The Image in Early Cinema : Form and Material 9780253034427, 9780253034397

Citation preview

In The Image in Early Cinema, the contributors examine intersections between early cinematic form, technology, theory, practice, and broader modes of visual culture. They argue that early cinema emerged within a visual culture composed of a variety of traditions in art, science, education, and image making. Even as methods of motion picture production and distribution materialized, they drew from and challenged practices and conventions in other mediums. This rich visual culture produced a complicated, overlapping network of image-making traditions, innovations, and borrowing among painting, tableaux vivants, photography, and other pictorial and projection practices. Using a variety of concepts and theories, the contributors explore these crisscrossing traditions and work against an essentialist notion of media to conceptualize the dynamic interrelationship between images and their context.

TOM GUNNING is Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. His is author of D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph and The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity. JOSHUA YUMIBE is Associate Professor and Director of Film Studies at Michigan State University. He is author of Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism, and Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema.

Cover illustrations: Top: Frame enlargment from Le Duel de Pierrot (Pathé, 1900). Courtesy of the Gosfilmofond, National Film Foundation of Russian Federation. Bottom: Jean-Léon Gérôme, Duel After the Masquerade, c.1857–1859—oil on canvas, 15.4 x 22.2 in., Baltimore, Walters Art Museum (autograph replica of the 1857 painting of Chantilly).

iupress.indiana.edu

IMAGE IN EARLY CINEMA

PHILLIPE GAUTHIER lectures in cinema and media at the University of Ottawa. His is author of Le montage alterné avant Griffith.

THE

SCOTT CURTIS is Associate Professor in the Department of Radio/Television/Film at Northwestern University. He is author of The Shape of Spectatorship: Art, Science, and Early Cinema in Germany.

CURTIS, GAUTHIER, GUNNING, AND YUMIBE

Film and Media

PRESS

IMAGE IN EARLY CINEMA THE

EDITED BY

Form and Material

SCOTT CURTIS, PHILIPPE GAUTHIER, TOM GUNNING, AND JOSHUA YUMIBE

the I M AGE in E A R LY C I N E M A

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

The I M AGE in E A R LY C I N E M A Form and Material

Edited by Scott Curtis, Philippe Gauthier, Tom Gunning, and Joshua Yumibe

Indiana University Press

This book is a publication of Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA iupress.indiana.edu © 2018 by Domitor All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Curtis, Scott, editor. | Gauthier, Philippe, 1980- editor. | Gunning, Tom, 1949- editor. | Yumibe, Joshua, 1974- editor. Title: The image in early cinema : form and material / edited by Scott Curtis, Philippe Gauthier, Tom Gunning, and Joshua Yumibe. Description: Bloomington : Indiana University Press, [2018] | Series: Early cinema in review: proceedings of Domitor | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018005348 (print) | LCCN 2018001494 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253034403 (e-book) | ISBN 9780253034397 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures—Philosophy. | Motion pictures and the arts. | Cinematography. Classification: LCC PN1995.25 (print) | LCC PN1995.25 .I43 2018 (ebook) | DDC 791.4301—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018005348 1 2 3 4 5  23 22 21 20 19 18

Contents

Introduction / Scott Curtis, Philippe Gauthier, Tom Gunning, and Joshua Yumibe1 Part I: Form 1 La part picturale du tableau-style / Valentine Robert15 2 The Unsettling of Vision: Tableaux Vivants, Early Cinema, and Optical Illusions / Daniel Wiegand26 3 The Vision Scene: Revelation and Remediation / Frank Gray36 4 Animating Antiquity / Laura Horak47 5 Caricature et films comiques à la Belle Époque: quand le dessin de presse rencontre le cinéma / Jérémy Houillère58 6 De la presse illustrée à l’actualité filmée (1894–1910): l’émergence d’une nouvelle « culture visuelle de l’information »? / Rodolphe Gahéry69 7 From Pathé to Paramount: Visual Design in Movie Advertising to 1915 / Richard Abel78 8 Landscape Topoi: From the Mountains to the Sea / Jennifer Peterson94 9 A View Aesthetic without a View? Space and Place in Early Norwegian Polar Expedition Films / Gunnar Iversen102 Part II: Material 10 Between Recognition and Abstraction: Early Vocational Training Films / Florian Hoof111 11 Ruptured Perspectives: The “View,” Early Special Effects, and Film History / Leslie DeLassus120

vi | Contents 12 Surface and Color: Stenciling in Applied Arts, Fashion Illustration, and Cinema / Jelena Rakin132 13 The Color Image / Joshua Yumibe142 Part III: Networks 14 Shared Affinities and “Kunstwollen”: Stylistics of the Cinematic Image in the 1910s and Art Theory at the Turn of the Century in Germany / Jörg Schweinitz153 15 Techniques in Circulation: Sovereignty, Imaging Technology, and Art Education in Qajar Iran / Kaveh Askari164 16 Corporeality and Female Modernity: Intermediality and Early Film Celebrities / Marina Dahlquist174 17 A Scientific Instrument? Animated Photography among Other New Imaging Techniques / Ian Christie185 18 Advertising with Moving Pictures: International Harvester’s The Romance of the Reaper (1910–1913) / Gregory A. Waller194 19 The City View(ed): Muybridge’s Panoramas of San Francisco and Their Afterlives in Early Cinema / Dimitrios Latsis203 20 California Landscapes: John Divola and the Cine-Geography of Serial Photography / Charles Wolfe212 21 What is a Fake Image? / Frank Kessler and Sabine Lenk228 22 The Lantern Image between Stage and Screen / Artemis Willis237 Part IV: Discourses 23 Pictorialism and the Picture: Art, Photography, and the “Doctrine of Taste” in the Discourse on Transitional-Era Quality Films / Tom Paulus249 24 Boredom and Visions in Vachel Lindsay’s Film Theory / Ryan Pierson257 25 Falling Desperately in Love with the Image on Screen: “The Flictoflicker Girl” (1913) and Cinematic Structures of Fascination / Denis Condon266

Contents | vii 26 An “Advertising Punch” in Every Frame: Image-Making in Early Advertising Films / Martin L. Johnson276 Appendix: Translations 27 English Translation of Chapter 1: The Pictorial in the Tableau Style / Valentine Robert289 28 English Translation of Chapter 5: Caricature and Comic Films in the Belle Époque: When the Illustrated Press Met the Cinema / Jérémy Houillère300 29 English Translation of Chapter 6: From the Illustrated Press to Filmed Actualities (1894–1910): The Emergence of a New “Visual Information Culture”? / Rodolphe Gahéry311 Subject Index321 Film Index331

the I M AGE in E A R LY C I N E M A

Introduction Scott Curtis, Philippe Gauthier, Tom Gunning, and Joshua Yumibe

Domitor, the international society for the study of early cinema, is a

non-profit, bilingual association for scholars interested in all aspects of early cinema from its beginnings to 1915. Domitor is dedicated to exploring new methods of historical research; understanding and promoting the international exchange of information, documents, and ideas; forging alliances with curators and film archivists; and nurturing the work of early career researchers. One of its most important activities is its biennial international conference. The first was held in Québec in 1990, and subsequent conferences were staged in Lausanne, New York, Paris, Washington, DC, Udine, Montreal, Utrecht, Ann Arbor, Perpignan/ Girona, Toronto, and Brighton. The University of Chicago and Northwestern University jointly hosted the 14th International Domitor Conference in Chicago and Evanston, Illinois, in 2014, and this book is its proceedings.1 Domitor conferences often prompt scholars to consider early cinema in terms of a theme (religion, borders) or some facet of the object itself (sound, distribution, technology). Recently, the conferences have encouraged the membership to view early cinema through the lenses of different disciplines, such as performance studies. The present collection continues this trend by highlighting the intersection between early cinema and multidisciplinary work on “the image.” As we know, early cinema emerged within a visual culture that was composed of a variety of traditions in art, science, education, and image-making. Even as methods of motion picture production, distribution, and exhibition materialized, they drew from and challenged practices and conventions in, for example, photography and painting. This rich visual culture produced a complicated overlapping network of image-making traditions, innovations, and borrowings among paintings, tableaux vivants, photography, and other pictorial and projection practices. Film and media scholars have created the concepts of “media archaeology” (Zielinski) and “intermediality” (Belting) to account for such crisscrossing traditions and to work against an essentialist notion of media, while other theorists have suggested ideas such as “image families” (Mitchell), “image-systems” (Barthes), and “an ecology of images” (Sontag) to conceptualize the dynamic interrelationship between images and their context. This collection

2  |  The Image in Early Cinema seeks to trace the various interactions involved in forming a new moving-image culture using the broad category of “the image” to examine intersections between visual culture broadly conceived and early cinematic form, technology, theory, and practice.2 Of course, as W. J. T. Mitchell has pointed out, the concept of “the image” refers to so many divergent phenomena that it hardly makes sense to subsume them under one category. Here we make no effort to delineate the theoretical outlines of an image map that would essentially cover the world. Instead, we use historical case studies to probe boundaries between disciplines and practices to test what might be included therein. From these cases it becomes evident that the range of what might be considered an image at the turn of the last century is not infinite; we are concerned primarily with visual culture as manifested in art, science, commerce, and education. So paintings, photographs, postcards, illustrations, graphs, and advertisements are just a few of the typical image types with which magic lantern slides and motion pictures interacted. How did they interact exactly? Image and medium depend on each other, of course, but a new medium often borrows an image from another or appropriates an image production method or presentation practice as it establishes itself. Or a group, such as advertisers or entertainers, might take up a new medium as part of its existing ensemble of representational technologies, just as writers might borrow a way of thinking about images, such as painting and photographs, to measure and compare the function and value of a medium against their own literary one. “Borrowing” implies debt, however, so “migration” might be another way to approach this interaction, as Hans Belting has suggested: “Images resemble nomads in the sense that they take residence in one medium after another.”3 A scene from a familiar painting might migrate to a tableau vivant, to a poster, to a magic lantern slide, and to a film, each time changing slightly and resonating differently with each new medium and audience. A stenciling practice from book illustration might migrate to postcard design and then to early color film production. Or a scientific experiment in fluid dynamics, staged in high-speed photographs of falling drops, might transform when reworked and refilmed for a motion picture. Indeed, this last example indicates most clearly that images do not simply migrate of their own accord; there is much effort involved to target, adapt, produce, distribute, and champion any image, convention, or practice that migrates from one medium, network, and community to another. The chapters in this collection underscore the need to think of the circulation of images as labor-intensive appropriations. If any given image is encrusted with layers of pre- and after-images accumulated in its many migrations, it is also true that no medium exists by itself. Media coexist, overlapping and mixing parts and practices, so that they “mirror, quote, and correct or censor one another.”4 In tracing the migration of images, the case

Introduction | 3 studies here emphasize the necessarily intermedial character of these pathways as, say, photography overlapped with film as film connected with painting—and vice versa. Even as new media emerged, old media lingered or, better, transformed both in their audiences’ perception and in practice, often as a way to survive, but more often as a reflexive response to a crowded field. Comparing the chapters by Dimitrios Latsis and Charles Wolfe, for example, we see snapshots of how serial photography functions before and after cinema. If the essays take early cinema as their starting point, they inevitably place this new medium in relation to a larger ensemble of interconnected media, conventions, and practices. In fact, the chapters emphasize four different but overlapping aspects of these intermedial migrations: image form, material, networks, and discourses.

Form As images migrate, what do they take with them? This group of essays emphasizes the common figures, conventions, tropes, and design strategies of intermedial images. Jennifer Peterson’s essay thinks about these common features as topoi, or repeated formulas, which helps us to see the migration of images not as simple and direct replication, but as the implementation of a shorthand that inevitably requires transformative adjustments, even if slightly, in the application to a new situation or medium. In this section’s first essay, “La part picturale du tableau-­ style” (all French-language chapters are translated into English in the appendix), Valentine Robert highlights a little-known but fully fledged intermedial network through a meticulous study of the various reproductions (by lithography, photography, or photogravure) of Jean-Léon Gérôme’s painting Un Duel après le bal (1857–1858), of its many stage re-enactments in tableau vivant, and of its cinematic reinterpretation by Pathé in 1909. Robert thereby demonstrates how cinema was truly the heir of the tableau vivant by underscoring the explicitly pictorial aspect of the tableau style in film. Similarly, Daniel Wiegand, in “The Unsettling of Vision: Tableaux Vivants, Early Cinema, and Optical Illusions,” demonstrates the debt early film owed to the tableau vivant, especially in presenting audiences unaccustomed to film’s visual field with familiar tropes and devices. The essay focuses on the dimensional nature of visual illusion in early films featuring tableaux vivants. Analyzing examples from around 1900, the essay traces how these films presented spectators with ambiguous, multistable imagery that played with an illusion of depth within a two-dimensional image. The spectatorial activity, and unsettling pleasure, involved in watching these illusions both fit with other forms of optical tricks of the era and also helped establish an attentive gaze particular to early film audiences confronted with the spatial ambiguity of the moving image. Frank Gray also takes account of traveling tropes in “The Vision Scene: Revelation and Remediation,” which analyzes the longstanding intermedial motif of depicting visions pictorially within the mise-en-scène of

4  |  The Image in Early Cinema painting, photography, lantern slides, and film. To show their adaptation in film practice at the turn of the century, the essay focuses on nineteenth-century vision scenes that depict psychological as well as supernatural states—as in the opening dream tableau of The Life of the American Fireman (1903). Through this trajectory, Gray tracks the ways in which visionary imaging provided media artists with a means to externalize interior experience, a method that would prove vital for the development of narrative cinema’s psychological complexity. Emphasizing bodily form as it travels through time and media, Laura Horak’s “Animating Antiquity” looks at turn-of-the-century body culture and focuses on the widespread interest in recovering the physical training methods of ancient Greece depicted in Greek literature and artwork. By emulating the still poses found particularly in ancient statues and bas-relief, educators and dancers such as Diana Watts and Isadora Duncan looked to antiquity to recover idealized modes of movement that would help train a stronger, more healthy citizenry beset by the otherwise degenerative effects of urban life and labor. In historicizing this tradition of body culture, Horak’s essay provides vital context for thinking through the parallel interests in stillness and movement found in the chronophotography and early film of the time. Likewise, Jérémy Houillère finds points of comparison between printed illustrations in the popular press and early comic films. His essay, “Caricature et films comiques à la Belle Époque: quand le dessin de presse rencontre le cinema,” proposes that many early French comic films drew on techniques developed by caricature in the press. Houillère describes three different kinds of interaction between these two visual worlds: the composition of the image, the figuration of the characters, and what the author describes as the “mise en dessin,” or “putting into drawing,” of the cinematic image. He notes a clear connection between the two media, one that goes beyond the mere circulation of techniques—a connection that includes caricature especially. On the other hand, Rodolphe Gahéry finds that our usual assumptions about the relationship between newspapers and early film may not obtain. In his article, “De la presse illustrée à l’actualité filmée (1894–1910): l’émergence d’une nouvelle « culture visuelle de l’information »?”, Gahéry shines new light on the nature of the interactions between fixed images of current events in the printed press and filmed actualities of the same events. Gahéry shows that, contrary to received opinion, the first informational moving pictures were not mere adaptations of what had already been printed in newspapers. Gahéry proposes that the roots of the earliest informative films lay not in educational or pedagogical systems of representation, as was the case with still images of current events, but rather in live entertainment, in particular the theater. Yet newspapers continue to be in other ways an important source for research on early cinema. Richard Abel’s essay, “From Pathé to Paramount: Visual Design in Movie Advertising to 1915,” focuses on the formal features in newspaper advertising design. Specifically, it

Introduction | 5 surveys design changes in movie advertising in newspapers during the early period. As the film industry realized the power of newspapers to attract audiences, they adopted various advertising strategies as well as different design solutions in an era when loquacious, ornate ads often gave way to more minimalist, modern approaches. Abel shows that the struggle between image and word, so central to early cinema, played out on the battlefield of the newspaper ad in subtle and intriguing ways. The next two chapters focus on common tropes or formulae in the depiction of landscape especially as a subset of this interest in form and topoi. Jennifer Lynn Peterson’s “Landscape Topoi: From the Mountains to the Sea” suggests that in dealing with early films of natural landscapes we can isolate a number of recurring topoi. Many of these recurring landscape topoi existed in visual media before cinema. Peterson sees topoi as different from repeated depictions of famous sites, such as Niagara Falls and Yosemite. A key example would be the rough seas so frequently filmed by early filmmakers, which she traces over more than a decade, and stresses its role as “a momentary spectacle of nature’s power to amaze and astonish.” These repeated depictions and topoi trained audience expectations of the travelogue and illustrated lectures, as Gunnar Iversen demonstrates in “A View Aesthetic without a View? Space and Place in Early Norwegian Polar Expedition Films.” This essay discusses how early Norwegian films of the Antarctic expedition by South Pole explorer Roald Amundsen offer views of this exotic locale without being able to offer the picturesque images usually associated with the early travel films. While the images of Amundsen’s expedition lacked visual specificity—showing little beyond blank, white horizons—nonetheless their status as views of a historic expedition drew audiences. Furthermore, the lack of familiar picturesque qualities of this landscape could be experienced as part of this alien landscape’s uniqueness, offering, as Iversen puts it, “a view without a view.” So the chapters in this section focus on repeated formulas that set up audience expectations and facilitate the migration of images and their formal conventions across media.

Material The chapters in this section emphasize the production of images. Production techniques, like images, migrate and adapt to new environments; there is a dynamic interrelationship between them in that the migration and adaptation subtly change both practice and environment, often because the material changes with the adaptation. A good example comes from Florian Hoof’s essay, “Between Recognition and Abstraction: Early Vocational Training Films.” Frank Gilbreth’s vocational films were a complex ensemble of media technologies and visualization practices, often drawing from disciplines such as management and mathematics. Consequently, Hoof argues that we must approach

6  |  The Image in Early Cinema these films as something other than educational or simply nonfiction films. Moreover, the adaptation of these disparate technologies and practices to film prompted Gilbreth to adopt a dialectical relationship between concrete and abstract images. That is, Gilbreth’s primary challenge, according to Hoof, was translating the concrete, detailed filmic image into an abstract one that could be grasped by workers and management alike. Doing this required a theory and practice that negotiated the material difference between these kinds of images. Moving to another kind of production—special effects—Leslie DeLassus’s essay, “Ruptured Perspectives: The ‘View,’ Early Special Effects, and Film History,” makes a surprising comparison between early special-effects shots—such as the glass shot and the matte shot—and what has become known as the “view aesthetic,” which gives the effect of a space apart from the camera, as if the image is a window. Matte shots, for example, mimic the effect of the view by inscribing viewers in the image looking at the “view” of the matte. Drawing upon Norman O. Dawn’s archive of special effects material, DeLassus emphasizes the production of special effects in early cinema to complicate our understanding of genres and spectatorial relationships. The next two chapters focus on stenciling practices and color production in early film. Jelena Rakin’s “Surface and Color: Stenciling in Applied Arts, Fashion Illustration, and Cinema” provides a technical and aesthetic account of film stenciling in France. Taking an intermedial approach, the essay examines the history of stenciling from the seventeenth century to its highpoint in the 1920s, as epitomized by Jean Saudé’s 1925 treatise on the method in the context of Art Nouveau and Art Deco applications. Having technical roots in both artisanal and industrial modes of production, the process was adapted to film in the early twentieth century; Rakin shows how the intermedial aesthetics of the process informed its application to film, particularly in the trick and fashion film genres of the silent era. Emphasizing the formal and interpretive consequences of specific production techniques, Joshua Yumibe’s “The Color Image” probes the way the processes of applied color in early cinema created specific registers of imagery through a close analysis of a fairly late example of the stenciled trick film, Gaston Velle’s 1910 Rêve d’art. Velle’s film deals with an artist and therefore self-­ consciously reflects on the making of images. As a late instance of Pathé’s stencil coloring, this film shows a change from earlier uses of applied color, showing less saturation and a more restrained palette. Color plays a key role in the film’s central dream sequence and trick effects but remains subordinate to a strong narrative line and an increased sense of naturalism. While brief, this section is key to any future research that hopes to connect image-making practices in various disciplines to commercial, educational, sponsored, and scientific filmmaking. The chapters in this section insist that these intermedial practices have aesthetic, ideological, and perhaps even social consequences.

Introduction | 7

Networks As we have seen so far, images migrate along a variety of routes in visual culture. But what are the precise connections within these routes? How does the world of painting, for example, actually connect to the world of photography and the world of film? This section emphasizes the intermedial pathways that images and practices take in their migration from medium to medium. How did form and material get from here to there? Jörg Schweinitz’s “Shared Affinities and ‘Kunstwollen’: Stylistics of the Cinematic Image in the 1910s and Art Theory at the Turn of the Century in Germany” outlines one pathway especially clearly. The chapter suggests an aesthetic zeitgeist of sorts by finding a common fascination with problems of surface and depth shared by aesthetic theorists, early film theorists, and early film directors. By comparing Adolf Hildebrand’s and Hugo Münsterberg’s ideas about pictorial form with the pictorial strategies of 1910s German melodramas, Schweinitz brilliantly demonstrates how shared approaches and ideals to image-making and viewing in turn-of-the-century Europe pointed the way for early film style. But aesthetic approaches or routes were not simply one-way. Kaveh Askari’s “Techniques in Circulation: Sovereignty, Imaging Technology, and Art Education in Qajar Iran” examines early film in Iran through its intermedial relationship to painterly traditions of the time. The reception of photographic and motion picture technology in the royal court of Iran at the turn of the last century coincided with an ongoing transformation of academic painting and art education in the country. While this shift in painting has subsequently been read in art history as retrograde—in its embrace of a nineteenth-century pictorial aesthetic instead of toward an emerging twentieth-century interest in abstraction—Askari connects these changes in painterly styles to an intermedial modernism profoundly shaped by the influx of new photographic and cinematographic technologies of representation. According to Askari, then, the relationship between painting and these newer technologies in Iran was dialectical. The next three chapters similarly underline the circulation of images across media and disciplines. Marina Dahlquist’s essay, “Corporeality and Female Modernity: Intermediality and Early Film Celebrities,” examines the relationship between a star’s “image” or persona and the actual images that circulate with the various promotional texts of fan culture. Using Pearl White and Annette Kellermann as examples, Dahlquist shows that the images in their autobiographies and in fan magazines worked to promote the stars as embodying a new ideal of femininity, at once strong and alluring—in short, exemplars of the New Woman. Ian Christie’s essay, “A Scientific Instrument? Animated Photography among Other New Imaging Techniques,” starts from an offhand and surprising mention by British film pioneer Robert Paul that he provided equipment and expertise to physicists at the turn of the century. Burrowing further, Christie

8  |  The Image in Early Cinema uncovers the context for such a remark, from Paul’s own scientific training to the use of film in popular science lectures. Along the way, Christie deftly illustrates the importance of the circulation of scientific cinematic images for research, popularization, and entertainment. Gregory A. Waller, in his essay “Advertising with Moving Pictures: International Harvester’s The Romance of the Reaper (1910–1913),” examines this multiple-media, illustrated lecture as an example of the hybridity and heterogeneity of motion picture advertising during this period. Focusing on the various venues through which these hybrid slideshows/lectures/motion picture shows circulated, Waller traces their changing narrative and distribution strategies as the source of a surprising generic flexibility. The shows were so adaptable that they were shown in fairs, expositions, vaudeville houses, agriculture colleges, courthouses, retail stores, religious camps, museums, and more—testifying also to the importance of advertising for a history of visual culture and of the cinema. The next two chapters stress the connection between serial photography, chronophotography, and motion pictures across the century. Dimitrios Latsis’ “The City View(ed): Muybridge’s Panoramas of San Francisco and Their Afterlives in Early Cinema” discusses Eadweard Muybridge’s 1877 and 1878 photographic panoramas of San Francisco and their echoes in early cinema, arguing that, in these “chrono-panoramas,” “Muybridge elaborated the technical and aesthetic stakes involved in the representation of movement in the photographic image.” Muybridge’s panoramas assembled a 360-degree view of the city from individual photos carefully fitted together. Latsis details the production, exhibition, and publication of these panoramas and the role that time and motion plays in them. The essay also traces their relationship to later motion picture panoramas of the city, both before and after the devastating 1906 earthquake. Jumping ahead to the late twentieth century, Charles Wolfe’s “California Landscapes: John Divola and the Cine-geography of Serial Photography” takes the unusual approach of relating the image in early cinema to contemporary serial photography, specifically John Divola’s work on southern Californian locations. Wolfe relates Divola’s serial photographs to such precinematic photographic series as Muybridge’s animal locomotion series. But the serial photographs of Divola also relate to early cinema topoi such as the chase and the use of receding vistas, as in films of Chaplin’s tramp, while Divolo’s use of abandoned dwellings evokes images from California slapstick by Keaton and Arbuckle. As images move from one place to the next, context is everything, as demonstrated by Frank Kessler and Sabine Lenk’s essay, “What Is a Fake Image?” It raises the question of early films of actual events that were not in fact filmed records of the events they portrayed. The authors investigate three different cases: a 1904 Selig Polyscope film, Naval Battles between the Russian and Japanese Fleets at Port Arthur and Chemulpo, which reproduces an event with miniatures;

Introduction | 9 Biograph’s 1896 McKinley at Home in Canton, Ohio, which was also exhibited as representing other events, such as the discussing of a peace treaty of the Spanish-­ American war; and finally a film of a Passion Play that was presented in New York City as representing the more famous Oberammergau production. “Fake” does not describe the nature of the film itself as much as the way it was exhibited, the authors conclude: “Images rather could become fakes, when staged or unrelated scenes were presented as actual records of a specific event.” Where and how a film was shown meant as much, if not more, than what it depicted. Artemis Willis similarly emphasizes the conditions of reception in her essay “The Lantern Image between Stage and Screen,” which asks that more attention be paid to the way lantern slide programs often presented adaptations of famous novel or plays, such as Ben Hur and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. To explore the nature of lantern slide presentation, she sets up two axes, first between the act of showing, in which slides display something, and the act of telling, in which slides form part of a narrative, and second, the spectrum from documentation to performance. The relationship between these four points can provide a means to describe different forms of lantern shows accenting the range of lantern performances and modes. These last two essays are more theoretical in their investigation of what takes an image along a particular route, but all the chapters in this section emphasize the importance of form and material as markers by which we recognize that an image has traveled at all. In other words, the historiographic task of tracing an image’s path along a network of linked media often depends on or starts with the recognition of a set of shared formal features, materials, or practices among the images in question.

Discourses Intermediality is discursive as well as practical. That is, the coexistence, superimposition, and overlap between media happen not just in spaces such as theaters, schools, and laboratories, but also in print. Indeed, what is written about images often prepares the way or documents the path of any given intermedial migration, as we see in the chapters in this section. For example, in “Pictorialism and the Picture: Art, Photography, and the ‘Doctrine of Taste’ in the Discourse on Transitional-Era Quality Films,” Tom Paulus discusses the adoption of aesthetic categories by film discourse during the transitional period. With the growth of trade journalism at the end of the first decade of the 1900s, writers turned to pictorialist and pastoral traditions to assess and promote new modes of film style that would help to integrate the emerging medium with reformist and uplift aesthetic traditions of the era. Analyzing a wide range of trade articles, Paulus delineates the variety of pictorialist landscape and fiction films gaining critical traction during the period. The rhetoric of fine art could only go so far to describe the cinematic experience, however. Ryan Pierson reexamines The Art

10  |  The Image in Early Cinema of the Moving Image in “Boredom and Visions in Vachel Lindsay’s Film Theory.” Moving beyond arguments about Lindsay’s interest in the relation of film to fine art in the era of mass culture and production, the essay takes seriously the book’s claims about cinema’s ability to reinvigorate a modern sense of wonder. Confronted with the modern problem of boredom, or ennui, Lindsay saw in cinema a means of regenerating a productive sense of wonder in a secular age. Looking at another kind of discourse—fiction—Denis Condon examines a short story in “Falling Desperately in Love with the Image on Screen: ‘The Flictoflicker Girl’ (1913) and Cinematic Structures of Fascination.” Condon uncovers the emergence of a critical discourse on spectatorship that emerged in the Irish labor press of the early 1910s. Analyzing a story published in the radical journal Irish Worker, Condon teases out its attentive, theoretical critique of the cinematic fascination with a heroine of an awestruck male spectator. Drawing connections to both the story’s contemporary labor context and later feminist film theory, the essay expands our genealogy of leftist critiques of distraction in the cinema. Finally, we end with an examination of the discourse of the nontheatrical, specifically how early film was incorporated and discussed in the domain of advertising—and how this discussion paved the way for the nontheatrical in general. Martin L. Johnson, in “An ‘Advertising Punch’ in Every Frame: Image-Making in Early Advertising Films,” places early advertising films in the context of advertising trends in general at this time, answering why motion pictures appealed—or not—to the advertiser. Advertisers skeptical of the efficacy of advertising in movie theaters, especially as programs leaned more heavily on fictional entertainment, tended to prefer nontheatrical venues, where the moving image could be an effective complement to the illustrated lecture or sales pitch. Advertisers, therefore, helped to push motion pictures beyond the walls of the theatrical. The chapters in this section focus on the discursive preparation involved in image migration and appropriation: how the written word functioned to smooth the way and describe the importance of (cinematic) images for any given group, from advertisers to workers to aesthetes. This and the previous section perhaps steer us away from form and material, properly speaking, but they also supplement our explanatory tools for understanding images and their historical context. Together these chapters provide snapshots of intermediality taken from multiple viewpoints and moments, collectively presenting a picture of image and media migration with greater clarity and depth than often found in early cinema studies. It is obvious from these cases that “intermediality” is not a state or a trend, but a description of activity that encompasses a broad range of endeavor. Indeed, it is this collection’s claim that understanding an image in early cinema necessarily implies taking this intermedial activity into account. In their quest to renew their own ventures, artists, entertainers, advertisers, educators, and scientists adopted, adapted, and transposed specific images, topoi, and practices,

Introduction | 11 thereby creating pathways between media that others followed and deepened. Discussions of these activities in the relevant literature often justified (or condemned) the appropriation, while giving ideas to other practitioners to follow a similar path or strike a new one. So through a study of form, material, networks, and discourses we can come to a better understanding of the role of images in the exchange between media. At the same time, a study of these intermedial connections provides a more thorough understanding of what an image is—and how its very form and material depend on these exchanges. These chapters also show that an image transposed from one medium to another briefly shines a bit more brightly in its new setting as its previous incarnation fades from view. This collection reminds us that, as historians, we must illuminate each frame—forward and back—in this ongoing series if we are to understand the medial transformations that motion pictures have undergone and now face.

Acknowledgments The organizers would like to gratefully acknowledge the support from the institutions and people who made this conference a success. At the University of Chicago: the David and Reba Logan Center for the Arts, the Film Studies Center, Julia Gibbs, James Lynn Rosenow, and Artemis Willis. At Northwestern University: the School of Communication, the Department of Radio/Television/ Film, the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, the Department of Art History, the Block Museum and Block Cinema, Dan Bashara, Mimi Brody, Zachary Campbell, and Leigh Goldstein. We also thank Monty George for his design work, and Terry Borton, David Drazin, Terri Kapsalis, and especially Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi for their help in staging the evening events. The editors would also like to thank Timothy Barnard and Jeffrey Moore for their translations, and Raina Polivka and Janice Frisch of Indiana University Press for making the Domitor series possible and for shepherding this volume along. Scott Curtis is Associate Professor in the Department of Radio/Television/ Film at Northwestern University. He is author of The Shape of Spectatorship: Art, Science, and Early Cinema in Germany. Philippe Gauthier lectures in cinema and media at the University of Ottawa. He is author of Le montage alterné avant Griffith. Tom Gunning is Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. He is author of D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph and The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity.

12  |  The Image in Early Cinema Joshua Yumibe is Associate Professor and Director of Film Studies at Michigan State University. He is author of Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism and coauthor of Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema.

Notes 1. Scott Curtis (Northwestern University), Tom Gunning (University of Chicago), and Joshua Yumibe (Michigan State University) comprised the Domitor 2014 Program Committee. 2. On media archaeology, see Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Cambridge, MA, London: MIT Press, 2006). On intermediality, see Hans Belting, Bild-Anthropologie: Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft (München: W. Fink, 2001) or Belting, An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body, translated by Thomas Dunlap (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). On image families, see W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). On image systems, see Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977). On an ecology of images, see Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977). 3. Hans Belting, “Image, Medium, Body: A New Approach to Iconology,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 2 (Winter 2005): 302–319, here 310. 4. Belting, “Image, Medium, Body,” 314.

Part I: Form

1

La part picturale du tableau-style Valentine Robert

L

’esthétique de l’image dans le cinéma des premiers temps s’est vue donner le nom de « tableau style », que l’on pourrait traduire littéralement par « style-­ tableau » et qui fut officialisé par la « bible » des chercheurs de Domitor, The Encyclopedia of early cinema1. La definition, détaillée par André Gaudreault, y décrit une esthétique « fondée sur l’unité d’action, d’espace et de temps, [et sur] une dynamique centripète du cadre »2. Si cette définition associe avant tout le tableau-style à la discontinuité du montage, dans A Companion to Early Cinema – que l’on pourrait appeler notre « Nouveau Testament » –, Rob King parle explicitement de « tableau style of framing »3. Et l’on a pu lire ailleurs, par exemple dans The British Cinematographer, « tableau style of staging »4. La notion qualifie donc le style visuel de l’image filmique originelle à tous niveaux (mise en scène, cadrage, montage). D’ailleurs, on trouve déjà la mention généralisée de « tableau style of filmmaking »5 dans le premier livre de Domitor – notre « Genèse » ? Cette généralisation a passé par nombre d’autres de nos « textes sacrés », à commencer par les écrits fondateurs de la définition signés par Tom Gunning6, Noël Burch7 et André Gaudreault8, que Richard Abel a synthétisés dans la formule « tableau style of autonomous shot-scenes »9. Elle connaît une sorte d’aboutissement avec le Silent Cinema Reader et sa locution globalisante de « tableau style of early films »10 (mais cela ne me fera pas dire que le Silent Cinema Reader est un livre apocalyptique). Si cette notion de tableau-style s’est imposée, c’est d’abord par sa validité historique, puisque ce terme français de « tableau » qu’on conserve intact en anglais, comme pour alléguer son caractère citationnel, était effectivement utilisé à l’époque pour décrire les premières images filmiques. « Dès le premier tableau, ‘Le repas de bébé’, toute la salle était conquise »11, dit l’un des premiers comptes-rendus du Cinématographe Lumière, qui n’a pas l’exclusivité terminologique: « Le Biographe est dès maintenant la grande attraction du jour. [. . .] Pendant vingt minutes, on assiste à une série de tableaux qui sont la vie même »12. Le terme s’applique même aux films qui ne sont pas projetés: « En introduisant dans une fente [du Kinétographe] une pièce de cinq cents, on voit aussitôt se développer toutes les phases d’un tableau animé »13. Bien sûr, « tableau » n’est pas le seul terme utilisé en français à l’époque – on parlait

16  |  The Image in Early Cinema aussi de « vues animées », de « scènes », et déjà de « films ». Mais l’appellation « tableau » se systématise avec l’avènement des films en plusieurs plans, où le mot vient désigner chaque prise de vue, que les catalogues numérotent pour parler de films « en 5/10/12 tableaux »14. En anglais, cette locution sera communément traduite par « scenes » ou par « pictures », mais on trouve parfois le mot « tableaux » intact15, que ce soit chez les représentants anglophones de Pathé16, Gaumont17, ou Méliès18. Provenant d’autres champs culturels, le terme « tableau » rattache l’image cinématographique à d’autres images, d’autres esthétiques. Le mot structure les pièces de théâtre19, et ne se limite pas aux images scéniques ; il en est de même de celles projetées, puisqu’on désigne également les plaques de lanterne magique sous le nom de « tableaux de projection »20 ou « tableaux sur verre »21. Le terme s’utilise aussi dans l’édition de lithographies (« tableaux en noir ou en couleur »22) et même pour les compositions presque vivantes des musées de cire23. « Tableau » s’utilise donc partout, il est comme le nom même de l’intermédialité. Et il est plus précisément le nom d’un pictorialisme. Car fondamentalement, le mot tableau, en français, veut dire peinture. La peinture encadrée et accrochée au mur. En réalité, si le mot s’utilise au théâtre, c’est parce qu’il règne un modèle pictural dans la dramaturgie, parce que depuis Diderot, on contemple une scène comme une toile peinte. D’ailleurs, les « tableaux » théâtraux les plus parfaits selon Diderot sont ce qu’on appelait des tableaux vivants. C’est-à-dire des moments de mise en scène où les acteurs ne se limitent pas à créer un effet pictural, mais imitent précisément une peinture célèbre, parfois même en tenant la pose plusieurs secondes, voire plusieurs minutes. Le phénomène a été théorisé par l’historien du théâtre Martin Meisel sous le nom de « realization »: ‘Realization’ [. . .] had a precise technical sense when applied to certain theatrical tableaux based on well-known pictures, [it] was in itself the most fascina­ ting of ‘effects’ on the nineteenth-century stage, where it meant both literal re-creation and translation into a more real, that is more vivid, visual, physically present medium.24

Or, ces realizations trouveront un terrain d’expérimentation privilégié au cinéma – où d’ailleurs, en français, on parle précisément de « réalisation » pour désigner la création d’images filmiques. Meisel lui-même avait parlé de cinéma, qui, fondé sur le paradoxe entre l’image fixe et animée, semblait à ses yeux l’héritier tout désigné du tableau vivant25. Mais l’état de la recherche en histoire du cinéma ne permit guère à Meisel de connaître d’autres tableaux vivants que ceux de Viridiana (Luis Buñuel, 1961) ou de MASH (Robert Altman, 1970), et il conclut que les citations picturales se concentraient dans ce cinéma pictoria­ liste postmoderne et n’étaient que « sporadiques dans les films antérieurs »26. Mais il n’en est rien, l’intuition de Meisel était juste. Le cinéma s’est réellement

La part picturale du tableau-style | 17 fait l’héritier du tableau vivant et a travaillé les realizations de manière non pas sporadique, mais primordiale. Ce n’est pas un hasard, selon moi, si l’on parle de tableau-style pour désigner le cinéma des premiers temps. Le paradigme esthétique du tableau s’est concrètement réalisé dans des imitations picturales directes. Les chercheurs sont rares qui, comme Ian Christie27, ont su ébaucher ce corpus pourtant très étendu, qui traverse tous les genres, des films bibliques aux films érotiques en passant par les films comiques et historiques28. Ces tableaux vivants filmiques problématisent de manière déterminante la forme, la matérialité et l’intermédialité de l’image dans le cinéma des premiers temps. L’un des cas les plus emblématiques est tiré d’une peinture de Jean-Léon Gérôme, Un Duel après le bal (fig. 1.1a). Il s’agit d’une scène de mort, qui pourrait paraître peu propice à une réanimation. Pourtant, en 1900, Pathé sort un film du même titre, Un Duel après le bal, dont l’enjeu est de réinscrire l’image fixe dans un mouvement gestuel et narratif. Le duel est d’abord reconstitué dans toute la vivacité de ses mouvements. Cela permet de vivre dans toute son intensité dramatique le moment où Pierrot est touché, et tombe dans les bras de ses témoins. Alors la composition picturale apparaît, les personnages se figent sous nos yeux et tiennent la pose plus de cinq secondes (fig. 1.1b)29. Le film semble s’arrêter. Mais le mouvement reprend et l’on assiste au déroulement dramatique de l’agonie et des lamentations, jusqu’à ce que Pierrot se soit définitivement écroulé à terre. Le film vient donc nous montrer l’avant et l’après du tableau, il redéploie la temporalité que la peinture de Gérôme condensait. Le travail sur la temporalité est précisément l’une des caractéristiques majeures de la peinture de Gérôme. Au XIXe siècle, la temporalité de l’image artistique se définissait essentiellement par ce que Lessing avait nommé « l’instant prégnant »: c’est-à-dire un moment artistique idéal qui condensait l’action en en suggérant l’avant et l’après dans l’imagination du spectateur30. Dominique Païni a cependant postulé que Gérôme avait rompu avec cette tradition pour développer une esthétique de « l’instant d’après », défini comme « un instant ­quelconque qui succède à ce qui aurait pu être idéal, ou prégnant »31. C’est-à-dire une sorte d’instantané photographique (voire photogrammatique) pris juste après l’instant prégnant. Dans cette peinture, Gérôme semble proposer un entre-deux de ces concepts. Certes, nous sommes après le moment fatidique. Pierrot a déjà été touché, il se meurt, le vainqueur a eu le temps de se retourner et de s’éloigner. Pourtant, il se joue bien ici un instant prégnant. La suggestion émotionnelle culmine dans ce tragique face-à-face avec la mort déguisé en comédie. De plus, Gérôme nous permet d’imaginer très précisément tout le déroulement de l’action par un subtil jeu d’indices: les deux épées, les pas dans la neige, les plumes tombées du costume de l’adversaire, la blessure. . . C’est comme si nous pouvions voir le duel dans le vide ménagé au centre, qui est comme la matérialisation spatiale

Fig. 1.1a Jean-Léon Gérôme, Duel après le bal, c.1857–1859—huile sur toile, 15.4 x 22.2 in., Baltimore, Walters Art Museum (réplique autographe du tableau de Chantilly de 1857).

Fig. 1.1b Le Duel après le bal (Pathé, 1900)—photogramme, avec l’aimable autorisation du Gosfilmofond de Russie (Fondation Nationale des archives de films).

La part picturale du tableau-style | 19 de l’ellipse temporelle32. Gérôme travaille ainsi une temporalité spécifique, qu’on pourrait appeler « l’instant prégnant d’après », en un paradoxe qui semble presque appeler la reconstitution cinématographique. Le film Pathé répond à cet appel en remettant les indices dans l’ordre. Il renchérit même par un ajout, puisqu’une femme qui n’était pas dans la peinture apparaît. Elle surgit du hors-champ, alors même que les deux adversaires de Pierrot sont en train de s’y engouffrer. Le film fait donc éclater le cadre de la peinture. Malgré leur pictorialisme et leur dynamique de tableau centripète, ces premiers films mettent déjà en place quelque chose de la tension théorique qu’a instituée André Bazin entre le cadre et le cache, c’est-à-dire entre un espace pictural clos, et un espace filmique ouvert sur un hors-champ33. Mais cette femme à la gestuelle frénétique ne brise pas seulement le cadre ; elle vient surtout rompre la pose et remettre le tableau en mouvement34, puisque ce film Pathé dramatise bel et bien un arrêt sur image. Le film fait voir et reconnaître l’image fixe. Il transgresse les lois du médium cinématographique pour matérialiser sa filiation picturale, qui est d’ailleurs proclamée dans le descriptif du catalogue: Cette scène prise en temps de neige dans un décor naturel est la reproduction exacte du tableau de Gérome qui figure dans la galerie du château de Chantilly35.

Le film fait donc explicitement référence à la peinture originale en citant son auteur et en spécifiant même son lieu d’exposition. Il est toutefois peu proba­ ble que l’équipe Pathé ait jamais mis les pieds à Chantilly36. Le film ne s’inspire assurément pas directement de la toile originale: il est pris dans l’engrenage de ses reproductions. L’œuvre de Jean-Léon Gérôme est emblématique de «l’ère de la reproductibilité technique» de Walter Benjamin37. Il est l’un des peintres qui ont le mieux exploité le contexte commercial et industriel de l’art du XIXe siècle. Allié à Goupil, le plus grand marchand et éditeur d’art de son temps, Gérôme déve­ loppe un style pictural basé sur la ligne et le réalisme presque photographique, qui permet à ses toiles d’être parfaitement reproductibles mécaniquement. Cela indignait au plus haut point Émile Zola: M. Gérome travaille pour la maison Goupil, il fait un tableau pour que ce tableau soit reproduit par la photographie et la gravure et se vende à des milliers d’exemplaires. Ici, le sujet est tout, la peinture n’est rien: la reproduction vaut mieux que l’œuvre38.

Qu’on partage ou non le mépris de Zola, on doit constater que la stratégie industrielle de Gérôme – qui lui a valu l’étiquette précinématographique de « producteur-réalisateur d’images »39 – paie. Un Duel après le bal connaît une reproduction par « cascades d’images »40, qui en font « l’un des tableaux les plus reproduits de son temps »41. Gérôme met en œuvre toutes les techniques (lithographie, eau-forte, photographie, photogravure), tous les formats (des planches à l’échelle aux cartes

20  |  The Image in Early Cinema postales), toutes les nuances (noir-blanc, brun, pierre de teinte, coloris), et tous les prix (des reproductions les plus luxueuses recherchées par la haute société aux séries industrielles distribuées en masse). Pendant plus de 30 ans, les reproductions sont incessamment relancées et imprègnent durablement l’imaginaire collectif. Lorsque Martin Scorsese, dans The Age of Innocence (1993), fait entrer son héros dans le salon d’un connaisseur, sa caméra fait un détour ostensible pour afficher en gros plan la pièce incontournable: Un Duel après le bal. Mais la répétition du tableau n’est pas le seul fait de la reproductibilité technique. L’historien d’art Stephen Bann a en effet prolongé les réflexions de Walter Benjamin en montrant que le XIXe siècle marqua l’avènement d’une « ère de la reproduction » au sens large, tant manuelle que mécanique42. Eik Kahng a même postulé que cette période vit l’émergence d’une véritable « esthétique de la répétition »43, où l’image était pensée dans la déclinaison, la transposition, l’appropriation. Un Duel après le bal en est exemplaire au point qu’il existe plusieurs originaux: Gérôme lui-même a recréé sa toile. Il a produit trois versions de taille différente44, qui varient la visibilité de l’arrière-plan et la silhouette de l’adversaire. Cette nouvelle conception du tableau donne tout son sens à la reprise de Pathé, qui s’en sert donc comme d’un tableau fait pour être reproduit, copié, adapté, et plus précisément « réalisé » en tableau vivant. La composition avait fait l’objet de nombreuses réincarnations sur scène avant d’être réinterprétée à l’écran. Deux ans à peine après l’exposition du tableau au Salon, on annonçait à Paris la représentation du Duel de Pierrot de Bridault et Legrand, pièce mimique « d’un nouveau genre »45, « tirée du fameux tableau de Gérôme »46. Ce tableau vivant fait école. On le retrouve à la fin de pièces comme Fanfan la Tulipe47 et il reste le clou de pièces dramatiques comme le Duel de Pierrot de Gustave Haller [alias George-Achille Fould] en 188148. Il fait aussi l’objet de tableaux vivants autonomes comme celui qui émerveilla Madison Square Garden en 1893: « parfait dans [son] absolue quiétude », la reconstitution du Duel se distinguait de la série en produisant « un effet douloureusement réel et cependant profondément pictural »49. On retrouve également le tableau de Gérôme dans des pantomimes comiques50, acrobatiques51 ou « à grand spectacle »52. Enfin, il est aussi joué dans les revues, par exemple dans Paris-Crinoline qui, moins d’un an après son exposition au Salon, présente sans doute le premier tableau vivant du Duel après le bal53. L’incomparable destin scénique de cette peinture de Gérôme a d’ailleurs été prédit d’emblée par Nadar, qui la caricature comme un « théâtre de guignol »54. Il devine dans la toile une sorte de tableau vivant prêt à l’emploi, fait pour être transposé dans un cadre scénique. Et la destinée de ce tableau vivant ne s’arrêtera pas au rideau, mais accèdera à l’écran. Accéder à l’écran peut devenir un moyen de retrouver un encadrement pictural doré. Car à cette époque, les images projetées s’encadrent souvent55. Les

Fig. 1.2a Edison Vitascope Company, Affiche publicitaire des projections Vitascope, c.1896—imprimé par la Metropolitan Print Company (New York), conservée à la Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/2003689462 (accès juin 2017.).

Fig. 1.2b Illustration du prospectus promotionnel The Cinerama. The Educational and Home Amusement (London: The Stress Company, s.d.), avec l’aimable autorisation de la Cinémathèque française, coll. Will Day.

22  |  The Image in Early Cinema premiers films ne prennent pas des tableaux que le nom, ils en prennent aussi le cadre – tant l’encadrement que les dorures, comme le rappelle l’affiche du Vitascope (fig. 1.2a). Charles Musser a même montré que ce cadre doré géant utilisé en 1896 autour des films Edison provenait précisément de la machinerie des tableaux vivants56. Cet usage d’encadrer l’écran, qui concrétise la définition de Tom Gunning du tableau cinématographique des premiers temps « mis en cadre plutôt qu’en récit »57, se popularise partout. Au point que lorsqu’il s’agira de penser la projection privée, le lieu qui s’imposera sera les murs du salon: on va projeter les films comme des peintures, à côté des autres tableaux, et dans les mêmes cadres (fig. 1.2b). Or, comme l’a amèrement constaté Zola, sur ces murs de salon, les peintures de Gérôme étaient omniprésentes: Il n’y a pas de salon de province où ne soit pendue une gravure représentant Le Duel au sortir d’un bal masqué [. . .], dans les ménages de garçons, on rencontre Phryné devant le tribunal [. . .]. Les gens plus graves ont Les Gladiateurs ou La Mort de César58.

Et il s’avère que le Duel n’est pas la seule peinture de Gérôme à avoir fait l’objet d’une realization au sein du cinéma des premiers temps, au contraire. Il en est exactement pareil de Phryne devant l’Aréopage59, des gladiateurs de Pollice Verso60 et de La Mort de César61. Chacun des tableaux de Gérôme cités par Zola s’est propagé des murs de salon aux écrans de cinéma. Chacune de ces peintures s’est vue devenir un « tableau » de cinéma, dans le sens pleinement pictural de cette désignation des premières images filmiques que j’espère avoir réactivé ici. Valentine Robert est Maître-assistante en Histoire et esthétique du cinéma à l’Université de Lausanne. Elle a codirigé Le film sur l’art, entre histoire de l’art et documentaire de creation et Corporeality in Early Cinema. Viscera, Skin, and Physical Form.

Notes 1. Richard Abel (dir.), Encyclopedia of Early Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2005), 209. 2. André Gaudreault, « Editing: tableau style », dans ibid., 210. 3. Rob King, « The Discourses of Art in Early Film, or, Why Not Rancière? », dans André Gaudreault, Nicolas Dulac et Santiago Hidalgo (dir.), A Companion to Early Cinema (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 158. 4. Duncan J. Petrie, The British Cinematographer (Londres: BFI, 1996), 8. 5. Expression de Peter Krämer dans Roland Cosandey, André Gaudreault et Tom Gunning (dir.), An Invention of the Devil? Religion and Early Cinema (Lausanne: Payot, 1992), 191.

La part picturale du tableau-style | 23 6. « The tableau-style of single-shot scenes » est formulé par Tom Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the origins of American narrative film: the early years at Biograph (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 37ss. Mais les occurrences courent dès ses premières conférences et articles, notamment dans « ‘Primitive’ Cinema–A Frame Up? or The Trick’s on Us », Cinema Journal 28 (hiver 1989), 3–12. 7. Le « tableau primitif » est défini comme la première caractéristique du MRP dans Noel Burch, La Lucarne de l’infini: naissance du langage cinématographique (Paris: Nathan, 1991). Cette théorie prend ancrage dans des études préalables comme « Primitivism and the Avant-Gardes: A Dialectical Approach », dans Philip Rosen (dir.), Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 483–506. 8. La notion de « tableau » émerge dès les premiers articles d’André Gaudreault qui, dans Du littéraire au filmique: système du récit (Paris/Québec: Armand Colin/Nota Bene, 1999[1988]), 28, considère que « l’acquis le plus décisif de ces dix dernières années de recherche [sur le cinéma des premiers temps est] cette ‘découverte’ de tout premier ordre relative à la conception qui aurait prévalu eu égard au plan [fonctionnant] comme un tableau autonome et autosuffisant ». 9. Richard Abel, The Ciné goes to town: French Cinema 1896–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 99. 10. Lee Grievson et Peter Krämer (dir.), The Silent Cinema Reader (Londres: Routledge, 2004), 188 (locution complète: « the tableau-style characteristic of films from earlier periods »). L’ouvrage compte plusieurs autres occurrences de « tableau style » (p. 57, p. 163, etc.) qui attestent de sa systématisation. 11. Le Stéphanois (Saint-Etienne, 27 avril 1896), 2, je souligne. 12. Le Figaro (Paris, 17 septembre 1897), 4, je souligne. 13. Frédéric Dillaye, Les Nouveautés photographiques. 3e Complément annuel à la Théorie, la Pratique et l’Art en Photographie (Paris: Librairie illustrée, 1895), 158, je souligne. 14. Voir le bilan de Karine Martinez, « La vue animée dans le discours journalistique », dans François Albera, Marta Braun et André Gaudreault (dir.), Stop Motion, Fragmentation of Time (Lausanne: Payot, 2002), 309–20. 15. Santiago Hidalgo a commenté la manière dont les premiers textes anglais sur le cinéma étaient bancals dans leur traduction de la terminologie française, « in the process creating a kind of ‘third language’ of mistranslated terms » (« Awareness of Film, Language, and Self in Early American Film Publications », dans A Companion to Early Cinema, op. cit., 210–11). 16. Aucun systématisme ne préside à ces choix de traduction qui divergent au sein d’un même catalogue, parfois sur une même page, à l’instar du Catalogue Pathé (New York, 1905), 133. 17. Winter in Switzerland (Gaumont, 1905) est ainsi présenté comme « a complete exhibition in nine remarkable tableaux » (The Elge Monthly List 66 [avril-mai 1905], 9). 18. Voir Jacques Malthète, « Détail de l’analyse des termes désignant le film chez Méliès », dans Jacques Malthète et Michel Marie (dir.), Méliès, l’illusionniste fin-de-siècle (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne nouvelle, 1997), 37–42. 19. Cet héritage théâtral a été étudié par Ben Brewster et Lea Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema. Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 20. L’Abbé Moigno, l’Art des projections (Paris: Bureau du Journal Les Mondes, 1872), 91. 21. Catalogue des tableaux sur verre pour l’enseignement par les projections A.Molteni (Paris, s.d.).

24  |  The Image in Early Cinema 22. Catalogue de l’imagerie de la Maison de la Bonne Presse (Paris, 1907), 7. 23. Le Catalogue illustré du Musée Grévin (Paris, 1891) est emblématique de cette terminologie. 24. Martin Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 30. 25. Ibid., 51. 26. Ibid., 91. 27. Ian Christie, « Painting and the Visual Arts », dans Encyclopedia of early cinema, op. cit., 493–497. 28. Voir ma thèse de doctorat L’origine picturale du cinéma. Le tableau vivant, une esthétique du film des premiers temps (2016, Université de Lausanne, dir. François Albera). 29. Je remercie pour leur aide dans la localisation de cette copie Peter Bagrov, Natalia Jakovleva, Valérie Pozner, Ivo Blom et Yuri Tsivian. 30. (Notion aussi traduite par « instant fécond ») Lessing, Laocoon [1766], trad. Courtin [1866] (Paris: Hermann, 2002), 55–57. 31. Dominique Païni, « Peindre l’instant d’après ou Gérôme cinéaste », dans Laurence des Cars, Dominique de Font-Réaulx et Edouard Papet (dir.), Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) L’Histoire en spectacle (Paris: Musée d’Orsay/Skira-Flammarion, 2010), 336. 32. Dominique de Fonts-Réaulx, « Cat. 51, Un Duel après le bal » dans ibid., 120. 33. André Bazin, « Peinture et cinéma », dans Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? vol.2, Le cinéma et les autres arts (Paris: Cerf, 1959), 128–9. 34. Cette figure vient aussi inscrire le tableau dans une temporalité narrative plus large en incarnant la cause du duel. Voir Yuri Tsivian, Immaterial bodies: a cultural analysis of early Russian films (Los Angeles: University of Southern California/Annenberg Center for Communication, 1999). 35. Catalogue Pathé (Paris, mars 1902), 8. 36. Le descriptif n’a d’ailleurs pas peur des raccourcis mensongers, puisqu’il n’est absolument pas tourné en décors naturels mais devant une toile peinte ! 37. Walter Benjamin, « L’œuvre d’art à l’ère de la reproductibilité technique (première version, 1935-dernière version, 1939) », dans Œuvres III, trad. Rainer Rochlitz (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 67–113/269–316. 38. Emile Zola, « Nos peintres au Champ de Mars [1867] », dans Ecrits sur l’art (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 184. 39. Dominique Païni, op. cit., 333. Sur cette vision précinématographique de l’œuvre de Gérôme, voir Laurent Guido et Valentine Robert, « Jean-Léon Gérôme: un peintre d’histoire présumé ‘cinéaste’ », 1895 Revue d’histoire du cinéma 63 (printemps 2011), 8–23. 40. Régine Bigorne, « A Publishing Policy », dans Gérôme & Goupil: Art and Entreprise (Paris: RMN, 2000), 88. 41. Dominique de Fonts-Réaulx, op. cit., 120. 42. Stephen Bann, Parallel Lines: Printmakers, Painters and Photographers in Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven/Londres: Yale University Press, 2001), 16. 43. Eik Kahng, « Repetition as Symbolic form », dans Eik Kahng (dir.), The Repeating Image: Multiples in French Painting from David to Matisse (Baltimore/New Haven/Londres: Walters Art Museum/Yale University Press, 2007), 13. 44. La première est à Chantilly (50x72cm), la deuxième au Musée de l’Hermitage de Saint-Petersbourg (68x99cm), et la troisième au Walters Art Museum de Baltimore (39x56cm).

La part picturale du tableau-style | 25 45. Le Ménestrel (Paris, 28 août 1859), 307. 46. Le Monde dramatique (Paris, 8 septembre 1859), 1. 47. Le Tintamarre (Paris, 6 novembre 1859), 5. 48. Cette pièce tourna avec grand succès jusqu’en 1888, mais fut vilipendée par la critique pour n’avoir « pas d’autre but » que de « reproduire en tableau vivant le chef d’œuvre de Gérôme ». L’Orchestre (Paris, 3 août 1881), 2. 49. The Sun (New York, 9 avril 1893), 6. 50. Le Figaro (14 mars 1889), 3. 51. Les acrobates Hanlon-Lee expliquent que la pantomime qu’ils performent jusque devant le grand-duc de Russie leur a été directement inspirée par « le fameux tableau de Gérôme ». Le Figaro (20 octobre 1879), 1. 52. L’Orchestre (15 septembre 1894), 4. 53. Roger de Beauvoir, Paris-Crinoline: revue en trois tableaux (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1858), 5. 54. Nadar, Nadar jury au Salon de 1857: 1000 comptes rendus, 150 dessins (Paris: Librairie nouvelle, 1857), 9. 55. Voir Judith R. Buchanan, « Un cinéma impur: framing film in the early film industry », in Steven Allen and Laura Hubner, eds., Framing Film: Cinema and the Visual Arts (Bristol: Intellect, 2012), 239–260. 56. Charles Musser, « A Cornucopia of Images: Comparison and Judgement across Theater, Film and the Visual Arts during the Late Nineteenth Century », dans Nancy Mowll Matthews et Charles Musser (dir.), Moving Pictures: American Art and Early Film, 1880–1910 (Manchester: Hudson Hills Press, 2005), 8. 57. Tom Gunning, « ‘Primitive’ Cinema – A Frame Up ? », op. cit., 10. 58. Emile Zola, op. cit., 184. 59. Le Jugement de Phryné (Pathé, 1897) consiste entièrement en une realization de cette toile de 1861. 60. Les reprises multiples de cette peinture de 1872 culminent dans le film Quo vadis? (Enrico Guazzoni, 1913). Voir Ivo Blom, « Quo vadis? From Painting to Cinema and Everything in Between », dans Leonardo Quaresima et Laura Vichi (dir.), The Tenth Muse: Cinema and Other Arts (Udine: Forum, 2001), 281–92. 61. Le tableau vivant de cette peinture de 1867 dans Julius Ceasar (J. Stuart Blackton et William V. Ranous, 1908) a été analysé par Roberta E. Pearson et William Uricchio, Reframing Culture: the case of Vitagraph quality films (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 87–95.

2

The Unsettling of Vision: Tableaux Vivants, Early Cinema, and Optical Illusions Daniel Wiegand

The emergence of film at the end of the nineteenth century enabled a visual

experience that, for many observers, was characterized by a certain unsettledness, an ambiguity between the images’ actual flatness and the impression of volume and depth they created. While this tension had certainly existed within earlier forms of image-making, the projection of luminous and moving photographic images defined it in a new and radical way, introducing what Antonia Lant has described as a “novel spatiality” into visual culture. As she puts it, film proved to be “an utterly flat medium of presentation, insubstantial, without texture or material, and yet evoking, in a wafer, a fuller illusion of the physicality and exactness of human beings than any prior art.”1 While Lant relates this general quality of film images to the contemporary discourse on “haptical” perception, this chapter will focus on films that self-consciously presented optical illusions and highly ambiguous images— often images within the film image, such as paintings or posters—hovering between volume and flatness. As I will demonstrate, visual ambiguity in these films became an attraction in itself while triggering scenarios of visual deception. Furthermore, I will argue that many of these playful explorations of visual uncertainty explicitly referred to and made use of the stage practice of tableaux vivants. As will become apparent, these imitations of artworks by live actors were not only situated within the context of high art and classical aesthetics but also firmly embedded within popular culture and, more specifically, within a tradition of ambiguous images that chiefly strove to entertain.

Visual Experiments at Biograph The Model, a film produced by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company in 1897, shows an artist at work in his studio. The surviving three frames from the Biograph Photo Catalog (fig. 2.1) and the description from the Biograph Picture Catalog suggest that there is no further plot ­development.2 The live model, clad

The Unsettling of Vision  |  27

Fig. 2.1 Frames from The Model (Biograph 1897, left) and His Masterpiece (Biograph 1899, right) as printed in the Biograph Photo Catalog, Vol. 1, No. 1–499 (retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3V988DP) and Vol. 3, No. 1002–1502 (retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.7282/T33T9HJ3).

28  |  The Image in Early Cinema in a white leotard signifying nudity, and the almost finished painting are set up next to each other, facing the camera frontally, thereby provoking spectators to let their eyes wander between the two. It is as if the “intellectually active processes of comparison and judgment” that Charles Musser attributes to early film spectators with regard to their prowess in intermedial culture,3 were addressed here by one cinematic shot, provoking a mode of reception that art historian Victor I. Stoichita refers to as the “inquiring eye,” a wandering gaze that eagerly absorbs the various “images within images” presented.4 Even if The Model with its rather sparse mise-en-scène is a far cry from the painted cabinets of curiosity analyzed by Stoichita, it still encourages spectators to explore and enjoy the various similarities and differences between the two figures. It is remarkable in this respect that despite some obvious deviations (most noticeably the size), there is a strong alignment between the two, with the figure in the painting standing out in stark relief against the background in a way similar to the real figure while both of them are part of the same plane surface of the film image. The artist seems to serve as a stand-in for the film spectators and their “inquiring eyes,” moving from one figure to the other, scrutinizing them from various distances, perhaps checking on how close the painting has come to the original. It is revealing to compare this film to His Masterpiece, another Biograph production apparently shot two years later, which has a very similar setting and even uses the same small painting as a prop (fig. 2.1). Again the painting is positioned immediately next to a real posing model, and again it seems that the filmmakers deliberately made the two figures look alike, thereby creating slight ­ambiguities—the surviving film print even reveals painted shadows on the model’s leotard. However, roles have been somewhat reversed. As opposed to the former film, the actress does not play a real model but the figure in another painting. It is as if the visual ambiguities only implicit in The Model had now been turned into a genuine optical illusion: a live actress only pretending to be a flat painting. Similar to some of the trick films by Georges Méliès from about the same period, the ambiguity inherent in the “false” painting, while still being presented to film spectators as a visual attraction, is transferred to the diegetic world of the film by becoming the nucleus of a rudimentary plot: when the figure in the painting begins to move and slightly turns her head, the painter is, for a short while, unsure whether or not he can trust his senses (until he eventually decides for the former and embraces the figure). So while the shift from The Model to His Masterpiece can certainly be understood in terms of early cinema’s penchant for remakes, it goes beyond a mere variation of an established pattern. The differences rather affect the basic structure of the film and almost bring about a change in genre. Even if no cinematic tricks—like the stop trick for instance—are used, His Masterpiece’s emphasis on illusion, animation, and sudden transformation reveals its kinship with the trick film, emerging in just these years.

The Unsettling of Vision  |  29

Tableaux Vivants: Illusion-as-Attraction There are several links between films like The Model and His Masterpiece and the stage practice of tableaux vivants or “living pictures,” as they were commonly referred to at the time.5 The actresses in these films with their characteristic leotards, standing still and posing as (or for) a painting, could easily be identified by contemporary spectators as tableaux vivant models even without any explicit reference in the film title (which was given in other cases such as A Living Picture Model Posing before a Mirror, Biograph 1897). Tableaux vivants were imitations of paintings or sculptures staged by living but motionless models, originally shown privately in aristocratic and high-bourgeois drawing rooms but later increasingly exhibited in public venues such as variety theatres, vaudeville houses, and music halls around the world, culminating in the enormous popularity of tableaux vivants in the years around 1900.6 Some of these acts, like those by German entrepreneur Henry de Vry, staged large paintings with up to thirty performers, making use of painted backdrops, stage machinery, and elaborate lighting effects. Smaller ensembles of three to four, like the 3 Olympier, usually posed as groups of sculptures, sometimes combining tableaux vivants with acrobatic acts or dance. Single performers, mostly either beautiful women or strongmen—and often in the nude—were also very popular.7 Within the context of bourgeois entertainment culture, tableaux vivants were frequently used to present the larger variety theatres, with their patrons from higher social strata, as places of art and refinement.8 At the same time, however, they were astonishing attractions that addressed spectators’ visual curiosity and adhered to the logic of the spectacle. With their display of nude bodies, performers capable of perfect physical standstill, and spectacular decor and lighting effects as well as the latest stage machinery, tableaux vivants around 1900 were not some odd leftover from nineteenth-century drawing room culture but an up-to-date stage attraction, firmly embedded within the international culture of display. Part of tableaux vivants’ attraction lay in their astonishing resemblance to real artworks and in their potential to play on visual perception. Advertisements and reports in the variety theater trade press frequently claimed that audiences were temporarily enticed to believe they were looking at real artworks rather than living beings. One advertisement for the famous tableaux vivants trio The Seldoms­ maintained that “you don’t think you see living people but masterpieces created by the greatest sculptors.”9 The illusory effect seems to have been even more spectacular when trained animals like dogs and horses were involved, as is indicated by an advertisement claiming that “the horse Loky is standing in a pose of such complete standstill that every spectator must be in doubt if he sees a living horse or one carved from stone.”10 As with other media of illusion, anecdotes of deception were spread in the trade press, often making fun of gullible and less-educated

30  |  The Image in Early Cinema spectators, as in a report on a show of tableaux vivants on a British music hall stage, “Two Germans were standing next to me. . . . One of them (he looked a bit dumb) just couldn’t believe that the ‘marble sculptures’ were not made of marble. It took some time for his friend to convince him that they were really girls.”11 These anecdotes did not only involve the lower educated but also those who were considered to be the authorities in the field of aesthetics. As one advertisement claimed, even famous sculptor Reinhold Begas “didn’t believe that these were living people until they moved,”12 and fellow artist Wilhelm Krumm was quoted affirming that “if he didn’t know that they were real, even an artist could be deceived thanks to the lighting effects and watching from some distance.”13 It may of course be doubted if many spectators were truly deceived by the posing figures, but as these sources indicate, tableaux vivants were at least presented and advertised as shows of optical illusions. This was surely done to underline the artistic value of the shows (“so artistic that you even take them for real sculptures”), but the comments in the trade press also reveal what Tom Gunning calls the “the entertaining pleasure of uncertainty and ambiguity,” a typically modern pleasure based on the very knowledge that one’s senses are fooled.14 While tableaux vivants can therefore certainly be linked to other turn-of-the-century shows of illusions (such as stage magic), they produced their own specific temporality. Spectators were probably not so much left in doubt if what they saw was possible as they were supposed to switch between one way of seeing (“image”) and another (“living people”), either as a sudden revelation that they had been deceived (indicated by some of the sources), as a skeptical gaze weighing the options, or as some kind of a playful dialog with the tableaux vivants, consciously switching back and forth between the two ways of seeing. In that sense, the temporal structure inherent in the perception of tableaux vivants bears a certain resemblance to conceptions of so-called aesthetic illusion as discussed in art theory at the time by theoreticians like Konrad Lange in Germany. Lange in his book Das Wesen der Kunst [The Nature of Art] construes illusion as the basic mental process involved in the perception of artworks, describing it as a “pendular movement,” a continuous “transposition going on in the consciousness of the viewer, when the perceived material object [e.g., a painting] is exchanged with its content.”15 Lange, a professor of aesthetics at the University of Tübingen (and later a fervent opponent of the notion of film as art) had practical experience with staging tableaux vivants, citing them as prime examples of so-called inverted illusion: while paintings are flat and give the impression of three-dimensionality, tableaux vivants, on the contrary, are formed by groups of solid bodies but are supposed to give the impression of a plane surface.16 To optimize this effect, various strategies had indeed been developed throughout the nineteenth century: the arrangement of the actors in a

The Unsettling of Vision  |  31 large picture frame; the arrangement of the audience in a delimited area to avoid extreme angles that would destroy the illusion; specific kinds of lighting; and sometimes even a veil hung before the stage, reducing the figures’ appearance of three-dimensionality.17 Despite the fact that tableaux vivants could be cited to illustrate concepts in academic art theory, the discourse surrounding their presentation in amusement venues such as vaudeville theatres seems in many cases far removed from conceptions of aesthetic illusion as fostered by Lange and others. Whereas these theorists strove to construct an autonomous perceiving subject capable of aesthetic judgment, the cited sources from the trade press rather reveal an enjoyment in the unsettling of vision and even in the possibility of genuine deception. In that respect, tableaux vivants should rather be situated within a tradition of ambiguous images from the realm of popular culture, such as the numerous picture puzzles, multistable images, and hidden images, which abound in illustrated magazines at the end of the nineteenth century. One example would be the famous “duck-rabbit” from 1892, which can be seen as either a duck or a rabbit (but never as both simultaneously) and which was later cited by Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein to elucidate his concept of Aspektwechsel, the sudden and surprising switch from one way of seeing to another, accompanied by a “cry of recognition”, “A rabbit! etc.”18

Tableaux Vivants in Film Wittgenstein’s “cry of recognition” marks the illusion in ambiguous images like the duck-rabbit or tableaux vivants as the seed of surprise and enjoyment in sudden revelations. Early cinema continued this tradition in genres such as the trick film, the féerie, and the comedy, and it did so in many cases by incorporating staging practices of tableaux vivants from the variety theatre. For instance, each shot in the Gaumont dance film Porcelaines tendres (Emile Cohl, 1909) shows a completely static tableau vivant in which the actors pose as porcelain figurines for at least ten seconds before they eventually start to dance. The film’s advertisement in Moving Picture World puts emphasis on this aspect of illusion-as-­ attraction, “A Gaumont in which mysticism is developed. A number of pieces of beautiful Sèvres porcelain are shown in series, and in each instance the pieces of ware are in reality composed of living people. When the pieces disintegrate into the original models who pose in various dances and drills the surprise of the audience is marked.”19 While Porcelaines tendres exhibits living bodies posing as three-dimensional figures, many early films played with the double nature of the tableau vivant oscillating between flatness and volume. French trick films and féeries by Georges Méliès (e.g., Le portrait mystérieux, 1899; La Fée Carabosse, 1903), Gaston Velle (e.g., La valise de Barnum, 1904; La garde fantôme, 1905) and Segundo de Chomón

32  |  The Image in Early Cinema

Fig. 2.2 The first tableau vivant from Living Pictures. “By the sea” and “The Tempest” (Biograph, 1900), later rereleased and copyrighted in the compilation Living Pictures (1903). Courtesy Library of Congress.

(e.g., Hallucination musicale, 1906) show various examples of convincingly ambiguous images for which it is indeed difficult to say (at least for some time) whether they are posed by live actors or if they are only flat images. As we saw before, the Biograph Company, being in constant exchange with New York’s vaudeville houses, used tableaux vivants from early on to create visual ambiguities. In fact, the company produced and distributed whole a series of “living picture” films between 1900 and 1903, showing similarly clothed models posing as famous paintings in a picture frame (fig. 2.2). In these films, the models do not move at all (the only moving element are two pages, opening and closing the curtain), making it in some cases almost impossible to tell whether they are real or not. In all these films, the illusion-as-attraction clearly solicits the film spectators, with the ambiguous images being frontally arranged toward the camera in direct address, but in some cases, they also involve diegetic characters. In Kiss Me (Biograph, 1904), we see a fake billboard with several posters advertising burlesque shows. One of the figures is a real woman standing in a space cut out from the wall (fig. 2.3).20 The dark background, of the same color as her dress, is reminiscent of certain trompe-l’œil paintings—usually derided or ignored by official

The Unsettling of Vision  |  33

Fig. 2.3 Kiss me (Biograph 1904). Courtesy Library of Congress.

art theory around 1900—which often utilized dark backgrounds to underline the effect of the figure reaching out of or even leaving the picture frame, such as in the famous Escaping Criticism (1874) by Pere Borrell del Caso. While this never happens in Kiss Me, the dark background still gives relief to the figure and suggests the possibility of a three-dimensional, living body. Even more so, the poster toys with the idea of a ripped-off surface, which is mirrored in the jagged outlines on the adjacent poster on the left. As the film proceeds, an old man and his wife enter the frame, with the husband obviously getting interested in the female figure as she pouts her lips and beckons him over, just until the old lady prevents him from taking further steps. It is impossible to recount what is actually happening here: is the old man hallucinating? Is the poster really coming alive? Is it really a person standing in a nook, trying to irritate passers-by? Attempts to pin down the film on any of these explanations seem futile because it is apparently less aimed at telling a coherent story than at exhibiting an ambiguous image-­ as-attraction and channeling this ambiguity towards a diegetic character, who accordingly becomes the butt of the joke.

34  |  The Image in Early Cinema The scenarios of deception enacted in these films—their playful, unruly, and often ironic tone, and last but not least their toying with erotic and voyeuristic concerns—set them apart from debates surrounding notions of aesthetic illusion in art theory, illuminating that they were rather indebted to a tradition of popular images in which the sudden discovery that visual objects may be different from what they seem and that one’s own senses (and those of others) are fallible became a source of pleasure, amusement, and laughter. In ways similar to tableaux vivants and other forms of multistable images, these films addressed a scrutinizing, maybe even suspicious gaze that enjoyed exploring visual paradoxes and shifts in perception. It is important to notice, however, that in doing so, early films did not only harken back to already existing forms of optical illusion but tested out their own capacity to create images lingering in uncertainty—who knows, maybe the flirting model will not only leave the billboard but the cinema screen as well. Daniel Wiegand is a postdoctoral researcher at Stockholm University. He is author of Gebannte Bewegung: Tableaux vivants und früher Film in der Kultur der Moderne, and editor with Jörg Schweinitz of Film Bild Kunst: Visuelle Ästhetik im vorklassischen Stummfilm.

Notes 1. Antonia Lant, “Haptical Cinema,” October 74 (Fall 1995), 45. 2. Biograph Photo Catalog Vol. 1, (1898–1905); Biograph Picture Catalog (1902), 14. 3. Charles Musser, “A Cornucopia of Images,” in Moving Pictures: American Art and Early Film 1880–1910, ed. Nancy Mowll Mathews and Charles Musser (Manchester/ Vermont: Hudson Hills, 2005), 160. See also Musser, “A Cinema of Contemplation, A Cinema of Discernment: Spectatorship, Intertextuality and Attractions in the 1890s,” The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Strauven (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 159–179. 4. Victor I. Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image: An Insight Into Early Modern Meta-Painting (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 146. 5. For a discussion of the relationship between tableaux vivants, early cinema, and the motif of the animated painting or sculpture, see chapter 2 in Lynda Nead, The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography, Film c. 1900 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), 45–104. For the general use of tableaux vivants and living sculptures in early cinema see Vito Adriaensens and Steven Jacobs, “The Sculptor’s Dream: Tableaux Vivants and Living Statues in the Films of Méliès and Saturn,” Early Popular Visual Culture 13, no. 1 (2015): 41–65; and Daniel Wiegand, Gebannte Bewegung: Tableaux vivants und früher Film in der Kultur der Moderne (Marburg: Schüren, 2016). 6. My research in the German variety theatre trade press has revealed over one hundred international acts active between 1890 and 1914.

The Unsettling of Vision  |  35 7. The imitation of sculptures was sometimes referred to as poses plastiques as opposed to tableaux vivants, the imitation of paintings. 8. See Daniel Wiegand, “Früher Film, Tableaux vivants und die ‘Attraktion des Schönen’: Archäologie eines diskursiven, bildgestalterischen und rezeptionsästhetischen Phänomens,” Film Bild Kunst: Visuelle Ästhetik im vorklassischen Stummfilm, ed. Jörg Schweinitz, Daniel Wiegand (Marburg: Schüren, 2015). 9. Advertisement, Das Programm 109 (1904). 10. Quoted from Joseph Garncarz, Maßlose Unterhaltung: Zur Etablierung des Films in Deutschland 1896–1914 (Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld, 2010), 25. 11. “Londoner Brief: The Living Pictures,” Der Artist 481 (1894). 12. Quoted from: Wolfgang Jansen, Das Varieté: Am Beispiel der Berliner Entwicklung (PhD thesis: Freie Universität Berlin, 1989), 358. 13. “Aus dem Künstlerleben,” Der Artist 1025 (1904). 14. Tom Gunning, “Phantasmagoria and the Manufacturing of Illusion and Wonder: Towards a Cultural Optics of the Cinematic Apparatus,” The Cinema, a New Technology for the 20th Century, ed. André Gaudreault, Catherine Russell and Pierre Véronneau (Lausanne: Éditions Payot, 2004), 40. See also Gunning’s “An aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator,” Viewing Positions, Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers, 1995), 114–133, especially 116–119. 15. Konrad Lange, Das Wesen der Kunst: Grundzüge einer illusionistischen Kunstlehre, 2nd ed. (Berlin: G. Grote, 1907), 74, 257. 16. Ibid., 507. 17. See Birgit Jooss, Lebende Bilder: Körperliche Nachahmungen von Kunstwerken in der Goethezeit (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1999), 164–172. 18. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ed. P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, 4th ed. (Chichester/Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) 208e; and Wittgenstein, Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, Volume 1, Preliminary Studies for Part 2 of Philosophical Investigations, ed. Georg Henrik von Wright and Heikki Nyman, (Chicago/ Oxford: Chicago University Press/Blackwell, 1982), 63e. 19. Moving Picture World 5, no. 11 (1909): 347. 20. The name Rose Sydell written underneath the poster refers to a famous burlesque star known, among other things, for her tableaux vivants. Biograph had already explored the idea of the living poster in three films from 1899: The Poster Girls, The Poster Girls and the Hypnotist, and A Midnight Fantasy. In these films, the models pose in front of poster backgrounds instead of standing in a nook.

3

The Vision Scene: Revelation and Remediation Frank Gray

The vision scene is a particular visual trope that has had a long presence within

the histories of Western visual art, photography, theater, and film. It was employed visually and narratively to represent either a character’s thoughts and feelings or her/his encounters with the divine and the supernatural. The depicted vision could be of many things—memories, dreams, nightmares, anxieties, or desires. Usually the visionary and her/his vision were composed within the same picture plane (or scene), with the vision presented either as an integrated element of the main image/scene or as a separate yet contiguous second image/scene (a picture-­ within-a-picture). The presence of the vision scene, therefore, created a symbiotic relationship between itself and the main image. The two images (or scenes) were conjoined, copresent, and codependent, and as such, they together represented a hybrid image that existed because of this relationship and this combination of elements. Here might be, simultaneously, the dreamer and the dreamed, the conscious and the unconscious, and the natural and the supernatural. This chapter is dedicated to understanding the multiple uses and manifestations of the vision scene in the nineteenth century and its emergence into film practice in the early twentieth century. It was particularly prominent in this period, as it was found across a considerable range of two-dimensional media (paintings, watercolors, prints, photographs, book illustrations, stereographs, and postcards) as well as in the narrative-based and temporally driven practices of theatre, opera, the magic lantern, and film. The dream, in particular, is the subject that dominates a great deal of this visual imagery. The late eighteenth century witnessed a fascination with visions and their depiction through the media of painting, print, watercolor, and the phantasmagoria. Romantic artists such as Blake, Fuseli, and Goya and their apparitions are central to this history. The visions in this period were not only inspired by canonical literature but also drawn from the artists’ own imagination. Jacob’s dream from the Old Testament is a good example of the former. It provided the impetus for William Blake’s Jacob’s Dream, a watercolor of about 1799–1806.1 Jacob lies asleep in the foreground and above him arises the spiral ladder that unifies the

The Vision Scene  |  37 earth with heaven. For Jacob, this dream vision was proof of the existence of the spiritual realm; here was the ladder to heaven and to God. (Gustave Doré’s wood engraving of the same scene would feature within his collection of illustrations for the English Bible in 1868.) By contrast, Henry Fuseli’s iconic painting The Nightmare (1782) is overtly secular, sexual, and demonic in nature. He fashioned a terrifying dream that marries a sleeping young woman with an incubus on her chest and a wild-eyed peering horse.2 Equally famous is The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, Francisco Goya’s aquatint from 1797–99. Its commentary states, “Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the source of their wonders.”3 All three examples bring together the dreamer and the dreamed into a single unified composition, and they offered a compositional framework in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for the representation of the dream, most notably within two subjects—the Soldier’s Dream and the Artist’s Dream. It is within these two dream tropes that the formal device of the picture-within-a-picture (the double image) would become very prominent. The Soldier’s Dream has an intermedial history that encompasses painting, engraving, ceramics, and film. Often this double image was placed within the context of accompanying prose, poetry, music, and song. J. M. W. Turner’s watercolor, The Soldier’s Dream, about 1835, is one of earliest examples. It was executed as part of his creation of a series of twenty vignettes for the anthology, The Poetical Works of Thomas Campbell (1837), which included Campbell’s poem The Soldier’s Dream of 1804. The poem had been written during the British involvement in the Napoleonic wars. Turner’s watercolour presents a soldier on duty at nighttime and below him his vision—a scene of home and family bathed in sunlight.4 Subsequent appearances of the Soldier’s Dream would offer variations on the same composition and resonate with contemporary military conflicts. For example, the woodcut The Soldier’s Dream was published in the weekly British periodical Punch in 1854. Set at the very start of the Crimean War, the sleeping soldier dreams of two contrasting events: his service on the front line and the penury faced by soldiers’ families at home.5 A year later, Edward Goodall created The Soldier’s Dream of Home (1855), a mezzotint based upon a design by his son Frederick and also inspired by Campbell’s poem. Out of the smoke from the night fire, the dream image of home hovers above the sleeping soldier.6 It is highly likely that this Soldier’s Dream, both as a print and as a hand-painted lantern slide, influenced the creation of American versions that circulated throughout the American Civil War, such as Nathaniel Currier and James Merritt Ives’ lithograph, The Soldier’s Dream of Home (ca. 1861–1865).7 Edouard Detaille’s painting, The Dream (1888) brought a new sense of monumentality and national purpose to the Soldier’s Dream. This vast work (300 cm × 400 cm) depicts French soldiers sleeping and their dream of rising up

38  |  The Image in Early Cinema against Germany and restoring honor to the nation after the defeat of 1870–1871. Its political capital was established through its purchase by the French state, its exhibition at the Musée du Luxembourg and its subsequent long circulation as a print and as a postcard.8 More generally, postcards from the 1890s to the First World War would also exploit the subject of the Soldier’s Dream as would the variant—a soldier’s family and its dream of their loved one serving in the armed forces. The increasing popularity and familiarity of the Soldier’s Dream no doubt influenced the production of Robert Paul’s two-scene film, His Mother’s Portrait; or, The Soldier’s Vision (1900). A wounded British soldier during the Anglo-Boer War dreams of his “mother at home praying for her son,” and his vision of her appears above him in the sky.9 He is rescued and it is discovered that the metal-cased portrait of his mother that he takes from her on his departure from England for South Africa (scene 1) has saved his life. Paul, in this instance, inserted the vision into a defined film narrative and, by doing so, used the new medium of film to provide a structured dramatic context for the dream vision’s use. The Soldier’s Dream presents a very particular social and military iconography, where the vision worked to serve the narratives of nation, war, patriotism, and family. Akin to the Soldier’s Dream is the Artist’s Dream. Various iterations of it are found throughout the nineteenth century and like the Soldier’s Dream, the double image of the dreamer and the dreamed (the picture with a picture) is very prominent. Three early Victorian painters played a significant role in the establishment of this trope. Charles Eastlake’s The Artist’s Dream (1845) features a sleeping artist imagining being awarded a prize by the Queen. Edward Henry Corbould’s The Artist’s Dream (ca. 1853) presents an artist asleep in front of his easel and a dream image of his visual world, uniting elements of the natural and the supernatural. John Anster Fitzgerald’s The Artist’s Dream (1857) is very similar. Its composition is effectively divided in two. On the right-hand side, in focus, is the artist asleep in his chair. On the left, in soft focus, is his ethereal dream of himself painting a model while elves and goblins encircle him.10 In 1893, the magician David Devant devised in a most spectacular fashion a stage interpretation of this trope for London’s Egyptian Hall. Entitled The Artist’s Dream, this dramatized magic act introduced the artist mourning the loss of his late wife as he sits next to his full-length portrait of her. While he sleeps, his dream is revealed to the audience when his wife materializes out of the painting and onto the stage, where she offers him consoling words.11 A version of Devant’s illusion was presented in New York in the next year by the magician Professor Hermann. Charles Musser has identified it as an important source for An Artist’s Dream/ The Artist’s Dream, the seventy-five-foot, single-shot film made for the Edison Company in early 1900. The film represents a very early instance of the Artist’s Dream on film. As the artist sleeps, the Devil orchestrates a set of fantastic and

The Vision Scene  |  39 frenzied actions made possible on film by stop motion. The Artist’s Dilemma (1900) by J. Stuart Blackton and Albert E. Smith for Edison is similar in both nature and form.12 What is important to mark is that Devant and the filmmakers were introducing a vision scene into a temporal, narrative space. As such, they were both reimagining and animating the Artist’s Dream. In his study of the relationship between nineteenth-century theater and early cinema, Nicholas Vardac drew attention to the vision scene, or vision effect as he called it, as a significant part of the spectacle of the Victorian stage, emphasizing its use in the work of Boucicault, Irving, and within pantomime. Vardac described the vision scene as, “the popular method for depicting the internal state of a character.”13 The ubiquity of the vision scene suggests that theater audiences were familiar with this trope and its function. Charles Kean’s London production of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII in 1855 is an intriguing example. It created the moment of Queen Catherine’s death and the arrival of angels possibly either through the use of Pepper’s Ghost (a mirror below stage and angled glass on stage) or the projection of lantern slides, or conceivably a mixture of the two. It was resonant with earlier interpretations of the very same supernatural scene in paint (Fuseli) and watercolor (Blake).14 Probably the most enduring vision scene for the British stage was the one created by the actor-manager Henry Irving for his own play, The Bells. Performed continuously for over 30 years (from 1871 to 1905), the scene appeared at the end of Act 1 and was captured in an engraving from December 1871.15 Mathias in the present, on stage in the foreground downstage left, remembers his past: the moment he murdered and robbed Koveski, the Polish Jew. This memory is visualized and dramatized on stage by being presented as a separate site of action behind Mathias. The audience was therefore confronted, simultaneously, with Mathias’ present and his past. This embedded vision scene represented an externalization of his suppressed memory. The migration of the vision scene across the nineteenth century from its use within the two-dimensional imagery of paintings and prints to its employment within the multidimensional spaces of the stage and the screen was motivated very clearly by a recognition of its dramatic value, a desire to reconfigure it within a narrative structure and to reimagine it through the uses of stagecraft, stage magic, and the newly invented special effects for film (stop motion). As intimated above, vision imagery also has a defined place within the histories of photography and photography-related media: the magic lantern, the stereograph, and the postcard. These histories are significant because they all combined not only to spread an awareness of the vision scene as a formal device among photographers but also, through its many applications, to further establish its public currency. The photographic vision usually consisted of a main image to which other elements were added through superimposition in order to create a new, formally unified and enigmatic whole. It was these superimposed elements

40  |  The Image in Early Cinema that could also alter and make strange the main image. This multiple-image work was usually created either through the combination of properly exposed and underexposed elements onto the same negative in-camera or through the creation of a composite image by the combination of two or more negatives onto the same positive plate/paper. Composite photography, what we would now refer to as photomontage, became very well established within Victorian photography. It was through an understanding of this practice that vision scenes were incorporated into photography. Henry Peach Robinson, a British photographer, was an important advocate of composite photography. He was instrumental in cultivating its importance and employing his term for the concept: combination printing. His public lectures, articles, many publications beginning with Pictorial Effect in Photography (1869), and the exhibition of his own photographs all contributed to the development and professionalization of photographic culture in Britain. Robinson believed that photography could aspire to become a new art form through the combination of elements and that this should become an essential part of the photomechanical image-making process. It was for him, “a method which enables the photographer to represent objects in different planes in proper focus, to keep the true atmospheric and linear relation of varying distances, and by which a picture can be divided into separate portions for execution, the parts to be afterwards printed together on one paper.”16 Fading Away (1859), with its marriage of five separate negatives, exemplified his refined approach and demonstrated, for Robinson, composite photography’s value and potential. From his purist perspective, he was also concerned about the misuse of composite photography. He said, “It is true that combination printing, allowing, as it does much greater liberty to the photographer, and much greater facilities for representing the truth of nature, also admits, from these very facts, of a wide latitude for abuse.”17 The wide-spread adoption of composite photography or combination printing of course nurtured the very “abuse” that Robinson feared, especially through the advent of trick photography, spirit photography, and photographically created vision scenes. The magic lantern, as a technology and as a cultural practice, became an important site both for the use and display of combination printing and, through it, the realization of vision scenes. For example, the English company Bamforth produced a range of commercial, photographic lantern slide sets in the late nineteenth century dedicated to the use of this trope. As in photography, the magic lantern vision was created through the use of superimposition in the creation of a composite single slide. In addition, the lanternist, by using either multiple lanterns or a lantern with multiple lenses, could also create a layered image made up of different slides that would combine on screen. This live vision mixing enabled angels, for example, to appear and disappear within the context of a vision slide sequence. Three examples from Bamforth identify this English company’s

The Vision Scene  |  41 characteristic use of the vision scene. In Catterina: A Pathetic Story (1893), an old man tells children stories from the New Testament, and as he speaks, illustrations of these wonders appear within the composition on the door to his right and dissolve in and out of view. In this case, the image of the speaker and listeners formed a master image that remained constant on the screen while the biblical illustrations were superimposed sequentially onto a section of this master image. The result was to imagine that the set of second images were the ones the children imagined as they listened to the stories. In Daddy (1896), a father and his daughter sit within an interior and mourn the loss of his wife and her mother. In a composite slide, the departed relative appears as an angel above them. Come Back to Erin (1902) depicts a young man sitting by a fireside remembering his loved one and hoping that she returns to him in Erin/Ireland. His thought is made tangible by a slide that combines this same scene with an image of his beloved hovering above him.18 These uses of the vision scene by lanternists were also utilized by early filmmakers. George Albert Smith, the English magic lanternist and filmmaker, is a key figure in relation to the introduction of the vision scene into film. Vision scenes played an integral role in four films that Smith made in 1898: Santa Claus, Cinderella, Faust and Mephistopheles, and The Corsican Brothers. These one-minute, silent film versions of established stories concentrated on those key “vision” moments within the original source texts that were the most magical in nature. In Smith’s films, the vision scene was the product of double printing and, with the visual evidence from the surviving two films Santa Claus and Cinderella, it is revealed as an inset second image within a circular mask that was positioned in the upper right-hand side of the frame. In each film, the vision appeared momentarily on a dark ground within the main image, actions took place within it, and then it disappeared. Santa Claus had its origins in the poem Twas the Night before Christmas (1822) and had become a popular subject within illustrated children’s books. The use of the vision in Santa Claus involves two children asleep in their bedroom on Christmas Eve. It was described as a “dream-vision . . . showing Santa Claus on the housetops in the snow.” As such, it functioned both as the children’s dream image (their desire) as well as a cross-cut to the parallel action on the roof of their home (fig. 3.1). In Cinderella—a multimedia text with a history spanning fairy tales, illustrated children’s books, and stage pantomimes—the Fairy Godmother visits Cinderella and reveals to her, “on the wall a beautiful vision of the Prince dancing a minuet with her at the Palace.” Smith’s vision in Faust and Mephistopheles operated in a similar fashion. Mephistopheles presents to Faust what he desires: a “charming moving vision of Marguerite at spinning-wheel in the garden.” This scene was derived directly from Act 1 of Gounod’s opera Faust, which was first performed in Paris in 1859 and then in London in 1863 (fig. 3.2). The vision in The Corsican Brothers was inspired by Henry Irving’s production of

42  |  The Image in Early Cinema

Fig. 3.1 The vision scene in G. A. Smith’s Santa Claus, 1898. Courtesy of BFI National Archive.

the play (first performed 1880), and it operates within the film’s main image as a form of crosscutting, for it presents the death of one twin brother to the other at the moment it occurs.19 Smith’s uses of the vision scene reveals that for him, it did not have a single function. In Cinderella and Faust and Mephistopheles, the vision is the creation

The Vision Scene  |  43

Fig. 3.2 The vision scene in Gounod’s Faust (c. 1870). Courtesy of Screen Archive South East.

of a supernatural agency that conjures up an image of desire for the respective protagonists. In The Corsican Brothers, it is the supernatural bond between the twin brothers that enables one, through the vision, to see the fate of the other. As in Santa Claus, this was also crosscutting in filmic terms—enabling the viewer to see two actions that are occurring simultaneously in different physical spaces. The vision in Santa Claus, as mentioned, also operates as a dream image. These multiple uses of the vision scene by Smith demonstrates his understanding of its different manifestations within a range of media, the utility of combination

44  |  The Image in Early Cinema printing as found in photography and the magic lantern, the creative and technical challenge a vision scene posed in terms of its use within film and its value as a popular commercial attraction. The technical changes that enabled filmmakers to make longer films sparked a new style of filmmaking, and this had an immediate impact on the uses of vision scenes. James Williamson’s film The Little Match Seller (1902), drawn from the short tale The Little Match Girl (1845) by Hans Christian Anderson, is a good example of this change. It runs just over three minutes and is a work of sustained complexity. It is composed of not one but a set of visions that are integrated into the main scene. It is the story of the last moments of a young girl’s life on a snowy New Year’s Eve as she dies of malnutrition and hypothermia. Through the act of lighting a set of matches, Anderson described how each, “blazed up, and where the light fell upon the wall, it became transparent like gauze, and she could see right through it into the room.”20 It is this room within her imagination where the little girl sees her desires, her memories, and her hope to be rescued from her terrible plight. With her last match extinguished, she dies and a winged angel appears and carries her soul up and out of the frame toward heaven. The Little Match Seller is a significant early composite film because of its use of an integrated sequence of five superimpositions (the product of double printing) and a continuous snow-falling effect. The subjective point of view of the dying child is the film’s purpose—for the viewer to simultaneously see what she sees. An important companion to this work is Robert Paul’s Scrooge, or, Marley’s Ghost (1901). Like the Williamson film, it was an adaptation of a well-established literary work (namely Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol of 1843). It is structured around three visions, each one being within a narrative sequence devoted to a different moment in Scrooge’s life. This use of the vision scene to signify specific memories and feelings would also be utilized in films such as Life of American Fireman (Edwin Porter, 1903), The Old Chorister (James Williamson, 1904), and Fireside Reminiscences (Edwin Porter, 1908). For example, in Porter’s Life of the American Fireman, the very first shot of the film features a fireman asleep in a chair, and his thoughts are revealed in a self-contained circular vignette to the right to him. This vision, or “dream bubble,” depicts a mother and her child, and it can connote both his love for his own family and their welfare, as well as all of the loved ones whose lives can be threatened by a domestic fire. Unlike Smith’s vision films of 1898, these films by Williamson, Paul, and Porter offer good examples of the formal move toward longer, less compressed, causally driven narratives. It is this change that saw the vision scene begin to move from being the sole focus of attention in a film to being repositioned as an integrated element within a narrative structure. This synoptic history of the vision scene as laid out here can be summarized as artists finding intriguing and often complicated solutions to the challenges posed

The Vision Scene  |  45 by visualizing and narrativizing thoughts, feelings, and uncanny encounters. From painting to print to stage to photography and to projected slides and films, this migration signifies an enduring fascination with the use of visions within specific media as well as their remediation across media. Through superimposition and juxtaposition, it was used within very particular pictorial and dramaturgical methodologies that enabled a viewer to see simultaneously the external and the internal worlds: to see a subject as well as her/his dreams. As a concept and as a practice, the vision scene would continue to motivate artists in the twentieth century, especially within surrealism and its multiple styles and forms of expression. Frank Gray is Director of Screen Archive South East at the University of Brighton. He is coeditor, along with Kaveh Askari, Scott Curtis, Louis Pelletier, Tami Williams, and Joshua Yumibe, of Performing New Media, 1890–1915.

Notes 1. William Blake, Jacob’s Ladder, or Jacob’s Dream (c. 1799–1806), Tate Britain, London. 2. Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare (1782), Detroit Institute of Arts. Blake and Fuseli’s place within Romanticism and its representation of the dream are subjects within Martin Myrone, Christopher Frayling and Marina Warner, Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination (London: Tate, 2006). 3. Francisco Goya, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (1797–1798), plate 43 with commentary from Los Caprichos (New York: Dover, 1969) (unpaginated). 4. J. M. W. Turner, The Soldier’s Dream (c. 1835), Tate Britain, London. 5. The Soldier’s Dream, Punch (April 1, 1854): 131 (attributed to John Tenniel). 6. A hand-painted lantern slide of The Soldier’s Dream after the Goodall print is found in the collection of La Cinémathèque Française, Paris. 7. Nathaniel Currier and James Merritt Ives, The Soldier’s Dream of Home (c. 1861–1865), Library of Congress, Washington. 8. Edouard Detaille, The Dream (1888), Musée d’Orsay, Paris. 9. See John Barnes, The Beginnings of the Cinema in England 1894–1901, 5, 1900 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997), 9, 190–191. 10. Charles Eastlake’s The Artist’s Dream (1845), Cardiff City Hall; Edward Henry Corbould’s The Artist’s Dream (c. 1853), Bristol Museum & Art Gallery; John Anster Fitzgerald’s The Artist’s Dream (1857): illustrated within Jeremy Maas, et al., Victorian Fairy Painters (London: Merrell Holberton, 1997), 114–115. 11. The scenario for Devant’s The Artist’s Dream is found within David Devant, My Magic Life (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1931), 230–233. Lynda Nead provides a detailed intermedial study of The Artist’s Dream in The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography, and Film around 1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 86–88. 12. Charles Musser, Edison Motion Pictures, 1890–1900 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 583–584, 647. 13. Nicholas Vardac, Stage to Screen (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1949), 35.

46  |  The Image in Early Cinema 14. Engraving of the vision scene from Kean’s production of Henry VIII, London, Illustrated London News (2 June 1855). 15. Engravings of the vision scene in The Bells; David Mayer, Henry Irving and the Bells (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), 46–47. 16. H. P. Robinson, Pictorial Effect in Photography: being hints on Composition and Chiaroscuro for Photographers to which is added a chapter on Combination Printing, (London: Piper & Carter, 1869), 192. Mia Fineman explores the history of photographic manipulation in Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012). 17. Ibid., 198. 18. These slide sets are found within Lucerna—the Magic Lantern Web Resource, http://www.slides.uni-trier.de. 19. Quotations from the catalogue descriptions found within John Barnes, Pioneers of the British Film, The Beginnings of the Cinema in England 1894–1901, 3, 1898, (London: Bishopsgate Press, 1983), 191–192. 20. “The Little Match Girl,” Fairy Tales from Hans Christian Andersen (London: J. M. Dent & Co., 1906), 142.

4

Animating Antiquity Laura Horak

I

n the decades leading up the turn of the twentieth century, many in the West worried that the health of their national populations was degenerating owing to the adverse effects of city living and factory work, alcoholism, sexually transmitted diseases, unhealthy clothing trends, and racial mixing. Various solutions were proposed, but one of the most popular and long lasting was the rise of “physical culture.” According to the physical culture movement, exercising held the potential to create healthy citizens, productive workers, vigorous soldiers, and, thus, a revitalized nation. But which exercises? Which kinds of motions would strengthen and energize the body and which kinds would drain and injure it? As film historian Marta Braun has shown, Georges Demenÿ—Étienne-Jules Marey’s assistant—used his mentor’s innovative chronophotographic methods to analyze the movements of soldiers, gymnasts, Olympic athletes, and ordinary citizens in order to recommend exercise regimens to French schools and the military.1 Similarly, American efficiency experts Frank and Lillian Gilbreth used long-exposure photographs to analyze workers’ movements so that they could train workers to move more efficiently, which should both increase production and decrease fatigue.2 However, film scholars’ focus on the role of technology in the quest to perfect human movement has obscured another important approach of the time— the turn toward antiquity. To figure out how humans should use their bodies to be as healthy as possible, many experts turned to the physical culture of the ancient Greeks, as transmitted via surviving writings and works of art. Ancient Greek sculptures and bas-reliefs depicted the human form at the height of health and vitality, and thus, as the reasoning went, Greek exercises and dance movements could be the key to achieving this level of vitality. Perhaps the most famous example of this line of thought is Pierre de Coubertin’s successful revival of the Olympic games in 1896. While much technologically driven motion analysis was led by and also focused on the bodies of men, Greek-­ inspired physical training was often led by and directed toward women. Two leaders of the latter approach were the British physical culturist Diana Watts (1867–1968) and the American dancer Isadora Duncan (1877–1927). The male French composer Maurice Emmanuel (1862–1938) also looked to the Greeks

48  |  The Image in Early Cinema as a guide for contemporary dancers, and many of the bodies modeling the movements he described were female. While I have so far opposed the technology-inspired efforts led by men with the Greek-inspired efforts led by women and men alike, in fact, these two movements did intertwine at times. Chronophotographers like Marey sometimes described their technological achievements as a way back to the ancient Greek way of seeing. When Marey presented three-dimensional representations of his chronophotographs of a horse and a man running to the Académie des Sciences (in 1878 and 1888, respectively), he observed, writes Braun, that “only the ancient Greeks came close to ‘seeing’ motion correctly and to incorporating that vision into their art. Photography, he showed, now enabled us to return to that original true vision.”3 Conversely, physical culturists like Watts and Emmanuel turned to chronophotography to prove that certain ways of moving did, in fact, correspond to Greek movement. (Duncan, however, remained skeptical of film and chronophotography.) This article will show how Greek-inspired physical culturists engaged with—and sometimes opposed—chronophotography in their efforts to perfect human movement. By bringing their voices back into scholarly discussions of chronophotography, we will discover not only the agency of women in this field but also how modes of perceiving and representing that seem to be radically new were also connected to traditions that were very old.4 Europe and North America had long looked to ancient Greece as the paragon of intellectual, artistic, and physical achievement. The way ancient Greeks trained and used their bodies seemed to promise vitality and strength, harmony with the natural world, and even virtues such as democracy, grace, truth, and beauty.5 Many at the turn of the century sought to recover a “natural” body that had been lost through Christian renunciation, Victorian prudery, and the shocks, mechanization, and clothing fads of modernity. As film and dance scholar Mary Simonson’s study of Greek pageants in American women’s colleges has persuasively shown, ancient Greece functioned as “an imagined space through which early twentieth-century Americans, especially white middle- and upper-class American women, could access particular experiences and claim particular rights—the right to education, to bodily liberation, to full political engagement.”6 She argues that, “ancient Greece, in the end, was both a window to the past and a space in which to define and construct a modern America.” European women and men also looked to ancient Greece for guidance in creating a new physical culture. The problem was figuring out how the ancient Greeks moved. All that the reformers had to go on were textual descriptions and still figures, such as statues, bas-reliefs, and vase paintings. Many found the textual descriptions too vague to be helpful, so they instead turned to the still figures. But how to coax movement out of statues and paintings? Their creative answers to this question is the subject of this chapter.

Animating Antiquity | 49 The long tradition of statue posing did not solve the problem, not even the celebrated poses plastiques of American Delsartean instructor Genevieve Stebbins. In her turn-of-the-century teachings and performances, Stebbins famously “melted” from one statue pose to another.7 Though Stebbins advised students to embody Greek virtues such as repose and harmony as they slowly shifted between poses, this melting movement was never imagined to approximate something the Greeks would have done.8 The same went for the so-called tableaux mouvants of fellow Delsartean Clara Power Edgerly and her students.9 British physical culturist Diana Watts proposed one way of solving the problem that I call corporeal revelation. Watts (also known as Emily Diana Watts and Mrs. Robert Watts) had studied jiu-jitsu in London since 1903 and, in 1906, published The Fine Art of Jujutsu.10 Lord Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts, even praised her book in Scouting for Boys.11 However, in the years that followed, Watts turned to Greek statuary and artwork for inspiration.12 In 1914, she published The Renaissance of the Greek Ideal. She spent the rest of her life touring the world demonstrating her exercise system. (It must have worked because she lived to be 101 years old!) In The Renaissance of the Greek Ideal, Watts argues “it is impossible to reconstruct the movement of a perfect Greek athlete, unless one feels the thing he was doing; unless one’s own muscles respond to the life and spring that the Greek sculptors were able to chisel into their marble.”13 She first tried out her theory on a statue of Herakles from the Temple of Aphaia on Aegina (see fig. 4.1), who was in a pose that scholars had deemed impossible, due to difficulty of balancing the entire body on the ball of one foot. Their mistake, Watts argues, was assuming that Herakles’ position was static. Having trained herself to what she judged to be the physical state of a Greek athlete, she reenacted the positions she imagined had led up to the sculpture’s pose and those that followed. “The whole sequence of movement came as a revelation,” she claims.14 “Passing through the positions which led up to that chosen by the sculptor,” she argues, “I proved [the pose] to be not only possible, but inevitable.”15 Watts discovered that the pose was not static but an instant within a continuous movement. She is confidant she has gotten the motion right because it was accompanied by feelings of joy and power.16 However, Watts realized that these subjective feelings were not enough to convince others, so she turned to chronophotography to prove that her reconstructed movement is correct. Watts went to the Institut Marey, which was then under the direction of Charles Richert, after the death of Marey ten years earlier. The Institut filmed Watts as she performed the motion that had, according to her, produced the Herakles statue. She printed one out of every ten frames in her book and enlarged the twelfth frame, which reproduced the Herakles pose almost exactly (see fig. 4.1). Watts likewise reproduced the movements of the Discobolus of Myron and the Esquiline Charioteer, which is now in the Capitoline Museums in Rome. Comparing her own chronophotography sequence to a photograph of

50  |  The Image in Early Cinema

Fig. 4.1 Watts shows that her reconstructed movement is accurate because her momentary position is identical to that of Herakles from the Temple of Aphaia on Aegina. From Diana Watts, The Renaissance of the Greek Ideal (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1914), Plate 1 and Cinema Series 1.

the Discobolus, Watts asserted, “When it is remembered that the rapidity of the whole movement is such as to render impossible any conscious imitation of one special pose, the differences between [the statue and her body in the enlarged frame] are surprisingly small.”17 Where it is easy to dismiss Watt’s approach to Greek movement as overly subjective, the chronophotographic sequence shows that she has plausibly reconstructed the statue’s implied movement, or at least one possible version of the movement. For Watts, only the trained, instinctual body can come up with Greek movement, but the instantaneous photograph has a crucial role in proving this movement correct. However, the proof only works if the moving pictures are arrested, so that one can inspect the individual frames and compare them with the original statues. Watts also claimed that her movements could predict the postures found in Greek art she had not yet seen. While reenacting the Charioteer of the Capitol atop a small case, she says that she did not realize that the camera was still filming her as she leapt down. She writes, “Then, one day, at the Louvre, while

Animating Antiquity | 51 ­ unting about for odd pieces of sculpture representing movement, I came across h the identical position of my descent from the case in a glorious bit of frieze representing the Apotheosis of Herakles, found at Delphi.”18 With this anecdote, Watts asserts that her theory is not just consistent with the data but predictive. Watts used another type of chronophotography to prove that her way of moving aligned with idealized geometric forms. Watts asked Richert and Lucien Bull from the Institut Marey to take long-exposure night photographs of her from above while she performed short exercises of her own design with small light bulbs fastened to each foot. For each exercise, she printed the original, unretouched photo, a second version of the photo with connecting lines drawn in, and also a drawn “geometrical” version (see fig. 4.2). The fact that her feet instinctively traced geometric patterns proved, she argued, that her movements were in accord with the fundamental order of the universe. She wrote, “By placing the human being in a condition whereby he is brought into stride . . . with the universal law of rhythm and harmony . . . he is enabled . . . to come into direct connection with vital force itself.”19 Once again, Watts’s physical instincts lead her to the movements and their import, but she turns to chronophotography for proof. (Some people, however, criticized her so-called ancient Greek exercises for being suspiciously similar to judo.)20 While instantaneous photography had sometimes been criticized for revealing awkward and implausible positions,21 Watts used photography to reveal a higher perfection in human movement. She claims to have discovered that the trained human being “may himself become the most accurate mathematical instrument!”22 Her project aligns with Marey’s own attempts to abstract the movements of living creatures into mathematically describable vectors. However, where Marey hoped to use his graphic method to describe all movements, healthy and diseased alike, Watts looked to geometric figures as a model for perfected movement. Like Watts, the French composer Maurice Emmanuel used contemporary human bodies and chronophotography for reconstituting ancient Greek movement, but his results were quite different. Unlike Watts, Emmanuel was a composer and musicologist. He had studied at the Paris Conservatoire, École du Louvre, and the Sorbonne, and received a doctorate for his thesis on ancient Greek dance.23 He was a professor of music history at the Paris Conservatoire from 1909 to 1936. Emmanuel published La Danse Grecque in 1896 (likely a version of his doctoral thesis), and it was published in English in 1916.24 Whereas most people reviving Greek dance spurned the Romantic ballet, Emmanuel used Greek art to show the similarities between ancient Greek dance and contemporary French ballet. His proof, similar to Watts’s, lay in comparing chronophotographs of dancers with representations of dancers in Greek art. Emmanuel also presented disparate figures from Greek art as if they were the sequential frames of a chronophotograph (see fig. 4.3).25

52  |  The Image in Early Cinema

Fig. 4.2 The registration of one of Watts’ exercises, from above, using long-exposure cameras and light bulbs affixed to her ankles at night. The first image is a photograph; in the second, the lines have been filled in by hand; and the third is a geometric rendering of her movement. From Watts, The Renaissance of the Greek Ideal, Plates 22 and 23.

Emmanuel argued that dance movements could only be reconstructed from a single, still figure if the image represented what he called a characteristic moment. This was “the moment when there would be no possibility of confounding the movement with any other.”26 For example, he points to the moment in an entrechat jump when the dancer is suspended. He writes, “The other moments are of no great value in determining the movement of which they are a part.”27 Emmanuel argued that Greek artists usually represented a characteristic moment rather than a series of secondary moments.28 Eleven years later, Henri Bergson would make much of the difference between characteristic and secondary moments, arguing that Phidias’s Parthenon horses presented a “characteristic” attitude that “‘freezes’ the true image of time,” while chronophotographs spread the gallop out into a series of moments that are “all in the same rank,” an illusory model of time.29 Emmanuel, however, was not concerned with the nature of time and saw no problem in chronophotography’s refusal to hierarchize, because he argued that any attentive student could deduce the characteristic moment of a chronophotographic series.30 (Watts implicitly suggests the same

Animating Antiquity | 53

Fig. 4.3 Maurice Emmanuel arranged drawings of diverse terra cotta figures, plaques, bronze statues, and vase paintings in series as if to show a complete movement. From Maurice Emmanuel, The Antique Greek Dance, after Sculptured and Painted Figures, trans. Harriet Jean Beauley (New York and London: John Lane Company, 1916), 68–69.

thing, by choosing to enlarge certain frames and not others.) For both Emmanuel and Watts, continuous movement belongs to the human body, not the mode of representation, which can simply be more or less helpful. Emmanuel and Watts understand Greek sculptures and paintings to contain movement within them, a potentiality awaiting a human body. Film historian Tom Gunning has argued that one can sense the potential for “the transformation of stillness into motion” in the “tense stasis of the instantaneous image.”31 Emmanuel and Watts would likely argue that Greek figures also possess this quality. Furthermore, Watts encourages her readers to cultivate this “tense stasis” within their own bodies. She writes, “The highest degree of Tension, although representing the most complicated vibratory movement of all the muscles, is the only condition in which perfect stillness can be maintained.”32 The tense stasis of the instantaneous image, for Watts, is not only the property of a new medium but also the corporeal ideal of the Greek athlete. Like Marey, Watts and Emmanuel suggested that Greek artists could see with their bare eyes what modern artists could only see via instantaneous photographs. Emmanuel states this directly, “Modern photography proves that the Greeks saw more correctly than modern people do.”33 While art historian Joel Snyder has persuasively argued that chronophotographs revealed a world fundamentally “outside the scope of human detection,”34 Watts and Emmanuel claim the opposite—that chronophotography revealed the world as ancient Greeks saw it but subsequent generations forgot how. What does it mean to claim that Greek artists saw chronophotographically? Marey, Watts, and Emmanuel do not speculate as to how exactly this worked. They imply that Greek artists could intuit the true form of the rapid and complex movements of living beings, an intuition that became lost to mankind until it was recalled by instantaneous photography. While Watts and Emmanuel saw chronophotography as a key tool for reviving Greek dance, the world’s most famous proponent of Greek-inspired dance,

54  |  The Image in Early Cinema Isadora Duncan, had no use for it. Born in California, but making her career in Europe and Russia, Duncan invented a new style of dance inspired by the movements and rhythms of the natural word, the music of composers like Brahms, Wagner, and Beethoven, and ancient Greek art.35 She often danced in bare feet and a loose white tunic. Duncan and her protégés established schools around the world, inspiring countless amateur and professional Duncan dancers. Despite her reputation as a Greek dancer, Duncan declared that she had no intention of imitating the Greeks. Instead, she writes, she looked to Greek art to learn their methodology, which was to study nature directly.36 In a 1903 speech, she argued that “To return to the dances of the Greeks would be as impossible as it is unnecessary. We are not Greeks and therefore cannot dance Greek dances.”37 For Duncan, each body should make the movements that are natural to it. Given the variation of the human body, each person’s dance should be unique to themselves. While Watts claimed that (only?) her own highly trained body had the power to intuit powerful and revitalizing Greek movement, Duncan argued that all bodies could intuit powerful and revitalizing movements uniquely inherent to each body. In this way, Duncan expands Watts’s concept of corporeal revelation more broadly than Watts would approve of. Duncan does not want to imitate the precise movements of ancient Greek dancers, but rather to bring back the essence of their dances, altered to fit her body and time period. Unlike Watts and Emmanuel, Duncan refused to allow her dances to be filmed. Photographer Edward Steichen recalled, “She said she didn’t want her dancing recorded in motion pictures but would rather have it remembered as a legend.”38 Filming a dance performance necessarily dematerializes and flattens the dancer’s body from three to two dimensions, slices continuous movement into individual frames, and evacuates the copresence of the audience and the dancer. It also creates a potentially lasting photographic copy of an otherwise ephemeral event. Duncan never specified why she did not want her dancing filmed, but her comment to Steichen suggests that she wanted to preserve the ephemerality of her dancing and remain indexed in human memory rather than photographic images. However, she did not object to artists representing her dances in drawings, watercolors, paintings, and sculptures. The most devoted was undoubtedly Abraham Walkowitz (1878–1965), a Russian-American modernist artist who made thousands of abstract, improvisatory drawings and watercolors of Duncan dancing after first seeing her perform in Paris in 1906. Many years and many thousands of drawings later, Walkowitz presented these sketches in series in his publication Isadora Duncan and Her Dances (1945).39 An art historian in 1971 recalled the distinctive format: “drawings crammed together on a page in a manner suggesting strips of motion picture film.”40 Some of Walkowitz’s sketches abstracted Duncan’s body and lines of motion into a collection of lines and shapes, evoking the aesthetics of Marey’s long-exposure photographs of illuminated points in motion.41 Although

Animating Antiquity | 55 Duncan ostensibly refused to be filmed, she was filmed at least twice, according to biographer Ann Daly—once in a lost screen test and once in an extant thirty-­ second fragment in which she dances at a garden party.42 It is not clear when the garden party footage was shot, what purpose it was intended for, or even whether Duncan consented to it. In the first part of the footage, when Duncan dances, the camera seems to be hiding behind some of the spectators at waist height. Duncan could not escape these types of representation, even if she disdained their value as any kind of truth or proof. When we think about the transformation of stillness into motion at the turn of the century, we quite rightly think about celluloid, cameras, chemicals, projectors, and optical toys. At the same time, though, many were also experimenting with turning the stillness of antique art into motion through the medium of the human body—and through women’s bodies, in particular. For Watts, Emmanuel, and Duncan, a combination of bodily mimicry, instinct, and revelation could restore the potential movement embedded in Greek art. For Watts and Emmanuel, chronophotography promised to show that their reanimations were just, with the implication that this new technology returned to humanity the analytic vision they had possessed long ago. None of these figures, though, was interested in reconstituting movement through moving pictures. Though some film theorists looked to Greek dance as a model for the medium’s potential, as film scholar Kristina Köhler has described, revived Greek dance most often appeared in movies only to be ridiculed.43 Mary Pickford’s spasmodic barefoot prancing in the 1918 movie Johanna Enlists (United States, directed by William Desmond Taylor, 1918) is typical. Nonetheless, for a period, reformers like Watts, Emmanuel, and Duncan argued that the Greek art of movement could cure any number of modern ills and that a new interplay between intuitive, athletic women’s bodies and technology could bring this art into the modern era. Laura Horak is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University. She is author of Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema (Rutgers) and editor with Jennifer M. Bean and Anupama Kapse of Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space (IUP).

Notes 1. Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 66–67, 186–187, 258. 2. Ibid., 104, 340–348; Scott Curtis, “Images of Efficiency: The Films of Frank B. Gilbreth,” in Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media, ed. Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 85–99. 3. Braun, Picturing Time, 137.

56  |  The Image in Early Cinema 4. Key works on chronophotography include Marta Braun, Picturing Time; François Albéra, Marta Braun, and André Gaudreault, eds. Arrêt sur image, fragmentation du temps/ Stop Motion, Fragmentation of Time (Lausanne: Editions Payot, 2002); Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002); Phillip Prodger, ed., Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 5. Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter, “Antique Longings: Genevieve Stebbins and American Delsartean Performance,” in Corporealities: Dancing Knowledge, Culture and Power, ed. Susan Foster (New York: Routledge, 2004), 72–91; Rachel Fensham and Alexandra Carter, eds. Dancing Naturally: Nature, Neoclassicism and Modernity in Early Twentieth Century Dance (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Mary Simonson, Body Knowledge: Performance, Intermediality, and American Entertainment at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 2013, 48–79. 6. Simonson, Body Knowledge, 79. 7. Nancy Lee Chafta Ruyter, Cultivation of Body and Mind in Nineteenth-Century American Delsartism (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999); Nancy Lee Chafta Ruyter, “Antique Longings: Genevieve Stebbins and American Delsartean Performance”; Carrie J. Preston, “Posing Modernism: Delsartism in Modern Dance and Silent Film,” Theatre Journal 61, no. 2 (2009): 213–233. 8. Ruyter, “Antique Longings: Genevieve Stebbins and American Delsartean Performance,” 79–80. 9. Ibid., 75–76, 84. 10. Diana Watts, The Fine Art of Jujutsu (London: W. Heinemann, 1906). 11. Yorimitsu Hashimoto, “Soft Power of the Soft Art: Jiu-Jitsu in the British Empire of the Early 20th Century,” in Questioning Oriental Aesthetics and Thinking: Conflicting Visions of “Asia” under the Colonial Empires, ed. Shigemi Inaga (Kyoto: International Research Center for Japanese Studies, 2011), 73–74. 12. To those who claimed that Watts’s Greek exercises looked suspiciously like jiu-jitsu, Watts explained that jiu-jitsu was likely the modern form of Greek “Pale Orthe” (upright wrestling), which had traveled from the Greeks to the Persians to the Chinese, before eventually arriving in Japan. Diana Watts, The Renaissance of the Greek Ideal (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1914), 37–39. 13. Ibid., 68. 14. Ibid., 3. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 69. 17. Ibid., 8. 18. Ibid., 72–73. 19. Ibid., 48–49. 20. Vimeo user Perurabo has scanned the “film series” of Watts’s exercises from her book and re-animated them, accessed December 26, 2015, https://vimeo.com/11388067. 21. Tom Gunning, “Bodies in Motion: The Pas de Deux of the Ideal and the Material at the Fin-de-Siecle,” in Arrêt sur image, fragmentation du temps / Stop Motion, Fragmentation of Time, ed. François Albéra, Marta Braun, and André Gaudreault (Lausanne: Editions Payot, 2002), 19, 23. 22. Watts, The Renaissance of the Greek Ideal, 62. 23. Alain Pâris, “Maurice Emmanuel (1862–1938),” Encyclopædia Universalis, accessed December 26, 2015, http://www.universalis.fr/encyclopedie/maurice-emmanuel/.

Animating Antiquity | 57 24. Maurice Emmanuel, La danse grecque antique d’après les monuments figurés (Paris: Hachette, 1896); Maurice Emmanuel, The Antique Greek Dance, After Sculptured and Painted Figures, trans. Harriet Jean Beauley (New York and London: John Lane, 1916). 25. Emmanuel, The Antique Greek Dance, 68–69. 26. Ibid., 122. 27. Ibid., 157. 28. In fact, Greek artists used various strategies, including sequential narratives (showing different moments of a story on different registers) and syncopated narratives (juxtaposing multiple moments into a single scene), as well as “characteristic” scenes. 29. As quoted in Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1990), 111–112. 30. Emmanuel, The Antique Greek Dance, 159. 31. Tom Gunning, “Animating the Instant: The Secret Symmetry between Animation and Photography,” in Animating Film Theory, ed. Karen Beckman (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 51. 32. Watts, The Renaissance of the Greek Ideal, 35. 33. Emmanuel, The Antique Greek Dance, 36. 34. Joel Snyder, “Visualization and Visibility,” in Picturing Science, Producing Art, eds. Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison (New York: Routledge, 1998), 379. 35. Sewell Stokes, “Isadora Duncan,” Encyclopedia Britannica, accessed December 26, 2015, http://www.britannica.com/biography/Isadora-Duncan. 36. Isadora Duncan, The Art of the Dance (New York: Theatre Art Books, 1928), 102, 139. 37. “The Dance of the Future,” delivered as a lecture in Berlin in 1903 and published in Leipzig that same year. As reprinted in Ibid., 62. 38. As quoted in Ann Daly, “Isadora Duncan’s Dance Theory,” Dance Research Journal 26, no. 2 (1994): 4. 39. Abraham Walkowitz, Isadora Duncan in Her Dances (Girard, Kansas: HaldemanJulius Publications, 1945). More recently, 300 of Walkowitz’s sketches of Duncan have been reprinted in Ann Cooper Albright, Modern Gestures: Abraham Walkowitz Draws Isadora Duncan Dancing (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2010). 40. Sheldon Reich, “Abraham Walkowitz: Pioneer of American Modernism,” American Art Journal 3, no. 1 (1971): 77. See, for example: Ann Daly, Done into Dance (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), 43. 41. Reprinted in Dorée Duncan, Carol Pratl, and Cynthia Splatt, eds., Life into Art: Isadora Duncan and Her World (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993). 42. For more information, see: Daly, Done into Dance, 226, fn 55. The garden party footage can be viewed on YouTube: TheJsmartins, “ISADORA DUNCAN UNIQUE FOOTAGE,” YouTube, accessed December 15, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaFZbhbcft0. 43. Kristina Köhler, “Between the Old and the New Art of Movement. Dance and Cinematic Reflexivity at the Intersections of Cinema’s Past, Present and Future,” in In the Very Beginning, at the Very End. Film Theories in Perspective, eds. Leonardo Quaresima and Valentina Re (Udine: Forum, 2010), 195–204.

5

Caricature et films comiques à la Belle Époque: quand le dessin de presse rencontre le cinéma1 Jérémy Houillère

Dès ses tout débuts, le cinéma français a entretenu des liens féconds et variés

avec la presse illustrée. Victorin Jasset est certainement l’un des premiers auteurs à en avoir rendu compte, dans une série d’articles parus en 1911: « À cette époque, le journal Le Chat Noir, qui pendant dix ans avait absorbé l’esprit des dessinateurs de Montmartre de même que le supplément du Gil Blas furent mis à contribution. Les dessins sans légende de Steinlein, Villette, Doës, Guillaume, Caran d’Ache, etc., firent longtemps les frais de scènes comiques »2. Après lui, plusieurs historiens se sont fait l’écho de ce constat, qu’on pense à Arnaud et Boisyvon3, Georges Sadoul4 ou encore François Albera. Dans son analyse de Rigadin peintre cubiste (Pathé, 1912), Albera inscrit les films comiques dans la « tradition » des dessins de presse: « Ce film appartient au genre comique, qui déprécie ce dont il parle, s’en moque, le caricature, dans la tradition des dessinateurs satiriques qui, depuis le milieu du XIXe siècle, brocardent la nouvelle peinture (Daumier s’y adonne comme les autres) »5. Le terme « caricature » – employé comme un verbe (« caricaturer ») – s’entend ici de manière métaphorique, dans le sens d’une représentation altérée de l’objet auquel il se réfère, afin de le tourner en dérision. Avant Albera, Sadoul avait déjà mentionné « les défroques caricaturales »6 d’André Deed, et Henri Agel la manière dont Linder « caricature [. . .] la société »7. Or, une « caricature », dans le sens premier du terme, est un substantif désignant un dessin ou une peinture, souvent un portrait, dont certains traits sont exagérément déformés. Si les commentateurs ont établi des liens entre les caricatures de la presse illustrée et les films comiques à plusieurs reprises, l’étude de ces relations n’a encore jamais fait l’objet de dévelop­ pements. En tant que composition picturale, la caricature partage pourtant avec l’image cinématographique bon nombre de caractéristiques, que ce soit en termes de cadrage, de structuration de l’espace ou de figuration. À travers l’analyse de ces caractéristiques communes, nous tenterons de montrer de quelle manière certains films comiques se sont nourris des procédés picturaux du dessin de presse.

Caricature et films comiques à la Belle Époque   |  59

Compositions Les caricatures de la presse illustrée se distinguent des « histoires en images », encore minoritaires en France à cette période, même si elles tendent à se développer8. Souvent assortie d’une légende, la caricature fixe dans un cadre unique une situation donnée, selon une composition réfléchie et ordonnée. Cette construction figée du cadre et de l’espace peut se comparer aux compositions alors en vigueur dans le cinéma des premiers temps. En effet, l’absence de découpage de l’espace qui prévaut alors dans le cinéma français (et à laquelle les films comiques n’échappent pas) induit une construction quasi picturale de l’image: les mouvements de caméra, ainsi que la variation des échelles de plan, sont très rares, voire inexistants dans plusieurs films. Sans nier les différences fondamentales qui existent entre un plan de cinéma et un dessin de presse, il est de ce fait possible d’opérer un véritable rapprochement entre les deux régimes de représentation. L’image de cinéma est construite, tout comme la majorité des dessins de presse, selon une vision « perspective » de l’espace, en conséquence de quoi l’organisation de cet espace implique régulièrement une dialectique entre un premier et un second plan. Par exemple, dans Onésime employé des postes (Gaumont, 1913), le personnage-titre est affairé, au premier plan, à la rédaction d’un courrier. Derrière lui, séparés par un guichet grillagé sur lequel figure une pancarte « Fermé », une foule de clients mécontents attend que l’employé daigne les servir (ce qui, bien sûr, n’arrivera pas). Si Onésime ne semble pas se rendre compte de l’attente qu’il occasionne, le spectateur a une vue d’ensemble sur toute la scène et ne peut que constater le manque de professionnalisme de l’employé. Un dessin publié dans Le Pêle-Mêle est construit selon une composition strictement identique9. Intitulé « La vie de bureau », il met en scène deux employés occupés, au premier plan, à une partie de dames (fig. 5.1). Une demi-douzaine de visages irri­­ tés sont fixés sur les deux joueurs. Comme chez Onésime, le premier et le second plan sont séparés par un guichet grillagé, seul rempart contre un inévitable déchaînement de colère. D’un dessin de presse à un film comique, il est courant de retrouver des ­images composées de manière similaire. Laurent Le Forestier cite à ce propos un dessin représentant un homme perché en haut d’une horloge, au milieu d’une rue. Un plan de Calino Bureaucrate (Gaumont, 1909) reprend exactement les mêmes éléments et la même disposition10. Le personnage, agrippé aux aiguilles de l’horloge, tente d’en inverser la rotation afin de regagner le temps qui lui permettra d’arriver à l’heure à son travail. Ces compositions, aussi bien celle de l’apprenti horloger que celle de l’employé distrait, dénotent une absurdité, une incongruité. Les personnages apparaissent isolés de leur environnement (Onésime seul au premier plan de l’image; Calino seul au sommet de l’horloge), leur obstination à défier le sens commun les situe en marge du monde qui les entoure. Résolument

60  |  The Image in Early Cinema

Fig. 5.1 George Omry, “La vie de bureau”, Le Pêle-Mêle, 26 mars 1911.

déphasés, en décalage par rapport à la norme et au bon sens, ces personnages rendent la situation risible pour le spectateur et le lecteur. L’image de la presse illustrée et du cinéma comique se nourrit abondamment de ces formes de décalages absurdes. En témoigne le rapprochement constant, dans un même dessin ou un même film, de figures antagonistes: c’est le motif récurrent du couple « mal assorti ». Forgés sur la base d’un contraste physique, ces couples que rien ne rapproche a priori offrent au spectateur ou au lecteur un contraste visible du premier coup d’œil. L’hebdomadaire La Caricature en donne plusieurs déclinaisons, par exemple un dessin intitulé « Étrange assemblage », dans lequel un petit homme trapu et souriant tient le bras d’une grande femme longiligne, à la mine abattue (fig. 5.2)11. Au cinéma, ce type de couple a surtout

Caricature et films comiques à la Belle Époque   |  61

Fig. 5.2 Moriss, “Étrange assemblage”, La Caricature, 3 février 1900.

été incarné par les personnages de Little Moritz et Rosalie. Sarah Duhamel, interprète de Rosalie, joue de manière récurrente le rôle de la femme massive et volontaire, entraînant dans ses péripéties un congénère fluet et peu entreprenant. Réunis à l’intérieur d’un même cadre, ces personnages bigarrés sont marqués

62  |  The Image in Early Cinema par le sceau de l’incompatibilité. Le sens commun voudrait qu’on ne les associât pas, car leur rapprochement étire l’abime qui les sépare: un homme grand et mince le paraîtra davantage s’il est placé à côté d’une petite femme corpulente. Le contraste est amplifié dès lors que ces personnages se retrouvent en coprésence. Ce type d’exagération comique obtenu par l’effet d’un contraste est recensé par Gombrich parmi les plus communes « figures de discours » de la caricature12.

(Dé)Figurations Si l’usage de la caricature est monnaie courante dans le dessin de presse, c’est également un procédé fréquemment utilisé dans les films comiques, en particulier chez Gaumont avec Jean Durand, mais aussi chez ses concurrents. Reposant sur la déformation et l’exagération comique, la caricature s’applique à de nombreux personnages comiques. De Boireau à Onésime, en passant par Calino ou Zigoto, tous ces personnages se caractérisent par une extraordinaire malléabilité. Dans Boireau, roi de la boxe (Pathé, 1912), le personnage-titre frappe tellement fort sur un de ses adversaires que ce dernier voit sa tête grossir jusqu’à faire trois fois sa taille normale. De même, dans Onésime et l’héritage de Calino (Gaumont, 1913), le malheureux Onésime, enterré vivant, sort de terre au printemps et voit ses doigts s’étirer comme pousserait un parterre de fleurs sauvages. L’hypertrophie et l’étirement d’une ou plusieurs parties du corps représentent un motif récurrent du cinéma comique, mais sont également des procédés éculés par le dessinateur de presse. La caricature appliquée à la figure humaine accentue les traits du visage, grossit un nez, réduit une bouche afin de donner une image déformée et le plus souvent déplaisante de la personne croquée. C’est le principe du portrait chargé, auquel s’est d’ailleurs si souvent adonné Émile Cohl, comme l’a bien montré Donald Crafton13. Le visage de la victime est porté jusqu’aux frontières de l’humanité, aux limites du reconnaissable: « L’art consiste à démêler le vice réel ou d’opinion qui était déjà dans quelque partie, et à le porter par l’expression jusqu’à ce point d’exagération où l’on reconnaît encore la chose, et au-delà duquel on ne la reconnaîtrait plus; alors la charge est plus forte qu’il soit possible »14. En cela, les poses grimaçantes prises par les personnages du cinéma comique, en gros plan ou plan rapproché, résonnent d’un écho particulier. Ces plans, qu’ils soient « emblématiques » ou non, font souvent l’objet d’une certaine recherche graphique, comme l’a rappelé Laurent Le Forestier15. Au début de Calino s’endurcit la figure (Gaumont, 1912), le visage du personnage apparaît cerclé d’un cache noir, sur un fond clair décoré de motifs abstraits faisant penser à des feuilles de houx. La bouche grande ouverte, découvrant les gencives, la langue tirée, les bras s’agitant dans tous les sens, ce portrait animé de Calino, à l’expressivité physique outrancière, fixe sur la pellicule ce que d’aucuns qualifieraient de « caricature photographique ». Dans un article publié en 1909 par Ciné-Journal, Attilio Lavagna se demande si les images d’« une pose bizarre, un mouvement étrange

Caricature et films comiques à la Belle Époque   |  63 et involontaire, une grimace saisie habilement par l’appareil photographique [. . .] peuvent et doivent se comparer aux caricatures »16. Avant lui, « le polygraphe Paul Lacroix [a proposé] à Nadar une association pour déposer un brevet de “cari­ cature photographique”, dont le principe serait de faire grimacer les visages des modèles photographiés en ayant recours à des lentilles déformantes »17. Il paraît clair que, dès le tournant du XXe siècle, l’image photographique a su s’emparer d’un procédé jusqu’alors cantonné à l’image dessinée. Les codes et les conventions de figuration appliqués dans la presse illustrée trouvent une résonnance dans le traitement de l’image photographique. Cependant, l’usage d’une lentille déformante, préconisé par Paul Lacroix pour accentuer les effets de la caricature, n’a pas eu cours, selon nos observations, dans les films du répertoire comique. Les déformations pratiquées sur les personnages sont le plus souvent le fait de trucages ou de postiches. La tête hypertrophiée du personnage de Boireau, roi de la boxe semble avoir été obtenue par des coupes successives dans la bande image (à la manière de ce qu’on appelait les « arrêts de caméra ») qui ont permis de poser sur le visage de l’acteur des masques de plus en plus grands tout en donnant l’illusion d’une continuité dans l’action. La tête paraît « gonfler » alors qu’il s’agit en réalité de plusieurs têtes apposées l’une après l’autre. L’usage d’une lentille spéciale pour obtenir des effets de déformation est par contre attesté dans le registre des « scènes à trucs ». Le catalogue Pathé fait mention, à ce sujet, du film Toto exploite la curiosité (n° 2756, 1909) dans lequel le personnage place sous le verre grossissant d’un microscope toutes sortes d’objets que le spectateur peut voir se former et se déformer. Par le biais de ces différents dispositifs, il apparaît clairement une volonté de manipuler l’image photographique du cinéma, de la transformer pour lui donner les caractéristiques de la caricature, comme le fait un dessinateur en manipulant son crayon sur une feuille de papier.

Mises en dessins La circulation du procédé de la caricature, entre le dessin de presse et les films comiques, trouve à se concrétiser dans ce que nous appellerons la « mise en dessin » caricaturale de l’image cinématographique. Cette expression de « mise en dessin » est à comprendre de la même manière que lorsqu’on dit « mettre en forme quelque chose ». Cela renvoie à l’idée de donner un nouvel aspect à une chose, à partir d’un matériau préexistant. Le nouvel aspect dont il est question ici est le dessin (d’après les codes de la caricature), et le matériau de base est bien entendu l’image photographique du cinéma. Il ne s’agit donc pas de relever dans les films toutes les traces de l’image dessinée (comme le décor de tubes pneumatiques dans Onésime employé des postes), mais plutôt de mettre en parallèle les deux régimes d’images afin d’étudier les transformations qui s’opèrent dans le passage de l’un à l’autre.

64  |  The Image in Early Cinema Un tel processus est à l’œuvre dans le film Rigadin peintre cubiste (Pathé, 1912), mentionné en introduction. Rigadin prend le parti farfelu de voir le monde qui l’entoure selon les préceptes de son art: « 1. Il n’y a pas de surfaces rondes. 2. Un œuf est un losange. 3. La Terre est un cube »18. Non content de réaliser des tableaux, il confectionne à lui-même et à sa bonne des costumes « cubiformes ». Mais le futur beau-père de Rigadin, M. Rondebosse, s’avère être fermement opposé à ce nouvel art décadent. C’est finalement en lui confectionnant un portrait « magistral » que Rigadin parvient à entrer dans les bonnes grâces de son beau-père: le mariage est sauf ! Les dessins du film ont été réalisés par Adrien Barrère, un affichiste à qui l’on doit de nombreuses publications dans la presse illustrée, notamment pour la rubrique « Têtes de Turc » du Fantasio, dans laquelle il croque les personnalités publiques du moment. Barrère est familier des « mises en dessins » de personnages du cinéma, car il a signé les affiches de la plupart des films comiques produits par Pathé (Max Linder, Bébé ou encore Bigorno). Les dessins réalisés pour Rigadin peintre cubiste diffèrent inévitablement de ceux qu’il fait habituellement pour la presse et les affiches de film, car il les a confectionnés en s’appuyant sur la méthode cubiste. Lorsqu’il met en dessin le personnage de M. Rondebosse, son trait est exagérément droit, ce qui donne au visage la forme d’un large rectangle. Le personnage reste néanmoins identifiable par la coupe de ses cheveux, de sa moustache et de sa barbe, ainsi que par les petites lunettes rectangulaires qu’il porte au milieu du nez. La charge comique repose alors sur l’écart entre la morphologie courbe et épaisse du personnage (renforcée par son patronyme: Rondebosse) et l’aspect pointu et anguleux de son portrait. Ce portrait entre volontiers dans la catégorie des portraits chargés, tels qu’on les a définis dans le point précédent. Le dessinateur simplifie les traits du visage en se concentrant sur des attributs précis et en accentuant certains détails: la barbe occupe ici un volume important en descendant très bas sous le menton. Cette « mise en dessin » caricaturale aux allures cubistes a plusieurs équivalents dans la presse illustrée: la caricature de l’artiste au travail est une thématique récurrente de l’image satirique. Ainsi d’un dessin réalisé par Luc en couverture du Journal amusant19. Intitulé « Le . . .bisme expliqué » (sic), il fait, tout comme Rigadin peintre cubiste, la satire de ce nouveau mode de représentation (fig. 5.3). Le peintre, au premier plan de l’image, fait face au lecteur, le toisant d’un air impérieux. Il pointe du doigt sa toile, censée représenter le modèle tenant la pose au second plan de l’image. Ce dernier est pourvu d’attributs qui permettront son identification une fois passé dans le « broyeur cubiste »: une rose dans la main droite, une casserole (!) dans la gauche, un large chapeau noir à plumes, etc. La figure dessinée sur la toile se caractérise par ses lignes exagérément droites qui remplacent chaque courbure du modèle. La pose est respectée, la place des attributs également. Quelques lignes de texte, attribuées au peintre, viennent

Caricature et films comiques à la Belle Époque   |  65

Fig. 5.3 Luc, “Le . . .bisme expliqué”, Le Journal Amusant, 9 novembre 1912.

compléter le dessin: « Je ne vous dis pas que c’est comme ça que vous la voyez. Je ne vous dis pas que c’est comme ça que je la vois. Je vous dis que c’est comme ça qu’elle est. » Prenant le lecteur à témoin, le peintre cubiste exprime dans ces trois phrases toute la folie qui guide son art. Poussant la subjectivité artistique dans ses plus lointains retranchements, il rejoint Rigadin sur le terrain d’un comique porté jusqu’à l’absurde. Avec les costumes qu’il s’est confectionnés, c’est tout son environnement que Rigadin traite par le cube. De la même manière, le peintre de Luc contredit le bon sens en affirmant que son modèle – dont le

66  |  The Image in Early Cinema lecteur perçoit sans peine les courbes – est elle-même un assemblage de cubes. Ces personnages sont manifestement en décalage avec le monde qui les entoure. La réalité dans laquelle ils évoluent correspond à une interprétation personnelle (et biaisée) de leur environnement. Rigadin, par l’entremise des dessins de Barrère, et le peintre fou de Luc ont su démontrer, par l’absurde, que la « mise en dessin » n’est jamais un processus neutre. Il s’agira toujours, en effet, d’une représentation personnelle, de la vision d’un auteur. La « mise en dessin » procède d’un nécessaire décalage avec le réel, d’une inévitable déformation (plus ou moins marquée selon le type de dessin). C’est ce qui a conduit Jean-Baptiste Massuet à parler d’une « inadaptabilité » du dessin de presse au cinéma photographique. L’image photographique (qui plus est en mouvement) se caractérise en effet par une forte analogie avec le réel; elle en rend une vision « objective », du moins d’après certains discours de l’époque20. En substance, ces discours mettent l’accent sur le caractère « étrange » de la rencontre entre un personnage né sur support papier et un environnement photographique. Cette « étrangeté » rendrait les deux univers visuels résolument incompatibles. Pourtant, la « mise en dessin » est un motif récurrent dans les films comiques. Le corps du personnage est régulièrement soumis à des forces dématéria­ lisantes, qui s’acharnent à le modeler et remodeler. Ainsi de Boireau dans Boireau, bonhomme de pain d’épices (Pathé, 1913), plongé dans le pétrin d’un boulanger puis enfourné, pour ressortir aplati, exhibé sur une planche, le contour du corps et les plis de son costume dessinés au crayon. Le cinéma comique se caractérise précisément par une mise à distance constante du réel. L’absurdité vient sans cesse défier le sens commun pour donner à voir au spectateur l’image de personnages déshumanisés. Cette propension marquée au décalage comique, à s’affranchir de la norme et du bon sens, me conduit à avancer l’hypothèse d’une parenté manifeste entre bon nombre de films comiques français des premiers temps et la caricature de la presse illustrée. L’image photographique du cinéma comique ne semble pas connaître, pour les cas que nous avons mentionnés, la frontière qui pourrait (devrait ?) la séparer de l’image dessinée. Les différentes « mises en dessins » que nous avons mentionnées établissent entre ces deux univers visuels une relation incontestable, qui dépasse la simple circulation de procédés. Si l’image cinématographique reste difficilement comparable à celle du dessin, le procédé de la caricature fonctionne comme une passerelle naturelle entre les deux régimes de représentation. À travers les trois types d’interactions que nous venons de retracer entre l’image dessinée et l’image filmique, le constat d’un rapprochement entre les deux médias semble évident. L’image du cinéma s’est nourrie des procédés de la caricature de presse, tant dans la manière de composer le cadre que dans celle de concevoir la figuration des personnages. Ces derniers, remodelés selon les codes

Caricature et films comiques à la Belle Époque   |  67 du dessin de presse, sont affranchis des barrières du réalisme de la représentation, et peuvent s’adonner à toutes les fantaisies imaginables. L’historiographie a surtout contribué à faire remarquer le traitement caricatural des sujets des films. Or, ce traitement caricatural concerne tout autant l’image, par le ­truchement de divers trucages et interventions sur la pellicule. Cela dit, il ne faudrait pas oublier qu’un dessin de presse ne pourra jamais être un plan de cinéma, et réciproquement. Le mouvement, dont le cinéma comique use en abondance, est une caractéristique dont le dessin de presse ne peut se doter (du moins pas à cette période, et pas de la même manière que le cinéma). Cette étude devra donc être développée afin d’envisager ces interactions non plus simplement en termes de rapprochement, mais en termes d’écart, seule manière de rendre compte de la spécificité de chaque médium. En outre, si nous pensons avoir cerné certains enjeux de cette circulation concernant le cinéma comique, il faudra également s’intéresser aux conséquences de ces interactions pour la presse. En effet, la caricature était jusqu’à la fin du XIXe siècle l’apanage de la presse illustrée et de ses dessinateurs. Son arrivée au sein d’un nouveau régime de représentation, celui du cinéma photographique, l’a fait entrer de plain-pied, comme l’a remarqué Bertrand Tillier, dans le domaine de l’image moderne21. Jérémy Houillère est doctorant en études cinématographiques à l’Université Rennes 2 et à l’Université de Montréal. Sa thèse porte sur les relations intermédiales entre les premiers films comiques français (1900–1914) et la presse illustrée de cette période.

Notes 1. Je tiens à remercier Laurent Le Forestier et le comité de lecture de Domitor pour leur relecture et leurs conseils avisés. 2. Victorin Jasset, « Étude sur la mise en scène en cinématographie », Ciné-Journal (21 octobre 1911), 51. 3. Etienne Arnaud et Boisyvon, Le Cinéma pour tous: Historique de la projection animée. La mise en scène (Paris: Garnier, 1922), 200–1. 4. Georges Sadoul, Histoire générale du cinéma II. Les pionniers du cinéma, 1897–1909 (Paris: Denoël, 1947), 313–4. 5. François Albera, L’Avant-garde au cinéma (Paris: Armand Colin, 2005), 56. 6. Georges Sadoul, Histoire de l’art du cinéma. Des origines à nos jours (Paris: Flammarion, 1953), 103. 7. Henri et Geneviève Agel, Voyage dans le cinéma (Tournai: Casterman, 1962), 110. 8. Plusieurs études, notamment anglophones, font état des relations entre « premier cinéma » et ce que l’on appellera par la suite « bande dessinée »: Jared Gardner, Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling (Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 2012); Josh Lambert, « ‘Wait for the Next Pictures’: Intertextuality and Cliffhanger

68  |  The Image in Early Cinema Continuity in Early Cinema and Comic Strips », Cinema Journal 48 (2) (2009), 3–25. Merci à Philippe Gauthier de m’avoir fourni ces références. 9. « La vie de bureau », Le Pêle-Mêle (26 mars 1911), 6. 10. Laurent Le Forestier, Les Films comiques produits par Gaumont entre 1907 et 1914 (Mémoire de Maîtrise, Université Paris 3, 1993), 35. 11. « Étrange assemblage », La Caricature (3 février 1900). 12. Ernst Gombrich, « The Experiment of Caricature », Art and Illusion. A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (London: Phaidon, 1980 [1960]), 279–303. 13. Donald Crafton, Emile Cohl, Caricature and Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 11–19. Je remercie chaleureusement M. Crafton de m’avoir fait parvenir cet ouvrage. 14. Diderot, cité par Plantu, Le Monde 2 (octobre 2002), 143. 15. Laurent Le Forestier, Les Films comiques produits par Gaumont entre 1907 et 1914, 35. 16. Attilio Lavagna, « Pour la liberté de la photographie anecdotique », Ciné-Journal (6–12 septembre 1909), 5. 17. Bertrand Tillier, À la charge ! : la caricature en France de 1789 à 2000 (Paris: Éditions de l’Amateur, 2005), 48. 18. Scénario Pathé (Bibliothèque nationale de France, IFN-6402534, 1912). 19. « Le . . .bisme expliqué », Le Journal amusant (9 novembre 1912). 20. Jean-Baptiste Massuet, Quand le dessin animé rencontre le cinéma en prises de vues réelles. Modalités historiques, théoriques et esthétiques d’une scission-assimilation entre deux régimes de représentation (Thèse de Doctorat, Université Rennes 2, 2013), 97–98. 21. Bertrand Tillier, À la charge ! : la caricature en France de 1789 à 2000, 49.

6

De la presse illustrée à l’actualité filmée (1894–1910): l’émergence d’une nouvelle « culture visuelle de l’information »? Rodolphe Gahéry

L

’expression « culture visuelle de l’information » ne saurait ici être entendue dans une hypothétique acception historique, tant elle est anachronique entre 1895 et 1910. Il s’agit plutôt d’un outil méthodologique et théorique désignant la production, la diffusion et la réception d’images à caractère informatif ou journalistique par et/ou pour un groupe social donné, à une époque donnée. Cette culture visuelle de l’information n’est donc pas sans rappeler les concepts de « paradigme » et de « séries » culturels forgés par André Gaudreault1. Ainsi, informer par l’image correspondrait à un vaste paradigme culturel, lui-­ même constitué de plusieurs séries culturelles telles que l’illustration de presse (gravures, photographies) ou le film d’actualités. Il va sans dire que cette culture visuelle de l’information n’est pas figée, et que son évolution est régie entre autres par les évolutions médiatiques elles-mêmes (apparition de nouveaux médias, « concurrences » ou rapports de force entre médias existants, etc.). Or, l’un des traits marquants de l’évolution de cette culture visuelle de l’information entre le milieu des années 1890 et 1910 correspond à l’émergence d’actualités filmées, qui ne tardent pas à se structurer en « journaux » dès 1909–1910 en France. Ce sont les conditions de cette émergence qu’on étudiera ici, et en particulier la question de la dépendance ou du déterminisme médiatique des premiers films d’information vis-à-vis des illustrations de presse. En effet, c’est une idée communément admise que de considérer que bon nombre des premières actualités filmées correspon­ draient, au mieux, à de simples adaptations littérales de ce qui a déjà été imprimé dans les journaux, et, au pire, à des adaptations édulcorées et/ou incomplètes, car destinées à satisfaire un public le plus large possible, qu’il s’agit donc d’éviter de contrarier ou de perdre dans des discours trop complexes sur le monde. Or, sans aller jusqu’à affirmer que les actualités filmées existent dès 1895 en tant que série culturelle autonome, nos recherche actuelles tendraient plutôt à

70  |  The Image in Early Cinema nuancer ce constat2 au profit d’une vision moins « déterministe », plus autonome, des premières images animées à caractère informatif vis-à-vis de « leurs aînées » de la presse illustrée. Cette démonstration implique dès lors d’embrasser une démarche comparative entre images fixes et images animées, elle-même fondée sur certains critères, que l’on a ici répartis dans les trois points du développement qui suit. Par ailleurs, afin de circonscrire un programme aussi vaste, cette étude se limitera à un horizon de réception et de diffusion français, ainsi qu’à la médiatisation des quatre événements suivants: l’affaire Dreyfus, dont la phase judiciaire court de 1894 à 1906, l’Exposition universelle de Paris en 1900, la guerre russo-japonaise de 1904–1905 et la crue de la Seine en 1910. Pour chacun de ces événements, deux corpus ont été constitués: l’un avec les vues animées à la fois contemporaines et relatives au déroulement des faits, et susceptibles d’avoir été diffusées en France ; l’autre avec l’iconographie de la presse illustrée telle que les deux titres français les plus lus entre 1895 et 1910 la publient (Le Petit Journal et Le Petit Parisien ont été systématiquement dépouillés)3. Soit, en les additionnant, environ 290 images de presse et 130 vues animées4.

Éléments de comparaison de la production et de la diffusion des images La question de la production et de la diffusion des images d’information est un premier critère important de la comparaison intermédiatique, en ce qu’elle permet d’apprécier le degré de dépendance du filmique par rapport au non-filmique. Ainsi, dans l’hypothèse d’une dépendance forte, l’ampleur et la fréquence des images fixes et des images animées sont censées se rejoindre, et un événement suscitant une publication massive et synchrone d’illustrations de presse engendrera, presque mécaniquement, une production massive et synchrone de films. Qu’en est-il au juste de la fréquence et de la quantité d’images produites respectivement par les journaux et par les cinématographes ? À priori, le propre d’une image d’information est de paraître au moment où se déroule l’événement qu’elle représente—ou de s’en approcher le plus possible. À cet égard donc, et sans véritable surprise, la chronologie de parution des images fixes est très semblable à celle des images animées, en ce qu’elle épouse, à quelques nuances près, la chronologie des événements eux-mêmes. Pour l’Exposition universelle de Paris par exemple, qui s’est tenue d’avril à novembre 1900, les 44 numéros du Petit Journal contenant des illustrations relatives à l’événement ont paru entre octobre 1899 et décembre 1900, là où, pour Le Petit Parisien, ce sont 21 numéros, entre février et novembre 1900. Et comme tous les films de l’Exposition correspondent à des tournages in situ, leur simultanéité avec l’événement va de soi. Ce constat d’une grande synchronie médiatique nécessite tout de même deux nuances. La première concerne l’affaire Dreyfus et le rythme des parutions dans la presse, beaucoup moins régulier et constant que pour les trois autres événements.

De la presse illustrée à l’actualité filmée   |  71 En effet, la publication d’images relatives à « l’Affaire » alterne entre des phases de silence ou d’atonie médiatique, durant lesquelles rien ne paraît, et des phases d’emballement médiatique, caractérisées par une grande quantité et une fréquence élevée d’images. Parmi ces dernières, les deux plus significatives correspondent certainement au procès d’Émile Zola (9 illustrations au total pour les seuls mois de janvier et février 1898) et au procès en révision de Dreyfus à Rennes (11 illustrations de juillet à septembre 1899 publiées dans les deux journaux). À l’inverse, nous n’avons trouvé aucune illustration avant décembre 1894, alors que Dreyfus est arrêté dès la mi-octobre, ni après septembre 1899, alors que l’Affaire ne se termine véritablement qu’à l’été 1906, du point de vue judiciaire, avec la réhabilitation de l’officier. Idem du côté des vues animées, car trois des quatre principales productions relatives à l’affaire Dreyfus (les reconstitutions de Méliès et de Pathé, ainsi que les prises de vue de la Société française de Mutoscope et Biographe à Rennes) datent de la fin de l’année 1899, tandis que la quatrième (encore de Pathé, en 1908) est certainement destinée au marché américain. Plus largement, des pratiques diachroniques de l’image animée d’information semblent peu à peu se développer, surtout à la fin de notre période, voire ultérieu­­ rement, et ce sera là notre seconde nuance. Deux exemples vont dans ce sens: le « recyclage » probable par Pathé de prises de vues in situ de la guerre russo-­ japonaise, qui ont été achetées puis montées avec les reconstitutions tournées par Lucien Nonguet en 19045, comme si l’insertion ultérieure d’images d’information plus « authentiques » permettait de valoriser (et sans doute de monétiser. . .) des reconstitutions de piètre qualité, quand bien même l’événement concerné était fini depuis longtemps. Autre cas significatif, mais plus tardif, car sans doute lié à l’essor des premiers « journaux d’actualités » autour de 1909–1910: le réemploi, par Gaumont, de certains plans de la crue de la Seine en 1910 à des fins de comparaison avec des crues ultérieures ou simplement comme « archive »—ces réemplois (5 occurrences relevées entre 1913 et 1922) étant explicités par des c­ artons intertitres. Mais même explicites, ces pratiques de « recyclage » ou de réemploi ne paraissent pas être tolérées dans la presse, ce qui les rend donc spécifiques aux images animées d’information et en cela particulièrement intéressantes. Reste que les différences les plus marquées entre les images de la presse et celles des cinématographes concernent davantage l’ampleur de certaines productions que leur fréquence. Si l’on peut affirmer assez indéniablement que la presse a produit une quantité d’images très importante pour « couvrir » nos quatre événements, les cinématographes se sont montrés beaucoup moins prolixes concernant l’affaire Dreyfus et la guerre russo-japonaise. Dans le premier cas, là où Le Petit Journal et Le Petit Parisien publient à eux deux une petite cinquantaine d’illustrations entre décembre 1894 et septembre 1899, ce qui est considérable, seuls quatre « films » sont tournés selon les modalités décrites plus haut. Et même si chacun d’entre eux, reconstitutions comme tournages en situation, regroupe

72  |  The Image in Early Cinema au minimum une dizaine de vues ou de tableaux, cela reste une production bien maigre, en comparaison, par exemple, des 91 vues que nous avons recensées l’année suivante pour l’Exposition universelle. Un écart entre « le fixe » et « l’animé » qui se creuse encore avec la guerre russo-japonaise: avec presque 140 images de presse réparties dans une centaine de numéros sur deux années (1904 et 1905), la quinzaine de vues reconstituées par Lucien Nonguet pour Pathé fait pâle figure ! Car nous n’avons trouvé la trace d’aucune autre initiative à la fois contemporaine et relative au conflit, en France du moins. En somme, du point de vue de la production et de la diffusion d’images à caractère informatif, le constat d’une dépendance absolue des vues animées envers l’illustration de presse ne tient pas, ou doit au moins être nuancé, affiné.

Presse illustrée et reconstitutions filmées: des différences formelles et esthétiques héritées Qu’en est-il maintenant du point de vue formel et esthétique, au cœur même de la notion d’intermédialité ? La distinction entre média « dépendant » et média « autonome » reste ici opératoire, dans le sens où, schématiquement parlant, un média autonome aura tendance à influencer les formes et l’esthétique d’un média dépendant,. Mais cette distinction n’est peut-être pas suffisante, car ces rapports de force peuvent se développer tantôt avec des médias plus jeunes, tantôt avec de plus anciens, selon une intermédialité qu’on se propose dès lors de qualifier, respectivement, de « prospective » ou de « rétrospective ». Or, il se trouve que les images d’information produites par la presse et les cinématographes sont, entre 1895 et 1910, toutes deux en situation de dépendance à l’égard de médias plus anciens, mais selon des influences fort différentes. Ainsi, et premièrement, s’il fallait tendre un fil reliant la totalité des images de presse constitutives de notre corpus, il faudrait sans nul doute le faire commencer quelque part durant le dernier tiers du XIXe siècle, au moment de l’essor de l’École de la IIIe République, tant l’iconographie journalistique, entre les années 1890 et 1910, prolonge un régime de représentation scolaire, voire pédagogique. Une influence formelle et esthétique héritée qui peut surprendre et qui doit certainement être discutée et approfondie, mais une influence qui, dans le cadre de cette étude, se décline selon trois modalités: l’illustration littérale, la fiche sérielle et, certes plus rarement, l’allégorie. La plus grande partie de ces images fixes s’apparentent d’abord à des « illustrations littérales », dans le sens où leur fonction est limitée à une représentation graphique de certains éléments textuels selon une démarche pédagogique de base. Une illustration littérale correspond, d’une certaine manière, au « degré zéro » de l’image d’information, elle se contente de suppléer une explication, un raisonnement, parfois un argumentaire, mais sans jamais s’y substituer. L’illustration littérale est totalement dépendante d’un autre type de contenu,

De la presse illustrée à l’actualité filmée   |  73 médiatisé via un autre support (texte de l’article, ou parole de l’instituteur. . .), mieux: elle est à son service, elle ne peut être comprise isolément sans l’autre contenu. Concrètement, pour ce qui est de notre corpus, ce procédé se matéria­ lise, par exemple, dans la présence de nombreux portraits, comme c’est le cas avec l’affaire Dreyfus. Cet effort de portraitisation passe en général par la mise en place d’attributs bien spécifiques permettant l’identification des protagonistes principaux. Dreyfus est ainsi volontiers dessiné avec ses lunettes pince-nez et une fine moustache, là où Zola arbore le bouc et le haut-de-forme. . . Sans être nécessairement apocryphes, ces attributs sont sans doute d’abord destinés à pallier les lacunes éventuelles des traits des dessinateurs, ou plutôt des graveurs, amenés à œuvrer parfois « à l’aveugle » et dans l’urgence. Cette mise en images d’individualités s’étend parfois à des groupes, pour lesquels les illustrateurs ont également recours à l’attribution de quelques détails significatifs, tels des drapeaux, des uniformes, des symboles, etc. C’est le cas, par exemple, des illustrations de soldats paraissant au début de la guerre russo-japonaise. Enfin, il s’agit aussi d’illustrer les lieux, de donner des repères spatiaux bien définis: lieux des procès de l’affaire Dreyfus, plans de l’Exposition universelle de 1900, ou encore cartes du conflit extrême-oriental. Autant de documents qu’on imagine assez aisément orner les murs d’une classe de Jules Ferry. . . Ceci vaut aussi pour les « fiches sérielles » évoquées plus haut et qui constituent une autre déclinaison de l’influence de l’imagerie scolaire sur la journalistique. L’exemple peut-être le plus probant concerne l’Exposition de 1900, à l’occasion de laquelle Le Petit Journal fait publier une série de gravures représentant les pavillons des Nations participantes, une fois par semaine. Ce qui représente tout de même plus d’une quarantaine de dessins, composés à la manière de « mémos », pays par pays, avec à chaque fois une composition similaire: le pavillon à proprement parler au centre, surmonté d’un ensemble formé par le drapeau, les armoiries et les figures du pouvoir (souverains en place, chefs d’État), par opposition aux peuples et à ce qui passe pour être leurs « us et coutumes », représentés au premier plan. Par sa sérialité et son approche positiviste, cette iconographie aurait, quant à elle, toute sa place dans ce qui correspondrait à un équivalent international du fameux Tour de France par deux enfants. . . Enfin, l’utilisation de l’allégorie par la presse, bien que beaucoup plus rare, relève elle aussi de cette influence pédagogique et scolaire sur l’image fixe d’information. Nous nous contenterons ici d’un exemple assez surréaliste, pour ses contemporains du moins, publié en 1910 par Le Petit Journal à l’occasion des inondations parisiennes: la mise en scène d’une allégorie de la ville de Paris sous les traits d’une femme coiffée du blason de la cité. Celle-ci mène fièrement son embarcation qui accueille une population parisienne liée solidairement par une quasi « union sacrée », qui transcende les conditions sociales pour mieux faire face aux caprices de la Nature. . . Une représentation dont la composition n’a rien

74  |  The Image in Early Cinema à envier à La Liberté deDelacroix, ce qui ne l’empêche pas de faire la « une » d’un quotidien parmi les plus lus de son époque. Bien loin de ces considérations pédagogiques, les images animées d’information, en particulier lorsqu’elles prennent la forme de reconstitutions, sont plutôt influencées par le spectacle vivant, en particulier par le théâtre. Ce constat est bien connu, et le visionnement des reconstitutions de notre corpus n’a fait que le confirmer, à l’instar de l’Affaire Dreyfus, produite par Méliès d’une part et Pathé de l’autre en 1899. Ces deux productions reprennent à peu près tous les codes formels et esthétiques hérités des Arts de la scène: la présence de ta­bleaux, dont l’unité de lieu et l’unité d’action évoquent des saynètes, un cadrage invariablement fixe adoptant un point de vue de spectateur, ou encore un jeu d’acteurs proche de celui du théâtre dramatique. À quoi s’ajoute la présence quasi obligée, et donc parfois superficielle, d’une acmé, d’un « clou du spectacle », pour adopter un vocabulaire forain plus adéquat. Ainsi des tableaux de la guerre russo-­ japonaise tournés par Lucien Nonguet, dont on a longtemps cru que l’épisode du naufrage du Pétropavlovsk était le clou, à la suite de Sadoul, alors qu’il s’agirait plutôt de celui intitulé Autour de Port-Arthur, dans lequel matelots et officiers sont regroupés autour du canon, dans l’ombre et la fumée, prêts à mourir pour défendre le port et ses navires6. Toujours est-il que les dépendances intermédiatiques rétrospectives des images animées d’information sont très différentes de celles de leurs homologues de papier.

De nouvelles intermédialités qui convergent vers une culture visuelle de l’information Des différences qui n’empêchent évidemment pas l’émergence de nouvelles relations intermédiatiques, qui cette fois rapprochent directement images fixes et images animées, en particulier les « instantanés » et les prises de vue en situa­ tion. Par conséquent, s’il convient de présenter plus précisément ces nouvelles intermédialités formelles et esthétiques, précisons d’emblée qu’il reste bien souvent hasardeux d’affirmer, des images fixes ou des images animées, quelles sont celles qui influencent les autres. D’autant que ce duo s’apparente en réalité davantage à un trio, dans lequel la photographie cette fois, joue un rôle prépondérant. C’est donc avec cette réserve qu’il faut lire les trois cas mis en exergue ci-dessous, même s’ils nous sont apparus tous trois comme des formes résultant des jeux d’influence directe entre images fixes et images animées. Le premier « cas » s’apparente à un travail de découpage spatio-temporel par certains dessins de presse qui tend à signifier le mouvement. À cet égard, c’est Le Petit Parisien qui fournit les exemples les plus pertinents, en particulier à propos de l’affaire Dreyfus et de la couverture du procès de Rennes. Certaines pages illustrées, dans la façon qu’elles ont de juxtaposer les gravures, d’alterner les « cadrages », tiennent presque du storyboard, du découpage plan par plan

De la presse illustrée à l’actualité filmée   |  75 d’une séquence cinématographique, au point d’ailleurs de ressembler fortement à certaines vues animées. C’est le cas notamment des éditions du 13 et du 20 août 1899, dans lesquelles deux pages illustrées sont très similaires aux vues tournées sur place par l’opérateur de la filiale française de la Biographe—opérateur dont on a longtemps cru, à tort, qu’il s’agissait de Julius W. Orde. Nous avons retrouvé un cas similaire en 1900, à propos d’un accident de passerelle survenu en marge de l’Exposition, à Paris, dans l’édition du Petit Parisien datée du 13 mai: il est remarquable d’y voir dessiné un tel découpage chronologique des événements, depuis l’accident à proprement parler jusqu’à l’arrivée des secours. Le prolongement assez attendu de ce genre de procédé coïncide, pour la presse, à l’arrivée des « instantanés » aux côtés des gravures. Il y a là une autre interaction intermédiatique évidente, sur laquelle il y aurait beaucoup à dire, car cette dernière se situe, plus que jamais, au croisement entre images fixes et images animées. Les quatre numéros du Petit Parisien qui illustrent la crue de la Seine en 1910 sont particulièrement significatifs de cette évolution de l’image de presse entamée depuis une bonne dizaine d’années, c’est-à-dire depuis l’essor des premiers cinématographes. . . Ces quelques exemples corroborent en tout cas le constat d’influences intermédiatiques qui sont tout sauf unilatérales et univoques, au plan esthétique comme formel. S’il est évident que les premières actualités filmées sont influencées par la presse, cette dernière n’a pas moins été influencée par le développement des techniques de prise de vues sur pellicule. Le troisième et dernier aspect formel résultant de nouvelles intermédialités correspond, d’après nous, à l’amélioration de la composition et du mouvement des vues animées en extérieur. Nous nous appuyons ici sur la comparaison entre deux corpus. D’abord celui de l’Exposition de 1900, que l’on doit essen­ tiellement à Lumière, Gaumont et Pathé côté français, et aux quelques opérateurs envoyés sur place par Edison, à commencer par James H. White, côté étranger. Celui des inondations de 1910 ensuite, dans lequel on trouve surtout des vues Gaumont à côté de quelques titres de Pathé. La comparaison, qui ne peut être développée ici par manque de place, permet de prendre conscience concrètement du perfectionnement de certaines techniques, à commencer par les tra­ vellings embarqués et les panoramiques. Ces derniers, s’ils sont déjà partout en 1900, tressaillent bien des fois, ont toutes les difficultés du monde à s’inscrire dans la durée, et surtout leur composition n’est guère aboutie—absence de motif profilmique, manque de profondeur, etc. En 1910, ne restent que quelques imperfections formelles liées à des difficultés d’exposition à la lumière, si l’on exclut bien sûr les aléas du temps et de la conservation des bandes. Le mouvement est toujours omniprésent, mais il ne donne plus l’impression d’être forcé. Il en va de même pour la composition, qu’elle se fasse dans la profondeur ou dans la largeur, qui est désormais très travaillée, notamment avec ces plans utilisant les rangées de platanes ou de réverbères parisiens comme ligne de

76  |  The Image in Early Cinema fuite, exploitant au passage les jeux de reflets insolites que permet l’eau de la crue. Ces plans, enfin, sont très proches de certaines photographies paraissant au même moment dans Le Petit Parisien.

Conclusion À bien des égards donc, cette étude rejoint certains des constats établis par Jürgen E. Müller depuis un certain temps déjà, lorsqu’il évoque, dans son fameux article consacré à l’intermédialité, des « interactions permanentes [qui] ne peuvent être confondues avec une simple addition ou juxtaposition »7. Il n’y a pas d’intermédialité simple, unilatérale et univoque, pas plus que linéaire et continue. Par conséquent, l’émergence d’une nouvelle culture visuelle de l’information, à supposer bien sûr qu’elle existe entre les années 1890 et 1910, ne saurait être perçue comme le simple passage d’une série culturelle à une autre, de « l’illustration de presse » à « l’actualité filmée » par exemple, quelle que soit la nature et l’intensité de ce passage et des rapports de force entre les deux séries. Notamment parce qu’il y a bien plus que deux séries à prendre en considération, ainsi que nous l’avons vu avec certaines influences intermédiatiques héritées, telles que l’iconographie scolaire ou certaines pratiques théâtrales, ou même avec la photographie et de nouvelles intermédialités—et la liste n’est sans doute pas exhaustive. Bref, nous sommes confrontés à des intermédialités plurielles et croisées qui peuvent passer pour un enchevêtrement inextricable. Sommes-nous pour autant face à un impossible objet de recherche ? Évidemment pas, à condition d’accepter la part aléatoire et fragmentaire inhé­ rente à l’approche intermédiatique, dont l’exploitation systémique et globalisante, en un mot « théorique », est en fait limitée. Müller, dans le même article, est le premier à en convenir: l’intermédialité ne permet pas de construire une « théorie des médias », mais plutôt de « repenser les histoires des médias »8—ce qui suffit largement à en faire une approche féconde et porteuse, au demeurant. C’est justement sur le plan d’une histoire des médias que semble émerger ce que nous avons ici nommé une nouvelle culture visuelle de l’information, dont les premières manifestations auraient par exemple en commun une esthétique de l’instantané et de la mise en mouvement, telles qu’on a pu les évoquer dans notre troisième partie. Dit autrement, et peut-être plus simplement, l’image d’information, qu’elle soit fixe ou animée, devient progressivement une image d’actualité entre les années 1890 et les années 1910, c’est-à-dire une image dont la fonction ultime consiste, de plus en plus explicitement et de plus en plus consciemment, en une captation sur le vif de l’événement qu’elle ambitionne de représenter. Et il semblerait que les influences réciproques entre images fixes et images animées, ces intermédialités buissonnantes, participent pleinement de ce processus: elles en sont l’un des leviers—mais sans doute pas le seul, certes. Finalement, ce que nous donne à voir cette étude comparative, c’est un processus d’institutionnalisation

De la presse illustrée à l’actualité filmée   |  77 de l’image d’actualité, dont l’un des premiers jalons concrets coïncide avec la mise en place des premiers « journaux d’actualités » en 1909–1910. Un processus qui est d’ailleurs intrinsèquement lié à celui, plus large, de l’institutionnalisation des pratiques cinématographiques, selon des modalités qui font par ailleurs l’objet de nos travaux actuels. Rodolphe Gahéry est Attaché temporaire d’enseignement et de recherche à l’Université Paris Nanterre. Il prépare actuellement une thèse de doctorat intitulée Les premières actualités filmées (1895–1914) : des Cinématographes au Cinéma ?.

Notes 1. André Gaudreault, Cinéma et attraction. Pour une nouvelle histoire du cinématographe (Paris : CNRS, 2008), 113–16. 2. Les Premières Actualités filmées (1895–1914): des Cinématographes au Cinéma ?, thèse de doctorat en cours (Université Paris Nanterre, sous la direction d’Antoine de Baecque). 3. Le Petit Journal tire 2 millions d’exemplaires par jour en 1900, au moment de son apogée, avant de reculer progressivement au profit du Petit Parisien, dont le tirage double entre 1900 et 1914 (de 1 à 2 millions d’exemplaires quotidiens environ). 4. Étant entendu que nous n’avons pas été en mesure de visionner toutes ces vues, certaines ayant disparu, nous nous sommes contentés des sources non filmiques, le cas échéant. 5. Nous reprenons ici dans une large mesure l’étude présentée par deux chercheuses russes, dans le cadre de la conférence Domitor de 1996: Galina Malysheva et Natalia Noussinova, « Actualité et fausse actualité chez Pathé (guerre russo-japonaise, 1904–1905), » dans Michel Marie et Laurent Le Forestier (dir.), Firme Pathé Frères, 1896–1914 (Paris : AFRHC, 2004), 273–82. 6. Ibid., 278–79. 7. Jürgen E. Müller, « Vers l’intermédialité: histoires, positions et options d’un axe de pertinence », MédiaMorphoses 16 (2006), 102. 8. Ibid., 100.

7

From Pathé to Paramount: Visual Design in Movie Advertising to 1915 Richard Abel

I

n December 1915, moviegoers in big cities across America had come to expect an unusually large Paramount Pictures ad in their local newspaper.1 Two columns wide and running down the edge of a full page, this one (fig. 7.1) comes near the beginning of a weekly series of the same size and length. The series’s format or layout and its trademark, type, font, and text all call for analysis, and eventually I will heed that call. For now, however, this particular Paramount ad can introduce an admittedly preliminary study of visual design changes in movie advertising over the previous decade. Although some examples come from trade journals, my main focus will be newspaper ads, especially from the early to mid-1910s. To address the issues these ads raise, one requires seeing them within the broader context of key developments in national advertising practices and noting specific correlations. Most historians agree that, by the turn of the last century, American advertisers were using innovations in printing to give growing emphasis to what was called the eye appeal of visual imagery.2 Sometimes described as a reaction against late nineteenth-century ads characterized by spaces filled with florid text or copy, a mélange of type fonts, and elaborate “Victorian decoration,” many (but not all) advertisers began to favor simple direct copy and art as signs of modern “good taste”—as in AT&T’s “new 1909 format of ‘strong, effective illustration, a forceful headline, and a short, pithy, well-boiled-down text.’”3 At the same time, those advertisers made that shift following the current tenets of “suggestive psychology,” in which “impressionistic”—or emotional, rather than rational and informative— appeals were deemed especially effective.4 Increasingly, their task was not so much to sell, “but to help people to buy.”5 If “the first duty of an ad,” wrote Earnest Elmo Calkins at the time, was to “get readers’ attention,” the second—and often more important—was to modify “the course of people’s daily thoughts, give them new words, new phrases, new ideas, new fashions, new prejudices, and new customs.”6 At its most extravagant, that task, according to A. P. Johnson, made American

From Pathé to Paramount  |  79

Fig. 7.1 Denver Post (December 10, 1915): 17.

80  |  The Image in Early Cinema advertisers the “key agents of progress” and their work in promoting c­ onsumption that of educators.7 In 1909, an internal J. Walter Thompson Company booklet came up with this succinct phrase: “America is the advertiser’s Promised Land, turned into reality.”8 It would take a few years for the new movie industry to begin to share that heady notion. Not unexpectedly, initial industry ads in the trade press, with few exceptions, tended to follow late nineteenth-century practices in their visual design. Most were filled with lots of copy and used a variety of typeface fonts, but they did usually highlight the company name in bold, black capital letters as a recurring, saleable brand. A 1902 Edison ad did double duty, as the name also heralded the famous inventor.9 Supplementing these brands, distinctive trademarks soon appeared—Georges Méliès’s “star,” Pathé-Frères’ French coq (tinted red on its film prints), and Kleine Optical’s doubly circled K.10 Slightly later examples include Vitagraph’s eagle clutching an emblematic V, Biograph’s encircled AB (in which David Mayer sees traces of an Art Nouveau style),11 Essanay’s Indian head (evoking the old nickel for nickelodeons), Selig’s Diamond S (a kind of cattle brand), and (befitting an early “independent” company) New York Motion Pictures’ running, snorting bison.12 Laemmle’s Film Service may have looked “old-fashioned,” using the owner’s miniature portrait and an abundance of copy, but that copy’s voice sounded conversational, lauded as American “plain speech” with its connotations of sincerity.13 Kleine Optical’s early ads may not have relied on “plain speech” sincerity, but they signaled authority in a variety of designs. One claimed a special status by framing its sales list of “original films” within pseudoclassical Greek columns; others printed the company’s name in script lettering. The most unusual adopted what was described as a “minimalist approach to layout” more characteristic of “fully modern advertising.”14 A later ad in Moving Picture World presented all of these features together, with minimal copy set in small caps and spaced as if in an outline of bullet points.15 Yet, given the company’s later ads, Kleine Optical seems to be experimenting here with different visual designs rather than “progressing” to something more “modern.” In 1906, once Pathé-Frères and Vitagraph began to sponsor Views and Films Index, the earliest trade weekly devoted to motion pictures, the company created a distinctive ad format that remained little changed for the next four years. A singular ad in late 1906 is both typical and unique (fig. 7.2). First, it occupies a full page and the Pathé name, framed within art nouveau bookends, looms large in boldface capitals, but in a serifed font, looking somewhat like a woodcut. The rest of the ad’s copy may deploy a variety of typefaces in listing the week’s film titles and other concise details, but it stands out in lots of white space. Strikingly unusual, however, is the blocked vertical graphic that represents Pathé’s daily sales in a long filmstrip, far outmatching the height of two iconic sites, the Eiffel Tower and the Washington Monument. By turning the filmstrip into the

From Pathé to Paramount  |  81

Fig. 7.2 Views and Films Index (November 2, 1906): 2. Courtesy of the Margaret Herrick Library.

abstraction of a tall building, the ad evokes the skyscraper images that major corporations like Metropolitan Life and Woolworth chose to connote their sense of power and authority. Pathé also was the first to see the advantage of placing ads in newspapers. In April 1908, perhaps in response to the public outcry over

82  |  The Image in Early Cinema sensational films in Chicago nickelodeons, the company created a small ad for the Chicago Sunday Tribune. Designed to look like a film title card, with white lettering on a black background, it was simple, direct, and to the point, assuring “the Public” that good moving picture theaters use only “pictures with the well-­ known little red rooster” trademark.16 Two years later, Pathé also was the first to launch a national advertising campaign in half a dozen metropolitan newspapers. Although the initial ad’s message once again reminded moviegoers that “Rooster brand films” stood for quality, its design seemed more conventional, except perhaps for the implied appeal to women and their “little daughters.”17 Other ads in this short-lived series seemed to target every member of a family by promoting a different one of Pathé’s wide range of “genres” each week.18 By the early 1910s, one can find in the trade press all kinds of ad formats, full of brand names, trademarks, production photos, film titles, and a variety of copy and fonts. Research on those ads, of course, would be worth pursuing. But my interest is in the advertising strategies that the industry engaged in, as companies only gradually realized they could benefit from addressing moviegoers directly through newspapers.19 An early proponent was Selig, which mounted an extensive publicity campaign in 1912 for its three-reel historical epic, The Coming of Columbus. According to a trade press ad, that publicity campaign included posters, electrotype ads, cuts, a press sheet, a piano musical score, full-­ page feature stories, and even “Columbus Busts.”20 The Colonial theater in Des Moines (Iowa) used two of those electrotype ads—on the same day. In one, a column surrounded by white space had the image of a sailing caravel framed by a rising sun atop a block of copy (in different fonts) that repeated the film’s title and “Selig’s Greatest Masterpiece”—with a tiny trademark insert.21 The other image, a line drawing of Columbus posed on the seashore like a Christian missionary with two caravels in the distance and two watchful native Americans crouched in the nearby reeds, topped a different text full of no less celebratory language enclosed by a heavy link chain (fig. 7.3).22 A year later, the Grand Opera House in Canton (Ohio) used two electrotype ads to promote Selig’s remake of The Cowboy Millionaire. The first had a cowboy about to lasso a cowgirl, both mounted on horses galloping at right angles just behind a large black trademark “branded” near the film’s title, but the company’s copy had been severely reduced.23 Two months later, a second ad reproduced another electrotype ad in its entirety that featured a single galloping horse and cowboy (with two others behind him) atop a rope-bordered block that included the film’s title against a different black background, copy that listed several sensational scenes, and oval portrait drawings of a cowgirl and cowboy anchoring the bottom corners. In November 1913, the Mutual Corporation launched a publicity campaign that greatly superseded the earlier efforts of Pathé, one that was “national in scope and directed to the attention of the general public.”24 Rather than focus

From Pathé to Paramount  |  83

Fig. 7.3 Des Moines Register (May 19, 1912): 2.5. Courtesy of Iowa Historical Society Library.

attention solely on a trademark, brand, or single film, Mutual sought to align newspaper readers literally with its customers (fig. 7.4). Taking up a full page in several Midwestern papers, the initial ad repeatedly flaunted its brand name, displayed two versions of its trademark winged clock (set at 8:00) as well as its slogan “Mutual Movies Make Time Fly,” and filled the bottom third of the page with a wealth of copy aimed directly at “YOU.”25 If much of the more p ­ rominent

84  |  The Image in Early Cinema

Fig. 7.4 Kansas City Star (November 9, 1913): C11.

of those “signs” first snared readers, what likely held them was the line drawing of an imagined audience (as if directed by the arrow linking the two winged clocks) around the opulent lobby box office of a palace cinema. Among the crowd are two well-dressed young women, an elderly rural couple, three or four young

From Pathé to Paramount  |  85 children (perhaps without chaperons), and a single dapper young man—most of their clothing suggestive of white middle-class or at least white-collar patrons. This ad clearly asks readers to see themselves in those moviegoers, find the nearest theater brandishing the Mutual trademark in the extensive list of more than one hundred in the city’s region, and “get the habit and go every night.”26 Another smaller ad depicts a mother apparently letting her three children go by themselves to their neighborhood theater with this caveat: “but be sure it’s the ‘MUTUAL Movies’” they will be seeing.27 Two other later ads return to the imagined crowds outside a palace cinema and give voice to one of the figures, as if accosting the reader. In one, a fashionably dressed woman urges her husband, “Let’s See the Mutual Movies”; in the other, among the smiling people exiting a Mutual Movies theater, one man bursts out, “The Best Show I Ever Saw.”28 In 1914, other companies came up with publicity campaigns, different from Mutual’s, apparently seeking to modify moviegoers’ behavior and give them those “new customs.” These ads promoted the weekly or biweekly serials that quickly proved so extraordinarily popular. Perhaps because serials were closely tied to installments, usually printed just before an episode’s screening in theaters, the ads tended not to be chary with copy. The initial ads for Universal’s Lucile Love took two forms (fig. 7.5). One emphasized the story, “a Literary Masterpiece” written by “The Master Pen,” with the title in boldface capitals and an extract from the first installment.29 Yet, what probably caught readers’ attention was the prominent line drawing of the heroine directing the gazes of three men in front of a biplane whose wings extend beyond both edges of the ad’s frame. The other, while also asking readers to look for the “new serial story,” displayed a different line drawing of the star, Grace Cunard, posed like a model and slightly slouched in a slinky gown.30 The initial ad for Universal’s second serial, The Trey O’ Hearts, held its hyperbolic copy within the straitjacket of a rigorously symmetrical visual design.31 Much of that copy was divided into two squared blocks of text, with five underlined run-on subhead appeals in each that again called most attention to Louis Joseph Vance’s story.32 Framing that text were abstract, heart-shaped emblems, suggesting moviegoers could resolve the serial’s “red blood” mystery by both reading the newspaper and viewing the film. Ads for Thanhouser’s Million Dollar Mystery similarly focused on the serialized story—or “latest novel”—from Harold MacGrath, often in a column running the full length of a page.33 But, they added other verbal and visual lures. One was a contest awarding $10,000 to the best 100-word solution to the story’s mystery. The other, at top center, was the line drawing of a magic lamp emitting a plume of smoke that curled into a question mark and enclosed the head of a woman whose black mask and black hair created a mysterious, tight-fitting hood. When feature-length films began to inundate theater programs in 1914– 1915, several new companies started leasing their trademarks so exhibitors and

86  |  The Image in Early Cinema

Fig. 7.5 Atlanta Constitution (April 5, 1914).

­ istributors could “brand” their own ads. In the fall of 1914, an early proponent of d this strategy was Paramount, in parallel with its national campaign in magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post.34 From major cities like Baltimore to small towns like La Crosse (Wisconsin) and Ogden (Utah), exhibitors took the risk of branding their ads (and programs) with the company’s familiar trademark (fig. 7.6).35

From Pathé to Paramount  |  87

Fig. 7.6 Ogden Standard (October 3, 1914): 3.

That trademark was distinctive in several ways. Printed in a serifed font, the words Paramount Pictures stand out against a sunlit mountain and darkening sky encircled by small stars. And the mountain metaphor was exceptionally apt, for it evokes the sense of “endurance and protective strength” that the Rock of Gibraltar had long characterized in Prudential Insurance ads.36 During the next year or so, that trademark would feature in more and more theater ads across the country.37 Although its newspaper ads were smaller, far less frequent, and indirectly aimed at exhibitors, those of Fox Film were unique. The company’s name was printed in a boldface capital letters, with the top of each F extending in a heavy line over the other letters, creating something like a modernized woodcut in what might appeal to “modern good taste.”38 In 1915, both Universal and Paramount developed and sustained national publicity campaigns that ran for months in many newspapers. Yet, each company seemed to hail a different class of readers through the ads’ visual design and copy. Universal’s ads had a standardized format: three columns wide and averaging a half page in length with a line drawing at the top or bottom, lots of headlined copy, which often highlighted “See How the Movies are Made,” and the company’s trademark—all serving to invite movie fans to visit the studios and backlots of the newly opened Universal City in Los Angeles (fig. 7.7). In the first of these, Laemmle himself lording over the land like the figure of science in an

88  |  The Image in Early Cinema

Fig. 7.7 Chicago Tribune (February 10, 1915): 10.

From Pathé to Paramount  |  89 AT&T ad,39 seemed to speak directly to readers in confidence, welcoming them as potential sightseers to a tourist destination said to rival the San Francisco and San Diego expositions.40 In others, his “plain speech” copy was colored by slang. “Do you know what? When you folks get to UNIVERSAL CITY . . ., we’re gonna do sumpin’ big.” “They Ain’t No Place Like It Nowhere—We mean Universal City.”41 The line drawings roughly sketched moviemaking structures or events. For example, a village destroyed by “a roaring, tearing, smashing, dashing flood”; backlot buildings with different facades on each of their four sides;42 Universal stars in a cluster of faces for readers to “Pick ‘em out;” or actors like Francis Ford, Lois Weber, Cunard, and others in cameos.43 In its own national campaign of weekly ads in the fall of 1915, Paramount (at least initially) also exploited what it assumed drew its patrons to theaters: stars. The first, as might be expected, snares readers with not simply a line drawing, but a striking half-tone cut-out of Mary Pickford (with the trademark attached like a brooch) in a close shot, filling the right half of the frame.44 Highlighted in the copy occupying the ad’s left half are the company’s name in large boldface script, Pickford’s signature (for added authenticity), and a list of other stars, many of whom individually would feature as half-tone cutouts in future ads.45 In early December, Paramount transformed this weekly series into a format that implicitly alluded to the skyscraper images in other corporate ads and now focused on the progress the company had made (as had the industry overall) within little more than a year. One of these resembled a monument with a huge number 1 brandishing the company’s name that topped a plinth inscribed with five of those firsts and “the trademark that stands for quality” at the base.46 Another comprised three pinned memos. The first read, “Why Paramount Pictures are Superior”; the second gave answers: they came from the “highest class” of producers, with “celebrated” stars, and (were seen) in the “best theaters”; the third, again, anchored the ad with the trademark.47 Moreover, the minimal copy in the first and third memos was larger and off kilter, as if to imprint them more forcefully on the reader. A third claimed that Paramount Pictures was responsible for the industry’s transformation from nickelodeons to palace cinemas, and at the ad’s top, represented that change in drawings: first of a cheap lobby full of sensational posters, and then of an imposing, elegantly designed cinema façade.48 In one of the last weekly ads, Paramount summarized its progress in a direct address to readers, “What this TRADE MARK means to YOU”—with none of the slang that characterized Universal ads—topping the column with the trademark in question filling a theater screen before a packed audience of patrons (fig. 7.8).49 At least two conclusions are worth highlighting from this preliminary survey. Although a number of companies seemed to adopt certain features of what Pamela Walker Laird describes as signs of “modern good taste,” the range of visual imagery and print copy in newspaper movie ads by the early 1910s was strikingly

90  |  The Image in Early Cinema

Fig. 7.8 Los Angeles Times (April 27, 1916).

From Pathé to Paramount  |  91 diverse. One possible way to tease out a pattern in that diversity, however, might be to differentiate the ads of companies like Paramount, heavily invested in feature films, from those like Universal, which remained even more committed to serials and short films. Such a pattern, of course, may seem overly schematic, but one thing is certain. If, in its brief national campaign in early 1910, Pathé imagined it might have a status similar to that of major companies like Kellogg’s, Coca-Cola, or Mennen’s that advertised regularly in newspapers, Paramount, in its sustained national campaign of 1915–1916, had achieved such a status and made good on that extravagant boast: “America is the advertiser’s Promised Land.” Richard Abel is Professor Emeritus of International Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Michigan. His recent books include Americanizing the Movies and ‘Movie-Mad’ Audiences, 1910–1914 and Menus for Movieland: Newspapers and the Emergence of American Film Culture, 1913–1916.

Notes This essay is partly drawn from the first chapter of my Menus for Movieland: Newspapers and the Emergence of American Film Culture, 1913–1916 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 21–63. 1. Paramount Pictures ad, Denver Post (December 10, 1915), 17. 2. Pamela Walker Laird, Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 260; and Elspeth H. Brown, The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884–1929 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 168. Cf. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 217. 3. Laird, Advertising Progress, 261, 266, 280–281; Roland Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Business (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 55. Illustrations on p. 60. The AT&T ads were created by the N. W. Ayer & Son Advertising Agency. 4. See, for instance, Walter Dill Scott, The Psychology of Advertising (Boston, 1907), cited in Lears, Fables of Abundance, 208. Cf. Stephen Fox, The Mirror Makers: A History of American Advertising and Its Creators (New York: William Morrow, 1984), 70–71; and Brown, The Corporate Eye, 168. 5. Joseph Appel, Growing Up With Advertising (New York, 1940): 123, quoted in Lears, Fables of Abundance, 205. Appel was the advertising manager of Wannamaker’s department store in Philadelphia, and the quote comes from his speech at the 1911 convention of the Associated Advertising Clubs of America. 6. Earnest Elmo Calkins, The Business of Advertising (New York: Appleton, 1915): 9, quoted in Laird, Advertising Progress, 355. Cf. Fox, The Mirror Makers, 43. See also Pretor, “The Mission of the Ad,” Brains for the Reader and Advertiser 30, no. 13 (1907): 7.

92  |  The Image in Early Cinema 7. A. P. Johnson, Library of Advertising (Chicago University of Commerce, 1913), 5–6, quoted in Laird, Advertising Progress, 379. Cf. Lears, Fables of Abundance, 206. 8. The J. Walter Thompson Book (1909): 5—quoted in Laird, Advertising Progress, 357. 9. New York Clipper (April 12, 1902): 164. 10. New York Clipper (June 13, 1903): 368, (October 15, 1904): 784, and (July 2, 1904): 444. 11. David Mayer, “Leaning to See in the Dark,” Nineteenth Century Theatre 25, no. 2 (Winter 1997): 25. 12. New York Dramatic Mirror (October 31, 1908): 8; Film Index (December 18, 1909): 901, and (October 30, 1909): 14; and Moving Picture World (October 23, 1909): 591. 13. Lears, Fables of Abundance, 205. See also Laird, Advertising Progress, 261. 14. Laird, Advertising Progress, 266. 15. Moving Picture World (September 19, 1909): 332. 16. Chicago Sunday Tribune (April 5, 1908): 3.2. Cf. the similar ad that even more clearly resembled a film title card in Show World (May 23, 1909): 33. 17. Chicago Sunday Tribune (February 6, 1910): 2.6. 18. Those “genres” included comedy, tragedy, travel pictures, educational pictures, juvenile pictures, and historical pictures. 19. Abel, Menus for Movieland, 21–23. 20. Selig ad, New York Dramatic Mirror (May 1, 1912): 30. The full-page feature story (whose text framed nine photographs) appeared in a number of newspapers such as the Canton News-Democrat (June 16, 1912): n.p. In conjunction with a contest, promoted by Selig, to award prizes for the best student essays on Columbus, the Orpheum in Canton also arranged a special morning matinee for interested school children—Orpheum ads, Canton News-Democrat (May 26, 1912): 14, (June 2, 1912): 16, and (June 9, 1912): 12. 21. Colonial ad, Des Moines News (May 19, 1912): 6. 22. Colonial ad, Des Moines Register and Leader (May 19,1912): 5. 23. Grand Opera House ad, Canton News-Democrat (March 16, 1913): 15, and (May 18, 1913): 7. 24. Robert Grau, The Theatre of Science (New York: Broadway Publishing Company, 1914), 316–317. 25. Mutual Movies ad, Kansas City Sunday Star (November 9, 1913): C11, and St. Paul News (November 30, 1913): 12. 26. In the Kansas City Star, the theaters spread across Missouri and Kansas; in the St. Paul News, they ranged farther, across Minnesota, the Dakotas, Wisconsin, and Iowa. 27. Mutual Movies ad, Kansas City Sunday Star (November 23, 1913): C11, and St. Paul News (November 29, 1913): 8. 28. Mutual Movies ad, Kansas City Sunday Star (December 7, 1913): n.p., and (December 21, 1913): B5. 29. Lucille Love ad, Atlanta Constitution (April 5, 1914): 68. 30. Lucille Love ad, Omaha World Telegram (April 12, 1914): 20. 31. The Trey O’ Hearts ad, Atlanta Constitution (August 16, 1914): M.9. 32. For a survey of subheadings, see Allen Hutt, Newspaper Design, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1967): 92–99. 33. The Million Dollar Mystery ad, Canton Repository (June 28, 1914): 5. MacGrath had written Selig’s earlier serial, The Adventures of Kathlyn.

From Pathé to Paramount  |  93 34. See, for instance, the Paramount ads, Saturday Evening Post (October 3, 1914): 55, and (November 7, 1914): 55. 35. Wizard ad, Baltimore News (September 6, 1914): 10; Ogden Theater ad, Ogden Times (October 3, 1914): 3; and Bijou Theatre ad, La Crosse Journal (October 31, 1914): 9. 36. See, for instance, the Prudential Insurance ad, Harper’s Weekly (December 19, 1896): 1256—reproduced in Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul, 37. 37. See, for instance, the Faurot Opera House ad, Lima News (February 7, 1915): 15; and Plaza ad, Waterloo Evening Courier Reporter (March 27, 1915): 7 38. Fox-Film ads, Cleveland Leader (March 7, 1915): Dramatic Section, 7, and Pittsburgh Dispatch (June 27, 1915): 4.6. 39. AT&T ad, Telephone Review 6 (January 1915 supplement): inside front cover— reproduced in Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul, 69–70. Walk-Over Shoes ad, Saturday Evening Post (June 28, 1924): 123. 40. Universal ad, San Antonio Light (February 10, 1915): 12. 41. Universal ads, San Antonio Light (February 17, 1915): 12, Indianapolis Star (March 31, 1915): 15, and San Antonio Light (April 28, 1915): 5. 42. Universal ads, San Antonio Light (February 17, 1915): 12, and Cleveland Sunday Leader (March 7, 1915): Dramatic Section, 2. 43. Universal ads, Cleveland Sunday Leader (May 2, 1915): Dramatic Section, 2, Atlanta Constitution (May 5, 1915): 7, and Cleveland Sunday Leader (May 16, 1915): Dramatic Section, 2. 44. Paramount ad, Detroit Free Press (September 2, 1915): 6. For more information on the use of half-tone cutouts in newspaper feature pages, see Hutt, Newspaper Design, 174–185, 220–222. 45. Among them were Charlotte Walker in the Paramount ad, Detroit Free Press (September 9, 1915), and Blanche Sweet in the Paramount ad, Chicago Tribune (October 18, 1915): 12. 46. Paramount ad, Denver Post (December 10, 1915): 17 47. Paramount ad, Detroit Free Press (December 30, 1915): 6 48. Paramount ad, Detroit Free Press (December 23, 1915): 6 49. Paramount ad, Los Angeles Times (April 27, 1916): 3.4

8

Landscape Topoi: From the Mountains to the Sea Jennifer Peterson

E

arly cinema is full of landscapes. From actualities to travelogues, from nature films to dramas, outdoor scenery is frequently the setting and sometimes the very subject of a great many films from the 1890s through the 1910s. Even as interior mise-en-scène began to develop into the craft of set design, enabled by carbon-arc lighting and the construction of more elaborate film studios, filmmakers continued to take their cameras outside throughout the 1910s. Although we know it when we see it, landscape is more complicated than it seems. Its long tradition in art history pushes back to antiquity and forward to the present moment. In the Western (Eurocentric) tradition, landscape art rose to prominence in the sixteenth century, but it is perhaps best known in its nineteenth-century iteration in the paintings of John Constable, J. M. W. Turner, Caspar David Friedrich, Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, and so forth. The term embodies a tension between the place being viewed and the prospect from which it is viewed. Even the dictionary definition of landscape signifies this tension. The word comes from the Dutch term landschap, and was first used in English in 1598. Landscape: 1  a: a picture representing a view of natural inland scenery  b: the art of depicting such scenery 2 a: the landforms of a region in the aggregate b: a portion of territory that can be viewed at one time from one place1

I would like to extrapolate two points from this. First, landscape has a dual nature. Its primary meaning is a picture; its second meaning is actually existing landforms. Second, while landscape is both about pictures and about real places, it is more about the former rather than the latter. When we analyze landscapes, we are analyzing discursive concepts and not actual places. But landscape is a particular discourse or representational system that has to do with concepts of nature, the environment, and the human relationship to the nonhuman world. Certainly, all nonfiction film bears a complex relationship to the real. Nonfiction in early cinema is a special case. As scholars have shown, nonfiction

Landscape Topoi | 95 genres were more numerous than fiction genres before the rise of the feature film. (While there were more fiction than nonfiction films produced after about 1903, the number of nonfiction genres continued to proliferate.) As one who has been working on early nonfiction film for a number of years, I can attest to the fact that it is difficult to get a handle on all these different genres. Categories listed in the trade press regularly include science films, topicals, nature films, scenics, animal films, acrobatic films, sports, industrials, and many more. Tom Gunning has likened these many genres to the Borgesian category of things “drawn with a very fine camel hair brush.”2 In this paper, I will outline some of the ways that the methodology of topos study can help us gain an understanding of the many different types of early film landscapes, working not from the principles of genre study but instead from the gallery of images early cinema presents us with. Early cinema’s impulse to document and map the world borrows heavily from traditions of landscape representation. Topos study can help us unpack the repeated gallery of landscape images that occur and reoccur in various forms of media. As an example, I shall conclude with a brief discussion of the topos of “rough seas.” It might seem that landscape is best approached as a test case for the relative amount of “realism” found in any given representation. And indeed, one of the most frequent responses to cinematic landscapes has to do with whether or not a film gets its place “right” or “wrong.” This was as true in 1896 or 1914 as it is today. Early scenic films were regularly praised for enabling people to travel without the expense and hassle of an actual journey, thus emphasizing the realism of this kind of landscape. But I want to make the case that it is too simplistic to explore landscape in film along a linear continuum of realism versus idealism. Rather, I believe landscape is best understood as a series of topoi—repeated formulas that change over time. This model is modular or even rhizomatic, reflecting the complexity of a representational system and tradition derived from (but radically divergent from) actual organic forms. The landmasses that appear over and over again in landscape representations tend to be particular places or particular concepts. Examples include the Lake District, as seen in The Open Road, by William Friese-Greene in 1927; Yosemite, as seen in countless early films, including Seeing Yosemite with David A. Curry, by Arthur C. Pillsbury in 1916; and the Peaceful Valley, as famously seen in the opening shot of The Country Doctor, by D. W. Griffith in 1909. Whether landscape or seascape, it is the meeting of the human and its environment that produces the idea of a place seen from a particular prospect. As such, landscape is profoundly and even achingly humanistic, even as it reaches toward the organic and nonhuman world of nature. Landscape, then, signifies nothing less than the meeting of the human and the nonhuman. This pressure point provides a good opportunity for thinking through certain important aesthetic and ideological problems, including the fraught relationship between humanity and the environment.

96  |  The Image in Early Cinema

Topoi Topos study is an approach that examines sets of topoi or repeated formulas, paying attention to how they change over time and in different media. Erkki Huhtamo, one of the foremost scholars in this area, defines a topos as “a stereotypical formula evoked over and over again in different guises and for varying purposes.”3 Topos study is a tool of media archaeology, which is itself an emerging paradigm in which historians investigate new media cultures through insights from past new media, often with an emphasis on forgotten or marginalized practices and inventions. This blurring of boundaries between old and new media is an effort to imagine media in terms of deep time, and an effort to imagine possible pasts and futures outside of linear media history. While media archaeology has begun to define a series of approaches and resistances (here I am thinking of the work of Siegfried Zielinsky and Jussi Parikka), its methodologies remain under theorized.4 Huhtamo’s topos study approach is one such methodology that I believe can be useful for early cinema, though it needs some clarification. The word topos comes from classical Greek rhetoric, and loosely translates as “topic.” It is also translated as “line of argument.” In his influential 1948 literary study, Ernst Robert Curtius emphasized the classical sense that topoi functioned as “storehouses of trains of thought” and that “in the ancient system of rhetoric topics is the stockroom.”5 The topos approach can be criticized, however, for being too general. In his book on panoramas, Huhtamo claims “a topos [is] a persistent cultural formula that appears, disappears, and reappears, gaining ever-new meanings in the process.”6 This formulation begs the question: How is a topos different from a genre? A genre would seem to be precisely “a persistent cultural formula that appears, disappears, and reappears, gaining ever-new meanings in the process.” But topos study is not genre study, even if both are interested in repetition and formula. A topos is not exactly an archetype either, topoi have a history, while archetypes (in the Jungian sense) are thought to be transhistorical. Huhtamo’s examples, in fact, are much more specific than literary or film genres, and they are grounded in material history. He analyzes many topoi, all related to modern media technology; one of the most important for him is the topos of the little people—or “Lilliputians”—who are represented as hidden inhabitants and operators of technology. Other topoi Huhtamo analyzes include “the ‘hand of God’ interfering in the lives of humans,” and the topos he calls “What is happening behind your back?”7 These are perhaps idiosyncratic choices, and here we come to a second critique of the topos approach: there are too many topoi to study! After a while, everything starts to look like a topos. This is hardly the basis for a productive or precise analytical methodology.

Landscape Topoi | 97

Landscape Topoi So how does topos study help us to grasp the meaning of landscape in early cinema? To begin with, we must define and identify the key landscape topoi, and this proves to be no simple task. Early cinema’s intermedial nature has been well established by now, and it should come as no surprise that early cinema’s many landscapes—mountains, waterfalls, lakes, pastoral scenes, and so forth—appeared in other forms of nineteenth-century media, such as magic lantern slides, photographs, stereographs, chromolithographs, postcards, and postage stamps. What fascinates me about the formulaic nature of these landscapes is their repetitive quality. Many of the identical mountains, waterfalls, lakes, and pastoral scenes appeared across these different formats and often from the same vantage point. This repetition sometimes takes the form of a quotation, reprising an already well-known image. For example, a famous scene from American history— Columbus landing in the West Indies in 1492—was depicted as a painting by John Vanderlyn in 1846 and hung in the US capitol rotunda; this image was subsequently reproduced as a popular lithograph, a 15-cent stamp, and eventually as a scene in a panoramic toy for children.8 The repetition of an image in different media is not in itself a topos, but rather a form of quotation. With landscape representations, the repetition comes in the form of a replication of points of view. Think of the endless images of Niagara Falls, most of which are taken from the same few vantage points and replicated in photographs, stereographs, and films. The repurposing of images is of course a core phenomenon of mass culture and it continues today at an almost unfathomable digital pace. In the early cinema period, however, these landscapes were repurposed at a slower rate, and of course this repurposing lacked the sarcasm of postmodern media (though parody does appear quite frequently). So what are the key landscape topoi in early cinema? One might at first consider topographies (mountains, rivers, deserts, valleys) or specific geographies (Niagara Falls, the Swiss Alps, Venice, Egypt) as topoi. But, while each example does indeed recur in formulaic iterations across time and in different media, they are not exactly topoi. Topographies and geographies are not discursive concepts; rather, these are geomorphological forms. It is not the landform or the place itself—the actual topography or geography—that constitutes a topos, but the tradition in which it is depicted that functions as one. Better examples of landscape topoi would include variations on the ideal landscape (the Pastoral, Arcadia, Eden, the fertile landscape, the eternal spring). Idealized landscapes are by far the most numerous type of landscape in early cinema. Variations on melancholic landscapes also appear (ruins, winter landscapes, dystopian cityscapes). Technology in natural landscapes—the machine in the garden topos—is common, as is the topos of wilderness or uninhabited

98  |  The Image in Early Cinema nature. In other words, a topographic feature such as a waterfall is not in itself a topos, but a particular kind of waterfall—one embedded into a larger Edenic scene, or one traversed by a train—functions as part of a topos. Topoi are ­cultural—even though landscape topoi reach toward representing the non-­ cultural or nonhuman. The topos study approach is not useful, in fact, unless it is used to illuminate some other issue of analysis, whether it be the history of media (in Huhtamo’s case) or the history of environmental consciousness (in my case). A topos, then, must reoccur frequently, it must reoccur across media, and it must be used to illuminate some other outside topic. My larger claim is that landscape functions as a way for films to spatialize reality, and topoi enable this spatialization to gain cultural resonance. Given its connection to the real, landscape is not just a pictorial technique; it is also historical and political.

Rough Seas Classical rhetoric scholar Ernst Robert Curtius remarked that in ancient poetry, nature is always inhabited nature. But landscapes of uninhabited nature begin to emerge in the sixteenth century, and gain force in the romantic period (through the work of the painters mentioned earlier, and many more). What has not been acknowledged is that we see a surge of landscapes of uninhabited nature in early cinema. By analyzing the topos of uninhabited nature, we can begin to identify when and how “nature”—the realm of the nonhuman, material world, significant in and of itself—began to emerge as an image in mass culture. In art history, such landscapes are called “pure landscape,” which is a landscape representation without narrative or allegory, and ideally without figures— an image in which nature is visualized for its own sake. Scholars such as W. J. T. Mitchell have pointed out that “Landscape . . . is never pure . . . except as part of the rhetoric that might accompany a strategy of resistance to some previous notion of ‘impurity.’”9 For me, landscapes of uninhabited nature are interesting for what they tell us about the emergence of an awareness of the environment. How did the understanding of “nature” change in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century? When did an ecological consciousness emerge? Early cinema’s landscape imagery, with its repeated conventions, can tell us about what Lawrence Buell calls the “environmental imaginary” in the early twentieth century.10 To conclude, I will briefly turn to my example: the topos of rough seas. Rough sea postcards were popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Often photographed at popular seaside resorts, rough sea images depict waves crashing against the shore. Like all topoi, which are intermedial by nature, the topos of “rough seas” can be found not only in early films but also in a broad range of other media including painting, photography, ­literature, and postcards. In these images, the seashore becomes akin to a contact zone between the rough uncontrollable power of nature and the tamed world of modern civilization.

Landscape Topoi | 99

Fig. 8.1 Rough Sea, Blackpool, postcard c. 1915. Author’s collection.

“Rough seas” films have been a part of cinema since the beginning. Rough Sea at Dover, shot by Birt Acres and R. W. Paul, was one of the most popular moving picture subjects of 1896–1897. A reviewer present at that film’s debut before the Royal Photographic Society in 1896 wrote, “The most successful effect [of the kinetoscopic work], and one which called forth rounds of applause from the usually placid members of the “Royal,” was a reproduction of a number of breaking waves, which may be seen to roll in from the sea, curl over against a jetty, and break into clouds of snowy spray that seemed to start out from the screen.11” What I find significant about this review is the combination of verisimilitude and sensation. This reviewer particularly remarks upon the movement of the images—the waves roll, curl, break, and “seem to start out from the screen.” These kinetic, three-dimensional effects are both realistic and sensational. It is precisely the contradictory appeal of realism and sensation in early cinema that early nonfiction film can help us understand. The Edison Manufacturing Company soon followed suit with several “rough seas” films of its own: Surf at Long Branch (1896), Surf at Monterey (1897), and Storm at Sea (1900). These films performed several functions in early cinema. Undoubtedly, they were popular because of the kinetic movement of the waves, which was fascinating for early cinema audiences accustomed to still photographs. This aspect of movement is specific to cinema, of course, and not a part of the rough sea topos as it appeared in other media such as postcards. The

100  |  The Image in Early Cinema films mentioned here are all extremely short (in keeping with the production and exhibition imperatives of the day), and so tightly framed as to render their actual locations unverifiable. Attempting to be realistic, rough sea films actually gesture toward modernist abstraction and fragmentation. Placed within a broad history of twentieth-century visual culture, the films (unwittingly) set the stage for a whole new exploration of landscape by abstract expressionist artists and beyond, a tradition that art historian Robert Rosenblum traced across Romantic aesthetics from Caspar David Friedrich to Mark Rothko.12 Rough seas are a particularly potent topos of silent-era cinema. Indeed, films showing some form of moving water—not just rough seas but also waterfalls, rivers, lakes, and even fountains—are some of the most common subjects in early nonfiction films.13 This is no doubt due to film’s seemingly magical ability to represent movement, and what better to showcase movement than water? Indeed, these films’ visual power gestures toward a set of questions about cinema-specific aesthetics. Images of water in motion produce a strongly affective experience for the spectator, and when you add color to this experience, the films reach a kind of lyrical affective peak that is quite different from the effect of fiction films. But these mechanically enabled water images are also tied to a longer set of visual traditions for the representation of water in art history, intersecting with the Romantic tradition of the sublime. The rough seas topos was still going strong in the 1910s, in films such as Rocks and Waves (Gaumont, c. 1911), and In the West of England (Hepworth, c. 1917). The first shot of Storm at Sea, which appears to be toned (or tinted) blue, gives us the perspective of a sailor looking out the prow of a ship. Art historian Katherine Manthorne has argued that Edison’s 1900 film, Storm at Sea bears a resemblance to Winslow Homer’s painting, Signal of Distress, which depicts a (still image) of a rough sea from the perspective of sailors standing on deck, and which he reworked in the late 1890s—possibly after having seen some of Edison’s films.14 Gaumont’s Storm at Sea, made over a decade later, shows the persistence of this perspective in its first (and longest) shot. By tracing the life of the “rough sea” topos, we can look back to a somewhat undefined “feeling for nature” that emerged in the Romantic period, and we can look forward as it gestures toward an awareness of a human place in the environment. Even though the figures have been vacated from these rough sea films, they really only have meaning due to the implied presence of humans looking at them. Landscape images in early cinema provided a discursive space for imagining nature at a particular moment when a nascent environmental consciousness was developing. The rough seas topos continues today in films such as The Day after Tomorrow and in news footage of superstorms like Katrina and Sandy. Today, this topos functions as a warning about rising sea levels and global warming. But in early cinema, rough seas functioned as momentary spectacles of nature’s power to amaze and astonish.

Landscape Topoi | 101 Jennifer Peterson is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at Woodbury University. She is author of Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film.

Notes 1. Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary, s.v. “landscape,” accessed July 2, 2015. http:// www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/landscape. 2. Tom Gunning, “‘Those Drawn with a Very Fine Camel’s Hair Brush’: The Origins of Film Genres,” Iris 20 (Fall 1995): 49–61. 3. Erkki Huhtamo, “Dismantling the Fairy Engine: Media Archaeology as Topos Study,” in: Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications and Implications, ed. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 28. 4. Siegfried Zielinsky, Deep Time of the Media: Toward and Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); Jussi Parikka, What is Media Archaelogy? (London: Polity Press, 2012). 5. Huhtamo “Fairy Engine,” 29; Ernst Robert Curtius European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 79. 6. Erkki Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 15. 7. Huhtamo, “Fairy Engine,” 35, 37, and passim. 8. For an account of this image as repurposed in different media see Jennifer Lynn Peterson, “The Art and Commerce of Nineteenth Century Visual Education: The Historiscope and the Milton Bradley Company,” Getty Research Journal, no. 6 (2014): 175–184. 9. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Gombrich and the Rise of Landscape,” in The Consumption of Culture, 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text, ed. Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (London: Routledge, 1995), 115. 10. Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995). 11. “Novelties at the R. P. S.,” Photogram, 3 (1896). Source: Internet Archive, accessed July 2, 2015, http://www.archive.org/stream/photogramvolume00kygoog /photogramvolume00kygoog_djvu.txt. Quoted in John Barnes, The Beginnings of the Cinema in England, 1894–1901: volume 1, 1894–1896, revised ed. (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 1998), x. 12. Robert Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko (New York: Harper Collins, 1977). 13. See Jennifer Lynn Peterson, Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). 14. Katherine Manthorne, “Experiencing Nature in Early Film: Dialogues with Church’s Niagara and Homer’s Seascapes,” in Moving Pictures: American Art and Early Film, 1880–1910, Volume 1, ed. Nancy Mowll Mathews (Manchester, VT: Hudson Hills, 2005), 59.

9

A View Aesthetic without a View? Space and Place in Early Norwegian Polar Expedition Films Gunnar Iversen

Film historian Tom Gunning has argued that the Urform of early nonfiction

film is the view. Most actualities are structured around presenting a visually interesting view that not only sates the spectator’s curiosity but also mimes the act of looking. In the “view aesthetic,” the world is presented to the camera, and the spectator is given the best vantage point for looking.1 Most often the camera observes something striking, but films can also observe the mundane or trivial.2 With simply filmic gestures, the view aesthetic represents both a mediated sense of “thereness” and a distanced and controlled view, looking at views of the world from a distant vantage point. This short essay explores a view aesthetic without views, films that mostly show only snow and ice and seem not to be site-specific, views that become spectacular only if you already know where they are taken. Using early Norwegian polar films, and especially the footage from Roald Amundsen’s 1911 expedition to the South Pole and a 1912 Norwegian newsreel Verdensspeilet [Mirror of the World], I argue that these films construct a site-specific space even though the view itself seems nonspecific. Showing an ice-covered surface and a few penguins or a ship at sea, the films’ construction of space and place is complex and layered. Oscillating between place and nonplace, these films can be used to problematize and develop aspects of the view aesthetic.

Representing the Unseen Continent Western culture has been fascinated with the Arctic regions since antiquity, but until a little more than a hundred years ago, the farthest northern region was largely unseen. Antarctica was even more mysterious, imagined yet unseen, and representations were modeled after what has been called the “Arctic Sublime.”3 Cultural historian Russell A. Potter, among others, has shown how the frozen North played an important part in visual culture in the nineteenth century through panoramas, dioramas, and pictures in the illustrated press. The imagination of artists and the

A View Aesthetic without a View?  |  103 public alike were captured by the remote, unseen, and mysterious polar regions in a century that saw almost every corner of the globe slowly open to the curious and examining eye of Western science and media as well as the last global expansion of imperialism. Representations of the Arctic regions also became models for representations of Antarctica and the mysterious frozen South. Most mysterious was the South Pole itself. As film historian Jan Anders Diesen points out, in the 1890s, Antarctica was a mystery. No one knew whether it was a number of ice-covered islands or a continent. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a number of European expeditions traveled to Antarctica; Robert Falcon Scott, together with Edward Wilson and Ernest Shackleton, made the first serious attempt to reach the South Pole in November 1902. Five years later, Shackleton led his own expedition, and he was the first to make the Pole itself the principal goal of an expedition.4 However, as we now know, Roald Amundsen and his men were the first to reach the South Pole, on December 14, 1911. Roald Amundsen was inspired to bring a camera along by the success of his rival Ernest Shackleton. Shackleton had visited Norway’s capital Kristiania in October 1909, where he showed slides and film footage as part of his lecture about his latest expedition. For many years, Amundsen had made a living and financed his many expeditions by lecturing but had only reluctantly included photographic slides in his lectures. However, Shackleton’s success made him see the value of moving images, and he signed a contract with the leading cinema owner in Norway, Hugo Hermansen, on July 26, 1910. Hermansen supplied a camera and 3,700 feet of film, and Amundsen gave Hermansen the right to show the film footage after he himself had used it in a lecture tour. The footage from the expedition to the South Pole was included in Amundsen’s first lecture in October 1912 in Kristiania, and a sixteen-minute cinema version premiered in Hugo Hermansen’s biggest cinema, Circus Verdensteater [Circus World Theatre], on November 9, 1912. Amundsen did not bring a film camera to the Pole itself because it would have been too heavy to carry and would have endangered the most important and perilous part of the expedition. He did, however, film the preparations before leaving Norway, life on board the ship on its way to Antarctica, and life on the Antarctic ice. Amundsen himself filmed the preparations, and his second-in-command, Kristian Prestrud, took over as cameraman after Amundsen left for the Pole. Much of the footage in the South Pole film, especially numerous scenes with penguins, was taken by Prestrud while Amundsen and four other men were on their way to the Pole. Scenes with penguins had been a great success in Shackleton’s lecture in 1909 in Norway, and Prestrud and Amundsen wanted to be sure to please their audiences.5 The film that is now called Roald Amundsen’s South Pole Expedition 1910–1912 became a big success, and in 2005 it was included in UNESCO’s exclusive collection of films in the Memory of the World.6 The success of the film in 1912 convinced Amundsen of the value of taking a film camera and a camera o ­ perator

104  |  The Image in Early Cinema along on his expeditions, and on his later expeditions to the frozen North he always had a camera operator with him. Amundsen produced four feature-length polar expedition films between 1923 and 1926.

The View Aesthetic without a View: Two Representational Strategies Representing the conquest of the South Pole was a big challenge for the visual media. The news of Roald Amundsen and his men reaching the South Pole was sensational, especially in Norway, but how to illustrate this event when there were no images posed a problem. That was also the challenge of Amundsen’s business partner, the cinema owner Hugo Hermansen. He capitalized on Amundsen’s success in his newsreel Verdensspeilet [Mirror of the World] in the spring of 1912, before Amundsen returned from Antarctica with his film footage of the frozen continent. The part of this newsreel that deals with Amundsen starts with an intertitle that informs the viewer that Roald Amundsen planted the Norwegian flag on the South Pole in December 1911. We see naval cadets raising and saluting the flag on a boat in the harbor of the capital, then the film cuts to Amundsen’s ship, Fram, before the expedition leaves for the South Pole. The segment ends with a short part where we see Amundsen himself talking to two men. This part of the newsreel tells a story but only indirectly, because the images from the Pole itself did not reach Norway until many months later. Using a part of the voyage, in this case images from the very beginning, as a synecdoche—a rhetorical trope or a type of figurative speech—to represent the whole journey and Amundsen’s achievement, Hermansen represented the unrepresentable in an indirect way. Part of the newsreel, the second shot of Fram in the harbor, was later reused in Amundsen’s film. When Amundsen returned, bringing with him forty-one minutes of footage from the trip, Hermansen could then make a different representation of the conquest of the South Pole, but now his challenge was different. Amundsen’s images had few impressive and picturesque qualities, and most of the time he had filmed his men, his dogs, or penguins in the ice and snow. Unlike most travelogues, the Amundsen South Pole film depicts a region that had not already been filmed or photographed, and his film is very different from “The Arctic Sublime”; there are no mountains of ice and snow or a Caspar David Friedrich–like vista with lead-in figures. Such imaginary fictional visions of the frozen South are replaced with flat, white dullness. Seeing the restored film today, one feels a little bit like Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s mariner: ice, ice everywhere, and not a view to see. The sixteen-minute South Pole film that was made out of the Amundsen footage became a big success in Norway. The restored version of the film has eleven segments, eleven intertitles, and a total of forty cuts. Most segments of the film consist of three or four cuts that depict the preparations before the journey,

A View Aesthetic without a View?  |  105 life on board Fram, life on the ice in Antarctica, and depictions of Amundsen leaving for the South Pole and of his return to the camp, Framheim, after having reached the Pole. These last images are clearly staged for the camera, and when Amundsen was leaving for the Pole, the dogsleds with him and his men go past the camera a number of times, repeating the important historical moment. The Amundsen South Pole film is a typical early travelogue. As film historian Jennifer Lynn Peterson discusses in her book on early travelogues, a collection of images better describes the structure of early travelogues than narrative or argument.7 Amundsen’s film is a multishot travelogue, but it is a collection of images rather than a documentary with an argument or a narrative. The film has a loose structure, and the trope of the journey holds together a collection of various visual fragments. It uses the cinema-specific quality of movement in different ways, either through pans, the jump cuts in the segments, or the filming of movement itself: ice floating by the ship at sea, whales or penguins moving on the ice or in the ocean, and the members of the expedition moving against the snow and ice. However, as a travelogue and polar film, the lack of picturesque views is an important feature of the film. The landscape has very little depth in the scenes, and most often we see only people or animals against plain whiteness, with no horizon, background of angry waters, or picturesque mountains. There is no obvious and particular resonant specificity or topographic authenticity in the pictures themselves. Amundsen’s South Pole film is different from Hermansen’s newsreel and has a very different representational strategy. Amundsen has images from Antarctica, although not from the Pole itself. The Pole is represented in the film by a still image of Amundsen and his men saluting the flag they raised there, but the images of Antarctica have no special markers or identity; they could be taken at other places in the world with lots of snow and ice. There seems to be no there there. The indexical force of seeing the real Antarctic icescapes is opposed by the seeming nonspecificity of the images in Amundsen’s film.

Through Amundsen’s Eyes Tom Gunning’s “view aesthetic” highlights the fact that the act of looking is either explicitly or implicitly incorporated into the early nonfiction films. The staging of the look is central to the view aesthetic, and the pleasure in the films lies in them serving as the surrogate of looking. In later documentaries, a larger argument or narrative replaces the look as representational structure. The act of observing seems to be of vital importance to the early travelogues and could also be important in a discussion of the films’ construction of space and place as well as audience fascination or affect. The lack of picturesque views and clear signs of a specific place in Amundsen’s South Pole film is interesting. That Amundsen and his assistant, Prestrud, had

106  |  The Image in Early Cinema only a very brief training in cinematography, and that they were more interested in staying alive than in making a picturesque film, is not so important here. The lack of views and the dull white flatness of the images themselves, the suggestion of limitless or infinite space, could have been an attraction in itself, and it creates questions about the boundaries of the view aesthetic. As Jennifer Lynn Peterson and others have pointed out, there are lots of early nonfiction films about seemingly nonspecific subjects such as rocks and waves.8 These are subjects that do not have particularly resonant specificity and topographic authenticity. Even though the images of Antarctica in Amundsen’s film seem to be devoid of specific markers of place and could be taken in many places other than in the specific place in Antarctica, they do not become unspecific nonplaces. In the early 1990s, the French anthropologist Marc Augé popularized the concept of the nonplace.9 The opposition of places and nonplaces derives from Michel de Certeau’s distinction between place and space, but Augé uses the concept of nonplace differently from de Certeau.10 For Augé, nonplace is specifically likened to the modern condition he calls “supermodernity,” and it certainly is a problematic concept to use about the earliest part of the twentieth century, but Amundsen’s images are those of both a very specific site and something seemingly unspecific; a nonplace. Geographers usually define place as a “meaningful location.”11 Places are made, and space is turned into place by some form of human practice or signification. Place is the way we experience the world and how we make the world meaningful. In Amundsen’s film, the camera is a witness, or the mechanical and technological extension of human action that makes place out of space, but the images themselves are devoid of site-specific markers. The geographer Tim Cresswell has pointed out that place is not just a thing in the world but is a way of seeing, knowing, and understanding the world.12 This could be one way of contextualizing the importance of the view and the act of looking in the early nonfiction films. The miming of the act of looking, and how some of Amundsen’s men (and penguins too) return the look of the camera, is important in making place out of space. The act of looking creates place out of seemingly endless dull whiteness. At the same time, we as spectators may experience the photographic effect with which Roland Barthes opens his famous book about photography, but in a slightly different manner. Barthes is fascinated by a photograph of Napoleon’s younger brother and the fact that he is “looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor.”13 Two things are important here: First, that knowledge about the photograph is of vital importance. If Barthes, or we, did not know that the man in the photograph was Napoleon’s brother, we would not respond in the same way. Second, the act of looking in the photograph mimes our act of looking at the photograph. The same things are important in the case of Amundsen’s film and in many other early nonfiction films.

A View Aesthetic without a View?  |  107 With the Amundsen film, we are fascinated by the men who are looking at Amundsen and who have “seen Amundsen’s eyes,” but we are also fascinated by seeing through Amundsen’s eyes. The act of looking is important not only as an aspect of the film and as a way of creating place out of space, but also as a way for audiences to be fascinated and affected by the collection of images. Although some of the images in Amundsen’s film seem to be of nonspecific nonplaces, the act of looking creates specificity. As anthropologist Marc Augé points out, “Place and non-place are rather like opposed polarities: the first is never completely erased, the second never totally completed, they are like palimpsests on which the scrambled game of identity and relations is ceaselessly rewritten.”14 This “game of identity” involves not only the act of looking in the film but also the look of the spectators. This act of looking is the main difference between Amundsen’s South Pole film and the early “rocks and waves” genre. In her book on travelogues and early nonfiction film, Jennifer Lynn Peterson discusses briefly the 1911 Eclipse film Dr. Charcot’s Trip Toward the South Pole and a review in Nickelodeon. Here, James B. Crippen praises the Charcot South Pole film for its “weird and affecting beauty” and its attempt to represent the “bleak and forbidding.”15 The review highlights some of the affective qualities of the polar film genre and points to the spectacular aspects of foreignness in these films. The lack of picturesque quality in Amundsen’s film, its views without a view, aspects of the film that we today may look upon as a failure to create images and affect, may have had other effects and affects in 1912. In the same way as a representation of an event is manufactured out of indirect material in the newsreel by Hermansen about Amundsen’s conquest, the “lack of picturesque qualities” in the Amundsen South Pole film may have represented a unique and maybe uncanny experience of a completely different world and landscape beyond ordinary picturesqueness. It could also have been a way for Amundsen to create an impression that was different from the picturesque images in the well-known genre of the arctic sublime, underlining the special importance and novelty of the media event of reaching the South Pole and its representation on film. Amundsen’s South Pole film is an interesting example of a different way of trying to create “thereness” by avoiding the usual elements of the arctic sublime, a film that can be used to problematize and develop aspects of Tom Gunning’s important concept of the view aesthetic. The film is an example of a view aesthetic without a view. It is also a more complex film than it seems, oscillating between place and nonplace and place and space, creating a multilayered audience position, especially for a modern audience. Today we see through Amundsen’s eyes a bleak and forbidding landscape; we see his men looking at him and looking at us looking at them.

108  |  The Image in Early Cinema Gunnar Iversen is Associate Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University. He is author with Astrid Soderbergh Widding and Tytti Soila of Nordic National Cinemas and editor with Jan Ketil Simonsen of Beyond the Visual: Sound and Image in Ethnographic and Documentary Film.

Notes 1. 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: Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1997), 9–24. 2. Jennifer Lynn Peterson, Education in the School of Dreams – Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013). 3. Russell A. Potter, Arctic Spectacles—The Frozen North in Visual Culture, 1818–1875 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007). 4. Jan Anders Diesen, “Sydpolfilmen,” in Roald Amundsens Sydpolekspedisjon 1910–1912 (Oslo: Norsk Filminstitutt, 2010), 5–7, 101–102. On Amundsen and on the polar expedition films see also: Tor Bomann-Larsen, Roald Amundsen (Oslo: Cappelen, 1995); Jan Anders Diesen, “De polare ekspedisjonsfilmene,” in Den andre norske filmhistorien, ed. Eva Bakøy and Tore Helseth (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2011), 14–28; Gunnar Iversen, “Med Amundsen på ekspedisjon,” in Virkelighetsbilder – Norsk dokumentarfilm gjennom hundre år, ed. Sara Brinch and Gunnar Iversen (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2001), 142–156. 5. Diesen, “Sydpolfilmen,” 16, 112. 6. Ibid., 7–9, 103–105. 7. Peterson, Education in the School of Dreams, 142, 145–150. 8. Ibid., 148. 9. Marc Augé, Non-Places—Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London: Verso, 1995). 10. Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 11. Tim Cresswell, Place – A Short Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 7. 12. Ibid., 11. 13. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 3. 14. Augé, Non-Places, 79. 15. Peterson, Education in the School of Dreams, 207.

Part II: Material

10

Between Recognition and Abstraction: Early Vocational Training Films Florian Hoof

I

n January 1914, Frank Bunker Gilbreth, an industrial and management consultant based in Providence, Rhode Island, renowned for his film-based time and motion studies, boarded the RMS Lusitania on his way to Berlin for a consulting job with Deutsche Gasglühlicht AG, a huge corporation that specialized in lightbulbs. Gilbreth’s task was to change the existing production system to the system of scientific management, also known at the time as the Taylor system. For this task, he established a film-training room for workers and executives in the company’s Berlin facilities that allowed for the projection of any kind of moving and still image available at the time. The project abruptly ended in July 1915, eighteen months later, just days after the RMS Lusitania—the ocean liner he had arrived on—was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine in the Irish Sea. Gilbreth complained that World War I was “about the 50th unexpected thing to keep me from being rich.”1 In reconstructing this specific case, I hope to contribute to the understanding of early vocational training films in industrial corporations. I contextualize such films as being part of a combination of moving and still images that were deployed using techniques imported from statistics, engineering, and educational theory. Here, I specifically focus on the visual cultures of engineering and business management and their interplay with images and image combinations employed in early vocational training films.

Early Vocational Training Film in Berlin Frank Gilbreth was working in a newly built industrial area of the Deutsche Gasglühlicht AG in the Berlin borough of Friedrichshain, the industrial heart of the city at that time. Because of its sheer size, the complex of factories was called the “city of lamps,” or Lampenstadt. The production complex situated in this area employed seven thousand workers plus additional staff in administration, management, and logistics. At the time, it was the biggest company ever to be changed to the system of scientific management. Consequently, ­communicating and ­lecturing

112  |  The Image in Early Cinema the new system was tremendously important to ensure progress. The center of this ambitious project was a large, newly established planning department situated in one of the main buildings. It consisted of several facilities and provided office space for Gilbreth and his assistants. According to Gilbreth, the planning department made “a wonderful showing. Nothing ever seen like it before in the history of S. M. [scientific management].”2 A key element of the department was the central planning room. Here, Gilbreth and his assistants steered the project. The planning department encompassed a fully equipped film laboratory to develop film stock; the Deutsche Gasglühlicht AG provided film stock as well as shooting and projection equipment from the Ernemann company.3 To operate the laboratory, Gilbreth employed Roger Freeman, an American cameraman, “to develop motion pictures and cycle graph pictures about 2 hours per day per week.”4 The planning department also included an “executives’ and workmen’s theater,” to be used for lecturing and screening vocational training films. The screening room not only had film projector devices but was also equipped with cutting-edge visualization technologies of the day: “We have . . . the photograph, the movies and stereo, and so with the combination of all these things we have a fairly good scheme for the visualization of our problem.”5 Although originally planned as part of a vocational training scheme for both executives and workers, the executives’ and workmen’s theater was used solely to communicate the new system to the middle and top management. “I lecture to about ten of them from 9:00 to 11:30 daily and make a great hit every time.”6 In his lectures, Gilbreth taught the very basics of scientific management. This included how to change the management system from oral to written communication by introducing written forms and documents. Another important issue was the area of work efficiency. For this he used film-based motion studies to show employees the superiority of his methods to change existing work movements. To involve his audience more deeply and to prove the urgency of his planned steps, Gilbreth screened films and presented stereoscopic pictures he had produced for consulting jobs in the United States. A report of Gilbreth’s consulting firm discusses “lectures to be given to the heads of department and also accompanied by moving picture projection of American methods.”7 During these lectures, film projection functioned in complex ways. Gilbreth regularly rewound, repeated, and stopped the film to use single frames as still images or to explain details. To proceed in this manner, he was forced to use a relatively faint projector, in this case an Ernemann Kinox projector, to avoid self-combustion of the film stock. Because of the weak light from the emitting lamps in the projector, he constructed appliances such as an open box that surrounded the screen (fig. 10.1) to prevent ambient light from reaching the film screen and distorting the images. Although moving images were a centerpiece of this vocational training framework, they were also accompanied by other visualization devices, because

Between Recognition and Abstraction  |  113

Fig. 10.1 “Executives’ and workmen’s theatre for viewing and criticizing micromotion films and simultaneous motion cycle charts of best workers demonstrating the One Best Way to do work.” Caption, Gilbreth LOM, SPCOLL, Purdue University Libraries, NF 56/299–12, Photo, TECHNOSEUM, Mannheim, Nachlass Witte/Gilbreth, Nr. 2005–0759.

production efficiency was about not only efficient work movements but also coordinating production and logistics. Gilbreth used a wide range of heterogeneous visualization and planning tools, including photography, lantern slides, charts, graphs, and stereoscopic cards. He utilized the latter to present corporate data as well as cycle-graphic studies of improved motion paths for working procedures.8 Abstract visualizations such as precybernetic graphical diagrams—flowcharts and route models—were used to display strategies and results of consulting efforts in the company. The vocational training practices in Berlin were shaped by heterogeneous visual and technological devices. How moving and nonmoving images—realistic and abstract visualizations—related to each other in context of vocational training can be exemplified in the case of film-based motion studies. Gilbreth used them to analyze, synthesize, and finally to change existing working patterns in factories to boost ergonomics and efficiency. His “Method and Apparatus for the Study and Correction of Motions”9 encompassed the cycle-graphic method, in which light bulbs were attached to a person’s extremities. The light bulbs were then lit so that the movements of the individual could be captured on film as a clearly defined light line, resulting in an abstract representation of a certain movement. These motion studies were almost pitch-black films, only partially lit by “various

114  |  The Image in Early Cinema paths and orbits of dots and dashes.”10 Interestingly, Gilbreth preferred abstract images to ordinary realistic movie shots for vocational training purposes because the differences between the old and the new motion paths were rather small but significant, and the light bulb method was specifically suitable to highlight these differences. To benefit from the ergonomic improvements, the workers had to exactly follow the “one best way”11 to perform a specific task. But it was challenging to instruct these small differences to the workers, a common problem within the realm of scientific management, because their systematic “principles appear to be so self-evident that many men think it almost childish to state them.”12 In this situation, to demonstrate new movements by screening a film of a worker executing a new motion path was not the proper solution. Even though the workers would easily recognize the movements in such a film, the purpose of the vocational training was different, because Gilbreth aimed toward the “motion minded”13 worker. Therefore, the transfer of knowledge could not be achieved by simply representing the new method, as this would only distract the trainees from grasping the qualities of the new motion paths. Instead, vocational training methods were needed that would help the workers adjust and coordinate their own body movements according to the new motion paths. To achieve this goal, Gilbreth used strategies of abstraction to encourage the workers to reflect on their own bodily behaviors. Thus, he was aiming not toward recognition but toward a “shock of abstraction” for the purpose of self-reflection. For Gilbreth to utilize film as an abstract learning environment, another fundamental problem had to be resolved. Film was flat, whereas the movements Gilbreth wanted to teach to the workers unfolded in a three-dimensional space. Consequently, he had to transform his “one best way” to perform work, which he had recorded on film, into three-dimensional wire models. To construct these models, he devised an “optical three-dimensional penetrating screen,”14 a threedimensional grid that enabled him to convert the filmic space into a quantifiable coordination system. This allowed him to translate film-based motion studies into numeric data. Based on these data, the motions could then be turned into wire models that unfolded into three-dimensional space. Devices and visualizations such as wire models and stereoscopic cycle graphs were turned into flat abstractions to continuously create tensions between an ideal “one best way” to perform a task and the realization of the abstract models in the realm of the factory floors. Motion studies brought together side-view abstract cycle graphs depicted on film, stereoscopic photographs, wire motion models, and moving and nonmoving images based on the representational concept of the central perspective. Raising attention to small changes that fit into an overarching system from a managerial point of view was not restricted to motion studies and the working body. It also concerned logistics, work-flow planning, and s­ tandardization

Between Recognition and Abstraction  |  115 ­ rocedures. Here, systemic aspects of large-scale production and logistic chains p were not visible in the first place but had to be visualized by congregating and combining diverse business data. Abstract visual knowledge about the production process put the management in a position to understand and reflect on these issues. Similar to the motion studies, strategies of visual abstraction were used to create awareness for previously unnoticed systematic aspects in the factories. Both film and business graphics, such as the flow charts and route models used in the executives’ and workmen’s theater, did not directly relate to the idea of a recognizable reality. Rather, they were used to visualize large sets of data by turning them into abstract figures and graphs. Abstraction was not only connected to an ever-emerging field of visual art but was also needed to stabilize and enable knowledge transfer—the ultimate goal of the executives’ and workmen’s theater vocational training film sessions. Narrative film sequences partly determined the structure of these vocational training sessions, but they ultimately relied on Gilbreth, or more precisely, on the engineer operating the diverse visualization devices in the projection room. Even when heterogeneous visualization devices guided the vocational training sessions, they had something in common with each other. Stemming from the visual culture of applied science, they shared a similar aesthetic of abstraction combined with the aesthetics of still and moving images. In the case of vocational training films, it was a useful strategy to realize certain educational effects. The aesthetic realm of early vocational training film can then be described as a space that stretches between abstraction and recognition, between dots and dashes and moving images that show people performing a specific task. In this visual space, the “shock of abstraction” was used for the purpose of learning.

Toward a Genealogy of Early Vocational Training Films The methodology developed for the executives’ and workmen’s theater cannot be explained solely as a cinematic situation or with references only to the visual culture of early cinema. Rather, we should understand it as a combination of moving and still images within an aesthetic realm that derived from applied sciences, educational theory, and the arts.15 Consequently, I argue that early vocational training films are connected to an alternative epistemological framework and must be situated in a different genealogy. The film setting Gilbreth established in Berlin differed essentially from screenings of educational and nonfiction films in cinemas, scientific societies, and world fairs at the time.16 Although the arrangement of time and space in the executives’ and workmen’s theater was partly structured through film, this was no pure black-box situation. In contrast to the screening of educational films, it was “learning with the lights on.”17 The images and image combinations employed in vocational training were rooted in both the technological materiality of film and the visual

116  |  The Image in Early Cinema realm of applied sciences such as engineering and management. Consequently, film was not at the very center of the vocational training lectures but was part of an interlinked framework consisting of different visualization devices. From that perspective, the relations between film and other visualization devices involved can be understood as a “heterogeneous ensemble of practices”18 that were gathered around the mode of abstract aesthetics for the purpose of vocational training. One dimension of this genealogy is linked to disciplines such as engineering, statistics, mathematics, management, and organizational studies. The visual culture of these applied sciences consisted of different tools and practices to visualize, calculate, and process data. It was part of a visualization boom that peaked around 1910.19 These graphical methods20 were specifically addressed as opportunities to override the mathematical rigor21 of conventional methods of data processing and presentation at the time.22 They were used not only to visualize data but also to provide for a space that would allow for creative and playful t­ hinking—creating a unique way for executives to react to newly emerging systemic production issues and to successfully coordinate factory work flows. Abstraction, similar to the purpose of the cycle graphs and wire models, offered a different mode of perception on reality. The second dimension of the genealogy of abstraction was influenced by an educational theory based on the concept of model-based learning. At the time, Maria Montessori most influentially argued for this concept. Adopting fundamental ideas from the philosophical perspective of sensualism, she argued that abstraction is key to an efficient learning experience; only one sense at a time should be trained for optimal educational progress. From her perspective, representing or displaying a movement is not the preferred way to transfer knowledge. To achieve optimal results, teaching efforts should be reduced to one sense at a time. Montessori conceptualized the human individual as an interlinked organism consisting of sense, nerve, and motor systems. To influence the system for the purpose of teaching or training, an external stimulus is needed to irritate the system. “The external stimulus acts upon the organ of sense, and the impression is transmitted along the centripetal way to the nerve center—the corresponding motor impulse is elaborated, and is transmitted along the centrifugal path to the organ of motion, provoking a movement.”23 Montessori relied on abstract learning models to stimulate the senses separately. She devised a whole system of learning models that provided for a wide range of external stimuli. Here she used ideas of object-centered learning conceptualized by Jean Itard und Edouard Seguin.24 While Montessori relied on real three-dimensional models, Gilbreth turned film into an abstract learning model that provided for external stimuli needed for educational purposes. “The moving film in the ordinary camera will

Between Recognition and Abstraction  |  117 give stretched-out cycle graphs, just as though we had made a Montessori model and then pulled it out.”25 What Gilbreth had in mind was some kind of reverse engineering of Siegfried Kracauer’s observation on film in his piece “On Berlin’s Picture Palaces,”26 published some ten years later. For Kracauer, “events of the three-dimensional stage imperceptibly blend into two-dimensional illusions.”27 Gilbreth turned the two-dimensional film illusion into an abstract three-dimensional learning system. In his perspective, this vocational training system could no longer be sufficiently described as motion pictures but should be classified as “devices for visual education.”28 This also distinguishes his vocational training films from educational films that were more directly linked to concepts of filmic displays of reality. Moreover, in sharp contrast to the latter, Gilbreth even experimented with blindfolding the individual to restrict stimulation to only one sense at a time. From this genealogical perspective and in combination with new methods of displaying business graphics, strategies of abstraction in early vocational training films were pragmatic attempts to turn devices of display such as film into devices for abstraction that could align with the latest scientific paradigms and results from empirical educational research.

Conclusion Key to understanding early vocational training films in the 1910s is focusing on their heterogeneous character. To fully grasp the technological as well as the aesthetic aspects of early vocational training films, it is crucial to focus on the interplay between the filmic register of recognition and the graphical register of abstraction in the context of applied sciences and educational theories. Thus, I propose to study early vocational training films as part of a heterogeneous ensemble of practices that takes into account the productivity of both the cinematic register of recognition and the graphical register of abstraction. Notwithstanding the strong resemblances, early vocational training films also differ from other sorts of film in the industrial realm that are referred to as “industrial film”29 or “educational film.”30 If one takes into account the technological and aesthetic specificity of early vocational films, they can be perceived not only as part of ideological conflicts31 but also as part of an epistemology that is determined by engineering and management rationality and their aesthetics of abstraction.32 Even though I have tried to show how the early vocational film differs from other film forms in the context of pedagogy, the films can clearly be defined as nonfiction films. Ben Brewster argued that the tendency toward narration in fiction films that started in 1904 did not apply to nonfiction film.33 Connecting early vocational training film to different registers such as the visual culture of engineering provides some insights into why nonfiction film took a different turn

118  |  The Image in Early Cinema in the case of narration and can provide an epistemological u ­ nderstanding of ­formal and aesthetic differences between fiction and nonfiction film that emerged roughly between 1900 and the 1910s. Florian Hoof is Assistant Professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Media Cultures of Computer Simulation at Leuphana University, Lüneburg. He is author of Engel der Effizienz. Eine Mediengeschichte der Unternehmensberatung and Angels of Efficiency: A Media History of Consulting.

Notes 1. Correspondence F. B. Gilbreth to L. M. Gilbreth, October 10, 1914, Gilbreth Library of Management (LOM), Special Collection (SPCOLL), Purdue University Libraries, NF 92/813–5. 2. Correspondence F. B. Gilbreth to L. M. Gilbreth, April 28, 1914, Gilbreth LOM, SPCOLL, Purdue University Libraries, NF 91/813–6. 3. Correspondence F. B. Gilbreth to L. M. Gilbreth, January 12, 1914, Gilbreth LOM, SPCOLL, Purdue University Libraries, NF 91/813–6. 4. Correspondence F. B. Gilbreth to L. M. Gilbreth, January 07, 1914, Gilbreth LOM, SPCOLL, Purdue University Libraries, NF 91/813–6. 5. Visualizing the Problem of Management, p. 10, typescript, ca. 1921, Gilbreth LOM, SPCOLL, Purdue University Libraries, NF 74/675–1. 6. Correspondence F. B. Gilbreth to L. M. Gilbreth, January 27, 1914, Gilbreth LOM, SPCOLL, Purdue University Libraries, NF 91/813–6. 7. Report Auergesellschaft, Gilbreth LOM, SPCOLL, Purdue University Libraries, NF 76/695–1/2. 8. For details see: Florian Hoof, Engel der Effizienz: Eine Mediengeschichte der Unternehmensberatung (Konstanz: Konstanz University Press, 2015), 318–337. English translation is forthcoming as: Florian Hoof, Angels of Efficiency: A Media History of Consulting (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 9. US Pat. Nr. 1.199.980, Method and Apparatus for the Study and Correction of Motions, filed on 23 May1913, granted 3 October 1916. 10. Frank B. Gilbreth, “The Effect of Motion Study upon the Workers,” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 1000 (1916), 273. 11. Frank B. and Lillian M. Gilbreth, “Applications of Motion Study: Its Use in Developing Best Methods of Work,” Management and Administration 7 (1924), 295. 12. Frederick W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (Norwood: Plimpton Press, 1911), 13. 13. Florian Hoof, “‘The One Best Way.’ Bildgebende Verfahren der Ökonomie und Innovationen der Managementtheorie nach 1860,” montage a/v 15 (2006), 137. 14. Sketch for optical three-dimensional penetrating screen, Gilbreth LOM, SPCOLL, Purdue University Libraries, NF 99/816–96. 15. For the aspect of abstraction and the arts, see Rosalind Krauss, “Grids,” October 9 (1979): 50–64.

Between Recognition and Abstraction  |  119 16. Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron, and Dan Streible, “A History of Learning with the Lights Off,” in Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States, Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron, and Dan Streible, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 15–66; Paul L. Saettler, The Evolution of American Educational Technology (Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates, 2004); Ben Singer, “Early Home Cinema and the Edison Home Projecting Kinetoscope,” Film History 2 (1988): 37–69. 17. Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron, and Dan Streible, Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 18. Michel Foucault, Dispositive der Macht. Michel Foucault über Sexualität, Wissen und Macht (Berlin: Merve, 1978), 119–120. 19. For details see Hoof, Engel der Effizienz, 63–90. 20. For a detailed definition see Hoof, Engel der Effizienz, 31. 21. Edwin Layton, “Mirror-Image Twins: The Communities of Science and Technology in 19th-Century America,” Technology and Culture 12 (1971): 562–580. 22. For the playfulness and creativity of the graphical method see Felix Auerbach, “Die graphische Darstellung,” Die Naturwissenschaften 6&7 (1913), 139–145, 159–164; Marcello v. Pirani, Graphische Darstellung in Wissenschaft und Technik (Berlin: Göschen, 1914). 23. Maria Montessori, The Montessori Method (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1912), 222. 24. Édouard Séguin, Traitement Moral, Hygiène et Éducation des Idiots (Paris: Bailliere, 1846); Volker Ladenthin, “Zur Pädagogik Jean Itards und zu Aspekten ihrer Rezeption bei Maria Montessori,” Pädagogische Rundschau 51 (1997): 499–515. 25. FBG’s notes, undated, Gilbreth LOM, SPCOLL, Purdue University Libraries, NF 50/292–301. 26. Siegfried Kracauer, “Cult of Distraction: On Berlin’s Picture Palaces,” New German Critique 40 (1987): 91–96. 27. Kracauer, “Cult of Distraction,” 92. 28. Technical War Films and Vocational Training, manuscript F. B. Gilbreth ASME Meeting June 4–7, 1918, Gilbreth LOM, SPCOLL, Purdue University Libraries, NF 126/887. 29. Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau, Films that Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009). 30. Orgeron, Learning with the Lights Off. 31. Lee Grieveson, “Visualizing Industrial Citizenship,” in Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States, ed. Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron, and Dan Streible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 107–123. 32. Such elements are also key to training films and scientific films. See Scott Curtis, “Dissecting the Medical Training Film,” in Beyond the Screen: Institutions, Networks and Publics of Early Cinema, ed. Marta Braun, Charlie Keil, Rob King, Paul Moore, and Louis Pelletier (New Barnet: John Libbey 2012), 161–167. 33. “Session 3: ‘Locations: Events, Fantasy, Response,’” in Nonfiction from the Teens, ed. Daan Hertogs and Nico de Klerk (Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1994), 32–33.

11

Ruptured Perspectives: The “View,” Early Special Effects, and Film History Leslie DeLassus

B

etween 1962 and 1974, special effects innovator Norman O. Dawn assembled a collection of 635 poster-sized collage cards composed of film-related archival ephemera that visually explicate the composite imaging processes for which Dawn is best known: the glass shot and the matte shot. Although film historians have well documented the importance of these processes to the technical development of motion picture special effects, the composite images and the films for which they were produced remain in relative obscurity.1 Dawn intended the cards to provide a comprehensive historical account of the 861 effects he produced while working in the US film industry between 1907 and 1950;2 however, the collection now consists of 164 cards that detail the processes of 235 effects produced for eighty-five films. The overwhelming percentage of missing cards reflects the broader absence in US film history of extant silent-era films, which constitute approximately 25 percent of the films produced during that period.3 The 164 cards that compose the collection constitute approximately 26 percent of the 635 cards that Dawn constructed, which accounts for 27 percent of the 861 effects Dawn produced. Likewise, 79 percent of the eighty-five films for which the cards account were produced during or prior to the silent era, of which 91 percent are nonextant.4 Rather than interpreting these absences through what Caroline Frick identifies as the “language of loss” of moving image preservation discourse, this paper examines the ways in which the gaps in Dawn’s historical record constitute history as much as they signal its loss.5 As Allyson Nadia Field points out, the absence of extant silent-era films calls for an alternative historical approach to the “extant-centric” model prevalent in film studies, which privileges the extant film as the model object through which the nonextant film is figured as a lost object.6 Rather, film historians need to consider nonextant film a worthy object of study precisely because in many cases the object of study of film history is nonextant film. Field demonstrates the significance of film-related archival ephemera to nonextant film history in her study of African American filmmaking in the

Ruptured Perspectives | 121 1910s, which provide points of access to the otherwise historically marginalized film practices that constitute “uplift cinema.”7 The card collection provides such points of access to sixty-one nonextant silent films for which Dawn produced effects, forty-two of which he directed and eight of which he produced. The film-related archival ephemera that compose the cards provide pertinent information related to these films, which traverse several distinct domains of film practice, including early scenic footage for newsreels and the amusement park ride Hale’s Tours of the World, early one-reel travel films, silent-era studio shorts, serials, and low-budget second-feature films as well as Dawn’s own independently produced silent and sound feature-length films. This diverse corpus points to a silent-era Hollywood cinema alternative to the classical model, largely forgotten because it is dominated by low-budget product intended to supplement more costly studio feature films. In contrast to the classical model, this alternate cinematic mode emphasizes the scenic and thrilling elements that characterize both early exhibitionist films and contemporary effects-driven blockbusters, thus locating Dawn’s special effects innovations at the intersection of these modes.8 The cards reenact Dawn’s special effects processes through multimedial configurations of archival ephemera, including oil paintings, expository diagrams, publicity and promotional material, camera records, production stills, film frames, frame enlargements, and excerpts from academic publications. Through the intersection of these diverse forms, the cards figure Dawn’s effects as processes of medial convergence through which other media forms intersect, including stereoscopy, the panorama, the museum diorama, the tradition of the picturesque, landscape paintings of the Hudson River School, and early twentieth-century amusement park rides. The media-archaeological works of scholars such as Jonathan Crary, Anne Friedberg, Alison Griffiths, Tom Gunning, Lynn Kirby, Jennifer Lynn Peterson, and Lauren Rabinovitz9 map such intersections within what Ágnes Pethő refers to as “a system of media convergence and transformation.”10 “Intermedial figurations” render “observable as form” the processes by which media converge and determine one another through their differential relations.11 Intermedial studies map these figurations by performing techniques that “convey medial difference” while simultaneously developing from this practice a “historical poetics of cinematic intermediality.”12 The following case studies examine the ways in which the matte- and glass-­ shot processes render images that conform to the organizing principles of the “view aesthetic,” while at the same time figuring the profilmic scene to which these views allegedly refer an illusion.13 The glass-shot and matte-shot processes mimic illusory effects typically attributed to human perception—the retinal afterimage and stereoscopic depth—to produce the illusion of a profilmic view, thus displacing perceptual operations attributed to human vision, which, in this

122  |  The Image in Early Cinema context, function to conceal the work of composite imaging.14 In the case of the glass-shot process, a large glass plate is positioned in between the camera view and the profilmic scene. A portion of the glass plate contains a painted image element that blocks part of the profilmic scene from exposure to the camera view during the filming process. The resulting image appears as a composite between the painted image element and the exposed portion of the profilmic scene. The matte shot conceals this shift from one appearance to another, presenting both exposures simultaneously. In this process, a matte covers a portion of the film during the exposure of the area not covered, after which the exposed part is blocked while the previously matted-out section is exposed. This displacement of the profilmic scene manifests in Dawn’s composite images as hyperbolic relations of depth between the foreground and background planes that make up the disparate elements of these images. These relations of depth suggest the continuation of the planar recession beyond the frame, thus producing the illusion of the profilmic scene through the allusion to its absence.

The Alienated Afterimage The matte-shot process invokes nineteenth-century discourses of vision in its appropriation of the retinal afterimage, a percept upon which the persistence of vision depends for its iteration of motion perception.15 The cinematographic adaptation of the retinal afterimage can be traced in the diagram of the matte-­ shot process (fig. 11.1), which describes the production of an effect for a short travel film produced for an English company opening trade in China titled Gorges of the Yangtze (Arthur Lee, 1908).16 The top sketch depicts the matte used in the first exposure taken of an aerial view of the location of the company’s headquarters, during which the portion of the film indicated was blocked. The lower sketch depicts the matte used to block the portion of the film exposed in the first exposure during the filming of the second exposure of a closer view of the headquarters. As with the retinal afterimage, the first image recorded remains on the film during the recording of the second image, which results in their composite. Unlike the use of a device such as the phenakistoscope, this process does not demonstrate the persistence of vision, as the separate exposures appear simultaneously as two different parts of the same image.17 The relative stability of the image elements extends the potential duration of the afterimage ad infinitum, thus producing the illusion of the contemporaneity of the two exposures. The compositional organization of the mise-en-scène depicted in the sketch of the resulting composite image (fig. 11.2) translates this temporal dissimulation into a spatial problem, rendering the illusion of contemporaneity between the separate exposures as two mutually exclusive vantage points. The magnifying glass offers an inadequate explanation, as it is an optical device that brings objects closer into view by enlarging them, but it could never do so from such a

Ruptured Perspectives | 123

Fig. 11.1 Detail, Box 12 Card 70, Norman O. Dawn Collection, Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin.

distance. Rather, it serves as a surrogate device that stands in for the intervention required to produce this spatially heterogeneous view. As a substitute for the matte-shot process, the magnifying glass outlines the border at which the two exposures meet, thus delimiting the boundary between the competing views with a marker of perceptual mediation. The mise-en-scène suggests the extension of this boundary beyond the frame, as the cropped handle gestures toward an invisible space in which the rest of it is held by the hand of a viewing body who presumably occupies the impossible position of two vantage points. The composition underscores this extension beyond the frame, as the spatial configuration of the two exposures implies a planar recession of depth in which the magnifying glass occupies the foreground and the aerial view occupies the background. In this context, the afterimage is no longer tied to its function in the discursive articulation of the persistence of vision. Rather, the multiple exposure process performs a cinematic version of the afterimage in which two exposures create the separate planes in a planar configuration of depth. The planar relation between the two exposures invokes the discourse of the “view aesthetic” as an alternative to

124  |  The Image in Early Cinema

Fig. 11.2 Detail, Box 12, Card 70, Norman O. Dawn Collection, Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin.

that of nineteenth-century physiological optics. In his formative essay on the view in early cinema, Tom Gunning describes the view aesthetic as an arrangement of compositional elements oriented from a vantage point determined by the limits of the camera frame from which a profilmic activity or space is made observable as a cinematic image. This spatial configuration suggests the observability of the profilmic phenomenon independent of its presentation as a cinematic image. The view aesthetic thus gestures toward the preexistence of the view by “preserving a look or vantage point” which “mimes the act of looking and observing.”18 As several film scholars, including Gunning, observe, the view aesthetic borrows depth cues from existing modes of image production, which configure space as a series of planes oriented in a recession from foreground to background, including landscape painting, stereography, topographical photography, and postcard views. This mimetic function grounds the view aesthetic within an existing network of formal conventions to which the planar configuration of depth alludes.19 It is through this compositional allusion that the view gestures toward an observation of the profilmic phenomenon independent of its presentation as a cinematic image. The matte shot makes this allusion more explicit by embodying depth cues in the figure of a magnifying glass, which mobilizes a vertiginous relay of the view between the foreground and the background planes. The enlarging function of the magnifying glass motivates the planar recession, directing the view from its physical location in the foreground plane to the magnified portion of the background plane visible through its frame. At the same time, the magnifying glass redirects the view by shifting the magnified portion of the background plane to the foreground plane. This movement between the planes mimics the binocular

Ruptured Perspectives | 125 activity that, according to David Brewster, produces the effect of a unified and in-depth stereoscopic view: “The relief is given by the subsequent play of the optic axes varying themselves successively upon and unifying the similar points in each picture that correspond to different distances from the observer.”20 This binocular activity never completely unifies the stereoscopic view. Rather, as Rosalind Krauss argues, the exaggerated relation of depth elicits a seemingly infinite relay between the planes of the optical adjustment upon which the stereoscopic view depends for its unity.21 The matte shot disengages the view from the binocular activity delineated by Brewster and Krauss, figuring this activity as an effect of a monocular optical device that stands in for the multiple exposure process.

The Histouristic View The diagram of the production of a glass shot for Hale’s Tours of the World (fig. 11.3) imagines the glass-shot process in stereoscopic relief. The two oil sketches comprise the foreground and background in a planar recession away from the camera view delineated in the drawing underneath. From the imaginary-camera point of view, the top sketch depicting the live-action scene constitutes the background plane, which is situated behind the bottom sketch of the painted plate of glass occupying the foreground plane. This imaginary mise-en-scène recalls Jonathan Crary’s description of stereoscopic relief in Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century. As with the planes of the stereoscopic view, the diagram renders the planes of the glass-shot process “as flat cutout forms arrayed either nearer or further” from the camera view.22 The nonextant status of the composited version of the glass shot precludes the presentation of a single unified image. Rather, the glass shot appears as two disparate image elements. To quote Crary, “What appears is the technical reconstitution of an already reproduced world fragmented into to two non-identical models, models that precede any experience of their subsequent perception as unified or tangible.”23 Like the “technical reconstitution” of the stereoscopic view, the diagram traces the process whereby the two non-identical models that make up the glass shot come to appear within the same visual field. The drawing of the camera establishes a point of view from which to imagine the unification of these two image elements in the filming process. In the diagram, the monocular perspective of the Debrie camera supplants the binocular activity elicited by the stereoscopic view as delineated by Brewster and Krauss. The imagined monocular perspective of the film camera aligns the disparate planes into a two-dimensional view. The red lines in the diagram extend the path of the camera view from the painted portion of the plate glass sketch to the dotted line drawing in the background plane of the live-­ action scene sketch. From this imagined perspective, the painted portion of the glass obscures the top section of the live-action scene, producing the appearance that the glass painting occupies the background plane of the view.

126  |  The Image in Early Cinema

Fig. 11.3 Detail, Box 1, Card 7, Norman O. Dawn Collection, Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin.

Ruptured Perspectives | 127 The glass painting depicts prehistoric ruins through which Dawn filmed the live-action scene of “native Indian women . . . bathing in pool back of Fonda.”24 Dawn mentions in his annotations that he added the painting of the ruins to “fit over the top of the plain lifeless background that was actually in the scene,”25 a practice historian Raymond Fielding refers to as “image replacement,” which increases production value by adding to the “pictorial enhancement of the final image.”26 Image replacement in this case also has an intermedial function, as Dawn based the glass painting of a “Mayan temple on a hill and one of their other monuments” on a postcard view,27 thus incorporating into the glass shot a preexisting view mass-produced for touristic consumption. As Lauren Rabinovitz observes in her study of early twentieth-century amusement, postcards condense scenic points of interest such as the ruins into digestible views that offer consumers fantasies of spatial mastery.28 The glass-shot process mimes this act of visual appropriation by replicating the view of the tourist already inscribed in the postcard view depicted in the glass painting.29 The composite of the two image elements assimilates the bodies of the bathing figures into this prefabricated fantasy, thus extending the acquisitive function of the view aesthetic incorporated in the adaptation of the postcard. In the case of the glass shot, this fantasy of spatial mastery provides the backdrop for the fetishization of genocide. The fictionalized prehistoric ruins tie the bodies of native Indian women to a mythologized archaic past that implies their inevitable disappearance, exemplifying what Fatimah Tobing Rony refers to as “ethnographic taxidermy.”30 The superimposition of this primordial backdrop over the “plain lifeless background” frames the bodies of indigenous peoples in a scenic tableau that forebodes extinction, as if frozen in a living museum diorama. This instance of image replacement gestures toward ethnographic taxidermy as an imposed misrecognition, a blinding from view mistaken for the view itself. The backdrop functions as the fetish substitute for the genocidal lack to which Dawn’s description of the “plain lifeless background” gestures. The painting of the ruins disavows the goal of genocide to annihilate a group of people from history, which would indeed leave a “plain lifeless background” in its place. Instead, the process of image replacement enacts a figurative concealment of genocide behind the veil of mythologized extinction.31 At the same time, the disunity between the two image elements as they appear on the card makes evident the artifice on which ethnographic taxidermy depends. The spatial disparity between the bathing figures and the ruins gestures toward the temporal remoteness between the contemporary context of the ethnographic Other and the timeless, static past of the ethnographic present imposed onto this Other.32 The lines connecting the camera view to the dotted outline of the ruins in the top oil sketch trace the projection onto the ethnographic Other of a prefabricated fantasy of this primordial present. The dotted outline underscores the tenuousness of

128  |  The Image in Early Cinema

Fig. 11.4 Detail, Box 1, Card 7, Norman O. Dawn Collection, Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin.

this present by effacing its own permanence, signaling instead a past in which the composited image was once produced and a future in which it will be imagined through its reconstruction. The live-action status of the figures suggests their contemporaneity with the production of their mythologized image, thus challenging the denial of what Johannes Fabian terms the “coevalness” of the ethnographic Other and ethnographer.33 By implying that the figures inhabit the same time as the fabrication of their imposed background, the card undermines the point of view from which the two image elements appear spatially and temporally unified.34 Taking into consideration the disunity of the image elements that compose the planes of the glass shot, the Hale’s Tours ride figured in Dawn’s sketch (fig. 11.4) becomes imaginable as an additional plane within the view. The ride doubles the relation between the bathing figures and the painted ruins, as it conflates the present tense of live-action riders with the past-tense projected images of train travel. The sketch depicts riders juxtaposed against a film projected on a screen situated in the front of a theatrically equipped train car. The illustration of the image projected on the screen outlines the vantage point from the front of a moving train, which resembles the point of view common to panorama train ride films often reused in the operation of the ride.35 Here, the ride functions similarly to a composite image, as it juxtaposes live-action riders against a prefabricated simulation of train travel. The depth cues of the sketched train point of

Ruptured Perspectives | 129 view combined with its position on the screen at the front of the train car suggest the spatial and temporal continuity between the riders and the footage projected on the screen. The ride often screened this footage during the simulation of the arrival and departure from destinations, including scenic locations such as the glass shot depicted in the diagram.36 Here, or perhaps in an alternative version that depicts the glass shot on the screen, the sketch extends the recession beyond the frame into a foreground plane in which the riders become another layer of taxidermy produced for a histouristic view.

Conclusion: The Viewed Aesthetic Both the matte- and glass-shot images figure in their respective planar configurations a deferral of viewing implicit in the view aesthetic. The matte shot suggests the extension of the planar recession beyond the limits of the frame to a foreground plane occupied by the beholder of the magnified view. The image simultaneously precludes the actualization of this view, as no particular viewer will ever be the one who holds the handle. Instead, the magnifying glass points to a prior scene of viewing in which this beholder of the view once held the handle. The impossible vantage point embodies the split between this implied prior act of viewing and the presentation of the view in which this act is implied. The magnifying glass in this case shows the enlarged portion of the background made visible in this prior act of viewing. Here, the matte shot is an iteration of the “cinema of attraction,” as it puts the view itself on display.37 In the case of the glass shot, the sketch of the Hale’s Tours ride visualizes the plane beyond the frame, figuring the prior scene of viewing as an attraction. As with the matte shot, the sketch splits the view between this prior act of viewing and the visualization of this act, thus gesturing toward another plane beyond the frame in which the view aesthetic is on display for histouristic consumption. Leslie DeLassus recently completed a dissertation in Film Studies at the University of Iowa titled “Salvage Historiography: Viewing, Special Effects, and Norman Dawn’s Unpreserved Archive” and teaches online courses in Gender Studies at the University of Mississippi.

Notes 1. For film histories that include Dawn’s special-effects innovations, see Raymond E. Fielding, “Hale’s Tours: Ultrarealism in the Pre-1910 Motion Picture,” Cinema Journal 10.10 (1970): 34–47; Raymond E. Fielding, The Techniques of Special Effects Cinematography (Burlington, MA: Focal Press, 1985), 31–34, 72–75, 80–86; Raymond E. Fielding, “Norman O. Dawn: Pioneer Worker in Special Effects Cinematography,” in A Technological History of

130  |  The Image in Early Cinema Motion Pictures and Television: An Anthology from the Pages of the Journal of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, ed. Raymond E. Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 141–149; Mark Cotta Vaz and Craig Barron, The Invisible Art: The Legends of Movie Matte Painting (San Francisco: Chronicle, 2004), 21–52. 2. While Dawn worked primarily in the US film industry, he did direct and produce three films in the Australian film industry, which include: The Adorable Outcast (1928), For the Term of His Natural Life (1927), and Showgirl’s Luck (1931). 3. David Pierce, The Survival of American Silent Feature Films: 1912–1929 (Washington DC: Council on Library Information Resources and The Library of Congress, 2013), 1–3. 4. “Initial Inventory,” Norman O. Dawn Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas. Extant silent films include: The Adorable Outcast (1928), Blind Husbands (James Cruze and Erich Von Stroheim, 1919), The Eternal Struggle (Reginald Baker, 1923), For the Term of His Natural Life (1927), A Tokio Siren (1920), and Typhoon Love (1926). Extant sound films include: Adventure (Victor Fleming, 1945), Green Dolphin Street (Victor Saville, 1947), The Harvey Girls (Robert Alton, George Sidney, 1946), Mister Robinson Crusoe (A. Edward Sutherland, 1932), The Romance of Rosy Ridge (Roy Rowland, 1947), See Here Private Hargrove (Tay Garrett and Wesley Ruggles, 1944), Showgirl’s Luck (1931), Tundra (1936), and Two Lost Worlds (1950). 5. Caroline Frick, Saving Cinema: The Politics of Preservation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 12. 6. Alyson Nadia Field, Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 27. 7. Field, Uplift Cinema, 29–31. 8. This analysis of Dawn’s work as a special effects cinematographer, director, and producer in the US film industry is based on primary source material from the Norman O. Dawn Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas. 9. For examples of these works, see: Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1992); Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Alison Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Tom Gunning, “Landscape and the Fantasy of Moving Pictures: Early Cinema’s Phantom Rides” in Cinema and Landscape: Film, Nation and Cultural Geography, eds. Graeme Harper and Jonathan Rayner (Chicago: Intellect, 2010); Lynn Kirby, Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997); Jennifer Lynn Peterson, Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); Lauren Rabinovitz, Electric Dreamland: Amusement Parks, Movies, and American Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 10. Ágnes Pethő, Cinema and Intermediality: The Passion for the In-Between (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2011), 38. 11. Pethő, Cinema and Intermediality, 38 12. Ibid., 43. 13. Gunning, “Before Documentary: Early Nonfiction Film 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.

Ruptured Perspectives | 131 14. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 125–136. 15. Ibid. 16. “Yangtze Project,” Box 12, Card 70, Norman O. Dawn Collection. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas. 17. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 97–113. 18. Gunning, “Before Documentary,” 14–15. 19. John Fullerton and Elaine King, “Local Views, Distant Scenes: Registering Affect in Surviving Mexican Actuality Films of the 1920s,” Film History 17, no. 1 (2005): 66–87; Gunning, “Landscape and the Fantasy of Moving Pictures,” 34–35; Gerry Turvey, “Panorama, Parades, and the Picturesque: The Aesthetics of British Actuality Films, 1895–1901,” Film History, 16, no. 1 (2004): 9–27. 20. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 122. 21. Rosalind Krauss, “Photography’s Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View,” Art Journal, 42, no. 4 (1982): 314–315. 22. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 125. 23. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 128. 24. “Hale’s Tours,” Box 1, Card 7, Norman O. Dawn Collection. 25. “Hale’s Tours,” Box 1, Card 7, Norman O. Dawn Collection. 26. Fielding, The Techniques of Special Effects Cinematography, 29. 27. “Hale’s Tours,” Box 1, Card 7, Norman O. Dawn Collection. 28. Rabinovitz, Electric Dreamland, 98–106. 29. Gunning, “Before Documentary,” 15. 30. Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 1996, 101. 31. Rony, The Third Eye, 99–126. 32. Rony, The Third Eye, 99–126. 33. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Subject (New York: Columbia University Press), 1983, 31. 34. Fabian, Time and the Other, 25–36. 35. Gunning, “Landscape and the Fantasy of Moving Pictures,” 57. 36. Fielding, “Hale’s Tours,” 34–47; Rabinovitz, Electric Dreamland, 67–96. 37. 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.

12

Surface and Color: Stenciling in Applied Arts, Fashion Illustration, and Cinema Jelena Rakin

Stencil coloring, or pochoir, for film is a practice of direct coloring of the

black-and-white film material by the use of matrices made out of positive prints. All the portions intended for the same color are cut out of the matrice print used for a stencil, then the stencil is positioned over the targeted print and the color is applied through the cut-out portions. Usually, several stencils are used on a film, each for a different color. This technique is often addressed in comparison to the color practices preceding and succeeding it, such as hand coloring and various attempts at “natural” color processes. Focusing, however, on the intermedial uses of stencil coloring and comparing them across the areas of film and the applied and graphic arts helps to foreground the specific material dimensions and the composite character of the color image, of which the latter is particularly significant in the case of film. Additionally, a contrastive view of the historical sources in the areas of artisanal industries and film helps highlight the dynamics of the aesthetic discourses at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, particularly the debates concerning the industrial and technical mode of production and their significance for the aesthetics of the colored film. This essay examines the intermedial context of film color and focuses particularly on the practical specificities of stencil coloring, on the written sources that deal with the aesthetic notion of the “essence” of a coloring technique and the normative guidelines these offered for the practical use, and on the specificities of image composition and the subject matter in stencil-colored films.

Artisanal Work and Serial Production In the European context, stencil coloring took an upswing in France during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when, influenced by the discovery of Japanese stenciling, artists and decorators started to recognize its creative potential. Prior to this, stenciling had been used for playing cards, engravings in

Surface and Color  |  133 the seventeenth century (vue d’optique), Épinal imagery (images d’Épinal), and wallpaper.1 In the late nineteenth century, the use of stenciling extended to areas such as wall and furniture decoration, and rugs and textile, and in the 1920s it gained significant recognition and importance in fashion and book illustration.2 Thus, the practice of stenciling for films in the 1910s and 1920s takes place alongside the more prominent use of stencil in applied and decorative arts. The foremost quality of this technique, which appears to have fostered its proliferation, is its disposition for a mechanized reproduction of a series of visual motifs. This also suggests why stenciling became of greater interest in a context in which the mass production of goods started to threaten and supplant the production of artisanal work crafted for a particular customer. A significant shortcut in the technical production process as well as relevant savings of time and human labor ensured the inexpensiveness and the proliferation of mass commodities. These precise factors also advanced the introduction of stenciling for film as a more practical and economical method than hand coloring.3 In this, the advantages of the technical shortcut that stencil provided for the medium of film are comparable to the advantages of stencil in other areas of its application. Jean Saudé, renowned for his expertise with pochoir, wrote one of the first comprehensive treatises on the technique, Traité d’Enluminure d’Art au Pochoir, in 1925. In order to valorize the technique, Saudé defends the general sector of artisanal production, which had been introduced to an industrial mode of production. Such vindication may have aimed to dismantle the arguments of the opponents of industrialization, who deplored the loss of the practical, artisanal knowledge that was perishing in the light of ever more dominant industrial production. The opposing viewpoints, such as those stemming from the Arts and Crafts movement, regarded merchandise produced in an industrial manner with skepticism and often dismissed it as being in bad taste.4 The Arts and Crafts movement, which originated in the mid-nineteenth century in Britain and soon spread to other countries, advocated the return to craftsmanship and rejected the use of machines because the mechanization of work and the industrial mode of production had, as a consequence, excluded artists, designers, and craftsmen from work that was now executed by manufacturers, who lacked skill and education.5 The movement propagated a return to the individual craftsmanship that honors the worker and that, owing to good and simple design, results in aesthetically worthwhile products.6 As Pamela Todd points out, even though the attitude toward the machines differed in Britain and Europe—since the European designers more readily “rejected the l’art pour l’art philosophy of the late nineteenth century, turned their backs on the past, and set out to create a new ornament and style appropriate to the machine age”7—in 1920s Europe, the skepticism toward the industrial production was still an ongoing issue that needed to be addressed. Hence, Saudé, writing in 1925—the year The International Exposition of Modern

134  |  The Image in Early Cinema Industrial and Decorative Arts took place in Paris—argues that industrial production had reached a point where it could allow the serial yet sophisticated execution of work by artists: One could object that in every country of the world we are flooded by appalling products of a modern factory and that an exhibition of art cannot succeed because there seems to exist a complete cleft between the arts and the industry. This is a mistake. In France, artists and manufacturers are currently making an alliance between practicability and reason. The industrial technique has arrived at such point of perfection that it will allow for the work of the most sophisticated artists to be conducted in series. A work of art can be made accessible for the masses. Good market does not need to be an indication of unsightliness.8

Even though Saudé is invested in advocating the serial production—and in that the pochoir technique—by the mid-1920s stenciling had in fact become a recognized artisanal practice, especially in the domain of illustration. Stencil-­ colored magazines such as Gazette de Bon Ton, Journal des Dames et des Modes, and Modes et Manières d’Ajourd’hui offered impressively colored illustrations and introduced the exclusive world of high fashion to broader audiences, contributing to the 1910s and the early 1920s being described as the golden age of fashion magazines as well as the era of pochoir.9 While magazines and albums of fashion design were serially produced and “opened the closed world of haute couture, a world of custom-made clothing for privileged few, to the public gaze,”10 they still contained a character of exclusivity as Hiroshi Unno argues, “Use of this stenciling technique, which requires skilled craftsmanship and achieves spectacular results, with fine shadings and bright contrasts, indicated a deliberate choice to focus on artistic quality rather than quantity and reach an exclusive audience. Prints produced by the photomechanical process, which easily produced large print runs but also produced rather fuzzy half tones, paled by comparison. The use of pochoir reached its pinnacle in luxurious limited edition albums and magazines.”11 For Unno, Art Deco thus reconciled and “acknowledged the emergence of mass culture, mass production, and the art that could be reproduced.”12 In addition to the luxury status that pochoir signified for fashion magazines and albums of design, stencil coloring also enhanced the status and value of film material. Stencil-colored films by Pathé were deemed as more a luxurious product than black-and-white prints and were accordingly manifested in their prices. Furthermore, as with printed media, fashion was also one of the important subjects for stencil coloring in film. As Eirik Frisvold Hanssen points out, stencil coloring was employed mainly in fashion films from the 1920s to the 1930s.13 Hanssen also points to the connection between the emerging fashion culture and cinema, noting that since women were seen as the primary consumers of both cinema and fashion, “there was an overlap in the target markets of the

Surface and Color  |  135 film, fashion, and cosmetic industries, resulting in the emergence of a culture of cross-promotion and ‘synergy.’”14 Hiroshi Unno offers another comparing view between cinema and the fashion of the mid- and late-1920s. He points to the circumstance that pochoir in fashion illustration fell out of use in the mid-1920s when photography was introduced in the fashion magazines as a more natural technique. Unno draws a parallel to the transition of cinema to sound that he perceives as having introduced a more natural manner of acting than did the expressive gestures of silent film.15

Material and Creative Specificities of Stenciling Technique Much of the academic and popular writing on artistic and artisanal industries at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries is guided by normative notions about the essence of an art form or likewise of a particular creative technique.16 These positions, which can be observed in reference to both film and stencil coloring, assume that each art or technique has a distinctive, expressive potential, that the fulfillment of this potential is what the artist should strive to achieve, and that the imitation of other arts and techniques should be avoided. Central to this line of thought—which goes back to Lessing’s dealings with the idea of the specificities of art form in Laocoon: Or the Limits of Poetry and Painting—is the characterization of the possibilities and limitations of particular art forms and techniques as well as the assumption that complying to the specificity of a creative form results in the most accomplished work. In the context of artisanal industries, related to this line of thought appear the notions about the just use of the material, which resonated significantly in art, design, and architecture of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries.17 Stenciling is particularly dealt with in instructional manuals. In an exhaustive volume from 1903 on art industries, French artist and designer Maurice Pillard Verneuil advocates the commitment to the purity of artisanal techniques. Verneuil emphasizes the standpoint that in every industry one should settle for getting out of one process a maximum of possible effects without, however, attempting to imitate other processes (thus reflecting both the ideal specificity of a technique and the just use of the material). For pochoir, Verneuil indicates that because of its propensity to produce repetitive and simple motifs, the process is notably appropriate for ornamental design.18 In a similar sense, an 1895 article from the journal The Decorator and Furnisher specifies as “practical limitations” of stenciling “the necessity for specially drawn ornament, the presence of ties19 in stencils, and the rendition of all design being devoid of light and shade.”20 Instruction for the application of stencil also advises the use of a confined number of colors as well as restraining from gradated colors: “Unless the craftsman uses a solid flat colour, no two impressions of his design will ever be alike. . . . This is what should be done in stenciling. Generally speaking, the

136  |  The Image in Early Cinema best and most decorative effects may be obtained by the use of fairly flat tints, gradation being introduced only when necessary, and only to the extent to which it is necessary.”21 Art Nouveau and Art Deco in general popularized a particular type of decorative image in which the spatial relations are not as much conceived in terms of perspective but rather organized as relations on the surface. Fritz Schmalenbach defines Art Nouveau (Jugendstil in the German context) as a style particular to artisanal industries and more importantly as a style in which the surface is a distinct two-dimensional space in its own right: “The space in which the treated objects and scenes are situated and occur is the surface, regardless whether it is the surface of screens and book pages, or of wallpaper and textile”; furthermore, “The surface has its own, flat bodies. It is not solely an image plane that contains the representation of the space but is itself a space.”22 Schmalenbach identifies certain techniques to be apt for this kind of style, even more, to have come into use to accommodate the particular design style of Art Nouveau, with its characteristic chromatic homogeneity of the surface. Among the techniques he mentions in this sense is stenciling.23 As it was with Art Nouveau, stenciling was also regarded particularly suitable for Art Deco: “In pochoir, blending colors is impossible. Colors are flat and lack weight and depth, suitable for the shadowless, translucent world of fashion. Pochoir was ideal for Art Deco.”24 In both its figurative use—notably in the renditions of female body and dress in fashion illustrations—and the ornamental practice, the tendency with stenciling was thus to create a flat surface style.25 This was a matter not only of stylistic tendencies of the time but also of the propensity of the technique to accommodate them, as Schmalenbach indicated.

Stencil-Colored Ornament and Fashion in Film Whereas in artisanal industries the lack of color gradation with stenciling had been adopted as part of the creative limitations of the technique, in film this aspect of color encountered critique. Even though tints applied to film through stencil were transparent aniline dyes that allowed for the gradation of the underlying black-and-white image to be visible, the lack of a gradation of colors themselves was still noticed and criticized: “The mechanical stencil work, as well as the so-called natural-color films, have both their admirers: those who like the natural color object to the lack of exactness in gradation of colors in stencil films, while the others say they are satisfied with the stencil system.”26 Such a critique raises fundamental questions about the aptitude of stenciling to comply with the qualities of the photographic film base. It also raises questions about the aesthetic status of hybrid images and a possible resonance of notions of technical purity and specificity in the case of colored film. In film, the use of stencil appears to be governed less in terms of the reflection about the potentials

Surface and Color  |  137 of that technique as found in the context of applied arts and more in terms of reconciling the stenciling technique with the film image. The chromatic layer added by stencil relates to the black-and-white photographic base largely as an applied and less as a formative component, since in most cases, the colors obey the contours of the objects existent in the black-and-white print, particularly when these are clearly discernible and solid objects.27 However, in the choice of the motifs, the use of stencil approximates some instances of a visual repertoire that already existed in an intermedial context, as in fashion illustration and ornamental design. In the stencil-colored film La danse du diable (1904), the ornamental background that appears at one point in the film is comparable to many vegetal and geometrical designs conceived for stencil in the applied arts as offered in manuals from around 1900 on, particularly for the area of ornamentation (fig. 12.1). The film is made as a top shot showing a black backdrop upon which the figure of a green devil is performing an unusual dance. Through substitution splices, different elements are interchangeably introduced to the backdrop: female figures, stars, and ornaments. Even though the physical body of the devil brings an element of volume, the spatial dimension of the image is not prominent because of the flat backdrop that lends itself for color ornamentation and the fact that there are no other objects in the image that would suggest different spatial distances.28 In the combination of chromatic and achromatic segments of the image, the black portions assume the function of the ties that hold the stencil together between the ornamental areas cut out for color. Stenciling imposes a physical restriction and defines the homogenous color surfaces that are governed by a contour of both the stencil and the shapes in the black-and-white image. The ornamental décor of the mise-en-scène in La danse du diable appears to be executed by the means of stencil, and in that, visual and technical doubling occurs when the stencil design in front of the camera is used as a pretext for stenciling the film material itself. Turning from La danse du diable to Pathé’s and Gaumont’s stencil-colored fashion films, the reference in these works to the imagery of fashion magazines can be explicitly deduced in cases where the live models showing off their dresses are introduced through the pages of a magazine opening, thus it is suggested that the spectator enters the illustrated world of fashion.29 The proximity to the fashion illustration can further be inferred within the visual style of the films themselves: in some cases, the perspectival unity appears to be of lesser priority, since the images are collaged in planar and decorative modes rather than in spatial terms. Such instances can be found in Gaumont’s various fashion revues that show female figures, fragmented or whole, enclosed within an oval shape and inserted through double exposure into a scenic backdrop of a street, landscape, and so on. These inserts clearly break the unity of scale and space, yet the image composition and

138  |  The Image in Early Cinema

Fig. 12.1 Ornamental décor and flat image composition in La danse du diable (1904; print from EYE Filmmuseum Amsterdam; photograph of the nitrate print: Barbara Flueckiger, Timeline of Historical Film Colors).

the homogenizing effect of nongraded pastel colors unify the seemingly disparate spaces and object scales into a distinct surface space. Apart from being photographic collages, these images are at the same time composites, since the material layering of the color and black and white is the result of processes of different technical order: stenciling is part manual and part mechanized whereas black-and-white instantaneous photography is an automatic process. With photography, the act of the inscription of the image content

Surface and Color  |  139 is not solicited by the human hand but rather by the physical and chemical processes by which the exposure to light is captured on the film gelatin. Because stenciling cannot claim indexicality in the same sense as photography and is conducted by human hand, it is characterized by referential contingency in relation to the depicted object. Thus the act of combining techniques of different orders and the hybridity of the resulting image occupy unique positions in the production of the moving color image. This is the case not only technically and aesthetically but also historically, since the coloring of film by stencil functioned as a transitional link between traditionally artisanal and fully automated image production processes. It is noteworthy that it is precisely the materiality of color that allowed for the hybrid—if only transient—consolidation of two divergent forms of image generation. Hence, in the context of intermedial aesthetics, the matter and process of the image generation appear as integral categories for an examination of the applied film colors of the silent era. .

Jelena Rakin is a doctoral candidate in the Film Studies department at the University of Zurich. She is finishing a dissertation titled “Film Color 1895–1930: Aesthetics, Materiality, Discourses of Modernity.”

Notes 1. Jean Saudé, Traité d’Enluminure d’Art au Pochoir (Paris: Éditions de l’Ibis, 1925), 8. 2. Amy Ballmer, “Pochoir in Art Nouveau and Art Deco Illustration,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 34, no. 2 (2008): 26–29, 92–93. See also Jeremy Aynsley, “Pochoir Prints: Publishing the Designed Interior,” in Moderne: Fashioning the French Interior, ed. Sarah Schleuning and Marianne Lamonca (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008), 11. 3. See Joshua Yumibe, Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 90; and Paolo Cherchi Usai, Silent Cinema: An Introduction (London: British Film Institute), 22. 4. Dietmar Rübel, Monika Wagner and Vera Wolff, eds., Materialästhetik: Quellentexte zu Kunst, Design und Architektur (Berlin: Reimer, 2005), 95f. 5. For a more detailed account on the industrialization and mechanization of work from the eighteenth century on and the consequent rejection of the machine by the Arts and Crafts movement in the nineteenth century, see Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design from William Morris to Walter Gropius (London: Penguin, 1975), 43ff. 6. Linda Perry and Karen Livingstone observe: “This balancing of design and technique was quite alien in mid-nineteenth century production when the search for new technology ensured that technique, in the form of novelty of effect, speed and cheapness of production, dominated. But it is perhaps in the advocacy of simplicity in design and manufacture, a need to allow the quality of materials to speak for themselves, that the Arts and Crafts movement had its greatest influence on the arts of today,” in “Introduction: International Arts and Crafts,” International Arts and Crafts, ed. Karen Livingstone and Linda Parry (London: V&A, 2005), 10.

140  |  The Image in Early Cinema 7. Pamela Todd, The Arts and Crafts Companion (New York: Bulfinch, 2004), 30. 8. Saudé, Traité d’Enluminure d’Art, 26f (translated from the French). 9. Hiroshi Unno, Fashion Illustration and Graphic Design: George Barbier: Master of Art Deco (Tokyo: PIE International, 2011). 10. Ibid., 24. 11. Ibid., 25. 12. Ibid., 17. 13. Eirik Frisvold Hanssen, “Symptoms of Desire: Colour, Costume, and Commodities in Fashion Newsreels of the 1910s and 1920s,” Film History 21, no. 2 (2009): 114. 14. Ibid., 112. 15. Unno, 25. 16. These normative notions principally address what is in the modernist context termed as medium specificity, and they are rooted in the philosophic and academic tradition of the aesthetic autonomy of art. For an overview on the history of the tradition of aesthetic autonomy, see Benjamin H. D. Buchloch, “The Social History of Art: Models and Concepts,” Hal Foster et al., Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernsm (London: Thames & Hudson, 2011), 22–31; and Hal Foster, Design and Crime (And Other Diatribes) (London and New York: Verso, 2003), 84ff. For an exemplary contemporary writing on the essence of art, see Konrad Lange’s extensive volume Das Wesen der Kunst: Gründzüge einer illusionistischen Kunstlehre (Berlin: G. Grote, 1907). Lange, a German art historian, is a particularly interesting figure since he also applied the theoretical groundwork of his writing concerning the essence of art to film. However, in Das Kino in Gegenwart und Zukunft (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Finke, 1920) he uses the notions of the essence of art to demonstrate that cinema is not an art form, but should instead be treated according to its own principles of essence—that for Lange are those of technology. Furthermore, texts on applied arts use similar rhetoric of specificity, especially in the case of the advocacy for the just use of the material. On this subject, see the anthology of texts from the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century Materialästhetik: Quellentexte zu Kunst, Design und Architektur by Dietmar Rübel et al. (eds.). 17. These are associated with Gottfried Semper’s writing on style in useful arts [nützliche Künste], in which he assigns the stylistic significance not only to the form, but importantly, also to the materials used to execute a work. See Rübel et al., 95. 18. Maurice Pillard Verneuil, Etude De La Plante: Son Application Aux Industries D’art: Pochoir, Papier Peint, Étoffes, Céramique, Marqueterie, Tapis, Ferronnerie, Reliure, Dentelles, Broderies, Vitrail, Mosaïque, Bijouterie, Bronze, Orfévrerie (Paris: Librairie Centrale des Beaux Arts, 1903), 120. 19. “Ties” is a term used in stenciling to describe individual lines of the design that are by necessity connected (tied) to the rest of the design so as to ensure a stable and resilient stencil that can be employed for repeated use. 20. Frederick Parsons, “The Art and Practice of Stenciling,” The Decorator and Furnisher 26.4 (1895): 141; The advocacy of flat ornamental style is already present in the mid-nineteenth century, for instance in the “Journal of Design and Manufacture,” established in 1849. The journal, associated with the Arts and Crafts movement, served as an attempt to establish principles of good design and ornamentation (see Lionel Lambourne, Utopian Craftsmen: The Arts and Crafts Movement from the Cotswolds to Chicago [London: Astragal Books, 1980], 9). This meant that “exuberant and overnaturalistic patterns” were regarded as something

Surface and Color  |  141 that needed to be avoided, and flat ornamentation and “simple and restrained forms” were advocated instead (ibid., 11). 21. George R. Rigby, “Design for Stencil-Work,” The Artist: An Illustrated Monthly Record of Arts, Crafts and Industries (American Edition) 28, no. 248 (1900): 207. Tendencies toward a more flat color style in the early twentieth century are also indicative of the attempts to standardize color quality. With the massive proliferation of industrial dyes from the nineteenth century on, color charts emerged as broadly used means of advertising and presenting dyes to the consumer. Ann Temkin points out that the colors presented in charts were “unmodulated by any brushstrokes or other textures, so as to demonstrate how flat the paint will appear on the surface to which it is to be applied,” in Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2008), 16. These kinds of charts can also be found in manuals for stenciling, such as A. Desaint, Ideas & Studies in Stenciling & Decorating (London: C. Griffin & Company, 1927). 22. Fritz Schmalenbach, Jugendstil: Ein Beitrag zu Theorie und Geschichte der Flächenkunst. Kunsthistorische Studien (Bern: Lang, 1981 [1935]), 1, 4. (Translated from the German). 23. Ibid., 25. 24. Unno, 128. 25. In this respect, the compositions and the use of color as practiced in stencil work are comparable to other popular forms of mechanically and serially produced color images, such as the poster design as executed through chromolithography from the end of the nineteenth century on. In a 1913 study of posters, Charles Matlack Price praises the characteristic flat style of color not graded in light and shadow, the simplicity of motive, and composition that is not bound to the principles of perspective, as he considers it to be admirably executed in the work of Jules Chéret. See Charles Matlack Price, Posters: A Critical Study of the Development of Poster Design in Continental Europe, England and America (New York: George W. Bricka, 1913). 26. M. H. Schoenbaum, “Color Cinematography,” The Motion Picture News (January– March, 1914): 22. 27. The exceptions to the retracing of the contour of the photographic image are found with the coloring of bodies in transitory states, such as fire and smoke effects in féerie films or when the surface is particularly detailed, as for instance with tree foliage or small-scale ornamental textures. In the latter cases, stencil usually homogenizes a larger surface through a color layer. 28. On a nonperspectival construction of space in early cinema, see also Noël Burch, Life to Those Shadows (London: BFI Publishing, 1990), 162–185; and Antonia Lant, “Haptical Cinema,” October 74 (Autumn 1995): 45–73. La danse du diable appears spatially more ambiguous than films shot in similar fashion as top shots but that clearly suggest that space represented is vertical to the ground level, such as Kiriki, acrobates japonais (1907) or Voyage sur Jupiter (1909). Kiriki, acrobates japonais establishes a ground level that is indicated as such in the first shot before the film switches to the top shot. Voyage sur Jupiter shows characters climbing a ladder. La danse du diable on the other hand offers no such unmistakable markers for spatial orientation. 29. The reference in this text is to information and visual material of the Gaumont-Pathé digital archives.

13

The Color Image Joshua Yumibe

Film emerged in an era when color imaging was undergoing an immense

transformation in art and in popular culture. The aniline revolution of the nineteenth century reconfigured the colorant industry as new, inexpensive dyes synthesized from coal tar flooded the market and displaced the natural colorants that had been extracted from expensive organic materials imported through colonial trade. William Henry Perkins’s development of mauveine in 1856, the first aniline dye to be marketed, set off a color wave in textile design and fashion of an ever-increasing palette of new synthetic colorants throughout the nineteenth century. This shift in both the materiality of dyes and their costs altered visual practices in popular imaging and textile design as well as in painting. New hues seeped into print ephemera as chromolithographed posters in streets, stenciled postcards for advertising, and colored wallpapers for the home. Popular entertainment, awash in new hues through innovative filters for theater lights and in the translucent, aniline hues of lantern slides, brought a new vibrancy to the nineteenth-century screen. These synthetic innovations were also adapted for painting, as new, artist-grade pigments—such as cerulean blue, alizarin crimson, and viridian green—emerged with increasing frequency throughout the century, enabling the chromatic innovations of the modern canvas by Impressionists, Pointillists, Post-Impressionists, Fauvists, and beyond.1 In conjunction with other technical changes such as the development of premixed pigments available in the new portable tin paint tube invented by the American painter John Goffe Rand in 1841—which enabled painting en plein air—and Sherwin-Williams’s refinement of linseed-oil paints in the 1880s, the artistic palette of the nineteenth century produced a modern and technically refined color image that profoundly influenced the chromatic media of the twentieth century. It is out of this saturated world that cinema developed in the 1890s, and the ways in which the emergent medium interacted not only with these color practices but also with the aesthetic ideals that circulated through them is worth examining in the context of the image in early cinema. To interrogate these pictorial practices, the current chapter focuses closely on one specific film, Gaston Velle’s stenciled Rêve d’art, which was released by Pathé Frères in March 1910, and through this case study examines how early color cinema was deeply enmeshed within

The Color Image  |  143 turn-of-the-century visual aesthetics. The color image of art, popular media, and film at the time was in a state of constant transformation, and the ways in which Velle’s film reflects and contributes to these changes is the focus here. Turning then to Rêve d’art to track these medial confluences: the film was produced as a split reel, 155 meters long, and is preserved by the Cinémathèque française from a stenciled nitrate print that had been distributed in Spain.2 Produced in 1910, it is a romantic and historical comedy that recounts in three segments the tale of the young painter Tristan, who falls in love with the beautiful Manon while she poses for a portrait in the first of the three segments. Set outside near a bucolic river on screen right and amid a lush, stencil-green woods in the background, the scene evokes plein air painting of the fin-de-siècle. In terms of content and color, comparisons can be made both to John Singer Sargent’s Impressionist-inspired Claude Monet Painting by the Edge of a Wood (1885), which reflexively depicts Monet painting the plush, leafy landscape while his lover and future wife, Alice Hoschedé, looks on, and to Henri Biva’s naturalist Matin à Villeneuve (1905), a verdant landscape painting of the Villeneuve-­ l’Étang park along the Seine on the western edge of Paris. Biva’s painting was a popular image that was subsequently mass-produced through postcards in 1906. In a similarly green-dominated pastoral setting in the film, Manon is stenciled in a pastel mauve dress and a yellow hat, while Tristan remains in black and white. This chromatic emphasis on Manon draws attention to her—as color has long been associated in popular imagery with the female visage—as well as to her class. Her clothing is aristocratic and historical, from the eighteenth or early nineteenth century, and before the era of anilines, when colored cloth was an expense largely available only to the upper classes. Indeed, Manon is the daughter of a wealthy landowner, who commissioned the portrait. In the scene’s action, when she turns to inspect the painting, the smitten Tristan slips in for a kiss on the side of her neck. Unbeknownst to them, Manon’s father has entered in the left background of the scene, and when he observes Tristan’s advances on Manon, he forcefully intervenes and sends Manon home in tears. He is unimpressed both by the bohemian artist and, judging from his glance at the painting, the artwork as well, for he pitches it off screen to the left, followed shortly by Tristan’s paints and palette into the nearby river to the right. This destruction of the painting and artist palette reflexively sets up the remaining plot of the film, as the dejected Tristan exits to his artist’s studio, which is the focus of the next segment of the film. Before turning to Tristan’s studio, it is useful first to situate the film within the media horizon of its day. Produced in 1910, Rêve d’art bears the marks of Pathé’s stencil productions of the time. As Richard Abel has traced, the company dominated international productions during the first decade of the 1900s in no small part due to the success of its coloring operations.3 During these years—the

144  |  The Image in Early Cinema period that Tom Gunning has theorized as the cinema of attractions—color was a popular but costly aspect of many early films.4 Intensive labor, carried out almost exclusively by women, was required to hand-color films frame by frame; however, Pathé was successful in industrializing its coloring techniques, shifting largely from the hand-coloring of prints to stenciling them in order to reduce production costs. Stenciling is one of the oldest artistic processes, its genealogy stretching back to the earliest cave paintings when artists’ hands were used to create negative impressions on cave walls as pigments were blown over them. Cutout versions of the stenciling process grew more widespread in France in the 1700s for the coloring of wallpapers, fabrics, and print media, and it was adapted for film in the early 1900s, for which Pathé was the leading innovator.5 The aniline dyes used during the early years of cinema—in particular during the pre-1907 cinema of attractions era—tended toward excess: saturation levels were high, and the hues were bright and obtrusive. This style of coloring worked well during the first decade of film production, when color was part of the attraction of the new technology, as exemplified by Pathé films such as Gaston Velle’s earlier La métamorphoses du papillon (A Butterfly’s Metamorphosis, 1904) and Segundo de Chomón Le scarabée d’or (The Golden Beetle, 1907). Through such saturated palettes, which are typically set off against neutral or black backgrounds, color added an obtrusive, projective dimensionality to the otherwise flat image.6 This virtual address of early color complemented the exhibitionistic, direct address of the performers’ frequent look to the camera, which, as Gunning has noted, is a hallmark of the cinema of attractions. Such obtrusive saturations were common in the hand-coloring and stenciling found in the films of the trick and fairy genres that Pathé specialized in during the early 1900s and that led to the company’s worldwide dominance during these years. However, by the end of the decade, taste cultures were changing as narrative films became more dominant, and Pathé responded by moving production away from trick films to historical dramas, literary adaptations (Film d’art), and nonfiction. In this process, the company crafted its coloring styles to be subdued, genteel, and less saturated, a stylistic emphasis that resonated better with the emerging norms of unobtrusive narration, for light, pastel hues could be deployed in ways less distracting to the eye.7 These changes in coloring style at Pathé were enabled by technical refinements made to its coloring methods of the time. Pathé reached a technical high point with its stenciling process by the end of the decade through the assistance of a number of technicians, including Jean Méry, Joseph Florimond, and Henri Fourel, who helped update the company’s machinery. These technicians helped modify the company’s stencil-cutting and dye-application devices to increase control and precision for the cutting of the stencils and for the dye-application process. These adjustments made it easier to cut the stencils by enlarging each frame onto an opaque glass plate upon which the worker would trace out the portions

The Color Image  |  145 to be cut. The modifications to the dye applicator allowed for the precise control of saturation levels and of the amount of dye used during the coloring process. Through these technical refinements, Pathé recalibrated color for narrative cinema as an artistic, genteel element that allowed it to function more unobtrusively. The color palette of Velle’s Rêve d’art is indicative of these technical changes: lightly saturated yet highly calibrated pastels—purples, pinks, resplendent greens, and yellows—dominate the design. Similarly restrained color palettes that emphasize pastel pinks and purples can be found throughout Pathé’s stencil films of the time, particularly in the company’s dramatic films beginning around 1909, such as David et Goliath (David and Goliath, 1910), Le siège de Calais (The Siege of Calais, 1911), and Une conspiration sous Henri III (1578) (Conspiracy in the Reign of Henry III [1578], 1911). These films frequently contain elaborate, multiprocess coloring work that creates painterly effects through the combination of toning, tinting, and stenciling. However, these coloring effects are not the centerpiece of the films, but instead help craft artistic settings for their narratives, which often match the look and style of historical painting, as in the way in which Pathé’s 1911 film, The Siege of Calais, corresponds visually to François-Édouard Picot’s 1838 painting of the same name.8 Significantly, such painterly references in Pathé’s films are not typically made to contemporary works; instead they point backward to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, attempting stylistically to remediate and appropriate the aura of these earlier artworks. An intermedial emphasis is also central to Rêve d’art, particularly in relation to what Frank Gray maps out elsewhere in this volume regarding “vision scenes” in film and popular imaging.9 The second segment of the film moves into the painter’s studio, where the despondent Tristan returns after his confrontation with Manon’s father. The mise-en-scène of the studio is telling of the type of middlebrow pictorial aesthetics being invoked in this early era of art cinema. Four landscape paintings decorate the wall in the background; a Roman bust sits to the left of the frame facing the center, where Tristan slumps on a stool, head in hand in front of an easel; the portrait of Napoleon astride a white stallion is on the right edge of the frame. The artistic pedigree of the studio is nineteenth century, and the slowness of the scene, as Tristan enters the room, points to a contemplative pose inherent to the cultural conception of the artist’s studio of the time: to appreciate art, one must be in the correct state of mind, even if, as in Tristan’s case, this is a depressed one. As Kaveh Askari has shown in his study of early art cinema, Making Cinema into Art, the artist studio is a key motif in turn-of-the-century art and illustration, specifically used to educate the general public about the labor that goes into creating art—telling one where art comes from and how it is produced.10 In a sense, this educational impulse is middlebrow and retrospective in nature, pointing to a nineteenth-century form of artistic labor that was under threat at that time by new forms of reproducible media, such as lithography, photography, and film, that

146  |  The Image in Early Cinema were supplanting painting in the realm of cultural production. However, the ways in which new media such as film appropriated and remediated older forms was also reflexive and inherently modern. Askari has located a particular trend in these instances of cinematic appropriation—in which silent films depict established modes of art—that he calls moments of “frame jumping,” in which the contemplative mode of viewing still paintings is shocked by the movements of the new medium leaping from the screen.11 One finds a subdued example of this in Rêve d’art: as Tristan contemplates his unfortunate day, Velle, who was a master of trick and color work at Pathé during the first decade of the 1900s, introduces special effects from his earlier work, which jump out of the film’s contemplative framework. Through a deftly executed trick dissolve-in, Manon, dressed as she was earlier in the day, appears in the frame via Tristan’s mind’s eye in a vision scene, which inspires him to return to work, sketching the outlines of her portrait. However, after her trick disappearance through a substitution splice, he realizes that he cannot complete the portrait without the paints that her father had thrown into the river. Though in ways retrospective in aesthetics in its chromatic depiction of a nineteenth-century painter at work, the film uses modern trick techniques to jump from a scene of labor and contemplation to one visualizing character interiority—cinematic effects that Hugo Münsterberg would characterize only a few years later as an “entirely new esthetic development, a new form of beauty in the turmoil of a technical age.”12 These effects continue in the scene as Tristan, despondent, lies down on the floor and drifts off to sleep, which introduces a second set of elaborate trick effects that are positioned within Tristan’s dream. In his slumber, a fairy godmother, standing behind his sleeping body and stenciled in yellow, materializes through a dissolve-in, jumping into the still frame through the trick effect. Through a match jump-cut, she transports them back to the river setting that opened the film and then awakens Tristan, who proceeds to pantomime to her the day’s unfortunate events. Nonplussed, she escorts him into the woods, and in the next shot, introduces him to two young women reclining in the grass holding bouquets of flowers. As they present the flowers to Tristan, various trick cuts and dissolves begin over three tableaux as the fairy godmother invites Tristan to watch a series of fairy entertainments. In the middle of the scene, a dancing woman robed as a butterfly appears between the onlookers and in front of an elaborate scenic backdrop decorated ornately in the Rococo style of the late eighteenth century with ornate vases full of a variety of flowers. As the woman in the center freezes for a moment during her butterfly dance, a trick dissolve occurs as the flower vases transform into six more women holding bouquets, and they join in the dance as Tristan and the godmother exit the frame so that the performance can be directly addressed to the camera. The film

The Color Image  |  147 thus invokes the stylistic effects of earlier trick and fairy films. A cut to a new shot occurs, still in the woods, that centers the butterfly dancer onto a Rococo set piece full of cherubic angels. The flower women who appeared earlier join in, throwing their various flowers onto the butterfly in homage before Tristan and the fairy godmother reenter the scene. Just as the special effects resonate with earlier trick and fairy films, the footage is also elaborately colored as in these genres, stenciled in a range of hues. However, there are differences in stylization in these effects from those found only a few years earlier in Pathé works by Velle as well as by Segundo de Chomón. The colors in Rêve d’art are distinctly soft and pastel—subdued in light purples and yellows, with multiple shades of green for the exterior foliage. The hues are seen in earlier trick and fairy films by Pathé; however, these are often paired with bright, saturated colors that would pop and attract the eye of the spectator with greater force—as in the scarlet flames of Le spectre rouge (The Red Spectre, 1907) and the rich and shimmering blues and golds of La peine du talion (Tit for Tat, 1906). It is significant that in Rêve d’art, the trick effects are filmed on location—outside of the tightly controlled studio used in almost all trick and fairy films—and in the natural world amid flowing grass and trees; the colors, in a subdued way, help to emphasize the setting. In a sense, the exterior location and colors naturalize the film’s magical effects, making them seem more integrated with the organic world. Beyond naturalism, the hues resonate aesthetically with the rococo backdrops of the fairy scenes. As opposed to the Art Nouveau stylizations found in fairy and trick films by Pathé such as Au pays de l’or (In the Land of Goldmines, 1908) and Sculpteur moderne (Modern Sculpture, 1908), which pair pastels with deeper, more saturated aniline hues, these backdrops remediate late baroque style both in form and pastel hue. Even if desaturated throughout, color is still a central thematic focus of Rêve d’art, as is evident in the film’s most elaborate trick effect. At the end of the exterior fairy performance, when Tristan and the fairy godmother reenter the frame, the older woman is handed a painter’s palette, which she takes to the posing butterfly centered in the frame and fills it with the colors of her wings. These artist paints are thus magical yet natural, not synthetic. She presents the marvelous palette to Tristan, replacing what he had earlier lost. When he looks at the palette, the film cuts to a point-of-view close-up of it from above, displaying six pastel hues: pink, gold, mauve, green, blue, and yellow. These magical colors then dissolve into women upon the palette, whose clothes are stenciled in the same hues as the paints. With this magical pairing, the film draws on the long-held association of color with femininity that has defined the chromatic image in the West— females have long been assumed to be more naturally attuned to color.13 Like aniline dyes, this is an artificial production, synthesized and marketed as natural

148  |  The Image in Early Cinema with increasing force at the turn of the last century, as mass culture emerged through the synthetic production and marketing of commodities, which increasingly obscured their means of production. In Rêve d’art, the fantasy continues, dissolving next into a more perfectly imagined and bucolic opening scene, which is framed on the marvelous palette. In this scene, Tristan is able to carry out the portrait of Manon without her father’s interference. While these scenes within the palette have a precious quality to them, they are in fact deeply embedded within the media culture of their day. Specifically, they take on the colors, shapes, and vision-scene logic of illustrated song slides of the time, which often created strange yet wondrous hand-­ colored photomontages of disparate elements in their images, as in the string of combinations found in Rêve d’art upon the palette.14 In the final shot of the segment, the film moves back to Tristan’s artist studio in a match fade-out and fade-in on him at the easel. However, it is Tristan’s dream doppelgänger who, with the magical palette in hand, is now hard at work on the portrait of Manon, for next to him is his still-sleeping double, in the same curled position that he was in earlier when the fairy godmother transported them to the woods. On completion of the portrait, the double disappears in a trick substitution splice as Tristan’s sleeping self awakes and remembers his dream in pantomime to the camera. Uncannily, he then discovers that the dream has become a reality: the portrait, which the camera catches a brief glimpse of, has magically remained on the canvas thanks to the fairy paints. In the final segment of the film, Tristan rushes to Manon’s estate and is confronted once again by her exasperated father, who throws him to the ground, knocking the portrait from Tristan’s hands. The father, however, has a change of heart when he glimpses the beautiful portrait lying at his feet. He calls Manon into the scene; she also is amazed by the resemblance. Upon Tristan’s proposal of marriage to the amenable young woman, Manon’s father gladly accepts, exchanging Manon for her magical portrait. In lieu of monetary gain or class prestige, the portrait—produced as it is with feminine colors just as the film itself was stenciled through women’s concealed labor—serves as a fitting trade in the film’s gendered economy, and a final, bucolic apotheosis of dancing villagers stenciled in mauve dyes concludes the story. Increasingly through the early 1910s, Pathé renovated the blatant special effects and colors of the fairy and trick genres to support a more dramatic framework. The film’s apotheosis is indicative of this move—rather than taking place in the fantastic world of dreams, the final celebratory tableau is incorporated into the everyday as a matrimonial fertility rite. The various trick effects that the film displays are still vital to its attractions, but they also function more narratively than in earlier fairy films and are integrated with a modern yet genteel artistic sensibility. These effects serve to enhance, not dominate, the film’s fantastic

The Color Image  |  149 story, and as such, the restrained stenciling does not overshadow the staging, but is deployed to create an atmosphere of fantasy within the natural world that restrains color from jumping from the screen. These renovations of coloring style and special effects were meant to make Pathé’s tricks instructive, in that they aimed to entertain as well as educate the audience in middlebrow pictorial artistry, legitimizing the medium. This move by Pathé was in many ways unsuccessful, for the company’s earlier dominance of the global market was waning in the 1910s, and based on trade press research, the film does not appear to have circulated widely. Stylistically, this subdued approach to coloring was also Janus-faced, referring back to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century modes of artistic practice while also looking forward to an emerging form of cinematic art that was expanding the frame of contemplative aesthetics. New modes of art cinema would soon flourish in color through the experiments of the following decade. First appearing cinematically before the war, the modernist color image would reach a certain apex in the avant-garde work of filmmakers such as Walter Ruttmann, Ferdinand Léger, and Dudley Murphy. And in more vernacular modes, the saturated Technicolor world of the jazz age was about to burst forth in intermedial splendor. Such reinventions are in fact the norm, for the color image in film, just as in surrounding media, continues in a state of chromatic transformation. Joshua Yumibe is Associate Professor and Director of Film Studies at Michigan State University. He is author of Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism and coauthor of Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema.

Notes 1. See John Gage, Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 221–224. 2. I am grateful to Pauline de Raymond of the Cinémathèque française for access to the film. 3. Richard Abel, The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 40–47, 87–101. 4. Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the AvantGarde,” in Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (London: BFI, 1990), 52–62. 5. For a more detailed discussion, see Joshua Yumibe, Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 76–97. 6. Ibid., Moving Color, 77–79. 7. Ibid., 123–124.

150  |  The Image in Early Cinema 8. Ibid., 127. 9. Frank Gray, “The Vision Scene: Innovation Revelation and Remediation,” in The Image in Early Cinema: Form and Material, ed. Scott Curtis, Philippe Gauthier, Tom Gunning, and Joshua Yumibe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), 36–46. 10. Kaveh Askari, Making Movies into Art: Picture Craft from the Magic Lantern to Early Hollywood (London: British Film Institute, 2015), 44–49. 11. Ibid., 51. 12. Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (New York: D. Appleton, 1916), 233. 13. See Jacqueline Lichtenstein’s discussion in The Eloquence of Color: Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993): 42–43, 190–191. 14. See for instance the illustrated lantern-slide work of the New York company, Scott and Van Altena, which specialized in these kinds of elaborate superimpositions, such as Scott & Van Altena “[Man, Woman in Palette]” 1912, 83:1741:0002, George Eastman Museum, Still Photograph Archive, www.geh.org/ar/strip35/htmlsrc/m198317410002_ful.html, accessed June 10, 2015.

Part III: Networks

14

Shared Affinities and “Kunstwollen”: Stylistics of the Cinematic Image in the 1910s and Art Theory at the Turn of the Century in Germany Jörg Schweinitz

W

hen looking at the writings of German-speaking art theorists and art historians such as Alois Riegl, Adolf Hildebrand, and Heinrich Wölfflin with the eyes of a film historian, striking correspondences become apparent between the formal interests of those art theorists and certain stylistic tendencies in films of the period. At the turn of the twentieth century, art theory had started to emphatically tackle the “problem of form”—thus the title of an influential book by Adolf Hildebrand.1 Art theorists were less interested in the objects represented in images than in the painterly and graphic qualities of images, especially image structures, in visual forms of composition. They also linked their observations to the peculiarities of human perception, such as the stimulation of the spatial imagination by a two-dimensional image. When watching fictional films from the 1910s—after having read these theoretical writings about painting—one notices that the cinematic images often display formal and compositional characteristics that correspond with the themes and positions accentuated by the art theorists. Art theory was interested in themes such as the creation of ornamental image qualities, good surface textures, effective spatial suggestion, and the relief effect of images; films of the 1910s reveal similar obsessions, predilections, aesthetic affinities, and visual interests as well as similar techniques for producing these effects.2 The decade is justly regarded as the undisputed “golden age of depth staging.”3 But a look at the image surface of elaborate films of the period likewise reveals graphic and, as it were, painterly sophistication. Of course, this applies especially to films that conspicuously rely on pictorial qualities and manifest their own Kunstwollen (will to art)—to adopt Alois Riegl’s famous term—a tendency that played an important role in cinema

154  |  The Image in Early Cinema at the time, especially in European cinema, which was particularly eager to elevate its products aesthetically in accordance with visual values and tendencies in the established pictorial arts. In a sense, one could also say that the aesthetic principles and theoretical accents posited by art theory with view to painting were clearly relevant far beyond the realm of fine art, in various media, whenever “good images” were concerned. To be clear, while theorists certainly articulated principles of artistic practice, I am not suggesting that theory itself necessarily had a direct normative effect across different media. Rather, I argue that it formulated aesthetic affinities theoretically—affinities that established themselves as part of the aesthetic zeitgeist in a variety of visual media through mechanisms such as prototype and imitation, or mutual influences, rather than through the study of theory. While theoretical writings thus accompanied these developments, interfered with them, and surely also expedited them, theory did not cause artistic practice nor would monocausal explanations do justice to the development of an aesthetic visual practice across different media. In any case, it is with remarkable dedication and precision that aesthetically ambitious films used the same compositional forms and aesthetic means addressed by art theorists such as Adolf Hildebrand, who can be considered a central exponent of the period’s art theory in several respects. Following the principle of pars pro toto, I will thus focus on some of his ideas in this essay. Himself a significant and prominent sculptor, Hildebrand had linked the experienced artist’s eye for form with informed psychological-theoretical considerations on the perception of images in his 1893 book on the problem of form in the fine arts. How influential and widely read the book was, how much it struck the zeitgeist and helped to shape it, is obvious not just from the incredible number of reprints (ten already by 1918) but also from the fact that a French edition was published in Paris and Strasbourg as early as 1903, followed by an English one in New York in 1907.4 Dozens of films made between 1912 and 1918 could testify to the high standard of stylistic sophistication in visual design, with cinematographic devices having been developed for the same kind of good image that the art theorists were interested in. In Germany too this standard was established at least since Franz Hofer’s Die schwarze Kugel (The Black Ball, 1913),5 Viggo Larsen’s Die Sumpfblume (The Swamp Flower, 1913), and the Max Reinhardt film Die Insel der Seligen (Island of Blessed, 1913), and it was further refined up to Die Börsenkönigin (The Queen of the Stock Exchange, Edmund Edel, 1916, released 1918), to mention just some of the surviving films. Emerich Hanus, a film director since 1915, had already proved that he was at the height of this standard, which he had adopted and perfected in, for example, Die Sühne (Atonement, Germany 1917).6 I will—pars pro toto—look at his film Die Liebe der Maria Bonde (The Love

Shared Affinities and “Kunstwollen”  |  155 of Maria Bonde, Germany 1917–18)7 more closely later. But first, let us turn to the theoretical discourse of the time.

Ideas of Surface and Depth in Theories of Art and Film When looking at turn-of-the-century art theory, one thing becomes apparent: one of its key foundations was the analysis of the relationship between the impression of flatness and spatial suggestion in two-dimensional images. From this relationship the theorists derived a series of requirements and techniques regarding image composition with regard to, for instance, evoking spatial depth or an increased plasticity of objects as they appear in a relief. At the same time, they were often interested in effects of visual abstraction, which result from an image exposing its flatness. Thus, standard themes of these theories of art are the general relationship between flatness and spatial suggestion in the two-­ dimensional image; based on that, the creation of a suggestion of deep space or an effect of a relief; and the effects of images exposing their flatness—for example, an ornamental composition or a painterly texture. In The Problem of Form, Adolf Hildebrand programmatically distinguishes between the “inherent form” (Daseinsform—the forms of things in reality) and the “effective form” (Wirkungsform—the forms in the artwork aiming at certain mental images that are realized in the perception of the work by the spectator). Since in art all reality is artistically shaped, Hildebrand argues that the “inherent form exists in the work of art only as an effective reality.”8 With view to the flat images of painting as an effective form, he is thus likewise interested in the creation of a unified impression of flatness and of an effective spatial suggestion. Because in the two-dimensional art of painting the “visual ideas of the [three-­ dimensional] form thus acquired are actually abstract in nature” (230), the challenge for the painter is to suggest spatial depth: “The painter mentally works with visual ideas that he expresses directly on a surface, thereby creating a whole in the sense of a distant image. Insofar as these impressions are intended to stimulate ideas of form, the painter has the task of depicting a surface image in such a way that we fully comprehend the object’s form. He does this by testing the visual impressions for the suggestive force of their three-dimensional clues, which he in fact employs and shapes for this purpose.” (232) To attain this goal, the painter needs to pull the observer’s gaze through the work’s surface layer, so to speak, into the imaginary space, and induce the eye’s general movement into depth. Hildebrand explores at length the question of how the images organize this “general movement into depth” of the observer’s gaze “from front to back,” thus inspiring a spatial imagination (243). He mentions “contrasts of light and shade” and color in “its capacity to denote distance” (250) as well as “intersecting lines” connected with the organization of distinct “layers of flatness” as means of differentiating depth layers within the image (244). In

156  |  The Image in Early Cinema short, it is the “contrasts in appearance that create spatial values” because “we associate them with images of objects that we relate to nature” that seem helpful to him in this context (244). At the same time—and in latent contrast—Hildebrand is also interested in how our gaze at two-dimensional images is always met with “a resistance to this general movement into depth,” with some of the image’s elements “becoming unyielding surface appearances” (243). In this context, he also notes a “surface effect,” that is, “surface impressions insofar as they are perceived as purely twodimensional” (249). In other words, he addresses a double gaze at images: “Thus images of objects can be separated in terms of distance and yet work together as a surface unity” (247). What is at issue is an oscillating gaze, which grasps represented (imagined) depth and the three-dimensionality of objects and yet simultaneously perceives paintings as pure surface, as a haptic texture without imagined concreteness and depth, a texture that has its own aesthetic appeal. For this second aspect, Hildebrand introduces the metaphor of the carpet: where the imagination of a represented object “is lacking, colors work only as colors. Unless the image of an object is evoked, these factors express neither nearness nor distance” (244). For Hildebrand, the “splotches and blots” characteristic of painting are especially typical of this oscillating gaze: they shape the image surface and, as pure color matter, can connect into visual compositions (surface patterns) of great unity. Sometimes, this “effect of splotches” (Fleckenwirkung) only gradually evokes an object impression, but it already has an aesthetic appeal at the first level. As much as Hildebrand was interested in such surface effects, they always seemed counterproductive to him as soon as they attracted too much attention and began to disturb the unified depth impression (245). With regard to his dialectical conception, which juxtaposes the ever-present image surface as a visually unifying force with the spatial depth that simultaneously reveals itself, he was primarily interested in the suggestion of spatial depth. All of this explores a field that also caught the interest of the earliest film theorists. Some of them celebrated the new spatial dimension of the moving image, others praised its palpable flatness. The American poet Vachel Lindsay belonged to those who hailed the special plasticity of cinema as “sculpture-in-­ motion” in a chapter of his 1915 book The Art of the Moving Picture. Lindsay found it desirable—and appropriate to the medium—if the film images displayed their inherent plasticity and spatial depth through perspectival layering and through lighting effects stressing the corporeal. By contrast, the enthusiastic early German film theorist and later gallery owner Herbert Tannenbaum, in his 1913–14 essay “Probleme des Kinodramas” (“Problems of the Photoplay”), deplored the necessity of an exceptional artistic effort to achieve at least a “relief-like” effect in film

Shared Affinities and “Kunstwollen”  |  157 “at the level of the image.”9 He claimed that the cinematic image in itself lacked the ability to suggest depth. In his view, the monochrome screen images create the impression of a “flat appearance of all things,” a “silent shadow-world” that lacks depth in every respect.10 It is a world “beyond our life, airy and light, a (mentally and visually) entirely two-dimensional world, which is . . . in its way, completely balanced, unified, homogenous.”11 Soon after, in his 1916 book The Photoplay, Hugo Münsterberg spoke of a “conflict of perception” and a “peculiar interference” in the face of the cinematic image:12 We certainly see the depth, and yet we cannot accept it. There is too much which inhibits belief and interferes with the interpretation of the people and landscape before us as truly plastic. They are surely not simply pictures. The persons can move toward us and away from us, and the river flows into a distant valley. And yet the distance in which the people move is not the distance of our real space. . . . It is a unique inner experience, which is characteristic of the perception of the photoplays. We have reality with all its true dimensions; and yet it keeps the fleeting, passing surface suggestion without true depth and fullness, as different from a mere picture. . . . It brings our mind into a peculiar complex state; and we shall see that this plays a not unimportant part in the mental make-up of the whole photoplay.13

With this peculiar interference between the perception of the flatness of the image and the illusion of depth, with his description of the “reality of this doubleness,”14 Münsterberg comes close to Hildebrand’s dialectical position.15 But whereas Münsterberg didn’t derive any specific aesthetics of the image from this, Tannenbaum did just that. More than Hildebrand, Tannenbaum was also interested in the pure impression of flatness, which created for him an abstraction not only from depth but also from the tangible quality of real things. The resistance of the image’s flatness was to be accepted and aesthetically exploited. In the sense of a “will to art” (Kunstwollen), the cinematic image was to be composed in a painterly way, as it were, so that “the competent use of light-dark-contrasts would create an appealing dispersal of splotches [Fleckverteilung], and a harmonious arrangement of lines through the respective grouping of realities,” says Tannenbaum.16 It is only after these aesthetic demands aimed at the dimension of flatness—which recall Hildebrand’s “effect of splotches”—have been fulfilled that Tannenbaum also wants the film image to suggest a certain sense of space.

Visual Compositions of Surface and Depth in Die Liebe der Maria Bonde If we now consider Emerich Hanus’s Film Die Liebe der Maria Bonde (The Love of Maria Bonde), which contributed to the advanced standard of cinematic-­ visual composition around 1917, a number of correspondences with the aesthetic

158  |  The Image in Early Cinema concepts of Tannenbaum and the art theorists is noticeable.17 Right from the start, the film bespeaks its creators’ obsession with sophisticated presentations of spatial depth as well as the painterly qualities of many shots. The “painterly” here never results from a direct borrowing of specific paintings; rather, it is the result of all aspects of the film coalescing in a mise-en-image, whose principles of composition and its haptic, sensual qualities have an aesthetic effect, which is closely related to that of contemporaneous bourgeois fine art. This relatedness includes a predilection for certain motifs such as the skillful representation of the textures and silky surfaces of dramatically folded fabrics, to name but one of the elements appearing in Hanus’s film that turn-of-the-century painting was also preoccupied with (fig. 14.1). The Blue Gown, a painting from 1917 by American painter Frederick Carl Giesecke, is just one example of this. In trying to analyze the conspicuously elaborate visual quality of Die Liebe der Maria Bonde in detail, one notes first that the film consists of rather long-­ lasting images in the tableau style (predominantly in full shot or three-quarter shot) showing the characters in their surroundings, with mostly interiors carefully constructed and lit in the studio. The considerable shot length was quite common in German melodramatic films at the time. The films’ goal was not to accelerate the narration. Rather, they aimed at creating a contemplative perception of their visually elaborate tableaus,18 emotionalizing the spectators through immersion in each specific situation, and arousing admiration for the pictorial beauty of the image.19 At the same time, attention is drawn to the relationship between spatial depth and flatness, which was so important to the theorists of the period. On the one hand, throughout the film, shots that excessively stage spatial depth regularly alternate with shots that exhibit a flat character. On the other hand, the dialectical simultaneity—or to use Münsterberg’s words, the peculiar interference—of impressions of space and flatness is especially prominent in this film, attaining a special aesthetic significance. The painterly, haptic effects created in certain shots—whether through lighting or through “ornamentalizing” the entire image—only truly emerge when the image slips into the impression of flatness and the spatial dimension of perception becomes aesthetically meaningless for a moment. The pronounced shift between spatial depth and flatness that is characteristic of Hanus’s film is instantly noticeable in a scene at the beginning of the first act. The scene is set in Mrs. Bonde’s parlor. Martin, the male protagonist, comes to visit, meeting the lady of the house and her daughters assembled in the parlor: the youngest daughter, Anella, and the middle one, Maria, with whom he becomes engrossed in conversation; the mother is stitching. Behind a curtain, jealous Gunne, the oldest daughter, is suffering. The shot of the parlor, which lasts almost four minutes with the same framing, is interrupted (and prolonged)

Shared Affinities and “Kunstwollen”  |  159

Fig. 14.1 A shot from Die Liebe der Maria Bonde (Germany, Emerich Hanus, 1917–18) reveals the textures and silky surfaces of dramatically folded fabrics. Courtesy Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin.

by only a few brief shots: one of Martin’s arrival in the hallway, one cutting in to a closer shot of the space near the bay window, and later, a shot of Gunne behind the curtain. The parlor shot is especially striking because of its meticulously calculated arrangement of image planes, which mark spatial depth. At least five planes are arranged here with great care: at the very front on the right is a curtain that everyone who enters or leaves the room passes and touches and which makes up the first plane; the second spatial layer functions as a “stage” in front of the chairs, where Anella plays her game with Martin; the third plane consists of chairs in front of a table, from where the mother and Maria watch at first; fourth, there is the space behind the table, an intermediate space to which the mother retreats while Martin greets Maria with a kiss on the hand; and the fifth plane is the space by the bay window, where Maria and Martin take a seat at the end. The game played by the characters within these spatial layers of the parlor for almost four minutes is quite remarkable—a ballet of changing constellations that gradually drifts from front to back and plays with the spectator’s

160  |  The Image in Early Cinema attention. The cut to a shot of the bay window again highlights the creation of spatial layers, though this time there are only two planes in a space less deep. Even more than the one before, this shot plays with the modeling potential of light and shade, which on the one hand marks the two depth planes and on the other partially suspends the spatial character. The mother is foregrounded on the right and sitting in the half-dark; behind her, in the second layer, is Maria in the bright center of attention, with Martin next to her in the half-­ shade. Exploiting the perceptual conflict between space and flatness, the entire image shifts toward an ornamental surface of high painterly value, caused by the lighting and the ornamental principle, that spreads from the visually salient lace window curtain to the entire room, as it were. This is followed by a cut to a completely flat image, the shot of Gunne behind a heavy curtain that hangs straight and horizontally to the line of sight, filling the entire frame. The image is “overgrown” by the curtain’s ornaments, and jealous Gunne seems at first to be immersed in the ornaments, until her face, illuminated almost relief-like, emerges with its expression of suffering. Then Gunne leaves the image toward the front, thereby giving us a depth marker again. What was already hinted at in the shot of the bay window reoccurs throughout this film: the partial suspension of the spatial impression in favor of the flatness of the image, which thus emphasizes painterly and ornamental effects. The lighting and the play with ornaments in the mise-en-scène play a crucial role here. Approximately thirty minutes into the film, Maria remains in her parlor alone after Martin has left the room with the now nearly grown-up little sister Anella. Maria wears a dressing gown that is richly decorated with ornaments in kimono style. As she turns away to step to the window, the ornamentation of the gown blends with the ornamentation covering the whole parlor, from the wallpaper through the upholstery to the carpet. Unlike the rather diffusely lit and somewhat dusky room (low-key lighting), the window appears as a bright contrasting surface, which is now in turn structured by the lace curtain’s rich ornamentation standing out strongly in the backlight. In terms of image perception, the room virtually ceases to be a room as the image is transformed into a super-ornament dominated by its two-dimensional character. The actress is immersed in this ornament. This effect is enhanced even more later, when Maria—sick, lonely, and full of jealousy—is waiting for Martin’s return at the window by night. The whole room becomes a dark, black surface; only the curtain’s ornament, outlined against the bright window (which shows nothing of the outside), stands out; in addition, there is Maria’s brightly illuminated upper body, visible as a series of white splotches in the backlight (fig. 14.2). This creates a flat image emphasizing—in condensed form—the appeal of that play with the effect of splotches stressed by Hildebrand and Tannenbaum. It is exactly what Tannenbaum described: the cinematic image is able to bring people “into

Shared Affinities and “Kunstwollen”  |  161

Fig. 14.2 A shot from Die Liebe der Maria Bonde (Germany, Emerich Hanus, 1917–18) shows the room as an ornamental surface. Courtesy Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin.

a complete uniformity with all things of the phenomenal world,” because “the photographic technology aligns people and things side by side within a single flatness.”20

Conclusion In summing up the line drawn here—from turn-of-the-century art theories through the beginnings of film theory to the film stylistics of the 1910s—we clearly note an overarching aesthetic sensibility. In this essay, I have highlighted the marked interest of the period’s theorists in the relationship between effects of surface and depth in the two-dimensional image. I have shown that art theorist Hildebrand and film theorist Münsterberg outlined a dialectical conception for which it is crucial that the gaze oscillates between the image surface and an effectively shaped, imaginary spatial depth. Tannenbaum proposed to design the image surface not just with view to suggesting deep space but also as a surface in its own right, as a specific aesthetic entity. The analysis of Hanus’s Die Liebe der Maria Bonde reveals that the film’s visual-stylistic qualities put great emphasis on the careful stimulation of such an oscillating gaze between surface aesthetics

162  |  The Image in Early Cinema and depth illusion. Pars pro toto, this testifies to the aesthetic zeitgeist connecting various media and discourses. Jörg Schweinitz is Professor of Film History at the University of Zürich. He is author of Film and Stereotype: A Challenge for Cinema and Theory and editor (with Daniel Wiegand) of Film Bild Kunst: Visuelle Ästhetik des vorklassischen Stummfilms.

Notes 1. Adolf Hildebrand, Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst (Strassburg: J. H. E. Heitz, 1893). 2. Antonia Lant also observes a correspondence with ideas of contemporaneous German art theory in the image stylistics of early films that follow the Egyptian fashion; see Antonia Lant, “Haptical Cinema,” October 74 (Autumn 1995): 45–73. On the visual structuring of depth in images of early narrative film, see Michael Wedel, “Sculpturing with Light: Early Film Style, Stereoscopic Vision and the Idea of a Plastic Art in Motion,” in Film 1900: Technology, Perception, Culture, ed. Annemone Ligensa and Klaus Kreimeier (New Barnet: Libbey, 2009): 201–223. 3. David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 175. 4. Adolphe Hildebrand, Le problème de la forme dans les arts figuratifs, traduit de l’Allemand par Georges M. Baltus (Paris: Emile Bouillon and Strasbourg: Heitz et Mündel, 1903); Adolf Hildebrand, The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture, translated and revised with the author’s cooperation by Max Meyer and Robert Morris Ogden (New York: G. E. Stechert & Co., 1907). 5. See Yuri Tsivian’s comparative study of Hofer’s and Bauer’s image stylistics, “Two ‘Stylists’ of the Teens: Franz Hofer and Yevgenii Bauer,” in A Second Life: German Cinema’s First Decades, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996), 264–276. 6. The Austrian Emerich (also Emmerich) Hanus (1884–1956) came to film around 1912–13, first as an actor. Supposedly, his first film role was that of Judge Arnoldy, which he played alongside Albert Bassermann in Der Andere (Max Mack, Germany 1913). This was followed by three important roles in films by Franz Hofer (Die schwarze Natter, Roman einer Verschollenen, Wer ist der Täter, all Germany 1913), which made him familiar with Hofer’s sophisticated principles of image composition. His own later works as a director are characterized by an elaborate visual style. 7. This film was part of a series of films with star actress Martha Novelly that was released in 1917–18, produced in Germany by the Astra-Film-Gesellschaft (located in Copenhagen and Berlin) and directed by Emerich Hanus. Die Liebe der Maria Bonde was probably produced in late 1917 and released early in 1918. The exact date of censorship or of the premiere are not known, nor is the name of the cameraman. In March 1918, an article in the trade press wrote about the film’s star, Martha Novelly: “Of late, she has created . . . enthralling female characters in new dramas (‘The Love of Maria Bonde’).” Friedel Köhne, “Martha Novelly,” Lichtbild-Bühne Nr. 13, 1918, supplement, n.p.

Shared Affinities and “Kunstwollen”  |  163 8. Adolf Hildebrand, “The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts” [1893], in Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics 1873–1893, introduction and translation by Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (Santa Monica, CA: The Getty Center for the History of Arts and the Humanities, 1994), 227–279, here 237. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 9. Herbert Tannenbaum, “Probleme des Kinodramas,” Bild & Film no. 3/4 (1913–14): 60–63), repr. in Prolog vor dem Film. Nachdenken über ein neues Medium 1909–1914, ed. Jörg Schweinitz (Leipzig: Reclam, 1992), 312–319, here 316. 10. Tannenbaum, “Probleme des Kinodramas,” 316, 313. 11. Ibid., 314. 12. Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (New York: D. Appleton, 1916), repr. in Hugo Münsterberg on Film: The Photoplay–A Psychological Study and Other Writings, ed. Allan Langdale (New York, London: Routledge, 2002), 43–162, here 70. 13. Ibid, 70–71, emphasis in original. 14. Ibid., 70. 15. What Hildebrand, who distinguishes “scanning” (Schauen) and “seeing” (Sehen) along these lines, shares with Münsterberg is that both theorists were influenced by axioms that they connected with the aesthetics of empathy (Einfühlungsästhetik). This theory was extremely influential in Germany around the turn of the century. For more details on the discourses of Einfühlung, including Hildebrand’s ideas, see Scott Curtis, The Shape of Spectatorship: Art, Science, and Early Cinema in Germany (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015): 214–230. 16. Tannenbaum, “Probleme des Kinodramas,” 316–318. 17. The film is available online at Filmportal.de: http://www.filmportal.de/node/1220080 /video/1220083. 18. In their insightful investigation, Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs come to quite similar observations regarding American and European developments; for a brief summary see Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film [1993] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016): 171–174. This book on tableau-style film staging is in many respects related to the field of my investigation. However, a significant difference in the scope of research must be noted. In the German tradition, the term “tableau” refers primarily to paintings. That is, when I speak of a cinematographic tableau, I am concerned with the comparison (and interaction) of compositional principles in long-lasting full shots on the one hand, and in paintings on the other. This corresponds to my focus in the study presented here. In contrast, Brewster and Jacobs’s interest is directed at the pictorialistic stage practice as the primary reference point for film. Accordingly, they use “tableau” with partially different semantics and refer to the linguistic usage in France, where the word is also significant in the theater language. Here separate scenes (with their own backgrounds) are called “tableaux.” 19. For further details of the close relationship between the account for moments of contemplation and the tradition of tableau and the contemporary discussion on this topic, see Kaveh Askari, Making Movie into Art: Picture Craft from the Magic Lantern to Early Hollywood (London: BFI Palgrave, 2014), 79–87. 20. Tannenbaum, “Probleme des Kinodramas,” 313–314, 318.

15

Techniques in Circulation: Sovereignty, Imaging Technology, and Art Education in Qajar Iran Kaveh Askari

A

s visitors walk through the entryway to the Cinema Museum at Ferdows Garden on Tehran’s picturesque north side, they encounter a work on canvas as the first item in its timeline of Iranian cinema history. Like the museum campus itself, this introductory exhibit juxtaposes the Qajar nineteenth century and contemporary Iran.1 It stands as a reminder of the curator’s role in pursuing the threads that link painting, photography, and early cinema. The painting is a large-format battle scene casually draped, like a curtain, on a brick wall (fig. 15.1). A garbed dummy at its left side demonstrates the role of the “curtain reader” (pardeh-khan). The scene begins the museum’s history of cinema with a pictorial narrative tradition in which performers “read” these canvases in public gathering places such as coffeehouses, recounting through their presentations stories of the Battle of Karbala or from The Book of Kings. The painting makes sense in the cinema museum. The curtain reader is a central tradition in popular Iranian painting and has salient connections to screen narrators who accompanied film projections in Iran into the mid-1930s. Curiously, this is the only painting in the museum’s timeline. The story quickly moves on, even if it opens by addressing the place of painting in Iranian cinema history. Given the focus of this volume on art-historical approaches to the image in early cinema, this museum entryway is a place where one might imagine a curatorial experiment. I want to take the opportunity of this collection to consider a second painting, a canonical work out-of-place, as if it were set alongside the curtain reader in the Cinema Museum’s exhibit on Iranian cinema history. Mohammad Ghaffarri Kamal al-Molk’s Hall of Mirrors (1896) depicts Naser al-Din Shah seated in the Golestan Palace, another Qajar palace-turned-museum, where the painting also remains on display (fig. 15.2). The space of royal portraits of the late nineteenth century, especially that of the optically obsessed Hall of Mirrors, would offer an important counterbalance to narrated picture traditions when imagined in a timeline of a technology-focused exhibit on the history of the

Techniques in Circulation  |  165

Fig. 15.1 Curtain-reading exhibit (pardeh khani), Cinema Museum, Tehran. Photographed by the author in 2014.

Fig. 15.2 Mohammad Ghaffari (Kamal al-Molk), Hall of Mirrors, 1896. Oil on canvas, 35 1/2" × 39 3/8", Golestan Palace, Tehran.

166  |  The Image in Early Cinema moving image in Iran. This curatorial experiment would highlight how traditions of sovereign image-making migrated from painting to photography and cinema, and then back to painting. In other words, imagining this well-known royal portrait out-of-place presents an occasion to consider cross-media traditions that were less about the live narrator and more about experiments with disciplines of imaging. Storytelling traditions provided one way of linking one medium to another in this period of proliferating images. Another link, one that engages the issues raised by this collection, has to do with what I call “intermedial optics,” wherein an artist’s inclusive embrace of imaging technologies provides an opportunity to give focused attention to the form and material of the image. Such an approach is particularly useful for understanding the cross-border circulation of images and for revising still-common assumptions about the lack, or lack of importance, of images in art from the Middle East.2

Imaging Technology and the Qajar Court In Iran, photography and cinema found a place in the royal court long before they circulated among wider audiences in the cities, and this tradition remained relevant even as the urban business of film and photographic exhibition emerged.3 The late Qajar rulers Naser al-din Shah and his successor, Mozaffar al-din Shah, were famous for their collections and sponsorship of optical devices, photography, and film. Photographs and photographic technology play major and diverse roles in the history of the image of Iranian sovereignty throughout this period. Not only were photographs and films used to document and display the royal court, but images taken from photographs were printed sequentially on decorative building joists, and wet-plate photographic portraits functioned as tiles in mirror mosaics along palace walls in Shiraz. Naser al-Din Shah collected cameras, telescopes, cartes de visite, and an assortment of photographic curiosities such as hairbrushes and seashells with hand-colored photographs affixed or printed on their rounded surfaces. Many of these objects remain in the permanent collection of the Golestan Palace Museum along with collections of the first photographs and films in Iran. Naser al-Din Shah was an avid photographer himself. He established a photographic institute in Golestan Palace and is responsible for thousands of the photographs in this archive. Moving images, too, had diverse applications. Mozaffar al-Din Shah continued his predecessor’s interest in photography and ordered his court photographer to bring the first motion picture camera to Iran during their visit to Europe in 1900. The films made under his rule spanned the personal and the official. They extended the established practices of court photography and sovereign portraiture in painting. Alongside the documents of parades and official events, the court photographer also staged scenes with the king that borrow from traditions of royal portraiture, which include

Techniques in Circulation  |  167 the popular equestrian scenes and guns-and-scope pictures that date back centuries. Paintings of the later generation of Qajars with poses comparable to those of the early films include Equestrian Portrait of ‘Ali Quli Mirza, I’tizad al Sultaneh (1864) and Naser al-Din Shah and a Cannon (c. 1865). These new imaging technologies in the royal court, in addition to being extravagant imports, were also actively integrated with traditions of displaying sovereignty. These points of integration, in which the modernity of the medium coincided with transformations of sovereign image-making, were institutional as well as individual. Photography arrived in the royal court just as court artists were revising the older workshop-based apprenticeships in favor of new programs of art education modeled largely on French academic painting. These educational methods were circulating in multiple directions around the world, where they were absorbed by very different institutions.4 Here, as with photographic technology, they joined with traditions of sovereign image-making. Russian and French art educators began to serve in the court with increasing frequency in the nineteenth century, and with the establishment of the Dar al-Funun royal academy around 1860, the French Academic model of art education became part of the standard curriculum for royal painters.5 Iranian artists studied at the academy and were sent abroad to copy old masters, and French art educators were brought to the school to move students through this centralized fine-arts curriculum. During this transitional moment, photography gained access to the workshops of art educators as a technical tool. But even if it was not typically considered an aesthetic medium in itself, it served as a model for a style that challenged long-standing traditions of court painting. The flatness of an early nineteenthcentury royal painting such as Portrait of Fath ‘Ali Shah Seated (Mihr ‘Ali, 1814), in which the jewels of the shah’s crown, clothing, and sitting cushions seemed to occupy one plane of repeating color and pattern, gave way to a differently configured image. Painters working after the introduction of photography began to combine elements of depth, detail, and shading with traditional techniques and familiar poses. In some cases, such as Portrait of Naser al-Din Shah (ca. 1855, watercolor, later reproduced in oil) and Musa’s Women Weaving a Carpet (1891), they worked directly from daguerreotypes and photographic prints. For these art educators and painters, the photograph helped to open up alternative configurations of space and a new iconography of royal figures. The shah’s minister of publication advocated for the technology’s use in landscapes and portraits to change the way painters treated light and shade, proportion, and perspective.6 At a time when the respectability of easel painting was on the rise but life-model classes’ exposed bodies were not easy to integrate culturally, photographic technology also filled this important curricular need. These images of vistas, bodies, and the built environment could be challenging (even threatening) to cultural hierarchies of image-making, but this was a different kind of formal challenge than

168  |  The Image in Early Cinema the stylistic inventions that would come in the middle of the twentieth century. In the decade leading up to the constitutional revolution of 1906, painters’ and educators’ modernism did not turn away from perspective. It resisted convention by migrating imaging technology and institutionalized styles of painting, from Dutch masters to French academic painters, into new institutional contexts where the conceptions of mastery, originality, and patronage were configured along radically different lines.

The Hall of Mirrors The most influential painter and educator in this moment of institutional transition was Mohammad Ghaffari Kamal al-Molk, as exemplified in The Hall of Mirrors. He excelled at the Dar al-Funun academy and continued on as a court painter and educator in the 1880s. He took a particular interest in the techniques of illusion, depth, detail, color, and movement that were restructuring royal painting. He made portraits from photographs, and he encouraged his students to do the same. He even experimented with movement and instantaneity in his paintings of the summer palace at Shahrestanak by introducing figures almost blurred in active postures and representing the water from fountains as an array of fixed droplets rather than a continuous stream.7 The Hall of Mirrors is the multiyear project that has defined Kamal al-Molk’s early period. The question of how to discuss its modernity is an enduring one. It has long been interpreted as a discreetly subversive portrait of Naser al-Din Shah, pretending to present a contemplative ruler while diminishing his stature. The painting drowns the king in a space of luxury, which could suggest that all of the elaborate ornamentation is failing to add up to a convincing image of sovereignty. Instead, it has separated him from the people of Iran. The naturalistic space somehow makes this display of wealth more conspicuous. These decorations of the palace, rather than symbols of power, have been read as obstacles to the effective management of the nation.8 In this interpretation, close attention to what the painter has done formally is less important than what he chose to represent. My interest in the painting does not contradict this critical perspective on the display of wealth so much as shift its emphasis. If there is an intervention in the image of sovereignty, one that bears relevance for cinema and media historians, I am inclined to look for it in what the painting shows off. What are also clearly on display here are the methods of painting that had permeated the royal academy. The work seems conceived as a way to demonstrate as many aspects as possible of the formal discipline being institutionalized in the training of royal painters. Both the painter and the patron he depicts are agents of these transformations. The optical possibilities of the mirrored hall in Golestan Palace overshadow its role as a display of conspicuous wealth. The room is actually quite small in

Techniques in Circulation  |  169 comparison with the adjacent rooms in the palace. It is surprising, standing in this space after knowing it only through Kamal al-Molk’s painting, to see that the painter’s distance from the king was actually less than twelve feet. The space does appear grander than it does in life, but how to read this visual exaggeration remains an open question. If the goal were to showcase extravagance, the larger and better-appointed rooms in the palace might have been used for this purpose. What this space has that the others do not is an interplay of windows, mirrors, mirrored ceilings, and the light-catching objects they reflect. The wide-­ angle effect, which creates a sense of a greater distance between the easel and the sitter, just as importantly allowed the painter an opportunity to play with perspective. The decorative repetitions in the tile flooring create an opportunity to exaggerate perspective. So do the mirrored ceiling panels, which reflect the trees in the garden beyond the windows. The mirrored walls at the back of the room reverse the images from the ceiling. They reflect the chandeliers, and further down the wall, paintings outside of the frame. The long shadows from window frames complement the other techniques of perspective. They also indicate something of the process involved in creating this painting over multiple seasons. Since the windows face south, the elongated patterns of light on the floor and the warm glow on the furnishings suggest a time of year when the sun is lower in the sky, possibly winter. This seasonal light contrasts with the lush summer foliage in the garden outside and reminds the viewer of the multiseason composite nature of the work. The Hall of Mirrors overturns the color palette of traditional royal portraiture. In a cultural context where mirrors represent not vanity but light, the artist makes a point to darken and saturate the intricate color tile patterns from the floor. He attends to the reddening of the light through single and double-layered curtains and the refraction of this red light in the chandeliers and the wall mosaics. Each of these elements—perspective, detail, reflection, and color—contribute to a work that does something besides realistically depict everyday palace life in passive appropriation or imitation of French Academic painters. The assumption of authorship works differently in this context. Ali Behdad counters notions of simple appropriation in photography by describing the early Iranian photographer’s work as akin to grafting in a garden.9 His metaphor seems appropriate here, too, as it highlights the multiple origins of a product as well as the process of joining as a craft in itself. The Hall of Mirrors performs its intentional craft in joining techniques. Less than an effort to imitate the natural world, it is a kind of flexing of pictorial muscles that makes a case for easel painting’s move up the hierarchy of the arts. In doing so, it potentially challenges other court-­ sponsored forms of artistic labor, but at the same time it grafts the novel form onto traditions more appropriate to this artistic context. This is an easel painting in which borrowed techniques are recognized and encouraged. Copied styles,

170  |  The Image in Early Cinema copied photographs, and even directly copied Rembrandts merited the same attention as new subjects.10 They were exhibited side by side. In the traditional guilds, expert copying had been a marker of talent that placed a painter at the top of the field. After European training became more common for court painters, expert copies of old masters were proudly displayed. They demonstrated intentional play with techniques and reflexive participation in a system of instruction favored in nineteenth-century art schools.

Media Circulation and Iranian Modernism This turn to the form of Kamal al-Molk’s work puts it in the context of film and photography in a way that can help to navigate two interpretations of the modernism of the work. The first is an established tradition of criticism of the emergence of this style, and particularly of the use of photography in Qajar painting. Historians of Iranian art have alleged that Kamal al-Molk’s style, copied by his students, held back the development of Iranian modernist painting for decades.11 Layla Diba reinforces this claim when she describes late nineteenth-­ century Iranian art as “retardataire compared with developments in Europe. . . . Photographic realism, and by extension, Ghaffari’s style of academic realism, actually delayed the onset of an authentic modern visual tradition, which did not emerge until the generation of artists that came on the scene after the Second World War.”12 Kamal al-Molk was indeed deepening his spaces, increasing his level of detail, and developing a verisimilar color palette at the same time that painters in Europe were moving their canvases in the opposite direction— toward a flatness and a range of colors with which many of the more traditional Iranian court painters would have found greater affinity. The argument follows that antinaturalistic elements in Iranian art have value, and this value was squandered by the presence of academic painting and photography in the teaching studio and the handicraft production chain. It was only after a half-century delay that Iranian art got back on track with movements like the Saqqakhane school, which turned away from these images and toward abstraction by way of Iranian folk traditions and calligraphic forms. This criticism of Kamal al-Molk is well supported by curators and scholars of Iranian modernist art—especially those who are or were associated with institutions such as the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. A second interpretation of the modernism of Kamal al-Molk’s work has been articulated in a lucid comparison by Fereshteh Daftari. She contextualizes her definition of modernism by placing The Hall of Mirrors next to Paul Gaugin’s flattened, decorative portrait of Jeanne Gopil in Tahiti, which was also completed in 1896: “Just as Kamal al-Molk was aspiring to western naturalism, Gaugin was seeking alternatives to the representational tradition of the Renaissance. Persian art is one place where he found it.”13 Rather than lament the school of Kamal

Techniques in Circulation  |  171 al-Molk, Daftari points out its symmetry with the work of Gaugin. He was experimenting with motifs, flat compositions, and colors that resemble Persian painting the same year that The Hall of Mirrors was experimenting with casting them off. To see The Hall of Mirrors as modern formal experimentation, what Daftari calls “old-master modernism,” is to recognize institutional context as giving significance to the form. My analysis of the work, while relying on Diba’s research and her insights about the integration of photography into Iranian art, tracks more closely with this revised definition of modernism in Iran. If its emphasis on circulation runs a risk of deemphasizing the foreign power of realism in Iran, it also counters assumptions that might cause western-trained art historians to miss the significance of salon-style painting as a form of experimentation within a multimedia environment. But some questions remain about how the methodologies of cinema and media history might supplement these interpretations of the late nineteenth-­ century turn in royal painting. This is where the imaging disciplines and technologies of The Hall of Mirrors come into play. When one moves from the p ­ erspective of the single medium of painting to the intersections of media technologies, one also reconsiders the questions of synchrony and of delay. The lament about a retardataire painting tradition and the assertion of a beautiful simultaneity with Post-Impressionism each imply a suspicion of the asynchronous. In multimedia histories, formal asynchronies and constellations of technologies abound. They are a distinguishing feature of media environments. By placing too much emphasis on the turn away from the image as a marker of Iranian painting’s modernity, those who suspect the presence of photography in royal painting risk downplaying what is odd about Kamal al-Molk’s particular turn to the image. The Rembrandt copy and the salon-style work engage different historical periods and techniques, as do the representations of instantaneity in the droplets of water fountains and the daguerreotype templates for portraiture. The formal discipline of academic painting, the conventions of royal portraiture, the lens (that must have been) used to create the wide-angle effect each have conflicting chronologies. Similarly, the mirrors in the Golestan Palace are themselves components of an optical technology for structuring space and light. Put in terms of Behdad’s metaphor, grafts are already abundant in this optical garden. Such a space confounds a linear genealogy. And if many of these works are, as I am suggesting, conspicuous displays of form in a media environment of increasing circulation, then the complicated chronology of this work is part of the creative process. “Retardataire” implies a kind of naivety that runs counter to the work’s purposive play with such historically varied forms and technologies. Worrying over or disavowing the datedness of this work might put too much emphasis on a specific definition of the work’s “success” and loses sight of the productive asynchrony of its optics.

172  |  The Image in Early Cinema Once one considers the multiple optical mechanisms at work in the construction of these images, their realism comes into question. While clearly iconic, The Hall of Mirrors outstrips any simple notion of photographic realism when it strikingly draws from a range of techniques and technologies to manipulate the space of a room. By highlighting the painting’s intermedial optics, it becomes more difficult to understand its construction of the image as simply antimodern, imitative, and thus categorically separated from the work considered foundational for a museum such as the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. Indeed, it might even be useful to add this museum to the exercise in imaginary curating considering that, when tasked with making a link between cinema and painting, TMoCA makes the same move as the Cinema Museum. On display at the TMoCA as of this writing, around the corner from works of Iranian modernism, is another coffeehouse narrative painting. This painting hangs in TMoCA at the entrance to the cinematheque. The curtain-reading storyteller and his narrative painting, despite its outsize presence in exhibits on early Iranian cinema, still makes sense in a cinema museum. This is perhaps less true in a museum of contemporary art. But the storyteller paintings, even in this venue, find themselves next to moving pictures where other nineteenth-­ century paintings do not. Reimagining an 1890s easel painting from the Golestan Palace Museum in the timeline at the Cinema Museum or outside of the cinematheque at TMoCA addresses questions of modern form and imaging technologies shared among these institutions. A historiographical attention to the image might encourage the kinds of curatorial and research projects that locate early Iranian cinema in assemblages that cross these three extensive and still largely separated collections and histories. Kaveh Askari is Associate Professor of English and Film Studies at Michigan State University. He is author of Making Movies into Art: Picture Craft from the Magic Lantern to Early Hollywood.

Notes 1. The fountains, chenar trees, and the restored architecture of this nineteenth-century summer palace are vestiges of the Qajar dynasty (1785–1925), but the institution is contemporary. The campus was repurposed in the late 1990s (opened in 2002), when Iranian art cinema had achieved global celebrity and reformists held high offices in the Iranian government. 2. For example, curators at the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar have sought to counterbalance this assumption in image-focused exhibits. 3. See Hamid Naficy’s discussion of the “artisanal” mode of Qajar filmmaking in A Social History of Iranian Cinema, vol. 1 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 27–50.

Techniques in Circulation  |  173 Several contributors to this edited collection have studied parallel traditions of representing monarchs in this period. 4. For a contrasting example, the American integration of academic painting relied on the infrastructures of the public lecture circuit and thus influenced uplift movements. 5. See Maryam Ekhtiar, “From Workshop and Bazaar to Academy: Art Training and Production in Qajar Iran,” in Royal Persian Paintings: The Qajar Epoch, 1785–1925, ed. Layla Diba and Maryam Ekhtiar (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Museum of Art in association with I. B. Tauris, 1998), 50–65. 6. For a translation of portions of this publication and its discussion of the growth of local photographers, see Iraj Afshar, “Some Remarks on the History of Photography in Iran,” in Qajar Iran: Political, Cultural and Social Change, ed. C. Bosworth and E. Hildebrand (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1983). See also Paul E. Chevedden, The Photographic Heritage of the Middle East: An Exhibition of Photography of Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Turkey, and Iran 1848–1893 (Malibu, Calif.: UCLA Research Library, 1981). 7. Paintings of summer palaces on exhibit at the Golestan Palace Museum, 2014. 8. Fereshteh Daftari assembles and discusses this tradition of interpretation in “Another Modernism: An Iranian Perspective,” in Picturing Iran: Art, Society, and Revolution, eds. Shiva Balaghi and Lynn Gumpert (New York: Grey Art Gallery in association with I. B. Tauris, 2002), 30–88. 9. Ali Behdad, “The History of Iranian Photography,” MENA Lecture Series, Northwestern University and Evanston Public Library, Evanston, Ill., May 11, 2015. The material presented in the talk came from Behdad’s book Camera Orientalis: Reflections on Photography of the Middle East (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 10. For a discussion of Kamal al-Molk’s copy of Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait as a Youth see Ekhtiar, “From Workshop and Bazaar to Academy,” 58–60. 11. Javad Mojabi cited in Layla S. Diba, “Qajar Photography and Its Relation to Iranian Art: A Reassessment,” History of Photography 37, no. 1 (January, 2013): 98. 12. Ibid., 98. 13. Feresheh Daftari, “Redefining Modernism: Pluralist Art Before the 1979 Revolution,” in Iran Modern, ed. Fereshteh Daftari and Layla Diba (New York: Asia Society in association with Yale University Press, 2013), 27.

16

Corporeality and Female Modernity: Intermediality and Early Film Celebrities Marina Dahlquist

I don’t like publicity. After all, what does the public care about me as myself? They only care whether or not I am a good actress.1

W

hether or not Pearl White liked publicity we do not know. But when it comes to the assumption that the audience cared only if she was a good actress or not, we can assume, with some certainty, that she was wrong. In 1916 the moving picture audience did care about her and other celebrities’ personality and private lives. In an article written by George Vaux Bacon, whom we can see alongside White in the photograph accompanying the text, the focus throughout is on White as a person, which fully tallies with her screen persona: her carefree attitude, independence, her attraction to danger, her competence when it comes to modern means of transportation, even conflating her film character’s name with her own: “Elaine [a Pearl White character] is a cracker-jack of a driver . . . with an ease and cleverness to awaken the admiration of the most demonic taxi driver in New York.”2 (fig. 16.1) As they drive through Manhattan with White at the wheel, she is not only acting out or described in terms of her screen persona, but the people on the streets and in passing cars appear to be her faithful audience as they call out: “Look! There’s Pearl White!” The article in Photoplay Magazine ends with a plug for White’s upcoming autobiography, in which she supposedly will give a more personal account about herself. This chapter explores the image of the female body as a key site for inscribing and performing modernity across media during the first twenty years of the twentieth century. The conception of this modern type of femininity, characterized by independence and resourcefulness—as well as exploitation on the flipside—found its template in early female film stars and their physical wherewithal and abilities at large, especially in the American serial films. Outside

Corporeality and Female Modernity   |  175

Fig. 16.1 Pearl White and George Vaux Bacon in Central Park (Photoplay Magazine, January 1916).

cinema, desirable stars were marketed in newspapers, trade papers, women’s magazines, and ads, even in autobiographical works. The intense medialization of the lifestyles and panache embodied by these women on and off screen blended into a complex and iconic cocktail of modern femininity. In the early 1910s, a radical change can be observed concerning the concept of female celebrities at large across many fields of endeavor, with cinema driving the process by repurposing images across media formats such as postcards, advertisements, and printed illustrations. Two prominent women will serve as examples of how overlapping traditions of image-making and text production were used to create and form the new phenomenon of film stars. The recycling of photographs and illustrations, often closely in conformity with the surrounding text, reinforced the star persona and a physically active femininity. As the same or very similar images appeared in different contexts and media, the images made the stars and a new physical culture widely known to different audiences and readers. The American film star Pearl White, best known for her leading roles in genre-defining action serials, the most widely advertised US film genre during the 1910s, and Annette Kellermann, an Australian professional swimmer turned vaudeville and film star in the US, are two celebrities who were widely promoted across popular media formats such

176  |  The Image in Early Cinema as motion-picture advertising, lifestyle articles, and celebrity postcards. White’s internationally circulated series of films were also reproduced as motion-picture novels that integrated stills from the films.3 In line with other hugely popular film stars such as Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin, White and Kellermann penned autobiographies at the height of their fame, making the most of their rising stardom.4 The autobiographies are not only stories of the American dream to fame and glory, but they also promoted a modern life style. Fairbanks’s 1917 publication Laugh and Live, for example, celebrated the founding principle of positive thinking and self-confidence to achieve better health, social prospects, and business. Capitalizing on the boundless interest in the personal lives of stars fueled by press agents and fan magazines, Pearl White’s autobiography, Just Me, was published in 1919, when she was thirty, only five years after her breakthrough in The Perils of Pauline (dir. Louis J. Gasnier and Donald MacKenzie, 1914).5 Annette Kellermann wrote several books, including How to Swim and Physical Beauty: How to Keep It, both published in 1918, when she was thirty-one.6 She also wrote various booklets on health, fitness, and beauty as well as My Story, an unpublished autobiography. The texts not only mediate a celebrity’s career in the midst of it but are used to add fuel to an already existing star image. Even though White and Kellermann stand as authors of these texts, to what extent they actually contributed is unclear. If the narratives were to a large extent a product of press agents and ghost writers, this would indicate that the star discourse could be read as purely fiction and would explain the unifying patterns discernable when it comes to imagery and personalities disclosed. As Richard DeCordova and others have argued, the film industry did not have a star system prior to 1907. With the shift to nickelodeons, the actor, or the “picture personality,” finally became central, not least as a means to advertise specific performances or theaters. During the years 1913–1914 another significant transformation took place: creating a star discourse, as the actors’ existences outside their professional practice became a primary focus. And the private lives of the actors were elaborated on in the rising genre of fan magazines.7 But how was a star or celebrity mediated in the 1910s, and in what way did their private and professional selves differ or intertwine in articles and advertisements that appeared as their own statements, such as interviews and authored articles with accompanying images? How were White and Kellermann promoted and lauded for their ideal bodies, their agility, and modern femininity? In the late 1910s, the myth around Pearl White was immense. With her soaring stardom, she was constantly in the news. Numerous articles explored and exploited White’s private as well as professional life, her background, career, home life, fame, and not least her daring feats on the screen. This Pearl discourse, to which she contributed herself, is, however, filled with gaps, contradictions,

Corporeality and Female Modernity   |  177 and perhaps a few tall tales. During a time when press agents emerged at the studios, which information was reliable and what was only promotion-seeking good copy was hard to tell. The hype around White and the serials she acted in were tremendous. But was White really “the best-known woman in the world” in the 1910s, or was this adage merely a line of wishful ads?8 Her autobiography, in a comprehensive format, sums up the marketing of a star performer emerging in a widely popular format, the serial film, and synthesizes her remarkable career during a time when film culture was reconfigured in a multitude of ways, not least due to promotional machinery around the star system. The autobiography, which supposedly was the first time White disclosed any authentic data concerning her early life and humble origin, confirms and underpins the blurred boundaries between the star discourse and her characters, which deCordova finds to align with the star system arising at this time.9 An exciting and adventurous past is drawn from a tough start: it describes her early self rather unflatteringly as a tomboy, an ugly, dirty, and wild “brat” full of pranks.10 Besides her film characters being definitely better off, White’s described background seems to have been ideal for creating the personality she was to be famous for. Without any consideration of danger, her impulsive lifestyle got her into precarious situations and, at times, accidents, fist fights, fires, devastating storms, and even armed audiences. Everything is told in an easygoing tone. The adventurous upbringing described is far from the turn-of-the-twentieth-century ideal for a bourgeois girl. Her lack of feminine qualities, such as good looks and manners, is a recurring theme throughout the book. The serials’ female heroines displayed endurance, strength, and authority in a style awash with film tricks, stunts, and spectacular effects set off against the fabric of modern technology. As Jennifer M. Bean has argued, the realistic dimension of White’s and other female action stars’ spectacular feats in the serials were heavily emphasized in trade articles and advertising material.11 That the dangers she was exposed to in the films were real—she allegedly insisted on performing all the stunts herself—remains one of the most recurrent strands of promotion. It was apparently of critical importance to convince audiences that the courage on screen was genuine and truly hers.12 Savvy audiences no doubt understood that even if it looked real on the screen, some thrilling actions, like high falls from cliffs, were too dangerous to act out.13 Pearl White, or rather Pathé, perpetuated a set of myths mixing Pearl’s private self with the film character Pauline, which added to White’s action persona by describing her as Pathé’s “Peerless Fearless Girl,” or the “Heroine of a Thousand Stunts,” and the serials as “‘the always in danger’ type of pictures.”14 This is also highlighted in her account of the contractual negotiations with Louis Gasnier, the head of production at American Pathé, leading up to her starring in The Perils of Pauline.15 The script presented to her outlined a number of skills

178  |  The Image in Early Cinema she did not master. On the eve of the first episode, she accordingly would have to learn how to play tennis, swim, drive a motorcar, and survive a smashup, all performed at her own risk. And it would continue in the same way; she always had to learn to do something new for each picture. Her attitude toward her job was ambitious, to say the least: “If I have to jump off a moving train, automobile, etcetera, I always take myself out and try it several times until I get to be pretty sure of myself before they take the picture.”16 In an effort to align characters and stars, the producers often gave the serial heroines the actress’s name. In this conflation of characters and actresses, the abilities of the heroines were grafted onto the personalities of the stars, which underscores that the breathtaking feats on the screens were real. The perils Pearl White faced seemed to spill over into her private life; in an interview for Motography, she enthusiastically shows off her bruises after an accident while riding a cab in Central Park on a Sunday afternoon.17 The dovetailing between life and screen made White’s characters and her private life emblematic for the modern and independent women of her time—the New Woman. The serial genre can hence be seen as a destabilization of traditional gender norms, placing the heroines far from the confines of Victorian domestic femininity and familial obligations with their meek modesty. The serial film did not present an absolute break with traditional gender norms, however. As Ben Singer notes, the promotion of the serials, as well as the episodes themselves, put an emphasis on luxury and extravagant fashion. The combination of athletic performance and fashionable appearance— characteristics considered as absolute opposites—was unfailingly emphasized.18 One striking example is the portrait on the cover of White’s Just Me from the serial The House of Hate (dir. George B. Seitz, 1918). Pearl is in a Paris Bohemia-style outfit, with a dark velvet beret popular at this time that was deprived of any lavish decoration. Pearl seems to be in the midst of something, looking to the right of the reader as though she was just stopping for a moment. This image constitutes a contrast to the book’s only other illustration, which is a studio photograph of White in an evening dress and wearing pearls, looking at the reader from slightly underneath, in a pose definitely set for the photographer. This contrast recurs in the costumes she wears in the films, the illustrations of her in articles and postcards, and the written narratives about her. At times, “amazed” reporters discovered a blond, petite, and gentle person instead of the mannish woman they expected. White’s femininity is persistently underlined in descriptions of her appearance, and her dress style constantly attracted considerable attention. The heroines put up two sides: the masculine and adventurous self when they wore an austere outfit, and a more feminine one, when they were rescued by male chivalry and luxury fashion put feminine glamour on display.19 This was probably another way to get the attention of a female audience. Despite her extraordinary abilities,

Corporeality and Female Modernity   |  179 hard work for success and modest upbringing were central components for the characterization. In the trade press, Pearl White often put up a homely and plain image of herself. In a note at the end of her autobiography with the telling title Just Me, she implores: “I am of ‘The People,’ and it is to ‘The People’ that I owe most of my good fortune.”20 White and Kellermann can be seen as leading exponents for the new femininity emerging, not least due to cinema, during the early twentieth century, and displaying shifting forms of mobility, female prowess, fitness, and independence. The autobiographies became a vehicle for heralding self-achievement in an established narrative form, connecting the dots from advertisements, articles, and other promotion material into a story. The format offered the stars a chance, at least theoretically, to make themselves heard and even to form and control their own image—or just add one more strand to the star and celebrity discourse. Annette Kellermann’s two books, How to Swim and Physical Beauty: How to Keep It, both published in 1918, are not obvious autobiographies. They were advertised as educational publications, and after Physical Beauty was published, there were runs of articles, in principle identical to the book, in the Boston Daily Globe and the Atlanta Constitution. These articles, about how to swim or how to achieve an ideal form, for example, appeared without any autobiographic framing, but they were illustrated with Kellermann’s silhouette in the one-piece bathing suit she was to become so famous for. The two books are so closely related to Kellermann’s life story and career that they hardly can be separated from the biographic genre. Both publications have numerous images of her in different costumes and contexts. In How to Swim, for example, the first image we see is of Kellermann’s one-hundred-foot dive in A Daughter of the Gods (dir. Herbert Brenon, Fox 1916). She apparently cleared the rocks by only three or four feet. The illustration sets the tone for Kellermann and her film star persona as the author of the book, even though the caption actually describes her in third person. The book’s illustrations enforce the link between Kellermann’s success as a star in aquatic dramas and her swimming abilities, as her beauty and perfect outline supposedly came from her exercises. Studio stills from her films, primarily A Daughter of the Gods, are mixed with informative, drawn illustrations showing Kellermann’s famous silhouette performing different swimming techniques. As one caption puts it: “Beauty of form and grace of action are developed by swimming as by no other sport or exercise.”21 The book is divided into four parts, starting with the chapter titled “The Story of My Swim to Fame and Fortune,” which is a biographical take of Kellermann’s childhood in Australia and how her swimming came about as a way to cure her weak legs. She overcame not only her disabled condition but her fear of swimming, and eventually she started to win races. At the age of sixteen she won the ladies’ 100 yards and mile championships of New South Wales in record

180  |  The Image in Early Cinema times. Finally, she became a success in vaudeville and moving pictures, where her water skills showed to advantage as an aquatic superstar as, for example, a mermaid in Neptune’s Daughter (dir. Herbert Brenon, Universal 1914) and in the million-dollar production A Daughter of the Gods. There were underwater sequences in the latter film and what is believed to be the first nude appearance in a major movie, putting on display what was by many considered “the most perfectly formed woman in the world.”22 In the second part of the book, devoted to “Easy Lessons for Beginners,” different kinds of strokes are taught, such as the backstroke and, for the expert swimmer, the freestyle stroke called the Australian crawl. It includes advice on the practice of livesaving, including the fact that the proper hold to use when rescuing a victim depends on the degree of calmness of the person. To overcome a panic-stricken victim, different techniques are presented. (The sheer competence of this female life rescuer to handle urgent situations and even use force if necessary brings to mind Pearl White’s capable heroine.) Kellermann’s book also includes a long list of water tricks and dives. Diving is, according to the author, the most beautiful and graceful art practiced by swimmers.23 The first objective, however, is to overcome fear. According to Kellermann, diving is not as exceedingly dangerous as the prevalent impression implies, and injuries and death are actually rare. The book’s overall lesson is to keep fit and attractive through physical culture, which is enforced by the images of Kellermann throughout the publication, almost all of them emphasizing her slim, feminine figure in either a one-piece suit or a revealing costume set against a neutral white or black background. At several points in the book, Kellermann emphasizes that swimming might be the best sport in the world for women. It is a graceful art, one that women perform more aesthetically than men. Women can swim with almost as much strength, and in distance swims, they can swim nearly at men’s records. According to Kellermann, there are many sports in which a woman only makes herself look ridiculous when trying to compete in a man’s sports, as she makes a poor show.24 Swimming and diving are the only sports besides skating, argues Kellermann, in which women have a good chance in comparison to men. In long-distance swimming, women’s records come within 10 percent of those of men. In another example, on Kellermann’s second swim through Paris, all of the women completed the race in comparison to only 40 percent of the male swimmers. Women know how to economize their strength and can stand the cold water much longer because of their higher percentage of fatty tissue. As a woman’s sport, swimming can be absolutely feminine and at the same time efficient as exercise.25 According to Kellermann, “Swimming is unquestionably the best exercise known for developing [a] woman’s physique to its fullest powers and charms.”26

Corporeality and Female Modernity   |  181 Swimming increases muscular tissue in those who are poorly developed, exercises the whole body, and burns excessive fat. According to Kellermann this more firmly knit and muscular body would be ideal for the modern American athletic girl. Even though a woman had many advantages as a swimmer, social regulations and costumes seriously restricted and handicapped Kellermann. After all, 1918 was only a few seasons after bathing girls on popular beaches wore shoes, stockings, bloomers, skirts, corsets, and a cap.27 Kellermann was actually arrested in 1907 at a public beach in Boston because of her “indecent” swimsuit. Both of Kellermann’s books object to prudish and puritanical ideas that restricted women’s performance not only in swimming, but in all forms of activity. As she points out: “The girl child, long before she is conscious of her sex, is continually reminded that she is a girl and therefore must forego many childhood activities.”28 Kellermann was not only an advocate for functional wear, she was also one of the first women to wear a one-piece bathing costume, which is considered to be the first step toward modern swimwear for women. How to Swim illustrates costumes for different swimming occasions, pointing out when a more practical outfit is requested. A one-piece was considered suitable for professional swimming and exhibition diving, as it was adapted for use in the water, while a skirt and cape might be practical on land or while going to and from the water. Kellermann’s richly illustrated publications are symptomatic of how representations of athletic women both shaped and reflected beliefs on sport and gender. In Physical Beauty, Kellermann argues that “beauty must emanate from a healthy condition of the body” and that swimming gives the body an even, symmetrical development, which was proven by her own appearance and constantly reproduced in full-body photographs and illustrations, often only wearing a tight one-piece suit. In contrast to the drawn images of Kellermann performing different strokes in How to Swim, the illustrations of Kellermann performing exercises in Physical Beauty are photographs taken against a blank, white background, still underlining her silhouette and figure in her one-piece suit but now also showing her face, further connecting these instructive images with the photographs from the film A Daughter of the Gods and studio portraits of Kellermann in different outfits. An anecdote tells that in 1908, after a study of three thousand women, Dr. Dudley A. Sargent of Harvard University dubbed Kellermann the “perfect woman” because of the similarity of her physical attributes to the Venus de Medici. The comparison of Kellermann’s measurements to the sculpture are accounted for in the book, along with the measurements of the average American college girl.29 Physical Beauty starts with the assumption that when it comes to women, the beauty of the body is fundamental in combination with education,

182  |  The Image in Early Cinema a­ccomplishments, and character.30 Kellermann criticizes what she calls a “perverted moral code” that questions cultivation of the corporeal. A married woman trying to keep her body beautiful would often be accused of showing sexual interest in men other than her husband. Kellermann turns the argument around: it is essential for a woman to keep her form and make the most of her physical body, not only to find but to keep love. How to keep one’s body fit and develop one’s physique is demonstrated in numerous illustrations showing Kellermann in her one-piece suit, resembling Musidora’s well-known silhouette in Louis Feuillade’s Les Vampires from 1915. Kellermann’s famous appearance was not only used for demonstrative purposes about to keep oneself fit and control one’s weight, but her “perfect” figure was used to sell her publications, as well. These two examples, Kellermann and White, show two celebrities of the film industry frequently mentioned in the popular press who were closely connected to fashion, sports, and a new, more physical ideal. Some traits are recurrent in their image: they were both strong-willed, independent, and self-­ made women who fought through the hardships of poverty and disability to become famous, successful, and celebrated. Fitness, physical activities, and endurance are praised not least by Kellermann’s numerous marathon swims, which made great publicity, including her three attempts to cross the English Channel. Youth, beauty, and their feminine sides are constantly emphasized along with an elegant and aesthetic image. Finally, adventure, success, and the love of the unknown are repeatedly expressed, together with an adventurous attitude and few if any family or conventional ties. White and Kellermann display a modern expression of femininity, as their physically fit bodies became an example of female modernity. This new femininity not only favored female emancipation but also allowed the exploitation of female bodies, as Hollywood stars, including Pearl White, soon would appear as swimming beauties in fan magazines.31 Within celebrity culture (as in western culture at large) the female body has continued to be an arena of heated discussions and questions of regulations of the female body are together with its exposure within marketing and media plenty. Even though the three books discussed have a distinct first-person narrative, one can doubt if these accounts are really the result of White’s and Kellermann’s own pens. Autobiographies or not, whoever was holding the pen was nevertheless negotiating the gender norms of her or his time. In the mid-1910s, more than 25 percent of all American men and boys over twelve years old and 75 percent of women and girls over twelve did not know how to swim. In arguing for Americans young and old to learn to swim, Kellermann gave her opinion on the matter: “That point is as non-debatable as woman’s suffrage. No question exists. Swimming for all! Suffrage for all.”32

Corporeality and Female Modernity   |  183 Marina Dahlquist is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at Stockholm University. She is editor of Exporting Perilous Pauline: Pearl White and the Serial Film Craze.

Notes 1. Pearl White quoted in George Vaux Bacon, “The Girl on the Cover: or, From Ptolemy to Pearl White in a Manhattan Motor Car,” Photoplay Magazine 9, no 2 (January 1916): 54. 2. George Vaux Bacon, “The Girl on the Cover,” 54. 3. See for example Charles Goddard, The Perils of Pauline: A Motion Picture Novel (New York: Hearst’s International Library, 1915), and Arthur B. Reeve, The Exploits of Elaine: A Detective Novel (New York: Hearst’s International Library, 1915). 4. Charlie Chaplin’s so-called autobiography was published as early as 1916: Charlie Chaplin, Charlie Chaplin’s own story: being a faithful recital of a romantic career, beginning with early recollections of boyhood in London and closing with the signing of his latest motion-picture contract (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1916); Douglas Fairbanks, Laugh and Live (New York: Britton, 1917). 5. Pearl White, Just Me (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1919). 6. Annette Kellermann, How to Swim (New York: George H. Doran, 1918), and Annette Kellermann, Physical Beauty–How to Keep It (New York: George H. Doran, 1918). 7. Richard deCordova, Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 50–92, 98–114. 8. For a discussion on Pearl White on the international market see Exporting Perilous Pauline: Pearl White and the Serial Film Craze, Marina Dahlquist, ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013). 9. White, Just Me, 11. 10. Ibid., 18, 41. 11. Jennifer M. Bean, “Technologies of Early Stardom and the Extraordinary Body,” in “Early Woman Stars,” Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra, eds., special issue, Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, no. 48 (2001): 12. 12. See for instance “Pearl White ‘Doubled’ Pathé Star Nearly Loses Her life in Strenuous ‘Iron Claw’ Stunt,” New York Dramatic Mirror 75, no. 1945 (April 1, 1916): 32. Also the perils of the production team were put forward in “Perils Pauline Didn’t Foresee,” Motion Picture News 9, no. 14 (11 April 1914): 28. 13. For examples on photographic tricks, see Kalton C. Lahue, Bound and Gagged: The Story of the Silent Serials (New York: Castle, 1968), 120–122, 217. 14. White, Just Me, 160. 15. Louis Gasnier was to direct the serial together with Donald MacKenzie. 16. White, Just Me, 162. 17. Pearl White quoted in Mabel Condon, “Sans Grease Paint and Wig,” Motography 12, no. 8 (August 22, 1914): 279. To further highlight this correlation between screen persona and private life and the very real dangers she was subjected to and simultaneously relished, she even performed an off-screen stunt act in April 1916 when she painted her initials in large letters on the Gregory Building in New York while hanging from the roof. See Bean, “Technologies of Early Stardom,” 23.

184  |  The Image in Early Cinema 18. Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and its Context (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 224. 19. For example, in Hervé Lauwick, “La vrai Pearl White,” Figaro (May 1, 1921): 1. 20. White, Just Me, 12. 21. Kellermann, How to Swim, 40. 22. See for example the ad in Photoplay Magazine 11, no. 3 (February 1917): 139. 23. Kellermann, How to Swim, 214. 24. Ibid., 38. 25. Ibid., 38–53. 26. Ibid., 124. 27. Ibid., 44–45. 28. Ibid., 45. 29. Kellermann, Physical Beauty, 49. 30. Ibid., 11. 31. See for example “Picture Queens as Playtime Mermaids: When Stars A-bathing Go,” Photoplay Magazine 8, no. 2 (July 1915): 112. 32. Kellermann, How to Swim, 177.

17

A Scientific Instrument? Animated Photography among Other New Imaging Techniques Ian Christie

Two sentences in Robert Paul’s 1936 lecture about his early “kinematographic

experiences” seem to have attracted little or no attention among historians of early film.1 Yet they point to an intriguing aspect of the developing relationship between science and cinematography even as cinema was becoming a popular entertainment. Paul mentions, laconically, his collaboration with three outstanding figures in British science at the turn of the century, apparently to provide them with demonstration films for lectures or popular presentations. The main reason for the neglect may be that the films in question apparently no longer survive, although Paul noted in the US version of his lecture, tantalizingly, that he “had the pleasure of personally presenting copies of these films to Thomas Edison at Orange N.J. in 1911.” By that date, he had in fact left the film business, explaining at the end of his lecture that he had “closed it down and destroyed my stock of negatives, numbering many hundreds, so becoming free to devote my whole attention to my original business, now a part of that of the Cambridge Instrument Company.”2 That he took the opportunity to visit Edison, whose kinetoscope had first lured him into “animated photography” and with whom he had a history of previous noncooperation, is intriguing. But neither any record of the visit nor the films apparently survive. Of course, Paul was not alone among the film pioneers in lending his expertise to the popularization of science. During the first decade of the new century, many of the early production companies introduced series of films that exploited the appeal of what could be presented as “wonders” or “secrets,” to be revealed by magnification or by variations in camera speed, thereby accelerating or slowing down natural processes. In many ways, these films built on traditions that stretched back to the mid-nineteenth century. Jeremy Brooker has traced how the Royal Polytechnic in London mounted a series of projected displays, in parallel with the success of its “dissolving views,” from the 1840s onward. These included a “projection microscope” introduced in 1842, showing “a range of objects from a

186  |  The Image in Early Cinema locust’s wing to a fly’s eye on a screen 27 feet wide.”3 This was followed by an opaque microscope, which magnified small objects and created a three-dimensional illusion on the screen, and soon by a cluster of exotically named devices such as the physioscope, the proteoscope, and the megascope. The rationale offered for many of these, in Polytechnic literature, was that they “opened up a new field to the scientific observer,”4 but Brooker identifies them as also feeding a public appetite for visual spectacle as part of “an emerging entertainment culture.”5 When animated pictures began to be projected in early 1896, after the kinetoscope had created an enthusiasm for moving images during the previous two years, they attracted “huge numbers” first to the Polytechnic and soon to the Empire Theatre in Leicester Square, where “hundreds were turned away nightly,” according to the pioneer historian and eyewitness Will Day.6 The key figure in creating a market for popular science films was Charles Urban, who launched his “Unseen World” programs, billed as “revealing nature’s closest secrets,” in 1903 at the same Alhambra Theatre in central London where Paul had inaugurated the public exhibition of British films in 1896.7 These “micro-­ bioscope” films, produced by Francis Martin-Duncan, can be seen as following directly in the Polytechnic tradition, with Urban “taking cinema back to its roots in visual spectacle,” as Luke McKernan suggests, treading “a thin line between scientific veracity and light entertainment.”8 Urban would proclaim his faith in this blend in a manifesto published in 1907, The Cinematograph in Science, Education and Matters of State (1907), accompanying his encyclopedic Urbanora catalogue. In the following year, Martin-Duncan was superseded by the amateur naturalist Percy Smith, whose “Secrets of Nature” series for Urban would eventually consist of more than fifty films of plant and animal life, using both magnification and time-lapse techniques. By this time, Urban was not alone in the field he had done much to create. As Thierry Lefebvre observed, “even before 1910, scientific popularization film multiplied on French screens, and towards the end of 1911, Pathé and Gaumont could be proud of their, if not weekly, at least very regular production.”9 But as Lefebvre also noted, this growing trend in commercial production was accompanied by a pattern of major producers “sponsoring” scientific research, often by loaning equipment.10 Thus Gaumont assisted the work of Charles François-Franck and Lucienne Chevroton, while in 1909 Pathé supplied specialist apparatus for a demonstration at the French Academy of Sciences.11 From recent work by scholars focusing on the rise of scientific film, notably Lefebvre, Gaycken, and Curtis, it would appear that not only were the major developments taking place in France and Germany, but much of this work lay in the fields of life sciences and medical education.12 This is where Robert Paul’s belated reference to his early involvement in scientific imaging may be instructive, because Paul was almost certainly unique among the moving picture pioneers in having had

A Scientific Instrument?  |  187 an up-to-date scientific education and a thriving electrical instrument business before he strayed into moving pictures as entertainment in 1896. Although he remained in general production for fifteen years, his electrical instrumentation business continued to grow and even boasted an American branch office by 1912, after his exit from film. By 1936, he would describe the “kinematographic business” as a “sideline,” but apparently something had prompted him to mention for the first time his strictly scientific film work. What exactly did he do? What scant information we have comes after a description of trick techniques used in films such as The Magic Sword (1901), which made use of new techniques of multiple exposure, reverse action, and variable speed:13 “By speeding up the camera to 120 pictures per second slow-­ motion pictures were taken, and in this way we were able, under the guidance of Professor Vernon Boys and Professor Worthington, to secure pictures of sound wave ‘shadows’ and falling drops respectively. A little later Professor Sylvanus P Thompson prepared several series, each consisting of several hundred diagrams, illustrating lines of force in changing magnetic fields; these we converted into animated pictures by the one-turn-one-picture camera [which we had employed for animated cartoons].”14 Among these names, Sylvanus Thompson had in fact been an important figure in Paul’s own education. As a pioneer in science education, he was recruited to head Britain’s first institution devoted to training a new generation of specialist technicians, the Finsbury Technical College, in 1885. This was also the year when Robert Paul entered the college, where in the following year he was “elected Senior Student after passing the College course in [the] Electrical Engineering Department.”15 At this stage in his career, Thompson was becoming interested in optics but had already made his name with a textbook on electricity and magnetism, which remained in print in different editions until 1920.16 Thompson was considered an outstanding popular lecturer, giving the annual Royal Institution Christmas lectures twice: in 1896 on “Light, Visible and Invisible” and in 1910 on “Sound: Musical and Non-­ musical.” (fig. 17.1) Neither of these matches Paul’s recollection of “illustrating lines of force in changing magnetic fields,” but magnetism was Thompson’s most famous subject before he became an early exponent of roentgen, or X-rays. So Paul’s animated demonstration of magnetic fields could have served Thompson on many occasions, such as the series of lectures he gave to the Society of Arts up to 1906.17 To get some idea of what Paul’s animation might have shown, consider a roughly contemporary illustration of magnetic field lines.18 The two other scientists that Paul mentioned in 1936, Charles Vernon Boys (1855–1944) and Arthur Worthington (1852–1916), were both distinguished physicists who had gained popular fame through a single aspect of their work in fluid mechanics, seemingly trivial but capable of fascinating a wide public. In Boys’s case, it was his study of the film that shows the production of

188  |  The Image in Early Cinema

Fig. 17.1 Silvanus Thompson lecturing to a juvenile audience at the Royal Institution Christmas lectures in 1910. Image via Wikimedia Commons, from Thompson and ­Thompson’s book Silvanus Thompson, His Life and Letters, published in 1920.

soap bubbles, recorded in an illustrated book first published in 1890, Soap Bubbles: Their Colours and the Forces which Mould Them, which astonishingly remains in print today. However, it was apparently this versatile experimenter’s work on sound waves that led him to Paul. Worthington spent much of his career as principal of the Royal Naval Engineering College, but after being alerted to the regular form of ink splashes by a schoolboy at Rugby in 1876, he made a lifelong experimental study of this phenomenon, publishing the popular book A Study of Splashes in 1908.19 Both of these were pioneers in using photography to explore and record the ephemeral phenomena they studied, and they devised apparatuses to take increasingly instantaneous photographs of bubbles and splashes. Wanting to use high-speed cinematography would have been a natural progression, and one that continued throughout the twentieth

A Scientific Instrument?  |  189 century. We do not know how Boys and Worthington came into contact with Paul, or indeed at what stage of Paul’s career as a film producer this contact happened. While so much of Paul’s film activity after he ceased publishing detailed catalogues around 1907 remains obscure, this information can only be speculation.20 It appears possible that Paul was offering a bespoke technical service to scientists, with whom he was also providing increasingly sophisticated electrical measuring and calibration instruments. Paul would have been a congenial collaborator for all three of these, after his scientific education at the Finsbury College and with his instrument company continuing to devise and market specialist equipment. Whether the slow-motion and animated films he described were for use in public lectures or in teaching is unclear. But in any case, the turn of the century was a period when new discoveries in physics were making regular headlines, and popular lecturers had become public figures. Like Thompson, both Boys and Worthington contributed to the Christmas Lectures at the Royal Institution, which have run since 1825 as a premier platform for popularizing science. In relation to broader scientific uses of photography, the historian Elizabeth Edwards has observed that “because of the ubiquity of photography by the late nineteenth century, there is relatively little commentary on it, on specific images or practices.”21 But by the mid-1930s, there were quite specific reasons why Paul may have been prompted to recall the much earlier collaboration with scientists that he had never before mentioned publicly. In 1931, he was a financial and possibly technical contributor to the major exhibition that celebrated the centenary of Michael Faraday’s discovery of electromagnetism. This exhibition, held at the Albert Hall in London, was proposed by the Institute of Electrical Engineering (IEE) and supported by the Royal Institution, where Faraday was based throughout most of his scientific career. Paul was already an active supporter of the Royal Institution and wrote his sole technical article about the contents of the Faraday exhibition in a journal devoted to the history of scientific instruments.22 In the following year, another film pioneer, Oskar Messter, contacted Paul to ask for corroboration of details of the mechanisms they had both developed in the mid-1890s.23 Fortunately, this correspondence has survived, and from it we can see Paul beginning to reach back to his early years of active involvement in film apparatus, while telling Messter that he no longer has access to documentation from this period. This correspondence continues across 1932 to 1935 and may therefore have stimulated Paul either to offer or to agree to giving the paper about his film career at the end of 1935, having remained completely silent about this for over two decades. Paul would also embark in 1934 on a collaboration with Sir William Bragg, joint winner with his son of the Nobel Prize in physics in 1915, to design

190  |  The Image in Early Cinema a new form of hydraulic pulsator to improve on the iron lung in treating breathing disorders.24 Although this was in a field far removed from film or even instrumentation, it seems probable that cumulatively these events had reminded him of an earlier involvement in science through helping Boys, Worthington, and Thompson produce sophisticated visualizations before high-speed cinematography became a widely used technique.25 What may have been a minor aspect of Paul’s career, although recalled with evident pride nearly thirty years later, reminds us of “the rich visual culture of popular science” at the turn of the century, when moving pictures formed part of an explosion of other new technologies of imaging.26 Forms of chronophotography by Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey long ago entered the standard story of the invention of cinema as precursors of, or steps toward, the realization of the continuous moving image. But there were many other modes of display and measurement which did not, even though some would play a vital part in electrical and ultimately televisual imaging. We need to guard against seeing these as merely milestones and curiosities on the way to the achievement of a single form, that of cinema, and try to understand “the ways that these optical spectacles were experienced by their audiences.”27 Crucially, this was also a time when new routes into science were opening up; it was a period before specialization, when prominent scientists could tackle a wide range of new phenomena. Silvanus Thompson, for instance, among all his other interests, took an early interest in X-rays, becoming the first president of the British Röntgen Society in 1897. Important crossover figures such as Wladyslaw Starewicz and Jean Painlevé, both drawn into film by their early biological interests, lay in the future and would keep open the porous border between cinema as entertainment and documentation before television discovered the vast potential of popular science. Meanwhile, the internet now provides unparalleled access to historic surviving popular science films, such as Max Fleischer’s The Einstein Theory of Relativity (1923),28 while also making visible in moving-image form work by Muybridge and Marey.29 It also provides access to contemporary demonstrations inspired by the original work of the now less famous Boys and Worthington, to which Paul first gave moving-image form, among that of many other scientists active as public communicators.30 We may never see his actual films, but Paul hinted at actual collaboration with Boys, Worthington, and Thompson and deserves at least to be inscribed in the historical record of scientific imaging. Ian Christie is Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck College. His recent books include The Art of Film: John Box and Production Design and Doctor Zhivago.

A Scientific Instrument?  |  191

Notes 1. Robert W. Paul, “Kinematograph Experiences,” Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, November 1936. This was a version of a talk given by Paul to the British Kinematograph Society on February 3 of that year, and published as “Before 1910: Kinematographic Experiences,” no. 38 in the society’s proceedings. Although almost identical, the two texts differ in small but significant ways. 2. Why Paul should have left the industry so abruptly and destroyed his stock of films (having previously been active in trying to ensure that films were preserved) has never been satisfactorily explained. Although the nature of the business had changed after the 1909 Paris Conference, and Paul was correct to observe “the expense and elaboration necessary for the production of an saleable film,” there have long been rumors that he had more personal reasons for ending his film career. See my forthcoming monograph on Paul. 3. Jeremy Brooker, The Temple of Minerva: Magic and the Magic Lantern at the Royal Polytechnic Institution, 1839–1901 (London: Magic Lantern Society, 2013), 59. 4. Illustrated Polytechnic Review (February 25, 1843), quoted in Brooker, The Temple of Minerva, 59. 5. Brooker, The Temple of Minerva, 61. 6. Will Day, “The First Public Exhibitions of Kinematography,” The Photographic Journal (October 1924): 495. 7. The Lumière Cinématographe was contracted to show daily at the Empire Theatre in early March 1896, and Paul was invited to run a competing program of his films at the Alhambra three weeks later. 8. Luke McKernan, Charles Urban: Pioneering the Non-fiction Film in Britain and America, 1897–1925 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2013), 43. 9. Thierry Lefebvre, “The Scientia Production (1911–1914): Scientific Popularization through Pictures,” Griffithiana 47 (May 1993), 137. 10. Lefebvre, “The Scientia Production,” 137. 11. Lefebvre, “The Scientia Production.” See also Oliver Gaycken, Devices of Curiosity: Early Cinema and Popular Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Scott Curtis, The Shape of Spectatorship: Art, Science, and Early Cinema in Germany (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); and Béatrice de Pastre and Thierry Lefebvre, eds. Filmer la science, comprendre la vie: Le cinema de Jean Comandon (Paris: CNC, 2012). 12. See, for instance, the valuable series of articles by Scott Curtis, from “Between Observation and Spectatorship: Medicine, Movies and Mass Culture in Imperial Germany” (2009) to “Dissecting the Medical Training Film” (2012). Details of these and others at https://www.communication.northwestern.edu/faculty/ScottCurtis. 13. On The Magic Sword, see my “The Magic Sword: Genealogy of an English Trick Film,” Film History 16, no. 2 (2004): 163–171. 14. Paul, “Kinematograph Experiences,” 510. In this version of the article that had originally appeared in the Proceedings of the British Kinematograph Society, the phrase “which we had employed for animated cartoons” does not appear. Paul apparently felt more comfortable about revealing his involvement in animation film—otherwise unknown—in the US version of the memoir.

192  |  The Image in Early Cinema 15. Finsbury Technical College and Old Students Association, Journal of the City and Guilds of London Institute, 1, no. 2 (March 1888): 66. I am grateful to John Barnes for this reference. 16. A. C. Lynch, “Silvanus Thompson: Teacher, Researcher, Historian,” Institute of Electrical Engineering Proceedings 136, pt. A, no. 6 (November 1989): 310. 17. See catalogue of Thompson papers held by the Institution of Engineering and Technology, London: “Lectures delivered at the Society of Arts, 1879 to 1906.” 18. Illustration from Newton Henry Black, Harvey N. Davis, Practical Physics (New York: MacMillan, 1913), 242. 19. The Cinémathèque Française library holds an undated pamphlet, in which Boys is quoted as endorsing the “Davron Micro-Telescope” for close-up photography, from an article in Nature, 1914. Online catalogue: http://www.cineressources.net/consultationPdf/web /o000/226.pdf. 20. The latest catalogue from Paul that I have located is a 1906–7 “B” catalogue of “selected” films, held by the Cinémathèque Française, http://www.cineressources.net /consultationPdf/web/o000/289.pdf. This refers, however, to an “A” catalogue, which may be obtained separately, without explanation of how that differed. 21. Elizabeth Edwards, “Exchanging Photographs: Preliminary Thoughts on the Currency of Photography in Collecting Anthropology,” Journal des anthropologues, 80–81, 2000. 22. R. W. Paul, “Some Electrical Instruments at the Faraday Centenary Exhibition, 1931,” Journal of Scientific Instruments 8 (1931): 337–349. 23. Messter first contacted Paul on July 14, 1932. The correspondence has been preserved in the German Bundesachchiv-Filmarchiv. 24. For an overview, see C. J. McSweeney, “The Bragg-Paul Pulsator in Treatment of Respiratory Paralysis: Report on Thirty-four Cases,” British Medical Journal (June 4, 1938): 1206. Documentation of Paul’s involvement comes from correspondence preserved in the Royal Institution archive. 25. See, for instance, Kelly Wilder, Photography and Science (London: Reaktion, 2009); Jennifer Tucker, Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); and Richard Kremer, “Educating the HighSpeed Eye: Harold E. Edgerton’s Early Visual Conventions,” in The Educated Eye: Visual Pedagogy in the Life Sciences, eds. Nancy Anderson and Michael R. Dietrich (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2012): 186–212. I am grateful to Scott Curtis for valuable comments on an earlier draft, and for his encouragement to relate Paul to an emerging culture of investigating photography of all kinds in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century science. 26. Tim Boon, Films of Fact. A History of Science in Documentary Films and Television (London: Wallflower, 2008), 13. 27. Iwan Morus, “Seeing and Believing Science,” Isis 97: 104. Quoted by Boon. 28. The film directed by the well-known popular animator Max Fleischer in collaboration with Einstein’s assistant Garrett P. Serviss, at https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=nb7GzyUemO0. 29. See Eadweard Muybridge: Photographs of Motion, appropriately from Stanford University students, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYKZif9ooxs; and Étienne-Jules Marey: films chronophotographiques 1890–1904 https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=wJ3GXRe0084. See also the re-animated work of the German pioneer Ottömar

A Scientific Instrument?  |  193 Anschutz and his Elektrischer Schnellseher, at https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=EArkp5YYTLA 30. Boys is referenced in Julius Sumner Miller, Lesson 9: Soap Bubbles and Soap Films (2013), at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5NwktsURpY. Also in Bubbles Bursting in Slow Motion (Discovery slow down, 2013), at https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=blNe2Ae5a2c. Worthington’s original printed illustrations have been animated at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_g0F_si04A

18

Advertising with Moving Pictures: International Harvester’s The Romance of the Reaper (1910–1913) Gregory A. Waller

During the early 1910s, one of the most widely circulated and widely

noted business uses of motion pictures was as a component in The Romance of the Reaper, an illustrated lecture produced by and circulated under the auspices of the International Harvester Company (IHC).1 Successfully touring and purportedly reaching “several hundred thousand people” from 1910 to 1913, Romance marked the beginning of International Harvester’s reliance on motion pictures for advertising, training, and public relations purposes, a commitment in place through most of the twentieth century.2 These uses of film—indicative of the varied commercial deployment of moving images even at this early moment in film history—could hardly have found a more prominent corporate champion. IHC was formed in 1902 by the union of the major competing American farm machinery companies and quickly came to dominate the North American market and aggressively branched out internationally (opening factories in Sweden and Germany by 1909), while introducing a bevy of new product lines, including trucks and tractors, by 1908. Almost from its inception, IHC faced legal challenges that finally led to one of the era’s highest-profile government suits that resulted in charging the company in April 1912 with monopolistic activities in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.3 Given IHC’s high public visibility, it makes sense to see much of its promotional efforts during the 1910s as being in the service of what Roland Marchand identifies as a more widespread phenomenon of the period: “the systematic construction of a corporate image” as part of a quest for “enhanced social and moral legitimacy.”4 For International Harvester, this long-term, multifaceted, and multiple-media undertaking—like the company’s more explicitly product-oriented advertising—was tied to preaching the gospel of “power farming,” that is, to promulgating a vision of technologically enabled, efficiently managed, and highly productive agriculture, trumpeted as the basis for

Advertising with Moving Pictures  |  195 the prosperity that came with modernity’s march toward progress, nationally and internationally. In this essay I focus not on the ideology of power farming and the role of corporations such as International Harvester in the reshaping of rural America but rather on what we might call the historical resonance of IHC’s The Romance of the Reaper as an example of corporate self-promotion, a distinct type of media product, and a particular use of moving pictures largely outside the movie theater. From this perspective, The Romance of the Reaper stands as a notable early example of the multiple-media lecture, an important and quite widespread nonfiction form also associated with professional travelers, explorers, war correspondents, and missionaries. Yet Romance utilized moving pictures not to generate box-office revenue or donations but for advertising purposes. As such, it differed significantly from more familiar varieties of the multiple-media lecture—such as travelogues à la Burton Holmes and straight-from-the-headlines accounts of the European War—notably in how it was marketed, circulated, and presented across a range of sites, as well as how it was revised and even reconceptualized by IHC over its three-year run. No complete record (and no extant footage) of The Romance of the Reaper seems to exist, but piecing together various newspaper accounts suggests that this full-length lecture consisted of three consecutive “tours,” each bridging past and present, America and abroad: (1) “conditions as they were and as they are,” with an emphasis on IHC’s production of implements and binder twine; (2) “what agriculture means to the world,” with an emphasis on the manufacturing of reapers, tractors, and gasoline engines; and (3) “forty centuries of toil and privation” supplanted by twentieth-century prosperity, with an emphasis on the technological evolution from sickle to reaper, harvesting practices around the world, and conditions on the modern farm.5 All told, this three-part “picture-story of world-wide development” drew on what was described as more than one hundred “colored views” and some four thousand or five thousand feet of motion pictures.6 Precisely how these still and moving images were arranged and how they were coordinated with the spoken words of a lecturer isn’t clear, though a newspaper account of a performance in Evansville, Indiana, for example, praised the motion pictures in Romance that showed “the development of the plow” as well as massive horse-­ drawn harvesters at work, while noting that lantern slides were relied on for images of IHC’s logging operations, steel mills, and nineteen factories.7 It is worth noting that nothing in the period discourse (including IHC’s own promotional material) claims The Romance of the Reaper to be sui generis and particularly novel in its use of motion pictures, or that IHC was breaking new ground by sponsoring a nonfictional, publicly presented, multiple-media performance. What does stand out from a survey of digitized newspapers and periodicals, however, is that the marketing of The Romance of the Reaper could vary

196  |  The Image in Early Cinema considerably, depending on the exhibition site and programming context. Only occasionally was Romance identified as an “illustrated lecture,” a familiar term that had been in use since at least the 1850s and had come to be largely associated by the 1870s with lectures that featured projected lantern slides. (Lectures were also illustrated by drawings, paintings, diagrams, experiments, equipment, or artifacts.) The promotional brochure prepared by the IHC Service Bureau pitched Reaper as a “lecture-entertainment with colored views and motion pictures” and attributed authorship to the lecturer, George Frederic Wheeler, which suggested that Reaper was akin to a performance by Burton Holmes or some other celebrity lecturer. (In fact, Wheeler was a novice performer with no significant experience on the lyceum circuit; other lecturers would later fill his position.) Yet previews for engagements of Romance at state fairs in 1910 called the new IHC product an “entertainment” and an “entertaining story,” while the local dealer who hosted The Romance of the Reaper in Fort Wayne, Indiana, referred to it simply as a “show” and the merchants who brought it to Hiawatha, Kansas, for a special Bargain Day attraction advertised it as a “picture-show lecture.”8 At the Lee County [Iowa] Farmers’ Institute, Romance was billed as an “illustrated story”; at the Opera House in Marble Rock, Iowa, as an “illustrated lecture with motion pictures.”9 At the well-established Chautauqua Assembly at Devil’s Lake, North Dakota, Romance served in 1911 as a “lecture” scheduled for Farmers’ Day, while that same summer, the much more modest Chautauqua gathering in Rushville, Indiana, promoted The Romance of the Reaper as “a moving picture show of greater worth than any which has been shown here.”10 This last claim should remind us that the moving picture theater was at this point in film history not the only site for a “moving picture show”; in fact, Berea College in Kentucky and the Georgia State Fair both advertised Romance as a “free moving picture show.”11 These examples suggest that there was no generally accepted term to describe what was by the early 1910s a relatively common type of multiple-media performance that relied on a lecturer, slides, and motion pictures. Furthermore, the labels applied to The Romance of the Reaper—lecture, illustrated lecture, moving picture show, free moving picture show, illustrated story—referred to distinctive forms of cultural, educational, and commercial production, likely conveying quite different connotations depending on the targeted audience, who might, for instance, associate illustrated lectures with high-minded travelogues suitable for a lyceum circuit (or even a church) and moving picture shows with inexpensive popular entertainment at the local nickelodeon or purpose-built theater. A number of factors could have enabled or enhanced what we might call the generic flexibility of The Romance of the Reaper. Most obviously, Romance was a hybrid performance that made use of three different, readily separable media and thus could be identifiable as a “lecture-entertainment with colored views and motion pictures,” a moving picture show with lecture, a story told in three

Advertising with Moving Pictures  |  197 registers, and so on. There also seems to have been considerable variation in how explicitly and how categorically Romance announced itself and was recognized as a product of International Harvester, as an advertisement, and as an example of corporate public relations. And it could well be that shows/lectures/entertainments involving motion pictures and designed to be presented primarily outside of movie theaters were not obliged to adhere to the protocols concerning genre and length that characterized the regularly delivered stream of commercial product tailored specifically for theatrical exhibition. What Romance was depended in good measure on where and how it was performed. As the engagements mentioned above suggest, Romance traveled a varied itinerary during its three years in circulation, including stops in theaters that had been booked especially for the occasion. In such cases, performances were usually scheduled outside standard operating hours, distinguishing Romance from the “theatrical” even when it was presented in a commercial theater. For example, in Lexington, Kentucky, Romance was scheduled for February 2–3, 1912, at the Hipp Theater (then primarily a vaudeville house) at ten o’clock a.m. on Friday and ten o’clock a.m. and one o’clock p.m. on Saturday, with an eye toward attracting farmers but not interfering with the regular weekend matinee performance.12 (On its first stop in Lexington two years earlier, this “splendid illustrated lecture” had been presented at the College of Agriculture of the State University.13) IHC initially rolled out The Romance of the Reaper in August 1910 at a quite different site—the week-long Iowa State Fair and Exposition, which was typical of grand-scale annual events highlighting agriculture and aimed largely at rural and small-town audiences. Presented in a dedicated black tent at this and other state fairs over the next few months, The Romance of the Reaper served as a prime draw in International Harvester’s exhibit, which typically included an array of agricultural machinery, a “power” farmhouse with domestic appliances driven by IHC’s engines, and a bevy of sales agents armed with giveaway postcards and other advertising material. The goal of such exhibits, wrote the company’s domestic sales manager, was to be “profitable” in three distinct ways—“as advertising mediums; as an educational force; and for immediate sales.”14 Looking back in November 1910 on the thirty-seven fairs at which IHC participated that year, Harvester World (IHC’s house organ) underscored the value of fair exhibits featuring Romance as instances of “accumulative advertising” whose effect “goes on and on, round and round, multiplying.”15 For IHC, maximizing the “accumulative” benefits of The Romance of the Reaper meant expanding the availability of this illustrated entertainment well beyond the circuit of state fairs. To this end, the company deployed up to three self-contained traveling units composed of a lecturer and projectionist. (Near the end of its run, Romance was reduced to a one-person operation, with the lecturer also operating the slide/motion picture projector.) Harvester World claimed that

198  |  The Image in Early Cinema when Romance was officially retired from service in November 1913, it had been offered three thousand times.16 One key distribution strategy was for International Harvester’s Service Bureau to book Romance under the auspices of a local firm that handled IHC products in a small town or small city, where it would appear as a special event for one day (often with both matinee and evening performances) at a multipurpose opera house, courthouse, or sometimes even a retail establishment or church-owned space.17 For example, a month-long tour during March 1912 through an IHC sales territory in rural Missouri covered twenty-four different towns, with two standing-room-­ only performances at each site: the matinee specifically designated for farmers and their families, and the evening show, which was “for the benefit of the schools, town officials, ministers, and personal friends of the local [IHC] agent.” Harvester World applauded the efforts of dealers who boosted attendance by localizing this touring event, sending out personal invitations, making sure that music was available at the performances (sometimes by the town’s brass band), and having one of the town’s “prominent citizen” introduce the lecture.18 While targeting likely customers at state fairs and rural small-town venues, IHC also made The Romance of the Reaper available for bookings that were not connected to the sale of farm implements and machinery. Thus it was performed at a variety of well-established events, ranging from a religious camp meeting in Zionsville, Indiana, to lecture series at the Museum of Natural History and the 125th Street YMCA in New York City.19 At the same time, Romance was scheduled as a special attraction at trade shows and professional meetings, such as the annual gathering of the Illinois Corn Growers’ Association, the Royal Livestock Show in Kansas City, and the Big Corn Show in Evansville, Indiana, as well as the huge Land Shows promoted by the Chicago Tribune in 1910 and 1912.20 (Such shows, conventions, and expositions were among the most visible nontheatrical sites for motion pictures during this period.) At the North Dakota Industrial Exposition, for example, Romance was presented in the on-site theater twice daily, with the evening performance followed by a vaudeville show that IHC had not provided.21 Such bookings reflect International Harvester’s exploitation of its self-styled “lecture-entertainment” as, simultaneously, “accumulative advertising” and “educational” outreach. Thus, schools of agriculture at the University of Missouri and Cornell University hosted The Romance of the Reaper, while it also was prominently featured at Chautauquas from Red Cloud, Nebraska, to St. Petersburg, Florida.22 The range of venues at which Romance was booked suggests the viability of the multiple-media lecture as an advertising medium, the various audiences IHC was attempting to reach, and the spectrum of nontheatrical exhibition sites open to corporate-produced advertising that used motion pictures in the early 1910s. The Romance of the Reaper thus serves as a notable example of what I have elsewhere termed multisited cinema, which is both a way of thinking about nontheatrical

Advertising with Moving Pictures  |  199 cinema before the term nontheatrical actually came into more common use in the 1920s and an acknowledgment that motion pictures have always been exhibited and situated discursively across an expanding—and changing—array of spaces, venues, institutions, and occasions. Since presentations of The Romance of the Reaper were almost always scheduled outside of moving picture theaters, tracking the itinerary of this show affords a glimpse of the territory of the nontheatrical—which could be imagined as unlimited and stretching across myriad sectors of public life—in the process of being explored, mapped, expanded, connected, and ordered. Across its three-year cross-country tours, particular iterations of The Romance of the Reaper could vary considerably, always within the parameters set by International Harvester. The company employed different lecturers and projectionists (who could well have worked with the same written script), and it seems to have welcomed local involvement in providing introductory speakers and musical additions to the program and likely allowed for adjustments to the length of the show to suit certain exhibition conditions (i.e., when Romance was booked as a special event at a small-town opera house as compared to when it was presented several times daily at a state fair). More interesting for my purposes are editorial changes specifically dictated by IHC’s advertising department. “Originally it was a straight advertising lecture for the state fairs,” declared Harvester World in 1913, “but the story seemed of so much interest that it was gradually improved until much of the advertising was lost, and it became largely an educational lecture.”23 In fact, for only some of the bookings did the promotional material for The Romance of the Reaper explicitly mention International Harvester, and the acknowledgement of IHC sponsorship was rarely if ever linked in this material to the point that Romance might be construed as corporate self-promotion. But what counted as “straight advertising” and what could pass as “largely . . . educational” material? In an article for the advertising trade magazine Novelty News, subsequently reprinted in Motography in September 1911, a representative of IHC explained that Modern farm machines and methods contrasted with the primitive agricultural ways, still in vogue in many foreign lands, furnish a great theme for pictures. So we have carefully cut all direct advertising, and are emphasizing the interesting points of the story. While we still show some of the processes relative to the manufacture of modern machines, yet, you can see, that all this has its place in the story, and helps to give it a more or less universal appeal. “The Romance of the Reaper,” as it is now presented, is a big illustrated entertainment, with an undercurrent of the best publicity.24

According to this somewhat tangled passage, a “great theme” (primitive versus modern agriculture) allows for an interesting, illustratable, big, and potentially universally appealing story, which can effectively satisfy the sponsor’s publicity

200  |  The Image in Early Cinema aims provided that this entertainment contains no “direct” advertising. These distinctions between direct and indirect advertising, sales pitches, and stories inform much of the discourse in the early 1910s concerning how businesses might best make use of motion pictures.25 The IHC agent who arranged the bookings for southern Indiana testified that the performances of Romance were “leaving the farmers with the impression” not that International Harvester is the “largest company on earth,” but rather that it is the “best company on earth,” not least of all because of how it treated its employees, including the girls working in its twine mills.26 Here the payoff was enhancing the corporate image of IHC rather than the immediate sales of farm machinery. Needless to say, International Harvester was definitely interested in selling reapers and harvesters. If, from the perspective of film history, The Romance of the Reaper stands as a prime example of the multiple-media lecture that circulated across a range of sites, this particular deployment of motion pictures also should itself be situated as but one (relatively minor) part of IHC’s wide-ranging, multitiered promotional, advertising, and public relations effort that made use of numerous modes of delivery, or what were called in the period mediums. Around the time The Romance of the Reaper began its three-­ year journey, Harvester World boasted that International Harvester’s advertising department annually circulated some 65 million pieces of “advertising matter,” including 2 million almanacs and 7 million post cards as well as innumerable print ads and a host of catalogues, calendars, and posters. Directly or indirectly, this print advertising—deployed as part of campaigns, reflecting a joint interest in sales and public relations—surely helped to shape the way that moving images were used by IHC in nontheatrical productions such as The Romance of the Reaper. Even a cursory look at the staggering amount of IHC advertising material in the 1900s and 1910s reveals the use of a surprisingly wide range of formal devices, rhetorical strategies, and aesthetic objectives.27 At the same time, International Harvester’s abiding investment in making and circulating images points to a basic fact about the early twentieth century’s proliferating visual culture. To understand the historical context and import in the United States of this visual culture—and hence of the cinematic image as image—requires, I think, taking into account the prodigious output and ubiquitous reach of advertising, which circulated its images via the mail, displayed them in public signage, highlighted them on the pages of magazines and newspapers, and projected them on screens across a host of sites in and out of the movie theater. Gregory A. Waller is Professor and Chair of Cinema and Media Studies in the Media School at Indiana University. His books include Main Street Amusements: Film and Commercial Entertainment in a Southern City, 1895–1930.

Advertising with Moving Pictures  |  201

Notes 1. This research relies largely on digitized periodical and newspaper material available from the Media History Digital Library, the Historic American Newspapers collection of the Library of Congress, and certain commercial sites: newspapers.com, newspaperarchive.com, and genealogybank.com. I have also made extensive use of the holdings of the McCormick-­ International Harvester Collection at the Wisconsin Historical Society. Thanks to archivists Laura Farley and Lindsay Hillgartner for their invaluable help. 2. “Passing of ‘The Romance of the Reaper,’” Harvester World 4, no. 11 (November 1913), 6. For information about IHC’s use of motion pictures, see my essays “Free Talking Picture— Every Farmer is Welcome: Non-theatrical Film and Everyday Life in Rural America during the 1930s,” in Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of the Cinema, eds. Melvyn Stokes, Robert Allen, and Richard Maltby (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2008), 248–272, 437–444; and “Going Back to the Old Farm: Business Screen, International Harvester, and the History of Advertising Film” (forthcoming). See also Kit Hughes, “‘For Pete’s Sake, I’m Not Trying to Entertain These People’: Film and Franchising at International Harvester” (forthcoming, Film History). 3. See the Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of Corporation’s March 3, 1913, report, The International Harvester Co. (Washington, DC: General Printing Office, 1913). For a sense of “agricultural industrialism,” see Deborah Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003). 4. Roland Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 10, 4. 5. “‘Romance of the Reaper’ to Be Told in Pictures,” Lexington [KY] Herald November 8 (1910): 1. 6. Brochure for The Romance of the Reaper (n.d.); available at University of Iowa, Iowa Digital Library, http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cdm/ref/collection/tc/id/61786. See also the promotional notice announcing The Romance of the Reaper that appeared, for example, in Threshermen’s Review 19, no. 9 (September 1910), 56; and Farm Implements 24, no. 8 (August 30, 1910), 48. 7. “Pictures Tell Reaper Romance,” Evansville [IN] Courier, (January 28, 1912), 3. 8. See, for instance, “Farming Leads the World,” Gazette [Stevens Point, WI], (September 14, 1910), 4; Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, December 14, 1910, p. 6; Brown County World [Hiawatha KA], (March 17, 1911), 4. 9. Mount Pleasant [IA] Daily News, (February 9, 1912), 3; Marble Rock [IA] Journal, (April 8, 1912), 5. 10. “Nineteenth Annual Program of the North Dakota Chautauqua,” Grand Forks [ND] Daily Herald, (June 25, 1911), sec. 2, p. 9; Daily Republican [Rushville IN], (May 29, 1911), 8. 11. The Citizen [Berea KY] (February 15, 1912), 4; Macon [GA] Telegraph, (October 8, 1911), 10. 12. Lexington [KY] Herald, (February 2, 1912), sec. 2, p. 6. 13. “‘Romance of the Reaper’ to Be Told in Pictures,” Lexington [KY] Herald, (November 8, 1910), 1. 14. R. C. Haskings, “State Fairs for 1909,” Harvester World 1, no. 2 (November 1909), 10–3. 15. William Browning, “The Trade Value of State Fairs,” Harvester World 2, no. 2 (November 1910), 2–3; Edwin L. Barker, “Educational Value to the Farmer of State Fairs,” Harvester World 2, no. 2 (November 1910), 6–8. 16. “Passing of ‘The Romance of the Reaper,’” Harvester World 4, no. 11 (November 1913), 6.

202  |  The Image in Early Cinema 17. See, for instance, ads for performances at: Viberg & McMaken farm implement store at Fort Wayne, Indiana (Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, December 14, 1910, 6); Holland’s Opera House in Hopkinsville, Kentucky (Hopkinsville Kentuckian, November 23, 1911, 8); the Mormon Tabernacle in Ogden, Utah (Evening Standard [Ogden UT], February 10, 1913, 5). Moving Picture World noted in 1914 that IHC “has done pioneer work in the matter of using moving pictures to teach agriculture. Every place that there was a gathering of farmers—at farm institute meetings, at state and county fairs—it has had its projecting apparatus and if necessary its black tent” (Frank H. Madison, “How Pupils Learn ‘Products,’” Moving Picture World 22, no. 2 [October 10, 1914], 190). 18. “Making the Most of the Lecture,” Harvester World 3, no. 5 (May 1912), 21. 19. Performance at “Zion park assembly and camp meeting” described in Indianapolis News, (August 3, 1911), 5; Wheeler visited New York City in March 1913, giving the lecture at the YMCA Hall on West 125th Street, then at the Museum of Natural History (Daily Paper [NYC] March 26, 1913, 3; March 29, 1913, 3). 20. See, for example: “First Entertainment for the Industrial Exposition Secured,” (Bismarck [ND] Daily Tribune), March 13, 1912, 3; ad for Royal Livestock Show, (Meade County [KA] News, October 6, 1910, p. 1); notice for Big Corn Show and Farmer’s Short Course, (Hopkinsville Kentuckian, January 13, 1912, 8); ad for Tribune Land Show (Chicago Tribune, October 23, 1910, p. 23). 21. Bismarck [ND] Daily Tribune, (September 30, 1912), 4. 22. Information about performances at Cornell University College of Agriculture auditorium (Ithaca Daily News, February 16, 1911, 8); and the University of Missouri College of Agriculture (University Missourian [Columbia MO], April 7, 1911, 1). 23. “Passing of ‘The Romance of the Reaper,’” Harvester World 4, no. 11 (November 1913), 6. 24. Edwin L. Barker, “Industrial Moving Pictures,” Motography 6, no. 3 (September 1911), 139–140. Identified as being reprinted from The Novelty News. 25. See, for instance, Joseph B. Baker, “Examples of Motion Picture Advertising,” Motography 5, no. 6 (June 1911), 133; Henry W. Mitchell, “The Camera as a Salesman,” System 18, no. 6 (December 1910), 580; and the many articles penned by Watterson R. Rothacker (then head of the Industrial Motion Picture Company), including more than twenty pieces he contributed to Nickelodeon (later Motography) in 1911–1913. 26. E. J. Ortmeyer, “Booking the Romance of the Reaper,” Harvester World 4, no. 3 (March 1913), 5. 27. “Making the Company Loved, Honored and Prosperous,” Harvester World 2, no. 5 (February 1911), 17.

19

The City View(ed): Muybridge’s Panoramas of San Francisco and Their Afterlives in Early Cinema Dimitrios Latsis

R

esearch into cinema’s origins as a visual and, more generally, perceptual technology has been a burgeoning component of the post-Brighton revival of interest in the early years of the medium. It has also played a vital part in the ongoing interdisciplinary exploration of the “image,” the rapport of cinema with other arts and visual technologies. Often forgotten, however, is that the movement of moving images was as much a technical as a conceptual problem that artists and experimenters sought to incorporate into still photography and other forms of visual culture in order to arrive at an animated alternative. The work of Eadweard Muybridge, in particular, has undergone a major reevaluation in recent years. The many recent studies of his work as a pioneer of chronophotography and the recovery of the full breadth of his activities as an inventor and artist from the archival record have, nonetheless, left intact certain assumptions about his artistic interests and intentions.1 These assumptions persist despite the nuanced contributions to research by scholars such as Marta Braun, Phillip Prodger, and Rebecca Solnit. They stem both from historians’ reluctance to see the technical, conceptual, and aesthetic aspects of Muybridge’s work as integrally aligned with each other and their tendency to consider his career in ­distinct, unrelated phases. If, however, we are willing to overcome this fixation with periodicity, we might note that between his initial instantaneous exposure of Leland Stanford’s horse at Sacramento in September 1876 and his more famous experiments in Palo Alto in June 1878, Muybridge was involved in one of his most spectacular ventures yet: two photographic panoramas of San Francisco, veritable time-lapse photographs of landscape, taken in January 1877 and in the spring of 1878.2 In what follows, I will venture a careful examination of Muybridge’s 1877 and 1878 panoramas of San Francisco as well as their afterlife in early cinema, to argue that it was in these “chrono-panoramas” that Muybridge elaborated the technical and aesthetic stakes involved in the representation of movement in the photographic image.

204  |  The Image in Early Cinema Equipped with his mammoth collodion plates and camera, Muybridge climbed atop the mansion of Mark Hopkins on San Francisco’s Nob Hill (then called California Street Hill). His aim was to make a panoramic photograph of the entire city, foregrounding its civic grandeur. As scholars such as Petra Watson, Paul Hill, and Stephen Herbert (among others) have shown, many predecessors had made photographic panoramas of the burgeoning port city of San Francisco; Muybridge would, nonetheless, be the first to produce a 360-degree, seamless view of the entire city, initially in eleven and then thirteen panels.3 What distinguished his work from these earlier examples (some of them by prominent photographers such as Carleton Watkins), was its ambition, scale, technical innovation, and above all, its single-minded focus on the temporal aspect of photography, specifically its capacity to capture a wide swath of space while simultaneously condensing time. He worked continuously from midmorning to three or four in the afternoon, starting from the southwest and progressing in a clockwise direction, taking one exposure every fifteen or twenty-five minutes. The end product was sold in a variety of formats, from cabinet display albums (complete with a key of all residences and businesses depicted) to individual framed views and “elephant accordion” folios. In a sense, Muybridge’s panoramas are the pinnacle of his long engagement with landscape photography.4 Even if their ostensible subject matter is technically a cityscape, in taking, developing, and marketing them, Muybridge applied the same techniques he had honed during his time photographing Yosemite, as a photographer on official duty for the government in Alaska and during the Modoc Wars, as a lighthouse surveyor on the Pacific Coast, and as a photographer of the both city and countryside sights in Northern California. Muybridge’s own interest in the panoramic representation of landscape originated in Yosemite and was first applied to San Francisco in an earlier partial panorama that formed an integral part of his documentation for the newly built mansion of Governor Leland Stanford.5 When we look closely at Muybridge’s giant panorama of 1877, signs of movement are everywhere: from the tracks of the California street cable car line that were just then being laid down to the ghost-like images of horse-drawn carriages, arrested in motion during the long exposures he took. This is a picture of a bustling metropolis of the West of which the city fathers (such as Muybridge’s patron Leland Stanford, whose mansion is given pride of place) could be rightfully proud. But it is in the photographer’s process, his almost structuralist approach to the recording of space, that one finds the most explicit precinematic “encoding” of movement. Muybridge methodically turned his camera by the predetermined twenty-seven degrees so that the entire view would be covered without overlaps. Perusing the panorama from left to right, one is not just traveling in space but indeed is traversing the span of a day in what is surely the first time-lapse photograph of a cityscape ever recorded.

The City View(ed)  |  205 In the pattern of shadows visible on these thirteen photographs, we can follow the unfolding of that day in more or less equal intervals. The only exception to this continuous, counterclockwise trajectory is found in the seventh plate, where Muybridge, having made a mistake, was forced to repeat the exposure; thus, the finished image looks as if it was taken much later in the day. Muybridge created something more than a simple panorama of San Francisco: what he created was, in fact, a fully enveloping chronophotographic panorama, the direct ancestor of what would later be called the “city symphony” genre.6 His process and the way the panorama might have been experienced by audiences are evoked in two pieces of creative writing that perfectly capture the artist’s working method. The first of these appeared in an article in Daily Alta California on July 22, 1877, where the writer employed a curious metaphor indicative of the way in which spectatorship functioned in the medium of the city-panorama. “Let us imagine a small ant wishing to get a comprehensive view of a painted Japanese dinner plate. He would succeed if he could get a thimble upright in the middle of the plate, then climb to the top of the thimble and look by turns in every direction. The ant, in that hypothesis, occupies a position similar to that of the man in San Francisco which represents the saucer, and the palatial dwelling of Mrs Mark Hopkins, on California Street Hill, is the thimble.7” The article goes on to identify the various features of the landscape in a sequence looking from left to right across the entire breadth of the panorama. Putting emphasis on the panorama’s serial nature, he specifies that it “was recently made by putting together a succession of views which, taken from a commanding central point, make a complete circuit of the horizon.” From this description, which Muybridge later quoted in his own promotional materials for the panorama, one can glean that the photographer’s primary concern was with a centralized point of view enabling the seamless contemplation of the surrounding scenery in a pan-like movement effected with the eyes. The sense of scale (the minuscule, ant-size stature of the viewer) could be achieved only if the effect of the immersion in the landscape was achieved, leaving no chance for the observer to become conscious of the artificiality of the view. This insistence on seamlessness guided Muybridge in all the different formats of the panorama that he produced. A report of an exhibition of his work in Sacramento in 1877, for instance, describes the work as “one long leaf which is folded and so capable of extension.”8 The experimental filmmaker Hollis Frampton would also signal this principle of the contiguity of space that translates into the continuity of spectatorial experience. Writing almost a century later, he noted that ““in the great San Francisco panorama of 1877, [Muybridge] condenses an entire rotation of the seeing eye around the horizon (an action that must take place over time) into a simultaneity that is at once completely plausible

206  |  The Image in Early Cinema and perfectly impossible; it is as if a work of sculpture were to be seen turned inside out, by some prodigy of topology.”9” The topological metaphor was later seized on by the Canadian poet Rob Winger, who, in Muybridge’s Horse (2002), included a chapter in verse entitled “Panorama of San Francisco”: “He climbs up Nob Hill to shoot the flattened hillside’s right angles . . . He’s come to make these pictures to announce his official entrance into America. The panorama is an exercise in citizenship. His last landscape photographs . . . The whole day, tracing sun across the city’s fiction . . . Details of the picture less important than containment, its ability to make readers insert themselves into the space willingly, surrounded in frames . . . What is essential here is that Eadweard has defined space unilaterally. Made a whole city’s chaos uniform, sequences its topography in tidy frames . . . What is essential here is his motion from interior to exterior and back . . . Movement between categories, a harnessing of tides.”10

In an expressive yet historically accurate manner, Winger presents Muybridge’s project as an enterprise connected to both “the nation” (and thus the politics of space) and to the individual spectator’s experience of mediated space through the panorama. The photographer thus sought to interpret and make sense of the chaotic landscape by organizing it along a lateral plane. The motion inherent in this rendering of space, Winger contends, is not just horizontal, along the line of the horizon, but also along the imagined third axis that transcends the two-­ dimensional representation of the city and reaches out to the spectator and back into the immersive expanse she is contemplating. This is precisely what Frampton meant by “turning space inside out,” compressing duration—the time it takes for the eye to traverse the entire picture of the landscape—into a simultaneity in which the gaze has the entire vista laid out at once before it. The spatiotemporal dynamic of Muybridge’s panoramas would later become a key preoccupation of early cinema. The motion that inhered in his ambitious, all-encompassing views of San Francisco was actualized in early filmed portraits of the city—a city in motion, in more ways than one. One of these films was in fact made while Muybridge was still alive but largely oblivious to the reach and development of the new medium of cinema. In late 1901 or early 1902, pioneer aviator T. S. Baldwin followed his successful demonstration at the 1901 Pan-­ American Exhibition with his biggest stunt yet: he climbed into his dirigible balloon on a late winter afternoon and ascended to a height of 1,500 feet above the city of San Francisco carrying twenty passengers who had paid the admission price of one dollar. What was special about this particular ascent was that it enabled the filming of the very first (surviving) aerial view captured in motion

The City View(ed)  |  207 pictures ­anywhere in the United States.11 The three-minute film starts with an overview of the launching grounds of the balloon, focusing on the residential area underneath. It then abruptly cuts to a view from a much higher altitude, revealing the grid of the city’s streets, before turning the camera slightly to reveal the full breadth of the metropolis. St Ignatius Church (built only months after Muybridge had taken his panorama) is discernible with its gothic spires, while the camera continues to revolve slightly until the balloon completes its descent. While Baldwin and his fellow “aeronauts” couldn’t replicate Muybridge’s achievement of a sharp and seamless 360-degree view of the city with all the major landmarks visible to the spectators, his film is indeed a vertical panorama along the vertical axis that can rightly be called a “bird’s eye view.”12 This film belongs on the same technological continuum as the painted prospect and the photographic panorama in their deployment of technology and perceptual modulations (notably the newly possible view from above) for the purposes of providing novel stimuli to contemporary audiences. Here the modernity of the city is coupled with the advancement of visual media and transportation to present an image of the urban West that Eastern and foreign cinemagoers had hardly encountered about a decade after the official close of the frontier.13 It is, in its sensorial address, meant to generate a mix of awe, vertigo, pleasurable recognition, and vicarious enjoyment from the landscape that Baldwin’s experiment comes closest to Muybridge’s pioneering chrono-panorama. It does not merely add what in the earlier work could only be implied (motion and panoptic perspective), it also furthers the quest of photographic media toward the utopian—or dystopian—goal of complete surveillance, an unseen energy that embraces all space, the type of quixotic mapmaking that Jorge Luis Borges would speak of in his short story “On Exactitude in Science” (1946), the “long panoramas of visions” that Whitman sang of, and that Google Earth seeks to emulate and profit from today.14 While neither Baldwin nor Edison (who distributed the film) called this view a panorama, it is evident from the film’s choice of camera movement and locations that it closely follows the conventions of the genre. The latter would yield further interesting samples in early films of San Francisco, none more haunting in their uncanniness as those taken in the aftermath of the Great Earthquake that all but leveled the city on April 18, 1906 (almost two years after Muybridge’s death).15 Of the dozen or so surviving cinematic records of the devastated city by Edison and American Mutoscope and Biograph Co. (AM&B) cameramen, five feature the word “panorama” in their titles, and all the rest use it in their promotional synopses. The format of the panorama provided a way for the intrigued public to experience the ruins and the magnitude of the disaster in the most comprehensive way possible. From a purely technical aspect, almost all the films present views of downtown San Francisco taken from street-level in 180- or 360-degree pans, aiming to integrate the ruins with familiar, ­semistanding l­andmarks. Vertical

208  |  The Image in Early Cinema Panorama City Hall and Surroundings p ­ rovides a double panorama, encompassing horizontal and vertical views of the tower of City Hall. The view of the cityscape in a state of destruction provided by these short snippets (Panorama Notorious “Barbary Coast,” Panorama Ruins, Aristocratic Apartments, and Vertical Panorama City Hall and Surroundings, among others), is arguably the reverse of what is usually expected of a “prospect view” and recalls Thomas Cole’s painting Destruction and Desolation from his “Course of Empire” cycle (1833–1836).16 What is inherent in this landscape is not its potential value for civilization once it is claimed from nature (the classical definition of a “prospect”), but rather the fact of nature having reclaimed the site from Man’s “progress.” As Rob Winger put it at the end of his poem about Muybridge panorama of San Francisco: All the landmarks he captures, fixed to glass squares, will be destroyed in less than two decades, earth reclaiming its geography from the skins of wood crowding Eadweard’s horizon. The San Andreas Fault shaking all this water from its rounded back.17

The camera no longer points away from the mansions of the rich but toward these very palaces of wealth lying in rumbles, the ultimate vanitas for the twentieth century at its dawn.18 AM&B’s San Francisco Disaster (shot by Billy Bitzer) stands out among the other films because it is a staged “recreation,” employing a small-scale model of the city set on fire to provide what in the minds of some viewers might have counted as a live view of the disaster rather than a faked spectacle. This type of reenactment replays the trauma of the catastrophe to construct a quasi-witness spectatorship, eliminating space twice over: destroying the mock-cityscape while undoing the distance between the spectator of the film and the site of the events depicted. In a sense, such simulations are just a radicalization of the concept of the panorama in that they aim to capture both a spatially comprehensive and a temporally vivid (“live”) vista. For Muybridge, too, authenticity came second to innovation and direct emotional and affective impact. The view that most resembles Muybridge’s panoramas of a quarter century earlier is Edison’s Panorama Nob Hill and Ruins of Millionaire Residences, shot from almost the same vantage point as the photographic panorama. In this film, the temporal component of the panoramic view is activated in a different but complementary way to Muybridge’s efforts at creating a time-lapse view of the city. The revolving scene of the collapsed manors and the surrounding infrastructure is shot as the catastrophic “after” version of the exact same view recorded in Muybridge’s “before,” forever mummifying in memory a city that in 1906 ceased to exist in reality. The similarity to Muybridge’s work was such that even

The City View(ed)  |  209 contemporaneous observers compared it to the forgotten pioneer’s photographs. Shortly after the disaster, the New York Public Library put on display its mammoth bound copy of the 1878 panorama as a memento of the devastated city.19 The journal Photographic News reported on the exhibition of Muybridge’s panorama in Kingston and the development of “a photographic film of the earthquake of San Francisco” that proved that the disturbance was the second greatest on record.20 The association of the two forms of optical evidence, the two different but complementary visual technologies in this context, is highly indicative of the archival and scientific value already conferred on Muybridge’s work both as a precedent to more modern geophysical and geomorphological measurement techniques and as historical record.21 Beyond these technical and scientific considerations, Muybridge prefigured another important aspect of the motion picture with his mindfulness of spectatorship. The giant format of the San Francisco panoramas, printed in “elephant folios,” and their 360-degree circuit of vision around the city were made with the spectator in mind. They represent the pinnacle of what still photography could achieve before biographs and cinématographes could be taken up on balloons to register more comprehensive aerial views of a city. The movement of the gaze that contemplates these chrono-panoramas accounts for their status as veritable time-lapse photographs. In his efforts to capture the temporal aspects of scenery, Muybridge set the foundations of an imaging revolution that would exploit the full potentialities of the persistence of vision, including in what we have come to know as motion pictures. Dimitrios Latsis is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the School of Image Arts of Ryerson University in Toronto.

Notes 1. Scholarship on Muybridge is rapidly proliferating, but for recent works of considerable impact, see Marta Braun, Eadweard Muybridge (London: Reaction, 2010); Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (London: Viking Penguin, 2003); Philip Brookman, ed., Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change (Gottingen: Steidl, 2010); and Phillip Prodger, Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). Prodger’s assertion that “there is little in [his landscape photographs] to presage his work as an instantaneous photographer” is a good example of the received assumptions of some of these critics (see note 34). For an up-to-date bibliography, see Stephen Herbert’s website, “The Compleate Muybridge” at http://www.stephenherbert.co.uk/mBIBLIOG.htm. 2. See Stephen Herbert, “Chronology of the Life and Work of Eadweard Muybridge, 1830–1904,” in Eadweard Muybridge: The Human and Animal Locomotion Photographs, ed. Hans Christian Adam (Köln: Taschen, 2010), 770–778.

210  |  The Image in Early Cinema 3. For comprehensive overviews of panoramas of San Francisco before Muybridge, see Petra Watson, Picturing the Modern City as a Panorama, (PhD diss., Simon Fraser University, 2007), 206–215. See also Paul Hill, “The Panorama of San Francisco from California Street Hill,” in Eadweard Muybridge: The Kingston Museum Bequest, ed. Stephen Herbert, 15–19; David Harris with Eric Sandweiss, Eadweard Muybridge and the Photographic Panorama of San Francisco, 1850–1880 (Montreal: Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Center for Architecture, 1993); and Eadweard Muybridge and Mark Klett, One City/Two Visions: San Francisco Panoramas, 1878 and 1990 (San Francisco: Bedford Arts, 1990). In his ads for the press, Muybridge, in characteristic and exaggerated self-promotion, branded it “the only panorama of San Francisco ever published!” It was priced at ten dollars. Unless otherwise noted, all references are to the final 1878 panorama. Muybridge had produced a number of panoramas earlier in his career, including of the Modoc Wars, while in Central America, and a panorama of the view from Leland Stanford’s residence, whose construction he was tasked with documenting. 4. Paul Hill, “The Panorama of San Francisco from California Street Hill,” 15. See also Rob Winger, Muybridge’s Horse (MA thesis, University of Guelph, 2002), 99: “His last landscape photographs.” 5. In Silver Cities: Photographing American Urbanization, 1839–1939 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), Peter Bacon Hales claims that “even in its visionary incarnation, a panoramic photography like Muybridge’s was still about property, about ownership and privilege” (167–168). 6. While there are certainly parallels between the Muybridge panorama and the “city symphony” genre in silent cinema—especially with regard to the “day-in-the-life” aspect of both—I am not claiming that their technical execution and reception were comparable; the similarities are more pointed on the level of the intention: capturing the life of the city in broad strokes, across both a spatial and temporal span. 7. Daily Alta California, 29, no. 9966 (July 22, 1877): 2, also cited in Braun, Eadweard Muybridge, 124. 8. Sacramento Daily Union, 3, no. 154 (August 25, 1877): 3. 9. Frampton, “Fragments of a Tesseract,” 77. See also René Bruckner’s discussion of the panorama as an important instance in Muybridge’s “linear narrative” work of “photographs conceived as successive components of a larger work.” Bruckner The Art of Disappearance: Duration, Instantaneity and the Conception of Cinema (PhD diss., University of California, Irvine, 2007), 85. 10. Rob Winger, Muybridge’s Horse, 99–100. The poem in its published form (Gibsons, BC: Nightwood, 2007) won a number of awards and was nominated for the top Canadian literary prize, the Governor General’s Award. 11. The film was cataloged as Bird’s-eye View of San Francisco, Cal., from a Balloon (1902) and survives in the Paper-Print Collection of the Library of Congress, FLA4501; Kemp R. Niver, Early Motion Pictures: The Paper Print Collection in the Library of Congress (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1985), 30. It can also be viewed in the “American Memory” section of the Library of Congress’s website. See also Nanna Verhoeff, The West in Early Cinema (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2006), 213–214, which discusses the film as emblematic of the “modernizing” West. For more on Baldwin, see Gary B. Fogel and Craig S. Harwood, “A California Impetus,” in Quest for Flight: John J. Montgomery and the Dawn of Aviation in the West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012), 60–78.

The City View(ed)  |  211 12. Although there had been earlier instances of photographic and cinematographic aerial panoramas, the terms “bird’s eye view” and “panorama” were used interchangeably in early films. For instance, a contemporaneous Edison film entitled “Bird’s Eye View of Dock Front, Galveston” was clearly not taken from the air and was indeed described as “a 180-degree panorama” in the promotional materials. See also Paula Amad, From God’s-eye to Camera-Eye: Aerial Photography and Modernity’s Post-humanist and Neo-humanist Visions of the World,” History of Photography 36, no. 1 (February 2012), 66–86. 13. For the technological image of the West as the flipside of its wilderness, see Peterson, “‘The Nation’s First Playground’: Wilderness Modernized in the American West,” in Education in the School of Dreams, 235–268. For the experiential parameters of the view in early cinema, see Tom Gunning, “An Unseen Energy Swallows Space: The Space in Early Film and Its Relation to American Avant-Garde film” in John L. Fell, ed., Film before Griffith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 355–366. 14. See Tom Gunning’s famous essay on the experience of early film audiences, “An Unseen Energy Swallows Space.” On cartographic perception and cinema, cf. Teresa Castro, La pensée cartographique des images: cinéma et culture visuelle (Paris: Aléas, 2011); Giuliana Bruno, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Tom Conley, Cartographic Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 15. Ironically, Muybridge’s panorama was first displayed for the public during that same year in the Kingston “Art Gallery.” The 1906 films referred to below are all from the Library of Congress’s Paper Print Collection and from the Sulphur Springs Collection of Pre-Nickelodeon Films at Southern Methodist University, available for viewing at the respective websites. 16. Muybridge had himself taken photographs of San Francisco after the Hayward earthquake of 1868. The Daily Alta California of October 28, 1868, notes that “Muybridge, the photograph artist who uses the pseudonym of ‘Helios’ in his work, has published several photographic pictures of some of the worst injured buildings, which show the effects of the later earthquake in this city.” 17. Winger, Muybridge’s Horse, 100. 18. The reference is to the genre of vanitas in Renaissance and baroque painting that was meant (through the use of symbols such as skulls) to convey a sense of man’s mortality and the hopelessness of life. 19. “Exhibitions,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library, X, no. 10 (October 1906): 504. 20. Photographic News, (May 4, 1906): 354. 21. Historical associations such as the California Historical Society and the Society of California Pioneers have repeatedly used Muybridge’s work and pre-earthquake films such as A Trip Down Market Street before the Fire (1906) to preserve the history of the city. Ironically, a considerable portion of Muybridge’s work in Yosemite and San Francisco is estimated to have been lost because of the fires that followed the 1906 earthquake.

20

California Landscapes: John Divola and the Cine-Geography of Serial Photography Charles Wolfe

Histories of visual technologies conventionally treat photography as a

precursor to cinema on three related counts: as an antecedent mechanism of photographic inscription, as a set of normative image-making practices, and as a repository of images on which early makers of moving pictures drew. A different perspective opens up, however, when we reverse the terms of this inheritance, attending to the perspective later photographic work provides on early histories of cinema. This essay extends such a perspective across many decades, taking up the question of how our understanding of early location filmmaking in Southern California is newly illuminated by contemporary photography produced in the Los Angeles region. I am inspired to consider this topic by the work of John Divola, whose four-decade career as a photographer was the subject of a 2013 retrospective, John Divola: As Far as I Could Get, exhibited among three West Coast venues: the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Pomona College Museum of Art. The dispersion of exhibition sites was in keeping with a key theme of the retrospective, which stressed the variety of locations in Southern California that have been ingredient to Divola’s photographic projects and the central role that cultural geography has played in his art practice. Curators and commentators have often identified Divola’s art work as exemplary of a “California aesthetic” or sensibility. “The sprawling, dynamic, ever-changing landscape of Los Angeles . . . has been Divola’s primary studio throughout his career,” notes Karen Sinsheimer, Curator of Photography at Santa Barbara Museum of Art, in her contribution to the exhibition catalog. A guiding principle of selection for the show in Santa Barbara, Sinsheimer explains, was “the documentation of his engagement within a space and place, and more often than not, the presence of urban and natural environments definitive of Southern California.”1 In a review of Divola’s retrospective in The Los Angeles Times, Jeffrey Fleischman offers a representative assessment of the cultural specificity

California Landscapes | 213 and significance of this career-long project, describing Divola’s “photographs and conceptual art as organic to Southern California—beaches, deserts, cities, mountains, the tug of light and at times a desolation playing amid a land of endless reinvention where human bonds can be provisional and many define themselves through the parade of popular culture.” In this regard, Fleischman adds, “Divola’s work is a pause in the noise, an escape from the clamor.”2 The remarks to follow pursue but also redirect this line of inquiry so as to consider the relationship of Divola’s photography to cinematic practices a century before. My claim here is that Divola’s contemporary approach to photographing the built environment helps to clarify the ways in which the changing landscape of Southern California, during the explosive development of the region at the turn of the twentieth century, occasioned innovative thinking about the relation between physical environments and the production of images, with long-­ term impact on the location-based comedy that emerged and coalesced into the genre of California slapstick in the 1910s. Like practitioners of early motion picture westerns, a companion genre, slapstick filmmakers exploited the variegated landscapes of California’s coastal and inland regions, offering mobile views of diverse environments and cultivating stories of human settlement and migration as shaped by social circumstances. In this work, motion picture units drawn to Southern California encountered local land use practices and policies that were in flux, under the pressure of rapid industrial development and population growth. Unlike New York or Chicago, this growth did not proceed concentrically from a commercial and industrial core but was highly dispersed, spreading in a patchwork fashion, as tracts of land were privately subdivided along emerging transportation systems, extending across the vast Los Angeles basin to coastal communities to the west, into neighboring foothills and agricultural valleys to the east, north, and south, and edging up against an arid desert landscape farther inland. I have argued elsewhere that California slapstick exploited the incongruous aspects of these changes, giving expressive form to the experience of disorientation and dislocation that movement through, and adjustments to, impermanent or transitional environments entailed. Through the flexible formal structure of the comic chase in particular, silent filmmakers extracted from Southern California’s varied rural, suburban, and urban landscapes a new, dynamic social map.3 By comparing examples of Divola’s photographic projects with familiar motifs of California slapstick, I hope here to bring questions concerning the legibility and cultural legacy of these early image-making practices more clearly into view. Locations play a central role in the trajectory of Divola’s career. Born in the coastal community of Venice, California, in 1949, he grew up in the West San Fernando Valley, not far from the 20th Century-Fox movie ranch, and his first photographic project focused on street views of houses in his mixed

214  |  The Image in Early Cinema rural-suburban neighborhood. After returning to Venice in the mid-1970s, Divola worked extensively in the coastal areas of Los Angeles, and for two of his most celebrated early projects—LAX/Noise Abatement Zone (1975–1976) and the Zuma series (1977–1978)—employed abandoned and vandalized houses as makeshift studios in situ. In the most celebrated photographs in these series, Divola frames exterior landscapes and seascapes through open doors and windows of the houses, registering a discordantly beautiful “picture window” effect. After joining the faculty at the University of California, Riverside in the late 1980s, Divola began to explore photo projects set in various inland desert communities, including Morongo Valley, Wonder Valley, and Twentynine Palms, the last the site of his 1993 installation and 2000 photobook, Isolated Houses, in which dwellings set at the far edge of the region’s urban landscape are identified by their longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates, fitting markers for homes that might otherwise appear “off the map.”4 Divola has described his working method as involving an interaction among three elements: the characteristics of a particular place and situation, the nature of the photographic medium, and his own disposition in that place at that time.5 He grants himself license to intervene in an environment prior to producing a photographic record of the encounter. When taking pictures of abandoned houses, for example, Divola will paint interior walls and alter the arrangement of objects so as to “activate” the space for the camera. Yet he also refuses to tamper with an image after the shutter has been snapped, and expresses deep respect for the hidden or surprising aspects of an environment that a photograph retrospectively brings to light. If traces of Divola’s own performance are inscribed in the finished images, then so, too, are many other attributes, yielding fresh discoveries. “I was always interested in intervening in a way that was visual or sculptural or performative,” Divola recalls, “but not particularly interested that there be a clear line between what I had done and what was there.”6 Early in his career he described his role as “directing” the “play of elements” rather than seeking to exercise total control.7 “You can’t control it totally,” he has more recently explained; “that’s the thing about photography, it pulls you into the world.”8 Divola’s familiarity and fascination with the history of older photographic and cinematic practices is evident throughout his work. For his 1995 installation, Seven Songbirds and a Rabbit, he isolated and re-photographed animals found in stereoscope negatives in the Keystone-Mast Collection at the California Museum of Photography, printing the new images on linen and framing them in the fashion of nineteenth-century library or museum displays. In “Occupied Landscapes: Yosemite” from Four Landscapes (1989–1992), a study of four pictorially resonant California sites, he references nineteenth-century photographs of the Yosemite Valley by Eadweard Muybridge and Carlton Watkins as part of a larger “California portfolio” that also encompasses Divola’s photographs of isolated houses in the

California Landscapes | 215 desert landscape surrounding Twentynine Palms, of stray dogs in the streets of Los Angeles, and of distant boats at sea along the Pacific Coast. Over the years Divola has also been drawn to the Hollywood studios as sites of photographic production, albeit viewed at a historical remove. Two of his curatorial projects involve the culling and conceptual arrangement of production stills documenting interior and exterior sets built on Hollywood sound stages during the high studio era, treating these photographs as archival images whose aesthetic and social value exceeds their initial instrumental function. For his 1997 exhibition and companion book, Continuity, Divola assembled contact prints from a recovered collection of set stills produced by Warner Brothers Studio between 1931 and 1934, and grouped them according to either their recurring architectural features (“Hallways,” “Mirrors”) or signs of narrative conflict that the deserted sets contain (“Evidence of Aggression,” “Incidental Action”). Artificial Nature, a 2002 installation, is composed of another thirty-six set stills displayed in a grid along three even rows with twelve images across. Details at the border or in the background of the set stills, when closely inspected, often disclose elements of the artifice by which the impression of a natural landscape is produced for and through the camera. In a related effort, Divola also photographed the demolition of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s New York City set on the studio’s back lot in Culver City in 1979–80, a project in keeping with his career-long exploration of the transitory quality of fabricated environments in Southern California, for which the MGM lot served as a prime symbol well in advance of its final razing. The relation of Divola’s work to motion picture history in Los Angeles runs considerably deeper, however, with roots in filmmaking prior to the emergence, growth, and consolidation of the Hollywood studios. Several of Divola’s projects, in fact, might be said to level the ground for rethinking location cinematography in Los Angeles in advance of the studio years. In these works Divola steers clear of the clichéd, densely mediated images of the region on which the film and television industries later came to rely. I take this to be what Fleischman means in part when he refers to Divola’s photography as “a pause in the noise, an escape from the clamor” of “the parade of popular culture.” The power of still images to both suggest and arrest movement is crucial to this “pause” effect. Divola has long emphasized serial and sequence photography over and against the individual photograph as an art object, a contributing factor in the complex temporality of his photo-works.9 Divola’s photographs are largely devoid of the plotted human actions that inform the scenarios of early westerns and slapstick comedies, and perforce lack the regulated rhythms through which these films unfold. Yet performative acts of different kinds charge Divola’s images in compelling ways. His photographic series often demonstrate the capacity of still images to render evident the multiple temporalities that inform our very conception of a landscape. By placing processes of photographic recoding in

216  |  The Image in Early Cinema

Fig. 20.1 Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert, multipanel sequence (courtesy of John Divola).

c­ onversation with other performative gestures, they call attention to broader patterns of environmental formation, transformation, resilience, and decay. The concepts underpinning these serial arrangements take a variety of forms. In some cases Divola organizes photographic series in proto-cinematic ways. With a nod toward late nineteenth-century animal locomotion studies, for example, Divola’s Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert (1996–1998, book 2004) alludes to early forms of instantaneous series photography while exploring a form more attuned to the flexible cine-geography of the comic chase, with the photographer as both agent and object of pursuit. The project’s straightforward title cues us to its recurring premise: a photographic encounter between the mobile photographer and the domesticated animals that chase his car along a desert road. Desire shapes the terms of the encounter. “Here we have two vectors and velocities,” Divola has commented, “that of a dog and that of a car and, seeing that a camera will never capture reality and that dog will never catch a car, evidence of devotion to a hopeless enterprise.”10 The photographs emphasize the vitality, persistence, and elusiveness of the dogs in their home environment rather than the capacity of Divola’s motor-­ driven camera to dissect the way the animals move, as might a typical Muybridge motion study staged against an abstract grid. The largest multipanel sequence Divola assembled for the project offers an especially suggestive example of the complex possibilities of this multipanel form (fig. 20.1). The sequence is composed of seven photographs across and five rows down, or thirty-five panels in all. If we follow the images left to right and top row down, a lateral chase comes into view. The position and scale of the dog change from panel to panel, an impression left by the jostling of Divola’s hand-­ held camera as his car moves along the irregular surface of the road. In his

California Landscapes | 217 a­ ssembling of the photographs, Divola retains these disjunctive elements, even as he ­preserves the possibility of our reading the chase as a linear form. As depicted, the chase is also deeply embedded within the desert environment, with four clusters of buildings serving as visual anchors at intervals in the mid-­ ground, and a third plane delineated by the reappearance of a ridge of mountains in the distance. Over the course of the bottom series, spatial perspective shifts as the pace of the dog appears to slow, and Divola’s camera pans 90 degrees, coming to rest on the road his car has just traveled. Revealed for the first time along the right edge of the final frame is a reflective surface—perhaps a side mirror or car window, evidence of the vehicle that has enabled the project—which provides a glimpse of the desert landscape from yet another angle. In composite, the series of panels offer an emblematic if fragmented portrait of an inhabited California desert, including its vast expanses, scrub vegetation, and outlying mountains, and the scattered dwellings that signal the human aspirations that have occasioned the dogs’ occupancy of this world. As mediated by Divola’s (twice-over) motored camera work and resulting montage, the spatial and temporal dimensions of the desert chase are reconstructed in halting measure, pause by pause and frame by frame. Serial arrangement, on the other hand, functions comparatively in Divola’s As Far as I Could Get, another “action” landscape project, this one lasting from 1996 to 2010 and set in diverse locations throughout the Los Angeles region. For each photograph in the series, Divola framed a path or roadway receding into the background, set the camera’s timer for ten seconds, sprinted in a direct line from the camera, and recorded the distance he was able to travel before the shutter fired—in effect, repeatedly staging his own race against the camera’s clock (figs. 20.2a and 20.2b). Here the temporal interval is marked within rather than between each photograph, a ten-second period measured by the space between the apparent placement of the camera and the position of the photographer-­ performer at the moment of capture. Recurring compositional elements—an expansive foreground, deep space, and a distant horizon, with the fleeing figure frozen near the midpoint of the image—provide a common graphic template within which to compare different regional landscapes. Even as the ten-second interval is translated into a fixed physical distance, moreover, the composition of the pictures invites us to consider other temporal registers: the time expended by Divola in the scouting of locations and precise staging of the images, for example, or the history of images on which the compositions draw.11 Among other tropes, photographs in this series evoke the durable myth of the lone traveler setting out—as far as he can get—employing a motif of movie westerns as well as silent slapstick races and chases in which the recessional quality of the action is enhanced by camera placement (fig. 20.3a), a device sentimentalized by Charlie Chaplin in his staging of the tramp’s final exit in films set in a variety of Southern California locations over several decades of work (fig. 20.3b).12

218  |  The Image in Early Cinema

Fig. 20.2a As Far as I Could Get series (courtesy of John Divola).

California Landscapes | 219

Fig. 20.2b As Far as I Could Get series (courtesy of John Divola).

220  |  The Image in Early Cinema

Fig. 20.3a Cruel, Cruel Love (Keystone, 1914).

Fig. 20.3b The Pilgrim (Chaplin, 1923).

California Landscapes | 221 Serial forms are also central to Divola’s approach to photographing abandoned houses, the very desertion of which presupposes a history of habitation and leave-­ taking. A simple but powerful use of temporal ellipsis, for example, is at work in House Removals, a companion project to Divola’s exploration of homes abandoned under the terms of the Los Angeles airport’s noise abatement program of the mid-1970s. Composed of two-panel diptychs, House Removals pairs color photographs of residential properties before and after a house, through a state-­ sanctioned program of removal, has been wholly cleared from view. The fixed relation of the photographs permits the viewer to examine closely the similarities and differences between the two images, to arresting effect. In each instance, a family home has vanished, as if by way of a camera trick. Divola elides the act of demolition itself in favor of a time-lapse “cut,” succinctly and eerily evoking the ephemeral nature of shelter and the vicissitudes of time and loss. Divola’s photographs of damaged and demolished houses offer a stark perspective on what cultural geographer Donald Meinig identifies as one of three core symbolic landscapes in the United States: in this case, the California suburb, an idealized image born of the population boom in Southern California in the early twentieth century, wedded to the emergence of automobile culture and the redefinition of leisure as a modern virtue, and disseminated widely through visual media, especially motion pictures.13 Carving the region’s valleys and expansive basin into neatly articulated properties, the prototypical California suburb, Meinig proposes, was designed to facilitate “indoor—outdoor living, with an accent upon individual gratification, physical health, and pleasant exercise.”14 In his studies of deserted suburban houses, Divola’s camera, in contrast, is drawn to signs of violation, deterioration, and entropy, to evidence of the deconstructive aspects of “indoor-outdoor living,” a potential anticipated in the comically flimsy shelters and inefficient construction sites frequently found in California slapstick, and perhaps most richly and intricately explored by Buster Keaton, from the prefabricated home building project at the center of his first released short, One Week (1920), through the leveling of a small city by gale force winds in the climax to his final independently produced feature, Steamboat Bill Jr. (1928). A sequence in Keaton’s The Scarecrow (1920) in which Buster seeks refuge from a dog amid the ruins of a roofless Spanish adobe may provide the most apposite example (fig. 20.4a). Consider especially the closing shot of this elaborate chase sequence, in which a single image anticipates three motifs we have seen in Divola’s photographic projects: pursuit by a dog, a sprint away from the camera, and a landscape view through the window or doorframe of an abandoned home (fig. 20.4b). In his exploration of interior spaces, Divola appropriates the framing function of doorways and windows to recast the distinction between inside and outside in striking ways. Photographic series in Divola’s LAX/Noise Abatement Zone, for example, offer varied perspectives on particular entryways, viewed

222  |  The Image in Early Cinema

Fig. 20.4a The Scarecrow (Keaton 1920).

Fig. 20.4b The Scarecrow (Keaton, 1920).

California Landscapes | 223 from outside and inside an abandoned house at different times of day, and on occasion feature a landscape view through the damaged window or door. In the Zuma series, which Divola shot from within a Malibu beach house that had been repurposed for training firefighters, he uses even more opulently desecrated interiors to frame stunning views of a seemingly limitless ocean, with water and sky illuminated by diurnal cycles of daylight, dawn to dusk (fig. 20.5a). We might compare here the poignant but passing evening beach scene in the 1916 Triangle-­ Keystone comedy Fatty and Mabel Adrift, featuring Roscoe Arbuckle and Mabel Normand, in which a matte shot of an incandescent sunset is embedded within the window frame of the young couple’s home on the evening before vandals, aided by a wind storm, send the seaside cottage adrift on the ocean (fig. 20.5b). This momentary hiatus in comic violence finds its complement sixty years later in Divola’s meditative exploration of Pacific vistas from a vantage point within the ruins of an oceanfront home. The cyclical temporality of the changing sunlight in Divola’s Zuma series, placed in tension with the progressive deterioration of the beach house structure, reminds us that the historicity of a “California aesthetic”—or any location-­ centered aesthetic for that matter—requires attention not simply to linear ­developments but to recurring and regenerative patterns in art practices. The enduring photographic qualities of particular California landscapes are part and parcel of the complex sense of time evoked by Divola’s reworking of such images. Even as they foreground the provisional and transitory nature of the built environment of Los Angeles and gesture obliquely toward the social processes through which the urban landscape has been transformed, Divola’s photographic series feature durable topographical elements, including inland deserts, coastal waters, and the flat plains upon which the “California suburb” first gained culturally legible form. If Divola’s curation of Hollywood set stills reminds us of the residual artfulness and strangeness of the studio system’s image-making practices, his location-centered work directs our attention to an earlier history of landscape cinematography, which the genres of chase comedies and western dramas absorbed. In an interview with Simon Baker included in the 2013 exhibition catalog, Divola attributes his fascination with abandoned houses in part to his discovery that their spaces “had a personality and sense of place and readable history of action, a history of who lived there and the kinds of things they left behind and the architectural vocabulary of it and then this sort of history of distress. . . . You can almost rewind back and see the sculptural trajectories of these changes.”15 Viewed in series, Divola’s photographs facilitate for cinema historians a similar “rewinding,” opening up new perspectives on the early encounters of actors, cinematographers, and directors with the complex geography of the region, including remote or abandoned locations not yet tracked by the larger motion picture

224  |  The Image in Early Cinema

Fig. 20.5a Zuma series (courtesy of John Divola).

Fig. 20.5b Fatty and Mabel Adrift (Triangle-Keystone, 1916).

California Landscapes | 225 companies to come. Divola’s photographic practices prompt ways of thinking about the performative dimension of such encounters, the negotiations involved in the production of new images, and the environmental histories these images may peripherally or unexpectedly reveal. Divola’s photography may also have special purchase in an era when we now capture and inspect stilled cinematic images digitally with ease, performing the very “pause” that Fleischman finds distinctly productive in Divola’s work. As Laura Mulvey has argued, our capacity to seize and store a still image from a film’s digital file has enabled new forms of possession of and critical reflection on moving images within and across historical periods.16 “This pause for the spectator, usually ‘hurried’ by the movement of both film and narrative,” Mulvey observes, “opens space for consciousness of the still frame within the moving image.”17 Drawing attention to the moment of photographic registration, the stilled image provides occasion to consider choices made in its own production—including camera placement, composition, and the choreographic opportunities that topographical contingencies inspire—and to identify clues to location that the flow of moving pictures may mask or veil. In related fashion, the “pause” of Divola’s still photographs provides us with an opportunity to reflect on earlier photographic encounters with the changing urban landscape of Los Angeles, including places not yet territorialized by the pictorial land grab of the motion picture industry. They have the potential to revive our sense of the exploratory efforts of early filmmakers charged with the task of transforming physical locations into performance spaces and to foster fresh ways of thinking about the places in which—and performances through which—motion picture genres took root in California a century ago. Charles Wolfe is Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and has published widely on various aspects of the history of Hollywood, independent, and documentary cinema.

Notes 1. Karen Sinsheimer, “California and John Divola,” John Divola: As Far as I Could Get (Munich: DelMonico Books/Prestel, 2013): 100, 101. 2. Jeffrey Fleischman, “Just Beyond the Frame,” Los Angeles Times (December 15, 2013): E1, E6. 3. See Charles Wolfe, “Slapstick Comedy Revisited,” in Slapstick Comedy, ed. Rob King and Tom Paulus (New York: Routledge, 2010): 169–189; and “From Venice to the Valley: California Slapstick and the Keaton Comedy Short,” in Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image, ed. John David Rhodes and Elena Gorfinkel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011): 3–30. Jay Leyda first proposed “California slapstick” as a label to

226  |  The Image in Early Cinema describe the style of physical comedy that flourished in Southern California during the silent era, in a paper presented at a symposium held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1985 and subsequently published as “California Slapstick: A Definition,” in The Slapstick Symposium, ed. Eileen Bowser (Brussels and New York: Féderation Internationale des Archives du Film, Museum of Modern Art, 1977): 2. 4. John Divola, Isolated Houses (Tucson: Nazraeli Press, 2000–2001). 5. Dinah Portner, “An Interview with John Divola,” Journal of Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies (September 1978). Reprinted in American Suburb X (April 19, 2014), http://www.americansuburbx.com/2014/04/interview-interview-with-john-divola.html. 6. Jan Tumlir, “John Divola: On the Vandalism, Forced Entry, and Zuma Series” (May 2005), http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~divola/Statements&Reviews/Three%20Acts /Interview.html. 7. Portner, “An Interview with John Divola.” 8. Tumlir, “John Divola: On the Vandalism, Forced Entry, and Zuma Series.” 9. Divola explains, “I’ve always been interested in series as opposed to individual photographs. I was always more curious about how a series indicates my complicity and functions as documentation of my ongoing engagement with a subject over a period of time. I never really wanted to make an individual photograph that was highly refined . . . optically or illusionistically. Instead, I wanted them to collectively describe a kind of engagement with a space or circumstance. They are remnants of an engagement as opposed to consciously constructed assertions.” Tumlir, “John Divola: On the Vandalism, Forced Entry, and Zuma Series.” 10. John Divola, Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert, Artist Statements & Reviews, http://www.divola.com/. 11. Concerning the temporality of creative labor, Divola has observed: “The beauty of the photography is distance. I can make an incredibly naïve and stupid mark, and then make an interesting photograph about a naïve and stupid mark. . . . If I don’t like it, I’ll do something else with it, or somebody will come and burn it and cover it up, and I can try again.” (Simon Baker, “Interview with John Divola,” John Divola: As Far as I Could Get: 180). In his remarks at the exhibition’s opening, Dick Hebdige elaborated on Divola’s employment of a spatial metaphor: “Distance—in other words, the length of time. The length of time it takes to set something up, to execute an action, to make a mark, to take a shot or lots of shots, to stitch the shots together.” (“John Divola. . . . As Far as I Could Get in Twenty Minutes,” Santa Barbara Museum of Art, October 13, 2013). It is but a small step here to a consideration of the history of such choices across longer time periods, a perspective that I am arguing Divola’s still and mute photographic projects provide the analyst of California landscapes in silent cinema. 12. Concerning the As Far as I Could Get series, art critic Christopher Knight writes: “The deeper into the scene that the artist penetrates, the more he’s swallowed up and the more oddly bereft a viewer feels, ignominiously left behind. It’s a frankly cinematic moment—Shane, come back!—yet disconcertingly devoid of the emotional manipulation of a Hollywood movie.” See Knight, “Out of the Ruins,” Los Angeles Times (November 13, 2013): D1, D4. The ending to Chaplin’s The Pilgrim, as illustrated in figure 20.3b, might be said to draw concurrently on the tropes of both slapstick comedy and westerns in this regard. 13. D. W. Meinig, “Symbolic Landscapes: Some Idealization of American Communities,” in The Interpretations of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays, ed. Meinig (New York,

California Landscapes | 227 Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 164–192. In addition to the “California suburb,” Meinig identifies the “New England village” and “Main Street” as key symbolic landscapes. For Meinig, these landscapes can be considered symbolic precisely to the extent that a set of characteristics associated with a region becomes “part of the iconography of nationhood.” In the case of the California suburb, Meinig proposes, Hollywood was principally responsible for the dissemination of this “new American lifestyle” nationwide. Meinig’s treatment of symbolic meaning as strictly a matter of national projection conforms to familiar critical frameworks adopted by cultural geographers of the period. It is worth nothing, however, that the cultural valences of California landscapes in early motion pictures outstrip a narrow framework of this kind. I consider some of the benefits and limitations of treating California slapstick as an American comic form in “California Slapstick Revisited”: 173–176, 184–186. 14. Meinig, “Symbolic Landscapes: Some Idealization of American Communities,” 171. 15. Baker, “Interview with John Divola,” 182. 16. Laura Mulvey, Death 24X a Second (London: Reaktion Books, 2006): 144–196. 17. Ibid., 186.

21

What is a Fake Image? Frank Kessler and Sabine Lenk

In all the world there is nothing so curious and so interesting and so beautiful as truth. Hercule Poirot in Agatha Christie’s Three Act Tragedy

According

to boleslas Matuszewski’s famous text from 1898, the cinematograph is an immensely trustworthy medium. While for him, as an experienced photographer, it was obvious that a photograph could be manipulated, he felt that the sheer quantity of frames on even a one-minute-long strip of film made it impossible to tamper with a cinematographic view. Hence his claim that the cinematographic record of an event is a piece of evidence that cannot be refuted: “Perhaps the cinematograph does not give history in its entirety, but at least what it does deliver is incontestable and of an absolute truth.”1 As a witness, in other words, the cinematograph tells the truth, not necessarily the whole truth, but in any case nothing but the truth. Note that for Matuszewski the trustworthiness of the cinematographic record has practical rather than ontological reasons.2 Even though the idea that the photographic, and by extension the cinematographic, record is a trace does function as a central argument for the truth-claim such images carry with them, it is the practical difficulty of altering them that constitutes their value as a document. However, the manipulation of the images themselves is not the only way to make a view “say” (or maybe even “prove”) something that in fact it does not. Around the time when Matuszewski wrote his text, there were already instances of moving pictures being criticized as fakes. Fakes, however, not by means of the rétouche frame by frame that Matuszewski referred to, but by other practices, which he did not mention and which we will discuss in what follows. But to what extent can these practices actually be considered “fakes”? First of all, of course, it is important to clarify this term. It was not used at the time in the way we talk about “fake documentaries” today (such as Forgotten Silver, 1995, by Peter Jackson and Costa Botes). These can be seen as a sophisticated game a filmmaker plays with the audience in which—similar to the trompe l’œil

What is a Fake Image?  |  229 in painting—the point is less to fool the viewers than to have them understand that what they see has been an “artificially arranged scene” (to use this expression from the early period) and to make them enjoy the artifice and admire the dexterity of the director, the actors, the cinematographer, and so on. Conversely, when a cinematographic view was called a fake around 1900, this generally counted as an accusation of willful deception.3 Yet, things are more complicated, and in fact— following Dirk Eitzen’s productive suggestion with regard to documentary—the question we ask should be: When is a fake image?4

Intentionality In the early years of his production, Georges Méliès had already produced a number of films depicting contemporary events—the eruption of Mount Pélé, scenes from the Greco-Turkish and Spanish-American Wars, the Dreyfus affair, the coronation of Edward VII—that were staged in his studio and thus by no means records in Matuszewski’s sense. But were they considered fakes? It depends; there is indeed the case of the well-known protest voiced by an unnamed French author in Le Petit Bleu, denouncing Le sacre d’Édouard VII (1902) as shameless fakery while the film was clearly marketed as a reconstitution of a rehearsal of the ceremony, at least as far as the producers were concerned.5 What comes to the fore here is an important issue: What is the status ascribed to the images when they are performed in a screening? And correspondingly, what is the communicational intentionality the viewer assigns to them? In the case of King Edward VII’s coronation, an announcement in the program presenting the film as a reconstitution in principle precludes its being seen as a fake. A spectator such as the journalist writing for Le Petit Bleu, however, must have taken the film as an actual recording of the event itself before discovering that he was watching (or had watched, as he may have found out only after the screening) a staged performance, which, consequently, he took to be a fake (unless the whole thing was a publicity stunt and thus a fake protest). The exhibition context of a film, the way it was announced or, the comments a lecturer added provided a framing that determined the status of the images for the audience either as a simple illustration (similar to the engravings one could find in illustrated magazines), a faithful reconstruction (which, one can presume, was Méliès’s ambition, given the way the film was marketed), or a record of a topical event. If, however, the audience is made to believe that a record of an actual event is being screened and it turns out that it is but an illustration or a reconstruction, then viewers will of course feel cheated. This runs exactly parallel to the contractual relationship between producers and exhibitors. Fakery, in this respect, is less a question of the image as such than of the way it is presented—by the producer to the exhibitor or the exhibitor to the audiences—and of the evaluation of the intentionality that is ascribed to it.

230  |  The Image in Early Cinema

Cases and Practices Let us look at three different cases. The practice of reconstructions, which was common before 1905, should thus not be considered as an attempt to mislead audiences into mistaking the image for a record. Producers, in many cases, explicitly announced in their catalogs that they were selling reconstructions. A case in point is a 1904 Selig Polyscope brochure presenting a series of films depicting “Naval Battles between the Russian and Japanese Fleets at Port Arthur and Chemulpo” as being “wonderfully accurate and realistic.”6 In the overall introduction to the series, the company states: “Besides, we have on our staff a former naval expert who is thoroughly familiar with all the locations in the far East that will come under the focus of public vision during the war. His assistance and advice will be invaluable to assist in establishing the accuracy of details in our reproductions in our thrilling and yet-to-be famous films.”7 It is quite probable that, in addition to the labeling of the films as “reproductions” (other companies used the term “representations”), attributes such as “accurate” and “realistic” functioned as markers of a reenactment, as they would be redundant if they referred to the record of an event. Such reproductions could be filmed in a studio, as was the case with Méliès, but also outdoors, or use scale models, as was the case quite probably with the Selig Polyscope naval battles. Some referred to very specific events, others to more generic ones, such as James Williamson’s Attack on a China Mission (1900). A second and more complicated issue is the reuse of images in a different context. An early example is the recycling of the American Mutoscope and Biograph’s 1896 footage of McKinley at Home in Canton, Ohio studied by Nico de Klerk.8 When the view was first released, it was meant to illustrate the Republican candidate’s front porch campaign and depict a moment when his secretary handed him a paper. After the election, the view was updated and said to show the newly elected president receiving congratulatory telegrams. In March 1897, the view was screened in London under the title The President William McKinley at Home, Canton, Ohio, USA after the inaugural ceremony.9 From April to June 1898, it was shown at the same venue in the context of the Spanish-American War.10 In March 1899, Dutch audiences could see it in The Hague as President McKinley and his Secretary Discussing Terms of Peace (in the Garden of his Villa in Canton).11 Obviously, the fact that the view in itself cannot be attached explicitly to a particular historical time and space (contrary to, for instance, the coronation pictures of the Dutch Queen Wilhelmina filmed in Amsterdam on September 6, 1898), facilitated such reuse and reframing practices. They might be considered fakes in the sense that after the original presentation they did not depict the situations or events they were supposed to show, but the audiences did actually see McKinley in Canton, Ohio, and not a reproduction of the scene.

What is a Fake Image?  |  231 A third example represents a probably less common case, which implied a misleading or even deceitful labeling, not as a subsequent reframing, but at the production stage. In December 1897, Richard Hollaman, president of New York’s Eden Musee, had a passion play filmed on the roof of the Grand Central Palace, which was marketed and presented as The Passion Play of Oberammergau, presumably in order to avoid attacks by religious groups that were opposed to an actor playing the role of Christ. On the contrary, presenting the film as a record of the famous traditional Bavarian performance would not raise such concerns.12 However, after the public premiere of the film on January 30, 1898, an article in the New York Herald revealed that the filming had taken place in New York and that the scenes shown were not “genuine reproductions” of the Oberammergau Passion Play.13 Here the term “reproduction” appears to have been used in the sense of “cinematographic record,” as signaled by the adjective “genuine” (in contrast to “realistic” or “accurate reproduction” in the Selig sales catalog quoted above). In this case, the producer’s and exhibitor’s intention clearly was to present the film as a record of the Oberammergau performance and not as an artificially arranged scene in its own right. The New York Herald’s revelation seems to neither have had a negative impact on the film’s success nor triggered protests from religious groups. Nevertheless, one could say that this is a relatively clear-­ cut example of a “genuine fake” meant to make audiences and reviewers believe they saw a cinematographic record of a famous staged performance, benefiting by the same token from the latter’s cultural reputation. While there may have been other types of faking, these three—the reproduction, the reframing, and the misleading or deceitful labeling—probably cover the most frequent practices. The question, of course, is how they were perceived by audiences. This, as noted before, depended largely on the context in which they were seen and on many paratexts (program bills, advertisements, comments by lecturers, etc.). Beyond that, though, a question remains: To what extent did audiences (including spectators who were part of the business) possess the necessary competence to critically assess the images that were screened?

Visual Literacy, Contextual Information, Media Literacy What was the degree of visual literacy viewers had around 1900? This is a question that most certainly arises with regard to reconstructions such as those produced by Méliès. At first sight, one might presume that his hand-colored rendition of the Mount Pélé eruption could hardly have been seen as an actual record of the disaster. To begin with, the fact that it is in color should have allowed viewers to distinguish it from black-and-white photographic images, and all of its features reveal quite clearly that this is a drawn rather than a photographic or cinematographic record of the scene. However, there was also a postcard about the event

232  |  The Image in Early Cinema that is equally in color and visibly a drawn picture, and yet it was marketed in Germany as “Originalaufnahme” of the catastrophe, a term that connotes both authenticity (Original) and photography (Aufnahme). Together with the fact that most illustrations in magazines were engravings rather than photographies, it is clear that journalistic practice, in any event, did not distinguish between different types of image technologies in terms of their truth-value. This, however, raises the question of how such a relative indifference relates to the astonishment of early Lumière audiences with regard to the movement of leaves and smoke or the foam rising in a glass of beer as a distinctive quality of the cinematographic image. In its 1902 catalog, Pathé explained its practice with regard to topical films as follows: “As soon as an event occurs, we send a cameraman to the location whenever this is possible. But we cannot guarantee the authenticity of all the views in this series because of the numerous difficulties to capture the events as they happen. In such a case, and because we need to act fast, we make an effort to reproduce the scenes trying to get as close as possible to the truth.”14 The criteria according to which the truth-value of the reproduction could be assessed needed to come from more or less authoritative and reliable external sources and in particular the coverage of the event in the press, resulting in an official version of how it was to be understood. As a matter of fact, accusations of faking generally seem to have relied on contextual information. Consider the famous anecdote of Francis Doublier, the Lumière cameraman, screening in 1898 a series of views to Jewish audiences in Russia and presenting them as images related to the Dreyfus affair. Critical comments concerned, among others, the fact that contrary to what he showed, there were no trees on Devil’s Island.15 Doublier’s practice was clearly one of deceitful labeling, as he pretended to show authentic footage of the events. It took viewers who had read about the affair and the conditions under which Captain Dreyfus was imprisoned to confront Doublier about the images that were projected with the information the viewers had gathered elsewhere. A similar case concerned a film on the 1906 San Francisco earthquake made by another company, which the Warwick Trading Co. exposed as a fraud in their Cinematography & Biograph Magazine. “This particular film shows the firemen busy at work deluging the burning debris with water, whereas every school-child knows, that at San Francisco, the ruins blazed for three days, simply because the earthquake had broken the water mains, and it was, in consequence, impossible to fight the flames:”16 Here, common knowledge (“every school-child knows”) about the disaster was mobilized to denounce the fakery, which the Warwick Trading Co. said they had detected in the film of one of their competitors. Again, this common knowledge had to come from other news media.

What is a Fake Image?  |  233 But what did audiences know about filming and the way in which cinematographic views were being produced around 1900? In the often-quoted story by Maurice Normand about an Irish girl in Paris who faints during a screening of Boer War films because she thinks she has seen her fiancé being shot, a gentleman explains to her that such views are taken regularly on the Buttes Chaumont, a public park in Paris, and thus do not show actual scenes from the battlefield.17 This indicates that such practices were known, and the fact that the story was published in France in L’Illustration and in Germany in the Frankfurter Zeitung made such knowledge available to a relatively large group of readers. In his study on the emergence of the war film, Stephen Bottomore lists several statements by filmmakers and journalists about how to detect fakes: “The nature of the advice varied, but one theme emerged from a number of commentators: the principle of plausibility. In particular, these writers pointed to fakes which were filmed from implausible battlefield positions where the cameraman would have been caught in the gunfire.”18 To assess the plausibility of a view, however, audiences needed to understand the way in which such images were obtained. This indeed introduces a potential gap between media-literate and media-illiterate spectators, at least for a certain period of time until audiences possessed on a larger scale a certain common knowledge about how cinematographic views are made and edited. To critically assess moving images of topical events around 1900, audiences thus could draw on contextual information (mainly the press coverage), on media literacy to gauge the plausibility of something being filmed on the spot, and on visual literacy to distinguish painted backdrops from outdoor filming. But as the practice of reproductions (or representations) was in line with the use of engravings in illustrated magazines, the general context of news media in this period may have flattened out the difference between types of images at least as far as their illustrative function went, as opposed to the cinematographic truth-claim that Matuszewski voiced.

Conclusion The fact that around 1900 a view could be considered a fake had less to do with the quality of the image itself than with the way it was labeled and performed. The reproductions and representations advertised by Méliès and others claimed accuracy for the way in which they depicted an event. Even the reuse of images might have been considered a legitimate way of referring to a given situation when they showed a more or less generic scene, such as the McKinley example. Deceitful labeling, on the other hand, clearly was an attempt to mislead customers, and here, contextual knowledge probably was the only means to critically assess the trustworthiness of the image.19

234  |  The Image in Early Cinema Distinctions between different types of images or genres of views undoubtedly were much less evident at the time. Georges Sadoul mentions that in the 1902 Pathé catalog, a film depicting L’Assassinat du Duc de Guise, a historical event that took place in 1588, was classed among the Scènes politiques, historiques et d’actualité and immediately followed a film about President Loubet’s visit to Russia, which probably did consist of actuality footage. From a more general point of view, Sadoul takes these different modes of representation as elements that constitute the emerging cinematic language.20 Similarly, Stephen Bottomore states with regard to the reproduction of topical events that “it was the path from fake to fiction which was most significant for film history” because “fakes were a leading (possibly dominant) form of acted narrative film up to 1900.”21 But then, we should probably avoid the term “fake.” Given the generic proximity between political, historical, and topical scenes in the 1902 Pathé catalog, the difference between staged and actuality footage apparently was not pertinent. In fact, what producers around 1900 called “reproductions” might be seen as the equivalent of today’s films that are promoted as being “based on a true story” or “inspired by true events.” Rather, images could become fakes when staged or unrelated scenes were presented as actual records of a specific event. Even though producers may sometimes have been dishonest, it seems that exhibition is the more relevant site to investigate. When is a fake image? When someone somewhere cheats. But an image is an image is an image. Frank Kessler is Professor of Media History at Utrecht University and Director of Utrecht University’s Research Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON). He is author of Mise en scène, and co-editor or Networks of Entertainment. Early Film Distribution 1895–1915. Sabine Lenk is a film archivist, media historian, and affiliated researcher at Utrecht University. She is author of Vom Tanzsaal zum Filmtheater. Eine Kinogeschichte Düsseldorfs.

Notes 1. Boleslas Matuszewski, “A New Source of History” [1898], Film History 7, no. 3 (1995): 323. 2. Matuszewski’s text is by no means an early example of what one might call the “indexical fallacy” or the “Bazinian fallacy,” even though the French critic’s conception of the ontology of the photographic image is much more complex and must not be reduced to indexicality, as Tom Gunning has convincingly demonstrated. See Tom Gunning, “Moving Away from the Index: Cinema and the Impression of Reality,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 18, no. 1 (2007): 29–52.

What is a Fake Image?  |  235 3. See Frank Kessler, “‘Fake’ in Early Non-Fiction,” KINtop. Jahrbuch zur Erforschung des frühen Films, 14–15 (2006): 87–93. 4. See Dirk Eitzen, “When Is a Documentary? Documentary as a Mode of Reception,” Cinema Journal, 35, no. 1 (1995): 81–102. 5. See Georges Sadoul, Histoire générale du cinéma 2. Les pionniers du cinéma (de Méliès à Pathé) 1897–1909 (Paris: Denoël, 1978), 212–213. See also Jacques Deslandes and Jean Richard, Histoire comparée du cinéma 2. Du cinématographe au cinéma 1896–1906 (Tournai: Casterman, 1968), 453–462. In the Blue Book of “Warwick” and “Star” Selected Film Subjects (London 1902), 138, the film is announced as “A Representation of a Rehearsal of The Coronation of Their Majesties King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra. Produced under the direction of Messrs. C. Urban, London, and G. Méliès, Paris.” In terms of audiences’ visual literacy, one can observe that the possibilities of manipulating photographs were widely known and even seen as an amusement for amateur photographers. See, for instance, L. de Saint-Fégor, “Amusements photographiques,” L’Illustration 3110 (October 4, 1902): 267. 6. Document available as a PDF file at https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers -lib/24603/, the Russo-Japanese war brochure is preceded by another one presenting a passion play. The item is dated 1903–1904, the latter date being presumably the one for the Russo-Japanese war film. 7. Ibid. For the various practices linked to reporting on wars around 1900, see Stephen Bottomore, Filming, Faking and Propaganda: The Origins of the War Film, 1897–1902 (PhD diss., Utrecht University, 2007, http://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/22650). 8. Nico de Klerk, “A Case of Reframing,” in id., Showing and Telling: Film Heritage Institutes and Their Performance of Public Accountability (PhD diss., Utrecht University, 2015), 32–39. We would like to thank Nico de Klerk for sharing his work with us before the thesis was submitted. 9. The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News (March 27, 1897), quoted in: Richard Brown and Barry Anthony, A Victorian Enterprise: The History of the British Mutoscope and Biograph Company, 1897–1915 (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 1999), 45. 10. Bottomore, Filming, Faking and Propaganda, ch. 5, 2. 11. Haagsche Courant (March 20, 1899). 12. The case is described and discussed by Terry Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights: A History of the Motion Picture through 1926 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1926, facsimile reprint New York: Touchstone, 1986), 366–374, and by Sadoul, Histoire générale du cinéma 2, 31–35 (largely based on Ramsay). For a general discussion of passion plays, including this case, see Charles Musser, “Passions and the Passion Play: Theatre, Film and Religion in America 1880–1900,” Film History 5, no. 4 (1993): 419–456. 13. The New York Herald (February 1, 1898). The article is reproduced in Ramsay, A Million and One Nights, 373–374. 14. Sadoul, Histoire générale du cinéma 2, 200. See also Sabine Lenk, “Der Aktualitätenfilm vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg in Frankreich,” KINtop. Jahrbuch zur Erforschung des frühen Films 6 (1997): 51–66. 15. See Stephen Bottomore, “’Zischen und Murren.’ Die Dreyfus-Affäre und das frühe Kino,” KINtop. Jahrbuch zur Erforschung des frühen Films 2 (1993): 69–83. The anecdote is discussed on page 71. According to his own account, Doublier discontinued this practice only when someone remarked that the events he referred to had taken place in 1894, thus before the invention of the Cinématographe. Again, the spectator in question had to refer

236  |  The Image in Early Cinema to contextual information in order to unmask Doublier’s attempt to fool the audience. See Francis Doublier, “Reminiscences of an Early Motion Picture Operator,” in “Image”: On the Art and Evolution of the Film, ed. Marshall Deutelbaum (New York: Dover, 1979), 23. Originally published in Image 5, no. 6 (June 1956). 16. “Fake and ‘Frisco—Ominous Facts,” Cinematography & Bioscope Magazine 3 (1906): 37–41. This article is discussed in Kessler, “Fake in Early Non-fiction.” 17. See the annotated reprint of the German translation originally published in Frankfurter Zeitung und Handelsblatt (June 8, 1900), “Delia im Kinematographen und der Burenkrieg. Ein Text zur Wahrnehmung des Films um 1900. Mit einer Vorbemerkung und Annotationen von Roland Cosandey,” KINtop. Jahrbuch zur Erforschung des frühen Films 6 (1997): 11–27. The French original “Devant le cinématographe” appeared in L’Illustration (February 24, 1900): 122–123. 18. Bottomore, Filming, Faking and Propaganda, ch. 2, 12. 19. To some extent at least, the venue where a film was shown may have had an impact on the way the truth-value of a film was assessed by the audience. The context of the projection (information, entertainment, education, etc.) makes audiences expect a certain type of discourse and thus has an influence on the way the images are perceived. 20. Sadoul, Histoire générale du cinéma 2, 198. 21. Bottomore, Filming, Faking and Propaganda, ch. 14, 9.

22

The Lantern Image between Stage and Screen Artemis Willis

This essay explores a particular phenomenon I am calling “the lantern image

between stage and screen.” Stage in this context refers to the legitimate stage, and screen to motion pictures. By lantern image I mean the projected lantern slide—the image in a magic lantern performance. But what is meant by the phrase “lantern image between stage and screen”? It could describe a number of phenomena, or “betweens”: it could refer to a chronological between, which situates a certain set of lantern practices along a timeline, occurring after those in the theater and before those in the cinema; it might describe an intermedial condition, a concept introduced by André Gaudreault, in which the lantern commingled or corresponded with stage, screen, and other forms1—its place among what Ian Christie has called “an ensemble of visual media”2—or it could indicate a hybrid practice, which combined actors with lantern slides and motion pictures, as in the types of early multimedia performance Gwendolyn Waltz has discussed.3 In this essay, it actually concerns a specific kind of lantern image, for not every lantern image fits the bill. The “lantern image between stage and screen” is an image from a lantern version of a narrative that also existed in the theater and the cinema, such as the stage and screen productions of Ben-Hur and Uncle Tom’s Cabin from the turn of the last century4 (fig. 22.1). This specific lantern image is, mysteriously, often excluded in discussions of stage, screen, and stage-to-screen. Scholars who work on particular texts that were adapted for the theater and the cinema, including Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben-Hur, have a tendency to consider lantern versions beyond the purview of their study.5 According to this logic, lantern versions are either associated with marginal activity around major productions, akin to parlor tableaux and spin-offs, as in the Duncan Sisters’ musical comedy Topsy and Eva, or they are deemed too fragmentary, like highlights and burlesques, such as the High Rollers Extravaganza Company’s imaginative show Bend Her.6 The lantern versions I am looking at, however, were faithful adaptations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben-Hur.7 The readings and slides were conceived scene-by-scene and image-by-image as complete narratives. Moreover, these

238  |  The Image in Early Cinema

Fig. 22.1 “The Winning Chariot,” Ben-Hur (Joseph Boggs Beale, 1894). Courtesy the Borton Collection.

lantern versions were mass-produced for mass consumption. That is, they were distributed by the major international outfits and performed for audiences in public spaces, often for decades. As minor as they may seem to us today, 120 years ago they were major enough to be considered instances of copyright infringement. In 1896, for example, Harper & Brothers succeeded in issuing a restraining order to the Riley Brothers firm of Bradford, England, preventing them from marketing the printed lecture accompanying their seventy-two-slide “Stereopticon Illustrator of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ” in the United States. Harpers considered the Riley version—issued in 1895 and registered with the Library of Congress in 1896—to be a dramatic representation, and thus viewed it as a commercial threat to the international Ben-Hur market.8 As such, it was

The Lantern Image between Stage and Screen  |  239 a notable harbinger of the landmark case Harper Bros. et al. v. Kalem Co. et al., which ultimately decided Kalem’s 1907 film version of Ben-Hur was an infringement.9 So these lantern versions were not necessarily as marginal or fragmentary as some have assumed. But they were ephemeral, which may explain why there has not been an adequate account of them. Following the work of Christie and others, I am suggesting we take this ephemeral form seriously.10 In doing so, I am also attempting to come to grips with the lantern form itself by way of the lantern image between stage and screen. Stage plays, motion pictures, and lantern shows are all dramatic forms, but their expression differs. My interest here is in exploring these differences. By examining these particular lantern images, I hope to begin to identify what we might think of as a “lantern specificity.” However, I must quickly add that my exploration is not a Laocöon, a Lessing-esque purist approach to the lantern medium11— I am more inclined to consider the lantern form as gloriously impure—but an inquiry into the aesthetic language of the lantern. In what follows, I will advance a preliminary system for mapping lantern images, and then offer a brief discussion of their formal qualities in relation to stage plays and motion pictures. In doing so, I hope to identify some features of the lantern image that more actively engage the lantern in discussions of stage and screen.

Mapping the Lantern Image While lantern slides could be exhibited in a variety of ways, they were typically produced with particular kinds of lantern performances in mind, such as stories, comedies, songs, and lectures. As a result, lantern images often possess a dominant mode of discourse or address. In order to map the lantern image’s modes of address, I offer two examples that illustrate the range from showing to telling.12 The first is a pictorial reconstruction of a scene from The World Finder, a “Spectatario” recreating in several acts Christopher Columbus’s celebrated voyage to the Americas, from his negotiations with the Spanish throne to his planting of the Spanish standard in the sands of the New World.13 A life-sized replica of the Santa Maria was to sail on a stage of water six feet deep, which could be transformed from a calm sea into a tempest by sophisticated wave, rain, and cyclone machinery, while an arsenal of electric lighting effects could depict lightning, fog, haze, and the entire passage from day to night, including the gradual appearance of the stars in the southern hemisphere, meteor showers, and the shimmering lights of the aurora borealis. Twenty-five telescopic stages, traveling on six miles of railroad track, could be sequenced and moved in such a way as to show Spain disappearing on the horizon or the island of Hispaniola (Haiti) coming into view. This production, which was to inaugurate Steele MacKaye’s ill-fated Spectatorium (planned but not realized for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago), aimed to “illustrate the noblest dramatic conflicts of

240  |  The Image in Early Cinema history” through a series of mute (i.e., not described by a narrator), colossal stage pictures, the frame of which measured 150 by 70 feet.14 As such, it represents a kind of limit case for the showing mode of address. The second example, which represents telling, the other end of the spectrum, is a lantern slide from Byron’s Gigantic Illuminated Pictures. Between 1901 and 1903, Joseph Byron’s photographs from stage productions such as William A. Brady’s Way Down East inspired a novel presentation of “the biggest displays ever attempted.”15 Indeed, Byron’s lantern slides were thrown onto a screen that filled the entire proscenium opening. In these presentations, multiple scenes from “the leading successes of the New York Theatres” were displayed, while an “orator” named Mr. George Turner described the productions, recounted the story of each play, and delivered some of the dialogue. In one particular presentation, a series of four programs, Turner described nearly one thousand scenes from such productions as The Darling of the Gods, The Sign of the Cross, Sherlock Holmes, and Foxy Grandpa.16 Byron’s Gigantic Illuminated Pictures was primarily expository; the images were designed to give audiences “a very fair idea of many of the successful plays” of the season.17 Thus its dominant mode of address was telling. This horizontal axis is helpful in exploring the expressive range of the lantern image, for most lantern images fall somewhere along the continuum of showing and telling. However, in addition to the lantern image’s mode of address, we need to account for its mode of representation. In the case of Byron’s Gigantic Illuminated Pictures, we can immediately identify their documentary value. The Byron Company, which specialized in flashlight stage pictures of Broadway productions from the 1890s to the 1910s, was regularly engaged to document such productions as Resurrection, Madam Butterfly, and Ben-Hur, and they often produced fifteen to thirty views of a given show, providing an invaluable record of the mise-en-scène. Lantern images in the presentation of Way Down East were reproduced from Byron’s photographs of Brady’s production, which began its run of forty-eight performances December 14, 1903, at New York’s Academy of Music, East 14th Street and Irving Place. According to David Mayer, D. W. Griffith used the Byron’s images as a memory aid to replicate character groupings for his film version of Way Down East.18 This image from Byron’s Gigantic Illuminated Pictures, therefore, also represents one end of a vertical axis: document. Conveniently, The World Finder also represents the other pole, that of performance. MacKaye’s production was entirely conceived as a performance in pictures; there were no spoken or sung lines. Instead, the production included a cast of actors who were trained in a special “pantomimic school” to express themselves through natural, physical action within each tableau.19 There was also a musical score composed and performed in support of the epic structure. Thus, every element of the production supported a dominantly pictorial form of dramaturgy, or “the creative art of the stage picture itself.”20

The Lantern Image between Stage and Screen  |  241

Performing the Lantern Image With a means to map lantern images for their emphasis on showing, telling, document, and performance, we can now turn to a lantern performance to think about its relation to stage and screen: a lantern version of Ben-Hur featuring twenty-four slides by Joseph Boggs Beale, performed by Terry Borton and Nancy Stewart on November 11, 2008. The first image of the three wise men fades in, and soft piano accompaniment begins. The narration commences with a short prologue of the promise of a new Jewish king. The image dissolves to a wide view of Jerusalem, which transitions to an image of two boys playing, as the narration describes the friendship between Judah Ben-Hur and Messala, his young Roman rival, and then shifts to a dialogue between them. While the narrator voices BenHur’s interior monologue about the future of his people, the image dissolves to a scene of the desert, which dissolves back to the image of Ben-Hur and Messala, and fades to black. As the next image fades in, we see the fateful scene in which Ben-Hur accidentally dislodges a loose tile from the roof of the Jerusalem house of Hur, which strikes the Roman governor during a military parade. The music intensifies as the narration describes what happened before, during, and after the scene, which transitions to a view of Ben-Hur and his family as they are banished to slavery and prison. The music shifts to a hymnal theme as an image of Jesus offering Ben-Hur a pitcher of water fades in, dissolves to a close-up of Jesus, and fades to black. In silence, the next sequence begins with a fade-in to an image of Ben-Hur rowing with fellow slaves in the Roman galley. The first feature we might note about this lantern sequence is that it is a screen entertainment that is primarily based on the lantern image. It privileges the projected picture and performs it through voice, music, and projection itself. By extension, we can see how much lantern practice performs the image, particularly in terms of onscreen duration of the projected images, transitions between them, repeated images, superimpositions, and so on. With our eye attuned to the screen, we can perceive the production of narrative taking place around the images, with the form emerging in the process.21 Thus I would locate Ben-Hur in the quadrant of the map where showing and performance are the dominants (fig. 22.2). A second observation is the flexible duration of the form, or the consolidation and expansion of the narrative. This particular version told Ben-Hur in thirteen minutes, versus the 194 minutes of the 1925 Fred Niblo version and the 212 minutes of the 1959 William Wyler version—a length that almost makes the peculiarities of the story tolerable but also extremely variable: image after image can be performed for as long or as short as the situation requires.22 Lantern narratives, with their capacity for consolidation-expansion, are akin to the bellows of an accordion, wherein the same story can be told in thirteen minutes or forty-five minutes, depending on the combined whims of the lanternist and the audience.

242  |  The Image in Early Cinema

Fig. 22.2 Mapping the lantern image. Illustration by Megan Montague Cash.

A third observation: the lantern image between stage and screen relies heavily on known moments. It can’t be reduced to a homogenous system because it is always constructed through a variety of media, each of which has its own set of associations, including those from the legitimate stage and the screen.23

The Lantern Image between Stage/Screen Debates What role might the lantern image between stage and screen play in stage-screen discussions? The stage/screen debate, as Gregory Waller has shown, extends back to at least 1908.24 In his 1983 study, Waller organizes a range of factions and positions within a framework of “popular aesthetics”: superiority of the theater, superiority of the cinema, theater and cinema purists, the alliance of film and theater (as in film d’art), and the affinity of film and theater (linked by m ­ elodrama, pantomime).

The Lantern Image between Stage and Screen  |  243 Significantly, this last category includes ­considerations of “the historical continuity of the stage and screen and the effect of film on theater and vice versa”—a question that has, of course, become central to more recent stage/screen debates.25 Some consider the relationship between stage and screen to consist of seamless transferences from late nineteenth-century theater to cinema. Others assert that film changed every aspect of its theatrical legacy. The debates revolve around Vardac’s 1949 Stage to Screen, which claimed that stage melodrama’s pictorial-realist aspirations—the Spectatorium, for example—were realized by the cinema. Yuri Tsivian’s work in this field questions the idea of a historical continuum between stage and screen. There is, for instance, a glaringly obvious fact: notwithstanding the spectacular nature of stage melodrama, theater is a primarily verbal form, whereas silent cinema is primarily a visual one, and this difference colors all elements of screen adaptation. Tsivian’s approach is a nuanced exploration into the nature of the forms, which asks the generative question “What can they do on film that they cannot do on stage?”26 In keeping with this line of inquiry, I want to ask “What can they do with the lantern that they can’t do in the theater or cinema?” Let us take a look at Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The Brady stage version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was presented at the Academy Theater, a house ideally suited for a show featuring hundreds of performers on stage at the same time and a variety of special effects. The proscenium opening was forty-four feet wide by forty feet tall, the stage extended sixty-six feet from the edge of the apron to the back wall, the stage house was seventy feet high with fourteen feet beneath it, six traps, and thirty-six feet at the first four wing entrances and seventy-six feet at the fifth and sixth. Thus the production featured a liberal use of spectacle—sensation scenes such as Eliza’s escape across the ice—and sophisticated mise-en-scène, as in a spectacular set of the St. Claire mansion. However, the stage picture varied greatly from different seats in the house. Moreover, the scale in the theater is always homogenous, with the human figure being the consistent unit of measure throughout the representation. Thus the presentation of a small and intimate scene must be played within the vastness of the stage space. Edwin S. Porter’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, on the other hand, was able to represent things in any scale it wanted. The screen is free from constraints of scale imposed by the human figure. Moreover, the relation of the figures to one another on the screen is the same for the entire film audience. However, the cinema, being the medium of motion par excellence, is not well suited for the presentation of tableaux, the main pictorial-dramaturgical unit in a range of melodramas with stage, screen, and lantern versions, from the abolitionist and toga melodramas I have been examining to temperance melodramas, fireman melodramas, and so on. The narrative richness of tableaux, I would suggest, is impoverished by the temporal limitations of motion pictures. It seems they are always too fleetingly

244  |  The Image in Early Cinema short or too tediously long, which is probably why the tableau ultimately had to be transformed by such devices as the close-up.27 The lantern form solves both logistical problems of viewing positions and tableaux narrative. In a lantern version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin from 1882, again illustrated by Joseph Boggs Beale, the spectators share the same view of the screen (it is still a two-dimensional affair), and the tableaux are not bound by any temporal restrictions. That is, they can be performed for any length of time. However, unlike motion pictures, lantern images can’t live without performance, and unlike stage melodramas, lantern versions do not typically begin in media res: the Beale lantern version of Ben-Hur commences with introductory remarks about the book, followed by five scenes concerning the three wise men before introducing Ben-Hur and Messala; the Klaw and Erlanger play opens with a brief pantomimic prelude of the wise men in the desert, which culminates in the illumination of the entire sky, after which the gauze drop descends and Act 1 begins on the Roof of the Palace of Hur; the Kalem film begins on the Housetop of the Palace of Hur. In order to have the flexible length I have identified, lantern versions must be adapting a familiar story. In this respect, they truly rely on associations with other forms. Given their reliance on the major forms of the novel, play, and film and their formal influence on early cinema tableaux, am I suggesting that lantern images facilitated the transition from stage pictures to motion pictures? No. The lantern is both a translator of other media and a medium in its own right, with stylistics, codes, and a language of its own. In fact, lantern specificity might ultimately be defined as expressive heterogeneity. Artemis Willis is a doctoral candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago.

Notes Thanks to Terry Borton and Kentwood Wells for generously sharing their collections and knowledge of Beale and Byron slides; to Megan Montague Cash for her elegant design of the lantern image map; and to the University of Chicago’s workshop in Theater & Performance Studies for invaluable feedback on an earlier draft of this paper. 1. See André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, “The Cinema as a Model for the Genealogy of Media,” Convergence 8, no. 2 (2002): 12–18. 2. Ian Christie, “Moving-Picture Media and Modernity; Taking Intermediate and Ephemeral Forms Seriously,” Comparative Critical Studies 6, no. 3 (2009): 299–318. 3. Gwendolyn Waltz’s research on early multimedia performance has focused on three uses of film projection on stage: as scenery behind actors, as alternating stage and film scenes, and as interaction between live and filmed performers. See “Embracing Technology:

The Lantern Image between Stage and Screen  |  245 A Primer of Early Multi-Media Performance,” in La decima musa: Il cinema e le altre arti/ The Tenth Muse: Cinema and Other Arts, ed. Leonardo Quaresima and Laura Vichi (Udine: Forum, 2001), 543–553, and “Filmed Scenery on the Live Stage,” Theatre Journal 58, no. 4 (2006): 547–573. 4. Klaw and Erlanger’s stage production of Ben-Hur opened at the Broadway Theater on November 29, 1899; Kalem’s film of Ben-Hur was released on December 7, 1907; William A. Brady’s revival of Uncle Tom’s Cabin opened at the Academy of Music on April 4, 1901; and Edwin S. Porter’s film of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was released in September 1903. 5. See, for instance, John W. Frick, Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the American Stage and Screen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), xiii–xiv. Since this paper was given in 2014, Jon Solomon has published a comprehensive study of the “Ben-Hur phenomenon,” which includes a detailed description of Ben-Hur “stereopticon slide sets.” See Ben-Hur: The Original Blockbuster (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2016), 512–534. 6. The Duncan Sisters’ musical comedy Topsy and Eva enjoyed a successful Broadway run at the Sam H. Harris Theatre from December 1924 to May 1925. A silent film version directed by Del Lord (with contributions from D. W. Griffith) was released by United Artists in 1927. For a reproduction of the High Rollers Bend Her poster, see Robert C. Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 206. 7. The lantern versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben-Hur that I am discussing were designed by Joseph Boggs Beale. See Terry Borton and Deborah Borton, Before the Movies: American Magic-Lantern Entertainment and the Nation’s First Great Screen Artist, Joseph Boggs Beale (New Barnet, Hertz, UK: John Libbey Publishing, 2014). 8. The Optical Magic Lantern Journal announced the Harper Bros. action against Riley in June 1896 and reported on its conclusion in “Wallace and others v. Riley Brothers, New York,” The Optical Magic Lantern Journal 7, no. 89 (October 1896): 166–167. For a detailed account of the case, see David Henry, “Ben-Hur: Francis Fredric Theophilus Weeks and Patent No. 8615 of 1894,” New Magic Lantern Journal 5, no. 1 (1987): 2–5. 9. See Ted Hovet Jr., “The Case of Kalem’s Ben-Hur (1907) and the Transformation of Cinema,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 18, no. 3 (2001): 283–294. 10. Christie, “Moving-Picture Media,” 303. 11. Gotthold Lessing, Laocöon: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Ellen Frothingham, 1766. (Reprint, New York: Dover, 2005). 12. See André Gaudreault, “Showing and Telling: Image and Word in Early Cinema,” in Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker, eds., Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (London: BFI Publishing, 1990), 274–281. Gaudreault’s well-known discussion of monstration and narration as opposing modes of narrative communication is extremely useful in terms of understanding early cinema. However, material difference changes the argument; with lantern images, the showing and telling modes are not in opposition but exist along a continuum. 13. For an illuminating history of Steele MacKaye’s Spectatarium, see J. A. Sokalski, Pictorial Illusionism: The Theatre of Steele MacKaye (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), especially 179–254. 14. Percy MacKaye, “Steele MacKaye, Dynamic Artist of the American Theatre,” The Drama: A Quarterly Review of Dramatic Literature no. 4 (November 1911): 170. 15. Grace M. Mayer, Once Upon a City (New York: Macmillian, 1958), 233. 16. See Kentwood D. Wells, “Byron’s Gigantic Illuminated Stage Pictures,” The Magic Lantern Gazette 26, no. 2–3 (2014): 3–27, especially 5–13.

246  |  The Image in Early Cinema 17. Hartford Courant, (May 28, 1903): 7, quoted in Wells, 5. 18. David Mayer, Stagestruck Filmmaker: D. W. Griffith and the American Theatre (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009), 194. 19. A. Nicholas Vardac, Stage to Screen: Theatrical Method from Garrick to Griffith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949), 149. 20. MacKaye quoted in Vardac, Stage to Screen, 140. 21. Cf. Joe Kember, Marketing Modernity: Victorian Popular Shows and Early Cinema (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2009), 206–7. In his discussion of the Riley and Kalem cases, Kember asserts that the projected slides, unlike the film, were not considered an infringement, because the lantern images in themselves were neutral and nonnarrative. 22. See Borton and Borton, Before the Movies, 111. The Beale slide set of Ben-Hur (1894–5) provided the narrative in twenty-four images:1. Balthazar in the desert awaiting Wise Men; 2. Wise Men Relating Histories; 3. Joppa Gate; 4. Wise Men conferring with Herod; 5. Adoration of the Wise Men; 6. Ben Hur and Messala; 7. Ben Hur and his Mother; 8. The Tile Falling from the Roof; 9. Jesus gives Ben Hur to drink; 10. Ben Hur before Arrius on the Galley; 11. Ben Hur Saves Arrius in the Sea Fight; 12. Ben Hur’s First Visit to Simonides; 13. Ben Hur checks Messala’s Steeds; 14. The Gambling Party, A Roman Orgie; 15. Ben Hur and Isis on the Lake;16. Ben Hur training the Arabs; 17. Chariot race—Overthrow; 18. The Wrestling Scene in the Palace; 19. Tirzah and her mother in the Dungeon; 20. Ben Hur Views Jerusalem; 21. Ben Hur Discovered by his Mother; 22. Amrah giving Food to her Mistress; 23. Ben Hur Finds his Mother, and 24. Ben Hur and Esther. Additional slides included: Ben Hur at the Oar; Circus Maximus; The Winning Chariot; St. John and his disciples see Jesus; “Ecce Homo!” (Behold the Man!); Arrius Going to Sea; Three magi on camels; The Magi arrive at Jerusalem; River Jordan, Christmas Night and The New Born King. Parts of the set were also offered under the heading Jewish Life and The Tribe of Ben Hur, a “Secret Society” set for a fraternal organization of the same name. 23. Audience familiarity with the narratives of lantern slide sets was assumed, as it was with early films, which relied on audience’s preexisting knowledge. See Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (New York: Scribner, 1990), 2, and Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 243–244. 24. See Gregory A.Waller, The Stage/Screen Debate: A Study in Popular Aesthetics (New York: Garland, 1983). 25. Waller, Stage/Screen Debate, 172. 26. Yuri Tsivian, “What Can We Do in Films that They Cannot on Stage? Film Style and Medium Specificity in the Cinema of the 1910s,” Theater and Film Studies 1 (March, 2009): 3–50. 27. See Benjamin Robert Brewster and Lea Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), especially ch. 2, “The Fate of the Tableau in the Cinema.”

Part IV: Discourses

23

Pictorialism and the Picture: Art, Photography, and the “Doctrine of Taste” in the Discourse on Transitional-Era Quality Films Tom Paulus

I

n the film trade journals of the transitional era, the concern with the artistic qualities of the moving picture initially appeared as a craft-related suggestion to the industry to concentrate its efforts more on outdoor shooting and not just on topical subjects. Although the suggestion was first made in light of a general call for more “lifelike” (i.e., less “stage-bound”) pictures—in which verisimilitude was seen to correlate with greater photographic depth and sharpness, realistically motivated lighting sources, and more natural groupings—by early 1909, it increasingly began to address the painterly potential of the outdoor setting. For instance, in his series for Moving Picture World, “The Modern Way in Moving Picture Making,” drama critic and photographic expert Thomas Bedding weighed the advantages of open-­ air shooting by drawing a comparison to pictorial photography: “Pictorial photography of the stationary kind is best done en plein air, as photographers know, and the same rule should hold good with regard to moving pictures.”1 Two months later, Essanay co-founder George Spoor was quoted by Bedding (writing as “Lux Graphicus”) on the future of the moving picture: “Says Spoor: ‘I thoroughly believe that what the other camera has done and will do, can be duplicated by the moving picture camera.’ Well, ‘the other camera,’ that is, the stationary camera, produces pictorial photographs. . . . Pictorial photography, in fact, has been admitted to an equality with the older graphic arts. . . . We shall go to nature for our inspiration.”2 Essanay’s other parent, Gilbert Anderson, had recently done just that, capturing the rugged landscapes of Golden, Colorado, as a picturesque backdrop for a number of the company’s Westerns. A Tale of the West, released in April 1909, for instance, was praised for its “unusually good” setting: “The scenery pictorially is unsurpassed by anything the Essanay people have done.”3 In France, the association between pictorialism and open-air shooting had already been firmly established. Gaumont researcher Bernard Bastide goes over

250  |  The Image in Early Cinema the genesis of Louis Feuillade’s series of “vues cinématographiques artistiques,” Les Heures (February 1909), during a train trip back to Paris from Basque country, citing a letter to the director’s journalist friend Jean Piermay: “Delighted with my explorations my nervous state kept me awake. I thus watched the sun rise in the Landes forest. The colors were like something out of a fairy play. Then I admired the qualities of the countryside at different times of the day. By turns, Dawn, Morning, Noon and Twilight each appeared to me in its particular beauty, and suddenly, near Orléans, I had the idea of putting together a film that I will call Les Heures in which I will depict all that, God willing.”4 Feuillade’s film presents itself as a true plein air nature study. But lest we confuse the director’s intent with pure veracity, we should take a look at the last line of his missive: “Tomorrow morning at ten o’clock we are going to see Corot’s paintings at the Louvre, and afterwards work.” Like Feuillade, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot wanted to capture “the qualities of the countryside at different times of the day” in a manner both truthful and aesthetically pleasing. In Corot’s paintings of the forests of Fontainebleau, the realism of the Barbizon school (Jean-François Millet, Théodore Rousseau) met with the neoclassical ideals of his greatest inspiration, academic landscape painter Claude Lorrain. Corot’s art, I argue, embodies a tension between the actual and the ideal (that we also find in the Romantic painting of Constable and Turner and in the American Hudson River School) that is central to the tenets of early pictorialist photography and the discourse on the quality picture during the transitional era. As we shall see, the academicist standard promoted both by Feuillade and company and the tastemakers of the American film trade journals entailed a conservative discourse on standards of taste that negates cinema’s proposed democratic ideal. Some of Corot’s most popular effects were sunset pieces or moonlight views that influenced not only Feuillade’s film but—through the wide circulation of Romantic motifs—became a staple of view painting and picturesque scenery produced for the tourist trade as either daguerreotype, stereoscope, or lantern slide in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They also became a standard part of the scenic travel film, which can be seen as the cinematic equivalent to the tourist guidebooks that were pouring off the presses in the mid-nineteenth century, and all presented natural scenery as pictures. In May 1909, Moving Picture World printed an admiring review of a Gaumont scenic that extolled that “moving pictures of very high pictorial quality may be and are produced”: This is a lovely picture called the “Glories of Sunset.” The photographer who made the exposure knew what he was about. For, though he is dealing with inanimate nature, he tells a very beautiful story indeed and he tells it pictorially: that is, in a series of well-composed, well-chosen and well-photographed scenes. First of all we have the effect of twilight almost

Pictorialism and the Picture  |  251 sensuously shown. One seems to feel indeed, in the words of the poet, “the shades of night are falling fast.” Then we see the setting of the sun; next the last of his rays, and finally the picture ends by showing the sea bathed in moonlight. Precisely how these effects are made it is not necessary for us to specify. What we are concerned with are the results, and certainly this film is a very beautiful nature study, appropriately toned, no doubt, in development, and conveying to the spectator all the delightful impressions of the actual phenomena of sunset.5

While “nature study” can be seen as no more than a synonym for the travelogue or scenic, as Jennifer Lynn Peterson has pointed out,6 the review makes clear that the term also refers to the pictorial inspiration behind the achievement of an authentic effect: composition and appropriate toning (boosting the more nuanced natural effect of the “coloris” observed by Feuillade in nature) are what make the actual delightful, aesthetically pleasing. Again, the principle that a nature study comes together not on site but in the study is exemplified by the art of Corot: while sketching en plein air, the painter always returned to the studio and tried to reconcile his direct visual experience with the “payages classiques,” the pictorially balanced and idealized landscapes, with carefully graded and modulated colors of Claude and Poussin. The Claudian schema was the primary mise en scène of the French, Italian, and American scenic, or travelogues, as is shown by Peterson and Giorgio Bertellini.7 In Claude, the spatial program is intimately tied to the idyllic pastoral scene, and it is in pastoral stories that the “view aesthetic” of the scenic was most easily integrated. Bertellini cites environmental scholar Christine L. Oravec on the theatrical constitution of the visual schema, the compositional principle, as follows: “The foreground bordered the edge of the frame, prosceniumlike, and was represented by a large tree or a side of a cliff, called a coulisse. The middle ground was illuminated and often contained a human or animal figure, a river, or a ruin to lead the viewer’s eye into the scene. Finally, the background of the landscape led to the horizon, framed by the objects in the foreground.”8 Jean Mottet has memorably summarized the schema’s standardized use in Griffith’s Biograph films,9 and pastoral subjects from other companies, such as Edison’s Little Shepherd of Tumbling Run (May1909), also featuring a striking moonlit view, were also seen to comply with the “principal canons of pictorialism.”10 As Scott Simmon has shown, the pastoral was the central spatial conceit in early “Eastern” Westerns,11 a fact proven by the identification of a “faithful rendition of a waterfall” in the Selig Western The Freebooters (September 1909) as one in “a series of . . . picturesque views.”12 The pastoral was also the most popular mode of the British school of pictorialist photography. There was Peter Henry Emerson, whose Millet-like photographs seem to be the point of reference in a piece entitled “Pictorialism and the Picture,” on the Biograph pastoral A Summer Idyll (September 1910): “Around

252  |  The Image in Early Cinema us as we write this article are a number of photographs; . . . upon one photograph in particular we never tire of gazing. We mean a simple plowing scene, and in this Biograph picture we have a similar theme pictorially treated.”13 But the pastoral mode was most prominent in the work of Henry Peach Robinson, who idealized not just the country setting but domestic rural life by referring to the classical genre painting of the Dutch school. The idealized rendering of nature as harmony and generalized order of form is at the heart of Robinson’s treaty on Pictorial Effect in Photography: Being Hints On Composition And Chiaroscuro For Photographers (1869), a book that went into four British and American editions and was also translated into French and German. Robinson’s aim was to show that photography, for all its expressive limitations in comparison to painting, could be more than merely a recording and documenting device. For Robinson, photography was not about taking a picture but about making it, arranging a subject for a maximum of pictorial effect. This was the rationale behind his highly contested combination printing technique, through which different images were combined to form an ideal, harmonious composition, often including posed figures and a painted backdrop. The academic standard proposed by Robinson gradually came to the fore in the trades as the discourse on authenticity started to wane. In “Pictorialism and the Picture,” the Moving Picture World’s columnist writes: “A photograph may be just a photograph: that is, a cartographical transcript of the original or, in simpler words, a mere map; or it may be a picture; that is to say, it complies with the definite laws of composition, balance, and all the rest of the elements that go to make up a picture of any kind. These are the elements that we desire to see in the moving picture.”14 The model for such picture-making—and for the accompanying “doctrine of quality”—was Robinson: “Many of our readers both in this country and abroad will recall the name of Mr. H. P. Robinson . . . whose work is still known in this country, whose books are sold, and whose influence is still felt. . . . Robinson was a man who sought to make pictures by photography, instead of merely photographs without any pictorial quality. Had Robinson been living now, he would have preached the gospel of pictorialism in the moving picture.”15 Robinson’s academicist theories look back to some of the founding texts of the eighteenth-century British discourse on the aesthetics of the picturesque, notably Royal Academy founder Joshua Reynolds, who famously noted that a “mere copier of nature” can never produce anything great; it is the “grandeur” of the ideas of the painter that “raise and enlarge the conception, or warm the heart of the spectator.”16 Another of Robinson’s sources is John Burnet, whose Treatise on Painting from 1837 is subtitled, “An Education of the Eye.” Burnet’s emphasis on learning echoes in Robinson’s observation that “only one with an educated eye of one familiar with the laws of the pictorial work can discover in nature those

Pictorialism and the Picture  |  253 accidental beauties.”17 This sounds like a classic defense of academicism, but by the time Burnet writes his other famous book, Turner and His Works (1852), his belief in the talents of the educated eye have been traded in for a more romantic conception of aesthetic perception. An observation such as “Nature unveils herself only to him who can penetrate her sacred haunts” is straight out of Hazlitt’s response to Reynolds, “On Genius and Common Sense” (1822). The discourse on genius and taste that is crucial to nineteenth-century British aesthetic theory (rooted in the “picturesque” debate of the 1790s) clearly shines through in the genteelism of a publication such as the Moving Picture World. It is perhaps best summarized in Louis Reeves Harrison’s column—in the same issue as the one on “Pictorialism and the Picture”—on La Fille de Jephté (July 1910), a late entry in the Gaumont series of “historical” films showing a distinct preference for biblical times and antiquity: Whoever selected the scenes of Jephthah’s Daughter has the esthetic faculty developed to an extraordinary degree. . . . It is a very noble tragedy . . . and it is handled in strict accordance with the philosophy of good taste. One scene after another of resplendent beauty is flashed upon the screen until it is filled to overflowing. There are so many, and they are so varied, gorgeous interiors, palaces, pavilions, streets, temples, exquisite lake vistas and flowering woodlands, that one deeply regrets the space limitations. It is an epicurean feast for anyone having a sense of the beautiful and it seemed to me that the crowning glory of the picture was the somber scene shown where the victim of a father’s hasty vow is being rowed back from the mountains where she has passed two months’ respite in prayer. In the distance is the sable mountain lifting its head against the dying sunlight, typifying the situation—the light of this young life is about to be extinguished—and in the foreground is the slowly moving boat bringing the victim. . . . I cannot, at this moment, recall any that surpass it in scenic loveliness and strict adherence to the doctrine of taste. . . . Jephthah’s Daughter is an important step in the evolution of the silent drama.18

Being a film critic who writes about motion pictures “from a fine-art standpoint,” Reeves Harrison attributes the film’s quality to its strict adherence to the doctrine of taste, a doctrine he would himself lay out in his groundbreaking treatise on the movies, Screencraft (1916). In the chapter on “Picture Composition,” he defines having a “picture eye” in the same way Henry Peach Robinson tied down the “faculty of artistic sight,” as determined just as much by aesthetic doctrine and convention as by Hazlitt’s individual genius.19 The point has often been made that the birth of the movie trade magazines coincided with the birth of the reform movement, and that the idea of cinema as an “educational” tool to uplift the masses was therefore logically propagated in reformist trades such as the Moving Picture World. I would like to elaborate on this by pointing to the uneasy relationship, within reformist discourse on the aesthetic

254  |  The Image in Early Cinema standard for motion pictures, with the genteel tradition of eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxon high culture. In conclusion, I offer a case in point. Writing in the April, 1909, issue of the Boston-based journal Photo-Era, the official organ of the American Federation of Photographic Societies, Carl H. Claudy somewhat softened the “Case Against the Moving-Picture” he had made in the previous month’s issue, in which he had held forth (in by now fairly predictable manner) against the “filth” he saw in the nickelodeons, both on the screen and in the audience. While holding to the position that movies primarily aim to “rouse the emotions and to draw a crowd” and that “their appeal is seldom, if ever, the appeal of beauty,” he granted that, all ideal conditions met, there were certain “pictorial possibilities”: as long as movie producers committed themselves to getting rid of all that is “ugly and cheap and common and untrue,” a new audience for pictures that held to a certain “doctrine of taste” could be reached.20 Sounding a lot like Robinson or Reeves Harrison, Claudy’s piece can also be seen as a typical instance of the reformist discourse in the trades of the time: in order to “uplift” the movies, it suffices for the exhibitor to clean up his act and give the public what they need: namely more pictorial, more beautiful, and more truthful pictures (in the Keatsian idealist coupling). Beauty in reformist discourse—inspired by another major classic of high Victorianism, Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869)—is seen as at once therapeutic, a calming device, and a means to instruct, a means of educating the classes and closing the class divide. But in Claudy, as in much of the trade discourse on pictorialism, the emphasis is less on the progressive language of uplift than on the doctrine of taste expressed by a cultural elite. This is the discourse of American genteelism. The genteelism of James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Edward T. Channing, and Ralph Waldo Emerson was based on their self-appointed role as the guardians of culture and taste, setting out to preserve a moral and aesthetic standard against the increasing materialism of working-class society. They saw themselves as American cultural gentry, the heritors and protectors of AngloSaxon high culture who remembered from Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy less that “culture seeks to do away with classes” than the thought that culture can solve moral infection. From German idealist philosophy they took the notion that mind was a power that could imaginatively reconstruct the world in alternative forms, creating beauty in art and heightening the sense of morality. They were appalled by the superficial vulgarity of literary naturalism and posited in terms familiar from Hazlitt’s Platonism that the greatest art does not record fact but penetrates through the material world and becomes a discovery of universal laws of aesthetic beauty, intellectual truth, and ethical rightness. By 1909, the culture of gentility was on the wane, but having given shape to the emerging middle-classes, its influence continued practically unabated. It can be read in Claudy’s doctrine of taste, in the reference to Longfellow in the Moving Picture

Pictorialism and the Picture  |  255 World’s review of Glories of Sunset, or in the elitist circumstances in which La Fille de Jephthé was first screened. The unveiling of La Fille de Jephthé was part of a special screening organized by its distributor, George Kleine, at the Press Club of Chicago. The screening was curated by Kleine representative Leroy T. Goble, a prominent member of the gentlemen’s club. “Mr. Goble selected his program with great care,” reported the newly minted Motography in one of its first issues, “in view of the somewhat sophisticated and intellectual nature of his audience.”21 On the program that evening were mainly scenic and scientific films, but there were also two other Gaumont films inspired by neoclassical painting: “Poems in Pictures” (Petits Poèmes Antiques) and “Spring” (Le Printemps). It was reported that “the scenic subjects all drew hearty ovations, especially those showing artistic ensemble.” The lyrical films were also enthusiastically received for their aesthetic value: “Jephthah’s Daughter, the only drama in the line-up, received considerable comment, and murmurs of appreciation; but it was a little piece of the pure scenery in the heart of the drama, a moonlight marine effect, that brought forth a spontaneous burst of applause.” There is nothing unusual about audiences applauding a film of high artistic and moral value, but the point is that for the Motography reporter, the evening was a pure display of the psychology of motion picture exhibition, the Kleine company showing “great perspicacity in the selection of subjects suitable for his distinct type of audience.” What I hope to have made clear is that democratization, the challenge to make high-quality films appealing to a broad and mixed audience, was perhaps a primary concern for the nascent industry but was not central to the new discourse on film aesthetics. What counted most was maintaining a genteel standard of taste, best expressed in the academic tenets of pictorialism. Tom Paulus teaches film history and film aesthetics at the University of Antwerp. He is editor with Rob King of Slapstick Comedy.

Notes 1. Thomas Bedding, “The Modern Way in Moving Picture Making,” Moving Picture World (MPW) (March 27, 1909): 360. 2. Thomas Bedding, “On The Screen,” MPW (June 19, 1909): 830. 3. “Comments of Film Subjects,” MPW (April 10, 1909): 442. 4. Bernard Bastide, “Les ‘séries d’art Gaumont: des ‘sujets de toute première classe,’” 1895 Mille huit cent quatre-vingt-quinze 56 (2008): 30. Les Heures was released in four parts: “L’aube, l’aurore,” Le matin, le jour,” “Le midi, la vesprée, le crepuscule,” and “Le soir, la nuit.”

256  |  The Image in Early Cinema 5. MPW (May 29, 1909): 709. 6. Jennifer Lynn Peterson, Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and Early Non-Fiction Films (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 81. 7. See Giorgio Bertellini, Italy in Early American Cinema: Race, Landscape, and the Picturesque (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 19–46. 8. Quoted in Bertellini, Italy in Early American Cinema, 31. 9. Jean Mottet, “Toward a Genealogy of the American Landscape: Notes on Landscapes in D. W. Griffith (1908–1912),” in Landscape and Film, ed. Martin Lefebvre (New York & London: Routledge, 2006), 61–91. 10. “Editorial,” MPW (May 22, 1909): 665. 11. Scott Simmon, The Invention of the Western Film: A Cultural History of the Genre’s First Half Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 12. MPW (September 25, 1909): 415. 13. “Pictorialism and the Picture,” MPW (September 10, 1910): 566–567. 14. Ibid. 15. “The Usual Thing,” MPW (October 1, 1910): 738. 16. Sir Joshua Reynolds, The Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds; Illustrated by Explanatory Notes & Plates by John Burnet (London: James Carpenter, 1842), 36–37. 17. Henry Peach Robinson, Pictorial Effect in Photography: Being Hints on Composition and Chiaroscuro for Photographers (London: Piper & Carter, 1869), 12. On Robinson’s relationship to Burnet, see David Lawrence Coleman, Pleasant Fictions: Henry Peach Robinson’s Composition Photography (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2005). 18. “An Esthetic Tragedy,” MPW (September 10, 1910): 568. 19. Louis Reeves Harrison, Screencraft (New York: Chalmers Publishing Company, 1916): 111–115. 20. C. H. Claudy, “Pictorial Possibilities in Motion Pictures” in Photo-Era, 12, no. 4 (April 1904): 171–176. 21. “Experiments in Educational Shows,”Motography (May 1911): 63.

24

Boredom and Visions in Vachel Lindsay’s Film Theory Ryan Pierson

V

achel Lindsay’s book of film theory, The Art of the Moving Picture, is divided into two parts. The first is a comparatively modest work of film criticism in an art-historical vein, essentially a typology of genres that analogizes each type to a plastic art (painting, sculpture, architecture, etc.), and based loosely on those analogies, makes some recommendations to filmmakers. The second part is more speculative, a commentary on the cultural significance of cinema more generally, and its conclusions are more evangelical and harder to make sense of, especially toward the end of the book. Architects become crusaders; filmmakers become prophet-wizards. And how does one take his closing statement that film will “go on and on in immemorial wonder”?1 Film scholarship has had difficulty putting these parts together. For the most part, historians and theorists have focused on Lindsay’s arguments about medium specificity, taking them as one sign of the arrival of the feature-length film as a middle-class art.2 Lindsay’s work is generally assumed to be eclipsed in importance by his contemporary, Hugo Münsterberg, and more noteworthy for its historical place than for its content.3 This chapter will try to recover The Art of the Moving Picture as a text more rich and coherent than it has been thought to be, by arguing that Lindsay does not celebrate what we recognize as the feature-length film at all but something almost wholly other to it. To articulate what this something is requires reading Lindsay through a different set of concerns: not the problem of defining a fine art in an age of industry and mass-culture attractions but the problem of boredom in an age of secular reasoning. This problem puts into relief a number of peculiarities about Lindsay’s theory: his analogies to the plastic arts, his remarks about spectatorship, and above all, his religious references and evangelical tenor. It threads together the book as a whole, from his pronouncements on basic aesthetic matters to his proclamations about the function of visionary artists in a technocratic society. By looking at how the problem of boredom links his aesthetics to his diagnosis of contemporaneous American

258  |  The Image in Early Cinema culture, it is possible to see that his aesthetic commitments are inseparable from a set of political commitments he has, and that both are more complex than they seem to be.

Trick Films and Boredom “A film that is all mechanical legerdemain” Lindsay writes, “is a nuisance.”4 He is referring here to the trick film, which had already passed out of favor by the time of his writing. He does not specifically call the trick film boring, but the point of his complaint is clear enough. Something inanimate appearing to move itself (as trick films often presented, by means of stop-motion photography) creates a burst of delight, but as the effect repeats itself—Lindsay’s example is the set of furniture that gets up and moves to a new home5—the delight is dulled away: “We are overwhelmed with a whole van of furniture.”6 He recommends that the trick can be put to better use with what he calls “fairy splendor,” or nursery rhymes and magical tales. The task of the filmmaker more generally, for Lindsay, is to get beyond the initial pleasure of seeing things move. This was a common criticism of films in the transitional era. Charlie Keil has noted that once the length of films increased in 1907 to a full reel, the attractions-­ based model of filmmaking was found wanting and the burgeoning trade press often complained about repetitive products.7 Donald Crafton has argued that the trick film, itself a relic of the attractions era, wore itself thin once audiences knew the mechanics behind the trick.8 The film industry’s solution was to turn to narrative. Relatively self-contained stories featuring clear cause-effect relations, characters with discernible motivations, and so on, enabled regular production of films according to reproducible formulas without feeling repetitive. They also helped cultivate a well-behaved and silently attentive spectator. This is, however, not exactly the solution that Lindsay suggests for the movies. There are several places in his book where his prescriptions don’t match up with what became classical narrative practice. He complains that films are already getting too long.9 He says that spectators should make conversation during screening.10 Most importantly, he stresses that it is not dramatic logic but what he calls “tableau logic” that makes for a satisfying motion picture.11 If the dulling away of film’s initial pleasures of movement is a problem for Lindsay, then, it is not to be addressed in terms of the familiar opposition between attraction and narrative. That opposition would suggest a conception of boredom more generally as a predominantly sensory phenomenon—essentially, a lack of stimulation. This kind of boredom, a numbness that gets churned up in the wake of the shocks of industrial and urban transformation, has been crucial to theorists of modernity. Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s history of the railroads notes that train passengers, after adjusting to the new sensory coordinates of rail

Boredom and Visions in Vachel Lindsay’s Film Theory  |  259 travel, got tremendously bored.12 Ben Singer and Patrice Petro follow a similar model, which we might call, drawing from Freud and Benjamin, the “stimulus-­ shield” model: to protect itself from trauma, the subject of modernity builds up a sensory shell, which results in a blasé attitude that, ironically, creates a craving for more shocks.13 Lindsay is after something different from this. He does make numerous references to stimulation, nervousness, and exhaustion in urban culture (particularly in his chapter “The Substitute for the Saloon”), but urban culture is not his primary interest. For Lindsay, the typical American’s love of machinery is tied to a love of applied sciences and mechanics—to a craving for certain kinds of explanations.14 This attitude, he says, “wearies the imaginations of our people.” (It is the imagination and not the body that he is pointing to.) The language suggests something closer to ennui.

Boredom and Authority More precisely, Lindsay’s language suggests the shared roots of boredom, with its mundane, somatic, and mechanical connotations, and ennui, with its more abstract and cultured airs. Literary historian Elizabeth Goodstein has argued that the former historically followed, and depended on, the latter. In the Middle Ages, acedia—idleness, or lassitude—was less an experience than an activity, a sin of depriving oneself of the joy of God’s presence. It was, in effect, a refusal to recognize God’s authority. During the Enlightenment, with the radical questioning of dogma, this lassitude began to be recognized as an experience in its own right (albeit often with a moral tinge left over from its earlier meaning). It became a feeling of being adrift and alone, wandering arbitrarily in the absence of a God who had previously been assumed to be the guiding force of purpose in human life.15 Importantly, the language of boredom was also forged in the aristocracy; to be bored could be a mark of superiority or distinction. In the nineteenth century, boredom discursively spread throughout the Western world with the growth of leisure time among the lower classes and the rise of secular explanations of various natural phenomena.16 Goodstein calls this spread of boredom the “democratization of skepticism.” In some respects, Lindsay’s film theory seems to express a longing for a retreat from this skepticism. The pleasures of the trick film—namely, the confection of visual novelty and the curiosity it inspires about how the trick is done— are temporary because they are, in a deeper sense, empty. The pleasures are there for the spectator to master and use up. They point to no enduring values. Lindsay levels a similar complaint at action pictures, which are said to provoke only “the ingenuity of the audience, not their passionate sympathy.”17 His repeated references to the plastic arts seem meant to offer a tradition of enduring values for cinema to build upon. At times his recommendations, which stress strong poses

260  |  The Image in Early Cinema and static compositions, read as if he wants to eliminate the movies’ capacity for movement altogether.18 One might thus identify Lindsay with a kind of Romantic thinking that laments the loss of religion as a unifying force in culture and its replacement with means-ends reasoning. This would seem to explain his well-known interest in religious myths, especially those of ancient Egypt. Such a view would imply, however, an embrace of the dogmatic function of religion—its ability to set in place, beyond question, a stable system of rules and behaviors. Lindsay embraces the opposite. He wants nothing beyond question, especially religious convictions. That is, although he rejects a secular attitude of ingenuity as a guiding cultural force, he takes from Enlightenment thought (or, more exactly, from an American huckster translation of Enlightenment thought) a need to test any and all claims to final authority. His writings are littered with references to the democratic process. He advocates local ballots at theaters to decide the best movies.19 He sometimes calls attention to the fact that his claims need to be tested by the reader.20 His early-career tenet of “New Localism” (published in Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty) asks future artists to “wander over the Earth in search of the secret of democratic beauty”—a term by which he means a sense of beauty that can grow and change through disagreement.21 (Put differently, “democratic beauty” is a sense of beauty that exists communally without strict consensus.) Lindsay is drawn to the movies as a modern art not by their being peculiarly urban but by their being peculiarly democratic. They are available to a wide variety of people and, at the time of his writing, still subject to a great deal of local variation. This helps explain Lindsay’s views on religion, which tend to mix different traditions together in strange combinations. Of his experience in religious education he writes: “I began to clearly understand that there was such a thing as systematic Dogma in the world, row upon row of immemorial bricks, regularly laid with a mortar of logic between, and the bottom row resting on nothing, mud, or infinity, as you please. I realized that this bottom row was arbitrarily chosen.”22 He rests dogma upon arbitrary choice, as if the matter was one of personal taste. However, taken to its logical conclusion, arbitrarily choosing a god (or several) is no different from acknowledging the absence of a god as a first principle—which points back to the problem of boredom in an age of secular reasoning. Lindsay’s thinking here encounters a tension. Without a higher authority to appeal to, the weariness of ennui seems inevitable, and Lindsay does not want that. Yet, to recognize a higher authority requires submitting to dogma, and Lindsay does not want that either. He tries to resolve this tension by means of cinema itself.

Authority and Revelation One of the most important concepts in Lindsay’s theory is “transfiguration.” He uses the term, borrowed from one of the miracles of the New Testament, to

Boredom and Visions in Vachel Lindsay’s Film Theory  |  261 refer to any kind of unforeseeable qualitative change. The concept’s opposite is mechanical, repetitive movement. Trick films deal in movement, and this is why a van full of moving furniture gets boring; fairy splendor, by contrast, is, as Lindsay calls it, “furniture transfigured.”23 Endowing a piece of furniture with life changes qualitatively the way it is looked at. It brings forth imaginative possibilities that were not contained in a view of the furniture merely sitting still. Lindsay also uses the term “transfiguration” to refer to characters who change form by double exposure.24 Transfiguration, of course, brings forth old belief systems of magic, mysticism, and so on, but it is also a way of imagining change. In transfiguration, the terms of the change are not given in advance. Mechanical thinking, or ingenuity, is hampered, for Lindsay, by a weakness. It cannot imagine change on terms other than those already given to it. Any conclusion must be contained in the premises. As such, ingenuity limits the ability of a culture to imagine (and, by extension, bring about) historical or political change. This is what I take Lindsay to mean when he says: “If Americans express hopes that can be put into pictures with definite edges, they picture machinery piled to the skies. . . . This, their own chosen outlook, wearies the imagination of our people, they do not know why. It gives no full-orbed apocalyptic joy.”25 A populace under the sway of mechanics will, he thinks, imagine its future in narrow terms. He claims that science fiction writers, and even political theorists such as Marx, imagine their utopias in ways too limited.26 How, then, to make transfigurative change imaginable? Through an appeal to visions. He takes the concept of a “vision” to have a religious power—that is, a vision is a sight whose source cannot be explained or verified but drives the seer toward new actions—but Lindsay often speaks of prophets and artists interchangeably as capable of having visions.27 What matters in both cases is that seeing something that does not exist, or that exists only privately and momentarily, can move the seer toward actions that brings it, or something like it, into public existence. Lindsay’s writings often refer to people having visions. Visions can lead to renewed devotion, as in his secondhand story about a vision seen by a congregation in Spain, or to art, as in his fictional tale about a composer who sees angels dumping wine into the East River.28 Two of Lindsay’s favorite films, Battle Hymn of the Republic and The Avenging Conscience, use double exposures to suggest something like visions. (The latter film’s special-effects sequence might be written off as a dream, but for Lindsay the reality status of the event is unimportant; what is important is the way that it changes the seer.) Those two films indicate the potential that Lindsay takes film to carry as a cultural artifact. Despite its status as a scientific invention, cinema, if seen in the right way, is a medium well suited to the receiving of visions. Lindsay writes of the projected image itself as ephemeral and obscure.29 It is hard to be sure of what one is seeing, which makes it possible to see fantastical things. Superimpositions,

262  |  The Image in Early Cinema double exposures, and fades accentuate this insubstantial quality. Film thus might be said to formalize what it is like to have a vision. This, for Lindsay, is an important function at a time when, in his words, “machine-ridden men have temporarily lost the power of seeing their thoughts as pictures in the air, and for the time abandoned the task of adding to tradition.”30 The reference to tradition is somewhat deceptive, as it is not clear just want tradition Lindsay wants to add to, since he mixes them so deliriously, and he is relying on the power of visions to change entrenched modes of thinking. This latter power is, for example, the function that Kierkegaard ascribes to visions in the Christian tradition: the power to unseat orthodoxy. In On Authority and Revelation, Kierkegaard writes that a revelation by definition must say something new and by implication always contains “the possibility of offense” to whatever establishment is in place at the time.31 Visions may test the authority of dogma, but what can test the authority of a vision? A vision, by necessity, is private and defies credibility. It seems immune to public debate. As Hobbes writes: “Seeing therefore miracles now cease, we have no sign left whereby to acknowledge the pretended revelations or inspirations of any private man.” This is why, for Hobbes, a commonwealth, even a Christian one, has no place for new revelations and must rely instead on interpretations of existing scripture.32 Lindsay’s solution is to democratize visions themselves. The solution entails a proliferation of competing visions among anyone and everyone, and at the same time, an attitude of healthy skepticism toward visions, even toward one’s own. He comes closest to a summary of his views on the matter in one of his early War Bulletins (pamphlets he distributed locally in his hometown of Springfield, Illinois): “Visions are not infallible. They are parables of the day, consolations of the hour. I think man should use Faith only when he must. Vision is better than Faith, but Experience is better than Vision.”33 The likeness to artistic inspiration is, again, pertinent. It does not matter for Lindsay where a vision comes from, so long as it brings something new into the world, and the world is where the worth of a vision must be proven. In Lindsay’s words, a priesthood’s authority is to be “established and disestablished according to the intrinsic authority of the light revealed.”34 Cinema enacts something like this democratization process as well. It is projected publicly and so is open to being tested. Although the projected moving picture has a sensuous similarity to a vision, Lindsay does not claim that cinema directly presents the spectator with a vision or with evidence of one. It is crucial that spectators evaluate it, press against it. In some respects the movie theater resembles, for Lindsay, a house of worship or Ali Baba’s cave.35 It is a place removed from the everyday world and bathed in a

Boredom and Visions in Vachel Lindsay’s Film Theory  |  263 soft half-light that seems to make strange sights possible. Yet this likeness implies too strong a reverential attitude, as if a spell were cast over the audience to make them mute receptacles of screen content. Lindsay balances this setting with others that encourage conversation: the art gallery, where clusters of people compare judgments aloud, and the baseball park, where spectators can yell at the umpire.36 Toward this end, he advocates that the image be projected silent so that the crowd can talk back to it. A year later, Hugo Münsterberg would approve of music during projection, which, he claims, “relieves the tension and keeps the attention awake.”37 By this he simply means that music alleviates the boredom of sitting quietly in a darkened room. Such a situation follows naturally from his conception of spectatorship as an isolated activity, characterized by a strong focus on a narrow zone of experience that makes one’s immediate surroundings seem to fall away, like reading a novel or working on an assembly line. For Lindsay, this is not so much of a problem, because the audience is asserting itself in steady dialogue with the screen and is not under the spell of it.

Immemorial Wonder Lindsay sensed that the source of the dullness that he found in trick pictures lay not only in the imaginations of early film producers but in the cultural imagination that had bred them. He theorized a solution to the broader problem of repetition by proposing a different way of making and seeing motion pictures. These ways would be grounded in the plastic arts but without their sense of immovable time, instead emphasizing an openness to change in the form of visions, which, in his view, could act as a safeguard against both the narrowness of mechanistic thought and the antidemocratic tendencies of religious dogma. Like other medium-specificity theorists, Lindsay made the case for cinema as art by comparing it to established art forms, but he tempered that case with the conviction that cinema could bring something new into the world by means of revelation. This conviction would later be echoed with a more spiritual tenor by Andre Bazin, for whom cinema’s capacity for realism carried with it a longing for the unverifiable (notably in his admiration of Rossellini and Bresson),38 and with a secular tenor by Gilles Deleuze, who, also interested in thoughts made sensible, wrote of cinema as “the organ for perfecting the new reality.”39 Wonder, the emotion with which Lindsay closes his book, is considered in the secular age to have a limited lifespan.40 Lindsay’s proclamation that the cinema would go on and on in immemorial wonder is, then, something of a contradiction in terms. It is not a hope that cinema will become immortal—he does say that “after centuries its beginning will be indeed remembered,”41 but he has little interest in the very notion of immortality42—but a kind of hope for a wonder that might at any time be resurrected, each time in a new form.

264  |  The Image in Early Cinema Ryan Pierson is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication, Media, and Film at the University of Calgary.

Notes 1. Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (New York: Liveright, 1970), 317, hereafter abbreviated AMP. This is a reprint of the 1922 edition of Lindsay’s book, which contains a new introduction by Lindsay. I should note that my arguments here apply only to Lindsay’s theory of film up to 1915; his later film writings, including the 1922 introduction, downplay the broader cultural ambitions of his early work, and it is those ambitions I wish to emphasize. 2. See Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 1907–1915 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 272; Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 77–78; and Daniel Morgan, Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012), 33. 3. See especially the passing mentions of Lindsay in Dudley Andrew, The Major Film Theories: An Introduction (London, Oxford, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), v and 12. 4. AMP, 142. 5. Lindsay takes most of the details of this scenario from The Automatic Moving Company (Romeo Bossetti, 1912). See AMP 62. 6. AMP, 63. 7. Charlie Keil, “From Here to Modernity: Style, Historiography, and Transitional Cinema,” in American Cinema’s Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices, ed. Keil and Shelley Stamp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 58. See also Keil, Early American Cinema in Transition: Story, Style, and Filmmaking, 1907–1913 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 20–44. 8. Donald Crafton, Before Mickey: The Animated Film, 1898–1928 (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1982), 29. See also Philippe Gauthier, “A Trick Question: Are Early Animated Drawings a Film Genre or a Special Effect?” Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 6, no. 2 (July 2011): 163–175. 9. AMP, 194. 10. AMP, 224. 11. AMP, 186. For more on the non-narrative significance of the tableau, see Roland Barthes, “Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein,” in Image Music Text, trans. and ed. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 71. 12. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), 58. 13. Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 101–130, and Patrice Petro, “After Shock/Between Boredom and History,” Discourse 16.2 (Fall 1993–Spring 1994): 77–99. This is not, however, to suggest that the temporality of urban modernity is solely one of shock or speed; see Ben Highmore, Cityscapes: Cultural Readings in the Material and Symbolic City (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), 8–12. My thanks to the anonymous reader who pointed this out to me.

Boredom and Visions in Vachel Lindsay’s Film Theory  |  265 14. AMP, 38. Lindsay is referring here to the pleasures of what Neil Harris has termed the “operational aesthetic” at the turn of the last century; see Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1973), 59–89. 15. Elizabeth Goodstein, Experience without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 40. 16. Goodstein, 112. 17. AMP, 38. 18. AMP, 132–133. 19. AMP, 225–226. 20. For example, AMP, 199. 21. Lindsay, Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty, in Dennis Camp, ed., The Complete Prose of Vachel Lindsay (Peoria, Ill.: Spoon River Poetry Press, 1988), vol. 1, 157–158, hereafter abbreviated CPVL. 22. War Bulletin Three, in CPVL, 109. 23. AMP, 147. 24. AMP, 146. 25. AMP, 309–310. 26. AMP, 307–309. 27. AMP, 299–304. 28. CPVL, 110–113, 165. 29. AMP, 281–282. 30. AMP, 298. 31. Soren Kierkegaard, On Authority and Revelation, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 25. 32. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Edwin Curley, ed. (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing), 249. 33. CPVL, 104. 34. AMP, 296. 35. AMP, 280–282. 36. AMP, 227. 37. Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, in Allan Langdale, ed., Hugo Münsterberg on Film (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 145. 38. Andre Bazin, “In Defense of Rossellini,” in What Is Cinema? Vol. 2, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 93–101; Bazin, “Le Journal d’un Cure de Campagne and the Stylistics of Robert Bresson,” in What Is Cinema? vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 125–143. 39. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 8. 40. See Philip Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). 41. AMP, 317. 42. AMP, 104.

25

Falling Desperately in Love with the Image on Screen: “The Flictoflicker Girl” (1913) and Cinematic Structures of Fascination Denis Condon

I

n august 1913, the Irish radical labor journal the Irish Worker was the somewhat unlikely place of publication for a short story entitled “The Flictoflicker Girl” (fig. 25.1).1 This story suggests that the male protagonist has become hopelessly infatuated with the screened image of the eponymous Flictoflicker Girl, the lead actress with a fictional film company. As such, the story ranks among the earliest fictional representations of the kind of fascination with the picture personality that was becoming a key part of the emergent institutional cinema’s economic strategy. The story’s appearance in the Irish Worker is unlikely not least because, as a journal whose primary task was to articulate workers’ views against those of hostile employers who controlled much of the press, the Worker largely used more direct forms of address than short stories. Although rhetorically ambiguous, “The Flictoflicker Girl” offers a critique from a far-left perspective of fiction cinema’s creation of a fascinated spectator rather than an active audience, which places it in a radical lineage that includes the 1920s avant-garde and post-1968 apparatus theory. Analysis of “The Flictoflicker Girl” and its contexts shows that radical critique of the fascinated spectator was already occurring in the early 1910s. “Charlie Payne was a quiet young man,” the story begins, before immediately qualifying that statement: “If he had any vices at all, which is distinctly doubtful, they were never unruly or noisy.” His youth is also qualified: he was not old or even middle-aged, but “in that hazy period when men cease to be regarded as eligible and have not yet secured the comfort and dignity of being described as old bachelors.” Other personal details, such as his profession, are not mentioned; instead, the story moves on to the details of his leisure. “Charlie never went to theaters, and music halls were places he detested, yet he had a distinct liking for picture palaces. He loved moving pictures, particularly Western ones, and those produced by the ‘Flickoflicker’ [here spelled differently from the rest of the story]

Falling Desperately in Love with the Image  |  267

Fig. 25.1 The Irish Worker’s masthead and an extract from “The Flictoflicker Girl,” 23 August 1913: 1. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

Company he simply adored.” Charlie’s loyalty to the Flictoflicker brand is based on unconscious erotic attraction: “The whole truth of the matter, though Charlie himself did not suspect it, lay in the fact that he had fallen desperately in love with Daphne Wildrew, the ‘Flictoflicker’ Company’s leading lady.” His attraction to Daphne manifests itself through a leap of the heart every time Daphne appears on screen, a physiological reaction that Charlie cannot explain to himself. With these few contextual details established, the story then focuses on the events of the evening, when Charlie—“lying luxuriously back in his sixpenny velvet tip up”—sees a film in which Daphne gets married and is then abused by her husband. Charlie is first consumed by jealousy and then so overcome by a range of emotions that he has to leave the picture house before the film is over: “Out of his seat he blindly stumbled and went into the streets. Arrived there he decided to go home. He would take an earlier tram and depart for his suburban residence. To be in the city where such an uncalled for display of wanton brutality was being exhibited periodically from 2 till 10.30 filled him with an intense hatred of his fellow men.” Running for the already departing tram, he is flabbergasted to find that the woman who pulls him aboard the otherwise empty carriage is Daphne Wildrew, who is “over for local scenes.” However, far from being the fulfilment of his dreams, this encounter is even more traumatic than his experience in front

268  |  The Image in Early Cinema of the screen because Daphne takes his declaration of love as a joke, perhaps as a result of a deliberate strategy by the star in dealing with amorous fans or perhaps because of miscommunication resulting from Daphne’s American vernacular. “‘Don’t, don’t,’ cried Daphne, ‘you’ll tickle me to death.’ Charlie expostulated his earnest denial of doing anything so unbecoming.” Despite his protestations, the communication difficulties are not overcome, and a defeated Charlie “gazed broken heartedly out of the window” as Daphne is met at her stop with a kiss by, of all people, the dastard from the film. And so it ends. It is a short story, running to just under 1,100 words. It is also a slight story, with just three sketchily delineated characters: Charlie, Daphne, and Frank, her lover and co-star. However, it is significant in Irish literature as one of the very few early examples of cinema-going as a literary device that can be discussed in relation to the life of the city. But it is of more than local interest, even if the full significance of its singular use of cinematic fascination can be appreciated only when it has been contextualized. It is among the first works of fiction internationally to feature obsession with a picture personality, a phenomenon that, not surprisingly, begins with the public promotion of film stars by name after 1910.2 Ken Wlaschin and Stephen Bottomore’s bibliography of fictional representations of cinema, “Moving Picture Fictions of the Silent Era, 1895–1928,” features just two examples of infatuation with a picture personality before the appearance of “The Flictoflicker Girl” in August 1913.3 Although very useful for comparative purposes, Wlaschin and Bottomore do not survey Ireland and therefore do not mention “The Flictoflicker Girl.” Nevertheless, Irish fiction writers appear to have been no less attracted to the cinematograph-as-literary-­ device than the authors whom Wlaschin and Bottomore discuss. In 1913 alone, “The Flictoflicker Girl” was joined by another Irish short story, “Pat Callaghan’s Christmas Discovery,” in which the eponymous journalist is brought close to ruin by his obsessive love for a picture-house pianist.4 However, there are no other known Irish stories that feature obsessive love for a film star. A comparison of the stories identified by Wlaschin and Bottomore with “The Flictoflicker Girl” reveals that they are similar principally in the fact that they feature heterosexual attraction to a screen star. Like the female protagonist of 1911’s “Romantic Lucy” and the male protagonist of 1912’s “The Photo Star,” Charlie has an unhealthy obsession with the moving image.5 However, unlike the outcome to Charlie’s story, by the end of the other two stories, “Romantic Lucy” has resumed her romantic relationship with a tangible person and the man in “The Photo Star” may—although this is less clear—have overcome his obsession with Flossie Florede. Charlie’s unreliability remains a constant in “The Flictoflicker Girl”; he is an obsessive loner, not someone who has developed a difficulty in existing relationships. Meeting Daphne does not resolve his difficulty, because

Falling Desperately in Love with the Image  |  269 his repeatedly emphasized innocence, which entails a lack of self-consciousness and a degree of emotional repression, blocks him from seeing any problem. Taking these three stories together, it is noteworthy that by the early 1910s, the notion of obsession with a star was a common enough cinematic discourse for it also to have become something of a literary trope. These stories offer early examples during the cinema’s transitional period of the star actor as part of the structures of fascination particular to the medium in London, Chicago, and Dublin, where the publishers of these stories were based. In addition to this, recent scholarship on stars by the early 1910s—particularly Martin Loiperdinger and Uli Jung’s collection and subsequent database on Asta Nielsen and Marina Dahlquist’s volume on Pearl White—has offered nuanced and theoretically informed historical accounts that show regional variation in the adoption of the picture personality.6 Such work demonstrates the value of attending to the specific contexts in which the star system has manifested itself. Nevertheless, returning to such a phrase as cinema’s “structures of fascination”— which derives from the apparatus theory of Jean-Louis Baudry, Christian Metz, and Laura Mulvey—permits a glimpse of a genealogy of radical critique coming from activist sources as well as academic ones.7 Mulvey uses this precise phrase when she argues that “the cinema has structures of fascination strong enough to allow temporary loss of ego while also reinforcing it.”8 Identifying with the attractive and engaging personalities, or “ego ideals,” offered by the star system, the spectator becomes lost to the world as s/he normally experiences it. Naturally, “The Flictoflicker Girl” does not use psychoanalytical theory to examine Charlie’s erotic attraction to the image, but it does offer a clear instance of the strength of cinema’s structures of fascination, located in the transitional era. Despite his cinematic connoisseurship, Charlie seems to expect that Daphne will address him directly with an erotic display in the manner of the cinema of attractions; he appears unable to deal with the fact that she is playing a character in a narrative film and rushes from the picture house, like a transitional-era Uncle Josh. As such, the historical record does demand attention to some notion of cinematic fascination, offering as it does such surprising examples of fascinated spectators in fiction of the early 1910s, and also including in the case of “Romantic Lucy” a good example of female desire, however ultimately contained. Indeed, John Burrows has offered a nuanced analysis of “Romantic Lucy,” in which he sees her working-­ class status and gender as manifestations of author Alphonse Courlander’s disquiet with Edwardian mass culture. “The Flictoflicker Girl,” by contrast, presents a middle-class male spectator, thereby shifting the focus to Charlie Payne’s disposition—a term that will be discussed below—in relation to the cinematic apparatus, lying back in his velvet tip-up willing an erotic encounter with the image of the female star, without which he will be disappointed by his cinematic experience.9

270  |  The Image in Early Cinema The vivid detail of the seating and its cost is not incidental to the story’s concerns; economics and erotics are thoroughly imbricated. It is also significant that the story insists that film production and distribution companies achieve economic success through eliciting brand loyalty to such companies as Flictoflicker by tapping into unconscious—certainly in Charlie’s case—erotic processes. While apparatus theory has been criticized for its inability to focus on the historical specificities of such situations, Frank Kessler has returned to Baudry to offer ways of reorientating his work historically.10 Kessler observes that some of the problems of doing this in English-language scholarship have been created by translators who render both “appareil de base” and “dispositif ” in Baudry’s essays as “apparatus” despite the fact that Baudry distinguishes between them. Kessler demonstrates the advantages of distinguishing appareil de base as the global term for the basic cinematographic apparatus from dispositif as the disposition of the instance of projection. For Kessler, many dispositifs are possible, not only those established by dominant modes of engagement with the image at a given period. It is not sufficient to say, for instance, that one or more dispositifs are associated with early cinema and that these are replaced by a different dispositif or dispositifs in the cinema of narrative integration. Kessler contends that a “historical investigation of historical and present dispositifs would thus have to take into account the different viewing situations, institutional framings, the modes of address they imply, as well as the technological basis on which they rest.”11 Such a historical investigation provides a basis for considering what the dispositif of the fascinated spectator presented by the “The Flictoflicker Girl” tells us about cinema at the moment of its composition in Dublin in 1913. The story is particularly intriguing as a unique source of information about the reception of cinema in Ireland at this early point in its institutional development. If thinking about the dispositif here means thinking about the relationships between text, viewer, and viewing situation, including aspects of technology and institutional framing, the first of these that should be addressed in relation to “The Flictoflicker Girl” is the institutional framing of what is after all a written fiction and not a film or an account of audience reception. Andrew Patrick Wilson, who wrote the story under the pseudonym “Mac,” is probably best remembered for his significant contributions to Scottish theater and film, including co-founding the Scottish National Players and directing a series of film adaptations of four popular golf-related Bertie Wooster novels in 1924.12 In the early 1910s, however, Wilson was in Dublin, where he had moved in 1911, and became heavily involved in theater and radical labor politics. A playwright, founding member of Irish Workers’ Dramatic Group, and later manager of Dublin’s famous Abbey Theatre, Wilson also subedited and frequently contributed to the syndicalist weekly the Irish Worker. At the Irish Worker, Wilson worked under the editorship of Jim Larkin, an inspired orator who is a hero of the Irish labor movement and one of the most

Falling Desperately in Love with the Image  |  271 revered figures of Irish history among many ordinary Irish people.13 The reason for such reverence is that he organized not the skilled artisans but the unskilled, poorest workers—the carters, dockers, and general laborers—in a city with the worst slum conditions in Western Europe.14 Larkin is particularly remembered for his leadership of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union and its strategy of sympathetic strikes, which in 1913 led to the largest labor dispute in Irish history, the Dublin Lockout of 1913–1914. As this name suggests, what began as a strike of transport workers became a lock-out of workers by the Dublin Employers Federation, led by industrialist William Martin Murphy. The struggle between Larkin and Murphy was an uneven media war, fought by Larkin primarily with the Irish Worker and by Murphy with the national newspapers he owned: the Irish Independent, Sunday Independent, Evening Herald, and Irish Catholic.15 Despite donations for strike pay from America and particular from the British labor movement, which also sent food shipments, the workers had returned to work on the employers’ terms by February 1914. Cinema played a lesser part in this media war. Neither the union nor the prominent employers were owners of cinemas, and so there are no such unionsponsored films of the Lockout, as Steven Ross describes in his book WorkingClass Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America.16 An Irish fiction film production company had been active in 1912, but by 1913, indigenous producers were offering only actualities and advertising films, and the few fiction films shot in the country were made by Gene Gauntier and Sidney Olcott in their postKalem guise of the Gene Gauntier Feature Players, or GGs.17 Although Larkin was involved in shooting one factual film said to be for fund-raising purposes, labor leaders did not see cinema as a regular medium of agitation nor as an accessible way of disseminating their ideas.18 They did, of course, use popular media to agitate, educate, and organize, but the popular agitational media of choice were first and foremost the press, and to a lesser extent, theater. Nevertheless, the references to cinema in the Irish Worker indicate that labor activists were thinking about the new visual medium. Most of these references suggest that they thought about cinema in fairly straightforward ways. It was a source of income in the guise of the advertisements for the Irish Cinema in Dublin’s Capel Street, the only entertainment advertisements that appeared in the paper on a regular basis. It was the occasion of a parody of prominent opponents of radical labor— including William Martin Murphy and picture-house owners who were also members of Dublin Corporation, and who were lampooned with many references to Hell and Satan for having attended a special screening of Dante’s Inferno in February 1913.19 And it was a new type of workplace, where the more equitable worker-employer relations being demanded elsewhere also had to be fought for, as they would be when Dublin’s Theatre de Luxe was picketed in late September 1913 following a worker’s dismissal for union activity.20

272  |  The Image in Early Cinema Nevertheless, the timing of the publication of “The Flictoflicker Girl” is highly suggestive of cinema’s relevance to the labor movement. The story appeared in the Irish Worker of August 23, 1913. This is the issue that would have been in circulation for Dublin’s largest festival of the summer, Horse Show Week. The Dublin Horse Show itself was a prestige event, but the influx of wealthy revelers to the city meant that special and additional entertainments were mounted, and newspapers printed special editions that contained more feature articles than usual, fiction and so on. The Irish Worker’s August 23 edition was also a Horse Show special, even if it did not explicitly state this. Rather than the usual articles excoriating the employers, the first page was dominated by cultural items. “The Flictoflicker Girl” appeared here alongside a review also written by Wilson of George Edwardes’s Gipsy Love, a musical comedy playing at the upmarket Gaiety Theatre, and an article analyzing the use of the term “respectability” in Irish society as a way of denigrating trade unionists.21 Unlike “The Flictoflicker Girl,” the intention of these nonfiction articles to draw out the immediate political implications of popular culture and language for Dublin workers is clear. These journalistic interventions were not the only surprises Larkin had planned for Horse Show Week. On August 26—three days after the publication of “The Flictoflicker Girl”—he called a strike of the workers at the Dublin United Tramway Company. This was designed to hit Murphy, who was chairman of the company, at the busiest time of the year. But Murphy and other employers faced down Larkin, dismissing workers who would not sign a pledge to boycott the union. Larkin was arrested for inciting riot but quickly released and then arrested again when he addressed a proscribed meeting in the Dublin city center that was baton-charged by the police. Violent clashes with the police in the early days of the strike left two workers dead, perhaps the “uncalled for displays of wonted brutality” the story mentions. Many workers on low wages and living in miserable conditions followed Larkin’s call to strike or were locked out by their employers for refusing to sign the pledge to ignore the union. They became further impoverished on meager strike pay and food parcels in the six months of strike that followed. On the eve of such events, Larkin believed it was timely to address cultural matters and engage in cultural critique. “The Flictoflicker Girl” addresses its readers—working-class trade unionists—as more sophisticated picture-house patrons than the naïve Charlie Payne, whose flight from the city-center picture house to the suburbs marks him out as middle class and whose foolish fascination with the screen is not excused by youth. For such workers, the dispositif described creates further distance from Charlie as he settles back into his luxurious seat. However, like Charlie, readers are assumed to share his “distinct liking for picture palaces,” at least to the extent that they must have a

Falling Desperately in Love with the Image  |  273 good knowledge of what goes on there to understand the story. Perhaps his connoisseurship, his love of Westerns produced by the Flictoflicker Company, is laughable, yet it was doubtless more so for readers who knew that branding by production companies was well established and that films were already highly codified into genres, of which the Western was the most popular; a reviewer of a show at one Dublin picture house commented in September 1913 that “no picture programme nowadays is considered complete if it does not include a cowboy film.”22 Similarly, Charlie’s infatuation with the Flictoflicker Girl would have been topical for readers familiar with the crazes for the Biograph Girl and the Vitagraph Girl, actresses who had only relatively recently become famous under their own names, Florence Lawrence and Florence Turner, respectively. Indeed, a month after “The Flictoflicker Girl” was published, Rotunda Pictures broke “new ground as far as Dublin picture houses are concerned” by beginning to show the city’s first film serial, Edison’s twelve-part What Happened to Mary, starring Mary Fuller.23 The Dublin Evening Mail reviewer commented that “all who have seen the opening scenes of Mary’s adventures will be eager to know more about this fascinating actress.”24 Daphne Wildrew is not the target of the story’s critique; she is like the serial queens: an active and engaging figure, capable of pulling Charlie aboard the train and nimbly dodging his professions of love. Therefore, it is the dispositif of the fascinated spectator that is the target of the critique in “The Flictoflicker Girl.” Charlie’s affordance of the expensive seats and flight to the suburbs is a flight from the world of workers who lived, worked, and fought in the city in late 1913 and early 1914.

Conclusion With the 1913 short story “The Flictoflicker Girl,” the Irish labor journal Irish Worker was among the first to critique cinema’s emerging structures of fascination from a radical perspective. The story specifically targets the star system’s commodification of heterosexual desire through the gaze, but in its description of the dispositif, it is careful to distinguish the foolish bourgeois male protagonist from the working-class readers of the journal, who are also assumed to have knowledge and an interest in cinema. As such, it suggests that it is possible to critique cinema while also enjoying it. This is, then, an early example of such critique, shaped by its own institutional contexts, but it forms part of a critical genealogy of activists, thinkers, and filmmakers who have repeatedly returned to the ways in which cinema has distracted spectators from the world around them. Denis Condon is Lecturer in Cinema at Maynooth University. He is author of Early Irish Cinema, 1895–1921.

274  |  The Image in Early Cinema

Notes 1. Mac, “The Flictoflicker Girl,” Irish Worker (August 23, 1913): 1. 2. Richard deCordova, Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990). 3. Ken Wlaschin and Stephen Bottomore, “Moving Picture Fiction of the Silent Era, 1895–1928: An Annotated Bibliography,” Film History 20, no. 2 (2008): 217–260. 4. Madge Barlow, “Pat Callaghan’s Christmas Discovery,” Killarney Echo and South Kerry Chronicle (December 27, 1913): 6. 5. Alphonse Courlander, “Romantic Lucy,” London Opinion Summer Annual (c. May 1911): 93–95, and Epes W. Sargent, “The Photo Star,” Green Book Album (September 1912): 451–456. “Romantic Lucy” is reprinted, along with seven other short stories featuring the cinematograph, in Andrew Shail, ed., Reading the Cinematograph (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2010), 155–158. Like the other stories in the collection, “Romantic Lucy” is analyzed in an accompanying essay, John Burrows, “‘She Had So Many Appearances’: Alphonse Courlander and the Birth of the ‘Moving Picture Girl’” (Shail 159–168). 6. Martin Loiperdinger and Uli Jung, eds., Importing Asta Nielsen: The International Film Star in the Making, 1910–1914 (New Barnet, Herts.: John Libbey, 2013), “Importing Asta Nielsen Database,” Martin Loiperdinger and Uli Jung, Deutsches Filminstitut, last updated June 1, 2015, http://importing-asta-nielsen.deutsches-filminstitut.de/, in Exporting Perilous Pauline: Pearl White and the Serial Film Craze, ed. Marina Dahlquist (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013). 7. The most influential works in English are Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” Film Quarterly 28, no. 2 (Winter 1974–75): 39–47; Christian Metz, “The Imaginary Signifier,” Screen 16, no. 2 (Summer 1975): 7–13; and Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975): 6–18. 8. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure,” 10. 9. Burrows, “‘She Had So Many Appearances.’” 10. Frank Kessler, “The Cinema of Attractions as Dispositif,” in Wanda Strauven, ed., The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007), 57–70. See also his “La cinématographie comme dispositif (du) spectaculaire,” CiNéMAS 14.1 (Autumn 2003): 21–34 and “Programming and Performing Early Cinema Today: Strategies and Dispositifs,” in Early Cinema Today: The Art of Programming and Live Performance, ed. Martin Loiperdinger (New Barnet, Herts.: John Libbey, 2011), 137–146. 11. Kessler, “Cinema of Attractions,” 61–62. 12. Steven Daedalus Burch, Andrew P. Wilson and the Early Irish and Scottish National Theatres, 1911–1950 (Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 2008). 13. Francis Devine, ed., A Capital in Conflict: Dublin City and the 1913 Lockout (Dublin: Dublin City Council, 2013). 14. Jacinta Prunty, Dublin Slums, 1800–1925: A Study in Urban Geography (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1998). 15. Donal Nevin, ed. James Larkin: Lion of the Fold (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1998). 16. Steven Ross, Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 17. Denis Condon, Early Irish Cinema, 1895–1921 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2008): 98–107, 153–159, 236–238.

Falling Desperately in Love with the Image  |  275 18. “Cinema Machines at Work at Liberty Hall: An Unrehearsed Picture,” Evening Telegraph (October 25, 1913): 5. 19. “Farrell’s Inferno,” Irish Worker (February 15, 1913): 3. 20. “Picketing a Picture Palace,” Evening Telegraph (October 7, 1913): 5; “Distributing Leaflets Outside Picture Theatre: Two Men Fined,” Dublin Evening Mail (October 14, 1913): 2. 21. Euchan, “The Love of Romance,” and Shellback, “The Value of Respectability,” Irish Worker (August 23, 1913): 1. 22. “Rotunda Pictures,” Dublin Evening Mail (September 9, 1913): 5. 23. Ibid., (September 23, 1913): 3. 24. Ibid., (September 27, 1913): 3.

26

An “Advertising Punch” in Every Frame: Image-Making in Early Advertising Films Martin L. Johnson

The advertising film, or as it is more commonly called, the industrial film, is

one of many early nonfiction genres whose formal and functional characteristics are better understood when placed in a context larger than that of the fledging cinema industry. In this chapter, I will discuss early industrial motion pictures produced in the late aughts and early teens of the twentieth century, a period that André Gaudreault has recently identified as the beginning of the cinema as an institution. Using the terminology of the period, I will refer to these motion pictures as “advertising films,” which, in addition to being historically accurate, raises methodological and conceptual questions that extend beyond the specificity of early cinema research. Yvonne Zimmermann argues that the advertising film, which she suggests encompasses many forms of moving images, from movie trailers to sponsored documentaries, is “ubiquitous yet ephemeral, multiform, shape shifting, performative and transgressive.”1 While I concur with Zimmermann’s argument for the significance of a genre that remains under-studied, in this essay I consider claims made by those within and at the margins of the moving picture industry who were invested in the success of advertising films in the period in which they first emerged. Promoters such as Watterson Rothacker, the Chicago-based founder of the Industrial Moving Picture Company, the journalist Ernest A. Dench, and International Harvester’s Edwin Barker vouched for the potential of motion picture advertising in a wide range of publications, from general interest magazines such as Scientific American and Popular Electricity to trade journals such as Motography, the Novelty News, and Judicious Advertising and industrial publications such as Industrial World and Gas Age. Even though these early articles rely on a suspiciously thin set of examples, which leads one to believe that movies produced by corporations such as Du Pont, International Harvester, and the Pacific Coast Borax Company were among the only successful sponsored motion pictures made in this period, they offer insight into the imagined potential of using the moving image as an advertising medium.

An “Advertising Punch” in Every Frame  |  277 Instead of seeing the push for advertising films in the early 1910s as a failed attempt to commercialize the movies, I will argue for considering these early industrial films in an intermedial context. Rejecting the notion that the cinema was the only venue for their movies, companies sought to integrate motion pictures into broader campaigns that, to use the terminology of the time, “connected” footage of factories, landscapes, and product demonstrations with branded everyday objects, print advertisements, displays, and lectures at conferences and conventions. My approach to this material is guided in part by Gaudreault’s recent work, in which he argues that the “cinema of attractions,” a term he famously coined with Tom Gunning to describe films made between 1895 and 1906, did not belong to the cinema at all, but, rather to an earlier cultural series of animated pictures, cinématographie-attraction, or kine-attractography. By leaving the first decade of what we thought was cinema to the land of variety shows and fairy theaters, Gaudreault also argues that the institution of cinema, by which he means the theaters, distribution networks, and production companies that allowed it to function as a distinct medium, does not emerge until around 1910. The cinema-institution, as Gaudreault calls it, “arose out of conflicts deriving from the new intermedial relations engendered by the advent and development of the kinematograph.”2 In order to understand the development of the cinema, Gaudreault argues, one must trace how a technology, the kinematograph, functions within and transforms existing institutions and creates a new one. Gaudreault challenges media historians to remove their disciplinary and medium-specific blinders in order to see how media technologies, cultural series, and institutions interact to create motion pictures as we know them. In this essay, I take up Gaudreault’s challenge by considering the production of industrial films in the 1910s within two distinct institutions, cinema and advertising. First, I will discuss the development of the advertising industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which helps establish certain aesthetic and business practices that impacted how motion pictures are received as an advertising medium. Next, I will consider how early film advertising producers and their clients sought to position their work within the fledgling institutions of advertising and cinema. Finally, I will turn to a discussion of how these producers addressed their failure to distribute advertising films to movie theaters in the 1910s and how their alternative distribution strategies helped lay the groundwork for a “useful” film industry that flourishes a few decades later.

Advertising before Moving Pictures Before moving to the discussion of specific advertising film campaigns, it is necessary to consider the development of advertising imagery in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Business and cultural historians, including Daniel Pope, Elspeth Brown, and Pamela Laird, have produced accounts of the

278  |  The Image in Early Cinema growth of the advertising industry in this period that emphasize the fundamental shift that took place between 1880, when advertising was largely textual and descriptive, and 1920, when advertising was largely visual and impressionistic. While many changes occur in the advertising industry—which was not recognizable as such until the mid-1890s—in this period, three were particularly important for early advertising films: the shift from producer-focused advertising to product-focused advertising, the embrace of a more expansive definition of “advertising media,” and the adoption of photography as an advertising medium. As a result of these shifts, the advertising film became valuable in the 1910s because of its capacity to reproduce reality, its ability to reduce the scale and complexity of machinery into discrete images, and the portability of the medium itself. Early advertising motion picture producers approached the medium as creators of images, not narratives, and only later realized the medium’s narrative possibilities. The first shift I will address is one from advertisements that centered on the manufacturer to ones that instead focused on products. As Laird has shown, in the nineteenth century, the founders of manufacturing firms played a personal role in the advertisements for their firm’s products.3 It was not uncommon, for example, for the founder’s name, biography, and image to serve as a guarantee of a product’s reliability. When new image reproduction processes, such as chromolithography and half-tone printing, made it easier to disseminate images, many manufacturers chose to reproduce pictures of their factory, often with their own home in the background, in order to cement the association between themselves, their factory, and their product. Laird suggests that these advertisements began to diminish in the mid-aughts, and product-centered advertisements became dominant by the late 1910s. Early advertising films bridged this gap between showing the factory and the product by depicting manufacturing processes with films such as Strathmore Mills (1911), the Phoenix Horse Shoe Company (1913), and The Making of Pure Foods in Battle Creek (1913) offering movie audiences a view of the factory floor. The second shift is from advertising campaigns focused primarily on newspapers and magazines to ones that embraced a more expansive definition of media. As Daniel Pope notes, in the late nineteenth century, advertising agents purchased space in regional and national publications wholesale and then resold that space to advertisers for a profit.4 Advertising agents who had previously been criticized for being merely “space brokers” began to add new services such as copywriting and ad design. By the turn of the century, as Laird notes, magazines were the dominant advertising medium, seemingly obviating the need for other media. Even so, print shops, sign painters, and other non-periodical media specialists used trade publications such as Novelty News and Signs of the Times to launch complaints about shortsighted companies who only pursued print media. A more measured 1911 article in Judicious Advertising listed the magazine as one of many

An “Advertising Punch” in Every Frame  |  279 media available to the advertiser, with the street car placard, the billboard, and the theater program just a few of the alternatives.5 While advertisers have long used the landscape and built environment as sites for the promotion of products, what was new in this period was the debate over whether these landscapes and objects should be seen as media or, as they had been in the past, mere novelties. Motion pictures, interestingly, were not seen by advertisers as a medium that could contain advertising space, despite the occasional efforts by producers to include signs and branded objects inside the frame, nor I have not found any evidence of efforts to sell theater “time” the way air time was later sold by broadcasters. Even though many advertisers provided their films to theaters at no charge, the available evidence suggests that theaters treated these free films as reels to be run at the end of a show rather than included in the paid section of the program. The third and perhaps most important shift that occurred in this period was the embrace of photography as an advertising medium. Elspeth Brown has argued that around 1910 advertisers ceased to focus on “education concerning the product’s merits,” with photography serving as illustrations of industrial products and processes, in favor of “creating desire through the stimulation of impulses, instincts, and emotions,” which photography assisted through the reproduction of impressionistic images of domestic tranquility secured by consumer goods.6 In 1911, a writer for Judicious Advertising emphasized the importance of “camera copy,” noting that “everybody realizes that a drawing can be made about as the advertiser wishes it to appear, but when the advertiser pictures his goods through the medium of photography, the average mind reaches the conclusion that here is an honest advertiser and one who wishes to show his goods as they are.”7 The photograph was effective because it was perceived as realistic, even when in practice it was almost as easy to manipulate as other modes of image-making. The moving image was initially valued by advertisers for similar reasons, as it conveyed not just things as they were, but also the advertiser’s sincerity in publicizing a diverse and complete portfolio of views of their factory operations, uses for their product, and satisfied customers. But the advertising film, as I will show, comes to serve other functions when it is put into practice.

The Medium Par Excellence When Watterson Rothacker, who founded the Industrial Moving Picture Company in May 1910, formulated his company’s slogan, “the best advertisement in the world will never be written, because moving pictures are the superlative advertising medium and exceed the limitations of any pen,” he called attention to the rivalry between advertising media. In fact, early advertising films were often used adjacent to, and sometimes in replacement of, other media, such as lantern slides, photographs, and product display cases. While many companies were satisfied to direct their advertising budget to purchasing space in newspapers

280  |  The Image in Early Cinema and magazines—publications such as Novelty Times and Judicious Advertising— Rothacker’s former employer highlighted those companies that were willing to try out new advertising media, including motion pictures. In early accounts of advertising film successes, their intermedial status is emphasized, with cinema seen as a more effective and efficient way of accomplishing something that had been carried out in another medium. For example, in October 1910, the journalist and publicist Horatio Stoll published an article in Judicious Advertising in which he discussed the use of moving images to promote travel, tourism, and colonization. While “neatly printed booklets, beautifully illustrated railroad guides, attractive postcards, and elaborate maps” often proved to be deceptive, the movies were seen as true representation of life. As Stoll notes, a “pile of pumpkins . . . large, perfect, highly colored pumpkins, . . . displayed at the California exhibit at the Chicago World’s Fair” proved to be a more effective advertisement for the state than any salesperson, and, he argues, “next to seeing the pumpkins, the next most satisfactory thing is seeing pictures of them.”8 Turning this agricultural example into metaphor, Rothacker argued that one only needs to “show a man a busy harvest scene, a vista of industrial prosperity, [and] the advantages of a community or territory and you sow seeds which, when cultivated, will bear fruit in the shape of new residents and capital invested.”9 Not surprisingly, many early advertising films were intended to display the products and landscapes on offer. These moving images are associated with vivacity, vitality, and vistas of a world transformed by new products. In this way, it is not surprising that so many early advertising films are associated with landscapes, from factory views to demonstrations of earth-moving tractors to shots of sites intended for consumption by tourists and business investors. Making successful advertising films required, at this early stage, the manufacture of a landscape to be viewed. At the same time, Rothacker emphasized that an effective advertising film was more than just raw footage of an advertiser’s products. As he observes in a column in the motion picture trade journal Motography, “there is no question as to the ability of moving pictures to display the operations of a machine, . . . [but the] question which arises is how to produce these subjects so that their advertising messages will be delivered successfully.”10 For Rothacker, production is an amorphous category encompassing the “labor and skill” of filmmaking, distribution, and the “persuasive powers of explanation” that mark a successful advertisement. Not surprisingly, Rothacker sees the function of advertising films to both “entertain the audience” and “create desire” for the displayed product.11 In one column in Motography, he suggests that the creative force behind a successful advertising film is the equivalent to a copywriter for an advertisement. While the camera is still responsible for depicting products and processes, the copywriter assembles those images into a narrative. Even if actuality footage

An “Advertising Punch” in Every Frame  |  281 alone demonstrates the superior quality of a product, Rothacker suggests that it is better to downplay the sales pitch in a film. As he puts it, “advertising moving picture subjects should be presented with the idea in mind that their story told apparently without advertising will deliver their advertising message in a more effective manner than can be done by blunt commercial announcements.”12 By early 1911, when his company was less than a year old, Rothacker has already identified the bind of the advertising film, and perhaps all advertising media—it is a genre that is most likely to meet its intended goals when no one, save its producers, recognizes it as such. In order to be effective, the advertising image must be placed in service of a compelling narrative, an effusive textual description, and a sophisticated dissemination plan. While Rothacker and his fellow boosters often argued that the moving image is transparently more effective than any other media, they were also careful to emphasize its particular strengths, notably its capacity to represent scale and its portability. If railroads and city boosters saw advertising films as a lucrative way to attract new residents, manufacturers of heavy machinery were interested in the motion picture’s capacity to demonstrate the power of their equipment. In August 1912, Homer Croy published a widely read article in System: The Magazine of Business in which he described an advertising failure that was rectified by moving pictures. A manufacturer of a large ditch-digging machine decided it would attempt to demonstrate its power at a meeting of the Road and Track Supply Association in Chicago. The plan was to place “one of its big ditchers in the building and put it through the motions of scooping up earth on a property embankment and dumping it on an imaginary flat car.”13 Even though the company succeeded in bringing the massive machine into the hall, they could not operate it in such a small space. Fortunately, according to Croy, an enterprising salesperson had the idea to set up a small screening room nearby and show a film of the machine in operation in Oklahoma. While the motion picture’s ability to reduce and reproduce the operations of heavy machinery may have appealed to a general public, advertisers instead emphasized the potential to reach busy executives and general managers. Heralding the arrival of portable projectors, a writer for Judicious Advertising noted in 1913 “not alone with the action-films seen in theaters, but in the salesroom, in the small office, and in millions of homes will the advertising film make its way.”14 It was the medium’s smallness, not just its capacity to make large things small and complex operations simple, that advertisers prized. While the promoters of advertising films do not lose faith in the power of moving pictures as a medium of persuasion, they do become disillusioned with the potential of these films to reach audiences in movie theaters. By February 1912, Rothacker was writing openly of the “failures” of moving picture advertising, isolating two problems—“poor production, and injudicious presentation,” or, as he goes on to discuss them, inferior photography and direction, and

282  |  The Image in Early Cinema unsuccessful distribution efforts.15 Rothacker complained that advertising films were banned from theaters affiliated with the Motion Picture Patents Company and discouraged by many independent theaters, as well. As a result, Rothacker suggested that even though the appeal of motion pictures was universal, advertising films were more successfully promoted to small groups, in nontheatrical settings. An editorial published in Motography in February 1913 observes that the free distribution of advertising film had the unexpected result of limiting their impact. As the editorial writer notes, “it is a peculiarity of human nature that what we pay for makes the most lasting impressions on us, and what we get for free we regard lightly—unless its appeal be so intense that we cannot forget it.”16 While it is difficult to test whether this was the real cause for the troubles of advertising motion pictures, such skepticism was rampant in the movie theater manager trade press.

The Story of a Moving Picture So far, I have suggested that a primary advantage of the advertising film was its ability to display items that were too large, too complex, or, most importantly, too dependent on the property of motion to effectively sell using other media. Even the boosters of advertising films themselves did not believe that the moving image alone was sufficient to complete sales. As Ernest Dench wrote in 1915, “for gaining attention, interesting and convincing prospective purchasers of many products it would be difficult to find a more powerful medium than the film. But printers’ ink must be called in to clinch the actual business.”17 By arguing for the intermedial qualities of advertising film, these early boosters pushed the medium beyond the confines of theatrical entertainment. Despite the fact that promoters of early advertising films exaggerated the viability of the field, many of their articles relied on specific examples of successes and failures. For example, a 1911 article in Judicious Advertising on the Pacific Coast Borax Company’s use of moving pictures, which began as early as 1908, noted that the company’s early efforts failed. According to the article, Pacific Coast Borax initially promoted its films as if they were a traveling stage act, sending twelve teams of advance men across the country to rent opera houses, distribute posters advertising “A Trip to Death Valley,” and supply local stores with enough borax to meet expected sales. Despite this investment—the article claims $100,000 was spent in total—the first show was a flop: “A fair crowd greeted the opening performance. When the lights were thrown on the curtain about twenty of the ordinary glass slides, advertising borax solely, flashed into view. But before the time had come for a single moving picture of ‘Death Valley’ half the audience had left the hall.”18 After this setback, the company destroyed its glass slides, hired a lecturer, and, the article suggests, edited its footage of “Death Valley” so it could lend itself to a narrative in which “a selling film was woven into the entertainment.”19 In addition to

An “Advertising Punch” in Every Frame  |  283 providing a critique of the lantern slide, the article called attention to the challenge of integrating narrative into the advertising film.20 Early producers assumed that the story of a product, like the lithographs of factories discussed earlier, were enough to draw in audiences. But these early stories were not fictionalized; rather, they were images of industrial operations that were sequentially organized. When boasting of the success of his company’s 1910 film Farming with Dynamite, made for Du Pont, Watterson Rothacker observed that “every red blooded person enjoys seeing a subject of this kind,” but the primary audience was “prospective buyers,” listing agricultural and mechanical colleges, farmers’ institutes and gatherings, and rural theaters as ideal exhibition sites before turning back to his universalist claims for the appeal of the dynamite films.21 Likewise, Edwin Barker, of International Harvester, observed in the Novelty News in 1911 that: “Very few of us know very much concerning the other fellow’s work, or the process of manufacture of the thousand and one things which enter into our daily existence. To see a picture that gives an idea of this work, or the processes of manufacture or growth of a common commodity, teaches while it interests. For this reason the motion picture is slowly finding a place in the schoolroom.”22 Other writers contrasted these “educational” advertising films, which showed everything from the manufacture of fountain pens to horse shoes and automobiles, with “entertaining” films that used narrative and fiction. Rothacker suggested that firms use the “softening veil of entertainment” to convey advertising messages but warned that such a strategy could result in losing the advertising message entirely.23 Despite this turn to entertainment, sponsors and producers alike found many advertising films, at least those made in the United States, inadequate. One film fan that Ernest Dench interviewed in 1915 suggested that advertising films “seldom [have] any of the intensely exciting dramatic flavor I am accustomed to, and the terrific climax at the end is conspicuous by its absence.”24 The producers of advertising film, it seems, were not able to keep up with the entertainment field, particularly once nonfiction subjects such as travelogues were relegated to the margins. But perhaps the advertising film wasn’t meant to only entertain. In conclusion, I want to pause on a recurring illustration in the articles discussed here, the use of strips of moving images as if to prove their material existence. The advertisers who embraced the advertising film were suspicious of claims that one could reach customers through “space” buys in general interest magazines. Instead, they saw the moving picture as an accessory to the lecturers, salespeople, and representatives they already employed, and sought out venues where they could show motion pictures as a medium that was, to use a phrase popular at the time, educational and entertaining. As commercial movie theaters became more invested in screening narrative fiction movies, advertising films promoters turned their attention to the development of nontheatrical markets and “useful”

284  |  The Image in Early Cinema motion pictures. While Horatio Stoll, in 1910, and many others dreamed of a “country . . . spanned by a series of theaters or choice open-air locations where moving picture advertisements will be shown without charge to the public,” in this early period it was a dream deferred, waiting for new technologies, new distribution and exhibition patterns, and new media to realize the possibilities of advertising with moving images. Martin L. Johnson is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at The Catholic University of America. He is author of Main Street Movies: The History of Local Film in the United States.

Notes 1. Yvonne Zimmermann, “Advertising and Film: A Topological Approach,” in Films That Sell: Motion Pictures and Advertising, ed. Nico de Klerk, Bo Florin, and Patrick Vonderau (London: BFI Palgrave, 2016), 22. 2. André Gaudreault, Film and Attraction from Kinematography to Cinema, trans. Timothy Barnard (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 69. 3. Pamela Walker Laird, Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 120–128. 4. Daniel Pope, The Making of Modern Advertising (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 117–131. 5. L. W. Rinear, “Media—The Vehicle of Advertising,” Judicious Advertising (December 1911): 101–104. 6. Elspeth H. Brown, The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884–1929. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 168. 7. Morton Sackett, “Camera Copy” Judicious Advertising (December 1911): 105–107. 8. Horatio Stoll, “Advertising Value of Moving Pictures,” Judicious Advertising (October 1910): 116. 9. Watterson R. Rothacker, “How Moving Pictures Stimulate Sales,” Judicious Advertising, (March 1911): 120. 10. Watterson Rothacker, “Possibilities in Industrial Pictures,” The Nickelodeon (January 14, 1911): 54. 11. Watterson Rothacker, “Advertising Machinery by Motography,” The Nickelodeon (January 28, 1911): 104. 12. Watterson Rothacker, “Motion Pictures that Really Advertise,” The Nickelodeon (February 11, 1911): 161. 13. Homer Croy, “Sales Demonstrations by Moving Pictures,” System: A Magazine of Business (August 1912): 129. 14. “The Kaiser Likes the “Movies,” Judicious Advertising (February 1913): 119. 15. Watterson Rothacker, “Pictures as an Advertising Force,” Motography (February 1912): 71. 16. “Commercial Films,” Motography (February 3, 1913): 70. 17. E. A. Dench, “Moving Picture Advertising to Sell Automobiles, Employed by Accessory Makers Also,” Judicious Advertising (July 1915): 87.

An “Advertising Punch” in Every Frame  |  285 18. Omer Doud, “How a New Selling Force Shot Borax Sales Up,” Judicious Advertising (October 1911): 69. 19. Ibid., 70. 20. As Jeremy Groskopf has noted, the lantern slide was a significant advertising medium in the aughts and early 1910s. See Jeremy W. Groskopf, “Profit Margins: The American Silent Cinema and the Marginalization of Advertising” (2013). Communication Dissertations, paper 47, Georgia State University. 21. Rothacker, “Where Moving Pictures Fit Into the Campaign,” Judicious Advertising (September 1911): 97. 22. Edwin L. Barker, Service Bureau, International Harvester, “Industrial Moving Pictures Make A Strong Advertising Appeal to the Masses,” Novelty News (July 1911): 6. 23. Watterson R. Rothacker, “How Moving Pictures Stimulate Sales,” Judicious Advertising (March 1911): 120. 24. E. A. Dench, “Film Advertising From Viewpoint of a Fan,” Judicious Advertising (February 1915): 74.

Appendix: Translations

27

English Translation of Chapter 1: The Pictorial in the Tableau Style Valentine Robert

The aesthetic of the image in early cinema has been given a name, a name

that the “bible” of Domitor scholars, The Encyclopedia of Early Cinema, made official: “tableau style.”1 There the tableau aesthetic was described in detail by André Gaudreault and defined as “founded on the unity of action, space, and time, [and on] the centripetal frame of the camera’s field of vision.”2 While this definition associates the tableau style above all with the discontinuity of editing, Rob King, in what we might describe as our “New Testament,” A Companion to Early Cinema, speaks explicitly of the “tableau-style of framing.”3 Elsewhere, for example in The British Cinematographer, we find expressions such as the “tableau-style of staging.”4 The concept thus describes the visual style of the early film image on every level (putting in space, in frame, and in sequence). Already in the earliest volume published by Domitor—our “Genesis”?, there is widespread mention of a “tableau-style of filmmaking.”5 This generalization entered into a number of other “sacred texts,” beginning with the foundational defining texts by Tom Gunning,6 Noël Burch,7 and André Gaudreault,8 which Richard Abel synthesized with his expression “tableau style of anonymous shot scenes.”9 It reached a culmination of sorts with the Silent Cinema Reader and its all-encompassing expression describing the “tableau-style of early films”10 (but this will not bring me to say that the Silent Cinema Reader is an apocalyptic book.) The reason this notion of the “tableau style” took hold is, first of all, because it is historically valid. The French word “tableau,” preserved intact in English as if to indicate its quoting nature, was in fact used at the time to describe the earliest film images, as one of the first reviews of the Lumière Cinématographe in 1896 illustrates: “Beginning with the first tableau, ‘Le repas de bébé’, the entire audience was won over.”11 This was not an isolated occurrence, as seen in this article from Le Figaro a year later: “The Biograph is now the great attraction of the day. . . . For twenty minutes we see a series of tableaux, which are life itself.”12 The term was even used for films that were not projected: “By placing a five-cent piece in a slot [of the Kinetograph] right away one sees develop every phase of an animated tableau.”13 Of course, “tableau” was not the only term used in French at the time;

290 | Appendix: Translations people spoke also of “vues animées,” “scènes,” and, even at this early date, “films.” But the term “tableau” came to be used systematically with the advent of multi-­ shot films; here “tableau” meant each shot, which catalogues numbered to speak of films “in 5/10/12 tableaux.”14 In English, the expression was commonly translated as “scenes” or “pictures,” but the word “tableaux” was sometimes used intact15 by the representatives of Pathé,16 Gaumont,17 and Méliès18 in the English-speaking world. With its source in other cultural fields, the word “tableau” connected the film image with other images and other aesthetics. Stage plays were structured in tableaux,19 but the term was not limited to describing theatrical images; it was also used for projected images, as magic lantern slides were described as “projection tableaux”20 and “glass tableaux.”21 It is also found in the lithography industry (“tableaux in black or in color”22) and even for the almost living compositions seen in wax museums.23 “Tableau” was thus used everywhere; it is something like the name itself for intermediality. More precisely, it is the name for a kind of pictorial quality. For the word “tableau” in French means, in essence, painting—painting in the sense of an object framed and hung on a wall. In fact, the reason the term was used in theater is because a pictorial model holds sway in stagecraft, ever since Diderot audiences have contemplated a scene the way one contemplates a painted canvas. Diderot, moreover, considered what would be called “tableaux vivants” to be the perfect form of theatrical “tableaux.” By this term is meant staged moments in which the actors do not restrict themselves to creating a pictorial effect but rather imitate precisely a famous painting, sometimes even by holding their pose for several seconds or even several minutes. This phenomenon has been theorized by the theater historian Martin Meisel under the name “realization”: “‘Realization’ . . . had a precise technical sense when applied to certain theatrical tableaux based on well-­ known pictures, [it] was in itself the most fascinating of ‘effects’ on the nineteenthcentury stage, where it meant both literal re-creation and translation into a more real, that is more vivid, visual, physically present medium.”24 These realizations would find a unique field for experimentation in cinema, where in French one speaks precisely of “réalisation” to describe the creation of the film image. Meisel himself spoke of cinema: founded on the paradox between the fixed and moving image, it appeared in his view to be the heir apparent of the tableau vivant.25 But the state of research in film history at the time made it impossible for Meisel to be aware of little more than the tableaux vivants found in films such as Viridiana (Luis Buñuel, 1961) and MASH (Robert Altman, 1970). He believed that pictorial quotations were concentrated in this postmodern pictorialist cinema and were only “sporadic in earlier films.”26 But this was not at all the case. Meisel’s intuition was correct: cinema really was heir to the tableau vivant and fashioned realizations not sporadically but in a primordial manner. It is not by chance, I believe, that we speak today of a tableau style in early cinema. The aesthetic paradigm of the tableau was concretely realized in direct

Appendix: Translations | 291 pictorial imitations. Few scholars have been able, as Ian Christie has,27 to sketch this corpus, which nevertheless is quite widespread, appearing in every genre, from Biblical films to erotic films by way of comedy and history films.28 These filmic tableaux vivants decisively foreground the form, material, and intermediality of the image in early cinema. One of the most emblematic cases is based on a painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme, Duel After the Masquerade (fig. 27.1a). This painting depicts a death scene, a topic that might appear poorly suited to being brought to life. And yet in 1900 Pathé released Duel After the Ball,29 whose aim was to give the fixed image gestural and narrative movement. First, the duel is recreated in all the vividness of its movements. This makes it possible for viewers to experience all the dramatic intensity of the moment when Pierrot is wounded and falls into the arms of his witnesses. At this moment the pictorial composition appears and the characters freeze before our eyes and hold their pose for more than five seconds (fig. 27.1b).30 The film appears to halt. But its movement resumes and we see the dramatic unfolding of Pierrot’s agony and laments until he definitively crumples to the ground. The film thus shows us the before and after of the tableau; it unfolds the temporality that Gérôme’s painting had condensed. This work on temporality was precisely one of the main features of Gérôme’s work as a painter. In the nineteenth century, the temporality of the picture was basically defined by what Lessing had described as the “fruitful moment,” meaning an ideal artistic moment that condensed the action by suggesting to the viewer’s imagination what came before and after it.31 Dominique Païni, however, has proposed that Gérôme broke with this tradition to develop an aesthetic of “the moment just afterward,” defined as “an ordinary moment of the period that follows what might have been the ‘decisive,’ ‘vivid’ or ‘ideal’ moment,”32 which is to say a kind of photographic (or even photogrammic) snapshot taken just after the fruitful moment. In this painting, Gérôme appears to be proposing something in between these two concepts. Clearly we are looking at the scene after the fatal moment. Pierrot has already been wounded, he is dying, and the victor has had the time to turn around and walk away. And yet a fruitful moment is at play here. Emotional suggestion culminates in this tragic face-to-face with death disguised in comedy costume. In addition, through the subtle use of clues Gérôme makes it possible for us to imagine very precisely the entire action as it unfolds: the two swords, the footsteps in the snow, the feathers that have fallen from the adversary’s costume, the wounding . . . it is as if we can see the duel in the empty space created in the center of the frame, which is something like the spatial materialization of the temporal ellipsis.33 Gérôme thus fashioned a specific temporality, which we might call “the fruitful moment just afterward,” in a paradox that seems almost to call out for recreation in the cinema. The Pathé film answered this call by putting the clues in order. It even upped the ante by making an addition, for a woman appears who was not in the painting.

Fig. 27.1a Jean-Léon Gérôme, Duel After the Masquerade, ca.1857–1859. Oil on canvas, 15.4" × 22.2", Baltimore, Walters Art Museum (autograph replica of the 1857 painting of Chantilly).

Fig. 27.1b Duel After the Ball (Un duel après le bal, Pathé, 1900). Frame enlargement. Courtesy of the Gosfilmofond, National Film Foundation of Russian Federation.

Appendix: Translations | 293 She enters from off screen at the very moment when Pierrot’s two adversaries are in the process of exiting the frame. The film thus shatters the frame of the painting. These early films, despite their pictorialism and their dynamic of the centripetal tableau, already establish something of the tension established theoretically by André Bazin: “between the frame and the mask,” meaning between an enclosed pictorial space and a filmic space open onto what is off screen.34 But this woman, gesturing wildly, breaks more than the frame; most of all, she breaks up the pose and sets the tableau back in motion,35 for this Pathé film is well and truly a dramatization of a freeze frame. The film concretely shows a fixed image, which we recognize as such. It transgresses the laws of the film medium to give its relation to painting material form. This intermedial affiliation is even proclaimed in the catalogue description of the film: “This scene, taken during a snowfall out of doors, is a precise reproduction of the painting by Gérôme found in the gallery of the Château de Chantilly.”36 The production thus explicitly refers to the original painting by quoting its author and even specifying where it is exhibited. Nevertheless, it is unlikely that the Pathé crew ever set foot in Chantilly.37 The film surely did not draw directly on the original painting; it is part of the cycle of its reproductions. Jean-Léon Gérôme’s work is emblematic of Walter Benjamin’s notion of “technological reproducibility.”38 He was one of the painters who best exploited the commercial and industrial context of nineteenth-century art. Working with Goupil, the largest art dealer and publisher of the day, Gérôme developed a pictorial style based on the line and on an almost photographic realism, making it possible to mechanically reproduce his canvases almost perfectly. This gave rise to Emile Zola’s extreme indignation: “Mr. Gérôme works for Goupil. He paints a picture for it to be reproduced by photography and engraving and sold in thousands of copies. Here the subject is everything, the painting is nothing: the reproduction is worth more than the artwork.”39 Whether one shares Zola’s scorn or not, we must admit that Gérôme’s industrial strategy—which earned him the precinematic label “producer-director of images”40—paid off. Duel After the Masquerade was reproduced in “cascades of published prints,”41 making it “one of the most widely reproduced paintings of its day.”42 Gérôme employed every technique (lithography, engraving, photography, photoengraving), every format (from full-sized plates to postcards), every hue (black and white, brown, tint stone, colored), and every price (from the most sumptuous reproductions sought out by high society to industrial series with mass distribution). For more than thirty years, reproductions of his work were constantly rising, permeating the collective imagination. When Martin Scorsese, in The Age of Innocence (1993), has his hero enter the salon of a connoisseur, his camera makes a visible detour to show a close-up of the inevitable piece in the collection: Duel After the Masquerade.

294 | Appendix: Translations The painting’s duplication, however, was not the work of technological reproducibility alone. The art historian Stephen Bann, extending Benjamin’s ideas, has shown that the nineteenth century was the beginning of an “age of reproduction” in the broad sense, both manual and mechanical.43 Eik Kahng has even suggested that this period saw the emergence of a veritable “aesthetics of repetition,”44 in which the image was varied, transposed, and appropriated. Duel After the Masquerade is exemplary of this to the point that several originals exist: Gérôme himself recreated his painting, producing three versions of different sizes45 in which the adversary’s silhouette and the visibility of the background vary. This new conception of painting is completely in keeping with Pathé’s re-use of the work, which treats Gérôme’s work like a painting made to be reproduced, copied, adapted, and more precisely, realized as a tableau vivant. The composition was the subject of numerous stage reincarnations before being reinterpreted on screen. Barely two years after the painting was exhibited at the Salon, the staging of Duel de Pierrot, by Bridault and Legrand, was announced in Paris as a “new kind”46 of dumb show, “taken from the famous painting by Gérôme.”47 This tableau vivant set a fashion; it was found in the finale of plays such as Fanfan la Tulipe48 and remained the main attraction of dramatic plays such as Duel de Pierrot by George-Achille Fould in 1881.49 It was also the subject of autonomous tableaux vivants, such as the one that amazed audiences at Madison Square Garden in 1893: “perfect in [its] absolute quiescence,” the recreation of the Duel stood out in the series of living pictures by producing “an effect that was painfully real and yet thoroughly picture-like.”50 Gérôme’s painting could also be found in “comic,”51 “acrobatic”52 and “spectacular”53 pantomimes. Finally, it was performed in revues, for example in Paris-Crinoline, which, less than one month after Duel After the Masquerade was exhibited at the Salon, presented what was undoubtedly the first tableau vivant of the painting.54 The incomparable stage destiny of this picture had, moreover, been predicted from the outset by Nadar, who caricatured the Salon painting as a puppet theater.55 He foresaw in the painting a kind of ready-to-use tableau vivant, made to be transposed to the stage. And the destiny of this tableau vivant did not stop at the theater curtain, but went on to the screen. Going on to the screen may have been a means to return to a gilded picture frame, for in those days projected images were often bordered.56 The earliest films took not only the name tableau from paintings, they also took their frame; both the frame and its gilding, as the Vitascope poster reminds us (fig. 27.2a). Charles Musser has shown, furthermore, that the source of this giant gilded frame used in 1896 around Edison films was precisely the machinery of tableaux vivants.57 This practice of framing the screen, which gives concrete sense to Tom Gunning’s definition of the early film tableau as “enframed rather than emplotted,”58 became popular everywhere, to the point that when it came time to think

Fig. 27.2a Edison Vitascope Company, poster advertising Vitascope golden-framed screening, ca.1896. Printed by Metropolitan Print Company (New York); retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2003689462/. (Accessed June 20, 2017.)

Fig. 27.2b Illustration of a leaflet advertising The Cinerama. The Educational and Home Amusement (London: The Stress Company, s.d.) Courtesy of the Cinémathèque française, Will Day Collection.

296 | Appendix: Translations of private screenings, the place that took hold was the wall of the family living room: films were projected like paintings alongside other tableaux and in the same frames (fig. 27.2b). As Zola bitterly remarked, Gérôme’s paintings were omnipresent on living room walls: “There is no provincial living room without an engraving of Duel After the Masked Ball hanging on its wall; . . . in bachelors’ homes we find Phryné Before the Court  . . . More serious people have The Gladiators or The Death of Caesar.”59 It turns out that the Duel was not the only Gérôme painting to be realized in early cinema; the same thing happened with Phryne before the Areopagus,60 with the gladiators in Pollice Verso,61 and with The Death of Caesar.62 Each of the tableaux by Gérôme mentioned by Zola spread from living room walls to cinema screens. Each of these paintings became an early cinema tableau in the full pictorial sense of this way of naming early film images, which I hope to have reactivated here. Translated by Timothy Barnard

Valentine Robert is Lecturer in History and Aesthetics of Cinema at the University of Lausanne. She is co-editor of Le film sur l’art, entre histoire de l’art et documentaire de creation and Corporeality in Early Cinema. Viscera, Skin, and Physical Form.

Notes 1. Richard Abel, ed. Encyclopedia of Early Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2005), 209. 2. André Gaudreault, “Editing: Tableau style,” in ibid., 210. 3. Rob King, “The Discourses of Art in Early Film, or, Why Not Rancière?” in A Companion to Early Cinema, ed. André Gaudreault, Nicolas Dulac, and Santiago Hidalgo (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 158. 4. Duncan J. Petrie, The British Cinematographer (London: BFI, 1996), 8. 5. An expression used by Peter Krämer in An Invention of the Devil? Religion and Early Cinema, ed. Roland Cosandey, André Gaudreault, and Tom Gunning (Lausanne: Payot, 1992), 191. 6. “The tableau-style of single-shot scenes” was formulated by Tom Gunning in D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 37ff. The expression occurs, however, in his earliest lectures and articles, in particular “‘Primitive’ Cinema–A Frame Up? or The Trick’s on Us,” Cinema Journal 28 (Winter 1989): 3–12. 7. The “primitive tableau” is defined as the primary feature of the PMR in Noël Burch, Life to those Shadows, trans. Ben Brewster (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). This theory was rooted in earlier studies by Burch, such as “Primitivism and the

Appendix: Translations | 297 Avant-Gardes: A Dialectical Approach,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 483–506. 8. The notion of the “tableau” emerged in the earliest articles by André Gaudreault, who has identified “the primordial ‘discovery’ of this early period’s prevailing view of the shot . . . as an autonomous and self-sufficient tableau” as “the most important contribution” to early film research. See From Plato to Lumière: Narration and Monstration in Literature and Cinema, trans. Timothy Barnard (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009 [1988]), 12. 9. Richard Abel, The Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema 1896–1914, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 99. 10. Lee Grievson and Peter Krämer, eds. The Silent Cinema Reader (London: Routledge, 2004), 188. (The complete statement reads: “The tableau-style characteristic of films from earlier periods”). This volume includes several other occurrences of the expression “tableau style” (57, 163, etc.), attesting to its systematization. 11. Le Stéphanois (Saint-Etienne, April 27, 1896), 2. My emphasis. 12. Le Figaro (Paris, September 17, 1897), 4. My emphasis. 13. Frédéric Dillaye, Les Nouveautés photographiques. 3e Complément annuel à la Théorie, la Pratique et l’Art en Photographie (Paris: Librairie illustrée, 1895), 158. My emphasis. 14. See the overview by Karine Martinez, “La vue animée dans le discours journalistique,” in Stop Motion: Fragmentation of Time, ed. François Albera, Marta Braun, and André Gaudreault (Lausanne: Payot, 2002): 309–320. 15. Santiago Hidalgo has commented on the way early texts on cinema in English had wobbly translations of French terms, “in the process creating a kind of ‘third language’ of mistranslated terms.” See “Awareness of Film, Language, and Self in Early American Film Publications,” in A Companion to Early Cinema, 210–211. 16. There is no system to these translations, which diverge within the same catalogue and sometimes on the same page. See, for example, Catalogue Pathé (New York, 1905): 133. 17. Winter in Switzerland (Gaumont, 1905) is thus presented as “a complete exhibition in nine remarkable tableaux,” The Elge Monthly List 66, April–May 1905, 9. 18. See Jacques Malthète, “Détail de l’analyse des termes désignant le film chez Méliès,” in Méliès, l’illusionniste fin-de-siècle, ed. Jacques Malthète and Michel Marie (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne nouvelle, 1997), 37–42. 19. This theatrical heritage has been studied by Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs in Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 20. L’Abbé Moigno, L’Art des projections (Paris: Bureau du Journal Les Mondes, 1872), 91. 21. Catalogue des tableaux sur verre pour l’enseignement par les projections A.Molteni (Paris, n.d.). 22. Catalogue de l’imagerie de la Maison de la Bonne Presse (Paris, 1907), 7. 23. The Catalogue illustré du Musée Grévin (Paris, 1891) is emblematic of this terminology. 24. Martin Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 30. 25. Ibid., 51. 26. Ibid., 91. 27. Ian Christie, “Painting and the Visual Arts,” in Encyclopedia of Early Cinema, 493–497. 28. See my doctoral dissertation, L’origine picturale du cinéma: Le tableau vivant, une esthétique du film des premiers temps (2016, Université de Lausanne, dir. François Albera).

298 | Appendix: Translations 29. This title, translated literally from the French Un Duel après le bal (Pathé, 1900), is the same word for word as the title under which Gérôme’s painting was popularized in France. 30. My thanks to Peter Bagrov, Natalia Jakovleva, Valérie Pozner, Ivo Blom, and Yuri Tsivian for their assistance in locating a copy of this film. 31. Gothold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry [1766], trans. Ellen Frottingham [1898] (New York: Dover, 2005), 16. 32. Dominique Païni, “Painting the Moment Just Afterward, or, Gérôme as Film-maker,” in The Spectacular Art of Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904), ed. Laurence des Cars, Dominique de Font-Réaulx, and Edouard Papet (Paris: Musée d’Orsay/Skira-Flammarion, 2010), 336. 33. Dominique de Fonts-Réaulx, “Cat. 51, Duel After the Ball,” in ibid., 120. 34. André Bazin, “Painting and Cinema,” in What is Cinema? vol.1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005 [1959]), 164–172. 35. This figure also inscribes the tableau in a broader narrative temporality by virtue of being the cause of the duel. See Yuri Tsivian, Immaterial Bodies: A Cultural Analysis of Early Russian films (Los Angeles: University of Southern California/Annenberg Center for Communication, 1999). 36. Catalogue Pathé (Paris, March 1902), 8. 37. The description is not afraid of untruthful statements, because the film was absolutely not shot out of doors but rather in front of a painted backdrop. 38. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (1935–39),” in Selected Writings vol. 3, 1935–1938, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 101–133. 39. Emile Zola, “Nos peintres au Champ de Mars [1867],” in Ecrits sur l’art (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 184. 40. Païni, “Painting the Moment Just Afterward,” 333. On this precinematic vision of Gérôme’s painting, see Laurent Guido and Valentine Robert, “Jean-Léon Gérôme: un peintre d’histoire présumé ‘cinéaste’,” 1895 Revue d’histoire du cinéma 63 (Spring 2011): 8–23. 41. Régine Bigorne, “A Publishing Policy,” in Gérôme and Goupil: Art and Entreprise (Paris: RMN, 2000), 88. 42. Fonts-Réaulx, Duel, 120. 43. Stephen Bann, Parallel Lines: Printmakers, Painters and Photographers in Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2001), 16. 44. Eik Kahng, “Repetition as Symbolic Form,” in The Repeating Image: Multiples in French Painting from David to Matisse, ed. Eik Kahng (Baltimore/New Haven/London: Walters Art Museum/Yale University Press, 2007): 13. 45. The first (50 × 72 cm) is at Chantilly, the second (68 × 99 cm) at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, and the third (39 × 56 cm) at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. 46. Le Ménestrel (Paris, August 28, 1859), 307. 47. Le Monde dramatique (Paris, September 8, 1859), 1. 48. Le Tintamarre (Paris, November 6, 1859), 5 49. This play toured with great success until 1888 but was lambasted by the critics for having “no other goal” than to “reproduce as a tableau vivant Gérôme’s masterpiece.” L’Orchestre (Paris, August 3, 1881), 2. 50. The Sun (New York, April 9, 1893), 6. 51. Le Figaro (March 14, 1889), 3.

Appendix: Translations | 299 52. The acrobats Hanlon-Lee explained that the pantomime they performed for people, including the Archduke of Russia, was directly inspired by “the famous painting by Gérôme.” Le Figaro (October 20, 1879), 1. 53. L’Orchestre (September 15, 1894), 4. 54. Roger de Beauvoir, Paris-Crinoline: revue en trois tableaux (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1858), 5. 55. Nadar, Nadar jury au Salon de 1857: 1000 comptes rendus, 150 dessins (Paris: Librairie nouvelle, 1857), 9. 56. See Judith R. Buchanan, “Un cinéma impur: Framing Film in the Early Film Industry,” in Framing Film: Cinema and the Visual Arts, eds. Steven Allen and Laura Hubner (Bristol: Intellect, 2012), 239–260. 57. Charles Musser, “A Cornucopia of Images: Comparison and Judgement across Theater, Film and the Visual Arts during the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Moving Pictures: American Art and Early Film, 1880–1910, ed. Nancy Mowll Mathews and Charles Musser (Manchester: Hudson Hills Press, 2005), 8. 58. Tom Gunning, “‘Primitive’ Cinema—A Frame Up?,” Grievson, The Silent Cinema Reader, 10. 59. Zola, “Nos peintres au Champ de Mars,” 184. 60. The Judgment of Phryné (Pathé, 1897) consists entirely of a realization of this 1861 painting. 61. The numerous realizations of this 1872 painting culminated in the film Quo vadis? (Enrico Guazzoni, 1913). See Ivo Blom, “Quo vadis? From Painting to Cinema and Everything in Between,” in The Tenth Muse: Cinema and Other Arts, ed. Leonardo Quaresima and Laura Vichi, (Udine: Forum, 2001): 281–292. 62. The tableau vivant of this 1867 painting in Julius Caesar (J. Stuart Blackton and William V. Ranous, 1908) has been analyzed by Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio, Reframing Culture: The Case of Vitagraph Quality Films (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 87–95.

28

English Translation of Chapter 5: Caricature and Comic Films in the Belle Époque: When the Illustrated Press Met the Cinema Jérémy Houillère

From its very beginnings, French cinema had fruitful and varied relations with

the illustrated press. Victorin Jasset was certainly one of the first authors to remark on this, in a series of articles published in 1911: “At the time, both the newspaper Le Chat Noir, which for ten years had absorbed the spirit of the Montmartre draftsmen, and the Gil Blas supplement were put into service. For a long time, drawings without captions by Steinlein, Villette, Doës, Guillaume, Caran d’Arche, and so forth were the staple comic scenes.”1 After Jasset, several film historians echoed this observation, from Arnaud and Boisyvon2 to Georges Sadoul3 and later François Albera. In his analysis of Rigadin peintre cubiste (Whiffles, Cubic Artist, Pathé, 1912), Albera situates comic films in the “tradition” of press drawings: “This film belongs to the comic genre, which disparages and pokes fun at his subject, caricatures it in the tradition of satirical cartoonists who, since the mid-nineteenth century, had lampooned the new painting (Daumier along with the others).”4 The term “caricature”—used as a verb (“to caricature”)—is meant here metaphorically, in the sense of an altered representation of the object it refers to in order to ridicule it. Before Albera, Sadoul had already mentioned the “caricatured stunts”5 of André Deed, and Henri Agel had spoken of the way Linder “caricatures . . . society.”6 A “caricature,” in the primary sense of the term, is a noun designating a drawing or painting—a picture—often a portrait, with features exaggerated to the point of deforming the subject. While commentators have repeatedly made connections between illustrated press cartoons and comic films, study of these relations has never been developed. As a pictorial composition, caricature nevertheless shares with film images many characteristics, whether in terms of framing, structuring the space, or figuration. Through the analysis of these common characteristics, I will attempt to show how some comic films have drawn on the pictorial processes of press images.

Appendix: Translations | 301

Compositions Caricatures in the illustrated press must be distinguished from “stories in images,” still in a minority at the time in France, although they were growing in number.7 Accompanied in general by a caption, a caricature frames a given situation in a thought out and ordered composition. This fixed construction of the frame and space was similar to the compositions found in early cinema. Indeed, the fact that French cinema of the day did not cut up the space, a trait shared by comic films, gave rise to an almost pictorial construction of the image: camera movements and variations in shot scale were very rare and even nonexistent in numerous films. Without denying the fundamental difference between a shot in a film and a drawing in the press, this similarity of construction enables us to make a true connection between the two representational systems. Film images are constructed, like the majority of drawings in the press, using a “perspective” view of space; as a result, organizing this space often creates a dialectic between foreground and background. For example, in Onésime employé des postes (Onésime, Post Office Employee, Gaumont, 1913), the title character in the foreground is busy writing a letter. Behind him, and separated by the grill of a postal counter on which can be read a sign saying “Closed,” a crowd of unhappy customers is waiting for the employee to deign to serve them (which, of course, will not happen). While Onésime does not appear to be aware of the waiting of which he is the cause, the film’s viewers take in the whole scene and cannot avoid remarking the employee’s lack of professionalism. A drawing published in Le Pêle-Mêle was constructed using a strictly identical composition.8 Entitled “La vie de bureau” (“Office Life”), it features two employees in the foreground engaged in a game of checkers (fig. 28.1). A half dozen irritated faces are fixed on the two players. As with Onésime, the foreground and background are separated by a counter grill, the only rampart holding back an inevitable unleashing of anger. From press drawing to comic film, we often find images with a similar composition. Laurent Le Forestier, for example, discusses a drawing showing a man perched on top of a clock in the middle of a street. A shot in Calino Bureaucrate (Gaumont, 1909) contains exactly the same elements arranged the same way.9 The figure, clutching the hands of the clock, is trying to turn them back in order to make up the time that would enable him not to be late to work. These compositions, the novice clockmaker and the distracted employee, depict absurd, incongruous situations. The characters appear to be isolated from their environment (Onésime alone in the foreground of the image; Calino at the top of the clock), and their obstinacy in defying common sense situates them on the margins of the world around them. Resolutely out of synch with the norm and common sense, they create a risible situation for the viewer and reader.

302 | Appendix: Translations

Fig. 28.1 George Omry, “La vie de bureau,” Le Pêle-Mêle, March 26, 1911.

Images in the illustrated press and comic films drew abundantly on these kinds of absurd disjunctions. This is seen in the constant placing together of antagonistic figures in the same drawing or same film—the recurrent motif of the “mismatched couple.” Nothing about these couples, with their contrasting physiques, suggests an a priori relation; they offer the viewer or reader a visible contrast from their first glance. The weekly La Caricature published several variations, such as a drawing entitled “Étrange assemblage” (“Strange Combination”), in which a short, stocky, and smiling man is holding the arm of a tall, long-limbed woman with a downcast look (fig. 28.2).10 In the cinema, this sort of couple can be seen in the figures Little Moritz and Rosalie in particular. Sarah Duhamel, who played Rosalie,

Appendix: Translations | 303

Fig. 28.2 Moriss, “Étrange assemblage,” La Caricature, February 3, 1900.

often appeared in film as a massive and headstrong woman, leading along on her adventures a thin and far from go-getter mate. Placed in the same frame, these motley characters were stamped with incompatibility. Common sense tells us that

304 | Appendix: Translations they should not be placed together, and doing so widens the gap that separates them; a tall, thin man appears more so, for example, alongside a short, corpulent woman. The contrast is amplified whenever the characters appear together. This kind of comic exaggeration obtained through contrast is identified by Gombrich as one of the most common figures of discourse of caricature.11

(De)Figurations While the use of caricature is common currency in drawings in the illustrated press, it was also frequently used in comic films, in particular with Jean Durand at Gaumont but also at its competitors. Based on comic deformation and exaggeration, caricature was used with numerous comic figures. From Boireau to Onésime by way of Calino and Zigoto, they all shared an extraordinary malleability. In Boireau, roi de la boxe (Boireau, the King of Boxing, Pathé, 1912), the title character strikes one of his adversaries so hard that his head swells to three times its normal size. Similarly, in Onésime et l’héritage de Calino (Onésime and Calino’s Inheritance, Gaumont, 1913), poor Onésime, buried alive, quits the earth in springtime and sees his fingers grow like a bed of wildflowers. The hypertrophy, or stretching of one or several parts of the body, is a recurrent motif in comic films but was also a well-worn technique of draftsmen for the illustrated press. Applied to the human figure, caricature accentuates the features of the face—enlarging a nose, reducing a mouth—to give a distorted and often disagreeable picture of the person being sketched. This is the principle of the portrait-charge, which Émile Cohl so often employed, as Donald Crafton has amply documented.12 The victim’s face is taken to the outer boundary of human likeness, the limits of the recognizable. Diderot once remarked: “Art consists in distinguishing the true defect that already existed in some part, or a defect believed to be one by public opinion, and expressing it with such exaggeration that we still recognize it but beyond which point we no longer would. Here the charge is as great as possible.”13 In this respect the grimacing poses struck by characters in comic films, in close-up or medium close-up, have a special resonance. These shots, whether emblematic or not, often involved a degree of graphic effects, as Laurent Le Forestier points out.14 At the beginning of Calino s’endurcit la figure (Calino Hardens His Face, Gaumont, 1912), the character’s face is encircled by a black mask against a light background decorated with abstract motifs resembling holly leaves. The wide-open mouth reveals the gums and the extended tongue while the arms wave about in every direction; this animated portrait of Calino, with its extreme physical expressiveness, recorded on film what some called the “photographic caricature.” In an article published in 1909 in Ciné-Journal, Attilio Lavagna wondered whether the images of “bizarre, strange and involuntary movements, of grimaces caught involuntarily by the camera . . . could and should be compared to caricatures.”15 Before him, as Bernard Tillier reports, “the prolific writer Paul

Appendix: Translations | 305 Lacroix [proposed] to Nadar that together they file a patent for ‘photographic caricature,’ whose principle would be to make photographic models grimace using distorting lenses.”16 It seems clear that, from the beginning of the twentieth century, photographic images adopted a technique until then limited to drawn images. The codes and conventions of figuration applied in the illustrated press found resonance in the treatment of the photographic image. Nevertheless, the films I have viewed show that the distorting lens proposed by Paul Lacroix to accentuate the effects of the caricature was not used in comic films. Distortion of the films’ characters was most often the result of trick effects or hairpieces. The hypertrophied head of the character in Boireau, roi de la boxe appears to have been obtained by successive cuts in the image track (like those obtained by what was known as the “stop-camera” technique), making it possible to place increasingly larger masks on the face of the actor without interrupting the illusion of continuity in the action. The actor’s head appears to “inflate” whereas in reality several heads were placed one after another. On the other hand, we can see the use of a special lens to obtain distorting effects in “scènes à trucs” or trick scenes. The Pathé catalogue mentions the film Toto exploite la curiosité (Toto Benefits by People’s Curiosity, no. 2756, 1909), in which the character places under the enlarging lens of a microscope all kinds of objects that the viewer can see take shape and become distorted. Devices such as these show clearly that there was a desire to manipulate the cinema’s photographic images and to transform them to give them the quality of caricature, like a draftsman working on a piece of paper with a pencil.

“Mise en dessin” The circulation of the caricature technique between the illustrated press drawing and the comic film took concrete form in what I will call the caricatural “mise en dessin” or “putting into drawing” of the cinematic image. The expression “mise en dessin” should be understood in the same way that we say something is “shaped,” or “mise en forme.” It suggests giving something a new quality out of pre-existing material. The new quality in question here is the drawing (following the codes of caricature), and the basic material is of course the cinema’s photographic images. It is thus not a question here of bringing out every trace of the drawn image in films (such as the set showing pneumatic tubes in Onésime employé des postes), but rather of considering the two image systems alongside each other to study the transformations taking place in the movement from one to the other. Such a process is at work in the film Rigadin peintre cubiste (Whiffles, Cubic Artist, Pathé, 1912), mentioned above. Rigadin is devoted to seeing the world around him according to the precepts of his art: “1. There are no round surfaces. 2. An egg is diamond-shaped. 3. The Earth is a cube.”17 Not content to paint his pictures, he makes “cubiform” outfits for himself and his maid. But Rigadin’s

306 | Appendix: Translations future father-in-law, Mr. Rondebosse, is firmly opposed to this new, decadent art. In the end, Rigadin succeeds in entering his father-in-law’s good graces by painting a “masterly” portrait of him—the marriage is safe! The film’s drawings were done by Adrien Barrère, a poster artist responsible for numerous works in the illustrated press, in particular the “Têtes de Turc” (whipping) rubric in Fantasio, in which he sketched public personalities of the day. Barrère was familiar with the mise en dessin of film characters because he designed most of the posters for the comic films produced by Pathé (with Max Linder, Bébé, and Bigorno). The drawings for Rigadin peintre cubiste inevitably differ from those he usually made for the illustrated press and film posters because he designed them with the Cubist method. When he drew the Mr. Rondebosse character, he used extremely straight lines, giving his face the shape of a large rectangle. The character was nevertheless identifiable by his haircut, moustache, and beard and by the small rectangular glasses he wore on the middle of his nose. The comic charge thus resides in the distance between the thick, round shape of the character (accentuated by his name, “round-hump”) and in the pointed and angular nature of his portrait. This portrait is a deliberate example of the portrait-charge, as defined above. Barrère simplified the features of the face by focusing on precise attributes and accentuating certain details; the beard, for example, is quite long, extending far below the chin. This caricatural mise en dessin with a Cubist bent had several equivalents in the illustrated press. Caricatures of artists at work were a recurring theme of satirical pictures. A drawing done by Luc for the cover of Le Journal Amusant,18 for example, entitled “Le . . . bisme expliqué” (sic) (“. . . ism Explained”), satirizes this new mode of painting just like Rigadin peintre cubiste (fig. 28.3). The painter, in the foreground of the image, faces the reader, taking stock of him in a haughty manner. He is pointing at his canvas, which is supposed to depict the model posing in the background. The model holds props that enable us to identify her once she has been put through the “Cubist mill”: a rose in her right hand, a saucepan (!) in the left, a large black feather hat, and so on. The figure drawn on the canvas is characterized by exaggeratedly straight lines that replace the model’s every curve. The pose is the same, the placing of the props also. A few lines of text, attributed to the painter, complete the drawing: “I’m not telling you that this is how you see her. I’m telling you that this is how SHE IS.” Taking the reader as witness, in these three sentences the Cubist painter expresses all the folly behind his art. Pushing artistic subjectivity to its furthest extremes, he joins Rigadin in the expression of comedy taken to the point of absurdity. The outfits Rigadin made turned his entire environment into something treated by the cube. Similarly, Luc’s painter contradicts common sense with his claim that his model—whose curves the reader can easily see—is herself an assemblage of cubes. These figures are clearly out of synch

Appendix: Translations | 307

Fig. 28.3 Luc, “Le . . . bisme expliqué,” Le Journal Amusant, November 9, 1912.

with the world around them. The reality in which we see them is a personal (and skewed) interpretation of their environment. Rigadin, in Barrère’s drawings, and Luc’s mad painter demonstrate through absurdity that mise en dessin is never a neutral process: it is always a personal depiction, the vision of an author. Mise en dessin follows from a necessary disjunction with reality and from an inevitable distortion of varying degrees, depending on the kind of drawing. This is what has led Jean-Baptiste Massuet to

308 | Appendix: Translations remark that the illustrated press drawing is “inadaptable” to the photographic image in cinema. The photographic image (in movement, moreover) is characterized by a strongly analogous relation with reality; it makes one’s view objective, at least according to certain discourses of the day.19 These discourses highlight the strange nature of the encounter between a character born on paper and a photographic environment. This strangeness, it was believed, render these two visual worlds resolutely incompatible. And yet mise en dessin was a recurring motif in comic films. The character’s body was regularly subjected to dematerializing forces which work hard to model and remodel it. This is the case with Boireau in Boireau, bonhomme de pain d’épices (The Gingerbread Man, Pathé, 1913), in which he is plunged into a baker’s kneading machine, baked, and emerges flattened and displayed on a board, the outline of his body and the folds of his clothing drawn in pencil. Comic films were characterized precisely by a constant distancing from reality. Absurdity ceaselessly defies common sense, revealing to the viewer an image of dehumanized characters. This marked propensity for comic disjunction, for breaking free of norms and common sense, leads me to propose the hypothesis of a manifest connection between many early comic films in France and caricatures in the illustrated press. The photographic image of the comic film appears not to have recognized the boundary which could have (should have?) separated it from the drawn image. The various forms of mise en dessin I have mentioned in the present text establish an incontestable connection between these two visual worlds that goes beyond the mere circulation of techniques. Even though the cinematic image can be compared to that of the drawing only with difficulty, the technique of the caricature operates as a natural bridge between the two systems of representation. Through the three kinds of interactions I have described here between the drawn image and the film image, there would appear to be an obvious connection between the two. The cinematic image drew on techniques used in illustrated press caricature, both in the way it framed the composition and in the way it depicted its characters. These characters, remodeled according to the codes of the illustrated press drawing, were freed from the restraints of realism and representation and were able to give themselves over to every imaginable fantasy. Historiography has mostly contributed to pointing out the caricatural treatment of film characters. Yet, by means of a variety of trick effects and interventions on the film stock itself, this caricatural treatment was employed just as much with respect to the image. That said, we must not forget that an illustrated press drawing could never be a shot in a film, and vice versa. Movement, of which comic films made abundant use, was something beyond the reach of the illustrated press drawing (at least during this period, and not in the same way as in cinema). The present study should thus be extended to consider these interactions not simply in terms of the connection between them, but in terms

Appendix: Translations | 309 of the distance between them, which is the only way to grasp the specificity of each medium. In addition, while I believe I have identified some of the issues around this circulation with respect to comic films, we should also examine the consequences of this interaction for the illustrated press. In fact, until the late nineteenth century, the caricature was the prerogative of this press and its draftsmen. Its arrival in a new system of representation, photographic cinema, cast it headlong, as Bertrand Tillier has remarked,20 into the domain of the modern image. Translated by Timothy Barnard

Jérémy Houillère is a doctoral candidate in Film Studies at the University of Rennes 2 and the University of Montreal. His thesis is on intermedial relations between the early French comic films (1900–1914) and the satirical press of the period.

Notes I would like to thank Laurent Le Forestier and the review committee of Domitor for their reading of this text and their thoughtful comments. 1. Victorin Jasset, “Étude sur la mise en scène en cinématographie,” Ciné-Journal (October 21, 1911), 51. 2. Etienne Arnaud and Boisyvon, Le Cinéma pour tous: Historique de la projection animée. La mise en scène (Paris: Garnier, 1922), 200–201. 3. Georges Sadoul, Histoire générale du cinéma II. Les pionniers du cinéma, 1897–1909 (Paris: Denoël, 1947), 313–314. 4. François Albera, L’Avant-garde au cinéma (Paris: Armand Colin, 2005), 56. 5. Georges Sadoul, Histoire de l’art du cinéma. Des origines à nos jours (Paris: Flammarion, 1953), 103. 6. Henri et Geneviève Agel, Voyage dans le cinéma (Tournai: Casterman, 1962), 110. 7. Several studies, especially in English, describe the relations between early cinema and what would later be called comic strips. See Jared Gardner, Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling (Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 2012); and Josh Lambert, “‘Wait for the Next Pictures’: Intertextuality and Cliffhanger Continuity in Early Cinema and Comic Strips,” Cinema Journal 48, no. 2 (2009): 3–25. My thanks to Philippe Gauthier for providing me with these references. 8. “La vie de bureau,” Le Pêle-Mêle (March 26, 1911), 6. 9. Laurent Le Forestier, Les Films comiques produits par Gaumont entre 1907 et 1914, unpublished master’s thesis, Université Paris 3, 1993, 35. 10. “Étrange assemblage,” La Caricature (February 3, 1900). 11. Ernst Gombrich, “The Experiment of Caricature,” Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (London: Phaidon, 1980 [1960]), 279–303. 12. Donald Crafton, Emile Cohl, Caricature, and Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 11–19. My warm thanks to Donald Crafton for sending me this volume.

310 | Appendix: Translations 13. Denis Diderot, quoted by Plantu, Le Monde 2 (October 2002), 143. 14. Laurent Le Forestier, Les Films comiques produits par Gaumont entre 1907 et 1914, 35. 15. Attilio Lavagna, “Pour la liberté de la photographie anecdotique,” Ciné-Journal 6–12, September 1909, 5. 16. Bertrand Tillier, À la charge!: la caricature en France de 1789 à 2000 (Paris: Éditions de l’Amateur, 2005), 48. 17. Scénario Pathé (Bibliothèque nationale de France, IFN-6402534, 1912). 18. “Le . . . bisme expliqué,” Le Journal amusant (November 9, 1912). 19. Jean-Baptiste Massuet, Quand le dessin animé rencontre le cinéma en prises de vues réelles: Modalités historiques, théoriques et esthétiques d’une scission-assimilation entre deux régimes de représentation, unpublished doctoral dissertation, Université Rennes 2, 2013, 97–98. 20. Bertrand Tillier, À la charge!: la caricature en France de 1789 à 2000, 49.

29

English Translation of Chapter 6: From the Illustrated Press to Filmed Actualities (1894–1910): The Emergence of a New “Visual Information Culture”? Rodolphe Gahéry

The expression “visual information culture” should not be understood here

as a historical term, as it would be highly anachronistic in the period 1895–1910. It is, rather, a methodological and theoretical tool designating the production, dissemination, or reception of images in an informative or journalistic manner, by or for a particular social group at a particular time. This visual information culture is thus reminiscent of the concepts of “paradigm” and cultural “series” in the sense used by André Gaudreault.1 Thus, to inform through images is part of a vast cultural paradigm, itself made up of several cultural series such as press illustrations (engravings, photographs) and, in film, actualities. It goes without saying that this visual information culture is not fixed and that its evolution is governed by, among other things, the evolution of media themselves (the appearance of new media, competition or power struggles between existing media, etc.). One of the major features of the evolution of this visual information culture from the mid-1890s to 1910 is the emergence of filmed actualities, which were soon structured as “newsreels,” beginning in 1909–1910 in France. The conditions of this emergence are my topic of study here, and in particular the question of the media dependence or determinism of the earliest informative moving images with respect to press illustrations. Indeed, it is generally acknowledged that many of the earliest filmed actualities were, at best, merely literal adaptations of what had already been printed in newspapers and, at worst, bowdlerized or incomplete, as they were designed to please the broadest audience possible and thus refrained from annoying or losing them in overly complex discourses about the world. Without going so far as to assert that filmed actualities existed as early as 1895 as an autonomous cultural series, the present author’s current research

312 | Appendix: Translations paints a more nuanced view2 in favor of a less deterministic, more autonomous vision of the earliest moving information images with respect to their “elders,” the illustrated press. A comparative approach between still images and moving images is thus required, one based on certain criteria, which have been grouped into the three categories that follow. Moreover, in order to set a limit to a program as vast as this, the present study will limit itself to questions of reception and dissemination in France and to media depictions of the four following events: the Dreyfus affair, whose judicial phase ran from 1894 to 1906; the Paris World’s Fair in 1900; the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905; and the flooding of the Seine in 1910. For each of these events, two bodies of work were constituted: one made up of moving pictures both contemporaneous with and treating the event and likely to have been disseminated in France, and the other made up of images from the illustrated press, as seen in the two most widely read titles in France between 1895 and 1910, Le Petit Journal and Le Petit Parisien, which were systematically combed through.3 The source materials came to a total of 290 press images and 130 moving pictures.4

Comparing the Production and Dissemination of Images The question of the production and dissemination of informational images is an important criterion of intermedial comparison in that it makes it possible to appreciate the degree to which the filmic was dependent on the non-filmic. Thus, according to the hypothesis of a strong dependence, the extent and frequency of still images and moving images are considered to meet, and an event that gives rise to the massive and synchronous publication of illustrations in the printed press will engender, almost mechanically, the massive and synchronous production of films. But what, exactly, was the situation with respect to the frequency and quantity of images produced by newspapers and films? Normally, an informational image appears when the event it depicts takes place, or as close to this moment as possible. In this respect, therefore, and unsurprisingly, the chronology of the appearance of still images is very similar to that of moving pictures in that it follows, with a few slight exceptions, the chronology of the events themselves. In the case of the Paris World’s Fair, for example, held from April to November 1900, the forty-four issues of Le Petit Journal containing images connected to the event appeared between October 1889 and December 1990. In the case of Le Petit Parisien, twenty-one issues between February and November 1990 covered the Fair. And, as all the films about the Fair were shot on location, their simultaneity with the event goes without saying. Nevertheless, this great media synchronicity must be qualified in two respects. The first concerns the Dreyfus affair and the rhythm of publications in the press, which was much less regular and constant than that for the other three events. In fact, the publication of images related to the affair alternated between

Appendix: Translations | 313 periods of media silence or lifelessness, during which nothing appeared, and periods of media enthrallment, characterized by a great quantity and frequency of images. Two of the most important such periods were without a doubt the trial of Émile Zola (nine illustrations in total for the months of January and February 1898 alone) and Dreyfus’s retrial in Rennes (eleven illustrations in the two newspapers appearing from July to September 1899). Conversely, I found no illustration around the affair before December 1894, even though Dreyfus was arrested in mid-October, nor after September 1899, even though the affair did not really conclude, from a judicial point of view, until summer 1906 with Dreyfus’s rehabilitation. The same is true of moving pictures, as three of the four main films to address the Dreyfus affair (the two recreations by Méliès and Pathé and the live footage shot in Rennes by the Mutoscope and Biograph Company for France) date from late 1899, while the fourth (by Pathé again, in 1908) was clearly made for the American market. More broadly, and this is the second qualification that must be made, diachronic practices seemed to develop around informational moving images, especially at the end of the period under study or even beyond. Two examples of this could be mentioned: Pathé’s probable recycling of location footage of the RussoJapanese War, which was purchased and then edited with the recreations shot by Lucien Nonguet in 19045 as if the later insertion of more “authentic” informational images made it possible to impart value to (and no doubt monetize) poor-­ quality recreations, even though the event depicted was long since over. Another significant but later case, as it was no doubt related to the rise of the earliest newsreels around 1909–1910, was Gaumont’s reuse of shots from the flooding of the Seine in 1910 as a way of comparing it with later cases of flooding, or simply as archival footage. This reused material (I have uncovered five instances between 1913 and 1922) were commented on in intertitles. Even when explicit, however, these practices of recycling or reuse do not appear to have been tolerated in the press, making them specific to informational moving images and thus of particular interest. The most marked differences between the images in the illustrated press and those in films, however, had to do more with the extent of some of the productions than with their frequency. The printed press undeniably produced a very large body of images in order to cover the four events under discussion here, but in the case of the Dreyfus affair and the Russo-Japanese war, kinematographers were much less prolific. With respect to the former, whereas Le Petit Journal and Le Petit Parisien published some fifty illustrations between them from December 1894 to September 1899—a considerable number—only four films were shot, as described above. And even though each film, whether recreating the event or shooting on location, had a minimum of ten shots or tableaux, this was a very lean output compared, for example, to the ninety-one moving pictures made in

314 | Appendix: Translations 1900 for the World’s Fair that I have been able to identify. This gap between still and moving images grew wider with the Russo-Japanese war: the fifteen or so recreations by Lucien Nonguet for Pathé pale in comparison to the nearly 140 press images found in some one hundred issues spread over two years (1904 and 1905). I have been unable to find any trace of other initiatives concerning the conflict and contemporaneous with it, at least in France. In short, from the point of view of the production and dissemination of informational images, the claim that moving pictures were entirely dependent on pictures in the illustrated press does not hold up, or at least must be qualified and refined.

The Illustrated Press and Filmed Recreations: Formal Differences and Inherited Aesthetics Let us now turn to formal and aesthetic questions, which lie at the very heart of the notion of intermediality. The distinction between “dependent” and “autonomous” media remains in effect here, in the sense that an autonomous medium, broadly speaking, tends to influence the forms and aesthetic of a dependent medium. But this distinction may not be sufficient, as these power relations can develop between both newer and older media under forms of intermediality I propose to call “prospective” and “retrospective.” It turns out that the images produced by both the illustrated press and kinematographers between 1895 and 1910 were dependent with respect to older media, but under much different influences in each case. First of all, if we had to posit a thread running through all the press images in the body of work under discussion here, we would without any doubt have to begin somewhere in the latter third of the nineteenth century, with the rise of universal education under the Third Republic, for journalistic iconography between the years 1890 and 1910 was, to a great extent, a continuation of a representational system tied up with the school system and even with pedagogy. This inherited formal and aesthetic influence may appear surprising, and it should certainly be discussed, refined, and explored in greater depth, but it is an influence that, for the purposes of the present study, took three forms: literal illustrations, cards produced in series, and, albeit much more rarely, allegories. Most of these still images were literal illustrations in the sense that their function was limited to the graphic representation of certain textual elements in keeping with an underlying pedagogical approach. In a sense, a literal illustration is the “zero degree” informational image: it limits itself to supplying an explanation, a reasoning, or at times an argument, but without ever taking the place of the text. The literal illustration is completely dependent on another kind of content and takes form as a medium by way of another kind of support (the text of an article, the words spoken by a schoolteacher). Better yet, it is in the service of this other content and cannot be understood in isolation. Concretely,

Appendix: Translations | 315 with respect to the body of work under study here, this process took material form in numerous portraits, for example with respect to the Dreyfus affair. This portraiture generally employed quite specific features that made it possible to identify the principal protagonists. Dreyfus was thus usually drawn with his pince-nez eyeglasses and a slight moustache, while Zola was shown with a goatee and a top hat. Without necessarily being apocryphal, these features were undoubtedly intended to fill in any possible gaps in the work of the draftsmen, or rather that of the engravers, who sometimes had to work “blind” and in a hurry. This depiction of individual features sometimes extended to groups, for which the illustrators also resorted to a few significant details such as flags, uniforms, and symbols. This was the case with the illustrations of soldiers appearing at the start of the Russo-Japanese War, for example. Finally, there was also the matter of illustrating sites, of providing well-defined spatial bearings: the locations of the Dreyfus trials, plans of the 1900 World’s Fair, maps of the conflict in the Far East. These are documents one can easily imagine adorning the walls of a class taught by Jules Ferry. The same is true of the series of cards mentioned above, another example of the influence of schoolroom imagery on images in the illustrated press. The most conclusive example concerns the 1900 World’s Fair, which Le Petit Journal marked by publishing weekly series of engravings depicting the pavilions of the participating countries. This came to more than forty drawings, composed country by country in the style of memos, each one with a similar composition: the pavilion in the center and topped with the national flag, the coat of arms, and depictions of the figures in power (sovereigns or heads of state) in contrast with the people and what passed for their ways and customs shown in the foreground. This iconography, by virtue of its serial production and positivist approach, took up its rightful place in what corresponded to an international equivalent of the famous book Tour de France par deux enfants. Finally, the use of allegory by the press, while much rarer, also derived from this influence of pedagogy and the school system on the informational still image. I will limit myself here to a rather surreal example, for 1910 at least, published by Le Petit Journal on the occasion of the floods in Paris. This allegory of the city of Paris shows a woman wearing the city’s coat of arms on her head and proudly leading her small boat full of residents of Paris, bonded by an almost sacred union, transcending social circumstance in order to better face the caprices of nature. This depiction had no cause to be envious of La Liberté by Delacroix, which did not prevent it from appearing on the front page of one of the most widely read daily newspapers of the day. Far removed from these pedagogical considerations, moving informational images, especially when they took the form of recreations, were more influenced by live entertainment, in particular the theater. This is a familiar observation,

316 | Appendix: Translations and viewing the recreations in the body of films under discussion here only confirms it. Such was the case with the two L’Affaire Dreyfus, produced by Méliès and Pathé in 1899 and that take up pretty much every formal and aesthetic code inherited from the stage: the use of tableaux, whose unity of place and action are suggestive of a short play; unvarying framing from the viewer’s point of view; and an acting style similar to that found in the dramatic theater. To this was added the almost obligatory, and thus at times superficial, peak moment or climax. In the Russo-Japanese War tableaux shot by Lucien Nonguet, for example, its climax was long considered, following Georges Sadoul, to be the episode of the sinking of the Petropavlovsk when in fact the climax was the tableau entitled Autour de Port-Arthur (Around Port Arthur), in which sailors and officers gather around the cannon in the shadows and smoke, ready to die defending the port and its ships.6 As always, these intermedial dependencies of moving informational pictures, which we see retrospectively, are very different from those of their paper counterparts.

The Convergence of New Intermedialities to Create a Visual Information Culture These differences obviously did not prevent the emergence of new intermedial relations, this time bringing still and moving images together directly, in particular snapshots and film shoots on location. As a result, while these new formal and aesthetic intermedialities merit discussion in more detail, it should be mentioned from the outset that to assert which of the two bodies of images, still or moving pictures, influenced the other is often hazardous. This is all the more true in that this duo was in fact more of a trio, in which photography now played a leading role. It is with this reservation in mind that we must consider the three cases discussed below, even if all three appear to be forms resulting from direct influences between still and moving images. The first case is a form of signifying movement by cutting up space and time in certain drawings in the illustrated press. Le Petit Parisien provides us with the most relevant examples, in particular with respect to the Dreyfus affair and coverage of his trial in Rennes. Some illustrated pages, in the way they juxtaposed engravings and alternated the framing, look almost like a film storyboard, the shot-by-shot breakdown of a film sequence, to the extent that they strongly resemble certain moving pictures. This is the case in particular of the August 13 and August 20, 1899, editions, in which two illustrated pages are very similar to films shot on location by the camera operator for the French office of the Biograph company—an operator long thought, mistakenly, to be Julius W. Orde. I have found a similar case in 1900 about an accident on a pedestrian bridge leading to the Paris World’s Fair in the May 13 edition of Le Petit Parisien, in which it is remarkable to see a drawing depicting

Appendix: Translations | 317 a chronological breakdown of events, from the accident itself to the arrival of emergency personnel. In the press, the somewhat expected spread of this kind of technique coincided with the arrival of snapshots alongside the engravings. Here we find another obvious example of intermedial interaction about which much could be said, because it is located more than ever at the intersection of still and moving images. The four issues of Le Petit Parisien that illustrate the flooding of the Seine in 1910 are especially indicative of this evolution of illustrations in the printed press begun at least ten years prior, meaning since the arrival of the earliest kinematographers. In any event, these few examples confirm the observation that intermedial influences were anything but unilateral and univocal on the aesthetic and formal levels. While it is clear that the first filmed actualities were influenced by the press, the press was no less influenced by the development of film shooting techniques, broadly speaking. The third and final formal quality resulting from these new intermedialities is that, in my view, of improvements in the composition and movements of moving pictures shot outdoors. Here I will compare two bodies of work to illustrate this point: first, that of the 1900 World’s Fair, which for the most part we owe to Lumière, Gaumont, and Pathé in France and to a few operators working on location for Edison, beginning with James. H. White; and second, that of the 1910 floods, a body of work in which we find mostly Gaumont moving pictures alongside a few titles by Pathé. Comparing these two bodies of work, which cannot be done extensively here for lack of space, makes it possible to see in concrete terms the process of refining certain techniques, beginning with pans and tracking shots from boats. In the case of pans, while these were already everywhere by 1900, they were often jumpy, and it was very difficult to make them last long. Their composition, especially, was not particularly successful: there was an absence of a profilmic motif, a lack of depth, and more. By 1910 there remained only a few formal imperfections related to the difficulties of shooting in daylight, apart from the question of preserving the reels of film given the vicissitudes of time. To put it simply, movement is always omnipresent but does not give the impression of being forced. The same is true of the composition, whether in depth or in breadth; this aspect was by now quite elaborate, in particular in shots that used lines of plane trees or Parisian street lamps as the vanishing line, making use along the way of the unusual reflections on the floodwaters. Finally, these shots are very similar to certain photographs appearing at the same time in Le Petit Parisien.

Conclusion In many respects, this study reaches the same conclusions as those arrived at by Jürgen E. Müller some time ago when, in his famous article on intermediality,

318 | Appendix: Translations he wrote, “continuing cross-effects between various concepts occur [that] are not to be confused with any simple addition or juxtaposition.”7 There is no simple, unilateral, and univocal intermediality any more than there is an intermediality that is linear and continuous. As a result, the emergence of a new visual information culture between 1890 and 1910, supposing that such a thing exists, cannot be seen as a mere passage from one cultural series to another, for example from press illustration to filmed actuality, no matter what the nature and intensity of this passage and the power relations between these two series, in particular because there are many more than two series to take into account, as we have seen with certain inherited intermedial influences, such as the iconography found in the school system and certain theatrical practices, and even with photography and new intermedialities. And this list is undoubtedly not exclusive. In sum, there were plural and intersecting intermedialities at work that might be seen as a tangled jumble. Are we then faced with an impossible research topic? Clearly not, on condition that we accept the uncertain and fragmentary quality inherent to the intermedial approach, whose systematic and all-encompassing use—in a word, its theoretical use—is in fact limited. Müller, in his article, is the first to agree: intermediality does not make it possible to construct a “theory of media,” but rather to “take a fresh look at media history or histories.”8 This, it might be remarked in passing, is enough to constitute a fruitful and productive approach. It is precisely on the level of media history that there appears to emerge during this period what I have termed a new visual information culture. The earliest manifestations of this culture shared an aesthetic of instantaneousness and putting into movement, as I described in the third part of this article. Put differently, and perhaps more simply, between 1890 and 1910 the informational image, whether still or moving, gradually became an actuality image, meaning an image whose ultimate function consisted, ever more explicitly and consciously, in capturing on the fly the event it wished to depict. And it appears that the reciprocal influences between still and moving images, these spreading intermedialities, were fully a part of this process. They were one of its levers but undoubtedly not the only one, of course. In the end, what this comparative study has shown is a process of institutionalizing the actuality image, one of whose first concrete expressions coincided with the founding of the first “actuality newspapers” in 1909–1910. This process is intrinsically tied up, moreover, with the institutionalization of cinematic practices in ways that are the topic of the present author’s current research. Translated by Timothy Barnard

Rodolphe Gahéry is a Doctoral Fellow at Université Paris Nanterre. He is presently writing a doctoral dissertation entitled “Les premières actualités filmées (1895–1914): des Cinématographes au Cinéma?”

Appendix: Translations | 319

Notes 1. André Gaudreault, Film and Attraction: From Kinematography to Cinema, trans. Timothy Barnard (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011 [2008]), 64–65. 2. “Les Premières Actualités filmées (1895–1914): des Cinématographes au Cinéma?,” doctoral dissertation, in progress (Université Paris Nanterre, supervised by Antoine de Baecque). 3. At its height in 1910, Le Petit Journal published two million copies daily before gradually declining in favor of Le Petit Parisien, whose circulation doubled between 1900 and 1914 (from one to two million copies daily, approximately). 4. Given that it was not possible for me to view all these films, as some have been lost, I have drawn on non-film sources in such cases. 5. Here I draw on the study by two Russian scholars presented at the 1996 Domitor conference. See Galina Malysheva and Natalia Noussinova, “Actualité et fausse actualité chez Pathé (guerre russo-japonaise, 1904–1905),” in Firme Pathé Frères, 1896–1914, eds. Michel Marie and Laurent Le Forestier (Paris: AFRHC, 2004), 273–282. 6. Ibid., 278–279. 7. Jürgen E. Müller, “Intermediality and Media Historiography in the Digital Era,” Acta Universitatis Sapientiae 2 (2010), 18. 8. Ibid., 19.

Subject Index

Page references in italics indicate a figure. Abel, Richard, 4, 5, 143, 289 Acres, Birt, 99 advertising: construction of corporate image, 194; direct and indirect, 199–200; evolution of, 277–279; media, 278–279; in moving pictures, efforts of, 195, 199, 280, 281–282; in newspapers, 4–5, 82; shift to product-focused, 278; study of, 10; in trade press, 82; use of photography for, 278, 279. See also movie advertising advertising films: characteristics of, 276, 278; competition with entertainment films, 283; criticism of, 282–283; early production of, 276–277; educational, 283; effectiveness of, 280–281; in movie theaters, ban of, 282; nontheatrical markets for, 283–284; primary advantage of, 282; products and processes depicted in, 278, 280–281 advertising posters, 294, 295 aerial panoramas, 206–207, 211n12 aesthetic theory, 253 Agel, Henri, 300 Albera, François, 300 American genteelism: discourse of, 254 Amundsen, Roald, 5, 102, 103, 104 Ancient Greece: as imagined space, 48; physical culture in, 47–48; statues of athletes of, 49–50 Anderson, Gilbert, 249 aniline revolution, 142 Antarctic expeditions, 102, 103 apparatus theory, 269–270 Arbuckle, Roscoe, 223 Arnold, Matthew, 254 Art Deco, 6, 134, 136 Artist’s Dream: exploitation of subject of, 38–39

Art Nouveau, 136 Art of the Moving Picture, The (Lindsay), 156, 257 arts: flat ornamental and color styles, 140–141n20, 141n21, 141n25; industrial production of, 133–134, 139n6; notion of essence of, 140n16 Arts and Crafts movement, 133, 139n6 art theory: on aesthetic principles, 154; on ideas of surface and depth, 155–157; on problem of form, 153 Askari, Kaveh, 7, 145, 146 Aspektwechsel: concept of, 31 Augé, Marc, 106 Bacon, George Vaux, 174, 175 Baker, Simon, 223 Baldwin, T. S., 206, 207 Bann, Stephen, 294 Barker, Edwin, 276, 283 Barrère, Adrien, 306, 307 Barthes, Roland, 106 Bastide, Bernard, 249 Baudry, Jean-Louis, 269, 270 Bazin, André, 263, 293 Beale, Joseph Boggs, 241, 244 Bean, Jennifer M., 177 Bedding, Thomas, 249 Begas, Reinhold, 30 Behdad, Ali, 169, 171 Bells, The (Irving), 39 Belting, Hans, 2 Ben-Hur (lantern show), 237–239, 238, 240, 241, 244, 245n4, 246n22 Benjamin, Walter, 293 Bergson, Henri, 52 Bertellini, Giorgio, 251 Biograph Company, 26–28, 32

321

322 | Subject Index Bitzer, Billy, 208 Biva, Henri, 143 Blackton, J. Stuart, 39 Blake, William, 36 Blue Gown, The (painting), 158 boredom: authority and, 259–260; evolution of concept of, 259; as lack of stimulation, 258–259; spread of, 259; trick film and, 258–259; in urban culture, problem of, 10, 257–259 Borges, Jorge Luis, 207 Borton, Terry, 241 Bottomore, Stephen, 233, 234, 268 Boys, Charles Vernon, 187–188, 189, 190 Brady, William A., 239, 243 Bragg, William, 189 Braun, Marta, 47 Brewster, Ben, 117 Brewster, David, 125 Brooker, Jeremy, 185, 186 Brown, Elspeth, 277, 279 Bull, Lucien, 51 Bull, Richert, 51 Burch, Noël, 289 Burnet, John, 252–253 Burrows, John, 269 Byron, Joseph, 239 California landscapes, 212, 223, 226n11, 227n13 California slapstick style, 225–226n3 Campbell, Thomas, 37 caricature: connection to comic films, 300, 301–302; construction of, 301; definition of, 300–301; deformation and exaggeration in, 304; mise en dessin, 305, 306, 307; mismatched couple motif in, 302–304 celebrities, 176, 178, 182 Certeau, Michel de, 106 Channing, Edward T., 254 Chaplin, Charlie, 176 Chevroton, Lucienne, 186 Chomón, Segundo de, 31, 144, 147 Christie, Ian, 7–8, 237, 291 chronophotography, 51, 53–54, 190, 203

cinema (cinematography): color production in, 6; comparison to fashion, 134–135; development of institution of, 1, 277; fascination with the picture personality, 267–268, 269; as immemorial wonder, 263; in Iran, 7, 164, 172; Kunstwollen (will to art) in, 153–154, 157; labor movement and, 271–272; landscape topoi in, 94, 97–98; multisited, 198–199; optical illusions, 26; pictorialist tradition and, 9; practice of screen framing, 294; relationship between science and, 185–186, 189, 190; in relation to photography, 212, 217, 221; staged performances, 229; star system, 174–176, 269; structures of fascination, 269, 273; studies of, 1, 140n16; tableau style in early, 3–4, 29, 31–34, 32, 243–244, 290–291; technical changes, 44; trustworthiness of, 228; view aesthetic, 102, 105; visual experience of spectators, 26. See also films Cinema Museum at Ferdows Garden (Iran): curtain-reading exhibit, 164, 165, 172 cinematic image: art theorists on, 156–157; conflict of perception, 157; gaze oscillation, 161–162; illusion of depth, 157 Cinematograph in Science, Education and Matters of State, The (Urban), 186 Claude Monet Painting by the Edge of a Wood (painting), 143 Claudy, Carl H., 254 Cohl, Émile, 304 Cole, Thomas, 208 colored films: emergence of, 142–143; shift to Technicolor, 149; stenciling technique, 132, 133, 134, 136–139, 138, 143–145, 147, 148–149 Columbus’s voyage to the Americas: reconstruction of, 97, 239–240 comic films: connection to caricature, 300, 301–302, 305, 308–309; distance from reality, 308; distortion and exaggeration in, 304–305; mismatched couple motif in, 302–304; “putting into drawing” (“mise en dessin”) technique, 305–306, 308 Companion to Early Cinema, A (King), 289 Condon, Denis, 10 Corbould, Edward Henry, 38

Subject Index | 323 Corot, Jean-Baptiste-Camille, 250, 251 Coubertin, Pierre de, 47 Courlander, Alphonse, 269 Crafton, Donald, 258, 304 Crary, Jonathan, 125 Cresswell, Tim, 106 Crippen, James B., 107 Croy, Homer, 281 Culture and Anarchy (Arnold), 254 Currier, Nathaniel, 37 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 96, 98 Daftari, Fereshteh, 170, 171 Dahlquist, Marina, 7, 269 Daly, Ann, 55 Darling of the Gods, The (lantern show), 240 Dawn, Norman O., 120, 121, 127, 130n2 Day, Will, 186 Debrie camera, 125 DeCordova, Richard, 176, 177 Deed, André, 300 DeLassus, Leslie, 6 Deleuze, Gilles, 263 Dench, Ernest, 276, 282 Destruction and Desolation (painting), 208 Detaille, Edouard, 37 Deutsche Gasglühlicht AG (German Gas Light Company), 111–112 Devant, David, 38 Diba, Layla, 170, 171 Diderot, Denis, 290 Diesen, Jan Anders, 103 Divola, John: Artificial Nature (installation), 214, 215; As Far as I Could Get (landscape project), 217, 218, 219, 226n12; career of, 212; Continuity (exhibition), 215; on distance in photography, 226n11; Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert sequence, 216, 216–217; House Removals, 221; Isolated Houses (photobook), 214; John Divola: As Far as I Could Get (exhibit), 212; landscape photography of Southern California, 212–213, 214; LAX/Noise Abatement Zone series, 214, 221; “Occupied Landscapes: Yosemite,” 214; “pause” effect in works of, 215, 225; photographic series, 215–216, 217,

221, 223, 226n9; photographs of damaged houses, 221, 223; role of location role in projects of, 213–214; Seven Songbirds and a Rabbit (installation), 214; working method, 214, 217, 225; Zuma series, 214, 223, 224 Domitor (international society for the study of early cinema), 1 Doublier, Francis, 232, 235n15 Dream, The (painting), 37 Dreyfus affair: in films, representation of, 232, 313; in illustrated press, depiction of, 312–313, 315, 316–317; in recreational films, 316 Dublin Evening Mail, 273 Duel After the Masquerade (painting): description of, 291; reproductions of, 292, 293; tableau vivant of, 294; versions of, 294 Duhamel, Sarah, 302 Duncan, Isadora, 4, 47, 54, 55 Durand, Jean, 304 Eastlake, Charles, 38 Edgerly, Clara Power, 49 Edison, Thomas, 185 Edwardes, George, 272 Edwards, Elizabeth, 189 Eitzen, Dirk, 229 Emerson, Peter Henry, 251 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 254 Emmanuel, Maurice, 47, 51–53, 55 Ernemann Kinox projector, 112, 113 Fabian, Johannes, 128 Fairbanks, Douglas, 176 fake image: audience perception of, 231; cases and practices of production of, 229, 230–231; deceitful labeling, 231, 232, 233; definition of, 228–229, 233; example of genuine, 231; plausibility principle and, 233; recycling and reuse of old footage, 230; reproduction of topical events, 234; studies of, 8–9; types of, 231; in war films, 233 Faraday, Michael, 189 Faraday exhibition in Albert Hall, 189

324 | Subject Index Feuillade, Louis, 182, 250 Field, Allyson Nadia, 120 Fielding, Raymond, 127 film posters, 32–33 films: depiction of art in silent, 144–146; “historical,” 253; increase of length of, 258; nonfiction genres, 94–95; production of industrial, 277; rough sea, 98, 99, 99, 99–100; scenic, 186, 250, 251, 255; scientific educational, 185–187, 190; tableaux vivants in, 31–34, 32, 163n18; topical, 233, 234; trick and fairy, 31, 147, 148–149, 258, 259–260, 263; war, 233. See also advertising films; cinema (cinematography); colored films; comic films; vocational training films Fitzgerald, John Anster, 38 Fleischer, Max, 190 Fleischman, Jeffrey, 212–213, 215, 225 “Flictoflicker Girl, The” (short story): author of, 270–271; critique of structures of fascination in, 273; extract from, 267; outcome of, 268–269; plot and characters of, 266–268, 273; presentation of spectator in, 269–270, 273; publication of, 266, 272; relevance to labor movement, 272–273 flooding of the Seine: depiction of, 312, 315, 317 Florimond, Joseph, 144 Fould, George-Achille, 294 Fourel, Henri, 144 Foxy Grandpa (lantern show), 240 Frampton, Hollis, 205 Francois-Franck, Charles, 186 Freeman, Roger, 112 Frick, Caroline, 120 Friese-Greene, William, 95 Fuller, Mary, 273 Fuseli, Henry, 37 Gahéry, Rodolphe, 4 Gaudreault, André, 237, 245n12, 276, 277, 289, 311 Gaugin, Paul, 170, 171 Gaumont Film Company: pictorial quality of, 250–251; reuse of old shots, 313; rough seas films, 100; scenic and scientific films,

186, 255; series of “historical” films, 253; stencil-colored fashion films, 137–138; tableau vivant in films of, 31 Gauntier, Gene, 271 Gérôme, Jean-Léon: Duel After the Masquerade, 3, 291, 292; Émile Zola on, 293, 296; pictorial style of, 293; techniques and formats, 293–294; works of, 296, 299n52 Giesecke, Frederick Carl, 158 Gilbreth, Frank: abstract learning method, 116–117; lectures of, 112, 113; media technologies used by, 5, 6; “Method and Apparatus for the Study and Correction of Motions,” 113; teaching models of, 114–115; vocational films, 111, 112–114 Gilbreth, Lillian, 47 Gipsy Love (musical comedy), 272 Goble, Leroy T., 255 Goodall, Edward, 37 Goodstein, Elizabeth, 259 Goya, Francisco, 37 Gray, Frank, 3, 4, 145 Greek dance: reconstruction of, 51–53, 53, 55 Griffith, D. W., 95, 240 Gunning, Tom: on cinema of attractions, 277; on color in films, 144; concept of view aesthetic, 102, 107, 124; definition of early film tableau, 294; on entertaining pleasure of uncertainty, 30; on film genres, 95; on Greek sculptures, 53 Hale’s Tours of the World (attraction at amusement parks), 121, 125, 126, 128, 128–129 Hall of Mirrors (painting), 164, 165, 166, 168–171, 172 Hanssen, Eirik Frisvold, 134 Hanus, Emerich, 154, 161, 162n6 Harper Bros. et al. v. Kalem Co. et al., 239 Harrison, Louis Reeves, 253 Hebdige, Dick, 226n11 Herakles from the Temple of Aphaia, 49, 50 Hermansen, Hugo, 103, 104 Hildebrand, Adolf: on “effect of splotches”, 156, 157; on flatness and depth of image,

Subject Index | 325 155–156, 161; on problem of form, 7, 153, 154, 155; on scanning vs. seeing, 163n15; on surface effects, 156 Hofer, Franz, 154 Hollaman, Richard, 231 Holmes, Burton, 195, 196 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 254 Homer, Winslow, 100 Hoof, Florian, 5 Horak, Laura, 4 Houillère, Jéremy, 4 How to Swim (Kellermann), 176, 179–180 Huhtamo, Erkki, 96 illustrated press, 314, 315 image(s): ambiguous, 26; color, 141n27, 142; common features of, 3–5; concrete and abstract, 6; context and, 1–2; drawn vs. film, 308; of the female body, 174–175, 182; flatness and depth of, 155–156; informational, 312, 314–315, 316, 318; intermediality of, 10–11; medium and, 2; migration of, 2–3, 7, 8, 10–11; oscillating gaze at, 156; in photography, manipulation of, 228; production of, 5–6, 141n25; still and moving, 290, 312; types of, 2. See also fake image imaging techniques: animated photography, 185, 186, 187; projection microscope, 185–186 Industrial Moving Picture Company, 279 intermediality: concept of, 1, 7, 9, 317–318 International Exposition of Modern Industrial and Decorative Arts in Paris, 133–134 International Harvester Company (IHC), 194–195, 199–200, 276 Iran: Dar al-Funun royal academy, 167; imaging technology, 166–168; integration of art and photography, 169–170, 171, 172; photographic institute in Golestan Palace, 166; realism of art, 170; retardataire painting tradition, 171; royal portraiture, 166–167 Iranian modernism, 170–171, 172

Ireland: film production companies, 271; labor movement, 272; media war, 271 Irish Worker (journal), 266, 267, 270, 271, 272, 273 Irving, Henry, 39 Isadora Duncan and Her Dances (Walkowitz), 54 Iversen, Gunnar, 5 Ives, James Merritt, 37 Jacob’s Dream (watercolor), 36–37 Jasset, Victorin, 300 Johnson, Martin L., 10 Judicious Advertising (journal), 278, 279, 280, 282 Jung, Uli, 269 Kahng, Eik, 294 Kamal al-Molk, Mohammad Ghaffari: artistic career, 168; Hall of Mirrors painting, 164, 165, 166, 168–171, 172; style of, 170–171 Kean, Charles, 39 Keaton, Buster, 221 Keil, Charlie, 258 Kellermann, Annette: on beauty of the body, 181–182; books of, 176, 179–181; career of, 179–180; celebrity status, 175–176, 182; criticism of moral code by, 182; images of, 179, 182; physical attributes of, 181; promotion of swimming by, 180–181, 182 Kessler, Frank, 8, 270 Kierkegaard, Soren, 262 King, Rob, 289 Kleine, George, 255 Klerk, Nico de, 230 Knight, Christopher, 226n12 Köhler, Kristina, 55 Kracauer, Siegfried, 117 Krauss, Rosalind, 125 Krumm, Wilhelm, 30 Lacroix, Paul, 305 Laemmle, Carl, 80, 87 Laird, Pamela Walker, 89, 277, 278

326 | Subject Index landscape cinematography, 223 landscapes: definition of, 94; in early films, 95, 98; repetitive quality of, 97; study of depiction of, 5; symbolic, 221, 227n13; of uninhabited nature, 98. See also California landscapes landscape topoi, 5, 95, 97–98 Lange, Konrad, 30, 140n16 Lant, Antonia, 26 lantern image: as advertising medium, 285n20; instances of copyright infringement, 238–239, 246n21; mapping of, 239–240, 242; performance of, 241–242; reproduction of, 239–240; stage/screen debates, 237, 242–244; study of, 9, 239; as transition from stage to motion picture, 244 Laocoon: Or the Limits of Poetry and Painting (Lessing), 135 Larkin, Jim, 270–271, 272 Larsen, Viggo, 154 Latsis, Dimitrios, 3, 8 Laugh and Live (Fairbanks), 176 Lavagna, Attilio, 304 Lawrence, Florence, 273 Lefebvre, Thierry, 186 Le Forestier, Laurent, 301, 304 Le Journal Amusant, 306, 307 Lenk, Sabine, 8 Le Petit Journal, 313, 315, 319n3 Le Petit Parisien, 312, 313, 315, 316–317, 319n3 Lessing, Gotthold, 135 Leyda, Jay, 225n3 Lindsay, Vachel: The Art of the Moving Picture, 156, 257; on dialogue with film, 263; film theory of, 257, 259, 264n1; on length of films, 258; on movie theater, 262–263; “New Localism,” 260; on problem of boredom, 257–258, 259, 263; transfiguration theory of, 260–261; on tricks in filmmaking, 258; views on religion, 260; on visions, 261–262 Livingstone, Karen, 139n6 Loiperdinger, Martin, 269

Lorrain, Claude, 250 Lowell, James Russell, 254 MacKaye, Steele, 239, 240 Madam Butterfly (lantern show), 240 Making Cinema into Art (Askari), 145 Manthorne, Katherine, 100 Marchand, Roland, 194 Marey, Étienne-Jules, 47, 48, 190 Martin-Duncan, Francis, 186 Massuet, Jean-Baptiste, 307 Matin à Villeneuve (landscape painting), 143 Matuszewski, Boleslas, 228 Mayer, David, 240 McKernan, Luke, 186 media: convergence of, 121; dependent and autonomous, 314; ensemble of visual, 237; forms and aesthetic of, 314 media archaeology, concept of, 1 media literacy of audience, 233 Meinig, Donald, 221, 227n13 Meisel, Martin, 290 Méliès, Georges, 31, 229, 230 Méry, Jean, 144 Messter, Oskar, 189 Metz, Christian, 269 Mitchell, W. J. T., 2, 98 modern femininity, 174–175, 178, 182 Montessori, Maria, 116 motion pictures: artistic quality discourse, 253–254 Mottet, Jean, 251 movie advertising: diversity of images in, 89, 91; electrotype ads, 82; minimalist approach to layout, 80; publicity campaigns, 85; use of trademarks in, 80, 86–87, 87, 90 moving image: as advertising medium, 276, 281–282; concern with artistic quality, 249; development of, 190; as fake, 228; recycling and reuse of, 313 “Moving Picture Fictions of the Silent Era” (Wlaschin and Bottomore), 268 Moving Picture World (trade journal), 250–251, 252, 255 Mozaffar al-din Shah, Shah of Iran, 166

Subject Index | 327 Müller, Jürgen E., 317, 318 Mulvey, Laura, 225, 269 Münsterberg, Hugo, 7, 157, 161, 257, 263 Murphy, William Martin, 271, 272 Musser, Charles, 28, 38, 294 Mutual Corporation: newspaper advertising, 83–85, 84; publicity campaigns, 82, 85 Muybridge, Eadweard: on artist’s working method, 205; attitude to authenticity, 208; chronophotographic method of, 203; exhibitions of, 209, 211n15; photographic panoramas of San Francisco, 203–204, 205, 206, 209; self-promotion, 210n3; techniques used by, 204; works of, 8, 190, 203, 210n3, 211n16, 211n21 Naser al-Din Shah, Shah of Iran, 164, 165, 166, 168 Niblo, Fred, 241 Nightmare, The (painting), 37 Nonguet, Lucien, 313, 314, 316 nonplace, concept of, 106 nontheatrical, discourse of, 10 Normand, Mabel, 223 Normand, Maurice, 233 Norwegian films, 5. See also polar films Novelly, Martha, 162n7 Novelty News, 278, 280 “Office Life” (drawing), 301, 302 Olcott, Sidney, 271 On Authority and Revelation (Kierkegaard), 262 “On Exactitude in Science” (Borges), 207 “On Genius and Common Sense” (Hazlitt), 253 open-air shooting, 249–250 Oravec, Christine L., 251 Païni, Dominique, 291 Painlevé, Jean, 190 paintings in theater and cinema productions, 294, 296 Paramount Pictures: advertising campaigns, 86, 87, 87, 89, 90, 91 Paris World’s Fair, 312, 313–314, 315, 316, 317

“Pat Callaghan’s Christmas Discovery” (short story), 268 Pathé-Frères (film production company): advertising campaigns, 80–81, 81; coloring styles, 144, 148–149; introduction of special effects, 146, 148–149; production scale, 143; publicity campaigns, 91; stencil-­ colored films, 134, 137, 142, 143–144; topical films, 232 Paul, Robert: electrical instrumentation business, 187; end of career, 191n2; as film pioneer, 7, 185; His Mother’s Portrait; or, The Soldier’s Vision, 38; involvement in scientific imaging, 186–187, 189–190; memoirs of, 191n14; public exhibition of British films, 186; Scrooge, or, Marley’s Ghost, 44 Paul, R. W., 99 Paulus, Tom, 9 Perkins, William Henry, 142 Perry, Linda, 139n6 Peterson, Jennifer Lynn, 3, 5, 105, 106, 107, 251 Pethő, Ágnes, 121 Petro, Patrice, 259 photography: act of looking, 106; as advertising medium, 279; aerial, 206–207; composite, 40; function of serial, 3; of human movement, 51; landscape imaging, 205; manipulation in, 235n5; movement representation in, 203, 204; “pause” effect, 215–216; principle of the contiguity of space, 205; relation to cinema, 212, 217, 221, 308; in science, use of, 188, 189; vision scene in, 39–40. See also chronophotography Photoplay, The (Münsterberg), 157 “Photo Star, The” (short story), 268 Physical Beauty: How to Keep It (Kellermann), 176, 179, 181–182 physical culture: in Ancient Greece, 47; chronophotography of, 48, 49–50, 51; motion analysis, 47; rise of movement of, 47; statue posing imitation, 49–51, 50 Pickford, Mary, 55 Picot, François-Édouard, 145

328 | Subject Index Pictorial Effect in Photography (exhibition), 40 Pictorial Effect in Photography: Being Hints On Composition And Chiaroscuro For Photographers (Robinson), 252 pictorialism (pictorial photography): artistic quality, 249, 252; comparison to open-air shooting, 249–250; elements of, 252; link to landscape painting, 250–251; pastoral genre, 251–252; principle canons of, 251; trade discourse on, 254 “Pictorialism and the Picture,” 251, 252, 253 Piermay, Jean, 250 Pierson, Ryan, 9 Pillsbury, Arthur C., 95 place: distinction between space and, 106 polar films: of Amundsen expedition, 103, 104–105, 107; construction of space and place in, 102; dull whiteness in, 104, 106; as early travelogues, 105; images from Antarctica in, 105, 106; lack of picturesque views, 105–106, 107; landscape in, 105; nonspecific nonplaces in, 106; representation strategies in, 102, 104–105; spectacular aspects of foreignness in, 107 Polyscope, Selig, 8 Pomona College Museum of Art, 212 Pope, Daniel, 277, 278 Porter, Edwin, 44, 243 Potter, Russell A., 102 Prestrud, Kristian, 103 Price, Charles Matlack, 141n25 Problem of Form, The (Hildebrand), 155 “Problems of the Photoplay” (Tannenbaum), 156 Rabinovitz, Lauren, 127 Rakin, Jelena, 6 Rand, Paul, 142 realization, phenomenon of, 290 Reinhardt, Max, 154 Resurrection (lantern show), 240 Reynolds, Joshua, 252 Richert, Charles, 49 Riegl, Alois, 153 Robert, Valentine, 3

Robinson, Henry Peach, 40, 252 “Romantic Lucy” (short story), 268, 269 Rony, Fatimah Tobing, 127 Rosenblum, Robert, 100 Ross, Steven, 271 Rothacker, Watterson, 276, 279, 280, 281–282, 283 Russo-Japanese War: in films, 313, 314, 316; in illustrated press, 313, 315 Sadoul, Georges, 234, 300, 316 San Francisco: aerial view capture, 206–207; fake film about earthquake in, 232; filmed panoramas of, 206–208; photographic panoramas of, 203–204, 205–206, 209 Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 212 Sargent, Dudley A., 181 Sargent, John Singer, 143 Saudé, Jean, 6, 133, 134 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 258 Schmalenbach, Fritz, 136 Schweinitz, Jörg, 7 Scorsese, Martin, 293 Selig, William Nicholas, 251 Selig Polyscope Company, 82, 230 Shackleton, Ernest, 103 Sherlock Holmes (lantern show), 240 Signal of Distress (painting), 100 Sign of the Cross, The (lantern show), 240 Simmon, Scott, 251 Simonson, Mary, 48 Singer, Ben, 178, 259 Sinsheimer, Karen, 212 Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, The (painting), 37 Smith, Albert E., 39 Smith, George Albert, 41–43 Smith, Percy, 186 Snyder, Joel, 53 Soap Bubbles: Their Colours and the Forces which Mould Them (Boys), 188 Soldier’s Dream, exploitation of subject of, 37–38 sound, scientific study of, 187, 188 special effects: alienated afterimage, 122–125; composite image, 122, 123, 124;

Subject Index | 329 Dawn’s collection of, 120; ethnographic taxidermy, 127–128; frame jumping, 146; glass-shot process, 121–122, 125, 129; image replacement, 127; matte-shot process, 121, 122–123, 123, 124–125, 129; in silent-­ era films, 120–121; studies of, 6, 121; trick techniques, 187; view aesthetic, 129 spectatorship, discourse on, 10 Spoor, George, 249 stage and screen, historical continuum between, 243 Starewicz, Wladyslaw, 190 Stebbins, Genevieve, 49 Steichen, Edward, 54 stencil coloring: aniline dyes in, 144; in applied and decorative arts, 132–133, 134, 136; as combining technique, 138–139; description of, 132; in films, 133, 134–135, 136–139, 138, 144–145, 147, 148–149; origin of, 132–133; practical limitations of, 135–136; in serial production, 133, 134; treatises on, 133; use of ties, 140n19 Stewart, Nancy, 241 Stoichita, Victor I., 28 Stoll, Horatio, 280, 284 “Strange Combination” (caricature), 302, 303 Study of Splashes, A (Worthington), 188 Sydell, Rose, 33, 35n20 System: The Magazine of Business (Crow), 281 tableau: definition of, 289; in early cinema, 289–291; in lithography industry, 290; as pictorial imitation, 293; realization of theatrical, 290; use of term, 289–290, 297n8; in wax museums, 290 tableau aesthetic, 289 tableaux vivants (living pictures): as aesthetic illusion, 3, 29–31; anecdotes about, 30; definition of, 29; in early films, 3–4, 29, 31–34, 32, 290–291, 294; exploration of visual uncertainty and, 26; nude bodies in, 29; perception of, 30; performers of, 29 Tannenbaum, Herbert, 156–157, 160, 161 taste, doctrine of, 254–255 Taylor, William Desmond, 55

Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century (Crary), 125 Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (TMoCA), 172 Temkin, Ann, 141n21 Thompson, Sylvanus, 187–188, 188, 190 Tillier, Bertrand, 304, 309 Todd, Pamela, 133 topos study, 96, 98 Topsy and Eva (lantern show), 237, 245n6 transfiguration theory, 261 Treatise on Painting (Burnet), 252 Tsivian, Yuri, 243 Turner, Florence, 273 Turner, George, 240 Turner, J. M. W., 37 Turner and His Works (Burnet), 253 Twas the Night before Christmas (poem), 41 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (lantern show), 237, 243–244, 245n4 Universal Studios: advertising campaigns, 85, 87, 88, 89 Unno, Hiroshi, 134, 135 Urban, Charles, 186 Vardac, Nicholas, 39 Velle, Gaston, 6, 31, 142, 144, 146, 147 Verneuil, Maurice Pillard, 135 view aesthetic, 102, 105, 107, 121, 123–124 Views and Films Index (trade weekly), 80, 81 visions, power of, 261–262 vision scene: Artist’s Dream, 38–39; in British theatre, 39; concept and practice of, 44–45; depiction through painting and print, 36–37; dreamer and the dreamed in, 37; in film, 36, 41; in photography, 39–40; Soldier’s Dream, 37–38; studies of, 39; use of technology for, 40–41, 43–44 visual information culture, 311–312, 316–317, 318 visual literacy, 231–232, 235–236n15 Vitascope poster, 294, 295

330 | Subject Index vocational training films: as abstract learning environment, 114; aesthetic aspects of, 117; business management, 112; early projects, 111; vs. educational films, 115–116, 117; epistemological framework of, 115–116; filming techniques, 112, 113; genealogy of early, 115–117; heterogeneous character of, 117; motion studies with, 113–114; as nonfiction films, 117–118; One Best Way to do work demonstration, 113; technological devices used for, 113–114, 117; visual abstraction strategies in, 114–117; visualization devices, 112–113, 115 Vry, Henry de, 29 Walkowitz, Abraham, 54 Waller, Gregory, 8, 242 Waltz, Gwendolyn, 237 Watts, Diana: exercise of, 52; The Fine Art of Jujutsu, 49; on jiu-jitsu, 56n12; reconstruction of Greek dance, 47, 52–53, 55; The Renaissance of the Greek Ideal, 49; statue posing imitation, 4, 49–51, 50 Way Down East (lantern show), 240 Wheeler, George Frederic, 196 White, James. H., 317

White, Pearl: autobiography Just Me, 176, 177, 178, 179; career of, 175; celebrity status of, 175–177, 182; film heroines of, 177–178; image of herself, 179; personality and lifestyle, 174, 176–178; photograph of, 175; in press, image of, 182n17 Wiegand, Daniel, 3 Wilhelmina, Queen of Netherlands, 230 Williamson, James, 44, 230 Willis, Artemis, 9 Wilson, Andrew Patrick, 270–271 Winger, Rob, 206, 208 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 31 Wlaschin, Ken, 268 Wolfe, Charles, 3, 8 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 153 Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America (Ross), 271 Worthington, Arthur, 187–188, 189, 190 Wyler, William, 241 Yumibe, Joshua, 6 Zimmermann, Yvonne, 276 Zola, Émile, 293, 296, 313, 315

Film Index

Age of Innocence, The (1993), 19, 293 Artist’s Dilemma, The (1900), 39 Artist’s Dream / The Artist’s Dream, An (1900), 38–39 Atonement (1917), 154 Attack on a China Mission (1900), 230 Avenging Conscience, The (1914), 261 Battle Hymn of the Republic (1911), 261 Black Ball, The (1913), 154 Boireau, the King of Boxing (1912), 304, 305 Butterfly’s Metamorphosis, A (1904), 144 Calino Bureaucrate (1909), 301 Calino Hardens His Face (1912), 304 Cinderella (1898), 41, 42 Coming of Columbus, The (1912), 82, 83 Conspiracy in the Reign of Henry III (1911), 145 Coronation of King Edward VII (1902), 229, 235n5 Corsican Brothers, The (1898), 41, 43 Country Doctor, The (1909), 95 Cowboy Millionaire, The (1909), 82 Cruel, Cruel Love (1914), 220 Dante’s Inferno (1913), 271 Daughter of the Gods, A (1916), 179, 181 David and Goliath (1910), 145 Death Valley (1911), 282 Dr. Charcot’s Trip Toward the South Pole (1911), 107 Duel After the Ball (1900), 17, 18, 19, 291, 292, 293 Einstein Theory of Relativity, The (1923), 190 Equestrian Portrait of ‘Ali Quli Mirza, I’tizad al Sultaneh (1864), 167

Farming with Dynamite (1910), 283 Fatty and Mabel Adrift (1916), 223, 224 Faust and Mephistopheles (1898), 41, 42, 43 Forgotten Silver (1995), 228 Freebooters, The (1909), 251 Gingerbread Man, The (1913), 308 Golden Beetle, The (1907), 144 Gorges of the Yangtze (1908), 122 His Masterpiece (1897), 27, 28 House of Hate, The (1918), 178 In the Land of Goldmines (1908), 147 In the West of England (1917), 100 Island of Blessed (1913), 154 Jephthah’s Daughter (1910), 253, 255 Johanna Enlists (1918), 55 Kiss Me (1904), 32–33, 33 La danse du diable (1904), 137, 138, 141n28 L’Assassinat du Duc de Guise (1902), 234 Les Heures (1909), 250 Life of American Fireman (1903), 44 Little Match Seller, The (1902), 44 Little Shepherd of Tumbling Run (1909), 251 Love of Maria Bonde, The (1917-18): effect of splotches, 160–161, 161; ornamental effects, 160; oscillating gaze between surface and depth, 161–162; presentations of spatial depth, 158, 160; production, 162n7; representation of textures and surfaces, 158, 159; scene in the parlor, 158–160; shot length, 158–159; visual composition, 157 Lucile Love, The Girl of Mistery (1914), 85, 86

331

332 | Film Index Magic Sword, The (1901), 187 MASH (1970), 16, 290 Million Dollar Mystery (1914), 85 Mirror of the World (1912), 102, 104 Model, The (1897), 26, 27, 28 Modern Sculpture (1908), 147 Naser al-Din Shah and a Cannon (1865), 167 Naval Battles between the Russian and Japanese Fleets at Port Arthur and Chemulpo (1904), 8 Neptune’s Daughter (1914), 180 Onésime, Post Office Employee (1913), 301 Onésime and Calino’s Inheritance (1913), 304 One Week (1920), 221 Open Road, The (1927), 95 Panorama Nob Hill and Ruins of Millionaire Residences (1906), 208 Passion Play of Oberammergau, The (1897), 231 Perils of Pauline, The (1914), 176, 177 Pilgrim, The (1923), 220 Porcelaines tendres (1909), 31–32 President McKinley and his Secretary Discussing Terms of Peace (1899), 230 President McKinley at Home in Canton, Ohio, USA, The (1897), 230 Queen of the Stock Exchange, The (1916), 154 Red Spectre, The (1907), 147 Rêve d’art (1910): coloring techniques, 6, 145, 147; content and genre, 143; production, 143; scene in the artist studio, 145, 148; special effects, 146, 147–148; Tristan’s dream, 146–147, 148

Roald Amundsen’s South Pole Expedition 1910–1912 (1912), 103 Rocks and Waves (1900), 100 Romance of the Reaper, The (1913): as advertisement, 197; corporate self-­ promotion in, 195, 197–198, 199–200; distribution strategy, 198–199; as example of multiple-media lecture, 195; generic flexibility of, 196–197; marketing of, 195–196; nontheatrical presentations of, 199; official retirement of, 198; production and circulation of, 194, 197–198; promotional brochure about, 196; structure of, 195; target audience, 198 Rough Sea at Dover (1896), 99 San Francisco Disaster (1906), 208 Santa Claus (1898), 41, 42, 43 Scarecrow, The (1920), 221, 222 Screencraft (1916), 253 Scrooge, or, Marley’s Ghost (1901), 44 Seeing Yosemite with David A. Curry (1916), 95 Siege of Calais, The (1911), 145 Steamboat Bill Jr. (1928), 221 Storm at Sea (1900), 99, 100 Surf at Long Branch (1986), 99 Surf at Monterey (1897), 99 Swamp Flower, The (1913), 154 Tale of the West, A (1909), 249 Tit for Tat (1906), 147 Toto Benefits by People’s Curiosity (1909), 305 Viridiana (1961), 16, 290 What Happened to Mary (1912), 273 Whiffles, Cubic Artist (1912), 305–307

In The Image in Early Cinema, the contributors examine intersections between early cinematic form, technology, theory, practice, and broader modes of visual culture. They argue that early cinema emerged within a visual culture composed of a variety of traditions in art, science, education, and image making. Even as methods of motion picture production and distribution materialized, they drew from and challenged practices and conventions in other mediums. This rich visual culture produced a complicated, overlapping network of image-making traditions, innovations, and borrowing among painting, tableaux vivants, photography, and other pictorial and projection practices. Using a variety of concepts and theories, the contributors explore these crisscrossing traditions and work against an essentialist notion of media to conceptualize the dynamic interrelationship between images and their context.

TOM GUNNING is Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. His is author of D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph and The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity. JOSHUA YUMIBE is Associate Professor and Director of Film Studies at Michigan State University. He is author of Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism, and Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema.

Cover illustrations: Top: Frame enlargment from Le Duel de Pierrot (Pathé, 1900). Courtesy of the Gosfilmofond, National Film Foundation of Russian Federation. Bottom: Jean-Léon Gérôme, Duel After the Masquerade, c.1857–1859—oil on canvas, 15.4 x 22.2 in., Baltimore, Walters Art Museum (autograph replica of the 1857 painting of Chantilly).

iupress.indiana.edu

IMAGE IN EARLY CINEMA

PHILLIPE GAUTHIER lectures in cinema and media at the University of Ottawa. His is author of Le montage alterné avant Griffith.

THE

SCOTT CURTIS is Associate Professor in the Department of Radio/Television/Film at Northwestern University. He is author of The Shape of Spectatorship: Art, Science, and Early Cinema in Germany.

CURTIS, GAUTHIER, GUNNING, AND YUMIBE

Film and Media

PRESS

IMAGE IN EARLY CINEMA THE

EDITED BY

Form and Material

SCOTT CURTIS, PHILIPPE GAUTHIER, TOM GUNNING, AND JOSHUA YUMIBE