Corporeality in Early Cinema inspires a heightened awareness of the ways in which early film culture, and screen praxes overall are inherently embodied. Contributors argue that on- and offscreen (and in affiliated media and technological constellations), the body consists of flesh and nerves and is not just an abstract spectator or statistical audience entity.

Audience responses from arousal to disgust, from identification to detachment, offer us a means to understand what spectators have always taken away from their cinematic experience. Through theoretical approaches and case studies, scholars offer a variety of models for stimulating historical research on corporeality and cinema by exploring the matrix of screened bodies, machine-made scaffolding, and their connections to the physical bodies in front of the screen.

Marina Dahlquist, Doron Galili, Jan Olsson, and Valentine Robert

Screened bodies are at the crosshairs of all cinemas—whether glorious or grotesque, mundane or majestic, dressed or disrobed; impossible, improbable, or imperiled; “deviant,” “normal,” or spectral; and across the panoramas of ethnicities, skin colors, sexualities, and ages. Mediated bodies and the bodies watching them provide the focal point for this collection, its explorative punctum. Films and film cultures have been studied from an array of productive vantage points. Within the framework of modernity, such studies situate cinema as a key strand of modern life and its convoluted hardships, bounteous pleasures, displacements of space, temporal multiplicities, and everyday lives. Historiographic models for studying cinema rarely offer an explicit attention to the meanings that screen bodies and bodies in attendance convey—and their interdependencies and manners of intersecting. the collection of essays presented here interrogates mediated corporeality within the larger sphere of screen practices and visual technologies, as well as their theories—and mainly during a time frame before 1915.

Clearly, film and media scholarship have often been bodily inclined, but predominantly in indirect ways. Why, then, does the body merit attention as a prime and explicit critical notion for early cinema at this particular moment in historiography and theory? the need for a body-focused collection can be gauged by the absence of this keyword in two recent volumes: Keywords for Media Studies and Keywords for American Cultural Studies. No “body” can be found among the lists of entry terms; instead, we find related notions such as affect, audience, gaze, gender, identity, intersectionality, mass, othering, personalization, queer, race, and many more. As the following group of essays evidences, an explicit awareness of the body as punctum and connectivity helps us better understand the many attractions of early cinema as a productive domain for studying modernity and its intertwined historiographies and theories. More generally, early cinema in its many varieties can, of course, be read as an encyclopedic archive for bodies in motion across all aspects of everyday life and its fictions.

This volume, hence, aims at inspiring a heightened awareness of film culture, and screen practices overall, as inherently embodied as well as inherently . . .