Early Cinema: The Sky’s the Limit

Note: This essay was originally written as a script for a video, which will be linked at the end of the article.

The definition of cinema has changed throughout the history of the medium. What was considered cinema in the early days is a far cry from the summer blockbusters released today. But in some ways, early cinema had an advantage over modern cinema. Nowadays, people have very strict expectations of what a movie is or what it should be and don't like it to be challenged. When Star Wars: The Last Jedi was released in theaters, featuring a scene where all audio is suspended for a short sequence, some theaters had to put up signs reassuring the audience that the film wasn't malfunctioning and that the silence was part of the film. Because if an action movie isn't barraging the viewer with rapid-fire sound for two hours, then obviously it must be a technical issue. For whatever advances have been brought to cinema by the march of progress, early cinema is fascinating and has always been fascinating to me, precisely because the filmmakers of that time had free reign to create, as they were not yet beholden to any rules or conventions of what constitutes a film. At that time, a film could be anything and everything!

Tom Gunning wrote in Cinema of Attractions, “Early filmmakers...have been studied primarily from the viewpoint of their contribution to film as a storytelling medium, particularly the evolution of narrative editing. Although such approaches are not totally misguided, they are one-sided and potentially distort both the work of these filmmakers and the actual forces shaping cinema before 1906.”

That's not to say that film isn't a storytelling medium, but back in the early days, not every film followed the now basic formulas, for better or for worse. Nowadays, movies are expected to have narratives and characters. Even ones portraying real-life events insert characters and situations that didn't exist for the sake of crafting a better story, Patch Adams springs to mind, having created a love interest for the main character who never really existed or other so-called "historical dramas" compositing characters together like in The Great Escape, compositing several real people into the characters depicted in the film, or how in Rudy, with the permission of the actual Dan Devine, (who was unaware of how antagonistic the screenwriter planned on making him) turned the football coach into a villain when he was actually the one who insisted on dressing Rudy in the final game. And that isn't even getting into how even documentaries have "narratives" and "characters", despite purportedly portraying actual events and people. Honestly, one of the things about studying film is that you learn to never fully trust anything you see put on a screen because you realize how easily the truth can be twisted and altered to suit a purportedly necessary narrative, and the idea of films becoming almost beholden to narrative elements would make an interesting study on its own, so I'll cut to the chase. This was summed up most succinctly by Jim Carrey as Andy Kaufman in Milos Forman's Man on the Moon: "All the most important things in my life are changed around and mixed up for dramatic purposes."

Early cinema was unburdened by that necessity and had “actualities” that were just events filmed by a camera with no narrative to speak of like Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory.

Several years ago, before the COVID-19 Pandemic, I made two trips to The Museum of the Moving Image, down in Queens, mainly for their Jim Henson Exhibit, but I also took a good look at their Behind the Screen exhibit, which details the history of filmmaking, which was, in general, a great experience, and if you live in NYC or are visiting Queens for any reason and have time to kill, I highly suggest visiting it. From that visit, I would postulate that early filmmakers were attempting to use their newfound medium to the fullest. The tools on display at the museum show that while they were working with, by today's standards, primitive tools, such as the early animation tools and kinetoscopes, they were still crafting unique films and did a lot with the little they had. And they utilized every tool they had at their disposal to create unique and interesting films.

Gunning writes of the “cinema of attraction”, which in his words is, “a cinema that bases itself on the quality that Leger celebrated: its ability to show something.” And he takes note of how conventions have changed, especially through the formerly widespread act of simply acknowledging the camera’s existence. “This action, which is later perceived as spoiling the realistic illusion of the cinema, is here undertaken with brio, establishing contact with the audience.” In today's cinema, such an act, unless it is meant to be part of the narrative, like in fourth-wall-breaking films, like Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Deadpool, or any Mel Brooks film, would be unthinkable. While a live performance inherently acknowledges the spectators (such as in pausing for applause or a reaction), films take place in a bubble where spectators are not allowed inside. And that change could be resultant of the shift of what type of art, films are trying to be.

Panofsky mentions the distinction between “folk art” and “art”, as such, "as a rule, folk art derives from what is known as 'higher art'". This on its own does not preclude experimentation, but it does create limits. "It was soon realized that the imitation of a theater performance with a set stage, fixed entries and exits, and distinctly literary ambitions is the one thing the film must avoid." While this is far from definitive proof, it seems to be the start of constricting film into a box of what is and what isn't acceptable to be considered "art". Films must avoid the elements of theater, they must take place in that bubble.

The Museum of the Moving Image contains a lot of history on the development of film, and the development of how not only the people making the films interacted with each other, the creation of various departments and sections of filmmaking (Makeup, Costuming, Set Design, etc.) but also the development of how film interacted with its audience.

Even the experience of seeing a film has become a sort of ritual, divorced from the early days when one would see a film by standing and staring into a large box through eye holes or by spinning a zoescope. And the farther the audience got, the more everything became samey. I mean, it feels like every single movie trailer follows identical beats, even when one film is a high-octane action film and the other is a biopic! Experimentation still exists in film today, I'm not disputing that, but on the whole, the major studios tend to gravitate to safer waters, whereas the pioneers of early cinema, including Louis Lumiere, were intrepid explorers heading for the rough waters ahead to see what they could truly do with their new medium, much like Lumiere depicted in his Boat Leaving the Port.

Early cinema was unique because there were no limits as to what it could be. While the state of cinema today is far from terrible, despite the advances in technology, mainstream cinema isn't quite as experimental, as spontaneous, as it was in the early days when filmmakers were throwing stuff at the wall to see what stuck. Indie film continues this trend to be sure, but it's very rarely seen in major releases. Early filmmakers were visionaries, and through the history of film, some of that vision has been lost because of the shift in what is and isn't considered "cinema" or "art" and the introduction of rules and conventions for films. But I hope that one day soon, in the art of filmmaking, the sky will once again be the limit.