ABSTRACT
The third chapter charts the history and development of film serials between the 1910s and the early 1940s. The chapter traces how the operational aesthetic impacted film serial storytelling, as contemporaneous criticism related the serials’ portrayed machines and mechanic death contraptions to their ‘machinic’, that is, continuously propelling narratives. These narratives are presentist, as serials establish their episodes as coterminous with the viewer’s own perception of time by reference to previous and upcoming narrative events, and as their narratives expand into multiple spaces as serials connect to newspaper and radio serials and seek to extend their narrative worlds to theater lobbies, local storefronts, and streets. The chapter also delineates the serials’ presentational mode of storytelling. Instead of suturing anecdotes into a seamless whole, serials stress the interstices, self-consciously highlighting their montage character and exploring and exhibiting divergent narrative and cinematographic possibilities of the filmic medium.
