Corporeality in Early Cinema

Viscera, Skin, and Physical Form

Marina Dahlquist, Doron Galili, Jan Olsson, Valentine Robert

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780253033659
• eBook ISBN: 9780253033680
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Corporeality in Early Cinema inspires a heightened awareness of the ways in which early film culture, and screen praxes overall are inherently embodied. Contributors argue that on- and offscreen (and in affiliated media and technological constellations), the body consists of flesh and nerves and is not just an abstract spectator or statistical audience entity.

Audience responses from arousal to disgust, from identification to detachment, offer us a means to understand what spectators have always taken away from their cinematic experience. Through theoretical approaches and case studies, scholars offer a variety of models for stimulating historical research on corporeality and cinema by exploring the matrix of screened bodies, machine-made scaffolding, and their connections to the physical bodies in front of the screen.

PART I

IMPOSSIBLE BODIES

Introduction

The kinematographic machinery and its illusory realism plays up marvelous worlds and on-screen bodies with potential for instantaneous changes, transformations, and mutations. The corporeal limitations and stabilities of our day-to-day world dissolve in the interstices between real-world physicality and its cinematic reproduction. This play with photographic images, still or moving, is enabled by the apparatus’s trick capacity, and most obviously so when the technology’s presumable restrictions were presented as a film’s, or a scene’s, main focus. The playfulness with what is possible or not, realistic or not, presupposes a flexible contract with the spectators as the integrity of the indexical images is questioned and negotiated. This rift between fantasy and reproductive realism italicizes early cinema’s fascination with the construction and metamorphosis of the image, which often delivered depictions of impossible bodies.

The open-ended logic of dreams and the fantastic in early cinema is most recognizable in the work of Georges Méliès. Here the “cinémagicien,” to use Vito Adriaensens’s pertinent designation for characterizing Méliès’s play with the new medium, creates a chaotic film world where the body is never safe from violations, assaults, or improvements. The portrayal of impossible bodies took many forms and variations, as the visual reproductions of bodies in motion by Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey became propelling forces for film practices, not least within comedies and trick films. Explorations of the photographic image and its limitations and possibilities were driven by a never-ending curiosity of the medium’s wherewithal. The actors’ physical competence, together with machinery’s propensities for playing with character stability, offered pinnacle moments of plasticity.

This section presents some of the ways impossible bodies were portrayed on-screen. The texts represent a crossfertilization of popular precinema stage performances, such as tableau vivant, vaudeville, and stage illusions, but also the illustrated press and spirit photography; all contributed intermedially to the magic of cinema. One example of this fruitful media transposition is the composite image of ghostly bodies, via the multiple-exposure technique, that Ian Christie discusses in his contribution. Jérémy Houillère, in contrast, explores impossible bodies in early cinema from a tradition of caricaturing doctors and the medical world. Such visualizations highlight the fear of surgical methods and new inventions being practiced on bodies under the knife.

As Tom Gunning argues in his contribution to this volume, even though the film medium appropriated older precinema traditions, a specifically cinematic body was created in the process. The Big Swallow, James Williamson’s ingenious 1901 film, serves up a quintessential impossible film body. In his interaction with the cinematic technology, the cameraman is swallowed by a man who is irritated by his presence. Early cinema inventively explored the existence of such impossible bodies in an unrealistic and malleable cinematic space by way of techniques, plot, and narrative structure. Highly popular among the audience back in the days, this play with cinematographic possibilities still inspires filmmakers.

1 The Impossible Body of Early Film

Tom Gunning

Fascination with the Body Invented the Cinema

Cinema was invented at the end of the nineteenth century to record the moving bodies of humans and animals. Most obviously, the chronophotography of Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey was designed to study bodies in motion. Although both Muybridge and Marey promoted the use of their images by artists portraying humans and animals in motion, chronophotography existed primarily to serve physiology. The scientific study of the body through motion pictures soon branched off into a nontheatrical, nonentertainment practice destined for the laboratory and the lecture hall. Yet even entertainment cinema remained preoccupied with the body. Thomas Edison and his kinetoscope, with its films of dancers, acrobats, and knockabout comedians, exploited the entertainment aspect of cinema that Marey had scorned in particular. But the visual presentation of Edison’s Black Maria films of the 1890s, with their dark, undefined backgrounds and accent on physical performance, revealed that the attraction of early cinema remained rooted in the observation of skilled, beautiful, unusual bodies in motion as much as creating a fictional world.

While I do not simply intend to resurrect the traditional distinction between the Lumières and Méliès, with its too-simple dichotomy between cinematic realism and fantasy, portrayals of the body in early cinema do show sharply differing approaches. As a scientist, Marey forced photography beyond the visual surfaces of the world in order to reveal its invisible laws and regularities. Marey processed the body into information, generating graphs and numbers as well as presenting an image of motion. However, the trick film, exemplified by the work of Georges Méliès, treated the body in a radically defamiliarized manner that drew on fantasy and traditions of the grotesque rather than scientific investigation. These fantastical bodies drew on a long tradition of iconography of monsters and demons and undoubtedly mined the resources of unconscious fantasy. Méliès also derived many tricks and imagery from the modern optical magic of the turn-of-the-century theater of illusions. The trick film not only appropriated these traditions but also reinvented them in cinematic terms and thereby created a new cinematically conceived body, endowing the new medium with its own technological, fantastic physiology. This body and its implications for the new medium form the topic of this essay.

Hard to Swallow

I am born in a beam of light

I move continuously, yet I am still

I am larger than life, but do not breathe

Only in the darkness am I visible

You can see me, but never touch me

I speak to you, but can never listen

You know me intimately, and I know you not at all

We are strangers, and yet you take me inside of you

What am I?

—Sally Potter in The Gold Diggers

James Williamson’s 1901 film, The Big Swallow, exemplifies the cinematic body of the trick film. It also offers a satire on the new media of photography and motion pictures and their relation to the body. Although its action and gag are immediately comprehensible, at least within a certain absurd logic, Williamson’s original catalog description details an almost forgotten context: the craze for snapping photographs of passersby without their permission. Kodak’s portable hand camera, with its brief exposure time and ease of handling, released a horde of “camera fiends” on an unsuspecting public, often arousing their ire.¹ Williamson’s description of his film clearly refers to this context: “‘I won’t! I won’t! I’ll eat the camera first.’ Gentleman reading, finds a camera fiend with his head under a cloth, focusing him up. He orders him off, approaching nearer and nearer, gesticulating and ordering the photographer off, until his head fills the picture, and finally his mouth only occupies the screen. He opens it, and first the camera, and then the operator disappear inside. He retires munching him up and expressing his great satisfaction.”²

The Big Swallow is deceptively simple, seeming to consist of a single shot (and employing an almost seamless continuity editing to convey the action of swallowing). The irate gentleman approaches the camera, coming into looming close-up, opens his greatly enlarged mouth, and seems to engulf a photographer, who topples into the dark, gaping mouth. The gentleman closes his mouth, withdraws a bit, and laughs heartily. The nearly invisible splices join, within a matrix of artificial darkness, a bodily exterior and its imagined interior in the act of swallowing. With this early example of elegant trick editing, Williamson sutures interior and exterior by constructing a truly impossible body that also ingests the very means of imaging itself, the camera.

While the film continues to evoke immediate laughter, even in undergraduates unused to silent cinema, it also sows some confusion among contemporary viewers. A recent account of the film by Michael Brooke on a British Film Institute (BFI) website reflects this uncertainty as a criticism: “The film might have been still more effective if Williamson had omitted the second and third shots altogether, since they detract from the logical purity of the first, ending on a completely blank screen as the swallowed camera is no longer able to function as a surrogate for the audience’s point of view.”³ While I am not exactly sure what “logical purity” means for an overtly absurdist comedy, the shot of the camera and its fiend disappearing into a dark, undefined space (admittedly with a suspiciously shrouded barrier inadvertently peeking out of the bottom of the frame) does introduce certain confusions. The large-format camera we see swallowed is not the Kodak-style hand camera that camera fiends used, but that may pose an unimportant inconsistency within a good joke. More complexly, many viewers (and quite a few commentators) have mistaken this still camera for a movie camera, and therefore miss the reference to camera fiends snapping pictures of unwary bystanders. But the paradox Brooke pointed out is more interesting than the type of camera. If the camera has been swallowed, how is the act of swallowing and its aftermath filmed?

This rift in rationally constructed space exemplifies early cinema’s fascination with the construction and destruction of impossible bodies, imaginable only through the technology of cinema. Early film not only plays with human anatomy but also, as in The Big Swallow, uses this irrational physiology to display the new possibilities of cinema, especially its play with the seen and the unseen, offscreen spaces, and the ambiguities of the interior and exterior. The plague of camera fiends snapping pictures without permission sets up a metaphor that Williamson’s joke literalizes and comically reverses. The black box of the camera arrogantly “swallows” its subjects whether they are willing or not. Refusing to suffer this fate passively, the protagonist of The Big Swallow reclaims his image by swallowing the apparatus—and the fiend to boot. Photography as swallowing the world was a common simile. (To quote only one example, the cameraman Serafino Gubbio in Pirandello’s 1916 novel Shoot! describes his camera as a machine made “to swallow up our soul, to devour our life.”)⁴ Williamson not only produced an original gag but also transformed an act of vision into the more grossly physical act of swallowing, chewing, and presumably ingesting. Swallowing appears as a carnivalesque version of picture-snatching.

Moving away from the film’s original historical context of late-nineteenth-century outrage over amateur photographers to more contemporary theoretical debates, film theorist Jennifer Barker ha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• General Introduction
• Part I: Impossible Bodies
• Part II: Inventories of the Body
• Part III: Performing Bodies
• Part IV: Bodily Features
• Part V: Embodied Audiences
• Part VI: Bodies in Exhibition Spaces
• Appendix: Original French Texts
• Index