Dead Ringers: The Remake in Theory and Practice

4. The “Personal” Touch: The Original, the Remake, and the Dupe in Early Cinema

The newness of the medium notwithstanding, the remake figured prominently in the cinematic experience from 1896 to 1906. From the Lumière brothers’ first programs in the Salon Indien of the Grand Café issued the rush to imitate its subjects. Edison’s Clark’s Thread Mill is considered by many a remake of La Sortie des usines ; Biograph’s Empire State Express (1896) and Edison’s The Black Diamond Express (1896)1 are both remakes of Arrivée d’un train; and Biograph’s Sausage Machine (1897) is a remake of Charcuterie mécanique. But although Americans may have been the most enthusiastic remakers on the international scene—circumstances facilitated by America’s nonparticipation in international copyright—the remake was hardly a peculiar American phenomenon.2 On the contrary, even George Méliès’s earliest efforts imitated Lumière subjects; his L’Arroseur (1896) is taken from L’Arroseur arrosé, and Arrivée d’un train (1896) and Les Forgerons (1896) from Lumière subjects of the same name (Deslandes 417; Sadoul 155). Charles Pathé broke into filmmaking with a train arriving from Vincennes (Sadoul 64). Britain’s Robert William Paul also did his versions of Lumière realism with waves at the seaside and C H A P T E R F O U R ��� The “Personal” Touch: The Original, the Remake, and the Dupe in Early Cinema JENNIFER FORREST 89 the arrival of the Epsom Derby (Sadoul 64), while the Swede, Ernest Florman , “plagiarized” an even earlier film made for the Edison kinetoscope, The Barbershop (1894) (Deslandes 267). Film producers even remade their own works; according to Alan Williams, the earliest “remake” ever was of the Lumières’ Sortie des usines because the negative was so worn from making copies that a new version, as faithful to the original as possible , had to be shot (159). And Pathé had a habit of recycling some of its successful films roughly every five years, a gesture that reflected changes in film structure.3 On the one hand, the practitioners of the new medium imitated each other in their quest for subjects that would show off their marvelous machines, continuing a nineteenth-century tradition which appealed to the imagination through a variety of machines from photographic cameras, to x-rays, and phonographs (Gunning 58).4 As Tom Gunning points out, it was the “Cinématographe, the Biograph, or the Vitascope that were advertised on the variety bills in which they premiered , not Le Déjeuner de bébé or The Black Diamond Express” (58). The Lumière brothers’ early withdrawal from film production to concentrate on the manufacture of equipment and raw film reflects this privileging of the machine over film, whose usefulness was limited to that of publicity (Sadoul 52). On the other hand, the practice of large-scale piracy reveals much about the early cinema’s popular beginnings5 and the widespread conviction—however much motivated by commercial concerns—that the product the new machine produced belonged to the public domain. In this sense, the early remake differs radically from its later incarnations, in which permission to remake must be obtained and sources acknowledged both financially and legally. It is essential, therefore, to distinguish between the pre- and post-19066 definitions of the remake, locating their point of intersection at the moment when film emerged from the veil of public domain to enter into the legal realm of the Copyright Statute. From 1902 to 1911, the courts were called upon to determine the nature of film authorship, but they were only the finalizing—but no less instrumental and legitimizing—element in bestowing on cinema a belated notion of originality and origin. Suing rival companies for copyright infringement occurred only after a series of important events took place in the industry; first, patent infringement litigation turned against Edison, making the company lose its economic edge in equipment and film sales, and forcing it to “play catch-up” with its more successful competitors (Levy 211); second, economic and organizational changes within the industry itself gradually shifted focus from equipment to film production, 90 JENNIFER FORREST forcing manufacturers to reassess their position on the secondary status of films; third, the increasing length and narrative complexity of films, as well as the cinema’s courting of a middle-class audience (Jeanne Thomas Allen 177),7 deemphasized the photographic nature of the medium and promoted its written sources in the adaptation from...