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The Birth of an Empire

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Amy Kaplan
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Extract

The Spanish-Cuban-American war of 1898 was one of the first wars in history to be filmed. Yet despite its participation in the birth of American cinema, the war disappeared as a subject from the later archives of filmmaking. No major films chronicle the three-month war in Cuba or the subsequent three-year war in the Philippines, although films have been made about virtually every other war in American history. My paper is about that duality, about the formative presence and telling absence of this pivotal war in the history of American film.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 114 , Issue 5 , October 1999 , pp. 1068 - 1079
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 by The Modem Language Association of America

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References

Notes

1 Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: U of California P, 1996) 75.

2 Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (New York: Scribner's, 1990) 225.

3 This paragraph summarizes my viewing of the collection of Spanish-American War films in the Paper Print Collection of the Library of Congress and draws on Musser's magisterial research in Emergence of Cinema; Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company (Berkeley: U of California P, 1991); and, in collaboration with Carol Nelson, High-Class Moving Pictures: Lyman H. Howe and the Forgotten Era of Traveling Exhibition, 1880-1920 (Princeton: Princeton UP, c. 1991).

4 J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (1902; Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1972) 215.

5 Thomas Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Cinema, Its Spectators and the Avante Garde,” Wide Angle 8.3-4 (1986): 63-70.

6 War Correspondents, Edison, 1898, Paper Print Collection, Lib. of Congress.

7 Charles Musser, Edison Motion Pictures, 1890-1900: A Filmography (Washington: Smithsonian, 1998).

8 Basil Courtney, writing for Motion Picture News (1925), qtd. in Anthony Slide, The Big V: A History of the Vitagraph Company (Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1976) 10.

9 Musser, Emergence of Cinema 258-61 and Before the Nickelodeon 126-37.

10 The American Soldier in Love and War, reels 1-3, Amer. Mutoscope and Biograph, 1903, Paper Print Collection, Lib. of Congress.

11 Kemp R. Niver, ed., Biograph Bulletins, 1896-1908 (Los Angeles: Locare, 1971) 90. My italics. There are three fictional films made together under the title The American Soldier in Love and War, which I will refer to as scenes 1, 2, and 3. The Bulletin recommends that the exhibitors intersperse them with two “actualities” made previously, one of real soldiers embarking for war and the other of a staged battle scene.

12 Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991) 47.

13 Love and War, Edison, 1899, Paper Print Collection, Lib. of Congress.

14 Musser, Emergence of Cinema 342.

15 Theodore Roosevelt, “The Strenuous Life,” The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (1899; New York: Scribner's, 1906).

16 Qtd. in James Thompson et al., Sentimental Imperialists: The American Experience in East Asia (New York: Harper, 1981)117.

17 Oscar Campomanes, “Grappling with the Primitive: The American Soldier in Love and War,” unpublished paper.

18 “‘Spaniards’ Would Not Fight: Vitascope Man Badly Treated by Men He Hired to Mimic the Battle of San Juan,” Phonoscope Apr. 1899: 15.

19 Qtd. in Michael Rogin, “‘The Sword Became a Flashing Vision’: D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation,” The Birth of a Nation, ed. Robert Lang (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1994) 252. According to his biographers, Griffith viewed his first films in 1898; given the popularity of war films, he most likely would have seen some of them.

20 Thomas Dixon, The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden, 1865-1900 (New York: Grosset, 1902) 368.

21 Rogin 289.

22 G. W. Bitzer, Billy Bitzer: His Story (New York: Farrar, 1973) 180. My italics.