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COPYRIGHT 2002 Duke University Press
The first two decades of moving-picture history offer numerous examples of films and industrial practices that give insight into the cinema's complex position within the expanding network of technological modernity. (1) From the cinema's initial obsession with speeding locomotives, out-of-control automobiles, and urban street scenes, to the nickelodeon's location as a convenient stop on busy urban thoroughfares, and the narration of the pleasures and horrors of technology, the moving pictures simultaneously participated in and provided representations of technological modernity's transformation of everyday life. (2) The link between early cinema and the proliferation of new technologies went beyond the moving pictures' ability merely to represent changes in everyday life. Indeed, the effectiveness of such representations often turned on the cinema's structural affinity to other technologies, relations that could be exploited in the deployment of new narrative devices whose increasingly abstract constructions of space and time placed greater demands on audiences. Noting that "after 1908 the most frequent device for portraying phone conversations was parallel editing, cutting from one end of the telephone line to another," Tom Gunning goes on to suggest that, "the fit between the spatio-temporal form of the event and that of its portrayal has a particularly satisfying effect which one suspects rendered the innovative technique particularly legible to film audiences." (3) In what follows, I would like to explore the idea that in the process of negotiating some of the more historically significant transitions in narrativity, individual films exploited the cinema's structural affinity not just with specific technologies--such as the telephone and the railway--but with the broader, expanding network of communication and transportation technologies specific to American modernity.
To greater and lesser degrees, recent analyses identify George Loane Tucker's Traffic in Souls (US, 1913) as a threshold film that sheds light on broader struggles leading to changes in the relationship between the cinema's technical base, its mode of address, exhibition practices, and spectatorship in the early 1910s. According to Ben Brewster, Traffic in Souls was the first US multireel feature-length film not based on a previously existing literary or theatrical source. Moreover, the film's narrative structure defied contemporary conventions for organizing multireel features into a linked series of relatively autonomous mininarratives marked by denouements that corresponded to reel breaks. (4) The latter structure, Eileen Bowser argues, allowed exhibitors to show individual reels separately in weekly succession and thereby preserve the variety format that guaranteed the high audience turnover rates on which their profits largely depended. Thus the standardization of the single-reel format gave exhibitors a large measure of control over how and when films were consumed, for as Bowser explains, "The longer the film, the less opportunity there was for the showman to intervene, and the less time available for nonfilmic elements. The exhibitor, perhaps unconscious of this loss of control, nevertheless strongly resisted it. As many of the exhibitors pointed out, one unsuccessful short film in the program could be offset by a good one, but if the feature was poor, the show could not be saved." (5) As a six-reeler that had to be projected continuously or risk narrative incoherence, Traffic in Souls offered a model for feature-length textuality that would allow production companies to wrest a measure of control over film consumption. Moreover, to the pleasure of the film's exhibitors, it was a popular success, particularly with female spectators. (6)
While the film can be seen as an artifact of the struggles marking the slow and uneven shift toward the standardization of the continuously projected multireel feature, it also marked a struggle between the industry as a whole and the reform movement that sought to uplift it. Based on the public scandal over the white slave trade and lurid tales of innocent girls seduced and then sold into a life of prostitution, the film provoked a struggle over censorship and female spectatorship. As Shelley Stamp has argued, some reformers warned that the film and others like it would incite in female spectators a dangerous curiosity for the formerly unseen spaces of red-light districts and brothels by transporting them to a variety of forbidden urban spaces. (7) At the same time, uncertainty prevailed over whether white slave films would act as a gateway into such traffic of as an educational tool that might warn potential victims about the tricks of the trade. According to Stamp, one reform-minded reviewer suggested that Traffic in Souls should not be shown to the moviegoing public, but be reserved solely for immigrant women arriving at Ellis Island and for rural emigres entering urban railway stations (9). Either way, such discourse identified the cinema in general and the white slave film in particular as crucial modern formations possessing the power either to help extend or arrest the slavers' diversion of everyday commerce and traffic into the so-called traffic in souls.
Drawing from these and other analyses of the film, I would like to show how Traffic in Souls appropriates, transforms, and thematizes the structural features and effects of technologies of transportation and communication in order to produce a narrative mode and an experience of spectatorship specific to the continuously projected long feature. (8) To do this, I will focus on the film's obsession with the mobilization of bodies and identities by mechanized forms of mass transportation and the particularly modern experience of being absorbed into traffic. I will focus specifically on traffic in order to highlight the structural relationship between this figure--its movements, connections, detours, and destinations--and the emergence of formal strategies used to structure the cinema's increasingly abstract constructions of time and space and the multiple story lines necessary to the continuously projected, multireel feature-length film.
It is no coincidence, I think, that the first American long feature not directly derived from a literary source melodramatizes the technological mobilization of bodies between Europe and the US, the country and the city, public space and private space, and the home and the brothel. Traffic in Souls connects various kinds of traffic crossing the spaces and time of everyday urban life with the experience of technological modernity. The film is based on the simple premise that to participate in modern life is to be absorbed into traffic. Traffic in Souls therefore organizes its narrative around the unceasing mechanical mobilization of bodies through space. At the heart of the film's melodramatization of technological modernity is a contradiction specific to the experience of being absorbed into traffic: When one merges into the mobilized mass of bodies and machines, one constitutes traffic by acting as a single unit of its broader movement. Yet at the same time that one constitutes traffic, one is constituted by it, defined by and subordinated to an already-determined path of twists and turns, forward propulsions, and arbitrary stops. Traffic in Souls suggests that if there is a danger linked to the subject position manufactured by traffic, it is the danger of simultaneously being the subject and object of a movement over which one has only illusory control. To elaborate this contradiction, the film presents us with two different kinds of traffic--the everyday traffic of commerce and mass transportation, and the scandalous white slave trade, known as the traffic in souls--and links each with one of the alternating subject positions manufactured by traffic. The film suggests that once the female traveler becomes the subject of an apparently legitimate traffic, she also risks becoming an object within a dangerously illegitimate traffic.
Traffic in Souls initially presents us with an image of everyday traffic: in its first hall two Swedish sisters arrive at Ellis Island via steamship to live with their brother; a country girl arrives by railway to live in the city; and two sisters cross urban space in order to make a living as shop clerks. The film thereby provides us with an image of the broader international, national, and local mobilization of bodies and commodities necessary for the survival of American industrial capitalism and the family in the early twentieth century. Yet the film immediately connects this legitimate traffic to the scandalously illegitimate traffic of the white slave trade, as the Swedish immigrants, the country girl, and Little Sister (Ethel Grandin) are, one by one, detoured from the flow of legitimate traffic into the white slave trade by the notorious traffickers, who capture their prey at train stations, at trolley stops, and in taxicabs. By repeatedly emphasizing the ease with which one might be detoured from one kind of traffic into another, Traffic in Souls underscores the idea that connected to every legitimate form of technological mobility is a dangerously unregulated form. Significantly, this illegitimate traffic is not figured as technological mobility out of control. In fact, the film neither provides us with an image of the hazardous speed, violence, and arbitrary impact of mechanized movement displayed by earlier films such as A Railway Smash-Up (Edison, US, 1904), or How It Feels to Be Run Over (dir. Cecil M. Hepworth, UK, 1900), nor does it imagine the potential horrors of mechanical breakdown, as does, for example, A Mother's Devotion (Vitagraph, US, 1911). This film, rather, suggests that the illegitimate traffic in souls is dangerous precisely because it exploits...
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