New York City in Early Films: An Iconographical and Iconological Analysis

Abstract

Accounts of early film have more often than not tended to observe the period less in regards to the films produced and more in a way that privileges formal developments, modes of exhibition, and audiences as the primary subjects of their investigations. This thesis aims to restore a critical interest in the films themselves as complex vessles of protean cultural meaning by placing them, and the city they capture, at the epicentre of a network of images and ideas concerning modern life. This thesis employs the early films of New York as a means of evaluating the multifaceted and multifarious ways in which modernity was impacting upon the city during the period of film’s cultural ascension. By surveying a large corpus of films with an oft-neglected method, this thesis finds that many of the films capture aspects of the radically transforming city in their iconography in ways which foreground modernity’s considerable impact upon the city and, contingently, modern life. This thesis applies an extensive iconographical-iconological method to the early films of New York to assess the ways in which the emerging medium enshrined the architectural, technological, and social transformations that the city fostered in light of modernity. This thesis consists of three large chapters that focus firstly on modernity’s impression on New York during the period mostly associated with actuality filmmaking, secondly on the city’s diverse social transformations that were articulated in early fiction filmmaking, and finally on the ways in which Coney Island on film embodies many of the principle ideas discussed throughout the preceding chapters. The research carried out over the course of this thesis demonstrates the ways in which the city was positioned as a primary subject of early New York film and anticipates the ways in which the city would come to figure as a primary structuring principle for filmmaking throughout the century.