In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Woof, Warp, History
  • Lee Grieveson (bio)

Late in 1908, a court case raised the question of the role of film as historical expression. In challenging the legality of a judgment against exhibiting The James Boys in Missouri and Night Riders under the terms of the Chicago Censor Ordinance of 1907, exhibitor Jake Block made what was taken as a rather surprising claim: the films, he asserted, were based on the "American historical experience" and thus could not be challenged on the grounds of immorality and obscenity inscribed in the ordinance.1 The lawyers for Block made a complicated conceptual move here: they sought to blur the porous borders separating fiction from history so that films would be included in the category of history, which, as nonfictional discourse, was, it was claimed, divorced from the category of the immoral.

The arguments held little sway in the Illinois Supreme Court, where Chief Justice James H. Cartwright observed that even if the films depicted "experiences connected with the history of the country," it did not follow that they were "not immoral" since they "necessarily portray exhibitions of crime" and, crucially, do so to audiences made up largely of children "as well as by those of limited means who do not attend the productions of plays and dramas given in the regular theatres."2 Cartwright made a straightforward distinction between film and history, evidently [End Page 119] untroubled by conceptual correspondences between historiography and the mass-distributed media of indexical imagining.3 In so doing, he was motivated, in part, by anxieties about the construction of history for those groups rather enigmatically described as of "limited means," a category covering economics/class and the perceived limited cultural "means" of the immigrant populations of Chicago.

Later legal decisions effectively deferred to Cartwright's conceptual distinction, most notably in 1915, when the Supreme Court denied cinema the constitutional guarantees of free speech and thus effectively cast it outside the sphere of public discussion that encompassed such nonfictional discourse as the press and, although precariously, "artistic" fiction that had a licensed role of cultural negation.4 A cartoon in D. W. Griffith's pamphlet The Rise and Fall of Free Speech, produced after the struggles over his own historical fiction, The Birth of a Nation (1915) responded to this decision by showing a globe next to a moving picture camera that was tugging at a length of fabric with the word "History" written on it. The globe is complaining, "I can't accept this fabric—it's nothing but warp!" and the moving picture camera is responding, "Sorry, sir! The censor took the woof!"5

Legal decisions, subtended by regulatory discourses and practices, and combined with the developing commercial practices of the mainstream film industry, constructed a discursive identity for cinema that centered on its distinction from nonfictional discourses, referentiality, and the real world. Mainstream cinema became, in part at least, a self-referential space, purposively disconnected from other forms of discourse and from social relevance. Woof, as history and the world, was ostensibly cast aside.

Yet this process of delimiting mainstream cinema's place in the public sphere was a consequence, in the main, of political interventions into the social function of cinema. The policing of populations and of the public sphere by various agents, groups, and institutions led to the restriction of commercial cinema's role in the public sphere, that "metatopical common space" in which members of society meet through a variety of media and discuss matters of common interest.6 Anxieties about cinema's effects on audiences and its place in the public sphere, like those Cartwright expressed, were widely articulated, subtended by broad concerns about the governance of populations. Woof, then, necessarily created the warp that was mainstream American cinema. Put another way, government discourses and practices delineated and delimited the possible social function of cinema, marking a terrain outside the public sphere as metatopical common space connected to ideas of "harmless entertainment." I believe this process was a crucial generative mechanism in the formation of what we call "classical Hollywood cinema."7

This argument suggests a revision to the now-canonical conception of the formation of classicism, which, in turn, is...

pdf

Share