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1 13 Louis Feuillade and the Cinema of Uncertainty Scenes of Dislocation in Early Cinema/History Early Cinema/French Silent Cinema This book is an effort to situate the crime serials of Louis Feuillade within early film history from an explicitly feminist perspective. To a certain extent, I will argue that a series of six films made by Feuillade All ways of differently thinking the history of power, property, masculine domination, the formation of the State, and the ideological equipment have some effect. But the change that is in process concerns more than just the question of “origin.” There is phallocentrism. History has never produced or recorded anything else—which does not mean that this form is destinal or natural. Phallocentrism is the enemy. Of everyone. Men’s loss in phallocentrism is different from but as serious as women’s. And it is time to change. To invent the other history. Hélène Cixous, “Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays.” It is we, with our language, who make the law. Who draw the borders and produce the exclusion. Who grant admittance. Who are the customs officers of communication: we admit or we reject . . . ordinary human beings do not like mystery since you cannot put a bridle on it, and therefore in general they exclude, they repress it, they eliminate it—and it is settled. But if on the contrary one remains open and susceptible to all the phenomena of overflowing, beginning with natural phenomena, one discovers the immense landscape of trans, of the passage. Which does not mean that everything will be adrift: our thinking, our choices, etc. But it means that the factor of instability, the factor of uncertainty, or what Derrida calls the undecidable, is indissociable from human life. Hélène Cixous, Rootprints The earth seen from the point of view of the moon is revived; it is unknown, to be rediscovered. Hélène Cixous, Rootprints between the years 1913 and 1920 can be read as one text. These films—Fantômas, Les vampires, Judex, La nouvelle mission de Judex, Tih Minh, Barrabas—share not only a consistency of narrative structure and visual style but also a progressive revelation of the threat posed by the figure of the criminal in the films. This threat—a “dislocation”1 of both cinematic and ideological subjectivity—plays out under a variety of guises throughout the serials, with each variation unveiling another layer of social, cultural, and aesthetic disturbance. Part of this work will involve a mapping out of these layers of dislocation, with a second objective of then reading this map through the lens of feminist theory and history—a process that involves another sort of dislocation, this time of the historiographic variety. Research on early cinema history has undergone tremendous growth and innovation in the last two decades. Of particular interest to this study are the efforts by a number of authors to define early cinema as an autonomous entity in itself, something more than the first flickerings of classical narrative film.2 The separate works of Noël Burch and Tom Gunning have been especially influential in sketching the parameters of this alternative cinematic form and moving early film history out of excessively teleological or biographical accounts (e.g., the great [male] pioneers of cinema: Edison, Porter, Griffith).3 Previous histories of early cinema emphasized an understanding of the era as “primitive” steps leading inevitably toward the classical, continuity style that came to define the Hollywood studio system.4 Although he retains the term primitive, Noël Burch’s analysis of early cinema presents a markedly different perspective. To be precise, Burch describes the first part of the silent era as a “primitive mode of representation .”5 His designation serves to demarcate both an ideologically and formally distinct, although not entirely separate, entity from the classical model, which he has labeled the “Institutional Mode of Production.”6 In fact, Burch’s link between the primitive and classical modes makes for some of his most provocative remarks concerning the cinema . The primitive mode’s unique characteristics—autarchy, or selfsufficiency of the tableau-style image; horizontal and frontal camera placement; the long take; and a decentered or multicentered placement of figures and action—function to place the film spectator in a position of externality to the image.7 Moreover, this externality is heightened by the exhibition practices of the era, which placed films at fairgrounds and nickelodeons—crowded and disruptive environments.8 One prodChapter 1 14...

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