EXPLORATION
LECTURE III
From that first December showing onward, the cinematographe proved to be a smash popular success.
The lumieres were first and foremost businessmen…the enormous commercial potential of their invention wasn't lost on them.
· Almost immediately, they chartered and trained a small army of cameramen/projectionists to fan out over Europe and Asia--capturing new and increasingly exotic locals and happenings, showing these films to audiences in music halls and cafes, auditoriums and other urban meeting places, and later, rural villages and fairs.
· Often, foreign concessionaries shared the revenues…they rented the hall and publicized the events…but the Lumiere's jealously guarded the technology.
In these early days of motion pictures, the Lumieres easily maintained the world monopoly on film distribution … Unlike Edison, they early realized the huge market potential of their inventions. They were shrewd businessmen with a tightly efficient and well-oiled marketing organization. The technology they had developed was tailor-made for spreading the new medium far and wide: it was portable, allowed a steady supply of new content. Audiences were in love with--intoxicated with-- product.
Edison quickly saw that his kinetoscope peep shows were simply not competition of projected movies and moved into taking over development of his own projected film (which he called the Vitoscope and premiered in New York a few months before the Lumiere cinematescope reached the US.
Within ten years, motion picture technology (both Lumiere's invention and parallel developments in Great Britain and the US) had spread globally. New motion picture companies sprang up like crabgrass.
Most of these companies turned to the portable camera to make their fortune. Their stock in trade was still largely non-fiction (or at least quasi-fiction): actualities, travel films (what the french called documentaires), expedition films, educationals, newsreels.
Although Lumiere-style travelling exhibitions continued throughout the last decades of the 19th Century, fixed movie theaters began to be more an more common fixtures in the urban landscape.
Despite the immense popularity and success of the Lumieres' worldwide organization, in the late 1890's the Brothers withdrew from exhibition tours and film distribution. Louis Lumiere had always contended that "The Cinema Is an Invention without a future." He contended that audiences would not continue to pay to gaze upon events which they could witness themselves on the streets.
The brothers turned their commercial attention to selling their cinematographe to others who wished to make a go at this "doomed medium."
And in some sense, Louis was right.
As audience sophistication increased, patience with "life on the hoof" and movement for movement's sake seemed to decrease.
As Brian Wilson has said: by the late 1890's,
"audiences required of the new medium what they expected of older media: stories, narrative with beginnings, middles, climaxes, denouements, and ends. And it was the fiction film that was to provide this age old want."
This is what non-fiction filmmaking was competing with by the turn of the century
· Magic of Melies DVD 1099
· Great Train Robbery (1903) DVD 1096
·
Although it may not look like it, Edwin S. Porter's Grt Train Robbery revolutionized movie storytelling…
HOW?
A completely new form of art…movies are suddenly able to deal with stories--with the treatment of time and action-- in ways that are unique in the history of art. Continuity editing.
By 1900, production companies were beginning to crank out "story films" for hungry audiences.
At this time, Edison's Biograph had become America's foremost producer. It made at least one story film a month. Many of these films, were "hits" available only to theaters subscribing to Biograph's own exhibition service.
Fiction film at this time went into a sort of artistic tailspin.
No longer content or economically able to simply document daily unadorned life of bourgeoise subjects, non-fiction filmmakers turned to increasingly exotic subjects…
· far away places,
· royalty, the presidency,
· dramatic world events, such as wars and disasters.
There was often a sense that actuality was, in itself, no longer a strong enough draw.
What to do when the historical world doesn't give you the kind of images audiences demand?
--You make them up,
--forge them,
--restage them to suit dramatic tastes.
And if the spectacle took liberties with reality…audiences didn't seem to care… Fact and fantasy in the popular imagination at the turn of the century wasn't all that clearly delineated in any case…
The wonder of the image, the ability to tickle the imagination was the point…the medium was still largely the message, and reality seemed to be whatever was being projected on the screen.
After 1910 these bits of synthesized reality increasingly made their way into newsreels which had initially been developed by European companies such as Pathe and Gaumont and which spread rapidly to the US. These were compilations of clips dealing with current events and famous people, fads, fashions, and public frivolities.
SHOW CLIP FROM DAWN OF THE EYE…(newsreels)
In the latter part of the 19th Century other things were happening that shaped audience tastes and filmmaking directions.
· US and British colonialism was cranking into gear, bringing Western nations into unprecedented contact with foreign lands and cultures (often at the point of a gun).
· There was a growing fascination in the West with the exoticism of far away lands and peoples.
· The colonial push also continued to provide fresh new markets for the movies abroad.
Films of travel and exploration also continued to fascinate the viewing public well into the early part of the 20th Century. The French called these early travel films "documentaires."
For workingclass audiences, seeing faraway places on the screen was often as close as they'd get to distant travel.
In 1904, Hale's Marvelous Tours of the World were introduced at the St Louis Exhibition:
· what might have been the first multimedia experience
· rocking carriage, ticket taker…projected scenes…Became a fabulously popular travelling show.
Four years later,
World traveller Burton Holmes coined the term Travelog and began presenting lectures illustrated with slides and footage he had taken on his trips…
I mentioned earlier that factual films increasingly turned to glamourous subjects such as the doings of royalty, generals, presidents…and ... if the president was a world traveller and adventurer--so much the better…
When Teddy Roosevelt made his famous 1907 hunting trip to Africa, enterprising film makers lost no time in covering the action: even if the action involved restaging the events with a Teddy look-alike and a flea-bitten lion from the Chicago zoo!
It's difficult to believe in this age of global travel and communication that in the early decades of the Century, many parts of the world remained uncharted or unvisited by Westerners--the world was a much smaller and much more provincial place. Increasingly, as explorers and adventurers fanned out into the great unknown, they schlepped moving picture cameras along with them.
An example: 1910 photographer and filmmaker Herbert Ponting accompanied Captain R.F. Scott on the first 2 year leg of his disasterous expedition to the Antarctic…The film was originally released in 1913 and later re-edited with narration in the 1930's into the film 90 Degrees South…
SHOW CLIP 90 Degrees
Travel and exploration also had a darker side in these year.
Nichols suggests that one of the streams down which early cinema floated -- What film historian Tom Gunning has called the "Cinema of attractions": the focus on spectacles, the wonders of the larger world beyond our own…
For late Victorians…and citizens of the early 20th century
the line between spectacle and exhibitionism was often pretty thin…
Late 19th and early 20th Century saw a fascination with fairs, exhibitions, and other venues devoted to glorifying technological and cultural progress.
The Chicago Columbian Exhibition of 1893 and The St. Louis World's Fair 1904 were prime examples of late century obsession with spectacle and fascination with cultural dominance.
Both of these fairs featured exhibits that put exotic and far-away cultures on display.
The St Louis fair of 1904, for example, featured a reconstructed "native" villages inhabited by imported indigenous peoples from the Phillipines upon which fairgoers could gaze and wonder.
For Western audiences at least, there was a sense that gazing upon exotic spectacles such as these somehow confirmed the viewers' exhalted position in the Great Chain of Being, which stretched from the lowly beasts to the pinnacle of culture--represented of course by Civilized Nations.
SHOW SAVAGE ACTS clip
In an era that demanded increasing novelty and entertainment thrills, the representation of faraway places and peoples often took a markedly sensational, if not downright exploitative turns.
The first quarter of the Century are filled with sorry examples of what can only be called racist ethnography. Probably the worst offenders were the husband and wife team of Martin and Osa Johnson. …Or as Kevin Brownlow has said :
To the pure documentarian, Mr and Mrs Johnson are beyond the pale, for they regarded the African continent as a kind of special effects department. They were obsessed by adventure and aimed exclusively fo thrills.
SHOW CLIPS: CONGORILLA
What can you say?
· Is there worth in this material at all--documentry, social text?
· How is this film different from acuality?
Not all early filmmakers wielding their cameras in the service of ethnography were this blatantly sensational or driven by commercial interests.
From the turn of the Century on, vanishing cultures, including those in the US, were the focus of sympathetic cinematic scrutiny. As early as 1910 the US Dept of the Interior sponsored photographers and filmmakers involved in documenting the American West and Native American cultures in particular.
There was also a long succession of commercial and academic non-fiction films dealing with Native cultures in the US. The most talented of the early photographers of Native Americans was Edward S. Curtis. Like his contemporary, Robert Flaherty, Curtis had a deep, humanistic interest in documenting disappearing cultures and spent over 20 years doing this through photography.
"What is it," he wrote, "that lies behind this door that history wants to close so suddenly?"
In 1914, convinced of the power of film to reach mass audiences and to accomplish his aims, Curtis made his only motion picture--In the land of the War Canoes (originally in the Land of the Headhunters) about the Kwakiutl Indians of the Pacific Northwest.
In part, the film was made to subsidize Curtis' photographic work.
In this film he established or at least reinforced a tradition that would mark many of the ethnographic films of the first part of the Century:
the view of traditional cultures in soft light of humanism and romanticism rather cold light of science.
Like Flaherty, Curtis embraced an idealized view of "traditional cultures" as
· somehow more noble than "civilized cultures", less tainted and corrupt
· more finely in tune with nature and self.
· In such a view, there was little room for the realities of history and little love for present day circumstances.
· Part of a tradition of romanticism stretching back to the 18th cent and french philosopher/author Jean-jacques rousseau and his notions of the Noble Savage
By the late 19th Century...this camp was not overly populated
Charles Dickens
To come to the point at once, I beg to say that I have not the least belief in the Noble Savage. I consider him a prodigious nuisance, and an enormous superstition. His calling rum fire-water, and me a pale face, wholly fail to reconcile me to him. I don't care what he calls me. I call him a savage, and I call a savage a something highly desirable to be civilised off the face of the earth. I think a mere gent (which I take to be the lowest form of civilisation) better than a howling, whistling, clucking, stamping, jumping, tearing savage. It is all one to me, whether he sticks a fish-bone through his visage, or bits of trees through the lobes of his ears, or bird's feathers in his head; whether he flattens his hair between two boards, or spreads his nose over the breadth of his face, or drags his lower lip down by great weights, or blackens his teeth, or knocks them out, or paints one cheek red and the other blue, or tattoos himself, or oils himself, or rubs his body with fat, or crimps it with knives. Yielding to whichsoever of these agreeable eccentricities, he is a savage – cruel, false, thievish, murderous; addicted more or less to grease, entrails, and beastly customs; a wild animal with the questionable gift of boasting; a conceited, tiresome, blood-thirsty, monotonous humbug.
SHOW CURTIS CLIPS
QUESTION: What questions does this clip raise about the role of the filmmaker and the relationship to subject? (Nicholas: What responsibility do filmmakers have for the effect of their acts on the lives of those filmed?)
What are the implications and possible outcomes of Curtis' manipulation of subjects and circumstances surrounding filming (and photography)?
What participation of subjects in the process of filming.
Does this mean the film isn't worth anything as documentation of the historical world.
What do the descendants of the film's subjects have to say…
Curtis' film was a substantial hit with critics but a box-office flop… (WHY?)
Films of travel and exploration managed to keep the documentary film on life support in the first decades of the 20th Century…even though, as I mentioned earlier, audiences had other things on their minds--things like D.W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin and Edwin S. Porter…
Break?
Robert Flaherty
(Nanook - 69 min)
The man who successfully managed to bring the form back into the public eye and who is credited with producing the first commercially-released documentary film was Robert Flaherty.
Flaherty was a contemporary of Curtis…a fairly unlikely savior.
Flaherty was the son of a mining engineer and prospector for US steel who plied his trade in Michegan and Canada. As a boy, Flaherty often accompanied his father on business trips and grew up in and around mining campus… From an early age, he had had contact with native people's--American Indians and Eskimos…