1898: Back to the Present

A Waking Dream

I find myself trapped in 1898, not by choice but by some strange force, as if the year itself were a lucid dream from which I cannot—or perhaps do not wish to—wake. Every path of research leads back to this temporal crossroads, this pivot point where centuries collide in the most unlikely symphony of events.

Perhaps this temporal magnetism draws me here because 1898 marks the precise moment when cinema evolves from mechanical novelty into the art of visual storytelling. Here, Georges Méliès conducts his revolutionary experiments with "Illusions fantasmagoriques," discovering the stop trick that would fundamentally transform how images could be assembled and meaning created through editing. Simultaneously, Edwin S. Porter's work "as a projectionist at the Eden Musée theater in 1898" becomes an education in the primitive art of continuity—learning to arrange discrete one-shot films into coherent programs that tell larger stories.

This is, in great measure, the essence of what we do as documentary filmmakers: we are visual essayists, crafting narratives on celluloid and pixels rather than paper. The kinship runs deeper than technique—it's philosophical. Just as Méliès realized that film could conjure impossible worlds through temporal manipulation, we discover that documentary can reveal hidden truths about the real world through the same fundamental alchemy of selection, sequence, and juxtaposition.

The Architecture of a Dream Year

Picture Vienna in winter: Freud hunched over his desk wrestling with The Interpretation of Dreams. He is mapping the unconscious while across the Atlantic, another kind of explosion is brewing—America's imperial awakening. The USS Maine will detonate in Havana Harbor, transforming the United States from continental power into global empire through what John Hay will call "a splendid little war." Against this backdrop of imperial emergence, George Frederick Bristow—America's first symphonic voice—conducts the premiere of his Fifth Symphony "Niagara" at Carnegie Hall.

The irony cuts deeper than geography: as Freud discovers that individual consciousness conceals vast hidden territories of repressed desire and traumatic memory, America discovers its own unconscious imperial appetite, previously repressed beneath continental expansion and isolationist rhetoric. Freud explores the inner cataracts of the mind just as Bristow celebrates the thundering waters that mark boundaries between nations—boundaries that America is about to cross with unprecedented force.

The Dreamer's Dilemma

Being trapped in 1898 means witnessing the birth pangs of modernity while still breathing the air of the 19th century. It's January 1st, and New York City suddenly swallows Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, and Staten Island, becoming the world's second-largest metropolis overnight—a municipal transformation that creates the stage for America's imperial century.

On January 13th, Émile Zola's pen strikes against the Dreyfus affair with "J'Accuse...!" The collision between old institutional power and new moral courage captures everything 1898 embodies. Seven months later, in Basel, Theodor Herzl convenes the Second Zionist Congress on August 28th. Here, the movement transitions from aspiration to institution, establishing the Jewish Colonial Trust—the financial mechanism that would fund systematic resettlement in Palestine. While America discovers its imperial appetite across oceans, Herzl institutionalizes a different form of territorial reclamation, one based on historical memory rather than military conquest, but equally transformative in its consequences. The decisions made in that Basel congress hall continue to reshape political realities today, creating a future that extends far beyond 1898's immediate horizons.

The Aleph of American Art

This is where the dream becomes most vivid, most strange—where I discover the Borgesian convergence that anchors me here. Three figures emerge like points in an aleph: Louis Comfort Tiffany begins experimenting with enamels in 1898, becoming one of the first designers to utilize electricity in his lamp designs, bringing Art Nouveau's organic sensibility into American homes; Commissioner Attilio Piccirilli receives his commission for the USS Maine memorial; and Bristow composes his final symphony.

Each represents a different artistic response to the pressures of modernity: Tiffany's orientalist-influenced Art Nouveau marking "the birth of a modern aesthetic for the emerging 20th century", Piccirilli's late Renaissance approach to public mourning, Bristow's European symphonic tradition serving American nationalist themes. Three distinct vocabularies for processing the same historical moment—the old world's forms stretched to contain new world realities.

The Year as Palimpsest and Celluloid

The temporal connections spiral outward from 1898: Tolstoy's "The Kreutzer Sonata," published in 1889 and "promptly censored by the Russian authorities," reached American shores where it was banned by the U.S. Post Office Department in 1890. His moral treatise against sexual passion took its title from Beethoven's 1803 composition—originally dedicated to George Augustus Bridgetower, a mixed-race violinist whose story would later inspire Rita Dove's "Sonata Mulattica." What Beethoven conceived as a musical tribute to a Black virtuoso became, through Tolstoy's appropriation, a Russian Orthodox meditation on temptation, which then became American moral panic—exactly the kind of censorship cycle that would define the coming century.

But 1898 adds another layer to this palimpsest: celluloid. "The shift in consciousness away from films as animated photographs to films as stories, or narratives, began to take place about the turn of the century and is most evident in the work of the French filmmaker Georges Méliès." While Freud maps the unconscious and Bristow conducts symphonies, Méliès is discovering that film can tell stories, can create what he calls "artificially arranged scenes." The same year that sees the USS Maine explode in Havana Harbor, cinema learns to explode narrative time itself.

The Previous Generation's Future

But here's the temporal paradox that holds me: the 1870s and 1880s generation that would witness my 1898 was actively dreaming it into existence. Edward Bellamy's "Looking Backward: 2000-1887," published in 1888, became one of the most popular novels of its day, selling more than a million copies and creating a political movement imagining 1898's immediate future as a technological utopia.

Bellamy made "daring predictions" including "the existence of radio, television, motion pictures, and credit cards," even envisioning something resembling Amazon with centralized distribution systems and on-demand music services "piped directly to homes via telephone wires". In the same year, H.G. Wells publishes "The War of the Worlds," imagining a future that never comes—Martian invasion, the collapse of civilization under alien heat rays, humanity's technological inadequacy against superior beings.

The 1870s-80s generation envisioning 1898 imagined it simultaneously as their socialist paradise and their science fiction apocalypse, while the actual 1898 I'm trapped in was busy birthing American imperialism and Freudian psychology—neither Bellamy's cooperative commonwealth nor Wells' interplanetary war, but something entirely different. Wells writes about Martians destroying English civilization just as America is about to destroy Spanish civilization. The future holds world wars and atomic weapons, not heat rays from Mars—but the terror Wells imagines of technological superiority and civilizational collapse proves remarkably prescient, just misdirected skyward instead of inward.

The ultimate irony? Wells' Martians never invaded Earth, but we became the Martians. By the 21st century, humans would be the ones launching artificial cylinders toward the red planet, the colonizers rather than the colonized. The heat rays and tripods remained fiction, but the imperial impulse Wells projected onto aliens became our own interplanetary reality. In 1898, as Spain's empire crumbles and America's begins, Wells imagines invasion from above while the real expansion was already reaching toward the stars.

The 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition had shown off "the products of the early Industrial Revolution," and by 1898, the Trans-Mississippi Exposition in Omaha was showcasing "the development of the entire West, stretching from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Coast"—not Bellamy's vision, but American empire stretching toward the Pacific.

Carnegie Hall, April 11th: The Future Applauds Its Past

On April 11th George Frederick Bristow conducts the premiere of his Fifth Symphony "Niagara." The elite audience at Carnegie Hall experiences what will be America's last great Romantic symphony before the modernist ruptures of the coming century.

The audience hears the thundering of Niagara Falls translated into orchestral language—nature's power channeled through European symphonic tradition in service of American nationalist sentiment.

As Bristow's baton cuts through the gaslit air, each member of the audience carries their own temporal displacement. They are the embodiment of the 1870s' future dreams, yet they themselves are dreaming forward to a 20th century they cannot imagine. We can only imagine who might have been there—perhaps Tiffany dreaming of expanding his decorative empire to Cuba's Presidential Palace, perhaps Piccirilli or Daniel Chester French, who would later collaborate with architect Henry Bacon to create the Lincoln Memorial, one of the last great monuments of the American Renaissance—but we cannot know. What we do know is that the entire cast of characters from my recent films could have been there, except for Tolstoy, who was exploring celibacy in Russia. And somewhere in this temporal convergence, the former enslaved and freemen fiddlers whose stories I would later chase in my documentary "Black Fiddlers" were creating their own musical traditions. The temporal loop closes when Joe Thomson, the last in a long line of Black fiddlers, reveals on camera that he and his cousin Odell will be honored at Carnegie Hall—the same hall where Bristow's audience applauds in 1898, finally welcoming the musical voices it once excluded.

1898: Back to the Present

The music swells, and the audience hears Niagara Falls translated into orchestral language—nature's power channeled through European symphonic tradition in service of American nationalist sentiment, just as their nation is about to erase boundaries across oceans.

When the final note fades and the applause begins, they are applauding more than Bristow's composition. They are applauding the strange temporal convergence that brought them here—refugees from the 1870s' dreams, pioneers of the 1900s' nightmares, momentarily suspended in the perfect acoustic of historical transition.

1898 won't let me go because it contains so many beginnings disguised as endings, so many futures emerging from what seemed like the settled past. To be trapped in 1898 is to be caught between worlds—sitting in that Carnegie Hall audience, applauding the moment when one century's dreams became another century's raw material for entirely different dreams.