Crossing Space and Transporting Methods: The Moving Image at the Turn of the Century and Beyond

Abstract

Crossing Space and Transporting MethodsThe Moving Image at the Turn of the Century and Beyond Kaveh Askari (bio) If you work in transnational cinema history, you come to appreciate the hospitality of colleagues in neighboring fields. Dealing with circulation and comparative contexts, it is common to find oneself at a conference or in a collection built around someone else's community. You hope that such relations of traveler and host will be generative, and you appreciate initiatives that take certain crossings as part of their founding tenets. The global itinerary of the moving image presents itself best to methods that, like Cusp, cross established periodizations, national frameworks, and the boundaries of medium. This is the case for media history of the 1890s as it is for later generations, but there is something about emergent cinemas that can serve as a guide for future crossings of discipline and territory. In preparation for moving into under-researched areas of transnational media history, I take a few cues from the intellectual history of the study of early cinema. Emergent in the 1880s and taking shape before the institutionalization of the narrative feature film in the mid-1910s, early cinema's standard period boundaries fit tidily within the long turn of the century. As a field of study, however, the curiosity about the films from this period has always been marked by asynchronies. The earliest films were some of the last to be acknowledged and understood within film studies. Early cinema scholars, from the start, have valued traditions that might seem too early or too late: Symbolist traditions in performance from Edison's "Annabelle Serpentine Dance" (1895) to Maurice Tourneur's The Blue Bird (1918); traces of the Incohérent movement in [End Page 25] the trick films of Georges Méliès; or proto-modernist inflections of color design in the manual application of color to early celluloid.1 The field expanded in the 1980s (or in one founding myth, at a 1978 conference in Brighton) and intermingled interpretive frames borrowed from Victorianists and modernists alike.2 Modernist theories of spectatorship, particularly a conception of attraction indebted to Sergei Eisenstein's interwar modernism, came to be used in cinema studies as shorthand for the moving images of the 1890s.3 To write about cinema in its first years as a "cinema of attractions" was already to be writing on the cusp of Victorian and modern.4 Setting claims of heroic invention aside, the study of early moving pictures has emphasized the way cinema established itself in the first place by assisting other art forms. It emerged only gradually as a medium with its own institutional identity.5 This intermedial work, tracing the ways the moving image served as a technical aid appended to the magic lantern show, to the vaudeville program, or to the scientist's imaging toolkit, complicates periodizations that might mark a decisive grand entrance for a medium subsequently celebrated as a vehicle for modern experience. In the early 1920s, when pictorialist composition found its way into cinema composition, or notions of modeling from architectural sculpture found their way into staging and shot scale, the vanguard of early art films aligned itself with an assortment of old-guard aesthetic traditions.6 Cross-media histories have provided a complement to the efforts to consider cinema's role in the modern transformations of subjective experience (distraction, astonishment) and temporality (acceleration, the new). In each case, cross-media history interlaces aesthetic strands from multiple periods and thus complicates the moving image's role as a driver of the new. Such asynchronies already characterized the field in its first generation, when it primarily focused on a handful of national traditions in Europe and North America. Transnational approaches to early cinema, which grew after the field had established itself in the academy, have amplified these asynchronies. Engaging the complexity of cinema's geographies necessarily complicates its chronologies.7 The physical realities of films moving across trade borders and through intermediary institutions, such as international exchanges and government censorship [End Page 26] bureaus, stretch time frames. The life of cinema artifacts in transit subverts the typical trajectory of film genres and imaging devices toward obsolescence. As...