The Cinematic Apparatus: Technology as Historical and Cultural Form

Abstract

In the first moments of the history of cinema, it is the technology which provides the immediate interest: what is promoted and sold is the experience of the machine, the apparatus. The Grand Café programme is headed with the announcement of ‘Le Cinématogra-phe’ and continues with its description: ‘this apparatus, invented by MM. Auguste and Louis Lumière, permits the recording, by series of photographs, of all the movements which have succeeded one another over a given period of time in front of the camera and the subsequent reproduction of these movements by the projection of their images, life size, on a screen before an entire audience’; only after that description is there mention of the titles of the films to be shown, the ‘sujets actuels’, relegated to the bottom of the programme sheet.¹ This machine interest and its exploitation can be traced in a variety of effects and repercussions, from, say, Edison’s lack of concern in the development of projecting apparatus (a business strategy based literally on selling the machine, projectors for audience viewing representing less of a market than kinetoscopes for individual, parlour viewing) to the relatively long-lived assumption that the industry was effectively one of cinema rather than films, the latter being elements of the experience of the machine, a uniform product to be sold by the foot and the reel (an assumption which, paradoxically, unwittingly, Edison had in fact seen beyond, fearing also that projection with its large group diffusion would lead to audience saturation and falling attendances for the interchangeable foot/reel productions).