Early Cinema

Space, Frame, Narrative

Thomas Elsaesser, Adam Barker, Thomas Elsaesser, Adam Barker

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781838715465
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

In the twenty years preceding the First World War, cinema rapidly developed from a fairground curiosity into a major industry and social institution, a source of information and entertainment for millions of people. Only recently have film scholars and historians begun to study these early years of cinema in their own right and not simply as first steps towards the classical narrative cinema we now associate with Hollywood. The essays in this collection trace the fascinating history of how the cinema developed its forms of storytelling and representation and how it evolved into a complex industry with Hollywood rapidly acquiring a dominant role. These issues can be seen to arise from new readings of the so-called pioneers - Melies, Lumiere, Porter, and Griffith - while also suggesting new perspectives on major European filmmakers of the 1910s and 20s. Editor Thomas Elsaesser complements the contributions from leading British, American, and European scholars with introductory essays of his own that provide a comprehensive overview of the field. The volume is the most authoritative survey to date of a key area of contemporary film research, invaluable to historians as well as to students of cinema.

II

THE INSTITUTION CINEMA

Industry, Commodity, Audiences

Introduction

Once More: Narrative

In the previous section, it was argued that the history of film form is bound up with the development of ‘narrative’, though in a more special sense than that given in traditional accounts. Not as the inevitable destiny of the cinema, in its drive for realism and verisimilitude, but understood as the most ‘economical’ solution to a number of contending exigencies involved in the representation of space and time, but also in the representation of the spectator within this space-time.

The compromise hinged on what one might call a logic of commutation or substitution, which in turn depended on the cinema severing two kinds of bond with the represented: the (ontological) one between the filmic and the pro-filmic, and the (physical) one between spectator and the screen. At first, films were presentations in the sense of reproducing situations already existing elsewhere: as self-contained actions, as topical events, as scenic views, as vaudeville sketches, jokes or gags–brought before a ‘live’ audience. But the historical dynamics was such that cinema developed its autonomy by working out how to convert this double ‘reality’ (that of the pro-filmic occasion and that of the spectator-screen relation) into a single one, in which each is somehow contained, yet also drastically refigured. The spectator had to be bound not to the screen (as a performative space) nor to the event or spectacle, but to their representations: this implied changing both the logic of the event represented and the place of the spectator vis à vis the event. If we recall the way the films of Lumière are read by Deutelbaum, Vaughan, deCordova, we can see that each emphasises the emergence of a new viewing subject (which we recognise as essentially that of classical cinema); by contrast, the readings of Burch, Gunning and Gaudreault all insist, for early cinema, on the autonomy of the events/actions as ‘attractions’, addressed to a collective audience who experience the viewing situation as external to and separate from the views represented. For the latter it is only when more complex actions are being put on screen (the multi-shot film and the beginnings of analytical editing) that a change occurred in the way spectators experienced the event or action: the history of the insert shot and the point-of-view shot, of overlaps and cross cutting being the most obvious instances of this change from presentation to representation, from monstration to narration.¹ The cinema’s turn to ‘narrative’ appears thus as the consequence, rather than as the cause of turning audiences into isolated spectators, bound to the representation by the spectacle of seeing space and time as variables of another logic which we perhaps too unproblematically identify with narrative.²

But why did the cinema have to convert collective audiences into isolated spectators? In order to answer this, we must look to the so-called institution cinema, a term naming a number of apparently very heterogeneous aspects: the social spaces needed to gather audiences and the practices regulating their admission; the production companies’ competition for access to and control of technology; the changes in distribution from selling to exchanging and renting, and most fundamental of all, the standardisation of an agreed commodity, recognised by producers and audiences alike. At first glance, none of this appears to have to do with questions of film form and the development of narrative as outlined above.³ Yet what is emerging from work done on early cinema’s institutional context is how crucially the emergence of narrative as the dominant mode is inflected if not outright determined by the particular definition which the viewing spaces, the mode of production and the distribution of product received. Thus, from the institutional perspective, too, narrative represents a compromise of different factors dovetailing in practice while nonetheless remaining contradictory in their effects.

This reminder seems the more necessary since little of the cinema’s subsequent history was implied in the invention itself: the recording and projection of moving images first appeared to be primarily of scientific interest, and of little use commercially beyond its novelty value and appeal as a toy.⁴ As a scientific invention the cinematograph was mainly an ‘extension’ of existing techniques,⁵ and only when its attraction and attractiveness to very large and very diverse audiences became manifest did the commercial potential dawn on the inventors, in contrast to the showmen. But especially as an entertainment form, the cinema raises a number of questions about the technological, economic and social environment from which it emerged and where it consolidated itself. Economically, there is little doubt that it inexorably came under the sway of capitalism. To grasp this in a non-reductive way, though, we need to investigate how it resolved or managed the changes between artisanal and industrial organisation, between entrepreneurial and managerial business practice, between the craft ethic of the workshop and the mass-production factory system. Such an economic perspective draws attention to the forces that decide and define the sort of commodity film actually is, and how it circulates. Yet these forces turn out also to be social and demographic, which is why questions of audiences and spectatorship loom large in the study of early cinema. Technology, on the other hand, which used to be regarded as the royal road to an understanding of early film history, now finds itself firmly embedded in other histories, mainly economic and legal.

Within the institutional development of early cinema we can distinguish at least two separate periods. The first comprises the years 1896–1907,⁶ and the other, the period up to 1917, by which time classical continuity cinema was fully in place. The most obvious moment in this history is the ‘Nickelodeon boom’, in other words, the fixed siting of exhibition outlets. This radically transformed the cinema, not only in the United States. But the Nickelodeon boom is both cause (in that it gave rise to a reshaping of film production and film distribution), and effect (in that it responded to the tremendous increase in popularity and demand). The second most momentous event is the transition from single reel to multi-reel film, and the changes this brought in the structure of the industry, the textual organisation of the film, and the commodity form of the product.

Film before Commodity: From Artisanal to Industrial Production

For the study of the primitive cinema’s mode of production several directions have opened up. First, how did the ‘pioneers’ acquire the technology involved in making pictures, and secondly, how did they control its use through legal battles around copyright protection and patents: what one might call the intellectual property relations involved. Thirdly, a more thorough investigation is needed of the industrial property relations. What was the character of film production from the turn of the century to the mid-1910s? Was it artisanal, industrial or entrepreneurial? When did it become fully capitalist and under what pressures did its monopolistic phase emerge? Defining the cinema’s mode of production also means having insight into the corporate strategies used to dominate an industry, of which the most prominent was the move of individual producers to form interest groups and associations–either for the purpose of sharing resources, like patents (cross-licensing) or to ensure the exclusion of other producers (the formation of cartels and the calculated increase in production values and costs).

Film-making began in the artisanal environment of professional inventors, showmen and small precision engineering firms. But already during the very early period, different strategies emerge.⁷ Michael Chanan in ‘Economic Conditions of Early Cinema’ reminds us that ‘an invention is brought about by a particular conjunction of technological opportunity with the exploitation of economic conditions’. By looking at the reasons behind Edison’s omission to take out overseas patents on the kinetoscope and comparing them to the business practices of British manufacturers, Chanan can already identify one key feature of all subsequent development: competition and the struggle for control. But the basic mechanism of control during the first period was the camera and projection equipment, deliberately designed so as to make it incompatible with other manufacturers’. Edison, Lumiére, R.W. Paul and Messter (the so-called ‘inventors’ of the cinema) all became producers of films mainly in order to establish dominance in the equipment market (format, perforation, etc. of the films obliging a client to use only their machines). The films themselves, however, were priced purely by quantity, as so many feet of celluloid. We are at a stage where the producers regarded the ‘software’ (the films) as the necessary inducement for establishing a monopoly on the production, sale or leasing of the hardware, which was the chief commodity.⁸

However, as soon as films entered an already established entertainment medium, such as vaudeville, music hall or the variety theatre, replacing integrally one act of the show, the balance of forces changes and another set of determinants takes over. The fact that film technology is used to reproduce mechanically and more profitably the show- and entertainment values of another medium, ends up changing this medium itself: in terms of its acts and numbers as well as in its exhibition practices and economic organisation, vaudeville becomes the proverbial dog wagged by its tail. Thus, what distinguished the cinema from vaudeville up to 1907 was not so much the types of films shown (hence the appropriateness of Gunning’s term ‘spectacle attractions’), but the cinema’s rapid development of separate and distinct business operations to cover production, distribution and exhibition.⁹ What Robert Allen has called ‘industrial autonomy’ is based on just such a rigid separation, and it emerges as the precondition for the rise of the storefront theatres and nickelodeons. ¹⁰ The historical alternatives outlined by Michael Chanan–either show the same film to different people (itinerant projection/Lumière) or show different films to the same people (fixed exhibition site/permanently installed projection equipment)–were already by 1905 resolved in favour of the latter.¹¹ The change from selling to renting, and the emergence of fixed sites other than vaudeville theatres are thus interdependent factors. As we shall see, fixed siting will in turn become the focus for change, having an effect on, but also being determined by, the institution’s technical ability to produce longer films as well as its aesthetic and formal ability to create longer, self-contained narratives.

Chanan’s discussion of the ‘special character of the commodity film’ compared to other commodities is thus particularly useful in detailing how to understand the change from selling to renting, and the introduction of film exchanges. His remarks on standardisation (of equipment and film stock) outlines a competitive logic which in due course was to bring about the decisive division of the film industry into its separate spheres, along with the various shifts of control which these entailed. The fact that film is a different kind of commodity in respect of us...