Early Cinema Today: The Art of Programming and Live Performance

Early Cinema Today:

The Art of

Programming and

Live Performance

KINtop. Studies in Early Cinema

KINtop Studies in Early Cinema expands the efforts to promote historical research and theoretical reflection on the emergence of moving pictures undertaken by the internationally acclaimed KINtop yearbook (published in German from 1992–2006). It brings a new collection of anthologies and monographs in English by internationally renowned authors as well as young scholars. The scope of the series ranges from studies on the formative years of the emerging medium of animated photographs to research on the institutionalisation of cinema in the years up to the First World War. Books in this series will also explore the many facets of 19th and early 20th century visual culture as well as initiatives to preserve and present this cinematographic heritage. Early cinema has become one of the most dynamic fields of scholarly research in cinema studies worldwide, and this series aims to provide an international platform for new insights and fresh discoveries in this thriving area.

Series editors: Frank Kessler, Sabine Lenk and Martin Loiperdinger

Early Cinema Today:

The Art of

Programming and

Live Performance

Edited by

Martin Loiperdinger

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Early Cinema Today:

The Art of Programming and Live Performance

Series: KINtop Studies in Early Cinema – volume 1

A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 9780 86196 702 5 (Paperback)

Ebook edition ISBN: 978-0-86196-902-9

Ebook edition published by

John Libbey Publishing Ltd, 3 Leicester Road, New Barnet, Herts EN5 5EW, United Kingdom

e-mail: [email protected]; web site: www.johnlibbey.com

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Unauthorised duplication contravenes applicable laws.

Contents

Preface by Martin Loiperdinger

Andrea Haller and Martin Loiperdinger

Stimulating the Audience: Early Cinema’s Short Film Programme Format 1906 to 1912

Part I: Programming and Performing Early Cinema Today – Outstanding Examples

Mariann Lewinsky

The Best Years of Film History: A Hundred Years Ago

Tom Gunning

‘From the Bottom of the Sea’: Early Film at the Oberhausen Festival

Madeleine Bernstorff

From the Past to the Future: Suffragettes – Extremists of Visibility in Berlin

Eric de Kuyper

Silent Films in their First Decades – Objects for Research or for Exhibition?

Vanessa Toulmin

Programming the Local: Mitchell & Kenyon and the Local Film Show

Part II: Crazy Cinématographe: Early Cinema Performance on the Luxembourg Fairground

Claude Bertemes and Nicole Dahlen

Back to the Future: Early Cinema and Late Economy of Attention

An interim report about Crazy Cinématographe

Dick Tomasovic

The Crazy Cinématographe, or the Art of the Impromptu Spectator

Claude Bertemes and Nicole Dahlen

The Art of Crazy Programming

Documentation of Crazy Cinématographe Programmes, 2007 to 2010

Conclusion

Frank Kessler

Programming and Performing Early Cinema Today:

Strategies and Dispositifs

The Contributors

Picture credits

KINtop

Martin Loiperdinger

Preface

Early cinema and its media performance practices had already fallen into oblivion for more than six decades when the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) screened fiction films from 1900 to 1906 to film scholars and archivists at the now legendary Brighton conference in 1978. The first steps to be taken following this initiative, of course, were to examine and study the material itself, i.e. the artefacts from that early period which the film archives kept in unmarked tin cans. The next steps then were to do research on the production, distribution, exhibition and reception of those artefacts, i.e. to reconstruct different aspects of early cinema history. In this respect, the Nederlands Filmmuseum (NFM, now named EYE – Film Institute Netherlands) became one of the leading archives because it had shown foresight in undertaking preservation and research efforts which afforded access to its rich collections from the first decades of the 20th century – mainly the Desmet collection – to the international research community. The two Amsterdam Workshops on Non-fiction from the 1910s (1994) and on Disorderly Order – Colours in Silent Film (1995), both curated by Daan Hertogs and Niko de Klerk, were eye-openers: the beautiful prints and their efficient programming were a surprise for everybody present who was not yet familiar with the marvellous collections of the Nederlands Filmmuseum.

In subsequent years, programming early cinema, for professional as well as for non-professional audiences, became an issue. Audiences also became an issue on various occasions. This first volume of KINtop – Studies in Early Cinema aims to provide first-hand insights given by the curators of some groundbreaking endeavours in arranging early cinema performances in Italy, Belgium, Great Britain, Germany and Luxemburg.

Starting in 2003, the regular retrospective 100 Years Ago at the Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna became the annual focus of early cinema presentation, showing about ten carefully composed programmes of the respective year’s film production of just a century ago. Owing to the outstanding sensitivity which Mariann Lewinsky has been devoting to the curation of this retrospective since 2004, Bologna is unquestionably the best place to represent the wide and lively range and colourful richness which early cinema programmes can offer. Accordingly, Mariann Lewinsky’s contribution to this volume describes, from her personal point of view, how she composes her film programmes, somehow comparable to a multi-course gourmet meal. Recently, in collaboration with Eric de Kuyper, she curated the ten programmes of the retrospective From the Deep: The Experimental Film 1898–1918 at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, in 2010. Tom Gunning, in his review of this major early cinema event, most notably underlines the delight in variety and sudden juxtapositions which many young filmmakers among the audience were offered to experience. The Oberhausen festival was the right place for the retrospective because, a century ago, indeed many filmmakers undertook experiments in what the new medium could do (if without claiming to be avant-garde artists).

Besides these comprehensive retrospectives the last decade saw some elaborate examples of programming early films on special topics to present a collection, to investigate a subject or to arouse special interest in chosen audiences for early films. There were Nico de Klerk’s Biograph programmes and Vanessa Toulmin’s Mitchell & Kenyon programmes which presented samples of the surviving film production of these companies to the professional audience of Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone and Sacile respectively. Not to forget the Imaginaires en contexte events which Eric de Kuyper curated in collaboration with the Cinémathèque royale de Belgique (now renamed Cinematek). In order to make audiences experience early cinema’s closeness to 19th century culture, Eric de Kuyper arranged screenings at locations which had strong affinities to the subjects of the films shown there. In addition, Eric de Kuyper uses live music as an important tool to bridge the gap between the films and today’s audiences who view them a century after their first releases. The musical accompaniment must not necessarily be limited to contemporary music of the 1910s: for example, as he points out, Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 8 of 1943 may well evoke the feelings of terror and death which were exited by the products of a steel plant which is exhaustively portrayed in a long industrial film from the First World War.

Recently, a subject-related event comprising five days of early film programmes and lectures was curated by Madeleine Bernstorff and Mariann Lewinsky in Berlin in September 2010, entitled Frühe Interventionen: Suffragetten – Extremistinnen der Sichtbarkeit (Early Interventions: Suffragettes – Extremists of Visibility). When they viewed prints in preparing the retrospective, suffragettes appeared to them as if they were spilling their physical presence out into the screening room and thus encroaching into the audience’s space. The curators tried to take into account such observations by way of programmes that called attention to the evocative intensity of the films, primarily to be found in anti-suffragette burlesques.

Vanessa Toulmin’s compact report on her many screenings of local films from the Mitchell and Kenyon collection to local audiences after more than hundred years underlines the amazing interest in the past of people’s own town which provoked many spontaneous reactions from audiences and made these shows a tremendous success all over England. Film performances sometimes borrowed a special aura from the locations of the screenings when they took place in the same town halls where those local films had been screened more than a century ago.

The ‘performative turn’ of today’s early cinema presentations took place in 2007, when the Cinémathèque de la Ville de Luxembourg started the Crazy Cinématographe experiment in a fairground tent. The fairground is a most demanding environment which absolutely requires fighting for the attention of the fairground visitors. The film screenings inside the tent must be preceded by a staged front-show to attract passers-by and lure them into the screening room. During the show inside the tent can be observed the resurrection of the film lecturer who had almost disappeared nearly a century ago (with some exception, i.e. the presentations of the Méliès family who still arrange live performances of some of the pioneer’s fantastic films).

While almost all live performances of early cinema today which are known to us neglect the historical institution of the film lecturer and instead are satisfied with the musical accompaniment by a piano player or a small orchestra, it is impossible to perform a fairground film show without barkers and film lecturers. Both are absolutely required by the fairground dispositif which fundamentally differs from all parameters of film screenings in the environment of film archives and cinema museums. Claude Bertemes and Nicole Dahlen present their remarkable reflections on how they programme the Crazy Cinématographe modules in order to defeat the noisy environment at the fairground. They also provide the Crazy Cinématographe programme documentation and the Crazy Cinématographe filmography which lists every single film shown in the first four years of this experiment’s existence.

These contributions written by professional film curators are rounded off with two articles which provide historical and categorical considerations for the comprehension of the different approaches of today’s programming and performing early cinema: Andrea Haller and Martin Loiperdinger give a short introduction into the practice of short film programming before the First World War as can be studied in programme advertisements of a German cinema entrepreneur, Peter Marzen, from Trier. Frank Kessler, in his concluding essay, unfolds a wide range of strategies and dispositifs which make ‘early cinema re-loaded’ a varied experience, but always a unique one.

Curating short film programmes of early cinema today sounds somehow similar to curating exhibitions of paintings: programmers try to put the films into an effective running order while aiming at underlining certain aspects of the images projected onto the screen. Every film within a programme stands in a relationship with its previous or following films, which requires much expertise to make the succession of films work as a programme. Given all the differences which might be observed with today’s audiences and audiences of a century ago alike, they also have something in common. Now and then, early cinema presented a novelty, a technological one at the turn of the century, an aesthetic one in recent years – so there has always been the element of surprise for audiences who watch(ed) early cinema film programmes.

Some contributions in this volume go back to the workshop ‘The Art of Programming Early Cinema, Now and Then’ which I organised for the Cinémathèque de la Ville de Luxembourg, in September, 2009. Some contributions were written especially for this volume. I feel very grateful to all contributors for their inspiring cooperation.

This volume was made possible through the generous support of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation, DFG) of the Cinémathèque de la Ville de Luxembourg.

Trier, June 2011

Martin Loiperdinger

PART I

Programming and Performing

Early Cinema Today –

Outstanding Examples

Andrea Haller and Martin Loiperdinger

Stimulating the Audience:

Early Cinema’s Short Film Programme Format 1906 to 1912

Early cinema reached its widest scope with the commencing boom of fixed-site cinemas from 1906 onward. The large majority of films from the period of early cinema shown again today date from 1906 to 1912. Under the leadership of Pathé, the film producers of that time provided the quickly growing market of fixed-site cinemas with numerous short films of different genres every week. Film distributors and cinema owners collected widely varied programmes from this plentiful offer. Film production expanded: The number of films produced increased, as did the number of copies per film title. Thus, from 1906 to 1912, substantially more films have been preserved than from the preceding years. With the rising output of films, the producers also developed a broader diversity accompanied by intensified standardisation within the genres themselves. Both tendencies met the need to assemble short film programmes following a model of lively alternation. This permitted the cinema owners to offer the audience good entertainment with seven or eight or even up to 20 short films. The ‘number’ programme of the fixed-site cinemas lasted at least one hour and up to much over two hours. These programmes were changed once or twice, sometimes even three times a week.

Thanks to the efforts employed by film archives throughout the world toward restoration and preservation, we have today again access to the genre diversity of early cinema – and it is easy to recognise the genre the individual films belong to: altogether good prerequisites for designing attractive programmes to familiarise today’s audience with early cinema.

This article presents short film programmes from the first years of fixed-site cinema exhibition in Germany. Generally speaking, short film programming was done much the same in most countries of Europe. The programme format was already fixed by 1906: Where did it originate?

In his reminiscences of the early days, Colonel Alfred Bromhead, general manager of Gaumont in Britain, tells us that three dominant types of film exhibitors existed before 1906: 1. The fairground travelling showman. 2. The town hall showman. 3. The music hall exhibitor.¹ These entrepreneurs created and standardized three distinct forms of film exhibition: (1) The fairground attraction of the cinematograph show of 15 to 20 minutes, performed in a mobile booth or tent within the environment of other tantalizing fairground attractions; (2) the cinematograph show in town halls, a stand-alone attraction of usually two hours, (3) the cinematograph ‘number’ of 10 to 15 minutes in music-halls and variety theatres embedded into a programme of live acts.

The fixed-site cinemas established the cinematograph show as a permanent stand-alone entertainment institution. It is the very differences in the duration of the film programmes offered before 1906 which suggest that the fixed-site cinemas reverted to the programming standards of the travelling town hall showmen. In contrast to the travelling fairground showmen, these town hall showmen have seen little research. For example, up to now, only one town hall showman enterprise has been researched for Germany, namely, Marzen’s Edison’s Elektrisches Theater in Trier, which catered to some southwestern regions of Germany: to Lorraine, the Western Palatinate, the Rhineland, and to Luxemburg.² For England, case studies exist on several travelling town hall showman enterprises, such as the Thomas-Edison Animated Photo Co., Ralph Pringle’s North American Animated Photo Company and Sidney Carter’s and