Week 2

This week we watched The Cabinet of Dr. Caligeri (Robert Weine, 1920), The Firemen of Folies-Bergere (with Josephine Baker), Sandow (W.K.L Dickson, 1894), Blacksmithing Scene (William Heise/W.K.L. Dickson, 1893), and Baby's Meal (Lumiere Brothers, 1895).

Something I found quite interesting to observe this week is the ways in which films of this era play with the idea that film can become a multitude of different things. Is it scientific/informative? Entertainment? Or art? This week we saw examples of each.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligeri truly encompasses early cinema’s focus on “body as spectacle” and utilizes both Edison and Lumiere techniques to display a struggle between domestic life and work, laced with queer themes and a mentally ill protagonist who is slowly losing his grip on reality. This utilization of both forms of cinema could be seen as a quite clever way to answer the question of what film is by answering that it is everything. It is entertainment, art, and documentation all at once. This use of complex and nuanced set design, blocking, and theatrical performance come together to document what an intense struggle with queerness and mental illness might feel like during this time. The film engages with the world around it in Lumiere fashion through the expansive world that it creates, yet sides with Edison in that much of the atmosphere is created within a studio space. This suggests that in fact both documentation and entertainment can be and are art.

Further, The Firemen of Folies-Bergere engages heavily in the idea of body as spectacle specifically in a homosocial environment. While there are women present within the film, they are clearly presented as being only objects of uncontrollable male voyeurism. However the portrayal of the voyeuristic male (the fireman) as being out of his mind would suggest a more deeply rooted criticism of male voyeurism itself. This once again can be linked to the Lumiere’s style wherein there is a deep engagement with the world that opens it up for deep criticism.

Finally, I noticed that the films Sandow (W.K.L Dickson, 1894), Blacksmithing Scene (William Heise/W.K.L. Dickson, 1893), and Baby's Meal (Lumiere Brothers, 1895), all staple examples of the differences between Edison and Lumiere film, each serve as a sort of base level of style and intent, that then films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligeri and The Firemen of Folies-Bergere are able to interpret, merge and manipulate into increasingly nuanced portrayals of the world at that time.They become more than just homosocial or family and domestic-based, they become all of it at once.