Thomas Pollock Anshutz, The Ironworker’s Noontime, 1880
By Jeffry Cudlin • February 23, 2007
An early American film audience was not a tough crowd. At the end of the 19th century, you could show an auditorium full of curiosity-seekers 20-second loops of just about anything—a ship buffeted by a storm, blacksmiths passing around a bottle, a mustachioed man planting a wet one on a heavyset widow—and they’d be enthralled. It’s not that audiences of the time were undiscerning. It’s just that at the dawn of American cinema, it simply hadn’t occurred to anyone that a movie needed to be like a play. These early films were filled with white noise, shot in exceedingly high contrast, and pared down to a few key compositional elements. Like paintings, they may have had recognizable subjects, but they were ultimately abstracted from everyday life. Indeed, at the end of the 19th century, audiences expected a movie to behave something like a painting—only with flickering light and motion added.
The Phillips Collection’s current show, “Moving Pictures: American Art and Early Film,” connects the first publicly exhibited movies to traditional fine art, juxtaposing 60 turn-of-the-century short films with American realist paintings and photographs from the same period. The works are mostly broken down by genre: natural landscapes, urban vistas, figure studies, portraits. They’re chosen and grouped primarily to illustrate compositional and thematic affinities, so not all of the paintings here are winners. But the show does a remarkably good job of capturing the thrilling yet alienating sense of dislocation that the first people to view human actions on celluloid must have felt. It also lays bare the aspirations of men like Thomas Edison and Eadweard Muybridge, whose pretensions to high culture shaped the opening chapter of movie history. In the process, the show spotlights a distinctly American strain of modernism, driven by a love of spectacle and a readiness to embrace extreme transformations in the cultural landscape at the turn of the 20th century.
Then as now, porn was at the forefront of the new media technology. Or, if not porn, at least kissing and partial nudity, the forms that prurience could take in a public arena in the 1890s. A popular example from 1896, “May Irwin Kiss,” is typical of Edison’s early films. A single shot of a few seconds running in a continuous loop, it shows a couple from a popular Broadway play of that year, “The Widow Jones.” The man twirls the waxy ends of his mustache for a moment then lunges in to plant a kiss on his partner. The two then spend some moments talking to each other through the corners of their joined mouths. It’s a clinical exposé of a phenomenon that was scandalizing American audiences at the time: excessive make-out scenes in the theater.
The simple set design of the early Edison films—harsh frontal illumination, solid black tar-paper background—was initially a necessity. Shorts were first viewed through tiny peepholes in Edison’s Kinetoscope machines, and for visibility’s sake, films needed to make sharp distinctions between figure and ground and show exaggerated actions.
Given these limitations, it’s no wonder that the earliest filmmakers didn’t see storytelling as an option for film. That attitude still held fast in 1904, when Edwin Porter produced “Parsifal.” The scene on view at the Phillips, “Parsifal Ascends the Throne,” is typical: A single, distant, stationary camera, lots of broad, campy gestures, and a few silly special effects, like a dove that descends on a string. Porter’s aim wasn’t to tell a coherent story but to offer spectacle and universal, easily understandable vignettes—not unlike traditional history painting, which distills a famous story into one emblematic image.
Film and painting had the most common ground at this time when it came to landscapes. By 1896, when devices like Edison’s Vitascope could project images onto a screen nearly 50 feet high, movies were surrounded by a chunky, ornate frame, suggesting the rarefied air and seriousness of a major salon painting. It’s easy to imagine the impression that the James H. White-produced Edison film, “American Falls From Above, American Side” (1896) made at such a scale. The lower half of the screen is filled with torrents of water from Niagara Falls, and the film also shows the efforts of a camera team venturing out onto the ice—the viewer is made aware not only of the cataclysm but of the effort to depict it. One stationary camera framing the scene for a brief moment isn’t terribly dynamic, but it trumps the large painting of the same subject nearby, William Morris Hunt’s “Niagara Falls” (1878). Hunt’s canvas is undistinguished—large, choppy knife strokes offer minimal indications of a scruffy, broken sliver of distant foliage, and streaming water in ridges of turquoise-green paint resolves into a shapeless mass of white mist in the lower left of the canvas. Aside from the fact that the picture was available in the Williams College collection—the venue that originated this traveling show—there’s nothing to recommend it.
A more interesting parallel between film and painting is the pairing of another Edison Company film produced by White, “The S.S. Coptic Lying To” (1898) and painter John Sloan’s “Wake of the Ferry No. 1” (1907). The film shows a ship’s railing and a single life preserver cloaked in atmospheric gloom; the distant rising and falling of the sea, along with the continuous spray of water, breaks the screen into diffuse white noise. It’s more reminiscent of the insistent stabbing brushmarks of French impressionism than the more unified (if still sketchy and energetic) strokes of Sloan’s painting. But the mood of Sloan’s work, with its murky grays and masses of brownish black punctuated only by a few shocks of warm color, suggests a connection between the Ashcan School’s palette and the stark look of film and photography. Indeed, Sloan was an inveterate moviegoer and often took inspiration from the films he saw. Not only were moviemakers imitating paintings; painters were beginning to imitate the movies.
Yet regardless of all of this artifice, there’s something haunting about seeing real-time actions broken down into a succession of dark, grainy profiles. Eadweard Muybridge’s stop-motion camera exercises with galloping horses proved that not only do all four of a horse’s hooves leave the ground while running— something that many didn’t believe at the time—but that what seems like a graceful, continuous rhythm really consists of many awkward-looking individual steps. Further, his loops, with each frame visibly hand numbered, gives a definite sequence and span to these motions. The horse is transformed into a sort of machine, endlessly, predictably stuttering across the screen.
Like Edison, Muybridge craved respectability; he used his horse studies to publicly ridicule the decidedly more romantic way that well-known painters of the day like Rosa Bonheur had attempted to envision and depict animal movement. But Muybridge’s studies were often doctored to exaggerate the effect. Further, his penchant for parading nude men and women in front of the camera as they danced, jumped, or balanced baskets on their heads smacked more of sublimated lust than science.
Nevertheless, in the late 1870s influential American artist and art educator Thomas Eakins followed Muybridge’s lead, incorporating motion photography in his teaching and his paintings. That meant abandoning most of the existing academic conventions for depicting human figures and animals. By championing cinematographic methods, he helped shunt aside a centuries-old visual culture dependent on received ideas about how to show action through stable poses.
Thomas Pollock Anshutz worked closely with Eakins at the time. His painting “The Ironworker’s Noontime” (1880) shows a similar quasi- scientific analysis of living creatures—in this case, American factory workers. It’s a gathering of mostly shirtless men engaging in a variety of activities: One figure in the foreground massages a sore bicep; a pair of young boys appears to be horsing around to the left; to the right, men and boys pump water, wash up, and simply sit or stand looking exhausted.
Each figure and pose was studied and drawn separately, then combined into the final painting. This may not sound all that different from the method of any neoclassical French artist from the previous 100 years. But the individual figures are far from idealized types—the influence of photography on these bodies is clear. Yet somehow, the use of the photographs makes the scene appear less real, not more; the contrast between the deliberate arrangements in space and the naturalistic body types is jarring. Equally strange are the warm tones of their skin, which contrast sharply, almost too sharply, with their surroundings: the bleak coal gray of the ground, the black looming expanse of the building and smokestacks behind them, the sliver of smoke-filled pale sky in the upper right. All these elements would be trademarks of Ashcan School painters, who showed the bleakness and poverty of America’s cities in the early 1900s.
“Noontime” is nicely paired with “Ninth Infantry Boys’ Morning Wash” (1898). The figures in the film are also spread evenly and deliberately across the frame. But these figures move, bending to draw water from the basins on the ground, then looking directly into the camera for a moment, self-consciously aware of its presence. The motion in the film is slower than real-time, so as each soldier dries his face and hands, his white towel flutters surreally, tracing balletic motions. It’s a simple piece, but the slow motion, the ritual, and the nervous glances are all oddly discomfiting and artificial. Like Muybridge’s horses, these men have been transformed into something else: a new perfected version of themselves.
In fact, as the paintings in the show become more and more stark (if exaggerated) depictions of material facts—as in the work of George Bellows—the Edison films appear more staged and unrealistic. A comparison of the light sparring in “Corbett and Courtney Before the Kinetograph” (1894) with George Bellows’ “Club Night” (1907) is telling. In the Edison film, heavyweight champ Corbett gingerly swings at his opponent, moving with a strange, tentative gait, never really projecting violence or menace. In the Bellows painting, the face of the figure on the left is a swollen wreck, a few stabs of pulpy reddish paint against a black background, cowering behind his gloves. A Francis Baconnesque crowd eggs the fighters on; one man in the front row appears to be simply a gaping hole of a mouth and two eye sockets wearing a suit.
The most affecting pieces in the exhibition are the cityscapes, a favorite subject for Edison filmmakers and Ashcan painters alike. As Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand did in their film “Manhatta,” which appeared at the National Gallery last year, Wallace McCutcheon produced a film for the American Mutoscope and Biograph company in 1902, “Lower Broadway,” that depicts the city as it was: a mechanized, overcrowded spectacle. Trolleys and horses move from the bottom left corner to the center along a sharp diagonal; competing, seemingly unending tides of human traffic pick their way through the right side of the picture. Row after row of tall buildings recedes into the upper right corner, into a haze of white smoke. The crowds appear to be circulated and processed by a giant transit machine, generating a sort of terrible rhythmic beauty.
In painter John Sloan’s hands, this jostling, crowding, and mechanization is thrilling, and his painting “Six O’Clock, Winter” (1912) is one of the show’s real treats. A dark elevated train traces a diagonal from lower left to upper right, bisecting a rich cobalt and yellow-green sky above and a swarm of people below, all viewed from the neck up. Men loading and unloading trucks and riding trolleys appear to crowd-surf, borne over the heads of the throng of glowing faces.
Count on Bellows to reveal the potential of such scenes for dehumanization. In “New York” (1911) he fills the lower fifth of the canvas with stooped, faceless figures, most of which are cut off at the knees by the bottom edge of the picture. Behind them the city rises in big blocks of dirty colors, with rectangular windows and barely legible advertisements encrusted on their surfaces. Drearier still is “Pennsylvania Station Excavation” (1909). The giant crater it depicts looks like the site of an unimaginable cataclysm; four tiny figures in the lower right are indicated by simple black apostrophes with dots of saturated red for faces. Aside from a bit of blue and some orange-yellow highlights in the clouds from the setting sun, the painting is all gray and black; ghostly marks that might be distant figures dot the interior of the crater, and black clouds of smoke rise from distant silhouetted smokestacks. Bellows makes us feel the shock of the new, and, though he may be a tad dramatic, it’s a powerful, affecting, starkly minimal image.
Bellows, Sloan, and McCutcheon, gathered together in the last room of the exhibition, show the rapid acceleration of human life in the modern age, and an American city radically remaking itself. But McCutcheon’s film portrait of the city is more fully a part of that process—not merely reflecting the transformation but also helping to drive it. With the advent of film, ideas of movement, likeness, and recording and remembering reality were all suddenly up in the air. Realist painters could either take Eakins’ route and adopt the new methods and standards, or, like Bellows, they could register the fallout.
The difference between then and now is the extent to which this transformation had the power to fascinate audiences. Popular film, of course, wouldn’t continue to occupy this odd territory in the nation’s consciousness. Then, it was part pseudo-science, part sideshow attraction, part triumphalist modern propaganda. Film conditioned its audiences, irrevocably changing the way they saw and knew the world. Moving Pictures helps us recapture a sense of what we’ve lost.