Convergence: The
International Journal of
Research into New Media
Technologies
http://con.sagepub.com
Parallel Histories: Early Cinema and Digital Media
Michael Punt
Convergence 2000; 6; 62
DOI: 10.1177/135485650000600205
The online version of this article can be found at:
http://con.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/6/2/62
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Parallel Histories
Early Cinema and Digital Media
Michael Punt
Abstract
: This article which research into a nineteenth-
suggests ways in
as
century technology such early cinema might be valid in
understanding digital technology. It identifies a number of stylistic
resemblances between
cinema,
early personal computing and the
internet. It also claims that there is some value in one
applying
analytical methodology to both  old and  new media. By looking at
an
digital technology through the filter of extremely well developed
discourse in
early film history, softer determinist accounts of digital
can which are not on the
technology emerge dependent premises of
those of various forms of Postmodernist criticism. In a
progress nor
reverse so to that a close
angle, speak, it also argues tracking of digital
as
technology and its critical discourses they unfold in various
entertainment forms can tell us much about the attractions and
fascinations that a had for its audiences.
early cinema had century ago
In short it claims a
continuity in audio-visual history and criticism which
is a valuable even the
addition, antedote, to
hyperbole and
unsupportable technological determinism that digital media has
attracted both in academic and commercial
commentary.
Introduction Over the last two decades we have become accustomed to the
dominance of the blockbuster as
part of Hollywood s  hit-driven
marketing strategy. We also have come to expect that the narratives of
these
high investment products directed at family audiences will be
driven
effects, often
by spectacular special only made possible with the
advent of
digital image manipulation technology. Hollywood has
reinvented itself since the economic lows of the 1970s and now
regards
its
(movies) as multimedia products that simultaneously target a
products
of distinct niche markets.
range
This a number of
approach to movies by the industry has encouraged
revisions in film those
theory, especially among concerning questions of
media
specificity. As No6i Carroll has argued, the eighteenth century
a tenacious
Enlightenment idea of medium specificity still exercises grip
on the
imagination in the arts. It proceeds from the assertion  that each
art form should pursue those effects virtue of its medium it alone
that, in
-
ie of all the arts - can achieve. 2 In this intellectual
regime the task of
a medium for those messages and forms that it
the artist is to examine
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63
alone can As Carroll, this on a
however,
express. points out depends
selective
media,
viewing of the evidence. All he argues, have more
than one constituent
component, and the decision to assign one as
dominant is a domain of
quite arbitrary and determined by history. If
of
expression is already occupied, then another way prioritising the
constituent
parts of a new medium is necessary in order to find a
owes much to new
 vacancy . Carroll s approach digital technology,
which transfers data from one medium to another without
distortion,
and New business
Hollywood s response to the opportunities that this
offers. The blockbuster movie
collapses (media specific) expressive
forms with cultural institutions such as the
cinema, fast food, and
games.
In our critical
so
doing, it forces us to rethink approaches to the movies.
Whereas Carroll has focused on art
theory, and Thomas Schatz (among
others) has
analysed the economics of Hollywood in response to
multimedia reconsideration of film
products, this article proposes a
history
(especially the history of early cinema) in light of digital
technologies.
As more and more research is conducted into the first decades of the
movies - no
especially into technological history - the cinema longer
seems to be the inevitable outcome of a cultural
imperative for
as the intersection of a
rendering movement. It is better explained
as a number of discrete devices and
complex network of discourses and
more or less
technologies already perfected for other purposes.
as historical research into
Consequently, early cinema technology has
discredited of
invention, it finds
teleological explanations of the process
itself more and more involved with
general questions concerning the
history of all technologies. This historiographic trend has prompted
more
speculative and richer questions about the beginning of cinema.
For
example, what other possible histories might there be for a given
invention such as the or the
Cinématographe Kinetoscope? How might
more
symmetrical accounts of technological change that acknowledge
those inventions which fail be
useful, and,
given that there are many
uses for a are the circumstances that favour one
machine, what
possible
use of
technology rather than another?
that to answer these
Increasingly it appears questions is to suggest that
some inventions become
 technologies , and others do not - almost by
accident. In orthodox
histories, for
technological example, Thomas
Edison s a
Kinetoscope is frequently cited as primitive form of the
cinema, even
though his idea of how the invention might be deployed
was was
vastly different from how the technology eventually used.
lavish
Kinetoscopes were peephole machines set up in parlours
intended to attract
high-class passing trade. The idea for this form of
came from the earlier success of
exploitation phonograph parlours,
which themselves were
developed by salesmen unable to shift the
as a business machine.
- merchandise Having sold the rights to the
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64
success,
phonograph before its financial Edison attempted to recover his
a new a
attraction, and
profits with developed  phonograph for the eye
called the
Kinetoscope. He was emphatically not interested in cinema
as a screen seems to have
experience, and the product that he aspired
to was much more like the VCR than the movies. What he envisioned
was volume sales of identical low-cost items to individuals for domestic
(like drums). What he
consumption pre-recorded phonograph got,
was the movies - the industrial manufacture of a
however,
high-cost,
of
high-risk product that is repeatedly sold to a changing group
consumers in built venues.
purpose
As that caused this
reveal, the
early film histories processes
renegotiation of use are difficult (if not impossible) to trace conclusively.
Increasingly, it appears one important factor was that users had
different ideas and made their demands felt in that
ways producers and
exhibitors were able to
respond with different kinds of software/product
and modes of exhibition. The cinema was more uses
shaped by its
than
by the technological features of moving pictures. In this historical
more in common with
approach, early cinema has much digital
technology (especially the domestic PC and the internet) than determinist
can
teleologies readily account for. Many of the social and economic
that have use of both
processes shaped the dominant stylistic
as a
technologies popular expressive medium have many strong
an invention s use once it is
parallels - especially in the renegotiation of
in the
public domain.
Perhaps the most obvious parallel between cinema and digital technology
can be found in the intersection of
advertising and entertainment. One of
the remarkable
insights that the paper print collection at the American
Library of Congress yields is the rich coalition of commercial interests in
the content of very
early films. These prints reveal not only the extent to
which entertainers and theatrical exhibitors used films in the pre-
nickelodeon era to nourish
appetites for their products, but also the
enormous number of trade names that were
incorporated into the views.
Some of this
advertising was obviously coincidental since the American
amusement,
city at the turn of the century was a melange of spectacle
and commerce. Much of
it, however,
appears to have been quite
(such
premeditated, ranging from promotional products
films for branded
as
cigarettes and alcohol) to the pre-meditated placement of frontages,
billboards,
placards and banners in apparently non-commercial  views .
Charles Musser estimates that
 something approaching half of the Edison
films made between the fall of 1896 and the end of 1900 were
subsidised
by transportation companies or other organisations seeking
turns
was less vaudeville
direct; films of
publicity Other advertising
were often  tasters for live
performances in the locality. Shots of the
Lumi6re or of Thomas Edison at were to a
work,
family at play, large
extent, an advertisement for the inventors.
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65
Even the of travel films was intended to
highly popular genre encourage
tourism. As Musser argues
 [t]he often stated claim that such films were
a from the fact that
cheap alternative to travel def~ected attention away
the films were to a considerable extent mode and shown
precisely to
The audiences may have been poor but as
encourage tourism. 5
Edward Tannenbaum the late nineteenth
out,  in
points century the
tourist was not restricted to the small number of
mentality people who
travelled abroad .~ The idea of tourism which the virtual flanerie of
travel films have
promoted stimulated people to visit strange quarters of
the even to decorate their homes
city, visit museums and displays and
with
culturally alien objects. This kind of  travel is the R,5nerie which
Giuliana Bruno ...
suggests is the experience of the  film spectator
someone who sets house amidst the as a
multitude,
up spectator at
home within the theatres crowd. ,.. sees without
seen,
being rejoicing
in his
world, at the centre of the world, he is
incognito: seeing the
nonetheless hidden from it. 7 To this kind of travel
advertising in films
both decorated the environment and acted as a
sign-post to other
pleasures.
In the of the films Musser refers to have been
past two years many
available via an internet link to the
Library of Congress. In using this
access users cannot have failed to notice a
particular form of
remarkable number of
correspondences between the two sets of image
environments that are
being negotiated - early cinema and early
internet
(not least in the dense
layering of overt advertising and product
are web browsers
placement). Not only persistently identified by
animated
logos, but search engines, the basic access tool for the  web
surfer even academic as
(and resources),
promote their own products
well as follow
providing vacant space to sell to sponsors. To hyperlinks
on the internet is to a a more or less
satisfy specific curiosity through
sign-posted shopping mall of still and moving images intent on making
with
cinema,
you even more curious. As early travelling through the
a street or
dataspace involves a kind of cultural tourism - walking
flaneurie in which idle
curiosity stimulates an appetite for products and
places.
Aside from the commercial and intertextual content there are formal
(that is compositional and structural) resemblances between early
cinema and the
digital environment of the internet - not least in the
web pages as
digital film loops (animated GiFs) which
appear on many
lures for the fl6neur s eye. Even
though the Edison films and animated
GiFs are a
separated by century in which the graphic arts (not to say
some
revisions,
moving pictures) have undergone quite extraordinary
there are remarkable similarities. For
example animated Glfs tend to
be
single-shot  scenes in which the action is centred against a still
are the
background. The most ubiquitous examples of this Netscape
move as loaded. like
These,
and Internet Explorer icons that pages are
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66
other
GiFs, describe a storm, a
many process (eg a meteor turning
a man on medium focal
globe, lifting his hat etc) and rely lengths which
Jean Louis Comolli as
regarded symptomatic of cinema striving to
hand, and,
 integrate into the image a vanishing perspective on the one
on the the movement of
other,
people and things along retreating lines
station).&dquo; As with films, GiFs are
(eg, the train at La Ciotat many early
structured on the
compelling repetition of the
palindrome. This simple
patterning, identified convincingly in early Lumi6re films by Marshall
Deutelbaum
(among others) has been attributed
by Livio Belloi directly
to the process of
filming in public.9
Belloi notes the
impact of the cameraman (especially the Lumiere
as flaneurs - are both
operators) figures who participants and observers
of the
metropolitan scene. ° The narrative structure of these early
films, it is
actuality suggested, derives from an  intuitive exploration of
and its
interpersonal space founding rites ... the observer openly bets
on the
conventions, with the sole
subjects observing micro-social
intention of more
directing and regulating their movements.&dquo; Put in
formalist terms, films that
provide the impression of reality  reproduce
a
subject matter within pattern of logic consistent with the logic of the
world that it serve to break
records,
excluding whatever elements might
the narrative flow . 2 As
early cinema restructured metropolitan views
as a social interaction of viewer and a
subject mediated by
the
technological representation, so the animated GIF similarly engages
virtual flaneur in a visual
repetition of the micro-social event of the city
advertisement, which
temporarily catches their distracted attention until
its
redundancy drives them on.
The of the
apparent ease with which many analytical procedures that
have been used to understand film can be transferred to
new
digifialJelectronic media may simply confirm the claim that this
can
loss,
technology replicate all other media experiences without
including the experience of critically engaging with media.
Alternatively they may suggest that there is more than a seductive
economic, social
parallelism here and suggest a closer consideration of
and
technological features of both the cinema and the internet. This
show that in be
may many important ways they may adequately
mapped to each other.
Perhaps the most closely matched correspondence is in the popular
either end of the twentieth
responses to new inventions at century.
Socio-economic studies of the nineteenth
century have noted how
were almost
displays of technology guaranteed to attract huge and
profitable audiences.&dquo; The institutional form of these displays include
world s amusement as
museums, fairs, (such
cheap theatres and parks
Coney Island), organised sport and public demonstrations of particular
as the
inventions such Cin6matographe. The economic elegance of
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67
these attraction built on the
interdependence of service providers
interests) and
(traction companies, electricity suppliers, and real estate
particular entertainments. The imperative to maximise profits in
response to technological change stimulated coalitions between utilities
and leisure in David
how, for
unpredictable ways. Nye has shown
example, the electrification of the trailey-car network freed land outside
the
stables, and
city, which was formerly used for horse livery. 14
Moreover with a short extension of these
transportation lines (to power
amusement
rides), the weekend
park lighting and surplus in supply
could be a
exploited for profit. As consequence companies more used
to
servicing the corporate sector became involved in popular
entertainments and even
by investing in parks and picnic groves,
buying National League baseball teams.15 Many providers understood
that the was a formative
trolley ride part of the entertainment
experience and offered  all in tickets for some attractions that included
the entrance fee
price of the trolley fare. Customers used these
either to foreshadow the
particular trolley rides in quite distinct ways -
thrills of the white knuckle rides to come, to a
provide refreshing breeze
in as the
trams, or to a sense of
open top produce gregarious solidarity
crowd on a venue.
converged single According to David
Nye, rides to
amusement of
parks eventually accounted for between 30-50 per cent
some were
company s traffic. Whatever the profits and pleasures that
to be were on a
however,
gained, they dependent complex financial
on a
ecology founded popular curiosity and fascination with
technology. This coalition of distributed business interests has been
duplicated in the development of digital technologies.
The owes
internet, like the
Cin6matographe, something to both scientific
and a resource.
military research originally not intended as public
intended,
Chronophotographic research in the nineteenth century was
other
among things, to refine bloodstock techniques for the cavalry and
to discover less arduous ways for men to march.
ARPAnet,
Similarly the
forms the backbone of the
which
internet, was an American Cold War
network intended to
provide the illusion that communications could be
maintained in the event of a total nuclear war.16 Quite an
quickly,
academic
community with access to mainframe computers exploited
their
over-capacity and built an informal academic network. A wider
was also
curiosity about the possibilities of electronic communication
stimulated as IP
by business providers such Sharp, and Prestel. Where
academics were interested in the
exchange of data, the wider
saw the as
community technology broadening the possibilities of wider
social interaction and
sector,
pleasure. In the service French Telecom s
decision to
provide Paris subscribers with a free  Minitel information
system (a telephone network extension which replaced the paper
a whole new infotainment
directory), spawned industry. With both
 Minitel and access to the
internet,
public telephone and cable service
even further in the entertainment
providers found themselves implicated
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68
industry.&dquo; As the prospect of  convergence between the PC and
television becomes a
technological and economic reality, utilities will
once
again need to consider their relationship with unaccustomed
partners in entertainment and even education.
In addition to some
conditions, the
aspects of socio-economic
complexity of the culture of technology which gave rise to the cinema
and
digital technology also bear comparison. Undoubtedly the popular
attraction of new inventions in the nineteenth some
reflected, to
century
even
extent, a
widespread perception of cultural (and geographical)
transformations that were the consequence of new
technology. The
universal
imperative to regulate nature in the service of improved
conditions for mankind
during this period focused inventors minds. In
the last decade of the nineteenth
221,500 patents
century, for example,
were filed in America alone.
Apart from enormous civil engineering
areas in which inventors worked were the
projects, the most prolific
mechanisation of
agriculture, transport and communications technology,
and medicine. A number of
scholars, dissatisfied with the
simplistic
determinism of romantic histories of the invention of
cinema, have
responded by seeking to show how the last two categories in particular
the
stimulated the scientific research that laid the foundations for
a
Cin6matographe and Kinetoscope. There is temptation, however to
regard the close of the last century and the end of this as a period of
massive
technological change in which the only possible response to
bewilderment is excited confusion. Whilst this
intriguingly explains
some features of the cinema and its uses in that we
subsequent ways
can understand
today, it defers questions concerning the causes of
technological change to the questionable idea of Progress.
The idea of
does,
Progress arguably, account for why particular devices
were invented at a certain
moment, but it does not
explain why similar
cultural different
imperatives were resolved technologically in very
Bernard and Michael Carlson have revisited the Edison archive
ways.
with
precisely this in mind.18 Using concepts from cognitive psychology,
they have tried to account for the invention of the cinema by posing the
broader
question:  How do inventors create new technologies? They
have a
suggested that inventors might be engaged in cognitively
of
impenetrable process representing mental models that come to them
means.
through various
Carlson and Gorman s owes much to recent work in
study Technology
Studies. One of the revisionist
approaches in the field has considered
the extent to which can be as a social
technology regarded principally
construction. Weiber John
Bilker, Law, and Trevor Pinch, others,
among
see the as an
history of technology ongoing interaction between
individuals or
socially dominant and particular inventions.
groups
the view that
_ Their position, which fundamentally opposes technology is
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69
un autonomous
agent of historical change, is epitomised in David Nye s
account of the electrification of America.
Introducing his study he points
out that  electrification was not a come from outside
thing that society
and had an was an internal
rather, it
&dquo;impact&dquo;: development shaped by
its social nexus. Put another way each an extension of
technology is
human lives: someone makes it, someone owns
it, some it,
oppose
all
it, and
many use interpret it. 19 His position in respect of electrical
distribution focuses attention on the value of
symmetrical economic
histories that examine the causes and
determining effects of business
failure. be a
Ultimately this may dangerously ahistorical and idealist
nuance,
position which cannot be sustained without but it begins to
between cinema and
suggest that some of the congruence digital
can be accounted for not that but
look,
technology just in the way they
in the processes by which new are invented and how
technologies they
become
public property.
A revisionist of cinema
approach to the emergence technology not
based on the also some of the
inevitability of progress may help unlock
mysteries of the origins of the personal computer. Robert Cringely, for
example, takes the view that technological innovation is shaped by the
hardware, the
possibilities of the imagination of those who come in
contact with
them, and, most
important, of the accidents of the market
and
applies this to digital technology_ In Cringely s history of the
personal computer he charts a transformation from the fixed bulky
machines accessed
by the professional elite to ephemeral, simple and
television sets and the
cheap software solutions which will snap into
as far as he is
concerned, is the interaction
phone lines. The causality,
of a new kind of
machine with  disenfranchised nerds like Bill Gates
who didn t meet the macho standards of American maleness and so
looked for a their own adult world and
way to create through that
creation,
gain the admiration of their peers. 2° In this seductive social
homology, Cringely suggests that personal computers were not
inevitable but are the fallout from  nerds
replacing the heavy-duty
muscle of the
corporate hardware giants with  brainy software.
Unlike other who tell
George Gilder and many high profile media gurus
the
 winners ,
story of computing from the point of view of the Cringely
a more
provides symmetrical causality for the various changes in
hardware and software
technology. He traces the realisation of
some individuals associated with the
particular personal ambitions of
as well as the missed
industry, opportunities of some others. He shows
how certain
inhibitions,
people with particular talents and similar social
were
accidentally met others (some of whom had venture capital) and
able to
(IBM)
temporarily challenge the hegemony of the market leader
an alternative view of the
by developing computer as a personal (rather
than
corporate) machine. With well~hosen examples of spectacular
a
- financial misjudgements by major players in the industry, he shows
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70
between established powers in the
gap industry and maverick
Bill
entrepreneurs (like the young Gates) who were closely in touch with
an alternative view of what
computers and computing  meant . This
small, but obsessive,
interpretative group was a constituency of
amateurs who were interested in
computing relative to semi-recreatior~al
uses. Once cemented their
equipped with basic machines many
affiliation with the
community of other enthusiasts by writing inventive
software, which
they freely shared. Subsequently the more personally
ambitious
(Bill Gates and Steve Jobs for example) began to exploit this
IBM, who were
commercially, and companies such as formerly
committed to the idea of the
machine, faced
computer as a corporate
as a domestic
competition from entrepreneurs who reinterpreted it
apparatus.
Ultimately Cringely is concerned with the power politics of Silicon
some brilliant
Valley. His conceptual premise and methodology yields
insights. Although he begins with grass-roots responses to computing,
his account
remains,
predominantly teleological and  top down . There
is, for
example, little consideration of what the personal computer
for as is clear from the
meant, or now means,
 ordinary users . Yet
new
example of the phonograph and Kinetoscope, when technologies
meet can be
popular audiences they significantly transformed beyond
the inventor s
recognition (process that can continue long after product
development). Over the century it has migrated from the parlour
room to  middle brow cult
a
through the teen bed-sitting apparatus and
a
(somewhat ironically) has become corporate machine used
predominantly by radio stations and club DJs. Similarly in the history of
cinema
technology, the basic apparatus became the foundation of a
mass cultural of the interaction of
experience as a consequence
economic, and social determinants which
technological, changed its
meaning. The power politics of Silicon Valley cannot explain fully the
transmutation of the
personal computer from the Altair to the iMac
without
acknowledging the family politics of restless teenagers and
anxious
parents.
Reading through Cringely s economic history with the benefit of
Technology Studies it becomes increasing apparent that the mistakes in
can be attributed to a
product design and development
of invention and innovation
misunderstanding of the processes by
established
(and not so established) corporations. In particular the
cardinal error of over
estimating the control that the innovator has on
the market
through subscribing to unsophisticated ideas about
the
technology and history. This often appears to drive decision-making
of commercial
as,
developers with often disastrous results for example,
in the
development of CD-ROM.21 CD-based multimedia technology
made
simple low-investment products possible which could have
the
- transformed traditional ways public interacted with both textual and
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71
visual data.
According to industry  vapourware , interactive CD-ROM
based on
architecture, was
hypermedia going to alter education and
This was
medium, it
popular entertainment in unbounded ways.
a
predicted, would be used to store data in great variety of forms (text,
sound,
movies) which would be accessed
image, graphics, associatively
to a
provide powerful value-added learning tool. CD-ROMs would
transform libraries
by eliminating the costly storage of volumes and by
was
providing different modalities of access to data would ultimately, it
claimed, affect short, its most avid
scholarship. In promoters insisted that
the CD would be a new
episteme. None of this seems to have
happened except in a number of highly specific applications, mostly
a
Instead,
concerning industry-training programmes. technology-led
discourse means that now, even at the
entry level authoring requires
a
high investment in baroque and often unreliable melange of devices
cards, scanners, cameras, an
ranging from video and sound digital
assortment of of
(incompatible) storage systems, and a complex array
now
memory hungry software. Playing them back likewise requires
relatively high specification equipment far removed from the original
vision of a data
equivalent to the Sony WalkmanTM. The revolutionary
have been lost to a deterministic
possibilities for CD-ROM appear to
understanding of the relationship between culture and technology while
the medium itself appears to have been
eclipsed by the internet.
The
problematic of technological determinism has recently become
a
something of topic in Technology Studies. Merrit Roe Smith and Leo
Marx have some the debates in a
attempted to bring sequence to
collection of
position statements.&dquo; Their view is that technology may
a
change society, but not in a regression along single line of
determinism. As who do not use
out,  Even those
they point computers
have had to accommodate their ways to some of its
requirements in
offices, banks, libraries, schools, airlines,
supermarkets, post hospitals,
or the
military services - few departments of contemporary life remain
unaffected new information are
by the technology. 23 Nonetheless they
consensus in a
attempting to reach some polemical opposition between
determinists and constructivists. At its most extreme R.L. Heilbroner is
the
founding proponent of  hard technological determinism. He
declares
unequivocally that  Machines make history by changing the
material conditions of human existence. 24 For some this is far too
or
reductive,
politically unacceptable, simply too selective of the
evidence. At the other
(one which more
pole closely resembles the
orthodoxies in
studies) is the view that the
contemporary film history of
technology cannot be independent of human actions. Smith and Marx
that this more
argue approach leads to the exacting and provocative
was the innovation made
questions in the historian s tool kit. Why by
these was it
people and not others? Why possible at this time and in
this or who
benefited, and
place rather than another time place? Who
_ suffered~ - in fact the very questions which have driven  New film
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72
are informecf
history since the 1970s by this actor theory of technology
and social a more
change. Between the two sophisticated determinist
also a
however,
(if
approach, points to the influence such widespread
on
culture, has
misplaced) belief in the idea that technology changes
the way that of social and
technology is manifest in the processes
economic decision
making. In short the widespread credibility of the
ensures its effectiveness.
concept of technological determinism
At stake in this debate may be the limits and scope of Modernist
useful
progress as a explanatory concept. It severely challenges the
extent to which it is useful to as a
regard history story of an avant-garde
destined to
change perception through different kinds of transgression.
The inclination here of a
postmodernist debate is supported by Leo
Marx s
argument, which suggests that the decline of the idea of
progress began mid-century. He upholds the notion that before the
Second World War there was a boundless
optimism founded in part by
was
technological development. It challenged, he suggests, by
Hiroshima, and more Island,
recently Chernobyl, Bhopal, Three Mile
acid rain and a
global warming. These disasters shattered the belief in
 technocratic idea of
progress.&dquo;
The social consequences of this loss of faith has manifest itself in a
vigorous political opposition in the  Green movement and nourished a
postmodern pessimism which nonetheless has to account for scientific
advances, for
example in social hygiene and medicine. This
coexistence of no more
oppositional responses to new technology is
evident than in those whose lives are
shaped by digital technology and
Marx s case is that in this mixture of
yet oppose it. opposition and
pessimism the credibility of technological determinism is reinforced and
so is as an autonomous
consequently technology s significance agent of
historical move he is able to relocate
change. In this technology in
can show how the very idea of
postmodernism, and technology,
as it was manifest in the nineteenth
especially century as an abstract
notion is now as it was then.
substantially the same
There is, however some evidence that what he has identified as
Postmodern a much earlier manifestation. As the
pessimism has history
of the nineteenth
century unfolds in all its complexity it becomes
different responses
increasingly apparent that there were a great many
to the even at the moment of its
technology triumphal conquest of
arduous nature. Both Wosk and Rosalind Williams have shown
Julie
how an ambivalence to
technology and the anxieties caused by large
civil be traced in
engineering projects and industrial processes, can
salon art and literature of the
period. Williams has suggested that the
boom in as an entertainment in the latter
technology part of the century
marked a shift away from active
engagement in science towards a
as a
passive consumption of its results as a spectacle; that is
more
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73
consumer own sake. In this
product for its consumption the new
contract between and was both
consumer
technology complex and
contradictory.
Nowhere is this more
complexity apparent than in early cinema. We
cannot fail to notice that time and
again it is the cinema which is the
cause of
as,
pain and discomfort for example,  countrymen are fooled
trains, men and women
by the image of onrushing caught in infidelities
of the camera, and endless are
by the unrelenting eye punishments
meted out for have been
voyeurism. For whilst audiences may
fascinated
seance,
by the technological wonder of the these viewings
were
frequently integrated with other pleasures. Thomas Elsaesser
negotiates this paradox through his reading of Siegfried Kracauer.
Noting that Kracauer focused not on the dialectical relationship
between
culture, but in the identification of:
high and low
...rootlessness, isolation, emotional
physical insecurity and
psychological stress as the material conditions which
necessitated a new life one
style: increasingly dedicated to
what we would now call
conspicuous consumption and
which Kracauer was the first to
leisure, and
conspicuous
a new
recognise was historically phenomenon. No longer did
those who made up the class demand from art and
entertainment that it
form, nor
represent them in an idealised
that it should show their lives as or
individually meaningful
heroised in the attitude of as was a
struggle, typical of
as the
bourgeois form such novel: but simply that it should be
able to was as the
aestheticise, turn into
play what experienced
violence, the
primary reality of everyday life : depersonalisation,
drill and routine of the
working day.26
Kracauer
responded to particular conditions in Germany in the late
1920s, but the extent to which his
writing can be mapped onto both the
immigrant centre in America at the turn of the century and the
of
use
(in all its subversive
pleasurable digital technology guises, e-mail
chit
chat, net
games, hacking and the circulation of
surfing,
transgressive images etc) proposes a long-standing fragility in the belief
idea of progress.
in a on the technocratic
Modernity based
If was used as an aestheticisation of the drill and
early cinema dangers
of both as an
working-life and the city, it was also used implicit criticism
of the scientific trend towards instrumentation in a sense.
postmodernist
In both America and
Europe popular participation in scientific enquiry
was
regarded until the middle of the nineteenth century. Indeed
highly
little distinction was made between the
professional and lay scientist.
men with little
Working-class disposable income would spend relatively
sums on
large subscription to amateur science societies and journals
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74
and
actively participate in the scientific project. Women too had
access to the books and
journals and it is well noted that in America
was women
teaching of science in schools predominantly done by (and
was not a
consequently patriarchal discourse until relatively late).
However as
professional scientists sought to elevate their social and
financial status with a career more esoteric
structure, so
increasingly
and
costly apparatus was used to confirm scientific theory. Royal
Societies
imposed conditions of entry that excluded not only lay persons
but also technicians who built demonstration machines for
public
lectures. As scientists became more committed to instrumental vision
(not entirely without opposition in their own ranks - including Marey) so
working class participation in the Enlightenment project of the
was reduced and
acquisition and circulation of knowledge finally
eliminated.
By the turn of the century the transition was complete, and
it is see the use of
possible to Kinetoscope and the Cin6matographe
used as entertainment as
symptomatic of the professionalisation of late
as a
nineteenth-century science which increasingly presented its findings
spectacle to be consumed rather than a project in which all could
once in the
participate.&dquo; However public domain these spectacles
were  used a and others
by audiences in variety of ways, some serious
more
quite flippant and subversive. But perhaps significantly the
dedication of scientific machine like the
Cin6matographe to frivolous
was in some sense a and
pleasure revenge on a science technology
that had abandoned them. In
short,
by the close of the nineteenth
were the
concerned,
century, as far as popular audiences compelling
on the technocratic idea
Modernism, in as far as it was based
logic of
of progress may have
already been quite weak.
The from this more nuanced historical
question that emerges approach
to
technology, culture and digital media is this: to what extent might
research into a
nineteenth-century technology such as early cinema
all, the
history be valid in understanding digital technology? After
one
mapping of the history of technology onto another may ultimately
be no more than a rhetorical
prove to strategy, arbitrarily imposing
on coincidence is often an
pattern on chaos - recognising that relying
act of
are,
desperation. There however a number of stylistic
resemblances between
early cinema and digital technology, at least as
it the internet and in
appears on personal computing. There is also
some value in one
applying analytical methodology to both  media .
an
By looking at digital technology through the filter of extremely well
developed discourse in early film history, softer determinist accounts of
can which are not on the
digital technology emerge dependent
those of various Postmodernisms.
premises of progress nor Reciprocally,
as Carroll seems a
if, convinced,
media-specificity is fallacy of
Modernism as I have tried to show here may well have been
(which,
some as the
already discredited in quarters as early beginning of the
a close
_ century), then perhaps tracking of digital technology and its
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75
critical discourses as can tell
they unfold in various entertainment forms
us much about the attractions and fascinations that a
early cinema had
for its audiences.
century ago
There is no inherent
valuable, but it is
guarantee that this could be
surprising that even the most basic methodologies and conceptual
models in film studies are unfamiliar in the literature on
media,
digital
morphological resemblances between early cinema
especially when the
and are so
digital moving images in the public domain suggestive.
be a worthwhile exercise. Moreover in a final
Exploring them may
also be time to notice that as the debates
re~erse-angle shot it may
about Modernism and that the
technology develop, it appears early
cinema or
may yield some of its more difficult history to postmodernist,
at least non-modernist theoretical models. This will mean
looking at the
invention and innovation of the cinema as a of
technology convergence
non-hierarchical discourses which a machine open to
produced plural
interpretation and constant reinterpretation through history. It may even
mean that instead of as one
regarding the cinema of the formative
more
life, it valuable, at
experiences in the making of modern might be
this
cinema, to consider it as the
point in the historiography of early
a
(and
beginning of the making of postmodern life which bourgeois
academic) culture has been slow to recognise.
1
Notes Thomas New
Schatz,  The Movies, eds.
Hollywood , in Film Theory Goes to The
8-
J.
Collins, H. Radner, A. Preacher Collins (London: 1993), pp.
Routledge
36.
2 Noël
Carroll,
Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: University of
Cambridge, 1996), p. 26.
3 See for
Chanan, The Dream That ,
Kicks
example Michael (London: Routledge &
BFI,
Paul, 1980); and Noel Burch, Life to Those Shadows (London:
Kegan
1990).
4 Charles
Musser, Edison Motion Pictures, An Annotated
Filmography 1890-1900
33.
Press,
(New York: Smithsonian Institute 1997), p.
5 33.
Musser,
p.
6 Edward
Tannenbaum, 1900 The Generation before the Great War (New York:
Anchor
Press/Doubleday, 1976), p. 201.
7 Giuliana
Bruno, (Princeton, New Jersey:
Streetwalking On A Ruined Map
Princeton
Press,
University 1993), p. 49.
8
Jean Camera, Field ,
Comolli,
 Techniques and Ideology: Perspective, Depth of in
Narrative, Reader, ed.
Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Philip Rosen (New
York: Columbia 443
Press, 1986),
University p.
9 Marshall  Structural Before
Deutelbaum, Films , in Film
Patterning in the Lumière
John 299-310.
Griffith, ed. Fell Press, 1983),
(Berkeley: University of California pp.
10 Louis
Belloï,  Lumière and his View: The Camerman s Cinema ,
Eye in Early
of Radio and no. 4 461-474.
Historical Journal Film, Television, 15,
(1995), pp.
11 472.
Belloï,
p.
12 Andre
Gaudreault,
 Temporality and Narrativity in Early Cinema , in Film Before
ed. Fell
Griffith Press, 1983)
, John
(Berkeley: University of California p. 312.
13 For an overview of the
popular entertainment in America during the nineteenth
Nasaw,
century see David Going Out (New York: Basic Books, 1993).
Downloaded from http://con.sagepub.com by Michal Pabis on February 27, 2007
© 2000 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
76
14 David
MIT,
Nye, Electrifying America (Cambridge, Mass.: 1990), pp.11-12.
15
Nasaw, p. 97.
16 For a discussion of how in the
period of nuclear diplomacy defence strategies
were as see
John We Now Know:
Goddis,
developed  weapons Rethinking the
Cold War
History University 1997).
, (Oxford: Oxford Press,
17 For an overview of the
development of the internet and its relationship to the
of the PC and television see Michael Machines:
Punt,  Accidental
convergence
The
Issues, 14,
Impact of Popular Participation in Computer Technology , Design
no. 1
(1998), pp. 54-81.
18 Bernard as a
Carlson, and Michael Gorman,
 Understanding Invention Cognitive
Process: The case of Thomas Edison and
1888-91 , Social
Early Motion Pictures,
Studies of no. 20 387-430.
Science
,
(1990), pp.
19 11-12.
Nye, pp
20 Robert
Cringely, Accidental Empires; How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their
Millions, (London:
Battling Foreign Competition, and Still Can t Get A Date
Penguin, 1996), p. 8.
21 See Michael Radical
Punt,  CD ROM,
Nostalgia, Cinema History, Cinema
no. 28 387-394.
Leonardo
,
Theory, and New Technology , (1995) pp.
22 Merritt
Smith, and Leo Marx, eds Does
Technology Drive History? The Dilemma
of
MIT, 1996).
Technological Determinism (Cambridge, Mass.:
23 Smith and
Marx,
p ix.
24 Robert
Heilbroner, Revisited , in Smith and Marx.
 Technological Determinism p.
69.
25 Leo
Marx,  The Idea of Pessimism , in Does
Technology and Postmodern
Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism, eds.
Merritt Smith and Leo Marx 237-258.
MIT, 1996),
(Cambridge, Mass.: pp.
26 Thomas  Cinema - The or "The Gamble with
Elsaesser,
Irresponsible Signifier
40
or Cinema no.
(1988),
History": Film Theory Theory , New German ,
Critique
65-89.
pp.
27 Michael
Punt,  "Well Who You Gonna Believe Me or Your Own
Eyes?". A
Problem of no. 36
Digital Photography , The Velvet Light Trap (1995), pp. 3-20.
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© 2000 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.