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Demolition d’un mur : The social construction of technology and early cinema projection systems

2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 12; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/17460654.2014.925247

1746-0662

Deac Rossell,

French Historical and Cultural Studies

AbstractThis article suggests that the widely adopted principles of the ‘Cinema of Attractions’ is a limited framework for studying the early period of the invention of moving pictures and proposes the use of ideas drawn from writers on the social construction of technology as the basis for a more useful and comprehensive methodology for analysis of the early period of invention. With examples drawn from both the technological artefacts of early cinema (the Maltese Cross intermittent mechanism, the Lumière Cinématographe) and from emerging cinematic practices (travelling exhibitors, optical projection systems), the alternative methodology described here is shown to be helpful in re-evaluating and restructuring the archaic inherited master narrative of the invention of moving pictures. The essay suggests that by looking at the material technology and practices of early cinema without prejudice or prior assumption, there is still much to be learned from surviving resources too long ignored; which in turn reveals a distinct need to restructure the habitual story of invention, which was formed in the 1920s and remains largely untested by modern scholarship.Keywords: early cinemapatentschronophotographytravelling exhibitorscinema technologyÉtienne-Jules MareyOskar MessterOttomar AnschützAuguste and Louis LumièreEmile Reynaud Notes1. There is no published, public, thorough list of international patent activity in early cinema. My own research document, still in progress, lists over 900 patents from 11 countries; of these, about one-third are for ‘basic’ apparatus: cameras, projectors, and viewers, sometimes in combination.2. In his study of 272 articles published in the first 25 volumes of the journal Technology and Culture between 1959 and 1990, John M. Staudenmaier (Citation1989) found only nine articles that dealt with failed technological innovations.3. Key essays in the field and extensive bibliographies can be found in Bijker, Hughes and Pinch (Citation1989), Bijker and Law (Citation1992b), and Bijker (Citation1997). A broad analysis of work in technological history is Staudenmaier (Citation1989).4. For a brief overview of Edison’s invention of the phonograph, and of several parallel inventors and the plethora of manufacturers who quickly took up the construction, sale, and exploitation of instruments for recorded sound, see Chew (Citation1967). Alfred O. Tate, Edison’s long-time business manager and later an early and enthusiastic biographer, recalled in Citation1938 that Edison was unhappy at the use of the phonograph for entertainment purposes, since he regarded the ‘exploitation of this field as undignified and disharmonious with the more serious objectives of his ambition. He dedicated his life to the production of useful inventions. Devices designed for entertainment or amusement did not in his judgment fall within this classification. (302)’5. For a thorough treatment of this topic, see Castan (Citation1995, 128–135).6. For a thorough discussion of the Phonoscope Company, see Loiperdinger (Citation1999). A further analysis of Demenÿ’s work is in Mannoni, de Ferrière le Vayer, and Demeny (Citation1997).7. Double-film-band apparatus was also proposed in the mid-1890s by Robert Dempsey Gray, Owen A. Eames, William Friese-Greene, Birt Acres, Jules Carpentier, and many others.8. Lumière film production rapidly declined after 1898, they sold off their patents in 1901, and they remained only a supplier of raw film stock to the ever-growing industry. Edison agreed to sell off all of his motion picture interests to the American Biograph and Mutoscope Company in 1900, an arrangement that was abandoned when Biograph could not raise the necessary funding. Edison retained his paper patents and was much later brought back as the figurehead of the Motion Picture Patents Company, a trust that was influential in shaping the business practice of American filmmakers between 1907 and 1912.9. Starting, respectively, as a maker of eyeglasses and simple school microscopes and as a phonograph agent on the fairgrounds, did Messter and Pathé succeed only on the basis of their legendary quality of salesmanship against these two highly respected and established photographic companies who were also pioneers of moving pictures? As well as against all other competitors? Or were other factors involved? Robert W. Paul’s success in relation to Riley Brothers or W.C. Hughes in Great Britain is another unexplored example of an ‘outsider’ dominating established firms who logically should have been able to take a prominent position in moving pictures. In these cases, and others, film historians have only written ‘company history’ in that they have looked only at the careers of film entrepreneurs based on a retrospective view of their success, and have rarely looked at their careers before entering moving picture work, or at the competitive context out of which they made their success – a context that can only itself provide answers to why they were successful and others were not. For a first glimpse of Messter’s position among his competitors in Berlin, see Rossell (Citation1997a), later published in English (Citation1998a).10. See Braun (Citation1992, 46–7). This is the best and fullest account of Marey’s work.11. ‘He was working on a projector whose whole function would be to mechanically synthesize the results of his analyser, slowing down some movements and speeding up others. He was not after a machine that would replicate the continuity of perceived movement: such an apparatus would have been of no use to him in his work’ (Braun Citation1992, 174 n. 23). Several other experimenters were also failing to achieve projection of moving pictures in this period, including Wordsworth Donisthorpe, William Friese Greene, Birt Acres, and, of course, Ottomar Anschütz (discussed later).12. Many of these images have, in recent years, been re-photographed and transferred to modern moving picture media (35 mm or 16 mm motion picture film or videotape; more recently to various digital media formats) and can now be seen in ways that Marey and his colleagues never saw them, giving the mistaken impression that these images were, in actuality, ‘films’ in our modern understanding of that word. While this is an interesting contemporary exercise in the re-use of historical photographs, and some have a startling appeal, it is important to remember that the process of this transfer, especially when undertaken with sophisticated computerized technology, substantively distorts the artefacts of the 1890s. At that time, it was impossible to use these images to reproduce motion or any halting impression of motion beyond painstakingly cutting up each image and placing it in a zoetrope, which Marey very occasionally did in order to check the veracity of his original recordings.13. For example, typical comments on Anschütz’s series chronophotographs compared them most favourably to the work of both Muybridge and Marey:14. It seems very likely that the failure of the Edison Kinetoscope in Germany was due to the prior exhibition of the Anschütz Schnellseher, whose images, although shorter in duration, were much larger and clearer for a viewer than those from the Kinetoscope.15. Thomas Armat saw his first photographic moving pictures in Anschütz apparatus at this World’s Fair, and started thinking about projected moving images. It seems most likely that the earlier conflicting reports of the Kinetoscope being seen at the Fair were confusions with the Anschütz machine, which at this exhibition was labelled the ‘Electrical Wonder’ – a label that (perhaps intentionally) could easily be confused with the well-publicized electrical work of the ‘Wizard of Orange’, Edison.16. In principle, a mechanical system camera for taking multiple images on a flexible band of photographically sensitized paper or celluloid must intermittently stop the moving band of film for a short period of time while the exposure is made, and then has a long period of time to move the band forward in readiness for the next exposure. A mechanical system projector, on the other hand, must hold the exposed frame on the intermittently moving band in its projection aperture for the longest possible period of time and then move the band forward to the next frame in the shortest possible time, putting a much greater physical strain on the film band and requiring a more sophisticated mechanical arrangement than in a camera. It is this often unnoticed distinction between the requirements of the two devices that accounts for the existence of fragments of ‘moving pictures’ from several pioneering inventors – including Aimée Augustin le Prince (20 frames, 1888), Wordsworth Donisthorpe (10 frames, c. Citation1890), and others – most of whom either planned or were working on projection apparatus for their cameras without leaving clear records or artefacts of any success. This distinction between the requirements of a camera and a projector also contributes substantially to the high incidence of flicker in the Lumière Cinématographe, as noted by many contemporary writers.17. There is a further complication with reading Marey’s images: as Marta Braun writes, ‘Although it formed no part of his intentions, Marey’s work in chronophotography had a seminal influence on early twentieth-century abstract art’ (Braun Citation1992, 277). The rediscovery and adaptation of Marey’s images in the period 1907–13 by painters such as Frantisek Kupka, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Villon, Anton Giulio Bragaglia and others made Marey’s laboratory images ‘modern art’. Marey’s work has retained its position as significant modernist artefacts for contemporary historians, with many failing to specify or understand the shift in perception of these materials during the periods 1890–96 (early cinema) and 1907–13 (artistic modernism). Simultaneously, the classically framed and traditional aesthetic of the Anschütz photographs are in every way ‘pre-modern’ and ‘old-fashioned’ in comparison, and were never compared to the dynamism and modernism of the new medium of moving pictures. Anschütz has suffered, too, from a surprising lack of empirical work on his career and accomplishments; see Rossell (Citation2001).18. See Rossell (Citation1998d, 22–25) for further details of these films. Unfortunately, the date of production for Einseifen beim Barbier has not yet been determined. If it was made after the Edison subject, then it fits well with Anschütz’s habitual re-making of his competitor’s (Muybridge, Marey) imagery so that he could show off his superior photographic skills. If, of course, it was made earlier than the Edison subject (and there was one early-model Schnellseher in New York City from 1890 and 16 automat Schnellsehers from October 1892), then there is an entirely new question to be asked about this work.19. The most detailed study of Reynaud’s life and work is Auzel (Citation1992). From 1897, Reynaud adapted photographed materials to his apparatus, redrawing and remounting them to fit his horizontally moved bands; and from 1898, he added conventional films projected with a Demenÿ Chronophotographe, intermixed with his short drawn dramas.20. To make his stories last longer, since 5–600 individual drawings would take at most only a minute to go through the apparatus at 12 frames per second, Reynaud ‘played’ his story on the Théâtre Optique by using two hand cranks on the reels storing the film band to move the band back and forth, reversing and repeating some movements and actions for comic or narrative effects. But in each sequence, whether moving forward or backwards, the illusion of movement was created by a continuously running image band that was optically interrupted.21. Throughout this article, the term ‘optical intermittent’ denotes systems that use continuously moving film in the projection apparatus, where each image is rendered apparently stationary at the projection (or viewing) aperture by the use of revolving mirrors or prisms. Some early, largely unsuccessful, optical systems also used multiple film bands and separate moving lenses. These optical intermittent systems were all in distinct contrast to many mechanical intermittent devices, which physically started and stopped the film band at the projection (or viewing) aperture. The technical problem for both types of intermittency was to shift the film band from one image to the next without producing any blurring on the screen (or at the viewing aperture). This necessitated a short movement when the projection aperture was not illuminated, during which the film advanced to its next image. The Edison Kinetoscope used neither method. Instead, a continuously moving film running at a high speed of 30 or more frames per second had a single-slot shutter running between the illuminated film band and the eye of the viewer. This system was inefficient in its use of both illumination and celluloid film, and produced a rather murky small image, incapable of projection, although several experimental adaptations of the Kinetoscope as a projection device were suggested and patented.22. Films that lasted longer, and did not degrade or lose their picture quality quickly, could easily have led moving pictures on an entirely different course of production and exhibition – as would the higher initial cost of optical apparatus (discussed below), which would have led to a more considered (and very different) evolution of the film industry, quite probably with a different social context.23. Moving slides for the magic lantern date to at least 1697; see Rossell (Citation2005).24. There are many similar contemporary statements in the literature. As Henry Hopwood, one of the first technical historians, wrote in Citation1899, ‘A film for projecting a Living Picture is nothing more, after all, than a multiple lantern slide’ (188).25. Cecil Wray, Improvements in Apparatus for Exhibiting Kinetoscopic or Zoetropic Pictures, UK patent 19,181 of 1896. Filed 31 August 1896. Issued 12 June 1897.26. John Nevil Maskelyne, An Improved Apparatus for Securing, or Exhibiting in Series, Records of Successive Phases of Movement, UK patent 11,639 or 1896. Filed 28 May 1896. Issued 1 May 1897. According to F. Paul Liesegang, this apparatus was still in use for high-speed photography at the Woolwich Arsenal as late as 1903; see Liesegang (Citation1908, 744).27. A very successful optical projection system was devised by Emil Mechau in 1912 with his Model I projector using a ring of mirrors to intermittently break the optical path of projection. With Mechau’s Model II of 1922, the Leitz photographic firm began manufacturing the projector commercially, building a factory in Rastatt for its production: over 500 examples were made through 1934 (by AEG after 1929), and the apparatus was widely used on the Continent and in Britain, where it was called the Arcadia. The device then had a longer, specialized use into the 1970s in the broadcast of 35 mm films by television.28. In particular, Charles Musser (Citation1990), whose opening chapter ‘Toward a History of Screen Practice’ (16–54), is a finely written history of lantern practice. Unfortunately, after this beginning, he fails to mention the lantern again in the remaining 568 pages of his text on early American cinema, relegating lantern culture once again to the status of a precursor. See also Rossell (Citation1998b).29. The first appearance of the Maltese Cross in a patent for moving picture apparatus was in Pierre-Victor Continsouza’s French patent No. 255,937 of 28 April 1896, which specified a particularly elegant five-sided intermittent. Because of its centrally important position in moving picture projection, many different variations of the basic principle have been called ‘Maltese Cross’ by both inventors and historians, including almost any kind of spur-and-slot mechanism, even to the point of calling the linear spur gear of the 1866 Choreutoscope lantern slide a type of Maltese Cross intermittent. Two well-known early cinematic examples are the ‘double Maltese Cross’ of Robert W. Paul, dating from February 1896, and the ‘inverted Maltese Cross’ intermittent of Raoul Grimoin-Sanson, patented on 5 March 1896 (French patent 254,515). The Maltese Cross today remains the basic intermittent movement in the majority of theatrical projectors in use, although since the 1980s new models of projector, particularly those intended for platter or cake-stand apparatus in multiplex cinemas, instead use small electrical stepper motors, like those developed for electric typewriters, as a substitute for the Maltese Cross intermittent since they are cheaper to manufacture or replace and can be used in a lightweight framework, further reducing capital costs to exhibitors.30. Messter himself makes a special point of his use of the Maltese Cross from his earliest apparatus in his autobiography (Citation1936, 31–35). Messter notes Continsouza’s patent, and says ‘Next came my “German gearing” in June, 1896, and its commercial exploitation ... it is still used today in every projector...’ (31). A Maltese Cross is proudly embossed on the cloth cover of Filmprojektoren Filmprojektion, by Ing. Kurt Enz (Citation1965), and many technical manuals include engineering analyses of the precise acceleration rate and rate of picture change by various designs of a Maltese Cross intermittent. See, for example, Forch (Citation1913, 15–20) or Thun (Citation1925, 99–100).31. I cite the second edition, revised by Hector Maclean, which is at hand. As Maclean notes, Hepworth’s text from the first edition of 1897 is preserved unchanged, the second edition only adding ‘a series of paragraphs, forming a concluding chapter’ (p. vii) that brought the work up to date.32. It should also be noted that film historians have significantly privileged the accounts of pioneers who survived into what might be called the ‘historical era’ of moving pictures. Prominently available to later historians, and therefore universally included in accounts of late nineteenth-century invention were interviews, memoirs or documents from Thomas Alva Edison (died 1931), Louis and Auguste Lumière (d. 1948 and 1954, respectively), Robert W. Paul (d. 1943), Oskar Messter (d. 1943), and Charles Pathé (d. 1957). Strong historical disputes arose when additional pioneering figures survived into the historical era – for example, the fights for historical recognition between Edison and C. Francis Jenkins (d. 1934) and Thomas Armat (d. 1948), between Oskar Messter and Max Skladanowsky (d. 1939), between the Lumières and Henri Joly (d. 1945). Significant figures who did not survive into the historical era of film were not only marginalized in later accounts but often totally forgotten, for example Birt Acres (d. 1918), George W. de Bedts (last recorded 1902), Philipp Wolff (d. 1898), Hermann O. Foersterling (d. 1900), Robert Dempsey Gray (last recorded 1896), or Ambroise-François Parnaland (d. 1913).33. In chapters 4 and 5, ‘Intermittent Mechanism’ and ‘Continuous Mechanism’, Hepworth (1900, 23–51) gives a detailed description of each type of mechanism, including only those that were currently on the market and which Hepworth considered the better machines. Those machines that are thoroughly bad, he noted, ‘need not be counted’ (51).34. Hepworth makes the additional wry comment that in operation, the Maltese Cross makes ‘a loud tapping noise, which, occurring so many times in a second, develops into a sound that can only be described as very loud. I have heard machines built upon this principle emit a noise that one may modestly liken to a burglar alarm – resisting the obvious temptation to adopt a Hotchkiss gun as a simile. (26)’35. Hepworth divided intermittents into two classes: mechanical, or those where the moving parts themselves stopped and started intermittently (Maltese Cross, Pawl and Ratchet, Drunken Screw) and continuous; or those where the moving parts were in steady, cyclical motion (Claw, Beater, Gripper).36. This is a rarely cited revised edition of Henry V. Hopwood’s classic technical history of Citation1899, Living Pictures. Interestingly, even at this late date Foster agrees with Hepworth that the best form of machine is that in which all parts (naturally excepting the film) are kept in continual rotation, thus minimizing any variable pressure on the elements of the apparatus. If intermittently acting parts are employed, the workmanship must be of the best, and the materials such as will stand continued friction and shock without perceptible wear. (152)37. A Maltese Cross intermittent could, of course, be made very cheaply and simply; it became the principal intermittent movement used in toy cinematographs made by many Nuremberg companies such as the Gebrüder Bing, Johann Falk, Ernst Planck, Georges Carrette, and others from 1899 through the 1930s.38. Some later beater intermittents touched only the edges of the film, not the picture area. This was the longest-lasting alternative to the Maltese Cross intermittent in use in professional equipment, with some models marketed up to c. 1914.39. I am indebted to Martin Loiperdinger for this report of the 10 December 1897 meeting of the Verein zur Förderung der Photographie in Berlin. For a further discussion of Hesekiel, see Rossell (Citation1997a, 175–6) or Rossell (Citation1998a, 59).40. For an excellent discussion of this mode of exhibition and its influence on filmmaking practice in Germany, see Müller (Citation1994, especially 10–102).41. Several modern historians give equally brief and one-dimensional accounts of travelling exhibition: ‘The music halls, the town hall shows, the travelling shows and the penny gaffs were soon followed, however, by the more genteel bijou theatres, which drew in the more genteel classes’ (Chanan Citation1986, 207); or, discussing a revival of film production at the end of 1903 as narrative structures took on a new importance: ‘The number of theatres showing films as a permanent feature as well as the number of travelling exhibitors rose rapidly’ (Musser Citation1990, 365). Musser has also written (with Carol Nelson) an excellent, detailed study of a middle-class travelling lecturer and film showman (Citation1991). A fine study of a fairground’s moving picture showman is Toulmin (Citation1998).42. For a more detailed examination of categories of travelling exhibitors, see Rossell (Citation2000).43. See, for example, Toulmin (Citation1996a and Citation1996b), Peters (Citation1962), Swartz (Fall Citation1997, 102–8) and van der Maden (Citation1981).44. Christiaan Slieker, for example, grew up in a family of fairgrounds showmen and married the daughter of a renowned carousel owner. Schichtl was part of a vast family of showmen active from at least 1800. Williams ran away from home at an early age to join the fairgrounds circuit as a magician; he produced his own independent shows from the 1860s.45. Pätzold told his skat-playing partner Max Gliewe about his construction, and Gliewe quickly introduced the new type of shutter in Oskar Messter’s apparatus in 1902.46. In July, 1897, Sandow also patented a method of making stereo moving pictures: UK patent 17,565 of 1897, Improvements in or Relating to the Production and Exhibition of the Pictures of Moving Objects. Filed 27 July 1897. Issued 9 July 1898.47. There are dozens of these small unidentified classified advertisements in all of the showman’s newspapers of the time (five in Der Komet 617 alone); local newspapers also occasionally carried such notices, although they are mostly unrecorded in the historical literature, being largely ignored by writers too eager to quickly retrieve names, dates, and places rather than uncover anonymous patterns of activity.48. Guido Seeber became the cameraman for nearly 150 films, including both versions of Der Golem (1915, 1920) and Die freudlose Gasse (G.W. Pabst, 1925). I am indebted to Jeanpaul Goergen for bringing this article to my attention.49. Charles Musser describes William Rock and Walter Wainwright, the Edison Vitascope franchisees in New Orleans as ‘the only ones ever to claim a profit’ from the Vitascope business in America (Citation1990, 130). According to Sylvester Quinn Breard, who has written the only detailed history of early exhibition in New Orleans, the two partners worked hard to keep their exhibition in the eye of the press, worked in league with a local concert band, offered coupons for tickets to children (if accompanied by an adult), offered reduced group rates to inmates of charitable institutions, ran different film programmes in morning and evening shows, survived (if they did not stir up) a censorship controversy over the May-Irwin Kiss, and engaged in a number of other promotional activities (Citation1951, 2–16).50. The main difficulty of the Cinématographe was its pronounced flicker during projection, caused by the design of its shutter and by the claw intermittent movement, which did not survive in projection apparatus (although it did survive in camera apparatus) because the time taken to advance the film to its next frame at the projection gate, relative to the time the film was at rest in the projection gate, was too long.51. The Cinématographe was 19.1 cm wide, 12.9 cm deep, and 19 cm high with its box of unexposed negative film attached at the top. See Pete Ariel, Ariel Cinematographica Register, Bd. 4, (Frankfurt a. M., Citation1989: Deutsches Filmmuseum), Nr. 0986.52. Compare, for example, the dimensions of the widely used Anschütz hand camera marketed by Goertz from 1890: 20 cm wide, 13 cm deep, and 20 cm high, weighing 3.3 kilograms. See Kummer (Citation1983, 54).53. August and Louis Lumière, Appareil de vision directe des épreuves chronophotographiques dit ‘Kinora’, French patent 323,667. Filed 10 September 1896.54. Gaumont issued a list of 100 titles transferred from Lumière films for the Kinora in 1900. See Herbert (Winter Citation1991) and Anthony (Citation1996), which contains a list of over 350 existing Kinora reels, some of which are the sole surviving copies of early films.55. The Lumière celluloid film business is also unresearched. Some information is in the selection of letters edited by Jacques Rittaud-Hutinet (Citation1995, 39–43 and 86–7); for a brief summary, see Rossell (Citation1998c, 71–4). The Lumière filmmaking practices also reinforce the idea that they saw moving pictures as an amateur medium for home use. Early films of Louis Lumière like Sortie d’usine, Repas de bébé, Forgerons, Pêche aux poissons rouges, and Baignade en mer (all 1895) are exclusively scenes of domestic activity or daily working life. These themes dominate Lumière productions that were made in and around Lyon, La Ciotat, or Clos des Plages; exotic, historical, monumental, or reportorial scenes that are the bulk of Lumière production were made principally on the road during the worldwide travels of Lumière operators.