Encyclopedia of Early Cinema (review)

In 1978 the thirty-fourth annual FIAF (International Federation of Film Archives) conference took place in Brighton, United Kingdom. The conference was organized around what at the time was a rare occurrence—the projection and evaluation of hundreds of fiction films from the period 1900 to 1906. Brighton proved a pivotal moment, marking a transformation in the amount and quality of both scholarship and archival activity devoted to the earliest decades of cinema history. This attention transformed the understanding of early cinema from what had previously been regarded more or less as a wasteland, a "primitive" period whose films were judged by their imperfect resemblance to later narrative models, to what rapidly became one of the most vital fields in cinema history.

The thirty years since the Brighton conference have witnessed the publication of scores of books on early cinema, as well as hundreds of articles, many of which appeared in the several journals that deal primarily or largely with the period: the German-language KinTop; 1895, the official journal of the Association Française de recherché sur l'histoire du cinéma; the British Early Popular Visual Culture; and Griffithiana, a journal associated with another wellspring of information about early cinema, the annual Giornate del Cinema Muto, a weeklong festival of silent-era cinema that has taken place for the last twenty years in northeastern Italy (either in Pordenone or in Sacile). Early cinema's professional organization, DOMITOR—which takes its name from a progenitor of the Lumières' cinematograph—was founded in 1985 at the Pordenone festival.

Encyclopedia of Early Cinema assembles a comprehensive synopsis of the considerable scholarship produced by this efflorescence of interest in early cinema. It covers the first twenty-five years of cinema history, from the early 1890s to the mid-1910s, and contains over 950 entries by 138 contributors as well as 132 black-and-white illustrations. Far from the assortment of anonymous authors who provide grist for much of the encyclopedia mill, the editor of this volume, Richard Abel, himself one of the most distinguished cinema historians of his generation, has marshaled contri butions from the best scholars in the field, resulting in a milestone publication that marks early cinema history's maturity as a field of study.

The reevaluation of early cinema after Brighton revealed a fascinating and neglected period, and reclaiming vast numbers of titles that had previously rested in a film-historical limbo was a significant achievement in itself. Just as important as the various reclamation projects, however, was the conceptual refocusing that was required to understand these films on their own terms, which resulted in the modification of certain general tenets of cinema history. One way the historiography of early cinema challenged and modified film history and theory was by throwing prevalent conceptions of film spectatorship into question. Perhaps the best-known concept to emerge from the scholarship on early cinema is the "cinema of attractions," a phrase coined by Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault (building on an idea advanced by Sergei Eisenstein in his work on what he called the "montage of attractions"). "Attractions" is a way of designating early cinema's particular mode of address, its tendency to solicit the viewer's attention directly through an emphasis on visual spectacle as opposed to classical cinematic narration's more indirect form of address. The astonished, yet self-aware spectator who corresponds to this aesthetic made the then-dominant concept of an absorbed, mystified spectator proposed by apparatus theory seem less hegemonic (and the fact that the early cinema presented a different form of aesthetic pleasure made this era attractive both to theorists and to filmmakers seeking an "oppositional" cinema).

Another way that early cinema historiography has impacted film history is by promulgating a more complex understanding of cinema's relationships with other media and arts. The perennial question, what is cinema? received a variety of answers; from the emphasis on montage as the essence of cinema in the 1920s and 1930s, for instance, to the countermovement in the 1940s that privileged the cinema's...