became famous at Selig for his westerns, especially beginning with The Law and the
Outlaw (1913). Next to G.M.Anderson and William S.Hart, Mix became a wildly
popular, flamboyant cowboy star. Yet like Buffalo Bill Cody, many of his legendary
deeds were in fact fables he himself had invented. Although never a cowboy in real life,
he was an outstanding marks-man and rodeo stuntman in his numerous movies.
Further reading
Birchard, Robert S. (1993) King Cowboy: Tom Mix and the Movies, Burbank: Riverwood Press.
NANNA VERHOEFF
modernity and early cinema
Modernity refers to the conditions of the modern world; while this can indicate the whole
of western history since the Renaissance (or the Enlightenment, or the French
Revolution), in the context of early cinema the term most often refers more narrowly to
the period since the industrial revolution, and specifically the changes in transportation,
communication, and urbanization occasioned by such new inventions/innovations as:
the railway, telegraph, telephone, electricity, photography, imperialism and worldwide
markets, mass marketing and the rise of a consumer culture, as well as the new
importance of scientific research for industry and society. In other words, it refers to “the
second industrial revolution” in the latter part of the 19th century, and the innovations on
which the emergence of early cinema was dependent.
Consideration of early cinema and modernity attempts to place cinema as an industry
and form of entertainment, as well as a narrative and aesthetic form, in relation to the
historical and cultural context in which it developed, especially fitting it into the novel
patterns of modern life. As an aspect of a cultural history of cinema, the relation between
modernity and early cinema would seem to be an obvious topic, unless one maintains a
strict formalist position that art as an autonomous form cannot be subjected to social
analysis. Clearly, patterns of early cinema exhibition in cities must be looked at in terms
of urbanization, reform legislation, and class tensions. Even the non-urban
fair/fairground exhibitions that formed the most frequent venue for cinema in Western
Europe before the 1910s changed in relation to the industrialization of the fair, the
introduction of electricity as a marvel, and the display of modern devices (including Xrays
and electrical generators) as attractions in themselves. Early film production,
especially by international companies (such as the various branches of the American
Mutoscope and Biograph Company in the USA, Great Britain, and continental Europe
at the turn of the century, or Pathé-Frères after 1904), must be approached in terms of
new international systems of trade. The technology of the cinema itself depends on
modern production of precision machinery and innovations in photographic chemistry,
not to mention cinema’s origin in scientific research via chronophotography. In terms of
technology, distribution, production and exhibition, early cinema makes constant use of
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the new conditions of modernity; indeed it could be said to exemplify them as a new
means of mechanical art and entertainment.
Short of abandoning (or radically narrowing) the project of film history, it would seem
that early cinema must be investigated in terms of modernity. While certainly some issues
in film history may not relate directly to the themes of modernity, nonetheless issues of
imperialism, gender, and race or ethnicity all take specific forms in the period of early
cinema and are dependent on the economic, technical, and social transformations of the
era. Work in investigating cinema and modernity has made use of a Germanic tradition
closely associated with the term, including works by Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Georg
Lukacs, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodore Adorno. More recent
theorists such as Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Stephen Kern, Anson Rabinbach, Jonathan
Crary, and Wolfgang Schivelbusch also have been influential in defining modernity for
film history. Although there is considerable overlap in the themes and even some of the
conclusions of these authors, there also are enough differences that it should not be
assumed that everyone dealing with the issue of modernity and early cinema necessarily
share all the same assumptions.
For the earliest period of film production and exhibition, reception of the new marvel
almost universally invoked not only the wonders of modern technology, but also new
experiences of unfamiliar and even uncanny effects this new technology spawned.
Further, many early films featured aspects of modern life: the movement of crowds in big
city streets, workers emerging from factory gates, trains arriving at stations. Images of
speeding locomotives stimulated perhaps the greatest excitement from commentators on
the first film programs. Thus they saw such programs as offering a view of a new life as
well as a new invention. Although scenes of modern life did not exhaust the repertory of
early films, which included vaudeville acts, scenes of everyday life, and picturesque
images of nature (ocean surf, Niagara Falls), modern images undeniably characterized
early film programs.
Early films, consequently, represented aspects of modern experience in both themes
and forms. Approaches to defining “experience” vary from theorist to theorist, from the
more phenomenological claims of Tom Gunning to the cognitivist investigations of Ben
Singer or the more psychoanalytically shaped theories of some of the feminist historians
(Miriam Hansen, to a degree). However, these differences do not interfere with a shared
assumption that films reflect changes in historical experience as well as relying on basic
cognitive consistencies. Historical experience appears in the way films are received
(understood and discussed) by audiences as well as in the way they are made. Thus
Hansen’s work emphasizes cinema’s role as an “alternative public sphere” for early
audiences, especially the women and recent immigrants who made up a significant
proportion of the nickelodeon audience in urban theaters. Movies, due to low ticket
prices, created working-class audiences mixed in gender, ethnicity, and age. And
working-class audiences, as social historians such as Ralph Rosenzweig have shown,
treated the nickelodeon as a social club as much as a place to view films. Film provided
food for discussion and a reference point for processing new experiences.
More controversial, perhaps, is Gunning’s argument that the format of cinema’s first
decade, which he terms the cinema of attractions (brief non-narrative doses of visual
pleasure—unusual scenes, gags, acts, tricks, or scenic views), can be related to the
experience of modernity. Gunning claims the presentational modes of attractions
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paralleled the shocks that Benjamin saw as typical of modern experience (and of cinema).
A great proportion of early films took confrontational and exhibitionistic stances towards
their viewers, as opposed to the more traditional absorption and contemplation called for
in the traditional arts. Thus, the brevity of these films and their frequent use of surprise
(explosions, tricks appearances and transformations, or display of visual curiosities)
created a fast-paced, unpredictable, and even nerve-shaking experience. The direct
address to the audience found in many early films (either through actors addressing the
camera—as in the outlaw firing at the audience in Edison’s The Great Train Robbery
(1903)—or through the phantom train rides which, as Charles Musser puts it, position
the “spectator as a passenger”) aggressively seized audience attention with a sensation
more closely related to the attractions of fairgrounds and carnivals than the traditional
aesthetic experience offered by legitimate theater, the classic novel, or the art museum.
While hardly a modernist or avant-garde technique, the cinema of attractions
exemplified the confrontational and often absurdist energy that avant-garde artists in the
1910s appropriated from the popular arts—the music hall, the circus, the comic strip—
as well as the cinema. The specific forms of the cinema that attracted many modernist
artists—especially their fast pace and compression of time—also repelled many middleclass
reformers of the era who very specifically related these aspects to the effects of
modernity that they found pernicious.
Thus, in 1911, Hermann Kienzl, a German theater critic, launched an attack on cinema
saying:
The psychology of the triumph of cinema equals the psychology of the
metropolis […] because the metropolitan spirit—constantly rushed,
staggering from fleeting impressions, curious and impenetrable—is
exactly the soul of the cinema […] And because the city dweller is as
accustomed to nervous stimulation as an arsenic eater to his poison, he is
especially thankful when a film gives him an exciting cops and robbers
story in about a minute.
Likewise, a Brazilian journalist writing in 1909 used cinema as the emblem for this
speeded-up pace of modern life brought on by new technology:
The great symbols of our era, the automobile, our delight, and the
phonograph, our torment, collapse distances and preserve voices just to
avoid wasting time. In the future, if our planet does not hurry to its finish
and end up carried off on the tail of a comet, the man of our era, I speedily
declare, will be classified as the “homo cinematographicus.”
Examples of such reactions to cinema as the epitome of modernity could be multiplied
and, as the examples cited show, are international.
Two points should be stressed. Although the modern forms of technology and
commerce clearly shaped the processes of early film production, the claim that cinema
had an intense relation to the experience of modernity was repeatedly articulated as a
theme in the reception of early cinema. Critics (and, putatively, audiences) understood
cinema as an essential part of the novelty of modern life. Its images, its principle icons,
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and its forms, especially its temporal structure, presented scenarios that seemed tailored
to people attempting to inhabit this brave new world. Secondly, although cinema’s first
decade corresponds to certain aspects of the experience of modernity (brevity,
confrontation, shock), the more narrativized cinema of its second decade just as
obviously inhabits and reflects upon this modern world. Indeed, the greater expansion of
cinema after 1906 arguably heightened its association with modern life.
Some critics, doubting the value of relating early cinema to modernity, have claimed
that such a relation cannot in itself explain stylistic change, especially given the strong
transformation of cinema from the attractions mode of the first decade to the greater
reliance on narrative structures and psychological characters after 1906. Yet no one has
claimed that modernity supplies the total explanation for film style. Indeed in his work on
D.W.Griffith at Biograph, Gunning emphasized the role such factors as changing
audiences, industry re-organization, pressure from cenregularize production contributed
to the increased narrativization of cinema and the stylistic forms that took in the period
around 1909. However, this sorship boards and reformers, and attempts to is not to say
that modernity cannot be related to different styles and their success with audiences.
Aspects of film style in 1903 as well as 1911 can be related to modernity, although often
to different aspects. From 1903 to 1910, the fast-paced aspect of early cinema, so often
compared to the tempo of modern life, moved from the brevity of individual films, the
rapid succession of attractions, and the variety of the early film program, to a new use of
fast-paced editing, a quick succession of gags within slapstick films, and the thrilling
death-defying stunts in serials. The desire articulated after 1908 to attract “respectable,
middle class audiences” does lead in some instances to films which seem to reflect more
traditional cultural values, especially as opposed to the ribald humor and outright anarchy
of certain films of the first decade. But the popularity of slapstick comedies, action
serials, and sensational melodramas into the early feature era shows that film audiences
still demanded the new dramaturgy based in shocks, one which can be related to
modernity in terms of temporality, technology, new concepts of gender, and the ongoing
pursuit of thrills and excitement.
Further reading
Bordwell, David (1997) On The History of Film Style, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Charney, Leo and Vanessa Schwartz (eds.) (1995) Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life,
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Crary, Jonathan (1990) Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth
Century, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gunning, Tom (1994) “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In) Credulous
Spectator” in Linda Williams (ed.) Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, 114–133, New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Gunning, Tom (1994) “The Whole Town’s Gawking’: Early Cinema and the Visual Experience of
Modernity” Yale Journal of Criticism, 7.2:189–201.
Hansen, Miriam (1991) Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film, Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Kern, Stephen (1983) The Culture of Space and Time, 1880–1918, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
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Rabinovitz, Lauren (1998) For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies and Culture in Turn-of-theCentury
Chicago, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Singer, Ben (2001) Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and its Contexts, New
York: Columbia University Press.
TOM GUNNING
modes of production: issues and debates
Marx used the term “mode of production” to analyze different economic systems with
respect to methods of organizing labor, allocating power, controlling material and
financial resources, distributing profit, and so on. In general, the modes of production
Marx examined were very broad and distinct economic structures such as slavery,
feudalism, capitalism, and socialism. More than just an issue of material or economic
activity, Marx saw modes of production as intimately tied to larger social and ideological
manifestations, whereby, as he wrote in A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy (1859), “The mode of production in material life determines the general
character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life.”
In cinema studies, the term has been used rather more narrowly, generally
sidestepping the social-reflectionist implications of Marx’s base/ superstructure paradigm
and focusing not on broadest-level economic structures but rather on different ways of
organizing the film-production process with respect to divisions of labor and authority.
For cinema historians, a “mode of production” refers to a particular set of production
practices—a particular system by which financial and material resources are mobilized,
decisions are made, and work functions are divided in the manufacture of films.
Technically speaking, a distinction can be made between a “mode” and a “system” of
production—the latter being a specific configuration or articulation of the former. So, for
example, recent scholars can discuss the “Hollywood mode of production” (as a mode
based on the detailed division of labor) while describing historical shifts in the specific
systems of divided labor constituting that mode. In practice, however, the terms “mode”
and “system” are generally used interchangeably.
The most fully elaborated analysis of modes of production in silent cinema has
concentrated on the US industry. Janet Staiger’s groundbreaking work in The Classical
Hollywood Cinema mapped out four dominant production systems that developed more
or less sequentially in the silent era: the “cameraman” system (1896–1907); the “director”
system (1907–1909); the “director-unit” system (1909–1914); and the “central producer”
system (1914–1930).
In Staiger’s breakdown, the initial “cameraman” system was a mode with little or no
division of labor. The filmmaker was a Jack-of-all-trades craftsman, conceiving and
executing virtually all parts of the production process. The same person selected subject
matter, decided upon technological and photographic options (cameras, lenses, raw stock,
etc.), handled staging (manipulating lighting, setting, people), photographed scenes,
developed and edited the film. The cameraman may or may not also have been the
owner/manager in charge of capital direction, but in any case he was a “unified” artisan
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