Body Shots:
Early Cinema's Incarnations
by Jonathan Auerbach
University of California Press, Berkeley,
CA, 2007
214 pp., illus. 17 b/w. Paper, $24.95,
£14.95
ISBN: 978-0-520-25293-6.
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University
mosher@svsu.edu
The early years of the cinema remain fascinating,
and author Auerbach has collected and
analyzed some significant movies in the
medium's first decade. In 1896 William
McKinley conducted the first cinema-enabled
campaign to be elected President of the
United States, for short silent films
of him at his Ohio home were shown nationally.
He might walk around in his front yard,
meet a visitor purported to bring news
of his successful campaign, and merely
look grave and presidential. Not only
did this allow him to be at home with
his sickly wife, but affirmed the wisdom
of his brother Abner's investment in Thomas
Edison's movie production company. Republican
newspapers would advertise and tout the
showings as a major political event, one
that dwarfed a personal appearance by
the Democratic candidate William Jennings
Bryan. When McKinley was assassinated
in 1901, a movie was quickly rushed into
production that re-enacted the electrocution
of his assassin Leon Czolgosz.
Though lacking the exploding automobiles
that seem mandatory in today's adventure
films, robust chase scenes enlivened early
movies too. "The Escaped Lunatic" (1903)
had a great title worthy of revival, and
a protagonist who returned to leap three
stories back into the window of the asylum.
"Dix Femmes pour un Mari" (1905) was a
French vignette of ten women pursuing
a single potential husband; its nuptial
pandemonium was evoked for later generations
in the Three Stooges' "Brideless Groom"
(1947). In the short 1901 comedy "The
Big Swallow", a pestering, proto-paparazzo
"camera fiend" is swallowed by his photographic
subject's gaping mouth. Like the 1894
"Edison Kinetoscope Filmed Record of a
Sneeze", or the 1896 filmed kiss upon
the lips of the vaudeville actress May
Irwin, such facial activity implies vocal
sounds even though film was then a silent
medium. Auerbach's chapter on vocal gesture
here draws upon Jonathan Sterne's work
on early audio recording for its technological
context.
The late Norman Mailer noted, during the
filming of his own film "Maidstone" in
the 1960s, that the relationship between
death and cinema was worthy of further
exploration. Auerbach compares a dead
cop on the street in "Daring Daylight
Burglary" (1903) to Eduard Manet's painting
"Dead Toreador" (1864). Yet perhaps an
appropriate response to cinematic eye
might be that of the young boy who stares
towards the camera through the duration
of the short fiction film "What Happened
on Twenty-Third Street, New York City"
(1901): a certain skepticism that punctures
the self-conscious, staged activity of
the entire filmed spectacle.