Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Early film histories have a special taste for the new. We rank inventions above borrowings; we look tenderly at little things like trick films, chase films, scenic pictures, or early actualities, while often giving the cold shoulder to screen adaptations – not because we deny them their share in film history, but rather because, deep down, we believe that the former are truer children of the film medium than are works begotten of other arts. Our dislike of canned theater and filmed novels is akin to the prejudice some cultures have against illustrated books. Not that I do not share this taste, but I quarrel with its universality. I think that in our attempt to outline the trajectory of early cinema we too readily identify innovation with invention – two things that do not necessarily entail each other. Novelty is a relational and often invisible value. There are epochs for which the new does not associate with the medium-specific, as there were filmmakers whose sense of novelty was different from ours. In European film history such is, roughly, the spell between 1910 and 1920, a relatively quiet season in terms of conventional inventions, though truly innovative in a less-visible sense. It is with an eye to elucidating those elusive innovations that I turn to Yevgeni Bauer, the most resourceful figure among Russian filmmakers of the 1910s, and his 1915 attempt at a screen version ... log in or subscribe to read full text