historiographic.pdf

University of Texas Press

Society for Cinema & Media Studies

Historiographic Method and the Study of Early Cinema

Author(s): Charles Musser

Source: Cinema Journal, Vol. 44, No. 1 (Autumn, 2004), pp. 101-107

Published by: University of Texas Press on behalf of the Society for Cinema & Media Studies

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3661175

Accessed: 20/02/2009 07:58

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless

you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you

may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=texas .

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed

page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the

scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that

promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

University of Texas Press and Society for Cinema & Media Studies are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,

preserve and extend access to Cinema Journal.

http://www.jstor.org

-I mv%

Historiographic Methodand the Study

of Early Cinema

CharlesMusser

For better or worse, my efforts to assess the state of film history have taken a per-

sonalturn. My workas a filmhistorianfoundtractionin the mid- to late 1970s when,

as an independent filmmakerand part-time graduate student, I became curious

about the beginnings of cinema, particularly of film editing. What was the first cut?

How did editing develop? The availableliteraturedid not adequately addressthese

issues, and so I began to explore them myself. Of course, my questions seem some-

whatnaivein retrospect. I soon realizedthat editing was around long before cinema,

that in nineteenth-century screen entertainment, the exhibitor, ratherthan the im-

age-maker,generally held editorialcontrolandwas responsible forwhatwe now call

postproduction. On a basic level, then, film editing wasnot inventedbut shifted from

exhibitorto productioncompany,resulting in the centralizationof this crucialele-

ment of creativecontroland acceptance of the filmmakeras an artisticand cultural

force. Intimately related to this insight into productionpractices was an interroga-

tion of the "pre-Griffith"system of representation, which prior scholarshad dis-

missed as primitive, unformed, and incoherent.Ratherthan assuagingmy curiosity,

these new understandings pointed to related topics for engagement, which absorbed

much of my energy for the next fifteen years.

Obviously I was not alone. The study of early cinema produced a community

of scholarswhose workwas historicaland based on archivalresearch.As has often

been noted, the 1978 annual meeting of the Federation of InternationalFilm Ar-

chives (FIAF), held in Brighton,England, proved to be a crucialmoment as histo-

rians, archivists, filmmakers, and theorists from Europe and the United States

came together to view fiction films made between 1900 and 1906 and to present

their initial insights on the pre-Griffith era. The conference signaled a new inte-

gration of academic and archive-based history and fostered tendencies that con-

tributed to the formulationof a new historiography. One of the most fundamental

changes involved a new approach or attitude towardthe subject.

Too often film scholars have maintaineda superior attitude towardthe works

they examine and the creative artists who made them. In this regard, Edwin S.

Porter, the key figure in my dissertation, was a touchstone. Film historians had

sometimes credited Porter with the breakthrough realization that cinema could

be a storytelling form, but just as quickly they had criticized him for being rather

inept as a storyteller. Of course, both assessments were off the mark.On the one

hand, storytelling was aroundfrom the onset of cinema and Porterwas just one of

many filmmakersto develop the story film in the early 1900s. On the other hand,

Cinema Journal 44, No. 1, Fall 2004 101

like Noel Burch and others, I found that Porter helped to pioneer a coherent

system of representation (a way of storytelling) that was fundamentally different

from the system that emerged in the nickelodeon era, as cinema became a form of

mass entertainment.

Tom Gunning'sconcept of the "cinemaof attractions," which leads to valoriz-

ing many of the qualities that Lewis Jacobs derided in the pre-1903 cinema, also

reflects this change in orientation.Revalorizationis something Gunning and I had

in common, and this has been crucial to our subsequent work, transcending dif-

ferences in approach and emphasis. Here Jay Leyda's role as my mentor was in-

valuable(he wasTom Gunning's mentoras well). Moreover, as I learned by working

in the film industry, creative work is difficult and far more layered and complex

than scholars generally recognize. To wrestle and returnto a group of films again

and again so that one's understanding changes and deepens requires a sympa-

thetic, humble openness to the materialand a readiness to accept a body of work

on its own terms. At the same time, film scholars cannot forsake critical engage-

ment with either the work or their own analyses. Otherwise, film history lacks

rigor,perspective, and a sense of limits. To move back and forth between these

two attitudes involves what I call "critical sympathy." Both approaches are crucial

to a method that is at once materialistand historical.

Beyond the question of attitude towardone's subject, engagement with early

cinema foregrounds at least five fundamental challenges for historical inquiry.

The first takes the form of a basic commandment: interrogate the status of the

film text! This commandment is less honored in practice than the announce-

ments of restorations and directors' cuts would have us believe. Often "restora-

tions"create synthetic textsthathaveno historical standing-mishmashes of variant

prints that obscure as much as they illuminate. (Paolo Cherchi Usai has written

eloquently on this point.1)

The problem of the text was no doubt responsible for my entry into serious

film scholarship. I was mystified that leading film historianssuch as Gerald Mast

could not establish which version of Porter's Life of an American Fireman (1903)

was the correct one: the cross-cutversion in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

Circulating Collection or the copyrighted version at the Library of Congress, with

its narrative overlaps and repetitions. Andre Gaudreaultand Noel Burch tackled

this question as well; that the copyright version reflected what was released in

1903 must seem quite obvious now, as it did to Burch at the time. In contrast, I

was a New Yorker challenging local institutional authority, and my analysis of the

different versions had to be much more sustained and "scientific" if I was going to

maintain friendly relations with my MoMA colleagues.2 In fact, Senior Curator

Eileen Bowser was responsive and provided support and archival guidance that

was crucial to my ongoing development as a scholar.

Looking at as many variant prints as possible and forcefully examining their

status has proved a keystone of the film historicalmethod as I have come to prac-

tice it. Writing about The Pawnshop (1916) in an exploration of Charlie Chaplin's

comic aggression towardwork and industrial labor, I used the MoMA print (then

the one most widely available). Eventually, I discovered that it was missing the

102

Cinema Journal 44, No. 1, Fall 2004

first few shots, when Charlie compares his watch to the calendar:a comparison of

two different kinds of time (industrial and preindustrial), which sets up much of

the film's subsequent ideological and comic bite. (Was this absence simply chance,

or did it help to adumbrate Chaplin'sideological critique and make him safe for

critics eager to frame his comedies as a genial form of humor?)

Oscar Micheaux's Body and Soul (1925) offered a different kind of textual

challenge. The available print seemed so disjunctive that many scholars assumed

that the film was radicallyincomplete and out of order, due to censorship and the

reworking of film materialsthat seemed to characterize Micheaux'smodus oper-

andi. Establishing the textual integrity of the survivingprint at the George Eastman

House (based on considerations such as footage counts, censorship records, and

stylistic similaritieswith Micheaux's earlier, recently rediscovered films) opened

the way for a sustained analysis of the film's hallucinatory, nonlinear style, which

depended on the recognition of key antecedent texts for its intelligibility. This

clarified, in turn, the limited nature of the textual gaps that did exist.

A second component crucialto historical study involves the exploration of the

relationship between films and other cultural works, including questions of adap-

tation. A concern with intertextuality is so basic to present-dayinterpretive strate-

gies thatit needs little comment. Nonetheless, the searchforthe telling, appropriate

intertext is typically elusive and depends on both immersion in the soup of period

artifactsand some serendipity. Such encounters can spark new and radicalinter-

pretations. Here again, early cinema was a powerful trainingground. I still recall

the shivering shock of discovery when an entertainment column in a Lewiston,

Maine, newspaper cited Porter'sThe Millers Daughter (1905) as an adaptation of

Steele MacKaye'splay Hazel Kirke (1888). This suddenly obvious connection fun-

damentally changed my subsequent understanding of the film (and to a lesser

extent Porter'sentire film work).

More recently, my realizationthat Ernst Lubitsch's Lady Windermere'sFan

(1925) was not just an adaptation of the Oscar Wilde play but also a meticulous

remake of the 1916 Ideal Film Company version has led to new understandings of

the Lubitsch film, the filmmaker'smodus operandi, and the Wilde play. These

encounters with hidden, unlikely, or unexpected intertextshave led me to pursue

a practice I call radical interpretation.

Radical interpretation involves making a sharp break from conventional wis-

dom about a film's meaning andvalue. One sign is a certain personal incredulity at

the interpretivejourney that the intertexts seem to dictate. Another symptom is

resistance from journal editors and specialists in the relevant subfields. Winning

over such skepticism through graduallydeepening explication and analysis is an

essential feature of radical interpretation, one that distinguishes it fromwild specu-

lation. The foremost practitioner of radical interpretation of American film was

the late Michael Rogin. Only an excess of criticism and lack of sympathy limited

his brilliant insights.

A third compellingproblem that came out of the study of early cinema involves

the nature of historical change, causality, and the transformationof film practice.

How did we get from A to B, from short one-shot films of fire runs (A Morning

Cinema Journal 44, No. 1, Fall 2004 103

Alarm,1896) andrescues (Fighting the Fire, 1896) to Lifeof an AmericanFireman?

And from Life of an AmericanFiremanto The Lonely Villa (1909)? Answering such

questions required a frameworkfor understanding historicaltransformation (in-

cluding the dialectic between changing modes of production and representation),

as well as more sustainedresearchand common sense.

The 1890s and early 1900s was a period of rapid, fundamental change in which

the domainof film practice was relatively small. Although the availableevidence is

often fragmentary, we can grasp the nature of historical change in that epoch with

a specificity that is not alwayspossible for later periods. Moreover, debates about

the nature of historical change have been sharp and wide ranging as revisionist

historianshave challenged accepted conclusionsaboutthe pre-Griffithperiod. Was

a sufficient supply of story films one of the preconditions for the nickelodeon

boom-the dominance of story films preceding the rise of specialized motion pic-

ture theaters-or a consequence? Historians using quantitative analysis of copy-

right records (divided into fiction and nonfiction categories) argued that the

dominance of story films over actualities (news and travel films) did not occur

until 1907 and therefore resulted from the demands of the nickelodeons and a

certain conspiracyamong film producers, who found that making fiction films was

cheaper than making actualities.

Working from a broader evidentiary base that did not simply depend on cat-

egorizing copyright entries but calculating the length of each subject as well as

the number of prints made of individual titles, I was able to establish that Ameri-

can companies (in particular Edison) were selling at least six times more footage

of acted/staged films than of actualities in 1904-6 (a ratio that remained remark-

ably constant in this period). The fundamental shift to story films had occurred

by 1903-4 and was undoubtedly a precondition for the nickelodeon boom, not a

consequence of it. Broadening the evidentiary base and interrogating assertions

about historical change on a multiplicity of levels (production, exhibition, com-

merce, cinematic form and subject matter, technology, intertexts) proved crucial

in addressing the questions of historical change.

The issue of historical sequencing has continued to inflect my scholarship, al-

though the issues have usually been more localized. In this respect, one recurrent

motifhas involved films thatwere releasedalmosta year aftertheir production, dur-

ing which deep social and culturalshifts occurred. Micheaux's Body and Soul, for

example, was shot in 1924, shortly after Paul Robeson appeared in three plays by

white playwrights about the "Negro Soul."Micheaux engaged these plays in a sus-

tainedandcritical way, but by the time his filmwas releaseda year later, memoriesof

those productions had faded (even in New York) andthe officialonset of the Harlem

Renaissancehad profoundly alteredthe contextfor reception. Interracialcollabora-

tion seemed to be working, and Robeson was a cultural hero in African American

communities-not the race traitorof Micheaux's critique.

Time and again,in-depth interrogation of the full sequence of events relevant

to a film's production, distribution, and reception has provided opportunities for

new interpretiveinsights. Similar groundings in archivalresearchare undoubtedly

basic to the best historicalwork currentlybeing done in film studies.

104

CinemaJournal 44, No. 1, Fall 2004

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: