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1 The Culture Broth and the Froth of 1 Cultures of So-called Early Cinema André Gaudreault In order to understand the conditions in which a media phenomenon as complex as cinema emerged and developed, it seems to me to be indispensable to look at the way it unfolded on the path to its institutional phase in terms of profoundly intertwined cultural factors. Cinema ’ s emergence was an evolutionary process, one that proceeded by way of sometimes conflictual and turbulent encounters and exchanges with other cultural sectors present at the advent of moving pictures. As I have attempted to describe elsewhere, 2 what the earliest users of the kinematograph did was simply to employ a new device within other cultural series , 3 each of which already had its own practices. At the turn of the twentieth century, the kinematograph was thus simply a new work tool , neither more nor less. It was used within various cultural practices; cinema , at that point, did not yet exist as an autonomous medium. It is thus going to extremes, in my view, to see cinema as having been invented in 1895, the year the Lumière Cinématographe – but not the cinema – was invented. The Cinématographe was the most advanced device of the day for capturing and restoring moving photographic images, but this procedure cannot be equated with “cinema.” “ Cinématographe” and “cinema” are thus not the same thing . What ’ s more, if we pass from the specific French term for the Lumière device to the more generic English term in wide use at the time and take this word in its most general sense, the kinematograph and cinema are not equivalent either . The Lumière Cinématographe and similar other devices were in fact only a preliminary to what would become, first of all, kinematography,COPYRIGHTED and later cinema. We mightMATERIAL thus say that the invention of the moving picture camera was a necessary but insufficient condition for cinema to emerge. This, essentially, is why French theory around the “dispositif ” in the 1970s instinctively came up with the apt expression “appareil de base” (base apparatus), found in the work of Jean-Louis Baudry,4 Jean-Louis Comolli, 5 and A Companion to Early Cinema, First Edition. Edited by André Gaudreault, Nicolas Dulac, and Santiago Hidalgo. © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. cc01.indd01.indd 1155 33/27/2012/27/2012 55:22:11:22:11 AAMM 16 André Gaudreault others: the Lumière Cinématographe, the Edison Kinetograph, the Bioskop, etc. were the base , not the summit . For the cinema is a sociocultural phenomenon which one does not “invent” just like that : there is no “cinema” patent, because the cinema is not a procedure; it is a social, cultural, economic, etc. system. Cinema, then, is something that was constituted , established , and finally institutionalized . Once the elements of the initial procedure were invented – a certain kind of mechanism for stopping the film stock intermittently in front of the shutter, a certain kind of shutter for letting in light, a certain rate of movement to expose the negative, a certain kind of film stock with certain kinds of perforations, a certain kind of mechanism for transporting the film through the camera, etc. – it was still necessary to perfect various techniques for making moving pictures (moving thus from hardware to software). It was also necessary that this latest novelty item take its place in the ways and customs of all sorts of people (if only by establishing the new habit of “going to the movies”). It was necessary also to try out various ways of exhibiting these pictures by setting up a system in which the various agents involved would interact (from the person who shot the pictures to the person who showed them). And it was necessary that these agents emerge (or that others try their hand at kinematography and incorporate it into their existing practice). All these things required time; years in fact. To attain a certain plateau of stability a fairly long period of trial and error first had to pass (this is essentially what “early cinema” was). In the final decade of the nineteenth century and a little beyond, a few hundred so-called “film pioneers” (all kinematographic neophytes, naturally) applied their wits to this task, drawn to the charms of the new device and to what had been made possible by individual viewing (with the Kinetoscope) or public projection (with the Cinématographe) of illuminated moving pictures. But at the time they laid their hands on this latest novelty and incorporated it into their own practice, all these neophytes, with the exception of a few, were already a part of – rooted in, we could even say – a profession connected to kinematography to varying degrees (but at the same time alien to it) and to the things tied up in its invention (scientific research, photography, the magic lantern, stage shows, itinerant attractions, etc.). And each of these professions had a specific culture, and rules and norms as well. Cinema ’ s emergence was thus the work of a variety of people with a variety of specific cultures, and it was out of this culture broth – we might even say this froth of cultures – that cinema emerged, many years after its initial procedure was in place. The primary quality of early kinematography was thus that it was the site of a particularly polyphonic form of expression, 6 something we must absolutely keep in mind if we wish to understand how the institution “cinema” was able to take shape out of the cultural and institutional hodgepodge of early kinematography. We must also keep this fundamental historical fact in mind if we wish to understand how cinema managed to extract itself from this seemingly ungoverned world and become a new, autonomous medium, finally free of the grip of the cultural series which nourished it early on. cc01.indd01.indd 1166 33/27/2012/27/2012 55:22:11:22:11 AAMM The Culture Broth and the Froth of Cultures 17 The polyphonic nature I ascribe to so-called “early cinema” is just as true of the period immediately before Thomas A. Edison and W. K. L. Dickson ’ s invention of the Kinetograph (around 1889–91) and the Lumière brothers’ invention of the Cinématographe (around 1894–5). The culture of the period leading up to the invention of the so-called base apparatus was one of multiple series, just like that of nascent kinematography. Each of these inventors, when they turned to the question of analyzing and synthesizing movement using images, were already a part of one or several established cultural or scientific series, and each of their propositions derived, necessarily, from the cultural or scientific series to which they belonged (and was in their own image). This was true of Étienne-Jules Marey and Georges Demenÿ, for example, and also of Edison and Dickson, all of whom had a chronophotographic approach, while the Lumières had a photographic approach. But it was also true of Émile Reynaud, whose approach was consistent with the cultural series optical toy, which he combined with the series illuminated projection. Nor is it surprising that the Lumières’ device unmistakably resembled a still camera and that a Lumière picture had the appearance of a photograph suddenly come to life. But this is no stranger than the fact that the animated drawings in Reynaud ’ s Théâtre optique seem to have come straight out of some sort of improved Praxinoscope, which, with its mirrors and cylinder, in reality it was. This is an essential question for anyone trying to determine who invented the base apparatus. In this sense, we can say that every cultural series contributing to this race to invent “cinema” has its own hero: Reynaud for the cultural series optical toy; Marey and Edison for chronophotography; Lumière for photography; and, for the magic lantern, as we will see below, Birt Acres. Naturally, a statement like this should not be taken literally, but we should keep it in mind just the same when analyzing such a highly multiple and complex phenomenon as the invention of the base apparatus, which arose out of a variety of cultural and scientific series, each with its own role to play in the aforementioned invention. For proof of this we need look no further than the following statement by the magic lanternist Roger Child Bayley, dating from 1900. Five years after the Lumières patented their Cinématographe and without any apparent polemical intent, Bayley was able to state not only that kinematography was “lantern work” and that the base apparatus was a “Kinetic Lantern,” but that the inventor of what we describe as the base apparatus was Birt Acres, a renowned lanternist, British like Bayley moreover, and that the other inventors of kinematographic proce- dures, with their Latin and Greek names, were followers and imitators: In the beginning of 1896 a novelty in lantern work was fi rst shown in London in the form of Mr. Birt Acres’ Kinetic Lantern, as it was then called, by which street scenes and other moving objects were displayed on the screen in motion with a fi delity which was very remarkable. Almost immediately afterwards a number of other inventors were in the fi eld with instruments for performing the same operation, and animated lantern pictures under all sorts of Greek and Latin names were quite the sensation of the moment. 7 cc01.indd01.indd 1177 33/27/2012/27/2012 55:22:11:22:11 AAMM 18 André Gaudreault What Bayley is doing here is locating the invention of the kinematograph on the side of the cultural series of which he was a champion and leading figure: the magic lantern.

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