Eva Orbanz
Seven days in New York
"Domitor" - this name was suggested by Antoine Lumière to his sons for the apparatus which then made history as the "Cinématographe". Ninety years later in 1985, five researchers, Stephen Bottomore (from England), Paolo Cherchi Usai (Italy), André Gaudreault (Canada), Tom Gunning (USA) and Emmanuelle Toulet (France) brought into being an association which borrowed the name of Antoine Lumière's long-forgotten idea and which devoted itself to the study of films and the cinema in the pre-First World War era. The official founding meeting of Domitor took place finally in 1987 during the Giornate del cinema muto in Pordenone. Meanwhile Domitor had attracted well over 150 members from more than 20 countries (taking country of residence, not nationality, as the determining factor). NO1
Domitor's objective is to carry out research into early films, i.e. covering the period from their beginnings to 1914.
Domitor regularly publishes a bulletin giving general information: notices on events, new publications and new members. In the 1987 Bulletin a bibliography was produced which included information on the work of Domitor members.
This year Domitor held its third international conference in New York City. The first took place in Québec in 1990 on the theme of "Film and Religion", the second in Lausanne in 1992 on "Cinéma sans frontières/Images across borders. Aspects de l'internationalité dans le cinéma mondial 1896-1918."
The Domitor conference in NYC on the theme "Cinema turns 100" was organised jointly with the Museum of Modern Art's Department of Film and Video and New York City University's Department of Cinema Studies.
Day 1 - Monday, 13th June
Registration at MoMA for conference participants - the programme allows for films to be shown in the first three days, followed by 3 1/2 days of talks. Approximately 175 participants attended the conference.
Films from all over the world which were produced between 1893 and 1900 were shown. Ron Magliozzi worked through the film archives for MoMA and films were programmed which could be made available from the archives. In total, around 725 titles, each between one and three minutes long: all the surviving Kinetoscope films of Edison, the newly restored films of Lumière, films by the American Mutoscope & Biograph, by Hepworth, Warwick, Paul and Williamson, by Skladanowsky and Messter, films from Australia and Italy.
A total of 255 films were shown today. Unfortunately I missed them all, sitting instead on an air-conditioned bus travelling from Brattleboro, Vermont, to NYC. In Brattleboro, I visited Helen van Dongen. We talked about her work in the '40s. With the help of her diary entries we discussed the filming of Louisiana Story and her life in New York and London in those days; a time in which many involved in documentary film were friendly with artists and in which MoMA was already the meeting place - under Iris Barry.
Julie Anderson from New York University had helped with accommodation; on Union Square, NYU had rooms in which many of the conference participants were accommodated - at favourable rates compared with the expense of hotel rooms in New York. I had a large room with an enormous fridge. On the bedside table a remote control for the TV with 23 channels and a telephone. The view afforded by the large window was over a narrow street and opposite a black wall with many fire escapes.
Day 2 - Tuesday, 14th June
On the radio, a discussion between various experts on the situation in Haiti. The hope was expressed that the democratically elected President Aristide can soon return from exile.
The weather: 33 degrees C with 80% humidity. Hot streets in which the air doesn't move. In the subway it is wonderfully cool. While travelling I read the ads. Among other things, designer braces as dental jewelry.
By the subway exit on 51st street, a cardboard "room" - the occupant is still asleep.
At 10am the showings begin in Titus II in MoMA. Today about another 250 films on the programme. Eileen Bowser gives a short introduction to each film, Roland Cosandey translating this into French. Martin Marks provides the piano accompaniment. Charles Kalinowski, Edward D'Inzillo, Greg Singer and Anthony Tavolacci project the films while Ronald Magliozzi is everywhere, keeping everything running smoothly.
The following films were shown (among others): American Mutoscope films copied from 68 mm to 35mm from the National Film and Television Archive, London; 75mm Lumière films on 35mm copied from the Archives du Film, Bois d'Arcy, and 35mm or 16mm copies from the Library of Congress, copied from their "paper print collection". The themes of the films changed rapidly; for the most part they are documentary films around one minute long. The film titles reflect their contents: Spanish Dance - American Falls - Luna Island - Harvesting Corn - The Crookedest Railroad Yard in the World - Arrival of Trains at Muskoka Wharf - Sheep Washing. Military parades and military gymnastics. Film from the Boer War. Work and leisure in the country.
Railways travel through the pictures, locomotives reach their stations; the camera travels on the loco through fields, forests and tunnels. On one journey - surprisingly two film reels long - the tunnel is illuminated, so that we are able to recognise it as a tunnel. The film ends when the train arrives at the terminus.
The films provide information from another age; the recorded image - the moment of filming and the framing - has a very poetic effect when seen today.
"Films" made by the Cinémathèque Française were also interesting: the moving pictures of the photographers Etienne-Jules Marey and Georges Demenij (who worked at the same time as Muybridge) were screened. These copies were presented by Mr. Lajon, who has an interest in this work.
Information from the radio during breakfast: North Korea has given way and the negotiations with the United States can continue. - The television station's application to film Lawson's execution in the gas chamber has been refused. - A fitness programme is to be introduced for police officers and from now on, being overweight will be ground for dismissal. - The New York Rangers have won the Stanley Cup again for the first time in 54 years.
On Lexington Avenue a coffee and doughnut seller: with lightning speed he flicks open the brown paper bag and drops in the coffee cup and cake - the same movement a hundred times an hour.
Today we'll only see about 170 films in MoMA. At the start of the day's presentations, Martin Marks (pianist) explains to the spectators that in contrast to the other early films, an original compilation of music pieces is still available from the Skladanowsky Brothers' programme. That makes his work a great deal easier. Otherwise, he has to watch the screen and "think simultaneously with his head and hands", each time suiting the music to the subject, meaning a musical change of theme every minute.
Documentary films continue as the main theme, including two versions of The American Flag.
The fire brigade in action: in the USA, England and Germany. And cars on the road. It was noticeable how the cars were filmed overcranked, while the fire engines - whether horse and carriage or motorised - rushed through the picture, the film being shot undercranked; probably in both cases the intention was to convey a feeling of security: the vehicle as a secure form of transport for the family, the fire brigade as the saviour in an emergency.
And there was a series of films about Galveston, in which shots of disastrous damage caused by a hurricane could be seen.
In some films we saw for the first time panning shots - sometimes steady, sometimes jerky. The moment this technique is invented can be seen on the screen.
At the end of the presentation in MoMA an invitation was issued by Anthology Film Archives; on the programme were a further 130 films by Louis and Auguste Lumière.
At 6pm the opening of the Conference at the second event venue takes place: New York University, D'Agostino Hall, 110W 3rd Street - our meeting point for the next few days.
Jacques Aumont's talk 'When is Primitive Cinema?' is dedicated to the late Christian Metz, "the accurate, modest, honest inventor, innovator of film studies"; it is meant to be provocative and is understood in that way. The discussion sparks off controversy: can film analysts provide a more competent contribution to the research of the history of early films than film historians? Gaudreault hopes that in the interests of Domitor, both can work together and thereby complement each other.
Day 4 - Thursday, 16th June
From our rooms on Union Square to NYU/D'Agostino Hall it takes about 15 minutes walk, without rushing. It's best to stay in the shade because in the sun it's already too hot. At 8.45 there are only a few people on the road. Washington Square is also virtually empty, apart from a couple of people asleep on the benches.
In D'Agostino Hall (actually, I would like to know who D'Agostino was) there's a friendly reception with coffee and muffins. The conference languages are English and French. Video monitors stand ready; talks can also be illustrated with slides or accompanied with recordings. Slides are used by all speakers and prove to be extremely useful.
The speakers receive no fees for their talks, nor do the organisers pay for travelling or accommodation expenses.
The Programme
9.30am Panel One: Other Technologies
Tom Gunning: World's Fair as Technological Microcosm: Cinema and Other Space/Time Technologies at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis, 1904. Guido Convents: Edison and his Kinetoscope in the Heart of Europe: Belgium 1894-1900. Marta Brown: Georges Demeny. Yuri Tsivian: "Speeding the 'Bullet-Message' ": Images of elsewhere in the Age of Electric Media. Moderator: Antonia Lant.
2.15 - 5.30pm Panel Two: Cinema's Cultural Intertext
André Gunthert: Instantaneous Cinematography in France 1891 - 1904. François Jost: Mental Images in Motion. Jean Mottet: Aesthetics of Disjunction in the Age of Spectacles and Stereotypes: The Question of Vaudeville. Donald Crafton: Film and Picture Postcards, 1894 - 1914. Presenter: Roland Cosandey.
In the evening there is something special. David Francis, assisted by Patrick Loughney, presents a Lantern Show in MoMA/Titus II: Slow Fade to Film: The Magic Lantern Before and After 1895. In the middle of the hall the projector has been set up - huge, with three lenses, gleaming in black and gold. Next to it, a large box of slides. The cinema quickly fills up. Lots of positive anticipation. David assures us that they will be using the same light intensity as that provided by the original limelight.
The first picture: a curtain. The second picture is missing and is explained by David: an opened curtain. But then comes the programme of moving pictures in wonderful colour. Funny "stories", dramas, panoramas, kaleidoscopes. In the middle, a short pause. Above all, for the "projectionists" who have to work hard: inserting the slide and each time fading out to the next slide, while retaining a certain rhythm. After the break, some longer stories - and then the climax: pictures to the text of "Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight". This is followed by the showing of a film with the same subject. Unfortunately the film is silent and in black and white. - Thunderous applause - a wonderful experience.
The workers on the Long Island Railroad are on strike. The strike was announced days before and buses have been organised to transport people in place of the railways.
The Football World Cup kicks off in the USA - the opening game takes place in Chicago between the reigning World champions and Colombia. Rollerblades are the latest thing in the streets of New York - lots of kids skate through the heavy traffic in between the cars.
The Programme
Panel Three: Non-Fiction Film
Arthur Cantrill: The 1901 Anthropological Cinematography of Walter Baldwin Spencer in Australia. Karen Backstein: Edison's 'Native' Dance: The Representation of Native American Performance in Early Cinema. Alison Griffiths: Early Ethnographic Film and Its Cultural Contexts. Natalia Noussinova: The Cinema in Russia Before Russian Cinema: Film History as Film Mythology. Moderator: Robert Sklar.
2.15 - 5.30pm Panel Four: Non-Fiction Film continued
Stephen Bottomore: The Third Dimension of Early Cinema Studies. Richard Crangle: Astounding Actuality and Life: Early British Film and the Illustrated Monthly Magazine. Dan Streible: Fake Prize Fight Films of the 1890s. Vanessa Schwartz: Re-thinking 1895: The Public Taste for Reality in Fin-de-Siècle Paris. Presenter: Paolo Cherchi Usai.
Arthur Cantrill shows Walter Baldwin Spencer's films on video: if one is sitting in the third row, one can hardly make out anything on the video monitor; he plays with it a sound recording which Spencer made of the Australian aborigines. Cantrill describes how Spencer himself did the filming. Spencer's diary serves as the basis for this talk; in it, Spencer provided drawings showing the camera angles used. Spencer was a scientist and did not want to direct the filming, i.e. he did not want to adjust anything, nor did he allow anything to be repeated for the sake of the camera. He wanted to film everything just as it happened. A very demanding approach in view of the technical possibilities of the time.
Karen Backstein's paper on Indian Dance is a good example of how historians use film to investigate a certain phenomenon but how the film itself - i.e. as an independent document or artform - plays no role. Backstein is concerned with the history of Indian Dance. And with these investigations the film has helped her document certain dances. Important certainly - but the Domitor conference seems to me to be the wrong venue for such papers.
Both Dan Streible and Vanessa Schwartz concern themselves with the question of how to get around "reality". Streible lectures on Lubin, the producer who staged boxing fights for film using laymen and was very successful. (Sometimes the film ran parallel with a fight! We were not told how Lubin got around the fact that he did not know while he was filming who would win the contest.) Schwartz recounts how it was newspaper reportage which ultimately served as the model for early feature films even if the route to the finished film was a long one: serialised novels emerged from reportage; the novels were reproduced in the Grevin waxworks museum; Zecca filmed the stories from the waxwork museum.
On the TV in the evening, it's US reality: Robert Shapiro gives a press conference. He must tell the public that O.J.Simpson has escaped. A short time later, the pursuit of "O.J." by six police cars and a TV company helicopter. When he gets home, the police and the TV are waiting for him. But he doesn't want to play along; so long as there is enough light for the cameras, he refuses to climb out of his car. We can't be there when he goes indoors. Or when he's arrested. The whole thing is so gripping that one can't switch off the TV, despite one's feelings of disgust.
Those (unlike me) not glued to the TV could watch projectors in action from the 1890s in the American Museum of the Moving Image. Carlos Bustamante reported enthusiastically on this the next day: watching films from, for example, 1895 on a projector from the same year is a completely different experience to watching the same film on a modern projector. His view was that one could get an idea of how the public saw films in the 1890s.
Day 6 - Saturday, 18th June
News on the radio about "O.J."
In the morning the panel is split into three groups and one can take one's pick. I stay in Group A: the papers on the whole are in English and I am interested in Alice Guy-Blaché.
The Programme
9.30 am Panel Five: Breakout
Group A. Richard Abel: Foreign Bodies on the American Stage: French Films Create a Cinema Market Before the Nickelodeon. François de la Bretèque: The Amalgamated Middle Ages of Early Film, 1895 - 1912. Alison McMahan: Alice Guy-Blaché: Heroic Victim or Reactionary? Marek Hendrykowsky: Edison and His Rivals in 19th Century Poland.
Alison McMahan is unable to recount much that is new about Guy-Blaché. She has only just begun her work. She starts by preparing a statement about the director/producer Guy-Blaché on the basis of films she has analysed. I am looking forward to hearing further results.
In the afternoon the conference participants were back together. After listening to the discussion during the coffeebreak, I had the feeling that I had been in the wrong group - others perhaps felt the same way. Coffee break.
2.30 - 5.45 pm Panel Six: Reception in Early Cinema.
Charlene Regester: African Americans in Early Cinema History: A Period of Protest and Self-Assertion, 1900 - 1914. Greg Walter: Motion Pictures as Chautauqua Entertainment, 1897 -1904. Frank Gray: Paul's Animatograph Works Ltd., 1896-97: Mapping the Company's Progress in a Field of Popular Spectacle. Malgorzeta Hendrykowska: What did the Polish Intelligentsia Expect from the Cinema, 1896 - 1910? Presenter: Lea Jacobs
Charlene Regester's talk on the African Americans in early US film was based exclusively on information from newspapers. It was informative but the question arose whether her conclusions would have been different if she had seen the films.
Frank Gray described the work of Robert William Paul, the optician who made films. With his "Theatrograph" he filmed the 1896 Derby - a sensation at the time, although one could not even make out the winning horse. Stephen Bottomore added that this was the first film ever to be archived; Paul gave it to the British Museum.
Dinner in an Italian restaurant; the Italian football team had just lost 0:1 to Ireland. In the restaurant the screen had been put away, T-shirts with the Italian team's logo were covered up but despite everything the atmosphere was cheerful.
In Millenium at 8.00 pm Corinne and Arthur Cantrill presented Projected Light. A film performance for two 16 mm projectors, slide projector, audiotape, posters, artifacts and two performers. Entrance cost $5. An endless performance in black and white and Kodachrome with a (partly) poetic text about the obviously wonderful house of A. and C. Cantrill.
On the way home, I buy 2 kilos' worth of New York Times - the Sunday edition!
Day 7 - Sunday, 19th June
Early check-out from the room. The lady on reception is a bit nervous; a wall of her office has just collapsed!
The Programme
10.15 am Panel Seven: The Word and the Film.
Claire Dupré la Tour: The Use of Intertitles in the Evolution of Early Film Construction, 1895 -1912. Isabelle Raynauld and Patrick Loughney: In the Beginning Was the Word: The Scenario/Screenplay in Early Silent Film (1893 - 1914). André Gaudreault and Germain Lacasse: The Showmen of Cinema, Quebec, 1897 - 1908. Presenter: Ben Brewster.
Isabelle Raynauld's and Patrick Loughney's talks complemented each other in a very interesting way. Raynauld established on the basis of her research that the script in early film already played a decisive role. Here it was already fixed exactly what, who and when things should happen; the story structure was linear. (Furthermore, although written for silent films, sound played an important role in these scripts, since it was exactly set which sounds should go with which picture: telephones ringing, bells chiming, clocks ticking, sirens wailing, shouts...) Loughney presented material from another film, confirming Raynauld's investigations. Regarding the film Tom Tom the Piper's Son, the following material is in the Library of Congress archive: papers on the planning of the film, the original script, the paper print, the original negative and a copy of the film. Because these documents cover the different stages of the film, an exact investigation into the story of its production is possible. The most important condition for competent research into film.
André Gaudreault and Germain Lacasse organise a successful conclusion to the conference. They deliver their interesting paper on the Showmen of Cinema in a highly entertaining way. The Showmen - a professional finish to a professional conference.
It is difficult to reach conclusions given the multiplicity of subjects and papers delivered. There were papers that were more interesting than others. There were some which were boringly delivered or uninteresting - probably because a competent analysis of the subject was lacking. Perhaps in this connection the conference's claim to importance was to give film research a firm place in the film archives. Lack of inclusion of film technique was the most fundamental omission. Every film aesthetic is also dependent on the prevailing film technique. And in spite of this, none of the papers commented on it.
I also think that film presentations and talks should be integrated in such a conference. The films shown at MoMA were informative and good and the overall impression was almost overwhelming; these films however almost never related to the talks themselves. It is to be hoped that in the future sufficient means for such an important conference will be available to allow this integration.
This is the first time that I have attended a Domitor conference. The scientific aspects of film do not necessarily belong to the everyday routine of a film archivist. I have the feeling that I have learnt something again. And my curiosity has been aroused. The next Domitor conference will take place in Paris in 1996.