I find the origins of silent film quite different to what I had imagined. I had expected there to be the same sensitivity and some what elevated standing that photography had worked up for the half-century previous considering the close technical lineage, but the pre-films are very different from the images captured in the early stages of photography.
The European the pre-filmic choice of subjects was familiar to their audience domestic/ wholesome in nature such as the brief silent film footage of workers leaving the Lumiere Brothers' factory in France. Contrasted to the American themes of a more sinister mood capitalised on by the Thomas Edison Company of dogs fighting, boxing matches, an elephant being an electrocuted and burlesque woman successfully. I find these films draw on a the tension between public and private, the idea of the gaze and voyeur. Especially in Edison's Kinetoscope, which enabled one person at a time to view moving pictures, almost in the attitude of a privileged peeping tom.
Instead of trying to establish the "flickers" as high art, appropriating the theatre and other visual imagery that would seek to elevate this new invention, it was allowed to paint a different picture that illustrates the common forms of social entertainment and attraction to the spectacular that still are present int the film industry.
