New Perspectives on Early Cinema History: Concepts, Approaches, Audiences 9781350181977, 9781350182004, 9781350181984

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NEW PERSPECTIVES ON EARLY CINEMA HISTORY

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NEW PERSPECTIVES ON EARLY CINEMA HISTORY Concepts, Approaches, Audiences EDITED BY

MARIO SLUGAN AND DANIËL BILTEREYST

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Mario Slugan and Daniël Biltereyst, 2022 Mario Slugan and Daniël Biltereyst have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xiv constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Ben Anslow Cover image: Inferno (1911) Bertran de Born (© The History Collection / Alamy Stock Photo) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-8197-7 ePDF: 978-1-3501-8198-4 eBook: 978-1-3501-8199-1 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

List of figures  vii List of contributors  xi Acknowledgements  xiv

Introduction: New perspectives on early cinema history Mario Slugan and Daniël Biltereyst

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PART ONE CONCEPTS AND THEORIES  19 1 Animated pictures according to Georges Méliès: A sober and unpretentious remediation, or when Méliès took a stand against … the cinema! 21 André Gaudreault 2 Attraction/narration/illustration: A third paradigm for early cinema 41 Valentine Robert 3 ‘The very act itself, even to the smack’: Early cinema, presence and experience 65 Gert Jan Harkema 4 Lost love on a hot summer day: The absorptive experience of the first film show in Denmark 83 Casper Tybjerg

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CONTENTS

PART TWO A  PPROACHES, METHODS AND SOURCES  101   5 Revisiting the fiction/non-fiction distinction: Early cinema and the philosophy of imagination 103 Mario Slugan   6 Using Mediathread for gesture analysis in the cinema of attractions 131 Danae Kleida   7 Librettos as source material for film history: The case of early Russian cinema 145 Anna Kovalova

PART THREE AUDIENCES AND EXPERIENCES  165   8 Narrative cinema as a separate attraction: Archie L. Shepard’s newspaper publicity  167 Paul S. Moore   9 Mapping Black moviegoing in Harlem, New York City, 1909–14 193 Agata Frymus 10 Attraction, narration, performance: A historical-pragmatic perspective on early cinema 213 Frank Kessler and Sabine Lenk 11 The other panicking audience: A New Cinema History approach to early cinemagoing, cinema fires, disasters and panics 227 Daniël Biltereyst Bibliography 248 Index  270

FIGURES

Figures 1.1 Top: a photogram from Le Bourreau turc (The Terrible Turkish Executioner directed by Georges Méliès © Star-Film 1904. All Rights Reserved), with the studio floor plainly visible. Bottom: the stage of the Robert-Houdin theatre and its floor. Images from Jacques Deslandes and Jacques Richard, Histoire comparée du cinéma, Tome 2 (Tournai: Casterman, 1968), 402  27 1.2 Casablanca (1942, directed by Michael Curtiz © Warner Bros. All Rights Reserved) 30 1.3 Photomontage ‘matching’ the stage floor of the Robert-Houdin theatre in Paris with the floor of the Montreuil-sous-Bois studio where Le Bourreau turc was shot  32 1.4 L’Équilibre impossible (An Impossible Balancing Feat directed by Georges Méliès © Star-Film 1902. All Rights Reserved) and its set in the form of a ‘proscenium opening’ erected on the studio floor (which is reminiscent of the framing of the stage in the Robert-Houdin theatre, as seen in Figure 1.1)  32 2.1 A triad of theoretical terms  42 2.2 McAllister Advertisement published in Lyceumite and Talent, no. 52 (January 1908) reproduced by Terry Borton, ‘The Professional Life of “Magic Lantern” Illustrated Lecturers’, The Magic Lantern Gazette 27, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 15  46 2.3 Still from Tom Tom the Piper’s Son directed by G. W. Bitzer © American Mutoscope & Biograph 1905. All Rights Reserved  51 2.4 William Hogarth, Southwark Fair, 1734 (etching and engraving, 36.5 x 47.5 cm, Metropolitan Museum, New York)  51

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FIGURES

2.5 Gustave Doré (design), A. Pontenier (engraving), Bertrand de Borne, 1865, published in L’Enfer de Dante Alighieri (Paris, Hachette, 1865), Ch. XXVIII, v. 123, Plate 58 (detail)  55 2.6 Still from L’Inferno directed by Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan and Giuseppe De Liguoro © Milano Film 1911. All Rights Reserved  55 4.1 Copenhagen Panorama  84 6.1 Mediathread environment  132 6.2 Example of Mediathread annotation  133 7.1 Cover of the Libretto Handbill. Nizhnii Novgorod, 1914  146 7.2 Advertisement for Lik zver’a (The Beast’s Face, 1917, Aleksandr Arkatov)  150 7.3 Poster for Żona (The Wife directed by Aleksander Hertz, 1915)  151 7.4 and 7.5 Promotional photographs for Natásha Rostova (1915, Pyotr Chardynin)  155 7.6 Advertisement for Stranitsy chernoi knigi (The Pages of the Black Book directed by Boris Glagolin, 1914)  159 8.1 Early advertisements for Shepard’s Moving Pictures. ‘The Great Train Robbery, A Thousand Thrills’, Lawrence (MA) American, 18 December 1903 (left); ‘Thrilling! Pathetic! Mysterious! Startling! Inspiring!’ Fall River (MA) News, 23 November 1903; and listed as a specialty for the Maude Hillman repertoire company, Pittston (PA) Gazette, 22 March 1902  168 8.2 Counts of moving picture shows listed in Miscellaneous ‘Routes Ahead’ in Billboard, New York Dramatic Mirror or New York Clipper, weekly from July 1903 to June 1906, removing duplicates listed the same week in more than one publication. Total numbers increase dramatically early in 1906 when Shepard’s and others’ indefinite weekly stands proliferate alongside touring routes  174 8.3 Shepard’s Enterprises, Julius Cahn’s Theatrical Directory, 1906, 102. The phrase ‘all the principal cities … ’ and the listed ventures include generalizations that do not accurately represent actual operations  176

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 8.4 Map of Shepard Enterprises itinerant territories and indefinitely recurring locations across the US, 1903 to 1909. Exhibition information was compiled by the author comprehensively from entertainment trade press listings and local newspaper publicity and reporting. Created by the author using Gephi  177  9.1 Advertising for the Crescent’s opening night. New York Age, 16 December 1909, 6  198  9.2 125th Street, Harlem, c. 1910. Maether & Co., postcard, Berlin, Germany. Lincoln theatre is visible at the centre of the photograph  199  9.3 One of the two managers of Crescent, Thomas Johnson, and Eugene ‘Frenchy’ Elmore, manager of Lincoln. Photographs from New York Age, 30 June 1910, 6 and New York Amsterdam News, 13 February 1929, 6  200  9.4 Cinemas in North and Central Harlem in 1916. The outline across area 155 to 147 signifies the Black settlement, after James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1930), 146. The line at the bottom of the image shows the beginning of the Jewish neighbourhood. Compiled by the author  204 11.1 Map showing the location of Menin’s The Barakken area on the southern part of the river Lys, near the French border. Geo-mapping indicating the residence addresses of the fourteen victims and the projectionist  231 11.2 Image of the café and the separate entrance of Cinema Buiksom. The photo illustrates how the venue was also used as a public hall, here for a ‘grand bal’ during the May Pentecost fair (year unknown). City Archive Menin  232 11.3 Interior of Cinema Buiksom. Figuranten/Heemkundige Kring van Menen, Het Leven in en rond de cinema’s van Menen (Menen: Heemkundige Kring, 2010), 165  233 11.4 Front page article on the Cinema Buiksom disaster, referring to the ‘frightening catastrophe in a cinema in Menin’ and ‘a mad panic’. Le XXe Siècle, 24 December 1912, 1  234

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FIGURES

11.5 Photo composition about the Cinema Buiksom disaster as it appeared in several newspapers, showing the corpse of the 67-year-old woman who died during the event (top left). The composition shows the venue’s projectionist (right), ‘gendarmes’, and police and judicial inspectors. We also get a glimpse of the cinema’s exit (left bottom) and entrance (middle bottom). City Archive Menin  237 11.6 Three days after the disaster, newspapers published this photo with police inspectors in front of Cinema Buiksom. Le XXe Siècle, 25 December 1912, 1  241

Table 11.1 Detailed Information on the Projectionist and the Victims’ Identities of the Cinema Buiksom Disaster  236

CONTRIBUTORS

The editors Daniël Biltereyst is Professor of Film and Media History at Ghent University, Belgium, where he leads the Center for Cinema and Media Studies. Biltereyst is the editor of various collections, including three volumes with R. Maltby and P. Meers (Explorations in New Cinema History, 2011; Cinema, Audiences and Modernity, 2012; The Routledge Companion to New Cinema History, 2019). He recently published Mapping Movie Magazines (2020, with L. Van de Vijver) and a monograph on film censorship in Belgium (Verboden Beelden, 2020). Mario Slugan is Lecturer in Film Studies and Strategic Lecturer at the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of three monographs: Montage as Perceptual Experience: Berlin Alexanderplatz from Döblin to Fassbinder (2017), Noël Carroll on Film: A Philosophy of Art and Popular Culture (2019) and Fiction and Imagination in Early Cinema: A Philosophical Approach to Film History (2019). He is a Fellow of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image and book reviews editor for Early Popular Visual Culture.

The authors Agata Frymus is a Lecturer in Film, Television and Screen Studies at Monash University, Malaysia. Her work concentrates on the intersections between silent film, race and audiences. She is the author of Damsels and Divas: European Stardom in Silent Hollywood (2020) and articles in various journals, including Celebrity Studies, Feminist Media Studies and Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (formerly Cinema Journal).

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André Gaudreault is a Professor at the Université de Montréal, Canada, Research Chair in Cinema and Media Studies and director of the TECHNÈS International Research Partnership on Cinema Technology. His publications include From Plato to Lumière (2009 [1988]), Film and Attraction (2011 [2008]), The End of Cinema? (with Philippe Marion, 2015 [2013]) and Le Récit cinématographique (with François Jost, 1990 and 2017). His current research is focused on the advent of editing, the broadcasting of operas in movie theatres, the archaeology of technological innovations in cinema, and the impact of the digital revolution on media. He has received numerous awards and distinctions for his work, including the Léon-Gérin Prize (2017), the Killam Prize in the Humanities (2018) and an Honorary Doctorate by Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 (2019). Gert Jan Harkema teaches film at the University of Amsterdam. He received his PhD from Stockholm University with a manuscript titled Aesthetic Experiences of Presence: Case Studies in Film Exhibition, 1986–1898. His work has appeared in Synoptique and Tijdschrift Media Geschiedenis [Journal of Media History]. Frank Kessler is a Professor of Media History at Utrecht University, Netherlands, and currently the Director of the Research Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON). He is a co-founder and co-editor of KINtop: Jahrbuch zur Erforschung des frühen Films and the KINtop-Schriften series. He has published numerous articles on film history and particularly early cinema. He is the co-editor of Machines, Magie, Médias (2018) and author of Mise en scène (2014, 2020). He participates in the research project ‘B-magic’ and is the project leader of ‘Projecting Knowledge – The Magic Lantern as a Tool for Mediated Science Communication in the Netherlands, 1880–1940’. Danae Kleida is a Junior Lecturer in the department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University, Netherlands, and a Research Assistant at Motion Bank. She is also a Guest Lecturer at the Academy of Theatre and Dance of the Amsterdam University of the Arts. She graduated from Utrecht University with a Research Master’s (cum laude) in Media & Performance Studies (2018). Her master’s thesis examined historical methods of dance notation and current practices of digital movement annotation. Her most recent publication is ‘Entering a Dance Performance through Multimodal Annotation: Annotating with Scores’ (2021). Anna Kovalova is an Associate Researcher at the European University of St Petersburg, Russia. She is the author of Kinematograf v Peterburge 1896–1917 (with Yuri Tsivian, 2011), and the editor of a volume of screenplays by the Russian playwright Nikolai Erdman (2010). She has published in Film History, The Russian Review, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, Osteuropa and other

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journals. As the head of the research team project Early Russian Film Prose, she created, together with a group of graduate and postgraduate students, the most complete electronic database of early Russian narrative film texts. Sabine Lenk is a film archivist and media historian. She worked for film archives in Belgium, France, Luxemburg, Great Britain and the Netherlands. From 1999 to 2007, she was the director of the Filmmuseum Düsseldorf (Germany). From 2015 to 2017 she was a researcher in the European project ‘A Million Pictures’ at Research Centre for Visual Poetics (Antwerp University). Since 2018 she has been a researcher at Antwerp University and Université libre du Bruxelles for the project ‘B-magic. The Magic Lantern and Its Cultural Impact as Visual Mass Medium in Belgium (1830–1940)’, which she co-authored. She is a co-founder and co-editor of KINtop, KINtop-Schriften and KINtop Studies in Early Cinema. Paul S. Moore is Professor of Communication and Culture at Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada. His media histories of cinema exhibition and newspaper distribution in North America have focused on the relation between audiences and publicity, appearing in Film History, Canadian Journal of Film Studies and The Moving Image. Recent work maps early transnational ‘circuits of cinema’, also a theme of the 2017 International Conference on the History of Movie Exhibition and Reception (HoMER), which he hosted in Toronto. Valentine Robert is Senior Lecturer of Film Studies at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. She is co-editor of Corporeality in Early Cinema: Viscera, Skin, and Physical Form (2018) and curator of ‘Tableaux Vivants’, a films and paintings programme featured at the Pordenone Film Festival 2017 (then in Bonn, Munich, Helsinki, Lausanne, Barcelona, and Paris). She collaborated in the cinematic section of exhibitions on Gustave Doré (Musée d’Orsay & National Gallery of Canada, 2014), James Tissot (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco & Musée d’Orsay, 2019–20) and the origins of cinema (Musée d’Orsay & LACMA, 2021– 22). Her next book will be titled L’Origine picturale du cinéma (2022). Casper Tybjerg is an Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of Copenhagen. His research interests focus on film historiography and Danish and international silent film, particularly the work of Carl Theodor Dreyer. He has written numerous articles on film history and has recently completed a book on the theory and method of film historiography. He is part of the Danish Film Institute research project ‘A Common Film Culture? Denmark and Germany in the Silent Film Era, 1910–1930’, where his work focuses on style and historiographical concepts.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This edited collection brings together a selection of papers presented at the twoday international conference ‘Rethinking the Attractions-Narrative Dialectics: New Approaches to Early Cinema’ (9–10 November 2018 in Ghent, Belgium). The editors of this volume would like to thank all the participants and in particular the keynote speakers, Professor André Gaudreault (Université de Montréal) and Professor Charlie Keil (University of Toronto). We are much indebted to all those who helped organize this event, in particular the staff at KASKcinema (especially Elisa De Schepper), session chairs (Charlie Keil, Frank Kessler, Dominique Nasta, Roel Vande Winkel, Kurt Vanhoutte), as well as students who were involved in the conference’s practicalities. The conference received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 746619 (Fiction, Imagination, and Early Cinema research project) and from the Flemish Scientific Research Council FWO. Here we would like to thank the Digital Cinema Studies network DICIS (in particular Leen Engelen, Philippe Meers, Roel Vande Winkel, Lies Van de Vijver) for their generous support. We also express our sincere gratitude to the contributors to this volume for their patience and for readily revising and updating their original contribution. We also wish to thank Veidehi Hans, Camilla Erskine and Rebecca Barden at Bloomsbury for their excellent guidance throughout the entire editing process of this volume. Finally, we thank our families and friends for their support during this book’s journey to completion. Mario Slugan and Daniël Biltereyst

INTRODUCTION: NEW PERSPECTIVES ON EARLY CINEMA HISTORY Mario Slugan and Daniël Biltereyst

The study of early cinema devotes itself to the history and pre-history of cinema up to approximately 1915. Once a niche part of film studies, early cinema scholarship has now become a veritable subdiscipline within the field. In 1978 a group of enthusiasts met to discuss ‘Cinema: 1900–1906’ as one of two of that year’s FIAF conference themes in Brighton. By the end of 2021 Domitor, the International Society for the Study of Early Cinema launched in 1985, had organized sixteen conferences. Domitor’s conferences are not even the only ones devoted exclusively to early cinema, as the yearly Seminar on the Origins and History of Cinema and the 2018 ‘Rethinking the Attractions-Narrative Dialectics: New Approaches to Early Cinema’ conference which brought about this volume attest.1 Book-length publications devoted solely to early cinema have proliferated as well. Following the pioneering work of Kemp R. Niver on the Library of Congress collections in the 1960s and 1970s, the 1980s saw the publication of a couple of edited volumes on early cinema starting with the FIAF proceedings.2 Since the late 1980s and early 1990s there has been a steady stream of not only Domitor proceedings but single-authored monographs as well, starting with the work of Guido Convents, André Gaudreault, Charles Musser, Eileen Bowser, Miriam Hansen, Tom Gunning, Yuri Tsivian and Herbert Birett.3 Today, it is sufficient to look at the Domitor website’s New Publications section to see the pace with which new book-length studies are coming out.4 A further testament to the study of early cinema as a subdiscipline is the appearance of a reader, an encyclopedia and a companion exclusively on the subject.5 Next to these longer works, there are also specialized journals such as Early Popular Visual Culture, Film History and KINtop which are devoted in great part to early cinema. Both historically and conceptually, the study of early cinema is a part of ‘new film history’, understood here in the sense elaborated by Thomas Elsaesser.6 This body of work which, according to Elsaesser, started gathering steam in the

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1970s and 1980s with the work of Noël Burch, Barry Salt, and Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery has been characterized by the production of alternatives to teleological, linear and great men models of history with a greater focus on empirical and archival sources.7 Distinguishing their efforts from earlier filmic histories written by Terry Ramsaye, Lewis Jacobs, Rachel Low and Georges Sadoul, revisionist or new film historians proposed that it is often non-filmic material – the discourse surrounding production, promotion, distribution, exhibition and reception of films – that can teach us more about film history than films themselves.8 As a part of new film history, then, the study of early cinema has produced a breadth of information on both films as texts and on the surrounding nonfilmic material practices of production, promotion, distribution, exhibition and reception. Just to give a few examples from each of these domains, only The Griffith Project boasts nine edited volumes on D. W. Griffith’s films before 1919 and there have been a range of monograph-length works on other film pioneers such as Georges Méliès and Edwin S. Porter.9 There have been numerous studies of early national cinemas.10 Specific early film genres have been analysed.11 Stylistic analyses including histories of style have been produced.12 Trajectories of notable production film companies have been tracked.13 Their film catalogues have been made available.14 Studios have been considered.15 Networks of film distribution have been assessed.16 Early film technologies have been discussed.17 Attempts at the reconstructions of various audience experiences have been made.18 Early film criticism has been analysed.19 Forms of regulations of early cinema have been addressed.20 And perhaps the main framework for this historical work has been to discuss early cinema in the context of changes brought about cultural modernity.21 The histories so produced are undoubtedly of great value. But we suggest that the study of early cinema has made an even greater contribution in its theoretical proposals, primarily in overturning the idea that early cinema was merely today’s cinema in its embryonic form and suggesting an alternative model on its own terms. Some of the most exciting and influential proposals among these have concerned 1) the articulation of the period’s stylistic features, 2) the theorization of what constitutes the filmic text, 3) the identification of relevant cultural practices and media for discussing early cinema, 4) the theorization of what constitutes the beginning of cinema and 5) the relation of early cinema to new media. Concerning the period’s formal traits (but also extending to the second and third point), the notion of the ‘cinema of attractions’, initially proposed by Gaudreault and Gunning and developed further by Gunning, offered a way of describing the textual traits of early cinema in positive rather than negative terms.22 Instead of non-narrative cinema or ‘primitive cinema’, the first decade of

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cinema came to be seen as a cinema of attractions characterized by preference of display over the construction of a diegetic world, of temporal punctuality over chronological development, and of direct address to the spectator over effacement of its rhetoric potential.23 Importantly, cinema of attractions was not only a matter of finding a new vocabulary to describe a formal dominant, but a reconceptualization of the first decade of early cinema as a period radically different from what followed later. Cinema of attractions also emphasized that the alterity of early cinema was as much a question of what was screened as what surrounded that screening.24 For instance, the apparatus as a technological novelty itself and its ability to allow for the perception of movement also acted as an attraction of its own. Moreover, as Rick Altman and others have shown, early cinema was far from silent and the recorded moving image was surrounded by a range of sounds issuing from exhibitors, barkers, lecturers, pianists, actors, singers, mechanical contraptions and the audiences themselves.25 This paves the way for the idea that it is not the recorded moving image that was the film text for early audiences, but the recording together with the surrounding performative aural aspects that constituted the film text. If this was ‘vertical’ expansion of the understanding of the film text, Musser also suggested the text’s ‘horizontal’ extension from discrete films to film programmes. Whereas present-day audiences usually treat recordings titled Bauerntanz zweier Kinder (Italian Folk Dance, 1895, Max Skladanowsky) or La Sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon (Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, 1895, Louis Lumière) as discrete textual units, during the early era these recordings were regularly a part of ‘unified programs built around a single event, theme or narrative’ as the popularity of boxing match, Passion Play, travelogue, war and military programmes demonstrates.26 In the idea’s most radical instance, Tsivian even proposed that for early cinema viewers it was the overall exhibition that formed the text, rather than any single film or programme performance.27 Put differently, this theoretical perspective was not only a matter of new film history’s methodological recognition of the importance of non-filmic material but an expansion and full-fledged problematization of what constitutes the film text. Similar to how the exhibition context was drawn into the film text, so have previously neglected cultural series – forms of signification – and media become a part of genealogies of early cinema.28 Whereas earlier, theatre and photography were seen as the closest relatives to cinema,29 early cinema historians and media archaeologists have proposed a range of other cultural series and media as key for reconstructing cinema’s genealogies including magic lantern shows, stage illusionism, illustrated lectures, visual toys, comics and visual immersion devices including panoramas and dioramas.30 From this theoretical perspective, for instance, Méliès’ recordings become primarily what André Gaudreault and

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Philippe Marion call ‘attractional packages’ – performances which were ‘already predetermined, predefined, and preformatted in and by an extra-cinematic cultural series’.31 Or to put it in media archaeology vocabulary, much of early cinema was a medium only in the sense of a delivery device whose later independence as an art form was by no means guaranteed at the time. In other words, this is not only a matter of identifying new important sources for early cinema histories, but reconceptualizing the terrain of potential relationships between different cultural practices and media and determining when one set of practices becomes institutionalized as a self-standing medium. Directly connected to the issues of relevant cultural series, practices and media is the question of when cinema, and by extension early cinema, started. Although this volume sees projections of photographically derived motion pictures as establishing the border between pre-cinema and cinema, scholars like Hermann Hecht and Laurent Mannoni have pointed out that if it is the appearance of the moving image alone that defines cinema, then cinema has a history that predates even photographically recorded moving images like Roundhay Garden Scene (1888, Louis Le Prince) or Monkeyshines No. 1 and 2 (1889 or 1890, William L. K. Dickson and William Heise) which require no projection and involves devices such as phenakistoscope and zoetrope.32 Similarly, if it is the projection of moving images that is cinema’s defining trait there are again devices like the seventeenth-century lanterns of fright which allowed for animated projections and which significantly precede brothers Skladanowsky or brothers Lumière public screenings from 1895. Rather than pushing the origins of cinema back in time, Gaudreault has argued that cinema becomes a cultural series of its own only around 1910 and that prior to it, cinema only existed as a part of these other cultural series like earlier moving image and screening series.33 In this sense, ‘early cinema’ is a misnomer for at the time there was no such thing as ‘cinema’ to begin with. The period should instead, according to Gaudreault, be called by its contemporary term – ‘kinematography’. Early cinema, lastly, also sheds light on new media and contemporary media ecologies. For instance, having traversed the path from a delivery mechanism to an institutionalized art form, early cinema prepares us for debates about the art status and potential canonization of some new media, such as video games.34 Early cinema also points to the diversity of genealogies of new media which go far beyond physical implementations of universal Turing machine and Von Neumann architecture. For example, if virtual reality is construed as a simulated experience of bodily presence to the scene depicted then it can be tracked to as early as the Great Frieze in the Villa dei Misteri at Pompeii from around 60 bce, with Hale’s Tours and Scenes of the World presenting one of its early twentieth-century instances.35 Early cinema can also serve as a reminder that present-day media ecologies are not as unique as some would claim. That fake films circulated widely around 1900 but were regularly identified

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as such by their audiences despite essentially constituting new media of the time suggests that present-day social media users should be no more naïve.36 And, perhaps most importantly, the history and pre-history of (early) cinema reminds us that at any given moment in time media ecologies are dynamic systems whose components are ever interacting, jostling, potentially heading to a dead end or for world domination (at least for a century or so as cinema has proven). In all these cases, then, the key theoretical point has been to treat early cinema as a challenge for film history which is only secondarily a matter of comparative dearth of historical data or even of development of a new method. Primarily, the challenge has been seen as a question of how to theorize a historical period whose stylistic traits, textual unit and genealogical heritage are radically different from present-day cinema and how to recognize this alterity in the first place. It is the contention of this Introduction that the theoretical contributions stemming from the study of early cinema have somewhat stalled as of late, and that, with some notable exceptions, the subdiscipline’s focus for the last decade or so has been largely on the history of early cinema rather than on early cinema as a challenge for film historiography. Wanda Strauven’s edited volume The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded exploring Gunning and Gaudreault’s titular theoretical concept, for example, is now fifteen years old.37 The existing reader, encyclopedia and companion on early cinema are all at the very least almost a decade old now.38 It is here where this volume hopes to contribute, by tipping the scales slightly towards the challenge of early cinema for film historiography and offering scholarly work which provides historical, methodological and theoretical essays alike. Precisely for this reason this edited volume is organized into three parts, devoted to contributing to theory, methodology and history of early cinema. In the first part – ‘Concepts and theories’ – the contributors present challenges to the much-used attraction-narrative dialectics paradigm and offer alternative proposals. André Gaudreault further develops his ideas on attractional packages and cultural series and argues for the importance of the notion of remediation for the understanding of Méliès’ work. Valentine Robert suggests that the notion of illustration is as relevant for early cinema as attraction or narration are. Gert Jan Harkema proposes that it is the idea of presence that is constitutive of early cinema experience. In the last piece of the part, Casper Tybjerg argues that it is the absorption and imagination rather than attraction that are crucial for construing the press reception of some of the earliest film screenings. Slugan’s appeal to the concept of imagination and methodological emphasis on the need to combine the methods of new film history and analytic philosophy provides for a smooth segue into the second part – ‘Approaches, methods and sources’. There Danae Kleida makes use of digital tools to offer an analysis of early cinema gestures. And in her chapter on Russian early cinema, Anna

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Kovalova argues for the importance of studying film librettos for understanding non-extant films. The last part – ‘Audiences and experiences’ – offers the bread and butter of early cinema scholarship – work on specific historical questions. Paul S. Moore explores how the audiences were primed into engaging Archie L. Shepard’s travelling show through sensational newspaper publicity. Agata Frymus expands our knowledge of African American cinemagoing by zeroing in on Harlem between 1909 and 1914. Frank Kessler and Sabine Lenk discuss the performative context of moving picture presentations focusing on exhibition in German Kinoreformer’s ‘Mustervorstellungen’. Daniël Biltereyst closes the volume with a case study on a disastrous fire in a working-class film venue in Belgium in 1912 which caused a panic and casualties among cinemagoers. The new perspectives on early cinema that this volume offers, therefore, fall broadly into domains of theory, methodology and historical case studies corresponding approximately to the volume’s three parts. Sometimes, the contributors try to innovate on two or more fronts at once, such as Tybjerg who develops his account of absorption and imagination based on a detailed study of the first film projection in Denmark; Slugan who integrates methods from analytic philosophy into film historiography to outline his understanding of imagination and fiction/non-fiction distinction by reinterpreting the promotion and reception of early trick and train films; or Kessler and Lenk who are as interested in the theory of attraction-narration dialectics as they are in the historical detail of ‘Mustervorstellungen’. And oftentimes the essays speak to each other within and across the sections: while a number of chapters directly engage the attraction-narration debate, others overlap in exploring the notions of remediation, imagination and the fiction/non-fiction distinction to name just a few of the most obvious intersections. If it feels like the essays from other parts could have as easily found themselves in the theoretical section this is because the volume’s greatest claim to novelty lies precisely in its theoretical considerations. Admittedly, the attraction-narrative dialectics has been around for a while, but the alternatives offer a theoretical refreshment on how to conceptualize the period. At the same time, this volume does not pretend to be comprehensive. Clearly, even among the list of questions that we have identified as challenges for film historiography, the present volume devotes itself mostly to the first three – cinema’s formal traits, the context surrounding projection, and relevant cultural series and media – while saying little on the other two – periodization and relation to new media. Moreover, even within our circumcision of cinema to projections of photographically derived motion pictures (which already excludes devices like the Kinetoscope39) we do not address non-theatrical and amateur cinema.40 Similarly, no sections such as ‘Technology and production’, ‘Law and censorship’ or ‘Economics and business’ appear here either. The reason for this is twofold. First, a claim to

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comprehensiveness would have necessitated a much larger book. Instead, we wanted a more compact volume where theoretical and methodological concerns were primary while still allowing some space for exploration of these matters on specific case studies. Second, the conference that led to this volume started as an exploration of alternatives to the attraction-narrative debate which sets up investigations of audiences and experiences as case studies much easier than those of cinema technology, censorship or business. The resulting volume is, of course, a balancing act of what to in/exclude and what the focus on and the readers will be the judges of how well the routine was performed. Rather than summarizing the volume’s contributions any further (for their abstracts should speak for themselves), in the remainder of this Introduction we instead want to chart the most promising developments in the study of early cinema in the last decade or so. These we identify as pertaining to digitalization, identity and geography. The goal is, of course, to put this outline in conversation with what this volume hopes to add to the study of early cinema (and where future work might lie). Although the new trajectories do not constitute theoretical developments in the sense that we have been discussing here, but a broadening of sources, methods and research questions, it is still necessary to address them to see how the novelty of our own volume fares in comparison.

Digitalization Arguably one of the most consequential recent developments in the study of early cinema has been the digitalization of a range of archival material and their online, most often open-access availability. Where earlier even rudimentary research demanded a visit to the archive, now it is possible to access a wealth of both filmic and non-filmic material with only a few clicks. While in 1978 at the FIAF conference in Brighton early cinema enthusiasts were treated to a thenunique opportunity of watching more than five hundred films from the era;41 only ‘The Early Motion Pictures and Sound Recordings of the Edison Companies’ of the Library of Congress’ Digital Collections boasts 341 motion pictures accessible to all with an internet connection and a screening device.42 Add to this other free online early cinema collections hosted by institutions such as Eye Film Museum and British Film Institute as well as a plethora of sources already available on DVDs and streaming services and it becomes obvious that nowadays it takes only a little bit of effort to access more primary film material than could have been possible even through painstaking curation and archival research only a few decades ago.43 Importantly, it is not only the traditionally understood discrete film texts that were digitized but also a wealth of discourse surrounding the production, promotion, distribution, exhibition and reception of these films. Leading the way here is

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undoubtedly the ‘Media History Digital Library’ which provides free online access to a range of key trade press journals from around the world (e.g. Moving Picture World, Der Kinematograph, Cine-journal) as well as to yearbooks, fan magazines, film books, censorship decisions, economic regulations, technical journals and magic lantern slides and catalogues.44 There are also country- and region-specific databases such as ‘Early Cinema in Scotland, 1896–1927’, ‘Stummfilm.dk’, ‘The German Early Cinema Database’, ‘Portale Cinema Muto Italiano’, ‘Rannee russkoe kino’ and ‘Filmographie des “vues” tournées au Québec au temps du muet (1897–1930)’ which provide information on films, cinema programmes, venue locations and journals and newspapers coverage.45 In this vein, one of our contributors – Anna Kovalova – has led the development of ‘Early Russian Film Prose’ database which collects early cinema librettos.46 National libraries around the world have also provided access to digitized copies of numerous newspapers and periodicals from the time which at least in part covered cinema.47 Universityemployed researchers, moreover, have access to a range of digitized newspapers through paid subscription services such as Gale Historical Newspapers. It might seem obvious, but it is worth making explicit that digitalization did not bring about only accessibility to unprecedented volumes of data. For the verbal component of this material, digitalization also introduced the almost instantaneous searchability meaning that specific queries can nowadays be looked up in a fraction of the time it would take to do so earlier when tangible print and microfilm were the dominant media of research. Admittedly, the search function comes with a danger of tunnel vision which might make a researcher blind to the context almost necessarily apparent to the historian flicking through physical paper. It also might instil complacency detracting from an actual visit to a physical archive and discovery of other potential sources. And, of course, the digitized material is far from perfectly accurate when it comes to optical character recognition. But for targeted searches trying to find out information on, say, Hale’s Tours and Scenes of the World the advantages are immense: where even less than ten years ago an expert interested in the history of this specific amusement venue in the US would have been able to check only a handful of sources like Billboard, New York Clipper, Moving Picture World and The Official Gazette of the United States Patents Office, today a simple search through a couple of databases will afford insights into Hale’s Tours based on a corpus that is far more representative of the overall situation than a few publications associated with the nation’s big urban centres.48 More specific digital tools have also abetted early cinema scholarship. Developed by Yuri Tsivian, Cinemetrics is a semi-automated tool which allows for measuring and visualization of average shot lengths providing insights into the evolution of editing tempo and rhythm.49 Digital maps, used by Jeff Klenotic as early as 2003, have afforded visualization of exhibition spaces and distribution networks over time in projects such as ‘London’s Silent Cinemas’

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and ‘Mapping Desmet’ as well as in Paul S. Moore’s contribution on Archie L. Shepard in this book.50 Another of the volume’s contributor’s – Danae Kleida – has participated in the Media Ecology Project which aims to enrich textual analysis through time-based annotation.51 Further digitalization will undoubtedly bring even more data and tools in the nearest future and it will be wise for early cinema historians to stay abreast of the developments.52

Identity The initial work on early cinema, irrespective of whether it was on film pioneers or the audiences, privileged white, male, middle-class, adult urbanites for a number of reasons ranging from the availability of sources to cultural biases embedded in the research culture. When it came to film pioneers it was initially common to discuss women only in relation to early film stardom focusing on figures such as Florence Lawrence and Mary Pickford.53 The cinema itself, by contrast, was thought to have been ‘fathered’ by figures like William K. Dickson, Thomas A. Edison and August and Louis Lumière, and virtually only male early film inventors, directors and producers deserved attention prior to the 2000s. For instance, although one of the key early film pioneers and perhaps the sole female film director between 1896 and 1906, Alice Guy-Blaché was practically erased from film history despite the fact that she directed and produced up to six hundred film titles and wrote a memoir discussing her career.54 Thanks to this work and projects such as ‘Women Film Pioneers Project’ which have shone light on more than three hundred women film workers it is becoming obvious that ‘what we assume never existed is what we invariably find’.55 Something similar is happening with the growing interest in African American film workers evinced through resources such as the Early African American Film database.56 The study of early film audiences was also initially biased in the same direction as that on film pioneers. Trade press and newspaper accounts perused with the intent of reconstructing historical experiences were, after all, again dominantly written by white, male, middle-class, adult city-dwellers. Taking a cue from the rest of the film studies, the second wave of work on the audiences had already starting in the 1990s recognized the importance of different social categories like gender, race, ethnicity, immigration status, urban/rural milieu, class and age for the better understanding of historical audiences.57 If there is a single lesson that brings this work together, it is that belonging to distinct social categories entailed different experiences of moviegoing. Simply put, it was one thing to watch film as a woman and another as a man, as a Black or a White person, as English- or Irish-born, as a local or an immigrant, in New York City or in Springfield, Illinois, as a white or a blue collar and as an adult or a teen. Taking The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight (1897) as just one example, the film, according to Miriam Hansen, afforded

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women ‘the forbidden sight of male bodies in seminudity, engaged in intimate and intense physical action’.58 But as Dan Streible evinces not every women would have necessarily enjoyed the spectacle, for those affiliated with the Women’s Christian Temperance Union campaigned against the film’s distribution.59 The most recent work in this vein has started tackling the intersectional nature of identity among film workers and the audiences alike. There has, for instance, been a growing interest in African American female filmmakers and film commentators like M. Webb and Drusilla Dunjee Houston.60 And it is in this volume that Agata Frymus makes headways into the exploration of businesswomen of Hispanic origin and their relationship with the African American audiences. More work in this direction can only be welcomed especially in the current context of cultural movements like Me Too and Black Lives Matter. At the same time, we would also like to briefly agitate for (a return to) the discussion of class not only because it is an axis of identity that has recently been neglected but because it is from the perspective of class that cinema can be put in a wider environment of both leisure industry and cultural institutions in general as Lee Grieveson has shown in his work on cinema censorship and the role of cinema in the formation of liberal democracy.61 Although the entertainment and state context is something early cinema scholars rarely lose sight of, investigations of whether within this framework the cinema experience was truly exceptional or not and whether cinema as an institution was unique or not are still rare.62 In other words, similar to how we have decentralized the film text as an object of inquiry there is also much to be gained if we decentralize cinema as an institution and produce histories of entertainment and other culture and industry institutions where cinema is only one (small) part.63

Geography Most scholarship on early cinema, even if distinct and intersectional social categories were considered, has focused on Europe and North America for many of the same reasons discussed in the previous section. With an increasing frequency and especially in the last five years, however, there has been exciting scholarship that has started looking into other regions as well, including Central and South America, Africa and Asia.64 Traditionally, early cinema histories of countries that have at the time been parts of foreign colonial empires have been neglected both by foreign and local historians. On the one hand, foreign historians usually focused on the imperial centre with little interest in cinema in the colonial outposts. On the other, local historians of cinemas of decolonized countries have often deemed only the postcolonial period or local filmmakers as genuinely national thereby sidelining early cinema in the process. Increased interest in Central and South America, Africa and Asia is very welcome because

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it allows us to see that it was not only modernity but also colonialism as its seedy underbelly that have been key to early cinemas across the globe and whose consequences can still be felt today across film industries. Another important consequence of this widening interest in early cinemas outside Europe and North America is that it has started putting pressure on both the periodization of early cinema as an epoch and the general applicability of the very notion of early cinema. We have already discussed questions around when (early) cinema begins. But work on Central and South America, Africa and Asia has also problematized when early cinema ends. In Europe and North America, it makes sense to speak of early cinema ending approximately in the mid1910s for a number of reasons which include the rise of the classical Hollywood style and its replacement of the transitional style, the dominance of narrative feature film as the industry’s key product over preceding single-reel films, the emergence of Hollywood as the hegemon of world film markets beating out its European competitors, the replacement of nickelodeons with large cinemas and the breakout and end of the First World War as a marker of a historical rupture. But in Central and South America, Africa and Asia where (with the exception of countries like Japan and India) moviegoing was far more important than local production which only started after the end of the First World War and where little actual fighting took place, there seems to be less sense to speak of early cinema if the period is in good part defined in terms of production and war. Furthermore, early cinema is a concept that has been developed by scholars working at North American and European universities for North American and European circumstances and as such it might have limited applicability to other continents and regions. Much like early cinema stands for historical alterity in relation to other epochs, it is also possible that there are considerable regional differences which cannot be easily subsumed under the heading of ‘early cinema’. The future of the subdiscipline also promises further work in this direction. There is already a healthy community of film historians working on early Central and South American, African and Asian cinema(s), and there are projects in progress which look at early cinemas in American and British colonies from a comparative perspective.65 This volume was initially set to comprise two chapters on the subject – on Indian film pioneer Debasheb Phalke and on early cinemas in Hong Kong and Singapore – but their production was unfortunately stopped short due to a combination of professional reasons, the Covid-19 pandemic and the resulting fallout which precluded travel to local archives, especially in the case of the latter chapter. This proves that physical visits to local archives are still a necessary part of research despite the boom in digitalization but also that digitalization has privileged North American and European sources. We are still confident that the gathered essays present a strong contribution to the study of early cinema. Where each of the essays boasts a unique and an original addition to early cinema scholarship, together they introduce a range of

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theoretical and methodological tools which make a claim to reconceptualizing the field and, by extension, the wider subdiscipline of film historiography. We also believe that the volume provides insights relevant for other disciplines as well. To give just a few examples, Robert’s rich discussion of the history of nineteenthcentury illustrations can be seen as contributing to book studies and the history of visual culture; Slugan’s engagement with the theory of fiction may be useful to film and art philosophers; Kovalova’s analysis of film librettos should also be regarded as adding to magazine studies; while Biltereyst’s account of a movie theatre disaster could easily double as a work of social microhistory. Of course, whether any of these claims holds up to scrutiny is for the readers to decide.

Notes 1

Co-organized by the Museum of Cinema and Girona University, the seminar has been taking place annually since 1999. A one-off conference organized by the volume editors took place at Ghent University on 9–10 November 2018.

2

Kemp R. Niver, Motion Pictures from the Library of Congress Paper Print Collection 1894–1912 (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1967); Kemp R. Niver, The First Twenty Years (Los Angeles, CA: Locare Research Group, 1968); Kemp R. Niver, Mary Pickford Comedienne (Los Angeles, CA: Locare Research Group, 1969); Kemp R. Niver and Bebe Bergsten, eds, Biograph Bulletins, 1896–1908 (Los Angeles, CA: Locare Research Group, 1971); Holman, Roger, ed., Cinema 1900–1906: An Analytical Study, vol. 1 (Brussels: FIAF, 1982); John L. Fell, ed., Film before Griffith (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983); Jay Leyda and Charles Musser, eds, Before Hollywood (New York, NY: American Federation of the Arts, 1987); Thomas Elsaesser, ed., Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (London: BFI, 1990).

3

Guido Convents, À la recherche des images oubliées: préhistoire du cinéma en Afrique; 1897–1918 (Brussels: OCIC, 1986); André Gaudreault, Du littéraire au filmique: Système du récit (Québec: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1988); Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema 1907–1915 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990); Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990); Herbert Birett, Das Filmangebot in Deutschland, 1895–1911 (Munich: Filmbuchverlag Winterberg, 1991); Tom Gunning, D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1991); Miriam Hansen, Babel & Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Yuri Tsivian, Istoricheskaia retseptsiia kino: kinematograf v Rossii, 1896–1930 (Riga: Zinatne, 1991). For the list of Domitor proceedings, see https://domitor.org/proceedings/ (accessed 4 November 2021).

4

Domitor, the International Society for the Study of Early Cinema, https://domitor.org/ research/ (accessed 4 November 2021).

5

Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra, eds, A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Richard Abel, ed., Encyclopedia of Early Cinema (London: Routledge, 2005); André Gaudreault, Nicolas Dulac and Santiago

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Hidalgo, eds, A Companion to Early Cinema (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2012). See also Prologue – Part IV in Lee Grieveson and Peter Krämer, eds, The Silent Cinema Reader (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004). 6 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘The New Film History’, Sight and Sound 55, no. 4 (1986): 246–51; Thomas Elsaesser, ‘The New Film History as Media Archeology’, Cinémas: revue d’études cinématographiques [Cinémas: Journal of Film Studies] 14, no. 2–3 (2004): 75–117. 7 Noël Burch, ‘Porter, or Ambivalence’, Screen 19, no. 4 (1978): 91–106; Barry Salt, Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis, 1st edn (London: Starwood, 1983); Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery, Film History: Theory and Practice (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985). 8 As such, new film history shares a lot of traits with ‘new cinema history’, a more recent concept clarified by Richard Maltby, ‘New Cinema Histories’, in Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies, ed. Richard Maltby, Daniël Biltereyst and Philippe Meers (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 3–40. 9 Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991); Frank Kessler, Sabine Lenk and Martin Loiperdinger, eds, Georges Méliès – Magier der Filmkunst (Frankfurt: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1993); Jacques Malthête, Méliès: images et illusions (Paris: Exporégie, 1996); Paolo Cherchi Usai, ed., The Griffith Project, vols 1–9 (London: BFI, 1999–2005). 10 Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema; Musser, The Emergence of Cinema; Michael Chanan, The Dream that Kicks: The Prehistory and Early Years of Cinema in Britain (London: Routledge, 1996); Richard Abel, The Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema, 1896–1914 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998); Joseph Garncarz, Maßlose Unterhaltung: Zur Etablierung des Films in Deutschland 1896–1914 (Frankfurt am Main, Basel: Stroemfeld, 2010); Aaron Gerow, Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation, and Spectatorship, 1895–1925 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010); Maite Conde, Foundational Films: Early Cinema and Modernity in Brazil (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2018). Dominique Païni, Paul Perrin and Marie Robert, eds, Enfin le cinéma! Arts, images et spectacles en France (1833–1907) (Paris: Musée d’Orsay, 2021). 11 Donald Crafton, Before Mickey: The Animated Film, 1898–1928 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and its Contexts (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2001); Dan Streible, Fight Pictures: A History of Boxing and Early Cinema (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008); Oliver Gaycken, Devices of Curiosity: Early Cinema and Popular Science (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2015). 12 Gunning, D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film; Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1997); Charlie Keil, Early American Cinema in Transition: Story, Style, and Filmmaking, 1907–1913 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001); André Gaudreault, 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).

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13 Michel Marie, Laurent Le Forestier and Catherine Schapira, La firme Pathé Frères: 1896–1914 (Paris: AFRHC, 2004); Vanessa Toulmin, Electric Edwardians: The Story of the Mitchell & Kenyon Collection (London: BFI, 2006); Isak Thorsen, Nordisk Films Kompagni 1906–1924: The Rise and Fall of the Polar Bear (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2017). 14 British Film Institute, Early Filmmakers’ Catalogues (London: World Microfilms Publications, 1983); Charles Musser, ed., Motion Picture Catalogs by American Producers and Distributors, 1894–1908: A Microfilm Edition (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1984–5). 15 Brian R. Jacobson, Studios before the System: Architecture, Technology, and the Emergence of Cinematic Space (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2015). 16 Frank Kessler and Nanna Verhoeff, eds, Networks of Entertainment: Early Film Distribution 1895–1915 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008); Nadi Tofighian, Blurring the Colonial Binary: Turn-of-the-Century Transnational Entertainment in Southeast Asia (Stockholm: Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, 2013). 17 Barry Salt, Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis, 3rd edn (London: Starwood, 2009); Jacques Malthête and Stéphanie Salmon, eds, Recherches et innovations dans l’industrie du cinéma: les cahiers des ingénieurs Pathé 1906–1927 (Paris: Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé, 2017); Benoît Turquety, Inventing Cinema: Machines, Gestures and Media History (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019). 18 Gregory A. Waller, Main Street Amusements: Movies and Commercial Entertainment in a Southern City, 1896–1930 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995); Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby, eds, American Movie Audiences: From the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound Era (London: BFI, 1999); Joseph Garncarz, Wechselnde Vorlieben: Über die Filmpräferenzen der Europäer, 1896– 1939 (Frankfurt am Main, Basel: Stroemfeld, 2015); Martin L. Johnson, Main Street Movies: The History of Local Film in the United States (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2018). 19 Richard Abel, ed., French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 1907– 1939, vol. 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Anton Kaes, Nicholas Baer and Michael Cowan, eds, The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory, 1907– 1933 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2016); Francesco Casetti, Silvio Alovisio and Luca Mazzei, eds, Early Film Theories in Italy, 1896–1922 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017). 20 Lee Grieveson, Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early-TwentiethCentury America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004); Tony Fletcher, Regulating the Cinematograph in London 1897–1906 (London: Local History Publications, 2017). 21 Key theoretical framework is provided by Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. H. Arendt (New York, NY: Schocken Books, 1978); and Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). 22 Gaudreault and Gunning’s original paper was first delivered by Gaudreault during the Cerisy Film History Conference in Summer of 1985 and originally published in Japanese: André Gaudreault and Tom Gunning, ‘Eigashi No Hohoron’, Gendai Shiso: Revue de la pensée d’aujourd’hui 14, no. 2 (1986): 164–80. For a while the

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only translation was in French: André Gaudreault and Tom Gunning, ‘Le cinéma des premiers temps: un défi à l’histoire du cinéma?’, in Histoire du cinema: Nouvelles approches, ed. Jacques Aumont, André Gaudreault and Michel Marie (Paris: Sorbonne, 1989), 49–63. The English translation appeared as André Gaudreault and Tom Gunning, ‘Early Cinema as a Challenge to Film History’, in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Strauven (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 365–80. Gunning’s widely cited article originally appeared as Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde’, Wide Angle 8, no. 3–4 (1986): 63–70. Its revised version is Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde’, in Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (London: BFI, 1990), 56–62. 23 Other terms included Burch’s ‘primitive mode of representation’, Musser’s ‘exhibition-led editorial control’ and Gaudreault’s ‘monstration’. 24 Note the deliberate use of ‘surround’ instead of the more usual ‘accompany’ to emphasize that the ‘surrounding’ material should not be considered as secondary to what is on the screen. 25 Richard Abel and Rick Altman, eds, The Sounds of Early Cinema (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001); Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2004); Julie Brown and Annette Davison, eds, The Sounds of the Silents in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 26 Charles Musser, ‘The Eden Musée in 1898: The Exhibitor as Creator’, Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies 11.4 (1981): 82. See also Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema, 193–262; Joseph Garncarz, ‘Filmprogramm im Variéte: Die “Optische Berichterstattung”’, in Geschichte des dokumentarischen Films in Deutschland, vol. 1: Kaiserreich, 1895–1918, ed. Uli Jung and Martin Loiperdinger (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005), 93–100; Martin Loiperdinger, ‘Filmpropaganda des Deutschen Flottenvereins’, in Geschichte, 121–48. 27 Yuri Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and Its Cultural Reception, trans. Alan Bodger (London: Routledge, 1994), 100–3. 28 For the discussion of the concept of cultural series, see André Gaudreault, Film and Attraction: From Kinematography to Cinema (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2011); Frank Kessler, ‘Notes on the Concept of Cultural Series’, https://dspace. library.uu.nl/bitstream/handle/1874/290013/Notes+on+the+Concept+of+Cultural+S eries.pdf?sequence=1 (accessed 29 May 2021). 29 Nicholas Vardac, Stage to Screen: Theatrical Method from Garrick to Griffith (New York, NY: Benjamin Blom, 1968); David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960 (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1985). 30 Germain Lacasse, Le Bonimenteur de vues animées: le cinéma muet entre tradition et modernité (Québec: Nota bene; Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 2000); Laurent Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow, Archaeology of the Cinema, trans. Richard Crangle (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000); Alison Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2008); Erkki Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013); Scott Curtis, The Shape of Spectatorship: Art, Science, and Early Cinema in Germany (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2015).

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31 André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, The End of Cinema?: A Medium in Crisis in the Digital Age, trans. T. Barnard (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2015), 92; André Gaudreault, ‘La cinématographie-attraction chez Méliès: une conception durable’, in Méliès, carrefour des attractions: suivi de correspondance de Georges Méliès (1904–1937), ed. André Gaudreault and Laurent Le Forestier (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2014), 27–43. 32 Hermann Hecht, Pre-Cinema History: An Encyclopaedia and Annotated Bibliography of the Moving Image before 1896 (London: BFI/Bowker Saur, 1993); Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow. 33 Gaudreault, Film and Attraction. 34 Grant Tavinor, The Art of Videogames (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). 35 Cf. Oliver Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). 36 Mario Slugan, ‘The Turn-of-the-Century Understanding of “Fakes” in the US and Western Europe’, Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies 16, no. 1 (2019): 718–37, https://participations.org/Volume%2016/Issue%201/35.pdf (accessed 31 May 2021). 37 Strauven, ed., The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded. 38 Elsaesser, ed., Early Cinema; Abel, ed., Encyclopedia of Early Cinema; Gaudreault, Dulac and Hidalgo, eds, A Companion to Early Cinema. 39 Musser, Before the Nickelodeon; William Kennedy-Laurie Dickson and Antonia Dickson, History of the Kinetograph, Kinetoscope, and Kineto-phonograph (New York, NY: The Museum of Modern Art, 2000); Richard Brown and Barry Anthony, The Kinetoscope: A British History (New Barnet: John Libbey Publishing, 2017). 40 Patricia Rodden Zimmermann, Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995); Dan Streible, Martina Roepke and Anke Mebold, ‘Introduction: Nontheatrical Film’, Film History 19, no. 4 (2007): 339–43. 41 For the filmography, see André Gaudreault, ed., Cinema 1900–1906: An Analytical Study, vol. 2: Filmographie/Filmography (Brussels: FIAF, 1982). 42 The Library of Congress, ‘The Early Motion Pictures and Sound Recordings of the Edison Companies’ Collection’, https://www.loc.gov/collections/edisoncompany-motion-pictures-and-sound-recordings/about-this-collection/ (accessed 4 November 2021). 43 Eye Film Museum collection, https://www.eyefilm.nl/en/collection/collections/ film/silent-film; BFI collections, https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/collection/ victorian-film; https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/collection/edwardian-britain-on-film; Women Film Pioneers Project list of DVD resources, https://web.archive.org/ web/20211007045107/https://wfpp.columbia.edu/dvd-resources-streaming-links// (all accessed 4 November 2021). 44 Media History Digital Library, https://mediahistoryproject.org/ (accessed 4 November 2021). 45 ‘Early Cinema in Scotland, 1896–1927’, https://earlycinema.gla.ac.uk/; ‘Stummfilm. dk’, https://www.stumfilm.dk; ‘The German Early Cinema Database’, http:// earlycinema.dch.phil-fak.uni-koeln.de/; ‘Portale Cinema Muto Italiano’, https://www.

INTRODUCTION

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ilcinemamuto.it/betatest/; ‘Rannee russkoe kino’, https://hum.hse.ru/ditl/kino/; ‘Filmographie des “vues” tournées au Québec au temps du muet (1897–1930)’, http://cri.histart.umontreal.ca/grafics/fr/filmo/. For a list of other useful sources see https://wfpp.columbia.edu/digital-resources-research-tools/ (all accessed 4 November 2021). 46 ‘Early Russian Film Prose’, https://hum.hse.ru/en/ditl/filmprose/ (accessed 4 November 2021). 47 Seven European national libraries and other institutions run Europeana: https:// www.europeana.eu/; Library of Congress’ Historic American Newspapers: https:// chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/; another particularly impressive resource here is Old Fulton NY Post Cards – https://fultonhistory.com – especially because its more than fifty million newspaper pages have been digitized by a single person (all accessed 4 November 2021). 48 Cf. Lauren Rabinovitz, Electric Dreamland: Amusement Parks, Movies, and American Modernity (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2012), 66–95; Mario Slugan, Fiction and Imagination in Early Cinema: A Philosophical Approach to Film History (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 83–98. 49 Cinemetrics, http://www.cinemetrics.lv/ (accessed 4 November 2021). 50 Mapping Movies, http://mappingmovies.unh.edu/maps/erma.html; ‘London’s Silent Cinemas’, http://www.londonssilentcinemas.com/londons-silent-cinemasmap/; ‘Mapping Desmet’, http://mappingdesmet.humanities.uva.nl/ (all accessed 4 November 2021). 51 Media Ecology Project, http://mediaecology.dartmouth.edu/wp/ (accessed 4 November 2021). 52 Cf. Nicholas Hidalgo and André Gaudreault, eds, Technology and Film Scholarship: Experience, Study, Theory (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018). 53 Niver, Mary Pickford Comedienne; Kelly R. Brown, Florence Lawrence, the Biograph Girl: America’s First Movie Star (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999). 54 Anthony Slide, ed., The Memoirs of Alice Guy Blaché, trans. Roberta and Simone Blaché (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1986); Victor Bachy, Alice Guy-Blaché (1873–1968): la première femme cinéaste du monde (Perpignan: Institut Jean Vigo, 1993); Alison McMahan, Alice Guy Blaché: Lost Visionary of the Cinema (New York, NY: Continuum, 2002). 55 Italics in the original. Women Film Pioneers Project, https://web.archive.org/ web/20211007044318/https:/wfpp.columbia.edu/ (accessed 4 November 2021). 56 Early African American Film, https://earlyracefilm.github.io/database/ (accessed 4 November 2021). 57 Kathryn H. Fuller, At the Picture Show: Small-Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996); Lauren Rabinovitz, For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies, and the Culture in Turnof-the-Century Chicago (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Shelley Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture after the Nickelodeon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), Daniël Biltereyst, Richard Maltby and Philippe Meers, eds, Cinema, Audiences and Modernity: European Perspectives

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on Film Culture and Cinema-Going (London: Routledge, 2012). For a pioneering contemporary sociological study see Emilie Altenloh, Zur Soziologie des Kino: Die Kino-Unternehmung und die sozialen Schichten ihrer Besucher (Jena, 1914). For the English translation, see Emilie Altenloh, ‘A Sociology of the Cinema: The Audience’, Screen 42, no. 3 (2001): 249–93. 58 Hansen, Babel & Babylon, 1. 59 Streible, Fight Pictures, 52–95. 60 Kyna Morgan and Aimee Dixon, ‘African-American Women in the Silent Film Industry’, in Women Film Pioneers Project, ed. Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal and Monica Dall’Asta (New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2013), https://doi. org/10.7916/d8-vt0f-1758; Peggy Brooks-Bertram, ‘Drusilla Dunjee Houston’, in Women Film Pioneers Project, ed. Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal and Monica Dall’Asta (New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2013), https://doi.org/10.7916/d8vsf2-3y15 (both accessed 4 November 2021). 61 Grieveson, Policing Cinema; Lee Grieveson, Cinema and the Wealth of Nations: Media, Capital, and the Liberal World System (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2018). 62 For one notable exception from the perspective of leisure industry, see Rabinovitz, Electric Dreamland. 63 For a step in this direction when it comes to entertainment, see Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 64 Zhang Zhen, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896– 1937 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Tofighian, Blurring the Colonial Boundary; Sudhir Mahadevan, A Very Old Machine: The Many Origins of Cinema in India (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2015); Glenn Reynolds, Colonial Cinema in Africa: Origins, Images, Audiences (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015); Dafna Ruppin, The Komedi Bioscoop, KINtop 4: Early Cinema in Colonial Indonesia (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2016); Nick Deocampo, ed., Early Cinema in Asia (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2017); Conde, Foundational Films; Emily Yueh-yu Yeh, ed., Early Film Culture in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Republican China: Kaleidoscopic Histories (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2018); Debashree Mukherjee, Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2020). 65 Lee Grieveson and Priya Jaikumar have recently sent out a call for allies titled ‘On Extractions and Media’ which is set out to produce histories of extraction by the Global North in relation to media objects and cultures. Together with Agata Frymus, Bindu Menon Mannil, Nadi Tofighian, Mario Slugan is similarly developing a project on a comparative early film history of British colonies of how local peoples experienced cinema in South Asia (Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Sri Lanka), Southeast Asia (Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia), Africa (Egypt, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa) and the Americas (Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Belize and Guyana).

PART ONE

CONCEPTS AND THEORIES

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1 ANIMATED PICTURES ACCORDING TO GEORGES MÉLIÈS: A SOBER AND UNPRETENTIOUS REMEDIATION, OR WHEN MÉLIÈS TOOK A STAND AGAINST … THE CINEMA! André Gaudreault

Here I will take as my starting point my hypothesis to the effect that what Georges Méliès offered his contemporaries, contrary to what one often hears said about the films of the magician from Montreuil, was simply, to a certain but very large extent, the capturing of a stage performance.1 In other words, the ‘canning’ of an attraction originating in a cultural series other than cinema. This is an astonishing conclusion, one that contradicts what I believed until just a decade ago. But I was led to this notion by the thoughts I presented at Cerisy in 2011, at the conference ‘Méliès, carrefour des attractions’, where I suggested that ‘the “personal compositions” Méliès staged in his studio were the same as those of the Robert-Houdin theatre’.2 The reason I say this is an astonishing conclusion is that one might object, for example, that Méliès, just the same, took the trouble to shoot his ‘numbers’ not on a theatre stage but in a real studio (his famous ‘atelier de pose’). One could also object that in almost all of Méliès’ films there is a constant, massive and recurring presence of numerous trick effects using collage techniques which are, just the same, specific to cinema […] Finally, one could object that Méliès, just the same, had recourse to a number of techniques

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which closely resemble certain basic principles of what would later be called ‘film language’ (close-ups, découpage, montage, etc.). In fact what my hypothesis of 2011 said in the end is that Méliès’ films were essentially a ‘remediation’.3 A rather basic remediation, a sober and unpretentious remediation, because Méliès’ films could finally, in a sense, be described as the mere reproduction on screen of a stage number. Meaning a continuation of an écranique nature, to employ Étienne Souriau’s term in French, of a fundamentally scénique or stage performance. A continuation such as this (that’s what remediation is!) is thus carried out without any form at all of what Ricciotto Canudo called ‘artistic interpretation’. In 1908 Canudo, to whom we owe the expression ‘the seventh art’, gave the following opinion of early films: We must now ask whether the Cinématographe is art. I say: it is not yet art, because it lacks typical elements of selection, of artistic interpretation and not the copy of a subject, ensuring that photography will never be an art.4 What Canudo is underscoring here is, as I explained at Cerisy, the fact that films did not yet, in those days, demonstrate the presence of a specifically film language superstructure which could enable them to go beyond their status as a mere recording of what the camera was placed in front of. A film was still only the ‘copy of a subject’, Canudo tells us; the subject in relation to which the filmmaker or camera operator had taken no creative distance, shall we say, which would be capable of raising cinema to the level of art and to confer on the agent producing or creating it some form of artistic status. Let’s take as an example Méliès’ first trick film, whose title is simply not Escamotage d’une dame but rather, in fact, Escamotage d’une dame CHEZ ROBERT-HOUDIN (The Vanishing Lady, 1896). Méliès thus revealed his true colours from the outset: what he was going to produce were ‘Robert-Houdin’ films. The films he was going to make would be ‘copies’ of subjects worthy of the theatre whose fortunes he oversaw at 8 Boulevard des Italiens in Paris (a magic theatre from which ‘dramatic art’ was absent). And if Méliès did not add the remark ‘at the Robert-Houdin theatre’ as a suffix to every title in his catalogue, it was because, one may presume, he deemed such a thing needlessly redundant and repetitive. Thus Méliès provided to us from the outset the key to his work – which is a manifesto in favour of what we today call remediation – as well as the key to fully and completely grasping the ins and outs of the category ‘attraction package’, to employ a term Philippe Marion and I have been using for some time now.5 By this we mean the way ‘performances already predetermined, predefined, and preformatted in and by an extracinematic cultural series’ are imported into the cultural series animated pictures.6

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This is also how Mario Slugan sees the matter when he writes the following about Escamotage d’une dame chez Robert-Houdin, precisely, and another Méliès film, Un homme de têtes (The Four Troublesome Heads, 1898), presented in an American Star Film catalogue as ‘one of the most marvellous tricks ever cinematographed’7: How the trick is accomplished is irrelevant for the structure of incredulity and absence of mandated imaginings. In other words, what is important is that nobody believes that disappearance and reappearance actually take place and that nobody is mandated to imagine anything. We could say the same even of a motion picture like The Four Troublesome Heads. In it Méliès takes off his head which continues to talk as he makes his head appear again and then proceeds to repeat the stunt two more times. […] Within such context it would have been quite easy to see The Four Troublesome Heads and similar motion pictures as a further development of tricks Théâtre Robert-Houdin was already famous for – ingenious and incredible but by no means putting any mandated imaginings into play. To rephrase a derogatory term and put a positive spin on it, such moving pictures would have easily been perceived as instances of ‘canned magic theatre.’8 By introducing Un homme de têtes as ‘one of the most marvellous tricks ever cinematographed’, the author of the description quoted by Slugan made no distinction between a trick effect in the pro-filmic and one in its recording, as if it were simply a matter of transferring onto film: the tricks took place in front of the camera and one only photographed or ‘cinematographed’ them. And that’s all! On stage, a magician – a ‘monsieur’ or ‘gentleman’ in the French version of the description (see Figure 1.1) – plays with his head, removes it, puts it on a table and even multiplies it.9 The kinematograph is used to record, or capture, his performance. Pure ‘canned theatre’, or ‘filmed theatre’ (‘théâtre filmé’), to employ a reviled expression, because it is associated with a historiographical tradition (Sadoul, Mitry, etc.) denigrated today because it disapproved of early film due to its seeming lack of cinematic specificity.10 It is worth noting that the English and French descriptions of the film Un homme de têtes differ considerably from one another, the English version obviously not being a translation of the French version: Un homme de têtes Scène extraordinaire. Un monsieur se présente, prend sa tête de dessus ses épaules et la place à sa gauche sur une table; une seconde tête lui étant revenue, il la prend à nouveau et la place à côté de la première, les deux têtes conversent entre elles ainsi qu’avec le personnage à qui il est revenu une troisième tête qu’il s’enlève à nouveau et place cette fois à sa droite, et donne

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un concert avec ses quatre têtes absolument pareilles. Il fait disparaître les trois têtes placées sur les tables, prend celle qui est sur ses épaules, la jette au loin et il lui en retombe immédiatement une autre.11 The Four Troublesome Heads One of the most marvellous tricks ever cinematographed. The magician approaches and, after the usual bow, proceeds with the tricks of taking off his own head, placing same on a table at his side. He is immediately supplied with another head, and in order to show the audience that there is no illusion about the trick, he crawls under the table, upon which is supported his first head. A second head is also removed from his shoulders, and finally a third, all being exact likenesses of the first. He is supplied with a fourth head and converses with the three severed heads on the table. Being musically inclined, he takes up a banjo and commences to play. The three severed heads are seen to sing, much to the discomfiture of the magician, who smashes the banjo over two of them, causing them to disappear. The third head is treated likewise, whereupon he throws his fourth head into the air, which again descends upon his shoulders. The magician then makes his bow and retreats from the scene. A most surprising and marvelous illusion.12 In Un homme de têtes, Méliès literally throws himself into the play of the attractional package or, at least, lends himself to this play: after taking off his first head, which he places on a table, and once he is ‘equipped’ with another head, the magician/gentleman indicates to the spectator that he is going to go under the table to show that there is no trickery and thereby prove that the head on the table, grimacing constantly, cannot be that of an accomplice hiding under the table. The English description spells this out: ‘in order to show that there is no illusion about the trick, he crawls under the table, upon which is supported his first head’.13 And Méliès (who plays the lead role, as is often the case in his films) performs the trick the way a magician on stage would do. This seemingly banal gesture of going under the table is not absolutely necessary in a film unless, as Slugan, moreover, remarks, it is to give spectators the illusion that what they are watching is a stage trick. The discourse in catalogues of the day describing Méliès’ films is practically always the same. Slugan recognizes this quite well when he states that Méliès’ trick films ‘were advertised and construed as recordings of famous magic tricks performed in popular magic theatres’,14 which is the same as saying that from the outset Méliès’ films have the appearance of capturing stage entertainment – making them, to my eyes, attractional packages. On this basis it is thus possible to propose that these films demonstrate that the moving picture camera was employed the same way it was by the Lumières, for example: in each case, the kinematograph was used to record a visual ‘spectacle’, whether that of a baby

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having breakfast or that of the gentleman removing his head.15 This is what I think, but it is also what Méliès himself thought, if we were to go by his own declarations, to which I will return in a moment. This is also what the detour I am about to take will show us – to examine the question of the status of these films with respect to the lame but unavoidable dichotomy which divides all films into two great mutually exclusive categories: documentary and fiction. Here I will call on a hypothesis of Henry Jenkins16 who, in Jean-Marc Larrue’s17 description, has established ‘a clear distinction between media themselves and […] the “delivery technologies” for media content: “Recorded sound is the medium. CDs, MP3 files and 8-track cassettes are delivery technologies.”’18 For Jenkins, these delivery technologies are ‘the tools we use to access media content’.19 These ‘delivery systems are simply and only technologies’ which are put in the service of content in order to propagate it, to make it available, audible, visible, consumable, etc.20 Such a conception appears to me to be a productive way of understanding the attitude of someone such as Méliès in the face of this new technology, the Lumière Cinématographe. It is also productive, in my view, for fully understanding today’s new kinds of audiovisual productions, live or delayed broadcasting of a variety of forms of entertainment (including operas and stage plays) in movie theatres. Such ‘performances’ on cinema screens are not, strictly speaking, ‘films’ (something clearly indicated by the expression ‘hors-film’21 commonly used in French, to describe them – while in English, they use expressions like ‘alternative content’ and ‘cinema event’) – even when they are not transmitted live but have had to be ‘put on a base’, as we used to say, with a view to their later projection. Although they are projected in cinemas, these ‘hors-film’ productions are not cinema (even if the appearance of the product appearing on screen in the end could in some respects make it possible to maintain the opposite). These operas, in particular those of the Metropolitan Opera of New York, are always publicized as simple ‘broadcasts’ via satellite of a performance taking place on stage, in New York, without ever mentioning that there is a production team led by an ‘image director’ armed with an artillery of cameras, whose intervention cannot help but result in a slight ‘plasticity of interpretation’. In such cases, the term ‘cinema’ (the scare quotes are necessary here for all sorts of reasons, some of which are obvious, given the highly polysemic nature of the term) is clearly used in the sense of delivery technology. This is unlike what happens, as we will see in a moment, in the case of a ‘cinema film’, an increasingly common expression. Or, to be more precise, in the case of film coming out of the space which I have suggested we call ‘institutional cinema’, the dominant paradigm in the sphere of cinematic practices from the 1910s (in contrast to the ‘kine-attractography’ paradigm which had dominated until then and about which, as I have remarked elsewhere, Méliès was the most typical and illustrative example).22

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What the magician of Montreuil did with his moving picture camera thus consisted in recording a stage production on celluloid with the intention of then using the projection device as a means of ‘delivering’ said recording. In one of Méliès’s theatre programs, which probably dates back to 1907 and which is signed ‘G. Ménard’ – surely a pseudonym used by Méliès, as the initials of the two names tend to indicate – it reads as follows, and is unequivocal: ‘the idea came to him to use the invention for a very special purpose; he used it to photograph his fantastic theatrical compositions, which allowed him to project them simultaneously in countless theatres.’23 What the kinematograph enabled Méliès to do was thus to ‘deliver’, onto the screen he had hung on the stage of his theatre (the Robert-Houdin), a magic sketch, a fairy tableau, a magic act or some other sketch of the kind, of which the spectator could have expected to see the ‘hard copy’ on the stage of the same theatre. In fact before scattering his works to the wind – by selling them around the world to anyone who wanted to buy them – and making them deliver (in one sense of the word), it was first and foremost to show them in his own theatre, to ‘deliver’ them there (in another sense of the word) that Méliès produced his animated pictures. As Jacques Malthête has said: Méliès conceived his films primarily for screening in his theatre, like magic sketches. Their characters were kinematographed in such a way that, when projected onto the screen at the level of the stage curtain, they were, for the audience of the Robert-Houdin theatre, similar in size to the actors who performed in flesh and blood on the stage.24 What counted for Méliès, from this perspective of ‘delivery’ he adopted, was that the ‘stage’ of his studio for taking images be the counterpart, the mirror, of the stage of his theatre, and that the floor of one matches the floor of the other. Méliès, moreover, said so himself when he remarked that the floor of his studio in Montreuil-sous-Bois was ‘constructed exactly like a theater stage’, or when he let it be understood, under the cover of his alias G. Ménard, that this studio was in fact itself a theatre, no less!25 A ‘special theatre’, of course, but a theatre just the same: I cannot enter here into great detail and even less explain the secret and ingenious techniques created by Mr Méliès and employed in his special theatre in Montreuil-sous-Bois, where his pictures are made.26 It must also be said that it was for want of being able to do things differently that Méliès did not shoot his sketches directly on the Robert-Houdin theatre stage and that it was by default that he had to, in order to record them, make do with this ‘atelier de pose’, which was his studio in Montreuil-sous-Bois. He states it clearly: ‘the absence of daylight in the theatres, the impossibility to

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appropriately light the stages and scenery in a regular and continuous manner; the very specific gestures of cinematographic views, highly different from theatrical gestures [...] are all causes that make filming impossible, or almost, in these conditions.’27 Here is why the floorboards on which the actors in a film such as Le Bourreau turc (The Terrible Turkish Executioner, 1904, Méliès), for example, moved about in Montreuil-sous-Bois in the suburbs of Paris, were in a sense in continuity with the floorboards of the Robert-Houdin theatre, which was located in Paris itself, on Boulevard des Italiens, and why the two floors matched one another (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1  Top: a photogram from Le Bourreau turc (The Terrible Turkish Executioner directed by Georges Méliès © Star-Film 1904. All Rights Reserved), with the studio floor plainly visible. Bottom: the stage of the Robert-Houdin theatre and its floor. Images from Jacques Deslandes and Jacques Richard, Histoire comparée du cinéma, Tome 2 (Tournai: Casterman, 1968), 402.

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Let us look, precisely, at this picture, Le Bourreau turc, which will provide an excellent example of the topics I am discussing. What exactly is the storyline of this short film, barely several minutes in length and consisting of a single tableau? This is what the Essai de reconstitution du catalogue français du Star-Film tells us: In Constantinople, an executioner is tasked with decapitating four convicts. But the heads rejoin the bodies of the victims, who come back to life. The victims take revenge by cutting the executioner in two, but he succeeds in patching the two pieces back together and takes off after them in pursuit.28 The film’s sole tableau, even though it is homo-frame,29 is nevertheless made up of fragments, because Méliès had to stop the camera during the shooting, and thus splice the film when shooting was over, in order to carry out the trick decapitations and, in the role of the executioner, have himself cut in two. This tableau shows us a public space in the city of Constantinople (today Istanbul) – or at least a representation of such a place, because it is a painted set on a backdrop – where the executions will take place. We might imagine, for the sake of argument, that it is Sultanahmet Square, close to the imperial palace, and that the action dates back several centuries. Let’s continue to use our imagination and suppose that we are now in Paris in 1890 (five years before the first public Lumière Cinématographe screening on 28 December 1895, and thirteen years before Méliès made Le Bourreau turc in late 1903). We are among the spectators of a magic sketch mounted on the stage of the Robert-Houdin theatre, on the Boulevard des Italiens, by the proprietor of this theatre, Georges Méliès. The staging of the sketch quite closely resembles that of the film itself thirteen years later (the same set, including the painted backdrop, but also of course with trick effects in the staging). Let’s say that this sketch – why not? – bears the same title as the film: Le Bourreau turc.30 And now, if we were asked to give the name of the street located behind this square in Constantinople, shown here, on this backdrop hung at the back of the stage of the Robert-Houdin theatre where the sketch is being acted out, we would say that it is not Atmeydani Street in Istanbul (which, in reality, lies behind Sultanahmet Square), but the Passage de l’Opéra in Paris, next to the Boulevard des Italiens. And this would be exactly the same reply we would have to give if we found ourselves fourteen years later, in 1904, watching the film ‘version’ of the same subject, being projected on the on-stage screen of this same Robert-Houdin theatre.31 For, unlike what the institution in institutional cinema would succeed in doing with films arising out of its space, a film such as Le Bourreau turc does not exude a properly filmic diegesis. The diegesis on offer to the spectator of a film such as this is a strictly theatrical one (it is a filmed diegesis more than it is a filmic one). The ‘fiction’ is in the pro-filmic, not in the

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filmic. In the first case, what is being acted out before me on this fall evening in 1890 is an on-stage fiction, which will remain memorable for me, a member of the public who went to see magic sketches at the Robert-Houdin theatre that particular evening. In the second case, when we are now in 1904, what I see, still at the same Robert-Houdin theatre where I have gone to see moving pictures, is a studio fiction recorded on film. This is not a fiction engendered or generated by the film. ‘Fiction’: there you go, I’ve said the word! And of course anyone who says ‘fiction’ thinks necessarily of ‘documentary’ … Such that it would be advisable for me to propose the following without risking not being understood: there is a way of viewing things which makes it possible to maintain that Le Bourreau turc is the product of a (filmic) documentary recording of the (theatrical) fiction developed (or énoncé, exhibited or recounted) by the sketch. The idea behind this film is of course to show us a fiction – not a cinematic fiction, however, but rather a theatrical fiction (in that the street we presume to be located behind the painted backdrop of the public square in Constantinople is not a Turkish street but rather a street in Paris). While watching in a movie theatre a film such as Casablanca (1942, Michael Curtiz), arising out of the space of an institution which distils for us different rules for reading the work than those in force at the time, we are on the contrary invited to imagine that the street located beyond the airport tarmac where Rick and Ilsa say their farewells (Figure 1.2) is, let us say, a street on the edge of the old Casablanca airport, in the Anfa district, and not, for example, Barnham Boulevard, which runs along the Warner Bros. studios in California, where almost the entire film was shot. Nor, of course, is it the street behind the movie theatre where we are watching the film. The reason for this is that institutional cinema does not make use of this ‘delivery technology’ aspect of the cinematic apparatus. It tends to go beyond this dimension, to transcend it. Indeed, as Philippe Marion and I have suggested, with respect to the ‘classical fiction film’: The reading we are called upon to make while a film such as this is being projected neutralizes the ‘archival’ aspect of the mere shooting of the actors’ performances, which are time-stamped, or time-stampable, but which lose their time-stamp moorings. It is somewhat as if the filmic material was transfigured and there remained the effects of a procedure of surpassing, of transcending, of Aufhebung. The filmic material thus undergoes something like a procedure of sublimation (and even profits from it, we might say), given that the living ‘show’ constituted by any acted performance passes immediately from its ‘recorded show’ state to that of a ‘sublimated’ show.32

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Figure 1.2  Casablanca (1942, directed by Michael Curtiz © Warner Bros. All Rights Reserved).

To return to Méliès, we must thus acknowledge that his films are, in a sense, transparent works (transparent ‘énoncés’, in fact). The cinematic mediation on which is founded Méliès’ remediation is such that it remains, as mediation, entirely imperceptible for and by the spectator. Méliès operates in such a way as to give spectators the sense that what is shown, what is depicted, is present alongside them. What spectators in the Robert-Houdin theatre saw, when they watched a Méliès picture showing a stage number, they saw not in a mediate way but rather in an ‘immediate’ way. This is a glaring example of what Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin call immediacy, which characterizes every media énoncé and emphasizes the content of the énoncé rather than the medium.33 Méliès’ own statements invite this interpretation; in 1930, for example, he exclaimed with respect to the cinema of the day: How can one not regret […] the too-great importance that the camera operator has taken on in modern pictures. He should be only a good photographer, nothing more. […] Wanting to demonstrate his mastery as an operator, [he] strives to take his pictures in the most baroque and implausible positions. […] Do people not see that all this extravagance only has the effect of removing any natural quality from the action unfolding and of drawing attention to the photographer, who should remain anonymous?34

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Transparency (and could we not say, moreover, that this transparency is documentary in nature?) is what Méliès sought to produce. For him, a film’s ‘fabrication’ should be carried out without ‘the camera operators and editors […] imprinting the film with [their] personal stamp’.35 One should avoid having the spectator ‘think about the existence’ of the filmmaker’s various ‘associates’ (or about the filmmaker himself), ‘because the spectator is there only to see what is shown to him on the screen’36 – just as the audience of a stage play is interested only by what is shown on stage: In the theatre, is the spectator concerned with the stagehands, the director, the electricians, the prompter, the dressers, the stage manager? Obviously not. And they at least are not trying to draw attention to themselves as they work together to make sure the play goes off without a hitch. Why do the camera operators not do the same?37 If, as Jean-Marc Larrue states, ‘the window that is a web page connects only with other windows and never with a three-dimensional reality which would or could exist outside of that window’, the window that is the projection screen at the Robert-Houdin theatre opens, for its part, onto the theatre.38 It is as if this screen, on which transparent ‘énoncés’ are projected, was itself transparent in the proper sense of the term. Transparent like a great gauze awning placed between the stage and the audience and which would not be a screen, precisely: transparent gauze through which the spectator could see the action unfolding in front of this backdrop of a fake Constantinople. As if this canvas had been hung here directly, in front of me, at the back of the stage of the Robert-Houdin theatre in Paris (and not in a studio in Montreuil-sous-Bois, about which I as a spectator know nothing). This is illustrated in the photomontage seen in Figure 1.3, which shows what a screening of Le Bourreau turc may have looked like at the Robert-Houdin theatre (only the spectators are missing!). It also gives a sense of the matching effect I referred to above between the floor of Méliès’ studio in Montreuil and that of his theatre in Paris. This desire for transparency could not be more apparent than it is in pictures such as L’Equilibre impossible (An Impossible Balancing Feat, 1902, Méliès), which put on film what in theatre circles is known as the ‘proscenium opening’ with its sky pieces (normally used to conceal the fly loft from the spectators) and its leg drops (normally used to conceal the wings), thereby pushing to the maximum the resemblance between the film image and the space of the stage (Figure 1.4). The metaphor of the transparent gauze awning appears to me to be appropriate for what I have just outlined because it supposes a one-directional chain of ‘communication’ between the spectators watching (the watchers) and the actors on view (the watched). The transparent veil refracts nothing, absolutely

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Figure 1.3  Photomontage ‘matching’ the stage floor of the Robert-Houdin theatre in Paris with the floor of the Montreuil-sous-Bois studio where Le Bourreau turc was shot.39

Figure 1.4  L’Équilibre impossible (An Impossible Balancing Feat directed by Georges Méliès © Star-Film 1902. All Rights Reserved) and its set in the form of a ‘proscenium opening’ erected on the studio floor (which is reminiscent of the framing of the stage in the Robert-Houdin theatre, as seen in Figure 1.1).

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nothing, of what is in front of it, on the side of the ‘watchers’, whom it invites to penetrate it with their gaze so that they have only one thing in mind (or rather before their eyes): the ‘watched’. And so they give themselves up to only one thing: to observing through this gauze the actions taking place before them, beyond the ‘transparent’ awning placed between watchers and watched. To arrive at this result, where reflexivity yields to transitivity, it is necessary from the start that the camera be used as a mere tool for recording the actions taking place before it. In other words, that it make a record of these actions by ‘registering’ them on a recording surface, the silver gelatin film strip. For this to happen one must privilege what we might call the zero degree of film style, avoiding like the plague all forms of ‘extravagance’ (cocasserie in French) with the camera. Because extravagance with the camera lies on the side of énonciation, of showing. One must also avoid any specifically cinematic artistic interpretation in order to produce an énoncé with the appearance of a document (I almost said a documentary) of the movements on stage taking place before the camera. These can be replete with extravagance (theatrical extravagance, of course) with, into the bargain, should the work be merciful, various artistic elements deriving from a visual interpretation of a theatrical or stage nature, the only hitch to the rule being the regular use of homo-frame splices that accompany all the trick effects from the suspension of filming which are present throughout Méliès’ views, but that the magician from Montreuil strives to make, rightly so, invisible. We have seen that for Méliès ‘the camera operator […] should be only a good photographer […] who should remain anonymous’ and avoid ‘imprinting the film with their personal stamp’.40 The reason was quite simple: what should interest the spectator is not the ‘personality of an associate’ of the film director, but the action. The film must thus remain anonymous (and the énonciation anonymous also?).41 And, especially, one should not forget that, as Méliès remarked a moment ago, his credo was that ‘the spectator is there only to see what is shown to him on the screen’. The camera only has to deliver information about what is happening in front of it (or about what the filmed agent experienced in front of it), without saying anything about what is happening behind it (or about what the filming agent experienced behind the camera) during the film shoot. Extravagances with the camera goes against this principle, because it ‘speaks’ to us about the filming agent. And by ‘speaking’ to us in this way about what happened behind the camera, this extravagance is squarely situated on the side of énonciation (of hypermediacy, to speak like Bolter and Grusin), not on the side of the much sought-after transparency (of immediacy). We must tell ourselves that in the end this is due to the sole fact that Méliès put no stock in creating a filmic work: what interested him, first and foremost, was creating a pro-filmic work. His pro-filmic, which he set up, staged and edited, in order to show it, already contained an autonomous, independent complete and finished work. The kinematograph did not need to take this work apart and

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put it back together, but rather only to register and relay it. This stage piece did not need the kinematograph to become (or become a second time) a thing of beauty: it was already a work, in a sense, and was already stamped with its own ‘beauty’. A beauty which demands that we respect at the very least its integrity (its textual integrity, shall we say). We thus find a confrontation between two autonomous cultural series: what we might call the magic sketch, and the kinematograph (which is not yet cinema … ). This conflict had to be resolved, in Méliès’ view, by respecting the specific role of each of the two cultural series: the work was created with the ‘sketch’ series and was captured and delivered with the ‘kinematograph’ series. Let’s now come full circle and return to that hors-film category I mentioned earlier, that of opera transmitted live in movie theatres. In his work for the New York Metropolitan Opera Guy Halvorson was found to be a bit subdued in the nervousness of his editing, but not in his excessive taste for low-angle shots and pointless, irritating ‘filmic gestures’. It must be pointed out that remediations such as these give rise to defiance towards cinema on the part of some critics working within the institution opera.42 This attitude, as we shall see, is perfectly comparable to that of Méliès with respect to films of the 1920s, and also to his conception of a moving picture presenting a magic sketch. In any event, this attitude has the same foundations and arises out of the same kind of collision or confrontation between autonomous cultural series. In the case at hand, the confrontation is between the series ‘opera’ and the series ‘cinema’, and what opera criticism seeks to defend is a kind of orthodoxy, a kind of integrity also. For this reason one must not let the ‘cinema’ series cannibalize the ‘opera’ series. An opera is an autonomous, independent work – as I remarked above – which cinema should not have to ‘redo’ except, of course, in the case of an opera which will be truly ‘made cinema’. Such as, for example, Ingmar Bergman’s Trollflöjten (The Magic Flute, 1975), whose remediation is more complex than merely ‘delivering’ or transmitting (even cine-transmitting) an opera. This extreme form of remediation is what is known as an adaptation. Because any particular opera I go to see at the cinema is a complete and self-sufficient work, I have a right to expect that its ciné-transmission will be the product of a mere relay. And that it will be an (almost) perfect replica of the original opera – the same as the one being acted out a few hundred (or thousand) kilometres away on the stage of the Lincoln Center in Manhattan while I sit in a movie theatre. I could expect a strict copy of the original work, because it is obvious to me that this opera, just like Méliès’ sketches in his day, has absolutely no need of the kinematograph or of cinema to come out beautifully. And yet this is not the case. The Met does not limit itself to an elementary remediation (a ‘sober and unpretentious’ remediation, as I said earlier about that of Méliès) of the operas it ‘delivers’ to the world’s movie theatres. Instead, it might ask those in charge of the capturing-restoring to pass these operas

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through the cinematic mill by subjecting them to the process that is now fairly commonly called ‘cinematizing’.43 This process involves an artistic interpretation which some people find outrageous with respect to an opera one wishes simply to ‘transmit’ – because, it is said, it departs from opera’s specificity because of the extensive ‘extravagance’ with the camera accompanying it. Here is what one critic has opined on the matter: The spectators in a movie theatre are privileged, you say? Not necessarily, because they are held hostage by the work of Gary Halvorson, who takes himself for a virtuoso and has outdone himself in his interference in the show through hysterical editing (in some cases with one-second shots!), fidgety tracking shots and impossible low-angle shots […] of people’s boots, for example. Have mercy: we would like to watch a calmly documented performance, not psychoanalyse the director!44 You’d think you were listening to Méliès’ criticism of ‘modern pictures’! What Christophe Huss, music critic for Le Devoir, is complaining about here is that fact that the ‘director’ of the capturing ‘has striven to take his pictures in the most baroque and implausible positions’ (as Méliès could very well have prompted to say from the wings), that he had put forward the ‘personality of an associate’ (Méliès again) – his camera operator – thereby ‘drawing attention to the photographer, who should remain anonymous’ (ditto). For Huss, as for Méliès back in the day, the putter-into-images should not do ‘too much’. He or she should remain a mere ‘witness’ and, above all, not take him or herself for a film director, projecting his or her ego into, onto or between the images! In short, they should be content with transmitting, ‘documentarily’, if I may say so, the fiction which the opera itself expresses. Huss states this clearly: ‘these broadcasts do not need a virtuoso and agitated filmmaker, but merely a witness of the theatre action’.45 We thus find, a hundred years apart, Christophe Huss (for the opera) and Georges Méliès (for the magic sketch) engaged in the same battle! When it is a matter of relaying a stage production by means of a ‘reproduction’ medium, each man comes down on the side of the greatest transparency of ‘énoncés écraniques’ as possible, in the name of respect for the work in question. Each is opposed to putting such works through the mill of cinema (‘cinematizing’) and rejects the superimposition of an artistic interpretation through the cinema. Because cinema, or the kinematograph, should merely relay these works without extravagance by the camera, which diverts the spectator’s attention from what really counts: what the original work shows and what it tells, precisely. And this should be done in a style as close as possible to the style of the original. In its passage from the opera house to the movie theatre, the opera is ‘cinematized’. It becomes something different and, in a sense, loses a part

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of its soul (or integrity) as an opera. This ‘cinematizing’ of operas in order to broadcast them in movie theatres is without any doubt a case of one cultural series contaminating another. The cinematic virtuosity of the putter-into-images, a powerful and legitimate factor in cinema’s identity, can thus seem completely pushed aside in the case of merely capturing and restoring a live opera or, more simply, of mediating it cinematically. As was the case with Méliès, about whom we can say, in the end (and this is an enormous claim, I’m quite aware, which shakes many of our ‘certainties’ to their core), that in both his writings and his films, Méliès was opposed to cinema – or opposed in any event to institutional cinema. Like Christophe Huss, he was jealously defending his cultural series against the ‘imperialism’ of cinema, against the subjugation of one cultural series by another. In the end, Huss and Méliès are against any kind of ‘cinematizing’ of the products of the cultural series to which they belong.

Acknowledgements This text is dedicated to the memory of Madeleine Malthête-Méliès (1923–2018), a true driving force for research into the work of the magician-kinematographer who was her grandfather. The work on which the present text is based has benefited from the financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Canada Research Chairs Program and the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture, through the intermediary of four university research infrastructures directed by André Gaudreault under the Laboratoire CinéMédias: the Canada Research Chair in Film and Media Studies, the Research Program on the Archaeology and Genealogy of Montage/editing (PRAGM/e), the International Research Partnership on Cinema Techniques and Technologies (TECHNÈS) and the Groupe de recherche sur l’avènement et la formation des institutions cinématographique et scénique (GRAFICS).

Notes 1

The present text is partially derived from a paper I first presented at the international conference Re-make! Réénoncer, relocaliser, remédier à l’ère numérique, held at Mudam, Luxembourg in October 2017, and that I have completely revisited, modifying and adding to it, for the paper I presented for my talk at Ghent University in November 2018 at the international conference ‘Rethinking the AttractionsNarrative Dialectics: New Approaches to Early Cinema’. Organizers of both conferences gave me the authorization for publishing the same text (one in French, one in English) in their proceedings. The French version appeared recently: André Gaudreault, ‘Les vues animées selon Georges Méliès: une remédiation sobre et sans prétention ou Quand Méliès prend position contre … le cinéma!’, in

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‘Re-’: Répétition et reproduction dans les arts et les médias, ed. Marion ColasBlaise et Gian Maria Tore (Sesto San Giovanni: Éditions Mimésis, 2021), 185–210. The article and quotations are translated by Timothy Barnard. My thanks to Anne Bienjonetti, Justine Chevarie-Cossette, Marion Charroppin, Marie-Ève Hamel, Joël Lehmann, Jacques Malthête and Ayse Toy Par for their contributions and support. 2 André Gaudreault, ‘La cinématographie-attraction chez Méliès: Une conception durable’, in Méliès, carrefour des attractions, ed. André Gaudreault and Laurent Le Forestier (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2014), 39. 3 See Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). 4 Ricciotto Canudo, ‘Trionfo del cinematografo’, Il Nuovo Giornale Illustrato, no. 3/330 (25 December 1908): 3. Emphasis in the original. 5 In a talk entitled ‘La mystérieuse affaire des styles à l’époque de la cinématographieattraction’ at the 13th international Udine conference in 2006. André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, ‘The Mysterious Affair of Styles in the Age of Kine-Attractography’, Early Popular Visual Culture 8, no. 1 (February 2010): 17–30. 6 André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, The End of Cinema? A Medium in Crisis in the Digital Age (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2015 [2013]), 92. 7 Complete Catalogue of Genuine and Original ‘Star’ Films, New York, 1903, 18, https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/26311 (accessed 29 April 2021). Quoted in Mario Slugan, Fiction and Imagination: A Philosophical Approach to Film History (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 52. My thanks to the author for allowing me to consult his manuscript before publication. 8 Slugan, Fiction and Imagination, 42. 9 This, as is well known, is a trick associated with a frequently recurring theme in the work of Méliès: decapitated heads, another example of which we will see below. 10 On this topic, I take the liberty of referring the reader to an article I wrote twenty years ago whose title indicates that we sometimes may have been a little quick out of the gate to condemn these two French film historians, at least with respect to this aspect of their work: André Gaudreault, ‘Les Vues cinématographiques selon Georges Méliès ou comment Mitry et Sadoul avaient peut-être raison d’avoir tort (même si c’est surtout Deslandes qu’il faut lire et relire)’, in Georges Méliès, l’illusionniste fin de siècle?, ed. Jacques Malthête and Michel Marie (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1997), 111–31. 11 Liste complète des films cinématographiques pour projections animées (perforation Edison) (Paris, n.d. [1901]), 6. 12 Complete Catalogue of Genuine and Original ‘Star’ Films, 12. 13 Ibid. 14 Slugan, Fiction and Imagination, 12. Emphasis in the original. 15 See Repas de bébé (Baby’s Dinner, 1895, Louis Lumière). 16 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2006). 17 Jean-Marc Larrue, ‘Du média à la médiation: les trente ans de la pensée intermédiale et la résistance théâtrale’, in Théâtre et intermédialité, ed. Jean-Marc Larrue (Villeneuve-d’Ascq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2015), 27–56.

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18 Ibid., 46. 19 Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 13. 20 Unlike media, which ‘are also cultural systems’. Ibid., 14. 21 In French one also speaks of ‘contenu alternatif’, as Timothée Huerne points out. In English there is a greater variety of expressions, including ‘alternative content’, ‘digital broadcast cinema (D.B.C.)’, ‘relay’ and ‘livecasting’, in addition to ‘cinemacast’ – a term Huerne translates as ‘ciné-transmission’. See Timothée Huerne, ‘Vers une théorisation du hors-film: le cas spécifique de la ciné-transmission’ (unpublished master’s thesis, Université de Montréal, 2017), 35, 46, https://papyrus.bib.umontreal. ca/xmlui/handle/1866/20171 (accessed 29 April 2021). 22 See André Gaudreault, Film and Attraction: From Kinematography to Cinema (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2011 [2008]). 23 Théâtre Robert-Houdin: Grandes matinées de prestidigitation [n.d., Bibliothèque nationale de France, Arts du spectacle department, 8-RO-17411]. 24 Jacques Malthête, ‘L’appentis sorcier de Montreuil-sous-Bois’, in Méliès, carrefour des attractions, ed. Gaudreault and Le Forestier, 147. 25 Georges Méliès, ‘Kinematographic Views’, ed. Jacques Malthête, in André Gaudreault, Film and Attraction: From Kinematography to Cinema (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2011 [2008]), 141. 26 Théâtre Robert-Houdin. 27 Méliès, ‘Kinematographic Views’, 136. 28 Jacques Malthête, Madeleine Malthête-Méliès and Anne-Marie Quévrain, Essai de reconstitution du catalogue français de la Star-Film, suivi d’une analyse catalographique des films de Georges Méliès recensés en France (Bois-d’Arcy: Service des archives du film du Centre national de la cinématographie, 1981), 171. 29 To use a term I proposed in an earlier text. See André Gaudreault, ‘Fragmentation and Assemblage in the Lumière Animated Pictures’, Film History 13, no. 1 (2001): 76–88; and André Gaudreault, with the collaboration of Jean-Marc Lamotte, ‘Fragmentation and Segmentation in the Lumière “Animated Views”’, The Moving Image 3, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 110–31. 30 The fact that the title of a sketch from before kinematography is the same as its equivalent on film is not at all bizarre when one considers that the following titles, all of them of sketches mounted by Méliès on the stage of his theatre before 1896 – the year he began to make moving pictures – have almost literal equivalents in his film output: La Fée des fleurs ou Le miroir de Cagliostro (1889), L’Enchanteur Alcofribas (1889), Le Manoir du diable (1890), Les Farces de la Lune ou Les mésaventures de Nostradamus (1891), Le Charlatan fin de siècle (1892) and L’Auberge du diable (1894). 31 Despite the fact that the street behind the backdrop of Le Bourreau turc, when the film was made in Méliès’ studio on rue du Bout-de-la-Ville (today rue FrançoisDebergue) in Montreuil, was the rue du Pré (today the rue du Capitaine-Dreyfus). 32 Gaudreault and Marion, The End of Cinema?, 95. 33 Bolter and Grusin, Remediation.

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34 ‘Le Gala Méliès’, Le Nouvel art cinématographique, no. 5 (January 1930), 84–5. My emphasis. This twenty-page text, which refers to Méliès in the third person (a ‘technique’ to which, as is well known, Méliès often resorted in his writings) appeared in January 1930 in the journal published by Maurice Noverre and is unsigned. Méliès specialists are convinced that parts of this text were inspired by Méliès himself, and more plausibly that they were even directly written by him. This is clearly the case of the passage I have quoted here. It is his style, his genre, even his way with words. It is difficult to attribute some segments of the text to Méliès, however, which would have been written by Noverre. 35 Ibid., 85. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 Jean-Marc Larrue, ‘Du média à la médiation’, 36. 39 This photomontage was created at my request by Joël Lehmann, technical coordinator of the Laboratoire CinéMédias at the Université de Montréal. 40 ‘Le Gala Méliès’, 85. 41 Amazingly, there are similarities to be found between these remarks by Georges Méliès and the hypotheses outlined by Christian Metz in his final book. Christian Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2016 [1991]). 42 In particular in the writings of Christophe Huss, the music reporter for the Montreal daily newspaper Le Devoir, whose columns on broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera of New York I have been reading regularly since 2007. 43 Cinematizing is also a concept applied to the ‘televized series’ format, as seen in the title of a recent master’s thesis: Justine Chevarie-Cossette, ‘La “Cinématisation” des séries télévisées contemporaines: le cas inédit du parcours de la série française Kaamelott (Alexandre Astier, M6, 2005–2009)’ (unpublished master’s thesis, Université de Montréal, 2017), http://hdl.handle.net/1866/20163 (accessed 29 April 2021). 44 Christophe Huss, ‘Le Metropolitan Opera au cinéma – pour les yeux d’Elina’, Le Devoir, 18 January 2010, https://www.ledevoir.com/culture/musique/281282/ le-metropolitan-opera-au-cinema-pour-les-yeux-d-elina (accessed 29 April 2021). (About the broadcast by the Met of the opera Carmen, with stage direction by Richard Eyre and filmed by Gary Halvorson.) 45 Christophe Huss, ‘Metropolitan opera – votre cinéma n’est pas un cinema … ’ Le Devoir, 17 December 2007, https://www.ledevoir.com/culture/musique/168880/ metropolitan-opera-votre-cinema-n-est-pas-un-cinema (accessed 29 April 2021). (About the broadcast by the Met of the opera Romeo and Juliet, with stage direction by Guy Jossten and filmed by Gary Halvorson.)

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2 ATTRACTION/NARRATION/ ILLUSTRATION: A THIRD PARADIGM FOR EARLY CINEMA Valentine Robert

The challenge of rethinking the attraction-narration dialectics launched by Daniël Biltereyst and Mario Slugan for the 2018 Ghent Conference and for this volume appeared to me as stimulating and necessary in early cinema studies. It led me to a daring proposal, which I submit here as a hypothesis, a programmatic idea rather than a conclusion, which will need future developments and verifications. My proposal is to extend the attraction/narration dialectics into a triad enlightening early cinema with a third and complementary theoretical paradigm, that I will call ‘illustration’ (Figure 2.1). Taking Biltereyst and Slugan’s ‘theoretical challenge’ as a starting point to reconceive my methodological process, this article will not provide a proper demonstration – only converging ideas, examples and lines of research. Nevertheless, I hope that the notion of ‘illustration’, which I identify as a complementary concept refining the dichotomy between attraction and narration in a triad, will prove to shed a new and promising light on early cinema aesthetics. In order to make a theoretical concept out of the term ‘illustration’, I needed to identify a broader and historical sense, getting back to relevant uses, meanings, nuances – and ‘illustration’ quickly proved to be as difficult to define as ‘attraction’ or ‘narration!’ But the etymological and historical fortune of the word ‘illustration’ attested its theoretical potential and relevance, more significant than ‘figuration’, ‘realization’, ‘monstration’, ‘description’, ‘composition’ or even ‘contemplation’. This article is indeed in the direct continuation of Charles Musser’s writings and of what he called a ‘cinema of contemplation’.1 Nevertheless, the notion of ‘illustration’ tends to involve a level of analysis more similar to the one implied by the concepts of ‘attraction’ and ‘narration’, and to allow for a better triangular

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Figure 2.1  A triad of theoretical terms.

articulation. Several theoretical aspects intrinsically define the illustration, which are of great applicability for early cinema. I aim to reveal how this paradigm can be useful to analyse the part of the text, the part of the eye and the part of the tableau in early cinema. Moreover, illustration (derived from Latin illustrat- ‘lit up’) means shedding a light on something, making it clearer. Etymologically, the concept thus directly mirrors the cinematic dispositive – one can barely make it more relevant. Furthermore, the very word ‘illustration’ was in use at the time of early films, which were explicitly compared to illustrated books and newspapers. For example, Edmond Benoît-Lévy, a key figure in early French cinema that could be nicknamed ‘the first advocate of cinema’2 longed to see, in 1907, the illustrated school textbooks be replaced by cinema sessions.3 According to Benoît-Lévy, geography and technical crafts would by this empirical way be taught instantly and far better. Instead of history textbooks, he suggested to use cinematic re-enactment of old events, and, regarding ‘current history that poses before the future’, Benoît-Lévy claimed that while his generation had to ‘read (and misread)’, ‘our grandsons will have to see’, ‘a few films [being sufficient] to restore our era!’4 The comparison grew stronger with the ‘illustrated newspapers that are aimed at the masses’: To show us news, the cinematograph is incomparable: we can show in the evening in Paris a fact which happened in the morning in Marseille. […] Outdated, Le Matin and L’Illustration! […] The cinematograph will be, and already is, the real popular newspaper.5 François Valleiry (who could, according to Richard Abel, be one of the pseudonyms of Edmond Benoît-Lévy himself)6 went further and formally proclaimed that ‘the cinematograph, whose success is now as universal as definitive, has conquered the world in the same way as the image of illustrated newspapers’.7 I will get back to these explicit comparisons and their foundations. To end this prelude, I will quote the seventeenth-century French art critic and illustration-

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devotee Roger de Piles, who made this utopian hypothesis: what if the Ancient had invented engraving? ‘We would distinctly know an infinity of beautiful things of which historians have left us only confused ideas’,8 he answered. He went on fancying how we could ‘see’ the magnificence of Babylon and the Temple of Jerusalem, or ‘judge with certitude’ the Greek and Roman ruins. We ‘could have inherited the art of the Ancient builders’, and Vitruve ‘would not have let us ignore’ all the instruments and machines that he described, the figures of which are ‘lost’.9 De Piles’ wording of this dream connected engravings with knowledge, precision and discovery, and served as a conclusion to his unsurpassed demonstration of the ‘usefulness’ of illustrations. According to him, the principles of these images went far beyond attraction and narration: Among all the good effects that can come from the use of prints, we have only reported here six, which will make it easy to judge the others: ●● The first is to entertain us by imitation and by reproducing through their painting the visible things. ●●

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The second to instruct us in a more powerful and prompt way than by words […] The third to shorten the time we would use to read again the things that have escaped our memory, and to refresh it at a glance. The fourth to make the absent things appear as if they were in front of our eyes, visible to us only through painful travel and great expense. The fifth to give the means to compare several things together easily, by the few places that prints occupy, by their great number, and by their diversity. And the sixth to form the taste for good things, and to give at least one hint of Fine Arts, which honest people are not allowed to ignore.10

Although the word ‘illustration’ did not exist at his time, Roger de Piles gave one of its best definitions, connecting its power to make people see a way to make them learn and remember, through concretization, empiricism, comparison, immediacy, synthesis and beauty. All principles that, as I will argue, also shaped early cinema images.

The part of the text An illustration mainly consists in a visual transcription of a textual material. It is an image rooted in a text, referring and interplaying with ‘the many kinds of writing around it’.11 The understanding of the picture requires the knowledge of this textual context. The most concrete meaning of the word ‘illustration’

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thus designates the images decorating a book, an album, a newspaper or any written medium. Such illustrations are created and watched in conjunction with the surrounding text, should it be a tale, an article, a description, a poem or even a psalm. This concrete pictorial significance precisely appeared during the nineteenth century, leading to an era called the ‘Golden Age of Illustration’: During the Romantic period, French publishing underwent a real revolution with the improvement of the presses and paper manufacturing, along with the development of new audiences, that publishers decided to conquer by lowering book prices. The image as an instrument of seduction invaded the world of print, books, newspapers or posters, and overturned practices. Its massive presence signals the birth of a new profession: that of illustrator. […] ‘Illustration,’ ‘illustrator,’ ‘illustrate’ are new terms in English, French, German and Italian in the 1820s.12 The massification and industrialization of illustration described here by Philippe Kaenel led to the rise of new formats of illustrated books and magazines, which shifted the balance between text and image. Traditionally, the text structured the edition, being continuous with illustrations ‘popping’ here and there as punctual and discontinuous supplements. But the ‘elegant thumbnails’ are increasingly considered ‘indispensable’, to quote the editor of Dumas’ La Dame aux camélias in 1858.13 Images tended to take more and more place and even overshadow the text, whose function changed: ‘Initially intended to better grasp the meaning of the text, the illustration ended up occupying most of the surface of the book, the text being reduced to the role of an explanatory caption.’14 A good example of this phenomenon is the Bible illustrated by Gustave Doré. The first traditional version included the complete Bible text ‘with the drawings by Gustave Doré’, as alleged on the cover.15 The illustrations appeared approximately every five pages, and were clearly a supplement to the continuous, autonomous, ‘holy’ and untouchable text. But the same illustrated plates were soon edited without the Holy Scriptures. In these more popular editions, the text had changed and shrunk to become no more than captions of the images, which now structured the book. The Doré compositions were indeed compiled to constitute every right-hand page in a visual continuity, supplemented by a discontinuous text. This all-illustrated version was significantly called ‘The Bible Gallery illustrated by Gustave Doré’,16 and became commonly titled ‘The Doré Bible Gallery’17 – the illustrator’s name shining as prime author of this ‘Bible’. The pictures still referred to the ‘greatest story ever told’, and remained the reference in the light of which the images were deciphered, but without the text being entirely written alongside. The Holy Scriptures were only partially quoted and evoked on the left-hand page. Selected and extracted in significant and

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evocative fragments: the text itself functions as an illustration. The biblical story has been abstracted, ‘internalized’ by the reader-beholder. We thus find in these Bible Galleries exactly what Noël Burch, André Gaudreault and Tom Gunning described about early cinematic Passion Plays, which can be extended to all early literary or historical adaptations: a succession of images relying on ‘external referents’,18 with an ‘extrinsic narrativity’.19 Tom Gunning established it in these terms: ‘The goal of the Passion Play was to illustrate and recall a well-known story rather than create a self-contained diegesis with narrative flow.’20 Gunning precisely used the word ‘illustrate.’ Focusing on the narration-attraction dialectics, he did not develop the notion – letting it to be our task, focusing on a complementary illustration-theory. This extrinsic narrativity of early cinema was most of the time embodied by the lecturer (in French le bonimenteur). New Cinema History has shown that early cinema cannot be understood ignoring this figure, who was standing next to the screen and whose speech accompanied moving pictures. Before the advent of intertitles, the visual frames of early film were linked to a textual discourse, delivered directly during the screening. This configuration of the early moving picture show derived from a tradition explicitly called the ‘illustrated lecture’. The screen was indeed, before and at the time of early film, used as a framework for so-called ‘illustrations’ of a lecturer’s speech. They consisted of lantern slide projections, amazing the audience with their impressive size and radiance on the big screen. These lectures were incredibly popular at the end of the nineteenth century. Touring like big shows, they could gather five thousand people in a single amphitheatre.21 To compare these screened images with paper illustrations was commonplace, consistent with the very title of ‘illustrated lecture’. Lecturers such as Alber claimed that the lecturer’s speech should be a sequence of oral ‘captions, accompanying not engravings in a book, but projected images’.22 The succession of slides was compared to the ‘turn of albums’ leaves’.23 Guillaume-Michel Coissac (often erroneously called Georges), the major early ‘minister’ for slides and films who founded and led the catholic production company La Maison de la Bonne Presse and the forerunner corporative journals Le Fascinateur and Cineopse, was one of the most explicit in this comparison: In short, projection is to the lecture what engraving, illustration is to the book. […] Some lecturers first treat their subject completely and then, when they are done speaking, turn off the lights and display all their views continuously. This process could be compared to a publisher who would place all his illustrations at the end of the volume. […] A second process consists in displaying the views at the same time as speaking. […] This is engravings in text.24

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This illustrative use of the screen was really defining for early cinema. Charles Musser identified two reasons for this. First, because ‘illustrated lectures were perhaps the dominant form of screen practice before moving pictures’.25 Screening was thus basically associated with an illustrative technique. Second, because ‘soon after the emergence of moving pictures, magic lantern showmen began to integrate them into their lectures’.26 Indeed, thanks to lecturers like Alexander Black,27 Lyman Howe and John Stoddard,28 as soon as moving pictures became available, the illustrated lectures combined slides and films, naturally considering early film in the same illustration paradigm. Early film projectors were most of the time created by the same production companies as magic lanterns (which were called ‘Stereopticon’ in the serious realm of the nineteenth-century illustrated lectures, the ‘magic’ terminology being mostly restricted to children’s shows). Still and moving image projectors were distributed in the same catalogues, aimed at the same public. It is thus not surprising to discover an advertisement promoting moving pictures projectors and ‘the finest films’ under the same headline as stereopticons and slides, i.e. ‘Illustrate your lectures!’ (Figure 2.2). Studying the early cinema lecturer’s practices in early cinema, André Gaudreault, with François Albera and then Philippe Gauthier, have distinguished two different tendencies: the ‘lecture-with-screening’ (conférence-avec-projection) and the ‘screening-with-comment’ (projection-avec-boniment).29 We thus discover the same empowerment of the image in early film shows as in illustrated texts, supporting the similar paradigm. This illustrative conception therefore seems indispensable to shed light on the hybrid and multimedia quality of countless early cinema shows. It is also decisive by fundamentally connecting early film to early comics. Indeed, the emancipation of the illustrated image led to the marketing of autonomous engraved plates, to the growing independence of the

Figure 2.2  McAllister Advertisement published in Lyceumite and Talent, no. 52 (January 1908) reproduced by Terry Borton, ‘The Professional Life of “Magic Lantern” Illustrated Lecturers’, The Magic Lantern Gazette 27, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 15.

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illustrator, and to pioneering comics experiments. As Donald Crafton summarized, ‘comics  and  moving pictures flourished together in the age of technological innovation and the rise of mass consumers’, cultivating ‘formal influence, content influence, individual interactions, and a shared social milieu’.30 To identify an illustrative paradigm in early cinema makes these links necessarily apparent, and urges film historians to benefit from illustration and comics studies. These fields have indeed developed fascinating theoretical concepts around illustration, which can be of groundbreaking use for early cinema aesthetical analysis, and highly enrich the attraction/narration dialectics.

The part of the eye As Philippe Kaenel underlined, the illustration shaped new aesthetic standards internationally.31 The industrial reproduction and diffusion of printed images expanded in Europe as well as in the United States from the 1840s and generated a global circulation of images. French journalists of the second half of the nineteenth century, for example, were amazed to find Epinal prints (glorifying Napoleon, Geneviève of Brabant or Hop-o’-My-Thumb) not only in French homes but also on the walls of ‘the wooden houses of the American pioneer’, Madagascar ‘huts’, Amerindian ‘wigwams’ and Inuit igloos.32 What is diffused is not only the content of the illustrations (with its ideological impact, as highlighted by Georges Sadoul).33 Their graphic style also crossed borders, formatting representations and vision. One of the essential features of this illustrative style was precision. Dedicated to what Alan Male called ‘immense visual scrutiny and research’, Victorian Age illustrators and engravers imagery epitomized ‘precision, delicacy and attention to detail’, which were at the time associated with ‘authoritativeness’.34 Moreover, the very principle of the illustration, as a visual transposition of a text, is to make the verbal description accessible to the eye in all its visual aspects and details. This research and taste for visual precision is at the very basis of the process, and part of its specificity. This praise for detail went hand in hand with the technological improvements of xylography after 1840. The replacement of long-grain-woodcut by end-grainwood-engraving and the development of mechanical transfer techniques in relief (thus compatible with typography) entailed and valorized a constant refinement of the line.35 This evolution of etching style interrelated with the academic standards of the time, praising authenticity and exactitude through meticulously realistic and ‘licked’ paintings – that Émile Zola mockingly said were made only to be printed.36 The painter aptly named Detaille was a master of this academic style: in front of his paintings, viewers marvelled at the ‘prodigy’ of this ‘total truth

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placed exactly, equally, in all parts of the canvas’.37 The public of the nineteenth century nourished indeed a real passion for pictorial detail, which represented the touchstone of this ‘century of observation’.38 Even the founder of naturalism was exasperated: Why does the public pounce with such fury on Meissonier’s paintings? […] The truth is that viewers are infatuated [with the fact that the artist] delineates the buttons on a vest, the charms on a clock chain, […] that he paints little figures four or five centimeters high, requiring a magnifying glass to be properly seen – this is what raises the crowd to a white heat of enthusiasm and makes even the quietest spectators delirious. They are flattered in their most childlike instincts, in their admiration of the overcome difficulty, in their love of the welldrawn and above all well-detailed little pictures.39 These ultra-detailed images which made the crowd ‘delirious’ (!) can be called photorealistic, and it is no surprise that the illustration practices of the time directly met and merged with photography. Even before the photographs could be printed directly and mechanically on paper (around 1880–90), they were used as sources for illustrators. From the 1840s, indeed, in newspapers such as the Illustrated London News, Eigen Haard or L’Illustration, engravers manually copied photographs on woodcuts, which were then printed.40 And for many years after the advent of photogravure, the illustrators still retouched photographs manually, in particular to keep the same level of detail.41 This aesthetics of detail, as we could call it, implied other features than the sharpness of the line and precision of the forms. Another highly exploited element was what Thierry Smolderen called the ‘swarming effect’.42 We might be tempted to amusingly rename it the ‘Where’s Wally effect’, as these illustrated books by Martin Handford have become the very symbol of a type of composition so rich and saturated that identifying Wally (however unmistakable) represents a challenge. According to the comics historian, the main founder of this technique, whose images will inspire most of the nineteenth-century illustrators (long before Handford in the 1980s), was William Hogarth: Prints depicting fairs and bazaars […] strove to reproduce ‘in miniature’ the euphoria of a leisurely stroll at a fair, where one’s gaze can joyfully move from one subject to another in the disorderly chaos. Hogarth based a new mode of reading on this principle. All of his engravings invite a variable, zigzagging circulation of the reader’s gaze. Occasionally they directly refer to the space of the fairground, as in the Southwark Fair (an engraving from 1733). […] Instead of the fluid, quasi-automatic reading [we have] a slow read, one that invites the eye to lose itself in the details and to return to them in order to generate

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comparisons, inferences, and endless paraphrases. Hogarth’s series demand genuine interpretive effort, even detective work, on the part of a reader.43 This depiction of the eye path, namely the ‘scattered labyrinth’,44 drawn in the prints by Hogarth and his nineteenth-century successors, is completed by wise comments about the visual culture of the time. Smolderen recalled that the faithful, ‘objective and documentary’ reproduction of ‘visible reality’ was then neither ideal nor natural.45 The standard mode was the ‘schematized illustration’, in which the artists eliminated any ‘unnecessary details’ to convey only the ‘most significant aspects’: the purpose was not to ‘transmit visual information (in the realistic, photographic sense of the term)’ but to ‘stabilize visual signification (most often in relation to the accompanying text)’.46 It turns out that we find exactly the same principles in early cinema aesthetics. One of the best-known reactions to the first Cinematograph screenings in 1895, showing Lumière’s baby eating at a garden table, was the famous comment that ‘the tree leaves were moving’. And among the sources written by the first viewers of the early Lumière films, we discover accounts like this: All the details can be seen: the waves of the sea breaking on the beaches, the quivering of the leaves under the action of the wind, etc. We should mention all of these little genre paintings that deservedly arouse curiosity.47 Early film images were explicitly compared to pictorial illustrations, and people marvelled at their moving details, even the tiniest in the distant background. As Richard Crangle explained, the moving pictures echoed the ‘use of photography or pseudo-photographic detail’ in illustrated magazines – to the point where it even appeared as an ‘achievement’ of theirs.48 And the connection goes further. Noël Burch was one of the first to define the style, which he called the ‘mode of representation’, of early cinema, and here is the main aesthetic feature he identified: The long shot ‘crammed with signs’ [continued] until 1906. This is a kind of picture whose content can only be exhausted – sometimes even simply read – by a modern spectator, at any rate, after repeated viewings. [It] demanded a topographical reading by the spectator, a reading that could gather signs from all corners of the screen in their quasi-simultaneity, often without very clear or distinctive indices immediately appearing to hierarchize them. [T]he lecturer represents the first attempt to linearize the reading of these pictures, which were often both too ‘autarchic’ to be spontaneously organized into chains and too uniformly ‘centrifugal’ for the eye to pick its way confidently through them.49

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This description totally mirrored the swarming effect described by Smolderen in graphic art. Burch analysed the early cinema ‘crammed’ and ‘topographic’ images exactly like Smolderen analysed nineteenth-century Hogarthian illustrations. He even acknowledged the key role of the lecturer’s text (the complementarity of which is our first argument to compare the film images to illustrations) to enable the linear ‘reading’ of the pictures sequence, and to appreciate the sinuous and complex path of the gaze in each frame. The attraction/narration dialectics is absolutely crucial, but not sufficient to properly comprehend these multiple visual ‘readings’ of the early moving image, how it was shaped and looked at. It must be remembered how illustrations had then, as Jean-Pierre Dubost stated referring to Roger de Piles, the ‘status of objects of perception and knowledge’.50 This scholastic conception of the contemplation was in line with the developments, in the endof-nineteenth-century education system, of what has been called ‘teaching by aspect’, considering that ‘by seeing, one observes, judges, remembers, imagines, reasons’, and promoting to ‘educate the senses first, then exercise judgement through reasoning that engraves knowledge in the intelligence’.51 At the dawn of the twentieth century, audiences observed early moving images as illustrations, in a similar empirical relationship, with a playfulness (with which all Where’s Wally fans are familiar) connected to the stimulation of perpetual discoveries (both visual and intellectual) and the repeated pleasure of seeing things already known in a new and better way. This illustrative paradigm thus sheds an essential light on the way early cinema spectators enjoyed these big moving swarming images, in the contemplation of which they immersed themselves. Marvelling at details grasped in an unrestricted scopophilia, they could rediscover their everyday world as well as faraway lands, groundbreaking scientific imagery as well as adaptations of well-known stories. As one of the best examples of this ‘topological reading’ required by early cinema, Noël Burch provided the first shot of Tom Tom the Piper’s Son (1905, Billy Bitzer, Biograph) (Figure 2.3). For today’s eye, this swarming shot of almost two minutes is totally indecipherable. The frame is overrun by around thirty people going about their business without any cohesion or convergence. It is only by seeing the scene again and again, and already knowing what must happen that we can barely spot Tom Tom, and the pig, and the larceny.52 Even an acrobat dressed entirely in white showcasing on a wire above the crowd goes almost unnoticed. Since no one is looking at her, she does not undertake the density of a visual centre for the spectator. Her function and all the ‘crammed’ frame’s aesthetics seem essentially decorative. It will prove to be properly illustrative. Burch didn’t know it, yet this iconic swarming shot is what I call a tableau vivant, i.e. the precise living ‘realization’ (to use Martin Meisel’s concept)53 of a painting or, like in this case, engraving. And not just any print. This shot is an accurate

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Figure 2.3  Still from Tom Tom the Piper’s Son directed by G. W. Bitzer © American Mutoscope & Biograph 1905. All Rights Reserved.

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Figure 2.4  William Hogarth, Southwark Fair, 1734 (etching and engraving, 36.5 x 47.5 cm, Metropolitan Museum, New York).

imitation of William Hogarth’s Southwark Fair engraving from 1734: the very illustration Thierry Smolderen identified as icon of the swarming effect (Figure 2.4)! So, beyond narrativity or attractivity, this early-film-frame-staging directly involves theories and practices of illustration. This aesthetics is particularly informed by the ideal of Hogarth to ‘lead the eye a wanton kind of cha[s]e’54 that Smolderen connects with freedom, curiosity and knowledge, diversity and free association, recreation and fascination. The transmedial issues are also essential, and the playful game of transposition of the same object (from the song to the engraving to the film) illuminates itself deeply in the historical perspective of illustration. The sentence of Hogarth praising how ‘the eye is rejoiced to see the object turn’d, and shifted, so as to vary this uniform appearance’55 takes a special resonance in light of the destiny of his own composition, which would still challenge the eye of early cinema viewers of 1905, ‘turn’d and shifted’ in moving pictures.

The part of the tableau The aesthetics of early cinema staging and framing is now commonly called ‘tableau-style’, making a theoretical concept out of the historical name of the film frame.56 Before being defined by the decomposition into shots, cinema was indeed shaped by the composition of the shot, considered as an ‘autonomous and self-sufficient tableau’, to use Gaudreault’s words.57 Most historians who have studied this tableau-style explored the transition, the way in which films moved from one to several shots. The advent of editing, relying mostly on the development of the narration paradigm, is at the centre of these studies. In the Encyclopaedia of Early Cinema, ‘tableau-style’ even appears as a subcategory of ‘editing’,58 defining itself as a style of montage rather than a style of image. An illustration paradigm could broaden these approaches and fully disclose the pictorial dimension of the early film tableaux.

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André Gaudreault himself associates the two notions, explaining that early films ‘used a series of “tableaux” to illustrate a story whose temporal and narrative scale would normally require an even longer length’.59 The concept of illustration implies indeed a principle of exemplar selection and crystallization. William Uricchio and Roberta Pearson have analysed this synthetic quality of the tableau-style in the Vitagraph productions labelled ‘Quality Films’. They discovered that these films were based less on the original texts (literary, historical or biblical) than on popular versions that were already reduced, cut and illustrated.60 These early motion pictures therefore refer to what Pearson and Uricchio call ‘key scenes’, ‘key moments’ and ‘key images’ – which could exist in the concrete form of a series of illustrations and directly model the film frames, as we will demonstrate. As pointed above, the word ‘illustration’ is part of historical terminology. The occurrences are countless in the official catalogues of the production companies promoting how this film or that one ‘illustrates’ such story, subject, theme or adventures.61 The term might be used for documentary pictures, such as Catching Turtles (1909, Pathé) which, to quote the Moving Picture World, ‘illustrates’ the turtle catching, ‘as only the Pathes can illustrate such a subject’.62 The educational connotations of the term are highlighted in the explanation which follows: ‘the scenes give a clear comprehension of how this is done’.63 The word is often used for fictional content: ‘the photographer did his work well […] to illustrate the story’64 can be exemplarily read in early cinema corporate press of the 1900s. A close examination even led me to identify a certain overlap between the word ‘illustration’ and ‘adaptation’.65 Alain Carou has indeed shown that, following the tradition of popular theatre and variety shows which radically cut classical plays to keep only two or three scenes shown autonomously, the literary adaptations of early cinema were far reduced, based on a visual selection approach much more than on narrative transposition.66 This phenomenon is likely proclaimed in the title of the 1897 Pathé film L’Assommoir de Zola – Scène du lavoir, in English L’Assommoir by Zola – Laundry Scene. It openly warned the audience that only one isolated scene was taken from the novel, more specifically a very visual one, often illustrated because of the spectacular, erotic as much as comical quality of this hot (in every sense of the word) women’s duel. The catalogue description of the first film version of Quo vadis (1901, Ferdinand Zecca and Lucien Nonguet, Pathé) is even more explicit: the production explained that ‘to follow the book in its entirety would have been pretentious and impractical. So we tried to extract the most interesting parts of the book, which we were able to group together in a single strip.’67 This fascinating depiction acknowledged the technical context of the films short duration and their screening as successive tableaux. It can equally serve as a definition for the illustrations in a book, carefully selected and treated as a series – or even autonomized in a succession of pictures simply

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captioned, as we described. It would therefore not be surprising that these ‘most interesting parts’ were precisely modelled on the illustrations of Sienkiewicz’s novel. In any case their illustration-like quality was clearly a determining element. Sidney Olcott’s 1907 Ben Hur was on this point unambiguous. The promotion of the film stated: ‘Illustrations adapted are those shown in the story by Gen. Lew Wallace.’68 A terminological research needs to be thoroughly done (with all the precautions it requires), but this sentence seems to indicate that the very notion of ‘adaptation’ appeared in the cinema field not to describe the transposition of a literary narrative into a film, but the reproduction of book illustrations into cinematic shots! What is certain is that the word ‘illustrations’ applies here absolutely equally to the book images and to the film frames, and that, visually, the book plates directly modelled the shots’ composition. These concrete examples, where illustration proved to have been a direct model for early cinema, will constitute my final – and illustrated! – argument. Studying the Vitagraph film in two parts dedicated to Napoleon (The Life Drama of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Empress Josephine and Napoleon, The Man of Destiny [1909, J. Stuart Blackton, Vitagraph]), Uricchio and Pearson recognized in it many ‘key images’ realizations: Vitagraph publicity for the Napoleon films also referenced a whole array of imagistic intertexts, containing what we term key images, that is, widely circulated visual renditions of events in Napoleon’s life, reproduced so exactly that ‘anyone at all familiar with art will recognize them at once.’ (Film Index, 10 April 1909) […] Famous paintings realized […] include: Napoleon’s crowning of Josephine, by David; the Battle of Friedland, by Meissonier; the marriage to Marie Louise, by Rouget.69 The references listed, such as David’s huge painting of the Coronation hanging in absolute autonomy in the Louvre, may seem to epitomize high art and have nothing to do with popular illustrations. But most of these paintings were famous precisely because they were reproduced and disseminated as illustrations. You could thus find David’s Coronation not only in the museum but also published in newspapers, printed in historical books and school textbooks, engraved in plates and postcards series, copied in Epinal prints, mimicked in Victorian cartoons and satirized in caricatures. Vitagraph even compiled and cited sources such as historical memoirs in their production and promotion work.70 The illustration paradigm thus permits to apprehend this intermediality, the general links of early films with its broader cultural and artistic context, and the propensity of early cinema to revive pre-existing images. Among the tableaux vivants of early cinema, many were based on images existing only or primarily as illustrations. The films listed in the category of what was called ‘Reenacted Newsreels’ stand out as emblematic, like the

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Assassinat du ministre Plehve (Assassination of the Russian Minister Plehve, 1904, Lucien Nonguet, Pathé). An illustration of this true story of July 1904 had been published, shortly after the event, in the Petit Journal, more precisely in the illustrated weekly Sunday supplement of this newspaper that was the first to feature colour illustrations, with an unprecedented popular success (one million copies were printed every week in 1895).71 The film was produced by Pathé about one month after the Petit Journal illustration, which acted as an essential reference for the decorator: I reconstructed the so-called ‘real’ part of the set with in hand the document that had already impressed the public: the image of the Petit Journal Illustré. [Then, I asked] to find in a knacker’s yard two horses, recently dead, similar to those harnessed to the carriage […] and in a depot of cars, an old carriage from the year 1900.72 The imitation is not so obvious in the film (which survived) because of the fantasy composition of the illustration, depicting the very detailed moment of the explosion, which is swallowed up in a smoky trick on the screen. But this quote attests that Laurent created his film’s set by reproducing the popular illustration with the precision of a tableau vivant. The notion of illustration proves to be really useful to understand not only this film but all the genre of early cinema re-enacted newsreels, which could seem so paradoxical to us today (traumatized as we are with fake news). But it all becomes clear if we take the illustrated press of the time as a paradigm, made up of drawings or touched-up photo engravings not pretending to be the authentic document but a conscious and didactic pictorial re-composition, detailed, meaningful, made to be contemplated and remembered in the collective imagination. One of the most famous and documented example of the genre is Le Couronnement du Roi Édouard VII (The Coronation of Edward VII, 1902) made by Georges Méliès and commissioned by Charles Urban, financed and distributed by the Warwick Film Trading Company. Acknowledged by Richard Abel in terms of ‘tableau vivant style’,73 this re-enacted newsreel was actually pre-enacted, created entirely in studio before the official ceremony in order to be ready to be sold and screened the very day of the 1903 Coronation. Méliès modelled his film on a whole set of documents and pictures of coronations and of Edward VII, at the head of which were prints from the Illustrated London News. Urban sent them to Méliès with these comments: I send you this day a copy of the Coronation Number of the Illustrated London News which is certainly a work of art. You will note that the uniform the King will wear for the Coronation is a Field-Marshal’s uniform, red coat,

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sash, and decorations, white trousers and high boots. This costume I have had confirmed by a gentleman in charge of the ceremony and therefore final. The prints sent you previously schewing the King in other costume than this have been merely unauthorized fancy pictures. There is also an illustration shewing King Edward taking the Oath, and an other depicting the Archbishop crowning His Majesty. These pictures should decide us in our reproduction.74 Urban and Méliès were not only looking for accuracy but also for ‘art’. The English producer asked Méliès to make this film his ‘masterpiece’75 and explicitly aimed for the most sumptuous reproduction, not only truthful but also beautifully arranged and staged, directly imitating illustrations considered as pictorial ‘works of art’. The result was openly promoted as a ‘a representation of a rehearsal of the coronation’, praising the ‘elaborate setting of a representation of’ Westminster Abbey and the ‘most impressive and dignified manner’ in which the figures were ‘impersonated by accomplished actors and actresses in every detail’.76 Following the model of documented but redesigned newspaper illustrations, the re-enactment in early newsreel was therefore not an element to hide but on the contrary a selling point. Finally, the realization of illustrations reigned over the first adaptations. As Bryony Dixon established, like ‘plethora of fairy tales based on book illustrations in editions of the brothers Grimm or Charles Perreault’, early film adaptations were ‘often adapted from sources via their illustrations rather than their text’.77 And the film staging and framing could be so faithful to the illustrations which already cut, synthetized and visually transposed the literary content, that film frames would become proper tableaux vivants. The Milano Films version of Dante’s Inferno in 1911 provides a good example, following Gustave Doré’s design in such detail that the screen seemed to become a ‘living illustration’ (Figure 2.5 and 2.6).

Figure 2.5  Gustave Doré (design), A. Pontenier (engraving), Bertrand de Borne, 1865, published in L’Enfer de Dante Alighieri (Paris, Hachette, 1865), Ch. XXVIII, v. 123, Plate 58 (detail).

Figure 2.6  Still from L’Inferno directed by Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan and Giuseppe De Liguoro © Milano Film 1911. All Rights Reserved.

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Conclusion To conclude and epitomize all the dimensions of our illustration paradigm, we will consider a culminating example: the early Jesus films, which around 1900 represented a proper genre, commonly called ‘Passions’ in reference to the Passion Plays. But the theatre was clearly not the only model for these pictures. The illustration paradigm was explicitly used in the debates about the potential blasphemous nature of these cinematic representations of the Christ. ‘There can be no objection’ to such moving pictures, proclaimed for example the Reverend Putnam cited by Charles Musser: ‘One might as well object to the illustrations of Doré and other artists in the large quarto Bibles.’78 This explicit comparison is not only captivating in likening the film images and the plates of illustrated Bibles but also in pointing to the question of the format. The parallel between the big screen on which the shots follow each other and the large-format illustrated pages that overlap one another infers the same contemplation, where the eye dives into the image and wanders through all its details. A third term underlies this analogy, which is the illustrated lecture, or more precisely the illustrated sermon. The biblical illustrations (especially those by Doré) had indeed been given a second life on the screen in the form of magic lantern slides, which were used and developed as a predilection tool by religious circles. The specific film advocated by the Reverend quoted above, which was the Passion produced by Hollaman and distributed by Edison in 1898, actually knew a hybrid diffusion, in the form of a show of half-still, half-animated images,79 intertwining slides and films and giving the cinematic tableaux a clear status of animated illustrations. Moreover, the Passions had the specificity to be sold shot by shot, by piece, each tableau independently, exactly like illustrative plates. Like plates, they could be bought in black and white or in colours (the whole practice and technique of colour in early cinema directly related to the illustration field).80 Like plates, they aimed to be collected and watched again and again (Passions were the most repeated screenings, systematically projected each Christmas and Easter, every year). This conceptual comparison between Jesus films and illustrations proved to be justified and concretized: early biblical films directly modelled their shots on Bible illustrations. La Vie et la Passion de Jésus-Christ (The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ) released in 1902 by Pathé provided great examples of tableaux vivants,81 especially reproducing Gustave Doré’s Bible illustrations – or even more certainly the Doré Bible Gallery. To rival this Pathé Passion, Gaumont produced a film titled La Vie du Christ (The Birth, Life and Death of Christ, 1906, Alice Guy) which they based on the rival illustrated Bible! Instead of Doré’s Gallery, Alice Guy took the Life of Jesus by James Tissot as a model and followed its illustrations even more explicitly than Pathé followed Doré. Guy explained in her memoirs that ‘Tissot had published a very beautiful Bible illustrated after

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the sketches he had made in the Holy Land’, and that she used it as ‘ideal documentation’ for her Passion (in particular for the decors, costumes and local customs).82 ‘Guy borrowed and appropriated Tissot’s composition’, clarified Gwendolyne Audrey Foster, and ‘instructed Henri Menessier to construct twenty-five sets after Tissot’s Bible’.83 So, like Doré’s and many Bible illustrators’ pictures, Tissot’s drawings were disseminated on the screens not only as slides in illustrated sermons but as tableaux vivants in early cinematic Passion Plays. Tissot’s re-enactment will especially be brought to its climax by Sidney Olcott in 1912, who will consider the illustrations series almost like a storyboard to faithfully realize and revive.84 These Passions even took our illustrative paradigm one step further since they generated illustrations themselves. These films were indeed so successful and meticulously staged that postcards or promotional illustrations were derived from their images. Most of the time the chosen composition was the culminating moment of the tableau vivant, most similar to the pictorial source, in an effect of illustrative eternal return. Pathé even published a booklet to be distributed to the exhibitors with the film, which looked like what could be called a mini-Pathé Bible Gallery! The layout was very similar to the Doré Bible Gallery, proposing next to the immobilized photograms (some of which directly re-enacted the illustrator’s compositions) a small text, with the very same letter ornament. Thus, Pathé really ‘translated’ back and forth their biblical film frames into illustrations. This last example finishes proving, I hope, that rethinking early cinema in the light of the concept of illustration leads to new theoretical horizons and obliges to fully consider the visual aspect, style and uses of the film images. One of the main criticism made toward the attraction/narration dialectics, in particular by Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs, was the ‘over-emphasis on the development of editing technique in the history of early film’, at the expense of the pictorial dimension.85 I do believe that this gap could be overcome if, in the theoretical dual equation of attraction/narration (which primarily relates to sensation and comprehension, and not contemplation, to montage, and not image), we add the third term of ‘illustration’. The complexification of a binary system (⇌) in a triangulation (△) allows to consider the poles in a relationship of balanced combination more than of mutual exclusion, and as complementary components more than as substitutes to each other. André Gaudreault’s recent works precisely nuanced the ‘contradiction’ between attraction and narration by emphasizing that they ‘can go hand in hand’.86 Tom Gunning insisted from the outset on setting the attraction/narration dialectics as a bipolarization instead of an opposition, with films ‘pointing in both directions’.87 Expanding the reading grid in an equilateral triangle with three symmetric paradigms should accentuate balanced approaches and combinatorial analysis, and definitely prevent temptation for any exclusive duality. Not unlike three-point lighting, where one light source is only conceived

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in relation to the others, this theoretical three-poles system allows for a whole range of nuances that promises to be highly operative. Lastly, this triangular modelling enables to fully assume the necessity of a third term, which appeared somehow in Gaudreault’s writings with the intermediary concept of ‘monstration’, mostly associated with the notion of attraction but nevertheless distinct. The theoretician who most clearly stated this need for broader analysis was Charles Musser: Cinema of attractions is one way to look at and describe some important aspects of early cinema. There are not only other perspectives, there are other aspects that need to be assessed and reassessed. […] To Gunning’s cinema of astonishment and the spectator as gawker, I would now counterpose a multifaceted system of representation and spectatorship that also includes 1) a cinema of contemplation; 2) a cinema of discernment in which spectators engage in intellectual active processes of comparison and judgement; and 3) finally a reaffirmation of the importance of narrative and more broadly the diachronic sequencing of shorts or films.88 It appears that the illustration paradigm I have presented here addresses all of these aspects: 1)

2)

3)

The ‘sustained, attentive contemplation’89 Musser recognized as encouraged by some early films, and which he, too, related to the way audiences were ‘meant to look at paintings’,90 is perfectly materialized in the ‘swarming effect’ and aesthetics of detail. The ‘critically active’ and ‘discerning spectator’, which Musser claims was invoked by early films (not necessarily in an opposite, but possibly simultaneous way to ‘states of astonishment or contemplation’),91 ideally connects with the intermedial comparisons implied by the illustration paradigm. I could not put it better than Musser when he says that ‘a film was not merely of interest “in itself”’. It was an image that spectators were meant to enjoy in relationship to other films, other images such as – precisely! – ‘paintings’, ‘postcards’ and ‘newspaper illustrations’.92 Finally, Musser’s questioning of the ‘narrative’ and his proposal to make it a more flexible concept, merely defined as a ‘diachronic organization’ and a ‘sequencing of images’,93 fully matches with the way ‘illustration’ made us revisit ‘narration’, to focus on the selection and imaging processes, transforming narrative adaptation in a succession of ‘key images’.

The theoretical triangulation of attraction/narration/illustration seems thus a way to make linkable the concepts which could have first appeared antithetical,

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and to encompass all the aspects so aptly pointed by Musser without losing the theoretical achievements of Gaudreault and Gunning. Naturally, my theoretical proposal may be rejected, but even in their refusal, early cinema and illustration seemed to be linked. Mallarmé provides the ultimate example of it. Desperate to see literature invaded by the image, the poet indeed traced, as disgusted by this perspective as we are excited about it, a direct and inexorable continuity from the illustrated plate to the early screen: I am in favor of—no illustration […] why not go straight to the cinematograph, the unfolding of which will replace, images and text, many a volume, advantageously.94

Acknowledgements Acknowledgements to the archivists of the Cinémathèque française and the Cinémathèque suisse, and Raphaël Oesterlé for his ‘swarming’ knowledge and generous advice.

Notes 1 Charles Musser, ‘A Cinema of Contemplation, a Cinema of Discernment: Spectatorship, Intertextuality and Attractions in the 1890s’, in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Strauven (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 159–79. 2 A lawyer by training (also the brother of the painter Jules Benoît-Lévy and the uncle of the educational filmmaker Jean Benoît-Lévy), Edmond is the founder of the first permanent movie theatre, the Omnia-Pathé in Paris, and the editor-in-chief of one of the first corporate magazines, Phono-Ciné-Gazette, in which he tirelessly pleaded the educational and artistic cause of films. 3 Edmond Benoît-Lévy, ‘Causerie sur le cinématographe’, Phono-ciné-gazette 63 (1 November 1907): 381–3. 4 Ibid., 382. All translations from French are by the author unless otherwise noted. 5 Ibid., 381–2. 6 Richard Abel, ‘Booming the Film Business’, in Silent Film, ed. Richard Abel (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 123. 7 François Valleiry, ‘Droits d’auteurs’, Phono-Ciné-Gazette 54 (15 June 1907): 230. 8 Roger de Piles, De l’utilité des Estampes, et de leurs usages (1699), reed. by Michael Wiedmann (1998), 10, http://estampeaquitaine.canalblog.com/ archives/2008/10/23/11193011.html (accessed 4 November 2021). 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., 7.

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11 Michel Melot, The Art of Illustration (Geneva: Skira, 1984), n.p. 12 Philippe Kaenel, ‘Illustration’, in Dictionnaire mondial des images, ed. Laurent Gervereau (Paris: Nouveau Monde, 2010), 786. 13 Gustave Havard, ‘[Editorial]’, in Alexandre Dumas, La Dame aux camélias (Paris: G. Havard, 1858), n.p. 14 Noëmi Blumenkranz, ‘Illustration’, in Étienne Souriau: vocabulaire d’esthétique, ed. Anne Souriau (Paris: PUF, 1990), 855–6. 15 La Sainte Bible avec les dessins de Gustave Doré (Tours: Mame, 1866), 2t.; The Holy Bible, with Illustrations by Gustave Doré (London and New York, NY: Cassell, Petter and Galpin, 1866–70), 2t. 16 The Bible Gallery illustrated by Gustave Doré (London and New York, NY: Cassell, Petter and Galpin, 1880). 17 The Doré Bible Gallery (Philadelphia, PA: Henry Altemus, n.d. [c. 1883]); similar editions were also published by other companies c. 1890, including John W. Lovell Co. (New York), The National Publishing Co. (Philadelphia), Belford-Clarke & Co. (Chicago and New York, 1891), etc. 18 Noël Burch, Life to Those Shadows (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1990), 146. 19 André Gaudreault, From Plato to Lumière: Narration and Monstration in Literature and Cinema (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 31 ss. 20 Tom Gunning, ‘Passion Play as Palimpsest’, in An Invention of the Devil? Religion and Early Cinema, ed. Roland Cosandey, André Gaudreault and Tom Gunning (Lausanne/Sainte-Foy: Payot/Presses de l’Université Laval, 1992), 107. 21 Terry Borton, ‘The Professional Life of “Magic Lantern” Illustrated Lecturers’, The Magic Lantern Gazette 27, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 7. 22 Alber, ‘Les narrations du prestidigitateur Alber’ (1895), cited by Alain Boillat, ‘Le spectacle de lanterne magique considéré sous l’angle de la conférence: quelques traces écrites d’une performance orale’, in Performing New Media, 1890–1915, ed. Kaveh Askari, Scott Curtis, Frank Gray, Louis Pelletier, Tami Williams and Joshua Yumibe (New Barnet: John Libbey, 2015), 231. 23 Unkapupa, ‘Burton McDowell’s lecture on “Samoa”’, The Lyceumite (December 1903): 8. 24 G.-Michel Coissac, Manuel pratique du conférencier-projectionniste (Paris: Bayard, 1908), 177–9. 25 Charles Musser, ‘Illustrated Lectures’, in Encyclopedia of Early Cinema, ed. Richard Abel (New York, NY: Routledge, 2005), 307. 26 Ibid. 27 About this first showman to integrate films in his ‘illustrated material’, see Kaveh Askari, Making Movies into Art: Picture Craft from the Magic Lantern to Early Hollywood (London: BFI/Palgrave, 2014). 28 Charles Musser published various studies about their lectures and how they integrated films. 29 André Gaudreault and François Albera, ‘Apparition, disparition et escamotage du “bonimenteur” dans l’historiographie française du cinéma’, in Le muet a la

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parole, ed. Giusy Pisano and Valérie Pozner (Paris: AFRHC, 2005): 167–99; André Gaudreault and Philippe Gauthier, ‘Les séries culturelles de la conférence-avecprojection et de la projection-avec-boniment: continuités et ruptures’, in Beyond the Screen: Institutions, Networks, and Publics of Early Cinema, ed. Marta Braun, Charlie Keil, Paul Moore and Louis Pelletier (New Barnet: John Libbey, 2012), 233–8. 30 Donald Crafton, ‘Comic Strips’, in Encyclopedia of Early Cinema, 148. 31 Philippe Kaenel, 786. 32 H. De La Madeleine, Le Temps (7 April 1866), cited by Georges Sadoul, Ce que lisent vos enfants: la presse enfantine en France, son histoire, son évolution, son influence (Paris: Bureau d’éditions, 1938), 6. 33 Ibid. 34 Alan Male, Illustration: A Theoretical and Contextual Perspective (Lausanne: AVA, 2007), 87–8. 35 See Jean-François Tétu, ‘L’Illustration de la presse au xixe siècle’, Semen, no. 25 (2008), http://journals.openedition.org/semen/8227 (accessed 4 November 2021). 36 Émile Zola, ‘Nos peintres au Champ de Mars (1er juillet 1867)’, in Ecrits sur l’art (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 184. 37 Louis de Fourcaud, ‘1894: Salon des Champs-Elysées’, Le Gaulois (30 April 1894): 4. 38 Expression by Sylvie Thorel-Cailleteau, ‘Un regard désolé: naturalisme et photographie’, Cahiers naturalistes, no. 66 (1992): 269. 39 Émile Zola, ‘Lettres de Paris. L’école française de peinture à l’exposition de 1878 (juillet 1878)’, in Ecrits sur l’art, 383–4. 40 Myriam Chermette, ‘Photographie et médias’, in Dictionnaire mondial des images, 1250. 41 Ibid. 42 Thierry Smolderen, The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2014), 5. 43 Ibid., 5, 8. 44 Ibid., 4. 45 Ibid., 8. 46 Ibid., 8–9. 47 Henri de Parville (1896), cited by Georges Sadoul, ‘Louis Lumière, metteur en scène’: 1895: Mille huit cent quatre-vingt-quinze, no. 87 (2019): 124. 48 Richard Crangle, ‘Illustrated Magazines’, in Encyclopedia of Early Cinema, 309. 49 Burch, Life to Those Shadows, 152, 154. 50 Jean-Pierre Dubost, ‘Ecriture et illustration: une compossibilité paradoxale’, in Penser et (d)écrire l’illustration: le rapport à l’image dans la littérature des XVIIIe et XIXe siècles, ed. Joanna Augustyn, Jean-Pierre Dubost and Sarah Juliette Sasson (Clermont-Ferrand: Presses universitaires Blaise-Pascal, 2019), 17. 51 Paul Berton, ‘L’Enseignement par l’aspect à l’école primaire’, Revue pédagogique 4, no. 2 (1879): 580–1. 52 Ken Jacobs, an experimental filmmaker committed to film micro-analysis, has taken this shot as experimental ground. He proposed to analyse and recut it: his film

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reframes the image, stops it, zooms in, zooms out, slows down, dissects the film, examining in detail what happened in this shot, and finding what Noël Burch called the ‘narrative center of the image, but also all the signs around it’ (Burch, Life to Those Shadows,166). 53 Martin Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in NineteenthCentury England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983). 54 William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty (London: J. Reeves, 1753), 25. 55 Ibid., 18–19. 56 See Valentine Robert, ‘The Pictorial in the Tableau Style’, in The Image in Early Cinema: Form and Material, ed. Scott Curtis, Philippe Gauthier, Tom Gunning and Joshua Yumibe (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2018), 289–9. 57 André Gaudreault, From Plato to Lumière, 12. 58 Richard Abel, Encyclopedia of Early Cinema, 209. 59 André Gaudreault, ‘Editing: Tableau Style’, in Encyclopedia of Early Cinema, 209–10 (emphasis mine). 60 William Uricchio and Roberta Pearson, Reframing Culture: The Case of the Vitagraph Quality Films (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 90 ss. 61 One example among many: we count forty-four occurrences of this word’s use – declined in ‘illustration(s)’, ‘illustrate(s)’, ‘illustrating’, ‘illustrated’ – in the Revised List of High Class Original Films Made by Gaumont, Urban-Eclipse, Théophile Pathé, Carlo Rossi, Ambrosio and Other Foreign and American Companies (s.l.: s.n., 1908), https://archive.org/stream/ revisedlistofhig00unse#mode/2up/search/%22illustrate+the+story%22 (accessed 4 November 2021). 62 ‘Comments on the week’s films: Catching Turtles’, Moving Picture World 5, no. 4 (24 July 1909): 125. 63 Ibid. 64 ‘Comments on the week’s films: Measure for Measure’, Moving Picture World 5, no. 10 (4 September 1909): 314 (emphasis mine). 65 The connotations, assumptions and implications of this term ‘adaptation’ which has now become commonplace was brought to light by François Albera in a paper entitled ‘Comment passer de l’écrit à l’image’ given on 15 February 2006 as part of the public lecture Derrière les images at the University of Lausanne. 66 Alain Carou, Le cinéma français et les écrivains: histoire d’une rencontre 1906–1914 (Paris: AFRHC/École nationale des chartes, 2002), 32–6. 67 ‘Quo Vadis’, Catalogue Pathé: scènes à grand spectacle (Paris, March 1902), 19–20. 68 Revised List of High Class Original Films Made by Gaumont …, 191. 69 Uricchio and Pearson, Reframing Culture, 118. 70 Ibid., 234 n.27. 71 See Ivan Chupin, Nicolas Hubé and Nicolas Kaciaf, Histoire politique et économique des médias en France (Paris: La Découverte, 2009). 72 Hughes Laurent, ‘Le Décor de cinema et les décorateurs’, Bulletin de l’Association française des ingénieurs et techniciens du cinéma, no. 16 (1957): 4.

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73 Richard Abel, The Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema 1896–1914 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1994), 93. 74 Charles Urban, ‘Letter to Méliès’, 10 June 1902 preserved at the Cinémathèque française. 75 Charles Urban, ‘Letter to Méliès’, 26 May 1902, same archival lot. 76 The Warwick Trading Company Film Catalogue (London, 1902), 138–9. 77 Bryony Dixon, ‘The Ancient World on Silent Film – the View from the Archive’, in The Ancient World in Silent Cinema, ed. Pantelis Michelakis and Maria Wyke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 35. 78 Rev. R. F. Putnam, ‘Letter to Home Journal’, 15 February 1898, cited by Charles Musser, ‘Passions and the Passion Play: Theatre, Film and Religion in America, 1880–1900’, Film History 5, no. 4 (December 1993): 443. 79 See ibid., and the catalogues that send slides and films of the Passion Play of Oberammergau on the same pages, encouraging the ‘combination of Stereopticon and Motion Pictures’ (Catalogue Chicago Projecting Co’s Entertainers Supplies, no. 120 [Chicago, IL, 1907], 338). 80 The exploration of this link represents a research, as huge as exciting, which is to be done. 81 See Alain Boillat and Valentine Robert, ‘Tableau Variation in Early Cinema: Life and Passion of Christ (Pathé, 1902–1905)’, in The Silents of Jesus in the Early Cinema, ed. David Shepherd (Oxford: Routledge, 2016), 24–59. 82 Alice Guy-Blaché, The Memoirs of Alice Guy Blaché (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1986), 42. 83 Gwendolyne Audrey Foster, ‘Performativity and Gender in Alice Guy’s La Vie du Christ’, Film Criticism 23, no. 1 (Fall 1998): 10. 84 See Valentine Robert, ‘The Resurrection of Painting: Tissot and Cinema’, in James Tissot, ed. Melissa Buron (San Francisco, CA and New York, NY: Film Arts Museum of San Francisco/Prestel, 2019), 72–5. 85 Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), vi. 86 André Gaudreault, Cinéma et attraction: pour une nouvelle histoire du cinématographe (Paris: CNRS, 2008), 95. 87 Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the AvantGarde’, Wide Angle 8, no. 3–4 (Fall 1986): 70. 88 Charles Musser, ‘A Cinema of Contemplation’, 160. 89 Ibid., 163. 90 Ibid., 162. 91 Ibid., 170. 92 Ibid., 171. 93 Ibid., 175. 94 Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Enquête sur le roman illustré par la photographie (1898)’, in Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 900.

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3 ‘THE VERY ACT ITSELF, EVEN TO THE SMACK’: EARLY CINEMA, PRESENCE AND EXPERIENCE Gert Jan Harkema

This way of turning things around, these antinomies, are different ways of saying that vision happens among, or is caught in, things—in that place where something visible undertakes to see, becomes visible for itself by virtue of the sight of things; in that place where there persists, like the mother water in crystal, the undividedness of the sensing and the sensed. –MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY1

In July 1896, when the Edison Vitascope was introduced to Chicago audiences at the mid-range Hopkins Theater, the city was simmering in heat. Inside, the temperature rose due to the popularity of the screen attraction with the sensational The May Irwin Kiss (1896, Edison) as the biggest hit of the evening. At least, that might be the first impression when considering the popularity of The May Irwin Kiss, in Chicago and nationwide, in 1896. Ever since its initial screenings, the scene has been a constant recurring figure in film history. Yet, if we want to say something about early film experiences, we have to revisit it once more, with feeling. After all, as Charles Musser observes, the scene was ‘undoubtedly the most discussed Edison film of 1896 and one of the most popular films of the novelty era’.2 At 50 feet and approximately running for 18 seconds (while projected in a loop), the film marked ‘cinema’s first sex act’ inaugurating ‘a new kind of sexual voyeurism unleashed by moving pictures’, while it also installed May Irwin and John C. Rice as the unlikely first stars of the screen.3 Not surprisingly, The May Irwin Kiss (which was also known as The RiceIrwin Kiss or simply The Kiss) got rave reviews in popular press. Seemingly

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indistinguishable from its original stage production, The Widow Jones, the Chicago Evening Journal wrote that ‘it is not as a picture, but as the scene itself reproduced’.4 In similar words, another newspaper powerfully observed that the picture ‘presented “the very act itself, even to the smack”’.5 From a historically remote perspective the reception of The May Irwin Kiss fits the description that from their initial screenings, projected moving pictures were an attraction based around a voyeuristic relation to (sexual) bodies that involved some kind of trompe l’oeil. In short, the new invention was so enthusiastically received because of its representational life-likeness, fooling audiences that they were watching ‘the original’ living bodies. Comments addressing that ‘not a movement was lost’ celebrating the Vitascope’s ‘faithfulness of detail’ support this claim, just like Raff and Gammon’s prospectus on device promising that from one moment to another the screen would become a stage.6 It is, however, very unlikely that audiences were actually fooled by the lifelikeness of The May Irwin Kiss or with the realism of projected moving pictures in general. Viewers throughout the US responded with laughter, or sometimes with unease or revolt. In her pivotal work on the history of the film kiss, Linda Williams rightfully concludes that there was hardly anything ‘overly sexy’ about seeing two middle-aged actors involved in an awkward kiss on screen shown in a loop.7 Rather, these audiences were caught in a viewing experience that was explanatory for the experiential, aesthetic impact that the cinematograph had on its spectators. Hence, as press clippings expressed that the scene was ‘Too funny for anything’, and ‘more ludicrous than the original’ while audiences ‘laughed until they almost cried’, viewers were not really intrigued by the performed eroticism but rather involved in a kind of comic effect bordering on the ridiculous.8 This effect of ridiculousness was, however, not just due to the comic performance on screen itself. Nor was it caused by audiences who, in a mode of contemplation, compared the screen entertainment to the familiar stage play. Rather, I would reaffirm Williams’ suggestion that this extreme laughter can be interpreted as a symptom covering a momentary shock caused by a surplus in perceptual impact. And, we could add, from a phenomenological perspective, that The May Irwin Kiss had such an enthralling impact on audiences because the moving image attraction was experienced by contemporary audiences as a performance that touched upon fundamental processes of visibility and perception itself. Hence, as I would argue, these early viewing experiences can be interpreted as touching upon existential feelings of ‘being-there’ or, as I will explain throughout this text, aesthetic experiences of presence. Presence, here, can be seen as ‘catching experience in the act of making the world available’.9 Maurice MerleauPonty was early to conclude that art lets us experience the way we live our embodied lives. Art thus thematizes perception itself. In aesthetic experience the

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spectacle of the object is also the self-spectacle of the sensuous appearance of the world, how the world comes into being.10 Cinema in the novelty period (‘kineattractography’ as André Gaudreault accurately calls these experimental years) was not dissimilar to experiential art in this respect. In the late-nineteenth century, new notions on perception and embodied movement were ‘on people’s minds’. Moving pictures enabled for a vernacular, concentrated yet sincere experience of this otherwise remote, scientific-philosophical discourse. Comments on the reception of the Vitascope and The May Irwin Kiss like ‘the very act itself, even to the smack’, therefore, can be tentatively and alternatively read as ‘catching experience in the act’. This chapter uses The May Irwin Kiss as a starting point of a discussion on the aesthetic experiences that the early moving pictures enabled. I will argue that the concept of presence is instructive in gaining a better understanding of early cinema’s sensuous impact and contradictory pleasures. Presence, here, should be seen as what Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht in Production of Presence labels ‘moments of intensity’ in which we suddenly feel the effects of presence. In these moments, objects or situations present us with an experiential encounter that allows us to feel our human, perceptual relation to our life surroundings.11 What follows entails a historically informed theoretical reconstruction of viewing experiences. As I will explain in the first part of this text, a deeper and more complete theory on the experiential impact of early cinema is necessary in order to explain the paradoxical reception of the moving picture attraction as both astonishing and mundane. The subsequent sections of this chapter deal with the ways in which the aesthetic experience of presence was conditioned or performed. First through what can be seen as a spatial intervention: The May Irwin Kiss as a screen attraction marked a fundamental shift in the here–there relation between the viewer and the performance, between viewing space and the performing space, between the auditorium and the stage. Thereby the Vitascope film initiated an eventful space in which space itself could be felt. Successively, I will discuss the Vitascope attraction as a performance of pure gesturality or, in other words, a performance of corporeal materiality. Hence, the film is discussed as illustrative to an aesthetics of appearing in which the experiential attraction of moving pictures was evoked by the mere appearing of animated bodies on screen despite of, or in lack of, their meaning and content.

Between astonishment and familiarity The popular introduction of projected moving images in 1896 constituted an event characterized by paradoxes and inconsistencies. During its earliest years, cinema evoked a wide array of reactions. The May Irwin Kiss illustrates a few of these. On the one hand, as mentioned above and drawing on reception documents from

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the popular press, audiences responded with intense cries of laugher. ‘A great laughing event’ stated the Philadelphia Inquirer.12 Almost bordering on hysteria, The Boston Globe wrote that the scene ‘caused the audience to shout with laughter and applaud as if mad’.13 At the same time, however, other members of the audience were repulsed. ‘Neither participant is physically attractive, and the spectacle of their prolonged pasturing on each other’s lips was hard to bear […] Monstrously enlarged, and shown repeatedly, they become positively disgusting’, as a commentator for the Chicago based Chap Book penned.14 Possibly even more fascinating is that these strong responses did not last. There seems to be some discrepancy between the sensational impact that the moving pictures have on a local scale, inside the theatre space, and a rather lukewarm response to the attraction from a broader cultural perspective. Apart from the weekly theatre reviews, these Vitascope shows did not spur any widespread debate. In Chicago, for example, The May Irwin Kiss remained on the programme for several weeks but after its initial rave reviews, the film was only mentioned in passing. Meanwhile, the moving pictures in general proved to become a silent hit that would relatively slowly spread throughout the scenography of entertainment in the novelty years of 1896 and 1897, thereby surpassing expectations of its inventors, theatre programmers and audiences. This suggests that the introduction of moving pictures was met with a paradox in terms of reception and viewing experiences. For one thing, the case could be made that, in terms of Gunning’s aesthetics of astonishment, the viewer was amazed, thrilled, shocked and left in terror and disbelief by the new sort of stimulus that was offered.15 However, one could equally argue that the Vitascope was as much a continuation of familiar cultural practices of attraction and that therefore spectators were not confused at all.16 The Vitascope, like the cinematograph and other moving picture attractions, had a unique mundaneness over it: experientially unique and thrilling, while the attraction was deeply rooted in familiarity and everydayness. ‘Unforgettable and immediately forgotten’, to borrow a Jean-François Lyotard’s phrasing on eventful immaterial aesthetics and its singular dispositions of sensibility.17 Street scenes and everyday life were a persistent theme in the films shown while the Vitascope was rapidly integrated in vaudeville programmes and beyond, sometimes as supporting entertainment or ‘chaser’ and at other times as central amusement. Hence, in opposition to the aesthetics of astonishment, Musser brings in a spectatorship of ‘attentive contemplation’. Drawing more on familiarity than newness, the kinematograph ‘mobilized the sophisticated viewing habits of spectators who already possessed a fluency in the realm of visual, literary and theater culture’.18 The May Irwin Kiss, in this respect, could have been familiar to audiences, especially to Chicagoans as the play The Widow Jones has been on stage earlier that year (and would return in a couple of months after as well).19 Yet, at the same time, the film was unsettling and comic.

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If we want to understand the impact of early cinema, we need a concept of viewing experience that is inclusive to the fundamental paradox entailing the radically new and the deeply familiar. Presence, in this manner, is a productive framework through which we can conceptualize both the astonishing and the mundane responses to early projected moving pictures. Whereas astonishment is usually associated with newness and novelty, presence originates from the inherently familiar. It is the experience when an object, a tree, an intimate body (my own body, or my child’s body, the other’s body), a word, a space, a sound, a voice, etc., that we usually take for granted and know creates a sudden sensuous intensity, a pause in perception, suspending the flow of meaning-making. All of a sudden, that object or that body is experienced in its materiality. In a moment of touch or in a brief glimpse of visuality we experience bodies and objects in their thingness. This is, as Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Martin Seel argue, the aesthetic potential of the ordinary, everyday or mundane.20 These moments of perception triggered by aesthetic objects or situations are characterized by a disbalance between meaning and sensing (although never outside meaning), marking an ‘oscillation between presence effects and meaning effects’.21 Hence, ‘The ordinary is always exceptional’, in Jean-Luc Nancy’s words.22 The effect of this can include elements of the comic, the grotesque, the uncanny or even the sublime, but in each of these experiences the materiality of the object or body itself takes centre stage. Or, as theatre scholar Erika FischerLichte concludes, ‘Presence does not make something extraordinary appear. Instead, it marks the emergence of something very ordinary and develops it into an event.’23 My argument here is that The May Irwin Kiss, and possibly even kineattractography as such, constituted such an aesthetic event of presence, thereby enabling aesthetic experiences of presence. In many respects, the scene was not so special at all. It was not overly sexual, the stage play The Widow Jones was not the biggest hit of the year, and May Irwin and John C. Rice were rather modestly well-known, middle-aged stars on the stage. Moreover, it is possible that the kissing scene was not even part of the original stage production, and that it was added to appeal, albeit in an ironic manner, to the controversy of an endless kissing scene in the stage production of Carmen in the previous year, or the act of prolonged kissing on theatre stage in general.24 The success of the scene was rather unexpected. The Pittsburgh Daily Post described Irwin’s newfound stardom as ‘a sudden rise from comparative obscurity’.25 The scene’s recording was initiated by a newspaper, The New York World, and the film roll was shelved for a month before it got first publicly shown in New York. In terms of content, audiences were used to seeing more affective kisses on stage. The content of the images, therefore, were more or less familiar. As a stage kiss, the performance was not extraordinary. Yet, as Musser concludes, ‘The film generated laugher and pleasure on its own terms.’26 It was precisely through

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the moving pictures, the spatial interplay of absence and presence and the mere performance of bodies on screen that audiences were aroused in a sensational experience.

The paradox of distance and nearness The May Irwin Kiss signified an aesthetic event first of all because of the spatial play of presences that it afforded. This was partly due to the interplay of presence and absence of the performers and the original play. As has been widely noted, May Irwin and John C. Rice became the first films stars because their virtual, screen bodies gained more presence than their physical, flesh-and-blood appearance. The performance, thereby, had a life on its own. For audiences, it was a major attraction that the bodies were there, on screen, while they were equally absent. The separation of the sign and the signified, of the recorded scene and the stage play, was made into an attraction of its own. The constant reference in early newspaper coverage of ‘the original’ confirms this. The May Irwin Kiss was considered as the ‘most thoroughly successful reproduction’ the Vitascope had to offer.27 Cinema played a major part in the spatial reorientation of modernity by offering a multiplicity of spaces. It developed the duality of distance and nearness, of the global and the local, into a singular attraction.28 Thereby, as Miriam Bratu Hansen concludes from Benjamin’s observations, it is cinema’s ideal social function to train audiences to better cope with the ‘changed configurations of distance and nearness, and to do so across fundamentally transformed registers of duration, movement and speed’.29 The virtual stardom involved in The May Irwin Kiss can be interpreted as such, but we can also think of audiences’ fascination with distant urban street scenes, the touristic film Niagara Falls, Gorge (1896, Edison) or Cuirassiers à cheval (Charge of the Seventh French Cuirassiers, 1896, Lumière) which constituted one of the Lumière Cinématographe’s biggest hits in the US context. Thereby moving pictures brought the distant near. The moving picture adaptation The May Irwin Kiss brought audiences virtually closer to the spectacle of the bodily performance (and the erotic event) than they could have imagined. The scene let audiences examine the bodily performance of the actors in detail, a process that was impossible to do when performed on stage. The element of repetition also contributed to this as it allowed viewers to observe the bodily movement over and over again. The extensive pre-exhibition piece ‘The Anatomy of a Kiss’ that the New York World ran should also be mentioned here. After all, it was this newspaper that arranged May Irwin and John C. Rice to travel to Edison’s Black Maria studio to get the popular stage kiss recorded.30 The article heralded the kinematograph’s capacity to dissect the act of a kiss performed by two middle-aged comedy actors into a seemingly

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endless amount of six hundred pictures. Stressing the Vitascope’s capacity for looping, the newspaper piece was – in a tongue-in-cheek fashion – installing the film version of the comic Irwin–Rice stage kiss as a parody to the extensive, erotic on-stage kissing popularized in operas like Carmen. The physicality of the actor’s upper bodies, the expressiveness of their faces and facial details such as Rice’s moustache and Irwin’s laugh were now more visible than ever, and up for inspection by audiences. As a result, the Chicago Journal observed: ‘In the reproduction of the ludicrous kissing scene between May Irwin and John C. Rice in “The Widow Jones,” one can almost distinguish the words themselves that the actors are speaking, so distinct and realistic is every detail of motion and facial expression.’31 Meanwhile, The May Irwin Kiss equally signified the Benjaminian ‘paradoxical entwinement of distance and closeness’.32 After all, the actors also appeared more abstract and distanced on screen. There occurs a fascination for the haptic nearness of things experienced as sensations, while the omnipresence of images proclaims distantiation through vision. Or, as Hansen summarizes Benjamin’s notion of the aura in relation to film: ‘For cinema has the power to increase the haptic impact of material objects and events, to bring the viewer closer to them than possible in ordinary perception, but only on the condition of technological mediation, which affords the viewer distance and protection from the actual phenomena.’33

Presence and eventful space The paradox of distance and nearness created a tension between the spectator and her surroundings, or between the spectator and the screen. This tension was basically the promise that in the moment of movement the flat, material, canvas screen could turn into a virtual immaterial screen space.34 The promise of this shifting spatial relation, the sudden spatial intervention that could appear, made the theatre space into an eventful space. Moreover, following Gumbrecht’s first typology of presence, it constituted a typical heterotopic space that enabled a culture of presence. Or, more accurately, moving pictures (as part of the vaudeville cultural practice) constituted a cultural phenomenon on the presence culture-side.35 Presence culture, in this sense, is distinct from the meaning culture. Whereas most of contemporary modern society is a meaning culture marked by a constant drive for concepts and understanding, society nevertheless allows for distinct moments and places that are particularly organized around bodily sensations. These sensational instants and occurrences are crucial because they confirm the subject as being part of the world. They are about the feeling of being alive, inscribing their bodies into the cosmic rhythms of others (as a collective experience). More on the side of magic than understanding (‘the practice of

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making things that are absent present and things that are present absent’), in these phenomena ‘the primordial dimension in which the relationship between different humans and the relationship between humans and the things of the world are being negotiated’.36 Although The May Irwin Kiss was rather two dimensional in terms of staging, lacking the depth in the image that many Lumière street scenes had, it nevertheless played with the spatial constellations between ‘here’ and ‘there’. In the exhibitionist mode characteristic of the cinema of attractions, John C. Rice winked at an audience absent at the time of recording (‘The delight of Mr. Rice, even unto the expressive wink, which he makes at the audience over his shoulder’), while viewers collectively shouted toward the absent performers on screen at the time of projection.37 Thereby, the transformation of the screen into an extra layer of space was a major appeal evident in the reception of the films accompanying The May Irwin Kiss on the playbill in Chicago’s Hopkins Theatre. The New York Times, for example, specifically praised the entrances and exits of actors appearing in Band Drill (1894, Edison).38 A syndicated piece celebrated the film for what seems to be the amount of people appearing on the virtual stage as ‘a couple of dozen people appeared’.39 Meanwhile, the Journal described The Suburban Handicap (1896, Edison), a recording of the popular horse race in New Jersey, as nearly transgressing the screen space and entering the auditorium which was, of course, a popular trope in the commercial discourse on the Vitascope and other moving picture attractions: ‘The unruly ponies dashing down the village street and kicking up clouds of dust and turning just as they appear to leap over the footlights into the orchestra pit.’40 These press clippings indicate an overt interest in the novel constellation of space that the moving pictures facilitated, especially in relation to the theatre auditorium. The observations, moreover, confirmed the theatre as a location where these sensuous and sensational experiences of space could be experienced. The cultural embeddedness of this experience remains important. Gumbrecht mentions how presence effects can particularly occur in relation to ritualized practices of meaning-making. It is in a culturally established ritualized practice that we can encounter these sudden moments of epiphany or presence. In the performance of rituals the spectator becomes part of the performance.41 Theatre or vaudeville, can be seen as such a ritualized practice: audiences knew by heart what their position was (in their seats, distanced from the performer), and what was expected from them (some sort of emotional response). They were familiar with the modular format of short acts with a particular order. It is this structure of the ritual that enabled audiences to become part of the performance as an event, as something ephemeral and transient occurring in the interplay between actors and spectators.42 The projected moving bodies, then, constituted an eventfulness based on the materialization of space. Within this ritualized, familiar interplay between

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performers and spectators, audiences were suddenly confronted with space as a lived space. The screen on stage had a double function in this respect. In its materiality, the canvas screen on stage presented relevance (‘look at this, this will be important’) while it also effaced itself as such by becoming semi-transparent changing surface for depth.43 In Sobchack’s words, it is due to movement that cinema ‘constitutes visual/visible space as always also motor and tactile space—a space that is deep and textural, that can be materially inhabited, that provides not merely an abstract ground for the visual/visible but also its particular situation’.44 In this moment, space was ‘fleshed out’ before the spectator.45 Hence it was space itself that audiences were now able to experience. Not as a prerequisite to re-presentation, but as a presentation in its own right. Most often, cinema is understood as a time-based medium. Early cinema, in turn, is considered to be occupied with modernity’s essential drive for the isolated present.46 With its loops, showing the kiss in a potentially endless repetition, a scene like The May Irwin Kiss sold the viewer this promise of a captured instant. Thereby the screen version of the kiss was distinct not just from its original on stage but also from other attractions in the vaudeville show. The moving image attraction delivered a series of potential intensified moments in an extreme temporality: the present-presence focusing purely on an experience in the here-and-now.47 As press reports mention the laughter that came with the repetition of The May Irwin Kiss, it could be argued that the absence of linear temporality contributed to both the comic effect of the film, as well as to its repulsive impact. From a standpoint of presence, we can further conclude that it was this intensified present that contributed to the spatial experience of presence.

A performance of bodies and gestures The May Irwin Kiss was, like so many other films in early cinema, situated around a bodily performance. Although many vaudeville attractions were organized around bodies – strange, odd, athletic or undefined – these screen bodies stood out. Filmed in medium shot and projected on a large screen, Irwin and John C. Rice’s bodies were greatly magnified. Projected in a loop, audiences were encouraged by the showman and by popular discourse to look for details. Hence it was the presentation of bodily gestures that gave the performing bodies on screen gravity. This emphasis on bodily details was also encouraged by the performers themselves. As May Irwin recalls the production of the scene in an interview in November 1896: As for that kiss itself, it was just evoluted [sic], and not preconceived. We had a sort of scene and instructions to add time, and we began by making the

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kiss one of those long, lingering ones. It took so that we made it longer and longer, until it became what it is. Well, we sat for it on one of the hottest days of last April. It was worse than July. We had to pose in a cabinet of black cloth with the sun pouring in upon us from above, and it was as hot as an oven. The perspiration poured from both of us, and if you look closely in the picture it can be seen. It was an awful experience.48 The winks, the gestures and the lips uttering silenced words all added to the status of The May Irwin Kiss as ‘more natural and full of fun’.49 ‘One sees the jolly May’s lips move as her face is nestled against that of John, and one almost hears her speak’, as the Los Angeles Herald concluded.50 Echoing the images of the autonomy of the kiss, it was through these detailed performances that the Vitascope was ‘getting at the truth of nature’.51 Meanwhile, the Vitascope attraction as an overtly bodily presentation also signified an abstraction from reality. It was a ‘pantomimic process which renders it [The May Irwin Kiss] even more ludicrous than the original’.52 Thereby, the Irwin–Rice kiss reflects the key function of the body that Jonathan Auerbach recognizes throughout early cinema: Early filmmaking makes manifest a rhetoric of the human form, turning the body itself into an expressive medium […] practices of cinema during its first decade came to rely most crucially on the dynamic language of body movement—gestures, comportments, and attitudes which, taken together, remain the ‘content of form’.53 This presentation of the body as the content of the form was, next to the presentation of space, a second way in which aesthetic effects of presence were involved in early cinema’s viewing experience. In her phenomenological theory of acting, Sobchack compares the functions of bodies on stage and on screen.54 This comparison becomes unequivocally useful when relating to The May Irwin Kiss. With stage acting, the body functions more metaphorically as a substitute for higher ideas. Sobchack categorizes this as the ‘personified body’; the body functions through big gestures to communicate meaning, knowledge and higher ideas in a very clear way. The spatial distance between the stage and the spectator requires this type of body. The screen body, on the other hand, involves a fair amount of both the ‘prepersonal body’ and the ‘personal body’. Prepersonal, in this sense, means the material ground of the acting body, involving preconscious behaviour like rhythms, jerky movements, tics and so forth. While these are still to a fair degree culturally habituated, these elements communicate ‘vitality affects’ signifying aliveness and the presence of the body. The personal body, in turn, means the screen actor’s capacity to be conscious of these functions and to use them in his/her acting persona. It seems that this

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combination of prepersonal and personal bodies is what May Irwin and John C. Rice were celebrated for in their Vitascope scene. Sobchack subsequently proposes that while the screen body appears in the lived screen space, and thereby does not share the same time-space with the viewer, the body on screen becomes more available and more material than a body on stage. Sobchack’s theory seems counterintuitive; she argues that the screen body is more available and more intimate, and is thereby not spatially removed. Her point demonstrates the experiential complexity of distancing the near. The reception of The May Irwin Kiss illustrates what Sobchack theorizes. Compared to the comedy performances on stage, the acting bodies appearing in the Vitascope projection gained a different presence. On screen the performance became more physically oriented when exhibiting bodily movements, details and gestures. Thereby, instead of communicating a higher idea or meaning, on screen the materiality and vitality of the body was foregrounded. Hence the projected bodies were monstrated, to borrow Jean-Luc Nancy’s terminology. Turned into pictures, by way of abstraction, the actors’ bodies lost their presence-at-hand (as Vorhandenheit) but gained an intense presence (as Gegenwärtigkeit) in terms of attention.55 Thereby, the effect of this abstraction and distancing is, quite paradoxically, an intimacy. This intimacy presented the bodies as nothing other than bodies. The effect was that the performance gained a fundamental materiality. Bodies are what constitutes performance itself because both the body of the actor (or the body of film), and the body of the spectator are necessary. After all, there is no perception without a body. Phenomenologically speaking, the body signifies thereby the limit, the degree zero of signification. Moreover, recorded before a black screen, devoid of a singular contextual time and space, these bodies were pure bodies, shot in what Gaudreault calls a ‘zero degree of filming’.56 Meanwhile, ‘Body is the total signifier, for everything has a body, or everything is a body (this distinction loses its importance here), and body is the last signifier, the limit of the signifier’, as Nancy ambitiously states.57 Following Erika Fischer-Lichte, we could state that what was at stake here, was the ‘performative generation of materiality’. Or, since the body was the dominant form of materiality in this exhibition, we are actually dealing with a ‘performative generation of corporeality’.58

‘The very act itself … ’ Bodies (our own and those of others) and spaces signify vital elements that in everyday life determine our position in the world. These elements mark our presence in the world, our relation to humans, objects and surroundings. It is through the performance of materiality and the performance as event that

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ordinary bodies and objects can emerge as extra-ordinary, exceptional, odd and transfigured.59 This, in turn, can be perceived as an experience of experience. Its effect, thereby, is not dissimilar to the famous hand-on-hand example that Merleau-Ponty uses to explain how, in a striking moment, we can experience our own body as both as-subject and as-object.60 This, then, comes closest to the ultimate fundamentally impossible fantasy taking a step aside, and looking at one’s own position in the world and how perception takes place. The early cinema performance thereby marked the spectacle of ‘coming-to-itself of the visible’ that Merleau-Ponty recognized in art: ‘A spectacle of something only by being a “spectacle of nothing,” by breaking the “skin of things” to show how the things become things, how the world becomes world.’61 The aesthetic experience of presence plays with that effect. In that sense, The May Irwin Kiss did just that: it caught experience in the act, the very act itself. Hence, we can think of The May Irwin Kiss not just as a (cinematic) representation of actors in a stage play but also as a presentation akin to an aesthetics of appearing. The moments of laughter and hysteria, and the comments referring to the ridiculousness of the film, could have very well been evoked by the emptiness of the scene in terms of representation and meaning, and the sheer abundance of performative corporeality (bodies) and performative materiality (space). This play of performative corporeality and materiality can be seen as a general capacity or possibility for cinema during its novelty period even though most depictions would quickly move to more meaningful and narrative forms of content. In various ways, thereby, an aesthetics of appearing was crucial to the experiential attraction of early cinema.62 In the case of The May Irwin Kiss the screen attraction called for an attentiveness on the viewer’s side on the mere appearance of bodies and space. The common effect of this perception focusing on presentation is a ‘heightened sense of the real’.63 The May Irwin Kiss just showed and monstrated. Thereby it attuned viewers to processes of perception and experience itself. In these moments of aesthetic experience, as Martin Seel confirms, ‘nothing other than the pure phenomenality of its objects comes to perception [as] the perception of objects stays at this radical making present’.64 The effect borders on an existential feeling as these moments allow for a ‘changeable sense of reality and belonging, which can be construed as a possibility space’.65 This then, is what made the film comic, absurd and shocking at the same time: it opened up the possibility of the world.

‘ … even to the smack’ – a conclusion In Chicago The May Irwin Kiss continued to ‘provide a rare fund of comedy’ for around six weeks.66 Slowly, it seems, the film’s popularity faded away and the scene was replaced by others. New films were now shown every week.

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This reception of an intensified momentary attraction that nevertheless faded away or got habitualized is illustrative for early cinema. It also marks the extreme temporality of aesthetic experience as something fleeting and fluid. It has endurance within the moment, but immediately resolves itself outside of it. Or, as mentioned above in Lyotard’s words, ‘Unforgettable and immediately forgotten.’67 The Vitascope, likewise, allowed for temporary sensations. From a broader cultural perspective, cinema’s capacities in terms of presence effects had a lasting impact. Cinema’s sensorial impact was only properly understood in hindsight several years after the novelty period, by the avant-garde movements that took modern perception itself as point in question, including Futurism and Dadaism.68 Possibly, therefore, early cinema shares in terms of experience a lot with performative and experiential art. In this chapter I have approached The May Irwin Kiss, also known as the Irwin– Rice Kiss or simply The Kiss, as an entry point into a discussion of early cinema experiences. Projected moving pictures in its early years basically enabled an experience about experience, or at least made allusions toward that experience of perception. From this angle we recognize, once again, how cinema was deeply embedded in the cultural context of the late-nineteenth century. Up to a certain extent it presented a vernacular version of the scientific, philosophical and physiological discourses that were pivotal for turn-of-the-century modernity. Hansen already described how Hollywood cinema was able to become a crucial medium of ‘vernacular modernism’. Cinema in the twentieth century would allow global audiences a ‘sensory-reflexive horizon for the experience of modernization and modernity’.69 But, of course, on more a fundamental, perceptual and possibly less reflexive level early cinema already did that from its outset. Moving pictures thereby both contributed and responded, as Pasi Väliaho observes, to a changing model that, in terms of psycho-physiological processes and milieus, ‘significantly reconfigured us as living beings’.70 The epistemology surrounding the moving pictures consisted of a range of ideas and imaginations from (popular) science and philosophy that were projected on this new medium, while cinema together with literature and art enabled to make tangible new modes of subjectivity. The May Irwin Kiss, therefore, should be considered as one element in a larger cultural paradigm operative in (Western) modernity’s urbanized environments in the late-nineteenth century. From an institutional perspective modernity marked the ongoing instalment of a meaning culture in which understanding, rationale and efficiency became ever more important. Yet it seems that within that cultural organization of society, presence effects were allocated a new place, particularly in the arts and in entertainment. I am well aware that from the standpoint of ‘the historical method’ this theoretical reconstruction of viewing experiences presented above is audacious. Yet I do believe that theory and aesthetic philosophy helps us to fill in the blanks

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that historical evidence and popular discourse leave. The growing interest into the history of emotions and the history of the senses implies the relevance of a phenomenological perspective to tackle the ‘problem’ of the limitations of language. Language, after all, is only one modality of experience and the complexity of sensuous experience often exceeds expression. Historian Constance Classen therefore concludes that ‘A lack of words, however, does not mean a lack of feelings or of social significance.’71 Presence is by definition beyond words, and thus marks a challenge to the historical method. The viewing experience as developed above should be seen as an attempt into a phenomenological reconstruction of what is lost. As a consequence, however, we should speak of a possible viewing experience, thereby avoiding historical essentialism. This paper originates, as explained above, from a dissatisfaction with the explanatory capacity of two seemingly mutually exclusive concepts on viewing experiences, Gunning’s aesthetic of astonishment and Musser’s cinema of contemplation and discernment. My argument is not that these modes of spectatorship are not true. I have argued, instead, for a theoretical concept of early cinema viewing experiences that was marked both by strong sensations and novelty, and with familiarity and the everyday at the same time. A framework in terms of presence allows us to discuss the impactful elements of early cinema, such as the contradictions in space and the performance of bodies. In Merleau-Ponty’s words, ‘the spectacle is first of all a spectacle of itself before it is a spectacle of something outside of it’.72 The spectacle of the self can be a spectacle of the technological medium and its novel qualities. This was of course very important for the reception of space and bodies in The May Irwin Kiss and other films. Experience, however, does not stop at the medium. Rather, experience is a relation between the subject and her/his surroundings. A proper discussion on the experience of early cinema, therefore, cannot stop at an analysis of the characteristics of a new medium. It also has to address how the viewer sensorially and perceptually related to the new medium, in a context that is crowded by other perceptions. It is particularly from this perspective that the framework of presence is promising, to discuss the act itself, even to the smack.

Notes 1

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’, in The Primacy of Perception, trans. Carleton Dallery (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 163.

2

Charles Musser, ‘The May Irwin Kiss: Performance and the Beginnings of Cinema’, in Visual Delights – Two: Exhibition and Reception, ed. Vanessa Toulmin and Simon Popple (Eastleigh: John Libbey Publishing, 2005), 97.

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3 Linda Williams, ‘Of Kisses and Ellipses: The Long Adolescence of American Movies’, Critical Inquiry 32 (Winter 2006): 290, 295. 4 Chicago Evening Journal, 3 July 1896. 5 Chicago Journal, 3 July 1896. 6 Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), 117. 7 Williams, ‘Of Kisses and Ellipses’, 293. 8 The New Haven Morning Journal and Courier, 23 May 1896. 9 Alva Noë, Action in Perception (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 176. 10 Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’, 181 n.42. 11 Martin Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing, trans. John Farrell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 97–8. 12 Philadelphia Inquirer, 11 June 1896, 11. 13 The Boston Globe, 19 May 1896. 14 As reproduced in The Shreveport Journal, 20 July 1896, 2. 15 Tom Gunning, ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator’, in Viewing Position: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 114–33. 16 Charlie Keil, ‘Integrated Attractions: Style and Spectatorship in Transitional Cinema’, in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Strauven (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 193–203. Joe Kember, on a similar note, describes how projected moving pictures were introduced as part of familiar stage and theatre practices. These institutional frameworks significantly ‘constrained’ the viewer’s response. In Joe Kember, Marketing Modernity: Victorian Popular Shows and Early Cinema (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2009). 17 Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 140–1. 18 Charles Musser, ‘A Cinema of Contemplation, a Cinema of Discernment: Spectatorship, Intertextuality and Attractions in the 1890s’, in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, 176. 19 Chicago Advertiser and Amusement News, 2 February 1896; 22 November 1896. For the extensive ‘route’ of The Widow Jones, see Musser, ‘The May Irwin Kiss’, 97–8. 20 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, ‘Aesthetic Experience in Everyday Worlds: Reclaiming an Unredeemed Utopian Motif’, New Literary History 37, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 299–318; Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing. 21 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 80. 22 Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 10. See also Alison Ross, The Aesthetic Paths of Philosophy: Presentation in Kant, Heidegger, LacoueLabarthe, and Nancy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 160–2. 23 Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, trans. Saskya Iris Jain (New York, NY: Routledge, 2008), 99.

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24 J. A. Sokalski, ‘Performed Affection: The Spectacle of Kissing on Stage and Screen’, in Allegories of Communication: Intermedial Concerns from Cinema to the Digital, ed. John Fullerton and Jan Olsson (Eastleigh: John Libbey, 2004), 299–320. 25 The Pittsburgh Daily Post, 22 November 1896, 9. 26 Musser, ‘The May Irwin Kiss’, 104. 27 Chicago Tribune, 5 July 1896, 36. 28 Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); Kern, ‘Changing Concepts and Experiences of Time and Space’, in Fin-de-Siècle World, ed. Michael T. Saler (London and New York, NY: Routledge 2015): 74–90. 29 Miriam Bratu Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Los Angeles and Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012), 101. 30 New York World, 26 April 1896, 21; Musser, ‘The May Irwin Kiss’, 104. 31 Chicago Journal, 11 July 1896. 32 Hansen, Cinema and Experience, 130. 33 Ibid., 101. 34 Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). 35 Gumbrecht, Production of Presence, 79. 36 Ibid., 83. 37 The Boston Globe, 17 May 1896, 18. 38 New York Times, 26 April 1896. 39 The Shreveport Times, 16 August 1896, 9; The Randolph Toiler, 11 September 1896, 3. 40 Chicago Journal, 14 July 1896. 41 Gumbrecht’s typical example of this is a beautiful play in a team sport. The more the spectator is aware of the rituals of the game, the more likely it is that a game becomes eventful, and the more likely it is that the viewer experiences a kind of epiphany or sensation. See Gumbrecht, ‘“Lost in Focused Intensity”: Spectator Sports and Strategies of Re-enchantment’, in Our Broad Present: Time and Contemporary Culture (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2014), 39–48; and John Pløger, ‘The Evental City: Moment, Situation, Present’, Space and Culture 19, no. 3 (2016): 260–74. 42 Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance, 33. 43 Lucas D. Introna and Fernando M. Ilharco, ‘On the Meaning of Screens: Toward a Phenomenological account of Screenness’, Human Studies 29 (2006): 64. 44 Vivian Sobchack, ‘The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Photographic, Cinematic, and Electronic Presence’, in Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2004), 151. 45 Sobchack, ‘The Scene of the Screen’, in Carnal Thoughts, 145. Trevor Elkington notes that cinema does not present an illusion of depth but a real perception of it. Moreover, as Elkington paraphrases Merleau-Ponty, ‘depth is the first dimension,

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the dimension in which our bodies operate on the day to day, the space of our perception of the world around us’. Trevor G. Elkington, ‘Moments in Space, Spaces in Time: Phenomenology and the Embodied Depth of the Cinematic Image’, unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Washington, 2001. 46 What comes to mind, of course, is Andrei Tarkovsky’s beautiful book Sculpting in Time: Reflections on Cinema, trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1989 [1985]). On early cinema, modernity and time, see Leo Charney, Empty Moments: Cinema, Modernity, and Drift (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). 47 Gumbrecht, Production of Presence, 58. 48 The Pittsburgh Daily Post, 22 November 1896, 9. 49 The Philadelphia Inquirer, 24 May 1896, 20. 50 Los Angeles Herald, 7 July 1896, 4. 51 The Boston Globe, 17 May 1896, 18. 52 Chicago Inter Ocean, 5 July 1896, 41 53 Jonathan Auerbach, Body Shots: Early Cinema’s Incarnations (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007), 2. 54 Vivian Sobchack, ‘Being on the Screen: A Phenomenology of Cinematic Flesh, or the Actor’s Four Bodies’, in Acting and Performance in Moving Image Culture: Bodies, Screens, Renderings, ed. Jörg Sternagel, Deborah Levitt and Dieter Mensch (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2012), 429–45. 55 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image, trans. Jeff Fort (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2007), 21; ‘The absence of the imaged subject is nothing other than an intense presence, receding into itself, gathering itself together in its intensity’. Nancy, The Ground of the Image, 9. 56 André Gaudreault, Film and Attraction: From Kinematography to Cinema, trans. Timothy Barnard (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2011 [2008]), 58. 57 Nancy, ‘Corpus’, in The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 195. 58 Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance, 75–6. 59 Ibid., 179. 60 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2002 [1962]). 61 Merleau-Ponty, Eye and Mind, 181 n.42 62 Gert Jan Harkema, Aesthetic Experiences of Presence: Case Studies in Film Exhibition, 1896–1898 (Stockholm: Department of Media Studies, Stockholm University, 2019). 63 Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing, 57. 64 Ibid., 91. Emphasis in original. 65 Matthew Ratcliffe, ‘The Phenomenology of Existential Feeling’, in Feelings of Being Alive, ed. Joerg Fingerhut and Sabine Marienberg (Berlin and Boston, MA: De Gruyter, 2012), 38. 66 Chicago Chronicle, 11 August 1896, 6.

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67 Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, and Rachel Bowlby (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), 141. 68 On the impact of early cinema as a new medium on the avant-garde, see Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Dada/Cinema?’, in Dada and Surrealist Film, ed. Rudolf E. Kuenzli (New York, NY: Willis, Locker & Owens, 1987), 13–27 and Annie Van Den Oever, ‘Ostrannenie, “The Montage of Attractions” and Early Cinema’s “Properly Irreducible Alien Quality”’, in Ostrannenie, ed. Annie Van Den Oever (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), 33–58. 69 Miriam Bratu Hansen, ‘Fallen Women, Rising Stars, New Horizons: Shanghai Silent Film as Vernacular Modernism’, Film Quarterly 54, no. 1 (Autumn 2000): 10–22. 70 Pasi Väliaho, Mapping the Moving Image: Gesture, Thought and Cinema Circa 1900 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), 10. 71 Constance Classen, The Deepest Sense: A History of Touch (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2012), xvi. 72 Merleau-Ponty, Eye and Mind, 181 n.42.

4 LOST LOVE ON A HOT SUMMER DAY: THE ABSORPTIVE EXPERIENCE OF THE FIRST FILM SHOW IN DENMARK Casper Tybjerg

The first public presentation of projected ‘living photographs’ in Denmark took place on Sunday 7 June 1896, in an establishment on City Hall Square in Copenhagen called the Copenhagen Panorama. The same day, the newspaper Politiken published a delightfully impressionistic account of the ‘Kinoptikon’, as it was called (there had been a special screening for the press the day before). In this review, included in full as an appendix to this article, the reporter describes himself as completely absorbed by the show, a spectatorial attitude supposedly incompatible with the cinema of attractions, at least according to the model of spectator address posited by Tom Gunning. I shall argue that this exposes fundamental problems with the theoretical framework attached to the cinema of attractions concept. I will begin by discussing the review in some detail, looking at both its author, Valdemar Koppel, and the Kinoptikon film show itself (adding a few details about the latter to existing accounts). I then turn more specifically to the concept of absorption as articulated by Gunning, who describes it as ‘standing at the antipode’ of the cinema of attractions.1 Finally, I examine discussions of the cinema of attractions concept, particularly those of Charles Musser and Mario Slugan, that question the strict opposition between attractions and narrative characteristic of the most influential formulations. Musser has emphasized how ‘[early] cinema thrived on diversity not only in its subject matter but in the ways that spectators looked at and responded to moving images on the screen’.2 The

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press coverage of the June 1896 film show in Copenhagen provides powerful evidence of this diversity of response.3

The observations of Narcissus The review ‘Kinoptikon’ was published on Sunday 7 June 1896 in the leftliberal daily Politiken, probably the most self-consciously modern newspaper in Copenhagen. It was signed ‘Narcissus’. The paper’s ledgers recording payments to journalists are preserved at the Royal Library in Copenhagen,4 allowing us to identify the man who wrote about the Kinoptikon for the paper: Valdemar Koppel (1867–1949), then twenty-eight, who would go on to become a prominent press figure and editor-in-chief of Politiken. Before saying a bit more about him, let us look at the film show he reviewed. It was held at the Copenhagen Panorama (Figure 4.1), created by Vilhelm Pacht (1843–1912). Pacht was trained as a painter but became an important innovator in the field of image reproduction technology and set up an art supplies factory.5 The Copenhagen Panorama was housed in a wooden pavilion in front of Copenhagen’s new city hall building. The pavilion was built in 1893 for the independent art exhibition, but the exhibition only ran for a few months each spring, and the rest of the year, it could be used for other purposes.

Figure 4.1  Copenhagen Panorama.

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Pacht’s Copenhagen Panorama was a new venture; a newspaper item from a month before the opening states that Pacht had obtained a licence ‘to establish a new permanent panorama here in town’, beginning its activity with ‘the newest invention in the field of optics, the so-called Kinoptikon, which reproduces moving life-size pictures’.6 While the Copenhagen Panorama would later supplement moving pictures with other kinds of visual attractions, the film show was its initial offering.7 When Pacht opened his Panorama in June, he held a press screening the day before the public presentation of his film show; many Copenhagen newspapers were therefore able to carry a review on the day the show opened, 7 June.8 While the press reports of the first show are quite numerous, the descriptions of the films are relatively unspecific: ‘One sees, for instance, a street with carriages crossing and pedestrians, a beach with rolling and foaming waves, a racetrack with horses rushing past, a machine shop with hammering smiths, a railway station where the train comes rolling in and passengers rush back and forth, etc.’9 The films are repeatedly said to be English. We can get a better idea of what the other films were by looking at a list which appeared in one newspaper on 1 July 1896. The day before, the Kinoptikon had reopened after having been closed for repairs for nearly two weeks (it was damaged by a fire on 17 June, apparently set by a disgruntled employee). The list appears to be a complete programme of nine films. The last two were new additions, so one or two films from the first showing may have been dropped, but it gives us valuable new information of the content of that programme: From an English racetrack Surf at Dover Sunday at Kempton Park Street scene in London Railway train (arrival) Blackfriars Bridge, London A blacksmith’s workshop Serpentine dance A magician10 We can compare the titles with John Barnes’ filmography of the earliest British films.11 The first of the two racetrack scenes is probably the 1895 The Derby (1895, Paul-Acres #5), and Surf at Dover must be Rough Sea at Dover (1895, Paul-Acres #13). Kempton Park is also a racetrack, but no films appear in the Barnes filmography that specifically refer to it. The street scene may be London Street Scene (1895, Paul-Acres #12).

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As far as the arriving train is concerned, one newspaper specifies that it arrives at Calais.12 This fits with Robert W. Paul’s only train film from the first half of 1896, Arrival of the Paris Express ‘at Calais (Maritime) and passengers disembarking’ (1896, Paul #2).13 The film of Blackfriars Bridge is likely Blackfriars Bridge (1896, Paul #29). The magician, one of the new additions, is described in the papers as pulling rabbits out of a hat; the film is almost certainly David Devant: The Mysterious Rabbit (1896, Paul #20). The blacksmiths (mentioned in several reviews on 7 June) and the serpentine dancer (added at the reopening) were probably not British films (no record exists of any British films of these subjects predating mid-1896), but rather the Edison kinetoscope films Blacksmithing Scene (1893, William Heise) and Annabelle Serpentine Dance (1894, William Heise); prints of both had been shown on Kinetoscopes in Denmark.14 We thus have a fairly good idea of what Valdemar Koppel and his fellow reporters saw at the press screening on 6 June 1896. Koppel was trained as a historian, but was hired by Politiken as a journalist in 1892. In his reporting, he covered the University of Copenhagen – the public defence of doctoral dissertations was considered important news then – but he also wrote both society columns and all kinds of regular news. He quickly showed himself a very deft writer, a master of the playful and elegant miscellaneous piece, and his skills are very much on display in his eight-hundred-word review of the first film show. The leading scholar of journalism as literature in Denmark, John Christian Jørgensen, included him in a book with profiles of eleven ‘elegant’ writers. Koppel’s hallmark was a conversational tone, making the reader feel as if he was sitting with a talkative acquaintance: ‘Koppel interrupts himself, drops in little words from informal, everyday speech, in short simulates a conversation situation where he has the floor and holds it. The text is like one continuous flow of talk.’15 Koppel had a particular liking for the causerie, chatty pieces that were ‘only journalism in the sense that they were published in a newspaper. They do refer to familiar localities, but they contain no news.’16 Koppel liked to include recurring characters in these pieces, turning them into a sort of serial. The signature ‘Narcissus’ appeared on four more Politiken pieces during the summer of 1896, one before ‘Kinoptikon’ (‘Single and Double Shrimp’, 26 May), and three after (‘The Heat’, ‘The Art of Going to the Circus’ and ‘In the Silly Season’).17 The ‘Kinoptikon’ piece is the only one of the five to report any actual news. All five pieces are written in the first person, but the character of the narrator is not entirely consistent. None of the four other ‘Narcissus’ pieces has the narrator float away into reverie the way he does in ‘Kinoptikon’, but in a later series of causeries with the by-line ‘Christensen’ (collected in book form in 1907 with the subtitle ‘The Ruminations and Vicissitudes of a Copenhagener’), the narrator repeatedly allows himself to drift off into musings and reminiscences. For instance, in the

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first piece, the narrator, a melancholy bachelor, goes to a restaurant expecting only the regular fare, but is delighted to learn from the waiter that the first oysters have arrived! Poets should let themselves be inspired by these culinary delights rather than ‘silly, young girls’, he reflects, and he thinks back to his time as a young student in Paris, going to fancy restaurants with a chanteuse of more advanced years. However, when the oysters arrive, the first one is spoiled and disgusting, bringing the happy musings to an abrupt end: ‘Sadly I sat there, the light of joy extinguished, inside me everything was grey and sad once again.’18 In the Kinoptikon piece, Koppel describes his impressions vividly, but what I want to emphasize here is their thoroughgoing absorptive character. In Koppel’s account, he becomes completely absorbed in the film show, repeatedly projecting himself imaginatively into the world of the screen, suffusing it with romantic reminiscences; even the apparatus itself occasions semi-erotic reveries. Of course, Koppel the master ironist does not allow us to take himself entirely at his word; the long anecdote at the beginning about the pretty schoolteacher and the confiscated zoetrope lets us infer a propensity for digression, and at the end the writer himself suggests that his imagination has become literally overheated. The by-line ‘Narcissus’ of course also suggests a certain self-absorption. (The same tone recurs in the musings of Christensen about lost love and his own melancholy disposition, exaggerated enough that an ironic distance is established to the narrating voice with his slightly ridiculous self-preoccupation.) Even so, Koppel clearly presents us with a mode of viewing that is very different from the one Gunning describes as characteristic of the cinema of attractions: ‘The spectator does not get lost in a fictional world and its drama, but remains aware of the act of looking, the excitement of curiosity and its fulfillment.’19 Koppel’s review describes a much more personal, immersed experience, charged with affect. It shows that a mode of reception much more like narrative absorption was in fact available to even the very earliest moving picture audiences.

The antipode of attractions The concept of the cinema of attractions as introduced in the 1980s by Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault has proven extraordinarily influential in the conceptualization of and research into early cinema. I do not question its usefulness and importance, but even allowing for a degree of hyperbole, it is difficult to square a sweeping declaration like, ‘Contemplative absorption is impossible here’,20 with the empirical evidence of an absorptive experience that Koppel’s review provides. I shall focus in particular on the idea of absorption and argue that the theory of spectatorship underlying the cinema of attractions concept is flawed in three different ways: it makes spectatorship a function of

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‘textual’ features rather than an actual experience; it falls prey to a semiologically inspired prejudice against emotional absorption; and it fails to appreciate the complexity and variety of absorptive experiences. In this section, after an examination of Gunning’s use of the term absorption, I will look in turn at the first two, discussing the third in the next section. In crediting the notion of the attraction to Eisenstein, Gunning writes in his initial ‘Cinema of Attraction’ article from 1986 that he has borrowed it to emphasize the contrast with the absorption in story of moviegoers watching Hollywood films: ‘I pick up [the term attraction] partly to underscore the relation to the spectator that this later avant-garde practice shares with early cinema: that of exhibitionist confrontation rather than diegetic absorption.’21 In the expanded version of the essay from 1990, Gunning again refers to absorption: It is the direct address of the audience, in which an attraction is offered to the spectator by a cinema showman, that defines this approach to filmmaking. Theatrical display dominates over narrative absorption, emphasizing the direct stimulation of shock or surprise at the expense of unfolding a story or creating a diegetic universe.22 In adding this paragraph, Gunning was probably thinking of the art historian Michael Fried’s notion of absorption; he explicitly refers to it in another article written at more or less the same time, ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment’ from 1989. Absorption and Theatricality, Fried’s influential 1980 book on eighteenthcentury French painting and art criticism, is constructed around a conceptual opposition between the two terms in its title. Gunning argues that the opposition of ‘theatricality’ and ‘absorption’ in painting can be mapped onto the difference between the cinema of attractions and narrative cinema: ‘The cinema of attractions stands at the antipode to the experience Michael Fried, in his discussion of eighteenth-century painting, calls absorption.’23 What Gunning emphasizes is the way the absorptive paintings make ‘no acknowledgment of the beholder’s presence’, comparing it to the theatre: ‘A similar exclusion of the spectator is evident in the scenography and style of the nineteenth century naturalist theatre, embodied in the idea of the fourth wall.’24 The same theatrical metaphor reappears in a later analysis of Georges Méliès’ Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon, 1902): ‘We are in the realm of spectacle, in which the audience is openly acknowledged and addressed, rather than the classical narrative film, in which the rule of the “fourth wall” prevails and the camera and viewer are ignored.’25 The opposition Gunning sets up between being astonished by attractions and being absorbed by stories evidently hinges on whether films do or do not contain features that can be described as acknowledgements of the presence of spectators. This is particularly clear in a passage from the 1994 essay ‘The Whole Town’s Gawking’, where Gunning

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writes: ‘The viewer of attractions is positioned less as a spectator-in-the-text, absorbed into a fictional world, than as a gawker who stands alongside, held for the moment by curiosity or amazement.’26 The viewer in this account is less a flesh-and-blood historical individual and more ‘a construction of the text’, as Nick Browne puts it in ‘The Spectator-in-the-Text’, the influential essay to which Gunning alludes.27 The clear dichotomy Gunning sets up between two ideal types of spectator is undoubtedly part of the reason why the concept of the cinema of attractions has proven so successful and teachable, especially since it can also be remapped onto the contrast between commercial cinema and the avant-garde (part of the original inspiration) as well as between classical and contemporary Hollywood. The firm characterizations of the ideal types, however, makes for a difficult fit with some parts of the historical record. A scholar critical of these simplifications, James Fiumara, writes that they have marginalized ‘the actual practices of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century popular entertainments and the modes of spectator experience they encourage’.28 Fiumara argues that these actual practices often relied extensively on story and narrative to engage spectators, not just shock and curiosity, and that historical scholarship should acknowledge this. Even the ideal types themselves become oversimplified: to characterize the figure of the Gawker, Gunning draws on Charles Baudelaire’s famous 1863 essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ describing and celebrating the worldly and modern flâneur-artist; yet Baudelaire also explicitly links this figure to the protagonist of Poe’s tale ‘The Man of the Crowd’, whom he describes as ‘pleasurably absorbed in gazing at the crowd’.29 Absorption, then, is explicitly part of the spectatorial attitude of this key prototype for the viewer of attractions. Before exploring the varieties of spectatorial absorption further, however, we need to look at the theoretical underpinnings of Gunning’s whole notion of spectator address. ‘Spectator/audience address’ is one of the three key ways attractions and narrative are fundamentally different from each other, Gunning has affirmed in a text from 2012 where he reflects on the notion of attractions.30 The second is temporality, meaning that attractions do not really have a temporal trajectory, but are either momentary, like fireworks exploding, or circular, like waves crashing repeatedly onto the shore. The third is autonomy of shots vs. the flux of continuity – attractions, when put together in assemblies of more than one, do not logically build upon one another or cohere into a whole: there is no development from one attraction to the next, and the order they appear in can easily be changed. Punctual temporality and autonomy of the individual animated view certainly apply to the Kinoptikon film show, at least from the historian’s point of view. In Koppel’s imaginative response, however, the train film becomes a story of lost love – and perhaps even one that began with the romance on the seashore imagined in response to Rough Sea at Dover, creating a narrative continuity of sorts. Gunning could reasonably reply that Koppel has let his imagination run

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wild on the basis of only the most minimal promptings from the films, and that it is still fair to use these two characteristics as criteria to differentiate the aesthetic form of attraction films from story films. When we turn to spectator address, however, I would argue that Gunning overstates the significance of films where performers look into the camera, bow to the audience or otherwise show that they are performing just as they would on a stage. The outsize significance given to addressing the camera is a legacy of enunciation theory. Mario Slugan has described the theory’s central conception as follows: This theory sets out to give an account of various aspects of film narration and spectatorship in terms of the distinction between two types of utterances – histoire and discours – developed originally by the French linguist Émile Benveniste. The distinction between the two boils down to the absence or presence of clear markers of enunciation, that is, the act of linguistic expression.31 This distinction, proposed by Benveniste to elucidate the peculiarities of the different past tenses of French verbs, was mapped onto cinema by French film theorists of the 1970s, and Gunning expressly invokes it: ‘the narrative mode in cinema corresponds to that which Émile Benveniste calls histoire in the case of language, while attractions make use of the signs of direct address which characterize discours’.32 The fundamental issue is that enunciation theory assumes that the speaker and the listener of the linguistic utterance situation can be analogized to the camera and the performer. Looking into the camera acknowledges that a ‘conversation’ is happening, placing the film in the realm of discours; but when actors avoid looking into the camera, the film supposedly appears to be histoire. In the 1960s and 1970s, when semiology promised to raise the scientific stature of humanistic inquiry by imposing the concepts of structuralist linguistics upon it, this analogy between the film camera and the speaker of an utterance may have seemed logical. Yet the analogy was always a very strained one; David Bordwell showed very clearly thirty-five years ago how little sense it makes to apply Benveniste’s linguistic distinction to moving images.33 It is particularly problematic because the logic of the theory turns the convention that actors not look into the camera into a deception, ‘discourse [discours] […] that […] masquerades as story [histoire]’.34 Spectators who become absorbed in the story thus fall victim to an illusion, a lie. The histoire/discours distinction could be used as a cudgel against ‘dominant cinema’ (Hollywood), and this polemical usefulness appears to have been a big reason why it was imported into film theory. Christian Metz, probably the most significant theorist of cinematic enunciation, wrote retrospectively about how this

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whole theoretical conception was animated by a ‘1970s spirit’ that ‘wanted to unmask the lie of absent enunciation and to describe the mechanisms of the process of concealment […] Discussion of the transparency of dominant cinema was based entirely on a deep-seated suspicion and skepticism about this transparency.’35 Under this theory, emotional absorption becomes an intrinsically suspect mode of audience engagement. In developing his concepts, Gunning thus relied on a framework that saw dominant narrative filmmaking as doubly suspect, not only because of its deceptions but also because of its marginalization of the anarchic early cinema, both institutionally and historiographically. Since the framework identified absorption with this iniquitously dominant cinema, it may have incited Gunning to proclaim that the kinds of cinema he championed, the cinema of attractions and the avant-garde cinema, were free of it; that contemplative absorption was ‘impossible’ for early Kinoptikon and cinematograph spectators, and that they ‘did not get lost in a fictional world’.36 Yet some clearly did.

Present on the platform As we have seen, Gunning links absorption to both fiction and narrative, as well as to the convention of the fourth wall in the theatre and to the new antitheatrical ideals of eighteenth-century French art critics. He evidently regards all of these as standing at the opposite pole from the direct address of the camera he affirms is central to his conception: ‘From a specifically cinematographic point of view, I have always underlined the use of the direct look or gesture at the camera as signaling an attraction.’37 Gunning’s main purpose, of course, is to characterize the cinema of attractions, but I would argue that absorption is a less straightforward and more variegated state than that. Media psychologists have taken considerable interest in absorption, though both terminology and definitions vary quite a bit, as cognitive psychologist and film scholar Ed Tan explains: ‘Absorption is an umbrella term for related experiential states that have been validated in empirical research’; as examples of such states, he mentions narrative engagement and narrative transportation, as well as presence, tele-presence, immersion and flow. In relation to film, ‘absorption involves an extraordinarily intense experience of the imaginary entertainment world’.38 It is worth noting that absorption is defined as something extraordinary, not something that necessarily happens every time we watch a movie or read a book. This way of understanding absorption seems more in line with the everyday experience that while some works may be enormously engaging to us, we find others boring, and that people differ about what is engaging and what is not. If absorption is held to be specifically a function of narrative, as Gunning seems to suggest, then films cannot really be absorbing if they lack developed

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storylines and characters. However, while narrative media have attracted most of the psychologists’ attention, they recognize that similar experiential states occur in other contexts. Ed Tan and several colleagues distinguish aesthetic absorption experiences from more general ones like the flow-state famously described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.39 Among aesthetic absorption experiences, they distinguish narrative ones, where the reader/viewer is engaged by a story and a set of characters, from non-narrative ones, which are ‘experiences with forms such as visual art, music, or “natural” aesthetic objects, for instance a setting sun, that is, anything that could be considered beautiful or aesthetically pleasing’.40 Since many early films have no or only rudimentary narratives, the possibility of non-narrative absorption is obviously very relevant here, and identifying it as a potential response to visual art brings us back to the work of Michael Fried. Charles Musser has revisited Fried’s work in the course of examining a number of examples of absorptive responses to moving pictures in what he calls ‘the novelty era’, the period up to 1897 when the new invention was an attraction in itself.41 Musser notes that Fried makes some distinctions between kinds of absorption that appear useful for understanding the reactions of early cinema spectators. Musser argues that films of picturesque natural sites like waterfalls were often projected as loops, allowing viewers to lose themselves in contemplation the way they might when standing in front of a landscape painting.42 Musser goes on to describe other viewers who would instead imagine themselves inside the picture, drawing here on Stephen Bottomore’s research on the ‘train effect’, which not only includes early spectators imagining being hit by the train on the screen but also accounts of spectators watching films of oncoming waves washing up on the seashore, worrying about getting their feet wet.43 Among the reviews of Pacht’s Kinoptikon, we can find an example in the newspaper Dannebrog, where the reviewer was particularly impressed by Rough Sea at Dover: ‘The illusion here is nearly strong enough to make you feel the urge to go for a little dip.’44 Despite the reservations, the reviewer here imagines standing on Dover Beach, inside the picture. Musser then turns to Michael Fried’s discussion and finds that he links the notion of absorption to two different ways of relating to paintings: The first constructs the beholder as absent (‘the fiction that no one is standing before the canvas’), while in the second the beholder metaphorically enters the world of the painting (‘the fiction of physically entering a painting’), which is to say that the beholder crosses over from his/her space into the world of the painting (or the film).45 Evidently, these two kinds of spectatorial position corresponds to the experi­ ence of the waterfall films and the surf films respectively, and Musser also

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argues that despite their seeming differences, they are, as Fried also shows, closely related. Musser argues that the ‘theatricality’ Gunning associates with the cinema of attractions, involving ‘a presentationalism that was certainly common in early cinema, particularly with short comedies, early trick films, scenes of vaudeville performances, and facial expression films’, occupies ‘a third spectatorial position’, rejecting any simple dichotomies. ‘[E]ven in the novelty era’, Musser concludes, ‘cinema encompassed and mobilized a range of spectatorial positions. Linking cinema in the novelty era to a specific mode of spectatorship seems problematic.’46 The set of early cinema spectatorial positions described by Musser is quite similar to those Mario Slugan arrives at in his book Fiction and Imagination in Early Cinema. Slugan argues that early cinema audiences had a conception of the distinction between fiction and non-fiction quite different from how we tend to think of it today. The theatricality-marked films of acrobats, magicians and other performers would, Slugan argues, be classed as non-fictional by early audiences, even when they feature fantastic sets and imaginary characters. They would be seen simply as documentary recordings of pre-existing stage performances (however insensitive such a view might be to the actual filmmaking ingenuity that went into making them). On the other hand, on Slugan’s account, train films like L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (Arrival of a Train, 1896, Lumière) or Arrival of the Paris Express were seen as fictions. Working from Kendall Walton’s definition of fiction as a kind of make-believe, Slugan argues ingeniously that because the onrushing locomotive bearing down on the spectators prompted them to imagine that it might run over them, the train films were in effect fictions to 1890s audiences. He points out how the reactions consistently use phrases like ‘as if’ that show that these spectators imagined but did not believe that the train was going to hit them.47 Two of the reviews of Pacht’s Kinoptikon describe the ‘train effect’ in connection with the train film (the others simply report variations on ‘you see […] a railway station where the train rolls in’48). One simply states: ‘The train rolls down along the platform, right at the spectators, then stops, while conductors and mailmen run up to open the doors, and the passengers hurry out with English speed and vigor.’49 The other, from Frederiksborg Amts Avis, uses as-if language: In the distance, you see the train come rushing towards you at high speed. There is movement on the platform, the railway staff busily draw near, the porters stand ready, the train approaches more and more with decreasing speed, at the end it is as if it came right at you; then it stops, the doors are flung open, the passengers step out, a lady with a firm grip on her dress pushes her way through, mail-carts roll up – and then it is over.50

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Slugan analyses such accounts of early filmgoing with the aid of concepts developed by analytic philosophers of film, particularly imagined seeing, the notion that the film prompts viewers to imagine that they see the scenes in the film. On the basis on the extensive historical evidence he examines, Slugan concludes that ‘some visual fictions mandated imagining seeing from within the represented site whereas others mandated imagining seeing the same without determining the spectator’s position’.51 Elsewhere, he describes this as the difference between being ‘present within the image’ and being ‘present to the image’.52 This distinction resembles the two kinds of absorption described by Musser. Describing the former kind of film, where spectators imagine themselves to be present inside the depicted world, Slugan (like Musser) refers to Bottomore’s surf film spectators, but his main example are phantom rides, films where the camera has been mounted on the front of the train, prompting spectators to imagine they are travelling on that train. Slugan sees this viewing position as corresponding to the least convincing version of the imagined seeing thesis, what the philosophers call face-to-face imagined seeing, where spectators imagine seeing the fictional scene from within the world of the fiction and from a point corresponding to the place of the camera: ‘According to the Face-to-Face Version, we imagine movie images as objective views of fictional situations perceived from an internal vantage point.’53 With later movies, where the camera constantly shifts position and distance, this is entirely implausible, but Slugan argues that it can be usefully applied to the special case of phantom ride films. The other type of film, where ‘the spectator only imagines to see what is represented without imagining themselves to be on site’, corresponds to the absent-beholder version of absorption described by Musser.54 This is, Slugan argues, the typical mode of spectator engagement with narrative films throughout film history. He also includes the train films here, since the spectators imagined the locomotive coming towards them in their seats in the auditorium, rather than standing on the platform: ‘And this is precisely how the viewers of The Arrival of a Train imagined seeing the train – without imagining themselves being at the station.’55 Slugan thus places imaginative engagement with the onrushing trains of early cinema on a continuum with the imaginative engagement we experience with later narrative films. Slugan’s philosophical inquiry is built on an extensive and careful study of historical documents, and his arguments are thought-provoking, but I am inclined to believe that Koppel’s review somewhat complicates his distinction between two kinds of imagined seeing. He first describes the train coming ‘right down at the spectators’, but then he puts himself inside the picture; unlike Slugan’s viewers of arriving trains, he does imagine himself standing on the platform. However, his visual perspective does not seem tied to the camera’s position: ‘I look

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at her closely’, he writes, suggesting a focusing of attention and a shift away from the distant, expansive view of the whole scene. This seems to me unlike the accounts of the face-to-face variant of imagined seeing that we find in the philosophical literature, because they insist that it means that the spectators imagine themselves in the spot where the camera stands, identifying its and their view.56 Admittedly, Slugan downplays the camera-identification aspect of face-to-face imagined seeing to focus on the notion of ‘being present within the image’,57 but I am concerned that the former remains so ingrained to the philosophical concept that discussing early film spectatorship in terms of imagined seeing raises more questions than it answers. It is nevertheless clear that Koppel uses the flickering images of Pacht’s Kinoptikon to construct an entire imaginary story world with a romantic narrative, revealing the power of the moving image to engage – from the very first – the imagination of the spectator.

Conclusion Valdemar Koppel’s review of the first projected moving picture show in Denmark supports the importance that Mario Slugan has given to imaginative engagement, even if it does not fit exactly within the conception of imagined seeing he advances. It describes a spectator who becomes entirely absorbed by the pictures on the screen, confirming Charles Musser’s argument that this was a frequent response among early moving image spectators. The cinema of attractions remains a useful concept, but it needs to be disentangled from a theoretical framework that remains overly indebted to linguistic categories. While the attractions concept captures something important and essential about early cinema, our framework for understanding the novelty period must be flexible enough to accommodate spectators whom the moving images prompted to construct an imagined fictional world and let themselves become lost in it.

Appendix: ‘Kinoptikon’ by ‘Narcissus’ [Valdemar Koppel] Politiken, 7 June 1896 A kinoptikon is, to speak plainly, only a development of a toy which I remember from my childhood. This toy consisted of a rotating cylinder containing a number of pictures of a horse in different positions, and when you looked through a hole and turned the cylinder, it looked exactly as if it was one and the same horse that moved.

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This toy I owned, I remember, for only one day. We had at the school a very beautiful schoolmistress of whom we were all very fond. Now it so happened that one day when the pretty schoolmistress was sitting and writing marks in our books, I had the idea of climbing up on a chair and kissing her at the back of the neck. I was then 8 years old. The schoolmistress did not mind taking us on her lap and petting us, but she did not like being taken by surprise in this way, and she gave me a bad mark for impertinence. My parents took this as a cause for confiscating the toy with all sorts of indefinite suggestions that I was a shameless young man who was sure to come to no good, and they gave the delightful invention away to a nephew, whereby they saved the expense of a birthday present, but at the same time sowed the seed in me of a distrust in mankind and a pessimism that has never really abated since. The other schoolmistresses I never kissed, as they were ugly. However, since it is not the purpose of this article to write my memoirs, it is best to return to the facts of the matter. That toy, to which so many both sweet and bitter memories have attached themselves in my mind, has later been perfected. Now 900 photographs are taken in one minute. These photographs then form a connected series of pictures which, when reproduced speedily in sequence, show us the photographed scene with all of its details. This is the briefest and clearest explanation of a kinoptikon that I after strenuous pondering have been able to devise. You sit in the dark and stare at a large piece of mounted white canvas. Then it begins. The canvas comes to life, and various urbane scenes are unrolled for us. We find ourselves in the enclosure during the Derby. There are crowds of people. Some stand impassively staring straight ahead, whereupon they sluggishly wander off. Others rush hastily across the track with bank-notes clenched in their hands. Dignified ladies also stroll past with elegant swells eagerly paying court. It is our own lilliputian Hermitage Field [race track], only infinitely more sophisticated and varied. All at once the machine stops. The minute is over, we are not at the Derby, we are sitting in the rooms of the Independent Exhibition in Copenhagen. Another picture. The coastline of an English landscape. The waves crash against the shore. No people or ships are seen; all you see are the waves rolling closer, dissolving into foam that disappears in tiny drops along the seashore. It is delightful and poetic. The picture is just as simple and grand, just as varied in its monotony as the ocean itself. And softly I lose myself in dreams of the summer I spent by the North Sea coast, strolling in the late hours of evening with the young beautiful lady to whom I so often repeated that I loved her that we both believed it in the end. Those were glorious days. Nature is the best of all. But the third picture is again completely different. It is a train trundling ahead, swiftly at first, then with diminishing speed, right down at the spectators. The station-master appears, pompous as all station-masters are. Porters leap up,

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coach-doors are thrown open, ladies and gentlemen climb out, others climb in, the train starts moving again and travels away. And in the window of a first-class compartment stands a lady waving her hand, a delightful young lady with a fine, intelligent face. I look at her closely; I realize that it is my true love, going far away, and that I shall probably never see her again, or if I see her, she will be lost to me, and we greet each other and say a few meaningless words. And I cannot understand at all why she does not jerk on the emergency brake and make the train stop and come down to me, when she sees that I am so utterly sad. But suddenly the electrical machine stops humming, and the pictures are gone. The hall lights up again, the show is over, and I pass into the next room, where Mr. Vilhelm Pacht welcomes the press with a glass of foaming champagne. The drink cools me, my mind clears. It is no joke, after all, having to review a kinoptikon when the heat has reached 30 degrees centigrade. (Translated by Casper Tybjerg)

Notes 1

Tom Gunning, ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator’, in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 123.

2

Charles Musser, ‘A Cinema of Contemplation, a Cinema of Discernment: Spectatorship, Intertextuality and Attractions in the 1890s’, in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Strauven (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 168.

3

Politiken is online at www.politiken.dk (accessed 28 April 2021); all other cited newspapers at www.mediestream.dk (accessed 28 April 2021). All quotations from Danish newspapers have been translated by the author.

4

Dagbladet Politikens honorarprotokoller 1884–1958 og Ekstrabladets honorarprotokoller 1904–1958, Manuscript collection, Royal Library, Copenhagen, Acc. 1994/17, box 14: Politiken: Honorarbog, 11/1895-9/1896, 440.

5

Kunstindeks Danmark, https://www.kulturarv.dk/kid/VisKunstner.do?kunstnerId=2674 (accessed 28 April 2021).

6

Politiken, 8 May 1896.

7

Under different management, it had housed an Edison phonograph parlour from the summer of 1894 to the end of 1895; from Christmas 1895 on, the exhibit also included four Kinetoscopes. For more details, see my forthcoming article, ‘The First Danish Film Shows Revisited’ in Kosmorama (www.kosmorama.org).

8

Eight Copenhagen dailies carried reviews on 7 June: Aftenbladet, Dannebrog, København, Politiken, Social-Demokraten, Dagbladet, Dagens Nyheder and Nationaltidende (the last three were co-owned and published identical reviews). The remaining two dailies, Adresseavisen and Berlingske Tidende, did not have Sunday

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editions and carried reviews on 8 June. Frederiksborg Amts Avis, a major provincial newspaper, had a detailed review on 9 June. 9 ‘Et nyt Panorama’, Social-Demokraten, 7 June 1896. 10 ‘I Københavns Panorama’, advertisement, København, 1 July 1896. 11 John Barnes, The Beginnings of the Cinema in England, 1894–1901, revised and enlarged edn, vol. 1: 1894–6 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1998), 229–66. 12 ‘Kinoptikon’, Aftenbladet, 7 June 1896. 13 Barnes, Beginnings, vol. 1, 247. 14 Deac Rossell, whose discussion of Pacht’s Kinoptikon is the most detailed available in English, argues that Pacht must have bought his apparatus from Acres: Deac Rossell, ‘Quartet: Four Stories of Early Cinema Research’, Early Popular Visual Culture 14, no. 4 (October 2016): 404–8. Since Pacht’s programme included several films he could have bought only from Paul, however, I believe it is more likely that Pacht’s projector was also provided by Paul; see Tybjerg, ‘Revisited’. 15 John Christian Jørgensen, ‘Valdemar Koppel – formfast elegance’, in De elegante: portrætter af elleve danske prosaister (Hellerup: Spring, 2018), 42. 16 Ibid., 43. 17 ‘Enkelte og dobbelte Rejer’ (26 May 1896), ‘Varmen’ (19 June 1896), ‘Kunsten at gaa i Cirkus’ (19 July 1896), ‘I Agurketiden’ (30 July 1896). 18 Valdemar Koppel, Christensen: En Københavners Betragtninger og Tilskikkelser (Copenhagen: E. Jespersens Forlag, [1907]), 10, 12. 19 Gunning, ‘Aesthetic of Astonishment’, 121. 20 Ibid., 123. 21 Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator and the AvantGarde’, in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Strauven (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 384. When Gunning here and in some of his other early writings refers to the cinema of attractions as ‘exhibitionist’ in character, he draws on the vocabulary of psychoanalytic film theory to describe its difference from the classical narrative cinema, said to be based on ‘voyeurism’. Today, however, the Lacan-inspired theoretical framework underlying the importation of these terms into film theory has been thoroughly discredited, and I do not think it is essential to Gunning’s concept of the cinema of attractions. Indeed, the words ‘exhibitionism’ and ‘exhibitionist’ are absent from all Gunning’s more recent cinema of attractions articles, including the retrospective article, ‘Attractions: How They Came into the World’, in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded; as well as ‘Lunar Illuminations: A Trip to the Moon (1902)’, in Film Analysis: A Norton Reader, ed. Jeffrey Geiger and R. L. Rutsky (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2005); ‘1902–1903: Movies, Stories, and Attractions’, in American Cinema, 1890–1909: Themes and Variations, ed. André Gaudreault (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009); and ‘Rendre la vue étrange: l’attraction continue du cinéma des attractions’, introduction, in Viva Paci, La machine à voir: à propos de cinéma, attraction, exhibition (Villeneuve-d’Ascq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2012). 22 Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attraction[s]’, 384. This is a reprint showing the changes from the first version of the article, ‘The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde’, Wide Angle 8, no. 3–4 (1986), to the expanded

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version, ‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde’, in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (London: BFI, 1990). 23 Gunning, ‘Aesthetic of Astonishment’, 123; citing Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988 [1980]), particularly 64, 104. In his 1991 book D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film, Gunning similarly notes: ‘My concept of absorption in film is indebted to Michael Fried’s treatment of eighteenth-century French painting’; D. W. Griffith and the Origin of the American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 287 n.19. 24 Gunning, ‘Aesthetic of Astonishment’, 123, 132 n.19. 25 Gunning, ‘Lunar Illuminations’, 72. 26 Tom Gunning, ‘The Whole Town’s Gawking: Early Cinema and the Visual Experience of Modernity’, The Yale Journal of Criticism 7, no. 2 (1994): 190. 27 Nick Browne, ‘The Spectator-in-the-Text: The Rhetoric of Stagecoach’, Film Quarterly 29, no. 2 (1975): 36. 28 James Fiumara, ‘Electrocuting an Elephant at Coney Island: Attraction, Story, and the Curious Spectator’, Film History 28, no. 1 (2016): 50. 29 Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1964), 7. Emphasis added. Cf. Poe’s tale: ‘I gave up, at length, all care of things within the hotel, and became absorbed in contemplation of the scene without.’ Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Man of the Crowd’, in Tales of Mystery and Imagination (London: Dent (Everyman’s Library), 1981), 102. 30 Gunning, ‘Rendre la vue étrange’, 20–2. 31 Mario Slugan, ‘The Rhetorics of Interpretation and Žižek’s Approach to Film’, Slavic Review 72, no. 4 (2013): 739; citing Émile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1973). 32 Gunning, ‘Rendre la vue étrange’, 21. 33 David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (London: Methuen, 1985), 21–6. 34 Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton et al. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982), 91. 35 Christian Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film, trans. Cormac Deane (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2016), 144. Emphasis added. 36 Gunning, ‘Aesthetic of Astonishment’, 123, 121. 37 Gunning, ‘Rendre la vue étrange’, 21. 38 Ed S. Tan, ‘Media Entertainment and Emotions’, ed. Jon F. Nussbaum, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), subsection ‘Absorption and Kindred States’, sections 1–2, https://oxfordre.com/ communication/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.001.0001/acrefore9780190228613-e-519 (accessed 8 November 2021). 39 Moniek M. Kuijpers et al., ‘Towards a New Understanding of Absorbing Reading Experiences’, in Narrative Absorption, ed. Frank Hakemulder et al. (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2017), 33; citing Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1990).

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40 Kuijpers et al., ‘Towards a New Understanding’, 33. 41 Charles Musser, ‘Rethinking Early Cinema’, 400–1. 42 Musser, ‘Cinema of Contemplation’, 162–3. 43 Ibid., 166–7; citing Stephen Bottomore, ‘The Panicking Audience?: Early Cinema and the “Train Effect”’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio & Television 19, no. 2 (June 1999): 186, 212–13. 44 ‘Levende Fotografier’, Dannebrog, 7 June 1896. 45 Musser, ‘Cinema of Contemplation’, 169; quoting Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, 108, 118. 46 Musser, ibid., 169–70. 47 Mario Slugan, Fiction and Imagination in Early Cinema: A Philosophical Approach to Film History (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 34–6. 48 ‘Kinoptikon: Levende Billeder’, København, 7 June 1896. 49 ‘Levende Fotografier’, Dannebrog, 7 June 1896. Emphasis added. 50 ‘Den nyeste. Fotografiens Triumf. Levende Billeder’, Frederiksborg Amts Avis, 9 June 1896. Emphasis added. In order to render this passage into reasonably idiomatic English, I have used ‘you’ rather than ‘one’ to translate the Danish indefinite third person singular man (similar to man in German). 51 Slugan, Fiction and Imagination, 96. 52 Ibid., 78. 53 George M. Wilson, Seeing Fictions in Film: The Epistemology of Movies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 51. 54 Slugan, Fiction and Imagination, 79. 55 Ibid. 56 See, e.g., Gregory Currie, Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 170–9; Wilson, Seeing Fictions, 36–40. 57 Slugan, Fiction and Imagination, 78. Emphasis in original.

PART TWO

APPROACHES, METHODS AND SOURCES

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5 REVISITING THE FICTION/NON-FICTION DISTINCTION: EARLY CINEMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IMAGINATION Mario Slugan

When watching Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 Uncle Tom’s Cabin we nowadays say that we are watching a fiction film. Among other things, we say that we see Eliza escaping over a frozen river or Legree beating Uncle Tom to death. We are far less inclined to say – as contemporaries regularly did – that we are watching an actuality film whose subject is the theatrical performance of various episodes from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel of the same name. We certainly do not categorize the film as an actuality. But why? Why do we opt to call this film an actuality only when pressed to admit the fact that all non-manipulated analogue photographic films are visual documents of whatever was in front of a camera? A few months after the premiere of Porter’s film, for instance, one reviewer described Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a film recording of William H. Brady’s theatre production of the novel: ‘Edison, the inventor of the moving picture machines, suggested to Mr. Brady the advisability of having films made of this mammoth production.’1 For the film’s contemporaries, it seems, it would take as much convincing to regard Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a fiction film as it would for us to take it as non-fiction. Our default engagement with the film in question, in other words, has shifted from non-fiction to fiction over the years. This is no isolated incident. Take Georges Méliès’ La Lune à un mètre (The Astronomer’s Dream or the Man in the Moon, 1898). To us this is even a better

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example of a fiction film representing an astronomer whose observation of the moon turns into a series of fantastical mishaps. Next to such a fantastical storyline there is an extensive use of a trick technique specific to film – substitution splicing – so from a present-day perspective it seems unclear how one would even go about denying the film’s fictional status. It again turns out, however, that the turn of the nineteenth century audiences did precisely that, seen the film as ‘a life motion picture reproduction of a celebrated French spectacular piece’.2 For them, even the most fantastical trick films could primarily be recordings of stage magic. At this point we might start to wonder what would need to happen for a representational work of art based on photographic reproductions of actual objects to be construed as a fictional work in its own right. Both traditional film history and New Cinema History have mostly taken the categories of fiction and non-fiction for granted. For traditional film history the dichotomy was exemplified by Méliès’ trick films and the Lumière brothers’ actualities. Under this model, Siegfried Kracauer, for instance, writes: ‘The films they [Lumière and Méliès] made embody, so to speak, thesis and antithesis in a Hegelian sense.’3 Although New Cinema History downplayed the fiction/ non-fiction dichotomy by focusing on the attractions common to many early motion pictures and perceived some early cinema genres as characterized by ontological hybridity, it did not question the initial categorization. Méliès’ trickfilms and the Lumière brothers’ train films continue to be categorized as fictions and non-fictions, respectively. The underlying idea of this chapter is that the inquiry into the nature of fiction which builds on theories from philosophical aesthetics can reveal a lot about early cinema that has been overlooked by existing models. It is undeniable that new film history has been instrumental in criticizing theories of film spectatorship that have often conflated the notions of fiction and illusion to argue that the condition of spectatorship is one of constant vacillation between being aware that one is only watching a film and confusing what the film represents for reality. Yet by continuing to invoke the notions of ‘suspension of disbelief’ and ‘diegetic illusion’ when speaking of fiction, New Cinema History continues to obscure the fact that it is not illusion or dis/belief that is constitutive of fiction. This essential place should be, instead, yielded to imagination or make-believe. Building on the argument that the philosopher of art Kendall L. Walton makes in his seminal work I intend to demonstrate just that.4 Since Walton’s monograph there has been a virtual consensus among philosophers of art that imagination is the defining trait of fiction.5 Kathleen Stock, for instance, cites Walton as ‘the cornerstone of this literature outlining positions that set the discursive agenda for years to follow’.6 Put most succinctly, fiction, according to Walton, is a subclass of imaginings or make-believes where makebelieve is an attitude taken towards a certain state of affairs, i.e. it is the imagining that a certain state of affairs obtains. Unlike beliefs, which are either true or

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false, questions of veracity are irrelevant for make-believes. Make-believes, by contrast, are either ‘mandated’ or not. Regardless of whether games of makebelieve occur in our mind, through performance, on screen, on paper, etc., they constitute fiction if they are mandated. Generally, the implicit rule in engaging representational works is that we are mandated to imagine whatever is represented in the work. In one scene from Psycho, for instance, we are mandated to make-believe Norman Bates talking to Marion Crane using the recorded images and sounds of Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh. But in the case of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and La Lune à un mètre we have seen that the earliest audiences did not imagine seeing Uncle Tom or the astronomer on screen despite them arguably being represented there. They instead understood the image as a ‘documentational’ recording of (magic) theatre performers rather than as a prop for make-believe. Why? And if so, why not also treat Psycho only as a recording of Anthony Perkins make-believing to be Norman Bates? In other words, where do the mandates for imagining come from? Why treat only the pro-filmic as a prop for make-believe and not the recording itself? Walton’s theory says little on this matter.7 This is where the study of early cinema comes in. Early cinema is clearly a challenge for philosophical aesthetics as much as it once presented a challenge for film history. At the same time, much like early cinema offered a unique way for rethinking cinema overall, early cinema can also allow us new insights into the nature of fiction. The article proposes that because of its relative youth and the availability of the material surrounding its advent, cinema presents an exceptional opportunity for understanding how a representational medium becomes employed in the production of fictions. Today, with archives making their collections available online for researchers worldwide we can more easily than ever see the earliest films, read contemporary reports by audiences, peruse trade press accounts, identify advertising strategies, analyse catalogue descriptions of early films and reconstruct their exhibition contexts. This abundance of paratextual material is regularly neglected by philosophers and yet it goes a long way in accounting for how Walton’s mandates get off the ground in the first place. Once fiction is understood as mandated imaging, we can also begin to understand numerous aspects of early film history from a new angle. For instance, we can start to appreciate the overlooked role imagination played in the earliest screenings of train films. In other words, it is not only that films like Uncle Tom’s Cabin and La Lune à un mètre migrated from non-fiction to fiction over the years, transitions also went in the opposite direction. As I shall argue, many of the earliest train films were in fact both billed and perceived as fictional films insofar they mandated imaginings about trains bursting through the screen and into the auditorium or about spectators riding those very trains.

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Are there textual criteria for fictionality? As Charlie Keil reminds us, film historians used to regularly cite the films of the Lumière brothers and George Méliès as incontestable evidence of the existence of two competing tendencies since the earliest days of cinema – fiction and nonfiction.8 More precisely, they distinguished between fiction and documentary (a category narrower than non-fiction film), but given that the key trait of documentaries for these historians was precisely their non-fictional nature, it was the fiction/non-fiction binary opposition that organized these histories. New cinema historians have, undoubtedly, provided numerous insights into film history. When it comes to the categorization of fiction/non-fiction, however, they have retained the emphasis on textual features. In their introduction to American Cinema from 1890–1909 Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault, for instance, distinguish between fiction films and actualities (understood as early non-fiction film) based on their content. Whereas actualities depict everyday events, acrobatic feats, views of various locales, etc., fiction films include trick films, gag comedies, chase films, etc.9 This is typical of other contributors to the volume as well as of the more detailed typology in The Encyclopedia of Early Cinema.10 Even the author of a rare detailed discussion of fiction in early cinema – Keil – is only sceptical about the applicability of the Lumière/Méliès dichotomy to the whole of early cinema and its definability in terms of content. In the case of L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (The Arrival of a Train, 1897)11 and Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon, 1902) he, however, does not dispute ‘[t]he obvious differences between the engine of steam and steel pulling into Ciotat station and the cardboard rocket hurtling toward a papier-mâché moon’.12 Keil continues: ‘we can distinguish fiction films from nonfiction by the means of presentation rather than by content’.13 In other words, it is not about what the film represents but how the film represents it (mise-en-scène, camera angle, distance, etc.). So, it is less about the difference between an everyday event and a fantastical exploration of celestial bodies and more about the on-location shooting of a train as opposed to the use of theatrical props and film tricks. Even under this modification, however, the criteria for whether something is fiction or not remain exclusively textual.14 But there is nothing internal to the two motion pictures that would allow us to classify L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat as non-fiction and Le Voyage dans la Lune as fiction. If we are to approach the Lumière film simply on the terms of its representational content and technique, what is to preclude us from taking it as a film depicting an arrival of, say, an undercover agent (hidden somewhere in the disembarking crowd) to a foreign town? Somebody sharing Keil’s view might point out that in virtue of its presentation the whole scene comes across as unstaged or, to put it in

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Gunning’s terms, that it exhibits the ‘view’ aesthetic – a standard trait of nonfiction.15 Given that the film elicits an impression of an everyday train arrival with people going about their daily business we must be dealing with non-fiction. But this would imply that no fiction film can make use of non-scripted performances and on-location shooting, and that is patently false. Another objection might be that there is clearly a moment when one of the disembarking passengers looks at the camera and then quickly leaves the shot, most probably because the cameraman had asked him to do so. But how does this preclude us from engaging the film as, say, a fiction about a cameraman who has had the bad luck of somebody ruining his shot? In other words, there is no reason a fiction film could not employ any or all stylistic features usually connected with documentaries – actual locations, use of non-actors as characters, minimal or no staging, etc. The same applies for the features and presentation techniques of the broader category of non-fiction which may include the elimination of narrative structures and representational form.16 In the case of Méliès’ film we are faced with an obverse predicament. There is undeniably a fictional story about a certain expedition to the moon that can be inferred from watching the film. There are, moreover, images of entities which clearly represent objects and agents non-existent at the time: flying rockets, humanoid Moon inhabitants and an anthropomorphic moon just to name a few. We need not, however, immediately take this as a sign that we are dealing with a fiction film. The fact remains that all the images cited are photographic reproductions of some actual objects. Much like it is possible to entertain a photographic image of a unicorn as essentially a photographic reproduction of a horse with a horn attached to its head, it is also reasonable to think of a Moon person on screen as an actor dressed up in a suit in front of a camera. The introduction of temporal dimension in film in contrast to photography and the articulation of a narrative does not necessarily mandate any imaginings either. The above unicorn is still just a horse with an artificial horn attached, albeit it is now galloping around. In other words, no internal trait of the film stops us from engaging Le Voyage dans la Lune simply as a recording of dressed up actors playing certain characters across different stage-sets and scenes, a point that André Bazin has made?17 And why not simply take the shots of the cardboard rocket and the papier-mâché moon as documents of how everyday material can be used to prompt imaginings of all sorts? The idea of cinema as ‘canned theatre’ used primarily to dismiss cinema as art in the early twentieth century certainly allows for this approach. An answer to these semi-rhetorical questions might be that, following Keil’s logic about the key role of presentation techniques in determining (non-)fictional status, Méliès’ film is not really an instance of ‘canned theatre’, and not even an instance of ‘canned magic theatre’ because there are clearly film specific effects in it. After all, the idea of ‘canned magic theatre’ has been criticized for decades

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by scholars such as Jacques Malthête.18 First, there are numerous occasions of antagonists simply disappearing from the shots clearly accomplished by means of substitution splicing. Moreover, multiple exposure plays a key role at least in the shot in which the rocket plunges from the moon back to the earth and the ocean. Finally, some prints of the film were hand-coloured so at least in some versions there are objects other than those reproduced by the camera that contribute to the representational content. Allow me to address these concerns in order. 1) The use of substitution splicing does not change the fact that the shots across the splice are of actual objects – the first with the actor dressed up as a Moon inhabitant and the second without him. Nothing changes as far as the option to engage the film as a recording of actual people participating in a game of make-believe about a mission to the moon. Though the technique can certainly aid us in imagining that hitting a Moon person over the head with an umbrella will make him disappear, we are still perfectly free to regard the scene as a great example of how actors are able to stand perfectly still as one of them departs the shot and then continues performing once the cameraman has started shooting again. 2) Multiple exposure presents no problem for similar reasons. Again, it is from actual objects that the photographic images are derived – that they are composed into a single image only documents how film can make it look like a rocket is falling into an ocean, though from our perspective it is really a matter of juxtaposing a cardboard rocket against a stock footage of the sea and then having the former move towards the lower edge of the frame as the shot progresses. In other words, we can treat this as a combination of stop-motion animation and multiple exposure. 3) The colour, admittedly, is not a result of shooting anything in front of the camera but a matter of adding pigments onto the filmstrip itself. Moreover, it is undeniable that, as Gunning and Joshua Yumibe have explained, colour in early cinema was used for fantastical effects and as an attraction in itself more often than for realistic reproduction.19 But this does not change much: we as viewers still have the possibility to treat colour as means for a more accurate representation of how the actual sets looked like. Given that the technology of the time did not allow for satisfactory colour reproduction, hand-painted additions are here to help us see, for instance, what the colours of dresses the actors wore actually were. In other words, we are still in the realm of Keil’s presentation techniques. Returning to the point about L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, in the same sense that fiction films are free to use any stylistic features characteristic of non-fiction, non-fiction may capitalize on any stylistic traits typical of fiction films. To recapitulate, the argument is not that Le Voyage dans la Lune is an instance of ‘canned magic theatre’ – the range of filmic methods employed in the production of the film make such a claim patently false. Rather, the point

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is that the nature of the recorded image always allows us to focus on the profilmic and articulate the image as a recording of the pro-filmic while downplaying or fully dismissing any further fictional representations that the pro-filmic might instantiate. The discourse on ‘canned magic theatre’ was only one historical form of such emphasis on the pro-filmic. At the same time, our ability to engage any object as a prop in a game of make-believe makes it possible to, based on textual features alone, treat even recordings such as L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat as fictions. The lesson then is that textual information (content and/or presentational techniques) on its own cannot reveal the (non-)fictional status of photographic film. What we need to figure out, therefore, is where does the mandate to imagine something based on what is presented to us come from? Under what conditions is the recording itself, rather than the performance recorded, taken as a prop for certain imaginings? In other words, how did it come about that we do virtually automatically treat Le Voyage dans la Lune as fiction and L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat as non-fiction?

Extra-textual criteria of fictionality What, then, is this additional extra-textual information that is necessary for attributing (non-)fictional status? Analytic philosophers have suggested that the key extra-textual information in this context is the authorial one (where the author is usually understood as the director in the case of cinema). According to Noël Carroll, for instance, a film is a work of fiction if the author intends the audience to imagine whatever the film represents.20 The obverse claim that the film is non-fiction if the author does not intend the audience to imagine anything about the film is also shared by other notable theorists such as Trevor Ponech and Carl Plantinga.21 The proposal seems enticing because determining authorial intentions about whether the author categorizes her film as fiction or non-fiction is relatively easily accomplished by looking at the film’s title, its generic specifications in TV guides and specialized internet portals, interviews, press releases, promotional campaigns and the likes. The problems arise, however, when it becomes clear that the intentionalist model for film is merely a special case of these philosophers’ views on fiction. In other words, a representation is fiction according to this model if its author intends the audience to imagine whatever is represented. Otherwise, it is non-fiction. For instance, Oliver Twist is a fictional work because Charles Dickens intended it to be fictional and not because there never existed such a boy like Oliver. Similarly, A People’s History of the United States is not fictional because Howard Zinn did not intend the audience to take it as fictional.

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This general model fails to accommodate the status of some crucial cultural texts such as mythologies, however. Consider Hesiod’s Theogony, i.e. the genealogy of the birth of the gods, from c. 700 bce. For us, Greek mythology with Theogony as one of its most comprehensive accounts is clearly a body of fiction. It would be reasonable to assume, however, that for Hesiod the history of the gods (though not necessarily fact) was a matter of belief rather than makebelieve. Over the years it became apparent that gods do not belong to the class of actually existing entities. But according to the intentionalist model this makes Theogony a work of non-fiction. The intentionalists could resolve this counterintuitive result by emphasizing that their definition of (non-)fiction is normative so later imaginative engagements with a text that was initially intended as non-fiction do not matter at all. But this hardly gets at the notion of how fiction is ordinarily construed. Normative definitions of ordinary language phenomena cannot be supported by the mere fact that they make categorization relatively easy. If they diverge substantially from how the phenomenon is usually construed, then they need to provide better reasons for the proposed redefinition. Though conceding on the matter of fiction in general the intentionalists might point out that demonstrating that texts can migrate across boundaries between fiction and non-fiction does not evince that films can do the same. Therefore, so long as there is no proof of the latter the intentionalist model is still applicable at least to cinema. Let us consider this objection by looking at numerous early cinema productions based on the Bible.22 Given the American and European early twentieth-century cultural and religious context it is safe to assume that for the greatest majority of filmmakers working at the turn of the century the Bible was a matter of belief rather than make-believe. Following this logic most, if not all, Passion Plays constitute non-fiction. Siegmund Lubin, for instance, the producer of one of the earliest Passion Plays – Passion Play (1898) – and a convert to Christianity from Judaism introduces his film and the accompanying lecture he himself penned by clearly articulating the intention to present the true story of Jesus Christ as recorded by the Holy Scripture: A brief, clear and vivid narrative of the birth, life, sufferings and death of our Lord Jesus Christ is here presented under the title of THE PASSION PLAY, which has not alone proven beneficial to the young in Bible classes, but has served to impress on the minds of all who are interested a better knowledge and clearer knowledge of Holy Scripture.23 But with the waning of Christianity throughout the twentieth century (which is essentially no different than growing out of mythology be it Greek, Polynesian, Judeo-Christian or otherwise) we can say that at this point a great number of people, myself included, can perfectly legitimately call these works instances

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of fiction. At the very least, the intentionalists must admit that there is place for transformation of non-fiction to fiction even in cinema. If a text intended as non-fictional can migrate into the fictional domain then clearly (non-)fiction must be a category that hinges on something different than authorial intentions. The best way to approach fiction, therefore, is institutionally. Rather than privileging the intentions we should look at the nexus of production, promotion, exhibition and reception to establish how each of these nodal points contributes to the formation of (non-)imaginative engagement with film. This is particularly important for early cinema when disclaimers like ‘All persons fictitious’ or labels such as ‘documentary’ and ‘fiction’ were not yet in circulation. In other words, though nowadays we most often know well in advance to what category the film we are going to see belongs to, we cannot assume that the same institutional framework was in place during the earliest days of cinema. Let us, therefore, consider in order what information production, promotion, reception and exhibition contexts reveal as far as the intended and actual beliefs, disbeliefs and make-believes early cinema audiences entertained when it comes to two canonical early genres – train and trick films.

Early cinema discourse on fiction and non-fiction The underdeterminacy of early genre classification I have argued that the crucial way in which we nowadays determine whether something is fiction or not is by checking to which existing category the film is assigned to. If we go to see a horror or a comedy we know that we are watching fiction. If we are interested in the latest documentary we are watching non-fiction. In those minority instances when we are confused with what we have seen, as for instance with why every episode of the first season of the TV show Fargo (2014–) opens with a superimposed text stating ‘This is a true story’, then we might query the Internet Movie Database, Rotten Tomatoes, Wikipedia or some other source to resolve the matter. Do early catalogues provide comparable guidance? The shortest answer would be: no. The earliest catalogues classify moving pictures more according to their length than in terms of some generic categories. For instance, Maguire and Bauccus’ catalogue of Edison Films dated 20 January 1897 primarily distinguishes between 50- and 150-foot motion pictures, and only within the 50-foot category does it separate the ‘New Niagara Falls Series’ from ‘New Subjects’.24 Among the latter Black Diamond Express is, for instance, side by side with thematically as varied moving images as Governor’s Guard,

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Cock Fight or Surf Scene. The Prestwich Manufacturing Company catalogue from the next year does something similar by distinguishing between ‘P’, ‘S’ and ‘W’ series according to film lengths.25 This practice is already on its way out by the end of the year for Warwick Trading Company’s catalogue from 1897–8 includes distinct categories for both train – ‘Railway Pictures’ and ‘Panoramas’ (which also include views from boats) – and trick films – ‘Robert-Houdin Films’.26 Even here both types of motion pictures are also listed under other categories, so a moving picture like the Arrival of an Excursion Train appears in a general untitled category and another like The Conjurer among ‘Humorous Subjects’.27 Nevertheless, the groundwork for the categorization of early film genre is set. By 1900 the categories become more robust. In American Vitagraph Company’s catalogue we find trick films, including The Astronomer’s Dream; or, The Man in the Moon under ‘New Magical Subjects’ as opposed to ‘Comedy Subjects’.28 Though train films such as The Brockville Disaster (‘Realistic Reproduction of the Great English Railway Disaster’)29 still appear under ‘Miscellaneous Subjects’, by at least July the next year there is a separate ‘Trains’ category in the Edison Manufacturing Company’s catalogue.30 The ‘Mystical’ category also appears in the same catalogue.31 The Warwick Trading Company has by then refined its categorization to distinguish numerous subjects including ‘Railway Subjects’ and ‘Panorama from Moving Train, Steamer, and Tram’, on the one hand, and ‘Magical and Trick Series’, on the other.32 By 1902 the two categories would prove quite stable as they appeared in American Mutoscope and Biograph Company’s catalogue with descriptions of the categories themselves.33 The persistence of the same categories at the time can also be tracked in other catalogues, including those by Lubin Manufacturing Company,34 Selig Polyscope Company,35 R. W. Paul36 and Hepworth Company.37 These categories on their own, however, do not specify whether films belonging to them are fiction or not. Consider American Mutoscope and Biograph Company’s account of their train film, i.e. ‘Railroads’: The Biograph has always been famous for its railroad views. The greatest sensation ever produced in moving pictures is our wonderful picture of the Empire State Express, the celebrated train of the New York Central & Hudson River Railroad. Our cameras, working at a speed of from 30 to 40 pictures a second, have a capacity for this class of work which has not to be found in smaller machines. We have covered the picturesque side of railroading all over the civilized world, and we point with pride to the completeness and comprehensiveness of our list. We have travelled in special cars from the Atlantic to the Pacific, all over Great Britain and the Continent; we have the armoured train on the South African Veldt, and the daily express arriving at Shanghai, China. A large proportion of these stereoscopic views have a stereoscopic value which must be seen to be appreciated.38

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On first inspection, this looks like a description of an actuality genre which mandates no imaginings whatsoever. A variety of factual trains are listed as constituting the category as well as countries in which these views are taken. The point appears to be illustrative – to provide a veridical representation of the subject matter. This, however, paints only half of the picture. Consider the reference to the Empire State Express (1897) as the ‘greatest sensation ever produced in motion pictures’. It is the image of this very train that accompanies the company’s 1901 Age of Movement publication which replicates the mandategenerating description from 1897: An express train traveling at the rate of a mile a minute is seen approaching, a mere spec in the distance. On it comes! ’Tis here!! Going by!!! Gone!!!! All with the vividness of reality, and so realistic that it does not require a great stretch of imagination to hear the roar and feel the breeze it makes.39 With this context in mind it can be as easily said that train films are about imagining the presence of the train in one way or another. In other words, the description of the category of train films as it appears is, on its own, underdetermined as far as decisions about the status of fiction in it are concerned. We need to look in more detail into promotion and reception of these films. The explanation of the trick film from the same company’s 1902 catalogue provides no better guidance: To take a good trick picture requires long experience, the best of properties, and the greatest care in photographic manipulation. We have been so long in the business that we feel justified in claiming that our work along this line is unequalled. Our list of subjects is full of good things, and the comedy element will be found to be largely predominating. A trick picture that gets a laugh is doubly good, and we have worked on the theory that the public is more interested in mirthful magic than in mere mystery.40 It is true that it is suggested that tricks are filmic rather than a part of stagecraft – and many film descriptions go on to explain the nature of the trick. But that does not guarantee any mandates for imaginings on their own if magical illusion remains the context. Films in this category like Demolishing and Building up the Star Theatre evince the point. There the trick is in making an exposure every four minutes, eight hours a day and then playing the film in reverse. That ‘the effect is very extraordinary’ can be simply understood as incredible rather than mandating imaginings.41 It is true that the comedy element is emphasized as particularly important of this category but on its own again this element again cannot determine either fiction or non-fiction. In other words, much like in the

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‘Railroads’ category we need to move beyond the generic description, i.e. into the accounts of specific films to gauge whether the film in question was construed as fiction or not. Thus, for instance, although both are in the same trick category, Sherlock Holmes Baffled is presented as fictional story about the famous detective,42 but A Mermaid Dance is not, i.e. it is described as a clever use of composite photography of a dancer and an aquarium scene.43 We could say then that although the labels of trick and train films clearly constitute some of the earliest film genres, unlike most of the modern genres their instances are not to be found exclusively on one or the other side of the line demarcating fiction and non-fiction.

L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, train films and phantom rides Turning to specific films, Stephen Bottomore’s discussion of what Yuri Tsivian has termed the ‘the train effect’, i.e. ‘an anxious or panicky reaction to films of approaching vehicles’, most notably its appendix 2, presents us with an unparalleled wealth of contemporary sources addressing the earliest screenings of numerous films depicting various vehicles rushing towards the camera.44 Bottomore demonstrated that although some contemporary reports describing the audience as flinching or even screaming certainly exist, it is only a decade or two later that these would be exaggerated into what would constitute the founding myth of cinema – the terrifying effect of cinema’s hyper-realism. Focusing on contemporary reports, Bottomore has made use of the perceptual phenomenon known as the ‘looming effect’ and Tsivian’s notion of ‘a viewer with untrained cognitive habits’ to explain audience’s panicky reactions without resorting to the idea that the audiences actually believed that they were faced with an onrushing vehicle. In this section I wish to build on Tsivian’s and Bottomore’s exemplary work by drawing attention to a recurrent theme in contemporary accounts they do not systematically address – the role of imagination – and propose an alternative account of ‘the train effect’. In other words, I will propose that for the very earliest audience moving pictures such as L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat presented instances of fiction insofar they were regularly seen as mandating imaginings about the onrushing vehicle and one’s spatial placement in relation to it. Conversely, films like Un homme de têtes (The Four Troublesome Heads, 1898) and on occasions even Le Voyage dans la Lune were plausibly perceived as recordings of theatrical performances, rather than fictions onto themselves. Paradigmatic examples of early train films – L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, Empire State Express, The Haverstraw Tunnel (1897) – are nowadays regularly cited as proto-documentaries. Yet producers and reviewers habitually

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promoted and described these films as inviting imaginative engagement. To put it in terms of Walton’s mandated make-believe, the contemporary accounts of these films (reviews, promotional materials, catalogue entries, exhibition settings) effectively spell out the mandate for make-believe at a time when the institution of cinema was in its becoming. I have already written about the invitation to imagine hearing and feeling the Empire State Express rush by. Another example concerns the publicity product for Cinématographe Lumière and L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat – an illustrated dinner plate.45 The illustration depicts an amazed audience looking at the onrushing projected train with the caption ‘one would think that it’s true’ (‘on croirait que c’est vrai’). Conditional mood is, of course, a way in which language articulates counterfactual imagining. In other words, the plate invites the audience to imagine that the train is rushing straight at the spectator. Yet another example is 1896 poster by Louis Abel-Truchet for Cinématographe Lumière as well. The railway is represented as protruding which invites the audience to imagine that the train is going to exit the screen and enter the auditorium. And indeed, the audiences responded in kind. Consider one of the most widely cited accounts of contemporary screening of L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat – Maxim Gorky’s: It speeds right at you—watch out! It seems as though it will plunge into the darkness in which you sit, turning you into a ripped sack full of lacerated flesh and splintered bones.46 The assertion with which the paragraph opens and the subsequent imperative certainly present the train as a danger. The graphic description at the end of the paragraph undeniably brings the threat home. The menace is not only visceral but murderous. Notice, however, that these rhetorical strategies are essentially qualified with the phrase ‘it seems as though’. This phrase serves less as a description of the looming effect than a sign of the imaginative mode underlying the whole passage. Nothing is actually going to plunge into the darkness. Nobody is actually going to be ripped into a thousand pieces. You need not actually watch out. Rather, you are supposed to entertain the prospect of a dreadful crash. You are invited to ruminate the contact with the implacable steel and your limbs as they are shred to pieces. You are asked to ponder the spectacle of your mangled body in the locomotive’s awful wake. In other words, you are invited to imagine that the train will break out of the screen destroying everything in its path with you in front. And this is why the description of the impossible consequences is so vivid. It is less an account of an actual threat than a prop for entertaining the most terrifying threat imaginable. In other words, Gorky is conveying in words the specific mandate for imaginings he finds to be present in the film.

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In fact, Gorky is feeding into the sensationalist press Ben Singer demonstrated to be already in wide circulation at the turn of the century exaggerating all sorts of possible (though improbable) urban catastrophes, with traffic and train accidents as their prime examples.47 The exhibition context of moving pictures that Bottomore is addressing could, therefore, easily prompt imaginings which take loss of life and limb as their subject matter. A particularly infamous train derailment did take place in Montparnasse in Paris just two months prior to the premiere of Lumière films at Grand Café when a train broke through the station wall and plummeted on the street below killing a pedestrian. One railway operator described another accident that almost took place like this: ‘For a moment I pictured the awful horrors of such a calamity, listened to the walls and shrieks of the mangled and dying, and saw in imagination the crushed and bloody corpses intermingled with the debris of that terrible wreck.’48 This is why the ‘thinking’ at the end of the following quote describing the screening of The Arrival of the Paris Express (1896) in Britain easily stands for actually imagining those very things: In the distance there is some smoke, then the engine of the express is seen, and in a few seconds the train rushes in so quickly that, in common with the most of the people in the front row of the stalls, I shift uneasily in my seat and think of railway accidents.49 Much like Gorky, this anonymous reviewer cannot help but imagine all sorts of terrors the train on the screen could cause. Here we can also see more clearly how it is in fact imagining the accident rather than experiencing the looming effect that prompts one to fidget nervously. The reviewer does not simply automatically shift in his seat but does so with time to conjure up an image of a train wreck in his mind. Equivalents to Gorky’s ‘it seems as though’ phrase – which evinces the role of imagination in the earliest audiences’ engagement with the film – can be also found in reports about both Lumières’ and other train films. In the first case, in the then leading Parisian magazine L’Illustration Félix Regnault writes: ‘The locomotive appears small at first, then immense, as if it were going to crush the audience.’50 President of the Vienna Photographic Society, Ottomar Volkmer, commented: ‘At last the train arrives, the locomotive appears tremendous; it seems as if it were going to run into the spectators.’51 Upon seeing the film, Méliès, similarly, writes to a friend: ‘ … the train dashes towards us, as if about to leave the screen and land in the hall’.52 A British reviewer of the cinématographe writes in the same vein: One of the most startling pictures is that of a railway station. You see the people hanging around the platform, and then all at once business is jerked into them. The train comes dashing along as if it were going to take a header

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right into the middle of the audience, and the people hurry and skurry for their seats in a most amusing manner.53 An account of an American Mutoscope and Biograph Company train films reads: ‘[the train] approaches at a fearful speed and appears as though it were going to burst from the picture into the audience.’54 In all these accounts ‘as if’ and ‘as though it were’ play the same role as Gorky’s ‘as though’. They all express a hypothetical stance in which the spectators are well aware that the train is not going to burst into the auditorium, yet they entertain it as a possibility. In entertaining a counterfactual possibility, they are essentially imagining an alternative state of affairs. In other words, they are playing a game of make-believe with the image of the train as a prop.55 An emphasis on imagining as the main (though not exclusive) cause of fright and even screaming is given in the following report of the screening of the Empire State Express in the US as well: Suddenly the Empire State Express looms in sight way off in the distance and comes steaming towards you—right dead at you at full speed. It makes even unimaginative person kind of shiver and wish he could get off to one side, but women—it scares them to death. Two ladies who were in the box last night screamed and fainted.56 The suggestion is that although the experience is visceral even for the unimaginative viewers (which could be explained in terms of the looming effect), the most intensive effect is afforded to those who engage the recording imaginatively. The full force of the train becomes apparent only when it is imagined as the harbinger of doom which will leave nothing but mangled bodies and contorted steel in its wake. Much like in a horror film, it is in imagining the scenario on screen that the spectator can experience genuine fright. If one’s imagination is lacking, by contrast, the effect is not completely lost but it does not amount to more than fidgeting nervously in the chair.57 In the case of The Haverstraw Tunnel finally – one of the most famous early phantom rides – the numerous panegyrics from the contemporary press the producers were only too happy to include in their Bulletins to further regulate reception. The following is a representative selection from these clippings: If you desire a novel experience go to the Palace Theatre any evening at a quarter to ten and travel (in imagination) on the cowcatcher of the locomotive of a West Shore (American) Express through the Haverstraw Tunnel. […] Instead of the scenes and figures coming towards you, as is the case with most of the other pictures, you seem to be going to them, and the effect is decidedly strange.58

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In all previous instances the audience has sat passive and witnessed scenes in motion, but in the latest example the position is, so to speak, reversed, and the spectator becomes part and parcel of the picture, for, by the exercise of the very slightest imagination, he can fancy himself perched upon the cowcatcher of an American locomotive tearing along at the rate of sixty miles per hour, with the landscape simply leaping towards him.59 Hitherto the audience merely watched moving objects, but in this recent addition the onlooker, by the aid of a little imagination, can fancy himself sitting an [sic] the bogie tracks of an engine travelling at the rate of sixty-five miles an hour with the landscape simply dashing towards him.60 The contemporary discourse on train films from a range of places including the US, Russia, France, Britain, Austro-Hungary and Algeria reveals how the convergence of a specific imaginative engagement with the films screened takes place. On the one hand, producers and promoters advertise films depicting onrushing vehicles as inviting imaginings about train disasters and the reviewers respond to their call. On the other, the reviewers report imaginary rides on phantom rides and producers are quick to include them in their catalogues to further normalize imaginary responses to their films. It is through this feedback loop between production, promotion and audience responses which specifies particular imaginings – the train crashing into the auditorium in train films and the spectator riding the locomotive in phantom rides – that the mandates are formed. Once this feedback loop is construed as mandating consistent imaginings there is good reason to think of numerous train films and phantom rides as fictional, at least at the time of their earliest screenings. It is undeniable that the fictions in these films were distinct. In the former case it is the train jumping out of the image that is imagined. The spectators imagine the locomotive invading their space – they do not imagine themselves at the train station. Like in Truchet’s poster for the Cinématographe Lumière the train is imagined as rupturing the screen and coming to a halt in the screening hall. It is the train that comes to them wherever the auditorium they are in might be. They stay where they are. In phantom rides, by contrast, the spectators imagine they are no longer in the auditorium. Instead, they are whisked away into the very locale that is being screened. They imagine themselves to be within the image, the sights rushing by them as they rush through the countryside. But even as distinct as they were the imaginings were articulated with such regularity that they constituted fictions. Imaginary engagement with these films, moreover, sheds further light on the myth of the panicking audience. For Bottomore, cinema’s founding myth misrepresents what was an optical illusion (the looming effect) for a cognitive illusion (of false belief that the screened train is real). What the myth of the

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panicking audience belies from the perspective of make-believe, by contrast, is the status of imagination in early cinema – what is initially articulated as a matter of active make-believe by contemporary audiences is in later mythical accounts misrepresented as false belief based on cognitive illusion.61 In other words, the articulation of the myth is a sign of how short it can take to transform what was initially perceived as genre of fiction into non-fiction.62 We could even say that these films did not only constitute distinct fictions of ‘presence’ – being present to as opposed to being present within – but that they also mandated imagining minimal stories.63 L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat seems to meet minimal requirements to call something a narrative – the presence of an agent and a disturbance in the equilibrium.64 Here, we are dealing with a suspense story in which a train is threatening the spectator by jumping from the screen directly into the auditorium only to swerve at the last moment. Gorky, for instance, after inviting us to imagine the collision and ripped sacks of lacerated flesh even provides closure to the story: ‘But this, too, is but a train of shadows. Noiselessly, the locomotive disappears beyond the edge of the screen.’65 In the accounts of The Haverstraw Tunnel we find something similar: The train is invisible, and yet the landscape sweeps remorselessly, and far away the bright day becomes a spot of darkness. That is the mouth of the tunnel, and towards it the spectator is hurled as if fate was behind him. The spot of darkness becomes a canopy of gloom. The darkness closes around, and the spectator is being flung through that cavern with demoniac energy behind him. The shadows, the rush of the invisible force, and the uncertainty of the issues makes one instinctively hold one’s breath as when on the edge of a crisis that might become a catastrophe. But the daylight shines ahead, and again the spectator is being swept through the fields and amid a fair country. The audience half-reels as it catches itself, exhausted from the sensation of travelling on the front of an express at lightning speed.66 As the spectator imagines travelling through the countryside something appears on the horizon, something that at first looks merely like a black speck but rapidly transforms into a shroud of darkness. This veil engulfs the viewer causing concern that something terrible might happen, some unknown catastrophe. But just as the spectator braces herself for the impending doom, the darkness disappears as quickly as it appeared, and the viewer finds herself safe again in the sunlit horizon. As we can see, there is an emotional arch here which spells out a narrative quite like the one experienced when imaginatively engaging L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat – a threat avoided at the last moment, a minimal narrative.

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Contemporary reports, therefore, demonstrate that even some prime examples of what Gunning has dubbed the cinema of attractions were accounted for in narrative terms. This of course does not mean that the formal traits usually associated with the cinema of attractions such as the direct address to the spectator, temporal punctuality and the highlighting of the power of display disappear. But it does mean that temporal punctuality can go hand in hand with chronological development and that the power of display can be a part of the construction of diegesis as early as in train film and phantom ride genres. In other words, this finding expands the category of double nature films – films combining both attractions and stories – from trick films, chase films and Passion Plays to include some train films and phantom rides as well. It also demonstrates that key examples of Gunning’s cinema of attractions were described in terms of both attraction and narrative by their contemporaries. Crucially, this conclusion offers itself once the films in question are treated as fiction, i.e. when the role of imagination is examined in detail.

Le Voyage dans la Lune and trick films Whereas train films can be said to have migrated from fiction into non-fiction, at least a subclass of trick films – a tradition Le Voyage dans la Lune is clearly a part of – must have gone the other route if their relation to the magic theatre is considered. As Gunning points out, magic theatre hinges on ‘mak[ing] visible that which it was impossible to believe’.67 Magic theatre uses sleights of hand, staging, lighting and other intricate stage devices for its effect. For instance, woman wiggling her toes after being sawn in half will generally cause amazement, wonder and disbelief if one is not aware of the design behind the trick. But if the trick is revealed the spectator clearly does not see a woman wiggling her toes any more, rather the spectator understands that another person hidden in the lower portion of the trunk is wiggling her feet or, in another version, notices that the feet are too mechanic in their movements to be real. The spectator certainly does not see the woman whose head is coming out of the other part of the truck as wiggling her feet. Crucially, magic theatre does not necessarily mandate any imaginings. A magic trick can, of course, be embedded within a larger fictional framework but on its own it is generally not supposed to be taken as prompting any makebelieve. We go to the magic theatre to see something which is unbelievable and to wonder at how it was accomplished. We are not mandated to imagine a woman cut in half precisely because we see her as such. If magic theatre makes visible that which one cannot believe and if it mandates no imaginings, then there is good reason to think that numerous films such as Escamotage d’une dame au théâtre Robert-Houdin (The Vanishing Lady, 1896)

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prompted no imaginings either. If disappearances and reappearances were a regular part of Méliès’ repertoire at Théâtre Robert-Houdin which he owned and for which he was quite famous, then it is safe to assume that seeing a similar trick on screen would have the same response – incredulity accompanied by no imaginings whatsoever. What is more, the film would have been screened at the actual theatre.68 Of course, considerably different devices were behind the disappearance of the lady and her later reappearance in the stage and screen version – intricate stagecraft in the former and substitution splicing in the latter. But neither is this something which would have been immediately clear to the early spectator, especially given the exhibition context, nor, even if the distinction was apparent, would it have necessarily made a difference. How the trick is accomplished is irrelevant for the structure of incredulity and absence of mandated imaginings. In other words, what is important is that nobody believes that disappearance and reappearance actually take place and that nobody is mandated to imagine anything. For instance, the catalogue entry for the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company’s Vanishing Lady (1897) insists on the film’s magic theatre origin: ‘This is the familiar trick of the magician […].’69 More importantly, it continues by stating that the trick is ‘executed by Paul Gilmore in an artistic manner’.70 As Gilmore was a well-known theatre actor of the time it is safe to say that the catalogue presents the film primarily as a recording of Gilmore’s performance. We could say the same even of a motion picture like Un homme de têtes. In it Méliès takes off his head which continues to talk as he makes his head appear again and then proceeds to repeat the stunt two more times until, eventually, the heads become too annoying. Miriam Rosen notes that one of Méliès’ most famous theatre tricks was Recalcitrant Decapitated Man wherein a professor’s head is cut off mid-speech only to continue speaking until it is returned on his shoulders.71 Within such a context it would have been quite easy to see Un homme de têtes and similar motion pictures as a further development of tricks Théâtre Robert-Houdin was already famous for – ingenious and incredible but by no means putting any mandated imaginings into play. Too rephrase a derogatory term and put a positive spin on it, such moving pictures would have easily been perceived as instances of ‘canned magic theatre’. Or, to use Gaudreault’s and Philippe Marion’s formulation, such motion pictures were seen as ‘attractional packages’ – performances which were ‘already predetermined, predefined, and preformatted in and by an extracinematic cultural series’.72 The same emphasis on the reproduction of magic theatre performance can be found in ‘Star’ Films catalogue entry on Un homme de têtes: One of the most marvelous tricks ever cinematographed. The magician approaches and, after the usual bow, proceeds with the tricks of taking off his head, placing same on a table at his side. […] to show that there is no illusion

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about the trick, he crawls upon the table, upon which is supported his first head. […] [Upon completing the trick] the magician then makes his bow and retreats from the scene. A most surprising and marvelous illusion.73 The trick is presented as cinematographed. Moreover, there is no mention of the possibility that the trick is made by filmic means, rather the suggestion is that it must be some stagecraft if the magician is crawling under the table. Furthermore, the magician addresses the audience bowing twice, prior and following the trick, precisely how he would do in the theatre. Finally, the catalogue entry emphasizes again that we are dealing with an illusion – something I have argued mandated no imaginings, but rather incredulity as Gunning’s and Matthew Solomon’s analyses show.74 That ‘canned magic theatre’ was an important context for contemporaries in construing cinema is further supported by reports such as an account of what was, as Richard Abel points out,75 actually Méliès’ 1898 La Lune à un mètre: An important adjunct to the continuous vaudeville bill will be the Parisian novelty ‘A Trip to the Moon’ shown at this house last week for the first time in America. ‘A Trip to the Moon’ is a life motion picture reproduction of a celebrated French spectacular piece. The entire spectacle has been reproduced, the film being the longest ever made.76 Notice how much emphasis is placed on reproduction by using the term on two separate occasions in two adjacent sentences. The matter is even more interesting here because, unlike films like Escamotage d’une dame au théâtre Robert-Houdin, Vanishing Lady or Un homme de têtes, La Lune à un mètre from our perspective appears to have not only a storyline but a fictional storyline at that. The above citation still suggests that the film was seen as a photographic reproduction of a game of make-believe rather than as something mandating make-believe on its own. The deciding factor for this appears to be that, as Gunning himself points out, this has also originally been a trick by Méliès performed first in 1891 as The Moon’s Pranks and the Misadventures of Nostradamus at Théâtre Robert-Houdin.77 In Gaudreault’s and Marion’s vocabulary, the ‘attractional package’ was clearly the magic trick. We can therefore follow Turquety Benoît in saying that ‘[t]ricks were adapted or reinvented for film; but they nevertheless came straight from the stage, and were perceived by spectators as “versions” of the older, familiar magical numbers that some of them had seen performed on the city stages’.78 Le Voyage dans la Lune is certainly far more than a trick film – not only is there a plethora of attractions that are, strictly speaking, not tricks but there is also an important narrative aspect to the film. Frank Kessler, moreover, reminds us of an important generic context of féerie – ‘a form of theatrical entertainment

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combining visual splendor, fantastic plots, amazing tricks, colorful ballets, and captivating music’.79 Ian Christie, furthermore, points to the context constituted by internationally famous novels From the Earth to the Moon (1865) by Jules Verne and The First Men in the Moon (1901) by H. G. Wells.80 Richard Abel also draws attention to the popularity of the adaptations of Verne’s novel – an operetta with music by Jacques Offenbach and a melodrama by French writer Adolphe d’Ennery – in both France and the US.81 In the American case, finally, Abel documents in detail the hype surrounding the cyclorama by Frederic Thompson and Elmer ‘Skip’ Dundy which premiered at 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo and then moved to Steeplechase Park in 1902 where it remained for a number of years. The context then includes a number of adjacent and overlapping cultural series – theatrical forms (féerie, operetta, melodrama), illusions (féerie, cyclorama) and literary fictions (melodrama, novel).82 From the perspective of literary fiction, on the one hand, the film could have been perceived as mandating imaginings about the travel to the moon. From the perspective of theatrical forms and illusions, on the other, the film could have been perceived as an instance of ‘canned (magic) theatre’ mandating no imaginings. In fact, there are contemporary accounts that formulate the spectacular theatrical context as the prevailing one. In a list of amusements for the Christmas entertainment at St. Charles Orpheum vaudeville theatre in New Orleans the following is stated: ‘“A Trip to the Moon” is a delightful feature of the present bill, and as beautiful spectacular production as has ever been seen.’83 Given that the title is not identified as a film but simply as a ‘feature’ and a ‘spectacular production’ and that it is immediately followed by a list of stage acts including Cressy and Dayne’s ‘The Village Lawyer’, Gargany’s comedy acrobats and soprano Edith Helena it is safe to assume that within the vaudeville context it is simply deemed to be (a recording of) one of the theatrical/performance acts. An even better example of a contemporary account of Méliès’ film in which Le Voyage dans la Lune is actually categorized as an instance of recorded pantomime (an English version of the féerie genre as Kessler reminds us) can be found in a digest of the upcoming shows at Maryland Theater in Baltimore. Here even the added colour is seen contributing primarily to the verisimilitude of the reproduction of the stage performance: The New Year attraction […] will combine the finest features of the vaudeville stage, together with a real novelty in the form of English pantomime just as it is seen in leading London theaters, presented in a most life-like and realistic manner by the latest marvel of the moving picture line—the American Vitograph. A different pantomime will be given each day, and will consist of from five to eight scenes, showing hundreds of moving images being just as in the actual performance with the magnificent spectacular scenic effects and  bright costumes in all colors. […] Among the selections will be the

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following: Monday, ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ […] together with a ‘Trip to Luna,’ in 30 magnificent scenes, based on the famous story of ‘A Trip to the Moon’ by Jules Verne.84 The understanding of Le Voyage dans la Lune as a recording of a game of make-believe, however, is not the one that prevails in the press reports of the time. It is the context of the Verne’s novel, present even in the above citation, which pushes audiences’ engagement with film toward imaginings. A reviewer from Nebraska, for instance, spoke of ‘a most marvelous portrayal of the story of the same name by the famous French novelist, Jules Verne’.85 It is a story that is portrayed rather than a performance of a story, as it is the case in the account from Baltimore American. Emphasis on film representing the make-believe story is present in other reviews as well: Among [new Vitagraph views] is ‘The Trip to the Moon,’ in which are shown the adventures of a band of Frenchmen who visit the moon. They have an airship built, embark in it, are fired from a huge cannon, sail to the moon, have all kinds of strange adventures there with the ‘Moon Folk,’ sail back to earth, land in the ocean, and are brought to land and rejoin their friends.86 [Méliès’] work is done in the little Houdin Theatre in Rue Chamberd, where the exhibition of moving pictures forms the entire evening’s entertainment. But these motion pictures are by no means the conventional series of reproductions of everyday sights and scenes now so familiar to vaudeville patrons. On the contrary, the Melies’ pictures are absolutely novel in their way. They run without interruption for nearly twenty minutes, all in one long film of nearly 1,200 feet, and they tell a complete story.87 As we can see from the reviews it is a matter of imagining the story in all its elements – from the astronomers’ meeting and the shooting of the cannon to the return to earth – rather than one of being dumbfounded by stage illusion. Moreover, although, as the contemporary review from Baltimore American evinces, the film was at least occasionally seen as a recording of a pantomime, the abundance of reports which speak of imaginary characters and effects directly without evoking any intermediary recordings strongly suggest that the prevalent way of engaging Le Voyage dans la Lune was one of make-believe. This should, however, not lead us to the conclusion that early trick films were in general seen as fictions. Due to the exhibition and magic theatre illusion context films such as Escamotage d’une dame au théâtre Robert-Houdin, Un homme de têtes and even La Lune à un mètre would have been perceived as mandating no imaginings. Whereas early trick films were often initially perceived by contemporary audiences as non-fictions or reproductions of stage attractions and are

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now regularly categorized as fantasy films or fictions, the engagement with early train film ‘actualities’ has shifted in the exactly opposite direction. As Tsivian has shown, in Russia it took less than two decades since the earliest screenings for the myth of the panicking audience to be articulated.88 During the earliest years, however, sources from a range of places, from Gorky’s famous newspaper account to Regnault’s description in L’Illustration and press reports from US to Russia, articulate the importance of make-believe in the train effect, a point consistently overlooked by scholars. With striking regularity these earliest viewers engaged the film as mandating imaginings about the train rushing out of the screen and running them over – a clear sign of fiction if there ever was one.

Notes 1

‘Theatrical Chat’, Grand Forks Daily Herald, 20 December 1903, 5.

2

‘Vaudeville and Minstrels’, Philadelphia Inquirer, 4 September 1899, 10.

3

Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1960), 30.

4

Kendall L. Walton, Mimesis as Make Believe: Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). For more detailed discussions of the fiction/non-fiction distinction in cinema and film studies, see Mario Slugan, ‘Theorizing Fiction in Film Non/Fiction: Some Thoughts on Recent German Film Theory’, Apparatus: Film, Media, & Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 8 (2019), http://dx.doi.org/10.17892/ app.2019.0008.161 (accessed 8 November 2021); Mario Slugan, ‘Textualism, Extratextualism, and the Fiction/Nonfiction Distinction in Documentary Studies’, Studies in Documentary Film 15, no. 2 (2021): 114–26; Mario Slugan, ‘Fiction as Challenge for Text-Oriented Film Studies’, New Review of Film and Television (2023 forthcoming). For a book-length study, see Mario Slugan, Fiction and Imagination in Early Cinema: A Philosophical Approach to Film History (London: Bloomsbury, 2019).

5

Gregory Currie, The Nature of Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); David Davies, Aesthetics and Literature (New York, NY: Continuum, 2007); Kathleen Stock, ‘Imagination and Fiction’, in The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination, ed. Amy Kind (New York, NY, and London: Routledge, 2016), 204–17. Some dissent has come from Stacie Friend, ‘Fiction as a Genre’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 112, no. 2 (2012): 179–209 and Derek Matravers, Fiction and Narrative (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2014). For a rebuttal see Stock, ‘Imagination and Fiction’.

6

Stock, ‘Imagination and Fiction’, 215.

7

Another problem is that according to Walton all photographic images mandate imagining that the object represented is in front of the viewer. In other words, all photographic representations are fictions of direct presence. This would make

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using Walton’s theory to determine the fictional status of early cinema an overkill, for practically all of (early) cinema would have to be treated as fictional. We can bracket off this part of Walton’s theory, however, without damaging his general framework by pointing out that the key reason Walton speaks of photographs as mandating imagining photographed objects as directly present is André Bazin’s idea that photographic films put us in the presence of the actor. André Bazin, ‘Theater and Cinema—Part Two’, in What Is Cinema? vol. 1, ed. and trans. H. Gray (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), 97. The key point here is that for Bazin photographs are like mirrors. But mirrors do not mandate imagining that the objects in the mirror are in front of us. Therefore, there is no reason to claim that photographs mandate such imaginings even if they are generally like mirrors. 8 Charlie Keil, ‘Steel Engines and Cardboard Rockets: The Status of Fiction and Nonfiction in Early Cinema’, in F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing, ed. Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner (Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 39. 9 André Gaudreault and Tom Gunning, ‘Introduction: American Cinema Emerges (1890–1909)’, in American Cinema, 1890–1909: Themes and Variations, ed. André Gaudreault (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 18. 10 Richard Abel, ed., Encyclopedia of Early Cinema (London: Routledge, 2005), liii–liv. 11 Martin Loiperdinger reminds us that there were three versions of the film; from 1895, 1896 and 1897, with the last one being the one we are nowadays familiar with. Martin Loiperdinger, ‘Lumière’s Arrival of the Train: Cinema’s Founding Myth’, The Moving Image 4, no. 1 (2004): 103. 12 Keil, ‘Steel Engines and Cardboard Rockets’, 39. 13 Ibid., 41. 14 Admittedly, in the case of travelogues Keil mentions that extra-textual lecturing could influence the film’s fictional status. This point deserves a separate study including determining whether the lecture could be instead a textual feature of a hybrid imageword text. The same holds for how programming affects film’s fictional status where the question becomes: what is the filmic text – the individual film or the programme? Due to space limitations, this cannot be answered here. 15 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. 16 Martin Loiperdinger has argued by identifying members of the Lumière family among the cast and by pointing to relative dearth of looks at the camera that the film is, in fact, staged. Staging is, however, neither a sufficient nor necessary condition for a film to be fictional because it is a presentational technique, i.e. a textual feature. Loiperdinger correctly points out that staging in L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat has only to do with deception and our willingness to see the film as a precursor to direct cinema. 17 André Bazin, ‘Every Film Is a Social Documentary’, Film Comment 44, no. 6 (2008): 40–51. I take titles to be features external to films as long as they cannot be found on the reel – something typical of many early films including L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat and Le Voyage dans la Lune.

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18 Cf. Jacques Malthête, Méliès: images et illusions (Paris: Exporégie, 1996). 19 Tom Gunning, ‘Colorful Metaphors: The Attraction of Color in Early Silent Cinema’, Fotogenia 1, no. 1 (1994): 249–55; Joshua Yumibe, Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012). 20 Noël Carroll, ‘Fiction, Non-Fiction, and the Film of Presumptive Assertion: A Conceptual Analysis’, in Film Theory and Philosophy, ed. Richard Allen and Murray Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 173–202. 21 Trevor Ponech, ‘What is Non–Fiction Cinema?’, in Allen and Smith, 203–20; Carl Plantinga, ‘What a Documentary Is, after All’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63, no. 2 (2005): 105–17. 22 See David J. Shepherd, The Bible on Silent Film: Spectacle, Story and Scripture in the Early Cinema (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); David J. Shepherd, The Silents of Jesus in the Cinema (1897–1927) (New York, NY: Routledge, 2016); and Charles Musser, ‘Passions and the Passion Play: Theatre, Film and Religion In America, 1880–1900’, Film History 5, no. 4 (1993): 419–56. 23 Lubin Manufacturing Company Catalogue Special, 1905, 2, capitalization in the original, in Motion Picture Catalogs by American Producers and Distributors, 1894– 1908, ed. Charles Musser et al. (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1984–5). 24 Maguire and Baucus Catalogue of Edison Films, 20 January 1897, in Musser, Motion Picture Catalogs. 25 Prestwich Manufacturing Company catalogue, 1898, in Early Filmmakers’ Catalogues, BFI (London: World Microfilms Publications, 1983). 26 Warwick Trading Company Catalogue, 1898–97, in BFI. 27 BFI, 6, 38. 28 American Vitagraph Company Catalogue, 1900, 2–3, 5, in Musser. 29 Musser, 6. 30 The Edison Manufacturing Company Catalogue, 1901, 93–4, in Musser. 31 Musser, 81–8. 32 Warwick Trading Company Catalogue, 1901, 54–5, in BFI. 33 American Mutoscope and Biograph Company Catalogue, 1902, 65, 119, in Musser. 34 Lubin Manufacturing Company Catalogue, 1903, 16–29, 63–5, in Musser. 35 Selig Polyscope Company Catalogue, 1903, 14–20, 29–30, in Musser. 36 R. W. Paul’s Catalogue, 1902, in BFI. 37 Hepworth & Co Catalogue, 1903, 5–6, in Musser. 38 American Mutoscope and Biograph Company Catalogue, 1902, 119, in Musser. 39 American Mutoscope and Biograph Company Catalogue, 1897, 1, in Musser. 40 American Mutoscope and Biograph Company Catalogue, 1902, 65, in Musser. 41 Musser, 72. 42 Ibid., 68. 43 Ibid., 73.

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44 Yuri Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and Its Cultural Reception (London: Routledge, 1994); Stephen Bottomore, ‘The Panicking Audience? Early Cinema and “Train Effect”’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 19, no. 2 (1999): 177. 45 For the reproduction, see Laurent Mannoni, Pesenti Campignoni, Donata and David Robinson, Light and Movement: Incunabula of the Motion Picture, 1420–1896 (Gemona; Paris; Torino: La Cineteca del Friuli; Le giornate del cinema muto, 1995), 401. 46 Quoted in Bottomore, ‘The Panicking Audience?’, 213. 47 Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2001). 48 Cy Warman, ‘Ringtown Put out the Light’, Omaha Daily Bee, 26 September 1897, 17. 49 Quoted in Bottomore, ‘The Panicking Audience?’, 213. 50 Quoted in Loiperdinger, ‘Lumière’s Arrival of the Train’, 97. 51 Ibid., 98. 52 Quoted in Bottomore, ‘The Panicking Audience?’, 194. 53 Ibid., 192–3. 54 Ibid., 194. 55 Cf. David Lewis, Counterfactuals (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986). 56 Quoted in Bottomore, 213. 57 The key criterion for distinguishing unimaginative and the imaginative viewer here is undeniably made along gender lines. There are gender stereotypes clearly at play here, but I would suggest that the reviewer’s (who is most likely male) stance is more ambiguous than it might seem at first. On the one hand, there seems to be a slight negative connotation in the very term ‘unimaginative’ as describing somebody missing a valuable faculty. After all, such a man is incapable of partaking in the film fully. He only ‘kind of’ shivers. On the other hand, although being imaginative is implied to be a positive trait, women in this account clearly tend to be too imaginative. This, in the long tradition of women being presented as irrational, hysterical and overly emotional, leads to excessive reactions such as screaming and fainting. Although the review implies that the optimal stance would be an imaginative albeit a more restrained one, the question remains: who, in the reviewer’s eyes, enjoyed the film more? 58 Quoted in Kemp R. Niver, Biograph Bulletins, 1896–1908 (Los Angeles, CA: Locare Research Group, 1971), 35. 59 Quoted in Bottomore, 36. 60 Ibid. 61 For a further discussion of the distinction between illusion, imagination and immersion on the example of phantom rides and Hale’s Tours and Scenes of the World, see Mario Slugan, ‘The Role of Imagination in Early Cinema: Fiction and Non-Fiction in Phantom Rides, Travelogues, and Hale’s Tours’, in A Treasure Trove: Friend of the Photoplay – Visionary – Spy? New Trans-Disciplinary Approaches to Hugo Münsterberg’s Life and Oeuvre, ed. Rüdiger Steinmetz (Leipzig: Leipzig University Press, 2018), 25–46; Slugan, Fiction and Imagination in Early Cinema.

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62 Loiperdinger was the first one to my knowledge to notice the ‘as if’ structure in numerous contemporary accounts. For him, however, the hypothetical is an ‘attempt to give readers an understanding of the film image’s projected spatial effect in Arrival of the Train’ rather than a sign of mandated imaginings. Loiperdinger, ‘Lumière’s Arrival of the Train’, 99. 63 It is important to remember that not all fictions are narrative (e.g. Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus) and not all narratives are fictional (e.g. documentaries). 64 Cf. Marie-Laure Ryan, ‘Toward a Definition of Narrative’, in The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, ed. David Herman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 29. This is a narrower definition than the one where the very existence of a minimal temporal transformation constitutes narrative: André Gaudreault, From Plato to Lumière: Narration and Monstration in Literature and Cinema (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2009). The problem under Gaudreault’s proposal is that any two adjacent frames from any film regarded on their own (so long as they depict dynamic temporal development) would constitute narrative. 65 Quoted in Colin Harding and Simon Popple, eds, In the Kingdom of Shadows: A Companion to the Early Cinema (London: Cygnus Arts, 1996), 5. 66 Quoted in Niver, Biograph Bulletins, 36. 67 Tom Gunning, ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator’, Art and Text 34 (Spring 1989): 33. 68 Miriam Rosen, ‘Méliès, Georges’, in World Film Directors, vol. I, 1890–1945, ed. John Wakeman (New York, NY: H. W. Wilson 1987), 747–65. 69 American Mutoscope and Biograph Company Catalogue, 1902, 66, in Musser, Motion Picture Catalogs. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid. 72 André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, The End of Cinema? A Medium in Crisis in the Digital Age (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2015), 92. 73 ‘Star’ Films Catalogue, 1903, 18, in Musser. The same description of the same film, but now billed as Four Heads Are Better than One because it has been duped, also appears in Lubin Manufacturing Company Catalogue, 1903, 17, in Musser. 74 Gunning, ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment’; Matthew Solomon, Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini, and the New Magic of the Twentieth Century (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2010). 75 Richard Abel, ‘A Trip to the Moon as an American Phenomenon’, in Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination: Georges Méliès’s Trip to the Moon, ed. Matthew Solomon (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2011), 129–42. 76 ‘Vaudeville and Minstrels’, 10. 77 Tom Gunning, ‘A Trip to the Moon (1902)’, in Film Analysis: A Norton Reader, 2nd edn, ed. Jeffrey Geiger and R. L. Rutsky (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013), 42. 78 Turquety Benoît, ‘Tricks and Effects: Introduction’, Early Popular Visual Culture 13, no. 2 (2015): 104. 79 Frank Kessler, ‘A Trip to the Moon as Féerie’, in Solomon, 115.

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80 Ian Christie, ‘First Footing on the Moon: Méliès’s Debt to Verne and Wells and His influence in Great Britain’, in Solomon, 65–80. 81 Richard Abel, ‘A Trip to the Moon as an American Phenomenon’, in Solomon, 129–42. 82 For more on the notion of cultural series, see Nicolas Dulac and André Gaudreault, ‘Circularity and Repetition at the Heart of the Attraction: Optical Toys and the Emergence of a New Cultural Series’, in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Strauven (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 227–44. 83 The Daily Picayune, 19 December 1902, 4. 84 Baltimore American, 27 December 1903, 30. 85 Lincoln (Neb.) Evening News, 18 May 1903, 7. 86 Times Picayune, 29 March 1903, 36. 87 Trenton Evening Times, 18 October 1903, 11. 88 Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia, 109.

6 USING MEDIATHREAD FOR GESTURE ANALYSIS IN THE CINEMA OF ATTRACTIONS Danae Kleida

Introduction ‘Look! The box is empty!’ conjurers shouted before a trick; they were soliciting the audience’s attention before performing their magic trick. However, their fellow film magicians of the early days of cinema never had the chance to say these words to their audience. Instead, they had to demonstrate them because sound was not yet combined with the film strip. In other words, early cinema films were meant to be understood without the agency of utterance. In this contribution, I explore whether the absence of sound led to the development of a visible bodily action in the place of the utterance. I examine how vivid and exaggerated gestures that functioned as alternatives for spoken words were incorporated into early cinema’s acting style. More specifically, this contribution examines how this type of gesture can be readily noticeable in early cinema trick films. The study of gestures is performed through the digital annotation platform Mediathread, which enables granular analysis with the creation of time-based annotations. This contribution narrates the process of annotating with Media­ thread five early cinema trick films and explains how the annotation process enabled alternative views of the material. First, it introduces Mediathread’s environment, explains its features and describes what the annotations can include. Next, it illustrates how the first research question was formed by engaging closely with a collection of early cinema films. Asking why there is vivid bodily action in trick films, this study examines the type of gestures employed to substitute speech and sound. To do so, it provides context by briefly referring to traditions of stage acting styles and discusses the reasons exaggerated gestures were employed in early cinema trick films. Looking through the lens of the ‘cinema of attractions’, it presents the annotation process and concludes that

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demonstrative gestures in trick films function as essential features for the trick’s enhancement and spatio-temporal continuity. Finally, it reflects on Mediathread’s possibilities and limitations.

Mediathread’s environment The exploration of gestures with the Mediathread platform was part of the ‘Paper Print Collection Pilot Study’,1 a collaboration between the Domitor research society, the Media Ecology Project (MEP) and the Library of Congress (LOC).2 On the one hand, this partnership aims to stimulate research on the Paper Print Collection, and on the other hand, to explore the possibility of using digital tools to perform research on early cinema films.3 Mediathread, an open-source digital platform developed by Columbia University’s Center for New Media Teaching was used for this research. The Mediathread platform provides a digital collaborative environment in which users can explore, analyse and organize webbased multimedia content. It can host a variety of image and video collections (such as YouTube, Flickr and library databases), enabling users to lift items out of these collections and into an analysis environment.4 It supports discussion forums, time-based annotations, as well as the generation of sub-clips, verbal descriptions and metadata. To better explain the process followed to create annotations, Mediathread’s environment will be briefly described. As can be seen in Figure 6.1, at the left column of the screen, there are the videos of the collection, at the centre the item to be annotated and at the right column, the annotations, the tags and

Figure 6.1  Mediathread environment.

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Figure 6.2  Example of Mediathread annotation.

the source of the video. What should be mentioned is that the annotations are time-based, which means that they are ‘tied’ to a specific moment of the clip.5 In addition, the annotations specify the duration of the annotation, having as a minimal unit, one second. Each annotation can include: (a) title, (b) time duration, (c) tags and/or (d) notes (see Figure 6.2). After annotating, the user can click on each annotation and play the desired annotated clip. That way, following the manual annotation, a user can focus on particular parts of a video/film – a possibility that later proved very useful for my research.

Gestures in ‘trick films’ The study of gestures in trick films started from an already curated Mediathread environment named ‘Performance and Tricks/FX’. This collection includes 189 early cinema films chosen by John Bells, Mark Williams and other team members of the online collaborative project. The research question regarding gestures in early cinema trick films developed while watching all trick films hosted at the Mediathread collection and the Library of Congress’s online catalogue. Possibly because of my dance background, one of the very first observations was that the bodily movement employed in these films was vivid, intense and exaggerated. This observation raised questions regarding movement, such as why the movement is so exaggerated, whether that had to do with the specific film genre, or if it was happening because of the period’s general acting technique. By re-watching some of the films attentively while focusing on movement, it was noticed that the most intense part of the movement was happening in the gestures the actors employed. Considering this, I decided to focus the research on these gestures. With this in mind, it was needed to first specify the type of gestures that was interesting to analyse. To narrow the scope of the examination, I drew from Adam Kendon’s ‘theory of gestures’. According to Kendon, ‘gesture […] is a name for visible action

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when it is used as an utterance or as part of an utterance’,6 where utterance means ‘any ensemble of action that counts for others as an attempt by the actor to “give” information of some sort’.7 There is a wide range of ways gesture can function as part of an utterance. For example, there are gestures that ‘play a central role in the accomplishment of important moments in social interaction’ such as greeting, showing gratitude, anger and challenge, and gestures that are ‘part of the process of discourse, a part of uttering something to another in an explicit manner’ such as pointing, depicting, representing and nodding.8 For this project’s scope, it was decided not to examine the ‘natural’ or ‘ordinary’ gestures employed consciously during speech and governed by an intention to say or communicate, but the gestures that can substitute the function of utterance and are not supplementary.9 The type of gesture examined is the ‘visible [bodily] actions that can serve as alternatives to spoken words’.10 In some circumstances (in this case, early cinema films), the sound was unavailable; hence, gesture can become a form of language all by itself.11 Due to the lack of the technological ability to combine image and sound in this early cinema period,12 films were understood without the presence of speech. Consequently, gestures were one of the primary media providing information for the film’s storyline and the actors’ intentions. However, gestures performed without audio should not be confounded with mime gestures. Although early cinema’s screen acting techniques share considerable similarities and influences with the mime tradition, some significant differences should be mentioned to avoid confusion. To further clarify this, Wilhelm Wundt’s classification of gestures into demonstrative and descriptive, as mentioned in Kendon’s Gesture, is rather helpful: Demonstrative gestures serve to draw attention to objects present, to indicate spatial relations, to refer to parties to the conversation, and to indicate body parts. The action of a demonstrative gesture is a pointing action. Descriptive gestures, which are subdivided into mimic, connotative and symbolic gestures, are gestures that stand for some object.13 Although mime tradition shares with the acting style of early cinema films the aspect of ‘silence while gesturing’, there is a crucial difference between them. As stated by Jacques Lecoq, ‘[t]he word mime refers to a phenomenon, that of imitation’.14 Screen acting practices do not have as their primary function the act of imitation. For instance, mimetic gestures imitate or allow us to see something invisible (e.g. a person that drinks with an invisible cup), while demonstrative gestures solicit our attention for something that is visible and can be used during the film; there is no need for imitation because the objects can be employed. With Wundt’s classification of demonstrative and descriptive gestures in consideration, the focus of the analysis was further narrowed by choosing to

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examine demonstrative gestures that draw attention to objects and establish spatial relations and by excluding descriptive gestures that stand for objects.

Pictorialism and early cinema acting styles In the interest of grasping the diverse functions gestures performed in early cinema trick films, I wish to refer to stage and film acting traditions briefly. The intention is to distinguish the specificity of early cinema’s acting style and give context to the decisions made. To this end, Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs’s Theatre to Cinema, which describes the historical relationship of theatre and film acting styles and staging techniques in great detail, is an invaluable resource.15 Brewster and Jacobs dedicate an extended part of their book to the pictorial stage and film acting styles. Pictorial staging refers to the actions on stage that evoke action as portrayed in a painting. In other words, stage acting included long periods of pause and extensive use of tableaux vivants (pictures resembling paintings). Stage actors of the period froze in positions that resembled paintings and played their roles while maintaining this position.16 For instance, the main actors would strike and maintain an attitude17 at the peak of the action while the rest of the performers grouped around them to form the picture. A long pause would then take place, and following it, the dialogue or the main actors’ speech would occur. According to Brewster and Jacobs, this type of staging ‘excluded any theatrical action, [and] also excluded those grand expressions of the passions’.18 In contrast to the pictorial acting style, which employed more contained expressive means, early cinema trick films required a different acting presence. What can be observed in a plethora of trick films such as Escamotage d’une dame au théâtre Robert-Houdin (1896, Georges Méliès) and The Mystic Swing (1900, Edwin S. Porter) is an exaggerated style of acting. Unfortunately, we cannot enjoy direct access to the acting style of the performances of that period. Access is provided to us by pictures, paintings, reviews and impressions. Thus, we do not possess accurate documentation for the acting in action; that is to say, how the actors were engaged in movement while playing. Nevertheless, if we observe and compare the acting styles between them, some assumptions can be drawn about whether they have some characteristic features in common. As mentioned above, one of the main characteristics of pictorial staging in theatre was long pauses. This feature required that actors maintained a still pose for prolonged periods, reaching from thirty to forty seconds, which is quite long for stage time.19 Thus, at the end of the nineteenth century, the acting pace on stage was significantly slow.20 This characteristic slow tempo in the acting style can be

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compared with the fast-acting tempo of early cinema films. It appears that this difference in the acting pace is attributed to the technological limitations of early cinema.21 Storylines and the interactions between actors had to be conveyed in a concise time. Consequently, this limitation demanded from the actors to achieve a more energetic and hurried acting style. In fact, this can be even more evident in trick films in which the tricks themselves are dominating considerable amounts of the film. The acting practice in trick films was a quick and rather exaggerated bodily action because there was an urgency for explaining the story play, the roles and the intentions of the characters in concise segments of time. The actors had to portray their emotions and move from one situation to the other in seconds. As explained above, trick films did not require pauses or less expressive gestures. Due to the lack of speech, gestures and bodily movement were exaggerated to solicit the audience’ attention and guide its gaze in particular parts of the film in a relatively short amount of time. Although the camera was bringing up the actor considerably closer to the audience (in contrast with the theatre stage), the lack of utterance was surmounting this feature, and therefore, vivid and demonstrative movements were necessary. A need for pauses or freezing the action was only a matter of filming demands. For instance, a pause from the actors was required when the filmmaker would stop filming to introduce a trick in the film. For this reason, the actor would have to stay in the same position for a few seconds until the desired trick was introduced in front of the camera. However, these pauses were not meant to be seen by the audience but were employed just for the trick’s sake. They were not projected, and they did not affect the overall acting style that the audience enjoyed. Another significant difference between pictorial and early cinema acting styles is whether their acting encompasses an absorptive character or not. The characterization ‘absorptive’ derives from the paintings that were ‘opposed to those that solicit attention.’22 An acting style characterized as absorptive means that the actors do not acknowledge the audience’s presence and do not address it. Thus, the audience can get completely immersed in the play. Christian Metz has claimed that the ‘theatre is exhibitionist – the actors on stage know they are being watched by the audience, and the audience know that the actors know. On the contrary, in cinema the actor is absent; only his image is present.’23 It is enough, it is even essential […] that the actor should behave as though he were not seen, that he should go about his ordinary business and pursue his existence as foreseen by the fiction of the film […] that he lives in a kind of aquarium.24 According to Metz, one of cinema’s definitive characteristics was the actors’ disregard of the camera and audience, which does not seem to apply in trick films. A different tradition can be discerned in trick films, especially in those

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involving a conjurer or those that imply that there is a magician on stage that will perform a trick. In trick films, the actors are not only continuously acknowledging the presence of the audience but also try to establish a relationship with it. They have to solicit the audience’s attention in order to perform their magic tricks.

The annotation process After setting the parameters for the analysis of gestures, I decided which films to annotate. The manual annotation of media is a highly time-consuming and laborious process. Considering this and the available research time, five films were annotated: Escamotage d’une dame au théâtre Robert-Houdin, Mesmerist and Country Couple (1899, Edison), The Mystic Swing, Lilliputian Dance (1906, Pathé) and The Enchanted Glasses (1907, Pathé). The five films selected from the Mediathread collection were chosen because the presence of filmic tricks was abundant. More specifically, throughout these films, there are disappearances, appearances and transformations about every two seconds. The annotation process was started by watching these films in slow motion to make every cut and trick discernible. While watching the clips, I kept track of the type of movements that occurred. This practice resulted in the creation of a simple vocabulary that was used for the first annotations. As explained above, the analysis’ focus was demonstrative movements that could stand in place of utterance. Hence, all discernible gestures that seemed to be supplementing spoken words such as bows, looks, head gestures, wait for signals and pointing actions were annotated. For instance, the annotation used descriptive words such as ‘wait’, ‘pointing’ and ‘look at the audience’ that allowed to quickly classify the main bodily action performed in each specific time-stamped annotation. After annotating the first two films and observing the annotations, it was easily noticeable that most were taking place right before or after a trick. On top of this, by revisiting the annotations and replaying the annotated clip excerpts, it was observed that these gestures were used several times to acknowledge the spectators. Taking this into consideration, the annotation process progressed by creating annotations that indicated demonstrative acknowledging gestures before or right after the trick. Following the completion of the annotation process, the (text-based and descriptive) metadata of the created annotations were studied closely. By crossexamining the gestures occurring in the annotated clips, it was possible to discern two categories: ‘establishing dialogue’ and ‘announcing’ gestures. More specifically, ‘establishing dialogue’ gestures were defined as those gestures that acknowledge the audience’s presence, initiate and maintain a dialogue with it.25 While ‘announcing’ gestures were defined as the gestures that draw the audience’s attention while announcing the coming of a trick.26 As explained later,

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within the category of ‘announcing’ gestures, two sub-categories were identified: ‘pointing’ and ‘cause & effect’ gestures.

The function of gestures The results of this research are in line with Tom Gunning’s account of the ‘cinema of attractions’.27 As Gunning states, the cinema of attractions refers to the early cinema films made before 1907, and its principal characteristic is not the telling of stories but presenting a series of views to an audience.28 In Gunning’s words: ‘[t] he cinema of attractions solicits a highly conscious awareness of the film image engaging the viewer’s curiosity’.29 The cinema of attractions is not an immersive and absorptive into the narrative and the plot experience; on the contrary, the cinema of attractions performs an ‘exhibitionist cinema’.30 It acknowledges its audience, addresses it directly and confronts it with the film instead of letting them emerge into the diegesis.31 Gunning’s description of an exhibitionistic and non-absorptive experience that acknowledges the audience and addresses it directly can be readily noticed in trick films such as Escamotage d’une dame au théâtre Robert-Houdin, Enchanted Glasses and Liliputian Dance, in which the actors bow to the audience as if they expect applause. Next to this, as noticed through the annotations, the actors solicit the audience’s attention to establish contact before and after the tricks. I maintain that the guidance of the audience’s gaze is necessary to display the ‘cinematographic trucages’32 and make them perceptible. Their gaze is captivated by the ‘establishing dialogue’ gestures, which include recurring looks and vivid gestures hinting at the forthcoming trick (see the compilation of ‘establishing dialogue’ gestures from the annotated films).33 The theory of the cinema of attractions demonstrates how significant it was to engage the viewer’s curiosity. It was imperative for the function of the trick that it was pronounced and expected. The actors had to be fully engaged in acknowledging the audience and adopting an expressive and captivating style of gesture for the deceit to work. As Georges Méliès admits, the pretext for making his films were the tricks, the stage effects. The ‘tale’ was only considered at the end.34 Bearing in mind that the tricks were the starting point for a plethora of films, one of the most critical issues and worries of the filmmakers must have been how to portray them so that the spectators notice them; in other words, how they would make these tricks discernible. What is striking in trick films is that although they aim to surprise and charm, the trick’s existence has been ‘avowed’ before the projection.35 The magic of the show is already avowed ‘in the periphery of the film, in its publicity [and] in the awaited commentaries which will emphasize the technical skills’.36 It is essential for the magicians to ‘intimate the existence of secrets to draw the audience’s attention; otherwise, the audience might conceivably miss the trick entirely’.37 It is the case of unabashed trickery;

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prior to and during our attendance at the magic show, we are aware that we are watching a magician that is going to trick us. Although we enjoy fabulous things, we are ‘aware of the fabrication and therefore we appreciate it’.38 With the above in mind, I wish to bring back the initial research questions: is there a reason that gestures in trick films are exaggerated, and if that is the case, what would that be? How did the actors’ efforts to establish and maintain contact with the audience function in trick films? How did these demonstrative gestures that announced the happening of a trick contributed to the trickery? What was the function of the actors ‘establishing dialogue’ and ‘announcing’ gestures? The two functions identified in the analysis of the actors’ gesturing are the illusion of a spatio-temporal continuity and the enhancement in the trick’s deceit through the announcement. It appears that one of the essential factors that place the audience and the actors in the same space and time is the gestures that establish contact. The audience is continuously acknowledged, and its attention is demanded. Gestures that signify utterances like: ‘Wait and see, see what I have done?’, ‘See? It’s empty’ or ‘I’m not hiding anything from you’ establish a dialogue between the audience and the actors and, thus, a spatio-temporal relationship. The actors demonstrate their tricks and act as if they are in the same room with the audience. In addition, the demonstration of the ‘magic tricks’ is quite regularly followed by gestures that maintain this dialogue between them. For instance, ‘Admire my dancers!’ and ‘Oh, what have I done!’ On top of this, most gestures that take place before the tricks are ‘pointing’ gestures. The actors point either with one or both hands to the place that the trick is about to appear. ‘Pointing’ gestures are noticeable in appearances, disappearances and transformations (see the compilation of short segments from the annotated films).39 The actor is pointing to a location, and suddenly, something appears; or they make something appear. The pointing action creates a temporal illusion; that is to say, it hides the fact that the gesture and the appearance have taken place at different times and that the appearance did not derive from the magician’s action. The trick that we have just witnessed has been recorded in a different time and order than the one projected. First, there was the recording of the pointing action, a stop for the trick’s appearance and then the film’s continuation. One of the determining factors of this illusion of temporal continuity is the pointing gesture. As Kendon claims, ‘it is only through some non-linguistic action that the tie between an utterance and its spatial or temporal circumstance can be ultimately established, and the gesture of pointing is one of the most obvious ways in which this is done’.40 The gestures that contribute to this illusion are primarily pointing gestures because they are regarded as indicators of an object or a location, which is later on discovered. The illusion of a continuous temporality is enhanced by the linear lines created by the pointing gestures. The

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body part that carries out the pointing action is moving in a well-defined path, and the dynamics of the movement are such that at least the final path of the movement is linear.41 The straight linear line drawn in space creates a logic of continuity in space and time. The pointing gesture before the trick indicates the location that the trick will take place, and then the trick’s appearance comes as a natural and expected after-effect. The actor points and the trick appears. The spectators have turned their attention to the indicated location and wait for a visual result to follow the movement. In this case, the gesture functioned as a clear announcement of the trick, and this function could also justify that the tricks were not a surprise for the audience but were rather expected. An equally important factor is the gestures that announce the trick. It seems that the gestural announcement of the trick is essential for its functionality. As Gunning states, ‘the announcing gesture creates a temporal frame of expectation and even suspense’.42 The gestures lure the spectator’s gaze and lead it right before the trick in the desired place. A rather indicative example is in Escamotage d’une dame au théâtre Robert-Houdin, where the actor employs an exaggerated gesture for the trick’s announcement. The trick is highly expected and almost impossible to miss. Furthermore, in other films, the gestures performed before the trick contribute to an illusion of cause and effect. For instance, in Lilliputian Dance, the magician waves her wand and ends her movement in a specific location. Her waving and pointing action provide not only the illusion of a temporal continuity but also a cause and effect sense. The magician’s movement indicates that the appearance/disappearance/transformation is a consequence of her gesture. The magician pronounced the trick, prepared the spectators and then charmed them with her majestic abilities. For instance, in The Enchanted Glasses, the dancers appear due to the conjurer’s waving, and they transform because of her ‘pointing’ gesture. In this specific example, even the magician’s movement’s quality is translated to the quality of the transformation trick. The trick is not a clear-cut appearance but rather a slow transformation using the dissolve technique (see the relevant excerpt).43 The magician’s hands and, therefore, her abilities are the reason for all these magic tricks.

Discussion of limitations and future research In conclusion, I wish to address the limitations encountered while working with Mediathread for this specific case study. Thanks to the creation of annotations, Mediathread allows a researcher to achieve great affinity with a research object and perform a very close reading. Moreover, Mediathread can offer alternative

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views of an object’s internal structures and document them by creating tags and sharing this knowledge digitally. Additionally, text-based annotations can prove to be rather beneficial for filmic textual analysis. Nevertheless, regarding gesture analysis and movement annotation, I believe Mediathread does not constitute the ideal tool. This is because detailed gesture analysis that could break down movement in small fragments is currently not possible. As mentioned previously, Mediathread’s minimal time unit is the second. In the context of early cinema trick films and due to the frames per second ratio, a gesture sequence that contains two to three gestures can be performed in under one second. Keeping in mind that the minimal annotation unit in Mediathread is one second, it is not possible to split and annotate each separate gesture. Hence, the annotations include an entire ‘gesture sequence’ and not the individual movements that compose it. Next to this, it is also not possible to examine microgestures performed in less than one second, which unfortunately constitute the majority. Analysing the microgestures that occur during a ‘gesture sequence’ could encourage observations of further techniques and strategies employed to make the tricks discernible and functional. To further elaborate on the reasons microgestures cannot be productively analysed with Mediathread, I will briefly mention how another project analysed longer movement sequences in early cinema films. Mediathread was also used for the ‘Florence Lawrence and Performance in Silent Cinema’ research project developed by Mark Williams (Dartmouth College) and Jenny OyallonKoloski (The College of Media at Illinois). The Florence Lawrence project sought ‘to understand what distinguished the performances of Florence Lawrence (known as the “Biograph Girl”) from other performers’ acting modalities during the rise of Hollywood’s star system’.44 This project aimed to annotate Lawrence’s spatial movement comprehensively, and to this end, a Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) annotation guideline developed by Koloski was applied. Spatial movement analysis – meaning to track the starting and ending point of the movement within the frame – was a much more attainable annotation assignment. For this project, we annotated spatial movement sequences such as walking, running, standing up, sitting and jumping. Next to this, while performing spatial movement analysis, the movement was segmented according to the type of movement and its direction. However, that is not possible with gesture analysis. Gesture sequences pass through multiple different spatial directions in a much shorter time. This can be observed in the video compilation ‘Announcing Gestures’, where the magicians pass through high and low spatial directions at a fast pace.45 If we did not have the time limitations of one second, we would be able to create further metadata about the specific directions and types of movement the gestures employ. Such a study could let us form further research questions that could inform us on the specificity of gestures in trick films. For instance, we could examine whether

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specific parts of the frame are used more often for tricks and if that impacts the tricks’ perceptibility. Especially for ‘establishing dialogue’ gestures, we could further examine how they engage the spectators and make a much more specific comparison with stage acting styles.

Notes 1 ‘Paper Print Collection Study – The Media Ecology Project at Dartmouth College’, http://mediaecology.dartmouth.edu/wp/projects/pilot-projects/paper-printcollection-pilot-study (accessed 27 April 2021). 2 Domitor, ‘Collaborations – Partnership with the Media Ecology Project and The Library of Congress’, Domitor, http://www.domitor.org (accessed 20 February 2021). 3 First results of pilot studies can be seen in Mark Williams, ‘The Media Ecology Project: Library of Congress Paper Print Pilot’, The Moving Image 16, no. 1 (7 December 2016): 148–51. 4 Mark Phillipson, ‘Mediathread: Introduction’, http://ecommons.cornell.edu/ handle/1813/28898 (accessed 27 April 2021). 5 For technical details and an overview of the Media Ecology Project, see John Bell and Mark Williams, ‘The Media Ecology Project: Using Linked Data to Support Distributed Analysis of Visual Culture’, 2018, http://mediaecology.dartmouth.edu/ wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/bell_williams_mediaecology_v2.pdf (accessed 27 April 2021). 6 Adam Kendon, Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance (Cambridge and New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1. 7 Ibid., 7. 8 Ibid., 1. 9 Ibid., 11. 10 Ibid., 1. 11 Ibid., 3. 12 Defined by Tom Gunning as from the invention of the cinematograph until the First World War, in Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde’, in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Strauven (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 36. 13 Kendon, Gesture, 91. 14 Jacques Lecoq, Theatre of Movement and Gesture, ed. David Bradby (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2006), 67. 15 Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1997). 16 Ibid., 12.

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17 Definition of the term attitude: ‘We term attitude the position adopted at the end of the walk, or when standing still’, as cited in ibid., 85. 18 Ibid., 11. 19 Ibid., 100. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., vii. 22 Ibid., 10. 23 Ibid., 12. 24 As cited in ibid., 12. 25 See examples of ‘Establishing dialogue’ gestures on YouTube, https://youtu.be/fSzp4_MyGs (accessed 18 October 2020). 26 See examples of ‘Announcing’ gestures on YouTube, https://youtu.be/EqAUztOxvm0 (accessed 18 October 2020). 27 Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attraction[s]’. 28 Ibid., 382. 29 Tom Gunning, ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator’, in Viewing Position: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 121. 30 Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attraction[s]’, 382. 31 Frank Kessler and Sabine Lenk, ‘Cinéma d’attractions et gestualité’, in Les Vingt premières années du cinéma français: actes du colloque international de La Sorbonne Nouvelle 4, 5 et 6 novembre 1993, ed. Jean A. Gili et al. (Paris: AFRHC, 1996). 32 Christian Metz, ‘“Trucage” and the Film’, trans. Françoise Meltzer, Critical Inquiry 3, no. 4 (1977): 662. 33 ‘Establishing dialogue’ gestures. 34 Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attraction[s]’, 382. 35 Metz, ‘“Trucage” and the Film’, 664. 36 Ibid. 37 Francesca Coppa, ‘The Body Immaterial: Magicians’ Assistants and the Performance of Labor’, in Performing Magic on the Western Stage: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present, ed. Francesca Coppa, Lawrence Hass and James Peck (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 89. 38 Dan North, ‘Magic and Illusion in Early Cinema’, Studies in French Cinema 1, no. 2 (2001): 71. 39 ‘Announcing’ gestures. 40 Kendon, Gesture, 222. 41 Ibid, 199. 42 Tom Gunning, ‘“Now You See It, Now You Don’t”: The Temporality of the Cinema of Attractions’, The Velvet Light Trap 32 (1993): 45.

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43 Quality of movement: excerpt from ‘The Enchanted Glasses’, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=N5SgGkNQXJo&feature=youtu.be (accessed 18 October 2020). 44 See Jenny Oyallon-Koloski and Mark Williams, ‘Annotating FloLo: Utilizing Laban Movement Analysis in The Media Ecology Project’, China Film Press (2018). 45 ‘Announcing’ gestures.

7 LIBRETTOS AS SOURCE MATERIAL FOR FILM HISTORY: THE CASE OF EARLY RUSSIAN CINEMA Anna Kovalova

Film librettos played a significant role in pre-revolutionary Russian cinema. These film synopses were published in the press and handbills distributed in motion picture theatres (Figure 7.1). Thus, these texts were familiar both to the viewers and to the cinematographers who used to read librettos in the trade periodicals. Since the mid-1900s, a libretto became a part of the daily routine for everyone involved in the cinema or interested in it. The focus of this paper is relatively narrow and specific, but the article is to contribute to broader international research on the role of cinema-related periodicals in early cinema history. Its various directions have been recently traced in an excellent edited volume, Mapping Movie Magazines: Digitization, Periodicals and Cinema History. In the introduction to the book, the editors Daniël Biltereyst and Lies Van de Vijver argue that film magazines and trade journals are much more than just additional sources for understanding films or film history facts: ‘Scrutinizing movie magazines is an important part of today’s film and cinema historian’s research strategies. While there is already some literature on movie magazines, both as research objects and as sources for examining issues like the discursive construction of stars and fans, we believe that much more work could be done about and with movie magazines.’1 By exploring film librettos published in the press, I hope to do a small part of this work, as early Russian film periodicals remain an uninvestigated area. One could hardly give an example of a typical Russian libretto because the texts differed significantly in the genre (there were librettos for dramas, comedies, non-fiction films), style and size. The libretto for Oskorblennaia Venera (Insulted

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Figure 7.1  Cover of the Libretto Handbill. Nizhnii Novgorod, 1914.

Venus, 1916, Viacheslav Viskovskii), an adaptation of Anna Mar’s novel A Woman on the Cross, was very short: God has given her the body and beauty that enchanted everyone … Iolanta was as handsome as Venus, and Vervena, a little female artist, worshipped her as a goddess. While painting her, she idolized her, and in her blindness, she could not see that Iolanta was a mortal being, and she was in love with Vervena’s brother Berner, a strange gloomy man who had been cruel to women. Overtaken by the endless love, Iolanta forgot all the conventions and became his slave … And Vevena started to give up her goddess … She saw Iolanta humiliated and Bener laughing at her, and she could not honor her the way she used to … She could not open Iolanta’s eyes to her brother’s true identity, and she did not want to witness Venus’s further fall, so she went abroad. But the fate has taken the part that the artist gave up … An incident has shown Iolanta the cruelty and staleness of the man she had given everything to, and the insulted Venus killed the mortal who had dared to laugh at her.2 Most librettos contained much more details and were a lot longer than this one, some of them were printed on two or three pages of a film periodical.

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Later film librettos of the 1900s and 1910s became a crucial source for scholars. Film historians who wrote about early Russian cinema worked with librettos a lot because the absolute majority of pre-revolutionary Russian films (nearly 85 per cent) are considered lost. But film critic Mark Kushnirovich was probably the first to analyse a film libretto as a genre and as a phenomenon in cinema history. In his paper ‘Russian screenplay … Childhood … Boyhood … Youth’, he speaks of the difference between ‘a libretto-origin’ (‘libretto-pevoistochnik’), that had been written before a film was shot, and ‘a libretto-description’ (‘libretto-opisanie’), that usually was created after that to advertise a new production: ‘The distinction is not striking, but still significant. The “descriptions” were more (sometimes far more) promotional, emotional, passionate, striving after literary effect.’3 Indeed, the evidence from the 1910s film press confirms that some librettos had been written before the shooting and played the role of scripts, whereas others were created afterward. For instance, in the early 1910s, Kino-kurer (CineCourier) corresponded: ‘The actors have collaborated with the directors, writers, artists and, above all, theatre lovers to set up a co-partnership for “artistic” film production based on literary librettos featuring stage stars.’4 Here, it is assumed that a libretto comes before the film, but some years later critic Valentin Turkin suggested otherwise: ‘In most cases, a libretto is created by a viewer, someone, who has watched the film and written of what he had seen, understood and felt while watching.’5 According to Kushnirovich, we can only classify librettos as ‘origins’ and ‘descriptions’ intuitively. This was the only way to study librettos when they were spread in different journals and handbills so that scholars could not see them as a corpus of texts. The situation changed in 2018 when the fullest collection of pre-revolutionary cinema librettos ever compiled was published. This collection is the result of a research team project, Early Russian Film Prose, at the Higher School of Economics (Moscow) that I have founded. Currently, our database contains 886 librettos, and we have reviewed twenty-one pre-revolutionary periodicals to collect them. The libretto database we have built is now available online.6 The introduction and some essays on film librettos written by research group members have been translated to English by Julian Graffy. Film texts that my colleagues and I have collected with great care and attention often became an object of satire and laughter during the 1910s. The most brilliant parody was written by the famous Russian writer Arkadii Averchenko who published a feuilleton, caricaturing a typical film programme that included librettos of ‘Catching Fleas in Norway (useful)’, ‘Fatal Misunderstanding, or Hand and Heart of an Innocent Girl (tragic)’ and ‘Final Sensational Film: Mother-in-law Has Arrived! (hermetic laughter!! 300 meters)’ among others.7 Many journalists have followed Averchenko and published their own satirical synopses parodying ridiculous film plots and poor libretto language.8 In the satirical encyclopedia ‘The Key to the Knowledge of Contemporary Cinema’, the journal Proektor (Projector)

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has defined libretto as a ‘description of a film that has nothing to do with its actual contents. Sometimes accompanied by the quarrel between the logic and grammar.’9 It would be difficult to speak of these texts as sources for film history if their context could only be drawn by such quotes. Luckily, later in the 1910s, film critics started to take librettos much more seriously: Who can speak of librettos while discussing gradual steps of the inspirationally created word’s artistic embodiment? And why ever not? I will say more: it is necessary to speak of a libretto because it is the final and perfect fulfillment of the author’s idea. Indeed, a film libretto as it now represents a product of collective work by the author, director, artist, cameraman and viewer.10 Drawing inspiration in this Vladimir Turkin’s point, I will show how a film libretto can be a source of knowledge of different aspects of the film: its plot, intertitles, visual enterprise and even filmographic data and film history.

Reflecting plots The main purpose of a libretto was to reflect a film plot. Therefore, for both the viewers of the 1910s and later film scholars, librettos have first and foremost been of interest as sources of film plots. Indeed, one can find very few examples of librettos that do not depict any plotline. One of the very few exceptions is the libretto of the film Bogdan Khmelnitsky (1910, director unknown) that hardly contains any details of the plot; it only praises (in a rather clumsy manner, if I may say so) the film itself: Its plot is incredibly fascinating, all the scenes are thrilling, the performance is splendid, the setting is charming, and the colorful costumes correspond with the historical era the film depicts. The picture we recommend should take one of the most prominent places within the cinematic repertoire. The heroic personality of Bogdan Khmelnitsky will undoubtedly attract everyone’s interest, and therefore we will not write about the film much. A huge number of orders for this picture, which have already been received from all the cities and towns of Russia, confirm that we have managed to satisfy the taste of the public and the interests of theater owners.11 Almost all early Russian film librettos do provide plots, but one could wonder whether it is best to look for them in the librettos rather than in more detailed screenplays. Unfortunately, the question is irrelevant in most cases because the overwhelming majority of early Russian screenplays are lost. Twenty-seven of

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them have been published before the revolution in the journal Pegas, and some have survived in the archives.12 But while we can count librettos in hundreds (886 of them form the database described above), the early Russian screenplays can be only counted in tens. Even in the rare cases when we do have both a libretto and a screenplay for a particular film, it is not obvious which text reflects the plot more accurately. Unlike librettos, screenplays were always written before the shooting, and it was quite common for directors and producers to make substantial plot changes right on the shooting stage. For instance, the screenplay for Lik zver’a (The Beast’s Face, 1917, Aleksandr Arkatov) written by the famous Russian Symbolist writer Fedor Sologub (Figure 7.2) ends just like his story Zverinyi byt (Animal Life, 1912) which he adapted for the screen. The protagonist Alexei Kurganov learns of an evil scheme against his young son Grisha: it turns out that people who had been closest to the family planned to murder the boy for his money. ‘We should run, we should cross the oceans and the mountains’, thinks Kurganov in despair.13 Yet, from the Proektor journal’s review, one can see that this ending probably did not seem sufficiently dramatic, and the film ended with Grisha’s death and his father’s suicide.14 The screenplay of the film Teni grekha (Shadows of the Sin, 1916, Pyotr Chardynin) is lost, but it most likely corresponded with its origin (that is Alexander Amfiteatrov’s novel Liudmila Verkhovskaya) just as Zverinyi byt did. At the end of the novel, the heroine played by the famous ballerina and actress Vera Karalli drowns while skating, but in the film, she freezes to death in a snow forest (the film is not lost, its copy has been preserved in Gosfilmofond of Russia). In the memoirs by the Russian film director Viacheslav Viskovskii, the reason for this plot change is explained thus: It took Pyotr Chardynin [the film director] […] several weeks to persuade Karalli to throw herself into the ice hole. […] She agreed at last. Fur coats have been found, a fine horseman has been hired, they have bought brandy enough for drowning in it, but it turned out that brandy was used for ‘warming up’ everyone involved in the shooting except for the horse. The cameraman with the ‘camel’ (that is the camera by Pathé) set himself on a snowbank, focused the camera on the ice hole, and prepared to ‘roll’. The triumphant moment was close. Karalli put off her cloak and in her dress ran to the camera, then backward, and fell in the ice hole while everyone was running a victory lap. The men instantly started to take her out of the water, and when Karalli’s head showed off, the cameraman shouted: ‘Stop! I am running out of film’.15 It was impossible to do the episode again, and that is why Chardynin had to change the ending. The libretto for Teni grekha reflects the final version of the

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Figure 7.2 Advertisement for Lik zver’a (The Beast’s Face, 1917, Aleksandr Arkatov).

ending: ‘She helplessly falls into the soft snow and faints. In the morning, her husband, and brother, worried about her strange disappearance, start to look for her. Due to her steps on the snow, they manage to find her, but she was already dead … ’16 It is an example of Kushnirovich’s ‘description-librettos’ that were written by the viewers after the film production, not before. It is only natural that in certain cases, ‘description-librettos’ were written by different viewers: several anonymous authors watched one film and published librettos independently. It might be possible to assume that such librettos could be contradictory and present opposite versions of the same story, but I have not found examples of that in the database. Yet, there are many cases of one libretto adding details to another, specifying certain plot twists. I will illustrate this with the film Żona (The Wife, 1915, Aleksander Hertz; in Russia, it was distributed with the title And Everything is Mourned Over … Laughed at … Broken … ) starring Pola Negri, who later became a world-famous actress (Figure 7.3). There can be found two librettos for the film in the Russian press. One of them describes the heroine’s downfall rather briefly:

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Figure 7.3  Poster for Żona (The Wife directed by Aleksander Hertz, 1915).

The husband had been sick for a long time, and that undermined family’s finances. For the sake of her husband’s health, Elena is going to put up her valuables. On her way she meets Maria, ‘a merciful lady’, who takes her home, gives Elena some money and her address. At Maria’s home, young people usually meet in the evenings to have fun. Lavretskii [the villain in the film] also often visits her […] For a large sum of money, Maria makes Elena and Lavretskii meet at her house. And the rough cynicism breaks Elena’s strength.17 In the second libretto, we get a much more detailed version of the story, and here it is more obvious that the woman has become a victim of the circumstances rather than of her weakness: To make it worse, her husband falls ill. She needs doctors and medicine. Poor Elena goes to lend some money. She walks an alley, sad and lonely. Feeling tired, she sits down on a bench. A lady is approaching her. She is welldressed, handsome, with a kind face. She compassionately asks Elena what

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the matter with her was. Her beautiful voice charms Elena, and she openly tells her everything. The lady seems to have taken young beauty’s misfortunes very much to heart. She walks her home, gives her some money, and asks Elena to visit her without ceremony. Poor Elena did not know that this lady was Maria Pilchinskaia, a madam who kept a house of ill repute. When she was in need again and came to visit Pilchinskaia, her photographer secretly took Elena’s picture and added it to the fancy women’s album. This house was popular among wealthy men, and Lavretskii was one of the clients. He once saw Elena’s photo in the album. ‘I will give you everything I have, but you must get me this beauty’, he said. Pilchinskaia sends Elena an invitation. Without any suspicion, Elena arrived and became the victim of Lavretskii’s lustful desires.18 We probably have here two libretto types described by Kushnirovich: the first one might be ‘an origin’ whereas the second one is almost certain ‘a description’ that is usually more helpful for reconstructing a film plot. A reconstruction of this kind is particularly important when it comes to identifying films. The database ‘Librettos of Russian Films 1908–1917’ has already been used for this purpose. Addressing the database among other sources, Peter Bagrov, a film historian and archivist, has identified the film Simfoniia bezumiia (The Symphony of Insanity, 1917, Vladimir Kasianov) that had been previously considered lost. Unfortunately for scholars, in the mid-1910s, there came up a tendency to shorten librettos and to exclude film endings from them. In other words, some librettos of 1915–17 look more like modern synopses that present a film plot avoiding spoilers. For instance, the libretto for Chelovek bez kavartiry (A Man without an Apartment, 1915, Viacheslav Viskovskii) ends up with a cliffhanger: The professor found his wife in the arms of a young man, and so she had to present Alexander Nikolaevich as Count Nepianelli who supposedly arrived without waiting for the professor to come. That was a rather convenient excuse for managing the situation, but whether the young bon vivant could use it properly, that the viewers will see on the screen.19 The libretto for the drama Puti izmeny (The Paths of Adultery, 1917, Andrei Gromov), written by the famous screenwriter Alexander Voznesenskii, presents the plotline only generally: the text is all about reflections on adultery as an existential problem.20 Aside from retelling the story, the anonymous author speaks of different peculiarities of a human soul. In such cases, it is essential to look for sources that would add details to the libretto which is usually the main source for reconstructing an early Russian film plot. The contents of Puti izmeny is very well presented in the review published in The Proektor journal.21

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Reflecting intertitles While reading a significant number of librettos one after another, one starts watching the films described by the texts – in his or her imagination, that is. Sometimes these imaginary films have intertitles: a libretto reader may turn specific libretto phrases into intertitles. Indeed, in many cases, librettos and intertitles were deeply connected, and occasionally an intuitive suggestion about a libretto quoting an intertitle might be successfully confirmed. That is especially relevant to librettos that contain different types of quotes. In that respect, it might be interesting to discuss a libretto for the film Kradenoie shchastie (Stolen Happiness, 1915, Pyotr Chardynin) which had two alternative titles: Dnevnik nekrasivoi zhenshchiny (The Diary of an Ugly Woman) and Drama nekrasivoi zhenshchiny (An Ugly Woman’s Drama). It begins with the following: In the mountains, tourists find a forgotten notebook that turns out to be a diary. Intrigued, they sit down and start reading, and a hard drama of a woman’s soul opens to them, page by page. These are the first pages of the diary: ‘You, whom I do not know, will understand with all your heart how I suffered. Look inside my soul, try not to understand but feel my sufferings … Cry over my fate, an autumn reckless fate of an ugly woman’.22 Then the libretto continues about a romance of the ugly woman and a dashing artist: he took a fancy to her because they met at a masquerade while she was wearing a mask. Their relationship developed, but she had not shown him her face until one day she decided to do otherwise: ‘I have made up my mind that it should either put an end to everything, or it should be the start of new happiness … If he tells me he does not care who I am, that he loves my soul, let him see me just as I am.’23 In the Gerasimov State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK, Moscow) there is a collection of copies of the intertitle lists for a large number of early films, including Kradenoie shchastie. The second intertitle in the list coincides with the first libretto quote; the only difference lies in punctuation: ‘2. … You, whom I do not know, will understand with all your heart how I suffered. Look inside my soul, try not to understand but feel my sufferings … Cry over my fate, an autumn, reckless fate of an ugly woman … ’24 The second quote in the libretto corresponds with the intertitles nos 23 and 24. All the intertitles in the list except the first one (‘A Mountain Adventure’) are quotes from the diary, which was unusual for the time. This clever structure was appreciated by the critic Vitol’d Akhramovich, who reviewed films for the Moscow Teatral’naia Gazeta (Theatre Newspaper): ‘The plot is presented on a high psychological level and comes with literary intertitles that create a special

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mood.’25 The film is lost, but one can find evidence for the critic’s judgement in the intertitles list as well as in the libretto. When some parts of a libretto are written in verses, it is also reasonable to suggest that they reproduce intertitles; some examples confirm that. A libretto for the film Elena Deeva (1916, Alexander Chargonin) contains two versed passages: Our marriage is odd and unhappy, And I blame Danila for that. He is so indifferent, And I am so in love with him. And – between us – he is not a husband to me, Nor I am his true wife. […] So, they were falling all over each other Daily and hourly. Kissing turns to begging … Their life became horrible!26 I could not find the intertitles list for this film, but one of the critics pointed out that some of them were versed: ‘The intertitles should have been edited more carefully: one should have either used only versed quotes from the novel or retell everything in prose. They should not have mixed one thing with another.’27 In this case, the libretto seems to reproduce the whole film’s structure: part of it is in prose, and another part is versed, and there seems to be no logic in the dichotomy. The narrator speaks both in prose and in verses, and the choice seems to be completely random. Very rarely can one come across librettos that not only reflect single intertitles but seem to be constructed of them. For instance, in the pre-revolutionary press, one can find two different librettos for the film Natásha Rostova (1915, Pyotr Chardynin), an adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace (Figures 7.4 and 7.5). The libretto published in Sine-Fono is typical; it retells the story just the way many other librettos did: Doing some errands Prince Andrew had to see the Marshal of the Nobility for the district, that was Count Ilyá Rostóv. Sad and anxious, he approaches the Count’s house, but suddenly he notices the two girls running toward him. These girls were Sonya and Natásha. Natásha was laughing with such joy, she was looking around her so merrily that Prince Andrew suddenly felt offended by her paying no attention to him. Natásha makes a strong impression on the Prince, and during the whole day he spent at the Rostóv’s Prince Andrew

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Figures 7.4 and 7.5 Promotional photographs for Natásha Rostova (1915, Pyotr Chardynin).

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repeatedly glanced at Natásha. He had to stay the night at the Count’s and was long unable to sleep in new surroundings.28 The same scenes are described in another libretto very differently: ‘1) Prince Andrew had to see the Marshal of the Nobility for the district Count Ilyá Rostóv in connection with the affairs of the estate of which he was trustee, and Prince Andrew went to visit him. 2) My daughter and my niece. 3) That night, alone in new surroundings, he was long unable to sleep.’29 The libretto text does not present a narrative; it consists of the numbered paragraphs, which are quite different from each other by their structure. It is constructed exactly as an intertitles list. It is noteworthy that the second libretto is closer to Tolstoy’s original text: the first and the second paragraphs are loose quotes from part three of the second book of War and Peace. It was typical for the Russian adaptations of the time to give quotations in the intertitles. Unlike Natásha Rostova, the film The Kreutzer Sonata (1914, Vladimir Gardin), an adaptation of another work by Tolstoy, has survived, and the copy has original intertitles that quote Tolstoy’s text. The journal Kinema which reproduced the second libretto of Natásha Rostova was published by Alexander Khanzhonkov’s who had produced the film. That might explain why the editors had the intertitles list that they probably considered good enough to replace a proper libretto that they did not have time or inclination to write. For pre-revolutionary reviewers, this probably was a disappointing libretto that did not serve its purpose: if you do not know the plot (everybody did not read War and Peace at the time), you will not learn of it from this choppy libretto. But for film scholars ‘intertitle librettos’ of that kind are extremely valuable. Luckily, we have a number of them, including a libretto for Anna Karenina (1914, Vladimir Gardin), an adaptation of another Tolstoy’s novel,30 which was printed in a handbill that is preserved in the Vologda State Museum-Preserve of History, Architecture and Decorative Arts.31

Reflecting the visual Overall, librettos were about telling a story for the viewers and exhibitors, who read film trade press where the texts were published and selected films that seemed thrilling to watch or purchase. Librettos were not supposed to depict camera work or artistic features of scenes. Yet, some ‘libretto-descriptions’ do that providing an excellent picture of what a viewer could see in a film. Let us turn to Schchastie vechnoi nochi (Happiness of the Eternal Night, 1915), directed by Evgenii Bauer. It is a full-length drama (1,402 metres) with a very dynamic plot. Lily is a blind girl; she has a loving friend Vadim who does everything to help her have eye surgery. It goes well, and Lily is no longer blind, but Vadim warns everyone that any anxiety can become a shock that could

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destroy Lily’s eyesight forever. That is why he does not bring her round when she takes his brother Georgii for the friend who saved her eyes and agrees to marry him. Georgii is shallow-hearted, and he only wants Lily for her money. Besides, he has another woman in his life, and when she comes to Lily to tell her the whole truth, Lily collapses and wakes up blind. She will never see again, but her devoted friend Vadim returns to her, and they decide to be together. The libretto for Schchastie vechnoi nochi is relatively short and does not contain a lot of details. Though one scene is described extensively and fully: When Lily woke up, it was dark … ‘Has the night come already?’, an idea shot across her mind. She walks to the curtains with uncertainty and hesitance, opens the window, but behind it there is also a dark night … She turns on electric lights, but she cannot see anything … Her face is distorted with fear. A horrible idea came to her mind – with her hands trembling she grabs the matches, lights the first one … the second one … but Lily’s eyes that are now blind again do not see a single flash of fire. With the cry of terror and endless despair, Lily falls down … This time her blindness came because of the extreme emotional upset, and Lily has to remain in the ‘kingdom of the eternal night’ forever.32 The film has survived, and if one compares it with the libretto, it will be evident that this climax scene is described with perfect accuracy: the camera follows Lily precisely the way the libretto narrator does it. Sometimes it is possible to assume that a libretto reflects certain visual scenes even when the film is lost. Zaraza (The Infection, 1915, Vladimir Kasianov) is a rare example of a thriller in early Russian cinema. It is an adaptation of Guy de Maupassant’s short story A Mad Man (1885), in which a public prosecutor catches an infection of murder mania from a criminal. At first, he ‘executes’ a bird, then he starts killing people. The short story is written in the form of a diary, and the main plot is not about the murders but about the madness that gradually turns a decent man into a maniac. According to many reviews, the film was constructed in the same way: ‘Even though the plot lacks movement and is focused mainly on the emotions of the murderer, Mr. Petipa [Marius Petipa who played the main part] has managed to depict his character’s complicated inner tragedy very clearly.’33 The libretto clarifies that, according to the text, ‘the inner tragedy’ was played not only by Petipa but also by German Voskresenskii, who performed the role of the dead criminal who had ‘poisoned’ his prosecutor with the mania. Each time when the prosecutor is about to kill, the criminal’s ghost is there to seduce him: ‘Walking by the seashore he bumps into a sleeping boat boy, and the ghost of the executed murderer haunts him again, it whispers: “Try to squeeze this boy’s neck, Mr. Prosecutor. What emotions will it bring you!”.’34 It might be suggested that the ghost was a flight of the librettist’s

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fantasy, but the presence of this character could be confirmed by the memoirs of the cameraman Alexander Nedykhlyaev and the list of the film’s intertitles.35 For instance, intertitle no. 16 reads: ‘The stabbed canary was just a prelude, Mr. Prosecutor. Try to squeeze this boy’s neck, Mr. Prosecutor. What emotions will it bring you!’36 Without the context of a libretto, it would be difficult to say whose line this is, but if we compare the two sources, we would probably prove that the criminal appeared not only in the first scenes, but became one of the principal characters. There are cases when we do not have intertitles or detailed reviews that could confirm the visual images provided by librettos, but these images might be so bright and persuasive that they leave little or no doubt. Medovyi mesiats (The Honeymoon, 1915, Vladislav Lenchevskii) is a comedy about newlyweds who have a big fight but make up in the end. In the libretto, it says: Yet, alas, the gates are closed, the park keeper is gone. The poor spouses must spend the night in the park. What is to be done? They have to stoop to fate … They sit on a bench, at first far from each other, but as the night chilliness approaches, they move closer and closer … When the Sun rises, Nina and her husband sit close, Fertner’s coat covers Nina, and she is smiling in her sleep. Obviously, the night they spent with no roof over their heads reconciled the husband and wife, and the new morning, a wonderful morning of a charming honeymoon, promises them the prior happiness.37 It would be enough to mention that the spouses became cold in the park and ended the quarrel, the bench scene does not add much to the plot, but it contains a detailed description of how the visual image was probably constructed. I cannot be entirely sure, but the description most likely coincided with this lost film scene.

Reflecting filmography and film history At the very start, in 1908, when the first librettos for Russian films were published, these texts began offering important filmographic information. The libretto for Drama v tabore podmoskovnykh tsygan (Drama in a Gypsy Encampment Near Moscow, 1908, Vladimir Siversen) mentions the length of the film – 140 metres.38 The libretto for Svad’ba Krechinskogo (Krechinsky’s Wedding, 1908, Alexander Drankov) mentions the production studio and actors: ‘The film by A.O. Drankov’, ‘The roles are performed by the actors of the Imperial theatres V.N. Davydov, Garlin and Novinskii.’39 Veniamin Vishnevskii undoubtedly used many such remarks when compiling his fundamental filmography.40

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More detailed and intriguing remarks can be found. That ‘[t]he film is based on a screenplay which was written by L. Palmskii from the accounts of an eyewitness … ’,41 is said in the libretto for Stranitsy chernoi knigi (The Pages of the Black Book, 1914, Boris Glagolin) (Figure 7.6). It was a propaganda film produced right at the beginning of the First World War about a family of a Russian professor who was imprisoned and brutally attacked by the Germans (the German commander executed the father, intended to rape the daughter, etc.). The reference to an eyewitness who was helping the screenwriter could be a clever advertising trick, but it is worth mentioning that Leonard Palmskii, who created the script, was a playwright and a journalist: he indeed had a chance to interview a witness. The libretto was not the only text that presented the idea of a true story on which the film was based. The journal Sine-Fono has republished a review from Novoe vremia (The New Time, one of the most popular newspapers of the early twentieth century): ‘Several scenes in the film reproduce exactly the journey home of a notable public figure and his family who had to leave Germany

Figure 7.6 Advertisement for Stranitsy chernoi knigi (The Pages of the Black Book directed by Boris Glagolin, 1914).

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when the war was declared. The main parts were played under the supervision of those who had suffered from the incident … ’42 In rare cases, in librettos, there can be found some clues on how the film was created. See, for instance, the first lines of the libretto L’Khaim (1910, Kai Hansen, Maurice Maître): ‘A colleague of ours has come out with an idea of filming several classic (if we can call them that way) scenes of Jewish life. The first of such scenes is the film “For the Life” [“L’Khaim”], a dramatic sketch of the life of a provincial Jewish town … ’43 Referral to ‘a colleague of ours’ seems a bit vague, and it would be wonderful if the author of the libretto could be more precise here. But the idea of this film being created as a part of a series of Jewish films is true and particularly important. The Russian branch of Pathé Frères that had released L’Khaim indeed started a new and extremely productive genre of ‘a Jewish film drama’. It has affected the whole Russian film industry and broadened the audience of motion picture theatres. ‘Recently in many Moscow theatres among others, there has been shown the film L’Khaim, a scene from the Jewish life. I know many people who almost never went to the electric cinema before but decided to go to see this picture’, a correspondent of the Sine-Fono journal pointed out.44 The next part of the Jewish series that had been announced by Pathé in the libretto for L’Khaim was the film Skripka (The Violin, 1911, Kai Hansen).

Conclusion A conclusion is supposed to summarize what has already been said and strengthen the initial argument. In this conclusion, something quite opposite will be done. Time has come to admit that librettos did not always accurately reflect film plots (or intertitles, or visual enterprise, or filmographic information). In many instances, the text does not truly correspond with a surviving film, and the dialogues in a libretto sometimes have nothing in common with the film’s original intertitles. This might be especially relevant for ‘librettos-origins’ that had been written before an actual film was shot. The libretto for the film Diadiushkina kvartira (The Uncle’s Apartment 1913, Pyotr Chardynin), one of the first and most significant early Russian comedies, appears to belong to this category. First, the text is focused on describing the starting point of the film; most of the plot is described briefly and vaguely: ‘A real mess comes up, we witness many funny misunderstandings … Yet, at last, things clear up.’45 Second, in the libretto, the action takes place in Paris, while in the film, it is transferred to Moscow (the characters write to each other notes that indicate that they are going to date at Sokol’niki, which is a Moscow park). Third, the film is preserved with the original intertitles, and they have nothing to do with quotes from the libretto.

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When one deals with the ‘librettos-descriptions’ that usually present a film more accurately, there still can always be sources that could provide more information about this or that aspect. Screenplays typically give a more thorough (yet often less precise) presentation of plots. The intertitles lists are obviously a more reliable source for exploring intertitles. If someone wants to get an idea of a lost film’s visual appearance, to ‘imagine’ the scenes as they were on the screen before the copies were gone, the evidence for all that will be most likely found in promotional photographs rather than librettos. When it is necessary to reconstruct a motion picture’s history or filmography, it is wiser to consult chronicles that were published in the trade press. That being said, a libretto must be considered an outstandingly unique source for a film historian, as it is probably the only one that is universal: potentially, it can speak of so many things in so little words. This polyvalence is strongly connected with another important characteristic of the genre: it is anonymous. Valentin Turkin puts it clearly: For our purpose – that is to prove the simple truth that a libretto is the pinnacle of the creative process that results in a film work of art – it makes no difference who composed a libretto: a professional writer, a young lady from a distribution company, or an intelligent doorkeeper at a motion picture theatre. In a libretto, it is not the style that matters, but the complete objectivity, that is, according to a loosely challenged definition, the subject of a genius.46 It is not easy to speak of genius when dealing with librettos that are often illiterate and clumsy. Naturally, the viewers of the early twentieth century liked to make fun of them. But at that time, it was hardly possible to imagine that soon these texts would become a principal source and instrument for scholars of early Russian cinema.

Acknowledgements I dedicate this article to my dearest colleagues Anna Andreeva, Alexander Anisimov, Anna Gudkova, Yulia Kozitskaya, Arina Ranneva, Sabina Shmakova, Nadezhda Shmulevich, Alexandra Zakharova and Julian Graffy.

Notes 1

Daniël Biltereyst and Lies Van de Vijver, ‘Introduction: Movie Magazines, Digitization and New Cinema History’, in Mapping Movie Magazines: Digitization, Periodicals and Cinema History, ed. Daniël Biltereyst and Lies Van de Vijver (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 3.

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2 ‘Novye lenty’, Sine-Fono, nos 7–8 (1917): 134. All quotes are translated by the author. 3 Mark Kushnirovich, ‘Russkii stsenarii – Detstvo … Otrochestvo … Yunost’, in Ekrannye iskusstva i literature: nemoe kino, ed. Anri Surenovich Vartanov and Neia Markovna (Moscow: Nauka, 1991), 135. 4 ‘Raznye izvestiia’, Kino-kurier, no. 2 (1914): 10. 5 Valentin Turkin, ‘Ot stsenariia k libretto’, Kino-gazeta, no. 25 (1918): 2. 6 Librettos of Russian Films 1908–1917, https://hum.hse.ru/en/ditl/filmprose/libretti/ (accessed 28 April 2021). 7 For an English translation of the feuilleton, see Anna Kovalova, ‘The Film Palaces of the Nevsky Prospect: A History of St Petersburg’s Cinemas, 1900–1910’, trans. Birgit Beumers, in A Companion to Russian Cinema, ed. Birgit Beumers (Oxford and Boston, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), 33–5. 8 See, for example, ‘Kinematograficheskie kuriezy’, Vestnik kinematografii, no. 3/83 (1914): 47; ‘Malen’kii fel’eton: programma kinematografa’, Zhivoi ekran, no. 21 (1916): 18–19. 9 Binom, ‘Kliuch k poznaniu sovremennoi kinematografii (Satiricheskaia entsiklopediia)’, Proektor, nos 9–10 (1917): 6. 10 Valentin Turkin, ‘Ot stsenariia k libretto’, Kino-gazeta, no. 25 (1918): 2. 11 ‘Novye lenty’, Kine-zhurnal, no. 21 (1910): 19. 12 Some of the screenplays are preserved in Russian State Archive for Literature and Art (RGALI), Gosfilmofond of Russia (the Russian State Film Archive), A.A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, etc. 13 Fedor Sologub, ‘Zverinyi byt’, in Sobranie sochinenii v 8 tomakh, vol. 6 (Moscow: Intelvak, 2002), 150. 14 ‘Novosti kinematograficheskogo rynka’, Zhivoi ekran, no. 22 (1917): 48. 15 Viacheslav Viskovskii, Moi dvadtsat’ let v kino: vospominaniia, f. 240, inv. 11, doc. 17, lists 8–9, Russian State Archive for Literature and Art, Moscow. 16 ‘Novye lenty’, Sine-Fono, nos 16–17 (1915): 91. 17 ‘Opisaniia kartin’, Proektor, no. 2 (1915): 35. 18 ‘Novye lenty’, Sine-Fono, nos 21–22 (1915): 118. 19 Ibid.: 98. 20 ‘Libretto kartin’, Kino-gazeta, no. 3 (1918): 4. 21 ‘Kriticheskoe obozrenie’, Proektor, nos 17–18 (1917): 13. 22 ‘Novye lenty’, Sine-Fono, nos 19–20 (1915): 89. 23 Ibid. 24 Kradenoe shchast’ie [intertitles], inv. 38, folder 11, list 18, the Gerasimov State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK, Moscow). 25 ‘Stranitsy ekrana’, Teatral’naia gazeta, no. 29 (1915): 17. 26 ‘Novye lenty’, Sine-Fono, no. 4 (1916): 48. 27 ‘Kriticheskoe obozrenie’, Proektor, no. 22 (1916): 13.

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28 ‘Novye lenty’, Sine-Fono, no. 9 (1915): 57–8. 29 ‘Opisaniia kartin’, Kinema, nos 3/4–19/20 (1915): 33–5. 30 On this film, see Anna Kovalova, ‘Anna Karenina (1914): Reconstructing and Interpreting a Lost Russian Film’, Film History 30, no. 2 (2018): 35–78. 31 Vologda film poster, 100 Years Ago: A Virtual Exhibition of the Vologda MuseumPreserve, http://www.vologdamuseum.ru/images/kinoaf/20.html (accessed 28 April 2021). 32 ‘Novye lenty’, Sine-Fono, nos 19–20 (1916): 148–9. 33 ‘Sredi novinok’, Sine-Fono, no. 3 (1915): 68. 34 ‘Novye lenty’, Sine-Fono, no. 3 (1915): 106–12. 35 Alexander Nedykhlyaev, ‘Na zare “Velikogo nemogo” v Rossii: vospominaniia kinooperatora’, f. 2912, inv. 1, doc. 1157, lists 71–73, Russian State Archive for Literature and Art, Moscow. 36 Zaraza [intertitles], inv. 2300, folder 10, list 38 (ob.), the Gerasimov State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK, Moscow). 37 ‘Novye lenty’, Sine-Fono, no. 1 (1915): 84. 38 ‘Novye lenty’, Sine-Fono, no. 3 (1908): 11. 39 ‘Novye lenty’, Vestnik kinematografov v Sankt-Peterburge, no. 4 (1908): 6–8. 40 Viacheslav Viskovskii, Khudozhestvennye fil’my dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii (Moscow: Goskinoizdat, 1945). 41 ‘Novye lenty’, Kine-zhurnal, nos 21–22 (1914): 93. 42 ‘Otzyvy pressy’, Sine-Fono, no. 3 (1914): 82. 43 ‘Novye lenty’, Sine-Fono, no. 6 (1910): 20. 44 G. Er., ‘Otkliki zhizni: sinematograf and natsional’nyi vopros,” Sine-Fono, no. 9 (1911): C 8. 45 ‘Novye lenty’, Sine-Fono, no. 24 (1913): 70. 46 Valentin Turkin, ‘Ot stsenariia k libretto’, Kino-gazeta, no. 25 (1918): 2.

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8 NARRATIVE CINEMA AS A SEPARATE ATTRACTION: ARCHIE L. SHEPARD’S NEWSPAPER PUBLICITY Paul S. Moore

The arrival of The Great Train Robbery late in 1903 seems genuinely to have heralded a new form of cinema – or at least a new rhetoric of cinema publicity. Consider two consecutive advertisements for Archie L. Shepard’s Moving Pictures in a weekly regional newspaper from Lawrence, Massachusetts. In November 1903, Shepard promoted only a variety of views of current events from around the world. ‘See […] The Election of Pope Pius X, The International Yacht Races, The Famous Delhi Durbar, Notable scenes in India, China, Egypt, Venice, Armenia and all parts of the world.’1 Shepard had started his picture show enterprise just a few months earlier, after several years projecting pictures as a specialty act within a touring repertoire company. His was one of a bumper crop of new itinerant exhibitors in 1903, although he was lucky to quickly establish a connection with Cahn and Grant’s syndicate theatre circuit in New England, filling open days and giving Sunday concerts such as here in Lawrence. He was well located to obtain new films directly from Edison, and was among the first itinerants to get a copy of Edwin S. Porter’s new production, The Great Train Robbery, for his next show in Lawrence just before Christmas 1903. This time, Shepard advertised his two-hour Sunday programme by singling out the new narrative film: ‘A thousand thrills […] More sensational features than could be crowded into five melodramas. Everything complete from the binding and gagging of the train despatcher to the final capture and death of the quartette of most daring train robbers imaginable.’ Other films ‘too numerous to mention’ were an afterthought in small print, including ‘a new and beautiful series of fairy tale pictures for the children’2 (Figure 8.1).

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Figure 8.1  Early advertisements for Shepard’s Moving Pictures. ‘The Great Train Robbery, A Thousand Thrills’, Lawrence (MA) American, 18 December 1903 (left); ‘Thrilling! Pathetic! Mysterious! Startling! Inspiring!’ Fall River (MA) News, 23 November 1903; and listed as a specialty for the Maude Hillman repertoire company, Pittston (PA) Gazette, 22 March 1902.

The Great Train Robbery played again at Shepard’s next visit to Lawrence in January, noted as ‘more exciting than a drama’ now among a list of other narrative films. Perhaps surprisingly, given the film’s legacy, The Great Train Robbery rarely precipitated effusive descriptions like Shepard’s at the time, and few others promoted it quickly for offering thrilling new sensations. Another travelling exhibitor, J. E. Comerford, was first to show the film in Fall River, Massachusetts, at a Sunday concert in the syndicate theatre, just like Shepard in Lawrence. The similarities ended there, at least in their newspaper publicity. Rather than an advertisement under the theatre’s banner, Comerford’s show had a small article highlighting his own illustrated lecturing, merely naming the film without description.3 Was Comerford’s audience as engaged and captivated by The Great Train Robbery as Shepard’s? Perhaps, but my concern is the entirely different question of how new discourses for film publicity such as Shepard’s were integral to tipping the scales as early cinema’s variety of attractions tilted towards dramatic narrative films. To be clear, I am not claiming that The Great Train Robbery caused or necessitated this new rhetoric; Shepard had begun adopting a melodramatic frame in his advertising earlier, such as late in November in Fall River, Massachusetts, asserting the show was ‘appealing to every human emotion. Grand! Beautiful! Thrilling! Pathetic! Mysterious! Startling! Inspiring! Intensely interesting’4 (Figure 8.1). Archie L. Shepard was one of the most prominent exhibitors in the United States between 1903 and 1907, perhaps if not ‘undoubtedly the largest exhibitor of moving pictures in the world’.5 His shows were among the first to shift their

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publicity towards sensational narrative films by embracing the rhetoric of stage melodrama. Setting aside obvious hyperbole and exaggeration as part and parcel of promotional ballyhoo, the corpus of Shepard’s newspaper publicity is remarkable for describing a mode of cinema reception promising narrative immersion as the leading attraction for a moving picture entertainment. Concurrent publicity for Shepard in Bangor, Maine, in January 1904 emphasized the growing length of an expanding list of popular story films. Le Royaume des fées (Fairyland, 1903, Georges Méliès) and The Great Train Robbery were new films listed with Life of an American Fireman (1902, Porter) and Le Voyage de Gulliver à Lilliput et chez les Géants (Gulliver’s Travels Among the Lilliputians and the Giants, 1902, Méliès), ‘which contain from 1,500 to 2,000 ft. and require from 15 to 20 minutes to exhibit’.6 The Great Train Robbery, in particular, was noted for its $4,500 expense and three months’ effort in production, with a result ‘astounding everyone who sees it’.7 As if testing the limits of melodramatic discourse, Shepard’s publicity in Hartford, Connecticut, soon promised ‘the robbery of a train, with the actual firing, bloodshed and scenes of terror, is shown most realistically’.8 Crossing the line from thrills into terror, from peril into bloodshed, Shepard’s phrasing was rarely again this graphic, and a reporter cautioned how the show ‘leaned much towards the tragic in many parts, death by violence seeming to be a very popular subject’.9 Perhaps this rare negative commentary in Hartford was spurred by the advance newspaper promotion as much as the film itself? And yet, even this critic was struck by the popular appeal of the evening’s show: ‘Moving pictures are no longer a novelty, but they still interest many people.’10 Shepard is largely forgotten, a passing footnote in histories of American cinema.11 To my knowledge, this chapter is unique in singling him out. In 1914, Robert Grau spotlighted Shepard’s importance as ‘one of the vital factors, if not, indeed, the most vital, in developing the present-day vogue of moving pictures as a separate attraction’.12 This notion was founded upon Shepard’s later success installing moving pictures in New York theatres, ‘first to give this form of amusement of his creation a permanent home in a first-class Broadway theatre at popular prices’.13 In their more recent film history, Charles Musser and Carol Nelson characterize Shepard’s style of show in relief against Lyman H. Howe’s commitment to an educational mode of uplift. ‘Shepard situated himself in the mainstream of urban, commercialized popular culture’, Musser and Nelson propose, which ‘increasingly featured the kinds of sensational, melodramatic films that were to appear in the first nickelodeons’.14 For Musser and Nelson, however, this pursuit of the latest popular sensations led Shepard to venture into the cutthroat arena of nickelodeons, ‘certainly, his exhibition practices were easily adapted to the opportunities offered by storefront theaters’.15 Their point is primarily to cite Shepard as quick to chase the profits of popularity, following the frenzied fads, which nicely contrasts against Howe’s alternative path into ‘high class’ travelogues for metropolitan audiences.

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In this chapter, I highlight Shepard’s advance newspaper publicity for positioning cinema as having achieved an artistic realm of its own. I isolate three themes where Shepard charted an identity for cinema’s autonomous cultural identity: silent drama as an art form in itself, achieved through immersive sensation, appealing to a popular taste. I will focus on autumn 1904 with the first publications of a set of short, widely printed articles that were reprinted for the next three years, effectively constituting a press book for Shepard’s cinema enterprises, then proliferating into multiple touring picture shows as well as a growing roster of weekly stands. In this wider context, the early promotional claims for The Great Train Robbery are less a description of a particular film than a marker of dramatic story films as an emerging centripetal force, even as cinema remained a whirl of miscellaneous attractions. At the same time, most evident in Shepard’s publicity, moving picture shows became an autonomous form of popular entertainment, a featured, separate attraction from other commercial amusements.

A cinema of miscellany? Between narrative and attractions The significance for American film history of the years 1903 to 1907 focuses on the rise of the story film, with The Great Train Robbery often spotlighted as a turning point. For its centenary in 2003, mainstream press headlines claimed ‘Story films began with a bang in 1903’ when The Great Train Robbery ‘launched [a] feature film industry’.16 Such generalizations date back almost as far as the film itself. By the end of 1908, one writer named it ‘the first long picture […] the first feature picture ever’.17 Recalling the film in 1916, William H. Swanson claimed it was ‘undoubtedly the starting of the present moving picture popularity and the first long motion picture ever produced’.18 Among the earliest commentators reflecting upon the point of no return precipitated by The Great Train Robbery was Archie L. Shepard himself, in an interview late in 1904: ‘The success of pictures like “The Great Train Robbery” […] has brought out others as carefully prepared and as well acted out as a play […] It is hard to gauge the public taste, but it is certain […] the taste has changed […] The public now demands sensation and must have it.’19 When Terry Ramsaye wrote his history of early cinema, the film anchored a chapter entitled ‘The Story Picture is Born’, which framed Porter’s work as ending the ‘dark hour just before the dawn’ when moving pictures ‘had nothing new to say’, gesturing to the commonplace notion of the so-called ‘chaser theory’ that the novelty of moving pictures in 1896 quickly wore off until this narrative turn in 1903.20 For my purposes, let me draw attention to Ramsaye’s casting the fame

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of The Great Train Robbery in terms of publicity, explaining how ‘the picture was, for its day, the sort that the picture makers now would advertise to the public as “an epoch making achievement of the art of motion pictures,” and to exhibitors as “a box office knockout.”’21 Lewis Jacobs, too, wrote a similar chapter on Porter, albeit more critically precise, putting greater emphasis on the earlier Life of an American Fireman for opening the floodgates of ‘intense personal reactions’ for audiences, who ‘as if viewing a real crisis, could not remain passive’.22 Jacobs offered the corrective that The Great Train Robbery ‘has been called the first story film in America; it was, more accurately, the most successful and influential of early story films’.23 Benjamin Hampton’s nuanced take positioned The Great Train Robbery as heralding a new period in the history of American cinema exhibition, focused on narrative films without entirely displacing the appeal and prominence of the earlier style of ‘episodic’ views, Hampton’s term for one-shot actualities. ‘From 1903 to 1910 the episodic films of the [earlier] period appeared on many screens; while on many others the new movies, telling a story in twelve or fourteen minutes, were gradually educating audiences to appreciation of longer, better entertainment.’24 The very same point was later repeated by Nicholas Vardac, tracing the shift of acting from stage to screen. While the longer, story film ‘one-reel melodrama’ gradually became the ‘basic form’ in the decade between 1902 and 1913, ‘it was not in extensive use until about 1906–1908, and even then films of this genre appeared on bills supported by episodic films’.25 Vardac elevates the timing of the arrival of Robbery, not exactly the film in itself, as a sign that ‘audiences had begun to lose interest in pictures that simply moved’, repeating the chaser theory in common-sense form.26 In a sense, audiences needed to be instructed how to engage with the new story films. This framework places my analysis of Shepard’s publicity in terms of two key debates over early cinema periodization focused on the chaser theory and the cinema of attractions. Elsewhere, I have revisited the 1984 exchange on the ‘chaser theory’ between Charles Musser and Robert Allen as a touchstone of analogue film historiography, now decades past.27 On its surface, Musser disputed Allen’s revisionist take on the idea that early films had been relegated to ‘last place on the bills of vaudeville theatres […] humorously knowns as “chasers.”’28 Allen had dismissed this notion by pointing out plenty of examples of early, nonnarrative film receiving fanfare as the featured attraction – exactly the kinds of early views Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault would soon characterize as ‘the cinema of attractions’, to which I will return shortly.29 Musser meticulously tested the hypothesis with rhetorical and methodological zeal, confirming how moving pictures had indeed suffered a period of disinterest, exacerbated by Edison’s litigiousness, before a distinct resurgence of activity mid-1903 in production and exhibition alike. The turning point coincided with the release of Porter’s Life of An American Fireman, soon accelerated with The Great Train Robbery.

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In subsequent work, Musser more specifically cites the 1903 introduction of the three-blade shutter to reduce flicker as a neat marker of the shift.30 That complexity of aesthetics, technology, cultural and political-economic factors – the ability to look at once at the screen and all around – marks the strength of Musser’s work. In simple terms of periodization, Allen’s revisionist take ‘contra the chaser theory’ pushed the definitive break to the nickelodeon boom in 1906 – the very same periodization that Tom Gunning initially gave when first defining the cinema of attraction.31 Musser’s subsequent debate with Gunning paraphrased the idea of the cinema of attraction as non-narrative, one-shot ‘films in which display, exhibitionism and spectacle take precedence over narrative’.32 This remarkably clear and succinct synopsis was provided by Musser in an essay detailing the limitations of the concept, launching another thorough empirical hypothesis test, like the earlier interrogation of Allen. Indeed, Musser framed his engagement with ‘attractions’ largely as a matter of preventing another ‘major step backwards’ because ‘to the extent that Gunning cited and used Allen and saw cinema of attractions as dominant until about 1906, his argument was premised on some of the very work against which I necessarily argued’.33 Musser admitted aspects of Gunning’s and Gaudreault’s propositions were useful as pedagogy because it is ‘easier for students to grasp—perhaps because they can simply see it on the screen, while the assessment I am making can only be established through sustained historical investigation’.34 On the other hand, Gunning’s original article hardly hides its premise as a matter of comparative art history, as more a genealogy of ‘inspiration for the avant-garde [that] needs to be reexplored’ and not aspiring to the empirical archival work that Musser was doing masterfully.35 Further, Gaudreault and Gunning elsewhere articulated exactly the concept’s analytical strength as the very core of their epistemology: ‘Theory must precede history, because it is theory that frees its objects.’36 Their conceptual work is positioned as built upon theories of historiography that foreground the incompatibility of synchrony and diachrony and necessitate a focus on the emergence and archaeology of ‘forms’ to stitch together the divide between simultaneity and succession.37 In his way, Musser, too, recognized that the crux of the problem for American cinema from 1903 to 1907 was precisely this blurred proliferation of types of cinematic forms, along the lines I noted above that Hampton had signalled decades earlier. Ultimately, the rise of narrative story films initially required the continued importance of ‘the showman in his capacity as exhibitor […] shaping if not creating meaning even as he organized the diverse, perhaps miscellaneous elements of narration’.38 This is the context for my spotlighting Archie L. Shepard for his promotional discourse, not as a marker of a definitive break, but providing a discourse of reception for a dramatic mode of film

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exhibition that gradually displaced earlier focuses on educational uplift and newsworthy actualities. On the one hand, I cannot understate the diversity of ways moving pictures played central and supporting parts in different types of travelling shows in these years; a growing number of film exchanges trading new and second-hand films and projectors meant cinema could appear almost anywhere.39 On the other hand, even among shows that made film the featured attraction, Shepard’s Moving Pictures were of a particular type: self-described as ‘high class’, touring wide geographic regions across state lines, booked as popular entertainments at commercial theatres in larger towns. Among the few fitting the type, in Pennsylvania and upstate New York, Lyman H. Howe transformed a degree of success with phonograph concerts into a career exhibiting moving pictures. In New England, John P. Dibble had also been giving stereopticon concerts for many years with his brothers before putting his ‘picturescope’ in the spotlight in 1898.40 In the Western states, Beaty Brothers toured as ‘the kinetoscope kings’ since 1899. In the Midwest, W. Frank Brinton began to combine exhibition of his airship models with moving pictures in 1897.41 Others, like Shepard, first operated projectors to provide pictures as specialties between the acts of touring vaudeville, dramatic or comedic repertoire companies. B. Albert Cook, for example, operated pictures for other companies before later establishing his own Cook and Harris moving pictures.42 Late in 1903 and throughout 1904, more or less concurrently, all of these showmen gain more prominence, booking commercial theatres, listing their routes in theatrical papers, advertising and printing advance publicity in town and small-city newspapers. They are joined by new companies operating picture shows in the same commercial model, with fierce competition in the populous northeast. Colonial, Morgan and Hoyt, Edwin J. Hadley and Herald Square moving pictures – in 1902 and 1903, all of these joined Dibble, Cook and Harris, and Howe to crowd the same New England territory Shepard toured. Advertising and advance publicity is a key distinction between these and the meagre, local efforts of dozens of ‘church basement’ itinerant cinema showmen who rarely purchased ads and whose ‘noteworthy’ events are documented only in newspapers’ ‘town gossip’ columns. In contrast, large-scale picture shows like Shepard’s were an ‘adworthy’ part of an entire season’s continual stream of theatrical attractions at the local syndicate theatre.43 Starting in September 1903, Shepard and other ‘high class’ exhibitors began listing their ‘routes ahead’ in theatrical trade papers.44 This ephemeral correspondence with show business peers is further evidence that moving pictures had found a modest but important place of their own on theatrical syndicates and touring amusement circuits (Figure 8.2). While dramatic, musical, variety, minstrel and circuses constituted the vast majority of itinerant ‘Routes Ahead’, a residual ‘Miscellaneous’ catch-all gave itinerant routes for magicians and illusionists, psychics and hypnotists,

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Figure 8.2  Counts of moving picture shows listed in Miscellaneous ‘Routes Ahead’ in Billboard, New York Dramatic Mirror or New York Clipper, weekly from July 1903 to June 1906, removing duplicates listed the same week in more than one publication. Total numbers increase dramatically early in 1906 when Shepard’s and others’ indefinite weekly stands proliferate alongside touring routes.

scientific displays, historical spectacles, trained animals and riverboats. In a sense, anything whose entertainment did not spotlight the talent of human performances fell into this ‘Miscellaneous’ residual category, where Shepard and others signalled moving pictures had become a separate attraction.

Archie L. Shepard’s moving picture enterprises Archibald Luman Shepard was born in Minneapolis in 1876, and began his career in theatre soon after leaving high school in 1896.45 He was later recalled as having gained experience in a theatrical, storytelling approach to moving pictures from assisting fellow Minnesotan, Clara Louise Thompson, in her staging of a spoken picture play, The Chinook, by A. J. Blethen, an illustrated monologue accompanied by up to two hundred photographic slides, in the style of Alexander Black.46 Perhaps Shepard was part of the company that assisted Thompson’s tour of the spectacle across the Midwest for two seasons from autumn 1896 through spring 1898. At some point before the turn of the century, Shepard joined E. C. Wilson’s touring repertoire theatre company.47 Although listed in the 1900 US Census as an ‘actor’, Shepard may have been handling the moving pictures offered as one of several specialties between acts of Wilson’s

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nightly plays. As early as September 1898, the Wilson Theatre Co. was offering its biograph for a special Saturday children’s matinee, and the moving picture specialty was occasionally noted in local advertising for the show from 1897 to September 1901, when Wilson turns to one-night stands without supporting specialties.48 Whatever led to the split with Wilson, by January 1902 Shepard had joined another touring repertoire theatre troupe, the Maude Hillman Company.49 ‘Shepard’s moving pictures’ were a named attraction in Hillman’s shows for all of 1902 until June 1903, apparently the first time the long-standing theatrical company had included moving pictures as a specialty between acts of its repertoire of dramatic plays. Between seasons in summer 1902, Shepard offered a limited number of moving picture shows independent of the Hillman Company. At one of these shows, he was noted as formerly of the ‘Edison Moving Picture Corps and Pan-American Exposition’, which may account for the late 1901 gap between Wilson’s and Hillman’s companies.50 At the end of the season in summer 1903, Shepard married fellow Hillman Company member Jane Pugh in her hometown in New England. Shepard and Pugh both parted ways with Hillman, and he spent the summer of 1903 exhibiting moving pictures in nearby small towns. With the start of the regular theatrical season in September 1903, Shepard begins touring two-hour picture entertainments in larger cities across New England at theatres in the dominant syndicate owned by Cahn and Grant (Figure 8.3). Shepard’s venture escalates quickly, especially through Sunday concerts at major theatres beginning in November 1903 in large, working-class cities: Lowell, Fall River, Providence and Lawrence. Three separate Shepard shows ran simultaneously beginning on Sunday 27 December 1903, to capture holiday audiences. Whether the quick expansion derived primarily from Shepard’s initiative or arose from Cahn and Grant providing an opportunity, the arrangement exploited the burgeoning popularity to their mutual benefit. Sunday shows in working-class cities, especially, were an ideal way to provide a relatively affordable, relatively popular entertainment on a day when the whole family could attend, at far lower expense than needed to pay actors and musicians for a seventh day’s work. Success managing multiple picture show outfits at Cahn and Grant’s houses in New England led to a similar arrangement with Klaw and Erlanger’s syndicate across the American South, which as a region had practically been devoid of all but the smallest, most local itinerant picture shows. While the original show continued to crisscross New England, a second touring outfit began the season in September 1904 in Virginia, touring down through the Carolinas to Florida and across the Gulf states and back through Tennessee. Shepard sent a third outfit to follow through the Southern states just two months later, before the earlier route had even reached Texas. In the meantime, Sunday shows began in even bigger cities. Shepard began providing regular concerts of moving pictures in Washington and Atlantic City in 1904, then Brooklyn and Manhattan starting in 1905, and soon joined the nickelodeon craze with a spate of short-lived daily theatres in various small cities (Figure 8.4).

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Figure 8.3  Shepard’s Enterprises, Julius Cahn’s Theatrical Directory, 1906, 102. The phrase ‘all the principal cities … ’ and the listed ventures include generalizations that do not accurately represent actual operations.

In April 1907, Shepard’s enterprises reached a zenith, launching a first all-day every day moving picture palace on Broadway. The opportunity arose when the famed Manhattan Theatre stopped booking new plays because the site faced demolition; Shepard, with new partners William Gane and Felix Isman, took a month-to-month lease on the theatre, facing Greeley Square at 33rd Street.51 Shepard’s publicity elsewhere began to refer to the Manhattan Theatre as ‘the only Broadway theatre devoted exclusively to moving pictures’.52 Shepard’s pictures began to play daily in several New England cities in 1907, exactly as the itinerant shows stopped touring. Shepard seemed poised to build a prominent early chain of picture theatres. And yet, nearly all these ventures closed by the end of 1908. Shepard was briefly in charge of a failed venture in 1909, the Vaudeville and Moving Picture Co. of America. Otherwise he simply fades out of the spotlight.53 In hindsight, the 1907 shift from itinerant exhibition to leased sites was a losing bet. Shepard’s star faded quickly in the booming picture industry. When his name popped up in March 1922 in connection with a faddish attempt to use a radio-controlled automobile on the stage of the New York Hippodrome, the trade press needed to explain who he was: the man who brought moving pictures to Broadway.54 Shepard died of tuberculosis in 1925, only forty-nine years old.55

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Figure 8.4  Map of Shepard Enterprises itinerant territories and indefinitely recurring locations across the US, 1903 to 1909. Exhibition information was compiled by the author comprehensively from entertainment trade press listings and local newspaper publicity and reporting. Created by the author using Gephi.

‘The dramatic tenses of wordless images’: setting the stage for silent drama Late in autumn 1904, the Free Press and Times in Burlington, Vermont, printed a series of five daily notices of advance publicity for Archie L. Shepard’s High Class Moving Pictures to be presented locally for the first time with two matinees and evenings at the Strong Theatre, the city’s new playhouse.56 Several dozen picture shows had been offered in the city in the seven years since a Vitascope first appeared in January 1897.57 Lyman H. Howe had only recently presented ‘the only edition deluxe of moving pictures in America’ in Burlington in September 1904.58 ‘Often imitated but never equaled’, this was Howe’s ninth visit to the city since he first extended his semi-annual touring circuit to Vermont in 1899.59 Moving pictures were routine by this point, although still not a daily option at dedicated movie theatres. Shepard’s publicity notices are nonetheless unusual for the coherence of claims made about how cinema had now reached an apex as an art form unto itself, a claim staked by describing the ways this particular show of moving pictures would affect its audience. The final article in the series singled out a particular film title among the variety Shepard would offer. Rather than detail its plot, however, the advance newspaper publicity promised heightened melodramatic sensation as the film’s attraction within the wider programme. This particular ‘unspoken playlet’ was given a spotlight, but the

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entire show, and cinema in general, was promised as teaching the ‘soul’ through ‘the silent workings of the senses’, employing ‘the dramatic tenses of wordless images’.60 Do not be quick to dismiss the rhetoric as spurious simply because it is published as publicity, although Shepard applied the text to different film titles over a period of several years. Let me use this November 1904 series of five short promotional articles for Shepard’s moving pictures from Burlington, Vermont, as a way of crafting an overview of the company’s publicity, which was printed across vast regions of the United States between 1903 and 1907. While each of these particular items in Burlington is published elsewhere, both earlier and for years to follow, the series here in Vermont are planned with unusual care. The items are printed daily from Monday to Friday, leading up to matinee and evening shows on Friday and Saturday. Each is slightly longer than the prior, and as a series they progress from highlighting general delight to describing specific sensational affects. On Monday, the first notice compared the pictures favourably to the ‘vice without excuse, crime without moral’ prevalent in stage dramas of the day, and instead promised ‘the combined forces of comedy, humor, pathos, and all that is healthily dramatic, which go to make a perfect evening’s entertainment’.61 The next day’s publicity began with the boast that ‘in this age of wonders and inventions, no art has taken more rapid strides than that of motion photography’.62 On Wednesday came a claim that Shepard would offer ‘the greatest of all moving picture exhibitions’, followed by a dose of reflexivity that served only to launch further effusive claims about the variety of experiences the audience should anticipate: The sweeping statement of the phrase ‘greatest of all’ will be verified by every witness […] pictures that fill the eye with wonder of marvels, that fill the frame with sensation, that please the mind with good wholesome comedy; and others that quicken the heart with emotion, in a brilliant ensemble combined to make a most delightful evening’s amusement […] The wide range that is covered affords an untiring divertissement for the mind.63 At this point, mid-week, the hint of dramatic affect from the show remains largely buried within the cascade of early cinema attractions that still privilege visual sensation as the common thread across the varied ‘ensemble’ the showman would display. But the final two items of Shepard’s publicity, on the other hand, dwelt in detail on the dramatic impact to be expected from one specific narrative film, plucked to feature for its melodramatic affect from among the two-hour show that was planned. First, an untitled ‘wild west scene’ was described in full as ‘abounding in thrilling and exciting interest, the kind that lifts you from your seats to expectation, eagerness and interest in the outcome […] It is a picture that will hold the attention riveted, for every second brings new situations, fresh

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excitement and true pictures of our Western country as it was but a few years ago.’64 Then, on the morning of the first actual show, Shepard’s advance publicity heightened the promised combination of uplift and amusement to an apex, but again through the prism of a particular film that would offer ‘a pathetic touch of nature’ among the variety programme later that day and next. Crucially, the publicity positioned cinema among the sublime achievements of the creative arts.65 Allow me to quote this final item at length: It is recorded in the world of fact that through the silent workings of the senses the soul is taught and mostly impressed by the contemplation of the ideal creations in art. A beautiful picture, an exquisite reading or a piece of sculpture, has often changed the course of human lives, often giving hope to the despairing, rest to the wearied soul, while it never fails to uplift the mind. Great lessons are taught in the dramatic tenses of the wordless images. To appreciate this one should see Archie L. Shepard’s little moving picture play, ‘The Old Homestead’ a pathetic touch of nature that strikes the minor keys of the heart and brings harmony out of life’s discords. This little unspoken playlet is one of the most touching dramatic subjects ever created in animated reproduction and is given in conjunction with a hundred others.66 The item had appeared before, nearly word for word, in Fall River, Massachusetts, nearly two months earlier in September 1904, and then in Vicksburg and Jackson, Mississippi, months later in February 1905, all describing the same ‘pathetic story’.67 Shepard’s various shows use nearly identical promotional text for another two years, later naming different sentimental films.68 The discourse is remarkable for staking the claim of cinema as an art form to itself in nearly the same terminology that would prevail in the decades to come: the unspoken, wordless picture play. Shepard approaches but never quite formulates the phrase ‘silent drama’, which became common in 1909 with the growing attention to fan attraction to the acting of still-unnamed movie stars.69 The term was already applied to a film version of the Passion Play, promoted between 1899 and 1902 as ‘a silent drama, a tragedy on canvas’.70 That paradigmatic example of a spiritual, religious experience of narrative cinema as ‘silent drama’ became a fixture in the world of letters, fandom and within the industry itself. Cinema was later described as ‘light and music suddenly came upon each other […] the seventh art was born’.71 In Shepard’s publicity, the nascent rhetoric of a ‘silent’ and ‘wordless’ art form allowed an occasional special film, such as an adaptation of Longfellow’s Hiawatha (1903, Joe Rosenthal), to be labelled as ‘the latest masterpiece of poetic motion’.72 A few earlier items of Shepard’s publicity used similar phrases. News readers in Greenville, North Carolina, were prompted to expect ‘some pathetic incident, a picture story as it were, with a beautiful moral on the scene’.73 For one of many shows in Fall River, the audience was promised an ‘all-star programme’ including

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‘“A Parisian Romance,” the latest and greatest pathetic wordless drama from life’.74 In Meriden, Connecticut, the film Driven from Home (Edison, 1904) was described as ‘a pathetic, wordless story’.75 For another three years until his itinerant companies stopped touring the South and New England, Shepard’s publicity continued to characterize moving pictures with these novel phrases of unspoken, wordless and silent plays and dramas. Most often the publicity items reprised or adapted the stories from late 1904, almost word for word as quoted above. Late in 1906, however, a year after Shepard’s pictures debut in New York City, a new article of publicity characterized the field of ‘wordless dramas’ as a metropolitan phenomenon emanating from Manhattan. Shepard’s moving pictures are now being produced in three leading theatres in New York City, where the best of talent find ready engagements for Sunday concerts and where Sunday concerts flourish as in no other city in the land. The moving picture is the play without words, depicting all the emotions that govern the human mind, portraying the vile weakness of the criminal, extolling the strength and glory of the pure in mind, each of the wordless dramas carry a moral lesson, a lesson so vividly presented as to leave an everlasting impression.76 The elements of this item date back nearly three years to Shepard’s earliest publicity in 1903, and we can see the codified version from 1904 here still, but affixing the ‘play without words’ to the talent pool of New York more clearly defines the emerging field as an entertainment industry in its own right, separate and equal alongside melodrama, vaudeville, tin-pan alley and the other ‘lively arts’.77 Indeed, Shepard’s publicity often used the notion of cinema as the silent drama to make distinctions and favourable comparisons with other forms of screen and stage amusements. Within an unusually detailed description of several films on the programme, an unnamed comic film about the trials of a French noble was noted as being ‘as good a Clyde Fitch comedy, a play without words’.78 Prospective audience members reading the paper were given an imperative worth quoting in full: Shepard’s pictures must not be confounded with the pictures used in a vaudeville theatre nor with an illustrated Stoddard lecture,79 or in fact with any other form of amusement introducing the moving picture. In the one case the pictures introduced are usually of such character and brief duration that they fail to interest at all, while on the other hand, the lecture attracts only a certain class of patrons, according to the subject, and diverts the intellect only.80 Here, most overtly, is Shepard’s own articulation of Grau’s assertion that these shows forged an identity for moving pictures as a ‘separate attraction’, not to

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be conflated, no longer even to be paired with, nor share the same stage or theatre with, vaudeville chasers, travel lectures or any other carnival or dime museum attraction. Those places may have ‘introduced the moving picture’ in the past, but now in 1904, at Shepard’s shows not least, the moving picture was an amusement industry to itself, an entire evening’s entertainment on its own. Cinema had been transformed from the ‘wonderful toy of a few seasons ago’ to become ‘a fixed star in the theatrical firmament’.81

‘Hold the eye and fill the mind’: promoting pictures with melodrama Shepard’s press items asserted that moving pictures could now stand apart from vaudeville, serving the thrills and laughs of popular entertainment instead of the edification of lecturing. In particular, some of his publicity proposed the experience of cinema now compared favourably with stage versions of popular melodramas, with added realism, added sensational thrills. Fledgling versions of this rhetorical bravado began in the autumn 1903 and winter 1904 season, when Shepard’s publicity often proposed generalizations about the cultural impact of the scientific achievements of cinema, in language reminiscent of the first years of screen machines, but emphasizing how a new phase had begun. One of the first positioned Shepard’s show by reflecting back to ‘when the first moving picture machines astonished us with their reproductions of life, little attention was paid to the securing of interesting subjects. Their novelty alone was sufficient.’ At this moment, in November 1903 in Amesbury, Massachusetts, the rest of the item proceeded to review the camera’s ability to reproduce ‘the nooks and corners of the earth’, with a result that the show ‘furnishes a liberal education in […] fascinating amusement’.82 The emphasis was still primarily on actualities and newsworthy views, although already combined with entertainment. In nearby Fall River, different newspapers printed articles extending the argument, but initially still with a focus on the realism of actualities. In The Herald, the ‘invention of the moving picture machine’ was cast as a great achievement of ‘this mechanical age’ because of its capacity to provide ‘exact reproductions of the greatest events of modern times’.83 In The News, the very same day, a different article similarly extolled the camera’s ‘collection of pictures of life in every land and clime’, but also ‘varied by numerous dramatic’ films. Even with the emphasis on actualities, the main claim was entertainment value because ‘the novelty of moving pictures never wears off any more than the varying panorama of life becomes tiresome’.84 Shepard’s publicity, however, gradually began to deploy the rhetoric of realism for the ability to achieve sensational affect rather than the scientific capacity to

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preserve the past and bridge remote distances. By February 1904, for example, the stakes were both raised and driven more squarely into emotional territory. ‘Come, laugh, cry and marvel with Shepard’, was the imperative, accompanied by the assurance of quality and permanence: ‘If Moving Pictures have come to stay the best is none too good.’85 I began this chapter noting how an early exhibition of The Great Train Robbery was described as having ‘a thousand thrills […] More sensational features than could be crowded into five melodramas.’86 The direct comparison with the popular genre of stage melodrama continued, on occasion sharpened to a point of outright attack. Consider the following explanation of how Shepard’s shows had left behind the ‘tame affair’ of other picture shows by embracing heightened realism, in another passage worth quoting at length: The pictures are very real, and there is more action in them than in a play. And they have one very great advantage over the play, all of the actors do their parts well. The story of an ex-convict is as good as one of Theodore Kremer’s melodramas, with the advantage that it has all of the action without the ‘curses on the woman’ sort of dialogue.87 The views of the moonshiners are as real as any stage picture in a play, and the interest of the spectators increase until they become as much worked up as though an actual scene was occurring […] The scenes are far more realistic than they could possibly be portrayed in any play. The most amusing of the views presented was that of the escape of Napoleon and his pursuit. […] Some of the spectators so lost themselves in the interest which they took in Napoleon’s flight that when his pursuers gained on him while he assumed the well-known pose, like the excited gallery god, they warned him that he would be caught.88 This moment of publicity for Shepard is uncanny for potentially serving as a chart or key for motifs from an entire field of early cinema scholarship tackling the relation between stage and screen. The trajectory was long ago paved ‘from Garrick to Griffith’ by Nicholas Vardac, whose analysis of the early thrillers of Edwin S. Porter acknowledge the very same aims and objectives as Shepard’s publicity claims – to be as good and better than staged melodrama. Even these earliest filmed scenes of actual daring action on real locations posed a threat to the artifice of proscenium-bound sets and props. ‘Against the realism of such sensational material, the stage melodrama attempting similar pictorial effects could hardly hope to compete.’89 Later generations of historians of cinema have focused similarly on the transition from theatre to cinema, such as Ben Brewster’s and Lea Jacobs’ careful attention to the early feature film, which cites and describes many films from before 1907, but mostly as comparison with later developments.90 Most starkly, the direct comparison between moving pictures and the melodramas of Theodore Kremer gestures to Ben Singer’s research into cinema’s abduction

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of the profits, audience, scenarios and discourses of ‘10-20-30’ theatricals.91 During Shepard’s brief moment around 1905, ‘blood and thunder’ stage melodramas were a popular genre to themselves, with specialized producers and playwrights – like Kremer – whose names alone could conjure the spectre of poor, pathetic heroes rescuing wealthy damsels from the arms of certain death to prove their star-crossed love was fated. Through the lens of Shepard’s publicity, that specific connection could stand in for a generalized dialectic between stage and screen ‘thrillers’ dating back at least to 1903, when Shepard began to use pathos as a touchstone to explain what to expect at this picture shows; in this newspaper item that generic reference is made specific. On top of the action, the publicity also draws attention to the acting in moving pictures, another theme of early cinema scholarship that more typically focuses on later years, for example, in Roberta Pearson’s and William Uricchio’s detailed analysis of Biograph and Vitagraph films from 1907 to 1910.92 Those films, about four to five years later, were remarkable as an improvement upon the overdrawn, simplistic pantomimes of earlier films – which means there was a latent discourse about earlier film acting, which is glimpsed in Shepard’s promotional discourse if only in a feint derivative form. Part of Shepard’s discourse of realism and sensation was his use of ‘incidental music and realistic mechanical effects’ which allowed all of his picture shows to truly be ‘two hours continuous exhibition’ only interspersed with illustrated songs rather than interrupted by vaudeville turns. From his very first season in 1904, there are no signs in advertising or publicity that Shepard ever employed lecturers to narrate the pictures. To be clear, this was not unique to him. Other picture exhibitors had earlier employed and highlighted their use of continuous musical accompaniment and drum and other theatrical sound effects.93 While not novel or unique to Shepard, he embraced music and sound effects fully, and eventually transformed these into outright ‘talking pictures’ at his Manhattan Theatre shows on Broadway, with actors speaking parts from behind the screen, sparking a brief fad for ‘humanovo’ and ‘actologue’ pictures.94 Shepard’s publicity spotlighted the melodrama of early story films in rhetoric straight out of stage melodrama advertising. The Moonshiners (1904, Biograph) for example, was full of deep heart interest […] a story of strong human sympathy, tragic pathetic and dramatic, leading the spectator for the moment to share in the perils of life […] and holding him spellbound throughout its vivid portrayal […] which terminates in a tragic climax. The story in pictures is intensely drawn, and dramatic in the extreme, holding the attention riveted throughout.95 Even the children’s spectacle Le Royaume des fées was promoted as ‘the most thrilling series of pictures available’, that would ‘hold spellbound the little

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ones from beginning to end’.96 With children, especially but not exclusively, parents were assured a wholesome show, but also one that would not simply entertain, but practically cast a spell on ‘the childmind’ counteracting boredom so that ‘for two hours or more, they are held in rapt attention as one by one of the marvels of animated photography are unfolded to their entranced eyes’.97 In other instances, the same effects were assured for everyone in the audience because the shows contained enough ‘varied features absorbing to all—the churchman, the clubman, the laborer, the old, the young who attentively relish the same thrills, or are convulsed with mirth, lost in admiration—surrender sympathetic tears and on through the entire gamut of human emotion’.98 And yet, the promise that Shepard’s pictures would ‘hold the eye and fill the mind’ for everyone in the audience was based upon the claim that ‘these pictures are the acme of photographic art and appeal to every taste’.99

‘Interest the masses as well as the classes’: Shepard’s aims and ends In conclusion, allow me to highlight one further theme within Shepard’s advertising rhetoric. Shepard proposed film had achieved autonomy as an entertaining art form, and adopted the frame of melodrama to stoke audience anticipation. Yet, the publicity also characterizes the audience for Shepard’s Moving Pictures as seeking a mass interest in amusement. His screen entertainments were positioned as fulfilling a popular demand for mass amusement that is not common among similar picture show exhibitors at the time. Although Shepard occasionally used the commonplace term ‘high class’ as a catchphrase for his pictures, as did Lyman H. Howe and many others, let me pinpoint Shepard’s relatively uncommon emphasis on providing films ‘so varied that all tastes, ages and classes’ would be amused.100 Variety was precisely what achieved a collective experience, because the show ‘embraces everything of common interest in the world’.101 On more than one occasion, Shepard turned to the cliché of providing ‘pictures that will interest the masses as well as the classes’. To be clear, broad popularity was a principle that seems largely achieved, marking out an inclusive public sphere for moving pictures as popular culture in a way that presaged the later paradigm for transitional-era nickelodeons, and into the classical Hollywood film industry. This point is a sociological concern built upon the content of films but with an effect that exceeds the screen that has been neglected in weighing the periodization of the shift from attractions to narrative. Musser and Nelson, as I have already noted, characterized Shepard as ‘in the mainstream of urban, commercialized popular culture’, and specifically distinct from Howe’s retention of education and uplift on a path towards a focus on travel lectures.102 There

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is nonetheless a lost opportunity to consider Shepard’s turn to a discourse of popularity as a latent factor in the waning of the cinema of attractions. The idea is worth making manifest. Shepard’s publicity is saturated with explicit inclusive invitations to children to join the moving picture audience, and of course, also assurances to parents that both they and their children would be entertained without offence. A great deal of research, including my own, has considered reformers’ concerns over the presence of young women and children in the nickelodeon audience.103 Few have stopped to consider how the diverse audience was constituted in the first place. We see traces of it here with Shepard’s overt assertion that the variety of moving pictures, by 1904, was appropriate for children, and was open to the entire family. As I have explained with respect to the later 1910s newspaper movie directory, claims that ‘everybody’s going’ exist within a paternal logic where ‘everybody’ actually meant a father, wife and children together.104 In that sense, classical film spectatorship encompassed neither an inclusive diversity of subjectivities nor an all-encompassing homogeneity, but normatively existed within the limited range of positions in the patriarchal, white middle-class family. Miriam Hansen was careful to define spectatorship in American silent cinema by considering the ways films ‘solicit their viewer through a variety of appeals and attractions and through particular strategies of exhibition’, which she sought to consider ‘in their multiplicity and complexity, in their uneven makeup and development’.105 She paid attention to women, children and differences in class and racial position to avoid presuming a homogenized theoretical form of spectatorship. For Hansen, early attractions provided a diversity of subjectivities an entry point because ‘the variety format not only provided a convenient structure for adapting as many traditions as possible […] the transposition of these into a new medium emphasized distinctions between genres rather than, as in later classical practice, making them variants of a relatively homogeneous mode of representation known as cinema’.106 I propose Shepard’s publicity, coincident with the rise of the story film, sketches a prototype for that later homogeneous subjectivity precisely by reflexively drawing attention to the breadth of popular taste that would be satisfied, collectively, at his picture entertainments. Early in 1904, Shepard’s audiences were assured the programme was ‘suited to the needs of the theater-going public’.107 By the end of 1904, the rhetoric has shifted to explain Shepard was responding to popular demand: ‘The wants of the public have been looked after and administered to in the fullest degree, and the former high standard will be eclipsed by this season’s efforts.’108 One newspaper item even took on the voice of the audience: ‘We have seen it and we want more of it.’109 At one point, early in January 1907, the knack for meeting popular demand was practically elevated to a magic act in a passage worth quoting at length:

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It is the master hand that can choose the most popular. Archie L. Shepard makes the claim of doing so for he has consulted popular taste and the public is its judge, consequently the appeal for their approbation is merely the endorsement of their own judgment. The judgment decides in favor of the people’s choice, subjects that interest many, subjects that appeal to their sympathies, that enliven with comedy or humorous interest come in climaxes to a surmounting laugh or thrill and leave a lasting effect […] The people’s wishes are answered and the people’s prices held forth.110 By this time in 1907, however, Shepard Enterprises were facing stiff competition from proliferating storefront nickel shows in all locations. Shepard shut down his touring companies and began instead to open daily picture shows in fixed locations.111 In part, his diminished place in histories of American cinema lies in him not being first to innovate any particular aspect of the business. Here I have tried to resuscitate his reputation by demonstrating he was among the first and certainly most prominent figure to shift to publicize, spotlight and position narrative fiction scenes as the key feature of his programmes. In the exaggerations and excess claims of his publicity discourse, Shepard built the idea of ‘the silent drama’ as an art form unto itself. His rhetoric signalled how an emerging narrative form of storytelling was becoming a unique strategy for cinema exhibition and publicity. Having expanded his operation and launched a half-national franchise, he created a playbook for his team of advance agents to use at hundreds of locations across the continent. None of what Shepard did within his shows was especially unique or pioneering, but he created all-purpose publicity that could be applied to any location in his many enterprises, whether a one-night stand in a practically rural small town in one of four regions of the country, or to promote his weekly and daily twohour picture shows in New York or other cities. Let me be clear: whether and how actual picture productions changed between 1903 and 1907 is irrelevant to my argument. The promotional scheme was fully-formed in 1904, essentially unchanged until 1908, even as production, distribution and exhibition shifted radically underneath the very same ground he had cleared and cultivated. By the time Shepard handed over the reins to his pioneering Broadway movie palace to William Gane, he had already called his itinerant companies home and wrapped up most of his circuit of nickel shows. Imagine a counterfactual history where Shepard instead established a film rental exchange business to exploit the new competition, rather than try to compete directly against the nickel shows. Even as a hypothetical premise, the prospect is nonsense. Shepard’s entire background was grounded in exhibition and showmanship on the road and management of moving pictures on itinerant theatrical circuits. When those ended, so did his career with it.

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Notes 1 Lawrence (MA) American, 20 November 1903, 2. 2 Ibid. 3 Fall River (MA) News, 9 January 1904, 7. 4 Ibid., 23 November 1903, 2. 5 Robert Grau, The Theatre of Science: A Volume of Progress and Achievement in the Motion Picture Industry (New York, NY: Broadway Publishing, 1914), 34. 6 Bangor (ME) News, 2 January 1904, 11. 7 Ibid., 8 January 1904, 3. 8 Hartford (CT) Courant, 30 January 1904, 7. 9 Ibid., 2 February 1904, 7. 10 Ibid. 11 Richard Abel, ‘Shepard, Archibald’, in Encyclopedia of Early Cinema, ed. R. Abel (New York, NY: Routledge, 2005), 855 12 Grau, Theatre of Science, 27–8. 13 Ibid., 35. 14 Charles Musser and Carol Nelson, High-Class Moving Pictures: Lyman H. Howe and the Forgotten Era of Traveling Exhibition, 1880–1920 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 143. 15 Ibid., 183. 16 Both headlines top a widely reproduced Associated Press wire story by Bob Thomas, ‘100 Years ago “Great Train Robbery” Launched Feature Film Industry’, Camden (NJ) Courier-Post, 18 December 2003, 4D; Thomas, ‘Story Films Began with a Bang in 1903’, Windsor (ON) Star, 20 December 2003, B3. 17 ‘Moving Pictures Popular’, Shawnee (OK) News, 5 December 1908, 6; reprinted, but original source not cited. 18 ‘The Inception of the “Black Top”: William H. Swanson Relates an Interesting Story’, Moving Picture World, 15 July 1916, 368–9. 19 ‘Trickery in Moving Pictures’, Buffalo (NY) Courier, 22 January 1905, 38. I was not able to confirm the original source of this article. 20 Terry Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights: A History of the Motion Picture through 1925 (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1926), 414. 21 Ibid., 418. 22 Lewis Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film: A Critical History (New York, NY: Harcourt Brace, 1939), 41. 23 Ibid., 42. 24 Benjamin B. Hampton, A History of the Movies (New York, NY: Covici-Friede, 1931), 39. 25 Nicholas Vardac, Stage to Screen: Theatrical Method from Garrick to Griffith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949), 180.

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26 Ibid., 181. 27 Paul S. Moore, ‘A “Distant Reading” of the “Chaser Theory”: Local Views and the Digital Generation of New Cinema History’, in Technology and Film Scholarship: Experience, Study, Theory, ed. Santiago Hidalgo (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), 169–92. 28 ‘Craze for Moving Pictures’, New York Sun, 14 March 1909, B6. 29 André Gaudreault and Tom Gunning, ‘Early Cinema as a Challenge to Film History’, in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Strauven (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 365–80. 30 Musser has cited the introduction of the three-blade shutter early in 1903 as a technological cause of a series of aesthetic, commercial and cultural effects that coalesce into an increased popularity for narrative cinema. See especially Charles Musser, ‘When did Cinema become Cinema? Technology, History and the Moving Pictures’, in Technology and Film Scholarship: Experience, Study, Theory, ed. Santiago Hidalgo (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), 33–50. 31 Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator and the AvantGarde’, in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Strauven, 381–8. This version, which I will cite exclusively, is a collation of two earlier versions of the canonical essay, carefully noting adaptations of the 1986 original for a 1990 edited update. Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the AvantGarde’, Wide Angle 8, nos 3–4 (1986): 63–70; and Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde’, in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (London: BFI, 1990), 56–62. 32 Charles Musser, ‘Rethinking Early Cinema: Cinema of Attractions and Narrativity’, in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Strauven, 393. 33 Ibid., 392. 34 Ibid., 403. 35 Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attraction[s]’, 381. 36 Gaudreault and Gunning, ‘Early Cinema as a Challenge to Film History’, 365. 37 Gaudreault developed the concept of ‘cultural series’ to guide his intermedial histories of pre-cinema. André Gaudreault, Film and Attraction: From Kinematography to Cinema (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 62–8. 38 Musser, ‘Rethinking Early Cinema’, 400. 39 Paul S. Moore, ‘“Bought, Sold, Exchanged and Rented”: The Early Film Exchange and the Market in Secondhand Films in New York Clipper Classified Ads’, Film History 31, no. 2 (2019): 1–31. 40 John P. Dibble fonds, Thomas Edison National Historic Park Archives, West Orange NJ. See also John Lewellen, ‘First Moving Picture Operator Resides Here’, Muncie (IN) Press, 18 March 1933, 3. 41 Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, ‘The Archeology of Itinerant Film Exhibition: Unpacking the Brinton Entertainment Company Collection’, in Companion to New Cinema History, ed. Daniël Biltereyst, Richard Maltby and Philippe Meers (New York, NY: Routledge, 2019), 112–22. 42 Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, ‘Modernity for Small Town Tastes: Movies at the 1907 Cooperstown, New York, Centennial’, in Explorations in New Cinema

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History: Approaches and Case Studies, ed. Richard Maltby, Daniël Biltereyst and Philippe Meers (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 280–94. 43 Paul S. Moore, ‘The Social Biograph: Newspapers as Archives of the Regional Mass Market for Movies’, in Explorations in New Cinema History, ed. Maltby, Meers and Biltereyst, 263–79. 44 The Clipper began listing ‘Routes Ahead’ in 1883, and by 1900 similar columns were added to the Dramatic Mirror and Billboard. See Moore, ‘“Bought, Sold, Exchanged and Rented”’, 7. 45 ‘Archibald Luman Shepard’, born 14 September 1876, US Census, Beloit District 2, Rock County, Wisconsin, June 1900; ‘Central High Graduates’, Minneapolis Tribune, 12 April 1896, 12. 46 I could not confirm the connection between Shepard and Thompson’s tour of The Chinook from a primary source. See Grau, The Theatre of Science, 29. 47 Archie Shepard is listed in the roster of the E. C. Wilson Theatre Co. in New York Clipper, 14 October 1899, 669, and again on 9 March 1901, 35. 48 Moving pictures were noted part of the Wilson Theatre Co. specialty acts as early as Marion (OH) Star, 28 September 1897, 5, becoming more prominent in advertising through October 1901. 49 Archie Shepard is first listed in the roster of the Maude Hillman Co. in Hornellsville (NY) Tribune, 13 January 1902, 3, and New York Clipper, 1 March 1902, 3. 50 Fitchburg (MA) Sentinel, 25 July 1902, 4. 51 When the Manhattan was finally forced closed in May 1909, Gane took the venture to a new location at 31st Street. See ‘Manhattan Lease Running Out’, Variety, 6 March 1909, 13; ‘Isman’s $1,500,000 Building’, Variety, 17 April 1909, 1; ‘Manhattan Closes’, Variety, 8 May 1909, 13. 52 Cohoes (NY) Republican, 1 June 1907. 53 ‘Getting on the Bandwagon’, Variety, 22 August 1908, 7; ‘New Corporation Formed’, Billboard, 23 October 1909, 16; ‘Changes Lubin’s Bookings’, Variety, 6 November 1909, 8. 54 ‘Radio Controlled Auto New Movie Stunt’, Motion Picture News, 6 May 1922, 2574. 55 ‘Obituary: Archibald Shepard’, Variety, 20 May 1925, 52. 56 Burlington (VT) Free Press and Times, 25 November 1904, 5. 57 Ibid., 5 January 1897, 5. 58 Ibid., 6 September 1904, 7. 59 Ibid., 5 September 1904, 5. 60 Ibid., 25 November 1904, 8. 61 Ibid., 21 November 1904, 6. 62 Ibid., 22 November 1904, 6. 63 Ibid., 23 November 1904, 6. 64 Ibid., 24 November 1904, 8. 65 The idea of cinema as the seventh art, in English, dates at least from the 1916 launch of the modernist little magazine, The Seven Arts, which included an analysis ‘Beyond the Screen’ by Kenneth McGowan, advocating for the movies among the

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modern arts. See Michael Devine, ‘“An Art that Won’t Behave”: Film and The Seven Arts, 1907–21’, American Literature 84, no. 1 (2012): 89–117. 66 ‘Amusements’, Burlington (VT) Free Press and Times, 25 November 1904, 8. I have not been able to identify the named film, ‘The Old Homestead’, but it was perhaps based upon a popular 1886 play by Denman Thompson about a rural ‘hayseed’ who travels to the big city. 67 Fall River (MA) News, 30 September 1904, 7, but in this earlier printing still without the phrase ‘dramatic tenses of wordless images’. Later printed as ‘A Pathetic Story’, Vicksburg (MS) Post, 10 February 1905, 5; ‘Shepard’s Moving Pictures’, Jackson (MS) News, 17 February 1905, 4. 68 Naming ‘The Farmer’s Daughter’ in Little Rock (AR) Democrat, 17 January 1906, 6; Naming ‘Her Fatal Wedding’ in Bennington (VT) Banner, 3 December 1906, 1; and naming ‘Foul Play’ in Bennington (VT) Banner, 4 February 1907, 1. 69 Thomas Bedding, ‘The Modern Way in Moving Picture Making’, Moving Picture World, 13 March 1909, 294, and ‘Coming Head Liners’, in the same issue, 302; ‘Act for the Eye Alone’, New York Sun, 29 August 1909, B6, reprinted as ‘The Silent Drama’, Lancaster (PA) Intelligencer, 15 October 1909, 11; and followed by ‘Acting The Silent Drama’, New York Sun, 6 December 1909, C5. 70 Scranton (PA) Tribune, 16 January 1900, 3; Camden (NJ) Post, 22 February 1902, 3. 71 Interviewing Abel Gance, ‘America Leads in Picture Field, Says French Producer’, New York Tribune, 15 May 1921, C4. 72 New Bern (NC) Journal, 6 September 1904, 2. 73 Greenville (SC) News, 4 October 1904, 5. 74 Fall River (MA) Herald, 4 November 1904, 2. 75 Meriden (CT) Record, 14 January 1905, 2. 76 Cumberland (MD) Times, 20 December 1906, 3. 77 Gilbert Seldes, The Seven Lively Arts (New York, NY: Harper and Brothers, 1924). 78 Vicksburg (MS) Herald, 26 November 1904, 5. See also Kevin Lane Dearinger, Clyde Fitch and the American Theatre: An Olive in the Cocktail (Lanham, MD: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press with Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). 79 X. Theodore Barber, ‘The Roots of Travel Cinema: John L. Stoddard, E. Burton Holmes and the Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Travel Lecture’, Film History 5, no. 1 (1993): 68–84. 80 Greenville (SC) News, 29 September 1904, 3. 81 Fall River (MA) News, 23 January 1904, 2. 82 Amesbury (MA) News, 18 November 1903, 2. 83 Fall River (MA) Herald, 23 November 1903, 2. 84 Fall River (MA) News, 23 November 1903, 6. 85 Fall River (MA) Globe, 15 February 1904, 6. 86 Lawrence (MA) American, 18 December 1903, 2. 87 Theodore Kremer was among the more popular playwrights of melodrama at the time. See Lewin Goff, ‘The Owens Davis-Al Woods Melodrama Factory’, Educational

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Theatre Journal 11, no. 3 (1959): 200–7; John L. Fell, ‘Dissolves by Gaslight: Antecedents to the Motion Picture in Nineteenth-Century Melodrama’, Film Quarterly 23, no. 3 (1970): 22–34. 88 Richmond (VA) Times-Dispatch, 26 November 1904, 10. Some of the text is missing or indecipherable, so I have inferred phrasing from later versions of the same publicity article, for example, Winston-Salem (NC) Journal, 1 December 1904, 6. 89 Vardac, Stage to Screen, 184. 90 Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1997). 91 Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2001). 92 Roberta E. Pearson, Eloquent Gestures: The Transformation of Performance Style in the Griffith Biograph Films (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992); William Uricchio and Roberta E. Pearson, Reframing Culture: The Case of the Vitagraph Quality Films (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 93 Starting in September 1898, Lyman H. Howe’s Spanish-American War-Graph was promoted as ‘accompanied with realistic sound and smoke effects’, Shenandoah (PA) Herald, 7 January 1899, 1. Howe carried this feature forward through 1902, when others followed. Alonzo Hatch’s Electro-Photo Musical Company promised ‘realistic sound will accompany each picture’, in March 1902 in Vergennes, Vermont, where a later review in August 1902 of Colonial Moving Pictures specifically noted ‘realistic sounds and incidental music added much to the success of the entertainment’. See advertising in Bridport (VT) Sun, 20 March 1902, 5, and 21 August 1902, 1. Musser and Nelson point to Lyman H. Howe’s use of a musical director, Max Walkinshaw, who travelled with his show as early as 1899. See Musser and Nelson, High-Class Moving Pictures, 91.   94 The ‘talking pictures’ phenomenon was an outright craze by 1908, when Loew’s Actologue and Zukor’s Humanovo Company had two touring companies across the northeast. See ‘In the Talking Picture Field’, Views and Films Index, 12 September 1908, 6. See also Musser and Nelson, High-Class Moving Pictures, 185–6.   95 Wilmington (NC) Messenger, 2 December 1904, 4.   96 Meriden (CT) Record, 16 September 1904, 2.   97 Charlotte (NC) Observer, 18 September 1904, 6.   98 Greenville (SC) News, 29 September 1904, 3.   99 Mansfield (MA) News, 30 September 1904, 5. 100 Fall River (MA) News, 12 November 1904, 7. 101 Richmond (VA) Times-Dispatch, 24 November, 1904, 10. 102 Musser and Nelson, High-Class Moving Pictures, 143. 103 Miriam Bratu Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 65–8; Paul S. Moore, ‘Socially Combustible: Panicky People, Flammable Films and the Dangerous New Technology of the Nickelodeon’, in Cinema and Technology: Cultures, Theories, Practices, ed. Bruce Bennett, Marc Furstenau and Adrian Mackenzie (New York,

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NY: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008), 75–87; J. A. Lindstrom, ‘“Almost Worse than the Restrictive Measures”: Chicago Reformers and the Nickelodeons’, Cinema Journal 39, no. 1 (1999): 90–112. 104 Paul S. Moore, ‘Everybody’s Going: City Newspapers and the Early Mass Market for Movies’, City & Community 4, no. 4 (2005): 339–57. See also Paul S. Moore, ‘It Pays to Plan “Em”: The Newspaper Movie Directory and the Paternal Logic of Mass Consumption’, in Companion to New Cinema History, ed. Biltereyst, Maltby and Meers, 365–77. 105 Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 24–5. 106 Ibid., 30. 107 Fall River (MA) News, 23 January 1904, 2. 108 Fall River (MA) News, 21 October 1904, 7. 109 Charlotte (NC) News, 20 December 1904, 2. 110 Bridgewater (NJ) Courier-News, 29 January 1907, 2. 111 At least twelve places showed Shepard’s Moving Pictures daily for at least a month in 1907, most prominently the Manhattan Theatre in New York (from 18 April 1907 to 1908 when William Gane takes charge), but also smaller ‘nickel shows’ across New England. Two straggling itinerant circuits continue in 1907–8, in Pennsylvania and Michigan, while Sunday concerts continue a final season in September 1907 at a handful of locations, most prominently the Columbia ‘Home of Melodrama’ in Brooklyn (until May 1908), and the Gayety Theatre in Washington DC, which lasts until 7 March 1909 – apparently the final show anywhere to bill itself as ‘Shepard’s Moving Pictures’.

9 MAPPING BLACK MOVIEGOING IN HARLEM, NEW YORK CITY, 1909–14 Agata Frymus

Visiting New York in the 1880s, James Weldon Johnson, then a young boy from Jacksonville, took an excursion to Harlem. What he remembered was a rural region of vast emptiness, inhabited chiefly by ‘squatters and goats’.1 While such underdevelopment was probably exaggerated – even then the area was a residential suburb housing white elites – the image it evokes, so dramatically detached from the popular connotations of Black renaissance, is telling. We must remember too that the village of Harlem became annexed by New York City in 1873, just over a decade before Johnson’s observations were made. At the dawn of the new century, the glory days of Harlem as unofficial capital of African America, still lay ahead.2 Coincidentally, as the position of Black residents in Harlem moved from periphery to the centre, so did the role of cinema. Nickelodeons proliferated across New York City between 1905 and 1910, at the exact time that witnessed more and more Black folk moving to the vicinity of the 135th Street.3 Indeed, the growing presence of movies was first captured by The New York Clipper in May 1908, reporting that film exhibition ‘secured a stronghold in Harlem and the Bronx’.4 This chapter investigates the first venues that catered to Black urbanites – the Crescent, Lincoln and Lafayette – by placing them within a socio-demographic landscape of the area. In mapping the practices of early Black movie exhibition, it also illuminates a set of disperse issues, such as white ownership, segregation and access to commercial entertainment. By locating the practices of film consumption within a wider spectrum of social phenomena, including the gradual influx of rural African Americans to the city, this chapter aligns itself with the methods of New Cinema History. Scholars working within the field argue that historical moviegoing cannot be separated from the consideration of geography, community-building and topographical

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space.5 Here, I examine fire insurance maps and articles from the Black press, simultaneously building on this understanding of cinematic practices as inherently local element structuring everyday lives.6

The Great Migration Housing a somewhat modest Black population in the early 1910s, Harlem’s Black community experienced a surge of thirty thousand in the six years following the outbreak of the First World War.7 This was a consequence of two movements: a steady influx of African Americans from North and South Carolina, as well as the growing numbers of English-speaking immigrants from Jamaica, Barbados and Montserrat.8 For those hailing from the West Indies, Harlem offered an escape from crippling poverty.9 For the latter group, relocation to one of the industrialized, urban centres of the North, such as New York or Chicago, was not only an economic choice – as is usually theorized – but often a matter of survival. From the mid-teens until the dawn of the 1920s, as many as 335,000 Southerners10 fled the rampant racism, segregation and violence they were subjected to in their homes, looking for new prospects in metropolitan centres of the North, particularly in ‘the city that never sleeps’.11 New York’s internal ethnic make-up was fluctuating, as Black people living in lower Manhattan, particularly Greenwich Village, were moving uptown, pushing Jewish and Italian immigrants to Queens and the Bronx. In turn, such changes led to bloom in Harlem’s commercial leisure. This was not a unique process, but a reflection of wider shifts nationwide; analogical developments were observed in all major cities receiving significant African American migration, from Chicago and Detroit to Pittsburgh. Interestingly, a contemporary sociologist Forrester B. Washington opined that the growing appetite for amusement amongst the Black population was one of the very forces that drove the migration from rural parts of the country. For those situated miles away from the county seats, going to the movies used to be occasional and rare; the widespread use of cars allowed for more frequent visits on a monthly, rather than an annual basis.12 Motivated to access a wider range of recreational facilities, Southerners set off to metropolitan areas, the only places where such desires could be satisfied.13 Decades later, another sociological project drew similar conclusions. Black women whose first glimpses into commercialized entertainment came when they visited dance halls in small towns, felt exhilarated by the comparative freedom they provided. Subsequently, E. Franklin Frazier reasoned, they envisioned more adventures in the world beyond, away from familial and religious restrictions. He also characterized Black communities as essentially ‘quiet and drab’, and, with the exception of Harlem and Chicago’s South Side, deficient in ‘the ferment of ideas’ that made metropolitan lifestyles both threatening and worth following.14

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Such findings might be overstating the collective demand for leisure – and its impact on the Great Migration – yet they illuminate the vibrancy of urban culture, and its unique pleasures. In her fascinating study on Black engagement with early film culture, Envisioning Freedom, Cara Caddoo emphasizes how new urbanites had encountered the movies before their relocation to the city. While the countryside might have lacked specialized screening venues, films were offered by churches and other Black community organizations. Caddoo maintains that ‘by the time most African Americans began packing their bags for the industrial North, cinema already figured into their sensibilities’.15

Commercial amusement Francis ‘Doll’ Thomas described how ‘colored folks’ who ‘thought [New York City] was where the streets were paved with gold’16 were hugely mistaken, because in reality, the majority of the establishments refused to serve them. Cinema houses were equally hostile: At the Loew’s they’d tell you it was sold out even though it wasn’t. Even the theaters that would admit you were segregated […] At Hurtig and Seamon’s, which later became the Apollo, you’d have to go round 125th Street and go up the back stairway. They tried to get fancy with it and call it the upper mezzanine, but everybody knew it was ‘n***** heaven’ and it was built for that.17 The reminiscenes of African American journalist George S. Schuyler shared many similarities with Thomas’ account. Ruminating on his life, Schuyler admitted that orchestra seating was usually beyond reach for Black viewers, unless they turned their steps to Lincoln or Lafayette, or found a way to mislead the theatre’s personnel: Randolph and I would stroll south on Seventh Avenue to catch the vaudeville show at Alhambra […] Entering the lobby, he would flatten himself against the wall near the ticket window, toss in the money and ask for two orchestra seats. Sometimes the deception worked, but when it didn’t, we would be sold tickets for the Black balcony.18 What makes the above descriptions even more striking is the fact that discrimination based on one’s ‘race, color, creed’ in places of ‘resort and amusement’, was illegal, and that such conduct was criminalized by the State of New York as early as 1909.19 The equal rights law put in operation in the summer of 1913 explicitly listed theatres as desegregated spaces, which points both to

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the state’s pioneering role in the passage of anti-discrimination legislation on a national scale,20 as well as to the persistence of discriminatory tactics. The letter of the law was de facto hardly executed, as the habit of relegating Black patrons to inferior seating on the balcony, even if they opted for orchestra seats, was as commonplace as it was enduring. Yet, Northern theatres generally – but not always – lacked architectural reminders of segregation, such as separate entrances for Black moviegoers.21 As much as asserting white consumer privilege, these practices also assigned people of colour with spatially separate and ‘patently unequal viewing position’.22 Despite a steady stream of northbound migrants changing the face of the area, such racial double vision was paramount to the daily lives of Harlem’s Black inhabitants. West 125th Street was remade into a local epicentre of business and entertainment as early as 1908. It was here that cultured city-dwellers could choose between the offerings of Harlem Opera House, Hurtig & Seamon’s Music Hall and the New Orpheum Theater.23 That is, they could do so as long as they were white. Those hungry for slightly cheaper thrills could direct their attention to cinema houses, from Proctor’s, to Orient and Loew’s Victoria. This thoroughfare, with its department stores and showplaces, was essentially out of bounds for Black Harlemites, and the situation started to change gradually at the end of the First World War. Even so, 125th retained its primarily white character well into the 1920s, resisting what was described in racist vernacular as ‘the invasion of Negroes’.24 In the mid-teens, Lenox Avenue marked the beginning of Black settlement, confining it to the few blocks between 136th and 140th Street. In the words of Thomas C. Fleming, who lived in the area in 1916, 135th Street was a discernible centre of Black life, whereas 125th was occupied mostly by Jewish tenants.25 Another resident from the era pointed out to the Irish presence in the vicinity, adding that the ‘switch to colored’ took place only in the 1920s.26 Indeed, historical research corroborates the narratives recollected by those who experienced Harlem first-hand. According to Robertson et al., it was only in the early 1930s that the ‘complexion of the street’ grew decidedly darker.27 Conscious of discrepancies between the institutional regulations and habitual practice, Black agencies reassured theatregoers of their rights. In 1917, New York Age summarized that any form of protest has to be aligned with local conditions, which vary hugely from one state to the next. Seating Black patrons in one side of the auditorium, for instance, would be viewed as discriminatory in some Northern cities; adhering to the same policy in a Jim Crow South, on the other hand, would carry strikingly different connotations. The message that resounded throughout the article, and one that maintained its power throughout the 1920s, was that of awareness and opposition. Given ‘more respectful consideration’ by white managers and ‘with the law decidedly in their favor’, people of colour in New York City cannot afford to be silent.28 Despite such passionate pleas, Black

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citizens struggled to protect their freedoms. Even if they decided to sue for such violations, the evidence was easily disregarded as insufficient. As noted by Mary White Ovington in her anthropological enquiry, ‘A case of a colored man refused orchestra seats at a theatre [in New York City] is dismissed on the ground that not the proprietor but his employees turned the man away.’29 In reality, African Americans were regularly limited to watching a film from the considerable distance of a balcony seat – an arrangement dubbed ironically as ‘Buzzard Roost’ or ‘N***** heaven’30 – or attending an after-hour screening, a socalled ‘midnight ramble’.31 The most brazen Black movie fans could take the risk and venture down to 125th Street, in the hope of attending a mainstream movie house. This option was, as Charlene Regester discusses, rife with contradictions. If allowed entry, a Black person could at once ‘revel in their temporary moment of privilege associated with whiteness’ and be simultaneously alerted to their disadvantaged societal position.32

Crescent It is perhaps no surprise that the first theatres to serve Black clientele were located on 38 and 50 West 135th Street respectively, at the very centre of Harlem’s African American and Caribbean section.33 While we know that Crescent and Lincoln opened on the same block of buildings within months of each other, in late 1909, there is no agreement as to which venue started operating first. Caddoo follows Alison Griffiths and James Latham’s research, stipulating that Crescent was the predecessor (Figure 9.1).34 Other historians, like Bill Egan and Henry T. Sampson, point towards Lincoln.35 It might be worth observing that Black media at the time provided no coverage relating to the inauguration of the latter institution, but the inauguration of the former took place on 16 December 1909. The opening night of the Crescent, hailed as a ‘first class vaudeville and moving picture house’ turned out to be so successful that many patrons had to be turned away.36 Writing a year later, a prominent Black film critic Lester A. Walton described Crescent as a place drawing a diverse clientele, where ‘white and colored sat side by side, elbowing each other’ and where Black ushers made no attempts to interfere by separating the races.37 It would be difficult to talk about dramatic arts of the era without giving due credit to Walton, one of the first generation of Black journalists able to make a living out of his profession. In another piece, the writer estimated that 90 per cent of Crescent’s customers comprised of Blacks.38 He predicted that soon enough Crescent’s success would become a threat to major theatres and that managers, fearing to lose their own patronage, would be forced to embrace open racial policy. In his unique, rhetorical style Walton articulates

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Figure 9.1  Advertising for the Crescent’s opening night. New York Age, 16 December 1909, 6.

an inevitable shift in management, to the ultimate benefit of ‘the colored theatregoers’. History is being made, and it is an unstoppable transformation. Unfortunately, we know very little about the types of photoplays screened at the Crescent, because most of the publicity and subsequent reviews oscillated around the peculiarities of the vaudeville show. The only source containing details that go beyond mentioning the simple fact of moving pictures comes in January 1910, with the advert promising ‘at least one Vitagraph picture daily’.39 In large measure, this can be attributed to the way in which screening venues operated. Prior to 1913, showmen did not know what titles they will receive far in advance, and the reels were rarely exhibited for longer than two days. Building publicity around the amenities of the theatre, its prestige or the film studio instead of individual movies was simply more viable.40 Furthermore, Jacqueline Najuma Stewart argues that the lack of substantial coverage of moving pictures before 1915 was a sign of bias in Black elites. To put it simply, Black columns recognized live performance as more highbrow than screen entertainment. Those covering the arts had personal links to theatrical agents, resulting in first-hand insight into the industry; such level of understanding largely surpassed their knowledge of the movie industry.41 While Crescent’s history proved short, as increasing competitions drove owners out of business by 1915,42 its trailblazing impact on local entertainment was vast. Some historians pointed out that, in staging established, sophisticated productions such as opera The Tryst, the venue initially aspired to appeal to middle-class customers. Opinion pieces in the local press continuously alluded to its reputation as a bastion of safe entertainment: ‘When patrons go to the Crescent Theater they expect to see a clean show. Those who want to see a muscle dance exhibition and hear a lot of raw talk know where to go for it.’43 One of the reasons that led Crescent to first emphasize more low-brow product and then ultimately close its doors, was the existence of Lincoln, another movie theatre in very close proximity.44

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Lincoln Headed by Maria C. Downs, a wealthy New Yorker of Puerto Rican or Cuban descent, the competing enterprise had expanded its original operation from a storefront nickelodeon to a theatre of three hundred capacity in 1909.45 At the outset, Lincoln specialized in moving pictures, but its programme soon incorporated Blackface and variety performance (Figure 9.2). In 1915, Downs amplified her profile – and profits – in erecting a new building in place of an old one, further increasing Lincoln’s seating capacity to 850. The bill included a feature film every day, as well as six vaudeville acts that changed twice a week. When the management invested in a resident theatrical company in 1915, the programming was enriched by a four-play act presented on weekly basis.46 Perhaps the draw of Downs’s business was captured best by one frequent attendee, who explained Lincoln ‘had movies and short acts for short money’.47 Looking back in 1927, New York Amsterdam News hinted at a working-class character of ‘the old Lincoln’, explaining it was not frequented by the highbrow members of the community.48 One of the very few female cinema owners, Downs had astute business acumen, and was quick to recognize the benefits offered by orienting the movie

Figure 9.2  125th Street, Harlem, c. 1910. Maether & Co., postcard, Berlin, Germany. Lincoln theatre is visible at the centre of the photograph.

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house towards a Black audience. This aspiration is reflected in the fact that she got rid of the previous name, Nickelette, and re-branded her business as Lincoln. At the time, there was a wider trend amongst Black and Black-oriented investors to name venues after heroic white figures that alleviated the African American plight. Naturally, the abolishment of slavery made Abraham Lincoln a popular choice. The tendency was additionally accentuated by the fact that 1909 marked the centennial of the president’s birth. In the silent movie period, approximately a dozen theatres shared his name, operating in locales as distant as Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Jacksonville, Kansas City, Washington DC, Houston and Knoxville.49 A Union general Oliver O. Howard was yet another contender in the naming game, with the most famed coloured theatre named after him in Washington DC.

Figure 9.3  One of the two managers of Crescent, Thomas Johnson, and Eugene ‘Frenchy’ Elmore, manager of Lincoln. Photographs from New York Age, 30 June 1910, 6 and New York Amsterdam News, 13 February 1929, 6.

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In addition, the establishment hired a potentially Black manager Eugene Elmore, known locally as ‘Frenchy’ (Figure 9.3). Although the racial identity of Elmore cannot be confirmed with certainty, especially in the apparent lack of census records – some sources depict him as a man of African descent, whereas others describe him as white – it is possible, as Freeland indicates that he was a light-skinned African American.50 For Jacqueline M. Moore, the naming policy worked in conjunction with the employment of Black managers to create an illusion that the theatres were in fact run by the members of the race, whilst in most cases, they were not.51 Indeed, it seems that the white proprietors of the Crescent, Henry Martinson and Benjamin Nibur used Black men, Thomas Johnson and I. Flugelman, as the spokespeople for their establishment.52 Hesitant to reveal their identity, the owners shifted the focus to the personae of the Crescent’s two official presidents.53 Equivalent strategy was demonstrated by businesses in other cities, for example in Washington, where the founders of Howard theatre used Black management as a front, in a way of profiting from ethnic solidarity.54 At the same time, it is challenging to confirm the actual position of Johnson and Flugelman in the Crescent, as we are forced to rely on either vague press accounts or established histories fractured by contradictory details. This issue affects many other minutiae elements of Harlem’s historical film scene. Despite the fact the pair is usually referred to as managers – and I am inclined to see them that way – one particular news piece claimed they were in fact original owners, who handed the playhouse to Martinson and Nibur in 1911.55 Was this simply a smoke screen, or a journalistic inaccuracy? The same feature also notably described the Crescent as ‘one of the best paying and most up-to-date motion picture houses in Greater New York’, which is an exaggeration at best. If the author is correct though, then Black cinema owners must have entered the local stage much earlier than 1919, when the Dunbar Amusement Company started to control Lafayette, or 1921, with William Roach’s Roosevelt theatre.56 In any case, I call into question Koritha Mitchell’s argument that Lafayette was the first of Harlem’s houses to be co-managed by an African American.57 Unequivocally, that distinction goes to the Crescent. The disappearance of Johnson and Flugelman from the records was followed by a subsequent appearance of Henry Ostreicher, formerly of Lafayette, who assumed the managerial position at the Crescent in May 1913. His location within the enterprise seems to be much clearer, as New York Age consistently refers to him as the manager. Also a white man, Ostreicher came from a Bavarian family who left Europe for New York City when he was still a child.58 Even though a high turnover of theatrical stuff in Harlem constitutes a problem for the historian, the situation was always far from clear-cut. As Walton observed at the time, ‘so many references are made of the Martinson, Ostreicher and Niburs in connection with the three houses that the theater-goers [sic] in Harlem are mystified as to

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who is who’.59 Ostreicher’s brother, Max, was involved in the running of Franklin, another desegregated cinema on 440 Lenox Avenue. White ownership – at once prevailing and contested – prompted much dismay in Black circles. One of the ways in which African Americans could express their civic consciousness was to finance Black-owned commerce, and strive to become owners themselves. ‘The obligation is upon the Negroes’, proposed one journalist, ‘to get hold of and control the business of the districts into which they are segregated. They owe that much to themselves and to their children.’60 Those in the epicentre of New Negro movement saw through the ploys of whites, in which a member of the race would be relegated to the principally representative, public role to attract business. Such was the case when one journalist accused Walton of serving as a kind of sympathy figure to the patrons of Lafayette. ‘[Walton] has never been of much importance’, reasoned the article, ‘and was only used for the purpose of having a little Napoleon to hold up before the colored people.’61 On the other hand, while Downs also hired Black staff, Harlemites were well aware of her role as Lincoln’s proprietor. As a matter of fact, the media tended to describe her as a friend of the race and something of an ally. The fact that white investors controlled the vast majority of Harlem’s wealth brings this argument to a broader point: that is, to the issue of white presence as a penetrating force within the Black communities. Racial control was visible commercially because the majority of neighbourhoods’ capital remained in the hands of white men who rarely resided within its boundaries. In spite of accepted histories painting Harlem as a refuge, or something of a counter space for ‘Blacks to be themselves, as they saw fit’,62 the area was never discernibly free from white influence. Recently, scholars such as Cheryl D. Hicks, Clare Corbould and Stephen Robertson highlighted the policing presence of white law enforcement in the district.63 Strolling down one of the Harlem’s busiest avenues, Black citydwellers were immediately confronted with white drivers seating behind the wheels of buses, street cars and private vehicles. Thus, the semi-legendary status of New York’s ‘Black Mecca’ did not protect its residents from police violence, or other incidents underpinned by racial hatred.

Lafayette Harlem’s position as a hub of Black entertainment was enforced in 1912, with the opening of Lafayette. The movie house became a point of interest even during the construction works, firstly because the New York Amusement Company, a consortium who backed the investment, promised to employ African American personnel, and secondly because of the debate on the theatre’s future name. At the time, Manuel Geo of Atlantic City has written to one paper to suggest naming it in honour of a trailblazing Black vaudevillian George W. Walker.64 Whilst the

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proposition was particularly timely, considering the artist died only a year before, at the age of thirty-eight, it did not take hold.65 New York Age also carried an appeal to those with enough capital to support the venture through the purchase of shares. In those early days, it was billed as W-H-C theatre.66 Boasting a capacity exceeding 1,500 seats, the theatre was able to house more patrons than the area’s existing Black playhouses, Lincoln and Crescent, combined. ‘Before the Lafayette’, reminisced one former resident, ‘the only theaters open to colored were little dumps.’67 Situated at the edge of a contemporary Black settlement, the venue was designed to attract patronage from both sides of the colour line. This dynamic found its reflection in the first night, when – as one paper recounted – managers looked around to see which race dominated the crowd. They were then to decide whether the operation should be a white or a Black one.68 While such details are likely to be an exaggeration, they are accurate insofar as they describe Lafayette’s spatial and social position as liminal. Initially, Lafayette fell short of fulfilling its proclaimed mission of ‘providing a place of amusement for the race’.69 The management welcomed only ‘respectable’ Blacks, which in practice meant that any Black individual could be relegated to inferior seating on the balcony, based on the personnel’s whims. Who counted as ‘respectable’ and who did not was rather arbitrary, causing an understandable stir in the Black neighbourhood. After six months, Lafayette banished the procedure that cost it both bad press and a substantial loss of profits. While there is no consensus as to when Lafayette categorically banished isolating Black spectators from the white auditorium, the evidence gleaned from the entertainment pages suggests it operated as a racially integrated space in February 1913.70 New York Age cited C. W. Morganstern as the man who put an end to the ‘segregation idea which aroused such as storm of indignation among the colored residents of Harlem’.71 Jervis Anderson implies the policy was mandated by Lester Walton, appointed as the new manager around 1914.72 These two viewpoints are not mutually exclusive, as Morganstern, a Broadway booking agent, worked in concert with Walton in overseeing Lafayette until February 1916. In most likelihood desegregation took place earlier, and thus could be attributed to Martinson and Nibur, two businessmen already in proprietorship of the Crescent. What managing it must have taught them was that the demand for racially inclusive spaces exceeded the existing supply; they started leasing Lafayette in the first months of 1913. In one interview, the new owners stated that every effort will be made to treat white and coloured patrons equally.73 A page-wide advert featured in one Black paper – which must have cost dearly – again referred to the principles of egalitarianism, carrying a poignant slogan: ‘Lafayette. Our Doors Are Open to All’.74 Newspaper stories from that time also contain attempts to court Black moviegoers with photodramas featuring ‘colored

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actors;’ likely to be one of the earliest screenings of Black-movie fare in New York City.75 Whereas Black opinion was always far from uniform, Lafayette tended to gather mostly positive exposure. When Robert Levy took the position of manager in the winter of 1916, the establishment started to stage a new play every Monday afternoon. From Tuesday onwards, the players used the morning sessions to rehearse the production for the following week.76 New York Age wrote approvingly of the up-to-date films shown at Lafayette, anticipating that ‘it will prove a strong and effective appeal to hundreds of motion picture fans in the district; but the pictures must be of high order’.77 Nonetheless, screen offerings were rarely a focus of Lafayette’s programming in the 1910s. If listed at all, the movies were granted only a passing mention, next to elaborate reviews of stage dramas.78 ‘Charlie Chaplin Nights’, which featured the comedian’s screen antics

Figure 9.4  Cinemas in North and Central Harlem in 1916. The outline across area 155 to 147 signifies the Black settlement, after James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1930), 146. The line at the bottom of the image shows the beginning of the Jewish neighbourhood. Compiled by the author.

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every Wednesday, were one exception.79 Overall, advertising generated by the enterprise vividly demonstrates its position as, first and foremost, theatre, and a moving picture house second. While historiographies of Harlem concentrate, understandably, on the Crescent, Lincoln and Lafayette, these three venues do not create a comprehensive map of Black moviegoing in the silent film period (Figure 9.4). Now, while it is extremely challenging to establish a number of Black-oriented cinemas in the district with any degree of certainty, a cartographic analysis of Harlem’s residential patterns hints at the general contours of its leisure landscape. The fire insurance maps from 1916 reveal ten theatrical locations within the boundaries of the Black settlement (Odeon, Mystic, Lincoln, Crescent, Lenox, Majestic, Franklin, Lafayette and two unnamed theatres). At least eight of these establishments were licensed to project movies. The remaining question is whether film outlets – both those in the midst of the Black enclave, as well as those around 125th Street – drew their attendance from Black population. The answer is, as always, complex. Storefront movie houses did not leave a trace in local newspapers, as they relied on hand-outs and posters to stimulate commerce. While I found no conclusive proof that some of the local cinemas, such as the places listed on the maps simply as ‘theatres’ were accommodating towards African Americans, their geographical position allows us to consider it likely. What we learn from the historiographies of other ethnic groups in New York City is that nickelodeons focused on strictly local trade: in the Jewish Lower East Side, almost all business came from the residents living within two to three blocks away.80 Franklin, for instance, featured prominently in theatrical section of New York Amsterdam News, which leaves no doubt regarding its racial orientation. In the beginning of the 1913 this medium-sized house with six hundred seats also merited a short mention from Walton: ‘Harlem has a new theatre and although no official statement has been made that it has been opened for colored theatregoers, nevertheless such is the case.’81 It seems that Mystic – which disappears from the map in 1923, replaced by a garage – also aimed to solicit African American custom.82 Lenox, on the other hand, was situated in a non-residential area at the very edge of Black settlement and did not encourage Black theatregoers, which probably contributed to it going out of business by 1923. Although cinemas located further downtown did not seek Black spectators explicitly, it does not mean actual Black patronage can be entirely excluded. Francis ‘Doll’ Thomas remembered, for instance, ‘a little frame shack’ nickelodeon on the corner of 125th Street.83 According to his testimony, the place – which he does not name, but geographical location makes Orient a likely contender – welcomed Black folk even before Lafayette started to do the same in 1912. What is more, movie houses in Harlem’s Jewish section were becoming increasingly more open to Black spectatorship at the height of the renaissance.84

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All in all, Black Harlemites could patronize anywhere between four to fifteen picture houses in 1916; however, some theatres included in this equation were situated in the Jewish quarter where non-white patronage was treated with ambiguity, if not outright hostility. Viewed from the country-wide perspective, New York City offered vast opportunities for Black entertainment, especially if we reflect on the number of racial minority theatres nationally. These oscillated at 112 in 1909.85 The contours of this portrait change drastically in juxtaposition to all movie houses open to whites. In 1912, for instance, New York Times estimated the total number of picture shows in Greater New York as 1,200.86 Judith Thissen approximates that around the same time the Jewish settlement downtown boasted about thirty-five nickelodeons alone.87 While far from precise, these figures indicate to the limitations placed on African Americans, unable to access the same number of cinemas, nor to move within the city’s rich amusements options with ease. They also help to illustrate how, seen from afar, the metropolis could gleam like a beacon of promise and prospects. For migrants already in the throes of urban life, and those with growing recognition of local disparities, it was often a source of great frustration.

Conclusion In 1915, Black movie fans could attend a theatre that welcomed their patronage (Crescent, Lincoln, Lafayette, Franklin) or take some risks by venturing into notso-colour-blind cinemas (Alhambra, Loew’s, Orient). While a number oscillating around half a dozen is hardly impressive – particularly when juxtaposed to estimated 460 cinematic venues88 within the New York City limits – such variety still surpassed amusement options available to the majority of Black Americans elsewhere. In that respect, perhaps only Chicago’s Black belt, another vibrant centre of African American activity, could compete with Harlem. Subscribers to Black magazines of nationwide circulation were aware of regional disparities, and often envious. A resident of rural Mississippi corresponded with Chicago Defender, yearning to have the access to the commercial Black entertainment of Northern cities. That, he wrote, would be ‘heaven itself’.89 The Crescent and Lincoln were not marketing movies inasmuch as they were selling the entire moviegoing package, with the family-friendly outlook and other indicators of respectability. Even though many pieces of the puzzle are still missing, what emerges from anecdotal or even ephemeral sources is sheer determination: to support Black film ventures and to carve out an independent space for Black expression.

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Acknowledgements This work was produced as part of Black Cinema-Going project, funded by the EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 792629.

Notes 1 James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way (London: Penguin, 2008), 153. 2 Indeed, Cara Caddoo writes that Washington DC was the ‘the capital of black life’ in America before the First World War. See her Envisioning Freedom: Cinema and the Building of Modern Black Life (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2014), 83. 3 James Latham and Alison Griffiths, ‘Film and Ethnic Identity in Harlem, 1896–1915’, in Hollywood and Its Spectators: The Reception of American Film, 1895–1995, ed. Melvyn Stokes (London: BFI, 1999), 46. 4 The New York Clipper, 9 May 1908, 324. Cited in Latham and Griffiths, ‘Film and Ethnic Identity in Harlem’, 52. 5 See, for instance, Daniela Treveri Gennari and John Sedgwick, ‘Memories in Context: The Social and Economic Function of Cinema in 1950s Rome’, Film History 27, no. 2 (2015): 76–104; Sam Manning, Cinemas and Cinema-Going in the United Kingdom: Decades of Decline, 1945–65 (London: University of London Press, 2020); Lies Van De Vijver and Daniël Biltereyst, ‘Cinemagoing as a Conditional Part of Everyday Life’, Cultural Studies 27, no. 4 (2013): 561–84. 6 For more information on the challenges of researching marginalized audiences, see Agata Frymus, ‘Researching Black Women and Film History’, Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media 5, no. 20, Special Issue: Doing Women’s Film and Television History (Winter 2020): 228–36. 7 Harold Cruise, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York, NY: William Morrow, 1967), 71. 8 Violet M. Showers Johnson, ‘What, Then, Is the African American? African and AfroCaribbean Identities in Black America’, Journal of American Ethnic History 28, no. 1, Racial Divides (Fall 2008): 79–80. In 1920, 20 per cent of New York City’s Black population was foreign born. See Ruth Reed, Negro Illegitimacy in New York City (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1926), 40. 9 Cheryl Greenberg, ‘New York City’, in The Great Black Migration: A Historical Encyclopaedia of the American Mosaic, ed. Steven A. Reich (Santa Barbara, CA, Denver, CO and Oxford: Greenwood, 2014), 248–52. 10 The figure is quoted in Robert H. Zieger, For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America since 1865 (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2007), 71. 11 By 1912, Harlem’s Black minority was sizeable enough to prompt one of the Catholic churches to reach out to African American worshippers. See Cecilia

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A. Moore, ‘Keeping Harlem Catholic: African-American Catholics and Harlem, 1920–1960’, American Catholic Studies 114, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 5. 12 Forrester B. Washington, ‘Recreational Facilities for the Negro’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 140, The American Negro (November 1928): 277. 13 Washington, ‘Recreational Facilities for the Negro’, 273. 14 E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 210; E. Franklin Frazier, Negro Youth at the Crossways (New York, NY: Schocken Books, 1967 [1940]), 287. 15 Caddoo, Envisioning Freedom, 10. 16 Francis ‘Doll’ Thomas in Jeff Kisseloff, You Must Remember This: An Oral History of Manhattan from the 1890s to World War II (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1989), 276. The interviewee was born in 1893. 17 Ibid., 276. Although some of the sources I draw on, particularly memoirs and recollections, are not prioritized by existing historical protocols – usually viewed as anecdotal or unreliable – I find them valuable, regardless of their fragmentary status. To paraphrase Anna Everett, while such evidence might be ephemeral, it nevertheless provides us with a picture of profound socio-political and historical impact. See Anna Everett, Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909–1949 (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2001), 2. 18 George Samuel Schuyler, Black and Conservative: The Autobiography of George S. Schuyler (New York, NY: Arlington House, 1966), 140. 19 New York State Civil Rights Law, art. 514, ‘Protecting Civil and Public Rights’, in States’ Laws on Race and Color, ed. Pauli Murray (Athens, GA, and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1997), 324. See also Laura Carlson, Comparative Discrimination Law: Historical and Theoretical Frameworks (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2017), 60. 20 David Freeland, Automats, Taxi Dances, and Vaudeville: Excavating Manhattan’s Lost Places of Leisure (New York, NY, and London: New York University Press, 2009), 138. 21 LaKisha Michelle Simmons, Crescent City Girls: The Lives of Young Black Women in Segregated New Orleans (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 193. Alhambra and Apollo initially had separate staircases. 22 Robert C. Allen, ‘Race, Region, and Rusticity: Relocating U.S. Film History’, in Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema, ed. Richard Maltby, Melvyn Stokes and Robert C. Allen (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2007), 37. 23 Jervis Anderson, This Was Harlem: A Cultural Portrait, 1900–1950 (New York, NY: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1982), 47. 24 Although decidedly racist in tone, the idea that growing size of the Black population was a form of invasion was also something that Black writers engaged with. The quote comes from ‘Drake and Walker to Invade 125th Street’, New York Age [NYA hereafter], 6 October 1928, 6. A symbolic turning point for the street came only in 1928, when a theatre thus far known as Apollo was leased by a husband and wife team of Black entertainers, Henry Drake and Ethel Waters, and renamed after them. See Observer, ‘At Harlem Theatres’, New York Amsterdam News [NYAN hereafter], 28 November 1928, 8. Drake and Walker’s Theatre Advert, NYA, 13 October 1928, 6.

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25 Thomas C. Fleming and Max Millard, In the Black World, 1907–1932 (San Francisco, CA: Max Millard, 2011), location 263. 26 Ted Fox, Showtime at the Apollo (New York, NY: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1983). Jeffrey S. Gurock also writes that East Harlem’s Jewish population was largely gone by 1930, with only 2,900 individuals living ‘amid growing Puerto Rican immigrant enclave’. See his, The Jews of Harlem: The Rise, Decline, and Revival of a Jewish Community (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1979), 183. 27 Stephen Robertson, Shane White, Stephen Garton and Graham White, ‘This Harlem Life: Black Families and Everyday Life in the 1920s and 1930s’, Journal of Social History 44, no. 1 (Fall 2010): 115. 28 Lester A. Walton, ‘Better Seating Accommodations in Theatres’, NYA, 4 January 1917, 6. 29 Mary White Ovington, Half a Man: A Status of the Negro in New York (New York, NY, London, Bombay and Calcutta: Longmans Green and Co., 1911), 214. 30 Charlene Regester, ‘From the Buzzard’s Roost: Black Movie-Going in Durham and Other North Carolina Cities during the Early Period of American Cinema’, Film History 17, no. 1, Local Film (2005): 113–24. Another term for the segregated balcony seating was ‘peanut gallery’. See Lauranett L. Lee, Making the American Dream Work: A Cultural History of African Americans in Hopewell, Virginia (Hampton, NY: Morgan James Publishing, 2008), 66. 31 Julia Leyda, ‘Black-Audience Westerns and the Politics of Cultural Identification in the 1930s’, Cinema Journal 42, no. 1 (Autumn 2002): 50. 32 Regester, ‘From the Buzzard’s Roost’, 116. 33 Lester A. Walton, ‘Music and the Stage’, NYA, 16 December 1909, 6. See also the same column on 10 November 1910, 6 and ‘Western Drama at Lafayette Next Week’, NYA, 7 September 1918, 6. 34 Caddoo, Envisioning Freedom, 102; Latham and Griffiths, ‘Film and Ethnic Identity in Harlem’, 58. 35 Bill Egan, Florence Mills: Harlem Jazz Queen (Lanham, MD, Toronto and Oxford: The Scarecrow Press, 2004), 12; Henry T. Sampson, Blacks in Blackface, A Sourcebook on Early Black Musical Shows, vol. 1 (Lanham, MD, Toronto, Plymouth: Scarecrow Press, 2014), 84. 36 Lester A. Walton, ‘Crescent Theatre Has Big Opening’, NYA, 23 December 1909, 6. For a thorough examination of Walton’s journalism and advocacy, see Everett, Returning the Gaze, 18–35; Allyson Nadia Field, Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 37 Lester A. Walton, ‘Mission of Crescent Theatre’, NYA, 6 January 1910, 6. 38 Lester A. Walton, ‘White Acts at Howard Theatre’, NYA, 11 August 1910, 6. 39 Crescent Theatre Advert, NYA, 6 January 1910, 6. 40 Shelley Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture after the Nickelodeon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 108. 41 Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (Berkeley, Los Angeles, CA and London: University of California Press, 2005), 127–8.

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42 Aberjhani, ‘Crescent Theater’, Encyclopaedia of the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Aberjhani and Sandra L. West (New York, NY: Facts on File, 2003), 74. 43 Lester A. Walton, ‘Theatrical Comment’, NYA, 18 July 1912, 6. 44 ‘Dramatics and Athletics’, NYA, 19 February 1914, 6. 45 Interestingly, Downs herself had some experience as a vaudevillian. Under her maiden name, Godoy, she also recorded what is now considered some of the very first Spanish-language songs made in the United States. See William A. Everett and Paul R. Laird, The Cambridge Companion to the Musical (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 71. 46 Richard Newman, ‘The Lincoln Theatre’, American Visions 6 (August 1991): 29. 47 Tom Davin, ‘Conversation with James P. Johnson’, Voices from the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Nathan Irvin Huggins (New York, NY, and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 327. 48 ‘Mrs. Downs’ Lincoln and Martinson and Nibur’s Crescent Were Pioneers’, NYAN, 9 March 1927, 10. 49 ‘Lincoln’ in The African American Theatre Directory, 1816–1960: A Comprehensive Guide to Early Black Theatre Organizations, Companies, Theatres, and Performing Groups, ed. Bernard L. Peterson, Jr. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), 125. Houston also had a theatre named after Lincoln. See ‘Doings of the Race’, NYA, 6 April 1916, 6. 50 ‘Mr. Elmore Gives His Gold’, Chicago Defender, 20 November 1915, 2. See also Freeland, Automats, Taxi Dances, and Vaudeville, 244. 51 Jacqueline M. Moore, Leading the Race: The Transformation of the Black Elite in the Nation’s Capital (Charlottesville, VA, and London: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 59. 52 This trend in ownership endured throughout 1920s, as 75–81 per cent of Harlem’s businesses were controlled by whites. See Stephen Robertson, ‘Constrained but not Contained: Patterns of Everyday Life and the Limits of Segregation in 1920s Harlem’, in The Ghetto in Global History: 1500 to the Present, ed. Wendy Z. Goldman and Joe William Trotter Jr. (New York, NY: Routledge, 2018): 223–37. 53 Walton, ‘Theatrical Comment’, NYA, 19 January 1911, 6. 54 Moore, Leading the Race, 59. 55 Walton, ‘Crescent Theatre Sold’, NYA, 24 August 1911, 6. 56 Sampson, Blacks in Blackface, 123. 57 Koritha Mitchell, Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890–1930 (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 48. 58 United States Census,1860, https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MCQK-PJ5 (accessed 27 May 2019). Henry Ostreicher in the entry for Baroch Ostreicher, 1860. 59 ‘Theatrical Comment’, NYA, 13 February 1913, 6. See also ‘Crescent Theatre’, NYA, 29 May 1913, 6. 60 ‘Make Segregation Pay’, NYA, 4 January 1912, 4. 61 Reprinted in Lester A. Walton, ‘In Retrospection’, NYA, 17 February 1916, 5.

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62 James De Jongh, Vicious Modernism: Black Harlem and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 7. 63 Cheryl D. Hicks, Talk with You like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, 1890–1930 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012) and Clare Corbould, ‘Sounds, Streets and Identity in Interwar Harlem’, Journal of Social History 40, no. 4 (Summer 2007): 859–99. Stephen Robertson, ‘Putting Harlem on the Map’, in Writing History in the Digital Age, ed. Jack Dougherty, Kristen Nawrotzki (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 192. 64 Lester Walton, ‘Music and the Stage’, NYA, 25 January 1912, 6. Manuel Geo, ‘The Walker Theatre’, NYA, 18 January 1912, 6. 65 Although the cause of Walker’s death was not reported, it is likely his demise was a result of syphilis. He experienced memory loss and was reportedly suffering from other alignments for two years. The 1909 punctuated his last on-stage appearance. See ‘Goerge Walker of Williams and Walker is No More’, The Broad Ax, 14 January 1911, 1. 66 ‘The W-H-C Theatre’, NYA, 28 March 1912, 6. 67 Thomas in Kisseloff, You Must Remember This, 276. 68 ‘We Are Still Going Down the Memory Lane and Recalling the Good Old Times’, NYAN, 22 July 1925, 6. 69 ‘The W-H-C Theatre’, 6. 70 Anderson mistakenly suggests this took place in 1914. See Anderson, This Was Harlem, 110; ‘Advertisement for Lafayette’, NYA, 20 February 1913, 6. 71 ‘The Lafayette Theatre Passes into New Hands’, NYA, 7 May 1914, 1. 72 Anderson, This Was Harlem, 125. 73 ‘Acquire Control of the Lafayette Theatre’, NYA, 6 February 1913, 1. See also Edward A. Berlin, King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and His Era (New York, NY, and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 228; Mark Berresford, ‘That’s Got ’em!’: The Life and Music of Wilbur C. Sweatman (Oxford, MS: The University Press of Mississippi, 2010), 79. 74 ‘Advertisement for Martinson’s and Nibur’s Lafayette’, NYA, 6 February 1913, 2. 75 The title of the movie is not known. The mention only goes as far to point out that the race picture ‘made a big hit at the Grand Theatre, Chicago’. See ‘Lafayette Theatre’, NYA, 18 September 1913, 6. 76 Errol Hill and James V. Hatch, A History of African American Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 204. 77 Lester A. Walton, ‘Lafayette Opens under Colored Management to Good Houses’, NYA, 5 July 1919, 6. 78 Lester A. Walton, ‘Lafayette Players in The Eyes of Youth’, NYA, 23 August 1919, 6. 79 Lester A. Walton, ‘Charlie Chaplin Might Eliminate Coarseness’, NYA, 15 February 1917, 6. ‘The Rajahs and Other Features at Lafayette’, NYA, 13 May 1915, 6. 80 Judith Thissen, ‘Early Cinema and the Public Sphere of the Neighbourhood Meeting Hall: The Longue Durée of Working-Class Sociability’, in Beyond the Screen, ed. Marta Braun, Charles Keil, Rob King, Paul S. Moore and Louis Pelletier

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(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2012), 299. What makes this particularly poignant is that the Jewish and African American communities of New York City resembled each other in some respects. See Catherine Rottenberg, ed. Black Harlem and the Jewish Lower East Side: Narratives Out of Time (New York, NY: State University of New York Press, 2013). 81 Lester A. Walton, ‘The Theatres in Harlem’, NYA, 9 January 1913, 6. According to New York Times, a capacity of six hundred was the most common for a movie house in the country. See ‘Amazing Developments in the Moving Picture Field’, New York Times, 7 September 1913, 4. 82 ‘About Things Theatrical’, NYAN, 24 February 1926, 7. 83 Thomas in Kisseloff, You Must Remember This, 276. 84 Alhambra, a theatre of 1,800 capacity, is emblematic of the phenomenon; routinely admonished for its discriminatory practices in the first years of the 1920s, it turned into a chief spot of Black live by the end of the decade. See, for instance, ‘All Negro Staff at the Alhambra Theatre’, NYA, 3 September 1927, 6. 85 Juli Jones, Indianapolis Freeman, 13 March 1909, 5. Cited in Gregory A. Waller, ‘Another Audience: Black Moviegoing, 1907–1916’, Cinema Journal 31, no. 2 (Winter 1992): 4. 86 ‘Amazing Developments in the Moving Picture Field’, New York Times, 7 September 1913, 4. The article also claims there is a total of ‘18,000 picture shows in the United States’. 87 Thissen, ‘Early Cinema and the Public Sphere’, 298. 88 The number is an estimation based partly on Eileen Bowser’s claim that New York City had a nickelodeon or a cinema for every 11,250 inhabitants. New York City had had a population of approximately 5,266,000 in 1915. In 1908, Moving Picture World estimated that New York City had anywhere between three hundred and four hundred nickelodeons and movie theatres. By 1910, the same publication speculated there were six hundred of them in Greater New York. See Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 1907–1915 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, CA and London: University of California Press, 1990), 7–8. 89 Chicago Defender, 8 May 1915. Cited in James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 86.

10 ATTRACTION, NARRATION, PERFORMANCE: A HISTORICAL-PRAGMATIC PERSPECTIVE ON EARLY CINEMA Frank Kessler and Sabine Lenk

In August 1985, the conference ‘Nouvelles approches de l’histoire du cinéma’ (new approaches to cinema history), organized and directed by Jacques Aumont, André Gaudreault and Michel Marie, took place in Cerisy la Salle (France). During the interesting, animated, sometimes also heated discussions, a paper co-written by André Gaudreault and Tom Gunning claimed that early cinema constituted ‘a challenge to film history’.1 The mainly francophone film historians and theorists thus learned for the first time about a new concept to analyse filmic forms from the first twenty years of cinematography which were said to belong to a ‘système d’attraction monstrative’ (in short: the cinema of attraction), which had to be distinguished from the later ‘système d’intégration narrative’ (in short: cinema of narration).2 Gaudreault and Gunning started with a discussion on the question of ‘synchrony and diachrony, structure and development, theory and history’ and their ‘tension, quite “twentieth-century-like”’,3 in which they referred to Jean-Louis Comolli, Gérard Genette, Ferdinand de Saussure, Tzvetan Todorov, Russian Formalists and also some cinema historians. Subsequently the two young scholars explained how these two ‘modes de pratique filmique’4 functioned and how they could be operationalized to segment the two decades between the first film screenings and the First World War, into a period from 1895 to 1908 (attraction) and another one from 1908 to 1914 (narration). In our contribution we will look at the concept again, exactly thirty-five years after its first presentation, and fourteen years after it was revisited and reassessed

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in a seminal volume edited by Wanda Strauven.5 After decades of studying the history of the early film and cinema industry since Deslandes and Richard’s groundbreaking but outside francophone scholarship not widely read book,6 what is the status of this concept? Is it still what it seemed at its beginning: a key concept for researching and teaching film produced before the First World War, or maybe even ‘before Griffith’? To what extent is it still valid despite various critiques? Are there alternatives to the dichotomous perspective that Gaudreault and Gunning advanced in Cerisy la Salle?

Narration and attraction(s) – presence and absence of facets Let us open with the following statement: seeing attraction and narration as mutually exclusive opposites is largely a misunderstanding of these concepts, as in that case they are seen as referring exclusively to the textual structure of the films in question, and in particular the presence or absence of narrative. As we have seen, at the 1985 Cerisy conference, André Gaudreault and Tom Gunning proposed a different conceptual couple. There is, on the one hand, the ‘system of narrative integration’ – that is a cinema in which all elements work in the service of the narrative, aiming to absorb the spectator in the diegesis. On the other hand, there is the ‘system of monstrative attractions’ (which should maybe have rather been termed ‘system of attractional display’, thus paralleling more explicitly its counterpart), privileging the presentation of spectacular elements. The former system can include attractional elements, but those will then be narratively integrated, while they can use a global narrative structure as a means to link these moments of spectacle.7 This basic distinction continues to have a heuristic value, of course, as it avoids looking at early cinema through the lens of classical narrative cinema. In this respect it has been extremely productive.8 In subsequent discussions, however, the focus has shifted more or less exclusively on the films’ textual properties and on discussions about whether or not a given film or film genre should be considered attractional rather than narrative, or vice versa,9 constructing an opposition that we think is erroneous in the first place.10 We will not pursue this discussion but address another issue that we think is an important aspect of a reassessment of the so-called cinema of attractions today. In the way it was originally conceptualized11 the focus lay mainly on early films’ textuality and the mode of address that was manifest in it. Yet, as we will argue, the performative dimension of the kinematograph is an important aspect of how films were perceived and received by historical audiences. This facet, however, was largely absent in the debates surrounding the notion of the cinema of attractions. We here refer to the various contexts within which animated

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photography was presented and which provided a framing that largely determined the way in which the moving images were viewed.12 Or, to put it in the terms of Roger Odin:13 the kinematograph functioned within different communication spaces, which also implied the possibility of different readings of one and the same film, including a foregrounding or downplaying of its attractional force (or at least its attractional potential).

Reception contexts and performative framings Let us return once more to the foundational article by Gaudreault and Gunning. When explaining their choice of the term ‘attraction’, they briefly refer to Sergei Eisenstein and his theory of a ‘montage of attractions’. Quoting Jacques Aumont’s discussion of Eisenstein’s theory, the two authors particularly emphasize one of the aspects of attractions, i.e. their relation to the circus, to vaudeville or the music hall and the sideshow: ‘a peak moment in the show, relatively autonomous, and calling upon techniques of representations […] more aggressive forms of the performing arts’.14 Gaudreault and Gunning in particular highlight the fact that attractions appear as a ‘peak moment’ and are ‘relatively autonomous’, as this ties in well with their fundamental premise that the system of monstrative attractions privileges the trick, the gag, the sudden surprise. When discussing chase films, for instance, they characterize them as ‘a collection of attractions. […] those giving chase all run into the same obstacle and pile up on each other; another attraction comes in the form of women who raise their skirts in order to cross a fence; and yet elsewhere a body of water must be crossed over slippery stones, assuring that at least one of the protagonists stumbles into the water’.15 This perspective, however, tends to neglect precisely the phases in-between such peak moments and the freedom of the audience to focus on other elements in the image such as, for instance, the landscape in which a chase takes place, waiting for the next spectacular effect to occur. So while the attractions in a way are conceived to somehow aggressively draw the spectators’ attention, the question remains if the audience actually responds accordingly. In his discussion of the various meanings the term ‘attraction’ receives in Eisenstein’s writings in the early 1920s, Jacques Aumont points out that the young Soviet director saw attractions as stimuli that were supposed to create specific effects, not unlike the attractions in early cinema according to Gaudreault and Gunning.16 However, as Aumont explains, Eisenstein was well aware of the fact that he could never be certain that the attractions that he built in the plays he staged or in his film would indeed allow him to create the effect that he had intended. Famously, Eisenstein was forced to acknowledge

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that the slaughter-sequence at the end of his film Stachka (The Strike, USSR 1925) did not have the desired impact with all of the Soviet audiences: ‘But on a worker audience the slaughter did not have a “bloody” effect for the simple reason that the worker associates a bull’s blood with the processing plants near a slaughter-house! While on a peasant used to slaughtering his own cattle, there will be no effect at all.’17 The effect that Eisenstein had calculated, in other words, misfired because some parts of his actual audience did not correspond to the spectators he had imagined when editing this scene. In Eisenstein’s case, the shock that he had prepared for his spectators missed its mark, because their social background and everyday experience prevented them from appreciating the analogy between soldiers slaughtering workers and butchers slaughtering a bull. Similarly, one could say that Georges Méliès, too, had no guarantee that the tricks that he staged were seen as magic attractions by all viewers in quite the same way, while he may have been relatively certain of how they would work with the audience at the Théâtre Robert-Houdin. In his critical reflections on the concept of ‘cinema of attractions’, Charles Musser insists for the early years of film exhibition on ‘the exhibitor’s potential role as editor, as constructor of narrative, as narrator and author of sustained programs’.18 One could add that the role of the exhibitor as narrator was in fact not only a conceptual one in constructing a sequence of films to be shown in a programme, but often also an actual one when exhibitors acted as lecturers; in general, when an oral discourse accompanied a screening, the reception could be oriented in ways that might even contradict the original intentions of a producer.19 Musser also evokes Passion Plays and fight films as ‘film genres that do not readily fit into the cinema-of-attractions paradigm’, as they implied an undisputable narrative dimension.20 Both genres were confronted with forms of censorship, albeit for different reasons, and did not fit in easily into the cultural practices of commercial film screenings. Yet, Musser concludes: ‘The kinds of disjunctions and slippages in the public sphere that Miriam Hansen has discussed from a Frankfurt School perspective are particularly evident in the cinematic exhibition and reception of Passion Plays and prize fights. This phenomenon of liberation stands in distinct but dialectical relationship to many aspects of the cinema of attractions.’21 The performative dimension of exhibition is manifest also in the broad range of institutional contexts in which films were screened: from large and small vaudeville or variety theatres to nickelodeons, not to forget venues such as town halls, church halls, meeting halls, schools, clubs, universities, etc. Films could be shown not only to entertain but also to uplift, to instruct, to persuade, etc. The mode of presentation as well as the paratextual framing could influence the audience’s experience, as could even the position of a film in a programme.22 Thus, when shifting the perspective from production to exhibition and reception, the production-centred concepts of ‘system of monstrative attractions’ and

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‘system of narrative integration’ are less capable of serving as tools to describe audiences’ experiences with films, because the textual and structural properties of the films do not necessarily determine the way in which they have been viewed.

Early cinema and the performativity of viewing dispositifs In what follows we want to first propose two thought experiments by looking at two of the most famous Lumière films and imagining them being shown in different viewing contexts, synchronically or diachronically, and arguing that they would thus function quite differently for their respective audiences. In this first step, we will in other words argue along the lines of a historical pragmatics and reconstruct both hypothetically and on the basis of primary sources the relation between reception context and the production of meaning.23 In a second step, we will look at a specific performance practice of early films, at a specific dispositif in other words, making use also of the insights of the so-called New Cinema History with its focus on exhibition and reception. This example we will discuss based on contextual information inferred from primary sources.

Example 1: L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (The Arrival of a Train, 1897, Louis Lumière)24 Our first example is the famous arrival of a train at La Ciotat station. The bestknown version of the film is supposed to have been filmed by Louis Lumière during the summer of 1897, based on the age of the Lumière children that can be identified in this view (no. 653 in the Lumière sales catalogue).25 The film that was shot in La Ciotat in 1897 could thus not possibly have been the one causing the alleged panic among the first spectators of Lumière films, a reaction that, as Martin Loiperdinger has convincingly shown, was a myth anyway.26 When the ‘remake’ was shown in Lyon on 11 October 1897,27 the Cinématographe was no longer a (technical) novelty, and probably even less so in the hometown of the Lumière family. In any event, audiences did not come entirely unprepared, as the new medium had been amply written about – not only positively, though, as a few months earlier, on 4 May, the disastrous fire at the Bazar de la Charité in Paris had drawn the general public’s attention to the potential dangers of the new technology. As for the arrival of the train, the appreciation of such a subject may still have been a complex mixture of the fascination produced by animated photography as such, and the visual attraction of the locomotive advancing from the far background (deep focus, continuing

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sharpness) entering the station, provoking a radical diagonal segmentation of the image followed by an orchestrated flow of parallel movements toward, away from or parallel to the camera (providing visual aesthetic pleasure for spectators sensitive to image composition). The projection took place in a communication space foregrounding the possibility of being entertained by this type of spectacle, in which, of course, the views were presented as part of a programme. Conversely, if the film had been shown to members of the Lumière family, maybe even at their own house (which we do not know, so this is indeed a thought experiment), the performance would have been a very different one. It would have taken place in the communication space of the family, as some kind of home movie, and the main attraction would have been to identify the family members in the midst of the crowd and maybe hear them remember the moment when the view was taken.28 Similarly, a public screening of the film in La Ciotat or even nearby Marseille might have functioned rather like the showing of a local view, where audiences recognize the location and maybe even some of the people in the crowd.29 Watching this film in one of the French colonies, spectators could experience some form of nostalgia. An article in L’Avenir du Tonkin in Hanoi published on 6 May 1899 described it as a subject that appeared to the audience as a familiar experience, triggering memories of France: The arrival of the train, a classical picture that all of us can recall and which reminds us of our homeland: the travelers are pale, as if they were seasick; one does not see individuals, but well-known types: the little maidservant, the butcher’s apprentice, the young man looking for a job, who leaves his village with his modest fardel; maybe he will come to Tonkin to seek his fortune, the awkward movements of the children are perfectly rendered.30 According to this report, the animated photographs were indeed perceived as images from the audience’s past back home, inviting even to create some kind of fiction about one of the characters that even evokes a possible narrative about his destiny. These few examples indicate that the performance context of a screening, its location and its specific circumstances could have an impact not only on how a film was understood in the same period but also to what extent and in what ways it constituted an attraction for different audiences.

Example 2: Partie d’écarté (A Card Game, 1896, Louis Lumière) The understanding of a film and of its features could vary not only synchronically, as we have argued with respect to L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat,

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but also diachronically, as over time the frame of reference could change for those seeing it. The Lumière view no. 73, Partie d’écarté, recorded in January or February 1896, was shown on 20 February 1896 at the Polytechnic Institution in London in a show organized by Félicien Trewey, who is also one of the four men that appear in it.31 In a famous and often quoted article on the Lumière Cinématographe, published on 30 May 1896 in L’Illustration, Félix Regnault described this view among others, insisting on the life-likeness of the representation: ‘one sees the smoke appear and rise in a real movement; the beer poured by the waiter foams in a natural way; the glasses are emptied when the drinkers drink’.32 Detailing all these minute effects that can be clearly distinguished in the picture, Regnault wanted to communicate to his readers that they did indeed appear as in real life, that they were not simulated by some mechanical device as in an optical lantern projection, but were authentic photographic recordings animated by means of the Cinématographe. This was of course a rather typical reaction that one can read in similar terms in other sources as well, written by observers witnessing for the first time the effects achieved by the new machine. Regnault’s comments can therefore be considered emblematic for the so-called ‘novelty period’ of the medium. When Georges Sadoul discussed this film fifty years later in his Histoire générale du cinéma, he still insisted on the cigar smoke and the foaming beer (knowing probably that these elements had been highlighted by the first commentators of the film, and maybe having even been directly inspired by Regnault’s article). But in addition, he emphasized an element that he considered in contradiction with the overall realism of the scene. The waiter, he writes, ‘circles around the players with theatrical gestures, laughing, raising his arms, slapping on his thighs’.33 He described the man as a ‘somewhat artificial character […] announcing the minor roles in Méliès’s films’.34 Sadoul’s retrospective appreciation bears witness to the film historical doxa that by then shaped the dominant ideas regarding such early Lumière films. They were praised for the technical achievement that allowed to photographically reproduce movement in all its details. An important step, of course, but for Sadoul and his fellow film historians only a very first one towards the art of cinema, while the figure of the waiter represented for him the ‘wrong’ direction of ‘theatricality’. As Sadoul saw it, the waiter’s exaggerated gestures did point forward towards Méliès’s staged films, which, however, the historian ultimately considered but another transitory phase in the evolution of the new art form of moving pictures. Also, his description indicates a perceptual shift from the fascination caused by the faithful reproduction of the real to the attraction of the human body as central element of the scene.35 Moreover, it underlines the historicity of the appreciation of such a scene. Within our thought experiment, we could suggest that Partie d’écarté, should it have been shown to an audience after the medium’s novelty

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period, might have been viewed as some kind of comical scene. A few years later it would probably have appeared as rather outdated, given its static framing, and maybe also because of the waiter’s histrionic gesturing, anticipating already Sadoul’s judgement half a century later. So even within the period of early cinema the status of an individual film, arguably, could change over time. In this case, there may have been a shift from the attraction of the realist representation as such, to the attraction of the waiter’s comic behaviour, and finally to a possible loss of appeal due to the film’s being considered outdated. In fact, Méliès considered such films in 1907 already as belonging to ‘the childhood of the art’,36 and Victor Jasset declared in 1911 that in those early days ‘everything became a pretext for a film, provided that there was some picturesque or apparent movement’.37

Example 3: Educational attractions In our third example, this time not a thought experiment but a confirmed historical phenomenon, we would like to focus on the specific performance practice promoted by the German Kinoreformbewegung, which aimed at creating a particular space of communication for films, combining education and entertainment. Their initiatives wanted to explicitly establish an alternative to commercial screenings in movie theatres and promoted the medium’s educational potential.38 Their shows were often multimedia events, combining the projection of still and moving images with sound effects and live music, or sometimes music played from a gramophone, as well as recitations and songs. In 1912, the Magdeburg Women’s Association, together with the local Teacher’s Association, organized a series of thematic evenings, and in addition afternoon screenings for children.39 The first evening presented a panorama of different subjects, two more programmes on other evenings were dedicated to the themes of ‘Far North’ and ‘Sunny South’. On the first night, the audience was treated to a film on the family life of birds, followed by one on performing parrots and two songs.40 Then a travelogue was projected, showing a trip through Egypt. The first part of the programme ended with two more songs. After a break the spectators saw two industrial films, one on the Liverpool steel works of Armstrong & Co, building giant canons, the second one on armour plates being tested by Krupp guns. After another break, the final section of the programme consisted of yet another travelogue, this time a trip through Canada, the recitation of two poems on topics linked to North America by well-known German authors, Theodor Fontane and Nikolaus Lenau, and finally a film showing the Niagara Falls. Looking at such a programme, it becomes evident that the attraction/narration dichotomy is not very helpful for a conceptualization of the performance. Even though the films apparently did include several spectacular scenes – a crocodile hunt, the firing of artillery, a war dance and the waterfalls – these attractions

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were embedded in an educational and uplifting context. The organizers tried, as it were, to domesticate the attractions by avoiding any form of sensationalism. The songs and recitations, the latter even thematically linked to the films, were inserted into the programme in order ‘not to overstrain the eyes’,41 but also to complement the film medium with established cultural forms, thus gentrifying the entire programme and positioning it as an alternative to watching films in a movie theatre, ‘where, in order to see one good picture, we would have to put up with many inferior ones: naturalistic, mawkish so-called “dramas”, scenes of crimes, tasteless jokes’.42 While such initiatives may have been marginal compared to the dominant practice of commercial film exhibition, they provide interesting examples of attempts to frame the moving image differently. With our three examples we have tried to show that in a certain sense not only the meaning of a film but also its mode of address can be considered to be partly ‘in the eyes of the beholder’, and partly in the way it was performed in a specific context. In other words, concepts such as ‘system of monstrative attractions’ and ‘system of narrative integration’ can only refer to formal aspects of films and maybe also their ideal-typical mode of address within the communication space related to the dominant institution that they were aimed at. As soon as specific performance contexts are taken into consideration, one has to realize that the images could indeed be read in different ways.

Conclusion When looking back at the way in which the study of early cinema has evolved over the past forty years – the legendary Brighton FIAF conference took place in 1978 – we can observe several shifts. In particular, the focus on the specificity of the new medium has given way to a broader view on the media landscape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in which moving pictures were but one among other forms of spectacle. Research on intermediality has helped understand the complex interactions between animated photography and other media. At the same time, the emphasis on early cinema’s textual specificity – and ‘alterity’ – is now complemented by knowledge that has been gained by research not only on film production but also on distribution, exhibition and reception. This, in turn, has fuelled approaches such as the New Film History and the New Cinema History, which have opened up new venues of research. So how should we deal today with the dichotomy of a ‘cinema of attractions’ and ‘narrative cinema’ which by now has become a key concept in the teaching of film history. Most importantly, one has to acknowledge that as categories, these terms permit but a rough categorization which in fact only allows to distinguish ‘early cinema’ as a very general category and institutionalized narrative cinema as an even more general one referring to films produced more

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or less according to the norms established by the so-called ‘Classical Hollywood Cinema’. At the time when this conceptual dichotomy was proposed, it served undoubtedly an important heuristic function in that it allowed to identify ‘early cinema’ as a field of study raising a specific set of questions and thus preparing the incredible quantity of studies on this period that were conducted over the past three and a half decades. In reply to the criticism that he and the other film historians of his generation were faced with at the 1985 Cerisy conference, Jean Mitry explained: ‘Sadoul and I only had the intention to open up new grounds and to stub the coppice in a field where things were still highly unclear and confusing.’43 For the younger generation of film historians the situation had already changed considerably. In particular, thanks to changing policies of many film archives emblematically represented by the 1978 FIAF conference in Brighton, film prints had become more accessible and their studies could be based on a broader range of material. They could now critically assess the way in which the territory had been explored so far and started to radically redraw the maps. The idea that early cinema was a cinema of attractions that differed profoundly from the forms of film art that had developed later was particularly valuable in dispelling the conception of the first decades of the medium as its ‘primitive’ phase. Moreover, it allowed to discover the richness of formal strategies employed by filmmakers and led to the many fine-grained studies that by now have demonstrated that ‘cinema of attractions’ is a concept that by itself is incapable to do justice to the complex and multi-layered cultural and historical situation of moving pictures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. So, in a way, it became the victim of its own success. In teaching, the concept is undoubtedly still very productive, if only to help students grasp the fact that the uncommon features that they perceive in early films are not due to the incapacity of the filmmakers but belong to a representational mode that differs from the one they are used to. However, as soon as students start to delve deeper into the period, it will become increasingly obvious to them that many films that they encounter, in particular non-fiction productions, cannot be reduced to the category ‘attraction’. Discussing early cinema in the classroom will inevitably lead to more nuanced descriptions and categorizations, depending largely on the perspective in which films are being discussed. Yet, it continues to serve as a beacon which from the distance provides a point of orientation. However, as we have tried to show, the ‘system of monstrative attractions’ and the ‘system of narrative integration’ are concepts that refer first and foremost to formal aspects of films and cannot, for instance, account for the range of possible readings in different viewing contexts. Nor can they help to understand the relations between films and the social, cultural and economic contexts in

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which they were made. To dig deeper into the many facets of the history of moving pictures around 1900, other conceptual tools are needed.

Notes 1 André Gaudreault and Tom Gunning, ‘Le Cinéma des premiers temps, un défi à l’histoire du cinéma?’, in Histoire du cinéma: nouvelles approches, ed. Jacques Aumont, André Gaudreault and Michel Marie (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1989), 49–63. The paper was presented in French by Gaudreault alone, Gunning had not been able to attend the conference. 2 Ibid., 57. It should be noted that Tom Gunning’s seminal article ‘The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde’ was published a year later, in 1986, and anthologized in 1990 adding an ‘s’ to ‘attraction’ in the title. For the chronology, see also Wanda Strauven, ‘Introduction to an Attractive Concept’’’, in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Strauven (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press), 11–16. 3 Gaudreault and Gunning, ‘Le Cinéma des premiers temps’, 49, our translation. 4 Ibid., 57. ‘Modes of film practice’ is the translation in André Gaudreault and Tom Gunning, ‘Early Cinema as a Challenge to Film History’, in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Strauven, 373. 5 Strauven, The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded. 6 Jacques Deslandes and Jacques Richard, Histoire comparée du cinéma. Tome 2 (Tournai: Casterman, 1968). 7 See also Frank Kessler, ‘The Cinema of Attractions as Dispositif’, in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Strauven, 57–69. 8 One should not forget other attempts to theorize the fundamental difference between early cinema and classical narrative cinema, such as Noël Burch’s distinction between a ‘Primitive Mode of Representation’ (PMR) and an ‘Institutional Mode of Representation’ (IMR). See Noël Burch, Life to those Shadows (London: BFI, 1990). 9 See, for instance, Musser’s critique of Gunning’s concept in Charles Musser, ‘Rethinking Early Cinema: Cinema of Attractions and Narrativity’, in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Strauven, 389–416. 10 Several authors proposed alternative concepts to distinguish analytically between different representational modes, even within the period of early cinema: apart from Noël Burch one could mention, among others, Roberta Pearson, Eloquent Gestures: The Transformation of Performance Style in the Griffith Biograph Films (Berkeley, Los Angeles, CA and Oxford: University of California Press, 1992); Frank Kessler and Sabine Lenk, ‘Cinéma d’attraction et gestualité’, in Les Vingt premières années du cinéma français, ed. Michèle Lagny et al. (Paris: Presses de l’Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1995), 195–202; Lea Jacobs and Ben Brewster, Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), all three being studies on acting and gestures, or Alison McMahan ‘Chez le Photographe c’est chez moi: Relationship of Actor and Filmed Subject

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to Camera in Early Film and Virtual Reality Spaces’, in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Strauven, 291–308, analysing camera position in relation to what is filmed. These authors mostly create a bi- or three-dimensional model which proposes parameters for fiction films, generally leaving out the realm of non-fiction. They focus on individual films as exemplary oeuvres per se and generally refrain from proposing a periodization. Such attempts ultimately did not follow Gaudreault and Gunning’s suggestion (and invitation) to expand their system and refine it for ‘a better understanding of the period’: Gaudreault and Gunning, ‘Early Cinema as a Challenge to Film History’, 373. 11 Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attraction(s): Early Film, Its Spectator and the AvantGarde’, in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Strauven, 381–8. 12 Jean-Pierre Sirois-Trahan also critiqued the focus on representation in the debates on early cinema and proposed a shift towards reception ‘as a consequence or corollary’ of such a representation. Sirois-Trahan considers early cinema (or at least a large part of it) aiming at what he refers to as a trompe l’œil effect. See Jean-Pierre Sirois-Trahan, ‘Trompe l’œil et réception spectatorielle du cinéma des premiers temps: l’exemple du dispositif de représentation scénique chez Méliès’, in La decima musa / The Tenth Muse, ed. Leonardo Quaresima and Laura Vichi (Udine: Forum, 2001), 221–2. 13 See Roger Odin, Les Espaces de communication: introduction à la sémiopragmatique (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 2011). 14 Gaudreault and Gunning, ‘Early Cinema as a Challenge to Film History’, 375; citing Jacques Aumont, Montage Eisenstein (Paris: Éditions Albatros, 1979), 57. 15 Gaudreault and Gunning, ‘Early Cinema as a Challenge to Film History’, 375. 16 Cf. Aumont, Montage Eisenstein, 61. 17 Sergei M. Eisenstein, Selected Works. Vol. 1: Writings 1922–34, ed. Richard Taylor (London: BFI; Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988), 65. 18 Musser, ‘Rethinking Early Cinema’, 403. 19 On lecturers, see the seminal study by Germain Lacasse, Le Bonimenteur des vues animées (Québec: Nota Bene; Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 2000). 20 Musser, ‘Rethinking Early Cinema’, 403. 21 Ibid., 404. 22 Not to mention all sorts of interventions into a film through censorship, but also the translation of intertitles, re-editing etc. An interesting case are the prints acquired by the Swiss Catholic priest Abbé Joseph Joye, who adapted commercial film productions for religious propaganda. See Roland Cosandey, Welcome Home, Joye! Film um 1910 (Basel and Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1993). 23 See Frank Kessler, ‘Historische Pragmatik’, Montage AV, 11 no. 2 (2002): 104–12. 24 Original title Arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat, filmed presumably by Louis Lumière. 25 For detailed information, see Michelle Aubert and Jean-Claude Seguin, La Production cinématographique des Frères Lumière (Paris: Bibliothèque du Film/ Éditions Mémoires du Cinéma, 1996), 225. 26 Martin Loiperdinger, ‘Lumières Ankunft des Zugs: Gründungsmythos eines neuen Mediums’, in KINtop: Jahrbuch zur Erforschung des frühen Films 6 (1995): 37–70.

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27 Aubert and Seguin, La Production cinématographique des Frères Lumière, 225. 28 On the communication space of the family, see Odin, Les Espaces de communication, 83–94. Martin Loiperdinger, ‘Lumières Ankunft des Zugs’, 62–6 argues that the film was actually staged and reads it as an ‘amateur film’ that Louis Lumière may have shot to demonstrate the possibilities of the Cinématographe at a point in time when the machine was to be commercialized and the Lumières assumed that their target group were first and foremost wealthy amateur photographers. 29 On early local views, see Uli Jung, ‘Local Views: A Blind Spot in the Historiography of Early German Cinema’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 22, no. 3 (2002): 253–73. 30 Quoted after Aubert and Seguin, La Production cinématographique des Frères Lumière, 225. 31 Aubert and Seguin, La Production cinématographique des Frères Lumière, 210–1. 32 Félix Regnault, ‘Le Cinématographe’, L’Illustration 2779 (30 May 1896): 447. 33 Georges Sadoul, Histoire générale du cinéma. Tome 1: L’invention du cinéma 1832–1897 (Paris: Denoël, 1946), 247. 34 Ibid. 35 This reality-effect in combination with the sheer number of frames that constituted a kinematographic view was also taken as proof that moving pictures were no fakes, that they could not ‘lie’, unlike a photograph which allowed retouching. See Boleslas Matuszewsi, ‘A New Source of History’, Film History 7, no. 3 (1995 [1898]): 322–4. 36 Georges Méliès, ‘Les Vues cinématographiques’, Annuaire général et international de la photographie (Paris: Plon, 1907), 368. 37 Victor Jasset, ‘Étude sur la mise en scene’, in Anthologie du cinéma, ed. Marcel Lapierre (Paris: La nouvelle édition, 1946 [1911]), 83. 38 See Frank Kessler and Sabine Lenk, ‘Kinoreformbewegung Revisited: Performing the Cinematograph as a Pedagogical Tool’, in Performing New Media 1890–1915, ed. Kaveh Askari et al. (New Barnet: John Libbey, 2014), 163–73. 39 ‘Rundschau’, Bild und Film 1, no. 1 (1912): 19–23. 40 In the introduction to the presentation of these programmes in Bild und Film they are presented as ‘kinematographische Unterhaltungsabende’, i.e. kinematographic evening entertainments. Therefore, we assume that all the titles refer to films, but especially the one on the family life of birds, which is said to consist of fourteen parts, might also have been a lantern slide set. Ibid., 20. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. 43 Jean Mitry, ‘L’Ancien et le nouveau’, in Histoire du cinéma: nouvelles approches, ed. Aumont, Gaudreault and Marie, 1989. Apart from Sadoul and Mitry this generation of film historians included many other pioneers such as Terry Ramsaye, Edward Wagenknecht or Lewis Jacobs in the US, Heinrich Fraenkel and Friedrich von Zglinicki in Germany and Jerzy Toeplitz in Poland to name but a few examples.

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11 THE OTHER PANICKING AUDIENCE: A NEW CINEMA HISTORY APPROACH TO EARLY CINEMAGOING, CINEMA FIRES, DISASTERS AND PANICS Daniël Biltereyst

A few days before Christmas 1912 fourteen people died in a movie theatre in a small industrial city in the western part of Belgium. During the event more than seventy people were injured, some of them with serious lifelong injuries. The disaster was caused by the panic that occurred when a reel of a cellulose nitrate film caught fire in a film venue in a blue-collar neighbourhood in the city of Menin (Dutch: Menen, French: Menin),1 which is close to the northern French border. In the days after the event, the catastrophe at the Cinema Buiksom2 was headline news, with Belgian, French and some other foreign newspapers reporting in great detail what happened in and around the venue. Reporters unashamedly drew attention to the victims’ identities, revealing their names, age, gender and sometimes profession, and where they lived or came from. The reports about the disaster not only contained sensationalist narratives about death, pain, grief and mourning, but also accounts of heroism, and other poignant stories about what happened in the venue. In the days and weeks following the catastrophic event, news media continued to inform their readers about the funerals, judicial and police investigations, as well as about the local political and national policy implications of the disaster.3 In using the Cinema Buiksom tragedy as a case study in the perspective of microhistory and a history of events, this chapter will focus on this event as

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a close-up strategy for exploring larger historical questions on early cinema audiences.4 These include questions on early cinemagoing practices, cinema audience compositions in terms of class, age, gender and moviegoing behaviour—issues, which are notoriously difficult to comprehend in the early cinema period.5 Rather than focusing on spectatorship as an audience engagement with films, we are more interested here in questions concerning the social and cultural embedding of the historical cinemagoing experience as recently developed within the New Cinema History perspective. This approach, or look at, historical cinema cultures employs methods of sociocultural and geomapping, and tries to understand cinema as a place, a space, an experience and as a societal practice where cinema experiences are a part of communitybuilding. In line with the social turn in the humanities, this perspective puts the focus on the concrete historical practices and the societal conditions of cinemagoing and film experiences through approaches like examining archival sources with traces of audience’s cinemagoing experiences, audience testimonies, oral histories and methods coming from memory studies.6 As this case study is about cinemagoers’ panicked rush to flee from a fire in a cinema, this chapter also intersects with two other important issues within early cinema scholarship. The first is about the complex concept of panic and the panicking audience – understood here in a quite different sense than the important debate within early cinema historiography on the early audience’s cinematic experience, namely the notion of ‘the (in)credulous spectator’ and the so-called ‘train effect’.7 Rather than dealing with what is often conceived as cinema’s founding myth of people fleeing in panic from the oncoming train on the screen, we will explore another, much more life-threatening form of panic – the anxiety of saving one’s own body or the urge to physically save endangered beloved ones. This chapter also addresses cinema disasters, more specifically the dramatic phenomenon of fires in early film venues – an issue that seems to occupy a rather ambivalent position in early cinema studies. On the one hand, as Gary D. Rhodes argued in one of the rare full-length publications concentrating on the physical risks of cinemagoing, The Perils of Moviegoing in America,8 early cinema’s public image was intrinsically linked to the danger of fires. This risk was a major societal concern that resulted in measures for controlling the material conditions of cinemagoing and fire safety regulations.9 However, even though fires in film venues were important in terms of an object of societal concern, policy measures and the audience’s awareness about the dangers of moviegoing, they remain a somewhat understudied phenomenon in early cinema scholarship.10 This chapter contributes to this scholarship and to what Rick Altman framed as ‘crisis historiography’ within film and cinema studies.11 Using the Cinema Buiksom fire as a case study in deadly panic we will concentrate on how this dramatic event acted as a catalyst for societal debate, and for shifting policies

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with regard to audience safety and cinema’s public image. Drawing on insights from disciplines such as panic and disaster studies, this chapter will engage with and deconstruct the concepts of panic and the irrational, hysterical audience.

Cinema fires, stampedes and uncanny panic The cinema fire as a discursive node and an audience scheme Even before moviegoing was institutionalized as an important leisure and a mass audience habit, the threat of fires in film venues was already a recurring node in public discourse on the new medium.12 Newspapers and magazines reported widely on devastating fires at public film exhibitions as early as 1897. A landmark in cinema’s early history, obviously, was the disastrous May 1897 fire at the Paris Bazar de la Charité, which caused 126 deaths including members of the aristocracy and high society.13 This hotly reported media event was not the only example of an early disastrous fire and in the next few years news about cinema fires kept on circulating widely in the US, Europe and elsewhere. This increased with the advent of the nickelodeon boom when, as Charles Musser wrote, theatre owners often lacked the means and knowledge to make their venues safe and ‘inexperienced operators created by the rapid spread of nickelodeons further increased the likelihood of disaster’.14 Musser estimated the total number of cinema fires in the US ‘by late 1907 [… as] perhaps a thousand’, the vast majority of which were minor incidents like the loss of a reel of film, but ‘the possibility of something much more serious—the death of a large number of moviegoers—always existed’.15 It is difficult to estimate the number of disastrous fires in cinemas, but one outcome was an increasing debate for regulating cinema and audience safety, most prominently through licensing with public welfare and fire safety laws. Writing about what happened in Canada and the US, particularly the 1908 Ontario law regulating cinema, Paul S. Moore argued that these dramatic events resulted in elaborate film bureaucracies encompassing careful inspection, safety laws, censorship, taxation and restricted admission.16 Similar legal actions were taken in European countries like Belgium, where in July 1908 a Royal Decree was ordered for regulating public film screenings.17 Here as well, the process of legal action concerning cinema safety was triggered by a series of sensationalist news stories about calamities at film screenings in Belgium and elsewhere including the public hall in Barnsley, Yorkshire, UK in January 1908. At this tragic event, which is often regarded as one of the great disasters of the early cinema

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period, sixteen children died and more than forty were injured during a Saturday matinee animated picture show. The high death toll of innocent children led to a large outpouring of grief and, as Luke McKernan wrote, ‘to much agonizing about the safety of film shows and public entertainment in general’.18 In fact, the deadly stampede in Barnsley’s Public Hall was not caused by a fire, but rather overcrowding and over-excited children trying to escape in a panicked state of alarm. Nonetheless, sensationalist news accounts explicitly referred to fire by reporting that a voice was heard to shout ‘fire’. The reason for this alarming cry remains unclear. However, it is interesting to note that the (young) audience’s awareness of the danger or the threat of fire associated with film exhibition might have triggered the disaster.

Societal and geospatial parameters This cinema fire node that appeared in sensationalist news reporting and apparently also existed in audience’s minds as a scheme for encountering cinema is equally important for understanding the 1912 Cinema Buiksom disaster. As we will see, it could be conceived as a milestone in Belgian attempts to control cinema as an institution. Before turning to the fatal event on 22 December 1912, we need to look briefly at the societal and geospatial parameters within which this cinema disaster took place – one that is at several levels to be defined as liminal and blended. Firstly geographically, because the cinema was located in a working-class district of the city of Menin, a mid-sized Flemish border town near the French–Belgian frontier with a century-old tradition of cotton and textile industries.19 Menin, which was also famous for brewing beer, was part of a wider industrial region, which spread over the border with towns and cities like Halluin (Dutch: Halewijn), Tourcoing, Roubaix and Lille (Dutch: Rijsel), and which was connected to the cities of Ghent and Antwerp and its international harbour via the river Lys. The city of Menin and the French–Belgian industrial region attracted a labour force from northern France and the northern part of Belgium, Flanders. Although most of these workers and their families lived in and around these industrial centres, many others commuted or rented a low-priced room so that they could go home for the weekend or on Sunday – which allowed them to keep close (affective and ideological) ties with their families who often lived in remote rural areas. One of the districts where many of these blue-collar workers lived in Menin was the De Barakken neighbourhood (French: Les Baraques). It was located on Menin’s other side of the river Lys and constituted an extremely vibrant area with many cheap rental properties, grocery and other shops, and lots of bars (French/ Dutch: cafés) (Figure 11.1). The name of the district, De Barakken, referred to the original seventeenth-century military site or barracks, which were rebuilt for civil use and housing during the second half of the nineteenth century. The rapid

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Figure 11.1  Map showing the location of Menin’s The Barakken area on the southern part of the river Lys, near the French border. Geo-mapping indicating the residence addresses of the fourteen victims and the projectionist.

expansion of this working-class area was accompanied by a similar growth in the nearby French town or commune of Halluin. Both areas gradually blended into each other to became one urban ensemble, with the French–Belgian customs constituting an administrative nuisance. Hence, commerce, transports, leisure and other human activities of Menin’s De Barakken and Halluin were closely linked and constituted one cross-national area, which was not just geographically liminal  and blended. The neighbourhood and the wider region were also linguistically highly mixed, with French and Flemish (a local version of Dutch) being often used even up to the level of the smallest unit being a nuclear family.20

The disaster It is within this vibrant and densely populated working-class neighbourhood that Cinema Buiksom’s proprietor, Henri Cottignies, opened the first permanent film exhibition initiative in the urban region of Menin-Halluin. At that time, many early Belgian film exhibitors used cinema as an additional business linked to an existing café (or the café-ciné).21 In Cottignies’s case, he owned a popular bar in De Barakken, which was very close to the Belgian and French customs (Figure 11.2).

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It remains unclear when Cottignies started showing movies, but after a few years of screening films in a tent in the backyard of the café, he constructed a cheap movie theatre of approximately 13 by 26 yards. On the ground floor of the cinema there were wooden benches, good for six hundred patrons. Four yards above the ground floor, there was a balcony in the back for another two hundred moviegoers, and on the left-hand side there was a separate staircase leading to another small balcony for the pianist or another musician, who accompanied the silent films (Figure 11.3). In the years before the First World War, Cinema Buiksom operated as a film exhibition hall mainly during weekends, mostly on Friday evenings and during Saturdays and Sundays. Besides film screenings, manager Cottignies also used (or rented) the venue for many other purposes such as for dance parties and balls, theatre performances, brass band and other music performances, and all kinds of public events, thus emphasizing the venue’s integration in local community life (Figure 11.2). On Sundays, Cottignies and his eighteen-year-old projectionist Valère Vandenabbeele organized three screenings of short films, at 3.00 pm, 6.00 pm and 8.00 pm. A ticket costed a mere 25 Belgian cents. The Cinema Buiksom disaster occurred during the 6.00 pm screening session on Sunday evening, 22 December 1912, a two-hour programme of six shorts. It

Figure 11.2  Image of the café and the separate entrance of Cinema Buiksom. The photo illustrates how the venue was also used as a public hall, here for a ‘grand bal’ during the May Pentecost fair (year unknown). City Archive Menin.

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Figure 11.3  Interior of Cinema Buiksom. Figuranten/Heemkundige Kring van Menen, Het Leven in en rond de cinema’s van Menen (Menen: Heemkundige Kring, 2010), 165.

remains unclear which films were shown during this disastrous screening. While newspapers and magazines reported the disaster extensively,22 the only film title named was the reel that caught fire; neither were any specific details given about that picture, which seemed to have been Alan Dwan’s early short The Haters (1912).23 Neither did they report negatively on the programme. The fact that none of the newspapers referred to any of the other film titles in the programme underscores the idea of the relative (un)importance of individual films in the early cinema period. Instead of naming or discussing the films, the press opted to indicate that the fire started at a precise moment when one particular film was playing. News reporters went into details about what happened around 7.30 pm, when the projectionist put on the fifth title, which broke, touched the arc lamp and burned, resulting in a short circuit. According to the news reports, ‘people in the theater just barely saw a flash of light on the screen’, followed by complete darkness. The projectionist apparently reacted quickly and extinguished the fire, but soon some people started to shout that there was a fire. This was the start of what most reports called a ‘panic’ (Figure 11.4). Although Cottignies tried to calm down the audience by shouting: ‘It’s finished, it’s nothing!’, many of the patrons stood up and tried to leave the venue through one of the two exits. His

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Figure 11.4  Front page article on the Cinema Buiksom disaster, referring to the ‘frightening catastrophe in a cinema in Menin’ and ‘a mad panic’. Le XXe Siècle, 24 December 1912, 1.

attempts to reassure the patrons that his cinema was a safe space failed to stop people’s idea that a potential life-threatening fire had started. This resulted in panic as an irrational behaviour and led to a disorderly displacement of bodies. What happened next was described by newspapers as ‘horrible’, ‘uncanny’, ‘catastrophic’ and ‘a murderous panic’. The most critical area with the majority of casualties was the balcony, the staircase and the wooden banister that broke when people tried to exit from upstairs in a disorderly manner. The sound of people crying, the darkness and the physical displacements of panicking bodies precipitated a rush for the stairs as cinemagoers pushed to gain access to the ground floor. As the patrons surged down the narrow wooden staircase, some people fell and were trampled or crushed by others. Others had to climb or walk over the fallen victims, who included children and older adults. There were testimonies about people climbing over and jumping from the parapet in an attempt to reach the

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ground floor. According to news reports, some of them fell hard on top of other spectators. The result was a stampede, especially around the broken staircase and near the main exit towards the courtyard, where dozens of injured people lied on the floor. The most life-threatening phase of the disaster lasted only a few minutes. Once the exit doors were opened, the evening light, backup and two gendarmes quickly entered the theatre and found an unimaginable chaos with many of the victims having broken bones or lacerations as a result of being trampled. Fourteen people died and more than seventy were injured.

A microcosm of local community Disaster journalism like the accounts of the Cinema Buiksom calamity is deontologically objectionable, but for (cinema) historians it can be a treasure trove for gaining more than just a vivid picture of the horrific event. The detailed descriptions of the victims, as depicted in the news reports, also provide information about the cinemagoing audience, in this case the patrons of a budget movie theatre in a working-class neighbourhood a few years before the First World War.24 Newspapers reprinted the names of cinemagoers who lost their lives – a list that included people’s age, gender, address and sometimes profession (Table 11.1). The articles also gave more detailed background information about some of them. Among the deceased there were as many women as men. In the cinema, there were people of all ages, including two children aged six. There were children of seven and eight, alongside senior adults such as a woman of sixty-seven. An image of the corpse of the old lady was integrated into a spectacular photomontage of the event, where we also see gendarmes, judicial policemen and the projectionist (Figure 11.5). Given that this was a late afternoon screening, it might explain why there is a slight overrepresentation of children, but among the victims we see also people in their twenties, fifties and sixties. The reports gave more poignant information on what happened with some of the victims such as the 24-year-old man from Bousbecque who jumped from the balcony, broke his spine and died (victim 1 in Table 11.1 and Figure 11.1). A 22-year-old man from Halluin who succeeded to escape, died after he decided to go back to rescue his girlfriend (victim 5). Another sixteen-year-old boy was rescued and taken to a neighbouring inn, where he received the best of care, but nevertheless ‘breathed his last there’ (victim 6). Another six-year-old boy died a few hours after the disaster (victim 13), whereas the oldest victim (no. 14) had gone to the cinema with her husband and initially survived before dying the following day. There were other sad stories such as that of a man, described as ‘a singer’ from Menin, who went into the venue in order to find his eight-year-old son, Henri. In an act of heroism, he successfully rescued people and got them out of the venue but found his own boy dead (victim 7).

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Table 11.1  Detailed Information on the Projectionist and the Victims’ Identities of the Cinema Buiksom Disaster.  

Name

Age

Gender

Address, street

City

1

Severin Delcourt

24

man

exact address unknown

Boesbeek

2

Julien Cornaert

8

man

Rijsselstraat

Halluin

3

Lecoutere Maurice

8

man

exact address unknown

Halluin

4

Wittoucke Leonie

50

woman

Bakkerstraat

Menin

5

Verbrugghe Arthur

22

man

op den Berg

Halluin

6

Decraene Jan

16

man

op den Berg

Halluin

7

Van de Casteele Henri

8

man

Wahisstraat 169

Menin

8

De Clercq Magdalena

7

woman

Halewijnstraat

Menin

9

Gogue Julie

22

woman

Pachthofdreef

Menin

10

Willemyns Louise

56

woman

Steenweg van Péruwelz

Halluin

11

Croes Eugéne

60

woman

Steenweg van Boesbeek

Halluin

12

Bossuyt Gaston

6

man

Noordstraat

Halluin

13

Meurissen Marcel

6

man

Grondwetstraat

Menin

14

Vanderhougstraete Marie

67

woman

Colbras

Halluin

15

Vandenabbeele Valère (projectionist)

18

man

Rekkemstraat

Menin

News reports very much focused on the children as victims, especially the ‘six-year-old angels’ (victims 12 and 13), and on families. There were stories like the one of the parents on the balcony with ‘children of 5 and 6 years old’ who could not escape and threw their children down. If we look beyond the chaos of that tragic event, it is clear that cinemagoing at this working-class cinema was deeply rooted in the local community, with people from all ages, generations and gender attending the screenings, including younger and older couples, and parents with their children. In terms of the geospatial spreading of the victims

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Figure 11.5  Photo composition about the Cinema Buiksom disaster as it appeared in several newspapers, showing the corpse of the 67-year-old woman who died during the event (top left). The composition shows the venue’s projectionist (right), ‘gendarmes’, and police and judicial inspectors. We also get a glimpse of the cinema’s exit (left bottom) and entrance (middle bottom). City Archive Menin.

(and the projectionist, who lived near the cinema, no. 15 in Table 11.1 and Figure 11.1), it is clear they all lived within walking or cycling distance from Halluin and Menin, with one young woman (victim 9) living 3.1 miles from Cinema Buiksom – who lived the furthest from the cinema. A final piece of information, which is interesting to understanding the make-up of those who attended the cinema, are the victims’ professional backgrounds. Unfortunately, newspapers did not consistently provide information on professional occupation. But from those about whom we have employment information, it is clear that the identified patrons were working-class men and women – mostly blue-collar workers at textile factories. We can only speculate on whether the victims constituted a sort of a ‘representative’ microcosm of the local community. Given the cinema’s strategy of segmenting audiences and targeting children and families with the Sunday’s late afternoon screenings, there might be something like an overrepresentation of children, parents and older adults, but apparently the manager did not change the programme for the three different screenings. It might also be that children and seniors were somewhat overrepresented as vulnerable and potential victims. But what comes out of this picture is that the patrons, or at least the victims’ profile was highly gender balanced, crossgenerational and working class.

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Cinema as a safe space, community life and panics Irrational, hysterical behaviour The Cinema Buiksom disaster arose out of the illusion of a fire. This illusion, or the projected image of what could become an all-consuming, life-threatening fire, appears to have triggered among some of the patrons something like a fire scheme, followed by a chain-reaction of people trying desperately to exit the building. The venue suddenly transformed into a dangerous place, or in some people’s mind an unsafe space. Most of the newspapers described this as a panic in the sense of an irrational, even hysterical reaction that led to a mass, disorderly physical displacement of bodies. One of the stories, reprinted in several reports, was that of a traumatized man who survived the massacre but became ‘senseless’ (or crazy). He subsequently became known as the man who walked around proclaiming to everyone, in Menin, that he had ‘won half a million in America and that they wanted to take this sum away from him’.25 Another poignant story mixing an individual’s irrational behaviour during a mass panic with the danger of a panicking crowd is the one about pickpockets who seemed to be present in the cinema. Full of disgust and disbelief, news reporters wrote about ‘corpse looters’ and a ‘gang of border skimmers’ (referring to criminals from the other side of the border, i.e. France), who were in the cinema, stealing from the wounded and dead. One newspaper described how ‘several women’s earrings had been torn off with such violence that the hooks remained stuck in the earlobe’.26 This image of a mass panic, irrational behaviour and the danger of a crowd very much echoed key insights from Gustave Le Bon’s controversial crowd psychology, that he most notoriously wrote down in Psychologie des foules (The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind), published in 1895.27 Le Bon’s view upon crowds, which was soon popularized and became highly influential, looked at the public as inherently irrational, dangerous and manipulative. Popular masses were seen as deficient in their collective reasoning. Entering the crowd, people are seen as becoming anonymous and losing control over what they do and feel. The popularized concept of the (mass) panic – a term that is equally widely used in everyday speech and news reporting – is very much in line with these ideas which present crowd members (or in our case, panicking cinemagoers) as losing their civilized standards and as letting their emotions govern their action. As we illustrated with various examples, this kind of behaviour also characterized the Cinema Buiksom disaster, at least the panic concept was very much part of the journalistic sensationalist toolkit. The Menin catastrophe of December 1912, however, also contained other kinds of stories about different

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types of audience behaviour – audience’s reactions which tend to underline rational behaviour, empathy, courage and social responsibility. These include stories of heroic, altruistic actions of people entering the venue to save those in danger. There were accounts of the cinema’s manager and others trying to de-escalate the situation – for example, the pianist apparently continued to play. Reports about bravery also illustrated the power of family ties and other affiliations – like parents searching for their children, or one mother and father clutching their two children in their arms, remaining calm and surviving the disaster. Newspapers and magazines also highlighted heroic actions like those of a ‘weaver from Halluin’ (a certain Émile Verfaille), who saved a six-year-old-girl and the adolescent boy who died in a nearby inn. Stories about people behaving rationally, even altruistically, in mass panics seem to be the exception, or at least, they differ from ideas about irrational behaviour in mainstream media coverage and common-sense opinions about mass panics and disasters. However, research on these phenomena indicates that this type of non-panicking behaviour is not exceptional, and that people are often co-operative and altruistic towards each other – even in life-threatening situations or amongst strangers. Studies on the psychology of crowd behaviour during emergencies show that this kind of behaviour rather than panic predominate, even in situations where there is a clear threat of death.28 As the Cinema Buiksom tragedy illustrates, altruism is often inspired by family bonds, by emotional affiliation and by concern for the safety of family members and friends. This social sciences approach to panic is interesting, not only to deconstruct ideas about the panicking audience – a concept carrying connotations of the (early cinema) audience being untrained, savage, misbehaving, primitive, chaotic, wild, manipulative or credulous. What is interesting here is that even in the heat of a fire scare the cinema was also a site of social connectedness, co-operation and solidarity, and that everyday norms and social roles continued to exert an influence.

Community life, social embedding, the return to normality In the aftermath of what happened on 22 December 1912, the Cinema Buiksom disaster was very much at the centre of the community’s social life. Funerals and other public acts of remembrance took place, which attracted the national press’s full attention again. Newspapers and magazines published stories of collective grief and mourning, and described in great detail how the streets in Halluin and Menin were ‘full of people’, and ‘pitch-black’. The event also quickly became a political issue. The day after the tragedy, a local opposition group, the ‘Liberal People’s Union’, wrote a sharp, open letter to the city council. In it the

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signatories blamed the Catholic mayor and his team for the disaster. The initiative smelled of unscrupulous political recovery, and the town council responded with another open letter addressing the entire population. In this letter the mayor pointed out that the city council ‘as always sympathizes with the infinite sadness and sorrow of the population’.29 The event was discussed in detail during an extraordinary meeting of the city council two days after the disaster.30 It is of continued interest that in these moments of solidarity and social connectedness, the mayor did not blame the venue’s manager. Neither did he refer to cinema as a dangerous place nor to films as morally corrupt – which was quite exceptional given the Catholic ambivalent attitude toward cinema at that time.31 The press also covered in detail the investigation into the cause and those responsible for the disaster (Figure 11.6). An initial inspection by the police revealed that neither the owner nor the projectionist was to blame. On Monday 23 December 1912, the day after the accident, public prosecutors from the cities of Kortrijk and Lille reconfirmed that the two men had acted correctly. They noted that the cinema complied with all the safety regulations recently laid down by the Belgian government in its 1908 Decree. The cinema management had installed the projection machine in a separate room with concrete walls and sliding iron doors. A few days after the disaster, the press announced without a hint of sarcasm or reproach that the cinema owner planned to reopen the venue. Manager Cottignies said he wanted to show that his business was sound and that his venue was a safe place. In order to ensure a return to normality (and to normal business) he organized a special screening reconstructing the fire. He said that the proceeds would be donated to the victims’ families. At the event, the cinema was once again fully packed – one newspaper even reported an audience of a thousand curious viewers. The re-enacted fire in the projection room was quickly brought under control. A correspondent wrote: ‘Everyone stayed seated. Suddenly, amid the deepest silence, a large flame was seen on the screen. A few seconds passed, the hall was again illuminated, and so the cinemagoers were able to conclude that the disaster was due to the fact that someone had shouted: “Fire”.’ This weird, even slightly morbid re-enactment of the disaster enabled a slow return to normality. Cinema regained its place as an economical and popular form of leisure for the community. The local weekly De Meenenaar described how the screening of films in Cinema Buiksom again ‘creates a great enthusiasm among those present’.32 The disaster, however, soon became a landmark, or an immaterial lieu de mémoire, in the community’s collective memory. In the weeks after the event, a popular local street singer wrote a poignant song about the terrible disaster, rhyming (at least in a local dialect of Dutch) that: ‘Your whole people had gone there from now on / to the Cinema Buiksom / to entertain them for an hour or two / but their pleasure turned into woe.’33

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Figure 11.6  Three days after the disaster, newspapers published this photo with police inspectors in front of Cinema Buiksom. Le XXe Siècle, 25 December 1912, 1.

Aftermath: another (moral) panic Barely two weeks after the Menin cinema disaster, two Catholic members of the Belgian Parliament submitted a report on the dangers of cinema – a report that was discussed a few days later in the Chamber of Representatives in Brussels (15 January 1913). Without mentioning the city of Menin explicitly, the report opened with a direct reference to the terrible catastrophe in a ‘cinéma de province’ (a provincial cinema). For the authors of this anti-cinema report, the Catholic Party representatives Eugène Standaert and Marquis Pierre Guillaume Imperiali, cinema was a ‘synonym for the glorification of crime and adultery’.34 Films showed only ‘sensational scenes of crime, murder and suicide’, and so corrupted the imagination of children that urgent action was needed. In the Chamber, one of them said: ‘You know, gentlemen [sic], with what passion they go to these unwholesome shows’, adding that ‘these shows make such a vivid impression on the minds of the youth that one wonders if, when you see children

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engaged in murder and theft, whether this is not the result of attending these halls’. The curbing of cinema and films was nothing less than ‘a work of public and moral hygiene’. For those opposed to cinema, the Menin disaster was an ideal springboard to lash out once again mercilessly. As happened in other countries, various social, political and religious organizations cooperated with each other in their attack on the new medium, on the place of the cinema and on the films shown there. We will not elaborate on what happened in the years to come and on how cinema was controlled in Belgium (leading to harsh censorship under German occupation, followed by strict controls on film after the First World War in 1920).35 But what happened in these pre-war years could easily be conceived as what Stanley Cohen, in 1972, described as a moral panic – a sociological concept that has also entered into journalists’ vocabulary for indicating a feeling of fear within society that some evil groups, cultural products or behaviour threaten key values and norms.36 Although this concept has been severely criticized, also for stressing irrationality in moral panic debates and actions,37 it remains useful to understanding how, in the pre-war years, cinema was seen as an evil within a moral panic context. This concept refers to a spiral of debate where participants use arguments for attempting to control what is conceived as being evil (or ‘the folk devil’). This is, obviously, another kind of panic than the ones discussed in this chapter (cf. the ‘perceptual’ panic that occurred when the first viewers encountered moving images, and the ‘bodily’ panic when people feared to be a victim of a fire or another disaster). This social form of panic about the dangers of cinema was prevalent in the pre-war period, and the participants in the spiralling debate used a wide set of arguments to control the medium. From this perspective it is remarkable that the initial press coverage and even the political discussion on the Menin disaster did not attack the venue and its proprietor, the films screened there or cinema as a societal institution. Instead, the cinema was conceived as a safe space, the manager as a responsible and respected member of the community and cinema playing a constructive part in community life. When discussed in a wider social arena and a moral panic debate, cinema was forcefully attacked, and the fire was just another compelling argument used to discipline the medium.

Conclusion This chapter focused on a microhistory of a fire in a small working-class cinema that caused a mass panic, several fatalities and casualties. We used this tragic event to examine early cinema spectatorship and audiences. The detailed and ‘exploitative’ media coverage of the event enabled us to comprehend the social

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composition of early cinema audiences, their behaviour during a catastrophe and the social embeddedness of cinema in this pre-war case. The fire, or rather the illusion of a fire, was an extreme case of a crisis, which enables us to understand more sharply issues of audience engagement with cinema. We focused upon an important (yet underexamined) node in early cinema discourses, the one on cinema fires, which led to panic and eventually death and casualties. Here we tried to deconstruct the panic concept and conceive different types of it, which need to be considered in order to understand cinema’s social role. These panics in terms of perception, embodiment and social/moral panic can be linked as well to different dimensions of spectatorship and audience engagement. Following Thomas Elsaesser’s suggestion in the context of the ‘(in)credulous spectator’ debate on cinema’s ‘make-belief of fright and anxiety’, we could think about multiple spectatorial/audience dimensions.38 Besides the dimension of spectatorship in terms of perception, consciousness and textual engagement, this chapter underlined issues related to audience’s spatio-temporal embodiment and social situatedness. A key finding on which we would like to conclude is that we hope to have shown through this microhistory the various levels of how cinema was very much part of the social fabric. Think about the geo-mapping of the victims; people attending the venue in large numbers and as families; cinemagoing as a crossgenerational, multilingual, cross-national and mixed-gender experience; cinema as an object of political struggle; consider also the dangers of public life such as pickpockets entering the venue; and so on. We did not discuss other issues like cinema’s place in a community’s leisure structure,39 where a café owner exploited the site in correlation with film exhibition and other community activities in the venue. Early cinema history was often a ‘history without names’,40 but we hope this radically de-anonymized microhistory ‘with names’ enables us to give a face to the specificities of early cinema’s profound social embeddedness.

Acknowledgements The author wishes to thank Tine Defever (Stadsarchief Menen/City Archives Menin), Anneke Deleu, Rudy Tyberghien and Ronald Vandenbussche for interviews and giving the permission to reproduce photos of Cinema Buiksom in Menin.

Notes 1

The city of Menin (or Menen) is located in the northern part of Belgium, Flanders, where the official language is Dutch. Menin has a French-speaking minority and there are some cross-border economic and other activities with France, where the city is known as Menin. Menin should not be confused with the city of Ypres with its

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famous Menin Gate Memorial dedicated to the British and Commonwealth soldiers who were killed in the region during the First World War. The distance between Ypres and Menin is 15 miles. 2

Given the fact that this film theatre was located in a mixed Dutch–French area at the French–Belgian border, Cinema Buiksom was also known as Cinema Buicsom, Buicksom or even Bucksom.

3

For a detailed analysis of the Cinema Buiksom disaster and its aftermath, see Daniël Biltereyst, Verboden beelden: De verborgen geschiedenis van filmcensuur in België (Antwerp/Amsterdam: Houtekiet, 2020), 31–61. See also Figuranten/ Heemkundige Kring Van Menen, Het Leven in en rond de cinema’s van Menen (Menin: Heemkundige Kring, 2010).

4

See Carlo Ginzburg’s reference to Siegfried Kracauer’s comparison between microhistory and the cinematographic close-up in Ginzburg, ‘Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know About It’, Critical Inquiry 20, no. 1 (1993): 26. See also in relation to cinema history and microhistory, Judith Thissen, ‘Cinema History as Social History: Retrospect and Prospect’, in The Routledge Companion to New Cinema History, ed. Daniël Biltereyst, Richard Maltby and Philippe Meers (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2019), 123–33.

5

For one of the few exceptions on a sociologically oriented survey on early cinema audiences for the period of the Cinema Buiksom disaster, see Emilie Altenloh’s Zur Soziologie des Kino: Die Kino-Unternehmung und die sozialen Schichten ihrer Besucher (Jena, 1914). See also Emilie Altenloh, ‘A Sociology of the Cinema: The Audience’, Screen 42, no. 3 (Autumn 2001): 249–93. See also Miriam Bratu Hansen, ‘Early Silent Cinema: Whose Public Sphere?’, New German Critique 29 (Spring–Summer 1983): 147–84.

6

See, for instance, Lies Van De Vijver and Daniël Biltereyst, ‘Cinemagoing as a Conditional Part of Everyday Life’, Cultural Studies 27, no. 4 (2013): 561–84. See also Richard Maltby, Daniël Biltereyst and Philippe Meers, eds, Exploration in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011) and Daniël Biltereyst, Richard Maltby and Philippe Meers, eds, The Routledge Companion to New Cinema History (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2019).

7

Yuri Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994). See also Tom Gunning, ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator’, in Viewing Position: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 114–33. Stephen Bottomore, ‘The Panicking Audience?: Early Cinema and the “Train Effect”’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio & Television 19, no. 2 (June 1999): 177–216. Murray Leeder, ‘M. Robert-Houdin Goes to Algeria: Spectatorship and Panic in Illusion and Early Cinema’, Early Popular Visual Culture 8, no. 2 (May 2010): 209–25.

8

Gary D. Rhodes, The Perils of Moviegoing in America, 1896–1950 (New York, NY: Continuum, 2012).

9

See, for instance, Paul S. Moore, ‘Socially Combustible: Panicky People, Flammable Films, and the Dangerous New Technology of the Nickelodeon’, in Cinema and Technology: Cultures, Theories, Practices, ed. Bruce Bennett, Marc Furstenau and Adrian Mackenzie (New York, NY: Palgrave, 2008), 75–87. Nezih Erdogan, ‘Early Cinema-Going and the Emergence of Film Culture: The First Pathé Cinema Theatre

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Opens in Istanbul (1908)’, Participations 16, no. 1 (May 2019): 698–717. https://www. participations.org/Volume%2016/Issue%201/34.pdf (accessed Febraury 2, 2022). 10 Richard Abel’s monumental Encyclopedia of Early Cinema, for instance, does not contain a separate lemma on (cinema or studio) fires; the phenomenon of destructive fires is restricted to specific cases of concrete disasters, the filmic representation of it or to fire safety policy measures. Much work is done on issues of the representation of disasters and fires, e.g. in a special issue on cinema and accident in Discourse 30, no. 3 (2008). For an analysis of the importance of cinema fires, see Moore’s ‘Socially Combustible’, 2008. 11 Research on fires in cinemas can be conceived as part of what Rick Altman framed as ‘crisis historiography’, where ‘technological dead ends and failures may play just as large a part in history as experiments contributing to today’s dominant technology’. Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2004), 17. See also on fires in studios, studio technologies and the concept of ‘combustible disorder’, Brian R. Jacobson, ‘Fire and Failure: Studio Technology, Environmental Control, and the Politics of Progress’, Cinema Journal 57, no. 2 (Winter 2018): 22–43. 12 The ‘node’ concept is used here in the critical discourse theoretical perspective of a nodal point as this has been developed in the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe as referring to a privileged sign around which other signs are ordered and which receives a centrality value in a discourse. See Louise Phillips and Marianne Jørgensen, Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method (London: Sage, 2002). 13 On the Paris Bazar de la Charité fire, see H. Mark Gosser, ‘The Bazar de la Charité Fire: The Reality, the Aftermath, the Telling’, Film History 10, no. 1 (1998): 70–89; Jean-Jacques Meusy, Paris-Palaces ou le temps des cinémas (1894–1918) (Paris: CNRS, 1996), 53–60. 14 Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990), 443. 15 Ibid. Arguing that the exact number of cinema fires is difficult to determine, Rhodes’ research comes up with ‘certainly hundreds, if not more’. See Rhodes, The Perils of Moviegoing in America, 232. 16 Moore, ‘Socially Combustible’, 77. See Jancovich, Mark, Lucy Faire and Sarah Stubbings, The Place of the Audience: Cultural Geographies of Film Consumption (London: BFI, 2003), 37–40 for the 1909 Cinematograph Act for the UK. 17 See Guido Convents, Van kinetoscoop tot café-ciné: De eerste Jaren van de film in België (Louvain: UPL, 2000), 339–43. 18 See Luke McKernan, ‘The Barnsley Disaster and the Engine-Driver Poet’, https:// lukemckernan.com/2014/10/12/the-barnsley-disaster/ (accessed 9 November 2021). For an overview of early cinema fires, see ‘A Calendar of Film Fires’, in This Film Is Dangerous: A Celebration of Nitrate Film, ed. Roger Smither and Catherine A. Surowiec (Brussels: FIAF, 2002), 429–53. 19 In 1910, the city of Menin had a population of 27,000 inhabitants. 20 For a historical geodemographic analysis of the Menin-Halluin region, see Dominique Vermander, ‘L’agglomération franco-belge Menin-Halluin’, Hommes et Terres du Nord 1 (1964): 42–55.

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21 For the Belgian café-ciné tradition, see Convents, Van kinetoscoop tot café-ciné. 22 This and the following paragraphs on the Cinema Buiksom disaster are based on archival work in the Menin City Archive and on newspapers and magazines. Except for specific details or quotes, we will not refer to these articles. The most informative articles on the disaster were published in local weeklies (De Meenenaar, 28 December 1912, 2; 25 October 1913, 2; De Poperinghenaar, 29 February 1912, 2), national Belgian dailies (e.g. Gazet van Antwerpen, 23 December 1912, 3; 25 December 1912, 4; De Nieuwe Gazet, 25 December 1912, 1; Indépendance belge, 24 December 1912, 3; Le XXe Siècle, 24 December 1912, 1; 25 December 1912, 1; Het Laatste Nieuws, 26 December 1912, 1; Le Peuple, 25 December 1912, 2; Het Vaderland, 24 January 1912, 1; 25 December 1912, 1; 27 December 1912, 2; 31 December 1912, 2; Het Nieuws van den Dag, 24 December 1912, 1; 25 December 1912, 1; 27 December 1912, 1; 29 December 1912, 3; Het Volk, 24 December 1912, 1; Vooruit, 24 December 1912, 3; 26 December 1912) and French daily newspapers (e.g. La Presse, 24 December 1912, 2; Le Grand Echo, 25 December 1912, 3). 23 The news reports indicate the Dutch and French titles (Het einde der wraak; La Fin de la haine). 24 See also Roy Rosenzweig’s ‘From Rum Shop to Rialto: Workers and Movies’, in Moviegoing in America, ed. Gregory A. Waller (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 27– 45. Originally published in Rosenzweig’s monograph Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers & Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 25 Nieuws van den Dag, 27 December 1912, 1; De Meenenaar, 28 December 1912, 2. 26 Nieuws van den Dag, 27 December 1912, 1. 27 Gustave Le Bon, Psychologie des foules (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1988 [1895]); English version: The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (New York, NY: The Macmillan Co., 1896). See also Emmanuel Plasseraud, L’Art des foules: théories de la reception filmique comme phénomène collectif en France (1908– 1930) (Paris: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2011). 28 See for instance Chris Cocking, John Drury and Steve Reicher, ‘The Psychology of Crowd Behaviour in Emergency Evacuations: Results from Two Interview Studies and Implications for the Fire and Rescue Services’, The Irish Journal of Psychology 30, nos 1–2 (2009): 59–73; Enrico Quarantelli, ‘Sociology of Panic’, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, ed. N. J. Smelser and P. B. Baltes (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2001), 11020–3. 29 Nieuws van den Dag, 27 December 1912, 1. 30 See Minutes of the Extraordinary City Council meeting of 24 December 1912 (‘Scèance extraordinaire’, Menin City Archive). 31 See Daniël Biltereyst, Verboden beelden, and Daniël Biltereyst, ‘The Roman Catholic Church and Film Exhibition in Belgium, 1926–1940’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 27, no. 2 (2007): 193–214. 32 De Meenenaar, 28 December 1912, 2. 33 Reprinted in Het Leven in en rond de cinema’s van Menen, 175.

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34 ‘Rapport de pétition’, Chambres des représentants – Annales parlementaires, 15 January 1913. 35 See Biltereyst, Verboden beelden. 36 Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1972). 37 See e.g. Chas Critcher, ed., Moral Panics and the Media (Maidenhead and New York, NY: Open University Press, 2006). 38 Elsaesser, Thomas, ‘Archaeologies of Interactivity: Early Cinema, Narrative and Spectatorship’, in Film 1900: Technology, Perception, Culture, ed. Annemone Ligensa and Klaus Kreimeier, 9–21 (New Barnet: John Libbey, 2009), 15. 39 See for an exemplary examination of these issues from a social and cultural historical perspective, Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will. 40 Diego Cavalotti, Federico Giordano and Leonardo Quaresima, eds, A History of Cinema without Names (Milan: Mimesis, 2016).

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INDEX

Page numbers followed by ‘f’ and ‘t’ refer to information in figures and tables respectively. Those followed by ‘n’ to notes with the note number following the ‘n’. Initial articles in non-English titles have been ignored for filing. For example, a reader looking for Guy’s La Vie du Christ by its non-English title, will find it in the ‘v’ section of the index. Abel, Richard 42, 54, 122, 123, 245n10 Abel-Truchet, Louis 115, 118 absorption antipode of cinema of attractions 83, 87–91 and gesture 136, 138 Koppel’s ‘Narcissus’ writings and review of Pacht’s ‘Kinopticon’ 5, 6, 83, 86–7, 89–90, 95–7 perceptual panic 92, 93, 114, 118–19, 125, 217, 228, 242, 243 types of 91–2 see also contemplation; mandated imaginings Acres, Birt (Paul-Acres) 85 adaptation 52–3, 55 aesthetic absorption 92 aesthetics of detail 47–51, 58 Africa 10, 11 African Americans 9, 10 see also Harlem Akhramovich, Vitol’d 153–4 Albera, François 46 Alhambra Theatre (Harlem) 195, 204f, 206, 208n21, 212n84 Allen, Robert C. 171, 172 Altman, Rick 3, 228 American Mutoscope and Biograph Company Catalogue (1902) 112–13, 121 American Vitagraph Company’s catalogue 112

Amfiteatrov, Alexander 149 analytical philosophy 6, 109 Anderson, Jervis 203 Annabelle Serpentine Dance (Heise, 1894) 86 Anna Karenina (Gardin, 1914) 156 Arkatov, Aleksandr, Lik zver’a (The Beast’s Face, 1917) 149 Arrival of a Train. See L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat Arrival of the Paris Express ‘at Calais (Maritime) and passengers disembarking’ (Paul, 1896 #2) 86, 93, 116 L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (Arrival of a Train, Lumière, 1896) 93, 106, 108, 109, 114, 115, 119, 126n16, 217–19 art absorption 88, 92 aesthetics of detail 48–9 tableau-style 53 themization of perception 66–7 artistic interpretation 22, 35 ­Asia 10, 11 Assassinat du ministre Plehve (Assassination of the Russian Minister Plehve, Nonguet, 1904) 54 L’Assommoir de Zola – Scène du lavoir (L’Assommoir by Zola – Laundry Scene, Pathé, 1897) 52

INDEX

astonishment and familiarity in responses to The May Irwin Kiss 67–70 Gunning’s aesthetics of 58, 68, 78, 88 Astronomer’s Dream; or the Man in the Moon, The. See La Lune à un mètre attractional packages 4, 5, 22, 24, 33–4, 121, 122 see also canned (magic) theatre (filmed theatre) attraction-narration paradigm and absorption experiences 83–4, 91–5, 138 defined 88, 89 histoire and discours 90 and the illustration paradigm 5, 41, 45, 50, 51, 57–9 performativity and audience reception 214–21, 222 periodization 213 and publicity for Shepard’s film shows 170, 171, 171–6, 184–5 usefulness of 172, 214, 221–2, 222 see also cinema of attractions; documentary reproduction-fiction dichotomy audiences acknowledgement/address of 71, 72, 88, 89, 90, 91, 136–7, 138 cinematization 35 cultural bias 9 film publicity promising sensation 168, 169, 171, 178, 181–4 and the illustration paradigm 49, 58 and immediate viewing of filmed theatre 24, 26, 30–1, 33 looming effect 114, 115, 116, 117, 118 Shepard’s popular appeal 173, 175, 184–6 viewing dispositions 215–17, 217–21, 222 see also absorption; Black moviegoing (Harlem); Buiksom Cinema disaster; contemplation; mandated imaginings; presence Auerbach, Jonathan 74 Aumont, Jacques 213, 215 authorial intention 109–11 avant-garde cinema 77, 88, 89, 91, 170

271

L’Avenir du Tonkin 218 Averchenko, Arkadii 147 Baby’s Dinner. See Repas de bébé Bagrov, Peter 152 Band Drill (Edison, 1894) 72 Barnes, John 85 Barnsley Public Hall disaster 229–30 Baudelaire, Charles 89 Bauer, Evgenii, Schchastie vechnoi nochi (Happiness of the Eternal Night, 1915) 156 Bauerntanz zweier Kinder (Italian Folk Dance, Skladanowsky, 1895) 3 Bazar de la Charité (Paris) 217, 229 Beast’s Face, The. See Lik zver’a ­Beaty Brothers 173 Bells, John 133 Ben Hur (Olcott, 1907) 53 Benoît-Lévy, Edmond 42 Benoit, Turquety 122 Benveniste, Émile 90 Bertolini, Francesco, L’Inferno (1911) 55 Bertrand de Borne (Doré, 1865) 55f bibles, illustrated 44–5, 56, 57 Biltereyst, Daniël 41, 145 cinema disasters (whole chapter) 6, 12, 227–47 Birth, Life and Death of Christ. See La Vie du Christ Bitzer, Billy, Tom Tom the Piper’s Son (1905) 50–1, 51f Black, Alexander 46 Blackfriars Bridge (Paul, 1896) 86 Black moviegoing (Harlem) movie culture and the great migration 193, 194–5 racial discrimination and commercial amusement 195–7, 198, 202, 203, 206 venues for Black audiences 193, 197–204, 204f Blacksmithing Scene (Heise, 1893) 86 Blackton, Stuart, Napoleon films (1909) 52 bodily performance. See gestures Bogdan Khmelnitsky (director unknown, 1910) 148 Bolter, Jay David 30, 33 Bordwell, David 90

272

Boston Globe 68 Bottomore, Stephen 92, 94, 114, 116, 118 Le Bourreau turc (The Terrible Turkish Executioner, Méliès, 1904) 27–9, 27f, 31, 32f Brady, William H. 103 Brewster, Ben 57, 135, 182 Brinton, W. Frank 173 British Film Institute online early cinema collections 7 Browne, Nick 89 Buiksom Cinema disaster audience composition 235–7, 236t, 245 the cinema 231–2, 232f, 233f events 232–5 as a microhistory 227–8, 243 news coverage 233, 234f, 235, 237f, 238, 239, 240, 241f, 242, 243 precipitating moral panic 241–2 return to normality 239–40, 242 societal and geospatial parameters 230–1, 231f, 237–9 Burch, Noël 15n23, 45, 49, 50, 223n8 Caddoo, Cara 195, 197 Cahn, Julius, Theatrical Directory 1906 176f canned (magic) theatre (filmed theatre) 21–36, 27f, 32f, 107–9, 121–2, 123 Canudo, Ricciotto 22 Card Game, A. See Partie d’écarté Carou, Alain 52 ­Carroll, Noël 109 Casablanca (Curtiz, 1942) 29, 30f Central and South America 10, 11 Chardynin, Pyotr Diadiushkina kvartira (The Uncle’s Apartment, 1913) 160 Kradenoie shchastie (Stolen Happiness, 1915) 153 Natásha Rostova (1915) 154, 155f Teni grekha (Shadows of the Sin, 1916) 149–50 Chargonin, Alexander, Elena Deeva (1916) 154 ‘chaser theory’ 171, 172

INDEX

Chelovek bez kavartiry (A Man without an Apartment, Viskovskii, 1915) 152 Chicago Journal 71, 72 Christie, Ian 123 cinema of attractions 2–3, 215 absorption as the antipode of 83, 87–91 absorption and the attraction-narration paradigm 83–4, 91–5 acknowledgement/address of audience 71, 72, 88, 89, 90, 91, 136–7, 138, 139 as an alternative to ‘primitive’ cinema 3, 222 and ‘chaser theory’ 171, 172 and Eisenstein’s ’montage of attractions’ 215 exhibitor as narrator 216 function of (exaggerated) gesture 138–40 periodization 171–2, 180, 184, 213 and spectatorial absorption 83, 88–9, 95, 138 temporal punctuality 3, 89, 120 usefulness as a teaching concept 214, 222 see also attraction-narration paradigm cinema broadcasts (of operas and stage plays) 25, 34–5 cinema disasters Barnsley Public Hall disaster 229–30 Bazar de la Charité (Paris) 217, 229 see also Buiksom Cinema disaster cinemas Copenhagen Panorama 83, 84–5, 84f see also Black moviegoing (Harlem); cinema disasters; Robert-Houdin theatre (Paris) cinematization 22, 35–6 Cinemetrics 8 class 9, 10, 175, 184–6, 198, 199, 230–1, 235, 235–8 Cohen, Stanley 242 Coissac, Guillaume-Michel 45 colonialism 10–11 coloured film 108 Comerford, J. E. 168 comics 46–7

INDEX

contemplation as the antipode of attractions (Gunning) 87, 91 illustrative paradigm 41, 50, 54, 56, 57, 58 Musser’s ‘cinema of’ 41, 58, 68, 78, 92 publicity for Shepard’s The Old Homestead 179 ­content and delivery dichotomy 4, 25–9, 33–4 Cook, B. Albert 173 Copenhagen Panorama 83, 84–5, 84f see also ‘Kinoptikon’ (Pacht) Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight, The (1987) 9–10 Coronation of Napoleaon (David) 53 corporeal materiality 67, 75–6 Cottignies, Henri 231–2, 233, 240 Couronnement du Roi Édouard VII (The Coronation of Edward VII, Méliès, 1902) 54–5 Crafton, Donald 47 Crangle, Richard 49 Crescent Theater (Harlem) 193, 197–8, 198f, 200f, 201, 203, 204f, 206 crowd psychology 238–9 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly 92 Cuirassiers à cheval (Charge of the Seventh French Cuirassiers, Lumière, 1896) 70 cultural bias 9–10 Curtiz, Michael, Casablanca (1942) 29, 30f David Devant: The Mysterious Rabbit (Paul, 1896) 86 David, Jacques-Louis, Coronation of Napoleon 53 De Liguoro, Giuseppe, L’Inferno (1911) 55f delivery and content dichotomy 4, 25–9, 33–4 Demolishing and Building up the Star Theatre 113 Derby, The (Paul-Acres, 1895) 85 description librettos 147, 150, 152, 160–1 detail, aesthetics of 47–51, 58

273

Detaille, Jean-Baptiste Édouard 48–9 Diadiushkina kvartira (The Uncle’s Apartment, Chardynin, 1913) 162 Dickens, Charles 109 Dickson, William L. K., Monkeyshines No. 1 and 2 (1889 or 1890, with Heise) 4 digital maps 8–9 digital resources 7–9, 11, 105 disasters Barnsley Public Hall disaster 229–30 see also cinema disasters discours and histoire 90 distance-nearness paradox 70–1 Dixon, Bryony 55 Dnevnik nekrasivoi zhenshchiny (The Diary of an Ugly Woman). See Kradenoie shchastie (Stolen Happiness) documentary reproduction-fiction dichotomy broadcasting opera 35 and delivery mechanism 4, 25–9, 33–4 early cinema audiences and audiences today 93, 103–5, 124–5 film style 33, 35 and genre classification 109, 111–14 intentionalist model 109–11 textual criteria for fictionality 106–9 train films 93, 104, 105, 106–7, 108, 109, 112–13, 114–20, 125 transparency 31, 33 ­trick films 103–4, 105, 106, 107–9, 113–14, 120–5 dominant cinema. See Hollywood films Domitor 1 ‘Doré Bible Gallery, The’ 44–5, 56, 57 Doré, Gustave Bertrand de Borne and Milano Films’s Inferno 55, 55f bible illustrations 44–5, 56, 57 Downs, Maria C. 199–200, 202 Drama in a Gypsy Encampment Near Moscow. See Drama v tabore podmoskovnykh tsygan Drama nekrasivoi zhenshchiny (An Ugly Woman’s Drama). See Kradenoie shchastie

274

Drama v tabore podmoskovnykh tsygan (Drama in a Gypsy Encampment Near Moscow, Siversen, 1908) 158 Drankov, Alexander, Svad’ba Krechinskogo (Krechinsky’s Wedding, 1908) 158 Driven from Home (Edison, 1904) 180 Dundy, Elmer ‘Skip’ 123 Early African American Film database 9 ‘Early Motion Pictures and Sound Recordings of the Edison Companies’ 7 ‘Early Russian Film Prose’ database 8, 147 Edison Manufacturing Company Catalogue (1901) 112 Edison, Thomas A. 9, 103, 171 films 70, 72, 111, 112, 137, 167, 180 see also May Irwin Kiss, The educational attractions 6, 42, 43, 45–6, 50, 173, 184, 220–1 Eisenstein, Sergei M. 88, 215–16 Stachka (The Strike, Eisenstein, 1925) 216 Elena Deeva (Chargonin, 1916) 154 Elmore, Eugene ‘Frenchy’ 200f, 201 Elsaesser, Thomas 1–2, 243 Empire State Express (1897) 112–13, 114, 115, 117–18 Enchanted Glasses, The (Pathé, 1907) 137, 138, 140 English pantomime 123–4 enunciation theory 90–1 L’Équilibre impossible (An Impossible Balancing Feat, Méliès, 1902) 31, 32f Escamotage d’une dame chez RobertHodin (The Vanishing Lady, Méliès, 1896) 22, 23, 120–1, 122, 124, 135, 137, 138, 140 exhibition audiences, acknowledgement/ address of 71, 72, 88, 89, 90, 91, 136–7, 138 digital resources 8, 105 fiction and mandated imaginings 111, 115, 116, 121, 124

INDEX

New Film History’s interest in 2, 3 performativity and audience reception 214–21, 222 showmen 45, 46, 173, 198 see also Shepard, Archie L. exhibition venues Copenhagen Panorama 83, 84–5, 84f see also Black moviegoing (Harlem); cinema disasters; Robert-Houdin theatre (Paris) extrinsic narrativity 45 ­Eye Film Museum 7 familiarity and astonishment in responses to The May Irwin Kiss 67–70 féerie theatre 122–3 see also pantomime FIAF Conference (Brighton, 1978) 1, 7, 221, 222 fiction 6, 87, 89, 91, 93–4, 95 see also documentary reproductionfiction dichotomy fight films 9–10, 216 filmed opera 25, 34–5 filmed theatre (canned (magic) theatre) 21–36, 27f, 32f, 107–9, 121–2, 123 fires Barnsley Public Hall disaster 229–30 Bazar de la Charité (Paris) 217, 229 see also Buiksom Cinema disaster Fischer-Lichter, Erika 69, 75 Fiumara, James 89 Fleming, Thomas C. 196 ‘Florence Lawrence and performance in silent cinema’ project 141 Flugelman, I. 201 For the Life. See L’Khaim Foster, Gwendolyne Audrey 57 fourth wall 88, 91 Four Troubesome Heads, The. See Un homme de têtes Franklin Theatre (Harlem) 204f, 205, 206 Frazier, E. Franklin 194–5 Fried, Michael 88, 92, 93 Frymus, Agata, on Black moviegoing in Harlem (whole chapter) 6, 10, 193–212

INDEX

Gane, William 176, 186, 192n111 Gardin, Vladimir, Anna Karenina (1914) 154–5, 156 Gaudreault, André ‘attractional packages’ 4, 5, 22, 121 and the Cerisy Conference (1985) 213, 214 cinema of attractions 2–3, 5, 87, 171, 172 and Eisenstein’s ’montage of attractions’ 215 fiction and actualities 106 and the illustration paradigm 45, 46, 51, 52, 57, 58, 59 ‘kineattractography’ 67 ’kinematography’ 4 on Méliès films as remediation (whole chapter) 5, 21–39 ‘zero degree of filming’ 75 Gauthier, Philippe 46 genre classification 109, 111–14 geography 10–11, 219 gestures bodily performance in The May Irwin Kiss 73–5 in trick films 131–2, 133, 135–40, 141–2 types of 134–5, 138 and viewing dispositions 219 see also Mediathread Gilmore, Paul 121 Glagolin, Boris, Stranitsy chernoi knigi (The Pages of the Black Book, 1914) 159, 159f ‘Golden Age of Illustration’ 44 Gorky, Maxim 115–16, 117, 119, 125 Graffy, Julian 147 Grau, Robert 169, 180 Great Train Robbery, The (Porter, 1903) 167–8, 168f, 169, 170–2, 172, 182 Grieveson, Lee 10 Griffith Project 2 Gromov, Andrei, Puti izmeny (The Paths of Adultery, 1917) 152 Grusin, Richard 30, 33 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich 67, 69, 71, 72 Gunning, Tom

275

aesthetics of astonishment 58, 68, 78, 88 fiction and actualities 106, 108, 120 and the illustration paradigm 45, 57, 58, 59 see also cinema of attractions Guy-Blaché, Alice 9 La Vie du Christ (The Birth, Life and Death of Christ, 1906) 56–7 Halvorson, Guy 34, 35 Hampton, Benjamin B. 171, 172 Hansen, Kai L’Khaim (For the Life, 1910, with Maurice Maître) 158–60 Skripka (The Violin, 1911) 160 Hansen, Miriam 9–10, 70, 71, 77, 185, 216 Happiness of the Eternal Night. See Schchastie vechnoi nochi Harkema, Gert Jan, on presence and experience (whole chapter) 5, 65–82 Harlem 193 movie culture and the great migration 193, 194–5 racial discrimination and commercial amusement 195–7, 198, 202, 203, 206 venues for Black audiences 193, 197–206, 204f Haverstraw Tunnel, The (Biograph, 1897) 114, 117, 119 Hecht, Hermann 4 Heise, William 86 Monkeyshines No. 1 and 2 (1889 or 1890, with Dickson) 4 Hertz, Aleksander, Żona (The Wife, 1915) 150–1, 151f Hesiod 110 Hillman (Maude Hillman) repertoire Company 168f, 175 histoire and discours 90 Hogarth, William 48–9, 51 Hollywood films 11, 29, 30f, 77, 88, 89, 90, 141, 184, 222 Un homme de têtes (The Four Troublesome Heads, Méliès, 1898) 23–4, 114, 121–2, 124

276

Honeymoon, The. See Medovyi mesiats Houston, Drusilla Dunjee 10 Howe, Lyman H. 46, 169, 173, 177, 184, 191n93 Hurtig & Seamon’s Music Hall 195, 196, 204f Huss, Christophe 35, 36 identity 9–10 audience composition (Buiksom Cinema disaster) 235–27, 236t, 243 class 9, 10, 175, 184–6, 199, 230–1, 235, 236–7 female audiences 9–10, 184, 194, 235, 236t, 235 female cinema owners 199–200 see also Black moviegoing (Harlem) illustrated bibles 44–5, 56, 57 illustrated lectures 45–6, 168, 181, 185 illustrated newspapers 42, 54–5 illustrated sermons 56, 57 illustration paradigm 41–3 aesthetics of detail (part of the eye) 47–51 extending the attraction-narration paradigm 5, 41, 50, 51, 57–9 tableau-style (part of the tableau) 51–5 textual context (part of the text) 43–7 imagination. See mandated imaginings Impossible Balancing Feat, An. See L’Équilibre impossible Infection, The. See Zaraza L’Inferno (Bertolini, Padovan and De Liguoro, 1911) 55, 55f institutional cinema. See narrative films Insulted Venus. See Oskorblennaia Venera intentionalist model 109–11 intertitles 153–6, 158, 160 Irwin, May 65, 69, 70, 71, 73–4, 75 Isman, Felix 176 Italian Folk Dance. See Bauerntanz zweier Kinder Jacobs, Ken 61–2n52 Jacobs, Lea 57, 135, 182 Jacobs, Lewis 171 Jenkins, Henry 25 Jesus films 56–7

INDEX

Jewish communities (Harlem) 194, 196, 204f, 205, 206 Jewish films 158–160 Johnson, James Weldon 193, 204f Johnson, Thomas 200f, 201 Jørgensen, John Christian 86 Kaenel, Philippe 44, 47 Karalli, Vera 149 Kasianov, Vladimir Simfoniia bezumiia (The Symphony of Insanity, 1917) 152 Zaraza (The Infection, 1915) 157–8 Keil, Charlie 106, 107, 108, 126n14 Kendon, Adam 133–4, 139 Kessler, Frank 122–3 on performativity (whole chapter) 6, 213–25 Khanzhonkov, Alexander 156 Kinema 156 ‘Kinoptikon’ (Pacht) 83, 84–6, 89, 91, 92, 93 Koppel’s review 83, 84, 87, 89–90, 94–7 Kinoreformbewegung 6, 220–1 Kleida, Danae 9 gesture analysis (whole chapter) 5, 131–44 Klenotic, Jeff 8 Koppel, Valdemar 83, 84, 86–7, 89–90, 94–7 Kovalova, Anna 8 Russian librettos (whole chapter) 6, 12, 145–65 Kracauer, Siegfried 104 Kradenoie shchastie (Stolen Happiness, Chardynin, 1915) 153–4 Krechinsky’s Wedding. See Svad’ba Krechinskogo Kremer, Theodore 182, 183 Kushnirovich, Mark 147, 150, 152 Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) 141 Lafayette Theater (Harlem) 193, 201, 202–6, 204f Lanterns. See magic lantern shows Larrue, Jean-Marc 25, 31 Laurent, Hughes 54 Le Bon, Gustave 238 Lecoq, Jacques 134

INDEX

lecturers (bonimenteurs) 45, 46, 49, 50, 183, 216 lectures, illustrated 45–6, 168, 185 Lenchevskii, Vladislav, Medovyi mesiats (The Honeymoon, 1915) 158 Lenk, Sabine, on performativity (whole chapter) 6, 213–25 Lenox Theatre (Harlem) 202, 204f, 205 Le Prince, Louis, Roundhay Garden Scene (1888) 4 Levy, Robert 204 librettos 6 concluding evaluation 160–1 ‘Early Russian Film Prose’ database 8, 147 filmography and film history 158–60 film plots 148–52, 160 intertitles 153–6, 158, 160 magazine studies 12, 145 publication 145, 146f reflecting the visual 156–8 satirical treatment of 147–8 types of 147 variations 145–6 librettos-descriptions 147, 150, 152, 160 librettos-origins 147, 152, 160 ‘Librettos of Russian Films 1908–1917’ database 152 Life of an American Fireman (Porter, 1902) 169, 171 Life Drama of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Empress Josephine, The (Blackton, 1909) 53 Life of Jesus (Tissot) 56–7 Lik zver’a (The Beast’s Face, Arkatov, 1917) 149, 150f Liliputian Dance (Pathé Frères, 1906) 137, 138, 140 Lincoln, Abraham 200, 204f Lincoln Theater (Harlem) 193, 197, 198, 199–202, 200f, 203, 206 literary adaptations 52–3, 55 L’Khaim (For the Life Hansen, Maître, 1910) 158–61 LMA. See Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) Loew’s Victoria Theater (Harlem) 195, 196, 204f, 206 Loiperdinger, Martin 126n11, 126n16, 129n62, 217

277

London Street Scene (Paul-Acres, 1895) 85 looming effect 114, 115, 116, 117, 118 Los Angeles Herald 74 Lubin, Siegmund 110 Lumière brothers (August and Louis) aesthetics of detail 49 attractional packages 24 audiences and the aesthetics of detail 49 bringing the distant near 70 documentary reproduction-fiction dichotomy 93–4, 104, 106, 113, 114–19, 125, 126n16 performativity of viewing disposition 217–20 street scenes 72 Lumière, Louis L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (Arrival of a Train, 1896) 93, 106, 108, 109, 114, 115, 119, 126n16, 217–19 Cuirassiers à cheval (Charge of the Seventh French Cuirassiers, 1896) 70 La Sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon (Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory, 1895) 3 Partie d’écarté (1896) 219–21 Partie d’écarté (A Card Game, 1896) 218–20 Repas de bébé (Baby’s Dinner, 1895) 24 La Lune à un mètre (The Astronomer’s Dream; or the Man in the Moon, Méliès, 1898) 103–4, 105, 122 Lyotard, Jean-François 68, 77 McAllister advertisement 46f McKernan, Luke 230 Mad Man, A (Maupassant) 157 magazine studies 12, 145 magic lantern shows 3, 4, 45, 46, 46f, 56 magic theatre 120–1 see also canned (magic) theatre (filmed theatre) Maguire and Baucus Catalogue of Edison Films (20 January 1897) 111 Maître, Maurice (and Kai Hansen, L’Khaim (For the Life), 1910) 160

278

Male, Alan 47 Mallarmé, Stéphane 59 Malthête, Jacques 26 mandated imaginings 105, 109 train films 93–4, 113, 114–19, 125 trick films 23, 105, 107, 120–1, 122, 123, 124 Manhattan Theatre 176, 192n111 Mannoni, Laurent 4 Man without an Apartment, A. See Chelovek bez kavartiry Marie, Michel 213 Marion, Philippe 4, 22, 29, 121, 122 Martinson, Henry 201, 203 Maryland Theater (Baltimore) 123 mass panic 229, 230, 238–9, 242 Maude Hillman repertoire Company 168f, 175 Maupassant, Guy de, A Mad Man 157 May Irwin Kiss, The (Edison, 1896) 65–6 astonishment-familiarity paradox 67–70 bodily performances and gestures 73–5 corporeal materiality 67, 75–6 cultural embeddedness 72, 77 distance-nearness paradox 70–1 and eventful space 67, 71–3 meaning culture 71 media ecologies 4–5 ‘Media History Digital Library’ 8 Mediathread 131 annotation process 131, 132, 137–8 environment 131, 132–3 possibilities and limitations 132, 140–2 Medovyi mesiats (The Honeymoon, Lenchevskii, 1915) 158 Méliès, Georges 2 anti-cinematization 36 and audience viewing dispositions 216, 220 filmed/canned theatre 21–9, 27f, 30–1, 32f, 33–4, 35, 107–8 film-specific effects 21, 28, 33, 104, 107–8, 121 genre classification 112 gesture analysis (Escamotage d’une dame chez Robert-Houdin) 135, 137, 138, 140

INDEX

non-fiction and mandated imaginings 23, 105, 107, 120–1, 122, 123, 124 Shepard’s publicity rhetoric 169, 183 theatrical/profilmic fiction 28–9, 34–5, 106, 107, 109, 114, 122, 123 on transparency 30–1, 33–4, 35 Méliès, Georges (films) Couronnement du Roi Édouard VII (The Coronation of Edward VII, 1902) 54–5 Le Bourreau turc (The Terrible Turkish Executioner, 1904) 27–9, 27f, 31, 32f L’Équilibre impossible (An Impossible Balancing Feat, 1902) 31, 32f Escamotage d’une dame chez Robert-Hodin (The Vanishing Lady, 1896) 22, 23, 120–1, 122, 124, 135, 137, 138, 140 Un homme de têtes (The Four Troublesome Heads, 1898) 23–4, 114, 121–2, 124 La Lune à un mètre (The Astronomer’s Dream; or the Man in the Moon, 1898) 103–4, 105, 122 Le Royaume des fées (Fairyland, 1903) 169, 183–4 Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon,1902) 88, 106, 107–8, 109, 114, 120, 122–3, 124 Le Voyage de Gulliver à Lilliput et chez les Géants (Gulliver’s Travels Among the Lilliputians and the Giants, 1902) 124, 169 Menard, G. See Méliès, Georges Menin (Belgium) 230–1, 231f see also Buiksom Cinema disaster Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 65, 66, 76, 78 Mesmerist and Country Couple (Edison, 1899) 137 Metropolitan Opera of New York 25, 34 Metz, Christian 90–1, 136 mime tradition 134 Mitchell, Koritha 201 Mitry, Jean 222 Monkeyshines No. 1 and 2 (Dickson and Heise, 1889 or 1890) 4

INDEX

‘montage of attractions’ 215 montage-style 51, 57 Moonshiners, The (Biograph, 1904) 182, 183 Moore, Jacqueline M. 201 Moore, Paul S. 229 on Shepard’s publicity (whole chapter) 6, 9, 168–94 moral panic 241–2, 243 Morganstern, C. W. 203 movie theatre disasters Bazar de la Charité (Paris) 217, 229 cinema disasters, Barnsley Public Hall disaster 229–30 see also Buiksom Cinema disaster movie theatres Copenhagen Panorama 83, 84–5, 84f see also Black moviegoing (Harlem); movie theatre disasters; RobertHoudin theatre (Paris) Musser, Charles and absorption 83, 92–3, 94, 95 and Allen on ‘chaser theory’ 171–2 attentive contemplation 41, 58, 68, 78, 92 on cinema safety 229 exhibitor as narrator 216 ‘horizontal’ extension (film programmes) 3 and the illustration paradigm 41, 46, 56, 58–9 on The May Irwin Kiss 65, 69–70 and Nelson on Archie L. Shepard 169–70, 184 Mystic Swing, The (Porter, 1900) 135, 137 Mystic Theatre 204f myth of the panicking audience 93, 114, 118–19, 125, 219, 228 Nancy, Jean-Luc 69, 75 Napoleon, The Man of Destiny (Blackton, 1909) 53 Narcissus. See Koppel, Valdemar narrative 107, 110, 119–20, 122 see also attraction-narration paradigm narrative films emergence as a separate attraction 167, 169–71

279

as general categorization 219–20 histoire 90 Hollywood films 11, 29, 30f, 77, 88, 89, 90, 141, 184, 222 Shepard’s advertising rhetoric 6, 167–9, 168f, 170, 171, 172, 177–83, 185–6 as silent drama 179 spectator absorption 88, 94 sublimation 29 Natásha Rostova (Chardynin, 1915) 154–6, 155f nearness-distance paradox 70–1 Nedykhlyaev, Alexander 158 Negri, Pola 150 Nelson, Carol 169, 184 new media 4 and the ‘train effect’ 116 New Negro movement 202 news media Black moviegoing 193, 196, 203–4, 206 Buiksom Cinema disaster coverage 233, 234f, 235, 237f, 238, 239, 240, 241f, 242, 243 illustrated newspapers 42, 54–5 librettos 145, 147–8, 149, 153, 154, 156, 158–9, 160 reviews of Pacht’s ‘Kinoptikon’ 83–4, 85, 87, 89–90, 92, 93, 94–7 reviews of The May Irwin Kiss 65–6, 68, 69, 70–1, 72, 74 routes ahead listings 173–4, 174f Shepard’s publicity rhetoric 6, 167–9, 168f, 170, 171, 172, 176f, 177–84, 185 New York Amusement Company 202–3 Niagara Falls, Gorge (Edison, 1896) 70 Nibur, Benjamin 201, 203 nickelodeons Harlem 193, 199, 205, 206, 212n88 and the performative dimension of exhibition 216 and periodization of early cinema 11, 172 safety 229 and Shepard’s touring picture shows 169–70, 176, 186, 192n111 women and children 185

280

Niver, Kemp R. 1 non-fiction vs. fiction. See documentary reproduction-fiction dichotomy Nonguet, Lucien Assassinat du ministre Plehve (Assassination of the Russian Minister Plehve, 1904) 54 Quo vadis (1901) 52 Olcott, Sidney 57 Ben Hur (1907) 53 ‘Old Homestead, The’ 181 Oliver Twist (Dickens) 109 opera, cinema broadcasts 25, 34–5 Orient Theater 196, 205, 206 origin librettos 147, 152, 160 Oskorblennaia Venera (Insulted Venus, Viskovskii, 1916) 145–6 Ostreicher, Henry 201 Oyallon-Koloski, Jenny 141 Pacht, Vilhelm 84 see also ‘Kinoptikon’ (Pacht) Padovan, Adolfo, L’Inferno (1911) 55f Pages of the Black Book, The. See Stranitsy chernoi knigi Palmskii, Leonard 159 panic bodily panic 227, 229, 230, 230, 233–5, 238–9, 243 moral/social panic 243–4, 245 perceptual panic 92, 93, 114, 118–19, 125, 219, 230, 244, 245 panorama films 112–13 see also ‘Kinoptikon’ (Pacht) pantomime 123, 124, 183 see also féerie theatre Partie d’écarté (A Card Game, Lumière, 1896) 218–20 Passions 45, 56–7, 110–11, 179, 216 Pathé (Pathé Frères) films 52, 54, 56, 57, 137, 138, 140, 149, 160 Paths of Adultery, The. See Puti izmeny Paul, Robert W. (Paul-Acres) 85, 86 Pearson, Roberta 52, 53, 183 People’s History of the United States, A (Zinn) 109 perceptual panic 92, 93, 114, 118–19, 125, 217, 228, 240, 243

INDEX

perceptual shock 66 ‘Performance and Tricks/FX’ 133 periodization 4, 6, 11, 171–2, 180, 184, 213, 223n10 Phalke, Debasheb 11 phantom film rides 94, 117–18, 119, 120 philosophical aesthetics 104–5 photorealism 47–8, 49, 66, 71 pictoralism 57, 135–77 Piles, Roger de 43, 50 Politiken 86 Koppel’s review of Pacht’s ‘Kinoptikon’ 83, 84, 87, 89–90, 94–7 Porter, Edwin S. 2, 182 The Great Train Robbery (1903) 167–8, 168f, 169, 170–2, 182 Life of an American Fireman (1902) 169, 171 The Mystic Swing (1900) 135, 137 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1903) 103, 105 presence 66, 67, 76–8 astonishment and familiarity paradox 67–70 bodily performance 74, 75 distance and nearness paradox 70–1 and eventful space 67, 71–3 impact of 77 moments of intensity 67, 69, 71, 72, 73, 76 Prestwich Manufacturing Company catalogue 112 primitivism 2, 3, 222 Proctor’s Theater (Harlem) 196, 204f profilmic/theatrical fiction 28–9, 35, 109, 122 Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960) 105 Pugh, Jane 175 Puti izmeny (The Paths of Adultery, Gromov, 1917) 152 Quo vadis (Zecca and Nonguet, 1901) 52 racial discrimination (Harlem) 193–5, 198, 202, 203, 206 railway films. See train films Ramsaye, Terry 170–1 ‘Re (and pre-)enacted Newsreels’ 53–5

INDEX

Regester, Charlene 197 Regnault, Félix 116, 125, 219 remediation 5, 6, 21–9, 27f, 30–1, 32f, 33–4, 35 Repas de bébé (Baby’s Dinner, Lumière, 1895) 24 Rhodes, Gary D. 230 Rice-Irwin Kiss. See May Irwin Kiss, The Rice, John C. 65, 69, 70, 71, 73, 75 ritualized practices of meaning-making 72 Robert-Houdin films. See Méliès, Georges (films) Robert-Houdin theatre (Paris) and mandated imaginings in Méliès’s films 121, 122 Méliès’s filmed/canned theatre 21–9, 27f, 30–1, 32f, 33–4, 35, 107–8 viewing disposition of the audience 216 Robertson, Stephen 196 Robert, Valentine, on the illustration paradigm (whole chapter) 5, 12, 41–63 Rough Sea at Dover (Paul-Acres, 1895) 85, 89, 92 Roundhay Garden Scene (Le Prince, 1888) 4 Routes Ahead listings 173–4, 174f Le Royaume des fées (Fairyland, Méliès, 1903) 171, 186 Russian films. See librettos Stachka (The Strike, Eisenstein, 1925) 218 Sadoul, Georges 47, 221, 222, 224 safety, see also cinema disasters St. Charles Orpheum vaudeville theatre (New Orleans) 123 Schchastie vechnoi nochi (Happiness of the Eternal Night, Bauer, 1915) 158 Schuyler, George S. 197 Seel, Martin 69, 76 sermons, illustrated 56, 57 sexual voyeurism 65, 66 Shadows of the Sin. See Teni grekha Shepard, Archie L. 9, 174, 176–7

281

advertising rhetoric 6, 168–70, 168f, 170, 171, 172, 176f, 178–84, 186 career 174–7, 177f, 186–7 mass appeal 173, 175, 184–6 Routes Ahead listings 174f showmen 45, 46, 173, 198 see also Shepard, Archie L. Simfoniia bezumiia (The Symphony of Insanity, Kasianov, 1917) 152 Siversen, Vladimir, Drama v tabore podmoskovnykh tsygan (Drama in a Gypsy Encampment Near Moscow, 1908) 158 Skladanowsky, Max, Bauerntanz zweier Kinder (Italian Folk Dance, 1895) 3 Skripka (The Violin, Hansen, 1911) 160 Slugan, Mario 23, 24, 41, 83, 90, 93–4, 95 revisiting the fiction/non-fiction distinction (whole chapter) 5, 6, 12, 103–30 Smolderen, Thierry 48–9, 50, 51 Sobchack, Vivian 73, 74, 75 social panic 242, 243, 250 Sologub, Fedor 149 La Sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon (Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory, Lumière, 1895) 3 sound 3, 45, 46, 131, 134, 183–4, 220 Southwark Fair (Hogarth) 48, 51, 51f spectators. See audiences splicing 28, 33, 104, 108, 121, 136 ‘Star’ Films Catalogues (1903) 23, 28, 121–2 stereopticon 46, 46f Stewart, Jacqueline Najuma 198 Stock, Kathleen 104 Stoddard, John 46, 180 Stolen Happiness. See Kradenoie shchastie Stranitsy chernoi knigi (The Pages of the Black Book, Glagolin, 1914) 159, 159f Strauven, Wanda 5, 214 Streible, Dan 10 Strike, The. See Stachka substitution splicing 28, 33, 104, 108, 121, 136 Suburban Handicap, The (Edison, 1896) 72

282

surf films 85, 89, 92, 94, 112 Svad’ba Krechinskogo (Krechinsky’s Wedding, Drankov, 1908) 158 Swanson, William H. 170 ‘swarming effect’ 48, 50–1, 58 Symphony of Insanity. See Simfoniia bezumiia tableaux vivants and the illustration paradigm 51–5, 56, 58 Jesus films 56, 58 pictorial staging 57, 135 ‘swarming effect’ 50–1 Tan, Ed 91, 92 Teatral’naia Gazeta (Theatre Newspaper) 153–4 temporal punctuality 3, 89, 120 Teni grekha (Shadows of the Sin, Chardynin, 1916) 149–50 Terrible Turkish Executioner, The. See Le Bourreau turc théâtre filmé (canned (magic) theatre) 21–36, 27f, 32f, 107–9, 121–2, 123 Théâtre Robert-Houdin. See RobertHoudin theatre (Paris) theatrical/profilmic fiction 28–9, 34–5, 106, 107, 109, 114, 122, 123 Theogony (Hesiod) 110 Thissen, Judith 206 Thomas, Francis ‘Doll’ 195, 205 Thompson, Clara Louise 174 Thompson, Frederic 123 Tissot, James, Life of Jesus 56–7 Tolstoy, Leo, War and Peace 154–5 Tom Tom the Piper’s Son (Billy Bitzer, 1905) 50–1, 51f ‘train effect’ 92, 93, 114, 118–19, 125, 217, 228 train films as an absorptive experience 89, 92, 93, 94, 96–7 documentary reproduction-fiction dichotomy 93, 94, 106, 108, 109, 112–13, 114–19, 125, 126n16 Pacht’s ‘Kinoptikon’ 85, 86, 89, 96–7 and the performativity of viewing dispotifs 217–19

INDEX

transparency 31, 33–4, 35, 91 Trewey, Félicien 219 trick films. See Méliès, Georges (films) Truchet, Louis (Abel-Truchet) 115, 118 Tsivian, Yuri 3, 8, 114, 125 Turkin, Valentin 147, 148, 161 Tybjerg, Casper, review of Pacht’s ‘kinopticon’ (whole chapter) 5, 6, 83–100 Uncle’s Apartment, The. See Diadiushkina kvartira Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Porter, 1903) 103, 105 Urban, Charles 54–5 Uricchio, William 52, 53, 183 Väliaho, Pasi 77 Valleiry, François 42 Van De Vijver, Lies 145 Vanishing Lady, The. See Escamotage d’une dame chez Robert-Hodin Vardac, Nicholas 171, 182 vaudeville Black American audiences 195, 197, 198, 199 bodily performance 73 and cinema’s emergence as a separate attraction 171, 180, 183 in films 93 peak moments 215 presence culture 71, 72 venue for early cinema 68, 123, 216 Vaudeville and Moving Picture Co. of America 176 Verne, Jules 123, 124 video games 4 La Vie du Christ (The Birth, Life and Death of Christ, Guy-Blaché, 1906) 56–7 viewing dispositions 215–16, 217–21, 222 Violin, The. See Skripka virtual reality 4 Viskovskii, Viacheslav 146, 149 Chelovek bez kavartiry (A Man without an Apartment, 1915) 152–3 Oskorblennaia Venera (Insulted Venus, 1916) 145–6

INDEX

visual pleasure (in the illustration paradigm) 46–51 Vitagraph films 52, 53, 183, 198 Volkmer, Ottomar 116 Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon, Méliès, 1902) 88, 106, 107–8, 109, 114, 120, 122–3, 124 Le Voyage de Gulliver à Lilliput et chez les Géants (Gulliver’s Travels Among the Lilliputians and the Giants, Méliès, 1902) 124, 169 Voznesenskii, Alexander 152 Walker, George W. 202–3 Walton, Kendall L. 93, 104–5, 115 Walton, Lester A. 197–9, 201–2, 203, 205 War and Peace (Tolstoy) 154 Warwick Trading Company catalogues 112 Washington, Forrester B. 194 waterfall films 70, 92, 111, 220 wave films showing 85, 89, 92, 96 Webb, M. 10 Wells, H. G. 123 ‘Where’s Wally effect’ 48, 50 White Ovington, Mary 197

283

Widow Jones, The 66, 68, 69 Wife, The. See Żona Williams, Linda 66 Williams, Mark 133, 141 Wilson Theatre Co. 176–7 women audiences 9–10, 187, 196, 236t, 237, 238 cinema owners 201–2 filmmakers 9, 10 ‘Women Film Pioneers Project’ 9 Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory. See La Sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon Wundt, William 134 xylography 47 Yumibe, Joshua 108 Zaraza (The Infection, Kasianov, 1915) 157–8 Zecca, Ferdinand, Quo vadis (1901) 52 Zinn, Howard 109 Zola, Émile 47, 48 Żona (The Wife, Hertz, 1915) 150–2, 151f

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