Building a geo-referenced database can be a labour-intensive task involving a steep technological learning curve. Capturing information manually from primary and secondary sources, integrating digitized material, and making sure that the data model is logical and conforms to standards can be costly, both in terms of money and labour. But any historical research project involves a data-collection moment, and building a digital database out of it does not add substantially to its costs. Since it allows other people to use the data and encourages collaboration, creating some form of digital output is
49 Internet Movie Database <http://www.imdb.com/>; BFI Film & TV Database
<http://www.bfi.org.uk/filmtvinfo/ftvdb/>, AFI Catalog of Feature Films
<http://www.afi.com/members/catalog/> [all accessed 25 February 2012].
a more efficient use of resources.50 However, in order to incorporate the advantages of GIS into humanities research, it is necessary to dismantle some of its positivist impulses, in particular the need for comprehensiveness that underlies quantitative analysis.
Given the limitations imposed by the types of sources used in this project, my use of GIS tools as a data management method has worked as a way of knitting together disparate pieces of information, using location as a connecting element. As a tool for data analysis, geo-referenced relational databases have supported an iterative method – a process of experiment and discovery, geared towards
exploration rather than confirmation. New fields and relations have been established as the hypotheses are revised, incorporating different classification schemes and producing visualisations that can in turn trigger new questions. The constant
revision of data schemes is not common practice in most top-down research designs, and the structure must certainly be fixed down at some point before the dataset is shared, but I think that approaching small-scale GIS projects with some flexibility is one way to subvert the ominous, bureaucratic undertones of the technology.
The ease with which one can revise and check hypotheses, and try different angles by querying and visualizing the data over and over, is one of the main advantages of a GIS approach. Adhering too strongly to a pre-determined set of attributes or data structures would undermine this flexibility and would pre-empt the kind of discoveries we can make. Thinking of the on-going process of discovery, however, also means that we cannot be content when we have formatted and printed
50 Michael Ross, Manfred Grauer, and Bernd Freisleben, ‘Introduction’, in Digital Tools in Media Studies, pp. 7-16 (p. 9).
a map with a neat wind rose in the corner. Sharing the data to allow other researchers to repeat experiments or test their own hypotheses becomes both possible and desirable. This collaborative dimension creates a field where local studies become much more relevant as part of a comparative framework, and where film history can contribute to broader questions as well as benefit from inter-disciplinary approaches. While there is a need for agreed data standards in order to realise this potential, individual research projects need to retain their distinctiveness so that they can continue to be built ‘from the bottom up’, as Jeff Klenotic puts it.51
Working with GIS does not need to be part of a megalomaniac project, and small-scale, modest projects can still benefit from incorporating location-based methods. This is a point also taken up by critical geographers like Jeremy Crampton, who has written about the developing tensions between two approaches to the use of digital mapping. On the one hand, GIS experts are trying to secure their position by entrenching ‘technical disciplinarity’, focusing on the technical aspects of GIS and controlling entrance to the field through professional certification. On the other hand, Crampton sees a growing field of critical practice alongside the exponential growth of amateur, collaborative, and open-source online mapping.52 A mapping practice that does justice to the critical tradition of film studies needs to retain the open-endedness and ‘indiscipline’ of amateur mapping. This is not to say that working with professional cartographers is not a good idea – rather that it should be done on our own terms and with a focus on process rather than product.
51 Klenotic, ‘Putting Cinema History on the Map’, p. 79.
52 Jeremy W. Crampton, Mapping: A Critical Introduction to Cartography and GIS (Chichester:
Blackwell, 2010), p. 5.
Just as the field of film studies was transformed by a greater interest on historically specific audiences rather than theoretically identical spectators, the recent interest in mapping needs to be kept both grounded and connected. ‘For there to be multiplicity there must be space’, said Doreen Massey to Karen Lury.53 In order to shed light on the endless multiplicity of the historical experiences of moving pictures we need to be able to situate them – but adding two coordinate columns to a massive data table does not do the trick. Mapping is not a substitute for analysis and imagination. Furthermore, the limits of inference from incomplete sources for quantitative data, and the role of maps and databases as technologies of power that have long served reactionary interests, demand a critical and reflective stance. Geo-databases and digital mapping are only some amongst many tools.
Their practical application in the chapters that follow is an experimental way to consider whether their rewards outweigh their costs and risks.
53 Massey and Lury, ‘Making Connections’, p. 232.
PART II
A GEOGRAPHY OF THE EARLY FILM TRADE IN
SCOTLAND
Chapter 3
Film trade in Scotland before permanent cinemas
Before the opening of the first permanent cinemas after 1906, public presentation of moving pictures in the UK did not take place in a dedicated space, but in a variety of impermanent locations. The spaces and practices of very early film exhibition signalled the inclusion of the new medium into existing ‘cultural series’, such as the fairground and the music hall.1 Because it was subject to other institutional
constraints and paradigms, the radical potential of film – residing in its mechanical reproduction and transportability – was not fully realised. Crucially for the present analysis, the fact that film was embedded within other practices means that the circulation of film prints was latched on to the itinerancy patterns of said forms of entertainment. Understanding how the various forms of early exhibition played out in the Scottish context, and how they related to different methods of film supply, provides a necessary starting point from which to unravel the changes of the regional film trade networks in the following years.
1 The concept of ‘cultural series’, already mentioned in passing in Chapter 1 but taking greater significance in this section, was introduced into film studies by André Gaudreault, who defines it as a subsystem or form of signification within a cultural paradigm. Gaudreault uses this concept to elaborate on his influential ideas about the fundamental intermediality of early film practices, which is an essential part of his definition of ‘kine-attractography’ as a polar opposite to institutional cinema. The apparent restriction of intermediality to pre-institutional practice is problematic, however, as Burrows shows through his study of the continued ‘cross-cultural co-dependence’ of silent British cinema. Gaudreault, Film and Attraction, pp. 63-64. See also Jon Burrows, Legitimate Cinema: Theatre Stars in Silent British Films, 1908-1918, Exeter Studies in Film History (Exeter:
University of Exeter Press, 2003), p. 14.
This chapter will concentrate on the strands of early exhibition described by the head of Gaumont, A.C. Bromhead, in a 1933 lecture that has become a reference point for many more recent studies.2 Recalling the main groups involved in the film trade before permanent cinemas, Bromhead spoke of three categories: the
fairground travelling showmen, the town hall showmen, and the music hall exhibitors. Within each of these groups there were significant differences, such as the varying skill levels identified by Deac Rossell in relation to the marketing of equipment to experienced and novice entrepreneurs.3 The cultural meanings associated with the spaces of early film shows were transferred, at least to some extent, to the reception of the new medium, shaping public expectations and discourse about it in very different ways. As mentioned before, there is a growing body of research on the fascinating interface between Victorian visual culture and early film. The characteristics of the film trade in its first decade, however, have remained underexplored.
2 A. C. Bromhead, ‘Reminiscences of the British Film Trade’, Proceedings of the British
Kinematograph Society 21 (1933) . This lecture, cited by Rachael Low in her first volume, contains several tropes that have been incorporated more or less critically in subsequent historiography. A recent revision of Bromhead’s categories in the context of Edwardian exhibition is in Vanessa Toulmin, ‘Cuckoo in the Nest: Edwardian Itinerant Exhibition Practices and the Transition to Cinema in the United Kingdom from 1901 to 1906’, The Moving Image 10.1 (2010), 51-79.
3 Rossell used the analytical frame developed by Wiebe Bijker for a social constructivist approach to the history of technology, to look at the relationships between equipment manufacturers and public entertainers as part of the process of definition of a new medium. Considering the different
projection technologies produced in the early period, Rossell breaks down the category of ‘town hall showmen’ into experienced and novice practitioners. He also separates the music-hall showmen who had steady contracts from those who had to travel around seeking short-term engagements. He finally argues that a sector of the equipment market was targeted at novice outsiders attracted by the
‘get-rich-quick’ hype. Deac Rossell, ‘A Slippery Job: Travelling Exhibitors in Early Cinema’, in Visual Deligths: Essays on the Popular and Projected Image in the 19th Century, ed. by Simon Popple and Vanessa Toulmin (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 2000), pp. 50-60.
This chapter will show how film fitted into the patterns of travel and trade used by fairground, public-hall and music-hall showpeople.4 It will argue that these patterns of itinerant exhibition were necessarily connected to different forms of film supply. As so much additional input was required in order to make a saleable product (the show) out of it, the exceptional nature of film as commodity was not yet evident. Therefore, film was traded as a regular commodity: sold outright, with all rights transferring to the buyer who could then exploit or re-sell it as he or she pleased. The co-existence of several forms of exhibition and trade produced a complex scenario in which the separation of roles that is distinctive of institutional cinema did not apply. As Vanessa Toulmin has shown, there was a ‘profound interrelationship’ between producers such as Mitchell and Kenyon, and all kinds of exhibitors around Britain:
Initially built on the itineraries of the fairground bioscopes, this web of contacts spread to include the burgeoning practices of the stand-alone/town hall showman. Independent film exhibitors such as Vernon’s grew out of these networks establishing their own circuits as a result and variety proprietors such as [Thomas] Barrasford had access to Mitchell
4 A version of some parts of this chapter has been published as: María A. Vélez-Serna, ‘Mapping Film Exhibition in Scotland before Permanent Cinemas’, Post Script 30.3 (2011), pp. 25-37.
and Kenyon’s expertise as a direct result of the wide dissemination of their products.5
As this quotation suggests, the network structure of the fairground trade was connected to the circuit structure of film exhibitors working the variety stage, but also to the independent nodes of stand-alone shows. The spatial patterns evoked in this description are as distinctive of pre-institutional exhibition as the showmanship practices that have attracted more attention. The relatively decentralised structure of the early film trade supported the diversity of exhibition contexts in which Scottish audiences first experienced moving pictures.