Critical Inquiry

Spring 2001
Volume 27, Number 3

Excerpt from
From Charcot to Charlot: Unconscious Imitation and Spectatorship in French Cabaret and Early Cinema
 by Rae Beth Gordon
Experimental psychology, clinical observations, and psychiatric theory in late nineteenth-century France furnished the Parisian cabaret and early film comedy with a new repertoire of movements, grimaces, tics, and gestures. At the same time, scientific experiments in the physiology of stimulus-response lent themselves to new ways of looking at the way that spectators reacted to certain performance styles. These are the important components in the history of the two forms of mass culture that I want to reconstruct here. Notions and, especially, images from medical science must be included alongside images from the wax museum, pantomime, puppet shows, and precinematic devices in the cultural series that contributed to the genesis of performance styles in the Parisian cabaret, café-concert, and in early film comedy. This essay, then, proposes and examines a previously unnoticed relation between a significant cultural and aesthetic style and the extraordinary upsurge of concern with and diagnosis of hysteria and epilepsy in late nineteenth-century French medical practice and theory. Parallel studies of suggestion and unconscious imitation, similarly, have considerable pertinence for spectatorship in the same period.1

Is there a relationship between ways that movement was staged in early cinema and corporeal pathologies related to hysteria and epilepsy: contractures, tics, catalepsy, and convulsive movement? I believe that hysterical gesture and gait is an important inspiration and basis for the style of frenetic, anarchic movement that is so present in early French film comedy and that many spectators recognized this source, thanks in large part to the emphasis that had been laid on nervous pathology in cabaret and café-concert performance styles before these styles were carried over into the new medium. I also argue here that there are correlations to be made between filmic movement and induced gesture in magnetizers' public exhibitions of magnetizers in the 1890s.

See Also

Garret Stewart: Modern Hard Times: Chaplin and the Cinema of Self-Reflection (Winter 1976)

Ruth Leys: Traumatic Cures: Shell Shock, Janet, and the Question of Memory (Summer 1994)

Felicia McCarren: The "Symptomatic Act" Circa 1900: Hysteria, Hypnosis, Electricity, Dance (Summer 1995)

Brigid Doherty: See: We Are All Neurasthenics! or, The Trauma of Dada Montage (Autumn 1997)

In addition, it seems plausible that café-concert performers provided models for potential hysterics who couldn't resist imitating the tics, grimaces, and convulsive movements that came to characterize the Nouvelle Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière. The enormous prestige that this entertainment venue had among the working classes -- the same classes that populated the Salpêtrière and Charenton -- forces us to ask whether the remarkable increase in cases of hysteria wasn't in part due to mimetic behavior. This was, at the very least, a fear that was frequently expressed by those who warned of the cabaret's pernicious and contagious atmosphere. Even a great fan of the café-concert like Georges Montorgueil wrote that the person who prophesied that his generation would end up in the same "bag of disarticulated subjects" as Charcot's patients was probably coming out of a café-concert at the time he made his pronouncement.2 Conversely, many psychiatric patients were keenly interested in the theater; one of Jacques Roubinovitch's patients who barely knew how to read and write composed a play in five acts. An 1878 case observation describes a woman with partial epilepsy and a memory that is "practically nil": she can't count or read, but she can remember the melody of any song.3 More than one of Charcot's patients, "cured" or not, went on to make a living as a street singer or, in the case of Jane Avril, as a Moulin Rouge dancer, when he or she left the hospital. While it is perhaps impossible to trace the criss-cross of influences with perfect assurance, what is certain is that, as early as the 1870s, a number of café-concert and cabaret artists borrowed gestures and movement from asylum inmates and that the phenomenon and enormous popularity of epileptic performers and of songs about nervous pathologies in the caf'conc' contributed to the furor of attention to nervous disorders in the 1880s and 1890s.

1. I first proposed the analogy between hysteria and performance style in the cabaret in a 1985 colloquium and have discussed physiological response and unconscious imitation in relation to film in two essays published in 1997. See Rae Beth Gordon, "Le Caf'conc' et l'hystérie," Romantisme, no. 64 (1989): 53Ð67; "Les Pathologies de la vue et du mouvement dans les films de Georges Méliès," in Georges Méliès: Illusioniste fin de siécle? ed. Jacques Malthête and Michel Marie (Paris, 1997), pp. 263Ð83; and "Laughing Hysterically: Gesture, Movement, and Spectatorship in Early French Cinema," Moving Forward, Holding Fast: The Dynamics of Nineteenth-Century French Culture, ed. Barbara T. Cooper and Mary Donaldson-Evans (Amsterdam, 1997), pp. 217Ð37.

2. Georges Montorgueil et al., Les Demi-Cabots: Le Café-Concert, le cirque, les forains (Paris, 1896), p. 14; hereafter abbreviated DC.

3. Désiré Magloire Bourneville and Paul Regnard, Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière (Paris, 1876), p. 44.

Rae Beth Gordon is professor of French at the University of Connecticut. Author of Ornament, Fantasy, and Desire (1992), her forthcoming book is entitled Why the French Love Jerry Lewis.

Editorial Office main page * Back Issues * Subscribe to CI