Early Silent Cinema: Whose Public Sphere?

Abstract

In search of a usable past, German discussions on the cinema as an oppositional public sphere habitually turn to the silent period and for reasons to be explored in this essay - tend to find a convenient model in the beginnings of American, rather than German, film history. Dieter Prokop, for one, claims that, until 1908 (the onset of trust formations) and even well beyond, American films display what he calls strukturelle Beziige, that anchor the characters and plots of these films in the actual social environment in which they were produced and consumed, that of a predominantly urban workingclass, largely immigrant audience. For Prokop, these references have progressive implications, regardless of the ideological inscription of the individual film or genre, in that they acknowledge the specific economic, social and cultural experience of the spectator and raise it to the level of public representation. While describing the monopolistic development of the American film industry as a process of social de-specification in subject matter and spectator appeal, Prokop maintains his valorization of structural for the rest of the silent period; he goes so far as to view the entire oeuvre of D.W. Griffith under the premise that it was addressed to a proletarian public sphere - albeit a rudimentary and diminishing one.' In a somewhat less deterministic fashion, Prokop makes the same argument for the genre of slapstick comedy. Combining elements of socially repressed sponaneity, aggressivity and sensuality with kinetic patterns that mimic Taylorized work processes, slapstick comedy - in Prokop's analysis - responded to the superimposition of historically 1. Dieter Prokop, Soziologie des Films (1970); revised and expanded edition Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1982), parts I & II; Arbeit am Stereotypen: Die Filme D.W. Griffiths, in: Prokop, Medien-Wirkungen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981), pp. 193 ff.