Comment: The New Consciousness and the Origins of Film

Abstract

Historians who describe the origins of film usually emphasize the technical background—the animated picture, the photograph, and the innovations of Marey, Muybridge and Edison. Roger Manvell's earlier analysis probably sums up the general feeling: "The cinema was invented out of the machine-world ___ n1 However, most historians also comment on the fact that film arrived at an interesting point in the late nineteenth century. Thus, Paul Spehr writes that the "movies were born at the end of the 19th century, during one of the most remarkable periods of scientific and industrial growth in the history of mankind. "^ Yet this emphasis on technical origins, together with a feeling that there was and is something unique about the phenomena of the movies, plus a good deal of confusion among early analysts of film^—all these factors tend to obscure the fact that in the 1890s film did not emerge in an intellectual vacuum—but can and should be related to prevailing ideas and themes. The decade of the 1890s was remarkable for a wide-ranging rejection of the certainties and values of the mid-nineteenth century. Not only among social reformers, but also on an intellectual level many leading thinkers began to reject the positivism of the previous generation which had sought to apply cut-and-dried scientific analysis to society and human behavior. The positivism which the generation of the 1890s rejected could be summed up by words such as 'materialism,' 'mechanism,' 'determinism,' 'scientific fatalism,' and 'naturalism.' In place of this creed, the late nineteenth century thinkers now emphasized what lay beneath the surface of reality and human experience, and investigated areas such as consciousness, the unconscious, and the world of dreams. The same approach could be seen in a revision of the meaning of time, space and