Cinema across Media: The 1920s, First International Berkeley Conference on Silent Cinema University of California, Berkeley, February 24-26, 2011

Cinema across Media: The 1920s was a two-and-a-half-day conference organized by the Department of Film and Media at the University of California, Berkeley. Organizers Nicholas Baer, Althea Wasow, and their Berkeley colleagues invited scholars from a variety of disciplines to consider the 1920s as a site of "rich intermedial traffic," with "media" including a range of technologies (photography, phonography, radio, the illustrated press) as well as the physical materials used for aesthetic expression (paint, print, plaster, stone, voice, and bodies). The event brought together thirty-seven panelists from a range of disciplines and 300-400 attendees at the Berkeley Art Museum and the Pacific Film Archive.

In conjunction with the conference, the Pacific Film Archive screened the newest restoration of Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1926), as well as Rien que les heures (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1926) and L'Inhumaine (Marcel L'Herbier, 1924). However, the highlight of the film program was the screening of three lesser-known silent comedies of the 1920s, presented by Paolo Cherchi Usai: Pass the Gravy (Fred L. Guiol, 1928), Should Men Walk Home? (Leo McCarey, 1927), and Springtime Saps (Les Goodwin, 1927). In his introduction, Cherchi Usai situated comedy and slapstick in the context of ways of approaching the canon. He pointed to the relative rigidity that makes the canon easy to slip out of but hard to enter, and observed that the canon has by and large been defined from the point of view of collecting institutions. Cherchi Usai further noted that despite the popularity of a number of iconic silent film comedians, the vast majority of American slapstick remains to be rediscovered. The screenings created an ambiance of Pordenone in Berkeley, and, indeed, the organizers emphasized that the International Berkeley Conference on Silent Cinema is meant to be a scholarly complement to the Giornate del Cinema Muto.

The conference demonstrated that some of the most interesting work currently being produced in Film Studies revolves around the 1920s. Certainly, the most methodologically innovative approaches in the field consider film intermedially. Across the papers and panels, scholarship de-emphasized medium specificity in favor of situating cinema not only in relation to other arts but also as an integrated aspect of the multimedia flourishings of the 1920s.

It was especially fitting that the conference was dedicated to Miriam Hansen, whose scholarship exemplified this kind of cross-media thinking. The conference began with a roundtable tribute to Hansen moderated by Mark Sandberg, who lauded her methodologically groundbreaking research, work which recognized the necessity for intermedial scholarship and expressed a commitment to historically informed film theory and theoretically informed film history. Tom Gunning reflected on his fifteen years as a colleague of Hansen's at the University of Chicago; Dan Morgan shared his experiences as an advisee of Hansen's, and more recently as a collaborator with her; and Linda Williams recounted how, as a member of a "traveling circus of feminist film scholars," she was taken to Germany by "ringmaster" Hansen years ago. The roundtable emphasized Hansen's meticulous attention to her work, her dedication to her students, and her investment in continuing her own work through her students. Gunning concluded his remarks by reading C. P. Cavafy's poem "The Horses of Achilles," in which the immortal horses weep before "the eternal disaster of death." The legacy of Hansen's scholarship was a continuous thread that connected the varied foci of the papers presented.

Scholarship that considers cinema's intermedial impacts, forms, and manifestations is, of necessity, an interdisciplinary endeavor. Not surprisingly, one of the most valuable aspects of the conference was the dialogue fostered between archivists and scholars of art history, architectural history, performance, and, of course, film history, theory, and criticism. In a plenary roundtable moderated by Janet Bergstrom, archivists and archival historians expanded the discourse of 1920s cinema to include investigations of areas often seen as marginal in the context of film scholarship's emphasis on avant-garde practices and discourses of modernism. Notably, Haidee Wasson presented research on the portable film projector, Dino...