© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved
Early cinema as child: historical metaphor and European cinephilia in Lumière & Company
Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow. He is editor of Asian Cinemas: a Reader and Guide (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2006) and author of the monograph Popular Cinemas of Europe: Studies of Texts, Contexts and Frameworks (Continuum, 2002). He sits on the advisory boards of Screen and Portal
The essay discusses some of the discursive peculiarities of the use of childhood as historical metaphor employed regularly in conceptualizations of the early period of cinema. The film Lumière & Company provides the frame of reference of the essay. Made in 1995 the film consists of forty short pieces directed by well-known directors from around the world and shot with a restored cinematograph. The essay identifies a child–adult relation as structuring the historical perspective of the film. Textual analysis reveals profound ambivalence in the project of the film, which was part of European commemorations of the 100th anniversary of the ‘birth’ of cinema. The celebration of early cinema, that is the declared objective of the film, goes hand-in-hand with an implicit critique of the naivete of a cinema of display and attractions, echoing in this way European attitudes to childhood. Furthermore, the majority of the handful of non-European directors participating, seem to challenge the position of ‘fathers of cinema’ attributed to the Lumière brothers by asserting their difference and implicitly foregrounding their exclusion from a late nineteenth-century, white, middle-class and European cultural form. The essay concludes by examining these ambivalences in the light of specifically European anxieties about the nature of cinema in the 1990s.