SNAPlab

When I first installed TikTok a few years ago, I thought to myself that this is something people must have experienced in the early 20th century with film. A new form of audio-visual entertainment that resembles its predecessors, but with slightly different possibilities. Creators have tried to work with the medium with varying degrees of success. The audience succumbs to its charms. Intellectuals are confused.

Like any historical analogy, of course, this one is inaccurate, but I want to use it to illustrate a research desire that I thought I would have no luck fulfilling. I ask the reader, then, to understand this analogy of TikTok and early cinema more as an evocation of my feelings about the subject of research. It reminded me of something I experienced 16 years ago.

When I was a film studies student reading the antology of new film history (Nová filmová historie: antologie současného myšlení o dějinách kinematografie a audiovizuální kultury. 2004), I was fascinated by the texts of Thomas Elsaesser, Tom Gunning, and Charles Musser on early cinema. These were translations of older texts into Czech.

I was fascinated by Thomas Elsaesser’s texts because of the way they managed to overturn my perception of the past. Suddenly, I didn’t understand the films of Lumiere and Porter through the eyes of a film studies student in 2009, but I realised that it was necessary to accept the period context and try to understand the films within it. These were not films at the beginning of cinema history. On the contrary, they were the result of history. From a research point of view, this meant studying literature and archival sources, which accompanied me for the rest of my studies. It was only later that I realised that I didn’t have to try to reconstruct the contexts of the past, and that’s how I got into current audiovisual culture.

I have always enjoyed reading Tom Gunning’s texts for their myth-busting power. Specifically with the text ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)credulous Spectator’ (Art And Text 34, Spring 1989 and many other times), it still fascinates me how he has managed to break out of the decades-old notion of naive spectators. The paradox is that the idea of naivety is still firmly rooted in us, which makes us naive ourselves. Otherwise, we could not think that short videos on the internet are “killing” or “eating” the brains of our children.

I like Charles Musser’s text ‘The Nickelodeon Era Begins: Establishing the Framework for Hollywood’s Mode of Representation’ (in Early Cinema. Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. T. Elsaesser. 1990) today more out of nostalgia. In terms of the formulation of the research problem and the arguments, I view it very critically today, but I used to give it to students to read despite the difficulties. Its greatest strength, I believe, is in its ability to convey an almost romantic image of film projection in the early era of cinema. However, Musser doesn’t simplify the situation, but instead points out the little details that show the complexity of the early years of film. One of the things that Musser has been focusing on is the composition of programs from different types of film and non-film performances. My colleague Chris Hogg talked about TikTok in a similar way when we spoke in the fall.

After reading these texts, I have always been a little sad that I will never experience the early era of cinema again. It’s not that the present is qualitatively different in terms of new film history. It was that early cinema was shown in the aforementioned texts as a stage of creative phase, where filmmakers explored a new medium, audiences were getting used to it, and together, from the bottom up, cinema was being made. Today, of course, it is similar with films and TV series. I just kind of get the impression that we all know what we’re doing (though maybe that’s what Porter thought, too).

TikTok changed that. Suddenly I saw a platform where people with no prior filmmaking or artistic training were staging funny sketches. I saw a platform where different types of performances alternated from trivia and commentary to musical performances to self-help videos. I immediately realized that this must have been how our ancestors must have felt in the early 20th century when they came to nickelodeon. They understood something, they didn’t understand something else, but they were actually having fun. It wasn’t artistic entertainment, but everyone was fascinated. Just like TikTok today.