pb omslag West in Early Cinema 02-12-2005 09:21 Pagina 1 In The West in Early Cinema, Nanna Verhoeff investi- gates the emergence of the western genre during the first two decades of cinema (1895-1915). She analyzes CINEMA NANNA VERHOEFF THE WEST IN EARLY many unknown and forgotten films from international archives and traces the relationships between films FILM FILM about the American West, their surrounding films, and other popular media such as photography, paint- CULTURE CULTURE ing, (pulp) literature, Wild West Shows and popular IN TRANSITION IN TRANSITION ethnography. Through this exploration of archival material she raises fresh questions of historiography and provides an innovative model for historical analysis. These first traces of the Western film reveal a surprising preoccupation with ‘presence’ and ‘actuality’ characteristic of modernity. It informs us about the way in which film, as a new medium, took shape within the context of its contemporary visual culture. Nanna Verhoeff teaches at the Institute for Media and Re/Presentation at Utrecht University. “Verhoeff has produced one of the most original and imaginative works on early cinema. She offers a witty and insightful approach to the relation between the scholar and the archive and the nature of historical research. Verhoeff dives into a profound consideration of the fragment and the nature of historical research.” TOM GUNNING – UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO “This ambitious book is highly original in its methodology and offers a ‘kaleidoscope’ of key concepts or topoi homologous with the ‘bits and pieces’ experience of early 20th-century film exhibition, a method that links our current interest in hypertextual organization with the THETHE WESTWEST historicity of visual culture. Indeed, Verhoeff has created a book that bears comparison with Raymond Williams’ Keywords.” RICHARD ABEL – UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN ININ EARLYEARLY CINEMACINEMA ISBN 90-5356-831-X AFTERAFTER THETHE BEGINNINGBEGINNING 9 789053 568316 NANNANANNA VERHOEFF VERHOEFF Amsterdam University Press AmsterdamAmsterdam UniversityUniversity PressPress WWW.AUP.NL The West in Early Cinema The West in Early Cinema After the Beginning Nanna Verhoeff Cover illustration: Gertrude McCoy, Motography VII, (June ): Cover design: Kok Korpershoek, Amsterdam Lay-out: japes, Amsterdam isbn x (paperback) isbn (hardcover) nur © Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or trans- mitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. “Motion Pictures” The experiments, the failures and the successes of the past twelve years have been stepping stones which have led to the production of the modern masterpieces in motography. The evolution of the pictures play began in , when an amazed public marveled at the seeming witchcraft which reproduced upon a sheet living and moving people, animals, and scenes. […] Today it is the subject that interests, not the novelty of the invention. Complete plays are enacted upon the curtain with specially written music that sometimes ranks with the classics. Reliable statistics show that , millions of admissions to motion picture theaters are sold to the people of the United States annually. Who can estimate the enormous power for good of this post modern factor in the entertainment and education of the masses? The library of the future will contain a file of motion picture films to demonstrate, better than books, the life of a people, their political, social and economic status. “Motion Pictures.” The Sun (February , ) “What Next?” As for the future of this remarkable business, with its Alladdin-like growth, it is impossible to predict. Growing at first from simple pictures which moved naturally and without dramatic possibility, it reached the pictures of constructed movement. Then came pictures more rapidly moving, but al- ways outside pictures. Then came that baneful fashion of the chase, upon which followed the little drama’s in little studios – dramas which ran to from to feet of film, and which possessed all the earmarks of blood and thunder. Now we have come to the film of eighteen to twenty minutes, to the period of the constructed play, to the period almost of epigram in subtitles. The cowboy is waning by the side of a declining Indian maid, to be succeeded by – ? Can anybody tell the picture men? –“Quick Fashion Changes: Public Demands New Subjects Constantly.” New York Times (August , ) The train robbery film seemed to prove pretty conclusively that in the balmy days when it was made, jerkiness, exaggerated posturing, and creeping backdrops to make trains “speed” were all part of the infant industry. No villain would dream of dying without spinning around thrice; and in gener- al, the audience, comprised largely of men and women who daily pick the best of modern films apart, had to agree that the cinema had progressed. – New York Times (July , ) Contents After the Beginning 11 1. After-effects 23 Bits & Pieces 25 City Limits 45 Deconstructing the Other 55 Easterns 77 Facts and Fictions 96 Genre 108 2. Coincidences 127 History Lessons 129 Instant Nostalgia 148 Jeopardy 157 Kaleidoscopic Worlds 175 Landscapes 188 Modernities 207 3. Strategies 221 Narrativity 223 Old Timers 236 Picture Postcards 250 Questioning Categories 270 Riding the Wilderness 282 Spectacle 296 Time Travel 308 4. Practices 325 Universal Ambition 327 Virtual Museums 345 Wild West Show 361 X-Rated 376 Young Wild Women 390 Zooming In, Zapping, Zooming Out 404 List of illustrations 413 Filmography 415 Bibliography 427 Index 455 Note The subtitle of this book has a number of different meanings, which will be out- lined in an introductory chapter. The succeeding chapters each concentrate on a single topic. Topics shift between theoretical and historical emphases, always in dialogue with the archival material. With this format I wish to convey not only the sense that we understand film culture better through specific foci of atten- tion, but also, conversely, that our thinking about general issues can benefit from a confrontation with the objects. The organizational principle is inspired by the hypertext model. The chapters congeal into clusters because the order in which they are presented follows a recognizable logic. At the same time, they remain based on the idea that they can be linked together in a variety of ways, through cross-references in the man- ner of hyperlinks (marked with icons: A – Z ), to form not a body of singular objects, but precisely the kind of kaleidoscopic whole that I consider most char- acteristic for early cinema as a cultural phenomenon. The short texts between the clusters will serve as guides and summaries for the linear reader, explaining the route followed in both preceding and succeeding clusters of chapters. New York Times (August , ) A After the Beginning Do you remember the Western film, and its sister, the Indian film, now so liberally supplied? Know, then, that these, the latest of fashions, are disap- pearing. – New York Times, What is found at the historical beginning of things is not the inviolable identity of their origin; it is the dissension of other things. It is disparity. – Foucault, Do you remember those films with cowboys and Indians, captures and chases, mountains and rivers, guns and arrows, that we call “the Western”? In contrast to the passage quoted in the first epigraph, which calls these films “the latest of fashions,” for us, today, the Western is old, yet far from disappearing. The genre so firmly associated with early America has in fact, according to some critics, been enjoying a postmodern comeback. These mirrored situations across a cen- tury call into question common-sense historical linearity. If this book is devoted to the early Western, it is in order to understand how such an “early” genre, so early that it does not yet go by its later name, can be going out of style while still being a “latest fashion.” The coincidence between “early”–here phrased through the word “latest”! – and “late” in the same historical moment raises questions about the retrospective nature of history writing. This book is about the first two decades of films about the American West, made between and , written a century later, looking back in an attempt to discover and de- scribe the uniqueness of this pre-Classical era of Westerns. This book is the result of a voyage of discovery through film archives. An ar- chive is a place replete with three things: objects from the past, the mission to preserve these from disappearance, and the categorizations that make them ac- cessible. The first engage the question of materiality, in the face of the fugitive nature of current screen culture. The second is sometimes articulated in terms of cultural memory, an urgently felt preoccupation of our time. The third con- cerns the discursivity of even the most rudimentary of classifications. The con- nection between these three strands underlies the current fascination with “the archive.” A 12 The West in Early Cinema I aim to explore how we can be loyal to “history” as an endeavor and a mode of inquiry, as well as to our cultural habitat, which is the present. This is where we are steeped in the culture of new media, and deal with the textual form of hypertext: a present in which we can see, and experience, a dual fascination, with new organizations and functions of images, and with archives. Hence, the motivating question of this book is: how does the current interest in the hyper- textual organization of visual experience – produced and promoted by the de- velopment of digital media and technologies such as Internet, DVDs, or digital games – relate to the historicity of visual culture? This question touches upon cultural philosophy, which can guide us in an enterprise of construction: of ar- ticulating what an “archival poetics” can be, and what it can do for such a bi- temporal history.