Photogenic Neurasthenia: On Mass and Medium in the 1920s

Abstract

There is no question that the mechanical reproducibility of film technologythe photographic basis of the medium, the regularized actions of gears and shutters, as well as the repeatability of effects-had secured cinema's status by the 1920s as the visual medium of the industrial era par excellence. Photogenie, that elusive concept at the heart of early French film theory (generally considered to be the very first theory of the film as medium) was, in an important sense, an attempt to define the nature of a cinematic art around the formal and perceptual properties of a new type of mechanical reproduction-a process that produced no concrete objects or images but rather the traces of a movement that occurred between photographic frames (or afterimages, to cite one of the English definitions of the term photogene).1 Still, lest we forget that mechanical reproduction is only one of the ways in which the cinema can be defined, consider the following incidentwhich, as far as I can tell, is not cited in any accounts of cinema and modernity. In the years immediately following World War I, French film industry journals reported regularly on a dispute that arose between the union of moviehouse owners and operators, the Syndicat des Directeurs de Cinemas, and Compagnie Parisienne de Distribution d'Electricite over the rate at which the electricity used to light the lamp in the cinematograph should be tariffed.2 At the heart of the dispute lay a distinction, which had been written into the French laws of energy distribution in the late nineteenth century, between the energy used to drive