Laws and cases

It’s high time we had a new addition to the Bioscope Library. Fresh in, and just being stamped and having its classification number assigned is The Law of the Motion Picture Industry (1916), by Gustavus A. Rogers. This is the text of a lecture given by a New York lawyer to the College of the City of New York on 28 November 1916. The legal side of early film may not seem to have that much appeal, but it is a crucial subject to grasp. Laws existing and laws which had to be devised for the purpose not only governed but helped define the new medium.

Gustavus A. Rogers proves to be a helpful guide, with a clear-sighted view of his subject and much case law that he is able to cite as milestones in the development of cinema as a social entity. There is a particularly helpful section on patent law (”Ask the average person who is the inventor of motion pictures and the answer will be, Thomas A. Edison. Mr. Edison himself would probably agree that he is the inventor, but the courts have held otherwise”.) and the formation of the Motion Picture Patents Company, which sought to restrict trade to those businesses which recognised Edison’s film patents. Out of this history Rogers draws some fascinating and helpful definitions of what motion pictures actually were (in law), what the technology was there to achieve, and how a motion picture production was to be defined. He cites in the important case of the Kalem Company v Harper Brothers, which determined that the Kalem 1907 film Ben Hur infringed the copyright of the Lew Wallace book on which it was based. Rogers’ interest is in what the ruling meant for the definition of a motion picture in other legal proceedings. He says that the the case had not “definitely determined as to whether a photo-play is really ‘a commodity’ or whether as such it comes under the jurisdiction of the Federal Anti-Monopoly Law”. Rogers’ inference from this is interesting:

I am, however, of the opinion that whenever it will become important to effectually dispose of the question, that it will be found that there is no difference between the photo-play and the celluloid record which is used upon the phonograph, or the picture postal-card. For, after all, what is sent in commerce is a strip, or strips, of film, contained in rolls of approximately a thousand feet each. On these are still photographs that are commercially useful when put into a projecting machine and ground out to portray the story on the screen, in the same manner as the phonograph record is put upon the machine for the purpose of reproducing the musical sounds or matter contained on the record.

This short document (sixty pages) is therefore useful not just as a survey of the law’s engagement with motion pictures to 1916, but as a thoughtful disquistion on what a motion picture actually is. There is useful discussion of trade marks, copyright law, censorship (with comparisons of the state of things in America, Britain and France), Sunday legislation, and an overview of the laws regarding motion pictures in various European countries. It’s available from the Internet Archive in DjVu (1.6MB), PDF (5MB), b/w PDF (1.5MB) and TXT (122KB) formats.

Fight pictures

I wrote a post a while ago on two new books on boxing and modern culture. I’ve just started reading Kasia Boddy’s Boxing: A Cultural History, which is a real treasure trove, so more on that in due course.

I’ve not yet laid eyes on Dan Streible’s Fight Pictures: A History of Boxing and Early Cinema, which is going to be a real treat, but anyone who’s in New York might like to know about an illustrated lecture the author will be giving at Light Industry, a new venue for film and electronic art in Brooklyn. The event takes place on 6 May at 8.00pm, and costs $6.

Here’s the blurb:

Between 1894 and 1915, the first generation of filmmakers produced more than 250 motion pictures with boxing and prizefighting as their subject. Fight pictures were among the most conspicuous, profitable and controversial productions of early cinema. From 1912 until 1940, U.S. law banned the interstate distribution of film recordings of prizefights. Congress enacted the law to suppress the celebrity of the first black heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson, titleholder from 1908 to 1915. Yet, only a few years after the start of the ban, fight pictures flourished again. Throughout the 1920s and 30s these supposedly criminal records were nearly ubiquitous in movie houses and other venues. In conjunction with his newly released book Fight Pictures: A History of Boxing and Early Cinema, Dan Streible presents glimpses of some of these ephemeral films, most of which no longer survive or exist only in fragments. Also on screen will be much of the ephemera – posters, photographs, cartoons, advertisements and the like – that accompanied these “moving fight pictures.”

See the likes of:
Corbett and Courtney Before the Kinetograph (1894)
Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight (1897)
A Scrap in Black and White (1903)
Squires vs. Burns, Ocean View, Cal., July 4th, 1907 (1907)
Jack Johnson: Der Meister Boxer der Welt (1911)

It’s a compelling history, one well worth telling and telling again. More from the ring in the near future.

Albert Kahn and his wonderful world

www.albertkahn.co.uk

Enthusiasts for Albert Kahn, autochrome photography and the BBC series The Wonderful World of Albert Kahn will be delighted to learn that there is now a BBC website devoted to Kahn. Its prime purpose is to promote the new book The Wonderful World of Albert Kahn: Colour Photographs from a Lost Age, by David Okuefuna (published 24 April), but it also has a selection of autochrome images, linked to a map of the world (courtesy of Flickr), a biography of Kahn and information on the Musée Albert-Kahn in Paris. The latter section refers to DVDs, implying that these come out of the BBC/ Musée Albert-Kahn collaboration. There is no further information given. My understanding has been is that there were no plans for a DVD release of the series, but that the museum might be releasing its own DVDs. I’ll try to find out more.

Further information on Albert Kahn, including a more extensive set of links with information on autochromes in general and the films taken as part of his ‘Archives of Planet’ project can be found on the Searching for Albert Kahn post on this site.

The Birth of a Nation

I think it’s true to say that, if film historians could go alter film history just that little bit, they would not have D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation as the cornerstone of their subject. The most sensational film of its age, one which ushered in the feature and a host of cinematic methods, one which drew in audiences in their millions, one which helped establish the cinema once and for all, one which made a huge amount of money - but also a film of blatant, poisonous racism. Why, oh, why, does such an important film in our field have to be a paean to the Ku Klux Klan?

The embarassment, if not downright offence, that the film tends to arouse in performance nowadays, does not, however, negate its importance to film history - for all the reasons listed above and more. And the film has been given an exhaustive and what looks on initial inspection to be very impressive historical treatment in this new book by Melvyn Stokes, D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation: A History of “The Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time”.

Stokes covers the origins, production, reception and subsequent history of The Birth of a Nation, working from a huge range of sources, including the D.W. Griffith papers and the papers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The book is weighty (408 pages), though not handsomely illustrated. There are substantial chapters on Thomas Dixon, whose novel The Clansman inspired the film; on Griffith’s personal history and outlook; on the film’s production; on its dramatic impact on the cinema and audiences; on the protests and actions made against the film, particularly from the black community in America; an analysis of Griffith’s view of history as expressed through the film; and the subsequent history of the film, both its exhibition (the front cover shows a protest against the film held in 1947) and its uneasy elevation into cinema’s canon.

The Birth of a Nation

Mevyn Stokes has produced some excellent work in the past on film audiences, and the book looks particularly strong on the film’s reception, its powerful effect on cinema as a social force, as a way of life for people. It attracted a huge middle-class audience most of which had not visited the cinema before 1915, widening cinema’s range, increasing its social acceptability, and of course bringing in much money from a wealthier clientele able to pay more for their tickets. Stokes makes it clear how little upset the film caused among the white majority audience, for whom the attitudes that it expressed regarding race were unexceptional. Plenty has been written on The Birth of a Nation’s importance for film aesthetics and narrative, and on its racial politics. Stokes covers this ground too, but it is by being equally strong on the exhibition, promotion and response from different kinds of audience, and on the film’s relation to American social and cultural history, that makes the book so usefully multi-contextual, if you will.

It looks set fair to become a standard text, not least just as a reference work for the subject, since every name, company or interest group involved seems to be cited somewhere. It’s not a radical re-reading of the film, but simply a methodical, thorough and palpably useful one. Perhaps we do not want to see a re-invented The Birth of a Nation in any case. It stands as a relic of cultural attitudes now overturned, “a reminder”, as Stokes says, “of just how much has changed since 1915″. It will always be an important film in history, but film history changes just as cultural attitudes change, and the film’s narrative skills now seem of far less moment than its significant place in the social and economic history of cinema that is starting to get written all the more.

The Haunted Gallery

www.amazon.co.uk

What fabulous book cover this is. I’d buy the book purely on the strength of the picture - in fact I just have. The image is a 1901 poster for the British Mutoscope and Biograph Company, taken from the copyright collection of The National Archives. Biograph’s 70mm films were a special feature of the Palace Theatre in London (still active today, currently showing Spamalot), and Biograph programmes generally featured news items - hence the full slogan on the screen (which is obscured on the book cover), ‘The Biograph Reproduces the Latest Events from All Parts of the World’.

But the book within is no less of a treasure. The subject of The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography, Film c.1900 is how the moving picture changed visual culture at the end of nineteenth century. Lynda Nead is an art and cultural historian, whose first foray into film history this is. Although the subtitle implies equal coverage of painting and photography, the motion picture takes centre stage, but is set into new and exciting contexts by demonstrating its effects alongside the whole range of contemporary visual media, including painting, photography, stage magic, the magic lantern, posters and even astronomy.

The result is a giddyingly rich brew of evidence and analysis, all expounding a shift in visual culture from stasis to motion, which in turn altered modes of perception and ushered in our modern world. The book’s title comes from a characteristic Nead use of the visual as metaphor: an illustration of the Haunted Gallery at Hampton Gallery, which she describes thus:

A space for pictures and for ghosts, the gallery is also for endless pacing watched by portraits of generations of the dead. It is a place of presences but not life, of likenesses which seem real but which are merely representations or figments of the imagination. The picture gallery is also a place of alternating light and darkness; it is a narrow apartment illuminated by shifts of light cast by unseen objects obliterating the light … How apt that the shadows cast on the ceiling by the windows and tapestried walls look like a strip of film, with intermittent, spaced-out picture frames, separated by short intervals of blank darkness. Set this sequence in motion and the enchantment begins; the pictures come to life and the ghosts haunt the gallery.

Nead finds in the haunted gallery a powerful metaphor for the ‘uncanny magic’ of early film. Typically she finds multiple analogues for this concept, from Edison and Biograph advertising films of ancestors climbing down from portraits on the wall to drink Dewar’s Whisky, to similar Scottish ancestors doing much the same in Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera Ruddigore, to Georges Méliès’ films The Living Playing Cards and The Mysterious Portrait, to tableaux vivant, to the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea (the statue that came to life). It all interconnects.

It certainly helps if you can see the pictures, and the book is richly illustrated throughout, sometimes enthralling so. Themes covered include the wheel and movement, representation of the everyday and the detective camera, the vision of mobility generated by the new-fangled motor car, the strip (the film strip, the cartoon strip and the striptease), and the astronomical imagination. This latter section looks at visions of the heavens (by way of serpentine dances, G.F. Watts, electricity and the Paris 1900 Exhibition), including some startling examples of astronomical photography spilling over into the imaginative world, represented in particular by Camille Flammarion, the French astronomer, author and astronomical filmmaker, whose 1872 novel Lumen describes all-seeing beings who view the passing of a time as a ray of light, in a constant relay of images. Metaphors, metaphors everywhere.

The best image comes last - a map of the procession through London taken to mark Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee on 22 June 1897 (filmed by many cameramen), marked with bright yellow explosion symbols to mark where Martian explosions occur as recorded in H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, published in the same year. However, it’s not all image and metaphor, and there’s a good deal of practical understanding of the production of images (still and moving) underpinning the theoretical stuff. The moving images make sense on a practical level as well as an imaginative one.

As with Jonathan Auerbach’s Body Shots, covered in a recent post, here is someone from outside the usual early film studies coterie, looking on the subject with fresh eyes and leading it into a broader cultural world, demonstrating bold analogies and connections, inviting in those from other disciplines to see how film was integral to a change in consciousness in the late-Victorian/early-Edwardian era. Both publications have enriched our field. I feel that the Bioscope may have to expand, to become just that little bit more metaphorical, if it is properly to represent its subject in its contexts. We’ll see.

Silent cinema in Tamil

I’ve just seen notice of this publication, a history of world silent cinema written in Tamil, reported on by The Hindu newspaper. It seems worth noting, for the record. Here’s the review:

ULAGA CINEMA VARALAARU — Mouna Yugam (Silent Period): Ajayan Bala; KK Books Pvt. Ltd.,

19, Srinivas Reddy Street, T. Nagar, Chennai-600017. Rs. 150.

A WELCOME publication in Tamil, most likely the first of its kind, narrating the interesting history of world cinema during the period December 1895 to October 1927 being the silent age when many purists and diehard conservatives sincerely felt that the medium would not last long. Ajayan Bala who is involved in many a capacity in cinema has narrated interestingly the fascinating true story of the founding, growth and development of silent film around the world, including India. Today there is great awareness about film history in this part of the country and this book will go a long way in filling the virtual vacuum that exists.

The book is well illustrated with thumbnail photographs, which adds to its attraction and utility.

The author is currently working on more volumes to continue his in-depth study and writing of the later exciting periods of world cinema. Economically priced, this book is a must read for Tamil readers who wish to know the fascinating tale of international cinema. The publishers also deserve to be congratulated besides the author for planning and publishing such a book.

Motion pictures

Execution of Czolgosz with Panorama of Auburn Prison (1901)

This gentle, business-like image comes from one of the most discussed and notorious of early films, Edison’s Execution of Czolgosz with Panorama of Auburn Prison (1901). Leon F. Czolgosz was the assassin of President William McKinley, and Edwin S. Porter and James White journeyed to Auburn Prison in upstate New York, reportedly with the hope of filming Czolgosz’s actual execution in the electric chair. Happily they were rebuffed, but they filmed the outside of the prison on the day of the execution, then back at the studio the Edison team dramatised the scene that had taken place inside, and cut the films together.

Should you wish to, you can see the film on the Library of Congress’ American Memory site, which supplies this original catalogue description:

A detailed reproduction of the execution of the assassin of President McKinley faithfully carried out from the description of an eye witness. The picture is in three scenes. First: Panoramic view of Auburn Prison taken the morning of the electrocution. The picture then dissolves into the corridor of murderer’s row. The keepers are seen taking Czolgosz from his cell to the death chamber, and shows State Electrician, Wardens and Doctors making final test of the chair. Czolgosz is then brought in by the guard and is quickly strapped into the chair. The current is turned on at a signal from the Warden, and the assassin heaves heavily as though the straps would break. He drops prone after the current is turned off. The doctors examine the body and report to the Warden that he is dead, and he in turn officially announces the death to the witness. Class B 200 ft. $24.00

So much that is complex, problematic, mysterious, engrossing and unique about the motion picture is bound up in this short film; in its production, reception and subsequent critical understanding. What exactly does it signify? What is the relationship between the actuality footage and the dramatised? How ‘real’ is it? How do we understand the figure of Czolgosz from what is presented to us? Why did audiences want to see the film, and what exactly did they see in it? It is these mysteries, and in particular the presence of the human body in motion, trailing all kinds of ‘anxieties and preoccupations’ with it, that forms the subject of a new book on early cinema, Jonathan Auerbach’s Body Shots: Early Cinema’s Incarnations, which places the Czolgosz film on its front cover.

It’s an inelegant title, but a compelling work - quite the best book on early film that I’ve read in ages. Its argument is not one you can summarise easily. Auerbach’s interest is in the earliest years of film before narrative took hold, when the signification of these figures in motion is not straightforward. He does not put forward an all-encompassing theory, but rather raises questions and demonstrates the complexity of an audience’s understanding of the figure in motion. In doing so, he rather lays into the dominant theory in this field, the ‘cinema of attractions’, promoted by Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault in the mid-1980s, and cited religiously by countless students and scholars of early cinema ever since. The theory (to use Auerbach’s words) “posits early films and filmmaking as a mode of showing that privileged immediate shock and sensation over narrative continuity and integration”. So, variety acts, exotic scenes, hand-painted colour, magic tricks - spectacle over story.

I doubt that Gunning himself would say that his should be a theory to explain all film before 1906, but it has become an orthodoxy, as Auerbach states, and he’ll have none of it. For him it is too cosy a solution, too tidy an explanation of what should be perplexing, uncertain territory. He finds the evidence provided by specific films, in their specific contexts, and it is close readings of just a handful of actuality (or pseudo-actuality) films that makes the book such an engrossing read.

Perhaps the book’s tour de force is the chapter on McKinley at Home - Canton, O (1896). This brief film shows the Republican candidate for the presidency, William McKinley, walking across his garden and receiving a telegram, before walking with a companion of out frame. Auerbach tell us the history of McKinley’s campaign (he made a virtue of staying a home), the film’s production (McKinley’s brother was on the board of the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company which made the film), its promotion, interpretations of the film at the time (the message he was receiving could be interpreted how you wished), the participatory nature of its reception (audiences reacting vocally to what they saw on the screen), and the film’s enthusiastic reception by a press largely dedicated to the Republican cause. Four years later, he would be assassinated, and the chapter concludes with a more speculative reading of Execution of Czolgosz.

Auerbach demonstrates the range of strategies and meanings that can underlie such a simple seeming actuality as McKinley at Home. Of course, not all films of the 1890s may yield such a rich contextual history, but it is the potential for such contexts that matters - that, and the relationship between film and audience, each operating in their own particular sphere. None of the profusion of ideas that Auerbach brings to his interpretation of McKinley at Home, Execution of Czolgosz, early Edison and Lumière actualities, The May Irwin Kiss, The Big Swallow, Personal or The Life of an American Fireman seems forced or inappropriate. The themes he takes on include the visualisation of sound, the emergence of the chase movie as proto-narrative, and finally a Barthesian meditation on death and early film, when such bodies cease to move.

The great appeal of early cinema is its receptivity to ideas, its status as a period when no one can be certain of what is going on, just as Auerbach says about the early actualities themselves:

… volition and animation are often at odds rather than coterminous, a fact that gives these early moving images a peculiar kind of affect, suggesting neither filmmakers nor viewers nor bodies on-screen quite knew what to make of or do with themselves. Hence their interest for me.

It seems a new generation of theorists is coming to the field (Auerbach’s background is in literary studies) and dragging early cinema forward or back into the many worlds to which it belongs. Body Shots is not an easy read, but then neither is it a difficult one. It makes films that you may not have seen nevertheless visible, and makes you want to look again with sharper eyes at those you do know. I may not have explained it terribly well, but I do recommend it.

The horse in animation

www.amazon.co.uk

Here’s something intriguing, if somewhat on the fringes of our subject. Rufus Butler Seder’s Gallop! is a very young children’s book, just published, which employs a patented technology, Scanimation. This shows animal figures as a kind of barcode-like strip. The animals move when you open a new page by pulling a scrambled underlying image which lies beneath an acetate strip marked with horizontal bars. Essentially, like silhouetted animations of Muybridge sequence photographs, we see a horse gallop, a chicken walk, a dog run, a cat leap.

The similarity to Muybridge’s work is very noticeable. Seder is described as being “an inventor, artist, and filmmaker fascinated by antique optical toys” and a description of the process points out that it

uses a technology based on the same principles as kinetoscopes, zoetropes, and other nineteenth century antiques that employed an optical illusion using the persistence of memory to create the flow of motion.

(Some confusion over technologies there, but I like the Dali-inspired term persistence of memory over the standard persistence of vision)

It’s not really possible to put over exactly how it looks, so I recommend checking out the children’s section of your local bookshop for the full effect, but Seder’s Eye Think Inc. site displays something of the effect, as in this animated GIF:

www.eyethinkinc.com/rulers/horse.html

It’s an intriguing invention, though one suspects that adults are going to be more diverted by the effect than children. Maybe it might register more if it could only generate the effect in colour. But for us it’s a useful illustration of the interconnectness of things: the fascination with optical illusions that led to the optical toys of the nineteenth century which in turn led to motion pictures, and woven into this thread the vision of Muybridge, who sought not simply to make things to move but to capture the motion of real life. And there’s the not unrelated history of the pop-up book (to which Gallop! is to some degree related), three-D, and the wonder of seeing things break out of the confines of a two-dimensional world.

It’s all animation, or animated pictures as the cinema pioneers had it - simply bringing things to life.

Projection Box Essay Awards

The winners have been announced for the inaugural Projection Box Essay Awards 2007-2008 for research into the projected and moving image to 1915.

The judges awarded the first prize of £250 and publication in Early Popular Visual Culture, to Dr. John Plunkett for his essay ‘Selling Stereoscopy 1890-1914: penny arcades, automatic machines and American salesmen.’

“ A thorough and well sustained argument … convincing and very well written … highly original.”
“ A clear and impressive piece of work.”

Second and third prizes of Projection Box books worth £100 went to: Professor Erkki Huhtamo, for ‘Penetrating the Perestrephic: an unwritten chapter in the history of the panorama’

“A fascinating piece of re-constructive archaeology.”
“The range of sources is remarkable …”

and to Christian Hayes for ‘Phantom Carriages: reconstructing Hale’s Tours and the virtual travel experience’.

“… has a good balance between the historical facts and the theorising. A good read.”

The titles of the other entries received and judged were (in no particular order):

• ‘Early Days of Cinematograph Projection’
• ‘Hidden History: exploring the lost world of early cinema’
• ‘From Dioramic Views to a Dissolving Partnership: Banks and Grieves and the “sensation of the age”‘
• ‘The Outside-in Machine: the Kinetoscope, its films and the Kinetoscope experience in London’
• ‘Returning to Fear: new discoveries in E.G. Robertson’s Fantasmagoria’
• ‘Tillie’s Punctured Celluloid’
• ‘Between Narrative and Expressive Value: notes on deep staging in early cinema’

The aims of the Award for 2008-2009 are to encourage new research and new thinking into any historical, artistic or technical aspect of popular optical media up to 1900; and to promote engaging, accessible, and imaginative work. The deadline for entries of between 5,000 and 8,000 words is 24 January 2009. All details including rules and application form can be found at www.pbawards.co.uk.

Colour, colour and more colour

A call for papers has been issued for a special issue of the Journal of British Cinema and Television on colour in British cinema and television. Organised by the University of Bristol’s ongoing AHRC-funded project on the history of colour cinematography in Britain, the call asks for proposals of 400-750 words to be sent to the editors Simon Brown and Sarah Street by 1 April 2008. Each article (subject to your proposal being accepted, of course) should be no more than 8,000 words and no less than 5,000 words. They are interested in any area that relates to colour and British cinema and television from any period, but are particularly interested in articles on the following themes:

• Particular colour processes that were used in Britain
• Early colour television
• Colour and home movies
• Colour in feature films
• Colour and British animation and/or documentary and/or avant-garde
• Issues of colour restoration
• The use of colour in contemporary television series such as The British Empire in Colour
• An interview with someone who has worked with colour or who has particular views on the use of colour in film and/or television (this should not exceed 5,000 words)
• Textual analyses of the use of colour
• Colour and theory
• Colour and audiences

Omnivorous stuff. Details on house style, length and other issues can be found on the Edinburgh University Press website, and the contact details of the editors are simon.brown [at] kingston.ac.uk and sarah.street [at] bris.ac.uk.