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3. Joyce, Early Cinema and the Erotics of Everyday Life
- Cork University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
At first, nothing much seems to happen in Thomas Edison’s 1901 film What Happened on 23rd Street, New York City.1 It shows an everyday scene, full of busy passers-by. However, a few boys and men appear to be loitering on the lookout, and the film’s promising title invites its spectators to do likewise. A grate in the foreground is pointed up when a woman strolls into shot, almost walks across it, then swerves aside. Finally, a young couple, talking intently, appear in the frame, and a flash of stockinged leg is the viewer’s reward as a draft from the grate blows the woman’s skirt up around her knees. What Happened on 23rd Street is a collision of categories. What initially seems to be an actuality film, akin to other early films of street scenes, turns out to be a sex comedy. Accordingly, the Edison Company placed it in its 1902 catalogue of ‘humorous films’: In front of one of the large newspaper offices on that thoroughfare is a hot air shaft through which immense volumes of air are forced by means of a blower. Ladies in crossing these shafts often have their clothes slightly disarranged (it may be said, much to their discomfiture ). As our picture was being made a young man escorting a young lady, to whom he was talking very earnestly, comes into view and walks slowly along until they stand directly over the air shaft. The young lady’s skirts are suddenly raised to, you might say, an almost unreasonable height, greatly to her horror and much to the amusement of the newsboys, bootblacks and passers by.2 This account carefully maintains the film’s instability of genre. The leg-show punchline is, it implies, entirely accidental – achieved ‘as our picture was being made’ – while the camera crew was innocently filming a street scene. By chance, an actuality film becomes something more enticing, a moment of exposure adding value to a well-established genre. However, the catalogue’s archness of tone implies its disingenuity. The 43 3. Joyce, Early Cinema and the Erotics of Everyday Life KATHERINE MULLIN location of the film, on 23rd Street outside the Flatiron building, was known as the windiest corner of the city, and in 1901 a famous ventilation grate made it notorious as an attraction for loafing males.3 Positioning a camera in front of the grate was an act of calculation – as, perhaps, was the hiring of an actress to walk across it at just the right moment. The title What Happened on 23rd Street, New York City is not simply documentary pedantry, then, but a come-on to those in the know. The film creates a drama of serendipitous exposure in the city streets, supposedly accidentally given and opportunistically gathered. That drama is akin to the kinds of urban visual pleasures keenly sought throughout Ulysses. Whether struggling to catch a glimpse of a stranger’s ankle in ‘Lotus-Eaters’, or entranced by Gerty MacDowell’s display of ‘shapely limbs encased in finespun hose’ (U, 13.170) on Sandymount Strand, Leopold Bloom shares the tastes of those hoping for a glimpse of stocking on the corner of 23rd Street. Yet there is more to the relationship between Joyce and early cinema than this apparent coincidence of subject. For the choreography, the sensibility and, ultimately, the punitive denouements of a body of early films seem to leave their traces on comparable moments of sexual frisson in Ulysses. The first films were actualities, showing brief scenes of everyday life such as the Lumière brothers’ 1895 La Sortie des Usines Lumière à Lyon (Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory) or, in the north of England and Ireland, Mitchell and Kenyon’s local ‘factory-gate films’ of the late 1890s.4 As Tom Gunning has argued, these films introduced a ‘cinema of attractions ’ – an ‘exhibitionist cinema’ conceived ‘less as a way of telling stories than as a way of presenting a series of views to an audience, fascinating because of their illusory power’.5 Their appeal derived from the novelty of recording ordinary events in a moving form, and their focus on the everyday was reinforced by their modes of exhibition. In ‘Nausicaa’, Bloom recalls seeing ‘Mutoscope pictures in Capel street: for men only’ (U, 13.794), and he participates in a form of film spectatorship that predated Joyce’s foundation of the Cinematograph Volta in 1909. Before 1909, when the first Cinematograph Act encouraged the opening...