The carceral aesthetic: Seeing prison on film during the early cinema period

Abstract

This article examines how actuality and fictional films about prisoners made during the early cinema period construct a carceral imaginary that appropriated visual tropes from the Middle Ages while experimenting with motion picture’s unique signifying properties. The essay constructs a genealogy of prison-set motion pictures made before 1914, a period overlooked in standard prison film histories, starting with actualities of prisoners including The Lock Step (1899) and Female Prisoners: Detroit House of Corrections (1899), and fictional one-reelers Scenes of Convict Life (1905) and Children’s Reformatory (1907). Aspects of prison iconicity explored in this essay include the cell as a penitential but occasionally anarchic space, the lockstep and prison uniform, and the representation of escape. The trick film’s mocking of penal authority via the metamorphoses of convicts’ bodies in When Prison Bars and Fetters are Useless (1909) and the subversion of time in The Impossible Convicts, provides a potentially deeper understanding of prison’s ‘structure of feeling’ than the later prison film. Unencumbered by the generic conventions of the studio system era, early prison films provide a striking vantage point from which to explore prison and prisoner’s paradoxical place within the popular imaginary.