Toying with Early Cinema: Media Studies in the Children’s Archive

Abstract

Toying with Early Cinema: Media Studies in the Children’s Archive Meredith A. Bak (bio) Researchers whose work falls under the multidisciplinary umbrella of childhood studies are accustomed to thinking creatively. “The traces of childhood found in archives and special collections,” Karen Sánchez-Eppler notes, “may tend toward the ephemeral.”1 Sánchez-Eppler also acknowledges the difficulty of finding the child’s perspective in the archive, pointing out that “[r]ecords of childhood and records made by children have been housed in archives and library special collections all along, although they have usually been classified in a manner that tends to obscure rather than highlight their presence.”2 Childhood studies has much in common with certain areas of media history. For instance, many scholars of childhood and practitioners of media archaeology contest teleological models of history that conform to a kind of “developmental paradigm,” and researchers in both fields maintain similar orientations to the archive as a repository to be interrogated and reinterpreted for missed perspectives.3 During the research for my book on nineteenth-century optical toys, I became used to venturing into archival spaces that did not register immediate or obvious connections to cinema [End Page 168] and media history.4 I spent a month at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts—an institution that endeavors to collect “everything printed in what was once British North America before the year 1877.”5 Yet their outstanding children’s literature collection includes several intricate movable and novelty toy books, which adapted pre-cinematic visual effects and gestured to experiences of spectacle and spectatorship that cinema would further institutionalize. Optical toys appear in the collections of such institutions as the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum of Childhood in London, and the Cotsen Children’s Library at Princeton University, where they are not typically or primarily regarded as objects of media history but for their relevance to the history of childhood. These objects’ inclusion across such varied collections demonstrates Sánchez-Eppler’s assertion that classificatory systems can conceal some associations just as much as they can illuminate others. Excavating the significance of optical toys as toys required archival encounters that sought these artifacts embedded within the visual and material worlds of childhood rather than within networks of meaning that prioritize the optical effects they produced (which have served as the primary basis for their link to the invention of cinema).6 Resituating these toys in this way opens up opportunities to view their functions as instruments of perceptual pedagogy, not as oppositional to the pleasure they afforded in play but as closely linked. If evidence of film and media’s longer history is distributed in such diverse archival contexts, interwoven with other narratives, to what other unexpected sources might we turn to trace histories that have remained under-considered? Moreover, can familiar texts in cinema history be reread to point us to previously overlooked forms of evidence? A new research project on the history of toys that come “to life” brought me to accounts of the origins of stop-motion animation and to a passage in Albert E. Smith’s 1952 memoir, Two Reels and a Crank. Smith recalls making a film called The Humpty Dumpty Circus in 1897 or 1898—shortly after he and James Stuart Blackton founded Vitagraph studios: “Vitagraph made the first stop-motion picture in America, The Humpty Dumpty Circus. I used my little daughter’s set of toy wooden circus performers and animals, whose movable joints enabled us to place them in balanced positions. It was a tedious process inasmuch as movement could be achieved only by photographing separately each change of position.”7 The film is not extant and may never have been made at all. If the film had been made, Donald Crafton hypothesizes, it was [End Page 169] not until later, between 1902 and 1905.8 Smith’s claim to have made The Humpty Dumpty Circus in 1898 is not widely believed by animation historians (and indeed, it can be disproven). However, his statement also raises an intriguing link between early animation and children’s play culture. This unexplored connection suggests...