Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kristen Whissel is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

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"In "Picturing American Modernity," Kristen Whissel thinks through the relation between early cinema and American culture at the turn of the century in imaginative and original ways. Probing cinema's interaction with both current events and other forms of mass entertainment (such as the Spanish-American War, the World Expositions, and Buffalo Bill's Wild West show), Whissel traces the creation of a new mass audience and cinema's role in shaping the culture of American imperialism. Her in-depth analysis of the films "Traffic in Souls" and "Shoes" reveals that the concept of 'traffic' can also organize strategies of film narration, as the cinema began to define itself as a new form of storytelling and national identity."--Tom Gunning, author of "The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity"

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PICTURING AMERICAN MODERNITY

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments........................................................................................................................ixIntroduction...........................................................................................................................11 The Early Cinema Encounters Empire: War Actualities, American Modernity, and Military Masculinity...................................212 Placing Audiences on the Scene of History: Modern Warfare and the Battle Reenactment at the Turn of the Century.....................633 Electric Modernity and the Cinema at the Pan-American Exposition: The City of Living Light..........................................1174 Regulating Mobility: Traffic, Technology, and Feature-Length Narrativity............................................................161Conclusion.............................................................................................................................215Notes..................................................................................................................................233Bibliography...........................................................................................................................253Index..................................................................................................................................263

Chapter One

War Actualities, American Modernity, and Military Masculinity

In August 1898 The Century magazine published accounts of naval battles fought during the Spanish-American War in which the United States defeated Spain to establish military, political, and economic dominance in the Western Hemisphere. As Captain John W. Philip of the USS Texas, after detailing the courage, efficiency, and technological mastery of his crew in battle, lamented: "I shall ever regret that the snap shot of the crew of the boat ... proved to be a failure, the films being ruined by sulphur. The crew was muscular and well developed, stripped to the waist and their bodies were besmeared with perspiration and the refuse of burnt powder. They were a mild and well-disposed set of men, but they looked angry." Although Captain Philip regretted the destruction of this particular photograph, the early cinema more than compensated for the loss. The Edison Manufacturing Co.'s war actuality films provided civilians with numerous life-size moving images of military men (at times "muscular and developed" and "stripped to the waist") who promised to rescue Cuba from an oppressive Spanish colonial regime and in the process deliver the United States from the ills of technological modernity. With the ability to reproduce "life-size" images of bodies in motion and views of disparate and distant points around the globe, moving pictures were particularly well suited to give new and compelling visibility to an emergent imperial masculinity. Following the declaration of war, the Edison Manufacturing Co. dispatched its newly licensed cameraman William Paley to military camps in Tampa, Florida (which served as a point of departure for troops and ships headed for Cuba and Puerto Rico), and then later arranged for Paley's transport to Cuba on one of the New York Journal's news yachts. The resulting films found in Edison's War Extra catalogue promised exhibitors films that "are sure to satisfy the craving of the general public for absolutely true and accurate details regarding the movements of the United States Army getting ready for the invasion of Cuba." Focusing on short bursts of "purposeful" movement, films shot at the military camp in Tampa make visible the kinetic movement and circulation of the male body in motion preparing for the conquest of the new overseas empire. In turn, naval views exhibit battleships adorned with "bustling" activity and the flag, thereby displaying in a single image the synthesis of militarized masculinity, powerful technology, and patriotism. Such films proved to be exceedingly popular with the audiences that flocked to venues such as New York's Eden Muse to see them, thereby "bringing moving pictures into an unprecedented number of metropolitan theatres" and revitalizing a flagging film industry.

In doing so, the moving pictures joined a range of other mass cultural forms in generating images of disciplined white male bodies harnessed to military technologies that came to represent a newly forged national-imperial identity based on an amalgamation of social Darwinism, the imperatives of industrial capitalism, the myth of the frontier, and the ideology of manifest destiny. The proliferation of such images in the sphere of commercialized leisure was joined by a resurgence of claims to an Anglo-Saxon virility that had led the "English-speaking race" to conquer and civilize vast areas and populations around the world. These discursive constructions provided compelling counternarratives to the all-too-familiar image of an enervated male body exhausted and effeminized by the demands of industrial capitalism and technological modernity that circulated throughout popular American culture. Moreover, they seemed to provide evidence that despite the increased participation of the New Woman in suffrage, reform, and anti-imperialist movements and the increased presence of immigrants in politics, the workplace, and the spheres of commercialized leisure, native-born Anglo-American men might once again strengthen their privileged grip on political legitimacy, cultural authority, and social control.

The emergence of this new image of martial masculinity on moving picture screens arrived at an opportune moment, for alarmists had repeatedly warned their fellow Americans that if native white masculinity declined as a result of the exigencies and excesses of modern life, so too would American "civilization." In the last decades of the nineteenth century, such concerns had brought American masculinity under the scrutiny of an older generation of male scientists, adventurers, psychologists, reformers, military veterans, and educators who described the younger generation as "unnatural," "degenerate," "effeminate," "over-civilized," "neurasthenic," and therefore in need of reform. As Gaylyn Studlar has shown, this group of specialists promoted a range of semicompulsory activities (scouting, competitive athletics, hunting trips, etc.) that would revitalize and strengthen individual character. As part of this trend, the discipline of military life was promoted as a corrective for the modern ills that plagued the male body and the national body. T. J. Jackson Lears has shown that a culturally powerful "martial ideal emerged as a popular antidote to over-civilization. Joining transatlantic currents of romantic activism, it animated cults of strenuosity and military prowess; it influenced literature and social thought, education and foreign policy. Though conventional wisdom dismissed war as an anachronism, many Americans began to hope that the warrior might return to redeem them from enervation and impotence." Hence, in 1898 war with Spain was welcomed in newspapers (especially William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal), magazines, and vaudeville houses as an opportunity to build male bodies and, in the process,...