The Last Machine, Early Cinema and the Birth of the Modern World

Afterimage, Summer, 1996 by LeAnn Erickson

- Hollis Frampton(1)

Whether generating its own history through cinema studies or cited as historical "evidence" in other histories, film and its commercial counterpart, cinema, has always maintained an inextricable link with history. The centenary of film is currently being celebrated in the form of special screenings, conferences and books, with an eye cast toward the infancy of film, the era dating roughly from 1895 to 1915.

Due to its unique ability to capture and preserve "reality," film has seemingly offered the world a reflection of itself. Early films included "actualities" (the earliest documentaries) recording everyday activities, newsreel (both staged and unstaged) of historical moments, educational films and fictionalized narratives. The reflection captured in these films may have repelled censors, armed reformers or entertained the masses, but moving pictures undoubtedly helped shape film's early audience's view of the world and of themselves. The images that captivated then, captivate us today. There is a certain awe that emerges while viewing early films, be they about suffragettes marching in New York City in 1912, or everyday life in small-town America, or even the fictionalized "cops" of a Mack Sennett comedy. These images fascinate because they lead us to think that we are, in fact, seeing history and, in seeing, we know the past. What is missing in this viewing experience is context - that elusive element that enables one to move beyond the moment to attain understanding.

The Last Machine, Early Cinema and the Birth of the Modern World (1994) by Ian Christie is that rare book on film in which context is the central concern and the window through which early films are identified and discussed. The book is an accompaniment to the BBC television series of the same name and, as stated by the author, the project is dedicated to bringing academic scholarship on early cinema to a wider public audience. It certainly delivers on this ambitious goal.

The scholars and archives cited and consulted for the project read like a Who's Who of early film study Noel Burch, Kevin Brownlow, John Fell, Miriam Hansen, Tom Gunning and Charles Musser are just a few of the notable scholars involved in the series.(2) Prominent film archives in France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States provided access and resources for the project. The author has used these sources to construct an engaging picture of early films and the times in which they were produced. Christie clearly understands that academic scholarship can seem narrow in its focus and is often not intended for a general audience, yet he commends early film scholars with doing society a vital service: "[Early cinema scholarship] has forced attention away from a select number of the random collection of early films that has survived - the 'classics' - and encouraged many to look at the corpus as a whole."(3) The holistic structure of the series and the book demonstrates that Christie takes this statement to heart.

The book is organized into five chapters with titles that hint at the near poetic approach the book will take toward its subject, such as "Space and Time Machine," "The Body Electric," and "The Waking Dream." Framed by such titles the chapters attempt to present the reader with a cultural context within which the highlighted films could be viewed. It is rare to find a film history book that quotes not only current reviews and news articles from the times but also novelists, poets, artists and scientists. A perusal of chapter two, "Tales from the City," includes references to authors E. M. Forster, Edgar Allen Poe and Georg Simmel, with quotes from French poet Charles Baudelaire and Russian symbolist Andrei Bely. These references and quotes do not exist in a vacuum but are directly linked to the films at hand. For example, the reference to Simmel's essay "The Metropolis and Mental Life" (1900) heads the discussion of a common theme in American vaudeville and early cinema: the "country hick" and his comic encounters with city/modern life. Rubes in the Theatre (1901, by Thomas Edison), A Rube in the Subway (n.d., produced by Biograph) and particularly interesting, Rube in an Opium Joint, all present a stereotypic representation of a country bumpkin awed and confused by the big city. Rube in an Opium Joint, made in 1905 by Billy Bitzer, survives in the Library of Congress's Paper Print Collection and is apparently a single episode from a longer film released one week later as Lifting the Lid. In this film a group of New York City sightseers supposedly visit a number of "exotic" locales with "the rube" constantly causing trouble in each situation. The questions and analysis that follow the film synopsis exemplifies the strength of the project. The book initiates an investigation as to what an original viewer may have gotten from the film, while posing questions as to historical meaning for viewers today. A reader is actively engaged in the discussion at hand in a way not generally encountered in other history books.