Travelling Cinema in Europe: Sources and Perspectives (review)

As is well known, the term "cinema of attractions" was coined by André Gaudreault and Tom Gunning in an attempt to free the discussion of early film – and the ensemble of affects which the cinematograph mobilised – from a concern with aesthetic effect in favour of the radical, disruptive nature the medium represented in the early years of exhibition. As Claude Bertemes argues in the concluding essay of Travelling Cinema in Europe, the work of Noël Burch and Thomas Elsaesser has been central in stressing the Protean and proletarian origin of the cinematograph as a social institution at the turn of the century.¹ Some of the essays brought together in this collection forcefully demonstrate the case for such a proposal where exhibition not only shared the qualities of carnival typical of the fairground whose origins pre-date the industrial age, but also had in common an apparatus which Walter Benjamin argued was predicated on "shock effect" or, as Claude Bertemes puts it, "profanation and misalliance".

The collection of essays edited by Martin Loiperdinger presents the proceedings of an international conference held in the Cinémathèque de la Ville de Luxembourg between 6 and 8 September 2008, organised by the Cinémathèque and the Media Studies Department of the University of Trier in the framework of the Travelling Cinema Project which was part of "Luxembourg and the Greater Region, European Capital of Culture 2007". Besides the conference, the Travelling Cinema Project funded the production of a double DVD and, importantly, a touring cinema presentation, Crazy Cinématographe, which was intended to return the cinematograph to the environment in which it spent its formative years around 1900 before the boom in permanent-site cinemas in the first decade of the twentieth century.² This perspective informs a number of the essays in the first two parts of the book. In the third and final part, travelling exhibition in Europe, mostly after 1920, is considered.

The first section of the book focuses on travelling cinema exhibition and reception in Europe before the First World War, and includes a discussion of exhibition practices discussed in trade periodicals by Daniel Fritsch, who considers the interaction between itinerant and permanent-site cinema exhibition represented in the German trade magazine, Der Kinematograph, and the Austrian journals, Die Kinematographische Rundschau and Die Schwalbe. This last publication retained an interest in the fairground at the core of its discussion of the cinematograph in the territory of the Habsburg monarchy before the First World War. Matthew Solomon makes a strong case for arguing that the emphasis given to the trick film genre in the received scholarship on Méliès and in some of films produced by Pathé has tended to eclipse the strong affinity that obtained between live performance on the fairground and its presence in the cinematograph. This perception helps Solomon demonstrate that the close relation which obtained between performance for the cinematograph and the type of performance encountered on the fairground confirms the distinctly plural field of performance that was encountered in the "cinema of fairground attractions". The centrality of the fairground experience to the cinematograph is also considered by Vanessa Toulmin in the centuries-old tradition of travelling fairs in the UK, where urban and rural fairs provided a ready-made circuit for upwards of two hundred fairs held annually between March and October. Difficulties in retrieving programme details from the promotional material showmen favoured (from photographs of fairground frontages, picture postcards, banners, handbills and posters rather than advertisements in the local press) are considered, and the often considerable financial outlay that was entailed in establishing lavish, gilded frontages, mechanical organs, and traction engines for haulage and for the generation of electricity is quantified in the course of Toulmin's essay. The routes travelled by showmen between 1896 and 1926 in Germany and neighbouring countries are the subject of Joseph Garncarz's contribution. Drawing on a database developed for the project at the University of Siegen...