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Contextualizing the apparatus : film in the turn-of-the-century Sears, Roebuck & Co.’s Consumers guide
Book chapter
Is part of
Exposing the film apparatus : the film archive as a research laboratory ; pp. 97-106.Publisher(s)
Amsterdam University PressAuthor(s)
Affiliation
Abstract(s)
The Sears, Roebuck & CO. 1898 Consumers Guide
Published by America and Canada’s largest mail order company, the 10.8 x 8.5 inches
(27.4 x 21.6 cm), 1120-page catalog was filled with illustrations, descriptions, and
testimonials regarding every possible commodity, including motion-picture-related
items. Several million copies per year found their way to farms and small towns across
the continent. The Consumers Guide offered projectors and films for sale, itemizing
the medium’s technological requirements, its business models, and programming
possibilities for the general public. It provides a highly detailed documentation of
what the turn-of-the-century public could be expected to know about the film medium
shortly after its birth.
Theoretical Framing :
A catalog can be an apparatus of sorts, as a causal agent and source of documentation
and evidence. The 1898 Sears Consumers Guide helped to position the medium of film
in the imagination of millions of readers, locating it as a technology, business opportunity, and source of information and entertainment. From a 21st-century perspective, it offers evidence regarding the intricate relationship of technology and text, of
the material conditions facing those who would use the medium, and of the period’s
cross-media endeavors. The Consumers Guide is an apparatus for understanding the
horizon of expectations that greeted the new medium of motion pictures.