ABSTRACT
Because seriality was important not only for the development of the serial but also for the feature, I will in this chapter not immediately go to what in fi lm literature could be recognized as safer havens of seriality to titles like What Happened to Mary (1912), The Adventures of Kathlyn (1913), The Perils of Pauline (1914), or outside America to Les Vampires (1915-1916) in France or Homunculus (1916) in Germany. Before but also during the development of the feature, seriality was already present in various nonserial fi lm forms that were fl uid and depended on innovations in production and distribution. There are many points of departure when delving into the seriality of non-serials. Interesting starting points could, for instance, include the seriality of numbers and order in early fi lm catalogues and fi lm programs; the succession of views and the mapping of space in travelogues; the cut-up narrative of 60-second Kinetoscope fi lms, like the episodes of a boxing match; the order of tableaux vivant scenes in Passion Plays like Lumière’s La Vie et la Passion de Jésus-Christ (1898); or the use of the bricolage narrative mode that is reminiscent of a vaudeville program or variety show. However, I will examine in this chapter the coming of fi lms longer than one reel, a development that took place from around 1908 to the mid-1910s. It is here that we can see the power struggles and problems of regularization in America that will also be important for the serial fi lm. I will discuss the use of the reel-break within a multiple-reel feature as well as the episodic feature. The positioning of the feature and the serial is not straightforward, but shifts and takes place on different levels: various interests were at stake, while within several groups different directions were taken.
