Woof, Warp, History

Lee Grieveson

Cinema Journal, 44, Number 1, Fall 2004, pp. 119-126 (Article)

Published by Michigan Publishing

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2004.0046

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/176098

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 “Linearity, Materialism, and the Study of Early American Cinema,” Wide Angle 5, no.
3 (1983): 5, in which they mention not only the emphasis on “firsts” but the organiza-
tion of historical accounts that follow the “decisive” actions of individuals who then
influence outcomes.
18. Paolo Cherchi-Usai, “The Philosophy of Film History,” Film History 6 (1994): 4.
19. See Jane Gaines, “First Fictions,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 30,
no. 1 (forthcoming).
20. Gunnar Iverson, “Sisters of Cinema: Three Norwegian Actors and Their German Com-
pany, 1917–1920,” in John Fullerton and Jan Olsson, eds., Nordic Explorations: Film
before 1930 (Sydney: John Libbey & Co., 1999), 93–101.
21. See Ángel Miquel, Mimí Derba, and Patricia Torres San Martin, “Introducción,” in
Mujeres y cine en América Latina (Guadalajara: Centro Universitario de Ciencias
Sociales y Humanidades).
22. Randolph Bartlett, “Petrova—Prophetess,” Photoplay December 17, 1917, 27. Before
starting her own company in 1917, Petrova had roles in several Alice Guy Blaché films.
23. Among the productive suggestions as to how to invent new historical approaches are
Barbara Klinger’s reference to historical writing as “a vigorously self-reflexive activity.”
Klinger, “Film History, Terminable and Interminable: Recovering the Past in Recep-
tion Studies,” Screen 38, no. 2 (1997): 12.

Woof, Warp, History

by Lee Grieveson

Late in 1908, a court case raised the question of the role of film as historical ex-
pression. In challenging the legality of a judgment against exhibiting The James
Boys in Missouri and Night Riders under the terms of the Chicago Censor Ordi-
nance of 1907, exhibitor Jake Block made what was taken as a rather surprising
claim: the films, he asserted, were based on the “American historical experience”
and thus could not be challenged on the grounds of immorality and obscenity
inscribed in the ordinance.1 The lawyers for Block made a complicated conceptual
move here: they sought to blur the porous borders separating fiction from history
so that films would be included in the category of history, which, as nonfictional
discourse, was, it was claimed, divorced from the category of the immoral.
The arguments held little sway in the Illinois Supreme Court, where Chief
Justice James H. Cartwright observed that even if the films depicted “experiences
connected with the history of the country,” it did not follow that they were “not
immoral” since they “necessarily portray exhibitions of crime” and, crucially, do so
to audiences made up largely of children “as well as by those of limited means who
do not attend the productions of plays and dramas given in the regular theatres.”2
Cartwright made a straightforward distinction between film and history, evidently

Cinema Journal 44, No. 1, Fall 2004 119

untroubled by conceptual correspondences between historiography and the mass-
distributed media of indexical imagining.3 In so doing, he was motivated, in part,
by anxieties about the construction of history for those groups rather enigmatically
described as of “limited means,” a category covering economics/class and the per-
ceived limited cultural “means” of the immigrant populations of Chicago.
Later legal decisions effectively deferred to Cartwright’s conceptual distinc-
tion, most notably in 1915, when the Supreme Court denied cinema the constitu-
tional guarantees of free speech and thus effectively cast it outside the sphere of
public discussion that encompassed such nonfictional discourse as the press and,
although precariously, “artistic” fiction that had a licensed role of cultural nega-
tion.4 A cartoon in D. W. Griffith’s pamphlet The Rise and Fall of Free Speech,
produced after the struggles over his own historical fiction, The Birth of a Nation
(1915) responded to this decision by showing a globe next to a moving picture
camera that was tugging at a length of fabric with the word “History” written on it.
The globe is complaining, “I can’t accept this fabric—it’s nothing but warp!” and
the moving picture camera is responding, “Sorry, sir! The censor took the woof!” 5
Legal decisions, subtended by regulatory discourses and practices, and com-
bined with the developing commercial practices of the mainstream film industry,
constructed a discursive identity for cinema that centered on its distinction from
nonfictional discourses, referentiality, and the real world. Mainstream cinema be-
came, in part at least, a self-referential space, purposively disconnected from other
forms of discourse and from social relevance. Woof, as history and the world, was
ostensibly cast aside.
Yet this process of delimiting mainstream cinema’s place in the public sphere
was a consequence, in the main, of political interventions into the social function
of cinema. The policing of populations and of the public sphere by various agents,
groups, and institutions led to the restriction of commercial cinema’s role in the
public sphere, that “metatopical common space” in which members of society meet
through a variety of media and discuss matters of common interest.6 Anxieties
about cinema’s effects on audiences and its place in the public sphere, like those
Cartwright expressed, were widely articulated, subtended by broad concerns about
the governance of populations. Woof, then, necessarily created the warp that was
mainstream American cinema. Put another way, government discourses and prac-
tices delineated and delimited the possible social function of cinema, marking a
terrain outside the public sphere as metatopical common space connected to ideas
of “harmless entertainment.” I believe this process was a crucial generative mecha-
nism in the formation of what we call “classical Hollywood cinema.”7
This argument suggests a revision to the now-canonical conception of the for-
mation of classicism, which, in turn, is predicated on a different emphasis in his-
torical writing on cinema. I will start with the local question of the forces shaping
classical Hollywood cinema to draw out some implications for current conceptions
of cinema history, seeking ultimately to assay some thoughts on the broad and
fundamental question of how we conceptualize the pressures and connections
between “contexts” and texts. In what is one of the crucial works of so-called new
film history, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and

120 Cinema Journal 44, No. 1, Fall 2004

Kristin Thompson propose that the interdependency of aesthetic and industrial
decisions shaped mainstream American cinema into a narrative form best described
as classical. Aesthetic aims are “sustained by” and in turn help sustain “an integral
mode of film production,” and this “mode of film practice” marks the most “perti-
nent and proximate collective context” for analyzing mainstream Hollywood. At
crucial moments of technological transformation, the authors argue, aesthetic de-
cisions took precedence over economic decisions in determining and maintaining
the form of classical cinema; likewise, moments of social transformation had little
impact on aesthetic norms.8 In this sense, the authors articulate a nuanced formal-
ist history, a “historical poetics,” that maintains, in the last instance as it were, the
primacy of style but that connects it to material practices in an extraordinarily
detailed way.
A critical practice of historical poetics, Bordwell has proposed, “produces
knowledge in answer to two broad questions about cinema: (1) What are the prin-
ciples according to which films are constructed and by means of which they achieve
particular effects? and (2) How and why have these principles arisen and changed
in particular empirical circumstances?”9 In proposing these questions, the project
of historical poetics takes leave of interpretive criticism and theory, putting to one
side questions about what films mean and how they resonate with cultural con-
texts to instead describe and explain formal norms.10 The broad currency of this
critical project and historiographic method is, of course, widely visible in contem-
porary cinema studies, underpinning important and justly influential work by
Bordwell and Thompson, in particular, and, as a consequence of the jointly authored
textbooks Film Art: An Introduction and Film History: An Introduction, having an
impact on widely shared pedagogical practices.11
Let me clarify this important critical move by returning to the question of
Hollywood classicism. The conception of the generative mechanisms in play in the
establishment and maintenance of mainstream American cinema as outlined in
Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson’s study stood in contradistinction to the argu-
ment that ideology shapes aesthetics, which was central to then-prevailing con-
figurations of film theory as political modernism.
Aside from the broad arguments about monocular vision, bourgeois subjectiv-
ity, and the classic realist text that proliferated in the post-1968 intellectual con-
text, the specific focus for Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson’s revision of ideas
about Hollywood classicism was Noël Burch’s account of what he termed the insti-
tutional mode of representation (IMR). Burch had argued that the potential radi-
cal heterogeneity of early cinema was foreclosed by conservative forces—in a word,
the bourgeois—and thus that the formation of the IMR was a consequence of
ideological pressures.12 Thompson and Bordwell took issue with Burch’s account
prior to completing The Classical Hollywood Cinema, arguing with some of the
historical detail in Burch’s work, but, more fundamentally, with both the broadness
of this ideology and with the historical model of causation in Burch’s account.13
Instead, advocates for a historical poetics of classicism propose that ideological
pressures are molded by the aesthetic norms that precede them. Yet if this is the
ultimate endpoint of the historical poetics of classicism, the possibility of the social

Cinema Journal 44, No. 1, Fall 2004 121

affecting textuality is never simply denied but rather is bracketed off, giving prior-
ity to the examination of formal norms and industrial formations as “proximate”
contexts. For example, Bordwell states:
To frame research questions about such formal processes as style is not to commit one-
self to a belief that the ensuing explanations are wholly of a formal order. It is perfectly
possible to find that the formal phenomena we’re trying to explain proceed from cul-
tural, institutional, biographical, or other sorts of causes.14

In practice, for Bordwell, as for other formalist scholars, cultural causes are rel-
egated in importance and the methods for connecting culture and aesthetics are
subject to critical scrutiny. One example can perhaps stand as emblematic here. In
a body of recent work on early cinema, scholars have suggested that the broad
cultural context of modernity influenced film form. Tom Gunning, for example,
has proposed that the aggressive viewer-confronting address and discontinuous
structure of early film as a “cinema of attractions” can be connected to large-scale
transformations in daily experience and sensory perception and perceptual envi-
ronments in the era of urbanization and modernization.15
In Bordwell’s critique of what he terms the “modernity thesis,” he questions
the possibility of historicizing vision and perception and thus the connections be-
tween, on the one hand, the wide-ranging transformations in society characterized
as “modernity” and, on the other hand, film texts.16 According to Bordwell, these
connections are vague, unclear, cannot be classified as “empirical circumstances,”
and thus negate fine-grained analysis of texts and textual transformation. Moder-
nity scholars, if they might be called that, have responded to this critique, arguing,
among other things, for the need to delineate relationships based on textual conti-
guity and interaction in order to understand the significance of films and cinema
within larger social and intertextual contexts.17
What seems to be at stake in the dispute about modernity and early cinema
is a broader question about the divisions and possible connections between for-
malist historiography and the practices of cultural history. I take this to be a
significant issue for contemporary film studies (and, indeed, study in the hu-
manities more generally). What are the possibilities for a cultural history of cin-
ema that takes the tenets and reservations of historical poetics seriously? Likewise,
what are the possibilities for a historical poetics that takes seriously the aims and
possibilities of a cultural history of cinema? I want to propose a necessarily brief
answer by turning initially to Gunning’s earlier work on preclassical cinema and,
by way of this work, once again to the constitution of classical cinema and thus
my opening examples.
In the important essay “Weaving a Narrative,” Gunning delineates the institu-
tional forces at work in the rationalization of narrative form associated with the
work of D. W. Griffith at the Biograph Company beginning in 1908.18 Arguing that
these forces were connected to an effort within the film industry to attract a well-
to-do middle-class audience, Gunning suggested that a narrative form, exempli-
fied by the subdivision and linearization of plot lines, mirrored aesthetic criteria
widely visible in plays and novels. If part of this argument was about economic

122 Cinema Journal 44, No. 1, Fall 2004

rationale, he suggested, part of it was also a way to articulate a moral discourse and
thus to divert reform anxieties about cinema.
In later work, Gunning developed more precisely his argument on the effect
of reform anxieties about cinema on film form, arguing that such concerns, along-
side their material consequences in the establishment of regulatory institutions,
pushed filmmakers to be conscious of moral norms and to integrate potentially
risqué content within an overall moral framework.19 Gunning’s work showed how
aesthetic practices were connected to ideological choices in a way that was clearly
linked to Burch’s pioneering studies—both arrived at the study of early cinema via
the avant-garde and its putative political potential—but Gunning offered a more
nuanced understanding of the pressures at work in shaping the narrative form of
mainstream American cinema.
Regulation was critical here. What Gunning was able to do was to begin to
trace connections between cultural anxieties, the creation of regulatory institu-
tions, and film form, thus drawing a line from anxieties as ideological practices to
textuality. Work in the 1990s on the cultural contexts of early American cinema
developed in part from this sense of the social embeddedness of textual practices,
mediated at times through various conceptions of regulation. This work includes
William Uricchio and Roberta Pearson’s book on distinctions in taste, class, and
early cinema; Sumiko Higashi’s book on the elevation of cinema to middle-class
highbrow status; and a body of work on what we might see as the correlative regu-
lation of women and cinema in the early twentieth century by Janet Staiger, Lauren
Rabinovitz, Shelley Stamp, and Constance Balides.20
My own recent work delineates in detail the regulatory anxieties articulated
about cinema and its audiences in America in the early twentieth century, con-
necting these discourses to particular elite groups and, in turn, to broad concerns
about governing audiences, citizens, and a mass public in the context of the large-
scale transformations associated with full-fledged industrial capitalism, urbaniza-
tion, and modernization.21 Varied practices of regulation were predicated on these
discourses and, thus, together elite discourses and practices had material effects
on the definition and shaping of mainstream American cinema at a time when its
identity was uncertain and malleable. This debate was in part about content and,
as Gunning shows, narrative form, but it was more substantively about the social
functioning of cinema, as my examples of Cartwright and the Supreme Court jus-
tices suggest—that is, how cinema should function in society, the uses to which it
might be put, and thus, effectively what it could or would be.
Woof or warp? In the end, the shaping of classicism as warp separated from
the woof of the world was a consequence both of economic decisions internal to
the film industry and of a regulatory policing of the public sphere external to that
industry. What we might call the mode of regulation, then, can be connected to
commercial practices and the social world. Or, put another way, the study of regu-
lation enables us to think carefully about cinema as the confluence of aesthetics,
commerce, and politics/power.
To use one final example: Richard Maltby has shown how the Production
Code shaped the aesthetics of Hollywood.22 Maltby’s compelling account of how

Cinema Journal 44, No. 1, Fall 2004 123

regulatory and commercial pressures pushed mainstream filmmaking toward
purposeful ambiguity, even incoherence, shows us a different classicism than that
connected to “formal harmony” and “decorum” as in Bordwell, Staiger, and
Thompson’s account.23 Rather, classical cinema was decisively shaped by a regu-
latory framework that sought to safeguard commercial interests principally by
acting as a buffer between Hollywood and the world, delineating the position of
cinema in cultural topography by creating, in Ruth Vasey’s words, “Hollywood’s
world as a realm apart, a self-contained universe, melodramatic but fundamen-
tally benign.”24 Woof, the world, and history were tugged away from the moving
picture camera by a combination of commercial and regulatory pressures.
Thus, work by scholars such as Maltby, Vasey, Annette Kuhn, Lea Jacobs, and
Jon Lewis makes clear the complex connections between aesthetics, commercial
goals, and practices of politics and power.25 All of this is certainly compatible with the
stated goals of historical poetics, and, indeed, Bordwell has played a role in publish-
ing some of this work and at times has singled out some of it as part of an expansive
definition of historical poetics.26 Yet the emphasis seems to me, at least, to push at the
borders of prevailing practices of historical poetics, for historicizing regulation is not
only about fleshing out the functions of the mode of production and “disclosing”
referential meaning but also about situating institutional and textual pressures in a
broader social, political, and cultural history. Censorship struggles and legal deci-
sions are verifiable empirically and thus can serve as “proximate contexts,” but they
are also underpinned by a complex discourse and government matrix that requires
the cinema historian to make interpretive connections among discourses, material
practices, film texts, and cinema—in short, between aesthetic and cultural spheres.
Laws create the social world, for sure, but the social world first creates laws.27
In this way, censorship studies must necessarily become cultural histories of regu-
lation, demanding that historians traverse other histories—of class formation, sexu-
ality, immigration, racial discrimination, for example—to situate aspects of cinema
history as parts of social, political, and cultural history. I take this to be an impor-
tant project. History matters. Justice Cartwright certainly recognized that.
A cultural history of regulation provides just one example of the continuing need
for cultural historians of cinema to carefully track the complex traffic between aes-
thetic and cultural spheres, making judicious interpretations of the connections that
can be made and of the ways culture functions in texts, just as texts function in cul-
ture. Tracking traffic like this is a critical task for cinema scholars interested in delin-
eating the multiple forces that have shaped cinema and, in turn, the way cinema has
participated in the shaping of culture. This task will continually induce scholars to
push at the borders of texts and of aesthetic histories, thus diversifying critical tasks
as they situate cinema in relation to social, political, and cultural histories and at the
confluence of questions about aesthetics, commerce, and power. If mainstream cin-
ema, in America at least, was constructed as warp separated from the woof of the
world, it behooves historians to retrace that process, insisting on the impossibility of
that separation—of the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere—while critically interro-
gating the terms of the myriad, complex, and essential connections between warp
and woof, the moving picture camera and the world.

124 Cinema Journal 44, No. 1, Fall 2004

Notes

1. Block v. City of Chicago, 87 N.E. 1011, 239 Ill. 251 (1909), 1011. For details on the
original ordinance, see Proceedings of the City Council of the City of Chicago, Novem-
ber 4, 1907, 3052.
2. Block v. City of Chicago, 1013; emphasis added.
3. On this correspondence, see Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, History,
Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).
4. Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio et al., 236 U.S. (1915).
5. D. W. Griffith, The Rise and Fall of Free Speech (Los Angeles, 1916), n.p.
6. Charles Taylor, “Modern Social Imaginaries,” Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 114.
7. I outline this process in detail in Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early-
Twentieth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
8. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cin-
ema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1985), xiv, 243–48, 304–8, 370–77.
9. David Bordwell, “Historical Poetics of Cinema,” in R. Barton Palmer, ed., The Cin-
ematic Text (New York: AMS Press, 1989), 371.
10. On this, see, in particular, David Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric
in the Interpretation of Cinema (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), espe-
cially chap. 11.
11. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, 6th ed. (New York:
McGraw Hill, 2001), and Bordwell and Thompson, Film History: An Introduction
(New York: McGraw Hill, 1994).
12. See the essays in Noël Burch, Life to Those Shadows (London: BFI Publishing, 1990).
13. Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, “Linearity, Materialism, and the Study of Early
American Cinema,” Wide Angle 5, no. 3 (1983): 4–15.
14. David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1997), 5.
15. For example, Tom Gunning, “The Whole Town’s Gawking: Early Cinema and the
Visual Experience of Modernity,” Yale Journal of Criticism 7, no. 2 (fall 1994), and
Gunning, “Now You See It, Now You Don’t: The Temporality of the Cinema of At-
tractions,” in Lee Grieveson and Peter Krämer, eds., The Silent Cinema Reader (London:
Routledge, 2004), 41–50.
16. Bordwell, On the History of Film Style, 139–49, 301–2, n.100. See also Charlie Keil,
“‘Visualised Narratives’: Transitional Cinema and the Modernity Thesis,” in Claire
Dupré la Tour, André Gaudreault, and Roberta Pearson, eds., Cinema at the Turn of
the Century (Lausanne: Editions Payot Lausanne, 1999), 133–48.
17. Tom Gunning, “Early American Film,” in John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson, eds.,
The Oxford Guide to Film Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 267–68,
and Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Con-
texts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 101–30.
18. Tom Gunning, “Weaving a Narrative: Style and Economic Background in Griffith’s
Biograph Films,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies (winter 1981), reprinted in Thomas
Elsaesser with Adam Barker, Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative (London: BFI Pub-
lishing, 1990), 336–46.
19. Tom Gunning, “From the Opium Den to the Theatre of Morality: Moral Discourse and
Film Process in Early American Cinema,” Art and Text 30 (1988), reprinted in Grieveson
and Krämer, The Silent Cinema Reader, 145–54; Tom Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the

Cinema Journal 44, No. 1, Fall 2004 125

 Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1991), 151–87.
20. William Uricchio and Roberta E. Pearson, Reframing Culture: The Case of the Vitagraph
Quality Films (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Sumiko Higashi, Cecil B.
DeMille and American Culture: The Silent Era (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1994); Janet Staiger, Bad Women: Regulating Sexuality in Early American Cinema
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); Lauren Rabinovitz, For the Love
of Pleasure: Women, Movies, and Culture in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (New
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Shelley Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls:
Women and Motion Picture Culture after the Nickelodeon (Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 2000); and Constance Balides, Making Dust in the Archives: Feminist
Archaeologies of Vice, Thrift, and Management in U.S. Silent Cinema (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming).
21. Grieveson, Policing Cinema.
22. See, for example, Richard Maltby, Harmless Entertainment: Hollywood and the Ideol-
ogy of Consensus (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1983); Maltby, “The Genesis of
the Production Code,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 15, no. 4 (1995); Maltby,
“‘A Brief Romantic Interlude’: Dick and Jane Go to 31/2 Seconds of the Classical Holly-
wood Cinema,” in David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, eds., Post-Theory: Reconstruct-
ing Film Studies (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1996).
23. Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, 4.
24. Ruth Vasey, The World according to Hollywood, 1918–1939 (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1997), 226.
25. Annette Kuhn, Cinema, Censorship, and Sexuality, 1909–1925 (London: Routledge,
1988); Lea Jacobs, The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film, 1928–
1942 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991); and Jon Lewis, Hollywood v.
Hard Core: How the Struggle over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry (New
York: NYU Press, 2000).
26. Vasey’s and Jacobs’s studies were published in a series edited by Bordwell, Donald
Crafton, Vance Kepley, and Thompson at the University of Wisconsin Press. Maltby’s
essay “‘A Brief Romantic Interlude’” was published in Bordwell and Carroll, eds., Post-
Theory. For Bordwell’s comments on this work on regulation, see, for example, Bordwell,
“Film Studies and Grand Theory,” in Bordwell and Carroll, eds., Post-Theory, 28–29,
and Bordwell, Making Meaning, 266.
27. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Force of Law: Toward a Sociology of the Juridical Field,” Hastings
Law Journal 38 (1987): 839.

The Future of the Past

by Janet Staiger

Five reasons for going or looking back dominate time-travel literature: explaining the
past, searching for a golden age, enjoying the exotic, reaping the rewards of temporal
displacement and foreknowledge, and refashioning life by changing the past.
David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country1

126 Cinema Journal 44, No. 1, Fall 2004