Introduction: Movies Before Cinema

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This special two-part issue of Wide Angle is a result of two related developments in film studies. ^* The more obvious of these, at least in academic circles, has been the expanding interest in the origins of the field. The consolidation of film history and film theory as a specific academic discipline (a consolidation demanded by a combination of factors: cinema’s achievement of a century of commercial and artistic history and social influence; the increasing pressures on academic resources during recent decades; and the evolution of new video, digital, and laser technologies that film’s hegemony as the motion picture medium of the twentieth century) has demanded that scholars and teachers of cinema examine more thoroughly where the field begins and what exactly it includes. A generation ago, little attention was spent on early cinema and even less on pre-cinematic history, which in most cases was understood as the development of that particular set of technologies that came together in the Edison laboratory’s kinetograph and the Lumière Brothers’ Cinématographe, as a result of the efforts of such “pioneers” as Eadweard Muybridge, William K. L. Dickson, Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince, and Emile Reynaud. In this earlier model of film history, the “primitive,” single-shot Edison and Lumière films were superseded first, by the somewhat less primitive films of George Méliès and Edwin S. Porter, and subsequently by the more mature two-reelers and features of D. W. Griffith.

Now, of course, thanks to the efforts of a good many scholars—Charles Musser, Tom Gunning, Thomas Elsaesser, and Marta Braun seem particularly noteworthy—we are coming to understand the full complexity of early film history and of those decades immediately preceding the Lumières’s first public presentation of films. And, just as important, we are coming to recognize that the history that begins on December 28, 1895 at the Grand Café in Paris is itself part of the much older, broader history of spectatorship in general, and more particularly, of those forms of spectatorship that in one sense or another, can be read as premonitions of cinema, either in the technological sense or in terms of the types of entertainment and enlightenment audiences experienced. Major dimensions of this historical/theoretical territory are charted by Richard B. Altick in The Shows of London (Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 1978), especially in his discussions of Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon, Louis Daguerre’s Diorama, and of the various forms of still and moving panorama that fascinated spectators from the late eighteenth century through the nineteenth century; by Erik Barnouw, in The Magician and the Cinema (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), by Martin Kemp, in The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1992), and by Jonathan Crary, in Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press, 1991). But as recent scholars, including those included in this issue of Wide Angle , have recognized, there are many related developments we need to explore if we are to have anything like a complete sense of where cinema came from and what it is.

The second relevant development in film studies that has instigated this collection of essays is the fascination of recent avant-garde filmmakers with early cinema and pre-cinema, and their translation of this fascination into forms of filmmaking and film presentation that not only derive from and relate to forms of spectatorship characteristic of the nineteenth and earlier centuries, but can help us see that modern cinema history should not be thought of as simply the evolution of commercial, feature-length entertainment, but rather, as a series of traditions, some more fully in the public eye than others, developing side by side—and in many cases, offering implicit and explicit cinematic critiques of one another.

Figure 1.

Frame enlargement from Peter Hutton’s Landscape (1987). Photo courtesy Peter Hutton.

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