The first two decades of moving-picture history offer numerous examples of films and industrial practices that give insight into the cinema's complex position within the expanding network of technological modernity. (1) From the cinema's initial obsession with speeding locomotives, out-of-control automobiles, and urban street scenes, to the nickelodeon's location as a convenient stop on busy urban thoroughfares, and the narration of the pleasures and horrors of technology, the moving pictures simultaneously participated in and provided representations of technological modernity's transformation of everyday life. (2) The link between early cinema and the proliferation of new technologies went beyond the moving pictures' ability merely to represent changes in everyday life. Indeed, the effectiveness of such representations often turned on the cinema's structural affinity to other technologies, relations that could be exploited in the deployment of new narrative devices whose increasingly abstract constructions of space and time placed greater demands on audiences. Noting that "after 1908 the most frequent device for portraying phone conversations was parallel editing, cutting from one end of the telephone line to another," Tom Gunning goes on to suggest that, "the fit between the spatio-temporal form of the event and that of its portrayal has a particularly satisfying effect which one suspects rendered the innovative technique particularly legible to film audiences." (3) In what follows, I would like to explore the idea that in the process of negotiating some of the more historically significant transitions in narrativity, individual films exploited the cinema's structural affinity not just with specific technologies--such as the telephone and the railway--but with the broader, expanding network of communication and transportation technologies specific to American modernity.