A Companion to Early Cinema ed. by André Gaudreault, Nicolas Dulac, and Santiago Hidalgo (review)

Like most scholars I know, I organize books on my shelves by subject. In this respect, the book under review presents a slight problem, for I am not quite sure where it should go. Undoubtedly it belongs within my broad early cinema category, but in the reference section or on the collected essays shelves? The book’s title with the word companion would suggest the former, because a companion is generally construed as being a handbook, and the blurb on the cover also defines it as that kind of book: “an authoritative . . . must-have reference for all those working in the field [of early cinema].”

But the book itself actually consists of full-length essays rather than entries, to wit, thirty-two essays by various authors, arranged into six rather loosely defined parts. Some of the essays are quite wide-ranging overviews of their subjects, others cover such specific subjects that they might seem to have no place in a judicious companion to early cinema, and yet others take a somewhat opinionated or prescriptive attitude to their subjects.

The reference volume with which this undoubtedly will be compared is Richard Abel’s Encyclopedia of Early Cinema, although the two works are actually very different.¹ The contrast is somewhat akin to that between a fiction film and a documentary: whereas a fiction film is made from a prewritten script, a documentary is made from a looser outline and ultimately is constructed from what the crew manages to film. So to create the previously mentioned Encyclopedia, the editor and his advisory board (myself included) drew up a list of entry headings, and then authors were assigned to write these short entries; for the Companion, one presumes that authors were asked what they could offer, and then the editor arranged the full-length essays that came in.

This means that if one is looking for specific information—for example, on William Selig or the Lumière brothers or on early film in Latin America—the Encyclopedia would be the volume for which to reach (or perhaps Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema or the index to filmmakers in the World).² One would be less likely to find the sought-for information in the Companion, even by using its inadequate index (see later).

Does this reduce the value of the Companion as a reference source? My initial answer would have been yes, and I would have placed this on my collected essays shelves. But then I read the book and modified my view, and I came up with three reasons why reference could be the right place:

1. 1. Wide perspectives. Given that the previously mentioned Encyclopedia and other brief-entry reference books already existed, Gaudreault wisely decided to do something different, and instead he offers us extended arguments by a range of leading scholars on subjects related to early cinema, which together offer an overall impression of the field.

2. 2. Readability. Few people would want to sit down and read an encyclopedia A to Z, whereas I believe that interested scholars will happily read several or all of these articles in their entirety.

3. 3. Teaching. Single articles are an important part of reading lists for students, and many of the contributions herein will be suitable for that purpose. This modular use of books is becoming more common, with some publishers selling single chapters (e.g., of travel guides).

So I suggest that this is indeed a reference book—of sorts. At this point, I will briefly outline the Companion’s articles one by one. Perhaps this seems a somewhat pedantic exercise, but I’d suspect that if potential purchasers must spend more than $150 on the volume, they might appreciate brief summaries of what they are getting.

André Gaudreault opens Part I with an article about the “froth of cultures” as seen in early cinema’s essential intermediality, or “polyphony,” as he calls it. Erkki Huhtamo, who contributes the second essay, has been...