drawing an egg from his sleeve, swallowing it, and producing it from his toe, then breathing fire.1 Like other characters in Parade, which transposed familiar elements of circus and music hall to the realm of classical dance, the “Chinese” Conjurer was derived from an archetypal figure of early-20th-century popular culture. Indeed, the “Chinese” Conjurer was a striking representative of trans-cultural impersonation that appeared frequently in variety theater and early cinema during the two decades before the opening of Parade (and indeed for many years after, especially in the case of theater).2 The self-conscious masquerade implicit in the many prior theatrical and cinematic iterations of the “Chinese” Conjurer was made even more explicit in Parade. Indeed, Massine described his character in the ballet as “a parody of the usual pseudo-oriental entertainer with endless tricks up his sleeve”.3 As this essay suggests, the “Chinese” Conjurer’s move from middlebrow to highbrow culture via the modernist makeover of Parade was but one of the figure’s many historical displacements and relocations. With a few notable exceptions, most so-called “Chinese” conjurers were only nominally Chinese, for Western magicians and filmmakers often adopted Asian guises onstage and onscreen to present tricks and illusions within ornamented stage settings.4 While a handful of Asian-born performers made magic in Western theaters – though seldom in Western films – they were greatly outnumbered in both conjuring acts and trick films by American and European racial impersonators.5 Western magicians, it should be noted, also impersonated the Japanese, although “Chinese” conjurers seem to have been more numerous. Orientalist magic made up an important feature of “up-to-date magic”, the popular revitalization of entertainment magic that spanned theater and cinema after the turn of the century, when Asian robes were a viable alternative to the customary evening dress of the modern magician.6 Orientalist conjurers were associated with a common repertoire of tricks that included breathing fire, performing acrobatics, and, most startlingly, producing large bowls of water.

O

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26 • The “Chinese” conjurer: orientalist magic in variety theater and the trick film

Unlike blackface, a much more prevalent form of racial impersonation, Orientalist magic was mostly non-verbal. Rather than speaking Pidgin English, magicians masquerading as Asians often used the pretext that they did not speak the languages of the countries where they performed so as to dispense with the stage magician’s traditional “patter”.7 Orientalist magic’s highly stylized modes of rapid appearance, disappearance, and transformation also provided a neat fit with the programming of visual “sight acts” in the variety theater. Additionally, its repertoire of spectacular illusions and recognized stereotypical markers of identity required hardly any cultural or linguistic translation. Orientalist magic acts moved between variety theaters in Europe and North America, transcending nations and regional language groups, while acts in the parallel Orientalist sub-genre of the trick film were distributed internationally, perhaps most notably by the sales agents of Georges Méliès and Pathé-Frères. Several troupes of magicians and acrobats from China had performed in Europe and the USA during the early 19th century,8 but the characteristic figure of the “Chinese” Conjurer only took shape at the end of the century, coinciding with the consolidation of variety theater as a form of entertainment bridging North America and Europe and its emergence as a primary venue for film exhibition. The figure of the “Chinese” Conjurer enjoyed wide international and intermedial circulation in the early 20th century, offering an instructive example of the contorted cultural relationship between race and nation at the time. A brief history of the “Chinese” Conjurer demonstrates how a non-Western national identity fabricated through racial impersonation could serve not only as a mask for Euro-American whiteness but also as a screen for the multiple migrations and exchanges that took place within the selectively transnational visual culture of performance and moving images constituted by modern mass entertainment. Orientalist magic was dominated by European and Euro-American performers, but the “Chinese” Conjurer owes its prototypical form to the popular Chinese magician known as Ching Ling Foo (1854–1922), whose given name has been rendered in English as Chee Ling Qua and Zhu Liankui. Ching Ling Foo was the inspiration, either direct or indirect, for most of the “Chinese” conjurers who performed in the variety theater and in trick films during the early 20th century. Much like early films, Ching Ling Foo’s many theatrical imitators crossed borders with relative ease, but this same privilege was not always available to Chinese-born performers like Ching Ling Foo himself. In April 1899, he was taken into custody by United States authorities, who tried to deport him to China. Ching Ling Foo’s deportation was only blocked when a judge ruled that theatrical performers were not in fact subject to foreign labor laws in the same way as other kinds of laborers.9 The following month, when Ching Ling Foo and his company were performing at Keith’s Union Square Theater in New York, the New York Times reported: “An unusual amount of interest was centred in these artists owing to an effort which was made to exclude them from appearing in the vaudeville houses in this city on the ground of coming under the alien labor law”.10 A year later, Ching Ling Foo was prevented from crossing the border into Canada when, “At the last moment he was warned that to cross the border meant banishment, as the United States Government would not allow him to return”.11 Although exclusionary attempts may indeed have served to increase American fascination with Ching Ling Foo and his company, as the New York Times suggests, decades of anti-Chinese legislation in the USA and Canada also had the larger effect of severely limiting the number of Chinese permitted to visit or immigrate to North America. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act had prohibited Chinese immigration to the USA, a law that was extended in 1892 by the Geary Act and made permanent in 1902. In 1885,

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Canada began exacting a $50 Head Tax from each Chinese immigrant entering the country; in 1900, the Head Tax was raised to $100 and, in 1903, to a prohibitively costly $500. Thus, the particular form of masquerade practiced by Chinese magic impersonators coincided with a conspicuous dearth of Chinese performers around the turn of the century. These impersonations fueled what Laikwan Pang describes as the “transnational imagination of magic”,12 filling a part of the void that separated Chinese performers from North American audiences and standing in for more direct modes of cultural interchange. In his parallel studies of Edison and Lumière films before 1900, Charles Musser highlights the uneven reciprocity between the nationalism and internationalism of early films, demonstrating both “the internationality of nationalism and the nationality of internationalism in cinema”.13 Musser posits a representational continuum ranging from the “cosmopolitan internationalism” of Lumière views shot around the world and Edison films depicting vaudeville stars from various countries to the “jingoistic nationalism” of Spanish-American War films. In the USA, according to Musser, cinema’s initial cosmopolitanism was rapidly supplanted by nationalism, but the pendulum swung back toward cosmopolitanism just after the turn of the century: Offering a somewhat speculative trajectory, one might say that the crisis in American cinema known as the “chaser period” had multiple determinants, one of which was the protracted, if temporary exhaustion of cinema’s nationalist-imperialist paradigm. Trick and fairy tale films, which demonstrated the greatest popularity at the turn of the century, tended towards the internationalist-cosmopolitan pole.14 Setting aside the debate over the so-called “chaser theory” and the reservations that Richard Abel and others have expressed about characterizing this period as one of commercial crisis,15 the Orientalism of the trick film suggests certain of the limits and exclusions of the “internationalist-cosmopolitan” scheme. While Orientalist magic certainly helped to prop up the cosmopolitanism of the trick film, it did so by embracing aspects of the polarizing rhetoric of race common to so many nationalist and imperialist ideologies. Instead of defining one national group in opposition to others, the tropes of Orientalist magic allowed a number of divergent national identifications to be conflated into a shared whiteness that was not unlike the “blackface whiteness that delighted and unified the increasingly wage-earning urban masses” of the 19th-century USA, according to David R. Roediger.16 As Roediger argues: “Minstrelsy’s genius was … to be able to both … take on blackness convincingly and to take off blackness convincingly”.17 Correspondingly, some pseudo-Asian magicians made a removal of their Asian guises part of the act. Magician George La Follette, who performed as Rush Ling Toy, concluded his vaudeville act by revealing that he was not Chinese: “So remarkable is the makeup that the audience does not know that a Chinese magician is not entertaining them until the necromancer removes his wig for the final bow”.18 Ching Ling Foo, the magician that La Follette and others were imitating, had come to the attention of the theatrical public at the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1898. The Omaha exposition was a celebration of the Western expansion of the United States and its status as an imperialist and colonial world power, asserted through the waging of the Spanish-American War that same year. Robert Rydell argues, “Like the other fairs, the Omaha exposition represented an effort to put the world on view and shape the world view of millions of Americans”.19 Chinese villages were a staple of world’s fair midways and – like other exotic exhibits – were often staffed and organized by immigrants. Mae M. Ngai contends, Chinese

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villages “were not simply a hegemonic discourse but were produced and received through processes of cultural negotiation and translation”.20 In her discussion of the Chinese village at the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, Ngai explains: It does seem to have made a difference that Chinese Americans sponsored the exhibit, not Euro-American show businessmen and ethnologists. Although the Chinese presence in the United States was marginal and controversial, the existence of an immigrant community meant that the Chinese village sponsors had access to capital, to the press, and to co-ethnics who could provide support in any number of ways – as audience, as employees, or as a resource for the new migrants (the actors) that came to work at the fair… [T]he Chinese village project was full of ironies. The exhibit was organized in the absence of China’s official participation in the fair, because China had declined to participate in protest against the Chinese exclusion laws … It was also ironic that these Chinese Americans, who supported China’s reform and modernization, emphasized ancient and traditional culture in the Chinese village … The Chinese village was built in exaggerated faux Chinese architecture and included a theater, which presented Chinese operatic pieces.21 At the Omaha exposition, Chinese theater presentations alternated with magic performances by Ching Ling Foo. Accounts differ as to whether Ching Ling Foo traveled from China to the USA for the exposition or if he joined the Chinese American contingent to Omaha after performing professionally in San Francisco.22 Ching Ling Foo’s tricks included traditional Chinese tricks like the cups and balls, torn and restored paper, and the production of objects large and small from the magician’s mouth.23 He proved to be one of the star attractions of the Omaha exposition, which was an initial staging point for the appropriation of Chinese magic into the mainstream of 20th-century American – and subsequently European – entertainment. After the Omaha exposition, Ching Ling Foo made a very successful tour of Keith’s vaudeville circuit in the 1899–1900 season. The New York Dramatic Mirror declared him “the greatest drawing card ever known in the history of vaudeville”.24 Performing with his wife and young daughter “Chee Toy”, who together “added no little luster to the act that set all America talking”,25 in addition to a number of Chinese acrobats, jugglers, and musicians, Ching Ling Foo concluded his act with a sensational illusion accomplished without the benefit of trap doors or stage machinery. He draped a large cloth over both arms and, as he lowered the cloth to the stage, an enormous bowl filled to the brim with water appeared beneath it. The bowl trick was the object of considerable public attention and – like the “vanishing lady” illusion Buatier deKolta had introduced more than a decade earlier – was widely imitated both by theatrical performers and early filmmakers. The bowl trick was the first feature of Ching Ling Foo’s performances to be appropriated by Euro-American conjurers. Magic dealers immediately offered the trick for sale and the magic magazine Mahatma editorialized: “Any person with the necessary apparatus can easily perform these tricks”.26 In March 1900, Mahatma noted approvingly, “Houdini is presenting his remarkable act in the principal vaudeville houses … the first formidable rival Ching Ling Foo has yet encountered”.27 Around the same time, Edison released the film, Ching Ling Foo Outdone (1900), which reasserted the superiority of the traditional magician while capitalizing on the conjuror’s name and feats. In the film, a stage performer dressed in black tie and tailcoat seems to outdo the famous Chinese conjurer by instantaneously producing not just a large tub of water but also a gaggle of geese and then making the tub disappear and a white child appear in its place. Unlike magicians such as Felicien Trewey, John Nevil Maskelyne, David

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Devant, and J. Stuart Blackton, each of whom appeared in films,28 Ching Ling Foo is himself absent from the screen, his nominal place occupied by a nameless white magician. The trick of the film, of course, is rooted not in the capabilities of the uncredited performer, who also appears in several other Edison trick films, including The Magician (1900) and The Mystic Swing (1900), but in the techniques of the cinematic apparatus, namely the substitution splice. In the American Mutoscope & Biograph film, A Farmer’s Imitation of Ching Ling Foo (1902), the substitution splice is similarly employed to show a rustic figure comically produce a woman, then a woman and a donkey, and finally three women from beneath a quilt. This film confirms not only the large number of Ching Ling Foo imitators but also the extent of Ching Ling Foo’s notoriety, for it depends on the spectator’s recognition of the comedic dislocation of Ching Ling Foo’s tricks from urban vaudeville theaters to the most far-flung areas of the rural American hinterlands. American magicians jealously credited Ching Ling Foo’s success solely to the bowl trick. When Mahatma exposed the trick in its pages in July of 1899, the explanation was prefaced by a rather disingenuous tagline: “It is not too much to say that his marvelous tricks have been the sensation of the vaudeville season”.29 Yet, Ching Ling Foo’s figure and performance style – and those of his fellow Chinese performers – were perhaps as appealing to Western audiences as his magic tricks. In her book on vaudeville, Caroline Caffin highlighted the exoticism of a Chinese conjurer for Western audiences: “Ching Ling Foo presents all these bewildering fantasies with nonchalant wizardry, smiling his inscrutable smile”.30 Other commentators made mention of Ching Ling Foo’s large size and very deliberate movements onstage. Cosmopolitan magazine’s Ruth Everett highlighted his “colossal stature and elephantine grace” in the following description: “The massive Ching appears clothed in the baggy trousers and flowing robes of his native land. His step is slow and shuffling, and he never leaves the stage for more than a few moments from the time he comes in to do his first little trick of sleight-of-hand until he has finished his act.”31 Ching Ling Foo and his many imitators brought about a vogue for Orientalist magic in American vaudeville. Asian magic impersonators were so popular that one vaudeville manager recommended that Howard Thurston, an American card conjurer who was attempting to reinvent himself as a stage illusionist, transform his act into an Orientalist masquerade after a lukewarm response from spectators at Keith’s New York theater in 1903: In my opinion, the only thing that is needed to make it one of the greatest acts in this country is just the method of presentation which Mr. Keith had in his mind when he booked the act; that is, that it be done in a thoroughly Oriental fashion from start to finish. The name “Howard Thurston” should be thrown aside entirely, and he should be given some Asiatic title that would be attractive. He should make up in a thoroughly Oriental manner, both as to face and costume, and sink his identity entirely. If he will do this and change one or two small details, it seems to me that he will be able to make almost as good a hit as any artist in his line that has ever appeared in this country … As the other houses have said, he is extremely slow in his work and does not put a great deal of life or animation into anything he does, but if he were in an Oriental makeup this fault would not be as nearly apparent and would be accepted as an eccentricity.32 This critique is especially striking because Thurston – American magician Harry Kellar’s chosen successor – would come to be seen as perhaps the foremost repre-

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Fig. 1. Chung Ling Soo (William Ellsworth Robinson), Magic (December 1902).

sentative of the European-American tradition of modern magic, the quintessential theatrical magician in tailcoat, bow tie, and top hat with a magic wand.33 The sheer number of Ching Ling Foo imitators performing after the turn of the century is suggested by a report published in December 1900 that fully three different performers were seen doing the bowl trick in New York City on the Proctor circuit alone during a single week.34 Each of these three performers – Henri French, Charles Aldrich, and The Great Lafayette – executed the bowl trick as part of a series of impersonations that included a timely impression of Ching Ling Foo. Quick-change artists helped foreground the role-playing of racial impersonation since for them the Chinese conjurer was one of a series of guises that could be slipped into and out of quite rapidly. A cinematic version of this sort of quick-change appears in Méliès’s Illusions Funambulesques/Extraordinary Illusions (1903), which begins with the revelation of a European magician beneath a pseudo-Asian costume. In the words of the catalog description, “a Chinaman holding a Chinese umbrella and a fan … leaps down … and transforms himself into an up-to-date juggler”.35 Both roles are played by Georges Méliès, who morphs between different versions of the figure of the magician within and across countless trick films.36 The practice of Chinese magical masquerade was widespread, complained one French magic magazine, “all quick-change artists who imitate magicians like to present themselves as Chinese” by “borrowing the fallacious artifices of an exotic costume” for their “Chinese travesties”.37 The French magician Alber emphasized, “No one is a prophet in one’s own land … Today the music halls advertise only foreign prestidigitators, or those pretending to be.”38 In the ironically titled film Le Thaumaturge Chinois/Tchin-Chao, The Chinese Conjurer (1904), Méliès enacts his own parody of Chinese conjuring. Méliès plays the reflexive role of a European magician

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EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL”

Fig. 2. Advertisement, New York Dramatic Mirror (28 January 1905).

concealed beneath a large mask, pigtail, hat, robe, and parasol who burlesques the performance of Chinese magic for an audience that understands it is watching a conventional act of magical impersonation. While John Frazer suggests, “Méliès may have had knowledge of China’s most famous conjurer of the time, Ching Ling Foo”,39 he was likely even more familiar with Chung Ling Soo, the most famous imitator of Ching Ling Foo who had been born William Ellsworth Robinson in New York City (Fig. 1). In the 1880s and 1890s, Robinson was a valued magician’s assistant, a highly sought-after designer of stage illusions, and a noted conjurer in his own right known professionally as “The Man of Mystery”. In 1900, however, Robinson became an international variety star by shaving his bushy moustache, donning a fake pigtail, and adopting the role of a Chinese conjurer in an Orientalist magic act, often playing the role of Chung Ling Soo offstage as well as on.40 Robinson had first performed his “Chinese” magic act at the Folies-Bergère and was well-known by French magicians.41 In 1902, a profile in Magic magazine elided Robinson’s own imitation of Ching Ling Foo and instead focused on the many imitators of Chung Ling Soo who were then performing; the author made recourse to a metaphor of mass production to describe their essential sameness: “No one would recognize on the stage in Chung Ling Soo of today the W.E. Robinson of old. It is as clever a bit of acting as it has been our lot to witness. The outcome of his success has been the wholesale manufacture of Chinese? Conjurors doing trick for trick as near as possible as produced by Chung Ling Soo.”42 The proliferation of “Chinese” conjurers reached absurd proportions in January 1905, when Houdini reported: “Chinese magic is becoming popular in England and all the kings of the genre are gathered in London: at the Alhambra we find Pee-pa-Poo, at the Empire Ching Ling Foo, at the Hippodrome Chung Ling Soo, and at the Bedford Ching Ling Flew. [Horace] Goldin began at the Palace under the name Goldin Poo”.43 With Ching Ling Foo and Chung Ling Soo performing opposite one another, the Weekly Dispatch newspaper orchestrated a contest between the two by persuading Ching Ling Foo’s manager to challenge Chung Ling Soo. Chung Ling Soo agreed to replicate ten of Ching Ling Foo’s tricks at the newspaper’s offices, but ignored the added condition that he “prove before members of the Chinese Legation that he is a Chinaman” when objections were raised to such an attempt “to change the issue into one of the nationality of the rivals”.44 At the date and time scheduled for the challenge, Ching Ling Foo did not come; his manager insisted that “Robinson” adhere to the conditions originally specified. One journalist joked that Ching Ling Foo had come, but Chung Ling Soo had caused him to disappear. Chung Ling Soo publicly declared

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himself the winner while intimating that Ching Ling Foo was imitating him. He began billing himself not just as “Marvelous Chinese Conjurer”, but as “The Original Chinese Conjurer” (Fig. 2).45 This bit of ballyhoo suggests that, as the ostensible original receded from view, the idea of originality could be redefined – if not rendered meaningless – by a serialized set of imitations. As Walter Benjamin recognized, this is a defining characteristic of cinema46 – here expressed in embryonic form in relation to the variety stage. Ironically, it was through non-fiction films that Ching Ling Foo attempted to assert his own authenticity. Before accepting theatrical engagements in England, Ching Ling Foo had engaged “a young Chinese, a photographer, who has taken some 8,000 feet of films of Chinese life and scenes for the biograph”.47 By accompanying his magic tricks with scenic films shot in China, Ching Ling Foo tried to forge a visual connection between his performances and genuine Chinese culture.48 Even though Ching Ling Foo’s engagements in England were cut short after the challenge, Chung Ling Soo had hardly caused him to disappear. Ching Ling Foo returned to China, where he continued to perform magic professionally. In 1912, he was back in the USA with the Ziegfeld Follies. Returning to China once again, Ching Ling Foo seems to have turned away from magic to become a film entrepreneur. In 1919, it was reported, “Ching Ling Foo is the president of the Colon Cinema Company of Tien Tsin and owns several moving picture theatres in China”.49 Like the earlier use of film in his act, not much else is known of Ching Ling Foo’s Colon Cinema Company or its place in the history of early Chinese cinema. “Chinese” conjuring of the kind practiced by Ching Ling Foo’s many imitators would remain an important sub-genre of theatrical magic long after Chung Ling Soo died onstage in 1918 during a performance of the infamous bullet-catching trick.50 Even though these Chinese impersonators would largely obscure Ching Ling Foo’s own magic, one can still discern his outlines behind the “Chinese” conjurers of trick films – not to mention the colorfully appliquéd jacket, pants, and variegated hat Picasso designed for Massine.

Notes 1.

Deborah Menaker Rothschild, Picasso’s “Parade”: From Street to Stage (New York: Sotheby’s, 1991). See also Richard H. Axsom, “Parade”: Cubism as Theater (New York: Garland Publishing, 1979).

2.

See, most recently, The Flying Carpet Theatre Company’s The Mystery of Chung Ling Soo (2005) and Raymond Yiu’s musical, The Original Chinese Conjurer (2006).

3.

Quoted in Rothschild, Picasso’s “Parade”, 91.

4.

On the larger history of Chinese impersonation in theater and music, see especially Krystyn R. Moon, Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music and Performance, 1850s–1920s (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005).

5.

Milbourne Christopher, The Illustrated History of Magic (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1973), 240–258. See also “Chinese Magic in the West”, Sphinx (June 1938): 98, 101.

6.

See my “Up-to-Date Magic: Theatrical Conjuring and the Trick Film”, Theatre Journal 58.4 (2006): 595–615, especially 603.

7.

Expressing a commonly held view among professional magicians, Henry Ridgely Evans explains, “Conjurers who lack ‘the gift of gab’ disguise themselves as Celestials and go in for the magic of the Orient, doing a silent act to the accompaniment of gongs, bells, drums and music of an Oriental flavor. Garbed in the swallow-tailed coat, white waistcoat and silk knee breeches of the conventional conjurer of the European stage, these aspirants for magical honors would attract little or no attention; they would literally be lost in the shuffle; but decked out as Chinamen and backed up with gilded scenery, richly embroidered table cloths, antique lanterns, and the like, they assume an importance in the public eye that their display of skill does not warrant.” Evans, “The Chinese Question”, Sphinx (September 1919): 160.

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EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL” 8.

Milbourne Christopher, Panorama of Magic (New York: Dover, 1962), 121–127. See also Simon During, Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 106.

9.

“Chinese Magician to Go Home: The Emperor Wants Him, and an American Official Arrests Him”, New York Times (2 April 1899): 1; “Chinese Conjurer to Stay: Ching Ling Foo Discharged from the Custody of Federal Officials”, New York Times (27 April 1899): 8.

10.

“Keith’s Varied Programme”, New York Times (7 May 1899): 18.

11.

“Notes”, Mahatma (March 1900): n.p.

12.

Laikwan Pang, “Magic and Modernity in China”, Positions 12.2 (2004): 299–327.

13.

Charles Musser, “Nationalism and the Beginnings of Cinema: the Lumière cinématographe in the US, 1896–1897”, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 19.2 (1999): 151. See also Musser, “Before the Rapid Firing Kinetograph: Edison Film Production, Representation and Exploitation in the 1890s”, Edison Motion Pictures, 1890–1900: An Annotated Filmography (Pordenone/Washington: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto/Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), especially 43. Apposite here as well is Musser’s insistence on “situating cinema within the larger framework of theatrical culture”. Musser, “Historiographic Method and the Study of Early Cinema”, Cinema Journal 44.1 (2004): 105.

14.

Musser, “Nationalism and the Beginnings of Cinema”, 169.

15.

Richard Abel, The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 1–6. See also Robert C. Allen, “Looking at ‘Another Look at the “Chaser Theory”’”, Studies in Visual Communication 10.4 (1984): 45–50.

16.

David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1999), 116. See also Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

17.

Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 116.

18.

“The World of Magic”, Sphinx (January 1911): 236.

19.

Robert W. Rydell, “The Trans-Mississippi and International Expostion: ‘To Work Out the Problem of Universal Civilization’”, American Quarterly 33.5 (1981): 587. See also Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

20.

Mae M. Ngai, “Transnationalism and the Transformation of the ‘Other’: Response to the Presidential Address”, American Quarterly 57.1 (2005): 63.

21.

Ngai, “Transnationalism and the Transformation of the ‘Other’”, 61–62.

22.

Jim Steinmeyer, The Glorious Deception: The Double Life of William Robinson, aka Chung Ling Soo, the “Marvelous Chinese Conjurer” (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2005), 176.

23.

David P. Abbott, “A Reminiscence of Ching Ling Foo”, Sphinx (April 1909): 9.

24.

“Ching Ling Foo’s New Contract”, New York Dramatic Mirror (3 February 1900): 18 – quoted in Musser, Edison Motion Pictures, 579.

25.

“Ching Ling Foo and Family”, Sphinx (June 1902): n.p. When Ching Ling Foo performed ten years later in the Ziegfeld Follies, his teenage daughter played the piano and sang popular American songs in English. Moon, Yellowface, 148–149.

26.

Mahatma (October 1899): n.p.

27.

“Flashes”, Mahatma (March 1900): n.p.

28.

Erik Barnouw, The Magician and the Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).

29.

“Ching Ling Foo’s Marvelous Feats Exposed”, Mahatma (July 1899): n.p. [emphasis mine] See also “Secret of Ching Ling Foo’s Marvelous Feats Exposed”, Sphinx (July 1903): 54–55. Both of these articles acknowledge an earlier exposure published in the New York World.

30.

Caroline Caffin, Vaudeville (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1914), 190. Caffin continues: “And the tiny Chinese children who assist him are so quaint, so unhuman and yet so childlike, that they seem like very perfect toys and one feels inclined to cry out with astonishment when they run about or smile like other children” (190–191).

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26 • The “Chinese” conjurer: orientalist magic in variety theater and the trick film 31.

Ruth Everett, “The Best Tricks of Famous Magicians”, Cosmopolitan (December 1902): 145. See also Abbott, “Reminiscence of Ching Ling Foo”, 9.

32.

“New York Show, Week of June 15, 1903”, Managers’ Report Books, vol. 0 (1902–1903), 277, Keith/Albee Collection, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City.

33.

Christopher, Illustrated History of Magic, 222–240. See also, for example, Robert E. Olson, The World’s Greatest Magician: A Tribute to Howard Thurston (Calgary: Micky Hades International, 1981).

34.

“Boston Items”, Mahatma (December 1900): n.p.

35.

Complete Catalogue of Genuine and Original “Star” Films (Moving Pictures) Manufactured by Geo. Méliès of Paris (New York: Geo. Méliès, 1905), 35. As Frank Kessler and Sabine Lenk point out, this is a striking moment “where Méliès literally reveals his image to the spectator … for a public already familiar with Méliès, it is thus much more than a simple transformation: the persona of Méliès is presented with a ‘here it is!’ as the appearance takes on the quality of direct address”. Kessler and Lenk, “L’adresse-Méliès”, in Jacques Malthête and Michel Marie (eds), Georges Méliès, l’illusionniste fin de siècle? (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1997),198. [my translation]

36.

On the stage of Méliès’s Théâtre Robert-Houdin, the wife of the Parisian magic dealer de Vère had sometimes performed “in Japanese illusion numbers” as Okita, “having been dressed and made up… in Japanese costume”. Georges Méliès, “Documents pour compléter l’histoire du Théâtre Robert-Houdin et pour faire suite aux mémoires de l’illustre Maître”, reproduced in Jacques Deslandes and Jacques Richard, Du cinématographe au cinema, 1896–1906, 2, Histoire comparée du cinéma (Tournai: Casterman, 1968), 517. [my translation]

37.

Abel Blanche, “Costumes de Magiciens”, Journal de la Prestidigitation 19 (October 1909): 2. [my translation]

38.

Alber [Jean-Jacques Edouard Graves], “Nul n’est Prophète en son Pays”, Journal de la Prestidigitation 33 (January 1913): 4. [my translation]

39.

John Frazer, Artificially Arranged Scenes: The Films of Georges Méliès (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1979), 141.

40.

Steinmeyer, The Glorious Deception.

41.

“From Our Paris Correspondent”, Mahatma (May 1900): n.p; “Chung-Ling-Soo”, L’Illusionniste 14 (February 1903): 105–106.

42.

“Chung Ling Soo (W. E. Robinson), Marvellous Chinese Conjurer”, Magic (December 1902): 18.

43.

Letter from [Harry] Houdini to [Jean] Caroly, 8 January 1905, in “Boite aux lettres”, L’Illusionniste 38 (February 1905): 15. [my translation]

44.

Quoted in “Did Foo Fool Sue or Can Soo Sue Foo”, Mahatma (February 1905): 87, 91–92. See also “Le duel Ching-Ling-Foo et Chung-Ling-Soo”, L’Illusionniste 38 (February 1905): 15–16.

45.

Advertisement, New York Dramatic Mirror (January 28, 1905): 19. [emphasis mine]

46.

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, trans. Harry Zohn, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 217–252.

47.

M[ax] B[erol], “Ching Ling Foo at Home”, Mahatma (July 1904): 7.

48.

Similarly, Shungopavi, a “genuine Moki Indian” conjurer who performed in vaudeville theaters and chautauqua tents, accompanied his “tricks in magic” with “a picture of the Rain Dance of his nation in the biograph”, about which he lectured. M.J. Keating, “Boston Show, Week of 30 January 1905”, Managers’ Report Books, vol. 3 (1904–1905), 66, Keith/Albee Collection. See also S. K. Hodgdon, “Criticism, New York Show, Week Jan. 16, 1905”, Managers’ Report Books, vol. 3 (1904–1905), 51.

49.

Evans, “The Chinese Question”, 161.

50.

For an interesting re-reading and re-contextualization of this legendary incident in magic history, see Christopher Stahl, “Taking Bullets”, Anamesa 2.1 (2004): 48–58.

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A note on the national character of early popular science films •

A note on the national character of early popular science films

Oliver Gaycken arious nations produced popular science films during the first twenty years of cinema history. The first systematic production of films on scientific topics for a wide audience came about in England, where F. Martin Duncan’s “The Unseen World” series, made for the Charles Urban Company, debuted in 1903. In late 1909 and early 1910, there was a flourishing of films de vulgarisation scientifique in France, following the success of Jean Comandon’s microcinematographic films produced for Pathé-Frères. In the USA, George Kleine published a catalogue of educational subjects in 1910, and soon thereafter the Edison Manufacturing Company made a foray into popular scientific filmmaking.1 In spite of the variety of national cinemas producing popular science films, the nation might seem a dubious category for differentiating among these productions. At first glance, an early popular science film from England looks very much like a popular science film from France or from the USA. In addition to this formal similarity, these films also exhibit a significant amount of repeated content, with titles about frogs or physics appearing in the catalogues of many producers in various countries. Taken together, this similarity is related to a general, albeit gradually changing, tendency in the field of early nonfiction: namely, the extent to which this material is seen as anonymous.2 The perception of anonymity has two primary, temporally distinct causes. On the one hand, these films are the victims of longstanding archival and film-historical neglect, so in this sense they are anonymous because they have been forgotten. On the other hand, however, the seeming interchangeability of these films is a positive feature that stems from the period of their production, the consequence of a desire for a type of film that was authorless and timeless. Producers saw a decided value in films that would have a longer shelf life than fictional products and that could be recycled. Charles Urban avidly repackaged his popular science material throughout his long career, and most producers of popular science films had recourse to a form of more or less creative reuse, from Pathé’s distribution of its nonfiction catalogue in the 9.5mm format, to the repackaging of Edison’s popular science films by Kleine under the Conquest label and Gaumont’s ambitious attempt to systematize its nonfiction footage into a motion picture encyclopedia.3 While to a certain extent early nonfiction’s anonymity is due to a lack of attention by cinema historians, it is also related to tendencies toward repetition and similarity exhibited by the films themselves, both in terms of representational strategies and in

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terms of content. A relatively widespread reaction to popular science films and early nonfiction more generally is that this sameness is boring. This observation, if meant dismissively, is not helpful, but it does contain an important insight: namely, that early nonfiction is marked by stylistic stability. To paraphrase a remark by Ben Brewster, nonfiction developed more slowly in terms of style when compared to the rapid innovations in the domain of fiction filmmaking.4 This slow pace of innovation might testify to a lack of ingenuity, but it can also be interpreted as evidence of the early popular science film’s reliance on previously-established representational strategies borrowed from preexisting cultural sources like the lantern-slide lecture or the demonstration lecture. In other words, the early popular science film’s stylistic development was less dynamic than that of fictional films because its modes were adequate to its tasks.5 To return to the question of the nation, we might wonder whether it makes more sense to insist on the powerful similarities that unite these films across national borders in terms of style and content. Given the early popular science film’s predominant neutrality, then, perhaps the most likely national identity for the early popular science film would be Swiss. Continuing along this line of thought can lead to the observation that the sameness of these films across national boundaries might be attributable to the notion that science is a universal language. This analogy, however, can lead us to theoretical work that has noted how the rhetoric of universality often conceals a fundamental heterogeneity.6 In other words, the notion of popular scientific cinema as a universal, or at least Anglo-European lingua franca (or, alternately, a degree-zero style of filmmaking), is misleading. To the extent that scientific discourse can be considered to constitute a universal language, its domain is limited to certain highly formalized forms of mathematics. As a rich vein of work in the history of science has argued, scientific projects and truths are often deeply indebted to national contexts. Recent accounts of Hermann von Helmhotz’s Physicalische-Technische Reichsanstalt and Louis Pasteur’s influence on French culture are just two examples of how conceptions of the nation influenced scientific thought and practice.7 So while there may be a current of discourse surrounding these films that suggests a kind of statelessness, in what follows I will consider how national identity can inflect the popular science film. National characteristics of the popular science film are usually different from the distinguishing features that have served to guide the analysis of the national attributes of fictional films. Instead of markers such as the French foreground versus the plan américan or an emphasis on editing over staging in depth, other, frequently extra-stylistic factors are where the impact of the nation on early popular science films reside. Indeed, the primary mechanism by which the nation appears in the popular science film is via rhetorical strategies that access the figural dimension of the filmic image. Something that haunted the promulgation of early cinema as an “instructive entertainment” was the specter of taboo images being smuggled into the public eye under the aegis of education.8 Science shows frequently contained a hint of the illicit, of indecency, where the word “scientific” served as a fig leaf, as in the freak show, whose recourse to scientific discourse refers us to the proximity of the science film to the exploitation film. This tendency is present at the origins of cinema in the figures of Eadward Muybridge and Thomas Edison, who both claimed that their films, some of which aroused the displeasure of certain spectators, were in the first instance scientific and therefore not censurable according to the same standards that would be applied to popular entertainment.9 In spite of the many similarities between their two inventions, the Muybridge Zoopraxinoscope was put in the Midway section of the Chicago

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Universal Exhibition, while the Edison Kinetoscope, had it arrived, would have been placed in the White City, the center of the Exhibition.10 The inability to nail down whether these entertainments are truly scientific is precisely what distinguishes the popular scientific show, which partakes both of the progressivist uplift discourses that saw motion pictures as an opportunity to use the most modern technology for the purpose of education and the fairground exploitation of these same devices, which could include such entertainments as P.T. Barnum’s sideshow, wax anatomy exhibits, or the exhibition of illegally duped surgical films.11 This ambivalence of the moving image is the register in which the national dimension primarily occurs. An example of how national concerns mark popular science films in this manner comes from Urban’s collaboration with F. Martin Duncan. The Empire of the Ants is a sixteen-part film with a total length of 600 feet made sometime in 1904 (Fig. 1).12 Here the issue of nationalism emerges in a typical strategy of the popular science film, that of anthropomorphism.13 The film does not appear to survive, but as the following descriptions of two of the films’ “pictures” make clear, the images themselves were not the deciding factor; rather, the appeal to the national occurs in their contextualization. Urban’s catalogue description provides a shot-by-shot description, which, according to the catalogue, served as the film’s intertitles.

Fig. 1. Advertisement for Urban/Duncan’s The Empire of Ants, Illustrated London News (1905).

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27 • A note on the national character of early popular science films

Picture #5, “Defending the Nest Against an Invading Army.” “The ants are the Japanese of the insect world, always watchful, resourceful, and ready if need be to fight to the death for the freedom of their nest. At the call to arms they quickly assemble, and put all their power into the fight.” […] Picture #14, “Combat with Spiders.” “As a nation the ants closely resemble the Japanese for their indomitable courage and perseverance. They will cheerfully attack a foe many times their superior in size and weight. Even those Russian ogres of the insect world, the giant spiders, will get the worst of it, and be slain or captured by the fearless ants, who are always ready to do battle for their rights.”14 The reference is of course to the Russo-Japanese War, which was fought in 1904–1905, and won by the Japanese, with whom the British were in fact allied in spite of an official stance of neutrality. This example may seem superficial or idiosyncratic, a topical reference that is clearly out of place, but this kind of nationalism in the popular science film is persistent.15 This metaphorical register, where animals serve as figures for geopolitical formations, is a pervasive way the popular science film engages the nation. Sometimes the issue of the nation can be located at the level of subject matter. In these cases the national dimension is similar to the specificity of travelogues – local knowledge, in other words. Deux escargotphages: La Glandia et L’Ophisaurus (Éclair, November 1913) is an example of this type of national inflection (Fig. 2). In this film, a mollusk and a snake that eat snails are fed for the camera. The national dimension here involves a subject that is particularly French. It also responds to previous French snail films, L’Escargot (Pathé, May 1911) and The Snail Industry (Gaumont 1911). Together this cluster of films signals a particular national knowledge.16 Of course, the differences among the films present are as interesting as the similarities. Within the seeming singularity of the “French snail film”, there are the differing approaches of Pathé, Gaumont, and Éclair. Gaumont’s approach to the popular science film actually comes closer to Urban’s vision of cinema as an educational device. The Gaumont film also crosses generic boundaries, blending the popular science film with the industrial film in its detailed demonstration of the cultivation, processing, and packaging of snails for market, and concluding with a bit of physiognomic comedy. We can contrast this approach with Éclair’s emphasis on violent action. This arresting image from Deux escargotphages can stand for the tendency in the popular science film to highlight scientific oddities, especially species that are rare, peculiar, or violent. Deux escargotphages also contains an element absent from the other films because it provides evidence of a colonial scientific project with its implicit reference to an intercontinental traffic in specimens. An article in La Nature entitled “Les Glandines: Mollusques carnassiers de Mexique”, which was published slightly before the Éclair film was released, begins by calling attention to a recent public lecture by Professor Bouvier at la Société nationale d’agriculture in Paris, who had received the animals from a certain Antoine Gineste, a monk living in Mexico (Fig. 3).17 Edison’s The Wonders of Magnetism (1914) provides an example of a film whose national characteristics relate to how it highlights a particular brand of technical knowledge or inventiveness. The demonstrations of various magnetic properties that constitute the first portion of the film, with a pair of hands demonstrating various properties of magnets, are probably more indicative of the “anonymous” tendency of popular science films. Similar framings and demonstrations exist in films from England and France. The second half of the film, however, consists of sequences that demonstrate the properties of electromagnets. This emphasis on electromagnetism makes the most

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Fig. 2. Video still from Deux escargothphages: La Glandia et L’Ophisaurus (Éclair, November 1913).

Fig. 3. “Les Glandines”, La Nature 2064 (14 December 1912).

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sense when we consider it in the light of Thomas Edison’s persona as the preeminent practitioner in the field of electrical invention. The extended attention to increasingly large electromagnets also resonates with a particularly American engagement with engineering and technical devices, which is most pronounced in the film’s final object. The film concludes with a detailed demonstration of “the Edison magnetic ore separator” (Fig. 4). Popular science films often follow the familiar dramaturgy of saving the best for last. With this logic in mind, this sequence, which details the workings of an unsuccessful device that consumed vast amounts of Edison’s resources in the 1910s, appears as a somewhat peculiar moment of calculated self-promotion. Yet if we think of how the image of Edison as the resourceful, inde-

27 • A note on the national character of early popular science films

Fig. 4. Video still from The Wonders of Magnetism (Edison, 1914).

fatigable inventor who was constantly promoting his own products draws on certain American stereotypes, then this concluding advertisement can strike us as a particularly American way to conclude a popular science film.18 The early popular science films from England, France, and the USA do not constitute a universal language; instead they are a closely related set of national vernaculars, indebted to 19th-century traditions of popular-scientific education through the image, and scientific showmanship. There is certainly more to this issue than suggested in these examples. For instance, the question of how popular science films formed part of national curricula for the education and formation of citizens remains an area in need of further research.19 These reflections hopefully can serve as a point of departure for such research and other questions about the relation of the nation and the popular science film.

Notes 1.

Other instances of the popular science film include the Italian popular science productions of the mid-1910s (Cines, etc.). The late 1910s witnessed a notable expansion of this domain, with the establishment of the German Kulturfilm (UFA founded its “Kulturfilmabteilung” in 1918), the establishment of the rubric of “nontheatrical” in the USA under the leadership of George Kleine and others, and the later Soviet experimentation with this form – a notable reference point here is Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Mechanics of the Brain (1925–1926).

2.

An example is that the copying and pirating characteristic of early cinema at times goes undetected in popular science films. For instance, footage from Urban’s and Martin-Duncan’s “Unseen World” 1903 series has been identified as an Edison film at the NFTVA, a misattribution that occurred presumably because the print begins with an Edison title card and contains Edison intertitles.

3.

On Urban’s career, see Luke McKernan, “‘Something More than a Mere Picture Show’: Charles Urban and the Early Non-Fiction Film in Britain and America, 1897–1925” (Ph.D. thesis, Birkbeck College, University of London, June 2003). On the Gaumont Encyclopedia, see Frédéric Delmeulle, “Contribution à l’histoire du cinéma documentaire en France: Le cas de L’Encyclopédie Gaumont (1909–1929)” (Ph.D. Thesis, Université de Paris III, 1999).

4.

A notable formulation of this view is the remark made at the Amsterdam workshop that nonfiction films “don’t seem to exist in the regime of stylistic pressure that was clearly there for fiction filmmakers”. Ben Brewster, quoted in Daan Hertogs and Nico De Klerk, Nonfiction from the Teens: The 1994 Amsterdam Workshop (Amsterdam, Stichting Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1994), 32.

5.

See Tom Gunning, “Before Documentary: Early Nonfiction Films and the View Aesthetic”, in Uncharted Territority: Essays on Early Nonfiction Film (eds Daan Hertogs and Nico De Klerk) (Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1997), pp. 13–14.

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See Thomas L. Hankins and Robert J. Silverman, “Science Since Babel: Graphs, Automatic Recording Devices, and the Universal Language of Instruments”, Instruments and the Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 148–177; and Miriam Hansen, “Film History, Archaeology, Universal Language”, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 173–187.

7.

See David Cahan, An Institute for an Empire: The Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt, 1871–1918 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France, trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law (Cambridge,: Harvard University Press, 1998).

8.

The phrase “instructive entertainment” is from Jennifer Peterson, Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and Silent Nonfiction Film (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming).

9.

On Edison’s claims for his early films scientific status, see Charles Musser, Edison Motion Pictures, 1890–1900: An Annotated Filmography (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 38–43; for more on Muybridge’s tactics in this area, see, Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 53.

10. See Tom Gunning, “The World as Object Lesson: Cinema Audiences, Visual Culture and the St. Louis World’s Fair, 1904”, Film History 6.2 (1994): 434. 11.

The story of the duped surgical films can be found in the series of articles on Dr. Doyen by Thierry Lefebvre, “Le Cas étrange du Dr. Doyen (1859–1916)”, Archives 29 (February 1990); “La Collection des films du Dr Doyen”, 1895 17 (December 1994): 100–114; and “Le docteur Doyen, un précurseur”, in Le Cinéma et la science, Alexis Martinet (ed.) (Paris: CNRS Editions, 1994), 70–77. Lefebvre has synthesized these articles and included a great deal of new material in Le Chair et le celluloïd: Le cinéma chirurgical du docteur Doyen (Bar-le-Duc: Jean Doyen, 2004).

12.

H.G. Wells published a story in The Strand (December 1905) entitled “The Empire of the Ants” – first collected in his The Empire of the Ants and Other Stories (Girard: Haldeman-Julius Co., 1925) – and reprinted in numerous subsequent collections, notably The Complete Short Stories of H. G. Wells (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1974). It is not clear whether any relation obtains between the two, although it is intriguing to think about the possible collision of Wells’s speculative story – dealing with the evolution of hive intelligence in a species of South American ant that causes them to challenge human dominance over the natural world (which would be made into a film in 1977 starring Joan Collins by MST3K mainstay Bert I. Gordon) – with Urban and Duncan’s popular scientific film. The Illustrated London News, which published the images from the Urban/Duncan film, was the venue for a previous Wells story, “The Man Who Could Work Miracles” (1898).

13.

For a reading of the story that places it into the context of colonial anthropology, see Charlotte Sleigh, “‘Empire of the Ants’: H.G. Wells and Tropical Entomology”, Science as Culture10.1 (2001): 33–71.

14.

Revised List of High-class Original Copyrighted Bioscope Films (London: Charles Urban Trading Company, February 1905), 130–131.

15.

The Giornate del Cinema Muto screened a recently restored Kulturfilm that portrays social insects as naturally occurring fascist states, Die Biene Maja und Ihr Abenteuer (Wolfram Junghans, 1926). Later examples with similar narratives include Der Armeisenstaat (Ulrich Schultz, 1935) and Der Bienenstaat (Ulrich Schultz, 1937).

16.

See Thierry Lefebvre, “The Scientia Production (1911–1914): Scientific Popularization through Pictures”. Griffithiana 47 (May 1993): 149, for a table of popular science films that demonstrates how production companies copied topics from one another.

17.

“Les Glandines: Mollusques carnassiers du Mexique”, La Nature 2064 (14 December 1912): 20–21.

18.

Of course, the USA was not the only nation where this type of product placement occured. Faites bouillir votre eau (Pathé, Jean Comandon, July 1910) concludes with an image of a bottle of Badoit mineral water.

19.

The inclusion of films in educational curricula was a halting process that did not gain any real momentum until the 1920s. For an early attempt to collect films for the goal of educational use, see George Kleine, Catalogue of Educational Motion Picture Films (Chicago: Bentley, Murray & Co., 1910). See also Marina Dahlquist’s essay in this volume.

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European melodramas and World War I: narrated time and historical time as reflections of national identity •

European melodramas and World War I

Dominique Nasta and Muriel Andrin Introduction he present essay is an attempt to set the bases for a theory of trans-national identity based on philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s discussion of mimesis in his seminal three-volume collection of essays, Time and Narrative.1 Having re-read Ricoeur on several occasions, we have come to the conclusion that his discussion of the dichotomy narrated time/historical time, which draws on Aristotle, quite surprisingly fits the contents and style of several European films from the early 1910s. Our particular focus on the relationship between five European melodramas shot between 1913 and 1915 – in France, Belgium, Denmark, Italy and Germany – and the context surrounding World War I, was suggested by Ricoeur’s remarks regarding the implicit links between the ground-breaking narratives by writers such as Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf and Thomas Mann, and the historical background against which their complex story lines unfold. According to Ricoeur: We find a basic indication of the way in which the fictive experience of time relates in its own way to lived temporality and time perceived as a dimension of the world in the fact that the epic, the drama and the novel never fail to mix historical characters, dated and datable events, and known geographical sites with invented characters, events and places. … Nevertheless, we would be sorely mistaken if we were to conclude that these dated or datable events draw the time of fiction into the gravitational field of historical time. What occurs is just the opposite. From the mere fact that the narrator and the leading characters are fictional, all references to real historical events are divested of their function of standing for the historical past and are set on a par with the unreal status of the other events.2 Endeavouring to reinterpret the “mimetic enterprise”, Ricoeur obviously rejects the Platonic conception of mimesis, which distances the work of art from its ideal model and transforms it into “an imitation of an imitation”. Instead he opts for Aristotle’s performative concept: for the latter, mimesis has “a single space wherein is unfolded human action” (le faire humain): such an action is the object in the expression, mimesis praxeos (mimesis of action), as a correlate of mimetic activity governed by the organization of the events into a system.3 Applied to our subject, early European melodrama around World War I, mimetic activity is made visible by the fact that character, setting and subject matter are not only vehicles for imitating extreme situations and emotions

T

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in a given context. They also contribute to a challenging re-contextualization of pre-war national identities, reframed by unusual procedures of mise-en-scène that remind the viewer, as will be explained later, of the complementary, rather than contradictory, relation of fiction and reality. But Aristotle’s mimesis, hence also Ricoeur’s, is tripartite: after mimesis 1 (prefiguration), which tries to pre-understand human action in its semantics and temporality, mimesis 2 (configuration) opens onto the arena of “what if” and creates narrative configurations that are meant as antonyms to historically validated, true stories. For the French philosopher – and this point will prove extremely relevant to our purpose – narrated time constitutes an alternative to the classical representation of time as flowing from the past toward the future. Thus, when approaching mimesis 3 (refiguration), meaning the reading/interpretive process, what interests Ricoeur is not only the process of restoring the author’s intention behind the text but also “the movement by which the work of art unfolds, as it were, a world ahead of itself”. Generalizing from Aristotle’s theories of mimesis 3, he goes on to say that this third stage marks the intersection of the world of the text (in our case films) and the world of the hearer or reader (the spectator).4 The films we will be dealing with do resignify the real world in its temporal dimension, either by way of imaginary, fictitious anticipations of subsequent historical occurrences or by reconstructing real events taking place more or less at the same time. In Ricoeur’s words, narrative configuration is often paradoxical: “on the one hand it sets up the kingdom of the ‘fable’, splitting it from the real action, on the other it refers to the … pre-narrative patterns stemming from real action”.5 Hence Ricoeur’s conclusion stresses the fact that historical events do not differ radically from events framed by a plot. What, then, is the fictional world created by European melodramas around 1914? And why approach melodramas, rather than historical epics, slapstick films, or early westerns? How do history, fiction and genre influence each other and to what purpose? In her essential contribution to the theoretical reframing of melodrama, “The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation”, Christine Gledhill argues broadly that melodrama is neither realism nor its opposite: “it takes its stand in the material world of everyday reality and lived experience and, acknowledging the limitations and the conventions of language and representation, it proceeds to force into aesthetic presence identity, value and plenitude of meaning”.6 Hence, rather than sticking to the notion of genre, she prefers to adopt Peter Brooks’s concept of “mode” as theorized in The Melodramatic Imagination (1976). Understanding melodrama as a mode facilitates, for Gledhill, a consideration of the ways in which a melodramatic sensibility can manifest itself across a wide range of texts and genres. The notion of modality defines a specific kind of aesthetic circulation adaptable to decades and national cultures. She subsequently draws attention to an essential paradox: filmic melodrama is of course mainly concerned with the personal life of its characters, but their inner being is often conveyed through extreme actions, hyperbolic décor, expressionist lighting, complex editing patterns. While also contributing to the operation of emotional pathos, this results in the spectator possessing knowledge – about the world of fiction and its extensions into reality – that is not available to the characters themselves.

Contextualizing the corpus At the end of the 19th century, one of the most agitated areas in Europe was the Balkans, where armed conflicts appeared between 1912 and 1913, followed by a brief peaceful

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interlude until 1914. At the beginning of the 20th century, Germany and Italy exhibited very explicit expansionist politics. The National State of Germany would find its perfect expression in the Pan-Germanic League. Although sparked by the assassination on June 28, 1914 of Franz-Ferdinand, heir of the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife in Sarajevo, war on a global scale came about as a consequence of very complex alliances. Germany, for nationalist reasons, took Austria’s side, while Russia chose that of the Serbs. These moves quickly provoked France and Belgium, followed by England’s anti-German mobilization. At the beginning of war, Italy decided to remain neutral; it would only participate in the conflict from 1915 on, signing the London pact asking for the restitution of the lands integrated into the Austro-Hungarian Empire. During the whole conflict, Scandinavian states were neutral, even though their positions differed. Denmark stood against Germany but remained, for commercial reasons, very cautious, with the press censoring any explicitly politic comment against Germany.7 The turn of the century also saw the advent of Modernity. Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin – among others- would establish the philosophical bases of a theory asserting that cinema owed its emergence to the perceptual dynamics of urban modernity. The latter was triggered by factors such as the extensive migration of human groups, the explosion of diversified economic circuits, and new forms of mass communication and entertainment.8

Case studies 1. August Blom’s film, Atlantis (1913), a German-Danish co-production adapted from the novel of the same name published the previous year by German Nobel-Prize winner Gerhardt Hauptmann, perfectly crystallizes the image of a relentlessly circulating society. In this new world Doctor Friedrich Kammacher, the main character, moves according to Ben Singer’s modern principle of horizontal mobility (“geographic mobility involving migrations from nation to nation, country to city, city to city, neighbourhood to neighbourhood”) but also according to the complementary notion of vertical mobility (“socio-economic mobility involving changes in profession, status, class, affiliation, and associated changes in mentalities and constructions of identities”).9 Horizontal mobility also has a technological component, which includes modes of communication: the drastically increasing number of telegrams, inter-urban telephone calls and letters illustrates the era’s incredible social dynamics and modernity’s effect on the circulation of ideas and things. Doctor Friedrich Kammacher, the film’s main character, flees from home on the pretext of business and leaves his children and mentally deranged wife in the hands of close relatives. While in the first sequences he moves within a supposedly Danish, not German setting, the narrative quickly shifts in time and space to other countries in a fluid and organic manner, his journey leading him to Berlin, Paris, Southampton, New York, and the American countryside, by car, train and boat. The title “Russian Jews on their way to a new land” (Fig. 1) is an apt illustration of pre-war horizontal circulation of populations in a politically neutral environment, allowing the film to open up a documentary or even ethnographic perspective. Thus, an occurrence in historical time leads to a storyline that alternates melodramatic events with the reality of a nautical environment. In one sequence set in the space reserved for the lower classes travelling on the ocean liner, this is achieved through the articulation of a complex shot that includes three levels of representation, among which is the salient figure of the smoking gipsy, eventually a temptress, but also men playing cards, in an agitated general atmosphere conveyed by multiple characters drinking, talking, and walking about

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Fig. 1. Film still from Atlantis (August Blom, 1913).

Fig. 2. Film still from Atlantis (August Blom, 1913).

within the frame. The gathering of different social layers of various ethnic origins is an explicit reference to the parable of the Tower of Babel: such an analogy facilitates, in Ricoeur’s terms, the fluid passage from mimesis 1 (the world as it is in action) to mimesis 2 (the passage to a complex narrative irrigated by fictitious details). Antithetic class contrasts – busy workers in the basement furnaces as opposed to the bourgeois passengers having dinner on the upper deck – are worked out within a self-contained universe, true to melodramatic conventions. The shipwreck of the boat itself paradoxically refers to the Titanic disaster of 1912, while also strangely anticipating the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 (Fig. 2). The circulation of information is at the core of the narration, allowing a more precise reference to the Lusitania in the SOS message (here explicitly displayed through an intertitle (Fig. 3) that saved half the passengers from drowning, which was not the case with the Titanic. Later on, in the sequence in which the sleeping Doctor imagines himself welcomed by a friend in a fictitious land, we witness the simultaneous use of mimesis 1 and 2: this is accomplished through the visual co-existence of the dreaming Doctor and his dreamt universe – extended by images of the Doctor sleeping and meeting his friend in the fictitious Atlantis.10 A parabolic anticipation of the subsequent catastrophe, the “dreamwork” takes place in the middle of the ongoing plot, while there is only one autonomous shot where the two friends walk in a small street of the fantasized, “Atlantis” (Fig. 4). Such a configuration clearly echoes Ricoeur’s understanding of art as unfolding “a world ahead

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Fig. 3. Film still from Atlantis (August Blom, 1913).

Fig. 4. Film still from Atlantis (August Blom, 1913).

of itself”. Moreover, “time’s arrow” is reversed: the Atlantis metaphor of the sequence perfectly foreshadows the symbolism of the shipwreck itself.11 Images and titles of newspapers being sold in the streets half an hour after the saviors’ arrival in New York, where Kammacher will indulge in several adulterous episodes, fit Singer’s view of modern life resulting in “the annihilation of distance” and “the shrinkage of the world”. Historical time, narrative time and real time thus again coincide.12 2. Much like Blom’s Atlantis, Léonce Perret’s Le roman d’un mousse (1914), shot a few months before the outbreak of World War I, plays on a striking representational realism, using real locations like the Eiffel Tower (Fig. 5) or Saint Malo’s ramparts. In this story, which also illustrates the horizontal mobility thesis, a young boy, Charles-Henri de Ker Armor, is abducted from his wealthy mother by two conmen, sent on a boat to Iceland and saved by the old sailor Paimpol, and finally returns to his mother just in time to see her convicted for crime and then saved by his testimony. While true to its realistic context, the film overtly sticks to what Gledhill defines as “the melodramatic mode”: this is quite clear in the chain of sequences following the mother’s departure with her lover. The courtship-balcony scene, in which we witness the silhouetted embrace of the lovers in an abundantly flowered décor, strikes one by its perfect hyperbolic representation.13 However, this romantic setting is narratively antithetical to the abducted child’s experience on the boat. Consequently, an explicit oxymoron results from the contrast between the supposed murder of the mother by one of the conmen and the typically Parisian party that he joins afterwards.

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Fig. 5. Film still from Le roman d’un mousse (Léonce Perret, 1914).

Fig. 6. Film still from Le roman d’un mousse (Léonce Perret, 1914).

As was the case with Atlantis, information circulates immediately and directly through press releases. Yet, unlike Blom’s film, in which the information is spread randomly, here news seems, in a typically melodramatic vein, to reach the concerned characters quickly, as Paimpol and the boy read the papers in which the mother’s case is exposed (“La Marquise Empoisonneuse – L’interrogatoire de l’accusée”). Perret’s film also plays on contrasting realist and metaphysical registers; while Charles Henri and Paimpol’s journey benefits from a highly realistic representation, their prayers and the mother’s figuring as a martyr are emblematic of a transcendent, typically melodramatic miseen-scène (Fig. 6). Most probably similar correspondences between narrated and historical chronotopes occur in what Laurent Veray describes as Perret’s “French patriotic vehicles”, namely films produced during the first year of the war: e.g. Françaises, veillez! (French women, be at our side), L’autre devoir (The other duty), or France et Angleterre forever (France and England forever). Indeed, Perret later directed for Metro, in the United States, the famous ode to European war efforts, Lest we forget (1918).14 3. Alfred Machin is yet another early filmmaker who specialized not only in war documentaries but also fiction war films produced by the famous Belgian branch of Pathé-Frères. The peak of Machin’s Belgian career is unquestionably Maudite soit la guerre (War Be Damned, 1914).15 In this pacifist drama made in 1913, released in June 1914, and which obviously takes place in Belgian locations, two friends turn into enemies while fighting an allegedly imaginary war. The emotional situation is enhanced by the fact that one of the men’s sister falls in love with her brother’s friend.

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Fig. 7. Film still from Maudite soit la guerre (Alfred Machin, 1914).

Fig. 8. Film still from Maudite soit la guerre (Alfred Machin, 1914).

This film exhibits an intriguing temporal contraction. Through a parallelism between historical events, which strongly anticipate the real conflict a few months later in Europe, and the narrative “emplotment”, we get a doubly conditioned story line. After a violent war scene, we see one of the soldiers picking a clover from the dead brother’s body and giving it to the officer. This significant object will later pass to the sister/lover, becoming an ironic symbol. Thanks to a typically melodramatic counterpoint, the “lucky charm” usually associated with a four-leaf clover is wholly deprived of positive qualities. Thus narrative time and historical time (even if fictitious) again coincide as demonstrated, in a split-screen occurrence that includes the battlefield on the one hand and the windmill fire on the other. Meanwhile, the officer evokes the dreadful reality for the young woman (Fig. 7). The film also sets up a new kind of simultaneous recollection. At the end of the emplotted narrative, the young woman, who has chosen to become a nun, remembers what she previously experienced; this can be seen through her coexistence with the recollected courtship scene (Fig. 8). Machin adds to the double image a seemingly realistic event that occurred on the warfront within a different spatio-temporal network, unfamiliar to the heroine, thus encouraging a particular kind of interpretive effort on the part of the audience.16 Here we certainly approach mimesis 3, Ricoeur’s refiguration. According to Ricoeur: “A new problematic is opened up by the distinction between imagination and recollection (…). Recollection is not only a present “as if”; it

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Fig. 9. Film still from Diana l’affascinatrice (Gustavo Serena, 1915).

Fig. 10. Film still from Diana l’affascinatrice (Gustavo Serena, 1915).

intends the present and posits it as having been (…). The possibility of turning to a memory and of sighting in it the expectations that were or were not realized later, contributes to inserting the memory within the unitary flow of lived experience”.17 These reflections are even more relevant when we realize that Machin himself was later conscripted into the French army as a filmmaker. Machin’s war-film experience would lead Griffith, in 1917, to ask him to film the French front in Hearts of the World (1918).18 4. While Atlantis and Le roman d’un mousse exploit “horizontal mobility”, Gustavo Serena’s beautifully tinted Diana l’affascinatrice/Diana the Spy (1915) takes a far different turn.19 A fascinating Mata-Hari figure from an unspecified Balkan-Danube country (played by the well-known diva Francesca Bertini) seduces an officer to steal important documents and inevitably falls in love with him, betraying her allied spies. As in many other contemporary war-time Italian films made by the Serena/Bertini couple (the most famous being Il Capestro degli Asburgo, shot during the same year), the communication systems are updated, in accordance with the development of the narrative. Thus, Morse Code spying devices are used in the sequence in which Diana and her accomplice send messages to the Austrian enemy, while other sequences involve telegrams or even pigeons (Fig. 9). These communication systems rely on a realistic rendering of situations, but also alternate with a highly hyperbolic compositional style. Such is

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the case with the spying sequence when Diana’s accomplice spots her falling for the man she is supposed to con (Fig. 10). Serena plays on the antithetic, moralizing aspect of the titles (“She must be punished”) as an inevitable prelude to chromatically grand guignolesque melodramatic effects. These dominate the episode where Diana blows up the observatory before being eventually caught and condemned for her acts. 5. With Franz Hofer’s German film, Heimgekehrt/Weihnachtsglocken (1914), we enter different territory in terms of both historical time and narrative time. Still active during the war, Hofer, whom Elena Dagrada describes as “the voyeur at Wilhelm’s Court”, sometimes sets aside his reputed “sinister gaze” and opts for easy-going stories with a touch of melodrama, designed exclusively for the German market. Here, a deceptively simple storyline tells of the return of two soldiers from the warfront on an unexpected leave, one of whom eventually proposes to the other’s sister.20 It is Christmas 1914, somewhere in Germany, a place that most Europeans associated with the destructive enemy that had started a war against Russia, which rapidly degenerated into a huge expansionist enterprise. Once again, news of an event is practically simultaneous with the event itself, reflecting the “annihilation of distance”. As in Machin’s film, visual recollections coexist with the figure of the son on the battlefield. However, a telegram-title soon heralds a “Christmas present”: “the son’s return”. If the scene of the parents imagining their fighting son is first a matter of wishful thinking, echoed and fulfilled in the reception of the telegram, in a subsequent scene the son’s surprise visit becomes a concrete reality. Thanks to a temporal contraction, there is practically no temporal difference between the moment the heroine, Lo, proudly shows the telegram and the actual home return. This tripartite mimesis is close to its quod erat demonstrandum in what proves a typical case of national identity: the tragic reality of war, seen through the filters of edulcorated [??] emplotment, implies a refiguration in which the spectator forgets about weapons, enemies, and death. As stressed by Ricoeur, the effect the (filmic) text produces on its audience, whether individual or collective, is an intrinsic component of the actual meaning of the fictitious universe.21 We only concentrate on the magic of Christmas songs and bells, the tolling of which is visually suggested several times, by means of what we have previously defined as being a subception – in other words, a subliminal aural perception.22 This survey is obviously the first phase of a larger project, as we are conscious that many cases of national identity from the same historical moment can be analysed within the framework we have attempted to establish: in the meantime, we hope our theoretical suggestions will help open up new perspectives within an ever challenging research field. Acknowledgements: We wish to thank Gabrielle Claes, Curator of the Belgian Film Archive, for graciously enabling us to have access to various film prints from the collection.

Notes 1.

Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 1, 2 & 3, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Originally published as Temps et récit (Paris: Seuil, 1983).

2.

Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3, 129–132.

3.

Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 1, 34.

4.

Ibid., 81.

5.

Ibid., 180.

6.

Christine Gledhill, “The Melodramatic field: an investigation”, in Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (London: British Film Institute, 1996), 86.

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EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL” 7.

Jean-Jacques Becker, L’Europe dans la Grande Guerre (Paris: Belin, 1996) and La Grande Guerre (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004); Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Jean-Jacques Becker, eds., Encyclopédie de la Grande Guerre, 1914–1918: Histoire et Culture (Paris: Bayard, 2004).

8.

Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity- Early Sensational Cinema and its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 8–9. Ibid., 27.

9. 10.

See Marguerite Engberg, «Atlantis», Les Cahiers du Muet 2 (November 1994): 1.

11.

We should also mention the visual references to the 19th-century German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich and to Waterhouse’s “The Lady of Shalott”. Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity, 26.

12. 13.

Laurent Veray, «Les films patriotiques de Léonce Perret» and Jean A.Gili, «Le roman d’un mousse» in Bernad Bastide and Jean A.Gili (eds), Léonce Perret, (Paris/Bologna: Association française de recherche sur l’histoire du cinéma/Cineteca di Bologna, Il cinema ritrovato, 2003), 73–100, 183–190.

14. 15.

Veray, “Les films patriotiques de Léonce Perret”. Jacques Polet extensively analysed this film in Revue belge du cinéma 38–39 (1993) 63–69.

16.

Eric De Kuyper, Alfred Machin (Bruxelles: Editions de la Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique, 1995).

17. 18.

Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3, 35–36. Machin made no fewer than fifty war “shorts” – e.g. L’aviation au front, La mort du soldat après 300 jours de guerre, both in 1915.

19.

Viva la patria (1915), a film with a very similar plot and a homonymous character called “Wanda”, is mentioned in Vittorio Martinnelli, Il cinema muto italiano – I film della Grande Guerra, 1915. Prima parte (Roma: Bardi Editore, 1992), 288. Unfortunately, the only remaining copy of Diana l’affascinatrice, restored in 2003 by the Belgian Film archive, is incomplete.

20.

Elena Dagrada, “The Voyeur at Wilhelm’s Court: Franz Hofer”, in Thomas Elsaesser (ed.), A Second Life-German Cinema’s First Decades (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996), 277–285. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 1, p.77.

21. 22.

274

Dominique Nasta, “Setting the Pace of a Heartbeat: The Use of Sound Elements in European Melodramas before 1915”, in Richard Abel and Rick Altman (eds), The Sounds of Early Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 95–109.

29

“Cow-punchers, bull-whackers and tin horn gamblers”: generic formulae, sensational literature, and early American cinema •

“Cow-punchers,

bull-whackers and tin horn gamblers”

W.D. Phillips n September 25, 1907, the American Mutoscope & Biograph Company began to advertise Terrible Ted, a one-reel comedy directed by Joseph A. Golden, in which a pre-pubescent protagonist falls asleep reading the story paper Wild West Weekly1 and dreams himself into an episodic series of sensational adventures before being wakened by his mother in the parlor of their bourgeois home. This film has previously been discussed by several other early cinema scholars,2 yet for the purposes of this essay it is noteworthy primarily for its lampooning of sensational story forms popularized by the cheap print industry (dime novels, story papers, etc.) at the moment when the film industry itself was beginning to regularly appropriate similar generic formulae. Terrible Ted not only atypically foregrounds the significance of generic formulas during this period of burgeoning fiction films, but can also be read, as this essay will demonstrate, as a unique instantiation of the complex relationship between transitional-era cinema, the cheap print industry, and issues of class, particularly the gap between middle-class and working-class culture frequently noted in this period.3 Forty-five seconds into Terrible Ted a close-up of the cover of Wild West Weekly replaces the long shot that had heretofore described the scene (Figs. 1 and 2). Although a number of early cinema scholars have addressed the relationship between films of this period, cheap sensational literature, and narrative genres,4 such a connection is rarely as foregrounded within the films themselves as it is here. However, this is not necessarily the most revealing combination of media forms evidenced in the film. Somewhat surprisingly, the relationship between this film and the popular literature it so obviously invokes is further reproduced in the language of the trade paper advertisement for the film. The following excerpt from this advertisement exemplifies the dime-novel vernacular style considered appropriate in its pitch to exhibitors: … Ted, from the window of the coach, indulges in a little gunplay and measures each bandit’s length in the sand. The next scene shows the interior of a tavern of the camp. Around the bar hang a bunch of cow-punchers, bull-whackers and tin horn gamblers when Ted blows in. He produces a roll as big as a Vienna loaf and suggests a little game of ‘draw’. One low-down gazaboe obliges him and tries to pull a queer deal when Ted yanks out his ‘45’ and puts him to sleep with his boots

O

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Fig. 1. Insert shot of Wild West Weekly in Terrible Ted (1907).

Fig. 2. Opening interior setting for Terrible Ted (1907).

on. The others are about to interfere, but Ted has them covered, and they slink out of the shack like a lot of whipped coyotes …5 Although this may have been written with a certain amount of tongue-in-cheek embellishment, it at least demonstrates a cultural familiarity with sensational literature not simply on the part of the film’s audience, but also on that of the exhibitors (the

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ad’s readers) and manufacturer (the ad’s writer). Thus, both the audience and the industrial personnel for at least this film, and arguably for a larger portion of early cinema, are implicitly identified with the readership of this kind of popular literature. Yet, by contrast, within the diegetic space of the film itself the juvenile reader is strongly identified by middle-class markers of house and home: both the parlor space in which he sits “studying” and his mother’s attire work to signify this class status (see Fig. 2). Even as the protagonist indulges in a notably working-class form of entertainment, the film goes to some length to make his middle-class position clear. If, as has been argued, the target audience of these forms of cheap literature was not always as neatly divided along class lines as has sometimes been assumed,6 still the film seems intent on describing an idealized middle-class audience. It follows that, in the same way the film constructs a middle-class audience for the generic formulas of story papers, it also projects a middle class audience for itself or, more broadly, envisions a middle-class audience within the very space of the theater.7 This is especially noteworthy in the context of what is known about the class-makeup of cinema audiences in the USA in mid-1907. Finally, the particular choice of generic formulas mocked within Terrible Ted points to the importance of the nation as a framing device in the analysis of the film text. The titular juvenile begins his episodic adventures in the urban streets outside his home and then moves steadily farther west, encountering outlaws, Indian warriors and even a squaw in need of rescue. If these generic tropes served as a form of shorthand in the communication between filmmakers and audiences, then it must be assumed that they were well known to the two constituencies. In the case of Terrible Ted, the tropes come largely from the genre of frontier adventure,8 which has been studied by scholars of 19th-century American sensational literature such as Michael Denning and Shelley Streeby.9 The nation not only serves to localize, to some degree, the types of formulaic sensational fiction most directly available to an audience, but, more importantly here, to describe the particular connotations associated with the genre’s recurring locations and characters. In addition to those studies which have connected narrative cinema and sensational literature in discussions of class structure and uplift discourse, there is also a growing body of scholarship on narrative genres of the transitional era that recognizes their relation to the traditions established by the cheap print industry.10 However, neither set of scholars addresses the notable similarities at the level of industrial development that these two culture industries appear to share. Consequently, a comparison of the 19th-century dime-novel industry and the industrial and material conditions present during the transitional era in early cinema seems overdue. Briefly, the craft of printing experienced a technological revolution in the 1830s and 1840s with the introduction of the steam rotary press that suddenly allowed for the mass production of printed material, followed closely by similar advances in the printing of images from wood-carved pressings. Improvements in the transportation infrastructure, particularly the completion of extensive railroad networks in the 1840s and 1850s, then facilitated a more accessible and dispersive dissemination of this print material;11 at the same time, the US Postal Service revised its regulations on rates and classifications of newsprint-style periodicals.12 This new ability to produce and distribute larger quantities of printed publications was directed toward a public which, in the American context, had been shaped by compulsory school laws and was, by mid-century, largely literate, even if the average reading level was moderate.13 This was a public that had largely been denied reading material due to the dearth of lending libraries and the prohibitive cost of bound books, and that, furthermore, had relatively few sources of entertainment. Thus there was a significant opportunity to be found in the production of cheap print stories that appealed to a new group of readers ignored by the

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traditional publications.14 This new large-scale dissemination to a mass audience obviously brought significant changes to the structure of the industry, and one result was a notable change in the role of editors.15 Originally serving as intermediaries between the reading public and story writers, editors increasingly sought out trends, proposed subjects, outlined plots, and generally orchestrated and supervised the rapid repetition of successful narrative formulas.16 These unique industrial factors led ultimately to a large-scale standardization of both form (ensuring that the mass production of printed material was consistent, efficient and regularly complied with postal regulations) and content (ensuring that the generic formulae could be reproduced as efficiently and economically as possible). In addition, producers of cheap sensational literature developed formulae “quite separate from the genteel fiction of the Victorian middle classes, the novels reviewed and serialized in the major periodicals: Century, Scribner’s, Harper’s and The Atlantic”,17 which tended to continue pre-existing literary traditions in the face of new material conditions rather than develop new traditions in response to new conditions. Without spending time here on the (more familiar) histories of the transitional-era cinema, I will merely point out what I recognize to be the principal similarities between the rise of the dime novel and that of motion pictures in the USA, specifically with respect to genre texts. Both resulted largely from technological advances; both were seen (at least originally) as catering to the “low-brow” and to the perceived, although largely undefined masses; both allowed a small group of powerful men (and women) who came up through the system and centralized production and distribution to form an oligopoly (Publisher’s Row and the Hollywood studio system); both increasingly located creative decisions within companies in a single individual (the dime novel editor and film producer); finally, via standardization of form and content, both redefined the role of textual engagement with “trends” and the courtship of the audience through said trends. Insofar as we understand classical Hollywood cinema as arising out of an increasingly standardized system of production and distribution,18 it appears that the modern function of genre came about principally not as a result of that standardization at the beginning of the 20th century, but rather as a consequence of the increased standardization of the print industry in the second half of the 19th century.19 Although certainly not the only cause, this does deserve more credit and critical attention than has generally been given. Furthermore, the widespread use and recognition of genres and genre texts in an era of mass-produced narratives preceding the “classical” industrial alignment of the film industry introduced and acclimated early filmmakers and film audiences to the communicative power of generic tropes and conventions; hence, it did not require an unusually astute producer to recognize the communicative potential of genre.20 For example, Scott Simmon, in his study of pre-transitional westerns, writes, “the image of the Indian was ideal because it came complete with a story in tow”.21 Filmmakers were able to employ this kind of image and audiences were similarly able to read and understand it due precisely to conventionalized connotations propagated in sensational literature and other forms of popular culture.22 This again points to the role and function of the nation as an intertextual field particularly relevant to the study of early cinema, as producers and receivers shared intertextual information and connotations that facilitated efficient communication across the restricted temporalities, or short running times, of early films. At least one significant difference in these two industries, however, remains extremely pertinent to this study. For the most part, the demand-driven increases in the cheap print story industry resulted in an increase in the quantity of product, an effect that has also been well noted in the cinema. However, to restate an accepted axiom, during cinema’s transitional era a change in quality was taking place simultaneously, both in

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the product (production costs) and in the overall experience (e.g. the venue of exhibition), in order to attract new and additional audiences as the competition over product increased beyond mere output.23 While the developing film industry was actively involved in increasing the quality of its product in a direct effort to court the middle-class spectator,24 the rise in quantity (spurred by increased demand) encouraged production companies to apply proven business methods and models of massmedia production. Perhaps the chief model here came from the cheap print industry.25 Although the primary audience for that industry was the working classes already incumbent within the young film industry, the model of genre formulas was applied (if rarely lauded) by the same film producers who were so loudly courting the middle classes supposedly put off by this type of story. Although these links to sensational genres were rarely approved by the US trade press (the uplift movement continuously downplayed or directly attacked most generic formulations), this certainly does not suggest that contemporary filmmakers and spectators were unfamiliar with these practices and formulas. Regardless of such pejorative attitudes, genre terminology clearly existed in the trade papers and newspapers that attended to early films, and several recent studies of early cinema have, in fact, formulated their arguments via a study of these distribution and reception-based discourses.26 Less noted has been the use of generic concepts on the production side, which can be demonstrated through a short investigation of how-to articles and manuals aimed at prospective writers of photoplays.27 These texts emerged largely in the (brief) moment of the transitional era when independent producers were in need of photoplay scenarios in an effort to match the demand for product. The first instructional manuals appeared in 1911, in conjunction with the first fan magazines – Motion Picture Story Magazine and Photoplay.28 To compete with the Trust, independent companies quickly streamlined their production process by hiring staff readers and writers who, by 1913, were largely able to meet their photoplay needs. Although often wafer-thin in both size and content, photoplay manuals continued to thrive as commodities after 1913 due to the hopes of aspiring screenwriters.29 The larger and more significant of these manuals usually address issues of genre in some manner and tend to reach beyond broad classifications (comedy, melodrama, western) to engage in early ideas of sub-genres.30 In The Photo-play: How to Write, How to Sell (1913), for instance, J. Arthur Nelson has a chapter on the “Classification of Subjects” in which he briefly (in four pages) lays out the conventions and expectations of nineteen different types of story subjects, albeit largely within a triad of comedy, drama and industrial filmmaking practices. Later in the book, he also writes that, “while the genus of plots may be reduced to two or three specific species, these may be said to cross and recross each other in a multitude of combinations”.31 Arthur Winfield Thomas’ 1914 manual offers several short photoplays as examples, each of which includes a short “genre-line” (my term) under the title, such as “Western Melodrama”.32 This reproduces a format adopted initially by Photoplay in reprinting scenarios, but the practice was abandoned in early 1912.33 In “The Photoplay Classified”, a chapter in his 1914 manual, William Lloyd Wright lays out several styles of film stories which he perceives, again, within the triad of drama, comedy, and industrial films, but he then divides comedies and dramas into subcategories such as refined and farce comedies, western and military stories, heart-interest dramas, and detective plots. Interestingly, he discusses the genre semantics (in Rick Altman’s sense of the term) of the western and crime dramas.34 Although this discourse may fail to avoid simple classification schemas, it does offer evidence, during the production process, of some relatively complicated thinking about genres, even in the era preceding the institutionalization of classical Hollywood cinema.

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Instead of the genre terms used to describe formulaic stories, a number of cinema scholars have identified company trademarks or brands as the predominant form of promotion during cinema’s transitional period.35 Charlie Keil in particular argues that “stable genre categories do not figure prominently within company advertising, partly because firms promoted their films as products of quality, and genre labeling could reduce the distinctiveness of individual films”.36 I think this serves as a good explanation for the general suppression of genre terms in studies of transitional and pre-transitional American cinema. Following this argument, the social perception of dime novels, story papers, and other forms of sensational literature in the period before the large-scale standardization of film product was of significant concern to film producers attempting to achieve and maintain middle-class legitimacy in the new, but growing film industry. Furthermore, if genre was perceived as the particular province of this prior culture industry, then the use of genre labels in a way which echoed the practices of cheap sensational literature37 was, in all likelihood, purposefully avoided in favor of other preferable labels – companies, literary or stage adaptations, and stars – that did not immediately produce comparisons to “low-scale”, “low-class” or subpar forms of entertainment. Although much of the literature contemporary to the emergence of narrative cinema in the USA at the beginning of the 20th century downplays the role of genre and the connection to the cheap print industry, this essay has argued for the significant symbiosis between the two. In the process, another correlation has emerged, made particularly relevant by the context of nation and cultural nationalism, which has, thus far, operated primarily in the background. The assumption of nation and/or race as common denominators for the construction of narrative and genre conventions, particularly the elevation of the white hero (increasingly aligned with Puritanical values) contrasted to “othered” foreign or colored (or both) antagonists, has been well documented by numerous scholars. It is, therefore, not surprising to note that the formation and consolidation of conventions and tropes did not take a significantly different shape in the transitional cinema of the 1910s than it had during the industrial alignment of the print industry in the 1880s or, for that matter, the original growthspurt of printed material in the 1840s.38 What may be less expected, however, is that the strongest instances of cultural nationalism seem to occur at moments of significant growth in these culture industries, when potential new audiences were being courted. It thus became essential to identify new or more comprehensive commonalities or, as was perhaps more often the case, to reassert old ones. Although more work needs to be done to support this claim, this correlation seems to account for both the numerous observations of cultural leveling present in the texts produced at these three key moments of industrial consolidation, as well as to allow a space for those notable, though short-lived, variations within small groups of genre texts in the periods preceding the formation of classical genre conventions.39 The end of the dime novel in the early part of the 20th century is generally attributed to two principal factors. The first involves changes enacted by the U.S. Postal Service, including an increase in second-class postal rates and a reclassification of format and content; the second was the growing dominance of the film industry in popular entertainment and culture. One survival technique applied by the cheap print industry was the transfer of content to pulp magazines, which changed the textual shape and format, with cheaper paper and fewer illustrations, but did not significantly affect the writing style or narrative forms employed. These pulp magazines began in the last few years of the 19th century, but only became truly popular when they began to specialize in genre-specific content after World War I.40 Although the cheap print industry was using formulas in an effort to standardize mass production for larger audiences at least

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from its industrial restructuring in the second half of the 19th century, its largest explosion in demand did not occur until this post-war pulp fiction boom. If the industry had largely settled into its oligopolistic business practices by the 1880s, and the application of genre-as-streamliner was similarly congealed by this point, why did it take another thirty-plus years for this explosion to occur and, more importantly, what occurred to facilitate it? This essay has attempted to demonstrate that it was the film industry’s employment of genres of sensational melodrama, borrowed and adapted from working-class popular literature (among other sources), wedded to cinema’s aggressive courtship of the middle class(es), which finally worked to acclimate the middle class to these kinds of sensational melodramas and to dissolve the earlier bifurcation of class structure and formula storytelling. In other words, the wide-spread success achieved by the sensational literature industry after World War I was due, in part, to its ability to “piggy back” on the middle-class legitimation of genre texts accomplished by transitional-era filmmakers. That said, middle-class fears of contamination from “below” certainly were not magically eradicated with the consolidation of the film industry at the end of the 1910s – uplift discourses were certainly prevalent in the 1920s, and continue to this day – yet it does appear that we can read this mass audience (and hence middle-class) acceptance of sensational genre literature after the war as indicative of the shift in perception affected by the film industry. Hence, the middle-class audience of genre texts – both literary and cinematic – envisioned by the filmmakers of Terrible Ted in 1907 did, in fact, come into existence, even if it required more than a decade for this vision to be realized.

Notes 1.

Wild West Weekly was a dime novel series that Frank Tousey began publishing in 1902 and which ran, in various formats, until 1943. Christine Bold refers to its contents as “moralistic adventure stories about clean-cut boys”, in Selling the Wild West: Popular Western Fiction, 1860–1960 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 15.

2.

See, for instance, Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 56; and Nanna Verhoeff, The West in Early Cinema: After the Beginning (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 384–386.

3.

The exact temporal parameters for cinema’s “transitional era” depend on the historical and theoretical methodology employed. See, for example, Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema: 1907–1915 (New York: Scribner’s, 1990); Charlie Keil, Early American Cinema in Transition: Story, Style and Filmmaking 1907–1913 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001); and the essays collected in Charlie Keil and Shelley Stamp (eds), American Cinema’s Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). For a discussion of class differences in transitional-era cinema, see Hansen, “Early Audiences: Myths and Models”, Babel and Babylon, 60–89; and Bowser, “The Recruiting Stations of Vice”, The Transformation of Cinema, 37–52. For a study of the role of class in the print industry see Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America, revised ed. (London: Verso, 1998), particularly chapters 1, 3 and 5.

4.

One of the more robust analyses of this type can be found in the articles included in Griffithianna 47 (May 1993) that discuss the French filmmaker Victorin Jasset, European popular literature, and the early development of (particularly French) crime and detective films, especially those made by Éclair. Richard Abel’s “The Éclair Tradition from Nick Carter to Zigomar” (88–109) presents the best balance of all three concerns; Francis Lacassin’s “The Éclair Company and European Popular Literature from 1908 to 1919” (60–87) focuses more on the history and tradition of sensational literature in France; and Tom Gunning’s “Attractions, Detection, Disguise: Zigomar, Jasset, and the History of Film Genres” (110–135) is especially concerned with the development of the narrative detective film as it relates to earlier attraction-based cinematic genres such as the trick film and chase film.

5.

Originally printed in Biograph Bulletin 109 (25 September 1907) and reprinted three days later in Moving Picture World (28 September 1907). Reproduced in Verhoeff, 385.

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Shelley Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 24. Streeby attempts to qualify some of the less robust models of readership offered by Michael Denning and others.

7.

The fact that the film is mocking these generic formulas does not prevent it from engaging in them as well.

8.

Interestingly, the character of the juvenile reader of sensational adventure fiction seems to have become somewhat codified within American transitional-era cinema, manifest in a number of comedies designed around the generic exploits and adventures (often dreamt) of these youth. Richard Abel notes that “the figure of the dime novel boy reader continued to circulate in one-reel comedies such as Bison’s Avery’s Dream (April 1911)” – see Abel, Americanizing the Movies and ‘Movie-Mad’ Audiences, 1910–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 303 n.56.

9.

Denning, 1998; Streeby, 2002. Along with many other studies of the products of popular culture, both apply ideas of the nation and the national imaginary in their analysis of the ideological underpinnings of generic tropes, including the layers of connective tissue conjoining the nation and class formations. Since this has been performed extensively elsewhere, I only note its obvious, though absolutely necessary, importance in extended studies of genre and popular culture. Furthermore, these genres were certainly not restricted to the sensational literature in the USA – see Lacassin (1993) for an introduction to European popular literature and the international mobility of genres and forms of literature.

10.

See Abel, Americanizing the Movies; Verhoeff, The West in Early Cinema; Andrew Brodie Smith, Shooting Cowboys and Indians: Silent Western Films, American Culture, and the Birth of Hollywood (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2003); Scott Simmon, The Invention of the Western Film: A Cultural History of the Genre’s First Half-Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Shelley Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture After the Nickelodeon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

11.

Streeby, 11–12.

12.

Daryl Jones, The Dime Novel Western (Bowling Green: The Popular Press at Bowling Green State University, 1978), 5; Denning, 18–19.

13.

Denning (31) claims that literacy in America was around ninety per cent by the mid-19th century, although “this was based on a minimum standard of literacy”. His source for this figure is Lee Soltow and Edward Stevens, The Rise of Literacy and the Common School in the United States: A Socioeconomic Analysis to 1870 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). Soltow and Stevens further claim (199) that by the 1890s “there was little difference in illiteracy rates for the native born and foreign born”. However, a quick perusal of their charts (168) indicates that these numbers do not apply to areas of the American South with significant populations of freed slaves and their progeny.

14.

Vicki Anderson, The Dime Novel in Children’s Literature (Jefferson: McFarland & Co., 2005), 73; Denning 31.

15.

Two good descriptions of the overall changes in the industry, although focalized through the contributions of particular individuals, are Albert Johannsen, The House of Beadle and Adams and Its Dime and Nickel Novels: The Story of a Vanished Literature, 3 vols. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950–1962.); and Madeleine B. Stern, Imprints on History: Book Publishers and American Frontiers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1956).

16.

For discussions of the increasing presence and responsibilities of editors see John Fell, Film and the Narrative Tradition (London: University of California Press, 1974), 6; and Bold, xiii. For a similar discussion with respect to demands on writers, see Streeby, 23–24.

17.

Denning, 12. Although Denning persuasively argues that these two bodies of literature are distinct enough to be considered separately, he does not directly address the separate development of generic formulae.

18.

Several scholars go to some pain to differentiate the filmmaking practice (early, classical, or otherwise) from a (completely) Taylorized production or factory-like system. See particularly Charles Musser, “Pre-Classical American Cinema: Its Changing Modes of Film Production” (1991) in Richard Abel (ed.), Silent Film (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 100–102.

19.

For a survey of the history of genre, see Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: British Film Institute,

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29 • “Cow-punchers, bull-whackers and tin horn gamblers” 1999). I do not claim that genre originated in the cheap print industry, only that perhaps its function of providing a common set of intertexts to produce audience expectations was first wedded to its function of streamlining and standardizing production for increased efficiency in this 19th-century culture industry. Moreover, I am not claiming that either cinema or sensational literature can be described as (or produced by) a fully Taylorized system, only that this often serves as a business-model horizon for media that value and demand variation as much as repetition. 20.

However, it could be argued that the impact of genre films was not felt significantly in the American film industry until control was focalized in a central, hierarchically-defined producer, a role which, in its control over the creation of new product, was strikingly similar to that of the focalized print editor. This has led scholars such as Anne Morey to analyse the “Taylorized formula for the production of screenplays” assumed by the Palmer Photoplay Corporation in Hollywood Outsiders: The Adaptation of the Film Industry, 1913–1934 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 109.

21.

Simmon, 11.

22.

I am not claiming a direct correspondence in specific genres across media lines – Rick Altman (34–35) has argued persuasively against the idea of intermedia generic “transplants” – still, I would argue that certain generic surface-level tropes and codified “shorthands” can make the intermedia jump.

23.

This is not to discount attempts toward improving the quality of product in print literature, such as color and number of images, but to stress the limits on degrees of change available to this industry in comparison to the cinema, such as production costs (print was bound by the definitions of the Postal Service) and site of consumption (over which print had little to no control).

24.

Miriam Hansen notes, “the most advanced forces in the industry … designed to attract a middle-class, ostensibly classless American(ized) consumer”, in “Reinventing the Nickelodeon: Notes on Kluge and Early Cinema”, October 46 (Autumn 1988), 188.

25.

The print industry was not the only reference. Abel, for example, remarks that G. M. Anderson’s Broncho Billy film series “can be seen as one of several efforts in the US industry to emulate the production and marketing strategies of repetition and variation found not only in French films, for instance, but in serialized magazine stories and juvenile pulp fiction” (108). In a slightly different context, Ben Singer applies the term “prototype” in his study of serial queens, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 244.

26.

See Abel, Americanizing the Movies, and Singer, Melodrama and Modernity.

27.

The longer manuals often grew out of the short trade paper articles.

28.

Jacy Deans, Playwriting for Motion Pictures (New York: Dean Publishing, 1911) is one example.

29.

These manuals were partially adapted from similar texts aimed at prospective and amateur writers of other literary forms, such as the short story and the novel. The format of the instructional texts is much the same, and they too engage occasionally in loose generic discussions, although the terminology is usually different (however, terms such as “comedy drama” do cross over). See, for example, J. Berg Esenwein, Writing the Short-Story: A practical handbook on the rise, structure, writing, and sale of the modern short-story (12th edn) (New York: Hinds, Hayden & Eldredge, 1918 [1908]); Charles F. Horne, The Technique of the Novel: The elements of the art, their evolution and present use (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1908); Clayton Hamilton, Materials and Methods of Fiction (Garden City/New York: Doubleday, Page, 1912).

30.

This use of genre terminology in cinematic discourse can be observed even earlier in distributor-exhibitor catalogs, published expressly to facilitate the exchange of goods. Although these materials are crucial for any study of genre in early cinema, they do not adequately, of themselves, demonstrate the use of genre as a form of communication between filmmakers and spectators. For an excellent discussion of this type of generic discourse and its importance in the study of film genres see Tom Gunning, “‘Those Drawn With a Very Fine Camel’s Hair Brush’: The Origins of Film Genres”, iris 20 (Autumn 1995), 49–60.

31.

John Arthur Nelson, The Photo-Play: How to Write, How to Sell (2nd edn) (Los Angeles: Photoplay Publishing, 1913), 61–64, 96. His use of “genus” (referencing the Linnaeus hierarchy furthered by Darwin) is noteworthy since it employs the Latin root of the French term genre before the latter had been generally appropriated for such discussions.

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EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL” 32.

Arthur Winfield Thomas, How to Write a Photoplay (Chicago: Photoplaywrights’ Association of America, 1914).

33.

Photoplay Magazine 2.2 (February 1912) used the phrases, “western comedy”, “comedy-drama”, “western drama”, and “a romantic story of the war of 1776”, in what I have termed “genre lines”. These classification markers do not appear under scenario titles after this issue. William Lord Wright, The Motion Picture Story: A Textbook on Photoplay Writing (Fergus Falls: Lundeen Publishing, 1914), 66–79. For Altman’s description of semantics (and syntax) with respect to genre, see “A semantic/syntactic approach to film genre”, originally published in 1984, reprinted in Altman, Film/Genre, 216–226.

34.

35.

See Bowser, “Brand Names and Stars”, The Transformation of Cinema, 103–119.

36. 37.

Keil, 24. Fell’s term “subliterature”, although unnecessarily pejorative for regular use with respect to the sensational literature industry, works well in this context.

38.

For example, Andrew Brodie Smith’s assertion (5) that “in the period 1913–19, to make Westerns appealing to the middle-class and disproportionately female audiences of the new, well-appointed movie palaces, producers created western heroes who were differential to traditional values of home, family and church”, is hardly dissimilar from Shelley Streeby’s claim (143) that in the late 1840s, even at the beginning of his long career, the dime novelist Ned Buntline “obscure[d] class divisions in favor of an ideal of white, rural, ‘native’ US manhood”.

39.

One example here would be the heroic Indian character in early cinema noted by Simmon (19–31), which disappeared during the western film’s development over the course of the transitional era. Bold, 6–7; Jones, 6.

40.

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Early ethnographic film and the museum •

Early ethnographic film and the museum

Wolfgang Fuhrmann he ethnographic use of motion pictures has generally been considered lagging in comparison to the growing worldwide popularity of cinema in the early 20th century.1 Although largely true, recent studies suggest that the situation in Germany did not follow this pattern. As Martin Taureg has shown, German ethnography’s theoretical focus on material culture combined with the country’s cinema reform movement to produce a notable early interest in the use of motion pictures as both research tool and teaching aid.2 Nonetheless, what sounds like another German Sonderweg (special path) in the history of the ethnographic film requires further qualification. Certainly, it would be reductive to consider German ethnography as characterized by a collective national profile. In a challenging history of ethnographic museums in imperial Germany, Glenn Penny has argued that the “cultural and social as much as the intellectual interests and desires of scientists, civic associations, collectors, patrons, and visitors, as well as the force of a growing international market in material culture, shaped the science of ethnology and German ethnographic museums”.3 Rather than assume a common national dimension within the discipline, Penny proposes a more nuanced understanding of the “internal dynamics” of German ethnographic science, such as personal and institutional interests and competition.4 Applied to the specific case of motion pictures, Penny’s argument suggests that the study of German ethnographic film must likewise take into consideration the agendas of the various ethnographers who were working in and for museums in a continuous competitive situation. Questions of production, distribution and exhibition of ethnographic films were therefore closely linked to the museums’ individual institutional policies, distinctive profiles, and local – rather than national – interests.

T

Collecting and filming material culture German ethnography’s particular interest in filmmaking is usually explained in relation to German Kulturkreislehre (diffusionism), an approach that emphasized the significance of the comparative study of the form and quantity of artifacts from different cultures to determine historical relationships. Collecting material culture was therefore a prerequisite for studying the history of mankind but also went hand in hand with the idea of “salvage ethnography”: only the systematic collection of the ethnographica of cultures untouched by civilization guaranteed their survival in the future – even if merely as artifacts in museum displays. Although German ethnography was more diverse in theory than the singular concept of Kulturkreislehre might suggest, the exhaustive collection of material culture was of

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paradigmatic importance to every ethnographer. Both amateurs and professionals were supplied with guidebooks that gave clear instruction not only about what cultural artifacts to collect but also how to collect them. The 1904 guidebook Anleitung für ethnographische Beobachtungen und Sammlungen in Afrika und Oceanien (Instruction for Ethnographic Observations and Collections in Africa and Oceania), edited by Felix von Luschan, director of the Berlin ethnographic museum, represents the first time that the motion picture camera was recommended for use in ethnographic research.5 Yet, as subsequent editions in 1908 and 1914 show, ethnographic filmmaking was recommended not in a spirit of experimentalism, but rather to preserve an aspect of material culture that no other medium could manage at the time – namely, movement. The recording of kinetic events such as initiation rituals, festivities, dances, or games was not to succumb to a kind of scientific Spielerei (gadgetry) that transformed the ethnic Other into visual spectacle; rather, film would serve to fulfil the ethnographer’s interest in documenting social relations in other cultures and societies.6

The ethnographic museum Luschan’s guidebook might lead one to conclude that it was the Berlin Museum für Völkerkunde that led the introduction of film into ethnographic observation. The Berlin museum was indeed the number one ethnographic institution in Germany and in a privileged hegemonic position, especially with regard to non-Prussian institutes like the Saxon museum in Leipzig. According to a resolution of the federal council (Bundesrathsbeschluß) in 1889, all ethnographic collections from colonial expeditions financed by the Reich had to be handed first to the Berlin museum. However, due to its outstanding position in imperial Germany and secure financial status, the Berlin museum could easily ignore public outreach efforts, and there is no indication that ethnographic film screenings became part of its didactic program.7 The example of the Leipzig Museum shows, by contrast, that other museums fought Berlin’s hegemony by establishing their own scientific profile. Since 1904 the Leipzig museum had been in municipal hands, its growth supported by Saxon politics, the local academic environment, and, not least, director Karl Weule’s talent for finding private investors and donors. Already by the turn of the century, Leipzig University had become an intellectual center of cultural sciences, with the “Leipzig Circle” of Karl Lamprecht, Wilhelm Wundt, and Friedrich Ratzel offering an effective academic counterbalance to Berlin.8 Its institutionalization as a major center of ethnographic teaching and research, however, began only during Karl Weule’s tenure (after Ratzel’s death) when the university launched the country’s first Ph. D. program in the discipline in 1904.9 Ten years later, in 1914, Weule got his own academic institute, the Ethnographische Seminar (Ethnographic Seminar), at the University. That same year the Saxon government approved an ethnological research institute, Forschungsinstitut für Völkerkunde, which, also under Weule’s directorship, was combined with Wundt and Lamprecht’s institute to become part of the “König Friedrich-August-Stiftung”, designed to offset the natural sciences grouping at Berlin’s “Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institute”.10 The Leipzig museum was thus home to the Ethnographic Seminar and the research institute, making Leipzig a center for ethnological study and ethnographic research in the heart of Germany. As Woodruff D. Smith has written, these activities at Leipzig reveal that “the elites of Saxon politics, business and intellectual life were usually ready to support anything that would show Saxony to advantage in comparison with Prussia”.11 What has not been examined – and what this essay will demonstrate – is the degree to which filmmaking also played a part in this competitive situation, as illustrated through Weule’s use of the new medium during and after his 1906 expedition to Africa.

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Ethnographic filmmaking Collecting and filming material culture were crucial aspects of Weule’s expedition to the south of the German East African colony between June and November 1906. While the initial goal was to explore a region southeast of Lake Victoria, he had to change plans because of a recent riot in the region. In agreement with the administration in Dar es Salaam and the Kommission für die landeskundliche Erforschung der deutschen Schutzgebiete (Commission for the geographic exploration of the German protectorates), which coordinated his expedition, Weule decided to travel to a region southwest of Lindi to study its “strange ethnic mixture of Wanjaturu, Wasiomi, Wassandaui, etc.”.12 By the end of his expedition Weule had collected approximately 1640 ethnographic objects, taken 1300 photographs, recorded thirtynine phonograms, and shot forty Fig. 1. Karl Weule in the East African colony, films (Fig. 1).13 summer/autumn 1906. Weule’s role in German ethnography has been only marginally studied within the discipline’s history, but it is clear that his academic reputation was based less on his role as a theoretical leader than on his practical efforts in establishing ethnography as a new academic discipline.14 It was, in fact, his interest in popularizing ethnography to the broader public and establishing his museum in Leipzig’s cultural life that led him to consider film a perfect teaching aid for the lecture hall. Weule clearly felt that the wide circulation of film should be supported by all means: “Film is the demonstration tool of the lecture hall; at the same time it is the archive of the vanishing customs of our primitive races. As such, its use and circulation should be supported with all means as a long as there is still time”.15 During his expedition Weule had already reflected on the possibility of combining film and phonograph recordings to familiarize the “non-East African” public with African customs: If the films are good, we will have the chance to show the non-East African public the overall picture of such a Ngoma [a popular festivity with dancing and singing] through the simultaneous exhibition of film and phonograph recordings. Moreover, the characteristic singing performances are thus preserved for posterity.16 Weule seemed to know that his films represented a unique demonstration tool, different in kind from the ethnographic artifacts that could be usually seen in museums. The exhibition of films became integral to his lectures, and reviews show that whenever Weule showed his films the lectures were successful. While that success was partly due to the “spectacular” character of the moving images – for many people their only chance to see “real” Africans – Weule did not shirk

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Fig. 2. Karl Weule and his troop.

showmanship in attracting the public’s interest. His films included more than strictly ethnographic material, as illustrated in the surviving print of his military escort, which stages Weule’s expedition as a scientific-military spectacle. His draft lecture notes further reveal that, in other films, he proudly portrayed himself as the “zünftiger Professor” (“proper professor”) in “wild Africa” (Fig. 2).17 Another film in which Weule shot an African “clown”, while certainly interesting from an ethnographic perspective, could also have been used as a funny intermission in a popular lecture about a scientific topic. As notes for the (incomplete) draft for Weule’s presentation at the Geographic Society in Leipzig show, his lecture was a carefully structured performance of films, slides, and phono-recordings that created a loose chronological narrative. His text includes short notes such as “The Pre-History of My Expedition”, “Acknowledgements”, “General Map: Research Area”, “Introduction of the Equipment and Aim of the Expedition”, “My First Fever”, “Photo Stroll to My Work”, “My Evening with the Ladies”, “Beginning of the Scholar’s Ethnographic Work”, the latter of which introduced the different films about African men and women, dances and festivities, a clown, and songs.18 The lecture finished with a phono-film exhibition showing the expedition on its return journey. Although Weule varied his lectures according to audience, it seems probable that their success was in the main due to his willingness to present his findings within a non-specialist framework. It is therefore not surprising that his lectures at the local branch of the German Colonial Society in Nürnberg became a well-attended Familienabend (family evening).10 Indeed, his fascination with film’s popularizing potential is illustrated by a Düsseldorf review of one lecture in which Weule was criticized for showing too many films!20 In contrast to the situation in Berlin, Weule was very much interested in establishing a close and vivid contact between the Leipzig museum and the local public.21 To make his museum more popular Weule experimented with new exhibition concepts, organized specific thematic exhibitions and offered museum tours. Revolving stereoscopes with ethnographic pictures were on permanent display in the exhibition halls, and the

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museum also established a slide archive for use by local institutions.22 Film screenings were obviously another chance to get the local public interested in the museum and ethnology; and, although Leipzig did not have the advantage of being the first to choose from collections of recent expeditions – this privilege was, as previously mentioned, exclusively reserved for Berlin – the situation seems to have been different with regard to ethnographic films. Already after his return from Africa, Weule had explained to the Leipzig city council that he planned to employ his phonographic recordings and films for courses and lectures to the general public.23 Within the context of early 20th-century museum politics, Weule’s interest in film’s didactic potential can be related to the so-called “new international trend” of the time, as evidenced also in the vogue for Schausammlungen (didactic displays) targeting a more popular audience. Whereas Berlin characteristically deemed the new Schausammlung “unscientific” and “inadequate”, other museums – Leipzig included – argued that the new displays were the only means for educating the broader public.24 Weule’s interest in such displays led him to canvass the opinions of museum visitors in order to refine his methods, and drafts of his lectures around this time show that he intended to use films in ethnography courses open to a broad, cross-class public.25 The museum inaugurated this approach with two courses on the German colonies in the winter of 1908–1909 and continued the offerings in the winter of 1909–1910.26 The courses were successful, with the per centage of participants from the working class increasing in both years. Indeed, Weule seems to have seized every chance to use his film screenings to promote the museum, as in February 1907 when the King of Saxon visited the museum. Given the King’s important role in funding and patronage, film screenings were an effective and modern way of arguing visually for the museum’s maintenance.27

Competition While Weule emphasized that his expedition would add another “glorious title” (Ruhmestitel) to German ethnography, his patriotism was limited when it came to sharing his films with other colleagues and museums. A correspondence concerning a proposed lecture at the Cologne Museum of Ethnography illustrates just how much control Weule sought to keep over his films. That correspondence, beginning in November 1905, was characterized by a continuous back and forth between Weule and the director of the Cologne Museum, Willy Foy, over the correct date and lecture conditions. After Weule’s return from his expedition, he began using the films as a strong argument to re-negotiate his lecture fee. Although prior to the expedition Weule had accepted a fee of 100 Marks plus travel expenses, he sought to renegotiate terms upon returning, arguing that, having spent so much money on technical equipment, “I must demand to my own chagrin half a blue note more [i.e. 50 Marks]”.28 Cologne was not pleased to learn about Weule’s new terms, but Weule insisted that, if the extra sum was not paid, he would either limit his lecture to the projection of lantern slides or refuse to lecture at all.29 Underlying the dispute was a struggle over the new medium’s didactic potential: who was authorized to control screenings of the films and with what permission could they be used? Weule’s emphasis on the “new situation” shows that he was quite aware of his position as an exceptional lecturer among his colleagues, and made sure that his audience was apprised of this on the day of his lecture. As the notes for his introductory speech emphasized: “The lecturer is able to show these dances in living pictures, while the phonograph reproduces the songs that were sung at this moment. For Völkerkunde this is something brand new and of high interest.”30 The lecture was indeed a success, but this did not end his dispute with Foy.

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On the contrary, negotiations now entered a confusing war of attrition as Weule began throwing up obstacles to Foy’s attempts to obtain copies of the films. According to a resolution coordinating ethnographic research in the colonies, other German museums were theoretically allowed to purchase Weule’s films at cost price; yet what should have been a simple transaction for Foy was complicated by a long correspondence between Weule in Leipzig, where the films were archived, and the Berlin Reichskolonialamt [RKA] (Imperial Colonial Office), which held the rights to the films.31 Foy had evidently been impressed with Weule’s films and, right after the lecture, contacted Hans Meyer, Weule’s mentor, at the RKA to ask about obtaining copies for museum exhibition purposes.32 Meyer advised Weule to follow the commission’s resolutions concerning the purchase of the films, but Weule continued to direct Foy’s inquiries back to the RKA, which, once again, contacted Weule and instructed him to put the copies at Foy’s disposal.33 This time Weule could not refuse; still, he obviously wanted to draw out the sale as long as possible, and answered a new letter from Foy by asking for more details.34 Foy meanwhile became indignant about these delaying tactics and replied: Since we do not want to use your phono- and film recordings for scientific studies but exclusively for museum purposes, we are not asking for detailed comments but are satisfied with correct information on the content and origin, quite similar to your lectures in which you presented phonograms and films without extensive explanations. With reference to the decision that we received from the colonial office we ask therefore again for the conditions and the sending of a list.35 Weule again did not comply with this request but only sent a list of his phonograms.36 In July 1908, the correspondence between Leipzig and Cologne came to an end. In a last letter Foy indicates that the museum was still thinking about possible film screenings and wanted information about the price of an apparatus and running costs. The museum had not yet decided to purchase Weule’s films but would make its decision later: Since our inquiries about cinematographic recordings are just a first provisional orientation, concerning whether it is worth the purchase of an apparatus [i.e. a projector] and what costs are associated with it, we ask first only for information of the approximate length of your usable films. Later we would reflect on all your recordings with the exception of the non-ethnographic, such as caravan shots, etc.37 At the annual conference of the German Anthropological Society in Cologne in 1910, Weule declared that film screenings were no longer being planned for the present and downplayed the role of “modern” media in his museum, emphasizing instead other important tasks such as inventorying the ethnographic collections.38 Perhaps it is true that he was no longer planning screenings for his classes, but his characteristic withholding of information suggests that, once more, he did not want to share his experiences with other institutions, preferring to reserve the use of film exclusively for the Leipzig museum.

Conclusion Weule never undertook another ethnographic film-expedition, although film remained a continuing concern in his work. For example, in 1908, he sent his assistant, Friedrich (Fritz) Krause, on a one-year expedition to Brazil, equipped with two still cameras, a phonogram, and a film camera.39 In 1913, another of his assistants, Paul German, was sent to accompany Leo Frobenius’ fourth African expedition. That time

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Weule emphasized in particular the significance of film, stating that the exhibition of ethnographic films was “so to speak in the air”.40 Later, after the loss of the colonies following World War I, Weule pursued a still more systematic use of cinematography, using his international contacts with scholars in the former colonies to ask them to collect, photograph, and film. For this he distributed questionnaires and instructions and supplied the scholars with still and film cameras.41 The filming of material culture framed German ethnographers’ understanding for more than half a century, eventually resulting in the founding of an ethnographic film archive, the Encyclopedia Cinematographica at the Institut für den wissenschaftlichen Film (Institute for Scientific Film) in Göttingen in 1953. Yet, as this essay has shown, what is usually known as the “German tradition” in ethnographic film history was based less on a close alliance among scholars than on a tangled web of personal interests, interpersonal relations, and institutional competition. Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Rob King for his excellent support in editing the text for this publication.

Notes 1.

See, for example, Alison Griffiths, Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn of the Century Visual Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 176.

2.

Martin Taureg, “The Development of Standards for Scientific Films in German Ethnography”, Studies in Visual Communication 9.1 (1983): 19–29.

3.

H. Glenn Penny, Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 11.

4.

Ibid.

5.

Felix von Luschan (ed.), Anleitung für ethnographische Beobachtungen und Sammlungen in Afrika und Oceanien (Berlin: Generalverwaltung der Königlichen Museen zu Berlin, 1904).

6.

Ibid., 97.

7.

Penny, 159. This does not mean that the museum lacked opportunities to organize film screenings. In September 1907, the Freie Photographische Vereinigung zu Berlin (Berlin Free Photographic Association) purchased a cinematographic apparatus and stored it at the museum’s disposal. There is no indication that the museum ever made use of it. Archiv Ethnologisches Museum Berlin: I/MV 0101 Acta betreffend die Freie photographische Vereinigung zu Berlin [now Deutsche Photographische Gesellschaft e.v.], Pars IVa: 1666/07, 5 February 1893.

8.

The term “Leipzig circle” is borrowed from Woodruff D. Smith, who qualifies it by noting that the label should not be taken to imply a significant degree of organizational coherence at Leipzig. Smith, Politics and the Sciences of Culture in Germany 1840–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 204.

9.

Otto Reche, “Karl Weule”, In Memoriam Karl Weule: Beiträge zur Völkerkunde und Vorgeschichte (Leipzig: R. Voigtländers Verlag, 1929), 1–12.

10.

Ibid., 5.

11.

Smith, 205.

12.

“Bericht der ‘Kommission für die landeskundliche Erforschung der deutschen Schutzgebiete’ an den Kolonialrat über ihre Tätigkeit im Rechnungsjahre 1905/06”, in Freiherr von Danckelman, Alexander, ed., Mitteilungen von Forschungsreisenden und Gelehrten aus den deutschen Schutzgebieten 19.4 (1906): 291–294.

13.

Weule to Meyer, 30 November 1906, Bundesarchiv [henceforth cited as BArch], R 1001/5637-2, 80.

14.

Born in 1864, Weule studied geography, geology, and mineralogy at the Universities of Göttingen and Leipzig, where he was a student of Friedrich Ratzel. From 1893 until 1899, he was assistant to Adolf Bastian in the Africa section of the Völkerkundliche Museum in Berlin, before returning to Leipzig University as a lecturer in ethnography and geography. In 1901, he was appointed to the chair of ethnography and prehistory at Leipzig University and, in 1907, became the director

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EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL” of the Leipzig Museum für Völkerkunde, which he transformed into the country’s second leading ethnographic museum. He died on 19 April 1926. 15.

Karl Weule, Negerleben in Ostafrika. Ergebnisse einer ethnologischen Forschungsreise (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1908), vii. Published in Great Britain as Native life in East Africa. Results of an Ethnological Research Expedition (London: Sir Issac Pitman and Sons, 1909), and in the same year in the USA through D. Appleton and Co., New York.

16.

BArch, R 1001/5673-2, 57.

17.

Weule to Meyer, 7 October 1906, BArch, R 1001/5673-2, 86.

18.

Quotes are taken from Weule’s lecture to the Leipzig Geographic Society, 1 March 1907. Archiv des Museums für Völkerkunde zu Leipzig [henceforth cited as AMVL]: C 17 AF.

19.

Fränkischer Kurier. Nürnberg (10 March 1908).

20.

Düsseldorfer Generalanzeiger (24 October 1909).

21.

Karl Weule, “Die nächsten Aufgaben und Ziele des Leipziger Völkerkundemuseums”, in Direktion des Städtischen Museums für Völkerkunde zu Leipzig (ed.), Jahrbuch des Städtischen Museums für Völkerkunde zu Leipzig 3 (Leipzig: R. Voigtländers Verlag, 1910), 151–174.

22.

Weule, “Die nächsten Aufgaben”, 166. The use of stereoscopes is reported in an article in the Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten (26 April 1908).

23.

Lecture to the Rat und Stadtverordnete der Stadt Leipzig (3 April 1907), AMVL: C 17 AF.

24.

Penny, 147.

25.

Penny, 149; Draft for 1908–1909 ethnology course, AMVL: C 17 AF. It is possible that film screenings were planned but never realized.

26.

Karl Weule, “Die nächsten Aufgaben”, 169.

27.

Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten (22 February 1907).

28.

Historisches Archiv der Stadt Köln, Holding 614, no. 364, 16–19.

29.

Ibid., 5.

30.

Ibid., 23.

31.

BArch, R 1001/5637-2, 141.

32.

BArch, R 1001/5673-2, 140.

33.

BArch, R 1001/5673-2, 141; RKA to Weule (4 May 1908), AMVL: Expedition.

34.

Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum to Weule (16 May 1908), AMVL: Expedition.

35.

Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum to Weule (27 May 1908), AMVL: Expedition.

36.

Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum to Weule (1 June 1908), AMVL: Expedition.

37.

Rautenstrauch Joest Museum to Weule (3 July 1908), AMVL: Expedition.

38.

Tägliche Rundschau (15 August 1910).

39.

Stadtarchiv Leipzig, Kap. 31. Nr. 12, Akten des Museums für Völkerkunde 5 (1907), 127.

40.

Stadtarchiv Leipzig, Kap. 31. Nr. 12, Akten des Museums für Völkerkunde 8 (1907), 200.

41.

Reche, 10.

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PART V Gender and the “National”

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31

Black hair, black eyes, black heart: Theda Bara and race suicide panic •

Black hair, black eyes, black heart: Theda Bara and race suicide panic

Mark Hain

he dark, exotic image of Theda Bara (Theodosia Goodman, 1885–1955), a transitional figure between late Victorian propriety and early 20th-century modernity, embodied a host of fears and desires felt by American audiences in the 1910s. Towards the end of 1915, the year that Bara shot to fame as “The Vampire” in a clumsy but wildly popular film called A Fool There Was (1914), her studio, Fox Film Corporation, issued a publicists’ report stating that in the past year, 162 babies had been named “Theda”. That the press release enthusiastically proclaimed that these newborns were “all white!”1 speaks of the ambivalence that marked Bara’s stardom and popularity. From 1915 to 1919, Bara starred in 39 films for Fox and in all but a handful played a calculating, manipulative woman whose wiles were frequently connected with her ambiguously ethnic appearance, exploited throughout her film career as Arab, Egyptian, Russian, Polynesian, Italian, Spanish, Mexican, or other “races” that stood in contrast to the Anglo-Saxon heritage valorized at the time as the stock of “true” Americans.

T

Bara has retained a dubious claim as the cinema’s first sex symbol. Less debatably, she has been recognized as an early instance of a film star whose celebrity was fabricated purely out of hype; notably, a massive publicity campaign preceded the release of A Fool There Was, establishing Bara as a personality even before the public saw her in her first starring role. A major part of that publicity, and of Bara’s celebrity, depended on constructing her as an exotic curiosity – an erotic, Orientalist fantasy that differed significantly from the predominant representation of women in 1910s films, such as the heroines of D.W. Griffith’s features, unquestionably “pure” both sexually and racially. In a period in which sociologist Edward Ross’s warnings against “race suicide”, a fear notoriously exploited by President Theodore Roosevelt, were still fresh in the cultural memory, and eugenics and nativist movements were expressing increased fear over waves of immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe, the construction of Bara as a sexualized ethnic Other and her resultant popularity seems anomalous.2 I would argue, however, that while Bara’s ethnicity (both fabricated and Goodman’s own “real life” Judaism) embodied numerous social and racial anxieties of the World War I era, aspects of her persona were constructed in such a way as to neutralize any real threat such a type presented to the racial purity of the United States. In fact, the function of Bara’s star image, with all its hyperbole, may not have been intended as a means of

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consuming the sinfully delicious sexuality of the Other, but rather as a warning against cross-ethnic and cross-class contact. As Wendy Kline notes in her study of eugenics and gender, the 1910s eugenics movements saw the problems of race suicide and female sexuality as inextricably connected;3 yet I propose that the conjoined titillation and threat to the hegemonic order that Bara embodied had at least as much to do with anxiety over the social and financial independence of the early 20th-century “New Woman” as with ethnic immigrant “undesirables”. This is not to imply that only one reading of Bara’s stardom is “correct”, however, for I also propose that subaltern audiences, including women and ethnic minorities, may have done very different things with an image that previously has largely been interpreted as harmful. William Fox (1879–1952), the founder of Fox Film Corporation, saw in the unknown Bara the opportunity to invent a new character type, one so enthrallingly alien, seductive, and nefarious, it combined anxiety and fascination into an irresistibly heady concoction. Aided by press agents Johnny Goldfrap and Al Selig, Fox used publicity photos and press releases even more exaggerated than Bara’s screen roles to whip up a veritable frenzy surrounding the mystery woman. Fox billed Bara as “The Wickedest Woman in the World”, and much of the publicity focused on the romantic mystique of her ethnic heritage, describing her as having been “born in the shadow of the sphinx”, the daughter of, variably, a French or Italian artist father and an Arabian dancing girl, an Egyptian princess, or a French actress mother.4 Bara’s publicity-generated persona thus reveals obvious remnants of 19th-century Orientalism, the demand born of colonialism to mark the foreign Other as bizarre, inscrutable, even sinful, as justification for invading and dominating peoples needful of the moral guidance and civilizing influence of Christian Europeans. As Edward Said wrote in his landmark exploration of Orientalism, the “Orient” is largely a European construction, “a place of romance (and) exotic beings” that is one of the “deepest and most recurring images of the Other”.5 Bara’s otherness was written on her body, not just in terms of the “foreignness” suggested by her cascading black hair, elaborate costumes, jewelry and headdresses, and smoldering, heavily-made up eyes, but in the unequivocal sexual allure of the “vamp”, the predatory phallic woman who snares men and exploits their weaknesses (Fig. 1). The vamp’s body simultaneously signified her power over others, and her powerlessness as the Other. Lary May, in noting the ambivalence “respectable” bourgeois audiences of the time had about onscreen sexuality, suggests that such anxieties would be mitigated by Bara’s “exotic façade” which “allowed the audience to identify sensual evil with foreigners”.6 In other words, Bara acted as a safety valve through which audiences could transfer repressed desires and anxiety onto the Other. In retrospect, Bara’s stardom can be read as a significant historical precedent for subsequent decades of not just promoting but creating stardom through publicity, and many cultural critics have interpreted her as little more than a commodity, constructed by the Hollywood studio system at the expense of women, ethnic minorities, and the actress herself. That this publicity was so successful, however, is a multi-leveled subject of study – one that, in George Lipsitz’s words, “resists univocal interpretations and inscribed ideological closures because of the hurts of history”,7 but also remains fascinating in the exuberance and absurdity of its fraudulence, and the ironic “truth” that the calculating seductress (whose very name was promoted as an anagram for “Arab death”)8 was actually a rather matronly, shy, soft-spoken Jewish actress from Cincinnati, who found the publicity surrounding her as ridiculous as have many later film scholars.

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31 • Black hair, black eyes, black heart: Theda Bara and race suicide panic

Fig. 1. Theda Bara as Salome.

Although I advocate a greater recognition of polysemous readings and uses, including perhaps resistant or subversive uses, of Bara’s star image, the “hurts of history” encapsulated in her mediated persona must be considered. Hegemonic racial hierarchies, Orientalism, and the attendant license they provided in rendering the (sexual) female body a receptacle for social unease and impropriety marked as “foreign” can be

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read as a reaction to socio-cultural fears of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Gayle Rubin has noted that social injunctions against sexual behavior tend to intensify in periods of cultural anxiety and serve as a form of displacement for that anxiety. Labeling these historical periods “moral panics”, Rubin notes the attendant developments “rarely alleviate any real problem, because they are aimed at chimeras and signifiers”.9 Bara’s star-making publicity was doubtlessly fed by such “moral panic”, principally the fearful speculation on the sexual behavior of the ethnic Other, and organized attempts to observe, codify, and control such behavior. The unprecedented escalation of immigration between 1890 and 1917, during which time 17,991,486 immigrants arrived in America,10 aroused great cultural anxiety, in large part because these recent immigrants, predominantly Central and Southern Europeans were thought, as Sean Dennis Cashman describes it, “less fit than earlier settlers in all aspects – physical, intellectual, economic, and cultural”.11 The result was the fear that America’s social order was under siege. According to Gaylyn Studlar, established Americans feared that the “Old World was reasserting itself in the New”, resulting in “the decline of democracy, the corruption of values, and the undermining of American character”.12 In response, American “nativism” – a doctrine that bound nationalism to racism and insisted that American-ness was homologous with the Anglo-Saxon heritage of the “founding fathers” – sought to contain the threat of this influx by invoking pseudoscientific concepts like Social Darwinism and eugenics to bolster the established racial hierarchy. One of the most pressing causes for alarm was the purported fecundity of the new immigrants, which spelled danger to nativist concerns in two ways: first, the “lower orders” would produce more offspring than Anglo-Saxon Americans, displacing and subsuming “true” Americans; and secondly, the Anglo-Saxon bloodline would be tainted through interbreeding with other ethnicities, resulting in a weakened mongrel nation in which the superior traits of the Northern European would be bred out and the degeneracy of the Eastern and Southern Europeans would be passed on. Reflecting on this ideology, in which ethnic diversity means instability, Ken Gelder observes “diversity means the loss of one’s nationality – hardly appropriate for an imperialist ideology which depends on the stable identification between nation and the self. The more diverse a nation, the less claim it has to national identity.”13 This precisely corresponds with the conditions of the race suicide anxieties that prompted nativist beliefs in many “established” Americans. With this in mind, I propose that a basic etymological analysis of the word “vamp” reveals much about the ideological implications behind Bara’s constructed persona. The equation of the femme fatale with the supernatural has a long history, and by the 1910s, the term “vamp” signified a predatory woman who uses sexual wiles to achieve her ends. Obviously derived from “vampire”, the two words were understood at the time of Bara’s celebrity as having separate but related meanings, both of which are significant regarding Bara’s persona. Bram Dijkstra sees the defining characteristic of the vamp as “antisocial feminine behavior of a sexual nature”,14 claiming that in the early 20th century, the term was understood as a “medical condition” affecting women: vampires were “unevolved, constitutionally still mostly ‘masculine’ women who had emanated from among the socialist masses to wreck havoc upon the male’s intellectual and economic evolution”.15 Just as the vampire of Eastern European folklore was seen as an agent of infection, a blood contaminator who reproduces others like him- or herself, Bara may have embodied the contemporary fear of the ethnic Other as the contaminator of the nativist blood line, the instigator of a race suicide through miscegenation. I regard the association of the vamp with the ethnic Other, synonymous with the “undesirable immigrant”, as highly significant, and Bara was frequently posed

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and photographed in ways that explicitly evoked the image of the folkloric vampire. A pre-release publicity photo for A Fool There Was shows her barefoot, in a tight-fitting black sheath, pulling her hair above her head to resemble bat wings or devil horns as she glowers into the lens. Likewise, an article from The Theatre (November 1915), featuring a photo of Bara from the same shoot, includes a graphic of a bat (Fig. 2). In a series of publicity shots, she was also posed like a decorous cannibal, lounging beside a skeleton (Fig. 3). The vampire and the vamp were both predators, draining their victims of life. The early 20th century retained many now discredited medical beliefs, including the concept of “seminal economy”, which held that any non-procreative sexual activity drained the male body of energy and could result in impotence or even more debilitating mental and physical ills. The discourse surrounding these maladies could be surprisingly straightforward: a newspaper advertiseFig. 2. Theda Bara as a bat figure. ment for Dr. Bennett’s Electric Belt, for instance, warned that “Sexual weakness and diseases fasten themselves upon men like a vampire, sapping away their vitality and life”. 16 “Sexual weaknesses” would have been recognized as coded language for a number of illicit activities, and I would speculate that a 1915 audience may have read the demise of John Schuyler (Edward José), Bara’s victim in A Fool There Was, as not just the result of a lethal combination of alcoholism and shame, but also hastened by sexual activity with a sexually aggressive, non-procreative woman. Like the folkloric vampire, Bara’s vamp (never given a name in the film) transforms Schuyler into something alien: he willingly separates himself from all forms of normalcy and propriety – his family, his social class, his professional status, his health, even his masculinity, as he becomes weak and clinging. Notably, the vamp diverts Schuyler from his ambassadorial mission to England, the ancestral home of “the right kind” of American, and lures him to Italy, a locale American nativists and eugenicists saw as a particularly troubling source of political radicals and racial atavists who would invade and destroy the nation: it is here that the vamp completes her transformation of the upright Schuyler into a creature nearly as Other as herself. The vamp’s degenerate sexuality, her hypnotic lure which caused men to shed civility and devolve into sexual frenzy, was seen as a debilitating effect of the female body – the fertile, child-bearing body corrupted in order to contaminate and destroy rather

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Fig. 3. Theda Bara with skeleton.

than produce. The vamp weakened and destroyed a man through his own sexual impulsivity. Yet Bara’s vamp characters stayed just on the safe side of acceptability precisely because they were non-procreative. As Mary Ann Doane points out, “It is appropriate that the femme fatale is represented as the antithesis of the maternal – sterile or barren, she produces nothing in a society which fetishizes production”.17 Bara’s sexualized ethic woman was acceptable spectacle for the audience’s voyeuristic gaze precisely because the vamp was inconceivable as the bearer of children. To an extent, then, the vamp’s non-procreativity defused the threat of Bara’s eroticism. In this sense, at worst a vamp’s sexuality could destroy an individual, but not a society or a race; at the social level, however, it was perhaps her performance of gender rather than sexuality that carried the most potential for disaster. Bara’s vamp was most threatening to the hegemonic order in that she embodied so many of the traditionally masculine traits Americans feared were also attributes of the “New Woman”.18 Not only was she distinctly removed from the roles of wife and mother, she also possessed characteristics, that while unseemly in women, were admirable in men: self-control, self-interest, economic independence, deviousness, motivation, aggression, emotional insensitivity, invulnerability to romantic love, and above all, power. This power resulted from the vamp’s ability to function successfully in both male and female roles; she possessed feminine wiles, but was as calculating and ruthless as a good (male) capitalist. She had enough sexual knowledge to be a highly effective manipulator and to exploit men’s sexual needs and weaknesses to her advantage, thereby feminizing them. She was monstrous because she did to men what they had done to women, not out of biological drive or desire, as would a man, but out of her compulsion to destroy the normative order. The vamp figure exposed white male fear at its most fevered pitch of hysteria, a fear which demanded a depiction of female agency so horrific that women’s “proper” place, separate and subservient, must be maintained at all costs. Defining “myth” as a social construction meant to reify and fortify the status quo, Roland Barthes writes that myth as envisioned by the petit bourgeois is unable to deal with the Other, which it either ignores or attempts to transform into something safely like itself – except in the case of the exotic, in which “the Other becomes a pure object, a spectacle”,19 and is thus

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drained of its power. Barthes’s theory appears to be borne out in the intentional promotion of Bara as an ethnic-exotic, reducing troubling social changes to a kind of spectacular scapegoat, a dangerous woman who was made identifiable by her exotic appearance. While most feminist critics have seen the vamp image as harmful, virtually all have dismissed it as a bizarre aberration.20 Interestingly, it is a male critic, Dijkstra, who has been the most vociferous in decrying this trope as brutally misogynistic. Dijkstra insists such portrayals “were used to justify a wide range of monstrously inhuman political practices”,21 and that “every time Theda Bara’s Vampire kiss made her audiences shiver, the continuing social misery and personal suffering of generations of women to come was made more inevitable”.22 While I agree that one has to be suspicious of the vamp image and carefully analyse how the image functions, I am also suspicious of any argument that provides no room for possibilities of individual agency. Although less extremist than Dijkstra, Doane similarly rejects the femme fatale trope as useful to feminism, at least in itself. She suggests, however, a possible redemption, stating that the femme fatale “is not the subject of feminism but a symptom of male fears about feminism. Nevertheless, the representation ... is not totally under the control of its producers and, once disseminated, comes to take on a life of its own.”23 Ambivalence and its resultant polysemy were intrinsic to the construction of the Bara persona, allowing her to appeal to varied audiences in different, even contradictory ways, thus forestalling any easy interpretation of the vamp character as positive or negative. Doane’s observation indicates that, in spite of the oppressive ideology contained within the dominant reading of the image, audiences who were themselves positioned as Others may have interpreted Bara in an entirely different way. The inevitability of polysemous interpretations precludes any absolute answers on how star images function discursively, and that function may have included disarticulations and rearticualtions by audiences that undo the anti-feminist, Orientalist fantasy which Bara’s publicity and mediated persona ostensibly set out to perpetuate. Broadening the field of inquiry beyond the scant few remaining films, and instead analysing both synchronic and diachronic epitextual evidence, such as publicity photos and stills, scripts, reviews, advertisements, posters, memoirs, fan magazines, trade publications, costumes, and other ephemera, one is better able to “read into” the discourse surrounding Bara, discovering more than we give the original audiences credit for probably finding as well. If we consider the distinctions of class, ethnicity, and gender in 1910s audiences, we may begin to form an interpretation of Bara’s star persona as multi-layered, and along with it, discover a more “sophisticated” audience. Many scholars have investigated the singular place of early cinema in the lives of women, particularly working class and immigrant women. As Elizabeth and Stuart Ewen observe, many early films spoke to immigrant and working class women with particular resonance, depicting the familiar difficulties of urban tenement life while still serving as “manuals of desire, wishes, and dreams” – manuals which included “practical guidelines for change”.24 This, however, often instigated generational conflict in immigrant families as mass media replaced traditional family authority; as the Ewens note, “The price of admission to the new culture was the negation of Old World notions of womanhood”.25 The Ewens also argue that American culture, including movies, however problematic, created new and more participatory models of femininity for immigrant women: “The concerns and experiences of immigrant daughters [...] led in some cases to active participation in the trade-union movement, political life, and involvement in the suffrage movement”.26 As Lauren Rabinovitz argues, moreover,

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movie theaters and star personae such as Bara’s could be simultaneously liberating and oppressive: “While the theaters may be understood as an alternative spot for accommodating working class, non-white, and immigrant women’s desires and for resisting dominant culture, they also helped to legitimize a woman’s role as sexual spectacle and to connect a sexual economy of monetary rewards to woman’s position as the object of male desire”.27 In her analysis of Pola Negri, the Polish actress also often typecast as a vamp, Diane Negra posits that Hollywood stars were also an important means of disseminating the belief that America was culturally and economically dominant over other nations, and as such, could take in foreign stars like Negri (or, in the case of Bara, fabricate “foreign” stars) and make them function ideologically to America’s advantage, demonstrating the benefits – and inevitability – of American imperialism. Nerga observes that the proliferation of vamp images in cinema coincided with a moment of seeming prosperity in the United States that was nonetheless riddled with doubts about the real efficacy of American economic policies and remained culturally isolated from foreign influences. The reason for this coincidence, Negra contends, is that the vamp “personified a whole category of newly arrived immigrants who (in the eyes of some Americans) called up these economic and social anxieties”.28 Increasing depictions of vamps onscreen also coincided with the rapid growth of women leaving home for work. Amidst the changes in the American workforce, Negra sees the vamp as a “figure with the capacity to disturb gendered relations of power”.29 Chief among the reasons is the awareness the vamp has of herself as simultaneously producer and the product, self-commodifying for the purpose of economic gain that, by the nature of her work, coincides with the undermining of patriarchal privilege, the family, and the marketplace.30 With the linkage of vampish types to non-Anglo-Saxon ethnicity, newly-arrived immigrant women were regarded as particularly threatening to economic stability and social mores. As Negra observes, “In the eyes of some Americans, it seemed that the immigrant woman, given the freedoms afforded by their entrance into a new culture, might indeed prove to be ungovernable, even ambitious”.31 Interestingly, publicity and promotion surrounding Bara played up the simultaneous promise and threat of female ambition.32 In a promotional article titled “Ambition Never a Sin, Declares Famous Vamp”, Bara (or a publicist) writes “A girl’s future is in her own hands. Her life is the clay from which she can model a masterpiece or a flat failure. It is up to the individual in each instance … . For all doors will open at the touch of the really ambitious girl.”33 Using audience ambivalence about ambitious girls and New Women as an enticement, ads for Bara’s film Lure of Ambition (1919) played to social anxieties by asking the presumably male reader “What about YOUR wife? Does she fret for diamonds, limousines, fine clothes and a life above your means? Does she hate domestic duties and long to be a writer, a lawyer, a doctor or an artist? If ambition is luring her on, where will it lead her?”34 With such interpretive opportunities as these, assessments of Bara’s stardom that do not account for the complexity of multiple discursive interactions remain unsatisfying. When Jeanine Basinger claims that the careers of vamp actresses such as Bara “didn’t last long, because men got tired of looking at them and women felt no connection to them”,35 she contradicts considerable evidence about Bara’s women fans. In several interviews, Bara herself remarks upon her female fans, stating in one that her vamp roles were popular because they played to men’s masochism and women’s desire for vicarious power over men.36 Along these lines, she analysed her own appeal in a 1917 interview printed in Fox Exhibitor’s Bulletin: “Women are my greatest fans because they

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see in my vampire the impersonal vengeance of all their unavenged wrongs ... they have lacked either the courage or will power to redress their grievances. Even downtrodden wives write me to this effect. I am in fact a feministe.”37 Bara’s dark exoticism attracted not just disempowered women seeking vicarious retribution, but also the same immigrant audiences that established Americans feared as cultural contaminants; Bara was, in a sense, a stereotype transmogrified into an icon, and audience response took a variety of forms, perhaps even resistant readings. In describing how early cinema helped the daughters of immigrants assimilate, Elizabeth Ewen says that Bara’s portrayal of a woman who breaks social conventions provided “a clear critique of the double standard”.38 Thus, while Bara’s star image has frequently been interpreted as a harmful perpetuation of racist and sexist ideologies, there is room for at least speculation on how her image may also have been empowering. A fascinating artifact serving as evidence for this supposition is a 1916 song, written by Alex Gerber and set to music by Harry Jentes, a popular African-American ragtime composer. “Since Sarah Saw Theda Bara” was a parody of Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants whose process of acculturation was shaped by popular culture, detailing the transformation of one Sarah Cohn, identified by J. Hoberman and Jeffrey Shandler as a stereotypical “ghetto girl”,39 after being enthralled by a Bara film: Since Sarah saw Theda Bara, she became a holy terror. Oi, how she rolls her eyes. Oi, how she can hypnotize. With a wink she’ll fascinate, and she wiggles like a snake. She’ll take you and try to break you. Then like a Vampire she’ll “vamp” away. The fellers all fall at her feet, and her smile is as false as her teeth. Since Sarah saw Theda Bara, she’s a wera, wera dangerous girl.40 Belying the notion that contemporary audiences received Bara’s stardom straightforwardly and with no irony, there appears to have been something analogous to camp in certain responses. George Chauncey, Jr., looking at the gay subculture of Newport, Rhode Island in the 1910s, writes that some of the “queens” were known solely by women’s names that they had taken from opera or the movies, including Theda Bara.41 One of the iconic figures of camp, Mae West, invoked Bara in her 1921 play, The Ruby Ring; describing different vamping techniques and their effectiveness on different types of men, West’s character reveals that the Theda Bara method works especially well on professors.42 Even at the height of her popularity, it seems likely that Bara and her vamp persona were enjoyed as a parody of the hegemonic order. Likewise, although Bara’s unique, if marginal, place in film history centers on fascination with the extremity of the publicity machine that generated and prolonged her star image, it is of interest to observe that her fictionalized identity as an exotic siren from fabled lands of mystery and danger was frequently recognized as a delightful and rather silly construction from the start. In his article on Bara, “The Vampire Woman”, Archie Bell begins by stating: “There is always some miserable joy-killer in this world, someone who appears at the great moment when enthusiasm is aroused to its highest pitch, and drops a hint that shatters day dreams”. Bell is apparently referring to himself, as two paragraphs later he reveals that Theda Bara is really Theodosia Goodman of Cincinnati.43 An unnamed writer takes a similarly tongue-in-cheek stance regarding Bara’s musings over her previous lives: “She thinks she’s Ar Minz, the original of Carmen or Cleopatra [... .] She cannot quite tell which it is that she happened to be before she blinked at the light of this world in Cincinnati as Theodosia Goodman”.44 If Bara’s ethnicity was both built up and revealed as a construction from the start of the Fox publicity campaign onwards, perhaps she served as a floating signifier in yet

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another context, demonstrating the constructedness of identity itself. On the one hand, the slippage between “true” and “false” ethnic identity suggests that ethnicity is a performance, with assimilation being merely one type of performance, a contingency rather than an intrinsic shift in a core identity. Thus, assimilation can be an act of will, rather than an imposition from outside the self, just as retention of ethnic identity and difference can be self-determined choice, performed at will. On the other hand, the atavism personified in Bara’s predatory vamp could also suggest to the dominant ideology, as well as to subaltern audiences, that identity formation can go “backwards” (becoming more “ethnic”) as well as “forwards” (becoming acceptably Americanized). Such an interpretation would feed the fears of nativist panic, while at the same time painting ethnicity as something to be ashamed of and shed to immigrant audiences. Collapsing depictions of the independent, non-procreative “modern” woman and the beguiling but racially inferior female exotic into the trope of the vamp, Bara’s persona clearly seems to be a sort of cautionary device, and under the logic of Social Darwinism and eugenics, the men who fell under her spell perhaps deserved to be taken out of the breeding pool. Based on extant stills and synopses, it appears that many of Bara’s vehicles sought to instruct audiences what to beware of in others, and in themselves. In the Foucauldian sense, the construction of the ethnic vamp was a means by which the Other was rendered explicitly visible, to be named, located, and controlled by systems of power. Such “chimeras”, however, are powerful beasts that can escape their confines, refiguring anxiety into a field of play rather than an injunction against certain behaviors. Whatever ideological intentions may have been encoded within the Bara persona undoubtedly became malleable in the hands of those shut out by the hegemonic order.

Notes 1.

Eve Golden, Vamp: The Rise and Fall of Theda Bara (Vestal, NY: Emprise, 1996), 111.

2.

For an indication of nativist concerns such as eugenics, miscegenation, and immigration in early 20th-century America, one need only consider the mainstream popularity of “scientific racism” studies by the lawyer Madison Grant (1865–1937), including his infamous and unfortunately highly influential volume, The Passing of the Great Race; or The Racial Basis of European History (New York: Scribner’s, 1921), or his later work, The Conquest of a Continent; or The Expansion of Races in America (New York: Scribner’s, 1933). The theories of Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909), which posited that there were certain visually distinguishable atavistic “types” in whom criminal behavior was inherent, also had great impact on American nativism; the most pertinent of his works is Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman, co-written with Gugliemo Ferrero and translated by Nicole Hahn Rafter and Mary Gibson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004 [1895]). Recent and useful studies of American nativist movements include Ali Behdad, A Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); David H. Bennett, The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History (2nd edn) (New York: Vintage, 1995); Brian N. Fry, Nativism and Immigration: Regulating the American Dream (New York: LFB Scholarly, 2007); John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002); and Dale T. Knobel, America for the Americans: The Nativist Movement in the United States (New York: Twayne, 1996).

3.

Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 18.

4.

Two Theda Bara biographies, Golden’s Vamp (1996) and Ronald Genini’s Theda Bara: A Biography of the Silent Screen Vamp with a Filmography (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1996), detail the publicity machinations concocted by Goldfrap and Selig. Among the most notable was a “hoax” press event that took place in early January 1915 at the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago, in which Bara was swathed in heavy furs and pretended not to speak English: having been born in the Sahara, she was always cold in the United States. Louella Parsons was among the reporters at the event and, in her biography The Gay Illiterate (1945), wrote that she witnessed Bara tearing off the furs and

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31 • Black hair, black eyes, black heart: Theda Bara and race suicide panic crying “Gimme air!” after she’d thought all the journalists had left. Golden speculates that this was intentional, part of the act put on for the press, thus indicating that ambiguity and play between truth and reality were a part of the construction of Bara’s image from the start. As long as the more absurd stories of Bara’s origins still held some sway, however, Goldfrap and Selig scripted outré things for Bara to recite as part of her life story and worldview for interviewers; these interviews typically took place in darkened interiors, heady with incense, in which Bara’s exotic, Orientalist image was enhanced by props such as crystal balls, Egyptian jewelry, and apparently even a boa constrictor. 5.

Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 1.

6.

Lary May, Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture in the Motion Picture Industry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 106.

7.

George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 177.

8.

Although Bara’s exotic star image is largely remembered as an Orientalist interpretation of Arabs through the lens of The Thousand and One Nights, a survey of interviews and publicity pieces appearing in US newspapers in 1915 reveal that she was far more frequently promoted as French, transplanted to the United States from Paris, where she was the star performer of the Theatre Antoine.

9.

Gayle S. Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality”, in Henry Abelove, Michele Barale, and David M. Halperin (eds), The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1993), 25.

10.

Sean Dennis Cashman, America in the Age of the Titans: The Progressive Era and World War I (New York: New York University Press, 1988), 147.

11.

Cashman, America in the Age of the Titans, 188.

12.

Gaylyn Studalr, This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 28.

13.

Ken Gelder, Reading the Vampire (London: Routledge, 1994), 12.

14.

Bram Dijkstra, Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood (New York: Knopf, 1996), 12.

15.

Dijkstra, Evil Sisters, 264–265.

16.

Dr. Bennett’s Electric Belt advertisement, Des Moines Leader (21 November 1900), 2.

17.

Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1991), 2.

18.

Sources of additional information on the New Woman include Janet Beer, Anne-Marie Ford, and Katherine Joslin (eds), American Feminism: Key Source Documents, 1848–1920 (London: Routledge, 2003); Alana S. Jeydel, Political Women: The Women’s Movement, Political Institutions, the Battle for Women’s Suffrage and the ERA (London: Routledge, 2004); Linda K. Kerber and Jane Sherron De Hart (eds), Women’s America: Refocusing the Past (6th edn) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); and Susan Thistle, From Marriage to the Market: The Transformation of Women’s Lives and Work (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

19.

Roland Barthes, “Myth Today”, trans. Annette Lavers, Mythologies (New York: Hill & Wang, 1973) 115.

20.

Early feminist works on cinema, such as Molly Haskell’s From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies (1974) and Sumiko Higashi’s Virgins, Vamps, and Flappers: The American Silent Movie Heroine (1978) critique Bara’s star image as almost a parody of the “real” issues affecting women and their mediated representations. While feminist film studies frequently acknowledge Bara as a remarkable figure in film history, she is almost always regarded as so aberrant as to merit scant “serious” inquiry. The assessment of Bara as “more notorious than illustrative (more infamous, so to speak, than famous”) is not unusual – Jennifer M. Bean, “Technologies of Early Stardom and the Extraordinary Body”, A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra (eds) (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 404–443).

21.

Dijkstra, Evil Sisters, 6.

22.

Dijkstra, Evil Sisters, 46.

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EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL” 23.

Doane, Femmes Fatales, 2–3.

24. 25.

Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen, Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992) 70. Ewen, 57.

26.

Ewen, 62.

27.

Lauren Rabinovitz, For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies and Culture in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 121. Diane Negra, “Immigrant Stardom in Imperial America: Pola Negri and the Problem of Typology”, A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, 379.

28. 29.

Negra, 381.

30. 31.

Negra, 395. Negra, 380.

32.

To indicate the sometimes contradictory aspects of how Bara’s image was constructed, she was also quoted warning young women against ambition, telling star-struck girls not to get their hopes up and be content with a life outside the spotlight – “Theda Warns Ambitious Girls”, Duluth News-Tribune (12 March 1916), 4.

33.

Bara, Thea (sic), “Ambition Never a Sin, Declares Famous Vamp”, Lexington Herald (23 November 1919), 13. “What about YOUR wife?” Lexington Herald (23 November 1919), 11.

34. 35.

Jeanine Basinger, Silent Stars (New York: Knopf, 1999), 204.

36. 37.

Mary B. Mullet, “Theda Bara – Queen of Vampires”, American Magazine (September 1920), 34. May, Screening Out the Past, 106.

38.

Ewen, 67.

39.

J. Hoberman and Jeffrey Shandler, Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting (New York/Princeton: New York University Press/Princeton University Press, 2003), 277. Hoberman, 277.

40. 41.

George Chauncey, Jr., “Christian Brotherhood or Sexual Perversion? Homosexual Identities and the Construction of Sexual Boundaries in the World War I Era”, in Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinius, and George Chauncey, Jr. (eds), Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (New York: Meridian, 1990), 298.

42.

43.

Pamela Robertson, “‘The Kinda Comedy that Imitates Me’: Mae West’s Identification with the Feminist Camp”, in David Bergman, ed., Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 160. Archie Bell, “Theda Bara – The Vampire Woman”, Theatre (November 1915), 246.

44.

“Theda Bara Worried; Recalls Egyptian Life”, Duluth News-Tribune (14 November 1915), 13.

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32

Who is the “right” star to adore?: nationality, masculinity and the female cinema audience in Germany during World War I •

Who is the “right” star to adore?

Andrea Haller n the early 20th century, movie stars often seemed to offer everything that real men did not. This essay explores how the female cinema audience in Imperial Germany responded to male movie stars and how their emerging movie fandom was linked to the contemporary discourse about nationality, national identity and patriotism during World War I. A telling example for this discussion is the German fan magazine debate about whether or not it was acceptable to “adore” the Norwegian actor Gunnar Tolnaes, who played characters as “foreign” as an Indian maharaja, instead of the German supreme commander, Paul von Hindenburg.

I

German cinema and its audiences during World War I After the outbreak of war in 1914, the German cinema industry began to prosper, as quotas for the import of foreign films were introduced and imports of films from enemy countries were eventually banned. In banning foreign films, the Germans saw their chance to break the pre-war hegemony of the French cinema industry and to halt the increasing distribution of American films, which were banned in 1916. The only foreign films shown throughout the war came from the Danish company “Nordisk”. Not only was the cinema program changing during the war, but the audience was as well. Women became an important, even the major part of the audience. At that time, Malwine Rennert claims, mainly women filled up the cinemas.1 And from Munich it was reported that only one out of ten visitors was male.2 Apart from the obvious reason that most men were at the warfront, Der Kinematograph detected another reason why women went so massively to the cinema: many women, whose husbands disliked the cinema, now took the opportunity to go the movies without “stirring up a domestic war”.3 That women visited the cinema in such large numbers, looking for distraction from wartime conditions, also provoked strong reactions. “Do people staying home, especially women”, the newspaper Der Reichsbote asked, “really have the time and interest to go to the cinema?”.4 Women “staying home” definitely had both time and interest, and that was not always approved by fathers, husbands and politicians. One consequence was that the public authorities of numerous German cities deprived several

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Kriegerfrauen (soldiers’ wives) of their national financial support when they had been caught visiting the cinema, reproaching them for wasting their money on “needless” leisure activities like the cinema, accusing them of “being idle and leading an amoral lifestyle”,5 and denouncing their “lack of domesticity and frugality”.6 Cinema was seen as a major threat to women’s moral sense, their patriotism, and self-sacrifice during the war. Yet German women firmly defended their right to go to the cinema, as evidenced by a certain Mrs. Laudien in Lichtbild-Bühne. “Don’t slander the cinema, but be grateful”, she wrote, “that the cinema admits all the poor Kriegerfrauen, so they won’t be oppressed by the cruelty of our time.“ German women, she added, should be able to enjoy “educational entertainment” as well as “entertaining education”.7 Along with the growing interest in cinema going, an active participation of women in the process of reception outside the cinema can be established. Women began to play an important role as movie fans. They demanded information about films, actors, and much of the movie business. From 1913 on, fashion and women’s magazines like Die Dame or Elegante Welt frequently reported on films and their stars. Indeed, the first movie fan magazine, Illustrierte Kino-Woche, was launched in 1913; three years later the name was changed to Illustrierte Filmwoche. The format of the magazine and especially the “letters to the editor” section indicate that the majority of the readers were female.

Which man should German women adore? In 1917, over a period of several weekly issues of Illustrierte Filmwoche, female readers debated the question of which star should be the “right” one to be adored by proper German women. The discussion was initiated by the magazine’s editor, Egon Jacobsohn, in an article in which he made fun of the German women who were seized by Flimmeritis, a new disease resulting from the obsession with movie stars and which ultimately led to the desire to become a movie star oneself. An “ardent reader” of the Illustrierte Filmwoche responded that she was almost cured of Flimmeritis. But when watching the Norwegian actor Gunnar Tolnaes on screen, she would still lose her sense of “equanimity and rationality”.8 Shortly before this exchange, Gunnar Tolnaes had played a mysterious and very handsome maharaja in the very successful Danish film, Maharadjahens Yndlingshustru [The Maharaja’s Favorite Wife],9 directed by Robert Dinesen and released in Germany at the beginning of 1917. This “exotic” film tells the story of a young girl, Engelen von Pylswert, who goes on vacation with her parents to Scheveningen, an aristocratic spa in the Netherlands. She is engaged to her cousin Viktor, her best friend. But the maharaja of the independent Indian state of Bhagalpur arrives in Scheveningen, and Engelen is deeply impressed by his appearance. When he leaves her a note saying they should meet, she sneaks out into the night to see him. Overwhelmed by his personality and physical presence, she follows him to his coastal city in India where she not only changes her name but also finds herself living in a harem with his other women. Not willing to share his love with other women, she demands to be his only wife. Before he can give answer, a European ship enters the city harbor, and the crew has an audience with the maharaja, who takes them to women’s rooms. When Engelen recognizes her cousin Viktor, she unveils her face. Viktor challenges the maharaja to set Engelen free, but the maharaja claims Engelen herself should choose whether she will stay or leave. When Engelen awakes the next morning, she sees her luxurious Indian garments and her simple European dress lying next to one another on her bed, the door of her room wide open. She puts on her old clothes and leaves the palace. When watchmen try to hold her back, the maharaja appears. Still mesmerized by his presence, she declares

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32 • Who is the “right” star to adore?

Fig. 1. Gunnar Tolnaes and Lilly Jacobsson in The Maharaja’s Favorite Wife (1916).

that she will submit to him. Ultimately, however, he realizes that he has to devote his love exclusively to a single woman, to the European woman (Fig. 1). That female reader of Illustrierte Filmwoche had surely watched this film and was disturbed by her adoration of Tolnaes for another reason besides Flimmeritis: “I should be ashamed of admiring a foreigner” she wrote, “even if he is from a neutral country”.10 Several issues later another female reader responded to these remarks about Gunnar Tolnaes. She acknowledged that Tolnaes is “quite handsome” in The Maharaja’s Favorite Wife but dismissed the cult around his star persona as “rather silly and to an extremely high degree distasteful”. Addressing the remorse of the first woman, she continued: “Why look so far afield? Germany itself has many great actors. I think Max Landa is as handsome as Gunnar Tolnaes, and a lot more interesting. [... .] When I hear such hymns of praise to Gunnar Tolnaes, I feel sick! He is no god!” And she concludes with the admonition: “Better to dote on Hindenburg [then supreme commander of the German army]!”.11 These letters to the editor must have triggered something in the female readers of the

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Fig. 2. Production still from The Maharaja’s Favorite Wife (1916).

magazine because they provoked an unusual participation in the discussion: “Why should we be confined to German stars?” one woman asked and alluded to the general incomparability of film actors with “our Hindenburg”. “You can adore both, but in different ways”, she wrote.12 In the next issue another reader made fun of the demand to dote on Hindenburg. But she also solved the dilemma of being a proper and patriotic German woman and adoring a foreign actor at the same time in quite an inventive way. Adoring movie stars is mostly a “flash in the pan”, she claimed, whereas admiring “our Hindenburg” is “real and true”.13 She also alluded to another interesting point: Tolnaes would never have provoked such intense responses if he had acted in a modern realistic drama. This discussion of Gunnar Tolnaes as an Indian maharaja has to be seen in the context of a growing interest in “Oriental” subjects and styles in popular literature, theater and film in the 1910s and early 1920s, especially in the wake of Indian philosophy and mythology that already had gained much attention. In popular culture, India was imagined as a “land of wonder and the art of love”, as Curt Moreck put it.14 In 1921, the German film critic, Willy Haas, wrote that “Indian movies” were much in vogue and that “Indian subjects have always meant a good bargain”. Above all, Haas noted that “most of the maharajas bear a striking resemblance to a teenage-heart-breaker from Copenhagen”.15 To understand the political implications of this discussion, one has to take a closer look at two different men, Tolnes and Hindenburg. These two can be seen as models not only of two different types of men, who might be adored by women, but also as embodiments of two different concepts of masculinity and nationality.

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Gunnar Tolnaes as the Indian maharaja One of the reasons the reader of the Illustrierte Filmwoche criticized the adoration of Tolnaes as an Indian maharaja was his double otherness with regards to national origin. On the one hand, Tolnaes was Norwegian, which meant he came from a country that was neither a direct enemy of Germany nor an ally during the ongoing war. Perhaps even more important than his Norwegian provenance was the fact that Tolnaes was portraying an exotic, Oriental figure from a non-western country. In an ad for the film in Lichtbild-Bühne, his persona was characterized as an “oriental man full of fervent vitality”.16 His character was described as mysterious and poetic, one who admired beauty in all its varieties. Besides, nearly all the articles about the film stressed his strikingly handsome physiognomy, so accentuated by the costumes and camerawork in the film. Elegante Welt and Illustrierte Filmwoche both claimed that female moviegoers went to see the movie several times just because Tolnaes – promoted as the legitimate successor of the recently deceased and passionately adored other Scandinavian actor, Waldemar Psilander17 – was so handsome in his maharaja costumes. “The circle of his fans has become enormous”, Illustrierte Filmwoche noted. Women loved his “tall, spellbinding stature which is typically aristocratic”, “his lordly head”, his “bright, piercing eyes”, and even “his slim feet in elegant shoes”, especially because he was portraying a “romantic figure saturated with beauty” (Fig. 2).18 Besides, the setting of the plot in India made it even easier to display Tolnaes as the proverbial Märchenprinz [fairy tale prince] because his character, costume and make-up weren’t limited to the demands of reality. It is important to stress that the screen-India does not have anything in common with the geographical place called India. Robert Dinesen’s screen-India has to be seen as a place beyond reality, an imaginary space able to incorporate various European projections of the East. It draws on the long tradition of the portrayal of India as magical place in European literature. Relating to this tradition Illustrierte Filmwoche called the film a “lovely fairy tale” taking place in a “dreamland”.19 The continuous change of costumes, from Indian habit and turban to modern western sports suit, only had one purpose: to underline Tolnaes’ character and his acting, especially his facial expression. Elegante Welt describes his face with “eyes like burning stars” and “lips fraught with irrepressible will power”.20 This was exactly what the German female moviegoers loved about Gunnar Tolnaes and the character he impersonated: passion, emotion, fervor, and fire. Accordingly, almost all the film stills and publicity photos published in the trade press and women’s magazines represent Tolnaes in highly emotional, even sensitive situations. Apart from his sensitive traits, the character of the Maharaja had another, more dominant, but also highly emotional side. The sensitivity in combination with passion and emotional dominance that he displayed in his relationship with Engelen made him even more attractive to women in front of the screen. Spellbound by his tenderness, on the one hand, and by his physical and sexual presence, on the other, Engelen is unable to say no to his demand to follow him to India, she submits to the power of emotion. “Impelled by a passionate wave of emotion”, she hurries to him, and, according to Illustrierte Filmwoche, “the maharaja had kissed away her free will and all her memories of what she had been before with his delicious tenderness”.21 This double-edged emotionality is typical of the cinematic portrayal of “Indian” or other “Oriental” characters during this period, as Brigitte Schulze points out.22 Rampant emotion is paralleled with uncontrollable power. That this power had a sexual dimension is what made the character of the maharaja, and the actor, Gunnar Tolnaes, so attractive for German women of that time.

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The end of the film is also quite typical of this dynamic: finally, the untamable maharaja gives all his love to a single woman, to Engelen. His uncontrollable emotionality and passion are tamed by the “western” – that is, regulative, rational – influence of a European woman, another kind of power that derives, as Schulze writes, from the “ideal amalgamation of love and ratio”.23 However, the German female audience’s adoration of a foreign exotic lover has to be surveyed in a more differentiated way. Although women doted on the character of the Indian maharaja, they were not attracted to his otherness and strangeness as such but to the mediated illusion of otherness, as a kind of “light” version of real otherness. The character of the maharaja as cinematic construction of otherness offered them the imagined body of a foreigner that could be consumed easily and safely. The audience knew full well that they were indulging in the illusion of otherness. And they appreciated this illusion because it enabled them to free their dreams of the ideal man from pragmatic considerations. One might suppose that the female European audience would not have been so enthusiastic if an “authentic” native Indian had portrayed the character of the maharaja. The article about Tolnaes in Elegante Welt indicates that it was by no means Tolnaes’ Oriental authenticity that attracted female moviegoers. Ironically, it was his Nordic physique that made him so attractive, “this gorgeous appearance, this enviable feature of the Scandinavian race”.24 The audience’s knowledge that a Northern European male was masquerading as an Oriental added zest to the character’s attractiveness. Besides, marking the main character as foreign and strange legitimized any deviant behavior. In contrast to numerous reviewers, who complained that the image of India shown in the films did not correspond with social reality, the female audience did not care about the film’s inauthentic portrayal of India. Reviewers feared that simple-minded, easily-impressed people – i.e. proletarians, children, and, of course, women – who were taken in by the film’s luxury and pomp might become even more dissatisfied with their own war time reality. Mocking these concerns regarding the lack of authenticity in setting and characters, Elegante Welt answered that such films had only one purpose, that of visual attractiveness of bodies and places: “If these ‘Indian movies’ give our popular film heroes and pretty actresses a chance to present themselves to the audience in the most effective manner and if they tell an enthralling story, then these films have fulfilled their purpose”.25

Generalfeldmarschall von Hindenburg, the German commander Paul von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg, to grant him his full name, was born in 1847 as the son of a Prussian landowner and officer. As a young man he took an active part in the German Unification Wars (Einigungskriege), in 1866 against Austria and in 1870/71 against France. In 1914, he was already retired, but only three weeks after the outbreak of the war, he was reactivated as the chief commander of the 8th army. At the end of August he smashed the 2nd Russian army at the famous battle at Tannenberg, which set the foundation stone for the myth of the Held of Tannenberg (hero of Tannenberg). In November 1914, after having defeated the 1st Russian army as well, he was assigned the supreme command of the German army on the eastern front. In August 1916, he took on supreme command of the entire German army. By then, just as Tolnaes was beginning to conquer the silver screen, a veritable cult emerged around Hindenburg: he was called “Russenschreck” or “savior of the fatherland” who defeated the Russian hordes, and “superfather” of the German nation as a whole. Streets and squares were named after him, and kitsch and knickknacks bore his name. He served as a kind of German ideal, a “deutsche Idealgestalt,“ and was regarded as a figure of national integration and identification. German aspirations for personal

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Fig. 3. Field Marshal General von Hindenburg.

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national integration were projected onto Hindenburg, whose outward appearance was perfectly suitable for this purpose (Fig. 3).26 At that point in time Hindenburg was 68 years of age. He was the kind of man a German woman should dote on: heroic, patriotic, loyal to his fatherland – but absolutely unattractive.27 He represented more of a father-figure – or even a grandfather figure – than a potential lover. Of course, there is much that distinguishes his status in German society from that of a movie star like Gunnar Tolnaes and the characters he portrayed. And it is not unproblematic to compare the mediated imaginary figure of an Oriental man with a living person. Taking the actor Tolnaes as the object of comparison does not solve this problem because his star persona was constructed by the media as well. But in a time of emerging mass media, Hindenburg was no less “present” to people than was a movie star, and his public image as political leader was no less constructed than was Tolnaes’ as a movie star. Besides, Hindenburg himself was a master of public self-portrayal through the media, and he was commodified and idolized much like a star. People could buy postcards, souvenirs, etc.; magazines and newsreels offered insight into his private life. With regard to the character traits on which his public image was constructed, Hindenburg was the radical antithesis to Gunnar Tolnaes as the Indian maharaja: He presented himself as the prototype of a military commander, the “Russenbezwinger”, but also as a rational and tactical scientist of war, whose decisions of life and death were not affected by his emotions. And he embodied typical German virtues like dutifulness and readiness to make sacrifices (Fig. 4). So Tolnaes as the Indian Maharaja and Generalfeldmarschall Hindenburg embody two different types of masculinity. Because of his emotionality and beauty Tolnaes is to some degree connoted as latently female; his gender remains ambiguous, whereas Hindenburg was thoroughly, stereotypcially male. Hindenburg was as “German” as a German could be; the maharaja was a stranger who embodied the potential “other”. The Maharaja was emotional; Hindenburg was tactical. The maharaja adored beauty and art; Hindenburg characterized himself as uninterested in theater or literature. The Maharaja was young, handsome and sexy, whereas Hindenburg was aged, stern, and unattractive. For Tolnaes as Maharaja, outward appearances played a crucial role; for Hindenburg what mattered were his inner virtues. To put it simply, Tolnaes wears feathers and pearls, whereas Hindenburg wears a uniform. With Gunnar Tolnaes’ Indian maharaja, German cinema offered a kind of counter to the hegemonic and socially desired image of masculinity, that of the proper German hero. The movie star embodied a different kind of masculinity that, due to its exclusive circulation through visual media, was defined to a greater extent by physical appearance. It was a kind of masculinity for which nationality and typical German virtues were less essential than passion and good looks.

The “Handsome Man”, women and the war Female adoration of a man for his good looks rather than his inner virtues provoked a certain unease in contemporary males, as women indulged in a kind of scopophilia that had been reserved for men. The actor’s right to exist was solely justified by the mere visual pleasure of women in front of the silver screen. This was perceived as something new and extraordinary as a 1916 article indicates: “Until the invention of film, the ‘handsome man’ had been a private matter of the boudoirs. Now the full light of the sun shines on him. The handsome man inhabits a public space, where he can make the heart of every woman in the world beat faster.”28 Behind the ironic tone of the article debunking the superficiality of contemporary women, “who think that under

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Fig. 4. Field Marshal General von Hindenburg.

every well-tailored cutaway a lordly mind is hidden”, lurks a barely disguised irritation that even men can become objects of vision. The cinematic display of a handsome male star undermined the “patriarchal economy of vision,“ as Miriam Hansen has put it, following Laura Mulvey’s concept of visual pleasure.29 The subversive potential of films that played on the visual attractiveness of their male actors became especially threatening in a time of war, when a stable national, bourgeois and patriarchal cinema system was just emerging. Indeed, Tolnaes was one of the major film stars mainly adored for their good looks. He was the prototype of the “new film-type of today”, claimed Elegante Welt, adding that “the male ideal of our day differs from that of our grandfathers’”.30 This reminds us that Hindenburg could have been the grandfather of most young readers and

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moviegoers. It is hard to imagine women going to the cinema just to watch a man with the body and looks of Hindenburg acting on the silver screen. As already suggested, the “handsome man” was even more of a threat during the war, when most adult men were at the front. As a public space, where one could sit in the dark mingling with all kinds of strangers, the cinema was imagined to be a place where women could commit adultery and other kinds of fornication.31 Soldiers, therefore, feared that the ersatz-satisfaction their wives or girl friends back home derived from male screen actors might lead them to be unfaithful. This fear has to be seen in a wider discursive context: for women, even before the war, extra- or non-marital relationships had received strong censure, morally and legally. Censuring became even more acute during the war, as female infidelity, especially the extramarital love affairs of Kriegerfrauen, virtually came to be considered an unpatriotic act. A strong link was created between female sexuality and patriotism. Betraying one’s husband was equated with betraying one’s fatherland.32 Needless to say, this link did not hold for men, especially soldiers. So the “virtual infidelity” committed by female movie fans doting on male movie stars was seen as a potential precursor of carnal infidelity.33 By contrast, the adoration of Hindenburg was considered harmless because his fatherly image could hardly stir up the sexual desires of women and girls on the Heimatfront [homefront]. Furthermore, the “handsome man” fuelled the fears of German men, and even German women, over the essence and meaning of manliness,34 what it meant to be a real man. The uncertainty about manliness, together with the fear of female sexuality, was aggravated by the sense that the female sexual desire was being delinked from socially desired and hegemonic images of manliness and realigned with national and racial otherness. The interracial relationship between an Indian maharaja and a European woman portrayed in a film like The Maharaja’s Favorite Wife only enflamed such fears. Indian films, therefore, were perceived as especially “dangerous” because they linked the visual pleasure of the “handsome man” to the visual pleasure of the “exotic”, in both setting and character. In such films a crisis of masculinity could not be separated from a crisis of nationality, especially during the war. Consequently, the German film industry and trade press had ambivalent feelings about The Maharaja’s Favorite Wife, perhaps more so because of the film’s great economic success. A review in Lichtbild-Bühne clearly shows how sensitive they were to anything foreign. The reviewer initially seemed puzzled as to why the film was so popular and why the audience was so thrilled. The answer – and the deeper reason for this puzzlement – finally came a few paragraphs later: “It’s not the performance of the leading actor, nor the plot nor the makeup! It’s the exotic-foreign!” In short, “the foreign countries have prevailed again!”.35 Indeed, they prevailed in a double sense. First, the film was produced by a foreign company, Danish Nordisk, and its leading man was Norwegian. So the domestic film industry again had to “watch powerlessly as foreign countries conquer the German market and audience”.36 Second, and perhaps more important, the colorful portrayal of life in a fictitious exotic country was much more interesting and attractive than images of life and death at the front or of the miserable everyday life at home. It was more enjoyable to watch a colorfully dressed Indian maharaja than their grim fellow countrymen in their gray uniforms. By blaming the audience for preferring the exotic and the foreign, and for making the film such a success, the reviewer implicitly was accusing the audience of being disloyal to the nation. Representatives of the film business and male critics, however, were not alone in expressing such concerns. The letters to the editor section of the Illustrierte Filmwoche also reveals self-censorship on the part of female moviegoers who could not dote on an Indian maharaja without suffering from bad conscience.

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This discussion about the “right” star to “adore” can be taken as a paradigmatic means of exploring the tensions that marked not only the longings and desires of female moviegoers but also the national identity of German society as a whole during World War I. It shows how the concept of the national is bound up with issues of sexual and racial difference. And it shows that, despite severe restrictions on the German film industry, German women attending the movies still longed for alternatives to what was considered patriotic in their everyday life, even if these alternatives were only fictional images, as in the case of the “Indian” film and its Norwegian maharaja.

Notes 1.

Malwine Rennert, “Kriegslichtspiele”, Bild&Film 4.7/8: 39.

2.

Josef Aubinger, “Münchner Brief”, Der Kinematograph 435 (28 April 1915).

3.

Spektator, “Düsseldorfer Brief”, Der Kinematograph 426 (24 February 1915).

4.

“Zwölftausend Kinobesucher mehr”, Lichtbild-Bühne 8.9 (27 February 1915): 9.

5.

Cf. for example, P.M Grempe, “Das Kino als Kulturbedürfnis”, Der Kinematograph 453 (1 September 1915).

6.

“Zwölftausend Kinobesucher mehr”, Lichtbild-Bühne 8.9 (27 February 1915): 9.

7.

Frau Laudien, “Kriegerfrauen und Kinobesuch”, Lichtbild-Bühne 9.1 (8 January 1916): 38.

8.

“Letters to the editor”, Illustrierte Filmwoche 5.38 (1917): 86.

9.

The English distribution title for Great Britian was A Prince of Bharata.

10.

“Letters to the editor”, Illustrierte Filmwoche 5.38 (1917): 86.

11.

“Letters to the editor”, Illustrierte Filmwoche 5.44 (1917): 103.

12.

Maria Zerjadke, “Letters to the editor”, Illustrierte Filmwoche 5.45/46 (1917): 107.

13.

M.W., “Letters to the editor”, Illustrierte Filmwoche 5.47/48 (1917): 110.

14.

Kurt Moreck, Sittengeschichte des Kinos (Dresden: Paul Aretz Verlag, 1926), 163.

15.

Willy Haas, “Reflektionen vor einem indischen Grabmal”, quoted by Brigitte Schulze, “Land des Grauens und der Wunder. Indien im deutschen Kino”, in Jörg Schöning (ed.), Triviale Tropen. Exotische Reise- und Abenteuerfilme aus Deutschland 1919–1939 (München: edition text + kritik, 1997), 78.

16.

Lichtbild-Bühne 9.49 (9 December 1916): 21.

17.

Cf. “Gunnar Tolnaes”, Elegante Welt 6.14 (4 June 1917): 7.

18.

“Gunnar Tolnäs, Plauderei von C. Röhn-Grevenkoven”, Illustrierte Filmwoche 5.12/13 (1917): 60. For a contemporary biography of Gunnar Tolnaes, see Marie Luise Droop, Gunnar Tolnaes (Berlin: Buch-Film-Verlag, 1920). Browsing through this little book that was obviously written for Tolnaes’ female fans, one can easily notice that the character traits of Tolnaes’ star persona were to a great extent equated with those of the maharaja. He was also portrayed as sensitive, passionate, and of somewhat noble origins. It was stressed that Tolnaes didn’t have to perform the character because he actually was the maharaja.

19.

Cf. “Gunnar Tolnäs, „Plauderei von C. Röhn-Grevenkoven”, Illustrierte Filmwoche 5.12/13 (1917): 60.

20.

“Gunnar Tolnaes”, Elegante Welt 6.14 (4 June 1917), 9.

21.

“Die Lieblingsfrau des Maharadscha”, Illustrierte Filmwoche 4.50 (1916): 316.

22.

Schulze, “Land des Grauens und der Wunder”, 72–83.

23.

Ibid., 75.

24.

“Gunnar Tolnaes”, Elegante Welt 6.14 (4 June 1917): 7.

25.

Cf. “Theatre and cinema”, Elegante Welt 7.8 (10 April 1918).

26.

For the public image of Hindenburg, see Wolfram Pyta, „Paul von Hindenburg als charismatischer Führer der deutschen Nation,“ in Frank Möller (ed.), Charismatische Führer der deutschen Nation (München: Oldenbourg, 2004), 109–147.

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I don’t want to claim that Hindenburg wasn’t sexually attractive to some German women; even Adolf Hitler had his female admirers. Describing Hindenburg as “unattractive” only means that he was physically unattractive.

28.

“Der Liebling des Publikums”, in Max Mack, Die zappelnde Leinwand. Ein Filmbuch von Max Mack (Berlin: Eyssler, 1916), 45. Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon. Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 248. See also Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Screen 16.3 (Autumn 1975), 6–18. Hansen explored the subversive potential of Rudolph Valentino’s films, but one might say that the cult of Gunnar Tolnaes as an Indian maharaja anticipated the cult of Valentino as an Arabian Sheik. All the features Hansen elaborated for the star persona of Valentino – the racial otherness, the Oriental features of his screen characters, the feminization and exoticism – can be found in the case of Tolnaes.

29.

30.

“Der neue Filmtyp von heute”, Elegante Welt 7.18 (28 August 1918).

31.

Cf., for example, a flyer entitled “Kriegerfrauen! Helft euren Männern den Sieg gewinnen” and written by Reverend Hermann Priebe – cited in “Zur Abwehr!”, Der Kinematograph 478 (23 February 1916). Cf. Ute Daniel, “Der Krieg und die Frauen 1914–1918. Zur Innenansicht des Ersten Weltkrieges in Deutschland”, in Gerhard Hirschfeld, Gerd Krumeich, Irina Renz (eds), ‘Keiner fühlt sich hier mehr als Mensch ...’. Erlebnis und Wirkung des Ersten Weltkriegs [Schriften der Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte; N.F. 1] (Essen: Klartext-Verlagsges, 1993), 131–149.

32.

33.

For more detailed information about the negative image of the Kriegerfrauen in Germany during the World War I, see chapters 9 and 10 in Birthe Kundrus, Kriegerfrauen. Familienpolitik und Geschlechterverhältnisse im Ersten und Zweiten Weltkrieg (Hamburg: Christians Verlag, 1995).

34. 35.

Cf. Hansen, 264. “Die Lieblingsfrau – und anderes”, Lichtbild-Bühne 10.15 (14 April 1917): 29.

36.

Ibid.

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PART VI Memory, Imagination and the “National”

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From Switzerland to Italy and all around the world: the Joseph Joye and Davide Turconi collections •

From Switzerl and to Italy and all around the world

Joshua Yumibe his essay discusses the Joseph Joye and Davide Turconi Collections: two interconnected collections that derive from film prints originally distributed in Switzerland and Germany at the turn of the century. After their initial release, a Jesuit priest, Josef Joye, collected the prints from the second-hand market and used them for educational and religious purposes in the Protestant region of Basel, Switzerland during the 1900s and early 1910s. While the prints were used in a specific local and national context, they also have gone on to re-circulate in various transnational contexts. In the 1960s the Italian film historian, Davide Turconi, inspected and culled frame samples from the prints (more on these incisions later), and these fragments comprise the Davide Turconi Film Frame Collection, which is currently housed at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York (GEH) and at the Cineteca del Friuli in Italy. Following Turconi’s efforts, in the 1970s, the National Film and Television Archive of the British Film Institute (NFTVA) in collaboration with the Swiss Jesuit order transferred the surviving prints from Switzerland to England for preservation. In this essay I will detail some of the interweavings of the national and transnational contexts that the Joye and Turconi Collections have moved through in order to reflect upon how different local collections originate and then migrate, and what these movements mean for the project of cinema historiography – what is gained and lost when our subject material circulates across borders. With regards to the topic of nationalism, my discussion thus focuses on the national character of collections rather than of productions. To begin, I would like to note that my first introduction to this material was through the proceedings of the first Domitor conference in 1990, An Invention of the Devil? Religion and Early Cinema, which contains an essay by Roland Cosandey on the Josef Joye Collection.1 I initially looked at Cosandey’s essay in the late 1990s when I first began studying early film history, but later I became closely involved with the Joye films through Turconi’s collection of fragments, which Paolo Cherchi Usai introduced me to in 2002 when I was doing research at the George Eastman House on manuallyapplied color processes in early cinema. As these fragments contain remarkable examples of early coloring (particularly of tinting, toning, and stenciling), I have been working since 2003 with the Eastman House and the Cineteca del Friuli on preserving the collection. However, before discussing the Turconi preservation project in more

T

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detail, I would like first to provide an overview of the Joseph Joye Collection. While this first part of the essay is largely drawn from Cosandey’s work and from conversations I have had with Paolo Cherchi Usai, Bryony Dixon, David Mingay, and David Robinson (all of whom have been involved with the Joye and/or Turconi Collections), it is important to reiterate this early history in order to contextualize a discussion of the collections’ various national and transnational afterlives following Joye’s involvement. Joye was born in 1852 in Romont, Freiburg, in Switzerland, and entered the Jesuit order as a young man. While I am not a historian of Swiss religious or political history, it is important to point out that the canton of Freiburg was one of the Jesuit strongholds in Switzerland before 1848, but the religious order was officially banned from the country with the establishment of the Swiss Federal Constitution in that year. This prohibition derived from the religious conflicts and eventual civil war of the 1840s (the Sonderbundskrieg), which pitted conservative Sonderbund Catholics in provinces such as Freiburg against liberal Catholics and liberal and conservative Protestants. The Sonderbund conservatives lost, leading to the Jesuit ban.2 While little is known about Joye’s personal politics, nonetheless, given this post-1848 national situation, his Jesuit affiliation is intriguing, and it did have implications for his vocation in turn-of-the-last-century Switzerland. With the Jesuit ban in place, he had to pursue his ordination abroad (primarily in Germany and Great Britain), which likely appealed to Joye’s apparent wanderlust. However, following an influx of Catholic emigrants to Basel from other parts of Switzerland and from Germany, Joye returned to Switzerland in 1886 to support the new Catholic population as the Vicar of St. Clara Church in Basel (a position he held until 1911, dying eight years later in 1919). Joye was welcomed as a Catholic Vicar, but he did have to downplay his Jesuit affiliation in this predominantly Protestant region. Much of the religious contestation in nineteenth-century Switzerland had to do with public education, which forced him to be cautious in his educational endeavors. Nonetheless, he worked to establish an instructional institution in 1898, later renamed the Borromäum, to strengthen the local Catholic community. Rather than focusing on ecclesiastical education, which would have been contentious, Joye directed the institution towards popular, communitybased social programs: caring for and instructing orphans, providing Sunday school classes, offering adult education programs for the working class and recent Catholic émigrés. Within this context, Joye turned to visual media for his pedagogical endeavors. He made extensive use of lantern slides in the 1890s and 1900s, many of which he created himself for lectures on topics ranging from biblical stories to historical topics, current events, and popular science. Sometime around 1900 he began to collect films and incorporate them into these lectures. Over the course of the next eleven years he accumulated a massive collection of prints from the second-hand market in Switzerland and Germany. From a later inventory completed in 1942, there were approximately 1,540 surviving prints in the collection at that time, though more existed originally. Cosandey notes that the collection may have comprised as much as 300,000 meters of footage; in a 1958 inventory, 180,000 meters survived, and when the collection was transferred to the NFTVA in 1976, 150,000 meters remained.3 From the NFTVA’s more recent inventory of the 1,158 surviving Joye titles in the collection, the majority date from the years 1908–1912 (931 of the 1,158 titles, with 1910 being the highest with 366). Only sixteen films date before 1905, and only one of these is from the nineteenth century (an unidentified French actualité of a procession in the Geneva Exposition of 1896). There was a sharp increase in titles beginning in 1905 (40

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from that year) leading to the peak years of 1908–1912; collecting began to drop off after 1913 (39 in 1913, 21 in 1914, 20 in 1915); and then only one or two films on average were added per year to the collection through the 1920s (some years with none, some with more). The most recent title listed in the collection, and the only one from the 1930s, is Das alte Spinnard by Tonfilm Produktions from 1935. These numbers do suggest that Joye made film part of the institutional practice of the Borromäum, something that lasted after his departure and continues today. However, given the scant numbers from the mid-1910s on, it appears that after Joye left the Borromäum, the institution began to phase out the acquisition of prints, becoming a site primarily of exhibition. Regarding the types of films in the Joye Collection, from Cosandey’s analysis of the inventory, a little over half of the films are nonfiction: mostly travelogues and industrials from around the world (examples of which were exhibited by Bryony Dixon at the 2006 Domitor Conference and previously at the Giornate del Cinema Muto in 2005). The other half of the collection is fiction: comedies, féeries, trick films, and some dramas. Based on Cosandey’s study of 476 titles in the NFTVA collection, more specific comments can be made about the composition of the collection.4 If one looks to the national origin of the titles, the collection is extremely international in nature. The largest grouping comes from France (at least 40 per cent) with Pathé being the most widely represented (approximately 20 per cent of the collection) and then Gaumont (perhaps 10–12 per cent). U.S. companies comprise perhaps 10 per cent of the collection; Italian companies perhaps 5 per cent. German, Danish, and British films also make up a small portion. These numbers do have to be taken tentatively, as they are based on Cosandey’s analysis of production companies rather than national origins, but I cite them to provide a general idea of the transnational composition of the collection. While the films were collected in a unique, local and national context, the collection was transnational in nature from its inception. What then are the dynamics of this interaction between the national and the transnational, and what insight might this provide for thinking about the particular context within which Joye was working? It is worth returning to Joye’s Jesuit affiliation, an order operating unofficially (and technically illegally) in Switzerland post-1848. Despite the official ban, individual Jesuit priests were generally tolerated in local parishes, particularly if they avoided controversial activities. Given Joye’s local circumstances, his turn to the cinema (along with other visual media) may have been a general means of popularizing his religious endeavors through socially integrated outreach and entertainment. However, the particulars of Joye’s lectures remain unknown, making specific claims about his uses of particular films difficult: one can only hypothesize based upon the surviving visual evidence what the lectures may have been like. But with these caveats, I suspect that the transnational nature of both the medium and the contours of his collection played a crucial role in his work. A useful way of framing this, I would argue, is that Joye is taking his Latin doctrine and translating it through film, zeroing in on what Miriam Hansen has recently theorized as the medium’s status as a modern, global vernacular.5 In turning to the cinema in his local situation, Joye is able to make a rhetorical connection between the Catholic religious experience that he is implicitly promoting and a modern, transnational experience that he is delineating on the movie screen of his educational lectures. This approach is significant in that it allows him to downplay certain dogmatic tenets of his order (papal infallibility being the most divisive of the time) and emphasize through image and accompanying lecture the relevance and interrelation of Catholicism for and with the wider world. Thus, the political conservatism with which his religious order was locally and nationally associated is contextualized and assuaged by the modern world of the cinema.

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This process of local appropriation and translation may also have affected the shape of the collection. No definite information exists regarding both how much discrimination Joye was able to exercise when acquiring films and what he actually screened from week to week. In many respects, the collection replicates the international film market of the early 1900s – the predominance of French (specifically Pathé) films, the large amount of nonfiction material, the extensive use of applied color, etc. However, as Cosandey has noted, there are signs that the collection may have been tailored to some extent toward Joye’s particular interests. It seems likely that the travelogues and industrials were geared toward Joye’s educational lectures. Also of interest is something Cosandey has noted regarding the fiction: while comedies and trick films were staples of fiction films in the 1900s, the relative paucity of dramas in the collection is significant. The collected dramas tend to be historical and/or religious in nature (e.g. a 1906 Gaumont passion play, Pathé’s 1909 Jeanne d’Arc, Helios’ 1911 Inferno, and Gaumont’s 1912 The Christian Martyrs), and there is a relative lack of modern dramas, though there are some, such as Pathé’s 1911 The Victims of Alcohol. However, it is easy to guess at the pedagogical function of a temperance film such as this, whereas the risqué melodramas and crime dramas such as Pathé’s grand guignols are seemingly underrepresented. One can hypothesize that Joye would not have had much use for such films in his screenings. This collection, then, while incredibly diverse, appears nonetheless to have been crafted for a specific exhibitor-based system that refracted religious and ideological goals particular to a specific national and political context. This formulation, I would argue, usefully calls attention to the back and forth negotiations at work here among films that were produced in various national contexts but were aimed at an international market, and then a specific, local reception that places them into a new religious and popular context after their initial runs. I would like to focus now on the afterlife of this collection following Joye – or more precisely, its afterlives, for as indicated earlier, the prints have survived in a variety of different forms. After Joye died, the prints remained at the Borromäum where they were cataloged and stored for almost fifty years. However, film preservation was not the mission of the Borromäum, and it had neither the funds nor the facilities to care for the material properly. Over the decades, the collection progressively deteriorated. In the late 1950s, Stephan Bamberger, a Jesuit priest and editor of the Swiss Catholic journal, Filmberater, became the curator of the collection and finally moved the films to better storage facilities in Zurich in 1958 (though without funding to preserve the nitrate material on safety stock). In 1972, the British filmmaker, David Mingay, became involved with the collection while researching footage for a documentary on early cinema, The Early Years of Cinema (1975). He alerted David Francis, the curator of the NFTVA, about the collection and its precarious state, and in 1976 Francis negotiated with Stephan Bamberger and with the Swiss national archives to transfer the films to the NFTVA for preservation.6 Since the transfer, the NFTVA has been steadily working on inventorying and making safety copies of the films. The bulk of this work was complete by the mid-1990s, though because of financial and technological constraints, most of the transfers were made in black and white, even if the prints were originally colored. Exceptions to this are some of the stencil films, which were copied on color stock. Notably, however, when making the black and white transfers of the rest of the material, the NFTVA did annotate in the catalog the patterns of the original tints and tones, which was not a common archival practice in the 1970s. Building upon these efforts, recent work at the NFTVA on the Joye Collection by Bryony Dixon (Silent Film Curator) and archivist Sonia Genaitay has focused on restoring more of these films’ original colors. This move to the NFTVA thus set up one of the migrations of the Joye Collection,

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Fig. 1. Sample Turconi envelope containing Messina (unid.) and Der kleine Musiker (Pathé-Frères, no date).

from Switzerland to England, where the surviving prints have been cared for since. I will discuss the implications of this move below, but first I want to explore some lesser-known work that was done on the collection prior to its transfer to England. In the 1960s, Davide Turconi was introduced to Bamberger through Nazzareno Taddei (a Jesuit priest from Milan), and Turconi visited Zurich to examine the Joye Collection. Upon finding a number of the prints in advanced stages of decomposition, he arranged with Bamberger to have some of the Italian films – approximately 200 – preserved in Italy. They were duplicated there and became the basis for the film collection of L’Associazione Italiana per le Ricerche di Storia del Cinema (AIRSC), which was founded by Turconi. The original nitrates were eventually sent to the NFTVA after the material in Zurich was transferred to England in the 1970s. Turconi also approached a number of other archives about preserving the rest of the collection, but given the expenses involved with such a large collection, none at the time had the funds to undertake such a project. Finding no means of saving the collection in its entirety, Turconi resorted to a desperate step: he cut frames from the films and carefully organized them in envelopes by title and date (when identifiable) in order to preserve in fragments what he feared would soon disappear (Figs. 1 and 2). There are an estimated 18,000 separate fragments in the Turconi Collection (usually two or three frames each), representing upwards of 1,000 titles of the Joye Collection. The number of fragments varies widely per film – from a single clipping to as many as 288 (Pathé’s 1911 The Victims of Alcohol) – but there are on average fifteen per title. More research is needed on the relationship between the clippings and the prints from which they derive to establish Turconi’s criterion for selecting the frames. In some cases the clippings may have been an attempt to document each shot of a film, and a substantial number of the fragments were clipped over splices, which to an extent masked the

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Fig. 2. The 25 clippings of Der kleine Musiker spread out on a light table. Although reproduced here in black and white, all of the clippings were stenciled and some were tinted and stenciled.

excision while documenting two shots with one clipping (or as is often the case, a shot and an intertitle). However, for some titles, the clippings appear to do more than simply provide a material trace of shots. In some cases, multiple clippings have been taken from individual shots, and appear to emphasize dramatic moments in the film. For instance, in Pathé’s 1911 The Infancy of Moses, five clippings (out of 28 total) document two shots of the famous story in which Moses’ mother and sister (Jochebed and Miriam) place the infant Moses into a basket in the Nile to save him from the Egyptians. Four of the five clippings are taken entirely from the same shot: in the first two, Jochebed in medium long shot clutches the infant to her breast; in the third Miriam stands beside them fervently praying; and in the fourth, Miriam places Moses into the basket in the background while Jochebed throws her arms up in grief and/or supplication in the foreground. The first frame of the fifth clipping continues the shot of the first four clippings, though with an elision of perhaps a half-dozen frames (Jochebed with her arms raised is now bent lower to the ground); there is a splice; and the next two frames of the clipping cut approximately 150º to frame Miriam in medium long shot as she places Moses into the reed basket in the river (Fig. 3). When fragmented as still photograms, these five clippings not only document two shots taken from what is undoubtedly a dramatic high-point of the film, but they also demonstrate Turconi’s interest and ability in selecting resonate tableau that punctuate the emotional dynamics of the scene. In other words, it appears that in some cases Turconi aimed not only to represent the shots in particular films but also to reproduce the dramatic structure of the films synecdochicaly through fragments. Significantly, these clippings from The Infancy of Moses also record the colors of early

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Fig. 3 (above). Turconi clipping from Moses (Pathé 1910). Originally stenciled purple, dark green, yellow, and light blue. Fig. 4 (right). Turconi clipping from Kinder-Korso in Nizza (unid.). Originally stenciled purple, red, pink, yellow, and light blue. The negative, rather than positive print, has been spliced here.

cinema. Of the 28 total Turconi clippings of the film, all but the frames with titles are elaborately stenciled. It is difficult to ascertain Turconi’s interest in color – if he made a special effort to select color samples or if the frames he chose were simply representative of the colorful nature of Joye’s collection – but the results of his work are remarkable. Of the clippings currently inventoried, approximately 70 per cent were colored through processes such as tinting, toning, hand coloring and stenciling, and while a small percentage shows signs of advanced decomposition, most are currently stable with their colors intact. The clippings thus comprise an invaluable record of these past color processes that have until recently been historically overlooked.7 The only significant difference that I have thus far identified in terms of the clippings’ composition in relation to the Joye Collection at the NFTVA is that there appears to be a greater proportion of Italian titles represented in Turconi’s material: perhaps as much as 12 per cent (60 of the 490 titles thus far identified) rather than the 5 per cent that Cosandey’s analysis of the NFTVA material suggests. In terms of the actual number of clippings, perhaps as much as 18 per cent of the clippings are Italian (1,600 of the 9,400 have been cataloged). These numbers are very tentative as we have not yet

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finished processing and inventorying the entire collection, but if it does hold up, it provides some insight into Turconi’s interest in the Italian material in the collection.8 In the 1980s, Turconi gave 40 per cent of the collection (approximately 7,000 fragments) to the Cineteca del Friuli and the other 60 per cent (approximately 11,000) to Paolo Cherchi Usai who housed the material with the George Eastman House. In 2001, Patrícia de Filippi, a student of the Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation at the Eastman House, worked on the Turconi clippings and set up many of the procedures for the current preservation project. Since 2003, I have been continuing this work with Cherchi Usai, the GEH and the Cineteca to preserve the original fragments and digitally scan the entire collection. The initial preservation work on the collection entails opening Turconi’s envelopes, one by one, and recording their content – the number of clippings, title information from the envelope, etc. – into the project’s database. Once the information from the original envelope has been documented, each clipping is then individually re-housed in a new paper envelope printed with inventory information (a 3.5" x 5" sheet of archival paper that has been tri-folded). Archival paper was chosen over plastic negative sleeves as it allows better ventilation for the gases exuded by the nitrate, thus slowing the rate of decomposition. All of the individual clippings are then collected, and placed into a new archival storage box, and this is then stored with the rest of the collection in the Eastman House’s film vault. Once a batch of Turconi envelopes has been inventoried, the nitrate fragments are scanned in color on a high-resolution flatbed scanner at 900 dpi to obtain a detailed digital record that complements and eases access to the nitrate originals. Smaller copies of these scans are loaded into the project database to facilitate the browsing and searching of the collection. At this point, we have completed inventorying and scanning the Eastman House’s portion of the collection. In addition, the other part of the collection from the Cineteca del Friuli has been loaned to the Eastman House for preservation along the same lines. (The preservation procedure have been slightly modified for this material as the Cineteca clippings were previously re-housed in slide casings with glass; as the glass does not provide proper ventilation, they are being removed from the casings and placed into paper envelopes like the rest of the collection.) We hope to finish the preservation side of the project by the end of the 2009. After completing a thorough filmography of the clippings, we aim to publish a CD-ROM that will provide ready access to the entire collection. With the past and present accounts of this material briefly sketched, I will conclude by discussing some of the issues raised by the Joye Collection’s circulation from its original context in Basel, Switzerland, into a transnational one. To illustrate this, I will focus on one of the Joye films screened by Bryony Dixon at the Domitor Conference: an unidentified 244 foot, stencil-film about a children’s floral parade in Nice from around 1911 (Fig. 4). The unofficial inventory title is Kinder-Korso in Nizza / Children’s Floral Parade in Nice, and it depicts a parade that was most likely part of the Festival of Flowers held each March in Nice. The parade is composed primarily of children, and strangely it is also a celebration of Americanism with U.S. flags prominently waving throughout the march. The NFTVA catalog describes the film as follows: ACTUALITY. Children’s floral/fancy dress parade in Nice with American theme. No title. Procession passes left to right in foreground, right to left in background, with crowds, three seafront pavilions and sky beyond. United States flags everywhere including on many prams. Decorated doll prams pushed by children with mothers (12). Man carries banner : “SECTION 3 ... GO CART”. More floral prams containing babies and pushed by their mothers.

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Long file of children in fancy dress, including soldier with United States flag, sailor with yacht, hussar, 18th century couple, Dutch girl in clogs, little black boy, Chinese girl, Stars and Stripes outfit, little black mammy, cupid (131). Dense procession of about forty “Chinese” girls in yellow with parasols. Banner: “SECTION 5. COSTUMES IN COLLEGE COLOURS”, followed by children in mortar boards, black boy, girl in outfit emblazoned with “YALE” (184). More decorated prams each containing two babies (196). Canopied float containing child; farm cart with yokels; boxing ring with two boxers. Banner: “SECTION 9. PONY TURNOUTS”. Yellow clown with pony and child, boy on pony, pony cart (244 ft). Note: Fixed camera throughout.9 The stenciling on the print, when compared to some of the other, contemporary French material, is rather crude for the time: brightly applied pastels of blues, yellows, pinks, and purples. Also, if one examines the film closely, either on screen or on a rewind table, one will note that the image stutters because of the splices in the nitrate print. Most of these stutters can be found in Turconi’s clippings. Based upon the present inventory, he removed thirteen clippings from the print ranging from two to four frames each – 37 frames total, or perhaps two seconds of a three and half minute film. In these two seconds, one sees again the women and girls in their pastel dresses promenading; several women, presumably mothers, push baby prams draped in flowers. From these clippings one can surmise that at least part of the film and parade celebrates femininity, specifically the procession from childhood to motherhood, flowers being this trajectory’s cliché. Curiously, in Turconi’s fragments, at least one national context seems to be elided from the parade: while there is one U.S. flag visible in the upper left corner and the American stripes are apparent in the center background, Turconi seems to have omitted most of procession floats that prominently emphasize Americanism through the display of the flag. Along with this elision, most of the males in the parade – the soldier, a sailor, young boxers, a young African dressed as Uncle Sam – have been omitted as well. While in a sense these fragments can be taken as a synecdoche for the film, as these elisions demonstrate, details are lost to history in this representation. But then one can say this of the film itself, as it now exists in Britain. Removed from the Borromäum and transported across Europe from one national situation to another, the film is separated from Joye and the particular religious, political, and educational context within which he projected it. But by extension, one could also say that simply focusing on this film as being part of the Joye Collection also ignores the film’s original history: like a ragpicker, Joye himself snatched the print from the second-hand market and added it to his collection at the Borromäum, perhaps using it to lecture about the French Riviera or the religious ideals of femininity or perhaps even the United States in some roundabout way. As fascinating as Joye’s use of the film may have been (if he indeed exhibited it), one must also remember that this too is a second history of the print: that the film with its pastel coloring also circulated through Basel or Germany, and that an audience before Joye’s presumably saw what we can look at now, and before that, a film company, perhaps a French one, made this film in Nice to celebrate some aspect of that city’s local character but most likely with the intent of distributing its locale to the world. What then does one make historically of these circumstances, these movements, these fragments? While Turconi’s clippings are to an extent tragic: to cut up a film in order to preserve piecemeal what cannot be saved as a whole is a sad reminder of the mortality of the medium we study. Nonetheless, the power of these frames is remarkable. They record a struggle to preserve and remember in the face of destruction. Also, they invoke

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an imaginative act of memory: not only to imagine from these fragmentary two seconds the three and a half minute whole, but also, to imagine a history of the film that is greater than this materiality. These fragments record an exhibition history from Switzerland to Italy and around the world – movements that also chart dramatic shifts in use (from the general market to Joye’s educational and religious work to the archival and academic contexts of the last forty years). This trajectory pushes forward to Britain where the NFTVA has preserved what remains of the print and also to the United States where in Rochester we are preserving these frames so that they can find new audiences – given the importance and remarkable nature of the material, we hope to present them again not only to archivists and academics but also to a broader public. The trail of these fragments also stretches backwards to the world of Joye and before him to the cinema networks of Switzerland and Germany and even further to a parade in southern France. In other words, I take these fragments and the transnational movements that have left their marks on them to illuminate the work of historiography: they beckon one to take what survives, these fragments, these films, these moments and to see them for what they are now, imagine them for what they were then, and for tomorrow what they might become. Acknowledgements: I am grateful for the continued support of the Davide Turconi Project by Paolo Cherchi Usai of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, Bryony Dixon of the National Film and Television Archive, Livio Jacob of the Cineteca del Friuli, Patrick Loughney, Anthony L’Abbate, and Ulrich Ruedel of the George Eastman House, and David Robinson of the Giornate del Cinema Muto. Additionally, I would like to thank Roland Cosandey for providing generous criticism on an earlier version of this essay regarding the Joye Collection and its Swiss context.

Notes 1.

Roland Cosandey, “L’abbé Joye, une collection, une pratique: Première approche”, in Une Invention du Diable? Cinéma des Premiers Temps et Religion: An Invention of the Devil? Religion and Early Cinema, Roland Cosandey, André Gaudreault and Tom Gunning (eds) (Sainte-Foy, Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 1992), 60–70. Also see Roland Cosandey, “Vom Fundus zur Sammlung – Chronik einer Verwandlung”, in Welcome Home, Joye! Film um 1910. Aus der Sammlung Joseph Joye (NFTVA, London): Kintop Schriften 1 (Basel: Stroemfeld Verlag, 1993); and David Robinson, “Davide Turconi and the Joye Collection”, in 24th Pordenone Silent Film Festival Catalog, David Robinson (ed.) (Sacile: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, 2005), 32–33.

2.

On these conflicts, see Urs Altermatt, “Conservatism in Switzerland: A Study in Antimodernism”, Journal of Contemporary History, 14.4 (October 1979): 581–610; W. B. Duffield, “The War of the Sonderbund”, The English Historical Review 10.40 (October 1895): 675–698; and Ferdinand, Strobel and P. Ugo Orelli, Der Regularklerus: Die Gesellschaft Jesu in der Schweiz: Die Somasker in der Schweiz: Helvetia Sacra: Vol. 7 (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1976).

3.

Cosandey, “L’abbé Joye, une collection, une pratique”, 68n8.

4.

See the partial listing in Cosandey’s Welcome Home, Joye! Film um 1910; and also Cosandey’s summaries in, “Vom Fundus zur Sammlung”, 13, and “L’abbé Joye, une collection, une pratique”, 68n9.

5.

Miriam Bratu Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism”, Modernism/Modernity 6.2 (1999): 59–77; and Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Fallen Women, Rising Stars, New Horizons: Shanghai Silent Film as Vernacular Modernism”, Film Quarterly 54.1 (Fall 2000): 10–22.

6.

In reconstructing this chronology, I have drawn heavily from Cosandey, “Vom Fundus zur Sammlung”, 13–14; and “L’abbé Joye, une collection, une pratique”, 68n8); and from David Robinson, “Davide Turconi and the Joye Collection”, 32–33.

7.

My dissertation, “Moving Color: An Aesthetic History of Applied Color Technologies in Silent Cinema”, Ph.D. Dissertation (University of Chicago, 2007), examines the colors of silent cinema. Also see the recent collections by Monica Dall’Aasta, Guglielmo Pescatore, and Leonardo Quaresima, eds., Il Colore nel Cinema Muto (Udine, Italy: Atti del II Convegno Internazionale di Studi sul Cinema, 1995); Daan Hertogs and Nico de Klerk (eds), ‘Disorderly Order’: Colors in Silent

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9.

Cosandey has informed me in correspondence that Turconi’s particular interest in the Italian material of the Joye Collection is substantiated by his efforts to preserve some of the Italian material through L’Associazione Italiana per le Ricerche di Storia del Cinema and also by his organization of the retrospective, “Il primo cinema italiano” in 1970 at the first Settimana internazionale del cinema in Grado Italy. Of the 67 films screened, 48 were from the Joye Collection. See “Vom Fundus zur Sammlung”, 14. NFTVA Catalog entry for “Kinder-Karno in Nizza [sic]”, retrieved on 28 December 2006 from http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sift/title/490733?view=synopsis

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The imagination of early Hollywood: movie-land and the magic cities, 1914–1916 •

The imagination of early Hollywood : movie-land and the magic cities, 191 4–191 6

Jennifer M. Bean Imagination: the action of imagining – or forming a mental concept of what is not actually present to the senses; the result of this process, a mental image or idea. Oxford English Dictionary

hat does it mean to speak of “movie-land”? In her 1915 essay for Feature Movie Magazine, reporter Edith Johnson obsessively lauds the land of movies as a locus of the “real”, a topography far removed from the parameters of the stage where “painted scenery, lights, etc., all add to the illusion”. But “[i]n movieland”, she intones, “there is real scenery, the forests and streams form the backgrounds, and when the brave girl plunges into the sea ... she is required to take a real plunge into a real-for-sure sea”.1 Not everyone, of course, appreciated a “real-for-sure sea”, and it may be Geraldine Farrar’s lack of water skills that brought her “Home Again from Movie Land”, as the New York Times headlined in August 1915, thus announcing the diva’s resumption of stage roles following her brief hiatus with the Lasky Company.2 That the realism of movie-land was itself “staged” is visibly evidenced in a 1916 essay carried by the Illustrated World, titled simply “Stagey Realism in Movie-Land”, which relays the monumental feats involves in constructing, performing, and shooting scenes “on-location”.3 Even so, the emphasis on a capacious topography that far exceeds the measured steps available on a rectilinear stage remains. The finite border movie-land most emphatically exceeds, however, is that implied by the frame and screen. As Rufus Steele exclaimed to readers of Ladies’ Home Journal in 1915, the “narrow eye” of the camera catches but a mere portion of the land “behind the screen”, the dimensions of which have “suddenly become just as big as all indoors and all outdoors combined”.4 Notwithstanding this writer’s noisy emphasis on novelty, on the temporal flash of the “suddenly”, one need only recall Eileen Bowser’s detailed account of the “wanderings of the motion picture studios” that began in earnest around 1908 to question what, precisely, was new in this ballyhoo surrounding “movie-land” by the mid 1910s?5 Glancing back a few years one finds that the Kalem Company settled a small studio base in Jacksonville, Florida, around 1908 and established a traveling company under the direction of Sidney Olcott that shot films in Germany, Ireland, the Middle East and Rome between 1910 and 1912. Based in Brooklyn, New York, the Vitagraph Company announced a trip to Paris in 1909, while traveling companies were sent to

W

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Jamaica and Maine, with a winter filming company established in San Diego, California, at the end of 1910. William Selig’s Polyscope Company shortly joined in the venture, spiraling outward from its central base in Chicago to set up a winter company in Jacksonville in 1910 and another in Los Angeles in 1911, while simultaneously shipping touring companies to New Orleans, Mexico, and Japan. Without pausing to account for every such studio mobilized in these years, this abridged list sufficiently hints that the wealth of on-location activities associated with movie-land, and concurrently the public’s perception of an increasingly powerful and pervasive Americanbased business, emerges well before the mid 1910s. How then, amid such an obvious continuum, do we pinpoint any historical difference? Why did “movie-land” become such a ubiquitous word, one suggestive of an equally ubiquitous space, between 1914 and 1916? A provisional answer is deduced by reflecting upon Bowser’s chapter title: “Detours on the Way to Hollywood”. If the years between 1908 and 1914 can be accurately termed a detour, then the logical conclusion to draw is that by 1914 we have arrived, so to speak, at Hollywood itself. This is slippery ground indeed, for it raises the question: “where” is Hollywood? Geography presents itself, and in turn presents a puzzle. A contemporary perspective might assert that the term “Hollywood” maps a particular geographical space occupying several miles that stretch between Ventura and Wilshire Boulevards in Los Angeles, incorporating parts of Griffith Park in the northwest and bounded by Beverly Hills in the southeast. This Hollywood is a neighborhood (one of three in the U.S. that share the name “Hollywood”, as do twenty-three other townships ranging in location from West Virginia to North Carolina, Florida, Texas, Idaho, Oregon, etc.) and certainly not a center of American film production. Confronted with such a muddled geography, the reader searching for more literal ground might point directly to those infamous letters boldly anchored to a hill that capitalize HOLLYWOOD before recognizing, of course, that the literal here is entirely figural, nothing more (and nothing less) than a sign. Moreover, this sign has a history. It was erected in 1923 by a real estate development company, headed by comedy director Mack Sennett and by Los Angeles Times publisher David Chandler, with the purpose of luring investors to purchase specific tracts of land – indeed, the sign initially read “HOLLYWOODLAND” until 1950, when the latter four letters were removed in an effort by the Parks and Recreation department to more easily effect the sign’s massive upkeep.6 I do not mean to suggest that when we speak of “Hollywood”, whether its early or late incarnations, that geography is not important. The migration westward of studio companies to California increases exponentially throughout the 1910s, and the business of building massive studio complexes in and around Los Angeles determines, in part, a significant component of movie-land’s historical formation in the years between 1914 and 1916. Emphatically, however, studio complexes built in Florida, New Jersey, New York, and Philadelphia also impressed. It is precisely the ubiquitous tension in these years between the settling, building and mapping of a geographically specific place, and the marked obfuscation of where this place might be, which effects a rhetorical recoil that relocates what I am calling early Hollywood – or “movie-land” as it was termed then – to an imaginary space, or to a mode of imagining, to a way of thinking about the American film industry as a spectral phenomena never entirely available to the senses, yet one relentlessly geared to producing sensational affects. One need not travel far to find that sensational fiscal and topographical calculations underlie the discourse at stake. Indeed the “million dollar investment” that William Fox paid in 1916 to build a “Great Film City” on Long Island, reportedly covering 11 acres of land, neatly competed with reports of “Inceville”, rebuilt in Culver City that

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same year, which also represented an “investment of practically a million dollars” although the complex in this case covered “15 acres of property”.7 In Los Angeles the Selig Company’s Jungle-Zoo, built to support the company’s “real wild animal dramas”, opened in June 1915 and was hailed as an enterprise of extraordinary proportions, although the exact proportions were occasionally in question. According to Motography, Selig’s “wonder-plant” covered “twenty-two acres” and the “mammoth gateway with its arch of elephants leading into the Jungle-Zoo alone represents an outlay of $50,000”. According to Moving Picture World, the “ornate entrance, on which alone $60,000 was spent”, opened onto a park comprised, in their calculations, of “thirty-two acres”.8 Regardless of such quirks in statistical regularity, these “striking monuments to the growth of the film industry” made clear that moving pictures were no longer a cheap amusement, much less a mechanical toy.9 To the contrary, as the U.S. Supreme court declared in 1915, motion pictures comprise “a business pure and simple, originated and conducted for profit”.10 A business, yes, but emphatically one neither “pure” nor “simple”. In the case of Selig’s Wonder-Zoo, for instance, the business of making movies merged seamlessly with the studio’s function as a public park. According to reporter G.P. von Harleman, the Selig grounds beget the “playground of Los Angeles”.11 Elsewhere, Selig forged an alliance with the railway industry to mount the “Selig-Feature Movie Exposition Special”, a 17-day tour that took visitors from Chicago to Los Angeles on a trip to experience “life, laughter and the wonders of an unfolding fairyland”. What unfolded more specifically was the combined attractions of grand-scale train travel, the spectacle of filmmaking, the wonders of the zoo, and the marvels of the San Francisco and San Diego Expositions.12 Dedicated to celebrating the first month of the park’s public opening, this gala event magnified the daily tourism available to any interested spectator, who could access the park by riding one of the jitney buses, if not the daily city street car, whose routes from the center of Los Angeles to the jungle-zoo’s location were established in conjunction with the park’s opening. One could also ride the bus to Universal City, the opening of which predated the Jungle-Zoo by three months.13 Known in the press as the “Magic Village”, later as the “Ninth Wonder of the World”, the built compound and its “colossal facilities” reportedly drew “four or five hundred casual visitors” every day that were willing to pay the cost of “25 cents admission to the grounds”.14 To be sure, the grand-scale tourism marking the enterprises of Selig and Laemmle proved difficult acts to follows, and visits to studio environments elsewhere took place on a smaller, albeit notable, scale. In the spring of 1914, when the Kalem Company opened their St. Augustine studio in Jacksonville, Florida, they hosted a “housewarming” for “local city officials and prominent society folk” as well as for “members of the film colony”, particularly the “Edison and Lubin companies”.15 Whether or not Siegmund Lubin extended a similar courtesy to the “Kalemites” to visit “Lubinville” in Pennsylvania is unclear, although he reportedly took pleasure in “showing visitors through the wonderful plant and expatiating upon the mechanical marvels of the place”.16 Marvels, too, were on display in Edendale, California, where the Keystone company–alternately dubbed “Sennetburgh” and “Keystonia” by the press – had mushroomed from a “tiny corner lot” in 1912 to “one of the largest studio sites in the entire industry” by 1916, and was heralded by reporter Mabel Condon as “one of the most likeable studios in the whole industry”. Although tours were never planned, Condon lured her readers with the possibility, inciting them to reflect: “one of the happiest penalties you might receive would be a sentence of a day or more to be spent on the Keystone lot”.17 What emerges so distinctively from these accounts is an unprecedented fascination

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with the “place” of motion pictures, a destination at once visible and spectacular. Even those of a less grandiose nature riveted attention, routed through itineraries drawn by newspaper reporters like Kitty Kelly, whose “Flickerings from Filmland” column in the Chicago Daily Tribune incorporated over twenty entries relaying her trip to California in the spring of 1915. After hopping aboard Carl Laemmle’s “Universal Special” in Chicago, speeding south, and witnessing the gala event that put Universal’s “motion picture municipality on the map”, Kelly’s itinerary spiraled outward.18 One day she “drifted out to the Majestic-Reliance studio” and browsed around, although it took a bit more dedication to reach the Essanay Company: “A ticket to Niles, a trip across the ferry, a short jaunt through an orchard blooming, poppy glowing country – and there you are in a regular cinematographic pocket”. Regaling readers with her first view of the “long, low building topped by Essanay’s familiar Indian head”, Kelly ambles about the grounds, peeping into the barn to watch “Broncho Billy” Andersen’s horse practice a few tricks, eyeing the people who “float about in make-up and flutter about in their Snakeville costumes”, and sizing up the “row of little bungalows” located “back of the studio” where, as Margeurite Clayton explained, “all the people live”.19 That the place where people live is also where they work emphasizes the singularity of the environment, its status as a contained topos. The reader may object, of course, that those bungalows assembled in the isolate stretch of country called Niles suggest nothing more than a practicality. But if the trip to Corona, Long Island, from greater New York proves a less treacherous commute, then it is worth noting the property William Fox purchased “adjacent” to the sixteen acres of his “Great Film City” for the purpose of building “cottages and homes of such persons as wish to live near their work”.20 In Philadelphia, likewise, motion picture people lived not in “the City of Brotherly Love” but at “Lubinville”, which one writer in early 1914 described as a “community, distinct and complete”, numbering “1000 inhabitants” on a property covering “five acres”.21 The rhetorical stress on the “distinct” quality of the place trumpets its difference from an elsewhere, bounded from any exteriority; the majority of studios, in fact, were quite literally bounded by ornate entrances, gateway arches or, in more picturesque vein, as at the American Studio in Santa Barbara, by “a high wall of cream colored concrete, banked with masses of flowers and shrubbery”.22 Thomas Ince, however, supplanted such pleasing flora with “an immense sign, the letters of which are plain enough to be seen and discerned nearly a half mile away”, which he “erected atop the gatekeepers building” in late 1914. According to reporter W. E. Wing, “it reads, ‘Inceville,’ and has made such an impression upon Alma F. Young, the faithful stage-‘bus owner, who conveys the tardy ones to toil each day, that he has caused ‘Inceville’ to be numbered among the stops on his route, instead of ‘Santa Ynez Canyon’”.23 The example is, in a word, exemplary, if we follow Michel deCerteau’s assessment that proper names “‘make sense’” of space: “in other words, they are the impetus of movements, like vocations and calls that turn or divert an itinerary by giving it a meaning (or a direction [sens]) that was previously unforeseen”.24 It may seem, at this point, that I have skirted an obvious prompt in our attempt to “make sense” of the American film industry’s phenomenal expansion in these years by treating the lexicon of urbanism – evidenced most powerfully in “proper names” like the Fox Film City and Universal City – only elliptically. But this oblique approach proves a necessary prelude, since it is only from a side view, and with a bit of squinting, that these environments resemble the model of industrial urbanism initially exhibited by Baron Von Haussman’s reconstruction of Paris in the mid-nineteenth century, where grand boulevards underlined by intricate sewer systems transformed medieval clutter into efficient thoroughfares, hence enabling the smooth and efficient circulation of people and goods. To be sure, the rhetoric of efficiency haunts the discourse we

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have been tracing, “There is a saying”, Henry MacMahon explained to readers of the New York Evening Post, “you can get anything you want at Inceville, for its activities are as complete as the modern city, despite the fact that it possesses only a few hundred inhabitants”.25 Despite such “complete” resemblance to the “activities” of a “modern city”, however, the commercial imperative specific to movie-land – a space designed for making motion pictures – insinuates a radical difference, the most obvious being the wild proliferation of cities and towns, as well as people and animals, within the studio-grounds: a profusion that deranges the organization of place a metropolis proper seeks to propose. The difficulty of delineating such an environment led some writers to express a “touch of hysteria after visiting the place”, while others were convinced they had entered “bedlam”.26 The latter term comes from the story of “Bob”, whose hunting party in the Santa Monica range, not knowing they had crossed the border into Inceville, suddenly encountered a “shock”: “It was an Irish settlement, true to life. In our retreat down the gulch we ran the gamut of erratic emotions. For a bit of Switzerland, a peaceful Puritan settlement, and substantial colonies of various nations hastened our delusion that the Santa Ynez range had suddenly gone mad.”27 The writer’s “delusion”, a nice word for what is commonly called psychosis, bespeaks an inability to distinguish between the real and the illusory. But the point of the piece lies in the urge to incorporate what are otherwise antipathetic mental states, since the very ontology of “Inceville” is conditioned by its status as both a “Wonderland” and a “Complete Municipality”. Other writers enter movie-land with a descriptive mode that initially lessens the image of the fantastical through the language of familiarity, an imago of the everyday. Hence, one pseudonymous author known only as “the Spectator” describes his tour of Universal City’s lunchroom thus: “Three French maids … ate their rhubarb pie calmly, while French artists in blouses were throwing dice with the man behind the lunch-counter. An Arab sheik with long white beard strode past, picking his teeth.” If the ostensibly fantastical appears more and more “real” in this description – where the picking of teeth, the throwing of dice, and the calm eating of pie resemble the normative features of a familiar world – then the reverse is also true: the apparently “real” is rendered more and more fantastic. As “The Spectator” quickly adds: “We missed only one character – Alice. Surely Lewis Carroll’s little girl would have been at home in the lunch-room of Universal City. One felt that if one clapped his hands the people would vanish. ‘You’re nothing but a pack of cards!’”.28 Curiously enough, things did vanish in movie-land. In Feature Movie Magazine’s 1915 spotlight on William Selig’s capacity to produce “all that is spectacular and elaborate in feature picture-plays”, for instance, the writer offers an example: “In ‘The Spoilers’ Colonel Selig ordered an exact replica of the town of Nome, Alaska, to be erected and it was destroyed by dynamite, an action called for in Rex Beach’s novel”.29 To “order” a “replica” may sound simple, but the labor involved in the construction of sites designed for destruction – which is to say, ironically, for motion picture production – surface with remarkable regularity. Readers of Motography learned that in preparation for an avalanche scene in The Diamond From the Sky, “artisans” at The American Studio in Santa Barbara were “mining and tunneling for several days so that the earth when it slid would have all the force and weight of a real avalanache [sic]”.30 If this flurry of artistic activity – erecting and dynamiting; mining, tunneling and sliding – insinuates a temporality that deranges the stability of place, the confusion may explain in part the uncertain location of the “Moorish city” and “ancient fortress” that William Fox allegedly built in order to “be destroyed by high explosives” in 1916 for the production of Daughter of the Gods. According to the New York Times, this “replica of a turreted, castled stronghold” was constructed on the coast of “the Island of Jamaica, British West

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Indies”, while Current Opinion offered an image of the set replete with a caption emphasizing: “No, this is not in Syria or Palestine, but is near Jamaica, Long Island, U.S.A.” That is to say, near the Fox Film City.31 Perhaps nowhere is the marvelous lack of certitude associated with making movies more loudly inscribed than in Carl Laemmle’s 1915 call to the public to “come and see” Universal’s facilities, recently transformed to what the Moving Picture World described as a “whole town built for the production of motion pictures”.32 Touting his City’s attractions in a tone akin to that of a circus barker, Laemmle bellowed: Come see the inside workings of the biggest moving picture plant in the wide, wide world – a whole city where everybody is engaged in the making of motion pictures, a fairyland where the craziest things in the world happen – a place to think about and talk about all the rest of your days! See how we blow up bridges, burn down houses, wreck automobiles and smash up things in general in order to give the people of the world the kind of pictures they demand. See how buildings have to be erected just for a few scenes of one picture then have to be torn down to make room for something else.33 To “blow up” or “smash up”, to “burn” or “wreck”, to relentlessly “make room for something else”: these practices are hailed as a sign of the times, specifically a sign of the “kind of pictures” demanded by the “people of the world”. Yet Laemmle’s jaunty cri de coeur does not direct attention to a view of any one picture per se, but rather to the spectacle of the processes of production and, ultimately, to the spectacle of the studio itself – “a whole city ... a fairyland” – designed to capture the public’s interest and fascination. As should be clear by now, the rhetorical conjunction of the urban and the mythological, the modern and the magical is salient to what I am calling the imagination of early Hollywood. But it is hardly new to the lexicon of film historical discourse. Without question, the most oft-cited example surfaces in Tom Gunning’s description of the earliest cinema as one which attracted viewers not by virtue of the particular representation available on screen, but by virtue of the spectacle of the machine itself, the Bioscope, say, or the Cinematograph, each akin to “the display of technological wonders[s] ... .of such widely exhibited machines and marvels as X-rays, or earlier the photograph”.34 That these marvels were widely exhibited at the World Expositions – at London in 1851, Chicago in 1893, or Paris in 1900 – is of particular interest in the present context, insofar as the historical development at stake is one in which the studio itself becomes an attraction commensurate not simply with the wonders exhibited at the Expositions, but with the wonder of the Exposition per se: an entirely constructed and fantastically drawn urban space – a whole city, a magic village, a fairyland. Implicit in my argument here, of course, is the synchronic construction of the San Francisco Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915 and San Diego’s Panama-California Exposition of 1915–1916, each of which overlapped with movie-land’s historical formation in a variety of ways. Although the phenomenological difference of these environments ultimately proves more compelling than their commensurability, it bears mention that when caricaturist Hy Mayer presented to readers of Puck a two-page sketch titled “In Universal City, A Moving-Picture Town”, the editors described it as “a series of double pages made by Mr. Mayer on his recent trip to the two California Expositions”.35 The rhetorical slippage between the “where” of the place – a visit to the Expositions or to a Moving-Picture Town? – evinces the emblematic scrambling of these built environments, while the choice to render “Universal City” also evinces a representational preference. It is hardly coincidental that attempts to describe the mirth-making design of Keystone’s “enormous and intricately linked stages”, which

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“generated a course that resembled a number of letter “‘S’s,’ one running into and overlapping the other”, would simply explain by way of comparison: “’The House of Mirth’ on the Zone at the San Francisco Exposition was, if anything, a little less intricate than is a stage of Keystone sets”.36 Comparisons of this sort not only favored movie-land; they also favored an innovative rhetorical mode and a touch of whimsy designed to reflect the fantastical proportions of the environment. Offering a “Chatty Description of Filmland’s Contribution to the Wonders of California’s Exposition Year”, for instance, one writer for the New York Dramatic Mirror opened a view of Selig’s Jungle Zoo in medias res; in the middle, that is, of an argument between its jungle folk. A tiger, complaining he had been cast in “an unpopular part” in a recent picture, is “admonished” by a lion who retorts: “‘Ain’t I the king of beasts; and didn’t they dissolve me into a coyote during a scene only yesterday? And you grouch around talking about trouble in the pictures?” More than simply mimicking the penchant for anthropomorphizing movie-land’s animal attractions, this scenario emphasizes the metamorphic tricks played by the camera, the “dissolve” that turns one creature into another, just as “Colonel W. N. Selig, the modern wizard of motion pictures... was able to wave a practical but effective wand over a few gulches and lop-sided hills, dissolving the whole misfitting jumble into a royal garden”.37 Like the magician for whom the fixity elsewhere associated with form is rendered plastic – or, at best, entirely immaterial – these spectral environments seem to construe the limit, the very horizon, of the imagination’s power of figuration. But before we leap to the conclusion that such chimerical shape-shifting proves movie-land’s triumphant appeal over that of the Expositions, we note this writer’s noisy claim that Selig’s “exhibit” is at once “most attractive” and, emphatically, “permanent”. This fantastical place is paradoxically a business; it has been built to last. The paradox however is only apparent, since what movie-land flaunts is most precisely the fantasy of a particular kind of business and by extension the fantasy of a particular mode of production, one that involves the participation and interaction of an entire polis. Put sharply, the American film industry’s privileged position in the dream world of modernity emerges from its capacity to envision a utopic place where the rationalizing imperatives of capitalism, the tyrannical regulation of time, and the numbing effects of assembly line labor, transform to a phenomenological realm of endlessly variegated metamorphosis and play. A comparison sharpens the point: if the World Exhibitions, in Walter Benjamin’s keen assessment, enshrine “places of pilgrimage to the commodity fetish”, then America’s movie-land heralds wonder at what might best be termed a “production fetish”.38 The spectacular whir of motion picture production, to recall Laemmle’s harrumphing, surfaces most visibly as a “crazy” mode of destruction – the smashing up, burning up, or blowing up of things – but the lure of the apparently anti-rational suffuses most every operation. This is a place “Where Work is Play and Play is Work”, to quote Universal Studio’s characterization of its West Coast facilities as early as 1913, a phrase that Mark Cooper explicates in his elegant study of that studio’s historical formation. Importantly, as Cooper notes, “play” functions in the studio’s self-promoting lexicon as a rhetorical gesture that not only links labor to fun, but links the fun of “play” to the relentless mutability of the place. Play structures the environment itself, which Universal Weekly described as a place that “takes on the appearance of an Oriental city, again it is a Spanish garrison, still again an Indian Pueblo ... a frontier settlement, or an army post”.39 Play, then, insinuates a mode of labor that defies the laborious, including the physical laws that elsewhere govern solid matter; the standardization of space and time gives way to a phantasmagorical spatial-temporal fluidity.

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In a much longer study, it would be possible to explore the paradoxical play whereby movie-land constitutes itself as an idealized world, a Utopia proper, uniquely capable of producing an ever greater, ever more idealized, future. The terms may not sound that unique after all, since every utopian vision, in a genealogy ranging from Plato’s Republic and Thomas More’s Utopia through Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract and the blueprints of possibility envisioned by St. Simon in the context of nineteenth century modernity, construe the past or present as an idealized future, often in the topographical form of an isolated city or polis. “But while a picture of the future”, observes philosopher Elizabeth Grosz, “the utopic is fundamentally that which has no future, that place whose organization is so controlled that the future ceases to be a pressing concern”. Indeed, it is precisely against the idea of the new, the unforeseeable and unprepared for “event” that most fantasies of Utopia are developed to reassure us.40 The imagination of movie-land – or early Hollywood, to invoke this term’s future – alone provides a vision of Utopia constituted, precisely, by the production of contingency, constant change: a volatile and magical impermanence. In lieu of any such extended investigation, let me conclude with a few remarks suggestive of movie-land’s capacity to impact our historical imagination of the period. It is indeed necessary to stress this “spatial” interruption of a familiar linear historicism that uniformly charts a trajectory in which the presentational mode of the earliest “cinema of attractions”, its flaunting of technological prowess and magical tricks, yields to a narrational system and a “realist effect” capable of absorbing the spectator; capable, that is, to borrow Miriam Hansen’s neat summation, of “segregat[ing] the fictional space-time on the screen from the actual one of the theater or, rather, the subordination of the latter under the spell of the former”.41 What I hope to have provoked into view is the ecstatic parameters of yet another space-time demanding our scrutiny, the distraction of which is nowhere more powerfully evinced than in a scenario envisioned by Rufus Steele in 1915 for readers of Ladies’ Home Journal, which begins with the image of “two girls” who sit “in the pleasant twilight of a moving-picture theater”: One was round-eyed with absorption in the romance unfolding before them. The eyes of the other girl narrowed with a thought that was deeper than the story. At length, the thought found expression in a whisper. ‘Were you ever filled with a desire to go straight through the screen and see just what is behind it?’ she asked ... I mean ... just as Alice went through the looking-glass? What we see is nothing but the shadow. Don’t you realize that somewhere all these interesting and exciting things are actually taking place?42 The “somewhere” of the place poses a lure, and the lure is a ruse. Leading his reader “behind” the “shadow”, Steele describes a place in which the material and geographical specificity of the “blue mountains” that are “indeed Californian” dissipate as soon as one begins to gaze: “for between the blue walls there moves a procession of events so heedless of all limitations of time and place as to leave one in little doubt that he has invaded the realm of the Grand Vizier”. I have little doubt that further investigation of this realm will lead us, like Lewis Carroll’s little girl, to a symbolic economy that is neither mirror nor symmetrical anti-matter to what we think we already know, but rather poses a historical riddle, the heuristics of which we may now begin to game.

Notes 1.

Edith Johnson, “Realism in the Movies”, Feature Movie Magazine 1.4 (5 May 1915): 39. [Hereafter FMM.]

2.

“Our Geraldine is Home Again from Movie Land”, New York Times (Aug. 22, 1915): X4.

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EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL” 3.

“The Search for Realism in Movie-Land”, The Illustrated World (Chicago, August, 1916), quoted in “Stagy ‘Realism’ in the Movies”, Literary Digest 49 (19 August 1916): 1147.

4.

Rufus Steele, “Behind the Screen: How the ‘Movie’ is Made in the Valley of the New Arabian Nights”, Ladies’ Home Journal (October 1915): 16.

5.

Eileen Bowser, “Detours on the Way to Hollywood”, The Transformation of Cinema (New York: Scribner’s, 1990), 149–165.

6.

See “The Hollywood Sign”, an on-line history published by National Public Radio (NPR), at www.npr.org/programs/morning/features/patc/hollywoodsign/index.html Charlie Keil also discusses the history of the sign in an unpublished paper, “‘They Make Movies There’: Hollywood as a Fantasy of the Everyday”. I thank the author for generously sharing his fascinating study.

7.

See, respectively “William Fox to Build Great Film City”, Motography (22 January 1916): 171, and “Ince Culver City Studios Now Open”, Motography (5 February 1916): 289.

8.

See George Blaisdell, “Great Selig Enterprise”, Moving Picture World (10 July 1915): 227; and “Selig’s Jungle-Zoo Soon to be Opened”, Motography (3 April 1915): 517–518.

9.

The quoted phrase is found in “Splendid Ince Studios Complete”, Motography (8 July 1916): 440.

10.

Quoted in Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking and the Studio System (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), 4.

11.

G.P. von Harleman, “Motion Pictures Studios of California: A Review of the Wonderful Development of the Film Producing Industry on the Pacific Coast”, Moving Picture World (10 March 1917): 1599.

12.

See “The Selig-Feature Movie Special”, FMM (10 June 1915): 42. This six-page exposé offers detailed accounts of every aspect of the trip, including lavish accounts of the scenery and views passed along the railway line, and promises participants the opportunity to watch Kathlyn Williams “make a movie”. See also Kitty Kelly, “Flickerings from Film Land: Are You Going? It’s Selig Special Day”, Chicago Daily Tribune (8 July 1915): 14. [Hereafter CDT.]

13.

An exquisite account of the ballyhoo surrounding Universal City’s opening is retailed in the opening chapter of Richard Kosarksi’s An Evening’s Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915–1928 (Berkeley: University of California Press) 1990.

14.

See “Universal’s Unique City: A Town Built for the Production of Motion Pictures”, Moving Picture World (10 July 1915): 231.

15.

“Two Views of the New Kalem St. Augustine Studio”, New York Dramatic Mirror (April 29, 1914): 28. [Hereafter, NYDM.]

16.

Esther Penington, “On the Inside at Lubinville”, Photoplay Magazine (February 1915): 133.

17.

See Mabel Condon, “Keystone: The Home of Mack Sennett and the Film Comedy”, NYDM (9 September 1916): 33.

18.

The quoted phrase comes from Kitty Kelly, “Flickerings From Film Land: World’s First Film City Opens Its Gates”, CDT (17 March 1915): 14. For details of the reporter’s trip west, see her “Flickerings from Film Land” columns in the CDT, respectively “‘Specialing’ with the Universals” (March 13, 1915): 15; “Universal Special Reaches Filmland” (15 March 1915): 14; “Kitty Writes from the Grand Canyon” (16 March 1915): 10; and “Specialing Aboard a Prairie Liner” (20 March 1915): 12.

19.

Kitty Kelly, “Flickerings from Film Land: Kitty Visits the Essanay Studio”, CDT (April 2, 1915): 23. On the trip to Majestic-Reliance, see Kitty Kelly, “Flickerings from Film Land: With Fay Tincher Off the Screen”, CDT (26 March 1915): 20.

20.

“William Fox to Build Great Film City”, Motography (22 January 1916): 171. Slight modifications to such a plan appeared when the Gaumont Company “tripled” the size of its plant in Flushing, Long Island, without incorporating living conditions, although general manager F.G. Bradford clarified that “stock” members of the company “are planning to buy or lease homes in Flushing to be near their work”. See “Gaumont to Triple Present Plant”, Motography (18 December 1915): 1277.

21.

“Lubinville”, NYDM (14 January 1914): 65.

22.

“The American Studio”, Moving Picture World (10 July 1915): 255.

23.

W.E. Wing, “On the Pacific Coast”, New York Dramatic Mirror (6 January 1915): 23.

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34 • The imagination of early Hollywood: movie-land and the magic cities, 1914–1916 24.

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 104.

25.

Henry MacMahon, quoted in “The Romance of Making the ‘Movies,’” Literary Digest (23 October 1915): 902. The first quoted phrase comes from “A Visit to Selig’s Jungle Zoo: A Chatty Description of Filmland’s Contribution to the Wonders of California’s Exposition Year”, NYDM (27 January 1915): 46.

26.

27.

See “Tom Ince, of Inceville: The Wonderland Which Began with One Stage and Now Covers an Investment of $35,000 – A Complete Municipality”, NYDM (24 December 1913): 34.

28. 29.

“The Spectator”, Outlook (4 August 1915): 823. “Colonel Selig: President, Selig Polyscope Company”, FMM (10 June 1915): 41.

30.

“Another Thrill for Serial”, Motography (29 May 1915): 887.

31.

See, respectively, “At Least $500,000,000 Invested in ‘Movies,’” New York Times (2 January 1916): SM20, and “Giants of the Stage are Pygmies Artistically on the Screen”, Current Opinion (July 1918): 30. See “Universal’s Unique City: A Town Built for the Production of Motion Pictures”, Moving Picture World (10 July 1915): 231.

32. 33.

Carl Laemmle’s announcement appeared in Universal Weekly, as quoted in Clive Hirschorn, The Universal Story (New York: Crown Publishers, 1983), 12–13.

34.

Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde”, Wide Angle 8.3/4 (1986): 66. Hy Mayer, “In Universal City, A Moving-Picture Town”, Puck (29 May 1915): 77.

35. 36.

See Mabel Condon, “Keystone: The Home of Mack Sennett and the Film Comedy”, NYDM (9 September 1916): 33. It is also true that Keystone in particular exploited the California expositions as sets built for hilarious indirection, prominently displayed in two 1915 shorts, Fatty and Mabel at the San Francisco Exposition and Fatty and Mabel at the San Diego Fair.

37. 38.

“A Visit to Selig’s Jungle Zoo”, ibid. Walter Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century [Exposé of 1935]”, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1999), 7.

39.

The Universal Weekly entry, “Where Work is Play and Play is Work”, appeared in the December 1913 issue, as quoted in Mark Cooper, “Work Space: Universal City”, unpublished paper, presented at the fourth international “Women and the Silent Screen” conference, Guadalajara Mexico, June 2006.

40.

Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2001), 139. Miriam Hansen, Babel & Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1991), 83.

41. 42.

Rufus Steele, “Behind the Screen”, 16.

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Editors and contributors Editors and contributors

Richard Abel is Robert Altman Collegiate Professor of Film Studies in the Department of Screen Arts & Cultures at the University of Michigan. Most recently he edited the award-winning Encyclopedia of Early Cinema (Routledge 2005), published Americanizing the Movies and ‘Movie-Mad’ Audiences, 1910–1914 (California 2006), and co-organized the Ninth International Domitor Conference at the University of Michigan (2006). His current project is Menus for Movie Land: Newspapers and the Movies, 1911–1915. Muriel Andrin received her Ph.D. in 2001 from the Université Libre de Bruxelles. She teaches at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and Universiteit Antwerpen and lectures at the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique in Brussels. She is the author of Maléfiques. Le Mélodrame filmique américain et ses heroines, 1940–1953 (Peter Lang 2005) and has written articles on women’s representation in contemporary film melodrama as well as on women directors. She also works on the new forms of interaction between cinema and contemporary art. Jonathan Auerbach is Professor of English at University of Maryland-College Park. He is the author of numerous publications on American literature and culture, including most recently, Body Shots: Early Cinema’s Incarnations (California 2007). He is currently working on a book about American film noir and citizenship. Canan Balan is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of St. Andrews (Scotland) and working on a dissertation entitled “Early Cinema Spectatorship in Istanbul from the 1890s to the 1930s”. She received her masters degree in Radio, TV and Cinema at Istanbul University and worked formerly as a teaching assistant at Bahcesehir University. She has published an essay on urban representations in contemporary Turkish Cinema in the annual Turkish Film Studies Conference proceedings. Jennifer M. Bean is Director of the Cinema Studies Program and Associate Professor of Cinema Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Washington. She is coeditor of A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema (Duke, 2002), and author of The Play in the Machine: Gender, Genre and the Cinema of Modernity (forthcoming from Duke). Her current projects include a collection of essays on the origins of the American star system and a study of the mass cultural/cinematic imagination. Giorgio Bertellini is Assistant Professor in the Department of Screen Arts & Cultures and Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. Editor of The Cinema of Italy (2004) and Silent Italian Cinema: A Reader (2008), he is the author of the monograph Emir Kusturica (1996), numerous essays on silent film culture in Europe and the USA, and a forthcoming study on race as a visual form entitled Postcards from Italy: Picturing Race in Early American Cinema. Marta Braun teaches in the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University. She works with Charlie Keil on early Canadian cinema and writes about chronophotographers E .J. Marey and Eadweard Muybridge. Her book, Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne Jules Marey 1830–1904 (Chicago 1994), was shortlisted for the Kraszna-Krausz award, a prize given bi-annually for the best internationally published book in photography. She was made a knight of the Palmes Académiques by the French Government in 1996. Rudmer Canjels received his Ph.D. in 2005 from Utrecht University for a study on the international distribution and cultural transformations of silent film serials, and he has published various articles on the subject. While working on the production of a documentary on Royal Dutch Shell, he wrote an essay on the more than eighty-year history, use, and impact of the Shell documentary films (published in A History of Royal Dutch Shell, Oxford University Press). He is currently working on a research project on industry-sponsored films. Ian Christie is Anniversary Professor of Film and Media History in the School of History of Art, Film and Visual Media, Birkbeck College, University of London. He has written and edited nearly a dozen books, including Scorsese on Scorsese (2003) and The Cinema of Michael Powell (2005), co-curated exhibitions such as Modernism: Designing a New World (V&A, 2006), produced a BBC2

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EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL” television series on early cinema, The Last Machine (1995), and published hundreds of essays, articles, interviews, and reviews for British and American journals, magazines, and newspapers. Marina Dahlquist is an Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema Studies at Stockholm University. She was awarded her Ph. D. in 2001 from Stockholm University for her dissertation, The Invisible Seen in French Cinema before 1917. She received a research grant from the Swedish Research Council (2002–2004) for the project, “Cinema and Cultural Globalization: Markets, Audiences, and the Public Sphere”, and was a Research Fellow at Göteborg University (2005–2006). She is currently completing a book on film culture in the USA, focusing predominantly on New York City in the 1910s. Nico de Klerk is a researcher at the Nederlands Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. Rooted in the collection of that archive, his work has focused on lesser-known aspects of film history: e.g. early nonfiction, colonial cinema, and the program as a presentation format. Besides organizing international workshops on these topics and composing programs, he has written articles for both Dutch and international film (historical) journals and books. For the Filmmuseum he co-edited Nonfiction from the teens, “Disorderly order”: colours in silent film, and Uncharted territory: essays on early non-fiction film. Wolfgang Fuhrmann is Project Manager of the DFG Project (German Research Foundation) – Film and Ethnography in Germany, 1900- 1930 – at the University of Kassel, Germany. He completed his Ph.D. dissertation on German colonial cinema at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He teaches film history at the universities in Kassel, Mainz, and Munich and as a visiting professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. His essays have appeared in History of Anthropology Newsletter, Journal of Film, Radio and Television, and KINtop. Joseph Garncarz teaches Theatre, Film and Television Studies at the University of Cologne and heads a research project on early German cinema at the University of Siegen. He has published numerous articles on German film history, early cinema, popular European cinema, Hollywood’s role abroad, star theory, and film versions, in journals such as Film History, Hitchcock Annual, Cinema & Cie, and KINtop, and edited collections and reference books. He is the author of Filmfassungen: Eine Theorie signifikanter Filmvariation (Peter Lang 1992) and a book on the emergence of cinema in Germany (forthcoming from Stroemfeld). Oliver Gaycken is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Temple University. He has published essays on the discovery of the ophthalmoscope, the flourishing of popular science films in France in the early 1910s,the figure of the supercriminal in Louis Feuillade’s serial films, and the surrealist fascination with popular scientific images. He is currently doing research on American popular science films before 1920 for a book entitled Devices of Curiosity: Cinema and the Scientific Vernacular. Frank Gray is the Director of Screen Archive South East and a Principal Lecturer in Art and Media History at the University of Brighton. His research concentrates on Victorian and Edwardian film culture with particular emphasis on production and exhibition in Sussex, the magic lantern in the 1890s, and the work of the Brighton School – the pioneers G. A. Smith and James Williamson. Tom Gunning is Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor of the Humanities in the Department of Art History and the Committee on Cinema and Media at the University of Chicago. He is the author of two books, D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film (Illinois 1990) and The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (British Film Institute 2000), as well as more than a hundred articles on early cinema, the avant-garde, film genres, and issues in film theory and history. His publications have been translated into a dozen languages. Mark Hain is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University. He is currently working on a dissertation exploring lost films and the intersection of cultural memory and preservation of films and cinematic artifacts. Other research interests include representations of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity in the media. His most recent publication is “Explicit Ambiguity: Sexual Identity, Hitchcockian Criticism, and the Films of François Ozon” in Quarterly Review of Film and Video (May 2007). Andrea Haller studied German literature, social anthropology, sociology and film studies at the University of Trier, where she is writing her dissertation on early cinema’s programming strategies and the female audience. She has written conference papers on local film history, early cinema programming practices, female movie-going and fandom and early movie stars. Her essay, “Seen

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Editors and contributors through the eyes of Simmel: The Cinema Program as a ‘modern’ experience’”, is forthcoming in New paradigms of perception: changes in media and perception around 1900. Gunnar Iversen is Professor of Film Studies in the Department of Art and Media Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He has written and published on film history, documentary and early cinema. His publications include a history of Norwegian documentary, Virkelighetsbilder (2001); Nordic National Cinemas (Routledge 1998), co-authored with Soila and Söderbergh Widding; and essays in Film History and Scandinavica as well as in several anthologies and encyclopedias. Amanda Keeler is a third year Ph.D. student and Associate Instructor in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University-Bloomington. Her research interests include early cinema history of the transitional era, the history of radio and television broadcasting, and contemporary feminist television studies. Her dissertation will explore the emergence of new media (cinema, radio and television) and the ways in which people have attempted to employ these media for educational purposes. Charlie Keil is Director of the Cinema Studies Institute and Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Early American Cinema in Transition: Story, Style and Filmmaking, 1907–1913, and co-editor, with Shelley Stamp, of American Cinema’s Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices. He is currently co-editing two anthologies, one on the 1910s (with Ben Singer) and the other on comedy and animation (with Daniel Goldmark), and also researching a study of early Hollywood. A SSHRC-funded study with Marta Braun will result in a database of all early films shot in Ontario. Frank Kessler is a professor of film history at Utrecht University and one of the founders and editors of KINtop. Jahrbuch zur Erforschung des frühen Films. He is the author of numerous articles on early and silent cinema. As a guest editor he published a special issue of the Historical Journal of Radio, Film and Television on early non-fiction film (2002). Together with Nanna Verhoeff, he edited Networks of Entertainment: Early Film Distribution 1895–1915 (2007). He was president of Domitor from 2003 to 2007. Rob King is a professor in the Cinema Studies Institute and Department of History at the University of Toronto, where he is completing The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture (University of California Press, forthcoming 2008). He has published articles on silent cinema and early film comedy in Cinema Journal, Velvet Light Trap, and Film History. Germain Lacasse is an Adjunct Professor in the Département d’histoire de l’art et d’études cinématographiques at l’Université de Montréal. A specialist in the study of early cinema and Québécois cinema, he is directing a research project devoted to the relations between early cinema and oral tradition. His principal publications are Histoires de scopes (1989) and Le bonimenteur de vues animées (2001). Torey Liepa is a Ph.D. student in Cinema Studies at New York University, where he is completing a dissertation that examines the emergence of dialogue in American silent film, 1909–1916. In addition to international silent film history, his research interests include theories and histories of modern mass culture and early technologies of representation, American cultural history and the ontologies of nature and landscape in the cinema. He has been an adjunct lecturer at New York University, Queens College and LaGuardia Community College (CUNY). David Mayer, Emeritus Professor of Drama and Research Professor at the University of Manchester, publishes extensively on British and American popular entertainment of the 19th and early 20th centuries. His recent writings explore the interstices between the late-Victorian stage and early cinema. He is founder-director of “The Victorian and Edwardian Stage on Film Project” at the University of Manchester and a contributing member to The Griffith Project. His Stage-struck Filmmaker: D.W. Griffith and the American Theatre is forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press. Paul S. Moore is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Ryerson University and recently became co-editor of Marquee: Journal of the Theatre Historical Society of America. His essays on the urban modernity of film exhibition have appeared in City & Community, Urban History Review, and the Canadian Journal of Film Studies. His book, Now Playing: Early Moviegoing and the Regulation of Fun, is forthcoming from SUNY Press. Research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada through a postdoctoral fellowship tenured at the University of Chicago.

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EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL” Dominique Nasta heads the Film Studies Department and teaches Film Aesthetics, History and Analysis at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. She has published two books, Meaning in Film: Relevant Structures in Soundtrack and Narrative (1992) and New Perspectives in Sound Studies (2004), as well as numerous essays on early melodrama, East European cinemas, emotions and music in film, and Europeans in Hollywood. She is the editor of a bilingual series on Film Studies, Rethinking Cinema/Repenser le cinéma, published by Peter Lang. Panivong Norindr is Chair of the Department of French & Italian at the University of Southern California. He teaches French and Francophone literature and cinema, as well as comparative literature and postcolonial theory. The author of Phantasmatic Indochina: French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film and Literature (Duke), he is currently completing a book entitled (Post)Colonial Screens. Charles O’Brien teaches film studies at Carleton University. He is the author of Cinema’s Conversion to Sound: Technology and Film Style in France and the U.S. (Indiana 2005). O’Brien spent the 2006–2007 academic year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in Washington, D.C., working on the manuscript for a new book, called Musical Films across the Atlantic, on the convergence of film and popular song through electric sound in the United States and Europe. Wyatt Phillips is a Ph.D. student in Cinema Studies at New York University. He is currently conducting research for his dissertation that will further historicize the role and function of genre in early American cinema. Daniel Sánchez Salas is Assistant Professor in the Communication Department 2 at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (Madrid) and editor of Secuencias. Revista de Historia del Cine / Sequences. Journal of the History of Cinema. His most recent publication is Historias de luz y papel. El cine español de los años veinte, a través de su adaptación de narrativa literaria española / Stories of Light and Paper. The Spanish Cinema of the Twenties, through its Adaptation of Spanish Narrative Literature (Filmoteca de Murcia 2007). Sheila Skaff is Assistant Professor and Head of Film Studies in the Department of Communication at the University of Texas-El Paso. She is the author of “The Law of the Looking Glass”: Cinema in Poland, 1896–1939 (Ohio University Press 2008). She received the 2006 Metchie J.E. Budka Award in Polish History from the Kosciuszko Foundation. Her research interests include East European cinema, early cinema, and media in the borderlands. Matthew Solomon is Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies in the Department of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. He has published essays on magic and silent cinema in Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-Change (2000), Cinema & Cie (2003), The Films of Tod Browning (2006), Theatre Journal (2006), and Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film (2006). He is the author of Disappearing Tricks: Houdini, Silent Cinema, and the New Magic of the Twentieth Century, forthcoming from University of Illinois Press. Gregory A. Waller is chair of the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University-Bloomington. He is the author of several studies of exhibition and movie-going in the USA, including Moviegoing in America (Blackwell 2002) and Main Street Amusements: Film and Commercial Entertainment in a Southern City, 1896–1930 (Smithsonian 1995). He is currently completing two projects: Movies on the Road, a history of itinerant film exhibition, particularly in the 1930–40s, and Japan-in-America, a study of the representation of Japan in American culture, 1890–1915 (http://www.indiana.edu/~jia1915/). John Welle is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, and Concurrent Professor of Film, Television and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame. His publications on early cinema include “Film on Paper: Early Italian Cinema Literature, 1907–1920”, Film History (2000); “Tales of Cinematic Customs: Early Italian Cinema Literature, Reception and Historiography”, A nuova luce. Il cinema muto italiano 1 / Italian Silent Cinema 1 (CLUEB 2000), and “The Last Days of Italian Silent Film: George Kleine’s Correspondence with Henrietta Delforno and the Crisis of the 1920s” in Incontri con il cinema italiano (Sciascia Editore, 2003). Joshua Yumibe is an assistant professor in the English Department and the Concentration in Film Aesthetics and History at Oakland University. He received his Ph.D. in 2007 from the University of Chicago for his dissertation, “Moving Color: An Aesthetic History of Applied Color Technologies in Silent Cinema”. Since 2003, he has been working on a joint project with the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, and the Cineteca del Friuli in Friuli, Italy, to preserve and research the filmography of the Davide Turconi Film Frame Collection.

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Index

Index By Caroline Jennings and Akili Tommasino A Abdulhamid, Sultan 175 Abdulhamid II, Sultan 175 Abel, Richard 1, 19, 25, 60, 161, 163, 229, 230, 236, 250, 281, 282, 283 AEG 49 Agnew, John 166 Albert, (Prince) 12 Albert Kahn Archive 27 Aldrich, Charles 253 Alger, Horatio 242,245 Alhambra (London) 100 Alinari Brothers 41 Allain, Marcel 223, 225 Altenloh, Emilie 190–191 Altman, Rick 5, 42, 279, 283 Alus, Sermet Muhtar 175,181 Alvin (“Japanese Theater”) 143 American Biograph, The 82 American Mutoscope & Biograph (AM&B) 4, 132–133, 135, 137, 144, 149 American Studies Association 18 And, Metin 175 Anderson, Benedict 1, 2, 20 Anderson, Nels 238, 247 Andrin, Muriel 5, 265 Aoki, Tsuru 148 Apex 146, 149 Arbuckle, Roscoe “Fatty” 7, 229–230, 233, 235, 240–241 Archive of the Planet 14, 15 Arden, Edwin 216 Arne, Thomas 99 Arnheim, Rudolph 28 Arnoldy, Edouard 47 Arris Theater 142 Association Koloniaal Instituut 101, 108

Associazione Italiana per le Ricerche di Storia del Cinema (AIRSC) 235 Astley’s Ampitheatre 93 Aubert, Michele 111 Auerbach, Johnathan 3, 17 Azlant, Edward 60 B Bakhtin, Mikhail 54,59 Balan, Canan 4, 5 Balboa 146, 151 Bamberger, Stephan 324–325 Bamforth 19 Bank, Horace 84–85 Bara, Theda 5, 295–304 Barnes, John 89, 92 Barnum, P.T. 260 Barrès, Maurice 117 Barrymore, Lionel 217 Barthes, Roland 23, 28, 40, 300–301 Basinger, Jeanine 302 Baudelaire, Charles 28, 39 Bazin, André 15, 28–29, 38, 39 Beach, Rex 336 Bean, Jennifer M. 6, 305, 332 Beck, Ulrich 7 Bedford Theatre (London) 254 Belasco, David 136, 146 Bell, Archie 303 Bellows, George 242 Benjamin, Walter 28–29, 38, 113, 255, 267, 338 Berger, Henning 127 Bergson, Henri 15 Berliner Gram-O-Phone Co. 209 Bernardini, Aldo 166–168, 170 Berne International Convention 114 Bertellini, Giorgio 3, 27, 119, 129

347

EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL” Bertillon, Alphonse 220, 224 Bhabha, Homi 1, 2, 5, 11 Bijou Theatre (Melbourne) 97 Bijou Theatre (Monessen) 247 Bioscope Company of Canada 63, 66 Bismarck, Prince 178–179 Bison-101 7, 150 Bitzer, G.W. “Billy” 132–133 Blackton, J. Stuart 252 Bläser family 187 Blom, August 267–270 Booth, John Wilkes 58–59 Borrás, Tomás 200, 204 Botrel, Théodore 209 Bourassa, Henri 206 Bousquet, Henri, 25 Bowers, Charley 239 Bowser, Eileen 230, 332–333 Boyer, Lucien 212 Bradford, Guy 66 Braun, Marta 3,63 Breistein, Rasmus 197 Brewster, Ben 259 British-American Company (Bri-Am)158–159 British Film Institute 6, 88, 321 British Mutoscope & Biograph 99 Brooks, Peter 266 Bruchési, Archbishop 207, 209–210 Bruhnes 15 Brummet, Palmira 174–175 Brunetta, Gian Piero 166,169 Brunius, John W. 198 Bruno, Giuliana 60 Bunny, John 7, 191 Burch, Noël 3, 15, 17, 19–20, 54 Byng, Frank 100 C Caffin, Caroline Cameraphone Campbell, Lindesay Caneppele, Paolo Canjels, Rudmer Carroll, Lewis Carroll, Noël Cashman, Sean Dennis

348

238, 252, 256 43, 44 97 166 215 336, 339 39 298

Catholic Legion of Decency 161 Cavell, Stanley 28 Cecchetti, Vincenzo 164–169 Çelik, Zeynep 181 Chakravarty, Dipesh 109 Chandler, David 333 Chaplin, Charlie 219, 236, 239–246 Charles I 99 Chase, Richard 18 Cherchi Usai, Paolo 321–322, 328, 330 Chesnutt, Charles 57 Chiarenza, Carl 27 Christie, Ian 3, 90 Chronophone 43–47, 48, 49, 50 Cincinnati-In-Motion 159 Cinémathèque Québéçoise 158 Cinématographe 11, 70–71, 92, 164, 167, 337 Cinephon 51 Cinephone 43, 45, 48 Cines 34, 149–150 Civic Theatre 3, 120–121 Chamberlain, Joseph 83, 90 Chase, Richard 18 Charles Urban Company 23–24, 63 Chauncey, George Jr. 303 Ciné Théâtrale d’Orient 173 Cineteca del Friuli, La 321, 328 Clark, Thomas Jefferson 142 Clayton, Margeurite 335 Cocteau, Jean 248 Cody, “Buffalo” Bill 12, 22, 133 Colette 15 Collins, Alf 20 Cologne Museum of Ethnography 289 Colon Cinema Company 255 Comandon, Jean 258 Commonwealth Edison Company 49 Condon, Mabel 334 Conness, Luke Edwin 157 Conness-Till Company 156–159 Cooks Travel Agency 12 Cooper, Mark 338 Cosandey, Roland 321–324, 327, 331 Crafton, Don 6 Cronje, Piet 93 Cricks & Martin 96

Index Cunibertie, John Curtiz, Michael

61 100

D Dagrada, Elena 273 Dahlquist, Marina 3, 118 d’Alembert 13 Daly, Arnold 216 Davenant, Sir John 99 Davide Turconi Film Frame Collection 321 Davis, Jeff 236 De Berti, Raffaele 167 De Filippi, Patricia 328 de Klerk, Nico 3, 7, 101 Decourcelle, Pierre 4, 215, 217, 219–220, 222 deKolta, Buatier 251 del Cid, Juan 200–201 Delacroix, Eugéne 112 Deleuze, Gilles 213 Demenÿ,Georges 54 DeMille, William 136 Dench, Ernest 120 Denham, Clifford 64,66 Denning, Michael 277, 282 Deroo, Eric 117 des Ormeaux, Dollard 207 Deutsche Mutoskop- und Biograoh-Gesellschaft 25 Devant, David Diaghilev, Serge 248 Diderot, Denis 13 Dijkstra, Bram 298, 301 Dinesen, Robert 308, 311 Dingwell, James 120–121, 129 Dixon, Bryony 6, 322–324, 328 Dixon, Royal 120 Dixon, Thomas 56, 134–136 Dixon Jr., Thomas 57–59 Doane, Mary Ann 300–301 Dominion Film Exchange 160 Domino 141, 145, 149–151 Domitor 2, 6, 12, 88, 321, 323, 328 Dorsey 145–146, 149 Doublier, François 14, 98 Doumer, Paul 115 Drumont, Edouard 117

Dumais, Joseph Dunbar Duncan, F. Martin Dunning, William Duskes, Alfred Dutch Colonial Institute

4, 206–213 57 258, 260 134 51 3, 101–102, 104–107, 115

E Éclair Company

110, 141, 143, 149, 151, 261–262 Eclipse 110, 149–150 ECPA 114 Eco, Umberto 246 Eden Musée 49 Edison Manufacturing Co. 12, 19–20, 22–23, 46–47, 53, 71, 82, 93, 95, 139, 141, 147–150, 159, 167–169, 216, 234, 250–252, 258–263, 334 Edison, Thomas A. 89, 118, 167 Edison-Thomas Pictures 82 Edwardes, George 83 Efendi, Ahmet Lütfi 174 Elgéphone 47 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 17–18 Erdoðan, Nezih 173 Essanay Company 142, 148, 159, 239, 245, 335 Everett, Ruth 252 Ewen, Elizabeth 301, 303 Ewen, Stuart 301 F Famous Players 141, 147, 150–151 Fehim, Ahmet 179 Fell, John 284 Ferah Tiyatrosu 178 Feuillade, Louis 225 Fischer Chronophone Theater 44 Flagg, James Montgomery 238 Flynt, Josiah 237 Foo, Ching Ling 249–255 Ford, John 100 Ford Motor Car Company 119 Foucault, Michel 213 Fox Film City 335, 337

349

EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL” Fox Film Corporation Fox, William Foy, Willy Francis Collection Francis, David Frazer, John Fredin, Karl Freer, James French, Henri Frobenius, Leo Frodon, Jean-Michel Fromentin, Eugéne Fuentes, Marlon Fuhrmann, Wolfgang G G. West & Son(s) Garncarz, Joseph Gasnier, Louis Gaudreault, André Gaumont

295–296, 302–303, 333, 335 335, 336 289–290 88 88 254 129 63, 67 253 290 113, 117 112 26 285

88 4, 185, 194 216 40 7, 14, 43–47, 49, 50, 66, 110, 147, 150, 173, 258, 261, 323, 324 Gaumont-Palace 50 Gaycken, Oliver 258 Gelder, Ken 298 Genaitay, Sonia 324 General Electric (GE) 49 General Film Company 160 George Eastman House 321, 328 Gerber, Alex 303 German Colonial Society 288 German, Paul 290 Gilroy, Paul 18 Gineste, Antoine 261 Girardet, Raoul 109 Girel, Constant 22, 24, 111, 116 Gledhill, Christine 266, 269 Gökmen, Mustafa 177 Golden, Joseph A. 275 Goldfrap, Johnny 296 Gori, Gian Franco 167–168, 170–171 Gotham Film Company 151 Grand Trunk Railway 65–66 Grant, Madison 304

350

Gray, Frank 3, 6, 79 Great Northern 149 Grieveson, Lee 119 Griffith, Alison 13 Griffith, D.W. 3, 55–59, 61, 118, 134, 136 Grosz, Elizabeth 339 Groulx, Lionel 206 Grusin, Richard 94 Guggenheim, Eugène 217 Gunning, Tom 2, 11, 19, 29–31, 40, 164, 174, 183, 281, 337 Gutteridge, Robert 66 Guzek, Mariusz 72–73 H Haas, Willy Haggar, Walter Hain, Mark Hall, Stuart Haller, Andrea Hamilton, Lloyd V. Hansen, Miriam

310 20 5, 295 242 5, 307 242–243 28–30, 40, 60, 118–119, 121, 129, 181, 229–232, 283, 315, 318, 323, 339 Harris, Joel Chandler 57 Haskell, Molly 305 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 18 Hayakawa, Sessue 141 Hendrykowska, Malgozata 46, 75 Henri, D. 173 Hepworth, T. Cecil 19–21, 53, 93, 96, 99, 100 Herenius, Rev. A.M. (L.) 123 Higashi, Sumiko 305 Higgins, James H. 120 Hippodrome 254 Hobsbawn, Eric J. 98 Hobson, John Atkinson 86, 88 Hofer, Franz 273 Holloway Empire 92 Holmes, Burton 142 Howe, Lyman 142 Hughes, Thomas 45, 49 Hughes, William Charles 34 Hugo, Victor 209 Hunt, Clarence 100

Index I Imouye, Souno 146 Imp 146, 150 Ince, Ralph 123 Ince, Thomas 148 Institut für den wissenschaftlichen Film (Institute for Scientific Film) 291 Insull, Samuel 44 Itala Film 7. 33, 35 Iversen, Gunnar 195 J Jackson, Helen Hunt 137 Jackson, Rev. William Henry 118 Jacobsohn, Egon 308 Jacobsson 309 James I 99 Japanese-American Film Company 144, 150 Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation 328 Jenkins, Henry 230 Jentes, Harry 303 Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company 149, 158, 332 Jewsiewicki, W³adys³aw 71, 73 Johnson, Edith 332 Johnson, Jack 134 Joker 151 Jolson, Al 52 Jones, Gavin 57 Jones, Inigo 99 José, Edward 299 Jossém Harald 50 Jowett, Garth 161 Joye, Joseph 6, 321–325, 327–330 K Kaden-Bandrowski, Juliusz 72 Kafadar, Cemal 174 Kahn, Albert 14–15, 27 Kalb, Charles 200 Kalem 139–141, 146, 149–150 Kay-Bee 140–141, 149 Keeler, Amanda 5, 229 Keil, Charlie 3, 53, 56, 63, 280, 340 Keith-Orpheum 47 Kellar, Harry 252

Kelly, Kitty 239, 244, 335 Kessler, Frank 3, 22, 111, 257 Keystone Film Company 5, 229–230, 239–242, 334, 337–338, 340 Kinetophone 46, 47 Kinemacolor 146, 151 Kinematograf 70 Kinetoscope 85 King, Rob 5, 236 Kipling, Rudyard 83, 85, 91–92, 94, 97, 98 Kittler, Friedrich 54 Kleine, George 7, 239, 258, 264 Korda brothers 100 Koszarski, Richard 163 Kracauer, Siegfried 28–29, 39, 40, 41, 267 Krause, Friedrich (Fritz) 290 Kruger, Paul 83, 85, 90–93, 97 L Lacasse, Germain Lacassin, Francis Laemmle, Carl La Follette, George Lombroso, Cesare Lamprecht, Karl Lamster, J.C. Lant, Antonia L’Arronge, Adolph Laudien, Frau Lefebvre, Thierry Leipzig University Lenk, Sabine Léry, R. Lewis, R.W.B. Lévi-Strauss Liepa, Torey Ligue Maritime Linder, Max Lindsay, Vachel Lipsitz, George Littau, Joseph Loiperdinger, Martin London, Jack López, Ana M. Lubin Lubin, Seigmund

4, 206 281 334–335, 337–338 250 304 286 101–102 27 189 308 264 286 257 212 18 4 3, 52 115 7. 191 118 296 143 25, 26, 42 238 73–75 150, 245, 334 334

351

EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL” Lumière

1–3, 7, 11, 13–15, 19, 22, 69, 96, 98, 111–112, 115–116, 164–169, 173, 250 Lundberg, Frans 124 Lutaud, Charles 112 Lykke-Seest, Peter 197 M Machin, Alfred MacKenzie, John MacMahon, Henry Madieu, Gérard Malmberg, Eric Mann, Thomas Mario, Marc Maskelyne, John Nevil Massine, Léonide Maurras, Charles May, Lary Mayer, Hy McComb, Tara McGerr, Michael McNamara, Brooks Méliès, George

270–271 98 336 110, 112–116 124–125 265 223 251 248, 255 117 296 337 4 231 13 20, 30, 93, 141, 145–147, 249, 253–254 Melville, Herman 57 Menichelli, Pina 181 Messter, Oskar 25, 46, 51 Metz, Christian 28 Meusy, Jean-Jacques 117 Millerand, Alexandre 110 Mingay, David 322, 324 Miron, Gaston 207 Mitchell and Kenyon Collection 99 Moore, Paul S. 4 More, Thomas 339 Moreck, Curt 310 Morey, Anne 281, 283 Morris, Jan 79 Moussinac, Léon 1 Mullens, Willy 24 Müller, Corinna 42 Mulvey, Laura 315 Musser, Charles 12, 19, 40, 60, 142, 238, 250, 256 Muybridge, Eadward 259

352

N National Film and Television Archive (London) 99 National Archives of Canada 213 Nederlands Filmmuseum (Amsterdam) 7, 108 Negra, Diane 302 Negri, Pola 302 Nelson, John Arthur 279 Ngai, Mae M. 250–251 Norindr, Panivong 3 Normand, Mabel 7, 229–230, 233, 235, 241 O Oberdeck, Kathryn O’Brien, Charles Olcott, Sidney Olsson, Robert Opper, Frederick Burr Örf, Vedat Orwell, George Özgüc, Agah Özön, Nijat

241, 243 3 332 126 238 179 98 172 172–173

P Pang, Laikwan Panofsky, Erwin Parsons, Louella Pasteur, Louis Pathé-Frères Paul, Robert Peiss, Kathy Pelletier, Louis Penny, Glenn Perret, Léonce Petithuguenin, Jean Picasso, Pablo Pickford, Lottie Pickford, Mary Plato Poole, Joseph Popple, Simon Porter, Carolyn Porter, Edwin S. Praiss family Prévost, M. Prószyñski, Kazimierz

250 28 304 259 7, 60, 108 99 242 158 285 269–270 223 248, 255 158 141, 158 176, 339 84–85 97 18 60 187 110 69–76

Index Proust, Marcel Prus, Boles³aw Pudovkin, Vsevolod

265 71 263

R Rabinovitz, Lauren 301 Raffaelli, Sergio 166 Raine, Michael 11 Randall-Bengry, Celia L (Rose) 89 Rasch, Ilka 6 Rathbun, John 46 Rathenau, Emil 44 Ratzel, Friedrich 286 Reeve, Arthur B. 217–219, 221, 224 Renan, Ernest 1–2, 109, 116 Rennert, Malwine 307 Rickards, Harry 97 Ricoeur, Paul 5, 265–266, 268, 271, 273 Rigadin 7 Riis, Jacob 242–243 Rivard, Adjutor 207 Robins, Edward H. 156–157 Robinson, David 320, 328 Robinson, William Ellsworth 253–254 Roediger, David R. 246, 250 Roosevelt, Theodore 135, 295 Rosenthal, Joseph 63, 99 Rosenzweig, Roy 242 Ross, Edward 295 Rossellini, Roberto 15 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 339 Rousselot, abbé 207 Roy, Camille 206 Royal, Edward Milton 137 Rubens 99 Rubin, Gayle S. 298 Ruedel, Ulrich 330 Rydell, Robert W. 250 S Safa, Peyami 179 Salas, Daniel Sánchez 4 Salt, Barry 20 Sargent, Epes Winthrop 55 Satie, Erik 248 SCAGL (Société cinématographique des auteurs et gens de lettres) 217, 224

Schneider, John C. Schwenzen, Harald Scognomillo, Giovanni Seguin, Jean-Claude Selig, William Sennett, Mack Serena, Gustavo Shakespeare, William Shandler, Jeffrey Shaw, Bernard Shklovsky, Viktor Shub, Efsir Siemens Silvio, Alex Simmon, Scott Singer, Ben Sjöström, Victor Skaff, Sheila Smith, Andrew Brodie Smith, G. A. Smith, Woodruff D. Snickars, Pelle Soltow, Lee Sontag, Susan Soupault, Phillipe Steele, Rufus Sterling, Ford Stern, Anatol Stevens, Edward Stocking, George W. Stoval, Tyler Streeby, Shelley Studlar, Gaylyn Sudermann, Hermann Sullivan, Sir Arthur T Taddei, Nazzareno Tagore, Rabinath Taine, Hippolyte Talbot, Frederick A. Taureg, Martin Thérien, Robert Thissen, Judith Thomas, A. D. Thompson, James

237 198 175 111 296, 336, 338 5, 333 272–273 17, 132, 134 303 15 165 15 49 211–212 278, 284 267, 283 198 3 163, 284 19–20, 60 286, 291 127 282 40 215 332, 339 239–240 69 282 27 114 277, 282, 284 298 189 98

325 15 112 46 285 213 129 89 99

353

EARLY CINEMA AND THE “NATIONAL” Till, Louis A. 157 Tillema, H. F. 108 Tolnaes, Gunnar 5 Tornatore, Giuseppe 168 Thomas, Arthur Winfield 279 Thompson, Kristin 53 Thurston, Howard 252 Tolnaes, Gunnar 307–312, 314–315 Toprak, Zafer 176 Toulmin, Vanessa 100 Tremblay, Michel 207, 213 Trewey, Felicien 251 Tsivian, Yuri 164 Twain, Mark 57 Turconi, Davide 321, 325 U UFA Unique Theatre (New York) Urban, Charles Uyehara, K.

263 48 258 143

V Valentino, Rudolph 318 Valiquet, L. P. 49 Verhoeff, Nanna 22–23, 25, 26 Vertov, Dziga 15 Velle, Gaston 93 Véray, Laurent 110, 270 Véronneau, Pierre 158 Victor Talking Machine Company 48 Victoria (Queen) 79, 86, 90–92, 99 von Harleman, G.P. 334 von Hindenburg, Paul 5, 307, 309–310, 312–316 von Koch, G.H. 123 von Luschan, Felix 286 von Moser, Gustav 189

354

von Schönthan, Franz Vorse, Mary Heaton

189 120

W Waller, Gregory A. 4 Warner, Stephen 89 Warwick Trading Company 99 Waters, Percy 160 Wedel, Michael 47 Welle, John P. 4 Wells, H. G. 264 West, Mae 303 West, Alfred John 79, 89 West, T. J. 100 Westinghouse 49 Weule, Karl 286–291, 291–292 Whissel, Kristen 16 White, Pearl 215–216, 222–223, 225 Wilhelm (Emperor) 178 Wilder, Gary 116 Wilson, Woodrow 134, 223, 245 Wing, W.E. 335 Winokur, Mark 239 Winston, Brian 195, 198 Wollen, Peter 248 Woods, Frank 58 Woolf, Virginia 265 Wright, William Lloyd 279 Wundt, Wilhelm 286 Y Yeigh, Frank Z Zangwill, Israel Ze’evi, Droor Zuckerman, Marvin Zweig, Stefan

67

136 176 193 25–26

Early Cinema and the “National” The thirty-four essays in this richly illustrated, landmark anthology are intent on rethinking the nation as a framework for writing early cinema history. Is early cinema still best understood in global or transnational terms? If not, when, where, and how did motion pictures become bound up with national cultures and national identities?