5 - Cinematic Collectivities

Summary

If “Many Many Women,” like The Making of Americans, invests in a collective history, then the portraits of individuals that Stein starts writing by late 1910 appear to have a very different scope. Yet the fact that these texts are about individuals does not mean that Stein gives up on the issue of how to understand a modern collective experience. Quite to the contrary: in the period between 1910 and 1913, Stein is intensely focused on the issue of a collective being, which she explores in dialogue with the cinema. She makes, for example, a series of group portraits about the figure of the crowd, that most modern of protagonists. In a number of those portraits, she moves the crowd from its habitat, the streets, to the famous Bon Marché department store in Paris. Here, again, Stein adds counterweight to the typically masculine symbols of modern city life: “the public sphere, the man of the crowd, the stranger, the dandy, the flâneur.” Department stores, as Lauren Rabinovitz indicates, were intertwined with a cinematic culture in that they were the subjects of early films, which tended to mock the consumerist frenzy. Like the panorama, furthermore, they were part of the nineteenth-century culture of spectacle out of which the cinema emerged. Or, as Rabinovitz puts it,

[a]s one of the chief urban spaces in which women freely circulated in the late 19th century, they prepared women for the cinema by providing exemplary spectacles both inside the store and within the framed window displays set into the stores’ facades along the street.

Another way in which Stein tackles the issue of a modern collectivity is through plays. Plays, Stein herself points out, share the cinema's “impulse to solve the problem of time in relation to emotion and the relation of the scene to the emotion of the audience.” What she means by this is that both art forms manage to create one experience made up of diverging temporalities, which she considered the fundamental problem of her generation. As we will see, the plays that Stein writes seek to locate a cinematic collective experience within the text. First, however, I want to show how her individualcentered portraits intersect with the cinema in creating new formations for a shared life, beyond the grasp of tradition. My focus is on “Orta Or One Dancing.”