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 Acknowledgements

I am indebted to the initial enthusiasm for this work expressed by Kate MacKay.
I was indispensably aided by Charlie Keil, who knows the scholarship and the
films in this area better than anyone and who tolerated interruptions in his
own writing to discuss mine. Another patient discussant, Kathy Elder, knew
about videocopies of early films before I did and alerted me. Mike Zryd pro­
vided essential documents and suggestions early on. Although he frowned on
the enterprise, Stan Brakhage offered crucial advice and assistance. Another
frowner, Bruce Elder, made extremely helpful objections, which is a special­
ity of his. An extraordinarily resourceful and supportive co-worker at Innis Col­
lege, Lisa Lanns, often extended technical expertise in making my computer
discs talk to the college printer when to me they seemed to be fighting. Spe­
cial thanks are owed to Lisa Morch who kept the many drafts of the manuscript
from contaminating each other and brought much appreciated refinements to
the documentation of the text.
.... fUm series program at the Art
~rio, April 24-May 17, 1992.
lHl:89Ws·22-7
B.T.
!llPW1mental films- History and criticism.
IItot/on~ures-History. I. Art Gallery of
~110. II. TItle.
tets,9.EMT47 1992 791.43'6 C92-093619-9

(M1Ql1l1...-yof Ontario is funded by the people of

~~~toUcht"eMinistry of CUlture and Com­
iiI¢iltiQns.~Addltlonalf;"nancial support is received
!.\',l,;'",',' " .
1t,~"ilfttc:lPality Of Metropolitan Toronto,
~~~t~canadaand The Canada Council.
"\:::.,, "

3
Preface

Back and Forth: Early Cinema and the Avant-Garde focuses on two areas of cin­
ema - the first phases of cinematic production and the tradition of avant-garde
films that resurrect early films by incorporating or reworking them. The impe­
tus for the catalogueand film series Back and Forth: Early Cinema and the Avant­
Garde grew out of an exhibition entitled The Avant-Garde and Primitive Cinema
prepared in 1985 by Bart Testa with Charlie Keil for the Funnel, in Toronto.
In the seven-year period between the two exhibitions, a massive scholarly and
curatorial reappraisal of the subject has taken place in the form of specialist
conferences, journal articles and the publication of numerous books. As a result
of this activity, new film prints of the very early material have been struck and
archival work has become much more active. This film material, often fasci­
nating and sometimes beautiful, is critical to understanding the genesis of the
art of film. While the earlier series at the Funnel took a cursory look at this
subject, the great quantity of new material that has since been made available
presents the opportunity for a much more thorough and interesting investiga­
tion of this topic.
The curious and important relationship between avant-garde filmmaking
and the reassessment of early cinema is explored both in this catalogue and in
the film series held at the Art Gallery of Ontario in the spring of 1992.
We are particularly grateful to curator Bart Testa for his sustained interest
in this topic. The research for the catalogue was complicated by the number
of new books that appeared on the subject just as Mr. Testa was writing his
text. They were, however, assimilated and considered in the final text.
This catalogue was made possible with the support of the Canada Council,
who also assisted with the presentation of the film series.

Cathy Jonasson
Curator, Film, Art Gallery of Ontario

5
Prelude: Early Cinema and the Avant-Garde

The historian of cinema faces an appalling problem. Seeking in his subject

some principle ofintelligibility, he is obliged to make himselfresponsible
for every frame of film in existence. For the history of cinema consists pl'e"
cisely of every film that has ever been made, for any purpose whatever.

The metahistorian of cinema, on the other hand, is occupied with

inventing a tradition, that is, a coherent wieldy set of discrete monuments,
meant to inseminate resonant consistency into the growing body of his art.
Such works may not exist, and then it is his duty to make them. Or
they may exist already, somewhere outside the intentional precincts of
the art (for instance, in the prehistory of cinematic art, before 1943). And
then he must remake them. 1

By way of prelude, let me begin by describing twO' exemplary instances where

film artists have shouldered Hollis Frampton's duty of remaking works into
"discrete monuments": Ken Jacobs's Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son (1969) and Ernie
Gehr's Eureka(1974)' I select these out from the slender, but by no means
insubstantial, grouping of experimental works that address early cinema with
unflinching directness, in many cases, literally by reworking original footage.
These films do so with a paradoxical aggression and discretion that recalls
what Roland Barthes reports to have experienced in looking at certain photo­
graphs: Jacobs and Gehr -put into these early films what was already there. 2 Let
me suggest that the first of these, Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son, can be taken as
a detailing of filmic space; and that the second, Eureka, composes itself as a
meditation on cinematic temporality. Matters grow more complicated once a
description closes in on the specifics but, for now, I propose these dimensions
as two types of Frampton's "resonant consistency."

I. Hollis Frampton, "For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses," in Circles of
ConfUSion: Film/Photogrophy/Video, Texts 1968-1980 (Rochester: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1983),
113.

2. Roland Barthes, Comero Lucido: Reflection on Photogrophy, trans. Richard Howard (Ne~ York: Hill
and Wang, 1982), possim, especially 8 and 76-77.

7
 ·. Ims belong to a complex historical moment of avant-garde recover the origins of their art. The avant-garde(:inema,~~tM"re.els.th.t~;:,~i\r4·/>'
~r-which Frampton's theorizing serves as a rich syntagma of a meta­ obligation, and Frampton has not been alone in expressing it~alth~~Seld()~,,~;',;:ih
e.Often narned structural film or, in Britain, structural/materialist film, 3 has the feeling been articulated so pointedly. Another fihn~tm~h'¥~'/'( .
:'" .

"'Jlaent was taken to be (one could say confused with) an experimental cerned with the primals of the art, Stan Brakhage, has often spoken of startinr
of filmmaking whose technical and formal features seemed to provide all over again, of origins figuring for him in an innocence of first sight.and the
~~uate basis of explanation. 4 These features can be and have been vari­ obligation falling upon the artist to remove the accretions accumulated by (;i~•
•~~ enumerated. What is relevant is their shared quality of radical reduction ema through its history. For Brakhage, the return to origins lies along the path
~Ita purifying and singular formal strategy exemplified by the relentless zoom of making film new, as it was first of all for filmmaker Maya Deren, who set
!t~"Michael Snow's Wavelenath (1969), commonly taken to be the genre's sig­ the "precincts of the art" by reinaugurating avant-garde cinema with Meshes
,rt'li.fure work. of the Afternoon in 1943, the date Frampton knowingly names as the moment
, This shared quality, however, leaves open to further conjecture the inter­ cinema comes into awareness of its obligations as an art. But the idea of a
"'" ,;

pretation of structural film, which has been variously associated with Mini­
~~.Art, Postmodernism and Process Art; understood as a phenomenological
'~taphor of consciousness; assigned political purpose; and accused of avoiding
~~t:}~ ,.' , '
'~litics altogether. s It is not my intention here to arbitrate or even to mediate
~1I ¢onflict of interpretations, but only to note, with Frampton, yet another
~r)lionant tendency among them toward "inventing a tradition." Jacobs and
~:x,t};
~~r: essay a gesture of leaping back in time to the first era of film production
:'\:;~:~, :-- ~ "'~
metahistory amplifies the notion of making film new by also insisting that the
artist's responsibility extends to tasks of remaking the history of the film
medium (even in instances when its purposes have not been artistic) into a tra­
dition of necessary and logically connected works. It is within the moment of
structural film that Frampton's conception of a metahistory of film takes the
form of an inevitable embarkation toward origins, steering back into the mys­
terious waters of the so-called primitive era.

••~'findlng there -across what must be recognized as a vast crevasse of film Circulating in the folklore of film studies is the late scholar Jay Leyd~
~~tory (for there intervenes all of what most consider film to be)-something ofi~rv~'t~n that early eiReihd Was by no ~e4IiS pIintitive bat ali €I a ef I-ivefy
~C)f1Sistent with cinema now, and more particularly with their own cinema. This creation, of"tbe cjnematic" jn an extraQrdinary stage offlJJ~cence.6 Here,
>
~tl1re, I believe, springs from their mutual emphasis on the rich suggestiveness then, is, in excerpt, Ken Jacobs's remark about Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son, his
~~Iatable techniques or forms.
c?}',''',;
own and the 1905 original:
,~.(i:('Perhaps it is inevitable that filmmakers should embark on attempts to
~.'ii;,t:" , The staging and cutting is pre-Griffith. Seven infinitely complex cine­
:~,,\
tapestries comprise the original film, and the style is not primitive, not
~,iJ.,·;·See.
Noe) Carroll, "Film" in The PMtmodern Moyement, ed. Stanley Trachtenberg (Westport: Green­
,r,J~,;' uncinematic but the cleanest, inspired indication of a path of cinematic
~ Press, 1986" 101-133 and especially 104-110, for a discussion of the terms structural film and

~~rallmaterialist film and the meanings that have become attached to them.
development whose value has only recently been rediscovered. My camera
'f;-\ ','

f[.;~··,.P,~sSitney, "Structural Film," Film Culture 47 (Summer 1969): 1-10. Sitney's first piece on the
closes in, only to better ascertain the infinite richness (playing with fate,
~ect named this mode of filmmaking and enumerated its formal features and so can be blamed for
taking advantage of the loop-character of all movies recalling with varia­
~!lgthiS impression. There is more to his article than that, and much more to his expanded discus­
tions some visual complexes again and again for particular savouring),
~'ln tile second edition of his Visionary Film: The American Ayant-Gorde, 1943-/978 (New York: Oxford

~nlty Press, 1979),369-397.

;~;::~;;~'::_,;' :,

~hi::l>avid E. James, "Pure Film," chap. 6 in Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton:

~on University Press, 1989), 237-279. lames surveys these and other readings. However, it must
6. There is no citation for this often reported sentiment of lay Leyda's. However, among the last of
~!~d that he is unique in the way he elaborates this last accusation of structural film "avoiding poli­
Leyda's accomplishments was to cocurate Before Hollywood (The American Federation ofthe Arts, 1986),
~.rtogether."
a touring exhibition of early American films.
("
~T:' .
t·i~\r..
~.;

f~'; . 9
'iii.
:!i
r-'
 :;'(i??;,:,~,:,;~~:;·[tt':·i1~ (' "
ri:~hthgdudncongruities in the story-telling (a person, confused, sud­ corresponding to the depth of the theatre's proscenium.
T~enlyloOks out of an actor's face), delighting in the whole bizarre human into a shallow middle ground that betrays the graphic depth,'''fi'
':,pbenornenon of story-telling itself and this within the fantasy of reading behind them.
,~y bygone time out of the visual crudities of film: dream within a dream!? The effect of this complex mise en scene is such a plenitude
Jacobs's "infinite richness" is not much exaggerated-that it is impossib'
,,;fhis text will confess a peculiar division in jacobs's Tom, Tom between analy­
, ',.,,1.
grasp the full contents of the image and, in particular, to notice the th~ftib.
'sis of a visual language and intimations of mystery that, as he says, makes anal­
progress of a pig which is the scene's plot point. In the context of its original'
,~is'a fantasy of reading. But first, recent research of film history offers some
screenings, however, this effect of a certain unreadability was modified by the
details of the circumstances surrounding the original film.
audience's assumed foreknowledge of the title rhyme ("Tom, Tom, the Pip­
'( Byno means an anonymously made primitive piece, Tom, Tom, the Piper's
er's Son/Stole a pig and away he run"). Such foreknowledge was typical for films
,,~ was created in 1905 by a man long recognized by film history, Billy Bitzer.
of the early period, which were usually planned not as original stories but as
~ree years later, he would become D. W. Griffith's cameraman and in that
visual renderings OiJ,cobs's "cine-tapestries") of tales or news events already in
~il~ity would secure the images whereby the famous Griffith Revolution was
wide circulation.
,',~!Tected. His demotion (one might call it that) to cinematographer followed
The rhyme in itself offers little potential for narrative development, and
: :~pon a change in American film production from the cameraman system to the
so Tom, Tom intersects with another genre, the chase film. The conventions of
j:'JJ;ector system. This change, the first important division oflabour in filmmak­
";:"1'
the chase largely concern entrances and exits of the cast, narrative motivation
::,;'i~. signalled that early cinema, with its partly artisanal way of working, was
for what early cinema, which devoted so much of its energies to the semiau­
\~~t to end. 8
. ,,".\',<
tonomous tableau, involved tricky 'negotiations of filmic space. In less sophis­
>', ,~itzer made Tom, Tom at American Biograph, one of the four leading U.S.
ticated films, the cast would enter and move across the screen; when the last
,_',tUm companies at the century's tum. An ambitious production for the period,
.~:. :'1' ~,,:.'
character left, the next shot would start the process all over again. Bitzer, how­
k'~b,:e film reflects a temporary equilibrium in early film narrative. Much that
ever, varies this convention with a remarkable virtuosity. In the intervening
'th~racterizes Tom, Tom, including its ten-minute length and its manner of tran­
five scenes, the camera is closer to the action, reflecting a tendency in the later
',;:;itibns between the seven contiguous scenes, was shaped by developments that
"i:~;" , -'r ,: '
primitive style (1905-1908)9 to close in on the proscenium distance. Most spec­
t"iw~rein place from around 1903. Not untypically, the film occupies two gen­
tacular is the way Bitzer utilizes all the areas of the frame, producing vertical
>,:~; The first is the fairy-tale film whose great progenitor was Georges Melies.
f,,'~}';'~ . and diagonal improvizations and deftly deploying doors and windows, a chim­
(;;~~~s. influence over set design can also be seen in Tom, Tom's remarkable studio
ney and a hayloft. His acr~batic cast climbs, jumps, tumbles and sometimes
s and especially in its opening and closing set-ups. The first replicates with
virtually flies, producing an amazing catalogue of human locomotion. Bitzer
!tiimirable fidelity William Hogarth's Southwark Fair (1733), and this accounts
~~ipart
L;,:'I;':"i'
for the busyness of the scene. Melies's influence can also be seen in
,
[),0.0 tableau construction of these two shots, which are taken from a distance
f' ,~
9. Cf. p. 8. The I.ter primitive style can be dated, in the United States particularly, between 1903 and
'f:"~" 1905, when it achieved stability that lasted until the start ofthe Nickelodeon er., 1907-1908. Its devel·
opment coincided with a new emphasis on fiction narratives and increasing lengths (to one reel) and
';l,t:<:,ited in Sitney, Visionary Film, 368.
~1 '
the concomitant rise of the multi-shot format. Rudimentary articulation of screen space through entrances
:\l~':· ,These terms are developed by Janet Staiger. See David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, and exits, "overlapping" narration (in which an action is shown twice, from successive diff~rent points
0~ (Jtlffical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style dod Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge & Kegan of view) and a slightly closer camera position, one that cuts off the .ctors' feet, approximating the medium
(.~I.1985), 116-117. shot, all typify this later style.

~i~
"I),'
~1m:J
' 11
'1,'11<
P~;i'
/;r~~-)1

-'-'-'-'-­
climaxes this remarkably complete early articulation of screen space in his sev­
enth and last shot, which returns to the full tableau by using the lower frame
line, when Tom jumps down a well in a failed last escape from his pursuers.
If I have dwelt on details of Bitzer's Tom, Tom, it is in support of Jacobs's
suggestion that his Tom, Tom is already there in the original's
Indeed, after reproducing the entire original film, he begins his analysis (accom­
plished by rephotographing the film from a screen) with a breakdown of the
first tableau into medium shots and close-ups, at least revealing to us the theft
of the pig. He then proceeds to demonstrate the frailty of cinematic illusion by
bringing his camera even closer to the image, reducing its details to blobs of
shadow. Although constantly varied, a similar three-step procedure shapes the
structure of Jacobs's film: a clarification of the original tableau, the isolation
of details and the decomposition of the illusion to its material infrastructure.
The last, when extended, allows Jacobs to do several things. In the lengthy
second passage of the film, he runs parts of the original through the projector
without its usual intermittent motion (sixteen frames per second for silent
films), reducing the image to a vertical blur that is then varied in speed and
texture. In this way Jacobs demonstrates a crucial material fact of cinema, that
there is no motion in a motion picture; the blurring is also a wry joke on the
notion of literal film, for it exposes the way in which film is, or would be,
invisible if it were seen literally. When he moves his camera so close to the
image that representation dissolves to grainy areas oflight and dark, Jacobs plays
out cinematic rhythms in abstracted, plastic fonn, roughly analogous to what
a strong jazz improvizer does with time and melody.
In the case of the second tactic, the isolation of details, Jacobs effectively
finds the whole language of cinema in Bitzer's Tom, Tom, by producing a com­
pendious analysis of each shot of the original. In the market tableau, his treat­
ment of two acrobats, a woman barely glimpsed in the crowded market scene
and the somersaulting man who is the last to leave that scene is, for example,
a study for close-up. This study also initiates Jacobs's exploration of the motif
10. In this regard, I disagree slightly with Bill Simon and Lois Mendelson's perfectly understandable
claim that "Jacobs has made a radically different film." See their" 'Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son''', Artforum
10 (September 1971): 47.
12
of flight, which Bitzer has woven into the action and which Jacobs pursues no
less obsessively than the cast chases Tom. Indeed, in the final tableau, Jacobs
notices and ecstatically explodes Bitzer's anomalous inclusion of a flock of real
birds in his studio, effecting a perfectly weird structural enactment of the flight
infinitude. 1O motif. Here, though, using stop-motion, Jacobs subjects Bitzer's acrobatic
actors to studies of the sort conducted by Eadweard Muybridge, the last of the
great p~oto-cinema inventors. Using stills in long series to freeze bodies in
motion, Jacobs suspends, advances, holds and reverses the man in mid-tumble.
In this and other respects, Jacobs's Tom, Tom has come to serve as an archaeo­
logical essay in addition to a semiotic genealogy of film language.
Jacobs works out numerous variations on what I call shot analysis, which
result in the long declensions he adduces from these initially simple-seeming
tableaux. In treating the scene where the cast; arrives through a chimney, Jacobs
refram~s and split~ the screen to underline Bitzer's internal point of view by
isolating three figures on ground level who watch and point as the pursuers
jump to the ground. Jacobs imitates those jumps by.introducing tilts, then
reverses the action and draws in for close-ups, including one in which he
touchingly reveals a young actress stunned by her fall. Jacobs's thorough anal­
ysis of Bitzer's shots woven into a single "cine-tapestry" reveals how he made
his screen more dynamic through internal composition and especially through
his vertical structuring of the frame in which motion assumes a quality of flight.
In a different way during a later section, Jacobs goes further, excerpting images
from the complete film for elongated inspection and reassembly. In Bitzer's
sixth tableau, an interior of a cottage, Jacobs isolates images that look like
nineteenth-century lithographs and reframes them in order to follow not only
the actors in close-up, but the "role" of a jug on a table and another abandoned
on the floor. By returning to these objects, which are less props than sparse
decorative elements on the heavily peopled set, Jacobs gives them a poetic,
painterly life and inverts their relationship to the actors, who themselves be­
come at times more like the props.
Elsewhere, Bitzer's more deliberate inclusion of painterly compositions is
underscore~. 'as when Jacobs isolates a background barn depicted on a back­
drop along a slight diagonal to imply depth of field. Jacobs shoots the image
from the side, angling his projection screen on a diagonal to the camera in a
13..
 pun on how depth is rendered on the viewer's screen. Indeed, it is virtually
impossible, after watching Tom, Tom attentively, not to believe cinema to be
one of the visual arts. Despite Jacobs's aggression toward the original Tom, Tom,
he is collegially insistent on showing that the powerful visual imagination he
has brought to bear on Bitzer's film is greeted by nothing less than its equal in
the original. In this regard, Jacobs discovers a personalization of Frampton's
concept of a resonant consistency of aspiration within the filmmaker's art.
There is, however, one protracted passage where Jacobs's generosity toward
, the 19°5 film is transformed into something else. In the hayloft scene (which
closely resembles the previous chimney scene), the camera comes in very close
an,d again reduces the image to shadowy blobs. But this time, Jacobs does not
'pull back into representation for a long while. Instead, using flicker, camera
movement and manipulations of speed, he produces pulsing abstract-expres­
sionist compositions in greys. Earlier, I compared this third procedure or tac­
, tic to a jazz improvization and indicated that his intent was to draw attention
. to the material infrastructure of film. Both readings are correct when applied
to the many briefer passages where Jacobs does this. Here, however, he uses
the indexical forms of light native to the photograph to rhyme his own cam­
era manipulations with the gestural syntax of action painting. What transpires
is not precisely either abstractionist or materialist; rather the organicism of
the photographic trace with its own pulse of light yields tactile, even erotic
forms that recall at this strange remove traces of moving bodies. In the last
frame, the figure of a man (Jacobs himself) places his hands on the edges of
the entire screen and then, from behind, appears to carry it away from the
camera, as if it were a mobile painting- but also as if he were carrying the
image into his own body, although the image resembles more a retreat into
a voidlike darkness.
The passage, reminiscent of an embrace that must end, is astonishing in
its pathos, and speaks both for the latent mystery of Bitzer's Tom, Tom and
against the seamless mastery Jacobs has brought to his analysis of the film.
.Under the appreciative aggression that the new Tom, Tom visits on its original,
Jacobs finally occludes the extremely lyrical discretion of his regret that only
in the imagination of his own art can this historical past, these bodies in motion
and his colleague's resourceful art be revisited.
Although the outward gentleness of Eureka, Ernie Gehr's remaking of
14
an original 19°3 five-minute actualityll-a single-shot trolley ride down San
Francisco's Market Street-seems a sharp contrast with Jacobs's aggressive anal­
ysis of Tom, Tom, Gehr's choice of a tril:>utary title indicates that the film holds
an analogous importance for him. Actually, the title is deriv~d from the origi­
nal film near the end, where the word moves into frame on the side of a truck
denotin~ the name of a California town. And although Gehr found the film itself
in Switzerland, he has remarked that part of its charm was how it "reminded
him of his first impressions of San Francisco after being discharged from the
army."12 These autobiographical coordinates, and the play between the found
denotation, the literal meaning of eureka ell have found it"} and its conven­
tional connotation of scientific discovery allow an interpretation of the title
as a pun both on Gehr's finding of the original film and the artist finding his
vocation. 13 I would argue,.too, that this finding includes, as Frampton suggests,
the discovery or "invention'· of a tradition of making, here reenacted ritually
as a contemplative remaking.
It is often suggested, including by Gehr himself, that the original film he
JoU"nd had heen made fOr Hale's TQ1)l:~' 14 a turn-of-the-century amusem~
mat that placed patrons in-view of a travelogue projected at the front of a rail­
-r oad car which rocked and otherwise kinaesthetically imitated train travel.
-Although the film Gehr discovered does fit the description of a likely Hale's
Tours film, the problem with this altogether delightful suggestion is that Hale's
Tours debuted at the St. Louis Exhibition in the spring of 1904, and became a
regular commercial attraction only a year later. This detail of its provenance
matters much less once ;we recall that many kinds of urban views and films shot
from all manner of mechanical conveyances were commonplace from the first
phases of film production. Indeed, no type of film better typifies the actuality
II. Cited in Tom Gunning, "An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)credulous Specta­
tor," Art and Text 34 (Spring 1989): 38. The expression actuality was used by a contemporary journalist
to describe films shot from trains, trolleys, etc. In early filmmakers' parlance, actuality refers to a single­
shot of something real, or actual, as opposed to a set·up fiction; the more familiar term documentary to
refer to non·fiction films waS not coined until the 1920s, probably by Grierson.
,. 12. P. Adams Sitney, Ernie Gehr (St. Paul: Walker Arts Center, 1980),32.
13. Ibid., 33.
Ibid., 32, for example.
15
ii~han the one Gehr chose to remake, and its type, in turn, exemplifies the par­
~:',: adox of cinematic temporality foregrounded in his treatment of the original.
'11, .
~';;" Gehr changed the 1903 film in two ways. He eliminated a brief turnabout
~~;,i!lfthe trolley at the end of its run, thus erasing the sole interruption of its steady
'*'fotward passage through space. He also elongated the film to thirty-eight min­
~~,,~t~$ by optically reprinting each frame eight times. The result is that Eureka's
."".",
;:\~ovement into deep perspectival space, strongly marked by the trolley tracks,
.
;(~'*lte wall of buildings lining the street and by the receding scale of people, ani­
~;"als and vehicles is modified by a succession of momentarily arrested friezes
w,.,
!;,\ofthe street scene. Moreover, the car's fairly regular stops provide the film
t:i:~~ a series of caesurae as trucks and autos block the view and flatten the deep
~\,lipace into the shape of a dark rectangle.
~J,:i;' The paradox of filmic time is that it is produced only by a string of frozen
M;~~ge fragments, a fact made apparent by still photography.
,C('Il!';",
In cinema, these
Igments of time appear to accumulate, along a linear and steady trajectory.
ere may be no real "motion" in a motion picture, but time mounts up into
"r:ts:pwn representation. With the aphoristic irony 'characteristic of his theo­
~i!'~ical formulations, Frampton remarks,
!~)!,: .
It is remarkable that cinema depends from a philosophical fiction that we
have from the paradoxes ofZeno, and that informs the infinitesimal calcu­
. Ius of Newton: namely, that it is possi~le to view the indivisible flow of
. time as if it were composed of an infinite succession of discrete and per­
fectly static instants. 15
~y;1i~is comes from his essay on Muybridge, the inventor of cinema according to
~~.~,,\. ,
recalls the double impulse behind the invention of cinema: the analrsis and
arrest of time in photography, and the subsequent reproduction of its flow. In
this slightly different sense, Eureka, like Tom, Tom, is an archaeological work.
But, then, too, its given theme is motion, time as "an unseen energy [that]
swallows space."17 The film is structured, with its staccato rhythm, as a series
of very brief vignettes, for example, the boy who peers through the tarpaulin
covering'~ truck and assorted pedestrians who, after brief appearances, vanish
behind the moving car and camera. Gehr's abbreviation of the concluding'
camera pan that tracked the trolley's turnabout changes the original film's
temporal structure and its implication of repeatable time, or rhetorically, the
frequentative tense of a repeatable action. This devouring time of the camera
is made manifest in the way Eureka climaxes, in a head-on encounter with
history itself; in fact, with the full-screen focus on a plaqu,e affixed to the
Ferry Building, which reads: "Erected in 1896." Significantly, this is the first
year a film camera could have taken the trolley through San Francisco. And
not much time would elapse before the San Francisco so observantly traversed
by this camera would shake apart and burn to the ground in the great earth­
quake of 1906.
In this delicate but axiomatic fashion, Gehr has not only brought into our
view the paradox of filmic temporality, but the pathos of early cinema. It is
not the personalized, collegial pathos of Jacobs's Tom, Tom, but what I am
tempted to call the pathos of objective, historical time always made axiomatic
by film. Early films ~specially vivify this quality which, in turn, injects them
with a dangerous charm.

:i!:~pton, 16 and in whose invention of the time-based proto-cinema machine,

:\(t~!=zo?praxiscope,the paradox of filmic time finally found issue.

In November of 1979, as a participant in a series of talks and screenings organ­
;"< .'In his distension of the print that becomes Eureka, Gehr restores the sem­
ized by the Whitney Museum of American Art entitled "Researches and Inves­
~}'~ce. as well as recognizing the fact, of this "succession of discrete and per­
. tigations into Film: Its Origins and the Avant-Garde," Tom Gunning prefaced
+,~br static instants," in other words, of the paradox in which the still image

)~ '." ':c h . •, _', ,I .his presentation of some of his first research into what was then labelled "primi­
V~tites~ The film seems to restore time by synthesizing it. This temporal play tive film" with this personal observation,

i;\,~;·,'Prunpton, Circles of ConfUSion, 74. 17.. Tom Gunning, "An Unseen Energy Swallows Space: The Space in Early Film and Its Relation to
~r\~},f!" i:~;':'. ',AlIIeI\ican Avant-Garde Film," in Film 8efore Griffith. ed. John L. Fell (Berkeley: University ofCaHfornia
')bld., 70.
,Press, 1983). 355-366.

17
 Comparing early film to recent films of the American avant-garde frees the
eii'f"yworks trom the ghetto of primitive babbfingt~ess-
..--:- .
~ented model of £jIm~ry has aSSlgne~mem~'H,w~HG~Il~a18see-lt:cor;SSle!lereeaaii1imy
films simply as failed or awkward approximatIons'of a-later style, we begin
to see them as possessing a style and logic of their own. In many respects
this style ... is different from that of later commercial film. Although this
"difference" is not the same "difference" by which the American avant­
garde separates itself from commercial cinema, a comparison is illuminat­
ing. I must add that the impetus for the comparison comes partly from
avant-garde filmmakers themselves, from artists such as Ken Jacobs, Ernie
Gehr, Hollis Frampton, and others who have directly included elements
from early films in their own work. Likewise, it was undoubtedly my en­
counter with films by these and other avant-garde filmmakers that allowed
me to see early films with a fresh eye. 18
~;);rhis text clearly takes avant-garde film as a pedagogical cinema. Gunning name~
!fihtt as an inspiration for the critic-historian's work, and particularly for his own
~;"~~1·i,i
~:llJnderlying thesis: that early cinema and the avant-garde are tangent across the
¥;':span of film's history, and different in unique ways from the Hollywood narra­
;'<tiv~ commercially intended tradition of film that lies between them. What
makes them tangent is not, therefore, a similarity between the films of the first
, era of cinematic production and those of the recent avant-garde, but instead,
~i· llowthey touch the critic-historian in acts of discovery, disclosure and discern­
:\n,ment in which the avant-garde artist leads the scholar toward fresh acts of
;{ ,$eeing. For Gunning, these acts inspire the work of uncovering the distant past
')'0£ an art whose career has been parcelized by a predisposition that sees cin­
"ema only as an instrument of the production of narrative.
One reading of this text suggests, as it may still to Gunning, a possible con­
. ,vergence of artistic practice and scholarly work. This possibility, in cinema
",$tu..dies, remains chimeric. The institutional framework of film research and
:L~hemore difficult setting in which avant-garde filmmakers struggle to produce
'\, ;,
their art, and to have it seen, are too separate. The issues that gave rise in the
"':Ia,e 1970S to the sustained study of early cinema-just prior to the moment of
, Ibid., 355-356.
Gunning's talk - emerged from disputes in film theory and film historiography.
Gunning alludes to the latter when he refers to the "progress-oriented model."
Then, too, there is the debate between film theory and what would soon be
called a new film historicism bringing notice to the institutional discourse of
cinema studies. Where the avant-garde arises as a topic, if at all, is within its
own subdiscipline. There are exceptions; in addition to Gunning's continuing
evocations, usually placed as codas to his essays throughout the eighties, there
are a few pages in the writings of Noel Burch. But these brief mentions sug­
gest that the matter of early cinema and the avant-garde is restricted to the
critics' private discernments and a sort of personal edification obtained through
avant-garde films.
Although the present text was inspired by my regular encounters with early
films, often in conjunction with Jacobs's Tom, Tom and Frampton's films used
in my teaching over the last decade, its contours were shaped by the writings
of Gunning and Burch. If I ever entertained the idea of any possible conver­
gence between the avant-garde and a new historiography of cinema, I learned
quickly that this ~ould remain only a staged meeting of the imagination - there
were two very different worlds here. Because this text is largely a species of
reportage, I have chosen to structure it in accord with contemporary critical
and historical debates through which the story of early cinema has been, I
believe, more truthfully re-staged by a new generation of film historians. I treat
avant-garde films as pedagogical interventions, as works that allow us to see
cinema again, in places and at levels where we had ceased to see it. In the idio­
lect of semio~ics (always provoking a lexis less than Frampton adumbrates),
the avant-garde cinema is here regarded as the metalanguage of early cinema.
This leads to a certain restriction of scope, inclusive only of experimental films
that treat early cinema directly by remaking it or, as Gunning says, by directly
incorporating some of its elements.
My discussion will cover five parts, roughly corresponding to the five chap­
ters that follow. ~ Ia~rs-ettt how an Implt~r "unthought" theory, held
by conventional film historians. of ci~as an invariably narr.ative art has ghet­
.d the first dozen years of early film productIOn, STnce real progress has
------ ........
nsidered to bel!in onlv wltli the entrance of O. W. Griffith. Critiques
os. what is now
c~lled the
-
uestioned, as I show in chapter one, a para­
19
~Ill hisl5FiQS orgaRi;uul all~Ag p\l~Qly linesl and aesttietic etltetit The
~ew
, historians argue that such historical models leave no room for explaining
the lEprgwict tt:khnolggiG%J and social cau:liti;t dri'l@ i!Ry bistoricaJ pbe - /
nomenon, including cinema. As I;;plore in chapter two, the first test case
<:::­
for this more complex analysis became, in the eighties, early cinema.
The second critique of conventional film history, taken up in chapter two,
arosEJlytill2 ttie efriy S~yentlfS in Eran~ffatatUs:eorr Also calling for -"
an analysis of multiple causality driving cinema toward its invention and devel­
opment, apparatus theorists differed in their focus on the ideological signifi­
cance of the film image as a formal system derived from cultural history. They
seized upon techniques of perspective to guide analysis of the basic film appa­
ratus. In chapters three and four, Burch's analyses of proto-cinema and early
films serve as a core around which I organize discussions of early cinema and
avant-garde films. In this respect, the structural films should be seen as a mode
of cinema critical of orthodox histories of cinema and allied with apparatus
theory. These experimental films raise fundamental questions about the mate­
rial, formal, perceptual and signifying processes of the medium. Whether
investigating the frame and the lens, as Snow does in WavelenBth, camera move­
ment and screen space, as do Gehr, Jacobs, Rimmer and Le Grice in their films
treating early cinema, or offering intimations of a philosophical sort, as does
Frampton, structural films disclose the significance of the basic apparatus by
reducing surface distractions (acting, narrative, scenic fascination) to expose
radical issues of technology, culture and representation. Burch articulates
aspects of that alliance and I take the view here that he mediates between appa­
ratus theory and the new historicism of which he is a founding, if idiosyncratic,
author. More importantly, it is Burch who pioneers the central arguments for
an understanding of early film as a different mode of art rather than as a primi­
tive prelude to the main event of classical narrative film. He also goes on to
make explicit some ways in which early cinema and avant-garde films are to
be related theoretically. In addition to drawing on Burch to create a context
for discussing structural films, I include a discussion of his own film, Correc­
tion Please, Or How We Got into Pictures (1979)' Burch also indicates considera­
ble ambivalence about the tendency of some experimental filmmakers to regard
early cinema as a "lost paradise." His pragmatism as a critical historian pro­
vides a corrective to facile theoretical correlations.
20
I have throughout these chapters supplemented Burch with the work of his
colleagues and analyses of selected avant-garde films where they seemed per­
tinent, either because Burch alludes to them (for example, Malcolm Le Grice's
After Lumiere, or Andy Warhol's Kiss) or because of their direct relevance (Joyce
Wieland's Sailboat). Although Burch sustains the most radical reinterpretation
of early cinema yet undertaken, I conclude the fourth chapter by criticizing
wllat might be termed the social foundation of some of his arguments. This
leads me to a revision of the question of the relations between early film and
its successor, the Hollywood classical cinema. Here, drawing on the recent
writings of Miriam Hansen, Andre Gaudreault, Thomas Elsaesser and Tom
Gunning, I assert that while many of Burch's analyses remain valid the social
question of the spectator shifts. Whereas Burch is close to apparatus theory,
~hese authors turn to earlier writings of the German theorists Sigfried Kracauer
and Walter Benjamin to argue that early cinema was really the prototype of
mass cultur~1 experience in modern society. In this light, avant-garde cinema,
especially for Elsaesser and Gunning, should be seen as an intermittent series
of reflexi,ve and calculatedly exaggerated exfoliations of that experience and
its significance.
In this prelude I have discussed one of Frampton's allusive and suggestive
reflections on cinema, but although Frampton privileges early cinema in both
his filmmaking and his writing, his analysis will not enter the principal dis­
cussions ofthis study. Given that I contend Frampton's writings (published in
Artforum, AfterimaBe and other well-known journals that allow the right sort
of theoretical emphasis I9 ), particularly those dealing with metahistory of film,
to be the most brilliant of the pedagogical interventions made in the avant­
garde on the topic of film history, this may seem a strange absence. However,
his absence here I would suggest is appropriate and emblematic of the private,
even obscure pedagogy that the avant-garde, and Frampton as its example,
exert on the film studies academy, at least on its more astute members, like
Gunning, who is even rarer in possessing the generosity to say so.
19. These writings are gathered in Frampton, Circles of Confusion.
2.

We should stop calling ourselves new. We are not. They were new. We are old,
and we have not necessarily aged as well as we should. To cite Eliot again: he
reports himself as answering someone who objected to, I suppose, Shakespeare,
Dante and Homer on the grounds that we know more than they did by replying,
"yes, we do, and they are precisely what we know." We also know more than
that very early cinema did. Unfortunately, they are not precisely what we know.
We are only beginning to penetrate the phantom, the fiction of the copious and
the readily available, to poke around in dusty attics and so forth, into the sort of
mausoleums guaranteed by a rapacious copyright system, for example, and to
retrieve heaven knows what-probably not Dante, Shakespeare and Homer-it
would be nice to know who the Homer of film will ultimately be perceived as,
by the way, let alone the Dante-but at least something of the context in which
those texts, if they ultimately are exurned, will be perceived.
-Hollis Frampton, "The Invention Without a Future," lecture at the Whitney
Museum of American Art, 1979.
1 Unthought Theories and Conventional Histories
Although it would seem that origins should exert a compelling interest on the
historian of an art, until recently, early cinema struck authors of the standard
historical studies of film as an obligation. Film history is a story and, like any
other, has to begin somewhere and needs some place to go. While this is obvi­
ously a cliche, indeed the basic cliche of any narrative, in this case the place­
ment of so-called primitive film as a pre-history takes on symptomatic value
here deserving of some diagnosis.
tional account, "primitive film" is included alonl! with proto­
/cinema. that era gf invention befbre the tIIcdibim assumed rl~9gRii!aBle-form,
relude to the "real story" of the movies~he inlefttiQR aRe ~FiR'liti>'@ lua
Um are posltloned at a zero point, not as a'iite trom wlncn to start the story,
but as a spot before the bsginning. To the conventional film historian, there is
a foc~:-e-:~::-u""l-:d:-is-t-in-c-~ to be sustained between the origins of the cinema and
the true historic genesis of film art.
Barely a pretext for cinema, and only in the most prosaic sense, the proto­
cinema and primitive era serve as the considerable pre-history extending from
the invention of photography in the 1830S through the capillary evolution of
optical devices and "philreictU:::::.including the thaumatrope, zoetrope,
photobioscope, praxinoscope, zoopraxlscope and the chronophotographic gun
(1827-1880s),. to the inventions of the kinetoscope, cinematoaraphe and vitascope
(1893-1896) and beyond through the first era of film production (1896-1908).
Only then, after this protracted preface, does the story swiftly start for con­
ventional historians, with the proclaimed Griffith Revolution of 1908 to 1915.
Typically Gerald Mast writes, "the history of the movies is, first of all, the his­
tory of a new art." I And for Mast and his colleagues, film art requires a certain
type of artist, a master, and that is David Wark Griffith.
The seven years following 1908 are a mere sliver of time to be selected
from cinema's nine decades of gestation but conventional historians locate the
true birth of the new art within that narrow span. After a short apprenticeship
I. Gerald Mast, A Short History of the MOYies, 3d ed. (Indianapolis: Robbs-Merrill Educational Pub­
lishing, 1981),2.
~s
 as a screen actor and scenarist spent at Thomas Edison's Bronx film studio, in the basement Salon Indien of the Grand Cafe located on the Parisian Boule­
D. W. Griffith travelled downtown to the American Biograph Company on vard des Capucines on December 28, 189}.5
Manhattan's Fourteenth Street. In the summer of 1908, more or less acci­
dentally, he began directing films. After making over three hundred of one­
and two-reelers, Griffith set to work on The Birth of a Nation, subsequently
released in 191}. For conventional historians, this film marks the installation
of a proper film language, the classical narrative style, and so, the advent of
the art of film itself.2
In the telling, of course, historians are seldom as baldly diagrammatic as
, .1s. Chapters oftbejr bggks ue devoted for example, t9 the @,ele efteehn<J
;dogical developments that led tg tAil iRl}8Rti8ft ef einemll. Proeeeeiftt;, ho~­
I;';',ever, "under the aegis of science," as Eric Rhode rUlRa,lts, tlu! i]:ll'e]:ltgn are'
~;~;seen to manifest only a radical cgntin8ency in thejr efforts3~'The tricksters,
~i;;"
rt
lh';·;, "
the fast talkers, the cranks, the defeated: all of them took part in the gold rush
'
~;;\ to invent the cinema."4 This greedy brood laboured and finagled in an expan-
;i': sive era of innovative manufacturers and industrialists of extraordinary foresight,
~, but that was just luck. Their avatar happened to be Thomas Alva Edison whose
ft;' Menlo Park, New Jersey research team produced the last important proto­
Ii, cinema machine, the kinetoscope. After its debut at the Chicago Exhibition
of 1893, this single-viewer device enjoyed a brief era of exploitation in amuse­
ment arcades, usually alongside Edison's phonograph, and foreshadowed the
early commercial career of projected motion pictures.
The point made repeatedly is that channels oblivious of the real direction
and importance of film evolution errantly travelled toward invention. Edison,
for example, had the means at his disposal to create film, but quickly grew
bored with his kinetoscope, making it just another step on the wandering path
,', that led only contingently to the first commercial screening of what is popu­
larly recognized as cinema. Conducted in relative obscurity by two brothers,
reputable manufacturers of photographic supplies in Lyon with the astonish­
ingly appropriate name of Lumiere, the debut of the cinematowaphe was held
7. Noel Burch points out that in France the development of such an extensive exhibition industry was
2. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style
, I
and Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), 1-70.
3. Eric Rhode, A History of the Cinema From its OriBins to 1970 (Middlesex: Penguin. 1976).25.
4. Ibid.
This event, however, is still not the curtain raiser in the history of film.
David Robinson explains why when he writes,
The cinematowaphe was still a long way from the cinema.... The ability
to record and subsequently project a moving photographic image was a
technological achievement for which there was as yet no evident use, and
certainly no aesthetic principles. 6
For these historians; then, even after film's invention, there would be many
more years of confusion', known as the "primitive period," about the use of
this not-yet medium. Historians depict the struggles among showmen in bring­
ing the machine out of the cafe basement and into the fairground and vaude­
ville. Then around 190} in North America, film came into its own venues, the
nickelodeons.7 This was a time when films spread over the world. "Yet for
years," Rhode remarks, "the cinema was more likely to lose your fortune than
to make it. It hovered between life and death in the nether world of the fair­
ground, the second-class music hall, the beer garden, the penny arcades and
the church sociaI."8
Nonetheless, an industry arose as the age of inventors yielded to the era of
vulgar amusements. While the period was still bereft of evident use of aesthetic
principles, filmmakers like Georges Melies, Ferdinand Zecca, R. W. Paul, Billy
Bitzer and Edwin S. Porter tried whatever they could think of and made the
industry their home. Historians convey the sense, however, that despite the
presence of these pioneers, film remained in the impersonal hands of popular
5. Ibid .• 15-16.
6. David Robinson, World Cinema: A Short History (London: Methuen & Co., 1973),21.
postponed. Although French films were the most popular in the world during the early era, they also
remained one of the longest to be tied to a primitive style. See Burch, Life to those Shadows, trans. and
.ed. Ben Brewster (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 43-79. Also see Miriam Hansen, "Early
Silent Cinema: Whose Public Sphere?," in Early Cinema: Space/ Frame/Narrative ed. Thomas Elsaesser
(Londpn: BFI Publishing, 1990). Hansen examines the parallel slow evolution of early Gennan exhibition.
8. Rhode, A History of the Cinema. 25.
~lS
culture and was still waiting to be born as an art form. Edgar Morin expresses
a fussy sort of distress over this circumstance between inventipn and real birth
of art waiting in the lower regions of commercial amusement: "For it was not
artists or educated men who brought about this transformation but rag mer­
chants, autodidacts, conjurors and c1owns."9
This was also an era of fragmentary preparations often depicted as a time
of anticipatory but unconscious "firsts and breakthroughs." So, for example,
Arthur Knight says of Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery (1903),
the success of this film was too overwhelming to be long ignored. It estab­
lished the single reel as the standard length for American films ... It set
both the fashion and the pattern for Western films. And it inspired other
directors to join Porter in exploring the implications of his disjunctive style
of editing, his free juggling of time and space. They increased the number
of scenes in their little dramas. Their cameras were no longer confined to
the studio: scenes taken on location were combined with shots staged
against painted sets. And all were assembled and given their final form at
the cutting bench, generally by the director himself. As these little stories
began to reach the screen ... the movies became the poor man's theater. 10
It is interesting to note in Knight's account how a genre (the Western), loca­
tion shooting, length and even rudimentary montage were unknowingly seeded
in the primitive "little stories." Porter, whose Life of an American Fireman (1902)
and The Kleptomaniac (1903) are so often cited as steps forward, is still treated
as just a way station on the journey toward Griffith. Exemplary of this view is
David Cook, who concludes his discussion of Porter's career with this combi­
nation of dismissal and prophecy: "the technology of the cinema had long
been born and the rudiments of its narrative language discovered. The cinema
now awaited its first great narrative artist, who would refine that language,
elaborate it, and ultimately transcend it."11 For Cook, and without dissent or
doubt among his colleagues, that great artist would be Griffith. Mast is even
more explicit:
I
9. Edgar Morin quoted in ibid., 2.
10. Arthur Knight, The Liveliest Art (New York: New American Library. 1957), 26.
II. David A. Cook, A History of Narrative Film (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1981),29.
Between 1895 and 1908, the movies had progressed from static, one~shot
"views" to increasingly fluid sequences of visually effective shots that pro­
duced a continuous if not necessarily complex narrative. The next evolution
of narrative would require a master with a firmer and bolder sense, not so
much of the individual cinematic elements but of the means to synthesize
them into clearer, more credible, and more powerful narrative wholes.
D. W. Griffith would display that sense within another year or two. 12
Indeed, it is the custom among historians to glimpse the future master-artist
in a long shot of a rocky promontory battling an evil bird, Griffith's costar in
the last ofPortcr's films to be remembered, Rescued from an Eagle's Nest (1907).
The shot is, of course, ric I emblematic: the last picture of the "primitive
cinema" proffers the vaguely P met ean image of Griffith struggling on a cliff,
virtuously saving a child, a romantic adumbration of an art about to begin.
This<conventionaI chronicle of cinema's prefatory period has been variously
written but its guiding argument remains amazingly consistent from historian
to historian. Today, under pressures both conceptual and empirical, this chron­
icle is increasingly regarded as the consequence of a mythic construction placed
upon not just early cinema but the whole of film history. Any possible new
account of early cinema can be written, as it is today in a remarkable array of
articles, monographs and theses, solely in the wake of a critique of the myth
of film history. The new books on early cinema by John L. Fell, Charles Musser,
Andre Gaudreault, Thomas Elsaesser, Miriam Hansen, Robert C. Allen, Noel
Burch and others are witness to a major shift in the historians' perspectives
and have probably refocused the debate on film history more than any other
writings. 13 Early cinema is privileged today as the laboratory of a new histori­
c~ film "--~stt\ui(dIiiees.s.:----------------- __
12. Mast, A Short History of the Movies, 38.
13. Robert C. Allen, Vaudeville and Film 1895-1915: A Study in Media Interaction (New York: Amo Press.
1980); Burch, Life to those Shadows; Elsaesser, Early Cinema: John L. Fell, ed., Film Before Griffith (Berke­
ley: University of California Press, 1983): Andre Gaudreault, Du Iitteraire au filmique, systeme du recit
(Quebec: Les presses de l'Universite Laval, Meridiens Klinckieck, 1988): Miriam Hansen, Babel and
Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991); Charles Musser,
Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1991): Charles Musser, History of the American Cinema, vol. I, The Emergence a/Cin­
ema: The American Screen to 1907 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1990).
2'

 Although there have been helpful restorations of film prints by ar~hives and
tified critically as a teleoloBY' Such assumptions lead historians to construct
especially of the colour tinting used in early films, there have been no unveil­
powerfully linear stories within which to organize the study of cinema. David
ings of forgotten masterpieces of cinema's earliest era. Instead, the new histo­
Bordwell and Kristin Thompson characterize this procedure when they write,
rians question the idea of the masterpiece as an historiographical marker and
"historical change is movement toward a goal, however vaguely formulated.
interrogate the role played by film aesthetics in underwriting conventional film
When a historian says that the silent film was struggling to speak, or employs
history. Here is where the critique might be said to begin, arising from con­
Qletaphors of progress ... the teleological assumption is likely to be present."16
temporary film theory, a renewed historiography and the play avant-garde films
Recently, two revisionist film historians, Robert C. Allen and Douglas
set into motion as a pedagogy of vision involving cinema's earliest era.
Go~wardlybut usefully labelled this unthought theory "the mas­
tereiece traditioI!Jn aesthetic film history.:lJ The masterpiece tra It~ nt­
- 5
ing film history consists of assemblin monuments of . them
I. would now like to offer a simple diagnostic thesis: that.!he conventional
Into a successive array. So, for example, beyond Griffith's The Bil til vf a Nation,
story is symptomatic of an unthou ht theory of film. Its slogan is voiced by

th~:.::a:::s~te::::r'J:p~ie~c;:e::...t~r.:::a.:::d.:..:it~io:::n::.rp.:.ro::c::e::e::d::s~t=o-.:t:h::e~s::a~m:e~d:i::.r=-ec=-t::o:.:.r-.::'s~l~n:to:.:.le:::r.:::a~n::ce:"'(~1':'9~16~), then
when he proclaims, as note a ove, t e history of the movies is, first of
to Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925) and on to Abel Gance's Napoleon
all, the history of a new art." 14 The unthought theory makes film history into
(1928). I hese works are Dot chosen arbitranly. as AII IlR 8ftd Gomer, point ""Out,
art'history but stems from an unreflected idea of art. The idea takes expres­
~ut accord~ng to a specifjcatioA ef Danid Rohinson's "aesthetic principles."
sive form when Cook quite typically finishes with Porter by prophesying (retro­

spectively, of course) Griffith as the "great narrative artist" who will enact a
istory sets out a progression of
belated discovery of cinema. Writing in a much more theoretically reflective
Hms in which editingGn be shown to advance from primitive beginnings to

. --
manner, Christian Metz claims that when film finally learned to tell stories

well, cinema gained its specific language. 15 The theoretical i'Jbtext hidden in ___

such a claim, that the development of narrative language is the condition for

.~ for meeting its artistIc destiny, IS what compels film historians te argue

artistic mastery; correspondingly, the Griffith Revolution is a culmination of

a series of breakthroughs in the editing of film images.
The conventional ro ression in film histories moves from ri
• b ng toward full dramati£¥tjculatiQg,;, lt rises feebly from the Lumil~re broth­
. ive bab­

. t~ the history of the film medium begins only with The Birt!J..4-e Nation.
ers' first actualites, for example, Arrivee d'un train d la Ciotat (1895) or Sortie
Such a claim is repeated covertly each time the phrase "film art" is mixed d'usine(1895) to Georges Melies's series of tableaux arrayed in sequence (circa
• ----.----:--- J

\'~P with ~arr~v=.!tis as if the art of film is to be defined by prox­ 19°°), through to Porter's sketchy crosscutting in The Great Train Robbery and
'.-imity: as film gaim tlie powel ofndliati"e, it becomes an art~ Fi~ the crude continuity in Cecil Hepworth's Rescued by Rover (1905)' The progres­
, ~ive are taken together and depicted as mutuall ldi~rk.al sion neatly arrives at Griffith's laboratory period at Biograph with his perfec­
; proeressiOn..-5uch assumptions - that film art is necessarily a matter of narra­ tion of crosscutting and contiguity matches in the years between 19°9 and 1913.
r
tive form and that it moves inexorably toward that form - have come to be iden­ Finally.the director's massive deployment of editing to structure The Birth of a
Nation produces the mythic classical narrative form armed and ready to explode

14. Mast, A Short History of the Movies, 2.

It Christian Metz, Film Lanauaae: A Semiotics of the Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press,
16. Kristin Thomp.on and David Bordwell, "Linearity. Materialism and the Study of Early American
19'74),47. In one of many similar formulations of this view, Metz writes, "It is not because the cinema
Cinema," Wide Anale 5 (1983): 5.
h language that it can tell such fine stories, but rather it has become language because it has told such
17. Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery. Film History: Theory and Practice (New York: McGraw-HlII,
flne stories." 1985),67-70.

29
 into the Hollywood film industry. This explosion makes Griffith the "Father
of Hollywood."
~y is film ediiLng taken as a crucial aesthetic device first among Mast,9
"cinematic elements"? And why is its main consequence taken to be the ri
of narrative form - Metz's and Cook's "narrative langua~? These are two ques­
.dons that occupy the new historians, who still accept the significance of edit­
ing but reject it as an aesthetic fundamental. A very suggestive psychological
answer has been derived from writing produced at the very start of "film art."
Just ~ year after The Birth of a Nation, a German-trained Harvard psychologist
named Hugo Miinsterberg published his short treatise The Film: A PsycholoBi­
cal Study: The Silent Photoplay in 1916. Miinsterberg was among the first ~
a~''jLc the cmhuins signifjcao<:v 'If til'll classical narrative style unfolded ~
Griffith and others. He was also among the few cultured elite who cast an
'-;;Ppreciative eye ~ the emergent medium at the time, seeing in film
sibilities of social uplift and moral improvement. IS Social and moral themes,
however, were secondary to Miinsterberg's main concern with an analysis of
the internal psychology of the narrative art of film.
In J. Dudley Andrew's analogy, Miinsterberg divided film pre-history into
odv, its technical history and its soul, which he
thought film to achieve through narrative form. 19 MiiDsterberg'Sidea of film's
-­ n._ ... L __. . . . . " . ' .
, , ' " "• . < ­ •. r . of l!adgets leading to the inven­
informational functions. Soon, films begin to preserve theatre, initiating its
:llDe?l\;re1?£];1W1£' Miinsterbe~rites, "while this movement to reproduce
stage performances went on, elements were superadded which the technique
of the camera allowed ... and ... led slowly to a certain deviation from the path
of the drama."2o This gradual development of specific cinematic techniques
18. See Richard Griffith's foreword to Hugo Munsterberg, The Film: A PsycholoBical Study- The Silent
Photoplay in /916 (New York: Dover Publications, 1970) v-xv: also see Lary May, ScreeninB Out the past'l/I1
The Birth of Moss Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
41-42, for a brief account of the controversial background against which Munsterberg wrote his study.
I~. J. Dudley Andrew, The Major Film Theories: An Introduction (New York: Oxford Univenity Press,
1976), IS.
20. Munsterberg, The Silent Photoplay in 19/6, 13.
prompted Miinsterberg to ask whether he might not "examine the esthetic
conditions which would give independent rights to the new art."21
These aesthetic c;ondjtjons are not.rnateria,lor technical ~'Jt fa! ebpgi
~nd much of Miinsterberg's book treats stylistic features of cinema and
~cially Itin, in a way that correlates them with mental st . n these
-pages Miinsterberg makes remarkable c aims about the lIve and emotional
u;:;lon that arises between a film and its spectator. What Miinsterberg saw in
.. tile Lype uffilills Gdffith was pioneering was compositional unity that "cuts
off every possible connection" between the artwork and the practical world.
"The work of art shows us the things and events perfectly complete in them­
selves, freed from all connections which lead beyond their own limits, that is
in perfect isolation."22 Instead of testing a film's veracity against the real world,
Miinsterberg insists that an aesthetic of self-enclosure ensures the psychologi­
the pos­ cal truth of the medium. The self-containment of cinematic representation is
the'source of cinema's principal aesthetic pleasure and ultimately its moral
value. Both derive from the way the
,---.
smooth weave of shots taken from ltuietB
angles could shape the outer world of images to the "inn
mind" instead of the temporal and s
words, if a film is well made, it has the ow the
subjectivity of the spectator Cjnema can then exteriorize the basic psycho­
logical workings of the spectator. Editing, for example, represents attention
through the close-up and memor throu h the flashback; and ima in don fr;
of space/time constraints, projects itself on the screen through crosscutting.
In the emergent classical editing style of narrative filmmaking Miinsterberg
discerned the perfection of a mental machinery of spectator subjectivity. It was
simply logical, then, that Miinsterberg saw the future progress of the "photo­
play" to be bound up with the evolution of the classical style of cutting and
framing as well as performative and scriptwriting refinements.
~sequent historians and critics have Ia'l!eJy agreed with Miinsterberg
. whose insistence that the technology is but an outer shell that needs to be
informed by animating principles and whose contention that films are not
1980),
21. Ibid., 17.
22. Ibid., 65.
.$?­
 shaped to outer realities but to aesthetic forms achieved by editing already, in
1916, layout the basic conceptjons oHillB themy tOward Which lliauy tUm apol- .....
ogists have gravitated. Indeed they exert tremendous pull toward what Andrew
~s "the formative tradition" of theories of cinema. 23 In these theories, film
artists are seen as those selfaware masters of cinema who shape the inert tech­
nical medium into an art with certain aesthetic potentials and resistances. Film
art is to be defined against the "primitive objectivity" that was earliest film's
main characteristic, and in accord with some theorization of the cognitive or
emotional subjectivity of the viewer. 24 Consequently, as Miinsterberg demon-
strated early, beyond the Griffith Revolution in which editing figured so impor­
tantly in installing classical narrative, a psychology of film viewing is entailed
in establishing "aesthetic principles" for film art. 25
If it seems I have veered away momentarily from film history toward con­
sidering theory, I do so with regard for deliberate statements by film theorists,
like Mfinsterberg, of their suppositions about cinema's aesthetic telos. Conven­
tional film historians instead rely on unthought theory and in so doing deploy
unself-reflexive assumptions in constructing cinema's career in time, and these
suppositions are allowed to serve as causal explanations. Even a preliminary
diagnosis of the symptoms of such a procedure makes evident the flaw in this
a~sthetic film history, whose inherent telos lacks the sufficiently various sense
of causality expected of proper historiography whatever its object of research.
Convention ry IS a myt ecause It POSI - aused
principle of film art and, to a sur risin de ree, negle
I conte and factors involved in film's development. 1­
cizing aesthetic film history, omery propose In p ace of such an
('.
-,'-,-,
account a history that pays attention to the actual material and social exis­
tence of film located in time. This proposal is what has come to be called "a
23. Andrew, Major Film Thearits, 11-13.
24. Rudolf Amheim, Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), passim.
25. In the Gennan theoretical tradition exemplified by Miinsterberg and Arnheim, the viewer would
be theorized along the model of Gestalt psychology; in the Soviet silent tradition, Formalism and
~Iovlan psychology were uneasily combined. See, for example, Peter Wollen, "Eisenstein's aesthet­
iCJ" in Signs and MeaninB in the Cinema (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1969).
new historicism" in cinema studies, and its pivotal initial area of investigation
is early cinema. 26
I would like to emphasize why historians push the invention and early phase
of film into the anteroom of cinema's history; it too is symptomatic: they
assume that the proto-cinema and early films have no aesthetic significance.
,Given their scientific and contraptional genesis, the first film machines were,
according to conventional film history, a neutral, purposeless technology.
The prodigy arose outside art, outside even a consciousness of art. "Under the
~ aegis of science," film was not even "a medium," as Robinson says, because it
came into the world without legitimate parentage. Its potentials needed to
be reformed, filled in and drawn out, and this could happen only after artists,
and specifically narrative filmmakers of a certain type, exemplified by the
"Father of Hollywood," became conscious of those potentials. The invention
of'cinema was radically contingent in respect to art, and the early cinema, says
Rhode, "hovered between life and death" like a shivering orphan out of a
Dickensian novel. Waiting for its artistic career to begin, the illegitimate waif
of technology fell into bad company and developed questionable morals in the
era of penny arcades and second-string music halls. Film does not feel the pull
of i'ts narrative destiny strongly enough until, after brief stints in the foster
homes of Melies, Porter and the other "primitives," the orphan is adopted by
its firm stepfather, Griffith, who secures a proper education for the foundling.
.'
26. Elsaesser, Early Cinema, 3-4.
2 Counter-Myths: Apparatus Theory, A New
Historicism, Structural Film

Against the p ~ that has undergirded conventional film history

three quite '(rrtferem\ounter-myths have arisen. The first is a new thrust in
French film theory usually called apparatus theory, after the articles published
by Jean-Louis Baudry and Jean-L;uis' Comolli i~ the early 1970S.1 As Philip
Rosen has explained, this writing marked a shift from the analysis of films as
"textual systems," which predominated in structuralist semiotics of the cin­
ema during most of the 1960s, toward considering the cinematic apparatus, in
the twin sense of the movie-machine (appareil) and the sense of arrangement,
device or disposition (dispositif).2
JThe second counter-myth arose out of the 1978 conference of the Federa­
tion Internationale des Archives du Film (F1AF), held at Brighton, in South
England. On this occasion, which has come to be called the Brighton Project,
an international gathering of film scholars examined and discussed a large body
of films from the "primitive period." The conference proved to be extraordi­
narily productive and led, during the 1980s, to a remarkable and thorough reex­
amination of early cinema now referred to as the ~lm hiftorjciW Two
consequences were a vastly more detailed empirical nowledge of the period
and new standards set for subsequent historiographical research on film. Al­
though still in process, the Brighton group's work also offers an exemplary
demonstration of how new models of cultural history can lead to remaking
accepted structures offilm history.>

I. The first important article, Jean-Louis Comolli, "Technique and Ideology: Camera, Perspective,
Depth ofField," was originally published in the French journal Les Cahiers du Cinema (1971), and trans­
lated in Cahiers du Cinema, 1969-1972: The Politia of Representation, ed. Nick Browne (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1990). Most of the key essays are anthologized in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha,
ed., Apparatus: CinematoBraphic Apparatus: Selected WritinBs (New York: Tanam Press, 1980); Philip
Rosen, ed., Narrative, Apparatm, ldeoloBY: A Film Theory Reader (New York: Columbia University Pc.,..,
1986), 281-374; and Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath, eds., The Cinematic Apparotus (London:
Macmillan, 1980).

2. Rosen, Narrative, Apparatus, ldeoloBY' 282.

3. Eileen Bowser, "The Brighton Project: An Introduction," Q!Jarterly Reviow of Film Studios 4 '(Fall
1979): 508-538. Also see Thomas Elsaesser, "General Introduction" to Early Cinema: Spocc/FratqU ,
Narrative (London: OFI Publishing, 1990),5-6.
 J {~l
;~':~;/;,
The third counter-myth is__fexpressed in.a slen~t important gr~g
of films made by primarily British, American and Canadian experimental (ibri.
m~rs tllat directly address_the body of work kl)own as primitive fiI~. These
works disclose artistic dimensions of early cinema often ignored by the con­
ventional critical accounts, which have sought aesthetic value only in narra­
tive foreshadowings. There are significant precedents in the early films of Rene
Clair, for example, Entr'acte (1924), and in Joseph Cornell's filmmaking begun
in the thirties. Moreover, as Tom Gunning, Thomas Elsaesser and Standish
Lawder have suggested in different ways, the primitive era played an occasional
but important part in the imagination of early modernist art movements, like
4
Cubism. However, the avant-garde's direct interest in early cinema remained
sketchy until the 1960S when some experimental artists began to incorporate
early films into their work. Notably, this occurred during the moment avant­
garde filmmakers marked a decided redirection of their attention toward the
perceptual and material parameters of cinema, a development that came to be
called structural film. s During the structural period, from the 19 0S into the 6 pulsating with movement and light, is interpreted by James as a negative sign
eighties, a significant number of filmmakers created films that paid attention
to cinema's first era, including: Ken Jacobs, Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son (19 6 9);
Hollis Frampton, Public Domain (1972), Gloria! (1979), Cadenza # I (1977-80 );
Ernie Gehr, Eureka (1974) and History (1974); Al Razutis, Visual Essays: Orioins
of Film (1973-84); and Malcolm Le Grice, After Lumiere (1974).
There are sharp disjunctions between apparatus theory and the new his­
toricism and between both of these and avant-garde cinema which should not
be underestimated. Although the intention of the apparatus theorists is both
historical and materialist, and while they do seek to overturn linear models of
historiography, their focus remains an analysis of the basic machinery of cin­
ema; accordingly, I will discuss how although their writing touches on proto­
cinema, their interest does not extend to early film. In contrast, the revisionist
4. Tom Gunning, "An Unseen Energy Swallows Space: The Space in Early Film and Its Relation to
American Avant-Garde Film," in Film Before Griffith, ed. John L. Fell (Berkeley: University of Califomia
Press, 1983); 355-366; Thomas Elsaesser, "Dada/Cinema?" in Dada and Surrealist Film, ed. RudolfE.
Kuenzli (New York: Willis Locker & Owens, 1987), 13-27; Standish D. Lawder, The Cubist Cinema (New
,"ork: New York University Press, 1975).
s. P. Adams Sitney, "Structural Film," Film Culture 47 (Summer 1969): 1-10.
<,,;
historians rely largely on empirical research; while semiotics has entered into
many of their examinations of early films, their enterprise has often been seen
as a turn away from film theory in the 1980s.6 Finally, while some authors
associated with apparatus theory and some of the new film historians have cited
the importance of experimental films, the discourse of avant-garde cinema does
_not, in the main, share much with contemporary film theory or the new film
historicism. Relationships among the three counter-myths, therefore, need to
be amplified and clarified, and, to some degree, allowed to remain speculative.
As I suggested in the cases of Jacobs's Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son and Gehr's
Eureka, the avant-garde is fascinated with the origins of their art, however
unattainable and even mysterious these prove to be. It has been suggested, by
David James among others, that structural film pursues a reductionist project
akin to developments in Minimal Art. An example of this interpretation is how
Gehr!s History (1974) has been taken to exemplify a refusal of the historical in
structural film. The minimalist gesture of Gehr's work, consisting of film grain
of history's traumas, or further, as the refusal of a purified cinema to admit
history 7 or to participate in the sign-culture altogether. Another interpreta­
tion of History has been suggested by Michael Snow, whose declaration of"[a]t
last, the first filml,"8 contains the ironical comment that Gehr's work is the
sign of what history has offered the film artist; this material emulsion, this flat
surface and this electrical light that shimmer in the dance of History as the phan­
tasm of an originary potential.
Apparatus theorists, the new historians and structural filmmakers share an
- ::==;;::;;=:=== ­
6. Tom Gunning, "Film History and Film Analysis: The Individual Film in the Course of Time," Wide
Angle 12 (July 1990): 4-19.
7. David E. James, AHegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1989), 263-264 and especially 277.
8. "If this film and the experience of seeing it are fiction?/ It is very close to a reflection on the medium
alone.! It is projected, one projects.! A grainstorm. Absolute.
"I'd like to say more but words fail me. This film is historically reductive. That won't do. One makes
choices. Choices are made. The opacity has been tapped, the black quivers, the matter is set in motiOn.
There is light. It's primeval, pre-historic. At last, the first film! It trembles in the eye-brain. Unlqlle;~
(Michael Snow, Film-Makers' Cooperatiye Catalogue, vol. 7 (New York: The New American CinemaGt-oup,
1989), 188. .
interest in isolating parts of film technology but none recognize the minimal
moment of origins. A film like History is inconceivable as a ·primitive work for
only high modernism knows how to engage the reflexive ritual of reduction
to produce minimalist work. Early cinema is itself not without occasional
reflexivity but the example James selects, Uncle Josh at the Picture Show (1902)­
in which a rube is fooled into believing the images he sees on a movie screen
and eventually tears it down - posits, as Miriam Hansen argues, an era and a
viewer more naive than itself.
Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell have suggested that apparatus theory
serves as a preparation of a new film historicism by providing a critique of the
unthought theory underlying conventional film history and by sketching an
agenda for a new materialist study of film. 9 They offer this remark on Comolli's
inaugural essays on the apparatus:
He criticizes historians who believe in a "treasure house of technique" bur­
ied at the founding of cinema and successively pillaged by filmmakers. He
argues at length against the search for "first times," .... To all these ten­
dencies of linear historiography, Comolli proposes alternatives as well. A
non-linear history will, he believes, be a "materialist" one: not serial cau­
sality but stratified intersections of determinations; not a closed evolution
of technique but an open account of economic and ideological practices;
not teleology and unfolding essences but uneven developments. to
Philip Rosen expands this assessment, claiming that apparatus theory sought to
reopen the account of film history to wider cultural issues of representation
and signification which had a critical role to play in the development of cinema.
"Most of the prominent theorists who have written in this area [of apparatus
theory]," Rosen observes, "have been concerned precisely with the junctures
of film and culture," and they have sought to "map an element of the often
rocky and disjunctive terrain on which we find and construct both the history
9. Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell. "Linearity, Materialism and the Study of Early American
Cinema," Wide Anule 5 (1983): 5.
10. Ibid., 5-6.
3El
of signification in general and the history of filmic signification in particular."11
The new historians do take up a similar agenda but what they derive from
apparatus theorists can be considered topical rather than methodological. Their
work develops along two major intersecting axes. The first is a return to fun­
damental research into primary sources and archival film texts in order to
uncover the social and economic patterns of early cinema's audiences, condi­
tions of exhibition, filmmakers' biographies and related conditions of produc­
tion. This research leads to crossovers of economic and industrial history with
~ocial and cultural history. It shows much about the organization of the film
industry, particularly in the United States, and offers an "open account of eco­
'nomic and ideological practices," a task that Thompson and Bordwell observe
Comolli proposes but leaves undone. 12 The second axis consists of meticulous
applications of semiotic models in order to identify the basic types of signifi­
cation that prevailed in the early cinema. These studies, especially those con­
ducted by Noel Burch, Tom Gunning and Andre Gaudreault, show how early
, film developed as a distinctive set of cinematic practices, from the single­
shot films of the prototypical Edison Company and the Lumieres, into more
varied forms. These analyses overturn conventional ideas of inevitable or uni­
""directional progress.
Although these two axes running through new histories of the early period
~e distinct types of scholarship, the second, semiotic-analytical writing, is en­
folded within empirical-historiographical research. At a high level of general­
,itation, therefore, it is plausible to characterize the new historians as equally
~ pursuit of apparatus theory's agenda (as per Rosen) of the "juncture of film
'and culture" in its earliest period, concerned to "construct ... the history of
Rosen, Narrative, Apparatus, IJeaJoBY' 282-283.
Thompson and BordwelL uLinearity, Materialism," 6.
filmic signification in particular." When the highly theoretical approach of the
apparatus theorists is compared to the rather guarded and specific work of the
new historians, however, differences loom large. My initial purpose here is to
put those differences in context.
Apparatus theory's initial period of formulation corresponded to the trans­
formation of the leading French film journal, Cahiers du Cinema, between 1969
and 1972.13 As a film theory, it served as the last corner on the French edifice
whose foundation was begun by Andre Bazin in the late 1940S and redesigned
by the cinema semiotics of Christian Metz two decades later. Inspired by the
writings of the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, apparatus theory took the
form of a polemic against key doctrines of conventional film history and the­
ory, including evolutionism, teleolooyand technoloOism.
~tltioni5i11 1efers to the axiom that anything tiiatContes iute b8ing deyel­
~s na~ally from origins seminally there in the first place. In the most con­
kntional film"llfstory, an atemporal property of the medium is said to be
discovered and made manifest as film art develops beyond a primitive phase.
Most often editing is valued as the essential cinematic property which devel­
ops along with narrative, and it is taken for granted that film art inheres in the
narrative use of film editing. Comolli develops an oppositional example, in
which the long take composed in deep focus cinematography is regarded, in
Bazin's revisionist theory, as the principal stylistic device of the development
of film style. For Bazin, montage-although historically necessary-was basically
an accretion on the essence of film, which he takes to be photographic real­
ism. Over the course of film's evolution, montage gives way to the realist heart
of film taken to be a process of refinement in which the essence of the medium
comes to manifestation. 14
Teleology is the same essentialist assumption but made from the opposite
poin~view, at the endpoint of an evoJ"tiowa.;rp~8eess that ICiElals jnbereRt
.­
prop~jes nid ta.1Lethere.from the ~_t~rt. In this case, a selective history is
13. This period has rarely been described as carefully as it is by Nick Browne in his introduction to the
recent anthology of key texts, Cahiers du Cinema, 1969-1972: The Politics of Aepresentation. The volume
includes the seminal text of apparatus theory, Comolli's "Technique and Ideology," 213-247.
14. Andre Bazin, "The Evolution of the Language of Cinema," in What is Cinema?, vol. I, compo and
trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967); Cornolli, "Technique and Ideology,"
235-238.
40
Instructed to show one property of the medium (moving inexorably) across
,rse historical contexts toward an achieved perfection. In the case of editing,
:,'conventional histories-Griffith at the dawn of Hollywood, Eisenstein in
let cinema, Gance at the peak of French silent film production-each film
·t is lifted out of his concrete circumstances and placed along an assumed
ctory. Comolli criticizes Bazin for constructing a discussion of deep focus
in a similar teleological model that maps its rise through Erich von Stro­
's Greed (1924), Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game (1938), Orson Welles's
'n Kane (1941) and William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives (1946).
The most pertinent and, as it happens, the most elaborate and sustained
que of the apparatus theorists is directed at technologism. In the form in
h it is most frequently encountered, technologism prizes technology as
heritance of science. In conventional histories, film is depicted as a basic
,ratus free of both ideological and aesthetic valuation due to its proximity
chnological origins. A theorist who has clearly stated technologism's
',unt of film with respect to ideology is Jean-Patrick Lebel, who writes,
'he camera is not an ideological instrument in itself. It does not produce
'specific ideology, any more than its structure inevitably condemns it to
•eflecting the dominant ideology. It is an instrument, and ideologically neu­
al precisely because it is an instrument, an apparatus, a machine. Its basis
scientific and it is constructed on that scientific basis, not accordino to
ideology of representation.... 15
,molli argues, against Lebel's notion of ideological neutrality, that the
a arises not solely as a scientific invention but out of a historical set of
~ines of the visible" with their own ideological tendencies. 16 The film
:d in Comolli, "Technique and Ideology," 217.
..,-Louis Cornolli, "Machines of the Visible," in The Cinematic Apparatus, 121-141.
41
, 'apparatus does not consist only of the technical devices"which preceded, and
were assembled into, cinema (the appareil), but the wider culture of image
making inextricably bound to the history of Western art and ideology that has
both guided representation and shaped all such devices since Leonardo da
,Vinci's camera obscura (the dispositif). As illustration, Comolli specifies the
"qlonocular perspective" of the lens of the movie camera inherited from Ren­
aissance painting. Film is therefore a product of a long, specific, ideologically
charged history of representing human vision in art. And because the techni­
cal development of the camera is an event locatable only within cultural his­
tory, as the lineal descendant of the camera obscura, it cannot be said to have
been invented on the basis of atemporal scientific principles. Instead, tech­
nique intersects with art and ideology on the plane of cultural history, ren­
dering it absurd to speak of a neutral technology of film. The theorist is obliged
to ask how and why the movie camera was developed at the moment it was
within the history that so radically shaped it. Comolli questions the invention
of cinema anew, and offers a perspective on its conditions:
What happened with the invention of cinema? It was not sufficient that it be
technically feasible, it was not sufficient that a camera, a projector, a strip
of images be technically ready. Moreover, they were already there, more
or less ready, a long time already before the formal invention of cinema....
It was necessary that something else be constituted, that something else be
formed: the cinema machine, which is not merely a combination ofinstru­
ments, apparatuses, techniques.... A dispositif was required... : an arrange­
ment which givers] apparatus and techniques a social status and function. 17
Film, then, can be understood as an ideological and social machine from the
beginning-or rather, from before the beginning-since this dispositif, the place
prepared socially including economics and the state of culture, was as neces­
sary as its technical components to the invention of film. Understanding the
birth of cinema must be opened up to what Thompson and Bordwell term
"stratified intersections of determinations,"IB or, as Stephen Heath summarizes
Comolli's argument:
1
17. Ibid., 121-122.
18. Thompson and Bordwell, "Linearity, Materialism," 6.
,42
:"'The fantasy of the conventional histories with their autonomous instance of
!i(technology and their endless problem of the 'invention' of cinema is exactly
\~that cinema exists in the technological; cinema, however, is not a techno­
"igical invention but a multiply determined development, a process...
inema does not exist in the technological and then become this or that
, tactice in the social; its history is a history of the technological and social
,t>gether, a history in which the determinations are not simple but multi­
,Ie, interacting, in which the ideological is there from the start. 19
.c'lllolli proceeds to outline a program of historical analysis that would
, economics, ideology and "the symbolic" in order to establish the
,eters of this social "cinema machine." But beyond several suggestive
ical forays into particular issues, like the obvious relationship of deep
to perspective, he fell short of developing this program.
'()molli's colleague, Jean-Louis Baudry, expounds on "the symbolic" by
the issue of the spectator-subject on the receiving end of the apparatus
Uustration of cinema's "ideological effect." In this way, Baudry's account
, ~yrnbolic arises from the same question that, as discussed in chapter one,
i. Miinsterberg's notion of film as a psychological phenomenon. Baudry
:,that if the camera inherits the optics of Renaissance perspective, it fol­
at cinema sets up a spectatorial situation for the film viewer similar to
tablished in classic Western painting. He terms this position as that
.ng to a centred "subject."2o This position is an ideal (that is, non-phys­
,. ,hen Heath, "The Cinematic Apparatus: Technology as Historical and Cultural Fonn," in The
Apparatus, 6.
;,Louis Baudry, "Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus." in Apparatus:
'phic Apparatus: Selected Writings, 27-30: see also Kaja Silvennan, The Subject of Semiotics
: Oxford University Press, 1983), 201-222: for a highly critical discussion of Baudry's theory,
yrroll, Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory (New York: Colum­
:ity Press, 1988), 13-32.
43
ical) and individuated simulation of vision (the eye of the single viewer is what
~ecomes idealized). This construction of the ideal-individual viewer position
inherent in the West's culture of visual images is the historical prerequisite
for the cinema machine to operate psychologically as an apparatus. Baudry ana­
lyzes this spectatorial position as a simulation of the account philosopher
Edmund Husserl gives of the "phenomenological subject," whose intentional­
ity provides unity to the diverse stimuli of the senses and synthesizes experi­
ence in meaning. 21 The cinema promotes a similar identification between the
viewer and the camera as the assurance of visual unities for the complex of sig­
nifiers at play in an image, and for signification, the production of the signi­
fied. The identification occurs especially in the simulation of a perceptual
match between the psychologically centring spectator-subject and the com­
positionally centred image accomplished by perspective, the film camera's abil­
ity to position the gaze inherited from classical art. The world seen on the
screen, like that of the classical painting, seems then to be organized around the
spectator's gaze and to achieve rational order for and because of his or her eye.
As an ideological effect (since all this is a simulation, a product of illusion),
the perspectival system to which the camera falls heir already implies the
dispositij of narrative cinema, the famous continuity system which negotiates
the unity between shots and finally across a whole narrative film and guides
the seamless linearity offilmmaking in the classical style. 22
Baudry's point in drawing comparison between cinema and Husserl's phi­
losophy is not to suggest that film's inventors or its early theorists read Husserl
and tried to make films in accord with his ideas; but rather to suggest that film
also had precursors and parallels in Western philosophical thought which give
cinema a cultural function at the level of its basic apparatus. In other words,
'an ideological place was ready in the culture for the production of cinema prior
to the invention of the appareiJ. The impact of this combination of philoso­
phy, art history, economics and psychology on the place of the film apparatus
has gone unconsidered by conventional historians. And so cinema appears as a
neutral technology born accidentally under ,the patronage of science without
21. Baudry. "Ideological Effects ofthe Basic Cinematographic Apparatus," 30-32.
22. As an example of how Baudry gets extended, see Stephen Heath, Q!Jestions of Cinema (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1981), passim.
A4
,an inherent purpose or aesthetic dimension. Instead of recognizing that in the
"
dcs of the lens the movie camera incarnates not sight but an idealization of
viewing subject produced historically, in other words, by an ideology, these
torians misrecognized cinema as the fortuitous arrival of a new technique.
Baudtyalso looks back to Plato's myth of the cave with its prisoners staring
•shadows cast upon the wall, and to Freud's dreamwork for other models of
(,,;
tator subjectivity engendered by the cinematic apparatus, finding both more
,ggestive of how the cinema apparatus really affects its viewers than Husserl's
el of the phenomenological subject. Film merely simulates Husserl's tran­
dental subject while it actually induces a state of mind akin to dreaming. 23
Baudry offers not one but three accounts of the apparatus: he repeats
'molli's.historical version concerning perspective; he proposes a philosoph­
,I account, drawing in Husserl and Plato; and he develops a psychoanalytic
'ount, in which he makes analogies between the viewer's experience of cin­
, ,nd dreaming. This third account, which initially seemed supplemental,
'ed to be so influential that the psychoanalytic analogy displaced other
.ts in Comolli's proposed materialist history of cinema. Apparatus theory
as a critique of the way historians and theorists constructed cinema, but
ry's psychoanalytic analogy overtook these parts of the critique. By the
1970S, and chiefly through Christian Metz's adaptation of Baudry's psycho­
tic anal ogy 24 in The ImaBinary SiBnifier, apparatus theory disappeared
Iy into the famous psychoanalytic "second semiotics of the cinema."25
Jean.Louis Baudry, "The Apparatus," in Apparatus: Cinematonraphic Apparatus: Selected Writinns,
lverman, The Subject of Semiotics, especially 201-222. Silverman ties this development into her
now standard, version of psychoanalytic film theory.
rand Angst, "Metz's Movie" and R. S. Hamilton, "Between the First and Second Semiologies,"
Obscura. 7, 31-41 and 67-86.
45
 3 No Paradise: Perspective, Proto-Cinema and

Modes of Representation

While they argue persuasively that apparatus theory outlines a materialist,

The look in Griffith was not something that had been there since the beginning
of the cinema. There was, first of all, the 20 years during which the cinema was
content merely to be the object of viewing, recording phenomena and move­
ments and the sights of the world. When today we see these early films ... we are
seeing the varied fruits of a cinematic Eden where the coldness and sophis­
tication of the look had not yet penetrated .... A cinema where the only currency
was that of gesture, where the viewers' eyes are functioning but not looking.
-Pascal Bonitzer, "It's Only a Movie," Framework (England) 14:23.
non-linear new historiography of film, Bordwell and Thompson conclude skep"
tically, "Comolli'does not construct an adequate specimen of the materialist
history he calls for ... that [he] has left the task undone suggests that he found
it daunting." However, they add, "there is one researcher ... who has attempted
to show in detail what a materialist history might be."1 That researcher is Noel
Burch, an American who has worked as a filmmaker and critic in France since
his late adolescence. 2 Burch does construct a historically important "speci­
men," isolating significant features of the representational system of early cin­
ema. His m~thod of analysis, derived from both semiotics and apparatus theory
and bridging the latter and contemporary historical research, has informed
much ofthe new historians' critical agenda. Burch also specifies how selected
experimental films are related to early cinema, and although his analysis in this
last respect is limited, his critical imagination is highly suggestive. Like the
theorists before him, Burch regards perspective as a basic issue of the film image
)

in mm history and argues that cinema, and therefore the representation of

vision, arises out of a culturally located history implying fundamental ques­
tions of spectator subjectivity. As I discussed in chapter two, ComoIIi believes
that conventions of representing perspective in Renaissance image-making
". predetermined the way film images would render space for viewers and that
this dispositij charged film ideologically even before its invention. Perhaps
because he offers only limited examples, Comolli discerns no principle by
. which a critic can make distinctions acn;>ss the history of the cinematic image.
: As a result, cinema is seen to arise from Western culture's codes of pictorial

Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, "Linearity, Materialism and the Study of Early American
Cinema," Wide Anale 5 (1983): 6.

For further discussion of Burch's career see Annette Michelson, "Introduction" in Noel Burch. The..
.0" of Film Practice. trans. Helen R. Lane (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1973).

46 47
representation, or, put another way, cinema is-' enfolded by these codes from
it~ very start. The focus of my discussion will be how Burch revises Comolli
. and Baudry by drawing specific attention to the historical sites of proto-cinema
and early film, arguing that the place prepared for cinema is not as tidy as appa­
ratus theory describes.
Burch shows the earliest era of cinema to be a contested site whose repre­
sentational system arises out of intersecting tensions and collisions. In addi­
tion to the dominant cultural master-code of perspective, other competing
codes- notably those emerging from a certain scientific culture, proletarian
habits of representation and those which occur within cinema itself because
it is an art of images in motion - clash with the classical codes of representa­
tion in the first era of film production, giving rise to what Burch terms the
Primitive Mode of Representation (PMR). As a result, Burch establishes the early
cinema precisely as a different or alternative cinema, a cinema possessed of a
definable otherness.
Both before and since the Brighton conference, Burch has produced a series
of overlapping essays and films in which he develops concepts of the differ­
ence of early cinema. 3 The most important ofthe films is Correction Please, or,
How We Got into Pictures (1979), an experimental essay into cinema's historical
development that encapsulates Burch's critical research. Although it is an idi­
osyncratic amalgam of pedagogy and pastiche, Correction Please is related to the
4 tal performance frame. After Lumiere re-stages this simple action from four
late "theory-film" phase of structural/materialist cinema. The film suggests
3. Noel Burch's major writings on early cinema are: UPorter, or Ambivalence," Screen 19 (Winter
1978/79): 91-105; "Charles Baudelaire versus Doctor Frankenstein," AfterimaBe 8/9 (Winter 1980/81):
4-21; "Un mode de representation primitif?," Jris 2 (1984): 113-123; "Passion poursuite," Communications
38 (1983): 30-50; "How we got into Pictures: notes accompanying Correction Please," AfterimaBe 8/9
(Winter 1980/81): 24-38; "Film's Institutional Mode of Representation and the Soviet Response," October
11 (Winter 1979): 77-96; "A Parenthesis on Film History." in To the Distant Observer: Form anJ.MeaninB
in the Japanese Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 61-66; "Primitivism and the Avant­
Gardes: A Dialectical Approach," in Narrative, Apparatus, IdeoloBY' ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Col urn:
bia University Press, 1986),483-506; Life to those Shadows, trans. and ed. Ben Brewster (Berkeley: Uni­
versity of California Press, 1990), 243-266. See also "Fritz Lang: German Period," in Vol. 2 of Cinema:
A Critical Dictionary: The Major Film-makers, ed. Richard Roud (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1980),
583-599; Noel Burch and Jorge Dana, "Propositions," AfterimaBe 5 (Spring 1974): 40-66.
4. See Rod Stoneman, "Perspective Correction: Early Film to the Avant-Garde," AfterimaBe 8/9 (Win­
ter 1980/81): 50-63. Stoneman draws out some of the obvious connections between Burch's Correction
Please and the films of the "structural/materialist" school. The key critical writings of this school are
-48
a double affinity between Burch's work with, on the one hand, experimental
cinema and, on the other, the new historicism.
In the 1970s, British experimental filmmakers allegorized theoretical ques­
tions using highly reflexive formalist studies in order to bring under scrutiny
specific issues of cinematic representation. Among the most rigorous of these
British films dealing with early cinema is Malcolm Le Grice's After Lumiere
(1974)' The film re-stages the early Lumiere single-shot comedy L'Arroseur arrose
(1895)' In the original, a boy steps on a gardener's hose; the man looks into
the nozzle just as the boy releases his foot and is sprayed. Angered, he chases
and spanks the boy as the film ends abruptly. Aside from foreshadowing a favour­
ite genre of early cinema, the "bad boy comedy," L'Arroseur arrose presents fea­
tures of film space in early cinema that Le Grice's film sets out to analyze.
There are mainly three: flattened planes of action (the illusion that the boy is
behind the man is at best schematic); an immobile camera that cannot yet artic­
ulate off-screen space (the brief chase falls out of view); and a completely fron­
different angles, each suggesting compositional tactics more complex than the
previous one. The last shot, in which the image switches from black-and-white
to colour, positions the viewer in an interior from which the boy and the gar­
dener can be watched in deep space and, at the same time, in the foreground a
woman can be seen playing a piano. s
gathered in Structural Film AntholoBY, ed. Peter Gidal (London: BFI Publishing, 1976). The idea of the
"theory film" is my own and it seeks to describe the development of a theoretically grounded illustrational
type of experimental filmmaking, a type that becomes increasingly programmatic and dependent on the­
ory in the course of feminist avant-garde filmmaking which grew out of the British structural/materialist
school. The idea is developed in an unpublished paper, "From Avant-Garde to Counter-Cinema," delivered
at the Film Studies Association of Canada annual conference, held at Queen's University, Kingston,
Ontario, June 1988.
5. Burch discusses After Lumiere very briefly in his "Primitivism and the Avant-Gardes/' 502.
 Le Grice's repetitions bring to the surface issues of filmic space which were
arguably unconscious in the Lumiere original. After the film has drawn out the
potentialities of this primitive tableau into a series of articulations of screen
space, the final shot constructs a double-plane (e.g., foreground mid-shot,
deep-space long shot) point-of-view shot in deep focus. This compositional
strategy of later classical cinema historically installed perspective in the film
image. In the details of its mise en scene this final image also alludes to Dutch (1922) .•. and, finally, the era of 'canned theatre', insofar as it is that of so
and Flemish interior paintings, instancing the classical painterly codes from many films made between 1929 and today.7
which cinema derived its depth compositions. An elegant and allusive essay
Burch draws from these five stages specific cinematic codes - camera placement,
into apparatus theory, After Lumiere uses a serial form to tease out spatial com­
cutting, sight-line matching and, finally, sound - that exemplify steps in the
plications from a radically simple mise en scene, reworking one ofthe first films
development of film language toward what critics commonly refer to as the
into a geneological exposition of the cultural usages in which the film appara­
classical narrative style.
tus comes to be enmeshed.
Among contemporary film historians, Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson typ­
Aware of its connection to films like Le Grice's, Ian Christie calls Correc­
ically place the successful development of the classical style around 1917,8
tion Please a "playful allegory" that tells the fall "of the early cinema from inno­
although they go on to trace later refinements - for example, those brought
cence to domination ... brought about by the seductive codes of match cutting
about in..1h,t.,German cinema of the 1920S, which for Burch is represented by
and synch sound."6 The historical allegory is apparent in the five dramatic ::-:---::-~~~-=-"--r-"""-~'
I~ ill.abuse. While Burch's historical model matches theirs, he prefers
scenes that punctuate the film to convey a slender fiction: an early British
the terminJogylnstitUtiOn Mode of Representation (IMR) over "classical style"
filmmaker, James Williamson, visits the Countess Skladanowsky. Attended
in order to emphasize that this style never belongs uniquely to cinema. He
by her archly sinister servants, the Countess seduces the boyish Williamson
stresses it is the result of what he calls the "reconstitution" of the representa­
into somnambulism. Rather like the reworking of the abrupt comedy in After
tional conventions of nineteenth-century bourgeois realist theatre, painting
. Lumiere, Burch's staged encounter is serialized into five remakes, each one of
and Iiterature- in other words, the codes of Western classical culture in the
which uses a progressively more complex style of filmmaking; however, Burch's
specific state of play that is proximate enough to impinge on the new medium
progression is more programmatically historical. As Burch explains in the fol­
of film.
lowing note, each version of the scene corresponds to one of five successive
The primitive cinema ended, therefore, not because the internal evolu­
stages of narrative filmmaking, demonstrating changes in shooting and cutting
tion of film form permitted it, and not because the apparatus arose from a cul­
in the development of film language:
tural ground prepared by traditional art, as the apparatus theorists contend.
For the record, I should indicate that ... the periods alluded to in the five In Burch's view it was instead the result of an historical intervention, "deter­
sequences staged by me are: the mature primitive years (ca. 1905), Griffith's mined by the necessity- ideological, but also directly economic- to reconsti­
middle period at Biograph (ca. 1910), the more mature films which Reginald
Barker made for Thomas Ince (ca. 1915), Fritz Lang's Mabuse dyptich [sic]
7. Burch, "Notes accompanying Correction Please," 24.

6. Ian Christie, upreface" to "How We Got into Pictures: notes accompanying Correction Please," 8. David Bordwell. Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: film Style
Afterimage 8/9 (Winter 1980/81): 22. and Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1985), 157.

50 51
tute, in the new area of cinema, the codes" of the "lnstitution."9 Precipitated
particularly by the recession of 1905, which reduced working-class attendance,
the film industry decisively began to make films in which the middle class
would recognize their contemporary culture. Such a recognition depended
upon economic and cultural intrusions and reactions, and therefore its devel­
opment occurred gradually; nonetheless, starting in 1906, cinematic represen­
tation moves closer to Burch's notion of the Institution. After this date, films
are made, evaluated and consumed by the bourgeoisie alongside realist painting,
fiction and theatre. By 1917, the IMR is basically already in place-as Bordwell,
Staiger and Thompson also point out-and what follows, for example the sound
cinema, completes by 1929 the generation of a fully classical narrative style.
The dramatic scenes in Correction Please allegorize this history ofthe Insti­
tution's installation of its codes as a psychodramatic sketch: the Countess's
seduction of Williamson by hypnosis. Between these serialized scenes, Burch
interpolates ten early films. These extracts are only roughly matched to the
formal developments of the acted scenes since Burch does not intend to show
a clear evolution. On the contrary, he wants to underscore differences between
the lively primitive films and the closing grip of the IMR emblematized by the
Countess's growing power. As Christie suggests, the allegory of Correction Please
could also be interpreted through Pascal Bonitzer's image, cited above, of a
"cinematic Eden." Bonitzer draws a border between paradise and the Fall using
the distinction between the prelapsarian "seeing" of early films and the cold
penetrating "look" of classical filmmaking. Burch's indicative subtitle, How
We Got into Pictures, tells us to watch how Correction Please extensively refers
to notions of voyeurism, penetration or invasion of space by the eye and iden­
tification between viewer and camera. In setting out the staged scenes and early
'film styles in juxtaposition, Burch also posits a dualism of vision. What lies
between the representational system of the early cinema and the later classi­
cal system of the Institution is a set of material, historical determinants that
shape ways of seeing in the cinema. Composition of the image and editing, the
allegory tells us, have profound effects on spectatorship. They are not the
results of arbitrary aesthetic choices drawn from some timeless storehouse of
9. Burch and Dana, uPropositions," 43.
52
neutral and inherent cinematic techniques, which of course is the major prem­
ise of apparatus theory.
For Burch, the analysis of formal parameters, consideration of their sources
and examination of their effects on the relationship between the spectator and
the filmic spectacle similarly form the basis of his criticism. Whether con­
ducted playfully in Correction Please or more formally in his essays, Burch's anal­
yses orbit the task of distinguishing early cinema's PMR from later cinema's IMR.
He contends early cinema arose as a mode of representation prior to the instal­
lation of perspectival codes; in this way primitive film marks a postponement
of cinema's assumption of the place claimed by the apparatus theorists to have
been prepared for it. The early cinema therefore arguably appears as an alter­
native cinema. This would seem to be the way some critics, like Bonitzer, and
artists in the avant-garde have come to appreciate film's first era.
If Christie is correct in suggesting that Correction Please construes the dif­
ference of primitive film as innocence, an Adam figure out of Bonitzer's Eden
rather transparently personified in the boyish Williamson, then the Countess
'. is a tempting Eve who leads Williamson into an aesthetic Fall from the Gar­
den. In his writings, however, Burch is far more ambivalent about that inno­
"•. cence than he is in making Correction Please. In his later book, Life to those
i~>Shadows (1990), Burch rejects the romantic division of early and classical cinema
~:.·that seems to underwrite Correction
~~~"J
Please: "I no longer really see the primi­
~;I,>tive cinema as a 'good object' on the grounds that it contains countless 'pre­
,~;;:tigurations' of modernism's rejection of classical readerly representation." 10
'''':Slsewhere, Burch more explicitly questions the attitude "linked more or less
',to the notion that the primitive cinema was a sort of Paradise Lost, 'regained'
today thanks to the various avant-garde movements."11 These rejections can
Noel Burch, Ufe to those Shadows. 198.
Burch, "Porter, or Ambivalence," 92.
53
 be divided into two related parts: he denies early cinema is innocent; and he
<:riticizes attempts to align early cinema and the avant-garde on the basis of
. their difference from classical film style. These rejections are framed in a
manner that merits some interrogation of Burch's project, for they pertain not
'just to the avant-garde's relationship with primitive film, but to any new his­
tOriography of the period.
In a programmatic essay called "Propositions," Burch outlines a set of
graded distinctions between the IMR and alternative filmmaking across film
, history.12 Most of Burch's writing follows that program and seeks to discern
, alternative cinemas that have arisen despite the historical hegemony of classi­
(:al narrative cinema. His first important essays, written for Cahiers du Cinema
and assembled as Theory of Film Practice analyze selected European art films as
alternatives to what he initially called the "zero point of cinematic style."13
A dmilar argument guides Burch in his study ofJapanese films, To the Distant
,Observer .14 His critical position is simple and broad: posed alongside the clas­
, :sical style there are, whether by cultural difference (Japan) or directorial sen­
;, ~, ,
'i, ~;bility (for example, Carl Dreyer's films), cinemas possessed of a discernible
l' o,therness. These cinemas serve as historical points of resistance to the domain
of the Institution that Burch analyzes formally at the level of their "specific
, ,codes of representation." IS
His analysis of early cinema is similar to these critical studies: Burch seeks
, to show that early cinema as a whole is an alternative cinema, and distinguishes
it,S PMR from the IMR as a formal and signifying system with its own stability
"and aesthetic integrity. Of course, since these films came before the hegemony
'oftheJMR, primitive films cannot be seen as an alternative cinema in the term's
',usual sense; nonetheless, the primitive era was significant in forestalling and
q\l"Hfying bourgeois cultural dominance over the new medium. The persua­
siveness of Burch's argument has succeeded in establishing early cinema as' a
. diB"e..el1t cinema and exerting tremendous influence in forming the agenda of
,the new historians.
12. Burchan4l>ana, "Propotitions." passim.
u. Bur<:h. Theorl tJf Film Practice, xix.
14. Burch, 10 tb~ Distant Obu1'Y~r.
15. Burch and Dana...Proposition.... 42.
54
Burch's argument, however, does not include the claim that the primitive
mode was innocent, nor that early cinema was closer to the essence of film
and therefore manifested an aesthetic state of grace closer to the medium's pri­
mal origins. From the start, Burch believes, "The Primitive era was essentially
contradictory, it was the scene of a constant confrontation."16 On one side, this
claim leads Burch to revise Comolli's view that cinema had a place determined
for it by cultural history. As I noted above, perspective remains fundamental
for Burch, but it actually serves as a stress point in distinguishing the PMR and
the. IMR. Just why and how did the first filmmakers postpone the reconstitution
of perspective? This question guides a great deal of Burch's discussion. In gen­
eral, he answers that the collective representational habits of surviving nine­
teenth-century proletarian culture, discernible in the films of primitives like
Melies, Haggar, Zecca, Porter and Hepworth, led to the formulation of a dis­
tinctive style of film images. The picture postcard, political cartoons, non­
bourgeois theatre, folktales, and other proletarian forms were the sources and
the early filmmakers recast them into a distinct system of film usages that owed
comparatively little to the serious bourgeois culture of the period.
Before pursuing Burch's analyses of proto-cinema and selected early films,
a pursuit in which other scholars will contribute, it is timely to ask why Burch
rejects early cinema as a harbinger of modernism in film. His general proposi­
,tion suggests that all forms of alternative filmmaking should have a natural
bond with one another. Moreover, Burch is aware that modern artists have
long regarded film with ambivalence. 17 As I discuss later, historians like Tom
Gunning and Thomas Elsaesser clarify this ambivalence in the imagination of
the avant-garde. For now, it is enough to say that modernists saw in cinema a
harbinger of the modernity that their work in traditional media like paint and
16. Burch, "Primitivism and the Avant~Gardes/' 490.
17. Burch. Ufe to thos< Shadows, 58-60, also see author's n. 6, 76-77.
55
verse sought to express, but that they felt disappointed by the degree to which
film absorbed the conventions of realist theatre and fiction, thus obviating
its newness.
One contemporary solution to this ambivalence is to see primitive films
as an anticipation of modernist film practice on the negative grounds that they
were not realist, classical films. When Burch refuses to regard early cinema as
a "good object" or as a lost paradise, it is, first of all, because the early films ,thing but indifferent to experimental filmmakers who collegially improvise
do not participate in such an abstract modernism by dint of their innocence. upon the primitive mode. Not only has he done so himself, with Correction
Burch calls such hypotheses "simplistic conflations."18 He also objects to the Please, but he has, for example, devoted attention to Jean Cocteau's recourse
notion that cinema took a wrong turn when it gained a classical narrative style to primitive modes in making Ie sana d'un poete (1930), suggesting "he may have
and must, through the avant-garde film, return to innocence. His characteriza­ been the first modernist film maker to have turned deliberately to primitive
tion of this position is quite polemical: strategies as an 'antidote' to those of the Institution."21 And he has repeatedly
incorporated Ken Jacobs's Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son (1969) as an intertext of his
This dichotomous ideology-the Institution as bad object, primitivism and
discussion of early cinema. 22 As modern artists, Cocteau and Jacobs consciously
modernism as good object - has also given rise to the idea that film history
ero~s the threshold back toward early cinema, moving through specific differ­
might have been-Le., should have been-different somehow, and that the
; erices of film language. If, as I remarked earlier, in the prelude, Jacobs does
Muses were only waiting for the New American Cinema to come along and
'entertain a myth of plenitude with respect to Tom, Tom, the avant-garde artist
set cinema back on the path of adventure from which it had veered when
,$imultaneously renders that myth ironically; that is, without falling under the
the shadow of Griffith fell upon it. I am afraid that I can only qualify such
Jantasy that early films are compliant with modernism.
a viewpoint as childish. 19

Burch's position is that early cinema is different on its own terms and because
of particular social roots impossible for the avant-garde to share. That said,
his polemic against the avant-garde affection for the primitive era cannot dis­
guise the fact that it is an ideology no more "dichotomous" than his own argu­
ments distinguishing the PMR and the IMR. Moreover, while Burch regards the
avant-garde as another alternative filmmaking, not some return to imaginary
innocence, he returns often to the pedagogical importance of experimental
filmmaking which, he says, "has made it possible for us today simply to read
many of the phenomena encountered in the earliest films."2o Finally, while he
rejects an idealist account of alternative cinemas that would see them as aligned
because they are different from the dominant style of filmmaking, Burch is any­
18. Burch, "Primitivism and the Avant~Gardest" 484.
,'he main thrust of Burch's writing on early cinema, as I have indicated. is to
,tablish its difference. Burch claims that the cultural sources of early cinema
rive in part from proletarian popular culture. However, the owners and oper­
rS'of the nascent film industry from the start were bourgeois, seeking to
sure that the content of early films hewed close to their middle-class views.
reh explains,
It is tempting to regard the system of representation at work in the vast
majority offilms produced during cinema's earliest period (which we may
,,' ,situate between 1892 and 1906) as an authentically working-class system,
"in opposition to not only the bourgeois novel, theater and painting of the

19, Ibid., 50S. ,Ibid., 499.

2,0. Ibid., 485. Ibid., 502. Also see Burch, Life to those Shadows, 150-160, for example.

56
57
 nineteenth century, but also an institutional mode of representation as it
was to develop after 1906...•
However, much of the otherness of the films of this era is patently over­
determined, often due to the contradiction between the aspirations-con­
scious and unconscious- of middle-class inventors and entrepreneurs on the
one hand and the influence of such plebeian or otherwise "alien" art forms
as the circus, the carnival sideshow, the picture postcard, or the lantern That "something else" was the PMR, and though eventually the immunity failed
show on the other. 23 and the Institution rapidly subsumed cinema, a whole era of filmmaking arose
in the hollow that contradiction created. Burch establishes its historical dif­
The primitive film was, then, a contested site not only because the cul­
ference along the perimeter of the PMR, defined, as the term suggests, by dis­
tural codes of the Institution were at odds with the representational modes
tinguishing it from the formal system of the IMR later installed within cinema.
of the working-class patrons of film, but also because its dramatic "sub­
The historical border between the two remains the Griffith Revolution, but
stance" and its cinematic form were sometimes mismatched. Burch details
it now becomes a socio-economic event rather than a discovery of cinema.
this explanation by isolating "three forces or historical and cultural trends
Burch itemizes the basic elements of the classical formal system as centred
which moulded the cinema during its first two decades."24 The first two
, framing, shot-reverse-shot editing, parallel montage, persona (novelistic char­
were the underlying and contradictory sources Burch has just evoked. The
acterization) and camera ubiquity (multiple camera angles and distances are
third, which is divided internally, is scientism. The first, "the aggregate of folk
integrated). Besides what Burch calls the "transparence" and "linearity" used
art kept alive by the urban working classes in Europe and the United States
to characterize the way films become like realist paintings and novels when
at the turn of the century," carried its forms. 25 The second force, contra­
these features of a formal system are established, the psychology of the spec­
dicting the first, was "the underlying pressures exercised by the specifically
tator-subject (as Baudry describes the viewer) is now locked in what Burch calls
bourgeoiS modes of representation."26 Though locked in contradiction, for
a "primal identification" between the viewer's eye and the camera. This iden­
about ten years,
tification gives rise to what Bonitzer terms the "look" (other critics have
The bourgeois ideology of representation ... secured little purchase on the termed it the "gaze"), and Burch retains the sense that the look penetrates the
nascent cinema; one could eyen say that during this so-called Primitive screen, providing an "imaginary journey" into film space much like the way
period the cinema was largely immune to it and that one result of this that mechanisms of perspective permit the eye to travel into the recesses of a
immunity, and of the contradictions it entailed, was the development of painting's spaces. These elements of classical style and new psychological sit­
something else. 27 , uation of the viewer replicate the spectatorial experience of tradi tional paint­
ing and theatre. Comparison between them and features of the PMR make sharp
distinctions analytically specific and historically demonstrable. Such a com­
23. Burch, "Film's Institutional Mode of Representation," 77. See also Burch, "Porter, or Ambiva­ parison provides the structure for Burch's historiographical investigation. Fol­
lence," 92-93.
lowing him, while also pointedly revising him, the new historians' analyses of
24. Burch, UPorter, or Ambivalence," 93.
early films have accepted and extended that structure.
25. Ibid .• 93. See also Burch, Life to those Shadows, 43-75. Burch's account of early cinema necessarily reaches back into the proto­
26. Burch, "Porter, or Ambivalence," 93. cinema and it is here that what he calls the third force, scientism, is chiefly
27. Burch, "Baudelaire venus Frankenstein." 7-8; see also Burch, Life to those Shadows, 70". operative. The role of science is by no means more separate or uniform in the

58
'.'

 invention of cinema for Burch than it is for apparatus theory. Rather, it lodges Athlete. Standing Broad Jump.

from Animal Locomotion 1872-1885

'a double conflict, felt along the twin arcs of film's cycle of invention, photo­
by Eadweard Muybridge

'"graphic reproduction and the analysis of motion. Instead of Comolli's claim

/: that perspective was the main force, Burch argues that the desire for repro­
duction, and the commitment to the analysis of motion, manifest contradic­
tory ideologies.
Andre Bazin once described film's inventors as obsessed with "the myth ideologically bourgeois or "scientistic" than the desire for total representation
, of total cinema." They dreamed of a machine that could make a "total repre­ that underwrites photography. However, the analytical project is rooted rather
'; sentation."28 Burch traces the roots of this myth to the bourgeois fetish for differently, in positivist rationalism. It does not want the world brought under
'photography that Charles Baudelaire attacked so vehemently in his polemic ownership through reproductive images, but possessed through clear and cer­
iigainst photography.29 Out of the massive narcissism of the rising middle classes tain knowledge of a discursive or quantifiable kind. 32 Photography is interest­
iipi'ang the voyeur's desire to own the world with the eyes and even to over­ ing to inventor-scientists such as btienne-Jules Marey or Eadweard Muybridge,
(\~ome death itself. This desire, which Baudelaire both diagnosed and despised, because it supplements the evidence of the senses and aids in the analysis of
~;)~".ped
"~ .
";"
the role photography played in the middle-class consciousness of the what cannot be seen, a matter of historical importance in analyzing motion.
;~l"Q1eteenth century. So, while those involved with the analysis of motion, like Plateau, Muybridge
'1 ..
~;Y'r;i Burch rather more lightly calls it the "Frankenstein ideology."30 Its mani­ and Marey, were no less preoccupied with a proprietary mastery over nature
;,.'t"iations include not just photography's enormous popularity, which gave it or over human labour-Muybridge began his experiments to aid the training
:';;~~
.
.cultural currency in the century's middle classes, but the many exten­
:~ ". '
of race horses, and more generally, the factory management techniques of
, *s~tlS, like Daguerre's diorama and stereoscopy, that course through the cycle Taylorism can often be traced to this work - their particular interests must be
:i}~t:proto-cinema inventions. These extensions, says Burch, reveal even more distinguished from the reproductive stream. 33
i\;0;~.rly the ties photography and its offspring have with the Institution. Not As an example, Burch offers the physiologist Marey's response to the syn­
:H'"
i"~do they vividly manifest class aspirations in their particularities (for exam­ thesis of represented motion underlying the invention of film. Marey, who
(;t~.how the diorama was shaped to bourgeois theatre practice), their forms invented the chronophotographic gun, a rapid-fire camera that could break
,i),'d1'ilgnify the same thing, that perspective is the core of the new photographic down movement into a series of still images, found re-synthesis redundant:
• Perspective, which Burch calls the" 'proprietary' dimension of the
But after all, what they show is what our eyes could have seen directly. They
i~m of spatial representation," is the recurring signifier of the longing for
have added nothing to the potency of our vision, stripped away none of
'\~l representation. 31
our illusions. Now, the true characteristic of a scientific method is to com­
commitment to the analysis of motion is no less obsessive and no less
pensate for deficiencies in our senses or to correct their errors. In order

:,21•. Aftdre Balin, "The Myth of Total Cinema," in What is Cin,ma?, vol. 1, comp, and trans. Hugh Gray

.. (~: University of California Press, 1967), 17-22.

U .. Charles Baudelaire, "The Salon of 1859," in Baudelaire: Selected WritinBs on Art and Arti,ts, trans.

'32. See Michel Foucault, The Order of ThinBs (New York: Random House, 1970),50-77, where Foucault
discusses both the twinship and sharp distinction between subjectivity/representation and discursive cer­
''''',E:Cbanet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972),291-298.

tainty. In making a similar distinction, Burch is really closer to the Husserl of the Crisis in the Euro~an
.'3G;o.,' ,:BUrch, "Baudelaire versus Frankenstein," passim.
Sciences than Baud')' is to his Cartesian Meditations.

It,;I~d.• 7.
33. Burch, "Baudelaire versus Frankenstein," 5; Burch, "Porter, or Ambivalence," 94.

61
 to do this, chronophotography must therefore abandon the representation 4 Early Episodes in the Career of the Gaze:
of phenomena as we see them. 34 Scanning the Primitive Tableau
Marey used his invention to take pictures as an aid to making precise draw­
"i-.gs, He served an ideal of scientific accuracy but was indifferent to reproduc­
Conventional film historians set up a famous dichotomy between Lumiere's
tion. And yet Marey's results, and simultaneously Muybridge's similar studies
realism and Melies's fantasy based on the subject matter preferred by the two
of animal and human locomotion using successive stills, contributed more
French pioneers. Lumiere's films were actualities, single-shot documentary
clirectly to the technical invention of cinema than any other efforts in the era
views while Melies's were "fairies," short magical fantasies. A deeper sense of
'~f inventions.
!I'
the colliding ideological impulses underlying film's genesis pushes the dichot­
;,' .• ' The split within the third force, scientism, is a matter of culture no less
omy a few years back toward an earlier and more telling division, between
;t~n the split between bourgeois high art and proletarian popular forms. In
Edison's fantasies of reproduction, leading to the first implanting of perspec­
/i~s case, however, a divided bourgeoisie culture spawned both the reproduc­
I~~ urge that animated inventors and, working alongside, those caught up in
tive and voyeurism in initial film productions, and Louis Lumiere's analytical
~::, I::': ". _ ' >

strategies, which would, despite the technical fact of the cinematographe's pho­
::~h()mmitment to analysis. Obscured by the technicist myth of neutral and acci­
tographic armature, actually undermine perspective and institute what Noel
i~ntal genesis, the divided scientism of the proto-cinema era exemplifies at
Burch terms the "free-floating scan" of the primitive mode. 1
:.Clcore of the emergent cinema the complex collision of cultural forces staged
i,"'"
Edison did not invent either of the two cinematic devices that were sold
;t~'t~e first years of film production, from 1894 to 1896. In this period, as it
under his name, the kinetoscope and the vitascope. The latter, the first suc­
r:_pens, there were just two groups of filmmakers, those associated with either
,','i:.:."
cessful American motion picture projection machine, was purchased in 1896
"(~~'name Edison or Lumiere, who would act out that first clash of impulses.
by Edison's confederates from Thomas Armat, who was exhibiting it as the
phantascope. 2 The hustle to obtain a projecting film device, rather than con­
tinuing attempts to devise one, was prompted at the Edison Company by news
that negotiations were well underway for the debut of the Lumiere cinemato­
araphe in the United States. Peripheral to the deal, Thomas Edison saw that
his name was fastened to the phantascope, now renamed the vitascope and
manufactured exclusively by his company. The misattribution was to ensure
that when it was being marketed, the public would connect the apparatus to
Edison's fame as "The Wizard of Menlo Park."
Edison was involved, however, in his firm's general development of motion
picture machines. The earlier kinetoscope, although mainly the invention of

I. Noel Burch, To the Distant Observer: Form and MeaninH in the Japanese Cinema (Berkeley: Univer­
sity of Cali fomi a Press, 1979),63.

2. Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison ManufacturinH Company (Berke­
ley: University of California Press, 1991), 58-60; Charles Musser, History of the American Cinema, vol. I,
',Cited In Burch, "Baudelaire versus Frankenstein," 12-13. The EmerHence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1990), 100-115.

63
 his employee, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, was developed and shaped by
Edison's conception. 3 What Edison really sought was completion of his pho­
nograph, a machine that would add pictures to sound. Or, as Burch puts it,
"for Edison, the project of moving photographs arose to supply a defect inher­
ent in the phonoyraph."4 Edison, then, joins the long line of inventors who
expanded one reproductive technology in order to perfect it as the medium
of total reproduction. Just as stereoscopy expanded photography into three­
dimensional illusion, the Edison movie machine was supposed to extend sound
reproduction into another sensory dimension. In fact, Edison's announced
aspiration was far greater:
I believe that in coming years by my work and that of Dickson, Muybridge,
Marey and others ... grand opera can be given at the Metropolitan Opera
House at New York without any material change from the original, and with
artists and musicians long since dead. s
Conventional historians read this statement ironically, hearing the cultural
pretences Edison and other inventors lavished on machines destined soon after
to appear in penny arcades. Disregarding this reading, Burch discerns a deeper
fantasy in Edison's expansive conception. The inventor longs for total rep­
resentation, even to the point of invoking Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk. 6 Simul­
taneously, he entertains a transcendence of death through a reproductive
technique. Burch draws the connection back to Baudelaire's attack on pho­
tography and concludes polemically:
This association of naturalism and a certain petty-bourgeois metaphysics
is a perfect evocation of Edison's character. In him we can locate the point
at which the bourgeois fantasy par excellence ... of the this-worldly non­
finitude ofthe subject, ofthe materialist victory over death, is, as it were,
sublimated in that of total representation, in which spectators overstep the
3. Musser, The Emergence of Cinema, 62-81.
4. Noel Burch, Life to those Shadows, ed. and trans. Ben Brewster (Berkeley: University of California
8. Scott Bukatman, "There's Always Tomorrowland: Disney and the Hypercinematic Experience,"
Press, 1990), 28. Emphasis in original.
9ctober 57 (Summer 1991): 55-78 .
.S. Ibid., 27. Emphasis in original.
6. Burch, UPorter, or Ambivalence," 94.
64
narrow limits of their lives in a communion with "artists and musicians long
since dead," projectinB themselves into the latter's survival. 7
Perhaps Burch exaggerates when he personalizes this as Edison's "character"
but what is pertinent is how a language grew up over sixty years of protO-cin­
ema to make such cultural and metaphysical fantasies the meaningful argot used
by engineers and businessmen advertising their aspirations, and that they very
likely believed. This is the myth-language of "total cinema," recognized first
by Baudelaire and labelled by Bazin. Even today-it expresses the fantasies guid­
ing certain developments in cinema, for example, simulcast television, omni­
max and, according to some accounts, Walt Disney World. 8
In any case, Edison's kinetophone was a technical and commercial failure.
Dickson's realization of the twin kinetograph camera and kinetoscope "peep
show" viewing machine, although lacking sound or projection capacity, suc­
ceeded however, and established the skeleton of American film production and
exhibition. The films that ensued, made by Dickson and the Edison subcon­
tractors Thomas Raff and Frank Gammon during the short interval between
the first kinetograph films in 1893 and commercialization of the Lumieres'
cinematoBraphe in 1896, are taken by Burch to characterize formal usages pre­
monitory ofthe Institutional Mode. 9
As soon as he had a working kinetoscope, Dickson needed a studio to
house the device, particularly because its heavy electrical motor (one of Edi­
son's contributions to the design) made it very cumbersome. He built a rotat­
ing film studio, the Black Maria, a tar-paper-covered building with a glass
roof, which permitted direct sunlight to be cast on the performers recruited
from vaudeville, sports and theatre. 10 Since the tar-paper surfaces made the
backgrounds black and props were kept to a minimum, this arrangement put
subjects in strongly illuminated relief against an empty background. The com­
position of these kinetograph films was intended to ensure maximum visibil·
7. Burch, Life to those Shadows, 28. Emphasis in original.
9. Noel Burch, "Porter, or Ambivalence," Screen 19 (Winter 1978/79): 94-95.
10. Musser, Before the Nickelodeon, 32-56: Musser, The Emergeoce of Cinema, 118-132.
65
ity when the films were run under the peephole aperture of the playback
machine, the kinetoscope. 11
The set-up, lighting and choice of subject matter would seem to have re­
sulted from purely technical considerations. Apparatus theory makes the point,
however, that technical matters are never without significant, and signifying,
effects. The consequence of Dickson's composition of strongly lighted subjects
enclosed in a rigid frame line was that figures appeared in sharp relief within
a strongly centripetal image. In these single-shot films, Dickson-and shortly
Raff and Gammon - heightened the centred composition by using medium shots
(Blacksmith Scene [1893], Annabelle Serpentine Dance [1894], the portrait of a
bodybuilder Sandow [1894] and The Barbershop [1894]) and close-ups (Fred Ott's
Sneeze [1894] and The May Irwin Kiss [1896]). These formal features of the first
Edison productions- figural relief, centred image, close camera distances and,
at the point of reception, solitary spectators hovering over the peephole of the
kinetoscope -prefigure the Institutional Mode's installation of perspective and
its corollary, the voyeuristic look. 12
In summary, Burch contends that Edison's conception of film guides his col­
leagues toward the kinetophonograph, and en route to that ambition Dickson
arrives at the kinetoscope. Although a somewhat unsatisfactory approximation,
the device still mediates the bourgeois ideology of total representation in a
technical process of reproduction. This mediation is exemplary in one crucial
formal aspect: the kinetoscope is already an apparatus for making perspectival
images. Edison's earliest films take the preliminary step toward establishing
what Burch in agreement with Baudry and Christian Metz calls the" 'primal
identification' with the Baze that sees, the gaze that is there, with the gaze of
the camera." 13 When fully armed, the classical style would complete that iden­
tification by extending it across much longer expanses of multi-shot narratives,
and later through realizing the dream of sound. But the Edison films already
actualize a primary element in that identification, the "re-creation on the
II. Ibid.
12. Burch, "Porter, or Ambivalence," 95.
13. Burch, Life to those Shadows, 250. EmphaSiS in original.
66
screen of the perspectival box of the Renaissance." 14 Accordingly, Burch com­
ments that his own analyses of early films show the step-by-step reconstitution
of the spectator-subject in cinema.
In the case of "the gaze that sees," Dickson's replication of perspective can
be said to prove specifically that the voyeuristic look is present in these first
film productions; it is, however, a very peculiar and partial instance of such
a replication. Beyond their centred frame and figure-ground relationships,
Dickson's films lack the other formal supports of a classical style, like camera
movement or editing. Yet, and this is the crux of Burch's argument, their
absence only serves to make the pressure of the gaze more obvious. For in the
isolated single image that constitutes these brief films, the gaze manifests as
an unwavering stare. Further, its voyeuristic pressure leads down a quick road
to ideological self-explication, namely through sexualized spectacles. Burch
speaks of "the erotic vocation of the close-up" in the Edison films with refer­
ence to The May Irwin Kiss, IS a theatrical adaptation reduced to its titular cli­
max. There is also a whole cycle of exotic dances that follow upon Annabelle's
kinetoscope debut in 1894. It is interesting to note that, as Charles Musser has
pointed out, the erotic charge comes as often from the nearly nude males, in
films like the bodybuilder poses in Sandow and the boxing cycle of films that
were the longest and most successful of Edison's first period. 16
However minimal their anecdotal interest, these films are fictions. They
are staged spectacles before the camera of frontally posed performers - boxers,
dancers, gymnasts and actors as well as assorted Edison employees-who inhabit
the curiously abstracted space of a darkened box. The composition secures
the identification of the viewer's captured look into that enclosed space, with
the camera's unwavering stare. There are no accidental departures or chance
entrances within this arrangement that would dislodge the viewer's eye from
watching the centre of interest; such complications will be met often, how­
ever,in the busy and, as Burch argues, centrifugal images of the Lumiere films.
14. Ibid.
15. Referred to as The Kisr in Burch, "Porter, or Ambivalence," 95. See also Musser; The Emergence of
Cinema, 118-119.
16. Musser, The Emeraence ofCinema. 75, 77, 82-85, 94-99.
.'1
 I have lingered over this peculiar but emphatically premonitory episode in
the early career of the gaze because, as it happens, sixty-six years later, avant­
garde filmmaker Andy Warhol recapitulates that episode. In the register of a
self-conscious exaggeration at every level, and especially in respect to tempo­
rality, Warhol makes long films reusing the minimal forms of Dickson's very
short ones. In another enclosed studio, Warhol's celebrated workshop and
social epicentre of the sixties known as the Factory, scenes are arranged and
illuminated to produce a neutral field holding often glaringly lighted perform­
ers in the fixed stare of another immobile camera. Warhol's early films mark
the first conscious turn of the American avant-garde toward a cinematic prim­
itivism. In his citation for the 1964 Independent Film Award, Jonas Mekas draws
direct comparison between Warhol's first productions and the early cinema:
Andy Warhol is taking cinema back to its origins, to the days of Lumiere,
for a rejuvenation and a cleansing. In his work, he has abandoned all the
"cinematic" form and subject adornments that cinema had gathered around
itself until now. He has focused his lens on the plainest images possible in
the plainest manner possible....
A strange thing occurs. The world becomes transposed, intensified,
electrified. We see it sharper than before. Not in dramatic, rearranged con­
texts and meanings, not in the service of something else but as pure as it is
in itself: eating as eating, sleeping as sleeping, haircut as haircut. I?
Mekas's invocation is almost exactly right but what should be questioned here
is a Comparison between Warhol and Lumihe when Dickson's style is really
~doser predecessor. Mekas's language of "rejuvenation" and "cleansing," so
$ignif'icantly joined to the claim that Warhol has gone back to "origins," reveals
:.tll~ufegree to which this critic imagines the early cinema to be the innocent
,\:~e.~ ·of origins. 18 For Mekas, writing in the early sixties at the height of the
':i:~e01jst influence on the American avant-garde, primitive film is the richly
\~;:: :jqllO$ Melr.as, Film Culture (Summer 1964): 1; Regina Comwell discusses this text and the subsequent
.c1~~.between Mekas and Parker Tyler on Warhol and primitivism in the avant-garde, in "Progress­
, ri~.~;ftIlOUS,,, Artforum (April 1980): 60-67.
:18. See Jeffrey K. Ruoff, "Movies of the Avant-Garde: Jonas Mekas and the New York Art World," Cin­
.~.d:./tIf!'fldI30 (Spring 1991): 18-20. Ruoff briefly examines Mekas's association of his own filmmaking
.>·>~~~""maoftheLumil'res.
;~;~l,:f':_:~:~~ ,d, ,J, • ,
prefigural "good object" that Burch denies it to be. 19 Innocence and purity
together weave an aesthetic mantle Mekas throws over Warhol's films, asso­
ciating the medium's original power of revelatory discoveries-of what eating
or getting a haircut is - with the modern artist's reductionist style.
In fact, Mekas is celebrating films which are the iciest and least ingenu­
ous productions of the 1960s' American avant-garde - Warhol's Sleep, Eat, Kiss,
Blow Job and Empire (1963-64)-with warm rhetoric suitable for an awards cer­
emony instead of mounting a serious argument. However, if evaluations of
Warhol's tone and significance are temporarily put aside, Mekas is certainly
correct in locating a corresponding primitivism between Warhol's films and
cinema's earliest era. The preceding discussion of the Edison films allows
some greater precision, on both formal and performative grounds, in situating
Warhol's origins more exactly with the Edison films. Comparing Kiss with The
May Irwin Kiss, Haircut with The Barbershop, or Blow Job with Sandow, signifi­
cant parallels can be noted. The camera approaches into medium range or close
to the figure, and once again the set-ups are designed for emphatically con­
tained performances. All of this is quite possibly an accident; but if nothing
else is true of Warhol, he cultivates compositional accidents studiously, using
repetition and serialization particularly to provide them with rigid structures.
Although they may be derived in aleatory fashion, Warhol uses and reuses for­
mats in his films, no less than in his paintings, to achieve a disturbingly para­
doxical effect: repetitive and uninvolved mechanicalism, and total manipulation
of each seemingly chance execution.
Approximating the visual form of Edison's cinema, Warhol then replicates,
in a tort~rous distension, its literal-time and closed-space productions. In the
abstract, such replication might only result in antiquarian curiosity-an inci­
dental isomorphism in film stylistics after sixty-six years - that is sometimes
called "Camp." Mekas's evocations of notions of cleansing and renewal smack
19, See Noel Burch, "Primitivism and the Avant-Gardes: A Dialectical Approach," in Narrative, Appa­
ratus, IdeoloBY: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986),
500-501. Burch discusses the connection between Warhol and early cinema in terms of "the PrimltiYe
camera stare," He attributes the association between Lumiere and Warhol to P. Adams Sitney rather than
Mekas and does not seek to correct this correlation by pointing to Dickson's films. He also sees wamol~1:
work as a modernist painter determining his treatment of primitive film. His brief remarks on the·~·
ter are not persuasive on any but the first ofthese counts and his tone is slightly dismissive. '.' ';"
 of critical compensation for films that might seem merely curious and empty. of desire that he defines in terms of a paradOXical proximity and distance. He

" However, in his later and more considered formal analysis of these Warhol adds, "the voyeur's desire is peculiarly abstract ... and the woman or man is only

films, Stephen Koch uncovers in the folds of their reductive style quite another all women or men, while the voyeur himself is merely One Who Sees."23 The

,dimension. Koch's Warhol is an artist decidedly less pure, though more intri­ obsessively repeated disposition of Warhol's films, so like the arrangement of

cately self-aware, than the one Mekas discerns. Koch argues that Warhol artic­ the scene used again and again in the Edison productions, has a purified cin­

ulates a refinement, if not a radicalization, of cinematic voyeurism whose ematic structure. Its effects are not revelatory in the realist sense Mekas claims

origins lie in the peculiar episode of the gaze which is Edison's cinema. for it, but in the sense of exposing the operation of a cinematic form by reduc­

Although he does not draw any historical connection, as Mekas does, be- ing it to an obsessive format. 24 That structure is, for Koch writing on Warhol,

,~W'een Warhol and early cinema, Koch observes how the temporal experience very like what is for Baudry writing on the ideological effects of the basic

/:! pfWarhol's Sleep unties the "knot of attention" a conventional film engenders cinematic apparatus itself, namely the channel of voyeuristic desire which

i d(~y means of a temporal strategy. Warhol's films represent literal time stretched installs its regime on our side of the screen's frontier setting up the spectator­

"l:?ut. Koch recalls, "[A]1l Warhol's silents were shot at 24 frames per second, subject. Koch summarizes Warhol's early cinema by suggesting that while all

~i!'H~ut they should be projected at 16 frames per second; the effect is an unchang­ films are, to a degree, bound up with voyeurism, Warhol's reduction to the
rudiments of literal time and the gaze achieves a purity rather diffe~ent in kind
,,;,;l;'.:::,<~ ',-", ,i

~i:H::\ii)g but barely perceptible slow motion." This effect is further augmented by a
i[t/:i~assive redundancy of action, literally named Eat and Sleep, etc. Time takes than Mekas sees, a distillation of the very paradigm of the voyeur's desire:
"i'" ..
:'~f\;QJl what Koch calls a serial deceleration, adding "the audience's participation Obviously, almost any important film-maker is likely to be a highly scopo­
;»:'\i,fri the image is never allowed to fall into the slot of that other temporal reality ...
\":'i'l,,' philic individual, and, of course, film has always been the voyeur's delight...
1r;~',~reated by narrative fantasy or conventionally edited structure."20 This treat­ But works like Kiss and Sleep and Eat reconstruct in their eventless essen­
~:;jnent of time conspires with the remoteness of the frame composition from tials a kind of paradigm, a structured filmic model of the voyeur's relation
',',:;".'

q,\,OUI' space - produced by effects of the static and rather remote camera, the to the world. One could almost diagram it. And that paradigmatic struc­
'!;"$gure-ground relation, and the closed frame line-to generate what Koch calls ture, with its absented, depersonalized voyeur, and its uncaring, ungiv­
':':;;d~\.tJte fixated distance of the Warhol stare."21 He expands on this description ing, self-enclosed spectacle embodies a kind of artistic and human drama
suggest something of the experience of viewing Warhol's films: felt moment by moment as the work reels through the projector, a vision

:Watching Sleep and Kiss . .. remote from the sexualized quiescence of the of remoteness. 2S
"sleeper, remote from the kiss, from the grinding of flesh on flesh, we find
.'" i:,'j)prselves voyeurs at both a proximity and a distance rio voyeur could ever "But the 'invention of cinema' did not take place solely in Orange, New jer­
:~',,: :if';",:.:,:~},:, f";""!
,li;;li'::,!:~J1~W, both near and far away as only the camera can be, unreal with its sey," at the Edison laboratories, Burch reminds us. 26 Within two years of its
"~inutely recorded literal reality.22

;jW\".,.~h's description demarcates a spectatorial position possessing its own mode 23. Ibid .• 41.
:X i ,);::"
24, In this respect, it is no accident that Sitney sees Warhol as the forerunner of structural film. See P.

::,·!,~.,,::St~hen Koch, StarBazer: Andy Warhal's World and His Films (New York: Praeger Publishers. 1973),

Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-1978 (New York: Oxford University
"~' . Press, 1979),371-374.

, ~id.,43. 25. Koch, StarBazer, 42.

22•. fbod. 26.' Burch, "Porter, or Ambiyalence," 95.

 debut, Edison's kinetograph was displaced in the development of early cinema

by the Lumiere brothers' cinematonraphe. The vitascope played catch-up, but
the first films of Louis and Auguste Lumiere spearheaded the dominance early
French cinema would enjoy over American as well as international exhibition
into the first decade of the new century. In his discussion of the Lumieres' first
productions, Burch's analysis of Sortie d'usine, Arrivee d'un train d la Ciotat,
Lancement d'un Navjre d 1a Ciotai, L'Arroseur arrose, Partie d'ecarte, Demolition
d'un mur (all 1895) is meant to support the basic claim that these films mani­
fest "a representational approach diametrically opposed to the one in The Kiss."27
There are two sides to Burch's claim, as there are in his analysis of Edison's
work. These might be called the ideological and the formal: ideologically, the
Lumieres' c'inematographe emerges from the analytical commitments of the
Marey and Muybridge school; formally, the compositions of the first Lumiere
films formulate a "view" fundamentally different from the voyeuristic gaze of
the Edison films. Burch believes the Lumiere films are the true primal of the
,.Primitive Mode of Representation, the ground from which the films of Memes,
Porter, of Pathe and of the British filmmakers, the great operators of that mode,
'Will grow. Consequently, Burch's analysis of Sortie d'usine, the Lumieres' very
fi~st production, also provides a precis of his definition of the PMR:
And this approach, which consisted in setting up a camera outside the fac­
tory gates and cranking the handle as soon as they opened in order to record
Blow Job 1963
an event which was certainly predictable in general outline but totally by Andy Warhol
unrehearsed in detail, is still akin to the "scientificness" of Muybridge
photographing a galloping horse, or Marey birds in flight. These "docu­
"mentary" images on the one hand, and the "narrative tableau" of L'Arroseur
on the other, were to give birth to a sort of panoramic view - an acen­
"non-directive" image leaving the eye more or less "free" to roam over
entire frame, and to organize the signifiers as it will (as best it can).28

~ox threatens Burch's argument on the ideological side. The actual maker
first Lumiere productions, Louis Lumiere, was an experienced photog­

95-96. Emphasis in origin.l.

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 Terminal City 1982
Correction Please, Or How We Got into Pictures 1979
by Chris Gallagher
by Noel Burch

76
77
 The Man with the Rubber Head 1902
by Georges Melies Rabbit's Moon 1970
by Kenneth Anger

ra
79
 Train Arriving at the Ciotat Station 1895
Lumiere's Train (Arriving at the Station) 1979
by Louis and Auguste Lumiere
by AI Razutis

2
83
 rapher and, as Burch allows, the brothers were the most successful manufac­
turers and purveyors of amateur photographic equipment in Europe, which
means they we;e at the forefront of the bourgeois cult of photography. In mak­
ing his films, Louis Lumiere obviously knew and applied the prevailing codes,
and he chose the favoured subject matter of his class and period. 29 So, the links
between the Lumiere brothers and photography, that harbinger of the Institu­
tion, are unavoidable, numerous and would appear to go to the core of the
Lumieres' ideological intentions.
Circumstantially, moreover, it happens that they showed their initial cine­
matographic effort, the single shot of their own workers leaving their Lyon fac­
tory, at professional photography gatherings, starting in March of 189~. The
film was a mere addendum to demonstrations of the brothers' experiments in
colour photography. As Vincent Pinel recounts the first such screening,

Louis Lumiere had come to give a lecture on the Photographic Industry,

on the Company of which he was a director, and on the attempts to indus­
trialise the Lippmann colour photographic process to which a large part of
his research work was devoted at the time. However, at the end of the lecture
there followed an impromptu presentation of a "projection Kinetoscope"
as the proceedings describe it. The three Lumieres, all present at the pro­
jection, were more surprised than anyone by the wave of enthusiasm that
Public Domain 1972 greeted the projection of a single film: Sortie d'usine. 30
by Hollis Frampton
Soon after, the brothers did begin promoting their device more earnestly, to
"a bourgeois, serieux, technically informed public,"31 preparing the way for what
would be an immensely successful commercialization. This started in Decem­
ber of 189~ at the Grand Cafe and exploded internationally over the next year.
Burch does not consider the ideological links between the Lumieres and
the photographic establishment to contradict their commitments to the ana­
lytic scientism. Nor does he discount their reputation as the first "documen­

29. Burch, Life to those Shadows, 15-16; Noel Burch, "Charles Baudelaire versus Doctor F~,;.
". \,';,~

AfterimaBe 8/9 (Winter 1980/81): 13-16.

30. Quoted in Burch, Life to those Shadows, 18.

31. Musser, Thr EmerBencr of Cinema, 135.

14
 tary" filmmakers, which, on the face of it, ought to align Louis Lumiere with
a,future cinema ofreproductive longing. 32 On the contrary, Bur~h resolves the
threatening paradox with two arguments. The weaker one takes the Lumieres'
self-awareness seriously: they would, he writes, "see themselves throughout
their lives as researchers, as scientists."H Their production of films lasted less
than twenty years, concluding in 1915, the year of Griffith's The Birth of a
Nation, while their research enterprise continued for half a century. Burch's
stronger argument emerges from his formal analysis of the films premised on
his declaration, "what we have here is an experiment in the observation of real­
ity," not an attempted reproduction. 34 Within the ambit of primitive cinema,
this experiment played a founding role in the primitive representational mode,
but the experiment was dialectical. The cinematoaraphe transformed photo­
graphic codes at the same time those codes "came to be inscribed in the first
filmic practices."35 In other words, formal analysis of the first Lumiere films,
and especially of Sortie d'usine, reveal them to be a synthesis of the contradic­
tion between the analytical and the reproductive promptings which had marked
the struggle across proto-cinema. The sign of that synthesis is in how these
, films overturn perspective, the master code of classical representation, insti­
tuted in photography as an apparatus. Cinema gives rise to the panoramic view,
the acentric or centrifugal image, to be read by the "free-floating scan" of the
viewer rather than the penetrating gaze invoked by perspective. This acentric
image governs both actualities like Arrivee d'un train and the narrative tableaux
like L'Arroseur arrose, for the form is indifferent to subject matter. The pano­
ramic view that encodes the following decade of primitive films proves to be,
'negatively, an obstacle to an emerging narrative style and, positively, an inte­
gral representational mode in its own right. 36
Burch's argument rests on his formal analysis of early Lumiere films. Some
';",problems arise with this analysis. In the course of a more recent discussion of
'3~. Burch, uBaudeiaire versus Frankenstein," 15.
l3. Burch. Life to those Shadows. 18.
J4. ,.Burch, uBaudeiaire versus Frankenstein," 15. Emphasis in original.
,3~. Burch, Life to those Shadows. 16-17.
Burch, "Porter, or Ambivalence," 96.
the same subject that significantly amplifies Burch's analysiS and resolves these
problems, Richard deCordova offers a detailed (and yet still partial) descrip­
tion of the single shot that is Sortie d'usine which is helpful initially in suggesting
how complicated this outwardly simple film really is.
The workers appear exiting from the Lumiere factory at Lyon-some from
a small door screen left, which masks in shadows the space behind it, the
majority from a gate expanding fully across the right side of the screen. A
depth is visible here, a depth through which the workers walk into view
and divide, exiting to either side of the 'place' marked by the absence of
the camera. At one point a man trots out of the crowd calling a dog behind
him. When the dog appears, however, we see it at the side of another man,
who is pushing a bicycle. The first man disappears into the foreground,
screen right, while the bicycle skids to a halt in the centre of the frame.
Suddenly, an unidentifiable person, perhaps a child, dashes across the screen
from left to right, in the foreground. Then the cyclist resumes his move­
ment, followed by the dog, both disappearing 'into' the foreground screen
left. Three more cyclists appear, each in movement towards the spectator,
the first disappearing left, the second right and the third left.
As the film ends the dog re-enters the foreground of the image from
the left, and a man runs into view from the right to help another man who
has just closed the left half of the gate. 37
We will soon have reason to refer back to this description and some features
of this bustling "view" deCordova brings to our attention. Of the same film,
Burch remarks, "The principal characteristics of La sortie d'usine [sic] - due to
the distance between camera and persons filmed, as well as of the focal length
of the lens selected - are a certain breadth of field and a certain scale of the
'actors'."38 These two features, namely the horizontal tableau and the long­
shot angle which would also characterize a great many primitive films, express,
says Burch,
37. Richard deCordova, "From Lumiere to Pathe: The Break-Up of Perspectival Space," in Early Cin­
ema: Space/Frame/Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (London: OFI Publishing, 1990).76.
38. Burch, "Baudelaire versus Frankenstein," 15.
87
 Lumfere's attitude to his subjects, in the framing which usually leaves such
ample space for the action to develop in all directions ... His scenes seem
in fact to unfold before his camera rather like a microbic organism under
a biologist's microscope. 39
Such a horizontal and panoramic composition arises from a scientific-analytical
attitude, expressed for Burch in the "choice of angle best suited to 'capturing'
a moment of reality." The same composition would be repeated again and again
in the cinema between 1900 and 1905 and effectively controlled the dynamics
of the primitive mode, distinguished by its "polycentrism" _ its proliferation
of areas within the frame drawing a viewer's attention. Burch explains this term
drawing on the same example:
the image in La sortie d'usine [sic] does not, any more than the street scenes
and other 'general views' which followed offer a spontaneous key to a
.', reading enabling one to itemise the complex content, especially after a
;"?:, single viewing. 40
\;"':;~::What Burch is marking out here around Sortie d'usine is an objectification of a
t,"It',:,I:,:,." <
\:"~~iousness both in the composing and the viewing of films that contradicts
:j,i'tfafl'ideology of reproduction which seeks a total and possessive representation,
:';i~hpse master (and centring) code is perspective. The Lumiere films offer a
.IK~$$ controlling. less readable, polycentric plenitude that is essentially disper­
!Wl~~ in its compositional dynamic. Therefore, Burch argues, this objectified
;:t:i'i/l?,,:~ "
[:":~~$Ciousness should be identified with the commitments to the analysis of
;)i~~~ement pursued by the Marey-Muybridge wing of proto-cinema. In sum,
"R~h, Burch's claim is that this analytical attitude is objectively expressed in
;;1~:-,':Pi
P,~4through
':,~".
compositional form. Just as Edison inherits the fantasy of total
:.l~t!f~duction and Dickson expresses it in his framing of the first kinetoscope
;~uc;:tions, which retain the essentials of perspective and engender the voy­
"i~ijstic gaze, Louis Lumiere is an heir of the analytic side of scientism and
-r~sJates its consciousness into a polycentric observational visual style generat­
bt, a scanning vision. In addition to serving as a bridge from the proto-cinema
to the first films, moreover, Burch's argument here is absolutely fundamental
to his thesis that early cinema rests upon its own PMR temporarily immune to
the seductions of the Institution and open to those cultural impulses stem­
ming from the proletariat. Indeed, the rest of his account of early cinema, and
those to be developed by the new historians researching this period are, at root,
an extrapolation of successive objectifications of the Lumieres' aesthetic, with
variations achieved in the films of Melies, Porter, Hepworth and others work­
ing within that mode.
Even if this account initially persuades us in a general way, leaving open
the possibility of revisions required by slightly later films, questions about com­
position of these Lumiere films, and especially of Arrivee d'un train a 1a Ciotat,
will still trouble the literal minded. Who cannot miss observing, in the unbro­
ken recession of the parallel railroad tracks that organizes that film's Single
image. the control exerted by perspective on its composition? Where is the
transformation of photographic codes Burch argues are occasioned by the
cinematonraphe? Since perspective is the film's main visual organizer, Arrivee
d'un train seems to have reconstituted within it the master code of classical
Western art quite successfully.
Burch does not answer this question satisfactorily. DeCordova, however,
addresses it directly. He points out two inseparable features of films made
with the cinematonraphe, one perfectly visible but apparently accidental and
the other hidden but material, that join Sortie d'usine to Arrivee d'un train
to their hundreds of successors in the Lumiere catalogue and beyond it. The
first, apparently accidental, feature is that people (and animals!) in these films
move "on-frame" and "off-frame" in an amazingly haphazard fashion. This is
a point deCordova prepares laboriously in the description quoted above: that
the appearances and disappearances of figures in these films occur so often
that they become unstable elements in the visual design. The second and mate.
rial feature is defilement, Thierry Kuntzel's term for the progression of the',;
material strip of single frames (photonrams) through the projector~"lT~~
together, these two features make it plain how cinema transforms
of painting and photography by discomposing perspective in the
representing movement.
41. DeCordova. uFrom Lumiere to Pathe," 78.
 A dose resemblance between painting and photography prevails in the sin­
cue to planar relations in the way that the placement of overlapping figures
. glcr photogram; the perspectival system is the nucleus of that resemblance, as
functions in classical painting. In another, more jarring film phenomenon dis­
. any- still frame from Sortie d'usine or Arrivee d'un train makes obvious. In the
turbing the planar subcodes of perspective, figures also approach too close to
fa<:tory film, says deCordova, "the workers do not just move: they move in per­
the camera becoming, notes deCordova, "more and more distorted, and at the
spective." The space of each frame is composed classically, which is what the
moment of their greatest abstraction they disappear."45 He discerns an exam­
'railroad tracks in Arrivee d'un train make so literal and emphatic. But move­
ple of this in the man who disappears into the foreground in Sortie d'usine. Sev­
ment in perspective, adds deCordova, "must be seen as a violent discomposition
eral figures also ej{it into the foreground toward the end of ['Entree d'un train,
,of the perspectival system." Perspective composes elements in a firm set of vis­
dissolving spatial cues. In early film history, this specifically cinematic effect
:~ relationships of scale, planar position, relation to the frame edge, reces­
of discomposition of perspective soon gave rise to a genre of sorts, a subtype
.~n into depth and so on. 42 Movement does not maintain those relationships
:'!i~the Lumiere films; the plenitude of haphazard entrances and exits actually
of the "trick film" exemplified by Hepworth's How It Feels to be Run Over by
" l,"f-~.' ,i',' ' , '
an Automobile (1900), Williamson's The BiB Swallow (1901) and Melies's ['Homme
3(~lves them. Frame by frame, then, the image conforms to perspective, in
,':'<,':i~rdance with the inheritance of photography, but defilement constantly
d 1a tete de caoutchouc (1901). The works by Hepworth and Williamson in par­
ticular literalize the logic of this effect in an extreme way. Both films end not
""",,~sfC?rms relations among the figures and their positions in space. Their "con­
;~i'~~}' ~,'"
just with disrupting perspective, but with the image itself abruptly fading to
xi~ flux," as deCordova calls it, destroys stable placement and the perspec-
I,..'.,~; ,
black when, respectively, an automobile and an angry passerby exit into the fore­
tfalls apart even while each frame still carefully supports it.43
"f~';'-:(;, , .~
ground, coded anecdotally as attacking the camera and destroying the image.
:,'i@:,';Burch only alludes to this paradox when he criticizes "an analysis offrame
i1'~'''applied to Arrivee d'un train as "always a dangerous procedure."44 Halted
A more significant and pervasive consequence of the dialectic between the
i.-I'.:':':"':!:.! ' ,
image as a frame and the discomposing effect of defilement is that perspective
':I',()tltain intervals, the shots seem not only to be ruled by perspective but to
t~ln
"becomes an active problem of representation in these films."46 One early
,. a veritable declension of shot types from long shot to a near close-up
~; ~"
solution to the problem was to minimize movement and/or to compose the
f~t~in Lumiere's single long take. (As discussed in the prelude, Ken Jacobs
"~ces just such an effect in his analytical treatment of Tom, Tom, the Piper's
frame to contain it, as the Lumieres do with Repas de bibe (1895") in which two
,I,
adults enframe the baby, closing the composition. This film suggests that con­
~~.)Seen in motion, however, the exits and entrances, which disperse the ventions of photographic portraiture exercise control. DeCordova provides a
~ing passengers and those awaiting them, also dislodge perspective's estab­
~~dcentre. It is this dialectical quality of early film's composition in motion
counter example in Partie d'ecarte (1895") in which a similarly symmetrical

:~~ives rise to what Burch calls po1ycentrism.

set-up of men around a card table is disrupted by the entrances and exits of a
servant. His analysis rightly treats this card party as a Sortie d'usine shot in
l,('t;'}"QeCordova also discusses the way perspective controls proportions and
~tiOIlS of figures with the purpose of indicating an ordered recession of
medium c1ose-up.47 The same control of movement and strong frame line solu­

~~s.:ln the Lumiere films, figures frequently mask each other, so that one
tion is also used on a much wider scale in Barque sortant d'un port, wllich
depicts a rowboat moving out to sea, away from the camera. In this, Olm.
~nbehind another often becomes a surprising event rather than a stable
,": ~,~ <: "I deCordova explains,
. ';.<

~~ .

!2" ,Ibid.
45. DeCordova, uFrom Lumiere to Pathe," 78.
lj."JlIld.
46, Ibid.
~;( ,,!I!arch. Dfe to those Shadows, 19.
47. Ibid., 78-79.
 ,'ihe~ is mov~ment in perspective, but the boat's slow movement out into
the infinite distance does not disrupt the more heavily stressed aspects of
the composition, which are present from the very first image of the film.48
The "stressed aspects" are a jetty extending from the lower right of the frame
into its depth toward the left, making a strong diagonal control over the image
accented by a group of two women and children at the tip. Two rowers and a
pilot at the boat's tiller labour for just under a minute against the swell as they
make some slight progress roughly parallel to the jetty. The boat does not leave
the frame, nor do other elements intrude from beyond it.
This treatment of screen space anticipated the many picturesque views of
the sea, boats and the shore in the first years of film production, and its com­
position in large measure defined the visual code of the extreme long shot. Its
organization has been carefully exfoliated by two Canadian experimental film­
makers, Joyce Wieland and David Rimmer. Wieland's Sailboat (19 6 7-68 ) Con­
sists of a series of ten almost identical shots of a single action, a small sailboat
crossing a lake whose dimensions fill the frame. Each shot is interrupted before
cqmpletion and then immediately returns, after cutting, to a nearly identical
one. In terms of deCordova's discussion of Barque sortant, it is as if Wieland
forestalls the threat of the boat exiting the frame line, jump-cutting back to an
e~rlier moment in the boat's progress. However, the slight difference between
these almost identical shots is significant because, in addition to the lateral
hesitation Wieland produces between them, the boat also recedes more deeply
'into the featureless distance between the jump-cuts from shot to shot. At the
" l~St moment of the film, the craft is about to vanish into that depth when
Wieland cuts the film off.
" Sailboat is a lucid conceptual miniature. Wieland disassembles the type of
;'::;ptrspectival solution deCordova analyzes in Barque sortant's maintenance of the
'A ;,r:~e line and the diagonal articulation of recession. Sailboat's repetitive images
)n!fits rnontage disjoin the unicity of the single Lumiere view into separate
':; '¢Jmponents. Lumiere's photograms progress in a controlled continuum of
"
'Ibid., 79. Also see Dai Vaughan, "Let there be Lumiere," in Early Cinema: Space/Frame/Narrative,
l1!omas Elsaesstr (London: BFI Publishing, 1990),63-67.
gradual recession in which perspectival spatial relations remain stable because,
as deCordova emphasizes, the frame line is well stressed by the jetty. In Sai]­
boat, a slightly disjunctive montage of nearly identical shots particularize the
compositional unity of the Lumiere film into a mixture of horizontal and depth
stabilities: movement across and movement in depth are represented separately,
as two distinct functions, the first carried by the frame, the second by the
montage, one deferred and the other progressive. In Wieland's film, the steady
progress of Barque sortant has been analyzed into components by an elegant
conceptual inflation of photograms into shots. Meanwhile, the shots' near­
identity almost hide (but not quite) the gentle ellipses that carry the sailboat
into the distance.
At about the middle of the film, Wieland stages an event that breaks the
virtual repetition of shots. A man appears from behind the camera (he emerges
out of the foreground), walks through the image and disappears below the
frame line, presumably to a beach below the camera's view. His actions recall
the departing workers and the servant at the card party in the Lumiere films
deCordova analyzes. This man's appearance and disappearance double the per­
spectival event of the sailboat's penetration of space and also interrupt it, rhym­
ing the occluded constant flux of the boat's recession with an action organ­
ized along an imaginary diagonal guide out to the horizon. This is a point
Wieland delicately underscores by slightly accelerating the boat's movement
into the depth of the frame after the man's departure.
The analysis of a short piece of early cinema performed by David Rimmer's
Seashore (1971) is analogous to the Wieland film. The original footage, whose
provenance is unknown, depicts a group, made up mainly of women in antique
bathing suits. Three of the figures are positioned from left to right along a jut
in the shoreline. The wider area of the dunes recede behind them into space,
so that the group forms a clear plane transecting the field of view. On the left,
two other figures, one readable as a woman, hug the frame line and are slightly
closer to the camera. Rimmer loop-prints this footage into two sets of sym~;
metrical and opposing serial repetitions. The first series repeats the origi~;;
footage in part or whole interrupted by fades. For the second series, Rim~~'
"flips" the footage, effecting a reversal of angles in the image. BecauSi' ' ,
etitions in a sense reduce movement to a sort of stasis, Rimmer's
 series and his slow fades have the temporary effect of restoring an approxima­
tion of what deCordova calls "a materially unrestricted time of contemplation"
thought to characterize the temporal experience of viewing a painting or pho­
tograph. In Seashore there is ample opportunity to isolate and even to memorize
the gestures of the three women, who soon seem to be performing a genteel
dance. The setting, their movements and period dress strongly suggest the three
Muses done in pre-Raphaelite style.
This contemplative engagement with the image, effecting a sort oflyricizing
of the photogram, is pointedly upset when Rimmer reverses the footage. The
viewer's spatial orientation, primarily with respect to perspectival cues, has
also been disrupted. It is never restored in the later portions of the film. Here
Rimmer uses sharper interruptions in cutting, superimpositions, and optical
printing to distort the footage. In Seashore, Rimmer has brought a distinction
between recorded event, however literally or lyrically rendered, and the lim­
ited compositional stability ofthe perspective system in cinema.
Both Wieland and Rimmer use interruptions to magnify the process of
defilement into an event in concert with serialization that stresses the stable
system of the image. In a sense, they exfoliate early cinema without entirely
rupturing it. Wieland develops an irony in her film by using a retardatory mon­
tage to maintain the closure of the frame, exposing its component photograms
by dilating them into shots. Rimmer likewise uses editing, splicing together
the same footage into a series, but he maximizes the shock of defilement be­
tween identity and difference undermining planar stability when he reverses
the angle of the image and begins to materialize its flatness and flux. In both
~lms it is striking how repetition promotes rapturous contemplation of a primi­
~i~e single image while also enacting a dissection of its perspectival system.
SimHar serial strategies structure Bill Brand's Demolition of a Wall (1974), in
~bich a remake of the Lumieres' film of the same title is dissolved into the
~mponents of film time, and Malcolm Le Grice's Berlin Horse (1970), in which
C'~,single action is rhymed through optical printing that transforms the screen
~~rfaceand the depth cues of the image. These are films in which the founda­
\~(mal crux of the Lumieres' films, the difference between classic perspectival
,. ,
, ~epth and its disruption over the course of movement-time, has become the
Noel Burch. To the Distant Observer. 63. See also Burch. "porter, or Ambivalence," 100•. ;';' .
tJflel(ive subject. They are works that variously both examine the composi·
ji~~nal problem of perspective and overturn the Lumieres' early solution. As
;i\i;~
;,)~:
well as indicating the complexity of these questions, these films explore the
radical difference made to early cinema's image by the pictorial codes of clas­
sical Western art.
There would be solutions to the problem of perspective in early cinema that
go beyond what deCordova terms its containment, but, historically, the poly­
centric image would remain the basic compositional condition. These solu­
tions, in effect, define the primitive mode not just in formal terms, but perhaps
more importantly, in terms of the discursive usages that characterized early film
culture. Burch rightly points out how directly Sortie d'usine adumbrates the pre­
dominant construction of the film image as a "centrifugal tableau." Here fig­
ures were arranged in a depth that was either only literal, in location shooting,
or radically flattened and schematic, in studio scenes. The actors were posed
frontally, gestured mainly in long-shot distance and were arrayed in a frame
"crammed with signs" that no viewer could not take in all at once.
Burch analyzes four further, in some ways compensatory, usages that accom­
pany tableau construction and which crucially shaped the reception of films
in the early period: repeated screenings, the "chase film," the lecturer, and
viewers' foreknowledge of story material. Burch points out, "it was ... the usual
practice at these first screenings ... to show the films several times in succes­
sion."49 The intention was to see what was missed the first or second time,
and this distinguishes the type of reception prevailing in the primitive cinema
from the habits of a later period in which images function as part of a narra­
tive "chain of signifiers ... each link devouring the previous one."so The early
cinema instead was bound more or less to the "autarky and unicity of each
frame."si In explaining the habit of repeated screenings, Burch explains,
this practice cannot be explained away simply by a virgin public's desire
to be astonished all over again. These images carry within them the need
to be seen and seen again; it is inconceivable that an audience in those days,
49. Burch, HBaudelaire versus Frankenstein," 16.
so.
51. Burch, "Primitivism and the Avant-Gardes," 486. Emphasis in original.
 ·anymore than now, could feel that they had seen everything there was to
be seen after a single viewing, in the way that we can now say we say we field,"55 Haggar exemplifies the potential difference in screen space when a
saw the film that was showing last week at our local cinema and have no divided style arose. Such divisions did not disturb makers of multi-shot films,
intention of going again precisely because we have seen it (consumed it, in as Porter's The Execution of Czolgosz (1901) and How They Do Things on the Bowery
other words): We are touching here on One of the basic contradictions (1902) demonstrate. However, more commonly, compositions relied on tableau
between the primitive cinema and the IMR.52 construction, and these, like Zecca's L'Histoire d'un crime (1901), repressed depth
cues, except for very controlled instances such as when the gates to the exe­
The critical difference that Burch ascribes to early film screenings between
cution site are flung open, revealing a painted flat of a deep space.
consumption of the image and seeing went beyond the first Lumiere films.
Tableau construction was, then, a solution to the problem of perspective
While the sense of repetitive inspections of the screen soon fell away as a reg­
based in another type of containment, a treatment of screen space as a plane
ular viewing practice, this difference explains further practices generated by
of action which was performance-based and narratively guided. Entrances and
the difficulty of reading the images.
exits, which deCordova shows were so disruptive in the Lumiere films, were
Performance codes aided reading, by remaining frontal and gesturally redun­
now coded as movements expressly motivated by dramatic exigencies, as in
dant. However, such tactics used by early filmmakers, who derived them from
Melies's multi-shot narratives like Trip to the Moon (1902), and in the early genre
popular theatre and sometimes comic strips, also underscore a more impor­
that systematized them, the chase film.
tant feature of tableau construction: that it precluded the type of haptic space
The whole narrative proposition of the chase genre rested upon manage­
that the viewer could "enter" and move around under the guidance of the cam­
ment of entrances and exits, of almost invariably the whole cast, which usu­
era angles. Instead, the viewer scanned the panorama ofa space to be read across
ally expanded from shot to shot to signals building momentum as the otherwise
as more or less of a flat plane rather than through and around. Hence, every­
repetitive series of tableaux went by. Initially, as in Williams's Stop Thief(1901),
thing about the image, including depth cues obtained by location shooting or
the pursuit was limited to movement across the frame, an instance of strict
studio flats, would be subject to a centrifugal dynamic. In this way the actors'
planarity. In Biograph's production of Personal (1904), however, the action
entrances and exits were directed to the sides of the image, not to the dispersed
proceeded along successive diagonals that, more or less, establish screen direc­
centre, and the frame line most often defined the arena of performance just as
tion between shots. Shot on location, the cast enters this extremely influen­
it does in the style of theatre from which its composition was derived. Burch
tial film from the left rear of the frame, starting at the foot of Grant's Tomb,
claims "the whole visual history of the cinema before the First World War ...
and exits at the right foreground. In a sense, the chase genre specialized in coor­
turns on this opposition between the 'Meliesian' affirmation of the surface and
dinating planarity and recession, by narratively coding depth in the frame as
the affirmation of depth."53 Although somewhat extreme in expressing this
rigidly as other genres did in the frame line.
dichotomy, William Haggar's biography of the Victorian criminal, The Life of
With Porter's Life of an American Fireman and The Great Train Robbery (both
Charles Peace (19 05), exemplifies the opposition. By alternating between "styl­
19°3), which were essentially variations on the chase, screen direction has
ixed interior scenes ... from which all illusion of haptic space seems to have
become systematic enough that the foreground could be an exit point and the
been cunningly exduded"54 and "exterior shots skilfully exploiting depth of diagonal the axis of action. Burch believes the chase initiates the development.
of continuity because its narrative premise was bound up with ways to create
52. Burch, "Baudelaire versus Frankenstein," 16.
a sense of contiguity between spaces. There was as yet, however, no cutting
53. Burch, Lif~ to those Shadows, 173. within the static long shot, no breakdown of the tableau, no conceivabl~.~
.Burch, "Film's Institutional Mode of Representation," 80.

55. Burch, Life to those Shadows, 173.

 sions ofthe panoramic space such as would be made by medium shots or close­
lapped montage seen in Life of An American Fireman, were anything but uni­
ups in the classical style. The Great Train Robbery does have a famed close-up
form and were often applied hesitantly.6o
of a bandit shooting at the camera; but the shot served only as an emblem, with­
The obstacle of the tableau, which was an impediment to any filmic nar­
out narrative purpose in the film, so much so that it was the exhibitor's choice
ration past a low level of complication, was in practice negotiated by relying
to run the shot at the start or the finish of the film. Similarly, Life of an Ameri­
on extrafilmic features of early exhibition, like the "lecturer" (extendable to
can Fireman enacts a ISo-degree reversal of angle between the two shots show­
a group of live actors) and the "foreknowledge" of the audience. Recently,
ing a rescue in the interior of a burning building. For many years, since an
researchers into early cinema, and especially Charles Musser, have shown just
anonymously and later edited version of Porter's film was taken to be the orig­
how much control exhibitors had over how films were perceived by viewers
inal in which these shots were crosscut and the interior view and exterior
in the years before 1905.61 As happened with The Great Train Robbery, projec­
interrupted each other, the film was regarded as an early anticipation of later
tionists arranged shots according to their own wishes. A great many films were
editing developments. In the original version, however, Porter's apparent obli­
still one shot long (or iflonger were purchased shot by shot) and programming
i,'Sition to repeat the complete action results in successive and overlapping inte­
films, usually along with other entertainment -like singalong lantern slides, or
,',;'.tiorand exterior views. 56 "For it was assumed," Burch explains,
'/,;/'1" live performers-meant stringing together very short pieces of celluloid. There
'. . that any violation of a single, frontal theatrical point of view would lead were two broad consequences of this exhibition practice, the second of which
'f\I{i;, .to a breakdown of the illusion of reality achieved by the single-shot "full­ will be treated in chapter five. The first is that the films were necessarily sub­
;'~~';;
;"(}!'iF',i
•. frame" scenes, inadequate though that illusion may have been.57 ject to rather heavy mediation, for example supplementary work of a lecturer.
,~~c,;>,>,:, " While not used everywhere, lecturers helped to draw attention to polycentric,
~)~~~f::, Despite a tendency toward multi-shot films, after 1903, and concomitant and polysemous, elements in film images which otherwise contained too much
'!;'~~~lopments in continuity and linearity instanced by the evolution of chase
'::j;~s, there was no fundamental change in the primitive film's tableau con­
to be seen, and too much meaning for the early viewer to spontaneously order
into an intelligible hierarchy of relevance. The function of the lecturer was to
(~'~tion. Its relative illegibility continued to demand what Burch calls a "top­
~;f~phical reading."58 Indeed, the centrifugal frame imparted by the Lumieres
set the itinerary of the viewer's reading, either by pointing out details of the
:}t;{~~",t sights in a travelogue, or by particularizing the narrative actions of a figure
:!;;ll~Qved to be a major obstacle to further linearization. Even in films of fairly
';;~rate narrative construction, like Melies's and Pathe's longer films of the
which, though important to the drama, might well go unnoticed in the busy
l"/'i;;~:" tableau. And naturally at long-shot, without commentary, the figure's individ­
;,:'r~y Passions of Christ, each image held maximum density that blocked shot
:):.'~hsitions. Paradoxically, the main conceptual obstacle was that each tableau
uation as a character could not be signalled to the audience. These problems
of narrative characterization help to explain why so many films of any scale,
',.emed unified and replete. As Porter's later Westerns and literary adaptations 59
like Melies's ImpOSSible Voyane and Conquest of the Pole, deployed clusters of
i.~'~illustrate, even those developments that were achieved, notably the over­
actors performing the same actions.
Burch draws a theoretical conclusion from such analysis: that the "diegt;~',d
0'""
process" of these tableau constructions is comparatively weak. Diegesis rel~j,L .'
. 56. Bu.rch, "Porter, or AmbiyaJence," 102-103. See Musser, Before the Nickelodeon, 212-234, for a full
dillel/SSl on of the critical and historiographical disputes surrounding this Porter film .

.,57. Burch. To the Distant Observer, 65.

'~8:"' Burch, Life to those Shadows, 152. 60. Burch, Life to those Shadows, 150-159.

61. Musser, chap. 5 in Before the Nickelodeon, 103-156; Musser admirably details this,
'sir. Ibid. See also Burch. "Porter, or AmbiYalence," 99-100.
and its ramifications for understanding early exhibition practices.

to a construction undertaken by the viewer of following cues provided by what
is seen to construct that whole of the representation. The imaginary presence,
for example, of the diegetic pro-filmic space of a complete narrative is a mat­
ter of constructing the arena of an action to which shots in classically made
films only allude iconically. While our ability to imagine such a diegetic whole
is stronger in any moving picture than in a still photograph which freezes time
and isolates space, the diegetic process is noticeably weaker in the primitive
mode where the succession of frontal images place the viewer in front of rather
than inside the spectacle. Primitive cinema does not allude nearly so often to
diegetic space but tends to be literal about the spectator's relation to the image.
In other words, in the primitive style it could be said that the pro-filmic real­
ity is virtually collapsed upon its iconic realization.
The chase film again serves as a minor but illustrative departure from the
literal concept of screen space. The chase film represents a solution to the
problem of ellipses which arises when moving from shot to shot; the charac­
ters remain the same, the action is repetitious, and the diagonal movement
codes the action simply. Together these features of the chase film serve to
construct a directional and temporal diegesis of strictly contiguous spaces and
successive times.
The diegetic process is a matter of degree, or what Burch calls "thresh­
olds." The supplementary work of the lecturer operates to cross a viewer from
literal into narrative space. His speech selects parts of the image for emphasis,
imparts information about the time of the action or situates shots in spatial
relationships. In other words, the lecturer narrativizes the iconic signs in the
tableau without disrupting the illusion of the crowded whole that cutting
would cause, and divides elements in the frame without the fragmentation
closer shots were believed to create. The lecturer historically initiates the sup­
1'1~ment of language to cinema in its early period by selecting signs from the
.. pOlysemy of the image and making them discursive and linear. Even if such
·.,performers were not as common as some critics would like to believe, their
'work obviously had a role to play in early film. This role would soon be taken
~er by descriptive and then by dialogic intertitles and, at the end of the 1920S,
'by the much delayed introduction of synchronous sound.
, A number of avant-garde filmmakers have shown considerable fascination
:~ththe diegetic process between language and cinema. Among them is Hollis
WI,'·,.; (
Frampton whose (nostalgia) (1971) sets out a series of photographs on a hot plate
which proceed to burn, providing movement, while asynchronously an off­
screen voice relating autobiographical anecdotes provides aids in deciphering
the photographs. Burch, however, turns to Michael Snow's A Casing Shelved
(197 0 ) as a more systematic "limit-instance in the relations between narra­
tive and diegetic process."62 In a hyperbolized deployment of the primitive
mode, Snow's work consists of a single image, a projected still showing shelves
crammed with personal objects. The spectacle offers a strange sort of abun­
dance, a shallow, packed space filled with horizontal and vertical compartments
containing almost entirely unreadable forms and shapes which turn out to be
objects familiar to the voice that accompanies the image. Burch explains, "The
work's 'narrative' is carried solely by Snow's own voice on tape, telling the story
behind each of these objects in turn," adding that it is difficult "not to be
reminded of the primitive lecturer 'deciphering' an image."63
As Snow's stories accumulate, the whole piece becomes, Burch says, "sat­
urated with narrativity" and yet the slender "visual guarantees" within the image
makes it "impossible to speak of any diegetic process" at work in A Casing
Shelved.64 In effect, Snow has pushed the supplementary lecturing to the other
extreme, putting it in place of the diegetic process, thus recasting the supple­
ment into a whole signifying process. Snow exaggerates the primitive tableau's
mute and motionless plenitude that cannot be imagined in the round, nor con­
nected to off-screen spaces. By impoverishing the diegetic process in this
extreme way, Snow reveals something of the curious threat that lies in wait so
near the surface of the polycentric tableau, namely the abundance of meaning
no viewer can understand. Finally, Snow's stories largely name and describe the
items seen in the im,age as indexical, and not iconic, signs at play in his narra­
tive, so that these items remain as witnesses to past events without providing
visual representations of them. It is entirely characteristic, too, of Snow's film
work to pull apart the iconic cue of the film image- which conventionally looks
something like what it represents and almost always bears the mark of a thing
62. Burch. Life to those Shadows. 258.
63. Ibid., 259.
64. Ibid. Emphasis in original.
10]

or event-from its indexical cue. But, like a bullet hole or a medical symptom,
indices do not have to picture their referents. Such resemblances are, however,
the basic condition of the diegetic process that depends upon iconic cues for
the construction of story-space and story-time. By refusing resemblance in the
way it does, A Casine Shelved alludes unmistakably to the primitive film tab­
leau (and its weakness), undermines its fundamental feature of rather literalized
iconic realization and radicalizes the supplementary narrativization of specta­
cle once performed by the lecturer.
What Snow makes evident, the peculiar play between the presented image
and the mental processes that constitutes the diegetic process to which the
lecturer points, is not the only such play in the early cinema. In practice, the
lecturer's supplement, and that of early intertitles, was seldom more than an
aid to deciphering key details. In a sense such performances, while helpful
when present, were not often necessary. This is the case because, as Burch
points out, early films were very often "predicated upon the knowledge of the
audience."65 The connections, claims Burch, to a popular culture exemplified
';'\), the picture postcard, musical hall turns and cartoons, meant that early cin­
':ea)la,was not self-enclosed. Unlike the novel and the theatre, it did not rely on
,'.','
the fully articulated forms of bourgeois culture. In these forms of the insti-
tijtional mode, and in the later cinema enfolded within it, the diegesis is pre­
i~~tned to be total and original with the work. For example, even an adaptation
,;,tth. biblical narrative, like Cecil B. De Mille's The Ten Commandments (1924),
:·,~dresses the spectator as if introducing characters and situations for the first
,,';,~~. In contrast, the early film culture was characterized by digests and illus-
~tions, parodies and pastiches of stories, characters and news events assumed
, tq},e already familiar to the viewer. The audience for Porter's Jack and the
;;':~4nstalk (1902) or Haggar's Charles Peace knew the tale and, as Burch comments,
'~"did not come to discover its twists and turns, but to look at the pictures, to
:etijoy the concatenation of a series of spectacularly presented archetypes - to
,~J::owse through an album of sumptuous photographs illustrating a text which
"WitS to be found elsewhere: it came to participate in a ritual of confjrmation."66
"5.. 8urch. "'Porter, or Ambivalence,1t 97.
66. Ibid.
It might be said that in these films, the diegesis, too, exists to a large degree
elsewhere, in the memories of the viewers, who were able to fill in the often
enormous gaps in the narrative and note key dramatic details with or without
the aid of a lecturer or explanatory intertitles. This suggests why the earliest
films of considerable length, consisting entirely of successive tableaux that
offered no suspense or narrative bridging between images, were derived from
67
European Passion plays and celebrated championship boxing matches. Burch's
example, Porter's 19 0 3 adaptation of Uncle Torn's Cabin, illustrates audience
foreknowledge well. The film reduces the celebrated novel to a ten-minute
film consisting of about twenty tableaux that represent the story's high points.
Each tableau is prefaced by a title serving rather like a chapter title that gives
away the dramatic climax to follow late in each scene.
This type of reception pertains not just to adaptation of novels, but to nur­
sery rhymes, fairy tales and topical events. Several critics, notably Musser and
Miriam Hansen, have drawn the somewhat complicated connections between
another Porter film, Terrible Teddy, the Grizzly Kine (19 01 ) and Teddy Roosevelt's
self-promotion as an outdoor's man. 68 However, a somewhat later film, also by
Porter, The Teddy Bears (19 0 7), provides an even richer example of two types
of familiarity with narrative materials, literary and topical, governing one film.
The first two sections of The Teddy Bears are an adaptation of Goldilocks and
the Three Bears69 in the style of Melies's fantasies, Pathe's Alladin and Porter's
own Jack and the Beanstalk. Goldilocks spies on the bears, rendered through
puppet animation, intrudes and, as in the fairy tale, is discovered. At this point,
the film becomes a chase and Porter switches from the studio to location shoot­
ing. Goldilocks is saved by a hunter modelled on Teddy Roosevelt, who shoots
all the bears except the cub who becomes the girl's pet. This third section
alludes to a well publicized incident in which Roosevelt refused to shoot a
young bear while on a hunting trip. By the time the film was made, the epi­
sode had set off a fad for stuffed teddy bears - one that has not wholly receded
for over eighty years. In commenting on the film, Hansen remarks that not only
67. Musser, The EmerBence of Cinema, 194-223.
68, Musser. Before the Nickelodeon, 16~ 165.
69. Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectotorship in American Silent film (Cambridge: Harvard Uni­
versity Press, 199\),48-49.
103
 does T~JJy B,ars assume foreknowledge, but the different sections assume dif­
ferent kinds and degrees ofinfonnation.7o
As the examples of Uncle Tom's Cabin and Teddy Bears suggest, and as Burch
contends, the relationship between the viewer and the narrative work of early
films functions within a popular culture more concerned with sho~ing than
telling. Solutions to problems of perspective in motion, solutions that would
have to be found before cinema could assume the narrative fonn after 1906,
did not initially reach beyond the five compensatory solutions Burch discusses.
Finding these later solutions was not urgent in the primitive period, for the
compensations of tableaux, early performance, the lecturer and the rather
interactive relations between spectators' knowledge and the screen converged
to shape the PMR as a satisfactory and full system on its own terms. The urge
to transform cinema would, in fact, come from outside, as the film industry
addressed itself to new tasks, particularly those of adaptation, forcing compari­
sons between films, plays and novels at the formal level of their modes of rep­
resentation. Of course, first came comparisons of content: filmmakers tried
direct transpositions of plays to the screen. The initial attempts to graft bour­
geois theatre onto the primitive cinema, Films d'Art, were plays recorded as
tableaux. This, says Burch, proved
a failure due precisely to the basic incompatibility between the primitive
mode of representation and the codes of the bourgeois theatre ... only the
establishment of a thoroughly haptic screen space, the linearisation of the
visual signifiers (through montage, "centering", and lighting), the consti-.
tution of an enveloping diegetic space-time, and so on, could in fact "ren- "
der" what was essential to this theatre (as well as the novels and paintings)
prized by the middle classes.71
:':The account Burch offers of the early cinema can and has been criticized both
' f9r its detail (pertaining largely to his examples) and for his general claim that
,tb~ primitive mode of representation arose out of a proletarian culture. With
,..::; . f'I.. ,./ Durch. "Porter, or Ambivalence," 98. Emphasis in original.
regard to some details, Burch tends to exaggerate "flatness" of the primitive
tableau in order to distinguish it from the haptic screen space of later film­
making. However, this exaggeration does not override the truth of his core
claims that perspectival compositions were sharply qualified in early cinema,
that tableau construction characterized the films and that a topographical scan­
ning of the image distinguishes the spectator's experience from that of the gaze
or look typical of the identification between camera and viewer generated by
later films. Indeed, as we will see below, several critics have built on Burch's
analysis and drawn out further distinctions of early film language.
Burch's most important social-historical claim is that early film audiences
were composed of working-class viewers and that their culture gave rise to key
aspects of the primitive mode. This claim already engenders some doubt when
Burch argues for the viewers' foreknowledge of novels like Uncle Tom's Cabin,
which is an exemplary production of American middle-class popular culture.
Similar arguments might be made with respect to the many Spanish American
war films, newsreels, Hale's Tours travelogues and even many of the fairy tales
that served as material. Burch makes allowance for these middle-class sources
when he argues that the "substance" of the scenarios was determined by bour­
geois owners while the forms of representation drew from proletarian habits.
However, his only argument for such a distinction is a negative and formal one,
namely that the PMR is not the IMR found in novels, theatres and filmmaking
of a later period. However, as John Fell has shown, and as Musser has also dem­
onstrated, the bourgeois culture also included popular forms like the picture
postcard, cartoons and less realistic forms of theatre. The modes of represen­
tation that early filmmakers drew from contemporary popular culture were not
as sharply divided along class lines as Burch insists. 72
The most convincing criticism of Burch's social argument is straightfor­
72, Admittedly the evidence that Fell, Musser and others offer comes from American sources whereas,
at least in Ufe to those Shodows, Burch substantiates his argument historically by drawing on French and
English social history where bourgeois interest in cinema was much slower in developing. This corre­
sponds to the retarded development of film styles in France and Britain while, in the U.S., cinema effort'
toward a more complex narrative style after 1906 occur more frequently and are quickly copied. MOSI
of the critics of Burch's proletarian thesis draw on Robert C. Allen's Vaudeville and Film /895-/9/5:
A Study in Media Interaction (New York: Arno Press, 1980) and the same author's "Motion Picture Exhi­
bition in Manhattan 1906-1912: Beyond the Nickelodeon," Cinema }ourna/18 (April 1979): 2-15.
105
 wardlyhistorical. The first important exhibition outlet for films in the United
text that D. W. Griffith, an unsuccessful stage actor and playwright, made his

States dominating the industry between the period of primitive cinema from
first appearances in film, as an extra and then an actor for the Edison Com-

1896 to 1906 was vaudeville. In major cities vaudeville theatres had a predomi­ pany and American Biograph.

nantly middle-class clientele, while smaller towns had a mixed-class clientele.73

None of these new industrial conditions or consequences changed film­

The large working-class audience conventionally given legendary status in the

making overnight but they certainly changed the practical conditions in which

study of early cinema was drawn after 1905 to the nickelodeons which, as the
films were made after about 1906. They permitted American films to draw

name indicates, catered to a clientele who could not afford the much higher
closer to the styles of theatre and the novel, to the compositional strategies

vaudeville admission prices. Although nickelodeons were soon especially nu­

and narrative conventions that prevailed in these media, while also adapting

merous in working-class districts, research has shown they were also to be found
them to cinema. The outside forces that directly prompted such changes would

in bourgeois shopping areas.

arise from several sources, not the least of which was the decision across the

A considerable irony accompanies this historical criticism of Burch's argu­ industry to appeal to middle-class patrons in order to diffuse anxieties about

ment. Around 1906, the rise.of the nickelodeon swiftly changed film produc­ the nickelodeon whose working-class clientele drew the worried attentions of
tion in the American industry and soon led to the end of the primitive period. urban reformers,75 The irony inflicted by this historical critique on Burch's

As Musser shows in great detail in his study, Before the Nickelodeon, filmmakers account is that when the proletarian audience on which Burch claims the PMR

like Porter were soon compelled to abandon the production methods of the
early cinema as the industry moved closer to assembly-line methods that fore­
shadowed the later studio system. 74 As the exhibition side of the industry
expanded tremendously, creating a much larger demand for films, production
had to be sped up, with several intertwined consequences. First, production
units within single companies multiplied, which meant that a supervisory stra­
tum appeared, and the division of labour meant the producer system, which
followed swiftly. Secondly, companies making more films faster tended to rely
on fiction films much more than before; as the scenario assumed greater impor­
ta,nce the demand for scriptwriters to generate original and adapted story mate­
.,rial expanded. Thirdly, because work was more regular than before, the film
industry attracted trained stage actors in larger numers who then tended to
nuance the cultural, social and, though to a much lesser degree, political terms
form repertory groups working for film companies. Such practices brought film
depends actually defines itself as a significant moviegoing public, the event con­
tributes to the conditions that presently end primitive cinema as a distinct era
in filmmaking. The likely absence of that audience earlier, of course, makes it
less certain that the PMR could be linked as directly as Burch claims to prole­
tarian culture and its habits of representation. Nonetheless, Burch has success­
fully argued that the early cinema was a different cinema and that this difference
lies between its mode of representation and those prevailing in the high bour­
geois literature and art of the late nineteenth century. What becomes prob­
lematic in Burch's account when it is confronted with the historical facts is
his somewhat hasty attempt to provide early cinema with a certain political
use value as a proletarian art form. More recently, researchers have begun to
in which the otherness of early cinema is to be understood.

production closer to those in theatre and, of course, theatre personnel began

'to make their presence felt in film production. It was in this industrial con­

. i7.J. 'See. for example. Musser. chaps. 11-12 in Before the Nickelodeon. 372-458. where he carefully details
Jhe tr,msformation of the Edison Company. Also see David Bordwell. Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson.
'n~ Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge & Kegan C~
75. See Ibid .• especially 427-432; Also see Lary May. Screening out the Past: the Birth of Mall
Paul, 1985). 157-173. and the Motion Picture Industry (New York: Oxford University Press. 1980). 23-59 for a conc~~!
?4. Musser. chap. 1\ in Before the Nickelodeon. 372-432. of the social pressures on the early industry and its response. ,.. . ';
 5 The Thrill of Demonstration

The kinetoscope fairly took their breaths away. 'What will they do next?'
observed Trina in amazement. 'Ain't that wonderful, Mac?' McTeague was
awestruck.
'Look at that horse move his head,' he cried excitedly, quite carried
away. 'Look at the cable car coming-and the man going across the street.
See here comes a truck. Well, I never in all my life. What would Marcus
say to this?'
'It's all a drick' exclaimed Mrs Sieppe with sudden conviction. 'I ain't
no fool; dot's nothun but a drick.'
'Well, of course Mamma,' exclaimed Trina; 'it's-'
But Mrs Sieppe put her head in the air. 'I'm too old to be fooled,' she
persisted. 'It's a drick.' Nothing more could be got out of her than this. 1

At the start of his extremely suggestive essay" 'Primitive' Cinema: A Frame-up?

Or, The Trick's On Us," Tom Gunning makes a gesture that might initially seem
a bit facile but is actually very clever. He quotes the passage above from the
novel entitled Mc TeaBue: A Story of San Francisco by American writer Frank
Norris, the same book later to be adapted by Erich von Stroheim as Greed
(1924). Gunning takes the anecdote to be largely reportorial, making the point
that early filmgoers differed from both the mythic viewers held spellbound by
illusion, ducking before Lumiere's oncoming train, as well as from their suc­
cessors engaged in a willed suspension of disbelief as they were absorbed into
the classical cinema's story on the screen. 2 They may have been amazed, but
they were not duped, a difference of utmost importance.
Several early films, 'the best known of which is Edwin S. Porter's Uncle Josh
at the MovinB Picture Show (Edison, 1902), make a comedy of that difference
by dramatizing the mythic primitive viewer. The protagonist, Uncle Josh, is a
~l\\'

1. Frank Norris, Mc TeaBue: A Story of San Francisco, cited in Tom Gunning, H ·Primitive' Cinema:
A Frame-up? Or, The Trick's on Us," in Early Cinema: Space/Frame/Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser
(London: BFI Publishing, 1990),95.

2. Ibid., 95-96.

109
 rube who attends a movie screening only to mistake the three single-shot films
In what follows I will be concerned both with examining different modes
for reality. He ducks when a train comes at him, grows agitated at the sight
of exhibition and reception in early cinema and the permutations of the aes­
of a bathing woman and, finally, tries to interrupt a roughhousing dalliance
thetic of such screen practice. By surveying critical analyses of its significance,
between a maid and a man, tearing down the screen in his attempt. The com­
a significance that Gunning argues continues through the later history of cin­
edy's significance is, of course, that it attributes the rapture of illusion to some­
ema and particularly in the alternative practices of the avant-garde, I will build
one else besides its 19 02 viewer-in this case, typically, to a naive bumpkin. 3
upon and branch away from Noel Burch's concept of the Primitive Mode of
The climax of his seduction to the illusion is a rigidly logical one: Uncle Josh
attempts to enter the scene himself. Representation; for example, the work of Gunning, Musser, Miriam Hansen,
Thomas Elsaesser and others foregrounds primitive film as an "other cinema"
In contrast to the fictional Uncle Josh, Gunning emphasizes how differ­
once again and, in a somewhat different way than Burch, indicates how the
ently Norris portrays the naivete of the German-American Mrs. Sieppe. Unlike
imagination of the avant-garde often circulates back toward the films of cine­
Uncle Josh, Trina's mother is dismissive of the show, calling it a trick that she
4 ma's first era.
has seen through. Her more Americanized daughter Trina and future son-in­
But first it is important to explore once more that hollow carved out by
law Mac are enthralled by the motion picture but they take the trick for granted
early film. When assessing criticism of Burch's claim that the primitive mode
and, as Gunning relates in the rest of the anecdote, interpret it as a wonderful
'. advance over the static images of the magic lantern show. was proletarian, Miriam Hansen rephrases the issue with admirable clarity in
the title of her essay "Early Silent Cinema: Whose Public Sphere?"6 Answering
Gunning makes the historical meaning clear: cinema was inserted into a
this question, she believes, is fraught with difficulties:
,c;ulture already practised in looking at projected images, and viewers possessed
'f1:1dimentary habits of reception that prepared them for the types of spec­ The reclamation of early silent cinema as a proletarian public sphere ...
:'~atorship which would develop later. Gunning's cleverness is to show through inevitably raises questions as to the epistemological status of such a con­
'.'NQrris's quasi-reportorial trio that such habits in fact traversed generatiqnal cept. Does it correspond to any empirical constellation that would sub­
.. and class boundaries. Mrs. Sieppe is the prototypical, if also partly legendary, stantiate the claim? Or are we dealing with yet another projection ofleftist
.,··inlmigrant proletarian representative of early film audiences while Trina and media theory ... motivated by the desperate desire to redeem the cinema
i!,Mlic are at least marginally urban members of an Americanized middle-class. as a 'good object' in the face of so much evidence to the contrary?7
i;~lIe their responses differ a bit, the mother dismissing the images, Mac and
::i1frin8 taking a critical delight, both gen~rations do partake in what Gunning For Burch, using the following logic, the evidence seems clear enough. After

,(j"~'Charles Musser describe as an aesthetic of display or demonstration)

';.1,1,:: ; ,
about 1906, the film industry sought to attract the middle class, in order partly
;,1'-:...• ,
to shake the unpleasant associations of its immigrant proletarian clientele; so,
<" >:" he reasons, prior to this date the cinema must have had a mostly proletarian
:i·.'~::· ',~ Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Films (Cambridge: Harvard
,?~/'slty Press, 1991),25-29, for a detailed discussion of Uncle Josh, which she points out was a remake
patronage. Moreover, changes in the style of films produced points to an adap­
~N-:;'" I'

"i~~lish flImmaker Robert Paul's The Countryman's First SiaM of the Animated Pictures (1901). tation of bourgeois codes of representation, a departure that opens a path

i~f,' '<;Mning," 'Primitive' Cinema," 102nl. In this footnote, Gunning explains Norris's calling the device toward analyzing proletarian representational habits in early films. Finally,
'.~j:ll. jlusage a kinetoscope: "The kinetoscope, of course, was the original name for Edison's peep-show abundant commentary from the industry and in the press of the period indi­
:~L However, since NOrris's reference is to projected images, he is undoubtedly referring to Edison's
~~tl. . Kinetoscope which was placed on the market in February 1897," -.
~;,; ."a.a,.Ies Mus~er, The Emeraence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907, Vol. 1 in History of the Amer­ 6, Miriam Hansen, "Early Silent Cinema: Whose Public Sphere?," in Elsaesser, Early Cinema, 228-246.
',.!'.".. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1990), 1-54.
7. Hansen, "Whose Public Sphere?," 228.
 cates a deliberate strategy was underway. The problem with Burch's rather
binary account, however, is that from the point of view of exhibition there were
really three stages in early film: the vaudeville era, 1896-1906; the nickelodeon
era, 1905-1913; and a gradual fade to the period of the movie palaces. Working­
~.Iass viewers become an issue for the film industry only after the second stage
is. underway, and by this point the early film style has begun to change. It
.:'becomes much more difficult, then, to portray the early film audience as
;_'-~c1usively proletarian. Yet it remains certain that the early cinema does not
'~possess the film language that Burch labels the Institutional Mode of Rep­
'<' ntation. In light of this more complicated periodization, Hansen puts
lpther question to be explored: just what did the later and supposedly bour­
\l)isCinema seek to do?
:;Hansen takes as her example D. W. Griffith's Musketeers of Pig Alley. Made
,?J2, the film lies between the early and the classical style. Its extremely
.pressed story is set and partly shot in New York's lower east side and con­
s the travails experienced by the Girl (Lillian Gish) and her fiance in the
lIt of a minor gang war. Musketeers has often been praised for its early street
. and, at first glance, the tolerance Griffith lavishes on the lovers and
4.keteers" might lead a present-day viewer to assume the director seeks to
the film to the nickelodeon's working-class audience. Offering closer scm­
:;Hansen points out, "Griffith projects an audience already removed from
:,social environment the film purports to represent, to whom he tenders
uresque values from a nostalgic or touristic vantage point."8 Fllr that audi­
"the ethnic slums are relegated to a somewhat exotic locale. The poor
\tbe immigrant- the bearded man outside the grocery store, the landlord
,"~e washerwomen -are so many props artfully selected, as the opening title
, ;~silly puts it, from "New York's Other Side." "Other," that is, than the pre­
'i•...
~" A" i
·ed, social position of the spectator. Meanwhile, the focus of the viewer's
}~~fication is Gish. Although the film antedates the rise of the star system,
'~pccupies a comparable position in the text, as the blonde, nameless and
~~raC:inated heroine. She manifests the distinction between performers pos­
'.~ed of "persona" and those who form mise en scene. This distinction, virtu­
",lyunknown in primitive films, pushes the viewer to hierarchize characters,
to enter into imaginary intimacy with the Girl while the others are cast in the
role of maintaining the mileau. Griffith's fabled usages-camera ubiquity, par­
allel montage, deep focus, medium and close-up shots-narrativize such divi­
sions in the viewer's attention and empathy.
With divided intention, Griffith wants to portray the world of the urban
poor and yet confines them to the periphery of the drama, which instead cen­
tres on one character the director made closer to the viewer through a pro­
cess of identification. But how is Lillian Gish's character made to seem like
the viewer? She is not akin to the viewer in any social way, since the Girl has
no particular social identity. Instead, closeness is created abstractly through
an intimacy with her problems which appear to be universal and sentimental,
the death of her parent and her romance, developed by the narrative structure
of the story. The film's end returns her to the arms of her fiance and they are
about to marry. Although the Girl is more an identificatory vehicle than agent
of this resolution, that is perhaps the point. Griffith's direction makes Gish,
already in 1912, the emblem of innocent femininity spiritually detached from
the violence and squalor around her. Her story takes viewers on a journey
through a world that Griffith has naturalistically detailed at the same time as
he has ensured it remains disassociated from his heroine's persona.
This analysis prompts Hansen to remark that films like Musketeers of Pig
Alley "advance the process by which empirical spectators were to be trans­
formed into the meta-spectator constructed by the classical text."9 While
still only a rudimentary version of the classical style, the film belongs to a
cinematic discourse different from that comprising primitive films like New
York City "Ghetto" Fish Market (1902) and The Kleptomaniac (1905), in which
milieu and characterization fully intersect and play heavily on class divisions.
To explain the difference that has occurred over the ensuing decade, Hansen
argues that the classical narrative style seeks to set up an idealized and socially
undifferentiated viewing position that standardizes what had previously been,
in early cinema, diverse acts of reception, in the social sense of ethnic, class
and gender responses. The meta-spectator of the classical style is a generali­
zation and abstraction of the earlier cinema's empirical spectator, just as
Gish's persona, the locus of a rudimentary viewer identification, is meant to
9. Ibid., 229.
113
 ,become an emblem of a generalized and abstract femininity.
In the course of her discussion, Hansen alludes to Hugo Miinsterberg,
geneity has a perfect psychological-aesthetic correspondent in Mlinsterberg's
whose early study The Film: A Psychological Study- The Silent Photoplay in 1916
abstracted, idealized and also radically individualized aesthetic film viewer/
I discussed in chapter one: There we saw that Mlinsterberg offered an aestheti
consumer. It is this viewer who takes what Burch calls the imaginary voyage
r.ationale for conventjonal film history b.r associatjn&...the spectator-subject \Xit
,...
ewerging strategies of mm edjtjng. Another, contemporaneous and socia
~
aspect of Miinsterberg's film theory now appears in view of Hansen's discus­
sion. When he drew his psychological correlation between tactics of film
editing and the mental acts performed by a spectator, Miinsterberg modelled
the viewer as a somewhat disembodied bundle of cognitive activities. In the
later chapters of The Silent Photoplay in 1916, he recasts this account in aes­
thetic terms, arguing that . s cholo of film comes together as an art: cin­
. ,erna is a detached and self-contained aesthetic experience. Because it conforms
, our mental processes rather than to the real world, film's artistic essence is
fundamentally interior and formal. Accordingly, Mlinsterberg explicitly denies
;,tbe film viewer is a social subject (Hansen's empirical spectator) and instead
becomes an aesthetic experience'the vIewer is severed from
"bot and moral concerns; the aesthetic experience will occur if the film
'\is'OJade with any deep intuition of the medium's artistic capability. The viewer
~~s,th~n become Hansen's meta-spectator.
~=:::'::=:';~:;-:O:i:;':~:i:::::':::
:1~prnpanies the rise, aft lassical style. Even after the film
!: ',';' " egan to court the middle class, it did not seek to suppress proletar­
i,ilYt,p.,tronage . Instead, films sought to assimilate this class of viewers, as Hansen
;j':~"~into a consumer society of which mass culture was to become both agent
?~~ object."lo Drawing on the work of Judith Mayne, 11 Hansen remarks that
'!~nsumerism proffers an image of one mass populace that shares homogene­
':,:~virtues and goals, and a firm consensus about how these may be realized.
':~ image is, on the one hand, diffuse and highly generalized and, on the other,
iJ,
..lbkl., :230. Hansen's argument here depends generally on Lary May's Screening Out the Past: The Birth
t~/tu'" and the Motion Picture Industry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), chapters 5-8.
Judith Mayne, "Immigrants and Spectators," Wide Angle 5 (1982): 32-41.
individualized in the model of the meta-spectator. This imaged social homo­
through the identificatory mechanisms of the bourgeois IMR, already roughly
formed, in the folds of Musketeers of Pig Alley.
In one respect, however, the social meaning of the IMR is superficially bour­
geois and Burch exaggerates its class character. Middle-class culture provides
the sources for the construction of narrative and performative conventions, for
devices that sustain viewer-character identification and for compositional codes
sustaining a pretence to realism, which typically in Musketeers of Pig Alley serves
as a variety of decoration. As essential as these may seem to a formalist critic
like Burch, in formulating differences between the primitive and classical
modes, the bourgeois forms of theatre, painting and the novel installed in cin­
ema are also in a sense limited to formal functions. They create, for example,
the veneer of a certain gentility, among whose preliminary cinematic icons is
doubtless the face of Lillian Gish. Such gentility is calculated to be defined
against the putative barbarism that the anxious middle class projected onto the
urban proletariat and, through them, onto the cinema. But behind that mid­
dle-class veneer, bourgeois culture was not exactly being reconstituted in the
new medium. Rather, a new entity was being forged, the popular culture of
mass consumption in which Hollywood cinema would playa starring role
between 1915 and 1950. Hansen concludes,
If the suppression of class and ethnic diversity was in keeping with the cin­
ema's pretension to a bourgeois public sphere, the effort to co-opt such
diversity into a generalized aesthetic appeal was more in touch with large­
scale transformations in the capitalist economy. 12
As a structure, mass culture did not have particularly deep class roots and
instead generated its own sphere. Its bourgeois forms were only that, repre­
sentational forms borrowed and then deployed superficially as an assurance of
decorum-initially and consciously to meet the objections of the industry's cul­
12. Hansen, "Whose Public Sphere?," 230.
115
./"
 tqred nOll·supporters and would-be refonners. 13 The bourgeoisie would never
~tirely accept popular cinema as a mirror of their aspirations and values, mak­
To understand that shift anew, the focus will now be adjusted to what it
'
means when cinema arises within a discourse of cultural history, this time tak­
(ng Mlinsterberg a rather exceptional, largely mistaken though also telling early
ing the view that this historical moment is distinctly modern. For many of the
enthusiast of film art. While as an episode in the historical career of capital,
new historians, it follows that the real start of such an enquiry lay in the writ­
consumer society represents a tremendous surge in the career of the owner­
ings of Sigfried Kracauer in the 1920s 15 and in Walter Benjamin's essays of the
operator class, as a cultural phenomenon it represents something quite differ­
1930S, where the cinema itself in both cases is taken to be deeply symptom­
~nt from the bourgeois experience of the previous century. Mass culture images
atic of modernity itself. 16 Benjamin argues that the appearance of lithography,
~re only slightly less alien to that class's self-reflection than to the proletariat,
photography, the phonograph, film and other techniques of reproduction arise
e'fen though the cultural hegemony of these images could be said to serve the
directly from the age of industrialization and coincide with the appearance of
~P,ds of the bourgeoisie, and to feed the class aspirations of the ethnics and
~.,tkers striving for a place in an emergent "white collar" labour market­ a mass society. These techniques of reproduction, Benjamin reasons, represent

,.
~~. The film industry's promotional rhetoric in the inter-testamental period
.... ;. '\ . ,'.
a "shattering of tradition," and signify first of all that modem aesthetics are sev­
ered from traditional ideas of art. For Benjamin, the culture of technology is not
~~n the primitive era and the fully formed Hollywood of the twenties not­
~~~tanding, in a consumer society middle-class virtues become the vaguer a neutral new vehicle of traditional art but a destructive force appearing at the
end of classical Western image making. Because he conceives the technologi­
'>T" ; ,of the consumer consciousness, and popular film culture becomes a
cal effects of industrialism to be a sharp break in both cultural and economic
ally misshapen, if hyper-engaging, simulation of being middle class. Its
history, Benjamin calls into question the notion that modes of representation
::'::"';:i)\~,,'r power is that it was made available to all for a low price of admission.
lr~~)l~~n matters are relevant to
can be continued by installing them in the new media of reproduction.
the question of whether Burch's sharp divi­
,~i,'~~tween the PMR and the IMR has a social basis. Burch's analysis relies on In his essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,"

k'~~edure of projecting back from the IMR to argue the paradigmatic "oth­
f':'
for example, Benjamin argues that the cutting difference between art in our
era and the past is the dispersal of "aura." 17 The term refers to the unique­
~. of early cinema. Hansen posits that, while such a division remains valid,
ness, sited authority, historicity and sacrality of artworks. Under the impact
lund upon which to argue the difference must be shifted. For Burch (and
of reproduction in the making and distribution of images, aura vanishes because
,apparatus theorists), the classical style results from the installation of
reproductive techniques have the capacity "to meet the beholder or listener
nal and bourgeois values in cinema and the end of a proletarian film
're. Hansen's thesis is that the emergence ()f classical cinema is a more
' ,

,~ambiguous and novel phenomenon, both in terms of its social basis and 15, Kracauer's writing in this period has long been obscured and unavailable but is lately coming to

""Y;~~s significance of its cultural production. Her argument synthesizes much light largely through the efforts of historians like Hansen and Elsaesser. See New German Critique 40 (Win­

)f~'~ research
ter 1987) devoted to Weimar Film Theory. A Kracauer text that has proved important to the new film
of the new historians and, while also criticizing Burch, she
~~with him that the essence of the phenomenon is "a paradigmatic shift
history, "Cult of Distraction: On Berlin's Picture Palaces (1926)": 91-96, is included. For a recent study
of Kracauer's critical position and method, see David Frisby, FraBments of Modernity: Theories of Moder­

~~,one kind of cinema to another-a shift, above all, in the conception of nity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), 109-186,

~,~Jat~ons between film and spectator."14 16. For full discussions of Benjamin's role in shaping current cinema research, see Thomas Elsaesser,
"Cinema- The Irresponsible Signifier or, 'The Gamble with History': Film Theory or Cinema Theory,";
Miriam Hansen, "Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: 'The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology'," and

'See May, ScreeninB Out the Past, 3-60, for a lively and detailed account of the early attacks on the Richard Allen, "The Aesthetic Experience of Modernity: Adorno, Benjamin and Contemporary Film The­
1Ji,lhduatry and its responses. ~ry," in New German Critique 40 (Winter 1987): 65-91; 179-224; 225-240.

:: ,Hansen, Bab.1 and Babylon, 24. 17. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Illuminations, ed.
Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969),221.

117
 cal culture, here exemplified by the endurance of Renaissance perspective
,in his own particular situation." 18 The broad consequence is a levelling of sen­

sibility and an enforced equivalency of objects, of which statistical quantifi­ despite the rigorous change of media.

This said, I hope that the historical limits of apparatus theory will become
cation is an appropriate symptom. Dispersal of aura and the new mobility of
more obvious. These theorists look to the film image as a single composition
images, Benjamin claims, "are intimately connected with the contemporary
for the heir to classical perspectival painting, and they overlook the more rad­
mass movements. Their most powerful agent is the film."19 For Benjamin, then,
ical implications of film editing. Their implied conception of film montage is
the aesthetics of modernity must be said to begin under a new set of condi­
limited to classical editing, a type of montage whose purpose is to subsume
tions, namely those of a mass society.
potential disjunctions between shots into a narrative flow, which is why it is
Benjamin believes that traditional aesthetics are rendered obsolete under
often called "continuity" or even "invisible" editing. More clearly aware of
, such conditions. The "total function of art is reversed ... it begins to be based
this problem than most film theorists, Stephen Heath endeavours to show that
, on another practice-politics."2o Benjamin is therefore far less willing than the

continuity editing plays a role as important as image composition in maintain­

. apparatus theorists or Burch to see a strong continuity between the visual cul­
ing the position of the spectator, and so the ideological effects of editing too

,::"tilfe of the past and the modern era. Like them, however, Benjamin situates the
1"',"-",1:' 23
;!:)bift from a traditional aesthetics to a modern politics of art on the pivot of bear comparison with those of traditional perspective.

}fr~e~tator reception determined by technological apparatus. The classical arts, Benjamin's argument reverses this priority between the film image and mon­
tage. He sees editing as the ground of film spectatorship and productive of a
;t:lOr'~ample, painting, promote contemplation in the viewer; the modern repro­
:'\';~ftive arts engender "distraction," an idea that Benjamin takes over from
distinctly modern experience, an experience of disjunction. The rapid changes
:~ between shots in a film militate against the type of contemplative absorption
;':!i:,Kljac;:auer. 21 By contemplation, Benjamin means absorption of the viewer into
:(~~artwork. Distraction puts "the public in the position of the critic," a'posi­ induced by looking at a painting. When, in a remarkable comparison, Benja­
min says cinema administers "shocks" to the viewer's perception comparable
,,!\~~n he associates with the testing and judging attitude of the scientist and psy­
,'::~ologist, and finally one he associates with the politicized critic of culture. 22
to the outrages calculated in Dada cabaret,24 he understands that the particU­
'f- "',
larity of film lies in its rapidly shifted imagery, giving rise to disassociation,
'! " 'As discussed earlier, apparatus theorists argue that the history shaping filmic
:j(i~'fliification and the consequent dispositif of the cinematic institution militate not centring, of the spectator-subject. Under the influence of Kracauer, Ben­
jamin emphasizes cinema is a cultural form that promotes a mirror-experience
" " t a critical state of reception. Using the metaphors of Plato's cave and

.,,,,'dream, for example, Baudry argues that the cinema reconstitutes absorption of social fragmentation in the real world. Kracauer wrote of cinema,

'at,:' mode of reception through compositional means, namely by simulating

">::i,o,'::':/
Here, in pure externality, the audience encounters itself; its own reality is
J,~.·:.' ~Celltred
"';,,,<
subject through perspectivally composed images. Such arguments revealed in the fragmented sequence of splendid sense impressions.
25

,:~~;lte the newness of film by insisting on its continuity with Western classi­
, ~'
Like Kracauer, Benjamin sees this fragmented experience as a key to under­

"18, lbid.
23. Stephen Heath, Q!Jestions of Cinemo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1981), see especially
1;. Ibid. chap. 2 on "Narrative Space." For a critical discussion of this theoretical synthesis of perspective. the
film image and editing. see Noel Carroll. chap. 3 in Mystifying Movies: Fods ond FoJ/ocies in Contempo­
io, Ibid.• 224.

rary Film Theory (New York: Columbia University Press. 1988), 89-146.

2L Hansen. "Benjamin, Cinema and Experience," 180-186. See alsDElsaesser, "Cinema- The Irrespon·

sible Signifier." 80-85. for a discussion of Kracauer's development ofthe idea of "distraction." 24. Be.njamin. "The Work of Art," 2}8.

22.'8enjamin. "The Work of Art," 237-241. 25. Kracauer, "Cult of Distraction." 94. Emphasis added.

'-,

standing the social psychology of cinema, although his emphasis is on the ways
cinema manifests a distinctly modern mode of perception to be associated
with urban and industrialized society:
The film is the art form that is in keeping with the increased threat to his
life that modern man has to face. Man's need to expose himself to shock
effects is his adjustment to the dangers threatening him. The film corre­
historical circumstances. Here Benjamin's and Kracauer's accounts of the filmic
spectator proves to be more richly pertinent to a number of new historians than
the theory of Comolli and Baudry (however important they are to Burch) in
revising an understanding of early cinema, and especially its relationship to the
avant-garde. In the next section, I will take up four authors among the film
scholars now rewriting the history of early cinema who have directly clarified
these pertinencies: Musser, Gunning, Gaudreault and Elsaesser.

sponds to profound changes in the apperceptive apparatus - changes that

are experienced on an individual scale by the man in the street in big-city

traffic, on a historical scale by every present-day citizen. 26

In historicizing the appearance of film Benjamin is an important precur­

sor of apparatus theory, but he anticipates problems with the way it will con­

strue the meaning attributed to composition in relation to cinema's ideological

significance. Although it is important to locate this discrepancy about the sig­

nificance of composition in film in a potentially sharp theoretical disagreement,

for present purposes the issue can be seen to turn on the types of films in ques­

tion. Benjamin takes the assertive montage of the Soviet cinema to be exem­

plary of the cinematic experience while the apparatus theorists generalize

Hollywood continuity editing as film's primary manifestation. In passing, Ben­

jamin also addresses aspects of Hollywood-style cinema, and especially the cult

of the star, but like Kracauer before him he judges classical filmmaking to be

a compensatory and transparent attempt to simulate aura. Hansen's discussion Ices were characterized by "the demystification of the screen."30

of Musketeers of Pig Alley partially indicates as well how, for example, persona
in. classical filmmaking affects such a second-order simulation. 27
The potential dispute I have begun to outline here must now be aban­
doned.2 8 The issue could be said to pivot partly on historiographic questions,
• on films in certain times and places and on practices of signification in differing
-~ :::::.
Musser initiates his inveStigation archaeologically, with the often mentioned
magic lantern practitioner and theorist Athanasius Kircher (1601-1680), and then
explores the work of his influential early nineteenth-century heir, Etienne
Gaspar Robertson, Musser's intent is to show that, from the st ~nr_
.ce l!uided technological developments and that "t~.practi.s

~6. Benjamin, "The Work of Art," 250.

27; In fact Burch has said a great deal more about Soviet montage cinema and the classical style. See

~i. "Film's Institutional Mode of Representation and the Soviet Response," October II (Winter 1979):

:'84-96. Hansen's elaboration of the social psychology of the star occurs in her Babel and Babylon, 245-294.

:~.~. Although mentioned by Elsaesser in "The Irresponsible Signifier," 65-67, and developed slightly
29. Musser, The Emergence of Cinema, 15-9\.
:further by Allen in "The Aesthetic Experience of Modernity," th~ differences and potential dispute

30. Ibid., 19.

·;:;,~tween contemporary film theory and the recent adoption of Benjamin and Kracauer as theoretical
""':. piM. in the new historical study of silent cinema have yet to receive sufficiently full treatment. 31. Ibid., 17. )
N,:·,}"',;

"'-.
 , ,~1II.IU1~0\ ~~ . ltivated often joined to what might be called instruction. As Musser care­
~setting5 to define their pm:pese. Rath~r, devel~pmentslDtersecte~ W I t h r f t / lly documents, such programs were permitted on Sundays, when pure amuse­
requirements of an established ractlc , a oop between m~-
ents, like music halls and burlesque shows, were closed by law. The keen
tion and app\jcat~. IS practice a cultiv ted and
nterest in science, industry, travel, history, religion and an emerging sociology
'la;gd bou ti cidedly
fuelled apparently boundless enthusiasms for grand exhibition formats where,
not a matter of "parlour toys" an alrground wonders" imposing astonish­
of course, the proto-cinema and its successors, Thomas Edison's kinetoscope,
ment, the engagement of audiences already familiar with the basic techniques
the Lumieres' cinematoyraphe, the vitascope and later Biograph's apparatus kept
and attentive to their improvement involved a~ aestheticsJlf dwonsuatl0n. ~
their first appointments with a widening publiC.
Something of this circumstance in the anecdote from McTeaBue comes across
The popular culture in which the cinema made its debut, then, was deeply
when Gunning points out that Trina and Mac compare the films to magic lan­
concerned with the rational mediation of the huge and rapid changes to be
tern shows. There was a widespread industry of "lantem entertainments" whose
associated with modernity, changes for instance in technology and industry,
patrons came not to be startled at illusions but to participate in discursive per­
in addition to the opening of the Orient and Africa to travel, remarkable archae­
formances. The magical and fantastic did playa part, as Robertson's career and
ological discoveries and the often disturbing social changes associated with high
the pre-cinema stage work of Georges Melies testify, but new developments
immigration. Cinema directly inherits these subjects from its ince tion, along
were greeted by audiences who sat intentionally, consciously, even conven­
with a relationship to expressing the be . s of a fist n in
tionally, in what Benjamin describes as "the position of a critic."32
... e world was ra

The theme of Musser's chronicle of the proto-cinema is that an aest tic

pre~ ie @Jaborate concatenations of "view~ Gunning draws this connec­

of disD av, in the ubli '

tion clearly when he observes,

the Lumieres' cinemato­
grapjIe. Accounts of proto-cinema written from the point of view ofinventors
It is not surprising that city street scenes, advertising films, and foreign
which tend to split this history between reproduction and analysis, in fact mir­
views all formed important genres of early cinema. The enormous popu­
ror the public's similarly split response, for, as Gunning remarks with respect
larity offoreign views (already developed and exploited by the stereoscope
to the first film showings,
and magic lantern) expresses an almost unquenchable desire to consum(
the world through images.... Early cinema categorised the visible worl<
Far from being places outside a suspension of disbelief, the presentation

as a series of discreet attractions a roductiO!

acts out the contradictory stages of involvement with the image; unfolding,

companies present a nearly encyclopaedic survey of this new'

like other nineteenth century visual entertainments, a vacillation between

topo ogy, ro panoramas to mi otography, from domesti,

belief and incredulity. 33

scenes to the e ea mg 0 prisoners and the electrocution of elephants. 3

The culture that favoured the magic lantern and other popular entertainments
~ on the IIlass sirculation of photography a
Remarking devel~nt whic
''Yu not completely separate from an audience interested in artistic applica­

exactly corresponds to screen practice toward the end of the nineteenth eel
tions for these amusements. This loftier motivation was in the minds of the

tury, Benjamin points to a further and very suggestive difference between suc
images and paintings when he writes,
,,,,:'~~. Benjamin, "The Work of Art," 240.

i:;i~· Tom Gunning, "An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and The (In)credulous Spectator;" Art
i:;~:~rt>'t 34 (Spring 1989): 35. 34. Ibid., 40.

I;}""
1
 'j
films themselves. This tendency extended to a determinative role in the forms
'ne,;demand a specific kind of approach; free-floating contemplation is

of early single-shot films and, after 1902, multi-shot films as well. In this light,
not appropriate to them. They stir the viewer; he feels challenged by them

the absence of complex forms of early films ceases to be an issue, as it was for
in a new way. At the same time picture magazines begin to put up sign­

the conventional historians who mythically reduced all primitive productions

posts for him, right ones or wrong ones, no matter. For the first time, cap­

to canned theatre. A more accurate understanding is that apparently simplis­

tions have become obligatory. And it is clear that they have an altogether

tic films were integrally related to a varied production of specific screen effects.
different character than the title of a painting. The directives which the

Their particularities of composition frequently and diversely violate the con­

captions give to those looking at pictures in illustrated magazines soon

ventions of stage tableau framing. In fact, Gunning terms them "genres," and
become even more explicit in the film where the meaning of each single

names several: the panorama, the travel view, the" 'facial expression' genre"
picture appears to be prescribed by the sequence of all preceding ones. 35

The Widespread use of captions to supplement initial mass media uses of pho­
tography, as Benjamin notes, is equivalent to the continuation in early cinema
of practices used in the discursive lantern lecture where the disjunctive quality
of various images needed to be mediated by language, as Andre Gaudreault has
shown. 36 Musser has detailed later applications of the lantern lecture at ven­
l,Ics like the Eden Musee in New York, when Edison's vitagraph films were
shown, most often in combination with slides and accompanied by a lecture,37
Musser's work on the proto-cinema importantly revises and enriches the
~/bistorical picture of the surrounding culture and its mode of reception. How­
i:,l:
;;{:~er, Musser remains mute on questions of thttideo)og-ka} SigIlifj~ of
f'(~ c ~ of screen practice in early cinema. One effect achieved by
,:~., - --=-----­
'!;j~nning in quoting McTeague is that it allows him, through Norris's trio, to
,iil",.verse the distance between Musser's documentation and his own critical
"'\'~r"";
'i~ysis of this continuum in reception. Gunning is concerned'with examin­
}?~:\permutations of the aesthetic of demonstration in the earl~ cinema's screen
,iipr..etice, along with its cultural and ideological effects, particularly on what
'if~~jamin calls apperception.
~.•~.,.•,,:,..,.(\".,.d.he fh st CI II 8f fjlmmak ing sbm,,~ WIlFe eilleEl eftcl the Hailies of the eppa­
Vl/
~~Ed:-the Mftiltoscope. biograph, cinematograph - instead of "habwas
~jhe._~eYices that produced the spectacle were foregrounded over the
,. '(I.,.
38
and the most durable and elaborated of these, the trick film. These might
be termed primitive form-genres because each displays a formal capacity of the
camera. The panorama demonstrates the ability of the camera to take in a 180­
or even 36o-degree view; the facial expression film displays the revelatory power
of a close-up: and the trick film, developed by Melies, exploits the effects of
editing. Their variety indicates the sources of early cinema were more various
and complicated than efforts to record theatre. The influences on the form­
genres came from diverse areas of endeavour from amusement to science, as
well as different media, from photography to political cartoons, while also car­
rying over the proto-cinema's subject matter,39
It is no secret to film historians that all of the types of shots, from extreme
long shot to tight close-up, already appear in the primitive cinema a decade
before continuity editing would integrate them into a narrative system. But
the question is, what motivated the evolution of a remarkably full repertoire
of shot types before they could be said to be needed narratively? Gunning's
answer is that these form-genres were often built around demonstrating a type
of shot, as in Grandpa's Reading Glasses (Edison, 19 02 ). In this multi-shot film,
a boy picks up his grandfather's magnifying glass (the action is seen in medium
shot) and a series of close-ups magnifying objects in the rOOm follow. The
appeal of this film lies in the display of the close-up, and Gunning points out
that the early use of camera positions closer than the famous proscenium-arch.
distance should be accounted for in this way and not just in terms of pril1liti~~:

'$S. Benjamin, "The Work of Art," 226.

premonitions oflater narrative techniques:

:16. Andre Gaudreault, "Showing and Telling: Image and Word in Early Cinema," in E15.e55er, Early Cin­

';nip, nS-277.
'!&. Gunning. U 'Primitive' Cinema: A Frame-up?," 97.

39. John Fell, Film and the Narrative Tradition (Berkeley: Uni.ersity of Cali fomia Press. t
,;!" Musser. The Emergence of Cinema, 271-272.

~any of the close-ups in early film differ from later uses of the technique
precisely because they do not use enlargement for narrative punctuation,
but as an attraction in its own right. The close-up cut into Porter's The Gay
Shoe Clerk (19°3) may anticipate later continuity techniques, but its prin­
cipal motive is again pure exhibitionism, as the lady lifts her skirt hem,
exposing her ankle for all to see. Biograph films such as Photonraphinn a
Female Crook (1904) and Hoolinan in Jail (1903) consist of a single shot in
which the camera is brought close to the main character.... The enlarge­
ment is not a device expressive of narrative tension; it is in itself an attrac­
tion and the point of the film. 40
What these form-genres have in common is the urge to demonstrate specific
capacities of the apparatus. Because they placed quite specific demands on the
camera's positioning and operation films just one shot in length are not so sim­
ple when seen as a group. Instead, a set of fonnal distinctions arises in the use
of the frame; however, these differences also disclose a unified aesthetic of
.demonstration. The medium-range "mug shot" of the facial expression film, the
deep-space diagonals of the travel view, touristic arrivals of trains, boats and
trolleys, the ponderous pivoting cameras of the spectacular panoramas, exploit
types of shots to serve certain and often repeated purposes. Viewers of these
films experienced the specific cinematic capacity and the subject matter put on
.display together, constituting what Gunning terms a "cinema of attractions."41
Focusing on the trick film because it provides the richest instances, Gun­
':lling develops examples of what Gaudreault terms the monstrator, one who
'I,,' .......- ..................
,.hows or demonstrates, rather th ter ' ial fi ure, the narra­
tor, one woe s t e story.42 Gaudr It emphasizes that narration was nec­
'. ex e 1 ar y cinematic spectacle (just as it was in lantern
:.':d.Ows), while the lecturer's perfonnance was an extrinsic narrative supplement,
;;,~king monstration and narration separate channels in the perfonnance. 43 This
:>44)' Tom Gunning, "The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, its Spectator and the Avant-Garde," in Early
,:,:eiM"''',58.
i .'41.. Gunning, "The Cinema of Attractions," 56-62.
~'4~. Cunn'ing, U 'Primitive' Cinema: A Frame-up?," 99-100.
;.:;~4J;.· Andre Gaudreault, "Showing and Telling: Image and Word in Early Cinema," in Elsaesser, Early On­
ri.~~. 276. See chap. 4 for a discussion of this supplementary work.
separation between narration and monstration Gunning argues, allows a proper
recognition of the early filmmaker's role as not always a weak narrational rep­
lication of a "passive theatricality"; as monstrator, the filmmaker's role wid­
ens to that of a cinematic strategist.
Gunning's most intricate example is the master of the trick film, Melies,
who made his often elaborate films using the controlling technique of "pre­
cise continuity of action over a splice, .."44 Melies's characteristic trick con­
sists of the disappearance and substitution of elements within an otherwise
stable frame. The astounding variety in his films arises from the imagination
Melies brought to improvizing on this single demonstration of film's illusion­
ist capability. It is usually claimed that he achieved his effects by stopping and
starting his camera. In fact, Melies spliced together nearly identical shots,45
consciously cutting to achieve his effects. Turning the camera on and off would
have prevented him from maintaining the rhythm of his often complex stag­
ings; instead, he edited with a strict principle of continuity which Gunning
terms "continuity, .. of viewpoint,"46 - to be distinguished from the analytical
05
breakdown and narrative linearization of shots that arise after 19 . Melies
maintained a rigid continuity of the frame while playing with isolated ele­
0
ments within it, like the woman in The Spiritualist Photonrapher (19 3), the
0
annoying demons that beset the traveIler in The Inn Where No Man Rests (19 3)
and the artist's own head in The Explodinn Head (1902). Melies's principle went
on to be widely imitated and Gunning points to The Innenious Soubrette (Pathe,
19 ), a three-shot film in which the centre shot rotates the angle forty-five
02
degrees but maintains the framing so that the maid seems to slide up the wall.
"This cinema," writes Gunning, "differs from later narrative cinema through
its fascination in the thrill of display rather than the construction of a story."47
Indeed, for Melies, the scenario is a pretext for effects, and permits him to
theatricalize them with gesture and sketchy narrative development. The con­
ception of these films, for their makers and viewers alike, is less the represen­
44. Gunning, U 'Primitive' Cinema: A Frame-up?," 98.
45. Ibid., 98.
46. Ibid., 99.
47. Ibid., 101.
12

Kracauer and Benjamin persist in discerning as the defining feature of the film
experience, even twenty years later. Indeed, Gunning locates a primal of that
experience in the confrontation and tight temporal logic of the thrill, calling
it the antipode of the contemplative-absorptive reception:
These early films explicitly acknowledge their spectator, seeming to reach
outwards and confront. Contemplative absorption is impossible here. The
viewer's curiosity is aroused and fulfilled through a marked encounter, a
direct stimulus, a succession of shocks....
The aesthetic of attractions developed in fairly conscious opposition to an
orthodox identification of viewing pleasure with the contemplation of
beauty. 54
!ppens, it was OD thjs feature of early cinema that moral
railing against the dangers of the new . es focused their ire,
rvousness" that film could in uce.
Weekly, for example, complained t at the cinema "makes no demands on the
audience, requiring neither punctuality nor pattern, for it has no end, no
sequence."56 And an educator of the period cautioned that film "tends to
overexcite and prevent the development of the emotional life, generating an
overwhelming drive for something that stirs and thrills.... Here lies the greater
danger of the motion picture drama."57 It comes as little surprise, therefore,
,that the film industry's campaign to reform itself during the nickelodeon era
'Jincluded conscious efforts to linearize the image, to tur~ strong cinematic
',effects to the rational and cohesive purposes of narrative and to replace con­
. !' ,
.':frontations between screen and spectator with the internalizations of screen
~",:,~pace that Miinsterberg found so important to a psychology of cinema.
ii,i" 'Nonetheless it was the disjunctiveness of shock effects that prompted
"',,;~,}~njamin to see film as symptomatic of a profound "shattering of tradition,"
i"i,~to associate it with a mode of perception that he characterized as distinctly
,,·,t,;.,:.
",y;$4., Ibid., 38-39.
Gunning, "An Aesthetic of Astonishment, "; Gunning, uThe Cinema of Attractions," 60.
',May, Screenina Out the Past, 39.
,;.;.,$'i.' ibid., 41.
\[, '
modern and non-bourgeois. Drawing on these insights, Gunning suggests this
new perception arises under the regime of industrial mechanization, so that
"even a filmed landscape panorama does not lend itself to pure aesthetic con­
templation. One is fully aware of the machine which mediates the view, the
camera pivoting on its tripod."58 Then, too, so many landscape films were shot
from trains. Indeed, a whole genre-exemplified by Black Diamond Express
(Edison, 189 6 ), Interior New York Subway, 14th Street to 42nd Street (Biograph,
19°5) and James Freer's CPR films, the first sustained productions of Canadian
cinema-and even a special exhibition format, Hale's Tours,59 grew up which
directly expressed this mechanized perception, twinning the still new sensa­
tion of travelling through a landscape on a train with its cinematic replication.
As Gunning remarks,
A film taken from the front of a train, an "unseen energy swallowing space"
~ers
(as one journalist described the experience of such a train panorama), dou­
bled this effect imposed by industrial apparatuses, intensifying the aliena­
Harpers
tion and the dynamic sensation of train travel. 60
This perceptual transformation is brought once again into the open by two
remarkable films in the contemporary avant-garde cinema, Ernie Gehr's Eureka
(1974) and Ken Jacobs's Opening the Nineteenth Century: 1896 (1990). Gehr's film
(discussed at greater length in the prelude) uses a 1903 one-shot film taken from
the front of a San Francisco trolley travelling down Market Street, reprinting
each frame eight times. Compositionally, the film foregrounds a double sys­
tem. The flattened planes of action, graphically a marked foreground, middle
plane and recessive distance, are doubled by the assertive penetration of tht
trolley tracks. Each frame can almost be counted off and the car's stops makl
regular caesurae along the film's relentless trajectory. This doubling greatl~
expands the mechanical doubling of the original, the trolley as a machine tha
58, Gunning, "An Aesthetic of Astonishment," 40,
59, Charles Musser, "The Travel Genre in 1903-1904: Moving Towards Fictional Narrative," in"Elsaesse
Early Cinema, 123-132; Raymond Fielding, "Hale's Tours: Ultrarealism in the Pre-191O Motion picture
in Film Before Griffith. ed. John L. Fell (Berkeley: University of California Press. 1983), 116-130: Pet'
Morris, "Images or Canada," in Fell, Film Before Griffith, 67-74.
60, Gunning. "An AesthetiC of Astonishment," 40.
1:

swallows space and the camera that analyzes it into discreet temporal parcels,
micro-views of the whole - these twin perceptual effects of mechanical posi­
tioning of the eye preclude seeing wholly in the space. In OpeninB the Nine­
teenth Century Jacobs takes a set of Lumiere travelogues (most of which were
shot from boats), reprints and projects them upside down. The viewer watches
them through a polarized filter, inscribing a stereoptic vision on the footage,
and bringing into a heightened awareness both the fact of the camera and
machine brought to a higher power. Paradoxically, in both films, the lyricism
of these antique cinema moments inspires a sensation of peering under the
blinds of technology into the temps perdu of San Francisco before the earth­
quake, and of glimpsing the Egypt and Venice of a century ago.
Unlike these avant-garde artists, Kracauer and Benjamin do not share such
a sense of the lyrical possibility of cinema. Their analysis is based on what
Gunning terms "the drying up of experience and its replacement by a culture
of distraction."61 For Kracauer, the theme of fragmentation means that the mov­
iegoing experience is "a total artwork of effects" which essentially manifests
a lack of coherence in modern experience. For this same reason, however, that
lack has a representational value because it indicates how, as a compensatory
form of entertainment, it "necessarily corresponds to that of enterprise."62 The
experience of work and of social life is paid compensation through disjunc­
tive forms and distracted reception in entertainment. The taste, or even drive,
for fragmentary sensation and thrills is symptomatic of a society's perceptual
change. For Benjamin,
Thus technology has subjected the human sensorium to a complex kind of
training. There came a day when a new and urgent need for stimuli was
met by the film. In a film, perception in the form of shocks was established
as a formal principle. That which determines the rhythm of production on
a conveyor belt is the basis of the rhythm ofreception in the film. 63
':<'hrcommenting on Benjamin's correlation between the experience of moder­
:ii('lUty and the form of shocks, Hansen draws out the comparison when she writes,
fit~.,;/,
'\!'~I~:_;:~'i
Vi;;.I. Ibid., 41.
:.,i!j~" Ibid.
i..'-.'
8efIj;unin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,"lIIuminotions, 175.
,
The adaptation of human perception in industrial modes of production and
transportation, especially the radical restructuration of spatial and tempo­
ral relations, has an aesthetic counterpart in the formal procedures of the
photographic media-the arbitrary moment of exposure in photography and
64
the fragmenting grip of framing and editing in film.
Cinema's institutional reaction was to attempt a restoration of the aesthetic
coherence of traditional forms, and particularly narrative, but while the proj­
ect takes the powerful form of classical narrative cinema, the restoration is never
entirely successful. This is perhaps why, twenty-three years later, Benjamin still
sees the social phenomenon of cinema in terms that resemble so closely the
experiences the exhibitors of early films actively sought to promote in "the
cinema of attractions." It is also why Gunning, who has brought that resem­
blance to light, refers to that same "cinema of attractions" as a continuous
"underground" and an "inexhaustible resource" for the history of film that was
to come. And it is the avant-garde's re-imagination of that earlier explicit cin­
65
ema ofthrills and shocks that Gunning especially has in mind.
In contrast to Mrs. Sieppe, Gunning reports, was the response of another
early twentieth-century filmgoer, the Cubist painter Fernand Leger. After
seeing Abel Gance's La Roue (19 22 ), Leger wrote, "The cinema turned my head
around.... I was so captivated by the movies that I had to give up painting."66
As a member of the artistic avant-garde, and soon to contribute the master­
piece of Cubist cinema Ballet mecanique (1924), Leger's reaction to film is typ­
ical of the modernists' responses to the new medium, particularly in the period
just after WW1. This period saw a new turn toward mechanical modernity for
which film frequently served as a metaphor, as in two texts Leger illustrated
at the time, Blaise Cendrars's La Fin du Monde-li/mee par /'AnBe N.-D. and
Yvan Goll's Die KinodichtunB'
The film metaphor proved in large measure to be based on an imaginal)
64. Hansen, "Benjamin, Cinema and Experience." 184.
65. Gunning. "The Cinema of Attractions," 61.
66. Cited in Standish D. Lawder. The Cubist Cinema (New York: New York University Press, 1975).8'
1,

cinema, however, and not on actual movies being made after 1920.
sentiment that runs through the whole of the French avant-garde, Leger wrote
that the power of film was a "matter of making images seen" but he was disap­
pointed with its "enslavement to traditional art forms, particularly theatre and
literature."67 Such ambivalent response was particularly evident in the case of
La Roue, a film sharply divided between an old-fashioned narrative (which Leger
reports having barely endured) and sophisticated and highly disjunctive mon­
tage techniques applied to certain sequences (those, in fact, constructed by
Cendrars68 ). Leger's own Ballet mecanique can partly be regarded as a remake
of the Gance film in which the potentialities of its montage are liberated. 69
Publicly, too, within the avant-garde cine-clubs, Gance's film was shown most
often in the form of the montage excerpts.
This isolation of passages from La R~ue suggests to Gunning that the mod­
ernists' enthusiasm for film was particularly prompted by elements that were
more properly features of the film's early period - namely mechanistic display,
the aesthetic of demonstration and the non-narrative confrontation between
spectator and screen. This leads Gunning to claim that what attracted the avant­
garde to films, even those as late as Gance's, "was precisely the exhibitionist
quality of turn-of-the-century popular art ... its freedom from the creation of
a diegesis, its accent on direct stimulation."7o The memory of, or even imag­
ining, primitive exhibition formats also held strong appeal. Primitive films
were placed amid entertainments that included vaudeville acts, singalong slide
~ows and comic turns. The films themselves were programmed as a hodge­
podge of comedies, actualities, chase and trick films. When artists like Leger
. ~w beneath the conventional narrativity of later films like Gance's, Gunning
~Jieves, they also looked back not just to the exhibitionism of early films but
. also to the ways in which films were actually exhibited.
Gunning draws on Sergei Eisenstein's essay on avant-garde theatre, "A
1923
;·.Mbntage of Attractions," to indicate how early film, as a cinema of attractions
W~ich a single film would serve as an element in a collage, corresponds to
Gunning, "The Cinema of Attractions," 56. Emphasis in original.
. See Lawder, The Cubist Cinema, 88-97 for an account ofCendrars's involvement with Gance.
;,.Gunning, "The Cinema of Attractions," 59.
the avant-garde ambition. In his own theatre work, Eisenstein understood an
Echoing a
attraction as
any aggressive moment in theatre, i.e., any element of it that subjects the
audience to emotional or psychological influence, verified by experience
and mathematically calculated to produce specific emotional shocks in the
7
spectator in their proper order within the whole. !
The historical sources listed by the Soviet director include the circus, puppet
shows, Grand Guignol and film comedy-in short the non-bourgeois forms of
popular culture in which early film was embedded. As his quotation suggests,
Eisenstein sought to recast such elements in a much more carefully calculated
structure of effects. However, what is relevant here is his isolation of each
attraction as a delimited shock effect and his attempts to theorize series of them
in a theatrical montage. Within a year, in fact, Eisenstein would go on to relate
72
this theory directly to his film work.
In effect, then, Gunning's notion of a cinema of attractions predates Soviet
montage, Benjamin's exemplary case of film as a Dada-like form in which ele­
ments of a performance were administered discontinuously as shocks, to the
early cinema itself. He remarks,
5' refers backwards t9 a popular t,ftsiti8P 2Dd forwards
to an avant-garde subversion. The tradition is that of the fairground and
~arnival, and particularl~elopmentduring the turn of the centuf)
in such modern amusement parks as Coney Island. The avant-garde radicali
sation of this term comes in the theoretical and practical work in· theatn
and film of Sergei Eisenstein, whose theory of the "montage of attractions'
intensified this popular energy into an aesthetic subversion, through a radi
cal theoreticisation of the power of attractions to undermine the conven
tions of bourgeois realism. 73
71. S. M. Eisenstein, Selected Works, vol. t, Writings 1922-34, ed. and trans. Richard Taylor (Londo
and Bloomington: OFl Publishing and Indiana University Press, 1988),34.
72. See Eisenstein, "The Montage of Film Attractions," Writings /922-34, 1, 39-58 .
73. Gunning, "An Aesthetic of Astonishment," 44nl3. II should also be added that here Gunni.
acknowledges that the term and concept of a cinema of attractions was developed in collaboration wi
Gaudreault.
1:
 has the virtue of allowing us to see specific links between Gunning's account
Ina similar vein, he cites the Italian Futurist Marinetti's contrast between "the
of the early cinema, Benjamin's theory of distraction and a historical avant­
'static', 'stupid voyeur' of traditional theatre" with the "aesthetics of aston­
garde correlative, Dada. To begin, Elsaesser cites Dada artist George Grosz: "I
ishment" and the "new spectator" who "feels directly addressed by the spec­
am like a film-strip and like a child in a thousand luna parks ... someone is
~ade and joins in, singing along, heckling the comedians."74
always cranking the handle."76 Grosz's gesture is a common avant-garde tac­
Gunning is associating both the "non-continuous" forms of the early films
tic, modelling the artists' irrational childlike perception on the cinema. He
and their exhibition circumstances in the fairground and in vaudeville with the
implies that the mobility of the eye of the urban dweller- the wondrous and
avant-garde's passion for montage effects. Further, he hypothesizes their close
subversive point of view made possible by modern locomotion (the train or
.connection in the avant-garde imagination. Although historically problematic,
automobile) and modern elevation (the balloon, the Eiffel Tower, the sky­
;Qu~ning's backdating of avant-garde imagination is very suggestive. The prob­
scraper)-has made human perception like that of the camera eye. At the same
:1~ is that artists only speak of films they encounter at a later stage in cine­
time, it is very unlike the retinal vision of our ancestors, composed instead
~s,development, albeit with regret and with an eye to something else lurking
like a classical painting. Moreover, Grosz suggests an alienation of subjectivity
';$nawork like La Roue. Leger, Eisenstein, Marinetti and many others also pro­
is indicated; someone else is turning the crank on the selPs now-mechanized
'~l~im the importance of popular theatre in terms of "attractions" possessed
Of an aesthetic of demonstration.and a non-diegetic, even anti-representational perceptual system.
The comparison is very apt. The early cinema everywhere took as its sub­
.:1l;IOde of presentation when compared to conventional nineteenth-century real­
:..m., In a daring conflation, Gunning asserts that the avant-garde actually looked ject matter the extraordinary "view" with its panoramas and travel films. Even
in narrative films, notably The Tunnel Workers (Biograph, 19 06 ) and Skyscrapers
.ilIr~ later films with an imagination charged with a nostalgia for popular arts. As
of New York (Biograph, 1906), the drama seems largely to eventuate from occa­
~'~sult, they saw, in effect, within narrative films the surviving "underground"
sions for extraordinary location shots. When the cinema sought to tame this
impulses of attractions openly manifested in primitive films. This is why the
sensationalism, says Elsaesser, the "total specular entrancement" that was
~Iy cinema seems to emerge repeatedly in the imagination of the avant-garde
installed in the wake of narrative codings laid "the final cornerstone of the
j:Ummaking beginning in the 1920S. Seeking to overthrow the narrative film
edifice of control and containment which has governed the development of
~~!lI~has been given over to conventional codes of representation, experimen­
mainstream cinema."?? A paradox arose for Dada, because the cinema seemed
~;,tilmmakers have intermittently intuited in "this earlier carnival of the
(~;.~-;,-',-
"initially anti-contemplative" on the screen; in response to this, the Dada fas­
c('~ina ... an unexhausted resource - a Coney Island of the avant-garde," and

cination with film spectatorship became in a sense "nostalgic." Consequently,

~~~tdone so down to the present. 75

"what was Dada in regard to cinema was not a specific film, but the perfor­
mance, not a specific set of techniques or textual organization, but the spec­
;~l.though Gunning is a film historian, one of the most insightful, and he pro­
tacle."78 The Dadaists cultivated cinema as a mode of performance and they
i~es that early cinema holds more or less a continuous, if ghostly, place in
achieved a calculatedly destructive self-consciousness which, for example,
;~t avant-garde imagination, he develops no concrete examples of how that
informs Rene Clair's and Francis Picabia's Entr'acte (1924). It is important to
!)~gination has been manifested historically.

;;"i. Thomas Elsaesser's essay on Dada and film, suggested again by Benjamin,
76. Thomas Elsaesser, "Dada/Cinema?," in Dada and Surrealist Film, ed. Rudolf E. Kuenzli (New York:
'j.'; i

',./ / ,'\ Willis Locker & Owens, 1987), 16.

\:,,?i~~
i'4:: Gunning, "The Cinema of Attractions," 59. 77. Ibid., 19.
~ -~ ­
78.
.:~S:.,
';'~,
,Ibid., 61.
'

,"
,',
~1 that this work was not originally made to be freestanding but was con­ first served as material meant to intrude upon a live performance.
~ted to ~erve as the title suggests, as an interlude, in Francis Picabia and Like Eisenstein's theoretical radicalization of the idea of attractions, Elsaes­
~ Satie's collaborative Relache, billed as a ballet. Clair seized on this oppor­ ser's historical example of Dada film practice reveals something of the logic
~lity to create a sort of homage to primitive film. Elsaesser describes Clair's of the avant-garde's relationship to the early cinema, a logic already suggested
t-oject this way, by Gunning. Fuelled by a nostalgia for a cinema of demonstration, and turn­
ing it into forms which can veer from self-reflective pedagogy (Jacobs, Le Grice,
Entr'acte works hard at "deconstructing" what had already become set as
Rimmer) through reductive recapitulation (Warhol, Snow, Gehr) to decon­
the conventions of the feature film and the cinema experience. It mocks
structive display (Clair), the avant-garde engages in an imaginary subversion of
,~:' the solemnity of state-occasions as they might have been presented in con­
t: temporary newsreel. By its satirical look at funerals, parades, and photo
classical film structures in order to exfoliate the "other cinema" within it. To
do so requires the experimental artist to traverse historical thresholds between
"';:< features from the world of arts, entertainment and leisure, Entr:acte ex­
diegesis and the cinema itself. In doing so', the artist resituates the spectator
};~';) pJodes the conventions of the newsreel in forms themselves borrowed from
back from the fantasy journey through classical cinema to collaborate in the
:~~,fthednema (American slapstick, the Keystone Cops, for instance), and thus
rewriting of the history offilm, or rather, ofits meta-history.
pcould be considered as being in turn part ~f a filmic genre-that of parody,
Throughout the present text I have tried to specify in particular avant-garde
\; . .were it not for the event for which it was conceived. 79
".,.~: ~.,

films as an aesthetics of demonstration, although it is a modernist one differ­

ent from the original that Gunning discerns in early filmmaking, one charac­
terized by the lyrical and pedagogical eye that experimental filmmakers have
turned toward their forebears. My examples have been drawn largely from struc­
tural film and interpreted as instances of meta-cinema concerned with dem­
onstrations of the basic apparatus, and which finds scope in examining and
remaking cinema's earliest productions. Such a remaking is an artistic collab­
oration across the span of film history, and is necessarily a task for the imagi­
nation. As Hollis Frampton suggests, this tasks the imagination with making
the films that are necessary.

~J:

.t~;;

tx:~~
~Ibid .• 20.
~'>~:- "
ii6::.
Z,,/: .
Ibid., H.

13~