Toward a History of Screen Practice

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Toward a History of Screen Practice

Starting points always present problems for the historian, perhaps because they imply a "before" as well as an "after." For the film historian, "the invention of cinema" is customarily viewed as the creation of a new form of expression, a new art form. Such a perspective presupposes not only cinema proper but "pre-cinema," an area of historical inquiry that raises significant methodological and ideological issues. This chapter (and the entire volume) questions the value of that starting point and the historical models it supports. Nonetheless, it does not seek to forsake starting points entirely nor, as Jean-Louis Comolli has done, to offer the possibility of so many starting points that the notion of a beginning is not only diffused but ultimately avoided.¹ Rather, it suggests an alternative perspective, one that places cinema within a larger context of what we shall call the history of screen practice.

In such a history, cinema appears as a continuation and transformation of magic lantern traditions in which showmen displayed images on a screen, accompanying them with voice, music, and sound effects. In fact, this historical conception of cinema was frequently articulated between 1895 and 1908. The Optical Magic Lantern Journal of November 1896, for example, observed that "The greatest boom the lantern world has ever seen is that which is still reverberating throughout the land the boom of the living photographs." In Animated Pictures (1898), C.

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