Early Cinema and the "National"

By Richard Abel, Giorgio Bertellini and Rob King

Essays on “how motion pictures in the first two decades of the 20th century constructed ‘communities of nationality’ . . . recommended.” —Choice

While many studies have been written on national cinemas, Early Cinema and the “National” is the first anthology to focus on the concept of national film culture from a wide methodological spectrum of interests, including not only visual and narrative forms, but also international geopolitics, exhibition and marketing practices, and pressing linkages to national imageries.

The essays in this richly illustrated landmark anthology are devoted to reconsidering the nation as a framing category for writing cinema history. Many of the 34 contributors show that concepts of a national identity played a role in establishing the parameters of cinema’s early development, from technological change to discourses of stardom, from emerging genres to intertitling practices. Yet, as others attest, national meanings could often become knotty in other contexts, when concepts of nationhood were contested in relation to colonial/imperial histories and regional configurations. Early Cinema and the “National” takes stock of a formative moment in cinema history, tracing the beginnings of the process whereby nations learned to imagine themselves through moving images.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 17, 2008
• ISBN: 9780861969159

Book preview

Introduction

Richard Abel, Giorgio Bertellini and Rob King

A nation presupposes a past; it is summarized, however, in the present by a tangible fact, namely consent, the clearly expressed desire to continue a common life.

Ernest Renan, What is a nation? [1882], trans. Martin Thom, in Homi Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990).

All what I see wit’ me own eyes I knows an’ unnerstan’s

When I see movin’ pitchers of de far off, furrin’ lans

Where de Hunks an Ginnies come from – yer can betcher life I knows

Dat of all de lans’ an’ countries, ‘taint no matter where yer goes

Dis here country’s got ‘em beaten – take my oat dat ain’t no kid –

‘Cause we learned it from de movin’ pitchers, me an’ Maggie did.

The Newsie’s Point of View, Moving Picture World (5 March 1910).

The nation and the national have long circulated as useful, supposedly definitive categories in cinema history. One can find them in early film manufacturer catalogues such as the 1896 Lumière sales catalogue of films shot in distant parts of the globe and organized according to country of origin. Or in early trade press attempts to classify the film product of the world, such as New York Dramatic Mirror ’s 1908 compilation of the distinguishing characteristics or infallible ear marks of films produced by different countries. ¹ Or in early histories of the cinema’s aesthetic development, such as Léon Moussinac’s Naissance du cinéma (1925), which singles out the American, French, German, and Swedish cinemas for special treatment. ² Or in early museum film programs, such as those of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), in the 1930s, that were influential in producing a canon of American, French, German, Swedish, and Russian/Soviet films. ³ And one can still find them in the curricular offerings – even required courses – of most university and college film programs, at least in the USA.

Relatively recent theoretical work, moreover, has given the nation and the national substantial analytical force, especially for historical studies of late 19th- and early 20th-century mass culture. Benedict Anderson’s argument that national consciousness depended historically on the development of print-as-commodity as well as a horizontal secular time brought about by mass-market publishing is especially provoca- tive.⁴ If one draws a homology with the situation at the turn of the last century, cinema then took the vernacularizing thrust of mass culture a step further, becoming a new venue for imagining the nation as an imagined community. Nearly as influential has been Homi Bhabha’s concept of the nation as a system of cultural signification ... [or] representation of social life whose ideological parameters increasingly were defined in terms of the foreign other (see that Newsie’s doggerel epigraph).⁵ One could argue, for instance, that when systems of signification began to coalesce within early cinema, they emerged as articulations of the nation, perhaps most clearly in the development of visual and narrative forms charged with national and racial connota- tions. In cinema studies today, in the early 21st century, however, we have to ask whether current film historiography and criticism have fully explored the heuristics of the problematized and revitalized notions of nation and national . That question has particular pertinence for the theory and history of early cinema, as the ninth International Domitor Conference, held at the University of Michigan (30 May – 2 June 2006), attests.⁶

The essays in this volume, all derived from that conference, stake out a variety of positions for rethinking nation and national as productive concepts in writing the history of early cinema and for envisioning them as dynamic rather than static categories. Those positions depend in part on which of several more specific questions writers have chosen to address. Can we assume that moving pictures were an international or global phenomenon from at least the time when the Lumières’ cinématographe was being exhibited around the world? Even if so, when, where, how, and to what degree did moving pictures become national or nationalized? What conceptions of the national (other than Renan’s, for instance) in circulation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries became bound up with early cinema – e.g. how was the national aligned with or against European colonialism, American imperialism, and the oceanic migration of peoples? What other visual media were co-opted in early cinema’s representation and embodiment of national difference? To what degree could specific practices – from production and distribution to exhibition and marketing or promotion – be characterized as national rather than something else? How did racial, ethnic, class, gender, and/or religious differences complicate national conceptions of early cinema? And what were the ideological or commercial implications of those complicating differences? Were certain emerging genres (e.g. westerns, historical films, comic series) and/or early movie stars considered national phenomena, and what were the consequences when either circulated beyond national borders?⁷

The following essays are organized more or less according to the interests they share. The first cluster addresses questions of terminology that proved crucial during the conference and offers a range of positions with regard to whether early cinema is best considered a national or an international phenomenon. Arguably this is an ambiguity that touches on the question of medium specificity: unlike the print media that provided a new venue for the emergence of national consciousness as early as the 16th century, according to Anderson, the circulation of visual images was never as limited by national/linguistic competencies. Thus, to whatever extent moving pictures were involved in imagining nations, they could do so only against the background of a de facto cosmopolitanism of the image.⁸ The imagined communities to which early cinema lent its images can then be approached as both inter-and intra-national phenomena. Tom Gunning, for instance, makes a compelling argument for the former, demonstrating the transnational character of early moving pictures, both in the global pathways opened up by worldwide capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism and in the representation of a new consciousness of the global ... a system of knowledge that inventoried an accumulation of data according to a Western hierarchy of value. Offering a counterargument to Gunning and the current paradigm defining early cinema, which tends to ignore national differences under the broader rubric of modernity, Jonathan Auerbach instead follows Noël Burch’s lead and chooses British filmmaking as a test case to demonstrate that both form and content [of early films] can be distinguished along national lines.⁹

Indeed, it is in terms of the transnational ,regional , or local dimensions of early cinema that a number of contributors complicate the notion of nation as a framing historio- graphic concept. Frank Kessler usefully unpacks the term national into distinctive, if overlapping components – as a sign of (1) geographical origin, (2) an imagined sense of belonging that becomes nationalistic, and (3) a cultural cliché or constructed image – and then illustrates their complex layering in single films: e.g. disentangling French-ness, German-ness, and Tyrolese-ness in Lumières’Danse Tyrolienne (1896). Giorgio Bertellini complements Auerbach and Kessler by arguing that pre-cinematic traditions of visual representation informed and inextricably conflated racial, regional, and national differences in early cinema, as in the transmedial and transnational circulation of stereotypical images of picturesque Southern Italian landscapes representing the South of Europe. Charles O’Brien demonstrates how regional variations in the technology of electrification – in London, Berlin, Paris, New York, and Chicago – determined the uneven global development of sound-on-disc technology prior to World War I; while Torey Liepa focuses on dialogue intertitles in 1910s American films, specifically D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), and their function as sites of cultural negotiation, upon which national, class, racial and other tensions were played out. Finally, an essay by Marta Braun and Charlie Keil and another by Sheila Skaff offer contrasting analyses of how, on the one hand, the Living Canada series of motion pictures could successfully construct a distinct notion of a Canadian identity, one indebted to a British heritage, for the purposes of spurring immigration and tourism, yet, on the other, how local filmmaking in the tripartite Polish territories could not aid in any construction of Polish identity because of fragmentation in the region’s nation- alist movements.

A second cluster of essays focuses on specific instances in which colonialism or imperialism serve as crucially significant factors in the visual imagining of the national in early cinema. Frank Gray and Ian Christie, for instance, analyse popular patriotic entertainments that included moving pictures in Great Britain. Gray argues that the quick magic of A.J. West’s Our Navy , a multi-media extravaganza that toured the country for fifteen years, was part of an imperial culture that uncritically promoted Britain and its vision and practices up until World War I; by contrast, Christie demonstrates that Robert Paul’s films of the Anglo-Boer War, shown in music halls and fairgrounds, reflected many of the ambiguities and dilemmas [...] exposed by the war itself: the price demanded by as well as the pride involved in war with Boer nationalists. Nico de Klerk and Panivong Norindr explore the ideological implications of motion pictures produced and/or circulated within specific colonial contexts. de Klerk offers a wide-ranging study of the nonfiction films produced, distributed, and exhibited in the early 1910s by the Dutch Colonial Institute, with the aim of stimulating emigration to the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia); Norindr focuses on how cinema was imagined and put into practice in the French colonies – notably in a 1916 Pathé-Frères document – and suggests that motion pictures at the periphery had an unexpected impact in shaping national film policy in France. Other contributors within this section examine the different roles that motion pictures played in debates over immigration in the USA, the controversial influx of different peoples within a single country. Marina Dahlquist contrasts the better citizenship work of organizations such as the Civic Theatre in Pawtucket, Rhode Island – using fiction and nonfiction films to help assimilate and Americanize recent immigrants – with early 1910s Swedish films made specifically for the home market as explicit propaganda against emigration. Contextualizing the short variety sketches that comprise AM&B’s Fights of Nations (1907) – one comes from Macbeth – David Mayer argues that the film’s chiefly comic racial and ethnic battles ... were, concurrently, also being played out for real and with far greater heat and seriousness for the American public. Gregory Waller situates a large body of Japan films (1908–1915) within a widespread and surprisingly diverse network of mass-produced images of Japan that [...] circulated in the United States and teases out their knotted strands of desire, fear, admiration, curiosity, and appreciation – of Japanophilia tempered by Japanophobia – all bound up with efforts to cope with a newly powerful other.

A third cluster of essays, as do several of those previously mentioned, presents one of the more striking discoveries of the conference: that recent research methods focusing on local film practices, especially in exhibition, force us to rethink the national in terms of marketing and publicity, programming and lecturing, and appropriation (e.g. through translation and/or regulation). On the one hand, Paul Moore uses the case study of Toronto, Ontario, to argue that nationalism is most easily and perhaps necessarily first instituted through [local] exhibition practices supported by state regulation and censorship, always already in response to the global, mass character of mainstream cinema. On the other, John Welle shows that, in the case of Italy before 1905, the underlying currents of Italian identity, favoring the city and the region rather than the nation, determined locally specific forms of moving pictures’ cultural reception. In the case of cosmopolitan Istanbul, Canan Balan counters the binaries framing prior histories of early Turkish cinema to argue that a multi-ethnic, multi-religious spectatorship culture determined the wondrous reception of moving pictures from abroad, a reception finally transformed by nationalization after World War I and by the increasingly contested presence of women in public life. Redefining a national cinema culture based on the films most favorably received in a country rather than on those produced there, Joseph Garncarz cites statistics on pre-war German audiences who favored multiple-reel German and Danish films even though together they accounted for only 20 per cent of those in circulation. The unique system of municipal cinema ownership in Norway, by contrast, seems not to have created a national cinema culture, for it took the successful import of Swedish films in the late 1910s, Gunnar Iverson suggests, to inspire a national style of indigenous film production. Finally, three essays focus on the naturalization or appropriation of foreign imports through the language of lecturers, translated intertitles, and/or novelized tie-ins. Daniel Sanchéz Salas examines the ingenious ways that film lecturers in Spain negotiated between local audiences and Spanish popular culture by, on the one hand, adapting places and characters to settings familiar to the viewer and, on the other, invoking a sense of national identity by making marginal comments on current events. In a case study of exhibition in Montréal, Québec, Germain Lacasse points to the important role of language in constructing French Canadian national identity, exemplified by Joseph Dumais’ vain attempt to override American film intertitles translated into the vernacular or joual through his lectures delivered in academic French. In an even more specific case in France, Rudmer Canjels argues that Les Mystères de New-York , in both Pathé’s imported film version and Pierre Decourcelle’ serial novelization, added anti-German and pro-American views that ensured its successful integration into French daily public experience during the wartime period of 1915–1916.¹⁰

A fourth cluster of essays address the question of whether the concept of genre has particular salience for an understanding of national imaginaries, not only because of historical specificity (the early western and the USA, the early epic and Italy, etc.) but also perhaps because the legacy of Lévi-Strauss within cinema studies makes genre a prime topic for issues of the nation or national. To return to Bhabha: if nations are narrative strategies, then the existence of recurrent narrative formulae – in genres – is a necessary (if not sufficient) symptom of national consciousness. The problem, however, lies in the balance between the national and global character of early cinema: given the transnational circulation of generic templates (e.g. the trick film, slapstick, etc.), how might we trace the accents of national particularity? What is it, for instance, about Pathé’s French-produced imitation westerns that makes them French, and for whom? Or, to what extent can Keystone-style slapstick films be read as American, when Mack Sennett freely acknowledged the influence of French filmmakers?

One fruitful area concerns the traditional issues of generic iconography and thematic structure (what Rick Altman terms the semantic and syntactic dimensions of genre).¹¹ Two essays in this section, both on American slapstick, uncover the national precisely in relation to these twinned dimensions – Amanda Keeler, by focusing on syntactic contrasts between America’s rural past and technological modernity in Key-stone’s 1915Mabel and Fatty series; Rob King, by exploring the nativist meanings of the comic tramp as an iconographic element of 1910s comedy. Iconography also frames Matthew Solomon’s compelling account of Ching Ling Foo imitators in turn-of-the- century stage magic and trick films, where Orientalist impersonations allowed Euro-American magicians and audiences to inhabit a shared whiteness imagined behind the mask of Asian stereotypes. Two other essays locate the national in the semantic distinctions that film texts construct between representations and what they consider knowledge or ultimate realities. For Oliver Gaycken, popular science films are inflected by national/nationalistic discourses in their reliance upon nationally specific knowledge (e.g. French science films about the snail industry) as well as nationalizing tropes through which scientific knowledge is represented (The ants are the Japanese of the insect world, as one such film declares). Dominique Nasta and Muriel Andrin, meanwhile, draw upon Paul Ricoeur’s distinction between narrated and historical time to explore how several European fiction films encode real historical events (specifically, World War I) within the affective mode of film melodrama. Finally, a pair of essays shifts the locus of genre consciousness to national institutions and industries. Charting productive homologies between the dime novel and transition-era fiction cinema, Wyatt Phillips traces the origins of American film genres to the standardization and rationalization of American mass culture industries. Wolfgang Fuhrmann sustains the materialist caste of Phillips’s argument by delving into the contrasting institutional climate of ethnographic museums in early-20th-century Germany and then arguing that ethnographic filmmaking’s early development should be explained less as a national phenomenon than as a specific result of local competition between museums.

Concluding this collection are two clusters of paired essays. The first pair takes up issues of gender, already broached in the Balan, Keeler, and King essays. Theda Bara’s star image as an independent, non-procreative ‘modern’ woman and ... beguiling but racially inferior female exotic (the predatory vamp), Mark Hain argues, could be read by American audiences as either a cautionary device allaying nativist anxiety, according to the logic of Social Darwinsim and eugenics, or else a potential means of feinting or counterfeint, refiguring anxiety into a field of play. Andrea Haller, by contrast, uses a German fan magazine’s debate over women’s unusual attraction to Gunnar Tolnaes, a Norwegian actor who played characters as ‘foreign’ as an Indian maharaja (rather than to General Paul von Hindenburg), in order to explore the tensions that marked not only the longings and desires of female moviegoers but also the national identity of German society as a whole during World War I. The last pair of essays offers different takes on our historical imagination of early cinema, the one through the national character of [archive] collections, the other through that of the idealized discursive world of movie land. Skillfully teasing out the interweavings of the national and the transnational contexts that the [Joseph] Joye and [Davide] Turconi Collections moved through (from Switzerland to Italy, England, and the USA), Joshua Yumibe reflects on what the migration of different local collections ... mean for the project of cinema historiography. Focusing on the immateriality of movie land as a magical utopic space, Jennifer Bean argues that the American film industry’s privileged position in the dream world of modernity derived from its transformation of the rationalizing imperatives of capitalism ... and the numbing effects of assembly line labor into a phenomenological realm of endlessly variegated metamorphosis and play.

Just as the Ninth International Domitor Conference represented an invaluable venue for initiating a discussion of these issues, the editors hope that the essays collected here will provoke further efforts in research, writing, and dialogue to rethink the nation and national as productive concepts for writing the history of early cinema. Such rethinking is also profoundly relevant in our current era of newly globalized capitalism, mass migrations of peoples across borders, and deceptive imperialist adventures.

The editors would like to thank the Office for the Vice-President of Research and the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan for granting a crucial subvention for the publication of this volume. Thanks also to John Libbey for so quickly agreeing to support this volume, to Don Crafton for helping to organize the essays, and to Ilka Rasch for doing some initial copyediting.

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. In conjunction with the conference, the Michigan Theater (a restored 1928 palace cinema) screened four evenings of rare films, with generous assistance from Russ Collins (director), Tara McComb (program coordinator), J. Scott Clarke and Walt Bishop (projectionists) and with marvelous organ and piano accompaniment by Stephen Warner. The first evening featured a rare multi-media event, Our Empire, based in part on the popular Our Navy show that toured Great Britain from 1900 to 1914. Our Empire included glass slides projected on a three-turret magic lantern (operated by David Francis, former head of the Motion Picture Division, US Library of Congress), early British patriotic films, popular tunes sung by Celia L. (Rose) Randall-Bengry, and a lecture performed with gusto by Frank Gray. The second evening screening was equally special: a dozen French nonfiction films from the British Film Institute’s Joseph Joye collection (all shown in restored color prints), introduced by Bryony Dixon, and a half dozen nonfiction Colonial Institute films from the Nederlands Filmmuseum, introduced by Nico de Klerk. The third evening saw a change of pace: a selection of French, Italian, and American comic films from the early 1910s, with stars like Max Linder, Rigadin, John Bunny, Fatty Arbuckle, and Mabel Normand. The last evening was devoted to national epics and sensational melodramas, including Itala’s spectacular Fall of Troy (also shown in a restored color print), Bison-101’s stunning The Indian Massacre, and Gaumont’s action-packed Their Lives for Gold .

8. On cosmopolitanism in relation to contemporary global society, see Ulrich Beck, Cosmopolitan Vision (Cambridge: Polity, 2006). Beck glosses the concept in an earlier essay: "We all are living by birth in two worlds, two communities – in the cosmos (that is nature ) and in the polis (that is, the city/state). To be more precise: individuals are rooted in one cosmos but in different cities, territories, ethnicities, hierarchies, nations, religions – all at the same time. Beck, Cosmopolitan Europe: A Confederation of States, a Federal State or Something Altogether New?" in S. Stern and E. Seligmann, eds.,Desperately Seeking Europe (London: Archetype Publications, 2003), 6. The term, we suggest, may be applicable to an earlier moment in global capitalism’s development.

9. Noel Burch’s 1980 lectures on early French, American, British filmmaking were collected and translated in Life to those Shadows (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 43–142.

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

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

PART I

Interrogating the National

1

Early cinema as global cinema: the encyclopedic ambition

Tom Gunning

"E arly cinema is a global cinema. National cinema only appears later in film history. I would endorse both these statements as important historical principles, and might restate them, borrowing a phrase from my colleague Michael Raine, one of the finest historians of Japanese cinema, as cinema was international before it was national. However, immediately a flurry of problems intervene, mainly dealing with terminology. What do we mean by: global, international or even national? I am reminded of a story I heard from my former colleague Homi Bahbha (my apologies to him if my memory is not exact). Interviewing an executive of Coca-Cola, Bahbha referred to Coca-Cola as an international corporation. The executive corrected him, saying that Coca-Cola considered themselves a global corporation" Bhabha asked him to explain the difference. The executive paused, rang for his secretary, who eventually entered with an official statement about the global identity of Coca-Cola. I confess I have forgotten what this definition was (and perhaps Bhabha did not recall when he told the story). But my point lies less in promoting any single definition, than in the relation among these terms, what they articulate and conceal, their power as markers of the power to define and articulate meanings.

Thus, I am not claiming that early cinema represents an era beyond and above nationalist squabbles or power plays, a utopian period that ignored borders from idealistic motives. If cinema crossed borders easily in its first decades, it followed global pathways opened up by worldwide capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism. In its first decade cinema production remained concentrated in the industrial and technologically developed countries of the northern and western hemispheres. Although film exhibition moved quickly across the globe (and indeed filmmaking as well, although primarily controlled by production companies located in the USA or Europe, in the form of filmmakers sent out on global voyages as hunters of images), it initially appears almost exclusively in the metropolitan centers of imperialistic commerce. Certainly the national economies and politics of these dominant nations determine many aspects of early cinema. If Auguste Lumière in 1896 announced to an inquirer from Grenoble that the Lumière firm intended to exhibit the Cinématographe in the capitals of Europe before touring the cities of France, the motivation certainly lay in potential financial return and publicity, not an internationalist sentiment.¹ Rather than proclaiming a prelapsarian status for early cinema, I would claim that in its first decades (prior, say, to World War I) a primary way that film understood itself was as a medium that could express a new sense of a global identity. The frequently stated ability of cinema to place the world within your reach, while neither its only impulse, nor restricted to this period, provides one of the most powerful images of what cinema was called to do when it first appeared.

One must place cinema’s global and international impulse at the turn of the century within a broader cultural context. While the expansion of exploration and trade through the eighteenth century certainly influenced the Enlightenment’s concepts of universal human rights, the enormous industrial and technological expansion that took place during the nineteenth century converted this ideal into capitalist systems of co-operation and exploitation across the globe. The exploitation of colonial spheres of influence as sources of raw material and then as markets for manufactured goods received tangible, as well as ideological, form in the World Expositions, which demonstrated and celebrated, as Prince Albert proclaimed of the Crystal Place Exhibition, the pathway from material to commodity as the power that made the new world turn round. At a previous Domitor conference I examined the way early cinema dovetailed into the ideology and patterns of display of the Universal Expositions at the turn of the century.² An experience of this newly accessible globe could become a commodity in numerous and novel forms, such as worldwide tourism, packaged by the Cooks Travel Agency, or the widely popular travel writings and lectures, revolutionized by photography, and the possibility of magic lantern projections, and eventually motion pictures. A variety of new media supplied a global consciousness for capitalist consumers. The rise of mass circulation newspapers and journals promoted the systematization of foreign correspondents and the gathering of news from all areas. Entertainment, especially the vaudeville and music hall stage, crossed borders and oceans, with international tours undertaken by singers, magicians, acrobats, clowns and dancers (this often exotic potpourri of performers was promoted by early cinema as well, as Charles Musser’s analysis of Edison’s first kinetoscope films shows³). Even overtly nationalistic forms of entertainment took on international aspects. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, the quintessential entertainment form of the myth of American expansionism, not only found the spectacle of the winning of the West a profitable commodity for export through its highly successful international tours, but began to incorporate a global perspective in its presentation of aggressive Americanism, including restaging of recent imperialist adventures into the Philippines, Cuba and Peking, as well as offering an international congress of rough riders of the world.⁴

The global as a form of entertainment and commodity at the turn of the century shadowed more official institutional markers of the single world that imperialism and capitalism had fashioned. The establishment of Standard Time and the Prime Meridian in 1885, regulating clocks across the hemispheres, was paralleled by the formation of scientific and scholarly organizations with international scope, often inaugurated or given impetus through congresses held in conjunction with the World Fairs.⁵ The Olympics held the first international games in Athens in 1896 (with the second games occurring in Paris in 1900, somewhat overshadowed by the Universal Exposition). The Second Socialist Internationale met in 1886, and established May Day as the official Worker’s Holiday across the globe. The disciplines of cultural geography and anthropology, which took the full scope of global human culture as their topic, became academically recognized in this period, as programs of exploration and survey brought the whole world into a systematic process of measurement and mapping. The global as I am using the concept represents a system of knowledge, not simply an infinite expanse of space: a broad and varied accumulation of data certainly, but one subject to inventory, hierarchy, and use. Achieving such global knowledge dominated the scientific and scholarly agendas of the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century.

Cinema played an essential role in conveying this new consciousness of the global, not only in popular entertainment, but also in scholarly endeavors. Defenses of cinema (and this continues into the 1930s, at least) against the onslaught of critics of the new sensational mass entertainments frequently quoted scholars who claimed that films of travel offered the best means of bringing an awareness of the global dimension home to average citizens. Film shows constituted the poor man’s or average citizen’s geography lessons, performing a basic pedagogical function. Certain reformers attempted to create an alternative to the commercial film program by presenting model film programs that conveyed a systematic view of the world to gawking slum dwellers, restless children, or complacent bourgeois.⁶ Beyond the pedagogic mission of reformed film exhibition, Alison Griffith’s masterful Wondrous Difference reveals that the new sciences of global observation, such as anthropology, outfitted themselves with a variety of recording technologies, including, as a rule, still photography, sound recordings and motion picture cameras.⁷

In the discourse of film reformers, this global cinema, primarily made up of non-fiction, stood as cinema’s one excuse, a possible exhibition strategy that could contrast with and ultimately combat the apparent addiction to sensational story films of violent crimes and sexual titillation that, it was claimed, would rot the minds of the proletariats that flocked to them. Thus an interlocking logic of both production and exhibition arose whose purpose was either pedagogical or scientific (either gathering and recording data or disseminating it) or both, and for whom the concept of the global becomes the ultimate frame of reference. Global cinema, therefore, represents more than a worldwide pattern of distribution and exhibition; it reveals an essential gestalt of cinema’s ambition during its era of novelty and innovation. Early films may appear brief and limited in scope compared to later feature films. But while short films constitute the basic component parts of early cinema, rather than the individual film canonized by later film history, the unit of cinema for this early period may more properly be understood as the program, the exhibitor’s assembly of a number of films in a single presentation. Although the modes and purposes for assembling a film program were varied, early cinema, like the newspaper or the vaudeville bill, could, and frequently did, draw on the global as a readily understood means of uniting a variety of interrelated attractions.

The film program provides an example of the way early cinema built complex and extensive structures out of fairly self-sufficient films (recalling Brooks McNamara’s definition of the variety format as one in which there is no transfer of information between elements),⁸ forming a whole whose sum is greater than its parts without creating a coherent narrative. Likewise, the film catalogue issued by production companies functions as more, I would claim, than simply an inventory of available merchandise. The commercial catalogue of the turn of the century (and this would be true of the great merchandizing publications of Sears and Roebuck, and Montgomery Ward, as well as film catalogues) performed the function of a systematic gathering and presentation of information that could best be compared to the first great global projects of the Encyclopedia of Diderot and d’Alembert. In commodity form, the mail catalogue placed the world within the reach of its customers, much as the Internet does today. The film catalogues of the early film companies, but most obviously those of Pathé-Frères and Lumière, offered the world in the form of consumable images.⁹ Although such catalogues offered varieties of films in many genres (a range of fictional and non-fictional forms: travel images, news events, gag and trick films, comedies and eventually melodramas, piquant erotic scenes and re-enactments of historical events), the global sensibility provided the all-encompassing metaphor.¹⁰

I propose the encyclopedia as an organizing concept for early cinema, the textual form of the global consciousness I have been describing. This term establishes a mode of filmic practice that avoids simply contrasting its forms with the standards of later cinema (as short films is opposed, anachronistically and rather denigratingly, to the later longer feature films). From a formal perspective, the concept of the encyclopedia, like the variety format, stresses that the individual film in this era was primarily conceived as part of a larger whole, not only of the exhibitor’s program, but also of the production logic of early production companies. Conceptually, an encyclopedia aspires to an all-encompassing delivery of knowledge, but in the modern era the form also acknowledges knowledge itself as ever-expanding, never final. Therefore, unlike most forms of documentary or fiction, the encyclopedia does not claim a final completeness of form. Made up of component parts or fragments (in the case of cinema, individual films) the encyclopedia can be constantly expanded and added to, the very self-contained nature of its individual components allowing this process of addition. I would claim that, as early film companies and at least certain viewers, thought of cinema as a global form, they also conceived of cinema as encyclopedic, an ever renewable catalogue made up of new editions through the addition of new films.

Film programs and catalogues represent two basic aspects of the industry, exhibition and distribution, both of which saw their roles as the bringing together of various attractions into a loosely structured but potentially global context. Film production, the third leg of the film industry’s tripod, perhaps most directly presented itself in global terms, especially in cinema’s earliest era. Thus the Lumière’s decision not simply to market domestic films of children, streets of Lyon and Paris, or local sights, but to equip companies of operators who would give exhibitions and gather new films globally indicates how quickly the inventors recognized a global potential for their new product. The Lumière catalogue of films demonstrates the global role that cinema took on, and the film views gathered by the cameramen Promio, Veyne, Mesquich and Doublier, as well as their globetrotting pattern of exhibitions, often given by the same cameramen as they toured the metropolitan centers of the world, delivered to the first film audiences a vivid visual demonstration of a new global consciousness. As the Lumière company moved out of the production of films, this global legacy was taken up by Pathé-Frères, whose non-fiction film views shot around the world presented even more systematically a living catalogue of the world and its people, and eventually by the Gaumont company (who even offered a Gaumont Encyclopedia as one of their film catalogues), as well as other companies who in a somewhat less systematic and extensive way offered views of travel.¹¹

But perhaps the most ambitious and consistently worked-out global concept of cinema came with its least commercial project, the Archive of the Planet of French financier and philanthropist Albert Kahn. I draw here on the superb dissertation and research of my student Paula Amad on this archive.¹² Kahn’s project, emerging between 1909 and 1912, comes towards the end of the period we define as early cinema and marks the survival and systematization of its encyclopedic ambition. As I intend to be a bit provocative by referring to the early film program as encyclopedic, merging entertainment with models of knowledge, to class Kahn’s project as encyclopedic, while hardly counter-intuitive, should not blind us to the difference between an archive and an encyclopedia. Encyclopedias are designed for the dissemination of knowledge, archives for its storage and retrieval. The encyclopedia recalls the archive in its range of topics and the modular nature of its entries, but it offers an actualized assembly, while the archive works in potentia, the source of many possible encyclopedias. The archive, therefore, remains the domain of the scholars who consult it, while the encyclopedia aims at a wider public.

Kahn’s Archive of the Planet remained very much an archive, although scholars may yet fashion an encyclopedia from it. Rarely, if ever, viewed by the broad public, it aspired to be a source for contemporary and future scholars to understand the global nature of twentieth-century human culture and everyday life. Emerging from Kahn’s own global travel and his belief that scholars must travel to understand the world, the Archive consisted of photographic records (principally motion pictures and autochromes, still photographs using the Lumière company’s color photography process) that Kahn commissioned from professional cameramen who traveled around the world and filmed aspects of everyday life. These were carefully catalogued in a system of fiches and were shown to visiting scholars – these included, Amad informs us, writers such as Rabinath Tagore, Bernard Shaw and Colette as well as Kahn’s mentor, philosopher Henri Bergson. Indeed Bergson’s interest in everyday life, and the cultural geography of his disciple Bruhnes shaped the project which was unfortunately curtailed by the loss of Kahn’s fortune in the 1929 stock market crash.

Amad does a masterful job of relating this project to the modern idea of an archive (or indeed, given its emphasis on the everyday, what she calls a counter-archive) and the pre-war French culture that fostered it. These films, whether of men passing into a sidewalk urinal in Paris, an Algerian prostitute interacting with her costumers, or an Indo-Chinese woman disrobing for the camera, ostensibly to show the layers of her native costume (with the cameraman discreetly throwing the lens out of focus as she appears nude) fascinate for their blend of the everyday and the exotic. The lack of a single specific interpretive context, rather than rendering them simply opaque, actually makes them rich in implications. Not that these films are free of ideology: the observing camera, its voyeuristic appetite for recording the details of behavior, express precisely the modern Western demand for a world consumed as pictures and information that marks what I am calling global consciousness. And yet in their contingency, their immediacy of gesture and movement, we sense a fascination in the fragments of reality that these cameras tore away. It would be the ambition of later filmmakers to either place such fragments into a whole (e.g. the montage theorists and practioners of the 1920s, such Vertov or Shub) or, even later, to let the fragment stand as a part of an implied whole (as in Bazin’s promotion of the realism of ellipsis in the work of Rossellini and the Italian neo-realists). But here in these brief films found within the Kahn archives not only does ambiguity but ambivalence reigns, a wondering sense that these images both add up to something we could never grasp and constitute in themselves a world we could never plumb. To paraphrase Amad, they are parts of both an encyclopedia and an anti-encyclopedia.

Two temptations surround the investigation of early cinema, and while neither of them can be easily dismissed, the limitations of each should be kept in mind. The first is to view this era (as Noel Burch once put it) as a lost paradise, a period of purity before commercialization and institutionalization. Although the commerce was different from that of later cinema and the institutions were primarily pre-existent ones, they certainly determined the nature of early cinema. But the other temptation is to see the early period simply as the origin of later practices, the fount of all later conceptions even if embryonic in form. The differences of early cinema, while they should not be romanticized, should not be eclipsed either in a search for paternity. The global nature of early cinema relates to global practices that persist to this day. But just as importantly, early cinema provided an image of the global as a new gestalt. As a highly technological form, able to circulate from place to place and thereby to annihilate the separation inherent in space and time, films collapsed these distances into the new proximity of an image culture. The exchange of images derived partly from their fragmentary and modular nature, their relative independence allowing modes of assembly that recalled the universality envisioned by the Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment. The rise of nationalist discourse through and around cinema, while not absolutely absent from early cinema, seems rather to depend on narrative forms and the use of documentary to create ideological arguments that appear in the 1910s using complex editing based structures of contrast and suspense. Cinema’s relation to both global and national discourses arose in the first decades of the twentieth century. It is our job as film historians to investigate the forms and practices that enabled their emergence rather than assume that either discourse is somehow inherent in cinema or simple readymade material that cinema can adopt naturally.

Notes

1. See the letter to Paul de Montal of 27 January 1896 in Auguste and Louis Lumière, Correspondances 1890–1953, ed. Jacques Rittaud-Hutinet (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 1994), 126.

2. Tom Gunning, The World as Object Lesson: Cinema Audiences, Visual Culture and the St. Louis World’s Fair, 1904, Film History 6.4 (Winter 1995): 422–444.

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

4. See the particularly fine discussion of Buffalo Bill in Kristin Whissel, Placing the Spectator on the Scene of History: the battle re-enactment at the turn of the century, from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West to the Early Cinema, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 22/23 (2002): 225–243.

5. See among other treatments, Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 11–16; and Michael O’Malley, Keeping Watch: A History of American Time (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990), 99–143.

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

7. Alison Griffiths, Wondrous Difference: Cinema Anthropology and turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).

8. Brooks McNamara, Popular Scenography The Drama Review 61 (March 1974): 119.

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

10. I discus the categories of early film genres found in these catalogues in ‘Those that are Drawn with a Fine Camel Haired Brush’: The Origins of Film Genres, iris 20 (Autumn 1995).

11. Beginning in 1904, Pathé extended its global reach by spawning distribution systems across the world and, beginning in 1908, spinning off regional production companies throughout Europe and the USA.

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

2

Nationalizing attractions

Jonathan Auerbach

Like most of us, I manage to wear more than one academic hat, having been trained in literary analysis, which I continue to pursue, along with my research in early cinema for the past decade or so, with American studies serving as something like a bridge between these two very different modes of representation, the verbal and the visual. Given the pressure to be interdisciplinary (whatever that means, exactly), I tried at first to combine these two interests, but have since learned the hard way that it is sometimes best to keep your hats separate. Attempting to import key operational concepts from one field into another without sufficient pause or historical reflection threatens to produce more confusion than fusion. In other words, however permeable or changing, disciplines have borders and boundaries, just as countries do.

I have self-consciously introduced this metaphor of borders in relation to disciplinary difference because it seems to me nation and the national as crucial concepts for both literary and cinema scholarship in fact function in markedly dissimilar ways. In the first half of this essay I propose to discuss some of these differences, focusing on how concepts of nation and nationalism have recently fared in American literary history and American studies. In the second half, I will then quickly shift gears, jumping across the Atlantic to discuss a group of turn-of-the-century British filmmakers, using their work as a kind of test case to probe certain very suggestive but somewhat loose claims first made by Noël Burch over twenty years ago, propositions that bear directly on this question of the nationalizing of early cinema attractions.

When I mentioned the theme of this Domitor conference to colleagues in my English department, I was greeted with surprise. To put it baldly: nationalism is currently something of a dirty word these days in literature departments, at least here in the United States. How it got that way is worth briefly tracing. As has been amply documented, the academic study of languages and literature in the late nineteenth-century emerged from a century-old tradition of European romanticism that regarded texts as a kind of secular scripture, defining the particular geist or spirit of individual nations. In this model of reading, Shakespeare, for instance, becomes a touchstone to understand English culture and character.¹ Partly because Great Britain and the United States shared a common language, American authors from the early nineteenth-century often felt burdened by a massive inferiority complex, the apprehension that their writing was mere imitation.

As a result, during this period we find all kinds of rhetorical gestures seemingly intended to liberate American authors from this yoke of cultural servitude, gestures that twentieth-century critics tended to accept and amplify in their analysis of these writers. So in 1837 Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his famous Phi Betta Kappa address at Harvard, The American Scholar, which later in the century became known as our intellectual declaration of independence, a characterization that continued to be reiterated in virtually every textbook until very recently.² In terms of form, theme, and/or language, this search to locate the special otherness of American literature became the central concern of a generation of scholars during the 1950s and 60s. To cite just two examples, Richard Chase, drawing on Hawthorne’s prefaces, proposed romance as a characteristically American symbolic genre in opposition to the novel, which in its realistic rendering of social life was a European mode, while R.W.B. Lewis around the same time coined the phrase American Adam to designate a set of preoccupations with innocence at the heart of the American experience.³ With the growth of the academic field of American studies during the cold war, scholars tended to offer an even sharper evaluation or celebration of US culture not simply as different from the rest of the world (especially the Soviet Union), but exceptional, outside of history as it were, at once unique but also paradoxically a model of democracy for other countries to follow.

Well, those days of American exceptionalism are pretty much over, at least in the academy. In the wake of the Vietnam War, the rise of feminism, and the social agitation of blacks and other minorities, the very idea of the nation as a unified totality, historically forged by consensus and compromise, began to crumble. Responding to the collapse of this master narrative, Americanists began to write a more inclusive literary history that would pay attention to contributions of formerly marginalized authors (mostly women and African-Americans). While the first impulse of such revision was primarily to open up the canon, around 1990 scholars more fundamentally began to challenge the underlying assumption that the nation itself should be the basic unit of, and frame for, analysis. To think outside such narrow confines, Carolyn Porter continued, the United States must be understood hemispherically, a perspective that would attend to cultural, political, and economic relations between and within the Americas.⁴ This wasn’t simply a comparative model, but a more radical reconstitution that imagined the United States as a network of overlapping regional and global forces, a web of contact zones.⁵ Paul Gilroy similarly described the Black Atlantic as a mixed space – neither African, American, British or Caribbean.⁶ This was one of the first of many studies to replace the geopolitics of the nation-state and its imperial ambitions with an emphasis on diaspora, hybridity, and borderlands. By the late 1990s this skepticism about US exceptionalism had so accelerated that the head of the American Studies Association would deliver a presidential address seriously questioning not only the name of the organization, but its very mission and subject matter.⁷ And as we might have expected, founding literary father Emerson has lately undergone some revision, from being regarded as the parochial voice of an idealized nationalism to a more cosmopolitan champion of world literature, including Asian religion and culture.⁸

Just as this transnational turn was gaining ascendancy in American studies (to attain a certain sort of orthodoxy today), I became interested in early cinema. As I look back, what first attracted and excited me about the field was the ease with which it took for granted its transnational status. Apart from a few patriotically-inclined historians who once worried about which inventors and filmmakers deserved which firsts, scholars by and large understood that early cinema from the start was a market-driven phenomenon of global modernity, with films being distributed and mimicked across the world map without any clear unilateral direction of influence. Even though our own discourse might be nationally and linguistically bound, the images we studied largely were not. I do think it is indisputable that images can cross borders more easily than words, to evoke the theme of a previous Domitor conference held in 1992.⁹ And so this shifting attention in early cinema studies from the transnational to the national some fourteen years later would seem to move in exactly the opposite direction from the shift in American studies, which has turned away from the national to embrace the transnational. Clearly the two concepts are mutually constituting – you can’t have one without the other – but I do think it is instructive to consider this dramatic difference in emphasis between the two disciplines, with current American studies concerns seeming a bit belated