Early American Cinema in Transition: Story, Style, and Filmmaking, 1907–1913

Notes

NOTES Chapter 1. Introduction 1. For the most concise overview of neoformalism and its application to film, see Thompson (1988), 3-44. 2. The original use ofthe term "narrativization," as coined by Stephen Heath, entails "the constant conversion to narrative, catching up the spectator as subject in the image of narrative and in the film as its narration" (1981), 107; critics following Heath tend to stress the ideological import of how the viewing subject becomes figuratively subsumed into the processes of narrative structuration. I prefer Tom Gunning's version, which downplays any Lacanian component. (This allows an understanding of the importance of spectatorial address without raising the issue of subjectivity to the level the original formulation would demand.) Simply put, narrativization involves the increased "subordination of filmic discourse to narrative purposes" (Gunning 1991), 42. 3. For an overview of the Brighton Project, see Bowser (1979),509-38; and Thompson (1984),139-43. 4. For an assessment of the contribution of the Vitagraph retrospective to early film scholarship, see Kramer (1988). 5. See Thompson (1985b), 155-230 and Salt (1983), 83-131. 6. See lesionowski (1987), Gunning (1991), and Pearson (1992); Bowser (1990); deCordova (1990); Sloan (1988); Uricchio and Pearson (1993); and Hansen (1991), Staiger (1995), and Stamp (2000). The most telling indication of the shift the scope of early cinema scholarship undergoes during the 1980s emerges when one compares the two summarizing anthologies published as virtual bookends for the decade. The earlier collection, entitled Film before Griffith, from 1983, ends as its title suggests, with essays considering the status of cinema circa 1907-8, whereas the final section of Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (1990), is entitled "The Continuity System: Griffith and Beyond." 7. Moreover, Russian formalism has often underwritten both their approaches: Thompson has invoked this theoretical tradition quite explicitly, particularly the work of Eikhenbaum, while the conceptual debt appears far less pronounced for Gunning, who shows a preference for Todorov, a descendant ofthe original "Russian 236 Notes to Page 11 237 school." By this, I do not mean to imply that there are not substantive differences in the two scholars' approaches, nor do I mean to suggest that they have pursued equivalent goals in how they have examined transition. Nonetheless, each has contributed immeasurably to our understanding of the relationship between narration and style within this period. Other scholars have offered a different assessment when comparing these two authors. Abel, for one, argues that Thompson's work shares with Barry Salt's an inherent binarism that also valorizes the classical system toward which all preceding style ostensibly leads. He distinguishes the work of Gunning (and Gaudreault) from that of Thompson by noting the former's openness to seeing transition in "dialectical" terms (1994), 102-3. This assessment strikes me as somewhat unfair. While Thompson's account of narrational shifts in The Classical Hollywood Cinema keeps the ramifications for classicism firmly in view, she still devotes ample attention to the singular achievement of transitional cinema, particularly in the context ofa book aiming to explicate the features ofthe later mode; see, as one example, Thompson (1985b), 194. Nonetheless, Gunning's analysis of the nature oftransition probably stands as the more fully elaborated of the two models, though Thompson (1997) bears comparison. 8. In his recent and invaluable account of early cinema in France, Richard Abel has provided yet another, more detailed periodization, chiefly constructed to account for changes in the French cinema, but perhaps more pointedly, designed to demonstrate how scholars have marginalized non-American cinemas within their periodizing schemas. Abel contends that we should understand the transition from the cinema of attractions to a fully narrative cinema as occurring in four stages, beginning with the years 1894-1904 (encompassing the cinema of attractions), followed by 1904-7 (representing the "transition to a narrative cinema"), then 1907-11 (the dominance of the "pre-feature, single-reel story film"), and ending in the 1911-14 period (and the "rise of the feature film") (1994), xv. I would dispute neither the notion that any account of American (or international) cinema during the formative years must at least implicitly acknowledge the influence of French filmmaking practice nor that developments in France may differ in some crucial ways from the circumstances which obtain for American practice. I will address this issue further later in the chapter. 9. The question ofwhen narrative filmmaking achieved dominance within the American marketplace has occasioned considerable scholarly debate, chronicled in Allen (1979), Musser (1984a), and Allen (1984). 10. Even...