Studios before the system: architecture, technology, and early cinema

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STUDIOS BEFORE THE SYSTEM:

ARCHITECTURE, TECHNOLOGY, AND EARLY CINEMA

by

Brian Richard Jacobson

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
CINEMA-TELEVISION (CRITICAL STUDIES)

August 2011

Copyright 2011 Brian Richard Jacobson
ii

Dedication

To my family

iii
Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I thank my dissertation chair and advisor, Vanessa Schwartz,
for her dedication to my work. Vanessa’s sage guidance, unfailing enthusiasm, and
selfless devotion to this project made it immeasurably better. Her work and fierce
commitment to rigorous scholarship have motivated me to work harder and be more
disciplined. Her intellectual curiosity and love of knowledge inspire me to think, explore,
and enjoy both the hard work and intellectual pleasures of academic life every day. Her
kindness, patience, and willingness to take over this project’s direction ensured its
success in the face of difficult circumstances. And her friendship and excitement about all
things French made research and writing more fun.
This project took form under the direction of Anne Friedberg, whose brilliant
scholarship and vision have inspired it to an end that she unfortunately could not enjoy
herself. I came to USC to work with Anne, and I am eternally grateful to have had the
opportunity to learn from her and to see her intellect in action. Her intellectual range
inspired me to think beyond traditional disciplinary bounds, and her work continues to
provide a rich model for my own explorations into the overlapping fields of cinema,
architecture, technology, and visual culture. I am a better person for having experienced
Anne’s leadership, wisdom, grace, good humor, and wonderful sense of style. This
dissertation is dedicated to her memory and enduring inspiration.
I thank my dissertation committee for their invaluable guidance and generous
support throughout my graduate career. Akira Mizuta Lippit’s intelligence inspired me
from my first day at USC, and I aspire in every moment of my work to achieve the level
iv
of insight that he makes seem effortless. His nuanced readings and exciting insights have
pushed me to develop my ideas beyond what I would have imagined. And Akira’s
encouragement and enthusiasm at key moments motivated me to push the project forward
to the end. Priya Jaikumar assumed an ever larger role in this project as it developed, and
I have been touched and inspired by her willingness to not only take on the project but to
embrace it at every step. Her work has provided a model of historical, theoretical, and
political engagement that I hope to emulate in future work. Priya’s exciting insights into
this project opened new a maze of unexpected and fruitful directions that I will be
exploring for some time to come. Steven Ross kindly agreed to join the committee late in
the process. His generous and rigorous feedback on the manuscript pushed me to refine
and better explain my ideas, and his work on early film history and working class cinema
helped guide my analysis of industrial development at the first studios. While researching
and writing my dissertation, I also received valuable suggestions and feedback from
Anne Higonnet, Kara Keeling, Richard Meyer, Eunice Howe, Phil Ethington, Ed
Dimendberg, Bliss Cua Lim, Miriam Levin, Pete Soppelsa, and Laura Kalba.
Funding from numerous institutions helped make this dissertation possible. A
Fulbright Fellowship allowed me to conduct research in Paris. Further research in Paris
and London was made possible by support from the Social Science Research Council’s
International Dissertation Research Fellowship, with funds from the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation. Early support from the Social Science Research Council’s Dissertation
Proposal Development Fellowship (with funds from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation)
made my pre-dissertation research possible. Summer funding from USC’s Visual Studies
Graduate Certificate program allowed me to complete early research in New York, and
v
the VSGC’s Anne Friedberg Memorial Grant for Interdisciplinary Research in Visual
Studies allowed me to complete the final stages of my research in New York and New
Jersey. Gene Autry and Frank Volpe Endowed Fellowships and the Mary Pickford
Foundation Scholarship from the USC School of Cinematic Arts provided support for
both research and writing.
In Paris, many professors, colleagues, and friends helped me navigate the archives
and enjoy my all-too-brief Parisian life. I thank Arnaud Roujou de Boubée, Amy Tondu,
Lindsay Turlan, Charlotte Goodwin, and Sarah Moroz for making my Fulbright
experience exceptionally productive and enjoyable; Christian Delage and everyone at the
Institut d’histoire du temps présent for offering me a place to work during my stay;
Dmitri Vezyroglou, Anne Kerlan-Stephens, and Christophe Gautier for welcoming me
into their seminar and providing a forum to share my work; and Rémy Besson, Priska
Morrissey, and Guillaume Vernet for sharing their work, ideas, and knowledge of the
French academy. I thank my fellow expatriate researchers and friends for many fond
memories. I am especially grateful for the friendship and support of Carolyn Purnell,
Tyson Leuchter, Naor Ben-Yehoyada, Julie Kleinman, Joshua Neves, Megan Fernandes,
Kfir Cohen, Mary Traester, Jonathan Hamrick, Jacob Lewis, Melissa Dean, Elisa Foster,
Jessica Fripp, Andrew Ross, and Kenneth Garner. I could not have enjoyed the pleasures
of Paris (or the French language) without the hospitality and friendship of Véronique
Goupil, Saphir Grici, Mary-Eve Simon, Géraldine Videau, Agathe Legrand, and Thomas
Brunot. Mille fois merci!
Many archivists and librarians provided invaluable assistance during my research.
I am thankful for the support of the teams at the Bibliothèque du Film, the Musée
vi
Gaumont, the Archives de Paris, the Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé, the Bibliothèque
Historique de la Ville de Paris, the Thomas Edison National Historical Park, the Museum
of Modern Art Film Study Center, the Margaret Herrick Library, and the Bronx
Department of Buildings. For their exceptional generosity, I thank Régis Robert and
Karine Mauduit at the Bibliothèque du Film, Mélanie Herick at the Musée Gaumont,
Leonard DeGraaf at the Thomas Edison National Historical Park, and Travis Goode at
USC.
Audience members at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conferences, the
11
th
International Domitor Conference, the Society for French Historical Studies
Conference, the First International Berkeley Conference on Silent Cinema, and the UC-
Irvine Visual Studies Graduate Student Conference provided valuable feedback on work
in progress.
I thank the faculty and staff in Critical Studies at USC for their hard work and
shrewd guidance throughout my graduate career, especially Bill Whittington, Linda
Overholt, Kim Greene, and Alicia Cornish. My colleagues at USC provided a
stimulating, supportive, and enjoyable community. For their intellectual generosity and
friendship, I would especially like to thank James Leo Cahill, Patty Ahn, Kristen Fuhs,
Bella Honess Roe, David Lerner, Elizabeth Affuso, Chris Hanson, Kate Fortmueller,
Brett Service, Veena Hariharan, Veronica Paredes, Bob Buerkle, Mike Dillon, Kristine
Tanton, Amy von Lintel, Jason Hill, Emmeline Yang, Meredith Drake, Anca Lasc, Sam
Solomon, and Adrienne Walser. Conversations and meals shared with Ryan Linkof,
Raphaelle Steinzig, Mike Godwin, Erin Sullivan, and Joel Maynes made my dissertating
days brighter.
vii
To Brian Adam Smith, Anderson Blanton, Seth Wood, Ariel Ross, Mark Ross
Wood, Michael Boaz, and Amy Wallace, you were always close to my heart. One more
dollar, y’all, and I’m goin’ home.
My family helped make this dissertation possible. Thanks go to Mary, Brad,
Lauren, and my family in New York for your kindness and support. To Ed and Carleen
Clark, your support and love have brightened my work on this project in invaluable ways;
thank you for making me part of your family. To Mom, Dad, Nana, and Papa, you gave
me the encouragement and love I needed to complete such a large project. You filled me
with intellectual curiosity, and you taught me to work hard and do my best. Thank you
for always being there for me. This work is – and always has been – for you.
Finally, thanks beyond words go to Catherine E. Clark, who made this
dissertation better in more ways and for more reasons than I could possibly enumerate
here. For helping me learn French; for editing every draft; for watching, talking, and
listening; for walks, runs, and hikes; for coffee in the morning and wine in the evening;
for your wisdom, generosity, and wit; for everything and so much more, thank you. Your
love and support make everything better.
viii
Table of Contents

Dedication ii

Acknowledgements iii

List of Figures ix

Abstract xvii

Introduction: Studios and Systems 1

Chapter 1: Black Boxes and Open-Air Stages: Film Studio Technology and 45
Environmental Control from the Laboratory to the Rooftop

Chapter 2: The “Imponderable Fluidity” of Modernity: Architecture, Building 99
Technology, and Cinema in the “Glass House”

Chapter 3: Dark Studios, Daylight Factories, and the “Age of Movement”: 161
Building Cinema and the City in Turn-of-the-Century New York

Chapter 4: Building a Cité du Cinéma in Paris: Film Studios as Urban Industrial 231
Centers

Chapter 5: Reinventing the Studio in the Transitional Era: Nature, Technology, 294
and Spectacle on the Backlot

Conclusion: Not Just Dream Factories 337

Bibliography 351

ix
List of Figures

0.1 Universal City Tour, ca. 1915 1

0.2 Gaumont studio set, ca. 1913 3

1.1 Black Maria, circa winter 1893-1894 45

1.2 Black Maria, summer 1903 50

1.3 Black Maria, circa winter 1894-1895, W.K.L. Dickson 51

1.4 Black Maria Design Drawing, W.K.L. Dickson, 1932 52

1.5 Black Maria Interior Photograph 53

1.6 “Interior of Kinetograph Theater,” Edwin J. Meeker 53

1.7 “Exterior of Edison’s Kinetographic Theater, Orange, N.J.,” Meeker 54

1.8 Mr. Edison at Work in His Chemical Laboratory (White and Heise, 1897) 60

1.9 Sketch for the West Orange Laboratory, Thomas Edison, 1887 61

1.10 Lithograph of the West Orange Laboratory, circa 1890s 61

1.11 Sketch for the West Orange Laboratory, Thomas Edison, 1887 63

1.12 Edison Laboratory, West Orange, NJ 64

1.13 Page 107 of Matthew Carey Lea, A Manual of Photography 68

1.14 Eadweard Muybridge’s outdoor motion picture studies studio/laboratory 70
at the University of Pennsylvania (built 1884)

1.15 Etienne-Jules Marey, Station Physiologique, built in 1882. 71

1.16 Interior View, Photographic Building, W.K.L. Dickson 72

1.17 Newark Athlete (Dickson and Heise, 1891) 73

1.18 Men Boxing (Dickson and Heise, 1891) 73

1.19 Dickson Greeting (Dickson and Heise, 1891) 74

x
1.20 Page 110 of Lea, A Manual of Photography 76

1.21 Marey’s Station Physiologique in 1883 80

1.22 Marey, “Stretching Exercises,” 1883 81

1.23 Marey’s third black hangar, built in 1886 82

1.24 Marey, “Demenÿ playing the violin,” 1887 82

1.25 Amy Muller (Heise, 1896) 83

1.26 Crissie Sheridan (1897) 85

1.27 Annie Oakley (Heise, 1894) 85

1.28 Robetta and Doretto (Dickson and Heise, 1894) 86

1.29 Athlete With Wand (Dickson and Heise, 1894) 87

1.30 Luis Martinetti (Dickson and Heise, 1894) 87

1.31 “Dickson Experimental Sound Film” (Dickson and Heise, 1895) 88

1.32 American Mutoscope and Bioscope Company Rooftop Studio, ca. 1896 90

1.33 Sandow (Dickson, 1896) 91

1.34 Chimmie Hicks at the Races (AM&B, 1900) 91

1.35 Passaic Falls (Heise, 1896) 93

1.36 Pan-American Exposition by Night (Porter and White, 1901) 95

2.1 First Méliès studio (Studio A) with set for Le Voyage dans la lune (1902) 99

2.2 Galerie des Machines, Paris, 1889 105

2.3 Studio A, shown with additions completed by 1900 109

2.4 Studio A, interior, taken facing away from the stage 111

2.5 Maison Robert-Houdin – 8, boulevard des Italiens 116

2.6 Une Chute de cinq étages (1906) 120
xi
2.7 Une Chute de cinq étages (1906) 121

2.8 Une Chute de cinq étages (1906) 124

2.9 Un Homme de tête (1898) 131

2.10 Le Portrait mystérieux (1899) 131

2.11 L’Homme-mouche (1902) 132

2.12 La Guirlande merveilleuse (1903) 133

2.13 Le Coffre enchanté (1904) 133

2.14 Le Portrait Spirite (1903) 134

2.15 Barbe-bleue (1901) 140

2.16 Technological spaces in Le voyage dans la lune 145

2.17 Le voyage à travers l’impossible 145

2.18 Méliès’s technological disasters 146

2.19 Méliès’s second studio (Studio B), Montreuil, 1907 151

2.20 À la Conquête du Pôle (Méliès, 1911) 153

2.21 Cover of Scientific American, November 21, 1908 153

2.22 À la Conquête du Pôle 154

2.23 À la Conquête du Pôle. Studio A as the “electrified factory” 155

2.24 À la Conquête du Pôle. Workers construct the flying machine in Studio A 156

2.25 À la Conquête du Pôle. Workers roll the flying machine out of Studio B 156

2.26 À la Conquête du Pôle. Studio B 157

3.1 “The Age of Movement.” American Mutoscope and Biograph Film 161
Catalog Cover, 1901

3.2 Demolishing and Building up the Star Theatre (Armitage, AM&B, 1901) 169

xii
3.3 Demolishing and Building up the Star Theatre 172

3.4 At the Foot of the Flatiron (AM&B, 1903) 173

3.5 Panorama of the Flatiron Building (AM&B, 1903) 175

3.6 A Perilous Proceeding (AM&B, 1902) 176

3.7 Skyscrapers of New York (AM&B, 1905) 178

3.8 Skyscrapers of New York (AM&B, 1905) 178

3.9 Elevated Railroad, New York (AM&B, 1903) 180

3.10 Pennsylvania Tunnel Excavation 181

3.11 Interior New York Subway 14
th
Street to 42
nd
Street (Bitzer, 1905) 184

3.12 Interior New York Subway 14
th
Street to 42
nd
Street 185

3.13 11 East 14
th
Street, AM&B Studio 193

3.14 Cooper Hewitt Lamp Advertisement, 1909 195

3.15 Interior of an unidentified studio combining glass and electrical lighting 198
(using both Cooper-Hewitt and arc lamps)

3.16 Filming in an unidentified factory with Cooper-Hewitt Mercury Vapor 201
Lamps

3.17 Westinghouse Air Brake Company (Bitzer, 1904) 202

3.18 Panorama View, Streetcar Motor Room (Bitzer, 1904) 203

3.19 Panorama of Machine Company Aisle (Bitzer, 1904) 204

3.20 “Studios and Laboratory of The Vitagraph Company, Brooklyn, New 206
York”

3.21 Vitagraph Studio, Brooklyn, New York 207

3.22 Sears & Roebuck Concrete Blocks Advertisement, ca. 1905 212

3.23 Edison Bedford Park Studio, Bronx, New York (Kafka and Sons, 216
architects), ca. 1907
xiii
3.24 “Horticultural Hall” (Schwarzmann and Kafka, architects), lithograph 217
by Thomas Hunter Westcott

3.25 Horticultural Hall, New Orleans Exposition, 1885 (Arthur E. Rendle) 217
3.26 Joseph Loth & Co. Silk Ribon Mill (Hugo Kafka, architect), ca. 1892 219

3.27 Joseph Loth & Co. Silk Ribon Mill (Hugo Kafka, architect), ca. 1892 219

3.28 Surface Sketch, Bedford Park Studio, September 21, 1905 221

3.29 Interior, Edison Bedford Park Studio, Bronx, New York 224

3.30 United Shoe Manufacturing Company (Ernest Ransome, architect, 1905) 225

3.31 Fagus-Werk (Eduard Werner, Walter Gropius, and Adolf Meyer, 1911) 225

3.32 Edison with a model of the “Concrete House,” ca. 1910 226

3.33 “Seven Wonders of Today’s World Eclipse Old ‘Seven Wonders’ 227

3.34 “Edison’s System of Concrete Houses” 227

3.35 “The Edison Aggregate,” March 1910, cover 228

3.36 “The Edison Aggregate,” March 1910, page 6 228

3.37 Edison Bedford Park Studio, Bronx, New York, after 1909 229

4.1 “Vue de la Cité Elgé” 231

4.2 “Paris Monumental et Métropolitain,” ca. 1900 236

4.3 Henri Ménessier, Une prises de vue en plein air, Vincennes, 1902 238

4.4 “View of our Workshops in Vincennes” 244

4.5 Pathé Montreuil Studio, Interior 247

4.6 “Usines Pathé-Cinéma de Joinville-le Pont” 259

4.7 “Usines Pathé-Cinéma de Vincennes” 260

4.8 First Gaumont stage with set designers 263

4.9 Faust et Mephistophèles (Guy, 1903) 265
xiv
4.10 Parisian Electrical Sectors, 1899 269

4.11 “Vue de Notre Théâtre (extérieur)” 272

4.12 Ateliers de Cinématographie, Plan du Rez de Chaussée, Auguste 274
Bahrmann, August 1904

4.13 Le Statue (Guy, 1905) 275

4.14 Clown, chien, ballon (Guy, 1905) 275

4.15 La Vie du Christ (1906) 276

4.16 Alice Guy tourne une phonoscène sur le théâtre de poses des Buttes- 278
Chaumont (1905)

4.17 Map of the Gaumont studio complex 279

4.18 “Vue de la Cité Elgé,” Detail. Gaumont Catalogue, January 1908 280

4.19 “Vue de la Cité Elgé,” Gaumont Catalogue, January 1908 281

4.20 “L’Homme du marbre,” anonymous, 1908 282

4.21 “Studio Gaumont,” Photo Album, nd , pages 12 and 19 283

4.22 “Studio Gaumont,” Photo Album, nd , pages 14 and 17 283

4.23 “Vue de la Cité Elgé,” Gaumont Catalogue, 1913 284

4.24 “Studio Gaumont,” Photo Album, nd, page 27 284

4.25 Une Histoire roulante (1906) 286

4.26 La Course à la saucisse (1907) 286

4.27 Une Héroïne de quatre ans (1907) 287

4.28 Le Patrie (1907) 287

4.29 La Possession de l’enfant (1909) 290

4.30 La Tare (1911) 290

4.31 “Fantômas,” anonymous, 1913 291
xv
5.1 Willat Film Manufacturing Company Studios, Fort Lee, NJ, 1914 306

5.2 Life Photo Film Company Studio, Fort Lee, NJ, 1915 307

5.3 Filming The Heart of a Race Tout (1909) 309

5.4 Undated photos of the Selig Edendale studio site 310

5.5 New York Motion Picture Company Open-Air Stage, Edendale, 1909 311

5.6 Biograph Studio at Girard and Georgia 313

5.7 American Film Manufacturing Company studio, Santa Barbara, ca. 1916 315

5.8 Balboa Film Studio, Long Beach, CA, ca. 1913 315

5.9 Famous Players-Lasky Studio, ca. 1915 316

5.10 Mack Sennet’s Keystone Studio with automobiles (nd.) 318

5.11 Paramount Studio Location Map (ca. 1926) 319

5.12 Selig Polyscope Company Pacific Coast Studio, Edendale 325

5.13 American Film Manufacturing Company studio, Santa Barbara, ca. 1916 327

5.14 Keystone Film Company (b. 1913, photo ca. 1917) 328

5.15 Norbig Studios (b. 1914, photo nd.) 329

5.16 Carlo Romanelli, Sculpture for the Entrance to the Selig Zoo, 1915 330

5.17 Thomas Ince Studios, Culver City (b. 1918) 331

5.18 Nestor Studio, Hollywood (ca. 1915) 332

5.19 Sennet-Keystone Studios, ca. 1917 333

5.20 Warner Bros. West Coast Studios from above (1932) 334

5.21 Poster for the Universal City Tour (1915) 335

5.22 Cover of the Universal City Tour Guide (1915) 335

6.1 Selig Studio, Chicago, ca. 1914 338
xvi
6.2 Charles Gatchell, “Any Day at Any Movie Studio, 1917 341

6.3 Rendering of Europacorp’s Project for the Cité européenne du cinéma 347

6.4 Interior of First Méliès Studio, ca. 1945 348

6.5 Black Maria Studio Replica (b. 1954) 348

xvii
Abstract
“Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology, and Early Cinema,”
examines the origins and early history of film studios and studio architecture. It develops
a transnational history of the studios as they emerged in the France and the United States
up to 1915. By examining the development of film studios in these contexts, I explain
how their major film corporations contributed to the studio’s development as a film
production space, an architectural and industrial form, and a site for the technological and
cinematic innovations that would make the studio a key instrument in Hollywood’s
“studio system,” the interwar European film industry, and the future of diverse forms of
studio-based media production.
Just as film historians reassessed early cinema in the late 1970s, rejecting
historians’ characterizations of the first films as “primitive” and undifferentiated, this
study demonstrates that the first studios were neither rudimentary nor haphazardly
designed. Indeed, the initial studios were as much the concrete product of a cinematic
imagination as the films produced in them. In order to generate imaginary worlds on film,
inventors had to create new worlds in which to film. Edison’s Black Maria, for instance,
may have looked like a mere wooden shed, but it was also a machine (built to rotate on a
metal track and with a retractable roof for capturing sunlight) on par with the most
innovative devices in Edison’s laboratory. Similarly, Georges Méliès’s studio resembled
a simple greenhouse but was in fact a complex amalgam of architectural forms including
Méliès’s own Robert-Houdin Theater in Paris, photography studios (such as A.A.E.
Disdéri’s studio on the Robert-Houdin’s roof), and the century-old tradition of glass-and-
iron architecture that included greenhouses, winter gardens, international exposition
xviii
spaces, and the Parisian arcades. By placing the first studios in this broader historical
context, I show how deeply embedded cinema has been, not simply in earlier
entertainment cultures or systems of representation and vision, but also in the
technological and architectural developments of the nineteenth century.
While film historians have described cinema’s place in the social and cultural
milieux of Western modernity, this study focuses on its concurrent relationship to the
technological changes of the second industrial revolution. Drawing upon the importance
of the “human-built world” articulated by historians of technology, I argue that cinema
should be understood as a critical component of the technological developments that
made the modern built environment increasingly artificial. Building on their histories of
the invention and dissemination of technologies such as electricity, electrical lighting, the
telephone, the automobile, and chemical dyes, my research also situates the first studios
in the development of building technologies and architectural designs. As architectural
historians have described, this period was marked by rapid advances in building materials
– most notably reinforced concrete, steel, and new forms of glass – that contributed to
both the physical reconfiguration of the urban landscape and the emergence of early
discourses of modernism in the work of architects and engineers including Eugène
Viollet-le-Duc, Gustave Eiffel, Peter Behrens, and Louis Sullivan. In order to theorize the
nature of early studio space, I thus situate the studios in a century-long development of
building materials and a genealogy of spaces that includes photography and magic lantern
studios, greenhouses, international exhibition halls, factories, artists’ studios, theatrical
stages, and scientific laboratories.

1

INTRODUCTION

Studios and Systems

Since the dawn of history men have built cities, some for refuge, some for defense
and some for habitation, but never before in the history of the world has a city
been built expressly for the purpose of making amusement for the rest of the
world. It is the magic city of make-believe and one never knows, as they stroll
about the streets of this city, whether they are looking at the real or unreal.
– The Facts and Figures about Universal City, 1915
1

Figure 0.1: Universal City Tour, ca. 1915. Los Angeles Public Library

By the time Universal Pictures opened its filmmaking city to the world in 1915,
the film studio had become a well-known, if still tantalizingly mysterious site of cultural
production. Universal's “magic city of make-believe” represented only the largest version

1
The Facts and Figures about Universal City: The One and Only Incorporated Moving Picture City on the
Face of the Globe, Souvenir Edition (1915), 1.

2

of the hundreds of studios found across the United States and Western Europe. As
advertisements suggested, the visitors who traversed its backlot sets on trolley car tours
found unreal city streets bearing the innumerable signs of reality that had become studio
cinema’s stock-in-trade. Like cinematic spectators, Universal’s visitors traveled from Old
Western towns to New York City streets and from ancient Greek agoras to Chinese
pagodas with the immediacy of a film cut. Cinema's impossible on-screen voyages, the
tour revealed, had tangible counterparts in studio-made cities.
To movie-savvy visitors, this likely came as no great surprise. The popular and
trade press had made basic knowledge of studio cinema a banality of the growing film
industry, and studio tours only reinforced many audience members’ assumptions about
the real places that produced film’s unreal spaces. Indeed, in only two short decades, the
film studio had already become an assumed feature of – and actively disavowed necessity
for – illusionary forms of cinematic representation. But as contemporary observers made
clear, to disregard the studio was to miss something profoundly unsettling about
cinematic reproduction. Reflecting on the eerie strangeness of the studio’s artificial film
worlds after a tour of Germany’s UFA studios in 1926, Siegfried Kracauer wrote:
the things that rendezvous here do not belong to reality. They are copies and
distortions that have been ripped out of time and jumbled together. They stand
motionless, full of meaning from the front, while from the rear they are just empty
nothingness. A bad dream about objects that has been forced into the corporeal
realm.
2

Almost a century later, the studio and its uncanny reality remain the most taken-
for-granted of the fundamental developments that shaped cinema in its earliest years.

2
Siegfried Kracauer, “Calico World: The Ufa City in Neubabelsberg,” in Dietrick Neumann, ed. Film
Architecture: Set Designs from Metropolis to Blade Runner (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1996), 191-3, 191.
Originally published as “Kalikowelt,” Frankfurter Zeitung, 26 January 1926.

3

This despite the fact that in the decade following Universal’s grand opening, the studios
would come to define one of the salient aspects of the modern film industry: as
filmmaking in America became identified with a place, Hollywood, its business model
took its name from a spatial system, “the studios.” While the term “studio” continues to
serve as a common metonymic substitute for American commercial cinema and a ready
identifier (in America and abroad) for the business entities that dominate popular
moving-image culture, such familiarity belies the scant attention that has been devoted to
the studios’ pre-Hollywood origins or to their architectural forms and functions in any
period.

Figure 0.2: Gaumont studio set, ca. 1913. Collection Musée Gaumont.
Studio architecture – the always present but rarely visible frame that lies just
beyond the visual field of studio films – has played a key but rarely acknowledged role in
the history of filmmaking. Cinema’s first architectural forms shaped early film form by

4

helping determine lighting quality, shooting angles, set sizes, and working conditions.
They contributed to film content by housing workshops for set, prop, and costume design,
storage depots, dressing rooms, and other workspaces. And they conditioned cinema’s
early industrial practice in the first darkrooms, editing and coloring ateliers, and facilities
for manufacturing film devices. To understand how early cinematic architecture shaped
early cinema, it is necessary to understand how nineteenth-century developments in
architecture, building technology, and urban infrastructure shaped the first studios and, by
extension, cinema.
This dissertation investigates the studio’s origins and early history along three
intersecting axes: the cinematic, architectural, and technological. It argues for greater
attention to the importance of architectural space in the early developments of cinematic
content, form, and industrial practice. It situates the studios in the history of nineteenth-
century architectural technologies and design techniques in order to explain how and why
cinema and architecture became such closely aligned arts at the fin-de-siècle. And it
considers the studio as a cinematic technology – as the forgotten technology of film
history and a key component of the apparatus – in order to carve out a new place for
cinema (and film studies) in the histories of technology and the technological changes
that shaped the Western world in the twentieth century.
Focusing on the United States and France – the largest pre-war film producing
nations – this study examines studios built by six of early cinema’s most important film
corporations – the Edison Manufacturing Company, American Mutoscope and Biograph,
American Vitagraph, Georges Méliès, Gaumont, and Pathé Frères – as well as a series of

5

smaller producers and the numerous film companies that emerged in Southern California
in the early 1910s. It traces the development of studios from their origins in laboratory
spaces and photography studio designs to their place in the traditions of transparent glass
structures, electrical illumination technologies, and industrial manufacturing facilities.
Borrowing from these contemporary models, filmmakers and architects conceptualized a
new type of architectural, industrial, and artistic space. In doing so, they shaped the future
content and form of moving images and helped transform modern visual culture within
and beyond the studio’s walls.
Early filmmakers and studio architects also contributed to the destabilization of
ostensibly clear distinctions between nature and technology and reality and artifice. These
instabilities arose from nineteenth-century architectural and technological changes that
came together by the century’s end to structure urban industrial modernity in the West.
Key features of the resulting confluence of cultural and industrial practices included: new
building materials such as iron, steel, Portland cement, reinforced concrete, and diverse
forms of glass (prismatic, diffusing, and transparent rolled plates); new architectural
designs for open interior spaces of never-before-seen sizes (seen, most notably, at
international expositions, but also in modern factories, rail stations, and skyscrapers); and
new technologies and technological systems such as electricity, electrical lighting, water
and sewer networks, human-built parks, and modern forms of rapid transport. The studios
were the quintessential product of these developments: they were built using the same
materials and designs, and they gave rise to similar conceptions of the built and natural
environments. What’s more, early filmmakers made architectural and technological

6

change the stuff of early cinema, both in urban actualities and in studio films that
recreated the modern built environment (often in order to produce incisive commentaries
about its potential dangers).
By examining the studio in these broad contexts, this study shows how deeply
embedded cinema has been – and remains – in the histories of architecture and
technology. It does so not only by demonstrating the importance of machines and built
spaces in film history, but also by helping write cinema more thoroughly into
architectural history and the history of technology. Cinematic architectures, it argues,
contribute missing chapters to well-known histories of nineteenth and early twentieth-
century building and design, including the late history of glass-and-iron construction and
the early history of architectural modernism. Cinematic technologies, it proposes, trouble
conventional histories and theories of technology by showing that their commonly
assumed distinctions between nature and technology were never so clear and that
technologies of representation further confound efforts to make them seem to be so.
By combining these closely connected histories, this study intervenes in three
related, if rarely linked fields: early film history, theoretical discussions of cinema and
architecture, and the history of technology. Building on early film historians’ attention to
cinema's place in the changes associated with modernity, I demonstrate that our view of
this period and of modernity must include the architectural developments and new
conceptions of space that shaped the first studios and the form of the films made in them.
This attention to architecture in the pre-World War I period shows that cinema's
relationship to architecture developed from cinema's very origins, a fact that has been

7

overshadowed by scholars' focus on the intermedial experimentation of the 1920s.
Shifting the study of film architecture to the first studios, I contend, also allows us to
better understand cinema's relationship to technology. Studios are not only architectural
spaces. They are also building technologies, and their film products are technological
spaces – artificial moving-image worlds for the screen. Finally, using this definition of
the studios and studio films as technologies, I propose new ways of theorizing film’s
ontology as a technological system and spatial form.
Studios in Early Film History and Historiography
Film historians have long been aware of the basic details of the first studios.
Thanks in part to early filmmakers’ efforts – by writing their own histories – to stake out
their place in the medium’s invention (if not in the industry’s growing coffers), the first
descriptions of the studios date to the era of their creation.
3
These initial accounts helped
shape the earliest histories of the industry. Beginning in the 1920s, with historians such as
Terry Ramsaye, Will Day, and Merritt Crawford, and in the 1930s and 1940s, with
Georges Sadoul, Jean Mitry, Gordon Hendricks, and Lewis Jacobs, historians paid due
attention to the studios as part of an effort to catalog the inventions and industrial
practices that led to modern cinema.
4
But just as they characterized early cinema as little

3
See, for instance, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson and Antonia Dickson, History of the Kinetograph,
Kinetoscope, and Kinetophonograph (New York: Albert Bunn, 1895), Georges Méliès, “J’ai construit le
premier studio du monde: il y a 40 ans,” Pour Vous: le plus grand hebdomadaire du cinéma, December 1,
1937, Méliès, “Les Vues Cinématographiques,” in Annuaire général et international de la photographie
(Paris: Plon, 1907), 362-92, Alice Guy, “A Propos des Débuts de l’Industrie Cinématographique,”
Gaumont publication, 1930, and Charles Pathé, De Pathé frères à Pathé cinéma (Lyon: SERDOC, 1970
[1939]).

4
Hendricks, for instance, uses Dickson’s lead role in designing the Black Maria as evidence of Dickson’s
status as cinema’s true inventor. See Hendricks, The Edison Motion Picture Myth (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1961).

8

more than the rudimentary training ground for Hollywood and interwar European
classicism, early historians seldom treated the studios as anything more than the
“primitive” precursors to more modern replacements. My analysis of the studios builds
on the work of a new generation of film historians that has revised these views of early
cinema. Although these historians have done little to recover the studio from its
inventors’ self-serving histories or its reductive depiction in early film histories, they
have provided both the materials and analytic models for a fresh approach to the studio
that underscores its key role in (early) cinema history.
The film historians who revised early cinema history beginning in the late 1970s
argued against accounts that, as Charles Musser has described, shared a teleological
three-stage model of early cinema’s development. These histories begin with brief
surveys of the pre-cinematic devices and chronophotography experiments that, in their
estimation, culminated in the basic apparatus. Next, they describe the first filmmakers’
fledgling attempts to develop a standard film form before quickly arriving at the
emergence of narrative film and its first auteur, D.W. Griffith.
5
Bolstered by newly
available archival materials, the rigor of historical research methods, and greater attention
to the context of cultural production (inspired by New Historicism and the new cultural
history), the new generation of early cinema historians rejected this narrative. They took
issue with four of its main ideas and assumptions including: 1) its preference for
technological determinants – hardware histories of early film apparatuses – over attention
to the cultural and social factors that shaped early cinema; 2) its characterization of the

5
Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (New York: Scribner, 1990),
15-17.

9

first films as “primitive,” undifferentiated, and deriving their aesthetics (when they are
even recognized as having an aesthetic) almost exclusively from theatre; 3) its
assumptions about the consistency of exhibition contexts and spectatorial practices across
the pre-1907 period; and 4) its positioning of early film form in a teleology culminating
in the development of classical Hollywood narratives.
The resulting studies recuperated early cinema as not simply a precursor to
modern cinema, but as a rich period of film history in its own right, with a wide variety of
competing production, distribution, and exhibition practices, aesthetic forms, and models
of viewing and experiencing moving images.
6
This study does the same for the studios.
Just as historians have rejected characterizations of the first films as “primitive” and
undifferentiated, I demonstrate that the first studios were neither rudimentary nor
haphazardly designed. The first buildings for cinematic production were as much the
concrete product of a cinematic imagination as the films produced there. In order to
generate imaginary worlds on film, inventors had to create new worlds in which to film.
To do so, they necessarily looked outside the new world of cinema to a range of spaces
and spatial models from studio photography, theatrical performance, laboratory research,
industrial manufacturing, and urban architecture. In order to account for these diverse
influences, this study similarly looks outside film studies for the histories and methods
that help explain how filmmakers and studio architects conceptualized their new spaces
of visual cultural production.

6
See, for instance, the essays collected in John Fell, ed., Film Before Griffith (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1983) and the essays in Thomas Elsaesser, ed., Early Cinema: Space-Frame-Narrative
(London: British Film Institute, 1990).

10

As the work of early film historians has shown, examining the new medium at the
moment of its clear imbrication in a range of cultural, social, economic, and political
developments underscores the value of innovative methodologies that reach across
traditional disciplinary divides. Indeed, as Zhang Zhen has described, “more than a
period term, early cinema functions as a critical category,” a field of research that relies
on and is enriched by cross-disciplinary methods and a mix of historically-grounded
theory and theoretically-informed history.
7
Inspired by this treatment of early cinema,
this study endeavors not only to enrich our understanding of the first studios, but also to
further expand the bounds of film history and theory to more fully account for
architecture and technology.
The architectural and technological developments that shaped the first studios
were part of a broader series of changes to the Western world that scholars have
examined under the rubric of modernity. Drawing on the work of early twentieth-century
theorists including Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, and Siegfried Kracauer, the
historians who have made early cinema a critical category have done so, in part, by
situating film’s development in modern visual culture and social experience. As
described by Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz, this work defines modernity through
six major elements:
the rise of a metropolitan urban culture leading to new forms of entertainment and
leisure activity; the corresponding centrality of the body as the site of vision,
attention, and stimulation; the recognition of a mass public, crowd, or audience
that subordinated individual response to collectivity; the impulse to define, fix,
and represent isolated moments in the face of modernity’s distractions and
sensations …; the increased blurring of the line between reality and its

7
Zhang Zhen, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896-1937 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2006), xv.

11

representations; and the surge in commercial culture and consumer desire that
both fueled and followed new forms of diversion.
8

Within and according to these conditions, cinema succeeded by appealing to urban
crowds hungry for visual amusement and fascinated by life-like representations.
Cinema’s initial formal conceit – what Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault have
described as the “cinema of attractions” – reproduced the modern thrill of direct sensorial
assault experienced in modern amusements such as vaudeville shows and carnival rides,
as well as in the increasingly frenetic spaces of modern urban life.
9
As Schwartz,
Gunning, Ben Singer, and others have shown, film subjects, in turn, fed audience desires
for “astonishing” views of bodily motion and spectacular display. These spectacles
especially included, as Alison Griffiths, Fatimah Tobing Roney, and Jacqueline Stewart
have described, spectacles of difference popularized at international expositions and in
museum displays that must be understood in the context of increasing global travel,
(im)migration, and colonial exploration.
10
As Miriam Hansen, Lauren Rabinowtiz, and
others have argued, this thrill of difference extended to film’s early viewing conditions,
where normal social, racial, and gender boundaries (if not their hierarchies) were often

8
Leo Charney and Vannessa Schwartz, eds., Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1995), 3.

9
See Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectators and the Avant-Garde,” in
Thomas Elsaesser, ed., Early Cinema, 56-62 (Orginally published in Wide Angle vol. 8 no. 3/4, Fall 1986)
and Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator,” in Linda
Williams, ed., Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
1995), 114-133 (Originally published in Art and Text 34 (Spring 1989)).

10
See Fatimah Tobing Roney, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1996), Alison Griffiths, Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-
Century Visual Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), and Jacqueline Najuma Stewart,
Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2005).

12

momentarily lost in the clamorous public spaces of mass viewing.
11
And finally, as
Charney, Mary Anne Doane, and Jonathan Crary have described, in its technological
manipulation of space and time, cinema gave form to emerging ideas about human
vision, bodily sensation, and human experience that animated scientific and philosophical
discourses of the day.
12

These arguments have been criticized on a variety of fronts. Historians such as
Musser, for instance, have encouraged closer attention to cinema’s more immediate
influences, arguing that by opening it to such a wide range of influences, one runs the risk
of no longer talking about cinema at all.
13
Another group of critics, led by David
Bordwell and Charlie Keil, have argued that proponents of what they term the “modernity
thesis” overstate urban experience’s role in conditioning viewing practices and
reproducing the features of urban life. They claim that these analyses fail to adequately
account for modernity’s role in the development of film form, thus rendering modernity
an ill-suited heuristic. As Keil explains, “the fact that cinema’s formal development
paradoxically refuses to conform to the contours of modernity as a cultural context
remains a vexing issue.”
14

11
See Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1991) and Lauren Rabinowitz, For the Love of Pleasure: women, movies and culture in
turn-of-the century Chicago (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998).

12
See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), Leo Charney, Empty Moments: Cinema, Modernity,
and Drift (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998, Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time:
Modernity, Contingency, The Archive (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), and Crary,
Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999).

13
Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (New York: Scribner, 1990).

13

Even when accepting Gunning and Gaudreault’s “cinema of attractions” model’s
clear formal connections between early cinema and modern experience, Keil, Bordwell,
and others have argued that this model breaks down when faced with the task of
explaining the development of film narratives. But such criticisms have neglected the
work of scholars including Schwartz and Mark Sandberg, who have shown that the
structured narratives of popular modern cultural forms such as wax museums, morgue
displays, and serialized literature offered early guides for cinematic narrative structure.
15

My discussions of studio architecture and its effects on filmmaking offer another way of
understanding how modernity helped guide film form across the early period and into the
1910s. I trace these formal developments from what I term the “framed aesthetic” of the
Black Maria and similar early studios (Chapter One), to the fluid and “plastic” forms
produced in the first glass-and-iron studios (Chapter Two), to the cinematographic
innovations and increased realism engendered by the mammoth studios of the
Nickelodeon era (Chapters Three and Four), and, finally, to the studio-inspired formal
techniques by which filmmakers captured urban environments (Chapter Three), natural
landscapes, and backlot sets (Chapter Five) throughout the pre-war years.

14
See Charlie Keil, “”To Here From Modernity”: Style, Historiography, and Transitional Cinema,” in Keil
and Shelley Stamp, eds. American Cinema’s Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004), 51-65, 57. The “modernity thesis” is David Bordwell’s term; see
Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). For a defense of the
“modernity thesis,” see Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). And for Gunning’s more recent response, see Gunning,
“Modernity and Cinema: A Culture of Shocks and Flows,” in Murray Pomerance, ed. Cinema and
Modenrity (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 297-315.

15
See Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-De-Siècle Paris (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998) and Mark B. Sandberg, Living Pictures, Missing Persons:
Mannequins, Museums, and Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).

14

My analysis of film architecture builds on scholars’ attention to the importance of
modernity’s urban spaces in the formation of early practices of film viewing. The
tangible links between architecture and cinema described by Anne Friedberg and
Giuliana Bruno, in particular, have generated foundational theoretical models for
analyzing early cinematic experience.
16
Friedberg and Bruno's examinations of turn-of-
the-century architecture and modern urban space have been critical for our understanding
not only of the kinds of spaces to which urban inhabitants – the first film spectators –
were acclimated, but also to the ways of seeing that such spaces engendered. As
Friedberg, Bruno, and others have argued, “topoi of modernity” including the panorama,
diorama, arcades, museums, and storefront window displays established the conditions
for early cinematic viewing by normalizing spatial experiences of transitory movement
and gazing at and across transparent and illuminated surfaces. The first film spectators in
cities like Naples, Bruno argues, approached the new medium conditioned by
architectures that “opened up the urban space and exploded the division between interior
and exterior in favor of a fluid light space.”
17

As Friedberg argues, urban inhabitants and exposition-goers became acclimated
to cinema-like experiences in late nineteenth-century architectural and technological
innovations that transformed the experience of movement. The introduction of motorized

16
See, for instance, Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1993), Giuliana Bruno, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the Films
of Elvira Notari (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), and the essays collected in Leo Charney and
Vannessa R. Schwartz, eds. Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1995).

17
“Film,” Bruno argues, “dwells on the borders between interior and exterior,” and cinematic spectatorship
becomes a “tactile appropriation” on par with the experience of the transparent architectures of urban
modernity. Bruno, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map, 45-49.

15

walkways and elevators as well as travel technologies such as the automobile, train,
trolley, and hot-air balloon, Friedberg shows, instituted what she terms a “mobilized
virtual gaze.” At the same time that viewing was increasingly mobilized by modern urban
space, transport machines, and representational devices, she argues, the body became
more immobile as humans increasingly relied on technologies of artificial movement.
18

Cinema epitomized this form of experience by mobilizing the vision of seated spectators
and offering virtual voyages to distant and often-unreal spaces assembled through editing.
In this study, I shift our attention from the architectures of early viewing to the
neglected architectures of production.
19
I argue that the mobilized virtual gaze’s
paradoxical creation of motion had a counterpart in the studios where its voyages were
constructed. As filmmaking spaces became more artificial, the illusionary images they
produced became more realistic. In a rare invocation of the studio, Walter Benjamin
underscores this paradox, writing:
In the studio the mechanical equipment has penetrated so deeply into reality that
its pure aspect, freed from the foreign substance of equipment, is the result of a
special procedure, namely, shooting from a particular camera set-up and linking
the shot with other similar ones. The equipment-free aspect of reality here has
become the height of artifice; the sight of immediate reality has become the ‘blue
flower’ in the land of technology.
20

18
Friedberg, Window Shopping, 3.

19
The rejection of psychoanalysis and apparatus theory that helped drive early film history in the 1980s
may help explain why even those film historians who made connections between film and architecture
neglected the film studio, itself a key component of the apparatus. This study aims to return our attention to
the basic apparatus without, however, assuming that it determined cinematic experience. Just as film
historians have shown that the story of cinematic experience is more complex than apparatus theory would
have it, so this study shows that the apparatus is more complex than film theorists and historians have
assumed.

20
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed.
Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 217-252, 233. Originally published
as “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 5
(1936). I have used Miriam Bratu Hansen’s translation from Hansen, “Benjamin, Cinema and Experience:

16

As Miriam Hansen notes, Benjamin’s “blue flower” here refers to the German
Romanticist “blaue Blume,” a metaphor for “the unattainable object of the romantic
quest.”
21
For Benjamin, in the studio “immediate reality” becomes the unattainable
object. Ensconced within the land of technology, the real becomes more artificial than
fiction itself, accessible only, and paradoxically, through the camera’s lens, the single
location from which one can imagine the artificial scene to be free of illusion.
Left out of such a reading is the character of the studio itself, which was, of
course, a real place, however unreal its staged spaces and film products might have been.
But as I show by examining studio architecture in the broader history of materials,
designs, and building technologies, the studios themselves were the product of a similar
kind of architectural artificiality. Like the films produced in them, the studios – the
physical products of the same developments that produced arcades, exposition halls, and
department stores – contributed to the blurring of reality and representation that helped
define modernity.
Examined as architectural spaces, the studios contribute not only to early film
history’s illumination of the ways that urban modernity affected cinematic spectatorship,
but also to a growing literature about cinema and architecture that has, up to this point,
scarcely looked beyond the architecture of theaters and on-screen buildings. By
examining studio architecture, this study links cinema to a series of architectural
traditions and argues that the history of film’s relationship to the city and to architecture

‘The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology,” New German Critique, No. 40, Special Issue on Weimar
Film Theory (Winter 1987), 179-224, 203-4.

21
Hansen, “Benjamin, Cinema and Experience,” 204.

17

remains incomplete without more precise knowledge of cinema’s physical place in the
construction of the built environment.
(Studio) Cinema and Architecture
Intermedial experimentation in the 1920s brought cinema into close contact with
modernist movements in everything from literature, poetry, and performance to painting,
sculpture, and especially architecture. Interactions between filmmakers, architects, and
set designers produced enormous studio sets, modernist buildings used for filmmaking,
films commissioned to document modernism's novel architectural forms, and critical
writing exploring the similarities between filmmakers’ and architects’ treatments of
space. Such collaborations led to proclamations about the two forms’ profound
relationship. As René Clair remarked, “the art that is closest to cinema is architecture.”
This view encapsulated the ideas of innumerable contemporaries, including Abel Gance,
Sergei Eisenstein (a trained architect), Siegfried Kracauer (also an architect), the architect
and sometimes set designer Robert Mallet-Stevens, art historian Elie Faure, and Le
Corbusier.
22

In the past two decades historians and theorists have investigated such claims and
their value for film studies and architecture through three primary frameworks: film’s use
of architectural space (on-location or in set design), architecture’s use of cinematic space
(as a source of ideas about space and movement), and the meeting of architecture and

22
Quoted in Paul Virilio, The Lost Dimension, trans. Daniel Moshenberg (New York, N.Y: Semiotext(e),
1991), 69.

18

cinema in the spaces and practices of reception.
23
Scholars have made the 1920s a
privileged moment for this analysis. City symphonies,
24
German Expressionist films,
25

and the films of the emergent European avant-garde
26
often serve as the earliest
foundational texts for the field. And indeed these films demonstrate many of the
important links that scholars identify between the two mediums: their shared proclivity
for the modern urban environment, their common ability to manufacture and organize
space, their mutual concern with the play of light and shadow on form, and, at least in
their respective modernist movements (both emerging in the 1920s), their shared
tendency for formal experimentation and abstraction.
The 1920s saw architects, filmmakers, and critics develop a variety of theories
and practices that celebrated the perceived intimacy between cinema and architecture.
27

23
Mark Lamster, ed., Architecture and Film (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000); Juan
Antonio Ramírez, Architecture for the Screen: A Critical Study of Set Design in Hollywood’s Golden Age,
trans. John F. Moffitt (Jefferson, North Carolina; London: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2004); Léon
Barsacq, Caligari’s Cabinet and Other Grand Illusions: A History of Film Design, ed. Elliott Stein, trans.
Michael Bullock (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1976); François Penz and Maureen Thomas,
eds., Cinema and Architecture: Méliès, Mallet-Stevens, Multimedia (London: British Film Institute, 1997);
Dietrich Neumann, ed., Film Architecture: Set Designs from Metropolis to Blade Runner (Munich,
Germany: Prestel-Verlag, 1996); Edward Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004); Stephen Barber, Projected Cities (London: Reaktion, 2002);
AlSayyad Nezar, Cinematic Urbanism: A History of the Modern from Reel to Real (New York: Routledge,
2006), and Lucy Fischer, “City of Women: Busby Berkeley, Architecture, and Urban Space, Cinema
Journal 49.4 (2010), 111-130.

24
See, e.g., Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand’s Manhatta (1921), Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a
Great City (1927), Dziga Vertov’s The Man With a Movie Camera (1929), and László Moholy-Nagy’s
Berliner Stilleben (1926) and Marseille vieux port (1929).

25
Especially The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Weine, 1920) and Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927).

26
Commonly cited films include Marcel L’Herbier’s L’Inhumaine (1924), Man Ray’s Les Mystères du
château de Dé (1929), Pierre Chenal’s L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui (1929) and Hans Richter’s Die neue
Wohnung (1930).

27
Architectural theorist and historian Anthony Vidler has outlined the appearance of a series of concepts—
Elie Faur’s “cineplastics,” Hermann Scheffauer’s “fourth dimension,” Erwin Panofsky’s “dynamization of
space and spatialization of time,” El Lissitzky’s “pan-geometries,” Sergei Eisenstein’s “architectural

19

Architects such as El Lissitzky, Robert Mallet-Stevens, and Bruno Taut sought new
possibilities in film for imagining and producing abstract physical forms to match the
cinematic spaces created through set design, camera movements, and editing.
28
At the
same time, filmmakers including Sergei Eisenstein, Marcel Carné, and René Clair
understood architecture and the urban environment to be “spatial art[s] experienced in
time” that were ready-made resources for cinematic representation.
29
And finally,
theorists such as Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer wrote about cinema and urban
space as modern brethren. Cinema offered the means to capture the fleeting experiences
of an urban modernity whose always-moving and changing ephemerality was in turn
perfectly suited to film’s materialist aesthetics.
30

While theorists conceptualized the similarities between these two modern art
forms, however, they also began to identify tensions between their definitions of
cinematic space and their judgments about what kinds of spaces could and should be
represented. These tensions were prompted in part by the increasingly sophisticated set
designs at the UFA studios that housed the artists of German Expressionism, the French
studios that re-created Paris in the 1920s, and the burgeoning studios of classical
Hollywood. As studio sets became more realistic, filmmakers and critics increasingly

montage” and Walter Benjamin’s “filmic unconscious”—that sought to explain the ways that cinema and
architecture produced comparable spaces and similar spatial experiences. For each of these theorists cinema
offered new ways to enliven architectural space by imbuing it with artificial motion—that is, to
technologically produce fluid, plastic, artificial spaces. See Anthony Vidler, “The Explosion of Space:
Architecture and the Filmic Imaginary,” in Dietrich Neumann, ed, Film Architecture: Set Designs from
Metropolis to Blade Runner, pp. 13-25.

28
Anthony Vidler, “The Explosion of Space: Architecture and the Filmic Imaginary,” in Neumann, ed.,
Film Architecture: Set Designs from Metropolis to Blade Runner, 17.

29
Ibid, 22.

30
Ibid, 19

20

denounced their artifice. Filmmakers such as Marcel Carné and René Clair argued that
cinema, as the art form closest to architecture, needed to preserve the reality of an ever-
changing urban fabric instead of recreating it in studios.
31

The ensuing debates about cinema and film studios questioned the medium’s very
ontological definition: did film’s mechanical reproduction record and represent reality, or
was it inherently artificial? Over the next three decades Kracauer would construct his
famous theory of film around the exposition of these “two tendencies.” Kracauer situates
their origins not, of course, in the 1920s, but in the first years of cinema with the
Lumières’ realist actualités and Georges Méliès’s artificial, studio-produced fictions.
32

While many have criticized this “naïve” division, the more important point to recognize,
as I describe in Chapter Two, is that both the Lumières and Méliès should be seen as
products of widely felt tensions between nature and artifice created by the increasingly
artificial spaces of everyday life.
It should come as no surprise that the film studio was a locus for concerns about
artificiality in the 1920s. Not only was cinema’s reality in doubt; architectural and
technological changes to the built environment had threatened long-understood

31
Ironically, Carné consistently remade city streets and urban locales in the studio, and Clair filmed
portions of Paris qui dort in a small studio in the suburb of Joinville-le-pont and shot Sous les toits de Paris
(1930) entirely on sets built at the former Éclair studio in Epinay-sur-Seine. Meanwhile, architects such as
Mallet-Stevens were expressing concern about the tendency in architecture to attempt to mimic cinema,
rather than “offer[ing] itself up naturally to filmic action, always preserving the distance between the real
and the imaginary” (Vidler, 23). See Marcel Carné, “When Will the Cinema Go Down into the Street,” in
French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, ed. Richard Abel, vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1988), 127-128. Originally published as "Quand le cinéma descendra-t-il dans la rue?"
Cinémagazine 13 (November 1933). On Sous les toits de Paris see R. C Dale, The Films of René Clair, vol.
1 (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1986), 143.

32
Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (London; New York: Oxford
University Press, 1960).

21

conceptions of urban space for decades.
33
As synthetic materials such as iron and steel
replaced stone, brick, and wood, architects, engineers, and critics called architecture’s
own “reality” into question. These changes were also experienced en masse at
international expositions and in the greenhouses, winter gardens, arcades, factories, and
housing structures that took form over the course of the nineteenth century. Cinema and
the first studios, which emerged at the century’s end, inherited the spatial characteristics
and tensions that defined turn-of-the-century architecture. As physical embodiments of
changes to building technologies and conceptions of space, cinema and architecture
would be instrumental, if rarely acknowledged components of the technological changes
of the early twentieth century.
34

Film Studies, Film Studios, and the History of Technology
In order to understand film’s key role in late nineteenth-century technological
change, it is necessary to expand the traditional view of film technology. Film must be
understood as part of a longer history of technological development that goes beyond
imaging and communications devices or the function and role of cinema’s “basic
apparatus,” the camera and projector. An engagement with the broader history of
technology is not unique to this dissertation, but this approach remains all too rare in film

33
As historian Annette Fiero explains, "For architecture, the birth of iron construction in this period was
revolutionary in spatial, representational, and as well technological terms, particularly given the
implications of radically changing methods and scales of production.” See Annette Fierro, The Glass State:
The Technology of the Spectacle, Paris, 1981-1998 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 49.

34
See Rosalind Williams, Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the
Imagination (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990) and Williams, Retooling: A Historian Confronts Technological
Change (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002).

22

studies.
35
Historians of technology, for their part, have been no more eager to examine
the importance of film.
36
This study brings film studies and the history and philosophy of
technology into greater dialogue by examining the film studio’s place in the context of a
range of turn-of-the-century technological developments. It also offers a speculative
rereading of cinema’s ontology through non-cinematic theories of technological change.
Using cinematic technologies, it argues, filmmakers produced not simply films, but
artificial worlds that were on par with the synthetic spaces of the modern built
environment.
More than a single technological object or even a set of objects, cinema should be
understood as an integrated system of technologies – or, to borrow a term from historian
of technology Rosalind Williams, an environment – for the production, distribution, and
exhibition of moving images.
37
Even focusing solely on moving-image production,

35
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 et de l’ombre, Musser The Emergence of Cinema, Rossell, Living Pictures, Crafton,
Talkies, and O’Brien, Conversion to Sound. On the apparatus debates, see Rosen, ed. Narrative, Apparatus,
Ideology.

36
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, eds, Modernity and Technology.
Notable exceptions include Carlson, “Artifacts and Frames of Meaning.”

37
According to Williams, “technologies are best considered as environments rather than as objects.” She
argues, “from such an environmental perspective, technological change is best evaluated in terms of the
general direction of change rather than in terms of the supposed effects of this or that device.” An
“environmental” definition of cinema as a technology allows for a flexible approach to changes in
cinematic technology—such as the addition of sound/color or the transition to video—that account for both
continuities and discontinuities in the changing cinematic system rather than seeing each technological
change as radical alteration of cinema as such. See Rosalind Williams, Notes on the Underground: An
Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990), 127.

23

cinema’s technological environment includes: the camera (along with its constituent
parts—lenses, apertures, motors, light sources, pulleys, bolts, screws, housing, electrical
contacts, etc.), film stock (and processing chemicals), and the almost universally ignored
studio.
38
As film historians such as Laurent Mannoni, Deac Rossell, and Charles Musser
have shown, the invention of even the most basic elements of this system – the devices
for photographically recording movement and projecting its reanimation – involved more
than two centuries of technological developments and cultural practices. Yet even
Mannoni, Rossell, and Musser’s massive histories do not successfully account for all of
the wide variety of technological developments that contributed to cinematic technology
and film form.
39

Technological advances in many fields shaped early cinema. Just as its emergence
as an artistic, cultural and social form was conditioned by the broad social, cultural,
political, and economic changes that defined modernity, so too cinema’s development as
a technological system was made possible by a diverse series of scientific and mechanical
pursuits that grew out of the “second industrial revolution.” Cinema’s development
roughly coincides with these breakthroughs in technology including electrical lighting,
the internal-combustion engine (and the automobile), airplanes, wireless
communications, and synthetic chemicals. The second industrial revolution was also a

38
This environmental definition of cinematic technology might also include the range of machines and
techniques for building film machines as well as the techniques used to record, process, and edit moving
images.

39
Mannoni, Le Grand art de la lumière et de l’ombre: archéologie du cinema; Deac Rossell, Living
Pictures: The Origins of the Movies (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998); Charles
Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (New York: Scribner, 1990). Mannoni
and Musser’s studies tend to focus only on the development of systems of recording (cameras) and
projection, while Rossell’s work includes important information on the development of celluloid film stock.
None of these studies deal in any detail with production spaces or technologies.

24

consumer revolution sparked by the production of new objects such as the bicycle,
chemical dyes, the telephone, electric lights, the camera, and the phonograph, which
transformed everyday life in the West. As Rosalind Williams describes, “never before nor
since has there been such a concentrated period of technological change affecting
ordinary people.”
40

Building on studies of cinema’s relationship to modernity, early film historians
have begun to address cinema’s relationship to this moment of modern industrialization.
Lynn Kirby’s examination of silent cinema’s close relationship to the railroad is
exemplary of this trend. Kirby shows that the railroad set the stage for experiential
changes that cinema would embody and exploit. Among these changes, she includes a
new temporal consciousness (of synchronicity and simultaneity), the power of disruption
and discontinuity, and, expanding on the work of historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch,
modes of “panoramic perception.”
41
Kirby shows how early filmmakers not only made
contemporary technologies popular film subjects, but that they adapted and developed
formal techniques in order to do so. Frances Guerin has similarly examined cinema’s
relationship to industrial lighting technologies, arguing that in Germany modernity light
was uniquely poised as both the condition of possibility for filmic representation and a
common subject of it.
42
Finally, Kristen Whissel’s recent work shows that film

40
Rosalind Williams, Notes on the Underground, 70. Also see Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis: A
Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870-1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1989; 2004), 296.

41
Kirby, 7. See Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in
the 19
th
Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).

42
Guerin, A Culture of Light (). Guerin’s work pushes historians, much as I do in this study, to untangle
cinema’s complex status as both a technology for recording and a recorder of technology.

25

technologies played a key role in documenting and disseminating images of and ideas
about American modernity. Aided by other transport, or in Whissel’s terms, “traffic”
technologies, cinema helped shape Americans’ understandings of modern life and
national identity built on military technologies and spectacular technological displays at
international expositions.
43
This study builds on Kirby, Guerin, and Whissel’s work by
focusing on building technologies and, more generally, cinema’s place in what historians
of technology have described as the greatest technological revolution in history: the
construction of a “human-built world” in which technologies came not simply to
dominate the natural environment, but rather to replace nature with artificial alternatives.
Historians of technology have used the idea of the “human-built world” to rethink
the history of technological change in the West.
44
Inspired by Lewis Mumford, historians
such as Thomas P. Hughes and Rosalind Williams have argued against the Industrial
Revolution as the epochal shift defining the modern world.
45
Hughes and Williams posit
the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century industrial revolutions as aspects of a much longer
process—Western civilization’s gradual detachment from the natural environment—that
simply accelerated in industrial modernity. As Mumford described in the 1930s, this
process involved modifications to the environment that are experienced not only through
new machines, but also in new social practices and cultural forms. This dissertation

43
Whissel, Picturing American Modernity

44
See Bertrand Gille, Histoires des techniques (Paris: Gallimard, 1978); Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of
Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983);
Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm (New York: Viking
Penguin, 1989); and Hughes, Human-Built World: How to Think about Technology and Culture (Chicago,
IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2004).

45
Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1934).

26

deploys this concept as a way of framing early cinema’s (and especially the studio’s)
relationship to the built environment of modernity.
In Technics and Civilization Mumford argues that the development of modern
technology in the West began in the tenth century, at least seven hundred years before the
first industrial revolution.
46
In Mumford's view, the centuries leading up to the inventions
of the steam engine and the automated loom involved a long process of ideological and
social preparation that explain why, with the Industrial Revolution, civilizations allowed
themselves to be dominated by mechanization. Modern industrial society, he explains, is
not defined simply by the existence of new devices or “mechanization and
regimentation,” but rather by the degree to which “these functions have been projected
and embodied in organized forms which dominate every aspect of our existence.”
47

Mumford’s argument rests on the recognition that mechanization develops
through changing conceptions of time and space that accompany new materials,
machines, and technological practices for ordering the natural environment. This process
began with the first repetitive use of tools and became modern in the temporally-ordered
routine of the seventh-century monastery. “The clock, not the steam-engine,” Mumford
argues, “is the key-machine of the modern industrial age.”
48
By the thirteenth century the
proliferation of mechanical clocks in cities initiated modern mechanization by
synchronizing human actions and causing a shift in temporal experience that prefigured

46
“Men had become mechanical,” Mumford writes, “before they perfected complicated machines to
express their new bent and interest.” Mumford, Technics and Civilization, 3.

47
Mumford, 4.

48
Mumford, 14.

27

the factory production and railroad schedules of the Industrial Revolution. Similarly, new
practices of building with wood and glass created new ways of ordering space that
anticipated the artificial environments that glass-and-iron architecture created in the
nineteenth century.
49

Historians have used Mumford’s analysis to investigate industrial modernity.
Hughes, Williams, and Leo Marx, in particular, have extended it to examine technologies
including electrical power systems, military devices, railroads, mining, and civil
engineering. While all of this work shares Mumford’s emphasis on technology’s
increasing control over nature and its corollary effects on experiences of time and space,
Williams’s analysis of late-nineteenth-century literature is especially useful for
understanding the cultural responses to technological change that developed alongside
cinema.
50

By examining the recurring theme of subterranean worlds in nineteenth-century
literature, Williams shows that by the turn of the twentieth century technological
alterations to the environment prompted both anxieties and fanciful speculations about
the future of built space. Williams argues, “since the nineteenth century, narratives about
underground worlds have provided a prophetic view into our environmental future … in a

49
On the social effects of glass from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, see Mumford, 124-131.

50
See Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden. Williams traces the roots of the human-built world to the
Neolithic revolution (10,000 BCE), when humans began to shift from “the pastoral life of hunting and
gathering” to “the integrated invention of agriculture, of cities, and indeed of history itself.” While the
Neolithic revolution involved material changes in humans’ abilities to control the natural environment, the
subsequent shift to a human-built world involves detachment from nature through the construction of
artificial space. In the human-built world, Williams argues, nature is “so mixed and mingled with human
processes that it can no longer be identified as a separate entity.” Williams, Retooling, 23-24.

28

manufactured world.”
51
Underground tales such as Edgar Allen Poe’s “MS. Found in a
Bottle” (1833), The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), and “Eureka” (1848),
Verne’s Voyage au centre de la terre (1864) and Les Indes noires (1877), H.G. Wells’s
The Time Machine (1895), Gabriel Tarde’s Fragment d’histoire future (1896), and E.M.
Forster’s “The Machine Stops” (1909) are, Williams argues, “stories not of descent into a
sacred timeless realm, but of projection into a highly complex technological human
future.”
52

Although the archetypal journey to the underworld is part of a much longer
literary tradition, Williams shows that narratives about imaginary subterranean societies
emerged as modern science and technology made such places increasingly possible.
53
By
the second half of the nineteenth century the installation of modern urban infrastructure
(“sewers, water mains, steam pipes, subways, telephone lines, electrical cables”) made
excavation a familiar aspect of daily life not only for rural mining communities, but also
for the pedestrians of the modern metropolis. While this excavation was often understood
as a component of valuable technological progress, it also created anxiety about
environmental and social changes.
54
Technological change seemed increasingly close to

51
Rosalind Williams, Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990), 4.

52
Williams, Notes on the Underground, 16.

53
Williams, Notes on the Underground, 11. In contrast, “as scientific knowledge advanced, the idea of
discovering a hidden inner world became less and less credible.”

54
“For the people of the nineteenth century,” Williams writes, “the everyday experience of looking at
overturned soil provided a visual image of social upheaval.” Williams, Notes on the Underground, 52-3.
See also David L. Pike, Subterranean Cities: The World Beneath Paris and London, 1800-1945 (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2005).

29

home as new consumer goods (mentioned above) made it commonplace, “domestic, even
intimate” to ordinary people rather than “progress on a heroic, titanic scale.”
55

During this moment, literary depictions of the underworld provided a form of
cultural evaluation that reflected the connections that theorists and critics were making
between technological, social, and psychological changes in the human-built
environment. Skeptics such as Friedrich Schiller and Thomas Carlyle warned against the
alienating and demoralizing effects of technology, emphasizing the image of the machine
encroaching on the natural environment. This negative view of technology contrasted
with sites such as department stores, the arcades, and amusement parks that used
technology to create “environments of consumer pleasure.” Williams argues that these
“pseudo-subterranean” fantasy worlds provided a temporary respite from technologies’
intrusion into the world at large.
By the turn of the twentieth century, the reception of technological change was
thus constructed on the dialectical relation between “two basic types of technological
environment—one invading the natural environment, the other sealed off from nature.”
56

The development of the human-built world was based on this give and take between
anxiety over the degradation of nature (and the associated social and psychological
consequences) and the desire for a self-constructed retreat. While Williams is correct to
emphasize the importance of consumer-oriented, artificially enclosed fantasy spaces to
the popular reception of changes to the built environment, she overlooks cinema’s

55
Williams, Notes on the Underground, 70.

56
Williams, Notes on the Underground, 113-14.

30

important role in this process.
57
Early film spectatorship was founded in the same kinds
of modern fantasy spaces. Moreover, early film viewing spaces were marked by the
interplay of pleasure and anxiety that characterized contemporary technology. On one
hand, these enclosed and “subterranean” spaces used technology to create a fantastical
retreat from the built environment. On the other hand, the sheer variety of such spaces
complicates any simple characterization of early cinema as an artificially enclosed space
of consumer pleasure. While kinetoscope parlors, nickelodeons, fêtes foraines, and early
film theaters may have at times fit this description, they were also spaces of technological
terror (due to fires produced by faulty projectors and nitrate film stock, for instance).
Indeed, early cinematic viewing spaces embody both aspects of Williams’s dialectic of
the modern technological environment. They are sources of pleasure and anxiety.
58

But if the spaces of cultural reception provided a respite from technological
change, it was at the very least an ironic one. As Williams notes, these spaces were no
doubt themselves products of the technological changes from which they supposedly
offered an escape. This irony is perhaps most pronounced in the case of cinema, not only
because of the technologies required for projection, but also because of the character of
the spaces and practices of film production that manufactured the worlds to which
spectators “retreated.” Film studios may be the prototypical sites of the human-built
world’s artificial reproduction of the natural environment.

57
Instead, Williams too quickly skips ahead to modern artificial spaces such as the “media room of a
private home,” first-class airplane cabins, and limousines. Williams, 113.

58
See, for instance, Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment.”

31

The studios offer an important example of the search for versatile sources of
consistent, controllable light that became one of the primary pursuits of technological
change in late nineteenth-century Western cities and manufacturing centers. Architects,
engineers, and filmmakers solved the problem of interior lighting through various means,
including the development of glass-and-iron enclosures on ever-larger scales. At the same
time, developments in reinforced concrete engineering made it possible to build “daylight
factories,” so named because their many windows allowed scales of interior lighting not
available with brick, stone, and wood construction.
59
Electrical lighting technologies also
offered new possibilities for controlling light beyond the dictates of the sun, seasons, and
weather. These developments in building technologies responded to the same demands
that led filmmakers into studios: the desire for controlled environments protected from
rain, wind, and snow and in which light and heat could be regulated and manipulated.
This movement to replace the natural environment with manufactured alternatives
allowed for (and was reproduced by) cinema’s paradoxical productions of greater
representational realism through studio-produced artificiality. The resulting films offered
a new form of artificial environment – technologically produced, moving-image worlds
for the screen – that were consistent with the electrical lights and diffusing glass that
replaced the sun, human-built parks that brought a version of nature into the metropolis,
and new forms of transport that replaced livestock, water currents, and wind power with
modern machinery. Cinema should be understood in this way as one of the key
technologies of the human-built world of industrial modernity. In turn, the human-built

59
On “Daylight” factories, see Reyner Banham, A Concrete Atlantis: U.S. Industrial Building and
European Modern Architecture, 1900-1925 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), Chapter 1.

32

world should be understood as a key aspect of cinema’s technological ontology. As a
modern technology and form of technological space, film would both contribute to
twentieth-century technological changes and offer a crucial medium for responding to
them.
Theorizing Film (Studio) Technology
By the 1930s, film theorists and critics of technology such as Lewis Mumford
recognized cinema's complex status as a technology and, more significantly, its unique
relationship to nature. Mumford classified cinema (along with photography) as “a
specific art of the machine,” an essential, if under-examined piece of his sweeping history
of technology.
60
For Mumford, the emergence of cinema marked not only a reshuffling of
modern notions of time and space, but also new and contradictory possibilities for
experiencing nature technologically.
61
Lamenting that “it has been so stupidly misused,”
Mumford proposes that, “the motion picture nevertheless announces itself as a major art
of the neotechnic phase. Through the machine, we have new possibilities of
understanding the world we have helped to create.”
62
Mumford’s view of cinema in many
ways simply echoes the views of contemporary thinkers such as Benjamin, Kracauer, and
Béla Balázs who noted film’s epistemological potential for accentuating human
perception (for instance, by slowing down, speeding up, and reversing movement and
enlarging objects).

60
Mumford, 337.

61
In the early twentieth century, he argues, “the flow of time ceased to be representable by the successive
mechanical ticks of the clock: its equivalent … was the motion picture reel.” Mumford, 243.

62
Mumford, 343.

33

But Mumford’s analysis also suggests a less tangible and more provocative
potential in cinema’s reproduction of the living world. In response to film’s presentation
of “the direct and immediate experience of living itself,” he argues, “we must directly
see, feel, touch, manipulate, sing, dance, [and] communicate before we can extract from
the machine any further sustenance for life.”
63
More than simply a call to reject
technological mediation in favor of lived experience, Mumford suggests that we hold the
power to unlock a hidden, vital potential in the machine. At the moment when, according
to Mumford’s view of technological change, machines threatened to replace nature with
manufactured alternatives, cinema and photography offered a last possibility for
extracting a form of liveliness from the natural world. What exactly Mumford had in
mind is far from clear, and the “machine arts” remain only a stimulating morsel in his
larger body of work. But Mumford was not alone in recognizing a strange potential in
technology to extract something typically unseen from nature. At the same moment,
Martin Heidegger was formulating a theory of technology with an equally compelling
vision of its relationship to the fleeting vestiges of the natural environment.
As a specific machine art, cinema should be understood somewhat differently as
an exemplary instance of what Heidegger would theorize under the similarly-inflected
category of “modern technics” and the modern attempt to conquer the world as an image.
As with Mumford, for Heidegger the condition of modern technics is characterized by a
shift in the relationship between nature and technology.
64
Pre-modern technologies

63
Mumford, 344.

64
See Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning
Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 3-35. Published

34

sought simply to work around nature’s limitations; modern technologies fundamentally
alter our conception of the natural environment by changing its nature through
reordering. Heidegger distinguishes between the wooden bridge that provides passage
over the Rhine without altering its flow and the hydroelectric plant that, in halting its
flow, changes the very essence of the river, placing it on reserve for exploitation.
65
This
understanding of modern technologies as dominating the natural environment
differentiates Heidegger’s theory from Mumford’s (and the “human-built world” thesis’s)
view of technological change as simply replacing it. And indeed, as Anne Friedberg
notes, Heidegger offered no more optimistic a view of modern media, which he believed
threatened to destroy the senses.
66

But Heidegger also argues that this alteration carries a crucial representational
function: “the fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as
picture.”
67
The natural environment reserved for human use is also ordered for
representation, framed and set before the human subject as an image.
68
In this respect,

in German as “Die Frage nach der Technik, Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfullingen: Günther Neske Verlag,
1954), 13-44.

65
Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 16. Heidegger also describes the process by which
the sun’s energy is stockpiled and used, long after the fact, in the form of coal mined, hauled, stored, and
burned into steam.

66
See Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006),
97.

67
Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other
Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 115-154, 134. Published in German as
“Die Zeit des Weltbildes,” Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1950), 69-104. The
published version comes from a lecture titled “Der Grundvorgang der Neuzeit ist die Eroberung der Welt
als Bild” (June 19, 1938).

68
Samuel Weber, “Upsetting the Setup: Remarks on Heidegger’s ‘Questing After Technics,’” in Weber,
Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 55-75, 68. The
necessary transformation of nature that occurs in this process can be clearly explained in terms of

35

Heidegger offers an important way of thinking about film technologies that complements
this understanding of cinema as a component of the artificial reproduction of nature in
modernity. The film studio, I will argue, serves precisely this function of ordering nature
– in a very tangible way – for reproduction. As Samuel Weber describes, Heidegger
fittingly terms this process enframing or emplacement (Gestell), a term that captures the
spatial character of modern technology’s manipulation of the natural environment.
69
As
Friedberg describes, the notion of the frame, or enframing, was never more than “a
metaphor for the ‘enframing’ implicit in modern thought and experience.”
70
It
nonetheless offers a valuable metaphor for cinema’s technological function. As I describe
in Chapter One, the studio was a machine for enframing nature (especially the sun) and
placing it on reserve for the production of moving images. Filmmakers used film
technologies to order and re-order nature by enframing it in the camera lens, on the
celluloid strip, and on the editing table, before sending it off to be re-framed in projection
and the subjective experience of viewing.
71

In this study I thus analyze cinema’s – and especially the film studio’s – role in
this re-ordering of nature as an image in industrial modernity both in Mumford’s terms,
as a prototypical example of an artificial technological environment, and in Heidegger’s,

agriculture, where pre-modern processes of hoeing and tilling – processes that simply encourage the land to
produce plants as it already would – give way to the technological and chemical processes by which
modern agriculture goads the land into mass-producing crops. As Heidegger describes: “Agriculture is now
the mechanized food industry. Air is now set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield
uranium, for example; uranium is set upon to yield atomic energy …” Heidegger, “The Question
Concerning Technology,” 15.

69
Weber, 71.

70
Friedberg, The Virtual Window, 97.

71
Friedberg uses Heidegger’s metaphor of the “frame” as “a grounding metaphysic for the dominance of
the frame and its visual system” in modern media. See The Virtual Window, 94-98.

36

as a technology for rendering the world as picture. By emphasizing Mumford’s rare
invocations of cinema and pushing Heidegger’s metaphor of enframing beyond simply
technology to include technological representation, I aim to further bridge the gap
between the histories and theories of technology and cinema that I address in historical
terms more generally. I explore the film studio’s dynamic history (as the product of a
range of architectural traditions, technological developments, and filmmaking needs) and
uniquely heterogeneous status (as a filmmaking site, an architectural form, and a
technological space). In doing so, I hope not only to close the gap between disciplines
and methodological approaches, but also to create space for other (and even more
imaginative) theoretical and interdisciplinary explorations of the relationships between
space, place, architecture, technology, and cinema.
The importance of these relationships remains as poignant as ever today as virtual
reality, online communities, artificial intelligence, cloning, and genetically modified food
make fears about technological reproduction and artificial environments ever-present in
the news media and popular culture. Just as the first film studios provided an important
site for both creating and evaluating artificial worlds, so moving-image media (and their
production spaces) continue to be key spaces and tools for imagining our technological
future. We would do well to remain attentive not only to those imagined futures, but also
to the technologies with which we imagine them and the lessons of their long histories.
Black Boxes & Glass Houses; Rooftops & Factory Floors; Back Lots & Backlots
Five chapters trace the chronological development of studio architecture up to the
cessation of French production during World War I and the early years of the classical

37

Hollywood studios in Southern California in the mid-1910s. Each chapter focuses on one
or two studios as exemplary models of general trends in studio form and situates them in
the architectural and technological contexts that informed the studios’ designs, the
content and form of the films produced there, and the studios’ relationships to the
changing built environment of Western cities. The chapters alternate between the
American (Chapters 1, 3, and 5) and French (Chapters 2 and 4) contexts, but also identify
continuities and discontinuities between the two nations and, when appropriate, other
important early filmmaking contexts.
While by no means exhaustive in its description of studio architectural forms or
filmmaking practices in the early period, this study does claim to account for the major
trends that shaped early studios in the West. My research has found remarkable
consistency in studio architecture across the United States (including studios in New
York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia), France, Britain, Germany, Italy, and
Denmark. Different architectural traditions no doubt contributed to regional specificity in
building forms and materials (especially for the buildings that often surrounded studio
production stages). But the glass-and-iron model described in Chapter Two became the
dominant studio form and, to the best of my knowledge, could be found in every national
context in this period. This consistency suggests that the architectural roots I describe –
the importance of glass-and-iron construction, photography studio designs, and the
increasing use of modern materials such as concrete and steel – reflect more general
trends that may be explained by modernity’s characteristic international movements of
people, materials, and ideas. As film historians have shown, this was especially the case

38

in early cinema, which not only was defined by the international movement of films,
filmmakers, and film technologies, but also is replete with cases of filmmakers working
in foreign studios and companies establishing studios in foreign nations.
72

The first chapter examines W.K.L. Dickson’s Black Maria studio and its critical
role in Dickson and Thomas Edison’s invention of moving images. At Edison’s West
Orange, NJ laboratory, the problem of inventing cinema became not simply a question of
creating a camera or projector, but also an architectural problem of producing the
necessary space for capturing movement. The Black Maria offered a solution in the form
of both a place in which to record movement and the frame and aesthetic for a modern
form of technological space – film. By situating the studio in the laboratory’s concurrent
projects – including the development of electricity, electrical lighting, Portland cement,
sound recording, the x-ray, and the telegraph – I argue that the lab’s culture of
experimentation and analysis shaped film production and contributed to the design and
use of the studio and its early film aesthetics. The Black Maria films’ formal character –
what I term the “framed aesthetic” – was a direct result of the studio’s architectural form
and reflected the technological enframing by which Dickson’s design strove to put the
sun on reserve for cinematic representation. I examine the roots of similar attempts to
regulate natural light and their aesthetic results in the photographic motion studies created
by Étienne-Jules Marey at his Station Physiologique in Paris (1882) and Eadweard
Muybridge at his laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania Veterinary Hospital
(1884). I track its later reincarnations in a series of rotating studios that Dickson built on

72
Indeed, the first studio designer, W.K.L. Dickson was born in France to British parents and designed
studios for two different American companies and two more for British and French affiliates.

39

a New York City rooftop in 1896, in London on the banks of the Thames in 1898, and in
the Parisian suburb of Courbevoie in 1899.
The decline of the Black Maria, which Edison replaced in 1901 with a new glass-
enclosed rooftop studio in Manhattan, corresponded with a shift in studio filmmaking
practices and film aesthetics. The second chapter examines the form of studio
architecture – the glass-and-iron studio – that replaced the Black Maria and became the
most common model for the film studio through the 1910s. It focuses on Georges
Méliès’s 1897 studio, the first in France, and situates the development of “glass house”
studios in nineteenth-century glass-and-iron architecture, particularly international
exposition structures and photography studios. The chapter argues that the same spatial
and material qualities that contemporary critics observed in the late nineteenth-century
architectural and engineering forms captured by filmmakers outside the studios –
including spatial fluidity, material plasticity, artificiality, and especially transparency –
characterized the glass studios themselves and reappeared in the form of the films made
in them. In particular, it examines how transparency – the principle that, according to
architectural historian Anthony Vidler, “dominate[d] all others throughout the history of
modernism” – shaped and was shaped by cinema. As the work of Anne Friedberg,
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, and others has shown, transparency was key to the practices of
looking through architectural surfaces (at storefront displays and the passing landscapes
seen from railroad cars) that helped shape early film spectatorship. But the darkened
theater was a site of architectural transparency only insofar as the screen offered a

40

window-like view into an artificial cinematic world. Rather, if cinema contributed to
modernist transparency, this chapter shows, it did so in its glass-enclosed studios.
Glass-and-iron studios gave rise to new film aesthetics that contrasted sharply
with the “framed aesthetic” seen in films produced at the Black Maria and its successors.
In examining the formal developments that emerged in Méliès’s studio, I use Michel
Foucault's concept of the “heterotopia” – a modern type of space in which “all the other
real sites that can be found within the culture are simultaneously represented, contested,
and inverted” – as one model for theorizing the studio’s unique juxtaposition of a
consistent architectural frame with an always changing interior.
73
If, as Foucault
contends, heterogeneity, movement, and interrelation defined modern space, the film
studio may have been its prototypical form and offered a critical location for exploring
the anxieties and possibilities of modern urban life.
Finally, the chapter analyzes how filmmakers such as Méliès indeed used the
studio to re-imagine and critique modernism’s transparent and technological spaces. It
focuses on Méliès’s Jules Verne-inspired Voyages Extraordinaires, reading these films as
critical responses to industrial modernity. Méliès’s films, it shows, typify the close
relationship that developed between cinematic production and technological change in
the early twentieth century. Filmmakers and architects used new technologies to construct
filmmaking worlds – the studios – that they in turn used to create film worlds, which
allegorized the dangers and anxieties produced by the modernizing built environment.

73
Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” translated by Jay Miskowiec, Diacrtics, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Spring,
1986), pp. 22-27, 24. Originally published as “Des Espaces Autres” in Architecture-Mouvement-Continuité,
October 1984.

41

The first filmmakers also, of course, quickly left their laboratories and studios
with devices and techniques ready-made for framing this changing built environment. My
third chapter begins by examining their non-studio films in order to situate cinema’s
architectural development in contemporary changes to Western cities and the industrial
landscapes around them. From the Lumières’ first subject, La Sortie des Usines Lumière
(1895), filmmakers working for Edison and Biograph in New York, the Lumières,
Méliès, and Pathé in Paris, and itinerant filmmakers Mitchell and Kenyon throughout
Britain made scenes of factory labor, civil engineering, skyscrapers, and modern forms of
travel frequent settings for early cinema. Focusing on New York City, I argue that these
films not only offer visual evidence of the technological context that shaped the first
studios and films; they also show how early filmmakers used their new film technologies
to both celebrate and, at times, critique the changes that shaped the modern built world.
The chapter further examines the studio’s relationship to the built environment by
recounting how competing American film companies in New York used cutting-edge
building technologies in an effort to construct the twentieth century’s most advanced film
studios. Responding to Edison’s 1901 move to a Manhattan rooftop glass house, in 1903
Biograph established the world’s first studio to rely exclusively on artificial lighting.
74

Biograph’s artificially lit films enjoyed critical and commercial success, pushing Edison
and companies such as American Vitagraph to use reinforced concrete and new forms of
glass to build larger and more flexible studios, which accelerated and enhanced
production. Using these materials, architects created film studios that attained new

74
The studio used Cooper-Hewitt Mercury Vapor lamps developed with financing from George
Westinghouse, Edison’s longtime foe in the electrical lighting business.

42

degrees of independence from the natural environment, allowing filmmakers to create
artificial film worlds seemingly at will, a flexibility that was key to cinema’s success in
the early twentieth century.
The fourth chapter analyzes the expansion of film studios into mass production
centers in major Western cities, focusing on Gaumont’s 1905 studio, built in northeast
Paris adjacent to the Buttes-Chaumont Park. The studio was the largest in the world
before World War I and comprised facilities for every aspect of film production and
distribution, including buildings for manufacturing cameras, projectors, and film stock.
As studios such as Gaumont in Paris, Pathé in Vincennes and Joinville, and Vitagraph in
Brooklyn began to look and operate more like the industrial centers of the later
Hollywood “dream factory system,” in what ways, the chapter asks, did the “factory”
metaphor match the reality of studio production? I examine Gaumont’s architectural
spaces and concurrent practices of film and industrial production, including its
development of early sound technologies and the electrical generators, transformers, and
regulators that the company needed because Paris’s emerging electrical network did not
reach the studio. In doing so, I argue that Gaumont became an emblematic site of the
tangible links between cinematic, architectural, and technological development that
marked early cinema.
The final chapter focuses on the transition to Hollywood and the peculiar
reinvention of studio form that took place there between 1909, when the Selig Polyscope
Company established the first studio in the LA area, and 1915. In the early 1910s, the
film studio’s architectural genealogy could be found in physical form nestled between

43

Hollywood’s rolling hills. While some companies began, once again, by filming on open-
air stages and “glass houses,” others shifted to the hybrid glass-enclosed and electrically-
lit studios that were becoming familiar across the U.S. and Europe. As more filmmakers
settled in southern California, they surrounded these older studio designs with the “dark
studios” and backlots that soon defined classical Hollywood. In doing so, they established
architectural and spatial models for Hollywood cinema by not only taking advantage of
California’s seductively cinematic landscapes, as has been described, but also by
grounding their film practice in the familiar studio settings established in cinema’s first
decade. The creation of studio backlots, I argue, offered a working solution to the same
basic tension that drove Dickson’s design for the Black Maria two decades earlier:
filmmakers still needed bright sunlight (and now also natural-looking scenes), and they
continued to create technological spaces to regulate the sun and put nature (now acres of
it) on reserve for cinematic representation.
The dissertation concludes in 1915, the year that Universal City opened as the
largest studio in the world while French studios stocked war provisions. In the next
decade the links between architecture, technology, and cinema would animate new stories
with the rise of classical Hollywood, the expansion of new studios across Europe and
Asia, sound films and the requisite studio architectures developed to produce them, and
the well-known experiments among avant-garde filmmakers and modern architects. As
this study demonstrates, the future of cinema was by no means fixed in its first two
decades, but the relationships between cinema, architecture, and technology forged in the

44

first studios would continue to be a key to how film forms, production practices, and
viewing experiences developed throughout silent cinema and well beyond.

45

CHAPTER ONE

Black Boxes and Open-Air Stages:
Film Studio Technology and Environmental Control from the Laboratory to the Rooftop

Figure 1.1: Black Maria, circa winter 1893-1894, Courtesy of U.S. Dept. of the Interior, National
Park Service, Thomas Edison National Historical Park.

In late 1892 at Thomas Edison’s laboratory in West Orange, NJ, William
Kennedy Laurie Dickson designed an architectural space like few seen before. Soon
dubbed the Black Maria—a colloquialism for nineteenth-century police paddy wagons—
the building was variously described by contemporary observers as a coffin, cavern, or
outright conundrum. Today it is better known as the world’s first film studio. Dickson
developed the studio concurrently with two of Edison’s better-known moving-image
machines, the Kinetograph (camera) and Kinetoscope (projector), and indeed the studio
was integral to Dickson’s work on these devices. Each operated on the same principles:

46

the juxtaposition of light and dark, the interplay of movement and stasis, and the
technological reproduction of nature. As with the Kinetograph and Kinetoscope, the
Black Maria allowed Dickson, Edison, and the inventors, artists, and image-makers who
followed to create new forms of visual representation and to contribute to the emergence
of new conceptions and experiences of modern technological space.
While the Black Maria remains an often-celebrated icon of early film history and
a companion “first” to Edison’s moving-image apparatuses, unlike those devices,
historians and theorists have failed to adequately account for its formal genealogy and, as
a result, its importance for theorizing film space.
75
Indeed, scholars have too quickly
accepted the idea (dating to Dickson himself) that the studio was simply a singular,
idiosyncratic form, and (following the earliest generation of film historians) that
“modern” studios soon made its “primitive” design little more than a souvenir of film
history. Such characterizations belie the complexity of the structure’s form and function,
its historical roots, and, in particular, the spatial predecessors that contributed to
Dickson’s design. These spaces—which included the Edison laboratory, Eadweard
Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey’s respective research laboratories, photography
studios, and civil engineering designs—point to the varied artistic, architectural,
scientific, and technological contexts that guided early cinema’s development.
76

75
Paul Spehr’s recent biography of Dickson provides a welcome expansion of our understanding of the
context from which the Black Maria emerged at the Edison lab. 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 lab have provided invaluable materials for the analysis that follows. See
Paul Spehr, The Man Who Made Movies: W.K.L. Dickson (Eastleigh: John Libbey Publishing, 2008).

76
As Georges Sadoul notes, another structure that may have prefigured or inspired the Black Maria was the
late nineteenth-century héliogravure glass-covered workshop, but Sadoul offers no evidence for this claim.

47

By examining the spaces and forms that influenced the Black Maria’s design, the
films that the Edison Manufacturing Company produced in the studio, and the studios and
films that came after it, this chapter will argue that cinema emerged as an important
component of a broad reformation of the relationship between nature and technology in
the late nineteenth-century. Beginning with Lewis Mumford’s work in the 1920s,
historians of technology have argued that the turn of the twentieth century marked a new
stage in the greatest technological revolution in history: the construction of an artificial
world founded not simply on our domination and exploitation of nature through
machines, but rather on nature’s outright replacement by human-built technological
environments.
77

The devices and materials undergirding this new technological world emerged
from late nineteenth-century research laboratories such as Edison’s. Here, the craft-shop
model of collaborative labor and invention encouraged overlaps and intersections among
new inventions that helped lead to the production of the broad technological systems that
shaped industrial modernity. Cinema should be understood as a significant component of
that process. The film technologies that emerged from the laboratory would offer a
powerful system of world building of their own, with the studio as their spatial locus. At
the Edison laboratory, the problem of inventing cinema became not simply a question of
creating a camera or projector, but also an architectural problem of producing the

See Sadoul, Histoire générale du cinéma, II: Les Pionniers du cinéma, 1897-1908 (Paris: Denoël, 1948),
134.

77
Mumford outlines this theory most completely in Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt,Brace,
and Company, 1934), but the early seeds of his ideas can also be found in his work from the 1920s,
including The Story of Utopias (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922) and Sticks and Stones: A Study of
American Architecture and Civilization (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924).

48

necessary space for capturing movement. With the Black Maria, Dickson offered a
solution in the form of not only a place in which to make films, but also the frame and
aesthetic for a modern form of technological space—film—that would be no less
technological in its future studio and non-studio forms.
Indeed, while the Black Maria may be the best example of the film studio’s direct
link to the laboratory, the studios that followed should equally be understood as
technological spaces, or, quite simply, as machines. From their origins the first studios
were designed to defy the dictates of day, night, weather, and location in order to frame
the production of artificial environments. Understood in this way, the studios fulfilled the
modern technological function that Martin Heidegger describes as “enframing” – the
process by which technologies extract “the energies of nature” and place them on
reserve.
78
The Black Maria, this chapter argues, enframed sunlight as a raw material
needed to activate the chemical processes for recording movement. Edison filmmakers
such as Edwin S. Porter and James White used the studio as one key component of the
basic apparatus for producing literal versions of Heidegger’s metaphoric “world picture”:
films that set the world before the human subject and rendered it knowable as a series of
moving images.
79

Studio “enframing” remained important to cinematic picture making beyond the
studio walls. Much like painters and photographers before them, filmmakers left the

78
Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology
and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 3-35, 15.

79
Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays,
115-154. My reading of Heidegger follows Samuel Weber’s analysis in the essays collected in Weber,
Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), especially
“Upsetting the Setup: Remarks on Heidegger’s ‘Questing After Technics,’” 55-75 and “Mass Mediauras,
or: Art, Aura and Media in the Work of Walter Benjamin,” 76-108.

49

studio with ideas about the nature of (film) space and techniques for representation that
would be critical to how they framed their non-studio subjects. As art historian Svetlana
Alpers has argued, as early as the seventeenth century the studio became, for some artists,
“not simply the site where they worked, but the very condition of working.”
80
As later
painters such as Paul Cézanne shuttled between their studios and local landscapes, their
experimentation with light and form in the studio necessarily shaped the way they painted
outside it.
81
This chapter proposes that for filmmakers such as Porter and White the
studio similarly conditioned their techniques for capturing film space, whether they were
working in the studio or using its principles to guide their work on location. Born from
and as spaces of technological and formal experimentation, especially with light, studios
offered filmmakers the space and conditions for developing their craft in ways that would
shape representation well beyond cinema’s first working interiors.
82

The Black Maria: Studio, Machine, Unknown Form

It obeys no architectural rules, it embraces no conventional materials and follows
no accepted scheme of color. Its shape, if anything so eccentric can be entitled to
that appellation, is an irregular oblong … Its color is a grim and forbidding
black, enlivened by the dull lustre of myriads of metallic points … the uncanny
effect is not lessened, when, at an imperceptible signal, the great building swings
slowly around upon a graphited centre, presenting any given angle to the rays of
the sun and rendering the apparatus independent of diurnal variations.
– W.K.L Dickson and Antonia Dickson, 1895
83

80
Svetlana Alpers, “The Studio, the Laboratory, and the Vexations of Art,” in Caroline Jones and Peter
Galison, eds., Picturing Science, Producing Art (New York: Routledge, 1998), 401-417, 416.

81
Alpers, 412. Alpers go so far as to argue that artists such as Cézanne used their studios to rethink their
ways of painting landscapes in ways that “alter[ed] the nature of painting.”

82
As Alpers argues elsewhere, “the [artist’s] studio serves as a place to conduct experiments with light not
possible in the diffused universal light or the direct solar light of the world outside.” See Alpers, The
Vexations of Art: Velázquez and Others (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 19.

50

The few existing images of the Black Maria may explain the tendency among
observers, critics, and historians to disparage the studio’s “primitive,” “rudimentary”
form, while variously describing it as a “dismal-looking affair” and a “rambling building
of cheap construction.” In one of only three known photographs of the studio’s exterior
[Fig. 1.2], reportedly taken in 1903, the structure appears as a ramshackle hodgepodge of
geometric forms, crudely cobbled together and ready, at any moment, to collapse into
only so many odd building blocks and irregular detritus.

Figure 1.2: Black Maria, summer 1903, Courtesy of U.S. Dept. of the Interior, National Park
Service, Thomas Edison National Historical Park.

Within only a few years, the seldom-used and now-dilapidated building would
indeed be demolished, perhaps taking its place, like so many provisional machines and
outworn technological spaces, alongside the discarded railroad wheel posed in the

83
William Kennedy Laurie Dickson and Antonia Dickson, History of the Kinetograph, Kinetoscope, and
Kinetophonograph (New York: Albert Bunn, 1895), 19.

51

photo’s foreground. Only a few years earlier, however, the studio was the center of
Edison’s film production and a hive of laboratory activity. In its more than half a decade
of use beginning in 1893, the studio framed the production of thousands of films
featuring contemporary vaudeville stars, local performers, miscellaneous celebrities, and
Edison lab employees.

Figure 1.3: Black Maria, circa winter 1894-1895, photograph signed by W.K.L. Dickson,
Courtesy of U.S. Dept. of the Interior, National Park Service, Thomas Edison National Historical
Park.

Dickson developed the studio’s design in late 1892 as part of the laboratory’s
preparations for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Edison hoped to
feature a series of Kinetoscopes at the Exposition, and Dickson recognized that a
dedicated production space with good lighting would be necessary to furnish these
machines with sufficient films.
84
A team of laboratory staff (led by John Ott, one of the

84
Spehr, 265. See also Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison
Manufacturing Company (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 32. Edison ultimately failed
to debut the Kinetoscope in Chicago due to delays in producing the machines. Musser, 39. The historical
details of the Black Maria’s construction and film production that follow are taken largely from Spehr,

52

laboratory’s most skilled machinists) and several freelance carpenters assembled the
studio according to Dickson’s design during the winter, completing the job in February
for a total cost of $637.67 (approximately $14,500 today).
85
It was built of wood covered
in tarpaper (a material typically used for waterproofing roofs) attached with tin nails, and
extended approximately fifty feet in length and fifteen in width, with a height varying
from seven to twenty-two feet.
86

Figure 1.4: Black Maria Design Drawing, Detail, W.K.L. Dickson, 1932, Library of Congress.
Far from being primitive in form, the studio had a complex design for capturing
sunlight, highlighting moving objects for the Kinetograph, and facilitating efficient film
production by increasing the available working hours and providing consistent,

Musser, and George J. Svedja, The ‘Black Maria’ Site Study: Edison National Historic Site, West Orange,
NJ (Washington, D.C.: Division of History, Office of Archaeology and Preservation, 1969).

85
Musser, Before the Nickelodeon, 32. Spehr, 330. Ott’s role in the construction is also suggested by an
undated work log entry. Ott Laboratory Records N-87-11-24 (TAED NL002:35). Some historians have
claimed that Dickson was absent during the construction, but Spehr shows that he left the lab (to recover
from an apparent nervous breakdown) only after completion of the initial construction. See Musser, 38,
Neil Baldwin, Edison , Inventing the Century (New York: Hyperion, 1995), 232. See also Gordon
Hendricks, The Edison Motion Picture Myth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), 140-141, and
Spehr, 269.

86
Musser, 32.

53

specialized workspaces for shooting, developing, and processing films. Dickson placed
the studio stage beneath two perpendicularly intersecting gabled roofs, the taller of which
rose to twenty-two feet and could be opened on one side to admit sunlight. Behind the
stage, the lower eighteen-foot roof covered the “black tunnel” that gives the Black Maria
films their distinct black background. On the other side of the stage, just beyond the roof
opening, Dickson added a nine by seven foot darkroom for loading and unloading film
from the Kinetograph, which could be mounted on tracks running between the darkroom
and the filming area. Dickson designed the entire structure to be mounted on a central
graphite pivot with wheels at each corner, perched on a circular track. Using two large
boards extending from the center of either side, several workers could rotate the studio in
order to adjust the angle of sunlight illuminating the stage through the open roof.

Figure 1.5 (left): Black Maria Interior Photograph, in Musser, Before the Nickelodeon, 36.

Figure 1.6: “Interior of the Kinetographic Theater,” Ink Drawing by Edwin J. Meeker in Antonia
and W.K.L. Dickson, “Edison’s Invention of the Kineto-Phonograph,” Century Magazine, Vol.
48, June 1894, 207-215, 207. Note the tracks emerging from the right foreground that would have
led to the darkroom.

As performers and the press began to visit in 1893, the studio, initially referred to
simply as the “revolving photograph building” or the “Kinetographic Theatre,” quickly

54

acquired both a new moniker and a reputation for being an especially strange structure,
even at the Edison laboratory. Lab personnel coined it the “Black Maria” after judging
that the studio bore closest resemblance to police vehicles of the same name.
87
For
Dickson, the studio resembled a “medieval pirate-craft” or “air-ship” in outer appearance,
while its interior evoked images of dungeons, torture, and death.
88
Likewise, former
Edison Company lawyer and manager Frank L. Dyer recalled the studio’s “lugubrious
interior,”
89
and one contemporary press report noted that it “reminded everybody of a
huge coffin.”
90

Figure 1.7: “Exterior of Edison’s Kinetographic Theater, Orange, N.J.,” Ink Drawing by Edwin J.
Meeker, Century Magazine, Vol. 48, June 1894, 214.

87
Spehr, 265.

88
Dickson and Dickson, 19.

89
Frank L. Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin, Edison: his life and inventions, Volume II (New York:
Harper, 1910), 543.

90
“Knocking Out Corbett,” New York Sun, 8 September 1894, 1-2. Quoted in Musser, Before the
Nickelodeon, 48.

55

Contemporary illustrations such as Edwin J. Meeker’s ink drawing for an 1894
Century Magazine article by Dickson and his sister, Antonia, must have reinforced such
descriptions. In Meeker’s drawing the studio appears slightly elongated, and the
darkroom’s exaggerated length indeed helps evoke the shape of a casket. The lightly
sketched, spare landscape stands in sharp contrast to the darkened studio’s imposing
presence. Meeker’s shading lines on the building’s forward section parallel the open roof,
creating a sense of movement into the interior, as if the studio might swallow elements of
its surroundings. In what may be read as a visual metaphor for the process by which
modern technology, in Heidegger’s theory, extracts energy from nature, an adjacent tree
dangles over the open roof, bending as if it were being sucked into the studio.
91
The
wood-plank bridge in the immediate foreground – a crude counterpart to the studio’s
modernity – reinforces such a reading and recalls Dickson’s comparison of the studio to
another nineteenth-century technology, the swinging river bridge.
92

The uncertainty and imaginative creation expressed in witnesses’ early attempts to
associate the new building with some familiar form suggests not simply the building’s
inherent strangeness, but, more importantly, the novelty of the film studio. While a more
conservative observer could very well have described the Black Maria as a strange but
not altogether unworldly pitched-roof house in need of windows and paint, its status as a
film studio—a previously unknown entity—contributed to doubts about its form and
function. Indeed, like the motion-picture machines used in it, the studio represented a

91
See Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 15.

92
“The movable principle of this building is identical with that of our river swinging bridges, the ends
being suspended by iron rods from raised centre-posts.” Dickson and Dickson, 19.

56

novel invention and an unfamiliar technology whose sources of inspiration and formal
influence remained (and, to a degree, remain) unclear. Contemporary observers did not
have to look far, however, to find more precise models for the studio’s design, both in the
Edison laboratory itself and in the technologies produced there. Like other
contemporaneous sites of cinematic invention, the West Orange laboratory framed early
cinema’s technological ontology. Within and according to the principles of these
laboratories and workshops, the first “studios” of sorts, cinema’s inventors and first
practitioners developed an idea of what cinema would become.
Laboratories, Workshops, Ateliers – Environmental Control in the First “Studios”
You can’t help but have noticed that Boulevard cafes aspire to become successors
of the Faculté des science. Below the room where one drinks glasses of beer, there
is a basement in which highly decorated gentlemen perform lectures and
experiments on cinema, the praxinoscope, and radiography. Enter: there are
vials, batteries, accumulators, wires, and tubes: it is the laboratory.
- Leo Claretie, La Revue enyclopédique, 28 mars 1896
93

The laboratories and workshops where scientists, inventors, technicians, and
tinkerers created the first film technologies became not only early exhibition sites, but
also, by default, the first film production spaces. From Lyon, Berlin, and Leeds to New
York, Washington, DC, and rural New Jersey, spaces of technological research and
development—amateur and professional alike—yielded the first fragments of moving
images. Like the early photographers who reproduced scenes in and from their
workshops, the first filmmakers made their workspaces and themselves early test subjects

93
Leo Claretie, La Revue enyclopédique, n154, 28 mars 1896, 50. Quoted in Jacques Deslandes and
Jacques Richard, Histoire comparée du cinéma, II: Du cinématographe au cinéma, 1896-1906 (Paris :
Casterman, 1968), 14. Deslandes and Richard note: “Les badauds qui font la queue boulevard des
Capucines, pour descendre dans le Salon Indien du Grand Café où clignote le cinématographe Lumière, ont
peut-être d'ailleurs l'impression qu'ils vont assister à une expérience de laboratoire.”

57

for new film technologies. The spaces and machines with which they worked and the
images they produced developed in tandem. Together, they helped establish the aesthetic
form and content of early moving pictures and created the initial norms that defined
studio film production, norms which first emerged in a more general culture, practice,
and spatial model of laboratory research and development.
94

The professional research laboratory—in both its public and private forms—
became a key site of scientific and technological creativity and labor in the nineteenth
century. Experimental labs and workshops have existed in varying forms since at least the
seventeenth century. But only in the early 1800s in Western Europe and by the second
half of the century in the United States did scientists and inventors institutionalize distinct
spaces of experimentation, research, and development.
95
Fueled by industrialization and
the increasing rigor of empirical science, laboratories found institutional support from
governments, universities, and corporations, and they quickly became potent symbols of
modern industrial society.
96

94
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 Lisa Cartwright, Screening The
Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995) and Oliver
Gaycken, “Devices of Curiosity: Cinema and the Scientific Vernacular” (Ph.D. diss., University of
Chicago, 2005), especially Chapter 2 on French vernacular science films produced at Pathé, Gaumont, and
Éclair from 1909 to 1914.

95
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 Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer,
Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1985), 39 and 57. See also the essays collected in Frank A.J.L. James, ed., The
Development of the Laboratory: Essays on the Place of Experiment in Industrial Civilization (Basingstoke:
Macmillan Press, 1989) and, more recently, the essays in Peter Galison and Emily Thompson, eds, The
Architecture of Science (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999).

96
Frank A.J.L. James, “Introduction,” in James, ed., The Development of the Laboratory, 1-9, 2.

58

First in chemistry, then in fields such as physics and astronomy, scientists
established norms for the physical spaces and practices of scientific research, teaching,
and training. In order to obtain rigorous and replicable experimental results, they focused
on producing highly coordinated and controlled spaces with consistent temperatures and
architectural stability. Architects met these requirements through close attention to
building orientation (to control temperature in relation to solar trajectories) and material
structure (including the use of deep support columns for increased stability, concrete
foundations to control ground temperature, and non-magnetic materials to avoid
interference with experiments and machines).
97

Like their scientist counterparts, individual inventors such as Edison followed
similar principals to create private industrial research laboratories. They profited from the
growing market for invention that drove the development the engineering profession and
innovation in major technological systems such as the railroad and telegraph. In the
second half of the nineteenth century support for industrial research developed on a wide
scale with laboratories such as Edison’s at Menlo Park.
98

97
On these architectural strategies for environmental control, see, for instance, Lawrence Aronovitch, “The
Spirit of Investigation: Physics at Harvard University, 1870-1910,” in James, ed. The Development of the
Laboratory, 83-103, 94; David Cahan, “The Geopolitics and Architectural Design of a Metrological
Laboratory: The Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt in Imperial Germany,” in James, 137-154, 138; and
Mari E. W. Williams, “Astronomical Observatories as Practical Space: The Case of Pulkowa,” in James,
118-136, 131-33.

98
See John Rae, “The Application of Science to Industry,” in Alexandra Oleson and John Voss, eds. The
Organization of Knowledge in America, 1860-1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979),
249-268, 251-253. As Paul Israel explains, the Menlo Park lab “was made possible by the growing interest
of large-scale, technology-based companies such as Western Union in acquiring greater control over the
inventive process by supporting the work of these inventors.” See Paul Israel, Edison: A Life of Invention
(New York: John Wiley, 1998), 119. On the development of industrial research laboratories beginning
around 1900, see also Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological
Enthusiasm, 1870-1970 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), especially pp. 150-180.

59

Established in 1876, the Menlo Park lab, which Edison famously dubbed an
“invention factory,” became a model for the organization of the first generation of
modern research laboratories in the United States.
99
Combining the shop tradition of
collaborative labor and experimentation with specialized machines, highly skilled
craftsmen, and workers versed in pure and applied sciences (supported by a large library
collection), Edison aimed to streamline invention into a profitable enterprise.
100
By 1887,
when he moved the laboratory to West Orange, Edison had developed a system of small-
scale invention supporting specific consumer industries and existing contracts that he
used to fund the lab’s larger development projects (which included the still-developing
electrical industry, magnetic ore-separation, and the electric storage battery).
101
At West
Orange, he would use his earnings from the electrical lighting business, his experience
from Menlo Park, and modern principles of laboratory design to create the most advanced
research laboratory in the world. The lab’s spatial organization, material design, and
culture of experimental practice would also produce and shape the world’s first film
studio.
The Edison Laboratory, West Orange, NJ

In 1897 Edison appeared in a film that seemed to offer its viewers a rare behind-
the-scenes glimpse of the world of invention he had created in West Orange. The film,

99
As Thomas Hughes notes, Edward Weston, for instance, “had a laboratory remarkably like that at Menlo
Park,” and Nikola Tesla (who worked for Edison when he first immigrated to America) established an
equally important laboratory in Manhattan and later another in Colorado Springs. Other notable
laboratories included those directed by: Elmer Sperry (1888), William Stanley, and Elihu Thompson
(1880). See Hughes, American Genesis, 34-39.

100
Israel, 119. See also, Israel, From Machine Shop to Industrial Laboratory: telegraphy and the changing
context of American invention (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992) and Baldwin, 194.

101
Baldwin, 194-5.

60

Mr. Edison at Work in His Chemical Laboratory, presents a lively, lab coat-clad Edison,
surrounded by all the trappings of a scientific laboratory and in the midst of an unknown
chemistry experiment.

Figure 1.8: Mr. Edison at Work in His Chemical Laboratory (White and Heise, 1897)
Whatever the film’s viewers may have been led to believe, the film was not, of
course, filmed in the chemical laboratory. Although the film’s producers, James White
and William Heise, modeled the set from a well-publicized photograph of Edison in the
laboratory’s chemical building, they produced Mr. Edison’s “experiment” a few steps
away in the more suitably lit Black Maria. The studio was no chemical laboratory, but it
was no less a space of experimentation. Indeed, in transposing the chemical lab to the
film studio, White and Heise restaged a process that had already taken place half a decade
earlier. As Dickson searched for the technologies, experimental practices, and spaces that
would lead to the creation of motion pictures, he found inspiration and models throughout
the West Orange laboratory.
Historian of technology Thomas Hughes has argued that early inventors such as
Edison were “like avant-garde artists resorting to the atelier” where they could be free to
create “a new way, even a new world, to displace the existing one.”
102
If the West Orange

102
Hughes, American Genesis, 24.

61

lab was Edison’s “new world,” the technologies produced there were aimed at not simply
displacing the world outside, but replacing it with a modern technological environment.
From within the artificial spaces of the laboratory, Edison contributed machines,
materials, and techniques for a new vision of industrial modernity. The Black Maria and
the films produced in it paralleled that project—the studio, operating according to the
same principles as the lab around it, produced an artificial environment and a series of
technological products that contributed to a broad process of technological change based
on environmental mastery, control, and mechanical reproduction.

Figure 1.9 (left): Sketch for the West Orange Laboratory, Thomas Edison, 1887, Edison Papers
Project, Batchelor and Edison Notebook N-87-06-00:73-74 (TAED NL001AAA:73-74).

Figure 1.10: Lithograph of the West Orange Laboratory, circa 1890s, Edison National Historic
Site

For the West Orange lab Edison initially envisioned, in Hughes’s words, “a
monumental and prestige-enhancing building in the French mansard style” that would
hide its technological function behind an impressive façade (a strategy, discussed in
Chapter Three, that Edison would later use for his film studio in the Bronx).
103
He
entrusted the design to New York-based architect Henry Hudson Holly, who had also

103
Hughes, American Genesis, 30. On the history of the West Orange Laboratory, see W. Bernard Carlson,
“Building Thomas Edison’s Laboratory at West Orange, New Jersey: A Case Study in Using Craft
Knowledge for Technological Invention, 1886-1888,” History of Technology 13 (1991): 150-67.

62

built Glenmont Estate, Edison’s new home, located only a short distance from the
laboratory site. Holly transformed Edison’s rough proposal into a more traditional three-
story factory design, retaining the spirit of prestige that Edison desired by decorating the
building’s principal façade with three two-story arched windows.
Behind this public face, Edison planned a dynamic space of invention with an
encyclopedic collection of materials and objects, specialized rooms for every branch of
science and engineering, and flexible spaces for improvised experimentation and
collaboration.
104
Quickly realizing that a single 250 x 50 foot structure would not be
sufficient, Edison re-conceptualized the laboratory as a multi-building campus with an
interior courtyard, surrounded by an exterior wall. The new design, which Edison
entrusted to a new architect, Joseph J. Taft, added four specialized buildings, each 100 x
50 feet, arranged perpendicular to the main building.
105

104
See the descriptions quoted in Spehr, The 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, Robert
Venturi, “Thoughts on the Architecture of the Scientific Workplace: Community, Change, Continuity,” in
Galison and Thompson, 385-398, 388. On the post-World War II context, see Galison and Caroline A.
Jones, “Factory, Laboratory, Studio: Dispersing Sites of Production,” in Galison and Thompson, 497-540,
499.

105
According to Paul Israel, Edison fired Holly due to the architect’s negligent management of the building
contractors. See Israel, 263. On the shift from one to five laboratory buildings, see Israel, 261.

63

Figure 1.11: Sketch for the West Orange Laboratory, Thomas Edison, 1887, Edison Papers
Project, Batchelor and Edison Notebook N-87-06-00:73-74 (TAED NL001AAA:73-74). To the
right of the main laboratory building, the four smaller buildings were initially (from right to left),
the galvanometric workshop, the chemical laboratory, the carpentry and pattern-making
workshop (half of the building was also devoted to chemical storage), and a metallurgical
laboratory that was used primarily for Dickson’s ore-milling experiments.

These four buildings – originally housing a galvanometric workshop, a chemistry
laboratory, a pattern making and carpentry shop, and a metallurgical laboratory – were
designed according to principles derived from nineteenth-century laboratory standards.
The galvanometric building, in particular, strictly conformed to common guidelines for
architectural stability and magnetic purity to facilitate precision electrical experiments.
Taft built the structure using nonferrous materials, including copper for the nails and
pipes and granite for the roof. The building stood on deeply lain brick pillars topped with
black marble and a concrete floor, and it was isolated from the other buildings by a
courtyard.
106

106
Israel, 263. Dyer and Martin, 652-3. Dyer and Martin note that despite the care taken to make the
building suitable for precision testing, the workshop would ultimately be thwarted by the construction of a
street trolley in West Orange several years later. After this, Dyer and Martin claim, the building was “used
for photography and some special experiments on motion pictures,” although the nature of these
experiments is unclear.

64

Figure 1.12: Edison laboratory, West Orange, NJ, Edison Phonograph Monthly, Vol. I, No. 3
(May 1903), 14. The Black Maria, which was torn down later in 1903, is located in the center. At
the time of the Black Maria’s construction, only the main laboratory building in the lower right
foreground, the four parallel buildings to its left, the gatehouse, and the small building beside the
studio existed. The others were constructed during the laboratory’s expansion beginning after
1901.

The laboratory opened in 1887 with a staff of approximately seventy-five men led
by four main experimenters, including Dickson, who was also the lab’s photographer.
107

It operated on a model of versatility, both in terms of its personnel (who collaborated in
experimental teams and often on multiple simultaneous projects) and its spaces of
experimentation (which often shifted function to accommodate different types of
research).
108
The machine shops, in particular, became central sites through which
experimenters routed many of the laboratory’s projects.
109
The laboratory housed two
machine shops, one on each of the first and second floors of the main building.
Surrounding the second-floor shop, Edison arranged a series of experimental rooms
assigned to specific projects, initially including Dickson’s ore-milling experiments.

107
Israel, 271. The staff included twenty-five to thirty other experimenters and a labor force of machinists,
pattern makers, draftsmen, carpenters, a fireman, a blacksmith, and a gatekeeper

108
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.” Dyer and Martin, 649-50.

109
Israel, 274-275. Edison’s process of invention emphasized modeling, for which he retained trusted
machinists who were capable of giving form to early abstract ideas.

65

Among these rooms was also the so-called “photographic room,” Number 5, where
Dickson conducted the first motion picture tests.
110

The versatility of the laboratory and its personnel, combined with the overlap
between projects created by spatial proximity and multi-tasking, left a mark on all of the
lab’s products.
111
Cinema was no exception. The Kinetoscope and Kinetograph were
shaped by the interactions of Edison employees engaged simultaneously in broadly
diverse areas of research that ranged from ore milling (Dickson), electric lamps (Charles
Brown), and telegraphy (William Heise) to precision electrical testing (Arthur Kennelly),
the phonograph, and precision machine work (John Ott).
112
Edison’s early idea of
recording images on a rotating cylinder, for instance, showed his debt to the lab’s
common use of cylinders in such devices as the phonograph and telegraph. In his second
motion picture caveat (1889), Edison proposed to use a common chemical laboratory
tool, the Leyden jar, to illuminate objects for recording.
113
And when Edison and Dickson
shifted from the cylinder design to a system involving strips of celluloid film, they fell

110
Dyer and Martin, 648.

111
As historian of science Peter Galison has argued, in scientific laboratories “it is through appropriation,
adjacency, display, and symbolic allusion that space, knowledge, and the construction of the architectural
and scientific subject are deeply intertwined.” See Galison, “Buildings and the Subject of Science,” in
Galison and Thompson, eds. The Architecture of Science, 1-25, 3. Dyer and Martin devote more than seven
pages to describing the lab’s 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, 640-648.

112
As Paul Spehr notes, John Ott helped Edison supervise the first designs for moving image apparatus due
to 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,
94, 99. Israel, 293. Spehr also notes that the second motion picture caveat’s use of glass cylinders was
logical given the availability of a glass blower (J.J. Force) at the lab and Charles Moore’s experience with
glass from his lamp work. See Spehr, 132. While such ideas also came, no doubt, from the work of other
inventors such as Ottomar Anschütz, the German who develeopd the “Tachyscope” that is known to have
influenced Dickson’s motion picture apparatus designs, their ideas were also the product of smaller scale
but nonetheless similar laboratory environments.

113
Spehr, 131.

66

back on their familiarity with moving strips of paper through the automatic telegraph
machine.
114
Just as these various machines and experimental devices transformed the
experience of industrial modernity, so would the cinematic technologies to which they
helped give form.
The first film studio—the architectural component of Edison and Dickson’s
pursuit of moving images—developed through a similar form of appropriation. In a series
of spaces developed between 1889 and 1892, Dickson drew from a range of sources,
many at the lab itself, to craft a controlled space of experimentation—a technological
environment—suitable for photographically reproducing movement efficiently and on a
large scale. While these spaces differed in form, their function remained consistent—they
were sites of both image production and continuing technological development, an
imperative that helped condition their photographic and cinematic products.
From Room #5 to the Black Maria: Producing Spaces and Images at West Orange

Dickson’s motion picture experiments began in the room set aside for his work as
the West Orange laboratory photographer, Room #5.
115
Unlike many parts of the lab, the
room remained locked, and during experiments lab personnel reportedly had to pass
notes, supplies, and food through a small portal.
116
As Paul Spehr suggests, this strict
regulation may have been due to the secret nature of Dickson’s motion picture
experiments, but it was just as likely an effort to protect the sensitive chemicals and

114
Spehr, 156-7.

115
Dickson may have become Edison’s photographer as early as 1884, and at West Orange he became the
laboratory’s official photographer. Spehr, 64-72. See also Hendricks, 13-14.

116
Spehr, 72.

67

photographic negatives housed there. This attention to the effects of light and its
necessary regulation would be the key feature and driving force behind Dickson’s
designs, first for an outdoor photography area and photographic studio, and ultimately for
the Black Maria. Through these successive spaces, Dickson transposed the strict attention
devoted to environmental control at the laboratory into the film studio and its practices.
Dickson designed the exterior photography area and the so-called “photographic
building” in 1889 while Edison was in Paris for the Exposition Universelle. These new
structures became necessary due to the problem of vibrations produced by the machine
shops and elevator adjacent to Room #5 and, more importantly, because the room’s
windows did not provide sufficient light for Dickson’s advancing motion picture
experiments.
117
Although Dickson had already used arc lights in his role as laboratory
photographer and experimented with light from laboratory tools such as the Leyden jar
and Geissler tube in his motion picture tests, these artificial sources of illumination
remained too weak to allow for satisfactory rapid exposures.
118
Dickson needed a better-
lit and controlled area in which to continue his tests, and he found inspiration in several
sources: contemporary photography studios, Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion
plates, and Étienne-Jules Marey’s Station Physiologique.
119

117
Some historians have claimed that only vibration problems caused Dickson to relocate the experiments,
but others have argued that Dickson’s need for light was the key motivation. For the former explanation,
see Baldwin, 212. For the latter, see Hendricks, 75-6 and Spehr, 162.

118
Spehr, 163.

119
While scholars have often noted the links between Muybridge and Marey’s respective contributions to
moving image technology, few have examined the similarities between their production spaces or these
spaces’ influence on early studio and film forms.

68

There can be little doubt that Dickson consulted, perhaps first, the laboratory’s
copy of Matthew Carey Lea’s A Manual of Photography (1868), a well-known
publication at the time with a section outlining plans for a photography studio, or “glass
room.”
120
For the photographic building, Dickson took the Manual’s diagrams, which
depict three variations on a simple structure providing “front-upper-side light” through
glazed openings, as the preliminary basis for his design.
121

Figure 1.13: Page 107 of Matthew Carey Lea, A Manual of Photography (Philadelphia:
Benerman & Wilson, 1868). Dickson very likely used Lea’s manual as a guide for the 1889
photographic building, the form of which bears closest resemblance to model B (Lea’s Fig. 67).

He composed the building in two main sections: the 18 x 20 foot studio and an
adjacent, two-story portion with two darkrooms on the first level and a projection room
above. The studio area had a gabled roof, glazed on both sides but built of solid brick

120
Hendricks, 76. Designs similar to the “glass room” described in Lea’s Manual became common in the
second half of the nineteenth century and helped influence another important strand of the film studio’s
genealogy – glass-and-iron architecture and the “glass house.” That history will be discussed in Chapter
Two.

121
Matthew Carey Lea, A Manual of Photography (Philadelphia: Benerman & Wilson, 1868), 107.

69

across the center, with sliding glass windows covering one wall.
122
The building was
located adjacent to the metallurgical building where Dickson conducted his ore-
separation experiments, and several freelance workers began its construction in August
1899.
123

During the new building’s construction, Dickson designed and built a second,
exterior area in which to continue his experiments. Although few details about this
facility remain, Dickson reportedly also built it along the side of the metallurgical
building and may have continued its use even after the photography studio’s
completion.
124
The inspiration for this setup came, most likely, from Muybridge and
Marey. Edison received a selection of Muybridge’s plates in November 1888 that one lab
worker later remembered being displayed in the library for “some months” afterwards.
125

As Dickson may have learned from Muybridge’s earlier 1888 lecture in Orange, NJ (or
during Muybridge’s subsequent visit to the Edison laboratory), Muybridge photographed
his motion studies against a black cloth hung against a wooden structure built at the
University of Pennsylvania in 1884 [Fig. 1.14]. Dickson may also have been aware of
Marey’s exterior shooting method, which, although more advanced by 1889, began

122
According to Spehr, the studio portion “was a single story greenhouse-like structure with sliding glass
windows on the front and back walls and a roof mostly of glass.” An interior photograph of the studio [Fig.
13] indeed reveals glazing on both sides of the roof, but only one wall appears to have glass windows.
Spehr, 160. See also Dickson (1933), and Hendricks, 78-79.

123
Spehr, 160.

124
Spehr 163.

125
Hendricks, 27. According to Hendricks, after Muybridge’s legendary lecture in Orange, NJ on February
25, 1888, Edison asked Muybridge to make a selection of his plates to be sent to the West Orange
Laboratory. Muybridge’s photo agency, the Photo Gravure Company, delivered the plates on November 15,
1888, and Edison immediately put them on display in the library.

70

similarly with a plain black cloth suspended on a wooden frame with movable panels
[Fig. 1.15].
126

Figure 1.14: Eadweard Muybridge’s outdoor motion studies studio/laboratory at the University of
Pennsylvania (built in 1884). University of Pennsylvania Archives, Eadweard Muybridge
Collection. Muybridge used a black cloth hung from a backdrop, marked at regular intervals with
white lines. Dickson built a similar structure against the metallurgical building at the West
Orange lab in 1889.

126
As Marta Braun explains, “Marey had begun his photographic experiments with the fixed-plate camera
at one edge of this field in early summer of 1882. He had erected his black background at the rim of the
outer oval and placed his camera about forty meters in front of it, so that the angle from which the figures
were photographed would not change appreciably and so that the complete movements would be captured
as they extended against the entire width of the background.” Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Étienne-
Jules Marey (1830-1904) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 74-6.

71

Figure 1.15: Étienne-Jules Marey, Station Physiologique, built in 1882. Bibliothèque du Film,
Paris. The first black backdrop is visible just behind the white movable camera wagon at the
center. The larger shed to the left is Marey’s second background, referred to as the “black
hanger,” built in 1883.
127

While this exterior space gave Dickson the bright light he lacked in Room #5, it did not
offer the environmental control that came with the photographic studio. Dickson’s move
inside prefigured later filmmakers who began filming on exterior sets before moving
indoors to escape the vagaries of wind, rain, and snow.
128

127
As Hendricks notes, Edison received a copy of Marey’s Le vol des oiseaux on November 12, 1889,
several weeks after the completion of the photographic building and outdoor shed, but Dickson may have
seen images of the Station Physiologique earlier in a Scientific American Supplement article from 1887 or
articles published in the Comptes Rendus, which the laboratory received regularly (and Dickson, who was
born in France and spoke French, was known to have followed closely). See Hendricks, 52 and 83.

128
Méliès, for instance, cites the weather as his primary motivation for building his first studio, the first in
France, and Alice Guy equally identifies spatial control as a primary advantage of the studio. See Chapter
Two.

72

Figure 1.16: Interior View, Photograph Building, photograph signed by W.K.L. Dickson,
Courtesy of U.S. Dept. of the Interior, National Park Service, Thomas Edison National Historical
Park.

The new photographic building, completed in late September or early October
1889, seemed to promise the conditions Dickson desired. An interior photograph of the
studio area shows that he equipped the room with shades for controlling sunlight and a
flat black background similar to the one probably used for the exterior shed.
129
In a
preview of the Black Maria’s later use, the building became a site of both image
production and continued experimentation. While Dickson regularly took advantage of
the new studio’s improved lighting conditions in his capacity as laboratory photographer,
the building’s main purpose remained the motion picture experiments, which advanced in
late 1889 as Dickson and his assistants – working in both Room #5 and the new building
– adapted the motion picture machines to use new Eastman film stock.
130
After a hiatus

129
Spehr claims that both of these backgrounds were recessed according to Marey’s instructions in an 1887
article in the Scientific American Supplement. The photograph of the studio’s interior, however, shows a
flat background, and the diagram Dickson produced for Will Day in 1933 similarly identifies a “black
background” with no mention of a recessed area. In fact, Marey seems to have adopted Marey’s
instructions for the recessed black “tunnel” only for the Black Maria. See Étienne-Jules Marey,
“Photography of Moving Objects, and the Study of Animal Movement by Chrono-Photography,” Scientific
American Supplement 579 (5 February 1887): 9245. Quoted in Spehr, 164.

73

during which Edison and Dickson refocused their efforts on the ore-milling project, the
motion picture experiments again accelerated in the latter months of 1890.

Figure 1.17: Newark Athlete (Dickson and Heise, 1891)

Figure 1.18: Men Boxing (Dickson and Heise, 1891)

During 1891 Dickson shifted his efforts to producing moving images in the
photographic building.
131
The film fragments that survive offer an early glimpse of the
image form produced by Dickson’s evolving studio architecture. Like Marey’s early
motion studies, Dickson and his new assistant William Heise’s films feature figures in
white set against stark black backdrops that dominate the frame. The photographic studio
frames an artificial space designed to efface itself in favor of a new space, the space of
the image rendered mechanically through the precise recognition of light reflected by
moving figures. The success of the environmental control in the laboratory is registered
here by the clarity of the figures outlined against an empty backdrop.
The famous image of Dickson doffing his hat – known as “Dickson’s Greeting”
[Fig. 1.19] – offers a reflexive instance of the artificial reality that Dickson discovered in
his experimental photographic laboratory-studio. In a prototypical early lab image,
Dickson appears from behind the camera to test his own recognition by the reproductive

130
Hendricks, 79. Spehr, 174-177.

131
Spehr, 201-203.

74

apparatus. His greeting addresses the viewer in an act of recognition – “attracting”
attention. But it also points up the success of the image’s spatial effect – the creation of a
lifelike technological world in miniature.

Figure 1.19: Dickson Greeting (Dickson and Heise, 1891)
The success of these early tests and further advances in the Kinetoscope,
Kinetograph, and the processes for developing their films led to new efforts to expand
film production. Despite this success, however, Dickson recognized that the photographic
building would not be suitable for further testing and image production. While the photo
studio offered a degree of control over the filmmaking environment, it was not versatile
enough for large-scale production and high enough quality images. Dickson lamented, in
particular, the appearance of side shadows caused by the studio’s fixed position relative
to the sun.
132
He designed the Black Maria to solve this and other problems by returning
to his earlier sources – Lea’s Manual and Marey’s Station Physiologique – combined
with a new set of ideas about how to more precisely regulate the experimental space.
The Black Maria: A New Design for Environmental Control
Dickson’s design for the Black Maria shared characteristics with the earlier
photographic building, but it also marked a profound and somewhat surprising break with
its predecessor. Rather than designing a better equipped and positioned “glass room,”
Dickson chose to abandon glass altogether, a move that materially distinguishes the

132
Spehr quotes a letter from Dickson in 1933 in which Dickson notes that they needed the sun to come
straight in to the building to avoid side shadows. Spehr, 265.

75

studio from the majority of those that appeared over the next two decades. Such changes
did not, however, alter Dickson’s principal goal and the studio’s basic purpose: precise
environmental control for both image production and technological experimentation.
Dickson’s primary concern appears to have been reflecting the brightest light
possible at an exact angle from the figures on the stage back to the Kinetograph’s lens.
The new studio would thus be, first and foremost, a highly refined machine for regulating
light. For this purpose, he needed a more dynamic structure than the photography studio.
Dickson introduced four major changes to the previous design: 1) he rejected the
transparency of glass in favor of the most opaque isolation possible, hidden beneath a
retractable roof; 2) he subtly transformed the roof’s shape to more precisely direct light
onto the stage (and perhaps in an effort to help control heat in the enclosed space); 3) he
traded the flat black background used in the photographic studio in favor of a “black
tunnel” like the one used by Marey; and 4) he made the entire structure mobile, allowing
it to be rotated according to the position of the sun.

76

Figure 1.20: Page 110 of Lea, A Manual of Photography. For the Black Maria, Dickson seems to
have followed Lea’s instructions (perhaps a futile effort) for reducing heat in the “glass room” by
creating a space between the roof’s peak and its opening, as seen here in Lea’s Fig. 69. The Black
Maria has a slight variation on this design. See the roof opening in Fig. 3.

The new roof design most likely came, once again, from Lea’s Manual of
Photography. In the same section detailing methods for constructing a “glass room,” Lea
offers several design variations for moderating high temperatures. As later accounts
show, visitors often complained about the sweltering heat in the Black Maria, a problem
that Dickson may have anticipated from the beginning, perhaps due to excessive heat in
the photographic building. While contemporary drawings of the studio often omit this
feature, photographs of the Black Maria [Fig. 1.3] (as well as Dickson’s later diagram
[Fig. 1.4]) show a gap between the peak of the studio’s roof and the opening of its
retractable portion. This design roughly corresponds to Lea’s suggestion for regulating
the temperature by leaving a “space between the southern slope of the ridge and the
ceiling on that side.”
133
Although Dickson’s design would not have produced the exact

133
Lea, 110.

77

effect that Lea proposed, it did restrict the amount of light entering the studio to the
smaller area of the stage, thus reducing solar exposure and determining the outline of the
filmable space.
Dickson’s decision to opt for an open-air roof rather than creating a glass
covering may also have been motivated by a desire to reduce heat in the studio. Dickson
would have recognized that enclosing the studio on all other sides would already reduce
the effects of wind, and at this early date rainy conditions would halt filming even in a
glazed studio. More likely, however, Dickson’s choice was driven by cost, speed, and
weight. Ordering custom glass for his design would have been much more expensive and
taken too long to allow for the studio’s construction in time to produce films for the
upcoming World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. More importantly, glass would
have made it difficult to rotate the studio, thus hampering its most novel and, for
Dickson, most crucial function.
The ability to rotate the studio according to the position of the sun allowed
Dickson to avoid the problem of side shadows that plagued his productions in the
photographic studio. Such control became necessary because Dickson’s evolving
recording device required more exposures per second and thus even more light on the
filmed subjects.
134
Ensuring that all of the sunlight admitted to the studio would reach the
stage at an exact angle was thus crucial to Dickson’s success. In order to achieve this
result he sought a radical solution: synching the studio’s operation with the movement of
the sun. By “rendering the apparatus independent of diurnal variations,” as he would later
describe, Dickson highlighted a profound and lasting tension in cinematic production

134
Spehr, 265.

78

between control of and reliance on the natural environment.
135
This tension mirrored the
conditions of scientific experimentation in the surrounding lab, where architectural
materials and designs maintained the strict environmental conditions necessary for
producing machines capable of reproducing and, at times, replacing nature.
While the studio allowed Dickson to regulate light in a way that had previously
eluded him, he remained not only subject to variations in weather but also to the earth’s
ceaseless rotation. Nonetheless, the ability to maintain maximum light in the studio
throughout much of the day changed the character of Dickson’s experimental space and
took film production a step closer to independence from nature. Cinema demanded
natural light, and the studio captured it architecturally by ordering and re-ordering the
sun’s rays with each studio rotation.
The Black Maria was a cinematic version of modern technics designed to make
natural light a technological form and place the sun on reserve.
136
Such efforts to
dissociate filmmaking from the strictures of nature drove studio architecture and
technology through the first decades of the twentieth century, as architects and
filmmakers sought new styles of open and dynamic architectural space, new forms of
reflecting and refracting glass, and, ultimately, technologies for electrical illumination.

135
Dickson and Dickson, History of the Kinetograph, Kinetoscope, and Kinetophonograph, 20.

136
Dickson vaguely links the Black Maria to a much earlier architectural effort to capture sunlight, writing:
“we are vaguely reminded [while standing in the Black Maria as it rotates] of that indissoluble chain of
ideas which links the past with the present, and into the commonplace of existing facts come memories of
that chamber in the golden house of Nero so arranged that ‘by means of skillfully planned machinery it
moved on its axis, thus following the motions of the heavens, so that the sun did not appear to change in
position, but only to descend and ascend perpendicularly.’” Dickson and Dickson, 22. The Dicksons offer
neither the source for this quote nor the name of the structure, which must be the Domus Aurea (Golden
House), built in Rome in the last years of Nero’s life (64-68AD). The Domus Aurea notably included an
octagonal room with an open dome that may have been surmounted by a rotunda that “rotated day and
night like the heavens.” See David Watkin, A History of Western Architecture, 4
th
Edition (London:
Laurence King Publishing, 2005 [1986]), 73.

79

They also linked cinema to the more general efforts of architects and inventors to design
materials and spaces that reproduced desirable features of the natural environment—such
as regulated light and heat, shelter from wind, rain, and snow, and access to clean and
fresh air, food, and water—while eliminating their undesirable counterparts.
Technologies produced in laboratories such as Edison’s helped make these new
environments possible, and films gave them another form.
Dickson further enhanced the Black Maria’s reproductive capacity by more
closely following Marey’s formula for obtaining sharp and rapid exposures of movement
at the Station Physiologique. Although he may have read Marey’s descriptions of the
shooting procedure used at the Station before constructing the photographic building, he
seems to have initially ignored the details of Marey’s report. Upon closer inspection,
Dickson would discover that Marey was an expert on the subject, having already
designed a series of experimental recording spaces with successively more favorable
results. In particular, Marey recognized, as Dickson would later, that the background
against which he exposed his subjects had a crucial affect on the images produced—in
other words, his image production required a specific architectural form.

80

Marey’s Black Hangars: Recording Movement at the Station Physiologique

Figure 1.21: Marey’s Station Physiologique in 1883. Bibliothèque du Film, Paris. The shed
shown here was the second backdrop Marey used for motion studies at the Station.

Upon beginning his experiments in 1882 against a simple wooden platform
covered in black and set at a forty-five degree angle to the camera, Marey discovered that
the background reflected too much light on his glass plates. Marey built a new
background the following year after a chemist, Eugène Chevreul, suggested
photographing his subjects in front of a black box. The new “black hangar,” a three-
meter-deep shed, initially had a background painted in black that Marey and his assistant,
Georges Demenÿ, later covered in even darker black velvet.
137
The new hangar produced
markedly sharper figures against its self-effacing black background, pushing Marey to
reduce his exposure times even further in an effort to produce as many images as possible
on a single glass plate.

137
Braun, 75-79.

81

Figure 1.22: Marey, “Stretching Exercises,” 1883. Bibliothèque du Film, Paris. Subjects filmed in
front of the new “black hangar” were more sharply outlined against the structure’s self-effacing
blackness.

As he described in an 1887 Scientific American Supplement article that Dickson
almost certainly read, during his experiments Marey discovered that over the course of
these exposures, even “small quantities of light, accumulating their effect over the whole
surface of the plate, end by fogging it completely.”
138
He suggested having not simply a
black background but a deeply recessed area behind the figures to be recorded. For this
purpose, Marey had built a third structure in 1886, now ten meters deep and equipped
with curtains to change the width and height of the opening to keep reflected light to an
absolute minimum.
139
The new background allowed Marey to produce new experiments
of birds in flight and begin new experiments on his recording apparatus in an effort to

138
Marey, “Photography of Moving Objects, and the Study of Animal Movement by Chrono-
Photography.”

139
Braun, 104.

82

find a more flexible technology that might be used for recording movement outside the
laboratory.
140

Figure 1.23 (left): Marey’s third black hangar, built in 1886. Bibliothèque du film.

Figure 1.24: Marey, “Demenÿ playing the violin,” 1887. Bibliothèque du film. For Marey, this
image represented a failed attempt to move the glass plate during recording, a process that he
hoped would allow him to create more clear, non-overlapping images on a single plate.

Dickson would use these principles and Marey’s images as part of the inspiration
for both the Black Maria and its early productions. The studio’s “black tunnel” was a
product of Dickson’s closer reading of Marey’s findings and, as in Marey’s research,
contributed to greater success in Dickson’s motion picture production. As with the
motion studies, this black tunnel also gave the Black Maria films their distinct visual
form. The studio produced an aesthetic of observation and investigation that was
consistent with the studio’s continued use as an experimental laboratory and which
defined early cinematic space in both the studio and its films.

140
Braun, 146. Braun notes that the images of Demenÿ playing the violin represent failed attempts to move
the glass plate during recording, a process that Marey hoped would allow him to create more clear, non-
overlapping images on a single plate.

83

The Framed Aesthetic: Early Studio Space and Film Form

Figure 1.25: Amy Muller (Heise, 1896)

The architectural solution to the problem of photographically reproducing
movement necessarily shaped its aesthetic form. The Black Maria films, produced largely
between mid-1893 and early 1896 (and more sparsely into 1901), share a basic spatial
form – a framed aesthetic – defined by their stark background, bright ground plane, and
the central area of action that emerges between them, typically limited to a single
continuous shot from a fixed camera position. Contained within the enclosed studio
space, their form was equally framed within a particular visual aesthetic.
141
The play of
black, white, and grey in these films produces a kind of zero degree of film space—a
simulated three-dimensionality created through the appearance of movement registered
by varying intensities of reflected light. While this basic setup varies – with the floor

141
In their direct address of the spectator and tendency to focus on single performances/events of interest in
their own right rather than on narratives, the Black Maria films are consistent with Tom Gunning and
André Gaudreault’s “cinema of attractions” model of early film’s general aesthetic, even while differing in
specific formal features from contemporary non-studio films. See Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions:
Early Film, Its Spectators and the Avant-Garde,” in Thomas Elsaesser, ed., Early Cinema, 56-62 (Orginally
published in Wide Angle vol. 8 no. 3/4, Fall 1986).

84

plane occasionally omitted in figural close-ups and the purity of the empty space at times
interrupted by spare set pieces (especially in the latter years of the studio’s use) – the
consistent repetition of spatial form in the Black Maria films offers a glimpse of the
initial spatial logic – the enframing of light and objects – that defined early studio
filmmaking and, to a degree, has remained in place (if hidden) ever since.
The Black Maria’s framed aesthetic emerged as a direct result of the
developments in Dickson’s experimental spaces (and Marey’s before him) that yielded a
method for registering sufficient light on film. Dickson solved the problem of recording
movement architecturally in two main parts. First, by absorbing light in the studio’s
recessed black tunnel, he created a void of unmoving space that dominates the films,
typically accounting for as much as 85 percent of the frame. While at times enough light
enters the studio to reveal the recessed background behind the stage, more often this
space registers in the images as a kind of non-space, an empty abyss of impenetrable
darkness that places the films’ moving figures in distinct relief. Before and beneath this
blackened void, Dickson created its counterpart, the brightly lit stage that gleams in grays
and whites beneath the studio’s open roof, interrupted only by the shadows of the figures
performing above.
These light and dark spaces define and delimit the studio’s most basic
architectural form and function. The filmed images acquire the illusion of three-
dimensionality with the introduction of figures and props into the area where light and
dark intersect. Suspended between the blackened recess and the illuminated base,
Dickson created a plane of filmic visibility. Here, the movement of bodies and objects

85

across the frame, reflecting light back to the Kinetograph lens, activates and de-activates
portions of the image as the visible space shifts between light (figure) and dark (empty
space). The results are particularly stunning in films that operate precisely on this logic of
fluctuation, such as in the abstract white forms of Amy Muller and Crissie Sheridan or the
grey clouds of smoke that paint the background of Annie Oakley (1894).

Figure 1.26: Crissie Sheridan (1897) Figure 1.27: Annie Oakley (Heise, 1894)

The logic of the studio frame and the bounds of its visibility were strict. In
Robetta and Doretto (1894), for instance, a rare early attempt to point the camera outside
the space designated by Dickson’s architectural design leads to virtual decapitation and
dismemberment as the performers exceed the studio’s visible plane. Such rare “mistakes”
suggest the degree to which the studio’s form and function shaped the form of the films
produced in it. This strict regulation of the space (and thus often the content) of the Black
Maria films corresponded to the rigorous experimental imperatives that shaped the
studio’s design.

86

Figure 1.28: Robetta and Doretto (Dickson and Heise, 1894)

The architectural space and aesthetic form that Dickson and Heise created in these
films not only produced entertaining scenes of performance and visual pleasure; they also
satisfied the experimental necessities that inspired them. Drawing on Marey’s
experimental spaces as well as his research subjects, Dickson’s framed aesthetic was, first
and foremost, observational and investigational. Like Marey and Demenÿ at the Station
Physiologique, Dickson made local athletes among the first subjects to “perform” in this
experimental laboratory [Figs. 1.17 and 1.29]. To be sure, Dickson did not use these
films or others, such as Annie Oakley, to analyze bodily movement or the behavior of
projectiles. Rather, the initial film subjects allowed Dickson to investigate the
performance of his experimental moving picture apparatus. The task of investigation and
observation that drove his image-making practices from the first “monkeyshines” tests in
the photographic building to the earliest test films in the Black Maria left its mark on the
entertainment films that followed. These tests confirmed the functionality of the studio’s
architectural form and systematized the basic procedures for capturing movement that
would remain consistent for commercial film production.

87

Figure 1.29: Athlete With Wand (Dickson and Heise, 1894)

Figure 1.30: Luis Martinetti (Dickson and Heise, 1894)

Given the typical subjects filmed in the studio – composed largely of vaudeville
performers and variety acts – one might even argue that the investigational practice of the
earlier experimental films remained both viable and desirable for entertainment-seeking
audiences. The entertainers that paraded through the studio by the hundreds in the mid-
1890s may not have been subjects of scientific analysis, but their acts invited close
observation of their impressive movements and corporeal feats. Especially given these
films’ initial viewing context – through the eyepiece of the Kinetoscope – such acts take
on the character of bodily experiments offered up for investigation to scientist-like
viewers peering as if into a microscope. These practices and experiences are consistent
with the “operational aesthetic” that, as Neil Harris explains, had attracted audiences
since the early nineteenth century by simply putting the processes of recording and
reproducing movement on display.
142

Alongside its use for recording commercial films, Dickson continued, moreover,
to treat the studio as an experimental laboratory until his departure from the company in

142
Neil Harris, Humbug: the art of P.T. Barnum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981 [1973])

88

1895.
143
Using Room #5, the photographic building, and the Black Maria, Dickson
modified the Kinetograph while also attempting to develop commercially viable
projection methods and sound systems. Perhaps the most striking instance of this
continued experimentation appears in the “Dickson Experimental Sound Film,” produced
in 1895. Here, in a film that bids homage, one might venture, to Marey and Demenÿ’s
earlier influence [e.g., Fig. 1.24], Dickson appears in the Black Maria playing the violin
while laboratory workers dance. The film is the only surviving example of a series of
subjects made for the experimental Kinetophonograph, a device with which Dickson
attempted to combine the new motion picture apparatus with Edison’s phonograph.

Figure 1.31: “Dickson Experimental Sound Film” (Dickson and Heise, 1895)

Although Edison only began manufacturing the system in 1895, the idea of
linking moving images to phonograph discs dated to the earliest motion picture tests and
may have even contributed to Dickson’s design for the Black Maria. The Edison
laboratory had a phonograph recording studio on the third floor of the main lab building,
and Dickson may have been inspired by the purity of its isolated space, either anticipating

143
Most historians have emphasized the transition from experimentation to production (Musser, for
instance, notes that it “was made easier by continuity in personnel” (Dickson and Heise)), but the two
practices no doubt continued in tandem. See Musser, The Emergence of Cinema, 75.

89

the film studio’s use for sound and image recording or in simply drawing a parallel
between their mutual need for precise environmental control.
144
Dickson’s attempt to
create a synchronous sound system – one of his final projects for the Edison Company –
not only reveals the continuing experimental imperative that conditioned the working
space of the first film studio; it also anticipates the complete environmental control that
filmmakers would seek as inventors and engineers adapted cinema to synchronous
recorded sound over the next three decades.
After the Black Maria: Rotating Studio-Machines and the Framed Aesthetic
In April 1895, Dickson left Edison to join a competing motion picture firm,
leaving film production and development in the hands of Heise and James White.
Although the two continued making films in the Black Maria (alongside greater attention
to exterior and actuality filmmaking), within a year it had fallen into disrepair and its use
waned until Edison had the studio demolished in 1903. The end of the Black Maria was
by no means, however, the end of the framed aesthetic. Dickson repeated much of this
process for American Mutoscope and Biograph, the company that would emerge as
Edison’s principal American competitor. In 1896 he reproduced the Black Maria’s basic
functionality (in pared-down form) for Biograph’s first studio.
145

144
Musser, The Emergence of Cinema, 88. On the phonograph studio, see André J. Millard, America on
Record: A History of Recorded Sound (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 258 and David L.
Morton, Sound Recording: The Life and Story of a Technology, 24. In the early 1910s, in fact, the
phonograph studio area on the third floor of the main laboratory building would be used as a studio for
producing Edison’s educational film series. See André J. Millard, Duncan Hay, and Mary Grassick, Edison
Laboratory: Edison National Historic Site, West Orange, New Jersey (Harpers Ferry, WV: Division of
Historic Furnishing, Harpers Ferry Center, National Park Service, 1995).

145
I will refer to American Mutoscope and Biograph as simply “Biograph,” as it was re-named in 1910.

90

Figure 1.32: American Mutoscope and Biograph Company Rooftop Studio, ca. 1896. Frederick
Talbot, Moving Pictures: How They are Made and Worked (London: William Heinemann, 1912),
p. 104.

Located on the roof of the Roosevelt Building at 841 Broadway, where Biograph
rented its offices, it consisted of a small shed housing the Mutograph camera and an open
wooden stage surrounded on three sides by a system of poles for hanging backdrops and
props. The two sections stood on a connected steel platform that could be rotated 180
degrees on a pivot below the camera shed, once again to follow the sun’s path. As in the
Black Maria, the camera could be moved on tracks to and from the stage. Production
began in mid-1896, and by the fall Dickson had already produced a small catalog of films
to support the company’s Mutoscope exhibitions.
146

The new studio produced an aesthetic that was similar to the Black Maria films.
Although Dickson did not equip the studio with the deep black recess that defined the
latter’s films, he continued to use a stark black backdrop that, thanks in part to Eastman’s
increasingly sensitive film, still rendered performers in sharp relief. In films with familiar
vaudeville subjects such as Sandow (1896) and Chimmie Hicks at the Races (1900), the
new studio reproduced the Black Maria’s framed aesthetic. Other films produced at the

146
Spehr, 410-412.

91

studio reenacted the development from the basic to increasingly complex representational
backdrops seen in Edison’s films, all coexisting during the studio’s use up to 1903.

Figure 1.33: Sandow (Dickson, 1896) Figure 1.34: Chimmie Hicks at the Races (1900)

Dickson reproduced this basic studio form two more times for Biograph, first in
London near the Thames in 1898, then in Courbevoie, France in 1899. According to
Spehr, the latter studios were less elaborate than their predecessors, but Dickson never
entirely abandoned the basic rotating capacity that defined his original Black Maria
design.
147
The formal film developments that their basic architecture engendered
expanded beyond Dickson’s studios and film productions. The framed aesthetic that
Dickson created in the Black Maria returned independently in the numerous workshops,
laboratories, and other early film studios that produced the first moving images. Such
continuity is not surprising given the similarity of the basic imperatives driving Dickson
and other inventors and filmmakers. The creation of both early moving images and film
aesthetics were founded on the abstract recreation of moving objects within precisely
controlled experimental environments. This process is a key component of the genealogy

147
Spehr, 487, 514, 523.

92

of early studio space and film form that continued to shape cinematic production into the
early twentieth century, both inside the studio and out.
Film Technology and the Human-Built World, Outside the Studio
As quickly as inventors created the first film technologies in their laboratories and
workshops, they left those spaces to test the new devices in the world outside. The
environments they captured were no doubt subject to few of the constraints placed on the
artificial environments created in the first laboratories and studios, but the cinematic
results were equally technological. Whether fictional films or actualities, films made out-
of-doors should be understood, like their studio-produced counterparts, as the product of
human-built worlds. By mechanically reproducing the natural environment (to the awe of
early spectators who were captivated by early actuality films such as Birt Acres and
Robert W. Paul’s Rough Sea at Dover (1895)) early filmmakers contributed to the
process by which humans increasingly experienced space through technological
mediation.
Conditioned by the contexts of invention and industrial development that
produced early film technologies, the first filmmakers left the laboratory and studio with
devices and techniques ready-made for framing and enframing the world outside through
both a literal and metaphorical technological lens. Not surprisingly, the subjects they
filmed often included the spaces and technologies that contributed to the transformation
of the modern Western world. From common scenes of workers leaving the factory to
trains, bridges, and tunnels, the modern built environment offered a perfect setting for
early cinema. Films such as the Lumière’s first subject, La Sortie des usines Lumière

93

(1895), Edison’s Union Iron Works (1898), and countless others made by these and other
companies, such as Pathé in France and Mitchell and Kenyon in Britain, produced
recognizable scenes of industrial experience.
148
Railroad films, such as Edison’s
repeatedly remade Black Diamond Express (1900), and films of flying machines, steam
ships, and automobiles both cataloged and, especially in the so-called “phantom rides,”
reproduced the experience of the conquest of space and time by modern machines of
travel.
149
And films of civil engineering feats such as Edison’s Passaic Falls (1898)
emphasized the spread of technological conquest in urban and rural settings alike.

Figure 1.35: Passaic Falls (Heise, 1896), a poignant juxtaposition of nature and technology.

The popularity of these films among both filmmakers and audiences is suggested
by the common appearance in early film catalogs of categories such as the “machinery”

148
These films contributed to and profited from the broader practices of “industrial tourism” that included
popular factory tours. See Allison C. Marsh, “The Ultimate Vacation: Watching Other People Work, A
History of Factory Tours in America 1880-1950” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2008).

149
I return to these films in Chapter Two, where I analyze Georges Méliès’s representations of travel
technologies, and in Chapter Three, where I focus on films of urban transport in early twentieth-century
New York City. See also the essays in Jeffrey Ruoff, ed., Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2006).

94

film, the “industrial,” and “railroads.” Such films both reflected and contributed to the
experience of modern space as increasingly technological, urban, and artificial, an
experience that was celebrated at international expositions and in the films that
documented them. At the Paris 1900 Exposition, for instance, Edison Company producer
James White, taking leave from the little-used Black Maria, recorded stunning images of
the architectural and technological novelties that captivated festival attendees and later
film audiences, including the Palace of Electricity, the Eiffel Tower (and its elevator),
and the Exposition’s moving boardwalks. These spaces and technologies offered
filmmakers a seemingly ideal testing ground for the new film technologies produced in
their laboratories and studios.
White arrived in Paris with a new rotating tripod head that facilitated his
panoramic exploration of the Exposition space. These panoramic films offered viewers a
technological experience of space that, although consistent with earlier experiences in
panoramas and dioramas, constituted a new form of modern spatial experience. As Anne
Friedberg has argued, these films reproduced the effect of the Exposition’s transport
technologies and created their cinematic equivalent through a virtual mobility—the
spectator’s experience of space became less physically mobile at the same time that
cinema created greater virtual mobility across space and time.
150

The following year at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, new Edison
employee and future studio head Edwin S. Porter joined White, and together they used

150
Anne Friedberg, “Troittoir Roulant: the cinema and new mobilities of spectatorship,” in John Fullerton
and Jan Olsson, eds, Allegories of Communication: Intermedial Concerns from cinema to the digital
(Rome: John Libbey Publishing, 2004), 263-276, 269 and 273. For Friedberg’s full treatment of this
paradoxical experience of modern space, see Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993).

95

the rotating tripod technology to produce similar cinematic effects in the “City of Living
Light.” Like the Exposition’s extravagant electrical light display, these films referred, in
Kristen Whissel’s words, “to the subordination of nature by modern technology.”
151
Each
evening the Exposition lights were slowly brought to full brightness just before dark, only
to be slowly turned off to reproduce the sunset. As one commentator described, “it is a
new kind of brilliancy. You are face to face with the most magnificent and artistic
nocturnal scene that man has ever made.”
152
In mid-October, Porter and White produced
this event’s cinematic analog, a panoramic testament to cinema’s power to reproduce and
control the effects of the sun. They created the film, Pan-American Exposition by Night,
by commencing the panorama during daylight hours, rotating the camera approximately
ninety degrees to face the Exposition’s Tower of Electricity before turning the camera off
to wait for the sunset; after dark, White and Porter turned the camera back on, continuing
the pan at the same constant speed, thereby creating the effect of a sudden transformation
from day to night.

Figure 1.36: Pan-American Exposition by Night (Porter and White, 1901)

151
Kristen Whissel, Picturing American Modernity: Traffic, Technology, and the Silent Cinema (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2008), 128.

152
Walter Hines Page, The World’s Work, quoted in Thomas E. Leary and Elizabeth C. Sholes with the
Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society, Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition (Charleston, SC: Arcadia
Publishing, 1998), 51.

96

The Edison Company catalog described the film as “pronounced by the
photographic profession to be a marvel in photography, and by theatrical people to be the
greatest winner in panoramic views ever placed before the public.” As Whissel argues,
Porter and White’s film “simultaneously enacted and aestheticized technological
modernity's transcendence of the natural order through electricity's disassociation of light
from time.”
153

Ironically, this disassociation – produced at the very moment when White and
Porter abandoned the Black Maria in favor of Edison’s new studio in Manhattan –
recalled the studio’s own radical attempt to defy nature through film technology. The
Exposition’s reproduction of the effects of nature through the precise ordering of its
technological environment paralleled the techniques used in contemporary film studios to
replicate the effects of nature needed for film production. In their films of the Exposition,
Porter and White took advantage of these conditions to build cinematic worlds that were
continuous with the technologies on display both in the City of Living Light and,
increasingly, in cities across the Western world.
The practice of choosing and changing the spaces of non-studio film production
was repeated in less extravagant form in the growing practice of outdoor shooting that
emerged at the turn of the century (and later on studio backlots). In extending their studio
techniques to location filming, to what degree did these filmmakers also extend the
studio’s technological enframing of nature? As I suggested at the beginning of this
chapter, one way of understanding the relationship between film technology and nature
outside the studio may be through Martin Heidegger’s visual metaphor for technological

153
Whissel, 120.

97

enframing. As Samuel Weber describes, for Heidegger technology produces “the world
brought forth and set before the subject, whose place thus seems secured by the object of
its representation.”
154
Cinema did so literally: filmmakers secured views of the world and
sent them back to fascinated audiences who came to know the world increasingly through
its photographic reproductions. As Lewis Mumford similarly described, as a “specific art
of the machine” cinema provided an important way of experiencing the world that was
consistent with the broader experiences of technological change. Like contemporary film
theorists such as Béla Balázs, Walter Benjamin, and Sigfried Kracauer, Mumford
recognized that through close-ups, slow- and fast-motion, and the simple fact of
recording movement, film provided a new epistemological tool for exploring and
explaining the visual world. But for Mumford, it also gave its viewers a contradictory
form of access to the fleeting experience of nature. Precisely by capturing it
mechanically, cinema made nature newly accessible – as a technological “world picture”
– to audiences conditioned by the technological experience of the modern world.
155

This view of the relationship between cinematic technology and nature reflects
the contradictions involved in early filmmakers’ constructions of film space, first in the
studio, but also in the changing modern built environment. With the Black Maria,
Dickson created a remarkable machine for producing images through precise
environmental control that was nonetheless constrained by the natural processes it sought
to escape. The tension between technology and nature in film production would continue
to condition the design of film studios into the new century, perhaps no more clearly than

154
Weber, “Mass Mediauras, or: Art, Aura and Media in the Work of Walter Benjamin,” 86.

155
Mumford, 6.

98

in the “glass house” studio designs inaugurated by Georges Méliès in France in 1897 and
Robert W. Paul in Britain the following year. While these studios did not derive from the
precision spaces and practices of laboratories such as Edison’s, they shared a need for
precision environmental control, and they created it by drawing on a different set of
influences that contributed to new ways of creating, controlling, and manipulating film
space. Indeed, even if the dictates of scientific observation and investigation were shed
during the development of the studio as a space of film production, the strict regulation of
space continued to shape the practices and forms of film, as well as the nature of film
space – a highly-regulated, ordered, artificial reproduction of the natural environment.

99

CHAPTER TWO

The “Imponderable Fluidity” of Modernity:
Architecture, Building Technology, and Cinema in the “Glass House”

Figure 2.1: First Méliès studio (Studio A) with set for Le Voyage dans la lune (1902)

In December 1937, only a month before his death, Georges Méliès recalled his
early role in cinema’s development with a characteristically bold exclamation: “I built the
first studio in the world!”
156
Méliès was already recognized, much as he is today, as the
inventor of “trick” or science fiction cinema, but in the waning moments of his life he felt
compelled to remind the world that he might one day be remembered by another title: the
architect of the world’s first film studio. Although Méliès did not build the first studio, he

156
Georges Méliès, “J’ai construit le premier studio du monde: il y a 40 ans,” Pour Vous: le plus grand
hebdomadaire du cinéma, December 1, 1937.

100

stood at the forefront of cinema's initial forays into architecture.
157
In 1897 he designed
and oversaw the construction of the first French studio on his family’s estate in the
Parisian suburb of Montreuil-sous-Bois. Méliès’s “glass house” – a greenhouse-like iron
frame with plate glass tiles – represents the first instance of what would become the
predominant studio form through World War I and into the 1920s.
Although based on similar principles as the Black Maria – especially precise
control of light and temperature – glass studios developed out of a different architectural
tradition that had important effects on the first studios’ forms, functions, and film
products. This chapter situates glass studios in the history of glass-and-iron architecture,
with emphasis on three building types that shaped early studio design: winter gardens and
international exposition structures such as London’s Crystal Palace (1851) and the
Galeries des Machines that wowed visitors at Paris’s nineteenth-century expositions; the
glass-and-iron photography studios found on rooftops throughout Paris in the second half
of the nineteenth century (including one on the roof of Méliès’s Théâtre Robert-Houdin);
and industrial spaces such as rail stations and factories that used large glass windows and
iron-supported frames to bring light and air into increasingly large interiors.
The first glass-and-iron studios and the films made in them reproduced the formal
characteristics and oft-cited experiences that fascinated critics and theorists of late-
nineteenth-century architecture: spatial plasticity, fluidity, and artificiality. Not

157
Dickson’s Black Maria, his Biograph rooftop studio in Manhattan, and Oskar Messter’s rooftop studio
on Friedrichstrasse in Berlin all predated the first Méliès studio. On Messter, see Klaus Kreimeier, The Ufa
Story: A History of Germany’s Greatest Film Company, 1918-1945, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber (New
York: Hill & Wang, 1996), 13 and Martin Koerber, “Oskar Messter, Film Pioneer: Early Cinema between
Science, Spectacle, and Commerce,” in A Second Life: German Cinema’s First Decades, ed. Thomas
Elsaesser (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996), 51-61, 54-55.

101

coincidentally, these studios housed early cinema’s most celebrated formal innovators,
including Méliès and Ferdinand Zecca in France, Robert W. Paul and G.A. Smith in
Britain, and Edwin S. Porter in America. Departing from the Black Maria’s “framed
aesthetic,” these filmmakers developed the formal techniques that later inspired critics
such as the art historian Elie Faure to celebrate cinema’s “moving architecture” as an “art
of cineplastics.”
158
The spatial manipulations and abstractions of this budding cinematic
plasticity were of a kind with the artificial materials underpinning glass-and-iron studio
architecture. Just as glass and iron could be forged, shaped, easily transported, and
applied to a growing variety of architectural forms and building practices, so glass studios
allowed for a diverse set of formal techniques and cinematic innovations in both content
and style. Glass and iron opened the studio to passing figures, objects, and most
importantly, sunlight. And in turn, the new films “opened” film space to new types and
degrees of motion across the frame’s borders, within the frame itself (in the form of
appearing and disappearing objects), and across multiple locations (each typically a new
version of the studio). Put simply, versatile studio spaces fostered filmmaking
experimentation.
Beyond these formal developments, the first glass studios also contributed to
developments in set design and storytelling that allowed filmmakers to produce stunning
responses to the changes shaping modern life and the “human-built world.” Méliès’s
Jules Verne-inspired “voyages extraordinaires” represent only the most apparent

158
Elie Faure, “The Art of Cineplastics” (trans. Walter Patch), in Richard Abel, ed., French Film Theory
and Criticism: A History/Anthology, Volume I: 1907-1929 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988),
258-267, 260. Originally published as “De la cinéplastique,” L’Arbre d’Eden (Paris: G. Crès, 1922, 277-
304.

102

examples of this period’s widespread fascination with (and commentary on)
technological changes to the built environment. His use of cinematic technologies
(including the studio) offers important insights into how films simultaneously used and
represented the technological developments that produced cinema in the first place. By
examining both Méliès’s well-known science fiction and trick films as well as his less-
celebrated works – and by investigating the origins of his studios – this chapter recasts
Méliès as more than a magician-turned-filmmaker or special effects innovator. Armed
with an imaging technology and a built space that could reproduce, record, and transform
the varied and shifting built world, Méliès became an insightful observer of the
technological environment of modernity and posed film as an interpretation as much as a
representation of that new technological environment.
A History of the “Glass House” – Iron and Glass Architecture in the Nineteenth
Century

[The nineteenth century] represents an immense transformation in the history of
human civilization. The natural sciences became more fruitful and powerful than
ever, and their union with technology drove them, in a race for a victory without
precedent, towards a goal of which earlier époques did not dare to dream: the
domination of nature.
– Alfred G. Meyer, 1907
159

Glass and iron construction developed into a critical component of the Western
city before World War I. New synthetic materials allowed architects and engineers to fill
increasingly large spaces with natural light, while also sheltering them from rain, snow,
cold, and, with the addition of ventilation and cooling systems, heat. Historians of
technology have argued that these changes marked the climax of the greatest

159
Meyer, Adolf Gotthold. Construire en fer. Histoire et esthétique. Translated by Marielle Roffi and Léo
Biétry. (Paris: Infolio, 2005). Originally published as Eisenbauten: ihre Geschichte un Aesthetik (1907).
My translation is from the French.

103

technological revolution in history: the construction of artificial, human-built worlds.
160

The new glass-and-iron structures’ artificiality came from their increasing capacity to
provide comfortable interiors independent of the natural environment outside, as well as
from their uncanny sizes and shapes and the objects that filled them—the exotic
vegetation of the greenhouse, the elaborate machinery at international expositions, and
department store wares and spectacular displays. But as architectural historians such as
Sigfried Giedion have argued, these buildings’ artificiality originated in the manufactured
synthesis of the materials used to build them. In Giedion’s words, “the seeds of this new
architecture were planted at the moment when handwork gave place to industrialized
production.”
161

The development and application of iron and glass in architecture closely
followed and depended on the technological developments of the Industrial Revolution.
The first glasshouse – an iron conservatory built in Stuttgart – was completed in 1789, the
same year that James Watt perfected the steam engine, the machine that literally drove
the large-scale iron projects of the nineteenth century.
162
By the middle of the century, a

160
See Thomas P. Hughes, Human-Built World: How to Think about Technology and Culture (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2004) and Rosalind Williams, Notes on the Underground: An Essay on
Technology, Society, and the Imagination (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990). Hughes and Williams argue that
the industrial revolution that began in Great Britain in the eighteenth century and the second industrial
revolution that transformed everyday life in Western cities in the latter half of the nineteenth century are
only two aspects of a larger technological revolution: “the creation of a new habitat for human existence”
(Williams, Retooling, 22).

161
Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time, and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1941), 182. See also Giedion, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in
Ferroconcrete, trans. J. Duncan Berry (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the
Humanities, 1995). Originally published as Bauen in Frankreich, bauen in Eisen, bauen in Eisenbeton
(1928).

162
Georg Kohlmaier and Barna von Sartory, Houses of Glass: A Nineteenth-Century Building Type, trans.
John C. Harvey (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986), 57. Originally published as Das Glashaus. Ein

104

period of large-scale and increasingly complex building commenced with new spatial
designs and structural techniques, the mass production of iron, and, after 1870, the
availability of cheap steel. Structures such as the monumental Jardin d’Hiver in Paris
(1848) and John Paxton’s Crystal Palace (1851) matched the artificiality of their
materials with their unprecedented designs.
163

Foremost among these buildings were the series of Galerie des Machines built at
the Paris expositions of 1855, 1867, 1878, and 1889.
164
The Galeries opened architectural
space for light and movement, requiring, in Giedion’s words, “new aesthetic
reactions.”
165
Commenting on the 1878 Galerie, French architect Louis-Auguste Boileau
encapsulated contemporary visitors’ inability to comprehend the new materials and
forms: “the spectator is not aware of the weight of transparent surfaces. These surfaces
are to him [sic] air and light, that is to say, an imponderable fluidity.”
166
Or as Giedion
agues about the 1889 Galerie, “the aesthetic meaning is contained in the union and
interpenetration of the building and outer space, out of which there grows a completely
new limitlessness and movement in keeping with the machines it contains."
167

Bautypus des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1981). On Watt, see Kenneth Frampton, Modern
Architecture: A Critical History, 4th ed. (London; New York: Thames & Hudson, 2007), 29.

163
Kohlmaier and Sartory, Houses of Glass, 58 and 60; Frampton, Modern Architecture, 33. Giedion,
Space, Time, and Architecture, 251.

164
As Fierro notes, the Galeries “continuously challenged previously known structural concepts and scales
of enclosed spaces." See Fierro, The Glass State, 9

165
Giedion, Space, Time, and Architecture, 251.

166
Quoted in Giedion, Space, Time, and Architecture, 267. Emphasis added.

167
Ibid, 271. The 1889 Galerie was overshadowed, literally, by its more famous neighbor, the Eiffel
Tower.

105

Figure 2.2: Galerie des Machines, Paris, 1889
The “limitlessness” and “imponderable fluidity” of interiors enclosed by
seemingly nothing more than “air and light” created new visual aesthetics and spatial
paradoxes that helped define the modern built environment. The widespread use of iron
and glass in the second half of the nineteenth century made brightened spaces of fluid
motion a common experience in Western cities. Parisian architects notably used iron and
glass in François Duquesney’s Gare de l’Est station (1847-52), Henri Labrouste’s
Bibliothèque Nationale (1858-68), Victor Baltard’s Les Halles market pavilions (1853-
55), and Eiffel and Louis Charles Boileau’s Magasin au Bon Marché (1876).
168
More
generally, as an observer described already in 1855:
It is enough to stroll through the streets of Paris where new constructions are
going up to recognize that the use of iron and cast iron in building is an
established fact, an adaptive improvement in the building industry.”
169

168
On the Gare de l’Est see Carroll Meeks, The Railroad Station; an Architectural History (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1956), 61-2. For the Bibliothèque National see Giedion, Space, Time, and
Architecture, 222-225. And for Les Halles and the Bon Marché see Giedion, 230-241. [Vajda work]

169
Michel Chevalier, “Exposition Universelle : Le Fer et la Fonte Employés dans les Constructions
Monumentales,” in Journal des débats (June 1, 1855). « Il suffit de se promener dans les rues de Paris où
s'élèvent des constructions nouvelles pour reconnaître que l'usage du fer et de la fonte dans le bâtiment est
aujourd'hui un fait acquis, une amélioration acclimatée dans l'industrie du bâtiment. »

106

By the early twentieth century, these new forms – which seemed to confound
traditional distinctions between interior and exterior, public and private, and nature and
artifice – fascinated architects and critics. As historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch argues,
the use of “ferro-vitreous architecture created a novel condition [in which] light and
atmosphere were … no longer subject to the rules of the natural world.”
170
Critics located
these tensions in building materials. German architectural historian Alfred Meyer, for
instance, argued in a 1907 treatise on iron construction that: “Iron inspired a certain
distrust because it was not immediately furnished by nature, but instead had to be
artificially prepared as a building material.” Meyer’s recognition of the “distrust” created
by mechanical synthesis would be an important source of inspiration for Walter
Benjamin, who repeatedly cites Meyer’s analysis of iron construction in his unfinished
Arcades Project. Benjamin’s Meyer-inspired analysis of the artifice of iron’s
“technological derivation” bears striking similarity to his earlier and better known
argument about the ontological status of art in the age of photography and film – the
machines that similarly displaced objects (in this case artworks) from their natural state
by mechanically reproducing them.
171

Inspired by Benjamin, film historians have shown that these architectural
developments set the stage for cinema’s very emergence. Three decades before the

170
Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 48.

171
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.; London: Harvard University Press, 2002),
[Convolute F3a,5]. I am of course referring to Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books,
1969). Originally published as “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” in
Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 5 (1936).

107

architects, filmmakers, and theorists of modernism would debate the realities of
architectural and cinematic spaces, ferro-vitreous constructions were shaping visual
perception and institutionalizing practices of viewing in the spaces of the modern city.
Window shopping, international expositions, travel culture, and popular amusements
such as the panorama, diorama, museum, and even the Paris morgue shaped urban
experience and contributed to the development of new visual practices.
172
Architectures
of spectacular display and new technologies of movement such as elevators and moving
walkways reconfigured spatial and perceptual experience for the urban inhabitants who
soon became film’s first spectators.
173

As Anne Friedberg describes, film itself became a new component of architecture
in early viewing spaces. Like building exteriors framed by glass-and-iron, the “virtual
window” created by the cinema screen made light “a building element in a newly
immaterial architecture.”
174
But light marks a key difference between the bright, virtually
open spaces of glass-and-iron buildings and the darkened, enclosed sites associated with

172
Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz, eds., Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1995), 3; Tom Gunning, “From the Kaleidoscope to the X-Ray: Urban
Spectatorship, Poe, Benjamin, and Traffic in Souls (1913),” Wide Angle 19, no. 4 (1997): 25-61; Giuliana
Bruno, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the Films of Elvira Notari (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1993); Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

173
On the Paris Morgue see Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-De-
Siècle Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). On technologies of movement see Anne
Friedberg, “Trottoir Roulant: the cinema and new mobilities of spectatorship,” in Allegories of
Communication: Intermedial concerns from cinema to the digital, ed. John Fullerton and Jan Olsson
(Rome, Italy: John Libbey Publishing, 2004), 263-276.

174
Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 151.
On early theater architecture and the relationship between architecture and viewing practices, also see
Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journey in Art, Architecture, and Film (New York: Verso, 2002).

108

cinematic spectatorship.
175
While the first exhibition sites may have engendered the same
viewing practices established in department stores, exhibition halls, and arcades,
materially these spaces stood at opposite ends of the spectrum. The cinematic spaces
most defined by urban modernity would be film studios. The same materials, designs, and
spatial concepts that structured the built environment of the Western metropolis
contemporaneously shaped cinematic architecture on its outskirts. Following Méliès’s
construction of the first glass-and-iron film studio in late 1897 in the Parisian suburb
Montreuil-sous-Bois, “glass house” film studios appeared in the parks and suburbs
surrounding Paris, London, and Berlin, the edges of Manhattan and nearby New Jersey,
and other major cities in the U.S. and Europe. Drawing on similar developments in
building technologies and architectural designs found across the West, architects and
filmmakers would reproduce the basic form of Méliès’s first studio repeatedly into the
1920s. For early spectators, film viewing often meant unknowingly gazing into glass-
and-iron worlds not unlike the ones they left behind when they stepped from arcades,
department stores, and exhibition halls into darkened theaters.

175
Ibid, 152.

109

Méliès and the First French Film Studio – Montreuil-sous-Bois, 1897

Figure 2.3: Studio A, shown with additions completed by 1900.

In May 1896, Méliès began making films in the garden of his family’s estate and
at locations around Paris.
176
Although he produced eighty films that year, Méliès found
outdoor production laborious and inefficient due to the often-changing weather
conditions that destroyed his sets and ruined his exposures. Finally, as he would later
write, “I was becoming famous, success seemed assured, and a quite simple idea came to
me: to avoid all of that, let’s take shelter.”
177
Méliès’s seemingly simple decision to
escape the vagaries of the often moist Parisian skies marked a profound shift in cinematic
production – the decided movement away from the natural environment and towards the
artifice of studio sets – that filmmakers and theorists would debate into the 1920s and
beyond. Like W.K.L. Dickson before him, Méliès recognized the competing demands

176
See Jacques Malthête, Méliès: Images et Illusions (Paris: Exporégie, 1996), 49.

177
Georges Méliès, “J’ai construit le premier studio du monde: il y a 40 ans.” My translation.

110

created by film’s reliance on natural light and the filmmaker’s need to regulate the
production environment. He sought to resolve this tension through studio architecture.
French historians have recounted the history of the studio’s design, construction,
and subsequent modification in more or less the same terms since Maurice Noverre’s
extensive description published in 1929.
178
As Noverre describes, Méliès designed the
studio himself using his Théâtre Robert-Houdin and contemporary photography studios
as a guide. After hiring a carpenter to build a wooden frame for the structure, Méliès
faced a major and costly setback: the frame was too weak to support the glass panes for
the walls and roof. Discouraged but resilient, Méliès elected to reinforce the wooden
frame with iron (rather than rebuilding from scratch), doubling his already large
investment to 70,000 francs.

178
Notwithstanding recent corrections by Malthête, Noverre’s remains the most accurate and
comprehensive account of the studios. Unless otherwise noted, the following description is drawn from
Maurice Noverre, “L’oeuvre de Georges Méliès. Étude retrospective sur le premier ‘studio
cinématographique’ machine pour la prise de vues théâtrales,” Le Nouvel Art cinématographique, Vol. 2,
No. 3, Brest, July 1929, 64-83. Cited in Malthête, “Les Deux Studios de Georges Méliès,” in Malthête and
Mannoni, eds, Méliès: magie et cinéma, 134-169. See also, Sadoul, Histoire générale du cinéma, II. The
full text of Noverre’s article is reproduced in Sadoul, Georges Méliès, 150-156. Jean Mitry also uses
Noverre’s description in Histoire du Cinéma: Art et Industrie: I. 1895-1914 (Paris: Editions universitaires,
1968). The best description in English is Paul Hammond, Marvelous Méliès (London: Fraser, 1974), 31-33.

111

Figure 2.4: Studio A, interior, taken facing away from the stage. Méliès is the leftmost figure. The
set construction depicted here and the absence of the cavern for the camera indicates that this
photograph was taken before the additions of 1898-1900.

In its initial form, the studio consisted of a simple quadrilateral frame, seventeen
meters long by six wide with four-meter high walls and a triangular roof that reached six
meters. Méliès covered all sides in frosted glass with the exception of several rows of
transparent glass facing the stage, and he oriented the studio to the south south-west so
that the stage was frontally lit at approximately one o’clock each day. In order to control
the amount and direction of light, Méliès equipped the studio with retractable cloth
shutters as well as a darkroom for developing film.
179

Méliès used his first studio to develop a broad repertoire of film techniques – both
for producing “trick” effects as well as artificial cinematic worlds – that would play an

179
Using Méliès’s production notes and the dates of the films, Malthête places the beginning of production
in the spring of 1897. See Malthête, “Les Deux Studios de Georges Méliès,” 138. For the studios
dimensions and diagrams, see Malthête, Melies : Images et Illusions (Paris : Exporégie, 1996), 57.

112

important role in defining early cinematic form. Méliès produced these tricks and formal
film strategies by drawing on earlier spaces of image production and spectacle that reflect
cinema’s complex relationship to nineteenth-century technology, especially photography.
Theatrical and Photographic Origins of the Film Studio – 8, boulevard des Italiens
Historians have almost exclusively associated Méliès’s first studio with his
Théâtre Robert-Houdin, emphasizing the ways that the studio replicated the stage setup,
trap doors, rollers and winches, and electric projectors of the theater.
180
But while Méliès
noted the similarities between his sites of production (the studio) and exhibition (the
Robert-Houdin, the first place that Méliès showed his films), he also emphasized their
key differences and highlighted the importance of photographic studios. In the often-cited
text in which he describes the studio as “a small-scale likeness of a théâtre de féerie,”
181

Méliès first compares it to a photographic studio “in gigantic scale.”
182

Photography studios were a recognizable feature of the Parisian landscape in the
second half of the nineteenth century. As art historian Elizabeth Anne McCauley has
described, commercial photography studios became common in the late 1840s and
reached their peak of production in the late 1860s, with 368 studios in Paris in 1868.
183

By the mid-1880s, the number of studios had leveled off at just over 300, a figure that

180
For instance, see Jacques Deslandes, Le Boulevard du cinéma à l’époque de Georges Méliès (Paris :
Cerf, 1963); Malthête, Melies: Images et Illusions, and John Frazer, Artificially Arranged Scenes: The
Films of Georges Méliès (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1979).

181
Georges Méliès, “Les Vues Cinématographiques,” in Annuaire général et international de la
photographie (Paris: Plon, 1907), 362-92. Translated as “Cinematographic Views,” trans. Stuart Liebman,
October 29 (Summer 1984): 24-34, 26.

182
Méliès, “Cinematographic Views,” 25.

183
McCauley, Industrial Madness, 1.

113

remained consistent through the first years of cinema.
184
For photographers, the studio
offered practical solutions for problems of lighting and climate control, as well as tools
for regulating and manipulating the space of photographic images. Like cinema in its first
decade, photography depended on vast amounts of sunlight for its lengthy exposures, and
entrepreneurs seeking suitable lighting conditions would purchase or rent the upper floors
of existing structures, where they added glass-and-iron enclosures.
185

Historians have rarely noted these photographic spaces’ influence on early
cinema, even within the plentiful work on the ontological relationship between film and
photographic media.
186
This neglect has obscured the ways that early cinema fit not only
into modern spaces of urban exhibition and spectacular experience, but also into spaces
of image production. In their material similarities to glass-and-iron structures such as
train stations and market halls, photographic studios reflected and contributed to the
artificiality, opening and fluidity of space, and incorporation of light that defined modern
space more generally. And as spaces of image production, they provide a more
conspicuous link between these themes and the creation of images in cinema.

184
McCauley, Industrial Madness, 50.

185
The numerous rooftop studios built in cities such as New York, Philadelphia, and Berlin during
cinema’s first decade are no doubt a continuation of this tradition.

186
On the relationship between photography and early cinema see Tom Gunning, “Embarrassing Evidence:
The Detective Camera and the Documentary Impulse,” in Collecting Visible Evidence (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 46-64 and Gunning, “Tracing the Individual Body: Photography,
Detectives, and Early Cinema,” in Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz, eds., Cinema and the Invention
of Modern Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 15-45. See also the essays collected in
Dudley Andrew, ed. The Image in Dispute: Art and Cinema in the Age of Photography (Austin: The
University of Texas Press, 1997) and Karen Beckman and Jean Ma, eds. Still Moving: Between
Photography and Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). On the use of lighting techniques from
photographic portraiture in early Hollywood, see Patrick Keating, “From the Portrait to the Close-Up:
Gender and Technology in Still Photography and Hollywood Cinematography” Cinema Journal 45, No. 3
(2006): 90-108.

114

In addition to revealing another instance of continuity between cinema and its
media forebears, photography studios also trouble common assumptions about what
cinema took from photography—namely, indexical realism. Especially in its studio form,
cinema also inherited photography’s capacity for both creating spectacular fiction and
making the unreal look real. In both media the artificiality of the studio provided the basis
for indexical reproductions of unreal productions, the results of which struck a delicate
balance between realism and artifice. That balance would become crucial to early cinema,
perhaps no more so than in Méliès’s films. While many historians have tied Méliès’s
filmmaking to his magical stage work, his blending of realism, artifice, and spectacle had
as much to do with nineteenth century photography studios as his theatrical experience.
Méliès likely forged the link between theatrical and photographic spaces in his
mind long before he ever imagined moving images, much less a studio for producing
them. From his earliest days as a spectator and later as a magician at the Robert-Houdin,
Méliès would have found theater and photography housed under the same (glass and
iron) roof. Since the 1850s, the building at 8, boulevard des Italians housed theatrical
productions on the first two floors and photographic re-productions above. In 1854 André
Adolphe Disdéri, portrait photographer and inventor of the carte de visite photograph (a
kind of photographic business card, typically two-and-a-half by four inches in size, that
became popular in Europe and the U.S. in the 1860s), set up his studio above the Maison
Robert-Houdin. This magic theater and part-time diorama show was managed by Robert-
Houdin’s brother-in-law and fellow magician, Pierre Etienne Auguste Chocat.
187
The

187
Elizabeth Anne McCauley, A.A.E. Disdéri and the Carte De Visite Portrait Photograph (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1985), 23. See also McCauley, Industrial Madness: Commercial Photography in

115

building itself offers a striking instance of the spatial links between spectacular displays
that characterized the experience of “modern life” in the latter half of the nineteenth
century in Paris. Positioned in the heart of Paris’s burgeoning boulevard culture, it
encompassed theater, magic, and diorama shows, scientific and technological exhibitions
(including electrical automata and the first public demonstration of the telephone in
1878), and Disdéri’s photographic studio, the largest in Paris at the time of its opening.
188

Paris, 1848-1871 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 73. Christian Fechner notes that “La présence
d’un laboratoire photographique au-dessus du théâtre fera toujours peser une menace d’inondation ou
d’incendie sur la petite alle qui, par deux fois, en 1881, à l’époque d’Émile Robert-Houdin, puis, en 1901, à
celle de Georges Méliès, faillit ne pas en réchapper.” See Christian Fechner, “Le Théâtre Robert-Houdin,
de Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin à Georges Méliès,” in Malthête and Mannoni, eds., Méliès: magie et
cinéma, 72-115, 87. See also Disdéri’s portrait of Robert-Houdin in Fechner, 75.

188
On “modern life” see the essays in Charney and Schwartz, eds., Cinema and the Invention of Modern
Life. On boulevard culture in Paris see Deslandes, Le Boulevard du cinéma à l’époque de Georges Méliès
and Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-De-Siècle Paris (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998). On the telephone demonstration see Fechner, 74.

116

Figure 2.5: Maison Robert-Houdin – 8, boulevard des Italiens. Note the placards above the
Théâtre Robert-Houdin advertising the “Photographie E. Tourtin” and those next door for the
“Ancienne Photographie Disdéri.”

As McCauley has described, “Disdéri's establishment … had one story,
containing storerooms, a framing studio, and a reception room, surmounted by a roof
story with two large terraces, an elegant salon for women, and a laboratory to prepare and
develop plates.”
189
Disdéri remodeled the studio in 1860, making it both a site for
photographic portraiture and a spectacular experience:
Visitors to the new studio entered through a Moorish door in an oriental façade
and passed through a vestibule decorated with portraits, up a well-carpeted
staircase, by Hamilton's theatre on the second floor, and into the first of Disdéri's

189
McCauley, Industrial Madness, 69.

117

three waiting rooms filled with Chinese porcelain, Sèvres ware, reproductions of
paintings, life-size portraits, and albums of cartes de visite.
190

The Robert-Houdin offered one magical view in an entrance that, like earlier nineteenth-
century attractions such as Etienne-Gaspart Robertson’s phantasmagoria (first opened in
1799), used a series of displays to condition the visitor for the main attraction to come; in
this case the uncanny spectacle of photographic reproduction.
191
As with Robertson’s
phantasmagoria, as visitors moved past the magic theater to Disdéri’s studio, they found
themselves positioned in the interstices of science and superstition, rationality and
spectacle, photography and magic:
The main salon de réception … included a view of Aurora on the ceiling,
allegories of chemistry, physics, painting, and sculpture in the corners, and
medallions of Jacopo della Porta (the supposed inventor of the camera obscura),
Niepce, Daguerre, and Talbot.
192

The tension between reality and artifice established in the entryways would have
been most marked, however, in the studio itself, where Disdéri posed his portrait sitters in
the midst of the indexical certainty promised by mechanical reproduction and an artifice
guaranteed by backdrops, props, and costumes. The tension between reality and artifice
created in studio photography reflected the spatial paradoxes of the studio’s materiality—
the uncanny blending of interior and exterior on the studio’s ferro-vitreous surface. Like
exhibition spaces and department stores, the photography studio framed spectacular
displays in glass and iron. And just as the industrial fabrication of these materials allowed

190
McCauley, A.A.E. Disdéri and the Carte De Visite Portrait Photograph, 51.

191
On the phantasmagoria, see Tom Gunning "Phantasmagoria and the Manufacturing of Illusions and
Wonder: Towards a Cultural Optics of the Cinematic Apparatus," in Andre Gaudreault, Catherine Russell
and Pierre Veronneau, eds, The Cinema, A New Technology for the 20th Century (Paris: Editions Payot
Lausanne, 2004) pp. 31-44.

192
McCauley, A.A.E. Disdéri and the Carte De Visite Portrait Photograph, 51.

118

for diverse architectural forms, so the studio’s artificial space fostered diverse staged re-
presentations. In each case the artificiality of the materials used (glass, iron, props,
costumes, and the camera itself) betrayed architecture and photography’s respective
dissociations from the natural environment and indexical reality.
193
Glass-and-iron film
studios such as Méliès’s would inherit these paradoxes and the tensions between reality
and artifice and interior and exterior, as would their films.
Méliès later disclosed his debt to photography studios in the description of his
initial plans: “Immediately I put on paper a design of a staging ‘workshop’ (because after
all, that is what one called the glass photography workshops, which were situated
generally on the sixth floor of buildings, or on the roof).”
194
He may have visited such a
studio from a young age,
195
was certainly familiar with the studio above his theater, and
eventually, in 1906, depicted one on film in Une Chute de cinq étages (A Mix-Up in the
Gallery).
196
The film – for which Méliès recreated a glass-and-iron rooftop studio in
striking detail – suggests Méliès’s conscious debt to photographic studio designs. It also
stages a number of the paradoxes that film and photography studios shared and invites a
further reconsideration of the distinction so often made between fiction films and
actualities in early cinema.

193
As McCauley notes, “photography itself retained an aura of magic” that made Disdéri’s association with
the magical theater and its owner below “more than fortuitous.” Ibid, 23.

194
Méliès, “J’ai construit le premier studio du monde: il y a 40 ans.”

195
According to Christian Fechner, Méliès began visiting the Robert-Houdin as a schoolboy at the age of
ten, in 1871. See Fechner, 89. One could speculate that Méliès’s father, the successful owner of a shoe
factor in Montreuil-sous-Bois, might have had the young Méliès’s portrait made in one of the studios.

196
Also known as Une Chute du cinqième étage.

119

Une Chute de cinq étages – Realism and Spectacle, Méliès and the Lumières
By the time Méliès took over the Robert-Houdin, Disdéri had gone bankrupt
several times, opened a second rooftop studio in the adjoining building, and in 1875
departed for Nice, leaving both studios in the hands of new photographers.
197
Around
April 1895, another photographer named Clément Maurice moved into the studio on
Méliès’s roof. Maurice had previously worked at the Lumière factory in Lyon and
continued to work for the Lumières in Paris.
198
Maurice organized the first public
screening of the Cinématographe at the Salon Indien, and Lumière reportedly invited
Méliès to the screening outside the Robert-Houdin after one of his “frequent” visits to
Maurice upstairs.
199
Remarkably, at the moment of cinema’s “birth,” the nominal
originators of cinematic realism and fiction shared an address. As Méliès’s later film
suggests, their physical proximity evokes the close relationship and often-porous
boundaries between realism and spectacle that photography and early cinema shared,
especially in their studio-produced forms.
200

197
Emile Tourtin took over the studio above the Robert-Houdin and Délié (the self-proclaimed “successor
of Disdéri”) moved into the studio next door. McCauley, A.A.E. Disdéri, 215-217.

198
According to some historians, Antoine Lumière rented the studio for Maurice (Georges Sadoul refers to
Maurice as Lumière’s “right-hand man”). Sadoul, Lumière et Méliès (Paris: Lherminier, 1985), 35.
Madeleine Malthête-Méliès claims that Méliès suggested the photography studio to Maurice and Lumière
and that Méliès even saw the Lumières’ first film devices there before the Grand Café screening. See
Madeleine Matlhête-Méliès, Méliès l’enchanteur (Paris : Hachette, 1973), 147-8. See also Deslandes, Le
Boulevard du cinéma à l’époque de Georges Méliès, 15, 20. Bernard Chardère and Guy and Marjorie
Borgé, Les Lumière (Lausanne: Payot, 1985), 96, as well as the letters from the Lumières to Maurice in
Jacques Rittaud-Hutinet, ed. Auguste et Louis Lumière: Correspendances, 1890-1953 (Paris: Cahiers du
cinéma, 1994).

199
According to Méliès: « M. Lumière père y venait fréquemment, ayant des intérêts dans cette maison
qu'il fournissait de plaques photographiques. Je le connaissais pour l'avoir rencontre souvent en sortant de
mon bureau. Un soir, vers cinq heures, je le vis arriver, l'air radieux, et il me dit: “Êtes-vous libre, ce soir? »
Cited in Chardère, Borgé, and Borgé, Les Lumière, 96. See also Malthête-Méliès, 157.

120

Figure 2.6: Une Chute de cinq étages (1906)
The film portrays a stereotypical portrait session in which the boisterous
photographer played by Méliès (wearing a long beard and an exaggerated costume that
recalls frequent stereotypes of photographers as hucksters) and his incompetent assistant
create a chaotic scene that sends the camera tumbling through the window to the
boulevard below.
201
Méliès produced the film in his first Montreuil studio, and it reveals

200
See the essays in the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 22, No. 3, 2002, a special
issue dedicated to early non-fiction cinema. On the tension between realism and fiction in Muybridge,
Marey, and the Lumière actualities, see Anthony R. Guneratne, “The Birth of a New Realism:
Photography, Painting and the Advent of Documentary Cinema,” Film History, Vol. 10, No. 2 (1998): 165-
187. For a broader set of considerations of such issues as reality and fiction, documentary and spectacle,
and shifting conceptions of vision in photography and moving images, see the essays in Patrice Petro, ed.
Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995).

201
McCauley’s description of early portrait photography is apt here: “For many visitors to the new studios
perched on rooftops to take advantage of the light the experience recalled the anxiety of visiting a dentist, a
man of dubious professional skills who forced his clients to undergo incomprehensible, painful
procedures.” McCauly, Industrial Madness, 17.

121

both the intricacy of Méliès’s deceptively simple set designs and the manipulations of
space that the studio made possible. In the first scene Méliès reproduces the rooftop
photography studio’s iron-and-glass enclosure using a painted backdrop for the studio’s
rear wall and roof, a wooden frame for its left wall, and a cluttered wall of real shelves,
paintings, and books on the right. The backdrop depicts distant rooftops painted in depth
through simulated glass, and Méliès includes drapes on two of the studio’s painted
rooftop panes, mimicking the methods he used to control light in his film studio. The
backdrop extends to the left of the frame, creating an illusion of depth and transparency
behind the open wooden skeleton of the left wall, the materiality of which is revealed
when Méliès’s camera is propelled out the window in the film’s title “chute.”
202

Fig. 2.7: Une Chute de cinq étages (1906)

The film’s intricate layering of backdrops and its simulated architectural frame
would have been difficult to complete outside of such an advanced studio. But these

202
This is difficult to see in a still reproduction – the film uses a painted backdrop that extends across the
entirety of the back of the frame. The left wall of the depicted photography studio also looks fake (as if it is
part of this painted set), but it is actually a flimsy wooden frame that extends out from the back wall. The
painted backdrop behind this wooden frame creates the illusion of depth.

122

spatial manipulations reveal more than the versatility that the studio provided to
filmmakers seeking to create compelling realistic and/or fantastic displays. They also
suggest the ways that filmmakers such as Méliès focused – often before any concerns
with narrative – on fabricating spatial illusions that recreated the paradoxes of space in
the modern built environment. In this film Méliès plays on the collapse of distinctions
between interior and exterior in glass-and-iron structures such as the photography studio.
He highlights the transparent surface marking the boundary between inside and out by
literally projecting the image-making apparatus through the “glass” surface and into the
city below. This movement of the camera becomes a metaphor for the plasticity of film
space and the fluid spaces of modernity more generally: as the camera moves through the
window and out of the frame, the film cuts to another scene, also shot in the studio, in
which the camera reappears as a projectile falling to the street below.
The photography studio setting emphasizes the artificiality of the film’s
production of space and reveals the ways that the film studio paralleled studio
photography’s production of the (un)real. The set is decorated with trappings similar to
those that McCauley describes in Disdéri’s studio: a sculpture of a ballet dancer, a short
faux-marble column, oil paintings, a table of photographs, and the portraitist’s painted
backdrop of a natural scene – precisely the objects that gave real photography studios
their contrived character. In Méliès’s film studio these objects serve a dual function—the
backdrops and props replicate a “real” photography studio, making the film realistic,
while also marking the unreality of the film studio, an artificially produced space using
artificial reproductions for productions of artificiality.

123

Within the transparent walls of Méliès’s studio and the frame of Méliès’s lens, the
rooftop photography studio becomes a symbolic representation of Méliès’s own studio,
with Méliès the photographer standing in for Méliès the cinematographer, recording
spectacular scenes of reproduction.
203
The photography studio depicted in Une chute de
cinq étages stands in for the film studio in which it was shot, thereby offering a small
window into the artificial world that most often lies hidden just behind the film’s four
frames. The photographer’s painted backdrop operates in the same manner. Not
insignificantly, this backdrop appears to depict a nature scene that promises to transport
the clients (and the implied viewers of this future photograph) photographically out of the
confines of the glass-and-iron studio (and indeed out of the built world) to a more natural
environment. In the same way, filmmakers such as Méliès used painted backdrops to
transport viewers into artificial but seemingly natural worlds beyond the screen. At a
moment when architecture and technology pushed nature further and further from
everyday urban experience, cinema offered its own contradictory access to the natural
environment through imaging technology. The painted backdrop used in this film – the
glass-and-iron wall and cityscape – underscores the illusionary effect of the film’s set by
reminding the viewer of how this artificial reality is created (and perhaps mockingly
showing how easily the illusion could come crashing down).

203
In Une Chute de cinq étages the photography studio is a mise-en-abyme for the film studio.

124

Figure 2.8: Une Chute de cinq étages (1906)
The subtle references to the filmmaking process continue as the film shifts to its
second scene via the propulsion of the camera out of the studio window and onto the
boulevard below. A painted backdrop again creates the illusion of the city, with the
viewer positioned at the street’s edge looking towards the building housing the
photography studio and an adjacent bijouterie, or jewelry shop, which recede slightly into
the background. Flyers bearing names such as “L. Micho” and “Claudel” cover the
jeweler’s wall. As John Frazer points out, Claudel was Méliès’s set decorator and
“Micho” mostly likely refers to his cameraman, Michaut.
204
These citations underscore

204
John Frazer, Artificially Arranged Scenes, 166. See also Madeleine Matlthête-Méliès, Anne-Marie
Quevrain, and Jacques Malthête, Essai de reconstitution du catalogue français de la Star-Film (Bois
d’Arcy: Service des Archives du Film, 1980).

125

the film’s self-referentiality as well as the artifice introduced into production by set
design and cinematography.
The scene otherwise appears on the surface to be little more than a typical comic
sketch—the camera falls from above, landing on an unsuspecting woman who transforms
into a bull with tripod legs for horns. After knocking a lamppost onto a passerby, the
woman/bull “battles” an épée-weilding gendarme before finally being unmasked and
rolled off in a wheelbarrow.
205
But given their cohabitation of 8, boulevard des Italiens,
this scene not only implies an incisive mocking by Méliès of his film rivals; it also
suggests a revision of the common distinction that scholars have made between Méliès
(the “father” of fiction film) and the Lumières (the originators of documentary).
Méliès overturns the idea of the Lumière operator who simply documents
actualités for a spectator who is invited to view these scenes as reproductions of reality.
Instead, the camera itself becomes the event of spectacular chaos and misapprehension—
perhaps a joke about the chaos that street filming caused in this period.
206
Méliès’s
misapprehended woman-as-bull reflects the illusion and staging of the actualité’s
depicted reality, and Méliès mocks the camera operator, ending the film with the
photographer collecting the remains of his shattered apparatus as the former clients grant
him a parting kick in the pants. Whether or not the film is a direct reference to the
Lumières or their photographer, Clément Maurice, it nonetheless strikingly juxtaposes the

205
This scene could also be read as a commentary on the role of women in public space in modernity. See
Friedberg, Window Shopping, Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), and Lauren Rabinowitz, For the Love of Pleasure: women,
movies and culture in turn-of-the-century Chicago (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998).

206
Alice Guy-Blaché noted that one of the primary reasons that Gaumont built its first studio was to avoid
the chaos of shooting on public streets caused by curious onlookers and the police. Alice Guy-Blaché, “A
Propos des Débuts de l’Industrie Cinématographique,” Gaumont publication, 1930.

126

“fictional” and “real” settings of the studio and the street. Like the juxtaposition of
Méliès and the Lumières at 8, boulevard des Italiens, the film’s two scenes suggest that
fiction and reality were never far apart in early cinematic production. Neither the studio
nor the street offered privileged access to the real or its imitation. In a metropolis
increasingly marked by artificial spaces and synthetic materials, filmmakers recorded
unnatural scenes with every turn of the “manivelle.”
Studio-produced films such as Une Chute de cinq étages represented a developing
form of illusionary realism created using painted backdrops, props, and multi-shot
editing. Having quickly made his productions almost exclusively studio-based, Méliès
developed formal techniques within and according to the studio space. The principal
characteristics of Méliès’s studio architecture became the defining characteristics of his
filmmaking. Like his contemporaries, Méliès transposed the formal qualities and
experiences of glass-and-iron exhibition halls and photography studios – artificiality,
spatial plasticity, and fluidity (between interior and exterior, visibility and invisibility,
and reality and fantasy) – into early “glass house” studio cinema.
Building Cinematic Space in the Glass House – Architecture and Early Film Form
As film historians have noted, Méliès became an important innovator in film
form, at times prefiguring later techniques by several years. Méliès’s innovations
included not only the “tricks” that we remember him for today (including stop-action
substitutions, double exposures, and matte inserts), but also multi-shot films, entrance
and exit continuity of characters and objects across shots, dissolves and fades between

127

shots, and basic narrative structures. The studio played a key role in Méliès’s
development of a multifaceted system for constructing and manipulating cinematic space.
It is no coincidence that many of cinema’s earliest formal innovators were also
the first filmmakers to work in glass-and-iron studios: Méliès in 1897, R.W. Paul and
G.A. Smith respectively in 1899, Cecil Hepworth in 1900, Edwin S. Porter in 1901 (in
Edison’s new Manhattan studio), and Ferdinand Zecca at Pathé’s new studio beginning in
1902.
207
While scholars have noted that the studio contributed to Méliès’s technical
proficiency, they have only begun to explore how the studio may have affected cinematic
form—for Méliès specifically and for early cinema in general. Barry Salt, for instance,
has argued that the studio made Méliès’s understanding of spatial continuity possible:
he was working in the one place, his studio stage, whereas everyone else making
multi-scene films was working in a number of different real locations in the one
film, and these locations tended to put some pressures on the way the action in
each shot should be staged.
208

But while Salt is right to note that Méliès’s studio gave him an element of continuity that
was initially (although not for long) rare for other filmmakers, he too quickly moves past
the “pressures” that the studio itself put on how action was shot and space constructed.
The studio provided more than simply a site for repeated filmmaking, which in
fact many filmmakers used even as early as 1897, whether on rooftops, makeshift
outdoor stages, or gardens, not to mention Dickson’s Black Maria.
209
As direct physical

207
Zecca is in some ways an exception because his first trick films were produced before Pathé constructed
its glass-and-iron studio in 1902. Similarly, Alice Guy produced trick films before Gaumont built its studio
in 1905. In each case, however, their initial tricks were likely borrowed from Méliès, and their later
innovations took form in their respective studios.

208
Salt, “Film Form: 1890-1906,” 35.

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links to the changing architecture of the late-nineteenth century, the studios also placed
filmmakers and filmmaking in the framework of that period’s new conceptions and uses
of space. Méliès reproduced the fluidity, spatial plasticity, and artificiality that defined
(studio) architecture in both the content and form (the early roots of Elie Faure’s notion
of “cineplastics”) of his studio films.
Trick Effects and Spatial Dynamism
When compared to other films in the pre-1903/4 period, Méliès’s stand out for
their fluidity—across tricks, shots, and story settings. Méliès quickly identified the
diverse kinds and combinations of movements that “moving images” offered, even
without ever moving the camera during a shot. Ironically, the basis of Méliès’s earliest
innovation – the stop-action substitution trick, or jump cut – involved the skilled use of
suspended movement (which Méliès learned, according to his version of the effect’s
apocryphal origin story, when the camera’s crank jammed during a location shoot,
literally halting the film’s movement for several moments).
210
By stopping the camera
during shooting and changing some aspect of the mise-en-scène, Méliès could make
objects and characters appear, disappear, and transform.
Gunning has argued that trick films using the substitution effect should be seen as
narratives of “non-continuity”—in which transitions from shot to shot are “emphasized
(and explained) by a discontinuity or disruption on the level of story.”
211
But while

209
A notable exception here is the jump cut, which Alfred Clark and William Heise used as early as 1895
in The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (the film was shot just outside the Black Maria). But while Clark
and Heise used the technique earlier, Méliès mastered its various uses in the studio. See below.
210
See Méliès, “Cinematic Views.”

211
Gunning, “Non-Continuity, Continuity, Discontinuity: A Theory of Genres in Early Films,” 90.

129

discontinuity is key to classifying these films, their success is based on the spatial and
narrative continuity that frames the films’ hidden suspensions, or cuts.
212
The trick works
precisely because the space in which it is performed remains fluid across the magical
transition. Méliès emphasized fluid seamlessness in the performance of substitutions by
transforming running and jumping characters and objects in mid-flight rather than the
seated figures seen in typical magic tricks (and his early film version, Escamotage d’une
dame chez Robert-Houdin (1897)).
In Méliès’s trick films the “imponderable fluidity” and limitlessness of glass-and-
iron architecture takes the form of endless transformations and uncanny
transmogrifications of both characters and the spaces they inhabit. In films such as
L’Auberge ensorcelée (The Bewitched Inn, 1897), L’Auberge de bon repos (The Inn
Where No Man Rests, 1903), and Le Revenant (Apparitions, 1903), for instance, shifting
spaces—including furniture and objects that flip, turn, move, change sizes, or simply
disappear—drive characters to madness. Méliès repeated this basic scenario throughout
his career, even up to his last film, Le Voyage de la famille Bourrichon (1913).
213
In other
films, characters themselves transform spaces, typically in order to fool or torment other
characters. In Le Tripot clandestine (The Scheming Gamblers’ Paradise, 1906), for
instance, crooks transform their gambling den (executed through mise-en-scène) to
outwit the police, and in Le Locataire diabolique (The Diabolical Tenant, 1909), a man

212
See Jacques Malthête, “Méliès, technicien du collage,” in Madeleine Malthête-Méliès, ed, Méliès et la
naissance du spectacle cinématographique (Paris: Klincksieck, 1984), 169-184.

213
A notable variation on this scenario is Les Affiches en goguette (The Hilarious Posters, 1906), in which
a wall of advertisements posted on a public street come to life, much to the dismay of passersby, including
the police, who are showered with flower and vegetables.

130

deceives his landlords by magically filling and emptying his apartment (performed using
jump-cuts) with items taken from only one suitcase. These spatial transformations
became even more complex in Méliès’s multi-shot films, but already Méliès uses
substitutions not only for magic tricks taken from his stage acts, but also to create a
spatial dynamism that appears across his oeuvre.
The critics and theorists who recognized film’s unique manipulations of space in
the 1920s were often simply recognizing the outgrowth of the formal developments of the
1890s. Indeed, the “new plastic impressions” that astonished Elie Faure at his local
cinema make for a fitting definition of the spatial plasticity first seen in Méliès’s films.
To use Faure’s words, the cinematic space produced in Méliès’s studios was “ceaselessly
renewed, ceaselessly broken and remade, fading away and reviving and breaking down,
monumental for one flashing instant, impressionistic the second.”
214

The plasticity of glass-and-iron architecture embedded in the studio’s structure
and materials reappeared in how the studio was used and in the cineplastic character of its
films. In other words, the function of the studio (and its films) followed its form. Two of
Méliès’s other common effects – multiple exposures and matte inserts – provide even
clearer evidence of how the studio’s plasticity contributed to the films’ “cineplasticity.”

214
Faure, 261.

131

Figure 2.9: Un Homme de tête (1898) Figure 2.10: Le Portrait mystérieux (1899)
Méliès uses multiple exposures – rewinding the film in the camera and re-
recording over already-exposed film – at least as early as 1898 in Un Homme de tête (The
Four Troublesome Heads) to create the illusion of three disembodied heads (Méliès’s of
course) singing while Méliès plays the banjo. Early the following year Méliès uses a
matte insert – again involving shooting on the same film stock multiple times, but here
with portions of the emulsion masked to prevent exposure in respective shots – in Le
Portrait mystérieux (The Mysterious Portrait, 1899) to create two Méliès figures on
screen, one framed as if in a painting.
With these techniques Méliès began to create complex, plastic spaces by
combining different versions of the studio set – “ceaselessly renewed, ceaselessly broken
and remade” – on film. This tended to involve creating multiple Méliès’s, as in L’Homme
orchestre (The One-Man Band, 1900), or transfigurations, as in L’Homme à la tête en
caoutchouc (The Man With the Rubber Head, 1901). But Méliès also emphasized his
ability to transform space by creating films that depicted impossible movement and
fluidity.

132

Figure 2.11: L’Homme-mouche (1902)

In L’Homme-mouche (The Human Fly, 1902), for instance, he uses a double exposure to
combine two shots: one of several women standing in front of a black backdrop on
opposite sides of the frame; the other taken from above the studio floor (which is painted
to look like a wall) with an acrobat performing stunts. The double exposure creates the
effect of a man who defies gravity to walk (or fly, as it were) on the wall while the
women look on in amazement.
215

215
British filmmaker R.W. Paul used a similar effect in 1899 in the film Upside Down, or The Human
Flies, in which Paul creates the illusion of a family playing games on the ceiling after a “professor of
spiritualism” levitates them. A Pathé film from 1903, La Soubrette ingénieuse, uses the technique to depict
a housekeeper who climbs the walls to clean picture frames. On the latter film, see Richard Abel, The Ciné
Goes to Town: French Cinema 1896-1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 79.

133

Figures 2.12-2.13: La Guirlande merveilleuse (1903) and Le Coffre enchanté (1904)

In other films, such as Le Revenant (Apparations, 1903), Méliès uses the
transparency created by the double exposure to animate the space with ghosts, phantoms,
and apparitions that fly across the top of the frame. And in films such as La Guirlande
merveilleuse (The Marvelous Wreath, 1903) and Le Coffre enchanté (The Bewitched
Trunk, 1904), he uses double exposures combined with dissolves to make characters float
in midair and slowly appear or disappear. As with the substitutions, these films play on
the spectacle of magically produced presence and absence, here further animated by
“reviving and breaking down” the space through the dissolve.
Just as the studio’s glass-and-iron architecture presented unique spatial qualities
and aesthetics in the unity of interior and exterior, so Méliès produced dynamic cinematic
spaces by blending contrasting studio sets into a single film image. He most often relied
on black backgrounds (akin to Muybridge and Marey’s motion studies and the Black
Maria films) to create locations in the frame that could be fluidly transformed. These
blank frames within the frame – typically in the form of doors, windows, or fireplaces,

134

but also picture frames, cavern walls, and the night sky – recur throughout Méliès’s films,
and indeed may be the dominant characteristic of his décor.
216

Méliès likely based his use of the black background not only on motion studies
and Edison’s Kinetoscope films, but also on tricks learned from spirit photography and
magical stage shows that mimicked spirit photography’s effects. As Gunning notes,
Robert-Houdin made extensive use of Spiritualist effects, and after reopening the theater
Méliès designed Spiritualist tricks “in which devices of lighting, careful control of point
of view, and an elaborate optical shutter derived from photography recreated the effects
of a materialization séance.”
217
Gunning points out that several of Méliès’s films,
including L’Armoire des Frères Davenport (1902) and Le Portrait Spirite (Spiritualistic
Photographer, 1903), were inspired by Méliès’s and others’ Spiritualist stage shows. The
latter film reveals not only Méliès’s debt to Spirit photography and its theatrical
counterparts, but also how familiar audiences must have been with Méliès’s black
backdrop and dissolves.

Figure 2.14: Le Portrait Spirite (1903)

216
Black backgrounds are also common in other early trick films such as those by R.W. Paul, Segundo de
Chomón, Alice Guy, Edwin S. Porter, J. Stuart Blackton, and Ferdinand Zecca, to name only a few.

217
Gunning, “Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations: Spirit Photography, Magic Theater, Trick
Films, and Photography’s Uncanny,” in Petro, ed. Fugitive Images, 42-71, 63.

135

The film begins with an announcer holding up two signs (in French and English)
that read: “Spiritualistic Photo. Dissolving Effect Obtained Without Black Backdrop.
Great Novelty.” Méliès then uses a framed white background to dissolve an actress
dressed as a sailor into her own drawing on the white canvas. The film’s “great novelty”
is somewhat exaggerated—the main change in the trick is the color of the background.
But the film nonetheless shows how consciously Méliès explored new techniques to
manipulate film space (and how conscious audiences were about the studio effects used
to do so). For Méliès, the blank sections of studio decor that he used to produce spatial
dynamism on film served the same function as the studio itself, which became a kind of
“heterotopia,” a unique and typically modern space that could be fluidly transformed to
fit any purpose or serve as any location.
218

As he shifted to multi-shot films, Méliès’s cineplastics became even more
pronounced as the studio began to function not only as a different location for each new
film, but also for related locations that had to be linked within a single film narrative. The
multi-shot film allowed Méliès to expand his creation of cinematic worlds, while also

218
Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” translated by Jay Miskowiec, Diacrtics, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Spring,
1986), pp. 22-27, 25. Originally published as “Des Espaces Autres” in Architecture-Mouvement-Continuité,
October 1984. Foucault formulated the heterotopia in an effort to conceptualize the new spatial epoch that,
like many of his contemporaries, he situated in the early twentieth century. In an era, he argues, in which
rapid transport and modern media created new degrees of proximity and interrelation of diverse spaces, the
space that can bring all other spaces under its purview becomes a crucial site for investigating the spatial
system as a whole. Alongside museums, libraries, fairgrounds, and gardens, Foucault cites the film theater
as one such critical modern space. But as a sight of dynamic spatial experimentation and critical evaluation
of modern space, the studio should be understood as perhaps the prototypical heterotopia. For another
account of changes to modern space, see Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, translated by Donald
Nicholson-Smith (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1991). Originally published as La production de
l’espace (Editions Anthropos, 1974). Lefebvre argues that modern space’s break with the past occurs
around 1910 and includes, among other things, a departure from “classical perspective and geometry,
developed from the Renaissance onwards on the basis of the Greek tradition (Euclid, logic) and bodied
forth in Western art and philosophy, as in the form of the city and town” (25). On the “spatial turn,” see
Philip J. Ethington, “Placing the Past: ‘Groundwork’ for a spatial theory of history,” Rethinking History
11:4 (2007), 465-493.

136

requiring new formal techniques for making those worlds intelligible to audiences.
Méliès became a key innovator in the development of a formal language for linking shots
and locations (even if aspects of this language were abandoned later). Devices such as
“correct” entrance/exit directions and dissolves between shots expanded Méliès’s use of
the studio space while also extending the fluidity and plasticity that he used in his single-
shot films.
Creating Space in Multi-Shot Films
While the single-shot film remained the norm until at least 1900 and multi-shot
story films did not become common until around 1903, Méliès produced notable long
examples in the pre-1903 period, including Cendrillon (Cinderella, 1899), Jeanne d’Arc
(1900), Rêve de Noël (The Christmas Dream, 1900), Barbe-bleue (Blue Beard, 1901), Le
Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon, 1902), and Le Voyage de Gulliver à Lilliput et
chez les géants (Gulliver’s Travels, 1902), as well as numerous others in 1903. As Abel
has noted, these early fairy tale films (or féeries) “forced Méliès to consider various
means of producing spatial coherence through an episodic sequence of tableaux.”
219

Given Méliès’s work at his Théâtre Robert-Houdin and his use of stage actors in
the films, there is little doubt that he drew on the theatrical tradition for this spatial logic.
As Noverre notes, shortly after production began in 1897 Méliès modified the studio by
adding features of the Robert-Houdin, including trapdoors, rollers, and winches. In order
to retain the size of the tableau and utilize both the trapdoors from below and the winches
from above, Méliès also dug a pit three meters below the stage, built a balcony above,
and raised the portion of the roof directly overhead. These features began to appear in

219
Richard Abel, The Ciné Goes to Town, 70-1.

137

films by 1898, and over the next two years Méliès also added a hanger for building and
painting backdrops as well as annexes on each side with large doors to allow cars, trains,
horses, and people to pass across the stage from outside.
220
With these additions in place,
the studio became, as Méliès later described it, “a small-scale likeness of a théâtre de
féerie.”
221
The new features added to the spatial dynamism already being created through
substitutions, double exposures, and matting effects by allowing characters to enter and
exit from all sides of the film frame.
Méliès also used these stage devices to create new levels of depth and virtual
movement within single shots. In Faust aux enfers (1903), for instance, Faust’s descent
into hell with Mephistopheles is represented through a series of changing scene decors –
Méliès raises and lowers partial backdrops to incrementally move the characters (and
viewers) through the cavern. Although the camera does not move, the changing set pieces
create the illusion of movement into the depth of the frame. Méliès did not, however,
simply use the studio to recreate theatrical scenes in single tableaux. More often, he
combines stage devices with camera effects such as dissolves to create specifically
cinematic spaces. For instance, in Faust’s descent Méliès uses a dissolve to re-introduce
Faust and Mephistopheles into the cavern in a new shot, and in the final tableau of Barbe-
bleue he uses the trapdoor to raise cutout ghost figures of Blue Beard’s dead wives that
are then transformed by a jump cut into live actresses.

220
Malthête, “Les Deux Studios de Georges Méliès,” 143-145.

221
Georges Méliès, “Les Vues Cinématographiques,” in Annuaire général et international de la
photographie (Paris: Plon, 1907), 362-92. Translated as “Cinematographic Views,” trans. Stuart Liebman,
October 29 (Summer 1984): 24-34, 26.

138

While Méliès’s use of theatrical devices and techniques helps to explain how he
developed his conception of cinematic space, the theater was only one of the influences
on Méliès’s formal strategies. As Pierre Jenn has shown through close visual analysis and
spatial mapping of films including Le Voyage dans la lune (1902), Le Royaume des fées
(1903), and Le Voyage à travers l’impossible (1904), Méliès did not simply, as French
historians Georges Sadoul most famously remarked, recreate stage views for the “man in
the orchestra.”
222
Jenn argues that Méliès created a “filmic time-space continuum”
precisely by using distinct points of view with different backdrops and camera
positions.
223
Unlike the single-shot trick films, in which Méliès maintained spatial
continuity by retaining the scene’s basic mise-en-scène across jump cuts or around matte-
inserts, for the multi-shot films Méliès faced the more complex problem of building an
intelligible story world by creating spatial continuity between shifting versions of the
studio’s malleable interior. Salt and Gunning note that Méliès quickly identified the
importance of entrance/exit directions for creating this continuity through mise-en-scène,
with films such as Le voyage dans la lune becoming early prototypes for the continuity
developed more fully in the “chase” film.
224

Méliès also combined these strategies with the camera effects that he mastered in
the trick films. An important example of such techniques is Méliès’s use of the dissolve

222
See Sadoul, Lumière et Méliès.

223
Pierre Jenn, Georges Méliès cineaste: Le Montage cinématographique chez Georges Méliès (Paris:
Albatros, 1984).

224
See Salt, “Film Form 1890-1906,” in Thomas Elsaesser, ed., Early Cinema: Space-Frame-Narrative
(London: British Film Institute, 1990), 31-44; and Gunning, “Non-Continuity, Continuity, Discontinuity: A
Theory of Genres in Early Films,” in Elsaesser, ed., Early Cinema: Space-Frame-Narrative, 86-94. On the
development of story films, see Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907,
vol. 1, History of the American Cinema (New York: Scribner, 1990), Chapter 11.

139

to transition between scenes (a device that directors such as Zecca and Porter initially
copied). As historians have noted, Méliès did not use the dissolve (as is most often the
case in classical Hollywood cinema) to signify the passage of time, but instead seems to
have used it in part as an attraction that emphasizes the “trick” of having multiple shots at
all.
225
Many critics have ignored Méliès’s use of this device because, as Salt argues, it
works against claims that Méliès “invented” classical editing forms. And those who do
discuss the dissolve (most notably Salt himself) have dismissed it as a “dead-end” that
was quickly replaced by the “more efficient” and soon standard straight cut.
226
But rather
than seeing this technique as a failure to develop classical editing strategies, we should
understand it as an important example of the ways that Méliès used editing to build a
uniquely cinematic space.
Méliès uses the dissolve as another means to create spatial fluidity, especially for
an audience that could not necessarily be assumed to understand the spatial logic of the
straight cut. Dissolves create a visual link between two unlike spaces, signifying their
spatial unity by momentarily making them a single space on the screen, as in the scene in
Cendrillon where a dissolve links Cinderella’s house with the ball, which she arrives at
moments later. At times the dissolve also creates symbolism through spatial
juxtaposition. In Barbe-bleue, for instance, after the queen leaves Blue Beard’s forbidden
chamber the dissolve creates an image of his former wives’ hanging bodies suspended

225
It should be noted that at times the transition between shots does involve the passage of time, but
because the dissolve is used irrespective of temporality between shots, it cannot be said to signify that
change. The dissolve between shots would also have discouraged exhibitors from cutting multi-shot films
into pieces rather than showing them in their entirety. On exhibitors’ roles as “editors” in early cinema, see
Musser, The Emergence of Cinema, 258-261.

226
Barry Salt, “Dissolved Away,” The Velvet Light Trap 64 (Fall 2009), 79.

140

over the now-sleeping queen, as if to show her dreams, or perhaps as a foreboding image
of her possible future.

Figure 2.15: Barbe-bleue (1901)

Given Méliès’s well-known claim that the stories in his “narrative” films were
only an excuse for staging tricks, we should be attentive to the ways that such strategies
for linking shots were, like the tricks themselves, about the production of intelligible,
fluid spaces for spectacular displays.
227
Despite Méliès’s claims about his own disregard
for narrative, we should also take note of the ways that his strategies for constructing
space influenced the development of early narrative form. These strategies bear striking
resemblance to the spatial characteristics of late nineteenth-century architecture and the
radical fluidity that observers identified with it. The plasticity of the studio’s shifting
interior, combined with the various forms of fluidity that Méliès created both within and
between shots, mirrored the flexible materials and versatile designs that gave form to
glass-and-iron studios. While it would be too much to say that Méliès drew direct

227
Méliès, “Cinematic Views.”

141

inspiration from the studio’s semi-transparent and malleable physical form for his
dynamically fluid treatment of film space, two conclusions seem clear: 1) the studio
allowed Méliès to experiment with film space by providing a controlled environment that
facilitated technical precision (thanks to consistent lighting, stable sets and cameras, a
ready supply of props, and doors and windows that could be opened easily to move
objects through the scene), and 2) the technological changes that shaped modern spatial
experience also helped condition both studio architecture and early film form.
The technologies that created modernity’s new architectures inspired early
cinematic narratives and settings in a more direct manner that can be identified
throughout Méliès’s career. Méliès himself grew up as a son of industry—his father
owned a shoe factory (again with a glass-and-iron roof) outside of Paris, where Méliès
developed technical skills repairing factory machines. Although he ultimately rejected his
place in the family business, his films nonetheless betray his industrial upbringing.
228

Many of Méliès’s most popular films made new technologies and technological
environments – both real and imagined – popular early film subjects. These films were
also allegories for the possibilities and uncertainties created by new technologies, and by
extension cinema itself. As urban populations adjusted to the artificiality of built space,
cinematic technology arrived to both re-imagine the built environment and re-create
artificial worlds on the screen. In this context, Méliès’s world building became exemplary
of a system of production and representation that would come to define studio cinema
and which offered filmmakers an important means for evaluating technological change.

228
On the Méliès factory and Méliès’s role in and eventual rejection of the family business, see Malthete-
Méliès, Méliès l’enchanteur (Paris: Hachette, 1973).

142

Georges Méliès, the “Jules Verne of Cinema”

In the advertising campaign for À la conquête du Pôle, Pathé Frères, the rival
company for whom Méliès ironically made his final films, proclaimed Méliès the “Jules
Verne of cinema.”
229
The title is somewhat misleading—the film was not based on a
Verne story, and in fact Méliès made only three adaptations of Verne’s work: Le Voyage
dans la lune (from Verne’s story Autour de la lune, published serially in 1869), Le
Voyage à travers l’impossible (1904, from the play completed in 1882 and staged in
1882-3), and Vingt milles lieus sous les mers (1907, published serially between 1869 and
1870).
230
Pathé most likely hoped to build on the success of these earlier films (and
Verne’s stories) by linking Méliès’s newest voyage with his earlier adaptations, all of
which included thrilling representations of travel and technology.
The “Verne” moniker remains suggestive, however, not only because Méliès was
known (and is often remembered) for these adaptations, but also because Méliès’s Verne-
inspired films and other technology-themed narratives represent a crucial component of
his work. Méliès was more than just a magician or special effects wizard. In these
“voyages extraordinaires,” as well as films depicting more familiar technologies such as
trains and automobiles, Méliès proves to be an insightful commentator on the

229
In Le Bulletin hebdomadaire Pathé, 1912. Cited in Laurent Le Forestier, “L’Enregistrement Fantastique,
ou Quelques Réflexions sur la Nature et l’Utilisation des Trucages Méliésiens,” in Malthête and Mannoni,
eds., Méliès: magie et cinéma, 211-239, 212.

230
Additionally, as many have argued, even these films are more composites of various nineteenth-century
cultural forms (including Verne’s stories, but also other literature, contemporary theater, and scientific
lectures) than “adaptations.” For instance, see Thierry Lefebvre, “Le Voyage dans la Lune, Film
Composite,” in Malthête and Mannoni, eds, Méliès: magie et cinéma, 171-209. For details on Verne’s
voyages extraordinaires, see Herbert R. Lottman, Jules Verne: An Exploratory Biography (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1996). See also the recent biographies by William Butcher, Jules Verne: The Definitive
Biography (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2006) and (in French) Joëlle Dusseau, Jules Verne (Paris: Perrin,
2005).

143

technologies that transformed the modern built environment (and helped give rise to film
studios). In this respect, Pathé’s comparison of Méliès to Verne underscores a key
component of Méliès’s films. Verne founded the technological environments depicted in
the Voyages Extraordinaires not on far-flung images of the future, but in tangible
components of late nineteenth-century modernity.
231
Méliès’s representations of
technology similarly reflected contemporary concerns more than visionary predictions. If
Méliès was the “Jules Verne of cinema,” it was not because he created visions of the
future or the unknown, but rather because he shared Verne’s critical eye towards the
technological cutting edge of their society.
232

231
Verne’s stories have often been regarded as visionary predictions of the technological future,
posthumously earning Verne such titles as the “father of science fiction.” But as literary scholars have
argued for decades, these characterizations not only overstate Verne’s capacity (or desire) to predict future
technologies; they also obscure the degree to which Verne focused first and foremost on the technological
changes (as well as the hopes and anxieties) of his own epoch. Arthur B. Evans as argued that Méliès’s
films contributed not only to Verne’s popularity in America, but also to his mythical status as the “Father of
Science Fiction.” See Evans, “Jules Verne and the French Literary Canon,” in Edmund J. Smyth, ed. Jules
Verne: Narratives of Modernity (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 11-39, 15. On cinematic
adaptations of Verne, see also Thomas C. Renzi, Jules Verne on Film: A Filmography of the Cinematic
Adaptations of His Works, 1902 through 1997 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998). See also, Michel Serres,
Jouvences sur Jules Verne (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1974), Arthur B. Evans, Jules Verne Rediscovered:
Didacticism and the Scientific Novel (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1988), Edmund Smyth, ed. Jules
Verne: Narratives of Modernity, and Timothy Unwin, Jules Verne: Journeys in Writing (Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press, 2005).

232
Just as Méliès is often remembered as the “father” of science fiction film, popular audiences, critics, and
scholars have tended to define Verne’s Voyages as “science fiction” (a retroactively assigned term that did
not appear commonly until the 1930s in the U.S. and the 1950s in France) in large part due to the
perception that Verne imagined non-existent technologies and predicted future events (such as space flight
to the moon). Verne’s work has also proven difficult to classify because of Verne’s position in French
literary history. Verne’s Voyages were part of a broader movement in nineteenth-century “realist fiction”
that sought to address questions about realism versus artifice and nature versus technology that animated
industrial modernity (and early cinema). As Timothy Unwin has argued, Verne’s work should be read and
understood in relation to this context of “experimentation, reflection about fiction, consideration of its uses
and abuses, [and] theorisations of its relationship to the so-called ‘real’ world.” See Unwin, Journeys in
Writing, 3. See also Evans, “Jules Verne in the French Literary Canon.”

144

Méliès’s “Extraordinary Voyages”: Cinematic Technologies, Technological Critique
Like Verne, Méliès repeatedly uses technological change, scientific discovery,
and global exploration to guide his films, and in fact only rarely portrays unknown or
futuristic machines.
233
From Visite sous-marine du Maine (1898) and Chirurgie fin de
siècle (1900) to Le Raid New York – Paris en automobile (1908) and A la conquête du
pôle (1911), Méliès draws his subjects from current events, technological developments,
and scientific discoveries. While Méliès’s representations do, at times, stray into
seemingly unfamiliar technologies (and carry travelers to unknown worlds), more often
they represent forms of transit and technological spaces commonly found in turn-of-the-
century Western cities.

233
Verne rarely sets the Voyages Extraordinaires outside the context of contemporaneous developments,
only briefly mentions objects and phenomena that were not known to at least educated audiences, and most
typically describes technologies recycled from the nineteenth century. Unwin encapsulates Verne’s
tendency to rely on nineteenth-century technologies (rather than inventing “futuristic” machines) in a
description that is equally appropriate for Méliès: “The machines and inventions of Verne's stories are
rickety contraptions which seem to have been put together with the incomplete means at the novelist's
disposal, a clumsy but charming bricolage …." Unwin, “The Fiction of Science, or the Science of Fiction,”
48. See also David Meakin, “Future Past: Myth, Inversion and Regression in Verne’s Underground
Utopia,” 94-108, and Unwin, “The Fiction of Science, or the Science of Fiction,” 46-59, both in Smyth, ed.
Jules Verne: Narratives of Modernity. As Michael Serres describes, “Notre ignorance a fait l'oeuvre de
Verne un rêve de la Science. Elle est une science des rêves. La fiction des Voyages est, dit-on, une science
fiction. Cela est faux, tout bonnement. Jamais une règle mécanique n'y est outrepassée, nulle loi naturelle,
de physique, de résistance des matériaux, de biologie, n'y est extrapolée.” Serres, Jouvences sur Jules
Verne, 82.

145

Figure 2.16: Technological spaces in Le voyage dans la lune. Industrial landscapes, factories, and
ateliers ground Méliès’s “voyages extraordinaires” in contemporary technological changes to the
built environment that underpin the more fantastic scenarios of space travel and hostile lunar
inhabitants.

Figure 2.17: Le voyage à travers l’impossible. The bridge recalls contemporary engineering feats
such as Gustave Eiffel’s Garabit Viaduct (Cantal, France, 1880-4) and Ponte Maria Pia (Porto,
Portugal, 1877) that allowed for easier and faster travel across difficult terrain.

In Le voyage dans la lune (1902), for instance, the industrial landscape and
machine workshop represent familiar sites of the Industrial Revolution—the same
technological settings that produced ideas about space travel that inspired Verne and
Méliès. Méliès replicates these spaces in Le voyage à travers l’impossible and A la
conquête du pôle, along with viaducts, railroad stations, ateliers, and laboratories. These
familiar settings underpin both the known devices (balloons, automobiles, trains,

146

submarines, and flying machines)
234
as well as the more fantastic scenarios (space travel,
flying trains, lunar inhabitants, and polar monsters) that Méliès depicts. More
importantly, they frame not only the films’ fantastic components, but also their critical
portrayals of new and potential future technologies.

Figure 2.18: Méliès’s technological disasters (clockwise from top left) Le voyage à travers
l’impossible (first two), Le Raid Paris-Monte Carlo en deux heures, Le Tunnel sous la Manche ou
le cauchemar anglo-français, Les Quatre cents farce du diable, and A la conquête du pôle

Méliès did not simply populate his films with new technologies; like Verne’s
stories, the films also cast a critical eye on the dangers and uncertainties that
accompanied technological change.
235
Méliès’s voyages lampoon early cinema’s popular

234
Flying balloons date to the eighteenth century, and were common sights in the nineteenth century
(notably including Nadar’s Le Géant, built in 1863). The automobile was also well-known invention by the
end of the nineteenth century (in France, Gustave Trouvé’s electrically-powered automobile was exhibited
in Paris in 1881, and in 1896 Armand Peugeot built a factory to produce automobiles with internal
combustion engines). Mechanically-powered submarines date to the 1860s (and inspired Verne’s Vingt
mille lieus sous les mers), as do early flying machines. In France, Jean-Marie Le Bris made well-
documented flights in his “Albatros artificiel” glider in 1856 and 1868 (when his machine was
photographed by Nadar – compare this machine [Fig. with Méliès’s “Aero-Bus” in A la conquête du pôle
(1911)), and the Wright Brothers’ first successful flight came in December 1903.

235
As Edmund Smyth argues about Verne: “his texts both incorporate and perforate the modern, by
encompassing the spirit of the scientific age and articulating some of its limitations and agonies.” Smyth,

147

travel genre by substituting farcical characters, unreal settings, and disasters, while also
revealing tangible concerns about the dangers of new technologies.
236
Indeed, Méliès
rarely depicts a technology that does not put its users in peril due to malfunction, human
error, or unexpected results. In Le Voyage dans la lune and Le Voyage à travers
l’impossible, for instance, the machines that transport passengers into space suffer
devastating crashes from which the travelers narrowly escape. Méliès replicates the
hazards posed by these fantastical devices for more common technologies such as
submarines, automobiles, and railroads as well as the machinery in workshops,
laboratories, and factories.
These kinds of technological disasters and workplace injuries were not
uncommon in the late nineteenth century. Méliès likely based images of railroad
catastrophe such as those depicted in Le Voyage à travers l’impossible and Les Quatre
cents farces du diable on real events such as the June 1891 collapse of a railway bridge
built by Gustave Eiffel near Munchenstein, Switzerland in which seventy-three
passengers died and 171 others were injured.
237
Such major accidents represent only the
most memorable of a more pervasive experience of technological danger in urban
modernity. As Ben Singer has shown, the turn-of-the-century pictorial press put the

“Verne, SF, and Modernity: an Introduction,” in Smyth, ed. Jules Verne: Narratives of Modernity, 1-10, 2.
Emphasis added.

236
On the travel genre see Musser, “The Travel Genre in 1903-1904: Moving Towards Fictional
Narrative,” in Elsaesser, ed. Early Cinema: Space-Frame-Narrative, 123-132; the essays collected in
Roland Cosandey and François Albera, eds. Cinéma sans frontiers 1896-1918 (Lausanne: Payot, 1995);
and Jennifer Lynn Peterson, Making the World Exotic: Travelogue and Silent Non-Fiction Film (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2010).

237
As Lynne Kirby has described, the drama and spectacle of railroad accidents (and the heroes who
prevent them) were immensely popular on the early screen. See Kirby, Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and
Silent Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).

148

quotidian disasters of modern transport (especially electric trolleys and automobiles),
factory labor, and tenement architecture into stark, if exaggerated relief.
238
Thus, while
Méliès’s representations of technological danger may have been packaged in seemingly
fantastic narratives, they were in fact much more pointed critiques and parodies of the
technological hazards of modernity. In Méliès’s films, technology offers not only new
possibilities for travel, exploration, and discovery, but also danger and uncertainty in the
form of bodily injury, transmogrification, hostile environments, extraterrestrials, and
technologically-produced “nightmares.”
Méliès’s critical view of modern technology contributed to a broader tradition of
fin-de-siècle fiction that allegorized technological change. As historians of technology
have argued, late nineteenth-century writers on both sides of the Atlantic made
contemporary technologies the subtext of a range of stories about the experience of
modern life in an increasingly artificial, human-built world. By the early twentieth
century, technological alterations to the environment were prompting anxieties
specifically focused on the future of built space.
239
As the installation of modern urban
infrastructure (including water and sewer systems, steam pipes, subways, telephone lines,
and electrical cables) made excavation a familiar aspect of life in the modern metropolis,

238
See especially Chapter 3, “Sensationalism and Urban Modernity” in Singer, Melodrama and Modernity:
Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).

239
Williams argues, “since the nineteenth century, narratives about underground worlds have provided a
prophetic view into our environmental future … in a manufactured world.” Williams, Notes on the
Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press,
1990), 4. Williams argues that underground tales such as Edgar Allen Poe’s “MS. Found in a Bottle”
(1833), The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), and “Eureka” (1848), Verne’s Voyage au centre de la
terre (1864) and Les Indes noires (1877), H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), Gabriel Tarde’s
Fragment d’histoire future (1896), and E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” (1909) represent the
uncertainties of life in “a highly complex technological human future.” Williams,, 16. See also David Pike,
Subterranean Cities: the World Beneath Paris and London, 1800-1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2005).

149

these changes prompted anxiety about their environmental and social consequences.
240
In
the latter half of the nineteenth century the second industrial revolution made such
changes even more pronounced as, in Rosalind Williams’s words, “consumer goods such
as the bicycle, the automobile, chemical dyes, the telephone, electric lights, the camera,
[and] the phonograph” rendered technological change commonplace, “domestic, even
intimate” to ordinary people.
241

At this moment, literary depictions of the underworld provided an important form
of cultural evaluation of the technological, social, and psychological changes taking place
in the human-built environment. Films such as Méliès’s served a similar function by
representing contemporary technologies, hypothetical technological developments, and
technological dangers on the screen. But even when film depicted similar (or, in the case
of Méliès’s Verne adaptations, the same) conceptions of technology and the human-built
world as contemporary literature, cinema’s relationship to technology made these images
particular. The same technologies and technological environments that changed the
modern built environment also produced the technologies and artificial spaces of cinema
itself. The critical representations of technology produced by Méliès thus also constituted
a reflexive (if unconsciously so) commentary on the possibilities presented by cinema.
Just as new technologies and artificial worlds promised to lead us to new, unknown, and
potentially dangerous experiences, so cinema offered an uncertain future of
technologically-produced visions and artificial worlds.

240
“For the people of the nineteenth century,” Williams writes, “the everyday experience of looking at
overturned soil provided a visual image of social upheaval.” Williams, Notes on the Underground, 52-3.

241
Williams, Notes on the Underground, 70.

150

In Méliès’s case, the technologies he depicts and allegorizes in his films share an
intimate relationship to his studios. Technologies such as trains, planes, and automobiles
that often appear in his films are just as often housed in the glass-and-iron spaces that
were re-shaping the built environment. From the photography studio in Une Chute de
cinq étages to the glass-enclosed atelier in La Photographie électrique à distance and the
machine shops in Le Voyage dans la lune, Le Voyage à travers l’impossible, and A la
conquête du pôle, the spaces of the modern built environment that produced Méliès’s
studios became the spaces of his films. Not surprisingly, these spaces at times uncannily
resemble not only glass-and-iron ateliers and the Galeries des machines, but also the very
studios in which they were produced. These similarities underscore the degree to which
the process of creating imaginary worlds on film was inextricably tied to the process of
creating new worlds in which to film. In 1911 Méliès brought these two processes closer
than ever in the production of A la conquête du pôle, the film for which he earned the
“Verne” moniker and in which his second studio made the artificial worlds of cinematic
production and representation one and the same.
Studio B and A la conquête du pôle – Studios as Artificial (On-Screen) Worlds
In 1907 Méliès designed and built a second studio (Studio B) on his estate in
Montreuil.
242
French historian Jacques Malthête has provided the best description of the
studio – a roughly triangular design, again enclosed in glass but also equipped with
Cooper-Hewitt Mercury Vapor lamps for artificial lighting.
243
Méliès built the studio as

242
Malthête, Méliès: Images et Illusions, 63.

151

an extension of his father’s original house, which he also used in part as a film-processing
laboratory.

Figure 2.19: Méliès’s second studio (Studio B), Montreuil, 1907.

Méliès built the new studio in an effort to take advantage of distribution offices
recently established by his brother Gaston Méliès in New York and the company’s
impending inclusion in Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company. With the new studio
in place, Méliès produced hundreds of films during 1907-9, his most active period of
production.
244
Within two years, however, Méliès was on the verge of bankruptcy, had
ceased film production of his own, and would make only five more films, ironically for
his rival Charles Pathé.
245
Among these Pathé productions was A la conquête du pôle, the

243
Malthête, “Les Deux Studios de Georges Méliès,” 151-153. Chapter 3 will discuss the use of Cooper-
Hewitt Lamps in studios beginning in 1902 with the American Mutoscope and Biograph studio in
Manhattan, the first studio to be entirely lit by artificial light.

244
Malthête, Méliès: Images et Illusions, 63.

152

longest (at thirty minutes) and most ambitious film of Méliès’s career. The film’s use of
the second studio – both for the film’s production and as a setting in the film itself –
typifies the close relationship between technological and cinematic production that
Méliès had helped establish more than a decade earlier.
A la conquête du pôle continues in the tradition of travel film parodies from
Méliès’s earlier career; in this case Méliès lampoons the polar expeditions captured on
film by adventurers and filmmakers such as Robert K. Bonine and Thomas Crahan for
Edison in 1898, Baldwin and Ziegler for the Warwick Trading Company in 1901, and
Sandon Perkins in 1908.
246
Méliès’s arctic voyage follows a Dr. Maboul (Méliès) and his
crew (comprised of caricatured delegates from America, England, Germany, Spain,
China, and Japan) as they construct a flying machine, suppress a group of suffragists who
want to accompany them on their voyage, and avoid a series of technological disasters
(and one arctic monster) on their trip to the North Pole and back. In many ways the film
merely reproduces the basic parodies and technological critiques from Méliès’s earlier
Voyages. Its significance, however, lies in Méliès’s use of the second studio as the
centerpiece of what is arguably a subtle depiction of the spaces and practices of
filmmaking, represented in the film by the creation of a flying machine.

245
Méliès’s decline was prompted by a series of factors including reduced audience interest in the féeries,
Méliès’s failure to shift to longer, more popular story films, the theft of three hundred negatives from
Méliès’s New York factory in 1907, and Gaston’s embezzlement of Star Films profits in the US. See Abel,
The Ciné Goes to Town, 36-7. The five Pathé films also include Les Hallucinations du Baron de
Münchausen (1911), a remake of Méliès’s 1899 hit Cendrillon (1911), a medieval adventure titled Le
Chevalier des neiges (1912), and a final travel film, Le Voyage de la famille Bourrichon (1913).

246
Other polar films were made in the early 1910s by European, American, and Japanese filmmakers at
both the arctic and Antarctic poles. See Stephen Bottomore, “polar expedition films,” in Abel, ed.
Encyclopedia of Early Cinema (London: Routledge, 2005), 523-4.

153

Figure 2.20 (left): À la Conquête du Pôle (Méliès, 1911). Méliès as the engineer, Maboul, in
Studio A announcing his bronze and aluminum “Aero-Bus.” Like Maboul’s flying machine, the
film studio would take Méliès to the pole and beyond.

Figure 2.21 (right): Cover of Scientific American, November 21, 1908. The photograph shows
Henri Farman on his October 30, 1908 flight from Châlons to Reims.

The film opens in a reception hall (shot in Studio A, recognizable by its wood
plank floor) with a brief survey of contemporary modes of transport. The would-be polar
voyagers pitch schemes involving balloons, automobiles, trains, sleds, ships, and
submarines before Maboul finally introduces his own bid to fly over the Arctic Ocean.
His proposed aluminum and bronze “Aero-Bus” represents the most fantastic of the
proposed machines, but once again reflects contemporary technological developments, in
this case the well publicized efforts of numerous aircraft designers such Henri Farman
(pictured in Fig. 2.21) to turn early flying machines into viable military tools and modes
of transport.
247

247
Production of the film came less than two years after Henri Farman’s famed first cross-country flight
from Châlons to Reims and amidst widespread experimentation that included aeronautical salons in Paris,
research labs such as Gustave Eiffel’s Laboratoire du Champ de Mars at the base of the Eiffel Tower
(moved to Auteuil the year of Méliès’s film), and flying schools. See Richard Hallion, Taking Flight:
Inventing the Aerial Age from Antiquity through the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2003), 265. See also Tom D. Crouch, Wings: A History of Aviation from Kites to the Space Age (New
York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2004).

154

Figure 2.22: À la Conquête du Pôle. Maboul displays his model for the Aero-Bus, which is also
the prop used for the film’s “flying” sequences (right).

Following the selection of the Aero-Bus and its passengers, Maboul leads the
crew on a tour of his laboratory and production facilities, a tour that also becomes a
virtual presentation of the film’s own production. Maboul begins the “tour” in his small
design studio (also Studio A), which is sparsely furnished with a drafting table, several
small chairs, and drawings of planes and balloons. Here Maboul presents the crew with a
model of the Aero-Bus suspended from the ceiling on thin strings. For the audience this
demonstration (by Méliès, no less) offers a preview of the film’s later flying sequences,
in which Méliès uses the same model to simulate the voyage over the Arctic (most likely
also shot in Studio A). This scene introduces a set of parallels – Maboul/Méliès and
crew/audience – that structure the remainder of the film. As Maboul presents his factory
and the construction of the flying machine to the crew, Méliès gives the audience a kind
of behind-the-scenes tour of the film’s production.

155

Figure 2.23: À la Conquête du Pôle. Studio A as the “electrified factory.” As in Le voyage à
travers l’impossible, the factory recalls the 1889 Galerie des machines.

Maboul/Méliès, crew, and audience proceed from the model presentation into a
large “electrified factory” (again in Studio A) with props and a painted backdrop that
recalls the 1889 Galerie des machines. A quick review of the factory machines sets up
the next scene, in which the tour continues with an examination of the Aero-Bus flying
machine’s production. Here, in a smaller factory workshop (Studio A), eight workers put
the finishing touches on the Aero-Bus. Maboul and the crew watch as two women in the
foreground sew canvas for the machine’s wings, a man shaves boards for its body, two
others affix panels to the roof, and the man and child in the center of the frame prepare
and apply solder to the machine’s joints.

156

Figure 2.24 (left): À la Conquête du Pôle. Workers construct the flying machine in Studio A,
again posing as a workshop (made to resemble the Galerie des machines with its glass-and-iron
wall and roof, seen in the upper left).

Figure 2.25 (right): À la Conquête du Pôle. Workers roll the flying machine out of Studio B,
posing as the film’s workshop.

While this scene can easily be read as simply a representation of the Aero-Bus’s
construction, it also documents the production of the film’s main prop—the life-size
“flying” machine. Remarkably, the “characters” in this staged workshop are not only
Maboul’s workers; they are also Méliès’s film crew. In this key scene, Méliès draws a
subtle parallel between the preparation for the voyage in the film world and the
production process in the studios.
Méliès’s use of painted backdrops and Studio B itself underscores this duality.
The left edge of the workshop scene’s backdrop resembles not only the 1889 Galerie’s
glass-and-iron skeleton, but also the front wall and door of Méliès’s second studio. The
flying machine faces this simulated glass wall, anticipating the following scene, in which
the completed machine is rolled out of Studio B (notably entering from the right to
maintain fluid continuity with the previous scene). The repetition of Studio A, along with
the fluid transition to Studio B, is yet another example of Méliès’s use of the studio’s

157

plastic interior to create larger cinematic worlds by repeatedly and fluidly linking the
same space posing as many different locations.

Figure 2.26: À la Conquête du Pôle. Studio B, a space of industrial and film production.

Following the launch of the Aero-Bus, the studio reappears several scenes later,
this time in frontal view with its doors open revealing a group of men (presumably the
factory workers) who watch as a caravan of automobiles passes by the workshop/studio.
With the exception of the rolled-up tableau suspended from the ceiling, the space bears
no ready markers of its cinematic function. Rather, the glass-and-iron exterior, large
hanging lights, and the ladder placed outside reproduce the workshop space created
earlier in Studio A using props and a painted backdrop. Méliès’s choice to use the studio
rather than painting another large backdrop is not surprising—the studio easily passes as
a machine workshop. But the important point is that the studio does not simply look like a
workshop; indeed, it was a space of industrial production. While its malleable interior

158

allowed the studio to perform as virtually any setting within Méliès’s films, this interior
was always framed, just off the screen, by the same glass-and-iron surface that framed
turn-of-the-century industrial architecture. The duality that Méliès creates by using the
studio as the workshop highlights cinema’s close relationship to these technological
spaces and the industrial practices that gave rise to the “human-built world.”
In A la conquête du pôle, Méliès creates a compelling link between two practices
of world building that defined the modern built environment and early cinematic space—
the physical construction of industrial buildings such as film studios and the cinematic
production of artificial environments. To understand the consequences of this circuit of
production and reproduction it is necessary to locate cinema at the intersection of the
architectural and technological changes of the late nineteenth century. Early cinema was
deeply embedded in these changes, and they influenced the development of both film
content and form. At the same time, as industrial modernity became the subject of early
films, film technology became not only a product of industrial developments, but also a
powerful means for evaluating technological change. Films such as A la conquête du pôle
leave us to wonder just how cannily early filmmakers recognized cinema’s unique place
in this process of building artificial worlds, physical and virtual alike.
Conclusion

Utilizing our daily experience of motion in the railroad train and the motor car,
the motion picture re-creates in symbolic form a world that is otherwise beyond
our direct perception or grasp. … Though it has been so stupidly misused, the
motion picture nevertheless announces itself as a major art of the neotechnic
phase. Through the machine, we have new possibilities of understanding the
world we have helped to create.
– Lewis Mumford, 1930
248

248
Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt and Brace Company, 1934), 343.

159

Like contemporary theorists such as Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Georg
Simmel, in the 1930s Lewis Mumford recognized cinema’s unique relationship to the
technologies and experiences of industrial urban modernity. Cinematic motion replicated
the technologically-driven movement of the automobile, railroad, and assembly line,
while its mechanical reproduction of images mimicked the artificiality of mass industrial
production. For Mumford, cinema offered a means not only to record and preserve, but
also to understand the technological changes to the modern built environment created by
new materials and machines. As a machine itself, cinema seemed to provide unique
access to the experiences of the modern industrial world. As this chapter has shown,
cinema’s relationship to technology was founded in the materials and designs that gave
rise to the first film studios—the technological environments of cinematic production. In
these industrial spaces, cinema took on the forms and spatial qualities—fluidity,
plasticity, and artificiality—that shaped the modern built world.
While Mumford was right that this relationship to technology made cinema
uniquely poised to represent and help us understand our new technological world, he
failed to recognize that cinema would also play an important role in that world’s very
creation. Filmmakers such as Méliès used the artificial environment of the studio not only
to reproduce modern spaces on film, but also to build cinematic worlds that were
themselves key components of an increasingly artificial, human-built environment. In
doing so, they made cinema the key medium for representing and evaluating technology
that Mumford and others would recognize years later.

160

Méliès, in particular, produced pointed cinematic commentaries about
technological change and its potential future dangers. At the same time, he used the
studio to not only evaluate the present and future of technology, but also the future of
cinema, which he saw as centrally linked to such technological discourse. Just as his
“voyages extraordinaires” explored where new technologies might lead, so Méliès’ films
and work process offer an exploration of where cinematic technology and the studio
would take future film audiences. In the first decades of cinema, these two concerns were
not so far apart. The studios that produced cinematic worlds were of the same character
as the factories, laboratories, ateliers, hothouses, photography studios, department stores,
office buildings, and exhibition halls that were redefining built space.

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CHAPTER THREE

Dark Studios, Daylight Factories, and the “Age of Movement”:
Building Cinema and the City in Turn-of-the-Century New York

New York! It is the epitome of the horror of the age. I hate it. I loathe its artificial
way of living, its mannerisms, its ways of thought. It has but one redeeming
feature, that it is getting so impossible that people must leave it or become crazy.
– Thomas Edison, 1905
249

Figure 3.1: “The Age of Movement.” American Mutoscope and Biograph Film Catalog Cover,
1901.

On the cover of its 1901 sales catalog the American Mutoscope and Biograph
Company announced the “Age of Movement.” Framed by electrical wires and menaced
by a bolt of lightning emanating from clouds in the upper right corner, the title bursts
forth in a luminous glow whose source appears to be none other than the interior of the
catalog itself. While the cover’s allusions to light and movement make reference to the
basic components of the projectors and films for sale within its pages, it is notable for the

249
“Edison, the Peaceful” The Sun, May 14, 1905. Edison Papers Project, Microfilm Edition, Reel 221.

162

absence of any direct reference to or representation of film itself. Instead, the catalog’s
iconography evokes the technological context that framed and shaped moving images in
the early twentieth century. As inventors, industrialists, and governments introduced
technologies such as electricity and electrical lighting to the Western world, filmmakers
embraced them as both the subjects of early films and the basis for new production
strategies and formal techniques.
Only a year later, Biograph made the reference to electricity on its catalog cover
the physical reality of its film practice, using newly developed mercury-vapor lamps to
outfit the world’s first entirely artificially lit, or “dark” studio in lower Manhattan.
Biograph’s shift to artificial lighting marked a new step in the process of divorcing
cinematic production from the dictates of the natural environment that began with
Dickson’s rotating Black Maria and Méliès’s glass-and-iron studio in Montreuil. As
American cinema industrialized, filmmakers came to understand technology as a
substitute for the natural environment. This shift away from nature epitomizes cinema’s
role in the broader process of technological change that created the artificial spaces of the
human-built world. As the 1901 Biograph catalog suggests, cinema’s role in industrial
modernity involved more than simply utilizing electricity in film production or recording
and re-presenting technologies on film. Cinema contributed to an “age of movement”
defined by the technological reproduction of natural phenomena (symbolized by the
electrical wires that exit from the catalog’s storm clouds).
As the films sold in this and other contemporary catalogs illustrate, early
filmmakers in New York were drawn to – and did not have to look far beyond their urban

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studios to find – dramatic images of environmental change. The development of
materials, technologies, designs, and building techniques in the late nineteenth century,
combined with new demands for urban infrastructure, led to the rapid and widespread
transformation of the growing city. In films depicting construction, demolition,
excavation, transportation, and celebration of new urban spaces, filmmakers not only
documented the city’s metamorphosis, they also used film technologies and formal
developments (including time-lapse photography, rotating tripod heads, in-camera
editing, and artificial lighting effects) to mimic the processes of urban change and
enhance their effects on film. These techniques underscore cinema’s close relationship to
the technologies and practices of architectural development in the early twentieth century.
Through the construction of film studios, moreover, cinema also figured in the
city’s physical modification. Using the same technologies with which architects
modernized urban architecture, film companies made New York the center of America’s
studio film production. Shaped by architectural and technological changes, especially
electrification and building techniques developed to enhance “natural” illumination
through larger windows and new forms of glass, studios reached greater degrees of
independence from the natural environment. In these studios, filmmakers discovered
novel ways to create artificial worlds, seemingly at will, a flexibility that drove the
Nickelodeon era’s massive success and made these studios models for American
cinema’s industrialization over the next decade.
250

250
The Nickelodeon period, generally understood to have lasted in America from 1905 to 1907, takes its
name from the storefront theaters that emerged throughout the U.S., beginning in Pittsburg in June 1905.
These small theaters, which typically exhibited film programs for a nickel, helped transform the film
industry by altering its exhibition model. As Charles Musser describes, the nickelodeon came about as a

164

While important work has detailed the ways that urban modernity affected
cinematic spectatorship and early films in turn shaped spectators’ experiences of the city,
the history of film’s relationship to the city and to architecture remains incomplete
without more precise knowledge of cinema’s place in the construction of the built
environment.
251
Cinema’s relationship to urban modernity includes more than
spectatorship and representations of the city. Studio production also developed both in
and in concert with urban architecture. As the history of New York’s first studios
demonstrates, the history of cinema, architecture, and urban space must be understood as
a material history founded on infrastructural changes to the modern built environment.
Modernization and the “Creative Destruction” of Manhattan
The first film studios emerged in New York during a period of extensive changes
to the city’s infrastructure. By the end of the nineteenth century, massive immigration, a
daily influx of commuters, new concentrations of corporate power, and the introduction
of novel building technologies had created “an urban landscape entirely new in the
history of civilization.”
252
The consolidation of the boroughs in 1898, which made New
York officially the largest city in the United States, centralized administrative authority

result of several developments in American cinema: “a large and growing audience base, a minimal level of
‘feature’ production, a rental system of exchanges, the conception of a film program as an interchangeable
commodity (the reel of film), frequent program changes, a continuous-exhibition format, and cinema’s
relative independence from more traditional forms of entertainment (except illustrated songs).” See Musser,
The Emergence of Cinema (New York: Scribners, 1990), Chapters 13-14, 417-89.

251
See, for instance, Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993), Giuliana Bruno, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory
and the Films of Elvira Notari (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993)the essays collected in Leo
Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz, eds. Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1995), and Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-De-
Siècle Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

252
Keith Revell, Building Gotham: Civic Culture and Public Policy in New York City, 1898-1938
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 3.

165

over the city’s increasingly strained utilities and transportation networks. Faced with
mounting concerns over pollution, unregulated development, overcrowding, and limited
natural resources, city leaders looked to new technological systems designed to take
advantage of the city’s natural resources while also overcoming the restraints of the
natural environment.
253

Historian Max Page has described the resulting modernization as the “creative
destruction of Manhattan.”
254
As Page and other historians have shown, New York
underwent the most rapid period of change in its history at the turn of the century as the
water and sewer system expanded, bridges and tunnels connected Manhattan to the
boroughs, elevated trains and subways created new networks of mass rapid transit across
the city, skyscrapers replaced brownstones and slums, Central and Prospect Park
provided man-made “natural” recreation spaces in the city, and electrical lights began to
transform daily life.
255
These developments fundamentally changed the city’s and its
residents’ relationship to nature by reproducing it in artificial forms.
256
This reproduction

253
In historian of technology Matthew Gandy’s words, “the rapidly growing settlement … faced the
prospect of social and economic collapse.” Gandy, 2.

254
Max Page, The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900-1940 (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1999).

255
Matthew Gandy, Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City (Cambridge: The MIT Press,
2002), 93. On Central Park, see Chapter 3. As we will see in the next chapter, the construction of artificial
“natural” spaces in the city also affected film production in Paris, as Gaumont built the world’s largest pre-
WWI studio adjacent to the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont (where the company often filmed). On electrical
lighting, see David Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880-1940
(Camridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). Although private domestic lighting would not become common until
the 1910s, already by the 1880s locations including factories, workshops, train stations, construction sites,
exhibition halls, theaters, and city streets began to install first electric arc lighting, then Edison’s
incandescent light technology. By 1900, historian Nye argues, Americans understood electricity—as a
source of lighting, industrial power, streetcar traction, and spectacular entertainment—as a key aspect of
life, from the city to the suburbs, and from factory labor to recreation.

166

would be experienced perhaps no more so than in the use of electrical lighting, a
technology that “astounded people because it violated the natural order” of sunlight.
257

Emerging industries capitalized on this wonder by drawing on natural iconography such
as the lightning bolt on AM&B’s “Age of Movement” cover.
258

These images were key to what Page identifies as the “unprecedented cultural
interpretation of the convulsions of urbanization.”
259
Despite its key role in this process,
film has remained surprisingly absent from discussions of the cultural response to
technological changes in this period. Filmmakers took to the streets en masse at the
century’s end, documenting and shaping how urban change would be represented and
received by audiences. At the same time, they created and tested new filmmaking
techniques that often replicated the changes taking place in front of the camera. This
correlation between the technologies that changed the built environment and the

256
With the creation of the New York State Water Commission in 1833 and the completion of the Croton
Aqueduct nine years later, New York joined other Western cities in gradually transforming its water system
“from an organic form … into a modern hydrological structure.” Gandy, 22. On the development of water
and sewer systems in New York City, see Gandy, Chapter 2.

257
Nye, Electrifying America, 2. Wolfgang Schivelbusch reminds us that gas lighting had a similar effect—
as a “triumph over the natural order”—both before and contemporaneously with electrical lighting. But
Schivelbusch notes that arc lighting was qualitatively different from earlier public gas lighting systems
because “in arc-light, the eye saw as it did during the day, that is with the retinal cones, while in gaslight, it
saw as it did at night, with retinal rods.” See Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of
Light in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 153, 115.

258
Nye, Electrifying America, 73. The Edison Electric Light Company and its customers wasted no time in
capitalizing on the public’s fascination with electricity, installing 334 lighting plants within two years
following Edison’s first demonstration of the incandescent lighting system in 1879. In 1882 the company
began commercial operation of the world’s first central generating station on Pearl Street in lower
Manhattan. Electrical lighting spread quickly in the city’s commercial establishments and outlying
factories, and reached massive proportions at international expositions that created “visions of a fully
electrified world.” (Nye, 33) On the Pearl Street Station and Edison’s early electricity companies see
Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930 (Baltimore: John
Hopkins University Press, 1983), 39.

259
Page, 7.

167

cinematic forms used to capture them underlies the close correspondence – an
infrastructural affinity – that developed between cinema and technology from the first
moving images created in experimental laboratories to the industrial spaces of the first
studios and in the streets of modernizing Western cities.
Cinema and New York City in the “Age of Movement,” 1901-1906
Cinema’s affinity for modern technologies developed in part as a subset of early
filmmakers’ and audiences’ fascination with metropolises such as New York.
Filmmakers who explored urban life could not help but discover sites of infrastructural
change in the city, and these scenes quickly became popular early film subjects. In
recording construction, destruction, and renovation projects, filmmakers discovered novel
ways to capture building technologies using film technologies. The resulting films
demonstrate how filmmakers developed formal techniques and common styles for
exploring city space on film, a decade before the more-often-celebrated city symphonies
and urban dramas that appeared in the 1920s and 1930s.
260
These early city films did
more than simply document elements of urban life, architecture, and new technologies.
Filmmakers also used their urban subjects as the occasion for formal experimentation,

260
The relationship between cinema and the city has received a great deal of attention in the last two
decades, often as a subset of broader considerations of cinema and architecture. Numerous collections and
book chapters have outlined, in Mark Shiel’s words, the “inextricabl[e] link” between the fortunes of
cinema and the city since the end of the nineteenth century. See Mark Shiel, “Cinema and the City in
History and Theory,” in Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice, eds. Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies
in a Global Context (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 1-18, 1. See also Dietrich Neumann, ed. Film Architecture:
Set Designs from Metropolis to Blade Runner (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1996), François Penz and Maureen
Thomas, eds. Cinema and Architecture: Méliès, Mallet-Stevens, Multimedia (London: BFI, 1997), and
Linda Krauss and Patrice Petro, eds. Global Cities: Cinema, Architecture, and Urbanism in a Digital Age
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), as well as the essays in the special issue “Cityscapes
I,” Clark Arnwine and Jesse Lerner, eds. Wide Angle 19.4 (1997). Curiously, although New York City is
often regarded as a prototypical “cinematic city,” early films made in New York are conspicuously absent
from these collections.

168

abstraction, and re-presentation that mirrored the changes they filmed and contributed to
cinema’s affinity to the technologies they recorded.
261

A particularly stunning example of such experimentation is Frederick S.
Armitage’s Building Up and Demolishing the Star Theatre. Between April and June 1901
the Biograph cameraman documented a representative case of urban change in a film that
suggests at once the dynamism of the city’s transformation and cinema’s ability to
reproduce and enhance it for the screen.
262
The Star Theatre was located at Thirteenth
Street and Broadway, across the street from Biograph’s offices in the Roosevelt Building
(an eight story, cast iron-framed loft and retail space built in 1893) and only a stone’s
throw from the site of their future studio on East 14
th
Street. The film depicts the
demolition of the theater at high speed, and exhibitors often projected it both forward and
backward to show both the “construction” and destruction of the theater (a month-long
process) in just over three minutes.
263

261
As with cinema and architecture, work on cinema and the city has often too quickly passed over the first
two decades of filmmaking by placing early city films neatly into the category of actualities. In a
formulation typical of this trend, architectural historian Helmut Weihsmann explains that early city films
inherited from actualities “the quality of a mere record, or silent witness of reality, rather than a work of
art.” Distinguishing such films from Méliès’s trick films, he contends that city films “emphasized primarily
the (re)presentation and perception of space rather than special effects, fake or pseudo-realistic, surrealistic
and magical elements.” Helmut Weihsmann, “The City in Twilight: Charting the Genre of the ‘City Film’,
1900-1930,” in Penz and Thomas, eds. Cinema and Architecture, 8-27, 8-9. Emphasis in the original.

262
Frame enlargements of the film line the bottom of the first chapter of The Creative Destruction of
Manhattan, making Page’s history a kind of flipbook. Curiously, although these reproductions suggest that
for Page the film offers an iconic example of “creative destruction,” he never mentions it in the text.

263
Production records show that Armitage began filming on April 18, and the final portion was developed
on June 4. See “American Mutoscope and Biograph Company Production Records, 1899-1912.” Museum
of Modern Art, MFILM 0125.

169

Figure 3.2: Demolishing and Building Up the Star Theatre (Armitage, AM&B, 1901)

Armitage framed the film’s single camera position in three main sections. The
area of the Star Theatre occupies the largest, upper right area of the composition, and is
set in the background, framed at an approximately eighty-degree angle so that when it
stands completed the entire Thirteenth Street façade is visible as it recedes into the
distance. The corner of the Roosevelt Building on the near side of Broadway vertically
bisects the theater just left of the main façade and entryway, thus dominating the left third
and foreground of the frame. On the Roosevelt’s ground floor the large glass windows of
the clothing store Hackett, Carhart & Co. reveal shifting product displays. Through them,
the viewer can glimpse the street traffic on Broadway that animates the frame’s lower
right and middle ground.
264

After a brief opening segment that sets the scene at normal tempo, the frame
becomes a dynamic frenzy of motion as the film animates the (de)construction at high
speed. Broadway’s pedestrian, equestrian, and streetcar traffic creates a horizontal,

264
The changing window displays recall the narrator’s experience of time travel (from across the street in
his greenhouse) in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895).

170

frame-bisecting blur, while just beyond this the Star Theatre rises and falls in horizontal
segments as sped-up workers scurry across the walls. According to the 1902 AM&B
Picture Catalogue, in order to create the desired time-lapse effect Armitage had to invent
a special electrical apparatus for recording exposures every four minutes for eight hours a
day.
265
In doing so, Armitage managed not only to create a remarkable demonstration of
the speed of modern urban change, but also to demonstrate cinema’s synchronicity with
it. Biograph’s catalog description neatly encapsulates the simultaneously turbulent and
ordinary character of this process:
One views at first the old Star Theatre standing as it had for years looking down
with serenity upon the bustle of Broadway traffic. Then as if struck by a tornado
of supernatural strength, the building begins to crumble. Chimneys totter, walls
cave in, and whole stories vanish, until at last the site shows only a cellar
excavation; and the Broadway cars with the sidewalk procession continue as if
nothing unusual had happened.
266

If “nothing unusual had happened” to the Star Theatre, it was indeed because tumultuous
scenes of urban re-construction were the norm at the turn of the century. The catalog’s
reference to nature in super-natural form reflects contemporary appeals to the natural
order as a way of explaining the power and rapidity of technological and urban change—
the same appeal that links electricity to a lightning storm on the “Age of Movement”
cover. But the “supernatural strength” represented in the film comes not from nature, nor
merely the demolition itself, but rather the film technology used to animate it in super-
natural form.

265
American Mutoscope and Biograph Company Picture Catalogue (November 1902), 72. Reproduced in
The American Film Institute catalog of motion pictures produced in the United States: film beginnings,
1893-1910 (Metuchen; London: Scarecrow Press, 1995), 255.

266
Ibid.

171

Indeed, film became the quintessential cultural form of Manhattan’s “creative
destruction.” At its most basic level – as a medium of spatial representation, temporal
change, and artificial reproduction – cinema replicated the spaces, dynamic movements,
and artificial materials of Manhattan’s modernizing built environment. In Building Up
and Demolishing the Star Theatre this relationship materializes in Armitage’s recording
method. While he used a special device to speed up the demolition, the result only
underscores how film, as a staggered series of images that becomes animated when
presented at higher speed, matched the daily, iterative character of demolition and
construction.
267
As the film shifts to high speed, the brief recorded segments of the
theater’s destruction – each of which on its own only begins to suggest the demolition as
a whole – combine to represent the movements of urban change in the same way that
individual photographs combine to create cinema.
Armitage does not simply document the theater’s destruction; he brings it to life
using the motion of film. In doing so, he highlights how, like cinema, modern urban
structures re-processed nature, particularly sunlight. The sun moving over Manhattan
determined the film’s shooting schedule, and it also triggers a series of movements that
animate the film’s more anonymous structure, the Roosevelt Building. In the left
foreground, the raising and lowering of its street-level awning and upper window shades
bring the Roosevelt to life in concert with this arc. The daily ritual of regulating light and
heat becomes a spectacle.

267
The early Lumière film Demolition d’un mur (1896) similarly reflects cinema’s affinity with the
construction and deconstruction of the built environment. See AM&B’s Razing a Brick Building (1902).

172

The film also demonstrates how architecture came to control the movement of
light within the city. Near the film’s midpoint, when the theatre stands nearly completed,
several unseen skyscrapers create large shadows that sweep across the frame like wipe
transitions marking virtual scene changes. The light-mediating effects of architecture that
create these shadows reflect the more generally mediated experience of nature in the
vertically growing city. And they provide evidence of the impetus behind calls for new
structural codes to regulate building height and distance from the street in many turn-of-
the-century Western cities.
268

Figure 3.3: Demolishing and Building Up the Star Theatre. A neighboring skyscraper’s shadow
creates a wipe transition.

Not surprisingly, similar locations of surprising or amusing effects created by the
city’s new architecture often attracted filmmakers’ attention. In the Edison comedy What
Happened on Twenty-Third Street, New York (1901), for instance, Edwin S. Porter and
George Fleming use the updraft from a sidewalk grating to raise the skirt of an actress
posing as an unsuspecting pedestrian. Other films such as Biograph’s At the Foot of the
Flatiron (1903) draw parallels between the urban experiences of construction and

268
See Nye, American Technological Sublime, 98. Before 1916, New York buildings could occupy up to
ninety percent of their lots with no regulation on building height. In that year the city responded to a
diverse set of concerns about unrestricted building height with a zoning resolution designed to retain
regulated “sky exposure planes” – spaces of visual access to the horizon measured at angles from the center
of the street and maintained by requiring that the upper stories of skyscrapers be stepped back at regular
intervals. Other cities imposed regulations at earlier dates, including Chicago, Boston, Washington, D.C.,
London, and, even, skyscraper-less Paris. See Mark A. Weiss, “Skyscraper Zoning: New York’s Pioneering
Role,” Journal of the American Planning Association, 58:2 (1992), 201-212 and Edward C. Relph, The
Modern Urban Landscape: 1880 to the present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 39-42.

173

cinema, each of which became street spectacles at the turn of the century. In this film the
high winds caused by the new skyscraper – the tallest building in New York for several
years after its construction in 1902 – make for a chaotic scene that mirrors the chaos often
caused by urban filming. In the film’s paradigmatic moment a man who stops to look at
the camera forgets to hold onto his hat for just long enough to lose it to the wind.
269

Figure 3.4: At the Foot of the Flatiron (AM&B, 1903). Urban spectacle created by both
architecturally enhanced winds and cinematic production.

The construction of buildings such as the Flatiron presented filmmakers with
unique opportunities for representing the city and its changing spatial qualities.
Skyscraper architecture created “a new visual category” – the “skyline” – that emerged in
the 1890s when critics began to recognize “the creation of an artificial horizon, a
completely mad-made substitute for the geology of mountains, cliffs, and canyons.”
270

The vertical perspectives enabled by the rising city prompted a new sense of triumph over
nature that was experienced as what historian of technology David Nye terms the
“geometrical sublime.” For Nye, the city’s new geometry marked a new and definitive

269
The camera is also notably positioned opposite a shop window, creating a kind of Bermuda Triangle –
camera, wind tunnel, window display – of modern spectacle for the passing pedestrians. One should also
note the film’s racist undertones—in contrast to the young white boy knowingly and confidently stares into
the camera, the black man is taken by surprise, becoming the brunt of the joke as he loses his hat like the
rubes commonly featured in early city films.

270
Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 91.

174

stage in the city’s dissociation from the natural environment that brought distinct visual
experiences:
The skyscraper completes the formation of the city as the double of nature,
providing a spectacular perch from which to contemplate the manufactured world
as a total environment, as though one were above it or outside it. … To make
sense of the panorama requires a series of comparisons and mental triangulations,
a series of abstract thoughts that manipulates the visible landscape.
271

For those who couldn’t experience these views by ascending one of the city’s
countless skyscrapers, filmmakers spread the “geometrical sublime” through novel
technologies and formal techniques. The circular and vertical panoramas facilitated by
the rotating tripod head – developed in crude form by Edison cameramen as early as 1897
and at Biograph in late 1899 – emerged as perhaps the most frequently used form for
capturing urban space on film.
272
These panoramic films not only allowed contemporary
spectators to “contemplate the manufactured world;” they also helped manufacture it by
manipulating the visible landscape with cinematic technology.
In doing so, the films also contributed to the development of formal cinematic
techniques that reproduced the embodied experience of urban modernity.
273
Just as the
verticality of the skyscraper challenged architectural norms and created novel spatial
experiences, so vertical panoramas such as Biograph’s Panorama of the Flatiron

271
Nye, American Technological Sublime, 106.

272
On the rotating tripod head, see Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema, 232-3, 266-7.

273
As Anne Friedberg explains, the vertical pan is only one example of how “camera movement could
virtualise the movements of the body.” See Friedberg, “Trottoir roulant: the cinema and new mobilities of
spectatorship,” in John Fullerton and Jan Olsson, eds. Allegories of Communication: Intermedial Concerns
from Cinema to the Digital (Rome: John Libbey Publishing, 2004), 263-267, 268. Tom Gunning has argued
that such techniques “began as a display of the camera’s ability to mobilize and explore space.” See
Gunning, “An Unseen Energy Swallows Space: The Space in Early Film and Its Relation to American
Avant-Garde Film,” in John Fell, ed. Film Before Griffith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983),
355-66, 361. On film panoramas and the correspondence between city and cinema in the 1920s, see
Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (New York: Verso, 2002), 21.

175

Building (1903) and In the New York Subway (1903) challenged the norms of film space
by emphasizing newly mobile cameras. Such films’ dizzying effects produced much
more than a record of urban life.
274

Figure 3.5: Panorama of the Flatiron Building (AM&B, 1903). Vertical expansion in
architectural and cinematic forms.

As filmmakers climbed the new skyscrapers and bridge towers, or simply turned
the camera away from their rooftop stages and onto the city below, they combined
architecture with camera movement to capture the monumentality of contemporary urban
development. In Panorama from the Tower of the Brooklyn Bridge (AM&B, 1903), for
instance, the newly constructed bridge becomes the rotating tripod’s corollary technology
for producing city views—images of the skyline from above and afar. Similarly, in
Panorama from the Times Building (AM&B, 1905) Wallace McCutcheon uses two shots
– a vertical pan that rises from the street below, beyond the tallest parapet, and into an
empty sky; then a horizontal 360-degree pan of the Theater District – to encapsulate the
city’s seemingly boundless expansion.
These films not only marketed novel visual experiences of the changing city
through cinematic experimentation; they also helped package those changes in
aesthetically pleasing and safe forms. In films such as Beginning of a Skyscraper (1902)

274
The catalog description for In the New York Subway emphasizes the film’s novel use of space: “the
camera is tilted up and down instead of across the field as in most panoramas.” See Kemp Niver, Biograph
Bulletins, 1896-1908 (Los Angeles: Artisan Press, 1971.

176

and Excavating for a New York Foundation (1903), for instance, Biograph cameramen
represent the city’s changing landscape at its seemingly most banal and, significantly,
benign. In films such as A Perilous Proceeding (AM&B, 1902), the “perils” of modern
construction are even downplayed or, here, presented ironically. In this film the
dangerous heights of skyscraper construction become an event of triumph as a vertical
pan follows the descent of a work crew suspended from a large crane, waving their caps
at the camera in celebration. Alongside films such as Opening of New East River Bridge
(Edison, 1903), Opening the Williamsburg Bridge (AM&B, 1904), and Opening
Ceremonies, New York Subway, October 24, 1904 (Edison, 1904) that reproduced the
institutional observance of infrastructural conquest, these films gave a positive face to the
“Age of Movement.”

Figure 3.6: A Perilous Proceeding (AM&B, 1902). Workers celebrate urban modernization from
above.

On the other hand, in early fictional films, which often combined city footage
with images taken in the new urban studios, filmmakers also depicted urban
modernization in a more ambivalent light. Such films struck a delicate balance between

177

celebrating modernization and critiquing its deleterious consequences.
275
In melodramas
such as Biograph’s The Skyscrapers of New York (1906) and The Tunnel Workers (1906),
for instance, director F.A. Dobson mixes spectacular images of modernity with terrifying
depictions of the hazards of modern industrial labor. The former film begins with
remarkable views of skyscraper construction shot on location. These opening shots
include three scenes of brick and scaffolding work framed by two left-to-right panoramas
showing the surrounding city and a group of workers being transported by a crane (as in
A Perilous Proceeding). Several scenes later, a dramatic fight ensues (the result of a
dispute between a fired worker and the foreman), introduced by a title card that reads:
“Atop the Skyscraper ----- Thrilling hand-to-hand encounter on one of the highest
buildings erected in New York.”
Dobson frames the fight at a low-angle that sets the combatants against the city
skyline beyond and creates suspense when the contractor tumbles perilously out of the
frame. In the following shot, now composed at a high angle that emphasizes the city’s
depth below, the contractor narrowly avoids death as workers rescue him from the lower
scaffolding. This shift from low to high angle composition heightens the film’s suspense
while also giving cinematic form to the perilous experience of the “highest building”
invoked in the title card.

275
On early filmmakers’ attention to and representations of the urban working-class, see Steven J. Ross,
Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1998), especially Chapter Two.

178

Figures 3.7-3.8: Skyscrapers of New York (AM&B, 1905).

Skyscrapers of New York offers a more critical view of modern industrial space by
mixing a view of modernization as a spectacle of engineering feats with a warning about
the reality of its dangers. The film’s ambivalent depiction of industrial development
reflected a more general trend in working-class melodramas (as well as Méliès’s critical
representations discussed in Chapter Two). No matter their attitude towards modern
urban life, fiction films contributed to the active relationship between cinema and the
technologies of urban modernization. While cinema helped acclimate viewers to the
city’s technologically mediated experiences, new technologies in turn provided cinema
with ready-made subjects and formal features.
276

As Armitage’s Star Theatre suggests, filmmakers exploited cinema’s affinity with
new city infrastructure to emphasize the “Age of Movement’s” dynamic quality. This is
perhaps no more clear than in filmmakers’ responses to the development of the elevated
trains and subway lines that changed metropolitan transport at the century’s end. The
emergence and expansion of electrical networks in Western cities that helped light the
city and its film studios around the turn of the century also powered new forms of

276
This relationship also involved important industrial films such as those made by AM&B at the
Westinghouse Works in 1904. See the discussion of these films below.

179

electrical transport. By 1900, electrical traction made tunneling and underground trains
feasible. The subsequent completion of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s long-desired tunnel
under the Hudson River transformed the formerly aquatic urban commute.
277
Electrical
traction also contributed to the development of the New York subway system, begun in
1900 by the Interborough Rapid Transit Company, whose first line opened in 1904,
running from Brooklyn to the Bronx by way of Times Square and the upper west side.
278

By 1925, six hundred more miles of subway tracks would crisscross the city, providing
both rapid transport and visual fodder for urban filmmakers.
Filming the Metropolitan Railway Systems
The films that captured the city’s new rail systems underscore the affinity
between early cinematic and urban technologies. In the case of urban railways, this
affinity was part of a larger relationship between cinema and the railroad that film
historian Lynne Kirby has argued “profoundly influenced the ways in which we perceive
and use the modern world.”
279
As Kirby shows, the railroad set the stage for cinema’s
emergence by acclimating passengers to experiences of discontinuity, shock, and what
Wolfgang Schivelbusch terms “panoramic perception.” After cinema’s arrival, the two
technologies became mutually reinforcing systems.
280

277
Revell, 26.

278
Revell, 106.

279
Lynne Kirby, Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1997), 12.

280
As Kirby argues, “the cinema developed images, myths, and perceptions of the train as much as the train
informed cinema’s own ways of conceiving of itself.” Kirby, 3.

180

Figure 3.9: Elevated Railroad, New York (AM&B, 1903)

In films such as 104
th
Street Curve, New York, Elevated Railway (Edison, 1899),
New Brooklyn to New York Via Brooklyn Bridge, n. 2 (Edison, 1899), Elevated Railroad,
New York (AM&B, 1903), and Across the Subway Viaduct (Armitage, AM&B, 1905) the
train becomes a corollary film technology, providing motion for the camera mounted on
either its front or rear. These “phantom rides” became popular early film subjects that
may also have been exhibited in “Hale’s Tours” – simulations of short rail voyages
created by rear-projecting films at the front of a train car that used sound effects and a
narrator posing as the conductor – at carnivals and fairgrounds throughout the US.
281
As
Kirby argues, such films contributed to the creation of “representational practices that
produce[d] a spectator-passenger drawn from a dynamic public.”
282
In other cases,
filmmakers used the railroad as another occasion for cinematic experimentation that
sought to capture the essence of the new technology’s dynamism.
A deceptively complex example of this occurs in G.W “Billy” Bitzer’s
Pennsylvania Tunnel Excavation (AM&B, 1905). Construction of the long-anticipated
tunnel began in 1903 and lasted until 1910, during which time the Pennsylvania Railroad

281
On Hale’s Tours see Raymond Fielding, “Hale’s Tours: Ultrarealism in the Pre-1910 Motion Picture,”
in John Fell, ed. Film Before Griffith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 116-130 and
Musser, The Emergence of Cinema, 429-430.

282
Kirby, 36.

181

also built its west Manhattan hub, Pennsylvania Station.
283
Bitzer (the future camera
operator for D.W. Griffith) documents an early stage of this process by once again using
what at first appears to be a characteristic left-to-right 180-degree panorama. Instead,
however, he divides the film into three shots linked by two subtle cuts, masked by the
panorama’s overall trajectory. By combining three shots rather than a continuous
panoramic view, Bitzer choreographs a dynamic scene in which the camera’s motion
mirrors the movement of three different debris-hauling trains that appear and disappear as
if from the future tunnel.

Figure 3.10: Pennsylvania Tunnel Excavation. Two cuts divide the film into three sections. In the
left image, note the appearance of a man just along the visible cut line. In the right image, a train
appears after the cut in the upper left sector of the lower frame.

The film begins with the camera framing a momentarily empty segment of train
tracks that stretches diagonally across a patch of barren ground and large rocks. The first
train slowly enters from the upper left-hand corner. As it cuts across the middle of the
frame, the camera begins its slow pan, which accelerates slightly as the train disappears.

283
As Kirby notes, film’s relationship to the railroad involved not only trains, but also hubs such as Penn
Station that “occupied a central place in defining the new form that urban culture and economy would
take.” Kirby, 135.

182

At this moment the first cut is noticeable when a man suddenly appears, walking on the
previously empty tracks, which are re-framed at a slightly higher position and now more
brightly exposed, suggesting an unknown time delay between shots. As the pan
continues, a longer uncut sequence reveals a series of three parallel tracks, one with a row
of empty open rail cars, all set against a stone backdrop lined with debris, machines, and
a group of workers. As the camera slowly turns away from this wall and towards the
opposite side of the excavation, a new train enters the frame from the right, moving in the
opposite direction from the camera’s pan and disappearing out of the frame. The camera
continues to move across the scene, gradually shifting to greater depth that reveals a
wooden support system that appears to mark an underground entrance. Suddenly, a
second cut reveals a third train that appears to exit from the wooden supports. Bitzer
creates the illusion of this impossible exit by continuing the pan at a constant pace and
arranging the new shot to begin just as the train starts moving from its position at the
edge of the wooden wall. The film ends as the pan continues to the right, leaving the last
train behind as it curves out of the left side of the frame.
In its use of breaks in filming to divide an otherwise continuous panoramic view,
the film recalls Edwin S. Porter’s Pan-American Exposition at Night (Edison, 1901).
Porter’s film uses the same strategy to recreate the Exposition’s daily shift from darkness
to electrically lit “daylight” by shooting the first half of the panorama during the day,
then pausing the camera and recommencing the shot at night under the electric lights. As
Kristin Whissel argues about the latter film, “Porter seems to have labored to reproduce
the structural experience of the electric sublime for the crowds that watched these films

183

beyond the confines of the Exposition.”
284
For Whissel, the film’s structural replication
of the Exposition’s electrical lighting not only helped to show film viewers “American
industry’s ongoing ability to subordinate the natural order to the demands and desires of
the commercial-industrial order,” but also to inscribe them into this emerging
technological system through the machine of cinema.
285
Bitzer’s film similarly re-
presents a powerful image of an emerging industrial modernity—a system that promised
to enhance city transport through a frenzy of trains and tracks that, in Kirby’s words,
“charged across city streets … erecting an aesthetics of steel, speed, and electricity.”
286

Bitzer manufactures an image and idea of this future infrastructure by animating the
excavation site – a space that has not yet become recognizably urban – through the
“infrastructure” of cinematic technology. Here, the spinning celluloid reel, iterative
production of cinematographic movement, rotating tripod head, and edited combination
of spaces “builds” a scene of modern urban industry in a way that matches the tunnel’s
literal construction. As numerous other railroad films (as well as Armitage’s Star
Theatre) demonstrate, Bitzer’s depiction of the excavation scene as a dynamic site of
modern movement was not entirely unique.
287

284
Each day the organizers would display the Expositions extensive lighting display, lit using
Westinghouse’s Tesla-designed alternating current dynamos powered by Niagara Falls, to create an
“electric dawn” preceded by a moment of complete darkness. See Kristen Whissel, Picturing American
Modernity: Traffic, Technology, and the Silent Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 132.

285
Whissel, 135.

286
Kirby, 135.

287
Other films that play on the dynamism of modern construction include Wallace McCutcheon’s Fastest
Wrecking Crew in the World (AM&B, 1903) and Porter’s Building Made Easy, or How Mechanics Work in
the Twentieth Century (1901). On the latter, see Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the
Edison Manufacturing Company (Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1991), 176.

184

In Railroad View—Experimental (AM&B, 1903), for instance, Arthur Marvin
enhances the speed of rail travel by cranking the camera at low speed during views taken
from the front and rear of a moving train.
288
Marvin’s under-cranking does for the
railroad what Armitage’s accelerated time-lapse images produce for the Star Theatre
demolition, creating the effect of the train moving at an extremely high speed. In a
somewhat different register, Edwin S. Porter’s 1904 film City Hall to Harlem in 15
Seconds Via the Subway Route plays on the perceived speed of rail travel (and
contemporary fears about the dangers of the subway that remain eerily prescient today)
by depicting a man who is sent flying through the subway tunnel to Harlem after igniting
an explosive in the station.
289
Through their cinematically produced exaggeration of the
railroad’s ability (like cinema) to conquer space and time, such films emphasized rail
travel’s novel effects while also demonstrating its structural similarity with film.

Figure 3.11: Interior New York Subway 14
th
Street to 42
nd
Street (Bitzer, 1905). The banks of
Cooper-Hewitt lamps are visible on the left track in the first frame.

Perhaps the most striking of these experimental re-presentations is another Bitzer
film, Interior New York Subway 14
th
Street to 42
nd
Street (AM&B, 1905). By artificially
lighting a subway car from a parallel track and filming from the front of a trailing train,

288
For a description of the film see Kemp Niver, Motion Pictures from the Library of Congress Paper Print
Collection, 1894-1912 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 153.

289
See the description in Niver, 57. Another Edison film inspired by the subway’s construction was The
Finnish of Michael Casey (1901), which also ends with an explosion. See Musser, Before the Nickelodeon,
176.

185

Bitzer creates a haunting image of the early New York subway. As the lead car traverses
the tunnels between Union Square and Grand Central Station, the adjacent lights flicker
through the columns that separate the tracks, creating a strobe effect of stuttered forward
movement. Just as the shutter on film projectors creates the illusion of cinematic motion,
so the flickering light – produced by a bank of Cooper-Hewitt mercury vapor tubes that is
occasionally visible when the tracks converge – accentuates the train’s forward
progression. As the train arrives at Grand Central Station, the filming creates a minor
spectacle as awaiting passengers look from the subway car to the lights on the opposite
track and, occasionally, to Bitzer’s camera. This series of shifting views inscribes both
the camera and the viewer into a compelling scene of industrial modernity. The
coincidence of railroad, electrical lighting, and cinematic technologies at the Grand
Central subway platform marks a powerful representation of the technological network
that produced modern urban experience.

Figure 3.12: Interior New York Subway 14
th
Street to 42
nd
Street. Passengers turn to look at
Bitzer’s camera while others remain facing the Cooper-Hewitt lamps on the opposite track (the
lamps are reflected in the leading subway car’s rear windows).

The same Cooper-Hewitt lamps that produced motion in Bitzer’s film were also
lighting up cinema in another crucial node of this technological system—Biograph’s film
studio, which stood only a few blocks from the film’s starting point. The studio’s

186

proximity to Union Station made the new subway an ideal subject and a convenient site
for experimenting with the company’s artificial lighting technology. In both the studio
and the subway, filmmakers imagined and re-imagined the emerging modern landscape.
As these films suggest, early cinema shared not only structural similarities with the
experience of railroad travel, but also an infrastructural relationship with the
technologies and materials that transformed New York. At the same moment in which
filmmakers were establishing formal, symbolic, and experiential links between cinema
and the city, the major film companies were contributing to the city’s physical
reconstruction through studio construction.
Building Cinema in New York City

The demands of cinema created a simple architecture; new construction materials
such as reinforced concrete worked in the same manner. The results should thus
lead towards the same goal, and if we add to this the present "economy" that does
not allow for excess and our current taste for the fundamentally pure and
geometrical "machine," we should arrive at a unity of conception between
cinematic architecture and architecture as it is really lived.
– Robert Mallet-Stevens, 1925
290

In the first decade of the twentieth century, the major film corporations that
emerged in America, France, Britain, and Germany in cinema’s first five years
dynamically expanded filmmaking operations, exchanging open-air and rooftop stages
for new and larger studios inspired by not only the glass house form initiated by Méliès,
but also novel materials and building technologies (especially electricity, concrete, and
new forms of glass). In New York, this process took form in the battle for American film
industry dominance between Biograph, American Vitagraph, and the Edison

290
Robert Mallet-Stevens, “Le cinéma et les arts; l’architecture,” Les cahiers du mois 16/17 (1925), 95-98,
97.

187

Manufacturing Company. In the midst of New York’s “creative destruction,” the Edison
Company, followed by its major competitors, contributed to New York’s “artificial way
of living” by using advanced building technologies to construct new studios. From plate
glass houses and “dark” studios lit by electricity, to prismatic glass windows and
“daylight factories” that used reinforced concrete designs to open building façades for
sunlight, studio architects made modern materials and designs the basis of early film
production.
Edison’s Glass House – Filming Above Manhattan, 1901
In 1901, Edison replaced the dilapidated and by then seldom-used Black Maria
with America’s first glass-enclosed studio, built on a New York City rooftop at 41 East
21
st
Street. Edison built the studio only a step away from the city’s entertainment center
(and its star performers and theaters) at Broadway and Fifth Avenue, the street that
“exemplified more than any other place on the island the nature of what Henry James
called the ‘provisional city.’”
291
Thanks to a momentary victory over Biograph for patent
infringement and resulting industry-wide stagnation as film companies awaited word on
the legality of their filmmaking apparatuses, Edison held a brief monopoly on film
production from the middle of 1901 to March 1902. Edison executives hoped that the
studio would provide a more consistent output of films, thereby allowing the company’s
lead filmmakers, Edwin S. Porter and George Fleming, to take advantage of their
momentary position of dominance.
292

291
Page, 26.

292
Musser, Before the Nickelodeon, 143. Edison also hoped to lessen its dependence on the production
licensees who produced most of the company’s films as filmmaking at the Blakc Maria declined after 1897

188

Edison’s Rooftop Glasshouse – 41 East 21
st
Street, Manhattan
The studio occupied almost the entire roof, approximately 90 by 20 feet, and was
enclosed in glass and iron for $2,800 (approximately $61,000 today) by the Hinkle Iron
Company. Porter outfitted the floor below the studio with a small room lit through an 8
by 10 foot skylight. He also included an electrically lit space of 10 by 25 feet that
contained dressing rooms and a dark room for film processing (although large scale
developing and printing of Edison films still took place at the West Orange
laboratory).
293
The studio opened in February, and was paying tangible dividends by the
following winter as Porter and Fleming produced numerous short studio films while
Biograph released only a few actualities. Aside from its economic benefits, the studio
also housed celebrated cinematic innovations, perhaps most visible in Porter and
Fleming’s Jack and the Beanstalk, produced in May and June 1902. Like Méliès’s Le
Voyage dans la lune, released only a few months later, the film featured noticeable
developments in spatial fluidity between shots, in particular in the sequence during which
Jack descends the beanstalk, exiting the bottom of the frame in each shot and reappearing
from the top of the subsequent frame. Just as with Méliès’s first glass house, the space of
filming and the techniques that filmmakers learned there shaped the films they produced.
Over the next four years, Porter would use the studio to build a broad repertoire of
film effects inspired by other filmmakers such as Méliès and facilitated by the studio.

(especially Albert Smith and J. Stuart Blackton’s American Vitagraph, which had been producing films on
an open-air rooftop stage at the Morse Building, 140 Nassau Street, since 1898). On the American
Vitagraph rooftop studio, see Anthony Slide, The Big V, 8 and Musser, “The American Vitagraph, 1897-
1901: Survival and Success in a Competitive Industry,” in Fell, ed. Film Before Griffith (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1983), 22-66, 30.

293
Ibid, 158.

189

Porter also took inspiration from the city’s numerous building projects and the city films
described above. In Building Made Easy, or How Mechanics Work in the Twentieth
Century (July 1901), for instance, Porter uses stop- and reverse motion effects to animate
brick laying and carpentry, thereby creating both a visual metaphor and a cinematic
equivalent to the additive, step-by-step building processes found on construction sites
throughout the city (and reproduced in Armitage’s Star Theatre). As such films suggest,
the city’s construction not only became the subject of early city films; it also inspired
fictional studio-produced narratives that make clear how attentive early filmmakers were
to the built environment in which they produced their work.
Porter would later proudly remark, “I was given charge of the first skylight studio
in the country.”
294
But although Edison’s Manhattan studio briefly represented the most
modern design in America, in Europe Méliès’s first studio predated it by almost four
years, and several British filmmakers (including R.W. Paul, G.A. Smith, and Cecil
Hepworth) were also working under glass and iron by 1900. And while the studio may
have allowed Edison to out-produce his open-air-based American competitors during
cold months, the short winter days nonetheless limited production and left filmmakers
subject to the dictates of the natural environment. For although the Edison studio had a
small electrically lit room, artificial light was not used for film production. This fact
betrays the ironic failure of the company that brought electrical lighting to New York to
foresee its development as a tool that would make the rooftop studio seem inadequate in
only a few short years when other filmmakers made electrical lighting key to their

294
Quoted in Musser, Before the Nickelodeon, 160.

190

success. What’s more, it would be Edison’s chief rival, Biograph that would help bring
electrical lighting to the film industry.
American Mutoscope and Biograph’s “Dark Studio” – 11 E. 14
th
Street, 1903
In the same year that Biograph proclaimed the “Age of Movement,” the company
itself was going nowhere fast. Following Edison’s copyright infringement victory,
Biograph’s future in the business was in doubt. Although the court allowed production to
continue under restrictions during an appeal of the ruling, the company also faced
declining sales due to both the limitations of its proprietary 70mm film format and an
industry wide lag in audience interest.
295
Finally, in March 1902, an appeals court’s
overturning of the Edison Company’s victory allowed its competitors to return fully to
production and sales. Biograph responded with a corporate makeover, complete with a
gradual shift to the industry standard 35mm film and plans to open a new artificially lit
studio.
296
The use of electrical lights for both production and exhibition would expand the
relationship between cinema and other technologies of the second industrial revolution.
In Biograph’s case it would also bring it into contact with one of Edison’s chief non-
cinematic rivals, George Westinghouse.
Electrical Lighting and the “Battle of the Currents”
Westinghouse, who achieved early success designing railroad technologies,
emerged as one of Edison’s chief competitors during the early days of electricity.
Beginning in the 1880s, Westinghouse and Edison headlined the highly publicized “battle

295
On the copyright case, see Musser, Before the Nickelodeon, 177-8. See also Musser, The Emergence of
Cinema, 305-7.

296
Musser, Before the Nickelodeon, 196.

191

of the currents” that pitted Edison’s direct current system of electrical production and
distribution against Westinghouse’s alternating system. Despite the Edison Company’s
early success with the Pearl Street station, other power stations and electric trolley
networks across the US, and the incandescent light bulb, by the end of the 1880s Edison’s
DC system faced rising competition from AC schemes developed in the U.S. by Nikola
Tesla at Westinghouse and by several European companies.
297
By the early 1890s, with
relatively reliable AC motors and transformers available, businesses and municipal
governments increasingly chose Westinghouse’s system. Even Edison’s increasingly
spectacular attempts to denounce alternating current as dangerous, including films such
as Execution of Czolgosz (Porter, 1901) and Electrocuting an Elephant (1903), could not
shift the move away from the AC system.
In 1892, facing declining profits and the reality that AC systems represented the
future of large-scale electrification, Edison’s investors, led by J.P. Morgan, sold Edison
General Electric to the Thomson-Houston Company in the merger that created General
Electric, effectively squeezing a bitter Edison out of not only the company’s name, but
also the electricity business altogether.
298
Instead he used his considerable profits to fund
new projects involving ore drilling, an electrical storage battery for automobiles, and the
Portland cement that would help drive the growing concrete industry in America. But,
although Edison was no longer involved directly in electrical lighting, his name was

297
In short, Edison’s direct current system delivered a steady stream of electricity at low voltage, but could
not efficiently distribute current across large distances. Tesla and Westinghouse’s alternating current, on
the other hand, could deliver electricity cheaply across great distances, but the current had to be scaled
down upon delivery for use in lighting or machinery and its high voltage distribution was seen (and
presented by Edison) as extremely dangerous.

298
Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930, 106-139. See
also Jonnes, Empires of Light, Chapter 9.

192

symbolically tied to both GE and the industry as a whole. How ironically fitting then, that
one of Edison’s biggest technological rivals – Westinghouse – would help his chief
American film foe – Biograph – rise to the top of the film industry in the prelude to the
“Nickelodeon boom.”
Cinema Goes “Dark” – Mercury Vapor Lamps and Artificial Daylight, 11 East 14
th
Street

Biograph’s reorganization coincided with fortuitous developments in the electrical
lighting industry. By the 1890s, inventors and investors had shifted their attention away
from the “battle of the currents” to innovations in lighting sources in an effort to replace
the incandescent bulb with brighter and more efficient systems.
299
Westinghouse, in
particular, sought new lighting technologies that would undermine General Electric’s
large market share based on its ownership of Edison’s patent for the incandescent
globe.
300
Peter Cooper-Hewitt, grandson of industrialist Peter Cooper and son of former
New York City mayor Abram S. Hewitt, began working on his own system of lighting
with mercury vapor tubes in the late 1890s. He and Westinghouse first met in fall 1899,
and reached an agreement in March 1900 that led to the formation of the Cooper Hewitt
Electric Company with Westinghouse’s backing in 1902.

299
The “battle of the currents” would continue to affect early cinema into the 1910s in both production and
exhibition. Like factory and mill owners and other industrialists, studio personnel and exhibitors often had
to contend with converting between AC and DC systems to meet machine compatibility. At least as early as
1900, Cecil Hepworth noted that alternating current was inferior to DC for film projection using arc lamps
because the variable current strength contributed to flicker. As we will see in the next chapter, some film
companies (such as Gaumont in Paris) even designed and marketed their own converters to support steady
electrical lighting for studios and arc lights for film projection, thereby further industrializing cinema and
expanding the spaces and functions of studios. See Hepworth, Animated Photography: The ABC of the
Cinematograph (London: Hazell, Watson & Viney, 1900).

300
Westinghouse’s investments included the Nernst lamp (for which Westinghouse formed the Nernst
Lamp Company in 1897), tungsten filament lamps, and finally Cooper-Hewitt’s mercury vapor lamp.

193

It is unclear how Biograph first came to use the Cooper-Hewitt lamps, but already
by the end of 1903 the company had plans for the world’s first studio to be lit entirely by
artificial lights.
301
The new Biograph studio introduced a film production practice that
would become so extensive that by 1919 an industry observer could remark: “needless to
say, motion-picture studios are the very best customers a power supply company can
hope for.”
302

Figure 3.13: 11 East 14
th
Street, AM&B Studio

For the new studio Biograph chose an apartment and basement in a brownstone at
11 East 14
th
Street, only a few blocks from its then current offices and rooftop studio at
the Roosevelt Building and, like Edison’s Manhattan studio, close to the Broadway and
Fifth Avenue entertainment district. In January 1903, the company received consent from

301
It is possible that Biograph was already planning an electrically lit studio using arc lights such as those
that would later be combined with the Cooper-Hewitt lamps, but switched to the mercury vapor tubes for
their greater efficiency and actinism. In a letter from 1920, Robert K. Bonine, an early Biograph and Edison
filmmaker, mentions correspondence with a Cooper-Hewitt employee who “fitted out the American
Mutoscope and Biograph plant at No. 11 East 14
th
Street.” See Robert K. Bonine to William L. Jamison
(March 5, 1920), Biograph Collection, Box 7, File 23, MoMA Film Study Center.

302
Austin Celestin Lescarboura, Behind the Motion-Picture Screen (New York: Scientific American
Publishing Co., 1919), 140. Janet Staiger notes that by 1918 the motion picture industry trailed only
automobile manufacturers, munitions manufacturers, and machine tool builders in the use of mercury vapor
lamps. See David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, and Janet Staiger, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film
Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 273.

194

its real estate broker to perform alterations on the interior of the building, including
enlarging a doorway (presumably to create space for the stage and for moving cameras
and décor) and installing heating units, gas and water fittings, and electrical wiring. The
broker also granted Biograph authorization for “erecting galleries, stairways and
appliances for electrical lighting and stage work, and making [a] trap door from [the]
Music Hall to [the] basement,” all in accordance with codes enforced by the Department
of Water Supply, Gas, and Electricity (DWSGE) and the New York Board of Fire
Underwriters.
303
The studio went into operation almost five months later, ironically with
a prank film—A Shocking Incident—in which a “bad-boy” character delivers electric
shocks from a hidden battery. By allowing the company to shoot films around the clock
and throughout the year, the Cooper-Hewitt lamps quickly brought Biograph to the head
of American film production, as the company easily surpassed output at Edison’s
formerly dominant rooftop glass house.
304

Biograph began production with several large banks of Cooper-Hewitts, each of
which contained eight mercury vapor tubes and was mounted on wheels or later
suspended from the ceiling. Inspection reports from the DWSGE’s Electrical Bureau, the
Board of Fire Underwriters, and Biograph’s electricians, Fred S. Chute and the Weed
Electric Co., show that the company repeatedly enlarged its electrical setup between 1906
and 1909 to include more mercury vapor tubes as well as arc lamps. These additions were

303
See “Alterations Consent for 11 East 14
th
Street,” Biograph Collection, Box 7, File 20, MoMA Film
Study Center.

304
Musser, The Emergence of Cinema, 340.

195

prompted by the need for additional production space to meet the demands of the
flourishing exhibition market during the Nickelodeon period.
305

Figure 3.14: Cooper Hewitt Electric Lamp Advertisement, 1909
The original Cooper-Hewitts were desirable not only for their increased
efficiency, but also because they were said to be less tiring on the eyes than earlier
incandescent bulbs. Because they lacked red and violet rays, the lamps produced an
unusual greenish-white light that, in one contemporary observer’s words, gave them “an
unnatural, indeed a ghastly, appearance.”
306
The Cooper-Hewitts were particularly well
suited for cinema and photography because the actinic photograph value of this “ghastly”
but otherwise bright light was not affected by its lack of red and violet rays.
307
One trade
journal noted, “the very quality of eliminating the red rays is what makes the Cooper-

305
An updated lease from December 20, 1905 shows that the company leased the three rooms at $700 per
year. In 1906, to support the studio’s expansion to three additional rooms on the building’s third floor, the
company added sixteen Cooper-Hewitts and sixteen floor-mounted arc lamps. Two years later they added
twelve more arc lamps, followed by twenty-five incandescent lamps and an additional six “flame-arc”
lamps in 1909. See “Lease for No. 11 East 14
th
Street,” Biograph Collection, Box 8, File 14, MoMA Film
Study Center.

306
Prout, 235.

307
Actinic value refers to the amount of light that exposes photographic stock. In the period before color
photography lights that lacked red and violet wavelengths were suitable because orthochromatic film stock
registered the blue-green end of the color spectrum. See Janet Staiger’s excellent description in Bordwell,
Thompson, and Staiger, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, 271.

196

Hewitt lights so valuable in photography. [Their] pictures … stand out as clear and sharp
as any daylight pictures ever made.”
308

Such proclamations suggest the degree to which film studios attained new degrees
of independence from the natural environment in the early twentieth century. Without the
necessity of open-air, or even glass-mediated sunlight, filmmakers could seemingly
create artificial cinematic worlds at will, a flexibility that helped make the Nickelodeon
period possible. In reality, however, although studio lights did make an important
contribution to the expansion of film production and the industrialization of the film
industry, they rarely replaced the use of sunlight altogether. In the years after Biograph
began using artificial illumination, glass house studios adopted electrical lights in an
effort not only to maintain production levels during the winter season, but also to find the
best exposure conditions year-round.
While filmmaking outside in unimpeded sunlight was generally accepted as the
optimal technique, filmmakers since Dickson and Méliès had recognized that such
conditions were rarely available, especially in urban locations. The search for favorable
climactic conditions or, in their absence, substitutes for sunlight became one of the major
driving forces in the development of early cinematic production. As Thomas Bedding,
former editor of the British Journal of Photography, noted optimistically in the Moving
Picture World in 1909, “a perfect substitute for daylight has to be discovered, although

308
Film Index (December 15, 1906), 4. Quoted in Musser, The Emergence of Cinema, 337. Emphasis
added.

197

thereotically [sic] it seems easy enough to make an artificial spectrum exactly
corresponding, ray for ray, to the solar spectrum.”
309

Lacking this “ray for ray” recreation of the sun, filmmakers settled for a shifting
and uncertain combination of various forms of glass, diffusing cloths, reflectors, Cooper-
Hewitts, arc lamps, and incandescent bulbs. Bedding himself could in one breath state “it
may be taken as axiomatic … that a daylight studio is the best all around in moving
picture making,” and in the next concede that “the ideal combination of lights is daylight
and electricity.”
310
A 1910 trade press article similarly provides a telling example of the
paradoxes of early electrical lighting, as well as how filmmakers understood technology
as a substitute for the natural environment. Glass house studio managers, the article notes,
often mimicked the sun with banks of Cooper-Hewitt lamps hung “directly against the
skylight so that they may be turned on to help out the natural light on a dark day and will
also give the operator his accustomed direction of light after dark.”
311

309
Bedding’s sixteen part series “The Modern Way in Moving Picture Making” appeared between March
and June 1909. Chapter Three, “The Studio,” appears in Volume 4, No. 13 (March 27, 1909), 360.

310
Bedding, “The Modern Way in Moving Picture Making: Chapter III: The Studio,” The Moving Picture
World 4, no. 13 (March 27, 1909), 360.

311
George C. Keech, “Mercury Lamps for Moving Pictures,” The Nickelodeon, May 1, 1910, 233. As we
will see in Chapter 5, such attempts to achieve “realistic” lighting conditions were prompted not only by
market demands for more, longer, and more realistic films, but also in part by the growing number (and
success) of films shot on location in the southern and western U.S. Already, though, before filmmakers
began to seek alternative filming venues and awe-inspiring exteriors, studios competed for lighting setups
that could manufacture realistic scenes in the urban built environment.

198

Figure 3.15: Interior of an unidentified studio combining glass and electrical lighting (using both
Cooper-Hewitt and arc lamps). Reprinted from John B. Rathbun, Motion Picture Making and
Exhibiting (Chicago: Charles C. Thompson Co., 1914), 59.

The only real consensus about film lighting seems to have come from film
reviewers and industry observers who increasingly decried what Bedding referred to as
the “harshness and unreality of illumination” as a result of over- or underexposure,
shifting levels of brightness, dark shadows, and unwanted highlights—in other words,
anything that ruined the illusionary reality of a “natural” scene.
312
This search for realistic
lighting techniques coincided with the gradual transition to narrative cinema in America
and the implementation of new systems of representation and narration in France at
Gaumont and Pathé.
313
Just as audiences and critics increasingly demanded more

312
Bedding, 360. Even with the transition to Southern California, electrical lights would of course become
essential components of both studio and location filming. A 1919 book on the industry would underscore
the new industry’s continuity with these early problems of producing “natural” light: “In fact, we are
replacing the good old sunshine, and it is only when we try to replace that great source of light that we
appreciate how powerful it is.” Lescarboura, Behind the Motion-Picture Screen (New York: Scientific
American Publishing Co., 1919), 140.

199

“realistic” narrative subjects, filmmakers sought ever more artificial ways to construct
and light film space.
Artificial Lighting and Modern Industrial Space – From the Studio to the Factory
The film industry’s increasingly rabid appetite for artificial light created a new
market for industrial grade lighting systems. By 1908, a number of lamp manufacturers
such as the Aristo Company, which produced the “flame-arc” lamps installed at Biograph
in 1909, had expanded their theatrical lighting services to include studio lighting.
314
Such
links between theatrical and cinematic lighting should by no means suggest that
filmmakers simply copied techniques from the stage, as film historians have previously
argued. “Instead,” as Janet Staiger contends, “the motion picture industry and the theater
both take their place in the larger development of arc and incandescent lighting.”
315

Indeed, film studios adopted electrical lighting technologies from a variety of non-
theatrical sources that included street lighting and search lighting. As the later Vitagraph
and Edison studios also show, developments in building technologies and designs using
glass and concrete must also be included in the history of film lighting.

313
Gunning situates the beginning of “narrative integration” around 1906, and Abel argues that a new
system of representation and narration develops in France beginning in 1905. See Gunning, “The Cinema
of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” in Thomas Elsaesser, ed. Early Cinema:
Space, Frame, Narrative (London: BFI, 1990), 56-62 and Abel, The Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema,
1896-1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 136. The use of electrical lighting and its
relationship to film form in France will be discussed in Chapter 4.

314
See in the inspection reports in Biograph Collection, Box 8, File 6, MoMA Film Study Center. On the
Aristo lamps see also “Robert K. Bonine to William L. Jamison (March 5, 1920).” Staiger also describes
industry use of Bogue and Kliegl lamps, each of which began as stage lighting companies but eventually
targeted film studios as well. See Bordwell, Thompson, and Staiger, The Classical Hollywood Cinema,
274.

315
Bordwell, Thompson, and Staiger, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, 273.

200

Biograph itself provides evidence of this broader context and the infrastructural
links that developed between the film studio and the spaces of modern industry. In 1908,
the company equipped its factory in Hoboken with the same types of arc and
incandescent lamps used in its studio, again installed by Weed Electric and approved by
the Board of Fire Underwriters. The inspection reports for both the studio and the factory
are notable for using ink stamps for “Direct Current,” “Arc Lamps,” and “Cooper-Hewitt
Lights,” illustrating how common these artificial lights had become by at least 1906. The
Cooper-Hewitts were known as efficient and effective substitutes for incandescent lights
in a variety of industrial settings. As an article on the lamps’ use for photography studios
remarked, they were also “said to be the most desirable form of light for factories,
machine shops, and work-rooms of architects and draftsmen, as well as for all classes of
photographic work.”
316

The Cooper-Hewitt lamps filled a growing need for the spaces of American
industry that, as David Nye explains, demanded qualitative changes in lighting conditions
in order to extend working hours and allow for new degrees of precision to support turn-
of-the-century industrial growth.
317
As corporations including GE and Westinghouse
invited film companies to record these changes for publicity and worker training,
filmmakers often turned factories into temporary studios.
318

316
Frank C. Perkins, “The Mercury Vapor Lamp for Photographic Work,” Scientific American, August 13,
1904.

317
As David Nye argues, “no American institution was in more rapid transformation in the 1890s than the
factory.” Nye, Electrifying America, 184.

318
A 1910 article on the Cooper-Hewitt lamps notes that “the demand for motion pictures of industrial
plants has caused several picture concerns to equip themselves with portable sets of Cooper-Hewitt lamps
which may be taken to these plants and set up to illuminate the moving machinery.” Keech, “Mercury

201

Figure 3.16: Filming in an unidentified factory with Cooper-Hewitt Mercury Vapor Lamps.
Reprinted from Rathbun, Motion Picture Making and Exhibiting, 57. Note that the Cooper-
Hewitts are placed directly in front of the factory windows, replicating the method used in many
contemporary glasshouse film studios.

One of the most striking examples of this is the series of films made by Billy
Bitzer at the Westinghouse Works in 1904. Less than a year after Biograph began
production at its new, Cooper-Hewitt lit studio, Bitzer underscored the company’s link to
Westinghouse by using the new lamps to make a series of films at Westinghouse’s
factories in Pittsburg. In these films, Bitzer took early cinema’s pursuit of the city’s
infrastructural technologies from the streets and studios to their origins—the machine
works that produced modern industry and the industrialized metropolis.
Biograph’s Westinghouse Works Series, 1904
Biograph’s sales catalogs featured twenty nine films from the Westinghouse
Works, depicting everything from the company’s electric sign, the factory steam whistle,
and workers punching time cards, to fixed-camera shots showing aisles of workers

Lamps for Moving Pictures,” The Nickelodeon, May 1, 1910, 233. Such films were only a subset of a
broader production of what the 1902 Biograph catalog lists as “Machinery” films (films often used by
traveling salesmen) as well as the railroad publicity films that date from the earliest days of cinema.

202

winding coils, long takes of machine tests, and panoramas of the factory’s interior.
319

Bitzer reproduced the technologies and techniques that produced industrial modernity by
transporting viewers into its prototypical artificial environment. Such films prefigured the
association that Walter Benjamin later drew between factory labor and cinematic
perception. While Benjamin notes that the process “which determines the rhythm of
production on a conveyor belt is the basis of the rhythm of reception in the film,” in the
Westinghouse films the structure and pace of mechanical production sets the rhythm for
cinematic re-production.
320

Figure 3.17: Westinghouse Air Brake Company (Bitzer, 1904). Westinghouse Works Series.
Bitzer’s film reels replicate the rhythm of the slowly circulating conveyor belts.

As in Biograph’s city films, the processes of filming at the Westinghouse Works
often reproduced the infrastructural character of the technologies they recorded. In
Westinghouse Air Brake Co., for instance, the dual assembly lines that slowly transport
air brake molds serve as the on-screen corollaries of the unseen film reel that captures

319
The purpose for the series is not clear, but several reasons seem likely. For Westinghouse, the films
would provide publicity at the St. Louis Exposition, where they were indeed exhibited (films from the
exposition also appear alongside the Westinghouse films in Biograph’s catalog). The films may also have
been shown at the Westinghouse Works for worker training and/or as part of the company’s newly created
“Electric Club.” See Works of the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company, 1904. Biograph, for
its part, likely expected the films to be popular subjects, for, as Steven J. Ross describes, by at least 1905
workers were the main audience for the movies. See Ross, Working-Class Hollywood, 6-7.

320
Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah
Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 175. Emphasis added.

203

their endless circular trajectory. Bitzer enhances the infrastructural parallels between
cinema and industry by reproducing the conditions of image production in the “dark”
studio for the factory, most notably in the series’ interior panoramas. Here, Bitzer uses
the Cooper-Hewitt lights to stunning effect by suspending them alongside the camera on
overhead rigging systems, thus creating sweeping aerial views. Just as in his later Interior
NY Subway film, Bitzer binds the Cooper-Hewitt lamps and the film camera with the
technologies of modern industry—in this case the same systems that transported
machinery through the Westinghouse factory. Like the fragments of metal that exit the
Westinghouse Works as completed machines, Bitzer’s panoramas comprise mechanical
assemblages, in this case of factory-produced images.

Figure 3.18: Panorama View, Streetcar Motor Room (Bitzer, 1904). Sparks and debris shower the
factory floor, illuminated by the unseen Cooper-Hewitt lamps that create a moving tunnel of light
just ahead of the camera. Note the factory windows just visible at the left edge of the frame.

In Panorama View, Street Car Motor Room, for instance, the hanging camera and
lights traverse the length of the factory, doubling the streetcar motors that swing through
the frame at varying intervals. At one point the camera pauses as sparks and debris,
emanating from just above the frame, shower the factory floor below, just as the unseen
Cooper-Hewitt lamps throw light onto the scene. The Cooper-Hewitts highlight the center
of the frame, creating a tunnel of light that not only enhances the composition, but which

204

was also necessary to sufficiently expose the film. The factory’s other primary source of
illumination, large rough plate glass windows, line the left edge of the frame, providing a
counterpoint to the Cooper-Hewitts’ artificial illumination. The combination of “natural”
and electrical illumination, which appears often in the Westinghouse series was a
common strategy used by both studio filmmakers and the architects charged with
providing light for modern industry. As in glass-house studies, this amalgam of lighting
techniques often occurred in structures such as the Westinghouse Works that were built
before and during the early days of electricity.
321

Figure 3.19: Panorama of Machine Company Aisle (Bitzer, 1904). The factory’s large rough plate
glass windows appear throughout the series, often helping illuminate the scenes.

Even as electricity became more common, architects continued to search for new
ways to capture sunlight, which still produced higher-quality films. While the electrical
lights that illuminated Biograph’s studio seemed to promise an electrically illuminated
filmmaking utopia, in reality “dark” studios would not become the industry standard for
more than a decade. In the meantime, film companies employed techniques taken from
the contemporary factory, department store, and skyscraper: architectures that they

321
As Dietrich Neumann notes, “Translucent, light-diffusing glasses such as rough plate glass, ground on
both sides, or corrugated glass with horizontal grooves were used from the 1880s onwards to provide
factories with an evenly distributed light.” See Neumann, “’The Century’s Triumph in Lighting’: The
Luxfer Prism Companies and their Contribution to Early Modern Architecture,” The Journal of the Society
of Architectural Historians, 54 no. 1 (March 1995), 24-53, 24.

205

captured on film. The American Vitagraph and Edison studios built in Brooklyn and the
Bronx respectively between 1905 and 1907 offer compelling examples of the links that
developed between the first studios and early modern architecture, each of which was
driven in part by this contemporary quest for light.
Prismatic Glass and Early Modern Architecture – Vitagraph, Brooklyn, 1905-6
Vitagraph had begun the twentieth century producing films on a Manhattan
rooftop and running an exhibition circuit as an Edison licensee. When the Edison
Company opened its new studio in 1901, Vitagraph’s focus shifted to exhibition, in part
due to Edison’s copyright victory over Biograph the same year. As Jon Gartenberg notes,
when the appeals court overturned Edison’s victory in 1902, Vitagraph expanded
autonomous production and, in response to the growing exhibition market that it helped
create, began construction of the new studio. By the end of 1907, Vitagraph would be
producing more than two times the number of films as its closest American competitor,
Biograph, with Edison a distant third. Using advanced architectural forms and lighting
technologies, the studio and the production practices it helped give rise to would become
paragons for the further industrialization of American cinema.
322

Vitagraph’s Filmmaking Center in Flatbush – 15
th
Street and Locust Avenue, Brooklyn
Vitagraph built its studio in the sparsely populated Flatbush area of Brooklyn at
15
th
Street and Locust Avenue. In addition to production stages, the structure initially
included a power station, machine shop, dark room, and business offices. The company’s
rapid success would lead to large-scale expansion in the form of additional studios and

322
Jon Gartenberg, “Vitagraph before Griffith: Forging Ahead in the Nickelodeon Era,” Studies in Visual
Communication 10, no. 4 (Fall 1984), 7-23, 8-9.

206

offices to replace its former facilities in Manhattan.
323
By 1910, the Moving Picture
World emphasized the studio’s grand scope, reporting, “the Vitagraph village takes on an
aspect of activity and prosperity that is an imposing tribute to the growth of the moving
picture business.”
324
Indeed, the studio was the first in a series of large American
filmmaking centers built by Selig Polyscope (1907) and Essanay (1909) in Chicago and
Siegfried Lubin (“Lubinville,” 1910) in Philadelphia, as well as numerous smaller studios
centered in Fort Lee, NJ that prefigured Hollywood.

Figure 3.20: “Studios and Laboratory of The Vitagraph Company, Brooklyn, New York.” As
studios became large centers of industrial production, their images became important markers of
corporate identity that appeared in film company catalogs and advertisements. See Chapters Four
and Five.

Vitagraph’s large smokestack – which still stands today in Brooklyn – gave
physical and symbolic form to the American film industry’s industrial growth, which, as
we will see in the next chapter, was paralleled in France at Gaumont and Pathé. The most

323
Musser, The Emergence of Cinema, 368-72.

324
August 27, 1910. Quoted in Anthony Slide, The Big V: A History of the Vitagraph Company (Metuchen,
NJ: Scarecrow Press 1976), 58.

207

unique aspect of the firm’s new studio, however, was its combination of electrical lights
and prismatic glass. As Film Index reported in August 1906, the studio design
incorporated a Cooper-Hewitt light installation as well as a “special apparatus and stage
… for taking novel pictures with special scenic effects. The entire roof and upper part of
the building is covered with a specially designed prismatic glass.”
325
Like Cooper-Hewitt
lamps and diffusing cloths, Vitagraph’s prismatic glass enclosure provided a bright,
evenly distributed light that avoided the shadows and uneven illumination critics such as
Thomas Bedding and trade journal editors had bemoaned in the years leading up to 1910.

Figure 3.21: Vitagraph Studio, Brooklyn, New York. Note the studio’s rockfaced concrete block
frame. The upper windows are composed of diffusing prismatic glass, as is the unseen roof.

Film industry appeals for improved lighting conditions echoed the demands of
urban inhabitants, commercial businesses, and industrialists. As architectural historian
Dietrich Neumann has shown, inventors and architects met those demands with novel
forms for capturing sunlight that included the rough plate and corrugated glass used in

325
Film Index (25 August 1906), 6. Quoted in Musser, The Emergence of Cinema, 468.

208

factories since the 1880s as well as white enameled terracotta and large mirrors on
building facades. In this context, prismatic glass became, in Neumann’s words, “the most
sophisticated and complex development among the many attempts in the last decades of
the nineteenth century to bring more daylight into the dark interiors of factories and
densely built urban centers.”
326

Prismatic glass had been used since at least as early as the eighteenth century to
light basements and the interiors of ships, and similar forms of light-directing glass were
commonly used in the nineteenth century in commercial architecture. The success of new
prismatic glass enterprises, such as Chicago’s Luxfur Company that emerged in the
1890s, came as a result of the growing desire to light urban interiors using the sun’s rays
rather than gas or electrical lighting. This desire reflected both the high costs of
electricity and architects’ initial reluctance to adapt architectural styles to fit
technological imperatives.
327
The search for new ways to capture natural light was also
prompted by a renewed desire for contact with nature in the increasingly technological
metropolis.
Prismatic glass offered a “natural” (because not electrical) solution to the
unnatural darkness created by sun-blocking elevated trains and skyscrapers (such as those
that cast shadows across Armitage’s view of the Star Theatre).
328
The idea that sunlight

326
Neumann, “’The Century’s Triumph in Lighting,’” 24.

327
Or, as a contemporary building journal put it, to avoid “cutting and patching the completed work of the
architect, [and] marring walls and ceilings with clumsy mouldings, which form lines that destroy the
harmony of the architecture.” The same article notes, “The more thoughtful and progressive men belonging
to the architectural and electrical professions have for some time felt the necessity of some well-defined
plan or system through which they can cooperate …” See “Architects and Electrical Engineers,” The
Builder and Woodworker XXX, Part 5 (May 1894), 65.

209

transported and transformed by building technologies such as prismatic glass was
somehow “natural” reflects the more general condition of artificiality that had overtaken
modern cities such as New York. As urban inhabitants spent more and more time in built
spaces, manufactured versions of nature (such as Prospect Park in Brooklyn, Central Park
in Manhattan, and the Parc des Buttes Chaumont in Paris) often came to replace the
natural environment itself, offering simulated oases from the urban built environment.
Prismatic glass produced an especially paradoxical version of this escape from urban
artifice—as Neumann notes, thanks to prismatic glass’s translucency, “an office or store
brightly lit by daylight could be isolated from the reality of the city outside.”
329
This
creation of artificial worlds isolated from the modern metropolis similarly animated the
development of film studios such as Vitagraph’s that produced miniature filmmaking
cities within the city.
Cinema’s gradual industrialization—suggested in part by the frequency with
which observers began to refer to new studios as “plants” and “factories”—was
consistent with the film studio’s steady progression towards independence from the
natural environment. But as the combination of electrical and glass lighting used by most
studios demonstrates, this desire for artifice remained in tension with both the slow
technological development of electrical networks and artificial light sources. Even as
electrical lighting became more common in studio production, filmmakers facing high

328
As a 1901 Brooklyn Daily Eagle article about the new glass recounts, “it has become a serious problem
to secure sufficient natural light, especially on the lower floors in crowded districts. A similar difficulty
arrives in large factory buildings in more or less isolated locations.” The article goes on to note that
according to some predictions prismatic glass would “soon become practically universal in factories, stores,
and all kinds of down town buildings in the larger cities.” See “More Light in Dark Buildings,” Brooklyn
Daily Eagle, May 26, 1901, 19.

329
Neumann, 29.

210

electrical costs or poor exposure from artificial lights again sought solutions rooted in
nature. Prismatic glass was thus a logical fit for cinematic production because it offered a
financially suitable solution to the problem of creating diffusely lit spaces by packaging a
rationally enhanced, purified version of the natural environment.
Early Modern Architecture and Early Cinema
Almost two decades later, architectural illumination using electricity and glass
would become a key component of modern architecture’s own pure forms, especially in
the early glass structures of the International Style. Such structures would inspire a
generation of architects, filmmakers, and critics to celebrate the links between
architecture and cinema’s respective abilities to produce new, dynamic forms of space.
As film historian Frances Guerin notes, “the foundation of modern German architecture’s
engagement with technological modernity” was precisely the “interaction of both
artificial and natural light with glass.”
330
The films of this period, Guerin shows, echoed
the “new modes of perception and representations of time and space within the industrial
landscape” imagined by modernists such as Bruno Taut, Walter Gropius, and Mies van
der Rohe.
331
The correspondence between architecture and cinema did not, however,
develop first in the 1920s, but rather was the product of the parallel developments in turn
of the century architecture and early cinema that intersected in the first film studios.
Indeed, by the time Vitagraph was installing its prismatic glass enclosure in
Brooklyn, architects including Luis Sullivan, William Le Baron Jenney, and Frank Lloyd

330
Frances Guerin, A Culture of Light: Cinema and Technology in 1920s Germany (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 24.

331
Guerin, A Culture of Light, 26.

211

Wright were making prismatic glass an important element of the new technologies and
rational designs that drove early modern architecture in America. In Europe, prismatic
glass would be similarly embraced by architects including Adolf Loos, Pierre Chareau,
Le Corbusier, Bruno Taut, and the founders of the Bauhaus, especially in new forms such
as the Glasseisenbeton (invented in 1909) that combined prismatic tiles with reinforced
concrete.
332

Early cinema and modern architecture were not just associated in ways that
support later claims for the two mediums’ similar approaches to the production of
modern space. Their link is deeper and more structural than that, for both early cinema
and early modern architecture shared a place in the more general creation of an artificial
built environment—a rationally constructed world that approximated nature using
cinematic and building technologies. The Vitagraph studio offers another example of how
such material changes conditioned the construction of early film studios. The 1906 Film
Index description of the studio notes in passing that the building is formed from concrete
blocks.
333
Photographs of the studio suggest that these blocks were likely a form of rock-
faced hollow concrete that became a popular material for cheap, fireproof construction
beginning around 1905 [see Fig. 21].

332
Jenney and Sullivan each used prismatic glass to light the lower floors of skyscrapers, and Wright
worked for Luxfer designing both prism glass tiles and prototypes for skyscrapers with prismatic glass
windows. In Europe, Luxfer prisms were manufactured in Liège, Belgium at the Val St. Lambert glass
factories and at the St. Gobain factories near Paris, and featured in the work of architects including Adolf
Loos. In Berlin, the Deutsches Luxfer Prismen Syndikat emerged as one of the most successful of the
company’s branches and the source of a new combination of prismatic glass with concrete –
Glasseisenbeton – that would be embraced by the Bauhaus and prominently featured in Bruno Taut’s 1914
exhibition pavilion at the Werkbund Ausstellung in Cologne. Neumann, 41-3.

333
Film Index (25 August 1906), 6. Quoted in Musser, The Emergence of Cinema, 468.

212

Figure 3.22: Sears & Roebuck Concrete Blocks Advertisement, ca. 1905.
As architectural historian Pamela Simpson describes, the use of concrete blocks
for private dwellings as well as commercial and industrial architecture increased rapidly
in the early 1900s. With rising brick and lumber prices, concrete became an increasingly
attractive alternative. Costs were low because Portland cement, reinforced concrete’s
main ingredient was increasingly cheap and widely available..
334
Cheap concrete blocks
would have helped Vitagraph offset the high cost of its prismatic glass (which Neumann
notes was on average ten times as expensive as plain plate glass and five times more

334
Pamela H. Simpson, “Quick, Cheap, and Easy: The Early History of Rockfaced Concrete Block
Building,” Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, Vol. 3 (1989), 108-118, 111. As we will see in the next
section, Edison’s Portland Cement Company played a significant role in these developments.

213

expensive than factory ribbed glass). No doubt, their fireproof qualities would also have
been attractive.
335

Interestingly, the concrete blocks gave the studio the false appearance of being
built from cut stone. As Simpson notes, natural pitched stone became the most common
style of concrete block ornamentation, and came standard with block making machines
sold by Sears and Roebuck beginning in 1906. Despite industry interest in the
possibilities offered by concrete construction, many architects, including Frank Lloyd
Wright, became outspoken critics of ornamental blocks because, as Simpson explains,
ornamentation violated emerging ideas about architectural purity and an unspoken rule
that “one material should not imitate another.”
336
However, for middleclass builders and
homeowners – and perhaps for Vitagraph – rock-face concrete was valuable precisely
because it successfully imitated real materials. By covering the façade of its studio in
expensive-looking “stone,” Vitagraph presented the public with an artificial image of
wealth and success. Indeed, as studios became larger, and film companies achieved and
cultivated greater publicity, film production spaces became symbolic representations of
the vitality of the businesses they housed.
337
It would thus be fitting that the buildings of
companies such as Vitagraph that made imitation and mass production the stuff of
modern culture should be wrapped in mass-produced material simulation.

335
Neumann, 35. The dearth of archival materials on Vitagraph makes it difficult to confirm if the studio
was indeed built from such concrete blocks, but photographic evidence supports the idea.

336
Simpson, 117.

337
Photographs of studios are often featured prominently in film catalogs, internal publications, and even
on company letterhead. These promotional images of the studio were the prelude to later images of studio
stars and stock companies.

214

While the details of how Vitagraph arrived at its studio design are scarce, studio
planning by the mid-1900s tended to be anything but haphazard. As the history of
Edison’s Bronx studio will show, studio construction was a highly coordinated affair that
at times involved multiple architects, engineers, and contractors, both design and re-
design phases, and negotiations with city building officials. The complexities of this
process help illustrate cinema’s place in the shifting architectural and regulatory context
that developed as nineteenth-century materials and designs gave way to the methods that
would define early modern architecture and film studios for decades to come.
“Daylight” Factories and Concrete Studios – Edison in the Bronx, 1905-9
By late 1904, Edison executives – like their counterparts at Vitagraph –
recognized the need for additional, better-equipped production spaces to compete with
output from Biograph’s new studio. Without electricity or space for electrical lights,
Edison’s rooftop studio in Manhattan suffered intermittent halts in production and
variable quality even during consistent periods of filmmaking. One Edison employee
later recalled, “every time we started to take a picture we would have to run out on the
roof next door and see if the sun would pass over a cloud.”
338
Edison’s solution to the
problem would be similar to Vitagraph’s—a concrete and glass studio equipped with
electrical lighting and built outside of central Manhattan to avoid high land prices. The
Edison Company purchased a plot of land in the Bedford Park area of the Bronx for
$15,000 in June 1905, and filed its first architectural plans with the Department of
Buildings in September. Four years, three architects, and numerous revisions later, the

338
Quoted in Musser, Before the Nickelodeon, 384.

215

studio was completed, with an additional extension, at a total cost of approximately
$48,000 (more than $850,000 today).
339

Edison signed agreements with contractors in late 1905, and the studio was
eventually built from reinforced concrete composed of Edison’s own brand of Portland
cement, which Edison had been developing since the late 1890s. While the final product
remained true to the spirit of the initial design, it was also marked by a series of building
permit violations, petitions, and amendments that led to long delays in construction and
important changes to the studio’s material and structural form. This long process reflects
the complicated state of urban construction that included new governmental regulations,
including New York’s Tenement House Act of 1901 and a general revision of the city
building code in 1906, the year before Edison built the Bronx studio.
340
This changing
architectural and legal landscape would have important affects on the studio’s form,
beginning with its architects.

339
Musser, Before the Nickelodeon, 384; 455. On the extension, see “Lybrand and Ross Bros. and
Montgomery to Edison,” 30 June 1909 (Edison Papers Project, Microfilm Edition, Reel 193).

340
Arthur F. Cosby, Code of Ordinances of the City of New York (New York: The Banks Law Publishing
Company, 1906). The 1906 Code followed earlier amendments to the 1882 law, including the 1889 Code
and the “Tenement House Act” of 1901, which notably required improved lighting, ventilation, and
plumbing conditions in public housing. On the legal context for concrete construction in the early twentieth
century, see Amy E. Slaton, Reinforced Concrete and the Modernization of American Building, 1900-1930,
especially Chapter 3.

216

Figure 3.23: Edison Bedford Park Studio, Bronx, New York (Kafka and Sons, architects), ca.
1907. Courtesy of the Edison National Historic Site.

Edison initially hired two New York-based firms to design and construct the
studio—Hugo Kafka and Sons, Architects and Arthur E. Rendle’s Paradigm Skylight and
Side Lighting Systems. Hugo Kafka, a Czech-born immigrant who studied at the
Polytechnikum in Zurich under architect and theorist Gottfried Semper, gained fame at
the 1873 Vienna International Exposition, where he won the Medal of Art and caught the
eye of Hermann Schwarzmann, lead architect for the 1876 Centennial Exposition in
Philadelphia.
341
Kafka immigrated to America to assist Schwarzmann on the 1876

341
Semper’s writings on art, architecture, and industry would soon inspire the development of the Bauhaus.
On Kafka see, Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC), Joseph Loth and Company Silk Ribbon Mill
(LP-1860), report prepared by Betsy Bradley (New York, 1993), 6-7, LPC, Louis A. and Laura Stirn House
(LP-2069), report prepared by Gale Harris (New York, 2001), 3, and Kafka’s obituary in American Institute
of Architects Journal 3 (1915), 305. On Schwarzmann’s trip to the Vienna Exposition, see John Maass, The
Glorious Enterprise: The Centennial Exhibition of 1876 and H.J. Schwarzmann, Architect-in-Chief
(Watkins Glen, N.Y.: American Life Foundation, 1973).

217

Exposition’s buildings, notably including the Horticultural Hall, one of the largest glass-
enclosed buildings in the world at the time. Rendle came with similar credentials,
including two medals for his own Horticultural Hall at the 1885 New Orleans Exposition
and important patents for the glazing techniques that would be used to enclose the
studio’s stage.
342

Figure 3.24: “Horticultural Hall” (Schwarzmann and Kafka, architects), lithograph by Thomas
Hunter. Thompson Westcott, Centennial portfolio: a souvenir of the international exhibition at
Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Thomas Hunter, 1876).

Figure 3.25: Horticultural Hall, New Orleans Exposition, 1885. (Arthur E. Rendle, architect).
Reprinted from Harper’s Weekly, January 1885.

While the influence of earlier “glass house” film studios – used first by Georges
Méliès in France (1897), Oskar Messter in Germany (1897), and R.W. Paul in Britain
(1898) – made experience with glass-and-iron construction desirable for film studio
design, in this case the two firms also brought another important expertise to the project:
familiarity with the rules and regulations that governed urban architecture.
343
After the

342
On Rendle, see “The New Orleans Exposition,” The New York Times 17 February 1884 and 5 March
1885. Rendle’s system of glazing is advertised in numerous trade journals as well as Rendle’s sales
catalogs beginning in the 1880s.

343
See Chapter 2.

218

1876 Exposition, Kafka established his firm in New York City, where he gained
experience in private, commercial, and industrial architecture. In 1903, Kafka’s sons –
Hugh, a Columbia University-trained architect, and Frederick, a civil engineer – joined
the firm to aid their ailing father. Although archival records suggest that Hugh Kafka, Jr.
handled the paperwork for the Edison studio, its initial design bears significant
similarities to the elder Kafka’s earlier work, most compellingly a factory he built on
New York’s upper west side in 1885.
344

The Joseph Loth & Co. Silk Ribbon Mill in Washington Heights, (designated a
New York City Landmark in 1993), suggests the kind of experience that would have been
valuable for a studio designer.
345
The mill was unusual, in part, simply for being designed
by an architect. In the late nineteenth century, engineers familiar with machines and
manufacturing methods typically designed mills according to standard codes developed
by insurance companies. In this case, however, Loth and Company, like Edison later,
needed an architect who could adapt standard mill architecture to the requirements of its
urban locale and the city building code.

344
Conflicting reports suggest that Kafka, Sr. may have retired from the firm sometime between 1903 and
1906 due to rheumatoid arthritis. See the Landmarks Preservation Commission reports, op. cit.

345
Information about the mill comes largely from: Landmarks Preservation Commission, Joseph Loth and
Company Silk Ribbon Mill (LP-1860), report prepared by Betsy Bradley (New York, 1993)

219

Figures 3.26-3.27: Joseph Loth & Co. Silk Ribbon Mill (Hugo Kafka, Architect), ca. 1892.
Landmarks Preservation Commission, Joseph Loth and Company Silk Ribbon Mill (LP-1860).

The three primary concerns that drove the mill’s design – meeting codes for
fireproof construction, providing adequate lighting, and maximizing unobstructed interior
dimensions. Twenty years later similar concerns, with markedly different results, would
also shape the designs for Edison’s studio. Kafka met these demands with an unusual “K”
shaped structure that anticipates the “I” or “H” shape of Edison’s studio. The mill’s “K”
plan consisted of a central factory floor and two long wings, all of which needed to be
narrow enough—less than thirty feet wide—to be built without the internal columns or
firewalls that would otherwise have been mandated by the city building code. These
unobstructed rooms allowed for effective natural lighting through the mill’s large glass

220

windows, while also facilitating both power transmission through long drive shafts and
electrical wiring for the plant’s artificial lights (still a relatively new feature for mills in
the mid-1880s that also anticipates the combination of artificial and electrical lighting
used in early twentieth-century film studios).
Aside from its unique shape, the Loth and Company mill was typical of the late
nineteenth-century industrial architecture that influenced the design of structures such as
Edison’s studio. The mill followed the New York City building code practice of
supporting brick walls with wooden beams and cast iron columns. Its large glass
windows illustrate an early version of the large column spans that architects used to
support greater internal illumination in the late nineteenth century. Kafka and Sons
repeated these strategies in the initial proposals for Edison’s studio.
Kafka submitted the initial plans for the “photographic studio” (as it was
designated in the building application) to the Department of Buildings on September 15,
1905. The original design consisted of a single “I” shaped structure composed of two
three-story wings joined by a central atrium, and called for a concrete and stone base and
a foundation composed of “reinforced Portland Cement concrete.”
346
The 64x23 foot
wing for offices, storage, and laboratory facilities would be built from stone-covered
brick with Georgia pine girders, columns, and floors, all supported by internal wooden
posts and floor beams. The 32x30 foot atrium and 62x43 foot production studio wing
would be enclosed in galvanized iron and glass with steel girders, columns, and peaked

346
Plan 1057, September 15, 1905. Bureau of Buildings for the Borough of the Bronx, New York (hereafter
BBBB).

221

roof trusses, with the exception of the rear section of the studio, which would also be
composed of brick, wood, and stone.

Figure 3.28: Surface Sketch, Bedford Park Studio, September 21, 1905. Bronx Department of
Buildings

The plans for the studio remained consistent with the basic design principles
found in the earlier Loth and Company Mill. The studio’s “I” shape, in particular,
recalled the strategy used in the factory to maximize unobstructed internal space by
limiting room widths (here to less than twenty-five feet in accordance with the amended
building code that would be adopted in 1906). Kafka restricted the office and laboratory
wing to twenty-three feet to allow for open interior working space. He seems to have
hoped that enclosing the rear section of the studio wing in brick would convince the
building examiner that it would be strong enough to support the glass-and-iron enclosure
without internal columns or beams that would have disrupted movement and vision and
created unwelcome shadows. By separating the two wings with an atrium, Kafka left the
studio with unimpeded access to the northern sun, while also helping protect the non-
studio area from the threat of fire (a common problem in early studios). As these design
decisions suggest, architects’ choices had important and tangible affects on filmmakers’
production practices and the visual forms of their films. An architect’s ability to create a

222

versatile working space allowing for multiple large sets lit by both bright sunlight and, by
the mid-1900s, electrical lighting, while also satisfying new city building restrictions,
could mean the difference between success and failure for early film companies. In this
case, Kafka would have to go to great lengths to appease the city building examiner and
give the Edison Company the studio it needed to maintain its position in the industry as
its principal American competitors, Biograph and American Vitagraph, began to out-
produce Edison in their own new studios.
The Department of Buildings rejected Kafka’s initial design on September 29,
two weeks after it was filed, leading to a series of petitions, amendments, and important
changes to the studio’s material structure. The studio suffered in part from a problem of
classification in the city building code. In the absence of a more accurate category, Kafka
submitted a permit application for “brick” buildings that were subject to laws governing
“warehouses,” a catchall term for everything from factories, mills, and power houses to
markets, railroad buildings, and observatories, none of which very well described the
proposed studio (which, in the eyes of the law, was just another, if odd, industrial space
that had yet to acquire any recognized rules or design standards).
The main problem with Kafka’s proposed studio from the perspective of the
building code was indeed the glass-and-iron enclosure on the studio wing. The inspector
considered the studio’s walls unlawful for two reasons: first, glass was not recognized as
a “hard, incombustible material,” and second, each wall was required to be at least twelve
inches thick.
347
In the absence of the required wall thickness, Kafka was required to
prove that the building’s girders, beams, and trusses would be of sufficient strength to

347
See Cosby, Code of Ordinances of the City of New York, Part VI, Sections 27 and 32.

223

support the upper walls and roof. The examiner rejected this claim straightaway,
however, noting that the building’s supports, both for the production studio area and the
brick-and-wood office wing, would be too weak.
Two months after the application was rejected, Kafka submitted an amendment
calling for augmentation of the wood girders and beams and an increase in the pitch of
the glass-and-iron roof that would reduce the load on its iron supports.
348
The amendment
also included a petition requesting a modification of the city building code to allow for “a
structural steel frame-work covered with sheet metal work and glass” that Kafka claimed
would be “exceptionally rigid” and use no combustible material. The petition cited
“practical difficulties” owing to the building’s proposed use for “special photographic
purposes,” underscoring the novelty of studio architecture vis-à-vis the city’s building
standards, which were rapidly becoming outdated.
349

Although the Department of Buildings accepted the new glass-and-steel
framework, the examiner again rejected Kafka’s enlarged wooden beams, and two weeks
later Kafka relented, replacing all of the structure’s brick walls and wood components
with reinforced concrete made from Edison’s own patented form of Portland Cement.
350

The new amendments were finally approved on December 27, and in mid-January 1906
Kafka submitted the initial bills to the Edison Company urging prompt approval so as to
initiate the process of obtaining steel. After several minor delays, contractors completed
the studio in late 1906.

348
“Amendment to Application No. 1057,” November 28, 1905. BBBB.

349
Petition, November 28, 1905. BBBB.

350
“Amendment to Application No. 1057,” December 18, 1905. BBBB.

224

Figure 3.29: Interior, Edison Bedford Park Studio, Bronx, New York. Courtesy of the Edison
National Historic Site. Like many contemporary studios, Edison’s was large enough to
accommodate multiple simultaneous shoots and/or scene changes.

Concrete Studios and Modern Architecture
In late 1905, Kafka and the Department of Buildings had transformed Edison’s
proposed studio from the iron, brick, and wood that defined nineteenth-century factories
into the reinforced concrete and steel that were revolutionizing early twentieth-century
architecture. As architectural historian Reyner Banham has shown, at this very moment
architects began to replace wood and brick with reinforced concrete frames, creating
what Banham terms “Daylight Factories,” so-named for their increasingly large windows
that provided more natural interior lighting.
351
The implementation of reinforced concrete
frames contributed to a revolution in materials and designs that transformed industrial
(and, with studio’s such as Edison’s, film studio) architecture.
352

351
Reyner Banham, A Concrete Atlantis: U.S. Industrial Building and European Modern Architecture,
1900-1925 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1986), 43.

352
Banham, A Concrete Atlantis, 56.

225

Figure 3.30 (left): United Shoe Manufacturing Company (Ernest L. Ransome, architect, 1905),
Beverly, MA. As Reyner Banham demonstrates, Ransome’s re-enforced concrete designs helped
revolutionize American industrial architecture and soon influenced European modernists, who
were introduced to these “Daylight Factories” first by investors and, later, through photographs
taken by architects such as Erich Mendelsohn during visits to America and in illustrated articles
and books by Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier.

Figure 3.31 (right): Fagus-Werk (Eduard Werner, Walter Gropius, and Adolf Meyer, architects,
1911), Alfeld, Germany. Banham argues that the Fagus Company’s owners introduced Gropius to
American industrial architecture after visiting the United Shoe Factory, leading to Gropius’s
design for the factory’s open glass facades that mimicked Ransome’s “daylight factories.”

As Banham explains, by the mid-1910s photographs of American factory
architecture were making a profound impression on European architects such as Walter
Gropius, Le Corbusier, and Antonio Saint’Elia, who were inspired by the grace of these
structures’ spare functional forms.
353
While the resulting European designs from the
1920s (and the analogous film sets created by architects working in the film industry)
have become the most commonly cited origins of the relationship between architecture
and cinema, the Edison studio predates such associations by almost two decades. The
Bronx studio and those that followed comprise an earlier history of cinema’s relationship
to architecture; a material history founded on infrastructural changes to the modern built
environment that Edison helped shape, alongside the cinema business, through his efforts
to develop a new form of Portland Cement concrete.

353
While the American factories’ concrete frames did not represent a revelation in structural engineering,
Banham argues that they offered powerful symbolic associations between modern ideals of rational design
and a romanticized vision of American industrial modernity. Banham, 9-21.

226

The first decade of the twentieth century witnessed a virtual explosion in
reinforced concrete construction, in part thanks to the large-scale expansion of Portland
cement production at the end of the nineteenth century.
354
Edison began working with
Portland cement in the late 1890s and created the Edison Portland Cement Company in
1899.
355
By 1901, he had invented a new form of cement roasting kiln and had plans for a
concrete structure—the “Edison Poured Concrete House”—that he claimed would
revolutionize low-income housing in cities such as New York.

Figure 3.32: Edison with a model of the “Concrete House,” ca. 1910. Smithsonian Institute.

As was so often the case with Edison’s highly publicized inventions, the press
seized on the concrete house, reporting on it incessantly in the early 1900s, even before
one was ever built. In January 1908, one article went so far as to hail the yet-to-be-
completed invention as one of the new “seven wonders of the world” (which notably also
included the skyscraper and Edison’s so-called “camera phonograph”).
356
In an article

354
Ibid., 104-5. Banham argues that concrete became “the exciting material at the turn of the century, and
its use, as measured by the quantity of cement consumed, is reckoned to have increased some fifteen-
hundred fold in the United States between 1880 and 1910!”

355
Paul Israel, Edison: a life of invention (New York: John Wiley, 1998), 403.

356
“Seven Wonders of Today’s World Eclipse Old ‘Seven Wonders,’” The St. Paul Daily News, 27 January
1908. Edison Papers Project, Microfilm Edition, Reel 221.

227

published the following year, Edison himself ranked the concrete house (followed by
motion pictures) as “the most wonderful advance in science and invention that the world
has ever known, or hoped for.”
357

Figure 3.33: “Seven Wonders of Today’s World Eclipse Old ‘Seven Wonders,’” St. Paul Daily
News, 27 January 1909. The seven wonders include “New York’s 48-story office building” (the
Metropolitan Life Insurance Tower, the tallest building in the world for four years beginning in
1909, when it was raised from its initial 11 story frame to 48 stories), the Lusitania, European
“war airships,” Marconi’s wireless telegraph, the electric locomotive, the “camera phonograph,”
and “Edison’s $1,000 concrete house.”

Figure 3.34: “Edison’s System of Concrete Houses,” Scientific American, 16 November 1907,
356. Edison Papers Project, Microfilm Edition, Reel 221.

Edison hoped to reform New York City’s rapidly transforming urban environment
(which he referred to as the “epitome of the horror of the age”) through the mass-
production of a concrete utopia built with his mass-produced, low-cost concrete
dwellings.
358
In the end, the plan scarcely came to fruition, and only a few concrete

357
Thomas A. Edison, “Strides in Concrete, Pictures and Fuel,” Hopkinsville New Era, 3 July 1909,
Science Progress. Edison Papers Project, Microfilm Edition, Reel 221.

228

houses were ever built. Instead, Edison’s Portland cement and rotary kiln (which
competing cement companies used into the 1920s) supported developments in reinforced
concrete construction that contributed to another set of utopian visions in 1920s European
modernism and concrete film studios worldwide.
359

Figures 3.35-3.36: “The Edison Aggregate,” March 1910, cover and page 6.

By 1910, the Portland Cement Company’s catalog, the Edison Aggregate, boasted
dozens of reinforced concrete structures built using Edison Portland Cement. The
“Daylight factories” featured in the catalog, which included Edison’s Phonograph Works
in West Orange, were but a step removed from those reproduced later by Gropius and Le
Corbusier. And they were even more closely linked to early cinema. Only a few months
after the completion of the Bronx studio in October 1907, Edison hired one of his chief

358
“Edison, the Peaceful” The Sun, May 14, 1905. Edison Papers Project, Microfilm Edition, Reel 221.

359
Neil Baldwin, Edison, Inventing the Century (New York: Hyperion, 1995), 279.

229

allies in the cement business—architect Horace Moyer, a concrete specialist—to design a
reinforced concrete extension that he added in 1909.
Each of these projects contributed to a new architectural landscape that helped lay
the groundwork for future developments in industrial, modern, and studio construction.
While Edison’s role in the development of Portland cement and reinforced concrete
should not be exaggerated, the link between his cement and cinema businesses
underscores the tangible associations between early cinema and modern architectural
change that were forged from the beginning of the century. It should thus be no surprise
that by the 1920s cinema and architecture would be widely recognized as modern
brethren. When architects such as Robert Mallet-Stevens and filmmakers including René
Clair and Sergei Eisenstein proclaimed a fundamental link between cinema and
architecture, they were only stating a point that had been in the making for nearly twenty
years in factories and studios from Paris, London, and Berlin to New York, Chicago,
Philadelphia, and, eventually, Hollywood.
Conclusion – Utopian Visions and Functional Designs

Figure 3.37: Edison Bedford Park Studio, Bronx, New York, after 1909. Courtesy of the Edison
National Historic Site. Horace Moyer’s reinforced concrete extension is just visible in the lower
right background.

230

The same year that Horace Moyer put the finishing touches on Edison’s Bedford
Park studio, the first permanent film studio was built in Los Angeles. Within a decade
Hollywood and its concrete studios would house a filmmaking utopia, or “dream factory
system,” that used functional techniques of modern manufacturing to create cinematic
“dream” worlds. The latent tension between the “dream” and the “factory,” the fantastic
and the functional in Hollywood’s concrete, glass, and “dark” studios mirrored the
blending of pragmatism, utopianism, and a romantic vision of American industrial
modernity in modern architecture. Indeed, when Walter Gropius instructed architects
participating in a 1919 competition to “go into buildings, endow them with fairy tales …
and build in fantasy without regard for technical difficulty,” he could just have well been
describing the task of (Hollywood) studio filmmakers—or film studio architects.
360

Early filmmakers and the first film studios played a small, if significant role in
driving the “age of movement” that produced images and ideas for an artificial urban
environment that, not coincidentally, would later seem perfectly designed for cinematic
representation. From the filmmakers who endowed the modern built environment with
“fairytales” by documenting, animating, and enhancing Manhattan’s “creative
destruction,” to the studio architects who adopted the newest materials and designs of
urban reconstruction to “build in fantasy,” cinema was part and parcel of a new
twentieth-century built environment.

360
Walter Gropius, pamphlet for the “Exhibition of Unknown Architects,” 1919. Quoted in Kenneth
Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical Introduction (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980), 123.

231

CHAPTER FOUR

Building a Cité du Cinéma in Paris:
Film Studios as Urban Industrial Centers
361

Figure 4.1: “Vue de la Cité Elgé,” Gaumont Catalogue, January 1908, p. 159. Collection Musée
Gaumont. Sales catalogues and other corporate publications increasingly advertised studio
infrastructure in the early 1900s. Gaumont’s publications celebrated the company’s growth in
prints that represented corporate evolution as the literal and figurative expansion (across the
picture plane) of physical infrastructure.

The expansion of French film studios in the first decade of the twentieth century
paralleled the growth seen in New York at Edison, Biograph, and especially Vitagraph,
whose Brooklyn compound became a model for American studio development in the

361
This chapter takes its title from a 1922 description of Gaumont’s Cité Elgé by French film theorist Louis
Delluc as well as contemporary and more recent descriptions of both Gaumont and Pathé’s respective
studio centers. It also makes intentional reference to another Cité du Cinéma that is currently under
construction on Paris’s northern periphery in Saint-Denis. Scheduled to open in 2012 at a cost of 150
million euros, Luc Besson and EuropaCorp’s Cité – France’s answer to Italy’s Cinecittà and Britain’s
Pinewood Studios – will encompass more than six acres, including business offices, the École National
Supérieure Louis Lumière film school, and 10,000 square meters of shooting stages. Housed largely in a
former Électricité de France factory, the studio represents a striking modern version of France’s first cités
du cinéma. As this chapter shows, the new Cité will take its place in a long tradition of film industry links
to industrial architecture and Paris’s electrical infrastructure. For a recent invocation of the “Cité du
Cinéma” moniker for Pathé, see François Sauteron, Une si jolie usine : Kodak-Pathé Vincennes (Paris:
L’Harmattan, 2008).

232

early 1910s. In Paris, a different set of architectural, technological, and regulatory
frameworks shaped similar degrees of studio growth. Within and according to the city’s
industrialization, its developing electrical and urban transport networks, and the
increasingly strict enforcement of laws governing the film industry, France’s major pre-
World War I film companies, Gaumont and Pathé Frères, erected mammoth studios on
Paris’s periphery with facilities for all aspects of their booming businesses. This chapter
examines the processes and products of French cinema’s industrialization, focusing on
the buildings that supported industry expansion, the new technologies they produced, and
the films and filmmaking practices they shaped. In doing so, it explains: 1) how film
studios became more than simply the large spaces for filmmaking we think of today and
2) how, in their large-scale development, studios shaped and were shaped by broader
changes to the city of Paris. If, as Giuliana Bruno has argued, the first filmmakers made
cinema “an art form of the street, an agent in the building of city views,” they did so not
only by filming in the streets, but also by rebuilding the city on studio sets.
362
While film
historians have closely examined cinema’s relationship to the urban environment in
actualities, city symphonies, and location shooting, this chapter continues the last
chapter’s focus on other significant ways that early filmmakers interacted with and
physically affected urban space through both films and studios.
363

362
Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (New York: Verso, 2002),
27. “The landscape of the city,” Bruno argues, “ends up interacting closely with filmic representations, and
to this extent, the streetscape is as much a filmic ‘construction’ as it is an architectural one.”

363
See, for instance, the essays in Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice, eds. Cinema and the City: Film and
Urban Societies in a Global Context (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), Dietrich Neumann, ed. Film Architecture:
Set Designs from Metropolis to Blade Runner (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1996), François Penz and Maureen
Thomas, eds. Cinema and Architecture: Méliès, Mallet-Stevens, Multimedia (London: BFI, 1997), and
Linda Krauss and Patrice Petro, eds. Global Cities: Cinema, Architecture, and Urbanism in a Digital Age

233

From their new studio headquarters, Gaumont and Pathé’s filmmakers continued
in the tradition of the Lumière operators and other early filmmakers who found ready
film subjects in the urban environs that housed cinema’s early development, production,
and exhibition. Unlike their predecessors, however, filmmakers such as Alice Guy and
Louis Feuillade for Gaumont and Ferdinand Zecca for Pathé followed Méliès’s model,
rejecting the contingencies of modern urban life in favor of safe staged interiors. The first
studios had offered a retreat from gawking crowds and meddling authorities, creating a
new version of city filmmaking – just off the trottoir – that existed alongside street
actualities in the early 1900s. As film companies grew, both physically and financially,
and strove to broaden their markets by making “art” films targeted at the bourgeoisie,
they continued to use subjects culled from beyond the studio gates. Series such as
Gaumont’s “La vie telle qu’elle est” (“Life as it is”) sought, paradoxically, to take up
urban social problems through studio-constructed “realism.” This chapter argues that
even while the trend towards greater film realism made possible in this period by larger
and better equipped studios often focused on cinema’s urban environment and its
quotidian dramas, surprisingly it did not involve an extensive return to real city locations.
More often, city scenes remained small pieces of studio-produced fictions that created
greater film realism, paradoxically, by relying on the artificial framing of the elaborate
set designs and lighting schemes created in France’s modernizing studios.
Studio modernization involved an array of operations and facilities that grew up
around the studios’ often-remarked-upon center points, the production stages. At large

(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), as well as the essays in the special issue “Cityscapes
I,” Clark Arnwine and Jesse Lerner, eds. Wide Angle 19.4 (1997).

234

companies these included: powerhouses; factory floors for manufacturing both film
apparatuses and non-film machines; facilities for processing and storing film stock;
artists’ ateliers that churned out painted backdrops, set pieces, and broadsheet poster art;
printing workshops for journals and advertising; and storehouses that stocked huge
collections of sets, costumes, and props. The spatial proximity of these diverse activities
not only contributed to efficient production practices, but also to the emergence of new
machines and techniques for pre- and post-production work in the studio factories that set
the stage for the Hollywood “studio system.”
Indeed, in the decade before Hollywood’s film companies made similarly gigantic
studios the central sites for what observers later described, in a lasting metaphoric turn, as
the “dream factory system,” the world’s largest film companies built literal factories. As
the studios became large centers of film production and manufacturing – looking and
operating like industrial complexes – film companies also adopted the policies and
practices – including economies of scale and vertical integration – that guided other
growing French industries. As historian Georges Sadoul has argued, this period saw
cinema break free from its artisanal roots to become a huge industry.
364
But while the
economic strategies and mass production models put in place did, as Sadoul describes,
underpin the industry’s expansion and lead to new production practices and film
technologies, this chapter argues that physical infrastructure played an equally
fundamental role. The studios built during this period not only represented the physical

364
“… en cinq ans [1903-1908], le cinéma, d'artisanat, devient une grande industrie “ Georges Sadoul,
Histoire générale du cinéma, II: Les Pionniers du cinéma, 1897-1909 (Paris: Denoël, 1948), 221. Sadoul
discusses this transition in Chapters 14 and 16, pp. 221-36, 253-64.

235

embodiment of the industry’s growth; they also helped determine what shape cinema
would take during its capitalist expansion.
Studios such as Gaumont’s Cité Elgé and Pathé’s facilities in Vincennes and
Joinville, on Paris’s southeastern periphery, became emblematic sites of the tangible links
between cinematic, architectural, and technological development that marked silent
cinema. As was the case with the studios built in New York, the construction of Parisian
studios brought the new industry into contact and, at times, into conflict with the city’s
own ongoing modernization. In Paris, urban development importantly included new
industrial architecture in the suburbs and the implementation of electrical and urban
transport systems that continued well into the 1910s.
365
The processes that shaped Paris’s
changing infrastructure helped determine the facilities and practices that developed at its
new film studios, including the production of non-cinematic devices such as electrical
transformers with applications beyond the film industry.

365
In municipalities along Paris’s southeastern edge, such as Montreuil, the site of Méliès’s studios and one
of Pathé’s, and Vincennes, home of Pathé’s studio headquarters, industrialization radically changed the
landscape from the 1850s to World War I. See Centre de documentation d’histoire des techniques,
Evolution de la géographie industrielle de Paris et sa proche banlieue au XIXe siècle (Paris: Conservatoire
National des Arts et Métiers, 1976). See also Tyler Stovall, The Rise of the Paris Red Belt (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1990), Chapter 1, 9-40.

236

Figure 4.2: “Paris Monumental et Métropolitain,” ca. 1900. I have marked the approximate
locations of the Gaumont (G), Méliès (M), and Pathé (P) studios. Pathé’s studios and factory in
Joinville lie just outside the map’s east-southeastern edge.

Infrastructural change also helped determine how the new studios would develop
within Paris’s already dense urban and rapidly growing suburban geography.
366
For
Pathé, the patterns of industrialization in Paris’s southeastern banlieue and new laws
regulating celluloid storage led to dispersed development, with studios and factories
spread from Paris’s southeastern suburbs into the outskirts of the twentieth
arrondissement. Gaumont, by contrast, consolidated its facilities at its Cité Elgé on a
large site in northeastern Paris.
367
This “city within the city,” as French film theorist
Louis Delluc would later describe it, lay outside of the city’s still-sparse power networks,
and thus required its own centralized facilities for electrical production.

366
The large Parisian studios discussed in this chapter show that film studio development was by no means
restricted to wide open spaces such as those around Los Angeles and in the south of France. As we will see
in the next chapter, the film industry’s shift to southern California and the creation of large studios there
was aided but not determined by LA’s relatively undeveloped geography.

367
The Cité Elgé was named after the pronunciation of Léon Gaumont’s initials.

237

Gaumont’s need for power helped determine its centralized model of development
as workshops and production plants grew up in close proximity to electrical substations.
It also gave rise to the company’s production of electrical equipment to support both the
studio itself and the film industry’s more general need for new technologies that would be
compatible with the broader processes of industrial modernization.
368
Although these
activities have been overshadowed by the production stages that more readily fit the
metaphoric image of Hollywood’s “dream factory,” early cinema’s real factories were no
less important to the industry’s development and success. Indeed, the economic triumphs
of the film industry in the early 1900s no doubt made cinema’s pre-war expansion
possible, but it was the studio infrastructure put in place in this period that became the
key element in the implementation of the techniques, machines, and practices that
propelled the industry into (and through) the First World War.
Pathé: Industry, Infrastructure, and Dispersed Film Production Southeast of Paris
France’s largest pre-war film company, Pathé, got its start in early 1896 when
Charles Pathé began shooting films in the courtyard of a café near his home in
Vincennes, a small suburb on Paris’s southeastern periphery. Equipped with a camera
developed by inventor Henri Joly, Pathé orchestrated his productions on a six-by-eight
meter uncovered stage with minimal sets and props.
369
In 1902, Pathé set designer Henri

368
Louis Delluc, “L’Envers du cinéma: Le Studio,” Magasin Pittoresque, 109. While Gaumont
consolidated its operations, Pathé and numerous smaller film enterprises spread their facilities throughout
and just outside the French capital at sites including Belleville, Vincennes, Joinville, Montreuil, Gentilly,
Neuilly, Epinay, and Boulogne-sur-Seine.

369
Laurent Mannoni, “Les Studios Pathé de la Région Parisienne (1896-1914),” in Michel Marie and
Laurent Le Forestier, eds. La Firme Pathé Frères, 1896-1914 (Paris: AFRHC, 2004), 59-106, 60. For
details of Pathé’s earlier involvement in the phonograph business and his early efforts to develop film

238

Ménessier re-imagined the early days of Pathé Frères in a remarkable image of this first
“studio.”

Figure 4.3: Henri Ménessier, Une prises de vue en plein air, Vincennes, 1902, oil on cardboard,
46 x 60cm, Paris: Bibliothèque du film.

Ménessier offers a rare behind-the-scenes glimpse of an early film shoot: four
actors in period costume perform in front of a wooden shed, goaded on by a gesturing
director flanked by his cloaked camera operator. Alongside the shoot, three costumed
actors wait for the next scene while an assistant stacks props and set pieces against the
shed. Ménessier frames the scene in a striking image of the suburban context that would
condition Pathé’s development over the next decade. Beyond the small garden and open
fields that immediately surround the stage, a nearby factory and distant smokestacks
foretell Pathé’s (and French cinema’s) not-so-distant future. Read from foreground to
background, the image offers a brief history of early filmmaking, from rural production

apparatuses with Henri Joly, see Laurent Mannoni, Le Grand Art de la lumière et de l’ombre (Paris:
Nathan, 1994).

239

under cloudy skies to urban industrial cinema in studio factories. It also illustrates the
broader context of suburban industrial development in which French cinema emerged.
370

The industrialization of Paris and its suburbs would be critical to Pathé’s
development from this small exterior set to one of the most powerful film companies in
the world. Using large capital investments from industrialists who hoped to either shift
their investments from older industries (such as textiles manufacturing) or build on
concurrent profits in new industries (such as electricity), Pathé and its competitors made
film studios and factories part of this broad process.
371
Industrialization’s affect on early
cinema did not stop, however, with this financial backing. For Pathé, in particular, the
specific patterns of industrial development that shaped Paris’s southeastern suburbs
would help condition the company’s infrastructural foundation.
Early Filmmaking and Incorporation at Pathé
In 1897, Charles and Émile Pathé sold their cinema and phonograph business to
the Compagnie Général des Phonographes, Cinématographes, et Appareils de Précision
[hereafter, Compagnie]. Led by a board of directors with diverse industrial interests, the
Compagnie sought to engage the Pathés in order to exploit the growing phonograph
industry and take advantage of Pathé’s film camera patent. Émile took charge of the

370
For Parisians in the late nineteenth century, the suburbs – or banlieue – carried special symbolic value as
a new liminal space between town and country that Victor Hugo described as “made up of two different
natures” and especially made for “reverie” and “the dreamer.” As art historian T.J. Clark describes,
modernist painters such as Georges Seurat and Vincent van Gogh helped shape the idea and experience of
social division and anomie that came with this emerging modern space. The studio-produced films
discussed at the end of this chapter may have played a similar role in creating an idea of modern life in its
urban and suburban locales. See T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his
Followers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 43. Hugo quote reprinted in Clark, 23.

371
Georges Sadoul notes in passing, “nous retrouvons ici les liens financiers qui unissent souvent le cinéma
et l’électricité, chez Eclipse, comme chez Gaumont, comme chez Edison, comme à la Biograph” (330).
Surprisingly, Sadoul ignores the broader significance of these links between the two young industries.

240

phonograph business, while Charles directed the initially much smaller film unit.
372
As
film historian and Pathé archivist Stéphanie Salmon has shown, although the Pathés
played a significant role in directing the Compagnie, its subsequent development and rise
to industry dominance should be attributed in no small part to the industrial experience of
their directors.
373

The Compagnie’s two principal figures – Jean Neyret and Claude Agricole-
Grivolas – are emblematic of the role that industry and finance capital played in shaping
early French film companies. Neyret, a former textile investor with links to the bank
Crédit Lyonnais, had recently shifted his interests to the growing steel and coal
industries, where he was president of Aciéres et Forges de Firminy and vice president of
Houillères de Saint-Etienne. Grivolas had been involved in companies manufacturing
machines for the electricity industry since 1875, including Les Etablissements Grivolas et
Sage et Grillet, which built apparatuses for electrical stations, and the Compagnie
française d’appareillage électrique.
374
Neyret and Grivolas brought the Pathés financial
backing as well as important industrial resources. As Richard Abel has described,
Grivolas had also recently acquired a manufacturing company directed by Victor
Continsouza and Henri René Bünzli. Their Manufacture Française d’Appareils de

372
According to Jean Mitry, the Compagnie approached the Pathés only after failing to attract the attention
of Méliès. Mitry, 96.

373
Stéphanie Salmon, “Les Débuts d’une industrialization Pathé (1898-1903).” Archives (Institut Vigo –
Cinémathèque de Toulouse) 93, June 2003, 1-12.

374
On Neyret, see Mitry, 95. On Grivolas, see Deslandes and Richard, 299-301.

241

Précision maintained a factory in the western Parisian suburb Chatou that would soon
supply Pathé’s film cameras.
375

With these resources, the Compagnie would grow from a small family business to
a multi-national enterprise. As Salmon and film historian Laurent Le Forestier have
separately described, it did so according to the Board’s careful attention to slow,
deliberate infrastructural development, tempered only by Charles Pathé’s own eager
demands for expansion.
376
Operating with one million francs of capital, the company
built a single factory in Chatou for producing phonographs in 1898, adding another only
in 1899 when capital reached two million francs.
377
On the strength of the phonograph
profits, in 1899 the company also bought the Vincennes café housing Charles’s film
production. Here, they continued to make films en plein air and turned out prints,
according to Pathé, at a rate of forty kilometers per day through 1901.
378
It would be
three years before the cautious Board would devote its resources to film infrastructure.

375
Richard Abel, “In the Belly of the Beast: The Early Years of Pathé-Frères.” Film History, Vol. 5, No. 4,
Institutional Histories (December 1993), 363-385, 364. Abel notes that Pathé would soon be the factory’s
largest customer. It is also important to underscore that the factory did not originate with or exclusively
produce film machines. The emergence of precision machining factories was an important component of
industrialization that contributed to the rise of cinema. See also Henri Bousquet, “L’âge d’or : De «
L’Arrivée d’un train » à « L’Histoire d’un crime »” in Jacques Kermabon, ed. Pathé, premier empire du
cinéma (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1994), 47-73, 48.

376
See Laurent Le Forestier, Aux sources de l’industrie du cinéma: le modèle Pathé, 1905-1908 (Paris:
L’Harmattan, 2006).

377
Charles Pathé, De Pathé frères à Pathé cinéma (Lyon: SERDOC, 1970 [1939]), 51 and Deslandes and
Richard, 303-4. Pathé dates the phonograph facilities in Chatou to 1899, but the company’s Conseils
d’Administration show that by October 1898, Grivolas was already requesting capital to enlarge the
factories to support growing consumer demand. See Compagnie Général des Phonographes,
Cinématographes, et Appareils de Précision, Conseil d’Administration [hereafter CA], October 11, 1898,
14-15.

378
Pathé, De Pathé frères à Pathé cinéma, 58. See also Mannoni, “Les Studios Pathé de la Région
Parisienne (1896-1914), 60.

242

Finally, in 1902, recognizing the rapid expansion of the cinema market and
bolstered by the booming phonograph business, Neyret, Grivolas, and new board member
Albert Ivatts approved a series of projects to expand Pathé’s cinema production units.
379

Like Gaumont later, Pathé began its infrastructural development by focusing on a central
site. Using family-owned property, the Pathés began to build a cité du cinéma in
Vincennes.
First Pathé Studio, 43, rue du Bois, Vincennes
During late summer and early fall of 1902, Charles Pathé and Albert Ivatts
oversaw the construction of a glass-and-iron-roofed “hangar” near the company’s
courtyard production stage. Perhaps due to its initially cautious and frugal approach to
infrastructural development, as well as the small scale of this initial studio,
380
the
Compagnie did not hire an industrial architect for the project. Instead, the directors
elected to engage a series of Vincennes-based professionals to build the new studio,
located at 43, rue du Bois. These local artisans included a contractor, Castella, and two
builders, Genteix and Dignaud.
381
The simple structure nonetheless offered Pathé’s
director, Ferdinand Zecca, many of the same advantages already seen in Méliès and R.W.
Paul’s glass-enclosed studios. In this new glass house, Zecca produced films that helped
make techniques such as matte inserts and dissolving transitions (seen already in his

379
From late May 1902, Charles Pathé launched repeated requests to the Compagnie board for more
resources to support the growing film industry, and the board responded with active investigation and
support for expanding its film facilities. See the CA reports for May 26, July 7, and August 25, 1902.

380
The exact size is unclear, but as Mannoni explains, it quickly turned out to be much too small to respond
to the rising growth of production. See Mannoni, 63. “Le premier théâtre de poses édifié par Pathé en 1902
s’avère beaucoup trop petit pour repondre à la montée croissante de la production.”

381
Salmon, 8.

243

Histoire d’un crime (1901) and numerous earlier studio films by Méliès) common
industry practices.
382
The studio’s increased film output also contributed to the industry’s
growth. At the Compagnie, cinema profits rose by 32 percent from 1902 to 1903, slowly
approaching the formerly dominant phonograph figures.
383

But despite this success, Pathé and Zecca quickly found the studio lacking, first in
light quality, then in size. While most historians have dated the introduction of electrical
lighting in French studios to 1905 or later, the minutes from the Compagnie’s Board of
Directors meetings suggest that Pathé outfitted its first studio with electrical lights
already in 1902, after deeming its natural lighting insufficient.
384
In November, Pathé
sent word to the Board that the studio’s cost had risen by 14,000 francs in order to
augment the power available for stage lighting. His report noted: “the current lighting,
which is sufficient for small scenes with few actors is not sufficient for large scenes with
many actors on stage.”
385
To complement the studio’s natural lighting, Pathé added
enough power for ten arc lamps that were used with reflectors to re-direct light towards
the stage in order to create softer, more diffuse illumination. The results, he reported, put

382
See Barry Salt, Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis (London: Starwood, 1983), 52.

383
Salmon, 2.

384
The CA minutes even contradict Charles Pathé’s recollection of the first studio, which, he explains was:
“sans autre installation électrique que celle qu’on trouve dans tous les immeubles.” It may be that the
additional expenses cited in the CA reports refer to outfitting the building for electricity beyond the state
when Pathé purchased the building, but Pathé makes no further reference to the studio in his memoirs. See
Pathé, 59. Mannoni, closely following Pathé’s account of the studio, ignores the possibility of electrical
lighting there, while Salt cites 1905 as the earliest date for artificial lighting at Pathé. See Mannoni, “Les
Studios Pathé,” 64 and Salt, 40.

385
CA, November 21, 1902. “l'éclairage actuel suffisant pour les petite scène avec peu de personnage, est
pas suffisant pour les grandes scènes avec beaucoups de personnages sur la scène.”

244

the company “in an exceptional position, allowing us to rapidly produce new cinema
projects.”
386

Soon, however, it became clear that the studio still lacked sufficient facilities to
support the industry’s growing demand for films. Although Pathé continued to use the
former café on the rue du Polygone as a workshop for processing film and producing
machines, sets, and props, by December he called for a new atelier devoted to set design.
After visiting the existing workshop, the Board authorized up to 5,000 francs to build a
glass-enclosed hangar on a rented property next to the studio. When negotiations with the
neighboring owner fell through, the Board elected to follow a new proposal from Pathé,
who suggested adding a glass roof to the rue du Polygone building at a cost of 20,000
francs.
387

Figure 4.4: “View of our Workshops in Vincennes,” Pathé Frères sales catalogue, May 1903.
Edison Papers – Motion Picture Catalogs. This engraving provides another example of film
companies’ efforts to use infrastructure to advertise corporate success. The same image reappears
in an August 1903 catalogue with a new caption, “View of our Factory at Vincennes,” that
suggests the continued fluidity of language for describing film production facilities in this period.

386
Ibid. “cette nouvelle escalation nous mettre dans une frontière exceptionnelle nous permettant de
produire rapidement de nouveaux projet cinématographiques.” That Pathé should be using electrical
lighting at this date is not surprising – as Barry Salt has described, arc lighting was becoming a common
means for effects or fill lighting that he identifies in Pathé films by 1904. More interestingly, however, is
that Pathé’s decision to adopt arc lights already 1902 may explain why French studios would not begin
using the Cooper-Hewitt lamps that became popular in America in 1903, first at Biograph, until the early
1910s. See Salt, 40. On French adoption of the Cooper-Hewitt lamps, see Mannoni, 71.

387
CA, December 20, 1902.

245

The new project, completed by late February 1903, allowed Pathé to increase
production of positive film stock to twelve thousand meters per day.
388
It also offers
architectural evidence of Pathé and Zecca’s increasing attention to division of labor, the
professionalization of diverse aspects of production, and attention to specialized
workspaces.
389
As was the case for Alice Guy’s productions at Gaumont and for Méliès’s
studio films, Pathé employed professional set designers trained in Paris’s theater
community.
390
The introduction of these professionals into film production helped
solidify the industry’s connection to the stage. The expansion and modernization of film
studios also, however, contributed to these professionals’ further incorporation into the
film community and away from the theatre.
As of early 1904, however, the new design atelier and studio remained
insufficient for the Compagnie’s film production. Pathé reported to the Board that the set
design workshop was running at full capacity and the lack of sufficient storage space
meant that any decors not used for multiple films (a practice often necessitated by the
demand for rapid production) had to be destroyed after each shoot. To make matters
worse, several property owners surrounding the production studio had built new large
buildings that blocked sunlight and thereby shortened the available working hours in the
studio. Pathé proposed to solve these problems in one fell swoop by demolishing the

388
Abel, The Ciné Goes to Town, 20.

389
As Salmon notes, “Le projet [to build a set design atelier] rend compte du besoin de multiplier les
espaces pour assurer l'efficacité des tâches ainsi que de l'augmentation des effectifs,” 8.

390
As set designer-turned-historian Léon Barsacq notes, Pathé’s decorators initially included Maurice
Fabrège, Albert Colas, Gaston Dumesnil, and Vasseur, all products of the same design studio. Léon
Barsacq, Le Décor de Film, 1895-1969 (Paris: H. Veyrier, 1985), 16. See also Mannoni, “Les Studios
Pathé,” 60. I discuss set designers and early French studios in more detail later in the chapter.

246

existing studio in favor of a new, larger building to house set design workshops, storage
facilities, and production stages. The new building would be high enough to avoid
shadows from neighboring structures, and Pathé also reached an agreement with the
proposed studio’s neighbors to restrict the height of their buildings.
391
At the same time,
he began plans for another production facility in nearby Montreuil that would help
maintain production during the construction in Vincennes.
Expansion and Dispersal: The “Provisional Studio” in Montreuil
In early 1904, as preparations for the new Vincennes studio slowly progressed,
the Compagnie purchased a lot close to Vincennes at 52, rue du Sergent-Bobillot in
Montreuil, only a stone’s throw from Méliès’s studio. Here, Pathé initially proposed a
three thousand franc, “glass-and-iron hangar for equestrian and other exterior films.”
392

Most likely in recognition of the still rising demand for films, Pathé later altered the
plans, calling instead for a large glass house studio. Although often referred to by Pathé
and others as the “provisional studio,” the resulting building continued to house film
production through the 1920s and now represents, ironically, the oldest remaining studio
in France.
393

391
CA, February 29, 1904. On Pathé’s agreement with the neighboring owner (a certain Malo, who may be
the Compagnie’s future architect), see CA, April 26, 1904.

392
CA, March 29, 1904. “un hangar en fer et de verre … pour les prises de vues équestres et autres en plein
eair.” See also Hugues Laurent, “Le Décor de cinéma et les décorateurs,” Bulletin de l’association
françaises des ingénieurs et technicians du cinéma 16 (1957): 3-11, 6 and Mannoni, 63.

393
In the 1920s the studio housed the Albatross film company, led by a group of Russian immigrants.
Today, the building, designated a Monument Historique, houses an acting school. See Jérôme Decoux,
Montreuil, patrimoine industriel (Paris: l’Association pour le patrimoine de l’Île-de-France, 2003), 29.

247

Figure 4.5: Pathé Montreuil Studio, Interior. Reproduced from Frederick A. Talbot, Moving
Pictures: How They are Made and Worked, revised edition (London: William Heinemann,
December 1912), 112.

The construction would not be complete until winter, but already by March
filmmakers and designers began production on its open-roofed stage.
394
At its
completion, the studio’s main glass hall covered 22 by 12 meters and, much like Méliès’s
original studio, initially housed both film production and set design in the same central
hall.
395
An undated photo [Fig. 5] of the studio’s interior offers a sense of the working
conditions in early studios, where set design, construction, staging, and filmmaking often
involved the same spaces and workers. While this photo, like many early studio images,
may have been produced for publicity, there should be little doubt that work in such
studios did involve the kinds of concurrent activities depicted: three workers (one on
either side of the stage and a third above) rig a backdrop of a city scene painted in depth
(alongside another, angled backdrop for an interior scene), operators prepare three
cameras for shooting, and stage hands arrange set pieces (including a worker who cuts a

394
According to Board reports, production at Montreuil continued en plein air through at least July. See
CA, August 18, 1904. Set designer Hugues Laurent would later recall that Pathé’s artists often ran into
Méliès’s team, with whom they happily shared ideas (without revealing too much). Laurent, 7.

395
Laurent, 6.

248

board in the foreground). As studio facilities expanded, these tasks would increasingly be
divided, both spatially and in terms of training and expertise.
Pathé’s decision to build the studio in Montreuil rather than closer to the
Compagnie’s current production facilities on the rue du Bois previewed the future
dispersal of its facilities across Paris’s southeastern suburbs. Montreuil was a sensible
location for this initial expansion: the provisional satellite studio would remain close to
Vincennes, and Montreuil’s patterns of industrialization were favorable for a film studio.
In particular, owing to resistance from Montreuil’s agricultural producers, the community
industrialized slowly and on a small scale. As a result, small factories and ateliers greatly
outnumbered the heavy industries seen northwest of Paris, and as horticulture gave way
to manufacturing, small agricultural plots became increasingly available for industry.
396

Pathé thus faced little risk of seeing its studio overshadowed by a large, smoke-
spewing factory or, given the size of the adjacent plots, the kinds of neighboring
construction that necessitated a new studio in Vincennes. Of equal importance to
Montreuil’s burgeoning industry and Pathé’s prospects for film production there, the
community had access to one of the city’s private electrical networks, by no means a
given, even in 1904. From 1899, Montreuil also housed a tramway station facilitating
access to and from Paris.
397
These factors, as well as the significant celluloid production
housed in Montreuil since 1870, may also have played a role in Pathé’s decision to build

396
Jérôme Decoux, Montreuil, patrimoine industriel (Paris: Associations pour le patrimoine de l’Île-de-
France, 2003), 3.

397
Decaux, 16. Montreuil received electricity beginning in 1890 from the Compagnie parisienne d’air
comprimé, one of six private concessions established by the Muncipal Council in 1889. See below for a
more complete description of electrical development in Paris and its affects on film studio development,
particularly at Gaumont, where city electricity would not arrive until after World War I.

249

a full-fledged studio there, enlarge it in 1906, and make it a permanent part of the
Compagnie’s production, even after completion of the Vincennes studio.
398
The
Montreuil studio’s success as a satellite production facility also offered proof of the
viability of a decentralized development model that may have contributed to the
Compagnie’s later willingness to spread its facilities across the suburbs and eventually
farm out film production to a series of disparate filmmaking facilities in Paris, Berlin,
Moscow, New Jersey, and California.
The New Studio in Vincennes
While production developed in Montreuil, at Vincennes the Compagnie devoted
substantial resources to its new modern studio. The three-story structure’s cost, not
including painting and glass, rose to 95,000 francs, plus another 11,500 for the heating
system.
399
The studio marked an important step in the industrialization of the
Compagnie’s film division: it would be a modern industrial space designed and built by
an industry professional. Pathé entrusted the studio to Eugène Laubeuf, a Chatou-based
architect whose firm, Les Etablissements Laubeuf, had completed projects for companies
including the Chemin de Fer de l’Ouest.
400

398
See Le Forestier, 140.

399
CA, March 29, 1904 and September 10, 1904.

400
CA, February 29, 1904 and March 29, 1904. See Jean-Luc Rigaud, “Un patrimoine disparaît.
Recherches autour du cas de l’industrie du disque à Chatou” (Memoire de master II Histoire des
Techniques, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2009), 64. Laubeuf may have been chosen for the
project due to his company’s proximity to the Pathé phonograph works in Chatou, the success of, which,
Rigaud argues, helped entice Laubeuf and other industrialists to establish operations there (96). Laubeuf
and his son André, an engineer trained at the Ecole nationale des Arts et Metiers, would continue to play an
important role in Pathé’s later construction in Vincennes. In 1911, the younger Laubeuf created a new
company in Montreuil producing metal frames used to build factories for numerous industrial
manufacturers, including Pathé and later for Kodak. See Cécile Katz and Jérôme Decoux, eds. Base
Architecture-Mérimée, Ministère de la Culture de la France, direction de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine,

250

Laubeuf’s design called for brick walls and windows on the rear and one side,
while the remainder, including the roof, was glazed in iron-and-glass. The ground floor
housed two ateliers for woodwork and ironwork, a film developing laboratory, storage
space for decors, and an office for the concierge. On the second floor, the set design
workshop stood adjacent to Charles Pathé’s long office, where he held regular meetings
with the designers and filmmakers. The second floor also had offices for the film
directors and the studio director, Dupuis. The top floor was devoted to film production,
with stages on either side to allow for simultaneous productions.
401
A specialty stage-
building company, Wessbecher, designed the two stages, the larger of which included a
sub-section and trapdoors for trick effects, much like Méliès’s theater after its
enlargement in 1899. Below the glass-and-iron roof, a system of black and white shades
allowed Pathé’s directors to control the brightness and diffusion of light to the stage.
402

The new studios in Montreuil and Vincennes created new possibilities for film
production. As Noël Burch has noted, their increased size, in particular, led Zecca and
Pathé’s other directors to explore increasing camera movement in the studio. Filmed
against the large painted backdrops that were also facilitated by the company’s new set
design studios, the horizontal panning sequences that distinguish films such as Au Pays

Ref. IA93000054 (Inventaire général, 2000). Available online at:
http://www.culture.gouv.fr/documentation/memoire/HTML/IVR11/IA93000054/index.htm (accessed
December 7, 2010). La Société Laubeuf, presently based in Saint-Mandé, not far from Monteuil, continues
to build glass-enclosed structures, notably including airport structures such as the reconstruction of Roissy
Charles de Gaule’s Terminal 2E. For details, see Laubeuf’s corporate website,
http://www.laubeuf.com/fr/realisations (accessed December 7, 2010).

401
Mannoni, 63. See also Laurent, 7, who notes that each Monday morning Pathé brought together the
directors of the studios in Montreuil and Vincennes, along with the directors, set designers, and camera
operators to outline the work for the week.

402
Laurent, 8.

251

Noir (1905) demonstrate the films’ new degrees of dynamism.
403
As was the case with
Méliès (see Chapter 2), the shift to new glass-and-iron studios brought increasing spatial
fluidity – including not only these horizontal and vertical pans, but also spatial tricks
(e.g., appearing and disappearing objects, multiple exposures in the same frame, and the
movement of characters and objects across the frame). Due in part to these features,
Pathé’s popular films dominated the French and American markets, leading to
unprecedented growth that necessitated infrastructural expansion to facilitate efficient
studio production and distribution.
404

Before Pathé could extend its operations in Vincennes, however, its growth took
an unexpected turn that changed the geographic face of Parisian production in ways that
would mark French studio cinema for years to come. Thanks in part to new laws
governing film and celluloid storage, Pathé’s expansion followed a new logic that led to
the creation of new cinema “city” in another nearby Parisian suburb.
“L’Affaire des Films” and Expansion to Joinville
Just as Laubeuf was putting the finishing touches on the new Vincennes studio in
September 1904 and Pathé began looking ahead to further infrastructural development,
the cinema industry came under new pressure from municipal authorities in the wake of a
celluloid-related disaster. On Saturday, February 20, 1904, an explosion at a celluloid
comb workshop in central Paris had left fourteen dead and numerous injured, creating a
scandal that led to renewed vigor in the city’s regulation of hazardous materials,

403
Noël Burch, Life to those Shadows, trans. Ben Brewster (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1990), 170.

404
See Abel, The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900-1910 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1999).

252

including films. The resulting attention to celluloid storage created what Pathé’s Board of
Directors referred to as “l’affaire des films” (the film affair). As the company sought to
expand its already massive film production, it faced the suddenly difficult task of finding
an acceptable location for its facilities.
The explosion took place in a multi-use building at the corner of the boulevard de
Sébastopol and the rue Etienne-Marcel early in the afternoon, reportedly just after
workers returned from lunch. Onlookers described a horrifying sequence of events as
workers and residents on the upper floors sought to escape a growing fire. Descriptions of
the “catastrophe” filled the popular press, and in the following days a disappointed public
waited outside the Paris morgue, hoping to catch a glimpse of the victims, who were not,
however, put on display.
405
News of the disaster continued to occupy the press for more
than a week as investigators sought the origins of the explosion and families mourned the
victims. The investigation revealed that the fire most likely came as the result of a
misplaced cigarette that ignited a stockpile of celluloid.
406

City officials responded to the tragedy by reinforcing existing laws regulating the
storage and use of hazardous materials in the city limits. For the cinema industry, the new
policies brought celluloid production, processing, and storage facilities under city
regulations as “établissements dangereux, insalubres ou incommodes.” Surprisingly,
despite the often-described attention to the dangers of film fires in theaters after the
Bazaar de la Charité disaster of 1897, spaces of film production and storage had remained
out of regulatory view. Pathé’s Board of Directors were thus surprised to receive word in

405
“La Catastrophe du boulevard de Sébastopol,” Le Petit Journal, 22 February 1904, 3.

406
“La Catastrophe du boulevard de Sébastopol,” Le Petit Journal, 24 February 1904, 3.

253

September that the company’s positive film stock would be reclassified to conform to the
new code. To meet the limitations on celluloid storage, the Board initially expected to
simply spread its supply across a series of small rented locations.
407
Two months later,
however, the matter remained unresolved. As Pathé’s lawyers pursued negotiations with
the city over the company’s existing security measures and the parameters of the new
regulations, the company became increasingly concerned about maintaining sufficient
access to the large amounts of both positive and negative film stock necessary for
production and distribution.
Pathé’s effort to conform to the city codes began with spreading its stock across
four storage sites, allocating three hundred kilograms to the studio on the rue du Bois,
twelve hundred to its nearby processing facilities on the rue du Polygone, eight hundred
to another neighboring site on the rue des Vignerons, and three hundred more to the
company headquarters on the rue St. Augustin. City inspectors, however, rejected the rue
du Polygone facility (where Pathé stored its original film prints), despite the fact, Pathé
noted, that it was built “below ground, with iron cabinets that could be easily flooded,
and that the film strips were themselves in iron boxes, sheltered from any exterior
contact.”
408
The following month, inspectors also rejected the rue des Vignerons storage
site, leaving Pathé in dire need of new facilities.
409

407
CA, September 10, 1904.

408
CA, November 9, 1904. Inspectors further surprised the Board by accepting the less secure conditions
on the rue du Bois, where negative film stock was stored in plain view through corridors on the second
floor.

409
CA, December 12, 1904.

254

By January the company began to grow desperate. Even if it were able to
convince the Prefecture to allow the maximum storage rates at the company headquarters,
the Montreuil studio, and the rue du Polygone facilities, it would still be short by more
than three thousand kilograms per day. To make up for the lack of storage space, Pathé
resorted to an inconvenient and inefficient system of moving celluloid from facility to
facility throughout the day.
410

These inconveniences threatened to slow the company’s stunning growth. In
February 1905, Pathé reported that the Vincennes factory, which was already producing
eight thousand meters of film per day, could not meet the potential market demand. Eager
to reduce its reliance on film imports from George Eastman, the Compagnie also sought
new facilities for producing its own film stock.
411
While the best course of action would
be to enlarge the Vincennes factory, the “film affair” left the company little choice but to
expand to a more remote location. Perforating negative film and processing, developing,
printing, and storing positive prints would thus be divided from storing negative film
stock and producing films, which would continue at the Vincennes and Montreuil studios.
This planned division of the production process anticipated the company’s later decision
to divest its production arm, instead renting out its production facilities and contracting
with smaller companies to produce films for distribution.
412

410
CA, January 9, 1905.

411
Pathé also continued to purchase stock from Lumière, but as production increased with the new facilities
in Joinville, the Compagnie became increasingly eager to own its own facility for producing film stock.
From mid-1905 into early 1906, Pathé engaged in negotiations to purchase the Blair Company’s film
factory in London, eventually completing the deal in March 1906. See CA, September 6, 1905 – April 5,
1906.

412
See Abel, The Ciné Goes to Town, 41.

255

The Board quickly approved the purchase of a new, two-acre site on the south
bank of the river Marne in the neighboring community of Joinville-le-Pont.
413
The site’s
cost of eighty thousand francs satisfied the Compagnie’s directors, who also noted that it
offered important access to major roads and a railroad station that would facilitate film
distribution. After several months of negotiations with the Municipal Council of Joinville
and the Public Health and Safety Council of the Department of the Seine, Pathé received
authorization in August 1905 to build a storage depot capable of holding up to 10,000
kilograms of celluloid and a series of workshops for celluloid production.
414

The Public Health Council outlined four specific regulations for the new facilities
that would put Pathé in accordance with city regulations. First, all celluloid had to be
enclosed in metal boxes and placed in a storehouse built of non-combustible materials
and surrounded by a masonry wall two meters from the building, all located at least thirty
meters from the street and fifteen meters from the other factory buildings. Second, Pathé
had to build an “intermediary depot” for the factory’s daily output, located in proximity
to the workshops. Third, the workshops themselves had to be twenty by twelve meters in
size, limited to a single ground level, and built entirely from non-combustible materials.
Each had to be equipped with six emergency doors opening onto the exterior. The
workshops’ steam heating systems had to have effective ventilation shafts, and all
lighting had to be electrical, with switches and fuses placed on the building’s exterior.
Finally, the individual workshops (each of which must be limited to a single task) had to

413
CA, February 3, 1905. See also, Thierry Lefebvre, “L’usine de Joinville, établissement dangereux,” in
Marie and Le Forestier, eds. La Firme Pathé Frères, 1896-1914, 49-58, 50.

414
CA, August 8, 1905.

256

be separated by alleys of at least five by eight meters.
415
As was the case with Edison’s
studio in the Bronx (see Chapter 3) and numerous other studios, the building codes put in
place to regulate modern urban development thus had an important affect on the
organization of cinema production practices. Especially as studios became large
industrial centers, they could not escape the notice of the city inspectors charged with
governing urban modernization.
In addition to these requirements, Joinville’s Municipal Council negotiated seven
further stipulations that focused largely on the aesthetics and environmental affects of the
new facility. The Council’s regulations required that Pathé design its factory to have “an
elegant architectural silhouette,” avoid large chimneys, be encircled with gardens, have
walls lined with trees, not emit dark or noxious smoke, and deposit waste water into a
designated sewer. These provisions reflected the community’s reluctance to become part
of the growing industrialization of Paris’s suburbs – to avoid, that is, the kind of factory
encroachment displayed in Ménessier’s painting of the first Pathé studio [Fig. 4.3].
416

Pathé initially met these requirements. It entrusted the design of the numerous
ateliers to a Vincennes-based architectural firm, Moisson et fils, architectes, led by
Théodore-Léon Moisson, who specialized in hotels and rental properties, and his son,
Georges, a recent graduate of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.
417
The firm completed the first

415
Lefebvre, 53.

416
Lefebvre, 52. Lefebvre quotes the Municipal Council: “Une ville qui vit surtout de la promenade et de la
villégiature des Parisiens et des étrangers doit sauvegarder la beauté de ses paysage et en particulier pour
Joinville […] empecher l’enlaidissement des bords de la rivière qui la fait vivre.”

417
CA, March 6, 1905. On Moisson et fils, see Louis Thérèse David de Pénanrun, Edmund Augustin
Delaire, and Louis François Roux, eds. Les architectes élèves de l’Ecole des beaux-arts, 1793-1907 (Paris:
Ecole nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, 1907), 350.

257

atelier in early December, and work continued at a rapid pace. Despite its agreements
with the Municipal Council, Pathé quickly eyed opportunities to expand. In April 1906,
as the original construction neared completion, Pathé reported that the facilities were
already four times as large as originally projected (and complained that it had again
become necessary to add two more ateliers for developing and tinting films).
418

A fawning article in Phono-Ciné-Gazette, a monthly industry magazine with ties
to Pathé, celebrated the new factory’s grandiosity by taking readers on a behind-the-
scenes tour of the five original ateliers, which housed, respectively: 1) machine supplies,
projection rooms, shipping and handling offices, and tinting; 2) perforation, printing,
developing, and drying; 3) film cleaning and the heating systems; 4) electricity, and 5)
storage. Such articles contributed to the emerging idea that film studios were more than
just buildings by offering readers a journey into the “midst of the labyrinths of this city –
for it is truly a city.”
419

For the remainder of 1906 and into 1907, Pathé continued to press for further
extensions of the new Joinville facilities, even as the existing construction dragged on.
These efforts were complicated by Pathé’s other ongoing efforts to purchase and enlarge
a facility in the northeastern Parisian neighborhood of Belleville for manufacturing
cameras and projectors, build (and then enlarge) a new factory in Vincennes for coloring

418
CA, April 24, 1906.

419
“au milieu des dédales de cette ville, -- car c’est une vrai cité.” Francois Valleiry, “Les Pellicules
cinématographiques (Leur Fabrication),” Phono-Ciné-Gazette 35, September 1, 1906, 332, continued as
“Fabrication des vues cinématographiques (suite),” October 15, 1906, 391-392. The article offers a unique
account of the production processes put in place in early film factories.

258

film prints, enlarge the film processing facilities in Vincennes, and, for the first time,
expand its operations to America.
420

At the end of 1907, however, Pathé finally approached the Department of the
Seine with a new proposal to expand its celluloid storage depot in Joinville to
accommodate 30,000 kilograms of film stock. The Préfecture authorized construction of
two new depots with capacities of 20,000 and 10,000 kilograms respectively. The
Compagnie hired a new architect, Charles Pathé’s Vincennes neighbor, Georges Malo, to
build these depots as well as an additional series of ateliers and a large smokestack to
serve its now enormous printing and processing factory.
421

420
The Belleville plant owned by Victor Continsouza already produced precision machinery, including
various film machines. Pathé sought to increase its production of cameras and projectors by bankrolling an
expansion project at the Continsouza works. In exchange, the factory would in effect become an exclusive
Pathé affiliate. Negotiations continued through 1907, and the project drug on with numerous difficulties
into 1908. See CA. Pathé built the Vincennes color factory in April 1906 to facilitate expanded coloring
with its stencil method and later for its automatic coloring machines. See CA, April 24, 1906 and Joshua
Yumibe, “Moving Color: An Aesthetic History of Applied Color Technologies in Silent Cinema” (Ph.D.
diss., University of Chicago, 2007), 152-155. On Pathé’s U.S. expansion, which began with a factory for
printing Pathé’s American releases in Bound Brook, New Jersey, see Chapter 5.

421
Malo had experience in atelier design and, on the strength of his friendship with Charles Pathé and his
future involvement in Pathé’s construction projects, would go on to a prominent career. See Anne Dugast
and Isabelle Parizet, eds., Dictionnaire Par Noms d’Architectes: des constructions élevées à Paris aux XIXe
et XXe siècles, Période 1876-1899, Tome III (Paris: Service des Travaux Historians, 1993), 79. The
Compagnie elected to replace Moisson due to the firm’s poor treatment of the initial Joinville project and
complications arising from its failure to properly bill the contractors. See CA, December 28, 1906 and
Lefebvre, 54.

259

Figure 4.6: “Usines Pathé-Cinéma de Joinville-le Pont [sic].” Reproduced from Le Film Vierge
Pathé: Manuel de Développement et de Tirage (Paris: Les Etablissements Pathé-Cinéma, 1926),
8. This photograph shows the two-level ateliers, large factories, and smokestack completed after
1907. The photo emphasizes not only the size of Pathé’s facilities, but also its place at an
important crossroads for modern transport – the road that extends to the horizon and the River
Marne, which parallels the black fumes that so infuriated the Joinville Municipal Council.

As images of the resulting facilities show [Fig. 4.6], Pathé had far exceeded the
original provisions of its agreement with Joinville and the Préfecture. Aside from the
trees that line the near factory wall and the proper spacing that separates the line of
ateliers to the right, the new construction blatantly ignored the original agreement,
including its interdictions against multi-story ateliers and, most obviously, large
smokestacks and dark fumes. Although these flagrant violations infuriated the Municipal
Council, the Préfecture ultimately dismissed the city’s complaints. Much to its chagrin,
Joinville had become a city forever marked by the industrialization of cinema.
422

Over the next two years, as it led the shift to renting rather than selling films,
Pathé continued to expand operations in Joinville and especially in Vincennes. On the rue
des Vignerons, the Compagnie further developed its printing and processing facilities

422
Lefebvre, 56-7. Pathé’s smokestack continues to define Joinville’s skyline as one of the few remaining
markers of early cinematic architecture.

260

while adding more studios. Two new glass-and-iron structures housed, respectively, the
studios of the Société cinématographique des auteurs et gens de lettres (SCAGL) and
Jean Comandon’s “studio scientifique.” The studios reflected Pathé’s new orientation
towards subjects targeting middle-class audiences and its focus on renting studios and
distributing affiliate companies’ films.
423

Figure 4.7: “Usines Pathé-Cinéma de Vincennes.” Reproduced from Le Film Vierge Pathé:
Manuel de Développement et de Tirage (Paris: Les Etablissements Pathé-Cinéma, 1926), 8. This
photo shows the extent of Pathé’s expansion on the rue des Vignerons, where printing and
processing facilities surrounded the studios Pathé leased to the Société cinématographiques des
auteurs et gens de lettres (SCAGL) and Jean Comandon’s “studio scientifique.”

A photograph of the rue des Vignerons with these additions reveals a sprawling
complex that recedes almost beyond view. In Vincennes, as in Joinville, Pathé controlled
a cité du cinéma carefully crafted to efficiently produce and distribute the machines and
films that powered French cinema and made Pathé its most dominant company. Such
photographs represented film industry power as a form of spatial dominance created by
studios and factories reaching out in every direction and poised to overtake what little

423
See Abel, The Ciné Goes to Town, 41.

261

remains of the surrounding landscape. Pathé’s chief French competitor, Gaumont, would
make such images of industrial strength the familiar iconography of its own studio “city,”
the Cité Elgé. Its history reveals a different set of urban infrastructural factors that shaped
cinema’s industrialization and produced another set of important links between cinema
and technology in the early twentieth century.
Gaumont: Electricity, Technology, and Centralized Production at the Cité Elgé
The specifics of Gaumont’s early development have often been overshadowed
both by Pathé and by the tendency to focus only on Gaumont’s large production studio,
the largest in the world before World War I. While this studio was no doubt the most
visually impressive of Gaumont’s facilities, the other buildings that formed the Cité Elgé
offer a more complete image of French cinema’s industrial growth in the early 1900s.
From its origins in photographic technology workshops, Gaumont grew into a company
with diverse interests in technological research and development that overlapped and
intertwined with its film productions. While the company’s emphasis on technology
came, in part, from the interests of its founder, Gaumont’s urban industrial context also
played a key role in shaping its infrastructural needs and the focus of its technological
research projects.
Early Facilities and Investment at Gaumont
Léon Gaumont began his career as an assistant in the workshop of Jules
Carpentier, the technician and inventor who built the first Lumière Cinématographe, and
at Max Richard’s Comptoir général de photographie. In 1892 he bought out Richard
using funding from Gustave Eiffel (who was interested in experimental optical devices)

262

and Joseph Vallot (head of an observatory at Mont-Blanc). In 1895 Gaumont renamed the
company the Société Léon Gaumont et Cie. The following year, using funding from
Eiffel, the Société took a quick step towards industrialization, building its first large
workshop for developing and manufacturing photographic instruments.
Gaumont established these first facilities on a plot of land owned by his wife,
Camille Maillard, adjacent to the Buttes-Chaumont Park in the relatively undeveloped
eastern edge of Paris’s nineteenth arrondissement.
424
The Buttes-Chaumont – an artificial
park built as part of Napoléon III and Prefect of the Seine Georges-Eugène Haussman’s
mid nineteenth-century reconstruction of the city – would later be a fitting neighbor for
the studio. Its manufactured spaces offered ideal vistas for location shooting in an
artificial, picturesque form of nature. The company’s early development, however,
preceded any thoughts of future film production.
Alongside lenses, binoculars, and photographic cameras, by summer 1896
Gaumont’s new workshop produced the company’s first film projector, Georges
Demenÿ’s Chrono. The following year its products also included Demenÿ’s camera, the
Chronophotographe.
425
With an idea of promoting his new devices by producing films to
go with them, Gaumont organized a small film production unit that, from May 1897,
devoted its efforts to filming actualities in Paris in the fashion of the Lumière operators
and Méliès, who had yet to complete his first studio.

424
As Gilles Venhard notes, Gaumont was eager to transform the business of his newly acquired enterprise
from an exclusive sales model to development, production, and sales. See Venhard, “Les vertes années de
la marguerite, 1896-1924,” in Philippe d’Hugues and Dominique Muller, eds, Gaumont, 90 ans de cinéma
(Paris: Ramsey/La Cinémathèque Française, 1986), 18-33, 21.

425
Garçon, 14.

263

Later that year Gaumont authorized Alice Guy to begin the company’s own
staged film productions, which she shot on “an asphalt terrace of several meters in area
against a high wall” adjacent to the company’s photographic development laboratory.
426

Fig. 4.8: First Gaumont stage with set designers, including Henri Ménessier (foreground),
undated photograph (ca. 1897), Bibliothèque du Film, LG362-B50.

A remarkable undated photograph of this first shooting stage shows Henri
Ménessier and his troupe of set designers posed, as if for a portrait, in front of a large
painted backdrop. The painting depicts a wooded scene, supplemented by a small
artificial bush that leans against one of the designers’ legs. A small gap between the
suspended canvas and the top of the photo reveals real trees that seem to escape from the
painting itself, as if nature and artifice were on a continuum rippling at the frame’s edge.
In its reproduction of a forest that seems to lie just beyond the set, this early Gaumont
backdrop underscores the ways that studio filmmaking, from its earliest incarnations, so
often produced cinema as the re-production of the natural environment outside. This
recreation of nature in artificial form marked a seemingly contradictory but nonetheless

426
Alice Guy, “A Propos des Débuts de l’Industrie Cinématographique,” Gaumont publication, 1930. “une
terrasse bitumée, de quelques mètres de superficie, close d'un haut mur”

264

common early step in studio production – the need for environmental and spatial control
drove filmmakers to dissociate production from the realistic spaces of nature and location
shooting, only to then turn to studio technologies to reproduce ever more realistic
versions of the real spaces they left behind.
Indeed, just as W.K.L. Dickson, Méliès, and numerous others had done before
them, Guy soon sought to dissociate filmmaking from the natural environs that Ménessier
could just as well reproduce in painted backdrops. Responding to Guy’s filmmaking
success, Gaumont covered the terrace with a glass roof, leaving only one side open to
Guy’s camera.
427
Beneath the glass roof, Guy and her design team, she later recalled,
“discovered, little by little, the thousand possibilities offered by this marvelous
invention.”
428
From trick films à la Méliès to productions of Faust, Gaumont’s first
studio supported the development of the company’s film production arm and its first
filmmakers’ formal techniques.
For the next five years, film productions continued alongside Gaumont’s primary
focus on the creation of photographic technologies and film apparatuses. The shooting
stage’s glass-enclosure changed the visual character of Guy’s films, bringing them closer
in quality to Méliès and Pathé’s studio productions. The roof and side walls helped Guy
avoid, for instance, the wind-blown trembling sets of her early exterior work, as seen in
films such as L’Aveugle fin de siècle (1898).

427
Noëlle Giret, “Les Studios Gaumont,” in d’Hugues and Muller, 101-107, 101.

428
Guy, “A Propos des Débuts de l’Industrie Cinématographique.” The full French quote reads (with no
shortage of national pride) “c'est sur cette petite terrasse, avec cette modeste installation que nous
découvrîmes, peu à peu, les mille possibilités offertes par cette merveilluse invention, bien française, qu'est
le cinéma.”

265

Figure 4.9: Faust et Mephistophèles (Guy, 1903). By 1904, when Gaumont decided to expand
film production and build a new studio, the form of Alice Guy’s films had reached the utmost
complexity seen on small exterior stages; only with the new studio built in 1905 did Guy and her
assistant, Louis Feuillade, expand from the standard forms seen in films such as Guy’s adaptation
of Faust.

Gaumont’s focus on machines rather than films, however, left Guy dependent on
a workspace that was only retroactively made into a shooting stage, whereas by 1903,
Zecca and his team at Pathé were using specially designed stages to bring complex set
designs and more complex stories to the screen. Finally, in 1904, convinced of the future
success of the film industry, Gaumont embarked upon a massive construction project
designed to expand filmmaking and bring Guy’s workspaces up to par with Pathé’s. To
do so, he incorporated the company and put its leadership in the hands a new president,
an industry mogul named Pierre Azaria. The new president brought the company into
contact with another of France’s booming industries, electricity. Alongside his duties as
Gaumont’s president, Azaria also served as president of the Compagnie générale
d’électricité and was the supervisor for Continental Edison and General Electric’s French
affiliates.
429

The repeated links between cinema and the electrical industry that are reflected in
the leadership at Pathé and Gaumont signal more than simply the emergence of the

429
Garçon, 18. Mitry, 154.

266

tangled political economies that, to this day, underpin global cinema. Rather, they
represent only one aspect of an intertwined history that significantly affected film’s
infrastructural and formal developments. The creation of electrical networks in Paris
would help condition Gaumont’s continuing emphasis on technology by framing cinema
within a context that necessitated technological intervention beyond the invention of
cameras, projectors, and other film-specific machines.
Cinema – and France’s first studios – would arrive in a city with radically uneven
electrical infrastructure and little standardization. To facilitate the industry’s growth as a
business, Gaumont recognized the need for machines such as electrical transformers that
would allow cinema to interface with new urban technologies. This emphasis on
technology meant that even as Gaumont devoted more and more resources to film
production, the company never shed its roots in technological research and development.
The results of urban technological change ensured that at companies like Gaumont, film
studio production remained closely aligned with film factory manufacturing.
Electrical Infrastructure in Paris – Framing Early Studio Development
That the electrical industry played such a large role in funding early French
cinema should come as no surprise. From as early as 1875 inventors and purveyors of
electricity and electrical lighting began building an industry through the slow but steady
process of illuminating French cities and transforming industrial power. Beginning with
commercial venues including the Magasin du Louvre, the Bon Marché, the Hippodrome,
the Opéra, and the Musée Grévin, each of which installed arc lights in 1878, as well as
industrial spaces such as railroad stations and construction sites, electrical lighting

267

became a viable and desirable alternative to gas.
430
The 1881 Exposition internationale
d’électricité in Paris reinforced this interest and sparked new growth in the industry by
facilitating an international exchange of ideas, technologies, and enthusiasm, especially
for the public debut of Edison’s new carbon filament lamp.
431
By the mid-1880s
electrical lighting was becoming common in Parisian stores and theaters, and in 1886 the
Municipal Council installed electric lights in its administrative headquarters – the Hôtel
de Ville – and began considering plans for a municipal lighting system.
432

The city met strong resistance from France’s gas industry, which managed to
protract the transition to electricity – with much more success than its American and
German counterparts – into the early twentieth century.
433
The 1889 International
Exposition, however, went a long way towards convincing the Municipal Council to
electrify the city. In addition to constructing buildings and monuments such as the Eiffel
Tower, preparations for the Exposition included other efforts to modernize Paris’s
physical appearance. Municipal authorities were particularly concerned with
implementing public electrical installations, lest the Exposition, in historian Alain
Beltran’s words, “show the whole world that the ‘City of Light’ scarcely merited its

430
Woflgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 54. On the Jablochkoff Lamp, see Alain Beltran, La Fée
Electricité (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 71. For the dates of electrical lighting’s introduction in Parisian
venues, see Shelley Wood Cordulack, “A Franco-American Battle of Beams: Electricity and the Selling of
Modernity,” Journal of Design History 18:2 (2005), 147-166.

431
Beltran, 84. Schivelbusch, 58.

432
François Caron and Fabienne Cardot, eds. Histoire général de l’électricité en France. Tome premier,
Espoirs et conquêtes (Paris: Fayard, 1991), 405.

433
Caron and Cardot, 386-7.

268

name.”
434
Concurrent developments in the private sector underscored the value of
transforming the city’s illuminating infrastructure. A series of gas-related accidents at
Parisian theaters led to both new city regulations and a more general movement by
private owners to shift their lighting systems to electricity.
On May 27, 1887 a fire at the popular Opéra-Comique killed eighty-four
performers and patrons and destroyed the theater. Investigators linked the fire to the
theater’s gas lighting system, triggering widespread renovations of Parisian theater
lighting, which became a matter of public safety.
435
The media spectacle and government
intervention that followed bear striking resemblance to the aftermath of the more well
known film fire at the Bazar de la Charité ten years later, which killed 121 spectators,
mostly women of Paris’s wealthy nobility. As with the Opéra-Comique, the fire at the
Bazar de la Charité led to increased regulation of spectacular exhibition spaces and
illumination technologies, in this case specifically governing cinema.
436
In response to
the Opéra-Comique fire, commercial venues such as the Odéon, Olympia, and Moulin
Rouge joined the Palais Royal, Nouveau Cirque, Musée Grevin and Paris’s large hotels in
installing new incandescent lighting systems.
437

Thus even as the municipal council began debating plan’s for building the city’s
electrical system in 1888, investors and developers had already begun the slow process
themselves. This existing infrastructure contributed to council debates that focused

434
Ibid. Beltran’s quote reads, “… l'Exposition universelle de 1889 (qui risquait de montrer au monde
entier que la Ville lumière méritait bien peu son nom ...).”

435
Ibid., 406.

436
Deslandes and Richard, 23-26.

437
See Cordulack, 147-166.

269

largely on whether the city’s electrical networks would be public or private. The city
elected to implement a hybrid form consisting of one municipal system (with an electrical
works serving the central markets at Les Halles and the surrounding neighborhoods) and
six sectors granted to private suppliers for eighteen years (up to 1907).
438
The
introduction of these private electrical providers expanded the market for electrical
machines as factories arose in and around the capital, creating ample profits for the
electricity investors that later funded the young film industry. Such investments would be
only one of the important affects that the city’s decision would have on early film
development.

Fig. 4.10: Parisian Electrical Sectors, 1899. The Municipal Council divided Paris into six
electrical sectors in 1899. When the concession ended in 1907, Gaumont’s studios remained
without electrical service in the sparsely developed area of northeastern Paris.

The Municipal Council quickly recognized the problems of its private system –
technological anarchy, uneven and often-sparse network development, and conflicts
between and amongst concession companies and with autonomous providers. The six
private concessions offered widely varying degrees of service and used competing and

438
Caron and Cardot, 408.

270

often incompatible electrical technologies. Four of the six companies employed direct
current systems, but only two of those four used compatible technologies.
439
Moreover,
much to the Municipal Council’s chagrin, the concessions showed little interest in
expanding their networks beyond already inhabited areas or heavy consumers, especially
after 1899, when it began to become clear that the city would not renew the concession
system past 1907.
In 1904, the city created a commission charged with finding a solution for
centralizing electrical production, standardizing the city’s networks, and expanding
service to areas with little to no electrical infrastructure.
440
Still, by the end of the
concession in 1907, the twentieth arrondissement, for instance, did not possess even the
most basic electrical network, while the nineteenth’s network remained untenably sparse.
In contrast to Pathé, which was served by the Compagnie Parisienne de l’air comprimé,
Gaumont’s facilities remained stranded in an electrical no-man’s land that would not
receive municipal power until after World War I.
441

Gaumont responded by mimicking the strategies used at other large industrial and
commercial establishments with high levels of electrical consumption. These companies,
many of which simply continued practices developed before the arrival of electrical

439
Caron and Cardot, 456. The Place Clichy and Compagnie Parisienne de l’air comprimé sectors used a
4x110 volt system with five wires, whereas the Edison sector used 2x110 volts with three wires, the Société
d’éclairage et de force sector used a simple 110 volt system, and the two remaining sectors – the Champs-
Elysées and Rive Gauche – used alternating monophase current.

440
Caron and Cardot, 567.

441
Caron and Cardot, 408; see also the map in Beltran, La Ville-lumière et la fée électricité: service public
et enterprises privées: l’énergie électrique dans la region parisienne (Paris: Éditions Rive Droite; Institut
d’histoire de l’industrie, 2002), 308. On Gaumont’s electrical system and its post-war connection to the city
network, see below and G. Mareschal, “L’éclairage dans les studios,” La Technique Cinématographique
100-101 (July-August 1950), 185-186.

271

providers, produced their own electricity. In 1889 the six concessions provided only
about thirty percent of the city’s overall consumption from twelve electrical stations
(versus twenty-four non-concession stations), a figure that rose to only fifty-four percent
in 1896.
442
At large Parisian hotels, theaters, and stores such as the Bon Marché, in-house
generators remained more practical than linking up with the city’s fledgling networks.
The basements of sites such as the Opéra and the Grand Café housed, in Alain Beltran’s
words, “veritable electrical factories.”
443
These private generators at times served
multiple buildings or small neighborhoods, creating “islands” of autonomous electrical
production that remained legal throughout the concessionary period.
444

Within this technological context, France’s major film studios became centers of
diverse forms of industrial production. Unable to rely even on official sources of
electricity, Gaumont made non-cinematic production a part of its business. In doing so, it
put film production into contact with diverse scientists, technicians, and technological
pursuits to support its industrialization. Under the guidance of industrialists and
inventors, Gaumont and Pathé’s facilities would thus become important sites of
technological development – cinema factories – built around not only impressive studios,
but also the diverse workshops and manufacturing facilities that housed and shaped
modern cinema.

442
Beltran, La ville-lumière, 136. Caron and Cardot, 456.

443
Beltran, La Fée Electricité, 102. “leurs sous-sol abritaient de véritables usines électriques.” In some
cases the concessionary companies also installed electrical generators in basements to supplement power in
high-usage venues. One such venue was none other than the Grand Café, site of a huge explosion caused by
an electrical generator in 1890, only five years before the Lumières would use the same basement to set off
an “explosion” of enthusiasm for moving images. On the Grand Café explosion, see Caron and Beltran,
“Chapitre III: Conclusion,” 455.

444
Caron and Cardot, 456.

272

Building the Cité Elgé
Gaumont began its expansion in 1904 with nothing less than the largest film
studio in the world. At more than six times the size of Méliès’s original glass-and-iron
studio in Montreuil, the structure marked a monumental step in the film industry’s growth
and a notable achievement in Parisian architecture. The architecture journal Les
Nouvelles Annales de la Construction even took a rare detour from coverage of the
development of the Parisian metro system and its new stations to devote an article to the
studio, accompanied by a photo of the completed glass house provided by Gaumont.
445

While the Nouvelles Annales article cites industry growth as the main reason for such a
large studio, it also points to cinema’s need for large, bright spaces specially made for
photographic reproductions. In its detailed description of the architectural strategies,
design elements, and materials used by the studio’s architect, Auguste Bahrmann, the
article underscores cinema’s specific architectural requirements.

Fig. 4.11: “Vue de Notre Théatre (extérieur),” Gaumont Catalogue, January 1906, p. 2. Collection
Musée Gaumont. View from the southwest.

445
E. Revoalen, “Notes et Documents: Ateliers de Cinématographie, rue des Alouettes (XIXe), à Paris:
M.A. Bahrmann, architecte; M.A. Michelin, constructeur,” Les Nouvelles Annales de la Construction Vol.
6, No. 613 (March 1906), 33-38.

273

Bahrmann’s principal concern remained maximizing the direction and quantity of
light to accommodate filmmakers’ continuing reliance on daytime shooting for the
majority of their productions. He positioned the two-story building on a north-south axis
and aligned the main stage along the eastern side of the wider northern wing’s top floor.
The studio’s thin iron skeleton permitted maximum natural sunlight to reach the stage
from midday through the afternoon, and stair access to the ceiling allowed the possibility
of suspending diffusing fabrics to more precisely distribute light. On the top floor of the
studio’s southern wing, Bahrmann created a large atelier for set design, which would
again be well lit through the open glass roof.
The studio design also accounted for cinema’s need for darkness, especially in
post-production. Below the design ateliers on the southern wing, Bahrmann created a
system of small rooms linked by windows to facilitate the successive stages of manual
film processing [Fig. 12]. He left the space below the stage relatively empty to
accommodate temporary storage and staging of sets, props, and performers between
takes. The first floor also housed the studio’s electrical substation, which was dedicated
to heating the large building and providing power for electrical lighting setups used, at
least initially, to accentuate natural illumination.

274

Fig. 4.12: Ateliers de Cinématographie, Plan du Rez de Chaussée, Auguste Bahrmann, August
1904. Archives de Paris. Bahrmann designed the studio with the stage located against the eastern
side (the top of this blueprint) to receive midday and afternoon sunlight. The processing rooms
are located on the ground floor to protect them from the light (and heat) entering the ateliers
located on the studio’s top level.

In addition to these concerns with regulating illumination, Bahrmann also sought
to create a versatile space that would allow for variations in filmmaking practice and film
form, including a range of focal lengths, camera angles, and set arrangements. To
supplement the possibilities created by the already large size of the stage, for instance,
Bahrmann’s design used large wheeled partitions to allow the annex on the studio’s
northern end to be used, alternately, as dressing rooms or to extend the stage. As the
Nouvelles Annales de la Construction noted, this variability would make it possible to

275

stage “historical events” on a grand scale.
446
The design would indeed have an important
affect on how the studios’ films would look.

Fig. 4.13: Le Statue (Guy, 1905). Henri Ménessier and Gaumont’s troupe of set designers used
the new dedicated facilities of the studio to create larger and more realistic backdrops, typically
painted in depth to create the semblance of enormous space in Guy’s new films.

Guy and her new assistant, Louis Feuillade, capitalized on these new spaces by
using larger, more elaborate backdrops that further accentuated the expanded space
allowed by the new stage. In films such as Le Statue, Guy created seemingly boundless
views that marked a striking departure from the comparatively enclosed spaces of her
earlier studio films.

Fig. 4.14: Clown, chien, ballon (Guy, 1905)

In other cases, the films playfully revel in the studio’s lavish size, reflexively celebrating
and exploring its expanded frame. In Clown, chien, ballon (1905), for instance, the

446
On the studio’s roof, an observation deck similarly suggested – at least to the Nouvelles Annales writer –
a potential site for “capturing natural, meteorological, or other scenes for science or historical curiosity.”
Revoalen, 34.

276

addition of a plaza scene painted in depth creates the illusion of open exterior space for
balloon-chasing chaos. Using its floating prop, this simple stage act probes the
boundaries of the new studio set, bounding from foreground to background, side to side,
and to the backdrop’s highest reaches.
The studio’s large size and set design facilities also allowed Guy to explore
complex arrangements of sets, props, and characters. In films such as her celebrated 1906
version of the Passion Play, La Vie du Christ, she stages fluid movements of characters
into and out of the frame through elaborate wooden sets with multiple levels and large
openings painted to appear as stone arches. Her new complex staging stood in marked
contrast to her pre-studio films, such as Faust, which feel claustrophobic by comparison.
Using these new architectural arrangements, Guy still tended to focus on a single primary
action in the center of the frame, but the increased space allowed for more action on the
periphery, where the pantomimed gestures of early actors and actresses often give the
films striking new degrees of dynamism.

Fig. 4.15: La Vie du Christ (1906)

277

In the new studio and under Guy’s tutelage, Feuillade also mastered this use of
depth, a formal strategy that would later earn him accolades in the Fantomas and Les
Vampyres series. As David Bordwell has described, Feuillade used sophisticated
approaches to staging characters and directing audience attention within the single
tableaux format. While these strategies did, as Bordwell explains, respond in part to
Gaumont’s later demands for rapid filmmaking, often on re-used sets, Feuillade first
developed his multi-layered staging techniques on the studio’s deep stage and its more
architecturally sophisticated set pieces, as seen in films such as La possession de l’enfant
(1909) and later in the “Scènes de la vie telle qu’elle est” series.
447

In addition to these formal developments, the studio’s technological systems also
facilitated other shifts in film technique. The electrical substation located in the basement
allowed Guy and Feuillade to more precisely control studio light by supplementing the
sun with a growing repertoire of diverse technologies for artificial illumination. An
unusual behind-the-scenes film from 1905 – Alice Guy tourne une phonoscène sur le
théâtre de pose des Buttes-Chaumont – shows the new studio and its lights in action, with
Guy directing one of the company’s early sound films. Two slow pans reveal large banks
of lights to the left and right of the stage (set before the same painted backdrop that
appeared in Le Statue [Fig. 4.13]). After signaling for the lights to be illuminated, Guy

447
See David Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2005), chapter 2. Bordwell offers a telling quote from Feuillade, who wrote that, “the
cinema proceeds as much, if not more, from the art of the painter than from that of the stage director, since
cinema addresses itself to our eyes by combinations of light and changing tonalities, and by qualities of
composition” (49). This attitude would be consistent with the studio’s emphasis on large-scale painted
backdrops and attention to deft studio lighting.

278

sets the Chronophotographe system in motion and begins the scene, a dance sequence
that utilizes the large stage to feature a large troupe of performers.

Fig. 4.16: Alice Guy tourne une phonoscène sur le théâtre de pose des Buttes-Chaumont (1905)

The film highlights the sophistication of studio film production that Guy put in
place within less than a year in the new studio. Using multiple banks of artificial lights
aided by reflectors (the large rectangular forms positioned below the lights in Figure
4.16), Guy developed techniques for creating even lighting across the stage. Such
measures were necessary to satisfy audiences who had grown accustomed to well-lit
studio productions without the harsh shadows that came to mark films as poorly made
and unrealistic. The experimental Chronophotographe system similarly required precise
control over the filmmaking environment to allow for the successful reproduction of
sound, an imperative that would eventually lead Gaumont to build a special sound studio.
For all of the radical transformations to film production at Gaumont that the
studio enabled, its initial setup remained consistent with many norms for the period. In
particular, the close proximity of pre- and post-production in a single building continued
the practice seen at smaller studios such as Méliès’s and Pathé’s studios in Montreuil.
Although the new studio streamlined these activities by organizing adjacent work,

279

storage, and improvisational spaces to allow for continuous shooting and rapid
processing, soon the increasing demand for films encouraged Gaumont to expand the
studio’s production capacity.
He quickly began to surround the giant glass cathedral with workshops to support
film production and the company’s continuing production of machines. The Cité Elgé
grew to include celluloid storage depots designed to safely hold film stock and prints for
distribution, and adjoining buildings soon housed ateliers devoted to editing films and
manufacturing small parts for cameras and projectors. By 1907, the studio had also
grown to include workshops for tinting and painting films, laboratories for testing new
coloring technologies, and additional facilities for perforating, developing, and printing
film stock. Rising electrical usage in these new facilities also forced the company to add a
second electrical substation.

Fig. 4.17: Map of the Gaumont studio complex with the original glass cathedral shaded red and
the additions completed by 1906 shaded green.

280

Fig. 4.18: “Vue de la Cité Elgé,” Detail. Gaumont Catalogue, January 1908, p. 159. Collection
Musée Gaumont.

The new facilities began to produce tangible results, not only in the form of films,
but also in the new machines, patents, and manufacturing techniques that appeared.
Gaumont filled the company’s laboratories with scientists, especially including chemists
trained in photography.
448
These scientists worked with technicians to replace machines
and techniques dating to the earliest days of cinema with new systems capable of
supporting the industry’s growth. Their products included machines and techniques for
developing, washing, and drying film prints, special boxes for safely transporting
celluloid, and machines for perforating and stamping virgin celluloid strips.
449
Modern
studio facilities not only helped bring these technologies about by providing laboratory
space for their development; in the case of technologies such as new automatic film
processing systems, the precise regulation of light and temperature in the new studios was
essential to the machines’ proper functioning.

448
Léopold Lobel, “Quelques Souvenirs,” La Technique Cinématographique, 100-101 (July-August 1950),
181-183, 182. As Lobel described, as cinema entered its industrial debut, it needed “a teacher [who was]
ready to make it benefit from science and experience.”

449
See Léopold Lobel, “L’évolution des ateliers de traitement de films,” La Technique Cinématographique,
100-101 (July-August 1950), 183-184 and G. Mareschal, “L’Évolution des machines à developer les films
cinématographiques depuis 50 ans,” Bulletin de l’association française des ingéneiurs et techniciens du
cinéma, Vol. 6, No. 11 (1952), 3-8.

281

As these technologies and techniques made celluloid preparation and film
processing more efficient, Gaumont added further structures to support expanded pre-
production, filming, marketing, and distribution. In 1908, the company added two large
buildings alongside the original glass cathedral: one to house a large new set design
department, and a second to serve as a printing factory for publicity materials.

Fig. 4.19: “Vue de la Cité Elgé,” Gaumont Catalogue, January 1908, p. 2. Collection Musée
Gaumont. The additional set design building and printing facility appear to the right of the
original glass cathedral.

Gaumont needed the printing facility, in particular, to accommodate changes to
the industry brought about film companies’ adoption of a new system of renting rather
selling film prints to distributors. This change in industry practice shifted the burden of
producing publicity to the film manufacturers, who needed to create audiences for their
films, both among exhibitors and audiences. From its artists’ studios and printing
facilities, the Cité Elgé produced diverse forms of visual culture – especially its Feuilles

282

de la Marguerite posters – that helped construct the meaning of Gaumont’s central film
texts in ways that prefigure today’s “convergent” new media landscape.
450

Fig. 4.20: “L’Homme de marbre,” anonymous, 1908. Lithograph print, 150 x 110cm. Collection Musée
Gaumont.

To facilitate efficient production, the new construction project linked the décor
building with the existing studio, creating a direct passage between the stages, the large
design shops, and the storage facilities, which grew to house large collections of props
and furniture. These storage houses again contributed to the films’ growing realism and
expanded storytelling possibilities by putting an expanded repertoire of tools for visual
world building at the filmmaking team’s disposal.

450
See the Gaumont exhibition catalog, Les Premières Feuilles de la Marguerite: Affiches Gaumont, 1905-
1914 (Gallimard, 1994). These studio products deserve further attention from film and media scholars, who
would do well to note the ways that early studios set the stage for “media convergence” long before the so-
called new media revolution. Such examples offer useful historical precedents for the practices described,
for instance, in Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press,
2002), and Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: NYU
Press, 2006).

283

Fig. 4.21: “Studio Gaumont,” Photo Album, nd, pages 12 and 19. Collection Musée Gaumont.

Any materials that could not be found in the prop storage rooms could be built or painted
in the set design and construction shops housed in the new building adjacent to the studio.
Beneath a glass-and-iron rooftop, teams of painters, sculptors, and woodworkers
fashioned the company’s film worlds in large-scale artists’ studios – the historical
forebears of the film studio now brought into its purview.

Fig. 4.22: “Studio Gaumont,” Photo Album, nd, pages 14 and 17. Collection Musée Gaumont.

Supported by these new facilities, Gaumont’s filmmakers grew into a large
production team sometimes referred to as the “Buttes-Chaumont School.” After Guy’s
departure to America, Louis Feuillade took over as studio director and was joined by
Léonce Perret and a band of both well known and now forgotten filmmakers including
Roméo Bosetti, animator Émile Cohl, Etienne Arnaud, Gaston Revel, Henri Fescourt,

284

Jacques Feyder, and numerous others who turned out Gaumont productions by the
hundreds.

Fig. 4.23: “Vue de la Cité Elgé,” Gaumont Catalogue, 1913. Collection Musée Gaumont.

In 1911 and 1912, Gaumont again expanded the studio’s shooting space, extending the
existing glass house and connecting it to a new sound stage to support advancing sound-
on-disc research and sound film productions. Here, Gaumont’s young filmmakers honed
their formal techniques, working side-by-side in the midst of the studio’s ever-changing
row of sets.

Fig. 4.24: “Studio Gaumont,” Photo Album, nd, page 27. Collection Musée Gaumont. This photo
would appear regularly in studio publicity, offering an image of rapid and efficient production to
stockholders and the exhibitors who relied on Gaumon to quickly supply them with marketable
films.

285

Cinema, the City, and Studio-Produced Realism
Gaumont’s repeated expansion of the studio stages up to 1912 reflects the
company’s focus on studio filmmaking in the pre-war period. While filmmakers no doubt
explored the area surrounding the studio, both for Gaumont’s actuality service and for
fictional films set in the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, studio-staged realism dominated.
When Gaumont’s filmmakers did exit the studio, however, the images they brought back
offer important evidence of how cinema’s relationship to the city developed beyond early
actualities. If, as film and urban historians such as Mark Shiel have argued, cinema’s
“peculiarly spatial form” made it ideally suited for examining urban space, such
examinations no doubt included the fictional films that made modern urban life one of
their primary backdrops and thematic sources.
451
Indeed, films like the ones made at
Gaumont in this period contributed to the development of what Nezar AlSayyad has
termed a “cinematic epistemology of the city,” a form of knowledge that took shape just
as much in fiction films as in their documentary counterparts.
452

Gaumont’s non-studio films made the spaces and technologies of Paris’s
modernization common settings. Much like Méliès and the Edison and Biograph
filmmakers described in the first three chapters, Guy and Feuillade were drawn to the
modern technologies and technological spaces found near the studio, including railroads,
bridges, and canals. Such spaces fill Guy’s versions of the common “chase film” genre,

451
Mark Shiel, “Cinema and the City in History and Theory,” in Shiel and Fitzmaurice, Cinema and the
City, 1-18, 5.

452
AlSayyad’s study of this cinematic epistemology looks only as early as the 1920s, beginning with
Walter Ruttmann’s commonly cited city symphony, Berlin: Symphony of a Big City (1927). Nezar
AlSayyad, Cinematic Urbanism: a history of the modern from reel to real (New York: Routledge, 2006).

286

which essentially required exterior filmmaking to satisfy its need for extended spatial and
temporal narratives. In films such as Une Histoire roulante (1906) and La Course à la
saucisse (1907), for instance, the modern mobility of rail travel becomes a spectacular
center point in the filmic mobility that came with the chase film’s edited linking of
disparate spaces. While the chase film helped inaugurate and acclimate audiences to
cinematic stories developing across distinct physical spaces and film shots, it did so by
presenting space as an often-chaotic morass of bodily energy pouring across the frame. It
would thus be fitting that Guy should make the railroad – a profound symbol of
modernity’s tension between technological order and technology unhinged – a constituent
element in the commotion of the “chase.”
453

Figs. 4.25-4.26: Une Histoire roulante (1906) and La Course à la saucisse (1907). Guy often uses
the modern modes of transport that lined Paris’s periphery to move characters through her
“chase” films.

In other films, Guy’s representations of city infrastructure recall Méliès’s more
fantastical critiques of modern technology. In Une Héroïne de quatre ans (A Four Year-
Old Heroine, 1907), for instance, the title character sneaks away from her dozing nanny
and into the Buttes Chaumont, where she begins her heroic afternoon by alerting police to
a robbery. As she wanders away from the park’s pleasant (if apparently dangerous)

453
Such representations of technology, as we have seen in Méliès’s films, offer a much earlier form of what
David Clarke refers to as modernity’s “dystopian alter ego,” which he identifies in films such as Blade
Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) or even Fritz Lang’s meditation on the modern city, Metropolis (1927). David
Clarke, ed., The Cinematic City (London: Routledge, 1997), 6.

287

environs, the under-aged flanêuse continues to solve modern “crimes” of another form.
She first encounters a blind man who has wandered precariously onto a canal lock gate,
rescuing him by deftly closing the lock before he tumbles into the trench below. In her
final heroic deed, she saves three drunken revelers by closing a gate that bars them from a
train barreling across the frame, only feet in front of the camera and the characters that
mirror the audience from across the tracks.

Figure 4.27: Une Héroïne de quatre ans (1907). The title heroine directs fellow wanderers to
safety at the industrial margins of the modern metropolis.

These fictional representations of very real modern technological changes fit
naturally in Gaumont’s broader repertoire of actuality subjects such as Le Patrie (1907) –
a short sequence of images documenting France’s answer to the Zeppelin – and the story
films that soon made Paris the focus of Gaumont’s renewed attention to modern urban
experience.

Figure 4.28: Le Patrie (1907)

288

Gaumont’s reliance on the studio was consistent with contemporary developments
in the French film industry. By 1908, filmmakers and the film trade press were making a
concerted effort to promote cinema as an art form. Building on formal techniques
developed in Pathé’s large studios and inspired by American productions, the new films
first focused on realistic historical dramas and filmed theatrical productions using stage
performers who rejected pantomime in favor of more realistic acting styles.
454
This
movement towards filmed realism also included films addressing contemporary social
problems.
At Gaumont, these efforts led to the company’s “Scènes de La Vie Telle Qu’elle
est” (“Scenes from life as it is”) series, which promised to transport slices of life to the
screen through new degrees of realism. Feuillade, the mastermind behind the series,
devoted its films to social commentaries, hard luck stories, and stories of corruption
starring a consistent troupe of actors and actresses who began to receive name credit in
the films’ title sequences. In the manifesto for the series published in the weekly Ciné-
Journal in April 1911, Gaumont committed itself to the realism of “people and things as
they are, not as they should be.”
455
Aesthetically, on the other hand, the manifesto

454
This movement is expressed most clearly in the emergence of new companies such as Film d’Art and
the Société Cinématographique des Auteurs et Gens de Lettres that focused on historical dramas and staged
theater. In France, its most vocal proponents included the weekly periodical Phono-Ciné-Gazette, which
had ties to Pathé, who sought to benefit from a shift in the legal status of cinema from entertainment to an
art form like theater. The “film as art” movement had parallels in other contexts such as America, where
Vitagraph’s “quality films” helped the company lead American production in the early 1910s. See Abel,
The Ciné Goes to Town, 246-77 and 302-25. On Vitagraph, see William Uricchio and Roberta Pearson,
Reframing Culture: The Case of the Vitagraph Quality Films (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

455
“Scènes de la vie telle qu’elle est,” Ciné-Journal 139 (April 22, 1911), 19. Translated and reprinted in
Richard Abel, French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 1907-1939, vol. 1 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1988), 54.

289

promised not so much realism as studio realism created through the “magic” of
photographers who made lighting and composition “child’s play.” This notion of realism
fit contemporary audience ideas about what counted as “realistic” – films in which
technical skill masked the visible artifice of cinema (e.g. poorly designed sets, harsh areas
of light or shadow, and overblown acting styles). The seeming contradiction of “realism”
built on the studio set also reflected the persistence of the studio’s paradoxical remaking
of nature first seen in Gaumont’s early painted backdrops [Fig. 4.8].
Although Feuillade set the first “scènes de la vie” in rural townships, the series’
commitment to quotidian struggles soon shifted to urban industrial modernity. This shift
would seem to suggest new cinematic attention to the city of Paris – and perhaps to the
realism of location shooting.
456
But while these films’ emphasis on greater realism did
often focus, at least thematically, on cinema’s urban environment and its “real life”
dramas, surprisingly it did not involve an immediate or extensive return to city
filmmaking. Instead, Feuillade continued to use models put in place in earlier socially
minded films such as La Possession de l’enfant (1909).

456
This attention to labor appeared more generally in early industrial films and, later, in the pointed
critiques of class relations that historians such as Steven Ross have examined in classical Hollywood
cinema. See Steven J. Ross, Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).

290

Figure 4.29: La Possession de l’enfant (1909). Brief location shots helped ground Feuillade’s
stories of urban life in its real spaces.

In this film about a child custody battle and the mother’s struggle to care for her
son without the financial support of his wealthy father, Feuillade transports the viewer
from one staged interior to the next (from the courtroom to a large bourgeois apartment to
a small flat) through brief exterior scenes that locate the story in the city. This strategy of
juxtaposing the company’s deftly staged studio interiors with real locations would
become standard in the “Scenes of Life as it is” series. Images of the city in these films
tend to be restricted to brief shots of building exteriors or familiar urban sites such as
train stations or monuments that offer brief moments of “real” settings that supplement
the films’ characteristic interior scenes.

Figure 4.30: La Tare (1911). Exterior shots locate the film in modern urban space.

291

By the mid-1910s, single-reel and feature length films such as the episodes in
Feuillade’s Fantomas and Les Vampires series gestured toward modern urban life in
another form. In these popular films, Feuillade used the same combination of realistic
studio settings and brief city interludes that appeared in his “Scenes of life as it is,” but
repackaged them as scenes of fantastical urban nightmares. In their depictions of bands of
criminals who terrorize the city, operating in hidden networks of power and corruption,
these films played to the exciting and frightening uncertainty of modern urban life taking
place just out of sight.

Figure 4.31: “Fantômas,” anonymous, 1913. Lithograph print, 160 x 120 cm. Collection Musée
Gaumont.

Indeed, this emphasis on studio-produced interiors reflects the ways that, as
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith has noted, studios allowed filmmakers to exert complete control
over cinematic representation, in this case by presenting a strange version of the modern
urban environment in which everything of note seems to take place indoors. As Nowell-
Smith argues, the built environment became something of a “casualty” of this emphasis
on studio production.
457
In the 1920s, filmmakers such as Marcel Carné and René Clair
would make this loss a battle cry, attacking studio-produced realism for its failure to

457
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “Cities: Real and Imagined,” in Shiel and Fitzmaurice, eds., Cinema and the
City, 99-108, 100.

292

capture the fleeting experiences of urban modernity.
458
Ironically, though, even Carné
and Clair continued to make studio realism the norm as they rebuilt Paris on large studio
sets just south of the city.
Even so, as images such as the iconic poster image for Feuillade’s 1913 series
Fantômas suggest, the built environment was by no means forgotten. Whether through
slices of real life or explicitly fictional representations of the hidden forces looming over
Paris, the city offered ready subjects for its urban filmmakers, even when they still
preferred to remake urban life on the electrically illuminated stages of their studio cities
within the city.
Conclusion
The onset of World War I in 1914 put a stop to filmmaking and studio growth at
Gaumont, which in the same year saw Universal City surpass it as the world’s largest
film studio. By the 1920s even Gaumont’s seemingly most advanced studio stages and
technologies – including the Chronophotographe system that had once promised to make
Gaumont the world’s first sound film company – had become out-of-date, leading to
massive renovations at the Cité Elgé. Powered by the city electrical networks that finally
arrived after the war, Gaumont slowly converted its glass-and-iron cathedrals into the
electrically illuminated “dark” studios that we think of today. The studios and factories
that made the company a hotbed of technological innovation and filmmaking prowess

458
See, for instance, Carné, “When Will the Cinema Go Down into the Street?” in Richard Abel, ed.,
French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988),
127-128. Originally published as “Quand le cinéma descndra-t-il dans la rue?” Cinémagazine 13
(November 1933).

293

before the war would soon seem like only so many square feet for business
conglomerates seeking to restructure and revive French cinema.
Gaumont’s attention to technological development did, however, continue
through and after the war, helping the company survive the halt in production that nearly
destroyed the film industry. In addition to aerial photography systems for warplanes and
lighting systems for the trenches, the company used its expertise in sound technologies to
develop radio transmission systems for aircraft and warning sirens for Paris. After the
war, Gaumont continued to supplement its struggling film business with research,
development, and manufacturing of sound systems for radio, telephony, and aircraft,
submarine sonar systems and automobile lighting.
The associations and overlaps between film and industry were not always this
complete, but they were far from unique. The idea of the Hollywood “dream factory
system” that appeared in the 1920s had roots in these studios, where efficient production
methods found architectural form, and in the real factories that underpinned the growing
film industry at Gaumont, Pathé, Vitagraph, and their growing competitors. While the
classical Hollywood studios and their interwar European counterparts would come to be
known for their massive sets and spectacular film products, as Gaumont and Pathé’s early
studio facilities show, filmmaking would be only one of the litany of “nuts-and-bolts”
practices that structured studio and industry development through silent cinema and well
beyond.

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CHAPTER FIVE

Reinventing the Studio in the Transitional Era:
Nature, Technology, and Spectacle on the Backlot

Some day, no doubt, when Time shall have granted a past to the motion picture
industry … a suitable tablet will be imbedded in a certain spot on the grounds of a
certain studio in Edendale, a suburb of Los Angeles. The testimony of the tablet
will be to this effect: ‘Here was Born the Great Photoplay Producing Industry of
California, June, 1909.’
- Los Angeles Times, 1916
459

For a brief moment in the early 1910s, the film studio’s architectural history could
be found in physical form nestled between southern California’s rolling hills. Between
1909, when the Selig Polyscope Company established the first production studio in the
Los Angeles area, to 1915, when Universal City opened a few miles north as the largest
studio in the world, the region became the site of a curious reinvention of film studio
form. After initially focusing on location shoots that dazzled audiences with western
landscapes, filmmakers combined these exteriors with scenes produced on new
California-based production stages. East-coast-style open-air stages and “glass houses”
quickly became the norm for west-coast studio productions and were soon complemented
by the hybrid glass-enclosed and electrically-lit studios commonly found in New York,
Chicago, and Philadelphia as well as throughout Western Europe. While the first
California film companies – which included Selig, the New York Motion Picture
Company, Biograph, Kalem, Pathé, and Vitagraph – did take advantage of the area’s

459
Lanier Bartlett, “How the Motion Picture Industry Thrives Here,” Los Angeles Times, 1 January 1916,
sec. III, p. 67. From its “certain” spatial vagaries, the article continues by more specifically identifying this
first studio: “For here, hidden away now between the big steel-and-glass studio and immense concrete
property-house of the Selig Polyscope Company’s Edendale plant, is the first permanent moving picture
stage built in California—the first footprint, as it were, of an industry which, in the six years since the
pioneer producing company of actors arrived from Chicago, has impressed in tremendous degree the life of
Southern California.”

295

seductively cinematic landscapes (as film historians have often recounted), they also
grounded their filmmaking practice in remade versions of familiar studio settings. This
chapter reexamines cinema’s westward expansion as a history of this process of
architectural re-invention and its studio products. The “birth” of the modern studio
system, it argues, took form through the combination of filmmakers’ efforts to find new
natural filmmaking environments and their adaptation and re-production of the
technological spaces of even earlier film studio history.
The well-documented migration of filmmakers from urban studios to neighboring
rural communities such as Fort Lee, New Jersey and brighter, warmer environs in the
southern and western United States beginning around 1907 came as a result of a number
of broader changes in the American film industry. From 1908 to 1917, a period that
Charlie Keil and Shelley Stamp have termed the “transitional era,” early cinema’s
practices of production, distribution, and exhibition gave way to forms and techniques
later attributed to Classical Hollywood. In 1908, Edison oversaw the formation of the
Motion Picture Patents Company, which led to the rise of competing independent
producers and distribution companies. This period saw an increase in competition
between film producers who sought to satisfy growing audience demand for new and
longer film subjects (which, in only a few years, grew from single-reels to feature
length). Film companies pushed to increase and accelerate filmmaking. In order to do so,
filmmakers rationalized studio production in large studio factories and left their studios in
search of longer working hours (especially during winter months) and compelling natural

296

landscapes that they hoped would appeal to audiences and exhibitors hungry for
innovation.
460

This return to nature was, of course, by no means the end of the studio. Rather,
the widespread departure from studio productions only reinforced the underlying tension
between the need for nature and the necessity of controlling it that characterized studio
film production from cinema’s origins. The subsequent return to studio filmmaking
would mirror the shift from exterior shooting to indoor production that gave rise to the
first studios more than a decade earlier. Just as early filmmakers sought consistent light
and shelter from rain, wind, and snow, the need for environmental control – including
protection from too much sunlight – quickly brought California’s new filmmakers back to
their staged sets. Ironically, in fact, the search for new filmmaking locations that found
filmmakers increasingly away from the studio played a significant role in the
development of a modern production space – the studio backlot – that would be the most
significant studio innovation of the transitional era.
As they set up shop in southern California, filmmakers mediated the tension
between the need for natural settings and the productivity of studio technologies through
the use of both interior studio stages and exterior backlot sets, the combination of which
offered a versatile, hybrid interior/exterior filmmaking environment. The backlot did not
radically transform the basic dynamics of film production: filmmakers had been
combining interior production with exterior shooting for years. But it did concretize a

460
See Charlie Keil and Shelley Stamp, “Introduction,” in Keil and Stamp, eds., American Cinema’s
Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 1-11.
Other key features of this period include: the instantiation of consistent codes of continuity editing and
narrative storytelling (in part due to increasing production but also thanks to consistent studio spaces), the
emergence of film stars, and increasing efforts by state authorities to censor and regulate film exhibition.

297

working solution to the tension between filmmakers’ needs for sunlit, natural-looking
scenes and technologically mediated working environments that would define Classical
Hollywood filmmaking in the “studio system.” Hollywood’s acres of backlots provided
predictable and controlled versions of the natural environment that filmmakers would
use, much as their painted studio sets, to fulfill the “heterotopic” function of creating, in a
single location, any imaginable (filmic) world.
461

The first Southern-California studios, like the buildings in early Western towns,
remained hidden behind decorative false-fronts, or architectural facades. However, as
studios became a permanent and frequently-imaged feature of the Southern California
landscape, the facades that hid their stages and backlots acquired new significance. The
changing forms of the studios and their representations in publicity and press photographs
reflected their changing functions and their increasing symbolic value. As studios became
“the studios” – metonymic substitutes for the activities taking place within their walls –
their physical spaces became not something to hide, but veritable company icons. As this
chapter shows, the departure from the studios at the beginning of the transitional era
would end with the studio’s “spectacularization.” In an ironic twist, the quest for natural
authenticity that helped bring filmmakers to Los Angeles would culminate, by 1915, in
the Universal City tours that made the studio’s illusionary quality cause for celebration.
Questing for Light, Nature, and Authenticity Outside the Studio
Cinema’s transition to Hollywood was a product of the same search for light that
drove early film studio architecture at the Edison laboratory, on the outskirts of Paris, and
elsewhere. As film historians have often described, from as early as 1907, filmmakers in

461
See Chapter Two on the “heterotopia” in studio filmmaking.

298

New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago began leaving their dark, cloudy homes during
winter months in search of longer and brighter daylight hours.
462
Even as artificial
lighting became more viable, solar illumination still produced a superior product, which
filmmakers, critics, and audiences demanded. Thanks to the increasing mobility made
possible by the nation’s expanding railroads, warmer and sunnier locales from Florida
and Texas to Colorado and California became alternative film production centers –
veritable filmmaking “hotspots” – for several months of the year. Taking advantage of
these new locations, filmmakers used studio-produced technologies and techniques to
shift film’s emphasis to natural landscapes that, like earlier travelogues and fiction films
shot on location, became popular among both critics and audiences in this period. Framed
by film technology, these natural scenes offered a respite from both studio interiors and
the artificial spaces of the modern city. Filmmakers’ exterior explorations would also set
the stage – metaphorically and literally – for the southern Californian backlots that made
nature a standing reserve for film’s mechanical reproduction.
Filmmakers from Chicago led the way in exploring the possibility of off-season
production. In the fall of 1907, the Selig Polyscope Company sent stage director Francis
Boggs to Los Angeles, where he shot exterior scenes for Selig’s one-reel production of
The Count of Monte Cristo (1908).
463
The next summer, Gilbert M. Anderson (aka

462
Other reasons for the move to Los Angeles included distance from the MPPC (for the independent
producers), inexpensive real estate, and weak labor unions. See Eileen Bowser, A History of the American
Cinema, II: The Transformation of Cinema, 1908-1915 (New York: Scribners, 1991), 149-165, Allen J.
Scott, On Hollywood: The Place, the Industry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 12, Robert
Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies, 67-85, and Steven J. Ross, “How
Hollywood Became Hollywood: Money, Politics, and Movies,” in Tom Sitton and William Deverell, eds.,
Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 255-
276, 257-8.

299

“Broncho Billy”) led a troupe from another Chicago company, Essanay, on a trip to
Golden, Colorado, where he recruited cowboys and began producing Westerns. New
York-based companies soon followed Selig. Fred Balshofer’s New York Motion Picture
Company came to Los Angeles in late 1909, and D.W. Griffith’s Biograph troupe arrived
in early 1910.
464

At the same time, Chicago, Philadelphia, and other New York and New Jersey-
based companies sought other suitable filming locations in the South. Florida, in
particular, attracted so many film companies that it became, in historian Shawn Bean’s
teleological estimation, “the first Hollywood.”
465
During the winter of 1908-1909, the
studio-less Kalem became the first company to send its filmmakers to Florida. They set
up shop in Jacksonville, which, as Bean describes, was a choice destination in part simply
because “the railway tracks from New York ended [there] at a grand central station” (a
rationale that underscores the modern character of cinema’s urban-to-rural trajectory).
466

Sigmund Lubin sent filmmakers along the same route from Philadelphia to Jacksonville
the following year (and later made it the home of Lubin’s comedy company). Selig
filmmakers from Chicago also arrived in 1910. Between 1912 and 1914 a litany of

463
See Bowser, 151, Kalton C. Lahue, ed., Motion Picture Pioneer: The Selig Polyscope Company (South
Brunswick: A.S. Barnes, 1973), 13, and Anthony Slide, Early American Cinema, Rev. ed. (Metuchen, NJ:
Scarecrow Press, 1994 [1970]), 28.

464
Bowser, 151-2.

465
Shawn C. Bean, The First Hollywood: Florida and the Golden Age of Silent Filmmaking (Gainesville:
University Press of Florida, 2008), 43.

466
The importance of modern infrastructure to film’s expansion should be underscored. As Tom Gunning
has pointed out, railway networks helped link even remote rural locations to the “topography of
modernity,” the experience of which was by no means limited to “crowded city streets.” See Gunning,
“Systematizing the Electric Message: Narrative Form, Gender, and Modernity in The Lonedale Operator,”
in Keil and Stamp, 15-50, 28.

300

companies including Essanay, Vitagraph, Edison, and Thanhouser spent at least brief
periods in the Jacksonville area.
467

Other companies took their operations to more far-flung locations. In 1910,
Gaston Méliès moved his company from New York to San Antonio, Texas, where they
briefly produced Westerns before undertaking a filmmaking voyage to East Asia. The
IMP company, which included Mary Pickford and later the director Thomas Ince, went to
Cuba in 1910, and filmmakers for the Yankee Film Company and Essanay ventured as
far away as Bermuda, Panama, and Mexico.
468

The films that resulted from these western, southern, and international tours
elicited enthusiastic responses from audiences and critics, who reserved particular praise
for their depictions of natural landscapes. As one 1911 review described, “It is this
element of the big out-of-doors with its sweep and freedom, that makes Western subjects
so attractive to the city shut-ins. Melodrama has no thrill to compare with the thrill of big
old nature.”
469
Such praise was common in contemporary industry criticism, which often
compared these settings with what came to be seen as dull studio-produced interiors. As
the same reviewer exclaimed, “How much finer is this than a narrow room with painted
settings and Jack making love to Gladys on the sofa!”As such critiques of studio
productions suggest, filmmakers’ voyages out of the studio fulfilled more than simply a
need for light or longer working hours. The primacy of mass-produced studio fictions had

467
Bowser, 154-5. Bean, 66-8.

468
Bowser, 156-8.

469
Nickelodeon V, 1 (January 7, 1911): 23. Quoted in Nanna Verhoeff, The West in Early Cinema: After
the Beginning (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 48 and 195. My comments about early
filmmaking in the west are indebted to Verhoeff’s intuitive analysis of the development of the Western
genre.

301

also cultivated a growing desire among spectators for a remedy to banal narratives and
dull, repetitive visual aesthetics. Nature scenes fulfilled this desire not only by providing
aesthetic alternatives to painted sets, but also by offering experiences of nature to urban
dwellers – the “city shut-ins” – increasingly embedded within the artificial environments
of the modern metropolis.
This fascination with seeing nature in motion, of course, was nothing new to film
audiences. One has only to think of Georges Méliès’s reported captivation with the leaves
fluttering in the wind of the Lumière’s Repas de bébé (1895)
470
or spectators’ delight at
films such as Rough Sea at Dover (Robert W. Paul, 1896) and its numerous remakes, to
grasp the early power of film’s technological reproductions of the natural environment.
471

Early filmmakers traveled the globe to capture such scenes, which included the southern
and western locales seen in such films as Royal Gorge (Edison, 1898), Old Faithful
Geyser (Edison, 1901), and Devil’s Slide (Bitzer, AMB, 1902).
472
Even as film
production became largely studio based, films of the natural environment remained an

470
Georges Méliès, “Propos sur les vue animées,” in Pierre Véronneau, ed. Dossiers de la Cinématheque
10 (Quebec: La Cinémathèque québécoise – Musée du cinéma, 1982), 17-18. A contemporary journalist,
Henri de Parville, similarly remarked upon the “trembling of the leaves.” For the Parville reference, see
Georges Sadoul, Histoire générale du cinéma, I: L’Invention du cinéma 1832-1897 (Paris: Denoël, 1948),
291. Sigfried Kracauer cites Parville by way of Sadoul in his own analysis of the Lumières and,
significantly, the ways their films opened on to elements of life “accessible only to the camera.” Once
again, the idea of nature made uniquely available to the camera recalls Lewis Mumford’s impression of
cinema as specific technology of the machine. See Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of
Physical Reality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997, 31. For a more recent discussion of the
responses to this film, see Nico Baumbach, “Nature Caught in the Act: On the Transformation of an Idea of
Art in Early Cinema,” Comparative Critical Studies 6 (2009): 373-383.

471
As Charles Musser notes, Rough Sea at Dover was “the hit film” at the New York premier of Edison’s
Vitascope projector in April 1896, and Edison would remake the film as Surf at Long Branch (1896). See
Musser, The Emergence of Cinema (New York: Scribners, 1990), 118, 180.

472
For a list of “North American landscape films” held in the Library of Congress’s Paper Print collection,
see Iris Cahn, “The Changing Landscape of Modernity: Early Film and America’s ‘Great Picture’
Tradition,” Wide Angle 18.3 (1996): 85-100.

302

important component of travelogue and other nonfiction film programs.
473
As Jennifer
Peterson explains, common names for these widely popular films included “nature
studies,” “natural scenic films,” and, most commonly, “scenics.”
474
Their “dream
world[s] of cinematic geography,” Peterson proposes, “simulate[d] the real world in order
to allow the spectator to leave [it].”
475

As Nanna Verhoeff argues, it was precisely this simulated escape from urban
modernity that attracted eastern city dwellers to early Western subjects.
476
As audiences
flocked to the realism of western landscapes, film companies sought to capitalize on this
interest by increasing western and southern productions, especially in the emerging
Western genre. They also recognized the utility of producing versions of the West closer
to home. During longer and brighter seasons, eastern producers took advantage of
undeveloped local landscapes to produce “Easterns” (historical films set and produced in
eastern locations) and “Eastern Westerns” (Western subjects produced on eastern
terrain).
477
Whether produced in California, Colorado, or New York, these films banked

473
See Charles Musser, “The Travel Genre in 1903-1904: Moving Toward Fictional Narrative,” Iris 2.1
(1984): 47-59.

474
Jennifer Lynn Peterson, “Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film: Education in the School of Dreams,”
in Keil and Stamp, 191-213, 195. See also, Peterson, Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and
Early Nonfiction Film (Durham: Duke University Press, Forthcoming). Peterson uses the term “travelogue”
to describe these films because of its continued use today.

475
Peterson, 206-7.

476
Verhoeff, 48.

477
On “Easterns,” see Nanna Verhoeff, 77-95. On “Eastern Westerns,” see Scott Simmon, The Invention of
the Western Film: A Cultural History of the Genre’s First Half Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003). Verhoeff deftly shows how these films contributed to the idea of the nation by reconstructing
the past (the “elsewhen”) through the image of the “elsewhere.” In this reading, the natural landscape thus
triggers nostalgia for the recent past of colonial times and the early days of the now vanishing frontier.

303

on the perceived “authenticity” of their natural locations.
478
As an American Film
Manufacturing Company advertisement proclaimed, these were “REAL WESTERN
PICTURES -- REAL WESTERN SETTINGS.”
The success of Eastern Westerns came precisely, however, from viewers’ relative
disregard for authenticity. As Verhoeff argues, to urban dwellers the “western” landscape
amounted, quite simply, to anything that was not the city.
479
As the success of
simulations of the West suggest, it wasn’t the western landscape per se that attracted
audiences, so much as any natural setting that could pass for the West. Filmmakers met
these desires by bringing the natural environment to the spectator in aesthetic forms that
followed the functions of film technology – the same cinematic enframing by which
studio filmmakers captured urban environments and international expositions.
Representations of nature, in other words, were no less technologically mediated
than their studio produced counterparts and were shaped by many of the same aesthetic
and technological considerations. As Scott Simmon describes, the first Westerns shot in
New York and New Jersey beginning around 1907 worked consistently to “reinforce the
landscape’s theatricality.” Filmmakers used standard setups in which “the camera [was]
generally fixed in place, actors’ bodies [were] filmed full length, and each shot [was] held

478
See Richard Abel, Americanizing the Movies and “Movie-Mad” Audiences, 1910-1914 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2006), 63-4 and Verhoeff, 96-107. As historians of early Westerns often
note, characterizations of the west as “authentic” or “real” were far from ideologically neutral. As Giorgio
Bertellini has argued, these representations of the natural environment – particularly in the picturesque
mode with which early filmmakers visually ordered America’s “wild” western landscape – promoted “a
contemplative, imaginative, and touristic mode of consumption that concealed power-laden, exploitative,
and merely utilitarian relationships.” See Bertellini, Italy in Early American Cinema: Race, Landscape, and
the Picturesque (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 98.

479
Verhoeff, 190.

304

for a relatively long duration.”
480
While this style, as Simmon notes, often reproduced
conventions developed in picturesque landscape paintings by the likes of Claude Lorraine
– “natural theatrical spaces open to the light and usually framed on the sides by
overhanging trees” – it also reproduced the basic strategy of the studio tableau. As they
did in the studio, filmmakers relied on their ability to quickly frame scenes in suitable
lighting conditions, a necessity that encouraged formal repetition and the emergence of
standard conventions for recording nature. As was the case in the studio, tight shooting
schedules promoted reproduction over improvisation.
As Simmon describes, these conventions changed as migrating filmmakers
encountered Western landscapes, a process that underscores the mediating influence of
film technologies on their natural subjects. Simmon recounts how D.W. Griffith, for
instance, struggled to find a suitable form for Western scenes, and that he and Billy
Bitzer often responded to these unfamiliar conditions by relying on techniques used for
eastern shooting and in the studio. In particular, Griffith and Bitzer used “iris lens effects
to limit the surrounding white space” of barren landscapes or simply steered away from
the most distinctive of Western terrain seeking “woodsy landscapes that could be molded
to eastern framing.”
481
Griffith later combined these approaches with new methods,
including higher camera angles that brought more of the ground into the frame (to reduce
the emptiness of the sky), long shots from high vantage points (again to emphasize varied
terrains over open skies), and the use of rock outcroppings and posed figures to anchor

480
Simmon, The Invention of the Western Film, 15.

481
Simmon, 41.

305

otherwise empty settings.
482
Filmmakers sought, in other words, to overcome, or tame
Western landscapes using familiar techniques as much as to capitalize on the West’s
unique or novel authenticity.
The construction of the natural landscape remained, moreover, closely linked to
studio practice. For traveling filmmakers, the studio remained an essential destination for
processing and printing film as well as filming the interior scenes with which they built
single-reel and feature-length narratives. For filmmakers who went west or south, the
initial seasonal travel schedule meant studio scenes simply had to wait for the return
home. In the east, meanwhile, filmmakers developed a rhythm of moving between
interior and exterior shoots. Nearby localities such as Coytesville and Shadybranch, New
Jersey became common destinations for location filming commutes from Manhattan.
Before D.W. Griffith began leading Biograph filmmaking trips to California, for instance,
the company regularly alternated between its Fourteenth Street studio and location shoots
in nearby Fort Lee, N.J.
483

Soon, however, even these short trips seemed superfluous, and filmmakers began
to take advantage of the available land in New Jersey by establishing studios closer to
their favored shooting locations. In 1909, Champion became the first company to
establish permanent facilities in Fort Lee.
484
This “indefinite place,” as a Moving Picture
World writer described the community, became an alternative studio center for
companies such as Biograph and the Willat Film Manufacturing Company (later renamed

482
Simmon, 42.

483
See Richard Koszarski, Fort Lee: The Film Town (Rome: John Libbey Publishing, 2004), 58.

484
See Koszarski, Fort Lee, 10.

306

Triangle). It also emerged as an outpost for a growing contingent of French film
companies seeking to avoid import taxes by producing films in America.
485
These French
companies, which included Éclair (1911), Alice Guy’s Solax (1912), and Peerless
Features (started by Éclair president Charles Jourjon in 1914), invested in large glass
studios that industry observers celebrated as the most modern to date.
486

Figure 5.1: Willat Film Manufacturing Company Studios, Fort Lee, NJ, 1914. Willat’s two
identical glass studios measured 60’ x 120’ and 52’ high. The facility included a 100’ x 150’
brick factory.
487

485
“American Éclair Studio,” Moving Picture World (October 7, 1911). Reprinted in Koszarski, Fort Lee,
100. French companies also sought natural settings for film production, both in American communities
such as Fort Lee, Bound Brook, NJ, and Flushing, NY, as well as in French coastal areas such as Nice,
where Gaumont established its “Victorine” studio in 1913.

486
Pathé also had a studio in Jersey City and made films in Fort Lee from as early as 1910. See Koszarski,
142 and Richard Abel, The Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema 1896-1914 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1994), 45, 52. Alice Guy established Solax after leaving Gaumont’s studio and processing
facilities in Flushing, New York (managed by her husband, Herbert Blaché).

487
See “Film Men Inspect Willat Studios,” Moving Picture World (August 15, 1914), 967. Reprinted in
Koszarski, Fort Lee, 153-4.

307

Figure 5.2: Life Photo Film Company Studio, Fort Lee, NJ, 1915. This 110’ x 68’ studio used a
cantilevered design to eliminate interior obstructions.
488

The construction of such studios suggests that even as filmmakers made
compelling vistas the basis for film aesthetics and emerging genres outside the studio,
they continued to fall back on staged productions. Interior scenes and environmental
control remained desirable, whether in the east, Florida, or under southern California’s
favorably cloudless skies. The quest for light, authenticity, and nature never entirely
detached filmmakers from studio techniques; rather, the further incorporation of
technologically reproduced natural scenes into longer narrative films (which also simply
required more locations) contributed to cinema’s increasingly holistic production of
artificial film worlds.
The seasonal exit from urban studios would ultimately find filmmakers in new
studios, especially as it became clear that southern and western locations would be more
than winter destinations. For their new infrastructure, filmmakers eventually imported

488
“Life Photo Film Corporation Completes Its New Studio,” Moving Picture World (March 27, 1915),
1945. Reprinted in Koszarski, Fort Lee, 98.

308

studio designs from New York, New Jersey, and Chicago. In southern California, in
particular, this return to the studio achieved a scale that would make Los Angeles the
preeminent filmmaking capital of America.
Remaking the Studio in Southern California
In 1911 the Nestor Company built the first studio in Hollywood at the corner of
Sunset Boulevard and Vine Street. As the first studio built in Hollywood proper, Nestor
represents the spatial and symbolic origins of the industry that would come to define and
dominate the medium’s modern narrative form under the name of the “studio system.”
Taken as an architectural space, however, Nestor’s structure was far from modern. In
fact, it bore closer resemblance to the first exterior production stages from cinema’s first
half decade than to the large Gaumont, Pathé, and Vitagraph studio factories discussed in
the last two chapters.
Studios in southern California progressed by no means steadily towards the
modernism of Classical Hollywood. Rather, due to a number of factors – including the
ephemeral nature of early filmmaking in the western United States, filmmakers’ focus on
location shooting, and the generally good weather conditions that made exterior stages
more viable than in the East – the studio would go through an uneven process of
development, reinvention, and adaptation before arriving at its more “modern” form in
the late 1910s and 1920s. This process helped shape the future of filmmaking (and
Hollywood) by making a blend of interior and exterior filmmaking spaces and shooting
practices common at studio complexes, where filmmakers split time between open-air
stages, glass house studios, and backlot sets. In order to trace the history of the studio’s

309

arrival in Hollywood, it is necessary to trace this uneven mixing of production spaces in
the early 1910s.

Figure 5.3: Filming The Heart of a Race Tout (1909) on Selig’s first Los Angeles back lot. Los
Angeles Public Library

Los Angeles’s first “studios” are emblematic of the return to studio origins that
characterized early staged filming in California. Studio production in L.A. began, quite
literally, on a back lot – the area behind a downtown laundry on Olive Street between 7
th

and 8
th
Streets.
489
Rented in 1909 by Selig director Francis Boggs, it would be Selig’s
Los Angeles home for a brief spring season in which Boggs oversaw the productions of
The Heart of a Race Tout and In the Power of the Sultan, the first staged fictional films
made entirely in California. In addition to this backlot space, Boggs also set up an open-
air rooftop stage built next door, where he directed a one-reel version of Carmen.
490
As
spring arrived, however, the company abandoned each of these stages and returned to
Chicago. The ephemerality of Selig’s first California production spaces reflects the logic
that guided the initial move to Los Angeles: driven by seasonal weather conditions,

489
See Bowser, 151 and Slide, 28. On the rooftop studio, see Gene Fernett, American Film Studios: An
Historical Encyclopedia (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1988), 210 and Kalton Lahue, ed. Motion Picture
Pioneer: The Selig Polyscope Company (New York: A.S. Barnes and Company, 1973), 32.

490
Slide, 28. On In the Power of the Sultan, see Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By … (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1976), 30.

310

filmmakers shuttled back and forth between their permanent studios in the East and what
were understood to be only temporary filmmaking sites in the West.
When they returned the following year. Selig’s troupe moved a few miles north to
Edendale (now between Echo Park and Silverlake), where Boggs built yet another open-
air stage. As a photo of the new site [Fig. 5.4] at the corner of Clifford and Allesandro
Streets suggests, the shooting area was nearly identical to Selig’s former downtown site.
Boggs and his crew simply built and placed painted backdrops on the ground, a set-up
that again recalls the very earliest staged shoots of the 1890s.

Figure 5.4: Undated photos of the Selig Edendale studio site and an early exterior stage. Los
Angeles Public Library.

Selig’s open-air productions remained the norm during the first years of Los
Angeles-area filmmaking. Even as companies moved away from the seasonal model that
made ephemeral stages a sensible option, they did not immediately seek to establish
studios like those in their eastern headquarters. Favorable weather conditions and

311

filmmakers’ initial focus on location shooting rendered large, elaborate studios a
superfluous luxury to which producers remained reticent to devote substantial resources.
Companies such as Selig did, however, recognize the utility of establishing facilities for
developing and printing films, a cost- and time-saving measure that made it easier for
filmmakers to remain in the West throughout the year.
Fred Balshofer’s New York Motion Picture Company (NYMP) followed Selig in
adopting this approach to west coast production. In late 1909, a site not far from Selig’s
studio in Edendale became the company’s permanent western home. Balshofer
transformed the lot’s unused wheat storehouse, barn, and several small shacks into a
laboratory, offices, dressing rooms, and an open-air stage. Rather than building a glass
studio, the company simply equipped its outdoor stage with muslin cloth shades for
regulating the sun, much as Méliès first had in the nineteenth century. Other open-air
California studios would use the same technique [Fig. 5.5].
491

Figure 5.5: New York Motion Picture Company Open-Air Stage, Edendale, 1909.
492

491
Robert Florey, Hollywood Village: Naissance des studios de Californie (Paris: Éditions Pygmalion,
1986), 111-13. Fernett describes the original structure as an abandoned grocery store. Fernett, 152.

312

Studio strategies such as the NYMP’s cloth regulators demonstrate filmmakers’
continuing need to account for and attempt to control even the most favorable weather
conditions. D.W. Griffith’s Biograph troupe used something similar in its first facilities in
downtown Los Angeles. Built at Washington Boulevard and Grand Ave in 1910, the
studio included an approximately 48’ x 42’ exterior stage equipped with a system of
vellum cloths on wires for filtering or blocking light.
493
Griffith concurrently shot
location scenes for films including Ramona, The Unchanging Sea, and Gold is Not All
before returning to New York in April. The journey west paid off, for as film historian
Eileen Bowser notes, “nothing made in Biograph’s little enclosed studio on Fourteenth
Street in New York could compete with such films.”
494
Griffith, it seems, was not so
sure. As the company prepared for its return to California the following winter, he
arranged for more permanent downtown facilities at Girard and Georgia Streets [Fig.
5.6]. This studio again featured an open-air stage, now surrounded by the offices,
storerooms, and film processing labs needed for longer-term west coast production.
495

492
From Florey, Hollywod Village, 111.

493
Florey, 25. This exterior studio may have been, as Fernett claims, another rotating studio in the form of
Biograph’s Dickson-designed Manhattan rooftop studio (see Chapter One). Fernett, 11.

494
Bowser, 152.

495
Florey, 26 and Bowser, 159.

313

Figure 5.6: Biograph Studio at Girard and Georgia, as it appeared in 1917 as Thomas Ince’s
temporary studio, still using muslin-covered exterior stages.

Alongside the open-air stages at Selig, Biograph, and the New York Motion
Picture Company, by 1912, Kalem, Pathé, Gaston Méliès (now returned from Asia),
Sigmund Lubin, and Nestor had established similar facilities in the Los Angeles area.
Kalem and Pathé added to Edendale’s growing status as the center of Southern California
filmmaking with studios near Selig, while Méliès’s studio (which would be taken over by
Lubin the following year) was located in Santa Paula. In Hollywood, Nestor’s studio
reflected the general state of production architecture that would continue through the
1910s: its main space consisted of a forty-square-foot raised wooden platform with a
network of wires controlling light-diffusing muslin cloths.
496

Despite the utility of these exterior stages – which never entirely disappeared –
companies also recognized the value of reproducing glass houses from the East. The Los
Angeles weather that seemed so perfect to seasonal filmmakers arriving from the dark,
cloudy environs of Chicago and New York was not, in fact, beyond reproach. Morning

496
See Fernett, 147 and Bowser, 161. On Kalem, see Slide, 35 and Florey, 87. On Pathé, see Fernett, 163,
Abel, The Ciné Goes to Town, 52, and Abel, The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900-1910
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 173. For Méliès and Lubin, see Florey, 88-9.

314

clouds, spring rain showers, and an overabundance of light made some form of studio
environment an asset for companies hoping to increase west coast production. Where
muslin and vellum cloths fell short, glass houses with shades, reflectors, artificial lights,
and secure storage spaces would succeed. The widespread availability and relative low
cost of land, moreover, meant that there was no need to choose one production space over
another. Indeed, most studios had both.
Selig’s became one of the first studios to combine interior studio production with
its exterior stages in Edendale. The company’s glass studio rose alongside its courtyard
stages, providing an indoor alternative during unfavorable weather conditions or when
special effects were called for. In a fitting description that underscores contemporary
recognition of the artificial character of studio production (and its relationship to
filmmaking in the natural environment), a 1916 Los Angeles Times article notes,
studios are now equipped with ‘artificial sun,’ largely for use in creating artificial
light effects, such as moonlight through a window into a darkened room, a glow
from a fireplace, etc. The rush of work is such at some of the plants that night
work is occasionally necessary.
497

Other companies soon followed suit. In Santa Barbara, the American Film Manufacturing
Company built its “Flying A” glass house in 1913 [Fig. 5.7]. The same year, the Long
Beach-based Balboa Company established its own enormous glass studio [Fig. 5.8].
498

497
Lanier Bartlett, “How the Motion Picture Industry Thrives Here,” Los Angeles Times (January 1, 1916),
III67.

498
On Balboa, see Fernett, 18-22 and Florey, 23.

315

Figure 5.7: American Film Manufacturing Company studio, Santa Barbara, ca. 1916.

Figure 5.8: Balboa Films Studio, Long Beach, CA, ca 1913.

Electrically equipped glass houses did not replace the companies’ open-air stages,
but rather served as a different kind of filmmaking environment. The addition of these
new structures offered more versatility to filmmakers who increasingly demanded a
variety of spaces to support their creative aspirations (in response to audience and critical
demands for innovation) and the market’s demands for rapid production.

316

Figure 5.9: Famous Players-Lasky Studio with exterior stage and glass house (ca. 1915).
Reprinted from Austin C. Lescarboura, Behind the Motion-Picture Screen (New York: Scientific
American Publishing Co., 1919), 159.

The coexistence of these two models of studio production juxtaposed on the same
premises also contributed to the development of a final key studio innovation of the
transitional era. By recycling familiar studio forms from cinema’s first decade, updating
older designs for their new environment, and adapting their filmmaking practice to the
constant shift between location shooting, exterior staged production, and interior studio
filmmaking, filmmakers arrived at the studio backlot.
Studios Beyond the Studio: Environmental Control on the California Backlot
The backlot would be the culmination of filmmakers’ competing desires for:
authenticity and reproducibility; spatial freedom and predictability; and the natural
environment and its controllable facsimile. These studio-like exteriors – outside spaces

317

where filmmakers could either build sets like those in the studio or return, again and
again, to landscapes that became set-like in their consistency – neatly encapsulate the
ways that cinema enframed the natural environment, transforming nature into a standing
reserve for technological reproduction. Responding to the same impulse that saw
filmmakers flock to the artificial (and prototypically cinematic) environments of
international expositions, backlot filmmaking made natural environments cinematic
showcases. Put another way, they made nature a studio.
Southern California’s varied scenic landscapes (and the rhetoric with which Los
Angeles boosters promoted them) attracted the first filmmakers and helped delay the
construction of permanent studios.
499
Either without fixed headquarters or fanning out
from their open-air stages, filmmakers would travel from site to site, storing up slices of
the California landscape to later piece together into film worlds. Some companies built
sets on these locations, perhaps expecting to return later (most often they simply
abandoned their remains after shooting). As Eileen Bowser notes, for instance, Angelenos
reported stumbling upon these deserted temporary sets while exploring Griffith Park.
500

Film companies established permanent facilities with an eye to maintaining their
access to these varied landscapes. They did so, in part, by making large fleets of
automobiles featured studio assets. Studio automobiles, which featured prominently in
publicity photos [see Fig. 5.10 and below], transported filmmakers and often large acting
troupes on daily regional commutes.

499
On the ways that Los Angeles boosters helped attract and retain film companies, see Denise M.
McKenna, The City that Made the Pictures Move: Gender, Labor, and the Film Industry in Los Angeles,
1908-1917 (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 2008), Chapter One.

500
Bowser, 160.

318

Figure 5.10: Mack Sennet’s Keystone Studio with automobiles (nd.)

As a Los Angeles Times article described,

Using Los Angeles as a base, the director can load his people into swift
automobiles and spin away over perfect roads to idyllic mountain canyons, swing
from here down through orange groves and beautiful gardens to the busy docks of
a great shipping port or a variety of beaches offering scenes that range in variety
from the teeming, Coney Island like gaiety of Venice of America to the lonely,
picturesque rocks of the sea-pounded coast below Balboa, or up along the
Malibu.
501

The article’s emphasis on “perfect roads” and its assertion that Los Angeles can even
replicate Coney Island with its “Venice of America” reflects ongoing efforts to attract
eastern companies. These and other references also suggest companies’ eagerness to cast
California landscapes as attractive alternatives. Describing such potential likenesses, the
article explains that the same director can lead his mobile film units from Malibu
“through the mountain passes to the (apparent) Sahara of Africa, the desperate desolation
of Central Asia or the storied wilderness of our own pioneer West.” A Paramount guide
to location shooting from the 1920s demonstrates the spatial imagination that lay behind

501
Bartlett, “How the Motion Picture Industry Thrives Here.”

319

this approach to location shooting. Southern California, filmmakers (and boosters)
suggested, could appear to be anywhere.
502

Figure 5.11: Paramount Studio Location Map (ca. 1926)

The ambition to creatively cast California as potentially anywhere in the world
(including imaginary spaces not of this world) was not a new development in cinematic
production. The creative geography with which filmmakers looked upon the California
landscape merely extended the spatial logic of studio cinema. From their origins, film

502
As Ed Dimendberg describes, “in many respects the material city [of Los Angeles] was a relatively
minor presence in commercial cinema during the four decades before the advent of the talkies. Studio
filmmakers rapidly became adept at making it look like someplace else and generally did.” See
Dimendberg, “Cinema and the Making of a Modern City,” in William Deverell and Greg Hise, eds., The
Blackwell Companion to Los Angeles (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 2010), 346-365, 349.

320

studios embodied the principal characteristics of what Michel Foucault terms the
heterotopia, a type of space resulting from the rationalization and increasing importance
of spatial relations in modern life. Defined, in part, as single places in which “all the
other real sites that can be found within the culture are simultaneously represented,
contested, and inverted,” heterotopias encapsulate the heterogeneity of modern spatial
experience by reproducing seemingly incommensurable spaces in a single location.
503

Just as the film studio staged such juxtapositions and offered a site in which to explore
their bounds, so the backlot – as a miniature form of filmmakers’ creative California
geographies – reproduced the unlikely spatial juxtapositions with which cinema probed
and transformed modern spatial experience.
As film companies sought to maintain their access to diverse settings by buying
up cheaply available land around Los Angeles, they reproduced the studio’s “heterotopic”
logic of limitless representation on the acres of privatized studio property that became
(Hollywood) studio backlots. The size of early backlots ranged widely from Selig’s
approximately forty-acre plot in Edendale to five hundred acres at Universal and Lasky’s
respective lots in the San Fernando Valley to Thomas Ince’s reported eighteen thousand
acres stretching south of Santa Monica.
504
At these “great ranches,” as a 1915 Los
Angeles Times article described them:
you are likely to chance upon big armies of cowboys riding madly to the
exigencies of a frontier tale … or glimpse a crowd of actors in quaint costume and

503
Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” translated by Jay Miskowiec, Diacrtics, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Spring,
1986), pp. 22-27, 24. Originally published as “Des Espaces Autres” in Architecture-Mouvement-Continuité,
October 1984.

504
Grace Kingsley, “Los Angeles the Globe’s Moving Picture Center,” Los Angeles Times (January 1,
1915), V146.

321

make-up for a tale of bygone Spanish days … [or] you may happen upon an
oriental village … or it may be ancient Greece … or you may find yourself on the
battlefield of the Civil War.
505

As another article describing Los Angles as a “Great Back-Drop for the World”
suggests, this celebration of the backlot’s malleability also included a temporal
dimension. These landscapes offered a space “where may be enacted … almost any other
land or time,” thus creating what Foucault terms “heterochronies” – “slices in time” that
trouble traditional temporal relations in the same manner as their spatial counterparts.
506

By extending the studio’s juxtaposition of real, unreal, and often-incompatible times and
spaces, the backlot prefigured and helped make possible film’s role in the modernity-
defining collapse of traditional notions of time and space. The resulting transformation of
“authentic” landscapes into studio technologies also exemplifies the ways that cinema
contributed to another key feature of modernity: the changing status of nature as
something to be technologically reproduced or replaced by its artificial likeness.
In their treatment as objects for reproduction, the backlot’s seemingly natural
settings became technological spaces. By buying large swaths of land around their
studios, film companies were able to store and preserve various versions of nature with
which to create artificial film worlds. Studio backlots provided filmmakers with the
predictability needed for rapid productions that were possible with painted backdrops, all
while also offering audiences seemingly authentic natural spaces. These studio-owned

505
Kingsley, “Los Angeles the Globe’s Moving Picture Center.”.

506
“Los Angeles Great Backdrop for the World,” Los Angeles Times (January 14, 1912), VI9. Emphasis
added. Foucault, 26.

322

spaces became preserved forms of nature – ordered natural settings framed and stored for
technological reproduction.
In their treatment as controllable facsimiles of natural landscapes, backlot
locations represented a cinematic version of what Martin Heidegger describes as nature
placed on reserve.
507
Just as, in Heidegger’s theory of “modern technics,” technology
transforms nature into a standing reserve for exploitation, so on the studio backlot nature
became a reserve for cinematic representation. Rather than seek out natural scenes,
filmmakers had only to return to preserved, predictable settings that functioned as studio
set pieces. Here, they used the camera to retrieve nature, as if from storage, for the
screen. Extracted from their surroundings, these slices of backlot reality served as ready
signifiers, both for real locations – Greece, Spain, or an “oriental village” – and for the
natural environment. Like film itself, the backlot acted as a medium for storing natural
scenes – a sort of stock footage not unlike the hours upon hours of snow scene recordings
that companies collected in the mountains around Los Angeles during the winter for use
later in the year.
508

This treatment of the natural environment as a resource to be stored for
mechanical reproduction fulfilled the same ambitions inaugurated more than two decades
earlier in the Black Maria. Dickson’s recognition of the technological utility of capturing
the sun for producing moving images helped establish a relationship between cinema and

507
See Chapter One and Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question
Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 3-35
[originally published as ‘Die Frage nach der Technik’, Vorträge und Aufsätze, 1967].

508
As the Los Angeles Times described, “it is a remarkable fact that even ‘snow pictures’ … are made more
successfully here in California than anywhere else. Every winter, companies of players … garner literally
miles of film of the most marvelous stormbound scenes for the entertainment of perspiring humanity the
world over during the summer months.” Bartlett, “How the Motion Picture Industry Thrives Here.”

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nature that continued in studios throughout the early 1900s and to backlots in the 1910s.
Cinema’s contribution to the human-built world’s artificial reproduction of nature
operated precisely on this dynamic of capturing natural resources, processing them
through film technologies, and reproducing them for welcoming audiences.
The transformation of nature into a studio setting reached its logical conclusion
when filmmakers transported their backdrops from the glass house (or open-air stage)
onto the backlot or simply built new sets on backlot sites. The expansion of the studio out
of doors pushed its productions to ever-larger scales and more robust (if still ephemeral)
architectural forms that were celebrated in films with life-like sets such as Griffith’s
Intolerance (1916). Here, cinema reached the pinnacle of studio realism through the
utmost artificiality – architectural facades without interiors. These building-less buildings
represented the same effort to reproduce features of the natural environment seen in the
first studios, adding only a new focus on representational realism. More importantly, they
mark the clearest expression of studio cinema’s place in the production of the human-
built world of industrial modernity. On the studio backlot, the artificial environments
created in the first studios became seemingly inhabitable cities that, when processed from
film to screen, bore virtually no distinguishing features from real built space.
Such practices did not, of course, preclude the continuation of a wide variety of
film production techniques, including location shooting in natural settings. But the
treatment of nature and the production of artificial built worlds that developed in early
film studios and later on their back lots continued in Hollywood and in studios across

324

Western Europe into the 1920s and beyond.
509
Classical Hollywood’s “dream factory
system” relied on the development of systems for efficiently storing up and reproducing
artificial realism, in and out of the studio’s walls, which, not inconsequentially, helped
preserve the mystery behind this illusionary reality. The studio’s growing exterior walls
became mirrors for the simulations taking place inside – like the backlot’s building-less
architectural facades, the studio walls served key symbolic functions for the emerging
film industry.
Representations in and of the Studio: Functionality and Symbolic Value
In this period of massive studio growth, film companies’ architectural facades
became exterior expressions of the same practices taking place on their hidden backlots.
As companies such as Selig and Nestor built new infrastructure, they also sought (often
quite literally) to construct industrial identities. Their studio architectures both served
functional utility and helped create symbolic associations. This strategy brought the
practice of advertising film companies through their studios (as described in Chapters
Three and Four) to a new level. At Southern California’s studios, the façade became a
key visual marker of corporate identity that reproduced the function of backlot sets. As
these facades developed, strategies for representing them adapted accordingly, and as
studios changed, they inspired new forms of representation that helped make the studio –
as much as its film products – a spectacle of cinematic production.
The first permanent studio in Los Angeles – Selig’s facilities in Edendale –
initiated this practice. After purchasing land for the studio in 1909, Selig wasted no time

509
The development of lighting technologies would soon make the difference between the “artificial sun”
and the real one virtually unrecognizable, eventually making the artificial version preferable, even for
location shoots (as anyone who has seen a recent film shoot can attest).

325

enclosing it within a wall designed ostensibly to provide security and privacy from
passing onlookers. In an undated photograph of the studio, just such a pedestrian watches
as an automobile exits the front gate [Fig. 5.12].
510
More curious visitors to early Los
Angeles studios reportedly went so far as to climb telephone poles for a glimpse behind
the façade at productions in progress.

Figure 5.12: Selig Polyscope Company Pacific Coast Studio, Edendale. Los Angeles Public
Library.

The studio’s terracotta-topped faux-adobe concrete walls offered more, however,
than simply protection from unwanted observers.
511
Selig’s Spanish Mission-style façade
borrowed from local architectural aesthetics – which had been influenced by the missions
at San Gabriel (b. 1791-1805) and Santa Barbara (b. 1820) – to project an image of
prestige and modernity. This increasingly common function of film studio architecture

510
See Fernett, 211 and Slide, 29. Allesandro Street is now Glendale Boulevard.

511
Denise McKenna points out that press articles encouraged curious readers to visit Edendale. See
McKenna, 55.

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made the studios both production spaces and symbols of industrial strength.
512
As studios
came to serve as metonymic substitutes for larger corporate operations, their physical
forms and visual reproductions became key representations of corporate identity. For its
new west-coast operation, Selig banked its identity on Mission Revival-style modernism.
As photographs of the studio such as Figure 5.12 demonstrate, the Mission
Revival style enveloped a strikingly incongruous modern form – the glass house. The
photograph’s precise matching of the right studio corner with one of the entryway’s bell
towers emphasizes the Selig studio’s contrasting architectures. This contrast recalls the
strategy by which architects hid modern designs and materials behind familiar classical
facades, most commonly in rail stations such as Paris’s Gare du Nord and New York’s
Penn Station.
513
Early California studios produced a compelling variation. Rather than
contrasting classical and modern architectures, studios such as the Selig Edendale branch
blended competing modern architectural forms.
514
Studios built by the American Film
Manufacturing Company at Santa Barbara in 1913 and two more Edendale studios, Mack
Sennet’s Keystone Studios (ca. 1913) and Norbig Studios (1914), used a similar
architectural model as Selig, making Mission Revival-inspired frontispieces a
recognizable early California studio motif.
515
The importance of the Mission style for

512
On Selig’s Edendale design, see George Blaisdell, “Mecca of the Motion Picture,” Moving Picture
World, 25 (July 10, 1915), 215-55. Reprinted in Lahue, Motion Picture Pioneer, 194-99, 197.

513
See Carol L.V. Meeks, The Railroad Station: An Arhictectural History (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1956) and Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in
the 19
th
Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 171-177.

514
Spanish Mission Revival was a distinctly modern architectural form that appeared in buildings at both
the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. See
Karen J. Weitze, California’s Mission Revival (Los Angeles: Hennessey & Ingallss, 1984), 51-56.

327

studio architecture tended to go no further than the studio’s exterior walls, within which
glass houses or open-air stages served the studio’s functional necessities.

Figure 5.13: Plans for the American Film Manufacturing Company Studio, Santa Barbara, ca.
1916.

Indeed, like the sets produced in the studios themselves, the importance of these
exterior facades remained more visual than utilitarian. They operated as what
architectural historian Reyner Banham might have described as the “fantastic garnish” to
the production stages’ “functional shell.”
516
Understood in this way, the studios represent
an early version of what Banham terms Los Angeles’s “fantastic” architecture—an
“architecture of symbolic assemblage” privileging the isolation of elements over
integrated designs, most notably exemplified by Graumann’s Chinese Theater (b.

515
On American’s “Flying A” Studio in Santa Barbara, see Fernett, 6, Florey, 19-21, and Kevin Starr,
Material Dreams: Southern California Through the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990),
267-8.

516
Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2001), 93. Original publication, London: Allen Lane, 1971.

328

1927).
517
Selig, Keystone, and Norbig, in other words, enveloped cinematic function
within Mission-style fantasy, a key signifier of the local vernacular style that fit cinema’s
efforts to create a suitable image for a new regional industry. In the minds of company
owners and architects, such symbolism in the new studios’ architectural features would
be key to the companies’ integration into their local communities.
518

Figure 5.14: Keystone Film Company (b. 1913, photo ca. 1917)

517
Banham notes that Graumann’s, “the ultimate shrine of all the fantasy that was Hollywood, kept most of
its fantastication as a garnish for the façade and the pavilions flanking Meyer and Holler’s generous
forecourt, while the architecture underneath is plain bread-and-butter stuff like the buns of the hamburger.”
Banham, 95-97.

518
Stephen Lawton, Santa Barbara’s Flying A Studio (Santa Barbara: Fithian Press, 1997), 47. Lawton
emphasizes the American Film Manufacturing Company architect J.C. Pool’s recognition that “its presence
needed to be carefully integrated with the Santa Barbara community,” a project to which they believed the
Mission-style studio would contribute. See also, Timothy J. Lyons, The Silent Partner: the History of the
American Film Manufacturing Company (New York: Arno Press, 1974 [c1972]).

329

Figure 5.15: Norbig Studios (b. 1914, photo nd.)

How the studios were photographed helped create a specific image of them. The
street-level, obliquely angled perspective from which photographers often represented
these facades allowed the viewer to see, especially in the photograph of the Keystone
studio, just how thin the outer walls were. Their adobe smoothness contrasted with the
industrial structures behind them. Such shots emphasized, perhaps unwittingly, the walls’
status as more surface than architectural substance. Taken from a short distance, such
shots also helped accentuate the studios’ perceived scale by allowing them to continue
beyond the photographic frame, as if a mere still-camera could never encompass them in
their entirety. These images provided the visual equivalent of the rhetoric found in studio
press releases, catalogs, and newspaper articles advertising the film industry’s ever-
increasing size, production figures, and success in its new California home.
Other companies produced variations on the Mission Revival model that focused
less on the local modernist vernacular than on producing prestige and spectacle. In 1915,
for instance, Selig hired the Italian sculptor Carlo Romanelli to design a concrete
sculpture [Fig. 5.16] to adorn the $60,000 entrance to his Zoo in Lincoln Park (which
would later become part of the Selig studios). As film historian Denise McKenna

330

describes it, “the entrance’s ornate Italianate style … declare[d] Selig’s cultural
aspirations. At once exotic and classical, the gate was designed to last and impress.”
519

Figure 5.16: Carlo Romanelli, Sculpture for the Entrance to the Selig Zoo, 1915

The fullest expression of this tendency toward architectural prestige and its links
to the film practice behind the façade, however, may be Thomas Ince’s studio in Culver
City (built in 1918). For his studio, Ince opted for the Colonial Revival style [Fig. 5.17]
with large columns and a classical pediment, which evoked power, stability, and prestige
through visual and symbolic associations ranging from ancient Greece to America’s
colonial heritage. Its use of this system of references underscores the façade’s symbolic
equivalence with the Ince studios’ sets and backlots, which no doubt mimicked similar
historical motifs. And indeed, Ince’s studio front would later become iconic as the logo in
the title sequences for Selznick International Pictures and a set for Gone With the Wind
(1939).
520

519
McKenna, 62-3.

331

Figure 5.17: Thomas Ince Studios, Culver City (b. 1918)

Studios that did not opt for the symbolism of recognizable architectural styles or
artistic flourishes created no less powerful symbolic associations in representations of
endless studio resources. A 1915 publicity photograph for Nestor’s Hollywood studio, for
instance, emphasizes the company’s fleet of automobiles that recedes, seemingly without
end, down Sunset Boulevard [Fig. 5.18]. The studio motorcade – represented similarly at
Keystone in Figure 5.10 – again implies the growing scale of the Los Angeles film
industry while also associating cinema with the modernity of rapid mobility (in a fitting
preview of and contributing component to Los Angeles’s freeway-bound future). Indeed,
few street-level photographs of studio facades failed to include at least one automobile,

520
See Fernett, 119.

332

reflecting both the reality and the symbolic value of cars in Los Angeles’s studio
production.

Figure 5.18: Nestor Studio, Hollywood (ca. 1915)

As studios and their backlots grew in size, new perspectives of studio
representation captured the grand scale of the film industry. In particular, photographs
moved away from street-level views to overhead vantage points. In a 1917 photograph of
Mack Sennet’s Keystone studios in Edendale [Fig. 5.19], for instance, the overhead angle
provides explicit evidence of the studio’s largesse that was previously only implied by
the oblique angles of early studio photographs.

333

Figure 5.19: Sennet-Keystone Studios, ca. 1917. Note the open-air stages with muslin diffusing
cloth covers in the foreground.

Studio personnel responded to these perspectives by utilizing a new site for a
secondary studio façade: the roof. As seen in Figure 5.19, for instance, not only did the
Sennett studios present themselves on the vertical plane, seen on the white façade to the
left, but also on the skyward facing plane seen on the roof to the right. These rooftop
logos and the aerial photographs that captured them would become a common
representational form for the Classical Hollywood studios of the 1920s and 1930s.
521

521
These photographs mark the visual confluence of two of Los Angeles’s largest industries: cinema and
aircraft production. See Philip J. Ethington, “Ab urbe condita: The Regional Regimes of Los Angeles since
13,000 Before Present,” in Deverell and Hise, eds., The Blackwell Companion to Los Angeles, 177-215 and
Starr, Material Dreams, 116-17.

334

Figure 5.20: Warner Bros. West Coast Studios from above (1932).

These views from above contributed to the perceived grandiosity of the studios
and to their status as sites that were just as visually spectacular as the films produced in
them. The studios, in turn, cultivated such ideas not only by advertising on the roof, but
also by literally making the studio a site for spectacle. As studios grew to the size of cities
and became “the Studios,” they invited film audiences behind the façade and into their
artificial film worlds.
Conclusion: Studios as Spectacles
In 1915, Universal City opened its doors to tourists, who were beckoned into “the
world’s only movie city.” At this “strangest place on earth,” visitors were invited to a
unique behind-the-scenes experience of the reality of studio production. Foreshadowed
on the cover of its souvenir guidebook – which depicts a Mercury-like giant who towers

335

over the studio, lassoing the globe with a filmstrip – the tour presented visitors with a
strange mix of the fantastic and the banal – from cavalry, roughriding cowboys, and
animal trainers to a U.S. Post Office, ice plant, and blacksmith shop. Like the tour,
Hollywood’s film studios operated precisely through this mix of the banal and the
fantastic, the functional and spectacular.

Figures 5.21 and 5.22: Poster for the Universal City Tour and Cover of the Universal City Tour
Guide (1915)

As Denise McKenna argues, the studio tour was, of course, a profit-making
enterprise, but it may also have been an effort on the part of film companies to make their
practices more transparent to a local community that remained skeptical of its new
industry.
522
As with the local architectural vernacular that some film companies used to
present the industry as seamlessly blending with its surroundings, studios tours gestured

522
McKenna, 81.

336

toward an idea of the film industry as a welcoming and beneficial new neighbor. These
two motives – profit and self-promotion – were of course closely linked.
Indeed, the studio tour banked on profiteering through entrance fees and the
future ticket sales created by further enamoring both local residents and visitors with the
movies. The studio tour worked through transparency – exposing the machinery behind
the illusionary effects of cinema’s studio-produced artificiality – the result of which,
studios hoped, would be to further ensconce their curious visitors in the spectacle of
cinema’s constantly evolving built worlds, physical and virtual alike. The heterotopic
place that was, at once, no place and everyplace became a place to visit.
The Universal City tour’s blending of the spectacular and the banal reproduced
the basic dynamic that studios and studio architecture had settled into by 1915. Studio
architecture operated as Reyner Banham’s “fantastic architecture,” through the interplay
of symbolic facades and functional underlying infrastructures. In their glass houses,
open-air stages, and backlots, filmmakers similarly strove for an operative balance
between spectacle, illusion, and realism that they achieved by reproducing natural
settings and realistic situations (and creating real-enough imaginary worlds). Studio tours
offered visitors a glimpse of the authenticity behind the illusion – the real techniques (and
even more banal day-to-day studio activities) that structured their silver-screen fantasies.
Even in unveiling the factory behind the dream, such tours only helped further shroud the
studio system in mystery by making the studio – cinema’s “dream factory” – just as
worthy of celebration as the performances and performers hidden behind its walls.

337

CONCLUSION

Not Just Dream Factories

And the studio, around which so great a skein of glamour has been spun, is after
all only a great Dream Factory, in which your dreams and others’ are woven into
a tiny ribbon that is carried half way around the world to be dreams for the tired
little shop girl next door and the rich old man in the mansion who has lost all his
own.
– G. Harrison Wiley, “The Dream Factory,” 1921
523

Nearly a century later, G. Harrison Wiley’s eloquently contradictory description
of the film studio – “only a great Dream Factory” – remains common parlance for the
buildings and industry that dawned in Los Angeles in the decade following World War I.
The “dream factory system” may forever, one might surmise, call to mind the assembly
line-like churning out of standardized film products whose escapist quality made them
fantastic dreams. But as this dissertation has shown, the “dream factory” metaphor might
be better understood not by looking forward to classical Hollywood’s golden years, but
rather by returning to the many factors that turned film studios into factories and their
film products into dreams in the three preceding decades. During this period, filmmakers
defined studio cinema as not simply a rationalized form of economic production, but also
as a technological and aesthetic system of spatial organization and environmental
regulation.
Whence the Dream Factory?

This study has examined the studio’s artificial spaces and the film worlds they
produced through three main approaches: 1) by situating the first studios in the

523
G. Harrison Wiley, “The Dream Factory,” The Photodramatist, vol. 3, no. 4 (September 1921), 21-24,
21.

338

architectural and technological developments that inspired their designs and physical
forms, 2) by analyzing the resulting studio architectures’ effects on film form, and 3) by
theorizing the studios’ and their films’ technological and spatial reproductions of the
modern world. If studio films came to offer a dream-like escape from the realities of
modern life, they did so first by reproducing the very conditions they were meant to
escape. Their films’ seeming distinctions from reality belie the studios’ recreations of the
artificial characteristics of industrial modernity.

Figure 6.1: Selig Studio, Chicago, ca. 1914. Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. One
observer’s description of the studio as “an enormous art factory” cannily encapsulates the
combination of industrial and aesthetic production taking place in Selig’s brick, glass, and iron
studio-factory.

339

It is of course no coincidence that studios took on industrial monikers during this
period. The machines and practices that produced industrial-manufacturing spaces also
shaped the first studios, even before they became literal and figurative “factories.” From
the technological spaces of the Edison laboratory to the modern materials used to build
glass houses and concrete daylight factories, developments in building technologies and
architectural designs provided the nineteenth-century conditions of possibility for early
twentieth-century studio cinema. By the 1910s studios were commonly recognized, both
architecturally and in their organizational methods, as factory-like. As a representative
1911 article about the Selig Polyscope Company’s “Diamond-S” studio in Chicago
described, “The Selig plant is an enormous art factory, where film plays are turned out
with the same amount of organized efficiency, division of labor and manipulation of
matter as if they were locomotives or sewing machines.”
524
But if cinema had become
just another kind of industry, its manipulated “matter” – film – was anything but a
straightforward industrial product. Studios produced art, entertainment, and aesthetic
experiences that necessarily bore the mark of the industrial contexts from which they
emerged.
Texts and Contexts

This study contends that film analysis should include greater attention to film
production spaces. Studios inherited spatial forms from modern materials and
architectural designs, and these spaces and materials helped determine the forms of early
studio films. As my analyses suggest, architectural space shaped film form in a variety of

524
Eugene Dengler, “Wonders of the Diamond-S Plant,” Motography VI, 1 (July 1911), 7-19, reprinted in
Lahue, ed. Motion Picture Pioneer: The Selig Polyscope Company (South Brunswick: A.S. Barnes, 1973),
75-83.

340

ways and to different degrees across studio contexts. The Black Maria’s unique
architectural design, for instance, produced a distinct, readily identifiable visual form –
what I have termed the “framed aesthetic” – that derived from its architectural function
(to capture sunlight) and reflected its roots in laboratory and scientific analysis. The
“imponderable fluidity” of Georges Méliès’s films, on the other hand, bears a more
conceptual relationship to his studio’s glass-and-iron form. Just as nineteenth-century
glass-and-iron structures fascinated contemporary observers by opening architectural
space to new degrees of fluidity, so Méliès’s studio films wowed audiences by opening
cinema to new kinds of spatial manipulation. The flexibility of Méliès’s production space
echoed the malleability of glass and iron as building materials, a correlation between
architecture and cinema that Elie Faure would later describe as “cineplastics.”
As Edison, Vitagraph, Pathé, Gaumont, and other major companies built larger
and more sophisticated studios, filmmakers and set designers built larger and more
realistic sets to satisfy changing audience demands. Architects such as Hugo Kafka for
Edison and Auguste Bahrmann for Gaumont facilitated these developments by using
modern materials to create large, brightly-illuminated interiors without columns that
would block shooting angles, prevent camera movements, or cast unwanted shadows on
the set. The flexibility offered by large stages serviced by set design workshops and prop
supply rooms helped filmmakers meet producers’, audiences’, and critics’ desires for
longer and more sophisticated narratives and more realistic styles. At the same time, the
growing number of filmmakers who left the studio to capture urban scenes and natural
landscapes continued to use studio technologies and techniques to frame the outside

341

world as if it were just another studio. And as the industry shifted to southern California,
all of these practices helped shape the development of film form on the studio sets and
early backlots where filmmakers replicated earlier studio designs and filmmaking
techniques.
As these examples suggest, attention to cinema’s architectural contexts offers new
ways of analyzing the development of film form, style, and content. This study argues
that it also opens new avenues for theorizing film space as well as film’s contribution to
our experience and understanding of the modern world. Architecture and technology
shaped early cinema, and cinema, in turn, helped shape the modern world in ways that
can be better understood by considering the studio as a key component of cinema’s
development.
Architecture, Technology, and Film Theory

Figure 6.2: Charles Gatchell, “Any Day at Any Movie Studio,” Picture Play (August, 1917)

342

Behind all of the diverse forms with which filmmakers explored and expanded
film’s spatial techniques, the studio remained a consistent frame, a strange physical site,
always present but rarely noticed in its film products. One way of understanding this
unusual spatial dynamic, I have proposed, is through Michel Foucault’s idea of the
“heterotopia.” A uniquely modern type of space, the heterotopia embodies precisely the
kinds of spatial experimentation the studio made possible. Studios offered key sites for
exploring the nature of modern space and spatial experience by juxtaposing simulated
versions of any and all real spaces in a single location. A 1917 cartoon parody of movie
studios – Charles Gatchell’s “impressions of an amusement factory as seen from the
ceiling” [Fig. 6.2] – makes light of such juxtapositions by ironically populating the studio
with sets that include: a working-class restaurant, a bourgeois salon, a rural den, and a
faux-Egyptian palace (while set designers paint the backdrop for a city scene in the
workshop below).
525
Such scenes of chaotic production and unlikely juxtaposition could
indeed be found on a smaller scale on “any day at any studio,” where filmmakers and set
decorators made imaginative recreations of like and unlike places the norm.
The unique possibility for producing, reproducing, and manipulating space in the
studio and on film remains important to cinema’s potential as a medium for exploring and
evaluating space today. As Anthony Vidler argues, “the architecture of film has acted,
from the beginning of this century, as a laboratory, so to speak, for the exploration of the
built world.”
526
Although the studios’ physical spaces have increasingly given way to

525
On the Picture Play cartoons by Gatchell and R.L. Lambdin, see Richard Koszarski, Fort Lee: The Film
Town (Rome: John Libbey Publishing, 2004), 192-7.

343

virtual software suites, filmmaking continues to be defined by imaginative creations of
space, and architects continue to use forms of moving-image modeling as fundamental
tools for imagining future places in the same way that filmmakers have since cinema’s
first “laboratory,” the Black Maria.
These creative spatial practices derived from the broader processes by which
modern technologies transformed Western cities into human-built artificial environments
beginning in the late nineteenth century. Architects and engineers altered cities with new
building materials such as glass, concrete, and steel as well as infrastructures such as
electrical lighting grids, water and sewer systems, and human-made parks. The studios
became their cultural counterparts: technological spaces that artificially produced
favorable conditions of nature for photographic reproduction. Filmic space offered its
own artificial environments as it recorded and replayed the ongoing changes to the city
for its urban inhabitants. At other times films captured and repackaged natural landscapes
for urbanites hungry for a version of nature outside the city. Such films offered a
contradictory form of access to nature – extracted and re-presented by film technology –
that was consistent with the ways that film studio technologies enhanced and reproduced
features of the natural environment for film representation.
Considered as an architectural technology, the film studio should be understood as
a key example of what Lewis Mumford and Martin Heidegger have separately described
as “modern technics.” Just as Mumford defines modern technology in terms of the
technological replacement of nature (synthetic materials for wood, brick, and stone;

526
Anthony Vidler, “The Explosion of Space: Architecture and the Filmic Imaginary,” in Vidler, Warped
Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2000), 99-110, 99.

344

machine power for animals, wind, and water; and chemical fertilizers for organic
processes), early studio cinema developed according to filmmakers’ progressive efforts to
manipulate, simulate, and replace sunlight in order to produce an idealized version of the
natural environment suitable for recording movement. Understanding the studios in this
way, I have argued, opens up an interpretation of cinema as a literal form of Heidegger’s
theory of enframing, the process by which modern technology places nature on reserve
and sets it before the human subject as a metaphorical image. From the Black Maria to
the backlot set, studios enframed nature in order to frame their film subjects. Films, in
turn, placed technological slices of the world before viewing subjects. As a “specific art
of the machine,” cinema would become, and continue to be, a key element of our
experience and so-often visual understanding of technology and technological change.
When understood, as I have proposed, as a system of interrelated machines, cinema may
even be the prototypical example of modern technology. This theory can only be borne
out through further attention by film and media scholars to how moving images fit in the
history of technology and by historians of technology to the importance of
representational technologies as much more than recorders and illustrators of
technological history.
Afterlives of the First Studios

In 1915, as Universal City welcomed studio tourists and a massive filmmaking
workforce, Gaumont and Pathé bid adieu to workers leaving for the warfront and made
room for war supplies which filled their vacant studios. Although World War I changed
the dynamics of the global film industry, it did not radically alter the film studio itself. If

345

anything, studios’ uses during the war only underscore the close relationship between
film and industrial modernity that developed during this period. Gaumont, for instance,
put its infrastructure and expertise in optics and sound technology to work in the service
of state-sponsored military manufacturing. The least surprising of its wartime products
would be its aerial cameras, developed for surveillance as early as 1916. But Gaumont’s
scientists and engineers also used their knowledge of electricity, studio illumination, and
sound recording to design spotlight systems for the trenches, wireless communications
systems for aircraft, and submarine sonar systems. The company adapted its production
techniques to military protocols and transformed its Cité Elgé into a literal military-
industrial complex. These practices helped Gaumont stay afloat during the war by
supplementing its comparatively meager film profits. In the war’s aftermath Gaumont
continued to manufacture non-cinematic devices even as film production became
profitable again.
527

The architectural forms and technological processes described in this study did
not undergo widespread changes until the 1920s, when advances in artificial lighting
technologies led filmmakers to cover their glass-and-iron walls with dark curtains and
pushed architects to replace glass houses with dark studios. The next clear breaking point
would occur with the widespread shift to sound in the decade’s last years, which
transformed studio architecture. That the 1920s should be such a privileged moment in
studies of cinema and architecture reflects the dynamism that came with these shifts in
studio architecture, the intermedial experiments that explicitly linked the two mediums,

527
In addition to its ongoing research into military technologies, Gaumont further diversified its industrial
output, producing, for instance, starters and lighting systems for the auto industry.

346

and the numerous critics who celebrated and theorized their similarities. This moment
can better understood, however, by accounting for the long and varied histories of
architectural forms and filmmaking practices that preceded it.
If, as Robert Mallet-Stevens argued, “a unity of conception between cinematic
architecture and architecture as it is really lived” seemed so apparent in the 1920s, it was
no doubt because the two were products of the same developments of materials and
designs in the previous century.
528
This is not to deny the real developments in film form
and representation in the 1920s, when architecturally-trained filmmakers such as Sergei
Eisenstein and architects-turned-set designers such as Mallet-Stevens offered striking
new visions of film’s potential to explore built space while classical Hollywood set
designers such as William Cameron Menzies and Anton Grot made studio set design a
modern art form. But those developments should be understood as part of a multifaceted
history of film’s architecturally-influenced formal evolution.
Many of the studios described in this study, including Gaumont’s Cité Elgé, the
Pathé studios in Joinville, and many of the southern California studios, remained in use in
the 1920s and, in renovated form, for decades to come.
529
Although film and building
technologies and filmmaking practices changed, the close relationships between cinema,
architecture, and technology forged in cinema’s first two decades remain key to the

528
Robert Mallet-Stevens, “Le cinéma et les arts; l’architecture,” Les cahiers du mois 16/17 (1925), 95-98,
97.

529
Pathé’s Joinville studios were home to productions for the Pathé-Natan conglomerate by filmmakers
including Jean Renoir, Maurice Tourneur, Jean Cocteau, Marcel l’Herbier, and Pierre Prévert. In Los
Angeles, Thomas Ince’s Culver City studio became MGM, X became Warner Brothers, as did the
Vitagraph studio, which remains a television studio today – The Prospect Studios – with the same façade at
the corner of Prospect Ave. and Talmadge St. in Los Feliz, only a short walk from where much of this
dissertation was written.

347

studio’s basic form and function. Even today, studios continue to be factory-like and their
films continue to be technological forms.

Figure 6.3: Rendering of Europacorp’s Project for the Cité européenne du cinéma, Saint Denis
(Jean-François Péneau/DR, 2010).

The relationship between film technology, architecture, and industry is perhaps no
more apparent today than in the project for French-led conglomerate Europacorp’s new
Cité européenne du cinéma in the northern Paris suburb of Saint Denis. The project has
repurposed an Electricité de France factory as the central structure of what will be
Europe’s largest film studio. This cinema city within the city – France’s answer to Italy’s
Cinecittà and Britain’s Pinewood Studios – will encompass more than six acres,
including business offices, the École National Supérieure Louis Lumière film school, and
10,000 square meters of shooting stages. As readers of this dissertation will understand,
the new studio will take its place in a long tradition of film industry links to industrial
architecture and municipal infrastructure. Film studios and modern factories shared the
common need for large spaces, efficient lighting, and power; they produced similar
(sometimes even the same) products; and they contributed to the same broad processes of
technological change. In large studios, cinema became a product not just of dream

348

factories, but of real factories, and their films made – and continue to make – the artificial
spaces of industrial modernity the realities of studio moving-image production.
Coda

Figure 6.4 [left]: Interior of First Méliès Studio, ca. 1945. Bibliothèque du Film.
Figure 6.5: Black Maria Studio Replica (b. 1954), Edison National Historic Site, West Orange,
NJ. Photo by the author.

The first American and French studios – the Black Maria and Georges Méliès’s
first glass house – did not survive the twentieth century, at least not as film production
spaces. Méliès’s studio stood undisturbed in Montreuil until, despite protests from
historians and cultural figures (including Henri Langlois, reportedly the most outspoken
of the studio’s defenders), new owners razed it in 1947. Although unused for more than
three decades, the studio continued to house a remarkable vitality up to its end. Between
the cracks of the studio’s forgotten stage, a burgeoning garden thrived under the natural
light that once exposed Méliès’s film productions – a fitting reminder of the correlation
between glass house photochemistry and greenhouse photosynthesis.

349

Not long after Méliès’s studio passed into oblivion, the Black Maria reappeared,
revived a half-century after its 1901 demolition. In 1954, the Thomas Alva Edison
Foundation funded the construction of a life-sized model of the studio that still stands at
the Edison National Historic Site in West Orange, NJ. No longer fit to house artificial
constructions, the Black Maria became one.
530
Ironically, the Edison Foundation initially
used the studio replica as a film theater, where Edison enthusiasts could watch 16mm
prints of The Great Train Robbery. Today, the Black Maria continues to serve as an
exhibition space in yet another form. British artist Lindsay Seers’s Extramission 6 (Black
Maria) – a video installation projected inside a reconstructed version of the first studio –
is currently touring the globe on loan from the Tate Modern, where it appeared as part of
the museum’s 2009 “Altermodern” Triennial.
531
Inside the scaled-down “studio,” visitors
watch a video that includes scenes of Seers building her Black Maria. That it should
become a reference for contemporary art – and a physical presence in museums and
galleries – seems a fitting future for the once-derided “ramshackle” building. As
architectures and technologies for what would become the dominant form of image
production in the twentieth century, studios such as the Black Maria played a key role in
defining modern aesthetic experience.
In the first studios, inventors and image-makers imagined and evaluated their
world – and their own practice – through a combination of building technologies,

530
An Edison archive curator used two photographs of the studio as guides to prepare three drawings that a
local architectural firm adapted and executed. George J. Svedja, The ‘Black Maria’ Site Study: Edison
National Historic Site, West Orange, NJ (Washington, D.C.: Division of History, Office of Archaeology
and Preservation, 1969), 32.

531
I thank Genevieve Yue for bringing this installation to my attention.

350

architectural designs, and image-making devices, and they continue to do so today,
whether on backlots and soundstages, in digital effects studios and software suites, or in
artists’ studios and galleries. The afterlives of Méliès’s glass house and Dickson’s Black
Maria offer a striking contrast and a puissant conclusion to this study of cinema and
architecture, technology and nature, and artificial reproduction: one swallowed by both
nature and the tides of progress; the other further fixed in systems of artifice, duplication,
simulation, and the spaces of modern visual culture.

Fin

351

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