"Traffic in Souls": An Experiment in Feature-Length Narrative Construction
1991; University of Texas Press; Volume: 31; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/1225161
ISSN1527-2087
Autores Tópico(s)Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis
ResumoTraffic in Souls was premiered at Joe Weber's Theater on Broadway and 29th Street, New York City, on 24 November 1913. It has at least two claims to fame. First, its sensational subject matter linked it and a number of other more or less contemporaneous films with a moral panic that eventually resulted in the inclusion of the white slave trade (the entrapment of young women into prostitution) in the list of topics explicitly barred under the Hays Office's Production Code.' Second, and more important for this study, it is a relatively early American-produced feature-length film, apparently, in fact, the first released on Broadway not based on a famous novel or play.2 It is also the first film of more than three reels produced by the Independent Motion Picture Company, whose president Carl Laemmle was at this time, and for some time to come, publicly committed against the feature film.3 Terry Ramsaye, whose source seems to be the film's editor, Jack Cohn, reported that it was made secretly in Imp's studios against Laemmle's wishes. I. G. Edmonds already expressed skepticism about this claim, and it has been effectively refuted by Kevin Brownlow: the film was a project of its producer and scriptwriter Walter MacNamara, openly made at Imp for Universal; by the time of the premiere, a third interest was owned by the proprietors of Joe Weber's Theater, the Shubert brothers, but it is not clear if they were involved in the production from its inception.4 However, it remains the case that this film was twice as long as any previously made by its production company and (as far as I know) by anyone involved in its production. This essay is concerned with the way the filmmakers responded to the problems implicit in this jump in length. A six-reel movie cannot be called unprecedented, of course, as by the time of the premiere films as long and longer were being regularly screened in the U.S. These were, however, predominantly European productions, and, as we shall see, Traffic in Souls in many ways rejects the models of narrative construction these productions offered. Although almost all the production companies active in America between 1910 and 1915 made some twoor three-reel pictures for hire to their normal licensed or independent outlets, feature cinema in the teens is not a simple outgrowth from one-reel cinema. The enormous growth in the production of short films in the years after 1906 occurred to feed the nickelodeon
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