Infrastructural Affinity: Film Technology and the Built Environment in New York circa 1900

Abstract

In an effort to describe energy surging through Koster and Bial's Music Hall during April 23, 1896, premier of Edison's Vitascope, a New York Times reporter settled upon a fitting, if predictable, technological metaphor. The theater, s/he wrote, was full of electricity. Little shock. Aft er all, when it came to Wizard of Menlo Park, what wasn't electric? More curious is source of that metaphorical energy, which emanated not from buzzing and roaring Vitascope hidden in balcony above, nor from electrical system that powered theater's lights, but rather from audience that filled its seats. As Times reporter put it, the spectator's imagination filled atmosphere with electricity, an electricity so powerful that sparks crackled around swift ly moving, lifelike figures on gold-framed white screen.1What, we might ask, made those spectators' imaginations electric? How could New Yorker of 1896 conjure up an energy so palpable that it could-like Vitascope itself-generate a moving, shocking, sparking vitality? It has, for good reason, become common in early film historiography to use such descriptions to draw associations between experience of early cinema and conditions of modern life. These kinds of associations came thick and fast at turn of century. From newspaper reviews and motion picture catalogs to work of artists, critics, and theorists, character of modern urban experience became one standard against which experience of moving images was judged.2Modern technology, in particular, shaped that experience and couldn't have been far from New York filmgoer's-or critic's-awareness. By time of Vitascope premier, New York was already in midst of a period of rapid and far-reaching change. Historian Max Page has described this process as Manhattan's creative destruction.3 Prompted by demands for new systems to support an expanding population and appease progressive reformers, New York's municipal officials and private entrepreneurs oversaw large-scale urban renovations. The filmmakers who took to streets en masse in cinema's first decade made ensuing demolition, excavation, and construction projects (and celebrations of them) popular film subjects. In doing so, they shaped how urban development would be represented and received by audiences.But filmmakers did more than simply document city's metamorphosis; they took advantage of film's ability to mimic processes of urban change and to enhance its effects. This correlation between technologies that changed built environment and cinematic forms used to capture them underlies close correspondence that developed between film and technology in cinema's earliest years. In cities, in particular, new filmmakers generated that correspondence by recording emerging urban infrastructures, oft en in ways that emphasized their scale and dynamism. New film technologies and techniques allowed them to explore these sites in ways that refl ected and reinforced what I will term an infrastructural affinity between modern urban infrastructure and infrastructure that underpinned film production. In characterizing its material base as a kind of infrastructure, I mean to highlight cinema's status as a technological system, changing and interchangeable parts of which helped shape how filmmakers worked and what they could do.4 In case of early New York City films analyzed here, film's developments-including rotating tripod heads, devices for time-lapse photography, in-camera editing techniques, and artificial lighting effects-shaped how filmmakers approached city by helping determine kinds of films they could make.The idea of infrastructural affinity corresponds, in many respects, with argument at heart of Siegfried Kracauer's study of film's redemption of physical reality that certain subjects . …