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Early Popular Visual Culture

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Cinemas second birth

Andrew Shail Guest Editor
a a

School of English Literature, Language & Linguistics , Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne , UK Published online: 03 May 2013.

To cite this article: Andrew Shail Guest Editor (2013) Cinemas second birth, Early Popular Visual Culture, 11:2, 97-99, DOI: 10.1080/17460654.2013.785714 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17460654.2013.785714

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Early Popular Visual Culture, 2013 Vol. 11, No. 2, 9799, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17460654.2013.785714

INTRODUCTION Cinemas second birth

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[T]he history of early cinema leads us, successively, from the appearance of a technological process that of the apparatus that records moving images to the constitution of an established medium that transcends and in some way sublimates the apparatus. Gaudreault and Marion 2005, 5 I hope I have not allowed it to be inferred that tioned are a mere epitome of the occurrences of they represent a crescendo of change which began ued for a long time continued in some respects the Great War. Hepworth 1951, 122 the developments I have mena single year. On the contrary in or around 1911 and continindeed right up to the year of

Probably once a week, I tell a student that when they write academically they must remember that they are no one from nowhere and nowhen: so its not our theatre; its British theatre. Ive derided colleagues claims that the best reason to study a certain eld is that one nds it interesting, privileging the perception of a pressing research question over the indulgence of personal interest. Both sanctimonious assertions are disingenuous, though: Ive been very much somewhere from somewhen in selecting an area of study since roughly 2001. Of course the reason I have given for seeking to mark the centenary of the second birth of cinema with a conference at Newcastle in 2011 and this special issue in 2013 is that if a medium is always born twice (to quote the title of Andr and Philippes 2005 article in this journal), then its second birth is as worthy of commemorating as its rst. But I was also simply born a few years too late to contribute to the generation of scholarship on the emergence of the cinematograph (its rst birth) that was linked to this events 1995 centenary; hence to me the second time that cinema emerged when ideas and practices agglomerated into norms, habits, institutions and consensuses , the moment due for a centenary about 15 years after 1995, has acquired a degree of importance that probably results as much from hankering after a centenary as from reasoned judgement. Cinemas second birth might even, ironically, be unsuited to a centenary. Even such a lengthy event as the First World War denitely began at a certain date and denitely ended at one of two dates (the armistice or the signing of the Versailles treaty), whereas cinemas acquisition of a mediativity was an accrual, a very protracted delivery. A prodigious list of developments comprising what I (and, I later found, Cecil Hepworth) have deemed to be a crescendo of reinvention occurring in the
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Introduction

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UK in 1911 appears early in my The Cinema and the Origins of Literary Modernism (2012): licences held by picture theatres rst outnumbered those held by older venues, on the back of this new type of venue (rst emerging in the UK in late 1907), Punch printed its rst cartoons about lm venues, national newspaper columns devoted solely to lm rst appeared, production companies releasing lms in the UK launched their rst publicity campaigns about picture personalities targeted at the general public, the feature lm made its rst appearance, and the rst lm fan magazine was released, distributing knowledge about cinema to a readership counted in the hundreds of thousands, rather than to the fewer than 10,000 readers amongst which the earlier trade magazines circulated (1833). But even with reference to a specic country this dating of the end of the cinematographs subservience is easily disputed: Joe Kember gives 1910 as the year of the most remarkable surge in investment in xed-site exhibition (2011); the introduction of a system of cinema-specic licensing at the end of 1909 (the Cinematograph Act came into effect on 1 January 1910) implies that the practice was now endowed with its own public in popular opinion; ction had taken over from actuality as the dominant mode on most lm programmes by the end of 1908, indicating a degree of common consensus on the idea that the technology was particularly suited to generating one specialist type of utterance: narrative. In spite of its cavalier and manifold disregard for centennial timing, however, this special issue of Early Popular Visual Culture is devoted to cinemas second birth for what I, and many of the colleagues gathered at the 2011 conference, regard as several pressing reasons: (1) if Philippe and Andr are right to claim that before a certain point the cinematograph was not cinema (simultaneously synonymous with this type of creative practice and with this type of building) at all, then the second birth isnt in any way secondary: it is the earliest point from which it is possible for historians of this particular visual medium to identify an object of study, and if the date of this point is unclear, then this makes it even more worthy of closer analysis and better description; (2) it is still necessary to combat a common perception that when the cinematograph stopped being an extension of earlier practices (Gaudreault and Marion 2005, 4) this was a great loss (for examples see Shail 41), meaning that the practices and institutions cohering around cinema thereafter constitute a kind of vacuum; (3) as it is already something of an orthodoxy amongst lm historians, and so risks becoming an unquestioned assumption, the double birth model demands particular scrutiny: in these articles, contributors pay this last task special attention, even Gaudreault and Marion, patiently waiting last in line this once. Andrew Shail School of English Literature, Language & Linguistics Newcastle University Newcastle upon Tyne, UK Guest Editor

References
Gaudreault, Andr, and Philippe Marion. 2005. A Medium is Always Born Twice.... Early Popular Visual Culture 3 (1): 315.

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Hepworth, Cecil. 1951. Came the Dawn: Memories of a Film Pioneer. London: Phoenix House. Kember, Joe. 2011. Interview with Louise Anderson. 1 July. Shail, Andrew. 1912. The Cinema and the Origins of Literary Modernism. New York, NY: Routledge.

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