Traffic in Souls (1913)

Credits: Director: George Loane Tucker                   Writing: Walter MacNamara (uncredited); George Loane Tucker (uncredited) Producer: Walter MacNamara Editor: Jack Cohn

Cast: Mary Barton...Jane Gail Lorna Barton...Ethel Grandin Their Father...William H. Turner            Officer Burke...Matt Moore William Trubus...William Welsh Mrs. Trubus...Millie Liston Alice Trubus...Irene Wallace William Cavanaugh...Bill Bradshaw The Cadet...Arthur Hunter The Go-Between...Howard Crampton 'Respectable' Smith...William Burbridge A Country Girl...Luray Huntley The Emigrant Girls' Brother...William Powers R.C. Cadet...Jack Poulton Swedish Cadet...Edward Boring Wireless Operator...George Loane Tucker First Cabin Cadet...Walter MacNamara Mrs. Gesham...Sarah McVicker Swedish Girl...Flora Nason Swedish Girl's Sister...Vera Hansey

Scenes to Look for in Traffic in Souls

• our introduction to the “dictagraph”

• the arrival of the “girl from the country” at New York

• the arrival of immigrants at Ellis Island

• police raid near film’s end

Terms to Know this Week: “cinema of attractions”; cross-cutting; spectacle; one-reelers; nicklelodeon; Georges Melies; D.W. Griffith; Edwin S. Porter; continuity editing; exhibitionism; gaze vs. glance cinema

Critical Commentary

"Traffic in Souls deserves to be recognized as one of the first American urban thrillers, a film whose editing and shooting style laid down modes of portrayal of the city still operative in film today.”

--Tom Gunning, “”From the Kaleidoscope to the X-Ray: Urban Spectatorship, Poe, Benjamin, and Traffic in Souls (1913),” Wide Angle 19.4 (October 1997): 25-61.

“The film is based on the simple premise that to participate in modern life is to be absorbed into traffic” (4).

Kristen Whissel, “Regulating Mobility: Technology, Modernity, and Feature-Length Narrativity in Traffic in Souls,” Camera Obscura 49.17.1: 1-30.

“The film splits between an educational imperative—the term documentary derives from the Latin docere, to teach—and a mainly entertaining ‘melodramatic’ structure. This split, in turn, divides the film between different aims and different understandings of the social functioning of cinema” (153).

--Lee Grieveson, “Policing the Cinema: Traffic in Souls at Ellis Island, 1913,” Screen 38.2 (Summer 1997): 149-171.

Discussion Questions

1. Although much of it is predictably melodramatic, Traffic in Souls still has the effect—nearly one hundred years after it was made—of surprising and shocking audiences. What in the film struck you as especially interesting, daring, or innovative?

2. This film is commonly classified as an example of Hollywood cinema’s “transitional” period-- the period, that is, when films were moving away from a reliance on spectacle and increasingly toward the narrative conventions of classical Hollywood cinema. Which of the narrative conventions discussed in last week’s lecture did you see in Traffic in Souls? Consider, for example, such narrative elements as closure, causality, character development, and climax.

3. Tom Gunning, one of the most prominent critics of early cinema, notes that Traffic in Souls is “obsessed with surveillance, spectatorship, and voyeurism. The film’s axiom is “in the city all actions are exposed to possible observers situated somewhere off-screen” (46). Can you think of specific instances in the film that support Gunning’s claim?

4. This film offers one of the earliest examples of crosscutting, the technique whereby a director alternates shots from two different sequences, often in different locales, suggesting that they are taking place at the same time. Can you recall examples of this technique?

5. Traffic in Souls plays a pivotal role in the history of cinematic representations of the modern city. Aside from its suggestion that the city is a place of constant surveillance, the film makes a number of claims about what city life is like. What are they? How does the film represent New York? You might wish to consider especially the film’s preoccupation with mechanized and street traffic (pedestrians, streetcars, buses, railways, steamships).

6. When the film was first released in 1913, it was particularly popular with female spectators. Why do you think so?

7. Many critics say that Traffic in Souls is a divided film. On the one hand, it aims to document an actual social problem. On the other hand, there is clearly an attempt to link this aim with the production of an entertaining, thrilling fiction. Do you agree with this assessment? Does the movie try to have it both ways? If so, what can you point to in the film that bears this observation out?

8. Though this film is explicit and shocking in many ways for its time, one of its notable suppressions is the depiction of prostitutes “at work.” Not once do we see a prostitute trying to pick up a client, or a prostitute engaged in a seductive or sexual act. What do you think the film loses through this suppression? What do you think it gains?

9. For a film made in 1913, Traffic in Souls’ preoccupation with technology is stunning. What are some examples of this preoccupation? What do you think is the significance of technology in the film?