“James Agee,” in a shorter version, was presented as a lecture for the Graduate Colloquium in Cinema and Media Studies, UCLA, 2012.
At the University of California Press I owe thanks to my editor, Mary Francis, for her patience, promptness, and wise responsiveness; to Lea Jacobs and the anonymous readers of the manuscript for their useful suggestions; to Rose Vekony for gracefully shepherding the book through production; and to copy editor Sharron Wood for her care and expertise, which saved me from many embarrassing errors.
The following individuals were instrumental in giving me information or opportunities to publish essays and present lectures: Charles Affron, Mirella Affron, Richard Allen, Dudley Andrew, Sarah Cooper, Corey Creekmur, Christophe Damour, Rhidian Davis, Richard Dyer, Christian Keathley, Robert Lupone, Robert Lyons, Colin MacCabe, Kathleen McHugh, Jim Miller, Michael Morgan, Chon Noriega, Gilberto Perez, Robert Polito, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Robert Stam, Steven Ungar, Helene Valmary, Ginette Vincendeau, Christian Viviani, Rob White, and Susan White.
Introduction
An Invention without a Future
The cinema is an invention without a future.
Attributed to LOUIS LUMIÈRE, 1895
In twenty-five years there will be very few scoffers at the movies; in fifty years the most cultivated men will be reading movie literature; in a hundred years such men as von Stroheim and Murnau will be spoken of as reverently as Mozart or Dickens are today, and The Last Laugh will be as enduring a work of Art as Vanity Fair.
JAMES AGEE, “The Moving Picture,” Bulletin of the Phillips Exeter Academy, 1926
Until such time as there is a past of some sort . . . a past which has been examined, has been subjected to a critical, a theoretical analysis, there can be no future. . . . This body of material, whatever it is, then imposes upon us the responsibility of inventing it.
HOLLIS FRAMPTON, “The Invention without a Future,” 1979
In the past seventy-five years we have seen the end of Hollywood’s classic studio system, the rise and decline of network television, the development of tent-pole exhibitions and huge marketing campaigns, the emergence of digital cinema, and a variety of ups and downs in the world of independent and international art films. As the millennium arrived, the U.S. film industry found new ways of controlling production and exhibition, digital technology altered the look and even the physical basis of cinema, most people watched movies at home, and the Internet was on the verge of supplanting all delivery systems for words, sound, and images. Film study in the academy had grown significantly, but universities were replacing aesthetics with sociology or anthropology and had become preoccupied with “new media.” The deaths of Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman in 2007 seemed to put a full stop to what had been a period of intense cinephilia, and there was widespread discussion of “postcinema” or the death of cinema, as if feature-length movies were going the way of God and the novel (whose obituaries were premature).
The titles of several recent essay collections—David Denby’s Do the Movies Have a Future?, J. Hoberman’s Film after Film: Or, What Became of 21st Century Cinema?, Dave Kehr’s When Movies Mattered, and Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia—are symptomatic of the times. Also symptomatic was the 2013 symposium sponsored by the Slough Foundation entitled “The End of Cinema and the Future of Cinema Studies.” Jonathan Rosenbaum, one of the featured speakers, offered a sort of counterlecture entitled “The Future of Cinema and the End of Cinema Studies.” I’m in sympathy with him: cinema isn’t ending, but academic specialists sometimes appear to be trying to kill off both it and themselves.
In recognition of such events, this book, which is preoccupied at various points with themes of death, takes its title from a remark supposedly made by Louis Lumière in reference to the motion pictures he and his brother exhibited in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century. Many cinephiles, among them Jean-Luc Godard, have attributed the statement to Lumière, but there’s no evidence he actually said it. The attribution nevertheless persists, linking cinema from its beginnings with death (for commentary on the phenomenon, see Cahill, 19). And yet the statement has a proleptic and ambiguous quality: it suggests that a work in progress was already accomplished, and its definition of cinema is unclear. Does it refer to the cinematograph, which indeed had a relatively short life-span, or to moving images in general? If the latter, history has proved its author laughably wrong. By 1926, thirty-one years after the first Lumière films, motion-picture technology and its various uses had developed to such an extent that a movie-mad, sixteen-year-old James Agee, quoted in the second epigraph above, could rhapsodize in his prep-school magazine about the glorious future of a new art form. A year afterward, silent films began to give way to talkies. Agee’s prediction came true, but the cinema he described was nearing its death; it survives only as a “legacy” form and an important part of artistic history, worthy of preservation and occasional imitation.
The third epigraph, from a 1979 Whitney Museum lecture by Hollis Frampton first published in a 2004 issue of October, has the benefit of a broader historical perspective. The topic is early cinema, but Frampton spends much of his time speculating on the future of the medium, which was confronting the rise of videotape and computers. Frampton argues that the invention of cinema needs to be seen in the context of an ongoing process of industrial revolution, and that cinema’s traditions and monuments are constantly evolving and being reshaped, not only by individual talent but also by changes in technology. The cinema persists, he suggests, but not always in its original form.
At the time of Frampton’s lecture, the silver nitrate used for early photographic prints was in short supply, and “what was once seen as a copious popular art” had become “paradoxically fragile, rare and bounded in time” (72). Scarcity enabled certain movies to return to what Walter Benjamin had termed the ritual basis of older arts, especially in museum retrospectives of rare films, which, Frampton observes, acquired their aura because “film and its allied arts of illusion are at once limitlessly plentiful and painfully fugitive” (72). A certain kind of movie was in fact dead or dying, but in his lecture Frampton confesses that he’s puzzled by the so-called Lumière statement, for which he offers two possible explanations, neither having to do with the end of cinema. The first he dubs the “Person from Porlock” explanation, which takes its name from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s story about the composition of the fragmentary “Kubla Kahn.” Coleridge had been inspired by a drug-induced dream, but when he began writing the poem a man from the nearby town of Porlock knocked at his door and caused him to forget how the dream ended. The cinema, Frampton proposes, might be regarded as an incomplete dream vision (perhaps not unlike Charles Foster Kane’s Xanadu, named for Kubla Kahn’s pleasure palace) that has yet to realize its full potential. His second possible explanation, which doesn’t contradict the first, is quoted in the epigraph above: the cinema didn’t have a future in Lumière’s day because it didn’t yet have a past. Whatever the cinema is, and whenever it began, it can be “invented” only by its ongoing history—or historie(s), as Godard might say.
One of Frampton’s most admired films, the thirty-eight-minute Nostalgia (1971), can be related to some aspects of this argument. The film is structured by Frampton’s recollections of a group of still photographs he made before turning to cinema, plus one found photograph. We hear what seems to be his voice (actually the voice of Michael Snow reading Frampton’s words) commenting on the history of the photographs, which an offscreen hand holds up one by one and then drops onto the hot element of an electric stove. As each photograph incinerates, it leaves behind a unique pattern of carbon residue, a fragile ash that looks as if it would dissolve at the touch of a breath. Meanwhile, the offscreen voice grows increasingly out of synch with the images and we begin hearing descriptions of pictures that haven’t yet appeared.
Nostalgia can be viewed as an experiment involving personal memory, real duration, and cinematic time, but it’s also a film about perishability and remediation. Unattractive as this last word might be, it’s the best way I know to describe such things as a live symphony hall concert broadcast on the radio, a novel transformed into an