Early Cinema Overview

Although the study of early cinema continues to evolve, over the past several decades some core and enduring methods and concerns have emerged that help to define the contours of a relatively distinct field of research. Broadly, “early” cinema includes the period of international film history spanning from around 1890 through 1915, that is, from the emergence of motion pictures as a “new” medium to the large-scale institutionalization of narrative feature filmmaking practices. The periodization has strong roots in the 1978 International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) conference, which brought together scholars and archivists who were interested in significantly reimagining the relevance of the cinema’s early years to film studies as a discipline. The conference hosted some seminal conversations that would eventually develop into several unifying discourses that are central to the field and that concern the following in a variety of ways:

Origins: There is a general investment in rethinking teleological histories that bracket off the early years of film as a “primitive” period relative to the feature filmmaking industry that developed in the teens. Included in this is an understanding that the cinema has multiple so-called origins, some of which place “film” in genealogies of media and what André Gaudreault has called “cultural series” that span centuries.

The Archive: There is a strong commitment to collaborations between film scholars and archivists, and to archival-based research—using film prints and other primary source materials—especially research at the margins of canonical film histories, that seeks to understand, for example, early cinema’s diverse economic, industrial, aesthetic, exhibition, and reception contexts on their own terms.

Intermediality: There is a strong interest in studying early cinema as part of a broader constellation or network of media, practices, and institutions with which fin-de-siècle motion pictures shared affinities, including vaudeville, amusement parks, world’s fairs, the magic theatre, popular science shows, and department stores, to name a few.

Education: Much scholarly work on early cinema has helped to bring the once-marginalized field seriously within the purview of cinema and media studies. There is thus a related effort to promote not only scholarly research on this period but also rigorous and innovative approaches to teaching it.

With its interest in the longue durée and in placing the cinema in a broader intermedial context, the field of early cinema studies has strong affinities with the study of early popular visual culture, media archaeology, and histories of “pre-” or “proto-” cinematic media from chronophotography to the magic lantern and shadow plays. Among the many questions that research in this area engages are, How did fin-de-siècle audiences receive the new medium in light of existing media? Where did the cinema make its home before the stabilization of the film industry? What impact did motion pictures have on other media, institutions, and modern life? And, equally important, In what ways is early cinema relevant to our contemporary moment? Exploring answers to these and countless other questions remains an ongoing and fruitful endeavor.


Bibliography

(This is meant to be neither exhaustive nor canonical but rather a place to begin.)

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Richard Abel & Rick Altman (eds), Global Experiments in Early Synchronous Sound (Film History 11.4, 1999) —DOMITOR 1998.

Richard Abel & Rick Altman (eds), The Sounds of Early Cinema (Indiana University Press/ John Libbey Publishing, 2001) —DOMITOR 1998.

Richard Abel, Giorgio Bertellini & Rob King (eds), Early Cinema and the “National” (Indiana University Press/ John Libbey Publishing, 2008) —DOMITOR 2006.

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