A Partial History of American Film in the Cinematic Century

Film weds the art of assembly to the ethos of the assembly line. At every instant, rapid accumulation and substitution make moving pictures move, for the image lingers in the mind's eye longer than in the field of vision. A two-hour-and-twenty-minute motion picture assembles 200,000 discrete images on a filmy strip that reels past the projector's lens at a speed symbolic of the twentieth century. And only in the spaces of access and egress provided by that century, only through the technologies of assembly, dispersion, and communication that defined modernity, could millions upon millions of spectators reel past the reeling images on these visual assembly lines, circulating billions of dollars, creating innumerable moments of identification and disavowal, national consciousness or social alienation. This assemblage depends, moreover, on other assemblies—of writers and directors, designers and publicists, photographers and stars, editors and extras, to name just a few. These clusters of labor were organized early in the history of cinema along the principles of production that characterized the automobile assembly line and the modes of distribution that defined the chain store. Each minute frame, in other words, while constituting one twenty-fourth of a movie second, is the product of the massive energy that assembles countless elements, from the smallest prop and the chemicals that allow that prop to become an image, to the trucks and merchants that disperse its replication to thousands of projection booths. And even here, whatever that thing (movie going? American cinema? Casablanca?) may be, as pastime, narrative, ideology, or celebrity vehicle, it exceeds its vast parts. American cinema, in other words, as a process, an industry, and a cultural phenomenon, shares a structural kinship to history. The troubling tension between general and particular that haunts historiography is elemental both to the construction of moving pictures and to their role as a cultural practice. "Of all the things everyone does," Michel de Certeau succinctly notes, "how much gets written down? Between the two, the image, the phantom of the expert but mute body, preserves the difference."¹ It is not that movies are historical, and even less so, pace Robert Rosenstone and Robert Brent Toplin, that they are "history,"² but more significantly that the experience of history is cinematic—a set of mediated references, always partial and infinite, attached to some form of narrative structure that artificially marks its incompleteness with gestures toward closure, implications of resolution, suggestions of coherence. The pleasure of cinema as a historical product and as a cultural phenomenon is that these gestures, implications, and suggestions can neither be completely embraced nor successfully disavowed. [End Page...