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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Writing and Rewriting Film History: Terms of a Debate
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2001-10-01
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Cinéma & Cie
Thomas Elsaesser
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Universiteit Amsterdam
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Writing and Rewriting Film History: Terms of a Debate
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/18944/16647
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WRITING AND REWRITING FILM HISTORY: TERMS OF A DEBATE
Thomas Elsaesser, Universiteit Amsterdam




Introduction: Back to the Future with Early Cinema?

  Early Cinema has become important for several interconnected reasons, both histor-
ical and theoretical, suggesting that the study of Early Cinema is important not only for
its own sake, but for our understanding of contemporary and maybe future media cul-
ture. This article gives a brief overview of the present state of studies in Early Cinema,
emphasising the difference between the so-called “New Film History” and more tradi-
tional ways of conceptualising the history of the cinema. The occasion also gives me an
opportunity to reaffirm my faith in the joint – and truly international – effort among
archives, curators and scholars, to rescue for posterity the very rich heritage of the first
years of the cinema. As a film historian and university teacher, I have always been inter-
ested in the origins of the cinema, but I have not always fully appreciated what was at
stake. In the 1960s, when I began to write about film, I did not challenge conventional
opinion, namely that the films of the Lumières, of Méliès, Edison, Messter and
Hepworth (to name some of the pioneers) were interesting mainly by their primitive
art lessness, when compared with what came after: the films of Griffith, Sjöström,
Stiller, or Maurice Tourneur. Charming and naive, the films from 1896 to 1912 seemed
to testify to the childhood of a medium which I loved only in its maturity and adult-
hood.
  A number of events during the 1980s radically changed my mind on this. Most dra-
matically, it was Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, held annually in Pordenone, Italy since
1981. This event, which combines extensive retrospectives of rarely seen, recently redis-
covered or restored films, with meetings between scholars and archivists, is justly
famous for revolutionising our view of the American cinema of the 1910s. But it has
also contributed enormously to our knowledge of Early Cinema in Europe, due to the
retrospectives of different national cinemas: Italian cinema, French Gaumont and Pathé
productions, the Early Cinema of Denmark and Sweden (1986), of Russia (1989), of
Germany (1990). The one single event, however, which prior to Pordenone had gathered
the world’s leading experts on Early Cinema, and which in turn inspired many scholars
to take a second look at the very first years of the cinema, was the 1978 FIAF Conference
held in Brighton, England. There, for the first time, a group of curators and historians
systematically viewed and discussed most of the surviving films from 1900-1906.
  The reports and papers presented there were a revelation, and since then, a veritable
explosion of scholarship devoted to Early Cinema has occurred. Already in the early
1980s, the material seemed to me so rich in the perspectives it opened, and so funda-
mental for helping us to rethink the history of the cinema that, after co-organising a

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                                      WRITING AND REWRITING FILM HISTORY: TERMS OF A DEBATE

conference on the emergence of narrative (Space Frame Narrative) at the University of
East Anglia in 1982, I decided to edit a collection of essays by the leading scholars in the
field, which was published in 1990, under the title Early Cinema: Space Frame
Narrative.
  What I want to do, then, is to give a rapid overview of why I think the study of Early
Cinema (roughly, from 1895 to 1917) has become so important, not only for its own
sake, but for our understanding of contemporary culture.


Why Early Cinema?

  It is not difficult to discern a conjuncture of several factors which has contributed to
the renewed interest in Early Cinema. Firstly: It has become commonplace to say that
this century has seen a quantum leap in the function of the audio-visual media, bring-
ing with it the sense that we need a new archaeology of our culture, the irreversible
shift from one representational code (in which our notion of truth, our system of
rationality was based on and supported by print), to another representational code
(increasingly relying on, defining itself and communicating via the combination of
sounds, images and graphics, alongside narrative and argumentative discourse). The
approaching centenary of the first public showings of projected images is therefore a
convenient marker to begin to undertake this archaeology.
  Secondly, and more specifically, the revival of interest in Early Cinema came from a
pressing sense that the models for understanding the cinema, and the histories derived
from these models, were inadequate, contradictory, unsound. Three basic assumptions
in particular, have seemed in need of revision: that film history is the history of indi-
vidual films; that the development of cinema has been in the direction of greater and
greater “realism;” and that this drive for realism explains why the cinema became a nar-
rative medium for telling fictional stories. But when we look at the introduction of
sound or colour, for instance, we realise that sound was first used mainly in musicals,
and that colour at first connoted “fantasy:” in both cases, realism was associated with
that which the new technologies displaced. However, if we look at the history of Early
Cinema, even this revision gets considerably more complicated: early films were rarely
silent, and indeed the technology of sound synchronisation was already very sophisti-
cated by around 1906. Secondly, Early Cinema was not in black and white, but at a
rough estimate, about 80% of it was stencilled, tinted or toned, which is to say, “in
colour.” This raises not only questions of evidence, of accuracy, of individual film prints
and their history, but more fundamental questions. Why was this knowledge repressed
for so long? Why was industrially produced sound film delayed for so long? Why did
colour disappear in the early to mid-1920s, and not reappear until the late 1930s? This
in turn raises an even more fundamental question: why did the cinema appear when it
did, which is to say why did it take so long to appear at all? What are the reasons for the
delay of cinema? To the history of what had been, there needed to be added the history
of what might have been, or at least an awareness of dead-ends and paths not taken. For
what became increasingly evident was that no inevitable logic about the development
of the cinema could be derived from technology itself: many of the features we now
associate with the cinema, such as safety film, colour or sound were discovered well
before they were adopted by the film industry. Solving the technical problems associat-

                                                                                         ­25
THOMAS ELSAESSER

ed with film was no guarantee that these might be implemented: too many other vari-
ables, from cost factors to patent rights, from monopolistic exploitation of a market to
trying to gain a competitive edge over a rival. Such interrogations run counter to any
linear conception of “progress” in film history, they also challenged the notion that
mankind had always been waiting and dreaming of the cinema, ever since stone-age
man had painted outlines of animals on the walls of his caves.
   Already in the late 1960s/early 1970s we find a radical critique of “idealist” film theo-
ry and its notion of both origin and teleology (Jean Louis Comolli, Jean Louis Baudry,
Noël Burch) in the name of a new (epistemological, archaeological, non-linear, “materi-
alist”) history. Early Cinema (or as Burch called it, “primitive cinema”) seemed a useful
way of challenging the linear, organic account, not least because so many of the films
made before 1905 seemed incomprehensible when viewed by the standards of classical
cinema (see Burch’s important essay “Porter or Ambivalence”).1
   Parallel to this predominantly French, theory-oriented challenge to film scholars
from the 1950s like André Bazin and Jean Mitry, we also find, among American film his-
torians, a more empirically minded critique of traditional film history (which had until
then been, by and large, the story of pioneers, of “firsts,” of adventure, discovery, of great
masters and masterpieces). Robert Allen, Douglas Gomery, Charles Musser, Janet
Staiger, Kristin Thompson, Russell Merritt and others demanded more exacting schol-
arship, and in the process, challenged the accounts of Terry Ramsaye, Lewis Jacobs or
Arthur Knight in the name of different determinants (mainly economic, industrial,
technological rather than artistic or biographical) and different kinds of evidence
(demographic data, business files, law-suits and patent wars rather than anecdotal or
interpretative evidence). Yet they also showed how closely the cinema was imbricated
in other media, such as vaudeville, Hale’s Tours, travel and colonialism, the popular
stage melodrama, the burlesque (the “media-intertexts” as they came to be known, of
Early Cinema).
   The cinema, in other words, was itself part of the enormous transformations that
reshaped, in the name of “modernity” and “modernisation”, our idea of work and pleas-
ure, the private and the public sphere, leading to the progressive industrialisation and
commercial exploitation of entertainment, tourism and leisure). From this vantage-
point, Early Cinema could be seen as quite distinct from what came after, suggesting
less of a continuous progress towards classical Hollywood cinema and more a series of
“breaks,” shifts and reorientations. But it can also be understood from a contemporary
perspective: in the patent wars, the cartel formation, and the rush for making popular
films we recognise today’s struggle to acquire the kind of software, which allows the
manufacturers of the hardware to impose their operating systems as the “industry-stan-
dard” on to a particular branch of the entertainment business.
   This also has implications for the way we think of cinematic style. Writers of the
“New Film History” were not looking for the film which had the first close-up, or the
first eye-line match, or the first trick shot. Such issues of originality and influence
belonged to the paradigms of the individual artist or of romantic genius, which –
derived from literature and art history – were seen as inappropriate for the history of
film styles and cinematic practice. Instead, scholars became interested in when and
how such devices became the “norm,” when and how they imposed themselves as a
general practice, or when they were accepted not as the marks of an artistic avant-garde,
but as the stock-in-trade of the filmmaker working for the public at large.

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                                       WRITING AND REWRITING FILM HISTORY: TERMS OF A DEBATE

Film and the Other Arts

  Thus, the champions of Early Cinema are in a counter-current also to the many his-
tories of the film that try to define the “essence” of the 7th art, by contrasting it with the
plastic arts, music, literature, painting and architecture. However, while it may seem
that the “New Film History” simply views cinema as an industry, and film as the com-
modity which this industry produces, there is actually a very vivid interest in redefin-
ing the relation between film and the others arts, though perhaps not so much as indi-
vidual creative acts, and more as “media” competing for public attention and the pub-
lic sphere of culture.
  Take the example of literature. While traditionally, much time had been spent on the
question of adaptation, on comparing a novel with its transposition to the screen, his-
torical research, notably by Nicholas Vardac, and more recently, by Rick Altman,
showed that many popular novels of the late 19th were throughout the 1880s and 1890s
adapted into plays for the popular theatre, before they became, in the 1900s, the mate-
rial for filmed adaptations. When we come to the 1910s, at least in the United States, the
greatest literary influence on the cinema is not the novel, but the short-story, itself the
product of the expansion and popularity of the monthly magazine, made possible by
cheaper paper and printing techniques.
  As far as the theatre is concerned, the direction of recent research has been to differ-
entiate more precisely between different kinds of theatre, and besides the bourgeois
theatre, to explore the very rich and varied traditions of vaudeville, variety theatre,
music hall and other staged entertainments as precursors, rivals or intermediaries,
when it comes to understanding the interaction between the popular, the respectable
and the less reputable in popular spectacle arts. Early Cinema, in each case, both drew
on and transformed these arts, which is particularly important when it comes to under-
standing the (often non-narrative, sketch-like) subject matter of the first films, but also
their manner of presentation, which makes them seem to us incomplete or incompre-
hensible, but would have made perfect sense to their original audiences, since they
were already familiar with the gags or comic routines from vaudeville.
  When it comes to the visual arts, the situation is once again, more complex than mere
borrowing or influence would suggest. What is typical of the first phase of the cinema
is the fact that before it became a predominantly narrative medium (i.e. from around
1907 onwards), much of the cinema’s pleasure derived from its illusionist capacities, its
trompe-l’oeil techniques, its animation sequences and trick shots – in short, its affini-
ties with stage magic on the one hand, and a baroque or at any rate non-realistic image
tradition on the other. Tom Gunning and Donald Crafton, for instance, have written
important new studies of the Méliès tradition, and of animation pioneers like Emile
Cohl.


The Archives and the Film Scholars

  At the same time, the 1970s also saw a new urgency on the part of film archives about
the preservation and accessibility of the surviving materials from the early period, part-
ly in response to specific crises in film archiving (the Langlois Affair in Paris, various
fires of nitrate film – Sweden, George Eastman House –, the fate of the Desmet

                                                                                           ­27
THOMAS ELSAESSER

Collection in Amsterdam), partly because the natural lifespan of nitrate film was com-
ing to an end, but also partly in response to the increased demand being made on all
kinds of audio-visual records by television, with its hunger for authentic material for
political, documentary, biographical, educational programmes.
   This in turn required the collaboration between scholars and archivists, the sifting
and processing of filmic and non-filmic material, but also ways of reliably identifying
films, and thus methods of dating, attributing, periodising films and especially film-
fragments. Hence the need for establishing not so much aesthetic criteria of excellence
and artistic value but of normative and comparative criteria.
   As one would expect, such diverse motives do not make for unanimity. Indeed, there
is a quite perceptible tension between scholars with an interest in Early Cinema as part
of a “cultural” or ideological or theoretical history, and scholars who are only concerned
with micro-analyses, who are revisionists and neo-empiricists. On the other hand, it is
remarkable – and sign of the vigour of this field of research – that the diverse contribu-
tions do actually form part of a debate, that there is a perceptible coherence and a cen-
tral set of issues and problems of which almost every scholar of Early Cinema is aware.


Film Style

   One of the central issues is that of film style, defined not as the visual flair of an indi-
vidual director, but as the formal characteristics of works that are similar either in
provenance (e.g. Pathé productions, Vitagraph films), in period (say, the multi-shot
films between 1900-1906), or genre (the chase films or filmed versions of the Passion).
This idea of style, first put forward by Early Cinema scholars such as Barry Salt, looks
for the “zero degree” of a given filmmaking practice, that is, what would have been con-
sidered the profession’s own practice in lighting, camera work, or composition. To this
one would add the limits and constraints imposed by the technology available at the
time, which requires detailed knowledge of the equipment available and in use at the
time, as well as a study of manuals and trade publications. Salt also regarded the aver-
age shot length in a film as telling us much about style. Pursuing a similar objective,
Noël Burch argued that one could identify, for instance, in the cinema before 1907 a dis-
tinct style paradigm, typified by frontal staging, a “flat” screen space, non-centred
action, and various other formal features. Proceeding inductively, Burch recognised
what all these features had in common: they emphasised the autonomy of the shot as a
complete scene, and the priority given to spatial coherence over temporal logic. This, in
essence, was what he called the “Primitive Mode of Representation” (PMR) which he
distinguished from the “Institutional Mode of Representation” (IMR) For Burch, the
object of inquiry was explain the interdependence and dialectical relationship between
the two, which could be explained in terms of distinct historical and ideological factors.
Hence his interest in the filmic avant-gardes and in alternative national cinemas, such
as that of Japan, or of Germany and Russia in the 1920s. Far from simply developing
from the primitive to the classical mode, the history of the cinema for Burch is involved
in a constant process between aspects of the primitive and the institutional mode, each
responding to a certain set of problems and constraints.
   The parameters that have been identified as pertinent for Early Cinema include, apart
from shot length, that of shot scale and shot density, of deep staging and shallow stag-

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                                       WRITING AND REWRITING FILM HISTORY: TERMS OF A DEBATE

ing, of shot division (e.g. into different playing areas: left/right, foreground/back-
ground), and the presence or absence of off-screen space. Together, or in certain combi-
nations, such parameters may be said to constitute a coherent system, and therefore a
style. When, for instance, André Bazin contrasted montage on one side and the long
take on the other, he was applying the parameters of shot scale, shot length, and stag-
ing (shot density), in order to construct two contrasting stylistic systems. Early Cinema
studies have begun to historicise these systems and to locate the reasons for the muta-
tion of stylistic features, in order to be able to explain change, and to create the basis for
historical periodisation. Style, especially when treated as a series of interdependent
variables, can thus be a very important tool for the film historians. Ben Brewster, for
instance, has combined the index of staging (deep-staging vs shallow staging) with that
of shot length (slow cutting vs fast cutting) to arrive at a possible stylistic system which
could be the basis for differentiating between European styles and American styles in
the 1910s.


From Film History to the History of the Cinema

  The double historical conjuncture – that of the cinema between 1896 and 1917, and of
its rediscovery in the late 1970s – does situate Early Cinema also in a wider context, the
one opened up by the revitalisation of film theory during the previous decade: the late
1960s and early 1970s. Hence, several sets of questions have influenced the debate: first-
ly, when and how did the very diverse technical processes and economic pressures
behind early film production undergo the kind of integration that was necessary to
turn filmmaking into the film industry? Secondly, how did this industrial logic impose
itself to the point of becoming inextricably bound up with the textual logic of the cine-
ma we call “classical”? Perhaps most intriguingly, given that the cinema manifests a
unique combination of the drives towards pleasure and intelligibility, what is its psy-
chic dimension, its connection with and extension of those older and more permanent
desires to picture the world in images and to experience it as doubled and mirrored?
  In trying to answer these questions, a new terminology emerged: alongside the need
to define and delimit the cinema’s “mode of production” (can we talk about Early
Cinema as “artisanal” and workshop-based, while post-1917 cinema is different,
because it is an industry?), Burch introduced the term “mode of representation,” mean-
ing thereby the different kinds of logic of the visible, the different technical but also
psychic “dispositifs” of showing and projecting which marks the Early Cinema off from
what came later. In short, what the concentration on Early Cinema had brought was to
reorient scholars away from film history as the history of films to film history as cine-
ma history (the history of exhibition practice, of audiences, of the social and physical
spaces where the cinema was experienced, as well as the history of the institutions –
industrial as well as legal – which needed to be develop for the cinema to become a mass
medium.
  Many other histories, it now seemed, had to be considered as part of the history of the
cinema, and it greatly expanded the sphere of expertise on which a film scholar could
draw. There was the general history of modern technology, and in particular, its phases
of invention, innovation, implementation, its cycles of research and development, of
diffusion. Thus, the history of capitalism, its developments from competitive, via cor-

                                                                                           ­29
THOMAS ELSAESSER

porate to multinational capitalism became as much an integral part as were the histo-
ries of related technologies of reproduction, transmission and representation. The
phonograph, the typewriter, the telephone, the machine gun and even the sewing
machine were seen as belonging both historically and sociologically to the same tech-
nological environment to which we owe the kinetoscope and the cinématographe (two
apparati which differ from each other not so much in their technical specification as
they do in their social uses, or “social imaginary”).


A Gathering of Audiences

   Implied in the shift from film history to the history of the cinema is also a quite
noticeable impulse to study audiences and the history of spectatorship. If it has always
been evident that the rise of the cinema depended on its huge popularity, the conditions
of this popularity had never been seriously investigated. On the contrary, scholars in
the past had to make a case for studying the cinema seriously, despite its popularity
with general audiences rather than because of it, if they did not want to risk the charge
of crass commercialism. What the example of Early Cinema offered was the realisation
just how complex and diverse had been the processes by which audiences had to be
gathered, and audiences had to be “built” that would regularly return to the cinema and
make it a focus of their leisure life. Starting with travelling shows, and as parts of the
vaudeville programme, films only were gradually projected at fixed sites, thus estab-
lishing the principle that it was economically more profitable to show different films
to the same people, rather than the same films to different people.
   This in turn meant that exhibitors were dependent on film-exchanges, i.e. “distribu-
tors,” instead of buying films outright. Along with the rise in purpose-built film the-
atres, the so-called “nickelodeons,” the increasing power of the film exchanges pro-
foundly altered the cinema as an institution: not only the physical spaces where films
were seen (the architecture, the amenities, the social environment), but also the types
of films (from one-reel films to full-length narrative films), and perhaps most signifi-
cantly, the audiences. It has been shown how, in the period between 1905 and 1909 the
cinema industry began to attract a more middle-class audience, and also a female audi-
ence, finally targeting the so-called “family audience” that became the mainstay of the
film-going public from the mid-1910s to the mid-1960s.
   Early Cinema therefore can be characterised as that period when the exhibition context
was still so strong that it exerted control not only over production, but also over how
films were being interpreted by their audiences. Charles Musser in particular has docu-
mented the way that films depended for their meaning on what he calls the “screen prac-
tice” of individual exhibitors, and how a veritable struggle for editorial control typifies
the relation between exhibitors on the one side and producers on the other. Not only were
early films not “silent,” because an elaborate musical programme would accompany all
performances, but both the commentary of a “lecturer” as well as the programming itself
(i.e. the order in which single-reel films were shown) could alter the viewing experience.
An often quoted example is the shot of the gunman firing his gun at the audience in E.S.
Porter’s The Great Train Robbery which could be shown at the beginning or the end of the
film – a choice that would seem nonsensical to a modern audience, used to the precise
place and narrative integration of such a crucial visual and dramatic event.

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                                     WRITING AND REWRITING FILM HISTORY: TERMS OF A DEBATE

   It is a good example of how the study of Early Cinema has given a new status of evi-
dence to hitherto unexplored non-filmic sources and documents, such as exhibitor’s
catalogues, the advertisements in trade papers, or the records of a local cinema. How
important for a historian a collection can be has been demonstrated by Roland
Cosandey’s work on the Abbé Joye Collection at the National Film Archive in London,
because the films there reassembled are in themselves a history of film-spectatorship,
as well as a document of the Catholic Church’s use of the new medium. Similarly, the
Desmet Collection in Amsterdam, which provides such an important resource for the
study of the international dimension of Early Cinema, is based on the films exhibited
in a particular cinema, and therefore allows one to reconstruct the actual way in which
films were seen, as well as how audiences might have responded. At the limit, each film
is an original, because its physical state, it splices or markings give precious informa-
tion about the exhibition practice. Similarly, each performance of a film becomes a sin-
gular and unique event: often, cinemas rivalled with each other not by the film they
were showing but by the size of the orchestra, or the wit of its lecturer – aspects of the
film performance known to the audience.
   The move away from the film-text to the context of exhibition, to spectatorship and
the attraction of audiences not only signals an awareness of the institutional factors
influencing the style and content of films, it also represents a pragmatic turn in a more
narrowly linguistic sense: the conviction that meaning is not inherent in the filmic-tex-
tual articulation, but derives from what different (groups of) spectators make of a film.
This stands in contrast to the semiological and psychoanalytic currents in film theory
which was looking to how the text constructs the spectator, positions him/her as a (gen-
dered) subject. Students of Early Cinema asked instead how spectators experience film-
texts in determined contexts which make them meaningful in the spectators’ time and
place.
   Early Cinema, then, provides in a very real sense a juncture between film history and
film theory in the form of a “historical pragmatics:” to understand how films are under-
stood (adapting a famous phrase of Christian Metz), by understanding how historical
spectators understood films. It means learning as much as possible about the condi-
tions of exhibition, but also about the mental dispositif and the “mode of representa-
tion.”


Narrative and Narration

  One such mode of representation, and historically perhaps the most important one,
is “narrative.” What separates Early Cinema from other modes of representation and
makes it comparable in some respects to avant-garde filmmaking is the fact that narra-
tive does not seem to have been as central to films before 1905 as it was to become sub-
sequently. The consequence is that our explanation of why the cinema became an
almost exclusively narrative medium needs to be revised. If narrative is often equated
with storytelling, we find that Early Cinema also told stories but that it told them by
adopting quite different narrational stances or narrational gestures. Not the linear logic
of implication and causation, but the parallel logic of different and discrete action
spaces or the paratactic logic of “one thing after another.” In each case, the function of
the narrator is more crucial and prominent, compared to the embedded or invisible nar-

                                                                                       ­31
THOMAS ELSAESSER

rator of the classical cinema. Implied in all Early Cinema, therefore, is the (often physi-
cal) act of showing, of presentation, or as André Gaudreault calls it “monstration.” This
may be done by a lecturer present in the auditorium, or the showman present in the
film, but it may also be more indirect and “textual,” as in the practice of the iris shot, or
the fade to black. Tom Gunning has called this type of presentational cinema a “cinema
of attraction,”contrasting it typologically to a “cinema of narrative integration.”
   But how to explain the change from one form of narration to another? Early Cinema,
as we saw, teaches us not to look to either technical perfection or realism as the
inevitable destiny of the cinema. And so it is with “narrative:” it emerges not as the nec-
essary adjunct to verisimilitude, but as the most “economical” solution to a number of
contradictory demands made in the representation of space and time, but also in the
representation of the spectator within this space-time.
   The compromise hinged on what one might call a logic of commutation or substitu-
tion, which in turn depended on the cinema severing two kinds of bond with the rep-
resented: the (ontological) one between the filmic and the pro-filmic, and the (physical)
one between spectator and the screen. At first, films were presentations in the sense of
reproducing situations already existing elsewhere: as self-contained actions, as topical
events, as scenic views, as vaudeville sketches, jokes or gags- brought before a “live”
audience. But the historical dynamics was such that cinema developed its autonomy by
working out how to convert this double “reality” (that of the pro-filmic occasion and
that of the spectator-screen relation) into a single one, in which each is somehow con-
tained, yet also drastically refigured. The spectator had to be bound not to the screen (as
a performative space) nor to the event or spectacle, but to their representations: this
implied changing both the logic of the event represented and the place of the spectator
vis à vis the event.
   While some scholars insist, for Early Cinema, on the autonomy of the events/actions
as “attractions,” addressed to a collective audience who experience the viewing situa-
tion as external to and separate from the views represented. It is only when more com-
plex actions are being put on screen (the multi-shot film and the beginnings of analyti-
cal editing) that a change occurred in the way spectators experienced the event or
action: the history of the insert shot and the point of view shot, of overlaps and cross
cutting being the most obvious instances of this change from presentation to represen-
tation, from monstration to narration. The cinema’s turn to “narrative” appears thus as
the consequence, rather than as the cause of turning audiences into isolated spectators,
bound to the representation by the spectacle of seeing space and time as variables of
another logic which we perhaps too unproblematically identify with narrative.
   But why did the cinema have to convert collective audiences into isolated spectators?
In order to answer this, we must look to the so-called “institution cinema,” a term nam-
ing a number of apparently very heterogeneous aspects: the social spaces needed to
gather audiences and the practices regulating their admission; the production compa-
nies competition for access to and control of technology; the changes in distribution
from selling to exchanging and renting, and most fundamental of all, the standardisa-
tion of an agreed commodity, recognised by producers and audiences alike. At first
glance, none of this appears to have to do with questions of film form and the develop-
ment of narrative as outlined above. Yet what is emerging from work done on Early
Cinema’s institutional context is how crucially the emergence of narrative as the dom-
inant mode is inflected if not outright determined by the particular definition which

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                                        WRITING AND REWRITING FILM HISTORY: TERMS OF A DEBATE

the viewing spaces, the mode of production and the distribution of product received.
Thus, from the institutional perspective, too, narrative represents a compromise of dif-
ferent factors dovetailing in practice while nonetheless remaining contradictory in
their effects.


Conclusion: A Sense of an Ending of (Classical) Cinema

   With this, we have come full circle. Early Cinema studies have helped to invigorate
not only historical film studies, but also set a new agenda for film theory. I would like
to conclude by pointing to another, more amorphous, but nonetheless important con-
juncture in which the interest in Early Cinema is playing its part: (1) that of alternative
cinemas, be they avant-garde or European art-cinema: historically, it was avant-garde
filmmakers in the 1960s and 1970s who “rediscoved” Early Cinema, in order to displace
the hegemony of Hollywood (Ken Jacobs, Noël Burch, Malcolm LeGrice); (2) the con-
temporary transformation of cinema-viewing through television, video-tape and other
new technologies of storage and reproduction has echoes in the period of rapid techno-
logical change at the beginning of the century; (3) the contemporary predominance of
technology and special effects in providing the primary attraction of cinema is in fact a
return to the beginnings, when it was the technology that people went to see rather
than the stories on offer; (4) finally, the resurgence (through television and popular
music) of performative and spectacle modes as against purely narrative modes makes
the post-classical cinema resemble the pre-classical period.
   The fact that so many contemporary phenomena seem to have analogies with the
first decades of film history has meant that the questions raised about Early Cinema
(that of a “cinema of attraction” vs a “cinema of narrative integration;” question of audi-
ences and gender; definitions of the public sphere of cinema; the role of technology and
standardisation) have a self-evident relevance in our own audio-visual environment,
where cinema and television have to coexist.
   Future work in this area, accordingly, will want to look at individual films with the
(cultural, demographic, industrial and institutional) contexts firmly in mind. In his-
torical explanation, which is a retrospective process, the object of analysis only emerges
as the construction of a theoretical discourse, and the question that I want to leave you
with is simply this: Early Cinema – can we enjoy it as merely a storehouse of marvellous
films, of treasures somehow miraculously saved for posterity, or do we not have to
think into our pleasure the fact that Early Cinema also exists as an object of theoretical
reflection which tells us more than we sometimes realise about us and our present?



1 N. Burch, “Porter or Ambivalence,” Screen, vol. 19, no. 4 (1978-79).




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