Introduction

In June 2002, the Domitor conference, taking place in Montreal, took as its organizing theme a familiar concept in film studies: “the apparatus.” In the past, studies of early cinema have been concerned with the history of the many and various optical devices that constitute early film projection, its predecessors, and adjacent or competing visual technologies of the period. But the cinematic apparatus is not simply a technological concern, of course, unless by “technology” we refer to something more expansive, as in Herbert Marcuse’s definition (1994, pp. 138-139), where a technology is “a mode of organizing and perpetuating (or changing) social relationships, a manifestation of prevalent thought and behavior patterns, an instrument for control and domination.” Indeed, since the 1970s, in film studies the term “apparatus” is most often invoked in a theoretical context in relation to questions of spectatorship and ideological power. This issue of Cinémas has collected from the Montreal meeting of Domitor articles that grapple with precisely this area of intersection—between cinema history and what has become known as “grand” theory—wherein early cinema and related visual entertainments (such as the phantasmagoria, panoramas, mutoscopes) are considered in terms of their implications for theoretical models of spectatorship and/or historical reception practices that might challenge such theories. The writers included here reconsider the continuing usefulness of the concept of an “apparatus” for framing both our historical questions and theoretical extrapolations, and in relation to the kind of viewing demanded by a variety of devices, texts, and practices during the period of cinema’s earliest elaboration. The value of the notion of the cinematic apparatus is not a question that should be taken for granted, as too much of cinema scholarship had (before the last decade or so) simply separated historiography from theory, or even set the two in irreconcilable opposition. While a rapprochement has undoubtedly taken place in more recent years, it is certainly time to consider directly how for early cinema studies the theoretical and historical can productively meet in the trope of the apparatus. In an article that is now over twenty-five years old, Rick Altman traces the major methodologies and reigning practices in U.S. film historiography of that period (the 1970s). While the then-emblematic works in cinema history that he (quite comprehensively) surveys and critiques are certainly no longer on the cutting edge of disciplinary historiography, Altman’s “Towards a Historiography of American Film” nonetheless remains conceptually valuable, clearly assaying a number of important approaches to writing film history, and tackling the still troublesome issues of, for example, periodization and canon formation. Altman (1977, p. 1) writes: “No longer can a film historian deal with all the facts, nor can he [sic] pretend that they are objective phenomena divorced from a particular way of looking at them.” Altman makes note of the consequences of each “particular way of looking at”—and, thus, of discursively constituting—cinema history. He deals with thirteen organizing principles of cinematic-historical explanation: those highlighting technology, technique, personality, a comparison between film and other arts, chronicle forms, social history, studio determinants, auteurism, film genre, ritual, legal, industrial, and sociological accounts (Altman 1977, pp. 2-21). In other words, Altman is not simply suggesting a taxonomy of popular “topics” within cinema historiography; in fact, his use of such categories does not necessarily designate a particular object of historical study, but rather identifies a privileged explanatory model applied to a variety of historical objects. In addition to outlining this variety of “theor[ies] of coherence of filmic events” (Altman 1977, p. 2), he also examines what such theories may suppress. And, based on existing U.S. film histories at the time …