Uncle Tom, Goldilocks and the Rough Riders: Early cinema's encounter with empire

Screen

Volumn 40, Issue 4, 1999, Pages 384-403

  Whissel, Kristen ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 63849264545     PISSN: 00369543     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/screen/40.4.384     Document Type: Review

References (50)

1. See especially, Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz (eds), Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995)
2. Tom Gunning 'The cinema of attractions: early film, its spectator and the avant-garde', in Thomas Elsaesser (ed.), Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (London: British Film Institute, 1990), p. 59
3. Robert Rydell All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984)
4. Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: the American Screen to 1907 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), p. 103
5. For an excellent analysis of the relation between cinematic representation, scientific racism and early ethnographic films taken at the World's Fairs, see Fatima Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996)
6. Musser, The Emergence of Cinema, p. 226
7. For an analysis of the effects of technological breakdown on the modern individual, see Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: the Industrialization of Space and Time in the 19th Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1977)
8. For analyses of representations of mechanical breakdown in early cinema and its link to developments in spectatorship and developments in film form, see Lynne Kirby, Parallel Tracks: the Railroad and Silent Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997)
9. and Tom Gunning, 'Heard over the phone: the de Lorde tradition of the terrors of technology', Screen, vol. 32, no. 2 (1991), pp.184-96
10. Tom Gunning, 'An aesthetic of astonishment: early film and the (in)credulous spectator', Art and Text, no. 34 (1989), p. 36
11. For an example of this aesthetic, see, in particular, actualities such as President Roosevelt and the Rough Riders (American Mutoscope and Biograph, 1898)
12. and Roosevelt's Rough Riders (American Mutoscope and Biograph, 1898)
13. Walter Benjamin, 'The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction', in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schoken Books, 1969), p. 22
14. These include films such as Wreck of the Battleship Maine (Edison, 1898)
15. and Divers at Work on the Wreck of the Maine (Biograph, 1898)
16. Gunning, 'An aesthetic of astonishment', p. 39
17. Roland Barthes, 'The rhetoric of the image' in Image/Music/Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Fontana Press, 1977), pp. 33-51
18. The audience arose, cheered and cheered again, and the climax was reached when a picture of Uncle Sam under the flag was thrown on the canvas'. Musser, Emergence of Cinema, p. 241
19. David Levy, 'Reconstituted newsreels, reenactments and the American narrative film', in Roger Holman (ed.), Cinema 1900/1906: an Analytical Study (FIAF, 1982), p. 250
20. Schivelbusch places particular emphasis on the mode of perception manufactured by mechanized forms of transport: 'Panoramic perception, in contrast to traditional perception, no longer belonged to the same space as the perceived objects: the traveler saw the objects, landscapes, etc. through the apparatus which moved him through the world. That machine and the motion it created became integrated into his visual perception: thus he could only see things in motion.' Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, p. 64
21. Gunning, 'The cinema of attractions', p. 59
22. Ann Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), p. 37
23. My reading of this film is influenced by Amy Kaplan's analysis of An American Soldier in Love and War. 'The Birth of an Empire', MLA Conference, San Francisco, 1998, published in PMLA, vol. 114, no. 5 (1999)
24. Renato Rosaldo, 'Imperialist nostalgia', Representations, vol. 26 (1989), p.108
25. See Nancy Armstrong, 'Why daughters die: the racial logic of American sentimentalism', Yale Journal of Criticism, vol. 7, no. 2 (1994)
26. Charles Townsend, Uncle Tom's Cabin: a Melodrama in Five Acts (New York: Wehman Bros, 1889), p. 31
27. Janet Staiger, Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 108
28. Noël Burch, 'Porter, or ambivalence', Screen, vol. 19, no. 4 (1978), p. 97
29. For a history of the frontal pose in theatre and cinema, see Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997)
30. Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: a Middlebrow Art, trans. Shaun Whiteside (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 30-31
31. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 23
32. For examples of such discourse. see Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States (New York: HarperPerennial, 1990), p. 306
33. See also Robert Beisner, Twelve Against Empire: the Anti-Imperialsts 1898-1900 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968)
34. For an excellent analysis of fictional and journalist revisions of the roles played by black American soldiers in the war, see Amy Kaplan, 'Black and Blue on San Juen Hill', in Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 219-36
35. Goran Rystad, 'The constitution and the flag', in Serge Ricard and Hélène Christol (eds.), Anglo-Saxonism in US Foreign Policy: The Diplomacy of Imperialism, 1899-1919 (Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l'Université de Provence, 1991), p. 11
36. The ageing of Uncle Tom, according to Eric Lott, began with stage reproductions that were informed by blackface minstrel shows: 'Strikingly, while Uncle Tom in Stowe's novel had been a strong and reasonably young man, Uncle Tom in successive productions of the play grew older and older, no doubt owing to the influence of minstrelsy's pathetic elderly men, such as Stephen Foster's Old Uncle Ned'. Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 217
37. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: The Noonday Press, 1991) p. 21
38. Ann Douglas uses the phrase 'the exaltation of the average' to describe Stowe's treatment of Little Eva, a characteristic which she argues is a 'trademark of mass culture'. Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York, Alfred Knopf, 1977), p. 4
39. Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs note, in Theatre to Cinema, p. 41, that an 1888 stage production of Uncle Tom's Cabin represented the race between the 'Natchez' and the 'Robert E. Lee'
40. See Norbury L. Wayman's Life on the River: a Pictorial History of the Mississippi, the Missouri and the Western River System (New York: Crown Publishers, 1971)
41. Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 52
42. Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the American West, volume 1 (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1900), p. 5
43. Moving Picture World, 27 April 1907
44. Variety, 9 March 1907
45. Rosaldo, 'Imperialist nostalgia', p. 108
46. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, volume 17, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1955)
47. For another example of the hypercorporealization of racial difference, see the Edison Co.'s Laughing Gas (Edwin Porter, 1904), which begins with a dentist administering laughing gas to an African-American woman and consists of a series of tableaux documenting her movement through the town as she infects various groups of initially shocked passers by with her laughter. Like the representation of Topsy in Uncle Tom's Cabin, this display of black femininity laughing for, and with, their respective audiences are racist spectacles constructed through early cinema's formal emphasis on shock, surprise and display
48. Miriam Hansen provides a close analysis of the significance of keyhole shots to voyeurism, exhibitionism and early film spectatorship in Babel and Babylon, pp. 34-42
49. Philip Rosen 'Disjunction and ideology in a preclassical film: A Policeman's Tour of the World, Wide Angle, vol. 12. no. 3 (1990), p. 20
50. Hansen reads the film's shift between its distinct mises-enscene as a part of 'a more general shift that preceded the transition to the classical mode', which 'entailed the adaptation of stylistic elements of the newsreel genre (authentic locations, mobile framing, greater variety of camera distance and angle) to the narrative film' that began around 1903, in 'Adventures of Goldilocks: spectatorship, consumerism and public life', Camera Obscura, vol. 22 (1990), p. 63