Pelletier, L. (2018). From photoplays to movies: A distant reading of cinema’s eventual legitimation from below. Film History: An International Journal, 30(2), 1–34. https://doi.org/10.2979/filmhistory.30.2.01
This paper is responding to the evolution of terminology used in film criticism and journalism in regards to two popular strategies of legitimizing cinema as an art form in it’s early days – imitating established arts such as opera and stage theater, and creating films that emphasized the uniqueness of the medium. One of the sources of the concept the author is building on, the opposing strategies in film legitimization, comes from film critic Gilbert Seldes in a 1924 essay in The Seven Lively Arts. While Seldes was using the existence of these strategies to highlight cinema’s supposed downfall, the author of this paper is using them as a basis for an etymological study.
The paper claims that the opposing legitimization strategies can be correlated with terms used to refer to motion pictures and their use over time, making use of Google’s ngram viewer and Arclight to track usage trends of different terms for motion pictures, with a focus on the first half of the 20th century. For example, the term “photoplay” was widely used during the 1910s as a way to distinguish film as an artistic medium rather than a mere science experiment, banking on the word association with stage theater, since it was still a more respected art form at the time.
This paper has importance because there is still lots of study to be done on early cinema, since emerging art forms can branch out in many different ways. With two of the largest early cinematic approaches being so different, understanding their effects on film and film criticism helps understand how film evolved into the sound era and beyond.