10.54103/2036-461X/17979
application/pdf
2036-461X
17979
38
en
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Enfin le cinéma! Arts, images, spectacles en France (1833 –1907), ed. by Dominique Païni, Paul Perrin, Marie Robert, Paris: Musée d’Orsay / Réunion des Musées Nationaux –Grand Palais, 2021, pp. 331
Text.Serial.Journal
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie
22
Reviews / Comptes rendus
2022-06-27
2022-05-31
2022-12-30
2022-12-30
145-147
Cinéma & Cie
Anna Franceschini
2022/06/27
10.54103/2036-461X/17979
145
Università IULM
2036-461X
38
en
147
Enfin le cinéma! Arts, images, spectacles en France (1833 –1907), ed. by Dominique Païni, Paul Perrin, Marie Robert, Paris: Musée d’Orsay / Réunion des Musées Nationaux –Grand Palais, 2021, pp. 331
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/17979/15817
22
                                                                                       Enfin le cinéma! Arts, images,
                                                                                       spectacles en France (1833–1907)
                                                                                       sous la direction de Dominique Païni, Paul Perrin,
                                                                                       Marie Robert
                                                                                       Paris: Musée d’Orsay / Réunion des Musées Nationaux – Grand Palais,
                                                                                       2021, pp. 331
                                                                                       DOI 10.54103/2036-461X/17979



                                                                                          ‘It is not a question here of telling the story of the   the sensorial richness of universal exhibitions is
                                                                                       invention of cinema but rather of evoking what it           what emerges from the words and images of the
                                                                                       invents: the modern spectator that, for the most            volume.
                                                                                       part, we are still’ (p. 26): the unequivocal statement         Subjected to the optical and motion stresses
                                                                                       by film theorist and historian Dominique Païni              provoked by the new urban landscape, illuminated
                                                                                       – curator, together with Paul Perrin and Marie              day and night by electric light and accelerated by
                                                                                       Robert, of the catalogue of the exhibition Enfin            modern modes of transportation, modern women
                                                                                       le cinéma! Arts, images, spectacles en France               and men demanded a visual entertainment equal
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License




                                                                                       (1833-1907), which recently took place at Musée             to the urban phantasmagoria. The convergence
                                                                                       d’Orsay, makes explicit, from the very beginning,           of scientific discoveries, technical achievements,
                                                                                       the underlaying assumption that guides the                  industrialization and rising capitalism, the desire
                                                                                       text’s structure. The adoption of an alphabetical           for ever more extreme sensory stimulations
                                                                                       order by the editors of the book is the pretext             and the availability of a portion of free time
                                                                                       for the organization of an atlas of modernity: a            that had previously been unknown to peasant
                                                                                       portolan chart drawing the tangle of routes that            living led to the invention of optical instruments
                                                                                       crosses ‘a bit haphazardly’, not without risks,             capable of opening the gaze towards the
                                                                                       and drifts towards the unknown ‒ a pêle mêle, to            boundless amplitudes of the world or, on the
                                                                                       use Païni’s words (p. 15) ‒, the handful of years           contrary, concentrating it into an unprecedented,
                                                                                       during which the new techniques of the modern               spectacular extraordinariness. This provided
                                                                                       observer arose.                                             the thrills and shocks that constituted the
                                                                                          By the beginning of the XIX century, the modern          armamentarium of effects aimed at producing
                                                                                       metropolis had grown thanks to the engineering              that aesthetic of astonishment which, according
                                                                                       of iron as a building material, granting new                to Tom Gunning, among others, characterized
                                                                                       views above and beyond human perception;                    the production of moving images until 1907.4
                                                                                       simultaneously the urban fabric became                         The book includes a large number of renowned
                                                                                       lightened and enriched with new recadrages                  scholars from various disciplines engaged in
                                                                                       due to the replacement of masonry with large                writing short essays which compose a heteroclite
                                                                                       glass panels. A city intersected by passages and            lemmary. The entries of this abecedary account
                                                                                       railways, lifted by the Eiffel Tower, intoxicated by        not only for this technical marvel, but also for the


                                                                                       Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 38 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                                       145
social construction of modernity, its less obvious      by Paul-Louis Roubert; Populaire by Valérie
manifestations that are nevertheless crucial in         Vignaux, Hors-champ by Marie Robert, p. 118;
outlining the profile of a demanding and shrewd         Immersion by Livio Belloï, p. 208, Temps by
audience, still open to wonder and amazement            Michel Frizot, p. 272; Vue by Érik Bullot, p. 292).
for the sake of discovery and sensation.                  The theatre of the world, understood as
   As the editors affirm, in the opening texts of the   an inventory of images and repertoire of
volume, it is not a question of reconstructing the      experiences (see the entry compiled by Paul
umpteenth history of cinema or sanctioning its          Perrin Inventaires, p. 134 and Jean François
ultimate truth, but of recovering the dimension         Staszak’s definition of Monde, p. 154), is Paris:
of movement, one that is enthusiastic and often         the city-screen portrayed in its discontinuity by
fortuitous, at times even frightening; that is          the Nabis painters.
understood not as mere mobility but in terms              Félix Valloton and Pierre Bonnard, abandoning
of change, the true index of modernity. Out of          the classical framing, break down the vision by
time and off the screen, the world continues to         highlighting its episodic and fragmentary nature,
happen and cinema, within the boundaries traced         transforming painting and print into a proto-
by the luminous rectangle of the frame, resigns         cinema, a synchronic repertory of the attractions
itself to intercepting a constant absence, chasing      that make Paris the city-spectacle par excellence,
after what Jacques Aumont calls ‘the feeling of         where everything is on display (on this subject:
an interminable anecdote’ (p. 40), that happens         Discontinuité by Isabelle Cahn, p. 86 and Nabi by
a little further away or a little before, perhaps a     Mathias Chivot, p. 170).
little after.                                             Moreover, Parisian architecture, the epitome of
   The defining apparatus makes use of concepts         which is the Eiffel Tower, is a tool for the creation
consolidated in the field of Film Studies, such         of a composite horizon of views that constantly
as, for example, screen, space and montage,             allude to its outliers, as in Henri’s lithographs
(respectively: Écran by Vanessa R. Schwartz, p.         and plates (see Hors-champ by Marie Robert, p.
92; Espace by Michel Frizot, p. 102 and Montage         118).
by François Albera, p.158); these are always              The body, the inescapable protagonist of the
illuminated by a multidisciplinary gaze that gives      cinematographic language — as much in its
an account of the mutual influence between              presence as in its noisy absence — is narrated
arts, languages and techniques on which the             as a comic agent (Corps Comique, by Laurent
aesthetics of modernity and the new way of              Guido, p. 62) and as a pathological patient (Corps
looking pivot.                                          Pathologique by Rae Beth Gordon, p. 68); it is
   The lemma ‘montage’, for example, is not only        described as colonized by the Western imperialist
described as intrinsic to the film, but is used to      gaze (Exhibitions by Stéphane Tralongo, p. 109) or
determine a new mode of fruition: the expository        by the equally imperialist male eye when it turns
form of the screening program, which lines up           to the scrutiny of the female body as a sexual
heteroclite fragments. Movement, one of the             object, further eroticized through the cinematic
main categories guiding the book, is investigated       mediation of keyhole masks or binocular lenses
– in painting, photography, as well as in the early     (Voyeur by Marie Robert, p. 286).
Lumière’s vedutist cinema – as a fortuitous and           And if cinema is the place where death seems
uncontrollable accident: the unexpected that            to be defeated, at least for the duration of a
frees bodies from the stasis of Étienne-Jules           projection, the body is precisely that battlefield
Marey’s chrono-photography and captures the             where the miracle of animation is accomplished.
instantaneous nature of action (see, for example,       The cinema of origins takes up the myth of
the entries Aléa by Jacques Aumont, p. 39; Animé        Pygmalion and Galatea, one of the iconographic



146                                                                                         Enfin le cinéma!
themes dearest to sculpture, and elaborates it        of arrival that is also a roaring restart; at the
thanks to its media specificity. (see Sculpture by    same time it seems to indicate the resolution of
Leah Lehmbeck, p. 242).                               an enigma or the occurrence of an alchemical
  Pictorial and proto-cinematographic naturalism      transmutation. An end title, rather than a
is complementary to spectacle, the artifice which     header, which follows that garble of events that
aims to entertain the masses. The depiction of the    constitute the emergence of modernity, whose
act of seeing, traces of scrutinies and evidences     brightest manifestation remains cinema.
of cinetisme are the counterpart of another             The book, which can be intended as an
colourful, blithe, abundant progeny: the one          autonomous publication, one that is not
of the dispositives amusant, of the cheerful or       necessarily entangled with the Parisian
gloomy technologies of vision which determine         exhibition, depicts the city as the perfect example
— or are determined by — the inception of the         of an intrinsically inter-media text, and indeed
modern spectator.                                     the appendix traces back the biographies of
  Tricks borrowed from prestidigitation, as in        those inventors, actors, directors who wove the
the case of Méliès, the use of colour and light       mesh of modernity into the new urban context.
in the composition of panoramas and dioramas,           The repertoire of images belongs to a basin
stage construction in studios, the fairground         which is, for the most part, urban: street
attractions, Loïe Fuller’s dance and, earlier, the    views, perspectives taken from the top of
plethora of optical toys and pre-cinematographic      modern construction, boulevard audiences and
devices barely managed to satiate the optical         theatrical spectatorship, storefront windows
hunger of the public at the turn of the nineteenth    and department store’s display of goods, wall
and twentieth centuries (see, among others,           affiches, crowded film stills or empty studios
the entries Attractions by Martin Barnier, p.         in the outskirts of Paris, harbours and train
53; Dessin by Dominique Willoughby, p. 78;            stations: these are the great part of the buzzy
Lanternes by Ségolène le Men, p. 147; Studios by      visual population which inhabits the pages. The
Brian Jacobson, p. 262; Trucs by Frank Kessler        epitome of the cityscape’s cruciality as the most
and Sabine Lenk, p. 276).                             powerful cinema incubator is the cover image:
  Page after page, entry after entry, we observe      Henry Rivière’s photograph of a couple caught
the shaping of an atlas that is susceptible           entering a train station. They are not crossing
to continuous amendments and subsequent               the threshold of a salle, a proto-cinema theatre,
hybridizations, as if cinema — ‘a technical           they are entering the realm of movement, and, as
precipitate’ in Paini’s words — could avoid           modern subjects, they are most likely capable of
taxonomies and rigid classifications and could be     grasping the spectacle of movement. Only there,
grasped, albeit for an instant, only in the breadth   in the end, at that stage of awareness, lies the
of a never-too-stringent, evocative map.              cinema.
  The volume is characterised by a composite                                       Anna Franceschini
structure that pushes us to move back and                                   [Università IULM, Milano]
forth between the pages, definitions and tropes,
creating a short circuit between the linearity
that characterizes the classic construction of a         Notes
book and the impossibility of harnessing cinema
                                                           4
                                                              T. Gunning, ‘An Aesthetic of
in a single trajectory. In short, the volume itself
                                                         Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)
is in motion. This begins with the title, which          credulous Spectator’, Art and Text, 34,
defines, with a joyful assertiveness marked by           (1989), 114-33.
exclamation, the conclusion of a process, a point


Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 38 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                                147
