Junking Modernity: Early Cinema, Globalization, and the Question of History

FAIN: FEL-288951-23

Jennifer M. Bean
University of Washington (Seattle, WA 98195-1016)

Research and writing leading to a book on the global circulation of discarded cinematic film prints in the early 20th century.

"Junking Modernity" jettisons common conceptions of early cinema which privilege, whether intentionally or not, western modernity's own discourse about itself. It does so by placing "junk" at the center of historical inquiry. The double meaning of the term is important. On one hand, junk signals the anti-world of technological modernity, the stuff that is discarded, useless and lacking in appeal. Insofar as junk emerges as a symptom of disorder, of things gone wrong (or grown old), however, it also refers to that which can be found and rescued: reclaimed, reworked, reintegrated. Junk, at its most interesting, is the mass-produced object become individualized or localized. Drawing from two decades of experience tracking celluloid fragments and "unidentifiable" reels in a dozen of the world's film archives, this study argues that the material alteration of mass media objects defines early cinema's global circulation in the first decades of the twentieth century.