The Real Tinsel : THE...

Few stories of the past century are more epochal, more exciting and more crucial to understanding our culture than the history of the movies--or motion pictures, film, cinema, whatever you want to call them.

The story of their rise, documented in these three initial volumes of Scribner’s proposed 10-volume history, seems, on the surface, pure Horatio Alger: humble beginnings, great advancement. Beginning around the century’s turn, in peep shows and nickelodeon screenings, films were, initially, cheap entertainment for the masses, particularly the poorer classes of the great American cities. Back then, the rich and the middle class turned up their noses at the movies--as they often do today--deploring their allegedly low moral character, their crude storytelling and the sweat, reek and fetor of their exhibition.

But, like few art or entertainment forms ever, the movies spread like wildfire, generating a phenomenal popularity that kept forcing them into new venues: from preposterously grandiose picture palaces like New York’s Roxy and Los Angeles’ Grauman’s Chinese of the 1920s to the drive-in theaters of the ‘50s to the shopping-mall multiplexes and cable-TV systems today. The movies, American-style--what they mean, what lies behind them, the history of both industry and art--that’s the subject matter of the three volumes listed above. And predictably, they uncover the dirt--and the hard economic realities--behind the glittering fairy-tale of the movies’ triumph.

The books’ time span is large, their scope broad. Charles Musser ends at 1907, but, since he means to uncover the roots of cinema, he goes back considerably further, to Kircher’s seminal writings, “Ars magna lucis et umbrae� (1646), through Edison’s late-18th-Century patents (based, largely, on L.W. Dickson’s labors), to the largely unexamined years right before and after Edwin S. Porter’s landmark 1903 “Great Train Robbery.�

Eileen Bowser covers the cinema from there through the mid-teens, detailing the “Patent Wars,� the breakup of the trusts and the evolution of classical film technique and syntax in the hands of D. W. Griffith and others.

Richard Koszarski then turns the spotlight on more familiar territory: the story of the silent cinema from 1915 and the World War I years, gliding through the period of the great silent stars (Garbo, Bow, Gish, Fairbanks, Keaton) and directors (Stroheim, Lubitsch, Sternberg) through the advent of sound.

If the scholarship in succeeding volumes is up to the level established here, especially by Musser, the proposed series will be a considerable achievement and an indispensable library addition for other film scholars.

Massively detailed, scrupulously and exhaustively researched, copiously graphed and illustrated, heavily footnoted, examining each period from several critical and sociological perspectives, these three books are perfectly representative, in many ways, of the state of academic film research today.

That is part of their strength; it’s also part of their failing. At their worst, they tend to speak in a circumscribed, flavorless language or tone whose inflections and overall structural frame may be mannered and irritating to people unschooled in the world of academic film journals.

I know I’m irritated. I never again want to see, in a film book, any term pilfered from linguistics or semiotics, or the phrase “narrative system� used in place of “style� or “story technique.� I have also developed an aversion to phrases like “dominant cinema.� It’s an instinctive revulsion, like the irresistible impulse that seizes me, whenever a fellow writer refers to films as “texts,� to ask if he plans on taking the movie to bed with him and reading it with a night light.

Musser’s book, almost twice as long as the other two, could stand--as Von Stroheim’s classic 1925 “Greed� could not--some judicious trimming. But Musser has a real saving grace: a plethora of what seems truly original research, and some provocative conclusions. He proves himself the academic master of this particular territory, swinging us in a grand arc through the entire prehistory of film and then taking us magisterially though Edison, his assistant Dickson, the earlier “more democratic� modes of exhibition, neglected but crucial early genres like the travelogue (Burton Holmes) and the prizefight film (featuring Jack Johnson) and, finally, the nascent and furiously active young industry itself.

Eileen Bowser then immerses us in the social context, the sights and sounds, of early pre-World War I America and explains how audience and industry interacted to create, by 1915, an art form (or narrative system?) capable of the mighty technical achievements of Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation� and, a year later, “Intolerance.� And Koszarski--even if his book strikes me as the weakest and less provocative of the three--still manages to uncover new material and vivify the old, particularly in cases like his gallery of the period’s luminaries, where he’s most obviously at ease and stimulated.

Since 1926, when it was first published, the standard, and best-known work on the period covered by these writers has been Terry Ramsaye’s “A Million and One Nights.� These three books, obviously the fruit of years of painstaking research, replace Ramsaye’s, to some extent, and yet none of them, not even Bowser’s at her best, match it for sheer vigor and passion.

Back then, near the dawn of cinema himself, Ramsaye did something that few academic film historians bother with much today. He made his subject come alive. He made it matter. As Scribner’s series continues--breaking new ground, unearthing more important new information and vital perspectives on the movies and their history--I hope future writers remember him.

Sometimes it’s best to forget all about narrative systems (and academic politics) and try for a little style instead.