Introduction, or The Things We Did Not Lose in the Fire

Abstract

Introduction, or The Things We Did Not Lose in the Fire Diana W. Anselmo (bio) I am touching a strip of film from the 1910s. Composed of sixteen frames, it depicts a man on horseback, galloping down a woodsy trail. In all likelihood, the motion picture these frames belonged to does not exist anymore; it is estimated that only 14 percent of US silent features survived time, neglect, floods, and fire.1 And yet this piece of sepia nitrate rests in my hands, available despite early cinema’s rampant ephemerality. Its survival is due to one movie-loving girl, Eleanor G. Fulton, who decided to assemble a hundred-page scrapbook honoring Jack W. Kerrigan, one of the first screen heart-throbs. Between 1913 and 1917, the twenty-something fan had access to Hollywood’s sprawling lots, so it is possible she gathered the discarded filmstrip herself, on one of her trips to the new Universal studio; there Fulton met her idol at least twice. In addition to the filmstrip, the personal scrapbook includes a snapshot of Kerrigan awkwardly standing by a trailer, the girl fan’s shadow cast by his feet. A proud declaration of authorship is penned under the vernacular reproduction: “Warren Kerrigan posed for this picture at Universal City, October 12 1915. I took it with my Kodak,” Fulton notes, signing off “EGF.”2 An autographed headshot is also preserved among hundreds of Kerrigan-related newspaper clippings and memorabilia. The blue ink scrawled across the star’s face is glossy, as if perpetually wet (Figure 1). Access and ephemerality are the key terms framing this dossier on “Alternative Archives.” I have access to Kerrigan’s snapshot and handwriting—to [End Page 160] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Jack W. Kerrigan’s autographed headshot in Eleanor G. Fulton’s annotated movie scrap-book (1913–1917). Photo by author. [End Page 161] a material piece of his largely lost filmography—because of a female fan’s archival labor and the knowledge exchange abetted by the World Wide Web. Fulton’s movie scrapbook found me in 2014 through an auction advertised on the online marketplace eBay. Without the portal of mass communication and commerce that is the internet, this peephole into early film reception and celebrity would have remained unavailable to me, and by extension to academic scrutiny. Trafficking in transience, fan artifacts from the silent era have a low survival rate. Most material sources conferred institutional protection and discursive currency have originated from within capitalistic enterprises, functioning to legitimize the systems of power that afforded their production; scrapbooks crafted by no-name screen-struck girls rarely qualify. Pushing against the erasure of female labor in early Hollywood, Janet Staiger, Shelley Stamp, Karen Ward Mahar, Amelie Hastie, Mark Garrett Cooper, Hilary Hallett, and Richard Abel, among many others, have shed light on how women helped implement a lucrative star system as directors, producers, screenwriters, columnists, patrons, and players.3 However, with their credits systemically unpreserved, female legacies of film authorship and agency continue to flirt with oblivion. Silence constitutes an invisible form of violence since it is difficult to mount a historical argument in the void of material evidence. Digital preservation has greatly contributed to the expedient diversification and accessibility of media history. Projects such as the Media History Digital Library, Lantern, Women Film Pioneers Project, and Early African American Film are research-based, non-profit databases that offer open access to (mostly English-language) productions, periodicals, and biographies of workers from the silent and sound eras, spotlighting women and people of color who have not received sufficient attention in scholarly and popular debate.4 Leveraging archival data to increase public awareness of diverse media histories, these databases are extraordinarily useful, particularly to instructors and students. Nonetheless, knowledge of early female moviegoing remains circumscribed to secondhand reports found in the periodical press and the memoirs [End Page 162] of film personalities, resources framed by commercial intent. That intent drives content, which drives exclusion through copyediting bias, market research, and consumer expectations. Black and queer people, for example, are seldom identified in these industry-sanctioned sources. Though undoubtedly part of the heterogeneous connective tissue comprising early US audiences...