The Cinema as a Visual Newspaper

Until recently, historians looking at turn-of-the-century American cinema have generally dismissed it as naive, primitive, and unformed. Next to the consistent photographic realism of Lumière and the theatrical artifice of Méliès, American subjects have seemed eclectic, derivative, "literal and unimaginative," and "significant today mainly as social documents."^[12] A more sympathetic and careful examination, however, reveals a unifying principle behind much American film production. As Robert C. Allen has pointed out, the screen was often described and conceived of as a "visual newspaper," where news items, human interest material, political satires, short cartoon-like sketches, and the sports page could all be combined within a variety format.^[13] As Leslie's Weekly ob-

served of Edison's rival, "The Biograph goes hand in hand with the daily press in presenting to nightly audiences events which they have seen during the day or read of in the evening papers."^[14] This came about, according to Harry Marvin, Biograph's vice-president, in response to audience demand:

In building up our business we were of the opinion at first that what the public would desire would be a series of finished and artistic pictures representing a scene or event of historic interest or artistic value. At first we followed such a course, but we soon found that the public demanded of us the prompt and reliable service of the daily newspaper rather than the artistic or aesthetic finish of the weekly or monthly magazine. That is to say, the public has expected us to gather the news in a pictorial way and disseminate it at once.^[15]

If Biograph offered the visual newspaper par excellence, Edison subjects also owed much to this philosophy of production.

As the first form of mass communication and mass entertainment, newspapers profoundly influenced many cultural forms, including cinema. The mode of representation used by these papers included, at one end of the spectrum, the "objectivity" of the New York Times and the New York Tribune , which treated the reporter and the camera as recorders of reality and arranged the resulting stories hierarchically, based on their newsworthiness. The primary function of these papers was to inform and, through their editorial pages, to instruct their readership. At another extreme was the variety format of the Hearst papers, which were as interested in entertaining as in informing, preferring the sensational to the dry. In many instances, of course, the Journal did provide its readership with photographs and "objective" accounts of important happenings, but the comic strip suggests that amusement was also an important function.

The front page of the New York Journal was an excellent indicator of events considered worthy of the Kinetograph Department's attention throughout 1901-2. Kansas Saloon Smashers , first advertised as Mrs. Carrie Nation and Her Hatchet Brigade , portrayed the prohibitionist and her followers on a saloon-wrecking rampage that received front-page coverage.^[16] The film was both reenactment and burlesque. While the set was based on a Journal photograph of a destroyed saloon in Wichita, Kansas, the characters and their actions owed much to the satirical cartoons appearing on the paper's editorial page.^[17] Lubin's exhibition service showed the film at Bradenburgh's Ninth and Arch Street Museum, where the pictures were "declared to be genuine ones" and headed the entire bill.^[18] This popular subject was promptly remade by both Lubin and Biograph. Later, when Carrie Nation's husband demanded a divorce, news reports inspired Edison's Why Mr. Nation Wants a Divorce .^[19]

Terrible Teddy, the Grizzly King , a burlesque on Teddy Roosevelt, then vice-president-elect, who was shooting mountain lions in Colorado, was based on a political cartoon series also running in the Journal . In a panel printed on

Kansas Saloon Smashers. A stop-action, concealed edit as
 Carrie Nation destroys the saloon.

February 4th, the cartoonist showed Teddy perched heroically on a pile of animals while two men wearing small tags labeled "my photographer" and "my press agent" record the event in the background. The second scene was inspired by a panel that appeared on February 18th. As with the Carrie Nation film, Porter and Fleming were playing with a subject that enjoyed frequent satirical treatment. To offer but one example, Dumont's Minstrels were performing the burlesque "Teddy Roosevelt, the Bear Hunter" the very week that this film was made.^[20]

"My Photographer" and "My Press Agent" watch Teddy shoot a cat in the first 
scene of Terrible Teddy, the Grizzly King.

Short screen comedies shared much with comic strips in the Sunday papers. The Happy Hooligan series, started by Blackton and Smith and continued by Kinetograph personnel, were indebted to the various cartoon strips depicting tramps ("Burglar Bill," "Happy Hooligan," and "Weary Willie") and appeared almost as regularly. The simple one-shot gags of Happy Hooligan April-Fooled (© April 6, 1901) and Tramp's Strategy That Failed (© May 15, 1901) are closest in their narrative structure to the Sunday strips. In these films, the humor revolved around the conflicts between constituted society and the outcast, with most situations ending with the tramp receiving an almost ritual beating.

The rube was another comic strip character who appeared in Porter/Fleming films. In Another Job for the Undertaker, The Hayseed's Experience at Washington Monument, Rube's Visit to the Studio, Rubes in the Theatre , and How They Do Things on the Bowery , this country hick encounters the modern mysteries of city life with costly naivete. In one comic strip, Uncle Reuben's unfamiliarity with "moving staircases" causes the loss of his bag and the "brick of gold" he has already been conned into purchasing.^[21] In Another Job for the Undertaker , the rube's inability to read and his unfamiliarity with gas lighting cause him to blow out the flame, resulting in his asphyxiation and death. In How They Do Things on the Bowery , he is duped by a woman con artist, one of the many fast-talking city types to take advantage of his gullibility.

Cartoons provided the storyboard for Terrible Teddy, the Grizzly King.

Hearst's papers also combined information and amusement in ways disquieting to the journalistic standards of the highbrow press. The New York Journal published artists' sketches of news events, particularly when appropriate photographs were unavailable. What was lost in accurate reporting was gained in romantic melodrama. Sketches of battles were more visually dynamic than photographs of the trenches during periods of inactivity. Likewise a battle enacted for the kinetograph in the New Jersey hills provided a romantic realism that William Paley never matched when he photographed U.S. troops in Florida or Cuba. Artists' sketches appearing on the front page of the New York Journal dramatized the sensationalistic aspects of the Biddle brothers' escape from prison.^[22] These were subsequently used by Porter and Fleming for the production design of Capture of the Biddle Brothers .

Perhaps the Journal's most distinctive use of visuals was the composite illustration that combined both drawing and photographic material. Such a syncretic amalgamation of disparate mimetic materials was at odds with the concept of a consistently represented, and therefore coherent, world that was then on the ascendency in the bourgeois theater and press.^[23] Certainly it was inimical to the New York Times , which in any case continued to put far more faith in the word than the image. The representational strategies in Hearst's papers have parallels in much of early cinema, particularly in Porter's work at Edison. In Terrible Teddy, the Grizzly King , the natural, wooded location coexists with the cartoonist's tags still attached to the actors. The carefully constructed authenticity of the set for Kansas Saloon Smashers is seemingly contradicted by the painted mirrors and props along the back wall and with the stop-action photography of trick films used each time Mrs. Nation smashes a mirror. This syncretism, which has been denigrated as immature by historians accustomed to viewing Hollywood realism as a teleological endpoint, thus had its equivalent in long-standing cultural forms (e.g., theater, newspapers, the magic lantern).