theoretical perspectives and
practical methodologies to solve
problems. But, unlike inter- or
multi-disciplinarity, it is not
necessarily derived from preexisting disciplines, nor does it
always
contribute
to
the
formation of new disciplines. The
creative act lies just as much in
the capacity to mobilize and
manage these perspectives and
methodologies, their “external”
orchestration,
as
in
the
development of new theories or
conceptualizations,
or
the
refinement of research methods,
the
“internal” dynamics of
scientific creativity. (Nowotny,
et.al. 2003, 179)
The Technological Imaginary
and the Cognitive Trace
Michael Punt
(Transtechnology Research)
University of Plymouth. UK
Abstract
In 2000 I published the outcome of
research into the invention, innovation and
mutual intelligibility of the Cinematographe
under the title of Early Cinema and the
Technological Imaginary. The study was
an
attempt
to
bridge
extensive
technological accounts of the beginnings
of cinema with social and cultural studies
of the same material. Crucial to this was a
review of popular science journal in the
U.S.A. France and Great Britain, and the
detachment of technology from science as
a professional domain of practice. Since
that time the concept of the Technological
Imaginary has gained some traction as a
way to thicken our understanding of the
historical processes but, perhaps more
importantly, as a framework in which to
understand the role of the imagination as
a user-led determinant of the meaning of
technology.
This paper will revisit the earlier study to
articulate the underlying concept of the
technological imaginary and argue for its
virtues in understanding the technological
form and transformations of media forms
in the late nineteenth century. It will then
report on more recent research into Hugo
Munsterberg and media form on the cusp
of the nineteenth and twentieth century in
which this concept of the technological
imaginary can be used to open the way for
reading film and cinema as a trace of
historic cognitive processes.
Keywords
Early Cinema, Avant-garde, Lumière,
Digitzation, New Film History,
Transdisciplinarity
Introduction
The
second
“Mode
2
characteristic
is
“transdisciplinarity”, by which is meant
the mobilization of a range of
In 2003 Nowotny, Scott and Gibbson tried
to capture a vision of transdisciplinarity
relative to the practices and opportunities
that were available to scholars working
today as a mode of knowledge production
that they dubbed Mode 2. Situated mainly
in the Social Sciences they resonated with
many of the practices of New Historicism
over the previous two decades as it was
reflected upon by Christine Gallagher and
Stephen Greenblatt when they finally
attempted to codify what was primarily a
mode of thinking about the organisation of
evidence. Film history, and especially the
histories of the early period after 1980
owed a considerable debt to this
rethinking in that it liberated historians to
approach early cinema on its own terms
rather than as a determinant of the
present. Another decade on, the emerging
cohort of born digital scholars, and the
changes in the public face of archives
means that access to cultural productions
is an expectation and a right, and
consequently the practice of history
becomes less a task for the pan handler
seeking gold in the silt, and more a project
in which oraganisation and association
reveals new topics and concerns. At this
juncture it seems reasonable to ask what
has changed in the practice of early
cinema history today; how have the
various mobilizations of disciplines to and
over their neighbours boundaries, and the
transformations of the storage and
distribution of evidence impacted on the
practice of early cinema history.
Text
Thomas Elsaesser’s defining anthology
published in 1990, Early Cinema: –Space–
1
Frame–Narrative makes that clear in the
general Introduction “From Linear History
to Mass Media Archaeology”
In this Elsaesser asks,
Are we to rely on the films alone,
given how each surviving print
has its own problematic history;
are we to treat as fact what
contemporary sources say about
particular films and the often
anecdotal histories of their
production? The tendency in
recent years has been to distrust
received wisdom and widely held
assumptions,
…
(Elsaesser
1990, 3)
The consequences of this approach to
history in its fullest practice are made clear
ten years later by Gallagher and
Greenblatt speaking of literature as an
infinitely precious and uncannily vivid
technique for the representation of
experience;
The greatest challenge lay not
simply in exploring these other
texts –an agreeably Imperial
expansion of literary criticism
beyond its borders–but in making
the literary and the non literary
seem to be each other’s thick
description. That both the literary
work and the anthropological (or
historical) anecdote are texts,
that both are fictions in the sense
of things made, that both are
shaped by the imagination and
by the available sources of
narration and description helped
make it possible to conjoin them;
but their ineradicable differences,
the fact that neither is purposebuilt for the other, that they make
sharply different claims upon the
actual,
that
they
are
incommensurable and virtually
impossible
to
foveate
simultaneously–made
the
conjunction
powerful
and
compelling. …
We wanted to recover
in our literary criticism a
confident conviction of reality
without giving up the power of
literature to sidestep or evade
the quotidian and without giving
up a minimally sophisticated
sense of the bodies and voices
that it represents. We wanted the
touch of the real in the way that
in an earlier period people
wanted
to
touch
the
transcendent.
2000. 31).
(Gallaher
et.al.
A generation on from Elsaesser’s
anthology which seemed to herald a new
discipline, and more than a decade after
New Historicism came out of its closet and
announced itself as a practice, some of
the promise seems to have evaporated.
Where, for example, is the publishing
challenge of Early Cinema studies that
once had its own shelf in the academic
book-store and now seems in danger of
becoming a heritage topic? Where is
“History”, that was once the ivory tower of
an academic elite and now has its own
dedicated channels on the television
capable of historicizing the trivial and
portentous without favour, or so it seems?
These questions set the stage for thinking
about early cinema studies as a “declinist”
history in the sense that David Edgerton
uses the term in England and the Airplane.
Crudely this might be characterised as:
Early Cinema, the nascent discipline that
was the flagship of a revitalised interest in
cinema studies, appears to have fallen
from its standing as a secessionist
challenge to the hegemony of mainstream
cinema to become an undifferentiated
Media Studies module supported by a
heterogeneous
Cultural
Studies
community and Youtube, Vimeo and Vine.
Similarly, history, the jewel of the
Humanities, has become a populist
stalking horse in which nostalgia masks
repressive ideologies presented by cult
characters from academia who should
know better. (Edgerton 2013, xv) This is
not the pessimistic history that is
unequivocally supported by the evidence
and certainly not the one I want to develop
here. On the contrary, the early cinema
bibliography continues to be strong, even
if its approach to history (and cinema) has
somewhat lost its pioneering edge. The
archives have done amazing work in
saving films that were in danger from
neglect, and restoration festivals, such as
those at Pordenone and Bologna, and arthouse presentations show every sign of
even greater vigour and strength than in
the pioneering days. They are better
funded than previously and (thanks to
television’s appetite for history) generate
more revenues. And, for similar reasons,
history as an academic discipline, may be
fronted by media-publicists, but it does
2
seem to be in a much better state under
the public radar and the quality of
available evidence and conduits of
dissemination are greater than they have
ever been.
As with nearly all the arts and humanities,
what contributes to the sense (if not the
fact) of a declinist trajectory is
paradoxically the instrument of its
popularity;
the
ascendancy
of
digitalisation. The wholesale and largely
uncritical engagement with digitalisation
projects in the early stages was driven by
two imperatives: public access and the
extent and condition of material for
academic research. In a Faustian pact
with governments we have all –archivists,
curators and academics– funded our
passions with the unsupportable belief that
digitisation is a sensible and sustainable
approach to the preservation and
understanding of our material and
immaterial past. The debates about the
instability and fragile transience of
digitisation and the archive have been
made elsewhere and will not be rehearsed
here. Instead in this essay (a text more
assertive than reflective of the literature) I
want to use the rhetoric of personal
anecdote–a history of a recent practice of
history–to sweep the tumbleweed and
dust and recover the secessionist trail that
Allen, Baudry, Burch, Channan, Comolli,
Elassaeser,
Ellis,
Fell,
Gaudrealt,
Gunning, and many others blazed in
recognising early cinema not as a
floundering first step of an emergent form,
but as a technique for representing
experience with uncanny vividness (to
paraphrase Gallaher and Greenblatt).
My own discovery of this trail derived from
my practice as an artist filmmaker in the
early 1980s. Along with many of my
politically conscious contemporaries I
regarded the institutional forms of
“representation” and “uncanny vividness”
with suspicion and developed techniques
to undermine the seductions of realism
and its ideological baggage. A key tactic
was to develop a systems-led process of
film making that offended the formal
values and aesthetic norms associated
with mainstream, art house, avant-garde
and even home movie films. To achieve
this I insisted on filming on negative stock
in a studio, which I tuned into a box in
which all the things that I wanted to
register light were painted black and vice
versa, (in effect reversing the light dark
coding of the image of the apparatus). I
used elaborate machines to replace the
norms of camera positioning and did all
the main work of the film; processing,
printing, cutting, editing and even
screening in a kitchen. Wilfully out of focus
and lacking in tonal contrast, obscure
images of hardly decipherable “things”
(often prints of images or corners of
television broadcasts) were captured as in
degraded prints contaminated by the dust
and cat hair of a domestic environment.
Mostly intended to be viewed (in a kitchen)
on an editing machine they were
occasionally projected on large screens
and perhaps did at times trigger an
uncanny vividness of something that
possibly originated in the quotidian but
was unclassifiable in its representation on
film. If this was the effect of the films then I
could claim that the political objective and
devastating challenge to hegemony (a
word that seemed to appear in every other
sentence and in the 1980s and meant
different things each time) was achieved.
In retrospect the great virtue of these films
is that they were short, some very short
(one lasted one third of a second) and did
not tax the viewer’s patience. And indeed
all that is written above is really enough to
engage with the political and ideological
intent of the works –the results are easily
imagined.
At this distance and with hindsight it is
easy to be declinist or ironic about the
immodesty of the aspirations, but perhaps
what is more important is that by focusing
on the serious political and social context
it is easy to forget that it was always great
fun to go to work everyday and talk to
other film-makers. It was exciting and
consuming to appropriate an industrial
technique of representation and to play
with it without regard to its inherent
aesthetic principles. In this period I
discovered that the films that I found the
most exciting to view were from a period
that I would later learn to call Early
Cinema. In the versions that I first saw,
mostly broadcast on television in
fragments, the struggle between the
technology of representation and the
reluctance of the object to be represented
by that technology chimed with a political
scepticism that chimed with emergent
feminist film theory: a scepticism I quickly
found evident in new historical approaches
to understanding the beginnings of
3
cinema. Early Cinema appeared to me to
be the perfect topic for an historical
practice that promised to challenge the
hegemony that I found so objectionable in
the histories of art that I had been reading
for twenty years. Moreover, as I quickly
found out, my discovery of the fascinations
of early cinema through experimental or
artisanal film practice was not especially
unusual. Many of the more exciting texts
that I came across were produced by the
kinds of subversive practitioners I felt
some connection with. In short I fell under
the spell of the “look” of early film, its
object of study, the approach to studying it
and the excitement of reading texts by
pioneers like Noël Burch, Michael
Channan,
Peter
Delpeut,
Thomas
Elsaesser, John Ellis, and Yuri Tsivian,
who had direct involvement with film
practice.
This is the context in which I first seriously
looked at La Sortie de l’usine Lumière à
Lyon. The context was a small crowded
post graduate seminar in which the
historical significance of the invention of
cinema was the primary topic. It was
screened on a fairly large domestic
television set and the version I saw was a
tele-cine copy of a damaged print –it was
over in 45 seconds and despite the fact
that is was played on a normal VHS
machine there seemed no immediate way,
or at least no perceived necessity to
repeat it. It was played once and
everything that to be said about the film by
the participants had to be based on a
combination of recollected experience and
preparatory reading. The scratches and
dirt on the print, the electronic noise of
electrons on a cathode ray tube,
(developed by Ferdinand Braun almost at
the same time as the Cinématographe),
merged with the image of the crowd of
workers as it fractured into individuals
turning right and left and finally running
toward the camera. This was no Zapruder
moment in which the significance of the
content compensated for the flawed
expression, in this viewing and in the
context of my own past the film became
the embodiment of New History in
practice. It was as near to the first
experience of the Cinématographe as we
could get. But contrary to Gallagher and
Greenblatt’s claim that it is virtually
impossible to foveate simultaneously the
literary and the anecdotal, in this intensely
focused context the film became a “semi-
material” object in which the quotidian and
the uncanny were undifferentiated as a
single construction. (For a discussion of
the semi-material object see: Punt 2013,
193-214) This story was transparently
both literary and anecdotal. I wish that I
had been clever enough to understand it
that way then.
Later on I was able to see various
versions of the same subject projected on
a large screen in a university cinema as
part of a long programme of early film.
They was shown in a large auditorium in
complete silence save for the ambient
noise of a dozen or so viewers holding
their breaths, aware that to foveate on one
aspect of the film was to be blind to
another. This was in 1990 when despite
the widespread availability of domestic
video, and indeed Laser disc, much of the
evidence that I and other film scholars
were excited by, and needed to
understand, was difficult to access and
seldom available to view it more than once
or twice. Early cinema scholars seemed to
be embroiled in an informal exchange of
bootleg video copies, often material that
was “surreptitiously” shot with bulky hand
held video cameras. Like many of my
colleagues I acquired a version of La
Sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon that I
used as reference for a term paper. It was
a third generation VHS copy of a video
film that had been shot at a screening of a
16mm teaching print on tour from the
B.F.I. It is not difficult to imagine that the
kinds of images I was working with as a
film scholar shared many qualities to those
that I had produced as an avant gardist
filmmaker in my kitchen. Over the years I
amassed a vast collection of very early
film material on video-tape, often extracted
from news items, advertisements and daytime television filler documentaries (often
with an with upsettingly patronising voiceover). Nonetheless they were jewels;
bleached out, at the wrong speed, and out
of focus, they had the seductive lure of
thermionic radio valves; they were the
archaeological remains of an authentic
practice that could never be fully known.
As a consequence La Sortie de l’usine
Lumière à Lyon remained something of an
obsession. The alchemical potion of the
excitement and lure of technology and
banality of the everyday the that these
bootleg versions of the film seemed to
deliver in spite of – or because of – the
degradation of the copy seemed to invite
4
questions that were important to the
reception of technology a century later. It
struck me that the work of the early
cinema historian should be literary and
anecdotal in order to include the recovery
of this vividness of the experience of the
crowds who flocked to the Salon Indien in
a way that had meaning today.
This detailed and personal account of my
project to understand cinema on the cusp
of the twentieth century is motivated
primarily to give some insight into what it
was like to “do new film history” in the 80s
and 90s, and through this to acknowledge
a debt to the extraordinary feats of
concentration and memory that earlier
scholars had exercised in building a
credible history, based very often, on the
experience of a single screening of a film.
The subsequent criticism of the canonical
and auteurist approach needs to be set
against the restrictions of access to the
essential data which must have been
equivalent to “doing” art history without
the benefit of photographs. Of course
there were the archives, but these were
not the archives that we know today; often
difficult to access and secretive about their
holdings these repositories offered viewing
facilities that in no way matched the
intended mode of presentation and
reception. In short, as we have now come
to recognize as a commonplace, history is
always partial, provisional and a story told
from the present. To this I would add that
history is also told through the present,
hence the attenuated and anecdotal
reflection on the recent past above.
Today the study of Early Cinema is
underpinned by a plethora of exquisitely
restored digital copies of films from
archives the world over that are available
for repeated analytical viewing as DvDs
and image files, as well as dozens of
versions of the same film uploaded onto
individual websites and by advertising
entrepreneurs such as Youtube and
Vimeo. La Sortie de l’usine Lumière à
Lyon on Youtube for example offers
dozens of copies of three versions. They
are described as having plots, and there is
a distinction made between one horse,
two horse and no horse versions a
distinction that was known but beyond
experience in the secessionist days of the
80s and 90s. A new generation of scholars
can access the material repeatedly, share
it globally in collaborative research and
even re-edit/remix it to test conflicting
interpretations
and
counterfactual
speculation. Through its digital mediation
in a modality that seamlessly segues with
invitations to parties, lover’s tiffs, cat
videos and the aggrandisement of the
banal the material of Early Cinema has
become a “fact” in the world of Facebook,
Instagram and twitter rather than a
fragment of another reality that is
tantalizingly out of reach. The commentary
in the texts accompanying these postings
is perhaps as incomplete and misinformed
as it was on 1990 day time television but
in a different way, and the problems of
unreconstructed historical accounts are no
less acute than they were then. Much of
the painstaking research that occupied the
previous generation seems to have been
overwritten in favour of the reinstatement
of the very myths that they were so
anxious to dispel (we can still read of
cinema being invented, of old black and
white films and audiences ducking and
screaming at screening of L’Arrivée du
train en gare de La Ciotat). Perhaps more
troublesome is that many of the metadiscourses of the secessionist spirit that
“found” and reinterpreted these films
appear to have also been overwritten. The
political imperatives of Burch, Baudry,
Channan, Comolli, Heath, de Lauretis,
Mulvey, et al seem to have lost their
standing as the fulcrum of their particular
historical
endeavour.
The
contextualisation of early cinema in
compelling studies of early twentieth
century entertainment modes and the
social struggles of women and immigrants
likewise seem to have slipped under the
radar as have the graphic accounts of
grinding poverty that the films speak to. It
may seem (to the declinist) that with
ubiquity (i.e. Google, Facebook , Twitter,
etc) driven by more and more
sophisticated profiling algorithms and
virtual production techniques there has
been a proportional (and apparently
irresistible) infantilization of the audience
in a careless contract with the devil.
While it may be declinist to see an
unashamed intellectual profligacy and
apparent embrace of laissez faire
economics (especially in the transaction of
personal data), as I have tried to show, the
difference and scope for positive recovery
is in understanding the historical material
as we now see it and how we engage with
it, and perhaps most radically how the
5
material now engages with us. As Latour
and others have been at pains to point
out, what is understood as the real is a
constantly mobile and contingent category
able to shift its place in a very short period
of time. In biology and climate science this
is very clear to us as we review the
popular understanding of evolution,
genetic code or carbon dioxide for
example;
convenient
ideas
for
understanding
scientific
laws
have
become “things” with volition and social
agency.
No less in media history. For example, in
1995 Robert Paul, was a mysterious and
fugitive figure in the story of cinema, an
instrument
maker
who,
through
intelligence and good fortune (it seemed)
was in the right place at the right time to
pioneer its introduction into England. For
most of the last century he was an
important but ill-defined shadow bridging
the facts of Edison’s Kinetoscope and the
Lumière
Cinématographe
with
the
enormous public appetite for cinema in the
early part of the twentieth century. 20
years ago, what literature existed about
Paul was built around repetitions of two or
three articles, and the very few films of his
that
were
available
for
viewing.
Nonetheless this provided a sufficient and
realisic basis to drive the story on. Today,
thanks to the work of many film scholars
digging away in collaboration with
archives, much more is known about him
and his imperatives. His films are available
to view and review on dedicated DvDs, his
life story has become more substantial
and the scientific instruments he produced
after turning away from cinema now fetch
five figure sums at smart auction houses.
(8) His historic function remains the same
but his materiality has become more
substantial. The same may be said of
other actors in the story such as Mitchell
and Kenyon or indeed Georges Mélièse.
The story of cinema shows us that the
transcendent is no less volatile and
contingent than the real – and both are
easily put into play in the quest for a
description of a vivid experience.
In the same vein, twenty five years ago it
would be unusual – impractical, if not
impossible to view La Sortie de l’usine
Lumière à Lyon 60 times in the space of
an hour. It was possible to freeze frame
with an analyzing projector or an editing
desk but practices that were not consistent
with the intended experience of the film
(an unrecoverable collective experience in
a
public
place)
were
frequently
condemned as inconsistent with the filmic
experience and, consequently, any
conclusions that were drawn were often
treated with academic scepticism. Much of
the same criticism was heaped upon
Wölfflin, Warburg and Clark as they
reshaped the understanding of painting
with
lantern
slides,
associative
constructions and photographic details.
Now all of these practices are essential
parts of the historian’s tool kit. The
opportunity
for
infinite
repetition,
comparison, and alteration may distance
the filmic object from its initial reception,
but the degree to which that can be
recovered depends considerably on the
theory of human cognition that is
privileged, and what techniques are
available to revisit the important details of
the states of mind of those for whom the
films were intended. The single (double or
treble) viewing it might be argued, brings
the analyst closer to the vivid experience
of the film in 1895 and was a more
authentic basis for any conclusions about
what the film meant. But a repeated
viewing of La Sortie de l’usine Lumière à
Lyon is to detach it from the virtual and
transcendent and offer the film as a text. A
digitised version on a reasonable
computer screen allows access to, not
only the formal construction the framing,
structure and economical elegance of the
film, but also to reveal the individual
interactions of the workers who, in the
original viewing conditions, appear as a
mass with the occasional individual who
tugs at a skirt or breaks free from the
crowd. (9) In this new presentational mode
we have the time and space to practice
Greenblatt and Gallaher’s version of New
History in the sense that we are able
…to recover in our literary
criticism a confident conviction of
reality without giving up the
power of literature to sidestep or
evade the quotidian and without
giving
up
a
minimally
sophisticated sense of the
bodies and voices that it
represents. [We are able to]
touch of the real in the way that
in an earlier period people
wanted
to
touch
the
transcendent. (10)
The relatively free access to some of the
versions of the film, the ability to take time
to compare the available copies, and the
6
ease with which the film can be stopped,
frozen and rewound opens up a dialogue
with the film so that indeed one can
foveate simultaneously with several
fictions: the fiction of the technical
invention, the fiction of the “plot”, the
fiction of the history ingrained on the
surface of the print and the fictions of the
published histories of the film, the fictions
of the daily interaction of the individual
workers and the fictions of film history.
To experience La Sortie de l’usine
Lumière à Lyon this way is to allow us to
also see it differently. In a repeated
viewing of La Sortie de ‘usine Lumière à
Lyon – especially in the so called “no
horse” version the workers are individuals
interacting in their own worlds as well as in
the reality of the Lumière payroll:
Controlled by the camera – certainly,
performing under orders – yes, disciplined
by Capitalism – reasonably, but on
repeated viewings many individuals seem
to be having fun, teasing, laughing,
resisting and hurrying. Moving at first at
the regulated pace of the factory - the
normal speed when you are paid by the
hour and then as soon as possible at a
personal pace, only accelerate from the
gate to move at the special speed
reserved for escape to a place outside the
frame where it is more fun to be. This kind
of viewing allows us to connect La Sortie
de l’usine Lumière à Lyon with other works
and practices that are normally beyond the
legitimate scope of film studies. For
example it invokes reflection on Watteau’s
various depictions of Fetes as broad
Arcadian ideals in which the individual
assignations and erotic consents are as
immanent as nature’s own promiscuity, or
to see Canaletto’s painting of the Piazza
San Marco with the Basilica (1730) as a
an
example
of
an
exceptionally
accomplished piece of painting, as a
triumphal celebration of the architectural
confidence of Venice, and also to become
an eavesdropper to some of the 50 or so
lunchtime conversations taking place in
the Piazza and its private corners. This
kind of repeated engagement and
transdisciplinary connection enables us to
experience the film as a simultaneous
object
comprising
the
real
and
transcendent. The new mode of “doing”
early cinema history seamlessly connects
the moving films with other images and
visual experiences that privileged the
static image as part of the cognitive and
intellectual process. In this instance, the
practices of the researchers begin to
provide a natural porosity between
disciplinary boundaries.
The opportunity to simultaneously foveate
these competing and quite detached
fictions and to produce a single reality–a
coherent experience–that is both material
and affective re-contextualizes much of
the material that is often used to provide
the technological background to the
Lumière’s inventions. For example, to
revisit illustrations of these in the context
of detailed attention to the individuals
walking out of the Lumière factory gates at
St Victor, 25 Montplaisir, is to see not only
the inventive cross-over between science,
technology
and
entertainment
that
characterised the public engagement with
emerging knowledge in the second half of
the nineteenth century, but also to see
people having fun with new technologies
and scientific assertions. Whether the
incidental figures in the illustrations in
popular science journals are being
“frightened” by Pepper’s Ghost, looking at
elaborate slipping lantern-slides, or trying
out Ottomar Anschutz’ Electrotachyscope
(or any of the thousands of other images
of so-called pre-cinema technology) they
frequently appear to share with the
workers leaving the factory an infectiously
frivolous engagement with the serious. For
all their gravitas as entrepreneurs,
important eminent scientists, university
teachers, and public luminaries of Lyon,
the Lumières too seem quite able to have
fun and lampoon themselves, their father,
their father-in-law’s brewery and even
Cèzanne, in a comic pastiche, in the film
Partie des Cartes. Similarly, Wyn
Wachurst make much of Edison’s various
personal pleasures mixing with his
entrepreneurial ambitions. These include
his initiation of community singing and late
night beer drinking at the West Orange
workshops, and (apparently) the impish
reanimation of Edweard Muybridge’s
photographs of naked women as one of
the contributing drivers of the development
of the Kinetoscope mechanism.The
beginning of cinema we have discovered
was fuelled by many things; social,
economic and technological. But the
opportunity to see it as a an instantiation
of both the real and transcendent
(regardless of how moveable these terms
might be) invites us to include a
particularly inventive disregard of “the
7
serious” by the protagonists in the story
who wanted to have fun and also possibly
provoke laughter; the sort of laughter that
Hans Richter insisted was at the core of
creativity and Dada. (Richter 1964. 64)
Thirty years on, and with the benefit of the
digitizalition of historical evidence and the
advantage of hindsight, it is clear to me
that my own film practice and its vision of
reception failed to recognise that and, as a
consequence, was hopelessly serious and
unreconstructed. I had failed to imagine
that the viewer would not also share and
express creative scepticism and joy in the
subversive (and profligate) use of the
technology. The viewers were, and had
every right to be, as full of subversive fun,
and as ostentatiously avant-garde as my
fellow artists and I aspired to be.
The acknowledgment of cross-grained and
perverse relationships with science and
technology suggests that an important
area for further research in the study of
early cinema would be to revisit the
images that have, hitherto, been largely
regarded only for their evidence of the
technological development that led to
cinema as we know it, and to
simultaneously factor in the depiction of
the apparently incidental users and
bystanders depicted in the image and in
whose imaginations it became a special
(and very real) pleasure that, for all their
foresight, the inventors and tinkerers who
designed and patented the technologies
for the audiences to consume never
imagined it could be. This may yield a
more sophisticated understanding of the
widespread participation in the scientific
creativity of the “workers” in 1900.
Conclusion
This reflection on film digitization, cinema
history and film practice may offer some
relief from a declinist tendency that flows
from a regret that the adventures to
access important material in draughty
vaults and on academic “black markets”
are no longer part of “doing” early cinema
history. To be sure finding material that
was thought to be lost, travelling across
continents to see three short Mélièse films
once was exciting, disciplining and
generative, it trained memory and
encouraged intense scholarly focus on
specific film texts. It spawned international
networks, and in general helped to
differentiate the functional purpose of the
historian from the archivist and the
enthusiast. But cinema history is now in
the hands of a new generation of “born
digital”
historians
for
whom
transdisciplinarity, or as Nowotny puts it
Mode 2, is the default mode of the search
engine, the undergraduate essay and their
own vivid engagement with the world. It
seems unlikely that these kinds of
scholars and especially the kinds of
practitioners that changed our view of
early cinema could exist today except as
anachronisms. “Avant garde” film-makers
in particular have long since found
different methods, wider conduits of
distribution, new kinds of audiences and
new topics for their film work. They are
competing for attention in a world in which
the very tropes and radical interventions
maybe unintended but are sufficiently
commonplace to become clichés that
stand in the way of meaning. For this
constituency the ubiquity of what was
once an elitist art practice promises a new
kind of adventure as Mode 2 historians of
cinema and film form begin to write
different provisional, and partial stories
told from their present: a present in which
the unprecedented availability of reliable
evidence stimulates new perceptual
modes and through playful disregard
paradoxically brings us closer to the vivid
experiences of those who first saw La
Sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon.
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