This article was downloaded by: 10.3.98.93 On: 07 Dec 2018 Access details: subscription number Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG, UK The Fin-De-Siècle World Michael Saler The Cinema Publication details https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315748115.ch42 Tom Gunning Published online on: 26 Nov 2014 How to cite :- Tom Gunning. 26 Nov 2014, The Cinema from: The Fin-De-Siècle World Routledge Accessed on: 07 Dec 2018 https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315748115.ch42 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR DOCUMENT Full terms and conditions of use: https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/legal-notices/terms This Document PDF may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproductions, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The publisher shall not be liable for an loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO THE CINEMA Tom Gunning NINETEENTH-CENTURY CINEMA Cinema appeared internationally in the 1890s, the result of exchanges between inventors and industrialists on several continents. By 1900 cinema had traveled around the world, appearing in major metropolises in the Americas, Europe and Asia as well as colonial Africa. Not only were films projected around the world, they were also shot in dozens of countries, introducing one of the dominant genres of early film: foreign views. Fin-de-siècle audiences in Chicago, Tokyo, Johannesburg or Moscow watched films shot in New York, Paris, Stockholm, Mexico City and Jerusalem. Several early film companies adopted the motto the world within reach, and fulfilled this promise by projecting an image of a world beyond borders. Although production companies remained concentrated in the West, cinema reflected a new global consciousness and films gave this a visible form. Cinema has been called the art of the twentieth century (Sontag 2001). Originally this phrase denoted an art of the modern, the product and the expression of the energies of a new age. Cinema appeared as a technological art, based in mass production, and the product of a democratic consumerist age. As an expression of modern experience, cinema offered new modes of representation, especially of space and time. Avant-garde movements claimed the cinema a relation that might seem in tension with film s role as the dominant popular art form (Brantlinger 1990, pp. 106 08). Cinema s identification with the twentieth century signaled its newness, contrasted with traditional art forms whose origins were legendary, or could be traced back millennia. Viewed, however, from our twenty-first century, this rubric places cinema in an already past historical period. Despite cinema s continued popularity and influence, any claim to be the art of our century, an exemplar of the contemporary, seems to have been usurped by electronic images in their varied forms: television, computer image or virtual reality. But did cinema truly belong to the twentieth century? The round number of centuries hardly serves to regulate history. Technological revolutions in media, urbanism and transportation, all of which affected the emergence of cinema, began somewhat before the mid-nineteenth century with the rise of the 661
Tom Gunning railway, the telegraph and photography. The development of instantaneous photography, the phonograph, the telephone and the automobile mark a slightly later period of accelerated transformation at the end of the century often referred to as The Second Industrial Revolution. (Chandler 1990, p. 28) Cinema emerged during this period, thus belonging exclusively to neither the twentieth nor the nineteenth century. Cinema belongs profoundly to this in-between era the fin de siècle. The fin de siècle denotes more than the beginning of a new century on the calendar of history. Like the uncanny clock time of midnight, it captures the moment where something ends while something else begins, a shadow that falls between the old and the new, a period of transition. If the fin de siècle predominantly connotes the end of something, a broad sense of decadence, it is perhaps poetic justice that the new invention of the cinema bridges this sense of shadowy decline into a new era of technological innovation. THE INVENTION OF THE FIN DE SIÈCLE Research by film historians over the last decades has revised and complicated the chronology of cinema s invention (or even the concept of invention Charles Musser s term the emergence of cinema describes the process better) (Musser 1990). But many cultural historians have not absorbed this revision. 1 I therefore offer a sketch of cinema s nineteenth-century pedigree. The controversies surrounding cinema s invention arose initially from rival patents and national (even local) pride, which need not engage us here. Thom Andersen s claim that at the turn of the century any reasonably skilled engineer could have invented cinema and several did, may underrate the skilled labor of cinema s pioneers, but it does stress that cinema emerged as a confluence of several technical innovations combined with a new desire to record time (Andersen 1975). But to trace these origins, we need to consider what we mean by cinema. Transforming images created by mirrors or projection have existed at least since the seventeenth century (Mannoni 2000, pp. 28 135). But devices that endow images with an appearance of continuous motion appeared only in the early nineteenth century with the Phenakistiscope (sometimes called the Stroboscope) and the Zoetrope. These devices revolved a series of images portraying successive stages of a simple motion (e.g. horses leaping, people dancing, a windmill turning) within a viewing aperture that functioned like a shutter. The human vision enables us to perceive such an intermittently appearing series of images as a continuous motion, provided that the images are properly designed and the revolutions reach a certain speed. These devices depended on images drawn on circular surfaces, such as the discs used in the Phenakistiscope or the circular paper strips of the Zoetrope. Such circumscribed surfaces could only hold short cycles of motion (therefore repetitive motions, such as dancing, jumping or sawing wood, were favored, since their repetition could seem to be continuous). These devices coincided with new research into human vision and optics and knowingly manipulate human perception in order to produce a moving image (Crary 1990). This melding of perception and technology constituted a dramatic innovation in the history of representation. However, they only provided a moment s sensation: movement was brief and repetitive. Yet they made images move and one could argue that later developments of cinema only elaborated this basic phenomenon. 662
The cinema Three major revisions supplemented these early moving image devices to yield what we usually consider cinema (although scholars could disagree on whether any one of them defines cinema). Extending the playing time of the moving image required redesigning devices so they no longer depended on a single revolving circular disc or strip. For some scholars, animating photographic images (as opposed to drawings) defines cinema (although one could claim, rather, that animation based on drawing formed the earliest form of cinema). Finally, projecting the moving image on a screen for some historians marked the true emergence of cinema (although the seminal invention of Thomas Edison, the Kinetoscope, like several other early devices, was actually a peepshow device like the original Phenakistiscope and Zoetrope, in which the viewer looked through an aperture to see animated photographs). These three developments transformed the toy-like devices of the early moving image and led to later developments of cinema. However, it can be debated which combination of them, if any, defines the medium. Projection systems, such as the magic lantern, which threw images painted on glass onto a screen by means of light focused through lenses, had existed since the seventeenth century. By the nineteenth century projecting lanterns constituted a widely popular form of entertainment and instruction (Mannoni 2000, pp. 264 96). A number of showman/inventors managed to combine Phenakistiscopes or Zoetropes with projection, so that a moving image could be shown on a screen to an audience, instead of being limited to one viewer at a time. As Charles Musser has shown, a long tradition of screen culture existed before cinema; projecting still or transforming images and the moving image had worked its way into this culture by the 1860s (Musser 1990, pp. 15 54). These early motion projections continued to be limited to brief sequences on revolving discs. One might therefore claim the major innovation that led to the emergence of cinema as more than a parlor entertainment lay in placing successive images on a lengthy flexible strip or band rather than a disc, which could be wound up on a reel, rather than simply revolved. Eventually this led to the material base of cinema becoming a strip of translucent material. Ultimately this strip gave its name to the medium itself: film (Rossell 1998, pp. 57 78). Film, like cinema, is a slippery term. It can denote both the medium based in moving images and the material that became the basis of that medium at least during the twentieth century: a thin flexible translucent strip of material, originally made of celluloid but later using a variety of synthetic plastics. The flexibility of this material base allowed the succession of images printed on it to greatly exceed a revolving disc since they could be rolled onto a reel rather than being restricted to the circumference of a disc. However, flexible-roll film was not the first choice of a material surface for pioneers of the cinema, largely because it was not widely available from manufacturers until the late 1880s. Thomas Edison s research laboratory supported the best-funded and technically sophisticated investigation into moving pictures at the turn of the century. While hardly the exclusive inventors of the cinema, Edison and his assistants, especially William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, explored a variety of techniques for obtaining a motion picture technology that would surpass the brief moving images others offered (Spehr 2008 passim). Dickson s interaction with early manufacturers of sheet celluloid, George Eastman and the Carbutt Company, led eventually to the adoption of rolls of celluloid as the base of cinema, as Paul Spehr has detailed. However, celluloid strips had not been the first 663
Tom Gunning choice. Edison s curious first choice reveals a great deal about the models for cinema and its engagement with time. An arguably new idea underlies the material basis and mechanical devices of cinema: the recording of time allowing a past moment to be replayed. While various systems of notation and representation allowed a record of the past, the first technological direct recording of the flow of a temporal phenomenon came with the phonograph, which records sounds, especially the voice and music, and allows them to be replayed. Several inventors had attempted to record sound mechanically in the late nineteenth century, including the Decadent French poet Charles Cros (whose drink Arthur Rimbaud had once laced with sulfuric acid in a Parisian dive). Thomas Edison offered a successful sound recording device in 1879. This phonograph (originally intended as a mechanical replacement for an office secretary), inscribed sound as indentations on a spiral track that snaked around a shellac cylinder. This machine inspired Edison s research into motion pictures (Gunning 2001). His original announcement of his new project in October of 1888 to the U.S. Patents Office declared: I am experimenting upon an instrument that does for the Eye what the phonograph does for the Ear (Musser 1990, pp. 63 64). The Edison motion picture research team first imprinted spirals of microscopic successive photographs around the surface of a cylinder that would be viewed through a magnifier. Although not a total failure, this approach proved impractical and Edison and Dickson next pursued the celluloid path (Spehr 2008, pp. 82 93; Musser 1990, pp. 64 72). While for decades the cylinder seemed an amusing detour from cinema s main path, now, in the era of motion picture DVDs based on audio CDs, it may seem prescient, underscoring the shared temporal role of sound and video recording. Celluloid had recently emerged as a new medium for photography, an alternative to fragile glass plates, especially the new roll film Eastman produced for the amateur hand-cameras, such as the Kodak Brownie (Rossell 1998, pp. 57 77). Many scholars consider Edison s Kinetoscope, which combined photographic moving images with the longer running time allowed by celluloid film as the defining moment for the emergence of cinema. But is photography necessary for cinema? The extraordinary figure of Émile Reynaud shows both how gradual the move from moving images to cinema was and how ambiguous determining the exact moment of cinema remains. (Auzel 1992; Cholodenko 2008; Mannoni 2000, pp. 364 86) Reynaud, a French artist and inventor, had created the Praxinoscope, an improved version of the Zoetrope, by adding prismatic mirrors to aid the viewing of the animation. (See Figure 42.1.) He introduced a projecting Praxinoscope in 1880, which allowed his invention to leave the parlor tabletop and present a public show of moving images. But the revolving circular format still limited the show to simple repetitive motions lasting a few seconds. A means of allowing a longer show was a necessity for performances before an audience. Reynaud first devised a series of flexible bands which carried hand-painted transparent images and projected them by means of a beam of light reflected from a mirror onto a screen, a system Reynaud named the Théâtre Optique. With this extensive band of images Reynaud could present a performance of close to ten minutes rather than a few seconds, which allowed him to present extended situations and stories. Reynaud further improved his devices by introducing a flexible transparent strip (apparently made of a gelatin product), moved by perforations engaging with a toothed wheel, on which he painted the 664
The cinema Figure 42.1 Historical artwork of a young girl watching a man using a Praxinoscope. Invented by Émile Reynaud in 1879, it was a nineteenth-century novelty item that was a precursor to modern cinematography Sheila Terry/Science Photo Library successive images of comic incidents. These programs can be considered the first animated films and, arguably, the first presentations of cinema. Entitled Pantomimes Lumineuses, these shows were publicly presented in late 1892 before a paying audience at the Parisian showplace of popular entertainments, the Musée Grévin, where it ran as an attraction for several years. But even if the importance of these shows must be acknowledged, their lack of photographic processes separates them from a major aspect of cinema s development, the use of photography as both a source for the series of successive images and a means of reproduction. Later animated films used motion photography as a means of making multiple prints. Reynaud s strips remained unique hand-painted objects, which greatly limited their distribution. Yet the moving image began with drawn images an important and often neglected aspect of cinema s origins in the nineteenth century. Indeed photography had to undergo a prolonged development throughout the nineteenth century in order to be useful for the development of motion pictures. When photography first emerged toward the middle of the nineteenth century, an extended exposure time was required in order to imprint a photographic image on a sensitive surface. Even in the 1860s photographic exposures took scores of seconds and photographing moving objects led to blurred images. The goal of producing a photographic process sensitive enough to capture the world in motion through a brief exposure remained elusive until the 1870s when Eadweard Muybridge managed to snap the image of a galloping horse (Prodger 2003, pp. 112 52). The relation 665
Tom Gunning between the images of still instantaneous photographs, which became increasingly possible toward the end of the century, and the moving images of the cinema may not be immediately obvious, since the freezing of motion in photography appears radically opposed to the reproduction of motion by the cinema. But instantaneous still photography allowed cameramen to register precisely the rapid successive exposures needed for both the analysis and the synthesis of motion. At the fin de siècle two separate traditions converged to form cinema: Reynaud s projection of successive drawings animated through the mechanics of a projected flexible strip of images, and instantaneous still photographs likewise arranged in series, but initially intended primarily as tools for scientific analysis of motion. This photographic practice was termed chronophotography the photographing of time. Eadweard Muybridge in the United States (who came from a photographic tradition) and Étienne-Jules Marey in France (who was trained as a physiologist) pioneered the use of instantaneous successive photographs to capture the stages of motion (Braun 1995). As a tool of analysis, chronophotography employed brief exposure times to still the course of time and motion. However, the need to demonstrate that these punctual moments truly formed instants of motion (since many found these unusual still images such as horses with all four hooves off the ground unlikely and suspected them of trickery) also led Marey and Muybridge to experiment with putting their images into motion. Muybridge used a projecting Phenakistiscope (which he called a Zoopraxiscope), still limited to the brief sequences of motion that could be endlessly repeated, to project his animal locomotion to audiences (Prodger 2003, pp. 112 222). Marey introduced a variety of flexible strips of photographic paper and eventually celluloid, as well as a revolving glass disc system, which his assistant Demenÿ initially devised as a tool for teaching the deaf to speak (Braun 1995, pp. 150 98). Thus a number of optical devices designed for both entertainment and scientific research combined to create cinema at the end of the nineteenth century. First and most essential was the creation, earlier in the century, of devices that could manipulate the interface between human vision and images in motion to create an animated image that moved continuously. Reynaud s construction of an extensive flexible band as the support for these series of images extended their length. Around the same time the development of instantaneous photography allowed the camera to master time and break the course of motion into individual photographs. These mechanically and chemically produced images could therefore replace the individually drawn images that had previously formed the basis of the moving image. Several inventors in different countries put together these elements to achieve cinema. Paul Spehr has offered a chronology of the period between October 1894 and December 1995 in which he lists the succession of motion picture inventions by such figures as the Latham family (US), Robert Paul (UK), Herman Casler (US), Birt Acres (UK), Georges Demenÿ (France), in addition to those I discuss below (Spehr 2008, pp. 379 82). A number had at least limited success, although their technical achievements were rarely matched by commercial exploitation. Thus the Anglo- French inventor Louis Leprince (whose mysterious disappearance after boarding a train has generated a variety of conspiracy theories) was able to produce a motion picture camera as early as 1888 whose successive images have recently been digitally animated, although during his lifetime he was never able to stage a successful public 666
The cinema projection, let alone turn his invention into a commercial enterprise (Spehr 2008, pp. 111 17). The German Skladanowsky brothers did manage a public showing of their brief motion pictures as part of a variety show at the Wintergarten Theater in Berlin in November of 1895, using a somewhat gerrymandered system of double strips of film (Mannoni, pp. 457 58). Two early cinema devices made the biggest impact on film history, due as much to strong financial and technical foundations of the companies that introduced them as their technical mastery. The Kinetoscope Thomas Edison developed from 1889 to 1894 earned him the frequently made claim to be the inventor of cinema, even if his device depended on a long tradition. Reynaud s flexible celluloid band moved by perforations and Marey s and Muybridge s experiments in photography and projection were essential to Edison. Equally important was the long process (detailed carefully in Paul Spehr s recent magisterial account of Dickson s career) that his assistant Dickson undertook of perfecting a celluloid strip that would serve both in the camera taking the views and in the Kinetoscope that displayed them (Spehr 2008). The flexible band allowed a more complete action than the disc viewers of chronophotography that had been designed by Marey s assistant Demenÿ or the German chronophotographer Ottomar Anschütz (Rossell 1998, pp. 42 47). The Kinetoscope s band of celluloid with its successive images ran continuously past a magnifying lens impelled by perforations and a toothed wheel, held tautly by a bank of spools. However, the Kinetoscope remained a peepshow device. Edison experimented with projection, but the Kinetoscope was conceived as a commercial machine, based on the phonograph, which had had success as a coin-operated machine. Edison assumed individual viewers peering in the viewer after dropping in their nickels would be his most profitable mode of exhibition. After Edison, the Lumière brothers are most often associated with the invention of the cinema. Like Edison their device was supported by a large enterprise, Lumière et fils, based in Lyon, France, which manufactured photographic supplies targeted mainly at the burgeoning amateur market. Pioneers in innovative aspects of photography (instantaneous and color photography especially), Louis and Auguste, sons of the company patriarch Antoine, turned their attention to motion photography, drawing important lessons from compatriots Marey and Reynaud as well as a careful examination of Edison s Kinetoscope. Their product, the Cinématographe, gave us the term cinema. Its lightweight, compact design allowed the operator to use it as a camera, and, with the addition of a magic lantern, as a projector, and even as a printer for making positive prints from negatives (Sadoul 1946, pp. 184 96; Chardère 1995). Cinema s most lasting impact has arguably been as a projection system. One could debate whether projection is a defining element of the new medium in which case Edison s Kinetoscope is relegated to the pre-cinematic (a term I find intolerably teleological). Perhaps based on the unexpected success of their early experimental showings before invited audiences, the Lumières were convinced that projection in the tradition of the magic lantern was the best commercial path for their new invention. In pursuing this path the Lumières were neither unique nor very original; a number of other motion picture pioneers included projection as an essential aspect of their apparatuses. Muybridge and Reynaud among others had offered motion picture projections and Leprince and the Skladanowsky brothers early spectacles were also conceived as projection before an audience. Indeed, as Charles Musser has 667
Tom Gunning demonstrated, at least one public paying performance predates both the Skladanowsky Berlin showing and the Lumières more successful commercial premiere of the Cinématographe at the Grand Café in Paris on 28 Dec 1895: Thomas Armat and Francis Jenkins showed their Phantoscope at the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta (Musser 1990, pp. 100 105). However, as opposed to the rather brief and often technically flawed exhibitions of Jenkins and Armat or Skladanowsky, the Lumière exhibition gained audiences in Paris and led not only to touring shows for exhibition throughout France but internationally. Because of the dual nature of the Cinématographe these exhibition-tours also became location shoots, as the company sent teams of operators around the world, charged both with exhibiting the Cinématographe and with shooting new films. These films became the center of future Lumière exhibitions, and one of the first genres of cinema emerged: the travel film. This chronology of the emergence of cinema roots the medium within the nineteenth century, specifically its last decades, the fin de siècle. The technology of cinema developed from a variety of material and technical innovations responding to modern concepts of space and time as well as new industrial processes and materials. Precision machinery regulating the movement of flexible materials such as celluloid and the light-sensitive chemicals of the emulsion that coated it allowed motion photography to break action into minute instants during filming and then replay these successive images rapidly enough to create the perception of motion. Thus at the end of the nineteenth century reliable mechanical devices could create moving images and project them for sizeable audiences. The possibility of replaying the unrolling of time revolutionized not only the possibilities of representation but modern consciousness of time itself. Cinema served not only as a means of recording time, but provided new ways to think about its malleability. As an industrial product capable of mass production (a single film negative could generate many prints) and relatively easy transportation (films could be shipped across borders and oceans) cinema quickly became a global commodity. If its centers of production remained limited to European and American manufacturers, its export and exhibition became truly international by 1896, less than a year after its first commercial success. Few cultural and technical innovations could claim to so powerfully embody the transition from the old century to the new. THE FILMS OF THE FIN DE SIÈCLE Cinema was amazingly stable for nearly a century. Although technical transformations occurred, such as synchronized sound, color photography, and thirddimensional effects, they were simply perfected or became dominant all three were experimented with before WWI (admittedly, with often short-lived results). But the format most of us think of as a film, a feature-length (e.g. about an hour or more) entertainment, usually of a fictional/dramatic nature, has dominated the international film industry only since around 1914. A different sort of film marked the medium s emergence and characterized the fin de siècle. In later cinema the moving image primarily served as a medium for a story or information. But in fin de siècle cinema movement formed the main attraction. Cinema emerged to show the movement of the world; the spectacle of the world in motion constituted the motive for the medium. Rather than a fictional world, early films displayed both the intricacies 668
The cinema and surprises of motion and the workings of the motion picture apparatus. Georges Méliès recounted his first viewing of the Cinématographe at a private preview (Quèvain and Chaconnet-Méliès 1984, p. 235). With consummate showmanship the Lumières had not revealed the nature of their new photographic novelty. The invited audience waited in expectation and Méliès described his disappointment when a projected photograph of the streets of Paris appeared on a screen, a spectacle presented for decades. But astonishment followed, as, after an instant, the still image was put in motion by turning the crank of the Cinématographe and the street was filled with the life of motion. Méliès, the premier Parisian impresario of stage magic, recognized the new invention s relevance to his profession and soon began to project films at his Théâtre Robert-Houdin between elaborate magical acts. We could differentiate between cinema, the means of displaying moving images and films, and the films it shows. The main attraction of the first cinema exhibitions was the apparatus itself and the first exhibitions of cinema in the 1890s advertised the names of machines (and there were a number of them: the Cinématographe, the Vitascope, the Biograph and many others) rather than individual films. Films shown tended to be brief, rarely more than a minute, and not infrequently were shown repeatedly, as loops, as audiences marveled at the effect of the moving image. They were often accompanied by music or spoken commentary and usually formed one attraction on a variety bill that included other acts: singers, acrobats, comedians and dancers. The moving image was considered a scientific and technical novelty and was covered as such in the press. Most viewers came to the earliest moving picture shows to see this novelty demonstrated. The earliest films belong to what I call motion genres (Gunning 2009). Whatever their subjects, their attraction lay in the motion they displayed. Take, for instance, a Lumière film from 1895 entitled L Arroseur arrosé (literally translated: The hoser hosed but more descriptively titled in English as The Bad Boy s Joke on the Gardener ), which has been claimed as the first fiction film. In a sense it does stage a story (unlike the Lumières everyday scenes, such as The Arrival of the Train, Workers Leaving a Factory or Demolishing a Wall). A mischievous boy steps on a garden hose, stopping the flow of water; when the gardener examines the nozzle, the boy steps off, releasing the spray into the man s face. This slapstick gag predated the film and had been the subject of a comic strip (Sadoul 1946, p. 251). But early film catalogs that hawked the film to exhibitors stressed its water effect, the movement no comic strip could capture. Thus, although early films fell into a number of genres (visual gags; scenes of everyday life; travel films; parades; dances and vaudeville acts), nearly all of them foregrounded the attraction of motion. Motion-based films dominated the first decade of cinema. But the moving image of early cinema stands in opposition to philosopher Giles Deleuze s concept of the Movement-Image in cinema. Deleuze s concept primarily refers to the creation of a trajectory of motion, usually across several shots. The Movement-Image is best exemplified by what Deleuze calls an Action-Image, a succession of shots that follow or construct an action (Deleuze 1986, pp. 12 28, 64 70). This structure became vital for film as it developed as a narrative medium, a carrier of story. This was not the primary mode of films during the fin de siècle, most of which consisted of a single shot. Editing only developed gradually, and the action-image first developed around 1903 06 with the appearance of the chase films, which were 669
Tom Gunning popular internationally. In the United States, Biograph s 1904 Personal followed a horde of women chasing a French nobleman who had advertised for a bride; the British 1905 kidnapping drama Rescued by Rover showed a faithful dog tracing and rescuing an abducted child; and perhaps most famously, Edison s 1903 The Great Train Robbery presented bandits who held up a train and then were killed by a pursuing posse. In early chase films the action of pursuit joins shots, constructing a continuous geography of contiguous spaces. Such editing patterns created an armature of cause and effect that would form the basis of later narrative cinema. These action-based films introduced the second decade of cinema, but the films from the literal turn of the century had a different form and focus. Rather than storytelling, the cinema s first decade privileged display, a tendency André Gaudreault and myself call the cinema of attractions (Gunning 1989; Gaudreault 2011; Strauven 2007). This cinema addressed the spectator directly, grabbing the viewer s attention with the visual equivalent of look at this! Rather than creating a diegetic (that is a fictional) world, viewed through a transparent fourth wall, the cinema of attractions invited viewers to marvel. This cinema of attractions displayed a variety of novelties, including the new technology s ability to capture the motions of everyday life or views of distant lands, or feats of performance (acrobatics, dances, even pornography). Careful examination of the prints of early films (made especially by André Gaudreault and his teams of researchers) has found that these films increasingly used some form of splicing (cutting and then joining the filmstrip). (Gaudreault 2000, pp. 8 15) In contrast to narrative editing, which joined different spaces through action, these splices served to augment display, for instance, by cutting out dead time when recording long events (such as a procession or a soccer match). Such splices were also used to make magical disappearances smoother. The ability to shorten cinematic time by splicing film led eventually to planning and shooting films in shots designed to be edited together, as in the chase films. Although the display of attractions and construction of a story through editing differ, they can shade into each other or even combine. Both modes of spectator engagement, attractions and narrative integration, persist throughout film history, but one or the other tends to dominate. Contemporary horror films teeter between the suspenseful narratives and direct displays of gore; porno films use some narrative elements as a fig leaf to hold episodes together, but sex scenes dominate. Literary adaptations may depend primarily on the narrative, but moments of spectacle occur in the display of costumes or dance sequences. During cinema s first decade, attractions and display dominated films. Perhaps the most complex genre of the cinema of attractions is the trick or magic film, a genre often associated with Georges Méliès. Deriving from the theater of illusions of the nineteenth century (of which Méliès was a major entrepreneur in Paris), the trick film presented a variety of visual illusions and transformations (Abel 1994, pp. 61 86). Méliès understood the Cinématographe as a marvelous visual illusion, recognizing the affinity the Lumières new invention had with his own theater of illusions. The first films he shot and showed in his magical Théâtre Robert- Houdin followed the Lumière model presenting moving images of everyday life. But Méliès soon figured out that cinema could also create magical tricks. Méliès later claimed his discovery of cinema s possibility of transformation occurred by accident when a camera jammed briefly while he was shooting a Parisian 670
The cinema Figures 42.2 and 42.3 Two stills from A Trip to the Moon/Voyage dans la Lune, a 1902 film directed by Georges Méliès, French illusionist and filmmaker RA/Lebrecht Music & Arts 671
Tom Gunning street; on the resulting film it seemed that a passing lorry magically transformed into a hearse. True or not, the anecdote illustrates the way the trick film redefined the cinematic apparatus. Cinema s continuous capture of time and motion can be interrupted either by stopping the camera, cutting the film, or combining these processes. Méliès realized these interruptions could pass unnoticed if masked by apparently continuous action. Thus, a person could seem to disappear or change into another figure, if the camera were stopped and the scene rearranged before continuing to shoot. Time could jump and thus transform reality instantaneously, magically. Méliès could make a lady vanish, without a trap door, simply by cutting her exit out of the film. Stopping and starting filming, splicing the film strip so as to render gaps smooth, filmmakers turned ladies into dogs, made apparitions fade in and out, while double exposures (running the film through the camera twice) could superimpose tiny dancing figures on a piece of cheese, or make star-crowned girls seem to float through the sky. These tricks could be absorbed into longer stories. Méliès early story films A Trip to the Moon (1902) (see Figures 42.2 and 42.3) and The Kingdom of Fairies (1903) attracted large audiences to the new medium, especially in the traveling cinemas that graced the fairs of England and Europe. A realm of cinematic fantasy opened that went beyond the reproduction of motion, partly by redefining cinema s mechanism. Using the devices of cinema, adopting fanciful costumes and sets from the féerique and pantomime theater, and applying vivid colors directly to the film prints filmmakers like Méliès created through cinema another world than the one we dwell in (Solomon 2010, pp. 40 79). Méliès and other filmmakers mastered a variety of cinematic tricks: transformation, disappearance, superimposition, overlap dissolves, fast motion, reverse motion and filming from unusual angles (and slightly later around 1906 techniques of animation). Although some trick films were inspired by well-known fairy tales, others simply presented a series of transformations performed by a magician. The longer trick films spun stories, but often relied on the viewer s foreknowledge of the tale rather than developing storytelling cinematic techniques. This was not a narrative cinema based in psychology or character motivation, and, as Méliès confessed, the tricks remained the main attraction, while the story allowed them to string together a succession of spectacular effects (Sadoul 1961, p. 118). Film historians have sometimes claimed the Lumières and Méliès represented opposed aspects of cinema: realism versus stylization; documentary opposed to fiction; reality or fantasy. However, although early film viewers certainly recognized the visual difference between magic films and views of everyday life, the films of the Lumières and Méliès (and the films of other early filmmakers, such as Edison or Robert W. Paul) primarily exhibited the new possibilities of motion pictures. Although cinema can be viewed as an eminently realistic mode of presentation, early cinema appeared as a device of wonder, presenting even the familiar world in the mode of the astonishing. FIN DE SIÈCLE AND THE CINEMA OF SHADOWS At its origins, cinema provided a novel mode of display for current events, vaudeville acts, brief gags, erotic images or views of foreign lands. Cinema in 1896 represented a triumph of science and technology, and was often associated with the name of inventor Thomas Edison, the avatar of a new era of electricity and possibility. The 672
The cinema cinema became an emblem of modernity, an entirely new way of making and seeing images: based on a mechanical and industrial system, which shaped light rather than pigment on canvas, carved marble or cast bronze. Electric light projected onto a screen, moving with the speed of modern daily life, the film image seduced viewers into a new realm of the virtual and immaterial, via the technological and mechanical. Cinema not only emerged during the fin de siècle, it embodied its contradictory energies. This new world of science also appeared as a fulfillment of ancient magic; Edison himself was named a wizard. The fin de siècle witnessed attempts to give magical beliefs a rational scientific basis (as in the international Society for Psychical Research) or to blend scientific discoveries with new occult beliefs (Theosophy, Spiritualism). Although ultimately this synthesis proved elusive, the trick film, which created apparent miracles of virtual transformation through scientific mechanisms, responded to such impulses. Lighthearted and mirthful in a way that contradicted most occult movements, trick filmmakers such as Méliès, Segundo de Chomón, Gaston Velle and Albert Smith brought the modern magic of the turn of the century to a technological culmination (Solomon 2010, pp. 60 79). Their films provided an image of a new world whose visions were neither traditionally material nor spiritual, but the product of light and technology. The generation that saw cinema for the first time experienced a transformation in the nature of visual media that produced a sense of wonder, simultaneously rational and astounding. Perhaps no record of a first-time viewing of cinema so perfectly embodies the cinema s affinity with fin-de-siècle culture as the pseudonymous newspaper report written by Russian writer Maxim Gorky reporting his viewing of the Cinématographe at a major fair in Nizhy Novgorod in 1896. I will give lengthy excerpts from the account that appeared in the newspaper Nizhegorodskii listok in July of 1896. (Gorky 1896) Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. If you only knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without color. Every thing there the earth, the trees, the people, the water and the air is dipped in monotonous grey. Grey rays of the sun across the grey sky, grey eyes in grey faces, and the leaves of the trees are ashen grey. It is not life but its shadow, it is not motion but its soundless specter. Here I shall try to explain myself, lest I be suspected of madness or indulgence in symbolism. I was at Aumont s and saw Lumière s cinematograph moving photography. The extraordinary impression it creates is so unique and complex that I doubt my ability to describe it with all its nuances. However, I shall try to convey its fundamentals. When the lights go out in the room in which Lumière s invention is shown, there suddenly appears on the screen a large grey picture, A Street in Paris shadows of a bad engraving. As you gaze at it, you see carriages, buildings and people in various poses, all frozen into immobility. All this is in grey, and the sky above is also grey you anticipate nothing new in this all too familiar scene, for you have seen pictures of Paris streets more than once. But suddenly a strange flicker passes through the screen and the picture stirs to life. Carriages coming from somewhere in the perspective of the picture are moving straight at you, into the darkness in which you sit; somewhere 673
Tom Gunning from afar people appear and loom larger as they come closer to you; in the foreground children are playing with a dog, bicyclists tear along, and pedestrians cross the street picking their way among the carriages. All this moves, teems with life and, upon approaching the edge of the screen, vanishes somewhere beyond it. And all this in strange silence where no rumble of the wheels is heard, no sound of footsteps or of speech. Nothing. Not a single note of the intricate symphony that always accompanies the movements of people. Noiselessly, the ashen-grey foliage of the trees sways in the wind, and the grey silhouettes of the people, as though condemned to eternal silence and cruelly punished by being deprived of all the colors of life, glide noiselessly along the grey ground. Their smiles are lifeless, even though their movements are full of living energy and are so swift as to be almost imperceptible. Their laughter is soundless although you see the muscles contracting in their grey faces. Before you a life is surging, a life deprived of words and shorn of the living spectrum of colors the grey, the soundless, the bleak and dismal life. It is terrifying to see, but it is the movement of shadows, only of shadows... Suddenly something clicks, everything vanishes and a train appears on the screen. It speeds straight at you watch out! It seems as though it will plunge into the darkness in which you sit, turning you into a ripped sack full of lacerated flesh and splintered bones, and crushing into dust and into broken fragments this hall and this building, so full of women, wine, music and vice. But this, too, is but a train of shadows. Gorky s testimony shows that the cinema did not necessarily appear as a triumph of life and realism, but could seem to blend realist movement with an unrealistic monochrome and eerie silence, yielding an uncanny effect, not unlike the contemporary experience of the uncanny valley, that uncomfortable zone between the familiar and the strange that realistic computer simulation provokes in some viewers today (Gunning 2012). For Gorky the cinema was a harbinger of a new world, bearing that sense of imminent apocalyptic transformation that haunts much of fin-de-siècle culture. He describes less an image of vitality and scientific progress than a ghostly realm, familiar from the symbolist and decadent writers of the era: the silence of Maeterlinck, the black magic of Huysmans, the pending apocalypse of Blok. This mute, grey life finally begins to disturb and depress you. It seems as though it carries a warning, fraught with a vague but sinister meaning that makes your heart grow faint. You are forgetting where you are. Strange imaginings invade your mind and your consciousness begins to wane and grow dim... Gorky s invocation of the shadow world of early cinema provides the perfect tone to close this survey of fin-de-siècle cinema. The cinema became increasingly familiar and common as the century aged. By 1905 it was no longer a novelty headlining in vaudeville and music hall programs and even the popularity of fairground cinema was beginning to fade. The pure novelty appeal of attractions gave way increasingly to simple narrative forms, as fairy tales, chase films and slapstick comedies began to 674
The cinema predominate over the actualities, trick films, foreign views and vaudeville turns that marked the first motion-based genres. Around 1906 converted storefronts and then specially built (or rebuilt) film theaters began to appear, such as the nickelodeons in urban America. While the Lumière Company ceased film production, major corporations with international networks for production began to emerge, such as Charles Pathé and Gaumont in France, while American pioneers Edison and Biograph began to make plans for a cartel of production companies that could turn out a regular schedule of films for the burgeoning nickelodeons. From 1906 on Pathé, Gaumont, Biograph and Vitagraph began to adapt cutting into a coherent mode of narrative expression, as characters began to emerge and eventually stars. On the eve of WWI cinema had transformed itself into a series of institutions, firmly based in modern business and industrial practices, as the films increasingly offered the feature-length narratives in established genres and promoted stars (and even auteurs such as D. W. Griffith, Mack Sennett or Max Mack), while the first film palaces were appearing in New York and Paris. But that is another (his)story. NOTE 1 For instance, the essay on cinema included in a previous anthology of essays on the fin de siècle: Fin de siècle and its Legacy ed. Mikulas Teich and Roy Porter: Photography, Cinematography and the Theater: A History of a Relationship by Barbara Lesak, makes no use of recent film historians and repeats many inaccuracies, such as the unsubstantiated myth that audiences panicked during the projection of train films at the Lumière program at the Grand Café in 1895. BIBLIOGRAPHY Abel, Richard (1994) The Cine Goes to Town: French Cinema 1896 1914 Berkeley: University of California Press. (2004) Encyclopedia of Early Cinema, 1st ed. London: Routledge. Andersen, Thom (1975) Eadweard Muybridge Zoopraxographer (Documentary Film). Auzel, Dominique (1992) Emile Reynaud et l image s anima Du May Bellour, Raymond, Frizot, Michel, Lista, Giovanni, Roumette, Sylvain (1986) Le Temps d un mouvement: Aventures et mèsaventures de l instant photographique, Centre National de la Photographie. Brantlinger, Patrick (1990) Mass Media and Culture in fin de siecle Europe in Mikulas Teich and Roy Porter eds. Fin de siècle and its Legacy Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Braun, Marta (1995) Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830 1904) University Of Chicago Press. Chandler, Alfred D. (1990) Fin de siècle: Industrial Transformation in Mikulas Teich and Roy Porter eds. Fin de siècle and its Legacy Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chardère, Bernard (1995) Les romans de Lumière Paris: Gallimard. Cholodenko, Alan (2008) The Animation of Cinema, The Semiotic Review of Books 18.2 1 10. Crary, Jonathan (1990) Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century Cambridge: MIT. Deleuze, Gilles (1986) Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 675
Tom Gunning Gaudreault, André (2000) The Diversity of Cinematographic Connections in the Intermedial Context of the Turn of the Century in Simon Popple and Vanessa Toulmin eds., Visual Delights. Essays on the Popular and Projected Image in the 19th Century Trowbridge: Flicks Books. (2011) Film and Attraction: From Kinematography to Cinema, trans. Timothy Barnard Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Gorky, Maxim Nizhegorodskii listok July 4, 1896 reprinted in Jay Leyda (ed.) (1983) Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film, 3rd ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 407 8. Gunning, Tom (1989) The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant- Garde in Early Film Space Frame Narrative Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker eds. London: British Film Institute, pp. 56 62. (2001) Doing for the Eye What the Phonograph Does for the Ear in The Sounds of Early Cinema Rick Altman and Richard Abel eds. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, pp. 13 31. (2009) The Attraction of Motion: Modern Representation and the Image of Movement in Film 1900: Technology Perception Culture Annemone Ligensa and Klaus Kreimeier eds. John Libbey, pp. 165 74. (2012) Truthiness and the More Real: What is the Difference? in Mo/re Re/al: Art in the Age of Truthiness Elizabeth Armstrong ed. Munich: Del Monico Books, Prestel, pp. 174 85. Herbert, Stephen and McKernan, Luke, eds. (1996) Who s Who of Victorian Cinema London: British Film Institute. Mannoni, Laurent (2000) The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archeology of the Cinema Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Musser, Charles (1990) The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 New York: Scribner. Prodger, Phillip ed. (2003) Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement Oxford University Press. Quèvain, Anne-Marie and Chaconnet-Méliès, Marie-Georges (1984) Méliès et Freud: Un avenir pour les marchands d illusions? in Méliès et la naissance du spectacle cinématographe Madeleine Méliès-Malthete ed. Paris: Klincksieck. Rodowick, D. N. (1995) The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Criticism Berkeley: University of California Press. Rossell, Deac (1998) Living Pictures: The Origins of the Movies Albany: SUNY. Sadoul, Georges (1946) Histoire générale du cinéma, Tome 1. L invention du cinéma (1832 97) Paris: Denoël. (1961) George Méliès Paris: Seghers. Solomon, Matthew (2010) Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini, and the New Magic of the Twentieth Century Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Sontag, Susan (2001) A Century of Cinema in Where the Stress Falls: Essays New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Spehr, Paul (2008) The Man Who Made Movies: W.K.L. Dickson New Barnet: John Libbey Publishing. Strauven, Wanda, ed. (2007) The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. 676