ABSTRACT
In what ways did motion pictures, which film scholars have associated with urban modernity, play an ideological role at a provincial event, 1907’s Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition? The seven-month-long Exposition commemorated the 300th anniversary of the founding of English colonies in America with the establishment of the Jamestown, Virginia, settlement in April 1607. Unlike the era’s other major expositions in Chicago, Buffalo, and St. Louis, this deliberately historical, provincially focused exposition, held outside the small Southern city of Norfolk, Virginia, explicitly did not promote ideologies of upcoming prospects such as industrial manufacturing, consumer product innovations, visions of the future, or solutions to the challenges of the urban metropolis (Love 1907; Rydell 1984). The rurally situated festival focused on everything that was the opposite of the fast-paced life of the Big City. It dwelt on white colonial heritage and celebrated a mythical past of pioneers conquering wilderness, eradicating Indians, and bringing civilization and American ideals to new lands. It celebrated military heritage and the exploits of the US Navy’s Great White Fleet in the Pacific (as Norfolk was a naval and shipbuilding center). It danced uneasily around optimistic visions of the New South, focusing more on the dominance of agriculture in the Southern economy than on any promises of industrial growth or racial equality. The only Big City represented at the fair was destroyed daily (shaken and burned to the ground at the “San Francisco Earthquake and Fire” exhibit). Nevertheless, the new technology of motion pictures was there. Entrepreneurs commissioned two one-reel films, Pocahontas: Child of the Forest (1907, Edwin S. Porter) and Scenes in Colonial Virginia (1907, Porter), to be produced by the Edison Company. These were shown in a small brick theater located in the fair’s entertainment zone, the Warpath. The films were especially designed, as Hayden White (1978) reminds us all histories are, to represent America’s founding myths in particular ways. While the Exposition’s subjects reinforced traditional themes of the Anglo-Saxon foundation of American civilization, I will nevertheless argue that the film narratives opened up small
spaces for readings that allowed modernity to be adapted to provincial tastes and some modern ideas to slip quietly in through the back door. Aspects of these film narratives moved beyond the traditional male-and white-dominated history that most US Americans learned in school at that time. Instead, they emphasized family building by the pioneers over the exploits of individual male pioneers. Pocahontas, a woman, energetically rescued lovers and colonists, anticipating the movie serial heroines to come. “Great white men” triumphed not due to natural inevitability, but through trickery, the labor of African slaves, and with the partnership of spunky wives and Indian maidens. Such representations indicate different attitudes toward women and Native and African Americans than those held in the nineteenth century, ones more in line with women suffragette and civil rights themes to flourish in the 1910s and 1920s. Overtly labeling these “modern,” however, is troublesome since suffragette movements often based their demands for women’s votes on exceptionally traditional views of women and families as well as specters of racial others taking control of the United States (Staiger 1995, 29-53; Schuyler 2006). Still, centering narratives on strong, independent women and showing white men not at their best presented new images of the past. This chapter asks us to re-evaluate exhibition and reception practices at the dawn of the “transitional era” of American cinema, when scenic tableau films coexisted and competed with narrative films, whose form was growing in complexity and length. At the same time in American society, nineteenth-century ideals coexisted and competed with twentieth-century ones (Fuller 1997; Fuller-Seeley 2008). As Ben Singer suggests, the transitional era of American cinema (and, I would argue, the interactions of cinema and modernity) were a “complex, dynamic process in which disparate forces-competing paradigms and practices-overlap and interact” (2004, 76). Film scholars contend that motion pictures embodied the idea of modernity produced by urban cultural change (Charney and Schwartz 1995). If so, then at the Exposition, this cinema intermingled change with cultural continuity, in a melding of new media form and cultural/ideological tradition. The films exhibited turned old stories into new ones, and linked the past with the speed, dislocations, and dangers of the present for the provincial middle-class audiences who viewed them. The 1907 Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition did not emphasize commerce or consumer culture in the manner of most world fairs. In this unsettled time of rapid industrial growth, some were wary of the wholesale rush into the “modern” world of goods, and the Jamestown Fair was a moment to discuss it, as one commenter noted:
The very best thing about it [Jamestown] perhaps is that it is not a “tomato can” exposition. By the tomato can exposition is meant the enormous
aggregations of canned fruits and other mercantile products, familiarly known as “exhibits”, which have bordered miles and miles of aisles and aisles in previous fairs.
