TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

In The Brilliant Biograph, Hondenkarren serves a different function. Through Rongen-Kaynakçi and Roumen’s curatorial framing, the scene now invites the viewer to contemplate the content of the film and what that quotidian rural labor could represent as the nineteenth century moved into the modernizing twentieth. From the perspective of the curators’ desire to immerse the viewer in high resolution images from a time of transition and transformation, Hondenkarren is reframed as something almost idyllic, making visible the space and time of cinema’s emergence. Ultimately, the exhibition history of Hondenkarren contains both a “performance” of the projected 35 mm film with one type of musical accompaniment as part of a program on camera placement, and a “performance” of the high-resolution digital file with a different score as part of an immersive, lyrical study of turn-of-the-century daily life. Through the “film as performance” framework, however, both instances can be “accepted as new authentic interpretations”.^[8]

A film’s shifting meaning is not always so dramatic. For example, Prinsengracht (NL, 1899) offers a phantom boat ride along the eponymous Amsterdam canal. In “The Wonders of the Biograph,” this film opens “People in Front of a Camera,” and the viewer is invited to observe the different individuals captured by the camera as they walk along the canal. In The Brilliant Biograph, there is still that sense of observing quotidian life; however, placed in “Greetings From…” Prinsengracht is nestled between a distanced view of Queen Wilhelmina’s carriage in front of Amsterdam’s Centraal Station and a scenic view of Venice, thus becoming more about the specificity of place—here the canal, the city of Amsterdam, but also Europe—and the people inhabiting this space. It is not the specific meanings here but the discursive shift itself that reveals an underlying flexibility and singularity inherent in (early) film exhibition, both historically and in the present day.