Porter, or Ambivalence*

Noel Burch

The work of Edwin S Porter - in so far as it is known to me, at

least1 is a locus of contradictions which informed the development of the cinema in its beginnings. Among professional historians, circumscribed as they are, no matter what their orientation
in other respects, by the linear view which has hitherto proved such
a serious hindrance to any attempt to evolve a materialist theory
of the history of the cinema, Porter's films have aroused entirely
contradictory attitudes. Three may be distinguished, each corresponding to one of the main ideological positions which turn by
turn have hindered any systematic examination of this period.
First there is the prevailing thesis concerning these beginnings,
according to which a language gradually emerged out of a sort
of primordial chaos generally described as 'theatrical': the language,
the cinema's natural language, innate in the camera from the outset, but only brought into the light of day as the result of determined efforts by certain 'pioneers of genius'. From which it follows
that the prescribed approach for anyone wishing to study this
period is the enumeration of 'firsts': 'the first close-up', 'the first
match cut', 'the first parallel montage', and so on ad nauseam.
And although the deliberate falsification of documents in support
of some film-maker or other's claims to priority is not entirely
* This article will be appearing in 1979 in Le Cinema Americain,
approche textuelle, Raymond Bellour ed, Flammarion, Paris.
1 Eight films out of the fifty-odd which have survived: The Life of an
American Cowboy, The Life of an American Fireman, Uncle Tom's
Cabin, The Great Train Robbery, Romance of the Rails (all 1903);
Rounding Up the Yeggmen (1904); Dream of a Welsh Rarebit Fiend
(1906); Rescued from an Eagle's Nest (1907). Romance of the Rails, one
of the earliest advertising films I have seen, is remarkable chiefly for a
long tracking shot behind a train; The Dream of a Welsh Rarebit Fiend
is a pleasant trick film in the Path6 manner; Rescued from an Eagle's
Nest is absolutely typical of the general advance of the American cinema
in 1907, but is otherwise unremarkable. I limit myself to a closer
analysis of the four major films of 1903.

92

proven, what is certain is that the proper thoroughness was not

displayed in the examination of certain documents, as I mention
below. It was under the criterion of this pursuit of 'firsts' that many
historians felt, like Lewis Jacobs,2 that they could establish Porter
as the. 'inventor of cinematic language'. No such assertion, of
course, in no matter what area, is admissible today.
Without departing from this linear and teleological view, other
historians who stress the 'popular charms' of the primitive cinema,
and who feel no obligation to argue precedence for Porter, fall
into the opposite extreme: they see in Porter only a common
plagiarist (I shall return to the ideological ramifications of this
interesting accusation), largely outstripped as an 'artist' by the
French film-makers and as a 'pioneer' by the English. This is the
attitude of Deslandes and Richard, but also, to a certain extent,
of their bete noire, Georges Sadoul.3
Lastly, another attitude seems to have been emerging over the
past few years, linked more or less to the notion that the primitive cinema was a sort of Paradise Lost, 'regained' today thanks
to the various avant-garde movements. As early as 1962 Professor
Gessner4 felt he could trace the seeds for VAnnie derniere a
Marienbad in the unusual montage of The Life of an American
Fireman, while other writers like to contrast the 'avant-gardism'
of Melies with the 'conformism' of Porter, Griffith et al.
To understand why the adherents of a linear history - and as
one sees, their ideological horizons can be very different seem
unable to redd Porter's films, a brief examination of the forces
working on the cinema at this period is necessary. Also relevant
would be an analysis, not of the spontaneous emergence of some
'natural' language, but of the establishment of a mode of representation, historically and culturally determined, and of the conditions which enabled it to continue exercising an almost absolute
hegemony over Western film production down to the present day.
Such an analysis lies outside the scope of the present article,
but my examination of some of Porter's films, which expose the
first stages of the process, will provide some clues towards its
explanation. First, however, a consideration of the contradictory
forces that were working on the emergent cinema even before 1895,
is necessary before I go on to describe how these forces were to
exercise contradictory influences on these films of Porter's.
As the investigations I am conducting stand at present, I dis1 The Rise of the American Film, first published New York, 1939, reprinted, New York, 1968.
3 Jacques Deslandes, Histoire comparie du cinema: vl De la cinematique au cinematographe, 1826-1896, Tournai 1966; v2, with Jacques
Richard, Du cinematographie au cinema, 1896-1906, Tournai, 1968.
Georges Sadoul, Histoire generate du cinema, 3rd ed, Paris, 1973
continuing.
4 Robert Gessner: 'Porter and the Creation of Cinematic Motion',
Journal of the Society of Cinematologists vTJ, 1962.

tinguish three forces or historical and cultural trends which mould- 93

ed the cinema during its first two decades.5 Chief among these,
obviously, was the aggregate of folk art kept alive by the urban
working classes in Europe and the United States at the turn of the
century. These comprise both modes of representation and narrative or gestural material deriving from melodrama, vaudeville,
pantomime (in England), conjuring, music hall and circus; from
caricatures, the 'penny plain, tuppence coloured' sheets, strip
cartoons; from magic lantern shows in the home,6 the street and
the theatre; from street entertainers, fairground acts,7 waxwork
shows. The corollary to these circumstances (both cause and
effect) was that in its early days the cinema addressed itself exclusively to the urban 'lower classes', and that its practitioners were
for the most part still 'of humble origin'. It is therefore not surprising that for at least ten years the more affluent turned up their
noses at the cinema, and that the middle classes contented themselves with sending their children (naturally) and the latter's
nurses or sometimes (it came to the same thing) their mothers
and grandmothers to these dubious places where all one saw was
pictures reflecting, 'in form and content", the infantilism of the
working classes.
The cinema, however, was developing within a society governed
by certain specific production relationships. It would have been
unthinkable that it might be 'immunised', that it might escape
the underlying pressures8 exercised by the specifically bourgeois
modes of representation - this being my second 'force' - from
literature, painting, and especially the theatre, which were then in
their heyday. Moreover, although a film might very occasionally
mirror the aspirations and struggles of the popular masses, the
substance of the great majority of films at this period reflects,
5 The present article has been produced in connection with a wider
study with Jorge Dana relating to the genealogy of the mode of
representation characteristic of the institution of cinema.
6 Aimed, it should be stressed, at the children of the bourgeoisie, like
all scientific toys such as the zoctrope or the praxinoscope which foreshadowed the projection of moving pictures. A fascinating study could
be made of the relationship between the popular presentational arts
(circus, puppets, etc) and an audience of middle class children not yet
broken in to the codes of the representational arts of their class.
7 One of the most important features of the early fairground cinema
in England and France was the lecturer, a barker who lured passers-by
into the booth, then delivered a commentary during the screening whose
'distanciating' effect became literally unbearable around 1910 with the
development of 'absorbing' techniques in the dominant narrativity. The
American lecturer, whose social implications were quite different,
derived from the tradition of the slide-show lecture.
8 Transmitted, in particular, through the medium of a specialized press
which, in America at least, developed. rapidly after 1905. Cf Skauffman
and Henstall (eds), American film criticism from the beginnings to
Citizen Kane", New York, 1972.

94

directly or indirectly, the viewpoint imposed by the ruling classes.

But this had been true of the English melodrama, for instance,
since its birth: only one or two "factory melodramas' at the beginning of the 19th century took up positions of class struggle (and,
as with the primitive cinema, this was usually a matter of opportunism on the part of lower middle class playwrights addressing
themselves to a working class audience). Nevertheless, the melodrama undoubtedly constituted a theatrical form quite distinct
from those of the bourgeois theatre. So for the first ten years of
the cinema's existence, linearity, haptic screen space and the individualisation of characters are features to be found only incidentally here and there. They still figure largely as elements dominated, in particular, by others of popular origin. But between 1908
and 1915 this relationship was to undergo a gradual reversal,
principally because of the economic development of the cinema
and the resulting need to attract an audience with more money and
leisure at its disposal.
A third force, which I shall call 'scientistic1, also presided over
this first period of development; and for a while its role, in conjunction with the modes of popular representation, was wholly
determinative. This 'scientism' certainly figured as an element of
dominant ideology, but it was also linked to genuinely scientific
practices; and it was in this respect that it was to influence the
early cinema in a way directly opposed to the impetus given by
those arts on which the bourgeois era had already left its mutable
mark. On a strictly technological level, the first moving pictures
came most directly out of experiments by Muybridge, Marey, and
other researchers whose goal was most certainly not the restitution
or representation of movement, but simply its analysis. The physiologist Marey considered himself satisfied when, by means of
the various ingenious instruments and apparatus he had constructed for the purpose, he had succeeded in breaking down human and
animal movement into successive photographic images. Yet only
a small further step remained, still from a strictly technological
point of view, for engineers like Auguste and Louis Lumiere, or
Edison and Dickson, to complete these experiments by synthesising the movement that had been thus decomposed.
Already adumbrated between these two first steps towards
the entertainment cinema, however by the Lumieres and by the
Edison team are the terms of the contradiction which was to
govern this whole first period. Edison, for whom the recording
and reproduction of moving images was merely - and this is significant - an extension of his earlier (and very profitable) invention of the phonograph, had set as the goal of his first experiments
in this new area the recording and mass distribution of opera (an
echo of the ideology of the Gesamtkunstwerk). And one of the
'dnema' devices which emerged from his laboratories, the kineto-

i
:

phonograph - whose lone spectator, in the sensory isolation of its 95

twin eye-pieces and headphones, received more or less synchronous
images and sounds was a striking prefiguration of the conditions
of cushioned darkness to be met with in the picture palaces of the
1930s. At the opposite extreme of the production line, it was
Edison's collaborators who also constructed a studio foreshadowing the first sound stages, and on it shot what was probably the
first real moving picture close-up: Fred Ott's Sneeze (1895). It seems
to me indicative of the profound nature of the forces which were
thus already at work on the emergent cinema that the stipulation
from the journalist who initiated this film was that the close-up
should show a pretty girl sneezing. It was purely for reasons of
expediency, it appears, that Dickson happened to use his assistant,
Fred Ott, thus frustrating his 'client' of the orgasmic image of his
desires. But Raff and Gammon, sub-contractors of the Edison/
Dickson processes, were soon to make the erotic vocation of the
close-up9 explicit in another way with their premonitory film The
Kiss (1896), a brief tableau borrowed from a successful Broadway
play (in other words, from the bourgeois theatre). Edison himself,
it seems, lost all interest in the cinema when he realized that his
dream of 'reproducing life' was impracticable in the short term (as
president of a vast trust, of course, he would soon display a keenly
renewed interest!). Nonetheless, through his vision of the cinema
and in the drift of the early experiments made under his direction, his name stands for the presence, during the cinema's beginnings, of forces stemming directly from the bourgeois ideology
of representation; forces which were, before too long, to exercise
an overwhelming influence on the future of the film industry.
But the 'invention of the cinema' did not take place solely in
Orange, New Jersey.
Georges Sadoul is correct in stressing that the first programme
at the Grand Cafe offered themes whose class content was perfectly
evident to a clientele recruited on the Grands Boulevards of Paris:
they saw that distinguished representatives of the solid citizenry
of Lyons were showing off their wives, their children, their pastimes - in short, their property. Yet these films also possess another
dimension. Although the class content of a film like La Sortie des
Usines Lumiere is identical to the rest on an iconographic level the Lumieres show their workers just as they show their private
harbour at La Ciotat - it presents (along with L'Entree d'un Train
en Gare, Recreation a la Mariniere, Lancetnent d'un Navire a la

Ciotat, and innumerable other films from the first Lumiere catalogue) a representational approach diametrically opposed to the
9 A vocation deriving in our cultures from the codes of social distance
as classified by the semiological discipline known as proxemlcs, whereby
the close-up corresponds to the 'intimate distance' associated with bodily
contact (intercourse or wrestling) cf Edward T Hall, The Hidden Dimension. London, 1969.

one in The Kiss, or for that matter in Le Dfjeuner de Bebe. And

this approach, which consisted in setting up a camera outside the
factory gates and cranking the handle as soon as they opened in
order to record an event which was certainly predictable in general
outline but totally unrehearsed in detail, is still akin to the 'scientificness* of Muybridge photographing a galloping horse, or Marey
birds in flight.10 These 'documentary' images on the one hand, and
the 'narrative tableau' of L'Arroseur arrosi11 on the other, were
to give birth to a sort of panoramic view an acentric, 'non-directive' image leaving the eye more or less 'free' to roam over the
entire frame, and to organize the signifiers as it will (as best it
can); an image, moreover, in which the presence of the characters
never predominates over their environment,12 but is invariably
inscribed within it.13 And it was this view, to be seen in both the
films of M61ies and Edwin S Porter's work for the Edison company,
which was to dominate cinema the world over for more than ten
years.
Of the four vitally important Porter films of 1903 that are known
to me, Uncle. Tom's Cabin is the most purely primitive; that is to
say, it resumes and strikingly illuminates some of the principal
features of the period. It also shows that the primitive mode of
representation was not simply an 'obstacle'; despite the opprobrium habitually levelled against the primitive 'theatricality' in
terms of which this film is entirely conceived and which I shall
attempt to reconsider - it is a remarkable piece of work. Made
following the popular success of a stage version of Harriet Beecher
Stowe's celebrated novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin is an admirable,example of the relationship which apparently existed betweejn^the
primitive cinema and its audience. In the context of the system
prevalent today (and this has been true for more than sixty'years
now), a screen adaptation of even a very well-known work must
'make as though' that work had no previous existence outside the
film. The 'digest' that is made of it must hold water on its own:
a typical Hollywood adaptation, even of the Bible, will identify and
establish all its characters and situations as though introducing
them for the first time, in accordance with the canons of the en10 The etymology of the name given by the Lumieres to their invention
(Cinematagraphe: 'inscription of movement') as against the Edison/
Dickson Vitascope ('image of life') neatly summarises the distance separating their respective ideological approaches.
11 Possibly derived from a contemporary strip cartoon.
12 The contrast with the black background in Dickson's interiors is
striking.
13 This is the great paradox involved in the literal transposition to the
screen of the proscenium frame: the characters are suddenly 'crushed'
by sets which they would have dominated in the theatre through their
voices and their 'presence* in relief, as well as the use of lighting . . . and
opera-glasses.

closed,- autarchic world of the bourgeois novel where the story 97

(and history, for that matter) exists only in so far as it is invented
by the text. A film like Uncle Tom's Cabin, which 'tells' a novel
several hundred pages long in some twenty tableaux and in ten
minutes, was predicated upon the knowledge of the audience, who
were left to fill in enormous narrative gaps for themselves (possibly
with the aid on occasion of a lecturer, but whose role was to jog
the audience's memory rather than to take its place). Each tableau
is preceded by a title, such as 'Eliza asks Tom to Go Away with
Her'. Apart from their obvious reliance on the spectator's previous
knowledge of the novel (the title quoted in the first in the film),
these succinct titles always refer to the climax of the tableau, often
still some time away. For example, 'Eva and Tom in the Garden'
introduces a tableau which begins with a long dance number performed by black servants before Eva and Tom make their entry.
There is therefore no direct causal link between title and image oi
the kind which was, of course, to become the rule after 1915 (and
which would find its equivalent in the word/image relationship
after 1929). Each tableau is thus programmed in advance, each
coup de theatre is 'given away' in advance, which obviates all effect
of suspense and induces, with the complicity of the audience, an
expectation quite different from the kind of expectation involved
in the bourgeois theatre and novel, for instance. Actually, the
notion of suspense is entirely irrelevant here, since the audience,
knowing the story already, ultimately did not come to discover
its twists and turns, but to look at the pictures, to enjoy the concatenation of a series of spectacularly presented archetypes - to
browse through an album of sumptuous photographs illustrating
a text which was to be found elsewhere: it came to participate in
a ritual of confirmation.14 One thinks of the medieval Japanese
courtesans contemplating the scrolls which illustrated familiar
stories handed down over the centuries. And this is only one of
the ways in which the primitive cinema more closely resembles
the arts of the Orient than those of the bourgeois West.15
Uncle Tom's Cabin, according to the historians of linearity, is a
'retrograde' film. Arid the montage model it presents is indeed the
first and the most elementary produced by the cinema (around
1896): a succession of tableaux without continuity links, either
spatial or temporal, undoubtedly 'modelled' on the theatre, but
and the qualification is important the popular theatre: we are a
long way from the 'three unities' which the bourgeois theatre
borrowed from the classical breviary. And one has to be com14 It is of course difficult to imagine how recent immigrants, said to
form the main clientele of the nickelodeons (in order to perfect their
English, according to Billy Bitzer) reacted to a film like this.
15 In Japan, the cinema retained its 'lecturer' (the benshi, derived in
particular from the doll theatres) until 1937.

98

pletely blinded by the ideology of 'progress' in the cinema not to

realize that within the framework fixed by this model, no matter
how elementary, remarkable films were produced: Haggar's The
Life of Charles Peace. (1904), for instance, or Billy Bitzer's Kentucky Feud (1905), not to mention films which have, admittedly
been more universally recognized, like Zecca's L'Histoire d'un Crime
(1901) or Melies' Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902). These films, deriving from' popular entertainments and bearing no real relationship to the theatre of Shaw, Feydeau, Antoine or Belasco, constitute
a cinematic 'specificity' whose legitimacy we should, after Warhol,
after Godard, be in a position to recognize. We can, in other words,
no longer impugn the plebeian origins of the cinema, taxed with
'theatricality', as a sort of original sin expiated by the "great Griffith'. In fact Griffith and his more innovatory contemporaries were
to endow the cinema with the essential characteristics of another
theatricality - that of 'the grown-ups', of the bourgeois theatre through a number of contributions which were undoubtedly constituent of a second 'specificity'. The failure of the attempts to
make a pure and simple transposition of the bourgeois theatre to the
screen (Films d'Art), a failure due precisely to the basic incompatibility between the primitive mode of representation and the
codes of the bourgeois theatre, had shown that only the establishment of a thoroughly haptic screen space, the linearisation of
the visual signifiers (through montage, 'centering', and lighting),
the constitution of an enveloping diegetic space-time, and so on,
could in fact 'render' what was essential to this theatre (as well
as the novels and paintings) prized by the middle classes . . . the
lack of which was being increasingly sharply felt by film-makers,
producers and the more perspicacious critics, notably in America.
But no history of the cinema claiming to be informed by historical and dialectical materialism can any longer give absolute
precedence to this second "specificity' - the institutional mode of
representation - over the first, from either a heuristic or even an
aesthetic point of view.
The first manifestations of a narrativity through montage (the
juxtaposition of several shots temporally and spatially disjoined,
and linked principally by a knowledge of the story to which they
refer: a system of which Uncle Tom's Cabin is a belated and fully
achieved example) were the innumerable versions of The Passion
which flourished in both Europe and America after 1896. Without
the aid of a single inter-title,16 sometimes presumably without
even a narrator, these sequences of visually autonomous tableaux
16 These do not seem to have been incorporated into films prior to
1900; the magic lanterns with which the more prosperous fairground
booths were equipped were apparently used only to project the opening
titles. Since each tableau of the Passion films was sold separately, each
had its own opening title.

nevertheless formed an easily recognizable narrative progression, 99

where everyone knew what had gone before and what was coming
next, and where everyone spontaneously furnished all the necessary mental "articulations'.
Next came a more elaborate form, which held sway for a good
ten years: the chase film, thought to have been conceived in England around 1900. The trend of this evolution is obvious: at each
stage, the concern was to weave closer and closer and more and
more significant links between the successive tableaux. To start
with, lacking the more sophisticated liaisons which were not long
in appearing (match-cutting systems, alternate montage, and so on),
film-makers contented themselves with launching a narrative course,
clearly constructed from one tableau to the next, which would
forge a chain of spatio-temporal sequentiality no matter what.
No matter that the screen direction (and/or entries and exits
from the frame) comprised 'bad matches' (according to criteria
formulated much later, of course); the simple situation of the
chase, bi-univocally concatenated from one shot to the next by
its very nature, sufficed to make the narrative movement legible.
This was the first decisive step towards closure, towards the linearity of the institutional mode.
With The Life of an American Cowboy - also 1903 - it becomes
evident why Porter is the 'Janus' of this period. With this film he
had - to talk like a traditional historian - one foot effectively 'in
the past* and one 'in the future'. Admittedly phrases like this do
relate to a very real trend in history; but for my part I shall simply
say that this film has some of the characteristics of two modes of
representation, one of which was to succeed the other, but cannot
be said to embody the future all on its own.17 And it is precisely
the co-existence of these two modes within the same 'text' - and
above all the manner of this co-existence - that makes Porter's
films so arresting and, from a heuristic point of view, so important.
The Life of an American Cowboy opens with a series of tableaux
showing 'scenes from daily life' in a settlement in the Far West
(and one cannot stress too highly the fact that at this time the
terms still referred to a living reality; hence, perhaps, in part, the
extremely realistic effect of some of the tableaux in this film or in Kentucky Feud). Nothing seems to bind these tableaux together, unless (possibly) the continuing presence of the same
characters. These characters, however, are still so dwarfed within
the frame, and their dress so similar,18 that to distinguish one from
17 The future was also The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, much closer to the
primitives (or to us) than to Griffith or DeMille.
18 No doubt the zealous attempts to make films in colour, which very
soon resulted in a number of ingenious processes, were largely due to a
premonition that this problem of differentiation might be resolved by
colour.

ioo

another is difficult, to say the least. One would be hard put to it,
for instance, to assert that the characters seen in the saloon (where
a somewhat intemperate cowboy rides in on horseback, and where
a citizen is persuaded to 'dance' by six-gun bullets) are the same
as the ones subsequently seen in front of the hotel (the arrival of
a stagecoach full of tourists, an exhibition of lassooing). This latter
shot, which is exemplary in its 'primitivism', with a small crowd
moving about and several actions going on at once, lasts for several
minutes. Then, about two-thirds of the way through the film, there
is a radical change in narrative method: bandits attack the stagecoach, and in a series of shots which instantly arouse a sense of
recognition in the spectator today,19 a 'thrilling chase' begins, still
in long shot of course, but with the connection between the shots
(both temporal and spatial) very clearly defined as being one
of proximity (if not of actual contiguity). Here we are at the opposite extreme from the loose autarchy of the earlier tableaux which
'led* nowhere, and whose busy, acentric composition has been
replaced by a determined effort towards simplification and 'centering' which greatly facilitates the establishment, link by link, of the
chain of signification.
The Great Train. Robbery, Porter's most celebrated film, made
at the end of this crucial year, 1903, after The Life of an American
Cowboy, extends this concatenatory structure to the whole film
(with the exception, as we shall see, of one shot). Each tableau
therefore now brings its 'brick' to the narrative edifice (Pudovkin's
terms are already apt here), and we pass from one decor to the
next with inexorable logic. The shots showing the robbery itself
arouse a very strong impression of continuity and proximity, and
certain articulations even come remarkably close to an effect of
contiguity (which was undoubtedly anticipatory for the period).
The final pursuit, notably with its crossing of a river followed
by a relatively mobile camera, is a model of the genre already
explored in England. Yet almost all the shots show the action
from 'far away', so that it still remains just as difficult to distinguish between the characters. There is even one moment at
which the modern viewer, attuned to certain codes which developed in symbiosis with the institutional mode, invariably assumes
the horsemen riding towards the camera to be the lawmen, whereas
they are in fact the outlaws, as one realizes only when the pursuing lawmen appear in frame behind them.
Given the course that Porter had taken, this remote impersonality, with its lack of presence and individualization, could not
but be felt as a deficiency . . . just as it was by the bourgeois
'non-audience' which turned up its nose at Porter's films along
19 Which doubtless also explains why our impression of 'hyper-realism'
vanishes too: for us montage, contrasted with 'non-montage', is an
undeniable sign of 'fiction'.

with the rest.20 No doubt that was why he added (and this may 101
have been a 'first') a close shot of a man (the Edison catalogue
states that it is 'Barnes, leader of the outlaw band') aiming his
gun at the camera 'and firing point-blank at each individual in the
audience'. But the most remarkable thing is that this shot was
originally delivered to the American nickelodeons and the fairground cinemas of Europe in the form of a separate reel; it was
up to the exhibitors to decide whether to stick it on at the beginning or the end of the film.
This shot is rich in its implications. In the first place, in addition
to being what was no doubt an excellent publicity gag aimed not
at the audience but at the exhibitors (at a time when they were
beginning to clamour for novelty), the gesture of allowing exhibitors to choose where to place the shot suggests that the production
executives, even though they may have realized what it introduced
into the Lilliputian world of the remaining tableaux in terms of an
individualized presence, had absolutely no idea what to do with it.
Not only did they feel it impossible (they were in fact not yet in
possession of the necessary syntactical means) to introduce this
shot during the course of the film - would it not break up just
this effect of continuity which had been so hardly won? - but they
were very probably unable to settle the problem of whether it
should go at the beginning or the end. Placed at the beginning, of
course, the 'frightening' effect of this unaccustomed image might
soften the spectators up emotionally; but would they not then be
disappointed by the subsequent return to and maintenance of
separation from the spectator and the codes of acting that entailed?
Placed at the end of the film, the shot might have a surprise effect
(by contrast with the preceding ones) and leave the spectator with
a pleasant memory; but in that case, would the shot 'colour' the
whole film as one might hope?21 Because, of course' this strategy
however prophetic it may have seemed, also remains a 'step backwards' as our advocates of linear interpretations would say, because it in fact undermines the narrative closure which was beginning to establish itself at this time. The shot is not an element in
the film; it simply purports to establish a new kind of link between
the spectator and the screen (and the metaphor of an outlaw
firing straight at the camera indicates clearly enough the sort of
relationship - fascinated aspiration and forcible rape - it was to
be). But it does so from 'outside' the diegesis: this outlaw is in
fact the lecturer in a new form. What we have here is therefore a
device that is essentially primitive in character, both in its quality
20 With the exception, it seems, of travel films and other documentaries,
though these were still made 'in the Lumiere manner'.
21 It goes without saying that I do not claim, here or elsewhere, to be
reconstituting the thoughts of people long since dead; I am simply
trying to open out, in a graphic way, the area of speculation suggested
by this shot.

102

of 'openness' and of paradoxical 'distancing' (at one level the gesture annihilates the distance, and at another, re-establishes it).
Interestingly enough, this device of the 'emblematic* close shot
soon became common practice and remained so for several years.
Lubin's The Bold Bank Robbery (1907) begins and ends with a
group portrait (in close shot) of the three protagonists,22 and it
was not uncommon for a film to end with a close shot of the pretty
heroine, whose charms had hitherto been revealed only in ensemble
shots, smiling at the camera. One can imagine the reactions of a
predominantly male audience to this sudden 'intimacy'.
By pointing to the existence of an earlier film called Fire! (1901)
by the important English pioneer Williamson, some historians have
sought to diminish the interest of The Life of an American Fireman,
which is both the most impressive and most problematic of the
films made in this key year in Porter's career. It is in fact true
that these two films are very much alike, in both subject matter
and narrative profile. But quite apart from the fact that Porter's
film comprises very specific experiments which make it of exceptional interest to the historian, such attempts to project into the
world of primitive cinema our conceptions of originality and plagiarism (deriving from bourgeois notions of private property) - in
actual fact our repression of intertextuality - are merely another
manifestation of the determination to linearize a phenomenon
which is basically resistant. To take this attitude is to ignore the
fact (while acknowledging it as an 'exotic' item) that for several
years cinematographic pictures simply did not belong to anyone,
either by law or by right (just a s still photographs, for several
decades, belonged to no one),23 and there was a free circulation of
ideas and images such as we can only guess at today. The notion
of plagiarism is all the more irrelevant here in that most films
borrowed both form and subject from elsewhere anyway - from
the popular arts which comprised the last real 'public domain' and that far from degrading 'original ideas', the films which
'copied' others frequently improved on them. (Sigmund Lubin's
reputation for being a mere plagiarist does not always seem to
me to stand up to a viewing of the films themselves, which are
often very much above average in quality).
At all events, among the major contradictions of this period, as
illustrated by Porter's films, the one that implies the deepest dis-

22 The effect here is even more 'progressive' than in Porter's case, since
the characters,- instead of being filmed against a black background, are
in the setting shown in the following or preceding tableau. The match
cut was not very far away - in fact the English, it seems, were employing
it already: cf Cecil Hepworth's Rescued by Rover (1904).
23 cf Maurice Edelman: Le Droit saisi par la photographie, Maspero,
Paris, 1972.

il

niption is undoubtedly that which is illustrated in The Life of an 103

American Fireman. The film opens with a montage often comprising ellipses so startling that one wonders how audiences could follow the story without a lecturer's help (in his office, the chief fireman dreams of a woman and child in danger they are seen in
vignette; in close-up, a hand breaks the glass and activates a fire
alarm; in their dormitory, the firemen get out of bed and rush to
the pole that leads to the engine-house; in the engine-house, the
fire engines start up; the doors open, and the engines leave). Next,
a series of shots corresponding directly to the 'cops and robbers'
or Western chase: the engines hurry to the scene of the fire. Finally
a long shot shows the burning house and the engines arriving. We
pass inside the house (a rudimentary studio set): the woman makes
an agitated appeal in front of the window, then collapses on to
the bed. A ladder appears, then a fireman. He carries the woman
to safety in his arms, returns, carries off the child, returns, and
puts out the fire (the whole comprising lengthy intervals during
which the frame remains empty between the successive disappearances and reappearances by the characters). The next shot shows
the facade of the burning house. The woman appears at the window, makes an agitated appeal, and disappears. The firemen set up
a ladder . . . and we see, obviously occupying the same length of
time, the same action that we previously witnessed from inside
the house.
Seeing this curious document in the form in which I have described it - that is to say, as it was deposited at the Library of
Congress in 1903 any historian worthy of the name ought to
find the process of its 'dialetical' gestation obvious enough: sensing
the as yet still distant possibility of absolute ubiquity in the
camera - the posibility, that is to say, that the spectator might
accept a series of shots as being different points of view of a
single continuous action, rather than simply variants of 'what he
might see from his seat' (here I am simplifying problems that are
more complex) - Porter in fact films one action twice, from two
different 'points of view' (actually the two were several miles apart,
which also implies an extraordinary intuition of the possibilities
offered by montage in the area of fictitious connections, theorized
by Kuleshov some twenty years later). But at the same time Porter
felt, probably with reason, that the audience was not yet ready
to accept this sort of transportation in space-time, and he (or
someone else, it doesn't really matter) decided to show the two
actions successively . . . which obviously has the effect of undermining the already remarkably controlled sequential linearization
of the preceding scenes. So once again one of Porter's 'steps forward' in fact ends by accentuating some features of the primitive
cinema even more strongly than before: its non-homogeneity in
The Life of an American Cowboy, its non-occlusion in The Great
Train Robbery, and here its non-linearity.

04
|

But the historiography of this film comprises another lesson.

Around 1940, it seems, on the strength of an entry in an Edison
catalogue which appeared to suggest that this double sequence
had been put together in 1903 in accordance with the rules of
modern continuity, someone (who?) simply re-edited the film, leaving out parts that quite obviously originally belonged, and Porter
was turned into the modest inventor of one of the basic syntagms
of the institutional mode . . . some ten years before any such figure
began to appear in the standard syntax. What is unfortunate is
that a number of historians, including Georges Sadoul, continued
to give credence to this myth following Lewis Jacobs, who appears
to have been the first to take this catalogue into account. More
interesting, however, is the question as to the authenticity or otherwise of the description. For if it should prove to be authentic (and
for the moment I have no real evidence to the contrary), it might
mean that the aspiration to this linear ubiquity which was to become characteristic of the institutional mode had reached a level
where it could be written down but not yet realized on film not
because of some technical obstacle, but because of an enormous
blind spot difficult for us to analyse. However, the fact that once
these two shots were filmed, it was decided to connect them in a
manner implying an obvious non-linearity rather than disturb the
unity of the spatial viewpoint, seems to me to say a good deal about
the alterity of the relationship these early films entertained with the
spectators who watched them. Does it not suggest that the feeling
of being seated in a theatre in front of a screen had, for spectators then, a sort of priority over the feeling of being carried
away by an imaginary time-flow, modelled on the semblance of
linearity which ordinary time has for us? But any such hypothesis
is extremely hazardous, and would require the backing of a good
deal more evidence before it could be seriously entertained.

Visionary, plagiarist, 'auteur' . . . none of these cliches can

really help in situating Porter's work. It is the readiness to con- fine his films within these terms which leads so often to the obvious
being bypassed; the fact that these films are the loci of contradictions, that their contradictions are also those of an era of
cinema, and that neither can be deciphered except by way of this
twin perspective. But once this decipherment has been achieved
(and I can only claim to have prepared the way here: among other
things, access to a far wider corpus of work is essential), it will
enable us to determine absolutely basic matters concerning the
genealogy of the institutional mode as well as the nature of the
primitive modes; and it is probably in this respect that Porter's
films will ultimately occupy a privileged place in the history of the
cinema.
Translated by Tom Milne.

Postscript
The Federation Internationale des Archives du Film (FIAF) symposium in Brighton (May 1978) gave me an opportunity of seeing
most of the remaining Porter films that have survived. These confirm the theses set forth here on the basis of what turn out to be,
indeed, his most important films (to which, however, I would now
add The Life of An American Policeman (1905). American scholars
have now definitive confirmation of what has been for some years
the prevailing hypothesis concerning The Life of an American
Fireman (a distribution copy found in Maine is identical with
copyright version) and while it was pointed out to me that 1903
is an incorrect date for The Life of an American Cowboy, the fact
that this film actually dates from 1906 merely confirms that 'progress' in Porter's work, as in primitive cinema as a whole, was
anything but linear.

105

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