Regulating mobility: Technology, modernity, and feature-length narrativity in Traffic in Souls

Camera Obscura

Volumn 17, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 1-29

  Whissel, Kristen ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949884845     PISSN: 02705346     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/02705346-17-1_49-1     Document Type: Review

References (45)

1. For analyses of the relation between early cinema and modernity, see the outstanding collection Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, ed. Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
2. For an analysis of the early railway film's link to masculinity and hysteria, see Lynne Kirby, Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).
3. Tom Gunning analyzes descriptions of the first audience reactions to the Lumières' Arrival of a Train and contextualizes them within the mode of the cinema of attractions in "An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In) Credulous Spectator," Art and Text 34 (1989): 31-44.
4. For an analysis of the lure and effects of the urban street on early film spectatorship, see Gunning's "From the Kaleidoscope to the X-Ray: Urban Spectatorship, Poe, Benjamin, and Traffic in Souls (1913)," Wide Angle 19.4 (1997): 25-61.
5. Gunning analyzes the transitional cinema's narration and exploitation of the terrifying breakdown of modern technology in "Heard over the Phone: The Lonely Villa and the de Lorde Tradition of the Terrors of Technology," Screen 32.2 (1991): 114-96.
6. Gunning, "Heard over the Phone," 188.
7. Ben Brewster, "Traffic in Souls: An Experiment in Feature-Length Narrative Construction," Cinema Journal 31.1 (1991): 38-39.
8. Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 1907-1915 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 192.
9. See "Traffic in Souls Makes Hit," Moving Picture World, 6 December 1913, 1157.
10. Shelley Stamp, "Is Any Girl Safe? Female Spectators at the White Slave Films," Screen 37.1 (1996): 12.
11. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 192.
12. See Ann Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993)
13. Kirby, Parallel Tracks.
14. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 189.
15. I borrow this phrase from Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing, and Zola (New York: Methuen, 1985).
16. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism, and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 21.
17. See Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey; Bowlby, Just Looking;
18. Susan Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989).
19. For analyses of this anxiety, see especially: Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986);
20. Shelley Stamp "Wages and Sin: Traffic in Souls and the White Slavery Scare," Persistence of Vision 9 (1991): 90-102;
21. Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991);
22. Lauren Rabinovitz, For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies, and Culture in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998).
23. See Lee Grieveson, "Fighting Films: Race, Morality and the Governing of Cinema, 1912-1915," Cinema Journal 38.1 (1998): 50-51.
24. US immigration Commission, "Steerage Conditions; the Importation and Harboring of Women for Immoral Purposes; Immigration Homes and Aid Societies; Immigrant Banks," in Reports of the Immigration Commission, vol. 37 (1911; reprint, New York: Arno, 1970), 76.
25. Jeremiah Jenks and W. Jett Lauck, The Immigration Problem: A Study of American Immigration Conditions and Needs (New York: Funk and Wangalls, 1911), 65.
26. US Immigration Commission, "Steerage Conditions," 90.
27. Gunning, "From the Kaleidoscope to the X-Ray," 48-49.
28. While I agree with Tom Gunning that the film "deserves to be recognized as one of the first American urban thrillers," scrutiny of its links to the melodrama is also productive. See Gunning, "From Kaleidoscope to the X-Ray," 41. For a detailed analysis of sensation melodrama and silent American film, see Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Pulp Cinema and the Social Contexts of Sensationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).
29. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 20.
30. For an analysis of these and other conventions of the stage and film melodrama, see especially Thomas Elsaesser, "Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama," in Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman's Film, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: British Film Institute, 1987), 43-69.
31. For an analysis of the ideological effects of the recorded voice's restoration to the filmed body by sound technology, see especially Mary Ann Doane, "The Voice of the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space," in Narrative Apparatus Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 335-48.
32. Bowser quotes a 1913 General Film advertisement that seems to address this frustration: "Some so-called features are merely single-reel stories 'padded' to fill more than a thousand feet of film. Not so, however, with General Film features. In every case the story must require more than a thousand feet to tell it clearly or it is not accepted in the form of a multiple-reel. A favorite trick with some producers of features is to use certain big scenes, as for example, a battle in a war drama, in several different pictures." General Film advertisement, New York Dramatic Mirror, 14 June 1913, 31; quoted in Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 204.
33. "Traffic in Souls Makes Hit," 1157.
34. Here I depart from Janet Staiger's argument that Little Sister represents the modern girl "who doesn't think" and therefore falls prey to the slave trade. See Staiger, Bad Women: Regulating Sexuality in Early American Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 116; 134-35; 138. Indeed each of the women who we see captured by the traders is a representative figure with a naive or inexperienced relation to urban technological modernity. The costumes of the Swedish immigrants overtly mark them signifiers for the "Old Country," thereby rendering them much more visible to the traffickers (to the extent that they stand out from the Ellis Island crowds that provide the diegetic setting for the scene). Similarly, the country girl appears somewhat bumpkinlike and has trouble negotiating urban street traffic - a flaw that makes it quite easy for the traffickers to divert her into the slave trade.
35. Stamp, "Is Any Girl Safe," 13;
36. Lee Grieveson, "Policing the Cinema: Traffic in Souls at Ellis Island, 1913," Screen 38.2 (1997): 166.
37. Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 84.
38. Carl Laemmle, "Doom of the Long Features Predicted," Moving Picture World, 11 July 1914, 185. I suspect that this particular fan's objections indicate a response to an increased proliferation of long features in 1913-14 in general and not to the effects of the popular Traffic in Souls in particular, for Tucker's film was banned in Chicago.
39. Richard Koszarski notes that Laemmle continued his shortsighted tirade against long features until 1917. See An Evening's Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915-1928 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 163.
40. According to Bowser, the gradual unhinging of the relationship between story and reel was a process underway in 1911. She quotes an editorial from Moving Picture World that argued, "It would seem that the time has come when the length of the film should in no way have anything to do with the subject matter; there is too much evidence of 'cutting off' to the detriment of the continuity of the pictures and this slaughtering for the subject only increases the ambiguity of the whole. Clear, well sustained plots, carried to a full and finished ending, leaving with the audience a feeling of satisfaction and completeness are demanded." Editorial dated 7 January 1911, 14-15; quoted in The Transformation of Cinema, 198-99.
41. On the serial, see Shelley Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture after the Nickelodeon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 102-52;
42. Ben Singer, "Female Power in the Serial Queen Melodrama: The Etiology of an Anomaly," Camera Obscura 22 (1990): 91-129;
43. Ben Singer, "Fiction Tie-Ins and Narrative Intelligibility, 1911-1918," Film History 5.4 (1993): 489-504;
44. Moya Luckett, "Advertising and Femininity: The Case of Our Mutual Girl," Screen 40.4 (1999): 363-83.
45. Moving Picture World, 7 January 1911, 14-15;