Seizing the light : Contingency and authenticity in early cinema

Building upon the work of Alpers, Baxandall, and Chartier in cultural and representational theory, and upon work done by Gaudreault, Musser, and Gunning on early cinema, this essay attempts to give a materialist account of a particular interpretive decision during a specific historical moment. In short, it asks on what grounds did early cinema audiences distinguish between "staged" and "unstaged" films ? It concludes that particular, historically-defined categories of perception, cognition, and evaluation -specifically those defining a unified or coherent picture -underwent a profound transformation in which the "captured" or contingent image came to be understood as a part of a new logic of spatial and temporal coherence, rather than as an indication of pictorial disunity.