Historiographic Method and the Study of Early Cinema

For better or worse, my efforts to assess the state of film history have taken a personal turn. My work as a film historian found traction in the mid- to late 1970s when, as an independent filmmaker and part-time graduate student, I became curious about the beginnings of cinema, particularly of film editing. What was the first cut? How did editing develop? The available literature did not adequately address these issues, and so I began to explore them myself. Of course, my questions seem somewhat naïve in retrospect. I soon realized that editing was around long before cinema, that in nineteenth-century screen entertainment, the exhibitor, rather than the image-maker, generally held editorial control and was responsible for what we now call postproduction. On a basic level, then, film editing was not invented but shifted from exhibitor to production company, resulting in the centralization of this crucial element of creative control and acceptance of the filmmaker as an artistic and cultural force. Intimately related to this insight into production practices was an interrogation of the "pre-Griffith" system of representation, which prior scholars had dismissed as primitive, unformed, and incoherent. Rather than assuaging my curiosity, these new understandings pointed to related topics for engagement, which absorbed much of my energy for the next fifteen years.

Obviously I was not alone. The study of early cinema produced a community of scholars whose work was historical and based on archival research. As has often been noted, the 1978 annual meeting of the Federation of International Film Archives (FIAF), held in Brighton, England, proved to be a crucial moment as historians, archivists, filmmakers, and theorists from Europe and the United States came together to view fiction films made between 1900 and 1906 and to present their initial insights on the pre-Griffith era. The conference signaled a new integration of academic and archive-based history and fostered tendencies that contributed to the formulation of a new historiography. One of the most fundamental changes involved a new approach or attitude toward the subject.

Too often film scholars have maintained a superior attitude toward the works they examine and the creative artists who made them. In this regard, Edwin S. Porter, the key figure in my dissertation, was a touchstone. Film historians had sometimes credited Porter with the breakthrough realization that cinema could be a storytelling form, but just as quickly they had criticized him for being rather inept as a storyteller. Of course, both assessments were off the mark. On the one hand, storytelling was around from the onset of cinema and Porter was just one of many filmmakers to develop the story film in the early 1900s. On the other hand, like Noël Burch and others, I found that Porter helped to pioneer a coherent system of representation (a way of storytelling) that was fundamentally different from the system that emerged in the nickelodeon era, as cinema became a form of mass entertainment.

Tom Gunning's concept of the "cinema of attractions," which leads to valorizing many of the qualities that Lewis Jacobs derided in the pre-1903 cinema, also reflects this change in orientation. Revalorization is something Gunning and I had in common, and this has been crucial to our subsequent work, transcending differences in approach and emphasis. Here Jay Leyda's role as my mentor was invaluable (he was Tom Gunning's mentor as well). Moreover, as I learned by working in the film industry, creative work is difficult and far more layered and complex than scholars generally recognize. To wrestle and return to a group of films again and again so that one's understanding changes and deepens requires a sympathetic, humble openness to the material and a readiness to accept a body of work on its own terms. At the same time, film scholars cannot forsake critical engagement with either the work or their own analyses. Otherwise, film history lacks rigor, perspective, and a sense of limits. To move back and forth between these two attitudes involves what I call "critical sympathy." Both approaches are crucial to a method that is...