Provenance and Early Cinema (Early Cinema in Review: Proceedings of Domitor) [Illustrated] 0253052998, 9780253052995

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Contents
Domitor Series – Précis
Introduction: Provenance and Early Cinema: From Preservation and Collection to Circulation and Repurposing
Part I. Studying Provenance: From Analog to Digital
1. Film Provenance: A Framework for Analysis
2. Origins: Early Films and Archival Collections
3. From Provenience to Provenance: The Kerstrat-d’hauterives Collection
4. Provenance and Film Historiography: 1910s Films at the George Eastman Museum
5. Issues of Provenance and Attribution for the Canon: Bookending Robert Paul
6. Shattered Provenance in the Digitization of Early Colorfilms
Part II. Preservation and Collection
7. Dreaming in Color: The Image and the Artifact
8. Where Did the Costumes in Early Cinema Come From?
9. Thinking With Provenance: Drawing Trajectories in the Francis Doublier Collection at the George Eastman Museum
10. Revisiting the Films of Albert Kahn’s Archives De La Planète: a Material Survey
11. The Thanhouser Studio Filmography: Analysis and Extant Prints
12. The Great War at Scale: New Opportunities for Provenance in World War I Collections at the National Archives (Nara)
Part III. Circulation
13. Chicago’s “censored Casualties” and the Provenance of Archive Prints
14. What Made the Mechanicals Move? Postcards in Transit
15. “The End of a Foreign Monopoly”: Bausch and Lomb and the Wartime Provenance of Optical Glass
16. Pathé Films in Brazil: The Archives of Marc Ferrez & Sons (1908–1916)
17. Establishing the Provenance of Early Advertising Films: Film Catalogs and the Creation of the Nontheatrical Market
18. A Journey on the World’s Most Northerly Railway: The Renaming and Remaking of Swedish Industrial Films
19. In Search of “The Edison Biograph Company”: Film History through Philippine Archives
20. Ownership, Exploitation, Stewardship: Tracking the Footage of the 1911–1913 Australian Antarctic Expedition
Part IV. Repurposing
21. Finding Early Cinema in the Avant-Garde: Research and Investigation
22. Ernie Gehr’s The Collector (2003) and Ernie Gehr the Collector
23. Flicker: Thom Andersen Takes Muybridge to the Movies
24. Provenance on Ice: Dawson City: Frozen Time and the Dawson City Collection
25. Praxis as Media Historiography: The Peep Box’s “expanding View” as Virtual Reality
26. How Newspaper Novels and Their Illustrations Shaped Japanese Films
27. Archival Object or Object Lesson? Bricolage as Process and as Concept in the Edmundo Padilla Collection
Appendix: French Language Essay
28. La Collection De Kerstrat-d’hauterives, De Sa Provenience À Sa Provenance
Appendix: French Language Essay
29. D’où Viennent Les Costumes Du Cinéma Des Premiers Temps?
Appendix: Dryden Theatre Screening Program
Index

Citation preview

“Provenance and Early Cinema turns critical attention back to Domitor’s core commitment to crossing institutional divides between university film departments and film archives/ museums. This commitment has always informed the work of the organization, but it has only intermittently been an object of inquiry itself.” —Kaveh Askari, author of Making Movies into Art: Picture Craft from the Magic Lantern to Early Hollywood

As material artifacts, these film fragments are central to cinema history, perhaps more than ever in our digital age of easy copying and sharing. If a digital copy is previewed before preservation or is shared with a researcher outside the purview of a film archive, knowledge about how the artifact was collected, circulated, and repurposed threatens to become obscured. When the question of origin is overlooked, the story can be lost. Concerned contributors in Provenance and Early Cinema challenge scholars digging through film archives to ask, “How did these moving images get here for me to see them?” This volume, which features the conference proceedings from Domitor, the International Society for the Study of Early Cinema, 2018, questions preservation, attribution, and patterns of reuse in order to explore singular artifacts with long and circuitous lives. JOANNE BERNARDI is Professor of Japanese and Film and Media Studies at the University of Rochester. PAOLO CHERCHI USAI is Senior Curator of the Moving Image Department at the George Eastman Museum and Adjunct Professor of Film at the University of Rochester. TAMI WILLIAMS is Associate Professor of Film Studies and English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and President of Domitor.

Provenance and Early Cinema

Remnants of early films often have a story to tell.

Bernardi, Cherchi Usai, Williams, and Yumibe

FILM & MEDIA

Provenance and

Early

Cinema

JOSHUA YUMIBE is Professor and Director of Film Studies at Michigan State University. He is author (with Sarah Street) of Chromatic Modernity: Color, Cinema, and Media of the 1920s, (with Tom Gunning, Jonathon Rosen, and Giovanna Fossati) of Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema, and of Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism. He is also editor (with Kaveh Askari, Scott Curtis, Frank Gray, Louis Pelletier, and Tami Williams) of Performing New Media, 1890–1915. Cover Illustration: George Eastman Museum — Davide Turconi/Josef Joye Collection

iupress.org ISBN 9780253052995

90000 >

Edited by Joanne Bernardi, Paolo Cherchi Usai, 9 780253 052995

Tami Williams, and Joshua Yumibe PRESS

PROV EN A NCE A N D E AR LY CINEM A

E A R LY C I N E M A I N R E V I E W: PRO C E E DI N G S OF D OM I T OR

PROVENANCE AND E ARLY CINEMA Edited by Joanne Bernardi, Paolo Cherchi Usai, Tami Williams, and Joshua Yumibe

Indiana University Press

This book is a publication of Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA iupress.org © 2020 by Domitor All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. Manufactured in the United States of America Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-0-253-05299-5 (paperback) ISBN 978-0-253-05300-8 (web PDF) 1 2 3 4 5  25 24 23 22 21 20

CONTENTS Domitor Series – Précis 1 Introduction: Provenance and Early Cinema: From Preservation and Collection to Circulation and Repurposing / Joanne Bernardi, Paolo Cherchi Usai, Tami Williams, and Joshua Yumibe 3 Part I. Studying Provenance: From Analog to Digital

1 Film Provenance: A Framework for Analysis / Paolo Cherchi Usai 23



2 Origins: Early Films and Archival Collections / Camille Blot-Wellens 34



3 From Provenience to Provenance: The Kerstrat-d’Hauterives Collection / Germain Lacasse 47



4 Provenance and Film Historiography: 1910s Films at the George Eastman Museum / Grazia Ingravalle 59



5 Issues of Provenance and Attribution for the Canon: Bookending Robert Paul / Ian Christie 70



6 Shattered Provenance in the Digitization of Early Color Films / Barbara Flueckiger, Noemi Daugaard, and Olivia Kristina Stutz 80

Part II. Preservation and Collection

7 Dreaming in Color: The Image and the Artifact / Joshua Yumibe 93

vi | Contents



8 Where Did the Costumes in Early Cinema Come From? / Priska Morrissey 106



9 Thinking with Provenance: Drawing Trajectories in the Francis Doublier Collection at the George Eastman Museum / Clara Auclair 118



10 Revisiting the Films of Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète: A Material Survey / Teresa Castro and Anne Sigaud 129



11 The Thanhouser Studio Filmography: Analysis and Extant Prints / Ned Thanhouser 143



12 The Great War at Scale: New Opportunities for Provenance in World War I Collections at the National Archives (NARA) / Bret Vukoder and Mark Williams 155

Part III. Circulation

13 Chicago’s “Censored Casualties” and the Provenance of Archive Prints / Richard Abel 169



14 What Made the Mechanicals Move? Postcards in Transit / Patrick Ellis 179



15 “The End of a Foreign Monopoly”: Bausch and Lomb and the Wartime Provenance of Optical Glass / Allain Daigle 192



16 Pathé Films in Brazil: The Archives of Marc Ferrez & Sons (1908–1916) / Danielle Crepaldi Carvalho 203



17 Establishing the Provenance of Early Advertising Films: Film Catalogs and the Creation of the Nontheatrical Market / Martin L. Johnson 214



18 A Journey on the World’s Most Northerly Railway: The Renaming and Remaking of Swedish Industrial Films / Marina Dahlquist 223

Contents | vii



19 In Search of “The Edison Biograph Company”: Film History through Philippine Archives / Nadi Tofighian 236



20 Ownership, Exploitation, Stewardship: Tracking the Footage of the 1911–1913 Australian Antarctic Expedition / Gregory A. Waller 247

Part IV. Repurposing

21 Finding Early Cinema in the Avant-Garde: Research and Investigation / André Habib 261



22 Ernie Gehr’s The Collector (2003) and Ernie Gehr the Collector / Ken Eisenstein 275



23 Flicker: Thom Andersen Takes Muybridge to the Movies / Eszter Polonyi 287



24 Provenance on Ice: Dawson City: Frozen Time and the Dawson City Collection / Charlie Keil and Christina Stewart 305



25 Praxis as Media Historiography: The Peep Box’s “Expanding View” as Virtual Reality / Christina Corfield 317



26 How Newspaper Novels and Their Illustrations Shaped Japanese Films / Norie Taniguchi 329



27 Archival Object or Object Lesson? Bricolage as Process and as Concept in the Edmundo Padilla Collection / Kim Tomadjoglou 340

Appendix: French Language Essay 

28 La collection de Kerstrat-d’Hauterives, de sa provenience à sa provenance / Germain Lacasse 353

viii | Contents

Appendix: French Language Essay

29 D’où viennent les costumes du cinéma des premiers temps? / Priska Morrissey 365

Appendix: Dryden Theatre Screening Program 377 Index 407

PROV EN A NCE A N D E AR LY CINEM A

DOMITOR SERIES – PRÉCIS

D

omitor, the international society for the study of early cinema, is a nonprofit, bilingual association for scholars interested in all aspects of early cinema from its beginnings to 1915. Domitor is dedicated to exploring new methods of historical research; understanding and promoting the international exchange of information, documents, and ideas; forging alliances with curators and film archivists; and nurturing the work of early career researchers. One of its most important activities is its biennial international conference. The first was held in Quebec in 1990, and subsequent conferences were staged in Lausanne; New York; Paris; Washington, DC; Udine; Montreal; Utrecht; Ann Arbor; Perpignan/Girona; Toronto; Brighton; Chicago/Evanston; and Stockholm. The George Eastman Museum and University of Rochester in New York jointly hosted the Fifteenth International Domitor Conference in 2018, and this book stems from its proceedings.1 Domitor conferences often prompt scholars to consider early cinema in terms of a theme (religion, borders, the body) or some facet of the object itself (intertextuality, sound, technology, distribution). Recently, the conferences have encouraged members to view early cinema through the lenses of different disciplines, such as image studies and performance studies. The present collection continues this tradition by asking contributors to examine the film object through the art historical concept of provenance, central to archives and museums in the domains of preservation and curation.

Note 1. Joanne Bernardi (University of Rochester), Paolo Cherchi Usai (George Eastman Museum), June Hwang (University of Rochester), Tami Williams (University of WisconsinMilwaukee), Caroline Yeager (George Eastman Museum), and Joshua Yumibe (Michigan State University) comprised the Domitor 2018 Program Committee.

INTRODUCTION Provenance and Early Cinema: From Preservation and Collection to Circulation and Repurposing Joanne Bernardi, Paolo Cherchi Usai, Tami Williams, and Joshua Yumibe

T

he exploration of provenance as a concept and method for early cinema studies marks both a critical return to origins and a vital and generative step forward. The very founding of Domitor in 1985 was the result of an important return to the archive. The archival reassessment of specific film prints and collections has brought with it profound historical insights into the chosen modes, styles, intermedial practices, and cultural investments of early cinema. As a practice, this has fostered a bottom-up approach to film history based on archival research and implicitly rooted in the provenance of filmic objects. A concept derived from museums, art history, and the art market, provenance has long been essential for determining the origins, history, legacy, and value of artifacts. The provenance of an artifact—how it was created and subsequently whose hands it passed through—has always been crucial for assessing the economic, cultural, and aesthetic heritage of the object. Even as provenance has been implicit to scholarly understandings of artworks, it is only relatively recently that the concept has become a pressing field of study within art history. Art historical interest in provenance has been fueled in part by a growing interrogation of the economic and cultural capital of the art market, as well as by the ethical imperatives of repatriating looted artworks in the Nazi context, a subject of increased research over the past few decades.1 To art historical accounts, we would also signal the importance of provenance in

4  |  Provenance and Early Cinema

postcolonial scholarship for critiquing the appropriation of indigenous and diasporic cultures in music and fashion, as well as for repatriating colonial objects accumulated by museums of the Global North. These legacies have been important to Homi Bhabha’s theorization of cultural hybridity in relation to the “postcolonial provenance” of language and subjectivity, which are marked by North-South flows of cultural meaning and identity.2 In a like manner, in film history, there is much to gain from the consideration of provenance as both concept and method. As material artifacts, early films often have crucial stories to tell. Yet, the question of their provenance has rarely been discussed outside of archives: the migration of specific films and collections, and who has developed, owned, accessed, repurposed, and hybridized them, is now of increasing concern. The movements of film—across formats and from producers and distributors to collectors, artists, and archival institutions around the globe—have implicitly shaped our written histories. Now, through explicit attention, the provenance of film promises to open further insights into cinema’s circulation, value, and heritage, particularly in a global context. Repatriating films and collections to their country of origin plays a smaller, though not insignificant, role in filmic provenance. Archives are often committed in significant ways to national heritage and, when feasible, collaborate internationally to repatriate duplicates of restorations. But, cinema was also built to circulate widely, and provenance provides a means of establishing not just cultural patrimony but also transnational flows. Given the growing, global dissemination of film through digital technologies as well as its recycling in experimental and new media practice, the need for greater attention to provenance is vital to track these flows. As the essays collected in this volume demonstrate, provenance provides a powerful heuristic to assess the origins, circulation, and repurposing of films throughout cinema history. Many of the chapters also consider how we might connect the material provenance of a film print or a collection to its broader cultural and aesthetic histories. For instance, how can provenance be deployed for thinking about the cultural circulation and influence of ideas, patents, images, styles, and technologies, from analog to digital? What does the provenance of prints and collections tell us about film heritage, preservation, and the privileging of certain works over others? And how does the provenance of the nonextant, of lost prints and forgotten films, also speak to the antipathies, lacunae, and silences of history? Finally, what does the material history of provenance tell us about early

Introduction | 5

film networks, local and global circulation, colonial imaging and extraction, and the reuse of media in different contexts? This volume turns to these foundational issues around provenance and early cinema and bears the fruit of many rich conversations, which could not have taken place in a more appropriate location than the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, the historic site of the founding of the Eastman Kodak enterprise.

Studying Provenance from Analog to Digital The chapters in this volume’s first section explore methodologies of provenance in relation to early cinema, with particular attention to the medium’s shifting material form, from analog to digital. The opening contribution by Paolo Cherchi Usai, “Film Provenance: A Framework for Analysis,” provides a rich and concise overview of print provenance while announcing its relevance for the entire spectrum of cinema’s material objects (prints, negatives, technologies). Cherchi Usai shows that provenance is germane to understanding the impact of shifting geographical and geopolitical contexts through which film prints travel—that is, from place to place and from hand to hand, in the commercial circuit and beyond, whether for archival preservation, collection, or reuse in diverse sociocultural contexts. Cherchi Usai usefully argues that the study of film provenance requires understanding the “connections and differences between the image carrier and the work it carries,” implicating the mutability of the material object, the alteration of its content over time, and what this means for film historians and curators alike. Significantly, Cherchi Usai’s chapter also announces issues taken up in this section’s subsequent chapters, from linguistic and/or disciplinary distinctions (or lack thereof) between archaeological provenience (the origins of an object) and art historical provenance (the successive owners of an object) explored by Germain Lacasse to considerations of how provenance extends to “postanalog” reincarnations of the cinematic object, echoed in the research findings of Barbara Flueckiger and others. In chapter 2, independent archivist and film historian Camille BlotWellens follows Cherchi Usai’s inaugural, theoretical, and historical study with a close inspection of provenance in its most material form in her penetrating essay “Origins: Early Films and Archival Collections.” By examining early moving images (from Skladanowsky Bros. to Pathé) held at the Swedish Film Institute, Blot-Wellens approaches “origins” from three

6  |  Provenance and Early Cinema

important perspectives: temporality, or when materials were produced and dated; ownership, or the acquisition of prints from individuals, production companies, or exhibitors; and finally form, or how such materials were organized, edited, grouped, and reedited. Drawing on a variety of early source types, Blot-Wellens’s insightful analysis of the “origins” of early films illuminates the intricacies of collecting and exhibition; more broadly, her work sheds new light on the relationship between provenance, early programming, and the cinematic experience, demonstrating how these very origins influence our ability to write both archival and film histories. In the third chapter, “From Provenience to Provenance: The Kerstratd’Hauterives Collection,” Germain Lacasse broadens the definition of film provenance by effectively focusing on a lost but documented collection of films shown by Marie de Kerstrat and Henry de Grandsaignes d’Hauterives, a pair of exhibitors from France active in Quebec and the United States from 1897 to 1910. The distinction between the terms provenience (which archaeologists use to refer to the site of discovery) and provenance (used by art historians to indicate a chain of ownership) is central to his approach. Lacasse illustrates the need to account for both provenience as a “fixed point” and provenance as chronological trajectory in order to restore social and historical context to the Kerstrat-d’Hauterives Collection. Through a detailed analysis of a two-page newspaper article, Lacasse extracts vital information on a popular film in the collection that was exhibited in St. Louis in 1907 as well as the relations between the film and the newspaper, the audience, and the lecturer. His research demonstrates how even lost films—the “black holes” of film history—can fill the gaps in our knowledge of film reception, lost exhibition practices, and lost collections. If the lost Kerstrat-d’Hauterives Collection, addressed in chapter 3, was, in Lacasse’s words, “itinerant, evolving, precarious . . . [and] neither protected [n]or preserved,” in the following chapter, “Provenance and Film Historiography: 1910s Films at the George Eastman Museum,” Grazia Ingravalle shows how even established, well-protected, and well-preserved collections can yield new discoveries when seen through the investigative lens of provenance. By tracing the provenance of three titles in the George Eastman Museum’s Moving Image Collection made between 1912 and 1914, Ingravalle shows how their significance has been influenced by different social and cultural contexts at distinct historical moments in time: from the particular film culture that surrounded their acquisition and preservation,

Introduction | 7

their history of screenings and restorations, and their contribution to the historiography of early cinema. Her study restores historical specificity to an underresearched category and period of American films (one- to tworeelers from the 1910s), revealing diversity and experimentation that challenges long-standing historiographical assumptions. In “Issues of Provenance and Attribution for the Canon: Bookending Robert Paul,” Ian Christie focuses on two films from Robert Paul’s canon that illustrate the problems that can complicate even a relatively stable canon. Such questions, he notes, can raise doubts about works previously acknowledged as well defined. In the context of early cinema, conventional methods of identification—film lists and physical characteristics, for example—can prove to be unreliable. Catalog publication might not have kept up with the rapid pace of film production, and physical characteristics that would otherwise serve as identifying features can be erased through generations of duplication and use. In such cases, borrowing identification and authentication techniques from adjacent disciplines and tracking provenance through other forms of documentation (text and image sources now accessible online) can help. In the final chapter of this section, provocatively titled “Shattered Provenance in the Digitization of Early Film,” Barbara Flueckiger, Noemi Daugaard, and Olivia Kristina Stutz bring the discussion of film provenance full circle by addressing the breadth of complexities that cinema’s increasing investment in digitization has generated. As the authors describe in detail, inasmuch as digital technology facilitates our access to early films, current digitization practices work against fundamental principles of restoration ethics. This chapter is a comprehensive overview of their research toward developing technologies to protect film’s integrity as a three-dimensional object “with all the physical and chemical properties film comprises as a material object.” By protecting photochemical film’s material integrity, such technology would by extension also guarantee its provenance. Flueckiger’s research team defines integrity as comprising the relationship between film’s philological and aesthetic expression and its material manifestations. From an analysis of the limitations of scanning processes and their implication for early applied color to the importance of acknowledging cultural and social contexts for the development of color cinematography (and its technology) in digital reproduction, the authors explore interdisciplinary approaches to facilitating the connection between digitized elements and their analog source material.

8  |  Provenance and Early Cinema

Preservation and Collection Building on these terminological and methodological approaches to provenance, this second section traces the concept’s vivid manifestations in the domains of film preservation and collection across a diverse array of contexts: from image acquisition and costume collection to small private and large-scale public metadata analysis. By studying a wide variety of personal and institutional practices, along with the attendant material and affective relationships that forge provenance, these essays provide new insights into the formation and transformation of early film heritage and histories, from the material artifact to big data, in dramatic and colorful ways. Reflecting conceptually on provenance, Joshua Yumibe’s essay “Dreaming in Color: The Image and the Artifact” is a vital contribution and testament to the origins and circulation of the Davide Turconi Collection, which comprises over twenty-three thousand original nitrate frames of 35 mm films, largely in color, from the early years of cinema. These rare frames and clippings gathered and preserved by Italian film historian Turconi in the 1960s from a massive pedagogical collection, acquired and left behind by Jesuit priest Josef-Alexis Joye in 1911, constitute an invaluable visual record of their original appearance, various parts of which have now been preserved by BFI and/or preserved and digitized one century later by the George Eastman Museum. In his account of the complex circulation and preservation of this material, Yumibe explores the potentially fragmentary nature of provenance that filmic artifacts comprise, just like the individual photograms reunited and celebrated in his powerful 2018 digital exhibit of nearly six hundred fragments, Dreaming in Color. Adding texture and motion, Priska Morrissey’s inspired essay “Where Did the Costumes in Early Cinema Come From?” interrogates the provenance of early film attire: from its kinship with established theatrical conventions to its evolving role in cinema and in relation to the French cultural series. Drawing on archival sources, specialized magazines, actors’ memoirs, and films, Morrissey traces the individual and material provenance of costumes across collections, and across media in its diverse scenic functions, raising a wide variety of questions about the ecology, economics, and aesthetics specific to costuming the new cinematic spectacle: from the temporality of physical costume changes to creative lighting effects. Morrissey’s penetrating archaeological approach sheds new light on the preservation and circulation of costumes from both an organizational and material perspective.

Introduction | 9

Clara Auclair provides a wonderfully detailed case study with “Thinking with Provenance: Drawing Trajectories in the Francis Doublier Collection at the George Eastman Museum.” Doublier was an expert technician and Lumière cinematographer who moved to the United States and ended up over the years working for companies such as Eclair, Solax, and Pathé and for various film laboratories in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and New York City. While usefully summarizing Doublier’s career, Auclair’s chapter primarily focuses on the history and status of the collection of Doublier materials that the George Eastman Museum acquired from his widow in 1948. Comprising 114 film prints, cameras, and paper materials, the collection has been an important source for tracing the transnational influence of French technicians such as Doublier on the burgeoning film industry of the United States. Further, the material provides an important case study of the provenance of a collection even within a single archive. After the material was accessioned or added to the collection, it was divided among different departments. While the provenance of the paper and technical materials was clear in the museum’s catalogs, the films by contrast are more difficult to trace, as they were by and large absorbed into the museum’s larger film holdings. Their provenance is rarely clear in the current film catalog, and one must instead, as Auclair has done, pursue them through the original James Card and George Pratt card catalog of the museum’s films. Card, who was the first film curator for the museum, a position he began in 1948 when the Doublier Collection was acquired, annotated the titles with a small “D” in the catalog records. Obvious at the time, such markers of provenance often grow opaque over the ensuing years without the work of archivists and historians who can reconstruct their vital significance. Echoing Yumibe’s exploration of the Turconi fragments and BlotWellens’s approach to “origins” by date, form, and ownership, scholar and archivist team Teresa Castro and Anne Sigaud raise crucial new questions about preservation and collection in their essay “Revisiting the Films of Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète: A Material Survey.” Castro and Sigaud conduct an in-depth analysis of the relatively unexplored and in many cases unmounted and truncated nonfiction excerpts of daily life, shot and assembled by and for the Archives de la Planète, founded by French banker Albert Kahn between 1908 and 1932. Through a study of the materiality of “rough assemblies,” “cut-outs,” and “negative” as well as “positive” nitrate prints, Castro and Sigaud raise provocative questions about the original function and motivation behind Kahn’s collection—that is, its conception

10  |  Provenance and Early Cinema

of nonfiction film as both archival material or “documents for the future” as well as its more explicitly political wartime role as concrete source material in unknown propaganda networks. A precious complement to filmic analysis, as well as to a particularly complex history of preservation and collection, this essay confronts new challenges through its multifaceted approach to material provenance (e.g., dating via editing seams, punches, or handwritten inscriptions) within and between films while also raising significant practical, methodological, and ideological questions. This section on preservation and collection ends with two captivating case studies about early film archives in the digital age: one more beautifully personal, and private, and another more broadly public, and national. Ned Thanhouser once believed the 1,086 film titles produced by the Thanhouser studio, which his grandparents established in New Rochelle, New York, and ran between 1910 and 1917, had been irrevocably lost because his grandfather destroyed all remaining negatives when the company closed. A 1986 television broadcast of an extant title from 1912 brought home the complexity and unpredictability of film provenance—the circuitous “object itineraries” of film prints—and initiated his ongoing research to better understand the studio’s contributions to this formative period of film history. In “The Thanhouser Studio Filmography: Analysis and Extant Prints,” Thanhouser documents his methodology and the results of his search to find and identify film prints and ensure their preservation and access. His investigation led him to film distributors, private collectors, and libraries and archives and benefited from previous scholarship that included a narrative history of the studio and founders, a comprehensive filmography with detailed film synopses, and contemporary reviews. To date, he has discovered 163 unique titles in thirty-seven locations; his research has also yielded a database that facilitates title identification; categorization of the Thanhouser output by genre, brand, and production location; and a more nuanced understanding of Thanhouser studio’s distribution channels, its relative productivity, and a comparison of the survival rate of its films with that of other contemporaneous production sources. In “The Great War at Scale: New Opportunities for Provenance in World War I Collections at the National Archive (NARA),” Bret Vukoder and Mark Williams present a case study undertaken in relation to Dartmouth’s Media Ecology Project. This study introduces new methodologies for the engagement with and study of provenance using two World War I film collections at the National Archives (NARA). The CBS World War

Introduction | 11

One Collection comprises one million feet (660 titles on 751 reels) of archival World War I footage amassed from twenty-six archives in ten nations for a commemorative prime-time network series in 1964–1965. The US Signal Corps Collection consists of footage shot by the unit from 1914 to 1936 and represents the first major wartime film documentation initiative carried out by the US military. Vukoder and Williams present an overview of both collections and their distinctive provenance characteristics: while the CBS collection, organized according to the institutional source for each individual reel, reflects a provenance that is “dynamic and complex,” the US Signal Corps footage is complemented by “rich, often precise, and consistently formatted provenance metadata.” Based on these respective characteristics, Vukoder and Williams suggest new ways for considering issues of historic provenance (e.g., digital tools that collate available provenance metadata into visualizations). Yet they also look forward, foreseeing how user interaction might transform the collections. In essence, they suggest possibilities for a cycle of ever-evolving transformation, a “‘future’ or potential provenance augmentation” in which both film footage and metadata can be “reconceived as a data set for long-distance learning and analysis at scale.” In this scenario, future use of the collections, including new scholarship regarding them, would further augment their provenance profile, generating a cycle of ever-increasing metadata enrichment that opens up new pathways of inquiry and discovery for generations of future users.

Circulation The extent to which our understanding of film provenance is affected by the material and geographic history of film prints—that is, their circulation, both in their country of origin and abroad—is the topic of the next section of the book. In “Chicago’s ‘Censored Casualties’ and the Provenance of Archive Prints,” Richard Abel delves into the review columns of the Chicago Tribune, where Kitty Kelly described the shots, intertitles, and scenes excised from release copies in a series of articles aptly titled “What the Censors Did.” In his selection of representative case studies, Abel analyzes the differences that can be found between release prints seen in Chicago in 1914–1915 and those available today, either in collecting institutions or on the internet. By doing so, he reflects on the important question of how an analysis that privileges the historical moviegoing experience can affect our evolving sense of early American cinema history.

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In exploring issues of circulation, both Patrick Ellis and Allain Daigle take a different approach to tracking provenance than following the movements of film prints. In “What Made the Mechanicals Move? Postcards in Transit,” Ellis explores the topic of intermediality by examining the provenance of postcards in the late nineteenth century. This entails noting where they originated from (almost always identifiable by the touristic images on the recto) and where they have traveled (at least in their initial routes marked by the addresses on the verso, along with a postmark). Taking up the circulation specifically of mechanical postcards—ones that incorporated a variety of transforming techniques, such as pull tabs and foldouts—the essay traces how these cards often worked reflexively to thematize their circulation, often in cinematic ways. For instance, many would deploy their mechanics to image the movements of automobiles and planes, the very apparatus of the postal circuits that the cards themselves would traverse. Interrogating these movements provides a means of thinking about how in many media, from postcards to cinema, issues of provenance are often reflexively built into their very mechanics. Allain Daigle takes up the issue of provenance in “‘The End of a Foreign Monopoly’: Bausch and Lomb and the Wartime Provenance of Optical Glass” to examine the circulation of film technologies, specifically the optical lenses used in cameras and projectors. Framing the topic internationally, the essay explores how at the turn of the last century quality optical glass, which was meant for use in lenses, derived from Europe and particularly from Germany. World War I, however, disrupted this dominance and allowed for companies such as Bausch and Lomb in the United States to gain a strong foothold in the optical glass industry, which realigned the international provenance of glass after the war. Daigle’s essay, thus, usefully expands the concept of provenance to account for the movement of film technology itself and provides a compelling case study regarding the implications of such circulation. In a similar vein, Danielle Crepaldi Carvalho investigates the commercial itinerary of a major European production company in South America. “Pathé Films in Brazil: The Archives of Marc Ferrez & Sons (1908–1916)” examines the archival holdings—now held at the Arquivo Nacional in Rio de Janeiro—of photographer Marc Ferrez, who imported and distributed films and cinematic equipment in Brazil at the beginning of the twentieth century with the help of his sons, Jules and Lucien. In her overview of

Introduction | 13

the complex and at times fraught professional relationship between Ferrez and Charles Pathé, Carvalho relates the birth of permanent venues for film exhibition in a postcolonial country where cinema fiercely competed with other forms of live entertainment while Pathé was trying to lure the attention of affluent audiences with its highbrow “Films d’Art” productions (in 1914, however, Charles Pathé would have no hesitation in urging Ferrez to acquire the exhibition rights to a popular serial, The Perils of Pauline, later exhibited in France in abridged form). No less intricate is the picture offered by Martin L. Johnson of the multiple lives of early promotional cinema in the United States. In its survey of early film catalogs from nontheatrical film distributors such as the Community Motion Picture Bureau, the Bureau of Commercial Economics, and the Pathescope Company of America, Johnson’s essay (“Establishing the Provenance of Early Advertising Films: Film Catalogs and the Creation of the Nontheatrical Market”) shows how advertising films of the 1910s were retitled and reclassified in order to make them suitable for schools, churches, and other institutions and remained in distribution for a decade or more, often as 28 mm or 16 mm prints. Regrettably, most advertising films from the period are lost; nevertheless, research on surviving titles like King of the Rails (General Electric, 1915) and Making Cut Glass (Kalem/T. G. Hawkes, 1914) demonstrates that many industry manufacturers turned to creating their own distribution operations, lending films for free or offering them to nontheatrical distributors. These advertising films formed the backbone of nontheatrical programs in the late 1910s and early 1920s. In Sweden, the circulation of nonfiction films could involve retitling and repositioning the same cinematic work in order to meet different needs, sometimes obscuring the actual provenance of the original work. The intricacies of this distribution practice are discussed by Marina Dahlquist in “A Journey on the World’s Most Northerly Railway: The Renaming and Remaking of Swedish Industrial Films,” dedicated to the use of visual media by corporate companies in the 1910–1915 period. The main case study offered by Dahlquist is a film called En resa med jordens nordligaste järnväg: Narvik–Riksgränsen (A journey with the world’s most northerly railway: Narvik–Riksgränsen), released in April 1910 by Svenska Biografteatern; a year later, another film, called Med jordens nordligaste järnväg: Narvik–Riksgränsen (Traveling with the world’s most northerly railway: Narvik–Riksgränsen), was released by a smaller firm,

14  |  Provenance and Early Cinema

A. B. Sveafilms. Other variations on the theme and permutations of these titles are documented in later years, alternately promoting the railway as an icon of modernity and celebrating the country’s picturesque mountain scenery; the path to be followed in this thematic labyrinth is a challenge of intriguing complexity. Nadi Tofighian has been working on early cinema in the Philippines and Southeast Asia since 2005. Tofighian’s research began with the earliest Filipino filmmaker, José Nepomuceno, who formed his Malayan Movies in 1917; since none of his films are extant, there was no other choice than to browse newspaper sources in the hope of finding meaningful traces of the films and their reception. To a large extent, “In Search of ‘The Edison Biograph Company’: Film History through Philippine Archives” is a much-needed recognition that there are many parts of the world where film provenance can be studied only in absentia: there is no national film archive in the Philippines, and the only reliable evidence on early cinema in that country can be drawn from printed sources. In the early 1900s, Manila had a flourishing newspaper industry with dailies and weeklies in English, Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog, and other local dialects. Through a close scrutiny of these sources, Tofighian persuasively argues that very different and at times conflicting narratives on the origins of cinema can be extrapolated from the many linguistic and ethnic groups represented by the popular press in the Philippines. It is fitting that the final chapter in the “circulation” section of this book addresses the issue of provenance of films made in the southernmost reaches of the world, far from the centers of early film production. Gregory A. Waller’s “Ownership, Exploitation, Stewardship: Tracking the Footage of the 1911–1913 Australian Antarctic Expedition” is a follow-up to the author’s former examination of the films made during the exploration of Antarctica, prominently featured in a 1915 multimedia presentation by the expedition’s leader, Sir Douglas Mawson. In his new essay on the subject, Waller focuses on the material history of the Australian Antarctic Expedition footage, with particular emphasis on questions of ownership rights, commercial exploitation, and multiple uses: how the reels were acquired, printed, colored, and edited; how they were modified and circulated under various lengths and titles for different purposes to different audiences; who controlled their exploitation; when their ownership changed; and last but not least, how they survived long enough to be safeguarded by a collecting institution.

Introduction | 15

Repurposing The volume closes with an interrogation of provenance in relation to the reuse and repurposing of early film prints and media in contemporary cinematic practices. As such, a number of essays examine the recycling of specific collections and print materials by a range of media artists in a variety of traditions, from experimental to mainstream and from found footage to virtual reality. André Habib’s “Finding Early Cinema in the Avant-Garde: Research and Investigation” follows some of these currents particularly through the North American postwar tradition. The chapter details some of the earliest work in this manner, specifically through Joseph Cornell’s long practice of recycling early and silent cinema prints. Habib also pays particular attention to the connections between avant-garde practice and film historians in the 1970s by surveying the 1979 Whitney Museum symposium Research and Investigations: Early Cinema and the Avant-Garde, organized by John Hanhardt. Coming a year after the Brighton symposium, the Whitney symposium brought together scholars such as Tom Gunning and Nick Browne with filmmakers Ernie Gehr, Ken Jacobs, and Hollis Frampton to examine the intersections across their historical and creative work with early cinema. From Cornell to Frampton to Jacobs, Habib also closely tracks the provenance of filmic sources, such as the Paper Print Film Collection, that enabled the experimental recycling practices that these filmmakers engaged in. Similar attention to the specificity of filmic materials that Ernie Gehr has drawn on in his creative practice can be found in Ken Eisenstein’s “Ernie Gehr’s The Collector (2003) and Ernie Gehr the Collector.” Eisenstein begins with a close reading of the recycled, silent footage found in the opening of Gehr’s digital production The Collector and moves on to analyze Gehr’s in-depth engagement with early cinema from his landmark 16 mm Eureka (1974) through his recent works. With regards to provenance, Eisenstein delineates Gehr’s collecting practices of filmic materials through sources such as Classic Film Collector, which allowed him to purchase numerous prints that he later recycled in his works. The type of home collecting of silent materials that such sources enabled was thus a crucial aspect of the back-and-forth historiographic work that Gehr enlists in his experimental practice. Eszter Polonyi, like Habib and Eisenstein, also examines experimental work from the 1970s that employs early cinema in “Flicker: Thom Andersen

16  |  Provenance and Early Cinema

Takes Muybridge to the Movies.” Focusing on Andersen’s seminal film, Eadweard Muybridge: Zoopraxographer (1974), Polonyi examines closely the aesthetic and cultural paradigms that informed the film’s assessment and reanimation of Muybridge’s images. As she delineates, rather than cementing a clear lineage between Muybridge and early cinema, Andersen’s work critically realigns the practice of zoopraxography with structuralist practices of experimental cinema in the 1970s. Charlie Keil and Christina Stewart explore the complex register of provenance in Bill Morrison’s award-winning 2016 found footage film: a dual tale of a turn-of-the-century Canadian gold rush town and the 1978 discovery of its cache of over five hundred discarded silent films, frozen in time. In their captivating essay “Provenance on Ice: Dawson City: Frozen Time and the Dawson City Collection,” Keil and Stewart demonstrate how the process of discovery, archival preservation, and poetic repurposing of the surviving nitrate films, at the end of a transit line, can be read as a narrative of displacement and retrieval and a testimony to the very nature of provenance. Drawing on both archival context and textual analysis, Keil and Stewart show how Morrison’s film emulates the very whims and contingencies of history and provenance in its archival approach to explore provenance as historical material and analytical process. In “Praxis as Media Historiography: The Peep Box’s ‘Expanding View’ as Virtual Reality,” Christina Corfield follows in the tradition of later artistic and experimental engagement with the media landscape of early cinema. In the chapter, she both delineates the history and theoretical implications of peep boxes, with a particular focus on mass-produced versions from the nineteenth century, and also delineates her own re-creation of peep boxes in her artistic practice. In reflecting on the provenance of such movements, from original to reconstruction, Corfield illuminates the immersive aspects of the medium, which becomes apparent not only in the usage of archival devices but also through the labor that goes into remaking and repurposing them. Reconstruction thus recovers a material sense of how these objects work and also of the work that went into producing them. Also examining the practice of repurposing, Norie Taniguchi uses provenance to track the reuse of images during early cinema itself, in “How Newspaper Novels and Their Illustrations Shaped Japanese Films.” The chapter draws on detailed archival research into illustrated newspaper novels to track their adaptation to stage and then to film in Japan. Focusing on one of the earliest Japanese narrative films, the nonextant Ono ga tsumi

Introduction | 17

(One’s sin, 1908). While the film does not survive, Taniguchi has been able to trace through surviving still images of the film its iconic relationship to production stills from theater and also to the original illustrations of the published novel. She thus elaborates on an iconic provenance taken up through the process of adaptation in early Japanese cinema. In “Archival Object or Object Lesson? Bricolage as Process and as Concept in the Edmundo Padilla Collection,” Kim Tomadjoglou recuperates the work of itinerant showmen Félix Padilla and his son Edmundo, who were based in the twin cities of Juarez, Mexico, and El Paso, Texas. Frontizero (borderlander) entrepreneurs who presented films throughout the northern border region between 1921 and 1937, the Padillas were amateur filmmakers and producers as well as exhibitors. Staying current with contemporary business practices as well as print duplication, editing, and color lithography techniques, they created original and hybrid entertainment by mixing original scripts, staged reenactments, and repurposed popular media (e.g., fictional and newsreel footage, print ephemera, and sound recordings) that they purchased in Mexico and the United States. Tomadjoglou focuses on an extant Padilla reel to illustrate their binational, improvisational, and heterogenous approach to film production and presentation, which she persuasively argues is best described as bricolage. She reveals how such artifacts challenge conventional concepts of provenance as a standard for “best practices,” both in theory and application. As fragmentary traces of a transitory, borderland cinema practice, they are evidence of cinema’s “unfixed materiality” and the limitations of “a film history bounded by national borders.” As this book seeks to demonstrate, through a wide range of approaches and the excavation of a variety of previously neglected areas, a return to provenance fosters a significant expansion of the boundaries of early cinema studies. This expansive engagement with provenance offers a deeper understanding of film both as a material object and in its circulation. A central motivation for exploring provenance in this volume is the ongoing transformation of the contemporary media landscape by new technologies, which continues to affect how moving images are created, consumed, and restored. Fortunately, this shift from analog to digital, which is now a critical aspect of the medium’s provenance, is also simultaneously precipitating an expansion of resources for research into material provenance, such as the bounty of film prints, trade materials, and analytical tools (e.g., full frame scans and time-based annotation) made available through online

18  |  Provenance and Early Cinema

platforms such as the Media Ecology Project, the Media History Digital Library, and the Timeline of Historical Film Colors. Such platforms give us increased historical access and “distance reading” data on issues of preservation, collecting, circulation, and repurposing as well as the investigative tools for studying the material traces of provenance scratched into the nitrate film frame itself. In light of these digital changes both to the medium and the research tools used to study it, it is worth reemphasizing the provenance of this volume on early cinema. Initially presented at the Fifteenth International Domitor Conference, hosted by the George Eastman Museum and the University of Rochester in New York, the essays of this collection, revised and expanded into the form collected here, took shape at one of the premier film archives in the world, where the provenance of film was formed out of the ineluctable legacy of the Eastman Kodak Company. Thus in the shadow of Kodak, which defined so much of the material provenance of cinema’s analog form, and whose fortunes have declined with the digital revolution, this volume’s formative questions about provenance and early cinema have pressing technical and geographic stakes that continue to resonate globally.

Acknowledgments The editors would like to express their deepest gratitude and warmly acknowledge the generous support of the institutions and people who made the fifteenth annual Domitor conference such a tremendous success: from Caroline Yeager, associate curator of the George Eastman Museum, for her infinite creativity, energy, and efficiency, and the tireless staff of the George Eastman Museum, to Dr. June Hwang at the University of Rochester and Clara Auclair at the University of Rochester / Université Paris Diderot for their assistance with the program and its translations. The wonderfully collaborative nature of this project, with its dual archival and scholarly components, was made possible by the contributions of so many archives and scholars, from the Cinémathèque française, the Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé, and the Swedish Film Institute to the ever-expanding and internationalizing Domitor membership, who proposed and presented such high-caliber work. The editors would also like to thank Timothy Barnard for his exemplary translations and Janice Frisch, Allison Chaplin, and the dedicated

Introduction | 19

editorial team at Indiana University Press for attentively shepherding this volume along. Finally, the project could not have come to fruition without the keen organizational skills and commitment of our editorial assistant, Hugo Ljungbäck, and the unwavering support of those at our home departments and institutions: George Eastman Museum, Michigan State University, University of Rochester, and University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Merci à tous!

Notes 1. See, for example, Johannes Gramlich, “Reflections on Provenance Research: Values— Politics—Art Markets,” Journal for Art Market Studies 1, no. 2 (2017): 1–14. Also, see the useful essays on provenance and art history collected in Gail Feigenbaum and Inge Reist, eds., Provenance: An Alternate History of Art (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2012). 2. See Larissa Förster et al., eds., Provenienzforschung Zu Ethnografischen Sammlungen Der Kolonialzeit / Provenance Research on Ethnographic Collections from the Colonial Era (Berlin: Arbeitsgruppe Museum der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Sozial- und Kulturanthropologie, 2017); and Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 56.

JOANNE BERNARDI is Professor of Japanese and Film and Media Studies at the University of Rochester, where she directs the ongoing DH project, Re-Envisioning Japan: Japan as Destination in 20th Century Visual and Material Culture. She is editor (with Shota T. Ogawa) of The Routledge Handbook of Japanese Cinema and author of Writing in Light: The Silent Scenario and the Japanese Pure Film Movement. PAOLO CHERCHI USAI is Director of the Cineteca Nazionale in Rome, Senior Curator-at-large at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, and Resident Curator of the Telluride Film Festival. He is cofounder of Domitor and of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival (Le Giornate del Cinema Muto). He is author of Silent Cinema: A Guide to Study, Research and Curatorship and (with David Francis, Alexander Horwath, and Michael Loebenstein) of Film Curatorship: Archives, Museums, and the Digital Marketplace. TAMI WILLIAMS is Associate Professor of Film Studies and English at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and President of Domitor, the International Society for the Study of Early Cinema. She is author of Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations, and editor (with Clément

20  |  Provenance and Early Cinema Lafite) of CNC Cinema Book awardee Germaine Dulac’s What Is Cinema?; (with Elena Gorfinkel) of Global Cinema Networks; and (with Kaveh Askari, Scott Curtis, Frank Gray, Louis Pelletier, and Joshua Yumibe) of Performing New Media, 1890–1915 (IUP, 2014). JOSHUA YUMIBE is Professor and Director of Film Studies at Michigan State University. He is author (with Sarah Street) of Chromatic Modernity: Color, Cinema, and Media of the 1920s; (with Tom Gunning, Jonathan Rosen, and Giovanna Fossati) of Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema; and of Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism. He is also editor (with Scott Curtis, Philippe Gauthier, and Tom Gunning) of The Image in Early Cinema: Form and Material (IUP, 2018).

PART I STUDYING PROVENANCE: FROM ANALOG TO DIGITAL

1 FILM PROVENANCE A Framework for Analysis Paolo Cherchi Usai

T

he story of where films come from may be conceived as a triptych: the material life of cinematic objects (prints and negatives but also machines and tools), the migration of the images they contained and produced, and the cultural journey of artifacts and practices related to their production and exhibition. These three narrative strands describe the film artifacts’ itineraries in space and time and seek to interpret their meaning. In qualitative terms, the analysis of provenance in film relies on a clear understanding of both the profound connections and the equally significant differences between the image carrier and the work it represents. It should be stressed that research on film provenance is not concerned with the origin of the projected image in itself. From this viewpoint, provenance should not be equated with concepts such as influence (transforming borrowed ideas and actions), paraphrase (repeating them by other means), plagiarism (copying them), and information retrieval (identifying the source of written, acoustic, or visual data). The issues and dilemmas of provenance have occupied scientists, art collectors, and historians since the beginnings of their endeavors. Scholars engaged in the study of paintings, sculptures, architectural remains, ceramics, music manuscripts, and other artifacts have always been keen to ascertain the movement of artifacts from one place to another. They did so mainly in order to establish, confirm, or disprove the identity and genuineness of whatever was entrusted to their expertise. Authentication, a

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cornerstone of archaeology and geology, also plays a key role in the collectors’ world by attributing a market value to an object or artwork for its sale, loan, or exchange.1 It is perhaps an exaggeration to say that provenance has received no attention from film historians. It is a fact, however, that scholarship on this subject has been largely confined to collecting institutions, mostly with the objective of assessing the intrinsic relevance of the material to be acquired or “restored” by a film museum or archive, hence the popularity of terms like orphans in reference to films with allegedly no provenance at all, and repatriation, where provenance acquires a normative connotation. In the domain of film preservation, the words authoritative and original indicate what scholars and curators really care about: the provenance they pursue is the urtext, the unaltered camera negative, the matrix of all prints to come, the “big bang” of film distribution and the detritus of all projection copies that have survived in incomplete, mutilated, or fragmentary form.2 Claiming that film provenance is irrelevant to film history because many identical prints were sold, rented, and circulated worldwide, and because it is assumed that it is virtually impossible to follow their itinerary from one projection booth to another, is not much different from arguing that what happened between the big bang and the current configuration of the universe is not as interesting as the big bang itself or the present position of the galaxies. The lesson to be learned from this reductionist view of film history calls into question the semantics of a presumed difference between provenance and provenience, the subject of a lively debate among scholars in the fine arts and archaeology of the early twenty-first century. The terms of reference in this discussion have been summarized in an essay by Rosemary Joyce revolving around the concepts of birth, location, and itinerary.3 In this perspective, using the word provenance emphasizes the material trajectory of the object from the moment of its creation to its present status as a collection item; provenience mostly refers to the physical place where the object was found or to its last recorded location before the object was, so to speak, extrapolated from its native environment and redefined as part of another context—the museum or the archive—for the sake of conservation, study, and (where applicable) exhibition. Joyce cites the example of an ancient Roman coin. It might have been recovered from the site of a shipwreck more than two thousand years ago: this would be its provenience. What happened to it before (its minting in Italy and being passed from hand to

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hand) and after (its fortuitous retrieval by a diver, its trade with an antiques dealer, its sale from the dealer to a tourist, its bequest from the tourist to her son, and its donation from his estate to a museum), plus the recovery itself: this is the story of the coin’s provenance. The example of Roman coins is pertinent to the analysis of provenance and provenience in early cinema (and, for that matter, of all cinema produced via photochemical negatives and prints), as it provides a good counterargument to the belief that the subject does not warrant any particular notice in film studies, given that projection prints were circulated from one venue to another through sale or rental and treated as fundamentally equal and interchangeable. Geologists tend to associate the concept of “where the object comes from” precisely with the opposite end of the chronological spectrum—the material and geographic origin of the item: the “big bang” as “provenience” itself. Transferred to the cinema realm, the science of film provenance would then be defined as a discipline whose goal is to figure out which cotton plantations were harvested for the manufacture of nitrate cellulose, the whereabouts of the silver mines exploited for the creation of a given film stock, and the type of cattle breeds selected for extracting the purest gelatin from their crushed bones to make the best photographic emulsion.4 What emerges from the survey in Joyce’s article is that provenance and provenience mean different things to scholars and researchers in different fields and that there are always compelling reasons supporting their opinions. “This is a beautiful Roman coin,” an art historian may argue, “why should I care where it comes from?”5 An archaeologist might reply, “Because it is evidence of the shipping trade in the Mediterranean.” In their respective domains, both statements are valid. A noteworthy aspect of Joyce’s article is its extensive coverage of exchanges about this subject on the internet. In a startling omission, however, she fails to mention a noteworthy comment posted on this very subject, arguing that “the original OED [Oxford English Dictionary] specifically says that ‘provenience’ came into being as an objection to the French ending form in ‘provenance.’ . . . So, from the start, ‘provenience’ was nothing more than a conscious attempt to make a French word look and sound English.”6 The same correspondent provides further evidence, but his earlier warning is enough to prompt a comparison of the English words provenience and provenance with their equivalents in other languages.7 There is only one term in French, provenance, Spanish, procedencia, and Italian,

26  |  Provenance and Early Cinema

provenienza; German has three, Erkunft (lineage, derivation), Ursprung (what is initial, the “beginning”), and Provenienz (commonly used in the arts and collectors’ circles); Russian has “происхождение” (proiskhozhdenie: genesis, origin) and “источник” (istochnik: source), but in recent years museum curators have introduced another, borrowed from the French, “провенанс” (provenáns). Swedish uses ursprung but also fyndplats (place of retrieval), while proveniens often indicates the last station before the entering of an item in a collection but could also include the entire “ownership” chain of an item since its manufacturing or creation before it enters a museum collection. The Japanese word for provenance is 出所 (shussho), which is the fixed translation in archival science; there is no specific word for provenience. According to film curator Kae Ishihara, provenance and provenience are treated as the same thing, and there is no need to define the difference.8 Such an array of variations on the theme begs the question of which languages should take precedence in setting the standard for a distinction (provenance as opposed to provenience) that is otherwise ignored or underplayed by others. A useful alternative to the verbal quagmire is to examine what provenance has meant in the minds of those who have studied, restored, and looked at photochemical film elements to date. To the extent that they cared, their intended target has largely been limited to knowing the whereabouts of film prints—simply ascertaining where a print is located and available now. In many instances, collecting institutions have satisfied the curiosity of their interlocutors by placing a logo or a title card at the beginning of projection copies, thereby turning the information on the object’s provenance into part of the object itself. These logos and title cards are sometimes followed by cumbersome explanations of how these versions were put together: the longer the text, the more the print being exhibited is imbued with an aura of cultural respectability in the belief that presenting the same information on paper would not suffice. Over time, older title cards and logos have been replaced by new ones. An example of this modus operandi comes from the British Film Institute. At its inception, its collecting body was called the National Film Library (1935–1955). This became in turn the National Film Archive (1955– 1992), National Film and Television Archive (1993–2006), and finally BFI National Archive, its current denomination. For a committed film scholar, the above chronology helps determine that an uncut 35 mm print bearing the logo “National Film and Television Archive” was struck in a film laboratory

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Figure 1.1. Title card with logo of the National Film and Television Archive on a 35 mm triacetate print, ca. 1998.

sometime between the mid-1990s and the late 2000s (see fig. 1.1). Whether archival logos ought to be treated as proofs of the print’s provenance or provenience is another matter, but it should be acknowledged that—from the perspective of a nonspecialized viewer or a curator responsible for organizing a film exhibition—their presence is an indirect validation of the cultural legitimacy of the source. In an ironic twist, these indicators of provenance are generally excised from digital reproductions for nontheatrical use; what once was a source of pride for the collecting institution becomes a nuisance for commercial distributors. The term restoration may be an effective marketing tool in promoting a newly preserved film, but its provenance and provenience—depending on how one wants to draw the line between the two—are verba non grata on the main credits of a so-called archival film, almost a hindrance to the enjoyment of the work. For different reasons, this attitude is shared by a large section of academic publishing on film history. In the 2009 Rutgers book series Film Decades, dedicated to the close analysis of representative films in the history of cinema, at the end of each volume the selected titles are designated by the digital copies commercially available, without mention of the collecting institutions that provided them.9

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In the first installment of another book series, launched in 2018 by Routledge, its editors commissioned an introductory survey of “archival cinema” to appear alongside contributions on other popular concepts, such as digital cinema, world cinema, and ethnographic cinema.10 Here archival cinema means, in essence, any moving image that belongs to the past and is collected by an institution or an individual for the sake of posterity, future accessibility, or private enjoyment.11 By privileging the term archive over library or museum, cinema studies has merged three parallel imperatives—preserving, browsing, watching—into the one that was best suited to a scholarly agenda in which the personalized exposure to the document takes precedence over the other terms in the equation. From this standpoint, the term archival cinema is loaded with ideological implications. It satisfies the requirement of accessibility while recognizing that conservation of the objects comes first, but once conservation has occurred there is no need of an intermediary in order to explain their past. This is one main reason why, to a large extent, the digital translation of photochemical moving images into “content” has been welcomed as a natural extension of a collecting institution’s statutory mission. In its commendable effort to promote access as an inalienable right of scholarly research, and as an inherent duty for the archivist, this line of argument has eclipsed the material identity of the collected object and obfuscated its status as a tangible messenger of history.12 Reframing the terminology of cinema studies (a fraught endeavor in itself) may not be enough to prevent this from happening; nevertheless, it would be a good start to replace the binomial archival cinema with others— similar, for instance, to medieval art or renaissance music—or, even better, to discard it altogether. After all, no taxonomy is better than a misleading one. Another option would be to accept film collections or ancient cinema as perhaps unsatisfactory but more transparent (and nonpartisan) alternatives. If that doesn’t work, it would be worth at least trying to distinguish museum cinema from archival cinema and to embrace the consequences of such a distinction. A good illustration of this point is provided by the early history of collecting organizations in the 1930s, when film libraries, film archives, and film museums had just begun to identify their respective domains, with the issue of provenance as an unspoken but crucial factor in the formulation of their strategy. The four institutions that participated in the founding of the first consortium of collecting entities dedicated to cinema, the

Film Provenance | 29

International Federation of Film Archives, had different prefixes or suffixes: the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the National Film Library in London; the Reichsfilmarchiv in Berlin; and the Cinémathèque française in Paris. Museum, library, archive, cinémathèque: the four cardinal concepts in the dictionary of cinema as an object of preservation were already in place back in 1938. The alliance between these pioneer organizations could have been called the International Federation of Film Museums, or Cinémathèques, or Libraries; their choice fell instead on the term archives, apparently regarded at the time as the most neutral and all-encompassing. Their representatives (Iris Barry, Olwen Vaughan, Frank Hensel, and Henri Langlois) had different views of why the history of cinema should be preserved, but they basically wanted the same thing. Against all odds, the most vocal advocate of print provenance in the newborn discipline was neither the Museum of Modern Art—as one might have expected, given the mission charter of the institution—nor the Reichsfilmarchiv. Instead, the first public record of provenance in a film collection came from the National Film Library in London under the auspices of its founding curator, Ernest Lindgren. The earliest catalog of the National Film Library’s collection, published in 1936, is admirably prescient in this respect.13 The provenance of each film is accurately recorded at the end of each entry, after the indication of the print’s length and—no less remarkably—its physical condition at the time of acquisition (see fig. 1.2). It allows us to reconstruct, albeit in very basic terms, how a film collection of international standing was born. Judging from the available evidence, Lindgren’s approach was not shared with equal enthusiasm by his colleagues. This does not necessarily mean that the others kept no record of print provenance: Henri Langlois had a phenomenal memory of where he had acquired his prints (he inventoried his holdings in jealously guarded notebooks), and there is no reason to believe that his German colleague Hensel didn’t keep a meticulous record of the acquisition sources in his archive. Contrary to his partners, however, Lindgren believed that sources should be an integral part of the public record of a national collection. Had the others followed his example from the start, film historiography (and, in all likelihood, film preservation) would probably have followed a very different course. Unfortunately for us, this did not happen. Five years after the National Film Library changed its name to National Film Archive (NFA), the institution’s card catalog still included a

30  |  Provenance and Early Cinema

Figure 1.2. Two entries from the 1936 Catalogue of the National Film Library (p. 45).

mention of print provenance, but the first volume of the NFA’s public catalog, published in 1960, no longer mentioned acquisition sources.14 It may be surmised that Lindgren resigned himself to discontinuing this commendable practice because nobody else had shown any inclination to follow suit, but there are other plausible motives behind the omission of film provenance in later editions of the NFA’s film registry. One stands out as emblematic of a peculiar challenge faced by Lindgren and his colleagues. Collecting institutions were acquiring objects that actually belonged to someone else, and, with few exceptions, there was no guarantee that film museums, archives, libraries, and cinematheques had the right to exhibit these works to the public. In the fine arts world, the purchase of a painting or sculpture generally confers by default the right to exhibit it to the public. Conversely, film museums and archives were retaining objects (mostly projection prints) that were to be returned to their owners after public exhibition. The fact that copyright holders neglected to reclaim these copies at the end of their commercial life was no legal justification for their transfer to other entities without a prior agreement. In theory, production and distribution companies could have easily disputed the legitimacy of the acquisitions and demanded the prompt restitution of their assets. So, collecting institutions deemed it prudent not to publicly divulge how prints had come into their possession (union catalogs of selected film elements, mostly from the silent era, held by members of FIAF strictly for internal use were created from the

Film Provenance | 31

mid-1950s). This act of self-censorship had profound and at times devastating consequences for the study of film provenance. Film producers were often remiss in tracking projection prints at the end of their profitable life, but this did not matter. To put it plainly, collecting institutions were assuming responsibility for objects that they did not own. The least they could do to protect themselves from a potential lawsuit was to withhold their sources. Private collectors felt particularly vulnerable to legal prosecution: some eminent personalities in the collecting community were indeed targeted by law enforcement agencies in the 1970s.15 In short, with the notable exception of government agencies such as the Library of Congress in the United States, film provenance became a well-guarded secret by force majeure, an internal record at best for most nonprofit organizations. The archives’ protective stance was facilitated by the relative indifference of the scholarly community, except when provenience might indicate outstanding pictorial quality, completeness, or both. The same could be said about researchers in other disciplines, such as theater studies, musicology, and the fine arts. After all, there is no particular need to inquire where a painting is from to appreciate its beauty (as in, “Why should I care where this beautiful Roman coin comes from?”). Specialists in drawings, music scores, and stage plays, however, do more than that. By gathering knowledge on the circulation of manuscripts, etchings, and archaeological remains, they seek to better understand their function in culture and so­ ciety. It could be argued that this is equally true for film prints and negatives, because their physical structure may change over time for reasons other than physical damage incurred in their journey from the film laboratory to countless projection rooms around the world. After all, the only quantifiable differences between provenance in film and other modes of artistic expression are the overall time frame of the film’s itinerary (from one projection booth or film exchange to another, normally a matter of months) and its speed of travel, generally measured in days or hours. The chronography of film “provenance” describes the life of projection prints and their photochemical negative sources as its objects of study. In the digital domain, the science of discovering where pixels have been added or subtracted and how they were modified is called forensics; before being adopted by professionals in digital imaging, the term was applied to criminal investigation, more specifically to corpses. It remains to be seen whether or not the definition of provenance can be productively extended

32  |  Provenance and Early Cinema

to the postanalog reincarnation of the cinematic object. In the meantime, early cinema may prove to be an ideal laboratory for the analysis of film provenance in the photochemical domain. It could also offer an opportunity to bypass the partition of cinema studies into three distinct categories: those who watch films and try to make meaning out of what they see, those who may or may not spend much time with projected copies but are very good at researching the printed or handwritten documentation they generate, and those who want to look at the objects themselves, making a special effort to draw knowledge from their material status. This demarcation was always questionable in operational terms. Conceptually, seen through the lens of film provenance, it is also indefensible. By pursuing their goals in unison, these three groups could achieve considerably more than the sum of their individual parts. A thorough, sustained, and open-minded engagement with the questions of film provenance across these areas offers a renewed chance to do so.

Notes 1. A useful overview of this subject can be found in Gail Feigenbaum and Inge Reist, eds., Provenance: An Alternate History of Art (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2013). 2. For a comparison with other disciplines, see Robert Harrison, Ruins and Fragments: Tales of Loss and Rediscovery (London: Reaktion Books, 2015), and David Pearson, Provenance Research in Book History: A Handbook (Oxford: The Bodleian Library; New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2019). 3. Rosemary Joyce, “From Place to Place: Provenience, Provenance, and Archaeology,” in Provenance: An Alternate History of Art, ed. Gail Feigenbaum and Inge Reist (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2013), 48–60. 4. Robert L. Shanebrook, Making Kodak Film (Rochester, NY: Robert L. Shanebrook, 2010), 29; 2nd ed., 2016. 5. K. Kris Hirst, “Provenience, Provenance, Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” ThoughtCo., last updated February 25, 2018, https://www.thoughtco.com/provenience-vs​ -provenance-3971058. 6. Steve Long, “Provenance vs. Provenience (One More Time),” discussion posting, August 20, 2006, http://culist.arch-l.narkive.com/0lqFSX1I/provenance-vs-provenience-one​ -more-time. 7. Long, discussion posting, August 22, 2006. 8. Letter to the author, June 4, 2018. 9. André Gaudreault, ed., American Cinema, 1890–1909: Themes and Variations (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009); Charlie Keil and Ben Singer, eds., American Cinema of the 1910s: Themes and Variations (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009); Lucy Fischer, ed., American Cinema of the 1920s: Themes and

Film Provenance | 33 Variations (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009). See also Paolo Cherchi Usai, “Early Films in the Age of Content; or, ‘Cinema of Attractions’ Pursued by Digital Means,” in A Companion to Early Cinema, ed. André Gaudreault, Nicolas Dulac, and Santiago Hidalgo (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 548, note 62. 10. Paolo Cherchi Usai, “Archival Cinema,” in The Routledge Companion to World Cinema, ed. Rob Stone, Paul Cooke, Stephanie Dennison, and Alex Marlow-Mann (London: Routledge, 2018), 426–35. 11. The first book on the subject was Jay Leyda’s Films Beget Films (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1964). In his foreword, Leyda expressed his discomfort with the term archive films but was also at a loss to find a suitable alternative. 12. Swiss film historian Roland Cosandey has suggested images antérieures (antecedent images) as an alternative term for archival cinema. See “Les images antérieures. Notes pour une approche possible,” lecture delivered at the Visions du réel film festival in Nyon, Switzerland, April 18–24, 2005, and revised in June of the same year, reproduced at https:// www.cinematheque.ch/f/documents-de-cinema/complement-de-programme/les-images​ -anterieures/. 13. Catalogue of the National Film Library (London: British Film Library, n.d. [1936]). 14. National Film Archive Catalogue. Part II, Silent Non-Fiction Films, 1895–1934 (London: British Film Institute, 1960). Parts I and III (Silent News Films and Silent Fiction Films) appeared in 1965 and 1966. 15. Dennis Bartok and Jeff Joseph, A Thousand Cuts: The Bizarre Underground World of Collectors and Dealers Who Saved the Movies (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016), xii–xiii.

PAOLO CHERCHI USAI is Director of the Cineteca Nazionale in Rome, Senior Curator-at-large at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, and Resident Curator of the Telluride Film Festival. He is cofounder of Domitor and of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival (Le Giornate del Cinema Muto). He is author of Silent Cinema: A Guide to Study, Research and Curatorship and (with David Francis, Alexander Horwath, and Michael Loebenstein) of Film Curatorship: Archives, Museums, and the Digital Marketplace.

2 ORIGINS Early Films and Archival Collections Camille Blot-Wellens

F

ilm archives preserve vast numbers of film elements, and each element has its own history before reaching the vaults of an archive. Some are deposited; some are exchanged; others are bought, found, or sometimes given . . . The origins and history of film materials prior to their entry into collections are decisive in our efforts not only to better comprehend the elements but also to better write film history and therefore to better restore and/or present films. Unfortunately, archives do not always keep records of the provenance of items in their collections—and most notably that of early films. While the reasons for this amnesia are multiple (historical, political, practical), archives should commit to recovering the memory of collections, and when paper records do not exist, the film materials can be interrogated. This article suggests some approaches to certain aspects of provenance— period, ownership, or form—by looking at items from the Archival Film Collections of the Swedish Film Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.1 More than an attempt to answer questions, this article aims to formulate and lay out some of the questions raised by the study of filmic elements and therefore to investigate not only the history of archives but also, naturally, film history itself.

Item #0: Little Gevaert Box The box arrived at the Swedish Film Institute from the National Museum of Science and Technology. One could say that this item represents an

Origins | 35

exemplary case due to the information indicated on the box: “2 perforated Max Skladanowsky strips. Width: 55 mm.2 Perforation: rounded, metallic eyelets,” “Given to Film Historical Collections, Nov. 58 by Erich Skladanowsky,” “Recipient: Robin Hood,” “Deposit from Film Historical Collections” (see fig. 2.1).3 This information alone allows a reconstitution of the context of the acquisition: in November 1958, twenty-five years after the creation of the Swedish Film Society (on October 31, 1933), which became the Film Historical Collections in 1940,4 Erich Skladanowsky (film historian and son of Max Skladanowsky) offered Robin Hood (Bengt Idestam-Almquist), one of the founders of the Swedish Film Society, fragments of “vintage” nitrate prints of Der jongleur (The juggler) and Das boxende känguruh (The boxing kangaroo)5 directed by his father, who had also made the first film known to be shot in Stockholm: Komische begegnung im Tiergarten in Stockholm (A comic encounter on Djurgården in Stockholm).6 The films were donated to the Swedish Film Society and deposited at the Museum of Science and Technology, which hosted the collections of the Swedish Film Society and later the Film Historical Collections between 1938 and 1970. This discovery led to the 1958 annual activity report of the National Museum of Science and Technology, which mentions the acquisition and confirms the information contained on the can: “Three hand painted scioptikon images from the 1880s, prepared by Max Skladanowsky, along with two pieces of his first films on celluloid—55mm wide with riveted splices— screened on his ‘Bioscope’ in 1895, were offered by his son Herr Erich Skladanowsky (Berlin) to the Swedish Film Society on its 25th anniversary and deposited at the Museum.”7 Through these two pieces of film and the box, several historical aspects are revealed: the item as evidence of original elements screened in 1895; the importance of Skladanowsky for Swedish film history;8 the efforts of Robin Hood to constitute the collections of the Swedish Film Society and later the Film Historical Collections, and thus the history of the institution. Unfortunately, many deposits or donations have no information of their origins. In fact, archives can have very little information on their collections—especially for old acquisitions or exchanges. For instance, the only information kept till now in the records of the Swedish Film Institute for item #1 is that it has been “in the collection for a very long time and the donor is unknown.”

Figure 2.1. Gevaert box.

Origins | 37

Figure 2.2. Hand-colored print of Le Coucher de la mariée (The bride’s bedtime, Eugène Pirou, 1896).

Item #1: “Scene in a Bedroom—Hand-colored Print” The film Le Coucher de la mariée (The bride’s bedtime), by French photographer Eugène Pirou, released at the Café de la Paix on October 11, 1896 (see fig. 2.2), was rather easy to identify thanks to the actress Louise Willy, who also performed this pantomime at the Théâtre Olympia in Paris during the same period.9 At the moment of the inspection, the element had been labelled “Sängkammarscen—handkolorerad kopia” (Scene in a bedroom— hand-colored print) without any information on the title (whether it arrived with or was given this title at the archive) or the provenance of the filmic element.10 Nevertheless, the careful analysis of the print gives very interesting clues on its possible history: the consistency of the application of the colors indicates that the dyes may have been applied by the seller and not the exhibitor, and the perforations photographed from the negative show that the print was made directly from the camera negative. Therefore, it is possible

38  |  Provenance and Early Cinema

to affirm with relative certainty that the print originates from Pirou’s workshop in Paris. Although the film was released in October 1896, the print was not necessarily struck at the moment of the release. In fact, Eugène Pirou sold films from 1896 (he even opened a specialized store in 1899) until 1904.11 It can be complicated to establish the print dates for film materials of this period since there is not always edge printing and there is little information allowing one to date the material, but an analysis of the condition of the negative when the print was struck can give some clues.12 Since, ordinarily, all the prints sold by production companies were made directly from the negatives, the latter tended to be damaged rather quickly by the numerous printings.13 Actually, in the case of the print of Le Coucher de la mariée, it is possible to observe several instances of mechanical damage photographed from the negative, some caused by the handling of the material (like folding of the negative) while others happened during the screenings (perforations used or forced) among other causes. This damage might indicate that the print was not struck immediately after the title release. Since the negative no longer exists, and since the print held in Stockholm is the only print of the title (in its Edison version14) that has been located so far, seemingly the only document that could be used as reference is a “paper print” deposited by Eugène Pirou on February 11, 1897, at the French National Library.15 Comparing the condition of the perforations of the negative in early February 1897, when the paper print was made, with their condition when the print was struck seems to indicate that the print was made after this date. Nevertheless, taking into consideration the huge success of the title, the negative was still in rather good condition when the print was made. Other information observed during the analysis of the film element is the common physical condition of the print, with many broken perforations, which could indicate that it was screened many times and consequently that the print may have belonged to a professional exhibitor. Naturally, the next questions are: Was the film screened in Sweden, and if so, when? A Swedish title that could correspond to Pirou’s film Ett nygift par och deras första bröllopsnatt (A newly married couple and their first wedding night) appears in a program of exhibitors Karl Rudbäck and Nils Svensson in early 1900.16 Of course, this title does not necessarily correspond to

Origins | 39

Pirou’s film; it could also be Le Coucher de la mariée ou la triste nuit de noce, produced by Méliès in 189917—or even the version produced by Pathé with the actress Louise Willy circa 1897.18 In Rudbäck and Svensson’s program, another film draws our attention: Parisiskan som går i badet (Parisian lady takes a bath), a title that also appears in the catalogs of Pirou, Méliès, and Pathé. Nevertheless, Waldekranz, who tried to identify the titles of Rudbäck and Svensson’s program, dated the production of most of the titles to 1895, 1896, 1897, and 189819—that is, prior to the meeting of Karl Rudbäck and Nils Svensson in the autumn of 1899.20 Since Svensson started screening films in Skåne in the winter of 1897,21 it is possible to think that most of the films screened by Rudbäck and Svensson were already screened by Svensson when he was touring alone. Furthermore, according to Waldekranz (once again), “the cinematographe announced and acquired by Svensson was very likely a Joly-Normandin device. Most likely he had also purchased films from Joly and Edison.”22 Knowing that Pirou had also produced films with a Joly-Normandin device, he very likely knew Henri Joly. This could mean that both Le Coucher de la mariée and Le Bain de la parisienne were actually produced by Pirou and not by Méliès. Indeed, identifying the production companies of the titles without the film materials can be very dangerous since the companies were offering the same titles; this is the reason why Waldekranz had doubts and identified the film as by either Méliès or Pirou.23 Of course, this is all hypothetical, and the investigation is still in progress. But, without a doubt, the print of Le Coucher de la mariée raises the fundamental question of the period of the making of the print—an aspect perhaps not studied enough, especially for early films—at a time when films had multiple versions and are therefore easy to confuse or when techniques of color application changed very fast. Also, by trying to date the print, it becomes possible to put the film element back into its distribution and exhibition context.

Item #2: “Pathé. 7 Short French Comedies” The second item is a can labeled “Pathé. 7st korta franska farser” (Pathé. 7 short French comedies). The can contained two nitrate prints24 and a nitrate dupe negative made from prints of the early 1900 as well as a card (see fig. 2.3) from the Kinocentralen laboratory—a film laboratory created in

40  |  Provenance and Early Cinema

Figure 2.3. Card from Kinocentralen.

1918 that was active until 196425 in Stockholm—under the name “Director Cederholm neg.” Tor Cederholm (1882–1948) was an important figure of Swedish cinema’s first years. After being an employee at Forsner’s photography store for five years, he started working in the film industry and in movie theaters in 1906 as a film photographer, as a cashier at the Nils Petter Nilsson & Son film theater for six years, and then as manager of the London-BiografTeatern (London-Cinema-Theatre), or “Londonbiografen” in Stockholm from 1914. He was also a member of the Swedish association of cinema owners (Biografägaresförbund) and even a chairman and board member in the teens.26 The Londonbiografen was inaugurated on April 1, 190527 at 5 Bryggargatan in Stockholm. The film theater would be the first of several opened in Stockholm by Nils Petter Nilsson. In April 1935, a special program was organized to celebrate the theater’s first thirty years: “Londonbiografen celebrates its 30 years. For this occasion, several films of the Londonbiografen’s old archives will be shown: 1. Little Pich (an artist on stilts) 1904 2. Window cleaner (a French trick film) 1905 3. It’s an ungrateful world (Pathé frères) 1905

Origins | 41 4. Punished ingratitude (a magic number) 1905 5. Cake walk (a dance scene) 1905 6. Lucky fishing (a French trick film) 1905 7. Scenes from “The Merry Widow” with Emma Meissner and Karl Barklind [sic] performed in 190928

The short films of the program coincide almost perfectly with the titles that form the dupe negative: La Pêche miraculeuse (The miraculous catch, Pathé, 1902), Le Laveur de devantures (The storefront washer, Pathé, 1904), Le Faux cul-de-jatte (The fake amputee, Pathé, 1903), Le Physicien mal récompensé (The poorly paid physicist, Pathé, 1905), Célèbre danse du cake-walk (Famous cake-walk dance, Pathé, 1903), Little Pich. Le Célèbre original comique (Little Pich. The famous original comic, Pathé, 1902), and Lili (Numa Peterson Handels-och Fabrik AB, 1903). Thanks to the film element and the information from the card, it is possible to establish that the anniversary program was prepared by Tor Cederholm from “vintage” prints—stored and possibly screened at the Londonbiografen.29 Cederholm then duplicated the prints at the laboratory Kinocentralen to get a dupe negative and a new print, which he submitted to censorship on March 27, 1935—that is, a few days before the screening at Londonbiografen—under the title “The old film archive of the Londonbiografen, year 1905.”30 Film elements not only enable the preservation of cinematic works but also help with writing the history of the life of the elements and the works after the original release. In this case, the ownership of the film element was vital to understanding the life of the films. But this film element also raises the question of how and when the films were seen. The last item is a reel made of several nitrate prints, which calls into question the origins of the print in terms of form.

Item #3: “7 Unidentified Documentaries. Foreign. 1900s. Silent. Nitrate” The film element was deposited by a photographer from Enköping at an unknown date, and it was not possible to track the original owner of the materials. While the can indeed contained seven reels, it contained, in fact, seventeen titles, produced between 1896 and 1904 (some films are still unidentified). The films that could be identified were produced by Lumière, Edison, and Paul.31

42  |  Provenance and Early Cinema

What’s more, twelve of the seventeen prints also arrived spliced together (see fig. 2.4) in a single reel: • Pont de Kasr-el-Nil (Kasr-el-Nil bridge, Lumière, n° 365, 12.3.1897– 18.4.1897) • Sortie du pont de Kasr-el-Nil (Kasr-el-Nil bridge exit, Lumière, n° 366, 12.3.1897–18.4.1897) • Kasr-el-Nil (Lumière, n° 368, 12.3.1897–18.4.1897) • Unidentified Switchback • Unidentified Pier • Place de la Concorde et entrée de la rue Royale (Place de la Concorde and entrance to the rue Royale), Lumière, n° 692, 25.10.1896– 7.11.1897) • [Rough Sea at Ramsgate (Paul’s Animatograph Works, 1896)] • Défilé de la garde républicaine et des pompiers (Parade of the Republican Guard and firefighters, Lumière, n° 972, 14.7.1898) • U.S. Battleship ”Oregon” (Edison, 20.8.1898) • Débarquement et feu de mousqueterie (Landing and musketry fire, Lumière, n° 839, 28–29.4.1898) • Charge de cuirassiers (The cuirassiers charge, Lumière, n° 604, 31.10.1897) • Défilé de cuirassiers (The cuirassiers parade, Lumière, n° 603, 1896– 31.10.1897)

Furthermore, according to their physical characteristics, the splices may have been made at the time the prints were created.32 This could mean that the films had been spliced to be screened together in a program of roughly ten minutes’ duration by the original exhibitor and that the program has been maintained since then in the form it had when it was screened and seen by the audience of the time. Even if it was not possible to find references to this program in any paper archives thus far, the material still holds the memory of its original screening. Naturally this memory is often reflected in film programs published in the press, for instance. But as seen earlier, it can be very tricky to know exactly which productions composed the program because of the multiple versions produced in different years and/or by different production companies. In this way, film archives preserve not only films but also the memory of their exhibition and presentation, notably for the early years. In the case of the reel preserved at the Swedish Film Institute, it is very interesting to see how diverse the subjects are in terms of themes and locations. It is certainly interesting to observe how the films could be presented

Origins | 43

Figure 2.4. Splices between nitrate prints of Défilé de la garde républicaine et des pompiers and U.S. Battleship Oregon and between Charge de cuirassiers and Défilé de cuirassiers.

at the time and how differently they can be presented nowadays. And yet, programming has always been essential to the way early films are experienced, then as at present. According to film historian Vanessa Toulmin, for “practitioners of film exhibition, the presentation and programming of early film shows were an important factor in their success.”33 For that reason, preserving, researching, reconstituting, and screening original film programs, whenever it is possible, is fundamental to gaining a better understanding of film experience as well as a better knowledge of the culture and perceptions of the period. After analysis, the titles that compose the film reel have been linked together in the database of the Swedish Film Institute, and the item was cataloged as “Unidentified non-fiction films program.” It was important not only to catalog the individual titles but also to respect the fact that the films reached the archive together since they were most probably presented together.

Conclusion During this study, more questions have been raised than answers given. Film elements represent an unrivaled source for better knowledge of film

44  |  Provenance and Early Cinema

history in so many aspects, from production to exhibition. By interrogating the provenance of the few items in this essay, it is possible to raise fundamental questions concerning the history of collections (and original ownership), identification of titles, dating film materials, and programming during a specific period. Therefore, the items kept in archives are not only a testimony and a medium of transmission of cinematic art; they also contribute to a different approach by the questions they provoke. I like to think that the history of archives, the history of film materials, and film history cannot be separated.

Acknowledgments This study is dedicated to Rune Waldekranz (1911–2003), whose work, Levande fotografier. Film och biograf i Sverige/Live Photos: Film and Cinema in Sweden on film circulation and exhibition in Sweden between 1896 and 1906 is still a point of reference almost sixty years after its publication.

Notes 1. The author would like to warmly thank Mathias Rosengren (Head of the Film Heritage Department), Jon Wengström (Head of the Archival Film Collections), and Ola Törjas (Librarian) for their help and support. 2. The original width is 54 mm. 3. “2 perfor. Max Skladanowsky-strimlor. Bredd: 55mm. Perfor.; runda, mettall-skodda hål,” “Gåva t. F.H.S. nov 58 av Erich Skladanowsky,” ”Förmedlare: Robin Hood,” ”Dep. Av Filmhistoriska Samlingarna.” 4. And was incorporated to the Swedish Film Institute when it was created in 1964. 5. Both titles were part of the program screened on November 1, 1895, at the Wintergarten of Berlin. The Swedish Film Institute also holds a handwritten program of the Wintergarten session, enriched of annotations for the operator. Film historian Dr. Janelle Blankenship could identify the document as being from Max Skladanowsky and prepared in 1935 for the commemoration of the forty years of cinema. Its origins and provenance are unknown. 6. The film was shot by Max Skladanowsky in August 1896, during his stay in Stockholm, outside the Novilla music-hall on the island of Djurgården, with actors of the Tivoli-Variété theater. Bengt Idestam-Almquist, När filmen kom till Sverige. Charles Magnusson och Svenska Bio (Stockholm: P. A. Nordstedt & Söners Förlag, 1959), 80–81. 7. “Tre handmålade skioptikonbilder från 1880-talet, utförda av Max Skladanowsky, samt bitar av två av hans första filmer av celluloidskivor med 55mm bredd och nitade skarvar, projekterade med hans ‘bioscope’ år 1895, ha överlämnats av hans son Herr Erich Skladanowsky, Berlin, vid Svenska Filmsamfundets, tjugofemårsjubileum och deponeras i museet.” Tekniska Museets Årsbok 1959 (Stockholm: Daedalus, 1959), 20–21. Moreover,

Origins | 45 the commemoration of the twenty-five years of the Swedish Film Society was celebrated at the Museum of Science and Technology on November 11, 1958, where Erich Skladanowsky screened a film by his father. Idestam-Almquist, När filmen kom till Sverige, 80. 8. “Max Skladanowsky deserves a place of honor also in Swedish film history, for having made, in August 1896, Sweden’s first dramatic film, based on its own script and with the help of Swedish professional actors and a new Skladanowsky camera.” Idestam-Almquist, När filmen kom till Sverige, 80–81. 9. And also according to film historian Rune Waldekranz: Levande bilder. De första biograferna (Stockholm: Sveriges Biografägareförbund, 1955), 31. 10. This title does not appear in the first register of the Film Historical Collections (Swedish Film Institute). 11. Camille Blot-Wellens, “Eugène Pirou, portraitiste de la Belle Époque,” Revue de la Bibliothèque nationale de France 50 (2015): 91. 12. Production companies could introduce their brand on the edges or at the beginning or end of the film strip (e.g., Lumière, Méliès). But this practice was not systematic as it would become some years later with the instauration of the rental system. For more information on edge printings and physical characteristics of early films, see the seminal Harold Brown, Physical Characteristics of Early Films as Aids to Identification (Brussels: FIAF, 1990). 13. Original negatives could get damaged very fast when many prints were struck and were no longer usable, which forced production companies to reshoot some titles. For example, Lumière produced no fewer than four versions of Sortie d’usine between May 1895 and February 1897. Michelle Aubert, Jean-Claude Seguin (Ed.), La production cinématographique des Frères Lumière (Paris: BiFi, 1996), 214–215. 14. Eugène Pirou made two versions of several titles of his catalog—one in Edison format and one in Joly-Normandin format. The Cinémathèque francaise holds two incomplete prints of the Joly-Normandin version of Le Coucher de la mariée. About the cinématographe Joly-Normandin, see also Camille Blot-Wellens, El cinematógrafo Joly-Normandin. Dos colecciones: Joâo Anacleto Rodrigues y Antonino Sagarmínaga (Madrid: Filmoteca Española, 2014) (http://www.mecd.gob.es/cultura/areas/cine/mc/fe/documentos/el-cinematografo-joly​ -normandin-1896-1897-.html). 15. The French National Library holds paper prints of the two versions. It was common for photographers to deposit copies of their work in the frame of the legal deposit. In this case, Pirou probably deposited the paper prints (of all his films, the same day) in order to protect his productions from his operator Albert Kirchner, also known as Léar, who had just patented a new device and would be leaving Pirou a few weeks later. Blot-Wellens, El cinematógrafo Joly-Normandin, 91. 16. Norrbottens Nyheter (March 22, 1900) mentioned in Rune Waldekranz, Levande fotografier. Film och biograf i Sverige 1896–1906 [Live Photos: Film and Cinema in Sweden] (Stockholm: Institutionen för Teater- och filmvetenskap, 1969), 136. 17. After identifying the film as Pirou in 1955, Waldekranz identified it as Méliès in 1969. Waldekranz, Levande fotografier, 138. Jacques Malthête, Laurent Mannoni, L’Oeuvre de Georges Méliès (Paris: La Cinémathèque francaise – Editions de la Martinière, 2008), 94. 18. Henri Bousquet, Catalogue Pathé des années 1896 à 1914. 1896 à 1906 (Bassac: Henri Bousquet, 1996), 846. 19. Waldekranz, Levande fotografier, 137–138. 20. Ibid., 135.

46  |  Provenance and Early Cinema 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. It may be relevant to say that Joly and Normandin also offered a device functioning with the Edison gauge (four perforations per frame). All the translations from Swedish into English were made by the author. 23. It is also important to say that Waldekranz did not study the print of Le Coucher de la mariée from the Film Historical Collections when he wrote his study. Waldekranz, Levande fotografier, Annexes, V. 24. An unidentified interview of an old man (on Gevaert-Belgium film stock of the 1920s) and a nitrate print of La Pêche miraculeuse (Pathé, 1902). 25. Entry of the Swedish Film Database: http://www.svenskfilmdatabas.se/en/item/?type= company&itemid=500065 (visited on August 15, 2018). 26. Paul Harnesk, ed., Vem är vem? Årgång I. Stockholmsdelen (Karlskrona: K. L. Svenssons Eftr:s Bokindustri A.-B., 1945), 140. 27. Dagens Nyheter (March 28, 1905), 4. 28. “LONDONBIOGRAFEN fyller 30 år. I anledning därav visas ur London-biografens gamla filmarkiv från år 1905 en serie kortfilmer: 1. Little Pich (Konstnär i styltskor) 1904, 2. Fönsterputsaren (Fransk trickfilm) 1905, 3. Otack är världens lön (Officin Pathé Frères 1905), 4. Bestraffad otacksamhet (Trollerinummer) 1905, 5. Cake Walk (Dansnummer) 1905, 6. Fiskelycka (fransk trickfilm) 1905, 7. Scener ur “Glada Änkan” med EMMA MEISSNER och KARL BARKLIND upptaget år 1909 Dagens Nyheter (April 8, 1935), 21; Reformatorn 15 (April 13, 1935), 7. Karl Barklind is in fact Carl Barcklind. 29. Unfortunately, it has not been possible to find all the titles screened at the “Londonbiografen” at the time. 30. “Ur Londonbiografens gamla filmarkiv år 1905.” Censorship card #52.023. Once identified, it turned out that the Swedish Film Institute also had a nitrate print of the program, which was duplicated in 1974. 31. The other films of this collection are A Collier’s Life (Paul, ca. 1904), Bad Boy and the Gardener (Edison, 1896), Jones’ Return from the Club (Edison, 1899), an unidentified military scene’s reconstitution (probably American), and an unidentified view of the Gothenburg harbor (thought to have been produced between 1903 and 1905). 32. This practice seems to have been common until the generalization of the rental system in the second half of the first decade of the 1900s (at least in Europe). 33. Vanessa Toulmin, “The Importance of the Programme in Early Film Presentation,” Kintop “Kinematographen-Program” 11 (2002): 19.

CAMILLE BLOT-WELLENS teaches Film Archiving and Early Cinema at Université Paris 8 Vincennes—St-Denis and Conservation and Restoration at Université de Lausanne. She is a researcher, film restorer, and archivist based in Stockholm, Sweden.

3 FROM PROVENIENCE TO PROVENANCE The Kerstrat-d’Hauterives Collection Germain Lacasse

Introduction This conference was entitled Provenance and Early Cinema. The call for papers, however, did not mention the important distinction now made by English-speaking historians and archivists between provenance and provenience. This latter term describes the place of origin of the object or artwork, distinguishing it from the former term, which defines the work’s historical trajectory in society. This distinction is interesting in the way it deepens the development of a cultural history of cinema and films, a history that must be approached through the study of reception contexts by means of a better consideration of the history of past or lost collections rather than the source and chain of owners of contemporary collections. In this text I will study as an example the history of the lost but documented collection of films shown by Marie de Kerstrat and Henry de Grandsaignes d’Hauterives, a pair of exhibitors from France active in Quebec and the United States from 1897 to 1910. Working in major amusement parks and vaudeville theaters, they initially showed historical films and later colored French fairy plays. Their broad collection of films enabled them to constantly change their program, and their extensive publicity enables us to identify fairly accurately the context in which they screened and commented on their films. I will analyze in detail their presentation of the film Vie et passion de Jésus (Life and Passion of Christ, Pathé, Zecca, 1907) in St. Louis, Missouri, by showing how nonspecialized newspapers make possible a more complex and sophisticated

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study of provenance than the trade press, which tells us more about the film’s origin. I will also demonstrate how this nonspecialized press enables us to follow the evolution and even the dispersion of the film collection and finally how digital archives today are facilitating the study of provenance.

Provenience and Provenance Let’s look first at this distinction between the terms provenience and provenance in more detail. An excellent discussion of this question can be found in an article by Rosemary Joyce in the anthology Provenance: An Alternate History of Art. She points out that this distinction has existed since the late nineteenth century, as the term provenience was coined by the art historian Percy Gardner in 1883. It was later used in different ways by archaeologists and art historians, and numerous debates around the suitability of the two terms took place. Joyce writes that today, for archaeologists, the term provenience is used to indicate the site where an object was discovered, while for the art historian provenance means the list of the object’s successive owners. The debate continues today, but Joyce describes how this discussion is relevant for historians: provenience is a fixed point, whereas provenance summarizes a chronological trajectory; the two meet, however, in a history of the object’s circulation.1 Joyce adds that this history should consider the object’s mutability, or the different meanings ascribed to it by audiences and later by historians. To this end, she believes that the two words describe two approaches that must be combined in order to constitute a biography of the object or collection. In the same volume, Anne Higonnet remarks that the term provenance too often describes a list of owners, which just as often masks the history of diverse meanings and of the work in space and time.

The Lost Kerstrat-d’Hauterives Collection and Its Provenance (Its Trajectory) In order to better establish the theoretical contribution of this distinction to the study of early cinema, I will take the example of a lost collection known for the many traces it has left behind: the collection of a pair of French exhibitors, Marie de Kerstrat and Henry de Grandsaignes d’Hauterives, a mother and son active in Quebec and the United States between 1897 and 1910 whose work was partially documented some thirty years ago and was completed in 2017.2 Some may contest my definition of this stock of films as a collection, and yet this is how it was conceived and used at the time. Its

From Provenience to Provenance | 49

importance in the United States between 1900 and 1910 was initially vaunted by the publicity of Kerstrat and d’Hauterives: “The Viscount d’Hauterives relies on no other firm. All his pictures are his property and he possesses the largest collection in the world of pictures in color, all of which have been hand-colored. The collection is valued at $25,000 and enables him to change the program every day and always have new material for his audience.”3 Naturally, this is publicity, but it has been confirmed by numerous reviews and was underscored by several trade papers at the moment when the Edengraph projector used by the Viscount was launched: “The story of the Edengraph as told by George Kleine . . . . The first Edengraph that I myself saw was in use at the Delmar Garden, at St. Louis, during the World’s Fair, at the exhibition given by Count d’Hauterives, who is well known to the trade as having the largest individual stock of special hand colored film of anyone in the United States, and whose reputation is that of projecting as perfect a moving picture as is possible with the most advanced appliances.”4 The collection began in 1897 with historical Lumière films (such as Napoléon et le pape Pie VII and Combat naval de Trafalgar) and Méliès films (Le Cauchemar, Le Laboratoire de Méphisto, Le Château hanté) and was advertised and commented on as a collection of history films, a fact highlighted by the company’s initial name, Historiographe Compagnie, which had its beginnings in Quebec. The most important and frequently shown film was Life and Passion of Christ. In 1897, Kerstrat and d’Hauterives showed the Lumière version, which they later replaced with the successive versions produced by Pathé (1903 and 1907). To avoid problems, the commentary was nevertheless always similar: the Viscount commented on the images’ aesthetic and the mise-en-scène, as other exhibitors commonly did with this topic. Kerstrat and d’Hauterives made their first appearance in the United States in 1899 with Méliès films re-creating the Spanish-American War (Explosion du cuirassé Maine), but this operation came to grief as their employer, Huber’s Museum, was sued by Edison for patent infringement. Conscious that they had to show American films in the United States, Kerstrat and d’Hauterives had acquired Edison films (such as Combat SharkeyMcCoy and What Happened to Jones). Nevertheless, they tried to maintain the French-language status of the collection by boldly staking their claims in American newspapers at the height of the patent war: in June 1901, an article published in various newspapers asserted that Henry d’Hauterives, with the support of the French government, was suing the American

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government for copyright protection of the Historiograph. He explained that French films were copied in the United States as if they were only a series of photographs and that to put an end to this plagiarism he was asking that films be recognized as artworks in their own right.5 This campaign to protect the French identity of their business and their collection appears, however, to have failed, for a few years later they were regularly showing several American films (Jack and the Beanstalk, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, etc.), and in their advertising they even paid tribute to Edison as the inventor of cinema.6 The collection evolved from its historical content toward entertainment adapted to amusement parks, following contracts in Atlantic City and in particular after being hired for six years (from 1904 to 1910) in St. Louis at the very popular amusement park Delmar Garden. By that time their show was based on colored French fairy plays by Méliès and Pathé (Faust, Cendrillon, Aladdin, Al Baba, etc.) and on big American hits (such as Rube and Mandy at Coney Island, The Great Train Robbery, and Deceived Slumming Party). The collection’s evolution shows that it corresponds to the model for French cinema in the United States theorized by Richard Abel: first, a major role in the market, followed by fairly rapid decline after sustained American production, which undermined French films.7 As their operations in the United States grew more difficult, the collection began to be sold off: around 1910 there appeared advertisements for the Historiograph featuring the 1900 version of the Life and Passion.8 Did there already exist in 1910, therefore, a market and an audience for these “old” films? Kerstrat and d’Hauterives appear at this time to have made the definitive decision to leave the United States and to try their luck elsewhere. The best indication of this decision was the sale of their old name and the oldest part of their collection to a traveling exhibitor named E. Rapp, who operated for several years in Missouri and Kansas using the names Historiograph and Parisian Mimo-Dramas and indicating in his publicity that the Life and Passion he was showing was the version from 1900.9 After the departure from the United States, the makeup of the collection is unknown. Kerstrat and d’Hauterives continued to work in Bermuda in the winter and in St. Pierre and Miquelon from 1910 to 1913, but we do not know what they showed. The last films were definitively lost when they returned to France in September 1913: all their baggage, including their

From Provenience to Provenance | 51

films, was swallowed up in the port of St. Malo when the small boat ferrying them capsized. The Viscount continued to screen films for soldiers during the 1914–1918 war, but it is not known what he showed. The collection had suffered a variety of misadventures throughout its use. It was, for example, damaged or reduced in size through accidents: a fire during a screening (in St. Rémi, Quebec, in September 1900) and a theft during a train trip between Montreal and Ottawa in January 1900—a classified ad in a newspaper noting that the bag containing the “Historiograph collection” weighed fifteen kilograms.10 Competitors and the media also tried to discredit the business by questioning where Kerstrat and d’Hauterives were from. The history of this collection cannot be traced by its surviving elements because these have disappeared, but by studying its trajectory (its provenance) we are able to confirm certain theoretical models of the development of early film exhibition in the United States and also to add some perspective to particular aspects or formulate a few hypotheses: existing collections are surviving, sedentary, immobile, protected, and “preserved,” and their provenience indicates the point they originated from to the point where they became immobilized. The history of this lost collection tells us instead about the trajectory of a collection that was once living, itinerant, evolving, precarious, heterogeneous, and neither protected nor preserved because it was subjected to all the ups and downs of the life of an artisanal itinerant business. We are familiar with the state of preserved collections, but we know little about their life; whereas, although we are ignorant of the state of lost collections, we sometimes know quite a bit about their past life, and their history can contribute to shining light on the existence of “provenu” or even “parvenu” collections and to thinking about them with less complacency.

A Moment in the Collection’s Provenance (St. Louis, 1907) My most recent digital archival research has enabled me to find textual and contextual artifacts that document a moment in the trajectory/provenance of the Kerstrat-d’Hauterives Collection. In this case we can say that the provenience/place of origin is important, because St. Louis, Missouri, was where Kerstrat and d’Hauterives were most active during the ten years they spent in the United States. They resided and worked in this city from May to October each year from 1904 to 1910.

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An article published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in December 1906 is highly informative about the relations between the newspaper, the audience, and the film as well as between the lecturer and the film.11 This twopage article was part of a special color supplement sponsored by a St. Louis department store, named throughout the other pages of the section: the “Grand Leader,” the property of Stix, Baer and Fuller, D.G. Co. The story of the life of Christ was thus inserted into printed commercial advertising meant to stimulate consumption over the year-end holidays by joining religious exaltation for adults with fun and excitement for children waiting for their Christmas presents. The Passion film was thus a consumer object in the rapidly emerging film industry at a time of enthusiasm in a country undergoing dazzling economic progress. Today the life of Christ seems incongruous on these two pages inserted into an advertising section in which texts, drawings, and photographs showcase Christmas gifts. The photograph of the Viscount d’Hauterives appears on the page among photographs of the film in a circular frame, in contrast with the rectangular film frames on the same page, something like a close-up or like the lecturer close to the screen (see fig. 3.1). This spatial arrangement, in which the subject precedes the object and stands out from it, is similar to the temporal relation between newspaper and film: the article is a long preamble to the screening, touting the value of the film but contextualizing it by recalling the earlier fears of the local clergy. The text begins with a headline atop both pages in medieval-style type: “Remarkable Pictures Coming to St. Louis. The Life of Christ in Moving Pictures.” Under the headline, eleven photograms from the film depict the tableaux of The Life and Passion, identified by a written caption. The largest photogram stretches across both pages and shows the Last Supper. Around the circular photograph of the Viscount on the left-hand page are smaller photograms in chronological order: “In the Manger . . . Flight into Egypt . . . The Holy Family.” Key elements of the text are printed in bold around the images: “Figures Posed by Head of Jesuits Under the Sanction of the Vatican . . . Photographs of Real Men Being Crucified Shock St. Louis Ministers Until They Learn the Facts . . . Historical Accuracy of All Accessories . . . Miracles Performed Before Moving Picture Machine . . . Modern Invention Graphically Depicts Every Occurrence From Last Supper to the Resurrection . . . Climax of the Moving Picture Craze.”12 The article remarks that moving picture fever had reached its limits and that this context had made it possible for producers to make remarkable films on the life of Christ. It points out that previously the clergy had been

From Provenience to Provenance | 53

Figure 3.1. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Sunday Magazine, 1906-12-09, page 6.

strongly opposed and had even obtained injunctions and the intervention of the police to prevent the screenings. It explains that rapid technical progress in the cinema now made possible a very sophisticated reproduction of the life of Christ, so much so that the pope and the Vatican now allowed such films, if they could supervise them. This was the case of the film mentioned in the article, shot in Paris under the close direction of the Jesuits, who guided the construction of the sets, the creation of the costumes, and, especially, the acting to ensure that the historical facts were as faithful as

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possible in each of the thousands of photographs that made up the film. According to Henry d’Hauterives, this multiplied by thousands the film’s historical credibility: The pictures, which have been supplied by expertise, reveal a remarkable degree of historical accuracy. As each one of the people in these pictures was moving naturally at the time the pictures were taken, the grouping has been striking and harmonious and what artists call the “composition” singularly successful. . . . The enacting of the scene in which Judas plays so strong a part had to be performed under the instructions of experts. The Jesuit priests know all these New Testament scenes by heart and it was a comparatively easy thing for them to instruct the actors of this remarkable performance. . . . A microscopic inspection of these pictures almost leads to the conclusion that real nails were in fact driven into the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet and that he had pressed down upon his head a crown of real thorns which made the blood trickle down his face.

This text is clearly different from the texts known to us that comment on the Passion (such as the Lubin company’s texts), but its interest lies in the way it contextualizes the St. Louis screenings by subjecting them to the interpretation of an exhibitor who had worked in this city for several years and was quite familiar with its parameters. His long explanations of the former opposition of the clergy and of the more recent approval of the church were no doubt justified by the reticence he encountered in this city. This part of the text could serve as a preamble to the screening of the films, a function it also filled through the newspaper. Nevertheless, no part of the text describes the narrative, as did the Lubin texts and other texts. Rather, it sought the favor of Edison, in addition to that of the pope: “This is regarded as the most audacious performance ever attempted by the owners of the remarkable instrument invented by Thomas A. Edison.” Henry d’Hauterives would certainly still recall that in 1899 he had been fired by Huber’s Museum, accused by Edison of having breached his copyright by displaying the Historiograph. An inset in the middle of the two pages is entitled “1080 pictures per minute.” It explains that to produce the illusion of movement the camera must take eighteen photographs per second, and that this film, some forty minutes in length, required more than one hundred thousand snapshots. This shorter text underscored again the importance of the debates around the contrast between photograms and continuity, emphasizing the fact that artistic merits lie in movement arising from the succession of images. This demonstration by Viscount d’Hauterives, including the allusion to Edison and his invention, should be seen in the light of the text he published in

From Provenience to Provenance | 55

St. Louis in 1901 in which he stated his intention to sue the American government. There he declared that Edison’s patent was invalid because it protected only the series of photographs, whereas a film was a work for which duration was an essential element. D’Hauterives’s long explanation is difficult to understand, as for several years prior St. Louis had seen several screenings of passion plays without appearing to cause any controversy. Among these was Passion Play of Oberammergau, screened on the Pike throughout the 1904 World’s Fair and accompanied by a lecture by M. McDowell.13 There was also a screening by Burton Holmes and several others.14 Perhaps Henry de Grandsaignes d’Hauterives had personally witnessed this resistance, because he showed films in St. Louis schools and other venues and was criticized by the clergy. French Catholicism still had a major role in this town; in fact, it still does to this day. Here, in the mid-nineteenth century, was built the largest Catholic cathedral in the American West, and on August 25, 2014, the keys to the city were given to the current pretender to the throne of France and Navarre, Louis de Bourbon, Duke of Anjou. In this context, the position of Kerstrat and d’Hauterives in St. Louis may have been lucrative but delicate, and this balancing act would explain the major precautions in this text. Even had the collection survived it could not tell us more on this topic, and we would have to study its trajectory just the same.

Conclusion The present study suggests including among what is known as a “collection” lost bodies of work that can be documented. In this sense, prerental-era projectionists become the owners of collections that have become lost. The trajectory of this lost series becomes an interesting topic of history, prompting us to see present-day collections as the tip of a long-submerged iceberg. I see these bodies of films belonging to itinerant exhibitors as collections, as these exhibitors themselves conceived them, and I would point out that these bodies of films were once living, evolving, fragile, and unprotected, unlike surviving collections, which are often bodies of work assembled after the fact. Their former life is not comparable but can be better known and understood by making connections between them and those bodies of work whose past is now virtual. In the same book I quoted at the outset of this article as my main source for these thoughts on provenance, Anne Higonnet reminds us that the term often describes the mere list of successive owners of a work or a collection that has acquired value over time. She

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emphasizes that this history of changing ownership often masks the history of the work itself and the diverse meanings ascribed to it.15 I would add that the combined study of the origin and trajectory of lost collections can contribute to a less complacent interpretation of those collections that have been preserved. For the study of the provenience (origin) of lost collections, digital archives are a goldmine of new information. Research now makes it possible to obtain very quickly large quantities of information previously almost impossible to discover. In 1982–1984, I needed two years to re-create the itinerary of Kerstrat and Grandsaignes d’Hauterives in Quebec alone, whereas in 2016–2017, I re-created their itinerary in the United States in a few months, analyzing this in a book published in 2017. St. Louis newspapers enabled me to extend a local study (provenience), while all the texts I found from a variety of other locations together enabled me to trace the provenance (trajectory). All of these data may someday, if not make it possible to rediscover films or collections, at least help to understand the trajectory of the collections that have been preserved through a better understanding of those that have been lost. We might also view differently the definition of a collection in general: at a conference in Montreal in 2017, Rick Prelinger spoke of YouTube as a living and productive collection, if only because of its extremely broad reach.16 In the new historical and archival context, the study of provenience may be the description of a virtual site and provenance the study of a trajectory in the digital world. The as-yet-unknown aspect of this new environment is nevertheless its fragility, conscious that film stock lasts less than a hundred years and the life span of digital media is still difficult to foresee. We might easily imagine that many digital archives will disappear, that collections will be parts of a whole whose lost elements will be similar to what physicists now call “black matter”: invisible, but physical reality can no longer be accounted for without it.

Notes 1. Rosemary A. Joyce, “From Place to Place: Provenience, Provenance, and Archeology,” in Provenance: An Alternate History of Art, ed. Gail Feigenbaum and Inge Reist (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2012), 148. 2. Germain Lacasse, “Dream World”: Parcours et discours d’un duo d’exploitants français aux USA 1899–1910 (Lac Brome: self-published, 2017).

From Provenience to Provenance | 57 3. Anonymous, “Music Hall,” The Auburn Bulletin, January 30, 1905, 5. 4. Anonymous, “History of the Edengraph,” Moving Picture World, March 28, 1908, 264; Moving Picture World 7, no. 4 (July 23, 1910): 199; Film Index 6, no. 4, 10–11; The Billboard, July 23, 1910, 24. 5. Anonymous, “Two Governments in Picture Suit,” The Republic (St. Louis), June 4, 1901, 6. This article was also published under the title “Storyettes” in the Shreveport, Louisiana, Times, June 11, 1901, 4. It likely also appeared in other newspapers as well. 6. Anonymous, “Remarkable Pictures Coming to St. Louis,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 9, 1906, 90–91. 7. Richard Abel, The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American 1900–1910 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), xii. 8. “Historiograph” advertisements, Springfield Missouri Republican, September 24, 1911, 7; Macon Daily Chronicle, December 11, 1911, 3; Chillicote Constitution, December 16, 1911, 8; Wichita Beacon, 17 March 1913, 4; and Wichita Daily Eagle, March 16, 1913, 22. 9. Advertisement, “E. Rapp’s Historiograph,” Chillicote Constitution, December 16, 1911, 8. 10. La Presse (Montreal), September 14, 1899. 11. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 9, 1906, 90–91. I will not comment in this article on the work of the lecturer, but this should also be considered as a lost material not adequately taken into account in history today and about which present-day collections say practically nothing. 12. Ibid. 13. Anonymous, “Will Describe Passion Play,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 27, 1904, 8. 14. Advertisement, “Burton Holmes,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 6, 1905, 6. 15. Anne Higonnet, “Afterword: The Social Life of Provenance,” in Gail Feigenbaum and Inge Reist, eds., Provenance: An Alternate History of Art, 195. 16. Rick Prelinger, “The Emergence of Collecting and the Effacement of Archives,” Cinema in the Eye of the Collector conference, Montreal, June 4–8, 2017.

Bibliography Abel, Richard, The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American 1900–1910. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999. Douglas, Jennifer, “Origins: Evolving Ideas about the Principle of Provenance.” In Currents of Archival Thinking, edited by Terry Eastwood and Heather MacNeil, 23–43. Santa Barbara: Libraries Unlimited, 2010. Higonnet, Anne, “Afterword: The Social Life of Provenance.” In Provenance: An Alternate History of Art, edited by Gail Feigenbaum and Inge Reist, 195–209. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2012. Joyce, Rosemary A., “From Place to Place: Provenience, Provenance, and Archeology.” In Provenance: An Alternate History of Art, edited by Gail Feigenbaum and Inge Reist, 43–56. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2012. Koszarski, Richard, “Richard Hoffmann: A Collector’s Archive.” In A Companion to Early Cinema, edited by André Gaudreault, Nicolas Dulac and Santiago Hidalgo, 498–524. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Lacasse, Germain, “Dream World”: Parcours et discours d’un duo d’exploitants français aux USA 1899–1910. Lac Brome: Germain Lacasse, 2017.

58  |  Provenance and Early Cinema Lacasse, Germain, and Serge Duigou, Marie de Kerstrat, l’aristocrate du cinématographe. Quimper: Éditions Ressac, 1987. Musser, Charles, “Les Passions et les mystères de la passion aux États-Unis 1880–1900.” In Une invention du diable? Cinéma des premiers temps et religion/An Invention of the Devil? Religion and Early Cinema, edited by Roland Cosandey, André Gaudreault and Tom Gunning, 145–186. Sainte Foy and Lausanne: Presses de l’Université Laval/ Éditions Payot Lausanne, 1992.

Websites Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec: http://www.banq.qc.ca/accueil/ Chronicling America: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/ Cinémathèque Québécoise: http://www.cinematheque.qc.ca/ Media History Digital Library: http://mediahistoryproject.org/ Newspapers.com: https://www.newspapers.com/ Old Fulton Post Card: http://www.fultonhistory.com/Fulton.html

GERMAIN LACASSE is Honorary Professor at the University of Montreal. His books include Histoires de scopes. Le cinéma muet au Québec and Le bonimenteur de vues animées. Le cinéma muet entre tradition et modernité. He is currently writing about the history of the magic lantern and the illustrated lecture in Québec.

4 PROVENANCE AND FILM HISTORIOGRAPHY 1910s Films at the George Eastman Museum Grazia Ingravalle

T

he provenance of the film collections at the George Eastman Museum reveals a vast network of relations between the museum’s first curator of motion pictures, James Card, and film societies, collectors, film dealers, film labs, independent distributors, and the Hollywood studios, along with federal institutions and other national and international film archives. This vast and articulated web of relations sheds light on a postwar film culture dominated by historical revisionism and a firm aversion to fixed historical canons. This was the cultural and social milieu that allowed the preservation of often obscure early films, and it played a key role in the formation of the museum’s collections since the institution’s origins as George Eastman House (GEH).1 This essay concentrates on the provenance of films such as George Nichols’s The Cry of the Children (1912), Helen Gardner and Charles Gaskill’s Cleopatra (1912), and Scott Sidney’s The Gangsters and the Girl (1914). These titles are currently preserved at the George Eastman Museum and well represent the diversity of 1910s films in its collections. Placing the provenance of films like The Cry of the Children, Cleopatra, and The Gangsters and the Girl within the continuing history of their preservation and changing historical value leads us to reconsider their significance within present historiographical debates around early cinema. It encourages us to explore the decade between 1907 and 1917, delimited on one end by the

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better-defined “cinema of attractions” and on the other by classical Hollywood cinema. Through this history, this essay questions the tautological definition of “transitional cinema”—which Ben Brewster defines as an oxymoron—foregrounding instead the historical specificity and stylistic diversity of 1910s cinema.2 In tracing the provenance of these films, I take on Paolo Cherchi Usai’s epistemological challenge to treat archival films as unique objects and material artifacts that bear the traces of their unique projection histories and storage conditions.3 Their provenance, however, unearths not only the material history of these film artifacts but, crucially, also the social history of their circulation before and after they reached the museum. Drawing on the work of art historian Anne Higonnet, we might think of provenance as “the social life of art things—extending from the conditions that brought objects into being, all the way to present conditions of collection and exhibition (which might continue to change long after objects were acquired by a museum).”4 In the case at hand, tracing the provenance of The Cry of the Children, Cleopatra, and The Gangsters and the Girl illuminates the particular film culture that surrounded their acquisition and preservation, including the history of their screenings and restorations, and their contribution to early cinema’s historiography, then as well as now.

Transitional Cinema in North America’s Postwar Film Culture George Eastman House was created in 1948. In that same year, James Card, in his capacity as assistant to curator Beaumont Newhall, began expanding the museum’s film collection.5 He took the Museum of Modern Art’s film collection as a standard for comparison, attempting to acquire all the titles that Iris Barry had not already selected, according to a principle of exclusion.6 Through selective acquisitions and film programs, MoMA had de facto established the very first film historical canon. Its core narrative was consolidated through the work of historians like Robert Brasillach, Maurice Bardèche, Paul Rotha, Lewis Jacobs, and Arthur Knight, crystallizing into what David Bordwell identifies as the “Basic Story” of the evolution of cinematic language, from Georges Méliès through Edwin Porter and D. W. Griffith, up to film’s artistic maturity in the 1920s.7 While Card’s operation earned GEH the derogatory epithet of “archive of trivia” (especially around MoMA’s circles), his strategy was actually motivated by a radical refutation of established historical canons.8 As

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Card stated in a 1957 speech at the Canadian Federation of Film in Toronto, “no one knows today which films are the classics of motion picture history .  .  .  ,” a kind of “agnostic” attitude that he shared with many other private collectors and enthusiasts of old films.9 His anticanonical historiographical stance also powerfully resonated with the mission statement of the New York–based Theodore Huff Memorial Film Society. “We are more concerned with film history than film art and/or appreciation,” explained William K. Everson; “we love the classics and the masterpieces and will show all we can get, but we’re perhaps even more interested in the lesser aspects of film history—the programmers, the B pictures, the interesting failures, that never seem to get much attention elsewhere.”10 It was according to this kind of nonhierarchical, nonsystematic, and at times polemical approach, in liaison with a vast network of private collectors, dealers, distributors, and enthusiasts, that GEH was able to build a repository of historical films in the shadow of the canon established by MoMA’s film library. It is not clear whether GEH’s acquisition of 1910s American films in the late 1940s and early 1950s was a conscious curatorial decision or rather an indirect consequence of Card’s skepticism toward MoMA’s historical canon. Even so, GEH’s film collection offers a privileged view into so-called transitional cinema, a period scarcely represented in film archival collections and still underinvestigated.11 In his partially autobiographic book Seductive Cinema, Card criticized the American Film Institute’s choice to catalog only the feature-length films from the 1910s, excluding the one-, two-, and three-reelers, which represented the majority of American films produced during those years. According to Card, the AFI catalog’s “fourreel” criterion negatively affected the preservation of shorter films, resulting in gaps in the documentation (particularly relating to the years between 1911 and 1915) and failure to advance a more nuanced understanding of the historical specificity of short-film cinema in the 1910s. Among the AFI’s most notable omissions, Card cited the westerns of William S. Hart, Tom Mix, and “Broncho Billy,” the Thanhouser dramas directed by Carl Gregory and George Nicholls (like the 1912 The Cry of the Children), and the archetypical gangster film, The Gangsters and the Girl, all among GEH’s film holdings.12 In May 1949, Card purchased a 16 mm print of Thanhouser’s The Cry of the Children from Charles H. Tarbox, who ran Film Classic Exchange, a Hollywood-based independent distribution business that operated until his death in 1984. Tarbox, who wrote two film history books based on the films

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in his collection, played a key role within the film-collecting community, chiefly because of the rarity of his material, including exceedingly rare early silent films that only survive today thanks to his efforts.13 The purchase of The Cry of the Children came months after Card acquired a reduction print of the 1913 Italian detective drama Tigris, a film that he wrote would have demanded “a complete alteration of existing [historical] accounts,” revealing Italian cinema’s mastery of narrative devices as well as spectacle years before Griffith.14 In a lengthy analysis, Card highlighted the thematic resonance of The Cry of the Children with such events as the 1911 fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory and the 1912 strike at the American Woolen Company. In Card’s mind, the film’s documentary shots—their deep focus and miseen-scène, set in a real mill and depicting real child workers—resonated with Lewis Hine’s photographs of the same subject, also held at GEH.15 The film was screened for the first time as a matinee on April 7 and 8, 1951, during the series “From Narrative to Drama,” part of a longer program titled “The Silent Film as the Basis of the Art of Motion Pictures 1880–1948.”16 In the 1960s, the film was extensively used for teaching purposes at the Rochester Institute of Technology and in sociology and art history classes at the University of Rochester. In 2011, The Cry of the Children was inscribed in the National Film Registry, and thanks to Thanhouser Company Film Preservation Inc., a digital copy is available on Vimeo and on DVD, both based on the same source print.17 The museum acquired two master copies of Scott Sidney’s The Gangsters and the Girl (1914), produced by Thomas H. Ince for Kay Bee: a 16 mm print and a 35 mm nitrate print. The provenance of the former remains hard to ascertain. Card most likely acquired this, too, from Tarbox in 1951 for his personal collection and screened it (along with Tigris) at the Dryden Theatre that same year on April 28 and 29 as part of a series titled “The Detective Film.”18 The discovery of the film’s original script, found by collector and dealer John E. Allen in Fort Lee, New Jersey, around 1952, endowed The Gangsters and the Girl with renewed historical relevance and prompted the museum to negotiate the acquisition of the film’s “original” nitrate print from Tarbox.19 The script helped clarify key aspects of both the film’s production and Ince’s production workflow, including his so-called detailed shooting script, which helped advance narrative continuity.20 John E. Allen was a close friend of Card’s and a key actor in the network of collectors, film societies, and archives through which old film prints were exchanged. He

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owned a film lab, Friendly Service, based in Park Ridge, New Jersey, not far from Fort Lee (the first “film town” before the studios settled in Hollywood), where some early films that had been produced or simply stored there could apparently still be found.21 As Allen explained, the script of The Gangsters and the Girl, for instance, “somewhat ch[a]rred and water soaked . . . [was] a survivor of the Triangle explosion and fire in Fort Lee.”22 According to the George Eastman Museum’s file cards, the film’s nitrate print was acquired from Tarbox in 1954, whereas the 16 mm print became the museum’s property in 1957, when Card sold most of his collection to GEH.23 Card not only had a special liking for this particular title; he also seemed personally invested in attempting to rescue Ince’s reputation in the face of the primacy traditionally attributed to director D. W. Griffith, around whom MoMA had crafted what Card considered to be a historiographical myth.24 He thus organized special screenings at GEH for members of the Theodore Huff Memorial Film Society, after one of which, Bill Everson admitted he had gained “a new respect for Mr. Ince.”25 This is the context in which the print of The Gangsters and the Girl circulated: from Tarbox to GEH, and from Card to Allen and the Huff Film Society, which screened it in 1953, 1958, and 1976. Everson identified it as the archetypical gangster film that established some of the genre’s main narrative tropes.26 The film remains scarcely known today, mainly because, except for an obscure DVD transfer on sale on iOffer.com, it can only be viewed in situ in a handful of European and North American film archives.27 In comparison to The Cry of the Children and The Gangsters and the Girl, there is no record of Cleopatra’s acquisition, nor is it ever mentioned in Card’s correspondence. The inclusion of a six-reel film titled Cleopatra with no further details (year, director, or cast) in a 1953 list of Card’s personal films suggests he might have acquired it prior to that date. This is partly confirmed by Card’s request to Kodak’s film laboratory for two 16 mm reduction prints of Cleopatra in 1952, a request he canceled a few months later.28 The absence of exhibition records for Cleopatra, except for the screening of an excerpt as part of the 1965 series “The Devil’s Envoys: The Femme Fatale in Silent Drama,” indicates it was screened rarely if at all. While such neglect might have been due to the presence of several splices on the nitrate print or shrinkage (according to Card’s notes, however, this was then only around 0.7 percent), one could argue that Cleopatra did not hold particularly high historical or artistic value in Card’s view.29 This seems to be the case despite the print’s beautiful original tints and tones and its

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status as one of only eight surviving American feature films from 1912 and a rare example of women’s early filmmaking.30 We had to wait until the year 2000 when, thanks to collaboration between Turner Classic Movies and the George Eastman Museum, Cleopatra was restored and broadcast as part of a tribute to early women filmmakers.31 Everson’s program notes for Cleopatra—which was screened at the Huff Film Society in 1957, most likely borrowing the print from GEH—mirror Card’s scarce consideration. While conceding that even films like Cleopatra hold some kind of historical value, Everson did not seem able to fathom the idea that an experienced actress like Helen Gardner could have disregarded “all the lessons of cutting, editing and camerawork that had been taught by Griffith since 1908.” He could only sarcastically conclude that “Griffith’s methods were thought to be completely wrong by the Gardner company,” a patronizing attitude that belittles Gardner’s artistic merits, reasserting the myth of Griffith’s artistic genius.32 What is more, his judgment reveals the extent to which, despite professing a revisionist historical approach, Everson considered the self-effacing devices that would have later morphed into Hollywood’s classic style as a historical norm against which developments and delays had to be measured. More broadly, one could argue that even if the film culture in which these 1910s films recirculated had rejected fixed historical canons in favor of a more pragmatic historical revisionism, the same culture nevertheless still subscribed to a teleological research agenda that saw film form and technique progress toward an artistic maturity primarily defined by narrative development. This is not only evident in Everson’s and Card’s programming choices—think of GEH’s early programs structured around narrative and artistic development—but also in their analyses of film form. In Seductive Cinema, Card highlighted the subtlety of Sidney Scott’s use of superimpositions in The Gangsters and the Girl to render the girl’s mental struggle represented through “flash-forwards in imagined time” that do not reveal the actual denouement (see figs. 4.1 and 4.2), a device that in his view anticipated Alf Sjøberg’s use of the same technique in Miss Julie (1951).33 Similarly, Card praised The Cry of the Children’s technical innovations, such as the use of double exposure and fade-ins in the final flashback and recapitulation, to the detriment of what he considered the film’s most “primitive” aspects—namely, child star Marie Eline’s pantomimic acting style and her direct camera address. What Card (like many other historians after him) failed to highlight in The Cry of the Children is a somewhat

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less readable kind of “vision” sequence, one representing a recursive temporality, suspended between flashback and flash-forward, not signaled by dissolves, fade-ins, or fade-outs. Early in the film, the young son sadly looks down beyond the frame while sitting at the breakfast table in the mill workers’ home. This shot is followed by the boy’s vision of himself tiredly working in the mill until the end of the shift, when he leaves along with a procession of exhausted workers. The boy’s visual introspection exemplifies a kind of ambivalent cogitative image typically featured in many films from the “transitional” period, a device that later standardizations of the flashback would have phased out. Such imaginary visions remain unaccounted for equally in Card’s teleological history of film’s technical and artistic development as much as in later revisionist historiographies opposing the “cinema of attractions” to that of “narrative integration.”34 Nevertheless, the film’s preservation allows us to reconsider its complex experimentation beyond the binary of attractions and narrative. Exemplifying cinema’s fluidity and diversity in the 1910s, The Cry of the Children shifts across various visual registers, combining the use of subjective imaginary visions with a veristic style and visual symbolism (the prologue quotes Barrett Browning’s verses) along with the early “factory gate” film genre. Similarly, thanks to recent historiographical work on women film pioneers, we can reinterpret Cleopatra’s key formal features against the background of the work of early women filmmakers. Capitalizing on their fame as early film stars, Helen Gardner, Marion Leonard, Florence Lawrence, Florence Turner, and Gene Gauntier turned to independent production around 1912–1913, experimenting with film techniques and narrative tropes.35 In this context, Gardner’s mannered acting, Cleopatra’s tableaus, close-ups, and mise-en-scènes can be read in a new light, less as a sign of primitiveness than as a distinct and coherent film language revolving around female performance. Cleopatra’s stylistic elements reflect its femaledriven narrative and characterization, which autobiographically merge with Gardner’s star persona, acting skills, and entrepreneurial talent. As a material and social history of the changing historical value of 1910s films over time, provenance sheds light on different generations and brands of film historical revisionism. Tracing the provenance of The Gangsters and the Girl, The Cry of the Children, and Cleopatra highlights the mutually influential relationship between the preservation (or curatorial neglect) of specific films, film historiography, and formal analysis. At the same time, the history of 1910s cinema’s underrepresentation in archival

Figure 4.1. The Gangsters and the Girl, frame enlargement from nitrate print, courtesy George Eastman Museum. “Flash forward in imagined time.” Should Molly (Betty Burbridge) give the gang away to the police?

Figure 4.2. Or should she betray Detective John Stone (Charles Ray)?

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film collections and belated historical investigation invites us to question anew the oxymoronic notion of “transitional cinema” and look instead for its historical specificity. As Tarbox argued, between 1911 and 1917 the film industry “was to offer opportunities for profits beyond those of any previous period. And it was to offer them to many and varied individuals of most diverse backgrounds.”36 This diversity inevitably resulted in the coexistence of a rich variety of approaches and formal experimentation. By shifting our attention away from the impermanent features of 1910s cinema to look instead at its synchronic significance, we might finally see this body of work less as a cinema of transition than one of experimentation and diversity.

Acknowledgments I wish to thank the staff of the Moving Image department of the George Eastman Museum and the William K. Everson Archive at New York University. I am also grateful to Santander Bank, which supported this research with a small research mobility grant in 2016, and the Leverhulme Trust for awarding me an Early Career Fellowship (2017–2020).

Notes 1. The George Eastman Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, New York (GEM), was known as George Eastman House (GEH) until 2015, when it changed its name. I will use the original name when referring to the museum’s early history and GEM when discussing recent initiatives. 2. Ben Brewster, “Periodization of Early Cinema,” in American Cinema’s Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices, ed. Charlie Keil and Shelley Stamp (Berkley: University of California Press, 2004), 74. See also Keil, “‘To Here from Modernity’: Style, Historiography, and Transitional Cinema,” in Keil and Stamp, American Cinema’s Transitional Era, 51–66; and Kristin Thompson, “The Formulation of the Classical Style, 1909–28,” in The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, ed. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), 155–240. 3. Paolo Cherchi Usai, Silent Cinema: An Introduction (London: BFI, 2000), 44. 4. Anne Higonnet, “The Social Life of Provenance,” in Provenance: An Alternate History of Art, ed. Gail Feigenbaum and Inge Reist (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2012), 203. 5. George Eastman House, A Collective Endeavor (Rochester, NY: George Eastman House, 1999), 5–7. 6. James Card, Seductive Cinema: The Art of Silent Film (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 120.

68  |  Provenance and Early Cinema 7. See Maurice Bardèche and Robert Brasillach, The History of Motion Pictures, trans. Iris Barry (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1938); Paul Rotha, The Film Till Now: A Survey of the Cinema (New York: Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith, 1930), 24; Lewis Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film: A Critical History (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co, 1939); Arthur Knight, The Liveliest Art: A Panoramic History of the Motion Picture (New York: New American Library, 1957); and David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 12–45. 8. Card, Seductive Cinema, 120. 9. James Card, “Archives and Archivists” (unpublished speech addressed at the Canadian Federation of Film, Toronto, Ontario, August 31, 1957), Stills, Posters, and Paper Collection (SPPC), GEM. I am grateful to Nancy Kauffman, still archivist at GEM, who transcribed this and other speeches and made them available to me. 10. William K. Everson Archive, The Theodore Huff Memorial Film Society—A Brief History by William K. Everson, undated mimeograph, accessed August 27, 2018, https://www​ .nyu.edu/projects/wke/byseries/huff_index.php. 11. David Pierce, The Survival of American Silent Feature Films: 1912–1929 (Washington, DC: Council on Library and Information Resources and the Library of Congress, 2013), 19. 12. The American Film Institute Catalog: Feature Films 1911–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), xv; Card, Seductive Cinema, 72–74. 13. Brent E. Walker, Mack Sennett’s Fun Factory: A History and Filmography of His Studio and His Keystone and Mack Sennett Comedies, with Biographies of Players and Personnel (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2010), 105. 14. James Card to Charles H. Tarbox, April 26, 1949. In the early years, the GEH’s policy limited the acquisition of nitrate films. See Card to Tarbox, December 21, 1948, both in SPPC, GEM. 15. Card, Seductive Cinema, 74–77. See also Richard Abel, “1912: Movies, Innovative Nostalgia, and Real-Life Threats,” in American Cinema in the 1910s: Themes and Variations, ed. Charlie Keil and Ben Singer (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 80–82; and Steven J. Ross, Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 106. 16. GEH, Dryden Theatre Motion Picture Lecture Series, March and April 1951, SPPC, GEM. 17. Library of Congress, Complete National Film Registry Listing, accessed August 27, 2018, https://www.loc.gov/programs/national-film-preservation-board/film-registry​ /complete-national-film-registry-listing/. The Cry of the Children, Vimeo, accessed August 27, 2018, https://vimeo.com/18500930; Thanhouser Classics Video Collectors Set, Volume II: Under the Mutual Banner (1912 to 1914). 18. GEH, 1952 List: James Card Collection; and GEH, Dryden Theatre Motion Picture Lecture Series, March and April 1951, both in SPPC, GEM. 19. Card to Tarbox, December 23, 1953, SPPC, GEM. Here Card refers to the print as “original,” but it is not clear what he means by that term. 20. George C. Pratt, “See Mr. Ince …,” in “Image” on the Art and Evolution of the Film: Photographs and Articles from the Magazine of the International Museum of Photography, ed. Marshall Deutelbaum (New York: Dover, 1979), 88–90. 21. Richard Koszarski, Fort Lee: The Film Town (1904–2004) (Trieste, Italy: John Libbey, 2004), 3 and 152.

Provenance and Film Historiography  |  69 22. John E. Allen to James Card, September 17, 1952, SPPC, GEM. Allen later sold the script to the Cinémathèque Française. Pratt, “See Mr. Ince …,” in Deutelbaum, “Image,” 88–90. 23. The Gangsters and the Girl, file cards, GEM. 24. See George C. Pratt, “A Myth Is as Good as a Milestone,” in Deutelbaum, “Image,” 103–106. 25. William K. Everson to James Card, undated, SPPC, GEM. 26. William K. Everson, American Silent Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 228. 27. FIAF, Treasures from the Film Archives Database. 28. James Card to David Crumb (Developing Department, Eastman Kodak Company), April 22 and August 4, 1952, SPPC, GEM. 29. Cleopatra, projection card, SPPC, GEM. 30. Pierce, The Survival of American Silent Feature Films: 1912–1929, 19. 31. Charles Tabesh (Turner Classic Movies) to Caroline Yeager (GEM), November 1, 1999, SPPC, GEM. 32. William K. Everson Archive, Program Notes Listed by Title, accessed August 27, 2018, https://www.nyu.edu/projects/wke/notes/huff/huff_571022.htm. 33. Card, Seductive Cinema, 78. 34. Brewster, “Periodization of Early Cinema,” in Keil and Stamp, American Cinema, 73; and Ben Brewster, “‘Traffic in Souls’: An Experiment in Feature-Length Narrative Construction,” Cinema Journal 31, no. 1 (autumn 1991): 49–50. 35. Karen Ward Mahar, Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 54–79; see also Jane M. Gaines, Pink Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries? (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018). 36. Henry H. Tarbox, The Five Ages of Cinema (Smithtown, NY: Exposition Press, 1980), 2.

GRAZIA INGRAVALLE is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Brunel University London. She is currently working on her book manuscript Museums of Cinema: Archival Film Curatorship from Analog to Digital.

5 ISSUES OF PROVENANCE AND ATTRIBUTION FOR THE CANON Bookending Robert Paul Ian Christie

H

ow do we delimit the body of work that defines an early filmmaker and thus registers their place in the canon? By custom and practice in early film studies, due to the high proportion of lost works, catalogs have played an important role, often recording many more titles than are known to exist in any viewable form. During the film industry’s first decade at least, the business was moving faster than the publication of catalogs could document, so there is a high probability that unlisted films may not have been identified as belonging to a particular canon—or may have been misattributed and subsequently entered secondary listings. In what follows, I examine two cases that pose different challenges to establishing the Robert Paul canon. Given Paul’s importance as a foundational figure of British film, and a pioneer in creating new filmic forms, establishing the status of these is highly significant. It may also be of methodological value in addressing other cases of uncertainty over early provenance. A further consideration is how resistant to revision canons are, because a film that is considered “by X” can over time become a “fact” that resists challenge. Physical characteristics might be the ideal basis for identification, at least in cases where original prints or portions of them exist. Thanks to Harold Brown’s pioneering work at the UK’s National Film Archive, a procedure exists for determining the likely nationality and approximate date of any existing film print.1 However, the majority of surviving early films

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have been copied at least once and may have lost some or all of their original identifying features in the process or survive only as fragments. Two cases from the body of Robert Paul’s surviving work, which I discuss here, illustrate these different aspects of the problem of canonicity.2 One is the film known as Footpads, widely regarded as one of Paul’s most interesting early films. The other is a fragment, recently discovered in a private archive, that bears a misleading title. Footpads is the title that was given to a film acquired by the British National Film Archive at some point after 1971.3 Traditionally it has been attributed to Robert Paul and dated to 1896. This attribution has been so long established that when I compiled R. W. Paul: The Collected Films, 1895–1908 in 2007, a DVD of all known Paul films to date in 2007, I did not hesitate to include it, even though I struggled, in my commentary and booklet notes, to explain how such a seemingly anomalous film could have been made as early as 1896 (see fig. 5.1). Largely because the film appeared on this DVD, it has now been republished widely on YouTube with the confident assumption that it is indeed a Paul film. It has even generated some online discussion—more, in fact, than any other early Paul film. But is it by Paul? Apart from not looking like any other Paul production of this period, it appears in no known list or catalog. It transpires that the title Footpads has always been an archive “supplied” title. Luke McKernan, who formerly worked in the National Film Archive, says in an online discussion that the film had “characteristic black-edged perforations” and was therefore classed as a Paul film on “Brown” criteria.4 One online comment, based on the YouTube publication, suggests it is a Kinetoscope production of 1895. This is even more unlikely from what we know of Paul’s production capacity at that time, well before the building of his studio in 1898. Another suggestion is that it might be Arrest of a Bookmaker, listed by Paul in 1896 although not believed currently extant. However, the catalog description of this title—“Struggle of a betting man with the police, and his arrest”—does not seem to correspond to Footpads as we have it: a well-dressed man is beset by robbers at night, in a very public city-center setting, before being rescued by a policeman. Could this really be a film of 1896? The only extant Paul film of that year with a nocturnal setting is 2am or the Husband’s Return, which we know is a scene from a play and appears to have been filmed on a theater set, presumably moved into the daylight, as was The Soldier’s Courtship. But The Husband’s Return is neither as elaborate nor dramatic as Footpads. A

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Figure 5.1. Footpads as it appears in a modern safety print.

later Paul film that shows an innocent pedestrian assaulted, Robbery (1897, also known as A Wayfarer Compelled to Disrobe Partially), is set in the open air in daylight. Although the dramatic action of Footpads is similar to some half-dozen early films, its setting is distinctive and apparently unique. The presence of a central monument, with a backdrop of illuminated advertising signs, has often led to a quasi-automatic assumption that it is intended to represent London’s Piccadilly Circus. Roland-François Lack, in his detailed discussion on the Cine Tourist website, demonstrates that the setting is indeed authentically London and is “a topographically exact view of Ludgate Circus, looking towards New Bridge Street from Farringdon Street.”5 At the left edge of the frame is the former King Lud public house, while the Bovril and Vinolia signs were on the Imperial Buildings (since demolished). Although the obelisk was subsequently moved, the building that carried the Mellin’s advertisement is still standing. Another aspect of this very well-preserved film that has attracted comment is the illuminated sign effect. Doel and Clarke note that “the sequential, letterby-letter illumination of advertising signs for ‘Bovril’ and ‘Vinolia’ in a painted night-time city backdrop is a pre-cinema technique borrowed

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Figure 5.2. Illustration by Charles Mulford Robinson, Harper’s Magazine, October 1902.

from lanternists.”6 Lack further observes that the sign’s progressive illumination and the film’s action are synchronized: “as the victim-to-be advances left to right across the set, the letters spelling Vinolia seem to advance with him, in parallel, until he is knocked down by the three robbers, at which point the letters go dark from top to bottom, falling as he falls” (see fig. 5.2) This is clearly a carefully choreographed film, which might lead us to doubt an early date. But is it even a British production? Lack reports finding an image from an American source that bears a striking similarity to the Ludgate Circus setting of the film.7 He writes, “The signature in the corner is that of American illustrator Henry Sumner Watson. The image originally illustrated an article by Charles Mulford Robinson called ‘Art Effort in British Cities,’ published in Harper’s Magazine in October 1902.” He continues, “There does seem to be a definite connection between his illustration and the backdrop of Footpads. All I can suggest for the moment is that either Watson produced the backdrop for Robert Paul and then recycled his material for a magazine illustration (replacing the actual brand names in the

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advertising with invented ones), or else Watson saw Paul’s film and was inspired by it—though both suggestions seem unlikely. Perhaps both images share a common, as yet undiscovered origin.”8 At present, we simply do not know when or by whom this film was made, but it seems overwhelmingly likely not to have been by Paul nor to have been made in 1896. In fact, Paul’s great period of innovation, which included making the world’s first multiscene films, came two years later, in the autumn of 1898. If Footpads were a Paul film, it would be a case of an elaborate setting never repeated and therefore a true “outlier.” However, it is clear that the by-now-conventional attribution still carries weight and will not easily be abandoned. My second case of a problematic attribution comes from the end of Paul’s career in production, which has been the subject of much speculation over the years. Why, or indeed exactly when, did Paul stop producing around 1909 and quickly close down his whole film business? Various reasons have been offered, some based on rumor, specifically that the death of a child was in some way linked with his decision to quit. Detailed biographical work has now shown that there is no date correlation between the early death of all Paul’s children and his abandonment of film. In fact, what he himself said in 1936, that the business had become “too speculative,” may well have been the simple truth of the matter.9 There were strong business grounds for recognizing that film production was becoming much more expensive by 1908–1909 and that future sales would be constrained by the power of producers such as Pathé and Edison to control the market.10 In fact, very few of Paul’s later films are extant, apart from an impressive documentary, Whaling Afloat and Ashore (1908). However, I have located a fragment of what appears to be one of Paul’s last films, which is known from reviews but has never been seen. The Burning Home, released in May 1909 to highly favorable reviews, involves a man who “misses his train, tram and ferry but cycles home in time to see a fireman save his child.” The reviews paid tribute to the scale of spectacle the film offered, especially a scene of what appears to be a full-scale house burned to the ground for the film. As a trade advertisement claimed for this “Headliner,” “Nothing of the kind has been attempted before. It is sure to draw large crowds . . . The British public dearly loves a fire, and this subject will prove the best investment you ever made.”11 The fragment discovered corresponds to what would be the film’s climax, with firemen fighting the fire and responding to the mother’s concern for her child (see fig. 5.3). Although spectacular, the film was apparently

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Figure 5.3. Fire rescue scene from The Burning Home.

not sufficiently successful in terms of sales to warrant continued effort on such a scale. At some point in the months after its release, Paul seemingly stopped all production and effectively withdrew from the film business.12 With this evidence of the extent that he was prepared to go to before deciding that a retreat from production was prudent, we can perhaps more easily understand the pragmatic basis of his decision. There is, however, a puzzling identification issue here too. The newly discovered fragment is prefaced by a rather elaborate title card, which does not correspond to The Burning Home!13 The title appears as “A Gallant Rescue,” and the card includes what had become Paul’s standard “RPL” trademark, with the explanatory text “Robert Paul, London,” even though there is no film with this title known to have been advertised by Paul. A trick film was released under the same title nine years earlier. In it, a fisherman trying to land a gigantic catch is rescued by a dock-keeper before the action plays in reverse to produce a “most laughable absurd” effect.14 The action shown in the fragment could justify the title “A Gallant Rescue,” but this is not Paul’s 1909 film, and the style of the title card clearly is late Paul. Indeed, it becomes the only known example of his later titling style15 (see fig. 5.4).

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Figure 5.4. The title currently attached to this scene.

There seems to be no plausible explanation of how this title became physically attached to a fragment of Paul’s much longer film, unless it is evidence of an attempt to sell the climax of the film as a separate short subject or as a promotional extract—a forerunner of the modern trailer. The Bioscope advertisement for The Burning Home urged exhibitors to “send for a sample at once.” Could what has survived be the sample on offer with its adjacent intertitle? However improbable, it is hard to imagine any other explanation. But this is another case where a “material fact” poses a challenge, even for a relatively stable canon such as Paul’s, which is otherwise well supported by the documentation of historic lists and catalogs. While much of the energy currently being devoted to scoping “media archaeology” seems to be directed toward interpretative strategies, it is important that this welcome enterprise retains the material basis of most archaeological activity. In the case of an even better documented canon, that of Lumière, the realization that there were at least four versions of Sortie d’usine was relatively recent and sheds important light on the demands made by the public launch of Lumière programs at the end of 1895.16 In the case of Paul, recent identifications by Camille Blot-Wellens and Bryony

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Dixon, respectively, of fragmentary materials held by the Archival Collection of the Swedish Film Institute and the BFI National Archive point to how much scope there undoubtedly is for further identifications and discoveries among surviving materials.17 Students of early film now have access to many new resources, especially from digitized records and lists, and the ability to consult far-flung experts. But while “unsupervised” online access is convenient and often beneficial, it can also give rise to unsupported assumptions and errors that may rapidly become accepted as fact. The consolidation of Footpads as a Paul production is a good example of this process at work. The danger of a “snowball” effect, whereby a hypothesis or assumption becomes accepted fact, is even more problematic with resources that depend on crowdsourcing, such as IMDb. One example of this process, in the context of Paul’s work, is the question of Walter Booth’s contribution to Paul’s studio output between about 1899 and 1906. This has progressed from an assumption to the claim on IMDb that Booth was “director” of thirty-eight Paul productions. Apart from the anachronism of the term “director” in this period, and the lack of any documentary evidence of Booth’s role in Paul’s company, this claim seems to derive from the belief that Booth’s background in stage magic led him to take charge of Paul productions involving trick-work. This has been challenged twice, by John Barnes in 2008 and by his brother William Barnes in 2016. The latter wrote in a program note for The Pordenone Silent Film Festival: One of John’s last articles before his death [in] 2008  .  .  . was entitled “The Quest for Walter Booth.” Even without access to our newly found portraits of Booth . . . John was convinced that Booth was the principal performer in the Paul films. He pointed out however that though Booth might have arrived at Paul’s studio well equipped with the tricks of the stage magician, the magic in the Paul films is entirely produced by a skilled film-maker, using the resources of the camera and the laboratory and a repertory of stop-motion, double exposure, camera inversion, laboratory manipulation.18

This trenchant historical analysis, acknowledging what little material evidence exists, serves to stabilize evaluation of the Paul canon. Undoubtedly there were many collaborators in the New Southgate studio, some of whom may have served as “directors” (notably J. H. Martin and Jack Smith), but all that can be claimed with any certainty is the company identity of the films issued by Paul.

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The unsolved questions posed by “A Gallant Rescue,” while welcome as material evidence, may also complicate or inform our assumptions about how Paul exited the film industry. Here there is perhaps a parallel to be explored in how historians of the medieval manuscript book have engaged with the composite nature of their surviving materials, giving new attention to the transmission and afterlife of these works in an avowed “media archaeological” turn.19 The model of modern films with verifiable “credits” is plainly unsuited to understanding early film, especially in its fragmentary surviving forms. Similarly, the authorship-based canons of conventional film studies may be equally unsuited to the urgent task of correcting and rewriting the history of this formative period. Becoming properly “archaeological” in relation to the surviving materials of early film, unafraid to accept the inability to assign identity or to explore modes of survival, may be the next challenges facing historians of the medium.

Notes 1. Harold Brown, “Physical Characteristics of Early Films as Aids to Identification,” FIAF, 1990. A new annotated edition of this is in preparation, edited by Camille Blot-Wellens. 2. Paul produced around eight hundred titles in his career, between 1895 and 1909, of which about eighty are currently known to exist in some form, including those “reconstituted” from printed Filoscopes. See the DVD R. W. Paul: The Collected Films, 1895–1908 (British Film Institute, 2007). I include a complete filmography, “Robert Paul Productions 1895–1909” in Ian Christie, Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 271–288. 3. Britain’s national film archive was originally called simply The National Film Archive and later the National Film and Television Archive. It is currently known as BFI National Archive. Documentation of how this film entered the archive seems to have been lost. But it does not appear in the printed NFA Catalogue of Viewing Copies dated 1971. 4. Recent inspection of the BFI Archive’s shrunken nitrate copy, kindly arranged by Bryony Dixon, does not resolve the identity of the film or its provenance. While the black edges and sprocket holes are broadly compatible with Paul productions, they are not sufficiently unique for a firm identification. However, they do not suggest a date as early as 1896. 5. Roland-François Lack, The Cine-Tourist, accessed June 1, 2018, https://www​.thecine​ tourist.net/piccadilly-circus-invisible-things.html; also https://www.thecinetourist.net/my​ -local-filmmaker.html. 6. Marcus A. Doel and David B. Clarke, “An Invention without a Future, a Solution without a Problem: Motor Pirates, Time Machines and Drunkenness on the Screen” in Lost in Space: Geographies of Science Fiction, eds. Rob Kichin et al. (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2005), 138. 7. Lack found the picture in the Proceedings of the Natural Electric Light Association Convention, held in Chicago in 1903, captioned as “Ludgate Circus, London, at night,

Issues of Provenance and Attribution for the Canon  |  79 showing that the use of large, striking electric signs is not confined to the United States of America.” 8. Lack, The Cine-Tourist. 9. Robert W. Paul, “Before 1910,” Symposium of the British Kinematograph Society, 1936. 10. Pathé started to lower the price of prints from 1903, provoking a crisis among British and other European producers, while Edison’s formation of the Motion Picture Patents Company in 1908 effectively curtailed their access to the American market. 11. The Bioscope, May 20, 1909, 42. 12. I have traced only two later films, Suspected; or the Mysterious Lodger (June) and What Happened to Brown (September). How Paul managed to quit the industry without any comment in trade journals remains a mystery. 13. The fragment was found in the Huntley Archive, and I must thank Amanda Huntley for access to this collection. 14. A Gallant Rescue, advertised in 1900 by Harrison & Co, a firm that Barnes doubted made any of their own productions. This film is not extant. 15. The Medium Exposed (1906) survives with a separate subtitle “Is Spiritualism a Fraud.” Both titles are in decorative capital letters framed by a border. Claire Dupré la Tour has carried out a detailed study of early titling practices for her doctoral dissertation at Paris III, concluding that Paul was the earliest to offer these. See also her “Early Titling on Films, and Pathé’s Innovative and Multilingual Strategies in 1903,” in Jean-François Cornu and Carol O’Sullivan, eds., The Translation of Films, 1900–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 16. Apparently the subject was in such heavy demand that it had to be reshot on numerous occasions, as negatives became exhausted. See “Les sorties d’usine,” in L’œuvre cinématographique des Frères Lumière, coordinated by Manuel Schmalsteig and students at the EAA La Chaux-de-Fonds, accessed June 1, 2018, https://catalogue-lumiere.com/series​ /les​-sorties-dusine/. This is based on the prior work of Michelle Aubert, Jean-Claude Seguin et al., La production cinématographique des Frères Lumière (Paris: Bibliothèque du film: Editions Mémoires de cinema: Diffusion, CDE, 1996). 17. A Collier’s Life (1904) and The Fatal Hand (1907) were identified in the Swedish Archive and were restored in 2016. Part of Fun on the Clothes Line (1897) was discovered in the BFI National Archive in 2017. 18. William Barnes, “The Magic Films of Robert Paul,” catalog of the Giornate del Cinema Muto (Pordenone, 2016), 207–208. John Barnes’s article was published posthumously by the Magic Lantern Society in its Newsletter 92 (2008). In fact, Booth’s subsequent career involved pioneering animation work rather than trick-based special effects. For a more nuanced view of Booth, see Malcolm Cook, Early British Animation. From Page and Stage to Cinema Screen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 84–87. 19. See for instance Martin K. Foys, “Medieval Manuscripts: Media Archaeology and the Digital Incunable,” in The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches, ed. Michael Johnston, Michael Van Dussen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 119–139.

IAN CHRISTIE is Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck College and Gresham College, and Vice President of Domitor. He is author of The Art of Film: John Box and Production Design, A Matter of Life and Death, and The Last Machine: Early Cinema and the Birth of the Modern World.

6 SHATTERED PROVENANCE IN THE DIGITIZATION OF EARLY COLOR FILMS Barbara Flueckiger, Noemi Daugaard, and Olivia Kristina Stutz

T

he advent of digital technology has made it easier to provide access to early films, but there is little awareness of how deeply digitization severs the ties to the material basis of historical films and to early films in particular.1 A majority of the DVDs, Blu-rays, and DCPs currently circulating in cinemas lack information about their source material and digitization process. Our investigations2 have confirmed that current digitization practices are detrimental to three fundamental principles of restoration ethics—transparency, documentation, and reversibility— thereby shattering the provenance of digitized film.3 Transparency refers to intersubjectively defined guidelines that rest on well-grounded knowledge; documentation includes information about the origin of the material objects used for the restoration process and each step in the workflow in a human-readable form; reversibility requires that all the steps are nondestructive, thereby allowing future restorers to apply new insights and better techniques. To counteract the failings of current digitization practices, the team from the research project European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant FilmColors is devising a comprehensive, interdisciplinary approach to the investigation of film colors that includes chemicophysical investigations, advanced documentation of historical film prints, and aesthetic analyses of large groups of films. This approach is being extended by research into the cultural context of film color development

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within the research project Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Film Colors.4 These methods aim to safeguard the integrity of the artwork and thus its provenance, a critical requirement of restoration ethics.5 Integrity of the artwork includes the systemic relationship between the material manifestation and the philological and aesthetic expression of a film, respectively. Only when the material foundations, the aesthetic appearance, and all analog metadata are translated into the digital domain can we secure the provenance of the digitized version of a film in a transparent, scientifically sound, and thus sustainable way.6

Implications of Scanning Early Applied Colors As we have noted on several occasions, scanning is a reduction process; in Nelson Goodman’s terms, it is a translation into an explicit notation system.7 In the discipline of film studies and in archival practice, the processes and implications of film digitization have been rigorously addressed by Paolo Cherchi Usai in his landmark study The Death of Cinema and by Giovanna Fossati in her book From Grain to Pixel.8 Nevertheless, little to no attention has been given to the mechanical and optical layout of scanners. Some segments of the professional community have long known that scanning is essentially a black box operation, so it is surprising that customers (film archives, film restorers) did not long ago pressure manufacturers to develop film scanners that are better suited to the ethical requirements of restoration.9 In our extensive study Investigation of Film Material-Scanner Interaction, we were looking deeper into these neglected aspects by systematically analyzing key factors of the operation principles of scanners.10 This chapter addresses only two of these key factors: the problems involved in capturing early applied colors, and the optics of illumination. It is widely acknowledged that scanners were not devised for historical color film stocks but rather for more recent chromogenic stocks. As a result, their illumination and sensor setup are generally reduced to three narrow spectral bands that do not match the spectral distribution of early film colors: the dyes and pigments applied in tinting, toning, and hand and stencil coloring. The fact that such a scanner configuration is essentially not a capturing but a measuring device has been largely overlooked. Consequently, two reduction processes—the selective spectral extraction and the binary

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assignment by digitization—add to each other, resulting in severe and unexpected complex distortions to the point where some scanners essentially become color-blind. Once access to the film’s color information is cut off, it cannot be retrieved. Moreover, most scanners are not able to capture the full width of the film print, and this cuts off access to important analog metadata in the perforation area.11 The second topic that becomes increasingly pressing when we reconsider film digitization is the color appearance in cinema projection, which is highly influenced by the optical arrangement in the projector, the type of illumination (carbon arc, halogen, or xenon), and the properties of the projection screen. Film archivists and restorers have long been aware of the difference between looking at tinted or toned film print on the inspection bench and seeing it projected onscreen, but this difference has never been scientifically investigated. A crucial factor in the different appearance of color in these two contexts, the Callier effect, results from the difference between diffuse and directed—so-called collimated—illumination.12 While diffuse illumination scatters between the metallic particles in the film stock, producing lower contrasts, directed illumination causes these metallic particles to completely block out the light rays, which creates sharper images with higher local contrasts. In his physical investigations for the ERC Advanced Grant FilmColors project, research scientist Giorgio Trumpy provided evidence of the color shift caused by the wavelength dependency of the Callier effect.13 All the professional film scanners that are currently on the market, however, rely on diffuse illumination to prevent hot spots and lower the effect of dust and scratches. The objective of our new ERC VeCoScan research project is to advance methods of multispectral imaging. Such methods will facilitate capturing the full spectral range of historical color films and the deeper investigation of the chromatic Callier effect with a wider variety of film stocks and scientifically sound, side-by-side projections on historical projectors in the Lichtspiel/Kinemathek in Berne, as executed in 2019.14

Film as an Aesthetic Object Inspired by Giovanna Fossati’s distinction between film as a philological concept—the film as text—and the film as a material object plus the performative dimension of a screening in a specific dispositive, we will argue for an extension to a four-level model for the discussion of film digitization.

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The fourth level to be discussed here is film as an aesthetic object. By film as an aesthetic object, we are referring to the layer between film as a material object and its exhibition or viewing circumstances. This aesthetic interlayer is based on the intrinsic aesthetic expression that governs a work of art and may be limited, altered, or at least influenced by the technological and material constraints of a film at the time of its production. As numerous scholars and film restorers have emphasized, a film’s ephemeral status as an aesthetic object is enhanced by the diverse constellation of different film stocks and filmic objects, such as film prints, negatives, and various versions—for example, diverse tinted and toned prints or prints featuring combinations of film color processes.15 In addition, we have to understand the temporal influence on a film print’s chemical and physical conditions, such as processes of degradation and fading. With the concept of film as an aesthetic object we address Cesare Brandi’s notion of the double historicity of a work of art—the work of art as a witness of the context of its creation and the work of art with traces of its own history.16 We use the term faktura to refer to a film stock’s three-dimensional materiality. The Russian formalists used this term in the 1910s and 1920s to describe the texture, surface, and/or materiality of artworks; in this context, the term denotes the layering of the film base, the emulsion, and the dyes and/or color compounds. The concept of material aesthetics takes into account the close relationship between a film’s faktura and its interaction with light, which defines the color rendition in projection. For instance, the chromatic Callier effect is exclusively attributed to the fact that light is scattered or blocked by the particles embedded in the film’s emulsion, hence film’s material foundation is characterized by its three-dimensionality. The concepts of affordance and agency as introduced in the material theory by art historian Ann-Sophie Lehmann (based on the reflections by psychologist James J. Gibson and sociologist Bruno Latour) also provide a useful structure for the discussion of material aesthetics.17 Lehmann uses affordance to describe different material properties that provide certain aesthetic possibilities or limitations and agency to describe the resulting aesthetic initiatives executed by human actors.18 Thus, a film’s aesthetics is highly influenced not only by its materiality and its exposure to light but also by contemporary profilmic decisions in production design that in turn respond to the strengths and weaknesses of a certain film stock.

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Film Aesthetics in Relation to Materiality, Affordance, and Agency Mimetic two-color films from the 1920s provide a symptomatic instance for the affordance of color film technology and its agency. These films reproduce only a limited part of the color spectrum from orange-red to bluegreen and are thus intrinsically related to their color process and their set design. Two examples are the famous case of The Black Pirate (Albert Parker, USA, 1926), with its carefully controlled, desaturated color palette of the Caribbean sea in Technicolor No. II, and the Kodachrome Two-Color film Parisian Modes in Colour (Anonymous, USA, 1926), with its haptic display of high-fashion garments in mainly two colors.19 In both films, the limited colors are a testament to contemporary color film technologies. There is no reason for a production design consisting of the pure colors blue or purple (agency) because the mimetic two-color technology can’t afford to depict those colors accurately in the first place. This evaluation of affordance and agency in relation to material foundations in early film color processes is crucial for the investigation of the material aesthetics of early film and to notions of film provenance. At the same time, when talking about shattered provenance in the digitization of early films, different colors or entire color processes can also cause certain problems precisely because of their very materiality. For such materialbased obstacles, the method of material iconography established in art history provides a useful framework. This approach centers on the materiality of artworks to illustrate how they gain meaning from their constitutive materials while also acknowledging their sociocultural historicity.20 For example, the opaque, oil painting–like “look” of Technicolor No. III is most apparent in its blacks, created by the dye-transfer process in proportion to the colored gelatin matrix.21 The more gelatin there is on the matrix, the denser the dye becomes on the faktura, creating a relief effect on the film’s surface. The color black, containing all the given colors in a subtractive color synthesis on the blank film, is per se the densest element of every dye-based faktura. It also creates the elevated portions of the relief and embodies the most opaque (black) objects depicted within the film at the same time. Kodachrome Two-Color is a tanning process similar to Technicolor No. II that is often used for black backgrounds, as in Parisian Modes in Colour. In this film it was used not only to make the fabrics pop out but also, according to James Layton, to hide (early) defaults of its technology, like color fringing.22 This is another example of the relation between affordance and agency.

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Dye-based blacks from two-color films in relation to silver-based blacks from autonomous applied color processes differ significantly in terms of color density, metallic scattering, and texture. These effects on a film’s visual appearance need to be carefully considered when scanning. In addition, digitization of two-color films might also produce difficulties in color grading because of the limited gamut of digital color, while dye fading (for instance the green dye in Technicolor No. II) completely obscures a film’s historical aesthetics. Using scientific material analysis as an extension of material iconography for evaluating material properties and material aesthetics, it is possible to achieve a more authentic rendition of color systems.23 This method secures film provenance and the integrity of the film work. This also opens up the question of whether it is possible to retrace film provenance by analyzing large groups of films through digital humanities tools, such as the annotation and analysis tool VIAN used in the ERC FilmColors framework.24

Epistemology, Integrity, Digitization As we argue above, digitization can compromise a film’s integrity on several levels. In addition to material aesthetics, there is a more fundamental consideration: the epistemology that governs a technology. Indeed, the appearance of a film is the result of technological specificities that, in turn, are the product of multilayered influences such as the historical moment and societal context in which they originate. The relationship between technological innovations and society is at the heart of the social construction of technology theory introduced by Wiebe Bijker and Trevor Pinch. In their seminal 1987 work “The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts,” Bijker and Pinch focus on relevant social groups that, because of their specific needs and problems, define what a technological innovation must provide in order to be successfully implemented.25 Furthermore, color film technologies respond not only to needs; they also originate from traditions of thought that are strongly connected to scientific discourse.26 These foundations shape every color process and, as a result, are inherent to a film’s appearance. Therefore, digitizing a color film without respecting these cultural and epistemological factors severs it from a part of its significance and endangers its integrity. In order to avoid such an intervention, it is vital for every digitization to consider its object from various angles. A multifaceted methodology, as advocated by the ERC Advanced

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Grant FilmColors and the SNSF Film Colors projects, allows for a profound understanding of color film, facilitating an ethical approach to digitization that benefits the integrity and provenance of color film. Color film technology emerged when color was becoming a commodity. Regina Lee Blaszczyk details how the consumer culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was accompanied by the advent of colorful goods, facilitated by the availability of synthetic dyes.27 This strong presence of color advanced the efforts to classify and systemize color that had started in the seventeenth century. The color systems of Albert Henry Munsell and Wilhelm Ostwald are only two of several examples that emerged during this period.28 In addition, the color revolution led to a new scientific interest in human color perception. As Joshua Yumibe states, “The physiological study of color afterimages led to the theorization of persistence of vision: the notion that an afterimage persists on the eye for a fraction of a second after perceptual stimulation and that this allows for the perception of movement.”29 Yumibe further delineates that, although the theory of persistence of vision has since been refuted—the illusion of movement is now thought to be caused by the so-called phi phenomenon—it remains an important theoretical framework to consider when thinking about the development of early cinematography. It is no surprise that when film emerged, so did color cinematography. On the one hand, color in film responded to the contemporary need for colorful commodities. On the other hand, the scientific interest in the relationship between color, movement, and perception found its continuation in color cinematography. Additive two-color processes such as Kinemacolor exemplify how nineteenth-century perception theory informed cinematography.30 In fact, Kinemacolor was based on the idea that persistence of vision was not only responsible for the perception of movement but could also be used to create the illusion of color.31 Kinemacolor was dependent on a set of rotary filters that were dyed red-orange and blue-green. The specific hues used for these filters have their own epistemology, as they stem from a tradition of color theory focusing on primary and complementary colors. Hence, the apparatus and the technology are essential to every Kinemacolor film. The digitization of Kinemacolor and the digital re-creation of its assumed color appearance overthrow the entire epistemology of the process. Neglecting the cultural and societal foundations of color cinematography compromises the integrity of the filmic object as the product of a culturally and historically localized technology. The reproduction of a process such as Kinemacolor via digital means, or the digitization of tinting

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by partially color-blind film scanners, represents a separation of the work from its technology. In addition to being arbitrary, such a process is problematic in terms of cultural and technological heritage and in the way it shatters a film’s provenance.

Conclusion Our paper has shown that we need contextual research and information in order to develop digitization processes that respect the basic requirements of restoration ethics. To date, the institutional aspects of technical service providers and the often-limited personal and financial resources of clients fail to bring about changes resulting in digitization that is aligned with indepth scholarly and scientific insights. While changing insights and practices have always been part of the restoration process, we need to anticipate future technological developments, such as ultra wide-gamut projection systems, high-dynamic range contrast rendition, and higher frame rates that would allow for the emulation of a mechanical shutter in accordance with historical projection technologies. As we have previously stated, we should aim for technologies that fully capture film as a three-dimensional object with all the physical and chemical properties film comprises as a material object.32 This includes the vital analog metadata that contains additional information about a film’s provenance. There are many technologies in the field of computational photography that are already partially applied to the documentation and investigation of artworks. These advanced computational techniques will capture the multilayered structure and three-dimensional material properties of film, or the full contrast range with high-dynamic range imaging. Hopefully, such methods will one day create a comprehensive reconstruction of analog films by means of a technology yet to be invented.

Acknowledgments This project has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program, grant agreement No. 670446 FilmColors.

Notes 1. See Paolo Cherchi Usai, The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory and the Digital Dark Age (London: BFI, 2001) and Giovanna Fossati, From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in Transition (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009).

88  |  Provenance and Early Cinema 2. DIASTOR https://diastor.ch/ and our current project ERC Advanced Grant FilmColors, http://filmcolors.org/2015/06/15/erc/. (accessed November 27, 2018). 3. Cesare Brandi, Teoria del restauro (Turin: Einaudi, 1977). 4. See research project Film Colors. Technologies, Cultures, Institutions, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, accessed June 15, 2020, https://www.film.uzh.ch/en​/res​e​ ar​ch/projects/verbund/SNSF-FilmColors.html. 5. See Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film, “FIAF Code of Ethics” (2008). 6. As described by Harold Brown, Physical Characteristics of Early Films as Aids to Identification (Brussels: FIAF, 1990). 7. See for instance Barbara Flueckiger, “Material Properties of Historical Film in the Digital Age,” NECSUS. European Journal of Media Studies 1, no. 2 (2012): 135–153; Barbara Flueckiger, Claudy Op den Kamp, Franziska Heller, and David Pfluger, “‘Digital Desmet’: Translating Early Applied Colors,” The Moving Image 16, no. 1 (2016): 106–124; Barbara Flueckiger, Claudy Op den Kamp, David Pfluger, “A Material-Based Approach to the Digitization of Early Film Colours,” in The Color Fantastic: Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema, ed. Giovanna Fossati et al. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), 237–259; and Barbara Flueckiger, David Pfluger, Giorgio Trumpy, Simone Croci, Tunç Aydın, and Aljoscha Smolic, Investigation of Film Material–Scanner Interaction (2018): 88, available online, accessed November 27, 2018, https://diastor.ch/results/; and Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art. An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1968, 1978 edition), 159. 8. See Paolo Cherchi Usai, The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory and the Digital Dark Age (London: BFI, 2001) and Giovanna Fossati, From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in Transition (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009). 9. See for instance Thomas C. Christensen, “Restoring a Danish Silent Film,” in Preserve Then Show, ed. Dan Nissen (Copenhagen: Danish Film Institute, 2002), 141. 10. Flueckiger et al., Investigation of Film Material–Scanner Interaction. 11. See Ibid. 12. As described by André Callier, “Absorption und Diffusion des Lichtes in der entwickelten photographischen Platte, nach Messungen mit dem Martensschen Polarisationsphotometer,” Zeitschrift Für Wissenschaftliche Photographie 7 (1909): 257. 13. Giorgio Trumpy and Barbara Flueckiger, “Chromatic Callier Effect and Its Repercussions on the Digitization of Early Film Colors,” Journal of Imaging Science and Technology 63, no. 1 (January 2019): 010506-1-010506-11. 14. Research project ERC Proof of Concept: Development of a New Versatile Archival Film Scanner (VeCoScan), led by Barbara Flueckiger (2018–2020), see https://www.film.uzh​ .ch/de/research/projects/archive-projects.html (accessed June 15, 2020). 15. See discussion in Bregt Lameris, The Film Museum Practice and Film Historiography: The Case of the Nederlands Filmmuseum (1946–2000) (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017), 120. 16. Cesare Brandi, Teoria del restauro (Turin: Einaudi, 1977), 6. 17. See James J. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual System (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966) and James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979) as well as Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: University Press, 2005). 18. See Ann-Sophie Lehmann, “Das Medium als Mediator: Eine Materialtheorie für (Öl)Bilder,” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 57, no. 1 (2012): 69–88.

Shattered Provenance in the Digitization of Early Color Films  |  89 19. As described by John Belton, “‘Taking the Color Out of Color’: Two-Color Technicolor, The Black Pirate, and Blackened Dyes,” in The Color Fantastic: Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema, ed. Giovanna Fossati et al. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), 97–108. 20. See Monika Wagner, Das Material der Kunst: Eine andere Geschichte der Moderne. (München: Beck, 2001). Adapted to film studies, the method focuses on analog film materiality targeting the material bases of film objects (faktura) and the profilmic arrangement of the set design in relation to the depicted materials in the mise-en-scène as a result of a causal depiction process. Both the method and concept will be the focus of the forthcoming PhD thesis by Olivia Kristina Stutz on early color film. 21. Ulrich Ruedel, “The Technicolor Notebooks at the George Eastman House,” Film History 21, no. 1 (2009): 47–60. 22. See James Layton, “Two-Color Kodachrome Test Shots No. III (1922)” (Library of Congress National Film Preservation Board, n.d.), available online, accessed November 27, 2018, https://www.loc.gov/programs/static/national-film-preservation-board/documents /ko​dachrome.pdf. 23. See Flueckiger, Op den Kamp, Pfluger, “A Material-Based Approach to the Digitization of Early Film Colours” (2018), and Masaki Daibo, Tomohiro Hasegawa, Kasuki Miura, “Limiting Color Grading for Two-Color Film Restoration. Utilising a Spectroradiometer to Create a Specific LUT,” Journal of Film Preservation 96, no. 4 (2017): 97–106. 24. See Barbara Flueckiger, “A Digital Humanities Approach to Film Colors,” The Moving Image 17, no. 2 (2017): 71–94. 25. Trevor J. Pinch and Wiebe E. Bijker, “The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts,” in The Social Construction of Technological Systems. New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, ed. Wiebe E. Bijker et al. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 17–50. 26. An in-depth analysis of these topics, which can only be briefly introduced for the scope of this contribution, is an integral part of Noemi Daugaard’s forthcoming PhD thesis in the framework of the SNSF research project, Film Colors. Technologies, Cultures, Institutions. 27. Regina Lee Blaszczyk, The Color Revolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012). 28. A leading topic of these works was the concept of color harmony. In fact, most color systems are based on normative conceptions of harmonious color combinations and often include rules, or even mathematical formulas, to determine which colors should be combined. See for instance Albert Henry Munsell, Atlas of the Munsell Color System (Malden, MA: Wadsworth, 1915) and Albert Henry Munsell, A Color Notation (New York: Munsell Color Co., 1919) as well as Wilhelm Ostwald, Die Farbenfibel (Leipzig: Verlag Unesma, 1917) and Wilhelm Ostwald, Die Harmonie der Farben (Berlin: Verlag Unesma, 1918). 29. See Joshua Yumibe, Moving Colors. Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 17. 30. Kinemacolor was invented in 1908 by Charles Urban and George Albert Smith; for more information see Timeline of Historical Film Colors, accessed November 27, 2018, http:// zauberklang.ch/filmcolors/timeline-entry/1214/. 31. For a more detailed description, see Benoît Turquety, “The Illusion of Movement, the Illusion of Color: The Kinemacolor Projector, Archaeology, and Epistemology,” in Exposing the Film Apparatus: The Film Archive as a Research Laboratory, ed. Giovanna Fossati and Annie van den Oever (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press/EYE, 2016), 223–231 and

90  |  Provenance and Early Cinema Benoît Turquety, “Why Additive? Problems of Color and Epistemological Networks in Early (Film) Technology,” in The Color Fantastic: Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema, ed. Giovanna Fossati et al. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), 109–123. 32. See Flueckiger, “Material Properties of Historical Film in the Digital Age” (2012), Flueckiger, Op den Kamp, Pfluger, “A Material-Based Approach to the Digitization of Early Film Colours” (2018), and Flueckiger et al., Investigation of Film Material–Scanner Interaction.

BARBARA FLUECKIGER is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Zurich. She is author of Color Mania: The Material of Color in Photography and Film and creator of the Timeline of Historical Film Colors. NOEMI DAUGAARD is a PhD candidate at the University of Zurich. She is author of Grauenvolle Atmosphären: Tondesign und Farbgestaltung als affektive und subjektivierende Stilmittel in “The Silence of the Lambs.” OLIVIA KRISTINA STUTZ is a PhD candidate at the University of Zurich, and a regular contributor to the Timeline of Historical Film Colors.

PART II PRESERVATION AND COLLECTION

7 DREAMING IN COLOR The Image and the Artifact Joshua Yumibe

T

he Davide Turconi Collection is material that I have examined before: first through the 2006 Domitor conference in Ann Arbor, The “National”/“Nation” and Early Cinema, and then through subsequent publications and presentations as the initial preservation and digitization phases of the project were completed in 2011, marked by the launch of the project website at the Giornate del Cinema Muto in that year.1 Exploring the questions that the 2006 Domitor conference addressed led me to begin thinking through issues that the concept of provenance raises. At one central level, provenance pertains to the origins and circulation of an object or collection of objects: where it came from and how it got to where it is now. For the Turconi material in its fragmented state, thinking about provenance also entails grappling with the transformation and loss of filmic materials as they circulate across space and over time as well as confronting how these changes affect understandings of the historiographic nature of film. Films are material objects that have histories often obscured by their very images: pictures designed as they are to be technologically reproducible, copied, and mobile across prints and formats. Moving images were from the get-go experienced in a multitude of ways, from town to town, country to country, and screening to screening due to shifting formats (early film prints of the same title might be available in color or black and white for different prices), variable print quality, differing projection devices and sound

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Figure 7.1. Entrance to the Dreaming in Color exhibit, courtesy of the George Eastman Museum.

accompaniments, foreign versus domestic versions, alternative edits often due to censors, and so forth. To focus on the image and to write histories of the image is central to cinema studies, but this can also obscure the archival history that accrues for the carrier of these pictures over time—the provenance of the artifact. The concept of provenance offers a useful opportunity to think more systematically about the Turconi Collection’s history in light of both the exhibition on the collection, Dreaming in Color, that was on display at the

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George Eastman Museum during the 2018 Domitor conference and in the context of archival records now available from the Josef Joye Collection, the film collection from which Turconi’s clippings derive. Mounted from January 13 to June 24, 2018, at the George Eastman Museum, the Dreaming in Color exhibit was an idea the museum had for the Turconi project ever since preservation work began on the materials, given the remarkable nature of the frame clippings that comprise it (see fig. 7.1). However, the opportunity to mount the exhibition only arose in 2016 thanks to the efforts of Paolo Cherchi Usai and others at the museum, such as Nick Marshall, who, as the manager of exhibitions and programs was instrumental in shaping the setup and installation of the exhibit. Also, given my involvement with the collection since 2003, I was asked to curate the actual Turconi frames used in the exhibit, and I drafted most of the corresponding texts. Our aims were twofold for the exhibition: to present the history of Turconi’s collection to a general public and in doing so to demonstrate the remarkable, immersive power of these early film fragments as well as the attraction of early cinema. In addition to the exhibition, the George Eastman Museum also coordinated a series of public events to tie in with the show, including one for children, Playing in Color on February 18, 2018, in which participants were given a tour of the exhibition and then given transparent, black-and-white frame enlargements that they could color in to mimic what they had seen, and an event for adults, Drinking in Color on May 2, 2018, that entailed both a tour and a subsequent cocktail party in which participants could mix drinks in colors paired with the nitrate hues on exhibit (see fig. 7.2). The Turconi Collection is one of the largest collections of early nitrate film frames ever collected, preserved, and made digitally accessible for study. The collection contains 23,491 clippings from films dating primarily from 1905 to 1915. The late Italian film historian Davide Turconi (1911–2005) gathered these rare frames in the 1960s from the film collection amassed by Jesuit priest Josef-Alexis Joye (1852–1919). At the time of Turconi’s inspection of the material in the late 1960s, many of the prints were in various stages of chemical decay, and some were being discarded because of their state. Fearing that eventually no trace would remain of these precious works, Turconi took brief clips from many of the prints—typically two to three frames long but sometimes longer, and from multiple points in a print—thus preserving an invaluable record of the films. He also copied down filmographic information, available from catalogs of the Joye Collection, onto envelopes in

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Figure 7.2. “Playing in Color,” courtesy of the George Eastman Museum.

which he stored the frames. Eventually in the 1970s, the remaining films in the Joye Collection were transferred to the British Film Institute’s National Archive in London, where they have been preserved ever since. Turconi gave a significant portion of the collection to Cherchi Usai, who brought it to the George Eastman Museum in the 1990s. A massive digitization project of the material was completed in 2011 after twelve years of active work in conjunction with the Giornate del Cinema Muto, the Cineteca del Friuli, and a number of other collaborating archives and collections that also held Turconi clippings. Importantly, Turconi did not horde the material but saw the historical collection as a teaching tool for scholars and archivists—a means of disseminating film history. Approximately six hundred frames were reproduced in the Dreaming in Color exhibition, organized into nine simultaneously projected slideshows that examine different aspects of the material: Moving Color, Splices, Language, Decomposition, The Body, Voyage, Magic, Fillettes de Bretagne, and a set of single frame clippings from the collection. Each slideshow theme was also described at the entrance of the exhibit and illustrated by facsimile, digital transparencies of some of the frame clippings, mounted on

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Figure 7.3. Two of the exhibition themes as mounted, courtesy of the George Eastman Museum.

lightboxes (see fig. 7.3). The slideshows contained on average seventy slides, with one clipping per slide. The single frame clippings were presented in the first room of the exhibit, projected large in cinematic scale, whereas the remaining eight slideshows were exhibited simultaneously in the second, adjacent room across its four walls—these clippings were typically two to three frames in length and were projected vertically to accommodate their height (see fig. 7.4). The slideshows represented material from the Turconi Collection, such as early film genres including travelogues, fairy tales, and magic tricks; technical aspects including splice marks, intertitles,

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Figure 7.4. Design of the exhibit by Nick Marshall, courtesy of the George Eastman Museum.

and color; the sometimes-beautiful decay found in some of the fragments; and all twenty of the clippings found in the Turconi Collection for the film Fillettes de Bretagne (Pathé, 1909). The exhibition’s thematic organization was in many ways grounded in the historical context of the era—early film genres and technical practices—but these themes were used relatively flexibly to juxtapose a variety of early film images. Assembling these slideshows came not long after the collaborative work I was involved with through the publication of Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema (2015), which has a similar historical yet hermetic organization into a series of themes.2 Dreaming in Color aimed for something parallel through its montage of frame clippings and slideshows, as for instance on its slideshow that focused on clippings in the collection with visible “splices.” It aimed to provide a microhistory of splicing techniques and styles in early film, from tape splices to negative splicing to various forms of narrative editing, but the ordering of the images was arranged with a certain progression—not quite a narrative progression but rather a kind of dreamlike structure of repeated patterns and motifs. Yet there is also a significant difference between Fantasia of Color and Dreaming in Color. In Fantasia, my collaborators and I focused the provenance of that work specifically on material only available through the nitrate holdings of the EYE Filmmuseum, yet we decided early on that

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we were not interested in presenting these frames as artifacts per se, with sprockets and edge codes visible in the main part of the book. Instead, we focused on the image in early cinema, its potency, depth, and power, and we cropped out the edges and frame lines, as they were extraneous to our aim. If Fantasia of Color was about the image, conversely Dreaming in Color and the Turconi project have always been centered on the artifact, for these film fragments tell us much about the visual culture of their time as well as the archival fate of film over the past century. These frames are object lessons in film’s fractured provenance. Though remarkably beautiful, they are first and foremost a unique historical record of the circulation of early cinema prints and also of the Josef Joye Collection, which I will turn to now. The Abbé Joye amassed his collection in Basel, Switzerland, at the beginning of the last century, for use in the educational institution the Borromäum, which he founded. Primarily between 1905 and 1911, Joye purchased between 1,540 and 2,500 film prints from the secondhand market in Germany and Switzerland. These were so-called junk prints, already entering into a second life with Joye. Also, the estimates vary on the original number of Joye prints, and indeed it was in constant flux given that after Joye left Basel in 1911, prints continued to be added to the collection and screened at the Borromäum and also removed due to decomposition. However, based on the catalogs produced at the Borromäum, it seems that the lower number of prints is more accurate and the higher may have derived from counting reels rather than titles. The films Joye collected were internationally distributed fiction and nonfiction titles, largely of French origin but also with a significant number of US, Italian, German, Danish, and British titles. Joye’s films—and subsequently Turconi’s clippings with some variations—are thus remarkably international in nature and generally reflect the composition of the European market at the time.3 Though Joye left Basel in 1911 and died eight years later, the films remained at the Borromäum until 1960, when Stephan Bamberger, a Jesuit priest who was the curator of the collection, gained approval to move them to the basement of a Catholic facility in Zurich, the Apologetischen Institut des Schweizerischen Katholischen Volksvereins (see fig. 7.5). A letter in April 1960 from the Provincial Superior at the time, Josef Stierli, to Bamberger delineates these arrangements: On the recent visit to Basel, I . . . raised the issue of the Abbe Joye’s film collection and received a very pleasant response. The Superior and Hauskonsult fully understand your concern to preserve this collection for the future. For

Figure 7.5. The basement storage facilities in Zurich for the Joye Filmarchiv, ca. 1970, courtesy of Archiv der Schweizer Provinz der Jesuiten, Zürich, Archiv Abbé Joye.

Dreaming in Color  |  101 this reason, the entire Basel collection will be handed over to the Film Bureau, and the Film Bureau has the full freedom to take all necessary and useful measures to secure and evaluate the collection. It is only desired that the films be collected later this year, so that they can be removed before the demolition of the old Borromäum building.4

Bamberger subsequently updated the Joye catalog, which the Borromäum had maintained. He later referred to the collection as the “Jesuit Enterprise in Early Cinema” and presciently envisioned that it would be “invaluable to a communications student envisaging a dissertation on the early cinema.” The collection has indeed proven extremely beneficial to numerous scholars, such as Roland Cosandey, Hansmartin Siegrist, and myself—the Joye and Turconi Collections indeed played pivotal roles in my PhD dissertation on early color cinema.5 For context, it is worth quoting further from Bamberger, from a brief article he wrote in 1991 about Joye and the collection: At age 34 [Joye] was assigned to teach at the Borromäum in Basel, a center where he gave Sunday school classes and lectures. He illustrated these at first with magic lantern slides, then, after 1900, with films. He amassed a collection of 2,000 movies . . . Joye died in 1919 at age 67, and the films languished in unfavorable storage conditions in the youth center where he had worked. Since 1958, I have had responsibility for the films . . . Restoration work was begun in 1970 by the Italian film historical society [the Associazione Italiana per le Ricerche di Storia del Cinema, AIRSC] and is now continuing under the auspices of the National Film Archive in London.6

There is much to discuss here that relates to the question of provenance. First, it should be noted that this article has been collected in the Josef Joye archive held by the Jesuit Bibliothek in Zurich as part of their provincial archives, overseen by Esther Schmid Heer. The Jesuit collection of Joye materials is extensive and sheds light both on Joye’s audiovisual programming in Basel as well as on the collection’s provenance and Turconi’s involvement with it. Basel-based librarian and researcher Regula Treichler, for instance, recently began studying a large collection of Joye’s lantern slides that have been transferred from the Borromäum in Basel to the Jesuit Bibliothek in Zurich. The lantern slides are largely commercially distributed materials from the turn of the last century. However, there are accounts of Joye preparing and coloring his own slides, but there is as of yet no clear evidence that the slides in Zurich were specifically of Joye’s making or coloring. Similar to the types of films that comprise the Joye and Turconi Collections, the

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lantern slides present a range of topics, from comedies and transforming slides to devotional slides and travelogues. Indeed, there is a very close parallel between the lantern genres and the film genres of the Joye Collection. Even more remarkable, some of Joye’s lecture notes for the slides survive at the Borromäum. They are organized in a number of detailed notebooks with a numbering system that matches the lecture points with serial numbers written onto the slides, so they can be performed in unison. Further research into these notebooks needs to be carried out in tandem with work on the lantern slides to determine what survives of each. However, there are unfortunately no surviving lecture notes for the films, and there may never have been formalized notes as with the slides, so how Joye actually presented the films is less clear. Despite this lacuna, there is still much that can be delineated about Joye and cinema and in particular about the collection’s provenance. First, beyond the Zurich materials, Hansmartin Siegrist has put forward a remarkable visual identification, which he reported in 2017 at the Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna.7 On reviewing some of the first Lumière films in Basel, Siegrist argues that Vue no. 308: Basel, a Bridge over the Rhine, from 1896, captures Abbé Joye posing for the camera. Siegrist has carried out extensive facial recognition and height analyses to confirm this: Joye was taller than average, and this figure matches his height almost exactly. The figure also walks with a slight limp, and Joye indeed had gout.8 Still, the figure is not in priestly robes, as Joye would have normally worn at the time, and the identification has yet to be fully confirmed. But if Joye’s interest in cinema begins at the emergence of cinema in Basel, it is worth flash-forwarding to what has become of his remarkable collection of films. The Zurich archival materials at the Jesuit Bibliothek shed much light on the specific work that was occurring on the collection in the 1960s and 1970s. First, it is clear that Bamberger was deeply concerned about the state of the collection and sought its preservation, as he was in repeated contact with the Jesuit order about acquiring funds for this work. A letter to his superior in 1967, titled “Investment for the Films Archive,” details the dire situation of the collection’s provenance: There is no doubt that, first and foremost, the most threatened films should now be re-copied. Of the original I have 300,000 meters (information from Father Hofer), we have brought only about 180,000 meters to Zurich. Of these, tens of thousands are certainly no longer copyable. Let’s assume that about 130,000 meters could still be saved. Of this remnant, an estimated 40,000 meters require immediate treatment and should not be destroyed . . .

Dreaming in Color  |  103 Due to agreements with the Italian Film Historical Society [AIRSC] (Enclosure 5), 11,000 meters are currently being duplicated in Milan at the expense of this association. Maybe there will be an agreement this year about another post. Negotiations over 5,000 meters are under way with the German Bundesarchiv in Koblenz.9

Thus, according to these estimates, the Joye Collection at its height, presumably in the 1910s, comprised approximately 300,000 meters of material (though it should be noted that in 1991 Bamberger put the original footage count at 250,000 meters). As explained earlier, this was a footage count based on between 1,540 to 2,500 prints. (For context, as of 2011, 1,158 nitrate prints still survive at the BFI.) However, of this original material, only 180,000 meters was deemed in good enough condition to be transferred to Zurich in the 1960s, and by 1967 Bamberger believed only 130,000 meters could be saved. In other words, in Bamberger’s assessment, approximately half of the collection had already been lost by the 1960s. As his letter and others indicate, to help preserve the material during the 1960s, Bamberger was also carrying out a number of negotiations with archives and institutions, including the Bundesarchiv, the Cineteca Nazionale in Rome, and with l’Associazione Italiana per le Ricerche di Storia del Cinema (AIRSC). The AIRSC was founded in 1964 by, among others, Davide Turconi, who became involved with the Joye Collection at that time. Indeed, in another document from Rome, Bamberger even lays out the arrangements he had made for Turconi to visit the films in Zurich in 1968: In late April or early May, Mr. David [sic] Turconi, the president of the Film Historical Society will return to Zurich for a few days, this time for us to provide films for copying at the expense of the archive. I ask you to treat him very well: he is an honest, simple man whom you can fully rely on. Incidentally, on the way from Zurich to Rome in Pavia he royally welcomed and entertained me. When asked what we would have to pay him for his work this time, he did not want to know anything about a payment. Surely you have to pay him travel and accommodation. And I would perhaps give him three hundred francs for his trouble. He knows what he has to do. One should only ask him to make the films ready for delivery so that a Ticino driver can take the boxes with them at the next opportunity.10

It is through these arrangements for the preservation of the Joye prints in Zurich, by way of Milan, that Turconi began to assemble his collection of fragments. What then to make of these circumstances and the fragmented origins of the Turconi Collection from the Joye Filmarchiv in the 1960s and 1970s?

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It is clear that Turconi was a welcome collaborator on the collection—one even potentially paid for the duplication work being carried out on the materials. Based on records, we know that this work was contracted in 1966: the AIRSC would help the Zurich Jesuits duplicate materials, splitting some of the costs. By 1971 only about a hundred films had been duplicated in Milan, with duplicate copies going both to Zurich and to the AIRSC.11 There is no record that Bamberger—who was based in Rome by this time—knew of the clippings that Turconi was taking from the films. But Bamberger, as his letters establish, was well aware that a significant amount of the material was being discarded due to decomposition. In recounting his work on the collection, Turconi told Cherchi Usai that for many decomposing prints, he would unwind the sticky reels along a clothesline to dry them out and make his clipping selections. The dire state of the Joye Collection during this period thus provides crucial context for why Turconi made the excisions. With material being discarded and funds being low for the rapid preservation that was needed, his was a last-ditch effort to save a partial record of Joye’s amazing but already fragmented collection. The impetus to collect, which both Joye and Turconi clearly had, is based on a cinephilic desire to own and hold in one’s hand what one has seen onscreen, as it enables one to keep these tactile artifacts as a memory fragment, a cinematic relic of the projected, living image. However, there is much more written across the fragments of the Turconi Collection. These artifacts come with deep histories that speak to the shifting value and provenance of the moving image across the twentieth century—how it could be preserved in some instances and in others discarded. Remarkably, the rationale for this fragmented provenance is evident in the document trail of the Joye Filmarchiv. Further, more than being interested in only collecting this new material, both Joye and Turconi (and Bamberger too) fundamentally wanted to make these films and subsequent fragments useful for education and for history—a goal that we also pursued in the Dreaming in Color exhibit, as presented at the George Eastman Museum in 2018.

Notes 1. See the chapter that resulted from the conference, Joshua Yumibe, “From Switzerland to Italy and All around the World: The Josef Joye and Davide Turconi Collections,” in Early Cinema and the “National,” ed. Richard Abel, Giorgio Bertellini, and Rob King (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 321–331; and also, Paolo Cherchi Usai and

Dreaming in Color  |  105 Joshua Yumibe, “The Davide Turconi Collection of Nitrate Film Frames (1897–1944),” Journal of Film Preservation 85 (2011): 46–49; and Alicia Fletcher and Joshua Yumibe, “From Nitrate to Digital Archive: The Davide Turconi Project,” The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists 13, no. 1 (April 2013): 1–32. This essay draws from and builds upon these previous essays. The project website and database are available at “Il Progetto Turconi/The Turconi Project,” http://www.cinetecadelfriuli.org/progettoturconi/. 2. Giovanna Fossati, Tom Gunning, Jonathon Rosen, and Joshua Yumibe, Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015). 3. Turconi clipped a higher percentage of frames from Italian films than are representative of the overall percentages of titles in the Joye Collection. See Yumibe, “From Switzerland to Italy and All around the World,” 327–328; and Fletcher and Yumibe, “From Nitrate to Digital Archive,” 12. 4. Josef Stierli, “Letter to Stefan Bamberger,” April 6, 1960, Josef Joye Filmarchiv, Schachtel 2, Archiv der Schweizer Provinz der Jesuiten, Zürich, Archiv Abbé Joye. My translation. 5. See Roland Cosandey, Welcome Home, Joye! Film um 1910. Aus der Sammlung Joseph Joye (NFTVA, London), Kintop Schriften 1 (Basel: Stroemfeld Verlag, 1993); Hansmartin Siegrist is currently completing the manuscript 47 Seconds of Basel 1896: A Snapshot of the Swiss Belle Époque; and Joshua Yumibe, “Moving Color: An Aesthetic History of Applied Color Technologies in Silent Cinema” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2007), which formed the basis for Joshua Yumibe, Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012). 6. Stefan Bamberger, “A Treasure Trove of Old Movies,” Company: A Magazine of the American Jesuits, Fall 1991, 11. 7. See Antti Alanen, “Film Diary: 1897: Cinema Anno Due: Revealing Lumière Vue N° 308 – Bâle: Pont Sur Le Rhin,” Antti Alanen (blog), July 1, 2017, https://anttialanenfilmdiary .blogspot.com/2017/07/1897-cinema-anno-due-13-revealing.html. 8. This is part of Siegrist’s forthcoming book 47 Seconds of Basel 1896, and I am grateful for his generosity in sharing this material. 9. Stefan Bamberger, “Letter from Stefan Bamberger to Superior: Investition Für das Filmarchiv,” March 12, 1967, Josef Joye Filmarchiv, Schachtel 2, Archiv der Schweizer Provinz der Jesuiten, Zürich, Archiv Abbé Joye. My translation. 10. Stefan Bamberger, “Letter from Stefan Bamberger to the Filmarchiv Josef Joye,” April 15, 1968, Josef Joye Filmarchiv, Schachtel 2, Archiv der Schweizer Provinz der Jesuiten, Zürich, Archiv Abbé Joye. My translation. 11. Stefan Bamberger, “Stefan Bamberger to Hw. Herrn and Willi Schnetzer,” April 9, 1971, Josef Joye Filmarchiv, Schachtel 2, Archiv der Schweizer Provinz der Jesuiten, Zürich, Archiv Abbé Joye.

JOSHUA YUMIBE is Professor and Director of Film Studies at Michigan State University. He is author (with Sarah Street) of Chromatic Modernity: Color, Cinema, and Media of the 1920s; (with Tom Gunning, Jonathon Rosen, and Giovanna Fossati) of Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema; and of Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism. He is also editor (with Scott Curtis, Philippe Gauthier, and Tom Gunning) of The Image in Early Cinema: Form and Material (IUP, 2018).

8 WHERE DID THE COSTUMES IN EARLY CINEMA COME FROM? Priska Morrissey

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here did the costumes in the earliest films come from? As far as costumes are concerned, cinema inherited the theatrical tradition. This inheritance can be viewed from a formal, visual, or sociocultural perspective, but it is also—and quite directly—organizational and material in nature. Thinking about the question of provenance from this concrete or even archaeological perspective is productive in many ways. We might think, for example, of the way in which research such as that carried out by Denis Dupont and Roland-François Lack around the precise sites where the earliest pictures were shot (streets, parks, the façades of houses, etc.) enables us to reconsider, among other things, the spatiotemporal organization of the film shoot and the way in which the “editing” of pictures was conceived.1 The present study also follows in the wake of a long series of historical studies of the connections between cinema and theater. And yet they have rarely been examined together from the point of view of costumes. Nevertheless, articles in the press, the pictures themselves, and later comments by those who worked on them indicate that thinking about costumes for the screen—thinking inherited from stage practices and that took into account the specificities of the film medium—existed from the earliest years or even months of the medium’s existence. By bringing to light the circuits through which film studio costume storerooms were supplied, we will indeed see that this theatrical inheritance did not come about without a degree of

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adaptation—whether borne or deliberate, conscious or unconscious—to a specific mode of production based on a temporal organization of the actors’ performances that was quite distinct (the single recording of a scene rather than its repetition from one performance to the next), with its own particular technical constraints (framing, the chromatic sensitivity of the film stock, etc.).

The Performers’ Wardrobe Under the laws still in force in the theater in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, performers had to provide any costume deemed to be “town clothing,” while the theaters supplied special costumes, period costumes, uniforms, wigs, hats, and accessories. Performers sometimes had to invest considerable sums in their wardrobe. There are also records of several court proceedings in which performers, having been removed from a role, demanded compensation for the cost of their costumes.2 In rare instances, in addition to their earnings, performers received an allowance that could be used to pay for some of their costumes. Jules Moynet explained the system in L’Envers du théâtre in 1873: Town clothing was almost always contractually the responsibility of theatre actors, but there are cases, and these are frequent in today’s modern repertory, when an actress must have costumes worth eight or ten thousand francs for a single play. The management gives her an additional allowance commensurate with her expenses, and often, out of this hard necessity and with the help of the newspapers, she turns this into a means to acclaim and success. Is the fashion for a certain kind of play somewhat exhausted? Quick, bring out a few sensational costumes; the press will marvel, ticket prices will go up, women will flock to see the play, and men will naturally follow suit.3

Here we see the importance of the media in the process of supplying fresh costumes and the already-strong connections between fashion designers and the theater, which also served to showcase their work. In the very early part of the 1900s, there was a sharp dispute in Parisian theaters around which costume costs theaters should assume. The major Parisian theaters tended to take on the entire responsibility for an actress’s wardrobe. The Comédie-Française, in 1902, began to consider paying the cost of town clothes for its male actors.4 French theaters were already paying the cost of town clothes for its actresses, with reimbursement running to 500 francs for evening gowns and 200 to 300 francs for other dresses. A few major male actors appear already, by this date, to have negotiated the cost of

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so-called town clothing. José Dupuis of the Théâtre des Variétés stipulated in his contract in the late nineteenth century that “[the theater’s director] will discharge in its entirety all his costumes, including his town clothes.”5 The two sexes were thus treated differently according to the fame of the actor, the size of the theater, and whether it was a Parisian or provincial theater—and, in addition, according to the actors’ specializations. The hiring contract for the town Grand Théâtre in Montpellier for the 1907–1908 season stipulated that, while dramatic actors would be provided only with “so-called period costumes, wigs, hats and uniforms,”6 opera actors had to supply “all costumes without exception, as well as their wigs and hairpieces, shoes and accessories, hats and all other clothing accessories.” The contract stated that female chorus singers had to supply their costumes and to declare that they “have the wardrobe required by the repertoire; they are also required to have a short white dress, yellow ankle boots, a powdered wig, etc.”; the male chorus singers had to “supply the linen, gloves, tights and shoes suited to the costumes supplied by the management. They must have appropriate town clothing (suit, trousers, black waistcoat, white tie, gloves; flesh-toned, red and pearl grey tights; natural-leather shoes, sandals, leather ankle boots, crakow shoes, yellow and black boots, shoes with buckles, cuffs, ruffles). All these objects must be in perfect like-new and clean condition.” Finally, female ballet dancers had to “supply every costume required by their roles, except those reputed to be in the storehouse furnished by the management and with which they must be satisfied. Nothing is supplied to the lead dancer”; dancers had to declare themselves “in the possession of perfectly fresh foundation garments, including silk tights, shoes, white and colored muslin, bodices, breastplates and flowers.” Acting on stage thus required a fairly diverse wardrobe. In 1878, Alfred Bouchard said as much in his definition of wardrobe: “An actor, actress or singer without a wardrobe will have difficulty finding employment outside of Paris, where theater managers do not have storerooms of costumes, except perhaps for extras and actors playing minor parts. It is not necessary to have absolutely every costume in one’s repertoire, but one must have enough to get by, by patching them up a bit.”7 The matter had still not been settled by 1912, when Albert Carré, president of the Association des Directeurs des Théâtres de Paris, tried to put in motion a project to supply town clothes to performers earning less than 300 francs.8 This manner of operating was carried over to the film industry. The film companies supplied special costumes, uniforms, masks, and so on. In every other case, the actors had to use their town clothes. Fernand Rivers

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gave an evocative account of this in his memoirs in 1945, in which he explains the hierarchy that could be at work between actors with the means to purchase and thus to act in an abundant wardrobe and those who had to make do with fewer personal effects and be careful that these precious effects were not damaged. Rivers gives as an example the quality of Max Linder’s costumes, with their “dazzling sumptuousness, not likely having come from the old wardrobe collection of the Odéon theater.”9 Owning a diverse wardrobe and showing its elegance to the right effect were thus ways actors set themselves apart from the others. What was being offered to actors here was both a space of freedom and a means of controlling their image, but this came at a financial price. In the case of film shoots, this freedom was not without consequence for the final editing of the shots, as these could have taken place over a period of several days and even in several places, if shooting outdoors was involved. In this sense, Rivers explains how a stylish actor would wear different costumes to shoot different scenes, which would have to be joined one after the other afterward, leading to what would later be called a continuity error. It is probable that female dancers, as in the theater, had to supply their own costumes and all their “foundation garments.” Thus when Georges Méliès hired the Châtelet dancers, they certainly had to show up with their own stockings, ballet slippers, and leotards. This was also obviously the case with performers whose clothing was a part of their character, for example the big boots worn by Little Tich.

Possessing a Store of Costumes When special costumes were required, theaters could delve into their own storehouses, which they generally possessed, albeit to highly variable extent. The film publishing companies, inheriting theatrical traditions, also quite quickly established a costume collection (see fig. 8.1). The most impressive and best documented example is probably that of Georges Méliès. A practical person, Méliès in his pictures used the costumes of the Robert-Houdin theater (the most famous example is that of the magician’s cape, or rather capes). In the middle part of the first decade of the century, he acquired the collection of the Lepère company and for his film shoots purchased the wardrobe of a renter who himself had purchased the costumes of the Renaissance theater in 1884 in order to supply the cavalcades, historical plays, variety shows, and operettas put on by theaters in Paris and its suburbs. Similarly, in 1908, the Éclair studio in Épinay-sur-Seine had a stock of props and a storehouse of costumes.10 In 1913, these studios were reequipped,

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Figure 8.1. Pathé costume shop. Photo: Pierre Trimbach. Maurice Gianati Collection. Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé, ca. 1910–1914. This may be the SCAGL studio store.

announcing that “immense storehouses and new workshops for making sets and costumes have been completed and will . . . make possible new efforts.”11 That same year, the Biogram company, located at 26 rue du MontThabor and founded in 1912, had two rooms: a laboratory and a costume storehouse,12 while the Théophile Pathé company prided itself on having among its material “theatre props, sets and costumes.”13 It is difficult to get a sense of the extent of these wardrobes, and the idea of a costume-making workshop at Éclair is intriguing. We should note several things concerning these storehouses. First of all, unless these costumes had been made expressly for moving pictures (which appears to have been quite rare), they most likely came from theater costume collections, which regularly went on sale: performers’ wardrobes, rental wardrobes, or theater wardrobes. These were, therefore, costumes made for the stage, with bright colors designed to be seen from afar and in darkness or under the footlights. At the same time, the reason theaters had storehouses of costumes was, on the one hand, because of the need to have a collection of repertory

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costumes for a typology of roles and trades—a gendered typology that reproduced societal norms—and on the other hand because of the principle that one costume could be used for several productions, sometimes over a very long period: it was more economical to own than to rent. For film shoots, which in the first decade of the century were often brief, a rental system appeared more appropriate (it is likely, moreover, that renting was employed more frequently, although it is difficult to come up with precise figures in this respect). When a company invested in a storehouse, it was drawing on a different mode of operation, that of the theater, and can be accounted for by this idea of a repertoire, of a functional typology. It was economical to own a police or nurse uniform because it could be used numerous times in the numerous pictures that were variations on the gags and intrigues around characters with identical, gendered, and stereotyped clothing. Finally, this manner of operating not only transferred part control over the costume to the film publisher; it also involved new ways of organizing work in the studios. Méliès explained this in 1907: “The tableau’s costumes are laid out in the actors’ dressing rooms for the following day. . . . After a succinct explanation of the characters they are going to play, they are given their costumes. They dress and put on their makeup; in short, they get ready the way they do in the theatre.”14 When a film publisher had and managed its own wardrobe, it could ensure that everything would be ready for the often costly film shoot, especially when there were a lot of extras. But this also involved cleaning and mending these costumes, thereby requiring additional personnel. For example, Méliès explained in the same 1907 text that “you also need costumers and seamstresses to repair and maintain the costumes.”15 In theaters of the day there were complaints that storehouse costumes were sometimes given “soiled to the costumers.”16 In 1907, Dr.  René Martial stressed the “parasites and parasitic skin diseases that can be transmitted by costumes, hats and wigs, which are used repeatedly without cleaning in between uses; and artificial dermatitis caused by poor-quality toiletries, makeup and impure rice powders.”17 In his view, in most cities in the provinces “the theatre is a revolting cesspool.” What was the situation with the film production wardrobe storehouses?

Renting and Making If a theater did not have a storehouse of necessary costumes, or if special costumes were needed or the play required specific outfits to be made, it could resort to renting or making them. Fin-de-siècle Paris had many firms

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specializing in theater costumes, footwear and arms for the theater, wigs and pasteboard for masks, and the like. Here too the film industry adopted the same way of working, which fit relatively well with the needs of film shoots. When a film studio had its own wardrobe storehouse, using the services of a renter made it possible to complete one’s list of costumes and appears quite often to have substituted for it. Méliès himself, who had a large storehouse, remarked that it was “always inadequate.”18 He reported that “we occasionally have to go to the theatrical costumers to complete the platoons, particularly for parades or processions, when many similar costumes are needed.”19 While custom-made costumes were common in the large theaters of Paris, the circumstances of film studios appear to be closer to those of smaller Parisian theaters and provincial theaters. Making one’s own costumes was rare, and rental took precedence. Already, in the case of Lumière pictures shot around 1896, Georges Hatot relates that each day when they became available at eight o’clock in the morning, and pulling a handcart himself, he picked up costumes from renters such as Stelmans, costumer for the Opéra and specializing in historical costumes, or from the firm Selmy,20 which, in an advertisement in 1896, offered “costumes for the Theatre, Operas, Comic Operas, Operettas, Dramas, Balls  and Cavalcades . . . at very moderate prices.”21 The correspondence of Boudier, administrator of the film publishing company SCAGL in the early 1910s, illustrates the everyday exchanges that took place between the studio and the usual theatrical suppliers of costumes (Granier, Traonouez, etc.), shoes (Galvin, supplier to the Opéra), wigs and hats (Baudu, Romain et Léon), and arms (Mauger).22 Some of these were large firms that supplied the major Parisian theaters—this was the case with Granier—but there were also renters or dealers of relatively specialized garments (see fig. 8.2). Thus behind the name Traonouez, located at 26 rue de Picardie, was the emblem of Au Coq Hardi, specialized in secondhand clothing since at least 1898 and in particular in secondhand military outfits.23 In 1910, SCAGL rented from Traonouez “the uniform of a naval officer.”24 Boudier also called on Mr. Prévost, administrator of the Châtelet theater, demonstrating that theaters and film studios actively borrowed and rented costumes between them. In November 1910, we might note, Boudier asked him to institute two rental rates: one for a three-day period (a rate that did not exist but that he was requesting) and another for a week (clearly the rate to which Prévost was accustomed). Boudier insisted, highlighting the special needs of film shoots: “Sometimes we are able to return this material to you within forty-eight hours, and we pay you for a week.”25 In all

Figure 8.2. Cover of the Maison Granier catalog. Theater costume rental, ca. 1900. Author’s personal collection.

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his exchanges with renters, Boudier limited himself to requesting stereotypical costumes (maids, debauched women, beggars, everyday men and women, colonial outfits, etc.), adapting to the moving pictures the typology in effect in the theater. While owning a stock of costumes brought with it restrictions with respect to space, hygiene, and maintenance, renting presented other problems to the administrators of film studios. Boudier contested and corrected his invoices and asked his interlocutors to use good costumes for men and women, enabling him to monitor closely every rental and the content of each basket as it entered and left the studio. We might imagine that theaters had the same problems, but Boudier also complained bitterly to the Granier company in December 1910 that, among the circus costumes provided to him, one women’s costume was missing (“we [were] obliged to procure one”26) and the male lead actor was also dressed by chance. Boudier’s resources were thus pinched, because renting was expensive. If the costumes were not ready when the shooting began, a solution had to be improvised: the shoot could not be pushed back a day, for which the main actors and extras had been paid. The theatrical heritage thus required a few modifications as a result of a different mode of production and a different temporal organization of the acting. This adaptation was also subject to the technical constraints of the film shoot related to the framing, lighting, and depiction of colors on ordinary orthochromatic film stock, all of which played a part in the choice and use of the costumes placed before the camera. In the theater, gas and later electric lighting made it possible to develop colored lighting effects that caught the display of increasingly fluid and transparent fabrics such as muslin and satin, while some lighting effects made it possible to transfigure sometimes poorly made costumes. In addition, theatrical costumes had to be recognizable from afar: they were often made in bright colors, and they were designed for the stage. This was the case with devils’ costumes, in dazzling blood red synonymous with danger and anger but that on screen gave black devils; while these already existed, they were nevertheless surprising at the time. In the film studio, conditions were much different: daylight was generally required to expose the film, with the cruelty and harshness that can be associated with it. A great many costumes that could be magnified on stage through lighting effects made a poor impression in full daylight. How color was to be shown had to be conceived differently. Although Boudier never mentions color in his

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correspondence with the rental companies, moving pictures of the time demonstrate that people had the same opinion of it. Bright white shirts and petticoats were avoided because, as Jacques Ducom noted in 1911, they became “too harsh when photographed and produced regrettable effects in the midst of the picture.”27 Similarly, red was banished because it appeared black on screen, and costumes tended to be simplified so that viewers could understand them, decked out with an array of colors so as to become a stock of color effects. As Verhylle explained in 1916, “in the theatre, everything which entertains and interests the human eye does not produce the same effect on the camera’s eye.”28 Where did the costumes in early cinema come from? From the theater, assuredly: directly when special costumes were rented or purchased or indirectly when cinema adopted the theater’s organizational methods, where performers still chose their wardrobe. The way moving picture wardrobes were organized is a perfect example of the theater arts heritage. The archaeological perspective I have adopted here has made it possible to shine light on this provenance and thereby on the active circulation from one medium to another, from the point of view of both organizational logic and the materials themselves. At the same time, this adoption involved a series of modifications and new uses specific to the film medium. The rental period (and thus the price) of a costume needed only for a few days; performers’ inability to change their outfit if they realized while acting that it should be modified or perhaps improved; the expression of a costume’s color or details on film stock that would later be colored; the constraints of the framing in choosing and employing a costume: all these factors illustrate the necessary adaptation of this heritage to the organizational framework of the film industry.

Acknowledgments The author would like to thank Stephanie Salmon and Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé.

Notes 1. See the website https://vincennes1900.blogspot.com (most recent consultation: July 8, 2019). Denis Dumont and Roland-François Lack recently presented their work at the “Cinéma 1900: magie et technologie” study day organized by Laurent Mannoni (Conservatoire d’histoire des techniques cinématographiques) at the Cinémathèque française on June 14, 2019.

116  |  Provenance and Early Cinema 2. See for example F. Marquet-Melchissèdec, “Chronique judiciaire: tribunal de commerce de Gand,” Le Progrès théâtral, organe officiel du Syndicat des artistes dramatiques 53 (August 20, 1906): 5–6. 3. Jules Moynet, L’Envers du théâtre: machines et décorations (Paris: Hachette, 1873), 218–219. 4. Santillane, “Les frais de costumes,” Gil Blas 8223 (May 24, 1902): n.p. 5. Ibid. 6. Anonymous, “Contrat du Grand théâtre municipal de Montpellier, saison 1907–1908,” Le Progrès théâtral, organe officiel du Syndicat des artistes dramatiques 67 (December 1907 – January–February 1908): 10–13. The following quotations come from the same source. 7. Alfred Bouchard, La Langue théâtrale: vocabulaire historique, descriptif et anecdotique des termes et des choses du théâtre, suivi d’un appendice contenant la législation théâtrale en vigueur (Paris: Arnaud et Labat, 1878), 124. 8. Marius Creuillot-Barlay, “Assemblée Générale du 29 mai 1912: rapports de la commission de contrôle,” Le Progrès théâtral, organe officiel du Syndicat des artistes dramatiques 110 (June 1912): 72. 9. Fernand Rivers, Cinquante ans chez les fous (Paris: Georges Girard, 1945), 11. 10. Conseil départemental de la Seine-Saint-Denis, Évelyne Lohr, Antoine Furio, Jean-Barthélemi Debost, “Les studios et laboratoires Éclair: 100 ans d’industrie cinématographiques à Épinay-sur-Seine,” Collection Patrimoine en Seine-Saint-Denis 26 (2007): 3. 11. Anonymous, “Rapport du conseil d’administration de la société des Cinéma-Éclair: assemblée générale ordinaire du 12 mai 1914,” Ciné-Journal 304 (June 20, 1914). Quoted in Henri Bousquet and Laurent Mannoni, eds., “Éclair, 1907–1918,” 1895 12 (1992): 49. 12. Thierry Lefebvre and Laurent Mannoni, eds., “Annuaire du commerce et de l’industrie cinématographique (France, 1913),” 1895 (1993): 19–20. 13. Ibid., 48–49. 14. Georges Méliès, “Kinematographic Views,” edited by Jacques Malthête, translated by Stuart Liebman and Timothy Barnard, in André Gaudreault, Film and Attraction: From Kinematography to Cinema (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 150. 15. Ibid., 144. 16. Louis Hervouet, “Congrès d’hygiène,” Le Progrès théâtral, organe officiel du Syndicat des artistes dramatiques 66 (November 1907): 4. 17. Dr. René Martial, “Hygiène dans les Ateliers dénommés: théâtres et concerts. Communication faite au 3e Congrès de l’Hygiène des Travailleurs et des Ateliers,” ibid., 4–5. 18. Méliès, “Kinematographic Views,” 144. 19. Ibid. 20. Georges Hatot, March 15, 1948 meeting of the Commission de recherche historique (Cinémathèque française, fonds CRH): CRH 052, 18. 21. Advertisement, L’Écho des jeunes: journal littéraire (September 1, 1896): 169. 22. A. Boudier, correspondence, SCAGL press book 1910–1914 (Cinémathèque française, fonds Sadoul). 23. Jean Marèze, “Voici de vieux uniformes des armes d’un autre temps, des habits d’immortels . . . ,” Paris-Soir 4339 (March 16, 1933): 3. In 1933, Le Coq Hardi was being run by the nephew of the company’s founder, who recalled his memories and friendship with Polin. 24. Boudier, correspondence.

Where Did the Costumes in Early Cinema Come From?  |  117 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. Jacques Ducom, Le Cinématographe scientifique et industriel: traité pratique de cinématographie (Paris, Librairie des sciences et de l’industrie, 1911), 172. 28. Verhylle, “Opérateurs tourneurs de manivelles ou photographes,” Le Cinéma et l’Écho du cinéma réunis 239 (November 3, 1916): 1.

PRISKA MORRISSEY is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Rennes 2 (France) and is a 2019–2021 CNRS delegate (Thalim laboratory). She is a former board member of Domitor and her research focuses on the history of early camera operators, cinematography, and costumes.

9 THINKING WITH PROVENANCE Drawing Trajectories in the Francis Doublier Collection at the George Eastman Museum Clara Auclair

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first encountered the Doublier Collection as part of my personal project as a student of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation at the George Eastman Museum. To graduate from the Selznick School, each student must choose a project involving the museum’s collections, constituting the basis of a final written report or thesis. Each student can choose to work, within the Moving Image Department, in the area where they would like to get more exposure, from collection management to projection, exhibition and curating, digital restoration, research and processing in the Stills, Posters, and Paper Collections, and so on. I chose to work with Deborah Stoiber, collection manager of the Moving Image Department, on a project called “The Last Surviving Print,” where I helped the museum identify and assess the preservation needs of their nitrate collections. I focused on the French titles of the list provided by Stoiber. From that list four cans of short nitrate film strips entitled “Doublier Collection” remained mysterious at the time. I only had the opportunity to inspect the content of one of the cans thoroughly, and it contained ten rolls of nitrate that had been spliced together and one unopened separate roll. Some films were duplicates of Lumière originals, and others featured filmed demonstrations of pre and early film artifacts, such as the thaumatrope and the Lumière camera. Working with questions of provenance is the day-to-day operation of a film museum or archive. When there is little information about a print

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in the museum’s working database, the first resource archivists go to is its institutional history by consulting either other staff members or the institution’s historical files. The George Eastman Museum has a very rich and well-preserved institutional history, its most invaluable one being its staff expertise and legacy. As a student of the Selznick School, I had the privilege to learn from Ed Stratmann, then assistant curator and now curator emeritus of the Moving Image Department. Stratmann was hired by James Card in 1974 and has worked with every curator/department head of the Moving Image Department before his retirement in 2016. Stratmann ran the preservation program of the Moving Image Department from 1988 to 2010, and whenever a staff member or a student had a question about a print or a preservation project, the first answer they were given was to go ask Ed.1 Indeed, Stratmann was able to direct me to preservation work the museum had done on the Doublier Collection in the early 2000s. Original nitrate Lumière prints were singled out from the collection and preserved on safety stock. Stratmann and Stoiber also advised me to consult the department’s first cataloging system, the James Card and George Pratt’s card catalogs,2 where I was able to find out that the four cans of films I was working with were just the tip of the iceberg—the Card/Pratt card catalog indicated that other films from the “French titles” list I was working from came from the Doublier Collection, which was in fact rich with over a hundred titles. Finally, while talking about my project with Nancy Kauffman, archivist for Stills, Posters, and Papers Collections of the Moving Image Department, she pointed out seven scrapbook albums belonging to Doublier now preserved in her vaults. The purpose of this article is not to go over the chronological discovery of each piece of this puzzle, but this short introduction would like to emphasize the wealth of information that can be gathered about a print when understood at the collection level and the important work and institutional knowledge relying on a museum’s or an archive’s personnel. The following article, presenting an overview of my investigation into the Doublier Collection, would not have been possible without their help. The Francis Doublier Collection was purchased by Kodak from Doublier’s widow upon his death in 1948. Kodak was probably very interested in acquiring Doublier’s Cinématographe along with numerous original Lumière prints for its Eastman Historical Photographic Collection.3 A letter from Doublier’s widow as well as two print lists, one dating from 1948 another from a later inventory in 1955, attest to the purchase.4 Both inventories combined amount to 114 titles, and among them are numerous rare

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early cinema artifacts, such as original Lumière prints; Eugène Augustin Lauste’s early sound experiments; some Pathé hand-colored prints; and even Brewster color, Kelley color, and Fox color sample strips. Along with the films and the camera, the family later donated seven scrapbooks to Kodak. Those seven albums were combined by Doublier and retrace the history of the motion picture, from the first mention of the concept of persistence of vision by Lucretius in 65 BC to Lauste’s early sound experiments.5 Every technological development is carefully framed on white album pages, and Doublier tends to favor European inventions over North American ones. Found in between the pages, unframed, are numerous documents pertaining to Doublier’s personal life, such as family photographs and correspondence, as well as articles from the press mentioning his career and his wife and descendants’ correspondence with the museum. The Doublier Collection at the George Eastman Museum, then, constitutes three main ensembles preserved in three different areas of the museum: the technical collection, the film prints, and the paper collection. The study of these three ensembles reveals the care Doublier took to situate his own heritage within French industrial film history, from Lyon in France with the Lumière Brothers to Fort Lee, New Jersey, where a burgeoning film industry settled in the 1910s. Reconstructing Doublier’s portrait as found in the archive, this paper would like to offer an analysis of his archival gesture, opening up questions of industrial history.

Being Remembered The paper and photographic components of this collection betray a specific strategy of remembrance in which Doublier used curated personal documents to ensure the preservation and heritage value of his life’s work. Doublier was born in 1878 and entered the budding film industry in 1894 because of a family tragedy. His father, Antoine Doublier, was working as a cooper in the factory of the Lumière Brothers, where he was killed in an accident in 1890. Following the accident, the company offered to hire all the children of the widow. Doublier started working for Lumière in 1894, and one year later, he was assisting the projectionist for the screening at the Grand Café on December 28. He continued his career for Lumière as an assistant cameraman and then cameraman, touring the world from 1895 to 1902 with the Cinématographe. He is famous for having engineered the presumed first “fake” documentary when he was touring Ukraine by

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pretending to screen images of the Dreyfus affair that were actually edited sequences of military parades from various sources. He confessed to have had an enormous success with this reel, until he was called out by a spectator remembering that the Dreyfus affair took place before the Cinématographe had been invented. Doublier had to concede and swore that he never showed the print again after this incident.6 In 1902, tired of image hunting, he was sent by the Lumière Brothers to open a photographic plates production plant in Burlington, Vermont, where he worked until it was shut down in 1911. Doublier was supposed to move back to Lyon after the closing of the Vermont plant but was offered work opportunities in Fort Lee, New Jersey, by film distributor and producer Jules Brulatour, who was then distributing Lumière stock to the growing independent film industry in New Jersey. After a visit to Fort Lee, Doublier accepted a position as head of the negatives department at the newly opened Eclair Studio. Doublier was the hero of the great Eclair plant fire in 1914, as he rushed into the vaults to save precious negatives while the flames were raging, an act of devotion that garnered much press attention. Soon after, Doublier left Eclair to become manager of Alice Guy-Blaché’s Solax laboratory. Two years later, and thanks again to his connection to Jules Brulatour, he designed and supervised with his architect brother-in-law Lucien Bessanay the building of the Paragon Film Laboratory on John Street in Fort Lee. In 1918, he moved to New York City to head the Eclipse film laboratory on 23rd Street. Doublier also claims to have designed and built the Eclipse laboratory, and there are blueprints designed by Lucien Bessanay of a proposed laboratory on 1600 Broadway dated 1935. If this information has not yet been confirmed, the presence of blueprints in the Doublier Collection shows that Doublier and Bessanay were clearly involved in several architectural projects. Doublier moved back to Fort Lee in 1920, as the technical manager of the Palisade Laboratories. In 1925, he became the technical manager of Hirligraph Laboratories. Pathé also hired him to conduct experiments in the 16 mm department of their factory in Bound Brook, New Jersey, and by the time of his death in 1948, Doublier was the vice president of Major Film Laboratory in New York City.7 Trying to be concise while describing Doublier’s career is a difficult task, yet one picture from the collection sums it up almost to perfection. In a portrait, Doublier has chosen to be represented in his office, wearing his lab coat and preparing solutions, probably for developing films (see fig. 9.1). Concentrated on his work, he is not looking at the camera nor acknowledging the moment of the photograph, even if the hint of a smile that can be

Figure 9.1. Portrait of Doublier. Credit: Francis Doublier Collection. Papers. Stills, Posters and Paper Collection, Moving Image Department, George Eastman Museum, Rochester, New York.

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read on his face could betray his seemingly uninterrupted work. Doublier only occupies the left half of the picture, leaving enough room to discover shelves stacked with chemicals. Doublier’s identity is here clearly defined through his occupation: a laboratory technician. But the picture seems to want to say more than just this. Shining in the foreground, his wedding ring and watch add a layer of accomplishment to the occupational portrait. And in the center of the shelf just next to his left arm and evidently out of place next to the chemicals lies his Cinématographe, always acting as a metaphorical reminder of his former career. Each detail of the photograph seems to function as a visual synecdoche: they act as parts pointing to an ensemble, serving an individual legacy. The picture says it all: the pioneering role he played in the history of cinema as one of Lumière’s cinematographers and his success story of building, managing, and experimenting in film laboratories in New Jersey and New York. To choose this photograph to be left with the albums is strategic: it serves an agenda of remembrance. Interestingly, Doublier does not insert himself directly into his historiographic work represented by the scrapbooks, yet his photographic presence always frames his projects. The albums carefully retrace the history of motion pictures using a scientific method with portraits, articles, and patents supporting each of his claims. If there are no portraits of Doublier per se within the album’s pages, the floating documents and photographs that were included with them clearly associate him in the legacy of the predecessors he hagiographically described. A similar strategy is used in the short educational documentary Doublier directed in 1939 entitled Cinematic Beginnings.8 The documentary, like the albums, aims at retracing the history of the birth of film, from Lucretius to the Lumière Brothers. Some still photographs from the albums were used in the film, which could indicate that the albums had been compiled in preparation for the film. Doublier alternates between technical demonstrations and film clips, going over precinema artifacts and all the inventions that led to the Cinématographe. He concedes the importance of the Vitascope and Edison and finishes with several Lumière shorts. Doublier does not include his role as a cameraman or laboratory technician in the film, yet he is not absent of the frame. His name and status, “Francis Doublier, Pioneer Lumière Cameraman,” proudly opens the credit title, and his portrait at the center of the “Finis” card beautifully closes his film. To make the most of Doublier’s paper collection, one must carefully navigate its ambiguous nature, negotiating between the hagiographic and

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nationalistic discourse articulated in the album pages retracing the history of the motion pictures and the emotional accounts relayed by the personal correspondence and photographs. Yet neither aspect must be evacuated, as they both nourish our understanding of the history of the early days of cinema. What transpires from this negotiation is the network of relationships running through both the official discourse of the album’s pages and the unofficial portrait of Doublier as a pioneer. Indeed, the Doublier Collection opens an interesting window onto both the history of the French film industry working in Fort Lee and more broadly in New Jersey and the film laboratory industry, as well as the collector’s world gravitating around them.9

Found in Between the Pages: The French Film Industry in Fort Lee, New York Doublier inscribes his legacy in the photo albums by revealing through pictures, documents, and donations the links that tied him to the well-known figures of film history. For example, he has pictures representing him or his relatives with Alice Guy-Blaché, Eugène Augustin Lauste, Lucien Andriot, and the Lumière Brothers. Thanks to this initiative, Doublier’s archive offers us a blueprint of what the Fort Lee network might have looked like and gives us clues to reconstitute its history. Even more interestingly, by following the threads laid by the Doublier Collection and digging into the archives and personal memories of the people who worked with Doublier in Fort Lee, it is not uncommon to find a similar involvement in the history and heritage of French cinema in the United States. One of the best examples is Alice Guy-Blaché, who prefaced her memoirs by a short account of the birth of the film industry, a gesture clearly aimed at establishing her own place in film history. Guy-Blaché adopts an opposite strategy from Doublier, as she inserts accounts of the development of the film industry in France and in the United States within the narration of her own life and work.10 Another telling example is set designer Henri Ménessier, who worked with Guy-Blaché at Gaumont in Paris before joining her at Solax in Fort Lee. Ménessier was interviewed by Musidora, as she was working with Henri Langlois on the Fonds de Commission de Recherche Historique in the mid-1940s for the Cinémathèque Française.11 Ménessier’s account of his career is precious as it corroborates Doublier and Guy-Blaché’s accounts of the film industry in Fort Lee and is also particularly rich as he gives

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technical accounts of the day-to-day activities of the studios in New Jersey and then California, where he followed Albert Capellani, often mentioning people and technicians by name. Ménessier is helpful in affirming the instrumental role Jules Brulatour played in the settlement of many French studios and technicians in the film industry in Fort Lee. Thanks to his knowledge of French, Brulatour was able to navigate both worlds, the French and the American film industry, to his profit. He played a major role supplying Lumière and Kodak stock to independent production companies as an independent contractor, thus going around Edison’s distribution circles. Ménessier also seems to be needing to assert the role played by the French film industry before the war when he tells Musidora, “It was during the war. In the American studios, you should have seen the camera they used . . . Pathés, Debries . . . American cameras only came after, the Bell and Howell, etc. . . . Frenchmen really did a huge favor to the Americans, since, as I was counting the other day, I found out names of over 100 French citizens from 1906 to 1914—and I am sure I am below the real number, since there were lots of laboratory technicians that were French too.”12 Finally, a precious document from Pierre Courtet-Cohl, reproduced in Richard Koszarski’s Fort Lee: The Film Town, also implies Emile Cohl’s involvement in a form of memorialization of his time spent in Fort Lee.13 It represents a map of the city of Fort Lee annotated by Emile Cohl, where he indicated the location of different French film studios and the city’s developing infrastructure as well as where the houses of some of his colleagues were. On the top right-hand corner of the map, Cohl drew Doublier’s house on Lemoine Avenue.

Drawing Trajectories Through studying the Doublier Collection, one can play with different iterations of the word provenance. Research work into the provenance of the collection at the George Eastman Museum not only uncovers the career of an important figure but also reveals different networks of relationships, helping us nourish our understanding of the mechanics of the early days of cinema. Second, we also must read Doublier and his family’s intent to assert the provenance of his collection into Kodak’s, and then the George Eastman Museum’s collection, as a source of pride. Many times in the correspondence, Doublier’s son and grandson recall that their father’s Cinématographe was preserved at the George Eastman Museum as a proof of Doublier’s legitimacy. Those two aspects obviously go together: it is because

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of Doublier’s involvement with the preservation of his own heritage that the provenance of his collection is so easily traceable within the museum’s collection. Finally, if one wants to push the meaning of the word further, there is something to say about the need to witness, historicize, and reassess the importance of the French film industry in the development of Fort Lee for those who emigrated there, even for a short time. Their national “provenance” and culture clearly played a role in how they received the different version of film history that existed in the United States. Finally, a few words about what this collection teaches us about institutional history, taking here the George Eastman Museum as an example. Since the collection was acquired by Kodak in 1948, the camera, films, and papers have been separated and moved to different departments, mostly as an answer to the objects’ preservation needs. If the link to Doublier has been clearly established and preserved for the paper and technical collections, one couldn’t say the same for the 114 titles purchased by Kodak. When searching the film titles in the current database, the reference to Doublier is seldom reported, save for a good amount of the original Lumière prints and, of course, his own work, Cinematic Beginnings. Yet this doesn’t mean that the information does not exist or has been lost; the list inventorying the purchase can be found in the museum’s paper historical collection, and the James Card/George Pratt card catalog also refers to Doublier either by mentioning his full name or by annotating a small D in the top right-hand corner of the card.14 The meaning behind the D had been lost through the different cataloging systems, which points to a different problem—that is, the documentation of a museum’s practices. It is still, then, possible to reconstitute what has been preserved of Doublier’s titles in the current Moving Image Department’s collection and to re-create, at least virtually, the Doublier Collection. Just as the D was temporarily lost in favor of other useful information, one should never lose sight of a collection’s material history after it enters the museum or archive. It teaches as much about the collector as the institution acquiring its collection.

Notes 1. A short biography of Ed Stratmann can be found on the George Eastman Museum’s website. 2. The George Eastman Museum has preserved and still actually uses the original card catalog established and maintained by James Card, first curator of the museum’s film collection, after the museum’s creation in 1948.

Thinking with Provenance  |  127 3. The collection was later donated to the George Eastman Museum, then Eastman House. 4. Doublier, Lisette and Card, James, 1948–1955, Francis Doublier Collection and Historical Files, Stills, Posters and Paper Collection, Moving Image Department, George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY. 5. Doublier, Francis, Francis Doublier Collection, Stills, Posters and Paper Collection, Moving Image Department, George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY. 6. This anecdote has been relayed in many articles about early documentary; see for example Stephen Bottomore, “Dreyfus and Documentary,” Sight and Sound (Autumn 1984): 290. Further details can also be found in Francis Doublier, “Lecture given by Francis Doublier at New York University, School of Education Auditorium, October 15, 1941, 2–4pm,” Francis Doublier Collection, Stills, Posters and Paper Collection, Moving Image Department, George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY. 7. This short bibliography has been compiled with the help of correspondence, documents, and articles found in Francis Doublier Collection, Stills, Posters and Paper Collection, Moving Image Department, George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY. 8. Cinematic Beginnings, directed by Francis Doublier (1939), 16 mm and 8 mm unsplit film, Moving Image Department, George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY. 9. André Habib is currently researching the role played by Francis Doublier in supplementing experimental filmmakers with prints of early films, possibly by duping film prints. André Habib, “Finding Early Cinema in the Avant-Garde: Research and Investigation” (paper presented at Domitor, Fifteenth International Conference, Rochester, NY, June 13–16, 2018). 10. Interestingly, Guy-Blaché’s preface and historical intervention within her text have been cut out from the English edition of her memoirs, published in 1986. The note from the editor explains that Guy-Blaché’s sources and historical facts being imprecise, he found it better to cut the preface in its entirety. Without discussing here what this does to GuyBlaché’s authorial voice, this also speaks to a continued rivalry between French and North American film historiographies. Alice Guy-Blaché, The Memoirs of Alice Guy Blaché, ed. Slide, Anthony, trans. Blaché Roberta and Simone, Filmmakers No. 12 (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1986). 11. Henri Ménessier, “Henri Ménessier: interview par Musidora,” Fonds Commission de Recherche Historique, 1946–1948, Bibliothèque du Film, La Cinémathèque Française, Paris. 12. Ménessier, “Henri, Henri Ménessier: interview par Musidora,” Fonds Commission de Recherche Historique, 1946–1948, Bibliothèque du Film, La Cinémathèque Française, Paris, 11. Translation is my own. 13. Richard Koszarski, Fort Lee: The Film Town (Rome, Italy: John Libbey Publishing, 2004), 11. 14. This constitutes a research hypothesis; no other cards except for titles coming from the Doublier Collection have a D in the top right-hand corner.

Bibliography Bottomore, Stephen. “Dreyfus and Documentary.” Sight and Sound (Autumn 1984): 290–293. Cinematic Beginnings. Directed by Francis Doublier. 1939. 16 mm and 8 mm unsplit film. Moving Image Department, George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY.

128  |  Provenance and Early Cinema Doublier, Francis. Francis Doublier Collection. Papers. Stills, Posters and Paper Collection, Moving Image Department, George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY. Doublier, Lisette and James Card. 1948–1955. Francis Doublier Collection and Historical Files. Papers. Stills, Posters and Paper Collection, Moving Image Department, George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY. Guy-Blaché, Alice. The Memoirs of Alice Guy Blaché. Translated by Blaché Roberta and Simone and edited by Anthony Slide Filmmakers No. 12 (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1986). Habib, André. “Finding Early Cinema in the Avant-Garde: Research and Investigation.” Paper, Domitor, Fifteenth International Conference, Rochester, NY, June 13–16, 2018. Koszarski, Richard. Fort Lee: The Film Town (Rome, Italy: John Libbey Publishing, 2004). Ménessier, Henri. Henri Ménessier: interview par Musidora. Papers. Fonds Commission de Recherche Historique, 1946–1948. Bibliothèque du Film, La Cinémathèque Française, Paris.

CLARA AUCLAIR is a PhD candidate in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester and in Histoire et Sémiologie du Texte et de l’Image at Université Paris Diderot.

10 REVISITING THE FILMS OF ALBERT KAHN’S ARCHIVES DE LA PLANÈTE A Material Survey Teresa Castro and Anne Sigaud

I

f the films and photographs of Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète (ADLP) collection are today becoming more and more familiar to film historians everywhere, many of the collection’s complexities having been brought to light and discussed in recent years (see in particular Amad, 2010; Perlès, 2015; and Perlès, 2019), its films have yet to reveal all their secrets, in particular when it comes to their provenance and social life.1 Given the collection’s richness and its wideness of scope, choosing a single film capable of illuminating it is a perilous exercise. Still, a short picture shot by an unknown cameraman in the Grands Boulevards, Paris, in 1913 might be considered iconic. Alternating moving and steady shots, the film was partially photographed from a moving tramway, the reverse tracking shots that allow us to glimpse the capital’s busy arteries perfectly encapsulating the archives’ sensibility to the flows of traffic, crowds, and modernity.2 As to the static shots, they focus on the vespasiennes, the men’s public urinals that could then be found in the streets of Paris, their “voyeurism” and attentiveness to the commonplace having been extensively commented on by a number of authors (among which Amad, 2010). Confirming the film’s epochal and representative status, French filmmaker Nicole Vedrès included it in her found footage documentary Paris 1900 (1947). Founded and entirely financed between 1908 and 1932 by French banker Albert Kahn (1860–1940), the Archives de la Planète famously proposed

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to record the ebb and flow of the world’s daily life—the everyday, in Paula Amad’s apt expression (Amad, 2010)—at a time of fundamental change. As summed up by geologist Emmanuel de Margerie (1862–1953), Kahn wished “to put into effect a sort of photographic inventory of the surface of the globe as inhabited and developed by Man at the beginning of the twentieth century” (Margerie, 1912). An ambitious and, in many respects, unconventional archive, Kahn’s project is actually the iconographic component of a larger documentary and philanthropic project. Conceived and implemented by the millionaire from 1898 onward, the latter articulated complementary means of “investigating” the world, such as travel scholarships (the Around the World grants), intellectual circles and discussion groups (such as the Around the World Society [1906–1949] and the National Committee of Social and Political Studies [1916–1931]), printed publications, and the photo-cinematographic archive known as Archives de la Planète.3 Kahn’s goal, which he never clearly formulated in a single master document, was to produce and assemble a multiplicity of documents and data capable of providing him and the French intellectual elites with “a universal summary of all facts, an impartial repertoire of all knowledge indispensable to a citizen of the world” (Denis, 1951, 57). These documents were to support his patriotic political action (Corneloup, 2015; Sigaud, forthcoming). In addition to the eighty thousand autochrome plates and stereoscopic photographs, the archives include almost one hundred thousand meters of film shot by a team of cameramen working for Kahn. Sent on missions in France and abroad, these men worked under the guidance of French geographer Jean Brunhes (1869–1930). Originally a professor of human geography at the University of Fribourg, Brunhes ran the ADLP from their official creation in 1912 until his untimely death in 1930 (Kahn was to lose his fortune in the aftermath of the 1929 stock market crash). Brunhes’s recruitment was accompanied by the creation at the Collège de France of a chair in human geography, a position funded by Kahn. The financier’s choice to align Kahn’s archives with the field of human geography—a fairly recent discipline, indebted to Friedrich Ratzel’s “anthropo-geography” and defined by Brunhes as the study of the relationships between human activity and the phenomena of physical geography—constitutes one of the archive’s singularities. However, if human geography undoubtedly shaped the archive’s visual politics, the films in the collection are not “geographical films”: as again Paula Amad has suggested, the Archives de la Planète constitute instead an archive of different nonfiction film genres, ranging

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from simple Lumière-style views (albeit multishot) and travelogues to ethnographic or scientific films (Amad, 2010, 64–95). In material terms, the film collection consists mainly of negative elements shot by Kahn’s employees or offered to the banker by the occasional collaborator. In a slightly lower proportion, we can find interpositive and positive elements that were struck and sometimes edited shortly after the shooting phase. Finally, the collection also includes a smaller set of positive elements bought from different production companies, belonging (or not) to the commercial network of the period. Since early 2017, we have been conducting joint research on the collection’s nitrate prints, preserved by the Albert-Kahn Museum (MAK) and physically stored at the archives of the National Center of Cinematography and the Moving Image in the former Fort of Bois d’Arcy. Despite our different points of departure—Anne Sigaud studying the intentions that shaped Kahn’s global philanthropic project and Teresa Castro focusing more specifically on the documentary nature of these films as well as their visual style, technique, and use of filmic forms (types of shots and camera movements, the evolving sense of decoupage and relations between shots, in-camera editing, the use of dissolves and fades, etc.) throughout the archives’ twenty-five years of activity, we were equally confronted with several questions that could not be answered by film analysis alone. It became evident to us that in order to understand the provenance of how Kahn’s films proceed from their shooting to their editing phase (i.e., from negative to positive print and from intention to production), we needed to physically examine the prints. This brought us face to face with the material nature of the collection and some of its singular characteristics: • the fact that most prints, either negative or positive, are rough assemblies sometimes made several decades after the shoot, which hinders our understanding of the original filming and editing logics; • the fact that an important amount of negatives, in particular for the 1914–1918 period, resemble cut-outs (in French, chutes): very short sequences, more or less abruptly interrupted and corresponding only approximately to the descriptions found in the original Archives de la Planète film register book (see below), which raises the question of the prints’ circulation and potential use as source material for other film productions; • the fact that a large proportion of negatives were never struck as positives during Kahn’s period of activity, which brings us to the

132  |  Provenance and Early Cinema problem of the archives’ intentions and to the conception of (nonfiction) film as an essentially archival source for the future; • the coexistence of the negative prints—emanating, in principle, from film shoots and missions commissioned and funded by Kahn—with a number of positive prints covering similar subjects to those represented in the collection but bought from external production companies belonging (or not) to the commercial circuit, such as Pathé and Gaumont, which draws attention to the history and philosophy of the collection’s constitution and begs the question of its documentary substance.

In this context, we decided to confront the scarce data that can be found in the rare written sources that have reached us—film development index cards (1918–1927, “carnet de fiches de développement des négatifs”), a film register book for negatives and positives (1937; 1908–1932, “répertoire des films négatifs et des films positifs”), a projection register book (1921–1950, “répertoire de séances cinéma [à Boulogne]”), and a footage register book (1908–1932, “répertoire cinéma”)—with the inspection of a sample of negative and positive nitrate prints belonging either to the MAK or to other comparable collections, such as the Defense Audiovisual Communication and Production Unit (ECPAD), whose World War I films, as we will see, share some conspicuous features with Kahn’s pictures.4 Our paper is a midterm review of the work accomplished so far: we will discuss a number of very specific case studies focusing on the period from 1908 to 1919 and suggest a number of hypotheses with regard to the material (and, to a lesser extent, social) history of the archives’ films/shots as well as to the filming and editing practices within the collection. Finally, we will also draw some preliminary methodological conclusions concerning the necessary articulation of film analysis, archival work, and the study of film provenance.

Three Case Studies from Paris: After Three Years of War to the Return of Metz to France Confronted with the necessity of delimiting our corpus of films, we decided, in the earliest stage of our common research, to respect two criteria: (1) the existence of positive prints documenting the same subject in different institutions, (2) the presence, at least in one of the selected institutions, of negative rush prints potentially constituting the “original” from which positive prints were later edited and struck. The first criterion made it possible for us to compare editing practices from different collections, and the

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second opened up the way to a close observation of the development and editing process. These principles allowed us to target a number of examples, for the moment almost exclusively concentrated on the period ranging from 1908 to 1919, and therefore giving us a precious glimpse on how the Archives de la Planète functioned during World War I—a period marked by Kahn’s open collaboration with the national propaganda services.5 During a first observation campaign, we were, in particular, able to observe the astounding complementarity between an archive’s collection of negative rushes shot in Paris in 1917 and a major propaganda film, Paris après trois ans de guerre (Paris after three years of war, 1917), from which positive prints can today be found at the ECPAD and at Pathé-Gaumont Archives.6 The film, shot by an unknown cameraman, aims to raise the nation’s morale and to strengthen its resolve to resist the German aggression by circulating images of a lively and uncomplaining capital city, where life goes on almost “as usual,” if not for the soldiers who can be seen walking the streets and the women who now occupy jobs traditionally done by men. At the time, it was also essential to convince the United States of America, who had only entered the conflict in April, that its French ally was resilient and in good spirits. The fact that so many of the Archives de la Planète negative rushes are abruptly cut short suggests that we are in the presence of chutiers, cut-outs, fragments, or trims. Furthermore, the thematic correspondence between the archives’ shots and some of the film’s sequences seems to indicate that, at least during the war, the images shot by Kahn’s cameramen were used as raw material in order to assemble “composite films”: pictures assembling shots from various origins, edited in function of a particular thematic unity, in order to produce films “whose format goes beyond that of the simple news report” (Véray, 2014). The fact that Albert Kahn was by then closely involved in state-sponsored propaganda activities strengthens this hypothesis and confirms that the Archives de la Planète are not only a cultural product of their time but also profoundly engaged in and with the politics of their time. Sometimes reduced to the project of a visionary man whose unedited and noncommercial films are addressed, in essence, to a vague future spectator, the Archives de la Planète should not only be seen as the “archives of tomorrow” (which they are also): their films, in particular during and after the war, are also documents for the present. As Kahn hints at in his only pamphlet, Rights and Duties of Governments (whose writing began around March 1917 and which was distributed to a restricted circle of his entourage

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at the time of the armistice, in November 1918) (Kahn, 1918), his documentary strategy aims to implement new forms of political governance and to promote institutional reform (Kahn, 1918; Sigaud, 2019). If some of these ideas were already taking shape in Kahn’s mind before the conflict, the war’s catastrophic upheaval seems nonetheless to have constituted a turning point, among other ways by concretely implicating his documentary project in the official propaganda effort. During a second observation campaign, we compared three versions of the film L’arrivée du cargo Orléans à Bordeaux (The arrival of the Orleans cargo in Bordeaux, 1917), of which positive prints are kept at the MAK, the ECPAD, and at Gaumont-Pathé Archives. The film documents the arrival of an American unarmed cargo, the Orléans, that successfully managed to break the German blockade. The examination of the prints allowed us to realize that the cameramen working for these different institutions shot almost the same images, sometimes side by side, other times from slightly different locations, as if following a common program, most likely imposed by the French military services. Despite some microdifferences concerning the order and length of the edited sequences, the positive prints kept in these three archives were composed in a similar way. In short, and when it comes to this particular example—a film covering a military event during the war—the hypothesis of a specific “look,” distinct, in particular, from that of the actualities of the period, is difficult to support. As a matter of course, when we move to the more institutional terrain of military events, the films shot by the cameramen at Kahn’s orders resemble, in many respects, those of the commercial production companies of their time. Finally, during a third observation campaign that we will discuss here in more detail, we compared the films L’entrée des français à Metz (The French enter Metz, 1918) and Metz reçoit le gouvernement de la République (Metz welcomes the Republican government, 1918), of which positive prints are kept at the ECPAD and at the MAK and whose negative rushes can be found at the ECPAD, the ADLP possessing a series of rushes on very similar subjects.7 The films in question are two propaganda pictures produced by the Société Photographique et Cinématographique de l’Armée (SPCA) (the autonomous propaganda body created in 1917 by General Liautey, the French Ministry of War): they celebrate the return of Metz to France after seventy years of German occupation. Usually, the material traces such as those we observed on the original nitrate elements examined so far are difficult to date with precision, in particular due to their heterogeneity. The

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Figure 10.1. Scratched-out notes on the original print of Paul Bressolles, Réfection d’un pont—L’entrée des troupes françaises à Metz, 1918, ECPAD.

traces result from the superposition of several layers of interventions: color gradings, intermediate duplication campaigns, sound synchronization campaigns, inscriptions and annotations for inventory purposes, repairs, and so on. The “Metz corpus,” however, proved to be exceptionally homogeneous, the confrontation between the prints’ inspection and the elements found in nonfilmic archives allowing us to document with unusual precision the filming, editing, and distribution processes of these two pictures. Furthermore, we were able to consolidate a number of hypotheses concerning the practical modalities of the collaboration between the Archives de la Planète and the French national propaganda services. First of all, the observation of the SPCA negative prints preserved at the ECPAD made it possible to identify two different sets of negative rushes (two chutiers) as well as a negative edited for intermediate duplication before new prints were struck. One of these sets of rushes—L’entrée des français à Metz—combines shots made by the two SPCA cameramen sent to Metz: Paul Bressolles (1861–1927) and Edgar Costil (1879–1943). Réfection d’un pont—l’entrée des troupes françaises à Metz (Rehabilitation of a bridge—the French troops enter Metz)8 corresponds to the negative rushes shot by Bressolles: a reference to his shooting journal was scratched out on the original print (see fig. 10.1), which was edited according to the order established on the same document.9 Les français entrent à Metz is a rough assembly shot in Strasbourg and Metz by three different cameras in November and December 1918.10 Some shots are incredibly short: they constitute the leftovers of the sequences used in the positive print. Other sequences in the same set remained intact, apparently unfit for exploitation: sometimes chaotic crowd movements conceal the military parade in the background, other times official personalities look straight at the camera while smoking a cigarette, and so on. Another element reinforces the

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Figure 10.2. Strong and neat splices alternate with photographed splices: positive print held by the ECPAD.

assumption that this reel was not intended to be duplicated: near the splices, no one worried about removing the fogged, overexposed flash-frames caused by the stop-camera technique. With regard to the positive prints held by the ECPAD, two elements should be pointed out: on the one hand, and despite bearing the same title, each print constitutes a unique copy; on the other hand, the editing is punctuated by the repetition of several scenes, shot from different perspectives. Strong and neat splices alternate with photographed splices, resulting from the duplication of previously edited positives (see fig. 10.2). Each print is therefore an assemblage of bits and pieces of other prints, struck at different moments.11 Moreover, entire sequences attest to a perfect mastery of in-camera editing techniques, splicing and the stop-camera technique coexisting within the same print. Written sources from 1917–1918 mention that the SPCA provided its partners with a “sample copy” from which “cut-outs and shortenings deemed useful” were made, after which the society furnished a print “for the normal exploitation of the film.”12 The “development operations, duplicating of the first interpositive elements and the editing” were conducted at the SPCA’s lab, “being understood that the editing would be [done] under [the supervision of the film’s commissioner].”13 The SPCA equally guaranteed “the negative’s development, as well as the striking, tinting and toning of the prints, essential to the film’s diffusion.”14 The nitrate positives that we inspected at the ECPAD are, most likely, an example of those “interpositive elements,” assembled thanks to a general editing scheme, adjusted according to the wishes of the different partners and then duplicated, probably in one single go. The SPCA preserved these “first interpositives,” while its partners kept the exploitation prints.

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Figure 10.3. Unknown cameramen, Metz, 1918, MAK.

With regard to the positive L’entrée des français à Metz held by ­Albert Kahn, it equally resembles these “first interpositive elements.” As a ­matter of fact, the archives were actively involved in a propaganda distribution c­ ircuit uniting the state and the private, associational sphere. The archives’ laboratory, in Boulogne-Billancourt, struck prints from these propaganda films; they were distributed through large, private propaganda associations, to which the state delegated the films’ distribution in the French territory, reserving for itself the task of their distribution abroad.15 The MAK ­archives, for example, hold exploitation visas for SPCA films, and the lab’s ­footage register hints at the Archives de la Planète print striking activity. With regard to the collection’s “Metz negatives,” the latter almost exclusively document scenes shot on the fringe of the government’s official “reception ceremony,” which took place on December 8, 1918 (see fig. 10.3). The sequences’ titles and dates are directly inscribed on the filmstrip, the negative attesting to Kahn’s cameramen’s presence in Metz. So it does come as a surprise that the positive held by Kahn is composed from SPCA images, since the banker also had its private cameramen on site. Either Kahn’s

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men were in Metz but did not film the event for some unknown reason, Kahn purchasing an SPCA print in order to make up for this absence of images, or the sequences documenting this important political event were shot but then included in a lost film. If this latter is proven to be the case, we are today in the presence of a set of negative rushes. In any case, these elements seem to confirm that, during the war and immediately after, the archives’ documentary project was totally in tune with the official propaganda discourse. Moreover, the collection’s institutional history also needs to be reconsidered, the conflict making clear that Kahn’s archive did entertain important relations with other filmic structures or institutions, cameramen like Lucien Le Saint (1867–1938) being at the service of different propaganda units. Given the large-scale cooperation system associating various private and public structures in the production of propaganda images during the war, the Metz shoots are perhaps best understood when placed in the context of the liberation of Alsace-Lorraine. On the one hand, several film projects, led by different organizations in November and December 1918, were carried out in various Alsatian and Lorraine locations and seem to be complementary (see Sigaud, 2016). On the other hand, both Kahn and Brunhes were strongly engaged with the Alsace-Lorraine question: as is well known, Kahn himself was an Alsatian Jew who, as a teenager and after Prussia’s defeat of France in the 1870 war and the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine by the Germans, opted to retain his French citizenship. This might explain why Kahn’s documentary undertakings became so closely entangled with national propaganda: although France had not gone to war because of Alsace-Lorraine, the “lost provinces” became an important symbol in French propaganda. Recognized during his lifetime as being “faithful to his birthplace of Alsace” (Willbrandt, 1930–1931, 46), it is perhaps not surprising that Kahn put himself—his fortune and his cameramen—at the service of the French state. Given this context, we believe that the street scenes shot in Metz and today preserved at the Archives de la Planète could be the rushes of a film shot for the propaganda services of Alsace-Lorraine, an organization that, distinct from the SPCA, possessed its own film unit, which Kahn materially supported and where his cameramen were perhaps mobilized. Once again, this hypothesis builds on the study of the complex provenance of these films. Some methodological conclusions are perhaps necessary.

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Provenance at the Crossroads of Film History: Some Methodological Conclusions While it is obviously difficult to draw general methodological conclusions from these very specific microhistorical case studies, it is important for us to point out how the physical inspection of our filmic sources and the complementary study of their provenance have helped us reconsider the political, cultural, and formal problems at the origin of our enquiry. In this context, it is useful to recall the notion of film-palimpsest, a term aptly coined by French film historian Sylvie Lindeperg in her book Les écrans de l’ombre (The shadow screens, Lindeperg, 2001). Discussing the links between cinema and history, Lindeperg insists on the need to unearth the different layers of a film’s “writing,” from its genesis to its shifts in space and time. Inspired by Bruno Latour’s idea that science can only be understood through its practice, she invites the (film) historian to enter the “black box” of the “film under construction” and to become a “ragpicker” in the terms of Siegfried Kracauer (Lindeperg, 2013). Focusing on a small sample of negative and positive nitrate prints, our study aims to access the still little-known “black box” of Kahn’s films by focusing on the question of provenance. While choosing this particular angle doesn’t allow us to unfold all its secrets, it at least provides us with a new line of sight. If the Archives de la Planète, like many nonfiction film collections, constitute a puzzling object of study, characterized by its scarce written sources and the fragmentary nature of its films, our material survey shows that the latter can—and should—be envisaged in itself as a meaningful element, raising as many questions as it suggests answers. The physical examination of the films, as well as their comparison to other contemporary prints shot by governmental or commercial organizations, confirms to us that Kahn’s films probably participated in unknown propaganda networks, casting new light on the double question of the archives’ intentions/ conceptions of (nonfiction) film as archival material. As a matter of fact, if so many negative rushes are abruptly cut short during the 1914–1918 period, it is perhaps because the films in question were seen not only as potential “documents for the future” but also as concrete source material for the propaganda films of their present time. During the war, everything—even the everyday—became explicitly political; in this peculiar context, even the passerby who stops to buy a

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bouquet of lilies in a capital city tormented by food shortages and rationing constitutes a meaningful event—both for the Archives de la Planète and for those who commissioned Paris After Three Years of War (Castro, 2019). Moreover, and this time with regard to the history of filmic and documentary forms, these physical observations are also a precious complement to film analysis, in particular when it comes to the practice of in-camera editing/splicing and ultimately to issues such as the relationship between shots and the evolution of decoupage. Among other things, a close observation of the prints shows that it is decoupage (understood not as a process that takes place before filming but as a structuring operation occurring during the shooting and creating a more or less articulate description/story around a place or an event)—not montage—that should be taken as the standard for the study of variation/evolution between films. In other words, nonfiction stylistic features, particularly during this period, cannot be thought of solely in terms of those dictated by fiction film.

Acknowledgments The research discussed in this essay has been conducted in the context of the Ciné 08–19 research project, which federates a large consortium of institutions and researchers on the history of cinema in France and its colonies between 1908 and 1919. The project is funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR). For more information on the project, see https:// cine0819.hypotheses.org/.

Notes 1. The bibliography on the material and social life of objects, which includes visual artifacts such as photographs, is long and would merit more detailed commentary particularly with regard to the so-called material turn. See, among others, Appadurai, 1986; Pinney, 1997; and Edwards and Hart, 2004. 2. France, Paris, les Grands Boulevards, 1913, positive nitrate AI122532. For a more developed discussion of tracking shots in the collection and their link to modernity, see Castro, 2019b. 3. For a more in-depth discussion of these different projects, see the catalogs Albert Kahn singulier et pluriel (Paris/Boulogne-Billancourt: Lienart/Albert-Kahn Musée et Jardin départemental, 2015). 4. The Établissement de communication et de production audiovisuelle de la Défense stores the audiovisual archives of the French defense forces from 1900 to the present and produces new materials.

Revisiting the Films of Albert Kahn’s Archives  |  141 5. With regard to this periodization, see Sigaud 2019a, Sigaud 2019b, as well as the collective catalog edited by Anne Sigaud, Réalités (in)visibles. Autour d’Albert Kahn, les archives de la Grande Guerre. Paris: Bernard Chauveau, 2019. 6. ECPAD, inv. 14.18 B 369 ; Gaumont-Pathé Archives n° 1917 155. No negative print from the film has been located. 7. SPCA “Metz” titles held at the ECPAD: Les Français entrent à Metz: positive 14.18 B 415; Les Français entrent à Metz: positive 14.18 B 128; Les Français entrent à Metz: positive 14.18 A 219; Libération de l’Alsace—comprising Les Français entrent à Metz: negative 14.18 B 656; Réfection d’un pont followed by L’entrée des troupes françaises à Metz: negative 14.18 B 531; Remises de décorations followed by Metz reçoit le gouvernement de la République: two positives and one negative 14.18 A 220. ADLP films conserved by the MAK and held at the National Center of Cinematography and the Moving Image: Entrée des troupes françaises à Metz: positive AI 100106; Metz, scènes diverses: negative AI 83975; Frescaty, hangar à zeppelin: negative AI 84171; Metz, réception du gouvernement français: digital element AI 110670 (the original positive has been destroyed). 8. ECPAD, negative 14.18 B 531. 9. ECPAD, journal nº 1903. 10. ECPAD, nitrate 14.18 B 656. 11. As if to confirm this idea, different sequences bear nonsequential serial numbers: after number 867 3 follows number 983 5, then 983 2 and 984 6 and then again 867 3. 12. ECPAD, SPCA archives: box 2, letter from the Head of Service at the SPCA to Mr. Sandberg, June 1, 1917. 13. ECPAD, SPCA archives, letter from the Under Secretary of State of the Fine Arts to the Marine Minister, May 3, 1917. 14. Archives nationales de France, AJ 30 338, administration provisoire de l’AlsaceLorraine après 1914, service général d’Alsace-Lorraine, service des éditions, 1917–1918: note du chef du cabinet civil du ministre de la Guerre à la SPCA, March 23, 1918. 15. On this topic, see Sigaud’s MA dissertation (Sigaud, 2016).

Bibliography Amad, Paula. Counter-Archive. Film. The Everyday, and Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Appadurai, Arjun, ed. The Social Life of Things. Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Londres, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Castro, Teresa. “Le quotidien est politique: le cas des films 1914–1918.” In Réalités (in)visibles. Autour d’Albert Kahn et les archives de la Grande Guerre, edited by V. Perlès and A. Sigaud, 186–193. Paris: Bernard Chaveau, 2019. ———. “Vues panoramiques et travellings. Les paysages en movement des Archives de la Planète.” In Les Archives de la Planète, edited by V. Perlès, 390–397. Paris: Liénart, 2019. Corneloup, Marie. “Au fil des fondations, les fils rouges de l’œuvre: continuité, ruptures, évolutions . . .” In Albert Kahn, singulier et pluriel, edited by Stephan Kutniak, 252–271. Paris/Boulogne-Billancourt: Lienart/Albert Kahn—Musée et jardin départementaux, 2015. Denis, Pierre. Les métiers et les jours. Paris: R. Julliard, 1951.

142  |  Provenance and Early Cinema Edwards, Elizabeth, and Janice Hart, eds. Photographs, Objects, Histories. On the Materiality of Images. London: Routledge Press, 2004. Kahn, Albert. Des droits et devoirs des gouvernements. Paris: imprimerie de Vaugirard, 1918. Lindeperg, Sylvie. “Film Production as a Palimpsest,” in Behind the Screen. Global Cinema, edited by P. Szczepanik and P. Vonderau, 73–87. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Lindeperg, Sylvie. Les écrans de l’ombre. La seconde guerre mondiale dans le cinéma français. Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2001. Perlès, Valérie. “Les Archives de la Planète: un projet en tension entre science et action.” In Albert Kahn, singulier et pluriel, edited by Stephan Kutniak, 193–211. Paris/BoulogneBillancourt: Lienart/Albert Kahn—Musée et jardin départementaux, 2015. ———, ed. Les Archives de la Planète. Paris: Liénart, 2019. Pinney, Christopher. Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998. Sigaud, Anne. “Des Archives de la Planète aux Archives de la Guerre: Réalités invisibles, notre raison doit les discerner.” In Réalités (in)visibles. Autour d’Albert Kahn, les archives de la Grande Guerre, edited by A. Sigaud, 30–54. Paris: Bernard Chauveau, 2019. ———. La collection des Archives de la Planète pendant la première guerre mondiale (1914– 1918), expression et moyen d’un projet pacifiste, humaniste et patriote. Mémoire de master sous la direction d’Olivier Forcade, Université Paris IV Sorbonne, 2016. ———. “Les ‘films Kahn’ pendant la guerre: un empilement de logiques.” In Réalités (in) visibles. Autour d’Albert Kahn, les archives de la Grande Guerre, edited by A. Sigaud, 142–152. Paris: Bernard Chauveau, 2019. Véray, Laurent. “Appropriation des images d’archives et exigence historique,” May 2014. http://www.ina-expert.com/e-dossiers-de-l-audiovisuel/appropriation-des-images-d -archives-et-exigence-historique.html. Accessed December 15, 2018. Wilbrandt, Robert. “Ce que je dois à mon voyage autour du monde.” Bulletin de la Société Autour du Monde 1930–1931.

TERESA CASTRO is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle—Paris 3. She is editor (with Maria do Carmo Piçarra) of (Re)imagining African Independence: Film, Visual Arts and the Fall of the Portuguese Empire. ANNE SIGAUD is a Heritage Officer and PhD candidate in contemporary history at Université Paris—Sorbonne. Her thesis explores Albert Kahn’s work and foundations within the context of political history and culture.

11 THE THANHOUSER STUDIO FILMOGRAPHY Analysis and Extant Prints Ned Thanhouser

J

ust over thirty-two years ago, in the fall of 1986, I was watching a PBS television documentary on silent films when, to my surprise, the Thanhouser studio logo appeared on the screen followed by the studio’s 1912 production of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I was stunned. My father had told me that all the films produced by my grandparents’ New Rochelle studio were burned and nothing survived. Edwin Thanhouser, my grandfather and studio head, did not believe the films had any value. Nobody cared about them, and it was too expensive to store the volatile nitrate negatives, so he burned them all! When I learned each negative made dozens of distribution prints that were sent to exhibitors and seen by audiences around the world, I was intrigued to find prints that had survived. Luckily, archives and private collectors treasured and saved many of these early films. When I saw my first Thanhouser film broadcast on PBS, however, the Thanhouser studio was not well known or studied. There was no central registry of the company’s surviving titles, easy access to extant prints, or a comprehensive study of its history and employees. I made it my mission to find and identify film prints, ensure their preservation, and reacquaint the academic community and silent film fans with the rich history of the Thanhouser studio and its pioneering contributions to early cinema. I have located and identified over 250 extant prints from the over 1,000 films produced by Thanhouser between 1910 and 1917.

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The Domitor 2018 conference in Rochester, New York, was the ideal venue to share the history of my search for and status of extant Thanhouser films. With an international audience focused on early cinema and new methods of historical research, this collaborative gathering of scholars and archivists is the perfect fit for sharing an account of extant Thanhouser material. I began my efforts before the internet brought to my desktop access to archival holdings and periodicals from the era. I called Blackhawk Films in Des Moines, Iowa, and learned they had two Thanhouser films that I could purchase: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1912) and King Rene’s Daughter (1913). I bought 16 mm copies of each for $87.50. In the spring of 1987, I rented a local movie theater, hired a musician, and screened these two movies to an audience of over one hundred friends and family members. I had to find more films, and thus my journey began. I learned of Anthony Slide’s chapter on the Thanhouser studio in his book Aspects of American Film History Prior to 1920.1 Tony introduced me to Q. David Bowers, who was writing a Thanhouser studio history that would include a comprehensive list of employees and films. In preparing The Thanhouser Studio: An Encyclopedia and History (1995), Bowers drew on trade publications, library holdings, and archives to compile the history of the Thanhouser studio legacy. This work contains over three thousand articles, including a narrative history of the studio and its founders, a comprehensive list of titles with detailed synopses, advertising copy, contemporary reviews, and biographies for over one thousand employees. Bowers’s manuscript was too massive to publish as a printed book, so I obtained a license to publish it, with support from the Library of Congress, as a CDROM in 1996. In 2013, the project was transferred to the internet for online access.2 Using Bowers’s extensive filmography and documentation, I compiled a database of all 1,086 Thanhouser titles produced by the studio from 1910 to 1917. This database has facilitated the identification of previously unidentified Thanhouser titles and has been useful in providing insight into the films released by the studio, categorizing them according to genre, brands, and geographic production locations. This resulted in a detailed timeline of the studio’s output as the industry shifted from “one-reelers” to longer feature film productions. This chapter documents the results of this analysis, the studio’s distribution channels, and the locations of extant films. I present case studies for three important Thanhouser films: A Doll’s House (1911), Cinderella

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(1911), and The Evidence of the Film (1913). Thanhouser’s production output is put in context with contemporary studios to examine the quantity of extant Thanhouser films vis-à-vis similar production efforts from this era. Finally, I discuss the results of improving the accessibility of extant Thanhouser films.

Thanhouser Films: Historical Overview, 1910 to 1917 The Thanhouser Company was incorporated in New Rochelle, New York, on October 25, 1909, by Edwin Thanhouser as president, Gertrude Thanhouser (Edwin’s wife) as secretary, and Lloyd F. Lonergan (Gertrude’s brother-in-law) as vice president. Edwin and Gertrude came from an extensive background in the theater; they had been stage actors since the 1890s and subsequently became managers of stock companies in Milwaukee and Chicago. Lonergan was a newspaper reporter for the New York Daily Herald when the studio was formed. Despite having no background in motion picture production nor the facilities or equipment to make films, Edwin’s and Gertrude’s intimate working knowledge of producing successful theatrical productions and a bookshelf of screen-ready plays provided a foundation for entering the motion picture business. The press recognized the Thanhousers as the first individuals with such experience to head an American motion picture studio. Lonergan’s fertile mind and storytelling skills, a legacy from his work as a newspaper reporter, were the inspiration for The Actor’s Children, the studio’s first release on March 15, 1910. This extant film was widely praised as the company’s debut by The New York Dramatic Mirror (March 20, 1910), which wrote, “This is the first film put on the market by the new concern, and deserves commendation.” The studio’s output grew quickly to two releases a week, and by 1912, three releases a week. The company was recognized by critics for producing high-quality films. It was a profitable venture in the emerging moviemaking industry, producing 25 percent of all independent releases. Success attracted investors wanting to participate in this growing market, and Edwin was courted by the Mutual Film Corporation (a Chicago film distributor). After several offers, Mutual convinced the Thanhousers to sell their interest in the studio for a sizable return. Their original investment of $10,000 in the Thanhouser Company was rewarded with a sale price of $250,000, a twentyfive-times return on their capital outlay, worth roughly $6.5 million today.

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Edwin and Gertrude decided to “retire” from the business while Lonergan chose to remain with the studio full time to head up scenario writing and production activities. Under Mutual, Charles J. Hite became studio head, renaming the enterprise the Thanhouser Film Corporation. His visionary leadership accelerated the studio’s alignment with new market trends: multireel feature films, the emerging star system, multiple production sites, and releasing one of the most successful serial film series of the era, The Million Dollar Mystery. Tragically, in August 1914, two years after taking the helm at the studio, Hite was killed in an automobile accident. Without Hite’s charismatic leadership and vision, the studio floundered for six months, losing key talent and producing lackluster films. Desperate to save the company, and their sizable investment, the Mutual board of directors enticed Edwin and Gertrude to return to the studio and resume the leadership roles that produced the early successes. In February 1915, Edwin returned as president and Gertrude as head of the scenario department with Lonergan retaining his role as head of production. By the summer of 1915, feature films running an hour or more were shown at elegant picture palaces across the nation. Admission prices had grown from the nickel that was charged at nickelodeons just five years earlier to fifty cents or a dollar in these elegant new venues. As a result, Mutual required its production companies, like Thanhouser, to deliver more feature-length productions. Edwin and Gertrude did their best to comply with their owner’s demands, but they never really found the formula. In June 1916, Mutual refused to continue distributing Thanhouser productions, forcing Edwin Thanhouser to seek a new distribution channel for the studio’s output. In July 1916, Edwin Thanhouser announced distribution arrangements had been made with American Pathé beginning in August for two five-reel features per month as part of Pathé’s greater program of Gold Rooster plays. Staffing at the studio was reduced, leaving only the jobs that were needed to make the two releases per month. For the remainder of 1916 and 1917, the studio produced only twenty-three more films, ending with The Heart of Ezra Greer released on October 7, 1917.

Filmography Analysis, Distribution Channels, and Extant Films The Thanhouser studio’s total output of 1,086 titles in just seven and a half years amounted to an average of just over two and a half films per week. As

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noted above, thanks to Bowers’s extensive research, a comprehensive database was generated that documents every film made by the studio, allowing categorization of each title by genre, brand, and production company.3 Categorization of film scenarios by genre reveals that almost half of the studio’s films (510 titles) are melodramas. Approximately a third of the films (330 titles) are classified as comedies, many credited to Lonergan’s pen, with humorous alliterative titles such as Hannah’s Hen-Pecked Husband (1915) and released under the Falstaff brand. Eight percent of the films (88 titles) are based on classic literature, including Shakespeare, Dickens, Longfellow, and Wilde. This analysis also shows 5 percent of the films (51 titles) are identified as romantically themed scenarios, such as An Elevator Romance (1911), A Niagara Honeymoon (1912), and The Song of the Heart (1915). Completing the genre analysis are a limited number of films (107 titles) categorized as mystery, documentary, educational, western, fairy tale, cartoon, fantasy, and advertising. This filmography analysis also reveals that Thanhouser had multiple brands under which it released films. Two-thirds of the films (745 titles) were released as Thanhouser films, beginning with The Actor’s Children on March 15, 1910, and ending on June 19, 1916, with the educational film Herons and Egrets, shot in Jacksonville, Florida. Ten percent (108 titles) of the studio’s output were released under the Falstaff comedy brand, beginning in November 1915 with “Clarissa’s” Charming Calf and wrapping up with Willing Wendy to Willie on April 29, 1916. Eight percent (82 titles) were released under the Princess brand, beginning in October 1913 with titles like Lobster Salad and Milk (1913). Four percent (43 titles) were serials released in 1914 and 1915 under The Million Dollar Mystery and Zudora brands. Just 3 percent of Thanhouser films (28 titles) were released as Pathé Gold Rooster Plays after Mutual ceased distributing the studio’s output. Several more minor brands with a limited number of titles round out this category: Than-O-Play, a short-lived three-reel release (22 titles); Thanhouser Big Production (5 titles); Diplomatic Free Lance series (4 titles); the Violet Gray detective series (4 titles); two Direct-from-Broadway Features; and one each under the Exclusive Features, Graphic Features, and Majestic brands. The filmography analysis also shows 90 percent of films (986 titles) were made in New Rochelle at the studio’s main facilities. Thanhouser had film crews at various locations during its history, with Florida (29 titles) and California (23 titles) being the most significant; the studio also had production teams in Yellowstone; Cape May, New Jersey; and the Bahamas.

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Distribution Channels: Domestic and International To get the Thanhouser studio’s films seen, the studio needed domestic and international distribution. In March 1910, Edison’s licensed production companies were supplying regular releases to dealers. As an unlicensed independent producer, Edwin Thanhouser had no established market, so he made nineteen copies of his first production, The Actor’s Children, and sent them to distributors. Many of these distributors were not willing to buy from a new entrant in the market with no established track record, and ten of the copies were returned.4 The remaining nine distributors who agreed to purchase the studio’s first film apparently liked it because repeat orders started coming in. In July 1910, the Thanhouser studio signed an agreement with the Motion Picture Distributing and Sales Company to sell its films to dealers around the country. In a bid to capitalize on the international market, Thanhouser also signed an agreement with Gaumont Company Ltd. in the UK to distribute its films in Europe. The Mutual Film Corporation became the US distributor of Thanhouser films after its acquisition of the studio in April 1912. An agreement was signed with Western Import Company Ltd. in 1913 for European markets, followed the next year by the establishment in London of Thanhouser Films Ltd. When Thanhouser was ejected from the Mutual distribution schedule in the summer of 1916, Edwin ­Thanhouser quickly signed an agreement with American Pathé and began releasing two five-reel feature films per month as Pathé Gold Rooster Plays in August.

Thanhouser Films: Extant Holdings Over the past three decades, I have established relationships with film archives and private collectors around the world, making numerous trips to visit international archives to view and discuss their Thanhouser holdings. The results from this research are compiled into another database that documents extant Thanhouser films.5 As of June 1, 2018, 254 extant Thanhouser films have been identified at thirty-seven different sites. Taking into consideration duplicate titles held in different collections, 163 unique titles are extant, comprising 15 percent of all films produced by the Thanhouser studio. The top ten locations and number of extant Thanhouser films is summarized in table 11.1.

The Thanhouser Studio Filmography  |  149 Table 11.1  Locations and Number of Extant Films Locations (Top 10) Library of Congress British Film Institute JEF Films* George Eastman Museum EYE Filmmuseum Library and Archives Canada J. E. Allen** Niles Essanay Film Museum Academy Film Archive Museum of Modern Art TOTAL (83% of extant films)

Thanhouser Films 71 40 19 18 15 11 10 10 9 9 211

* Private archive (Jeff Aikman), includes Tarbox Collection, nonresponsive to access requests. ** Gift to LoC, inventory has yet to locate any of these titles.

This collection of extant Thanhouser titles provides a good cross section of the films produced and released by the studio for each year of production. Figure 11.1 shows the number of films produced by year plotted against the number of unique extant titles.

Thanhouser Films: Three Extant Film Case Studies Three extant Thanhouser films are representative examples of the provenance for many of the surviving titles of the collection. A Doll’s House (1911), a one-reel drama based on Ibsen’s famous play, has a notably interesting provenance because of its around-the-world journey. It was simultaneously released on July 28, 1911, in New Rochelle and in Europe by Gaumont. A 35 mm nitrate print with English intertitles ended up in a Paris flea market, where Japanese silent film collector and Waseda University professor Hiroshi Komatsu purchased it during a trip to Europe circa 1995. After returning to Japan, he made a 16 mm reduction copy in 2008. I met Professor Komatsu at the 2012 Domitor conference in Brighton, where he informed me of this Thanhouser film. He graciously allowed me to make a digital copy in 2017. In 2018, I was contacted by Eirik Hanssen of the National Library of Norway, who was organizing a conference to screen all extant silent films based on Ibsen’s novels. I provided him with a digital copy of A Doll’s House, which was shown to this conference of Ibsen scholars.

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250

229

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26

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33 8

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9

0 1910

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1912

1913 Released (1,086)

1914

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Extant (163)

Figure 11.1. Thanhouser Releases vs. Extant Titles.

On December 22, 1911, Thanhouser released the one-reel film Cinderella based on Charles Perrault’s classic fairy tale. One of the most popular fantasy stories of all time, the story was adapted as early as 1898 by George Albert Smith. There are seven known extant prints of the Thanhouser version. Cinderella prints can be found at the British Film Institute (35 mm nitrate and safety print); George Eastman Museum (16 mm print); UCLA Film & Television Archive (16 mm print); EYE Filmmuseum (35 mm nitrate and safety prints); the Danish Film Institute (35 mm nitrate print); and two private collections (an 8 mm reduction print from Blackhawk and a 16 mm print held by JEF Films in Osterville, Massachusetts).6 The nitrate print of The Evidence of the Film (1913) was discovered in March 1999 on the floor of a projection booth in Superior, Montana, by a crew decommissioning a theater. John Eickhof (Northwest Theatre Equipment Company, Wendell, Idaho) made this discovery. His technician, Phil Housh, contacted me through the Thanhouser.org website. Mr. Eickhof graciously donated the nitrate print to the Library of Congress for preservation. The film contains scenes of work being performed by women in the editing department, which are of interest to scholars studying the industry’s contemporary working conditions. The film-within-a-film narrative device was novel for its time and helped educate audiences on the process of moviemaking. It was added to the National Film Registry by the Librarian of Congress in 2001.7

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400 347

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257

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109 82

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0 1910

1911

1912

1913 Vitagraph

1914

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Thanhouser

Figure 11.2. Vitagraph vs. Thanhouser Titles, 1910 to 1917.

Thanhouser Extant Films Compared With a comprehensive database of all extant Thanhouser films in hand, I conducted research to compare the Thanhouser studio output with that of several contemporary studios. Figure 11.2 reflects Tony Slide’s research on the production of the Vitagraph Company, one of the most productive studios of the era licensed by Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Trust, compared to Thanhouser’s output from 1910 to 1917.8 This analysis shows a similar production profile (with a correlation coefficient of 78%) between the two studios, with Vitagraph producing almost twice as many films as Thanhouser during the same period. There is no comprehensive database with the number of extant Vitagraph films cataloged by release date, but scholar Ben Brewster is aware of 368 surviving Vitagraph films from the studio’s entire production history (1897 to 1925) located at the British Film Institute, Library of Congress, and George Eastman Museum.9 This yields a survival rate of 18 percent for the studio’s entire production history versus Thanhouser’s 15 percent. I also compared the number of extant Thanhouser films with surviving films made by Alice Guy and Lois Weber, chosen because they are extensively documented on the Women Film Pioneer Project website, including productions they worked on and listings of extant material. Alice Guy was involved as director, producer, screenwriter, co-director,

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co-producer, or co-screenwriter from 1910 to 1917 on 327 films, with 42 extant prints, a survival rate of almost 13 percent.10 During the same period, Lois Weber worked in similar capacities as Guy on 98 films; 25 extant prints yields a 25 percent survival rate.11 The 15 percent survival rate for Thanhouser titles is therefore relatively consistent with the survival rate for these contemporary filmmakers.

Thanhouser Films: Modern Usage and Viewership Since discovering the two extant Thanhouser films Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1912) and King Rene’s Daughter (1913) in 1986, I have acquired over one hundred Thanhouser titles on safety film, videotape, and digital files. Fiftyseven titles were published on videotape starting in 1997, transferred to DVD disc in 2004, and released for online viewing in 2011. Over six thousand VHS tapes and DVDs have been sold, and online titles have received over fifty-nine thousand views. Most sales are direct from the Thanhouser. org website with a small fraction of DVD sales from Amazon; all online views are hosted on Vimeo.com, which provides comprehensive statistics on viewership.12 Easy access to extant Thanhouser films and associated research materials has resulted in renewed interest in the academic community for the studio and its role in early cinema. Over thirty academic papers have been presented at international film conferences, published in journals, and hosted on the Thanhouser website,13 including Gertrude Homan Thanhouser: Her Story in Film by Ned Thanhouser, presented at the Women and the Silent Screen Conference (2017); All in the Family: The Thanhouser Studio by Ned Thanhouser, published on the Women Film Pioneer Project site (2016); From Stage to Screen: Edwin Thanhouser’s Rise to Fame and Fortune in Early Cinema presented by Ned Thanhouser at the Society for Media and Cinema Studies (2013); and Narration and Authorship in the Transitional Text: Griffith, Thanhouser, and Typicality by Charlie Keil, presented as part of Movies, Media, and Methods: A Symposium in Honor of Kristin Thompson (2010). Extant Thanhouser films are available on the Thanhouser.org website and for sale on DVD, from the first Thanhouser film, The Actor’s Children (1910), through the third-from-last production, The Man without a Country (1917). The Thanhouser Encyclopedia by Q. David Bowers is also available online and is organized into a narrative history (1865 to 1918), a filmography

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for all 1,086 films, and biographies of over a thousand studio employees. Also available online is a digital collection of ephemera from the company, produced in cooperation with Iona College in New Rochelle, New York. It consists of over a thousand artifacts.14 Because extant Thanhouser films were scattered around the globe, difficult to access, and with fragmented documentation, little has been done by the academic community to examine the impact of the studio on early cinema. Now, with improved access to extant Thanhouser films, and the studio’s history, filmography, and biographies, further study of Thanhouser’s contribution to the formative years of cinema should yield a new and insightful understanding of the motion picture industry and the culture it spawned.

Notes 1. Anthony Slide, Aspects of American Film History Prior to 1920 (Metuchen, NJ; London: The Scarecrow Press, 1978). 2. Q. David Bowers, Thanhouser Films: An Encyclopedia and History, accessed October 10, 2018, https://www.thanhouser.org/cdrom.htm. 3. Ned Thanhouser, Thanhouser Filmography Analysis, accessed October 10, 2018, https://www.thanhouser.org/Research/Thanhouser-Filmography-Analysis.xls. 4. Edwin Thanhouser, “Reminiscences of Picture’s Babyhood Days,” The Moving Picture World (New York: Chalmers Publishing Company, March 10, 1917), 1524–1525. 5. Ned Thanhouser, Thanhouser Film Database. 6. The BFI and EYE versions are available on DVD and online streaming at http://www​ .thanhouser.org (accessed December 8, 2018), including insightful commentary by University of York professor Judith Buchanan. 7. This title is also available on DVD and online at http://www.thanhouser.org (accessed December 8, 2018). 8. Anthony Slide, The Big V: A History of the Vitagraph Company (Metuchen, NJ; London: The Scarecrow Press, 1986). 9. Ben Brewster to Ned Thanhouser, “Re: Call for Submissions to the Domitor 2018 Proceedings” (email September 5, 2018). 10. Alison McMahan, “Alice Guy Blaché—Women Film Pioneers Project,” Women Film Pioneers Project, accessed October 10, 2018, https://wfpp.cdrs.columbia.edu/pioneer/ccp​ -alice-guy-blache/. 11. Shelley Stamp, “Lois Weber—Women Film Pioneers Project,” Women Film Pioneers Project, accessed October 10, 2018, https://wfpp.cdrs.columbia.edu/pioneer/ccp​-lois​ -weber/. 12. “Thanhouser Silent Films (1909 to 1917),” accessed December 8, 2018, https://vimeo​ .com/groups/thanhouser.

154  |  Provenance and Early Cinema 13. Ned Thanhouser, “Research Center,” Thanhouser Company Film Preservation, Inc., accessed October 10, 2018, https://www.thanhouser.org/research.htm. 14. “Thanhouser Studio Archive,” Iona College Libraries, accessed October 10, 2018, https://www.iona.edu/thanhouser/.

NED THANHOUSER is President of Thanhouser Company Film Preservation Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. He directed the documentary film The Thanhouser Studio and the Birth of American Cinema and has produced over twenty DVDs of surviving Thanhouser films.

12 THE GREAT WAR AT SCALE New Opportunities for Provenance in World War I Collections at the National Archives (NARA) Bret Vukoder and Mark Williams

T

his chapter offers a case study that illustrates new considerations of historical provenance issues undertaken in relation to the Media Ecology Project (MEP). It will introduce new methodologies in the engagement with and study of provenance regarding two considerable collections of historic international World War I films at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Each collection features distinctive, historic provenance characteristics that are central to their study. We will feature analytical work with specific reels of film, provide collection overviews via digital tools that collate available provenance metadata into visualizations, and consider new scholarship about these collections that augment their provenance profile. The Media Ecology Project is a digital resource at Dartmouth that has been designed to realize a virtuous cycle of scholarly secure access to archival materials online in order to develop new interdisciplinary scholarship about these archival materials that facilitates preservation goals and adds significant new value back to participating archives. This virtuous cycle is enabled by technological advance and new practical applications of digital tools and platforms. In a fundamental sense, this is a sustainability project via the digital humanities, regarding the essential work of the archives to preserve moving image history as public memory.

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By fostering innovations in both granular close-textual analysis (traditional arts and humanities methodologies) and computational distant reading (computer vision and machine reading methodologies), MEP is a collaborative incubator to develop twenty-first-century research methods that will continually discover new scholarly applications that engage archival content. Our workflow can be described in this way: the MEP enables researchers across disciplines to (1) digitally access archival moving image collections and the provenance of these materials, (2) build a dynamic context of research that enhances the descriptive provenance of individual films and better enables search and discovery within these archives, (3) develop new research uses over time by a wide range of users, and (4) contribute back to the archival community through the fluid contribution of metadata and other knowledge that augments the provenance profile of the original print or copy of materials in these collections. The first collection we consider in this study comprises roughly one million feet of archival World War I footage collected from multiple international archives by the CBS television network in order to produce a twenty-six-episode prime-time network series for the fiftieth anniversary of the Great War during the 1964–1965 television season. This vast footage collection represents a singular instance of intermedial provenance. The film materials were assembled by CBS with evident attention to the organizational provenance of each reel of footage from the original archives, plus related descriptive provenance metadata for each reel. As a result, the collection is roughly navigable for future scholarship in relation to its complex and dynamic provenance. It is therefore a boon to researchers across many disciplines interested in World War I as a transformative event of “modern” history. The second collection is footage produced between 1914 and 1936 by the US Army Signal Corps, which represents the first major motion picture endeavors by the US military. This collection is augmented by substantial provenance metadata, often very precise and consistently formatted. This makes it a potential resource for an additional regimen of new research: efforts to develop computer vision and machine learning tools for parsing moving image history. In this latter context, both collections may prove to enable a very different kind of “future” or potential provenance augmentation regarding both footage and metadata reconceived as a data set for what is referred to as analysis at scale.

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Approaching the centennial of the United States’ entry into World War I, and sitting on the largest holding of World War I media in the United States, in early 2014, the National Archives began to systematically restore and reorganize several of the motion pictures related to this global event. They established a three-phrase initiative with the goals of making the films more accessible and navigable. First, NARA regenerated finding aids and organized descriptive material from the deteriorating papers and index cards associated with the films. Second, they used the SAMMA robot to migrate those films that were already on U-matic tapes to digital files. Third, they used a newly donated scanner to make high-definition restorations of the most requested items from the collection.1 In revisiting the materials housed within the CBS World War One and Signal Corps collections, the NARA archivists uncovered fascinating and illuminating narratives that paint fuller pictures of the films’ provenance, creating new avenues of research for scholars and historians. The first significant collection in our study comes from footage gathered by the CBS television network while creating its ambitious twenty-sixepisode series World War One, which aired from September 1964 to March 1965 on the fiftieth anniversary of the Great War. Relying exclusively on archival footage, still photos, insightful written narration performed by Robert Ryan, and a brilliant score by composer Morton Gould, the series offers a loosely linear exploration of the significant events related to the war between 1914 and 1920. Interspersed within this timeline, the series also offers secondary episodes that address particular themes, such as the erosion of European dynasties and the lives of soldiers fighting trench warfare. To compile footage for this thirteen-hour documentary, CBS sourced its material from twenty-six different archives across ten nations, such as the Grinberg Film Library (United States), Svensk Film (Sweden), and Kinoteca (Serbia, formerly Yugoslavia).2 While the majority of the material captures scenes related directly to the war, the films also offer footage of events meant to contextualize it. The series seeks to explain the cultural and political preludes and fallout from the war both in Europe and the United States. The collection therefore holds a host of film fragments that offer images of world leaders, significant events, and nations as they were before and after the war. For example, to construct the narrative of the United States as a “nation in its unforgotten youth . . . isolated, introverted, idyllic” before its entry into the war, the footage employed for the eleventh episode, “Wilson and War,” features scenes from the 1916 World Series, a Catholic

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Church service in middle America, and a beach on a leisurely day.3 Because the episodes distill the vast holdings of archival footage down to narrative bullet points, the scenes within the broadcasted CBS series only minimally represent the scope of the footage the network compiled. CBS undoubtedly recognized the historical value of the films it had collected. Only a month after the airing of the final episode on April 9, 1965, they donated the footage to the National Archives, saying they were “delighted” and “proud” to grant this “important source for historical research” to NARA. The only major conditions of the loan stated that CBS could always access the material and that the films be prohibited from exhibition for twenty years.4 As soon as the twenty years were up, media companies jumped on the opportunity to show the series. The documentary ran on the A&E channel multiple times in the 1980s, was re-released by Fox on VHS in 1994, and recently received DVD treatment by Timeless Media in 2014. Today, the individual CBS episodes also freely circulate on videosharing websites such as YouTube and Vimeo. The full scope of the CBS collection goes well beyond what has circulated within popular media outlets. As it presently stands at the National Archives, the CBS record group holds 660 titles on 751 reels, 85 percent of which is digitized. Each reel is organized according to the source or archive from which its materials came, such as Kinoteca. As a result, clips are often hodgepodged together with little chronological or subjective logic relative to historical events or the CBS series. For example, in the entry labeled “CBS-WWI-353” at NARA, a portion of the reel provides three very different scenes. First, British troops move through and above the trenches, setting up weaponry and tending to their wounded. Then, the reel cuts to a well-formed line of Turkish soldiers on horseback. Finally, the images show the Japanese army lying prone with their guns, guarding an American train as it passes through Siberia.5 Despite the variety of scenes within one reel, the NARA archivists’ cataloging of the CBS collection produced searchable metadata that concisely describes all the sequences within a certain item. While the descriptions are terse and often lacking context, they issue enough guideposts for researchers to meaningfully engage with the footage and even pursue focused projects. One such example comes from a 2017 event at Dartmouth College, for which several scholars curated a 1917 Centennial Series through a variety of media, including graphic arts, literature, and film. In revisiting the Bolshevik Revolution, they selected and screened salient footage from

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Figure 12.1. The metadata, which corresponds to item “CBS-WWI-131,” incorrectly identifies the figure as Lillian Gish. The image actually shows her sister, Dorothy Gish.

the CBS collection, such as both staged and documentary excerpts showing Lenin and scenes of the revolution. The clips bring to life the streets of Russia as soldiers parade through the snow, holding banners. Then the reel shows Lenin beneath the Soviet flag, standing on a balcony and lifting his fist as he speaks passionately to the crowd below him.6 At the same time, the collection’s guideposts are far from perfect, presenting challenges to historians, archivists, and artists. While access should be a central priority for the films and metadata, those who navigate the material should practice due diligence in any annotation of the footage, since some of the descriptive metadata is inaccurate. For example, in a clip used for the fourth episode of the CBS documentary, titled “Atrocity 1914,” we see images from an American rally in support of Belgium after it was invaded by Germany. Metadata associated with the clip inaccurately describes the person in the scene. The brief entry labels the figure as actress Lillian Gish, but the source footage from the Grinberg item reveals the woman to actually be her sister, Dorothy Gish (see fig. 12.1).7 To scholars outside the field of early cinema, this perhaps is an easy mistake to make. Yet it demonstrates the care with which researchers need to collate the metadata with its corresponding footage, because small mistakes in the electronic record can compound issues with future access and computer vision analysis.

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Even with these occasional inconsistencies, the CBS World War One collection provides us several means by which to interrogate spaces of intermedial provenance. With details of the archives from which the materials were sourced, access to the finished product of the CBS documentary, and evidence of the cataloging process, we can ask questions pertaining to the selection, curation, and narrative of the 141 miles of footage within the CBS World War One collection.8 More broadly, we can reflect on the process and meaning of memory with such an impactful event as World War I. The other motion pictures that the National Archives centrally focused on for its World War I centennial project were those of the US Army Signal Corps. Although this wing of the army is often better known for its output during World War II, the Signal Corps was actually quite prolific during World War I, shooting over a million feet of 35 mm footage. The photographic section of the Signal Corps formed in July 1917, three months after the United States declared war. According to Phillip Stewart, the section’s “stated purpose of still and motion-picture film documentation was in use for propaganda and in scientific and military reconnaissance, but it was principally the production of a pictorial history of the conflict.” The section started with twenty-five men and grew to include nearly six hundred soldiers by the end of 1918. A unit of one motion-picture cameraman and one still-picture photographer was assigned to each army division and special service unit, resulting in wide coverage of the war.9 Unlike the CBS collection, these films are extensively and logically cataloged. The Signal Corps mirrored the clear, well-defined processes that defined its parent branch, the army. Phillip Stewart adds, “A fairly complicated system was developed . . . to ensure accurate identification of the film [that was] shot.” They carefully numbered the material film, then set up an index with descriptions of each shot. Next, “laboratory personnel arranged the scenes supplied by the cameramen into 1099 subjects . . . in a chronological order, fully edited and captioned, and shipped them to the War Plans Division,” where the captions were verified and placed within a “detailed subject index.”10 The physical holdings were profoundly large by the end of the war. According to NARA archivist Criss Kovac, the Signal Corps had to spend “somewhere between $2–3 million ($40–50 million in today’s money) [for] creating and maintaining the collection” between 1917 and the mid-1930s.11 When the army decided to relocate all these films and indices to the National Archives in December 1939, the new deposit—according to the

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chief of motion pictures at that time, John Bradley—“would occupy approximately 100% of our present available storage space,” which led Bradley to “expedite the installation of an air-conditioning [system for] . . . adequate protection.” He certainly thought the space and the associated expenses were worth it, saying, “I doubt the historical value of the . . . film . . . can be seriously questioned.”12 In considering these actions, Kovac claims, “Given that film archiving was a fledging concept in 1939, Bradley was ahead of his time.”13 Today, the amazing work of Bradley and other NARA archivists, particularly those of the last few years, has given us 470 titles on 871 reels in the 111-H collection, with 90 percent of the films digitized. The majority of the footage has even been processed through an HD scanner, producing beautiful, crisp images from the material. Although disorganized on the original loan in 1939, the 130,000 index cards with shot descriptions now constitute rich metadata that will aid our time-based annotation efforts and—because of its scope and precision—computer vision analyses done at scale. As in the CBS collection, much of NARA record group 111-H holds wartime footage, such as a film covering the manufacturing of gas masks. Beneath these stills from the film (see figs. 12.2 and 12.3) are their respective entries of descriptive time-based annotations, which were generated in the original indexing of the film. Fascinatingly, these descriptions often go beyond a labeling of people, places, and events. They may include details of film form, such as mention of the camera distance in these entries from 111-H-1204.14 Also, similar to the CBS collection, much of the 111-H record group captures the breadth of events that defined the era. For example, one reel shows what supposedly is the only authentic footage of the Lusitania leaving before its final voyage. The film’s intertitles claim, “This is a bonafide picture and the only one in existence of the last trip of the ill-fated ship. No other movie men were permitted on the dock.”15 Though the World War I Signal Corps collection has many similarities with the CBS material, there are two clear features that distinguish it: the visual quality of much of the footage and the extent of its metadata. Because we can more readily foreground the indexical materials as useable metadata, we have the chance to foster a “potential” or “future” provenance, establishing foundations from which researchers and machines can navigate this rich historical footage in years to come. The tools of the Media Ecology Project are particularly well suited to these goals, balancing the locality of close readings performed by experts and the efficiency of

Figures 12.2 and 12.3. Metadata from the NARA collection provides the scene number, shot description, and duration (in reel length) of two sequences from item 111-H-1204, which covers the production of gas masks. 12.2. “Scene 19 – Closeup of man folding and shaping gas mask. – 15ft.” 12.3. “Scene 30 – Long shot of rows of women mounting rubber mouthpieces. – 12ft.”

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computer-based learning to ultimately produce an accessible and annotated network in which we can collectively explore anew the significant events of World War I. Within MEP’s emerging research environment, Mediathread has allowed the documentation of written descriptions and tagging through fullframe time-based annotations. By deploying the NEH-funded Semantic Annotation Tool (SAT), we will enhance the precision of our already granular annotation methodology by adding geometric targets within a frame and real-time playback of annotations with subsecond resolution. These innovations will make the time-based annotations capable of referencing films with greater specificity, a key enhancement given the degree of innovation and experimentation that was endemic to the silent film era. SAT also provides the backend infrastructure to model and instantiate an ongoing, iterative process of computer vision algorithm refinement—an ongoing cycle of algorithm training and excellence—that features (1) manual time-based annotations that help to train deep learning algorithms, (2) the production of many additional time-based annotations via these algorithms, (3) the evaluation and refinement of the new annotations by means of further manual annotation work within the SAT environment, and (4) the application of the resultantly refined annotated data set as the new training set, and so on. The World War I footage in the NARA collections can be selectively curated into test data sets within MEP that incorporate training metadata derived from a key new resource, one that represents a new and important model of collaboration between DH scholars and professional documentary filmmakers: the shot log of archival footage utilized in a recent three-part PBS American Experience program about the history of World War I (the shot log was generously provided to MEP by program archival producer Lizzy McGlynn). In relation to, for example, selected notecards of precise shot-specific metadata produced as part of the documentation by the Signal Corps itself (materials found within the NARA Signal Corps collections), we may realize a unique and precedent-setting collaboration in the advancement of digital humanities audiovisual analysis toward enhanced video search and multimedia information retrieval. These films can also be studied via another type of data, in this case machine generated: optical flow tracking based on computer vision analysis of the films.16 In relation to optical flow data, the SAT tool will allow us to pinpoint where in the frame the annotated movement takes place, which

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will facilitate the isolation of various types and degrees of movement in the frame and allow us to visualize pathways of screen movement in the mise-en-scène for these collections. These improved annotation strategies will strengthen our ability to document the movement patterns that we are observing; they will aid in our communication of these findings to research collaborators and will enhance the complementarity between our manual annotations and computer vision analysis.17 The films represented in these collections will designate a galaxy of new research inquiries, especially when placed into linked data relations with one another and with the new textual and contextual metadata we will provide. In a sense, we will reanimate early cinema history, especially for audiences and users new to this material. In both a conceptual and a practical sense, this will establish a new set of thresholds in a digital humanities context by rearticulating the dialectic described in the very notion of digital humanities practice. Our project will visually and progressively inform the tension that exists between the traditional humanities tenets of close textual analysis and the demand for distant reading and analysis at scale in the computational sciences. For example, research in convolutional neural networks theory has suggested research questions informed by what is called the two-streams hypothesis: the difference that exists in the human visual cortex between two pathways of understanding, between the ventral stream tied to object recognition and the dorsal stream tied to the recognition of motion.18 The use of optical flow representations and metadata generation (using the ACTION toolset) will contribute to the data pool of optical flow research (data on hundreds of films) and to the fundamental experiential defamiliarization that will exist in the contradistinction of representations between the display of granular object and movement-related metadata via the Semantic Annotation Tool versus machine-generated overlays of optical flow motion analysis. Scientists, scholars, and artists alike will be in a position to consider and explore unique ways to further interrogate and mobilize this new aesthetic experience and pursue new research questions and representational innovations. In this way, our collaborative analyses of these collections can also be an engine for new and previously unconsidered research questions and methods, or, a first draft of varied directions of interdisciplinary digital humanities pursuits that can directly engage the arts, historical and cultural studies, and computational analysis.

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Notes 1. Criss Kovac, “America’s World War I Collection,” Journal of Film Preservation 90 (2014): 57. 2. Document CBS-WWI, “Box Lists and Descriptions.” Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc. Collection, Motion Picture Newsreel Films Used for a Documentary Series on World War I, ca. 1908–1930. National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 3. World War One, “Wilson and War,” Episode 11. CBS. December 20, 1964. 4. Document CBS-WWI “Donor File.” Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc. Collection, Motion Picture Newsreel Films Used for a Documentary Series on World War I, ca. 1908–1930. National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 5. Motion Picture CBS-WWI 353; Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc. Collection, Motion Picture Newsreel Films Used for a Documentary Series on World War I, ca. 1908–1930. National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 6. Motion Picture CBS-WWI 623; Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc. Collection, Motion Picture Newsreel Films Used for a Documentary Series on World War I, ca. 1908–1930. National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 7. Motion Picture CBS-WWI 131 and Document “Index.” Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc. Collection, Motion Picture Newsreel Films Used for a Documentary Series on World War I, ca. 1908–1930. National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD, and its metadata document. 8. Phillip W. Stewart, “The Reel Story of the Great War,” Prologue 49, no .4 (2017), https:// www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2017/winter/reel-story-great-war. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Kovac, “America’s World War I Collection,” 58. 12. Document, “Accession Letter;” Record of the Office of the Chief Signal Corp Officer, Record Group 111-H, National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 13. Kovac, “America’s World War I Collection,” 58. 14. Motion Picture 111-H-1204 and Document “111-H-1204.” Record of the Office of the Chief Signal Corp Officer, Record Group 111-H, National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 15. Motion Picture 111-H-1221; Record of the Office of the Chief Signal Corp Officer, Record Group 111-H, National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 16. Optical flow is a feature of the ACTION toolset, also NEH funded and produced at Dartmouth by Professors Michael Casey and Mark Williams. 17. Since the presentation of this paper at Domitor 2018, the Media Ecology Project has received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Advancement office to research and publish a diverse set of perspectives on historic films from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: The Paper Print and Biograph Compendium will produce an example of the diverse collection of data described here but applied to over four hundred select films from the early silent cinema era drawn from collections at The Library of Congress, the EYE Fimmuseum, and the Museum of Modern Art. 18. See for example Karen Simonyan and Andrew Zisserman, “Two-Stream Convolutional Networks for Action Recognition in Videos,” NIPS ’14 Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, Volume 1 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 568–576.

166  |  Provenance and Early Cinema BRET VUKODER is a PhD candidate in Literary and Cultural Studies at Carnegie Mellon University. He is co-coordinator of the National Archives’ World War I and USIA motion picture collection pilots for the Media Ecology Project. MARK WILLIAMS is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Dartmouth College. He is editor (with Mark Garrett Cooper, Sara Beth Levavy, and Ross Melnick) of Rediscovering U.S. Newsfilm: Cinema, Television, and the Archive and director of the Media Ecology Project.

PART III CIRCULATION

13 CHICAGO’S “CENSORED CASUALTIES” AND THE PROVENANCE OF ARCHIVE PRINTS Richard Abel

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 rovenance. For me, the term, however pronounced, at first seemed off-putting and certainly not propitious. After all, I’m not an archivist, and when doing research, I’ve taken note of little more than the differences between the lengths of films when first released and those of prints that have entered the archives. Or thumbed through the old card catalogs to find the sources of those prints, say, at the National Film Archive or the Library of Congress. “Oh, you’ll think of something,” my late wife Barbara Hodgdon said, “just start with some memory work”—at which she was exceptionally skilled in writing about Shakespeare in performance. So, I went on an “expedition,” as Winnie the Pooh would say, and recalled the research I did on American newspapers in the 1910s— specifically, my discovery of Kitty Kelly’s playful, astute film reviews in the Chicago Tribune in 1914–1915.1 At the end of her nearly daily columns, she often added a postscript that summarized what the Chicago censors had done to sometimes more than a dozen films set for release in the city. Ah ha, I thought, I’d always hoped to explore what she called “Cuts,” “Cutouts,” “Ouch,” “Zowie,” and “Why Exhibitors Go Insane,” partly because this kind of censorship data is so very rare.2 Could Kelly’s columns, widely read when American popular film culture was just emerging (see fig. 13.1), offer an oblique angle into raising questions about the gnarly issue of provenance?

Figure 13.1. Kitty Kelly, “Flickerings from Filmland,” Chicago Tribune (August 4, 1915): 12.

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I think so, but not without asking whether we should trust her summaries. That Kelly kept on writing these postscripts from July 1914 through November 1915 suggests that we likely can.3 In Chicago the censors apparently had no problem letting Kelly list all those daily “rejects” and “cutouts.” Had they wanted to, they could have refused her access to their records. So, assuming we can accept these summaries, I want to pursue several questions: What if surviving film prints from 1914–1915 differ from the prints that Chicago movie fans actually saw on their theater screens? And, if so, what are the implications of those possible differences, especially for those of us writing American cinema history of the early to mid-1910s? Before taking up a few specific film titles for analysis, let me give you a taste of what the Chicago censors objected to in a range of films no longer extant. Not surprisingly, they closely scrutinized foreign imports. This is how they dismembered The Mystery of St. Martin’s Bridge, an Italian feature: “Close view of girl’s attempt to brand man with iron; entire scene of man entering [and] remaining in girl’s bedroom; subtitle: ‘That is the man who ruined me. I killed him’; vision of execution showing ax descending upon the girl’s neck.”4 One wonders what they did in late 1915 to the branding scene in DeMille’s The Cheat. Perhaps wary of the divided loyalties of Chicago audiences one year into the Great War, the censors took their own ax to the nonfiction feature The Battle and Fall of Przemysl: “All subtitles or phrases giving names of nations at war” (at least thirteen are listed).5 American features also could not escape their scissors. Here are the “cutouts” in Reliance’s The Outcast: “Cabaret scene showing girl in harem skirt dancing among the audience; three scenes of man and woman drinking at table in saloon until Mae Marsh appears; flash three struggle scenes between man and girl; two scenes of man choking young man; two subtitles: ‘You are an outcast’, ‘A girl of the slums, are you not?’; insert subtitle in reel four to read: ‘They fell in love and were secretly married.’”6 Whatever “flash” means, the reference to the star, Mae Marsh, is rare, but so is the added intertitle near the end, in which the censors seem intent on ensuring there is no uncertainty about the story’s happy ending. Nor were Keystone comedies spared; Across the Hall, probably a rerelease or an older print given a new title, lost its “entire bedroom scene.”7 Like grim reapers, the censors likely snipped out one of the film’s funniest scenes. Among the summaries filling Kelly’s postscripts are at least three for which film prints survive. The first is episode 13 of Kalem’s Hazards of Helen series, Escape of the Fast Freight (February 1915). The plot has Helen (Helen

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Holmes) at her usual job, a railroad telegraph operator, responsible for a cash box posted to her remote station. Two vagrants steal the money and flee on a passing train, but Helen follows, leaping off a bridge onto one of the train’s boxcars, and ultimately helps capture the thieves.8 In her “Censorial Amputation” postscript, Kelly’s summary is brief: “Flash holdup; forcing girl into closet; stealing money from box.” If the latter two moments were cut from the film, they did not really change the overall narrative action. Even flashed, however, they could have introduced some possible confusion for audiences at the time, especially if they missed why and how Helen turned up in that closet and what exactly the vagrants stole. Given the censors’ apparent concern for criminal acts, it is puzzling that they may not have cut out the two shots in which Helen yells for help, and one thief fires his revolver at the closet door; in the following shot, Helen luckily already has ducked and escapes being wounded.9 For current cinema historians, the discrepancy between the print shown in Chicago and that now available on DVD, admittedly, is not great and hardly affects most commentaries about the film, which focus on Helen as a white-collar worker and on Helen Holmes’s often dangerous stunts (see fig. 13.2).10 That is not the case with the two other surviving prints. One is Fox’s notorious A Fool There Was, starring Theda Bara. In mid-January 1915, the Chicago censors at first rejected the film outright, giving this reason: it “portrays the degradation of men by an unmoral woman; contains a number of sensuous love scenes and carousals of immoral women and degraded men.”11 Whether other cities or states banned the film is unclear.12 Whatever changes the company made, Fox resubmitted A Fool There Was a month later. Yet the censors still were not satisfied and ordered the following numerous “cutouts”: “Two long scenes of woman in negligee packing trunk and interviewing discarded lover and flash all other scenes with him; close view of woman putting foot on stolen pocketbook; all views of woman at portal of ship in which she opens dress and sticks courtplaster on bosom; entire garden scene showing woman on couch and man stretched on ground up to where messenger delivers letter; kissing scene between woman and her new sweetheart; two scenes of intoxicated girl on couch; kissing scene between woman and old man.”13 All but two of these cuts remain in the Kino DVD drawn from the Killiam Collection. The cut footage of Theda Bara in her negligee packing and deceiving the drunken lover she is about to abandon not only was clearly too risqué; it also made her character a criminal as well as an immoral woman. Too

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Figure 13.2. Uncensored scene in Kalem’s Hazards of Helen: Episode 13 (1915).

risqué also was the later cutout shot of Bara exposing her bosom at the ship’s portal, although two other shots of her preening there were enough to attract the attention of her next victim, John Schuyler, a married man who is being sent to England on a diplomatic mission. Months later, the two end up in Italy, and here is a frame grab from the cutout garden scene, which was described as present in a print shown in Salt Lake City in late January 1915 (see fig. 13.3).14 Did this indulgent scene upset the censors because Schuyler was so obviously under Bara’s spell, because she was plying him with liquor, which would turn him too into a drunkard, because she could stretch out so languorously like a self-satisfied feline, or all of the above? A letter from Schuyler’s wife leads to the cut footage of his impulsive threat to throttle Bara and the ease with which she deflects that into a passionate kiss. When, in the climactic scene, the wife comes to beg her husband, now a besotted old man, to return home with her, Bara confronts them and calmly, deliberately reexerts her control—in this frame grab (see fig. 13.4). This brazen display of Bara’s sexual power apparently was too much for the Chicago censors, and the cut footage could allow Schuyler’s wife to leave, simply accepting her defeat. While these cutouts poke some holes in the film’s narrative action,

Figure 13.3. Censored scene in Fox’s A Fool There Was (1914).

Figure 13.4. Censored scene near the end of Fox’s A Fool There Was (1914).

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they mainly serve to tone down Bara’s erotic charge and tamp down any threat that charge would have on male audience members, perhaps lured to theaters by efforts, at least in Chicago, to ban the film.15 The other surviving film is The Life and Death of King Richard III (starring Frederick Warde), released in October 191216 and exhibited relatively widely throughout 1913 and 1914. More on that in a moment. What Kelly calls “film casualties” are rather extensive: “Killing of king; entire scene showing thrust of sword into dead body, wiping blood from sword, and shaking blood from hand; stabbing of duke; close to camera view of smothering of princes; subtitle: ‘Richard brutally offers his dagger to his wife and suggests that she kill herself’; pouring of doped wine into glass.”17 The scene of Richard killing King Henry VI and then spearing the dead body, however, also includes an intervening shot in which Richard acknowledges an adoring crowd from the adjacent balcony. Was that shot also cut? Concerns about depicting physical violence seem the basis for this “casualty” as well as that of the two hired men stabbing the Duke of Clarence. Yet the next one—the close view of smothering the little princes—does not appear in the AFI’s restored print. Nor does the intertitle of Richard and Lady Anne, although it could have been added along with the new intertitles created for the restoration. Finally, what of the cutout footage of Richard ordering the wine to be poisoned for Lady Anne? Does this cutout suggest that Lady Anne dies from illness or choking and not from poison? Overall, these cutouts raise several questions. On the one hand, does eliminating the visual violence in three scenes and the poisoned wine in another lessen our sense of Richard’s brutality and perhaps focus even more attention on the film’s many processions, other large gatherings, and “authentic” costumes and props? On the other hand, does the absence of both the close view of the smothering and the intertitle in the AFI print make us ask about its provenance: What happened to collector William Buffin’s 35 mm print, either before he saved it in the late 1930s or before he donated it to the Library of Congress in the 1960s? But there is another complication in what audiences saw (and heard) at the time.18 Preliminary research reveals that the film was distributed as a state rights feature that toured cities such as Richmond (Virginia), San Francisco, and Buffalo, but mainly smaller towns like Harrisburg (Pennsylvania), Fort Worth and Galveston (Texas), Oshkosh (Wisconsin), and even Brainerd (Minnesota).19 Moreover, Frederick Warde accompanied the film for many of its screenings. Especially intriguing for the provenance

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of the restored print is that Warde appeared on stage in “evening dress” to introduce the film by performing Richard’s famous opening soliloquy and then reciting his principal lines for each relevant scene. And in towns like Kittanning (northeast of Pittsburgh), where he did not appear and many in the audience may not have been familiar with the play, a large ad for the Wick Opera House included a lengthy summary of the action in each of the film’s five reels.20 Consequently, the surviving restored print of Richard III not only includes footage that some audiences at the time may not have seen but also is missing Warde’s vocal performance, a significant dimension of the theater experience in 1913–1914 and likely a live performance that was never quite the same from one venue to another. So, at the end of this brief expedition, what’s next? During and after the Domitor conference panel discussion, colleagues raised several specific issues about Kelly’s language and the process of responding to censors’ orders. First, Kelly’s specific terms for the censors’ kinds of objections largely may have adhered to what was standard at the time, for other censors and even for the industry itself. Her subheads for these postscript summaries, however, read like mocking performances of shock, their playful glibness masking her own critical take on film censorship—and allowing her to keep on compiling all those “cuts” and “cutouts.” Second, how exactly were “cuts” ordered by the censors made in the release prints, and who was responsible for doing that? Without specific documentation, it is difficult to imagine how some, perhaps many cuts of either parts of scenes or of whole scenes would not affect the continuity of a film. How much would that have bothered audiences, or would they have become accustomed to it? As for who or what agents responded to the censors, perhaps the most logical answer is rental exchanges, which the major producers and/or distributors recently had been setting up for the regional circulation of film prints. Pending documentation that would confirm it, the best guess is that rental exchanges already were engaged in inspecting, repairing, and transporting film prints, so they likely had the staff and facilities to take on the added task of reediting, when required, with some degree of efficiency. But this expedition also leads to a more general argument, and not only for those of us writing American cinema history of the early to mid1910s. First, we should be careful in analyzing any individual film print that survives in an archive and/or is accessible in digital form. We already, of course, are wary of the materiality of a film print from the early twentieth century, which may have come from one of a variety of sources (rarely from

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an “original” negative or positive and often from a secondhand collector), a print that could have been anything from a rerelease or a worn-out print to a duped 16 mm copy. Second, we should be even more wary of not considering how ephemeral was the experience of any one film on screen at the time of its release or exhibition, which could have differed from one set of city or state censors to another and even from one exhibitor to another in the same city. In other words, the film print viewed then may not correspond exactly to what we can view today. The history of early cinema that we continue to rewrite, consequently, should not, as we too often do, privilege the film as a single (usually) material object, yet neither should it focus primarily on traces of its ephemeral, sometimes censored existence in theaters a hundred years ago. The issue is what kind of balance ought we to strike between the two or, rather, how do we best configure the relationship between what is material and more or less fixed now and what was once quite fleetingly ephemeral then.

Notes 1. Richard Abel, Menus for Movieland: Newspapers and the Emergence of American Film Culture, 1913–1916 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015). 2. Another method of teasing out possible film censorship would be to compare the story printed in a newspaper that purports to follow a film in order to ascertain what is missing and cannot be attributed to the film’s manufacturer. A case in point is Edwin Blue’s retelling of episode 12 of Pathé’s Who Pays?: Toil and Tyranny in the Monessen [Pennsylvania] Independent (August 4, 1915): 3. 3. In Detroit, by contrast, the police department censors did not allow newspapers access to the specifics of their work, and a few surviving issues of the Michigan Film Review published no more than the monthly totals of their bans, cuts, and revisions—“Detroit Film Censors Report for April,” Michigan Film Review (May 7, 1918): 1; “Detroit Censorship Bureau Report for May,” Michigan Film Review (June 11, 1918): 3; “Censorship Bureau, Detroit,” Michigan Film Review (July 16, 1918): 8. 4. Kitty Kelly, “Flickerings from Filmland,” Chicago Tribune (June 9, 1915): 14. 5. Kitty Kelly, “Flickerings from Filmland,” Chicago Tribune (August 25, 1915): 14. The censors even banned a Hearst-Selig newsreel covering the capsized Eastland ferry on the Chicago River and the rescue of most of its 2,500 passengers: “Permit refused on ruling that these films are ‘commercializing a calamity’.”—Kitty Kelly, “Flickerings from Filmland,” Chicago Tribune (August 3, 1915): 12. Yet the censors allowed the Chicago Tribune newsreel on the disaster to circulate, perhaps because the newspaper promised to donate any profits to a relief fund for the victims’ families. 6. Kitty Kelly, “Flickerings from Filmland,” Chicago Tribune (August 4, 1915): 12. 7. Kitty Kelly, “Photoplay Stories and News,” Chicago Tribune (July 11, 1914): n.p. No film of this title is listed in the “Filmography” or “Index” of Rob King’s The Fun Factory:

178  |  Provenance and Early Cinema The Keystone Company of the Emergence of Mass Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). 8. National Film Preservation Foundation, Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900–1934; Program 2: New Women, 2017. The Library of Congress restored this print in 2006. 9. I thank Vincent Longo, a Screen Arts and Cultures doctoral student at the University of Michigan, for this and all subsequent frame grabs. 10. Scott Simmon, “The Hazards of Helen: Episode 13, The Escape on the Fast Freight (1915),” Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900–1934 (San Francisco: National Film Preservation Foundation, 2017), 71–75. 11. Kitty Kelly, “Flickerings from Filmland,” Chicago Tribune (January 13, 1915): 14. 12. Preliminary research in the trade press and in newspaper databases turns up no references to any bans of the film. 13. Kitty Kelly, “Flickerings from Filmland,” Chicago Tribune (March 30, 1915): 10. 14. “‘A Fool There Was,’ Drama of a Siren’s Power Over Men; Two Great Stars Featured; Plays at American Today and Saturday,” Salt Lake Tribune (January 29, 1915): 8. 15. A Denver exhibitor cleverly solicited letters from women “who had expressed detestation for the Vampire” and used their responses to promote the “terrible end” of Bara’s similar character in her next film, The Clemenceau Case—“Denver ‘Vampire Week’ Proves Effective Publicity,” Motion Picture News (May 8, 1915): 59. 16. Richard III Film Company ad, New York Clipper (October 12, 1912): 6. 17. Kitty Kelly, “Flickerings from Filmland,” Chicago Tribune (November 14, 1914): 15. 18. Preliminary research suggests that the film may not have been shown in Chicago, but I don’t think that invalidates my analysis, partly because of questions about the AFI’s restored print and partly because of Warde’s personal appearances. 19. “Amusements,” Richmond Times-Dispatch (January 22, 1913): 9; “Frederick Warde’s King Richard III,” Harrisburg Patriot (February 14, 1913): 4; “Out of Town News,” New York Clipper (April 26, 1913): 24; “Amusements,” Galveston News (April 26, 1913): 5; “Savoy Theatre,” San Francisco Dramatic Review (May 17, 1913): 10; Grand Opera House ad, Daily Northwestern (February 16, 1914): 4; “Two Buffalo Managers Hand in Resignations,” Motion Picture News (September 26, 1914): 24; “Music and Drama,” Brainerd Dispatch (December 18, 1914): 5. 20. Wick Opera House ad, Simpson’s Leader (November 10, 1913): n.p. Contextual information of a different kind could have led audiences to interpret the ending of Edison’s The Land Beyond the Sunset (1912) not as a possible suicide (tempting for a current viewer) but as a passage into heaven. Shortly before the film’s release, John A. Joyce’s poem of the same title, which envisioned heaven “beyond the sunset,” appeared in newspapers such as the Cumberland [Maryland] Times (November 14, 1912): 4.

RICHARD ABEL is Professor Emeritus of International Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Michigan. He is author of Motor City Movie Culture, 1916–1925 (IUP, 2020) and of Menus for Movieland: Newspapers and the Emergence of American Film Culture, 1913–1916.

14 WHAT MADE THE MECHANICALS MOVE? Postcards in Transit Patrick Ellis

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ostcards have stymied many critics. Walter Benjamin could not complete his lengthy planned essay on them.1 Jacques Derrida meandered for five hundred pages in his epistolary named for the format, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. He complained of a “postcard apocalypse” because he found these small objects so dense, so indecipherable.2 Why? Consider the simple, typical postcard: public-facing image on the front, semiprivate text on the back. Recto: a well-known, perhaps shopworn view. Verso: a pithy, sometimes boilerplate intimacy. Recto: the provenance of the card, announcing where the tourist nominally purchased the artifact. Verso: its intended destination, and evidence of the postcard’s route—a postage stamp, a postmark.

The card arrives in a home with the rest of the mail, in a pile of expendable boilerplate and personal letters. The card is then examined, perhaps discarded, perhaps selected for display, perhaps chosen for domestic preservation. These recto–verso binaries of public and private, of industry and artisanship, of disposability and collectability culminate in many layers of meaning, all on a small piece of media real estate.3 Benjamin and Derrida suffered, in their way, from cartolinamania, the period media enthusiasm– cum–pathology that leaves the viewer overwhelmed by postcards.4 Their

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attempts to consider the postcard were doomed for two reasons: as a result of the medium’s ephemerality—we still find them tucked between the pages of books or at the bottom of a desk drawer—and as a result of the medium’s success. There are simply too many postcards to adequately grasp the scope of the phenomenon, tout court, whether as cultural critic or deconstructionist. With a background in cartes de visite and greeting cards, postcards boomed especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. (Their rise and fall correspond roughly to the simultaneous arc of stereo views, and each medium benefited from developments in photography.5) Postcards were an affordable—indeed, cheap—mass communication. They were mailed almost as simply and as frequently as you might today send a text. One estimate suggests that in France, in the early 1900s, fifty postcards were being produced per family, per year.6 They were especially associated with tourist sites—no collector will ever have every postcard view of the Eiffel Tower—and amusement parks (see fig. 14.1).7 One study of postcards sent from Brighton Pier suggests that the main use of the text on the card’s back was for flirtation and courtship, which, as one might imagine, would correspondingly increase the number sent.8 In one day in 1906, people sent more than two hundred thousand postcards from Coney Island;9 a single address might receive as many as five postcard deliveries a day.10 In order to keep cartolinamania at bay, I winnow this fleeting mountain of text and image by focusing on one particular format, frequently called the “mechanical postcard.” The mechanical was a genre of card that had its greatest success in the first decade of the twentieth century. Its unique feature was that the images on a mechanical postcard moved; they did so by employing a variety of techniques, including pull-tabs, accordion foldouts, rotating volvelles, lenticular printing, and more.12 The most frequent thematic inspiration for this movement was transit: the cards pictured automobiles and airplanes, showing the new world of motordom and aeriality. I propose that mechanical postcards adopted and repurposed expressly cinematic and animatic techniques in order to relay messages that selfreflexively concerned their means of delivery. That is to say that mechanical postcards mediated their provenance and their transit—their route from sender to receiver by car, bus, train, or airplane—in a way that defined the format. As a cultural residue of the growing mobility of the populace, these postcards delivered transportation in the guise of communication.

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Figure 14.1. Riding the Flip-Flap observation ride at the Franco-British Exhibition of 1908; arranging a meeting at the fair.11

A Note on Deltiology What becomes of these unbottled messages? What shores do they wash up on today? Beyond the initial mailing documented on the card, what route did the postcards illustrating this chapter take to reach these pages? In the lead chapter of these proceedings, Paolo Cherchi Usai lays out a triptych for understanding film provenance; it is one that works neatly for postcards as well. Postcards, too, have a “material life,” in this case, between publisher and vendor, sender and receiver; they evidence a “migration of the images they contained,” selling pictures of local places destined for farflung locations; and they are a record of a “cultural journey,” as they travel through the post and its elaborate network of airplanes, trains, and trucks, before moving onto the domestic sphere.13 In this sphere, postcards customarily have a shelf life—affixed to a wall or, later in the twentieth century, magnetized to a refrigerator. If they are not then disposed of, they may be selected for household conservation—placed

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in a box of other paper mementos or bound in a dedicated album. These boxes and albums ultimately appear at estate sales or auctions, where dealers purchase them. They are then broken down and resold individually at a postcard or paper fair (many cities, large and small, have such events) or at online shops and auction houses, where there are millions of cards for sale. Postcard collectors—so-named deltiologists, to mirror their postal competitors, philatelists—target the theme of card they seek. Customarily, postcard collecting begins with a regional focus; buyers search for images of their place of origin. They might also focus on certain technologies (e.g., automobiles), events (e.g., World’s Fairs), or products (e.g., cigarettes). Postcards are seldom archived beyond this stage; so ends their trail of provenance. But there are exceptions. Many local history museums and libraries will inherit the cards of a hometown collector. This is the most reliable source of archived cards for researchers; however, their regional focus may be of less use for those seeking to characterize larger, different phenomena. There have been very few large-scale, concerted attempts to preserve postcards in the United States.14 Postcards have been used periodically by historians, and by and large, they have been treated as illustrations of other subjects.15 As employed in the tool kit of the historian of early film, postcards have tended to be used as auxiliary evidence: as an image of the spectacle, location, or star under discussion. Very rarely, they have been a record of correspondence. Here, I make a case for these novelties as objects of study that, as we have learned with (for example) optical toys, are not merely supplementary to film and other media but worthy of individual attention.16 As Lauren Kassell proposed regarding another set of paper ephemera, “objects that were once considered evidence for historical inquiry have become their subjects.”17

Media Archaeology of the Mechanical Postcard While the abundance of mechanical postcards and their clustering in the early twentieth century was unprecedented, the techniques they employed were not new. In terms of paper engineering, there were pull-tabs, flaps, and wheels in a variety of paper media beginning in the medieval period and flourishing in the Renaissance.18 Astronomy used volvelles to show celestial mechanics.19 Medicine used flaps to show the layers and movement of the body.20 By the nineteenth century, such movable paper comes to be associated with children’s literature, as in for instance the publications of Dean

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and Sons, whose illustrated volumes incorporated mechanical movement and dissolves.21 The abiding success of the pop-up book, first popularized by German printers in the nineteenth century, means that movable books remain the medium most associated with such techniques.22 Another important antecedent for the mechanical postcard also arose during the nineteenth century, when similar techniques were incorporated onto cards for the first time. During the Biedermeier period (1815–1848), German and Austrian printers produced mechanical Glückwunschkarten (greeting cards). Expressing fond sentiments of romance, love, or friendship, they were often given in person. The hand-to-hand intimacy of these Biedermeier cards’ mode of delivery was mirrored in the themes they focused on. The mechanical movements they incorporated were animated, typically, by human celebration—a budding romance, a growing family— often delivered with an element of surprise: a couple leans in for a kiss, children suddenly materialize. In this way, we might tie the peek-a-boo logic of the Biedermeier card to the phantasmagoria, those gruesome magic lantern slides that often used mechanical movement in order to offer a startle. The mechanical postcard, when it arrived, incorporated all the aforementioned techniques and also remediated many forms of optical toy and device that were popular in the nineteenth century. There were panoramic postcards that used various techniques to fold out and provide an expanded, 180-degree view; moving-panoramic postcards that pulled or (more often) rotated an image through a screen; dioramic postcards (in the Daguerreian sense) that changed the image through experiments in illumination; kaleidoscopic postcards that incorporated rotating volvelles; stereoscopic postcards meant to be looked at with a specialized viewing apparatus;23 and much more. There were, in turn, domestic opaque projectors that specialized in turning postcards into magic lantern slideshows. Above all, though, mechanical postcards borrowed the logic of that most successful of twentieth-century optical media, the cinema.

Carte Animée: Between Cinema and Transit As Donald Crafton has noted, postcards and cinema codeveloped.24 Emerging in the same moment, they shared an audience and milieu; they favored similar subjects, between travelogue and vaudeville; and they joined in an encyclopedic globalism that would have been familiar to the Lumières, aiming to index the local—every small town in the United States, the United

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Kingdom, France, Germany, and beyond, was photographed for postcards— and capture glimpses of distant parts of the world. Postcards were featured as titular topics of early films, such as Biograph Beauty Postcard (1905) or The Lightning Postcard Artist (1908). A successful postcard genre was often adapted into film, as in for instance the “rough sea” postcards that were adapted into scenics,25 or in Alice Guy-Blaché’s blockbuster postcard adaptation, The Cabbage Fairy (1896).26 In the 1910s, postcards came to offer affordable portraits of movie stars to the public.27 The postcard also served as inspiration to the avant-garde in a fashion similar to cinema.28 The mechanical postcard, meanwhile, drew from the cinema at the level of form and content. Many different manufacturers produced mechanical cards (some specializing in the format, others including them alongside normal postcards), and they each devised their own proprietary names, usually indicating the special technique employed. The Revolview and the Rotograph had revolving discs. The Spirit-Graph had images that only materialized when an accompanying red film was applied. These names echo the baroque nomenclature of the optical toy. Other cards pointed to the contemporaneous rise of animation—in France, one term for mechanicals was carte animée. The mechanical postcard is in the same animated lineage of the “transforming image” that Tom Gunning has claimed for flip and blow books.29 One of the most abundant producers of mechanical postcards in the United States called their cards Magic Moving Pictures. If the mechanical postcard aimed to borrow some of the luster of the moving image via its neologisms, it also aimed to borrow some of its technique. In particular, the mechanical postcard aimed to intermedially expand beyond the limits of the single-image postcard (which was the overwhelming norm) by showing multiple viewpoints and depth through accordion trapdoor techniques. A typical mechanical card from Kent, England, for instance, has an opening cut around the pictured airplane; lift it, and an accordion foldout presents multiple thumbnail images of the location (see fig. 14.2). The tourist postcard that documents a trip is suddenly in competition with the travelogue, aiming to expand its repertoire and number of images, showing the viewer a broader range of scenes. Again, mechanical postcards flower at this moment toward the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, remediating as many optical toys and visual devices as they could. The question is why, since the means for producing such cards long existed, do these techniques reappear after decades of neglect? Cinema is one answer. It accounts for some of the “panel

Figure 14.2. The accordion foldout here contains a message from the sender rather than images. Undated.

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Figure 14.3. A small selection of mechanical postcards for sightseeing automobile tours in various cities. While the façade is the same, each of these has an accordion foldout within that contains different images. 1908.

coding” that transpires in the foldout images of the mechanical card—the relationship between one pictured location and another and how they are separated by or tied together in panels—and which Jan Olsson has noted “was a conventionalized signifying practice for scores of technological exchanges” in this period.30 Film joins locations together through editing, just as a tour bus might from its window. Most cards that adopted mechanical means were about transit in some way or another.31 The motorized charabanc (early tour bus) and airplane each prompted successful series of mechanical cards.32 In these foldout accordion cards, a generic template is tailored to the given location (see fig. 14.3). These postcards thematized their own distance, their own travel routes; they pictured their own mechanized means of delivery, no longer passed directly, hand to hand, between friends as with Biedermeier cards but delivered by a new machine and its intermediaries. Some foldout cards show early experiments with airmail; others show the mail carrier that will nominally deliver the card. They are self-reflexively about the gulf between their provenance and their reception, between what happens to the card between sending and reception.

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A single image will not suffice to capture an airplane or tour bus ride. Thus the postcard employed cinematic techniques, editing the city into multiple views. A considerable amount of production value went into these images. There is equal attention, indeed perhaps more attention, paid to the small images embedded in the foldout as to the cover image. Postcard producers aimed to mirror the diversity and speed of images that travelers witnessed en route, each card a miniature travelogue. Or, put another way, each card was an episode, showing different views of different places with the same title and framing. They were, to quote Olsson again, “strange hybrid messages using one form of communication, mail, to hint at another.”33

Telegraphic Lacuna Marshall McLuhan once offered a reading of “transportation as communication.”34 He meant, for instance, the symbiotic relationship between newspapers and railways, their expansion in the nineteenth century tied: newspaper companies paid for railway track to help extend their distribution. It can be ambiguous where transit ends and communication begins in this rapport. McLuhan noted that “roads and the written word were closely interrelated”—until the invention of the telegraph.35 Similarly, the arrival of wireless telegraphy and telephony (which would become radio) helped to sever the connection between mechanical postcards and transit. Once these new transmission techniques became a widespread and affordable means of communication, toward 1910, some postcards tried to conceal themselves as telegrams, bearing their trappings in a form of technological mimicry. People pictured in cards would be shown to be communicating via Morse code or holding oversized telegram envelopes. Transit mechanicals waned. Space that had heretofore been for cinematic images was given over instead to telegraphic text. In some mechanical cards, the thumbnail images simply disappear—wireless telegraphy conveys text, not images, and postcards kept consistent to the parameters of the technology (see fig. 14.4). Circulation is a precondition for provenance. Resultantly, the palimpsest of provenance—the marks of place, producer, sender, carrier, owner, collector—that exists on a mechanical postcard is especially layered. Each carrier leaves evidence, be it prose, postmark, or indeed water damage. Radio waves left fewer marks of provenance. As the technology gradually replaced the postcard as a simple means of communicating while traveling, mechanical postcards such as those discussed became a lacuna in media

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Figure 14.4. The palimpsest on this card is particularly deep; the cardboard backing of this card is in fact a reused postcard for Silverdale, Lancashire. 1908.

history (a prelude to the disappearance of provenance in the digital age?). It may be more useful, then, to reverse McLuhan and read instead communication as transportation. The mechanical postcard reflected the new transportation networks in which it traveled, from motordom and aeriality to radioland. The transit of this most ephemeral of media became its very subject: provenance as genre. What, then, made the mechanicals move? They moved at multiple levels: as an apparatus reliant on the human motor of the user (like an optical

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toy); as an image of physical or temporal movement (the airplane, the tour bus); as a cinematic, pithy, mass epistolary; and as a epiphenomenon of the increased travel of the populace that used them (the prerequisite of sending a card is to travel to a new place): postcards in transit.

Acknowledgments My thanks to Donald Crafton for his insights on the relationship between cinema and postcards; also to Larry Seidman, for his help with Biedermeier cards.

Notes 1. See Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin’s Archive: Images, Texts, Signs, trans. Esther Leslie (London: Verso, 2007), 173. 2. Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 13. 3. David Scott Diffrient writes of these paradoxes and their relationship to cinema in “From Collecting Views and Visions of the City: Episode Films, Paris vu par . . ., and ‘Postcard Cinema,’” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 32, no. 7 (2015): 589–610. 4. For an image of cartolinamania, see the catalog accompanying Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts show, The Postcard Age: Selections from the Leonard A. Lauder Collection (Boston: MFA, 2012), 14. For more on such media enthusiasms, see Erkki Huhtamo, “From Kaleidoscomaniac to Cybernerd: Notes toward an Archaeology of the Media,” Leonardo 30, no. 3 (1997): 221–224. 5. See Edward W. Earle, ed., Points of View: The Stereograph in America—A Cultural History (Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1979). 6. Aline Ripert and Claude Frère, La carte postale: son histoire, sa fonction sociale (Paris: CNRS, 1983). 7. On postcards of the Eiffel Tower, see Naomi Schor, “Cartes Postales: Representing Paris 1900,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 2 (Winter 1992): 188–244. She estimates that there are at least ten thousand postcard views of Paris by the start of the twentieth century. On postcards and amusement parks, see Lauren Rabinovitz, Electric Dreamland: Amusement Parks, Movies, and American Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 8. Annebella Pollen, “Sweet Nothings: Suggestive Brighton Postcard Inscriptions,” Photography and Culture 2, no. 1 (2009): 77–88. 9. Rabinovitz, Electric Dreamland, 105. 10. Tom Philips, The Postcard Century: 2000 Cards and Their Messages (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000), 12. 11. For more on observation rides, see Patrick Ellis, “‘Panoramic Whew’: The Aeroscope at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, 1915,” Early Popular Visual Culture 13, no. 3 (2015): 209–231. 12. The only article to address these cards as a genre (and largely from the point of view of a collector) is from Robert L. Berthelson, “Cards with a Flip, Wiggle, and a Twist,” Yankee 43,

190  |  Provenance and Early Cinema no. 1 (1979): 134–141. Kim Timby treats lenticular cards in particular in 3D and Animated Lenticular Photography: Between Utopia and Entertainment (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015). 13. Paolo Cherchi Usai, “Film Provenance: A Framework for Analysis,” this volume, 23–33. 14. A shortlist of major collections for the American researcher would include those at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Newberry Library, the Smithsonian, and the University of Maryland. For a survey of smaller but important collections, see Norman D. Stevens, ed., Postcards in the Library: Invaluable Visual Resources (New York: Routledge, 2013). 15. Ibid. for a range of examples of how postcards have been employed by historians. 16. Donald Crafton, “The Veiled Genealogies of Animation and Cinema,” Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 6, no. 2, 2011: 93–110. 17. Lauren Kassell, “Paper Technologies, Digital Technologies: Working with Early Modern Medical Records,” in The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities, ed. Sarah Atkinson et al. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 120. 18. Suzanne Karr Schmidt, Interactive and Sculptural Printmaking in the Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 2018). 19. Jessica Helfand, Reinventing the Wheel: Volvelles, Equatoria, Planispheres, FactFinders, Gestational Charts (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002). 20. Meg Brown, “Flip, Flap, and Crack: The Conservation and Exhibition of 400+ Years of Flap Anatomies,” The Book and Paper Group Annual 32 (2013): 6–14. 21. See for instance Dean’s New Book of Dissolving Views (London: Dean & Son, 1861). 22. The publications of Ernest Nister and Lothar Meggendorfer are famed for their pop-up innovations in “animated paper,” as Amanda Brian noted in “Listening to Lothar Meggendorfer’s Nineteenth-Century Moving Picture Books,” The Princeton University Library Chronicle 74, no. 3 (Spring 2013): 366–396. The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum has many of these volumes and featured them in an exhibition, “Surprise! Surprise! Pop-Up and Movable Books” in 1989. 23. For an interesting study of stereoscopic cards, see Stephen Herbert, Theodore Brown’s Magic Pictures: The Art and Inventions of a Multi-Media Pioneer (London: The Projection Box, 1997), 102. 24. Donald Crafton discussed this in his paper “Film and Picture Postcards, 1894–1914,” delivered at the Third International Domitor Conference, New York (1994). The interrelations of postcard and cinema continue to the present day: see Isabelle McNeill, “Glossy Postcards and Virtual Collectibles: Consuming Cinematic Paris,” Journal of Urban Cultural Studies 4, no. 3 (2017): 387–405. 25. Jennifer Lynn Peterson, Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 148. 26. Jane Gaines, “Of Cabbages and Authors,” in A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, ed. Jennifer Bean and Diane Negra (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 88–118. 27. Described in Q. David Bowers, “Souvenir Postcards and the Development of the Star System, 1912–1914,” Film History 3, no. 1 (1989): 39–45. 28. See for instance the postcard collaboration between John Heartfield and George Grosz, described in Matthew Biro, The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin (Minneapolis, MA: Minnesota University Press, 2009), 190–193; or the postcard drawing-collages of Joan Miró, discussed in Jordana Mendelson, “Joan Miró’s DrawingCollage, August 8, 1933: The ‘Intellectual Obscenities’ of Postcards,” Art Journal 63, no. 1

What Made the Mechanicals Move?  |  191 (Spring 2004): 24–37. Anne McCauley provides an excellent overview of the use of postcards in the arts in her review of Postcards: Ephemeral Histories of Modernity in Visual Resources 27, no. 3 (2011): 267–271. 29. Tom Gunning, “The Transforming Image: The Roots of Animation in Metamorphosis and Motion,” in Pervasive Animation, ed. Suzanne Buchan (New York: Routledge, 2013), 52–69. 30. Jan Olsson, “Framing Silent Calls: Coming to Cinematographic Terms with Telephony,” in Allegories of Communication: Intermedial Concerns from Cinema to the Digital, ed. John Fullerton and Jan Olsson (Rome: John Libbey, 2004), 159. 31. There are of course nontransit-themed mechanical cards—flirtation and reproduction are likely the next most frequent mechanical themes—but transit is the norm. 32. The airplane also prompted an entire genre of “fantasy travel” real photo postcards, in which people posed in mock airplanes, as shown in Tom Philip’s Fantasy Travel: Vintage People on Photo Postcards (Oxford: The Bodleian Library, 2012). 33. Olsson, “Framing Silent Calls,” 159. 34. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994 [1964]), 89. 35. Ibid.

PATRICK ELLIS is Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he is developing his book project, Aeroscopics: A Media Archaeology of the Bird’s-Eye View.

15 “THE END OF A FOREIGN MONOPOLY” Bausch and Lomb and the Wartime Provenance of Optical Glass Allain Daigle

I

n the February 1920 issue of Popular Science, fifteen months after the end of World War I, Bausch and Lomb Optical Company ran a fullpage advertisement titled “The End of a Foreign Monopoly.” Below an illustration of a heavily muscled man pulling a large core of hot optical glass from a low fire, the advertisement presents a dramatic narrative of interrupted provenance: “Optical glass assumed, over night, a new and terrible importance, when the world went to war with Germany. For the world, so far as it knew, was largely dependent on Germany for the higher grades [of optical glass], dependent on an enemy for the very eyes of fleets and armies—periscopes, aeroplane camera-lenses, searchlights, field glasses, range-finders. And optical glass cannot be made over night.”1 While many countries had robust commercial capabilities for manufacturing optical instruments, the war revealed that the glass necessary to construct those precision instruments was almost exclusively supplied by Germany.2 World War I has been discussed in relationship to the military’s use of cinema, the war’s systematization of perception as a form of violence, and the development of motion picture technical standards, but less attention has been paid to how the war also dramatically rearranged the manufacture and circulation of photographic lenses.3 After the beginning of World War I in 1914, the optical manufacturers of England, France, and the United States were cut off from a supply of optical glass—with no existing infrastructure

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Figure 15.1. During World War I, Bausch and Lomb became the largest manufacturer of optical glass in the United States. Popular Science (February 1920).

to support an immediate wartime need for optical instruments. The production of precision lenses for photography and cinema—both in the United States and abroad—was significantly affected by the ways in which Allied optical manufacturers addressed abrupt changes in the origin and circulation of materials from which film technologies were made. To broaden a discussion of provenance in early cinema, this chapter will examine the American production and circulation of photographic lenses from 1914 to 1918. While provenance is primarily used in this collection to discuss the historical movements of film prints, I use provenance to foreground how the circulation of lenses was strongly influenced by the uneven development of national optical industries. Specifically, this chapter examines the effect of a wartime shortage of optical glass on the production of photographic lenses at Bausch and Lomb, an optical company based in Rochester, New York (see fig. 15.1). While Bausch and Lomb is more widely

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historicized in cinema studies for their production of the industry standard Cinephor projection lenses in the 1920s and the Cinemascope lenses of the 1950s, I center this chapter on Bausch and Lomb’s relationship to a broader network of optical markets and suppliers.4 The wartime development of the optical industry also has striking parallels and intersections with developments in engineering, higher education, and manufacturing discussed in the history of science and technology.5 Although these industrial networks were not necessarily preoccupied with motion picture production, they were nonetheless a vital part of the technological infrastructure that studios and exhibitors drew on in their efforts to create and distribute films. By examining the wartime development of Bausch and Lomb, I ultimately argue that national anxieties about the provenance of optical glass played a key role in expanding international optical industries in ways that were unintentionally beneficial to the industrialization of film production. To understand why the supply of optical glass was such a cause for anxiety during the war, it is necessary to understand the relationship between national provenance and optical production in the late nineteenth century. Much like the dye industry, optical glass was regarded as “one of the exclusive, industrial heritages of a few European countries” and “popular prejudices decreed that everything optical must come out of Europe.”6 Prior to the 1880s, most lenses for microscopy, astronomy, and photography were imported from English, French, and German manufacturers.7 The Euro­ pean origin of a lens was not a guarantee of quality. Rather, it was a shorthand used to describe a tradition of European lens craft that largely did not exist in the United States. As late as 1916, there were no schools in the United States where the practical foundations of a lens grinder’s trade were taught.8 The institutional matrix of science, industry, and education that had led to economic success in agriculture, manufacturing, and electricity had yet to extend to the production of precision optics in the United States.9 Consumers closely associated lens quality with Europe because, for most of the nineteenth century, precision lens production was predominantly an artisanal practice. Nearly all workers engaged in the production of optical instruments in the early and middle nineteenth century were “tradesmen with training in metalwork and the construction of small machines who had picked up their optical skills after gaining employment in a shop engaged in building and selling optical instruments.”10 The quality of a lens was closely tied to the individual reputation of an optician, a relationship reflected in the practice of engraving lenses with maker names like

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(Johann) Voigtländer, (Carl) Zeiss, (Andrew) Ross, and (John Henry) Dallmeyer. As one New York dealer phrased it, “we would have more confidence in a lens bearing the name of its maker than in one without it, because the latter would not dare to put his name on a bad or objectionable article if he cares for his reputation.”11 Furthermore, the professional craft of melting, grinding, and polishing optical glass was historically passed down through apprenticeship rather than in schools. A belief in lens quality was implicitly a belief in technology as technique, and in the nineteenth century, the professional infrastructure for optical craft was largely limited to England, France, and Germany. The provenance of a lens implied its quality on the basis of these material practices. However, in the 1880s, the basis of professional beliefs in optical quality began to shift from a belief in the craft of individual opticians to a belief in the universal science of optics. This was largely due to the industrial and commercial efforts of Zeiss, a German optical firm that primarily sold microscopes. Following their construction of The Glass Works in 1884, Zeiss began to manufacture new kinds of optical glass.12 The Glass Works was the first large-scale glass factory capable of melting “chemically durable glass types with high reproducibility in those properties that high end optical systems require.”13 Among these was barium crown glass, which made it possible for Zeiss to manufacture new kinds of distortionless photographic lenses. Zeiss’s anastigmatic lenses of the 1890s were lauded for capturing images with minimal distortion, but it was Zeiss’s manufacture of glass with specific and reproducible material properties that made these designs viable both in practice and in the minds of practitioners. Zeiss sold glass, but more importantly, they also sold a belief in industry. Zeiss’s catalogs, trade demonstrations, and presence in educational institutions encouraged consumers and practitioners to believe that scientific systems, rather than individual professionals, could form the basis of reliable manufacture in optics.14 Optical quality was closely associated with Germany from 1890 to 1914, but for all that the popular imagination divided lens quality along national lines, the infrastructural reality was much more international than most histories acknowledged. For example, while Bausch and Lomb promoted its “emancipation from foreign control” following the war, a significant part of Bausch and Lomb’s prewar success in manufacturing photographic lenses resulted from its commercial alliance with Zeiss.15 Bausch and Lomb’s position as an American optical company was historically defined by its

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capacity to provide a domestic supply of goods that were historically produced in Europe. After losing two fingers in a buzz saw, German immigrant John Jacob Bausch fell back on his secondary trade in the spectacle business and set up a small optical workshop in Rochester in 1853.16 The shop sold eyeglasses, microscopes, and other imported optical products from Europe.17 Following an embargo on European imports during the American Civil War, Bausch and Lomb became successful selling spectacle frames and diversified to produce a variety of optical products, particularly those that required a high degree of precision.18 Bausch and Lomb was the primary lens provider for Eastman Kodak as early as 1888 and was exclusively licensed by Carl Zeiss in 1892 to make Zeiss Anastigmats and other lenses for the American market.19 The production of Zeiss products at Bausch and Lomb enabled Zeiss to bypass costly import tariffs and establish a larger market share in the United States, and Bausch and Lomb drew upon Zeiss’s tradition of scientific advertising to convince consumers of the quality of an American-made lens.20 It was the mass-manufacturing of photographic lenses in the tradition of Zeiss that made Bausch and Lomb a prosperous company at the turn of the century.21 By 1903, the company had produced five hundred thousand photographic lenses, and by 1910, the company reported that it had produced over a million photographic lenses.22 After the formation of “The Triple Alliance” in 1908, Zeiss moved from a licensing relationship to a partnership with Bausch and Lomb and one of Bausch and Lomb’s subsidiary partners, the Saegmuller Company, which was the primary producer of gunsights for the US Navy. As Bausch and Lomb wrote in a preface to their 1912 catalog, The Triple Alliance was an international partnership that “concentrated the resources, the experience and the energies of the two leading optical firms of the Old and New World.”23 The international growth and expansion of optical manufacturing— the combination of the old and new worlds—found a growing market for precision lenses in the motion picture industry. While any lens could hypothetically be used for film production, the lenses generally used in taking motion pictures were “ultra-rapid anastigmats.”24 Or, more simply put: camera operators desired corrected lenses that were fast enough to capture crisp, clear detail for when the negative was projected in theaters. According to Motion Picture News, American Cinematographer, and The Handbook of Kinematography, the most popular anastigmatic lens with cameramen during the prewar period was the Zeiss Tessar.25 It was not quite as

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sharp as the Voigtländer Heliar, another ideal lens for cinematography at the time, but the Tessar was twice as fast and offered “reserve speed in case of emergency.”26 Bausch and Lomb manufactured Tessars in the United States, and while there was debate over whether domestic quality was equal to “genuine” Zeiss quality, they were largely accepted as equal. Assurances of optical quality implied by technological provenance helped facilitate the increasingly international exchange of film technologies, and by the early twentieth century, cinema had become a strong influence on the development and design of photographic lenses.27 However, beginning in 1914, the predominant influence on the manufacture of photographic lenses shifted from cinema to war. The first rumblings of this change were felt in Britain, but the effects quickly rippled out to the rest of the Allied nations. In August 1914, Britain’s navy blockaded the German Imperial Fleet in its ports to restrict the mainland’s access to supplies. Without access to German optical glass, Britain was unable to manufacture binoculars, range finders, periscopes, and other precision optics that had become essential to military operations. At first, the British government satisfied the need by purchasing German lenses from the public, but in November 1915, all unsold optical instruments in private or commercial hands were commandeered.28 The Chance Brothers, Britain’s largest domestic supplier of optical glass, was only able to provide about 10 percent of Britain’s wartime demand. One of the only other substantial alternative suppliers, the French company Parra-Mantois, was quickly overwhelmed by orders from other European instrument makers whose German optical glass supply was also compromised.29 Because the Allied nations were so heavily dependent on the German supply of optical glass, the war created an immediate shortage with no domestic industry capable of immediately satisfying that deficit on either a national or international scale. If optical provenance was increasingly discussed as a commercial preference in film technologies prior to the war, by 1914, optical provenance described a fundamental material shortage. Both because of the fear of losing access to German glass and because of the economic promise of supplying a Europe at war, the United States began to industrialize its precision optical industry in 1914. Bausch and Lomb had been experimenting with melting new kinds of optical glass as early as 1903, but it was only in the winter of 1914–1915 that multiple buildings were specifically constructed at Bausch and Lomb for the purposes of creating a

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national supply of precision optical glass.30 These experiments took on new urgency when Zeiss dissolved The Triple Alliance in 1915 after Bausch and Lomb took on contracts for the manufacture of field glasses for the British, French, and Russian governments.31 Although Bausch and Lomb and other domestic glass companies were beginning to research how to create optical glass at a mass scale, by the time the United States entered the war in 1917, the domestic production of optical glass was still inadequate to the standards and volume required by the military. Following the optical glass supply crisis, Bausch and Lomb became the primary site of the US military’s investment in domestic glass production. In 1917, a research lab was established at the Bausch and Lomb factory on advice of the council of National Defense.32 The task of the lab was not only to reproduce the kind of optical glass that had long been produced in Europe but also to develop information about the process of its manufacture.33 After seven months of work at the Bausch and Lomb plant, by the end of 1917, the essential details of the manufacturing process had been developed. The amount of usable optical glass produced across the United States increased from about three thousand pounds per month in April 1917 to seventy-nine thousand pounds per month in October 1918. As Colonel F. E. Wright reflected in his 1921 report The Manufacture of Optical Glass: A Wartime Problem, “the records show that in the short period of 19 months, we did accomplish much to overtake decades of German experience.”34 It was not just the supply of optical glass but the quality of glass that guided the American wartime effort. As Germany held such a high reputation for optical glass quality prior to the war, American optical industries needed to reassure the military and other domestic industries of the equality, if not the superiority, of domestic glass. For example, in the winter of 1916–1917, Bausch and Lomb produced a batch of optical glass that was used in “the manufacture of several hundred high-priced anastigmat photographic lenses” that had previously only been created using the “highest grade Jena glass.”35 The lenses were fitted to speed cameras and subjected to “exacting tests,” after which the testing manufacturers wrote that the tests demonstrated that the new Bausch and Lomb lenses were “not only equal, but superior to the same type of lenses heretofore made from the imported glass.”36 Regardless of whether the lenses were, in fact, superior, the publication of this information in Bausch and Lomb’s 1919 catalog indicates that lens suppliers were as much concerned with proving that domestic lenses

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were superior to foreign lenses as they were with meeting supply numbers. The technical accomplishment of crisp, clear images demonstrated not only good design but a particularly national form of success that continued to be defined against a history of German provenance. While photographic lenses were increasingly produced in France, Britain, and the United States during the war, the motion picture industry had limited access to these supplies. Many optical companies made a reserve stock of motion picture camera objectives, but nearly all optical companies who formerly made photographic objectives were limited to military production.37 When the scarcity of precision lenses for aerial surveying led the US Signal Corps to requisition photographic lenses from the public in 1917, they asked specially for Zeiss Tessars and Voigtländer Heliars— German lenses that were also preferred in cinematography for their speed and sharpness. As Karl Brown noted in American Cinematographer, “No greater tribute could be paid a lens than the willingness of cameramen to pay fancy prices for the Tessar when importations were impossible during the war.”38 At theater screenings, “four-minute speakers” would urge audiences to “loan whatever glasses they might have to Uncle Sam.”39 The war also caused dramatic shortages in the supply of motion picture projectors. Many exhibitors changed their screen size immediately in order to accommodate impending restrictions on lenses, and Edwin S. Porter’s wartime career was largely dedicated to creating a projector lens manufacturing plant on Long Island.40 Although filmmakers and exhibitors had access to existing equipment, the uncertainty of where supplies would come from in the future sharpened the value of a quality lens. As it happened, optical manufacturers quickly found themselves with a surplus of optical glass following the end of the war in 1918. Without the wartime demand, many of these cottage industries were forced to redirect their investments or fold.41 As Twyman suggests, the greatest innovations in the optical industries occurred during the postwar conditions of austerity.42 Camera lenses introduced during the war found alternative uses in photographing theatrical productions with ordinary theater lighting, projecting images in larger moving picture halls, and capturing increasingly fast movement on cinematographs.43 Wartime innovations in optics were thus applied to the motion picture industry, and as The Moving Picture World proudly declared in 1919, “The lenses which make possible motion picture photography and projection, have until recently all been made from optical glass imported from Europe. The glass for the cameras being made

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in America is now being turned out by the Bosch [sic] and Lomb plant, among the largest customers of the company being the Eastman Kodak Company, who buy all their lenses from Bausch and Lomb.”44 The Moving Picture World’s nationalist sentiment was characteristic of a postwar tendency to narrative optical development as a singularly national endeavor. With titles like “America’s Optical Emancipation” (1919), “America’s Conquest of Optical Glass” (1919), “Breaking a German Monopoly” (1919), and “Make Lenses Better Than Germans” (1919), articles in both the popular press and professional trade journals framed Bausch and Lomb as a triumphant example of American industry—although, given antiGerman sentiments in the United States, one might also speculate about how a company founded by German immigrants may have felt particularly compelled to demonstrate its national character.45 Although the international optics community that formed during the war came to champion the pursuit and dissemination of knowledge across national boundaries, the origin stories of optical progress that followed the war largely structured the history of optics around the division, rather than the joining, of the old and new worlds of glass.

Notes 1. Bausch and Lomb, “The End of a Foreign Monopoly,” Popular Science (February 1920): 2. 2. Stewart Wills, “How the Great War Changed the Optics Industry,” Optics and Photonics News 27, no. 1 (2016): 40–47, https://www.osapublishing.org/opn/abstract​ .cfm?uri=opn-27-1-40. 3. Cinema’s Military Industrial Complex, ed. Haidee Wasson and Lee Grieveson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018); Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (London: Verso, 1989); Janet Staiger, “Historical Note: Standardization and Independence: The Founding Objectives of the SMPTE,” SMPTE Journal 96, no. 6 (June 1987): 536. 4. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia, 1985), 252; J. F. Taylor, “Skouras: ‘Impossible’ Is Unknown,” The Film Daily (September 16, 1954): 10. 5. David Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); Olivier Zunz, Why the American Century? (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998); David A. Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production: 1800–1932 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). 6. Hugh A. Smith, “America’s Optical Emancipation: How a Dreamer of 66 Years’ Standing Has Seen His Vision Realized,” Scientific American (May 3, 1919): 454. 7. Bausch & Lomb Optical Company, “Introducing Ourselves,” Photographic Lenses (Rochester: Bausch & Lomb Optical Company, 1912), 5.

“The End of a Foreign Monopoly”  |  201 8. Carl Louis Gregory, “Motion Picture Photography,” The Moving Picture World 27, no. 8 (February 26, 1916): 1300. 9. Zunz, Why the American Century, ix–xvi. 10. Stuart Feffer, “Ernst Abbe, Carl Zeiss, and the Transformation of Microscopial Optics,” Scientific Credibility and Technical Standards in 19th and Early 20th Century Germany and Britain, ed. Jed Z. Buchwald (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1996), 25. 11. “Putting the Maker’s Name on Objectives,” The American Monthly Microscopial Journal 10, no. 12 (December 1889): 279. 12. For a more detailed history of Zeiss and optical glass, see Feffer, “Ernst Abbe, Carl Zeiss.” 13. Peter Hartmann et al, “Optical Glass and Glass Ceramic Historical Aspects and Recent Developments: A Schott View,” Applied Optics 49, no. 16 (June 2010): 158. 14. Feffer, “Ernst Abbe, Carl Zeiss,” 58. 15. Bausch and Lomb, “The End of a Foreign Monopoly”; Michael Pritchard, “Bausch and Lomb,” in Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, ed. John Hannavy (London: Routledge, 2007), 121. 16. Donald Padgitt, A Short History of the Early American Microscopes (London: Microscope Publications, 1975), 85. 17. “John Jacob Bausch and Henry Lomb,” The German American Corner (Marina, CA: Davitt Publications, 1996–2000), http://www.germanheritage.com/biographies/atol/bausch​ .html. 18. Padgitt, A Short History, 86–88. 19. Pritchard, “Bausch and Lomb,” 121. 20. “Triple Alliance: Zeiss - Bausch & Lomb – Saegmuller,” Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments (Harvard University, 2017), http://waywiser.fas.harvard.edu​/peo​ple​ /7108/triple-alliance--zeiss--bausch--lomb--saegmuller. 21. Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, 252. 22. Pritchard, “Bausch and Lomb,” 121; Bausch & Lomb Optical Co, “Photographic Lenses,” Catalog H (Rochester: Bausch and Lomb Optical Company, 1910), 7. 23. Bausch and Lomb Optical Co., “Introducing Ourselves,” 5. 24. “Picture Lenses Are Ultra-Rapid Anastigmats,” Motion Picture News 13, no. 19 (May 13, 1916): 2948. 25. Ibid., 2948; Karl Brown, “Modern Lenses: Section Three,” The American Cinematographer (July 1, 1922): 4–5; Colin N. Bennett, The Handbook of Kinematography (London: The Kinematograph Weekly, 1911). 26. “Picture Lenses Are Ultra-Rapid Anastigmats,” 2948. 27. W. Taylor and H. W. Lee, “The Development of the Photographic Lens,” Proceedings of the Physical Society 47, no. 3 (1935): 509. 28. “The British Glass Scramble,” Optics & Photonics News 27 (January 2016), https:// www​.osa-opn.org/home/articles/volume_27/january_2016/features/how_the_great_war​ _changed_the_optics_industry/the_british_glass_scramble/. 29. Stephen Sambrook, “No Gunnery Without Glass—Optical Glass Supply and Production Problems in Britain and the USA, 1914–1918” (2000), http://www.europa​.com​ /~telscope/glass-ss.txt. 30. Smith, “America’s Optical Emancipation,” 455. 31. Benedict Cromwell, America’s Munitions 1917–1918 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1919), 578.

202  |  Provenance and Early Cinema 32. “America’s Conquest of Optical Glass: Our War Time Emancipation from Germany in a Small Thing but as Vital as Dyes and Chemicals,” Manufacturing and Industrial Management (August 5, 1919), 174. 33. F. E. Wright, The Manufacture of Optical Glass: A War-Time Problem (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1921), 11. 34. Ibid., 5. 35. “Excerpt from Bausch & Lomb Optical Glass Catalog of 1919,” Bausch and Lomb Archives (Rochester), 4. 36. “Excerpt from Bausch & Lomb Optical Glass Catalog of 1919,” 4. 37. “Cinema Camera Objectives,” Motion Picture News 18, no. 15 (October 12, 1918): 2432. 38. Brown, “Modern Lenses,” 5. 39. “How Simplex Met Lens Shortage: A Human Interest Story of Industrial Achievement during the World War of Nations,” Motion Picture News 19, no. 1 (January 4, 1919): 114. 40. Ibid. 41. Sambrook, “No Gunnery.” 42. F. Twyman, “The Vitality of the British Optical Industry,” Journal of Scientific Instruments 2, no. 12 (September 1925): 370. 43. Ibid., 371–372. 44. “Make Lenses Better Than Germans: Bausch & Lomb Optical Company Now Produces Glass That Excels the Boche Jena Product,” Moving Picture World 40, no. 8 (May 24, 1919): 1178. 45. Smith, “America’s Optical Emancipation”; “America’s Conquest”; “Breaking a German Monopoly,” The Trader (July 1919): 63–64; “Make Lenses Better Than Germans.”

ALLAIN DAIGLE received his PhD in Media, Cinema, and Digital Studies from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where he completed his dissertation titled “Fast Glass: Modernity, Technology, and the Cinematic Lens.”

16 PATHÉ FILMS IN BRAZIL The Archives of Marc Ferrez & Sons (1908–1916) Danielle Crepaldi Carvalho

T

his essay deals with the circulation of films by Pathé Frères in Brazil between 1908 and 1916. It seeks to reflect on the preeminent role played by the French Brazilian entrepreneur Marc Ferrez and his sons Jules and Lucien in exploring the distribution of Pathé films and equipment throughout the Brazilian territory. Their exclusive arrangements had a strong impact on the cinema business in Rio de Janeiro, especially in relation to the prominence of French cinema in the city. Its effects both reverberated and were triggered by the press of the period, which is one of the main sources for this article. The concept of provenance offers us a fruitful approach to our object. The examination of the French cinematographic company trajectory in a historically peripheral country such as Brazil, the migration of films and the specificities of their incorporation and resignification in the Latin American cultural context, exemplify with complexity the meanders of early cinema’s transnational circulation. The signing of the agreement between the Ferrez and Pathé Frères around 1907–19081 confirmed the hegemony of French cinema in the country. This preponderance, however, was not absolute. I will highlight the coexistence of both French and foreign films—especially from North America—on Brazilian screens, and I will analyze the meanings attributed to this phenomenon. My research focuses on Rio de Janeiro, where Marc Ferrez & Filhos (Marc Ferrez & Sons) was located. The company signed a contract with

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Pathé that was intrinsically related to the capital of Brazil; the social life of the city followed French models, in which cinema played a fundamental role.2 Beginning in 1907, film exhibition in Rio de Janeiro moved from the street markets to dedicated film theaters at a time of formidable expansion of Pathé’s production.3 The contract between Ferrez and Pathé dates back to the time when the first cinemas were inaugurated on Avenida Central; in typical Haussmanian style, Rio’s newest avenue ripped the central area of the city in a straight line, from Mauá Square to the Guanabara Bay. The opening of Avenida Central coincides with Pathé’s efforts to penetrate the world’s market, following the strategy so eloquently described by Stéphanie Salmon in Pathé à la conquête du cinéma (2014). Echoing a Pathé film, Avenida Central would soon be the scene of an unusual “Mi-Carême” parade (in which a “Queen of the Working Class” would be chosen). The leading fashion columnist of the time wrote in his daily newspaper column, “We went to see the Mi-Carême’s festival in Paris, in the Cinema Rio Branco. This is the party that we plan to do in Rio.”4 As the circulation of Pathé films in Brazil was steadily increasing, the country sought to populate the streets of its still provincial capital with the same public who attended its cinema shows, using the French people depicted on the screen as models for the kind of social atmosphere the tropical country aspired to. We also need to consider, however, the earlier impact of the French film industry in Brazil, as well as the people that made it possible, since they familiarized their audiences with French cinema’s themes and narratives as well as, symbolically, the French modus vivendi. As I will further discuss, this allegiance would determine both exhibitors’ and journalists’ resistance to films made in other foreign countries. The main source for this essay is the Ferrez Family archive, publicly available at the Arquivo Nacional.5 The archive includes contracts between the company and its national and international partners as well as detailed financial records on the distribution of Pathé films and equipment around the country (Marc Ferrez owned the Cinema Pathé, located on Avenida Central, in association with Arnaldo Gomes de Souza). The archive also holds thousands of letters exchanged between the father, the two sons, and their business partners. These documents will be examined in order to show the scope and depth of Pathé’s presence in Brazil and the evolution of cinema in Rio de Janeiro from fairground attraction to highbrow entertainment.

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I A key figure in the introduction of French cinema in Brazil is the Italianborn Paschoal Segreto, who arrived in the country after escaping his impoverished hometown, Salerno.6 In the still provincial capital at the turn of the nineteenth century, Segreto was the owner of the Salão Paris no Rio (Paris Salon in Rio), a venue located on Rua do Ouvidor, which, at that time, was the most important street of the city. At the end of 1897, the Salão Paris no Rio exhibited the “Animatographo Super-Lumière,” “representing beautiful views of important European locations.”7 Contrary to the announcement, there is no evidence of any Lumière projectionist having arrived in Brazil at the time.8 According to Ian Christie, the apparatus had actually been made by Robert William Paul; as the word animatograph was inscribed on Paul’s machine, it may have been appropriated by both the Brazilian exhibitor and the local press, together with the name Lumière.9 Some of the films presented at the Salão Paris no Rio could indeed be Lumière productions, such as Passagem de artilheria na Rua Humberto 1o, em Turim, Polícia que recolhe ao quartel, em New-York, and Bondes elétricos, em Londres.10 On the other hand, a “devilish” Serpentina francesa in color11 was from Georges Demenÿ (Danse serpentine, Gaumont, 1897), while Dois namorados12 is probably May Irwin Kiss (William Heise, Edison, 1896). As it turns out, Paschoal Segreto exhibited views of manufacturers from around the world, personally obtained by his dealer at the companies’ headquarters, together with various pieces of technical equipment.13 In the advertisements of these views, their origin mattered less than their theme. The variety of the attractions was also emphasized: phonographs, dioramas, stereoscopes, and so forth. Segreto’s main attempt was to give the public a “Journey around the World”; hence the 1897 announcement of the Animatograph, illustrated by the image of a ship, with a “ship ticket” to be paid for admission at the picture show.14 Even so, France (especially Paris) deeply influenced Segreto (as well as Rio’s “elegant” inhabitants), as testified by some of the venues the entrepreneur ran between 1897 and 1915: besides the Salão Paris no Rio, there was the Moulin Rouge, a café-concert that provided the public with drinks, beautiful women singing and dancing the cancan, and pornographic films. In 1906, Segreto would present there the “humorous, comical and danceable pantomime A Trip to the Moon,”15 a theatrical version of the film by Georges Méliès that he had exhibited for years in yet another venue, the Fluminense Park. The Moulin

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Rouge would later be called Maison Moderne, a sort of miniature Coney Island featuring automatic machines, shooting targets, roller coasters, and animated views.

II The Brazilian infatuation with France goes back to the time when Brazil became the seat of the Portuguese empire at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The French Artistic Mission reached Brazil in 1816, shortly after the arrival of Lisbon’s royal family. Its members had migrated there to flee from Napoleon’s siege; nevertheless, Portugal’s long-standing cultural debt to France was promptly restored in the new world. In fact, one of the men who landed in Brazil with the famous mission was Zépherin Ferrez,16 father of Marc. Zépherin was a famous painter, one of the founders of the Academia de Belas Artes do Rio de Janeiro. Marc Ferrez’s spiritual proximity to the homeland of his ancestors (where he would physically return on multiple occasions) opened up to him the prospect of establishing a close professional liaison with Charles Pathé. The relationship between Marc Ferrez & Filhos and Pathé Frères dates back at least to 1905, the year when Marc Ferrez associated with Arnaldo Souza, the owner of a bar located in Rio’s Passeio Público (Public Walk). Arnaldo started to show films with a Biograph projector owned by the Italian traveling exhibitor Victor de Mayo, then with another machine owned by the Ferrez company.17 Among the Ferrez files there is a brochure by Marc Ferrez, printed by the Typography L’Etoile du Sud in 1905, which mentions a projector called Eureka.18 According to it, this machine was “constituted by a strong lantern equipped with a condenser and a dual objective, adapted to a Demeny Chronophotoscope,” which allowed the seamless transition from fixed to animated projection.19 This is quite likely the machine that Arnaldo Souza operated in the Passeio Público, judging from the date of the contractual agreement between him and Marc Ferrez. In the bucolic Passeio Público, on the screen set up right in front of the bar’s kitchen,20 among the trees, were shown films such as Les Petits vagabonds by Lucien Nonguet (Pathé, 1905), which moved the public “to noisily applaud, laughing aloud” and the press to consider it the “great apotheosis of vice.”21 Ferrez and Arnaldo were quick to realize the commercial possibilities of the entertainment; two months later, they presented Les Martyrs de l’Inquisition (Lucien Nonguet, Pathé, 1905) in a colored version. The

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journalist and renowned playwright Arthur Azevedo applauded the cast of “true artists” and the “complete illusion” of reality conveyed by the colored film, although he questioned the exhibition of those crude scenes in that location. Despite the fact that the “bloody and horrifying drama”22 was immediately followed by the comedy Les Débuts d’un chauffeur (Georges Hatot, Pathé, 1906), the cruelties of religious oppression seemed to Azevedo unfit to be exhibited in a public park, among flowers, glasses of beer, and lemonade. Azevedo’s text foreshadows a shift in the aesthetic fruition of cinema toward the experience in a dark auditorium. The acclaim surrounding the projections at the Passeio Público, and the opening of Avenida Central (where the first film theaters of the city were built), led Marc Ferrez and Arnaldo Souza to open there the Cinema Pathé, which would be an integral component of Rio’s urban landscape during the next decade. The contract between Ferrez and Souza “for the exploitation of cinematographic showings in the buildings of 147–149 Avenida Central” was signed on October 21, 1907: Marc Ferrez being responsible for the supply of films, with Souza in charge of the management of the venue. The company name Arnaldo and C. was probably due to Ferrez’s attempt to avoid possible sanctions from Pathé, which barred its distributors from running cinemas.23 The initial contract between Ferrez and Pathé is not available in the Arquivo Nacional. Although the relationship between the two seems to have begun around 1905,24 their first known correspondence dates only from mid-1908. The exchanges include useful pieces of evidence, such as the general terms of the contract established by Ferrez and Pathé, film clippings with the film company’s logo, and a harsh letter to Marc Ferrez written by Charles Pathé himself, in reaction to Ferrez’s resale of black-and-white films for a higher price than previously agreed. By this time, the contracts between Ferrez and the owners of other film theaters in the city had multiplied. Among them were Paschoal Segreto (who had established venues in Largo do Machado, 154 Avenida Central, and 15 Praça Tiradentes) and Jácomo Rosário Staffa (owner of the Cinema Parisiense, located at 179 Avenida Central). The investigation of the contracts and letters involving these personalities allows us to observe the effort by Ferrez to control the Pathé brand at a national level. In 1908, the company began to exchange missives with José Tous Rocca, who would eventually become its head representative for the north and northeast regions of Brazil. In one of these letters, Ferrez

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attacked Jácomo Staffa for his alleged dissemination of malicious gossip about Marc Ferrez & Filhos at the French headquarters of Pathé.25 Staffa was apparently the person responsible for informing Pathé that Ferrez had increased the rental prices of the films. Pathé became ubiquitous in Rio de Janeiro, largely due to the brand’s dominance in the press through advertisements, newspaper columns, and commentaries. At the beginning of 1908, the French company was considered synonymous with cinema, as shown by a cover of Rio’s Fon Fon!, in which the allegorical figure has a brooch depicting a rooster, symbol of the French company.26 A year later, in August 1909, the company’s releases were more popular than ever. Another magazine illustration, entitled “Cinematografomania,” portrays a family group; someone says: “I did not like this drama, it ends very badly: after the guy finds out the crime, a large rooster appears on the screen. Very dull.”27 The newspapers of the period made frequent references to Pathé in relation to the Films d’Art Season, organized in early 1909 by the owners of Cinema Pathé and Cinema Rio Branco28 at the Teatro Lírico, the city’s foremost opera house at the time. The goal of the Films d’Art Season was to magnificently continue the sessões da moda (fashion screenings), which provided affluent audiences of the area with prestige shows held on a regular basis: selected venues of Rio de Janeiro held these special events twice a week since early 1908, aiming to promote cinema as elite entertainment. In the course of the Film d’Art Season, which lasted about a month, the Teatro Lírico presented films such as L’Arlésienne (Albert Capellani, 1908), adapted from a play by Alphonse Daudet and featuring music by Georges Bizet, and L’Empreinte, or la main rouge (Paul Henry Burguet, 1908). The screenings were lavishly opened by Henri Lavedan’s L’Assassinat du Duc de Guise (André Calmettes and Charles Le Bargy, 1908), with the original music by Saint-Saëns being played by a twenty-five-piece orchestra.29 The occasion was widely discussed in the theatrical columns of Rio’s newspapers, eloquent proof that cinema had finally reached the “high art” circles of the capital.

III In those years, the press’s emphasis on French films overshadowed productions from other countries, especially North American productions, which

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entered Rio de Janeiro in discreet but steady steps, beginning from lesser-known theaters such as the Cinema Ouvidor. North American cinema was being perceived as a model to be thoroughly rejected as an attempt to impose, in a colonialist fashion, a French-inspired mold to the capital. In early 1908, about fifteen thousand men from the US naval fleet took the streets of the city for a few days, entering cafés and cinemas and flirting with the girls. In order to portray them, the cartoonist J. Carlos borrowed a well-worn archetype of American cinema, the cowboy, making him gallop along Avenida Central and say (in English): “I am the only smart man of that Central Street.”30 The derogatory allusion is reiterated by Figueiredo Pimentel, a fashion dictator of the time, in reference to North American women: “celebrated in sports, . . . they have an unpleasant appearance on the street. It is rare to see a lady walking graciously. . . . Perhaps it is the mania of haste that ruins the beauty and dignity of the walk.”31 It would take almost a decade—and major changes in Brazilian society—for Pearl White to be praised for those same attributes. North American cinema was then considered a synonym for violence and speed, as opposed to the “interpretive gracefulness of Pathé films.”32 It would begin to spread throughout the city’s theaters in 1916. At the beginning of World War I, Cinema Pathé had already been absorbed by a monopoly cartel, the Companhia Cinematográfica Brasileira (CCB).33 The venue was theoretically in control of the CCB until December 31, 1916 (the date of the deed transferring it back to Marc Ferrez & Filhos34), but several documents of the family archive testify to the litigation between Ferrez and CCB for control of the brand in the national territory. Ferrez continued to maintain a personal correspondence with Charles Pathé. In one of these letters, sent from the United States, Pathé tried to persuade Ferrez to acquire the twenty-episode serial The Perils of Pauline (Louis J. Gasnier and Donald MacKenzie, 1914), which Charles Pathé had offered to Ferrez for a good price. As an attachment to one of his letters, Charles Pathé forwarded a template describing the recommended conditions for the exhibition of the series. According to Charles Pathé, it was important for Ferrez to emphasize that the purchase of the series was influenced by a “temporary shortage” of European productions and that he was unable to pay more money for it than he would have had to invest for buying “good” European films, which the Brazilians preferred.35 In a letter written by Marc Ferrez to his son Jules around 1913–1914, however, the father expressed his deep resistance to American cinema: “Your observations on

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the choice of films are quite astonishing. You must know that there are three categories of pictures. First: Pathé and Gaumont, which are the crème de la crème; second: Nordisk, Éclair, Film d’Art and Asta Nielsen, whose doors are closed to us because of Staffa and Sestini. What’s left? Eclectic (when they are good), some German, Danish, Norwegian (which are not worth anything in general) and Eclipse.”36 The tension between father and son announces the future of their company. There is no document in the archive confirming that the transaction on The Perils of Pauline was actually completed; in fact, the series reached Brazil only in 1916. As Souza has so well documented, the opening of new offices in Rio de Janeiro by Universal (in 1915), Fox, and Paramount (in 1916) marked a rapprochement between North American distributors and the Companhia Cinematográfica Brasileira. The scarcity of European production during World War I, the exhibitors’ growing demand for fresh material, and the tendency of Brazilian companies to focus on distribution rather than production paved the way to an intensified business with American companies.37 In the two years following the failed intervention of Charles Pathé in the Ferrez business, and until the CCB deal on the exhibition of North American films in Brazil, Cinema Pathé alternated old film programs and shows combining stage and screen. The venue closed in early 1916, then reopened only as a site for film exhibition. One of the main attractions of the year was The Exploits of Elaine (Louis J. Gasnier, George B. Seitz, and Donald MacKenzie, 1915), featuring the same Pearl White of The Perils of Pauline. As in the previous case, The Exploits of Elaine was exhibited in Rio de Janeiro in conjunction with the publication of the story in daily newspapers.38 Marc Ferrez soon surrendered to North American cinema. The company’s bookkeeping shows that in 1917 Fox’s programs gradually overlapped with those of Pathé.39 Between 1916 and 1918, an itemized list of films—with mention of expenses and revenues for each—indicates that the most beloved film stars of the period were Tom Mix and William Farnum, followed by George Walsh and Theda Bara.40 The effects of the war on film distribution had determined a profound change in the public’s taste and models of social life, now turning toward the American example. Charles Pathé had to adapt to circumstances. By the end of 1916, after the great success of The Exploits of Elaine, The Perils of Pauline was finally shown in Rio de Janeiro.

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Acknowledgments My deepest thanks to Elyse Singer and Paolo Cherchi Usai, who assisted me in the revision of this essay.

Notes 1. Condé, “Marc Ferrez & Filhos,” 15. 2. Souza, Imagens do passado; Carvalho, “Luz e sombra no écran.” 3. Gonzaga, Palácios e poeiras; Salmon, Pathé à la conquête du cinéma. 4. Figueiredo Pimentel, “Binóculo,” Gazeta de Notícias (March 22, 1908): 6. 5. Arquivo Nacional: Família Ferrez: http://bases.an.gov.br/ferrez//ficha_tec_pesq2.php, (accessed August 30, 2018). 6. Many film pioneers in Brazil were immigrants who had arrived in the country since the mid-nineteenth century, encouraged by governmental decrees marketing the growth of white communities. In 1906 there were around twenty-five thousand Italians in Rio, as opposed to just three thousand French, in an overall population of eight hundred thousand (see Vittorio Cappelli, A Belle Époque italiana no Rio de Janeiro, 2015: 24, 28). 7. “Salão Paris no Rio,” A Notícia (August 16–17, 1897): 4. 8. Gonzaga, Palácios e poeiras. 9. I am grateful to Ian Christie, with whom I have discussed this matter at the 2018 Domitor Conference in Rochester. 10. “Teatros,” A Notícia (December 22–23, 1897): 2. 11. A. A. [Arthur Azevedo], “Palestra,” O País (December 24, 1897): 1. 12. The film inspired a local playwright’s comic portrait of two lovebirds: “— Oh! How beautiful!/ — It’s a love scene, but they do not say anything./ — Now they kiss!”. F. C. [Figueiredo Coimbra], “Diálogos,” A Notícia (December 11–12, 1897): 1. 13. A newspaper item reported that Paschoal’s brother, Affonso Segreto, was in New York after a trip to Europe over several months. See “Salão Paris no Rio,” O Animatógrafo (1897): 1. 14. “Salão Paris no Rio,” O Animatógrafo (1897): 4. 15. “Teatro Maison Moderne,” Gazeta de Notícias (July 15, 1906): 14. 16. Condé, “Marc Ferrez & Filhos,” 16. 17. Gonzaga, Palácios e poeiras. 18. Ferrez, Máquinas e Acessórios para Fotografia, produtos químicos, etc. 19. Arquivo Nacional: Família Ferrez – Marc Ferrez 1.0.7.1. 20. Notívago, “Rio à noite,” Rio Nu, Year VIII, N. 719 (May 27, 1905): 3. 21. Gazeta de Notícias (January 21, 1907): 3. 22. A. A. [Arthur Azevedo]. “Palestra,” O País (March 4, 1907): 1. 23. Salmon, Pathé à la conquête du cinéma; Arquivo Nacional: Família Ferrez – Família Marc Ferrez 2.0.1.16. 24. The first contract about the Cinema Pathé states that Souza is the sole owner of the venue located in the Passeio Público, which leads us to believe that at the beginning, Ferrez had only supplied films and equipment to Souza; his commercial relationship with Pathé Frères must therefore have started prior to 1907: see Souza, Imagens do passado, 163–190, and Arquivo Nacional: Família Ferrez – Família Marc Ferrez 2.1.1.

212  |  Provenance and Early Cinema 25. Arquivo Nacional: Família Ferrez – Família Marc Ferrez 2.0.1.14. 26. Fon Fon!, 2, no. 50, March 21, 1908. 27. “Cinematografomania,” Fon Fon!, 3, no. 35, August 28, 1909. 28. Owned by William Auler, who was also under contract with the Ferrez family. 29. Carvalho, “Luz e sombra no écran,” 116. 30. J. Carlos, “Ainda a grande armada,” Fon Fon!, 2, no. 44 (February 1, 1908). 31. Figueiredo Pimentel, “Binóculo,” Gazeta de Notícias (October 9, 1908): 3. 32. “Sete dias de um neurastênico,” Fon Fon!, 3, no. 49 (December 4, 1909), quoted in Souza, Imagens do passado, 146. 33. The monopoly began in São Paulo under the initiative of the Spanish immigrant Francisco Serrador; see Souza, Imagens do passado. 34. Arquivo Nacional: Família Ferrez – Família Marc Ferrez 6.1.1.2.2. 35. Arquivo Nacional: Família Ferrez – Marc Ferrez 1.0.1.13. 36. Família Ferrez – Júlio Ferrez 2.1.1.2. 37. Souza, Imagens do passado, 313, 328. 38. Danielle C. Carvalho, “Os mistérios da cidade moderna,” 2015. 39. Família Ferrez – Família Marc Ferrez 6.1.0.5.2. 40. Família Ferrez – Família Marc Ferrez 6.1.0.5.1.

Bibliography Bernardet, Jean-Claude. Filmografia do cinema brasileiro (1900–1935). Jornal O Estado de S. Paulo. São Paulo: Governo do Estado de São Paulo, Secretaria da Cultura, Comissão de Cinema, 1979. Cappelli, Vittorio. A Belle Époque italiana no Rio de Janeiro: aspectos e histórias da emigração meridional na modernidade carioca. Rio de Janeiro: EDUFF, 2015. Carvalho, Danielle C. “Luz e sombra no écran: realidade, cinema e rua nas crônicas cariocas de 1894 a 1922.” PhD diss., Universidade Estadual de Campinas, 2014. ———. “Os mistérios da cidade moderna: a propósito de Os Mistérios de Nova York (1914) e seus congêneres brasileiros.” Significação: Revista de Cultura Audiovisual 42, no. 43 (August 2015): 74–95. Conde, Maite. Consuming visions: Cinema, writing and modernity in Rio de Janeiro. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2011. Condé, William N. “Marc Ferrez & Filhos: Comércio, distribuição e exibição nos primórdios do cinema brasileiro (1905–1912).” MA thesis, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, 2012. de Paula Araújo, Vicente. A bela época do cinema brasileiro. São Paulo: Editora Perspectiva, 1976. de S. N. Martins, William. “Paschoal Segreto: ‘Ministro das diversões’ do Rio de Janeiro (1883–1920).” MA thesis, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, 2004. Ferrez, Marc. Máquinas e Acessórios para Fotografia, produtos químicos, etc. Rio de Janeiro: Tipografia L’Etoile du Sud, 1905, 50–55. Gonzaga, Alice. Palácios e poeiras: 100 Anos de Cinemas no Rio de Janeiro. Rio de Janeiro: Record: FUNARTE, 1996. Salmon, Stéphanie. Pathé à la conquête du cinéma (1896–1929). Paris: Édition Tallandier, 2014.

Pathé Films in Brazil  |  213 Souza, José Inácio de Melo. Imagens do passado: São Paulo e Rio de Janeiro nos primórdios do cinema. São Paulo: Editora Senac, 2003.

DANIELLE CREPALDI CARVALHO is a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Communications and Arts of the Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil, where she is currently working on sound in early Brazilian cinema.

17 ESTABLISHING THE PROVENANCE OF EARLY ADVERTISING FILMS Film Catalogs and the Creation of the Nontheatrical Market Martin L. Johnson

I

n late 1911, General Electric, a leading manufacturer of electrical goods, commissioned the Essanay Film Company of Chicago to make a narrative fiction film promoting the use of electrical appliances. Titled Every Husband’s Opportunity, the film was exhibited throughout the United States, often with support from local utility companies, who donated appliances to be given away after the show. General Electric was one of many large corporations, including International Harvester and du Pont, who dabbled in motion picture production in the early 1910s. While Gregory A. Waller and Kit Hughes have discussed the importance of Back to the Old Farm (Essanay, 1912) to International Harvester’s corporate identity, General Electric instead disavowed its foray into narrative fiction.1 In a company history published in Business Screen in 1954, Every Husband’s Opportunity is misdated as 1909 and criticized for containing too much blatant advertising to be shown in theaters.2 Furthermore, according to this company history, film was too unwieldly for use in the showroom, limiting its value as a sales tool. John Schwem, GE employee and author of the Business Screen article, claimed that the company learned how to use cinema effectively only after he and other employees began shooting scenes of the electrification of a railroad in Butte, Montana,

Establishing the Provenance of Advertising Films  |  215

in 1913, with the resulting picture finding a larger, and more sustainable, audience than the heavily promoted Every Husband’s Opportunity.3 In fact, General Electric, like many other manufacturers in this period, largely eschewed the theatrical market. General Electric created its own distribution operations that would lend films for free to all comers, charging only for shipping. In addition, it appears that they gave their reels to nontheatrical distributors, which would use company films to buttress their catalog offerings. While Every Husband’s Opportunity was exhibited as a promotion for General Electric appliances, films made just a few years later, such as King of the Rails (1915), which told a progressive narrative of developments in transportation that culminated in the electrified railroad, were instead described as educational and screened in theatrical and nontheatrical settings at the behest of electrical companies and engineering societies. While some companies, including International Harvester, du Pont, and Ford Motor Company, continued to affiliate themselves with their films, many other companies sought to distance themselves from the films they made, believing that the stain of advertising would sharply limit their reach. These two factors—a belief that free film distribution would be the only way to ensure that their films would be seen and the certainty that anything that looked too much like advertising would be rejected by exhibitors and audiences—allowed advertising films to infiltrate nascent nontheatrical markets more completely than has been commonly understood. The circuitous distribution path taken by early advertising films has resulted in their misreading as industrial or educational films. Using reports and film catalogs from early nontheatrical film distributors and libraries, such as the Community Motion Picture Bureau and the Municipal Reference Library, as well as those distributed by original producers of these films to retrace their provenance, I will show how advertising films were retitled and reclassified in order to make them suitable for schools, churches, and other institutions and how they remained in distribution for decades, often as small-gauge prints. These advertising films formed the backbone of the nontheatrical program in the late 1910s and early 1920s, filling in gaps when neither the distributors nor exhibitors had the means to create their own motion pictures. When one considers the provenance of a film, one often thinks in reverse, reviewing donation agreements, production records, and material evidence provided by the film itself in order to determine its origin. In this chapter, however, I want to think forward and consider how early

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advertising films traversed genres, exhibition sites, and formats in the 1910s and 1920s in order to create a market for educational and industrial film in nontheatrical spaces. While a focus on the provenance of these films merely lifts the veil, revealing them to be merely advertisements for corporate products and processes, thinking more about how and why their intentions were concealed gives us a window into the relationship between early cinema and the nontheatrical sphere that emerges in the late 1910s.

I. Advertising Films and the Resistance to Genre General Electric’s decision to disavow the narrative feature market was not as brave as they claimed. Many corporations in this period embraced emerging genres of film, such as the “process film” and educationals, and others cast their lot with travelogues. The trade press, in particular, was attentive to these early efforts to use motion pictures as an advertising medium. By the mid-1910s, it was a common belief in the United States that films that appeared to be delivering blatant advertising messages would not be exhibited, and corporations responded by making films that purported to have scientific, historical, or geographic interest. Other companies described their films as a romance or a story or as offering audiences a trip through or a visit to another world. Such films began to borrow from aesthetic strategies of other nonfiction films, organizing their views as a narrative or claiming to launch an educational investigation into the latest technological and scientific marvels. The fact that these films could be seen as educational was exactly the point. By downplaying branded products, companies—most of which were manufacturers—were able to use film to explain to potential customers just how the products they were being asked to buy were made and what possible uses could be made of them. While trade magazines for producers and sponsors often referred to these films as advertising, in public they were more frequently referred to as industrials. While we think of advertising primarily as an activity of branding, for General Electric and other companies it was more important to depict a world in which the corporation’s product was indispensable. We see this narrative of progress and modernity in many advertising films from the 1910s. Motion pictures such as Grape Juice: From Vine to Bottle, or, as I believe it was also called, Making Grape Juice, or just Grape Juice, set the consumption of grape juice within both pastoral and industrial ideals, promoting not only Welch’s, which sponsored the film, but also

Establishing the Provenance of Advertising Films  |  217

the idea of drinking grape juice in the first place.4 As advertising film producers became more invested in the promotion of industries, rather than products or brands, they had both the freedom to work with all comers, even those that in other contexts would have been seen as competitors, and the imperative to place these films before as many potential consumers as possible. The fluidity of generic descriptions of advertising films was connected to the corporation’s desire to be seen in as many venues, under as many labels, as possible.

II. Securing Films for Nontheatrical Exhibition If advertising film producers had, by the mid-1910s, firmly committed to putting their motion pictures before as many types of audiences as possible, even if it meant removing product brands and company logos from the film and related material, theatrical exhibitors were still suspicious of advertising. But fledgling nontheatrical exhibitors—many of whom were more committed to the missions of their particular institutions than they were to adherence to the codes of film presentation—were open to showing films of all sorts, not just those attached to attractive genres, production companies, or stars. Already, I have alluded to the struggle many advertisers encountered seeking to place their films in theaters. These struggles coincided with yet another one, that of nontheatrical exhibitors who sought to secure films for exhibition in churches, schools, and other institutions. While nontheatrical organizations were invested in showing certain kinds of films, including “fairy tale” films and movies that could illustrate curricula that were already in place, they were also eager to obtain films of all sorts. For example, in 1918, Ina Clement, a cataloger for the Municipal Reference Library in New York, compiled a report on how city governments might obtain and use films in civic institutions.5 In her report, Clement divides motion pictures into four classes: films made by commercial manufacturers, presumably for entertainment purposes; propaganda films; municipal films; and advertising films. Calling this latter category “some of the most valuable films produced,” Clement goes on to point out that some advertising films might be unsuitable for civic lessons but still valuable for instruction.6 Echoing the writings of other Progressive reformers, most notably John Collier of the People’s Institute and the National Board of Review, Clement called for a film library that would complement the commercial industry, which saw motion pictures as a disposable commodity.7

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While Clement did not imply that the Municipal Reference Library was prepared to answer this call by entering the film distribution business, she did use her report to list distributors that were willing to lend out their films much as a library would, at low cost, with the expectation that such films would be available for an indefinite period of time. Because of her civic focus, Clement spotlighted issues such as fire safety, sanitary milk, and paved roads. Even so, a range of advertising films, promoting cement roads, milk brands, and manufacturers of fireproof equipment, are listed alongside motion pictures made by governments and commercial producers. The list of industrial distributors included the National Association of Manufacturers, Underwriters’ Laboratories, Borden’s Condensed Milk Company, and the Portland Cement Association. In this way, nontheatrical exhibitors’ desire to draw on a film library for their shows dovetailed with large corporations’ desire to build a library of films that could be continuously lent out to a variety of institutions. Around the same time, other nontheatrical producers sought to fulfil the needs of their expanding markets and looked for advertising films to fill gaps, both programmatic and pragmatic. Collectively, these entities helped forge the nontheatrical market, based in part on the strength and reach of their programming. Some distributors, such as the Bureau of Commercial Economics, founded in late 1913, focused on disseminating advertising films to the general public, while others, such as the Industrial Department of the YMCA—which was also established in 1913—were more invested in film programs on moral and social uplift.8 One of the largest and most diverse of these early nontheatrical film distributors, the Community Motion Picture Bureau, which entered the distribution business in 1915, worked with a wide variety of clients, from churches to Chautauqua assemblies to schools. In 1917, the CMPB landed the contract to supply motion pictures for nontheatrical exhibition to US troops stationed overseas during World War I, which allowed it to further scale up its distribution work.9 The CMPB prided itself on its review process, including careful inspection of motion pictures for content and suitability for diverse audiences, making its programs particularly instructive on the question of the use of advertising film in nontheatrical film programs. While the Community Motion Picture Bureau did reject or refuse to consider some films for their advertising content, including Universal’s Safety First (1918), made for Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, American Sheet and Tin Welfare (1919) for the United States Steel Company, and

Establishing the Provenance of Advertising Films  |  219

All Aboard! (1918) for the American Bankers Association, they also recognized advertising films as a discrete category of motion picture exhibition and production.10 In an information sheet the CMPB circulated in order to drum up new business, both “advertising” and “selling” were listed as potential subjects of community interest, alongside the venues the organization most frequently worked with, such as schools, churches, factories, and community centers.11 Although one might assume that educators would share with exhibitors a suspicion of advertising messages, Leslie Willis Sprague, a minister and director of CMPB’s industrial service section, emphasized his editorial staff’s training in the “highly difficult art of making programs to serve the interests of education, propaganda, and uplift, while combining clean entertainment and wholesome recreation with these interests.”12 Films that had been made for one purpose, it seems, could be more easily adapted for another than films that were made solely for entertainment. While nontheatrical distributors often purposefully hid the origins of their prints by changing the names of film titles and removing production information, it is still possible to determine the sources of some of the films. For example, in a list of programs the CMPB first offered to military troops, one finds General Electric’s The King of the Rails (1916) listed alongside other films of manufacturing, presumably first made to promote specific products and processes.13 In fact, a significant percentage of CMPB’s film programs were not from repurposed commercial narrative fiction films but rather from the very advertisers who were excluded from the commercial field. When provenance is considered only as a search for origins, it has the unanticipated consequence of reducing film to the humble circumstances of its birth. However, by also considering the ways in which films are brought into the world, exchanged, copied, distributed, and abandoned, it is possible to get some hint at their greater significance. While the Community Motion Picture Bureau was active for less than a decade, its president, Warren Dunham Foster, and editor, Warren’s mother, Edith Dunham Foster, assembled ambitious film programs and brochures. He was also able to use his organization’s wartime profits, and the trust and experience they earned as a result of this work, to disseminate its film programs far more widely than the corporations who first produced the films. More importantly, the CMPB and similar early distributors made advertising films, which by the early 1920s were almost exclusively called industrial or educational films,

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palatable to nontheatrical audiences, even while they were still considered unwelcome in movie theaters.

III. A Library, Not an Archive When Essanay contracted with General Electric, International Harvester, and likely other corporations to produce motion pictures in 1913, they were operating under the assumption of commercial film production. Within months, or perhaps a year, Every Husband’s Opportunity and Back to the Old Farm would be discarded, replaced by another advertising film, leaving behind newspaper advertisements, scant discussion in trade periodicals, and, perhaps, a single print. While research on a film’s production might reveal its original purpose as an advertising film, such an inquiry reduces the artifact to its production year alone, ignoring its continued participation in a catalog of moving images with similar ambitions. The exhibitors’ reluctance to show advertising films had a lasting consequence on not just the types of advertising films that were produced but also how they were distributed and reused. From 1913 forward, advertising films were produced with a very different commercial logic than narrative fiction films in this period. They were not intended to be disposable; rather, corporations came to expect that their investments in the cinema would deliver returns for a very long time. Early General Electric films like King of the Rails (1916) and The Benefactor (1917) remained in company catalogs for decades.14 While many of these films continue to be held by the corporations that initially produced them, others have found their way to film archives and have become a focus for film preservation.15 Corporations were also able to get their films widely distributed without fully abandoning expectations that their films would influence those who saw them. Advertising films were distributed by well-regarded companies and screened at a variety of institutions. Nontheatrical exhibitors and distributors alike used advertising films to round out their program or give the illusion of a surplus of films for use by interested parties. While this essay has focused on the distribution of advertising films by early nontheatrical companies, General Electric also continued to make and distribute its own films. Within a few years, the company established its own motion picture department, making more than thirty films for general audiences over the next decade and many more in the years that followed. As Schwem put it in his 1954 reflection on GE’s film work, “educational

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pictures . . . presented an excellent public relations opportunity but we never guessed the proportions to which this concept was eventually to grow.”16 Like other corporations, General Electric preserved its earliest films not out of an archival impulse but rather because it thought its films could continue to attract audiences. While we think, in general terms, about early cinema’s value as salvage, or as a mere fragment of the past, for the producers, distributors, and audiences who engaged with early advertising films in the late 1910s and 1920s, such works were more likely seen as evidence of what the cinema could be, a medium in which pedagogy and promotion were imbricated. In this way, the provenance of early advertising films is also a guide to how new genres, such as educational film and documentary, emerged in the 1920s and beyond.

Notes 1. See Gregory A. Waller, “International Harvester, Business Screen, and the History of Advertising Film,” in Films That Sell: Moving Pictures and Advertising, ed. Bo Florin, Nico de Klerk and Patrick Vonderau (New York: Palgrave, 2016), 40–53, and Kit Hughes, “‘For Pete’s Sake, I’m Not Trying to Entertain These People’: Film and Franchising at International Harvester,” Film History 27, no. 3 (2015): 41–72. International Harvester also made a film in 1910, The Romance of the Reaper. In Waller’s account of Back to the Old Farm, the film was both more successful than Every Husband’s Opportunity and, more importantly, not recognized as an advertisement for International Harvester. As Waller notes, International Harvester’s own company histories treat Back to the Old Farm as an important early landmark in the company’s motion picture production, very different from General Electric’s perception of what is likely a very similar film. To my knowledge, Every Husband’s Opportunity is not extant. 2. John W. Schwem, “My 45 Years of Business Film[m]aking,” Business Screen 15, no. 2 (March 1954): 56–57. 3. Schwem, “My 45 Years of Business Film[m]aking,” 58. This date appears to be correct, though I have not located independent verification of this specific film being screened. 4. An extant copy of this film is titled Grape Juice from Vine to Bottle, held by the George Eastman Museum. This particularly copy was released by the Pathescope Company of America and is identified as Grape Juice in an undated catalog. See Descriptive Catalog of Pathescope Films (New York: Pathescope Co. of America, c. 1918). 5. Barry W. Seaver, A True Politician: Rebecca Browning Rankin, Municipal Reference Librarian of New York, 1920–1952 (Jefferson, NC: Macfarland & Company, 2004), 31. 6. Ina Clement, “Teaching Citizenship via the Movies: A Survey of Civic Motion Pictures and Their Availability for Use by Municipalities,” Municipal Reference Library Special Report, no. 2 (New York: City of New York, 1918), 5. Board of Review Collection, New York Public Library.

222  |  Provenance and Early Cinema 7. For more on the film library, see Anke Mebold, “‘Just Like a Public Library Maintained for Public Welfare’: 28mm as a Comprehensive Service Strategy for Nontheatrical Clientele, 1912–23,” in Networks of Entertainment: Early Film Distribution, 1895–1915, ed. Frank Kessler and Nanna Verhoeff (New Barnet, Herts: John Libbey, 2007), 260–274. For more nontheatrical distribution in the 1910s, see Richard Abel, “The ‘Much Vexed Problem’ of Nontheatrical Distribution in the late 1910s,” The Moving Image 16, no. 2 (2016): 91–107. 8. For more on the Bureau of Commercial Economics, see Sean Savage, “The Eye Beholds: Silent Era Industrial Film and the Bureau of Commercial Economics,” (MA thesis, New York University, 2006). On the YMCA’s film work, see Ronald W. Greene, “Pastoral Exhibition: The YMCA Motion Picture Bureau and the Transition to 16mm,” in Useful Cinema, ed. Haidee Wasson and Charles Acland (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 205–229. 9. For more on the Community Motion Picture Bureau, see Sue Collins, “Film, Cultural Policy, and World War I Training Camps: Send Your Soldier to the Show with Smileage,” Film History 26, no. 1 (2014): 1–49, as well as Martin L. Johnson, “The Theater or the Schoolhouse? The Social Center, the Model Picture Show, and the Logic of Counterattractions,” Film History 29, no. 4 (2017): 1–31. 10. Foster Clipping Files, Library of Congress. 11. “Information Sheet.” Board of Review Collection, New York Public Library. 12. Leslie Willis Sprague, “Motion Pictures in Community Service,” January 1920. Board of Review Collection, NYPL. Similar language appears in many of CMPB’s publicity materials. 13. Warren Dunham Foster, “Educational Motion Pictures for the Camps” (c. 1918). Board of Review Collection, NYPL. 14. For example, both films are offered as “Silent-Non-Technical” films in a 1930 catalog. See Motion Pictures and Illustrated Lectures (Schenectady, NY: General Electric Company, 1930). General Electric Collection, miSci Archives. 15. The National Film Preservation Foundation, in particular, has been instrumental in preserving and digitizing advertising films from the 1910s, though most of their work has been with public collecting institutions rather than corporate archives. 16. Schwem, “My 45 Years of Business Film[m]aking,” 58.

MARTIN L. JOHNSON is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is author of Main Street Movies: The History of the Local Film in the United States (IUP, 2018).

18 A JOURNEY ON THE WORLD’S MOST NORTHERLY RAILWAY The Renaming and Remaking of Swedish Industrial Films Marina Dahlquist

T

he history of cinema is inextricably linked with the industrialization and modernization that occurred during the twentieth century, which formed a new culture of prosperity and development. Not only because it reflected the changes of its time, cinema came to play a vital part in the production of industrial modernity. Its potential to communicate with the masses was considered unsurpassed, and moving images themselves had an immense cultural impact as the perhaps most modern of amusements, much owing to its mobility: of images, views, lifestyles, and ideas to reach differing audiences. On top of that, they promoted urban landscapes and modern ways of living. Dating back to the early 1900s, Swedish industries—of which steel and timber were the most prominent—in combination with an energy market in transition, drove social change. As Rick Prelinger and others have shown, industrial companies—in Sweden as elsewhere—harnessed visual media to promote products, educate staff, and inform the public about new possibilities of a modern lifestyle.1 Their multiple advertising campaigns disclose the scope of possibilities at hand, of what moving images could be used for, as well as demonstrate a change of focus over time, ultimately teaching the public how to understand and navigate modern

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society. Drawing on company archives such as those of Pathé Frères, Filial Stockholm—Pathé’s Swedish branch that opened in Stockholm in September 19102—the collection of film billboards at the National Library of Sweden, Kungliga biblioteket, and the power company Vattenfall AB, along with the rich resources that the Swedish censorship board, Statens Biografbyrå, holds, this essay explores the origins of the multiple films on the electrification of the railway called “Malmbanan” or “the iron ore railway.” The railway was inaugurated in 1903 for the transportation of iron ore from the northern Swedish towns Luleå and Riksgränsen to Narvik at the Norwegian Atlantic coast. One of the most prestigious projects of its time, films about “the iron ore railway” appeared in film programs all over the country during the years 1910–1915. Numerous film titles were made, and specific film titles were copied, renamed, and repositioned within new distribution networks as well as program contexts, making the provenance of the productions unclear. By analyzing the repetition and confusingly similar titles of the attractive topic of the new railway and the possibilities of the modern industrial world, early film practices, and print circulations when it comes to early nonfiction and industrial films in Sweden will be examined and explored. The films at hand are not easily categorized as nontheatrical or even as industrial, as they were screened both at moving picture theaters as well as at other venues, often with very different contexts and purposes. The ones shown theatrically are undoubtedly easier to trace by way of film programs published in newspapers and on billboards, especially in the early years; otherwise, tracing the films is almost entirely dependent on company archives. In Sweden there are also notes and decisions made by Statens Biografbyrå, which came into operation in late 1911 and is a tremendous resource for tracing these films’ historical impact or even their mere existence as they documented every film title that was to be shown in public on a censorship card. Even within a theatrical context, the films about Malmbanan stand outside the prevalent categorization and division of genres. Defining genres as well as subgenres is, as Frank Kessler and Eef Masson point out, a difficult task for film scholarship in general and even more so when it comes to nonfiction cinema.3 Even so, the category of “scène d’industrie,” used in Pathé’s distribution catalogs in a variety of subject areas, is usually not used for the many Pathé titles screened in Sweden at this time. Rather, the industry titles are described as “Mycket intressant” (very interesting) or

Figure 18.1. Advertisement for Slumrande miljoner: Ett besök i Kirunavaara och Narvik in Svenska Biografteatern’s program in Eskilstuna, December 5, 1910. Programblad, Kungliga biblioteket, Stockholm.

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“Intressant bild” (interesting images).4 This is made evident by how Pathé Frères, Filial Stockholm advertised new titles in the Swedish film journal Filmbladet in February 1915.5 The film Porjusanläggningarnes invigning, “the inauguration of the power plant at Porjus,” which recorded an inspection of the Porjus power plant and the electrified railway, advertised as a title of “utmost interest for the whole country,” was prominently displayed in its own section outside of the listings of dramas, comedies, nature scenes, and actuality films. The topic of the railway was considered attractive to the general public and was therefore given prominent advertising. According to surviving billboards, these films often appeared as the opening act at the theaters.6 The billboard advertising Slumrande miljoner: Ett besök i Kirunavaara och Narvik in Eskilstuna as an opening film in 1910 even emphasized it as the first title of a new series (see fig. 18.1).7 In Sweden, as elsewhere, industrial films were produced and circulated for various purposes, including research and training, safety, process observation, and promotion. These included educational, commercial, and nonfiction films, and they formed part of a larger cultural project aiming to transform the image of the sponsoring industry and to create media interfaces that would allow corporations to synchronize their goals with broader cultural and societal concerns. The potential of the film media for teaching “civics”—to form citizens and show how communities should operate—was considered almost endless, which is one of the reasons why many educational films were financed by various industrial firms and departments. The films simultaneously depict the growing industries and their importance for a new era as the industrial companies invite and guide the audience through their plants and processes. Falling outside of the domain of conventional theatrical cinema, such films firmly belong to an emerging canon of sponsored and educational film and media that has developed over the past decade in the wake of numerous publications on the subject. Such publications include, among others, the edited volumes Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media; Useful Cinema and Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States;8 three special issues of Film History; a Society for Cinema and Media Studies scholarly interest group; and the Orphans Film Festival. In the early 1910s, many industrial films screened at Swedish moving picture theaters depicted manufacturing industries and their many products—chocolates, fans, black currant jam, Manila hats, artificial flowers, and the like. Many of the films were Pathé productions, and, as

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is often mentioned in the censorship cards, they were considered suitable for schools and other educational frameworks.9 Heavy industries such as timber, ore, iron, and coal were also represented in a national as well as international context.10 The collaboration between Pathé and important Swedish industries is made evident by two film programs from October 1914, both of which were advertised in the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, with films by Pathé in collaboration with Stora Kopparbergs Bergslags Aktiebolag, whose assets at this time included ironworks, forest industry, and power plants. The headline describes the two film programs as displaying “Swedish national richness” because they depicted the manufacturing process for iron and wood processing.11 At the beginning of the twentieth century, there is an obvious fascination with how the infrastructure of a modern society works by harnessing transportation, manufacturing, and means of communication. For example, the film Hur Stockholmarna får kol och koks. Bilder från Olaus Olssons kolgård vid Värtan (Svenska Biografteatern, 1915) shows images from a coal depot outside of Stockholm and details the processing that occurs between the time when the raw coal arrives and when it becomes available for Stockholm’s inhabitants.12 A similar film, approved by the censorship board the very same month, was Pathé’s Skandinaviens tidsenligaste kolgårdsanläggning, H.G. Söderbergs Importaktiebolags kolgård vid Värtan, “H.G. Söderbergs Importaktiebolags coal yard in Värtan. The most up-to-date coal yard in Scandinavia,” which begins by showing coal being unloaded from a ship and then follows it from the coal yard to the railway.13 Pathé Frères, Filial Stockholm regularly approached industries of interest, fostering a collaboration on film topics that concerned manufacturing processes or products for the companies’ internal use. The resulting films would then accordingly either be used internally or for international theatrical distribution, with potential for far-reaching visibility and advertising.14 The particular interest in the potential of working with industry to document spectacle is evident in correspondence between Siegmund Popert, the head of Filial Stockholm, and prospective clients. For example, in a letter to Herr Ingeniör Sundblad in Trollhättan, Popert details plans to send a cinematographer to document an upcoming explosion.15 Among the industrial concerns that Pathé Frères, Filial Stockholm filmed were the plants of A. B. Lux, which produced vacuum cleaners and lamps; the different industries of A. B. Stora Kopparbergs Bergslags; the iron ore fields in Kiruna; the printing house of the newspaper Stockholms Dagblad; and the

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mail-order firm Åhlen & Holms’s plants and sales venues.16 Worth mentioning is that ore mining in Kiruna was filmed in 1913 not only for Pathé’s theatrical repertoire but also for Luossavaare-Kirunavaara Aktiebolag (LKAB), which had ordered moving pictures for internal use. LKAB was asked to supply explanations of the filmed material in order to enable Pathé to make accurate intertitles. Given their correspondence about film storage, this may have been LKAB’s first commissioned film.17 As is demonstrated in the letter exchange, the distinction between commercial theatrical screenings and commissioned industrial titles was often made clear. Industry’s interest in film was not only for marketing purposes but also for archival ones, which was the case with Pathé’s Porjusanläggningarnes invigning. For example, the Swedish State Power Board (Kungliga Vattenfallsstyrelsen), founded in 1909—later Vattenfall AB—upgraded their archive in order to include moving images, incorporating within their archive a copy of this film showing an inspection of their Porjus power plant.18 With very limited deposits of coal and oil but vast resources of hydroelectric power in the north of Sweden—“white coal” as it was called— Kungliga Vattenfallsstyrelsen became not only a major force of power for Swedish industry but also a vital source for the expansion and electrification of the railway. The first hydroelectric power stations were likewise dependent on industry and the railroad. Thus, the close ties between the steel industry and Kungliga Vattenfallsstyrelsen’s expansion of hydroelectric power (including the electrification of the Malmbanan railway) were essential to the rapid growth of infrastructure. During the first half of the twentieth century, Swedish visual media portray an almost heroic effort to, by way of technology and modernization, overcome and “tame” the forces of nature. And to reach out to the most deserted of places. One of the three early hydroelectric power stations constructed around 1910, the one at Porjus, located north of the Polar circle, had the main purpose of providing electricity to the Malmbanan railway,19 the first major railway in Sweden to be electrified, in 1915. The project received major attention, not only as an icon of modernity but also for its proximity to spectacular scenery in the northern wilderness. In the advertisement for En resa med jordens nordligaste järnväg: Narvik-Riksgränsen— a title that could be translated as “A journey with the world’s most northerly railway: Narvik-Riksgränsen”—from April 1910 by Svenska Biografteatern (Swedish Biograph), the film was promoted as a self-produced Swedish topic and, as was often the case, given a rather extensive summary. The

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promotional text explains that even though the railway had been constructed mainly for the transportation of iron ore, it had also become popular among tourists due to its more than forty kilometers of picturesque mountain scenery with spectacular snow-covered mountains and lakes.20 Another almost identical film title appears a few years later, in 1915, titled Med jordens nordligaste järnväg: Narvik-Riksgränsen (Traveling with the world’s most northerly railway: Narvik-Riksgränsen) in an advertisement for a Stockholm theater. However, there is neither production company nor summary mentioned.21 Numerous film titles about the iron-ore railway were made and often screened at regular movie theaters. Films and excerpts from films were copied, then partly renamed and repositioned within new company distribution networks and program contexts, making the origins of the productions unclear. To further obstruct the question of provenance, a slew of new films would then be made on the same topic, with very similar titles, as part of a trend to show the audience new and spectacular achievements. One example of this kind of title change is Med jordens nordligaste järnväg: en färd Narvik-Riksgränsen, from 1911, a production by the small firm A. B. Sveafilms, which specialized in industrial and nonfiction films. The title could be translated into “The world’s most northerly railway: A journey between Narvik and Riksgränsen.” A new copy of the film, with the shorter title “En färd Narvik-Riksgränsen,” was made a few years later by Svenska Biografteatern in February 1915.22 As Siegmund Popert pointed out in a letter concerning a dispute about one of Pathé’s fiction films that had been screened under a different but very similar title in localities outside of a rental contract, it was common within the film industry to steal and reproduce attractive films.23 In the case of the Malmbanan, however, it was not only one specific film or title but numerous ones depicting the same, or very similar, subject matter, with the same or very similar footage. An amazingly large number of films with slightly different titles, all depicting the spectacular railway, appeared in the years to come. New copies of the films, all with similar titles, as well as new material on the same topic, were made on several occasions.24 Each gives witness to the spectacular feats in the north—the railway, the power station—combined with depictions of technical accomplishment, wilderness, and magnificent scenery. These marvels were of course enabled by the modern woman and man bringing impressive technology together with beautiful and forceful

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nature. Many of these films were screened at regular movie theaters that were geographically quite scattered. But most of them were shown in the southern parts of Sweden, from Stockholm south, where the railway and the northern landscapes would likely have been seen as especially spectacular and exotic. Med jordens nordligaste järnväg: en färd Narvik-Riksgränsen is a surviving example of this split in attention between the amazing construction in the far north and the touristic view. The cinematographer seems almost distracted by the landscape as the beautiful scenery comes into view. It is lyrically depicted from the train, stealing attention from the railway’s impressive structure and important cargo. The scenery at this location—or, more specifically, the waterfalls at Porjus—was shown in another film from the same year, 1911, by Nordisk film, as part of another touristic and immensely popular motif: waterfalls. Both local ones and widely known ones, such as Niagara and Victoria Falls, were popular film topics.25 The preoccupation with the ore mining in Kiruna and the railway that transported the ore to the Norwegian coast and to Narvik display an interest in technical achievements and the exotic north. The films are either advertised as industrial films or without any classification at all, although in another national context, as for example in the United States, they could have been categorized as travelogues. This was the case with the film En resa med jordens nordligaste järnväg: Narvik-Riksgränsen, described as a beautiful and appealing naturbild (depiction of nature) in one advertisement.26 Even so, it has a somewhat tenuous connection to the other films in the program: one of them presented images from the war, another one—the closing attraction of the show—was a comedy-drama in three acts. The industrial film and/or travelogue was commonly placed in film programs with fictional and other film classifications during this period. The recurring motif of the railway and its spectacular scenery was popular, and there were several copies—at least seven—of the same film between December 1913 and January 1915, as is made clear by the censorship card of the Sveafilm production with the long, overelaborate, and repetitive title: En färd på Narviksbanan. Med jordens nordligaste järnväg: En färd Narvik-Riksgränsen (A railway journey to Narvik. The world’s most northerly railway: a journey Narvik-Riksgränsen). Not that surprisingly, this title was never used. In Filmbladet, for example, the film is only mentioned as Med jordens nordligaste järnväg. En färd Narvik-Riksgränsen in January 1915.

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And in February of the same year, only Med jordens nordligaste järnväg is mentioned. A similar example is given by the film Inspektion av Porjusanläggningen samt Riksgränsbanan, which could be translated as “Inspection of the Porjus plant and the iron ore railway,” by Swedish Pathé, from 1915, in which the power plant at Porjus and the transformer station at Abisko are inspected as well as the ore transportation in very harsh weather.27 As is pointed out in an intertitle, the footage shows the difficult weather conditions and “the struggle against the snow.” The day after the censorship board approved it, the film was advertised with the shorter title Porjusanläggningarnes invigning.28 Also in this film, as is described in an ad for its screening at the Wictoria-Teatern in Malmö, the technology and the spectacular nature are given double billing with the railway and its large rotating snowplow, moving through what is described as the extraordinarily beautiful scenery in the snowy north.29

Conclusion Despite the relative lack of attention to industrial film titles in scholarly contexts, the importance of moving pictures for the manufacturing, trade, and, not least, the tourism industries was evident as early as 1915, when Dagmar Waldner, one of the leading figures of the Swedish film reform movement, wrote that a modern business is unthinkable without cinema.30 Moving images became a popular visual tool to communicate with possible customers and the public about social concerns. The new modern society, its infrastructure, and the prerequisites it brought were a recurrent theme in industrial film during the 1910s as well as during the decades to come. Even so, the presentations of the films at hand and their titles were confusing and unclear at best. In the very early 1910s there were copyright problems—moving images were stolen, copied, and given new titles and labels. And as this essay has shown, consistency in titling within the example of Malmbanan existed neither within nor between production companies. This is rather surprising, since the censorship cards were to be sent with every copy of a film at each rental.31 Consistency in titling films seems to have been much more stable in other genres. How the audience apprehended the significant number of very similar or almost identical titles and topics among films is difficult to know. Were they by any means affected by what Nico de Klerk in a recent text calls “the hangover effect”? Even though de Klerk discusses

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how two numbers within a program might affect each other, how did very similar films and titles affect the audience between programs?32 Would yet another similar film still attract an audience? And why didn’t the production companies make more of an effort to differentiate the titles and advertisements from each other? To what degree was the title inconsistency deliberately used or even noticed by the theater owners? The films about Malmbanan were often presented in film programs advertised on billboards and newspapers, even if there were exceptions—images from Luleå, Porjus, Kiruna, and Malmberget were also included in Pathé’s newsreels, “Pathéjournalen.”33 At the same time, the programs consisting of 1,000- to 1,200-meter films that Pathé Frères, Filial Stockholm supplied their customers with at this time did not necessarily include a selection process for titles, even if a negotiation about possible nature, sports, and industrial images took place. Descriptions of the films seem to have been presented only a couple of days before the shipment, even if popular dramas were booked well in advance.34 Despite repetitions and potential confusion when it comes to titles and genre or series affiliation, the topic of the iron-ore railway was very popular during these years. However, the combination of the magnificent northern landscapes and new technologies was no isolated occurrence. Just to mention one example from some ten years later, in October 1925, the International Exhibition of Hydropower and Tourism took place in Grenoble and somewhat surprisingly combined the topics of hydroelectric power and tourism. Sweden’s pavilion, centrally located, was sponsored by Järnvägsstyrelsen (Swedish Rail Agency), Kungliga vattenfallsstyrelsen, and Svenska turisttrafikförbundet (Swedish Tourist Traffic Association), which had been founded in 1902 to promote foreign tourism in Sweden. At this exhibition, moving images were not shown, but a large diorama depicting a snowy view from the railway at the Swedish/Norwegian border was built, showcasing what was still the world’s most northerly railway, the Malmbana. Through the diorama’s northerly landscape moved a model of an electrical train with twenty carriages loaded with ore, with an engine measuring six meters all together.35 Apart from the diorama, the pavilion was dedicated to the exhibition’s tourist department, where information about tourism in Sweden, including mountain cottages and hydroelectric plants, could be found. Here again the attraction of the exotic landscape and new technology is put on display, but now in an international arena.

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Notes 1. See for example Rick Prelinger, The Field Guide to Sponsored Films (San Francisco: National Film Preservation Foundation, 2006). 2. For a discussion on Pathé’s Swedish branch, see Marina Dahlquist, “Global Versus Local: The Case of Pathé,” Film History 17, no. 1 (2005): 29–38. 3. Frank Kessler and Eef Masson, “Layers of Cheese: Generic Overlap in Early NonFiction Films on Production Processes,” in Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media, ed. Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 75–79. 4. See, for example, the advertisement for the title Pappersindustri (paper industry) in Pathé’s program at Biograf-Teater, Västervik 1January 4, 1910, and Saltverken i S:t Giuliano “Saltworks in S.t Giuliano,” Biografen Pathé, Västerviks Teater, October 6, 1911, while the title Timmmerindustri i British Columbia (Timber industry in British Columbia) is advertised as an “Intressant och lärorik industribild” (interesting and instructive industrial film), Pathé’s program at Biograf-Teater, Västervik November 18, 1910. Programblad, Kungliga biblioteket (National Library of Sweden), Stockholm. 5. Filmbladet, no. 3, February 15, 1915, 46. 6. See for example, Billboard for Svenska Biografteatern in Eskilstuna in April 1910 where En resa med värdens nordligaste järnväg is the opening title or billboards advertising Malmbrytning å Kirunavaara at Biorama, Halmstad, January 12, 1911, Biograf Continental, Västervik, March 20, 1911, and Visby Biografteater, Visby, May 1, 1911. Programblad, Kungliga biblioteket (National Library of Sweden), Stockholm. 7. Advertisement for Slumrande miljoner: Ett besök i Kirunavaara och Narvik in Svenska Biografteatern’s program in Eskilstuna, December 5, 1910. Programblad, Kungliga biblioteket, Stockholm. 8. Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media, ed. Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009); Useful Cinema, ed. Charles Acland and Haidee Wasson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States, ed. Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron, and Dan Streible (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 9. For a discussion about “process films,” see Tom Gunning, “Before Documentary: Early Nonfiction Films and the ‘View’ Aesthetic,” in Uncharted Territory: Essays on Early Nonfiction Film, ed. Daan Hertogs and Nico de Klerk (Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1997), 9–24. 10. See for example letter to Herr Ingeniör Sundblad from Siegmund Popert, Pathé Frères, Filial Stockholm, dated January 21, 1913, and letter to Stora Kopparbergs Bergslags Aktiebolag from Pathé Frères, Filial Stockholm, dated February 13, 1913. Pathé Frères, Kopiebok, Utlån, 1913. Svenska Filminstitutets Bibliotek, Stockholm. 11. Advertisement for “Tvänne kinematograf-aftnar över ämnet ‘Sveriges nationalrikedomar,’” in Svenska Dagbladet (October 13, 1914): 276. For the collaboration between Pathé Frères, Filial Stockholm and Stora Kopparbergs Bergslags Aktiebolag when it comes to filming their works and establishments, see letter to Stora Kopparbergs Bergslags Aktiebolag, from Siegmund Popert, Pathé Frères, Filial Stockholm, dated April 19, 1913. Pathé Frères, Kopiebok, Utlån, 1913. Svenska Filminstitutets Bibliotek, Stockholm. 12. Censorship card no. 12064 (February 8, 1915).

234  |  Provenance and Early Cinema 13. Censorship card no. 12173 (February 22, 1915). 14. See for example a letter to Herr Direktör Olof Asklund from Siegmund Popert, dated April 3, 1913, in which Popert asks for permission to film the manufacturing of crisp bread, without displaying any manufacturing secrets. Such a film would, with Pathé’s more than sixty branches worldwide, give good visibility to the product. See also the negotiations about possible film productions in a letter to Sveriges Tegelindustriförening, from Siegmund Popert, Pathé Frères, Filial Stockholm, dated April 29, 1913. Pathé Frères, Kopiebok, Utlån, 1913. Svenska Filminstitutets Bibliotek, Stockholm. 15. Letter to Herr Ingeniör Sundblad from Siegmund Popert, Pathé Frères, Filial Stockholm, dated January 21, 1913. Pathé Frères, Kopiebok, Utlån, 1913. Svenska Filminstitutets Bibliotek, Stockholm. 16. Letter to Husquarna Vapenfabriks A. B. from Pathé Frères, Filial Stockholm, dated August 6, 1913, concerning negotiations about filming of the weapon industry Husquarna Vapenfabriks A. B.’s plants for internal or theatrical use Pathé Frères, Kopiebok, Utlån, 1913. Svenska Filminstitutets Bibliotek, Stockholm. 17. See letter to Luossavaare-Kirunavaara Aktiebolag from S. Popert, Pathé Frères, Filial Stockholm, dated April 5, 1913. See also letter to Fröken Hilma Hansson, from Siegmund Popert, Pathé Frères, Filial Stockholm, dated August 23, 1913. Pathé Frères, Kopiebok, Utlån, 1913. Svenska Filminstitutets Bibliotek, Stockholm. 18. Unsigned, “Filmarkivering,” Filmbladet, no. 4, March 1, 1915, 52. 19. When the construction was started there were no roads or railway leading to Porjus, which is why the construction and the transporting of material became enormously time consuming. To begin with, material and necessities had to be carried from the closest town, which was Gällivare about fifty kilometers away. 20. Advertisement for En resa med jordens nordligaste järnväg: Narvik-Riksgränsen in Svenska Biografteatern’s program in Eskilstuna, April 4–6, 1910. Programblad, Kungliga biblioteket, Stockholm. 21. Advertisement for Med jordens nordligaste järnväg: Narvik-Riksgränsen in WanadisBiografen’s program in Stockholm, 1915. Programblad, Kungliga biblioteket, Stockholm. 22. Filmbladet, no. 3, February 15, 1915, 44. 23. Letter to Advokaten Herr Louis Abel from Siegmund Popert, dated April 29, 1913. Pathé Frères, Kopiebok, Utlån, 1913. Svenska Filminstitutets Bibliotek, Stockholm. 24. Some of the titles are En resa med världens nordligaste järnväg (Svenska Biografteatern, 1909), Slumrande miljoner. Ett besök i Kirunavaara och Narvik (1910), Med jordens nordligaste järnväg: en färd Narvik-Riksgränsen (AB Sveafilms, Stockholm, 1911), En färd på Narviksbanan. Med jordens nordligaste järnväg (Sveafilm, 1913), Malmbrytning Å Kirunavaara, Med jordens nordligaste järnväg: Narvik – Riksgränsen (1915?), En resa NarvikRiksgränsen (Sveafilm, 1915?), En färd Narvik-Riksgränsen, Porjusfallen (Nordisk film, 1911), Inspektion av Porjusanläggningen samt Riksgränsbanan (Pathé Frères, Filial Stockholm, 1915), Porjusfallen i Norrland (1912), Porjusanläggningarnes invigning (1914), Porjus (1915). 25. Examples of film titles of famous waterfalls shown on Swedish theaters: Pathé Frères, Niagarafallen (Original title: Les chutes de Niagara) Censorship card 879, October 24, 1911, and, URBAN’s (Sv Films Co) Viktoriafallen, Censorship card 1510 (older copy), November 23, 1911. 26. Billboard for Excelsior-Biografen, Kristinehamn, September 3–15, 1915. Programblad, Kungliga biblioteket, Stockholm.

A Journey on the World’s Most Northerly Railway  |  235 27. Censorship card no. 12110 (February 14, 1915). 28. Filmbladet, no. 3, February 15, 1915, 46. 29. Billboard for Wictoria-Teatern, Malmö, 1914. Programblad, Kungliga biblioteket, Stockholm. 30. Dagmar Waldner, “Kinematografien och den modärna affärstekniken,” Filmbladet, no. 7, April 15, 1915, 90. 31. See for example letter to Herr N. Marklund from Siegmund Popert, Pathé Frères, Filial Stockholm, dated February 1, 1913. Pathé Frères, Kopiebok, Utlån, 1913. Svenska Filminstitutets Bibliotek, Stockholm. 32. Niko de Klerk, Showing and Telling: Film Heritage Institutes and Their Performance of Public Accountability (Wilmington: Vernon Press, 2017), 47–58. 33. Letter to Biografägaren Herr C. W. Andersson from Siegmund Popert, Pathé Frères, Filial Stockholm, dated September 1, 1913. Pathé Frères, Kopiebok, Utlån, 1913. Svenska Filminstitutets Bibliotek, Stockholm. 34. Letter to Herr Brukspredikant Henrik Larsson från Siegmund Popert, Pathé Frères, Filial Stockholm, dated March 29, 1913. Pathé Frères, Kopiebok, Utlån, 1913. Svenska Filminstitutets Bibliotek, Stockholm. 35. Unsigned, “Sverige får en egen paviljong i Grenoble i turistutställningen,” Svenska Dagbladet (February 21, 1925): 1.

MARINA DAHLQUIST is Professor of Cinema Studies in the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University. She is editor (with Joel Frykholm) of The Institutionalization of Educational Cinema: North America and Europe in the 1910s and 1920s (IUP, 2019) and (with Doron Galili, Jan Olsson, and Valentine Robert) of Corporeality in Early Cinema: Viscera, Skin, and Physical Form (IUP, 2018).

19 IN SEARCH OF “THE EDISON BIOGRAPH COMPANY” Film History through Philippine Archives Nadi Tofighian

I

n recent years, a number of studies have reevaluated and broadened the scope of early cinema scholarship in Southeast Asia; as a result, many early film exhibitions previously unknown to scholars have been discovered and documented.1 I have been working on early cinema in the Philippines and Southeast Asia for more than ten years, using newspaper sources to map film exhibition and distribution. My research on the earliest Filipino filmmaker, José Nepomuceno, who formed his Malayan Movies in 1917, was based on contemporary newspaper sources since none of his films are extant.2 Articles and advertisements printed in these periodical sources often provide unique material to track the films, to improve our understanding of their reception, and to write a broader history of early film industry and culture. I have subsequently used newspaper sources from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to write the early history of film exhibition and distribution in the Philippines. I argue that the colonial history of the Philippines, its linguistically diverse population, and its currently decentralized institutional research infrastructure, with several separate archives and libraries holding different collections, further complicate the research process for film scholars, often producing disparate historical narratives on the development of early cinema. This paper consists of two sections. The first brings to the surface the historiographical challenges of writing early film history in Philippine

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archives in regard to available sources and newspaper collections spread across different archives. The second section demonstrates in practice how broadening the scope of archival research to incorporate a wider range of periodical materials presents a far more nuanced picture of the development of film exhibitions in Manila from the earliest itinerant exhibitors in 1897 to the establishment of permanent movie houses a few years later. By identifying the advertised film titles, the newspaper sources help uncover the speed of film distribution in the region. The section also shows how different newspapers provide information about the varied admission prices for different film exhibitions and thereby reveal important insights regarding the demographics of cinemagoers and their choices of venues.

Film Historiography At present, three book-length studies provide an entry point to early film history in the Philippines. In the space of two monographs, published in 2003 and 2012, Nick Deocampo explores how Spain and the United States influenced the development of Filipino films and cinema practice during their respective colonial rules.3 Similarly, in an earlier (1998) book, Clodualdo del Mundo focuses on the aspects of Philippine cinema and early film screenings that relate to US colonial rule. In particular, he sees colonization as a process that leads not only to cultural estrangement but also to adaptation, negotiation, indigenization, and native resistance.4 In his article for the 2017 anthology Early Cinema in Asia, Charles Musser points to the impact of these books on the study of Filipino film history, describing them as “revelations that have forced me to confront significant gaps and unfortunate limits in my own work,” arguing that early film history in the Philippines, due to its colonial history, should also be considered “an essential component of American film history, at least between 1898 and 1946.”5 My suggestion is that, while contributing greatly to the production of early film histories in the region, existing studies have overlooked the growing and reciprocal relationship between cinema proprietors and the newspaper industry, which resulted in the dispersion of information about films exhibited in different venues across a wide range of newspapers. Scholarly (or critical) reliance on a few selected newspaper sources, therefore, results in an omission of a significant number of early film exhibitions. The main primary sources in existing studies of Filipino film history are the daily newspapers Manila Times and, to a greater extent, El Comercio, which was

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self-fashioned as the main source of information about the Philippines and as “the only medium to use if you want to reach the Spanish and Filipino population of the Philippines.”6 In Cine, Deocampo presents a list of film screenings in Manila, based solely on advertisements in El Comercio. According to that filmography, films were screened in 1897 and then in 1900, 1902, and 1906, whereas no film exhibitions are listed for Manila in the years 1898, 1899, 1901, 1903, 1904, and 1905.7 The myth of there being no screenings in 1898 and 1899 is still enduring. On the website of the government agency National Commission for Culture and the Arts, an article titled “History of Philippine Cinema” published in 2015 claims that after the 1897 exhibitions “film showing was not resumed until 1900.”8 However, a large number of printed advertisements, for instance in Manila Freedom, suggest that regular and varied film exhibitions took place in Manila in 1898 and 1899. Similarly, the Spanish-language press, such as El Mercantil and El Progreso, illustrate that there were daily film exhibitions in several locations in Manila between 1903 and 1905. Such gaps and omissions, mostly caused by the use of limited archival sources, can also be found for other countries around the world. For Southeast Asia, the Encyclopedia of Early Cinema, for example, incorrectly claims that the earliest film exhibition in Malaya took place in 1898, followed by another one in 1906,9 and that the first film screening in Cambodia occurred in 1909.10 The historiography of cinema in colonial Indonesia started, up until recently, with the earliest film exhibitions on Java, claimed to have taken place in 1900, an inaccurate statement repeated so many times it became a recurring trope in the history of world cinema.11 Dafna Ruppin has subsequently rectified these inaccuracies and covered the first two decades of early cinema in her 2016 book The Komedi Bioscoop: Early Cinema in Colonial Indonesia. According to a variety of newspaper sources, projected moving pictures were exhibited for the first time in Southeast Asia in 1896 and 1897: in Batavia (Jakarta) through the Scenimatograph in October 1896; in Manila through the Kronofotografo in January 1897; in Singapore through the Ripograph or Giant Cinematograph in May 1897; in Bangkok through the Cinematograph in June 1897; in Hanoi through the Cinematographe in September 1897; and in Taiping with the Projectoscope in December 1897.12 The names of the promoted devices could vary greatly, making it harder to assess what actual device was used. For Ada Delroy Company’s exhibitions in Southeast Asia, the cinematographic device was advertised

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as “cinematógrafo” in Spanish-language papers in Manila and “London Bioscope” in English-language papers in Singapore.13 I have used printed material in archives throughout Southeast Asia to write the regional history of early cinema and distribution patterns. In most countries of the region, one can visit the National Archive or the National Library, with the respective collections of extant newspapers; in Singapore, most of them have been digitized. However, in the Philippines at least six institutions in Metro Manila hold different collections of early newspapers: the National Library and Archives; the Filipinas Heritage Library; the Lopez Museum and Library; and the academic libraries of University of the Philippines Diliman, Ateneo University, and University of Santo Tomas. A selection of Filipino newspapers can also be found at the Library of Congress, the New York City Library, and different university libraries in the United States. Many primary sources I use have not previously been used in research on early cinema and colonial history. My research targeted a variety of film-related material ranging from exhibition advertisements to social and cultural commentaries as well as editorials related to cinema, modernity, and the entertainment industry. By expanding the scope of archival work to include more than a dozen newspapers, many of which have previously eluded the attention of film scholars, held across different libraries and archives in the Philippines and the United States, this article fills some of the extant gaps in the early history of cinema in the Philippines.14 A more comprehensive overview of archival sources, held across different libraries, reveals an increasingly dynamic picture of the spread of early film culture. Moreover, the growing number and popularity of film exhibitions soon resulted in a reciprocal relationship between cinema proprietors and the newspaper industry. Antonio Ramos, the proprietor of Cinematógrafo Colón in Iloilo, arranged test screenings for the press before the opening of film exhibitions. In turn, the press printed regular announcements inviting the readers to attend the shows.15 Manila at the turn of the century had a flourishing newspaper industry with many dailies and weeklies in English, Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog, and other local dialects. The various publications focused on selected language groups and social classes, with cinema proprietors choosing different newspapers to advertise their exhibitions in order to reach their target audiences. As a consequence, depending on which newspaper sources and what archives film historians have had access to, different perspectives are presented, and, as a result, disparate histories are written.

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Early film distribution illustrates the regional connections within Southeast Asia. The travel paths and itineraries of film exhibitors and other amusement companies encompassed diverse urban and rural territories, with Singapore functioning as a regional distribution hub.16 This changed when the Philippines became a colony of the United States in 1898 and US film exhibitors and distributors began to enter the Asian market via Manila.

Tracing Exhibitions and Admission Prices Escolta Street was the busy commercial center of Manila where the earliest screenings of the Chronograph and the Cinematograph in 1897 conducted by the Spaniards Antonio Ramos and Francisco Pertierra from Spain, and by Leibman and Peritz from Switzerland, took place. By 1899, other companies exhibited films in venues along Escolta.17 A significant difference between the 1897 and 1899 exhibitions is that the former screenings happened during the Spanish colonial period and the latter during US rule. The change of the regime opened Manila’s film market to new entrepreneurs, who appropriated and combined famous cinema-related brand names as a marketing strategy, disregarding the provenance of the films. The 1899 advertisement in figure 19.1, for example, shows the so-called Edison Biograph, with an unidentified proprietor, promoting their new device as “Biograph” and “Edison’s latest Biograph.”18 The exhibited films included the Edison titles The Corbett-Courtney Fight (William K. L. Dickson, 1894), Fire Rescue Scene (William K. L. Dickson and William Heise, 1894), Muscle Dance (William Heise, 1895), Egyptian Dance (William Heise, 1895), Hula Hula Dance (William Heise, 1895), Streets of Cairo (William Heise, 1896), Express Train (James H. White, 1896), and Bull Fight (James H. White, 1898).19 On the basis of such program, it is fair to assume that an Edison projector, rather than a Biograph, was used for the show. Films produced in the United States in the mid-1890s were thus still being exhibited in the Philippines by the end of the century. The pace with which films reached Manila gradually increased, although it still varied considerably. Newsreels and cinematic reenactments of important events were quickly circulated around the world. In Manila, however, The Assassination of President McKinley (Edison, 1901) was exhibited fifteen months after the assassination, whereas a film advertised as Death of Pope Leo XIII (1903) was exhibited three months after the fact.20 The varying temporal gaps may be related to the development of film distribution system in those

In Search of “The Edison Biograph Company”  |  241

Figure 19.1. Advertisement, Manila Freedom (May 18, 1899): 7.

two years as well as to the themes of the newsreels: it was perhaps unwise to show films about the assassination of a president in a nation colonized by the United States; films about the pope, on the other hand, would attract wide audiences in a Catholic country like the Philippines. The audiences in Manila saw the same street scenes, train views, serpentine dances, magic tricks, war episodes, and royal pageants that were exhibited in the rest of the world. In the Philippines, these films were also presented as messengers of the progress of Western science and educational tools. In their portrayal of a distinctly Eurocentric perspective of culture and society, these moving images cemented the worldview of the colonizers. In 1903, Cinema Walgraph advertised Georges Méliès’s colored Jeanne d’Arc (1900),21 while Cinema del Oriente exhibited Pathé’s Guillaume Tell (Lucien Nonguet, 1903) a mere two months after it premiered in Paris. Cinema del Oriente specifically targeted the American population in Manila in its advertisements, with slogans such as “The only cinematograph having people you can understand.” In a review in El Progreso, William Tell was described as showing the life of “the great champion of Swiss Independence” and ending “with the Swiss cheering their liberator.”22 Considering that

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the Filipino resurgence and fight for independence was ongoing, the fact that the film was promoted and positively reviewed by the local Spanishlanguage press could be seen as a demonstration that the forces advocating Filipino independence were strong among large sections of the population. By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, Manila had more than twenty movie houses or cinematógrafos.23 In her seminal book Exporting Entertainment, Kristin Thompson writes that in 1911 Manila had around twenty-five theaters, mostly American-owned, which primarily exhibited films from the United States.24 Newspaper advertisements spread across hundreds of daily and weekly publications, as well as the annually published Manila city directory, show more minutely that exhibition venues had quite a diverse ownership and screened a variety of films from many parts of the world. Movie houses were spread throughout Manila, thereby reaching populations with different social backgrounds. Permanent movie houses were established in business districts, in residential areas, near markets, and in city outskirts and could be found in districts such as Quiapo, Santa Rosa, Tondo, and Sampaloc. Admission prices for film exhibitions gradually fell during the first decade of cinema. Information on ticket prices, however, varies slightly according to the newspaper sources being used, as each of them promoted different cinematographic venues. This provides a diversified understanding of who was able to afford and attend the picture shows. As cinematic exhibitions proliferated, different film theaters appeared to be targeting specific groups, as they were located in different parts of the city with different ranges of admission prices. The tier system and seating arrangements also varied, depending on where the exhibition was held and what kind of performance was advertised. The tickets for the earliest exhibitions in 1897 were priced at $1.50 and then gradually lowered around the turn of the century. Prices at Cinematógrafo Walgraph and Cinematógrafo Parisien in 1902 were $0.40 (or sometimes $0.30) for first class and $0.20 for second class; the Parisien charged $0.20 and $0.10 during its final days in 1903.25 According to advertisements, these programs were shorter and lasted between thirty minutes and one hour, which made it possible to have more screenings every evening. As various newspaper sources make clear, film exhibitions had to end before midnight, as no public shows were allowed after that time.26 These prices ($0.40 and $0.20) eventually stabilized, and Cinematógrafo del Oriente, Cinematógrafo Universal, Cinematógrafo Walgraph, Cinematógrafo Rizal, and Cinematógrafo Apolo all used the same fees,

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with occasional variations for certain exhibitions, as did Cinematógrafo Colón in Iloilo.27 Film exhibitions became spaces where people from most social and ethnic backgrounds had shared experiences. Cinema Parisien was reported to have sold over one thousand preordered tickets within a few hours after advertising the exhibition of new films from Spain.28 This particular venue had regular audiences of three hundred to four hundred people, where spectators were reported to be mostly women, for each of their shows in 1905. One film exhibition was so crowded that the newspaper reviewer felt compelled to leave halfway through the program.29 Cheaper exhibitions were still hard to afford for people without a regular income, and the poorer segments of society were excluded from these entertainments. According to published reports, thousands of homeless people were living in shacks near Cinema Parisien in Manila in 1905. The proprietor, Antonio Egea, as well as several members of the audience, had complained several times to the police about people, especially children, coming to the lounge of the cinema and “spoiling” their viewing experience.30 The different price levels and resulting seating arrangements maintained a stratified social space and largely separated audiences based on race and class. In Manila, the cheapest seats were not exclusively reserved for “natives”—a practice that existed in colonial Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Vietnam as it was imperative, within colonial societies, to show the superiority of the colonizer, and thus it would be inappropriate for white people to sit uncomfortably with the masses. In the Philippines, however, cinema provided a space that challenged the ideals of colonial segregation. A 1905 feature in El Mercantil provides a favorable comparison of cinema with theater, opera, and concerts. The author of the piece states that they prefer to pay twenty cents to sit “democratically” on a hard bench and watch many short films rather than pay two dollars to sleep on a comfortable chair at the “serious theatre.”31 While some moviegoers responded positively to the wider accessibility of cinema, several film theaters decorated their lobbies and exhibition stages with artworks, frescoes, and panoramic images in order to imitate the lush interiors of opera halls and other bastions of what was considered high culture.32 This was to provide the film venues with an aura of respectability in hopes of attracting the upper echelons of society. Cinema Walgraph was described as a favorite meeting space for the high society of Manila and Cinema Filipino as the place where the most distinguished families gathered in the evenings.33 In less than a decade, cinema in Manila was transformed from an ancillary component of circus or vaudeville to a stand-alone medium with its

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own side attractions, which often moved between different cinematic venues. Many cinematographic venues featured zarzuelas, vaudeville shows, operettas, and amateur singers in their programs. Vaudeville acts went from one cinema to another, as did the film reels. Some acts that had been featured at Cinema Parisien in a given week could be found at Cinema Rizal or Cinema Walgraph on the next.34 Live performance for the cinematic space was inherently cosmopolitan; there were reported to be Italian, French, Cuban, Spanish, English, American, Russian, Chinese, and Filipino artists working in different theaters and shows.35 In the course of my research, I have also found advertisements for the exhibition of filmed local events, including several procession films, such as for the Virgin of Antipolo, for the arrival of the Taft Commission, and in commemoration of nationalist writer José Rizal; the parade of the Macabebe volunteers (Filipino soldiers who fought the Spaniards and later joined the US forces); and street scenes on the river bank in Manila. These filmed local events, which I have not been able to locate and view, reproduced racial hierarchies and negotiated the role of religion, national heroes, and colonial relationships.

Conclusion The history of early film exhibition and distribution in most geographic areas outside Europe and North America remains fragmental. The same can be said about the current understanding of how early cinema affected sociocultural and colonial histories in these regions. Tracing the history of early and hitherto undocumented film screenings in Manila reveals the complex and culturally specific relationship between the cinema industry and daily and weekly periodicals. The use of varied archival sources contributes to the construction of a more complete image of the developments in early cinema industry in the region, since different companies and movie houses chose different newspapers for their advertisements. Although archival holdings have several missing issues and years for many of these publications, read collectively they provide a wide and nuanced perspective on the development of cinema in the Philippines.

Notes 1. Nick Deocampo, Film: American Influences on Philippine Cinema (Manila: Anvil Publishing, 2012); Nadi Tofighian, “Blurring the Colonial Binary: Turn-of-the-Century Transnational Entertainment in Southeast Asia” (PhD diss., Stockholm University, 2013); Dafna

In Search of “The Edison Biograph Company”  |  245 Ruppin, The Komedi Bioscoop: Early Cinema in Colonial Indonesia (New Barnet: John Libbey, 2016); Nick Deocampo, ed., Early Cinema in Asia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017). 2. Nadi Tofighian, “José Nepomuceno and the Creation of a Filipino National Consciousness,” Film History 20, no. 1 (2008): 77–94. A few years ago, the independent film historian Teddy Co found a film accredited to a certain “Josh Nelson” and filmed around Zamboanga City in Mindanao. This film, with unknown providence, bears many similarities to José Nepomuceno’s lost Moro Pirates (1931). 3. Nick Deocampo, Cine: Spanish Influences on Early Cinema in the Philippines (Manila: National Commission for Culture and the Arts, 2003) and Deocampo, Film, cit. 4. Clodualdo A. del Mundo, Native Resistance: Philippine Cinema and Colonialism 1898–1941 (Manila: De La Salle University Press, 1998). 5. Charles Musser, “Nationalism, Contradiction, and Identity; or, A Reconsideration of Early Cinema in the Philippines,” in Early Cinema in Asia, ed. Nick Deocampo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 73. 6. Rosenstock’s Business Directory of the City of Manila Philippine Islands, June 1903 (Manila: The Bulletin Publishing Co., 1903). 7. Deocampo, Cine, 372–373. It is, however, clear that this list is incomplete as several film exhibitions between 1903 and 1905 are mentioned earlier in the book. 8. Arsenio Boots Bautista, “History of Philippine Cinema,” April 14, 2015, accessed June 30, 2019, http://ncca.gov.ph/about-ncca-3/subcommissions/subcommission-on-the-arts-sca​ /cinema/history-of-philippine-cinema/. 9. Stephen Bottomore, “Malaya,” in Encyclopedia of Early Cinema, ed. Richard Abel (London: Routledge, 2005), 412. 10. Ingrid Muan, “Cambodia,” in Encyclopedia of Early Cinema, 91. 11. S. M. Ardan, “Indonesia,” in Encyclopedia of Early Cinema, 320; Misbach Yusa Biran, Sejarah Film 1900–1950: Bikin Film di Jawa (Jakarta: Komunitas Bambu, 2009). 12. Advertisement, Java-Bode (October 9, 1896); Advertisement, El Comercio (January 2, 1897); Advertisement, Straits Times (May 12, 1897): 2; Advertisement, Bangkok Times (June 11, 1897); Advertisement, L’Avenir du Tonkin (September 1, 1897): 3; Notice, Perak Pioneer (December 22, 1897): 3. 13. Advertisement, Straits Times (April 6, 1900): 2; Advertisement, Manila Freedom (June 1, 1900). 14. Ang Suga, Cablenews American, El Comercio, El Mercantil, El Progreso, El Tiempo, La Alborada, La Independencia, Libertas, Manila American, Manila Daily Bulletin, Manila Freedom, Manila Nueva, Manila Times, Philippine Free Press, The Citizen, and The Independent. 15. “Pruebas de unas cintas,” El Tiempo (February 8, 1905): 3. 16. See Nadi Tofighian, “Mapping ‘the Whirligig of Amusements’ in Colonial Southeast Asia,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 49, no. 2 (June 2018): 277–296. 17. 12 Escolta and 18 Escolta. Advertisement, Manila Freedom (May 23, 1899); Advertisement, Manila Freedom (June 3, 1899). 18. Advertisement, Manila Freedom (May 18, 1899): 7. 19. Advertisement, Manila Freedom (May 18, 1899): 7; “The Biograph,” Manila Freedom (May 20, 1899): 8; “A Wonderful Exhibition,” Manila Freedom (May 25, 1899): 5; “The Biograph,” Manila Freedom (June 3, 1899): 8. 20. Advertisement, El Progreso (December 17, 1902): 3; Advertisement, El Progreso (October 28, 1903): 4. President William McKinley was fatally shot on September 6, 1901, and the Pope’s death occurred on July 20, 1903.

246  |  Provenance and Early Cinema 21. Advertisement, El Mercantil (January 3, 1903): 6. 22. “Gran Cinematógrafo de Oriente,” El Progreso (December 10, 1903): 3. 23. H. Frankel, “The Apolo Theater, Manila,” Moving Picture World (December 3, 1910): 1304; Rosenstock’s Directory of China and Manila 1910 (Manila: The Rosenstock Publishing Co., 1910). 24. Kristin Thompson, Exporting Entertainment: America in the World Film Market, 1907–34 (London: BFI Publishing, 1985), 45. 25. Advertisement, Ang Suga (May 14, 1902): 2; Advertisement, El Progreso (December 10, 1902): 3; Advertisement, El Mercantil (November 11, 1903): 6. 26. “En el Cinematografo del Oriente,” El Mercantil (August 6, 1904): 2; “Cinematografo Walgraph,” El Mercantil (September 19, 1904): 2. 27. See, variously, Advertisement, El Mercantil (June 18, 1903): 5; Advertisement, El Progreso (August 20, 1903): 3; Advertisement, El Progreso (November 19, 1903): 4; Advertisement, El Progreso (December 10, 1903): 4; Advertisement, Libertas (February 1, 1904): 3; “Espectaculos,” advertisement, El Mercantil (December 15, 1904): 3; Advertisement, El Tiempo (January 18, 1905): 3. Cinema Visayas had a price of ten cents (“Espectaculos,” advertisement, El Mercantil (October 29, 1904): 3). 28. “Cinematografo Parisien,” El Mercantil (April 7, 1905): 3. 29. “De Teatros-Cinematografos. En El Parisien,” El Mercantil (June 23, 1905): 2; “De Teatros-Cinematografos. En El Parisien,” El Mercantil (July 7, 1905): 2. 30. “Cinematografo ‘Parisien,’” El Mercantil (February 11, 1905): 3. 31. Zapatillas, “El teatro-mixto,” El Mercantil (May 18, 1905): 2. 32. Advertisement, El Progreso (August 9, 1903): 4; “De Teatros-Cinematografos,” El Mercantil (August 25, 1905): 2. 33. “Cinematografo ‘Walgraph,’” El Mercantil (June 10, 1904): 2; “Teatralerias. En El Filipino,” El Mercantil (November 15, 1907): 1. 34. See, variously, “En el Cinematógrafo Rizal,” El Progreso (December 1, 1903): 3; “El Cinematografo Oriente,” El Mercantil (December 3, 1904): 3; “De Teatros-Cinematografos. En El Oriente,” El Mercantil (February 15, 1905): 2; “En el Walgraph,” El Mercantil (July 29, 1904): 2; “Buen Cinematografo,” El Mercantil (June 28, 1905): 2; “De Teatros-Cinematografos,” El Mercantil (August 12, 1905): 2; “El Walgraph,” El Mercantil (October 23, 1905): 2. 35. “Teatralerias,” El Mercantil (June 19, 1903): 1; “De Teatros-Cinematografos. En El Parisien,” El Mercantil (May 16, 1905): 2; Advertisement, El Mercantil (June 27, 1905): 4.

NADI TOFIGHIAN is a research fellow and lecturer in the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University. He is currently working on his book, “Let the American Show You”: Early Cinema in U.S. Colonial Territories.

20 OWNERSHIP, EXPLOITATION, STEWARDSHIP Tracking the Footage of the 1911–1913 Australian Antarctic Expedition Gregory A. Waller

M

otion pictures shot during the Australian Antarctic Expedition (AAE) led by Douglas Mawson in 1911–1913 circulated in North America from 1915 into the 1920s. For a previous Domitor volume, I examined Mawson’s 1915 lecture tour that featured this footage (combined with lantern slides taken during the expedition) as an example of the multimedia lecture—a commercial performance and exhibition format in the mid-1910s that was not limited to the high-profile tours of Lyman T. Howe or to professional lecturers specializing in travelogues, like Burton Holmes and Frank Roberson.1 Relying largely on unpublished material held in the South Australian Museum, I will focus in this essay on the history of the AAE footage in North America during the 1910s and 1920s. Tracking this footage—taken here to include negative and prints—offers a way of considering questions related both to provenance narrowly defined, in art historian Rosemary Joyce’s definition, as “a chain of ownership” “ideally beginning with the creation of the object,” and also to what I will call stewardship, meaning a particular type of proprietary interest and active oversight of the sort that Mawson demonstrated with the film shot during the expedition he led.2

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Thanks to archivist Quentin Turnour, we know a great deal about the provenance of the sixty-nine minutes of film shot during the AAE that is now housed in the Australian National Film and Sound Archive under the title The Home of the Blizzard. How the AAE footage ended up in this archive and what was entailed in the process of accessioning, preserving, and making available this invaluable material are, for Turnour, central research questions. “The history of a film’s provenance, survival and preservation,” he rightly observes, “often contributes to an understanding of its original form and creation.”3 By a careful study of the surviving footage and extant records of early screenings, he is able to determine with some precision where, when, and by whom particular scenes were filmed. For Turnour, establishing the provenance of the AAE footage involves both identifying the originary act(s) of filming and also examining the movement of this footage to and within the physical spaces, internal logics, and shifting priorities of a national archive. My interest here is in the history of the AAE footage between its origin and its archival accession, meaning in this case, the ownership, the commercial rights and uses, the printing and storage, the coloring and the editing, and the repurposing of this footage from 1912 through the 1920s, particularly in North America. All these conditions and activities bear on the question of stewardship. Readily accessible online sources make clear that as a way of signifying action and obligation, stewardship has different valences depending on the context. From the perspective of lawyers, stewardship “refers to responsibility of taking care of another person’s property or financial affairs,” while a “data steward” in a corporation or institution is an employee tasked with “ensuring the fitness” of content and metadata in an organization.4 In contemporary parlance, the term is sometimes used in relation to the environment and environmentalism (as in certain uses of the phrase corporate stewardship) and, more commonly, as a centerpiece of Christian ethics, where it typically refers “to the way time, material possession, or wealth are used or given for the service of God.”5 Recently, archivists have begun to examine “shared stewardship” in terms of nongovernmental, community-based archiving practices of material understood, in Joel Wurl’s phrase, “less as property and more as cultural asset.”6 More directly germane to this study, Dictionary.com defines stewardship as “the responsible overseeing and protection of something considered worth caring for and preserving”; synonyms include terms like preservation, care, conservancy, control, maintenance, management, protection, and supervision.7

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Rights and Safeguards Since the motion pictures shot during the AAE were from the first intended to be screened publicly and to generate revenue to defray the costs of the expedition, it was important to specify who owned this footage and who had the legal right to exploit it commercially. Initially, the AAE film seemed destined for exhibition in moving picture theaters. In November 1911, before Mawson departed for Antarctica, he signed a contract granting the Gaumont Company of Australia exclusive worldwide rights to “exhibit lease sell let on hire [sic] and generally exploit commercially” for two years any film shot during the expedition in exchange for providing the AAE with film stock, a moving picture camera, and lenses. The contract called for Mawson to turn over all negatives to Gaumont, which would cover the cost of and carry out developing and printing, “while taking every care and precaution to safeguard the said films.” Significantly, Mawson retained the copyright to the AAE film as well as the right to use the footage in his own lectures.8 Thus while ownership rested with Mawson, stewardship as a commitment not only to print and profitably exploit but also to “safeguard” the footage was Gaumont’s legal responsibility. In May 1912, film shot during the beginning of the expedition was already being screened to audiences in Australia under the title With Dr. Mawson in the Antarctic.9 Clearly more (or better) footage was needed because that same month, the contract between Mawson and Gaumont was amended to include a provision that a Gaumont cinematographer would accompany the AAE for six weeks.10 By the summer of 1913, an Australian exchange advertised the availability of 3,500 feet of film of the expedition.11 Significantly, in October 1913, Mawson had already taken on some measure of proprietary oversight by arranging with the Sydney [Australia] Safe Deposit Company to store “one complete print approximately 4,000 feet showing the expedition’s work” as well as three 1,450-foot prints covering the beginning of the expedition and two 1,000-foot prints of footage shot during the voyage to Antarctica to bring home the survivors.12 The negative remained in Gaumont’s keeping. But neither Gaumont nor Mawson was satisfied with their contractual arrangement. Gaumont complained that the AAE footage was uninteresting and of poor quality, even appealing in April 1914 to Kodak for a full refund on the film stock.13 (Perhaps this assessment trumped any obligation to take good care of the footage?) Mawson, in turn, began legal proceedings

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to break the contract since he was convinced that Gaumont had not sufficiently exploited the footage and had not provided him with film for use with his lectures. In addition, Mawson pressed the company to account for 1,200 feet of what he claimed to be “lost” negative—which would suggest that Gaumont was lax in fulfilling its contractual obligation to “safeguard” footage that Mawson deemed valuable.14 Gaumont did not deliver this missing negative to Mawson until 1916,15 well after Mawson (in January 1915) had underscored his ownership of the footage by filing a US copyright for a lecture with motion pictures and lantern slides under the title Racing with Death in Antarctic Blizzards.16 Aiming to profit from a potentially lucrative North American lecture tour (following the model of other polar explorers), Mawson signed a contract in January 1915 assigning the North American distribution rights to well-established promoter Lee Keedick. Keedick paid $800 for two 4,800feet prints and organized a lecture tour for Mawson followed by a monthlong engagement at a multipurpose theater in New York City. After Mawson had left the United States in May 1915, Keedick continued to book the film (using various other lecturers) into opera houses, churches, colleges, and concert halls and then into different Chautauqua circuits well into 1918. In addition, in 1916, Keedick had a print prepared with intertitles, which allowed the film to be screened without a lecturer.17 In November 1916, Mawson agreed to (or at least never questioned) a different type of distribution deal, likely arranged by Keedick, to sell the rights to 1,500 feet of the AAE footage to the Lyman H. Howe Films Company for a six-month period.18 Reedited with added intertitles (which increased the length of the Howe Company’s version to 1,800 feet), Racing with Death was featured as part of a multifilm program that was billed as Lyman H. Howe’s Travel Festival. This program was screened in several US states by five traveling Howe companies between January and May 1917. Another, unrelated, transaction came in 1925, when the American Museum of Natural History acquired for its collection a 3,734-feet version of the AAE film, entitled Sir Douglas Mawson’s Antarctic Expedition (which was also the title Howe sometimes used).19

Mawson’s Stewardship of the AAE Footage The striking but perhaps not surprising point in my brief survey of these transactions involving the AAE film is that the length of the prints in North

Ownership, Exploitation, Stewardship  |  251 Table 20.1  Entry for “Sea Bird Life” in Mawson’s Film Index Roll Length

Subject

31 81ft

Skua Gulls feeding on the carcass of a seal A skua gull at its nest Snow Petrels emerging from their nests Snow Petrels (cont.) Silver grey Petrels Silver Petrels courting Silver grey Petrel on its nest

32 40ft 32A 65ft

Colour 51ft 30ft 40ft 14ft 10ft 27ft 14ft

Stain amber or tone slate ditto Stain amber or tone slate blue ditto ditto ditto ditto

America varied quite significantly, from the ones Keedick had prepared (48,000 feet) to Howe’s shorter version (1,500 feet with 300 feet of added titles) to the film that the American Museum of Natural History acquired (3,734 feet).20 There was, in fact, no standard release print drawn from the AAE footage, no readily identifiable “film” that we can point to as the original text, only variants (often with different names) that circulated across a host of almost exclusively nontheatrical sites and occasions. Further, none of these variants used all the available AAE footage, which totaled 5,355 feet (without “tail ends”) and with “two [unidentified] stills each 15 ft. to be added,” according to the “Film Index” Mawson prepared in 1916.21 This 5,355 feet would seem to have included the “missing” 1,500 feet of negative in ­addition to the approximately 4,000 feet that Mawson had stored in Australia in 1913. In his Film Index, Mawson arranges the shots by subject and identifies the shots and amount of footage included on each small roll of negative. The topic, “Sea Bird Life,” for instance, is comprised of seven shots (see table 20.1). This meticulous record keeping, I would argue, is an example of resource management, attesting to Mawson’s proprietary investment in this footage, above and beyond his attempt to account for and have access to all the usable film taken during the expedition. He identifies by subject and length each shot and sorts the shots into categories and subcategories. Perhaps most interesting, Mawson also explicitly indicates how each shot should be “stained” or “toned.” In another typed document from 1916, entitled “Notes on Colouring the Film,” Mawson’s instructions are even more

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detailed, as when he explains that “seven-eighths of the film is best in various shades of blue toning, ranging from slate where the blue is barely perceptible, through what I call slate-blue, ice-blue, to sea-blue. The deeper blues can be used where there is little else but ice in the picture; and the deepest blue when there is only ice and sea water not in proximity to the land.”22 If in the 1950s Mawson was thinking of posterity and a long-term archival home for the footage of his long-ago expedition, in the 1910s, he was not concerned with the scientific uses, artistic value, or potential historical import of the motion picture record of the expedition but instead with the possibilities of generating income from the AAE film. Thus his aim in itemizing the footage, shot by shot, and in providing quite carefully formulated “notes on colouring” was presumably to render the AAE film a more commercially viable product.23 Writing to Gaumont’s London office in August 1916, Mawson went so far as to request that several scenes be printed in different tones as a way for him to compare the results before making a decision on how new print(s) should be colored. He also specified details that needed to be highlighted in the printing, noting, for instance, that “in both rolls 10 and 14 the detail of the ice is the real object of the picture” and indicating that another segment “wants careful attention, the main object being to show the penguins jumping in their flight through the air.”24 Had the AAE footage been commissioned by or sold outright to Gaumont or another company serving the theatrical exhibition market, decisions about printing would no doubt have been made in-house as an ordinary matter of course—provided that the footage was deemed worth bothering with in the first place. Though Mawson’s careful shot-by-shot index suggests how the film could be parceled out into discrete, reusable shots, there is no evidence that he ever considered treating the AAE film as material for something like a stock footage library. But Mawson did consider possibilities for exploitation beyond the repurposing of the footage that the Howe Film Company had achieved with their 1,800-foot version. In a March 1919 letter to Pathé’s London sales manager, Mawson indicates that he has two different prints of the AAE material: “a short selection of 1800 feet, printed and titled by the Lyman Howe Company of America” and 5,000 feet of the “complete negative” without titles.25 That year Mawson offered to sell the world distribution rights (exclusive of North America) to an unidentified company (presumably Pathé), proposing that the continuing commercial value of the

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AAE footage—then more than six years old—was precisely that it could (with added titles and filmed lantern slides) be the basis for five different commercially viable films, including “natural history” shorts and a “full entertainment” feature film.26 This ambitious plan was not realized, and a year later, Mawson would confess in a letter that “the exploitation of the Expedition film has been a very up-hill game for me. It yields no profit to me and certainly no pleasure. It is the only section of the Expedition affairs that I now thoroughly detest and will remain with me always as a sort of ­nightmare though always in this period with an eye toward generating a profit.”27 Seeking to generate profit from what he called the “Expedition film” by agreeing to distribution deals with Keedick and the Howe Film Company was in no way incompatible with Mawson’s stewardship of the footage under his care. Even after the deep disappointment he expressed in 1920, Mawson held on to the footage, turning down in 1928 Howe’s offer to purchase 1,000 feet (for $750) for use in its long-running short novelty series Lyman H. Howe’s Hodge Podge, even though the company advised him that “your negative is getting older and older . . . and in the course of time may not be of any value whatsoever.”28 With another Antarctic expedition in the works, Mawson informed Howe that “I have always placed a high value upon that film, the negative of which you have stored for me . . . I have held it back for a propitious time like that which will now develop . . . My aim is to incorporate the more striking features of the film with the new one we hope to obtain, and in this way secure a picture of unusual value . . . in the meantime please house it [the negative] safely.”29 “Housing” the negative in a suitable facility was no small matter. Mawson had stored the negative in the Lyman H. Howe Films Company facility in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, beginning in 1917, when this company had produced and exhibited its abridged version of the AAE film. (Previously, Gaumont held the negative.) By the 1920s, the Lyman H. Howe Films Company was doing much of its business—beyond Lyman H. Howe’s Hodge Podge—as a laboratory and storage facility.30 Mawson ordered from Howe in 1918 two prints of what he called the “complete negative.” This business arrangement continued through the 1920s, and other prints may have been struck for Mawson in 1923, after Howe’s general manager offered Mawson the opportunity to purchase “toned and stained” prints for six cents per foot, with added charges for intertitles.31

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Conclusion Tracking the history of the AAE footage is significant as a case study, I would argue, given how little research has been done on the handling of negatives and the process of printing motion pictures in the 1910s. Mawson may have been entirely idiosyncratic in how he chose to manage, safeguard, and attempt to profit from the footage he owned; that remains to be determined. What I have taken to be evidence of his stewardship was likely common practice for mainstream commercial film producers and distributors operating in a fast-paced business environment that constantly required new product: assuring quality control over printing; deciding on tinting, toning, and intertitles; keeping accurate records of the footage shot; storing negatives and prints. But while film of the AAE (in different variants) was exhibited for profit, Mawson was not a professional filmmaker, and he was dealing with nonfiction footage that had limited, almost entirely nontheatrical distribution and a long shelf-life (or so he thought). As such, his proprietary interest in, control over, and attempts to make use of the AAE footage highlight questions that are relevant for thinking about stewardship across a range of “useful” nonfiction cinema in the 1910s and 1920s, including, for instance, films produced for the purposes of scientific research, formal educational instruction, public health campaigns, corporate public relations, missionary fund-raising, civic boosterism, employee training, advertising, and government agency outreach. Who actually owned, maintained possession, and safeguarded such nonfiction footage? Where was it stored? When were prints struck? Who would make decisions about the visual appearance of these prints? Was the footage repurposed? Such questions point to the materiality of nonfiction film and complement historical research concerning how useful cinema was produced, circulated, and exhibited. At the same time, provenance surely matters when it comes to any example of nonfiction footage from the silent era: when and by whom was such footage acquired and rendered screenable for nontheatrical sites and occasions? When and how (if at all) was this footage accessioned into an archive? We might even find in the history of nonfiction footage evidence of provenance as the “transformative power of ownership” during the “itinerary that an object follows as it moves from hand to hand,” to use Gail Feigenbaum and Inga Reist’s formulation.32 But bearing in mind the example of the AAE footage and the material facts of costly, easily damaged,

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manipulable motion picture negatives and prints, taking into account the prerogatives and practices of stewardship are likewise of prime significance if we are aiming toward a more inclusive history of silent cinema.

Acknowledgments Thanks to Richard Maltby and Ruth Vasey for their hospitality in Adelaide, to Mark Pharoah of the South Australian Museum for invaluable assistance, and to Indiana University’s Office of the Vice President of International Affairs for an Overseas Research Grant.

Notes 1. Gregory A. Waller, “The Multiple-Media Lecture: Racing with Death in Antarctic Blizzards (1915),” in Performing New Media, 1890–1915, ed. Kaveh Askari, Scott Curtis, Frank Gray, Louis Pelletier, Tami Williams, and Joshua Yumibe (London: John Libbey, 2014), 150–159. 2. Rosemary A. Joyce, “From Place to Place: Provenience, Provenance, and Archaeology,” in Provenance: An Alternate History of Art, ed. Gail Feigenbaum and Inga Reist (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute Publications, 2012), 49. For a detailed account of the use of the footage in Australia and England, see Robert Dixon, Photography, Early Cinema and Colonial Modernity: Frank Hurley’s Synchronized Lecture Entertainments (London: Anthem Press, 1913), 18–29, 33–38. 3. Turnour’s essay originally appeared as “A.K.A. Home of the Blizzard: Fact and Artefact in the Film on the Australian Antarctic expedition, 1911–1914,” NFSA Journal 2, no. 3 (2007): 1–13. His later, revised version is available online: https://www.nfsa.gov.au/latest/aka-home -blizzard-part-one; https://www.nfsa.gov.au/latest/aka-home-blizzard-part-two. 4. See, for example, https://definitions.uslegal.com/s/stewardship/; Sara Rosenbaum, “Data Governance and Stewardship: Designing Data Stewardship Entities and Advancing Data Access,” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2965885/ 5. See, for example, Edward E. Lawler, “Corporate Stewardship,” https://www.forbes .com/sites/edwardlawler/2015/09/22/corporate-stewardship/#1a11a10eb257; and http:// christianstewardshipnetwork.com/category/biblical-stewardship. 6. Joel Wurl, “Ethnicity as Provenance: In Search of Values and Principles for Documenting the Immigrant Experience,” Archival Issues 29, no. 1 (2005): 72. See also Michelle Caswell, “Rethinking Inalienability: Trusting Nongovernmental Archives in Transitional Societies,” American Archivist 76, no. 1 (2013): 113–134; and “Toward a SurvivorCentered Approach to Human Rights Archives,” Archival Science 14, no. 3–4 (2014): 307–322. Thanks to Andy Uhrich, archivist at Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive, for these references. 7. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/stewardship?s=t; https://www.thesaurus.com /browse/stewardship?s=t. 8. Memorandum of Agreement between Gaumont and Mawson, November 16, 1911. South Australian Museum [hereafter SAM], Mawson’s Papers, 169AAE.

256  |  Provenance and Early Cinema 9. See Lyceum ad, Sydney Morning Herald, May 7, 1912, 2; “Spenser’s Antarctic Special,” Sydney Morning Herald, May 15, 1912, 2; Lyceum ad, Sydney Morning Herald, May 14, 1912, 2; Lyceum ad, Sydney Morning Herald, May 17, 1912, 2. 10. Amended contract, Mawson and Gaumont, May 15, 1912, SAM, 169AAE. 11. Ad for Complete New Series with Dr. Mawson in the Antarctic, Australian Kinematograph Journal, August 7, 1913, 12–13, SAM, Scrapbook, M362M. 12. Letter to Sydney Safe Deposit Company, October 30, 1913, SAM, 169AAE. 13. Letter from Gaumont to Eitel, August 29, 1912; Letter from Gaumont to Kodak, April 11, 1913, SAM, 169AAE. 14. Mawson wrote to Gaumont’s manager: “I want to know what has become of the negative of Hurley’s (A.A.E.) film of the summer 1911–12. Also have you negative of Primmers’ taking on our winter sub-Antarctic cruise of 1912? Not having copies of these has been a disadvantage in my recent lectures”; Mawson to Gaumont June 12, 1914; see also Mawson to Hutchinson, June 29, 1914; Mawson to Gaumont, June 27, 1914, SAM, 169AAE. 15. In a letter dated September 9, 1916, Mawson mentioned that Gaumont had recently turned over to him 1,200 feet of negative that it had “lost” for three years. SAM, 169AAE. 16. Mawson copyright applications: Library of Congress Catalogue of Copyright Entries Part 4 New Series, Volume 10 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1915), 84; Library of Congress Catalogue of Copyright Entries Part 1 New Series, Volume 12 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1915), 323. 17. Contract with Keedick, May 21, 1914. Letter from Lyman Howe Attractions to Mawson, February 2, 1917, SAM, 173AAE. 18. Letter from Mawson to Walkinshaw, November 9, 1916, SAM, 169AAE. 19. The acquisition is listed in The American Museum Endowment: Fifty-Seventh Annual Report of the Trustees for the Year 1925, American Museum of Natural History (New York, May 1, 1926), 115. The AMNH hosted a lecture by Mawson in 1925, so it is possible that the print it acquired came from Mawson. 20. For variation in the prints available in Australia and England, see Robert Dixon, “Travelling Mass-Media Circus: Frank Hurley’s Synchronized Lecture Entertainments,” Nineteenth Century Theatre & Film 33, no. 1 (2009): 9–29; and Tourneur, “A.K.A. Home of the Blizzard, Part I.” 21. SAM, 174AAE, contains both handwritten and typed versions of this index, dated 1916. 22. “Notes on Colouring the Film,” SAM, 174AAE. 23. He was likewise aware of scratches on the negative caused by printing in addition to the scratches “due to particles of ice getting into the gate of the camera when taking [the pictures).” Mawson to Walkinshaw, November 7, 1915, SAM, 173AAE. 24. Letter from Mawson to Hitchcock, July 25, 1916; Mawson to Hitchcock, August 16, 1916, SAM, 169AAE. 25. Letter from Mawson to Pathé, March 3, 1919, SAM, 173AAE. 26. Mawson proposal draft, SAM, 173AAE. 27. Letter from Mawson to Hurley, February 1, 1920, SAM, 6DM, folder 1. 28. Letter from Lyman H. Howe Films Company to Mawson, September 20, 1928, SAM, 173AAE. 29. Letter from Mawson to Gillaum, General Manager, Lyman H. Howe Films Company, February 25, 1929, SAM, 173AAE.

Ownership, Exploitation, Stewardship  |  257 30. An ad for Lyman H. Howe Laboratories in Moving Picture World 43, no. 8 (May 22, 1920): 1123 highlighted the expansion of Lyman H. Howe Laboratories, noting in particular its capacity for producing “film prints, with artistic tints and tones.” Howe was also attempting to tap into the nontheatrical market, see ad in Educational Film Magazine 5, no. 4 (April 1921): 27. 31. Letter from Lyman H. Howe Films Company to Mawson, April 3, 1923, SAM, 173AAE. 32. Gail Feigenbaum and Inga Reist, “Introduction,” in Provenance: An Alternate History of Art, ed. Gail Feigenbaum and Inga Reist (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute Publications, 2012), 1; Joyce “From Place to Place,” 49.

GREGORY A. WALLER is Provost Professor and Director of Cinema and Media Studies in the Media School at Indiana University Bloomington. He is author of Main Street Amusements: Movies and Commercial Entertainment in a Southern City, 1896–1930.

PART IV REPURPOSING

21 FINDING EARLY CINEMA IN THE AVANT-GARDE Research and Investigation André Habib

T

his chapter is a fragment of a larger project that is concerned with the relationship between avant-garde filmmakers, found footage films, technology, early cinema, archives, and, more generally, the “archive.”1 The project develops an archaeological approach to found footage filmmaking that engages with the genealogy of often canonical experimental films in order to locate the provenance of the footage used: How was it found? In what archive? In what milieu? In what location? These films can be found in official film archives but also in random, but not unimportant, sites. Canal Street junk shops, Soho rubbish bins, Fort Lee warehouses, TV broadcasts, or even YouTube are not materially, ideologically, nor institutionally neutral spaces. As such, they are worth interrogating, if only because they tell us much about the social status and historical presence of such films: How and why did it get there in the first place? In what form, format, version, through what remediation?2 This approach also involves better understanding the tools, the materiality, and the technical operations that allowed and, in certain instances, dictated the creative action of the filmmaker. To state the somewhat obvious but often forgotten, one does not reuse the same types of images, with the same techniques, and in the same fashion in 1936, 1974, 1989, and 2019. Accessing images and sounds on VHS tape, 16 mm reels, through a DVD rip, or on a decayed 35 mm

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nitrate print produces very different films. The same goes for the types of tools used: as I have shown elsewhere, Ken Jacobs could not have made his famous Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son (1969–1971) without his old bulky 1938 Victor Animatograph 16 mm projector; in the same way the Kodak Analyst projector was absolutely central to the creation of Ernie Gehr’s Eureka (1974–1979), made a few years later.3 The principle of provenance, along with the material and preservation status of any document, are fundamental aspects of archival theory and practice and essential tools for any scholar engaged in historical inquiry. Given the substance of found footage works, this notion is also essential for understanding the fundamental dimensions of these films and getting a better sense of the “archival” context in which they were made. Many things appear as we try to answer a seemingly simple question: how and where were these seminal found footage films’ footage found? Through pursuing this question, what appears, in a way, is an epoch’s “archive,” in the Foucaldian sense of the word. What comes into play are various discourses, practices, institutional histories (who is preserving what and when, through whom, in which version, etc.) but also different players, from archivists to film collectors to filmmakers. This mode of inquiry also raises issues interlocking film technology, pedagogy, aesthetics, film heritage, and historiography. Scholars and critics such as Reginal Cornwell, Tom Gunning, Noël Burch, Bart Testa, Jeffrey Skoller, and Katie Russell, among others, have been discussing for some time and have analyzed with great detail the dialogue between early films and experimental cinema with a focus on those found footage works of the 1960s and 1970s that reuse early films. Many, like Gunning and Burch, have explicitly acknowledged the role these found footage films have played in shaping a “new awareness” toward early cinema in the late 1970s and early 1980s. During an exchange in 2009, Gunning wrote, “Ken Jacobs inspired me as a scholar, not only by opening up early cinema as a realm of research for me, but also by opening up for me (as for so many) a whole new awareness of what a moving image was and could be, of how all the dimensions and hidden aspects that lurk within what we see and take for granted can be raised to a new awareness.”4 At an important Whitney Museum symposium curated by John Hanhardt in 1979, Research and Investigations: Early Cinema and the Avant-Garde, the same (but slightly younger) Tom Gunning also famously recalled, “It was my encounter with films by these and other avant-garde

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filmmakers that allowed me to see early films with a fresh eye” by “freeing them from the ghetto of primitive babbling to which the progress-oriented model of film history had assigned them to.”5 And Noël Burch, during the same event (his text was later published in 1986), also confirms that “it is no doubt the experience of the avant-gardes . . . which has made possible for us today simply to read many of the phenomena encountered in the earliest films.”6 Although not recognized fully, it can be argued that the Whitney Symposium, which took place one year after Brighton, was a cornerstone event both for avant-garde cinema and early cinema scholarship. Film historians, critics, art historians, and filmmakers gave talks, and early films screened alongside experimental films and performances. It seemed to testify to this incredible cross-pollination of early cinema historiography and experimental film practices of the 1970s and was a rare moment where early cinema historians and avant-garde artists mingled. This event in part seemed to have inspired Toronto’s 1983 Funnel screening, Film Begets Film (the title borrowed from Jay Leyda’s 1963 book on compilation films), which focused very largely on early cinema in experimental films with works by Al Razutis, David Rimmer, Malcolm Le Grice, Ken Jacobs, and Hollis Frampton. This program seemed to have been the premise to Bart Testa’s remarkable book Back and Forth, Early Cinema and the Avant-Garde.7

Joseph Cornell and Early Cinema The focus of attention of this historical conversation has been mostly directed toward the structural films of the 1960s and 1970s, for reasons that are obvious. But we could consider another genealogy, through the work of pioneer artist and film collector Joseph Cornell, often considered the father of found footage filmmaking and whose influence on filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, Larry Jordan, Jonas Mekas, and Ken Jacobs is widely attested. What has been less discussed is Cornell’s role as filmmaker as collector. Cornell’s interest in early cinema, and in particular Méliès and other early French films, is well documented and features prominently in his archives: film clippings, correspondence with other film collectors, and the like.8 It also appears in the very rare screenings he organized where he showed films in his collection in the late 1940s,9 which is confirmed when looking at his collection of films.10 This collection is central to understanding the

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often complex collage films he worked on in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, although the history of these films is foggy, and it is often hard to decide whether or not a certain assemblage of footage should or should not be considered a “film” by Cornell, since they were rarely shown before his death in 1972. Cornell is best known as the author of Rose Hobart, the famous reedit of the 1931 East of Borneo starring Rose Hobart. A version of the collage was first shown in December 1936, at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York,11 and only much, much later, in the early 1960s, fueled by the enthusiasm of Ken Jacobs,12 Jack Smith, and Jonas Mekas, who ended up preserving and transforming it in more than one way—in 1968.13 But Cornell made many more films that were almost never shown. One of the very rare occasions seemed to have been a November 30, 1970, Anthology Film Archives inauguration screening that showed A Midnight’s Party alongside Meliès’s Le Voyage à travers l’impossible and films by Jerome Hill and Harry Smith.14 The copy of the invitation that is now housed at the Smithsonian American Art Museum was addressed to Henri Langlois!15 Some of Cornell’s collage films, such as The Midnight Party and Jack’s Dream, were completed, following specific indications, by Larry Jordan in 1969 and 1970, whereas other so-called collage films, such as Bookstalls or Vaudeville Deluxe, were discovered in 1978 by Rick Stanberry and Sean Licka at Anthology Film Archives, where Cornell’s film collection first landed in 1969.16 The collection was made up of Cornell live action “films” (shot by other filmmakers, like Stan Brakhage and Rudy Burckhardt), collage films, and films that were simply in his collection (bought through the years for his own and his disabled brother Robert’s amusement). More recently, in 2011 at MoMA (where the collection was moved in 1995, in circumstances that remain vague), Anne Morra and Peter Williamson, two curators who had the task of going through each reel in the collection, believed they stumbled on yet another Cornell collage film, which they named Untitled Joseph Cornell Film (The Wool Collage). The film offers a fascinating potpourri of seemingly random images from different epochs and genres assembled together: educational films on the production of wool or velvet, scientific films, early travelogues, the 1926 pirate film Eagles of the Sea, snippets from Henri Fescourt’s 1925 Les Misérables, and, among numerous other films, a fragment from Méliès’s Tom Whiskey ou l’illusioniste toqué of 1900, which is stitched after a 1942 Castle Film, Here Comes the Circus, as if to instill a dialogue between these two “moments” of film attractions.17 It could be worth noting that this same

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Méliès film reappears in another collage film of the late 1930s, Thimble Theater (completed by Larry Jordan in 1968). The Wool Collage, alongside other Cornell “films,” offers an insider glimpse into what was collectible, at the time, for a film collector obsessed with marginalia, including early cinema. It may also be worth noting that Cornell seemed to have befriended for a time Francis Doublier, the famous Lumière operator who had moved to the United States, worked in Fort Lee, and who was at that point, in the 1940s, working in a film lab in Manhattan called Major Film. Certain sources mention that the Lumière and Méliès films in Cornell’s collection may have come from Doublier. According to Deborah Solomon, they had a falling-out when Doublier began copying without Cornell’s permission some of the rarer films he would bring to him for repair and cleaning. Sources also mention that Cornell would find his films in a warehouse in New Jersey, probably in Fort Lee, where scraps of discarded films were sold by the pound.18 Looking at Cornell’s collage films through the lens of provenance forces us to address many unturned stones: How did film collectors obtain films through the 1930s and 1940s? Who was copying and selling them? What was the market for scientific, sponsored, silent cinema, amateur, and educational films that appear prominently in these films? Cornell’s collages also point to an imaginary of the discarded archive, the junk shop, the garbage bin, and the dusty attic that, in many ways, numerous filmmakers reactivated in their found footage films, from Bruce Conner and Ken Jacobs to Craig Baldwin and Peggy Ahwesh.

From Tom, Tom to Public Domain There is nonetheless another imaginary of the film archive that found footage films also point to, and that is not an imaginary of the “collector.” This is tied, I would argue, to the Paper Print Collection renaissance, transferred by Kemp Niver and Bill Ault, and that began circulating in various forms in the mid- to late 1960s. Ken Jacobs’s masterpiece, Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son, completed in 1971, is probably the best known example of this. After reading about a screening Niver organized at MoMA in a 1968 New York Times article, Ken Jacobs, who was then giving classes at St. John’s University, rented a print of Billy Bitzer’s (but possibly filmed by Wallace McCutcheon) 1905 Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son in the summer of 1968, which was part of a larger curated selection of roughly one hundred paper print

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films produced by Niver and distributed by Brandon Films in New York and Pyramid Films in California.19 The rented print included two other paper print films alongside Tom, Tom: The Subarbanite (AM&B, 1904) and An Acadian (Arcadian) Elopement (AM&B, 1907). Jacobs saw this reel on an old Victor projector that was given to him by his former landlord, Hy Adelman.20 Amazed by the film, he began “performing” with it, slowing it down, playing it backward, and so on. As he explains it to Scott Macdonald, “I began playing with these films as a kind of performance. And then I’d have friends over and do it for them. At the end of one performance, my painter friend Jeff Koos came up to me . . . and said ‘Ken, that was wonderful. You should be filming it.’ I said, ‘I’ve been thinking about that.’ He grabbed me by the shoulders and said, ‘Do it!’”21 Which Jacobs did. Using his Victor projector, a translucent screen, and a 16 mm Arriflex camera, he assembled what is possibly the most influential experimental film of the 1970s. It is worth noting that the original 1905 Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son has also been persistently and obsessively reworked by Jacobs through performances, film, and video works since the 1970s. This is particularly the case since the rediscovery in the early 2000s of a 35 mm print of the original 1905 Bitzer/McCutcheon film, which had been sitting in MoMA’s vaults all this time without Jacobs knowing it. It was scanned specifically for Jacobs, and he has used it to bring about a series of fantastic digital works.22 Hollis Frampton, another major figure of the avant-garde, was also involved with the Paper Print Collection (surely after having seen Jacob’s Tom, Tom). He went to Washington in the summer of 1971 or 1972, screened numerous paper print films, and ended up buying 125 titles of the collection. The purpose was in part to own certain films that he liked, but his plan was also to include some of the films at different sections of his unfinished Magellan project that had begun its gestation by that time.23 Some of the paper prints were also used in films of the cycle, like Cadenza #1 (1980), which included Little Piece of String (1903), and Gloria! (1979), which included another Biograph film, Murphy’s Wake (1902). In Frampton’s filmography and CV, there is also an elusive title, Public Domain (1973, though dated in other places as 1972, but which doesn’t seem to have been shown publicly under that title before 1985, after his death). The film, now in distribution at the Filmmaker’s Coop, is a ready-made collage of sixteen titles culled from the Paper Print Collection, stitched together with black leader, and presented in alphabetical order (which is impossible to decipher when you see the film) to which he tagged along his famous signature logo. It is quite possible

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(although impossible to confirm) that it is this selection of paper print films that was shown after his talk on early cinema at the Whitney Museum during the symposium, a talk he entitled “The Invention without a Future,” which ends with this stunning finale: This is simply a roll, upon which I won’t comment at all, from the Paper Print Collection at the Library of Congress. . . . My principle of selection is so embarrassing that I don’t propose to tell you anything about it at all, but it demonstrates something of the past which, like all pasts, is self-proclaiming, repetitive, redundant, naughty, sometimes astonishing, and, in this case, on the principle that nothing much was made of if at the time, essentially impenetrable to us. It is by that mechanism that this body of material, whatever it is, then imposes upon us the responsibility of inventing it.24

Frampton’s talk took place on November 17, 1979, between a talk by Nick Browne on “film discourse and family space” and a Nervous System performance by Ken Jacobs using the first tableau of Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son.

Eureka During the same Whitney symposium, a day before Frampton, on November 16, 1979, after Tom Gunning’s talk, Ernie Gehr’s Eureka was presented alongside George Landow, Morgan Fisher, and Hollis Frampton films. Eureka was finished in 1974 but not screened publicly before January 1979, at the time under the title Geography. Eureka is a reinterpretation through slowing down of the film now known under the title A Trip Down Market Street, shot in 1906 a few days before the April 18 earthquake.25 Eureka was made by refilming the original material with a Bolex, slowing the pace considerably by multiplying each frame by either four or eight with a Kodak Analyst projector and subsequently heightening the contrast in the lab, producing an even more ghostly phantom ride through Market Street.26 But Eureka is also very much a trip through this document, this unique photographic, filmic record of this place and time. It is also possibly one of the most haunting of all found footage films of the 1970s. The story behind Ernie Gehr’s discovery of the film is worth detailing, if only because it corrects Jeffrey Skoller’s erroneous statement that “the creation of Eureka came about when Gehr found such a film in a box of discarded 16mm film.”27 Ernie Gehr was invited, in August 1974, in Montreux, Switzerland, to take part in a film program curated by Annette Michelson, New Forms in Films. Near the end of his stay, Michelson—seeing the structural affinity of the original 1906 film with Gehr’s films—showed him a 16

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mm print of the film that completely bewildered him. It triggered his own youthful memory of sounds and images of visiting San Francisco and Market Street after having been discharged from the army in the early 1960s, which mixed into his confused feelings about returning to Europe, which he had fled with his parents as a small child in the 1940s. This mixed set of emotions, it can be argued, eventually led him to make Eureka the way he did.28 How did Annette Michelson end up with the print? She got the print through a student of hers, Ruth Perlmutter, who had been attending her classes at NYU. Perlmutter lived in Philadelphia and had shown Michelson the film while she stayed at her house in the suburbs before a talk Michelson was giving at Penn University Museum. Michelson asked if she could bring the film to Montreux, where she showed it to Gehr. But how did Perlmutter get the print? I ended up tracking her down a couple of years ago. It seems she obtained it from a Bay Area salesman named George who worked for her husband, who ran a brass foundry in Reading, Pennsylvania. He had sent her the film knowing of her interest in cinema, saying he had found it—from what she recalls—in a trunk belonging to his father, along with a 1903 pornographic film, which he threw into San Francisco Bay. What is completely baffling about this story is that, right around the same time, at least one other 35 mm nitrate print of A Trip Down Market Street had begun an important step of its archival life. In 1970, a print was acquired by the American Film Institute from George Post, an old Russian projectionist who had established himself in San Francisco at the end of World War I and had in his collection newsreel material on the history of San Francisco.29 The Library of Congress eventually obtained the print from AFI in 1972 and made a safety print in 1976, two years after Gehr discovered his copy and made Eureka. There are, according to David Kiehn,30 two other known nitrate prints of the Market Street film, apart from the one at the Library of Congress, although none of them correspond to the 830 feet of the original: one belongs to Rick Prelinger, who got it from the collector and newsreel cameraman Frank W. Vail, who died in 1998. The third print came from Ward Kimbell, Disney animator and director. It seems the print that belonged to Ward Kimbell was used to make 16 mm copies that were sold and rented through Murray Glass’s Em Gee Rental Library.31 Closely comparing the many versions of the film would obviously show very different archival trajectories of this piece of historical film.32 This goes to demonstrate how the anecdote revolving around the making of Eureka

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can allow one to draw a small map of the circulation of these early films in and outside film archives, the role played by collectors and independent rental companies but also institutions, avant-garde film scholars, specific film technologies, and so on.

The Impossible Hale’s Tour Show To conclude briefly, I wish to share an uncanny coincidence I discovered a couple of years ago. David Kiehn’s remarkable historical work on A Trip Down Market Street led him to speculate convincingly that the film was probably shot in April 1906, based on ads published in the New York Clipper: one on April 28 confirms the Miles Brothers’ presence to document the earthquake and provides essential information on the Market Street film, shot a week before they say; another ad, from April 21, also in the New York Clipper, advertised two films by the Miles Brothers made specially for the Hale’s Tour of the World.33 One of the two films was “A Trip Through Market St.” The other film that was advertised was called “Climbing Mount Tamalpias.” The filmmakers seemed to have been a little disoriented, since they probably realized after they sent the ad that the film was actually going down and not up . . . they also corrected the spelling mistake and correctly named the film: “A Trip Down Mount Tamalpais” (at least that is how it was copyrighted on April 21, 1906, and is now found in the Library of Congress Paper Print Catalogue). In 1996, Ken Jacobs used a 16 mm paper print film transfer from the Library of Congress of an unknown origin to him to make a beautiful film called Disorient Express (in 35 mm). As you may have guessed, the film he used was “A Trip Down Mount Tamalpais.” The principle of the film— without Jacobs knowing the Miles Brothers’ mix-up in 1906—revolves precisely around the confusion between climbing up and going down, with Jacobs paying tribute to the Hale’s Tour ride by flipping the image, playing it forward and backward, and by producing a mirror image that adds to the dizzying attraction of the piece (a principle he also used in The Georgetown Loop, made the same year, using another paper print film bearing the same title, shot by Billy Bitzer in 1903). In other words, Ernie Gehr in 1974 and Ken Jacobs in 1996 both used Miles Brothers films shot roughly the same month, advertised in the same ad, unknowingly sharing what would have been a stunning Hale’s Tour bill in 1906.34

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Acknowledgments This article has benefited widely from the help of fellow scholars and friends who have provided invaluable information. I wish to thank in particular Anne Morra, Rick Prelinger, David Kiehn, Ken Eisenstein, and Dan Streible as well as Ernie Gehr and Ken and Flo Jacobs. I also wish to thank Joshua Yumibe for his close reading of the text.

Notes 1. In French, the word archives is always grammatically considered a plural, les archives, and only in the 1960s began being used more conceptually to refer to an idea rather than an accumulation of documents in an often state-policed site. The distinction between archives (plural) and archive (singular) can probably be traced to Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge and his attempt to develop a notion of archive that does not refer to documents but to the system of regulation and production of statements and the formation of discursive regularities. Most certainly Derrida also contributed widely to this tendency, as did others after him. See Michel Foucault, L’archéologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969) and Jacques Derrida, Mal d’archive (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1995). 2. See for instance my article, “Archives, mode de réemploi. Pour une archéologie du found footage,” CiNéMAS 24, no. 2–3 (Spring 2014): 97–122. 3. André Habib, “‘Think of Me as a Projection Accessory to the Kalart-Victor’: Looking at Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son through the Lens of a 16 mm Projector: Scrambled Notes on Technology and Experimental Pedagogy,” paper presented at the Film Studies Association of Canada annual conference, May 31, 2016, Calgary, Canada. 4. Email exchange with Tom Gunning, June 26, 2009. 5. Tom Gunning, “An Unseen Energy Swallows Space; The Space in Early Cinema and Its Relation to the American Avant-Garde Film,” in Film Before Griffith, ed. John L. Fell (Berkeley: University of California Press 1983), 355. 6. Noel Burch, “Primitivism and the Avant-Gardes: A Dialectical Approach,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 485. 7. Bart Testa, Back and Forth: Early Cinema and the Avant-Garde (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1992). 8. There are also wonderful exchanges between Iris Barry and Cornell, who lent MoMA a certain number of prints of his personal collection, and there’s mention of James Card trying to woo Cornell in 1949 into selling him his copy of Sumurun, a rare Lubitsch print he had in his possession, even providing him with an Emile Cohl film, Le tout petit Faust, in exchange, but to no avail it seems. The anecdote is reported in Deborah Solomon, Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts Publications, 2004), 200. 9. P. A. Sitney’s article, “The Cinematic Gaze of Joseph Cornell,” included two unidentified announcements for such screenings organized by Cornell. The first is a Film Soirée presented at the Norlyst Gallery, March 2 and 16, 1947, that was promoting, for the

Finding Early Cinema in the Avant-Garde  |  271 first program, “Exclusively French, early period (ca. 1905), Magic, fantasy, Max Linder, etc.,” and for the second: “American Nickelodeon: Comedy, Drama, Pearl White, Valentino, Clara Kimball Young, Chaplin, etc.” The second announcement is for a January 21, 1949, screening of “Early Films from the Unique Collection of Joseph Cornell” including “Méliès Magic,” Zecca’s A Detective’s Tour of the World, varieties and early fantasy films as well as Chaplin. The screening took place at the New Art School as part of its “The Subject of the Artist” series. The following week, on January 28, John Cage gave a lecture on “Indian Sand Painting.” 10. The kind people at MoMA (a deep thanks to Anne Morra) sent me the catalog list of Cornell film holdings, in which you find Méliès, Zecca, Lumière, Cohl, Sennett, and so on. 11. For a detailed firsthand account of the infamous Rose Hobart screening, see Julien Levy, Memoir of an Art Gallery (Boston: MFA Publications, 2003), 229–231. 12. It seems not many people know the story, but it is worth reading, in Ken Jacobs’s own words: “Yes, I was very complicit with Jonas re ROSE HOBART. Told him about it, raved about it, gave him the lp and blur filter. Was upset when his print was violet but couldn’t move him to change it. I had become angry with mindlessly abusive Cornell and when returning the film, more than likely the camera original, stupidly held back the music and filter. I had been traveling out to Cornell’s home on Utopia Parkway in Queens being ‘interviewed’ for a paying job creating order to his antique cut-outs (no person could be more wrong for the job but I was broke, hungry, desperate). He spent all the interview time venting his resentments. One day when I arrived his candybox illustration Mom directed me to the basement where he was, broom in hand, sweeping up. ‘I get almost as much pleasure as I do making a box in cleaning out a mouse-nest.’ He then turned to a shelf holding cans of film and took a handful and thrust them on me with the words, ‘You’re interested in film.’ The films included ROSE HOBART. He then explained use of the dark-blue filter and handed me the 331/3 rpm record I believe called Holiday in Brazil.” (Ken Jacobs, email exchange with author, March 8, 2018) 13. The earliest official screening of Rose Hobart (post the 1936 Julien Levy show) I was able to find was an October 21, 1963, screening at the Filmmaker’s Showcase (Gramercy Arts Theater). The ad presents the film under the title A Collage of Rose Hobart. It is presented, with other films by Cornell (Nymphlight, A Fable for Fountains, The Aviary, A Century of June), alongside works by Breer, Brakhage, and Menken. As for the many versions of Rose Hobart, thorough philological research needs to be done, not strictly into the reediting of East of Borneo (which Derek Long recently reconstructed) but also through comparing the various copies that exist at Anthology, MoMA (which has recently discovered another reedit of material culled from East of Borneo) and at other institutions like Centre Pompidou, and compare it with the at least three different DVD versions that exist, which show different tints and music, to determine exactly what we talk about when we talk about this elusive entity called Rose Hobart. It could also be worth looking into the Cornell journals of the 1940s and 1950s, which mention Rose Hobart and could lead us to believe it is much more a work in progress than a fixed work. 14. As is indicated on the invitation, The Midnight Party was “begun in the 1930s by Cornell and completed according to his instructions by Larry Jordan in 1969.” 15. Joseph Cornell Papers, Smithsonian American Art Museum (Box 14, folder 42). 16. For general discussion concerning these collage films, see P. A. Sitney, “The Cinematic Gaze of Joseph Cornell,” in Joseph Cornell, ed. Kynaston McShine (New York:

272  |  Provenance and Early Cinema Museum of Modern Art, 1980). There remains dispute as to the status of these films: should we consider them “finished” films and include them, on the same level, with other Cornell films, since he never showed them publicly? Their loose, almost random editing and their lack of formal unity can, on one level, indicate a haphazard assemblage of disparate material with no artistic intention, but on another level, can be perfectly justified and coherent with his poetics of collage and disruption. These collage films clearly point to the question and limits of intentionality when considering what should or should not be considered a “piece.” 17. When we know the incredible role Castle films played in the making of Bruce Conner’s films, in particular his A Movie (1958), where they account for at least 50 percent of the footage used, but also films, theater, and nervous system by Ken Jacobs such as Star Spangled to Death (1957–1959, 2003), his Theater of Unconscionable Stupidity Presents: Camera Thrills of the War (1981), A Man’s Home Is His Castle Films: The European Theater of Operations (1974), and The Whole Shebang (1984). 18. See Solomon, Utopia Parkway, 199; also, Michael Pigott, Joseph Cornell versus Cinema (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 1; Charles Simic, Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell (Hopewell, NJ: The Eco Press, 1992), 8, which mentions Doublier. Although the “New Jersey warehouse” seems to be corroborated by many sources, to my knowledge, it hasn’t been—and should be—investigated more thoroughly. 19. Kemp R. Niver, In the Beginning. Program Notes to Accompany One Hundred Early Motion Pictures (New York: Brandon Books, 1967) and Kemp R. Niver, The First Twenty Years: A Segment of Film History (Los Angeles: Locare Research Group, 1968). 20. See Ken Jacobs, “Beating My Tom, Tom,” Exploding, Special Issue on Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son (October 2000). It is worth noting that in this article, as well as every other mention of the making of the film, Jacobs talks about a Kalart-Victor Projector (although he sometimes also mentions a RCA Home-Sound Projector). After a long exploration, and thanks to the help of Ken and Flo, as well as John Klacsmann from Anthology Film Archives, I was able to actually see the projector Jacobs used, which is, in fact, a Victor Animatograph 1938 projector, model 40. The confusion may have come from the fact that, once hired at SUNY in Binghampton, he would have the film department buy the just-as-clunky and complicated to use Kalart-Victor 16 mm projectors. See Scott Macdonald, Binghampton Babylon (New York: Suny Press, 2015). 21. See Scott Macdonald, “Ken and Flo Jacobs,” in A Critical Cinema 3. Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 388. 22. Digital and video reworkings by Jacobs include A Tom, Tom Chaser (2002), Return to the Scene of the Crime (2008), Anaglyph Tom (Tom with Puffy Cheeks) (2008), and Nervous System Performances include The Impossible: Chapter One “Southwark Fair” (1975), The Impossible: Chapter Three “Hell Breaks Loose” (1980), The Impossible: Chapter Four “Schilling” (1980). See William Rose, “Annotated Filmography and Performance History,” in Optic Antics. The Cinema of Ken Jacobs, ed. Michele Pierson, David E. James, Paul Arthur (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 263–272. 23. See Hollis Frampton and Bill Simon, “Talking about Magellan: An Interview,” Millennium Film Journal nos. 7–8–9 (Winter 1980–81): 5–26; and On the Camera Arts and Other Consecutive Matters (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 250–251. 24. Hollis Frampton, “The Invention without a Future,” in On the Camera Arts and Other Consecutive Matters, 181–182.

Finding Early Cinema in the Avant-Garde  |  273 25. The original film, it was discovered a couple of years ago by David Kiehn, was shot— depending on who you speak to, between late March and April 11 or 14, 1906—by the Miles Brothers. 26. Although Eureka and Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son both rework early films (1905–1906), the results differ in great part due to the type of projector they used. The Victor projector used by Jacobs is not an analytic projector and does not allow a precise frame-by-frame advance. So what we see, in Jacobs’s film, is his performance on the material (frame by frame, detail by detail) and not a frame-by-frame photography. Eureka, by contrast, was made by reshooting off of a screen, frame by frame, the original material similar to the way an optical printer would. This technological difference seems decisive and often overlooked. 27. Jeffrey Skoller, Shadows, Specters, Shards. Making History in Avant-Garde Film (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 9. In an article I quoted earlier, I reviewed the different common mistakes films such as Eureka and Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son have attracted. See André Habib, “Archives, modes de réemploi,” op. cit. 28. On this point, see “Excerpts from Discussions with Ernie Gehr,” Film Culture 70–71 (1983): 122. 29. See “The Search for Lost Films. David Shepard discusses the importance, methods, costs and confusions of film archive work,” Film Comment 7, 4 (Winter 1971–1972): 62. 30. Email exchanges with David Kiehn, June 11 and 15, 2018; January 7, 2019. 31. Murray Glass began his business in the late 1960s but does not recall when the Market Street film entered his catalog. Although I have been unable to locate and compare this print, Ken Eisenstein provided me a transcription of the opening title of the film Emgee Film Library had in circulation. The film is dated 1905 and attributed (as was long believed) to Jack Kuttner. It also mentions: “This film was originally made in 2 parts but the second part is lost, while the first part was found in Jack’s attic after his death.” Concerning the original Ward Kimball nitrate print, both David Kiehn and Rick Prelinger are unsure if it has survived. It is clearly not housed in any official or known archive to this day. It could be worth mentioning that after having mentioned this to Ernie Gehr, he was able to find his print of the Market Street film and provide me with the following details: “Shortly after the splice the first credit appears, and it states: Prod. 5739 /Seq. Market /SC. st. /T. I / After the above, the title: A tour down / MARKET STREET / on a cable car / Before the Fire” (email exchange, June 23, 2019). Rick Prelinger’s response to this information was the following: “From the sound of it this looks like a copy of a roll from a studio stock footage library. The production number probably refers to a feature film, and the ‘SC. St.’ looks a lot like a studio library abbreviation for ‘street scene.’ There is a rumor that the Disney stock footage library contains a version of this film, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it had found its way into other libraries” (email exchange, June 23, 2019). A close analysis of the print used to make Eureka could possibly help identify the exact provenance of Gehr’s print and perhaps even establish another, yet unknown, source of the film. 32. A recently performed 8k scan of the Market Street film has provided very useful insight into the Vail nitrate print owned by Rick Prelinger: it “makes it much easier to see the gaps that were filled from a print at least one more generation removed, and also contains clues in the visible perfs that make clear that Frank Vail’s print may not be from an original neg.” (email exchange with Rick Prelinger, January 7, 2019).

274  |  Provenance and Early Cinema 33. Some details of David Kiehn’s discovery are found in the 60 Minutes story about the film that aired on October 17, 2010. For an interview with Kiehn concerning the discovery, see http://www.ilovelibraries.org/article/librarians-solve-mystery-100-year-old-film-aired​ -60-minutes (retrieved January 7, 2019). 34. I recount of this anecdote in my article “Le cinéma de réemploi considéré comme une archive: A trip down Market Street (1906) et Eureka (1974),” in L’avenir de la mémoire, ed. André Habib and Michel Marie (Lille: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2013), 147–158.

ANDRÉ HABIB is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of Montreal. He is author of L’attrait de la ruine and La main gauche de Jean-Pierre Léaud.

22 ERNIE GEHR’S THE COLLECTOR (2003) AND ERNIE GEHR THE COLLECTOR Ken Eisenstein

T

he opening shot of Ernie Gehr’s The Collector (2003, 18 min., DV) points backward. Two women wearing dark coats and patterned and sashed hats stand upon a balustraded terrace looking toward the left side of the frame. One of them gestures to something off-screen as she smiles, the angle her raised arm makes with her body almost aligning with the lines on the pier behind her. The full length of her limb is blackened by her sleeve, but most of her hand’s exposed skin is a tone of gray that melds into the base of a decorative planter along for the ride in this blackand-white still photograph from—my skill at dating fashions is minimal— perhaps the 1920s. The only thing in Gehr’s video that these two could be looking (back) at is his title card, or the few seconds of black, blank screen that follow it. But the video’s second shot—another still photograph, which appears (fashions again) to be more fin de siècle and which has greater signs of wear (blotches, speckles of white, some scratches)—changes that (see fig. 22.1). The frozen indication in/of shot one had hung in silence for eight seconds, and when it gives itself over, via a straight cut, to shot two’s city square with a small boy in a straw hat facing away from us, we get, more than the spatial sense of an eye-line match, the sensation that the two ladies are looking back in time. Their retrospective vantage is the same as Gehr’s was in 2003 when he gave specific order to the nearly 150 photographs that make up The Collector (despite my mention of the silent first shot, most of these photographs are accompanied in the video by the sound

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Figure 22.1. Title card and first two shots of Ernie Gehr’s The Collector.

of a speeding, slowing, or whistling locomotive). No, not identical in the stretch or length of years, but Gehr and the two gals all seem to be looking over the turns of centuries. The world premiere of Gehr’s The Collector took place in March 2004 at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater in Los Angeles in a program entitled “New Work by Ernie Gehr.” Also screened were the even newer (and also in its world premiere) The Morse Code Operator (or the Monkey Wrench) (2004, 23 min., DV), Passage (2003, 14 min., 16 mm), and Rear Window (1991, 10 min., 16 mm). Although Gehr had begun exhibiting the fruits of his then recent turn to digital video by the end of 2001, this 2004 screening may have been the first to combine Gehr’s new medium with his old.1 From 1967 through 2004, Gehr made over twenty films, all in 16 mm. Passage was the penultimate. Only Precarious Garden (2004, 13 min., 16 mm) remained destined for celluloid, and that title was soon folded into a variation of the Los Angeles lineup presented later that same year as part of the Forty-Second New York Film Festival’s “Views from the Avant-Garde.”2 The Collector and Passage remained a pair there, but Rear Window was replaced by Precarious Garden, and Morse (a found footage video made out of Griffith’s The Lonedale Operator [1911]) was switched with The Astronomer’s Dream (2004, 15 min., DV—a found footage video made from a small portion of Méliès’s The Eclipse, The Courtship of the Sun and Moon [1907], not, as one might have guessed, from Méliès’s 1898 film bearing Gehr’s title). Just as the ordering of photographs in The Collector is always a considered act of aesthetic combination, Gehr’s groupings for screenings are extremely telling. These two 2004 shows pitted older (early 1990s) and last (2003–2004) films against latest (2003–2004) videos, and in so doing they highlight more than a question about two mediums. While Rear Window, Passage, and Precarious Garden are all titles that in some sense signal the past, passing, and tenuous state of Gehr’s use of 16 mm, the three videos, all dependent on different original materials that reach even further back into the photographic

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past, form an enticing trio. It is a consideration of the provenance of Gehr’s sources in this three-pronged bouquet that centers this rumination on his collocations. This zigzagging effort to tease out the order (and content) for an early set of presentations from Gehr’s turn to video is one that also relates to a companion term of provenance: provenience. Injected by Paolo Cherchi Usai, via an article of Rosemary Joyce’s, at the start of Domitor 2018, provenience is an archaeological concept referring to “the original findspot of an object.”3 Joyce summarizes the difference between the two this way: “provenience is a fixed point,” provenance is “an itinerary” for the object in question. Gehr’s swapping of titles and/or order for his screenings is a deliberate way of searching for how best to make sense of a dense and demanding art, a reshuffling that allows one film or video to open up another in new ways. Of course, there is no true provenience when it comes to avant-garde film programming, only an ever-shifting ground of enriched contexts for first-time, or repeat, viewers. Yet there is a singular trail to Gehr’s creation and exhibition of any one of his films or videos over time. This loose conflation and confusion of provenience and provenance is fitting for Gehr’s case. Something similar might be said about Gehr’s approach to the idea of iteration, though here, amplificatory reaction needs to be separated from intuitive provocation. Almost as soon as P. Adams Sitney pointed out in print that Gehr does not work in serial form, Gehr began his Auto-Collider series (2009–2014).4 These videos are part of a now nearly twenty-year effort in the digital realm that has garnered very little analysis since none of Gehr’s electronic output is in distribution. What began with Paul Arthur’s review of Gehr’s first theatrical video as “a pendant” to his films forged in “obstinate pixels” has barely accrued its own necessary chain.5 Federico Windhausen singled out Crystal Palace (2002) and its play with interlacing in his 2011 discussion of film “vs.” video in the avant-garde.6 And Tony Pipolo, in his in-depth review of Gehr’s 2013 NYFF screening, traces a non-monadic (lovingly contra-Sitney?) arc among the five videos that were shown.7 In elaborating Pipolo’s insights into how Gehr’s images connect, and how technologies are considered over multiple titles, I hope to give concrete credence to Gehr’s unusual forms of seriality and autobiography. Let’s now return to an earlier pack of his videos where points must be eked out of etched surfaces. The inspirations that breathed life into The Collector have been addressed explicitly by its maker on at least two occasions. For Los Angeles

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in 2004, Gehr penned this elusive and allusive program note for his video: “What drives the collector? Textures. Colors. Dust. Phantasmagoric memories and associations. A scattering. The present. The passage of time. Sleep.”8 The opening question is a funny riff on the video’s soundtrack of train noises, but both that mode of transport and its exfoliated pun—training— also add layers of depth: phantom rides, skill, learning. Colors? But the whole piece’s source imagery is in black and white. Nevertheless, it pays to recall what Gehr’s friend Hollis Frampton said of “nineteenth-century photographs”: they “are properly spoken of as monochrome, within a range of sumptuous reds, browns, sepias; they were almost never black and white.”9 A more straightforward rationale for the video was coaxed from Gehr more than ten years later. For a 2017 conference at the Cinémathèque québécoise, André Habib asked Gehr to reflect formally on how he came across the source film for his Eureka (1974, 30 min., 16 mm). The result was a paper that Gehr read titled “Confessions of a Filmmaker-Collector.”10 In all of his years of 16 mm making, Gehr’s famous rephotographing of San Francisco’s Market Street remained his only work of found footage—a one-off—despite (or in part because of) the craze for this genre in the 1980s and 1990s. By the time of Habib’s prompt, which was well after Gehr’s shift to video, there had been an avalanche within Gehr’s oeuvre. Not only were The Collector, The Morse Code Operator (or the Monkey Wrench), and The Astronomer’s Dream in existence, but Panoramas of the Moving Image: 19th Century Mechanical Magic Lantern Slides & Dissolving Views (2005, 5-channel installation, DV), New York Lantern (2008, 14 min., DV), Abracadabra (2008, 29 min., DV), Carnival of Shadows (2012, 6-channel installation, DV), Street Scenes Panorama (2015, 4-channel installation, DV), and Creatures of the Night (2016, 24 min., DV) were too. All were comprised of preexisting media (magic lantern slides, early cinema, and animated silhouettes). Furthermore, two additional registers elongate this list. Gehr had returned to some of his own shot (now “found”?) footage from the early 1970s to make Essex Street Quartet (2004, 68 min., DV), which includes a borrowed title for one of its four parts in Workers Leaving the Factory (After Lumière) (2004, 12 min., DV).11 He also revisited almost all the above videos with what might be thought of as found again footage works: Photographic Phantoms (2013, 26 min., DV), 19th Century Mechanical Magic Lantern Slides & Dissolving Views (2009, 19 min., DV), In Slumberland (Thanks to Winsor McCay) (2014, 8 min., DV), Bon Voyage (2014, 7 min., DV [also a 3-channel installation]), Better than Ever (2015, 15 min., DV), Good Grief! (2015, 5 min., DV [formerly Three Pairs

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of Shoes]), and Street Scenes (2016, 32 min., DV). “Movies” begetting movies in Gehr’s videos is way off from one-off. While Gehr’s 2017 text mainly discussed the circumstances around Eureka, its last third turned to his life as a collector more broadly. From the start of his exploration of film, he “was intrigued by [its] roots and traditions . . . as well as the world into which [it] was born.” Beginning in the late 1960s, Gehr started to linger at camera stores, to haunt the Photographic Historical Society of New York’s fairs, and to hunt the ads in the pages of “a periodical whose title [he] believe[d] was ‘Film Collector’ [sic].” After decades of modest amassing, an unfortunate realization was made one night in the mid-1990s, sparking the impetus behind the twenty-first-century explosion in Gehr’s use of artifacts: I discovered fungus on a large number of [my] amateur stereo glass slides. These were one-of-a-kind slides that I was quite fond of. They were largely snapshots of families getting together or documenting their travels. None of them were personal to me. Yet, I wanted to save them. So I asked around . . . was advised that there was not much one could do. The best way to protect the good slides would be to get rid of the fungus damaged glass slides, which I eventually did. Still, it was unsettling to find out that I could not do anything to save them. And over time, that slowly ignited a desire to work with items within as well as with items outside my collection.

Gehr does not mention The Collector (made from these glass slides) by name as the first of the videos to grow out of his own collected matter, nor did he show The Collector at the Montréal conference despite that gathering being called “Cinema in the Eye of the Collector.” True, Gehr doesn’t mention any titles until the very end of his paper, and then it is only to announce what he will be showing at one of the conference’s evening screenings: Street Scenes was to have its world premiere on a double bill with Eureka (even this title is not given until Gehr’s last paragraph despite its having been discussed at length earlier). But the gap gets more curious when, after his prepared remarks, Gehr presented two excerpts to illustrate what he meant by “work[ing] with items within as well as with items outside” of his collection.12 “Outside” was demonstrated with Cotton Candy (2001, 49 min., DV)—here, and in the next example, the title from which the excerpt comes was not withheld. Shot at San Francisco’s Musée Mécanique, the clip is of Gehr’s camera looking in on a mutoscope featuring a sequence from a Harold Lloyd film. “Inside” was covered by Photographic Phantoms, Gehr’s

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“remake” of The Collector. Even though Gehr sets up the clip of Photographic Phantoms with a few PowerPoint slides of his own stereoscopic viewers and stereographs, he does not relate the background information that some of these same materials had been used previously in The Collector. Thus, part of a video was shown, preceded by a few images of the parts that it was made out of; however, all traces of an intervening original video were omitted. Why? Could Gehr still have been feeling the sting of Manohla Dargis’s review of his 2004 NYFF program where The Collector, the only entry that Dargis didn’t like, was called “a disappointingly literal video”?13 Was this why he remade it by adding flairs of flicker and negative in Photographic Phantoms? The Collector’s subtlety may be harder to be grabbed by, but it is in no way a letdown. To play Gehr’s original program note for The Collector off of Dargis’s use of the word literal: isn’t “a scattering” different than a littering? The latter is tossed waste; the former hints at something closer to sowing. To revive the titles of a now disowned pair of Gehr videos (Cinematic Fertilizer 1 [2007, 5 min.] and Cinematic Fertilizer 2 [2007, 8 min.]), The Collector and its origin story were cinematic fertilizer, a kind of scat or manure nourishing row upon row of seed that had been stored since the 1970s.14 Returning to that opening shot of The Collector, maybe our two female guides are indeed also pointing back to the black abyss between them and “The Collector / © Ernie Gehr.” Can’t that blank spacer between title and first photograph stand for the lag between Gehr’s purchases as a collector and the much later use of his collection as a basis for his own moving image making (e.g., the material for the 2012 Carnival of Shadows [exhibited in 2015] was bought in 1974)?15 Thankfully, this darkness can now be redeemed as a gestational one. You see, the first time a permanent spotlight illuminated Gehr, the filmmaker had already crossed into a self-imposed black hole. February and March 1971 saw the culmination of the first leg of Gehr’s artistic path, but in at least one important way, it all must have felt a bit fleeting. Having stumbled into his exposure to avant-garde film in 1966 by simply getting in out of the rain (and into a Filmmakers’ Cinematheque screening of films by Stan Brakhage) in midtown Manhattan, Gehr’s development took rapid steps. Within two years, his first 16 mm effort, Morning (1968, 4 min.), was being presented alongside a Brakhage film at the Cinematheque! That Gehr’s next four films (up through History [1970, 40 min.]) were included in MoMA’s conceptual art show Information, in the late summer of 1970, must have

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fueled an acceleration, for Gehr completed his next trio of films, including Serene Velocity (1970, 23 min.), in just a few months (instead of the two and a half years it took to make his first five). At the start of 1971, Gehr had a oneperson retrospective screening through MoMA’s Cineprobe series; it was also the occasion for a sneak peek at a work-in-progress called Still, which was finished shortly thereafter (1971, 55 min.). To celebrate all this, Film Culture bundled together Gehr’s program notes from the Cineprobe with a filmography and an interview (Gehr’s first) conducted by Jonas Mekas. However, given Film Culture’s sporadic publication schedule, these items did not appear during the year that Gehr had so triumphantly begun. The magazine’s inside cover around that time confessed that they “published quarterly (approximately),” but the summer, fall, and winter of 1971 flew past without a follow-up to the issue (no. 52 [Spring 1971]) that had gone to print before the Gehr section was complete. Finally, a full year after Mekas’s interview with the thirty-year-old filmmaker, issue nos. 53–54–55 (Spring 1972) came out. Gehr shared the front cover with Charlie Chaplin. He had been enshrined into avant-garde film’s history (and film history in general) front and center; pinned, but belatedly. During that crucial year’s delay, a dam had begun to build within Gehr. As the rest of 1971 turned to 1972 and on, Gehr began to abandon the completion of new films (one on a changing SoHo, another, a serial with the tentative title Animated Shorts) or finish them but withhold them from exhibition and distribution (e.g., Eureka).16 After the Cineprobe screening, no new films were shown in New York until 1979 (Eureka), and even highlights from Gehr’s first batch were only rarely revived in a city at the center of American avant-garde film and in which Gehr lived. The reasons for this whirlpool of withdrawal were multiple: finances were always an issue but so was a sense of being shut out and underappreciated.17 Looking back at the 1970s, it was as if the MoMA screening and Mekas interview that had launched the decade had put a pin in, instead of on, Gehr. The silver lining to this greatly slowed pace of production in the 1970s was that it allowed Gehr to spend creative energies inside other people’s, and another times’, creations. Through the devices and images he began collecting, or just playing with, at the fairs, or ordering, or just imagining, through the pages of Classic Film Collector (the full title of the periodical mentioned above), Gehr’s in/activities shed light on a skewed form of accumulation. In contrast to more formal auctions (with distanced blocks and bidders), Gehr got to inspect and handle much more than he would ever purchase.

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His store of objects and ideas was further stocked by things he could only read about and imagine (im/perfectly) in the pages of Classic Film Collector. This astonishingly rich publication was filled with testimonials like “how i started collecting [sic],” contemporaneous ads for New York shops (e.g., Cinemabilia) and old magic lantern ads from American Boy, updates on Henri Langlois’s and Kemp Niver’s activities (reprinted from other news sources), original articles on Winsor McCay and Méliès, classifieds, cartoons on film collecting by Mike Avril, and films for sale by companies such as Historical Films, I. K. Meginnis, Griggs Moviedrome, Glenn Photo Supply, Blackhawk Films, Northwest Custom Movies, and Reel Images.18 Gehr’s sending away for films from these sellers could be seen as a replacement for the experience of awaiting the processing of his own footage or answer prints. Perhaps more exciting than seeing how something he shot turned out was seeing what had been recorded without him, before him.19 Fascinatingly, Gehr had noted a new direction in his post-Cineprobe conversation with Mekas that, while not directly foreseeing his role as a collector, offered a parallel ethos of the matter-of-fact and the readymade (the italics are mine): “I am very happy with [Still]. It’s quite a bit different from what I had done before, though related. It goes into an area of film that I’m interested [in] going into now. There are a lot of things that happen in this film and they all pass as naturally and unemphasized as the images, as 24 frames pass through the projector gate every second.”20 Still’s long static takes outside a street-level Manhattan window were only slightly more “happen[ing]” than the actual view at any given time since Gehr had superimposed second takes over first ones, fusing two temporal hunks together. This, compared to his earlier films, which had—via single frame time exposures, distortive camera movements, and, most famously in Serene Velocity, throbbing focal length changes—pulsated much more emphatically. The less intrusive technique of Still was more meditative, more revealing of the world passing by. An article by Regina Cornwell on the first wave of Gehr’s career, written in November 1972 but not published until 1977 (Film Culture’s inside cover then regretted “no regular financial backing” and so new issues were “published only after we collect [from subscriptions, back issues, private gifts, etc.] enough money to pay the printer for the previous issue”), begins with this line about Still: “Looking through the screen frame onto the illusion of a New York street, one begins to perceive what could be called ghosts—ghosts and ghosts of ghosts—illusions and illusions of illusions for one hour as the researches of Lumière and Méliès seem to converge.”21

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Cornwell’s comparison was prescient: Eureka, to say nothing of all the digital videos based in pre-, para-, and early cinema, was yet to come. It is also startling. Gehr knew of his developing interests, but did Cornwell? Did she glean them from Still? Gehr’s digital making quickly returned him to the procedures of Eureka. That this was fully inaugurated by a phase that began with a Lumièresque source (the amateur stereoscopic glass slides of, as Cornwell described the foci of the French pioneers, “daily events”), and a Méliès and a Griffith film, recapitulates film history (the ca. 1895, ca. 1896, ca. 1908 trajectory covers early cinema’s actualities and trick films and transitional cinema’s mode of narrative).22 At the same time, it dips back into a static forbearer by recalling the Lumières’ photographic plate business. An added twist in these videos has to do with the materiality of their sources. At no point in The Collector is it made explicit that each of the images is but one of a stereoscopic pair. While they all contain an off-screen sibling image that was taken just off to the side, these stereoscopic origins stay cloaked. The closest we come to this extratextual knowledge (gained, in my case, during a studio visit with Gehr) from the video itself is in hints buried in its two most unusual shots (see fig. 22.2). Almost exactly halfway through The Collector is an image that raises the notion of halves: a photograph of a mustached man on the far left of Gehr’s frame gets cut off by a white ground that fills the right side. Upon it are handwritten markings and words: “ / 2 – Viaje a Europá con Papá.” That no other photograph has been bisected like this makes this one stand out. There is likely more image off to the left, and the figure we do see would be repeated on the far right of the full rectangular slide’s doubled image, the words being written in the space between stereo. The man (papa?), who is the only subject in this framing, may simply be looking on over the real (absent) subject’s shoulder. The other clue is even more intriguing and occurs earlier. A little over two minutes into The Collector, the photo of a young boy being buttoned up (by his mother?) flips horizontally. The mirrored image, slightly altered in terms of cropping and a degree or two of rotation, follows a version of itself after a cut. Even though the second image does not have the true perspectival difference that stereoscopes require, it nevertheless metaphors that device’s need for approximate doubling. Furthermore, the flipping references the glass base of the stereograph Gehr used. As easy as it is to horizontally flip images digitally (which is what Gehr in fact did with a different moment from his handheld shot of the slide), only vertical axis rotation is possible by hand with nontransparent stereograph cards. Glass, on the other hand,

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Figure 22.2. The two tells from The Collector (top) and two telling frames, about twenty seconds apart, from the fourth minute of The Astronomer’s Dream (bottom). That the oddballs from The Collector evoke a mama and a papa speaks to generating founts. N.B. the blurred lines in Astronomer’s occasionally lift, offering glimpses of an underneath.

can be seen through, even if it does put more distance and interference (the thickness of the glass) between the image and the eye. This brings us squarely to the importance of surfaces. As counterpoint to the veiling of provenance in The Collector, The Astronomer’s Dream, despite its titular (and visual) disguise(s), revels in constantly and overtly prompting wonder about its source material. One of its most striking characteristics is all of the dust and hair that is visible throughout, so-called imperfections, which urged me to ask Gehr about his Méliès “master” for The Astronomer’s Dream: it was his own 16 mm print of The Eclipse I was told! This means that Gehr’s tracks into the digital age, his passage from film to video, made early pit stops into his collecting past, emotional layovers with emulsion, callings on celluloid and all that clings (cf. Gehr’s post-2006 found footage videos made from digital copies of early cinema [and note 22]). Did he buy the Méliès print from Classic Film Collector? Reel Images had run a big ad for that title in their supplement to the Winter 1977 issue. Such hypothesizing about genesis and encounters—about pathways from inspiration to circumstance to completion to reception—envelops the conceptual, the material, and the biographical. Entertaining provenance from all of these sides is paramount for studying an artist (and art) as complex as

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Gehr(’s). More than defining answers, we critics are responsible for raising proven questions.

Notes 1. “To the best of [Gehr’s] recollection” it was the first (email with the author, September 29, 2018). Cotton Candy (2001, 49 min., DV) was screened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in November 2001; it was a MoMA commission. Fall of 2002 saw three videos presented at the New York Film Festival: Glider (2001, 33 min., DV), Crystal Palace (2002, 27 min., DV), and City (2002, 35 min., DV) (see Jared Rapfogel, “The New York Film Festival 2002—A Report,” Senses of Cinema, accessed October 3, 2018, http://sensesofcinema​ .com/2002/festival-reports/new_york/). I saw my first Gehr videos, Glider and Cotton Candy, at Chicago’s then new Gene Siskel Film Center in April 2002. Tom Gunning held a public conversation with Gehr after the screening. I would like to thank André Habib, Kaveh Askari, Mark Anderson, IUP’s reviewers, and, especially, Josh Yumibe for their various forms of feedback on this presentation/paper. 2. For a compiled list of what was shown at “Views from the Avant-Garde” over the years see Herb Shellenberger, “Views from the Avant-Garde [1997–2012],” MUBI, accessed October 3, 2018, https://mubi.com/lists/views-from-the-avant-garde-1997-2012. For reviews from a number of these years, see Michael Sicinski, The Academic Hack, accessed October 3, 2018, http://academichack.net/index2.htm. 3. The quotes in this line and the next are from Rosemary A. Joyce, “From Place to Place: Provenience, Provenance, and Archaeology,” in Provenance: An Alternate History of Art, ed. Gail Feigenbaum and Inge Reist (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2012), 48. 4. P. Adams Sitney, Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 197. Sitney begins his chapter on Gehr (in a book partly concerned with Whitmanesque sequencing): “Ernie Gehr presents each of his 16 mm films, digital films, and installations as an autonomous monad. He never organized his films into series.” See the long footnote on the same page for more nuance, including mention of the Essex Street videos that I briefly touch on below. 5. Paul Arthur, “Cotton Candy,” Film Comment 38, no. 1 (January/February 2002): 75. 6. Federico Windhausen, “Assimilating Video,” October 137 (Summer 2011): 69–83. 7. Tony Pipolo, “Digital Conversion: Ernie Gehr’s New Work,” Artforum 52, no. 5 (January 2014): 63–64. The videos discussed are Photographic Phantoms (2013), Winter Morning (2013), The Quiet Car (2013), Auto-Collider XVIII (2011), and Brooklyn Series (2013). 8. “New Work by Ernie Gehr,” REDCAT, accessed October 3, 2018, https://www.redcat​ .org/event/new-work-ernie-gehr-0. Note the repetitions of the words phantasmagoric, passage, and powers in the full page of Gehr’s program notes. 9. Hollis Frampton, “Eadweard Muybridge: Fragments of a Tesseract,” in Bruce Jenkins, ed., On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 31. Frampton’s essay originally appeared in Artforum (March 1973). Gehr himself has written about Muybridge, and my comments on the opening shot of The Collector recall the kind of observation he makes about an ax and a stump (19) in one of Muybridge’s photographs. See Ernie Gehr, “Aspects of Eadweard Muybridge’s Photographic Work,” in Radical Light: Alternative Film & Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–2000, ed. Steve Anker, Kathy Geritz, and Steve Seid (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 19–25.

286  |  Provenance and Early Cinema 10. The program for the conference can be seen on TECHNÈS’ site, accessed June 15, 2020, http://technes.org/en/conferences/#1573351611502-c72ed0eb-3302. An extra thanks to Habib for sharing a file of Gehr’s text with me. Quotations in the next paragraph come from it (3, 4, 6). 11. The footage for Essex Street Quartet had been used once before in an installation. For details on the exhibit for which this much shorter version of Workers Leaving the Factory, 1895, Lumière Brothers (1995), and its companion, The Sneeze, 1894, Edison Company (1995) were created, see my “‘Where Time Does Not Play’: Ernie Gehr Turning on a Dime,” in Ernie Gehr: Bon Voyage, ed. Andrea Bellini (Milan: Mousse Publishing, 2015), 42. 12. Video documentation of Gehr’s full presentation can be found on Vimeo, accessed October 3, 2018, https://vimeo.com/230469588. 13. Manohla Dargis, “Exploring Some Brief but Extraordinary Views of the Ordinary World,” New York Times, October 16, 2004, accessed October 3, 2018, https://www​.ny​ti​me​s​ .com/2004/10/16/arts/movies/film-festival-reviews-exploring-some-brief-but-extra​ordi​nary​ -325627.html. 14. On the disappearance of Cinematic Fertilizer 1 and 2 cf. Shellenberger with “Film and Digital Works 1967–2014,” in Bellini, 128–130. 15. Sean Fuller, “Talking with Ernie Gehr about His Carnival of Shadows,” MoMA’s Inside/Out, accessed July 1, 2019, https://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2016/02/09/talk​ ing-with-ernie-gehr-about-his-carnival-of-shadows/. 16. Sitney discusses this never released (a key fate for Sitney) serial (207). 17. More on this can be found in my “Turning on a Dime,” 27–29. 18. The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center has a nearly full run of Classic Film Collector from 1962–1978 on microfilm. An overview is given in Samuel K. Rubin, Moving Pictures and Classic Images: Memories of Forty Years in the Vintage Film Hobby (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2004). N.B. Classic Film Collector went through various name changes; Rubin was its founder and editor. 19. For some of the titles that Gehr has collected over the years, see his 2012 program at the Harvard Film Archive, accessed October 12, 2018, https://library.harvard.edu/film​ /films/2012janmar/gehr.html. A few originally announced films (Little Tich, Slippery Jim, and The Land Beyond the Sunset) were substituted out (for Serpentine Dances, The Dancing Pig, Flatiron Building, and Incline Panorama). 20. “Ernie Gehr Interviewed by Jonas Mekas, March 24, 1971,” Film Culture 53–54–55 (Spring 1972): 35–36. 21. Regina Cornwell, “Works of Ernie Gehr from 1968 to 1972,” Film Culture 63–64 (1977): 29. The quote in the next paragraph is from the same page. 22. The Griffith based Morse was reworked and shown in 2006 at the NYFF. It held a spot (with that 2006 date) on Gehr’s 2011 filmography (provided to me at that time by the filmmaker), but it too is now absent from the list in Bellini (see note 14). In Sicinski’s review of the NYFF screening, he writes that Morse’s source is the “National Film Preservation Foundation’s DVD” (see note 2).

KEN EISENSTEIN is Assistant Professor of English in the Film/Media Studies Program at Bucknell University. He has published numerous essays on experimental cinema and is completing a book on Hollis Frampton.

23 FLICKER Thom Andersen Takes Muybridge to the Movies Eszter Polonyi

I

n his film about the maverick Englishman Eadweard Muybridge: Zoopraxographer (1974–1975), the California-based filmmaker Thom Andersen seldom repeats an image.1 With the several thousand chronophotographic sequences by Muybridge, Andersen had no dearth of choice. When the same passage appears twice in his film, it does not so much produce repetition as introduce variation (see fig. 23.1). Andersen shows twice Muybridge’s six-shot sequence of the silhouette of a man launching himself into the air and then clearing a four-foot hurdle. The film’s soundtrack clarifies the difference between the two iterations, accompanying the first with the sonorous bowing of a string instrument and the second with a spritely pizzicato plucking of strings. First, we get a good look at each of the sequence’s six images, and when they reappear, they roll by in quick succession. We contemplate them as six separate images and then as six moments in one leap. The difference is as abrupt as the phase change between an object that is stationary versus one in movement. Or the apperception of six photographs versus one moment of cinema. If Andersen repeats the image, it is to chart the film’s field of concern in the distance between still and moving images. At least one viewer of Andersen’s film describes the film’s merit in its ability to span the leap between still and moving images. Surveying the impact of Muybridge on art of the United States in the 1970s, Tom Gunning recalls seeing the film at its New York premiere: “In 1974, Thom Andersen’s

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Figure 23.1. Eadweard Muybridge: Zoopraxographer. Dir. Thom Andersen. Ed. Morgan Fisher. New Yorker Films, 1974–1975. 16 mm. Stills.

extraordinary documentary film opened at the New York Film Festival, allowing contemporary audiences to experience the thrill of the transformation into motion, as Muybridge’s actual photographs (as opposed to drawings based on them) were animated for the first time.”2 The effect Gunning describes in the transition can be related to the optical illusion whereby the eye blends many distinct images if they are viewed in rapid succession, one of the founding concepts of cinema as a historically distinct mode of moving image construction. Gunning implies that viewers prior to Andersen’s had not had the opportunity to see Muybridge’s motion studies in movement, that this film constituted the first appearance of Muybridge’s motion studies in the physical location of a movie theater and in the cultural and operational idiom of “the movies.” Muybridge has long held the status of one of cinema’s eminent pioneers. Given the consistency with which the discourse of cinema’s origins has returned to Muybridge’s work in the late 1870s and 1880s, it is somewhat remarkable that his work would not have appeared on film prior to 1974. If Muybridge really did significantly contribute to the appearance of the moving picture, why did it take almost a century before his work made it into a movie theater? One cannot have Muybridge champion the medium and then disappear from its main site of exhibition. Andersen’s film proposes a reading of Muybridge’s photographic oeuvre in which its relationship to cinema is far from straightforward. The presence of certain conventions of documentary filmmaking

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may suggest unequivocal and objective treatment of its material. Such is the accompaniment of the images by a script, read out by the authoritative voice of Dean Stockwell, or the rigor lent to the sixty-minute feature by its chronological structure, which starts with Muybridge’s early years as book salesman and landscape photographer in the 1860s and 1870s and then surveys his development of chronophotography on Leland Stanford’s ranch before focusing on the images of animal and human locomotion created at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1880s. As convincing as we may find Andersen’s presentation of the motion studies, their appearance in the filmic medium was far from historically necessary or technically effortless. This paper argues that Muybridge appealed to Andersen because the transfer of his work to film required a break with by-then sedimented practices of film production. It demonstrates this through the series of steps Andersen took in his transfer of the motion studies onto individual frames of film stock. If Andersen seems to build toward the cinematic in this film, this is accomplished only by way of extensive repurposing of what was at the time understood as cinema. Rather than a neutral medium, film acts as a cipher or code that emphasizes certain aspects of chronophotography while repressing others. The more faithfully he reconstructs Muybridge’s system of Zoopraxography, the more static his images appear to be. At the point of closest encounter between the two systems or apparati, Muybridge’s images actually appear to vanish completely, only flaring up in flashes between patches of dark, empty film. Rather than predestined for movement, the flicker effect of his images places them at odds with the optical and technical means by which the impression of movement would normally be secured. What is at stake in the film is the art historical issue of provenance— that is, the extent to which the appearance of any image can be accounted for by way of a moment of origin rather than a series of encounters or events. These motion studies have to be located in between the efforts of Andersen and Muybridge, in between apparati of movement and stasis, in between the 1880s–1890s and the 1960s–1970s. Andersen shows the history of the motion studies to be multiply determined and temporally nonlinear. In this sense, their flickering on film is created by neither one nor the other image maker. On the one hand, the flicker was the well-known effect of inconsistencies in the design and use of early and protocinematic devices, quickly becoming effaced with efforts to standardize and consolidate the film apparatus. However, it reemerged in the series of experiments on the film apparatus by an international group of structuralist filmmakers, to

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which this paper hopes to prove Andersen to have at one point belonged. If the motion studies on this film flicker, it is because they are the result of returning to the past from the present, and the return of the past in the present. Muybridge was theatricalized at the very moment that the cinema no longer had clear preference for either the site of the movie theater or the assemblage of practices and techniques constituting its equipment. The flicker is the symptom of this hybridity.

The Zoopraxiscope Muybridge’s connection to moving image history is a recurring trope in historical treatments of his work. One does not have to look far to find claims that Muybridge was the “inventor,” “father,” “pioneer” of the moving image.3 Already in film history written in the 1930s and 1940s, Muybridge’s legacy is defended as heatedly by some as it is contested by others.4 For a time, the debate over Muybridge’s contribution to cinema history revolved around his anticipation of and potential influence on one of the first commercially successful mechanisms for the photographic capture of motion— namely, Thomas Edison’s Kinematograph.5 But his connection to cinema has persisted beyond the technicalities of precedence with an enduring appreciation for the photographic apparatus he devised on Stanford’s ranch in California and the conceptual implications of his motion analysis. Andersen’s focus in Muybridge in many ways departs from the more heroic renditions of Muybridge’s life and work. For one, the Horse in Motion series, and indeed the chapter of his life at Palo Alto, occupies a fraction of his attentions. As suggested by the film’s title, Andersen organizes his study around the Zoopraxiscope. Designed by Muybridge in the fall of 1879, the Zoopraxiscope appeared relatively coincidentally with the motion studies and contributed significantly to their soon-to-be-gained fame (see fig. 23.2). Despite the important role it was to play in securing the images’ visibility and publicity, the Zoopraxiscope is treated in relative isolation from his chronophotography.6 This might partially be because Muybridge did not appear to consider it entirely his own invention, or at least never sought to patent it.7 The device carried with it none of the scandal surrounding his motion studies, for instance in 1882 when the images he was about to present to the Royal Society in London appeared in a volume called The Horse in Motion that had been published by someone else.8 Not to mention that the device had a jawbreaker of a name.9 But more to the point is that the Zoopraxiscope did not always achieve the effect Muybridge had intended.

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Figure 23.2. Eadweard Muybridge: Zoopraxographer. Dir. Thom Andersen. Ed. Morgan Fisher. New Yorker Films, 1974–1975. 16 mm. Stills.

Instead, the device introduced several unforeseen and perplexing issues with regard to Muybridge’s presentation of his work. Muybridge’s intention in designing the Zoopraxiscope had initially been scientific. It followed on several experiments by Muybridge and Stanford to obtain an impression of their images in movement. At the heart of this enterprise was an assumption made about the alignment of purpose between the motion study and the moving image. Just as the separation of a movement into successive phases constituted the possibility of its intellectual analysis, Muybridge and Stanford set out believing that the same could be gained from their recombination into an image in movement. And at least on the basis of the initial success of the Zoopraxiscope, there was little to indicate otherwise. Muybridge deployed the Zoopraxiscope at a series of lectures in Paris and London, largely to lavish praise.10 And while Muybridge would continue to retain the enthusiasm of the public for several years to come, he experienced increasing difficulty in securing the support of scientists. Not only did the familiarity of the moving image fail to serve as guarantee of the rigor of his process, to Muybridge’s rival Etienne-Jules Marey, it exploited the very “weaknesses of our senses” that he had designed his own instruments to supplement.11 As Muybridge discovered within a few years of introducing the Zoopraxiscope, the moving image not only did not assist scientific analysis; it also prevented it. More than science, the Zoopraxiscope may better be described as serving the purposes of spectacle. Even as he accepted an appointment at the University of Pennsylvania, Muybridge took the Zoopraxiscopic device on lecture tours that were meant to raise subscription figures on the multiple volumes of his forthcoming Animal Locomotion. At the point where Muybridge’s talks become a numbers game, the moving image served a purpose no different from that of any of the other optical toys or instruments by which lanternists, for instance, would regale the public.12 Muybridge’s

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willingness to cater to the public would be why Gunning would regard the Zoopraxiscope as an expression of Muybridge’s identity as entrepreneur.13 Far from analytic purposes, the function of image synthesis appeared to be “multisensual illusionist entertainment,” an early example of the hyperrealism later described as Bazin’s myth of total cinema.14 And it is with this understanding of the Zoopraxiscope as appealing to the desire for illusion that we begin to see how it aligns with the cinematic. Andersen’s film in many ways follows the format assumed by Muybridge to display his images in lectures. Like an itinerant lecturer, the film travels through a network of distributors that ensures it a learned audience far and wide. The person of the exhibitor, in this case represented by the voice of Dean Stockwell, narrates Andersen’s script in voiceover. The range of images he assembles in this film follows the composition of Muybridge’s lectures. For instance, the lectures allegedly continued to include images from Muybridge’s earlier career as landscape photographer, perhaps retaining the early lantern slide lecturers’ interest in putting together travelogues, but with the majority of images coming from the motion studies Muybridge made for the University of Pennsylvania. As if Andersen had followed the announcements for Muybridge’s lecture series at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1892, he includes “a selection of the consecutive phases of movements by Men, Women, Children, Horses, Dogs, Cats, Wild Animals, and Birds, photographed while they were jumping, boxing, dancing, galloping, trotting, kicking, flying, or engaged in other muscular exercises.”15 Like Muybridge, Andersen shows his motion studies as both sets of multiple photographs appearing simultaneously in the image frame and as a sequence of individual images that are projected in rapid succession, or to use the words of the announcement, that are “put in motion with the semblance of actual life by the Zoopraxiscope.”16 And finally, the construction of a theater hall especially designed for showing Zoopraxographic (i.e., “electro-photographic investigation of the movements of animals”) at the Exposition seems largely commensurate with Andersen’s general aim to inscribe Muybridge within the social, aesthetic, and physical space of the movie theater. If Andersen appears to be following a specific model of displaying Muybridge’s images, it is because of the analogy he is building between the Zoopraxiscope and the cinema. At the time Andersen made his film in 1974, he did not have access to the instruments by which Muybridge reconstituted the motion; his battery of cameras had broken down. Very few

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models of the Zoopraxiscope are known to exist, and, even if he had access to such a device, its use would have little served Andersen’s purpose. While scholarly curiosity and even archival research informed his pursuits—of which there is at least one piece of evidence in Andersen’s acknowledgment by the historian R. B. Haas17—Andersen was approaching Muybridge from within a set of pressing issues regarding the modern film apparatus. Insofar as they could be aligned with the modern cinema, Muybridge’s projected lectures need to be contextualized within these contemporary concerns. Cinema underwent a dramatic shift at the time Andersen worked on his Muybridge. The 1970s saw the emergence of video, a storage medium whose commercial success threatened the viability of photocelluloid-based film practice. But it also challenged the expectation of film’s continued consumption within the setting of the movie theater.18 Given the range of cheap copies of films made available by VHS, it no longer made sense to be banking on people regularly going to the movies. To be making a film to be viewed in this setting in the mid-1970s was to proceed with newfound awareness of the way cinema had exceeded this format, both recently and in the past. For a filmmaker like Andersen but also the editor on Muybridge, Morgan Fisher, a film in this space was warranted only if it provided insight into the alternatives to the kind of filmmaking to which it had for decades been subject.19 It only made sense for films that had drawn on materials and techniques from outside of the bounds of the standard film apparatus. Muybridge constituted a potentially critical intervention in the exhibition format of the movie theater. For the appearance of his chronophotographs within a theatrical venue was in no way a foregone conclusion. In fact, despite the apparent similarities between his projection show and other competing devices at the time, Muybridge experienced none of the success of, for instance, the Kinetoscope he had allegedly helped inspire. Comparing the Zoopraxiscope with the device that had been slated to failure by its designers, the Cinematographe, Andersen writes that, “however much more respect [the Zoopraxiscope was granted] on its debut . . ., it was an invention without a future. Muybridge made the first motion photographic pictures. But he was in no sense an inventor of the modern cinema.”20 Instead of gradually shifting out of his lanternist lecturer format so as to be able to enter the space of the movie theater, time made it increasingly clear that Muybridge did not—or could not—match his competition.21 This

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ostensible failure to cater to the expectations of the average movie theatergoer was precisely what made the Zoopraxiscope of interest to Andersen and Fisher.

The Flicker “Between each frame, when the shutter closes over the lenses the strip of film is repositioned. There is a moment of darkness, a fragment of time which is not recorded. Time like any known quantity, is infinitely divisible.”22 Projecting images at less than full speed, the Zoopraxiscope must have put on a great show. Delivered in a sequence of distinct but successive phases, prosaic gestures like walking, strolling, jumping, or smoking assume the capacity for riveting drama. They are the textbook definition of suspense. The trajectory they take is never unclear; every viewer knows how the hurdler is going to land, how the javelin thrower will turn, the batter swing. But their deferred execution remains an inexhaustible source of anticipation. It is perhaps this variable tempo that Gunning had in mind when he remembered the “thrill of transformation” produced by Andersen’s film. Unsurprisingly, this is also where Andersen locates the spectacular aspect of Muybridge’s talks. “On his lecture tours,” the voiceover elaborates, “the individual photographs from the plates were projected on the screen as stills, then animated by the Zoopraxiscope, its wheel accelerating until finally, life-like motion was reproduced.”23 With each gesture executed at a different speed, the viewer never knows when a sequence might pass the threshold between still and moving. Which is why the viewer might expect the projection of a motion study at full speed to be gratifying. Something it is not. The final chapter of Andersen’s film, titled “Retrospective,” is where he begins to animate several motion studies from the University of Pennsylvania years (see fig. 23.3). And while these images are ostensibly meant to amplify the development of a single gesture, they somewhat fall short of their target. For neither the trajectory nor the development of these photographed gestures is clear. Jerks and spasms mar the fine swing of an athlete’s arm balancing a bowling bat. Flashes of light interrupt a woman and child’s run. The background switches between a wall of horizontal stripes, vertical stripes, and both together. Virtually all the studies in this segment are subject to the effects of a pulsing vibration in light. The effect is remarkable when one realizes that the only change has been the swiftness with which images succeed each other, or Andersen’s incremental approximation of

Figure 23.3. Eadweard Muybridge: Zoopraxographer. Dir. Thom Andersen. Ed. Morgan Fisher. New Yorker Films, 1974–1975. 16 mm. Stills.

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the frame rate necessary to produce the illusion of motion. As Muybridge’s photographs progress toward and accomplish motion, they dissolve into a convulsive fizzle. Muybridge may have been aware of certain imperfections in his projected images. In examining the Zoopraxiscope, the scholar Stephen Herbert noted that the number of images that were being fed into the device frequently varied. Drawing on the mechanics of prior rotating optical devices, the Zoopraxiscope projected images as they appeared along the perimeter of glass discs. Muybridge had in total two sizes of disc on which the successive phases of a given movement were to be arranged (sixteen inches and twelve inches in diameter), meaning that if Muybridge wanted to rotate through several discs at an even speed, the number of phases on each disc would need to remain the same. But as can be seen from the discs that remain, the number of phases range—rather wildly—between nine and thirty-five, averaging around twelve.24 The exact consequences to such unevenly spaced sequences running through the same projection device are difficult to estimate, but what is clear is that Muybridge was having to rotate his discs at multiple speeds (or frequency of images per second). And this may have caused issues—specifically, a flicker. At least one attendee of Muybridge’s lectures complained of flicker. Reporting from Berlin in 1891, Bruno Meyer notes the “perfectly terrible movements” of Muybridge’s projected silhouettes: “As a result of the insufficient numbers of phases of movement, the motion was presented not steadily, but intermittently, and it had about it something fidgety, jerky, . . . [a] tortuous commotion [that] now further intensified in that one saw not a single animal in motion, but four or five ‘identical’ one after the other.”25 Meyer’s description of the images’ faltering pace can readily be attributed to the speed of projection falling below the rate necessary for the projector’s shuttering mechanism to remain invisible. Muybridge had slowed down in his cranking. The flicker might be regarded as an artifact of early film projection.26 Until the introduction of external regulatory mechanisms in the late 1900s, early film projectors produced often abrupt changes in luminescence.27 This could be due to the flaring of a carbon arc source or, more commonly, the sudden visibility of the film projector’s shuttering mechanism, which had to do with the manual cranking of early projection equipment.28 These issues not only also applied to the Zoopraxiscope but were compounded with a low (and variable) frame rate that kept the projected images shifting in and out

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of a flicker. In a sense, Muybridge’s flicker marked a hard line between him and early cinematic apparatuses. For while mechanically regulated cranking mechanisms would resolve the first set of issues, there was nothing to be done about the second—which is where we can begin to understand the value, to a filmmaker like Andersen, of theatricalizing Muybridge. Once again in the postwar period, the flicker was considered an inalienable property of the film apparatus. All forms of film projection, insofar as they involve a film passing in between a light source and a sectored disc, produce a flicker. Without the flicker intermittently interrupting the stream of images, there would be no image. But as a constitutive feature of film, the flicker was also not meant to be visually evident. So when in 1969 P. Adams Sitney referred to the flicker as one of the four characteristics of avant-garde filmmaking, he used it to inscribe the film apparatus within a reflexive study of itself.29 When in the early to mid-1960s, Tony Conrad began researching the range of frequencies producing the flicker effect, he found a way of producing nonstandard shutter speeds within the material limits of the standard film stock projected at twenty-four frames per second.30 If the film ensuing from Conrad’s investigations, The Flicker, would become a staple example of structuralist filmmaking for Sitney, this was because the conditions of any film’s projection had been made tangible by the flicker. To Conrad and to Andersen, the flicker was a trace left in the image by the film apparatus. Andersen’s choice to work on Muybridge stemmed from a structuralist concern. This becomes most apparent in the segment at the end of Muybridge. Although it has not been cataloged independently of Muybridge in any of Andersen’s filmographies, this part of the film might be considered as a flicker film in its own right (see fig. 23.4). In it, Andersen reconstructs the motion study by Muybridge in which two unclothed female models step toward one another and meet for an embrace at the center of the image. Markedly sensual on account of the gesture, the models’ nudity, and the sudden eruption of color, the short piece provides a summation of Muybridge’s photographic apparatus. Andersen has divided the short into segments of image and darkness, seemingly in recognition of the visibility of the Zoopraxiscope’s shuttering mechanism. Like Conrad in The Flicker, Andersen shifts through several ratios of image to darkness. The sense in which the film exhibits a full spectrum of flicker rates is clearer in Andersen’s case, as the film begins with lengthy stretches of darkness that are interrupted with flashes of an image and progresses by a gradual shortening

Figure 23.4. Eadweard Muybridge: Zoopraxographer. Dir. Thom Andersen. Ed. Morgan Fisher. New Yorker Films, 1974–1975. 16 mm. Stills.

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of the interval of darkness between the images. As the film nears the point at which the length of the interval matches that of the image segment, the eye starts to see the discontinuity as a vigorous flicker. At this point, the image no longer clearly registers, and the eye transitions to watching a burning ring of afterimages. Arriving just as the lips of the two female models meet in a kiss, Andersen’s flicker locates the tangibility of the apparatus within this sensual gesture. The Zoopraxiscope more or less failed Muybridge. It systematically marred projection of his images and forced him to compromise on the standards of scientific accuracy to which he believed himself to be held accountable.31 But it was this very flicker created by the Zoopraxiscope used as a moving-image device that made it into a productive object of study to Andersen in the 1970s. On the one hand, the intermittencies of image Muybridge produced suggested a discrepancy between his process and the techniques and technologies traditionally identified with cinema. As Andersen notes in the soundtrack, Muybridge “was in no sense an inventor of the modern cinema.” The Zoopraxiscope, along with its attendant system of recording apparatuses, produced a jumping, spluttering supply of images that no scientist or filmmaker could expect their viewers to observe in an attitude of unblinking attentiveness for the length of a feature film. Despite indicating structural incompatibility between the Zoopraxiscope and the modern cinema, however, the flicker also aligned Muybridge with attempts to engineer the flicker that contemporaries of Andersen, such as Tony Conrad, understood as prototypically cinematic. Muybridge’s Zoopraxiscope may have been a “technological curiosity,” as Andersen notes toward the end of Muybridge, “unnecessary for the development of modern cinema,” but this seeming discontinuity with the modern film apparatus did not discredit Muybridge from recognition as a pioneer of the art of the moving image—quite to the contrary. “Muybridge made the first motion photographic pictures,” as Andersen states, precisely because his working methods allowed cinema to develop beyond the concerns of scientific observation.

The Editor Muybridge’s flicker was not just filmic. Halfway through Muybridge, Andersen displays a sequence by Muybridge involving a woman picking up a broom, seen first laterally and then from the rear. Although the images

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in the sequence are made to appear from the first to the last and are repeated six times, her gesture remains murky after the sixth repetition. For although Andersen shows the images across the length of time it might reasonably take one to lift a broom, each phase of the movement flashes on the screen so rapidly that most of the time the screen is dark.32 Andersen explains in the voiceover that he is demonstrating the average interval between Muybridge’s images, which he believes to be “one-third of a second.” With each exposure lasting “only one-hundredth of a second . . . less than a thirtieth of the actual movement is photographed.” “The rest,” he adds, “is lost.” We have seen plenty of evidence of Andersen foregrounding the discontinuity of a given sequence. But Andersen’s restoration of the interval between images as nothing, as a hiatus, a blank, drives home the vast amount of information lost in Muybridge’s process and the fundamentally still nature of his images. Rather than a process of image synthesis, Andersen’s task in Muybridge involved restoring film lengths to Muybridge’s images, specifically the lengths of time that had elapsed in between each instant he had photographed. For, as seen in the above example, unless additional images were added to his projected sequences, there would be hardly any images left for the viewer to pick up on in the movie theater. In order to re-create the impression of movement in the motion studies, Andersen needed to transcribe Muybridge’s original frequencies of image exposure onto film stock. Using traditional cel animation, Andersen step-printed Muybridge.33 Instead of transferring each of Muybridge’s images onto one frame of film, depending on the length of time that Muybridge had noted to have elapsed between images, each image would be transferred to two, three, or more film frames. The resulting Muybridge can be understood as the systematic undermining of the cinematic conventions that conditioned the film’s viewing situation. In screening the film on a modern projector, Andersen was effectively working against the standardized protocol of projecting twenty-four frames a second. The film needed to be produced in such a way that it served the mechanical needs of the projector but also bore testimony to the former projecting device of the Zoopraxiscope. So, Andersen inscribed traces of Muybridge’s “projector” onto the film stock manually, essentially recovering Muybridge’s projecting phenakistoscope through a series of discrete, manually executed interventions by which its variable frequencies were made to appear in film stock. Consequently, Andersen’s excavation of the

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Zoopraxiscope is better understood as a graphic rather than filmic endeavor. Similar to Tony Conrad in the early 1960s, Andersen’s manipulated film stock could be played like a film on a projector, but its actual construction had occurred in a two-dimensional layout similar to Conrad’s “Exposure Time Sheet.” As it is practiced by Andersen in 1970, the Zoopraxiscope constituted nothing more than the regularized but variable patterns, rhythms, and tempos at which Muybridge’s images appear on the screen.34 In order to turn Muybridge’s chronophotographs into a film to be shown in the cinema, Andersen returned them to their roots in paper as prints to be cut into pieces and shuffled into various photographic arrangements.

Notes 1. The author wishes to thank Mark Webber at Visible Press for his assistance with the literature on which this paper is based, and Joshua Yumibe, Evan Neely, and Carolyn Birdsall for providing thoughtful feedback. The many ways in which the librarians and faculty at the Pratt Institute have supported study of this print in Pratt library’s collection should also be acknowledged. Eadweard Muybridge: Zoopraxographer. Dir. Thom Andersen. Ed. Morgan Fisher. New Yorker Films, 1974–1975. 16 mm. 2. Tom Gunning, “Never Seen This Picture Before,” in Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 263. 3. Some book-length investigations include Kevin MacDonnell, Eadweard Muybridge: The Man Who Invented the Moving Picture (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1972); Gordon Hendricks, Eadweard Muybridge: The Father of the Motion Picture (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1975); Robert Bartlett Haas, Muybridge: Man in Motion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). 4. See Haas’s review of the literature in his chapter “Retrospection and Retirement,” 187– 203, which includes Leslie Wood’s 1937 The Romance of the Movies, which withdraws credit from Muybridge, as does Benjamin Bowles Hampton’s 1931 A History of the Movies, Gilbert Seldes’s 1937 The Movies Came from America, and Terry Ramsaye’s oft-cited assessment in his 1926 A Million and One Nights: A History of the Motion Picture through 1925 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), 40–41. 5. Haas, Muybridge, 173–189. 6. Haas confines his treatment of the Zoopraxiscope to two short entries in his study, and Hendricks supplies little more than illustrations of the device. The relative absence of information regarding the specifics of Zoopraxiscope and other projecting devices used by Muybridge was ostensibly the motivation for the extensive catalog and description of the device provided by the 2004 Kingston Bequest volume. Marta Braun also acknowledges this in Eadweard Muybridge (London: Reaktion Books, 2012), 243n2. 7. Scholars have speculated that this is because of its relatively straightforward combination of two prior devices—namely, the mechanism for image synthesis provided by the early nineteenth-century philosophical toy the Phenakistoscope and the projecting capacities of the magic lantern. For the series of projecting Phenakistoscope devices that

302  |  Provenance and Early Cinema either preceded or surpassed the one assembled by Muybridge, see Stephen Herbert, “Projecting the Living Image,” in Eadweard Muybridge. The Kingston Museum Bequest, ed. Stephen Herbert (Hastings, East Sussex: The Projection Box, 2004), 111–112, and Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990), 15–54. 8. The controversy surrounding the Palo Alto photographs stemmed from their appearance in 1882 in the form of a published book entitled The Horse in Motion that attributed sole authorship to JDB Stillman. Muybridge allegedly received news of the book from the president of the Council of the Royal Society shortly before he was meant to present the same photographs to the society. For details see Hendricks, Eadweard Muybridge, 131–146; and Haas, Muybridge, 135–144. 9. In fact, Muybridge changed his mind twice about the name, initially intending to call it a Zoographoscope and then a Zoogyroscope. 10. “Happily I have strong nerves, or I should have blushed with the lavishness of [the] praises,” Muybridge writes in a letter, cited in Braun, 173. See Haas, Muybridge, 127–131, 132–135; Braun, Eadweard Muybridge, 159–173. 11. Marey became famously skeptical of the moving image, allegedly falling out with his assistant George Demeny when he attempted to employ the motion pictures he had made in the context of the laboratory for commercial purposes. See Gunning, “Never Seen This Picture Before,” 249; and Joel Snyder, “Visualization and Visibility,” in Picturing Science, Producing Art, ed. Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison (New York: Routledge, 1998), 379–400. 12. On the connection between Muybridge and the lecturing lanternists, see Musser, The Emergence of Cinema, 15–54. 13. “Muybridge among the showmen: the moving image as an attraction,” Gunning, “Never Seen This Picture Before,” 250–256. 14. Gunning, “Never Seen This Picture Before,” 253. 15. Announcement composed by Newton H. Carpenter, secretary of the Art Institute in Chicago, cited in Haas, Muybridge, 174. 16. Idem. 17. Haas mentions the conversations he had with Andersen as he was completing his own study of the photographer in the mid-1970s. See Acknowledgements, Haas, Muybridge, unpaginated. 18. Although in Andersen’s case the alternatives are largely the “gray” spaces of nontheatrical film consumption rather than the white cube of the art gallery, for a thorough account of cinema’s migration out of the space of the darkened movie theater at this time see Andrew V. Uroskie, “Siting Cinema,” in Art and the Moving Image: A Critical Reader, ed. Tanya Leighton (London: Tate Publishing, 2008), 386–400; Andrew V. Uroskie, Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 19. For Andersen on Fisher, see Thom Andersen, “Pebbles Left on the Beach: The Films of Morgan Fisher,” in Slow Writing: Thom Andersen on Cinema, ed. Mark Webber (London: The Visible Press, 2017), 183–196. 20. As transcribed from the last segment of Muybridge, entitled “Retrospective.” Andersen, 1974–1975, 16 mm film. 21. Tellingly, the Zoopraxographic Hall at the Colombian Exposition of 1893 constituted a turning point for Muybridge as he had not only designed the theater expressly for his

Flicker | 303 equipment but had also financed it out of pocket. Maps of the fairgrounds indicate that the theater was dismantled soon after his contract had expired. Haas, Muybridge, 176, footnote 2. 22. Transcribed from Muybridge, “Retrospective,” Andersen, 1974–1975, 16 mm film. 23. Idem. 24. Illustrations Herbert, “Projecting the Living Image,” 63–96. To add to the confusion, Muybridge often placed two or more rows of images on each disc, which meant that there were two or more frequencies involved in a single rotation. 25. Anthony’s Photographic Bulletin, May 9, 1891. Cited in Herbert, 133, and Hendricks, 214–215. 26. Kevin Brownlow, “Silent Films: What Was the Right Speed?” in Early Cinema. Space Frame Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (London: BFI Publishing, 1990), 282–292; Timothy Barnard, “The ‘Machine Operator’: Deus Ex Machina of the Storefront Cinema,” Framework 43, no. 1 (2002): 40–75; Timothy Barnard, “Projectionists,” in Encyclopedia of Early Cinema, ed. Richard Abel (New York: Routledge, 2004), 535–537. 27. Regulatory mechanisms for projection seemed to have included motorized projectors starting in 1908 and cue sheets starting in 1916, paper slips indicating the speed at which specific sequences in a film were to be projected, Barnard, “The ‘Machine Operator’,” 55. 28. The combination of problems of illuminance and the frequency of intermittence is often referred to as “critical fusion frequency.” S. J. Lederman and Bill Nichols, “Flicker and Motion in Film,” in The Cinematic Apparatus: Technology as Historical and Ideological Form, ed. Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 96–105. 29. The four characteristics are a fixed camera position, the flicker effect, loop printing, and rephotography off a screen. P. Adams Sitney, “Structural Film,” in Film Culture Reader, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York; Washington, DC: Praeger Publishers, 1970), 327. 30. See Branden W. Joseph, Tony Conrad the Dream Syndicate (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2008), 279–352. Andersen would have been familiar with Conrad’s research as he publishes a short essay on Muybridge in the same 1966 issue of Film Culture that prints Conrad’s notes on the flicker. Tony Conrad, “‘The Flicker’ From a Letter to Henry Romney, Dated November 11, 1965,” Film Culture, 1966. 31. The compromise is most evident in Muybridge’s abandonment of the photographic process in favor of hand-painted figures and the transfer of the photographic images to the device’s discs (Braun, Eadweard Muybridge, 162–163; Herbert, “Projecting the Living Image,” 113–114). An example of Muybridge’s mounting frustration with the Zoopraxiscope and the connection he made between its deficiencies and the decline of interest in his work can be found in a grievous letter he wrote in 1899 in which he asks that the reader personally visit J. B. Colt and Co., the company he had charged with reproducing and disseminating his Zoopraxographic discs, and destroy them. “These I would like to be so utterly destroyed, that no remnants of them will remain. [. . .W]ill you do me the favor of calling at Colts place and personally smash them into very small pieces,” Herbert, “Projecting the Living Image,” 139. For the accusation of fakery on the basis of his painted figures, see Anita Ventura Mozley, ed., Eadweard Muybridge. The Stanford Years, Exhibition Catalogue (Stanford, CA: Museum of Art; Stanford University, 1972), 14–21. 32. In fact, the image occupies one frame of film, so it is 1/24 of a second. The ratio of image to darkness is 1:8 throughout each repeat of the sequences. 33. Andersen writes that the film was “an animation film made with traditional cel animation. Thus, it required concentration on every single frame. It was a difficult film

304  |  Provenance and Early Cinema to finish and maybe the only film I’ve made on which I felt completely out of my depth,” Andersen, “Pebbles Left on the Beach,” 268. We learn from Ross Lipman that “when Andersen’s laborious re-animation process exceeded time limits in UCLA’s workrooms, the production moved shop to the Dickson/Vasu studio, where it was completed on any stand not occupied by the 1970s Peanuts cartoons, which were shot there simultaneously.” Ross Lipman, “Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (1975),” UCLA Film and Television Archive, 2013. Web. 34. Further evidence of Andersen drafting Muybridge as a photographic assemblage is a similar two-dimensional device he adopted in planning his 1967 --- -------- (a.k.a. The Rock ‘n’ Roll Movie), which he describes as “documentary material organized by a predetermined structure.” It appears that Andersen had arranged his collection of image and sound sequences both “horizontally” and “vertically.” “A sequence of picture-sound equations with randomly chosen terms: vertically, --is completely structured, horizontally, it is completely random.”--- -------- (a.k.a. The Rock ‘n’ Roll Movie). Dir. Thom Andersen and Malcolm Brodwick. LUX, 1964–1965. SD Digital file.

ESZTER POLONYI is Visiting Assistant Professor in History of Art and Design at the Pratt Institute and Lecturer in History of Art at Columbia University.

24 PROVENANCE ON ICE Dawson City: Frozen Time and the Dawson City Collection Charlie Keil and Christina Stewart

B

ill Morrison’s Dawson City: Frozen Time (2017) tells two stories concurrently: the changing fortunes of a Canadian gold-rush town (including its status as the endpoint of the distribution circuit for silent motion pictures) and the 1978 discovery of a cache of discarded film found there under the permafrost. The latter improbably owes its existence to the former, and, in an act of fitting symmetry, Morrison relays the saga of Dawson City primarily through images that have been retrieved—either from the footage of the once-abandoned film reels or from a series of glass-plate photographs taken by Dawson resident Eric Hegg. (The photos also risked elimination when they were discovered embedded in the walls of a home in the area.) Images, then, assume an integral role in Morrison’s film: they are not only at the heart of a narrative that focuses on their displacement and reclamation, they are the surviving witnesses, mute testimony to the nature of provenance. This paper, the combined efforts of a film scholar and an archivist, also tells two stories, or at least adopts two distinct approaches: on the one hand, we analyze how Dawson City: Frozen Time uses retrieved images to reimagine the possibilities of the found footage film—in this case, while the documentary consists of found images, at the same time it also recounts the discovery of those very same images. On the other hand, we expand on the tale of discovery and preservation of the Dawson City Collection

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that Morrison’s film introduces. By providing this dual approach, we hope to underscore the complex register of provenance that lies at the heart of Dawson City: Frozen Time. As the decaying images from the Dawson City Collection dance across the screen, they testify to the unique nature of history embedded in celluloid, preserved but degraded. The marks of time, amplified by a process of burial that left the films unintentionally protected, in a haphazard fashion, speak of both a period when Dawson City experienced a boom and the intervening years that have seen the town reduced to a shell of its former self. Much like the footage from the collection, Dawson City in its present form serves as a reference point to a past that is lost to us, save for fragments. And Bill Morrison’s technique of illustrating the history of a largely forgotten town, through a neglected cache of jettisoned film images from its moviegoing heyday, animates an alternative method of representing film history, relying on the conjoined drama of deterioration and preservation. Morrison’s method is deliberate: save for limited current-day interviews with two local curators and select news footage of the cache’s discovery and subsequent exhibition in the late 1970s, voice is all but eliminated from the film. Morrison eschews voiceover and largely employs silent-era newsreels. In so doing, he underscores the importance of the visual record to our understanding of this moment in history. The imagistic legacy of turn-of-the-century America reinforces the value of the Dawson City Film Find, as it came to be called. In these degenerated and often incomplete film texts, Morrison discerns the key to revealing the ethos of an era. Excavation of the past becomes literal in Dawson City: Frozen Time: digging up a storehouse of old films retrieves not just a cinematic treasure trove but also a means to explore history. As Morrison himself has said, “having an ally inside an archive is very important . . . [the elements of the Dawson City Film Find] became crucial building blocks for my film.”1 How the films from the Dawson City Film Find became part of an archive is a key narrative thread within the film, and Morrison is equally attentive to the materiality of the discovery and its indebtedness to the intertwined histories of Dawson City and cinema. Dawson City: Frozen Time begins with the moment of discovery but quickly pedals back in time to demonstrate how a collection of films ended up buried in a small town just shy of three hundred kilometers south of the Arctic Circle. The film’s archival history begins in July 1978, when Sam Kula of the National Film, Television and Sound Archives of Canada (NFTSA), later to become Library

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and Archives Canada, received a phone call from Michael Gates, curator of collections for the Klondike National Historic Sites, the restoration arm of Parks Canada. Gates called Kula to inform him that a cache of motion picture films had been found buried in the permafrost at a construction site in Dawson City and to ask if NFTSA would be interested in the find.2 The immediate context for the collection’s existence extends back to 1902, seventy-six years prior to the find, when the Dawson Amateur Athletic Association (DAAA) was formed. By 1903, the DAAA had started showing films, and eight years later the second-floor gymnasium was converted into a movie theater. According to Clifford Thomson, a bank employee in Dawson City from 1928 to 1932, the Canadian Bank of Commerce acted as a film distribution agent and custodian of the films shipped in. The remote location of Dawson City made it economically undesirable for films to return to their point of origin. Accordingly, after the films were shown, they were stored in the basement of the abandoned Carnegie Library.3 Aside from the theater, the DAAA facilitated many sporting activities and even had a swimming pool (see fig. 24.1). The pool, cut deep into the permafrost, was used for swimming in the summer and then boarded over, flooded, and frozen for use as a rink for hockey, curling, and skating during the winter. This had always caused a less-than-ideal ice surface, which locals learned to tolerate.4 The Dawson Amateur Hockey Association, of which Thomson was treasurer, decided in the summer of 1929 to fill in the pool to eliminate the ice surface issue. Coincidentally, the basement of the Carnegie Library was nearly full, and Thomson was tasked with contacting the film distributors in California regarding the return of their films. Instructed to destroy the films any way he saw fit,5 Thomson decided to solve the two issues at once by filling in the pool with the films and earth, then covering it with new wooden floorboards.6 For forty-nine years, the majority of these films sat deep in the permafrost, which created a stable cold-storage environment for the nitrate film materials. In December 1937, a fire, thought to be ignited by nitrate film still kept in the theater, destroyed the main DAAA edifice. The only part of the complex to survive was the hockey arena, which sat adjacent to the main building.7 The site remained vacant until 1978, when construction began on a new civic recreation center. During the initial soil test of the site, construction was halted when a large cache of films was found, and David Burley, excavation site archeologist for Klondike National Historic Sites, was brought in. Burley and Gates

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Figure 24.1. The DAAA Natatorium (1908), twenty-one years before becoming the resting place of 507 reels of nitrate film. Dawson City Museum 2006.15.3.

examined some of the films that lay close to the ground surface. By crossreferencing some of the titles found against reports from the Dawson Daily News, they tentatively determined that the films were from the 1915–1920 period. Subsequent ignition testing on some of the bleached film indicated that the films were printed on flammable nitrate film stock.8 Parks Canada/Klondike National Historic Sites acted as an overseer of the project, providing technical assistance, cold storage, and fire-resistant facilities at their Bear Creek compound. This consisted of an old sod-roofed root cellar, once owned by the Yukon Consolidated Gold Corporation, which turned out to be a perfect cold-storage location, as it was able to maintain freezing conditions in high summer.9 The Dawson City Museum, under the direction of museum director Kathy Jones, was contracted by the NFTSA to excavate the films, inventory the salvageable films, perform rudimentary editing, and prepare the films for shipment to Ottawa (see fig. 24.2).10 NFTSA was responsible for the shipping to Ottawa, the subsequent permanent storage, and preservation of the films.

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Figure 24.2. Freshly dug, wet, and covered in dirt. Yet the myriad of found images contained within tells the remarkable story of recovery, resilience, and cinematic history. Courtesy of Kathy Jones-Gates.

Jones and a team of four students were only allowed ten days for the excavation. Using film equipment, guidelines, and nitrate film-handling training provided by the NFTSA, the small team started the process of identifying and preparing the films for shipment.11 They discovered that the majority of the films were stored in metal shipping containers. These containers held between six to eight reels of film. The films were tail out and in many instances still retained their paper censor bands and/or their shipping instructions. The films recovered were either frozen or extremely wet and were immediately stored in the root cellar. Films found close to the ground surface were in the poorest condition due to water damage from the annual freezing and thawing cycles and due to chemicals in the soil from the corroding metal film cans and reels. Films positioned lower down in the swimming pool, below the permafrost line, were in much better condition.12 The nearby Bear Creek Acetylene Plant, which had high ceilings, concrete floors, and metal-clad interior walls, was commandeered for the manual processing of the materials after they had been removed from the

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ground.13 Due to safety concerns with nitrate, the team could only work on two films at a time, and no smoking was permitted anywhere on the site. This work included manual inspection and winding the films onto cores. Information gathered from the paper censor bands, shipping containers, and title cards was used for preliminary identification of the films at this time. Once the films were inspected and given an inventory number, they were wrapped in paper and secured with cloth string, then boxed for shipment.14 The official end of the Dawson City portion of the project was on October 5, 1978. This facilitated the recovery of 507 reels of film, 436 of which were preliminarily identified. The remaining 70 reels were too damaged to be identified in Dawson City and were sent to Ottawa as they were found. In August 1980, another 26 reels were recovered and sent to Ottawa, bringing the total film find to 533. Shipping the materials to Ottawa proved to be an equally taxing endeavor. A trucker willing to ignore regulations for transporting hazardous materials drove the films to Whitehorse. After their arrival there, the Department of Defence provided an Air Force C-130 Hercules, which flew the films to Ottawa.15 Once the films were received at the NFTSA, a six-member team was assigned to work on the collection. They set up a triage system for determining the conservation priorities of the collection and rehoused all the films in two-thousand-foot film cans. The high humidity and extreme wetness of the films required immediate attention. In some reels, the emulsion had liquified, while in others the ID tags and cloth strings were starting to mold, and this mold was beginning to transfer to the films. The presence of humidity was so severe that the team often had to replace the new film cans every couple of weeks to prevent the recurrence of rust.16 The scale of the collection was too large for NFTSA to handle alone. They reached out to the Federation of International Film Archives (FIAF) for help, with two members, the American Film Institute (AFI) and the US Library of Congress (LoC), offering assistance. Larry Carr at AFI checked the NFTSA-created inventory against the holdings of other FIAF archives.17 Paul Spehr at LoC agreed to transfer the American productions to the national collection, which ultimately resulted in 389 reels of film being repatriated to the United States.18 The first priority for the films remaining in Ottawa was preservation through rewashing and proper drying. NFTSA and a private contractor,

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Graphic Film Lab, commenced on a workflow that used a 35 mm five-tank black-and-white processor converted into a rewash machine. The machine loosened the dirt and film layers, rehardened the emulsion, rewashed the film, and then dried it. Prior to running the film through the machine, the film splices were reinforced with stainless steel staples. The process of running films through this converted rewasher lasted five months. Once the films were stabilized through this process, staff inspected them, conducted repairs, measured shrinkage, captured filmographic information, and described content.19 Films found to require additional cleaning were put through an ultrasonic cleaner. The average shrinkage of the films ranged from 1.6 percent to 3.5 percent, in both length and width. Due to this shrinkage, the films showed warping, edge fluting, spoking, cupping, and embossing. Depending on the overall condition of a given film, the staff took one of three further steps.20 Films in good condition were timed and reprinted inhouse by NFTSA, using their continuous-run contact printer. Moderately shrunk films were sent to another external contractor, Bytown Visual Effects, to be optically printed, and films with shrinkage of 2 percent or more were treated with a lengthy vacuummate process to temporarily render the films in their original dimension before they were copied on the optical printer. For each film, a new 35 mm preservation safety negative, a 35 mm Fine Grain Master Positive, and a 35 mm release print were created. Working concurrently in the United States, LoC applied their own method of rewashing and drying based on the drying-rack method used by film labs in the 1920s and 1930s.21 They subsequently reprinted the majority of their films in-house, using their sophisticated step-contact printer. In a few cases, films were sent out to a private lab to be optically printed. Through an agreement between NFTSA and LoC, the two institutions exchanged reference copies of each film they had preserved. In May 1984, the LoC completed their preservation work on the 389 repatriated films, and by September 1985, NFTSA had completed work on the 144 films that remained in Canada. The full collection of 533 films that has become known as the Dawson City Film Find contains films distributed between 1910 and 1925 and includes newsreels, primarily from the World War I era, one- and two-reel comedies or dramas, serials, actualities, and feature films. Contained in the find were films previously thought lost, including Polly of the Circus (Horan and Hollywood, 1917) and Wildfire (Middleton, 1915).22

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Conservation of the films has continued at Library and Archives Canada (LAC), and the films are now being converted into digital formats.23 Returning to the nitrate originals, LAC is currently undertaking a project to create 4K-resolution scans of the films and make them available on their YouTube channel.24 Having used clips from ninety-three different films in the collection, Morrison has said that without the availability of digital scans he would not have been able to make Dawson City: Frozen Time. Fittingly, the currency of the collection is the film’s jumping-off point, with an accident of discovery proving the continued importance of images to cultural memory. In 2014, media attention focused on footage contained within newsreels from the Dawson City Film Find (the Find) preserved by the LAC when it became clear that this footage included crucial moments from the infamous 1919 World Series “Black Sox” game-fixing scandal. Morrison, who had learned that the LAC held the footage, found himself at the center of stories about the discovery, and a clip from an interview with the director on the sports show High Heat, from the Major League Baseball Network, opens the documentary. As Morrison has explained, he deliberately begins the film with the High Heat excerpt because “it is so clearly an artifact of our current culture: the graphic, the sound effect, the narration. It meets the audience in media language of the time and place we live in now. From there we go back in time, to 1979, when the films had been restored and were first being shown publicly in Dawson City at the Palace Grand. This trajectory allowed me to go further back, to the beginning of celluloid and then cinema, and from there tell the story of cinema as it related to Dawson City.”25 Just how the “story of cinema” relates to Dawson City is at the heart of the documentary. Partly it is a coincidence of timing: gold was discovered in the hunting and fishing grounds of the Tr’ochek, an indigenous Hanspeaking people, at virtually the same moment that commercial film exhibition began in the United States. The growth of prospecting, just like that of film, was spurred by a zeal for fast fortunes, and Dawson City sprang up overnight, amassing 3,500 residents in a year and ballooning to 40,000 a year later. The conditions of Dawson City’s growth—many recent arrivals, often with excess idle time—created a demand for recreational diversions. Many of the entrepreneurs who stepped in to supply the residents with amusements would themselves become key figures in the world of film, such as Sid Graumann and Alex Pantages. And, of course, cinema would become an integral component of the entertainment landscape in Dawson City, with four film theaters serving the populace at one point.

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Figure 24.3. Unrest in Dawson City finds its counterpart in frenzied imagery from films in the Dawson City Film Find.

The unbridled growth of Dawson City, and the passion for finding gold that fueled it, leads Morrison to capitalize on the metaphor of fire as an uncontrollable phenomenon. Imagery of unstoppable flames insistently inserts itself into the visual schema of Dawson City: Frozen Time. Ravenous flames link Dawson City to cinema from the outset: the town suffers from persistent destructive fires throughout its history, while dangerously flammable nitrate possesses an incendiary quality that seems to burn up footage of medium founders Auguste and Louis Lumière. Just as Dawson City’s early years are defined by an endless series of fires, so too are cinema’s: Morrison accompanies mention of the 1897 Charity Bazaar disaster in Paris with footage depicting a conflagration in Polly of the Circus, a 1917 feature that is part of the Find. Later, to underscore the chaos underlying Dawson City’s persistent streak of burning buildings, Morrison conveys the town’s turbulence via a montage of diegetic unrest in various Find films (see fig. 24.3). The string of images accelerates in wild intensity as the wobbly nature of the unstable stock finds its auditory counterpart in the electronically distorted nature of Alex Somers’s score.

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This is a strategy Morrison will repeat throughout Dawson City: Frozen Time: moments from the discovered films illuminate central incidents in the documentary. When the rapid influx of prospectors leads to a rash of gambling establishments in Dawson City, Morrison cuts in shots from a series of Find films depicting card playing and wagers. When unwanted film reels are dumped into the Yukon River, Morrison includes parallel actions of items tossed overboard from Find films, just as he inserts moments that show characters sleeping when other reels are submerged underground. This mirroring technique speaks to broader parallels that structure the documentary as a whole: beyond the destruction by fire that besets both Dawson City and nitrate film, one can point to parallel extractions (ore from the ground, the cache of films from beneath the permafrost) and parallel displacements caused by technological change (the prospectors by mechanized mining techniques, silent films by sound motion pictures). Ultimately, Dawson City and silent films suffer the same fate: they are bypassed by progress, their moment of glory lodged in a past that becomes ever more remote. Yet neither completely disappears, even if their present moment displays the scars of earlier neglect: many buildings in Dawson City exist in advanced stages of disrepair, while the images from the Find films are riddled with decay, preserved but damaged. The penultimate Find film excerpt comes from a feature called The Salamander, with a title card informing us that “the Salamander of the ancients was a mythical creature that lived through fire unscorched.” If the Dawson City Films escaped death by self-immolation, they still emerged from their frozen tomb in a state of permanent, if defiant, decrepitude. Morrison imparts this sense of paradoxically ecstatic woundedness in the final Film Fund clip, a frenzied dance of despair from a Pathé newsreel captured in emphatically deteriorated images. To its final moments, Dawson City: Frozen Time insistently relies on the unearthed and vulnerable images whose discovery it documents, thereby emulating the vagaries and contingencies of history and provenance in its very methods as a documentary.

Notes 1. Daniel Eagan, “NYFF Interview: Bill Morrison,” Film Comment, October 6, 2016, https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/nyff-interview-bill-morrison/. 2. Yvette Hackett, “The Dawson Collection: Summary of Events Relating to the Dawson Film Find” (1985), Library and Archives Canada internal document.

Provenance on Ice  |  315 3. David Burley and Michael S. Gates, “The Dawson Film Discovery: An Outline of Parks Canada’s Involvement,” Research Bulletin 40 (1980): 1–5. 4. Sam Kula, “Rescued from the Permafrost: The Dawson Collection of Motion Pictures,” Archivaria 8 (1979): 141–148. 5. Burley and Gates, “The Dawson Film Discovery.” 6. Kula, “Rescued from the Permafrost.” 7. Hackett, “The Dawson Collection.” 8. Michael S. Gates, “The Dawson City Film Find: A Major Cooperative Film Conservation Project,” Journal of the International Institute for Conservation 1–2 (1980): 13–16; Burley and Gates, “The Dawson Film Discovery.” 9. Burley and Gates, “The Dawson Film Discovery.” 10. Gates, “The Dawson City Film Find.” 11. Hackett, “The Dawson Collection.” 12. Hackett, “The Dawson Collection.” 13. Gates, “The Dawson City Film Find.” 14. Hackett, “The Dawson Collection.” 15. Kula, “Rescued from the Permafrost.” 16. Hackett, “The Dawson Collection.” 17. Kula, “Rescued from the Permafrost.” 18. Hackett, “The Dawson Collection.” 19. Hackett, “The Dawson Collection.” 20. Hackett, “The Dawson Collection.” 21. Hackett, “The Dawson Collection.” 22. Kula, “Rescued from the Permafrost.” 23. Paul Gordon, “Email to Christina Stewart,” January 31, 2018. 24. http://www.youtube.com/user/LibraryArchiveCanada/videos, accessed May 20, 2018. 25. Eagan, “NYFF Interview.”

Bibliography Burley, David, and Gates, Michael S. “The Dawson Film Discovery: An Outline of Parks Canada’s Involvement.” Research Bulletin 40 (1980): 1–5. Eagan, Daniel. “Notes on Dawson City: NYFF Interview: Bill Morrison.” Film Comment, October 6, 2016. https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/nyff​-inter​ view-bill-morrison/. Gates, Michael S. “The Dawson City Film Find: A Major Cooperative Film Conservation Project.” Journal of the International Institute for Conservation 1–2 (1980): 13–16. Gordon, Paul. Email to Christina Stewart, January 31, 2018. Hackett, Yvette. “The Dawson Collection: Summary of Events Relating to the Dawson Film Find” (1985), Library and Archives Canada internal document. Kula, Sam. “Rescued from the Permafrost: The Dawson Collection of Motion Pictures.” Archivaria 8 (1979): 141–148.

CHARLIE KEIL is Principal of Innis College and Professor in the Cinema Studies Institute and the Department of History at the University of

316  |  Provenance and Early Cinema Toronto. He is author of Early American Cinema in Transition: Story, Style and Filmmaking, 1907–1913 and editor most recently of A Companion to D.W. Griffith. CHRISTINA STEWART is a film and media archivist at Media Commons, University of Toronto Libraries. She is an instructor in the Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management graduate program at Ryerson University.

25 PRAXIS AS MEDIA HISTORIOGRAPHY The Peep Box’s “Expanding View” as Virtual Reality Christina Corfield

F

rom an expensive and exclusive item owned only by the wealthy to a performative entertainment circulated by itinerant showmen, the peep box has been embodied in multiple forms and practices across places, spaces, and times.1 The peep box can be loosely described as a miniature space of immersive illusion. Boxlike in structure, the peep box’s defining features include a peephole in the front of the box and a series of theatrical scrims behind the hole that construct an image of a receding view. The combination of the viewer’s limited visual field and the scrims that guide the viewer’s eye to the image at the back of the box enhance the visual experience of Euclidian perspective, thereby creating a powerful reality effect driven by an illusion of depth. What interests me about these devices is how they acted not simply as technologies of illusion but also as educational and ideological object lessons.2 For this reason, I am particularly drawn to the nineteenth-century paper peep boxes that were mass produced and sold as amusements and souvenirs and that articulated and signified notions of progress, national superiority, and technological modernity. Within many of these paper peep boxes, the viewer’s perception is focused on national prestige as well as the advancement of science and technology (which is promoted both through the peep box’s form and its content). The souvenir paper peep box as an object doesn’t simply commemorate or celebrate events such as the opening

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of the Thames Tunnel of 1843 but also enables an act of acculturation. With this in mind, I argue that far from being an obsolete technology, the peep box and its “expanded view” potentially offers a metaphorical model for media historiography—something we can use to teach and complicate media histories. I view my own art practice, which has recently included the production of several peep boxes as miniature theaters for a multichannel video piece, as enacting a form of critical media historiography that doesn’t simply reconstruct an older media form but also ties that medium to social and political discourses in the present, turning the act of reconstructing an old form of visual media into an act of cultural resistance. I recognize the concept of provenance as a concept about origins, about genealogies and “what came before.” However, rather than simply use the peep box to explicate one of the many genealogies of cinema and immersive media, I hold it up as an example to argue for a reconsideration of the way in which histories of cinema and visual media more broadly can be reactivated, engaged with, and situated in the present through their physical reconstruction. In part, this peep box project is a way to think about provenance as a complex intersection of histories in which media objects are historical iterations of ongoing social, cultural, political, and technological processes. Yet, this project is also about how remaking and repurposing archival objects can provide new knowledge about them, both for the producer and for those who subsequently interact with the reconstructed object. Provenance therefore is a guiding principle in this peep box project, but it is a principle that has been altered. My peep boxes subvert and socially repurpose the typical content of historical peep boxes. Yet this alteration does not discard or disrespect historical information or original artifacts. Rather, I believe such repurposing and alteration creates space for the imparting of historical information and the invitation to discuss provenance itself and its ongoing importance in the present. For most of the eighteenth century, peep boxes were highly popular as a form of parlor entertainment for the wealthier classes. Initially constructed from a long rectangular box made of wood into which a viewer peered through a hole, scenes were constructed by sliding in a series of six to eight decorative scrims, which worked to create a sense of perspective and depth similar to set design in the theater. Indeed, historians of precinematic media, including Ralph Hyde and Barbara Stafford, have explained the peep box’s emergence through and imbrication with baroque theater design as well as other devices of perspective, such as table top tableaux

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and Boîtes d’Optiques.3 The preeminent producer of these objects in the late eighteenth century was Austrian printmaker Martin Engelbrecht, who was known for his high level of detail and equally high production quality.4 Similar styles of peep boxes were produced in France, Germany, and Great Britain, but by the early nineteenth century, the heavier, more expensive wooden boxes were replaced in popularity by smaller, lighter, cheaper paper versions. These paper peep boxes substituted the wooden box with a cardboard slip case and accordion-like, collapsible paper sides, making them easily portable and more desirable as consumable products, but also making them attractive forms of entertainment that could be enjoyed anywhere, not just in the parlor. Often sold as souvenirs, the scenes depicted in peep boxes varied greatly. Many were topographical, showing views of cities, famous buildings, or exotic lands. Others represented social events such as local festivals, elaborate masked balls, and scenes from popular theater, but those that are most pertinent to my repurposing of peep boxes celebrated feats of engineering, such as the opening of the Nuremburg-Furth railway bridge in 1835, the opening of the Ludwig canal in 1843, and the Crystal Palace in London in 1851, which housed the Great Exhibition. What linked all these varied scenes together, and what makes them important for histories of immersive media, was the way the illusion positioned the viewer within in space of the scene itself. In the case of the Thames Tunnel souvenir, a viewer could imagine being inside the tunnel; the scene of a masked ball would insert the viewer as an attendee or, as part of a theatrical scene, the viewer occupies a position in the audience. In other words, these various peep boxes incorporated the viewer into their virtual worlds—places and times potentially inaccessible to and separate from the world of those viewers who peeped into their layered scenes. In his 2003 book Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, historian of art and immersive media Oliver Grau traced a history of immersive virtual environments, in which he cited as early examples the 360-degree paintings of the Villa Dei Misteri at Pompeii and the Chambre du Cerf at the papal palace at Avignon as well as the spectacularly painted baroque ceilings and set design of seventeenth-century Italy and the Netherlands.5 Within Grau’s history, peep boxes are classified more as voyeuristic boxes of illusionistic perspectives, a complement to other technologies and architectures of largescale immersive environments that engulf viewers within their room-sized architectures.6 Yet Grau’s focus remains on each large-scale environment’s

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totalizing illusion, as he draws a through-line from these older examples to the room-sized environments of early 2000s virtual reality technologies.7 However, I think of peep boxes as achieving a similar immersive, rather than simply illusory, effect. Partly because of their physical structure but also partly because of the illusory effects they generate: peep boxes are akin to those technologies that bridge actual and virtual worlds. Immersion is not what necessarily defines virtual experiences, and I find Anne Friedberg’s definition in Virtual Window more helpful in terms of thinking about the peep box. In Virtual Window, Friedberg argues that what was virtual was rendered so through a frame that acted as a portal to another world.8 Whether that frame was a window or a screen, it worked because “the frame separates the materiality of spectatorial space from the virtual immateriality of spaces seen within its boundaries.”9 For Friedberg, the virtual is defined not by the strength of its illusory effect, as with Grau, but by a characterization of materiality on one side of the frame and immateriality on the other side. The peep box’s illusory effects, however, do not separate the virtual from the actual by such a definition but rather emphasize the materiality of the architecture and its importance to the immateriality of the effect, which is optical. The images rendered on the other side of the peephole do not become less material when viewed but rely—just like the architecture of the rooms Grau includes in his history—on the perfect alignment of their materiality with the viewer’s perspective, which is guided and controlled by the position and size of the peephole. In order for the illusion of the peep box to work to maximum effect, the peephole must act as a mediating architecture, separating the worlds inside and outside the box. So, to a degree, Friedberg’s concept of the window or the frame adequately describes the act of looking into a peep box, blocking out the exterior world of the viewer, and immersing the viewer’s entire visual field in the perspective represented by the view through the peephole. And yet, the peep box cannot be fully described by this definition, because as soon as the viewer pulls back from the peephole and sees the apparatus extended, each scrim visible, and each part of the architecture available for inspection, it becomes clear to the viewer that the paper accordion and the world it contains does occupy the same space as the spectator. So where does this leave us? Here, I turn to Tom Gunning’s work on the Thaumatrope. The Thaumatrope, a piece of card with images drawn or printed on both sides, is activated by being spun, thus producing a virtual image as the human

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brain reads the two images blurred together as one. Placing the Thaumatrope within a history of the technological image, Gunning describes the important double function of the device—that of demonstration and demystification. These functions of the Thaumatrope represent a common characteristic in philosophical toys that were designed to teach users about human perception by producing a visual effect and by demonstrating how the effect is produced. As Gunning explains, “the lessons learned by the thaumatrope depended on the manipulator not only being in control of the device, but also being able to examine its elements both in motion and in stillness.”10 While Gunning argues for the connection of perception and technology through the coordination of hand and eye, accomplished through the spinning of the Thaumatrope, the peep box’s illusory and educational power lies in the tension between the restricted and unrestricted visual fields of viewers as they interact with the device. The power of the immersive depth effects—which only produce a successful virtual image when the peep box’s perspective is correctly aligned and a viewer’s vision is reduced to the monocular—is balanced by the visual accessibility to the peep box’s expanded structure.11 As an object that symbolizes as well as represents principles of perspective, the peep box acts as an object lesson in the most literal sense, demonstrating how multiple provenances of visual media can be reactivated through creative praxis, weaving together histories of the moving image; immersive technologies; and scientific, technological, and art objects. The world’s largest collection of paper peep boxes lies in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The Jonathan and Jacqueline Gestetner Collection, built by private collectors over a period of thirty years, was gifted to the museum in 2016 and is a treasure trove of examples ranging from the early nineteenth to the twenty-first century. The collection features examples of commercially produced paper peep boxes as well as those produced by amateur enthusiasts and more experimental examples produced by artists. This collection is undoubtedly extremely important, not only for its preservation of historical artifacts but also for the variety of its representation of the device and the people who produced them. Public access to the collection— especially to the older boxes, which are very fragile—has been encouraged by the museum itself, which set up a viewing service for seven boxes in its collection during the summer of 2018, and also by artists who have sought to replicate the experience of looking into the peep boxes through digitization and animation.12 In addition, Ralph Hyde authored a richly illustrated

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volume to accompany the collection, which includes details of the history and construction of peep boxes, and it is through this volume that I first encountered paper peep boxes and their varied and wonderful contents and makers. However, while reconstructing peep boxes would ideally be accompanied or augmented by access to historical, physical examples, this may not always be possible, and reconstructing the peep box can potentially provide hands-on engagement with, enthusiasm for, and access to a media history that otherwise might remain out of view or inaccessible. I did not have access to the Victoria and Albert Museum, and my initial production of peep boxes arose from the desire to experience the effects of peering into a peep box unmediated by screens, cameras, or other digital technologies. I also wanted to experiment with the replicability of the peep box to better understand its construction. In other words, my peep boxes raise awareness of their history by pointing toward the physical provenance of historical peep boxes in museum collections while also inviting direct engagement with the devices through physical reconstruction, creating opportunities to both understand how the devices work as well as experience their visual effects firsthand. Importantly, however, I also see the peep box as holding the potential to teach principles of disruption and resistance, to challenge historical narratives that seem predetermined or “given,” whether those narratives are social or cultural, methodological or technological. The peep box’s place in the history of immersive media turns the act of making a peep box into an act of world building, and as such, can be an activity that generates imaginative possibilities that envision alternatives to the status quo. Furthermore, the peep box also raises questions about how media histories and concepts of provenance can be engaged with when access to archives or museums and the objects within them proves difficult or just isn’t an option. Crucially, such creative engagement provides the opportunity to discuss media history as something that is done rather than something that happened. The doing of media history inherently raises issues and questions of authorship, questions such as who gets to write narratives of provenance, and how do those authors—the provenance points of media histories themselves—inflect and color those histories? Such questions provide opportunities to engage critically with historiographic practices, examining why the acknowledgment of media histories remains important, and how, by understanding and challenging the doing of media historiography affects, we see the technologies we rely on today. Furthermore, discussions of authorship introduce the idea that making our own media, reactivating the provenances of twentieth- and twenty-first-century media, can allow

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Figure 25.1. Stills from Transcontinental 1860 showing various sections of the Pony Express route panorama and intertitles taken from nineteenth-century newspapers.

for acts of resistance or empowerment. The potential of the peep box to be constructed and produced by anyone is an opportunity for individuals and groups to perform their own rendering of historical narratives, to create embodiments of their own historical perspectives and experiences, and to draw historical media out of the past and into conversation with events and technologies of the present day.13 The educational potential of the peep box and its ability to represent a self-enclosed world-in-miniature brought to life through powerful depth effects led me to take the peep box as a model from which to build a creative media archeological project. This project, which ties together nineteenthcentury media through their role in processes of cultural and geographical colonization, includes peep boxes as viewing environments for a digital video. Titled Transcontinental 1860, this project combines the video of a hand-painted and hand-animated moving panorama (played on a smartphone) with its installation inside a series of peep boxes, drawing lines between the old and new immersive technologies of the nineteenth-century peep box and the twenty-first-century smartphone as well as between communications and spectacular media (see fig. 25.1). Each handmade peep box frames the video with a miniature theatrical environment, couching one

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technology inside the other, thus providing a formal and historical infrastructure for the project that guides and shapes how viewers encounter, absorb, and understand the landscape video presented. The video depicts a landscape of the route of the transcontinental Pony Express, a messenger system that prefigured the telegraph and the railroads in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. The Express was instrumental in charting and implementing the route of future communications and transport technology networks and as such was simultaneously responsible for the subsequent processes of land “acquisition” necessary for national expansion.14 This route is deeply embedded in histories and mythologies of the American West especially as they intersect with the geopolitical expansion of the United States from the nineteenth into the twentieth century. To envision this route is to engage themes not dissimilar to those visible in the scenes of engineering and technological progress depicted in original paper peep box souvenirs, exploring popular expressions of nationalism as made visible through the celebration of technologies that enforce or bolster national prestige. As part of Transcontinental 1860, I have been producing peep boxes that represent current political events in the United States; these events take a critical rather than a celebratory view of current US politics (see fig. 25.2). Original peep boxes may have used scrims to sanction ideological agendas by creating and augmenting reality effects through an illusion of depth—thus aligning “reality” with the nationalistic celebration of feats of civil engineering or famous buildings—but in reconstructing my peep boxes I chose to subvert the usual iconography associated with peep box scenes, taking a different ideological path. By altering the visual content of the scrims, self-consciously adapting them to offer a critical visual and cultural framework, the landscape video can encourage thought on the ways that technologies—in this case, both technologies of vision and communication—have been used to organize the American landscape to be “productive” to American modernity, whether in the nineteenth or twenty-first century. Many of these scenes, which include images taken from the Dakota Access Pine Line protests at the Standing Rock reservation in North and South Dakota; the Flint, Michigan, water crisis; and scenes of Occupy protesters during the 2008 recession, contextualize the video’s historical narrative by suggesting that acts of disciplining the land continue today through ongoing struggles, disputes, and injustices (see figs. 25.3 and 25.4). However, more than simply drawing from journalistic images,

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Figure 25.2. One of the peep boxes featured in Transcontinental 1860.

my critique is also made visible through the structure of the object itself. Playing with the functionality of the device as one that generates reality effects, I have altered the alignment of the scrims and adopted disjunctive sizing of imagery to transform the visual field “inside” the peep box into an abstract collage rather than a coherent and unified space. These visual misalignments work to draw attention to the cohesiveness or lack thereof of the history shown, suggesting, through the disrupted image produced, a structurally dysfunctional history. The peep box is a medium that can complicate histories of immersive media and trace the provenance of theatrical and mobile visual media along unexpected paths. Yet, the peep box also provides an opportunity to consider the ways we frame and teach provenance as we teach histories of cinema and media more broadly. My reconstructions of peep boxes articulate one point of provenance for later immersive media, yet importantly, what my peep boxes demonstrate is how older media, as examples of provenance, need not remain in the past. Rather than leaving such historical objects guarded and preserved in archives and museums, I view these objects as templates from which to both explicate and discuss the historical and

Figures 25.3 and 25.4. Peep views of two peep boxes from my installation Transcontinental 1860 that reveal scenes depicting, in one peep box, protests following the 2008 recession and the Occupy movement, and in another peep box, scenes from the Flint, Michigan, water crisis.

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cultural contexts of media production while putting that historical information in conversation with contemporary issues, contexts, and technologies. Crucially, the making of these boxes engages the idea of provenance as it describes authorship, raising questions around who “does” such historical work, how engagement with such histories can be fostered, and what (visual) languages can be adopted to make the value and importance of such work legible in various ways to various publics.

Notes 1. For an introduction to the history of peep boxes, see Ralph Hyde, Paper Peep Shows: The Jacqueline and Jonathan Gestetner Collection (Woodbridge: Antique Collector’s Club, 2015), 10–65; Barbara Maria Stafford, “Revealing Technologies/Magical Domains,” in Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen, ed. Barbara Maria Stafford and Frances Terpak (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2001), 105–109. 2. Stafford, Revealing Technologies, 108. 3. Hyde, Paper Peep Shows, 12–20. 4. Ibid., 14; Frances Terpak, “Objects and Contexts,” in Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen, 336. 5. Oliver Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003), 25–71. 6. Ibid., 50–52. 7. However, Grau does acknowledge the critical need for aesthetic distance from roomsized immersive environments as he discusses the work of Charlotte Davies. Grau, Virtual Art, 202–204. 8. Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006), 5–6. 9. Ibid., 6. 10. Tom Gunning, “Hand and Eye: Excavating a New Technology of the Image in the Victorian Era,” Victorian Studies 54, no. 3 (Spring 2012): 503. 11. I draw here from the work of Jonathan Crary on the technological disciplining of vision in the nineteenth century and before, particularly as he describes the metaphoric role of monadic vision as a reflection of rational order. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990), 129. 12. See Catriona Gourlay, “See the Paper Peepshows Up Close in the National Art Library!” July 6, 2018, accessed June 27, 2019, https://www.vam.ac.uk/blog/museum-life​ /see-paper-peepshows-up-close-in-the-national-art-library; in addition, the artist and V&A photographer George Eksts produced animated films of two peep boxes in the collection, which allows viewers to enter and travel around scenes depicted in each box. Katy Canales, “Animating History,” February 6, 2017, accessed June 27, 2019, https://www.vam.ac.uk/blog​ /museum-life/animating-history. 13. The amateur construction of peep boxes is a practice historically visible in both the availability of construction kits at the height of peep box popularity as well as examples

328  |  Provenance and Early Cinema of homemade peep boxes produced from scratch by amateur enthusiasts. One example of an amateur enthusiast is Maria Graham, an example of whose work can be found in the Gestetner Collection. Hyde, Paper Peep Shows, 22. For examples of construction sets, see also Hyde, Paper Peep Shows, 58–62. 14. For accounts of the organization and importance of the Pony Express’s route, see Arthur Chapman, “Mail Routes in Dispute,” in The Pony Express (New York: G. P. Putnams’s Sons, 1932), 56–74; Roy S. Bloss, “The Big Idea” and “Making the Headlines,” in Pony Express: The Great Gamble (Berkeley: Howell-North Press, 1959), 13–22 and 55–62; Joseph J. DiCerto, “The Challenge and Beauty of the Land” and “Dangerous Trespassing,” in The Saga of the Pony Express (Missoula, MT: Mountain Press Publishing Co., 2002), 71–97; Howard R. Driggs, “In the Days of the Gold Rush,” in The Pony Express Goes Through (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1935), 22–23; Raymond W. Settle and Mary L. Settle, “Organization” and “The Pony Bows to the Lightening,” in Saddles and Spurs: The Pony Express Saga (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1955), 35–51 and 191–211.

CHRISTINA CORFIELD is a video artist and PhD candidate in the department of Film and Digital Media at the University of California Santa Cruz.

26 HOW NEWSPAPER NOVELS AND THEIR ILLUSTRATIONS SHAPED JAPANESE FILMS Norie Taniguchi

Introduction One cannot discuss the development and provenance of Japanese cinema without referring to the popularity of traditional theater plays and serialized newspaper novels, both of which provided a creative basis—an intermedial form of provenance—for early Japanese cinema. Japanese cinema began initially by shooting scenes from Kabuki plays and geisha dance performances without a film-specific story line. One of the earliest narrative films in Japan is believed to be Ono ga tsumi (One’s sin), produced by Yoshizawa Shouten (the present-day Nikkatsu Film Company) and shown at Asakusa Sanyukan Theater in 1908. The film, adopted from one of the most popular melodramatic Shinpa theater plays of the same title, features the main female part played by Onnagata, a male Kabuki actor specialized in playing female characters. Just as it was with that of Western nations, the Japanese film industry at the time still focused on the production of short films rather than feature-length productions, which resulted in Ono ga tsumi being a short movie consisting of just two scenes, “Beach Shore” and “Drowning of Two Boys.” However, accompanied by a benshi (a silent film narrator) and live music, the film Ono ga tsumi became an unexpected hit, bringing in a daily full-house audience that led to the production of a sequel. The success of Ono ga tsumi, despite having only two scenes, can be attributed to the fact that it was based on a serialized newspaper novel that had already won great popularity, particularly among female readers, before

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the film was produced. The production of multiple theatrical versions of the story following the conclusion of the newspaper run also contributed to the film’s ensuing success. In Japan, it was common for novels to be accompanied by illustrations to convey the story more effectively and to add visual appeal. Published daily in newspapers, serialized novels were no exception and had a solid readership throughout the entire country. In the case of Ono ga tsumi, audiences were able to understand and enjoy its film version even though it had only two scenes because by the time it was released, they had already become familiar with the story line and especially with its accompanying visual illustrations through the original serialized newspaper novel. As with Ono ga tsumi, early Japanese filmmakers often re-created film scenes based on these illustrations as well as the scenes from the original theater plays, which were also influenced by newspaper illustrations. Such published illustrations were a foundational “provenance” that strongly shaped the visual aspect of early Japanese cinema. Japanese narrative film began its development by deeply relying on the provenance of images from Japanese print culture. In this chapter, I will examine the visual provenance of Japanese films through Ono ga tsumi, exploring how serialized newspaper novels and their accompanying illustrations shaped early Japanese films. Specifically, I will look at the original illustrations of Ono ga tsumi from serialized newspaper novels as well as still photos from theatrical productions that were used as the bases—or prototypes—to create Ono ga tsumi’s film scenes. The provenance of these images will allow us to examine a lost and forgotten aspect of early Japanese cinema.

1. Yuho Kikuchi’s Novel Ono ga tsumi (My sin) The novel Ono ga tsumi was written by Yuho Kikuchi and was serialized in newspapers from August 17, 1899, to May 20, 1900. At the time Ono ga tsumi was published, there were two genres of popular newspaper novels in Japan: classical novels that featured samurais in Edo period and modern novels, a popular literary genre called Katei-Shosetu (the family novel), which usually depicted Japanese women who typically suffered from the social and sexual injustice prevalent in Japan at the time. Ono ga tsumi was an emblematic work of the Katei-Shosetu genre and achieved high popularity and support from female readers.

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To summarize Kikuchi’s original novel, Tamaki Minowa, a female high school student, is duped by a young medical student, Tsukaguchi, and becomes pregnant. She secretly gives birth to a baby boy, who is adopted by another family. Tamaki eventually marries another man with whom she has a son, Masahiro. Due to Masahiro falling ill, Tamaki moves to a seaside village for a change of air. Here she befriends Tamataro, a son of a local fisherman. One day, while Tamataro and Masahiro are playing on the beach, a large wave sweeps Masahiro out to sea. Tamataro tries to help Masahiro; however, they are both taken by the wave and drown at sea. After their bodies are found, Tamataro’s adoptive mother tells Tamaki that Tamataro is actually her first son that she had with Tsukaguchi the medical student. Tamaki breaks down and weeps for her two lost sons.

2. Serialized Newspaper Novel Illustrations After Japan opened its doors to the West in 1868, the new “newspaper” medium prevailed, taking over “kawara-ban,” a primitive tile-engraved news sheet from the Edo era. Serialized newspaper novels were almost always accompanied by illustrations as they inherited the style of “kawara-ban,” which attracted its readers with illustrated Tsuzukimono, a serial story that reported incidents, crimes, and other events familiar to ordinary citizens. In Tsuzukimono, attention-grabbing illustrations were what lured people into reading the article. Because of this, people expected serial newspaper novels such as Ono ga tsumi to be accompanied by vivid storytelling illustrations. An example of such vividness can be found in an illustration from the first episode of Ono ga tsumi that depicts Tamaki in the foreground and four of her school friends in the background wearing kimono. This highly detailed illustration not only describes a moment in the novel but also shows the intricate kimono patterns and conveys the emotions of each character with such liveliness and effectiveness that it sets the tone for the entire episode. The scenes depicted in illustrations that accompanied each episode of serial newspaper novels left strong impressions on the readers, and because of this they were often adopted by stage producers and filmmakers, eventually becoming the story-defining scenes of the film.

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3. Ono ga tsumi: Serialized Newspaper Novel and Theater Play Soon after the conclusion of its newspaper run in 1900, the stage version of Ono ga tsumi was produced and opened in theaters. Theatrical versions that followed serialized newspaper novels had already become a common practice in the Japanese entertainment industry as a way to create intermedial tie-ins that raised the popularity of both novels and theatrical productions. When turning a novel into a theatrical adaptation, the novelist and the play’s scriptwriter often discussed and cooperated in breaking down the novel into several sections, with particular emphasis on the novel’s climactic scene, in order to create the most effective format for a theatrical play. In the case of Ono ga tsumi, the aforementioned illustrations were used as decisive elements to create some of the most memorable stage scenes. These illustrations (fig. 26.1), from Osaka Mainichi Newspaper (March 26 and 27, 1900), depict the dramatic scene in which Tamaki, with her husband and son, unknowingly meets her lost son, Tamataro, and his adoptive mother for the first time while strolling on the beach. This is one of the most crucial scenes of the story, as it eventually results in the tragic deaths of the two innocent boys. Compare this image (fig. 26.1) with the Banzuke/Program or advertisement flyer (fig. 26.2, top left) for the Ono ga tsumi stage production at Misakiza Theater (1905), and the stage photos (fig. 26.2, top right) from Shintomiza Theater (1907) and (fig. 26.2, bottom left) from Meijiza Theater (1912), all depicting the scene of the first encounter between the two groups of characters. The images show Tamaki with her family and Tamataro with his adopted mother or father, and you can see the striking similarities they share—from the composition of the scene to the kimono patterns, the Western-style clothing worn by Masahiro (Tamaki’s son) and the hat Tamaki’s husband is wearing. Judging from these photos, it is obvious that the producers of theatrical and film versions of Ono ga tsumi adopted the illustrations from the serialized newspaper novel and used them as the prototypes for shaping the visual details of their works. The provenance of these original illustrations enabled these adaptations, as the visuals were well recognized by the Japanese reading and viewing public.

4. Ono ga tsumi the Film “Beach Shore” How was the same scene depicted in the film? Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing for sure because the film, like so many works of early

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Figure 26.1. Top, right: Illustration of episode 82 of Ono ga tsumi (1900). Image: Tamataro, Tamaki’s husband, Tamaki, and Masahiro. Osaka Mainichi Newspaper (March 26, 1900). Bottom, left: Illustration of episode 83 of Ono ga tsumi (1900). Tamataro’s adoptive mother, Tamataro, Masahiro Tamaki’s husband, and Tamaki. Osaka Mainichi Newspaper (March 27, 1900).

Japanese cinema, was lost during the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923. However, there is one surviving still photograph from the film, which shows us a glimpse of what the film looked like. Included in the photo (fig. 26.2, bottom right) is likely the re-creation of the images from the original illustrations and the stage play: Tamaki, her son Masahiro, and her husband, and Tamataro and his mother with one unknown figure. As mentioned earlier, this “encounter” scene is a decisive turning point of the story as Tamaki and her husband will suffer the tragic deaths of the boys. This photo,1 included in Nihoneiga Hattatsushi 1 (Junichiro Tanaka, 1957), accompanies the memoirs by Nobuchika Nakano, the producer and actor of the 1908 film Ono ga tsumi (My sin) with a caption, “Shot during the filming of Ono ga tsumi at Katase Beach.”2 However, there is one problem. When this photo was published in the first anniversary issue of Katsudo Shashinkai (first published film magazine in Japan, by Yoshizawa Shoten) in June 1910, it had a caption that said, “Ono ga tsumi by Kichinosuke

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Figure 26.2. Top, left: Banzuke/Program at Misakiza Play Theater (1905). The title says “Auther Yuho Kikuchi,” Ono ga tsumi, published by Syun’yodo, Seven Scenes (divided sections). Image: Tamataro’s adoptive father (sometimes mother changed to father), Tamataro, Tamaki’s husband, Tamaki, and Masahiro. Banzuke/Program or advertisement flyer at Misakiza Theater (Waseda University Theater Museum). Top, right: Stage photo from Shintomiza Play Theater (1907). Image: Tamataro’s adoptive mother, Tamataro, Tamaki’s husband, Tamaki, and Masahiro. Stage photo at Shintomiza Theater Engei Gahou, Entertainment Pictorial Magazine (November 1907). Bottom, left: Stage photo from Meijiza Play Theater (1912). Image: Tamataro, Tamataro’s adoptive mother, Tamaki’s husband, Masahiro, and Tamaki. Stage photo at Meijiza Theater Engei Gahou, Entertainment Pictorial Magazine (August 1912). Bottom, right: Photograph from Film Ono ga tsumi, produced by Yoshizawa Shouten (1908 or possibly 1910). Image: Tamataro’s adoptive mother, Tamataro, Masahiro, Tamaki’s husband, Tamaki, and unknown figure. Source: Tanaka, Jun’ichiro. Nihoneiga Hattatsushi. History of Film and Its Advance in Japan (Tokyo: Chuou Koronsha, 1968), 127.

Kinoshita/Kunitaro Gomi Actors Troupe.”3 If the caption was correct, then the photo would have to be dated from 1910, not 1908. However, there is no proof that Yoshizawa Shoten took pictures of the film scenes in 1908. Following the Yoshizawa’s official product lists issued between 1905 and 1910, the novel-based films such as Ono ga tsumi first appeared in 1908,4 and the actual pictures of film scenes did not appear until 1910.5 Katsudo Shashinkai was first published in June 1909; therefore, there is a possibility that the photo was shot exclusively for the magazine.

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Moreover, the photograph published in Nihoneiga Hattatsushi 1 is larger and clearer than the one that appeared in Katsudo Shashinkai. Since all photographs that Yoshizawa Shoten owned were lost during the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, one must wonder where and how Junichiro Tanaka got hold of the photograph that was included in his book. One possibility is that it was given to him while he was conducting interviews with those who worked on film production at Yoshizawa Shoten, one of them being the company founder Kenichi Kawaura, who had retired from the film industry in 1915.6 Today, we can only speculate about the information Tanaka was provided along with the photo. However, it was Tanaka himself who found the rebound version of Katsudo Shashinkai on the shelf of a used bookstore after the Great Kanto Earthquake.7 As such, it is difficult to think that Tanaka failed to conduct research on the photo of Ono ga tsumi, which was supposedly photographed in 1910. With that in mind, I have relied on Tanaka’s explanations in this paper. While the original 1908 Ono ga tsumi only has one existing still photograph, we are able to speculate based on the producers’ memoirs and other reference materials that its scenes were modeled after the illustrations that accompanied the serialized newspaper novel and that they are similar in their compositions to the images made familiar through the advertisement and still photos of the story’s theatrical version.8 Choji Nakauchi, a Japanese author and scriptwriter, aptly explained the reason why the original film version Ono ga tsumi was so well received by the public despite the fact it consisted of only two scenes. In his article about the Meijiza Play Theater production of Ono ga tsumi that appeared in the August 1912 issue of Engei Gahou (Entertainment Pictorial Magazine), he explains: “The entire Ono ga tsumi was played in just two locations, Hakone and Bousou Beach. If this was a brand-new story, it would have struggled to garner the interest of the audience with only two scenes. However, because the play deals with a well-recognized, popular story that people are already familiar with, having these two scenes, one on the beach and the other in mountains, is enough to make it a summertime hit.”9 In the Japanese theater community at the time, it was common practice to break down stories into several sections, each having a climactic scene. This made it possible for theater producers to select any of the section(s) of the story depending on the time or the season it was played in or in which theater it was performed. Because of this the earliest filmmaker selected the scene of “Beach Shore,” and this is the unique reason that the

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Figure 26.3. Top, left: Illustration of episode 74 of Ono ga tsumi. Image: Masahiro and Tamataro are playing on the beach. Osaka Mainichi Newspaper (March 18, 1900). Top, right: Illustration of episode 99 of Ono ga tsumi. Image: Tamataro realizes that a high wave is swallowing up Masahiro. Osaka Mainichi Newspaper (April 12, 1900). Bottom, left: Illustration of episode 100 of Ono ga tsumi. Image: Tamataro tries to help Masahiro. Osaka Mainichi Newspaper (April 13, 1900). Bottom, right: Illustration of episode 101 of Ono ga tsumi. Image: They both ended drowning to death. Osaka Mainichi Newspaper (April 14, 1900).

film version of Ono ga tsumi was successful even though it fell way short of being a full-length film.

“Drowning of Two Boys” The scene in which Masahiro and Tamataro are swept up by the wave and drowned was considered to be impossible to re-create on the stage because it required water, even though it is one of the story’s most crucial scenes. In the serialized newspaper novel, it took several consecutive issues to describe the tragic scene, and these were accompanied by dramatic illustrations of two boys fighting against the billowing sea. (See fig. 26.3; there were six total illustrations in the serialization.)

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In his memoir, Nobuchika Nakano, an actor and the producer of the film in 1908, remembers that he had a difficult time shooting the scene because the children were afraid of the big waves at the time.10 Although the film no longer exists, it is safe to speculate that the illustrations from the serialized newspaper novel were used here as visual references to create the scene. The provenance of the serialized illustration emerges to guide us to reconstruct the scene in the lost film.

5. Ono ga tsumi the Film after 1908 Yoshizawa Shouten was not the only producer to adapt Ono ga tsumi for the screen. Several other later silent versions exist, and these too continue this process of visual adaptation from the illustrated novel. The scene in which Tamaki breaks down over the death of Masahiro and Tamataro was re-created in the later versions of the film released in 1916, produced by Tenkatsu Nippori Tokyo Studio (supposed to be directed by Nobuchika Nakano), and 1917, produced by Nikkatsu Mukojima Tokyo Studio (supposed to be directed by Tadao Oguchi). Both versions are also lost, but stills survive depicting the scene in both films, and both have been molded after the novel’s illustration (see fig. 26.4). From the 1917 film productions, another later scene also survives in which Tamaki and her husband lament over the two boys (fig. 26.4, bottom right), which was also likely adapted from one of the novel’s illustrations (fig. 26.4, bottom left).

Conclusion Ono ga tsumi first appeared as a serialized newspaper novel in 1899 and continuingly represented the visual illustrations for almost a year. It was then brought on stage in 1900 and ended its film run at the time when film companies began producing narrative movies in 1908. Although only consisting of two scenes, Ono ga tsumi was a great success because the Japanese general public was familiar with its story line and its visual images. The illustrations in the serialized newspaper novel came to be the visual provenance of the story and served as a prototype of the filmic scene to determine the visual details of the story. In this paper, I have traced the visual provenance of the newspaper novel and theater play Ono ga tsumi and used the surviving film stills to show the importance of this provenance for reconstructing the scenes of lost films.

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Figure 26.4. Top, left: Illustration of episode 102 of Ono ga tsumi. Image: Four fishermen (who found two boys in the sea), two dead sons, and Tamaki. Osaka Mainichi Newspaper (April 15, 1900). Top, right: Film Ono ga tsumi (Nikkatsu, 1917). Image: Tamaki, Tamataro’s adoptive mother, two dead sons in front, and four fishermen (who found two boys in the sea) in back. Katsudo Gaho, Film Pictorial Magazine (June 1917). Bottom, left: Illustration of episode 106 of Ono ga tsumi. Image: Two dead sons, Tamaki, and her husband. Osaka Mainichi Newspaper (April 19, 1900). Bottom, right: Film Ono ga tsumi (Nikkatsu, 1917). Image: Tamaki’s husband, two dead sons, and Tamaki. Katsudo Gaho, Film Pictorial Magazine (June 1917).

The visual provenance of novel illustrations allows us to unearth these decisive moments in the lost and forgotten era of early Japanese cinema.

Notes 1. This photo (a collection of Tanaka) was donated to Tanaka’s hometown and today is owned by Nitta branch of Ota city library in Gunma prefecture. 2. Tanaka, Jun’ichiro. Nihoneiga Hattatsushi (History of Film and Its Advance in Japan) (Tokyo: Chuou Koronsha, 1957), 127. 3. The beginning of Katsudō shashinkai no. 10 (June 1910), in Makino Mamoru, ed., Fukkokuban Katsudō shashinkai vol. 1. Facsimile edition of Katsudō shashinkai (Tokyo: Kokushokankōkai, 1999).

How Newspaper Novels Shaped Japanese Films  |  339 4. Katsudō shashin film seika hyō (Yoshizawa Shoten Official Product List) in August 1908, in Makino Mamoru (ed.) Nihon eiga ron gensetsu taikei 003(22) Meijiki eizō bunken shiryō shūsei. 002, Facsimile edition of Yoshizawa Shoten Official Product List from 1905 to 1910 (Tokyo: Yumanishobo, 2006), 375. 5. Katsudō shashin film seika hyō (Yoshizawa Shoten Official Product List) in February 1910, in Makino Mamoru (ed.) Nihon eiga ron gensetsu taikei 003(22) Meijiki eizō bunken shiryō shūsei. 002, Facsimile edition of Yoshizawa Shoten Official Product List from 1905 to 1910 (Tokyo: Yumanishobo, 2006), 576–584. 6. Tanaka describes his experience of calling on Kawaura in 1940 at Izu hot-spring resort in his book, Nihon eiga shi hakkutsu (Investigate Japanese film history) (Tokyo: Tōjusha, 1980). 7. Yoshiro Irie, a scholar of Japanese film history, indicates that Facsimile edition of Katsudō shashinkai was used by Tanaka’s collection, which Tanaka purchased in 1923 (today it is owned by Nihon University College of Art), by “Japanese Film History and Yoshizawa Shoten,” in Makino Mamoru, ed., Nihon eiga ron gensetsu taikei 003(22) Meijiki eizō bunken shiryō shūsei. 002, Facsimile edition of Yoshizawa Shoten Official Product List from 1905 to 1910 (Tokyo: Yumanishobo, 2006), 751–775. 8. Similar visual and narrative development can be recognized in the text and film of Ukiyo (The floating cloud), one of the most characteristic pieces of family novel by Yanagawa Shun’yo (1877–1918). The text of Ukiyo was serialized in Tokyo Nichinichi Newspaper and Osaka Mainichi Newspaper from 1915 to 1916, with a film adaptation being produced by Nikkatsu Studios in 1916. The film Ukiyo was discovered in recent years and is owned by The Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum, Waseda University in Tokyo. 9. Nakauchi, Choji. “Bon-no-Meijiza,” (Meijiza Theatre in Summer) Engei Gaho (Tokyo: Engeigahōsha, 1907–) (August 1912), 131. 10. Nobuchika Nakano, “Nakano Nobuchika Kaisodan” (Recalls story of Nobuchika Nakano) in Makino Mamoru, ed., Fukkokuban Katsudō shashinkai, vol. 2. (Tokyo: Kokushokankōkai, 1999), Facsimile edition of Katsudō shashinkai no. 14 (November 1910): 3.

NORIE TANIGUCHI is Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Research Fellow in Film Studies at Nihon University of Art in Tokyo.

27 ARCHIVAL OBJECT OR OBJECT LESSON? Bricolage as Process and as Concept in the Edmundo Padilla Collection Kim Tomadjoglou

T

he principle of provenance is a concept used by institutions, both private and public (museums, libraries, art galleries, foundations, and archives), to determine “best practices” for developing an organizational system used to arrange and classify acquired materials (objects, documents, artifacts, and records, for example).1 To authenticate the moving image archival object for purposes of documentation, professionally trained archivists, such as myself, observe best practices by following the principle of provenance or “original order” so as to make a reasonable determination as to its unique “origin.”2 Information gleaned about the most recent original source of the object is used to assign it an identity within a larger organizational system—a “synthetic whole”—a totality of material objects and things that researchers and archivists refer to as the history of cinema.3 The inherent reproducibility of moving image “works” (a specific title and not a particular copy or version), however, problematizes the very notion of provenance, as does the cinema itself. First, we must consider that cinema is a public space as well as a performative art and variety-programming institution. Like dance and theater, cinema cannot be reaccessed and thus has no singular material artifact.4 Second, transitory and nonindustrial cinema practices, such as those of traveling amateurs and itinerants, leave behind few or no traces (filmic or nonfilmic). Similarly, most non-Western silent cinema has been lost entirely

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or exists in fragmentary form, largely as a result of past and present geopolitical and economic reasons (outright destruction, neglect, and lack of funding). Fragments and absences remind us of national and linguistic difference, the importance of location and peoples. Cultural heritage and patrimony, concepts often used to determine identity or authenticity—that is, provenance—broadly construed, cannot account for borders, whether geopolitical or otherwise. With cinema we often deal with multiple, not fixed, entities, so we must consider other less empirically directed approaches when interpreting and historicizing neglected or underrepresented cinema practices. In this chapter I offer a case study of borderland itinerancy in order to rethink provenance in terms of the significance of place. Itinerant showmen Félix Padilla and his son Edmundo, from the twin cities of Juárez, Mexico, and El Paso, Texas, presented films extensively throughout the northern Mexico–United States border region between 1921 and 1937. Like exhibitors of the cinema’s earliest years, the Padillas were also filmmakers and producers who took complete control over the presentation, content, and promotion of their work. They wrote original scripts, staged fake and authentic reenactments of the Mexican Revolution, and created advertising using repurposed popular media commodities: fictional and newsreel footage, photographs and postcards, and illustrated magazines and sound recordings that they purchased from dealers in both Mexico and the United States. Fronterizo entrepreneurs—that is, migrants and travelers who live in between places, freely moving back and forth—Félix and Edmundo were in step with contemporary business practices and demonstrated acumen and ingenuity when developing their screen practice.5 They learned modern film duplication and editing techniques as well as commercial color lithography, and they employed amateur actors who played stock figures based on both real people and fictional characters, often mixing the two. Neither fully Mexican nor unequivocally American, moving borderlanders like the Padillas were resourceful by necessity. Because of the paucity of commercially produced Mexican films, they recycled foreign and American products in order to satisfy their predominantly local Mexican and Mexican American audiences’ preference for Mexican subjects.

Bricolage and Fronterizo Living The Padillas’ amateur binational, homegrown, and nonindustrialized enterprise was based on a heterogeneous method of production and presentation

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that I argue is best understood as bricolage, the bringing together and repurposing of preexisting elements, and bits and pieces of materials, in order to produce a new construction.6 Their method—cutting, pasting, duplicating, and lifting—resembles modern twentieth-century bricolage techniques and operations such as collage, montage, and decoupage used in artistic and literary practices. The very nature of the medium of film is built on diverse bricolage operations, such as cutting, duplication, and transfer, and the cinema and film preservation practices use these representational strategies and techniques of appropriation such as quotation, excerption, accumulation, and repetition. Moreover, bricolage characteristics share much in common with individual and institutional collecting activities, like pillage, hoarding, and raiding.7 Bricolage and fronterizo living share the basic characteristic of improvisation and are self-directed. In offering the concept of bricolage to describe the craft repurposing exemplified by the Padillas’ artisanal, bilingual, and bicultural media practice, I examine Comerciales de El Paso, a reel of sound and color fragments constructed by Edmundo in the 1940s.8 The reel presents a diverse assemblage of advertising and musical subjects (interracial, ethnic, and variety stage performances) that allow us to historicize the Padillas’ intermedial performative mode of exhibition using bricolage techniques as representation and as a form of presentation. Unusually freighted with multiple (and sometimes divergent) possible meanings, the concept of bricolage may help us to understand the entrepreneurial spirit and drive of itinerants like the Padillas, who engaged in a cinema of the margins, located well outside the borders of industrialized and institutional practices.

Bricolage and the Cinema Bricolage was put into use by Claude Lévi-Strauss and has a well-established place in the field of cinema studies, although it has not been historicized as a practice or form of representation, as in the disciplines of art and architectural history.9 A French loan word, bricolage derives from the verb bricoler (to tinker) and the English term do it yourself, and it refers to the process of improvisation in a human endeavor. The term bricoleur (tinkerer) refers to the individual. In the context of cinema exhibition, Miriam Hansen uses the term bricolage to underscore how shifting moods, styles of representation, genres, and performance modes all produced, supplied, and encouraged a diversity of visual and auditory sensations. Bricolage in this

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sense also has myth-making properties with implications for the collective audience and the social space of experience.10 Alan Larson Williams describes how the bricoleur gathers the leftovers— the bits and pieces, remains and debris—in order to create new structures or capabilities that improve on preexisting ones. Importantly, he emphasizes the entrepreneurial spirit and creativity of the bricoleur.11 Mary Ann Doane, like Williams, differentiates between the bricoleur’s creative use of preexisting structures and the scientific work of the inventor, scientist, or engineer who activates structures in order to produce a new invention or process that changes the world. Doane uses Lévi-Strauss’s two modes, bricolage and science, in order to argue that in being oppositional, art (within that context) is a somewhat anomalous category with respect to cinema. As a form of technology, cinema is paradoxically capable of representing the contingent and the unstable by providing the ephemeral with an enduring trace or record.12 I apply similar interpretations of the term bricolage and use it to refer to a flexible practice in which different elements and techniques are brought together and arranged in a new way in works or products of do-it-yourself endeavors, like those of the Padillas.

Intermediality, Hybridity, and Bricolage While they operate in concert and overlap conceptually, intermediality and hybridity differ from bricolage in that bricolage is a practice or craft. André Gaudreault’s theory of intermediality defines a technical medium’s mixed state of being or becoming in order to theorize the structure of a media technology in a broader sense, but bricolage is a mixing method that one does in specific instances to produce interwoven and flexible forms of representation.13 Hybridity is simply something mixed and does not necessarily define the specific types of operations—cutting, duping, lifting, and reassembling material from different sources—that are produced by bricolage devices and characteristics such as collage, decoupage, and montage.14 In such cases, linguistic as well as “class and symbolic capital differences” produce new meanings by cross-cutting national as well as binational, transnational, and local differences.15

Edmundo’s Experimental Reel Comerciales de El Paso Edmundo’s experimental reel Comerciales de El Paso, produced in the 1940s after Félix’s death, exceeds traditional boundaries with respect to content and how it is constructed using old and new audiovisual duplication

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technologies.16 It is an unusual artifact that is both disruptive and fascinating. Possibly created for Edmundo’s own pleasure and his curiosity about sound and color technology, the reel directs our attention to a number of audiovisual bricolage processes that the Padillas employed. Comerciales de El Paso consists of local and national advertising assembled together with musical subjects (interracial, ethnic performances and stage acts), and it also combines a mixed audio track with black-and-white film stock from different eras, color tinting, and English and Spanish intertitles. Kodak Sonochrome tinted base stock designed not to interfere with the soundtrack was possibly used to reproduce the effect of tinting. The content of the reel and arrangement of segments is loosely organized, although the element of sound is used to link advertising with music performance subjects and consumerism. For example, we hear big band and jazz music, the Spanish castanets of tango dancers accompanied by an orchestra, Christmas bells ringing, and the harmonizing voices of a barbershop quartet while viewing advertisements for goods such as the latest Chevrolet car models of 1942 and movie theater ticket gift books. The different sounds associated with varied consumer activities are produced using both synchronous and asynchronous sound-on-film technologies and techniques, such as voiceover and film recording of live stage acts. But we also have artificially manufactured asynchronous sound (music) produced from 78 rpm records through duplication and matched to disparate images in which performance and advertising are combined with original and in-house produced intertitles. As another example, tinted ads for local El Paso businesses, Christmas holiday shopping, and the 4 Star Film festival (at one time possibly screened at Félix’s Imperial Theater) announce coming theater attractions. A voiceover narration in English accompanies an animated cartoon for Texas Consolidated Theaters and is followed by a series of performances, including the El Paso Orange County barbershop quartet on a fake outdoor stage, a couple performing a tango in a ballroom to traditional music, and an exotic Hispanic female dancer performing in a gypsy camp to the rhythm of a Bohemian polka (see fig. 27.1). Advertising in English and Spanish for the latest models of Chrysler and Plymouth automobiles (for example, superimposed over the image of the dancer, the speed of her movement increasing with the accelerating tempo of accordion music and cheering cries) similarly functions as links connecting disparate musical and performance elements to the theme of consumerism. In this abstract way, the reel presents border consumer cultural production as bricolage hybridity.

Archival Object or Object Lesson?  |  345

Figure 27.1. Edmundo Padilla Collection, LoC, Washington, DC.

Edmundo’s reel is intriguing on many levels and displays different aesthetic effects while producing representations of interracial hybridity and cross-ethnic gender and regional interaction delivered as performance. For example, we see bricolage heterogeneity as performance attraction on film in a segment that also exemplifies cinema as bricolage with respect to content, form, and public presentation. A female acrobat dressed in a leotard and tights uses her body as an instrument of athletic strength and as attraction. She slowly bends over backward until we eventually see her forehead upside down facing us as viewers (see fig. 27.2). Once upright, she assumes a side profile view then raises her leg while lowering her head and outstretching her arm in order to balance on one foot. Her inverted body becomes an abstraction attraction as falling colored balloons appear like giant bubbles bouncing onto the stage, creating a layer of color over her contorted body. Her corporality and strength disappear behind a shower of blue colors. A Spanish-language advertisement for a local El Paso garage superimposed over the surface of the image adds a third layer to this hybrid construction. This segment uses color film stock mixed with the sounds of

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Figure 27.2. Edmundo Padilla Collection, LoC, Washington, DC.

a slow rhythmic motif that is taken up in the harmonizing of a barbershop quartet in the next segment, which is tinted bright orange. In the reel’s final excerpt, a male performer in blackface and a top hat performs on stage with a woman of color (possibly Latina) backed by a group of scantily clad Anglo female tap dancers accompanied by a band of black male musicians. The order of the individual sequences on the reel does not reveal an apparent theme and may be a result of random selection and arrangement. Although they are discontinuous, the disparate segments operate as a “unified sequence” in which different transnational and translocal forms of social interaction and exchange are represented, using the technical processes of bricolage, assemblage, and construction.17 The local and the national are further combined by mixing in-house and industrial produced intertitles (English and Spanish) for El Paso’s local A. B. Poe Motor and Watkin’s companies with voiceover ads for national brands such as Chevrolet and the Lone Star Motor Companies. In order to construct this segment, Edmundo mixed sound film stock with blackand-white footage with applied yellow-gold color tinting. For local audiences, the addition of Spanish-language intertitles presents another layer

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by which images, sound, and written language communicate information to the viewer. Hybridity thus reproduces the real, using aspects of the film image as document and the sound recording as voice and/or sound effect. In this way, the reel as a totality, or “synthetic whole,” produces a double contradiction as a result of combining technologies, language, and content from different eras that are nonetheless unified. In its constructive process of combining fictional with nonfictional content and intermedial forms, Comerciales de El Paso resembles the Padillas’ La venganza de Pancho Villa, one of their many filmic versions of the life of the eponymous outlaw rebel.18 Both film product and performance, Comerciales de El Paso—like La venganza—is an open, nonfixed work in which the difficulty of separating and identifying bricolage characteristics (decoupage, collage, montage) operates to defy the notion of provenance, broadly construed as unique origin or source. These processes often overlap and operate simultaneously in order to produce new representations via constructivist forms of assemblage.19 Decoupage is described as “the art of [creating] surfaces by applying cutouts (as of paper) and then coating with usually several layers of finish (as lacquer or varnish).” Collage is defined as “a work of art that is made by attaching pieces of different materials (such as paper, cloth, or wood) to a flat surface.”20 In this way, Comerciales de El Paso, like the extant print of La venganza, allows us to explain bricolage characteristics and techniques that the Padillas used to produce film and related advertising products as well as to construct their audiovisual performances: decoupage, as in altering surfaces through writing or pasting; collage, or the transfer of material from one context to the next; and montage, or “the dissemination of the borrowings to the new setting”—that is, the scattering of information to a different spatial-temporal dimension.21 But Edmundo’s Comerciales de El Paso also raises problems of generic identification. The barbershop quartet sits on a fake fence and performs “How I Love You Tonight” under a tinted orange and glowing moonlight sky. Soundies, Royal Revues and Telescriptions are recordings of performed stage acts in which intermedial forms produce hybridities of various kinds (race, mise-en-scène, sound) in addition to being examples of new technological processes. Yet Soundies and Telescriptions—or, in this case, Royal Revues—are a generic form in which localized and national expressive forms, language, and representational strategies are distinct. Royal Revue performances, for example, drew from southern jazz, blues, Latino,

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Figure 27.3. Edmundo Padilla Collection, LoC, Washington, DC.

Caribbean, and Mexican dance and music performance traditions (see figure 27.3). Importantly, these short sound films are often overlooked in film historiography as well as in the selective process used for film preservation. Assembled from discontinuous elements that are linked together to create a mosaic metaphor that, using fragments or excerpts, expresses the border paradox (between Mexican and American and traditional and modern), Edmundo’s Comerciales de El Paso allows us to read what is “in between” and to conceptualize what is borderless as well as that which relies on a stable border or referent to generate a particular meaning. A fragment is a signifier “that would summarize in one form many characteristics of a given object.”22 Like the special role of absences in bricolage, fragments make us aware of what is not represented. But reproducible visual media and recorded sound fragments add an illusionistic layer to real objects and in this way allow us to consider Edmundo’s reel as standing in for both the Padillas’ products as well as their exhibition practice. Both archival object and object lesson, Comerciales de El Paso helps us to understand how Félix and Edmundo approached bricolage as a process,

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from different directionalities, rather than as a theoretical concept. That is, they relied on the inherent referential capability of audio and visual materials in reproducing the real using preexisting fragments and the cinema as bricolage rather than as industrial product. Like borderlanders who faked their identity and used disguises in order to cross the border, the Padillas were do-it-yourself exhibitor-producers who used bricolage for their own specific reasons, responding in part to the transborder experience. As a case study, the Padillas’ screen practice bears ruptures and discontinuities. Similar to other paradoxes that are characteristic of borders in general, the inconsistency and incompleteness of the Padillas’ artifacts help us recognize the unfixed materiality of cinema and the limitation of a film history bounded by national borders. Bricolage places importance on the particularities of place as well as on the craft of filmmakers and preservationists who tinker and adjust when working with historical artifacts as a means to conceptualize what is changing and mobile, never stable. Moving away from the theoretical notion of medium specificity, we can use bricolage to reframe questions of provenance and to understand film preservation as a mode of film history.

Notes 1. This essay is a revised version of a chapter from Kim Tomadjoglou, The Transnational Media Practice of Fronterizo Empresarios Félix and Edmundo Padilla, 1916–1937 (PhD diss., New York University, 2016), UMI: 12492, and part of a forthcoming book-length study. In library terminology such a system is referred to as “collections management” and typically takes the form of a database or bibliographic utility (for example, WorldCat), which is a global catalog of library collections. 2. While here I use the term archivist to refer to the entire class of professionally trained individuals working with motion picture artifacts, it is important to stress the division of labor that distinguishes the specialized work of one archivist from another in areas such as curatorial, cataloging, inspection, preservation, and restoration. 3. See Philip Rosen, Change Mummified. Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 117. 4. Though by restoring moving image artifacts we can attempt to replicate what we consider to be an authentic cinema experience, these presentations are new works. 5. Fronterizos can be Mexican nationals, Mexican Americans, or foreign refugees (Jewish, Chinese, Japanese, etc.) who reside in border cities either in the United States or Mexico or in both countries while maintaining a transient lifestyle. 6. Group Mu, eds., Collages (Paris: Union Générale, 1978), 13–14, cited by Gregory L. Ulmer, “The Object of Post-Criticism,” in The Anti-Aesthetic Essays on Postmodern Culturei, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), 84. 7. Significant for the cinema, Strauss writes the verb bricoler in its older meaning applied to recreational activities—ball games, billiards, hunting, shooting, and riding and always

350  |  Provenance and Early Cinema “with reference to some extraneous movement: a ball rebounding, a dog straying,” or similar. The bricoleur who works with his or her hands differs from the craftsman in that he or she “uses devious means.” Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (La Pensée Sauvage), trans. George Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd. (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962), 16–17. 8. The reel was possibly labeled this way by Edmundo or may have been recorded on an inventory made by filmmaker Gregorio Rocha when he examined the reel in El Paso (ca. 2000). The assigned title given to the work by Library of Congress catalogers is [Royal Revues and Other Local Ads from El Paso, Texas]. 9. See Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991). This literature on bricolage is too extensive to cover here and is examined in my larger study noted above. 10. Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon. Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 30. 11. Alan Larson Williams, Republic of Images: A History of French Filmmaking (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 8–9. 12. Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 165, 169. 13. See André Gaudreault, Film and Attraction: From Kinematography to Cinema, trans. Timothy Barnard (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011). 14. Importantly, Néstor García Canclini argues the application of divergent meanings of hybridity in the social sciences are based on dichotomous conceptual pairings (tradition/ modernity; north/south; local/global) that drive much of the work in the Latin American context. For Canclini hybridization—a continuous process of transculturation in the form of exchange, lending, and borrowing between cultures—is the object of study rather than hybridity. See “Introduction” in Canclini’s Hybrid Cultures. Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, trans. Bruce Campbell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), xxiii–xxix. 15. Howard Campbell and Josiah McC Heyman, “The Study of Borderlands Consumption: Potentials and Precautions,” in Land of Necessity: Consumer Culture in the United States-Mexico Borderlands, ed. Alexis McCrossen (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 331. 16. After Félix’s death in 1937, Edmundo continued to travel and show movies, though much less frequently and sometimes with a partner. It is possible he exhibited this reel to the public. 17. On the internally unified sequence with respect to history and artifacts, see Rosen, Change Mummified, 117. 18. See my dissertation and my “Film Compilation: The Border, Bricolage and La Venganza de Pancho Villa,” Vivomatografías. Revista de estudios sobre precine y cine silente en Latinoamérica 2 no. 2 (December 2016): 33–71. 19. Here I am not referring to Russian constructionist artistic practices of the 1920s, although there are similarities in method. The aesthetic, social, and political contexts are quite different, as is true in Picasso’s use of bricolage in his cubist artworks and which I examine in the larger study. 20. Definitions from Meriam-Webster.com (Meriam-Webster, n.d.), accessed May 21, 2020, http://www.meriam-webster.com/dictionary/decoupage and http://www.meriam​ -webster.com/dictionary/collage.

Archival Object or Object Lesson?  |  351 21. Ulmer, “The Object of Post Criticism,” 84. 22. Edward F. Fry, Cubism (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 27, cited by Ulmer, “The Object of Post Criticism,” 85.

KIM TOMADJOGLOU is an audiovisual archivist and historian who has curated retrospectives at museums and festivals internationally. She served as director of the AFI national collection and as principal liaison to the Library of Congress, where she was awarded a Kluge Fellowship in 2019 to work on her book on Félix and Edmundo Padilla.

APPENDIX: FRENCH LANGUAGE ESSAY

28 LA COLLECTION DE KERSTRAT-D’HAUTERIVES, DE SA PROVENIENCE À SA PROVENANCE Germain Lacasse

Introduction Ce colloque était intitulé “Le cinéma des premiers temps et la question de la provenance.” L’appel de communications ne mentionnait cependant pas la distinction importante que des historiens et archivistes anglophones font maintenant entre provenance et “provenience.” Ce dernier terme désigne le lieu d’origine de l’objet ou de l’œuvre, le distinguant du premier qui définit plutôt le parcours historique de l’œuvre dans la vie sociale. Cette distinction est intéressante pour intensifier le développement d’une histoire culturelle du cinéma et des films, une histoire qui doit être évoquée par l’étude des contextes de réception, en considérant mieux le parcours de collections passées ou disparues plutôt que l’origine et la chaîne de propriétaires de collections contemporaines. J’étudierai comme exemple l’histoire de la collection disparue mais documentée des films présentés par Marie de Kerstrat et Henry de Grandsaignes d’Hauterives, duo d’exploitants français actifs au Québec et aux États-Unis de 1897 à 1910. Présents dans les grands parcs d’attraction et les théâtres de vaudeville ils ont diffusé d’abord des films historiques et ensuite les fééries françaises coloriées. Leur large collection de films leur permettait de changer constamment de programme, et leurs abondantes publicités permettent d’évoquer avec assez de précision 353

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le contexte de projection et d’interprétation des films. J’analyserai en détail leur présentation de Vie et passion de Jésus (Pathé, Zecca, 1907) à St Louis (Missouri) en montrant comment les journaux généralistes permettent une étude de la provenance plus complexe et raffinée que la presse corporatiste qui nous renseigne surtout sur l’origine. Je montrerai également comment la presse généraliste permet de suivre l’évolution et même la dispersion de la collection, et finalement comment les archives numérisées facilitent maintenant l’étude de la provenance.

Provenience et Provenance Étudions d’abord plus en détail cette distinction entre les deux termes. Une excellente réflexion sur cette question a été formulée il y a cinq ans par Rosemary Joyce dans l’ouvrage collectif Provenance: An Alternate History of Art. Elle indique que cette distinction existe depuis la fin du 19ème siècle, le terme provenience étant apparu sous le plume de l’historien d’art Percy Gardner en 1883. Le mot a ensuite été utilisé selon des définitions différentes par les archéologues et les historiens d’art, et de nombreux débats sur la pertinence des termes ont eu lieu. Joyce écrit qu’aujourd’hui le terme provenience désigne pour l’archéologue le lieu de découverte d’un objet, tandis que provenance signifie pour l’historien d’art la liste des propriétaires successifs de l’objet. Le débat se poursuit encore mais Joyce indique en quoi cette discussion est pertinente pour les historiens: provenience est un point fixe tandis que provenance résume un itinéraire chronologique, mais les deux se croisent dans une histoire de la circulation de l’objet.1 Joyce ajoute que cette histoire doit considérer la mutabilité de l’objet, laquelle désigne les significations différentes que lui prêtent les publics et ensuite les historiens. À cette fin elle considère que les deux mots désignent deux approches qui doivent se combiner pour constituer une biographie de l’objet ou de la collection. Dans le même ouvrage Anne Higonnet rappelle que le terme provenance désigne trop souvent la liste de propriétaires, qui masque aussi souvent l’histoire des significations diverses et des œuvres dans l’espace et le temps.

La collection perdue Kerstrat-Hauterives et sa provenance (son parcours) Pour mieux établir l’apport théorique de cette distinction dans l’étude du cinéma des premiers temps, nous prendrons comme exemple une collection

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disparue connue par les nombreuses traces qu’elle a laissées: la collection d’un duo d’exploitants français, Marie de Kerstrat et Henry d’Hauterives, mère et fils, actifs au Québec et aux États-Unis entre 1897 et 1910, dont l’activité avait été partiellement documentée il y a trente ans et fut complétée en 2017.2 On contestera peut-être ma définition de ce stock de film en tant que collection, mais pourtant c’est bien ainsi qu’elle fut conçue et utilisée à l’époque. Son importance aux USA entre 1900 et 1910 est d’abord vantée par les publicités des Kerstrat-Hauterives: “Le vicomte d’Hauterives ne dépend d’aucune autre firme. Toutes les vues sont sa propriété et il possède la plus grande collection au monde de vues en couleur, toutes coloriées à la main, collection évaluée à 25 000 dollars. Elle lui permet de changer de programme chaque jour et de toujours avoir des nouveautés pour son public.”3 Il s’agit certes de publicité, mais elle était confirmée par de nombreux comptes rendus et soulignée par plusieurs journaux corporatifs au moment du lancement du projecteur Edengraph qu’utilisait le vicomte: “The story of the Edengraph as told by George Kleine . . . The first Edengraph that I myself saw was in use at the Delmar Garden, at St Louis, during the World’s Fair, at the exhibition given by Count d’Hauterives, who is well known to the trade as having the largest individual stock of special hand colored film of anyone in the United States, and whose reputation is that of projecting as perfect a moving picture as is possible with the most advanced appliances.”4 Cette collection débuta en 1897 par des films historiques Lumière (e.g., Napoléon et le pape Pie VII, Combat naval de Trafalgar) et des films Méliès (Le cauchemar, Le laboratoire de Méphisto, Le château hanté) et elle était annoncée et commentée comme une collection de films sur l’histoire, mise en valeur par le premier nom de la firme: Historiographe Compagnie, qui fit ses débuts au Québec. L’élément le plus important et le plus récurrent était La passion de Jésus. En 1897 les Kerstrat-Hauterives en montraient la version Lumière, qu’ils remplacèrent plus tard par les versions successives produites chez Pathé (1903 et 1907). Pour ménager les susceptibilités le commentaire fut cependant toujours semblable: le vicomte expliquait les tableaux en insistant sur la qualité esthétique des images et de la mise en scène, comme le faisaient couramment les autres exploitants avec ce sujet. En 1899 les Kerstrat-Hauterives firent une première apparition aux USA avec des films Méliès reconstituant la guerre hispano-américaine (Explosion du cuirassé Maine) mais cette opération se termina mal car leur employeur Huber’s Museum fut poursuivi par Edison pour des questions

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de brevet. Comprenant qu’ils devraient montrer des films américains aux USA les Kerstrat-Hauterives se procurèrent des films Edison (e.g., Combat Sharkey-McCoy, What Happened to Jones). Ils tentèrent cependant de protéger le statut français de la collection en intervenant avec audace dans des journaux américains au plus fort de la guerre des brevets: en juin 1901 un article publié dans divers journaux affirme qu’Henry d’Hauterives, appuyé par le gouvernement français, poursuit le gouvernement américain pour que l’Historiograph soit protégé par des droits d’auteur. Il explique que les films français sont copiés aux USA comme s’ils n’étaient que des séries de photographies, et pour mettre fin à ce plagiat il demande que les films soient reconnus comme des oeuvres spécifiques.5 Cette campagne pour protéger l’identité française de leur entreprise et de leur collection semble cependant avoir été ratée car quelques années après ils montreront régulièrement plusieurs films américains (Jack and the Beanstalk, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, etc.) et dans leur réclame ils rendront même hommage à Edison en tant qu’inventeur du cinéma.6 La collection évolua de son contenu historique vers un statut divertissant adapté aux parcs d’attraction, après des contrats à Atlantic City et surtout après une embauche pour six ans (1904–1910) à St Louis au très populaire parc d’attractions Delmar Garden. Le spectacle fut alors axé sur les fééries françaises coloriées de Méliès et Pathé (Faust, Cendrillon, Aladdin, Ali Baba, etc.) et sur de grands succès américains (e.g., Rube and Mandy at Coney Island, The Great Train Robbery, Deceived Slumming Party). L’évolution de la collection montre qu’elle correspond au modèle théorisé par Richard Abel pour le cinéma français aux USA: une place d’abord majeure sur le marché, puis un déclin assez rapide après l’essor de la production américaine soutenu en discréditant la production française.7 À mesure que l’activité aux États-Unis devenait plus difficile la collection commença à être vendue: on trouve vers 1910 des publicités annonçant l’Historiograph et mettant en vedette La passion de 1900.8 Y avait-il donc déjà en 1910 un marché et un public pour des films “anciens”? Les Kerstrat-Hauterives semblent alors avoir pris la décision définitive de quitter les États-Unis et tenter fortune ailleurs. Le meilleur indice de cette décision est la mise en vente de leur ancien nom et de la partie plus ancienne de leur collection à un exploitant itinérant nommé E. Rapp qui opère pendant quelques années dans le Missouri et le Kansas en utilisant les appellations Historiograph et Parisian Mimo-Dramas et en spécifiant dans ses publicités que La passion qu’il présente est la version de 1900.9

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La composition de la collection après le départ des États-Unis est inconnue. Les G. d’H. continuèrent leur activité aux Bermudes en hiver et à St Pierre et Miquelon de 1910 à 1913 mais on ne sait pas ce qu’ils projetaient. Les derniers éléments en furent définitivement perdus lors de leur retour en France en septembre 1913: tous leurs bagages, y compris les films, furent engloutis dans le port de St-Malo lorsque la barque qui faisait le transbordement chavira. Le vicomte fit encore des projections pour les soldats pendant la guerre 1914–1918 mais on ne sait ce qu’il montrait. La collection subit diverses mésaventures tout au long de son exploitation. Elle fut par exemple endommagée ou réduite par des accidents: un incendie pendant une projection (à St Rémi, au Québec, en septembre 1900), un vol pendant un voyage en train en janvier 1900 entre Montréal et Ottawa, une petite annonce du journal précisant que le sac contenant “la collection de l’Historiographe” pèse quinze kilos.10 Les compétiteurs et les médias tentèrent aussi de discréditer l’entreprise en questionnant l’origine des Kerstrat-Hauterives. L’histoire de cette collection ne peut être décrite par ses éléments survivants puisqu’ils sont disparus, mais l’étude de son parcours (de sa provenance) permet de valider certains modèles théoriques du développement de l’exploitation initiale aux USA mais aussi de pondérer certains aspects ou d’émettre certaines hypothèses: les collections actuelles sont survivantes, sédentaires, immobiles, protégées, “conservées,” et leur provenience indique d’où elles sont venues jusqu’à ce qu’elles soient immobilisées. L’histoire de cette collection perdue raconte plutôt le parcours d’une collection autrefois vivante, itinérante, évolutive, précaire, hétéroclite, non protégée ni conservée parce que soumise à tous les aléas de la vie d’une entreprise artisanale itinérante. On connaît l’état des collections conservées mais on connaît peu leur vie, tandis que si on ignore l’état des collections perdues, on connaît parfois très bien leur vie passée, et leur histoire peut contribuer à éclairer l’existence des collections “provenues” ou même “parvenues” et de les envisager avec moins de complaisance.

Un instant dans la provenance (St Louis, 1907) Mes recherches plus récentes dans les archives numérisées m’ont permis de trouver des artefacts textuels et contextuels qui documentent un moment du parcours/provenance de la collection Kerstrat-Hauterives. En ce cas on peut dire que la provenience/lieu d’origine est importante puisque St Louis (Missouri) fut l’endroit où les G. d’H. furent le plus actifs pendant leurs dix

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années aux États-Unis. Ils séjournaient et travaillaient dans cette ville de mai à octobre chaque année entre 1904 et 1910. Un texte publié dans le St. Louis Post-Dispatch en décembre 1906 est très révélateur pour étudier la relation entre le journal, le public et le film, de même qu’entre le bonimenteur et le film.11 Il faut préciser que les deux pages font partie d’un cahier spécial en couleurs commandité par un grand magasin de St Louis dont l’identité est précisée partout dans les autres pages: “Grand Leader,” propriété de Stix, Baer & Fuller, D. G. Co. Le récit de la vie de Jésus est ainsi enchassé dans la réclame commerciale imprimée destinée à exciter la consommation pendant les fêtes de fin d’année en ajoutant à l’exaltation religieuse des adultes l’excitation ludique des enfants attendant des étrennes. Le film La passion est ainsi un objet de consommation dans l’industrie du cinéma en période d’émergence enthousiaste et accélérée dans un pays alors en fulgurante ascension économique. La vie de Jésus apparaît aujourd’hui plutôt incongrue sur ces deux pages insérées dans ce cahier publicitaire où textes, dessins et photos étalent des étrennes. La photo du vicomte d’Hauterives apparaît sur la page parmi les photos du film, dans un cadre circulaire s’opposant aux rectangles des photogrammes de la même page, un peu comme au premier plan, ou comme le bonimenteur près de l’écran (voir fig. 28.1). Cette disposition spatiale où le sujet précède l’objet et s’en détache est semblable à la relation temporelle du journal et du film: l’article constitue un long préambule à la projection, il valorise le film mais le contextualise en rappelant les craintes exprimées auparavant par le clergé local. Le texte commence par un gros titre coiffant les deux pages entières en caractères de style médiéval: “Remarkable Pictures Coming to St Louis. The Life of Christ in Moving Pictures.” Sous le titre apparaissent onze photogrammes du film qui illustrent les tableaux de La passion et sont identifiés par une légende écrite. Le plus grand photogramme s’étend sur les deux pages et montre “The Last Supper.” Entourant la photo circulaire du vicomte sur la page de gauche sont disposés des photogrammes plus petits ordonnés chronologiquement: “In the Manger  .  .  . Flight into Egypt  .  .  . The Holy Family . . . “ Entourant les images sont imprimés en caractères gras les faits saillants du texte: “ Figures Posed by Head of Jesuits Under the Sanction of the Vatican . . . “Photographs of Real Men Being Crucified Shock St Louis Ministers Until They Learn the Facts  .  .  . Historical Accuracy of All Accessories . . . Miracles Performed Before Moving Picture Machine  .  .  . Modern Invention Graphically Depicts Every Occurrence

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Figure 28.1. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Sunday Magazine, 1906-12-09, page 6.

From Last Supper to the Resurrection . . . Climax of the Moving Picture Craze.”12 Le texte affirme que la fièvre des vues animées a atteint ses limites et que ce contexte a permis aux producteurs de tourner des films remarquables sur la vie de Jésus. Il rappelle qu’auparavant le clergé y était fermement opposé et a même obtenu des injonctions et des interventions de la police pour empêcher ces projections. Il explique que les rapides progrès techniques du cinéma permettent maintenant une reproduction très sophistiquée de la vie de Jésus, tellement que le pape et le Vatican permettent

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maintenant de tels films si ils peuvent les superviser. C’est le cas pour le film mentionné dans l’article, tourné à Paris sous la gouverne minutieuse des Jésuites qui ont guidé la construction des décors, la création des costumes et surtout l’interprétation des acteurs pour s’assurer que la vérité historique soit la plus fidèle possible dans chacune des milliers de photographies que comporte un film, ce qui selon Henry d’Hauterives semble multiplier par milliers le degré de crédibilité historique. The pictures, which have been supplied by expertise, reveal a remarkable degree of historical accuracy. As each one of the people in these pictures was moving naturally at the time the pictures were taken, the grouping has been striking and harmonious and what artists call the “composition” singularly successful. . . . The enacting of the scene in which Judas plays so strong a part had to be performed under the instructions of experts. The Jesuit priests know all these New Testament scenes by heart and it was a comparatively easy thing for them to instruct the actors of this remarkable performance. . . . A microscopic inspection of these pictures almost leads to the conclusion that real nails were in fact driven into the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet and that he had pressed down upon his head a crown of real thorns which made the blood trickle down his face.

Ce texte est évidemment bien différent des textes connus destinés à commenter La passion (per exemple les textes Lubin) mais son intérêt vient de ce qu’il contextualise la présentation à St Louis en la soumettant à l’interprétation d’un exploitant qui travaille dans cette ville depuis des années et en connaît bien les paramètres. Ses longues explications sur l’opposition antérieure du clergé et sur l’approbation plus récente de l’Église sont sans doute justifiées par des réticences qu’il a rencontrées dans cette ville. Cette partie du texte pouvait servir de préambule à la projection des films, fonction qu’il joue aussi par l’intermédiaire du journal. Il ne comporte cependant pas de partie décrivant la narration, comme le font les textes Lubin et d’autres. Il cherche plutôt les bonnes grâces d’Edison en plus de celles du pape: “This is regarded as the most audacious performance ever attempted by the owners of the remarkable instrument invented by Thomas A. Edison.” Henry d’Hauterives se souvient certainement encore qu’en 1899 il a été congédié par Huber’s Museum accusé par Edison d’avoir violé ses droits en affichant l’Historiographe. Un encadré disposé au milieu des deux pages est intitulé “1080 pictures per minute.” Il explique que pour produire l’illusion du mouvement la caméra doit prendre dix-huit photographies par seconde et que ce film d’environ quarante minutes a nécessité l’enregistrement de plus de cent

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mille clichés. Ce texte plus court vient souligner encore l’importance de l’argumentaire sur l’opposition entre photogrammes et continuité, insistant que la valeur artistique réside dans le mouvement résultant de la succession des images. Venant du vicomte d’H. cette démonstration, incluant l’allusion à Edison et son invention, renvoie au texte publié à St Louis en 1901 où il prétendait poursuivre le gouvernement américain . Il y déclarait que le brevet Edison était invalide parce qu’il ne protégeait que des séries de photographies tandis que les films étaient des œuvres dont la durée était une composante essentielle. La longue explication du vicomte est difficile à comprendre, St Louis ayant connu pendant les années précédentes plusieurs projections de Passion Play qui ne semblent avoir suscité aucune controverse; il y eut entre autres un film de la Passion d’Oberammergau projeté sur le Pike pendant toute l’exposition de 1904, accompagnée par une conférence de M. McDowell;13 il y eut aussi une projection par Burton Holmes, et plusieurs autres.14 Peutêtre Henry de G. d’H. avait été personnellement témoin de telles résistances parce qu’il présentait des films à St Louis dans les écoles et ailleurs et fut critiqué par des clercs? Le catholicisme français avait alors une place importante dans cette ville et l’a d’ailleurs encore aujourd’hui: on y a construit au milieu du 19ème siècle la plus grande cathédrale catholique de l’Ouest américain; le 25 août 2014 on a remis les clés de la ville à l’actuel prétendant au trône de France et de Navarre, Louis de Bourbon, duc d’Anjou. Vue dans ce contexte la position des Kerstrat-Hauterives à St Louis pouvait être lucrative mais délicate et cette position d’équilibriste expliquerait les précautions importantes que le texte manifeste. Si la collection avait survécu elle ne pourrait nous en dire plus à ce sujet et il faudrait quand même étudier son parcours.

Conclusion Cette étude suggère d’inclure parmi ce qu’on appelle “collection” les ensembles disparus qu’on peut documenter; les projectionnistes d’avant la location des copies deviennent dès lors des propriétaires de collections qui sont disparues. Le parcours de cette série disparue devient un élément intéressant de l’histoire, il incite à considérer les collections actuelles comme la pointe d’un iceberg depuis longtemps fondu. Je considère les ensembles de films ayant appartenu aux exploitants itinérants comme des collections, ainsi qu’ils le pensaient souvent eux-mêmes, et je rappelle que ces ensembles

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ont été autrefois vivants, évolutifs, fragiles, non protégés, au contraire des collections survivantes qui sont des ensembles souvent constitués a posteriori. Leur vie antérieure n’est pas comparable, mais pourrait être mieux connue et comprise en la mettant en rapport avec ces collections dont le passé est maintenant virtuel. Dans le même livre que je citais au début comme ma principale source pour cette réflexion sur la provenance, Anne Higonnet rappelle que le terme désigne souvent la simple liste des propriétaires successifs d’une œuvre ou d’une collection ayant acquis de la valeur dans la durée. Elle souligne que cette histoire des changements de propriétaires masque souvent aussi l’histoire des œuvres et des significations diverses qu’on leur a attribué.15 J’ajouterais que l’étude croisée de l’origine et du parcours des collections disparues peut contribuer à une interprétation moins complaisante des collections préservées. Pour étudier la provenience (origine) des collections disparues les archives numérisées offrent une mine d’informations nouvelles. La recherche permet maintenant d’atteindre très rapidement des quantités importantes d’information autrefois presque impossibles à découvrir. En 1982–1984 il m’a fallu deux ans pour reconstituer le parcours des G. d’H. au Québec seulement, tandis qu’en 2016–2017 j’ai reconstitué leur parcours aux ÉtatsUnis en quelques mois et l’ai analysé dans un livre paru en 2017. Les journaux de St Louis m’ont permis d’approfondir une étude locale (provenience) tandis que l’ensemble des textes trouvés provenant de diverses autres localités m’ont permis de retracer la provenance (le parcours). L’ensemble de ces données pourra éventuellement, sinon permettre de retrouver des films ou des collections, du moins aider à comprendre le parcours des collections conservées, par une meilleure connaissance de celles qui sont disparues. On pourra peut-être aussi envisager différemment la définition des collections en général: lors d’un colloque à Montréal l’an dernier Rick Prelinger16 parlait de YouTube en tant que lieu de collection vivant et productif, ne futce que par la diffusion extrêmement large qu’il suscite. Je sais bien que son approche est controversée mais je l’apprécie parce qu’elle déplace les bornes de l’histoire et des archives. Dans le nouveau contexte historique et archivistique, l’étude de la provenience sera peut-être la description d’un lieu virtuel, et la provenance l’étude d’un parcours dans le monde numérique. L’aspect encore inconnu de ce nouvel environnement est cependant sa fragilité, sachant que la pellicule dure au moins cent ans, tandis que la vie des supports numériques est encore difficile à anticiper. On peut facilement prévoir que beaucoup d’archives numérisées disparaîtront, que les collections seront des parties

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d’un tout dont les éléments disparus seront comme ce que les physiciens appellent maintenant la “matière noire”: elle est invisible mais la réalité physique ne peut plus s’expliquer sans elle.

Notes 1. Rosemary A. Joyce, “From Place to Place: Provenience, Provenance, and Archeology,” in Provenance: An Alternate History of Art, ed. Gail Feigenbaum and Inge Reist (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2012), 148. 2. Germain Lacasse, “Dream World”: Parcours et discours d’un duo d’exploitants français aux USA 1899–1910 (Lac Brome: édité à compte d’auteur, 2017). 3. Anonyme, “Music Hall,” The Auburn Bulletin (30 janvier 1905): 5. 4. Anonyme, “History of the Edengraph,” Moving Picture World (28 mars 1908): 264; Moving Picture World, Vol. 7, No. 4 (23 juillet 1910): 199; Film Index, Vol. 6, No. 4: 10–11; The Billboard (23 juillet 1910): 24. 5. Anonyme, “Two Governments in Picture Suit,” The Republic, St. Louis (4 juin 1901): 6. L’article est aussi paru dans le Times de Shreveport, Louisiane (11 juin 1901): 4, sous le titre “Storyettes” et probablement dans d’autres journaux. 6. Anonyme, “Remarkable Pictures Coming to St Louis,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch (9 décembre 1906): 90–91. 7. Richard Abel, The Red Rooster Scare. Making Cinema American 1900–1910 (Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1999): XII. 8. Annonces “Historiograph,” Springfield Missouri Republican (24 septembre 1911): 7; Macon Daily Chronicle (11 décembre 1911): 3; Chillicote Constitution (16 décembre 1911): 8; The Wichita Beacon (17 mars 1913): 4; The Wichita Daily Eagle (16 mars 1913): 22. 9. Publicité, “E. Rapp’s Historiograph,” Chillicote Constitution (16 décembre 1911): 8. 10. La Presse, Montréal, 14 septembre 1899. 11. St. Louis Post-Dispatch (9 décembre 1906): 90–91. Nous ne commenterons pas le travail du bonimenteur dans le cadre de cet article, mais son activité devrait aussi être considérée comme une matière disparue dont l’histoire actuelle ne tient pas assez compte et sur laquelle les collections contemporaines ne nous disent presque rien. 12. St. Louis Post-Dispatch (9 décembre 1906): 90–91. 13. Anonyme, “Will Describe Passion Play,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch (27 mars 1904): 8. 14. Publicité, “Burton Holmes,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch (6 septembre 1905): 6. 15. Anne Higonnet, “Afterword. The Social Life of Provenance,” in Provenance: An Alternate History of Art, ed. Gail Feigenbaum and Inge Reist (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2012), 195. 16. Rick Prelinger, “The Emergence of Collecting and the Effacement of Archives,” colloque Le cinéma dans l’œil du collectionneur, Cinémathèque québécoise, Montréal, 4–8 juin 2017.

Bibliographie Abel, Richard. The Red Rooster Scare. Making Cinema American 1900–1910. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999.

364 | Appendix Douglas, Jennifer. “Origins: Evolving Ideas about the Principle of Provenance.” In Currents of Archival Thinking, edited by Terry Eastwood and Heather MacNeil, 23–43. Santa Barbara, Libraries Unlimited, 2010. Higonnet, Anne. “Afterword. The Social Life of Provenance.” In Provenance: An Alternate History of Art, edited by Gail Feigenbaum and Inge Reist, 195–209. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2012. Joyce, Rosemary A. “From Place to Place: Provenience, Provenance, and Archeology.” In Provenance: An Alternate History of Art, edited by Gail Feigenbaum and Inge Reist, 43–56. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2012. Koszarski, Richard. “Richard Hoffmann: A Collector’s Archive.” In A Companion to Early Cinema, edited by A. Gaudreault et al., 498–524. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Lacasse, Germain. “Dream World”: parcours et discours d’un duo d’exploitants français aux USA 1899–1910. Lac Brome: Germain Lacasse, 2017. Lacasse, Germain, and S. Duigou. Marie de Kerstrat, l’aristocrate du cinématographe. Quimper: Éditions Ressac, 1987. Musser, Charles. “Les passions et les mystères de la passion aux États-Unis 1880–1900.” In Une invention du diable? Cinéma des premiers temps et religion/An Invention of the Devil? Religion and Early Cinema, edited by R. Cosandey et al. Sainte Foy et Lausanne: Presses de l’Université Laval et Éditions Payot Lausanne, 1992.

Sites Web Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec: http://www.banq.qc.ca/accueil/ Chronicling America: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/ Cinémathèque Québécoise: http://www.cinematheque.qc.ca/ Media History Digital Library: http://mediahistoryproject.org/ Newspapers.com: https://www.newspapers.com/ Old Fulton Post Card: http://www.fultonhistory.com/Fulton.html

GERMAIN LACASSE est professeur honoraire à l'Université de Montréal. Ses principales publications sont Histoires de scopes. Le cinéma muet au Québec et Le bonimenteur de vues animées. Le cinéma muet entre tradition et modernité. Il prépare maintenant un ouvrage sur l'histoire de la lanterne magique et de la conférence illustrée au Québec.

APPENDIX: FRENCH LANGUAGE ESSAY

29 D’OÙ VIENNENT LES COSTUMES DU CINÉMA DES PREMIERS TEMPS? Priska Morrissey

D

’où viennent les costumes des premières mises en scène cinématographiques? En matière de costumes, le cinéma est l’héritier de la tradition scénique. Cet héritage peut être envisagé d’un point de vue formel, plastique et socioculturel, mais il est également—et très directement— organisationnel et matériel. Penser la question de la provenance sous cet angle concret, voire archéologique, se révèle à bien des égards fructueux. Qu’on songe, par exemple, à la manière dont des travaux comme ceux de Denis Dupont et Roland-François Lack consacrés aux lieux précis de tournage (rues, parcs, façades de maisons, etc.) des premières vues du cinéma, permettent de repenser—entre autres—l’organisation spatio-temporelle des tournages et la manière dont on envisageait le “montage” des vues.1 Cette étude s’inscrit également à la suite d’une longue série de travaux d’historiens consacrés au couple cinéma/théâtre. Cependant, ce couple a rarement été envisagé du point de vue des costumes. Or, des articles de presse, les vues et des témoignages ultérieurs indiquent qu’une pensée du costume pour l’écran—héritée des pratiques scéniques et prenant en compte les spécificités du cinématographe—existe depuis les premières années, sinon les premiers mois d’exploitation du cinématographe. En mettant au jour les circuits d’alimentation des magasins de costumes des ateliers de prises de vues cinématographiques, nous verrons en effet que cet héritage ne se réalise pas sans une adaptation, subie ou réfléchie, consciente 365

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ou non, à un mode de production spécifique qui repose sur une organisation temporelle du jeu des artistes toute différente (prise de vues unique d’une scène et non sa répétition de représentation en représentation) et des contraintes techniques particulières (cadre, sensibilité chromatique de la pellicule, etc.).

La garde-robe des artistes Selon le droit encore en vigueur au théâtre à la fin du xixe et au début du xxe siècles, les artistes doivent fournir toutes les tenues dites “de ville” tandis que les théâtres s’engagent à leur fournir costumes spéciaux, costumes d’époque, uniformes, perruques, coiffures et accessoires. Les artistes sont parfois amenés à investir des sommes considérables dans cette garde-robe. On trouve d’ailleurs trace de plusieurs procès où les artistes, se voyant destitués d’un rôle, exigent des dommages-intérêts pour couvrir leurs frais de costumes.2 En de rares cas, en plus de leurs appointements, les artistes perçoivent des “feux” qui peuvent être destinés à payer certains costumes. Jules Moynet l’explique dans L’Envers du théâtre en 1873: Les toilettes de ville sont presque toujours portées par contrat au compte des artistes dramatiques; mais il y a des cas, et ils sont fréquents dans notre répertoire moderne, où une actrice a pour huit ou dix mille francs de toilette dans une seule pièce; l’administration lui alloue des feux en rapport avec les dépenses à faire, et souvent elle fait, de cette dure nécessité, un moyen de réclame et de succès, les journaux aidant. Dans cette sorte d’ouvrages la vogue de la pièce est-elle quelque peu épuisée? Vite, apparition de plusieurs toilettes à sensation; la presse crie merveille, exagère les prix; le public féminin arrive en foule, et le public masculin emboîte le pas tout naturellement.3

On note ici l’importance du renouvellement médiatisé des toilettes et les liens, déjà forts, entre les maisons de couture et le théâtre qui sert aussi de vitrine. Au tout début des années 1900, le débat fait rage au sein des théâtres parisiens concernant ce qui doit ou non être assumé par eux concernant les costumes. Dans les grandes scènes parisiennes, la tendance est à la prise en charge de la garde-robe intégrale des artistes féminines. À la ComédieFrançaise, en 1902, on commence à s’interroger sur les frais de costumes de ville des artistes masculins.4 Le Français payait déjà les costumes de ville de ses artistes femmes; les toilettes étant remboursées à hauteur de 500 francs pour les robes de soirée, 200 à 300 francs pour les autres. Certaines grandes vedettes masculines semblent avoir déjà réussi à négocier les frais des costumes dits “de ville.” José Dupuis, du théâtre des Variétés, aurait spécifié

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dès la fin du xixe siècle dans son contrat que “son directeur solderait intégralement tous ses costumes; y compris les costumes de ville.”5 Il existe donc des différences de traitement selon le sexe, selon le degré de célébrité du comédien, selon l’importance du théâtre, selon qu’il s’agit d’un théâtre parisien ou de province. Et aussi selon les spécialités des artistes. Le contrat d’engagement du Grand Théâtre municipal de Montpellier pour la saison 1907–1908 stipule que, si les artistes dramatiques se verront remettre seulement les “costumes, perruques et coiffures dits d’époque ou d’uniformes,”6 les artistes lyriques doivent fournir “tous leurs costumes sans exception, ainsi que leurs perruques et postiches, chaussures et leurs accessoires, coiffures et tous autres accessoires de vêtements.” Le contrat précise que les choristes dames doivent fournir leurs costumes et déclarer “avoir une garde-robe nécessaire au répertoire; elles sont tenues, en outre, d’avoir un costume blanc court, des bottines jaunes, perruque poudrée, etc.”; les choristes hommes doivent “fournir le linge, les gants, les maillots et la chaussure appropriés aux costumes qui leur sont fournis par la Direction. Ils doivent avoir une tenue de ville convenable (habit, pantalon, gilet noir, cravate blanche, gants; maillots chair, rouge et gris perle; souliers cuir naturel, sandales, bottines jaunes, poulaines, bottes jaunes et noires, souliers à boucles, manchettes, jabots). Tous ces objets devront être en parfait état de fraîcheur et de propreté.” Enfin, les danseuses du corps de ballet doivent “se fournir tous les costumes exigés par leurs rôles, sauf ceux réputés de magasin fournis par la Direction et desquels elles devront se contenter. Il n’est rien fourni aux premiers sujets” et les danseuses doivent déclarer “posséder dans un parfait état de fraîcheur tout le bas vestiaire, soit: maillots de soie, chaussures, tarlatanes blanches et de couleur, corsages, cuirasses et fleurs.” Accéder à la scène requiert donc l’acquisition d’une garde-robe plus ou moins diversifiée. En 1878, Alfred Bouchard ne dit pas autre chose quand, dans sa définition du mot garde-robe, il précise: “Un comédien ou comédienne, chanteur ou chanteuse, qui n’aurait pas de garde-robe, trouverait difficilement un engagement en province, où les directeurs n’ont pas de magasin de costumes, si ne n’est pour les figurants et les utilités. Il n’est pas nécessaire d’avoir absolument tous les costumes de son répertoire, mais il faut en avoir assez pour y faire face, en les rafistolant un peu.”7 En 1912, la question n’est toujours pas réglée et Albert Carré, président de l’Association des directeurs des théâtres de Paris, tente de mettre en place un projet visant à fournir des costumes de ville aux artistes dont la rémunération serait inférieure à 300 francs.8

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Ce mode de fonctionnement est reconduit dans l’industrie cinémato­ graphique. Le théâtre de prise de vues fournit les costumes spéciaux, les uniformes, les masques, etc. Dans tous les autres cas, les artistes doivent apporter leurs tenues de ville. Fernand Rivers en donne un témoignage évocateur en 1945 dans ses Mémoires, où il explique la hiérarchie qui s’impose entre les artistes qui peuvent s’offrir et donc proposer une garde-robe riche et les autres qui doivent composer avec moins d’effets et faire attention à ce que ces précieux effets ne soient pas détériorés. Rivers souligne par exemple la qualité des costumes de Max Linder, d’une “richesse éblouissante et qui ne sortaient vraisemblablement pas du fripier de l’Odéon.”9 La propriété d’une garde-robe diversifiée comme la maîtrise de son élégance semblent donc faire office de facteurs de différenciation entre les artistes. C’est à la fois un espace de liberté et un contrôle de son image qui sont ici offerts au comédien, mais qui va de pair avec une contrainte financière. Dans le cadre des tournages cinématographiques, cette liberté n’est pas sans conséquences sur le montage final des plans qui peuvent avoir été tournés sur plusieurs jours, voire en plusieurs lieux s’il est prévu de tourner des plans en plein air. Ainsi, Rivers explique comment un comédien coquet tourna différentes scènes qui devaient par la suite être montées les unes à la suite des autres, avec un costume différent, entraînant ce qu’on appellera par la suite un “faux raccord.” Il est probable que les danseuses, comme au théâtre, devaient fournir leur costumes et tout l’ensemble du “bas vestiaire.” Ainsi, lorsque Méliès engage les danseuses du Châtelet, ces dernières devaient certainement venir avec leurs propres bas, chaussons et justaucorps. C’est évidemment aussi le cas des artistes dont la tenue fait partie de leur personnage, comme l’illustrent les longues chaussures de Little Tich.

Posséder son magasin de costumes Lorsque des costumes spéciaux sont requis, les théâtres peuvent piocher dans leur propre magasin qu’ils possèdent généralement, quoique d’une richesse très variable. Héritiers des traditions scéniques, les maisons d’édition cinématographiques s’équipent, elles aussi et assez rapidement, d’un fonds de costumes (voir fig. 29.1). L’exemple le plus éclatant et le mieux renseigné est probablement celui de Georges Méliès. Pragmatique, Méliès a utilisé dans ses vues des costumes du théâtre Robert-Houdin (l’exemple le plus fameux reste le célèbre ou plutôt les célèbres manteaux de magicien). Au milieu des années 1900, il acquiert le fonds de la maison Lepère et, ce faisant, il achète, pour les besoins des prises de vues, la garde-robe d’un

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Figure 29.1. Le magasin des costumes Pathé. Photo: Pierre Trimbach, collection Maurice Gianati collection, Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé, c. 1910–1914. Il s’agit probablement de la réserve du théâtre de prise de vues de la SCAGL.

loueur qui, lui-même, avait acheté des costumes du théâtre de la Renaissance en 1884 pour ravitailler les cavalcades, pièces historiques, revues et opérettes des théâtres de Paris et de sa banlieue. De la même façon, en 1908, les studios Éclair installés à Épinay-sur-Seine disposent d’une réserve d’accessoires et d’un magasin de costumes.10 En 1913, ces studios bénéficient de nouvelles installations et annoncent: “De vastes magasins, des ateliers nouveaux pour la confection des décors et des costumes viennent d’être achevés et vont  .  .  . permettre de nouveaux efforts.”11 “La même année 1913, la société Biogram, située 26, rue du MontThabor et fondée en 1912, possède deux pièces: un laboratoire et un magasin de costumes,12 tandis que la société Théophile Pathé et compagnie se targue, parmi son matériel, d’avoir des “accessoires de théâtre, décors, costumes.”13 Il est difficile de se faire une idée de l’étendue de ces garde-robes et l’idée d’un atelier de confection chez Éclair intrigue. Notons plusieurs choses concernant ces magasins. Tout d’abord, à moins d’avoir été confectionnés spécialement pour les vues (ce qui semble

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très rare), ces costumes proviennent fort probablement de fonds de costumes de théâtre qui sont régulièrement mis en vente: garde-robes d’artistes ou maisons de location, de théâtre—il s’agit donc de costumes faits pour la scène, aux coloris éclatants, conçus pour être vus de loin et dans l’obscurité et sous les feux de la rampe. Par ailleurs, la possession d’un magasin de costumes au théâtre repose d’une part sur la nécessité d’avoir un fond de costumes de répertoire qui renvoie à une typologie de rôles et/ou de métiers—une typologie genrée et reproduisant les codes sociétaux—, et d’autre part sur le principe qu’un costume servira pendant plusieurs représentations, parfois sur une très longue durée: il est plus intéressant de le posséder que de le louer. Pour les besoins de la prise de vues qui s’effectue, dans les années 1900, dans un temps souvent court, un système de location semble a priori plus approprié (et il est d’ailleurs probable que la location ait primé en termes quantitatifs même s’il est difficile d’établir des comptes précis en la matière). Lorsqu’une maison investit dans un magasin, elle hérite d’un mode de fonctionnement autre, celui du théâtre, et se justifie davantage par cette idée de répertoire, de typologie fonctionnelle. Il est intéressant de posséder un uniforme de policier ou de nourrice parce qu’il sera utilisé à de nombreuses reprises, pour de nombreuses vues qui déclinent des variations de gags et intrigues sur des personnages aux tenues identiques, genrées et typées. Enfin, non seulement cette organisation transfère une partie de la maîtrise du costume à l’éditeur, mais encore elle implique une nouvelle organisation du travail dans les studios. En 1907, Méliès explique: “les costumes du tableau sont préparés dans les loges des artistes, lesquels sont convoqués pour le lendemain. . . . Après explication succincte du personnage qu’ils ont à représenter, les costumes leur sont distribués; ils s’habillent, se maquillent, bref, préparent leur personnage comme au théâtre.”14 Posséder et gérer sa propre garde-robe permet de s’assurer que tout est prêt pour la prise de vues souvent coûteuse, surtout en cas de figuration nombreuse. Cependant, cela revient aussi à s’occuper du nettoyage et des réparations éventuelles de ces costumes et donc d’un personnel supplémentaire, comme chez Méliès qui explique, toujours en 1907, que “des costumiers et ouvrières pour les réparations et l’entretien sont nécessaires.”15 Rappelons qu’au théâtre à cette époque, on se plaint que les costumes de magasins sont parfois rendus “souillés aux costumiers.”16 En 1907, le Dr René Martial insiste sur “les parasites et maladies de peau parasitaires qui peuvent être transmises par les costumes, coiffures et perruques, qui servent aux uns et aux autres sans

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nettoyage préalable; les dermatites artificielles dues aux mauvais produits de toilettes, aux fards, aux poudres de riz impures.”17 Selon lui, dans la plupart des villes de province, “le théâtre est un infect cloaque.” Qu’en était-il des magasins de costumes des théâtres de prise de vues?

Location et confection Si un théâtre n’a pas en magasin les costumes requis, s’il s’agit de costumes spéciaux ou que la pièce nécessite la réalisation de tenues particulières, il peut avoir recours à la location et à la confection. Paris à la Belle Époque compte de nombreuses maisons spécialisées dans les costumes, les chaussures ou les armes de théâtre, les perruques ou les cartonnages pour les masques, etc. Là encore, l’industrie cinématographique reprend à son compte le même mode de fonctionnement qui correspond relativement bien aux besoins des prises de vues. Lorsque le théâtre de prise de vues possède son magasin, faire appel à un loueur permet de compléter la liste des costumes et, bien souvent, semble largement le suppléer. Méliès lui-même, propriétaire d’un large magasin, explique que ce dernier est “toujours insuffisant.”18 Selon lui, “il n’est pas rare que l’on soit obligé d’avoir recours de temps en temps à la location chez les costumiers de théâtre pour compléter des pelotons lorsque de nombreux costumes semblables sont nécessaires— principalement dans les défilés ou cortèges à nombreuse figuration.”19 Si la confection spéciale est chose courante dans les grands théâtres parisiens, la situation des théâtres de prises de vues semble plus proche de celle des théâtres parisiens de moindre envergure ou des théâtres de province. La confection semble rare et la location prime. Déjà, pour les besoins des vues Lumière tournées vers 1896, Georges Hatot raconte qu’il récupérait chaque matin, tirant lui-même la voiture à bras, les costumes qui devaient être disponibles dès 8 heures, chez des loueurs comme Stelmans, costumier de l’Opéra et spécialisé dans les costumes historiques, ou la maison Selmy20 qui proposait, dans une publicité datant de 1896, des “costumes de Théâtre, Opéra, Opéra Comique, Opérette, Drame, Bals et Cavalcades . . . à des prix très modérés.”21 Au début des années 1910, la correspondance de Boudier, administrateur du théâtre de la SCAGL, témoigne des échanges quotidiens qui avaient cours entre le studio et les fournisseurs habituels des théâtres en matière de costumes (Maison Granier, Traonouez, etc.), de chaussures (Galvin, fournisseur de l’Opéra), de perruques et postiches (Baudu, Romain et Léon)

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et d’armes (Mauger).22 Il s’agit de grandes maisons qui fournissent les plus grandes scènes parisiennes—c’est le cas de Granier, mais aussi de loueurs ou marchands d’habits plus ou moins spécialisés (voir fig. 29.2). Ainsi, derrière le nom de Traonouez, situé 26, rue de Picardie, se trouve l’enseigne Au Coq Hardi spécialisée dans la friperie au moins depuis 1898 et plus spécifiquement la friperie militaire.23 Dès 1910, la SCAGL loue à Traonouez une “tenue d’officier de marine”.24 Boudier fait également appel à M. Prévost, administrateur du théâtre du Châtelet, témoignant des actifs services de prêt et de location entre les théâtres et les théâtres de prise de vues. Notons qu’en novembre 1910, Boudier lui demande la mise en place de deux tarifs de location: un prix pour trois jours (qui n’existe pas et qu’il demande) et un second pour une location d’une semaine (visiblement le tarif auquel est habitué Prévost). Boudier insiste et met ainsi en lumière le propre de la prise de vues: “quelquefois nous pouvons vous remettre ce matériel dans les 48 heures et nous payons une semaine.”25 Dans tous ses échanges avec les loueurs, Boudier se contente de commander la location de costumes typés (domestiques, ribaudes, mendiants, femmes et hommes peuple, costumes coloniaux, etc.), reprenant pour le compte des vues la typologie en vigueur sur scène. Si la possession d’un lot de costumes est contraignante en termes de place, de service et d’hygiène, la location pose d’autres problèmes au responsable administratif du théâtre de prise de vues. Boudier conteste et rectifie les factures et demande à ses interlocuteurs d’utiliser des bons costumes hommes et des bons costumes femmes permettant de garantir un suivi sérieux de toute location comme le contenu de chaque panier à l’entrée comme à la sortie du studio. On imagine que ces problèmes étaient les mêmes au sein des théâtres, mais Boudier se plaint aussi amèrement auprès de la maison Granier en décembre 1910 que, parmi les costumes cirque fournis, il manquait un costume de femme (“nous [avons été] obligés de nous en procurer un”)26 tandis que l’acteur principal a aussi été habillé de fortune. L’organisation est donc en flux tendu car la location coûte cher. Si le matériel n’est pas prêt au moment du tournage, il faut improviser des solutions: on ne peut repousser une journée de tournage pour laquelle artistes et figurants ont été payés. Ainsi, cet héritage théâtral nécessite quelques arrangements liés à un mode de production et une temporalité de jeu différents. L’adaptation est également soumise aux contraintes techniques de la prise de vues. Les contraintes liées au cadre, à la lumière, au rendu des couleurs sur la pellicule

Figure 29.2. Couverture du catalogue de la Maison Granier, loueur de costumes, c. 1900. Collection personnelle de l’auteure.

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ordinaire orthochromatique jouent dans le choix et le jeu des costumes offert à la caméra. Sur scène, l’éclairage au gaz puis à l’électricité ont permis le développement d’effets de lumière colorés jouant avec le déploiement de tissus toujours plus fluides, plus transparents comme la mousseline ou le satin tandis que certains effets permettent de transfigurer des costumes parfois de médiocre facture. Par ailleurs, le costume théâtral doit être lisible de loin; ses coloris sont souvent éclatants; leur élaboration est pensée pour la scène. C’est le cas des costumes de diables, pensés dans un rouge sang éclatant, synonymes de danger, de colère et qui donneront à l’écran des diables noirs qui, s’ils existent déjà, n’en restent pas moins inattendus à l’époque. À l’intérieur du théâtre de prise de vues, les conditions sont très différentes: la lumière nécessaire à l’impression de la pellicule est généralement la lumière du jour avec la cruauté et la dureté qui peuvent être les siennes. Un grand nombre de costumes qui peuvent être magnifiés sur scène par les jeux de lumière ont piètre allure au grand jour. Le rendu des coloris doit être envisagé différemment. Si Boudier ne mentionne à aucun moment la question de la couleur dans ses courriers aux loueurs, les vues témoignent d’une réflexion partagée sur leur rendu. On évite les blancs éclatants pour les chemises et jupons car, selon Jacques Ducom en 1911, ils viennent “trop durs en photographie et produisent des effets déplorables au milieu des tableaux.”27 De la même façon, on bannit le rouge qui devient noir à l’écran et on tend à l’épure des costumes afin qu’ils deviennent lisibles aux yeux des spectateurs et qu’ils se parent des atours de la couleur en devenant des réserves de coloris. Comme l’explique Verhylle en 1916, “au théâtre, tout ce qui amuse et intéresse l’œil humain ne produit pas le même effet sur l’œil objectif.”28 D’où viennent les costumes des vues cinématographiques des premiers temps? Du théâtre assurément, directement lorsque sont loués ou achetés des costumes spéciaux ou indirectement lorsque le cinématographe reprend le mode d’organisation scénique qui fait encore reposer sur les artistes le choix de leur garde-robe. L’organisation de la garde-robe des vues cinématographiques illustre parfaitement l’héritage des arts scéniques. La perspective archéologique adoptée ici permet d’éclairer la provenance et, partant, la circulation effective entre un médium et l’autre, tant du point de vue de la logique organisationnelle que des éléments matériels eux-mêmes. Cependant, cette adoption implique une série d’arrangements et nouveaux usages propres au médium cinématographique. La durée (et donc le prix)

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d’une location d’un costume dont on n’aura besoin seulement quelques jours; l’impossibilité pour l’artiste de faire évoluer sa tenue s’il se rend compte en jouant que celle-ci doit être changée ou peut être améliorée; le rendu d’une couleur ou des détails d’un costume sur la pellicule qui sera par la suite coloriée; les contraintes du cadre dans le choix et l’usage du costume constituent autant d’illustrations de la nécessaire adaptation de cet héritage au cadre organisationnel de l’industrie cinématographique.

Remerciements L’auteur aimerait remercier Stephanie Salmon et la fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé.

Notes 1. Voir le site Internet: https://vincennes1900.blogspot.com (dernière consultation le 8 juillet 2019). Denis Dupont et Roland-François Lack ont récemment présenté leurs recherches lors de la journée d’études “Cinéma 1900: magie et technologie” organisée par Laurent Mannoni (Conservatoire d’histoire des techniques cinématographiques) à la Cinémathèque française le 14 juin 2019. 2. Voir par exemple F. Marquet-Melchissèdec, “Chronique judiciaire: tribunal de commerce de Gand,” Le Progrès théâtral, organe officiel du Syndicat des artistes dramatiques 53 (20 août 1906): 5–6. 3. Jules Moynet, L’Envers du théâtre: machines et décorations (Paris: Hachette, 1873), 218–219. 4. Santillane, “Les frais de costumes,” Gil Blas 8223 (24 mai 1902): np. 5. Ibid. 6. Sans auteur, “Contrat du Grand théâtre municipal de Montpellier, saison 1907–1908,” Le Progrès théâtral . . ., 67 (décembre 1907 – janvier-février 1908): 10–13. Les citations qui suivent proviennent de la même source. 7. Alfred Bouchard, La Langue théâtrale: vocabulaire historique, descriptif et anecdotique des termes et des choses du théâtre, suivi d’un appendice contenant la législation théâtrale en vigueur (Paris: Arnaud et Labat, 1878), 124. 8. Marius Creuillot-Barlay, “Assemblée Générale du 29 mai 1912: rapports de la commission de contrôle,” Le Progrès théâtral . . . 110 (juin 1912): 69–73, 72. 9. Fernand Rivers, Cinquante ans chez les fous (Paris: Georges Girard, 1945), 11. 10. Conseil départemental de la Seine-Saint-Denis, Évelyne Lohr, Antoine Furio, Jean-Barthélemi Debost, “Les studios et laboratoires Éclair: 100 ans d’industrie cinématographiques à Épinay-sur-Seine,” Collection Patrimoine en Seine-Saint-Denis 26 (2007): 3. 11. Sans auteur, “Rapport du conseil d’administration de la société des Cinéma-Éclair: assemblée générale ordinaire du 12 mai 1914,” Ciné-Journal 304 (20 juin 1914), cité dans Henri Bousquet et Laurent Mannoni (dir.), “Éclair, 1907–1918,” 1895 12 (1992): 46–51, 49.

376 | Appendix 12. Thierry Lefèbvre et Laurent Mannoni, dir., “Annuaire du commerce et de l’industrie cinématographique (France, 1913),” 1895 hors-série (1993): 19–20. 13. Ibid., 48–49. 14. Georges Méliès, “Les vues cinématographiques: causerie par Geo. Méliès,” Annuaire général et international de la photographie (1907): 360–392, 388. 15. Ibid., 378. 16. Louis Hervouet, “Congrès d’hygiène,” Le progrès théâtral . . . 66 (novembre 1907): 3–4, 4. 17. Dr René Martial, “Hygiène dans les Ateliers dénommés: théâtres et concerts. Communication faite au 3e Congrès de l’Hygiène des Travailleurs et des Ateliers,” ibid., 4–5. 18. Georges Méliès, op. cit., 378. 19. Ibid. 20. Georges Hatot, réunion du 15 mars 1948 de la Commission de recherche historique (Cinémathèque française, fonds CRH): CRH 052, 18. 21. Publicité, L’Écho des jeunes: journal littéraire (1 septembre 1896): 169. 22. Correspondance d’A. Boudier, pelurier de la SCAGL1910-1914 (Cinémathèque française, fonds Sadoul). 23. Jean Marèze, “Voici de vieux uniformes des armes d’un autre temps, des habits d’immortels . . .,” Paris-Soir 4339 (16 mars 1933): 3. En 1933, le Coq Hardi est tenu par le neveu du fondateur, ce dernier évoquant ses souvenirs et son amitié avec Polin. 24. Correspondance d’A. Boudier, op. cit. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. Jacques Ducom, Le Cinématographe scientifique et industriel: traité pratique de cinématographie (Paris: Librairie des sciences et de l’industrie, 1911), 172. 28. Verhylle, “Opérateurs tourneurs de manivelles ou photographes,” Le Cinéma et l’Écho du cinéma réunis 239 (3 novembre 1916): 1.

PRISKA MORRISSEY est maîtresse de conférences en études cinématographiques à l’université Rennes 2 (France) et actuellement en délégation CNRS au sein du laboratoire Thalim (2019-2021). Ancienne membre du conseil d’administration de Domitor, elle travaille sur l’histoire des opérateurs de prise de vues, de la photographie du film et des costumes.

APPENDIX: DRYDEN THEATRE SCREENING PROGRAM George Eastman Museum, Rochester, New York

Fifty-Seven Prints of Early Films (1896–1920) from the George Eastman Museum A program curated by Paolo Cherchi Usai and Tara Najd Ahmadi Music accompaniment by Philip C. Carli, piano

Program 1—Wednesday, June 13, 2018, 7:30 p.m. Running time: approximately 90 minutes THE ADVENTURES OF DOLLIE (Biograph Company, United States, 1908) Director: D. W. Griffith Cast: Arthur Johnson, Linda Arvidson, Charles Inslee, Madeline West Original length: 713 ft. Print: 16 mm triacetate positive (Kodak), 260 feet + 11 frames [701 ft. in 35 mm], 11' (16 fps), black and white (GEM Accession no. L2005.0148.0022; The William K. Everson Collection/New York University) Titles: none Title on print: Adventures of Dollie Duplication laboratory: not known Date of duplication: not known Source: 35 mm paper print, Library of Congress Provenance: Copyright Office, Library of Congress, 1908 LES MÉSAVENTURES D’UN TONNEAU (Pathé, France, 1906) English title: Travels of a Barrel Director: not known Cast: not known 377

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Original length: 70 m. (229.6 ft.) Print: 35 mm triacetate positive (Kodak), 199 feet + 5 frames, 3' (16 fps), black-and-white stock (GEM Accession no. 1975.0007.1578b) Titles: none Title on print: none Duplication laboratory: not known Date of duplication: 1956 Source: 35 mm nitrate positive (GEM Accession no. 1974.0007.4702) Provenance: Gift of George K. Spoor (date not known, ca. 1949–1974) LE PRINTEMPS AU JAPON (The Japanese Film/Pathé, Japan-France, 1916) English title: When Flowerland Awakens in Japan Camera: not known Original length: 285 m. (935 ft.) Print: 35 mm polyester positive (Kodak), 575 feet +10 frames, 9' (16 fps), color stock (GEM Accession no. 2000.0380.1) Titles: English Title on print: When Flowerland Awakens in Japan Duplication laboratory: Haghefilm, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Date of duplication: 2000 Source: 35 mm nitrate positive, stenciled (GEM Accession no. 1999.0537.0001) Provenance: Gift of David Eve, Bolton, Great Britain, 1999 FLEURS. BOUQUET DANS DES VASES (Gaumont, France, 1912) English title: Reproduction of a Bouquet by Ordinary Cinematography Camera: not known Original length: not known Print: 35 mm triacetate positive (Kodak), 26 feet + 12 frames, 26" (16 fps), color stock GEM Accession no. 1994.1025.0001) Titles: English Title on print: Reproduction of a Bouquet by Ordinary Cinematography Duplication laboratory: Haghefilm, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Date of duplication: 1994 Source: 35 mm diacetate positive, black and white, Chronochrome process (GEM accession no. 1975.0166.0001) Provenance: Gift of Eastman Kodak Company, Rochester, NY (date unknown)

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LE MÊME BOUQUET PAR CHRONOCHROME GAUMONT (Gaumont, France, 1912) English title: The Same Bouquet by Chrono-Chrome Gaumont Camera: not known Original length: not known Print: 35 mm triacetate positive (Kodak), 28 feet + 2 frames, 28" (16 fps), color stock (GEM Accession no. 1994.1025.0001a) Titles: English Title on print: The Same Bouquet by Chrono-Chrome Gaumont Duplication laboratory: Haghefilm, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Date of duplication: 1994 Source: 35 mm diacetate positive, black and white, Chronochrome process (GEM Accession no. 1975.0166.0001a) Provenance: Gift of Eastman Kodak Company, Rochester, NY (date unknown) DÖDSRITTEN UNDER CIRKUSKUPOLEN (Svenska Biografteatern, Sweden, 1912) English title: The Last Performance (US) Director: Georg af Klercker Cast: Carl Barcklind, Selma Wiklund af Klercker, Georg af Klercker, John Ekman, Paul Hagman, Eric Lindholm, Gustaf Bengtsson Original length: 636 m.; 631.5 m. (after censorship) Print: 35 mm triacetate positive (Kodak), 1,011 feet + 14 frames (incomplete), 15' (18 fps), color stock (GEM Accession no. 1990.0185.0001) Titles: English Title on print: The Last Performance Duplication laboratory: John E. Allen, Park Ridge, New Jersey Date of duplication: 1990 Source: 35 mm nitrate positive, tinted, toned (GEM Accession no. 1974.0007.2096) Provenance: Museum purchase, 1957 Note: The film was distributed in the United States by Pathé. * * * CINÉMATOGRAPHE LUMIÈRE: SEVENTEEN FILMS (Total running time: ca. 18' at 16 fps)

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24e CHASSEURS ALPINS: SAUTS D’OBSTACLES (Lumière, France, 1897) Camera: not known Original length: ca. 20 m. (65 ft.) Print: 35 mm polyester positive (Orwo), 48 feet + 3 frames, 48" (16 fps), black-and-white stock (GEM Accession no. T18.0021.0001) Titles: none Title on print: Sauts d’obstacles—chasseurs alpins Duplication laboratory: Haghefilm Digitaal, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Date of duplication: 2017 Source: 35 mm nitrate positive (GEM Accession nos. 2017.0080.0001) Provenance: Museum purchase from private collection, 2017 Note: Lumière catalogue: Première liste, 1897, p. 8, “France. Vues militaires,” no. 172 / Aubert & Seguin catalogue no. 903. Soldiers of the Chasseurs alpins (the mountain infantry elite of the French Army) jump in formation over obstacles. Shot in Villefranchesur-Mer (Alpes Maritimes), France. The title on print “Sauts d’obstacles—chasseurs alpins” is handwritten in ink on a single blank frame, located at the head of the film, a few frames after the opening.

DANSE AU BIVOUAC (Lumière, France, 1896) Camera: [Alexandre Promio] Original length: ca. 20 m. (65 ft.) Print: 35 mm polyester positive (Orwo), 47 feet + 6 frames, 47" (16 fps), black-and-white stock (GEM Accession no. T18.0021.0002) Titles: none Title on print: none Duplication laboratory: Haghefilm Digitaal, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Date of duplication: 2017 Source: 35 mm nitrate positive, black and white (GEM Accession no. 2017.0080.0002) Provenance: Museum purchase from private collection, 2017 Note: Lumière catalogue: Première liste, 1897, p. 13, “Espagne. Vues militaires,” no. 266 / Aubert & Seguin catalogue no. 141. Soldiers at Vicálvaro camp, Madrid, Spain, dance a jota, alone and in pairs. Filmed in June 1896.

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FÊTE AU VILLAGE (Lumière, France, 1896) Camera: [Alexandre Promio] Original length: ca. 20 m. (65 ft.) Print: 35 mm polyester positive (Orwo), 42 feet + 3 frames, 42" (16 fps), black-and-white stock (GEM Accession no. T18.0021.0003) Titles: none Title on print: Fête dans un village suisse Duplication laboratory: Haghefilm Digitaal, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Date of duplication: 2017 Source: 35 mm nitrate positive, black and white (GEM Accession no. 2017.0080.0003) Provenance: Museum purchase from private collection, 2017 Note: Lumière catalogue: Première liste, 1897, p. 16, “Suisse. Genève (Exposition de 1896,” no. 312 / Aubert & Seguin catalogue no. 1370. A scene filmed at the Swiss Village, the star attraction at the 1896 National Exhibition in Geneva, Switzerland. A group of men and women in traditional costume perform a circle dance among a crowd of visitors to the exhibition. François-Henri Lavanchy-Clarke, Lumière’s concessionary in Switzerland, is directing the scene. Wearing a straw boater, he encourages the dancers through broad gestures, while acolytes animate the scene. The title on print, “Fête dans un village suisse,” is handwritten in ink on a single blank frame located at the head of the film, a few frames after the opening. POMPIERS: ALERTE (Lumière, France, 1897) Camera: not known Original length: ca. 20 m. (65 ft.) Print: 35 mm polyester positive (Orwo), 50 feet + 8 frames, 50" (16 fps), black-and-white stock (GEM Accession no. T18.0021.0004) Titles: none Title on print: none Duplication laboratory: Haghefilm Digitaal, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Date of duplication: 2017 Source: 35 mm nitrate positive, black and white (GEM Accession no. 2017.0080.0004)

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Provenance: Museum purchase from private collection, 2017 Note: Lumière catalogue: Cinquième liste, 1897, p. 2, “Vues d’Angleterre. Belfast,” no. 723 / Aubert & Seguin catalogue no. 1094. Steam fire engines drawn by horses dash at full speed out of a fire station, followed down the street by onlookers. Filmed in Belfast, Northern Ireland (formerly Ireland). SALUT DANS LES VERGUES (Lumière, France, 1898) Camera: [Alexandre Promio] Original length: ca. 20 m. (65 ft.) Print: 35 mm polyester positive (Orwo), 46 feet + 3 frames, 46" (16 fps), black-and-white stock (GEM Accession no. T18.0021.0005) Titles: none Title on print: none Duplication laboratory: Haghefilm Digitaal, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Date of duplication: 2017 Source: 35 mm nitrate positive (see note) Provenance: Loan from private collection, 2017 Note: The nitrate positive of this title was returned to the seller in exchange for a nitrate print of another Lumière film, Boleras Robadas (ensemble), 1898 (Lumière catalogue: Première liste, 1897, p. 8, “France. Vues militaires,” no. 846 / Aubert & Seguin catalogue no. 148). This is a print of second generation, poorly duplicated from its source. Layers of the various elements can be seen around the edges of the frame, and the frames constantly shift around, creating stability problems in the image. The print also has several shifts in exposure. Lumière catalogue: Sixième liste, 1898, p. 2, “Vues maritimes,” no. 837 / Aubert & Seguin catalogue no. 82. Sailors from the Austrian navy climb aloft, display flags from the rigging, and wave their hats to people supposedly on shore. Filmed in the port of Šibenik, Dalmatia, on the Adriatic coast of Croatia (formerly Austria-Hungary), in April 1898. [JOUSTING TOURNAMENT IN FRONT OF A ROYAL COURT] (Maker unknown, France, 1899) Alternate archival title: [Paris en 1400—Reconstitution de la Cour des Miracles (a)] Camera: not known

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Original length: not known Print: 35 mm polyester positive (Orwo), 61 feet + 4 frames, 1' (16 fps), black-and-white stock (GEM Accession number T18.0021.0006) Titles: none Title on print: none Duplication laboratory: Haghefilm Digitaal, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Date of duplication: 2017 Source: 35 mm nitrate negative (GEM Accession no. 2017.0080.0006) Provenance: Museum purchase from private collection, 2017 Note: Two knights on horseback start a joust in front of a court of honor. Spectators enjoy the reenactment scene, aligned on the right and left sides of the tilt yard. The scene takes place in front of a brick medieval building. This film should not be confused with Un tournoi, Lumière catalogue no. 1012 / Aubert & Seguin catalogue no. 642, shot in the Palais-Royal gardens on June 13, 1899. [A KNIGHT BEING BESTOWED BY THE KING OF FRANCE] (Maker unknown, France, 1899) Alternate archival title: [Paris en 1400—Reconstitution de la Cour des Miracles (b)] Camera: not known Original length: not known Print: 35 mm polyester positive (Orwo), 22 feet + 7 frames, 22" (16 fps), black-and-white stock (GEM Accession no. T18.0021.0007) Titles: none Title on print: none Duplication laboratory: Haghefilm Digitaal, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Date of duplication: 2017 Source: 35 mm nitrate negative (GEM Accession no. 2017.0080.0007) Provenance: Museum purchase from private collection, 2017 Note: This film is a reenactment of a French king bestowing a knight. The set is identical to the one in [Reenactment of scenes from Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris], also included in this collection. [REENACTMENT OF SCENES FROM VICTOR HUGO’S NOTRE-DAME DE PARIS] (Maker unknown [Lumière?], France, 1899) Alternate archival title: [Paris en 1400—Reconstitution de la Cour des Miracles (c)]

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Camera: not known Original length: not known Print: 35 mm polyester positive (Orwo), 172 feet + 7 frames, 3' (16 fps), black-and-white stock (GEM Accession no. T18.0021.0008) Titles: none Title on print: none Duplication laboratory: Haghefilm Digitaal, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Date of duplication: 2017 Sources: two 35 mm nitrate negatives, respectively 75 ft. and 43 ft. (GEM Accession no. 2017.0080.0008); 35 mm nitrate positive ([170 ft.]), black and white (GEM Accession no. 2017.0080.0009) Provenance: Museum purchase from private collection, 2017 Note: This film (of unusual length for the period) was found in the form of two camera negatives (respectively 57 ft. + 43 ft.) and a projection print with a single splice. Some footage of the nitrate positive print was not found in the nitrate negative and vice-versa. The safety negative and positive is a composite of all the elements. So far as we decipher correctly the action, the film appears to be a very summarized reenactment of Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), concentrating on some moments seemingly taken from Book I. 3–6 (Esmeralda dancing, her goat Djali at her side; Quasimodo trying to abduct Esmeralda, who is saved by Captain Phoebus or by Pierre Gringoire, the poet; Esmeralda marrying Pierre Gringoire), adding to it, in the background, a character throwing Quasimodo from a roof, a wild variant of what happens in Book X. 3 (Frollo being thrown from Notre-Dame by the hunchback). The location—a set, with a painted background on the left as it seems—is meant to represent the Cour des Miracles. The building in front of which the action takes place is identical to the one in [A knight being bestowed by the King of France], also included in this collection. Film historian Maurice Gianati has indicated that a reconstruction of the Cour des Miracles was presented to the public in April 1899, ahead of the 1900 Universal Exhibition in Paris. [PANORAMIC PAINTING OF A BATTLEFIELD] (Maker unknown, France, ca. 1897–1906) Camera: not known

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Original length: not known Print: 35 mm polyester positive (Orwo), 47 feet + 1 frame, 47" (16 fps), black-and-white stock (GEM Accession no. T18.0021.0009) Titles: none Title on print: none Duplication laboratory: Haghefilm Digitaal, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Date of duplication: 2017 Source: 35 mm nitrate negative (GEM Accession no. 2017.0080.0010) Provenance: Museum purchase from private collection, 2017 Note: This is a 360-degree view of a panoramic painting. The camera pans from left to right in a circular and irregular fashion, discovering what looks like a panoramic painting of a battlefield. The camera seems to remain on the same axis but pans at variating speeds, making it difficult to grasp the content of the painting. It could be the Reichshoffen Panorama (1881) by Théophile Poilpot and Stephen Jacob, depicting a battle in Alsace during the FrancoPrussian War of 1870. [MILITARY PARADE AT THE COUR D’HONNEUR IN VERSAILLES] (Maker unknown, France, ca. 1903) Camera: not known Original length: not known Print: 35 mm polyester positive (Orwo), 43 feet + 2 frames, 43" (16 fps), black-and-white stock (GEM Accession no. T18.0021.0010) Titles: none Title on print: none Duplication laboratory: Haghefilm Digitaal, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Date of duplication: 2017 Source: 35 mm nitrate positive, black and white (GEM Accession no. 2017.0080.0011) Provenance: Museum purchase from private collection, 2017 Note: The poor image quality was likely caused by an error in the processing of the original element. This scene depicts a parade of cuirassiers and carriages during an unidentified state visit in the Cour d’honneur in Versailles. According to Jean-Marc Lamotte (Institut Lumière), consulted by Clara Auclair and Roland

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Cosandey on the identification of this print, the film should not be confused with Départ de Sa Majesté le roi et de M. le président de Versailles (Lumière catalogue, Catalogue des vues pour Cinématographe, 1907, no. 1392 / Aubert & Seguin catalogue no. 515), filmed in October 1903, which depicts King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy visiting France. [PANORAMA ON THE CREUSE RIVER # 1] (Maker unknown, France, ca. 1897–1906) Camera: not known Original length: not known Print: 35 mm polyester positive (Orwo), 49 feet + 10 frames, 50" (16 fps), black-and-white stock (GEM Accession no. T18.0021. 0011) Titles: none Title on print: none Duplication laboratory: Haghefilm Digitaal, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Date of duplication: 2017 Sources: 35 mm nitrate negative (GEM Accession no. 2017.0080.0012); 35 mm nitrate positive, black and white (GEM Accession no. 2017.0080.0013) Provenance: Museum purchase from private collection, 2017 Note: This film, taken from a boat traveling on a river, prominently features a large building with a sign reading “Papeterie de la Haye-Descartes.” The film starts by a still shot of the building and the dam, then the panorama starts after a cut. The Papeterie de la Haye-Descartes was a well-known French factory of the nineteenth and early twentieth century in La Haye-Descartes on the Creuse River (now Descartes, Indre et Loire, France) that specialized in the manufacture of high-quality paper. [DAM ON THE CREUSE RIVER] (Maker unknown, France, ca. 1897–1906) Camera: not known Original length: not known Print: 35 mm polyester positive (Orwo), 50 feet + 2 frames, 50" (16 fps), black-and-white stock (GEM Accession no. T18.0021.0012) Titles: none Title on print: none

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Duplication laboratory: Haghefilm Digitaal, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Date of duplication: 2017 Source: 35 mm nitrate positive, black and white (GEM Accession no. 2017.0080.0014) Provenance: Museum purchase from private collection, 2017 Note: Men walk across the footbridge of a weir in single file, carrying large boxes, while men in boats are fishing. The location is likely near that of [Panorama on the Creuse River #1 and #2], as a dam can be seen briefly in both of those films. [PANORAMA ON THE CREUSE RIVER # 2] (Maker unknown, France, ca. 1897–1906) Camera: not known Original length: not known Print: 35 mm polyester positive (Orwo), 34 feet + 14 frames, 35" (16 fps), black-and-white stock (GEM Accession no. T18.0021.0013) Titles: none Title on print: none Duplication laboratory: Haghefilm Digitaal, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Date of duplication: 2017 Source: 35 mm nitrate negative (GEM Accession no. 2017.0080.0015) Provenance: Museum purchase from private collection, 2017 Note: In this second panorama on the Creuse River, the camera pans past many of the same buildings seen in [Panorama on the Creuse River #1]. The camera is rather unstable and shaky, with a pan from right to left before coming back on its trajectory. [PAPER FACTORY] (Maker unknown, France, ca. 1897–1906) Camera: not known Original length: not known Print: 35 mm polyester positive (Orwo), 15 feet + 2 frames, 15" (16 fps), black-and-white stock (GEM Accession no. T18.0021.0013) Titles: none Title on print: none Duplication laboratory: Haghefilm Digitaal, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Date of duplication: 2017

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Source: 35 mm nitrate negative (GEM Accession no. 2017.0080.0015) Provenance: Museum purchase from private collection, 2017 Note: This brief segment was found on the same roll of film as [Panorama on the Creuse River #2], with no splice in between. The original was severely underexposed. Large rolls of paper can be seen on the right side of the image. In the background is an only partially visible sign, which could possibly read “Glaçage du papier”—the process of adding a glossy coating to paper. If so, this footage was probably shot within the factory Papeterie de la HayeDescartes, seen in [Panorama on the Creuse River #1]. [TYPOGRAPHERS AND JOURNALISTS IN EDITORIAL OFFICE] (Maker unknown, France, ca. 1897–1906) Camera: not known Original length: not known Print: 35 mm polyester positive (Orwo), 45 feet + 8 frames, 45" (16 fps), black-and-white stock (GEM Accession no. T18.0021.0014) Titles: none Title on print: none Duplication laboratory: Haghefilm Digitaal, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Date of duplication: 2017 Source: 35 mm nitrate negative (GEM Accession no. 2017.0080.0016) Provenance: Museum purchase from private collection, 2017 Note: Two typographers in work clothes set a frame of type and take it away to be printed, while a group of men in suits—presumably journalists—examine and read printed pages. [MEN UNLOADING A TRAIN] (Maker unknown, France, ca. 1897–1906) Camera: not known Original length: not known Print: 35 mm polyester positive (Orwo), 50 feet + 14 frames, 51" (16 fps), black-and-white stock (GEM Accession no. T18.0021.0015) Titles: none Title on print: none Duplication laboratory: Haghefilm Digitaal, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Date of duplication: 2017

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Source: 35 mm nitrate negative (GEM Accession no. 2017.0080.0017) Provenance: Museum purchase from private collection, 2017 Note: This film depicts men unloading large sacks of rags and other supplies from the car of a freight train pulled by horses. A canvas sign that reads “Papeterie de la Haye-Descartes” hangs from the second car. The scene was probably filmed near the same location seen in [Panorama on the Creuse River #1 and #2]. [TRAIN PULLING INTO A FACTORY] (Maker unknown, France, ca. 1897–1906) Camera: not known Original length: not known Print: 35 mm polyester positive (Orwo), 52 feet + 14 frames, 53" (16 fps), black-and-white stock (GEM Accession no. T18.0021.0016) Titles: none Title on print: none Duplication laboratory: Haghefilm Digitaal, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Date of duplication: 2017 Source: 35 mm nitrate positive, black and white (GEM Accession no. 2017.0080.0018) Provenance: Museum purchase from private collection, 2017 Note: The camera takes the perspective of a train as it travels down a track and into a factory. The film was shot at the Chocolat Menier factory in Noisiel, near Paris. The shooting location has been identified by Maurice Gianati. * * * LA DANSE DU FEU (Star-Film, France, 1899) English title: Haggard’s “She”—The Pillar of Fire Director: Georges Méliès Original length: 20 m. (65 ft.) Print 1: 35 mm polyester positive (Fuji, from a Fuji acetate negative), 64 feet + 8 frames, 1' (16 fps), color stock (GEM Accession no. 1996.0165.0001) Print 2: 35 mm acetate positive (Kodak, from a Fuji acetate negative), 64 feet + 8 frames, 1' (16 fps), color stock (GEM Accession no. 1996.0206.0001)

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Print 3: 35 mm polyester positive (Fuji, from a Kodak acetate negative), 64 feet + 8 frames, 1' (16 fps), color stock (GEM Accession no. 1996.0166.0001) Titles: none Title on print: none Duplication laboratory: Haghefilm, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Date of duplication: 1996 Source: 35 mm nitrate positive, black and white, hand-colored (GEM Accession no. 1997.0151.0001) Provenance: Gift of Eric Levine, 1995 Note: The donation of this hand-colored print—the only known copy of Méliès’s 1899 film—prompted a unique experiment in film preservation. Two different preservation negatives (on Kodak and Fuji stock, both on acetate base) and three projection prints (two on Fuji stock, one on Kodak base) were struck from the same nitrate positive. The goal of the test is twofold: first, to compare the chromatic values of the three different prints; second, to assess the longevity of the base and of the color emulsion in all the elements, all struck at the same time, by the same laboratory, and stored in identical conditions of temperature and humidity. UN DRAME EN MER (Pathé, France, 1905) English title: A Tragedy at Sea Director: Gaston Velle Original length: 120 m. (394 ft.) Print: 35 mm polyester positive (Orwo), 420 feet + 2 frames (incomplete), 7' (16 fps), color stock (GEM Accession no.2015.0078.0003) Titles: English Title on print: A Tragedy at Sea Duplication laboratory: Haghefilm Digitaal, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Date of duplication: 2015 Source: 35 mm nitrate positive, black and white, tinted, toned, and hand-colored (GEM Accession no. 2015.0028.0001) Provenance: Gift of Christopher Brescia and Walter Ordway, 2015 Note: A boat is leaving the harbor. Shortly afterward, a fire erupts on the vessel. Chaos and panic ensue: some passengers try to reach

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the lifeboats; others have no choice but to leap off the boat (a long insert on black-and-white stock clearly belongs to another film, yet to be identified). George Eastman Museum’s nitrate print was the only survivor among several reels found by Christopher Brescia in a dumpster in the Adirondack Mountains in the early 1980s, then left in the storage room of a movie theater near Albany, New York. FEDORA (Caesar-film, Italy, 1916) Director: Giuseppe De Liguoro and Gustavo Serena Cast: Francesca Bertini, Gustavo Serena Original length: 2,042 m. (6,699 ft.) Print: 35 mm polyester positive (Kodak), 777 feet + 13 frames (fragment), 13' (16 fps), color stock (GEM Accession no. 2001.1234.0001) Titles: English Title on print: none Duplication laboratory: Haghefilm, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Date of duplication: 2001 Source: 35 mm nitrate positive, black and white, tinted (GEM Accession no. 2002.0353.0001) Provenance: Gift of Ngā Taonga Sound and Vision/The New Zealand Archive of Film, Television and Sound, 2002 LA ROSE BLEUE (Gaumont, France, 1911) English title: A Busy Cupid Director: Léonce Perret Cast: Suzanne Privat Original length: not known Print: 35 mm polyester positive (Orwo), 546 feet + 5 frames, 9' (16 fps), color stock (GEM Accession no. 2014.0253.0001) Titles: English Title on print (reconstructed): La Rose bleue Duplication laboratory: Haghefilm, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Date of duplication: 2014 Source: 35 mm nitrate positive, tinted, toned, stencil (GEM Accession no. 1975.0007.2158) Provenance: not known

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Program 2—Thursday, June 14, 2018, 7:30 p.m. Running time: approximately 90 minutes [MESSTER ALABASTRA—CAN-CAN] (Messter-Film GmbH, Germany, 1909) Camera: not known Cast: not known Original length: not known Print: 35 mm triacetate positive (Kodak), 198 feet + 7 frames, 3' (16 fps), color stock (GEM Accession no. 1992.0407.0001) Titles: none Title on print: none Duplication laboratory: not known Date of duplication: 1983 Source: 35 mm nitrate positive, black and white, hand-colored (GEM Accession no. 1983.1813.0001) Provenance: Gift of John E. Allen, 1962 ROSALIE FAIT DU SABOTAGE (Pathé, France, 1911) English title: Jane on Strike Director: Roméo Bosetti Cast: Sarah Duhamel Original length: 160 m. (525 ft.) Print: 35 mm polyester positive (Orwo), 503 feet + 11 frames, 8' (16 fps), black-and-white stock (GEM Accession no. 2011.0413. 0001) Titles: English Title on print: Jane on Strike Duplication laboratory: Haghefilm, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Date of duplication: 2011 Source: 28 mm diacetate positive, black and white (GEM Accession no.1981.0503.0001) Provenance: Gift of 3M Foundation, 1977 THE RICH AND THE POOR (American Manufacturing Company, United States, 1911) Director: not known Cast: J. Warren Kerrigan and Adrienne Kroell

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Original length: ca. 1,000 ft. (305 m.) Print: 35 mm polyester positive (Kodak), 598 feet + 7 frames (incomplete), 10' (16 fps), black-and-white stock (GEM Accession no. 2018.0038.0001) Titles: English Title on print: none Duplication laboratory: Cinema Arts, Newfoundland, Pennsylvania Date of duplication: 2016 Source: 35 mm nitrate positive, black and white (GEM Accession no. 2015.0216.0001) Provenance: Gift of Phil and Terry Winer, 2016 Note: In the late 1990s, Phil and Terry Winer were browsing at an antiques store in Ithaca, New York, when they came across an old suitcase with a reel of film inside. Deciding it looked rather interesting, they purchased it and took it home for safekeeping. Fast forward to 2015—the Winers are now retired and have decided to move to California. While cleaning out their home, they found this reel of film. Shot in March 1911 in Chicago just before the company left for California, the film is a melodrama about workers in a steel manufacturing plant who strike for better pay. The end of the film is missing. UN CONTE D’ALSACE (Gaumont, France, 1920) English title: Heart’s Memory. A Simple Alsatian Story Director: not known Cast: not known Original length: not known Print: 35 mm triacetate positive (Kodak), 462 feet + 15 frames, 8' (16 fps), color stock (GEM Accession no. 1997.0164.0001) Titles: English Title on print: Heart’s Memory. A Simple Alsatian Story Duplication laboratory: Haghefilm, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Date of duplication: 1996 Source: 35 mm diacetate positive, black and white, Chronochrome process (GEM Accession no. 1975.0007.0075) Provenance: Gift of Eastman Kodak Company, Rochester, New York (date unknown)

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A WESTERN GIRL (Star-Film, United States, 1911) Director: Gaston Méliès Cast: Francis Ford Original length: ca. 1,000 ft. (305 m.) Print: 35 mm polyester positive (Kodak), 928 feet + 6 frames, 15' (16 fps), color stock (GEM Accession no. 2000.1047.0001) Titles: English Title on print: none Duplication laboratory: Haghefilm Digitaal, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Date of duplication: 2000 Source: 35 mm nitrate positive, black and white, tinted (GEM Accession no. 2000.0336.0001) Provenance: Gift of American Film Institute, 2000 * * * GEORGES DEMENŸ—60MM CHRONOPHOTOGRAPHE: SIXTEEN FILMS (Total running time: ca. 8' at 16 fps) Note: The prints exhibited here are 35 mm reductions from 60 mm nitrate positive and camera negative elements. The projection rate of the Demenÿ films varies enormously from one film to another, with speeds ranging from twelve frames per second or less to almost twenty-four frames per second. Given the brevity of the films presented consecutively on a single reel, it may not be possible to adapt the projection speed to the requirements of each print. The primary source for the information discussed in this section is “Liste des vues animées” in Les Projections mouvementées par le Chronophotographe de G. Demény (Paris: L. Gaumont, 1896), p. 16. Film identification for this section of the program is provided by Clara Auclair, PhD student at the University of Rochester/Université Paris Diderot. MAUVAIS JOUEURS [?] (Georges Demenÿ, France, 1896) Original length: ca. 23 m. (ca. 75 ft.) Print: 35 mm triacetate positive (Agfa Gevaert, from Kodak acetate negative), 31 feet + 12 frames, 32" (16 fps), black-and-white stock (GEM Accession no. 1996.0654.0001a)

Dryden Theatre Screening Program  |  395

Titles: none Title on print: none Duplication laboratory: Haghefilm Digitaal, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Date of duplication: 1996 Source: 60 mm nitrate positive, black and white (508 frames) (GEM Accession no. 1989.1058.0001a) Provenance: Extended loan from Karl Malkames, 1989 Note: Content: Three men playing cards and drinking. One man standing on the back is watching them play. Toward the end of the film, the two men sitting in front start fighting over the game. The 60 mm nitrate positive shows a bad tear toward the end of the scene. The film is about to tear completely. Two titles from the Chronophotographe catalog could correspond to this film (no. 72—La Partie de cartes, and no. 74—Mauvais joueurs). We are suggesting the latter as the likely title of this film. [DEMENŸ CHRONOPHOTOGRAPHE—STREET MARKET (FRANCE)] (Georges Demenÿ, France, 1896?) Original length: ca. 23 m. (ca. 75 ft.) Print: 35 mm triacetate positive (Agfa Gevaert, from Kodak acetate negative), 35 feet + 14 frames, 36" (16 fps), black-and-white stock (GEM Accession no. 1996.0654.0001b) Titles: none Title on print: none Duplication laboratory: Haghefilm Digitaal, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Date of duplication: 1996 Source: 60 mm nitrate positive, black and white (574 frames) (GEM Accession no. 1989.1058.0001c) Provenance: Extended loan from Karl Malkames, 1989 Note: Scene in front of a custom house. “Bureau général des douanes” can be read on a building in the background. Men are carrying crates and boxes in front of a tent. One man is standing on top of a pile of crates in front of the building. The film was significantly undercranked in relation to other titles in this collection, at a speed of about twelve frames per second. No titles

396 | Appendix

in the Gaumont Chronophotographe catalog seem to match this description. Another copy—incomplete and partially decayed— of this film is also included in the collection (GEM Accession nos. 1974:0007:0072—Reel 2 [nitrate] and 2011.0044.0001e [safety]). DRAGONS (Georges Demenÿ, France, 1896) Original length: ca. 23 m. (ca. 75 ft.) Print: 35 mm triacetate positive (Agfa Gevaert, from Kodak acetate negative), 37 feet + 4 frames, 37" (16 fps), black-and-white stock (GEM Accession no. 1996.0654.0001c) Titles: none Title on print: none Duplication laboratory: Haghefilm Digitaal, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Date of duplication: 1996 Source: 60 mm nitrate positive, black and white (596 frames) (GEM Accession no. 1989.1058.0001h) Provenance: Extended loan from Karl Malkames, 1989 Note: French cavalry in a field. The numbers 38 and (in smaller type) 91 have been stenciled on the print. Number 38 corresponds to a matching title on the list, Dragons (French military unit, cavalry). The meaning of the other number on the print has not yet been determined. LE LABOUREUR (Georges Demenÿ, France, 1896) Original length: ca. 23 m. (ca. 75 ft.) Print: 35 mm triacetate positive (Agfa Gevaert, from Kodak acetate negative), 37 feet + 2 frames, 37" (16 fps), black-and-white stock (GEM Accession no. 1996.0654.0001d) Titles: none Title on print: none Duplication laboratory: Haghefilm Digitaal, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Date of duplication: 1996 Source: 60 mm nitrate positive, black and white (594 frames) (GEM Accession no. 1989.1058.0001b) Provenance: Extended loan from Karl Malkames, 1989

Dryden Theatre Screening Program  |  397

Note: Two farmers are ploughing the land with cattle. A farmhouse can be seen in the background. Only one title from the Gaumont Chronophotographe catalog really matches this scene: no. 67—Le laboureur (The Ploughman). [DEMENŸ CHRONOPHOTOGRAPHE—SEASHORE AND CLIFFS] (Georges Demenÿ, France, 1896) Original length: ca. 23 m. (ca. 75 ft.) Print: 35 mm triacetate positive (Agfa Gevaert, from Kodak acetate negative), 33 feet + 5 frames, 33" (16 fps), black-and-white stock (GEM Accession no. 1996.0654.0001e) Titles: none Title on print: none Duplication laboratory: Haghefilm Digitaal, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Date of duplication: 1996 Source: 60 mm nitrate positive, black and white (533 frames) (GEM Accession no. 1989.1058.0001i) Provenance: Extended loan from Karl Malkames, 1989 Note: Seashore scene. The tide. There are at least three titles in the Chronophotographe catalog that refer to this topic. As the framing is focused on the tide, it could be no. 70—La vague (The Wave). The setting, however, also suggests two other titles: no. 61—Sur la grève, n°1, and no. 62—Sur la grève, n°2. [DEMENŸ CHRONOPHOTOGRAPHE—STREET SCENE (FRANCE)] (Georges Demenÿ, France, 1896) Original length: ca. 23 m. (ca. 75 ft.) Print: 35 mm triacetate positive (Agfa Gevaert, from Kodak acetate negative), 32 feet + 3 frames, 32" (16 fps), black-and-white stock (GEM Accession no. 1996.0654.0001f) Titles: none Title on print: none Duplication laboratory: Haghefilm Digitaal, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Date of duplication: 1996 Source: 60 mm nitrate positive, black and white (515 frames) (GEM Accession no. 1989.1058.0001g)

398 | Appendix

Provenance: Extended loan from Karl Malkames, 1989 Note: A carriage moves along a street bordering a fenced garden. This film could be La Caravane au jardin d’acclimatation (Chronophotographe catalog no. 13). Further research is needed, however, to identify the location of this scene. SCÈNE À LA TERRASSE D’UN CAFÉ (Georges Demenÿ, France, 1896) Original length: ca. 23 m. (ca. 75 ft.) Print: 35 mm triacetate positive (Agfa Gevaert, from Kodak acetate negative), 37 feet + 14 frames, 38" (16 fps), black-and-white stock (GEM Accession no. 1996.0654.0001g) Titles: none Title on print: none Duplication laboratory: Haghefilm Digitaal, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Date of duplication: 1996 Source: 60 mm nitrate positive, black and white (606 frames) (GEM Accession no. 1989.1058.0001f) Provenance: Extended loan from Karl Malkames, 1989 Note: Two groups of people interact, visibly intoxicated. The scene seems to be shot in a studio, similar to the 60 mm print 1989.1058.0001d. Only one title in the Gaumont Chronophotographe catalog really matches this action: no. 19—Scène à la terrasse d’un café. AVANT L’ASSAUT: LE MUR (Georges Demenÿ, France, 1896) Original length: ca. 23 m. (ca. 75 ft.) Print: 35 mm triacetate positive (Agfa Gevaert, from Kodak acetate negative), 29 feet + 12 frames, 30" (16 fps), black-and-white stock (GEM Accession no. 1996.0654.0001h) Titles: none Title on print: Avant l’assaut—Le Mur [see note] Duplication laboratory: Haghefilm Digitaal, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Date of duplication: 1996 Source: 60 mm nitrate positive, black and white (476 frames) (GEM Accession no. 1989.1058.0001d) Provenance: Extended loan from Karl Malkames, 1989

Dryden Theatre Screening Program  |  399

Note: Fencing scene. Two men are practicing before a match. The 60 mm copy has a printed-in handwritten title at the tail of the film. It reads “Avant l’Assaut Le Mur / Négatif B(on) n°21,” matching the title and number in the Gaumont Chronophotographe catalog: 21—Avant l’assaut: le mur (Before the Fight: Practice). [DEMENŸ CHRONOPHOTOGRAPHE—BEACH SCENE] (Georges Demenÿ, France, 1896) Original length: ca. 23 m. (ca. 75 ft.) Print: 35 mm triacetate positive (Agfa Gevaert, from Kodak acetate negative), 29 feet + 4 frames, 29" (16 fps), black-and-white stock (GEM Accession no. 1996.0654.0001i) Titles: none Title on print: none Duplication laboratory: Haghefilm Digitaal, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Date of duplication: 1996 Source: 60 mm nitrate positive, black and white (468 frames) (GEM Accession no. 1989.1058.0001e) Provenance: Extended loan from Karl Malkames, 1989 Note: A family is walking along a beach, fishing by foot with landing nets. The nitrate print is very brittle, with several pieces of film breaking along the edges. No less than five titles in the Gaumont Chronophotographe catalog refer to beach scenes. Since this specific view takes place along a pebble shoreline rather than a sandy beach, it might be no. 61—Sur la grève, n°1, or no. 62—Sur la grève, n°2; it could, however, also be no. 63—Sur la plage, n°1, or no. 64—Sur la plage, n°2, or maybe no. 71—Au bord de la mer. [DEMENŸ CHRONOPHOTOGRAPHE—HORSE DRAWN CARRIAGES ON COUNTRY ROAD] (Georges Demenÿ, France, 1896) Original length: ca. 23 m. (ca. 75 ft.) Print: 35 mm polyester positive (Kodak), 38 feet + 10 frames, 39" (16 fps), black-and-white stock (GEM Accession no. 2011.0044.0001a) Titles: none Title on print: none Duplication laboratory: Cineric, New York Date of duplication: 2008

400 | Appendix

Source: 60 mm nitrate negative (618 frames) (GEM Accession no. 1974:0007:3618a) Provenance: Extended loan from Karl Malkames, 1989 Note: No titles in the Gaumont Chronophotographe catalog seem to match this film. As of 2018, the original camera negative— the only one in the Demenÿ Collection of the George Eastman Museum—is considerably warped. [DEMENŸ CHRONOPHOTOGRAPHE (VARIANT OF NO. 41?)— CHARGE DE DRAGONS] (Georges Demenÿ, France, 1896) Original length: ca. 23 m. (ca. 75 ft.) Print: 35 mm polyester positive (Kodak), 33 feet + 11 frames, 34" (16 fps), black-and-white stock (GEM Accession no. 2011.0044.0001b) Titles: none Title on print: none Duplication laboratory: Cineric, New York Date of duplication: 2008 Source: 60 mm nitrate positive, black and white (539 frames) (GEM Accession no. 1975.0007.0072—Reel 1) Provenance: Extended loan from Karl Malkames, 1989 Note: Cavalry charge in an open field. The film was significantly overcranked in relation to other titles in this collection, at a speed of about twenty-two frames per second. The numbers 39 and 374 are handwritten on the head of the film. No. 39 in the Gaumont Chronophotographe catalog, however, is missing: the numbering sequence jumps from 30 to 41 (nos. 39 and 40 are absent). This print could be a variant of n°41—Charge de dragons. DÉPART DES VOITURES AUTOMOBILES À LA PORTE MAILLOT (Georges Demenÿ, France, 1896) Original length: ca. 23 m. (ca. 75 ft.) Print: 35 mm polyester positive (Kodak), 10 feet + 2 frames (fragment), 10" (16 fps), black-and-white stock (GEM Accession no. 2011.0044.0001c) Titles: none Title on print: none Duplication laboratory: Cineric, New York Date of duplication: 2008

Dryden Theatre Screening Program  |  401

Source: 60 mm nitrate positive, black and white (162 frames) (GEM Accession no. 1974:0007:0072—Reel 3) Provenance: Extended loan from Karl Malkames, 1989 Note: Car procession along a Parisian park, presumably Porte Maillot. The action matches a Lumière film, Voitures automobiles (Lumière catalog no. 97). Both films would have been shot at the Porte Maillot in Paris on the occasion of the Paris-Melun race of May 14, 1896. [DEMENŸ CHRONOPHOTOGRAPHE—MARBLE ARCH, LONDON] (Georges Demenÿ, France, 1896) Original length: ca. 23 m. (ca. 75 ft.) Print: 35 mm polyester positive (Kodak), 14 frames (fragment), 1" (16 fps), black-and-white stock (GEM Accession no. 2011.0044.0001d) Titles: none Title on print: none Duplication laboratory: Cineric, New York Date of duplication: 2008 Source: 60 mm nitrate positive, black and white (14 frames) (GEM Accession no. 1974:0007:3618c) Provenance: Extended loan from Karl Malkames, 1989 Note: Carriage in front of Marble Arch, London. No title in the Gaumont Chronophotographe catalog seems to match the content of this film. [DEMENŸ CHRONOPHOTOGRAPHE—STREET MARKET (FRANCE)] (Georges Demenÿ, France, 1896) Original length: ca. 23 m. (ca. 75 ft.) Print: 35 mm polyester positive (Kodak), 23 feet + 13 frames (incomplete), 23" (16 fps), black-and-white stock (GEM Accession no. 2011.0044.0001e) Titles: none Title on print: none Duplication laboratory: Cineric, New York Date of duplication: 2008 Source: 60 mm nitrate positive, black and white (381 frames) (GEM Accession no. 1974:0007:0072—Reel 2) Provenance: Extended loan from Karl Malkames, 1989

402 | Appendix

Note: Scene in front of a custom house. “Bureau général des douanes” can be read on a building in the background. Men are carrying crates and boxes in front of a tent. One man is standing on top of a pile of crates in front of the building. No titles in the Gaumont Chronophotographe catalog seem to match this description. The print shows significant deterioration of the emulsion. A longer copy of the same film is also included in the collection (GEM Accession nos. 1989.1058.0001c [nitrate] and 2011.0044.0001e [safety]). [DEMENŸ CHRONOPHOTOGRAPHE—ARRIVAL OF A TRAIN] (Georges Demenÿ, France, 1896) Original length: ca. 23 m. (ca. 75 ft.) Print: 35 mm polyester positive (Kodak), 14 feet + 7 frames (incomplete), 14" (16 fps), black-and-white stock (GEM Accession no. 2011.0044.0001f) Titles: none Title on print: none Duplication laboratory: Cineric, New York Date of duplication: 2008 Source: 60 mm nitrate positive, black and white (231 frames) (GEM Accession no. 1974:0007:3618b) Provenance: Extended loan from Karl Malkames, 1989 Note: Location unknown. The film was significantly undercranked in relation to other titles in this collection, at a speed of about twelve frames per second. No titles in the Gaumont Chronophotographe catalog seem to match this subject. PLACE DE L’OPÉRA À VIENNE (Georges Demenÿ, France, 1896) Original length: ca. 23 m. (ca. 75 ft.) Print: 35 mm polyester positive (Kodak), 3 feet + 6 frames (fragment), 3" (16 fps), black-and-white stock (GEM Accession no. 2011.0044.0001g) Titles: none Title on print: none Duplication laboratory: Cineric, New York Date of duplication: 2008 Source: 60 mm nitrate positive, black and white (54 frames) (GEM Accession no. 1974:0007:3618d)

Dryden Theatre Screening Program  |  403

Provenance: Extended loan from Karl Malkames, 1989 Note: Street scene in Vienna (Gaumont Chronophotographe catalog no. 32). A printed-in handwritten inscription reads “Place de l’Opéra à Vienne—Négatif—n°32.” * * * GENERAL ALLENBY’S ENTRY INTO JERUSALEM (War Office Cinematograph Committee, Great Britain, 1918) Camera: Harold Jeapes Original length: 340 ft. Print: 35 mm triacetate positive (Kodak), 323 feet + 6 frames, 6' (16 fps), black and white (GEM Accession no. 1988.0563.0001) Titles: English Title on print: General Allenby’s Entry into Jerusalem Duplication laboratory: Cinema Arts Inc., Newfoundland, Pennsylvania Date of duplication: 1987 Source: 35 mm nitrate positive, tinted (GEM Accession no. 1974.0007.3626) Provenance: Gift of Santa Barbara Historical Society, Santa Barbara, California, 1958 AH! LE DONNE! . . . (Jupiter Film, Italy, 1917) Director: Eleuterio Rodolfi Cast: Mercedes Brignone, Eleuterio Rodolfi, Armand Pouget Original length: 881 m. (2,890 ft.) Print: 35 mm polyester positive (Kodak), 747 feet + 0 frames (fragments), 12' (16 fps), black-and-white stock (GEM Accession no. 2003.0586.0001) Titles: Italian Title on print: Ah! Le donne, le donne!! Duplication laboratory: Cinema Arts Inc., Newfoundland, Pennsylvania Date of duplication: 2003 Source: 35 mm nitrate positive, black and white, tinted (GEM Accession no. 2002.1376.0001) Provenance: Gift of Oscar Pallme, 2001 Note: Reel 2 was totally decomposed at the time of the original donation. Reels 1 and 3 are incomplete. The print is part of the Roberto

404 | Appendix

Pallme Collection, a large repository of films retrieved in 2001 from a storage room in the Pallme family residence in Torre del Greco, Italy. * * * CASIMIR SIVAN: THREE FILMS (Total running time: ca. 1' at 16 fps) [LES BAINS DE LA JETÉE DE PÂQUIS] (Casimir Sivan, Switzerland, 1896) Camera: not known Original length: not known Print: 35 mm triacetate positive (Agfa Gevaert, from Kodak acetate negative), 29 feet + 4 frames, 29" (16 fps), black-and-white stock (GEM Accession no. 1997.2573.0001) Titles: none Title on print: none Duplication laboratory: Haghefilm Digitaal, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Date of duplication: 1997 Source: 35 mm nitrate positive, black and white (GEM Accession no.1997.0300.0001) Provenance: not known; possibly a purchase by Eastman Kodak Company from E. M. Baumann, ante 1951 [STEAM TRAMWAY] (Casimir Sivan, Switzerland, 1896) Camera: not known Original length: not known Print: 35 mm triacetate positive (Agfa Gevaert, from Kodak acetate negative), 20 feet+ 0 frames, 20" (16 fps), black-and-white stock (GEM Accession no. 1997.2574.0001) Titles: none Title on print: none Duplication laboratory: Haghefilm Digitaal, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Date of duplication: 1997 Source: 35 mm nitrate positive, black and white (GEM Accession no. 1997.0300.0001) Provenance: not known; possibly a purchase by Eastman Kodak Company from E. M. Baumann, ante 1951

Dryden Theatre Screening Program  |  405

[EXPOSITION NATIONALE SUISSE, GENÈVE 1896—PALAIS DES BEAUX ARTS] (Casimir Sivan, Switzerland, 1896) Camera: not known Original length: not known Print: 35 mm triacetate positive (Agfa Gevaert, from Kodak acetate negative), 2 feet + 1 frame (fragment), 2" (16 fps), black-and-white stock (GEM Accession no. 1997.2575.0001) Titles: none Title on print: none Duplication laboratory: Haghefilm Digitaal, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Date of duplication: 1997 Source: 35 mm nitrate positive, black and white (GEM Accession no. 1997.0300.0001) Provenance: Print exchange with Cinémathèque suisse, Lausanne (originally from Musée Suisse de l’appareil photographique, Vevey), 1997 * * * LES DÉBUTS DE MAX AU CINÉMATOGRAPHE (Pathé, France, 1910) Directors: Max Linder, Louis J. Gasnier Cast: Max Linder Original length: 185 m. (606.8 ft.) Print: 35 mm triacetate positive (Kodak), 278 feet + 8 frames (incomplete), 5' (16 fps), black-and-white stock (GEM Accession no. 1974.0007.0627a) Titles: French Title on print: Débuts de Max au cinéma Duplication laboratory: not known Date of duplication: 1972 Source: 28 mm diacetate positive, black and white (GEM Accession no. 1974.0007.0605) Provenance: Gift of John E. Allen, 1962 Note: The handwritten name of Don Malkames is printed onto the film leader. PETITE ROSSE (Pathé, France, 1909) English titles: A Tantalising Young Lady (UK release), The Little Vixen (US release)

406 | Appendix

Director: Camille de Morlhon Cast: Arlette d’Umès, Max Linder Original length: 541.2 ft. Print: 35 mm polyester positive (Orwo), 508 feet + 3 frames, 8' (16 fps), color stock (GEM Accession no. 2015.0078.0002) Titles: English Title on print: none Duplication laboratory: Haghefilm Digitaal, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Date of duplication: 2015 Source: 35 mm nitrate positive, tinted, toned, stencil (GEM Accession no. 2015.0015.0001) Provenance: Gift of Ngā Taonga Sound and Vision/The New Zealand Archive of Film, Television and Sound, 2015

INDEX

Note: Page numbers in italics refer to images. Abel, Richard, 11, 50, 356 Abracadabra (Gehr, 2008), 278 A. B. Sveafilms, 14, 229 Acadian (Arcadian) Elephant, An (AM&B, 1907), 266 Across the Hall, 171 Actor’s Children, The (Thanhouser, 1910), 145, 147, 148, 152 Ada Delroy Company, 238 Adelman, Hy, 266 Adventures of Dollie, The (Biograph, 1908), 377 AFI (American Film Institute), 61, 175, 268, 310 Ah! Le donne! (Jupiter Film, 1917), 403–4 Ahmadi, Tara Najd, 377 Ahwesh, Peggy, 265 Aladdin, 50, 356 Albert-Kahn Museum (MAK), 131, 132, 134, 137 Ali Baba, 50, 356 All Aboard! (1918), 219 Allen, John E., 62, 63, 392, 405 All in the Family: The Thanhouser Studio (Thanhouser), 152 Amad, Paula, 130 American Experience (PBS series), 163 American Sheet and Tin Welfare (1919), 218 Anaglyph Tom (Tom with the Puffy Cheeks) (Jacobs, 2008), 272n22 Andersen, Thom, 16, 287–90, 292–94, 297, 299–301 Andriot, Lucien, 124 Animal Locomotion (Muybridge), 291 Archives de la Planète (ADLP), 9–10, 129–30, 133, 134, 137 Arlésienne, L’ (Capellani, 1908), 208 Around the World Society, 130

Arquivo Nacional (Rio de Janeiro), 12, 204 Arrest of a Bookmaker (Paul, 1896), 71 Arrivée du cargo Orléans à Bordeaux, L’ [The arrival of the Orleans cargo in Bordeaux] (1917), 134 Arvidson, Linda, 377 Aspects of American Film History Prior to 1920 (Slide), 144 Assassinat du Duc de Guide, L’ (Lavedan, 1908), 208 Assassination of President McKinley, The (Edison, 1901), 240 Astronomer’s Dream, The (Gehr, 2004), 276, 278, 284 “Atrocity 1914” (CBS documentary), 159 Auclair, Clara, 9, 384, 385 Au Coq Hardi, 112, 116n23, 372 Ault, Bill, 265 Australian Antarctic Expedition (AAE) footage, 14, 247–54 Auto-Collider series (Gehr, 2009–2014), 277 Avant l’assault: Le mur (Demenÿ, 1896), 398–99 Aviary, The (Cornell), 271n13 Back and Forth, Early Cinema and the Avant-Garde (Testa), 263 Back to the Old Farm (Essanay, 1912), 214, 221n1 Bad Boy and the Gardener (Edison, 1896), 46n31 Bain de la parisienne, Le, 39 [Bains de la jetée de Pâquis, Les] (Sivan, 1896), 404 Baldwin, Craig, 265 Bamberger, Stephan, 99, 101, 102, 103, 104 Bara, Theda, 172–73, 174, 175, 178n15, 210 Barcklind, Carl, 379

407

408 | Index Bardèche, Maurice, 60 Barklind, Karl, 41 Barnes, John, 77, 79n18 Barnes, William, 77 Barry, Iris, 29, 270n8 Battle and Fall of Przemysl, The, 171 Baumann, E. M., 404 Bausch, John Jacob, 196 Bausch and Lomb Optical Company, 12, 192–200, 193 Bazin, André, 292 Benefactor, The (General Electric, 1917), 220 Bengtsson, Gustaf, 379 Benjamin, Walter, 179 Bertini, Francesca, 391 Bessanay, Lucien, 121 Better than Ever (Gehr, 2015), 278 BFI (British Film Institute), 8, 26, 77, 96, 103, 150, 151 Bhabha, Homi, 4 Bijker, Wiebe, 83 Biograph Beauty Postcard (1905), 184 Bitzer, Billy, 265, 266, 269 Bizet, Georges, 208 Blackhawk Films, 144, 150, 282 Black Pirate, The (Parker, 1926), 84 Blankenship, Janelle, 44n5 Blaszczyk, Regina Lee, 86 Blot-Wellens, Camille, 5–6, 9, 76 Blue, Edwin, 177n2 Boites d’Optiques, 319 Boleras Robadas (ensemble) (Lumière, 1898), 382 Bondes elétricos, em Londres, 205 Bon Voyage (Gehr, 2014), 278 Bookstalls or Vaudeville Deluxe (Cornell), 264 Booth, Walter, 77, 79n18 Bordwell, David, 60 Bosetti, Roméo, 392 Bouchard, Alfred, 367 Boudier, A., 112, 114–15, 372, 374 Bowers, Q. David, 144, 147, 152 Boxende känguruh, Das [The boxing kangaroo] (Skladanowsky), 35 Bradley, John, 161 Brakhage, Stan, 263, 264, 271n13, 280

Brandi, Cesare, 83 Brasillach, Robert, 60 Breer, Robert, 271n13 Brescia, Christopher, 390, 391 Bressolles, Paul, 135 Brewster, Ben, 60, 151 “Broncho Billy,” 61 Brown, Karl, 199 Browne, Nick, 15 Brulatour, Jules, 121, 125 Brunhes, Jean, 130, 138 Buffin, William, 175 Bull Fight (White, 1898), 240 Burbridge, Betty, 66 Burch, Noël, 262, 263 Burckhardt, Rudy, 264 Bureau of Commercial Economics, 13, 218 Burguet, Paul Henry, 208 Burley, David, 307–8 Burning Home, The (Paul, 1909), 74–76, 75 Cabbage Fairy, The (Guy-Blaché, 1896), 184 Cadenza #1 (Frampton, 1980), 266 Calke walk (a dance scene) (1905), 41 Calmettes, André, 208 Canclini, Néstor García, 350n14 Capellani, Albert, 125, 208 Caravane au jardin d’acclimatation, La (Demenÿ, 1896?), 398 Card, James, 9, 59–64, 65, 119, 126, 126n2 Card, James, 270n8 Carli, Philip C., 377 Carnival of Shadows (Gehr, 2012), 278, 280 Carr, Larry, 310 Carré, Albert, 108, 367 Carvahlo, Danielle Crepaldi, 12–13 Castle Films, 264, 272n17 Castro, Teresa, 9 Cauchemar, Le (Méliès), 49, 355 CBS World War One Collection, 10–11, 156–61 Cederholm, Tor, 40, 41 Célèbre danse du cake-walk [Famous cakewalk dance] (Pathé, 1903), 41 Cendrillon, 50, 356 Century of June, A (Cornell), 271n13 Chance Brothers, 197

Index | 409 Chaplin, Charlie, 281 Charge de cuirassiers [The cuirassiers charge] (Lumière, 1897), 42, 43 Château hanté, Le (Méliès), 49, 355 Cheat, The (DeMille, 1915), 171 Cherchi Usai, Paolo, 5, 60, 81, 95, 104, 181, 277, 377 Christie, Ian, 7, 205 Cinderella (Thanhouser, 1911), 144–45, 150 Cinema Pathé (Rio de Janeiro), 204, 207, 209, 211n24 Cinemascope, 194 Cinémathèque française (Paris), 29, 124 Cinematic Beginnings (Doublier, 1939), 123, 126 Cinematic Fertilizer 1 (Gehr, 2007), 280 Cinematic Fertilizer 2 (Gehr, 2007), 280 Cinematographe, 119, 120, 121, 123, 125, 293 Cinephor lenses, 194 Cineteca del Friuli, 96 “Clarissa’s” Charming Calf (Thanhouser, 1915), 147 Clarke, David B., 72 Classic Film Collector, 15 Clement, Ian, 217–18 Cleopatra (Gardner and Gaskill, 1912), 59, 60, 63–64, 65 “Climbing Mount Tamalpias” (1906), 269 Cohl, Emile, 125, 270n8 Collector, The (Gehr, 2003), 15, 275–84, 276, 284, 285n9 Collier, John, 217 Collier’s Life, A (Paul, ca. 1904), 46n31, 79n17 Combat naval de Trafalgar (Lumière), 49, 355 Combat Sharkey-McCoy (Edison), 49, 356 Comédie-Française, 107, 366 Comerciales de El Paso (Padilla, 1940s), 342, 343–49, 345, 346, 348 Community Motion Picture Bureau (CMPB), 13, 215, 218–19 Companhia Cinematográfica Brasileira (CCB), 209, 210 Conner, Bruce, 265, 272n17 Conrad, Tony, 297, 299, 301, 303n30 Conte d’Alsace, Un [Heart’s Memory. A Simple Alsatian Story] (Gaumont, 1918), 393

Corbett-Courtney Fight (Dickson, 1894), 240 Corfield, Christina, 16 Cornell, Joseph, 15, 263–65, 270n8, 271n12 Cornell, Robert, 264 Cornwell, Regina, 262, 282–83 Cosandey, Roland, 33n12, 101, 384, 385 Costil, Edgar, 135 Cotton Candy (Gehr, 2001), 279 Coucher de la mariée, Le [The bride’s bedtime] (Pirou, 1896), 37–39, 37, 45n14 Coucher de la mariée ou la triste nuit de noce, Le (Méliès, 1899), 39, 45n17 Courtet-Cohl, Pierre, 125 Crafton, Donald, 183, 190n24 Creatures of the Night (Gehr, 2016), 278 Cry of the Children, The (Nichols, 1912), 59–65 Crystal Palace (Gehr, 2002), 277 DAAA (Dawson Amateur Athletic Association), 307, 308 Dahlquist, Marina, 13 Daigle, Allain, 12 Dallmeyer, John Henry, 195 [Dam on the Creuse River] (unknown, ca. 1897–1906), 386–87 Danse au bivouac (Lumière, 1896), 380 Danse du feu, La [Haggard’s “She”—The Pillar of Fire] (Star-Film, 1899), 389–90 Danse serpentine (Demenÿ, 1897), 205 Dargis, Manohla, 280 Daudet, Alphonse, 208 Daugaard, Noemi, 7 Dawson City: Frozen Time (Morrison, 2017), 305–14 Death of Cinema, The (Cherchi Usai), 81 Death of Pope Leo XIIIi (1903), 240 Débarquement et feu mousqueterie [Landing and musketry fire] (Lumière, 1898), 42 Débuts de Max au cinématographe, Les (Pathé, 1910), 405 Deceived Slumming Party, 50, 356 Defense Audiovisual Communication and Production Unit (ECPAD), 132, 133, 134, 135, 136 Défilé de cuirassiers [The cuirassiers parade] (Lumière, 1896–1897), 42, 43

410 | Index Défilé de la garde républicaine et des pompiers [Parade of the Republican Guard and firefighters] (Lumière, 1898), 42, 43 de Klerk, Nico, 231–32 De Liguoro, Giuseppe, 391 Demenÿ, Georges, 205, 302n11, 394–402 [Demenÿ Chronophotographie (Variant of No. 41?)—Charge de dragons] (Demenÿ, 1896), 400 [Demenÿ Chronophotographie—Arrival of a Train] (Demenÿ, 1896), 402 [Demenÿ Chronophotographie—Beach Scene] (Demenÿ, 1896), 399 [Demenÿ Chronophotographie—Horse Drawn Carriages on Country Road] (Demenÿ, 1896), 399–400 [Demenÿ Chronophotographie—Marble Arch, London] (Demenÿ, 1896), 401 [Demenÿ Chronophotographie—Seashore and Cliffs] (Demenÿ, 1896), 397 [Demenÿ Chronophotographie—Street Market (France)] (Demenÿ, 1896?), 395–96 [Demenÿ Chronophotographie—Street Market (France)] (Demenÿ, 1896), 401–2 [Demenÿ Chronophotographie—Street Scene (France)] (Demenÿ, 1896), 397–98 DeMille, Cecil B., 171 Deocampo, Nick, 237, 238 Départ de Sa Majesté le roi et de M. président de Versailles (Lumièree, 1907), 386 Départ des voitures automobiles à la Porte Maillot (Demenÿ, 1896), 400–401 Derrida, Jacques, 179, 270n1 “Devil’s Envoys, The: The Femme Fatale in Silent Drama” (1965), 63 d’Hauterives, Henry de Grandsaignes, 6, 47–51, 54–56, 353, 355, 356, 358, 360 Dickson, William K. L., 240 Diplomatic Free Lance series, 147 Disorient Express (Jacobs, 1996), 269 Dixon, Bryony, 76–77, 78n4 Doane, Mary Ann, 343 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Thanhouser, 1912), 143, 144, 152

Dödsritten under Cirkuskupolen [The Last Performance] (Svenska Biografteatern, 1912), 379 Doel, Marcus A., 72 Dois namorados, 205, 211n12 Doll’s House, A (Thanhouser, 1911), 144, 149 Domitor conference, 3, 18, 93, 95, 149, 176, 277 Doublier, Antoine, 120 Doublier, Francis, 9, 119–21, 122, 123–26, 265 Dragons (Demenÿ, 1896), 396 Drame en Mer, Un [ A Tragedy at Sea] (Pathé, 1905), 390–91 Dreaming in Color (Yumibe), 8 Ducom, Jacques, 115, 374 Duhamel, Sarah, 392 Dupont, Denis, 106, 365 du Pont company, 214, 215 Dupré la Tour, Claire, 79n15 Dupuis, José, 108, 366 Eadweard Muybridge: Zoopraxographer (Andersen, 1974), 16, 287–301, 288, 291, 295, 298 Eagles of the Sea (1926), 264 Early Cinema in Asia anthology (2017), 237 Eastman Kodak Company, 5, 18, 196, 200, 404 East of Borneo (1931), 264, 271n13 Éclair studio, 9, 109, 121, 210, 369 Eclipse, The Courtship of the Sun and Moon, The (Méliès, 1907), 276, 284 Écrans de l’ombre, L’ [The shadow screens] (Lindeperg, 2001), 139 Edengraph projector, 49 Edison, Thomas A., 54–55, 79n10, 290, 360, 361 Edison company, 38, 39, 41, 74, 123, 125, 151 Egea, Antonio, 243 Egyptian Dance (Heise, 1895), 240 Eickhof, John, 150 Eisenstein, Ken, 15 Ekman, John, 379 Elevator Romance, An (Thanhouser, 1911), 147 Eline, Marie, 64

Index | 411 Ellis, Patrick, 12 Em Gee Rental Library, 268 Empreint, or la main rouge, L’ (Burguet, 1908), 208 Encyclopedia of Early Cinema, 238 Engelbrecht, Martin, 319 Entrée des français à Metz, L’ [The French enter Metz] (1918), 134, 135, 137 Envers du théâtre, L’ (Moynet, 1873), 107, 366 Escape of the Fast Freight (1915), 171–72 Essanay Film Company, 214 Essex Street Quartet (Gehr, 2004), 278, 286n11 Eureka (Gehr, 1974), 267–69, 273n26, 278, 281 Eureka (Gehr, 1974–1979), 15, 262 European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant FilmColors, 80, 82, 83–84 Everson, William K., 61, 63 Every Husband’s Opportunity (Essanay, 1911), 214, 215, 221n1 Evidence of the Film, The (Thanhouser, 1913), 145, 150 Exploits of Elaine, The (Gasnier, Seitz, MacKenzie, 1915), 210 Explosion du cuirassé Maine (Méliès, 1899), 49 Exporting Entertainment (Thompson), 242 [Exposition Nationale Suisse, Genève 1896—Palais des Beaux Arts] (Sivan, 1896), 405 Express Train (White, 1896), 240 EYE Filmmuseum, 98, 99, 150 Fable for Fountains, A (Cornell), 271n13 Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema (2015), 98, 99 Farnum, William, 210 Fatal Hand, The (Paul, 1907), 79n17 Faust, 50, 356 Faux cul-de-jatte, Le [The fake amputee] (Pathé, 1903), 41 Fedora (Caesar-film, 1916), 391 Feigenbaum, Gail, 254 Ferrez, Jules, 12, 209 Ferrez, Lucien, 12 Ferrez, Marc, 12–13, 203, 204, 207–8, 209–10

Ferrez, Zépherin, 206 Fescourt, Henri, 264 Fête au village (Lumière, 1896), 381 FIAF (Federation of International Film Archives), 310 Fillettes de Bretagne (Pathe, 1909), 96, 98 Film Classic Exchange, 61 Film d’Art Season, 208 Film Decades (Rutgers book series), 27 Films Beget Films (Leyda, 1964), 33n11 Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media (Hediger and Vondereau, eds., 2009), 226 Fire Rescue Scene (Dickson and Heise, 1894), 240 Fisher, Morgan, 267, 293 Fleurs, Bouquet dans des Vases [Reproduction of a Bouquet by Ordinary Cinematography] (Gaumont, 1912), 378 Flicker, The (Conrad), 297 Flueckiger, Barbara, 7 Fool There Was, A (Fox, 1914), 172–73, 174, 175 Footpads (Paul, 1896), 71, 72–74, 72, 77, 78n4 Ford Motor Company, 215 Fort Lee: The Film Town (Koszarski), 125 Fossati, Giovanna, 81, 82 Foster, Edith Dunham, 219 Foster, Warren Dunham, 219 Foucault, Michel, 270n1 Frampton, Hollis, 15, 263, 266–67, 278 Friedberg, Anne, 320 From Grain to Pixel (Fossati), 81 From Stage to Screen: Edwin Thanhouser’s Rise to Fame and Fortune in Early Cinema (Thanhouser), 152 Fun on the Clothes Line (Paul, 1897), 79n17 Gaevart box, 34–35, 36 Gallant Rescue, A, 75, 76, 78, 79n14 Gangsters and the Girl, The (Sidney, 1914), 59, 60, 61, 62–65, 66 Gardner, Helen, 59, 64, 65 Gardner, Percy, 48, 354 Gaskill, Charles, 59 Gasnier, Louis J., 209, 210, 405

412 | Index Gates, Michael, 307–8 Gaudreault, André, 343 Gaumont, 149, 210; Australian Antarctic Expedition footage and, 249–50, 252, 253 Gauntier, Gene, 65 Gehr, Ernie, 15, 262, 267, 269, 275–85 General Allenby’s Entry into Jerusalem (War Office Cinematograph Committee, Great Britain, 1918), 403 General Electric, 214, 215, 216, 220–21 George Eastman House (GEH), 59–64, 67n1 George Eastman Museum (Rochester, N.Y.), 5, 8, 18, 150, 151; Demenÿ Collection, 400; Doublier Collection, 118, 119, 120, 121, 124, 125; Dreaming in Color exhibit (2018), 94–99, 94, 96–98, 104; Dryden Theatre Screening Program, 377–406; Francis Doublier Collection, 9; Moving Image Collection, 6; Selznick School of Film Preservation, 118, 119. See also Turconi Collection Georgetown Loop, The (Bitzer, 1903), 269 Gertrude Homan Thanhouser: Her Story in Film (Thanhouser), 152 Gibson, James J., 83 Giornate del Cinema Muto, 93, 96 Gish, Dorothy, 159, 159 Gish, Lillian, 159 Glass, Murray, 268 Glenn Photo Supply, 282 Gloria! (Frampton, 1979), 266 Good Grief! (Gehr, 2015), 278–79 Goodman, Nelson, 81 Gould, Morton, 157 Grape Juice: From Vine to Bottle (Welch’s, 1910s), 216–17, 221n4 Grau, Oliver, 319–20, 327n7 Graumann, Sid, 312 Great Train Robbery, The, 50, 356 Griffith, D. W., 60, 62, 64, 276, 283, 377 Griggs Moviedrome, 282 Grinberg Film Library, 157 Guillaume Tell (Nonguet, 1903), 241 Gunning, Tom, 15, 184, 262–63, 267, 287, 288, 292, 294; on the Thaumotrope, 320–21 Guy-Blaché, Alice, 121, 124, 127n10, 151–52, 184

Haas, Robert Bartlett, 293, 301n6, 302n17 Habib, André, 15, 127n9, 278 Hagman, Paul, 379 Hale’s Tour of the World, 269 Hanhardt, John, 15, 262 Hannah’s Hen-Pecked Husband (Thanhouser, 1915), 147 Hansen, Miriam, 342 Hanssen, Eirik, 149 Hart, William S., 61 Hatot, Georges, 112, 371 Hazards of Helen series (Kalem), 171, 173 Heart of Ezra Greer, The (Thanhouser, 1917), 146 Hegg, Eric, 305 Heise, William, 205, 240 Hensel, Frank, 29 Herbert, Stephen, 296 Here Comes the Circus (1942), 264 Herons and Egrets (Thanhouser, 1916), 147 High Heat (sports show), 157 Higonnet, Anne, 60, 354, 362 Hine, Lewis, 62 Historical Films, 282 Historiographe Compagnie, 49, 50 History (Gehr, 1970), 280 Hite, Charles J., 146 Hodgdon, Barbara, 169 Holmes, Burton, 247 Holmes, Helen, 171–72 Home of the Blizzard, The (AAE footage), 248 Horse in Motion (Stillman), 290, 302n8 Howe, Lyman T., 247 Hughes, Kit, 214 Hugo, Victor, 384 Hula Hula Dance (Heise, 1895), 240 Hur Stockholmarna får kol och koks. Bilder från Olaus Olssons kolgård vid Värtan (Svenska Biografteatern, 1915), 226 Hyde, Ralph, 318, 321–22 Idestam-Almquist, Bengt, 35 I. K. Meginnis, 282 Impossible, The (Jacobs, Nervous System Performances), 272n22 Ince, Thomas H., 62, 63

Index | 413 Ingravalle, Grazia, 6 Inslee, Charles, 377 In Slumberland (Thanks to Winsor McKay) (Gehr, 2014), 278 Inspektion av Porjusanläggningen samt Riksgränsbanan [Inspection of the Porjus plant and the iron ore railway] (Swedish Pathé, 1915), 231 International Federation of Film Archives, 29 International Harvester, 214, 215, 221n1 Investigation of Film Material-Scanner Interaction (Flueckiger, Daugaard, Stutz), 81 Ishihara, Kae, 26 Italian Film Historical Society (AIRSC), 101, 103, 104 It’s an ungrateful world (Pathé frères, 1905), 40 Jack and the Beanstalk, 50, 356 Jacob, Stephen, 385 Jacobs, Ken, 15, 262, 263, 265–67, 269, 272n17 Jacobs, Lewis, 60 Jeanne d’Arc (Méliès, 1900), 241 Jeapes, Harold, 403 Johnson, Arthur, 377 Johnson, Martin L., 13 Joly, Henri, 39 Joly-Normandin device, 39 Jones, Kathy, 308 Jones’ Return from the Club (Edison, 1899), 46n31 Jongleur, Der [The juggler] (Skladanowsky), 35 Jordan, Larry, 263, 264, 265, 271n14 [Jousting Tournament in Front of a Royal Court] (unknown, 1900), 382–83 Joyce, Rosemary, 24, 25, 48, 277, 354 Joye, Josef-Alexis, 8, 95, 102 Joye Collection, 95–96, 99, 100, 101, 102, 104 Kahn, Albert, 9, 129–34, 137–38 Kasr-el-Nil (Lumière, 1897), 42 Kassell, Lauren, 182 Katei-Shosetsu genre, 330 Katsudo Shashinkai, 334–35

Kauffman, Nancy, 119 Kawaura, Kenichi, 335 Kay Bee company, 62 Keedick, Lee, 250, 251, 253 Keil, Charlie, 16, 152 Kelly, Kitty, 11, 169, 170, 172, 175, 176 Kerrigan, J. Warren, 392 Kerstrat, Marie de, 6, 47, 48, 50–51, 55, 56, 353, 355 Kerstrat-d’Hauterives Collection, 6, 51, 353–61 Kessler, Frank, 224 Kiehn, David, 268, 269, 273n25, 274n33 Kikuchi, Yuho, 330–31 Killiam Collection, 172 Kimbell, Ward, 268 Kinemacolor, 86 Kinematograph, 290 Kinetoscope, 71, 293 King of the Rails (General Electric, 1915), 13, 215, 219 King Rene’s Daughter (Thanhouser, 1913), 144, 152 Kinocentralen laboratory (Stockholm), 39–40, 40, 41 Kinoteca (Serbia), 157, 158 Kleine, George, 49, 355 Klercker, Georg af, 379 Klercker, Selma Wiklund af, 379 Knight, Arthur, 60 [Knight Being Bestowed by the King of France, A] (unknown, 1900), 383 Kodak, 125, 126 Komatsu, Hiroshi, 149 Komedi Bioscoop, The: Early Cinema in Colonial Indonesia (Ruppin, 2016), 238 Komische begegnung im Tiergarten in Stockholm [A comic encounter on Djurgården in Stockholm] (Skladanowsky, 1896), 35, 44n6 Koos, Jeff, 266 Koszarski, Richard, 125 Kovac, Criss, 160, 161 Kracauer, Siegfried, 139 Kroell, Adrienne, 392 Kula, Sam, 306–7

414 | Index Laboratoire de Méphisto, Le (Méliès), 49, 355 Laboureur, Le [The Ploughman] (Demenÿ, 1896), 396–97 Lacasse, Germain, 5, 6 Lack, Roland-François, 72, 106, 365 Lamotte, Jean-Marc, 384, 385 Land Beyond the Sunset, The (Edison, 1912), 178n20 Landow, George, 267 Langlois, Henri, 29, 124, 264, 282 Latour, Bruno, 83, 139 Lauste, Eugène Augustin, 120, 124 Lavanchy-Clarke, François-Henri, 381 Lavedan, Henri, 208 Laveur de devantures, Le [The storefront washer] (Pathé, 1904), 41 Lawrence, Florence, 65 Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States (Orgeron, Orgeron, Streible, eds., 2012), 226 Le Bargy, Charles, 208 Le Grice, Malcolm, 263 Lehmann, Ann-Sophie, 83 Lenin, Vladimir, 159 Leonard, Marion, 65 Levine, Eric, 390 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 342, 343, 349n7 Leyda, Jay, 33n11 Library and Archives Canada (LAC), 306–7, 312 Library of Congress (LoC), 31, 151, 169, 268, 310, 311 Lichtspiel/Kinemathek (Berne), 82 Licka, Sean, 264 Lieautey, General, 134 Life and Death of Richard III, The (1912), 175–76 Lightning Postcard Artist, The (1908), 184 Lili (Numa Peterson Handels-och Fabrik AB, 1903), 41 Lindeperg, Sylvie, 139 Linder, Max, 109, 368, 405, 406 Lindgren, Ernest, 29 Lindholm, Eric, 379 Little Pich (1904), 40 Little Pich. Le Célèbre original comique [Little Pich. The famous original comic] (Pathé, 1902), 41

Little Piece of String (1903), 266 Lloyd, Harold, 279 Lobster Salad and Milk (Thanhouser, 1913), 147 Londonbiografen theater (Stockholm), 41 Lonedale Operator, The (Griffith, 1911), 276 Lonergan, Lloyd F., 145, 146, 147 Long, Derek, 271n13 Lubitsch, Ernst, 270n8 Lucky fishing (1905), 41 Lucretius, 120, 123 Lumière Brothers, 9, 41, 45n12, 120, 121, 124, 313; Gehr and, 282, 283; Kerstratd’Hauterives Collection and, 355 Luossavaare-Kirunavaara Aktiebolag (LKAB), 228 Lyman H. Howe Films Company, 250, 252, 253 Lyman H. Howe’s Hodge Podge series, 253 Macdonald, Scott, 266 MacKenzie, Donald, 209, 210 Magic Lantern Society, 79n18 Magic Moving Pictures, 184 Maison Granier catalog, 113, 373 Major Film Laboratory (New York), 121 Making Cut Glass (Kalem/T. G. Hawkes, 1914), 13 Malayan Movies, 14, 236 Malkames, Don, 405 Malkames, Karl, 395–403 Manufacture of Optical Glass, The (Wright), 198 Man without a Country, The (Thanhouser, 1917), 152 Marc Ferrez & Filhos, 203–4, 206, 208 Marey, Etienne-Jules, 291, 302n11 Margerie, Emanuel de, 130 Marsh, Mae, 171 Marshall, Nick, 95 Martial, René, 111, 370 Martin, J. H., 77 Martyrs de l’inquisition, Les (Nonguet, 1905), 206–7 Masson, Eef, 224 Mauvais jouers [?] (Demenÿ, 1896), 394–95 Mawson, Sir Douglas, 14, 247, 249–54, 256n14

Index | 415 May Irwin Kiss (Heise, 1896), 205 Mayo, Victor de, 206 McCay, Winsor, 282 McCutcheon, Wallace, 265, 266 McDowell, M., 55, 361 McGlynn, Lizzy, 163 McKernan, Luke, 71 McLuhan, Marshall, 187, 188 Media Ecology Project [MEP] (Dartmouth), 10, 18, 155, 156, 161, 163 Media History Digital Library, 18 Medium Exposed, The (Paul, 1906), 79n15 Med jordens nordligaste järnväg: NarvikRiksgränsen [Traveling with the world’s most northerly railway: NarvikRiksgränsen] (A. B. Sveafilms, 1911), 13–14, 229, 230–31 Meggendorfer, Lothar, 190n22 Meissner, Emma, 41 Mekas, Jonas, 263, 264, 281 Méliès, Georges, 39, 45n12, 49, 50, 60, 112, 205, 241, 389; Châtelet dancers and, 109, 368; Cornell and, 263; on costumes, 111, 370; Gehr and, 276, 282, 283; Kerstratd’Hauterives Collection and, 355 Même Bouquet par Chronochrome Gaumont, Le [The Same Bouquet by ChronoChrome Gaumont] (Gaumont, 1912), 379 [Men Unloading a Train] (unknown, ca. 1897–1906), 388–89 Ménessier, Henri, 124–25 Menken, Marie, 271n13 “Merry Widow, The” (1909), 41 Mésaventures d’un Tonneau, Les [Travels of a Barrel] (Pathé, 1906), 377–78 [Messter Alabastra—Can-Can] (MessterFilm GmbH, 1909), 392 Metz reçoit le gouvernement de la République [Metz welcomes the Republican government] (1918), 134 Meyer, Bruno, 296 Michelson, Annette, 267–68 Midnight’s Party, A (Cornell), 264, 271n14 Miles Brothers, 269 [Military Parade at the Cour d’Honneur in Versailles] (unknown, ca. 1903), 385–86 Million Dollar Mystery, The (film series), 146 Misérables, Les (Fescourt, 1925), 264

Miss Julie (Sjøberg, 1951), 64 Mix, Tom, 61, 210 Morlhon, Camille de, 406 Morning (Gehr, 1968), 280 Moro Pirates (Nepomuceno, 1931), 245n2 Morra, Anne, 264 Morrison, Bill, 16, 305–6, 312, 313 Morrissey, Priska, 8 Morse Code Operator (or the Monkey Wrench), The (Gehr, 2004), 276, 278, 286n2 Motion Picture Patents Company, 79n10 Moustacchi, Dominique, 384 Movie, A (Conner, 1958), 272n17 Moynet, Jules, 107, 366 Mundo, Clodualdo de, 237 Municipal Reference Library, 215, 217, 218 Munsell, Albert Henry, 86 Murphy’s Wake (Biograph, 1902), 266 Muscle Dance (Heise, 1895), 240 Musée Mécanique (San Francisco), 279 Museum of Modern Art [MoMA] (New York), 29, 60, 61, 63, 266, 280, 281 Musidora, 124 Musser, Charles, 237 Mutual Film Corporation, 145, 148 Muybridge, Eadweard, 16, 285n9, 287–94, 296–97, 299–301, 303n24 Mystery of St. Martin’s Bridge, The, 171 Nakano, Nobuchika, 333, 337 Nakauchi, Choji, 335 Napoléon et le pape Pie VII (Lumière), 49, 355 NARA (National Archives), 10, 155, 157, 160, 161, 162, 163 National Committee of Social and Political Studies, 130 National Film and Television Archive, 26, 27 National Film Archive (NFA), British, 29–30, 70, 71, 169 National Film Library (London), 26, 29 National Film Registry, 62, 150 National Library, French, 38, 45n15 Nepomuceno, José, 14, 236, 245n2 Newhall, Beaumont, 60 New York Lantern (Gehr, 2008), 278 NFTSA (National Film, Television and Sound Archives of Canada), 306–11

416 | Index Niagarafallen [Les chutes de Niagara] (Pathé, 1911), 234n25 Niagara Honeymoon, A (Thanhouser, 1912), 147 Nichols, George, 59, 61 Nielsen, Asta, 210 Nikkatsu Film Company, 329 19th Century Mechanical Magic Lantern Slides & Dissolving Views (Gehr, 2009), 278 Nister, Ernest, 190n22 Niver, Kemp, 265, 282 Nonguet, Lucien, 206–7, 241 Nordisk, 210, 230 Northwest Custom Movies, 282 Notre-Dame de Paris (Hugo, 1831), 384 Nygift par och deras första bröllopesnatt, Ett [A newly married couple and their first wedding night] (Pirou), 38–39 Nymphlight (Cornell), 271n13 Oguchi, Tadao, 337 Olsson, Jan, 186, 187 Ono ga tsumi [One’s sin] (1908), 16–17, 329–38, 333–34, 336, 338 Ordway, Walter, 390 Ostwald, Wilhelm, 86 Outcast, The, 171 Padilla, Edmundo, 17, 341, 342, 343–49, 350n16 Padilla, Félix, 17, 341, 342, 344, 348, 350n16 Palisade Laboratories, 121 Pallme, Oscar, 403 [Panorama on the Creuse River #1] (unknown, ca. 1897–1906), 386, 389 [Panorama on the Creuse River #2] (unknown, ca. 1897–1906), 387, 389 Panoramas of the Moving Image (Gehr, 2005), 278 [Panoramic Painting of a Battlefield] (unknown, ca. 1897–1906), 384–85 Pantages, Alex, 312 [Paper Factory] (unknown, 1897–1906), 387–88 Paper Print Film Collection, 15, 265, 266, 269

Paramount Pictures, 210 Paris 1900 (Vedrès, 1947), 129 Paris After Three Years of War (Castro, 2019), 140 Parisian Mimo-Dramas, 50 Parisian Modes in Colour (Anonymous, 1926), 84 Parisiskan som går i badet (Parisian lady takes a bath), 39 Parker, Albert, 84 Parra-Mantois company, 197 Passage (Gehr, 2003), 276 Passagem de artilheria na Rua Humberto 1°, em Turim, 205 Passion Play of Oberammergau, 55, 361 Pathé, 5, 9, 13, 39, 50, 74, 79n10, 210, 252; in Brazil, 203–10; costume shop, 110, 110, 369, 369; Filial Stockholm, 224, 226, 232; Gold Rooster Plays, 146, 147, 148; Kerstrat-d’Hauterives Collection and, 355; newsreels, 314 Pathé, Charles, 13, 206, 207, 209, 210 Pathé à la conquête du cinéma (Salmon, 2014), 204 Pathé-Gaumont Archives, 133, 134 Pathescope Company of America, 13 Paul, Robert, 7, 41, 70, 71, 73–78, 78n2, 205 Pêche miraculeuse, La [The miraculous catch] (Pathé, 1902), 41 Perils of Pauline, The (Gasnier and MacKenzie, 1914), 13, 209, 210 Perlmutter, Ruth, 268 Perrault, Charles, 150 Perret, Léonce, 391 Pertierra, Francisco, 240 Petite rosse [A Tantalising Young Lady (UK); The Little Vixen (US)] (Pathé, 1909), 405–6 Petits vagabonds, Les (Nonguet, 1905), 206 Phenakistoscope, 300, 301n7 Photographic Phantoms (Gehr, 2013), 278, 279–80 Physicien mal récompensé, Le [The poorly paid physicist] (Pathé, 1905), 41 Pimentel, Figueiredo, 209 Pinch, Trevor, 83

Index | 417 Pipolo, Tony, 277 Pirou, Eugène, 37, 38, 45n14 Place de la Concorde et entrée de la rue Royale [Place de la Concorde and entrance to the rue Royale] (Lumière, 1896–1897), 42 Place de l’Opéra à Vienne (Demenÿ, 1896), 402–3 Poilpot, Théophile, 385 Polícia que recolhe ao quartel, em New-York, 205 Polly of the Circus (Horan and Hollywood, 1917), 311, 313 Polonyi, Eszter, 15–16 Pompiers: Alerte (Lumière, 1897), 381–82 Pont de Kasr-el-Nil [Kasr-el-Nil bridge] (Lumière, 1897), 42 Popert, Siegmund, 226, 229, 234n14 Pordenone Silent Film Festival, 77 Porjusanläggningarnes invigning [“the inauguration of the power plant at Porjus”], 226, 228 Porter, Edwin S., 60, 199 Post, George, 268 Post Card, The: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (Derrida), 179 Pratt, George, 9, 119, 126 Precarious Garden (Gehr, 2004), 276 Prelinger, Rick, 56, 223, 268, 273n32, 362 Printemps au Japon, Le [When Flowerland Awakens in Japan] (The Japanese Film/ Pathé, 1916), 378 Promio, Alexandre, 380, 381, 382 Provenance: An Alternate History of Art (Joyce), 48, 354 Public Domain (Frampton, 1973), 266 Punished ingratitude (a magic number) (1905), 41 Racing with Death in Antarctic Blizzards (AAE footage), 250 Ramos, Antonio, 239, 240 Rapp, E., 50, 356 Ray, Charles, 66 Razutis, Al, 263 Rear Window (Gehr, 1991), 276

Reel Images, 282, 284 [Reenactment of Scenes from Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris] (unknown, 1900), 383–84 Réfection d’un point—l’entrée des troupes françaises à Metz [Rehabilitation of a bridge—the French troops enter Metz] (1918), 135, 135 Reichsfilmarchiv (Berlin), 29 Reist, Inga, 254 Resa med jordens nordligaste järnväg: Narvik-Riksgränsen, En [A journey with the world’s most northerly railway: Narvik-Riksgränsen] (Svenska Biografteatern, 1910), 13, 228–30 Return to the Scene of the Crime (Jacobs, 2008), 272n22 Rich and the Poor, The (American Manufacturing Company, 1911), 392–93 Rimmer, David, 263 Rivers, Fernand, 108–9, 368 Rizal, José, 244 Robbery (Paul, 1897), 72 Roberson, Frank, 247 Roberto Pallme Collection, 403–4 Robin Hood (Bengt Idestam-Almquist), 35 Robinson, Charles Mulford, 73 Rocca, José Tous, 207 Rodolfi, Eleuterio, 403 Romance of the Reaper, The (International Harvester, 1910), 221n1 Rosalie fait du sabotage [Jane on Strike] (Pathé, 1911), 392 Rose bleue, La [A Busy Cupid] (Gaumont, 1911), 391 Rose Hobart (Cornell, 1936), 264, 271nn12–13 Ross, Andrew, 195 Rotha, Paul, 60 Rough Sea at Ramsgate (Paul’s Animatograph Works, 1896), 42 Rube and Mandy at Coney Island, 50, 356 Rudbäck, Karl, 38, 39 Ruppin, Dafna, 238 Russell, Katie, 262 R. W. Paul: The Collected Films, 1895–1908 (DVD), 71

418 | Index Saegmuller Company, 196 Safety First (Universal, 1918), 218 Saint-Saëns, Camille, 208 Salamander, The, 314 Salmon, Stéphanie, 204 Salut dans les Vergues (Lumière, 1898), 382 Scène à la terrasse d’un café (Demenÿ, 1896), 398 Schwem, John, 214, 220–21 Seductive Cinema (Card), 61, 64 Segreto, Paschoal, 205 Seitz, George B., 210 Serena, Gustavo, 391 Serene Velocity (Gehr, 1970), 281, 282 Serpentina francesa, 205 Sidney, Scott, 59, 64 Siegrist, Hansmartin, 101, 102 Sigaud, Anne, 9, 131 Sir Douglas Mawson’s Antarctic Expedition, 250 Sitney, P. Adams, 277, 285n4, 297 Sivan, Casimir, 404–5 Sjøberg, Alf, 64 Skandinaviens tidsenligaste kolgårdsanläggning, H.G. Söderbergs Importaktebolags kolgård vid Värtan (Pathé, 1915), 226 Skladanowsky, Erich, 35 Skladanowsky, Max, 35, 44nn5–6, 45n8 Skladanowsky Bros., 5 Skoller, Jeffrey, 262, 267 Slide, Anthony, 144 Slumrande miljoner: Ett besök i Kirunavaara och Narvik (1910), 225, 226 Smith, George Albert, 150 Smith, Jack, 77, 264 Société Photographique et Cinématographique de l’Armée (SPCA), 134, 135, 136–38 Solax laboratory, 9, 121, 124 Soldier’s Courtship, The (Paul), 71 Solomon, Deborah, 265 Somers, Alex, 313 Song of the Heart, The (Thanhouser, 1915), 147 Sortie du pont de Kasr-el-Nil [Kasr-el-Nil bridge exit] (Lumière, 1897), 42 Sortie d’usine (Lumière, 1895), 76

Souza, Arnaldo Gomes de, 204, 206 Spehr, Paul, 310 Spirit-Graph, 184 Sprague, Leslie Willis, 219 Staffa, Jácomo, 208, 210 Stafford, Barbara, 318 Stanberry, Rick, 264 Stanford, Leland, 289, 291 Star Spangled to Death (Jacobs), 272n17 [Steam Tramway] (Sivan, 1896), 404 Stewart, Christina, 16 Stewart, Phillip, 160 Stierli, Josef, 99 Still (Gehr, 1971), 281, 283 Stockwell, Dean, 289 Stoiber, Deborah, 118, 119 Stratmann, Ed, 119 Street Scenes (Gehr, 2016), 279 Street Scenes Panorama (Gehr, 2015), 278 Stutz, Olivia Kristina, 7 Sumurum (Lubitsch), 270n8 Svenska Biografteatern (Swedish Biograph), 13–14, 228, 229 Svensk Film, 157 Svensson, Nils, 38, 39 Swedish Film Institute, 5, 42, 43; Archival Film Collections, 34, 77 Swedish Film Society, 35, 45n7 Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Film Colors, 81, 86 Tanaka, Junichiro, 333, 335 Taniguchi, Norie, 16–17 Tarbox, Charles H., 61–62, 63, 67 Testa, Bart, 262, 263 Thanhouser, Edwin, 143, 145, 146, 148 Thanhouser, Gertrude, 145, 146 Thanhouser, Ned, 10, 152 Thanhouser studio, 10, 61, 143, 146, 148, 151–53 Thanhouser Studio, The (Bowers, 1995), 144 Than-O-Play, 147 Thaumotrope, 320–21 Theodore Huff Memorial Film Society, 61, 63 Thompson, Kristin, 242

Index | 419 Thomson, Clifford, 307 Tigris (1913), 62 Timeline of Historical Film Colors, 18 Tofighian, Nadi, 14 Tom, Tom Chaser, A (Jacobs, 2002), 272n22 Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son (Jacobs, 1969–1971), 262, 265–67, 273n26 Tom, Tom: The Subarbanite (AM&B, 1904), 266 Tomadjoglou, Kim, 17 Tom Whiskey ou l’Illusioniste toqué (Méliès, 1900), 264 Toulmin, Vanessa, 43 Tournoi, Un (Lumière, 1899), 383 Tout petit Faust, Le (Cohl), 270n8 [Train Pulling into a Factory] (unknown, ca. 1897–1906), 389 Transcontinental 1860 (peep box), 323–24, 323, 325, 326 Treichler, Regula, 101 Trip Down Market Street, A (1906), 267, 268, 269, 273n32, 274n33 “Trip Down Mount Tamalpias, A” (1906), 269 Trip to the Moon, A (Segreto, 1906), 205 Trumpy, Giorgio, 82 Turconi, Davide, 8, 95, 103 Turconi Collection, 8, 9, 93–95, 97, 98, 101, 103, 104 Turner, Florence, 65 Turner Classic Movies, 64 Turnour, Quentin, 248 2am or the Husband’s Return (Paul, 1896), 71 Twyman, F., 199 [Typographers and Journalists in Editorial Office] (unknown, ca. 1897–1906), 388 UCLA Film & Television Archive, 150 Ukiyo (Nikkatsu Studios, 1916), 339n8 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 50, 356 Universal studios, 210 Untitled Joseph Cornell Film (The Wool Collage), 264, 265 U.S. Battleship “Oregon” (Edison, 1898), 42, 43 US Signal Corps Collection, 11, 156, 160, 161

Vail, Frank W., 268, 273n32 Vaughan, Olwen, 29 Vedrès, Nicole, 129 Velle, Gaston, 390 Venganza de Pancho Villa, La (Padilla), 347 Verhylle, 115 Victor Emmanuel III, King, 386 Victoria and Albert Museum (London), 321–22 Vie et passion de Jésus [Life and passion of Christ] (Pathé, Zecca, 1907), 47, 49–54, 354, 356, 358, 360 Vimeo, 152, 158 24e Chasseurs alpins: Sauts d’obstacles (Lumière, 1897), 380 Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (Grau, 2003), 319 Virtual Window (Friedberg), 320 Vitagraph, 151 Vitascope, 120, 123 Voightländer, Johann, 195 Voyage à travers l’impossible, Le (Méliès), 264 Vue no. 308: Basel, a Bridge over the Rhine (Lumière, 1896), 102 Vukoder, Bret, 10, 11 Waldekranz, Rune, 39, 44, 45n17 Waldner, Dagmar, 231 Waller, Gregory A., 14, 214, 221n1 Walsh, George, 210 Warde, Frederick, 175–76 Watson, Henry Sumner, 73, 74 Wayfarer Compelled to Disrobe Partially, A (Paul, 1897), 72 Weber, Lois, 151, 152 West, Madeline, 377 Western Girl, A (Star-Film, 1911), 394 Whaling Afloat and Ashore (Paul, 1908), 74 What Happened to Jones (Edison), 49, 356 White, James H., 240 White, Pearl, 209, 210 Wildfire (Middleton, 1915), 311 Williams, Alan Larson, 343 Williams, Mark, 10, 11 Williamson, Peter, 264

420 | Index Willing Wendy to Willie (Thanhouser, 1916), 147 Willy, Louise, 37 Windhausen, Federico, 277 Window cleaner (1905), 40 Winer, Phil and Terry, 393 With Dr. Mawson in the Antarctic (AAE footage, 1912), 249 Women Film Pioneer Project, 151 Workers Leaving the Factory (After Lumière) (Gehr, 2004), 278 World Series footage, 157, 312 World War I, 12, 192, 197–99, 209, 210, 218

World War I films, 10–11, 155–64 Wright, Colonel F. E., 198 Wurl, Joel, 248 YMCA, Industrial Department of, 218 Yoshizawa Shouten, 329, 333, 334, 335 YouTube, 56, 71, 158, 261, 312, 362 Yumibe, Joshua, 8, 9, 86 Zeiss, Carl, 195, 196 Zeiss optical firm, 195–98 Zoopraxiscope, 290–94, 296, 299–301, 301n6, 303n31 Zoopraxography, 289