Paper short abstract:

Punt examines the determining impact on film form and cinema institutions exerted by audiences at the very threshold of cinema’s invention (c1895) and shows how established worldwide business networks allowed for a complex traffic between the remote audience and the observed that shaped film form.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will discuss the determining impact on film form and cinema institutions exerted by audiences at the very threshold of the cinemas invention between the years of 1894 and 1900 and will show how established worldwide business networks allowed for a complex traffic between the remote audience and the observed that shaped film form. Proceeding from established historical research on the business strategies of the inventors of various parts of cinema technology, the paper will show how the mode of exhibition invited an interactive relationship with its local audience, and through the processes of distribution built an international consensus of how to view and classify the 'other' without resorting to a hegemonic interpretation of the film text.

Through a formalist analysis of the products of moving image technology and their cultural use as cinema we may be able to avoid the pitfalls of textual analysis, and, interrogate the film archive for evidence of a changing imaginary in which the self and the other are in flux. The significance of this approach is that the cinema dispositif (technological arrangement) can become an analogue for human consciousness that can be decoded relative to independent frameworks of data.