Uploaded 20 September 2002
An archive is a place replete with three things: objects from the past, the mission to preserve these from disappearance, and the categorizations that make them accessible. The first engage the question of materiality, in the face of the fugitive nature of current screen culture. [1] The second is sometimes articulated in terms of cultural memory, an urgently felt preoccupation of our time. The third concerns the discursivity of even the most rudimentary of classifications. I contend that the connection between these three strands underlies the current fascination with “the archive.” [2]
I am interested in archives because it is where I work. I am interested in contemporary culture because it is where I live. Between the two, “history” as a discipline and a way of thinking is the mediating concern. The question I will address in this article lies in that in-between: how does the current interest in the hypertextual organization of visual experience – produced and promoted by the development of new electronic media such as the Internet and other digital technologies such as CD/DVD-ROM or computer games – relate to the historicity of visual culture? This is a question of cultural philosophy. By raising it, I aim to explore how I can be loyal to “history” as an endeavor and a mode of inquiry, as well as to my cultural habitat, which is the present. It will guide me in an enterprise of construction: of articulating what an “archival poetics” can be, and what it can do for such a bi-temporal history.
The unstable but important relationship between the real archive that is my starting point and place of work, and the conceptual metaphor of “the archive” – or “archival” – as a cultural model, is in need of explication. Because it is metaphoric and conceptual, I will term this relationship “archival poetics,” a term I coined in analogy to such poetics based on semiotic systems: narrative poetics; on foci of attention: a poetics of gender; on periods: Renaissance poetics; or conceptual metaphors such as mine: a poetics of place. By mobilizing this slightly dated term “poetics” I aim to reflect on the connections between objects, systems within which they can be understood, and the cultural life in the present within which such “readability” functions, in terms of poetics’ etymological sense of making. The current interest in hypertextual discursive organization will serve as an underlying, orienting heuristic metaphor that will help me articulate an archival poetics helpful for actual analysis of early screen culture, in other words, for screening the past. I will examine the “hypertextual” manner in which a pre-digital medium such as early film organizes visual experience. This metaphor helps me simultaneously to probe the question of archive and the question of how to decipher the material objects stored there.
Instead of linear, hypertextual documents are structured for a reader/viewer to enter, and to choose his or her own trajectory. Similarly – but of course, not identically – film in its early days was already a medium of explicit polysemic address. While it was not structured for the viewer to enter and organize at liberty, it was part of a practice of showings programmed at liberty by the exhibitors. Both provide opportunities for “virtual travel” demanding choices that occur in specific, virtually unique moments in time. In this sense, both hypertexts and early cinema only exist in unique performances. [3]
In the following section, I argue for a reading of archival fragments on the basis of the comparison with hypertextuality. Then, I speculate that the archival model is a necessary sequel of the archaeological one, used from Freud to Foucault. From this conclusion, I then move on, in the next section, to an example of the archival-poetic move that suspends the distinction between fragment and whole. In the last section, the prominent place of narrativity in archival poetics is foregrounded. This importance further explains the exemplary status of the early Western in the history of cinema. My conclusion, therefore, offers some reflections on the relevance of archival poetics to a self-aware historiography for today.
I start in the material place of the archive and find there my object of such a conceptual and material interpretation, called “Bits & Pieces” the Archive of Nederlands Filmmuseum (NFM) in Amsterdam, “Bits & Pieces” is the term used in the catalogue to refer to fragments rather than complete films. My primary object of analysis in this article is a variety of such bits and pieces, a selection from the total of more than 450 bits preserved by the archive. I take this selection both as the arbitrary collection of fragments it really is, and as a retrospectively constructed “whole” the organization of which is comparable to a hypertext. I aim to read such indications as “Bits & Pieces,” and the archival reality they cover, in relation to a sense in which fragmentation also characterizes the “complete” films of the time of early cinema from which they stem, and whose traces, leftovers, ruins, or antiquities, the archive holds – has put on hold.
In other words, the name used today becomes a metaphor for the most typical feature of the cinematic culture of the time. I am speaking of the time, roughly between 1895 and 1915, when cinema made its debut in Western culture. I draw upon a study I am currently conducting, in which I examine bits and pieces of what has later become “the Western,” not coincidentally evoking and invoking the fantasies and myths freshly forged about the past of a wilderness that was, at that very moment, becoming obsolete. [4]
The becoming-obsolete also characterizes the materiality of what lies dormant in archives at a stage of screen culture where the standard state of being is a kind of fugitivity of reception. Not that the Internet and the computer do not allow to “save” images, but the speed and overload of information makes the act of accessing and processing overwhelmingly more important than preservation.
This notion of Bits & Pieces can serve to set up the conceptualization of cinema as a representation of the other seen through the eyes of a self– modern urban culture – subjected to fragmentation due to modernity. I will argue that “Bits & Pieces” is more than the title for what has neither name nor identity in the cinematic archive: unclassifiable leftovers, too good to throw away, not good enough to be archived, catalogued, identified, and stored for future use. Unwittingly, the NFM bestowed on these humble strips of celluloid the honorable function to embody and emblematize the secret to a culture no longer alive. To uncover that secret, they must be decoded, made readable. Thus the small, barely appreciated treasures of the NFM become the bearers of an archival poetics. To understand the current fascination with the archival, moreover, that readability must enable us to “translate” the meanings of the Bits & Pieces into interests, anxieties and desires that run through the beginning of the twenty-first century and its culture of novelty. Novelty and the anxiety over loss of what is also rejected, characterizes both the early and the late twentieth century. This ambivalence underlies current “archivalism.” If anachronism is as inevitable as it is, necessary, even, to exist in a fugitive present through a vested interest in our self-constructed past, the cultural state that informs the interest in the archival might well be the digital revolution with the Internet’s fundamentally different sense of “text,” than the task we now know to be hopeless, to restore.
How Bits & Pieces Tell a Story: Pre-conceptualizing the Archive
We are looking, here, at things belonging to the earliest days of cinema, and the network of genres within it. But “early” should not be seen stylistically, as an indication of the historical position of my material as “early”, in the sense of immature. On the contrary, I contend that the fragmentation is not at all a symptom of immaturity of the medium, nor of the “genre” of, for instance, the Western, even if my material stems from an early stage of both cinema and genre. There are three reasons why this would be a misconception: the error that threatens the project of defining an archival poetics , or a post-enlightenment raison d’être for archival work and its usefulness for an interest in the archival in our time. All three reasons qualify that interest. The first inflects the self-definition of history, the second, of epistemology, the third of our (post-)modern sense of self. Archival poetics, then, will be considered as an approach to culture that combines cultural history, methodological reflection on the production of knowledge, and philosophy.
First, there is a purely practical, material reason. The bits and pieces that the Bits & Pieces consist of are material leftovers of objects irremediably lost in the present. The phrase is therefore, rather, a metaphor for the lacunary access we have, in our time, to the past we wish to recover as part of our sense of self. This gives pause to the historian. For, second, this material deficit is a symptom not of the historical material itself but of cultural history and our (historical) epistemic limitations. Moreover, the fragmentation that I claim to be characteristic of the films is often self-conscious and self-reflective as it was an accepted part of contemporary production and exhibition practice. This speaks to preoccupations of our own time. As Kaja Silverman has argued in a different context, the valorization of unity at the cost of fragmentation is not in itself beyond scrutiny. Indeed, only a culture that anxiously put primacy on unity in order to hold off the risk of a fragmentation that it knows to be inherent in it, will cast the fragmented out as its own abject. [5] I contend that current dis-ease with that anxiety and a desire to establish more nourishing as well as less utopian (because unifying) connections with the past, informs the interest in the archival in today’s culture.
The notion of Bits & Pieces also helps to explain that what seems to be an archaeology of early screen culture, in this case Westerns, is not an attempt to follow through the archaeological metaphor in all its aspects. On the contrary, the “archival” qualifies the archaeological. There is no project of digging into the depth of a lost culture; rather cinema is often considered the most “superficial” form of cultural self-expression. There is no attempt to unify fragments to rebuild “structures” or “shapes”; this is not always possible, and given the amount of glue required, the restoration risks making the historical object all but invisible. As is well known from archaeology, sometimes the dilemma to either restore beyond recognition, or to celebrate ruins as if they were authentic, is better left aside altogether. Thus, in my case, the fragments are valuable in themselves. Only from the unreflective anachronistic vantage point of the present in which the ideal film requires causality, coherence and (often) approximates 90 minutes projection time, can we decide that the short bits that take only seconds or minutes are in fact not whole. Rather, fragmentation characterizes the films as they were made and watched in their own time. Hence, conserving the bits and pieces as such comes as close to making their “nature” visible as attempts at physically restoring them, if not, in some cases, as hyperbolic instances, closer.
Given the still-predominant cultural status of narrative in film, television, and written text, albeit under siege in the unstable structure of hypertextuality and hypermedia, I consider the fragmented state of my samples of Bits & Pieces through the question of narrative. [6] What we find in the archives is primarily pieces of nitrate that are somehow associated with “the Western.” Nothing remotely “whole,” “coherent,” self-enclosed can be detected. Yet, what we see, today, as “the Western” is a filmic genre in which certain typical plots are conventionalized, hence, “naturalized” to a high degree. We expect fights, chases, abductions and rescues. In other words, narratives.
The importance of narrative becomes evident when we consider the generically relevant scene type of the chase. I see the chase as a form first of all, and probe its unfolding in films such as The Hold-up of the Rocky Mountain Express (AM&B, 1906, Library of Congress) as a hybrid and Indiaan grijpt kidnapper [NFM title] [Indian Seizes Kidnapper] (Pathé Frères, c.1910, NFM) as “pure” chase films. In contrast, The Cowboy and the School-Marm (Bison, 1910, NFM) is an example of an integrated chase film. Here, the role of the scene type as a means of constructing narrativity is important. In this last film there is a noticeable narrative that is based on the chase but not solely structured as chase anymore. [7] The comparison of these three films highlights the narrative aspect of movement, speed, and causality, and their relationship to display. The relationship between subject and object is especially relevant in this respect. In this relationship, the question of what the focalized object is, determines what kind of subjectivity and objectivity is programmed in the representation. Display, view, and attraction turn out to be counter-forces to narrative. The narrativity that emerges from this inquiry, then, is the direct product of the archival poetics considered as such, so that it can become a model not for retrieval of the past but for a future understanding of the past in terms of the encounter staged by the archival discourse Bits & Pieces.
But for the corpus of early films that this paper is concerned with, this expectation of narrative inflected as narratives of chases, rescues, fighting and the like, does not necessarily hold. The presence and the place of chases in the cited examples vary and expecting them to furnish the basic narrativity of the films is an anachronistic projection. Hence, a cultural history of this corpus that avoids as much as possible the kind of anachronistic projection that promotes evolutionistic arrogance in any encounter with something “old,” is best off starting from this clash between what we expect and what we see. Through that confrontation, I contend, the historian’s archive can become an “archival poetics” for our time.
At first sight, narrativity means movement, time, and coherence. In what is without a doubt the most cited and followed definition of narrative, Poetics, Aristotle defines a plot as a series of actions, with a beginning, middle and end. Not that this definition says much. But for this inquiry, it becomes unexpectedly relevant if we consider that even this most general of definitions falls short of describing the artifacts epitomized by the Bits & Pieces. It also falls short in the face of hypertextuality and its logic of association and collage, structured by hyperlinks. For the definition takes for granted a wholeness that my corpus de-naturalizes. By clearing away this age-old narrative poetics, I aim to make visible what the archive as such offers as a poetics of bits and pieces.
A first ambiguity resides in the site of those things: in the film’s fabula, as we are accustomed to think, or in the viewer’s need to construct them. Reader-oriented criticism has made us aware of the indispensable input of the viewer. Reception study is not limited to counting visitors, but also seeks to account for what visitors do. [8] But there are no records of our films other than reviews, and the archive’s Bits & Pieces do not get reviewed. Hence, your own viewing experience is the only means of gaining access, even indirectly. But here is the catch – which is also the way out of the dilemma of cultural history. The archival material is only anything “cultural” if it is viewed. And the viewing of bits one after another makes whatever you see into actions, simply because the images succeed each other.
This turns narrativity from a text-immanent, structuralist concept to a reader-based cultural mode, questioned by new media and the dis-unified, fugitive and user-dependent status of narrativity therein. Even if there is no clear fabula that structures an internal logic, a sense of narrative emerges and captures you. Between Bits & Pieces – archival dust – and a sense of film, culture, genre, or what have you, narrative emerges out of the time-travel of the encounter that cannot be situated firmly either in the past or in the present, but that momentarily if without illusion, fulfills the deep desire for unity. I submit that this dynamic of fragmentation and provisional, subject-made, hence, fundamentally diverse wholeness through narrativity, constitutes the attraction of the archival in present-day culture. It consoles for loss of unity by empowering the cultural participant to construct a composition, or bricolage, out of material pieces from the past. This is how the archive, and the Bits & Pieces most characteristic of it, tell stories.
From archaeology to archive: digging up and laying out
After a long-standing fascination with depth and digging, then, the archaeological metaphor is currently being superceded by the archival – for truly historical reasons concerning the history of the present. In this section I attempt to explain why this change is necessary. I cite the metaphor of archaeology for a reason besides the obvious association with the metaphorical label “Bits & Pieces” in the catalogue of the Nederlands Filmmuseum. In the introduction to Le western: archéologie d’un genre [The Western: Archaeology of a Genre] Jean-Louis Leutrat proposes, as his title reveals, an archaeology of the Western genre. [9] The Western, he argues, does not exist as a “natural object” (“objet naturel”). Archaeology, as a process of reconstruction, is needed to replace a history of natural objects:
Il faut substituer à l’histoire d’un objet naturel celle des objectivations qui ont reconstruit ce domaine où les connexions, les rencontres, les alliances, les jeux de force, les stratégies, ont, à un moment donné, formé ce qui a pu fonctionner presque immédiatement parfois comme évidence.
[It is necessary to substitute for the history of a natural object, the history of the objectifications through which we have constructed that domain where connections, encounters, alliances, the play of forces and strategies have at some point shaped what was then able to function, almost instantly, as self-evident.] [10]
Leutrat suggests that it is precisely the multiple origins that constituted the generic shape of the Western, that cause a need for an archaeological endeavor when the investigation of the “origin” of the Western is at stake. The structure of this argument has become famous through the work of Michel Foucault. Leutrat quotes Foucault who points out how genealogy has as its mission to preserve a sense of disparity that belongs to the object from the past (“maintenir ce qui s’est passé dans la dispersion qui lui est propre”; “to hold on to what has happened in the dispersal that characterizes the past”). In other words, genealogy, as “method” that goes with the archaeological enterprise, must lay bare the multiplicity of origins, or originary diversity, of the object of investigation thereby maintaining this diversity. In Foucault’s negative formulation:
La généalogie ne prétend pas remonter le temps pour rétablir une grande continuité par-delà la dispersion d’oubli; sa tâche n’est pas de montrer que le passé est encore là, bien vivant dans le présent, l’animant encore en secret, après avoir imposé à toutes les traverses du parcours une forme dessinée dès le départ. (… Suivre la filière complexe de la provenance, c’est au contraire maintenir ce qui s’est passé dans la dispersion qui lui est propre.
[Genealogy does not claim to go back in time in order to restore a grand continuity beyond the dispersal of forgetting; its task is not to demonstrate that the past is still with us, alive in the present that it animates secretly, after having imposed through the course of time a shape that it had designed from the beginning.] [11]
In view of this insight, it is necessary to adopt a post-archaeological attitude, inflecting it into an archival one that endorses fragmentation instead of attempting to overcome it, and this, not only on the level of generic categories such as “Western.” Nor is this “archivalism” merely a way out of preservation problems in the archive. Although classification and cataloguing determines accessibility, it is not only on that level that fragmentation manifests itself. Rather, fragmentation is, here, a metaphor for the three-dimensional fragmentation of my object of study: the broken body of early Westerns.
The fragmentation holds on three levels simultaneously: a physical fragmentation (the often unidentified fragmentary filmstrips in the archive), a generic fragmentation, as a result of the fragmentation of an historical screen culture, and the resulting archival fragmentation. Hence, the inadequacy of generic classification for these films, so unsuitable given the inherent fragmentation of the texts of early cinema. Like the changing shapes of the glass snippets in a kaleidoscope, these texts are reconfigured in the ever-changing programming format in which the films were exhibited.
Leutrat and other historians of early cinema have proposed a history of their object in these terms borrowed from Foucault. They invoke archaeology as metaphor for a historical investigation that preserves the multiplicity of origin, that avoids linear thought, and that proposes a new perspective on chronology. The historiography of early cinema is infused with these thoughts. For example, in his introduction of Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative Thomas Elsaesser refers to Walter Benjamin’s often-quoted text “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, in which Benjamin argues that, in Elsaesser’s words, “the very existence of cinema necessitated a new archeology of the artwork […” In the wake of Benjamin, Elsaesser introduces the term “archeology,” a term Benjamin himself did not use, to offer a general positioning of the approaches to early cinema as paradigmatically different from film history in general. [12] I situate my own project within this paradigm. But this positioning often remains very quick and general, without reflection on how this historical approach can be worked out within the analyses of the historical object. I would propose analyses that are integrated in this theoretical positioning of the historian, so that a more fleshed-out picture emerges. Only then can such a view truly model, shape, a connection between the present of hypertextuality and the fragmented past, a connection that also integrates a textual, structural analysis to a cultural one.
This integration is part of my “archival poetics.” For if the former analysis fails to account for the cultural meanings of its objects, a cultural-historical one tends to fail to probe, and learn from, those objects’ specificity. I find the Film Museum’s act of preserving these shreds under this title an extraordinarily stimulating move on the part of an institution that is, by all accounts, an archive. In a Foucauldian view, an archive is not just a place but also the ensemble of discursive practices that enable “utterances” by and on the objects preserved there, so that they can constitute a “field.” This view implies that the archive is discursive. It also implies that all those who “use” the archive, research the material preserved there, “speak” its discourse and contribute to the further extension and deployment of that discourse. The mechanisms of selection are part of the archive’s discourse. Preserving only what seems, to our eyes, “whole,” would be to “speak” an anachronistic discourse about the material, thus constituting the object rather than merely preserving it. Such decisions determine the legitimacy of the objects stored, categorized, catalogued and studied – or not.
Here lies another element of archival poetics. Objects are not oeuvres in the sense in which we now speak of the oeuvres of John Ford or Sam Peckinpah, or, to stay with early cinema, D.W. Griffith, or C.B. DeMille. In this sense, the fragments-objects also stand for a change in our perception of things from the past in a culture where authorship is becoming collective, anonymous, and dynamic. [13] In order to drive that point home, the NFM chose to preserve also the unidentified, seemingly useless, fragments – only made meaningful if viewers act upon them. But the very notion of the fragment questions the status of the result of this archival gesture. For fragments are by definition bits of larger wholes, even when these wholes are lost beyond recovery. This necessitates the move from the archaeological to the archival poetics that this paper advocates. The second part of my article sketches that move through a detailed case.
The fragments are very short, in fact, they are too short to project them individually. The archive has made longer “montages” on several film reels that contain multiple fragments. By grouping these bits and pieces in order to be able to present them, the Nederlands Filmmuseum has done more than merely preserving fragments. Moreover, the archive has made collections of these fragments on videotape, to make them available for close scrutiny by researchers. Its “poetics” – its gesture of “making” – is this: it has changed their status from fragments to details. This may be a necessary, inevitable act, but it is not neutral. Now, the shreds are parts of a new whole such as the projection reels or the research tapes. This gesture is also a “speech act,” an act performed within a discursive practice. The ambiguous status of the bits, as fragments of lost wholes and as details of larger whole on a video tape, makes them “orphans” of cinema history. [14] This status shows in a variety of ways. For example, in addition to the un-glorious title of the tape, the bits are numbered (roughly “Bits & Pieces 1 to 449”, but since the tapes hold an open category, the number will increase during the history of the archive (and may even have changed while I am writing this), not categorized by content. By this emphatic presentation of the bits as fragments, yet re-constituted as details, the archive poses us questions regarding the relationship between present and past.
Naming the hero: a case study
Sometimes the rubric of Bits & Pieces is used in order to be able to preserve a fragment of a larger film that is not available for preservation. Initial cataloguing categories can be replaced with the rubric Bits & Pieces. An instructive example is the following film, initially catalogued thus (in my translation from Dutch):
Record 12669
TITEL orig. : Redding, De (g) [The Rescue] given title : Redding, De CONTENT genre : Fiction. Western
description: Small child runs away from home and is recovered
PRODUKTION country: United States
year: 1911 – 1913 ACTORS: Harry Meyers [?]
old vault number: B4233 (has become Bits & Pieces nr. 429, added to B11207)
As an incomplete and unidentified film this fragment is first catalogued as an individual film, but due to its incompleteness it is taken up in the category of Bits & Pieces. It loses the given name (“De Redding” [The Rescue]), based on the narrative content of the fragment, is given a number (“has become Bits &Pieces nr. 429”), and is added to a longer collection of fragments (“added to B11207”). As such, it receives a new role within the collection. This new role, I submit, projects the role of this new “character” as a potential “hero” in the narrative produced by the archival poetics. As a fragment the bit is a whole, as whole as fragments can possibly be; as an individual title, it remained incomplete. The labor of cataloguing such small bits might seem futile to the amateur as well as to the historian looking for mute things willing to yield to historiographic pressure. But it is in fact absolutely important that the museum decided to take them so seriously. For one of the researcher’s most relevant criteria for selection is determined by the accessibility of material in the archive, and the key that unlocks this treasury is its catalogue.
The “promotion” of fragments to details is an act of great consequence. [15] Emphatically, details are not fragments. Each kind of “bit” has a different function, a different relationship to wholeness and unity. For the historian, a fragment points to a whole; it can be a clue in identification. The decision to consider something a fragment puts an epistemological attitude in place. The goal of looking at objects as fragments is the dream of the whole behind it. The detail, in contrast, is a snippet that is a point of analysis. It is not broken off but considered as if through a magnifying glass. Its status as detail enables analysis. In this sense, a detail is in fact “larger” than the whole. This can be put in another way. A fragment poses questions, a detail answers them. This is why the decision of the NFM to preserve the bits, but to mount them together on one tape for accessibility, carries consequences in two directions. Together, these consequences define what I suggest here as an archival poetics. It puts forward the double status of this old material: by offering the fragments as documents – for example, to reconstitute the history of ideas – the museum has simultaneously, also, elevated them into monuments through the act of embedding them within, hence, making them part of, a discourse, and positioned them in the present. [1] [16]
Here, the first section that re-conceptualized the archive joins this second one that makes that conception concrete. For, it is a major contention of this paper that fragmentation is the “originary” status of the early Western and that this makes the archival a suitable model for the present. It is because of that state that this (not-)genre can model our sense of culture in the age of electronic media. The two are not structurally similar as artifacts but they are similar in the structure of their cultural functioning. This contention requires in the first place a serious engagement with the bits and pieces, in order to at least be able to characterize the “genre,” including its three dimensions, provisionally, if only metaphorically, or rather, synecdochally. If metaphor, the transport or translation of a vehicle onto a tenor, characterizes the relationship between the archive and contemporary fragmented culture, synechdoche, the extension of meaning from bit to whole is the logic that underlies the deployment of the Western for an understanding of present-day’s fascination with the archival. The bits and pieces stand for the “whole,” not of their “parent”-films, which may never have existed, but of the culture from which they were broken off when they ended up in the archive. Synecdoche, after all, is the figure where the part – fragment – stands for the whole. Even if, we can now see, the whole does not exist and may never have existed as a film; the fragment does not exist as a leftover of the whole, but means “whole.” Meaning is at the level at which the fragment operates; as a cultural intervention. For, as a culture, a visual subculture including the specific exhibition practices for the amazement and delight of urban people, the “whole” did exist. How can we write the history of early Westerns on the basis of such fragments? This question poses the methodological issue that any attempt to define a genre, such as the Western, also poses.
I have argued elsewhere that genealogical decisions are just that: decisions, not divisions inherent in the objects but epistemological decisions performed by the historian. [17] There, I deploy the Wittgensteinian concept of “family resemblance” to foreground the indecisive, provisional status of such decisions. This is necessary in order to protect the objects, of which we know so little, from reifying denominations. Now, if family resemblance is the more appropriate entrance into the genre, and if, on the other hand, fragmentation is a constitutive feature of the objects in all their dimensions – their material status, their narrativity, and their viewing culture – then this should enable me to establish a status for the fragments qua details. In other words, the family resemblance between fragments turns them into “details,” that is, small elements provided with “family features” that may be points of recognition. In the next section, I will perform a small exercise in this grouping in order to demonstrate the productivity of a notion of archival poetics as a bridge between a structural analysis that ignores cultural practice and a cultural study that ignores the objects on which that practice acts. If my arbitrarily selected Bits & Pieces begin to move, move you, the case will have been made for their status as characters, actants, perhaps even heroes, in a new narrative told by old things, directed – as in “mise-en-scène”, or film making – by the archive. It will have consoled us today for the loss of unity by providing us with a new sense of narrative as, at long last, post-Aristotelian. Beginning, middle and end are no longer “in the text” but of our making, of our own poiesis. The archival poetics, then, will have emerged. Its hero is the fragment-turned-detail.
Telling the Story: Reading Archivally
Bits & Pieces nr. 66 is listed in the catalogue with a description that is at the same time the sub-title of the unidentified film which lacks an original title: “Woman and children are assaulted by gang of criminals.” [18] The fragment runs approximately 2 minutes (on video). The opening shot shows the woman and the frightened children in a room with a window. Through the window we can see a painted view of a tree and a telegraph pole. The room is on the second floor. The woman, whom we, as narrativizing cultural agents, “appoint” as the mother of the two girls, looks out of the window. The next shot shows what is happening downstairs. Three robbers are holding down a man while they are busy robbing the place. Back to the upstairs room. The woman closes the window, opens it again and waves her handkerchief out of the window. The next shot shows the waving from an opposite perspective. Seeing the outside view of the house, we can deduct that the house is in fact a train station. We see her waving from the perspective of the possible viewer from who the woman tries to get attention. A train is approaching. The bandits enter the room and pull the woman and children with them. Crosscutting to the outside perspective, we see that, at the same time, the train is approaching. Tension builds up. The three are taken downstairs. A long shot shows the train arriving. A few men exit the train and hurry towards the station. They capture the bad guys. The woman and children hug one of the men: a family reunited?
Here, the fragment stops. The narrative is closed. This is an almost complete narrative, which leaves few questions unanswered. Is this really a fragment, or is it a concise summary, bringing a more elaborate narrative back to the essential course of events? It seems to be complete, containing the most elementary part of a last-minute rescue. The generic recognition of suspense and closure in the form of a happy ending, leaves nothing unsolved. Like The Lonedale Operator (Biograph, 1911) the story is about a hold-up of a train station and the suspense of the approaching rescue is shown in similar style, by cross-cutting back and forth between the assaulted woman and the rescue by train. As a summary, only lacking the exposition, the film may be better than in complete form, for it literally cuts right to the chase.
Another fragment, Bits & Pieces nr. 21, seems to stops where nr. 66 began. According to the summary title in the catalogue it shows a hunting expedition in an open landscape. [19] This suggests a non-fiction film. We see, however, four men in costume, riding horses. In the front, two men are dressed up as colonial hunters, with white helmet and white clothing. Two men behind them are dressed up as cowboys. The relationship between the four men is immediately established. The two men in white riding in front are superior; the two men anonymously in the back are positioned as their subordinates. The two white men dismount their horses and walk through the Western-like landscape with guns and lassos. Suddenly they stop. One man kneels and points to something off-screen. Excitement. They start to prepare for something to happen. Here the fragment stops. At this moment of suspense, the abrupt ending of the fragment emphasizes the structure of narrative. With the tension that has been created in these few seconds, the lack of resolve and the open ending emphasize the missing part of the film.
Like the previous film, nr. 66, about the robbers and the train, this fragment poses the question of what is complete, showing what is missing precisely by not showing what is missing. This establishes the productivity of incompleteness, its performance as poiesis or making, is thus established. Also, the question of selection is left dangling in this absence. Why are these two examples possibly relevant for my corpus – or my other eagerness, that of a viewer in the present – and how does the archival act help put that relevance on the table?
The fragments are relevant as a potential group. The following example adds to establishing this group. Bits & Pieces nr. 104, described as “Cowboy hangs enemy on a rope above abyss. Under the rope he burns a candle. United States” shows a fragment of an exciting adventure story. [20] The part of the narrative that is shown here is almost a focused, blown-up detail of the first robbery fragment, that could follow (temporally) the second example. Thus, if we choose to watch nrs. 21, 66 , and 104 as one hypertextual path on which we click, this snippet shows the climax, following a suspenseful event. The cowboy in a cabin ties a man to a rope, and hangs him dangling from a rock. A medium shot functions as a close-up. We see the made-up face of the victim. He looks like the conventional representation of a Mexican. The cowboy in the cabin positions a candle under the rope. Here the fragment stops. We know that something awful is about to happen, but we do not know if there will be a last-minute rescue. Because of the tragedy that could happen, the fall from the victim in the ravine, we can deduct that the cowboy in the cabin is probably a criminal. The victim has to be “good.” But this is uncertain again when we consider the fact that the victim is made-up as a Mexican and that usually – according to conventions of the Western – Mexicans belong to the category of criminals. Generic conventions instruct us here to position the fragment into a specific type of narrative. The prologue of this fragment that we mentally, hypertextually, add to the remaining images has built up the tension that these images ultimately take to a climax. The climax itself, the “answer” to the question whether the Mexican is, in fact, a victim or not, is never given. But the question, not the answer, builds the narrative. What makes the story is that we ask ourselves, will the rope snap?
But “tension” is only one path in my hypertextual reading of the collection of bits. Visual marvel is another one. Therefore, let me now click on another example, which further elaborates my archival poetics and its attraction for the present by an emphasis on vision. For it poses less the question of completion and narrativity, but more of spectacle. Bits & Pieces nr. 319, “Een fantastisch duel,” shows the visually spectacular collision of two trains, in front of a stadium full of spectators. The intertitle that opens the fragment announces and describes this spectacle: “A fantastic duel. Two locomotives run against each other at a speed of 100 kilometers in the presence of the inhabitants of Indianapolis.” [21] The footage shows two trains and a stand filled with spectators. “Conductors and stokers jump off the locomotives a moment before the collision.” [22] A train is shown moving through the frame. Next shot: the collision. For quite some time, several seconds of the total duration of the fragment of only two minutes, we see the explosion and the burning remains, prolonging the moment of collision. Here the fragment ends. This is not so much a fragment of a narrative but, within my chosen trajectory, a pure and self-contained act of a play: spectacle in its essence. Yet, although on this path I am focusing on visual marvels, a build-up in tension is also produced here. The intertitles lead up to a very literal climax. The shot of the burning trains functions as a close-up of the result of the collision. If I had put this bit in the trajectory of the previous group, it would have functioned perfectly there.
One way to deal with the ambiguity of this short piece which hovers undecidedly between fragment and complete film – a possibility that is acceptable once we unlearn to expect set length – without explaining that same ambiguity away, is to look at it as, also, generically ambiguous. For all its spectacularity, the sort of footage this is belongs to a form of non-fiction. Documentary footage is often edited-in within scenes of a more fictional (i.e. narrative) kind. This is also the case in films we consider complete. For example, The Hold-up of the Rocky Mountain Express (AM&B, 1906) that I mentioned before, is a “phantom ride” film. This type of film, essentially the dynamic display of landscape through a point-of-view shot taken from a moving train, is part of the Cinema of Attractions. This film is shot in the same year by the same company as Into the Haunts of Rip van Winkle, In the Heart of the Catskills, Grand Hotel to Big India, to name a few of its “peers,” and is part of a collection of early Biograph films that were re-issued in 1906 for exhibition in the railroad car theaters of Hale’s Tours.
These railroad films are mentioned in the Biograph Bulletins, nr. 73 (June 3, 1906). Many of the titles listed there are preserved today by the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. The Bulletin heads: “Hale Tour runs attractive Railroad Pictures which have been found highly successful with tour car schemes.” The Hold-Up of the Rocky Mountain Express is printed in bold letters and stands out in this listing of forty-four titles:
This film is concededly the greatest crowd-drawer of them all. It gets the money when everything else fails, and no other film offers such opportunities for front display. Ran for five weeks continuously at the headquarters of the Brady Grossman Co. 46 east 14th Street, New York City, and still running on the issuance of this bulletin. The action shows a railroad run, an interior comedy scene, the hold-up as viewed from the inside, then on the track, finishing with a race between the train and the bandits, who first take to a hand car and then to a horse and wagon. The robbers are captured at the crossing for an exciting finish.
A “railroad run,” which is a phantom ride type of film, is quite suitable for the Hale Tours exhibition, which took place within the train car. Here, the run is combined with a simple plot, including characters, actions, motivation, building up suspense, and satisfying closure. Within the context of this argument, I speculate that this film might have been the pride of Biograph, and the most successful with the public, because it has such an elaborate narrative. It stands out among the titles in this list that are mostly “mere” phantom rides. The enumaration of the segments of the action, in the Bulletin, suggests that the film is composed of bits like the one in the Bits & Pieces collection.
This disproportionate length of the run, of a chase – disproportionate from the point of view of today – in an otherwise rudimentary plot, shows that the “balance” between elements was very different then compared to present-day cinematic discourse. This difference was emphatically related to the place of the chase as not simply a typical scene but as one that produced the narrativity that it was subsequently to exploit. Other films of this group include digressions from the phantom ride display of landscape in the form of a short narrative. This happens, for example, in In the Haunts of Rip Van Winkle. The review mentions “Magnificent mountain scenery in the Catskills, introducing an amusing comedy feature of a tramp who goes to sleep on the track.” Or, I can mention The Valley of the Esopus, considered “An amusing fishing picture” that “figures as the feature of this film, which shows a run through the site of New York’s new $161,000,000 reservoir in the Catskill Mountains.”
Keeping this generic wavering in mind while viewing our Bits & Pieces in the archive, I suggest that the spectacle of the colliding trains in the bit nr. 319 has a similar function to such insertion footage. Thus, just as much as the allegedly complete, reviewed films of the time, this bit offers a glimpse into the aesthetic of early cinema. The similarity of the intertitles between this piece and many longer films in which documentary footage is inserted, is striking. For example, the numbers of miles and the speed of the trains are specified. Similarly, in the case of an oil find, the numbers of gallons would be spelled out.
In order to grasp the significance of such insertions for the characterization of the Western of the period as fundamentally heterogeneous, as well as, in that heterogeneity, congruent with the present state of culture, I find it crucial to pay special attention to breaks, to the absence of attempts to make the documentary footage blend in harmoniously with the rest of the film. This aesthetic is also evident in another aspect that makes fragmentation visible, namely attention to abrupt endings. These endings, we can now see, are neither more nor less abrupt than the cut-off points in the Bits, or the insertion points in the films like The Hold-Up of the Rocky Mountain Express. If these breaks turn out to pertain to an aesthetic rather than the result of accidents, it is no longer reasonable to decide between “fragment” and “complete” film. Conversely, there is no strict reason to believe in the completeness of the latter in any absolute sense. The act of the archive – its poetics or making – has now visually “explicated” the primary characteristic of the ancient material. It has done this, I contend, through making the Bits & Pieces available for an utterly modern reading, according to the variable model – not the reality – of hypertext.
Archival Poetics and Story-Telling
All this, then, belongs to the double-edged story emerging from the archival act of “preserving” bits and pieces by grouping and naming them Bits & Pieces. A story of history, and a story in history. In other words, the story of the encounter between present and past uniquely brought to light by the archive’s humble labor. To further probe the yield of this labor as well as to honor it, I will continue on the track it projects for the historian desiring to understand the visual culture of a century ago, and the cultural analyst desirous to mobilize this understanding to illuminate another moment of intense intertwinement of cultural and technological innovation.
The act of considering these bits in terms of archival poetics can now be taken to function as a meta-poetics: as a model for the understanding of a more extended corpus of films, for the historical position and motivation for the search for this understanding, and for the sense of culture in the present that demands such understandings. As we have seen, narrativity is not to be taken for granted in these films; the tension between narrative movement in the plot or in the fabula does not bear comparison with the kind of harmony between these that we take for “natural” in present-day cinema. But when considered not as structure per se but as solicitation, the tension suspends that viewing habit by putting forward the aim of that strategy – that blending – so that it becomes denaturalized and can be seen as one among other possible strategies, not the only “natural” one.
This is one way in which an “archival poetics” can help the historian while, at the same time, also explaining current fascination. On the basis of the narrativity emerging from the purely sequential presentation of Bits & Pieces, establishing a connection between narrative as a textual feature and its effect in captivating the viewer, it sustains the desire to know and understand, in fact, to have a past, preserved, available, and riveting in its unreadability, in the archive.
Ultimately, archival poetics is both narratively propelling and anti-narratively frustrating; there lies its specificity and its significance. I understand the subject of narration as concerning both how film ” tells a story” and how film “tells a story,” that is, in terms of semiotic mode as well as content. From that vantage point, I now explore two questions simultaneously. The first concerns narrative strategies invented to convey narration as a mode of showing things, of captivating spectators; of turning the moving image into an image moving (its spectators). The second, altogether different question follows the cultural process in which the object of that show, of that narration, became a story rather than an idea, or a spectacle such as landscape only. I have been interested above all, here, in finding a way to analyze the crossing of these two strands. For that crossing, that trussing together ties narrativity to an idea of the generic development of narration conceived as not “natural” but as something that could as well have evolved in a different direction – according to different links in hypertext.
In order to demonstrate the relevance of archival poetics for the history of early cinema, let me go back to my earlier example, the chase. The chase is narrativity in its most characteristic, perhaps even essential form. It is also quintessentially filmic. Yet, come to think of it, precisely this essential event of the intricacies of narrative and film within a “Western” theme is anything but “natural.” For the chase does not exist visually, one can only experience a chase, but never witness a chase in full, only in filmic representation. For one thing, the event happens too fast and cannot be registered from one point of view. For another, in “real life,” a chase only happens in the body and consciousness of each one of the participants, rigorously limiting it to “being followed at high speed” and “being afraid” or “following in order to capture.” Neither of these “moments” or elements of the chase can be visually shown; one feel fear, and one rides fast, but the connection between the two is inferred, not seen.
As we learned from the bit of the woman waving a flag at a window, it is only when a camera cuts from the one to the other, from the one of the run and the one following, that the narrativity of the scene can be established, the theme “persecution” conveyed as a series of small actions producing (sub-)events, together forming the string we now automatically read as “chase.” It is only after the fact – after the habit of seeing such sequences has been established – that the chase film can be considered narratively defined. The chase, thus, is a narrative form of display.
However, the type of narrativity emblematized by the chase is also generic, exemplifying the problematic status of the genre- avant-the-genre so to speak. it gives us a preview of the genre that follows the inventions of the captivating, suspenseful effects that can be achieved by cutting from one participant in such an event to the other, focusing on the dust on the road and the sweat of the horse, the backward glances of the victim and the determined face of the follower, the fast-moving trees that are lines up as mute spectators of the event, all, together, saying “this is a chase.”
In the summary of The Hold-up of the Rocky Mountain Express quoted above, the reviewer emphasized how the film is a combination of “types of scenes”, a generic kaleidoscope. He mentioned “a railroad run”, “an interior comedy”, “the hold-up”, “a race.” This enumeration does more than just provide us with a list of scenes considered typical at the time. It also demonstrates how strongly the reception of the films qua narrative was bound up with the string of such scenes that held them together. Read through archival poetics, the importance of this list, therefore, as a ground for a characterization of the place of narrativity in the establishment of generic conventions, cannot be over-estimated. Establishment as process, not seen, retrospectively, as its result, but, with the review as witness, caught in the act.
Here is my own description of the film: It begins at a train station. Some turbulence occurs from unclear causes. Perhaps the man who comes running in is late, and his friends who were waiting for him to wave him goodbye, are relieved. Suddenly the camera begins to move. It turns out a train was waiting, at least, there is a suggestion that this is the case. Hence, I infer, the man has barely made it to the train. People wave along the track. This is followed by a beautiful panning shot of a typical phantom ride, or just a train ride, while the landscape glides by. The camera is mounted high on top of the train. At first some houses can still be seen, later only the landscape: the train has left town, moving from civilization to nature. The scenery becomes more and more rocky.
Then the narrative part begins. A cardboard interior shows men and women in the wagon. A spinster-type woman is sitting by herself. Two men and two women are sitting next to each other. The lone woman attempts to attract attention. The men and the women pair up, however, and she remains alone. A black servant enters. The woman traveling alone beats him up. A homeless person enters; the spinster tries to kiss him. Quite a weird scene, all in all.
The film moves to the outside again. A tree trunk is lying on the track, signaling the narrative scene to come. The train stops, two men remove the trunk, but then Two bandits appear and keep the men under fire. One of the bandits goes inside and demands the loot. He has the looks of a cowboy. The film moves to the outside again. A carriage approaches. Brief gunfire occurs and the bandits take the carriage and the people on it, holding them hostage. The train accelerates and pursues the bandits. Down at the bottom of the track they bypass a wagon and horse. They jump from the carriage onto the wagon and hence, they take – steal – these. They continue to ride along the track. The chase continues. There are now three subsequent relays of chasing: the bandits running, riding on the carriage, riding on the wagon, each means of transportation increasing their speed. The road ends at a railroad crossing with a house. Some people exit the house with shotguns and capture the bandits. The End.
This film offers the mix of nonfiction display of landscape and the train with narrative fiction of the hold-up and the chase that I mentioned before as more characteristic of the Western at the time than the harmonious blend of predominant narrative in later Westerns. This characterization is emphatically not to be construed as an “early” stage in a linear development. Instead, seen through the lens of the hypertextual model, I suggest it is a paradigmatic example of the kind of display narrative the reign of archival poetics has imposed on the Bits & Pieces.
For example, short and “simple” as the film may strike us, it is quite an ambitious film. However simple in narrative structure, confined to the predictable sequence of one hold-up, one chase, one capture, it features a wide range of themes that can be considered typical. In quick succession and simultaneous display we witness versions of the themes of an opposition between civilization and nature, of racism, and sexism, narratively intertwined when the scorned woman is also the one who beats up the black servant and acts out her sexual frustration by assaulting the tramp. This kind of narrative economy is itself a case of non-integration, however, if we consider that there remains a clear division between the “decent couples” who are ordinary, therefore boring, therefore simple background, objects of display but narratively speaking, not viable; and the group of narratively active agents, consisting of the social rejects: the spinster, the black man, and the tramp. Moreover, the film plays with the mixing of genres, narrative strategies and possible camera positions.
All this can be summed up in the words through which Gunning argues that the chase format is essential for the development of narrative form:
The chase [… plays a pivotal role in the transition from a cinema of attractions to a cinema organized around storytelling. It provided a model for narrative causality and linearity extending over several shots and established the continuity of space and time that subtended narrative action. [23]
What is archival about this? Time – slow emergence, not ready-made presence – and dispersal; conservationism and reconstructionism superceded by engagement and solicitation. I have not established this model suddenly. It had to be retrieved from various reiterated bits. After the beginning – after seeing the Bits & Pieces in the archive of the NFM we know that this is a skill that is not natural but can be learned, culturally acquired. The symbolic form of the chase, only semiotically possible once it is recognizable qua chase because technicalities have become invisible, hiding behind predictable effects, turns it into a narrative chase, as opposed to, say, a display-chase.
The grouping, found once I embarked on the chosen path of narrative, revealed the broken theme. Properly narrative elements of the content of this symbolic form are the theme of loss and recovery and, of course, the last-minute rescue. And, as it happens, these themes are abundant in the Western genre. This is how, then, we can speak of specific forms of narrativity as form plus content toward effect, as defining the genre-to-be, or the not-yet-genre in the making. The making turns this view into a poetics; the effect targets the present; the diachronic perspective makes it historical, not just structural; and the work that makes sense of all this, is archival.
Conclusion
What does this discussion mean for the historian of cinema. To make my case for an archival poetics as truly poetics – as making, forging what it presumably only stores – I put forward the claim, hyperbolic as it may sound, that the act of making the tape Bits & Pieces is a creative act of discursivity, making visible, hence, speakable, something that only later could become “the Western.” That later Western is now firmly a thing of the past. But as such we need it in the present. The archive’s bits, in contrast, are meaningful as models of such a retrospective hold on the past to sustain us in a present that is just as confusing, exciting and yielding on the condition of being, constantly, made: that of the new media. Therefore, I end this paper with a speculation on some general features of narrativity in the films that explain why their archival status itself would be attractive as a model for current screen culture.
For it is thanks to the paradoxes and tensions around narrativity that the archivally produced “early Western” can stand as both an emblem of archival poetics and a model for a history of the present, where “the archive” fascinates a culture suffering from amnesia and caught up in new narrativities that, like this emerging and unstable genre, lack pre-existing plots, forms, or structures. In order for narrativity to be activated, a certain continuity is expected by the viewer – an expectation that must, first, be solicited by reiterating instances of narrativity. Moreover, a plot development is required to achieve closure. But according to the hypertext model, this closure can only be produced by the viewer, the cultural agent in charge of the making. Thirdly, the level of narration requires a narrativity that the medium itself already implies, but that, within the framework of narrativity, can be exploited, displayed, and integrated.
On the one hand, narrative continuity is challenged by the tension, or alternation, between elements of the fabula – events – and the display of setting and elements of show. On the other hand, narrativity is required for the manageability of the mission of Westerns of the period, to translate the representation of space (elsewhere), time (elsewhen), and people (the other) into a story that is moving in the two senses of the word: moving images that move their audiences.
Crucial for early cinema’s narrative techniques is a heavy reliance on intertextual knowledge and the use of conventions such as easily recognizable character types and familiar plot structures. Commentary in the press on these conventions reveals this, but also criticize it and show an increasing demand of a “new” mode of narration. This is the case with present cultural modes and practices as well. But today, that intertextual knowledge has become unmanageable, so that the hypertextual model foregrounds the need and the liberty for the viewer to make choices in her construction work.
The cultural work of archival poetics is profound, necessary, and emotionally intense. The nostalgic element in our looking back at the past is also invested in the materiality of the bits that testify to a time now gone when “behind” the screen were things. The obsoleteness of that object status turns the archive into a place of worship, whereas the fragmentary state that reigns there, “objectively,” reassures us about the fragmented state of present screen culture. The object of longing and mourning resists absolute loss when it can be integrated in a similarity with today. This task is attributed to the de-authorized narrativity that binds archivalism to hypertextuality. In the dialectic between the force of narrative, the motor that propels the film, and the viewing of it, a dialectic where narrativity is the counterforce of display, landscape may serve as a metaphor and narrative as a connector. Hence, then, the exemplary role played in my story by the genre that integrates landscape and narrative: the Western – genre of the future, narration of the past.
Endnotes
[1] “Fugitive,” not in the material sense, although the material status of electronic information is fundamentally different from paper and celluloid; but in the sense that too much comes in to bother preserving it.
[2] Of the many recent publications on cultural memory, Andreas Huyssen’s Twilight Memory: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia,(New York: Routledge, 1995) remains a good starting point.
[3] I use the definition of hypertext and hypermedia as analysed and defined by George P. Landow. See especially his Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). I do make a distinction between hypertext as structural model of a text and hypertext as text. Where “hypertext” as term may be ambiguous I use “hypertextual document” for hypertext as texts
[4] Nanna Verhoeff, After the Beginning: Cinema and the American West before 1915. 2000, Utrecht University: Ph.D. dissertation.
[5] On this particular argument, in relation to the Lacanian fantasy of the body in bits and pieces, see Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World, (New York: Routledge, 1996 (esp. 20-27)).
[6] I take standard narrative theory, mostly in the structuralist heritage, as a starting point, but not endpoint. See for example, Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 1997) for terminology.
[7] A “chase oriented trajectory film” is what Gunning calls his example of The Adventures of Dollie (AM&B 1908) (D.W. Griffith and the Origins of Early Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991, 68).
[8] Aristotle’s Poetics was already aware of this, as its author demonstrated in his theorization of catharsis as the wholesome effect of tragedy on its viewers.
[9] Jean Louis Leutrat, Le Western. Archéologie d’un genre. (Lyon: Presses UdL,1987).
[10] Leutrat, Le Western: 5. My translation.
[11] Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire.” Hommage à Jean Hyppolite. (Paris: P.U.F, 1971), 152. My translation.
[12] See Thomas Elaesser, Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative,(London: BFI Publishing, 1990), 1.
[13] I take my cue from Landow’s analysis of how hypertext blurs the distincition between author and reader. See his Hypertext 2.0. , especially his chapter 4: “Reconfiguring the author.”
[14] I borrow this name from the 1999 symposium “Orphans of the storm: saving ‘orphan films’ in the digital age”, held at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina.
[15] For an extensive analysis of the question of details, including their differentiation from fragments, see Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine, (London: Methuen, 1987).
[16] For this distinction of monumental (sic) importance, see Michel Foucault, Archeology of Knowledge. London: Tavistock Publications Ltd,1972. Translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith. (originally published as L’Archéologie du savoir. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1969) esp. pp 138-140.
[17] For further elaboration of this issue, see my After the Beginning: Cinema of the American West, before 1915 (2002, Ph.D dissertation, Utrecht University).
[18] “Vrouw en kinderen worden belaagd door boevenbende. Edison. Verenigde Staten, 1910[c].”
[19] “Expeditie in weids landschap, Verenigde Staten.”
[20] “Cowboy hangt vijand aan een touw boven afgrond. Onder het touw laat hij een kaarsje branden. Verenigde Staten,”
[21] “Een fantastisch duel. Twee locomotieven loopen tegen elkander met een snelheid van 100 kilometer in tegenwoordigheid der bevolking van Indianapolis.”
[22] “Machinisten en stokers springen van de locomotieven een oogenblik voor de samenstoot.”
[23] Tom Gunning, D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 1991: 67)