CROWD CONTROL: EARLY CINEMA, SOUND, AND DIGITAL IMAGES

Abstract

At first my observations took an abstract and generalizing turn. I looked at passengers in masses, and thought of them in their aggregate relations. Soon, however, I descended to details, and regarded with minute interest innumerable varieties of figure, dress, air, gait, visage, and expression of countenance. -Edgar Allan Poe, The Man of Crowd Of all changes in cinema's gestation period, perhaps most interesting concerns a shift in subject matter. The early Lumiere actualities mark first consistent cinematic appearance of crowds. If pre-cinema pioneers such as Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey posed problem of understanding individual locomotion, Lumieres extended this problem to masses. In fact, beginning with Lumieres, film history crystallizes into a history of crowd control-in sense of organizing masses both on screen and in their theater seats. Indeed, if we trace historical factors behind cinema's invention, we find a legacy of nineteenth-century institutions designed to regulate masses. For James R. Beniger, an industry and economics researcher at Annenberg School of Communication, these institutions responded to a of initiated by Industrial Revolution's chaotic social and economic upheaval. In The Control Revolution, Beniger suggests that Industrial Revolution's advances in transportation and communications suddenly separated producers from consumers. Local trade, once based on intimate and personal contacts, became specialized national and eventually global markets. However, problems emerged with this market expansion. The producers' ever-increasing distance from consumers made market conditions murky and unreadable. This economic problem soon carried over into social realm. For example, as nineteenth-century markets expanded, urban centers became concentrated with workers fulfilling industrial factories' swelling labor needs. Within a single generation, basic structure of social relations radically changed throughout industrialized societies. In large cities, unlike local villages or small towns, citizens could be anonymous-a situation leading to an urban anxiety over and political instability. Indeed, in popular literature, Edgar Allan Poe exploited this anxiety by promoting man of crowd as the genius of deep crime (Poe, 492). In Poe story, title character was not only illegible in terms of class and occupation, but also totally unpredictable in his movements around city. In response to this double crisis of illegibility and unpredictability, several nineteenth-century technologies, institutions, and social policies attempted to visualize, classify, and predict emerging industrial crowds, with devices ranging from statistical graph to cinematographe. However, in film history, reading, organizing, and predicting crowds is not limited to early cinema. Interestingly, film history's most pervasive crowd images coincide with cinema's major technological transitions. Thus, this essay uses images of crowd as an entry point for reconsidering cinematic technologies in terms of Beniger's control revolution. How exactly have cinematic technologies controlled filmic image? Do crowd images contribute to an institutional process for standardizing new technologies? And how has image of crowd changed in relation to new technologies? To begin answering these questions, this article provides three snapshots of crowds during cinema's most important technological integrations: its invention in 1895, sound's standardization in 1920s, and contemporary use of computer-generated imagery. By superimposing three distinct moments in film history-moments generally considered in isolation-this article reveals a recurring pattern to cinema's technological assimilations. Control: Visualization and Synchronization As a product of nineteenth century's crisis of control, photography, and later, cinema, emerged as technologies for restoring identification and predictability among industrial society's anonymous masses. …

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