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The first section characterizes the structure of feeling of US presidential elections during the long 1890s, making comparisons between that decade and the contemporary moment, noting similarities between the campaigns of William McKinley and Barack Obama. It briefly considers new media moments such as radio and television as well as recurrent structures of politicking in the twentieth century. The second section considers the shift from Film Studies to Film and Media Studies and the dialogic relations between the study of early cinema and the emerging field of media archaeology. Finally considers ways in which the illustrated lecture can be analyzed within the framework of Documentary Studies.

The introductory chapter outlines a theory of early cinema in Brazil and its relationship to the country’s invention of modernity. Theories and examinations of early film’s relationship to modernity have by and large focused on the medium’s links to changes and transformations wrought by the advent of industrialization. Noting that such transformations were not present in Brazil, the introduction outlines how early film in Brazil—that is, its arrival and dissemination—were linked instead to a political project impelled by the first Republican regime, one that sought to transform the country into modern nation-state of order and progress. The chapter maps ways in which this imbrication between film and this project laid the foundations for the birth Brazilian cinema and modernity in Brazil. In doing so, it provides an alternative modernity of early cinema.

Turning to gestural performance in dancefilm, this chapter examines the exchange between silent film performers and the new discipline of modern dance in the first decades of the twentieth century, connecting this to the choreographic project of Pina Bausch. In the early years of cinema in Hollywood, many actors were originally dancers or were sent to study with the early modern dance duet Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn at the Denishawn School in Los Angeles. The focus on physical performance in the silent film era brought dance and acting into an intimate relationship and produced a gestural mediality—a term drawn from Giorgio Agamben's theory of gestural cinema—that can be traced through to contemporary dancefilm.

Dance writers have frequently acknowledged the revolution that the close‐up has enacted upon the profilmic in dancefilm and video, offering new perspectives on the dancing body. The proximity to the performing body that transformed the dramatic language of early cinema quite literally “witnessed” a similar transformation of the dancing body; a more intimate movement vocabulary found its medium and shifted from subtext in a live performance to text in a particular type of dancefilm. This mode of screen performance thereby also created a new type of film bearing little relation to action-based dancefilms such as musicals and ballet recordings, which tend to document virtuosic feats in long‐shot. The work of Hungarian film theorist Béla Balázs and the film theory of Gilles Deleuze provides a framework for considering the corporeal micro‐choreographies found in such films, offering an alternative model of the cinematic close‐up traditionally theorized in relation to the face. My concept of micro‐choreographies describes both the cinematic movement order produced in dancefilms where bodily sites are shot in close‐up, as well as dancefilm effects that mimic this type of cine‐choreography.

The book’s introduction provides a historical overview of the intersections of cinema and surveillance and of the theoretical treatment of surveillance in film. Through analysis of the shared technological histories of surveillance and film, as well as exemplary instances of early cinema, it shows the close relationship between the development of narrative technique in film and surveillance practice, arguing that both are deeply implicated in forming racial visibility, and thus that surveillance and cinema are racial projects. This introduction also suggests that such an analysis of surveillance in cinema has been constrained in part by overreliance on the conceptual framework of “voyeurism” and argues that voyeurism must itself be understood as existing within a historical and political context. The introduction thus provides a short analysis of the canonical surveillance film The Conversation to demonstrate how cinematic narrative and surveillance practice function together in the formation of both personal and political subjectivity. The remainder of the introduction provides outlines of the chapters of the book, which address more contemporary films and genres and introduce new theoretical frames through which to understand surveillance through cinema, and vice versa.

This chapter, written by Ian Christie, confronts the challenge of how to do media history, considering how ‘intermediate’ media live on, or are revived, in other media. This is not a model of media history according to the logic of the survival of the fittest, a Darwinian take, nor the teleological model associated with the linear medium of print but, arguably, a cinematic model, and an early cinematic one at that. Media history here is not understood according to the language of later cinema, through the cut and the edit, nor the continuity principle, rather it works by dissolves and overlaps, in precisely the manner that many of the earliest films did. As Christie illustrates, the technologies of the kinetoscope, praxinoscope, and filoscope are not ‘stepping stones “towards” cinema proper’, but (co)exist in an ‘ongoing ensemble, with frequent revivals and repurposings’.

This chapter situates the book as a counter-history of the emergence of lesbian sexuality in early cinema. The study is described as a post-Foucauldian history of sexuality that aims to sustain the radical implications of Foucault’s foundational work in History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge, Volume 1. The chapter articulates the book’s approach in terms of queer historiography. One of its key strategies is the endeavor to suspend present-day sexual knowledges in the encounter with early films and other extrafilmic archival materials. To presume, at least before critical work commences, the sexual opacity of early cinema is to start from the position that the past is different from the present, particularly in terms of sexual subjectivity, but not to accede to a homophobic denial of the historical existence of same-sex desire or queer ways of living and being. The chapter explores the consequences of this approach for critical modes of identification, and queer articulations of historical time, in the context of recent debates concerning queer temporality.

This chapter explores how silent cinema in Japan provided an important context for the development of the historiography of kabuki in the early twentieth century and the role played by the playwright and theater historian Tsubouchi Shōyō in developing a history of Japanese drama that foregrounds gesture over voice. Beginning in the 1910s, Shōyō developed a conception of theatrical ukiyo-e prints as proto-cinematic and used this idea to argue for these prints as an archival record of theatrical gesture. At the same time, this conception of woodblock prints as a cinema-like archive deemphasized the role of the actor’s voice for which there was no equivalent record. Only in recent years have historians begun to explore the early history of sound recording of kabuki from the first decades of the twentieth century to argue for the role that these SP records might play in not only supplementing but fundamentally complicating a historiography of kabuki theater from which the actor’s voice has long been absent.

This coda draws attention not only to the opacity of sexuality but its complex ordering across multiple, dynamic registers. It instigates a close reading of a digital fragment from the archive of early cinema in order to denaturalize processes of sexual representation and their interpretation, and to consider their imbrications in sexuality itself. It argues that the simultaneous sexual transparency and opacity of such digital fragments in the present foregrounds the ongoing value of an interdisciplinary film history while also sharpening the need to make explicit our perspectives, disciplinary frameworks, and approaches to film historiography.

This chapter covers film distribution, exhibition, and reception in Havana during the era of silent cinema and of Cuba’s first republic, which roughly overlapped. At the turn-of-the-century, moving pictures arrived in Havana just as Cubans achieved independence from Spain and founded their own nation. But, by forcing the Platt Amendment into Cuba’s constitution, the United States assured that Cuba was only “semi-sovereign” in relation to US power, exerted in the form of military occupations, political tinkering, trade policies, investors, and a flood of US-made goods. Among those goods were US-made films, which began to monopolize Havana’s multiplying moving picture halls especially during World War I, which saw the rise of Hollywood’s studio system and its global dominance. The big Hollywood studios had each opened a distribution office in Havana by the early 1920s, and a number operated their own “picture palaces,” to the dismay of local distributors and exhibitors. This chapter finds that Havana’s early cinemas—and the business and print cultures emerging around them—were sites where Cubans continued to forge their national identity through complex negotiations with US power. They were not just sites for the conveyance of US influence but also for the continued promotion of revolutionary Cuban nationalism.

This chapter explores one line of development in DV independent production, which concerns short digital animations that are made by and/or circulated for online (or on-mobile) movie-makers/viewers. Compared to institutionalized mass-consumed animation, these independently produced digital animations cinema are unregulated, un-marketed and unbranded (i.e., freely gifted and shared), and occupy an amateur space outside, although not fully separated from, the growing animation industry in China. By conceptualizing such animations as animateur cinema, the author examines its distinctive contribution to “alternative” cultural spaces, broadly defined by non-institutional and unofficial locations. Besides being an important and yet still quite undervalued development of DV culture in the contemporary Chinese context, Chinese animateur cinema’s modalities of production and distribution also establish important lines of connection with early cinematic practices and therefore contribute a new perspective to the broader re-thinking of cinema in the digital age.

Chapter 1 looks at ‘authentic attractions’ and at phenomena that might be referred to as ‘documentary before documentary’. Though the documentary film had not yet formally come into being, one might discern a documentary ‘impulse’ in the combination of education, edification, sensation, and entertaining display encountered in sites such as the Midway Plaisance at the Chicago Exposition of 1893. This event brought together efforts to invoke a distinct American national identity through an amalgam of technologies, commercial ventures, cultural expectations, and ideological notions that fed into early cinema in the US, and into a popular taste for nonfiction actualities. The chapter moves on to examine films of the Edison Company, suggesting that rather than see these early films as ‘documents’ as opposed to fully fledged ‘documentaries’ we might consider how they lie at the heart of the documentary tradition, in no small part due to their interactions with a national imaginary.