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The Everyday in Visual Culture
Slices of Lives
François Penz, Janina Schupp, François Penz, Janina Schupp
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The Everyday in Visual Culture
Slices of Lives
François Penz, Janina Schupp, François Penz, Janina Schupp
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About This Book
This book explores how the comparative analysis of visual cultural artefacts, from objects to architecture and fiction films, can contribute to our understanding of everyday life in homes and cities around the globe.
Investigating the multiple facets of the everyday, this interdisciplinary collection generates a new awareness of everyday lives across cultures and challenges our traditional understanding of the everyday by interweaving new thematic connections. It brings together debates around the analysis of the everyday in visual culture more broadly and explores the creation of innovative technological methods for comparative approaches to the study of the everyday, such as film databases, as well as the celebration of the everyday in museums. The volume is organized around four key themes. It explores the slices of everyday lives found in Visual Culture (Part I), Museums (Part II), the City (Part III) and the Home (Part IV). The book explores the growing area of the analysis of everyday life through visual culture both broadly and in depth.
By building interdisciplinary connections, this book is ideal for the emerging community of scholars and students stemming from Visual Culture, Film and Media Studies, Architecture Studies and practice, Museum Studies, and scholars of Sociology and Anthropology as well as offering fresh insights into cutting-edge tools and practices for the rapidly growing field of Digital Humanities.
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PART I Slices of everyday life in visual culture
1 EARLY FILM AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF EVERYDAY LIFE ON SCREEN
DOI: 10.4324/9781003107309-3
“People from 1896 in everyday motions, and here we are watching”One of 191 YouTube comments on Blackfriars Bridge1
In autumn 1898, the English pioneer filmmaker Robert Paul announced that he was turning his back on subjects taken from everyday life – “Trains, Trams and Buses”, as he disparagingly described these – for a new phase of “animated photography” production.2 Henceforth he would exploit the new medium’s “capacity for producing BREATHLESS SENSATION, LAUGHTER AND TEARS” with a series of staged story-films. And through the combined efforts of a team of craftsmen and performers assembled at his new studio in North London, he was able to offer 80 of these, which he guaranteed would “rivet the attention” of spectators.
What was Paul saying goodbye to in 1898? We might call it the “demonstration” or “novelty” phase of moving pictures, lasting from approximately 1895 to 1898, which has indeed appeared to offer “slices of everyday life” to later spectators. The following account of the Lumière “first film” is typical of an anachronistic view common today:
What La Sortie de l’Usine shows us is life, simple life, everyday life, without effect, without special effects, crying out “truth” despite the absence of color and above all of sound. The Lumière cinematograph thus heralds the triumph of realism in the future history of cinema. However, this natural simplicity does not exclude a certain form of “staging”, that is to say here of preparation, which is an even more fundamental given for the development of cinema.3
Here the original film has been conscripted into a powerful teleological narrative, which casts Lumière and Georges Méliès as the founding fathers of cinema, representing “realism” and “fantasy”. The fact that La Sortie was carefully restaged over several months is reduced to conceding that it was “prepared”; and the issue of how the Lumière and other early films were actually presented – generally with an accompaniment of live music, or phonograph accompaniment, or spoken introduction and even sound-effects – is also elided, in order to cast it as preserving for us a vision of “simple everyday life”.4
We can find a similar attitude in comments on an early Robert Paul film, Black-friars Bridge, made a year later in mid-1896 and currently presented online by a London tourism organization as “a fascinating record of traffic on the bridge with pedestrians curious about the presence of the camera”, when there is good reason to believe it was carefully staged.5
But before considering these cases in more detail, it may be useful to review briefly the status and history of “everyday life” as a frame of reference. This is very obviously a debatable concept, one that is likely to mean different things to different commentators, often without any need to specify further what is meant. As the sociologist Erving Goffmann observed: “To speak … of ‘everyday life’ … is merely to take a shot in the dark … a multitude of frameworks may be involved or none at all”.6 But even if there is today considerable academic debate and controversy around the term, I want to suggest there are also two historical perspectives relevant to the creation and reception of the films of 1895–1896.
One of these was the burgeoning of new literary genres in the mid-nineteenth century, dramatizing the life of the city in essentially nonfictional terms. Walter Benjamin coined the phrase “panorama literature” in his study of Charles Baudelaire, evoking the rash of cheap publications designed to be sold in the streets of Paris, likening these to the “plastic foreground of the panoramas and their anecdotal form”.7 In France, the new fashionable form was the “physiology” detailing “types that might be encountered by a person taking a look at the marketplace”. Soon, Benjamin observes, “the physiology of the city had its turn” and eventually the nation and all its inhabitants. Such “physiologies” were intended to be innocuous, uncontroversial in an era of looming political censorship; and they gave birth to the better-known concept of the flâneur, as celebrated by Baudelaire in his famous essay on Constantin Guys, “The Painter of Modern Life” (1865).8 For such a “passionate spectator”, likened by Baudelaire to “a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life”, it would be impossible to be bored in a crowd.9
Contemporary with the Paris of the arcades and the feuilletons, there were parallel developments in many European countries during the century. Edgar Allan Poe’s 1840 story “The Man of the Crowd”, set in London, was quickly translated and is now recognized as the prototype of the modern urban mystery (an “X-ray of the detective story”, in Benjamin’s evocative phrase).10 Even earlier, Charles Dickens had launched his career by contributing a series of anonymous “Sketches by “Boz” to a range of magazines in the early 1830s, which were subtitled as “illustrative of Every-day life and Every-day people” when published as a collection in 1836.
Benjamin cites Dickens’s complaint that “my figures seems disposed to stagnate without crowds about them”.11 More systematically, the journalist Henry Mayhew profiled “the London poor” in a series of articles for the Morning Chronicle, eventually published as four substantial volumes, illustrated with engravings in the 1860s. And in 1880, Anthony Trollope, already famous for his “Barsetshire” novels about English provincial life, would enter this expanding market with his profiles of London Tradesmen for the Pall Mall Gazette.
Meanwhile, visual representation of everyday life had accompanied, and indeed often cross-fertilised, its literary and journalistic coverage (Dickens’ Pickwick stories, which became his first novel, were originally commissioned as captions to illustrations). Constantin Guys, the subject of Baudelaire’s essay, had worked extensively for the pioneering Illustrated London News before returning to Paris to portray its social variety. And from 1869, The Graphic competed with extensive illustration of its news and features, often employing notable artists, such as Luke Fildes and Hubert von Herkomer. As wood-block illustration was superseded by half-tone reproduction of photographs, the periodical reading public of the 1880s and 1890s was thoroughly accustomed to seeing “the very form and presence of events as they transpire, in all their substantial reality”, as the Illustrated London News had promised as early as 1842.12 And in addition to such abundant printed material, there were both projected photographic lantern slides and stereographic images widely available to offer even great immediacy.
None of this is to deny the impact of moving pictures from 1894 onward, as seen first on the Kinetoscope; or the enthusiastic response to pioneering projected shows during 1895. If anything, it is to underline that moving pictures reached audiences that were well prepared for a further degree of “life-likeness”, having witnessed rapid progress in recent decades. And, as we will see, the choice of early subjects made by both Lumière and Paul reflected this climate of expectations. But there is also another historical perspective to bear in mind: namely that of subsequent changing attitudes toward the first subjects shown. As cinema developed rapidly during the early twentieth century, becoming mass entertainment after approximately 1910, neither the public nor the industry showed any interest in preserving early films. This resulted in the majority of all early films being lost – current estimates suggest an average of 20% surviving – with the Lumière catalogue very much an exception, due largely to the company having opted out of the commercial film industry and preserved its archive.
On the rare occasions they were seen or remembered, this was likely to be as objects of amusement or derision. The Studio des Ursulines in Paris, one of the first cinemas devoted to film as avant-garde art, ran a regular feature “Ten minutes of pre-war cinema” during the 1920s, which apparently provoked mirth among its fashionable audience.13 One of these, the young director René Clair, would later muse on such lack of respect for the recent past, reflecting on what it would mean for contemporary work seen in the future.14 In Britain, with few if any opportunities to see early film, Virginia Woolf would write in 1926 about film seeming “at first sight simple, even stupid”, before listing typical newsreel subjects and reflecting on them “having a quality which does not belong to the simple photograph of real life”.15
Later in this tantalizing essay, she sets up a contrast between the clumsiness of literary adaptations and early filmmakers seeming
dissatisfied with such obvious sources of interest as the passage of time and the suggestiveness of reality. They despise the flight of gulls, ships on the Thames, the Prince of Wales, the Mile End Road, Piccadilly Circus.
Almost alone among inter-war commentators, Woolf implied that early film portrayed an “unexpected beauty … life as it is when we have no part in it”, which was subsequently overlaid by “enormous technical proficiency”, while awaiting the discovery of “some secret language which we feel and see, but never speak”.
The history of recovering film’s earliest years has yet to be written, but it largely dates from the years after World War Two, when film archives began to take stock of what materials had survived and to make copies of these on the new nonflammable “safety” film stock. Two circumstantial factors would leave their mark on this process. One was that most early prints were copied onto black-and-white stock, even if they had survived in colored prints. And the other was that early film’s low frame-rate was routinely disregarded, leading to films being projected – and crucially transferred to video for use on television – at “sound speed”. This would give rise to what came to be accepted as the inherent “jerkiness” of early film – a mark of its primitiveness.
Apart from these material issues, the post-war period would see a succession of critical and theoretical paradigms adopted within the emerging field of Film Studies that prioritized “...