Epígrafe 3. Emociones y salud.
1.3.2 Emociones e Hipertensión arterial esencial.
In Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show, the Josh character is a so-called ‘rube’ or country bumpkin; a stock character in vaudeville, comic strips and other popular media whose stories often involve him in a bruising encounter with modernity, such as with an escalator or department store. At the moving picture show, he believes what he sees before him is real and repeatedly approaches the screen in order to interact with its projected figures. When he tries to stop a screen couple from kissing, he suddenly encounters the material barrier he has been overlooking and, concealed behind it, a projectionist
From this description of Uncle Josh it is clear that the relationship
between the film and the spectator, which is one of the principal subjects of the present study, is a major element of the narrative. Produced in 1902, the film belongs to a period of early cinema characterised as the ‘cinema of attractions’ by Gunning.11 In Gunning’s conceptualisation, the cinema of attractions, with its
way of addressing the audience directly and showing and presenting them with sights rather than relating a story, establishes a ‘different relation to the
spectator’ than that of films after 1906 or thereabouts. The predominance of direct address precludes the audience’s adopting a voyeuristic position in relation to the pre-1906 film, which is what distinguishes early cinema from that of narrative integration.12 The present analysis of Uncle Josh aims to
complicate Gunning’s idea that the audience’s voyeurism was impossible in the cinema of attractions. I am far from the first to interrogate his formulation of attractions. Indeed, Gunning himself is careful to state that early cinema
needn’t entirely preclude narrative.13 Similarly, Paul Young sees Uncle Josh as
a ‘a transitional film, an attempt to mediate the historical tension between attractions and story films’.14
The present analysis of Uncle Josh departs from previous work by teasing out the brief that cinema seems to hold in the era as part of its
examination of the spectator’s behaviour. This involves a lengthier exploration
11 Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attractions’, pp. 381-8. 12 According to Gunning, ‘Now You See It’, p. 5:
Attractions pose a very different relation to the spectator. The attraction does not hide behind the pretense of an unacknowledged spectator [in this respect it recalls Thelma Ritter's line as Stella in Hitchcock's Rear Window – "I'm not shy, I've been looked at before"]. As I have stated elsewhere, the attraction invokes an exhibitionist rather than a voyeuristic regime. The attraction directly addresses the spectator, acknowledging the viewer's presence and seeking to quickly satisfy a curiosity.
13 Ibid., p. 4.
14 Paul Young, The Cinema Dreams Its Rivals: Media Fantasy Films from Radio to the Internet
of the eponymous picture show than is carried out elsewhere. However, it also revisits the question as to why the audience, in the form of the individuated instance of the Josh character, is made visible to such a high degree. Miriam Hansen argues that he functions as a ‘negative example’ for audiences of early film still learning a ‘mode of reception appropriate to the cinema’.15 Although
Hansen’s interpretation of the main character recognises his high visibility and importance, my misgiving about this argument is that it overlooks a tendency of contemporary films to recognise the comic potential of the diegetic audience as an attraction in its own right. Examples of such films include the Edison
company’s own in Rubes in the Theatre (Edwin S Porter), a remake of Lubin’s
Two Rubes at the Theatre (S Lubin), Trapeze Disrobing Act (George S Fleming; Edwin S Porter, all 1901), The Extra Turn (Edwin S Porter) and Two Chappies in a Box (both 1903). They all prominently feature lively, participatory variety- theatre audiences who are crucial to the comedies in which they are
represented. The Josh character is similarly the main attraction and his performativity is amplified by the theatrical setting of the picture show. A precedent for this is set in Rubes in the Theatre:
The film was photographed as though the camera were on a vaudeville stage taking pictures of the audience. Immediately in front of the camera and in the center of a group of seated spectators are two men made up to resemble country bumpkins. Throughout the film, the only action visible is the antics of the rubes and the other spectators close to them who are laughing at them…16
The Lubin film upon which this Edison remake was based, Two Rubes at the Theatre, presents approximately what is described above with the addition of an
15 Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA;
London: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 28.
16 Kemp R Niver and Bebe Bergsten, Motion Pictures from the Library of Congress Paper Print
usher who tells the rubes to remove their hats. Jokes originate in the rubes’ clothes, uproarious gestures and laughter and delighted, childlike engagement with on-stage events as they point at the camera (which inhabits the position of the stage they are watching) and subside repeatedly into giggles (fig. 1.1). Apart from that, their consumption of nuts and apples, use of opera glasses and the amusement of the spectators around them provide other sources of humour.
Trapeze Disrobing Act, Two Chappies in a Box and The Extra Turn are all Edison films which make use of the same variety-theatre-stage set as that of
Uncle Josh (figs. 1.2a and 1.2b). The two rubes who form the audience of
Trapeze Disrobing Act have long beards and eat apples in a similar manner to those in Lubin’s Two Rubes at the Theatre but they inhabit the box where Josh first appears and ‘begin going through antics, which to say the least, are highly amusing. When the stockings come off, the climax takes place. The Rubes jump from their seats and make things lively for a short time in the theatre’.17
The Edison catalogue quoted here – perhaps disingenuously – places
emphasis on the rubes’ actions rather than on the disrobing. In Two Chappies in a Box the spectators are ejected from said box for spilling the contents of a bottle of wine on the curtains (observed by Charles Musser as symbolic of phallic and incontinent excitement) and creating a disturbance while trying to attract the attention of a female performer.18 In The Extra Turn the three
occupants of the box demonstrate their approval of the first act, but are really there to make clear their feelings about the extra turn by lobbing missiles at him in the form of hats and cushions.
17 Library of Congress, 'Trapeze Disrobing Act', Library of Congress, (n. d.)
<https://www.loc.gov/item/96514756/>, accessed 18 April 2018.
18 Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S Porter and the Edison Manufacturing
Figure 1.1. Two Rubes at the Theatre makes a spectacle of rubes in the audience
Figures 1.2a and 1.2b. Trapeze Disrobing Act (1.2a) is one of the films shot using the same variety-theatre set as Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show(1.2b)
When regarded in the context of films that relish the comically rambunctious interactions between audience and performer – or theatre
management – the notion of Uncle Josh as educative on cinema spectatorship seems overstated and less persuasive. Such a didactic mission also
presupposes a kind of hypocrisy at Uncle Josh’s heart, overlooking how the film exposes the contradictions and complexities inherent to the cinema of
attractions’ mode of audience address. After all, the whole gag is predicated on the idea that such a mode of address – as well as the projected image itself – produces befuddling effects and illusions, regardless of the viewer’s intellectual
capacities. My contention is, therefore, that Uncle Josh’s problem isn’t
exclusively the issue of spectatorship or reception but attractions themselves. As part of this, I argue that the film is self-aware regarding the nature of
attractions, and critiques their de facto inscription of viewers as primarily sensation-seeking. I thus highlight the ways in which Uncle Josh’s comedy is indeed predicated on the audience’s voyeurism and so addresses itself
pointedly to a sophisticated viewer.
The function of the picture show and ‘cinematic voyeurism’
Before the protagonist makes himself conspicuous in Uncle Josh by breaching the confines of his theatre box, the screen is illuminated by a title card crediting ‘The Edison Projecting Kinetoscope’ (fig. 1.2b). Uncle Josh’s producer, Edwin S Porter, includes title cards while it appears – from the fragment that survives – that its British forerunner, The Countryman and the Cinematograph, doesn’t. Title cards in Uncle Josh are therefore a deliberate enhancement. They clarify the structure of the picture show as a series of machine-manufactured
diegeses. As such, they lend Uncle Josh a linearity, by signalling that the views presented on screen are discrete and discontinuous by design. They obliquely gesture towards the unifying artistic consciousness of whoever edits them into a particular order while being careful to signal them as separate items. Yet titles, like much in Uncle Josh, also indicate the dichotomy between narrative and spectacle. On one hand, they aid the picture show’s legibility as a diegetic or on-screen world from which we, the audience and Josh, are excluded. On the other, they address us in that they are visual ‘fanfares’ or presentational
flourishes like the seeming curtsies with which the dancer addresses the audience as she begins her performance.
The titles give the lie to Uncle Josh’s appearing to be a single-shot film. In this connection, they relate to an evolution in the use of camera trickery. In the two Uncle Josh films made by Porter before the present case study – Uncle Josh’s Nightmare and Uncle Josh in a Spooky Hotel (both 1900) – we are entertained by the protagonist’s being tormented by elusive devils and ghosts who escape capture by means of substitution splicing. In other words, the appearance and disappearance of figures – through blatant substitution splicing – is the highly visible source of Josh’s antagonism. Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show employs the technique somewhat differently. Substitution splicing allows intradiegetic films to succeed each other smoothly at first. When Josh tears the screen down, it makes the screen materialise and stages the dramatic revelation of the projectionist. In other words, it is used to create and maintain, for some duration, the reality of the diegetic picture show. It is equally used to destroy it. Yet overall, it doesn’t draw attention to itself as a technique, as in the other Uncle Josh films, through its presentation of the laws of nature being defied. Rather, it reveals what is, notionally, always behind the screen. Therefore, in the present and latest Uncle Josh film (Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show), substitution splicing’s functions involve its disguise, as a
technique, for the greater part of the film, rather than its naked display. In short, titles ‘describe’ or delineate the screen, and the cinematic machinery as a
whole, as an internal contiguous diegesis that eventually disintegrates with the removal of the screen.
This more sophisticated and subtle deployment of camera trickery in a film staging a picture show reflects the fact that exhibitors were among the first to carry out film-editing related functions, as Musser has shown.19 Exhibitors
produced picture shows by assembling lengths of film and incorporating
elements such as magic lantern slides, a lecture, narrator or music. The initial title card enunciates this conflation of cinematic projection and film production by seeming to credit the projecting kinetoscope with the authorship of the show. Since Josh’s foolish behaviour and misinterpretations are also integral to the show, we might even think of him in connection with the occasional narrator used during the exhibition of early film whose function was to ensure it ‘went over’. When regarded in isolation, the individual cinematic attractions portrayed in Uncle Josh do indeed conform to Gunning’s broad characterisation of them in his various writings. However, Uncle Josh itself, assisted by title cards,
represents the ways in which a picture show might be narrativised through editing. Title cards and Josh as intradiegetic ‘narrator’ are two devices that point towards the attempt to integrate spectacle into an overarching structure, if not a narrative.
Josh’s naivety as a spectator is a highly entertaining facet of Uncle Josh. However, this characteristic is, in some respects, mirrored in the inclusion of ‘Parisian Dancer’ in the picture show. ‘Parisian Dancer’, which doesn’t appear to have survived, or to have been documented, as a film independent of Uncle Josh,20 recalls a period in the Edison company’s film production in which
demand was partly met by recording variety acts at the ‘Black Maria’ studio, an activity which was at its peak between 1894 and 1897. This phase was in the recent past when Uncle Josh was copyrighted in January 1902. By then, the
20 No film entitled Parisian Dancer is listed in Niver’s and Bergsten's account of the Library of
Congress' paper print collection or in Charles Musser, Edison Motion Pictures, 1890-1900: An Annotated Filmography (Gemona (UD) Italy: Giornate del cinema muto, 1997). Nor have I been able to find any description of a film that might match ‘Parisian Dancer’ in Niver and Bergsten, Musser or via the Library of Congress’ online catalogue. The provenance of the film can therefore only be a matter of speculation, though its look very much suggests its having been filmed at Edison’s Black Maria studio.
studio that replaced the Black Maria had already been functional for a year or two.21 The sparse black background against which the dancer performs the
cancan provides a typical example of the aesthetic created by the original Black Maria studio (figs. 1.3a and 1.3b). Since the Black Maria was the original
crucible for an experimentation with film that would facilitate the commercial exploitation of the (non-projecting) kinetoscope, its appearance within Uncle Josh recollects past practice, despite the fact that the history of the filmic medium was extremely short at the turn of the century. Although Josh’s foolishly dancing along is undoubtedly the principal butt of the joke, it is
interesting that a film visually connected to Edison’s early days of production is the one charged with leading the protagonist into error. In Josh’s embodying what might have been imagined as the behaviour of the first audiences ever to encounter moving pictures, he might be said to find his counterpart, in filmic terms, in a product of the first phase of Edison film production like ‘Parisian Dancer’.
Figures 1.3a and 1.3b. Amy Muller (William Heise, 1896) (1.3a) illustrates the aesthetic of films shot in the Black Maria studio, as does ‘Parisian Dancer’ in Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show(1.3b)
With its mention of Paris, the title card of ‘Parisian Dancer’ exceeds its overt function to introduce the film by encouraging our recognition of the cancan, a dance which, wherever performed or displayed, solicits arousal but not the sort of participation entered into by Josh. As far as this is concerned, his attempted interaction with the dancer is more interesting than discussion of
Uncle Josh generally allows, as he clearly interprets the dance as a species of jig. Aside from the obstacle of his want of a skirt to veil whatever he might have to reveal beneath, he doesn’t cancan so much as spring about, swinging his arms as well as his legs (fig. 1.3b). ‘Parisian Dancer’ exacerbates Josh’s ignorance via misleading visual cues as well as its direct address. Its framing reproduces the dancer on screen as a life-size figure. Her frontal orientation encourages Josh’s belief in her issue of an invitation which he answers in the affirmative. Josh’s interaction with ‘Parisian Dancer’ exposes the contradictory effects created by films characteristic of the attractions era. On the one hand, the dancer’s frontal orientation is a form of audience address. On the other, her performativity defers active solicitation of the audience and functions to
modulate the manner in which her dance is received. In other words, Josh’s confusion excavates the contradictory ways in which attractions function.
Within the diegesis, Josh’s ‘partnering’ the dancer dissolves the
spectatorial relationship between viewer and object that exists between himself and the figuration. This entails his making a spectacle of himself to rival that of the dance. His comedic misinterpretation somewhat dilutes the dancer’s display of sexuality. His dancing doesn’t, therefore, limit the joke to one about his failure to recognise a figure traced in light. He also overlooks what the title card initially helps to establish about the dance’s purposes: its provocation of scopophilia. Rather than Josh’s refusal to objectify the dancer being a feminist
gesture, it is the result of his desire to attract her attention and, perhaps, to penetrate her personal sphere. Secondly, the effect of his actions is to
commandeer some of the attention that might normally be the preserve of the film alone. This undercutting of ‘Parisian Dancer’ also repackages the cancan as faintly ridiculous; or, at least, as not to be taken wholly seriously.
In discussing another film in which women’s legs are exposed, What Demoralized the Barbershop (1901), Musser points out that the film grants the spectator the same titillating view as the men in the shop. It ‘suggests the superiority of cinematic voyeurism; film spectators can look from the unhumiliating comfort of their seats’.22 Similarly, we can enjoy Josh’s
humiliation from the comfort of ours, and one of our pleasures is our appreciation of ‘Parisian Dancer’ on levels from which the protagonist is disbarred by his naivety.
‘Parisian Dancer’ thus produces, for our entertainment, two dancers including Josh. Their equivalence in our eyes functions in several ways. Firstly, it underscores Josh’s lack of knowledge and our superiority to him in terms of our competence as an audience. It thereby highlights what Musser calls our ‘cinematic voyeurism’. Yet the film in the film includes cues that anticipate and encourage Josh’s mistake. His juxtaposition with the dancer allows us to perceive this and to perceive that the relationship between intradiegetic viewer and film is characterised by naivety on both sides.