Sensationalism and the Early History of Film: From Magic Lantern to the Silent Film Serial Drama of Louis Feuillade

Abstract

When sensation novels became popular during the 1860s the literary industry was quick to recognize a lucrative line of business, so much so that twenty years later Vizetelly could promote a whole series of French “detective” novels by marketing them as “French sensation novels.” Publishers of books and periodicals were able to swarm the market with countless, readily available titles that supplied a strong demand for riveting stories full of shocking revelations. The plot of sensation novels hinged on a limited set of narrative functions and plot developments that the reader could easily grow accustomed to: despite the variations of each specific title and the interpolations deriving from a mix of genres such as the sensational-bildungsroman of Bound to John Company, most narratives repeated a successful formula. I am deriving the term narrative functions from Vladimir Propp’s formalist analysis of oral history and Russian folklore. With this formalized view I do not mean to diminish the contribution that each individual author gave to the genre with their choice of subject and specific stylistic features. I only want to note that sensation novels, like many forms of popular literature, tended toward a standardization of narrative and character development. Riveting scenes and heart-wrenching conflicts migrated from one novel to the other and constituted a sort of koinè, a common language, of late Victorian sensationalism in popular literature.