The Black Maria: film studio, film technology (cinema and the history of technology)

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Notes

1. Paul Spehr’s recent biography of Dickson provides a welcome expansion to our understanding of the context from which the Black Maria emerged at the Edison laboratory. Spehr’s meticulous research has provided important evidence of Dickson’s debt to photography studio design, and his description of Dickson’s earlier photography studio projects at the laboratory have provided invaluable materials for the analysis that follows. See Spehr, Man Who Made Movies.

2. Mumford outlines this theory most completely in Technics and Civilization, but the early seeds of his ideas can also be found in his work from the 1920s, including Mumford, Story of Utopias and Mumford, Sticks and Stones. See also Hughes, Human-Built World; Hughes, American Genesis; Williams, Notes on the Underground.

3. As Lisa Cartwright and Oliver Gaycken have shown, the laboratory became a key site for film production in early scientific and medical films, including films produced in laboratory-studios such as Jean Comandon’s at Pathé and Éclair’s special studio at Epinay-sur-Seine. See Cartwright, Screening the Body and Gaycken, ‘Devices of Curiosity,’ especially chap. 2 on French vernacular science films produced at Pathé, Gaumont, and Éclair from 1909 to 1914.

4. As Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer explain, the term ‘laboratory’ was new in the seventeenth century, when access to scientific research machines required special locations for experimenters and, at times, observers. These spaces became sites for controlled, rigorous experimentation that was distinguished from observation that could be tainted by the contingencies of nature. See Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 39 and 57. See also the essays collected in James, Development of the Laboratory and, more recently, the essays in Galison and Thompson, Architecture of Science.

5. James, ‘Introduction,’ 2.

6. See the descriptions quoted in Spehr, Man Who Made Movies, 61. See also, Israel, Edison, 261. This kind of dynamic spatial logic has continued to shape modern laboratories; see, for instance, Venturi, ‘Thoughts on the Architecture,’ 388. On laboratories in the post-Second World War context, see Galison and Jones, ‘Factory, Laboratory, Studio,’ 499.

7. Dyer and Martin, Edison, 649–50. As Dyer and Martin describe, Edison’s main workspace on the second floor, room No. 12, ‘is at times a chemical, a physical, or a mechanical room – occasionally a combination of all, while sometimes it might be called a consultation-room or clinic.’

8. Galison, ‘Buildings and the Subject of Science,’ 3.

9. Dyer and Martin devote more than seven pages to describing the library, stock room (which they call a ‘museum’ and ‘sample-room of nature’), and the third-floor display cases (a ‘scientific attic’). See Dyer and Martin, Edison, 640–8.

10. As Spehr notes, John Ott helped Edison supervise the first designs for moving image apparatus because of his skill in producing mechanical models of all types and his expertise with the cylinder phonograph. Edison later added William Heise to the project for his expertise in threading the paper telegraph. Spehr, Man Who Made Movies, 94 and 99. See also, Israel, Edison, 293.

11. Spehr, Man Who Made Movies, 131 and 156–7.

12. I develop a more complete analysis of the influences on Dickson’s design – which include the Edison laboratory, contemporary photography studios, Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge’s respective research laboratories in Paris and at the University of Pennsylvania Veterinary School, and swinging bridges – in the first chapter of my dissertation, Jacobson, ‘Studios Before the System.’

13. In addition to his experiments, Dickson was the West Orange laboratory’s official photographer. See Hendricks, Edison Motion Picture Myth, 13–14.

14. Research on cinema and technology has traditionally focused on three main areas: debates over the ontology and specificity of the medium as an art, Marxist and psychoanalytic-driven apparatus theories (primarily of the 1970s), and hardware and innovation histories of moving-image technologies from pre-cinema to sound, color, TV, 3D, video, and digital technologies. In these areas, however, cinema’s relationship to other technologies has typically been limited to other image-making devices, or, in the broadest cases, to other entertainment and communications mediums. See, for instance, Mannoni, Le Grand art de la lumière; Musser, Emergence of Cinema; Rossell, Living Pictures; Crafton, Talkies; O’Brien, Conversion to Sound. On the apparatus debates, see Rosen, Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology.

15. Despite the fact that it is arguably one of the quintessential technologies of the last century, cinema tends to be skipped over in favor of (or overshadowed by) studies of more recent media technologies, especially computers and the Internet. See, for instance, Misa, Brey, and Feenberg, Modernity and Technology. Notable exceptions include Carlson, ‘Artifacts and Frames of Meaning.’

16. See Kirby, Parallel Tracks; Guerin, A Culture of Light; Whissel, Picturing American Modernity. This work has developed out of renewed attention to early film history in the early 1980s and its relationship to the social and cultural conditions of modernity. See, especially, Zielinski, Audiovisions; Friedberg, Window Shopping; the essays collected in Charney and Schwartz, Cinema and the Invention; and Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time. Other key early works include, Schivelbusch, Railway Journey; Kern, The Culture of Time; Asendorf, Batteries of Life. More recently, see the essays collected in Gaudreault, Russell, and, Gunning, Le Cinématographe and Le Forestier, Aux Sources de l’industrie.

17. See Mumford, Technics and Civilization and Benjamin, ‘Work of Art.’ More recent work by film theorists has also offered new conceptual grounds for understanding cinema’s relationship to technology that should inspire further historical research. Exemplary work includes the study of the relationship between cinema, the X-ray, and atomic bombs in Lippit, Atomic Light and Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media.

18. See Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse; Manovich, Language of New Media; Parks, Cultures in Orbit. See also the recent studies of film’s place in the digital world, such as Mulvey, Death 24× a Second; Rodowick, Virtual Life of Film; and the essays in Berry, Kim, and Spigel, Electronic Elsewheres.

19. Hediger and Vonderau, Films that Work; Acland and Wasson, Useful Cinema. For another exemplary model of analysis that addresses cinema’s role in and response to modern industry, see Michael Cowan’s recent work on Weimar advertising films, for instance, Cowan, ‘Advertising, Rhythm.’