Emergence Of Cinema Research Articles

Tracing the Photogram

Garrett Stewart, Between Film and Screen: Modernism's Photo Synthesis Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999, 386 pages. . . . to examine more particularly the way the stylistic "cues" of film narrative work to structure our access to screen action's photogrammatic basis. What should soon grow clear is that the reframed photograph and the consecutively rephotographed film frame can operate as systemic alternatives to each other within the same metatextual field. This is crucial. . . . Between photographic input and cinematic output, spectation's middle term is the cognitive photo synthesis of subliminally determined movement. Much that attaches to this motion can be specified in four related ways. Between optic signal and cinema's viewed world, the event of filmic manifestation. Between photographic still and motion picture, the photogram in motion. Between strip and screen, the track in action. Between footage and image, the text in process. (Between Film and Screen, 17) I am concerned from here on out with the photographic or photogrammatic moment on—because in and of—film: the nodalized scopic materiality of still image (filmed photograph) or stalled imaging (photolike halt of film). Indeed the former (photo) may implicate the latter (seized frame) by bringing to mind the fixed imprint within the chain of represented action. Whether rippling or rupturing the cinematic continuum with such traces of its own propellant frames, both the reset photo and the arrested (and so asserted) track depend on a spatial disjunction between filmic record and cinematic apparition. (Between Film and Screen, 19) [End Page 1090] We would with good reason expect any extended study by master narratologist Garrett Stewart to tell a story. In this respect, Between Film and Screen does not disappoint. With verve, authoritative erudition (visual as well as literary), and the commitment to thinking evidenced only by authentic theorists, Stewart relates the story of film's relation to its subtexts, paradigms, targets, and supplements in photography. This is by no means the only account of film that could be given. Stewart furnishes meticulous scrutiny to the alternative renditions. He extracts what is productive and suggestive from these interpretations, whether by Stanley Cavell, Gilles Deleuze, or Vivian Sobchack. But then, having surveyed the broader culturo-exegetical environment in which he tells his tale—the play of the "photogram" in the constitution of film narrative, convention, and form and the emergence of cinema in its wake as a complex scene of textual production and synthesis—he fulfills his task with the resolve and ethical mission we expect from a thoroughgoing original. (The photogram amounts to photographic elements, whether images themselves or formal aspects of photographic composition, framing, focus, depth of field, and lighting, embedded within the sequence of film.) Without the benefit of some central national or international forum on the current status of the visual and on its interrelation to the textual, at a remove from the Montparnasse or cultural center-stage on which stellar philosophers and critics debate this and related issues, Stewart nonetheless configures highly acute and responsive frameworks for the taking in of visual artifacts which he then illuminates over an astonishing telephoto field of production and exegetical possibility. Whether the films of Between Film and Screen or the genre paintings of more recent work (he has discovered the painting sub-genre, a corollary to the "photogram" in film, in which the subjects are invariably engaged in the reading, deciphering, or recitation of texts), Stewart subjects the visual artifacts of his selection to readings of unrelenting sense and astonishing illumination. In so doing, he claims a leadership role in the inevitable and overdue discourse surveying the boundaries and interfaces between the visual and the textual. Critics who address textual artifacts to the exclusion of this conversation and the translations it occasions do so increasingly at the risk of their own cultural irrelevance. Stewart's canvas is a vast one. The multiple critical POVs (points of view) he enlists into his account, ranging from film and photographic history to the theoretical exposition of experimental cinema to the theories of narrative, textuality, and allegory...

The end of celluloid: digital cinema emerges

Digital cinema enhances film image quality significantly, but high costs could delay its adoption. Hollywood has begun a major technological transformation, retooling its production and distribution business to exploit computing, broadband networks, and digital displays. Inevitably, digital cinema will reshape the entertainment business and may further blur the lines between the theatrical and home entertainment markets. Indeed, many of the components necessary for digital cinema's emergence have already been tested and proven in film production and post production. However, Installing a digital cinema projection system in a theater (cinema) runs about $150000 (USD). That's a lot of money for an industry accustomed to spending no more than $25000 for a film projector that will last 50 years.

Playing at Being Indian: Specta Torship and the Early Western

Anickelodeon screening of an “Indian” melodrama almost one hundred years ago might have seemed both novel and reassuringly familiar to audiences at the time; novel, since “Indian” films were suddenly en vogue at the time, and this may have been the spectator's first taste of the exciting new genre, and familiar, since many of the films' narrative and iconographic tropes would have been instantly recognized from nineteenth-century painting, photography, theater, popular literature, advertising, museums, world's fairs, and traveling Wild West shows.1 As early as 1840, visitors to Barnum's American Museum in New York City would have marveled at the “Grand Exhibition of a large company of Indian Warriors with their Squaws.” Performing at the museum every evening, the troupe demonstrated the “various modes and ceremonies of savage life, superstitions, war songs, dances, etc.”2 Consumed as popular entertainment for well over half a century before the emergence of cinema, audiences would have had few problems recognizing enduring tropes in the representation of Native Americans when they encountered them in cinematic form in the 1890s. While cut from the same discursive cloth as their precinematic antecedents, these films nevertheless, as the quote from “The Vogue of Western and Military Dramas” indicates, provoked a lively debate over the generic parameters of the Western, including expressions of dismay at the artistic liberties taken by some filmmakers. I explore the topic of spectatorship and the early film Western, approaching the subject from two perspectives: first, the role of Indian actualities as cinematic intertexts for the “ethnographic” set pieces used in “Indian” films, and second, the ways in which audiences may have understood the widespread practice of casting whites in Indian leads in early Westerns.

Art, Ideology, and Entertainment in Soviet Cinema

The historical simultaneity of cinema's emergence as a mass medium and the Bolshevik revolution virtually determined that the new regime would appropriate film as a key weapon of mass persuasion. Lenin's famous dictum that us the most important of all arts is the captures the ambition to appropriate all means available, especially modern ones, to effect a programme of sociopolitical engineering. It does not, however, ipso facto mean that Bolshevism played a pioneering and unique role in manipulation of the moving picture. Lenin made rather a confession of faith, by itself entirely derivative and unexceptional, in the power of film to inform and persuade. His statement actually betrayed Russia's relative backwardness, for he projected for Bolshevism what had already been demonstrated under capitalism. Equally noteworthy is that he, no less than Stalin, who later intervened systematically in film production, had almost no appreciation of cinema as art, that is, as a medium of creative expression. Both viewed it in purely utilitarian terms, the former having scant sensibility for the fictional feature film and the latter preoccupied with word more than image and increasingly unwilling or unable to distinguish fictional constructions from reality. Their belief in cinema's enormous public power was expressed primarily, especially in the latter case, through mania for control.(1) Since Soviet cinema, even more than that of Nazi Germany, arguably provides a case sui generis for state domination of the medium, its historiography has been periodized and heavily contoured by political developments. The relative ideological and economic freedom of the 1920s supported a pluralistic film culture, remembered for the avant-garde and classics of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Dovzhenko et al. After the first Party Conference on Cinema in 1928 the film industry suffered progressive economic and artistic decline, being consigned by the tenets of Socialist Realism (reality envisioned in terms of its revolutionary development) and the Stalin-cult of servility and artistic banality until the 1950s. A quantitative and qualitative revival began under Khrushchev and continued through the late 1960s. The conservatism of the Brezhnev era, while not as suffocating as Stalinism, meant general stagnation as the state prevented release of the more enterprising artistic projects. Only with glasnost in the 1980s did cinema again enjoy freedom comparable to that of the 1920s. The institutional and aesthetic form of Soviet cinema, as well as its ideological thrust, cannot be understood without reference to politics, especially the ambitions of Lenin and Stalin. Yet the medium also respected other dictates, some artistic and theoretical, some economic and some technical. It is in exploration of these that the recent spate of publications on Soviet cinema proves most illuminating and challenges aspects of the conventional historiography. Even before the dramatic changes leading to the dissolution of the former Soviet Union stimulated rethinking of the Soviet experience, new methodologies in social and cultural history prompted revisionism. Interdisciplinary interest in film, drawing attention to marketing strategies, popular as well as critical reception, international trade patterns, motion picture financing, the paradigms of genre cinema and the studio system, began to chip away at traditional interpretations. In conjunction with the recent opening of archives and unprecedented dialogue between former Soviet scholars and the west, these approaches are generating fresh perspectives on Soviet cinema. Three of the five books considered here, two of which belong to a new series from Routledge, bring together papers read to international and interdisciplinary conferences at which former Soviet scholars were represented. Historians, political scientists, art historians, filmmakers, and scholars of literature and film theory present topics ranging from detailed formal analyses of specific motion pictures to interpretive readings of periods and genres. …

Manhattan Nickelodeons: New Data on Audiences and Exhibitors

The nickelodeon boom in Manhattan was an extraordinary phenomenon. At the close of 1905 movies were still a relatively marginal amusement, filling brief slots at the end of vaudeville shows or running on Sundays in melodrama theaters that aimed to evade New York's blue laws against live performance. Two years later, nickelodeons had revolutionized urban recreation and altered the commercial landscape of Manhattan. Well over three hundred small storefront movie theaters, known as nickelodeons, and converted larger theaters screened movies full-time by 1908. Early exhibition in Manhattan holds special interest for film history, not because it was necessarily the most extensive or important (although it may well have been, since New York City was the nation's commercial and cultural capital, as well as the center of the pre-Hollywood film industry) or because it was particularly representative of the emergence of cinema elsewhere in the country (recent historians have stressed different patterns of development in different cities and towns),' but rather because Manhattan's nickelodeon boom so often has functioned as historical shorthand for the rise of the movies in general. For most people, even those of us who know better, the image of cramped, dingy nickelodeons in Manhattan's Lower East Side ghetto stands as a symbol for the cinema's emergence in America. This synecdoche stems largely the superficiality of traditional survey histories and perhaps, more generally, the ideological convenience of the notion that the birth of mass entertainment in America took place at the gateway of the promised land, welling up from below, the lives of new immigrants and working people. Because Manhattan's nickelodeon boom has played such a prominent role in shaping our conception of early film history, as well as American social history, it is crucial that we derive an accurate picture of that phenomenon. How big was the nickelodeon boom in Manhattan? What was the make-up of the nickelodeon's audience in terms of both class and ethnic composition? In what kinds of neighborhoods were nickelodeons located, and what explains their distribution? Who were the exhibitors? How stable was the nickelodeon business? These questions have remained unresolved for a surprisingly long time. The issue of early cinema's class composition and orientation has been especially pivotal in recent historical work. Whereas traditional film histories

"Pathe Goes to Town": French Films Create a Market for the Nickelodeon

No one writing about the silent cinema in France after World War I can ignore the fact that films so dominated the market that they determined, in part, what constituted a French cinema. But is the converse true for the period prior to that war? Can any of us writing about the cinema in the United States, especially before 1910, ignore the fact that films sometimes dominated the market and so determined, in part, what became an American cinema? Apparently we can, or at least we can avoid dealing with films all that seriously. Even Charles Musser's recent and remarkable The Emergence of Cinema pushes films to the margins (in sections appended to the ends of chapters), following the long-held, probably unconscious tendency of film historians to Americanize early cinema.2 But what if we challenge this tendency, recognize the structuring absence around which early cinema was constituted, and foreground the foreign bodies of films so prominent in its midst?3 That is what I propose to do in this essay, focusing on the period from 1902 to 1906, the years of the cinema's emergence as a viable industry. For it was during those years that the films of Georges M6lies and Path6Freres had a considerable impact-to the point where, by the summer of 1905, Path6 had become the leading supplier of moving pictures for the market.

Charles Musser: The Emergence of Cinema. The American Screen to 1907.

Charles Musser: The Emergence of Cinema. The American Screen to 1907.

MUSSER, Charles.The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907.

(1993). MUSSER, Charles. The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907. ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews: Vol. 6, Romantic Studies, pp. 156-158.

The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907.

The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907.

The emergence of cinema: the American screen to 1907

The emergence of cinema: the American screen to 1907