1898 Lubin Model

In the 1890s, vaudeville, print media, and film were inextricably bound together in an intertextual and what we might call (following film scholars' discussions of early cinema's intermediality) an "intermedial" relationship. Vaudeville and the theatrical medium's method of variety programming provided early film producers with an existing format through which they could exhibit their films (Allen Vaudeville and Film). Furthermore, as Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz point out, "Cinema [in the 1890s] constituted only one element in an array of new modes of technology, representation, spectacle, distraction, consumerism, ephemerality, mobility, and entertainment--and at many points was neither the most compelling nor the most promising one" (1).

Battlefield Telephone

One aspect of this intermediality is exemplified by advertisements in the New York Clipper for Sigmund Lubin's "1898 model" which combined a cineograph and stereopticon, thus embodying both the emerging technology of the film projector while also retaining the residual technology from an older history of screen practice. Indeed, several communication technologies were exploited by the military, the news media, and the entertainment industry to mediate the war with Spain. For instance, the Milwaukee Journal published an illustrated column about the use of battlefield telephones in Cuba, while a "commision stockbroker" in Worcester, Massachusetts sold "news and gossip" about the war, inviting "citiziens. . .to call and inspect [it]". As one advertisement announced: "I received yesterday, April 26 over my private wires 116 messages containing gossip and information on the [Spanish-Cuban] situation . . . ".

The Worcester Telegram was quick to advertise its own use of the latest technologies to bring its readers the facts: "While. . .one story was being hustled into shipshape," reports the Telegram, "a special diamond-tipped wire was clicking off the latest news from Havana and the editorial department was pressed into service taking [reports] from the telephone" (February 19, 1898). Symptomatic of many newspapers' self-fashioned participatory role, the Telegram would also brag that its reporters were assisting divers in the Maine investigation, which, in turn, made celebrities out of many Spanish-American War journalists such as Stephen Crane, Frances Scovel, Richard Harding Davis, Frederic Remington, and even a young Winston Churchill. Indeed, upon his return from "correspondent's war," Davis would insist in Harper's Weekly that "[Stephen] Crane [was] quite as much of a soldier as [any] man . . ." because under enemy fire he remained "as unconcerned as though he were gazing at a cinematograph" (160).