My topic is the vamp film, a hugely popular subgenre which flourished briefly in the United States between 1915 and 1925, at a time when cinema was still in the process of establishing itself as primarily a narrative medium. By 1915, it is generally assumed, the transition from a ‘cinema of attractions’ to a ‘cinema of narrative integration’ was more or less complete.11 For an authoritative account, see Charlie Keil, Early American Cinema in Transition: Story, Style, and Filmmaking, 1907–1913 (Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press. 2001). It may be, however, that some doubts remained about the medium’s exact function. The claim I will advance here is that the vamp film – a multi-media event staged as vividly in the fan magazines as on the screen – played a significant (if in the long run ineffectual) part in perpetuating those doubts. Film history has had little to say about vamp films.22 Sumiko Higashi, Virgins, Vamps, and Flappers: The American Silent Movie Heroine (Montreal: Eden Press, 1978), 55–78. On the whole, they have been categorised as a ‘relatively conservative’ subgenre of the fallen woman film.33 Lea Jacobs, The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film, 1928–1942 (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1997), 12. According to Miriam Hansen, the ‘perverted female look’ they activate was one of a number of ‘allegories’ deployed by the film industry in order at once to empower and to contain ‘female desire in general’.44 Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 122–3. My feeling is that they deserve further and more detailed attention, on account not only of their popularity at the time, but of their fabulous indiscretion. I want to propose a particular scene in a selection of these films as an index to the degree of uncertainty that persisted, for a while, in attitudes to film as a medium. Between 1915 and 1925, most if not all of the major Hollywood production companies turned out one or more melodramas featuring a female vamp. These films were one of the means by which Hollywood established itself as the globally dominant mass medium which we sometimes take to exemplify the ‘American century’. A ‘vamp’ was a woman hell-bent on seducing the nearest available millionaire: a courtesan, then, but one who will not rest content until she has stripped her victim of everything he possesses and of everything he is, of his very being. The figure of the vamp required a new kind of star: a mature actress of (allegedly) exotic origin. According to the Fox Film Company’s publicity department, Theda Bara (1885–1955) – born Theodosia Goodman, in Cincinnati, Ohio – was the daughter of an Arabian princess and an Italian sculptor brought up in Egypt. Fox touted her (optimistically) as a combination of the biblical Delilah and Lucrezia Borgia.55 Ronald Genini, Theda Bara: A Biography of the Silent Screen Vamp, with a Filmography (Jefferson NC: McFarland & Company, 1996), 16. Pola Negri (1897–1987) was at least Polish: her father had been arrested and sent to Siberia. As Diane Negra points out, the ‘hypersexual cinematic vamp’ of the 1910s and 1920s was in essence ‘a thinly disguised incarnation of the threat of female immigrant sexuality’. These florid embodiments of ‘resistant female ethnicity’ crystallised anxieties concerning race, gender, and sexuality widespread in post-war America.66 Diane Negra, ‘Immigrant Stardom in Imperial America: Pola Negri and the Problem of Typology’, in Off-White Hollywood: American Culture and Ethnic Female Stardom (London: Routledge, 2001), 55–83 (pp. 62, 56). ‘Women are my greatest fans,’ Bara declared in an interview she gave in June 1917, ‘because they see in my vampire the impersonal vengeance of all their unavenged wrongs [...] Even downtrodden wives write to me to this effect. And they give me the perfect compliment. “I know I should sympathize with the wife, but I do not.” I am in effect a feministe.’77 Quoted by Lary May, Screening Out of the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 106. Negra goes on to explain that the vamp’s ‘transgressive ownership of her own labour’ was to prove especially problematic, because it enabled her to ‘carry off a kind of masquerade – a false femininity’.88 Negra, ‘Immigrant Stardom’, 72, 77. I want to suggest that the masquerade involved a particular kind of labour – the production of the ‘come-hither look’ – which, while no doubt threatening, also generates an unexpected reflexivity: these are moments at which film itself, as a medium, is also on show, in all of its masquerade. What is especially striking about the labour involved in the vamp’s masquerade is that it involves an act of pure (and resolutely unfeminine) calculation. For she plans the entrapment of her victim like a military campaign, having carefully researched his circumstances and habits. Furthermore, the initial encounter usually occurs in a public or semi-public space, and thus requires an exchange of coded signals. This is in effect a relationship consummated at a distance, with no need for physical contact or the expression of feeling. Essentially, all that will ever be exchanged is information. While the encounter between vamp and victim undoubtedly puts race, gender, and sexuality in dramatic play, its animating force would appear to be, as I hope to show, a thought about the process or mechanics of communication. The scene of the encounter involves looking and being looked at, but its provocations extend beyond the poetics and politics of vision. It does not entirely fit the paradigms of visual pleasure which have long constituted a vital tradition in film theory. I will suggest later that the vamp film began to conform to those paradigms only at the moment of its disappearance, in or around 1925. A familiar, dependable account of the development of a twentieth-century media system or ecology chronicles the gradual emergence of analogue storage technologies (sound recording, film) from the shadow of a digital communication technology (the telegraph), to be challenged, in turn, at the height of their ascendancy, by analogue communication technologies (broadcast radio, television); before digital computing, at once storage and (from the 1960s) communication technology, brought the whole process ‘full circle’.99 Friedrich Kittler, ‘The City Is a Medium’, in The Truth of the Technological World: Essays on the Genealogy of Presence, trans. Erik Butler (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 138–51 (p.145). The computer defines our era, a ‘universal media machine’ capable of converting ‘all cultural categories and concepts’ into algorithm.1010 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2001), 47. ‘By the late twentieth century,’ John Durham Peters remarks, ‘all media melt (incompletely, I would add) into digits.’1111 John Durham Peters, ‘Strange Sympathies: Horizons of Media Theory in America and Germany’, in American Studies as Media Studies, ed. Frank Kelleter and Daniel Stein (Heidelberg: Universitätverlag, 2008), 3–23 (p.15). Peters’s caveat is a salutary reminder that such transformations do not happen overnight. We might think of the vamp film as a comparable incompleteness in an otherwise decisive shift of emphasis, capital, and prestige, within the media system, from telegraphy to cinema. In what follows I will test two hypotheses: first, that considerable uncertainty persisted, well into the 1920s, concerning the exact function of cinema as a medium; secondly, that the vamp films prominent immediately after the transition to a cinema of narrative integration exploited a residual uncertainty concerning the uses of the medium in such a way as to create a ‘come-hither look’ which is not primarily about looking and being looked at. By 1900, the electric telegraph was the pre-eminent global telecommunications medium. Thanks to Guglielmo Marconi’s indefatigable promotion of wireless telegraphy, it remained so well into the twentieth century. From the outset, cinema felt pressure from technologies such as telegraphy and telephony which had succeeded in defining an alternative version of what a truly modern medium actually does: make a connection, instantaneously, at a distance. In 1899, some New York vaudeville theatres hired Vitagraph to show pictures of the America’s Cup yacht races a few hours after their occurrence. By arrangement with Marconi, others used wireless messages to plot the positions of the boats on a map displayed in the intervals between acts. The competition for instantaneity was fierce. The New York Clipper even felt moved to declare that ‘the secret of Moving Pictures consists in their TIMELINESS’.1212 Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (New York: Scribner’s, 1990), 274–5. The years immediately before the outbreak of the First World War saw the development of film as a news-gathering medium to rival the newspaper. Its further, very successful use for information and propaganda purposes during the war gave that development a massive further boost. George Creel, who ran the Congressional Committee on Public Information, claimed that during the war ‘the screen’ had brought the ‘story of America’ to millions world-wide, ‘flashing the power of our army and navy, showing our natural resources, our industrial processes, our war spirit, and our national life’.1313 George Creel, How We Advertised America (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1920), 273. It was not just that the newsreels had become a ‘necessary part’ of the cinema programme, rather than mere filler. It was that cinema had begun to imagine itself as a ‘screenpaper’: an apparatus of ‘animated journals’ and sensational extras ‘flashing to surprised audiences the record of events that the newsboys are even then shouting in the streets outside’.1414 Jerome Shorey, ‘The Romance of the Newsreel’, Photoplay, February 1919, 74–5 (p.74). Mutual had already named its twice-weekly newsreel the Screen Telegram.1515 ‘Screen Telegram Comes to New York’, Moving Picture World, 20 July 1918, 379. By 1919, it was possible to describe the films made by Picture News and Pathé Gazette as the products of a ‘film news medium’.1616 ‘High Court of Justice’, The Times, 12 March 1919, 4. For the first half of the 1920s, at least, most commentators continued to think of film as a channel of communication with a built-in range of functions, none of them exclusive. The term almost invariably used with reference to film was not ‘medium’, but ‘medium of’. It could not (yet) just be a medium. It had still to present itself as a medium of some already defined activity: dramatic expression, entertainment, art, education, news, advertising. By the end of the 1920s, it was possible, in some quarters at least, to speak confidently of ‘the film medium’. A path had been cleared to the medium-specific approach of Rudolf Arnheim’s Film as Art (1932). What most concerns me here is the fact that it needed clearing. A scene which would take a quarter of an hour to play upon a stage may pass in the course of a single minute on the film. An idea is conveyed, and the audience jumps to its significance. If suggestion plays a large part on the stage, it plays a still larger part on the films. A thought passes from the screen to the spectator with the condensed and instantaneous significance of a Marconi message.1919 Agnes Platt, Practical Hints on Acting for the Cinema (London: Stanley Paul, 1921), 35. One way to grasp the aspiration to condensed and instantaneous significance is by examining how the term ‘flash’, which had long since furnished telegraphy with the idea of the ‘newsflash’, found its way into film discourse. A ‘flash’ was a scene shown momentarily, for a fraction of a second. In Hollywood movies, the flash-scene is a kind of newsflash: a headline without a report. It messages without even the faintest pretence of representation in full. Flash-scenes achieved their prominence in film discourse thanks to censorship, which until 1930 remained the primary responsibility of municipal and state authorities. During the 1910s, trade journals such as Motography ran regular items listing the latest idiocies committed by the censorship boards. Censorship worked by requiring that scenes either be cut altogether, or reduced to a flash. The changes required by the Chicago Board of Censorship in August 1914 apparently included the reduction to flashes of scenes which involved gambling, excessive violence, ‘girls in tights’, love-making performed on a couch, and people of colour behaving in an unruly fashion.2020 ‘Weird Stunts of Our Censor Board’, Motography, 1 August 1914, 151–3. The flash-scene is a newsflash, a message in code. It demonstrates to those who possess the code that sex is happening, or violence, or savagery, or poker. Censorship required film to behave telegraphically. Within Hollywood, the flash soon came to be understood as a way to pre-empt censorship: to message, without showing. There is an excellent example in Charlie Chaplin’s A Woman of Paris (1923). Chaplin has to reveal that the heroine is a kept woman. He manages this by having her maid open a drawer, thereby dislodging the collar of a man’s dress shirt, to the evident consternation of her ex-fiancé, who has come to paint her portrait. Adolphe Menjou, who plays her worldly protector, remarked in his autobiography that ‘little touches’ like this gave the film ‘a flavour that was new to picturemaking’. But what created the flavour? Not the demand for continuity in editing which we now take to have been the basis of the classical Hollywood style, and which the starkness of the shot of the collar on the floor at the maid’s feet palpably exceeds. Menjou also said that an earlier scene in the film in which a heavily disguised Chaplin plays a porter hurling luggage around was cut to a ‘brief flash’ because, although popular with preview audiences, it got in the way of the plot.2121 Adolphe Menjou, It Took Nine Tailors (London: Sampson, Low, Marston, 1950), 112–13, 115. Narrative requirements prevailed, in this case. But a signal had nonetheless been sent, a newsflash about the star’s presence in his own film. The practice of the flash, shaped in large measure by censorship, did a good deal to shape cinema as telegraphic, as a connective or messaging medium; even, or especially, when it sought to represent.2222 I develop the distinction between representational and connective media more fully in Literature in the First Media Age: Britain between the Wars (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). From around 1900, ‘sex’ could be taken to mean an activity or behaviour as well as a gender. The cognate term ‘sex appeal’ was originally used, from around the same time, of a play which took sexuality or sexual relations as its theme. ‘The play which contains no sex appeal is described by professional critics as being “undramatic” or “not a play at all”,’ an article in Current Literature explained in July 1910.2323 ‘The Greatest French Playwright since Molière’, Current Literature, 49 (1910), 85–6 (p.86). To lack sex appeal was to fail to function as a medium. Only subsequently did the term come to refer to personal magnetism, sometimes in the form of a transitive verb. To ‘sex-appeal’ someone was to make oneself attractive to them. ‘Vampirism’ became the term of art for sexual predation, or the calculating, carefully targeted exploitation of sex-appeal, thanks to a painting by Philip Burne-Jones which prompted a best-selling poem by Rudyard Kipling. In 1910, the poem in turn gave rise to a short ‘picture dramatization’ starring Margarita Fischer (1886–1975). All three were entitled ‘The Vampire’. But it was not until 1915, and the further development of the feature-length film as the Hollywood staple, that the vamping scene assumed its definitive shape: its shape, I will argue, as a thought about telecommunication. In the volume of the standard History of the American Cinema covering the period from 1907 to 1915, Eileen Bowser devotes a single paragraph to vamp films. But the scene she chooses to exemplify the new patterns of analytic editing which were later to be consolidated into the classical continuity system is a scene in Red and White Roses (1913) in which a vamp sex-appeals her victim across a crowded restaurant.2424 Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema: 1907–1915 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 187–8, 262–5. The questions raised by this scene, and others like it, do not only have to do with the consolidation of the classical continuity system. For it rapidly becomes clear that this vamp, like her many successors, does not so much embody or express or perform sexuality as transmit it. Fischer was soon to be outbid in the vamping stakes. The opening line of Kipling’s poem (‘A fool there was …’) had sufficient force to generate a full-length play, and then, in 1915, a sensational feature film starring Theda Bara. Fox’s A Fool There Was, directed by Frank Powell, set a seal on the vamp film’s iconic scene. Scanning the paper one day, the Vampire discovers that John Schuyler (Edward José), a wealthy lawyer, has been appointed US government representative in London, and swiftly books herself a cabin on the ship taking him to Europe. As he boards the ship, Schuyler passes the corpse of the Vampire’s previous victim going in the opposite direction (he has just shot himself on the sun-deck). Schuyler’s family have already arrived to see him off. They chat unconcernedly as the come-hither look flashed by the Vampire, after due preparation with powder-compact and mirror, strikes home (figs 1 and 2). What this iconic scene makes amply clear is that the vamp’s readiness to be more than looked at is immediate: no delay required, no beating about the bush. The news has been flashed from temptress to victim – and from screen to spectator. Bara went on to make many more such movies, including Cleopatra (1917) and When a Woman Sins (1918). Meanwhile, discussion of the significance of her signature role was intensifying in the trade journals and fan magazines. In a 1916 Photoplay article about Olga Petrova (1884–1977, born Muriel Harding) – a ‘shadowland patrician’ who can ‘vamp quite a few’ – Constance Severance noted that the term has several other senses, including an improvised accompaniment, and ‘Something added to give an old thing a new appearance’. The vamp, Severance continued, is the ‘unconventional, or improvised, accompaniment’ to a man’s life.2525 Constance Severance, ‘Our Lady of Troubles’, Photoplay (October 1916), 56–8. The senses she draws attention to might remind us of vamping’s long association with telegraphy. To ‘vamp’ a telegram was to insert into it matter not in the original; that is, to hack it. In A Fool There Was, the Vampire’s come-hither look is matter inserted into the message sent by the departing husband’s embrace of his wife. Operating at a distance, by cyber-warfare, she has sucked the life out of a marriage. Does she at the same time suck the life out of a medium ostensibly dedicated to story-telling? For what we feel, at this moment, is the sheer force of a message sent. Even when the vamp did get to close quarters, she remained in a way tele-communicative, as an April 1917 article by J.B. Waye in Picture-Play Magazine was to point out. The article describes a day in the working life of a young actress called Marie Wayne (1887–1949), which appears to have consisted of nine consecutive passionate embraces with nine separate men on nine separate sets; hence her designation as the ‘kiss bandit’. But Waye clearly regards the kiss itself, the epitome of intimacy, as something communicated at a distance. ‘When the lights went out and Marie started for home, the nine men who had used the receiver while she had used the mouthpiece were crowded about the entrance.’2626 J.B. Waye, ‘The Kiss Bandit: A Day on the Trail of the Rouged Lips’, Picture-Play Magazine, April 1917, 187–8 (p.188). The choice of metaphor is significant. By this account, the kiss is a message transmitted down the telephone wire from mouthpiece to receiver. Sex-appeal, it seems, had to do with getting a message through. Mae Busch (1891–1946), who starred in Erich von Stroheim’s The Devil’s Pass Key (1920) and Foolish Wives (1923), was soon to describe herself as the ‘New Thought Vamp’, telling an interviewer that ‘I can do anything I choose if I project my thought toward an objective.’2727 Herbert Howe, ‘The New Thought Vamp’, Motion Picture Magazine, November 1921, 40–41 (p.41). ‘In these piping days,’ Severance had concluded her piece about Petrova, ‘no moving picture corporation can maintain its self-respect unless it supports at least one vampire.’2828 Severance, ‘Our Lady of Troubles’, 57. Film Fun even built its own elaborate ‘shrine’ to the vamp.2929 The Shrine of the Vampire, Film Fun (January 1919), 2. Next off the production line was Pola Negri, who made her name in Ernst Lubitsch’s Madame Dubarry (1919). The heroine’s career involves two key transformations: from milliner to courtesan, and from courtesan to king’s companion. In both cases, she is ‘discovered’ while running errands, seen (and seeing) at a distance in a public or semi-public space. In both cases, she makes up carefully before putting herself on display: the toilette is a signal in code. Paramount hired Lubitsch and Negri as a pair in 1922. Also prominent in Film Fun’s vamp shrine was Louise Glaum (1888–1970), who deserves mention, if only on account of her box-office smash of 1920, the unfussily titled Sex (fig. 3). During a scene set in a night-club, the heroine transfers her affections from one rich idiot to another by means of a come-hither look rendered in close-up (fig. 4). There is surely more ‘hither’ than ‘look’ in this expression reduced to a signal. The vampire business was still going strong, or quite strong, in 1925, with new contenders like Nita Naldi (1894–1961, born Mary Nonna Dooley) and Barbara La Marr (1896–1926, born Reatha Dale Watson) making an impact. Naldi and La Marr contributed side-by-side pieces on ‘This Business of Being a Vampire’ to Motion Picture Magazine. Naldi waxed lyrical about vamping Valentino in the toreador epic Blood and Sand (1922); and with some justice.3030 Nita Naldi, ‘This Business of Being a Vampire’, Motion Picture Magazine, March 1925, 42. In Blood and Sand, the scene of the come-hither look takes place at the bull-ring, as a triumphant Valentino acknowledges the crowd’s applause (figs 5 and 6). There is a difference, however: one which might suggest that the vamp film had begun to conform to the rules of a cinema which demanded the full representation of the male – and more particularly the female – body. Valentino’s star-status may well have made the difference. For Naldi observes him, through a pair of opera glasses, before he observes her. There is, now, an explicit preoccupation with looking and being looked at, with the power of the gaze. According to Miriam Hansen, Valentino’s films ‘rehearse the classical choreography of the look almost to the point of parody, offering point-of-view constructions that affirm the cultural hierarchy of gender in the visual field’. Whenever Valentino lays eyes on a woman, Hansen adds, ‘we can be sure that she will turn out to be the woman of his dreams, the legitimate partner in the romantic relationship’. Whenever a woman initiates the look, however, ‘she is invariably marked as a vamp, to be condemned and defeated in the course of the narrative’.3131 Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 269. Classical Hollywood cinema re-inscribed that cultural hierarchy over and over again upon the bodies of the vamp’s many and various successors. In Blood and Sand, however, a thought about communication – about perverted, or vamped, communication – persists. After the show, Naldi manages to get Valentino’s undivided attention. Knowing that he will not be able to resist her, Valentino asks a friend to send a reassuring telegram to his wife (the woman he had seen first, the woman of his dreams), which the film promptly vamps by superimposing upon it a question mark (fig. 7). That extra-diegetic question mark passes from the screen to the spectator with the ‘condensed and instantaneous significance’, as Agnes Platt might have put it, of a Marconi message. The exploits of the ethnically hybrid vamp, and by implication of the ethnically hybrid star who plays the part, have marked cinema as a hybrid medium, at once representational and connective. By the mid-1920s, there were a number of overlapping categories available to describe the New (or newly sexualised) Woman. Fox’s The Folly of Vanity (1925), for example, included parts for a ‘Siren’ (Edna Gregory), a ‘Russian Vamp’ (Edna Mae Cooper), and a ‘Blond Gold Digger’ (Lotus Thompson). But the (older, wiser, darker) sirens and vamps were on the way out. The emphasis had shifted to a defiantly blonde or near-blonde gold-digging: the ‘Cinderella story’, in industry parlance.3232 Jacobs, Wages of Sin, 11–13. There could be no objection to aggressive social mobility as long as it culminated in the expression of a ‘naturally’ feminine (and American) self. In 1925, Mary Pickford (1892–1979, born Gladys Louise Smith) invited readers of Photoplay to propose some possible screen roles, adding that she did not want to be in costume pictures, but only those dealing with the problems of the ‘average American girl’. The role she eventually chose for herself was that of a shop assistant, in My Best Girl (1927). Maggie does not realise that her co-worker, Joe the stock-boy, is the owner’s son. When Joe’s father tells her that marriage to Joe will ruin his career, she attempts to sacrifice herself by pretending that she was only after his money. She smears on lipstick, smokes a cigarette, and dances to a recording of a song called ‘Red Hot Mama’. Joe and his father, looking on, understand that it is only an act: her natural self shines through the masquerade. The gold-digging template was to prove immensely popular. Hollywood Cinderella stories include Manhandled (1924), Orchids and Ermine (1927), Possessed (1931), Bed of Roses (1933), and Baby Face (1933). Baby Face, in particular, is strong stuff. Even there, however, female sexual aggression is offset by a powerful dose of natural (American) femininity. The same could be said of the celebrated flapper films of the 1920s. ‘The flapper’s sexuality was not perceived as overpowering men; she was soft and romantic, and although she viewed her paid work as a sign of her independence, she did not seek a career that would require her to forgo marriage.’3333 Stephen Sharot, ‘The “New Woman”, Star Personas, and Cross-Class Romance Films in 1920s America’, Journal of Gender Studies, 19 (2010), 73–86 (pp. 78, 75). Such confidence in the power of self-expression – as opposed to tele-communicative technique – seems at once to produce and be produced by an understanding of cinema as a narrative mass-medium, or popular representational art. The vamp, however, did not go quietly, even in films made by directors whose work was to set the pattern for classical Hollywood cinema. My final example of the tribe’s power to unsettle a medium as well as a moral code is from Cecil B. DeMille’s Old Wives for New (1918). The first in a divorce trilogy, Old Wives for New was to be followed (with a certain lack of imagination) by Don’t Change Your Husband (1919) and Why Change Your Wife? (1920). These films look back to Griffith at his most sententious, and forward to the comedy of remarriage. They are cynical, and didactic. They sermonise; and they message mischievously. DeMille came from a distinguished Broadway family. In December 1913, he abandoned a failing stage career and set off for California to take up the post of director-general of a new film studio, the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company, before long to become Famous Players-Lasky. Lasky and DeMille presented themselves as purveyors of art rather than amusement. Reviews in the trade press began to put increasing emphasis on DeMille’s ability to create pictorial effects, in particular through nuanced lighting. Rembrandt and Titian were among the names cheerfully taken in vain. DeMille certainly believed his own propaganda. In an interview he gave to Moving Picture World in July 1917, he spoke of the ways in which the audience might be made to ‘feel’ the background of a scene rather than ‘see’ it. ‘We are beginning to pose our people in the settings as a painter would pose them, with consideration for the perfect balance of the scene.’3434