Itinerant cinema and the moving image of modernism’s borders

• Main Author: Riordan, Kevin
• Other Authors: School of Humanities
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2020
• Subjects: Humanities::Language::English; French Cinema; Border Studies
• Online Access: https://affirmationsmodern.com/articles/5/; https://hdl.handle.net/10356/143759
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The film historian Jacques Rittaud-Hutinet argues that early cinema’s itinerant projectionists, without their quite knowing it at the time, were responsible for “a new sensibility […] a new art and, above all, a new way of seeing.”[1] More than the medium’s much-heralded inventors, these men were, for Rittaud-Hutinet and others, the real pioneers. They captured the world on film, and then they captured the world’s attention by screening those films. As they traveled the world in the 1890s, these pioneers improvised many of cinema’s most foundational practices—what David Rodowick calls its “automatisms”—and these practices have since survived cinema’s so-called death.[2] While histories of cinema have addressed the contributions of these itinerant projectionists, modernist studies has largely neglected them. Yet amid the dusty reels and sensational origin stories of early cinema, these projectionists, technicians, promoters, filmmakers, and showmen produced the broader and enduring cinematic imagination—with all its figurative jump cuts, dissolves, and montages—that informed, and still informs, modernism. These men were responsible, in a very concrete sense, for the circulation of modernist objects, ideas, and practices across borders.