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F i l m - P h i l o s o p h y
ISSN 1466-4615
http://www.film-philosophy.com
Volume 3 Number 36
September 1999
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Tina M. Kelleher
Why Film History Should Not Repeat Itself
_Celebrating 1895: The Centenary of Cinema_
Edited by John Fullerton
Sydney: John Libbey, 1998
ISBN 1-86462-015-3
288 pp.
This broad-ranging anthology features a selection of essays delivered at a
1995 conference sponsored by the National Museum of Photography, Film and
Television, and the University of Derby. 'Celebrating 1895' provided a
forum to commemorate and to interrogate contemporary understandings of
early film, and this collection represents both the breadth and
international scope of the undertaking.
Consisting of twenty-seven short essays, segmented into five parts, the
book contains a sampling of scholarship addressing the formal and
historical elements that conditioned the production and reception of early
cinema, and that, in the words of the volume's editor, John Fullerton,
reflects 'the sense of occasion' (ix) that inspired conference
participants. The attempt, however, to attain representativeness -- of the
event, of diverse critical approaches, of cultural and social identities --
necessarily sacrifices more sustained theoretical inquiry into the
revisionary historicism at work in some of the essays. _Celebrating 1895_
nevertheless remains an informative and provocative collection that
effectively illustrates the various cultural, social, and technological
milieux from which cinema emerged.
Part one, 'Inscribing a New Technology', questions the technological
determinism underlying linear historical narratives. Starting with a brief
history of how the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television
acquired and developed many of its present-day holdings for exhibition, the
section proceeds to characterize some of the institutional agendas and
structures that have shaped our understanding of film. Simon Popple
demonstrates how pre-1913 film historiography catalogued technologies and
celebrated individual ingenuity, a procedure that obscured the economic
incentives, the social pressures, that spurred invention. Popple contends
that 'cinema's status as a mongrel technology' (20) -- as a 'bricolage' of
chemical, optical, and engineering advances, bearing aesthetic, economic,
and social implications -- merits in-depth examination and he briefly
points to some primary sources that would facilitate more textured research
in this field. Deac Rossell likewise challenges originative histories by
placing the emergence of cinema within the context of an existing magic
lantern culture, which used, among other techniques, narration and slide
projection to simulate the kind of temporal progression and visual
immediacy subsequently enabled by film. The section also pays homage to two
frequently-overlooked cinematic pioneers from Poland: Kazimierz Proszynski,
an inventor who constructed and designed several innovative cameras and
projection devices, and theorist Karol Irzyhowski, who philosophized about
the impact of film upon the human senses.
Section two, 'Exhibition and Audiences', looks at the exhibition contexts
for, as well as the viewers of early film. Richard Abel reevaluates the
French movie company Pathe's most successful releases in the United States
between 1908 and 1916. He weighs claims made in the French Trade Press as
potential evidence that an increase in female moviegoers in pre-World War
II France generated new market demands, which in turn changed the narrative
content of Pathe's films. In this vein of inquiry, Vanessa Toulmin examines
the unique context of British traveling show grounds, which were managed
predominantly by women and included live acts interspersed with a film's
screening. Working-class involvement in early British cinema also receives
attention: Alan Burton demonstrates how, before 1920, liberal activists
used film to propagate for the Consumer Co-Operative Movement, and Nicholas
Hiley argues that histories of early cinema should factor how the consumer
demands of workers and their families influenced developments in the film
industry. Reading 'period evidence against the grain' (92) William Uricchio
and Roberta E. Pearson reveal racial tensions surrounding the controversial
dismissal of New York City's former deputy chief of the Bureau of Licenses,
Gaetano D'amato, an Italian-American who allegedly issued questionable
licenses to nickelodeons. Also included in this section is Mat Bjorkin's
essay on the failed efforts of a Swedish exhibition company to cash in on
one of that nation's major cultural figures, August Strindberg.
The third segment, 'Popular Culture', evaluates how conventions and themes
from other cultural forms carried over into film. As Gary and Estela Keller
contend, stereotypical representations of Hispanics prevalent in popular
literature transferred seamlessly to celluloid. Peter Kramer's essay
discusses how literary 'bad boy' figures a la Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer
gained a cinematic after life in American film adaptations, and Stephen
Johnson demonstrates how _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ became highly popularized
through a variety of stage productions and Edwin S. Porter's 1903 film,
which continued the 'Tom Show' tradition. Richard Crangle's 'Saturday Night
at the X-rays: The Moving Picture and The New Photography in Britain, 1896'
cannily points out that X-rays initially attained greater recognition than
the cinema. The X-rays novelty waned, however, once the public became
immune to static representations of skeletal structures; on the other hand,
film thrived because of its representational mobility, because its newness
could be perpetually recuperated via the narrative possibilities of visual
sequencing. Finally, Casper Tyberg challenges critics who dismiss the
sensation film genre in Denmark as a form of alienation, as a series of
fleeting 'shocks', and examines autobiographical and journalistic sources
that suggest the genre invigorated its subjects just as often as it
'shocked' them.
Perhaps the most ambitious and unwieldy part of _Celebrating 1895_ is the
fourth section, 'Cultural Representation', which is organized around the
ways in which film wrought changes upon earlier conceptions of the public
and the private. Opening with Karen Kenkel's essay on nationalism in the
film reform movement of Wilhelmine Germany and the attendant difficulties
it encountered when trying to reconcile a mass audience with traditional
understandings of German culture, the next essay by Constances Balides
argues that Cecil B. DeMille's _The Cheat_ (1915) articulates an American
Fordist agenda in its depiction of a modern woman responsible for managing
the domestic sphere. Stephen Bottomore shifts concerns back across the
Atlantic, tracing how British and continental monarchs made the transition
from experiencing film as a private amusement, to becoming targeted by
media blitzes, which subjected royal families to persistent public
scrutiny. On this critical front, Andrew Higson examines how nationalistic
heritage discourses -- the hallmark of contemporary Merchant Ivory
productions -- first made their way into cinema. The focus then shuttles
back across the Atlantic, as Alison Griffiths engagingly sketches the
application of moving pictures to ethnographic research and considers 'the
institutional negotiation of the demands of scientific education and
popular appeal' (192) at the American Museum of Natural History. The
section rounds off by turning to films about South East Asia: Frank Gray
considers the reception of James Williamson's _Attack on a China Mission
Bluejackets to the Rescue_ (1900) amid other contemporary illustrations of
the Boxer Rebellion, and Clodualdo del Mondo discusses problematically
racist cultural and historical representations of the Spanish-American
conflict in the Phillipines.
Part five, 'Reconsidering Formal Histories', commences with Kristin
Thompson's investigation of scenario manuals from the 1910s. These provided
formulaic narrative guidelines for the production of screenplays, and she
shows these to be remarkably consistent with the structure of screenplays
produced within the past twenty years. Jan Olsson's essay factors
censorship restrictions placed upon the screenplays of Swedish films during
the 1910s, and Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs evaluate how the 'pictorial
style' of acting, that was prominent in live theater productions, became a
useful expressive tool in European films, especially when close-up shots
and sophisticated editing techniques were not readily possible. Thomas
Elsaesser concludes with a discussion of German film historiography. He
considers how antecedent theatrical forms influenced the structure of film
programs, how this reconfigured narrative space and the reception of film.
Although Fullerton's anthology captures the atmosphere of the conference,
it perhaps could have benefited from more thorough editing. The sections
would cohere better with prefatory remarks and with fewer essays, arranged
within a more specifically-defined framework of concerns. This would have
helped place the essays in dialogue with each other -- the books existing
format leaves this work up to the reader's imagination. Also, the condensed
introduction leaves little room to parse out the perceived stakes of the
respective sections, and the prose becomes bogged down by the mantra 'the
ways in which' (a transitional phrase rendered distracting and empty when
repeated more than twenty times in three pages). While I think such
measures would have better distilled both the atmosphere and content of the
conference, this remains a rich and thought-provoking collection that tells
us as much about the state of film criticism in 1999 as it does about
film's emergence in 1895.
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA
Copyright © _Film-Philosophy_ 1999
Tina M. Kelleher, 'Why Film History Should Not Repeat Itself',
_Film-Philosophy_, vol. 3 no. 36, September 1999
<http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/film-philosophy/files/kelleher.html>.
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