CHAPTER ONE

Oh! Althusser!:

Historiography and the

Rise of Cinema Studies

ROBERT SKLAR

Some half dozen years after switching his professional address from history

to cinema studies, the author of this essay revisited an Organization of Ameri

can Historians annual meeting. There, much was of old, not least the time

honored tropism toward exaggerated titles. A paper entitled "Marxist Theory

and American Historians,'' by Jonathan M. Wiener of the University of Calif or

nia, Irvine, was a case in point.1 It covered many important themes, though,

as the author heard it, Marxist theory was not among them. This omission im

pelled him to speak up in the question period. It was an excellent paper, went

the gist of his remarks, but its subjects were historiography and sociology of

the profession-the books and careers of radical American historians. He had

hoped to learn more on American historians' relation to Marxist theory. In

his new field, cinema studies, contemporary European Marxist theory was an

influence of surprising dimension, perhars invoked not wisely but too well; he wanted to know how radical American historians had responded to this

body of theoretical work What about, just for example, the writings of Louis

Althusser ... . . . Aaabh. He perceived a palpable sigh of relief from the scholars on

the dais. An intervention that, at the least, pointed to certain lacunae in the presentation was now, by the incantation of a single name, happily contained. Oh, Althusser. The author was well aware, having been present on the occa-

This chapter reprinted with changes from Radical History Review 41 (Spring 1988): 10-35.

12

13

sian, how enthusiastically an assembled multitude of MARHO historians had greeted E. P. Thompson's energetic harangue against the French philosopher nearly a decade before2 Perhaps, by invoking that well-calumniated name, he intended unconsciously to negate his own critique, knowing that the vast majority of listeners that day subscribed as a matter of faith to Thompson's thundering dictum: "History is not a factory for the manufacture of Grand Theory, like some Concorde of the global air; nor is it an assembly line for the production of midget theories in sries. Nor yet is it some gigantic experimental station in which theory of foreign manufacture can be 'applied,' 'tested,' and 'cpnfirmed'."3

Still, let the spirit of that inquiry hattg in the air, as a sign of a gap, a difference, between the social formation of disciplines. Cinema studies came of age as an academic subject at a time when its most closely aligned fields, such as philosophy, literary studies, and art history, fell deeply under the thrall of contemporary European theories, Marxist and non-Marxist, an experience shared perhaps by a few historians, but surely not by the field as a whole. As film history came under the purview of dominant theoretical discourses in the emerging cinema discipline, its links to traditional academic history were tenuous; its ties with radical historiography, despite many superficial similarities in vocabulary, were weaker still. More recently, as some historians have begun to utilize the approaches of theoretically grounded literary criticism, and some film scholars have developed interests in social historians' work, these differences have begun to diminish, though not yet through much mutual familiarity or common dialogue. This chapter seeks to foster that dialogue by exploring some aspects of the development and current state of historical writing about film.

D Althusser. Rather than discard the name, why not start with it? His essay "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Towards an Investigation" probably had more impact on the concept of "history" in the fledgling years of cinema studies than all the works of the world's historians piled on end.4 A secondary diffusion of his viewpoints within the film field came through his influence on Marxist literary theorists and critics such as Pierre Macherey and Terry Eagleton' Yet a third possible source, his role a' catalyst in the important debates between structuralism and culturalism in British Marxist historiography, had a negligible effect on film history until quite recently.'

Within cinema studies, the most widely adopted of Althusserian notions was probably the concept of ideological state apparatuses. These are such instruments of social function as religion, education, the family, law, and (most important for cinema scholars) communications and culture; through these institutions, "all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects." 7 Ideology, meanwhile, is that which "represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence." 8

14 Oh! Althusser!

Imagine the potency of this conception for a hypothetical scholar, steeped in theory, unfamiliar with the training historians receive in historiographic procedure (Thompson's notorious "historical logic")-' Like an expressway elevated over a teeming city, Althusser's formulation might be seen to offer a royal road to cinema history without the necessity of descending into the mean streets of historical research (let alone the coal mines historians frequently mention as metaphors for their place of labor), where historians "are always handling facts in bunches and in series," as Thompson insists.10 Within this framework, a film industry is by definition an ideological state apparatus. Films "represent" ideology and "interpellate" individuals as subjects. Ideology flows smoothly from its source (whether this is the state, the bourgeoisie, capitalism, or a compendium of all three is not often clarified or specified) through the film production and distribution process into the spectator's willing eyes and ears. From the elevation of this theoretical stance, the work that historians do-researching questions of historical agency, of conflict and transformation-becomes more or less immaterial.

No one familiar with the debates within British Marxist historiography that prompted Thompson's original diatribe and engaged him and others in considerable later polemics will be entirely surprised by this model, however hyperbolic it may appear. In certain ways, to be sure, it is a straw man. Stated in this way, it does not do justice to those Althusserian insights that can and ought to be fruitfully combined with other historiographic procedures; nor does it acknowledge the emergence of several film historians whose research methods meet any standard of mainstream academic historiography, and whose deployment of historical and social theory is considerably more sophisticated and complex But it is not an exaggeration to say that the model once held a widespread dominance over cinema studies approaches to film history and continues through rhetorical habit to wield an influence. The phenomenon needs to be placed in the context of the field's development.

0 All cinema studles, to simplify, can be divided into three generations. The first generation, coming from such backgrounds as journalism, archival work, filmmaking, or some other facet of the film business, was largely self-taught and nonacademic. This cadre formed the core of personnel who began teaching film history and criticism courses in universities in the 1960s, along with a few academics with backgrounds in speech and theater who had founded a small scholarly society around 1960." The second generation consisted of academically trained humanists, primarily, as we have seen, from literary studies, philosophy, and art history, who recruited themselves for the new field as it expanded in the 1970s and began to establish journals, hold conferences, and, most important, build graduate programs. The third generation is comprised of the cinema studies doctorates those programs have begun to produce, the leading edge of which is now moving from junior faculty status into tenured

15

appointments. The sweep of generations was encapsulated, albeit imperfectly, at a landmark conference sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities at City University of New York in 1975, where, among the featured speakers, critic Andrew Sarris may be said to have represented the first generation, philosopher Stanley Cavell the second, and semiologist Umberto Eco-not as a member but as a signifier of changing discourses-the third 12

The expansion of cinema studies in the 1970s was one of the crucial aspects of its social formation that differentiated the field from such others as history . .Where older disciplines tended to be static at the base, or even contracting, c}nema studies was rapidly building its foundation. Where some academic areas took on the appearance of invetted pyramids, heavy at the top with senior professors but thin at the bottom with junior faculty and new graduate students, cinema resembled the traditional pyramid, heavy at the bottom and thin at the top. The consequences, though rarely if ever discussed in the field, were profound. With a small scholarly establishment and an underdeveloped methodological structure, the emerging. discipline was wide open to be swept away by the strong theoretical winds from Europe. Writing "theory" made it possible for new practitioners at all academic levels to achieve publication without having to wait to build a base of knowledge through months and years of film viewing and archival research. In the face of this rapid transformation of discourses, many in the first and second generations retreated from active roles in the scholarly and professional development of the field.

Cinema studies became, in many remarkable ways, a discipline shaped by it' third generation: a youthful field where the young predominated. There were many positive aspects of this phenomenon. New and potentially radical academic discourses deriving from feminist, psychoanalytic, and even Marxist theory moved swiftly to the center of the discipline, rather than remaining marginal or oppositional. A sense of excitement, energy, and possibility pervaded scholarly gatherings, where there was little of hierarchy, hidebound tradition, or Old Guard stuffiness to stifle a decidedly democratic air. Careers indeed seemed open to talent.

There was also a down side. If plentiful opportunities existed to read and publish papers, the positive aspects of "gate-keeping" processes were largely missing. Scholarly conferences were crowded with papers but made little or no provision for formal commentary or floor debate. Many such papers went quicldy into nonrefereed journals without sufficient opportunity for constructive criticism and thorough evision; a considerable number, therefore, suffered from what one might call premature publication.'' While attacks against unfavored texts and viewpoints were often ferocious, within the circle of dominant or fashionable discourses, self-critique barely existedH When intellectual contradictions and questionable propositions revealed fissures in the prevailing orthodoxies, the issues rarely received thorough analysis and

16 Oh! Althusser!

:lebate; instead, they were put aside as if their problematic had been resolved, and it was time to change the subject of inquiry. The constructive tasks of building a discipline and its discourses, in a sometimes skeptical academic environment, provided few spaces for challenging self-examination.

These circumstances, however, are changing. One sure sign of transformation is a recent dramatic surge in cinema books published or accepted by university presses, not only revised dissertations, which in general have shown marked improvement as the field has matured, but also postdoctoral monographs by established scholars. Essays are often written as probes, stabs, first tries at a theme; they are often too brief for conclusive demonstration of a point. Books are generally held to higher standards for evidence, structure, and fullness of argument. Historical writing has traditionally tended to favor the book as the more effective forum for the field's emphasis on extensive documentation and narrative presentation. The essay's predominance in early cinema studies scholarship thus placed film history at a certain disadvantage in the discipline's development-a disadvantage that was only exacerbated when the theoretical discourse applied an Althusserian viewpoint toward history itself.

The dominant film theory discourse drew a distinction between itself and existing film historical practices: It operated in the realm of "science," film history remained in the realm of "ideology." 1' Film historiography as so far constituted was considered in much the same terms as had aroused E. P .. Thompson's anger. At worst, it exhibited the ideological errors of empiricism and positivism; at best, however, it could do little more than assemble the raw empirical data that theorists required to exercise their analytic powers on historical subjects. Theory wore the doctor's white coat; history sat in the waiting room, in need of diagnosis and cure.

Film theorists never went so far as Althusserians in other fields, including history, who questioned the validity or relevance of empirical data entirely. Still, in those years, theorists were no more likely to be found in archives than atheists in foxholes. During much of the decade following the 1975 CUNY conference, film history played a decidedly subordinate role in the development of cinema studies. Film historians continued to shoulder the lamp and pickaxe and go about their humble empirical work, but it is possible, in retrospect, to see more clearly the conceptual and psychological adjustments they faced in striving to establish film history from a traditional academic historiographic perspective on a solid foundation of primary research.

The sheer volume of work to be done, both in film viewing and in utilizing document sources, was daunting. A vast array of new data, including Hollywood studio archives of films and production files, was becoming available for the first time. Innovative historians were beginning to demonstrate the value of searching out previously unexplored material, such as the legal records and daily newspapers Charles Musser scrutinized in hts reconstruc-

17

tion of early American film history.16 And there was the challenge not only of keepmg up and commg to terms with the dominant theoretical discourses but of struggling to establish a place for historiographical procedures and something like Thompson's "historical logic" within it. Fo: some time, the combination of hyperactive theory and underdeveloped history left ltttle room for dialogue between the two practices. There were few occaswns whre the two discourses shared a platform or an essay's pages, and the formulatiOn of the issues almost invariably took a monologic form. One of the major gatherings where history was accorded a significant place was a c:onference entitled "Cinema Histories, Cinema Practices " held in California in 1981. It approached film history, along with other confrence subjects, from a "theoretical frame (sometimes loosely labeled 'structuralist' or 'post-structuralist') ... derived in large part from the writings of Sanssure, Peirce, Freud, Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Althusser, Derrida, Barthes and/ or Foucault"-a. teoretical frame whose synchronic structures, one rn'ight say, needd (and sttll need) to be examined in relation to the diachronic tropes of h1stoncal d1scourse, rather than simply applied.n The interrogation of theo from a historical perspective was not on the conference agenda, howeve'7 only the interrogation of history from a theoretical viewpoint. Perhaps as result, only one of the four papers eventually published under the rubric "Cinema Histories," Thomas Elsaesser's "Film History and Visual Pleasure: Weimar Cinema," has entered significantly into emerging film historiography dtscu:ses; the others,

.whatever their merits, appeared in various ways too prehmmary, too exclusiVely theoretical, or too brief and specific.18 The Elsaesser essay is an elegant and wide-ranging theoretical meditation on German cmema before 1933 that centers on a critique of Siegfried Kracauer' s classic From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History oF the Gerrna a/ BTh , . > n ':' m. e essay reformulates a h1stoncal problematic along three primary hoes: the quettOn of spectatorship; of the specific cinematic institution (that IS, the cmema tndustry and its practices within the wider frame of cultural discourse and representation); and, in the language of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, of the cinematic "imaginary" (roughly speaking, the way cinematic representatiOn seeks to construct a unified, complete discursive system that a spectator may comprehend). The main point it asserts is that Weimar cinema was an ":rt" or "avant-garde': ciema, based on the German film industry's n_eed fr product differentiation from the dominant Hollywood imports, on cmema s place tn the Ideological debates about art within German culture of the 1920s, and on social movements and technological trends giving precedence to the visual.20 The essay stands as perhaps the outstanding contribution to film history from the theoretical discourses of the post-1975 decade, but It has not been Immune from the revisionary impulse in a rapidly advancing field In a recent book, Patrice Petro has challenged Elsae$ser's perspective on German silent films (in this and other essays) for its failure in her view ' '

18 Oh! Althusser!

to take into account their relation to historical audiences, and, in particular, the female spectator."

Film history as a historiographic practice received its first book-length treatment in 1985 with the publication of a textbook aimed primarily at undergraduates, Film History: Theory and Practice, by Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery, leading historians of cinema studies' third generation." They had gained prominence as revisionists and vigorous critics of prior film historiography; they were avatars of a micro-historical rigor they had found wanting in nearly all past, and most current, film historical scholarship (some of Allen's views will be discussed in greater detail below). The most unusual part of the book-surprising, perhaps, for an undergraduate text-was their effort in the opening chapter, "Film History as History," to place their subject within the heavily theorized discourse of cinema studies as a whole.

Two aspects of this short introduction stand out. The first is how little they attempt to locate their endeavor within any significant contemporary historiographical discourse-no Annates School, no British cultural studies, no Foucault, no Hayden White; indeed, no work of traditional academic history of any sort published in the previous fifteen years. The only non-film historians mentioned are E. H. Carr, Carl Becker, and David Hackett Fischer." The second is how critical they are of the theoretical frame of cinema studiesa criticism that is almost completely muted, however, by its extreme brevity and by their own argument for a different theoretical starting point.

Their burden is to rescue the empirical research that forms the basis of the micro-historical studies they favor from the critique of empiricism in the cinema field's dominant theoretical orientation. They attempt thisalthough with no acknowledgment and probably also no awareness-by, in effect, turning Althusserianism on its head: Where the Althusserian viewpoint regarded theory as part of "science" and relegated history to the realm of "ideology," they make a case for history as science and criticize theory for being ideological.

Their argument in favor of a scientific basis for historical empiricism is drawn from philosopher Carl G. Hempel's essays from the 1940s on "general laws" in history. In contrast to this, they call the contemporary theoretical frame conventionalism because it treats forms of knowing as conventions, and they regard it as an extreme form of relativism. Their goal, however, is to offer a mediating stance between the empirical and the theoretical, based on a philosophical concept of Realism, which, they say, offers descriptive models of mechanisms that cause observable phenomena. From a Realist perspective, they write, "it is the frustrating but exciting task of the film historian to describe the working of the generative mechanisms in film history in general and the particular conjunction of those mechanisms in any given film historical phenomenon." z4

Ultimately the book proposes a Realist notion of "generative mechanisms" as a method for studying film history. This may have merit in a text-

19

book aimed at novices to historical study, for it urges students to look behind events and assess multiple determinants. But what does it contribute to the advanced historiographical and theoretical debates in the field? Uncomfortable with what they may rightly regard as an unwarranted disparagement of historical procedures in cinema studies theory, they yet exhibit unfamiliarity with contemporary historiographic discourses and end up grasping at philosophical straws in their search for a method. Paul Veyne provocatively claims in Writing History that "history has no method," that it is composed of plots." Once one has produced descriptive models of generative mechanisms in film history, how to relate them, rank them, assign value to them, assess their determinative power? One needs a value system, a per.'lpective toward competing explanatory models. Film History: Theory and Practice ends up no less relativistic than they claim contemporary theory to be, but without the virtues of what they call conventionalism, that is, of proceeding from theories of how societies and cultures are formed and how they function."

Developments within cinema studies, meanwhile, have led to a revaluation from other perspectives of history's place in the field. Film theorists have begun to acknowledge that many of their subjects and concerns need to be examined in a more fully historicized and historiographic framework. One example is a 1984 article reconsidering a classic text of post-1968 French theory and criticism, influenced by Althusserian ideas on art's relation to ideology, that seeks to identify "progressive" or "subversive" films produced within the dominant framework of cultural production. The theoretical-critical endeavor "underplays any sense of systemic context," the article suggests, and continues, "it seems quite necessary to consider the attributes of the diachronic systems they, as micro-systems, inhabit." 27 (One may get a sense from this quotation of the rhetorical standards often employed in the cinema studies field.)

In the past several years, however, the practice of film history has become richer and more varied. Several third-generation scholars previously associated with theoretical or formalist approaches have indeed brought forth substantial works linking historical and textual analysis, such a5 The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, by David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson." In fields such as Italian cinema of the Fascist era, previously little examined in American scholarship, new debates have been inaugurated by the appearance of important monographs.29 The vanguard of a fourth generation, recent doctorates whose training includes both history and theory and who are utilizing and even attempting to synthesize the discourses without past distinctions and hierarchies, has begun to make it> mark.30

0 It will be helpful to bring some of the perspectives and transformations in film historiography into sharper focus by examining a historical problematic in detail. One such subject-the ethnic, cla>S, and gender characteristics

20 Oh! Althusser!

of early American cinema audiences-holds a significance that is not limited to film history but is of concern to film theory and, more generally, social and cultural history. It also has the merit of bringing scholarship from cinema studies and from radical social history into mutual purview.

Like many genuinely important historical subjects, moreover, it is of more than merely academic interest. The questions under debate-to what extent working-class and immigrant men and women (and children) formed the significant audience for early cinema; what cultural transactions occurred in that audience, whether it constituted an autonomous working-class public sphere or was the site for the absorption of hegemonic domination; and to what degree, and for what purpose, film forms, genres, and subjects were constructed. in response to that audience-inflect our broader understanding of cultural formation and transformation, of what cultural representations signify, of the relation between modes of cultural production and reception. Although Foucault warns us to be wary of overemphasis on origins, it is inescapable that the conflict over early cinema has to some extent shaped the dominant ideologies and discourses on the relation of media, class, and culture through most of the twentieth century.

This author should make clear his own stake in the subject. Although writing on the class, ethnic, and gender characteristics of moviegoing is nearly as old as the cinema itself, his Movie-Made America, A Cultural History of American Movies (1975), along with Film, The Democratic Art (1976) by Garth]owett-works by historians who later became members of the second generation in film and communications studies-may be said to have reinaugurated the debate in the mid-1970s.31 A brief retrospective of the author's aims in this project, with whatever insights hindsight can muster, can provide a starting point for the ideological, as well as the historiographic, issues in the debate.

Movie-Made America, in this light, is a work of New Left historiography. It participated in the radical scholarly endeavor begun in the late 1960s to reexamine and reinterpret the American past. Its effort in cultural history was aligned with the work of radical social and labor historians and, with them, linked to the scholarship of British culturalists like Thompson and Raymond Williams. The task was to reconstruct a past in which common people struggled to determine their own lives and institutions.

The book's opening paragraph asserts that movies "rose to the surface of cultural consciousness from the bottom up" -a familiar phrase from those years-"receiving their support from the lowest and most invisible classes in American society." 3Z It goes on to interpret the emergence of the movies as a cultural phenomenon in the context of early twentieth-century urban life, as a source of knowledge and values for immigrants and working people in conflict with traditionally dominant forces in American society. For much of their history, from censorship battles to the blacklist, movies had been a site

21

1-1 House of Pathe nickelodeon, Chicago, ca. 1907. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

of struggle over cultural power-a struggle intensified by the never-forgotten fact that many of the industry's corporate leaders stemmed from immigrant '"'"', ]ew1sh Eastern European roots, and as _alien newcomers gained control over a medium reshaping American culture. For this and other reasons, movies often .Cilallerged the middle-class social code, "gave expression to the underside American values and behavior," presenting "grotesque exaggeration, ... e>ta:V")larce, violence, and sexual license" (104).

Even from so truncated a summary, one can see how readily this view-

22 Obi Althusser!

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1-2 Motion picture catalogue, Collection of Geoffrey Bell. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

point lies open to a critique from an Althusserian perspective-one similar in form to the criticisms of British culturalism that aroused Thompson's ire. The cinema is one of the most powerful ideological state apparatuses in twentiethcentury bourgeois capitalist society, this argument might run. Movie theaters are a primary place where "ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects."" While the philosopher himself sought to make clear, in a postscript to his article "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," that class struggle continues both within and between those institutions, the Althusserian impulse in cinema studies tended to ignore this caveat in favor of such dictums as "an ideology always exists in an apparatus, and its practice, or practices. This existence is material.'' 34

Thus cinema theorists found ideology in the form of a "bourgeois mode of representation" both in the cinematic apparatus (camera, lens, and so on) and in such practices as the construction of fictional narratives.35 It was bourgeois ideology down the line, from the camera's eye straight through to the spectator's, and there were enough disquieting aspects of this theory-such

23

1-3 Unidentified magazine illustration, ca. 1910, with the caption: 'The movingpicture theater bas become America's favorite family entertainment. Apparently even the babies attend the show."

as whether it was possible to create oppositional practices or even a Socialist cinema using cinema apparatus so thoroughly imbued with bourgeois ideology-that the notion of movie audiences as a site of class or any other kind of struggle hardly deserved notice.

When a revisionist counterargument to the emphasis on working-class and immigrant audiences for early American cinema almost immediately arose, however, it did not originate from Althusserian theory, however much the revisionist texts later became enfolded within that world view. It is important to stress that the arguments over cinema audiences were not enclosed within Marxism or Marxian-oriented social and cultural analysis, as were the British conflicts between structuralists and culturalists. Indeed, at first glance itis not easy to place the revisionists within an ideological framework Their

R'D?,; ''"'""' appear to be primarily historiographic and methodological, in ser-of that purportedly most unideological of causes, the advancement of kriowledge.

The revisionist texts in question are Russell Merritt's 1976 essay 'Nickk>deon Theaters, 1905-1914: Building an Audience for the Movies," and

24 Obi Althusser!

1-4 Gar/ton Motion Picture Laboratories, ca. 1911. Photograph by Byron, Tbe Byron Collection, Museum of the Oly of New York.

Robert C. Allen's 1979 article "Motion Picture Exhibition in Manhattan:' Beyond the Nickelodeon."" Both articles focus on micro-studies of individual cities (Merritt on Boston, Allen on New York) in contrast to the macro-approaches of previous book-length works. While both express the caveat that a single city cannot represent the whole, both essays attempt to transform the general interpretation of their subject-and, from a methodological standpoint, both define their evidence in such a way as to produce an implicit, "naturalized" ideological result. Despite occasional efforts, by its practitioners or by others, to link film history revisionism with Althusserian or other Marxisms, its more fundamental connections are in fact to the consensus school of American historiography before the 1960s, whicb, in contrast to a Marxist historical model based on class struggle, regarded United States social history as unified and largely conflict-free.

Merritt and Allen both place a middle-class audience in movie theaters earlier than they regard previous accounts to have done; the implication is that the nickelodeon era was much shorter than had been supposed, and that the

25

image of tawdry store-front theaters in immigrant and working-class districts needs to be redrawn in favor of a much closer integration between movies and established entertainment districts and forms. Merritt's article however gives only brief glimpses of his city's social and economic comp;sition as basis for drawing inferences about theaters and audiences. While he comments on the inhospitability of Boston's South End and Roxbury for theater development, we get little sense of where the working class lived, shopped, and worked. Given Boston's unique geography as a peninsula, one would want to know more about its "Zone of Emergence," as Robert A. Woods and Albert]. Kennedy called it: outlying immigrant and working-class communities such as Cambridgeport, East Cambridge, Charlestown, East Boston, and South Boston.37 By defining his subject as Boston alone, it may be that Merritt found the middle class because the working class was elsewhere.

Allen pays more attention to ethnic and class characteristics of Manhattan neighborhoods and attempts briefly to distinguish among ethnic groups in moviegoing. His analysis is based on motion picture theater data drawn from Trow's Business Directory of Greater New York, particularly for 1908, when 123 theaters were listed. "It is, of course, possible that these listings are not exhaustive," Allen admits in a footnote." One piece of evidence that suggests Allen's caveat needs to be given more than passing consideration was the New York City mayor's December 1908 order revoking movie theater licenses. Most such theaters appear to have sought licensing as common shows at rwenty-five dollars rather than pay the five hundred dollars required for vaudeville and stage houses; contemporary press accounts suggested that more than six hundred theaters were affected by the order.39 Although not all of these were in Marthattan, the existence of this data might impel a historian to wonder whether some of these common shows might not have made it into Trow's Business Directory, and reconsider one's thesis accordingly.4o

The aim of these revisionist essays was not so mucb to assert the primacy of "bourgeois ideology," as in the Althusserian model, as to diminish the significance of immigrant and working-class audiences, and the possibility of class struggle, in the formation of early cinema. Rather than analyses of bourgeois ideology, they are representatives of it. Merritt's and Allen's arguments were absorbed without mucb debate into then prevailing cinema studies discourses because they buttressed the dominant theoretical viewpoint, however much the ideological foundations of the respective projects differed.

In the early 1980s, as feminist discourses became more prevalent in the cinema field, rwo essays by women scholars reopened the question of early motion picture audiences, not specifically from the viewpoint of gender, but clearly with female spectators in mind. One was Judith Mayne's 1982 article "Immigrants and Spectators," the other Miriam Hansen's 1983 article "Early Silent Cinema: Whose Public Sphere?"41 The importance of Mayne's work lay in its restoring to the cinema studies discourse a notion of the possibility

24 Oh! Althusser!

1-4 Carlton Motion Picture Laboratories, ca. 1911. Photograph by Byron, Tbe Byron Collection, Museum of the CiJ:y of New York.

Robert C. Allen's 1979 article "Motion Picture Exhibition in Manhattan: Beyond the Nickelodeon."" Both articles focus on micro-studies of individual cities (Merritt on Boston, Allen on New York) in contrast to the macro-approaches of previous book-length works. While both express the caveat that a single city cannot represent the whole, both essays attempt to transform the general interpretation of their subject-and, from a methodological standpoint, both define their evidence in such a way as to produce an implicit, "naturalized" ideological result. Despite occasional efforts, by its practitioners or by others, to link film history revisionism with Althusserian or other Marxisms, its more fundamental connections are in fact to the consensus school of American historiography before the 1960s, which, in contrast to a Marxist historical model based on class struggle, regarded United States social history as unified and largely conflict-free.

Merritt and Allen both place a middle-class audience in movie theaters earlier than they regard previous accounts to have done; the implication is that the nickelodeon era was much shorter than had been supposed, and that the

25

image of tawdry store-front theaters in immigrant and working-class districts needs to be redrawn in favor of a much closer integration between movies and established entertainment.districts and forms. Merritt's article, however, gives only brief glimpses of his city's social and economic composition as a basis for drawing inferences about theaters and audiences. While he comments on the inhospitability of Boston's South End and Roxbury for theater development, we get little sense of where the working class lived, shopped, and worked. Given Boston's unique geography as a peninsula, one would want to know more about its "Zone of Emergence," as Robert A Woods and Albert]. Kennedy called it: outlying immigrant and working-class communities such as Cambridgeport, East Cambridge, Charlestown, East Boston, and South Boston.37 By defining his subject as Boston alone, it may be that Merritt found the middle class because the working class was elsewhere.

Allen pays more attention to ethnic and class characteristics of Manhattan neighborhoods and attempts briefly to distinguish among ethnic groups in moviegoing. His analysis is based on motion picture theater data drawn from Trow's Business Directory of Greater New York, particularly for 1908, when 123 theaters were listed. "It is, of course, possible that these listings are not exhaustive," Allen admits in a footnote." One piece of evidence that suggests Allen's caveat needs to be given more than passing consideration was the New York City mayor's December 1908 order revoking movie theater licenses. Most such theaters appear to have sought licensing as common shows at twenty-five dollars rather than pay the five hundred dollars required for vaudeville and stage houses; contemporary press accounts suggested that more than six hundred theaters were affected by the order." Although not all of these were in Manhattan, the existence of this data might impel a historian to wonder whether some of these common shows might not have made it into Trow's Business Directory, and reconsider one's thesis accordingly''

The aim of these revisionist essays was not so much to assert the primacy of "bourgeois ideology," as in the Althusserian model, as to diminish the significance of immigrant and working-class audiences, and the possibility of class struggle, in the formation of early cinema. Rather than analyses of hourgeois ideology, they are representatives of it. Merritt's and Allen's arguments were absorbed without much debate into then prevailing cinema studies discourses because they buttressed the dominant theoretical viewpoint, however much the ideological foundations of the respective projects differed.

In the early 1980s, as feminist discourses became more prevalent in the cinema field, two essays by women scholars reopened the question of early motion picture audiences, not specifically from the viewpoint of gender, but clearly with female spectators in mind. One was Judith Mayne's 1982 article "Immigrants and Spectators," the other Miriam Hansen's 1983 article "Early

. Cinema: Whose Public Sphere?"'1 The importance of Mayne's work lay

Its restoring to the cinema studies discourse a notion of the possibility

26 Oh! Althusser!

o{ working-class agency; Hansen raised similar issues in a more elaborated theoretical and comparative framework.

So brief as to be more of a suggestion than a developed account (a common problem in cinema studies scholarship), Mayne's article nevertheless introduced several significant perspectives. She begins by calling into question a particular strand of earlier historiography that, in her view, mythologized early movie theaters as places where immigrants were offered assistance in becoming Americanized, and workers found escape from daily labors42 She inquires how this putatively benign Americanization was actually constituted as a social process. Drawing on the radical social and economic theories of Eli Zaretsky, Paul Baran, and Paul Sweezy, she posits the emergence of a consumerist culture in which elements of the traditional private sphere and public sphere shifted location, were drawn out of, or intruded on, one another.43

For immigrants, in Mayne's account, the experience of moviegoing became a focal point for this transformation of spheres, a site of mediation between them. Movie theaters provided a sense of community, as well as the spectacle on the screen of a consumerist private sphere. "While cinema became an agent of the new culture of consumerism," Mayne writes, "the response of immigrants to the movies suggest' that cinema kept alive fantasies of resistance to that culture. . . . The fantasy component of the movies gave a unique imaginary shape to private and public space .... Fantasy may imply 'escape,' but it is also a form of resistance, an imaginary refusal of real conditions of existence."44

Was Mayne aware how closely this last phrase echoed Althusser's definition of ideology (in Ben Brewster's English translation) as "the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence"? 45 A longer essay might have examined more thoroughly this perhaps fortuitous rhetorical link between fantasy and ideology and considered the implications of the disparity-dearly a fundamental question-between the scholar's notion of refusal and the philosopher's of interpellation. Unfortunately, under the circumstances, Mayne derives her concept of resistance from an analogy with the rise of the eighteenth-century middle-class novel, a somewhat tenuous basis for her argument. Her viewpoint is not so much historical (or quite sufficiently theoretical) as it is heuristic, a challenge to a model of the immigrant and working-class spectator as a passive receptor. It suggests at least the possibility of reconceptualizing that spectator as someone capable, in both imagination and collective activity, of striving to protect or construct an autonomous cultural space.

Hansen's essay "Early Silent Cinema" deals with American cinema institutions and discourses-including all the texts discussed so far here-principally to provide a comparative counterexample for her primary subject, early silent cinema in Germany. Her concept of "public sphere" was drawn spe-

27

cifically from recent theoretical debates in West Germany about the notion of "proletarian public sphere" propounded in the writings of Oscar Negt/ Alexander Kluge'' This formulation, in Hansen's paraphrase, has a highly abstract quality; however, Negt/Kluge argue, she contends, that the theoretical category of "proletarian public sphere" can be developed even in the absence of positive evidence of its existence in working-class life. Its possibility could be derived from its "negative determination" from "hegemonic efforts to suppress, repress, destroy, isolate, split, or assimilate any formation of a potential proletarian public sphere and to appropriate its material substance, experience, in the interest of private profit-maximation."47

From this perspective, Hansen gives a somewhat ambiguous assessment of the possibility that American early silent cinema may have constituted to

some degree a "proletarian public sphere." Early cinema would qualify as such an instance, she writes, "if only for the comprehensive efforts ... to rid the institution of its class-specific stigma." Still, "the cinema's transition from an anarchic cottage industry to a monopolistic branch of American Business" was not a totally unified process; "the unequal development of productive relations, spectatorship and individual authorship left traces of resistance in the films themselves." (Although no specific evidence is adduced, it is likely she is referring to remnants of narrative style and images of proletarian life that survived from an earlier period when cinema was putatively more classspecific.)"

"In a more radical sense," she goes on, "as a medium for a fundamentally different organization of public experience, the cinema's potential for resistance hinges on the formal organization of spectatorship," in the interaction between films and the spectator's mental life.'' Hansen's analysis is closely linked with Mayne's, but with a more pessimistic outlook. "I hope to have elucidated the precarious status of the notion of early cinema as a proletarian public sphere,'' she concludes, with the added caution that, "as a theoretical construct, this notion is useful only insofar as it acknowledges the contradictory dynamics of its historical reference point." 5o

D All right, then, we are two discourses. The gap or difference earlier alluded to between the two disciplines, cinema studies and academic history, may appear after this brief survey to be a chasm. On one hand, works by revisionist film historians appear to be fueled by an underlying ideological purpose that leads them to significant absences and distortions in their use of evidence; on the other, theoretical approaches to the subject that are more sophisticated and challenging ideologically also may appear, from the perspective of academic history, arcane and abstract in terminology and woefully lacking in documentation. It may seem clear, from this one example, that the doing of film history within cinema studies has much to learn from the procedures and standards of evidence that prevail in academic history. It remains

28 Obi Althusser!

to be asked whether, and what, academic historians may need to learn from cinema studies practitioners. American early silent cinema and its audiences are perhaps the single subject to which both film historians and radical social historians have given substantial attention. To turn from the former to the latter is to perceive at once fundamental differences of approach.

Film historians have tended to emphasize institutions and processes, while radical social historians, not necessarily neglecting either of those subjects, have nevertheless placed their emphasis on the lived experiences of people. Those radical social historians who have so far written about early cinema have in general not made it their central focus of inquiry, but have considered it as part of immigrant and working-class lives, as one of many sites of leisure and communal activitiesthe dance halls, saloons, amusement parks, and other private and commercial entertainments that have been the focus of the past decade's resurgence of historical study on working-class life and popular culture.

Within this perspective, they draw on a broad range of social history sources not often utilized by film historians, including first-person accounts both contemporary and retrospective, survey research by social science and social work professionals, and popular periodical literature. "Secondary material fairly contemporary to the period under investigation is often more useful in analyzing historical trends than contemporary film scholarship that asks different questions," Elizabeth Ewen asserts in her 1980 article "City Lights: Immigrant Women and the Rise of the Movies." 51 While Ewen does not specify what she means by "different questions," one may assume her remark is an implicit rejoinder to film history revisionist texts and cinema theory that seemed more determined to claim bourgeois hegemony over movies than to examine the evidence of working-class experience in relation to them. "Failure to appreciate the viewpoint of the past," she adds, "produces a one-dimensional present-mindedness" (S51).

Ewen's article was the first significant writing by a historian on early American cinema to follow Jowett's and the author's books. As in Mayne's and Hansen's slightly later articles in the cinema field, Ewen's feminist perspective began to shift attention to women's experience at the movies and to questions of female spectatorship. Because her focus is on the relations between immigrant mothers and their daughters, however, her emphasis is on the generational composition of movie audiences rather than, directly, issues of class. Whereas "the outside world of American culture was viewed with hostility by most immigrant mothers," she writes, the movies "became the one American institution that had the possibility of uniting generations and was cross-generational in appeal" (SSO). Ewen does point out that the moviegoing experience was "an emanation of community," but, as the previous quotation suggests, her concern was more with how the movies "became for immigrants a powerful experience of the American culture which was often denied

29

to them" (S52, S51). While she could hardly be accused of an uncritical or benign account of Americanization for which Mayne faulted earlier historians, the emergence of a new consumerist mass culture is the process she seeks to chronicle. Therefore her accourit quickly leaves the early period and moves into the 1910s and 1920s.

Ultimately Ewen views the experience of immigrants at the movies as a multiple mediation "between an historic uprooting and an unknown and threatening urban society" and "between traditional culture and the emergent terms of modern life" (this latter aspect of mediation was taken up several years later in Mayne's article). Citing Walter Benjamin, Ewen sees film as a part of mass culture, participating in "the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage." 52 From a feminist perspective, she concludes her essay ambivalently: "The form and content of domination changed, but new authorities replaced the old" (S65). As part of this process, she suggests, cinema provided elements of pleasure and new knowledge.

Roy Rosenzweig's 1983 book Eight Hours for What We Will was the first historical work to focus on (though from a different perspective, and in different terms) the question raised by Hansen that same year about the possibility of a "proletarian public sphere" in the context of early cinema." Conceived in the framework of both American and British scholarship on nineteenthcentury working-class culture, Rosenzweig's monograph was one of the most thorough studies of workers' time and space for leisure, "a sphere of life free from the constraints imposed by their employers" (52). Focusing on Worcester, Massachusetts, as a case study, Rosenzweig found that public sphere in saloons, recreational spaces, and holiday activities, and in the workers' struggle to retain control over leisure time and space against middle-class efforts to "reform" and reshape them.

The movies occupy only one chapter out of eight in Eight Hours. They come at the chronological conclusion of Rosenzweig's narrative, in a context that permits the historiographic problematic to be posed in an entirely new way: What happened to the pre-existing proletarian public sphere when its participants significantly shifted their leisure activity into the temporal and spatial setting of the motion picture theater? Rosenzweig's answer to this question may apply only to Worcester, but it provides a model in research and interpretation against which competing theories and explanations may be tested.

In Worcester the beginnings of motion picture exhibition seemed to follow a pattern conforming to the Merritt-Allen revisionist thesis: movies mixed with live entertainment in the central downtown vaudeville theaters then the conversion of several such theaters to full-time movie programmin (though whether their vaudeville or movie audiences were "middle class" in the Merritt-Allen sense of the term is not clear). But the next development diverges from the revi,ionistmodel: "new, cheap movie houses" open, and "a

28 Oh! Althusser!

to be asked whether, and what, academic historians may need to learn from cinema studies practitioners. American early silent cinema and its audiences are perhaps the single subject to which both film historians and radical social historians have given substantial attention. To turn from the former to the latter is to perceive at once fundamental differences of approach.

Film historians have tended to emphasize institutions and processes, while radical social historians, not necessarily neglecting either of those subjects, have nevertheless placed their emphasis on the lived experiences of people. Those radical social historians who have so far written about early cinema have in general not made it their central focus of inquiry, but have considered it as part of immigrant and working-class lives, as one of many sites of leisure and communal activitiesthe dance halls, saloons, amusement parks, and other private and commercial entertainments that have been the focus of the past decade's resurgence of historical study on working-class life and popular culture.

Within this perspective, they draw on a broad range of social history sources not often utilized by film historians, including first-person accounts both contemporary and retrospective, survey research by social science and social work professionals, and popular periodical literature. "Secondary material fairly contemporary to the period under investigation is often more useful in analyzing historical trends than contemporary film scholarship that asks different questions," Elizabeth Ewen asserts in her 1980 article "City Lights: Immigrant Women and the Rise of the Movies."51 While Ewen does not specify what she means by "different questions,'' one may assume her remark is an implicit rejoinder to film history revisionist texts and cinema theory that seemed more determined to claim bourgeois hegemony over movies than to examine the evidence of working-class experience in relation to them. "Failure to appreciate the viewpoint of the past,'' she adds, "produces a one-dimensional present-mindedness" (551).

Ewen's article was the first significant writing by a historian on early American cinema to follow Jowett's and the author's books. As in Mayne's and Hansen's slightly later articles in the cinema field, Ewen's feminist perspective began to shift attention to women's experience at the movies and to questions of female spectatorship. Because her focus is on the relations between immigrant mothers and their daughters, however, her emphasis is on the generational composition of movie audiences rather than, directly, issues of class. Whereas "the outside world of American culture was viewed with hostility by most immigrant mothers,'' she writes, the movies "became the one American institution that had the possibility of uniting generations and was cross-generational in appeal" (550). Ewen does point out that the moviegoing experience was "an emanation of community," but, as the previous quotation suggests, her concern was more with how the movies "became for immigrants a powerful experience of the American culture which was often denied

29

to them" (552, 551). While she could hardly be accused of an uncritical or benign account of Americanization for which Mayne faulted earlier historians, the emergence of a new consumerist mass culture is the process she seeks to chronicle. Therefore her accourit quickly leaves the early period and moves into the 1910s and 1920s.

Ultimately Ewen views the experience of immigrants at the movies as a multiple mediation "between an historic uprooting and an unknown and threatening urban society" and "between traditional culture and the emergent terms of modern life" (this latter aspect of mediation was taken up several years later in Mayne's article). Citing Walter Benjamin, Ewen sees film as a part of mass culture, participating in "the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage."52 From a feminist perspective, she concludes her essay ambivalently: "The form and content of domination changed, but new authorities replaced the old" (565). As part of thL process, she suggests, cinema provided elements of pleasure and new knowledge.

Roy Rosenzweig's 1983 book Eight Hours for What We Will was the first historical work to focus on (though from a different perspective, and in different terms) the question raised by Hansen that same year about the possibility of a "proletarian public sphere" in the context of early cinema." Conceived in the framework of both American and British scholarship on nineteenthcentury working-class culture, Rosenzweig's monograph was one of the most thorough studies of workers' time and space for leisure, "a sphere of life free from the constraints imposed by their employers" (52). Focusing on Worcester, Massachusetts, as a case study, Rosenzweig found that public sphere in saloons, recreational spaces, and holiday activities, and in the workers' struggle to retain control over leisure time and space against middle-class efforts to "reform" and reshape them.

The movies occupy only one chapter out of eight in Eight Hours. They come at the chronological conclusion of Rosenzweig's narrative, in a context that permits the historiographic problematic to be posed in an entirely new way: What happened to the pre-existing proletarian public sphere when its participants significantly shifted their leisure activity into the temporal and spatial setting of the motion picture theater? Rosenzweig's answer to this question may apply only to Worcester, but it provides a model in research and interpretation against which competing theories and explanations may be tested.

In Worcester the beginnings of motion picture exhibition seemed to follow a pattern conforming to the Merritt-Allen revisionist thesis: movies mixed with live entertainment in the central downtown vaudeville theaters then the conversion of several such theaters to full-time movie programmin (though whether their vaudeville or movie audiences were "middle class" in the Merritt-Allen sense of the term is not clear). But the next development diverges from the revisionist model: "new, cheap movie houses" open, and "a

30 Obi Althusser!

working-class movie audience" develops (193). "A> late as 1914," according to Eight Hours-a good half decade after the bourgeoise gained control of the cinema in the revisionist account-"the Worcester working class still seems to have dominated the city's movie houses" (208).

In Rosenzweig's view, the movie theater managed to accommodate the proletarian public sphere that had taken shape in the saloon, the church, and the fraternal lodge. It became "a central working-class institution that involved workers on a sustained and regular basis" (195). Rather than speculating on the relation between screen representation and spectator response, Rosenzweig emphasizes the viewing environment: "Whatever the degree of control of the middle and upper classes over movie content, the working class was likely to determine the nature of behavior and interaction within the movie theater . . . . Together, the immigrant working-class movie manager and the immigrant working-class audience developed a style of moviegoing that accorded with, and drew upon, earlier modes of public working-class recreation" (199). These included low prices and nonstratified seating, "lack of a structured time schedule,'' and "an air of informality and relaxed socializing" (201).

In sum, in Rosenzweig's account, "not only did movie theater conduct grow out of traditions of public working-class behavior based on sociability, conviviality, communality, and informality, but movie theater conditions also accorded with the realities of working-class life" (203). It was the autonomy of the movie theater as a working-class institution-a proletarian public sphere-that was the target of middle-class reform concern. Ultimately, this autonomy was lost as "a national market insulated from local pressures . . . intruded itself into the everyday lives of working people,'' and moviegoing became an interclass phenomenon (219). But, he argues, "in many ways the development of moviegoing habits was a sharper break in middle-class culture than it had been in working-class culture" (212).

Rosenzweig stresses in his conclusion that working-class culture in Worcester was "alternative" rather than "oppositional" (223). Did the end of the nineteenth-century proletarian public sphere that had survived into the early movie theaters therefore mean that the working-class audience was homogenized into bourgeois hegemony, the new form of domination of which Ewen wrote? Rosenzweig argues no. The new desires, expectations, and sense of entitlement fostered at the movies, he writes, could, when blocked by economic injustice or denial, lead to greater demand for fulfillment. The road from the saloon through the cinema might, he suggests, have ended up at the union hall, in a new oppositional mode.

Rosenzweig's utopianism has a long tradition in leftist historiography, but it is an afterthought, not an argument. His central thesis is sufficient here. However much the Worcester model may be modified by similar case studies of other cities, Eight Hours challenges the revisionist version of early motion

31

picture exhibition and audience development. If only by his reminder that the upper class belongs in any class analysis of control over motion pictures, Rosenzweig complicates the standard view of middle-class cultural power prevailing in cinema studies.s4

D These several works of radical social history clearly have the potential to make indispensable contributions to film history-and by their influence already have begun to do so, particularly by restoring working-class experience and class conflict to the discourse on early cinema, from which dominant theories and revisionist histories had elided them. Yet if a dialogue now might begin between social historians and film historians, it is bound to have its own dialectic. Cinema studies practitioners may now be learning that there cannot be satisfactory film history without adequate social history, but one may also ask if there can be satisfactory social history without an adequate history of films.

"The struggle over the movies," the author wrote in Movie-Made America "was an aspect of the struggle between the classes" (123). In "Early Sileo; Cinema,'' in direct reference to Elizabeth Ewen's social history perspective, Miriam Hansen writes, "It was not merely the space [of viewing] that constituted a new public sphere, a public sphere of a new type; it was the interaction between the films on the screen and the 'film in the head of the spectator.' "55 From different viewpoint,, these remarks point to difficulties inherent in social histo.ries' limiting their consideration of cinema to the social interaction of persons within a theater space. Cinema in this sense is different from the saloon and the dance hall and other cultural sites valorized in radical social history of popular culture. Whatever cinema was as this type of social experience, it was also a mass communications medium with esthetic, ideological, and psychological dimensions. Its social contestation ultimately arose in relation to film spectatorship as a mental experience.

For more than a decade the influence within cinema studies of Althusserian Marxism and bourgeois film history revisionism has positioned that nexus between "films on the screen and the 'film in the head of the spectator' " as a one-way process of hegemonic domination. Radical social historians and radical film historians have challenged the ideological underpinnings as well as the historiographic wealmesses of film history revisionism and, from the author's perspective, have reaffirmed and considerably extended the argument about class and cultural struggle over cinema in Movie-Made America.

The next task is to renew the debate-in the United States, perhaps to engage it substantively for the first time-over Althusserian concepts not only concerning ideology as representation but also concerning its purported

' capacity to interpellate subjects. One way to begin is through a reconsideration of the value for this project of the Benjaminian notion of twentieth-

32 Oh! Althusser!

century mass media liquidating "the traditional value of the cultural heritage." In this perspective, the history of cinema is not a sidelight to contemporary historiography, it assumes a central place within it. Film hL>tory is both a necessary and an appropriate site for a rilalogue within Marxian historiography over cultural representation and reception.

NOTES O

Acknowledgments: The author would like to thank Adrienne Harris, Barbara Melosh, Charles Musser, and Daniel Walkowitz for their helpful critidsms of earlier drafts of this essay.

1. Jonathan M. Wiener, "Marxist Theory and American Historians" (Paper presented at a session entitled "Marxism as an Organizing Theme in Recent American Historiography," 7 April 1983, Cincinnati, Ohio).

2. This talk was later expanded into the essay "The Poverty of Theory or An Orrery of Errors," in E. P. Thompson, Tbe Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (New York Monthly Review Press, 1978), 1-210.

3. Ibid., 46. 4. Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Toward an In

vestigation)," in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York Monthly Review Press, 1971), 12786. Jane Gaines gives a brief explanation for the importance of Althusserian Marxism to the development of cinema studies discourse in Great Britain in "White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory," Cultural Criti

34 Oh! Althusser!

27. Barbara Klinger, " 'Cinema/Ideology/Criticism' Revisited: The Progressive Text," Screen 25, no. 1 Oan.-Feb. 1984} 41-42, commenting on jean-Luc Comolli and Jean Narboni, "Cinema/Ideology/Criticism, Part I," Screen 12, no. 1 (Spring 1971 ), partial translation by Susan Bennett of an editorial from Cahiers du Cz'nema 216 (Oct 1969). For film theorists' approach toward historiography, see Iris 2, no. 2 (1984), with nearly a dozen articles on theory of cinema history.

28. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema. Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York Columbia

University Press, 1985). See also Dana Polan, Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative, and the American Cinema, 1940-1950 (New York Columbia University Press, 1986).

29. See Marcia Landy, Fascism in Film: The Italian Commercial Cinema, 1931-1943 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), and james Hay, Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy: Tbe Passing of the Rex (Bloomington: Indiana University'

Press, 1987). 30. A sampling of historical studies by younger scholars at home both in history

and theory includes Jonathan Buchsbaum, Ct'nema Engage: Ftlm in the Popular Front

(Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1988); Ella Shohat, Israeli Cinema, East/West and the Politics of Representation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989); Antonia Lant, Blackout: Women and British Cinema in World War Two (Princeton: Princeton University Press, forthcoming); and Tom Gunning, D. W Griffith and the Origins of American

Narrative Film (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, forthcoming). 31. Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies

(New York Random House, 1975); Garth Jowett, Film' The Democratic Art (Boston, Little, Brown, 1976).

32. Sklar, Movie-Made America, 3. Additional citations will appear in the text. 33. Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," 173. 34. Ibid., 166. The postscript is on 183-86. 35. See Jean-Louis Baudry, ''Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic

Apparatus," trans. Alan Williams, Film Quarterly 28, no. 2 (Winter 1974-75} 39-47; original French publication, 1970;jean-Louis Comolli, ''Technique and Ideology: Cam

era, Perspective, Depth of Field," trans. Diana Matias, Film Reader 2 (1977); original French publication, 1971.

36. Russell Merritt, "Nickelodeon Theaters, 1905-1914: Building an Audience for the Movies," in Tino Balio, ed., Tbe American Film Industry (Madison: University of

Wisconsin Press, 1976), 59-82; Robert C. Allen, "Motion PictUre Exhibition in Manhattan, Beyond the Nickelodeon," Ctnema journal 18, no. 2 (Spring 1979} 2-15. See also Robert Clyde Allen, "Vaudeville and Film 1895-1915, A Study in Media Interaction," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Iowa, 1977.

37. Robert A Woods and Albert J. Kennedy, The Zone of Emergence, abridged and edited with a preface by Sam B. Warner,Jr. (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University

Press, 1962). The original manuscript was prepared in the years 1907-14. 38. Allen, "Motion Picture Exhibition," 14. 39. Press accounts in New York Times, December 13, 21, 24, 25, 26, 28, 1908, give

details; New York's foreign language press is an unexplored resource for further study

of these important events. 40. Charles Musser has also challenged Allen's assertion that Italian working

class immigrants were unlikely to be moviegoers, arguing that they attended those

35

very movi'

theters hat Allen cotens were supported by middle-cla''iS spectators; see All, Motion Ptcture Exhibitton, 9, and Musser, Before the Nickelodeon 425. For more extended critique of Allen's historiography see Musser, ''.Another Lok at the Chaser Theory' "; Allen, "Looking at 'Another Look at the 'Chaser Theory' " nd "M ' u l All "

a

24\J;;er s .. ep y to en, Studies in Visual Communication 10, no. 4 (Fall 1984}

. . 41. Judith yne, "Immigrants and Spectators," Wide Angle s, no. 2 (1982} 32-40; Mtrtam Hansen, Early Silent Cinema: Whose Public Sphere?" New German Critique 29 (Wintr 1983): 147-84; an essay by Noel Burch, "Porter,.or Ambivalence," Screen 19, no. 4 (tter??78-79): 91-105, was also influential in reviving interest in the working class wtthm cmema studies discourse.

. 42. Works cited include Russel Nye, The Unembarrassed Muse. The Popular Arts t Amen .(New .York: The Dial Press, 1970); Lewis jacobs, The Rise of the American Ftlm, A Cnucal Htstory (New York Harcourt, Brace, 1939); and Jowett, Film.

43. Eli Zaretsky, Capiialism, 7be Family, and Personal Life (New York Harper & Row, 1976); Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, An Essay on the American Economic and Scial Order (New York Monthly Review Press, 1966).

44. Mayne, Immigrants and Spectators," 38, 39. 45. Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," 162.

. 46. Oscar Negt/Alexander Kluge, 0./Jentlichkeit und Erjahrung. zur Organisations-analyse von burgerlicher und proletarischer O.ffentlichkeit (Frankfutt Suhrkarnp, 1972);

_se als? Eberhard Knodler-Bunte, "The Proletarian Public Sphere and Political

Orgamzatton, New German Critique, no. 4 (Winter 1975): 51-75. 47. Hansen, "Early Silent Cinema," 157. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid., 158. so. lbid., 159. 51. Elizabeth Ewen, "City Lights: Immigrant Women and the Rise of the Mo

"

Si T. l rwr. tes,

gns.:Journa 0 women tn Culture and Society 5, no. 3 Supplement (1980} SS1 n.1S. Addtttonal citations will appear in the text.

52. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction " Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), 2

53. Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1. Additi?nal ctattons will appear in the text. Another historical study touching on early cema ts Lary May, Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion 7,tctur Indus? (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). See also the chapter

Amencan Matton Pictures and the New Popular Culture" in Daniel]. Czitrom Media and he American Mind: Pram Morse to McLuhan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carohna Press, 1982} 30-59.

54. Kathy Peiss, Ch Amusen Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of the-Century_ N York (Phtladelphta: Temple University Press, 1986), is an important radical soct.al htstory study concerning places of heterosocial interaction such as the dance hall and amusement park Her treatment of the cinema is broad and thorough but breaks little new research ground.

55. Hansen, "Early Silent Cinema," 158-59. Words cited within the quotation are from Alexander Kluge.