Marta Braun, Charlie Keil, Rob King, Paul Moore and Louis Pelletier (eds.), Beyond the Screen: Institutions, Networks and Publics of Early Cinema.

Ascarate, Richard John

Marta Braun, Charlie Keil, Rob King, Paul Moore and Louis Pelletier (eds.), Beyond the Screen: Institutions, Networks and Publics of Early Cinema. London: John Libbey Publishing, 2012. ISBN 9-780861-967032 Paper 350 pp. $31.50

From 13-16 June 2010, film, media, and communications scholars as well as filmmakers converged upon Ryerson University (Toronto) and the University of Toronto for the eleventh bi-annual Domitor conference. Domitor, the name proposed by the father of the Lumiere brothers for one of their early movie projectors, is an international society dedicated to the study of pre-1915 cinema. The thirty-seven essays in Beyond the Screen: Institutions, Networks and Publics of Early Cinema represent an eclectic fraction of the 2010 conference papers. As the editors explain in the introduction, the contributors "explored the various ways that a range of institutions, both commercial and non-commercial, shaped early cinema's functions and social uses" (2).

The institutions explored include a diverse cast of characters--individuals and groups--from the fields of education, science, social and religious reform, and advertising and propaganda. Organized beneath the somewhat porous rubrics designated in the title and among more specific divisions of "charity and religion," "government and civics," "education and advocacy," "science and magic," "art and aesthetics," "exhibition and showmanship," and "community and the public sphere," the essays offer dazzling--and frequently, first-time--glimpses into the "ways in which [early cinema] influenced and intersected with realms beyond the world of entertainment" (1). Space constraints demand the reviewer select only a handful of the essays for critique; however, silence should not be understood to connote disparagement. All of the essays are well-written, well-argued, and often well-illustrated with archival images.

Jennifer Horne, for example, briskly surveys the academically untilled ground of American Red Cross film production and exhibition from 1916 to 1922. During this time, Red Cross chapters screened over one hundred films (only seven of which still exist). Topics included agriculture, health, schools, roads, and child welfare, but the films also highlighted the organization's charitable work during the First World War. Venues for these screenings ranged from rotary halls, schools, Kiwanis clubs, churches, libraries, and lodges. Horne then focuses on the ways the Red Cross employed the concept of neutrality as "both a filmic device and an ideological rationale" (13) and how the concept eventually broke down. She argues that a shift in the agency's financial needs and the desire of exhibitors to display practical patriotism quickly broadened spectatorship from local Red Cross chapters to the public at large. In turn, this viewership expansion bred confusion within the agency, manifesting itself in internal documents and announcements in trade papers advertising Red Cross films. On the one hand, the agency's professed mission of humanitarian work rested on an assumption of political neutrality. On the other, the Red Cross became an auxiliary of the armed forces once congress declared war against Germany in April 1917. As Horne describes the politico-cultural atmosphere of the time, "Lines between intellectual and popular audiences were blurred, as were the lines between information and spectacle" (14). Even after the war, films depicting the poor in foreign lands and Red Cross efforts to ameliorate their plight devolved into exotic exhibits of American superiority.

In another essay, Oksana Chefranova examines how Tsar Nicholas II shaped cinema's development in Russia through his tight and enduring control over filmic documentation of his monarchy and empire. This documentation, known collectively as the Tsar Chronicle, consisted of about 363 private and public actuality films made before 1917. The emperor had always been an aficionado of film and photography, shooting and screening films within the imperial palaces, even ducking into local movie theaters during the war to take in a reel or two and express solidarity with his subjects. He also acted as film censor and promoted the careers of favored directors. Chefranova argues that the Tsar's "multi-faceted participation in film was fundamentally a continuation of his supervision of all domains of the empire" (64).

She then devotes some time to describing the Russian monarch's view of film as infallible historical evidence, as vessel of absolute truth. She carefully articulates the distinctive sense in which Russians understood the concept of "chronicle," one adopted from the Byzantine Empire, as a linear and unadorned series of events from the life of its subject. She shrewdly supports her argument by comparing the monarch's diary entries to the films about him whose production he had overseen: "The emperor's diary and the Chronicle films envisioned history as a non-hierarchical panoramic stream with no beginning and no end, as fragments arbitrarily pulled out of the stream of life" (66). Still, she argues, whatever Nicholas II's intent, the Chronicle films balanced uneasily between hagiography and reportage, between the sacred and the profane.

Meanwhile, with no apparent irony, Murray Leeder admits in his essay that he has not "encountered much scholarship foregrounding the importance of the skeleton" in early cinema (180). Nevertheless, the intrepid scholar notes the fascination of filmmakers such as Georges Melies, Walter R. Booth, George Albert Smith, Emile Cohl, and Segundo de Chomon with, of all things, skeletons. He then sets out to contextualize Melies's Escamotage d'une dame chez theatre Robert Houdin or The Vanishing Lady (1896)--in which the director makes a living woman disappear, reappear as a skeleton, then return as her former incarnate self--within the "broader cultural fascination with skeletons in the 1890s" (176). But what motivated such fascination? Leeder explains that the 1895 discovery of X-rays by German physicist Wilhelm Rontgen generated great interest not only among scientists, but also among occultists and spiritualists (as evidence of their claims about unseen, supernatural realms) and connoisseurs of erotica (who could now undress female objects of fascination in a technological and hands-free way). Indeed, initially oblivious to the carcinogenic effects of prolonged exposure to radiation, Scottish scientist James MacIntyre created two X-ray films in 1897.

Leeder sweeps across vast cultural terrain to gather evidence of a skeleton vogue fueled by X-ray images and trick films: hack poetry, erotic French postcards of skeletal showgirls, and magic acts. Neatly tying the historical to the contemporary, he observes that a 2010 online calendar released by the imaging company EIZO featuring X-ray images of a woman in high heels and posing provocatively features the same "constellation of nudity, voyeurism, and 'scientific' dismemberment recognizable in The Vanishing Lady" (181).

The volume leaves little for which the editors and contributors might be taken to task. One could reprove them, perhaps, for being somewhat Eurocentric. While the essays cover aspects of early cinematic history in the United States, England, Ireland, France, Germany, Russia, Canada, Norway, Belgium, and the Netherlands, China makes only a cameo appearance as subject of Western missionary efforts. (The first Chinese film, The Battle of Dingjunshan (Ren Jingfeng) was produced by a Beijing company in 1905.) Latin America is nowhere to be found, even though countries such as Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina screened domestic films as early as 1896. And not so much a criticism as a linguistic caveat: Those without a reading knowledge of French will have to forego the insights and findings of five of the essays. (A pity, as Andre Gaudreault and Philippe Gauthier in their comparative analysis of the conference-avec-projection and the projection-avec-boniment unveil "une certaine forme de continuite" between "la lantern magique et le cinematographe," in that "le cinematographe serait, en quelque sorte, un chassis passe-vues ameliore" (237)). But these are minor flaws. As collections of early cinema history go, this one offers manifold delights.