Introduction: Film Beginnings

Film history contains many firsts, many starts (some of them false), and many different kinds of pioneering.

George Pratt's 1971 Image essay, "Firsting the Firsts", dealt with the conflicting priority claims offered by the supporters of various early film projectors, notably Woodville Latham's Eidoloscope, the Lumiere Cinématographe, and Max Skladanowsky's Bioscop. What did these machines project, to what sort of audience, and on exactly what dates in 1895? Indeed, much of the energy expended by film historians from Georges Sadoul to Gordon Hendricks was devoted to documenting mechanical priorities, an exercise that resembled something between a horse race and a patents examination.

This issue of Film History avoids the arguments over mechanical priority (Deac Rossell covered that pretty well in our Summer 1995 issue), but instead focuses on other beginnings: aesthetic, industrial, and even legal issues which needed to be resolved before the moving picture could evolve from a curiosity to a mass medium.

For example, how well do we understand the narrative roots that nourished Porter, Griffith, and every other early filmmaker trying to tell stories with a camera designed to capture birds in flight or sneezing factory workers? Patrick Feaster and Jacob Smith suggest that many of the issues crucial to an understanding of film narrative had already been thoroughly investigated, between 1877 and 1908, by the recording industry. It was no coincidence that Edison and Pathé both pioneered the production and merchandising of sound recordings before they turned their attention to moving pictures (and brought with them not just a business model, but a heavy dose of the recording industry's most successful experiments in content and style).

Rescued from an Eagle's Nest, produced by Edwin S. Porter and J. Searle Dawley in 1907, has its own peculiar roots. Yes, the heroic rescue was certainly in place at the Eden Musée before D.W. Griffith battled the bird in Edison's Bronx film studio. But as David Mayer shows, the filmmakers swept in everything from the wax museum display to "Irish" stage melodrama, with nods to classicalmythology and the advertising campaign of a popular beer.

On an even more basic level, Steven Maras sifts through the records of the Copyright Office in Washington, D.C., on a hunt for the origins of the medium's very name. Edison's first productions were registered as photographs, but just how, and when, did their producers – and the examiners in Washington – begin seeing them as something else? Not merely a legal or linguistic exercise, the hunt also reveals the potential value of these records in helping unravel a wide range of other questions.

The history of film exhibition is another slippery battleground. Have we been spending too much energy arguing about the location of urban nickelodeons and the social level of their audiences? Was that the only significant retail tradition pioneered by early filmmakers? Philippe Gauthier suggests that non-narrative spectacle cinema, still flourishing today in theme parks and IMAX theaters, was far more significant a century ago than most historians care to admit. Hale's Tours, it seems, deserves more than a footnote in the history of the multiplex.

Unfortunately, our understanding of the cinema's narrative roots, or the history of its exhibition sites, has often been distorted, elided, or filled with inexplicable gaps. But the ways in which men and women worked to make careers in this industry (and the ways in which they struggled to make some sense of it), have been equally misunderstood. In England, as Gerry Turvey shows us, Ethyle Batley moved in a few years from life as a touring player to a position as the country's most prominent woman filmmaker – not just a director of sentimental children's melodramas, but of war films and sports pictures. Present at the beginning, she helped create not just a new role for women, but a small part of the nascent industry itself. A generation later, men like Adrian Brunel and Ivor Montagu could step into this already established motion picture industry and confront more complex issues of authorship and collaboration, participating in a widespread debate waged on the pages of...