Early Cinema Today: The Art of Programming and Live Performance. KINtop. Studies in Early Cinema I (review)

If a genealogy for the "performative turn" in the study of early cinema were to be proposed, two groups of scholars would be identified as blazing a trail: André Gaudreault and Germain Lacasse, who championed the role of the moving picture lecturer in an issue of iris which they co-edited in 1996,¹ and Frank Kessler, Sabine Lenk, and Martin Loiperdinger who, faithfully nursing the predominantly German-language journal, KINtop, since 1992, have taken the bold initiative of inaugurating a new imprint devoted to early cinema, the first fruits of which, the subject of this review, demonstrate the longevity of concerns that they share with Gaudreault and Lacasse. That the "performative turn" may prove to be far-reaching (similar to the turn to "the new film history" which followed in the wake of the 1978 FIAF Brighton conference) may also be proposed, since the recent 2012 Domitor conference has addressed some of the concerns considered in the essays which Loiperdinger brings together for this collection. In short, the collection presents a wide range of approaches to the programming of early film, both historically and in the present-day context, while sounding a vibrant and timely call to review the relation that has evolved between scholars, archivists, and film programmers in matters relating to the programming of early cinema today.

That the domain of historical reception has significantly broadened in recent years is the first thing that strikes the reader. Including essays by archivists, curators, academics, and cultural interventionists who demonstrate a flair for combining these professional activities, the early part of the collection presents a series of models for programming early cinema. Eric de Kuyper, programming at Cinematek (the former Cinémathèque royale de Belgique), has recently sought to redefine the institutional relation that has obtained between film archive, museum, and cultural organisation. Recognising the degree to which cinema in the earliest years was rooted in nineteenth-century culture, de Kuyper proposes that a frame of reference can be reanimated today when early film, presented in a culture where "event" is valorised at the expense of spectacle, can once again be celebrated as performance rather than as an object of traditional academic research.²

Alternative strategies in programming are also explored by a number of other contributors. Mariann Lewinsky, director, since 2004, of A Hundred Years Ago, a series of programmes shown at the Cinema Ritrovato Festival in Bologna, writes about strategies she has developed that militate against an evolutionary approach to film history. For Lewinsky, films may be presented either as documents of a past time or as an aesthetic experience available in the present, approaches which favour film being presented in keeping with its historical moment(s). Lewinsky and Madeleine Bernstorff, a member of the Programming Committee of the International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen, since 2000, also discuss initiatives behind a programme of films on the suffragette movement which they curated at the Zeughauskino, Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin, in September 2010: Frühe Interventionen: Suffragetten - Extremistinnen der Sichtbarkeit (Early Interventions: Suffragettes - Extremists of Visibility). By harnessing films of the suffrage movement between 1900 and 1914 with films that commented on the movement, they were able to represent a variety of competing dynamics to an audience which was not only diverse, but challenged the homogeneity often associated with programming and academic investigation. Echoing these concerns, a short piece by Tom Gunning revels in Lewinsky and de Kuyper's programming of experimental film between 1898 and 1918 at the 2010 Oberhausen festival ("Vom Meeresgrund", From the Bottom of the Sea), where films grouped around themes (colour in early film, images of labour, travel, the new woman) supervised the adrenalin rush on which early film thrived, contrary to many contemporary presentations which primarily rely on historical contextualisation.

The range of programming strategies and the diversity of audience involvement are central to concerns considered by...