And the studio, around which so great a skein of glamour has been spun, is after all only a great Dream Factory, in which your dreams and others’ are woven into a tiny ribbon that is carried half way around the world to be dreams for the tired little shop girl next door and the rich old man in the mansion who has lost all his own.
—G. Harrison Wiley, “The Dream Factory” (1921)1
NEARLY A CENTURY later, G. Harrison Wiley’s eloquently contradictory description of the film studio—“only a great Dream Factory”—remains common parlance for the buildings and industry that dawned in Los Angeles in the decade following World War I. The “dream factory system” may forever, one might surmise, call to mind the assembly line–like churning out of standardized film products whose escapist quality made them fantastic dreams. But as this book has shown, the “dream factory” metaphor may be better understood not by looking forward to classical Hollywood’s golden years but rather by returning to the many factors that turned film studios into factories and their film products into dreams in the three preceding decades. Indeed, the more we look back, the more the metaphor seems inadequate for encapsulating the studio’s function and importance.
During film’s first two decades, filmmakers defined studio cinema not simply as a rationalized form of economic production but also as a technological and aesthetic system of spatial organization and environmental regulation. The development of studios wasn’t about creating dreams, it was about producing two kinds of spaces: real spaces based on scientific principles and practical procedures for registering reflected light; and virtual image spaces defined by the spatial character of the real spaces in which they were produced. Although film scholars have tended to focus on the latter, the emergence of cinematic space cannot be properly understood without knowledge of cinema’s first material spaces and the convergence of the building materials, technical expertise, and practical experience that shaped their early forms.
WHENCE THE DREAM FACTORY?
Beneath its “skein of glamour,” the early film studio’s material reality—its mix of iron and glass, brick and mortar, concrete and steel—betrays a no less complex system of influences. Cinematic space emerged as a confluence of materials and designs drawn from the spaces of modern science, industry, and art. From advanced research labs and hothouses, to factories and mills, to photography studios and artists’ ateliers, the spaces that defined modern production furnished the principles for cinema’s unique production of space.
This study has examined the studio’s artificial spaces and the film worlds they produced through three main approaches: (1) by situating the first studios in the architectural and technological developments that inspired their designs and material forms, (2) by analyzing the resulting studio structures’ effects on film form, and (3) by theorizing the studios’ and their films’ technological and spatial reproductions of the modern built environment and the new technologies that animated it. From early urban actualities and Edison and Biograph films depicting modern infrastructure to Méliès’s critical parodies of technological change and Feuillade’s downbeat depictions of modern “life as it is,” film technology came to play a key critical role in documenting and evaluating the developments that shaped the urban infrastructures and technologies that had helped shape cinema itself and especially its first studios.
Indeed, if studio films came to offer both critical commentaries on and dreamlike escapes from the realities of modern life, they could so readily do so, in part, because of their close ties to it. Their locations in and around metropolises like Paris and New York meant ready access to stories from the street. And in their material forms, the studios’ themselves were re-creations of the artificial characteristics of industrial modernity that also defined their film products.
It is thus no coincidence that studios took on industrial monikers during this period. The machines and practices that produced industrial-manufacturing spaces also shaped the first studios, even before they became literal and figurative “factories.” From the technological spaces of the Edison laboratory to the modern materials used to build glass houses and concrete daylight factories, developments in building technologies and architectural designs provided the nineteenth-century conditions of possibility for early-twentieth-century studio cinema. By the 1910s studios were commonly recognized, both architecturally and in their organizational methods, as factory-like. As a representative 1911 article about the Selig Polyscope Company’s “Diamond-S” studio in Chicago described, “The Selig plant is an enormous art factory, where film plays are turned out with the same amount of organized efficiency, division of labor and manipulation of matter as if they were locomotives or sewing machines.”2
As the histories of Gaumont and Pathé demonstrate, that rational economy had important architectural components. Indeed, early studio architects’ common backgrounds in industrial design underscore the direct links between architectural efficiency in the studios and the efficient designs that shaped early-twentieth-century factories. What’s more, many studios housed much more than just filmmaking. At large studios like Gaumont’s Cité Elgé, Pathé’s studios in Joinville and Vincennes, and Vitagraph’s studio in Brooklyn, film was but one form of industrial output. The tendency to think of studios simply as places in which to make movies has obscured the many other industrial activities that have long structured cinema, and this study’s analysis of those film and non-film practices should suggest the value of examining the diverse work of cinematic production spaces into the early sound period and beyond.
Even if cinema had become just another kind of industry, its manipulated “matter” was anything but a straightforward industrial product. Studios produced art, entertainment, and aesthetic experiences that necessarily bore the mark of the industrial contexts from which they emerged. This study contends that film analysis should include greater attention to the aesthetic effects of film production spaces. Studios inherited spatial forms from modern materials and architectural designs, and these spaces and materials helped determine the forms of early studio films. As my analyses suggest, architectural space shaped film form in a variety of ways and to different degrees across studio contexts. The Black Maria’s unique architectural design, for instance, produced a distinct, readily identifiable visual form—what I have termed the “framed aesthetic”—that derived from its architectural function (to capture sunlight) and reflected its roots in laboratory and scientific analysis. The “imponderable fluidity” of Georges Méliès’s films, on the other hand, bears a more conceptual relationship to his studio’s glass-and-iron form. Just as nineteenth-century glass-and-iron structures fascinated contemporary observers by opening architectural space to new degrees of fluidity, so Méliès’s studio films wowed audiences by opening cinema to new kinds of spatial manipulation. The flexibility of Méliès’s production spaces—and similar ones housing the likes of Zecca, Smith, and Porter—echoed the malleability of glass and iron as building materials, a correlation between architecture and cinema that Elie Faure would later describe as “cineplastics.”
As Edison, Vitagraph, Pathé, Gaumont, and other companies built larger, professionally designed studios based on the experience of their predecessors, filmmakers and set designers built larger and more realistic sets to satisfy changing audience demands. Architects such as Hugo Kafka for Edison and Auguste Bahrmann for Gaumont facilitated these developments by using modern materials to create large, brightly illuminated interiors without columns that would block shooting angles, prevent camera movements, or cast unwanted shadows on the set. The flexibility offered by large stages serviced by set design workshops and prop supply rooms helped filmmakers meet producers’, audiences’, and critics’ desires for longer and more sophisticated narratives and more realistic styles. At the same time, the growing number of filmmakers who left the studio to capture urban scenes and natural landscapes continued to use studio technologies and techniques to frame the outside world as if it were just another studio. As the industry shifted to Southern California, all of these practices helped shape the development of film form on the studio sets and early backlots where filmmakers replicated earlier studio designs and filmmaking techniques.
As these examples suggest, attention to cinema’s architectural contexts offers new ways of analyzing the development of film form, style, and content. This study argues that it also opens new avenues for theorizing film space as well as film’s contribution to our experience and understanding of the modern world. Architecture and technology shaped early cinema, and cinema, in turn, helped shape the modern world in ways that can be better understood by considering the studio as a key component of cinema’s development.
ARCHITECTURE, TECHNOLOGY, AND FILM THEORY
Behind all of the diverse forms with which filmmakers explored and expanded film’s spatial techniques, the studio remained a consistent frame—a strange physical site, always present but rarely noticed in its film products. One way of understanding this unusual spatial dynamic, I have proposed, is through Michel Foucault’s idea of the “heterotopia.” A uniquely modern type of space, the heterotopia embodies precisely the kinds of spatial experimentation the studio made possible. Studios offered key sites for exploring the nature of modern space and spatial experience by juxtaposing simulated versions of any and all real spaces in a single location. Contemporary observers took note. A 1917 cartoon parody of movie studios—Charles Gatchell’s “impressions of an amusement factory as seen from the ceiling”—makes light of such juxtapositions by ironically populating the studio with sets that include a working-class restaurant, a bourgeois salon, a rural den, and a faux-Egyptian palace (while set designers paint the backdrop for a city scene in the workshop below).3 Such scenes of chaotic production and unlikely juxtaposition could indeed be found on a smaller scale on “any day at any studio,” where filmmakers and set decorators made imaginative re-creations of like and unlike places the norm.
The unique possibility for producing, reproducing, and manipulating space in the studio and on film remains important to cinema’s potential as a medium for exploring and evaluating space today. As Anthony Vidler argues, “the architecture of film has acted, from the beginning of this century, as a laboratory, so to speak, for the exploration of the built world.”4 Although the studios’ physical spaces have increasingly given way to virtual software suites, filmmaking continues to be defined by imaginative creations of space, and architects continue to use forms of moving-image modeling as fundamental tools for imagining future places in the same way that filmmakers have since cinema’s first “laboratory,” the Black Maria.
These creative spatial practices derived from the broader processes by which modern technologies transformed Western cities into human-built artificial environments beginning in the late nineteenth century. Architects and engineers altered cities with new building materials such as glass, concrete, and steel as well as infrastructures such as electrical lighting grids, water and sewer systems, and human-made parks. The studios became their cultural counterparts: technological spaces that artificially produced favorable conditions of nature for photographic reproduction. Filmic space offered its own artificial environments as it recorded and replayed the ongoing changes to the city for its urban inhabitants. At other times, films captured and repackaged natural landscapes for urbanites hungry for a version of nature outside the city. Such films offered a contradictory form of access to nature—extracted and re-presented by film technology—that was consistent with the ways that film studio technologies enhanced and reproduced features of the natural environment for film representation.
Considered as an architectural technology, the film studio became a key example of what Lewis Mumford and Martin Heidegger separately described as “modern technics.” For Mumford, modern technology is defined by the technological replacement of nature: synthetic materials for wood, brick, and stone; machine power for animals, wind, and water; and chemical fertilizers for organic processes. Early studio cinema similarly developed according to filmmakers’ progressive efforts to manipulate, simulate, and replace sunlight in order to produce an idealized version of the natural environment suitable for recording movement. Understanding the studios in this way, I have argued, opens up an interpretation of cinema as a literal form of Heidegger’s theory of enframing, the process by which modern technology places nature on reserve and sets it before the human subject as a metaphorical image. From the Black Maria to the backlot set, studios enframed nature in order to frame their film subjects. Films, in turn, placed technological slices of the world before viewing subjects. As a “specific art of the machine,” cinema would become, and continue to be, a key element of our experience and so-often visual understanding of technology and technological change. When understood, as I have proposed, as a system of interrelated machines, cinema may even be the prototypical example of modern technology. This idea must be borne out through further attention by film and media scholars to how moving images fit in the history of technology and by historians of technology to the importance of representational technologies as much more than recorders and illustrators of technological history.
AFTERLIVES OF THE FIRST STUDIOS
In 1915, as Universal City welcomed studio tourists and a massive filmmaking workforce, Gaumont and Pathé bid adieu to workers leaving for the warfront and made room for war supplies, which soon filled their vacant studios. Although World War I changed the dynamics of the global film industry, it did not radically alter the film studio itself. If anything, studios’ uses during the war only underscore the close relationship between film and industrial modernity that developed during this period. Gaumont, for instance, put its infrastructure and expertise in optics and sound technology to work in the service of state-sponsored military manufacturing. The least surprising of its wartime products would be its aerial cameras, developed for surveillance as early as 1916. But Gaumont’s scientists and engineers also used their knowledge of electricity, studio illumination, and sound recording to design spotlight systems for the trenches, wireless communications systems for aircraft, and submarine sonar systems. The company adapted its production techniques to military protocols and transformed its Cité Elgé into a literal military-industrial complex. These practices helped Gaumont stay afloat during the war by supplementing its comparatively meager film profits. In the war’s aftermath, Gaumont continued to manufacture noncinematic devices, even as film production became profitable again.5
The architectural forms and technological processes described in this study did not undergo widespread changes until the 1920s, when advances in artificial lighting technologies led filmmakers to cover their glass-and-iron walls with dark curtains and pushed architects to replace glass houses with dark studios. The next clear breaking point would occur with the widespread shift to sound in the decade’s last years. That the 1920s should be such a privileged moment in studies of cinema and architecture reflects the dynamism that came with these shifts in studio architecture, the intermedial experiments that explicitly linked the two mediums, and the numerous critics who celebrated and theorized their similarities. This moment can be better understood, however, by accounting for the long and varied histories of architectural forms and filmmaking practices that preceded it.
If, as Robert Mallet-Stevens argued in 1925, “a unity of conception between cinematic architecture and architecture as it is really lived” seemed so apparent, it was no doubt because the two were products of the same developments of materials and designs in the previous century.6 This is not to deny the real developments in film form and representation in the 1920s, when architecturally trained filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein and architects-turned-set designers such as Mallet-Stevens offered striking new visions of film’s potential to explore built space while classical Hollywood set designers such as William Cameron Menzies and Anton Grot made studio set design a modern art form. But those developments need to be situated in a multifaceted history of film’s architecturally influenced formal evolution.
Many of the studios described in this study, including Gaumont’s Cité Elgé, the Pathé studios in Joinville, and many of the Southern California studios, remained in use in the 1920s and, in renovated form, for decades to come.7 Although film and building technologies and filmmaking practices changed, the close relationships between cinema, architecture, and technology forged in cinema’s first two decades remain key elements of the studio’s basic form and function. Even today, studios continue to be factory-like and their films continue to be technological forms.
The persistent relationship between film technology, architecture, and industry is perhaps no more apparent than at French-led conglomerate Europacorp’s new Cité Européenne du cinéma in the northern Paris suburb of Saint Denis. Europacorp has repurposed an Electricité de France factory as the central structure of Europe’s largest film studio. This cinema city within the city—France’s answer to Italy’s Cinecittà and Britain’s Pinewood Studios—encompasses more than six acres, including business offices, the École National Supérieure Louis Lumière film school, and 10,000 square meters of shooting stages.
As readers of Studios Before the System will understand, the new studio has taken its place in a long tradition of film industry links to industrial architecture and municipal infrastructure. Film studios and modern factories shared the common need for large spaces, efficient lighting, and power; they produced similar (sometimes even the same) products; and they contributed to the same broad processes of technological change. In large studios, cinema became a product not just of dream factories, but of real factories, and their films made—and continue to make—the artificial spaces of industrial modernity the realities of studio moving-image production.
CODA
The first American and French studios—the Black Maria and Georges Méliès’s first glass house—did not survive the twentieth century, at least not as film production spaces. Méliès’s studio stood undisturbed in Montreuil until, despite protests from historians and cultural figures (including Henri Langlois, reportedly the most outspoken of the studio’s defenders), new owners razed it in 1947. Although unused for more than three decades, the studio continued to house a remarkable vitality up to its end. Between the cracks of the studio’s forgotten stage, a burgeoning garden thrived under the natural light that once exposed Méliès’s film productions—a fitting reminder of the correlation between glass house photochemistry and greenhouse photosynthesis.
Not long after Méliès’s studio passed into oblivion, the Black Maria reappeared, revived a half-century after its demolition. In 1954, the Thomas Alva Edison Foundation funded the construction of a life-sized model of the studio that still stands at the Edison National Historic Site in West Orange, New Jersey. No longer fit to house artificial constructions, the Black Maria became one.8 Ironically, the Edison Foundation initially used the studio replica as a film theater, where Edison enthusiasts could watch 16mm prints of The Great Train Robbery. Today, the Black Maria continues to serve as an exhibition space in yet another form. In 2009, British artist Lindsay Seers’s Extramission 6 (Black Maria)—a video installation projected inside a reconstructed version of the first studio—brought the studio back into public view as part of Tate Modern’s 2009 “Altermodern” Triennial.9 Inside the scaled-down “studio,” visitors watch a video that includes scenes of Seers building her Black Maria. That it should become a reference for contemporary art—and a physical presence in museums and galleries—seems a fitting future for the once-derided “ramshackle” building. As architectures and technologies for what would become the dominant form of image production in the twentieth century, studios such as the Black Maria played a key role in defining modern aesthetic experience.
In the first studios, inventors and image-makers imagined and evaluated their world—and their own practice—through a combination of building technologies, architectural designs, and image-making devices, and they continue to do so today, whether on backlots and soundstages, in digital effects studios and software suites, or in artists’ studios and galleries. The afterlives of Méliès’s glass house and Dickson’s Black Maria offer a striking contrast and a puissant conclusion to this study of cinema and architecture, technology and nature, and artificial reproduction: one swallowed by both nature and the tides of progress; the other further fixed in systems of artifice, duplication, simulation, and the spaces of modern visual culture.