cinema second birth

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Cinemas second birthAndrew Shail Guest Editor

a

aSchool of English Literature, Language & Linguistics , Newcastle

University, Newcastle upon Tyne , UK

Published online: 03 May 2013.

To cite this article: Andrew Shail Guest Editor (2013) Cinemas second birth, Early Popular Visual

Culture, 11:2, 97-99, DOI: 10.1080/17460654.2013.785714

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17460654.2013.785714

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INTRODUCTION

Cinemas second birth

[T]he history of early cinema leads us, successively, from the appearance of a techno-logical process that of the apparatus that records moving images to theconstitution of an established medium that transcends and in some way sublimates theapparatus.

Gaudreault and Marion 2005, 5

I hope I have not allowed it to be inferred that the developments I have men-tioned are a mere epitome of the occurrences of a single year. On the contrarythey represent a crescendo of change which began in or around 1911 and contin-ued for a long time continued in some respects indeed right up to the year ofthe Great War.

Hepworth 1951, 122

Probably once a week, I tell a student that when they write academically they

must remember that they are no one from nowhere and nowhen: s o i t s not

our theatre; its British theatre. Ive derided colleagues claims that the best

reason to study a certainfi

eld is that onefi

nds it interesting, privileging the per-ception of a pressing research question over the indulgence of personal interest.

Both sanctimonious assertions are disingenuous, though: Ive been very much

somewhere from somewhen in selecting an area of study since roughly 2001.

Of course the reason I have given for seeking to mark the centenary of the sec-

ond birth of cinema with a conference at Newcastle in 2011 and this special

issue in 2013 is that if a medium is always born twice (to quote the title of

Andr and Philippes 2005 article in this journal), then its second birth is as

worthy of commemorating as its first. But I was also simply born a few years

too late to contribute to the generation of scholarship on the emergence of the

cinematograph (its first birth) that was linked to this events 1995 centenary;

hence to me the second time that cinema emerged when ideas and practicesagglomerated into norms, habits, institutions and consensuses , the moment due

for a centenary about 15 years after 1995, has acquired a degree of importance

that probably results as much from hankering after a centenary as from reasoned

judgement. Cinemas second birth might even, ironically, be unsuited to a cente-

nary. Even such a lengthy event as the First World War definitely began at a

certain date and definitely ended at one of two dates (the armistice or the sign-

ing of the Versailles treaty), whereas cinemas acquisition of a mediativity was

an accrual, a very protracted delivery.

A prodigious list of developments comprising what I (and, I later found,

Cecil Hepworth) have deemed to be a crescendo of reinvention occurring in the

Early Popular Visual Culture, 2013

Vol. 11, No. 2, 9799, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17460654.2013.785714

2013 Taylor & Francis


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UK in 1911 appears early in my The Cinema and the Origins of Literary

Modernism (2012): licences held by picture theatres first outnumbered those

held by older venues, on the back of this new type of venue (first emerging in

the UK in late 1907), Punch printed its first cartoons about film venues, nationalnewspaper columns devoted solely to film first appeared, production companies

releasing films in the UK launched their first publicity campaigns about picture

personalities targeted at the general public, the feature film made its first appear-

ance, and the first film fan magazine was released, distributing knowledge about

cinema to a readership counted in the hundreds of thousands, rather than to the

fewer than 10,000 readers amongst which the earlier trade magazines circulated

(1833). But even with reference to a specific country this dating of the end of

the cinematographs subservience is easily disputed: Joe Kember gives 1910 as

the year of the most remarkable surge in investment in fixed-site exhibition

(2011); the introduction of a system of cinema-specific licensing at the end of

1909 (the Cinematograph Act came into effect on 1 January 1910) implies that

the practice was now endowed with its own public in popular opinion; fictionhad taken over from actuality as the dominant mode on most film programmes

by the end of 1908, indicating a degree of common consensus on the idea that

the technology was particularly suited to generating one specialist type of utter-

ance: narrative.In spite of its cavalier and manifold disregard for centennial timing, however,

this special issue of Early Popular Visual Culture is devoted to cinemas second

birth for what I, and many of the colleagues gathered at the 2011 conference,

regard as several pressing reasons: (1) if Philippe and Andr are right to claim

that before a certain point the cinematograph was not cinema (simultaneously

synonymous with this type of creative practice and with this type of build-ing) at all, then the second birth isnt in any way secondary: it is the earliest

point from which it is possible for historians of this particular visual medium to

identify an object of study, and if the date of this point is unclear, then this

makes it even more worthy of closer analysis and better description; (2) it is

still necessary to combat a common perception that when the cinematograph

stopped being an extension of earlier practices (Gaudreault and Marion 2005,

4) this was a great loss (for examples see Shail 41), meaning that the practices

and institutions cohering around cinema thereafter constitute a kind of vacuum;

(3) as it is already something of an orthodoxy amongst film historians, and so

risks becoming an unquestioned assumption, the double birth model demands

particular scrutiny: in these articles, contributors pay this last task special atten-

tion, even Gaudreault and Marion, patiently waiting last in line this once.

Andrew Shail

School of English Literature, Language & Linguistics

Newcastle University

Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

Guest Editor

References

Gaudreault, Andr, and Philippe Marion. 2005. A Medium is Always Born Twice.... EarlyPopular Visual Culture 3 (1): 315.

98 Introduction


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Hepworth, Cecil. 1951. Came the Dawn: Memories of a Film Pioneer. London: PhoenixHouse.

Kember, Joe. 2011. Interview with Louise Anderson. 1 July.Shail, Andrew. 1912. The Cinema and the Origins of Literary Modernism. New York, NY:

Routledge.

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