Kristen Whissel,
Picturing American Modernity: Traffic, Technology, and the Silent Cinema.
Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4201-4
US$22.95 (pb)
288pp
(Review copy supplied by Duke University Press)

Kristen Whissel’s Picturing American Modernity: Traffic, Technology, and the Silent Cinema takes us deep into the world of cinema and cultural modernity at the turn of the twentieth century, a world that scholars have been exploring for fifteen years now. The book sits within the corpus of works devoted to the cross-pollination of cinema, technological modernity and modern culture that includes the groundbreaking anthology of Vanessa Schwartz and Leo Charney, The Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, Ben Singer’s Melodrama and Modernity, Tom Gunning’s work (including The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity), and Mary Ann Doane’s The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Since the publication of these and other works in the 1990s, if national identity and nation building are not a source of discussion, it is assumed that in the cross-pollination of cinema, modernity and modern culture at the turn of the twentieth century, the culture in question is American. As a result, while publications have appeared on the synergy of cinema, culture, technology in Europe and Asia, Whissel’s is the first book length study to examine how these forces come together to produce images and a collective imaginary of what it means and should mean to be American at this time. Whissel’s book considers how cinema as an apparatus is involved in, and also, how individual films represent nation building, imperial expansion and simulate national feeling.

Whissel examines how the technological innovations of the cinema in its broader social and cultural context contributed to the articulation of a peculiarly American modern life. This imperial American identity is seen in representations of war (the Spanish-American War, the Phliippine-American War), the white-slave trade, the Pan-American Exposition of 1901. Thus, for example, Whissel demonstrates how, when young men go to war, there is a simultaneous mobilization of bodily experience and (white) male American identity. In particular, she argues how the cinema as a technology engaged in this mobilization, and how actuality and battle reenactment films such as 10th US Infantry, 2nd Battalion, Leaving Cars (Edison 1898) and William F Cody’s Buffalo Bill’s Wild West reenactments represented this mobility as a strategy of nation building and imperial expansion. In one of the most compelling examples, Whissel discusses how the use of the electric chair administered and demonstrated the efficiency and “power” of American industrial capitalism. It was, as Whissel argues, a rationalization and, therefore more humane, acceleration of death fit for a modern nation. And when this is captured on film in Execution of Czolgosz, with Panorama of Auburn Prison (Edison 1901), screened at the Pan American Exposition, the electric chair was heralded as one of a number of technologies, including electrical light and the cinema, that affirmed the infinite structural possibilities that go hand in hand with technological development. Thus, for example, because Czolgosz was held to be the embodiment of national degeneration, his execution in such an efficient way was testament to the power and efficiency of national industrial progress.

In addition to her argument for the filmic and cinematic “picturing” of a national imaginary within a technologically defined modernity, Whissel claims the intervention of Picturing American Modernity to be its principle of coherence: traffic and notions of trafficking. Whissel interweaves the phenomenon of traffic in all its variations and meanings, both literal and metaphorical, as the driving force in the discourses of modernity that arise in the productive relationship between cinema, and other modern phenomena such as electricity, the electric chair, technologies of the battlefield, and the white slave trade. As Whissel argues, these and other phenomena – new technologies of transport, various forms of mobility, circulation of bodies, communications – both as individual cultural inventions and in their collective cultural articulation, are defined by a movement in time and space across seemingly impermeable boundaries. In turn, this transgression of time and space sees the cultural forms involved in literal and figurative forms of “trafficking.” This trafficking is, in turn, the defining feature of modern life.

There is much to be recommended about Picturing American Modernity. It is very dense, and not for the weak-minded, but those who persist will reap the rewards of Whissel’s exemplary film historical scholarship. The amount of visual, historical and theoretical material covered here is impressive to say the least: the book moves from the articulation of warfare, through questions of shock and mobility as they are taken up by Georg Simmel in his work on the modern condition, theorizations of vision and perception in wartime that began with Ernst Junger, modernity in its historical conception found in the work of Walter Benjamin, Benedict Anderson’s conception of imagined communities, the history of silent film, the role of photography in the civil war, and more! While the multitude of discourses running through Picturing American Modernity may seem overwhelming, they are, for the most part, well-handled.

Methodologically, it is a model history with its syntheses of historical research and theoretical-analytical insights, neither of which suffers under the weight of the other. The film analyses are logically placed within their broader cultural moments (of modernity) and connected to the technological innovations taking place in their midst. Similarly, both are connected to the evolving sense of American collective identity as it is articulated in this turn-of-the-century culture – not only cinema, but magazines, literature, and so on. The real strength (and pleasure) of the book lies in both the expert film analyses, and also, the historical accounts of the cultures in which numerous Edison, Biograph and other films were circulating and in which they made sense. The analyses of Traffic in Souls (USA 1913) and Shoes (USA 1916) could well be cited as authoritative, they are so thorough and compelling. Both these and other films are placed to create a picture of the cultural and historical effects and anxieties that the films both contribute to and represent. In addition, Whissel typically draws the cultural “picture” of turn of the century American modernity via rigorous archival research. Some documents and films are presented for the first time, others in new ways through this lens of the notion of traffic and trafficking. Similarly, the strength of the conceptual/theoretical argument lies in the book’s demonstration of how the early cinema was used at the turn of the century for the construction of a peculiarly American identity, specifically an American imperial identity.

Each of the individual chapters stands alone and, to reiterate, offers a thorough understanding of the role of the early cinema in the articulation of an American cultural identity as it is seen through the lens of War, the Exposition, the white slave trade. While the notion of “traffic” is a viable principle of coherence for all of these discourses, I was left unconvinced of the force and necessity of this added layer. Indeed, there are places where “traffic” and “trafficking” appeared as no more than a convenient term used for purposes of coherence. Also, I was left wondering what further insight is enabled by this extra discursive layer? Notions of circulation, temporal-spatial mobility, the exchange of capital, the corporealization of identity and so on, are not new to analyses of the co-existence of cinema and modernity. Similarly, their force in Whissel’s argument stands alone without the further umbrella label of “traffic.” In short, the interventions made by the focus on discourses of nationhood were challenge and intervention enough, and the inclusion of arguments about “trafficking” made an already theoretically dense book, more complicated.

Ultimately, however, Whissel’s is a valuable addition to the literature on cinema, cultural and industrial modernity at the turn of the century. It is a must read for all historians of early and silent cinema. I couldn’t help feeling that the book comes as a tribute to the work of Anne Friedberg, and especially her earlier work on modernity and mobility, both of viewers and viewed. Even though this may not have been Whissel’s intention, the timing of its publication and Picturing American Modernity’s elaboration on so many of Friedberg’s groundbreaking insights, make it a welcome accolade of this recently departed, profoundly influential, doyenne of cinema studies.

Frances Guerin,
University of Kent, UK.

Created on: Tuesday, 1 December 2009