An early ad for Edison's Kinetoscope called it 'The Life Producing Marvel,' while its rival, the Mutoscope, offered 'Living Pictures.' Moving pictures promised more than still photos: they aimed to bring life itself to viewers. Names like Bioscope, Phantoscope, Veriscope and Vitascope hinted at their goals to show 'life,' 'light,' 'movement,' and 'truth.’
In 1896, Edison’s Vitascope premiered at Koster & Bial’s Music Hall in New York City, featuring a series of films arranged with an uncanny comprehension of cinema and human psychology. It begins with two pretty young girls in the Umbrella Dance, followed by Sea Waves at Dover threatening to immerse the audience, then a kinetic burlesque boxing match, followed by two patriotic messaging films Band Drill and The Monroe Doctrine, which mirrored Sea Waves with images of guns bombarding the shoreline, finally the premiere ends in a return to the cosmopolitan status quo with dancing girls in Serpentine Dance. There you have all the elements of the modern ‘militainment’ film— violence, brawling, kinetic effects, patriotic symbolism, all carefully wrapped in sex. In essence, no more or less evolved than Top Gun, somehow born fully formed at the fin de siècle.
As the US contended with colonial struggles in Cuba, Philippines and Puerto Rico, publisher William Randolph Hearst—the main inspiration for Charles Foster Kane in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane—saw film's potential to document war, and funded Edison's cameraman to capture the Cuban conflict. Soon after the creation of "The Monroe Doctrine," the Edison Manufacturing Company was engaged in the dissemination of fervently patriotic cinematographs, sensationalizing Spanish war atrocities, depicting the warped and twisted remains of the battleship 'Maine,' Spanish fortifications in Cuba, and the American military was poised for imperial expansion. A mere two years after its first demonstration, Edison began marketing his “Life Producing Marvel” as the “wargraph.” In concert with Hearst, the Edison consortium did everything in their power to propel the United States towards conflict with Spain.
The visions of the wargraphe, in its presentation of martial spectacle, embraced a phantom life of heroism—wherein the imaginal cavalry and cannon left no wound on the audience, delivering thrill without consequences. The public imagination tasted combat without death, and therefore, without end. Cinema thus opened a vein of unquenchable bloodlust and eternal war, a resource with near magical properties. Without such technology, a “liberal imperium” fronting a voluntary army would likely be impossible.