Transports Of Delight: The Image of the Automobile in Early Films

TRANSPORTS OF DELIGHT: THE IMAGE OF THE AUTOMOBILE IN EARLY FILMS by Julian Smith In the summer of 1979, with the aid of a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies, I began to survey themes associated with the automobile in the American film before 1921. I undertook this project because I was interested in exploring how a new popular art form began to impose meanings on (or build myths around) an artifact that has become one of the central symbols of an entire culture. The bulk of my research was conducted at the Library of Congress, where I read copyright descriptions, plot summaries, and reviews of approximately twenty thousand films made before 1921 --and where I viewed several hundred of the earliest films in the motion picture collection. I found that at least five hundred of these thousands of films made significant use of the automobile in terms of plot, theme, or characterization. I have outlined the preliminary results of this survey in the Fall 1980 issue of Michigan Quarterly Review devoted to the automobile and American culture. My purpose now is to suggest several connections between the growth of the popularity of both movies and cars, the "transports of delight" of my title. This title involves a double conceit: that both motion pictures and automobiles are forms of transportation. This assertion may puzzle readers who are accustomed to using the word "transportation" in the utilitarian sense: the movement of people or objects through space. This is the sense of the word that John Howard Lawson intends when he says: "to most people, the automobile is a means of transportation, but it has assumed a ritualistic importance in film."- It is the sense that Harry Reasoner also intends in The Great Love Affair, a 1965 CBS documentary, Julian Smith teaches In the FiZm Studies Pnognam at the University ofa Florida. He is the author ofa Looking Away: Hollywood and Vietnam [Scnlbnens, 1975). 59 when he says that television's "car commercials all promise a lot— besides transportation. What they do is, they find out what are dreams are and play them back to us --- What we are dreaming about is love, beauty, freedom , fun, luxury, speed, class, and sex appeal." Both Mr. Lawson and Mr. Reasoner make a common mistake: they assume that the car is a form of transportation and that film isn't. Spenser, Milton, Shakespeare, Dickens—none of these worthy gentlemen ever saw a movie, but could we bring them back in a time machine, one of those transports so dear to Hollywood, they would all agree that motion pictures do indeed provide transportation: the state or condition of being transported by emotion, of ecstasy—of being enraptured. Ah, you say: automobiles transport us in the primary sense of physical movement while movies carry us away in another sense. My response is that motion pictures and motor cars are equally capable of supplying emotional transport. Well before 1910, civic leaders were complaining of how the impressionable were being swept off their feet by movies—and in 1909, in the Futurist Manifesto, the Italian poet, artist and motorist, F. T. Marinetti, celebrated "the beauty of speed," hymned "the man at the wheel," and boasted of how the "raging broom of madness" caused by getting behind the Wheel "swept us out of ourselves and drove us through [the] streets." To demonstrate how early moving pictures and motor cars came together to provide transports of delight, I am going to focus on four short films from the Library of Congress Paper Print Collection. A quick inspection of the index to the Paper Print Collection2 suggests something of the relative interest that various forms of transportation may have held—or the accessibility to those forms of transportation of the early camera operators. Ni ver lists ten films in which airplanes or balloons appear, sixteen showing bicycles, seventy-four in which automobiles appear, one hundred and nineteen focusing on ships, and one hundred and forty-one showing us railroads of one kind or another. I find these raw numbers interesting: though the automobile has clearly pulled ahead of the two other new modes of transportation, it seems to have a...