Part II - The Cinema, or Beginning Again

Summary

The portraits Stein started making around 1909, when she was finishing The Making of Americans, both continued that project and initiated a new direction. “In the beginning,” Stein dramatizes in “Portraits and Repetition,” “I continued to do what I was doing in the Making of Americans, I was doing what the cinema was doing, I was making a continuous succession of what that person was until I had not many things but one thing.” In tune with The Making of Americans, Stein wanted to make a “whole” or “complete” portrait. Yet where she had framed her big book as a history project, she now wants us to look at her texts as cinematic compositions. On the one hand, this is not as odd a step as it may seem. If the pursuit of life itself was central in theoretical discussions on hermeneutics and history, then the cinema of the 1890s and early 1900s, as we will see, was actually considered to capture life itself. The cinema appeared to make it possible to keep the very movements of life in the here and now from fading into the past. Both the tradition of historical reflection that we have been discussing and the cinema, in other words, were seen as ways into life that trumped either older (idealist or positivist) philosophical approaches, or technologies and art forms (photography and painting). On the other hand, Stein's cinema claim is not unproblematic. Where she conceived of all three of the early texts we have discussed as histories, there are few data that actually relate her 1910s texts to the cinema. Even when we take into consideration the two never-produced film scripts she wrote in 1920 and 1929, and the texts she contributed to the film magazine Close Up in 1927, there is little that links her work to early twentieth-century cinema. In “Portraits and Repetition,” Stein even admits that she “doubt[s] whether at that time [she] had ever seen a cinema.” Yet that does not seem to undercut the cinematic quality of her texts. “[A]ny one is of one's period,” she explains, “and this our period was undoubtedly the period of the cinema and series production. And each of us in our own way are bound to express what the world in which we are living is doing.”