Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life

Investigations into cinema’s origins typically question the identity of the inventor, explore how moving pictures represented the natural evolution of a series of devices designed to capture reality more accurately, or use psychoanalytic theories to link cinema’s attraction and unconscious desire. The thirteen authors in this volume challenge both the trivial and teleological analyses common to these histories by situating the new cultural technology within the context of rapid changes occurring in late-nineteenth-century cities. Not only was the cinema emblematic of urbanization, but the urban milieu provided residents with the tools to appreciate motion pictures before their invention.

Ben Singer finds the new medium inseparable from the fast-paced and perilous urban environment. He argues that turn-of-the-century cities were fraught with excitement and danger. By examining stories in the popular press, he uncovers a plethora of anxieties plaguing city dwellers. Entertainments such as amusement park rides and vaudeville stunts offered residents a distraction from the overstimulation of the city and provided a means through which they could cope with their tensions. Like these amusements, early cinema provided a forum in which audiences could face their fears in a controlled setting. Thus action and sensation characterized the subject matter of many early films.

The city, with all its stimuli, soon became an object of entertainment in its own right. Vanessa Schwartz’s look at turn-of-the-century Paris reveals a strong link between amusements and stories in the popular press. People flocked to the Paris morgue not to identify anonymous corpses but to witness dead bodies about whom the newspapers had written. The wax museum went a step further by offering a narrative coherence in its displays. As spectators moved through the museum they experienced an unfolding story, as in the seven-panel display of a crime in which the museum took the spectator through the murder, arrest, and trial. The conventions of these amusements, namely spectacle and narrative, prepared audiences to “read” early motion pictures.

The creation of a mass audience, so crucial to cinema’s success, was established by the late nineteenth century. Erika D. Rappaport has discovered that London department store owners actively cultivated a female clientele, which allowed women to participate in the public sphere of urban leisure previously dominated by men. Similarly, Marcus Verhagen sees the role of the poster in turn-of-the-century Paris as bridging gaps between the Left and Right as well as mirroring the leveling of class differences apparent in the urban environment. Enlarging the concept of a “public,” indicative of the social and economic transformation in modern cities, laid the groundwork for the creation of the mass audience at the foundation of cinema’s widespread popularity.

Readers will be pleased with the thematic coherence of the thirteen essays in this collection, yet may find the urban focus troubling. At the turn of the century, at least in America, the majority of the population did not live in large cities. Thus, most people were not subjected to the forces of urbanization described by these authors as defining modern life. Yet we know that rural Americans enjoyed motion pictures from the beginning. Why were rural residents attracted to an entertainment so tailored to the city landscape? Alexandra Keller is the only author in this collection to address this question. The Sears catalog, she argues, transported provincials to the world of the city by initiating in them a desire for the commodities represented therein. Rural Americans became urbanites by proxy, taken to city environs through the pages of the catalog. Yet the works of Kathy Fuller, Gregory Waller, and Hal Barron suggest that rural populations experienced mass consumerism and motion pictures differently then their urban counterparts. Barron, in a recent book, has found that rural Americans situated the commodities they purchased from mail-order catalogs within their own world view; they did not become homogenized...