Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Haidee Wasson (bio) Long before the shifts wrought by the current plethora of electronic and digital formats there was an array of analog formats fueling media change. The contributors to this dossier focus on but one of these: 16mm film. First standardized in 1923 and widely used for over fifty years, this format bred a paradigmatic family of technologies that evolved into a dynamic, expansive, multi-modal media system, catalyzing lasting transformations in film art, theory, and practice. These essays honor 16mm’s centenary with scholarship that begins to map the international scale, scope, and continued impact of this uniquely important format. Recent scholarship in media studies by Lisa Gitelman, Jonathan Sterne, and others has rejected ahistorical and ontologically static definitions of media, urging the adoption of better ways to assess the shifting technical as well as industrial and aesthetic dynamics that constitute phenomena we tend to name with big, broad terms such as telephone, cinema, and television.1 Sterne proposes that we focus on formats. According to him, formats are “particular historical instantiations” that can help us to understand the rules that determine how “a technology can operate.”2 They result from “a range of decisions that affect the look, feel, experience and workings of a medium.”3 Formats then are also more than technical clusters. They are also cultural, aesthetic, institutional, and political. The product of intentioned thought, negotiation, debate, and norms, formats also shape subsequent technological, aesthetic, and experiential phenomena. More [End Page 146] specific and narrowly conceived than the general media categories that undergird so much media history and theory, they help to make particular media applications, experiences, and uses more easily legible. Applying this to film history, for instance, demonstrates that cinema has long consisted of many formats that have changed over time. Big, loud, small, silent, color, architectural, and portable modes of cinema have co-existed. Each becomes a productive entry point to help us think more thoroughly about what cinema has long been—a complex multi-formatted medium. Initially marketed in 1923 as a filmmaking system for amateur film-makers, and as a film rental service for viewing movies reduced in size from industry-standard 35mm film prints, 16mm was born of the technological ferment that was integral to Hollywood’s rise. It was conceived as a complement to the industry’s equipment and business models. By the early 1920s, the American studios had built a blossoming empire on a form of entertainment that required centralized, rationalized modes of production, big audiences, and thousands of brick-and-mortar points of sale: movie theaters. Let’s call it big-box cinema. Yet all along, an unlikely crew of engineers, equipment manufacturers, chemical companies, community activists, artists, and theorists imagined something different. They foresaw a future wherein moving images and sounds would also thrive—beyond Hollywood—everywhere else. For them flashy feature films and spectacular picture palaces were but a prelude to the myriad other forms and functions yet to be discovered. As such, 16mm equipment developed in notable contrast to the industry’s heavy, expensive, and specialized cameras and projectors. This new system was comparatively portable, affordable, adaptable, easy to use, accessible, and programmable. Crucially, its film stock was not only smaller and hence lower cost but also non-flammable, unlike the 35mm cellulose nitrate stock that was used to produce and exhibit theatrical films into the 1950s.4 This foundational shift to acetate film, whose chemical-industrial roots are explored in this dossier by Alice Lovejoy, eliminated the threat of fire in filmmaking, storage, distribution, and projection, allowing 16mm prints to move (and accumulate) more freely; they could be shown just about anywhere. Collectively, the technical capacities of this new format enabled a significantly more horizontal ecosystem for making, circulating, and using film, laying the foundations for decades of explosive growth in the United States and around the world. Scholars of film have long known that 16mm was essential to facilitating modes of filmmaking that were both apposite and opposite to dominant commercial cinemas; these included amateur, home, documentary, independent, and experimental films. An emerging field of scholarship is building on this, demonstrating that 16mm also catalyzed film activity across business, industry...