SOME YEARS AGO, in a whimsical mood, Bertrand Tavernier warned that anyone displaying the least interest in the French cinema, especially prior to the forties, would be seen as “an amnesic dinosaur, a collector of irrelevant relics,” and would be in grave danger of “imminent departure for a mental institution.”1 So why, one has to ask, devote a whole book to French film theory and criticism written during the early decades of this century, especially when there may be even more serious objections to such a project? According to the standard textbook, after all, French film theory and criticism does not really begin until just after World War II, with the famous essays of André Bazin. Nothing written prior to Bazin, Dudley Andrew claims, has either the “solid logic and consistency” or the “diversity and complexity” of Bazin’s influential ideas: hence the earlier writings can be dismissed in a couple of paragraphs as a repetitious series of enthusiastic, yet rigorless pronouncements.2 Furthermore, according to the most comprehensive reader on avant-garde film theory and criticism, “perhaps the most fecund constellations of theoretical work” come not from France but from “the Soviet classical period and the avant-garde cinema that emerged after the Second World War” in the United States and Great Britain.3 Such authoritative assertions, although once accepted as valid, are now open to question, particularly in the light of recent historical scholarship.
A growing number of essays and books have drawn attention to the wide range and rich perspicacity of early French writing on the cinema as well as to its supposed faults and lacks. Stuart Liebman, for instance, has suggested that “the film theories developed in France between 1910 and 1921 may ... be regarded as seminal contributions to the discipline of film theory.”4 Similarly, Ian Christie has chided current historians and theorists for neglecting French film theory and practice in the decade between 1919 and 1929 and its “crucial importance to any understanding of the tradition of ‘film as film’.”5 More specifically, David Bordwell has argued that one particular concept—the “musical analogy”—“functioned to brake a tendency to think of the cinema as an art of the real” (as representation and narration) and thus “helped theorists think of a film as an interplay of formal systems.”6 I myself have concluded that Impressionism, for instance, both as a theory in the 1920s and as a continuing critical concept, cannot begin to encompass the diversity and complexity of either early French writing on the cinema or actual film practice.7 Yet much of this discussion has remained confined within the context of special interests geared to privileged auteurs or narrowly defined avant-garde movements.8 What is needed now is a historical study that, building on this scholarship, can take as its subject the sheer plenitude of early French writing on the cinema—with all of its contradictions—as well as the unusually sustained continuity of its development as a discourse over several decades.
Such a study—and the further debate it should produce—is circumscribed, however, by the limited availability of primary texts. In scattered books and journals, to be sure, recent translations of some major figures have appeared—for example, Abel Gance, Jean Epstein, Germaine Dulac, René Clair, Antonin Artaud, Ricciotto Canudo, André Antoine, Georges Méliès.9 And the French themselves have collected and published a good number of texts, although marketed almost exclusively under the rubric of individual authors—for example, Gance, Epstein, Clair, Colette, Louis Delluc, Léon Moussinac, Philippe Soupault, Marcel L’Herbier.10 Yet these early French writings are nowhere as accessible (in English) as are the early Soviet writings on the cinema, which they certainly rival in importance (if not in influence) and on which they seem to have had some, as yet unexamined, impact.11 Finally, no one book has collected them into a portable archive for wider dissemination.12 Demonstrating the value and usefulness of early French writing on the cinema, therefore, must coincide with an effort to recover as much of that writing as possible.
This book—and its companion volume, French Film Theory and Criticism, 1929–1939—to appropriate the language of Michel Foucault, is conceived, then, as an archaeological project.13 In this volume, I mean to excavate the period from 1907 to 1929 in France and resurrect the significant texts that intersected with—seeking either to determine or to respond to— the historical development of the silent cinema. To open up a space or “horizon of utterance” for the performance of voices, both recognized and unrecognized, banded together or separate, competing for dominance. To foreground especially those that have long been forgotten or suppressed. I also mean to engage in a dialogue with those voices, creating what Linda Gordon has called “a tension between historical empathy and rootedness in one’s own present.14 To trace some of the intertextual linkages, for instance, within the structured network of discursive and nondiscursive practices in French society (economic, social, political, ideological), out of which film theory and criticism emerged and within which it has remained partially enmeshed. To question the underlying assumptions or “given conditions” of what eventually became, during this period, a relatively autonomous cultural discourse—namely, French film theory and criticism— a discourse with its own subject, loosely defined set of methodologies, and often fascinatingly contradictory manner of articulation. Through such a double operation of re-presentation, this book thus offers both a critical map or historical framework for early French film theory and criticism as well as a site or “archive” for others subsequently to engage with, reimagine, and rewrite.
SETTING the boundaries of a space or the endpoints of a period, of course, has something of the arbitrary about it. Beginnings are always questionable, if only in raising the specter of the “myth of origins.”15 Why 1907? The choice is determined by a number of factors. Prior to that date, the cinema still often was considered as an extension or derivative form of photography, just as it had been at the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris.16 By then, however, the transformation of the French film industry into a major new institution of spectacle entertainment, dependent upon the continuous production and exhibition of fiction films, had begun in earnest and was well established by 1908–1909.17 The first specialized film journals appeared between 1903 and 1909, and the first regular newspaper column devoted to the cinema in 1908. Furthermore, beginning specifically in 1907, “the year of the cinema,” according to one writer,18 also sets two crucial texts in juxtaposition—the first by a major filmmaker, Georges Mélies, summing up French film practice to that point; the other by an influential literary critic and acutely observant spectator, Remy de Gourmont, surveying current films and cinema audiences and looking toward the future. Endings are no less suspect. Why 1929? Here the sound film “revolution” imposed a different kind of transformation on the French film industry, one that altered the material bases of film production and exhibition and, in turn, threatened to reorder the very terms of discourse on the cinema. As a consequence, certain prominent voices and discourse positions suddenly either waned in influence or else fell silent, and critics such as Moussinac even proclaimed “the death of the avant-garde.” Closing off at 1929, of course, has the advantage of restricting all the texts selected to those concerned exclusively with the silent cinema. But it also allows this first volume to culminate in the series of polemical debates—over the nature and function of both film in general and the avant-garde in particular—which so animated the cine-clubs and specialized journals in the late 1920s.
Within the boundary of these two decades, however, it is possible to demarcate smaller, perhaps even more arbitrary boundaries. Two early periods, before and during the Great War, constitute crucial stages in the development of French film theory and criticism; and the way they are marked off from one another suggests a principle of division for the others. From 1907 to 1914, we encounter something akin to what Foucault has called the initial threshold of a discursive practice.19 Two assumptions are relevant here. First, out of a network or weave of accepted discursive practices and established institutions, as he might put it, a series of conflicts or struggles erupts—to clear a space for something distinct but not yet autonomous. Here that network includes, without being exhaustive, several sciences and technologies, the socioeconomic institutions of an emergent monopolistic capitalism, the journalistic practices of disseminating information and advertising, the cultural institutions of popular spectacles, the practice and criticism of the established arts, as well as then-current philosophies of aesthetics and related theories of perception and cognition. Second, just as no one text on the cinema in this period can be said adequately to mark a point of origin for French film theory and criticism, so too are nearly all texts constituted as combinatoire, by more or less synthesized bits and pieces of other discourses. In other words, these early writers tend to act as flâneurs, strolling here and there and cobbling together a variety of idioms and social practices.20 By focusing on such transitional texts in a still unintegrated discursive practice, as Richard Terdiman argues, one can detect all that more easily the rough “fit” of its operation as well as the movements of resistance to it.21
From 1915 to 1919, after the onset of the war had interrupted all discourse on the cinema (as well as film production), we confront a second threshold in the development of French film theory and criticism as a discursive practice. The sets of terms articulated or half-articulated before the war, particularly those defining the cinema as a mass entertainment and a new art form, begin to settle in place, through various transformations and “hardenings”—with Emile Vuillermoz and Louis Delluc in the forefront of a further series of struggles. Out of the combinatoire of previous texts, a spectrum of aesthetic positions emerges. According to how they take up and answer a number of crucial questions—concerning the raw material of cinema, the possible forms of films and their methods of realization, and the value or function of cinema22—these half-dozen positions establish a range of both actual and potential, narrative and non-narrative film practices. From then on, French film theory and criticism is largely occupied with working out the ramifications of those positions and their interrelation or dialogue with other discourses and cultural practices.
The subsequent decade of French writing on the cinema might seem to constitute a single period that would coincide with the historical “flowering” of the silent film. Yet the major shifts and breaks that mark the contours of that discourse suggest a pattern of demarcation similar to that of the previous decade. The end of the Great War, for instance, permitted a sudden expansion of the public forum devoted to discourse on the cinema—in newspapers, film journals, books, and ciné-clubs—and an explosion of voices and texts throughout the next several years. The middle of the decade brought several significant changes as well: the influential critic and cineaste Louis Delluc died in 1924; certain difficulties in financing (partly in response to the election of a quasi-leftist government) occurred in the film industry and compromised many filmmakers; several prominent cine-clubs and specialized cinemas now formed the nucleus of a viable alternate cinema network; and arguments for a non-narrative avant-garde developed from then on in earnest. Consequently, it seems reasonable, as well as convenient, to break the period of the 1920s into two roughly equal five-year units—from 1920 to 1924, and from 1925 to 1929.
In one sense, this four-part periodization schema imposes a “natural” grid of order onto the discursive flow of French writing on the cinema. In another, more important sense, however, it merely provides an arbitrary set of neatly symmetrical, manageable units with which to “bite into” or disrupt that discursive flow and the conceptual clusters that circulate throughout. “A history, like a society, is a continuum that historians and sociologists compulsively violate and tear up into periods and categories” Regis Debray writes, “[after all] if it were not broken up, the continuum would in effect be unintelligible.”23 Early on, for instance, key terms such as realism, photogenie, and cinegraphie repeatedly crop up in everything from polemical statements to simple reviews and seem anything but fixed securely in meaning. Moreover, certain “binary oppositions” provide a locus of intelligibility at particular moments of debate and contestation. Is the cinema, for example, principally a commercial enterprise or an artistic endeavor? Is its primary function aesthetic or socioecomonic? Is it a unique new art form or a synthesis of all previous arts? Specifically, is it more closely allied with theater and prose fiction or else with music or painting? Is it narrative or descriptive, expressive or revelatory? Is it a popular or an elite form, national or international in appeal, and individual or collective in its production? Is the filmmaker a metteur-en-scene or an auteur?
By the end of the Great War, different sets of these terms coalesce into a half-dozen conceptual clusters or loosely defined “theories,” both narrative and non-narrative, that recur in various formulations throughout the next decade. Initially caught up in a “classical” French tradition of Romantic Idealism, they undergo rewriting within the context of such diverse intellectual currents as Modernism, Surrealism, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Marxism. Nearly all of these conceptual clusters or “theories” are formulated in opposition—whether explict or implicit, offensive or defensive— to what the French perceived, but rarely described, as the “classical Hollywood cinema,” whose continuity systems almost exclusively served the story and character action.24 Their writings can be seen, then, as a sustained effort to define uniquely French “theories” of the cinema. Finally, no one writer can be said to have attempted, let alone achieved, a rigorously systematic, coherent theory of film—although certain texts by Epstein, Dulac, Canudo, and Moussinac may come close. Such a notion of theory, however, seems premature for the period, as well as highly dubious as an aesthetic absolute. Instead, individual texts tend to produce an “ephemeral” form of writing “in sync” with an ephemeral and rapidly changing art. As “speculative” essays generating insights and ideas in order to provoke action and further debate, these French texts thus constitute a polemically engaged discourse that resists our conventional efforts at canonization.
THE FOUR SECTIONS that comprise this book all include introductions that act as chapters in an ongoing “critical history” followed by complementary anthologies of texts in translation. Each introduction follows a similar format, with “local” variations to meet the demands of a particular period of reference. First, I offer a sketch of the public forum or sphere in which French film theory and criticism was articulated—a survey of the important film journals, literary and art journals, newspapers, and books that devoted attention to the cinema. Next, I single out some of the discursive and nondiscursive practices and institutions that at the time significantly intersected with this particular discourse—or, in the case of the first section, the discourses and institutions out of which French film theory and criticism emerged. Then I take up what seem to be the central concepts, problems or questions, and aesthetic positions of the period’s writing on the cinema, analyzing their articulation and interpénétration across key texts as well as suggesting ways to question the distinctions and dichotomies that underlie them. Lastly, I make connections between features of these positions or “theories” and certain prior and contemporaneous aesthetic principles and concepts in the other arts. And I draw some parallels or points of resemblance to later French film theory and criticism—specifically, to the writings of André Bazin, Jean Mitry, and some of the more recent work of the 1970s.
The choice of texts for each section follows certain principles. Generally, I have sought to select texts that best represent or put in play the significant voices, positions, and issues of a particular period. This means that not all texts are equally articulate, coherent, and easily comprehensible; and some may seem maddeningly incoherent or contradictory, but such incoherence can be significant. Given the restrictions of length or space, I have tended to amass a large number of shorter documents rather than to privilege a few longer texts that might be taken as a “canon” or set of monuments and thus skew one’s sense of the range and variety of writing. On the one hand, a good deal has had to be excluded in choosing excerpts from the few important books on the cinema;25 moreover, material that I considered repetitious or irrelevent has been cut from some of the individual essays (and these cuts are clearly marked by ellipses). Also excluded have been some texts that are sufficiently well known and readily available in English, as well as those that, though polished and comprehensive, merely reiterate what was said aptly and clearly enough long before. On the other hand, I have included clusters of reviews devoted to influential or controversial films—for example, La Dixième Symphonie (1918), Caligari (1919), El Dorado (1921 ), La Roue (1922–1923), and Napoleon (1927)—not only because they particularize some of the major debates of a period but also because much of the best French writing was done in response to specific films. Finally, the texts are arranged chronologically rather than thematically or according to author.26 This allows the reader literally to follow the historical progression of this discourse through more than two decades; but, more importantly, it allows for some thinking different from my own. The reader can draw his or her own connections and relations among these texts and, therefore, formulate a reading or interpretation that may deviate from that which I lay out in the introductions.
In the end, of course, my own writing and selecting are guided by a set of interests and aims. Despite an insistence on the multiplicity of this discourse, I tend to focus on the development of French film theory and criticism within the framework of discourse modes that position the cinema as (1) an instrument of scientific research and technological innovation, (2) a medium of information and education or social persuasion, (3) a form of popular spectacle or mass entertainment, and (4) a new form and language of art. Admittedly, the latter two discourse modes receive far greater attention, especially as the book goes on. Concentrating on them, however, does allow me to relate the cinema to broader cultural concerns in France and especially to analyze the emerging patterns of an autonomous film aesthetics. Yet if my thinking remains bound to a tradition that privileges the aesthetic, I trust that I also conceive and analyze the subject of the aesthetic as a cultural and ideological practice within the context of a larger cultural history. And I hope that I have succeeded at least halfway in picking up and untangling, as Walter Benjamin would say, some of the lost “threads that represent the weft of the past as it feeds into the warp of the present.”27 In the end, may the method and format of this book offer a model for others doing research on related bodies of film theory and criticism. For here the writing of history is accompanied by the unearthing of something close to an archive, which—through further sifting, interrogation, and analysis— may well contain the seeds of that history’s rewriting.
1. Bertrand Tavernier, “Le Cinema français des années 30, essai d’anthropologie sociale,” Positif, 117 (June 1970), 16.
2. Dudley Andrew, The Major Film Theories (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 12–13, 134–35.
3. P. Adams Sitney, “Introduction,” The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism (New York: New York University Press, 1978), viii.
4. Stuart Liebman, “French Film Theory, 1910–1921,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 8 (Winter 1983), 2.
5. Ian Christie, “French Avant-Garde Film in the Twenties: From ‘Specificity’ to Surrealism,” Film as Form: Formal Experiment in Film, 1910–1970 (London: Arts Council of Britain, 1979), 37.
6. David Bordwell, “The Musical Analogy,” Yale French Studies, 60(1980), 142.
7. Richard Abel, French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915–1929 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 279–81, 286–89.
8. See, for instance, Richard Abel, “The Contribution of the French Literary Avant-Garde to Film Theory and Criticism (1907–1923),” Cinema Journal 14 (Spring 1975), 18— 40; Eugene McCreary, “Louis Delluc, Film Theorist, Critic, and Prophet,” Cinema Journal 16 (Fall 1976), 14–35; Paul Hammond, “Off at a Tangent,” The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on the Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1978), 1–22; David Bordwell, French Impressionist Cinema: Film Culture, Film Theory, and Film Style (New York: Arno Press, 1980); Norman King, Abel Gance: The Politics of Spectacle (London: British Film Institute, 1984).
9. See, for instance, René Clair, Cinema Yesterday and Today, ed. R. C. Dale and trans. Stanley Appelbaum (New York: Dover, 1972); Jean Epstein, “Magnification,” trans. Stuart Liebman, in October, 3 (Spring 1977), 9–15; Jean Epstein, “For a New Avant-Garde,” trans. Stuart Liebman, in Sitney, The Avant-Garde Film, 26–30; Germaine Dulac, “The Essence of Cinema: The Visual Idea,” trans. Robert Lamberton, in The Avant-Garde Film, 36–42; Antonin Artaud, “Sorcery and the Cinema (1927),” trans. P. Adams Sitney, in The Avant-Garde Film, 49–50; Ricciotto Canudo, “The Birth of the Sixth Art (1911),” trans. Ben Gibson, Don Ranvaud, Sergio Sokota, and Deborah Young, in Framework, 13 (Autumn 1980), 3–7; Jean Epstein, “Bonjour Cinéma and other Writings,” trans. Tom Milne, in Afterimage, 10 (Autumn 1981), 9–38; Abel Gance, “The Era of the Image Has Arrived,” trans. Anne Head, in Rediscovering French Film, ed. Mary Lea Bandy (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1983), 53–54; André Antoine, “The Future of Cinema,” trans. Stuart Liebman, in Framework, 24 (Spring 1984), 6–9; Georges Méliès, “Cinematographic Views,” trans. Stuart Liebman, in October, 29 (Summer 1984), 23–31.
10. Recent French collections include Robert Desnos, Cinéma (Paris: Gallimard, 1966); Léon Moussinac, L’Age ingrat du cinéma (Paris: Editeurs français réunis, 1967); René Clair, Cinéma d’hier, cinéma d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Gallimard, 1970); Philippe Esnault, “Antoine et le réalisme,” La Revue du cinéma: Image et son, 271 (April 1973), 3–64; Noël Burch, Marcel L’Herbier (Paris: Seghers, 1973); Jean Epstein, Ecrits sur le cinéma, vols. 1–2 (Paris: Seghers, 1974); Alain et Odette Virmaux, ed., Colette au cinéma (Paris: Flammarion, 1975); Philippe Soupault, Ecrits de cinéma, 1918–1931 (Paris: Pion, 1979); Roger Icart, ed., Abel Gance ou Le Prométhée foudroyé (Lausanne: L’Age d’homme, 1983); Louis Delluc, Le Cinéma et les cinéastes: Ecrits cinématographiques, vol. 1 (Paris: La Cinémathèque française, 1985); Louis Delluc, Cinéma et cie: Ecrits cinématographiques, vol. 2 (Paris: La Cinémathèque française, 1986).
The only French anthologies of early film theory and criticism have been long out of print: Marcel L’Herbier, Intelligence du cinématographe (Paris: Corréa, 1946); and Marcel La-pierre, Anthologie du cinéma (Paris: La Nouvelle Edition, 1946).
11. See, for instance, the many references to French film theorists and critics in B. M. Eikenbaum, ed., The Poetics of Cinema (1927), trans. Richard Taylor, as Russian Poetics in Translation, vol. 9 (Oxford: RPT Publications, 1982).
12. Compare, for instance, Ian Christie and Richard Taylor’s extensive anthology of Russian and Soviet film theory and criticism (1911–1939), soon to be published by the British Film Institute.
13. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper & Row, 1972); Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Geneology, History,” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 139–64; Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); and Guiliana Bruno, “Towards a Theorization of Film History,” Iris 2.2 (1984), 41–55. I also borrow several terms later in this paragraph from Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation),” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127–86, as well as from several essays on Althusser—Michael Gordy, “Reading Althusser: Time and the Social Whole,” History and Theory 22.1 (1983), 1–21 ; and Stuart Hall, “Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post-Structuralist Debate,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 2 (June 1985), 91–114.
14. Carol Lasser, “Interview: Linda Gordon,” in Visions of History, ed. MARHO (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 77. See, also, Rob Harding and Judy Coffin, “Interview: Natalie Zemon Davis,” in Visions of History, 113–14.
15. The best critique of the “myth of origins” with respect to the cinema appears in Jean-Louis Comolli, “Technique and Ideology: Camera, Perspective, Depth of Field, Parts 3 and 4,” trans. Diana Matia, in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 425–30.
16. In the organizational framework of the 1900 Paris Exposition, the cinema was classified under Photography; and the committee responsible for the Photography exhibits included only two men associated with the cinema—Jules-Etienne Marey and Louis Lumière. See Emmanuelle Toulet, “Le Cinema à l’Exposition Universelle de 1900,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 33 (April-June 1986), 179–209.
17. Observers throughout the French press in 1907–1908 commented on the upsurge in film production and exhibition. Permanent cinemas in Paris, for instance, increased from only 10 in 1906 to 87 by the end of 1908—Emmanuelle Toulet, “Le Spectacle cinématographique à Paris de 1895 à 1914,” Thèse de l’Ecole des Chartes (Sorbonne, 1982), 344. For a description of the places where films were screened in the Boulevard area of Paris, between 1895 and 1908, see Jacques Deslandes, Le Boulevard du cinéma à l’époque de Georges Méliès (Paris: Cerf. 1963), 73–87.
18. J. B., “Le Cinématographe,’ L’Orchestre (12 July 1907).
19. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 186.
20. The critical use of the term flâneur originally comes from Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: New Left Books, 1973), 35–66.
21. Richard Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 120–21.
22. Andrew, The Major Film Theories, 6–8.
23. Regis Debray, Teachers, Writers, Celebrities: The Intellectuals of Modern France, trans. David Macey (London: New Left Books, 1981), 39.
24. A comprehensive definition and exposition of the “classical continuity system” can now be found in David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
25. See, especially, Henri Diamant-Berger, Le Cinéma (Paris: Renaissance du livre, 1919); Léon Moussinac, Naissance du cinéma (Paris: Povolovsky, 1925); Henri Fescourt and Jean-Louis Bouquet, L’Idée et l’écran: Opinions sur le cinéma, vols. 1–3 (Paris: Haberschill et Sergent, 1925–1926); and Léon Moussinac, Panoramique du cinéma (Paris: Le Sans Pareil, 1929).
26. There are, however, four exceptions to this chronological order of selected texts. Although Marcel L’Herbier’s “Hermes and Silence” (April 1918) appeared after Emile Vuil-lermoz’s critique of the essay (February 1918)—because of publication difficulties—I have placed the L’Herbier text before the Vuillermoz text so that readers will better understand what Vuillermoz is criticizing. Also, because Marcel Gromaire’s six-part essay, “A Painter’s Ideas about the Cinema,” was published over a three-month period (beginning on 1 April 1919), I have placed it after Jean Cocteau’s “Carte Blanche” column (28 April 1919), the latter of which is related closely to earlier articles by Louis Delluc and Louis Aragon. Perhaps the most unusual choice has been to move Ricciotto Canudo’s “Reflections on the Seventh Art,” from its posthumous publication date, in 1926, to a point coinciding with its probable composition, so that its summation of Canudo’s position on the cinema follows and complements Delluc’s last major statement in “Prologue,” Drames du cinéma (1923). Finally, I have placed all the writings on Gance’s Napoléon (1927) together in a group, even though Vuillermoz’s second review of the film appeared shortly after several other essays by Jean Prévost, Antonin Artaud, and Jean Epstein, in November 1927.
27. Walter Benjamin, One Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: New Left Books, 1979), 362, quoted in Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: Verso, 1981), 57.
Note: Were it possible to revise this volume extensively, I would add one or two articles from Edmond Benoît-Lévy’s Phono-Ciné-Gazette (1905–1909), include the full text of Victorin Jasset’s historical sketch of the early cinema in Ciné-Journal (1911), and reword some of my translations for greater accuracy and felicity. For this paperback version, however, only minor corrections have been made.
Richard Abel
January 1993