Reading the Cinematograph: The Cinema in British Short Fiction 1896–1912 (review)

At the turn of the nineteenth century, the appearance and rapid proliferation of moving pictures across the United States and Europe occasioned a great deal of debate concerning the cultural and ethical implications of this new technology. Alongside innovations such as the Röntgen ray, the automobile, and the telephone, the cinematograph was taken by various commentators to embody key aspects of the period’s ideas about modernity. Some writers focused upon the spectacular aspects of film shows in relation to the changing nature of everyday life; some sought to extend a general debate about the alienating effects of modernity, which had earlier been associated with the development of the train and the modernization of metropolitan spaces; and others found that film typified the tendency of modern technologies to shrink the world, bringing distant individuals and foreign scenes into contact with domestic audiences. These debates were not reflections of some hidden or implicit aspect of the technology, but were part of an open public discourse characteristic of cultural critics and the promoters and viewers of moving pictures alike. They were a vital component, too, of the stabilisation of the new medium within existing entertainment institutions, including British music halls, fairgrounds, town halls, shop shows, lecture theatres, and, from about 1908, new exhibition spaces known in Britain as electric theatres, picture theatres, or cinemas. From at least 1896, then, discourses concerning the function of moving pictures proliferated, and these debates can be seen productively as both a reflection of prevalent cultural themes and anxieties and an extension or critique of changing institutional trends within the nascent industry.

Previous successful collected editions of material seeking to represent early debates on film have focused principally on the periodical press and newspapers (for instance Stephen Herbert’s three-volume A History of Early Film [2000] and Colin Harding and Simon Popple’s In the Kingdom of the Shadows [1996]), or on early images and caricatures relating to moving pictures (for instance Stephen Bottomore’s I Want to See this Annie Mattygraph [1995]). Reading the Cinematograph focuses specifically on the representation of film shows within short stories, a form whose heyday transpired at roughly the same time. Concentrating on this form enables Andrew Shail to create an interesting format, interspersing eight short stories of varying length (and as contributor Tom Gunning notes, of varying “literary value” [116]) with critical essays intended to draw out aspects of their broader cultural or institutional significance. It also enables the contributors to undertake an interestingly interdisciplinary mode of engagement with these stories: chapters are at once focused on the stories as evidence for film-historical thinking and as examples of literary prose. Contributors include film historians and literary scholars, but the volume forms part of the Exeter Studies in Film History series and leans understandably toward the study of film. The standout essays in the collection, however, tend to be those that address both in some detail, in part because these essays are also able to account implicitly for the troubled status of fictional representations as evidence.

Shail’s introduction provides some valuable insight on the volume’s format and mode of analysis, and it is clear that the evidence presented by the stories reveals a great deal about the “perceived nature of film” during this period (14). The introduction also provides some useful context concerning the development of the short story at the turn of the century, clarifying that this literary form benefitted from several of the same market trends and industrial processes that sustained the growth of film. These explanations help to justify the culturalist rationales that preoccupy several of the following chapters that explore the role played by the cinematograph in short stories. For example, Lise Shapiro Sanders’s account of the story “Love and the Bioscope” (1912) emphasises its participation in what she calls “the discourse of modernity” (204), whose features include...