New York! It is the epitome of the horror of the age. I hate it. I loathe its artificial way of living, its mannerisms, its ways of thought. It has but one redeeming feature, that it is getting so impossible that people must leave it or become crazy.
IN THE FIRST decade of the twentieth century, the major film corporations that had emerged in America and France in the 1890s significantly expanded their filmmaking infrastructure. They replaced open-air and rooftop stages with larger studios inspired by the glass house form as well as features of modern structures such as skyscrapers and factories. Using novel materials and building technologies—especially electrical lighting, concrete, and new forms of glass—studio architects contributed to the physical transformation of cities like New York and Paris. This chapter and the following one develop a materialist history of cinema’s early architectural development that emphasizes how studio architects responded to the conditions of urban architecture and infrastructure in the century’s first decade. By situating the resulting studios in infrastructural changes to the modern built environment, these chapters call attention to the tangible ways that architectural and urban development shaped cinema. In short, they argue that cinema developed not simply in but also in concert with urban architecture.
This approach offers new ways of thinking about cinema’s association with the city, an often-explored relationship that has been analyzed almost exclusively in terms of film’s role in representing urban spaces or of the city’s importance as a site of cinematic spectatorship. Early film historians, for instance, have emphasized how the conditions of urban modernity affected cinematic spectatorship and how early films in turn shaped spectators’ experiences of the city.2 Other scholars have celebrated how “city symphonies” such as Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s Manhatta (1921), Robert Flaherty’s Twentyfour-Dollar Island (ca. 1926), and Paul Florey’s Skyscraper Symphony (1929) made modern urban space a subject of cinema’s modernist experimentation in the 1920s. Such films have become key early examples of cinema’s close and lasting connection to cities like New York.3 But film’s relationship to the city has long gone well beyond the latter’s importance as a site for location filming and the less tangible ways that urban experience may have helped condition cinematic experience (and vice versa). Urban cinema, in other words, is about more than just spectatorship and representation.
In New York, cinema’s architecture took shape as part of the struggle for American film industry dominance between Biograph, American Vitagraph, and the Edison Manufacturing Company. In the midst of far-reaching changes to New York’s architecture and municipal infrastructure, these companies contributed to the city’s “artificial way of living” by using advanced building technologies to construct new studios. The professional architects upon whom film companies increasingly relied made New York an important center of America’s studio film production.4
Shaped by new architectural forms and building technologies, the new studios reached greater degrees of independence from the natural environment. Most importantly, the same techniques used to create artificial light and to enhance “natural” illumination in urban architecture more generally allowed architects to develop designs focused on the specific needs of film production. New urban studios still used rolled plate glass façades and roofs, much like Méliès and R. W. Paul had done first in the 1890s. But architects also introduced innovations such as the extensive electrical lighting setups that would soon define “dark” studios as well as designs borrowed from industrial architecture, including prismatic glass windows and “daylight factory” designs that used large, open building façades supported by reinforced concrete to allow greater access to sunlight. In short, studio architects made the materials and designs that would come to define modern architecture’s well-tempered environments the basis for early studio film production.
These designs and materials underscore cinema’s place and role in creating a “human-built world.” Like Dickson and Méliès before them, studio designers focused on enhancing natural light and dissociating studio filming from the dictates of weather and seasonal climate changes. Building studios in cities both contributed to and complicated their efforts. On the one hand, architects could draw inspiration from a wealth of designs and materials for projecting sunlight to the interiors of urban buildings. At the same time, however, they faced new degrees of oversight from municipal building officers charged with enforcing reforms to make cities safer and healthier. Those conditions shaped the human-built environments of cities like New York, and they would help condition cinema’s built worlds, both in the studios and their films.
Architects’ ability to reproduce favorable features of the natural world allowed filmmakers to develop novel and more efficient ways to create artificial film worlds, seemingly at will. Their ability to expand working hours and take advantage of larger, better-lit, and more efficiently arranged studio stages drove the Nickelodeon era’s success and made their studios models for American cinema’s industrialization over the next decade.5 By 1910, these spaces had also helped make studio production the norm. The result of cinema’s ultimate reliance upon modern building materials and designs would be a striking continuity between the spaces of modern urban life, the sites of film production, and the cinematic worlds they produced. As this chapter will demonstrate, that circuit of materials, designs, and built worlds defined cinema’s place in New York and made film a product of architectural modernism two decades before Sheeler and Strand made the city a focus of “modernist” cinema.
MODERNIZATION AND THE “CREATIVE DESTRUCTION” OF MANHATTAN
New York’s first film studios emerged during a period of extensive changes to the city’s infrastructure. By the end of the nineteenth century, massive immigration, a daily influx of commuters, new concentrations of corporate power, and the introduction of novel building technologies had created what one historian has described as “an urban landscape entirely new in the history of civilization.”6 The consolidation of the boroughs in 1898, which made New York officially the largest city in the United States, centralized administrative authority over the city’s increasingly strained utilities and transportation networks. Faced with mounting concerns over pollution, unregulated development, overcrowding, and limited natural resources, municipal leaders implemented new technological systems designed to take advantage of the city’s natural resources while also overcoming the restraints of the natural environment.7
Historian Max Page has described the resulting modernization as the “creative destruction of Manhattan.”8 As Page and other historians have shown, New York underwent the most rapid period of change in its history at the turn of the century as the water and sewer system expanded, bridges and tunnels connected Manhattan to the boroughs, elevated trains and subways created new networks of mass rapid transit across the city, skyscrapers replaced brownstones and slums, Central and Prospect Parks provided human-made “natural” recreational spaces, and electrical lights began to transform daily life.9 These developments fundamentally altered the city’s and its residents’ relationships to nature by reproducing it in artificial forms.10 New Yorkers would experience that reproduction perhaps no more so than in the use of electrical lighting, a technology that, as David Nye argues, “astounded people because it violated the natural order” of sunlight.11 Emerging industries capitalized on this wonder by drawing on natural iconography, and cinema was no exception.12
On the cover of its 1901 sales catalog, for instance, the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company used one such icon to announce the “Age of Movement” (fig. 3.1). Framed by electrical wires and menaced by a bolt of lightning emanating from clouds in the upper right corner, the title bursts forth in a luminous glow like the headlight of an oncoming locomotive, the source of which appears to be the interior of the catalog itself. While the cover’s allusions to light and movement make reference to the basic components of the projectors and films for sale within its pages, it is notable for the absence of any direct reference to or representation of film itself. Instead, the catalog’s iconography evokes the technological context that framed and shaped moving images in the early twentieth century. As inventors, industrialists, and governments introduced technologies such as electricity and electrical lighting to the Western world, filmmakers embraced them as both the subjects of early films and the basis for new production strategies and formal techniques. In New York, that process would take form through the competitive studio expansion that began with the construction of Edison’s second studio in 1901.
EDISON’S “SKYLIGHT STUDIO”—FILMING ABOVE MANHATTAN
New York’s first purpose-built film studio reproduced the basic character of Méliès’s studio on the outskirts of Paris, transporting its photography studio–like design to a Manhattan rooftop at 41 East 21st Street. America’s first “glass house” studio replaced the dilapidated and by then seldom-used Black Maria. Its location not only put Edison’s production center just steps away from the city’s entertainment hub (and its star performers and theaters); it also contributed to the rapid architectural changes taking place around Broadway and Fifth Avenue, the street that, in Page’s words, “exemplified more than any other place on the island the nature of what Henry James called the ‘provisional city.’ ”13 The new location offered Edison Company filmmakers an ideal location from which to explore the city and capture its provisional state in city films such as What Happened on Twenty-Third Street, New York (1901), Opening of New East River Bridge (1903), and Opening Ceremonies, New York Subway, October 24, 1904 (1904). It would also give the company an edge in the increasingly competitive industry at a moment when studio resources became key aspects of corporate strength.
Edison executives hoped that the studio would provide a more consistent output of films than the Black Maria or its production licensees, thereby capitalizing on the company’s current position of industry dominance. Thanks to a momentary victory over Biograph for patent infringement and the resulting industry-wide stagnation as film companies awaited word about the legal status of their filmmaking apparatuses, Edison held a brief monopoly on film production from the middle of 1901 to March 1902.14 During this period, the company’s lead filmmakers, Edwin S. Porter and George Fleming, used their new studio to meet market demand and explore new filmmaking techniques and aesthetic forms.
Porter later recalled proudly that the studio was “the first skylight studio in this country.”15 It occupied almost the building’s entire roof, approximately 90 by 20 feet, and was enclosed in glass and iron for $2,800 by the Hinkle Iron Company and the Metropolitan Fireproofing Company.16 On October 23, 1900, Hinkle Iron reported that the city building department had approved plans for the “Photographic Studio,” which it completed by mid-January 1901.17 Porter outfitted the floor below the studio with a small room lit through an 8 by 10 foot skylight. He also included an electrically lit section of 10 by 25 feet that contained dressing rooms and a darkroom for film processing (although large-scale developing and printing of Edison films still took place at the West Orange laboratory).18 The studio opened in February and was paying tangible dividends by the following winter as Porter and Fleming produced numerous short studio films while Biograph released only a few actualities.
Aside from its economic benefits, the studio also housed celebrated cinematic innovations, perhaps most visible in Porter and Fleming’s Jack and the Beanstalk, produced in May and June 1902. Like Méliès’s Le Voyage dans la lune, released only a few months later, the film featured noticeable developments in spatial fluidity between shots, in particular in the sequence during which Jack descends the beanstalk, exiting the bottom of the frame in each shot and reappearing from the top of the subsequent frame. Just as with Méliès’s first glass house, the space of filming and the techniques that filmmakers learned there left both tangible and more conceptual marks on the films they produced.
Like Méliès, Porter recognized the continuity between his new studio and the rooftop photography studios that had helped inspire it. Shortly after taking charge of the new studio, Porter and George Fleming produced a film that, in its comical representation of portrait photography, prefigures Méliès’s Une Chute de cinq étages (1906). The film—The Old Maid Having Her Picture Taken (1901)—turns on the old joke that one could be so ugly as to break a mirror, expanding the affliction to apply to any manner of studio objects. Using a combination of studio tricks and stop motion, Porter and Fleming use the old maid’s “ugliness” to wreak havoc on the simulated studio: sample photographs fall from the wall, the studio’s clock hands spin wildly before the clock joins the photos on the floor, and a full-length mirror breaks, confirming the joke. When the photographer finally attempts to take the old maid’s picture, the camera itself rejects her gaze, exploding in a puff of black smoke.
Much as Méliès would later, Porter and Fleming took advantage of their studio’s glass-and-iron design to simulate the film’s fictional studio world. The backdrop’s painted glass panes mimic the film studio’s rooftop glass enclosure and glass-and-iron walls, which also contribute to the illusion by appearing in the film itself, reflected in the imperiled mirror (fig. 3.2). More than simply underscoring the similarities between film studios and other spaces of visual cultural production, the studio’s appearance on screen—however rare—suggests that filmmakers like Porter and Méliès may have recognized such continuities and thought about the nature of their working environments. In Porter’s case, the changing city that shaped and framed that environment left an evident mark on the kinds of studio films he produced.
Over the next four years, while he used the studio to build a broad repertoire of film effects inspired by filmmakers like Méliès and facilitated by the studio, he also took inspiration from the city’s numerous building projects and city films produced by Edison and its competitors. In Building Made Easy, or How Mechanics Work in the Twentieth Century (1901), for instance, Porter uses stop- and reverse-motion effects to animate bricklaying and carpentry, creating both a visual metaphor and a cinematic equivalent to the additive, step-by-step building processes found on construction sites throughout the city and enhanced by films like Frederick Armitage’s Demolishing and Building Up the Star Theatre (Biograph, 1901). As such films suggest, the city’s construction not only became the subject of early city actualities; it also inspired fictional studio-produced narratives that make clear how attentive early filmmakers were to the new built environment.
Although Edison’s Manhattan studio briefly represented the most modern design in America, in Europe Méliès’s first studio predated it by almost four years, and British filmmakers including R. W. Paul, G. A. Smith, and Cecil Hepworth were also working under glass and iron by 1900. While the studio may have allowed Edison to out-produce his open-air–based American competitors during cold months, the short winter days still limited production and left Porter and his colleagues subject to the dictates of the natural environment. For, although the Edison studio did have a small electrically lit room, artificial light was not used for film production. How ironic that the company that brought electrical lighting to New York should fail to recognize that artificial lights would make the rooftop studio inadequate in only a few short years. Adding insult to injury, it would be Edison’s chief rival, Biograph, that would take the first important steps toward bringing electrical lighting to the American film industry.
AMERICAN MUTOSCOPE AND BIOGRAPH’S “DARK STUDIO”
Less than a year after declaring the “Age of Movement,” Biograph would make the reference to electricity on its catalog cover the physical reality of its film practice. Using newly developed mercury vapor lamps, the company outfitted the world’s first entirely artificially lit, or “dark” studio in lower Manhattan. Biograph’s shift to artificial lighting would mark a new step in the process of divorcing cinematic production from the dictates of the natural environment that began with Dickson’s rotating Black Maria and Méliès’s glass-and-iron studio. It would also secure Biograph’s place in the industry and help drive cinema’s expansion in the Nickelodeon era.
In contrast to its proclamations about the “Age of Movement,” in the year before its studio expansion, Biograph’s business was going nowhere fast. In the wake of Edison’s copyright infringement victory in 1901, the company’s future was in doubt. Although the court allowed production to continue under restrictions during the appeal process, the company also faced declining sales due to both the limitations of its proprietary 70mm film format and an industry-wide lag in audience interest.19 Finally, in March 1902, an appeals court overturned the Edison Company’s victory and allowed its competitors to return fully to production and sales. Biograph responded with a corporate makeover, complete with a gradual shift to the industry standard 35mm film and plans to open a new artificially lit studio.20 The use of electrical lights for both production and exhibition would expand cinema’s relationship to other technologies of the second industrial revolution. In Biograph’s case it would do so by bringing the company into contact with one of Edison’s chief noncinematic rivals, George Westinghouse.
Westinghouse had emerged as one of Edison’s main competitors during the early days of electricity. Beginning in the 1880s, Westinghouse and Edison headlined the highly publicized “battle of the currents” that pitted Edison’s direct current system of electrical production and distribution against Westinghouse’s alternating system. Despite the Edison Company’s early success with its Pearl Street Station in Manhattan, other power stations and electric trolley networks, and the incandescent light bulb, by the end of the 1880s its DC system faced rising competition from AC schemes developed by Nikola Tesla at Westinghouse and by several European companies.21 By the early 1890s, with relatively reliable AC motors and transformers available, more and more businesses and municipal governments chose Westinghouse’s system. Even Edison’s increasingly spectacular attempts to denounce alternating current as dangerous, including films such as Execution of Czolgosz (Porter, 1901) and Electrocuting an Elephant (1903), could not shift the move away from the AC system.
In 1892, facing declining profits and the reality that AC represented the future of large-scale electrification, Edison’s investors, led by J. P. Morgan, sold Edison General Electric to the Thomson-Houston Company in the merger that created General Electric, effectively squeezing a bitter Edison out of not only the company’s name but also the electricity business altogether.22 Edison used his considerable profits from the sale to fund new projects involving ore drilling, an electrical storage battery for automobiles, and the Portland cement that would help drive the growing concrete industry in America (and later give form to Edison’s own film studios). Although Edison was no longer involved directly in electrical lighting, his name was symbolically tied to both GE and the industry as a whole. How fitting, then, that one of Edison’s biggest technological rivals—Westinghouse—would help his chief American film foe—Biograph—rise to the top of the film industry in the prelude to the Nickelodeon boom.
CINEMA GOES “DARK”—MERCURY VAPOR LAMPS AND ARTIFICIAL DAYLIGHT
Biograph’s reorganization coincided with fortuitous developments in the electrical lighting industry. By the 1890s, inventors and investors had shifted their attention away from the “battle of the currents” to innovations in lighting sources in an effort to replace the incandescent bulb with brighter and more efficient systems.23 Westinghouse, in particular, sought new lighting technologies that would undermine the large market share that General Electric enjoyed thanks to its ownership of Edison’s patent for the incandescent globe.24 Peter Cooper Hewitt, grandson of industrialist Peter Cooper and son of former New York City mayor Abram S. Hewitt, began working on his own system of lighting with mercury vapor tubes in the late 1890s. He and Westinghouse first met in fall 1899 and reached an agreement in March 1900 that led to the formation of the Cooper Hewitt Electric Company with Westinghouse’s backing in 1902.
It is unclear how Biograph first came to use the Cooper Hewitt lamps, but already by the end of 1903 the company had plans for the world’s first studio to be lit exclusively by artificial lights.25 The new Biograph studio introduced a film production practice that would become so extensive that by 1919 an industry observer could remark: “needless to say, motion-picture studios are the very best customers a power supply company can hope for.”26
Biograph built the new studio in an apartment and basement of a brownstone at 11 East 14th Street, only a few blocks from its offices and rooftop studio at the Roosevelt Building and, like Edison’s Manhattan studio, close to the Broadway and Fifth Avenue entertainment district. In January 1903, the company received consent from its real estate broker to perform alterations on the interior of the building, including enlarging a doorway (presumably to create space for the stage and for moving cameras and décor) and installing heating units, gas and water fittings, and electrical wiring. The broker also granted Biograph authorization for “erecting galleries, stairways and appliances for electrical lighting and stage work, and making [a] trap door from [the] Music Hall to [the] basement,” all in accordance with codes enforced by the Department of Water Supply, Gas, and Electricity (DWSGE) and the New York Board of Fire Underwriters.27 The studio went into operation almost five months later, beginning on a reflexive note with a prank film—A Shocking Incident—in which a “bad-boy” character delivers electric shocks from a hidden battery.
By allowing the company to shoot films around the clock and throughout the year, the Cooper Hewitt lamps quickly brought Biograph to the head of American film production, easily surpassing output at Edison’s formerly dominant rooftop glass house.28 Biograph began production with several large banks of Cooper Hewitts, each of which contained eight mercury vapor tubes and was mounted on wheels or later suspended from the ceiling. Inspection reports from the DWSGE’s Electrical Bureau, the Board of Fire Underwriters, and Biograph’s electricians, Fred S. Chute and the Weed Electric Co., show that the company repeatedly enlarged its electrical setup between 1906 and 1909 to include more mercury vapor tubes as well as arc lamps. These additions were prompted by the need for additional production space to meet the demands of the flourishing exhibition market.29
Business and industry users opted for the original Cooper Hewitts for their increased efficiency and because they were said to be less tiring on the eyes than earlier incandescent bulbs. Because they lacked red and violet rays, the lamps produced an unusual greenish-white light that, in one contemporary observer’s words, gave them “an unnatural, indeed a ghastly, appearance.”30 The Cooper Hewitts were particularly well suited for cinema and photography because the actinic value—the ability to expose light-sensitive chemicals—of this “ghastly” but otherwise bright light was not affected by its lack of red and violet rays.31 One trade journal noted, “the very quality of eliminating the red rays is what makes the Cooper Hewitt lights so valuable in photography. [Their] pictures . . . stand out as clear and sharp as any daylight pictures ever made.”32
Such proclamations suggest the degree to which film studios attained new degrees of independence from the natural environment in the early twentieth century. Combined with glass-mediated sunlight, the addition of electrical lighting meant that filmmakers could seemingly create artificial cinematic worlds at will, a flexibility that helped make the Nickelodeon period possible. After Biograph began using artificial illumination, filmmakers working in glass house studios soon adopted electrical lights in an effort not only to maintain production levels during the winter season but also to find the best exposure conditions year-round.
While most producers and critics agreed that filmmaking outside in unimpeded sunlight was the optimal technique, filmmakers since Dickson and Méliès had recognized that such conditions were rarely available, especially in urban locations. As Thomas Bedding, former editor of the British Journal of Photography, described, “climatic uncertainties . . . make outdoor moving picture photography something of a luxury.”33 The search for favorable climatic conditions or, in their absence, substitutes for sunlight thus became one of the major driving forces in the development of early cinematic production. Bedding noted optimistically in Moving Picture World in 1909, “a perfect substitute for daylight has to be discovered, although thereotically [sic] it seems easy enough to make an artificial spectrum exactly corresponding, ray for ray, to the solar spectrum.”34
Lacking this “ray for ray” re-creation of the sun, filmmakers settled for a shifting and uncertain combination of various forms of glass, diffusing cloths, reflectors, Cooper Hewitts, arc lamps, and incandescent bulbs (fig. 3.3). Bedding himself could in one breath state “it may be taken as axiomatic . . . that a daylight studio is the best all around in moving picture making,” and in the next concede that “the ideal combination of lights is daylight and electricity.”35 A 1910 trade press article similarly provides a telling example of the paradoxes of early electrical lighting, as well as how filmmakers understood technology as a substitute for the natural environment. Glass house studio managers, the article notes, often mimicked the sun with banks of Cooper Hewitt lamps hung “directly against the skylight so that they may be turned on to help out the natural light on a dark day and will also give the operator his accustomed direction of light after dark.”36
The only real consensus about film lighting seems to have come from film reviewers and industry observers, who increasingly decried what Bedding referred to as the “harshness and unreality of illumination” as a result of over- or underexposure, shifting levels of brightness, dark shadows, and unwanted highlights—in other words, anything that ruined the illusionary reality of a “natural” scene.37 This search for realistic lighting techniques contributed to the gradual transition to narrative cinema in America and the implementation of new systems of representation and narration in France at Gaumont and Pathé Frères.38 Just as audiences and critics increasingly demanded more “realistic” narrative subjects, filmmakers sought ever more artificial ways to construct and light realistic film spaces. Their efforts were prompted not only by market demands for more, longer, and more realistic films but also by the growing number and success of films shot on location in the southern and western United States. Already, though, before filmmakers began to seek alternative filming venues and awe-inspiring exteriors, studios competed for lighting setups that could manufacture realistic scenes in the urban built environment.39
ARTIFICIAL LIGHTING AND MODERN INDUSTRIAL SPACE—FROM THE STUDIO TO THE FACTORY
The film industry’s increasingly rabid appetite for artificial light created a new market for industrial-grade lighting systems. By 1908, a number of lamp manufacturers such as the Aristo Company, which produced the “flame-arc” lamps installed at Biograph in 1909, had expanded their theatrical lighting services to include film studio lighting.40 Such links between theatrical and cinematic lighting should by no means suggest that filmmakers simply copied techniques from the stage, as film historians have previously argued. “Instead,” as Janet Staiger rightly contends, “the motion picture industry and the theater both take their place in the larger development of arc and incandescent lighting.”41 Indeed, film studios adopted electrical lighting technologies from a variety of nontheatrical sources that included street lighting and search lighting.42 And as the histories of the later Vitagraph and Edison studios will also demonstrate, developments in building technologies and designs using glass and concrete must also be included in the history of film lighting.
Biograph itself provides evidence of this broader context and the infrastructural links that developed between the film studio and the spaces of modern industry. In 1908, the company equipped its factory in Hoboken with the same types of arc and incandescent lamps used in its studio, again installed by Weed Electric and approved by the Board of Fire Underwriters. The inspection reports for both the studio and the factory are notable for using ink stamps for “Direct Current,” “Arc Lamps,” and “Cooper Hewitt Lights,” illustrating how common these artificial lights had become by 1906. The Cooper Hewitts were known as efficient and effective substitutes for incandescent lights in a variety of industrial settings. As an article about the lamps’ use for photography studios remarked, they were also “said to be the most desirable form of light for factories, machine shops, and work-rooms of architects and draftsmen, as well as for all classes of photographic work.”43
The Cooper Hewitt lamps filled a growing need in the spaces of American industry that, as David Nye explains, demanded qualitative changes in lighting conditions in order to extend working hours and allow for new degrees of precision to support turn-of-the-century industrial growth.44 As corporations including GE and Westinghouse invited film companies to record these changes for publicity and worker training, filmmakers often turned factories into temporary studios (fig. 3.4).45
One of the most striking examples is the series of films made by Billy Bitzer at the Westinghouse Works in 1904. Less than a year after Biograph began production at its new, Cooper Hewitt–lit studio, Bitzer underscored the company’s link to Westinghouse by using the new lamps to make a series of films at Westinghouse’s factories in Pittsburgh. In these films, Bitzer took early cinema’s pursuit of the city’s infrastructural technologies from the streets and studios to their origins—the machine works that produced modern industry and the industrialized metropolis.
Biograph’s sales catalogs featured twenty-nine films from the Westinghouse Works, depicting everything from the company’s electric sign, the factory steam whistle, and workers punching time cards, to fixed-camera shots showing aisles of workers winding coils, long takes of machine tests, and panoramas of the factory’s interior.46 Bitzer reproduced the technologies and techniques that produced industrial modernity by transporting viewers into its prototypical artificial environment. Such films prefigured the association that Walter Benjamin later drew between factory labor and cinematic perception. While Benjamin notes that the process “which determines the rhythm of production on a conveyor belt is the basis of the rhythm of reception in the film,” in the Westinghouse films the structure and pace of mechanical production sets the rhythm for cinematic reproduction.47
Much like the city films produced by Biograph during this period, the processes of filming at the Westinghouse Works often reproduced the infrastructural character of the technologies they recorded. In Westinghouse Air Brake Company, for instance, the dual assembly lines that slowly transport air brake molds serve as the on-screen corollaries of the unseen film reel that captures their endless circular trajectory. Bitzer enhances the infrastructural parallels between cinema and industry by reproducing the conditions of image production in the “dark” studio for the factory, most notably in the series’ interior panoramas. Here, Bitzer uses the Cooper Hewitt lights to stunning effect by suspending them alongside the camera on overhead rigging systems, thus creating sweeping aerial views. Just as in his later film Interior NY Subway 14th Street to 42nd Street (1905), in which he illuminated a subway car with a bank of Cooper Hewitt lamps on a parallel track, here Bitzer binds the Cooper Hewitt lamps and the film camera with technologies of modern industry. At Westinghouse, the same systems that transported machinery through the factory become tools for moving the camera and viewer. Much like the fragments of metal that exit the Works as completed machines, Bitzer’s panoramas comprise mechanical assemblages, in this case of factory-produced images.
In Panorama View, Street Car Motor Room, for instance, the hanging camera and lights traverse the length of the factory, doubling the streetcar motors that swing in and out of the frame. At one point the camera pauses as sparks and debris, emanating from just above the frame, shower the factory floor below, just as the unseen Cooper Hewitt lamps throw light onto the scene. The Cooper Hewitts highlight the center of the frame, creating a tunnel of light that was necessary, first and foremost, to expose the film but which also results in a striking composition. The factory’s other primary source of illumination, its large rough plate glass windows, line the left edge of the frame, providing a counterpoint to the Cooper Hewitts’ artificial illumination. The combination of “natural” and electrical lighting, which appears throughout the Westinghouse series (fig. 3.5), was a common strategy used by both studio filmmakers and the architects charged with providing light for modern industry. Just as in glass house studios, structures such as the Westinghouse Works that were built before and during the early days of electricity often featured this amalgam of lighting techniques.48
Even as electricity became more common, studio architects continued to search for new ways to capture sunlight. While the electrical lights that illuminated Biograph’s studio seemed to promise an electrically illuminated filmmaking utopia, in reality “dark” studios would not become the industry standard for more than a decade. In the meantime, film companies employed techniques taken from contemporary factories, department stores, and skyscrapers. The American Vitagraph and Edison studios built in Brooklyn and the Bronx beginning in 1905 illustrate the links that developed between the first studios and early modern architecture, each of which was driven in part by this contemporary quest for light.
PRISMATIC GLASS AND EARLY MODERN ARCHITECTURE—AMERICAN VITAGRAPH, BROOKLYN
By 1911, Vitagraph’s facilities in Brooklyn would represent the height of American cinema’s early industrialization. It featured facilities for all phases of production and postproduction, from a carpenter shop, set design workshops, and a wardrobe department, to a writing department and four studio stages, to developing, printing, tinting, and joining rooms. In addition, the studio housed manufacturing facilities for Vitagraph projectors, a publicity department, and business offices (see fig. 3.6). In sum, the studio came to represent, in one trade review’s estimation, “a model institution.”49 The history of this model highlights the important role that studio infrastructure played in film companies’ success in the century’s first decade. Vitagraph’s Brooklyn facility also offers a key example of cinema’s place in the changing materials and designs of modern architecture.
Vitagraph had begun the twentieth century producing films on a Manhattan rooftop and running an exhibition circuit as an Edison licensee. When the Edison Company opened its new studio in 1901, Vitagraph’s focus shifted to exhibition, in part due to Edison’s copyright victory over Biograph the same year. As Jon Gartenberg notes, when the appeals court overturned Edison’s victory in 1902, Vitagraph expanded autonomous production and, in response to the growing exhibition market that it helped create, began construction of a new studio. By the end of 1907, Vitagraph would be producing more than twice the number of films as its closest American competitor, Biograph, with Edison a distant third.50 Using advanced architectural forms and lighting technologies, the studio and the production practices to which it helped give rise would become paragons for the further industrialization of American cinema.
Vitagraph built its studio in the sparsely populated Flatbush area of Brooklyn at 15th Street and Locust Avenue (fig. 3.7). In addition to production stages, the structure initially included a power station, machine shop, darkroom, and business offices. The company’s rapid success would lead to large-scale expansion in the form of additional studios and offices to replace its former facilities in Manhattan.51 By 1910, Moving Picture World emphasized the studio’s grand scope, reporting, “the Vitagraph village takes on an aspect of activity and prosperity that is an imposing tribute to the growth of the moving picture business,” a view echoed by The Nickelodeon, which expressed similar wonder at Vitagraph’s “large proportions.”52 Its large smokestack—which still stands today—gave physical and symbolic form to the American film industry’s growth. And indeed, the studio would set the standard for a series of large American filmmaking centers built by Selig Polyscope (1907) and Essanay (1909) in Chicago, Siegmund Lubin’s “Lubinville” studio (1910) in Philadelphia, and later studio centers in Southern California.
The most significant feature of Vitagraph’s new studio was not so much its size as its approach to studio lighting. The studio combined a Cooper Hewitt light installation with a prismatic glass wall and roof that one trade journal described as a “special apparatus and stage . . . for taking novel pictures with special scenic effects.”53 Like Cooper Hewitt lamps and diffusing cloths, Vitagraph’s prismatic glass enclosure provided a bright, evenly distributed light that avoided the shadows and uneven illumination that critics such as Thomas Bedding and trade journal editors had bemoaned in the years leading up to 1910.
Film industry appeals for improved lighting conditions echoed the demands of urban inhabitants, commercial businesses, and industrialists. As architectural historian Dietrich Neumann has described, inventors and architects met those demands with novel forms for capturing sunlight that included the rough plate and corrugated glass used in factories since the 1880s as well as reflecting materials such as white enameled terracotta and large mirrors mounted on building façades. In this context, prismatic glass became, in Neumann’s words, “the most sophisticated and complex development among the many attempts in the last decades of the nineteenth century to bring more daylight into the dark interiors of factories and densely built urban centers.”54
Prismatic glass had been used since at least as early as the eighteenth century to light basements and the interiors of ships, and similar forms of light-directing glass were commonly used in the nineteenth century in commercial architecture. The success of new prismatic glass enterprises that emerged in the 1890s, notably including Chicago’s Luxfur Company, where Frank Lloyd Wright designed prismatic glass tiles, came as a result of the growing desire to light urban interiors using the sun’s rays rather than gas or electrical systems. This desire reflected the high cost of electricity as well as architects’ initial reluctance to adapt architectural styles to fit technological imperatives.55 The search for new ways to capture natural light was also prompted by a renewed desire for contact with nature in the increasingly technological metropolis.
Prismatic glass offered a “natural” (because not electrical) solution to the unnatural darkness created by sun-blocking elevated trains and skyscrapers. The idea that sunlight transported into darkened interiors by building technologies such as prismatic glass was somehow “natural” reflects the more general condition of artificiality that had come to define modern cities such as New York. As urban inhabitants spent more and more time in built spaces, manufactured versions of nature such as Prospect Park in Brooklyn and Central Park in Manhattan came to replace the natural environment itself, offering simulated oases from the urban built world. Prismatic glass produced an especially paradoxical version of this escape from urban artifice. As Neumann notes, thanks to prismatic glass’s translucency, “an office or store brightly lit by daylight could be isolated from the reality of the city outside.”56 In other words, customers could trade one form of urban reality for another, no less artificial one. This creation of artificial worlds sequestered from the modern metropolis similarly characterized the development of film studios like Vitagraph’s that produced miniature filmmaking cities within the city.57
Cinema’s gradual industrialization—suggested in part by the frequency with which observers began to refer to new studios as “plants” and “factories”—remained consistent with the film studio’s steady progression toward independence from the natural environment. But as the combination of electrical and glass lighting used by most studios demonstrates, this desire for artifice remained in tension with both the slow technological development of electrical networks and artificial light sources. Even as electrical lighting became more common in studio production, filmmakers still faced high electrical costs and poor exposure from artificial lights, and they again sought solutions rooted in nature.58 Prismatic glass was thus a logical fit for cinematic production because it offered a financially suitable solution to the problem of creating diffusely lit spaces by packaging a rationally enhanced, purified version of the natural environment.
EARLY MODERN ARCHITECTURE AND EARLY CINEMA
By the 1920s, architectural illumination using electricity and glass would become a key component of modern architecture’s own pure forms, especially in the early designs of the International Style and the Crystal Chain group. Such structures would inspire a generation of architects, filmmakers, and critics to celebrate the links between architecture and cinema’s respective abilities to produce new, dynamic forms of space. As Frances Guerin notes, “the foundation of modern German architecture’s engagement with technological modernity” was precisely the “interaction of both artificial and natural light with glass.”59 German films of this period, Guerin shows, echoed the “new modes of perception and representations of time and space within the industrial landscape” imagined by modernists such as Bruno Taut, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe.60 The correspondence between architecture and cinema did not, however, develop first in the 1920s. Rather, the ties between architecture and cinema that helped define modernism were the product of the parallel developments in turn-of-the-century architecture and early cinema that intersected in the first film studios.
Indeed, by the time Vitagraph was installing its prismatic glass enclosure in Brooklyn, architects including Luis Sullivan, William Le Baron Jenney, and Frank Lloyd Wright were making prismatic glass an important element of the new technologies and rational designs that drove early modern architecture in America. In Europe, architects including Adolf Loos, Pierre Chareau, Le Corbusier, Taut, and the founders of the Bauhaus embraced prismatic glass, especially in new forms such as the Glasseisenbeton (invented in 1909) that combined prismatic tiles with reinforced concrete.61 Moreover, the associations between early cinema and modern architecture do more than simply support later claims for the two mediums’ similar approaches to the production of modern space. Their link is deeper and more structural than that, for both early cinema and modern architecture shared a place in the more general creation of an artificial built environment—a rationally constructed world that approximated nature using cinematic and building technologies.
In addition to its use of prismatic glass, the Vitagraph studio offers another example of how such material changes conditioned the construction of early film studios. Vitagraph built both the studio’s original building and the exterior wall that isolated it from the street using concrete blocks. Photographs of the studio suggest that the blocks were likely a form of rock-faced hollow concrete that became a popular material for cheap, fireproof construction beginning around 1905 (see figs. 3.6–3.7).62 As architectural historian Pamela Simpson has described, the use of concrete blocks for private dwellings and commercial and industrial architecture increased rapidly in the early 1900s. With rising brick and lumber prices, concrete became an increasingly attractive alternative. Costs were low because Portland cement (reinforced concrete’s main ingredient) was increasingly cheap and widely available.63 Cheap concrete blocks would have helped Vitagraph offset the high cost of its prismatic glass, which Neumann notes was on average ten times as expensive as plain plate glass and five times more expensive than factory ribbed glass. No doubt, their fireproof qualities would also have been attractive given the risks associated with celluloid, risks that we most often think of in early theaters but which also plagued film studios.64
But Vitagraph’s interest was not limited to such functional concerns. The concrete blocks also offered the formal benefit of giving the studio the false appearance of being built from natural cut stone. Contemporary observers noted the effect. As one described, the studio consisted of “mysterious looking buildings of gray stone.”65 Whether Vitagraph was aiming for mystery or realism, it must have hoped that its new rock-faced concrete studio would leave an aesthetic and symbolic impression. That symbolism would put the studio in compelling dialogue with long-standing architectural debates about synthetic materials, debates that also related to Vitagraph’s concurrent turn to “quality” films.
Despite industry interest in the possibilities offered by concrete construction, many architects, including Frank Lloyd Wright, became outspoken critics of ornamental blocks. As Simpson explains, for Wright and others, such ornamentation violated ideas about architectural purity and the rule (dating to the ideas of John Ruskin and William Morris) that “one material should not imitate another.”66 On the other hand, for middle-class builders and homeowners—and perhaps for Vitagraph—rock-face concrete was valuable precisely because it successfully imitated real materials. By covering the façade of its studio in expensive-looking “stone,” Vitagraph presented the public with an artificial image of wealth and success, an ornamental anti-modernism that would be expressed no less in the company’s film remakes of classical works of literature and theater.67
Vitagraph’s use of architecture to project a corporate image in this way would become a common strategy for the companies that devoted significant resources to their studios in the years that followed. Indeed, as studios became larger and film companies achieved and cultivated greater publicity, film production spaces became symbolic representations of the vitality of the businesses they housed.68 It would thus be fitting that the buildings of companies like Vitagraph that made imitation and mass production the stuff of modern culture should be wrapped in mass-produced material simulation.
Vitagraph’s success during the Nickelodeon period brought further studio expansion. Even as it established the Los Angeles–area studios discussed in chapter 5, the company continued to add to its Brooklyn base. By 1912, the Vitagraph “plant” was already recognized as one of the country’s most efficient producers. As Louis Reeves Harrison described in his “Studio Saunterings” report about it, “the factory resources of the Vitagraph Company can be imagined when it is realized that they are turning out five releases of thousand-foot reels each week, a rate of production that involves the use of a complicated and well-organized force in all departments.”69 The following year, Vitagraph added a new, 55 × 110 foot glass studio and an additional open-air stage across the street that was large enough to hold an 85 × 40 foot painted backdrop.70 By 1914, the building covered “several acres” and consisted of more than a dozen buildings, including five studio stages and large factory floors powered by dynamos in the basement.71
Details of how Vitagraph arrived at its studio designs or how its architects interfaced with municipal building restrictions remain scarce, but we can be sure that studio planning in early twentieth-century New York was anything but haphazard.72 As the history of Edison’s Bronx studio shows, studio construction was a highly coordinated affair that at times involved multiple architects, engineers, and contractors, both design and redesign phases, and negotiations with city building officials. The complexities of this process help illustrate cinema’s place in the shifting architectural and regulatory context that developed as nineteenth-century materials and designs gave way to materials like prismatic glass and concrete blocks and the methods that would define early modern architecture and film studios in the decades to come.
“DAYLIGHT” FACTORIES AND CONCRETE STUDIOS—EDISON IN THE BRONX
By late 1904, Edison executives—like their counterparts at Vitagraph—recognized the need for additional, better-equipped production spaces to compete with output from Biograph’s new studio. Without electricity or space for electrical lights, Edison’s rooftop studio in Manhattan suffered intermittent halts in production and variable quality, even during consistent periods of filmmaking. One Edison employee later recalled, “every time we started to take a picture we would have to run out on the roof next door and see if the sun would pass over a cloud.”73 Edison’s solution to the problem would be similar to Vitagraph’s—a concrete-and-glass studio equipped with electrical lighting and built outside of central Manhattan to avoid high land prices. The Edison Company purchased a plot of land in the Bedford Park area of the Bronx for $15,000 in June 1905 and filed its first architectural plans with the Department of Buildings in September. Four years, three architects, and numerous revisions later, the studio was completed, with an additional extension, at a total cost of approximately $48,000.74
The studio was eventually built from reinforced concrete composed of Edison’s own brand of Portland cement, which the company had been developing since the late 1890s. While it ultimately remained true to the spirit of its initial design, the studio’s development was marked by a series of building permit violations, petitions, and amendments that led to long delays in construction and important changes to its material and structural form. This long process reflects the complicated state of urban construction that included new governmental regulations, including New York’s Tenement House Act of 1901 and a general revision of the city building code in 1906, the year before the Bronx studio’s construction began.75 This changing architectural and legal landscape would have important affects on the studio’s form, beginning with Edison’s choice of architects (fig. 3.8).
Edison initially hired two New York–based firms to design and construct the studio—Hugo Kafka and Sons and Arthur E. Rendle’s Paradigm Skylight and Side Lighting Systems. Their respective credentials make Edison’s choice clear. Hugo Kafka, a Czech-born immigrant who studied at the Polytechnikum in Zurich under architect Gottfried Semper, had gained fame at the 1873 Vienna International Exposition, where he won the Medal of Art and caught the eye of Hermann Schwarzmann, lead architect for the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia.76 Kafka immigrated to America to assist Schwarzmann on the 1876 Exposition’s buildings, notably including the Horticultural Hall, at the time one of the world’s largest glass-enclosed buildings. Rendle came with similar credentials, including two medals for his own Horticultural Hall at the 1885 New Orleans Exposition and important patents for the glazing techniques that would be used to enclose the studio’s stage.77
While the influence of earlier “glass house” film studios made experience with glass-and-iron construction desirable for film studio design, in this case the two firms also brought another important form of expertise to the project: familiarity with the rules and regulations that governed urban architecture.78 After the 1876 Exposition, Kafka established his firm in New York City, where he gained experience in private, commercial, and industrial architecture. In 1903, Kafka’s sons—Hugh, a Columbia University–trained architect, and Frederick, a civil engineer—joined the firm to aid their ailing father. Although archival records suggest that Hugh Kafka, Jr. handled the paperwork for the Edison studio, its initial design bears significant similarities to the elder Kafka’s earlier work, most compellingly a factory he had built on New York’s upper west side in 1885.79
The Joseph Loth & Co. Silk Ribbon Mill in Washington Heights (designated a New York City Landmark in 1993) suggests the kind of experience that would have been valuable for a studio designer (fig. 3.9).80 The mill was unusual, in part, simply for being designed by an architect. In the late nineteenth century, engineers familiar with machines and manufacturing methods typically designed mills according to standard codes developed by insurance companies. In this case, however, Loth and Company, like Edison later, needed an architect who could adapt standard mill architecture to the requirements of its urban locale and the city building code.
Three primary concerns drove the mill’s design: meeting codes for fireproof construction, providing adequate lighting, and maximizing unobstructed interior dimensions. Twenty years later, similar concerns, with markedly different results, would also shape the designs for Edison’s studio. Kafka met these demands with an unusual “K”-shaped structure that anticipates the “I” or “H” shape of Edison’s studio. The mill’s “K” plan consisted of a central factory floor and two long wings, all of which needed to be narrow enough—less than thirty feet wide—to be built without the internal columns or firewalls that would otherwise have been mandated by the city’s building code. Kafka’s design also facilitated efficient illumination using a combination of electrical and natural light similar to what would be found later in film studios. Its unobstructed rooms allowed for effective natural lighting through the mill’s large glass windows, while also facilitating both power transmission for the factory floor through long drive shafts and electrical wiring for the plant’s artificial lights, still a relatively new feature for mills in the mid-1880s.
Materially, the Loth and Company mill was typical of late-nineteenth-century industrial architecture. The mill followed the New York City building code practice of supporting brick walls with wooden beams and cast-iron columns. Kafka used especially large column spans to frame the mill’s plate glass windows, an early version of the strategy that architects used in the late nineteenth century to achieve greater internal illumination. Kafka and Sons repeated these strategies in the initial proposals for Edison’s studio.
Kafka submitted the initial plans for the “photographic studio” (as it was designated in the building application) to the Department of Buildings on September 15, 1905. The original design consisted of a single “I”-shaped structure composed of two three-story wings joined by a central atrium, and called for a concrete-and-stone base and a foundation of “reinforced Portland Cement concrete.”81 The 64 × 23 foot wing for offices, storage, and laboratory facilities would be built from stone-covered brick with Georgia pine girders, columns, and floors, all supported by internal wooden posts and floor beams. The 32 × 30 foot atrium and 62 × 43 foot production studio wing would be enclosed in galvanized iron and glass with steel girders, columns, and peaked roof trusses, with the exception of the rear section of the studio, which would use brick, wood, and stone.
The plans for the studio remained consistent with the basic design principles found in the earlier Loth and Company Mill. The studio’s “I” shape, in particular, recalled the strategy used in the factory to maximize unobstructed internal space by limiting room widths (here to less than twenty-five feet, perhaps in anticipation of the amended building code that would be adopted in 1906). Kafka restricted the office and laboratory wing to twenty-three feet to allow for open interior working space. He seems to have hoped that enclosing the rear section of the studio wing in brick would convince the building examiner that it would be strong enough to support the glass-and-iron enclosure without the need for internal columns or beams, which would have disrupted movement and sight lines and created unwelcome shadows. By separating the two wings with an atrium, Kafka left the studio with unimpeded access to the northern sun, while also helping protect the non-studio area from the threat of fire.
Such choices were not, of course, left to chance, and contemporary observers recognized that architectural designs had important and tangible affects on filmmakers’ production practices and the visual forms of their films. As Thomas Bedding described in 1909, for instance, “Anybody familiar with the making of moving pictures can see that some of the American manufacturers are restricted in the choice of subject by exiguity of stage space. Their plays are produced in very shallow rooms, and so the scope for dramatic action is limited.”82 Indeed, an architect’s ability to create a versatile working space allowing for multiple large sets lit by both bright sunlight and, by the mid-nineteen aughts, electrical lighting, while also satisfying new city building restrictions, could mean the difference between success and failure. In this case, Kafka would have to go to great lengths to appease the city building examiner and give the Edison Company the studio it needed to maintain its position in the industry as the studios of its principal American competitors, Biograph and Vitagraph, began to out-produce it.
The Department of Buildings rejected Kafka’s initial design on September 29, two weeks after it was filed, leading to a series of petitions, amendments, and important changes to the studio’s material structure. The studio suffered in part from a problem of classification in the city’s building code. In the absence of a more suitable category, Kafka submitted a permit application for “brick” buildings that were subject to laws governing “warehouses,” a catchall term for everything from factories, mills, and power houses to markets, railroad buildings, and observatories, none of which very well described the proposed studio, which, in the eyes of the law, was just another, if odd, industrial space that had yet to acquire any recognized rules or design standards.
From the city building inspector’s perspective, the main problem with Kafka’s proposed studio was the glass-and-iron enclosure on the studio wing. The inspector considered the studio’s walls unlawful for two reasons: first, glass was not recognized as a “hard, incombustible material,” and second, each wall was required to be at least twelve inches thick.83 In the absence of the required wall thickness, Kafka was required to prove that the building’s girders, beams, and trusses would be of sufficient strength to support the upper walls and roof. The examiner rejected this claim straightaway, however, noting that the building’s supports, both for the production studio area and the brick-and-wood office wing, would be too weak.
Two months after the application was rejected, Kafka submitted an amendment calling for augmentation of the wood girders and beams and an increase in the pitch of the glass-and-iron roof that would reduce the load on its iron supports.84 The amendment also included a petition requesting an exception to the city’s building code to allow for “a structural steel frame-work covered with sheet metal work and glass” that Kafka claimed would be “exceptionally rigid” and use no combustible material. The petition cited “practical difficulties” owing to the building’s proposed use for “special photographic purposes,” underscoring the novelty of studio architecture vis-à-vis the city’s building standards, which were rapidly becoming outdated.85
Although the Department of Buildings accepted the new glass-and-steel framework, the examiner again rejected Kafka’s enlarged wooden beams, and two weeks later Kafka relented, replacing all of the structure’s brick walls and wood components with reinforced concrete made from Edison’s own patented form of Portland cement.86 The new amendments were finally approved on December 27, and in mid-January 1906 Kafka submitted the initial bills to the Edison Company urging prompt approval so as to initiate the process of obtaining steel.87 After several minor delays, contractors completed the studio in late 1906.
The new studio led to marked improvements in Edison’s film output that critics associated with the studio’s design. A 1909 article in Moving Picture World touting “Edison Progress” noted that “our own criticisms of the company’s work have, from week to week, borne testimony to the improvement in photographic quality which Edison pictures have recently maintained.”88 Written just after the completion of a concrete addition in late 1909, the article associates Edison’s picture quality and high film output with the company’s attention to modern methods of picture making and its “capacious” studio space, which allowed for up to five or more simultaneous productions (fig. 3.10). Both the studio’s sheer size and Kafka’s attention to the ways that architectural design affected lighting and, as a result, photographic quality, had successfully brought Edison back, in the article’s words, to “the forefront of the world’s moving picture makers.”89
CONCRETE STUDIOS AND MODERN ARCHITECTURE
The new studio’s success owed much to its architects’ deft recognition of the need to implement the day’s most advanced materials and designs. As was the case at Vitagraph’s studio in Brooklyn, Edison’s Bronx home brought cinema into its earliest relationship with modern architecture. In late 1905, Kafka and the Department of Buildings had transformed the studio from the iron, brick, and wood that defined nineteenth-century factories into the reinforced concrete and steel that would define early twentieth-century modernism. Indeed, as architectural historian Reyner Banham has shown, at this very moment architects began to replace wood and brick with reinforced concrete frames, creating what Banham terms “Daylight Factories,” so-named for the increasingly large windows that provided more natural interior lighting.90 The implementation of reinforced concrete frames contributed to a revolution in materials and designs that transformed industrial (and, with studios such as Edison’s, film studio) architecture and would help inspire architectural modernism.91
As Banham explains, by the mid-1910s photographs of American factory architecture were making a profound impression on European architects such as Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, and Antonio Saint’Elia, who were inspired by the grace of these structures’ spare functional forms.92 While the resulting European designs from the 1920s (and the analogous film sets created by architects working in the film industry) have become the most commonly cited origins of the relationship between architecture and cinema, the Edison studio predates such associations by almost two decades. The Bronx studio and those that followed comprise an earlier history of cinema’s relationship to architecture—a material history founded on infrastructural changes to the modern built environment.
The Edison Company contributed to those very changes, alongside the cinema business, through its efforts to develop a new form of Portland cement concrete. Edison had grandiose visions for Portland cement that had striking consistency with modern architects’ later utopian ideals for reinforced concrete. The first decade of the twentieth century witnessed a virtual explosion in reinforced concrete construction, in part thanks to the large-scale expansion of Portland cement production at the end of the nineteenth century.93 Edison began working with the material in the late 1890s and created the Edison Portland Cement Company in 1899.94 By 1901, the company had invented a new form of cement roasting kiln and had plans for a concrete structure—the “Edison Poured Concrete House”—that Edison claimed would revolutionize low-income housing in cities such as New York (fig. 3.11).
As was so often the case with Edison’s highly publicized inventions, the press seized on the concrete house, reporting on it incessantly in the early 1900s, even before one was ever built. In January 1908, one article went so far as to hail the yet-to-be-completed invention as one of the new “seven wonders of the world,” which notably included the skyscraper and Edison’s “camera phonograph” (fig. 3.12).95 In an article published the following year, Edison himself ranked the concrete house as “the most wonderful advance in science and invention that the world has ever known, or hoped for.”96 Motion pictures had to settle for runner-up.
FIGURE 3.12 “Seven Wonders of Today’s World Eclipse Old ‘Seven Wonders,’ ” St. Paul Daily News, January 27, 1908 (Edison Papers Project). The seven wonders include “New York’s 48-story office building” (the Metropolitan Life Insurance Tower, the tallest building in the world for four years beginning in 1909), the Lusitania, European “war airships,” Marconi’s wireless telegraph, the electric locomotive, the “camera phonograph,” and “Edison’s $1,000 concrete house.”
Edison hoped to reform New York City’s rapidly transforming urban environment (for him, the “epitome of the horror of the age”) through the creation of a concrete utopia built with his mass-produced, low-cost concrete dwellings.97 In the end, the plan scarcely came to fruition, and only a few concrete houses were ever built. But Edison’s Portland cement work—especially the rotary kiln he developed and that competing cement companies used into the 1920s—did support developments in reinforced concrete construction that contributed to another set of utopian visions in 1920s European modernism and concrete film studios worldwide.98
By 1910, the Portland Cement Company’s catalog, the Edison Aggregate, boasted dozens of reinforced concrete structures built using Edison’s Portland cement (fig. 3.13). The “daylight factories” featured in the catalog, which included Edison’s Phonograph Works in West Orange, were but a step removed from those reproduced later by Gropius and Le Corbusier. And they were even more closely linked to early cinema. Only a few months after the completion of the Bronx studio in October 1907, Edison hired one of his chief allies in the cement business—architect Horace Moyer, a concrete specialist—to design a reinforced concrete extension that he added in 1909 at a cost of $20,000.99
Each of these projects contributed to a new architectural landscape that helped lay the groundwork for future developments in industrial, modern, and studio construction. Each also helped define modern spatial experiences, physical and virtual alike. The link between Edison’s Portland cement and cinema businesses underscores the important role that architecture played in shaping cinematic space from the beginning of the century. It should thus come as no surprise that filmmakers, architects, and theorists in the 1920s would celebrate the relationship between cinema and architecture—they were stating a point that had been in the making for nearly twenty years. We should not, moreover, allow the immaterial associations that those observers drew between cinematic and architectural spaces to delimit our understanding of the two mediums’ lasting relationship. Indeed, this chapter has described a tangible history of how the film industry and those working in it were shaped by, adapted to, and left their mark on architecture and urban environments in cinema’s earliest days. Similar histories should be written about the periods that followed.
CONCLUSION: UTOPIAN VISIONS AND FUNCTIONAL DESIGNS
The demands of cinema created a simple architecture; new construction materials such as reinforced concrete worked in the same manner. The results should thus lead towards the same goal, and if we add to this the present “economy” that does not allow for excess and our current taste for the fundamentally pure and geometrical “machine,” we should arrive at a unity of conception between cinematic architecture and architecture as it is really lived.
—Robert Mallet-Stevens (1925)100
The same year that Horace Moyer put the finishing touches on Edison’s Bedford Park studio, the first permanent film studio was built in Los Angeles. Within a decade Hollywood and its concrete studios would house a filmmaking utopia, or “dream factory system,” that used functional techniques of modern manufacturing to create cinematic “dream” worlds. The latent tension between the “dream” and the “factory,” the fantastic and the functional in Hollywood’s concrete, glass, and “dark” studios mirrored the blending of pragmatism, utopianism, and a romantic vision of American industrial modernity in modern architecture. Indeed, when Walter Gropius instructed architects participating in a 1919 competition to “go into buildings, endow them with fairy tales . . . and build in fantasy without regard for technical difficulty,” he could just have well been describing the task of studio filmmakers—or studio architects.101
Early filmmakers and the first film studios played a small, if significant role in driving the “age of movement” that produced images and ideas for an artificial urban environment that, not coincidentally, would later seem perfectly designed for cinematic representation. In the century’s first decade, filmmakers endowed the modern built environment with “fairy tales” by documenting Manhattan’s “creative destruction,” while studio architects adopted the newest materials and designs of urban reconstruction to “build in fantasy.” Put another way, before Manhatta and Mallet-Stevens, cinema had Hugo Kafka and Horace Moyer. Before Hollywood’s massive sets and false-front cities, it had prismatic glass and Portland cement. It was in those guises that cinema developed lasting links to modern architecture and became part and parcel of a new twentieth-century built environment.
