Storage, simultaneity, and the media technologies of modernity

T he motion picture medium during its first few decades offers a vivid instance of a nineteenth-century technology which simultaneously gave form to and was shaped by the conceptions of space, time and event which defined the culture of modernity. Whether we invoke modernity in Baudelaire’s sense of the transitory, the fugitive and the contingent, or the sense of the mass reproduction attendant to modern industrial production, the film medium has been emblematic. Not surprisingly, these two very different senses of modernity infuse our understanding of the medium’s early years, linking the physiological studies undertaken by Muybridge and Marey, the motion analysis studies by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, and the fragmentary and relativistic notions of space and temporality celebrated in the cinematic and meta-cinematic work of Léger, Duchamp, Pirandello and commodified for a mass public by the pantheon of early film directors. However, despite its embeddedness in the fabric of modernity, and despite its frequent invocation as an analogue for the modern, the cinema’s relationship to modernity is not unproblematic. In the pages ahead, I shall address some of its complications, especially as they relate to the historical conception of moving image media. By reconsidering the horizon of expectations which greeted the appearance of the film medium, I hope to problematise aspects of the fin-desiècle notion of mediality and pursue some of the implications both for the definition and reception of early film and electronic media, issues which resonate with the new digital media technologies and, more generally, with our historical vision of media development. The film medium’s definition and inscription as a technology and cultural practice, despite the efforts of the post-Brighton conference generation of film historians, has tended to be positioned within a teleologically-oriented notion of technological development. Of course, the last two decades of film historical scholarship have successfully complicated our understanding of narrative, performance and other signifying practices. Moreover, some scholars have taken pains to delineate the conditions of reception attendant to the medium’s first audiences. But with a few significant exceptions, such work has tended to be textual in orientation, revealing film studies’ genealogical links to the discourses of literary studies and art history. Significant aspects of film’s status as a medium have thus been marginalised, and among the most significant has been the issue of time.