The Cinema and Its Shadow: Race and Technology in Early Cinema AliceMaurice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

Abstract

The Cinema and Its Shadow: Race and Technology in Early Cinema Alice Maurice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.Cinema began as a series of brief but luminous tricks played upon its audience in the dark. Within the frame of the film screen and, indeed, the early twentieth century, the trick was often predicated, as Alice Maurice argues in The Cinema and Its Shadow, on the presumption of tangible racial difference. Race-change and masquerade, when partnered with the apparatus of the camera, became evidence of the medium's power to attract and deceive. Later, these instruments would beckon toward verisimilitude. Early cinema provided ethnographic accounts of Sioux cultural in Buffalo Dance (Edison Manufacturing Company, 1894), fixated on race-centered metamerism with images of black bodies submerged in white soapsuds in A Morning Bath (James H. White, 1896), and transformed Chaucerian paradigms of misdirected kisses into racist punchlines on the impossibility of interracial desire in a series of iterative films.Racial difference provides, in the first decade of the twentieth century, a link to cinema's nascent signifying practices (47). Blackface abounded but so did selfreflexive cultural products, which destabilize the naturalized relationship between contemporary visual arts and postmodern metanarrative. Two proto-chase films, The Miller and the Sweep (George Albert Smith, 1897) and The Chimney Sweep and The Miller (American Mutoscope and Biograph, 1900), show black and white-signified by soot and flour rather than flesh-subject to mutual substitution and equally capable of obliterating spectatorial discernment. Clouds of each substance fill the screen in order to emancipate... and combine... essences that 'become' motion (34). In What Happened in the Tunnel (Edwin S. Porter, 1903) the screen goes black, and a harassed white woman substitutes her body with that of an African-American domestic, surprising the audience by revealing her white male harasser in a taboo embrace when the light returns.As cinema aged in the teens and twenties, it authenticated its aesthetic potential by refining its representation of the human face. Just as psychoanalysis and philosophy centered subjectivity as a focal point for critical analysis, the cinematic close-up demonstrated the appropriate apparatus for realistic analytical detail of the subject's face (80).Cecil B. DeMille's The Cheat (1915) refined this mechanism with proximate closeups of its white female and Asian male characters, played by Fanny Ward and Sessue Hayakawa. The latter was simultaneously praised for offering a quiet, 'inscrutable' performance and providing a glimpse of life among an ethnic group frequently represented as alien (93, 97). …