Subject Matter and Ideology

A second line of attention in this study focuses on subject matter and its treatment in Edison films. Here cinema is related to other cultural texts and

practices from which film production appropriated images, gags, and stories. At first they were almost exclusively from the world of masculine amusement, of dancing girls and prize fights. Output was soon adjusted to accommodate "heterosocial" amusement in which women and men participated as spectators. Porter's earliest films, often made with George S. Fleming or James White, served a variety of needs. Some were incorporated into travelogues, perhaps the most popular form of pre-cinema screen entertainment. Others documented vaudeville acts. Most functioned as a visual newspaper. The newspaper in turn-of-the-century America, then one of the few forms of mass communication, had a profound influence on other cultural practices, not least of which was the cinema.^[36] Individual films had strong ties to different types of journalistic features: news stories, editorial cartoons, human interest columns, and the comic strip. Even fight films and travel scenes were not inconsistent with cinema as a visual newspaper, for the papers covered both sports and travel. As with the newspapers, the purpose of cinema at the turn of the century was to inform as much as to entertain. By 1902-3, cinema was losing its efficacy as a visual newspaper and was reconceived primarily as a storytelling form. For most production companies, this shift meant that cinema's new role was increasingly to amuse. A significant exception to this pattern involved a group of Porter films made between November 1904 (The Ex-Convict ) and December 1905 (Life of an American Policeman ). These had an explicit social concern. Often Progressive in their politics, they presented a complex, sometimes contradictory, and finally conservative vision of the world. Only at the end of 1905, when the nickelodeon era was under way, did Porter accept the notion of cinema as simple amusement—a shift that may well have been influenced by commercial decisions made by Edison executives.

As the proliferation of storefront theaters turned cinema into a form of mass entertainment, traditional guardians of American culture and public morality protested against subject matter they often considered sensationalistic and corrupting. Porter and the Edison Company found that the broader their audience, the narrower the boundaries of acceptable subject matter and its treatment became. While Thomas Edison and his managerial staff actively supported the articulation of certain "standards" in the face of mounting protest, propriety was occasionally violated—at least in the eyes of some critics—even within the Kinetograph Department. The solution that finally won the support of Edison and his executive Frank Dyer was to defuse criticism by supporting a National Board of Censorship. For these entrepreneurs, the issue was not freedom of expression but maximizing profits within a mass communication system.

Films expressed larger social, political, and cultural concerns even as they sometimes served a personal, reparative function for the filmmaker.^[37] The ideological orientation of early cinema has been much discussed. Noël Burch has argued that in form and content these films reflected "the infantilism of the working classes. "^[38] Others, such as Robert C. Allen, have seen early cinema as

addressing a middle-class audience and presumably reflecting its ideological orientation.^[39] Certainly, America has been called a middle-class country, and this is nowhere more apparent than in its cultural products. The middle class, however, was not a single, unified group, but made up of diverse and even contradictory interests. Harry Braverman makes a useful distinction between what he calls the old and the new middle classes.^[40] The old middle class was largely outside the labor-capital dialectic in that it neither sold nor bought labor power on an extensive basis. The new middle class of employees, however, functioned within this labor-capital dialectic, assuming in certain respects the position of the working class and at other times that of employer. Although Porter was a member of the new middle class, his attitudes were shaped by his earlier experiences in Connellsville, Pennsylvania, where his family and then Porter himself had been small businessmen. His films reflect a personal distaste for the workings of large-scale, impersonal capitalistic enterprises: particularly The Ex-Convict, The Kleptomaniac , and The Miller's Daughter . This was not a uniquely personal vision so much as the principal cinematic expression of a more general outlook that then found frequent cultural expression.

In looking at Porter's work, one finds a remarkable ideological unity. The filmmaker's unhappiness with advanced capitalism extended beyond the subject matter of his films and included his resistance to the manufacturing division of labor that arose in the wake of the nickelodeon era. Here again, his approach was that of the old middle class. This did not mean that he wished to work alone, but that he preferred to work with others in an informal, collaborative manner. Finally, the representational system that Porter championed reflected the same old-middle-class orientation, not simply because it embodied a specific set of working methods and prevented the new, impersonal system of mass entertainment from operating effectively, but because it usually depended on audiences sharing his basic cultural frame of reference. Within this framework of production and representation, Porter conducted a far-reaching exploration of cinema's manifold possibilities.