Abstract
Two very different, but related, recent exhibitions at the Musée d’Orsay (28 September 2021–16 January 2022) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (20 February–10 July 2022) explored the relationships between early cinema and nineteenth-century French visual culture. Although I only saw the latter, which was an unqualified triumph, even those who were unable to travel to Paris or Los Angeles during the global pandemic can enjoy the treasures and insights of both of these ambitious exhibitions in the pages of the two exhibition catalogues, which are likewise both triumphs. Enfin le Cinéma! Arts, Images et Spectacles en France (1833–1907) was co-edited by co-curators Dominique Païni, Paul Perrin, and Marie Robert while City of Cinema: Paris 1850–1907 was co-authored by co-curators Leah Lehmbeck, Britt Salvesen, and Vanessa R. Schwartz, with an excellent additional chapter by Brian Jacobson. Despite the fact that the exhibitions were planned in tandem and followed one another chronologically, the two books (like the respective exhibitions) are strikingly different but quite complementary. Each volume is richly illustrated and beautifully produced, but few of the same images appear in both of the books since the overlap between the exhibitions ended up being minimal. 1
Enfin le cinéma! is organised by a series of words and phrases which are discussed in short entries of a few pages set in small type and larded with footnotes, followed by capsule biographies of a number of key figures – together the work of some 65 different authors altogether. City of Cinema is shorter and more argument-driven as well as more readable; its authors wear their erudition lightly. A selection of stills from early films with notes by Aaron Rich follows each of the book's six short chapters. Both exhibitions also generated supplemental streaming video content that will be a boon to interested readers and future researchers provided it persists online after the exhibitions themselves recede from memory.
The title Enfin le cinéma! implies a certain teleology, but the premise of the eponymous exhibition is more nuanced than the word ‘enfin’ (finally) might suggest. As co-curators and co-editors Païni, Perrin, and Robert explain in an interview with film historian Benoît Turquety (25–35), they wanted to avoid chronicling a series of inventions or proffering another linear account of the prehistory of cinema. Instead, they used the sheer variety one sees in early films as a kind of a prism that refracted different facets of pre-cinematic and para-cinematic culture to inspire the contours of the exhibition. 2 The Musée d’Orsay exhibition was organised by the following categories: ‘Life Itself’, ‘The Spectacle of the City’, ‘Movements in the Natural World’, ‘Time Made Visible’, ‘Testing the Body’, ‘The Voyeur's Gaze and Women's Bodies’, ‘Augmented Reality’, ‘History in Painting’, and an Epilogue on ‘The Movie Theatre’. Some of these themes appear in the exhibition catalogue, which also discusses certain of the specific works that were on display in the galleries. 3
But, the Enfin le cinéma! catalogue is not organised thematically, nor as a linear discussion of the works in the exhibition, which are listed at the end (311–321), although not all are reproduced in the catalogue. Instead, Enfin le cinéma! proceeds alphabetically as a series of words and phrases each followed by short discussions by different authors. These discussions include a number of short, thought-provoking interventions on topics as varied as aquariums (Guillaume Le Gall, 44–45), colonial exhibitions (Stéphane Tralongo, 109–111), sound recordings (Giusy Pisano, 252–255), and theatrical and cinematic tricks (Frank Kessler, Sabine Lenk, 276–279). The juxtaposition of short entries attached to very different terms, some of which are nouns, others adjectives, placed in alphabetical order, makes for interesting reading, especially since some of the terms are unexpected and/or obliquely related to the ostensible subject of the exhibition. Among the most intriguing are entries on the ‘oneiric’ (Mireille Berton, 186–187) and the ‘satiric’ (Jérémy Houillère, 238–240). Co-editor Perrin's entry on ‘inventory’ (134–139) as a strategy of painting, photography, and early cinema seems consistent with the catalogue's organisational rationale. What the various entries lack in overall coherence is more than made up for by promising directions for future research.
Paging through Enfin le cinéma! presents the reader with a number of interesting connections, along with a rich panorama of previously unpublished images. One is left with an afterimage of some of the motifs that were recirculated – or ‘recycled’, as at least two different authors put it (240, 307) – during the late-nineteenth century, many of which appear in early films. The range of different museums and archival sources from which the exhibition and the catalogue were sourced is extremely impressive and some extraordinary finds were brought to light. Attention to nineteenth-century stereoscopy is one of the catalogue's strengths, including Martin Barnier's discussion of stereoscopic ‘attractions’ (52–55), Salvesen's entry on ‘relief’ (228–231), and Denis Pellerin's biographical sketch of Louis Jules Duboscq, who developed several stereoscopic moving image devices before his death in 1886 (297). The short biographies that come at the end of the catalogue (294–307) are all exceedingly concise and useful, containing little-known details even about figures as familiar as Loïe Fuller (Rhonda Garelick, 299), Auguste and Louis Lumière (Thomas Galifot, 302), and Alice Guy-Blaché (Joan Simon, Pamela B. Green, 300), as well as precious new information about film colourist Élisabeth Thuillier and her daughter Berthe Thuillier (Stéphanie Salmon, Jacques Malthête, 306).
Several of the strongest entries in Enfin le cinéma! were written by the co-curators and scholars who co-authored City of Cinema, including Salvesen, Schwartz (‘capital’, 56–58), Lembeck (‘sculpture’, 242–244), and Jacobson (‘studios’, 262–264). But, unlike Enfin le cinéma!, City of Cinema explicitly focuses on Paris, which was the epicentre of international film production at the turn of the twentieth century. Of what Richard Abel called ‘The Big Four’ of early French cinema, only Lumière was located elsewhere, in Lyon, while Méliès, Pathé, and Gaumont were all based in Paris. Paris was also a crucial site for the creation of modern art and indeed modernity writ large. 4 City of Cinema proposes that modern life was itself cinematic and locates some of its most vivid expressions in late-nineteenth-century French visual culture.
The clou of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibition was a working replica of Émile Reynaud's projecting Praxinoscope, borrowed from the Cinémathèque Française and restored for the show. 5 The Théâtre Optique was a completely artisanal large-scale mechanism for projecting hand-painted images in motion exhibited at Paris's Musée Grévin in 1892 (65–68). This was some three years before the Lumière Cinématographe, a working example of which was also on display – borrowed from the newly opened Academy Museum in Los Angeles. Visitors to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibition were also treated to spectacular five- and six-feet-wide original lithographs advertising Lumière and Pathé (reproduced on pp. 47 and 4, respectively) as well as a number of well-chosen paintings, including an oil study Georges Seurat made for his final masterpiece Le Cirque which is not reproduced in the catalogue. 6
In one of the exhibition cases, an open copy of Albert Robida's 1888 novel Le Dix-Neuvième Siècle, the back and front covers of which show the parade of modern life projected from the lens of a magic lantern for a well-dressed female spectator holding opera glasses and a newspaper (10–11), was a material reminder of the important role of print culture in mediating modernity both textually and visually. In Robida's previous novel, the 1883 Le Vingtième Siècle, ‘one of the earliest illustrated books of science fiction, he envisioned giant screens transmitting images from one distant place to another’ in a far-off future set in the year 1955 (Schwartz, 38). 7 Jean-Marc Côté envisioned something similar in a lithograph made in 1899 that depicted the year 2000: Côté's imagined hybrid of telegraphy, phonography, and motion-picture projection, for which he coined the neologism ‘Cinéma-Phono-Télégraphique’ (24), looks like an analogue version of the videoconferencing interface I used to speak to one of the co-curators of the Los Angeles exhibition.
But, the real surprises of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibition were displayed below eye level in several cases of ephemera – eminently modern, but entirely disposable, historical artefacts. Among the most memorable were ephemeral advertisements, prints, and games manufactured to capitalise on the popularity of the interracial physical comedy team Footit et Chocolat, who appeared in several Lumière films. If, as Charles Baudelaire claimed, modernity was defined by ‘the transitory, the fleeting, the contingent’ (qtd. on 93), then objects like these (which not only survived, but somehow found their way into the gallery of a major art museum) point to a more inclusive and material account of historical modernity that takes into account the vernacular and the everyday.
The City of Cinema catalogue is chockablock with great insights and film references that merit additional attention. Schwartz's excursus on the kiosks that flourished after 1855, when ‘the government introduced new dedicated advertising structures known as Morris columns to the streetscape’ (40), subsequently appearing in numerous paintings, engravings, photographs, and films of Paris, is especially instructive. In nineteenth-century French culture, Salvesen notes, ‘performing and consuming intermingled’ (62) within the ‘competitive marketplace of visual culture’ (64), phrases that evoke fundamental characteristics of modernity. What film theorist Jean-Louis Comolli described as the ‘frenzy of the visible’ (qtd. on 72) originated in this very milieu, which also produced the cinematic apparatus, a highly consequential ‘concatenation of objects, images, and practices’ (Salvesen, 70).
By carefully trawling the holdings of French archives, the curators of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibition came up with an especially inspired choice of early films, including a number that have not been much discussed to date. Films were selected thematically around a number of compelling configurations: ‘Paris Projected’ (28–35); ‘La Ville Écran’ (48–59); ‘Shaping the Modern Spectator’ (74–87); ‘Fine Art on Film’ (100–119); ‘On the Move’ (136–153); and ‘Every World in One’ (168–181). Although many of the films programmed for the exhibition are in the public domain, rights issues made it impossible to extend these programmes for posterity through a DVD publication or streaming videos online; published stills, a ‘Film List’ (182–183), and what can be found online elsewhere, will have to suffice for most readers. Ultimately, City of Cinema succeeds in its stated aspiration of serving as ‘a compelling reference for and inspiration to future scholars’ (189) – not to mention, I would hasten to add, a splendid resource for students and for interested members of the general public. Readers of French and those interested in seeing even more fabulous images are advised to also invest in a copy of Enfin le cinéma!
