Wonder Cabinets and Writing Cinema History

Abstract

Wonder Cabinets and Writing Cinema History Richard Abel (bio) There is history because there is the past and a specific passion for the past. And there is history because there is an absence.1 Jacques Rancière Writing cinema history cannot be anything but dialogic; one is always raiding or poaching, taking inspiration from, conversing or arguing with colleagues and predecessors. Fifteen years ago, I dedicated The Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema, 1896–1914 to a host of earlier French cinema historians who, in one way or another for twenty years, had guided or challenged my own research and writing. At the same time, in a short essay, I peopled the map of my own shifting interests—from silent cinema in France to early cinema in the United States—with theorists, historians, and scholarly discussion groups that were pushing or pulling me in a relatively new direction.2 This short piece for Cinema Journal could be another moment for taking stock, for extending or even redrawing that map. Yet there is hardly space enough here to name all those cinema historians (and theorists) whose work has impacted, and continues to impact, my own. Besides, this forum rightly imposes rather strict limits: reflect on a few books that have had a particular influence on your work. I could [End Page 177] pay homage to any number of colleagues and friends, but choosing among them risks angering or disappointing so many others. Instead, in the interests of what, pretentiously perhaps, could be called interdisciplinarity and intermediality, I want to draw attention to several books well beyond the borders of cinema studies (here, again, far too many are excluded), books that during the past fifteen years prodded me to design a course entitled "The Emergence of Mass Culture and Early Cinema" and simultaneously provoked my rethinking about how not only to conceptually map but also to write cinema history. Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism may seem a predictable choice, although the closest it gets to moving-image media is a paragraph or two glancing at the technological reproducibility of photography in the work of nineteenth-century colonial archaeology. Whatever reservations one might have, Anderson's concept of nationalism has had considerable analytical force, especially for studies of the emergence of mass culture. Essentially he argues that the nation, as a new kind of "imagined community," emerged through "the interaction between a system of production and productive relations (capitalism), a technology of communication (print), and . . . a general condition of irremediable linguistic diversity." 3 If Anderson focuses on "the novel and the newspaper" as forms of print capitalism that fostered a national consciousness in the nineteenth century by creating "unified fields of exchange and communication," some early cinema historians like myself have drawn a homology with the situation in the early twentieth century, focusing on motion pictures as a new technology of communication, one epitomizing the general transformation that produced a more or less unified arena of exchange and communication increasingly dominated by visual culture rather than print culture.4 When my study of early French cinema made me realize that French Pathé films dominated the US motion picture market from at least 1905 to 1909, I began to wonder how this concept of the nation as an "imagined community" could be useful in arguing that, in the United States, motion pictures initially were not, as previously thought, necessarily an "American" mass entertainment. Rather their production and circulation had to undergo a process, discursive as well as economic, of nationalization. That argument became central to The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900–1910 and even more explicitly framed my analysis of an "imagined community of nationality" (on screen and off) in Americanizing the Movies and "Movie-Mad" Audiences, 1910–1914. Richard Ohmann's Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century also compelled me to rethink my sense of early motion pictures with his claim that Americans were "gathered . . . into a nation organized," not politically, but rather "around markets, money relations, and commodified culture."5 Yet the book's impact was broader than that. First, Ohmann offers a usefully concise definition...